The Wounded Soul

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Two people I love each lost a parent in the last two weeks. One was a mother; the other a father. Both were elderly and ill, so their deaths were expected–at least intellectually, but losing someone who is an essential piece of the foundational bedrock in your life story is never easy. Though my own parents passed away long ago, occasionally, I still reach for my phone to call my mom about her recipe for my favorite sour cream chocolate cake or ask my dad what kind of behavior modification I might try for a grandchild who hates middle school. It’s instantly disheartening to remember such calls would require heavenly intervention.

During the days between my late thirties and early forties, I sang in an amateur triple trio. We practiced once a week early on Saturday morning, leaving our spouses home to wrangle the chaos of households full of kids and pets and laundry. It was eerie that when I heard of the loss of the parents of my two friends, an involuntary recording of one of those Saturday morning rehearsals began to play in the back of my head:

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole.

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

I’m old enough to have learned that no one escapes the “wounds” of life; it seems to be a programed part of being human. Because of the “human” part, each of us responds differently to our “wounds”. I remember a young father in my neighborhood years ago. I don’t know the full extent of his sorrows or the difficulty of his life, but one afternoon, he opened the door of the air traffic control tower where he worked and stepped off the edge–falling almost 100 feet to the asphalt runway below. When I spoke to his wife later, she told me that he had reached a point where he believed continuing to live was a nightmare he could not face. The worst nightmare was to yet come. He survived. He lived several more years in a nursing home, a quadriplegic trapped in a wheelchair.

To that same neighborhood a young mother from California moved in with her two sons. She was fleeing an abusive relationship. She had no job, limited education, and little family support, but she was one of the feistiest women I have ever known. She found a minimum wage job at a local business and depended briefly on her area religious congregation for help providing her children with the essentials her salary didn’t allow.

Every day for months she scanned the “help wanted” section of the newspaper looking for a better job. In the summer of 1981, the union of the air traffic controllers went on strike demanding considerably higher wages and a 32-hour work week. President Ronald Regan declared them in violation of federal law which decreed that federal employees could not strike, and he fired 11,000 of them. My young friend saw an add in the paper for air traffic control employees and support staff; she was brazen enough to apply. She didn’t know anything about air travel or airplanes, for that matter, but when the interviewer asked her what qualifications she had to handle such a high stress job, she said, “I’m raising two sons alone. I’m mom, dad, financial support, doctor,  teacher, housekeeper, and therapist. I can handle anything you throw at me.” The interviewer, under serious pressure to get air commerce back into business, thought for a moment and said, “Good enough for me.” He hired her on the spot. For at least the two or three years I knew her before she married again and moved, she earned a very healthy salary.

Two people, same neighborhood, similar employment. Both “wounded”. One despaired; the other thrived. There is, of course, no easy explanation. People are far too complicated to reduce them to simple this + that = this equations. I’ve read several studies lately which suggest Americans are moving away from the faith of their fathers—in whatever form that may have taken. What, I wonder, do they do when, like my two former neighbors, they are faced with the inevitable challenges of life which rip away their solid platforms of expectation and leave them with nothing to hold on to or to believe in?

For many, faith is a far too simplistic and too intangible an explanation. How much influence can something we can’t see or even touch have on our thoroughly tangible lives? Sometimes I wonder, too. But when I do, without my conscious bidding, the words play again in my head—there is a balm in Gilead to heal the wounded soul.