The Almighty Force: Personal Faith and Perspective

In light of the recent death of one of my family members, I have been musing on personal faith and its context in my brief life. This faith has sustained me through both tragedies and triumphs in the past and continues to support me each day. I know that many of my readers are not religious, so please do not take this story as an attempt at conversion - it is exactly the opposite. Personal faith must be approached on one's own path, and this is my story of arriving at it.

I first learned about my religion through the media. Growing up in a secular household, with one parent Christian and the other Muslim, I had never really thought about Allah from the perspective of organized religion. He was a being in the abstract sense when I was younger - I have no memories of faith beyond the paper-thin symbolism of winter holidays. I didn't know about Ramadan then.

I've written previously about 9/11 and its role in making me a reactionary activist to the Islamophobia that followed. But seeing Islam as a personal religion is different than seeing it in the activist light. No, it came to me in another package: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I read this book at an age that was much too young for its subject matter, though I appreciate that it came into my life at that point (and am intensely curious to see what different impressions I get when I finally read it again). Malcolm X was a convert to the Muslim faith, someone who did not take the teachings for granted and approached them with careful eyes. Though he did not bring Islam to me, the words of his book displayed to me that the religion is loving as it is powerful, and as familiar.

At that time in my life, I needed a force like that. I had been bullied in school and was suffering from depression, though at the time the only names I had for it were apathy and loneliness. I chose personal faith over personal destruction, though the idea was still abstract. To this day, it comforts me to know that this choice was the one that kept me stable and allowed me to fully experience the life that I lead now - faith has passed with me through the shocking times and the beautiful ones, and it resides within me to return to lest I forget.

I suppose that's why I am returning to it now. The reassurances that my faith provides keep the sadness at bay. There is an end to suffering and there is a better place that we pass into once we are in the care of Allah once more. But more than that, the strength and dignity of our religion keep me working to improve my own circumstances and take stock of the life I am leading: what can I do better to take care of myself and those close to me? What can I do to better the world that we live in, so that we are not waiting in vain to pass into death? Even as I am alone, I gather strength and perspective. We are only given the burdens we can carry, and I will carry on with the number of days, months, and years I have left.

Immigrant Mourning

How does one feel sadness properly?

This week opens for me with a very recent death and a very raw period of mourning. As much as I believe that death is a natural inevitable process, it still shakes you to the core when it comes close. It's almost enough to make me want to write clichéd sentences moralizing about those who have passed on and those who remain here with us. Almost.

But more than that, I feel very strongly that I must talk about the experience of being in mourning as an immigrant. I am part of the satellite family that lives several time zones away, and I am apart not only from our larger family, but from my own small family as well. Though it is never easy to drop everything and deal with a family emergency, we don't even have the option to return home. We can only orbit around, waiting for a time to return to them. We grieve alone.

I find it odd that this aspect of the immigrant experience is understated. Intellectually, I know that it is overshadowed by the rhetoric of the American dream and the opportunities of entering a new life, forging an individual path, and participating in capitalism, but my heart is focused elsewhere. It shows me the profound loss that is involved in moving halfway across the globe for so-called opportunities. The inevitable missing of births and deaths, the broken families, and the hard edge of being alone - my heart takes in these feelings and tries to blunt them so that I can be sad in a proper manner. So that I don't tie in my individual sadness with the infrastructure that contributes to it. So that I can still feel good about the place that I live in, have been adopted into, even as I yearn to be with my family and take rest.

Months back, during Thanksgiving, I wrote a piece on gratitude for Dear Sugar and I talked about returning to Bangladesh for the first time last year. I wrote:

"I am grateful for that empty place at the table. I am thankful that sometimes people need not know each other to care for them. We are contributing to the stockpile of love in the universe – whether that’s through writing advice columns or finding gratitude in the hardest moments. What we manifest is who we ultimately become."

I am caring and I am loving from afar. I cannot reach that empty place at the table, and neither can many of my family members. But it is there.

How does one feel sadness properly? I want to address this question in my posts this week. Look out for some more writing on sadness and mourning in the next few days. And thank you, as always, for reading.