In 1964, Robert Coles interviewed a poor black woman who spoke of the desperation of her life, and the difficulty of finding happiness:
“To me, having a baby inside me is the only time I’m really alive.”
She was right and she always will be, for life is all about being pregnant. It is all about being alive and feeling alive with love inside, for that is what the inner child gives us. Yes, a woman feels alive during pregnancy, but if the life she feels is that of a child other than her own, the feeling will pass after birth and not return until the next pregnancy.
It is only when we feel pregnant with love for ourselves that we feel really alive and know why Mona Lisa smiles.
Women need to be pregnant, and men need to be pregnant. There is no other way of being in touch once again with our whole nature. There is no other way of re-membering.
For men, making a killing during the hunting season or in the battlefield or in the stock market doesn’t do it. Acquiring mounds of minerals and magnifying our net worth, or scoring bulls eyes with hoards of women, or being immersed in any other addiction does not fill the emptiness that only being pregnant and re-membering can fill. Having a son, and being filled with pride is no substitute for being pregnant with our own inner child and filled with love, for only when we are filled with love are we prepared to become lovers of our sons and peacemakers instead of warriors.
Tony Blair quoted Thornton Wilder* at the Memorial Service to the British people who died in the Twin Towers: “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Let us all be aware and celebrate our life-long pregnancy, for love is the only survival, the only meaning. --Michael Murphy
*The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
3 comments:
I imagine this kind of pregnancy with the inner child as one taking oneself in one's hart. When we love ourselves we are alive and when we are alive we are able to give the gift of love.
I had a seminary teacher--a wonderful man named Joop van Beeck, a Jesuit from the Netherlands--who signed a letter to several of us (one of whom was pregnant), "all my love to the pregnant and the merely expectant." I think he understood the confluences you're referring to.
Dear Simona and Patricia,
Alive and expectant! Yes! And pregnant, till death do us part, with possibilities. The possibilities issue from the Soul and the Spirit, and it is only from Soul and Spirit that unconditional love is born. Happy Pregnancy to you both! Love, Michael
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