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Coils of barbed wire leaf out and produce a nine-petaled orange flower: such is the poignant design on the cover of the memoir The Choice – Embrace the Possible (2017) by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an Hungarian-American survivor of Auschwitz.
Sustaining this teenager through ever-present death threats for eighteen months was her mother’s counsel, “You’re responsible for whatever you put in your mind. No one can take it from you.” Another factor was her life-plan with soul mate Eric enlivening her imagination, filling it with song and dance.
Yet, after the author’s 1945 liberation from the death camp, narrated within the first sixty-nine pages of this memoir, impenetrable evil continues weighting the balance. No matter what, Eger would be the free woman she was destined to become, without Eric, without her parents and grandparents, without her language, without her country.
But how return to life? What about the residual psychic wound, stalking beneath her ghostly shudders, dreams—this wound repelled by language’s efforts to make sense of it? How live with her senses having been saturated by the gruesome? Even others assault her Jewishness in other countries. Yet, decades of harrowing psychic cleansing empowers Dr. Eger to say to us: “…I would love to help you discover how to escape the concentration camp of your own mind and become the person you were meant to be.”
In my perception, Dr. Edith Eva Eger achieved a depth of psychic freedom few experience in this life. How privileged we are to have her memoir The Choice – Embrace the Possible that shows us how to change.
Father, the hour has come. John 17:1
Since pre-historic times, globally, natives have left traces of the Sacred Feminine: temples, sacred wells, jewelry, amulets, pottery, statues, and so much more—all rendered in precious materials wherever found. Each trace suggests its own story of the encounter with the Sacred Feminine.
This day in 1531, a significant story unfolded outside of Mexico City, told by Juan Diego who was walking to the Franciscan mission station to continue his studies as a recent convert to Catholicism. A simple man, though by no means destitute, he prayed while warming himself within his tilma or cloak, a coarse fabric made from the threads of the maguey cactus. As he rounded the hill at Tepeyac, a pregnant woman attired in the garb of an Aztec princess greeted him. She identified herself as the Mother of God and wanted a church built in her honor, a place of succor for the distressed.
Because the archbishop of Mexico City, Fray Juan de Zumárraga demanded an authentic sign from Juan’s heavenly visitor, the woman instructed Juan to fill his tilma with Castilian roses, growing in the rocky outcropping above him, and show them to the archbishop. However, winter’s rigor had already killed off all vegetation in the area. Only cacti lay dormant.
Yet, Juan did as he was told, and the next day he emptied his tilma of the white roses before the archbishop and his advisors. What remained on the tilma was the imprint of this dark-skinned woman with mysterious eyes, still kept in her Basilica, North of Mexico City.
What’s staggering about this story, though, is the integrity of the tilma, subject to scientific scrutiny since the work of Dr. Jose Ignacio Bartolache in 1789, even up to the present NASA research.
So, we do have an intercessor in the Sacred Feminine, close to us. Over the main entrance of her Basilica are carved the words: Am I not here, I who am your mother?”
