were and where she was and yet would ask, “ ... where’s Granddad, is he upstairs?”
(My grandfather died before I was born and the hospital where my mother died was
a single story building that she was very familiar with for many years). Somehow
recollections of a place from her childhood had become enmeshed in the reality in
which she was living, yet for her this did not present a problem; she was living
simultaneously two phases of her life in two very different places.
Something similar happened to my father when he too was approaching his
death. I n an isolation ward, he regained consciousness and told the story of how
he had been “ ...back with the men in the Army”, marching off somewhere and then
being told by a superior officer to “ ... go back, you can’t come with us”. There are
other instances concerning friends who were nearing the time of their death and
whose environments were transmogrified to other places. There was Michael for
whom the Sacred Heart Hospice at Darlinghurst became, in its most literal sense, a
new home somewhere in I ndia where he dressed and behaved quite differently and
took on a new identity along with his new residence.
There are other places (place conceived here as a continuum of possibilities
linked to consciousness, as the existential measure of being, of existence and
identity) that have influenced my life and soul and made me what, in essence, I am
and will become. Both the religious and the spiritual influence my soul. Outwardly
it craves the religious, that which reflects a structured belief system with formal
worship practices and a cultural context. However, it is the spiritual, that which
transcends language and culture, is more emotionally based, more mystical and is
connected to subjective inner experiences, that prevails. I n consequence, soon
after leaving school I entered a Roman Catholic seminary, much to the displeasure
of my Jewish mother and my equally displeased, lapsed-Catholic father. The
seminary provided me with some semblance of spiritual life although I eventually
rejected Roman Catholicism and escaped to a kibbutz in I srael where I gained a
new spiritual perspective, albeit unorthodox and catholic.
My kibbutz life presented me with a conundrum for although I was, under
the I sraeli Law of Return, a Jew, having a Jewish mother, and although I had
thoroughly rationalized my abandonment of Catholicism and its ways, I nevertheless
felt counterfeit as a Jew because I couldn’t really accept Jewish-Hebrew theology
and practice either. I felt like an actor experimenting with different painted faces
and curious narratives all of which prevented others from seeing the real me. I
returned to Australia and became immersed in a career in social work and over the
ron
(Ron)
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