As I write this, it has been a little more than a week since the 39 members of the cult called "Heaven's Gate" were found dead in a mansion in the Rancho Santa Fe section of San Diego, victims of a mass suicide that they hoped would take them to join a UFO in the Kingdom of Heaven.
After the saturation coverage given the cult by the mainstream news media, there remains not much to be said about the tragic loss of 39 fellow believers in the truth of the UFO phenomenon. Officials in San Diego said at one point that there was also little mystery left to unravel about the cult because they left so much information behind them that their motivations were clearly understood very quickly after the bodies were discovered. Whether or not we believe what Heaven's Gate was saying at the end, we do at least understand their UFO-based theology and their sincere believe that, as Christ said in the Sermon On The Mount, "To lose your life is to save it."
And that quote from the Gospel is typical of the kind of difficulty the situation presents to the people left behind after the cult's exit. Much of what they say about the Bible really is in there after all, and the interpretations that Marshall Applewhite taught to his followers were almost "reasonable" in the light of what the Bible actually says. Even the fact that some of the members were found to have been castrated, including Applewhite himself, is not without precedence in the Gospel. Matthew 19:11-12 (Revised Standard Version) has Christ telling his disciples, "Not all men can receive this saying, but only to those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive it, let him receive it."
That is just one example of how it could be argued that, in spite of the bizarre nature of both the cult's beliefs and the horror of their decision to collectively take their own lives, the scriptures themselves can offer a kind of witness to the sci-fi theology that Heaven's Gate was operating under. While no one wants to endorse what the cult did, one remains haunted by the idea that there was some sound religious doctrine contained in what most view as the ravings of lunatic fringe extremists made victims of their own madness.
A columnist for "The Chicago Tribune," a journalist named Mary Schmich, interviewed a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School named Martin Marty. Marty offered Schmich the following analysis:
"All religions," Marty told her, "including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which dominate our culture, and Buddhism and Hinduism in other cultures, are born of anomaly and things that wouldn't make sense otherwise. Thus they all enter the world as extravagances, as misfits."
Over the centuries, some misfits become mainstream, according to Marty, and thus have an advantage over new ones precisely because they're old.
"Religions," he said, "get less strange as they go on."
Such as the early Christians and how they were viewed by Ancient Rome-a religion that meets in secret catacombs and has a ritual in which they eat their God? Is that not strange? he asked. Early Christian martyrs went to their deaths in the name of Christ, and in our times, Schmich's column continues, mothers have sent their sons to war in the name of Allah.
"Seeking martyrdom and effecting it," Marty said, "is a lot like suicide."
The doctrines and teachings of Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles (who preceded Applewhite in death in 1985), are both complex and maddeningly familiar to people who view the UFO phenomenon in religious or spiritual terms. So many of the beliefs we have held sacred for many years are being spoken to us now by voices already gone to their graves, voices that cannot return and prove the rightness of either their cause or their manner of death.
If we are to maintain our own beliefs in the face of their frightening leap of faith into the mystery that is death, it behooves us to look back at Heaven's Gate as non-judgmentally as possible. Just as the UFO and alien abduction phenomena remain mysteries that are still a long way from being understood, so does the death of the 39 cult members take its place among the many UFO-related mysteries that will continue to puzzle all those who seek a solution in real-world-terms to things that most likely have their origin in worlds very different from our own.
Are the cult members the first martyrs to a new Space Age religion? Are they deluded victims to the religious madness of yet another lunatic cult leader? Perhaps that answer can only come after the passage of time, after we see what the New Millennium actually does bring in the way of apocalypse or business-as-usual, after more genuine, level-headed research into UFOs and the people who witness them.
Above all, we need to approach the search for truth with a great deal more patience than the members of Heaven's Gate, who were tragically already certain they had found the answer.