Wombs: A Simple Truth (Continued)

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....