The Sweetness of Tears
Read The Sweetness of Tears Online
Authors: Nafisa Haji
The Sweetness
of Tears
NAFISA HAJI
Dedication
for Ali and Khalil
Epigraph
And the tears you shed, my grieving one, they are sweeter than the laughing of one seeking to forget, and pleasanter than loud voices in jest. Those tears shall cleanse the heart of hating and teach him that sheds them to be companion to those of broken heart. They are the tears of the Nazarene.
Kahlil Gibran, “My Friend,”
A Tear and a Smile
Through the night of doubt and sorrow
Onward goes the pilgrim band.
Sabine Baring-Gould (1867 Hymn)
Originally written in Danish by B. S. Ingemann
T
he first time I ever experienced doubt, I tried to climb over it. Literally. The way I’d been taught, doubt was a seed planted by Satan, the fruit of which led to disobedience. But my doubt had nothing to do with God or the Bible. My doubt was closer to home—though it would take me far from it, eventually, across oceans and continents, stretching bonds of love and loyalty to the breaking point before I could return again, finally, at peace with all of who I was. Back then, I did everything I could to avoid the hiss of that serpent—the temptation of knowing what I didn’t want to know. At first, I simply ignored the whispers, pretending I didn’t see what I saw, as if there were a way not to believe what your own eyes tell you. I knew how the story of original temptation ended and I had no wish to be cast out of the garden.
It was a struggle I kept to myself through the whole of tenth grade. To give voice to the questions—even in my own head—would have been to give them power, to confirm the presence of doubt, to risk eventual downfall.
The effort of denial drained me of words—a remarkable thing that did not go unnoticed.
“You’re so quiet lately, Jo. What’s wrong?” Mom asked me worriedly at dinner.
The second she did, Dad dropped his fork to reach over and put his hand to my forehead, shaking his head when he found it cool to the touch, running a calloused thumb down the length of my nose, tugging at my ponytail in that way that he did.
“No fever,” he declared. “Only stops talking when she’s got a fever. Normally. Never lets anyone else get a word in. Now’s your chance, Chris,” Dad said to my brother, who shrugged, flashing a brilliant smile, teeth, shine, and sweetness lighting up the expressive face that was all Chris ever really needed to communicate with, the face Mom always said was worth a thousand words. Dad was stingy with his—complete sentences being a luxury in which he rarely indulged. He wasn’t so frugal with his ears, though, lending them to me generously through all the girly, childhood prattle I subjected him to as I grew up.
Mom listened, too, more actively, in fact, inserting herself into my monologues, upstaging me, in a way, with her anxious and worried engagement, always scanning for problems she felt compelled to help me solve, to pray over, quick to feel slighted on my behalf. Conversations with Mom were tiring. For her, I know, because of the effort it took to be so emotionally invested in the events of my life, in my successes and failures. For me, too, because her anxiety was contagious, making me want to hide things from her to spare her the worry. Though I never did. Until now.
“Is it school?” Mom asked again, unconvinced by Dad’s reassuring diagnosis. “You can always go back to Christ Academy, you know. I never liked the idea of you transferring to Garden Hill High.” She’d made her objections loud and clear in the summer before freshman year, wanting me to stay with my brother, Chris, at Garden Hill Christ Academy, which we’d both attended since preschool, instead of going to the public high school around the block, which is where she’d gone to school herself.
“Nothing’s wrong, Mom. School’s great.” It was. But I wondered, still, if she hadn’t been right in wanting me to stay at Christ Academy.
I felt Dad’s eyes on my face and ignored the instinct to avoid them—the same way I had to fight not to avoid Mom’s and Chris’s for most of that year, still only managing to look
at
their eyes, instead of into them, like focusing on the glass of a window instead of seeing through it.
It wasn’t until summer that I could admit the doubt that plagued me, even to myself. At camp. Pilgrims’ Progress Summer Youth Camp, which Mom had founded when I was eight years old.
Pilgrims’ Progress Summer Youth Camp—PPSYC, which Chris started calling Psych for short—was Mom’s special project. The brochure—which Chris and I helped to stamp and label, sent out to churches all over Southern California—described it as “an experiential summer learning program for Christian children, firmly rooted in the teachings of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Spreading the Good News was a family tradition spanning four generations, a glorious one that I knew I would one day follow. My great-grandfather was The Reverend Paul Pelton.
The
. If you know anything about the evangelical world, you’ve heard of him. He was the son of an Oklahoma preacher, born just after the first world war, who took off to circle the globe as a missionary just after the second one, wife in tow. Their only daughter, Faith Pelton—my maternal grandmother—was born in China. When she was ten years old, her parents brought Grandma Faith to the States for a visit. It was her first time on American soil.
They arrived just in time to see Elvis Presley make an appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
—one of his first, before they decided to cut his pelvis out of the shot. There and then, shocked by what he saw that night in grainy black-and-white—Elvis making love to a bunch of screaming girls with his voice, swinging and gyrating in a way that must have looked, to him, like wild, simulated, non-missionary sex—my great-grandfather decided to stay in the States, realizing that while he’d been away, spreading the Good News to poor, ignorant souls who would otherwise have perished, the Christian nation he called his own—the land of the Puritans from whom he was descended—had itself been lost.
Two years after he decided to stay in the States, Great-grandpa Pelton’s book,
Evilution,
was published. It was a bestseller, and made him a hero in conservative Christian right circles. Years later, Great-grandpa Pelton’s fame helped to inaugurate his grandson’s career in the same medium that had so horrified him when he returned to the States. Uncle Ron, Mom’s brother, moved more than a hundred miles north from home in Garden Hill, a suburb of San Diego, to the suburbs of Los Angeles, becoming the youngest ever televangelist, launching a weekly TV show when I was still a kid. Uncle Ron said his mission was to turn Hollywood into
Holy
wood.
Mom carried on the tradition, too, in a more quiet kind of way. Her focus was children. My brother and me. Our cousins and all the kids from our congregation. From the beginning, the camp she founded—PPSYC—was a family affair. As the camp director, Mom practically became everyone’s mother for the two weeks we spent in the hills of Southern California, making sure all the kids were well-fed, always locked and loaded with plenty of Bactine and Band-Aids. Grandma Faith, who was a nurse, spending most months of the year off on medical missions around the world, sometimes joined us, flying in just in time from someplace far away. Uncle Ron would make an appearance, even televising a sermon from camp once. Dad was in charge of the nuts and bolts of the operation—literally. He’s a carpenter and handyman and he was the one who rigged up all the fun stuff beforehand. The construction of the elaborate obstacle course, under Mom’s direction, was his baby. And the obstacle course was what did me in.
Every day, after breakfast, we’d jog through tires and try to swing over Sloughs of Despond—huge mud puddles specially hosed down so that there was no way to avoid getting covered in muck if we let go of the Rope of Faith. We ran through the woods, hiked up rocky hills, through “valleys” of Humiliation and Shadows. Most of the obstacles were named for the path that Christian’s journey takes in John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress,
symbolic landmarks on a trek of faith carefully designed by Mom every summer to illustrate a specific detail of the allegory of salvation that was one of Mom’s favorite books—the reason, she said, that she was a Christian.
Before we even learned to read, Mom gave Chris and me our own copies of the book at Christmas, stuffed into our stockings, explaining later how the March sisters in
Little Women
—another book Mom was a big fan of, chock-full of subtle and overt references to John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century Puritan classic—had gotten the same gift from their mother in the frugal days of sacrifice during the Civil War. She always jokes that part of the reason she married Dad was that his last name was March. She named my brother Christian, after the pilgrim in Bunyan’s work. She named me Josephine, after the tomboy in
Little Women
. Josephine March, aka Jo, just like my namesake.
I loved camp. But not as much as Chris did. He was the first to finish every project, every treasure hunt, every race. Except for one year, when we had a crazy, mixed-up race that Mom called The Give Place Race. The idea was to be last.
The race began right after breakfast. When Mom said: “Ready, set, go!” no one moved. Not one step was taken. Eventually, we all sat down. We sat and sat, giggling at first. It felt like hours passed, even if it was only a few minutes. We weren’t allowed to talk. Some of us bowed our heads and prayed. Then Dad wheeled out a gas barbecue and fired it up just beyond the finish line. We watched him, hyperalert, as if we hadn’t just stuffed ourselves at breakfast, while he carefully opened a package of hot dogs. Then another. Mom laid out all the fixings. Dad took out a cooler and propped it open so that we could see the delicious assortment of sodas it contained. Bags of chips were brought out, too, and displayed at one of the picnic tables near the finish line. And potato salad. One by one, taking each other’s measure, most of the kids started to move, taking steps, slowly, haltingly, giggling again, toward the finish line.
Only my brother, Chris, sat patiently, still at the starting line, chalked in white at the beginning of the dirt track. I tried to hang in there with him for a while. But I was bored and hungry and more than a little hot. I crept forward, still hanging far behind the rest.
Pete McGraw was in the lead. This was no surprise: Pete had never yet managed to demonstrate any of the virtues of a spiritual pilgrim that Mom’s carefully crafted curriculum required, destined to be sent home from camp the very next year, expelled permanently, for climbing up on a crate to peek into the girls’ bathroom. When Pete reached the finish line, which was within sight of the start of the race, he hesitated for a long time before finally stepping over. Mom patted him on the back and congratulated him. Pete had been afraid before. Now he smiled and nodded happily. Mom handed him a hot dog, a Coke, and a bag of chips. The boy took them, muttering thanks, still painfully aware that by the rules that Mom had set up, he had lost the race. After a second, he ripped into the bag, popped open the soda, and took a big bite out of the hot dog.
The rest of us drooled at the sight. Within seconds, we were all right there beside him, claiming our own hot dogs, bags of chips, and cans of soda. Mom stood to the side, her eye on the stopwatch she had held and not yet needed. I had barely taken one bite of my hot dog, savoring the taste of the mustard and relish, only had time for one swig of pop, when Mom blew the whistle around her neck. Loudly. She advanced on us with a big trash can in hand, taking everything away from us to dump. Then she stood at the finish line and beckoned to Chris, the only one among us who had never wavered from the start. As Chris approached, she gathered the same treats for him as she had for us. She handed them to Chris, who took them warily. Mom led him to the picnic table, where none of the rest of us had bothered to sit.
“Take your time, Chris. There’s no hurry. Not for you, who has had patience,” Mom assured Chris. She watched for a moment as Chris dug into his meal and then whipped out her worn pocket copy of
The Progress,
opened the book to a marked page, and read: “Passion of the men of this world; and Patience, of the men of that which is to come. For as here thou seest, Passion,” Mom gestured to all of us who had finished first, “. . . will have all now. . . . So are the men of this world; they must have all their good things now; they cannot stay till next year, that is, until the next world, for their portion of good. But first must give place to last . . .”
We, those who represented Passion—and lack of Patience—sat and watched as Chris finished his first hot dog and then had another. At that point, Mom decided that we had all suffered enough in the way of a good lesson and passed us all another round of hot dogs, saying, “You get it don’t you? That this world is temporary? So are all the prizes in it. Here and gone before you know it. The real reward, the one worth waiting for—everlasting life in Heaven—is what it’s really all about.”
None of us were surprised that Chris was the one who “won” the race. He took himself very seriously at camp, embracing the identity of the pilgrim he was named for with a conscientious zeal that none of the rest of us could ever match.
By the time Chris and I were in high school, we were junior counselors at the camp—along with some of the other handful of kids who had come loyally since its inception. Now, PPSYC was a huge affair, with hundreds of kids attending from all around the country, hundreds more being turned away after Uncle Ron started to endorse the camp on his television show.
In the summer after tenth grade, we got there the night before camp began. Mom happily walked us through the Progress Course, or PC—as the obstacle course was now called—taking us through to the end, where her latest allegorical innovation had been rigged up by Dad the weekend before. The Wall of Doubt. In
Pilgrim’s Progress,
Christian gets sidetracked from “the way” and imprisoned by the Giant Despair in the Doubting Castle. Because the construction of an actual castle would have been too elaborate a project (not to mention a little scary for the younger kids to be locked up in), Mom had compromised with a wall instead—ten feet high, with ropes attached on either side to help us climb up one side and down the other. I eyed the wall uneasily, wary of the doubt that had recently become a companion I refused to acknowledge.
The first day of camp, I couldn’t get over it. I gave up after a few tries, walking around it to the end of the course. I told myself that I lacked the upper-body strength needed. Other girls at camp had trouble, too, after all. I brooded over my failure that night and the next few, failing again and again no matter how hard I strained. The few others who had failed managed to conquer it eventually. I started gulping down my meals, using free time to practice, doing pull-ups and push-ups to develop the muscles and strength I needed. On the day before the last day of camp, I had still not managed to conquer the Wall of Doubt.