Mount Olives was a world more than it was a church. Its stony steps, castle-brown doors, sky-high multicolored stained-glass windows, deep red pews, and adjoined building filled with shifting rooms made the church a fortress against the outside world. This was a community of Haitian immigrants who believed God called them to deny themselves and found their new selves within these walls. Their commitment to this place is all things: idolatry, security, admiration, continuity, reverence, and the relief of having a place in a foreign land that belongs to them; a home within their new home. In a land that demands assimilation–a new language, new rituals, and rhythms–this place provided a familiarity that produced safety, breathing access to a freedom sparked first through religious reclamation and sustained through the simple yet profound act of belonging.

This was an everyday affair. Sunday school followed by Sunday morning and evening service, Monday night Bible Study, Tuesday night youth choir, Wednesday night prayer and testimony service, Thursday night worship team practice, Friday night prayer service, Saturday morning fasting and Saturday night praise and worship, and repeat on Sunday. It demanded devotion and provided a parallel reality to accompany your everyday life.

Definitions for life were found here. Membership in this house came with a list of demands. A set of rules to prove you were indoctrinated into this gospel. Women in knee-length skirts, inside and outside the church, with natural-colored nails only, simple hairstyles, with a strong recommendation and preference for natural hair, because “fake” hair was deemed a sin, and a thin lace cloth or hat to cover your hair—your glory—during service as a sign of respect for God. They believed in modesty. While the men were not subject to as many physical demands, a clean, polished short haircut was expected at all times. Any sign of long, big hair could result in restrictions within ministry. When these rules were accepted, Mount Olives became an expansive ecosystem equipped to meet any need. A small price to pay for the worlds it was actively building.

While God acted in establishing this place as a spiritual institution—the entryway to attendance—the moral compass by which they navigate it, and the framework that governs their relationships to one another, what is created around this center extends far beyond religious communion. It is a world unto itself. Merging identity formation, cultural preservation, and belonging. It is because it demands participation that members feel ownership towards the social infrastructure actively created. There are few people who passively participate within the construct of this world. And so, over time, it became a self-functioning body.

I think often of my mother, a woman whose entire history revolves around the church. A single institution — or institutions, if we were to be specific about the different churches and church communities she’s been part of—became her primary container for meaning. For women like my mother, ministry came before everything else. Her job acted as a resource to fuel her real work, the church. Work that gave her life purpose. Work that defined her identity. Work that introduced her to her husband. Work that provided her with friendships, women and men whom she’d raise her children alongside, who would be there to hold her in her grief, celebrate anniversaries, champion her during trials, bruise her with betrayals, and soften her with reconciliation. Ministry gave her access to a life. My mother views ministry the way I view a career—something to be nurtured, grown, developed, revised, and shaped. A means to access, and a validator of identity.

On Sundays, my mother was incandescent. Arriving at church ten minutes before 8am service began, dressed to be regal, unmoving from her self-proclaimed position: first seat, second row towards the left, with a direct view of the pulpit. Her worship was to be heard by God. Her claps a commanding battle cry, and her Amen’s a resounding affirmation to everyone in the room. While she did not teach her Sunday School Class, leadership was done from her seat. She was demanding, yet gracious, stern, and moldable by the ladies around her. During special occasions, she was a member of an exclusive group of ladies who managed the church kitchen. Women who rarely took volunteers, having perfected their working stations through decades of practice and easily fed a church with over a thousand members without a hiccup. Her choir seat was predetermined, seated next to women whose children were best friends to her own, as they sang French hymnals with an opera sound.

On Thursdays, she was a shepherd. Leading a group through prayer and worship, discipling women through religious doctrine, encouraging them through life’s trials, providing financial assistance when needed, being all things mother, friend, leader, and teacher. This was her life’s work. Work that brought her equal parts gladness and sorrow, satisfaction and stress. Her impact? Undeniable. Her involvement? Expansive. It is impossible to accurately give an account of my mother apart from her ministry and the church. Both so deeply woven into her identity and history, they seep through everything. My own friendships, childhood friends who’ve followed me through every transition of my life, find their origins here. Her days are filled with activities that center this place. I wonder, if she did not have her ministry and the church, who would my mother be?

Perhaps that’s beautiful.

But perhaps it’s also limiting.

Perhaps that is the only thing she knows.

And perhaps it is the very thing people so desperately cling for today. In a world where people so pressingly long for community, where articles across publications analyze and theorize the disappearance of third spaces, where people now commodify this longing through brands by prescribing aesthetics to gatherings. I think of my childhood church and how seamlessly it created a social infrastructure people are struggling to recreate today.

True community should not be commodified. It is not always picture perfect. It is not in need of branding nor aesthetics to validate its togetherness. It is simply the joining of people, ritualistic or not, and expansive in its outreach towards needs.

I am far removed from Mount Olives today, both time and distance separating us but its influence is still etched across my heart. When I think of my childhood, I think of Mount Olives and all it provided me: Children’s Day, where bouncy houses, cotton candy machines and games filled the church backyard followed by a gala where the children of the church took center stage, Children’s Choir, Children’s Church, Youth Camp and Youth Revivals, Movie Nights, Summer Camp, where kids learned to swim and took trips to various activities, Step Team, Church plays, Conventions with our sister churches across the United States, Block Parties, Sunday School Parties, church anniversaries; it was at church that I learned to read and write in French and Haitian Creole, and where I perfected my skill for public speaking. Mount Olives provided me with a backdrop that kept Haitian customs alive for me. When I was a single black face in a sea of whiteness, Mount Olives provided me with an affirming identity where I wasn’t othered.

Since leaving home, I have been a part of many new and different worlds, providing me with different frameworks of what community means for different people, some wide and expansive like Mount Olives and others transactional, and yet, Mount Olives is the only one, despite time and distance, that upon return feels like home.

Perhaps the Haitian immigrants who started this church weren’t merely searching for friends, community, or faith alone, but a world large enough to hold a life.

It is a world I often wonder if I can replicate.

Whenever anyone asks me about Haiti, I lie. I borrow stories from those around me to tell tales about a country I’ve only visited twice, until these fantasies become revisionist history and morph into memories I now own.

I’m unsure if I felt pride in being Haitian as a child. I was seven when we moved into an affluent, all-white Jewish neighborhood, where I realized for the first time I was Black, and my teacher stood me up in front of the class, pointed to Haiti on the map, and declared it was “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere”. A direct contrast to the histories my mother would soon teach me, but a truth according to Google. At school, I was the only black girl and therefore the keeper and mirror of all Black History, even if it wasn’t mine. At my Haitian Pentecostal church, I was Haitian but not quite; my Creole was broken, my conduct a bit too American. At my church, our nationalism went as far as our faith would allow. I was a child, existing between multiple realities at once, trying to make sense of what made me me, what was true, and what histories I wanted to claim as my own.

In 2019, when I visited Haiti for the first time in a way I could remember, I grieved for all the memories that could have been. For my mother, this trip was a Homecoming. From the moment her feet reconnected with the soil that birthed her, she was joy. An exceeding joy I had not known her to be. She was free in a way that surprised me and a way I envied. Haiti was hers, and I was a foreigner on its land; yet, I had never been more connected to soil before. It was a paradoxical experience: to feel as if you are returning and discovering at the same time. I belonged there, and my belonging had been robbed from me.

Seeing Haiti with adult eyes, I wanted her to be mine.

For the first time, I saw the Haiti my mother had described to me as a child: Haiti was mother to the Black western world and was punished for birthing freedom. She was an island, mountainous and rich, resilient by nature and giving to a fault. She welcomed everyone onto her land when she was full of things to give and gave until she was empty. And while now poor to some, she is still rich in beauty.

I walked around Haiti, enthralled by everything she had to offer. When I returned to the States, I questioned what “home” meant and if it was possible to belong to two opposing places at once. Can you belong to a place you physically do not know? Can it still be your own? Can home be a place you have never lived and likely will never hold residence in?

In truth, I am jealous of every first-gen afforded the opportunity to freely visit their homeland and make it their own. Those who know their land enough to travel without supervision or a guide, because it has become a home for them, too. In reality, the majority of my family now lives in America. As my elders become older, without their guide, how will I know Haiti? How do I claim it as my own to pass down to my children?

I often wonder if my grandparents knew when migrating to America that they would have grandchildren who wouldn’t speak their language. What parts of ourselves have we given up to assimilate into a life we were told was better than the one we had? I wonder if my own grandchildren will be fully assimilated into American culture or if Haiti will still be alive in them, too.

A friend once told me I walk around as if I have sak pase written on my forehead. It is a desperate attempt to cling to the island that formed my history, born from a deep need to keep Haiti alive in me. Because if not Haiti, who do I belong to? If not Haiti, who knows my name? Not in its American way, but in the way it was designed to be spoken. If not for Haiti, where would I be?

I may not have had pride in being Haitian as a child, but as an adult, pride is the only language I speak when Haiti sits on my lips. It may not be mine to claim, I may not have been born on its soil or spent summers in its rivers, I am still chasing memories I do not own, and still it has defined everything that I am.

In 2020, when I watched my father unexpectedly take his last breath on his bedroom floor, while begging God for a different outcome and fearing the damage grief would do to my mind, I thought about what it meant to be drowning and how it felt familiar in my body.

I exist in a before and after. My father’s death irreparably altered my brain in a way that you can trace how and when parts of my character changed. You can point to the day all innocence left my body. You can see when life became more, when feelings became real, and when my emotions began to carry depth; it was the day life grabbed me by my neck and told me its name.

Before my father died, I had made a practice of hiding my pain, even from myself. I’d collect my trauma, dress them in lies, and disguise them around the room of my life. It was a game I liked to play, mostly because I was ill-equipped to experience and feel the gravity of what it meant to be disappointed by God, and I had no answers to the question of why it felt like my faithfulness was consistently met with pain. And so, it was easier to pretend pain did not exist than to question the foundation of my faith. But unbeknownst to me, I was sinking long before I’d begun to drown.

Then my father died, and grief began to seep through every part of me. It leaked out of me in ways I couldn’t collect, disguise, or hide, and it demanded attention. It became the master of my life. When I woke up, it was beside me, funneling every thought through its lens. It would appear in the most random moments, making mundane tasks and thoughts entryways for wells of sadness, anger, or regret. For me, grieving felt like suffocating through bouts of water with nothing to hold onto; choking under the weight of my sudden new reality. I’d become a shell of myself.

And yet still, hardships have a way of teaching you the beauty of life and faith through pain. My most painful moments also became my birthing place, and I have since learned to become grateful for the things I wish did not happen.

Due to the magnitude of my pain and grief, I couldn’t pretend to be anything other than what I was: needy. The beautiful thing about being in need is that your needs are met with abundance. Friends learning new recipes just so that you’ll eat again. An aunt driving 30 minutes in the middle of traffic to take you on a walk because you sounded sad on the phone. Friends shipping you your favorite ice cream states away so you’ll smile. Kindness is a beautiful thing, and love lifts.

Grief threatened to take my life while in return giving it back to me. The existential experience of unraveling just to realize you’ve been made new; returning to yourself fuller, more mature, and with more clarity. It takes boldness to feel. It was a beautiful thing to grieve my father, a man who deserved every ounce of my pain. He was a giant. A man whose love made you feel larger than life. Whose slopping kisses stayed with you for hours after. Whose laugh came from his belly, and his smile shone brighter than the sun. A man who, even in death, is fathering me from the grave.

I found God at the end of my grief. I realized the sweetness of laughter. I found joy in tears. I learned to love my mother better. I learned the beauty of friendship. I dared to hope again. In grief, love carried me.

Life is sweet and burdensome; it is a beautiful, tumultuous road. When my father died, I could never have dreamed that I’d be calling grief a gift and a friend. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Twenty years after drowning, I can tell my grandmother that I’ve finally learned to swim.

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