Sign outside of a San Francisco cafe [Photo: Baraka]

Somewhere on my spiritual journey, I lost my empathy.

My faith and trust in God were built up through years of harrowing illness. In the last few months, though, I’ve realized that faith has become a wall shielding me from feeling pain, my own and everyone else’s.

Saying “God willing, everything will be all right” should be part of the conversation, but I’ve too often used it as the end, as if that is all that needs to be said.

Growing up, I often found religious people to be lacking in empathy. They perceived any display of emotion or struggle as evidence of weak faith, rather than as a sign of the Creator Himself who chose us to be human with all our messy emotions, questions, and thoughts rather than the cool perfection of angels.

In spite of rejecting the “Islam of No” somehow I found myself denying emotions and making soothing noises to friends in need before quickly moving on, thinking to myself, “It will all be fine, eventually.”

What I meant by “eventually” was the afterlife. But short as this life will seem to us then, it is real enough now.

While reading the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude I was struck by this passage:

Spiritual life is not mental life. It is not thought alone…Nor does the spiritual life exclude thought and feeling. It needs both. It is not just a life concentrated at the “high point” of the soul, a life from which the mind and the imagination and the body are excluded. If it were so few people could lead it. And again, if that were the spiritual life, it would not be a life at all. If man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. Everything must be elevated and transformed by the action of God, in love and faith.

My faith and certainty walled off my heart and love, though they are what drew me back to Islam in the first place. I began to feel that any longing or desire on my part or suffering on the part of others was to be glossed over instead of acknowledged and deeply felt.

For three years I’ve struggled with my neurologist’s proclamation that I cannot have biological children and yet I have not allowed a word to pass my lips here. I have rarely spoken about it to my closest friends. And I have barely acknowledged the depths of loss, sadness, anger even to myself.

I have been afraid of being ungrateful to God.  When I have been given the ability to walk and see again who am I to ask for more?

A dear friend of mine, Maximus Mercury, made a comment I’ve never forgotten:

I’ve always been taught that it is an extremely powerful prayer and should be recited with great sanctity and with full cognition of the degree of humility it requires. If you feel the words, please recite it repeatedly: “La ilaha illa anta subhanaka inni kunto minazzualimeen”… This is a prayer for miracles. Ask Allah for everything and more, with all the longing and petulance in your heart. He is the Only One who can grant you everything and sometimes He just waits for you to ask.

And yet I did not ask, for the longest time.

Now, I ask for a child with all the longing and petulance of my heart, and I am afraid. It is one thing to not reach out, it is another to ask and face the possibility of being denied.

If I have found comfort in the One who gives generously, will I be able to find equal comfort in the One who denies?

So my crisis of faith is more the acknowledgment of the possible crisis that lies ahead. It is when we ask and do not receive, or when we have something and it is taken away that faith is shaken. And yet, many of us do not think about faith until the very moment of crisis, the moment when we are at our most vulnerable, when we need faith and find that it is not there.

Buoyed by the high tides of life, I can pretend that the rocks don’t exist. But when the tide recedes again, as it must, it reveals all the jagged rocks of uncertainty and fear, questions and anger that have yet to be worn smooth by the water of faith. Those rocks will break your heart and soul if you stumble into them during the ebb of the tide.

The tide is full now but, undoubtedly, it will recede. I’m trying to prepare for the rocks that I know are waiting for me below.

I’m also trying to open my heart to suffering, to feeling the heaviness of pain, loss, and struggle in others. Somehow, I twisted faith into being beyond emotion. But, faith should make us ever more human, ever more compassionate, ever more loving, ever more a reflection of the One who embodies all those beautiful characteristics.

Even the prophets, the pinnacles of humanity who had absolute faith and certainty in God, wept as they shared the human burdens and sorrows of their people or experienced personal losses of their own. To cut myself off from feeling is to deny my own humanity.

Three dear friends of mine especially come to mind right now:

One friend is tortured by a marriage gone sour which she feels unable to leave, although her three young children are now suffering alongside her.

The second’s mother was just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She is bravely and painfully trying to comprehend the losses that may lie ahead, of having a parent still alive but gone in every other way that makes her Mother.

And the third suffered a miscarriage after years of hopeful trying. There is hardly a day that goes by that her suffering and anger do not make me weep.

My initial reaction to soothe and then look away was because it is so very painful to see those whom we love suffer. It is so very agonizing to see their tears falling and be powerless to stop them. It is so very hard to allow their pain to bruise our own hearts, and to bear the discomfort instead of moving away to protect ourselves.

But I’ve realized that I must remain present. It is not enough to say “God willing, everything will be all right.”

While I can believe that and point the way to the Light, I must also be willing to sit here in the darkness beside my friends, holding them so close that they can feel my love, so close that I can feel their hearts break.