I thought about it now and what I thought was that I was not going to post it.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

Not because the footage was not significant, but because I could not produce content about something I did not yet understand.

And I was honest enough with myself to know that I did not yet understand what had happened in my open hand.

I called my friend Sammy.

Sammy was 29, Palestinian American, worked as a software engineer, the person in my life I was most direct with.

I told him what had happened.

all of it in the same order I had told Father James.

He listened without interrupting.

And when I finished, he said, “The warmth, you’re sure it was from inside the bread.

” I said, “Sammy.

” It was like holding something with a heartbeat.

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, “What do you think it was?” I said, “I think you know what I think it was.

And I think you know why I am not saying it yet.

” He said, “Because saying it means something.

” I said, “Because saying it means everything.

” Sammy said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I’m going to find out if it is true.

” Not whether the warmth was real.

I know the warmth was real.

I mean, whether what Father James says it means is true, whether the one who was in that host is who he says he is.

Sammy said, “How are you going to find that out?” I said, “The same way I find out anything.

I’m going to read everything available and then I’m going to ask the source directly.

I spend the next four days reading.

I had a Bible on my phone, a modern English translation I had downloaded for debate research months earlier and never read seriously.

I opened it and I started with the Gospel of John, which three different sources recommended as the starting point for someone encountering Jesus without prior Christian framework.

I read carefully the way I read anything important with attention to what was actually being said rather than what I had been told was being said.

I found things I had not expected.

I found a person who was specific in a way that religious figures in my previous framework were not allowed to be.

I found a person who got tired and sat beside a well because he was worn out from walking.

I found a person who attended a wedding and made wine when the host ran out, which was not the kind of first miracle I would have designed for a god, and which I found unexpectedly, completely convincing because of its ordinariness.

I found a person who knelt in the dirt in front of a crowd gathered to execute a woman and wrote something with his finger that we never find out the content of and then said, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.

” And every single member of the crowd walked away.

I found a person who wept at his dead friend’s tomb before he raised him from it.

I found the bread of life discourse in the sixth chapter, the same passage Father James had preached on.

I am the living bread that came down from heaven.

Whoever eats this bread will live forever.

And this bread that I will give is my flesh given for the life of the world.

The people who heard it were confused and offended.

Many of them left.

Jesus did not soften the statement to keep them.

He [clears throat] let them go.

And then he turned to his closest friends and said, “Do you want to leave too?” And Peter said, “Lord, where would we go? You have the words of eternal life.

” I read that exchange and I sat with it for a long time.

Peter did not say I fully understand what you just told us.

He said where would we go? He said there is nowhere else that has what you have even when what you have does not yet make sense to me.

That was the most honest thing I had read in years and it was 2,000 years old.

I went back to Our Lady of the Lakes on Tuesday morning.

Father James was in his office and the door was open and he looked up when I knocked on the frame and said, “I wondered when you’d come back.

” I sat down and I asked my questions.

I had a list.

Father James answered every question I brought for 3 weeks of Tuesday and Thursday morning meetings in that small office overlooking the garden behind the church.

He answered the easy ones and the hard ones with the same quality of attention.

never performing certainty he did not have.

Never constructing an argument to cover a gap when honesty about the gap was more useful.

He was the most intellectually honest religious figure I had ever had a sustained conversation with.

And I had been having sustained conversations with religious figures since I was 17 years old.

I asked him about the incarnation, the claim that God became human.

And he gave me the answer I had heard before in Islamic reputation of Christianity.

But this time he gave me the full version, not the version I had been given to argue against.

He said, “The incarnation is not God dressing up in human form for a visit.

It is God fully becoming what he created.

subject to hunger, subject to cold, subject to the specific experience of being misunderstood by the people who should have known you best.

Subject to death, he paused.

The reason this matters for what happened to you on Saturday is this.

The God in that host is the same God who has been hungry, who has been tired, who has been betrayed by someone who ate dinner with him the night before.

He has been in your position, and he has been in a position much harder than yours.

He knows what it is to reach the end of your own capacity.

And his response to being there is always the same.

I said, “What is his response?” He said, “Father, forgive them every time.

” That’s the first word from the cross.

Before the pain is over, before the betrayal is resolved, forgiveness first.

He looked at me.

You came here to crush something he gave his life to make available to the whole world.

His response was to warm your hand.

I thought about that for several days.

I thought about it during the week between meetings when I sat at my kitchen table every night with the Gospel of John and work through it slowly, one chapter at a time.

I was in the passion narrative, the account of the final days, the arrest and the trial and the crucifixion.

I had read this material before in preparation for arguments.

I had read it looking for inconsistencies, looking for the human construction underneath the theological claim.

I was reading it now looking for the person.

What I found was a person who in the garden before his arrest knelt on the ground and asked that the cup be taken from him and then said not my will but yours.

Not theatrical acceptance, real fear, real cost, real choice.

I found a person who when the crowd came with swords and torches to arrest him, stepped forward and said, “I am the one you are looking for.

Let these others go.

” protecting the people he loved even while being handed over.

I found a person who during the trial when the high priest asked him if he was the son of God said yes and gave the court the statement they needed to execute him not defending himself telling the truth knowing what the truth would cost.

I found the cross and the seven words from it and I read them in order slowly and I paid attention to the sequence.

forgiveness first, then care for his mother, then the man dying next to him.

Today you will be with me, then the darkness and the question, the only question that was also a prayer.

Why have you left me? Then I am thirsty.

Then it is finished.

Then into your hands I give my spirit.

A person choosing every word with full awareness of what was happening and organizing his last moments around the people who needed something from him rather than around himself.

I closed my Bible on that Thursday night and I said out loud to my apartment, which was the same thing as saying it to whoever was in my apartment, which was the same thing as saying it to whoever had been warm in my hand on Saturday.

You chose all of that.

Every part of it, you could have stopped it and you chose not to.

And the reason you chose not to was me.

Was everyone who was going to come into that church wanting to crush what you offered and needing to find that you were still warm in their hand.

Anyway, I stopped.

I have been angry for years and I did not know what the anger was about and I think I know now.

I was angry because I was empty and I did not know where to go for the thing I needed.

And every place I looked that should have had it did not seem to have it.

Not in a way I could feel.

I pressed my hands flat on the kitchen table.

You were in that host.

I know you were in that host.

I felt you and I could not close my fist because you were there and my body knew it before my mind did.

I stopped again.

Then I said, I do not know how to do this.

I do not know what it costs yet.

Not completely, but I am not empty anymore.

Not since a Saturday.

And I am not going back to the hollow.

So here I am here.

All of it.

Whatever is left of me after I lost my legs on a stone floor, it’s yours.

I stayed at the kitchen table for a long time after that.

The Minneapolis night moved outside my window.

Cars on the street below.

A wind coming off one of the 10,000 lakes 2 mi west.

The ordinary city being ordinary all around a person who was sitting inside a different category of ordinary than the one he had occupied that morning.

The warmth that came was not dramatic.

It was not the sudden stunning warmth of the host in my hand on Saturday.

It was quieter than that, more like the warmth that builds in a room over an hour than the warmth of a fire you woke up to.

Gradual and pervasive and real.

It started in my chest and moved slowly.

And it was the specific warmth of something that had been missing for a long time and was no longer missing.

and the space where the hollow had been was now occupied by something patient and warm and quiet and old.

I sat there until midnight.

Then I went to bed and slept without interruption for 8 hours, which was the first time I had slept without interruption for 8 hours in longer than I could accurately remember.

The next morning, I called Father James.

I said, “I need to tell you where I am.

” He said, “Come in Thursday.

” I said, “I can’t wait until Thursday.

” He said, “Then come today.

” I drove to Our Lady of the Lakes in the Tuesday morning traffic and I walked into the church and I sat in the same chair I had sat in on Saturday and I said without preamble, “I gave my life to Jesus last night at my kitchen table.

And I need someone to help me understand what comes next.

” Father James sat down across from me and he looked at me for a moment.

He said, “Tell me what happened.

” I told him the kitchen table and the prayer and what had arrived slowly in the warmth afterward.

He listened to all of it.

And when I finished, he did something that surprised me.

He put his face in his hands for a moment, not from distress, from something that looked like relief, so deep it needed a moment to pass through him.

He looked up and his eyes were wet.

And he said, “I have been praying for you since I got the message that you are coming.

Not for the outcome, just for you.

for whatever you actually needed.

He paused.

I think you found it.

We talked for 2 hours about what came next.

He introduced me to the RCIA process, the formal path by which adults entered the Catholic Church, which was not a requirement for what I had already found, but which was the structure available for learning and community and belonging.

He introduced me to the Tuesday evening young adult group, a community of people in their 20s and 30s who met in the parish hall for Bible study and conversation and the kind of honest theological discussion I had been conducting in the wrong
direction for 3 years.

He gave me a Bible with my name written inside the front cover in his own handwriting, which was the smallest gesture and the largest gift of that whole period.

I drove home and I sat at the kitchen table that had been the site of the previous night’s prayer and I thought about what the next conversation was going to cost.

Not the community, not the followers, the kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon with my parents.

That conversation I thought about my father’s hands on the steering wheel of a cab at 4 in the morning.

I thought about my mother praying with the easy personal quality that I had watched my whole life and never fully understood.

I thought about my sister Dina who had always had what I had just found and who had never been able to explain how to get there because some things cannot be transmitted and can only be received.

I called Dana first.

She was 25 and living in Saint a po and working as a nurse and she was the person in my family who would receive what I had to say with the most complete understanding.

I called her on a Wednesday afternoon and I told her everything from the beginning.

The plan, the church, the host in my hand, the warmth, the floor, Father James, the kitchen table on Tuesday night, what had arrived.

Dina was quiet for so long after I finished that I said her name to check if she was still there.

She said, “I’m here.

I’m just She stopped.

” Then she said, “Fared, I have been praying for you for 4 years, not 4 weeks, 4 years.

” She said, “Not because you were in trouble, because I could see you were empty and I knew where the thing you needed was, and I could not give it to you.

I just kept asking Jesus to find you.

” She stopped again.

And then you walked into a church to crush the Eucharist and he warmed your hand.

She made a sound that was somewhere between laughing and crying.

That is so completely him.

That is exactly who he is.

I drove to my parents’ house in the Seward neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon, 2 weeks after the kitchen table night.

I had told Dena and I had told Sammy and I had told no one else yet.

My parents were both home.

My father was in the kitchen when I came in, making coffee on the stove top in the small brass pot he had brought from Jordan in 1993 and which had survived 31 years in America without being replaced.

My mother was in the living room with her reading glasses on and a book in her lap.

I sat at the kitchen table and my mother came in and sat across from me and my father put three small cups on the table and poured without asking and sat at the end.

I told them completely.

I did not soften the part about the plan and what I had gone to the church to do because they deserve the full truth and because the full truth made what came after more accurate rather than less.

I told them about the host in my hand, the warmth, my legs, the floor, Father James, the weeks of reading and conversation, Dana’s four years of prayer, the kitchen table Tuesday night, and what had arrived.

My father listened with his hands around his small coffee cup and did not interrupt once.

My mother’s face moved through things I could not fully read.

When I finished, my father set down his cup and looked at the table for a moment and then looked at me.

He said, “You went there to destroy something.

” I said, “Yes.

” He said, “And it was warm in your hand.

” I said, “Yes.

” He was quiet again.

Then he said, “I have driven a cab in this city for 20 years, and I have prayed in that cab at 4 in the morning, and I have been certain of the God I was praying to.

” He paused.

I am not going to tell you that what you held in your hand was nothing.

I was not there.

I do not know what it was.

He looked at me directly.

I know my son.

I know when my son is telling me the truth.

He picked up his coffee cup.

You are telling me the truth.

He drank.

That was his full statement.

and it was enough.

My mother waited until my father stood up to refill the pot.

Then she looked at me across the kitchen table with the eyes she had used my whole life to check whether I was actually okay rather than performing okay.

And she said, “Are you at peace?” I thought about the kitchen table and the warmth that had come slowly and the 8 hours of sleep and the hollow that was no longer hollow.

I said, “Yes, for the first time in years.

Yes.

She reached across the table and covered my hand with both of hers and held it for a moment without saying anything.

Then she said, “Then I believe you.

” And she meant it, not I agree with you.

I believe you.

And those two things are different.

And the difference was everything.

I going public was the last thing and the largest thing.

I had 95,000 followers who had received an announcement that I was going to the church and had been waiting for content that had never arrived.

I had been silent for 3 weeks except for a single post saying the video was delayed indefinitely.

The comments were full of speculation, concern, and a current of impatience from people who had been anticipating confrontation content and had not received it.

I recorded the video on a Monday morning sitting at the kitchen table that had become the most significant location in my apartment.

Plain white shirt, no production setup.

I looked at the camera and I told the truth.

I told them about building hold the line on anger that I had dressed in theological language and called conviction.

I told them about 3 years of confrontation content and the hollow underneath every successful episode.

I told them about the plan and our lady of the lakes and what I had intended to do with the host.

I told them about the warmth in my open palm.

I told them about my fingers stopping and my legs giving out and the stone floor of a Catholic church in Minneapolis on a Saturday afternoon in March.

I told them about Father James and the weeks of reading and the kitchen table on Tuesday night.

I said I went to that church to crush something Catholics call the body of Christ.

I held it in my hand to show that nothing would happen.

Something happened.

Something I have spent 3 weeks trying to explain and cannot.

Something that was warm and specific and alive and that looked at me through a small white disc and was not surprised by what it saw and was not angry about any of it.

I paused.

I have been making content about the emptiness of Christianity for 3 years from inside a much larger emptiness of my own.

I have been performing a faith I could not feel and calling the absence of feeling a sign of mature religion.

I looked at the camera.

I know the difference now.

I felt the real thing in my hand on a stone floor in Minneapolis.

And I have felt it every day since on my kitchen table and in that church and in the Gospel of John and in every conversation with a priest who knew I was coming to crush what he believed was holy and prepared his volunteers to help me.

Anyway, I stopped.

His name is Jesus.

He was in the host I tried to destroy.

He warmed my hand and put me on my knees.

And I am not ashamed of either of those things.

You can take my platform.

You can take my reputation.

You can call it manipulation and weakness and a breakdown.

You cannot take the warmth.

And the warmth is worth everything I am giving up to tell you about it.

I uploaded the video and set my phone face down on the kitchen table and went for a walk along the lake.

The response was everything I had prepared for.

The anger came fast and public.

former followers calling it the worst betrayal they had seen from a Muslim media figure.

Continue reading….
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