Extreme Methods, Logical Message

Calling any group a “cult” is a wonderful way of punishing its members and distancing us from them. By all reports, the Heaven’s Gate members were remarkably cheerful about committing suicide. Their videotaped last words to the world seem level-headed and unforced. It’s a hell of a way to go: the purple cloths, buzz haircuts and Nike sneakers. But who is to say that they were, “wounded, foolish followers” or “weak and wounded,” as editorialists have described them.

To trash their beliefs in UFOs or their faith in Marshall Herff Applewhite (“Do”) is fine. But to patronize and diminish them as human beings is to replicate the anxious conditions that may have propelled them into Applewhite’s and Betty Lu Nettles’ arms in the first place. Clearly, these 39 fairly well educated, productive people with a fondness for “Star Trek” and longing for the afterlife were uncomfortable in their own skins and repelled by the world we share. Except for the way they chose to express their brotherhood and sisterhood and how they ended their lives, what makes them so “wounded” and “foolish?”

I’m a skeptic. UFOs are for the birds. Hale-Bopp is a lovely comet, not a sign of impending doom. But especially at Easter, I have more than a little sympathy for “cultists” who act with such deep revulsion for the mixed values of individual achievement and self-promotion that most of us grudgingly accept.

History tends to be kind to the self-martyred. There are those who respect the Albigensians who died at the stake for their heretical Gnostic beliefs, which were not light years distant from Heaven’s Gate’s. Others venerate religious groups either kneeling to or awaiting a Messiah. And let us not even think about the channeling, crystal-gazing New Agers among us who may be at least as dotty as the dead website addicts.

So why not extend the same measured respect to dead “cultists” who take the most terrible step clearsightedly, even joyfully? We disagree. We are repelled. We insist we are baffled. But is there none among us who, shorn of the weird and unusual aspects of Heaven’s Gate, does not feel, at times, what they felt most of the time, that it’s a lousy world I can’t fix up and maybe there is a better world somewhere else? Does it truly matter if that better world is to be reached by a UFO vehicle or by prayer or by heavenly intercession or by God’s will?

Yes, they were wounded, in a way more common than we care to acknowledge. Probably foolish. But let’s be very careful not to expel “cultists” from the human race altogether because they chose an extreme, bizarre, literally self-destructive way of sending a message that does not seem altogether illogical at a time of mainstream religious celebration of the dead, the risen and the crucified.