The House of Praise: The Child Who Goes Ahead, the House That Breaks and the Fruit That Returns

Fruit of the Heart, Part 4 of 4

The House of Praise: The Child Who Goes Ahead, the House That Breaks and the Fruit That Returns

When the child of a believer dies, God — who already knows — asks His angels what His servant said; and for the parent who praised Him, and said that to God we return, He has a house built in Paradise, and names it the House of Praise.

Nothing said in that room, in that hospital corridor, in that car on the way home, was hidden from Him, and still He asks. He does not ask how old the child was, or what the child would have become, or whether the parent had done everything right. He asks what the parent said. And in that report it is God who calls the child the fruit of his heart: this series took its name from the words of the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, about his daughter, and here God Himself says it, of the child of any believer. Something has been taken — and God is asking what His servant said.

We are very good at visiting some houses: the wedding, the 'aqiqa, the graduation. And there are houses in every community that we stop visiting. The couple who lost a baby before it was born. The marriage that ended, which we go on discussing with our eyes across the hall. The widower alone at the school gate with a lunchbox he packed himself. The mother raising her children on her own. The woman who has not married, asked at every wedding when her turn will come — and the man asked the same thing, with a different laugh. And the old father by the window of a care home on the morning of Eid, waiting. There are men in every one of those houses. And the night does not say one word about what the people in them did; it describes only what the rest of us do, and stop doing. So tonight, we visit them.

Three nights have walked with the three sevens of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him: seven years of play, seven of adab, seven of keeping a child close. There is no fourth. At twenty-one the child is grown, and the circle turns: the child who was raised becomes the one who raises — his own children, and one day the parents who raised him. The verse that opens the night puts the series' own word, tarbiyah, into the mouth of that grown child, standing beside a mother or a father grown old and asking God to have mercy on them, as they reared him when he was small. So the night takes us into three houses: the house where a child went ahead, the house that broke and is being rebuilt, and the house where a parent grew old. Tonight is the circle.

The question underneath it

God knows what happened to us. What did we say, when it happened?

And when it happened to someone else — the house that lost a child, the house that broke, the parent grown old — what did we say to them, and what did we stop saying?

What the evening covers

• The child who goes ahead. A father who spoke, over the loss of his eldest son, of God's hidden graces; the children of the believers in the care of Abraham and Sarah, peace and blessings be upon them, and raised by Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her, until she hands them back; a name for every child, even the one miscarried, as Imam Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, taught, for the child will turn to its father; and Jacob and Job, peace and blessings be upon them, in whom tears and praise sat together.

• There is no shelf. Sayyedah Khadijah, peace and blessings be upon her, sought, the reports say, by the chiefs of her people; she waited, and chose, and sent to the Prophet herself, and spoke for herself at her own wedding; Ruth, the widow who proposed, whom the whole city called virtuous; and the race of luxury, which keeps good young women and men from marrying — for the shelf is built by the rest of us, never by the one who waits.

• The Prophet's own house. Widows, a divorced woman and stepchildren, and God's promise that when a couple part He will suffice each of them; the knowing nod across the hall, slander without a word, and the same calumny once spoken of the Blessed Saint Mary, peace and blessings be upon her; the father who walks away from his child, and the father who is pushed out; and the child who is never a weapon, in either parent's hands.

• A home with one parent is not a broken home. Hagar, peace and blessings be upon her, alone in a barren valley with her son, and her running, which every pilgrim retraces; Mary, raising her son under slander, and sheltered by God; the Prophet, raised an orphan, and then a widowed father raising his little girl; and remarriage, after a death or a divorce, which is no betrayal — for a woman or for a man.

• The fruit returns to the root. Not even a sigh of irritation, and not even a hard look; the little girl who ran to her father and was called the mother of her father; Joseph, peace and blessings be upon him, seating his parents high upon the throne; the care home, where placement is not the sin and abandonment is; and a young scholar who went home to his father's side, and a daily gift to a mother and a father, while they live and after they have gone.

It ends at her house, one last time. Sayyedah Fatimah knew that she was leaving them, and Imam Ali sat with her, and they wept together a while; and her first request was not for herself but for her children: that he marry again after her, for the woman she chose would be to her children what she had been to them. Medina cried out with a single cry; her two boys wept in front of their father, and the people wept at their weeping; and the people who had come to pray over her were sent home. Fourteen centuries on, no one knows where to stand to greet her. And the maqtal, As I Am, is for Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her: her burial in secret, her husband at the grave of her father, and the daughter who, fifty years later, became a mother to a caravan of orphans.