Cleansing in the Rain: the Final Purge

I sat on the grass as the rain poured over me. Hard. It’s that time of year in Tampa when rain pours every single day. Each drop fell to heal a different wound -- wounds so deep I had forgotten they existed. Wounds I carried. Wounds the earth carried. Stories merged into one vast web: my stories and others’. Salty and unsalted drops ran down my face. 

I was cleansing in the rain for God knows how many times in two years. This cleanse, however, was different. It wasn’t sitting at rock bottom searching for the beauty in my pain while the rain poured over me. Nor was I looking for the great opportunities of growth, asking myself the same question: what am I supposed to learn from this? This was heavier. A hurt that wasn’t stagnant. It felt like boulders were finally breaking and the water trapped in them were gushing out. 

Something (so small) had happened the day before that triggered and unleashed everything. I knew God was listening. I could feel Him. I could feel him closer than my jugular vein. It was the final purge; and it wouldn’t stop. 

The sky poured. I continued to sit. I drained the rocks in me. I prayed.   

A month earlier I met an Iraqi at a hotel breakfast in a different country. “We really are good people,” he said, his distant eyes locking into mine. “We used to see you all marching for us on TV. It gave us hope.” The word hope was dead as it rolled off his tongue. The same way he found his mother floating in a river with a bullet in her head.

We were from the same generation. Each witnessing the war from a different angle. He, in Baghdad. Me, in the United States. It could have been me watching him on TV in front of the White House calling for sanctions. In the summer of 1990, we cut our trip short visiting my grandmother, and rushed back to Atlanta one day before the borders closed for the first Gulf War. My oldest sister was born in Baghdad after my parents fled the monstrous Assad regime in 1980. How many times did God save me from experiencing war? I could have been in Syria. I could have been in Iraq. But it wasn’t my destiny. Yesterday it was Bosnia. Today it’s Gaza. What will it be tomorrow?  

What was my destiny? What is my purpose? Who really is God? What does He expect of me? Why so much suffering? Here. There. Everywhere. The stories are billions. The pain is one. 

My destiny was here, in America. More specifically, it was two marriages. Two divorces. One long. One short. Each barring scars that led me to growth. Strength. Understanding. And Love. 

The first marriage was the vehicle for my offspring. To continue the torch of God’s Light and Guidance (inshaAllah) in five different directions. 

I will always cherish the memories of that marriage and the wonderful experiences that came with it. He was and is a very good man. Good women are for good men; and good men are for good women. My children are blessed to be ours. We are blessed to be theirs. 

My second encounter uprooted life as I knew it. A tornado for this exact moment: purging of the self. To understand opposites: strength and weakness; light and dark; truth and deception; actions and words; peace and turmoil. The tools I need for 40 and beyond. Who he was or is has no significance. A character dropped in and plucked out. A relationship will end exactly as it begins. With my first, it was slow and long, and for that, the closing was slow and long to find the peaceful flow forward. With the second, it was quick and began with a text; so it ended quickly. Also with a text. Just enough time to shatter a vessel so that God could give me all kinds of glue to recreate and build stronger.     

I continued to cry. Everything was moving deep within my tissues. One must feel the pain for it to exit. Never block or numb it. You either become stagnant, turning your pain into a fungus-infested swamp of emotional gunk and trauma, or you let the feelings surface and flow like a river that eventually opens into the great ocean. Yacob, may God be pleased with him, had two emotions: extreme grief and extreme joy. We need both to understand each one. We need feelings to attach to God and to have spirituality. If we don’t have spirituality, then we can’t have resilience. Without resilience, we can’t bring beauty to people. And the swamp is never beautiful, but the river opens into majesty.

For hours, the rain continued; then suddenly, it slowed. The drops became softer, merciful. Each pearl felt like a whisper on my skin. My muscles melted. The sky turned blue. The rain felt kinder. A perfect full-arched rainbow appeared. The Giver of Gifts was giving me a gift. This, I was sure. For God comes to you the way you see Him. It was the greatest validation. Each color representing something hopeful. For that, new tears came. Tears of gratitude. Tears of love. Tears of humility. “Thank you, Allah.” 

I held my heart to contain the overwhelming emotions the same way our Mother Hajar, may God be pleased with her, held the flow of zamzam to protect it for her son. I sat up. I breathed in, filling every space in my lungs. I held it for 10 seconds. Then slower than my inhale, released. I let it all go. 

There was God everywhere. His attributes were surrounding me. There was beauty in every pain. To suffer is to cleanse. Whether it’s here. There. Everywhere. In Sudan. In Afghanistan. In Syria. In our homes. In our minds. The goal is one: to kill the ego. To do that, you must kill a part of your self. To die before you die, then make the world a healthier and more beautiful place like Abdelqader al Jilani, Omar al-Mokhtar from Libya, Abdelkader al-Jazaeri, or Rabiah al-Adawiya. This is the only way to be purified and return Home to where Adam and Hawaa first began.    

With the rainbow slowly fading, I decided I would prepare for 40 even though it was 6-months away. We prepared for Ramadan 6-months before its arrival to truly benefit from its greatness. If what the sages say is true, that 40 is the beginning of wisdom, then it must also be true that it’s not the age that brings wisdom; but the preparation. Shouldn't we then prepare for 40 and the new journey ahead, entering it with a newfound self and space?

After a week, I gathered my journals from the past years, especially the last five. Thousands of pages. I burned them one by one. I watched the fire take them, saw the words melt and the memories disappear into silence as if they had never existed. Inside me, a space was clearing. I could feel the opening from al-Fatah. 

“One day Allah will personally come to you and lift the pain out of you,” my cousin once told me. 

I never believed him.

But he was right. It wasn’t the absence of pain he meant, but the hold pain has over a person. I’ve always been a cheerful girl; my greatest weakness was laughing too much. Yet beyond that, I clung to my stories, stories that were too old to carry into my future.

They no longer existed, and I was free. 

هذا من فضل ربي