DATE: Wednesday, April 2, 1997              TAG: 9704020002

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B12  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   33 lines

HEAVEN'S GATE SUICIDES SCHEDULED DEPARTURE

Dismissing the 39 Heaven's Gate cultists who committed suicide as ``crazies,'' as many may be disposed to do, diminishes them and us. For it dismisses the depth and breadth of the personal pain and confusion that led or pushed the 39 away from families and other loved ones to a group promising solace and certitude. They ended their lives in the confident expectation of rapture.

We suspect that sorrow was the predominant emotion in response to the news of what happened. For to live is to experience pain - in truth, we are compassionate toward others to the degree that we are aware that pain, psychic no less than physicial, is not unique to us but common to all.

The millennium will soon be here. Millions see apocalyptic meaning in the end of one thousand-year period on one planet in the cosmos and the start of another. Look for other group suicides (a small band committed suicide in Canada days before discovery of the horror in the San Diego mansion) as the 20th century fades.

A bumper sticker reads: ``Life is tough. Then we die.'' For Earth's billions of believers, ``Life is tough. Then we really live.'' The Heaven's Gate cultists perished in such faith. That they believed they would be transported to an alien spacecraft trailing Comet Hale-Bopp is easily derided as bizarre, as misguided, as clap-trap religion.

But the manner of their departure and the grief of the survivors who could not have saved the 39 from calculated self-destruction are, for many of us, sobering, humbling.

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