Shima Was Warm Shelter
I love her. I never met her.
Author’s Note: The names in this story have been changed for the protection of some people I still love.
I.
Three months after I graduated from college, I went to live and work in an Iranian immigrant & refugee community in Vancouver, BC.
I was pretty stupid in the way most 22-year-olds are: still round enough in the cheeks for it to be endearing and absolutely 100% rock-solid sure about the nature of God, the universe, and everything.
I hadn’t yet realized that the god I knew was one I’d largely made in my own image: abiding by my (American, white, 21st century) rules, acquainted with suffering in theory but in practice more concerned with doing things the right way (see also: the Points God.)
It was through my experience with this Iranian community that the very first tiny cracks in my Jesus-points theology began. My experiences among this community set in motion what would become a ten-year journey through the painful deconstruction and glorious reconstruction that would define my twenties.
And the reason it happened was Shima.
II.
Shima did not live in my little Iranian community in Canada. We only numbered about 30-50 people at any given time, from a handful of families, most of whom had left their country under threats of persecution I’d only ever read about.
They would tell me about it in bits and pieces. Midnight raids of their bookshelves from secret police. Interrogations in dark basements. “Vacations” to Turkey they knew they’d never come back from.
They were so casual about such terrible details sometimes.
“Yes, we lit a heat lamp on the living room floor and propped a blanket up like a tent. We pretended it was a game because the kids were small.”
“Oh, you know, you had to run across the border exactly when they told you, because they were shooting and they had search lights.”
“Well, they put this written warrant for my execution on the table. I was probably 18.”
At 22, I remembered the DC Talk-branded book, Voice of the Martyrs, which I’d read in the fourth grade (wayyy too young for its intended audience.) In the 90s, we were raised with stories of contemporary Christian martyrs. We were asked monthly, weekly even, what we’d say if (and when, many emphasized) someone held a gun to our face and demanded that we deny Christ. (This was a very real thing that happened to most of us during adolescence.)
I had spent much of my childhood trying to be the kind of person who appeared in those books: so consumed with holiness that I’d respond to my impending death with a laugh. I nursed a well-intentioned, deeply ingrained savior complex and a conviction that purity was something I could actually attain.
Meeting the real-life saints humbled me quickly. When I met the people who had actually had this life-or-death experience in real life, they were so much more than just beautiful, sanitized stories for young evangelical zealots to consume. They were real people — ones who squabbled, danced, yelled at each other, threw fun and raucous parties, languished in the cold Vancouver rain.
I was languishing, too, but I didn’t know it. I was living on ministry donations, keeping my grocery budget to $25 CA per week, soaked to my socks because I wouldn’t buy new boots. On cold days, I would turn on the oven in my beloved yellow kitchen and nap, since my apartment didn’t have any way to turn up the heat.
These very same people I’d read about in Voice of the Martyrs (or seen on CNN and Fox) cut my hair for free, called me when I inevitably got sick, chatted away as I tried (failed) to get the rhythm of Persian into my ears. They chastised me for never answering my phone (which I absolutely deserved). They blew up at me a few times for the stupid 22-year-old things I did. I blew up at them, too.
They were teaching me, even though they didn’t know it, about being a grown up. The way people will surprise you. The way we are never just one thing. They told me where the good grocery stores were, sent me home with tadigh, told me to stop eating fesenjan because of my acne-prone skin (I did not listen to them because I love fesenjan).
And sometimes they told me about Shima.
III.
I never met Shima. I don’t even know what she looked like. And by the time I came to join the small group of immigrants in Canada, she had already died.
But everyone in my small, formative community had been touched by her in some way: spiritually, emotionally, financially. She played a crucial part in many of their stories of emigration and escape. As I asked more about my neighbors’ lives, their journeys to Christianity, to Canada, to each other, Shima’s hands were everywhere. She became a sort of legend for me: the off-screen character who puts the story in motion. Hamlet’s father in Act I, scene I.
And the more I learned about her, the more I wanted to be like her.
Like the horrible details of my friends’ escapes from the Ahmadinejad regime, the details about Shima came in bits and pieces.
She was an elder at the church in Tehran to which most of my friends belonged.
She was a little older than most of the people I worked with in Canada (mostly young families). She’d built a steady little life, and she kept the books at the underground church.
Each person I met seemed to have interacted with her in some way.
She had given Masoud money when she learned about his “vacation” to Turkey.
She had been praying for Reza as he agonized over whether to leave his family.
She had let Laleh stay with her when her mother kicked her out.
She had been the keeper of the church’s roster and documents. A literal death sentence if the government ever found out.
I think she had a husband once, but he’d either passed or been ill for a long time. Mostly, Shima seemed to exist on her own terms. She was the kind of person, everyone said, who just kind of knew things.
I believe it was Shima who introduced the two founders of our church in Canada—a married couple and the bedrock of our community. Had she not simply known which woman God had for this man, we wouldn’t have had a group to begin with.
And it was like this with everyone. I was continually shocked at how far Shima’s influence had spread. It was like every new Iranian I met knew about her. Young twenty-somethings discussed her like something between a beloved, cool aunt and a grandmother. Grumpy babas cracked a craggy smile about her under usually stern, perfect mustaches.
I remember that when I finally had the courage to ask about her for real, Firuzeh, proud and beautiful in her forties, sat on a couch opposite me. She took an inhale through her nose and leaned her head back against the wall while she thought. “Shima was…” eyes closed. Another deep inhale to think. “Warm shelter.”
IV.
This was really how people talked about her, in that almost songlike tone of voice that Persians use for poetry, which has no English equivalent. Thoughtful. Reverent, even. Special. Shima was someone who was like home. Someone who made people feel at home. And I, twenty-two and a little dumb and full of certainty about the type of Christian Soldier I would be, was broken open by this description. I was bowled over at how much of what I was learning, unlearning, becoming was due to the faithfulness of a woman I would never meet. A woman who was, on paper, so ordinary.
Shima was not a pastor, not a deacon. I like to imagine she would have laughed in the face of the regime, but in the end it was a sickness, not the secret police, that took her. She was not a glamorous, stylized story in my Christian Rap-endorsed book. She was just this regular person who had shown up in a million little ways, for dozens of people around her. Over and over and over again.
Warm shelter. A friend.
She never left that church in Tehran, and she probably had no idea how many people in Canada owed parts of their lives to her.
She definitely didn’t know about me, stomping to Persian church in soaked boots, examining my faith for the first time, and learning how to be a grown-up.
And yet, so much of her remained. And as I absorbed new theology and ghormeh saabzi, as I learned, unlearned, came into my adult self, I started to think of her as the kind of person I wanted to be. No longer a fictionalized martyr pure unto a fiery death, but the kind of person who feels like home in a million little ways. Over and over and over again.
V.
I am the second generation of Shima’s influence. You are now the third.
Together, you and I are part of her legacy, which now spreads across two decades, an ocean, and at least five countries. That’s what happens when someone is faithful in the little things, willing to be inconvenienced by the needs of the people around them, willing to play the off-screen role in the big, exciting story.
Now, a decade older and a whole different person, I still think of her when I consider the kind of Christian, the kind of woman, the kind of person I want to be. Someone who is there for you in the small things. Someone who feels like home.
And someday, when I am in heaven, I’ll get to meet Shima and tell her.
You don’t know me, but you changed me. I want to be just like you.
Warm shelter.
A friend.
Id forgotten about being asked what we would do if asked to deny Christ. Adding to the list of things to talk about in therapy 😫