A few years after graduating from high school completely disillusioned about continuing my education, a short year and a half stint as a carpenter's apprentice in the flooring industry, followed by another year and a half sojourn in the army and almost without hope or faith in anything, I entered therapy. I had learned about a special form of therapy that felt right for me while in the army stationed in the southern region of Germany. I decided to face my demons and to try to heal the wounds.
After three years of intense therapeutic work, much personal insight and feeling the pain of unmet needs, I emerged still not quite purged of that sudden thought that had come to me while I walked the lonely streets of the Bronx years before. It took me many years to realize that I had gone into therapy with unreal expectations. I wanted to put all my trust in my therapists; they would give me the answers to my life-problems. I had escaped into therapy only to finally realize that life, my life, persists as a profound problem that I could not and cannot ignore. No therapy, sophistication nor a brave, but empty, cynicism will do. The question persists, "why do we exist, only to suffer and then die?"
Slowly I began to see that therapy had been more like a womb in which I could face my hurts and come to know my needs, to grow as a human being. I learned of my infinite smallness in the face of reality, but also of my infinite significance. I do matter. Our words may lead us up to the spiritual wellsprings of our being, but they cannot express the ineffable truth. Questions arise within us and make of our lives an enigmatic complexity. They come from a silence we cannot name. Over the years searching for answers that would make sense of my pain and loneliness, I came to accept that the questions which come unbidden to my consciousness reveal an important aspect of my existence which I too often failed to see. Simply stated, we need wombs to live whole lives. We need others in order to understand and to heal.
We need wombs. We need to give an answer to an apparently indifferent world. In my teens I burned with questions that I could not find adequate answers for. Again, why do we live, if only to suffer and then die? When my mother fell ill with cancer and lay dieing in fear and pain, I prayed to an unseen God, hoping and longing with all my fourteen-year old heart for her deliverance and when she died I could not easily accept her death. Still a chord struck inside me clearly that I could only hear years later. I tried to ignore the question arising from within, the need to make sense of my world. But I found I could not avoid the consciousness of a problem needing a solution no matter how remote or difficult. My little humanity still required an adequate answer that would nourish it. Our need for one another furnishes the ground of that nourishment.
To be continued....
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Wombs: A Simple Truth
We need a mythic reworking of a simple truth: we need each other and vitally depend upon a ground greater than our individual selves. But before I sketch my reasons for believing this narrative I would like to share a bit of my own story.
Many years before that terrible day in September, 2001, my mother died. I felt helpless and hid my grief in silence and disbelief. When the World Trade Towers fell scattering the lives of thousands, I once again felt that old helplessness, grief and disbelief. This time, though, I shared it with others.
It seems only natural that youth fills us with a passionate concern for the meaning of life and of our lives in particular. Questions burn inside. As we grow older most of us, it would appear, push the questions of life, death and suffering into the background and more practical ones replace them. In my case they lived on happily inside me demanding answers.
I sought the answers from many sources. My Roman Catholic background, for example, tried to instill in me a faith in a remote, hidden, silent God infinitely separated from the world, but somehow near at hand when we needed Him. Prayer and faith would finally do the trick. Keep on the faith track and all would turn out well in the end. But what about all that life lived before that end. A beatific belief in suffering became the highest value in this scheme of things and Jesus on the Cross its sacred symbol. His life and words took a back seat. In the end I had to abandon traditional religions' answers and explore the questions in my own way and in my own time.
I read Plato's "Republic" at fourteen. It spoke of justice and I longed for an understanding of that justice in my life. I discussed. I argued. I tried to listen for answers that would allow me to make sense of a world that I felt more and more estranged from and that would address a need I only vaguely recognized. A high school chemistry teacher once chided me with her detached view of the universe. She told me it had no meaning and that ultimately nothing really mattered. If only I could learn to develop the so-called "scientific" approach to life's cruelties and mysteries then my desperate search would end. She did not know that tenacious wounds lay buried inside me and would not heal by an appeal to such a rational and emotionally empty view of existence.
Then one day as I walked alone in the streets of my native Bronx, a bold thought arose within me. This powerful thought allowed me to see something dimly emerging at the very horizon of my consciousness. No matter how vigorously I would try to deny the upward surge of that primal "why" or how I tried to ignore the need to find a meaning for my existence, I could not escape the fact my life had become a "problem."
This fact I could not run away from nor will away. Maybe, the world did not have any meaning as some people claimed. Nevertheless, the dawning awareness of the "problem" pried open my consciousness. Years later I would encounter Martin Buber, the Hasidic philosopher, poet and mystic, who spoke to me of Man's condition as an existential problem. For Buber Man becomes a problem to himself and this defines us. For Buber,"man can become whole not in virtue of a relation to himself, but only in virtue of a relation to another self."(1) He believed in the power of relationship and as we know this can be quite problematic.
To be continued....
Many years before that terrible day in September, 2001, my mother died. I felt helpless and hid my grief in silence and disbelief. When the World Trade Towers fell scattering the lives of thousands, I once again felt that old helplessness, grief and disbelief. This time, though, I shared it with others.
It seems only natural that youth fills us with a passionate concern for the meaning of life and of our lives in particular. Questions burn inside. As we grow older most of us, it would appear, push the questions of life, death and suffering into the background and more practical ones replace them. In my case they lived on happily inside me demanding answers.
I sought the answers from many sources. My Roman Catholic background, for example, tried to instill in me a faith in a remote, hidden, silent God infinitely separated from the world, but somehow near at hand when we needed Him. Prayer and faith would finally do the trick. Keep on the faith track and all would turn out well in the end. But what about all that life lived before that end. A beatific belief in suffering became the highest value in this scheme of things and Jesus on the Cross its sacred symbol. His life and words took a back seat. In the end I had to abandon traditional religions' answers and explore the questions in my own way and in my own time.
I read Plato's "Republic" at fourteen. It spoke of justice and I longed for an understanding of that justice in my life. I discussed. I argued. I tried to listen for answers that would allow me to make sense of a world that I felt more and more estranged from and that would address a need I only vaguely recognized. A high school chemistry teacher once chided me with her detached view of the universe. She told me it had no meaning and that ultimately nothing really mattered. If only I could learn to develop the so-called "scientific" approach to life's cruelties and mysteries then my desperate search would end. She did not know that tenacious wounds lay buried inside me and would not heal by an appeal to such a rational and emotionally empty view of existence.
Then one day as I walked alone in the streets of my native Bronx, a bold thought arose within me. This powerful thought allowed me to see something dimly emerging at the very horizon of my consciousness. No matter how vigorously I would try to deny the upward surge of that primal "why" or how I tried to ignore the need to find a meaning for my existence, I could not escape the fact my life had become a "problem."
This fact I could not run away from nor will away. Maybe, the world did not have any meaning as some people claimed. Nevertheless, the dawning awareness of the "problem" pried open my consciousness. Years later I would encounter Martin Buber, the Hasidic philosopher, poet and mystic, who spoke to me of Man's condition as an existential problem. For Buber Man becomes a problem to himself and this defines us. For Buber,"man can become whole not in virtue of a relation to himself, but only in virtue of a relation to another self."(1) He believed in the power of relationship and as we know this can be quite problematic.
To be continued....
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