by Latifah Taormina
Sometimes, as if through a misty curtain of flowers and light, I can still see her. Her name was Sumari. Siti Sumari. I called her Ibu. She was very special. I don’t know how to put it into words, but it was something lovely and light that you could feel when she was near.
I didn’t get to see Ibu a whole lot as she lived in Indonesia, and I lived in California. But late one summer, when we were both visiting a place called Skymont, in Virginia, I spent almost a whole week with Ibu. She told me stories every day, and when I had to dress up for something, I would come show her what I was going to wear. And later, we would go for walks, and she would take my hand and tell me more stories.
In all her stories, there was always someone who was ordinary on the outside, but very ‘special’ inside. What made them ‘special’? They never complained, they were always grateful to God, and, as Ibu would say in her gentle sing-song way, “Every minute, every hour, every day, they ask God’s forgiveness.” Asking forgiveness, for Ibu, meant asking to be clean, to be returned to one’s real self instead of being all cluttered up with ideas of trying to be like somebody else. It wasn’t about breast-beating and wailing about guilt. It was a way of receiving God’s grace.
By November, the glow of summer had gone. It was a cold, damp, Northern California winter. I was missing Ibu terribly. I was also experiencing many difficulties in my life. Test after test. Many times, out of the blue, I felt like Ibu was asking me to come visit her in Indonesia, but I would rebuke myself for having such thoughts — as if I could receive such a message from afar, as if Ibu would send a message to me of all people. And then I would ask forgiveness for being so prideful.
In February the word came. Ibu had died.
Oh no. I felt terrible. It felt like the bottom dropped out of my world. It dawned on me that she had indeed called me, but I had dismissed the message and had not gone. I cried and cried. I was still crying two days later. But as I lay in my bed I felt Ibu come into my room. Not in the way you could see a person, but in the way you can feel a presence. And she sat in the chair near the bed. It was a chair my grandmother had covered in a fabric full of tiny pink roses. Ibu very much liked pink.
“Why are you crying?” she asked. “Because I won’t ever see you again, “ I sobbed. “Because I didn’t come when you called me.” “You mustn’t cry,” she said. “Ibu loves you.”
I blinked up all my tears and turned to look at her, for when she said that, I felt full of rose petals — a kind of feeling I’d never had before. But when I turned, I couldn’t see her at all. And then I thought to myself. “Now you are really losing it. You think Ibu is sitting in that chair and talking to you.” “No,” Ibu said laughingly. “I am really here. And to prove I am here, I will tell you a story.”
This is the story Ibu told me:
Once there was a woman who lived with her young son in a little house way out in the country. And they were very, very poor. She had no husband or family to take care of her, and her son, while he was a very good boy, was still too young to earn a living. So the woman had to do everything all by herself.
Because they lived way out in the country near the edge of the forest, the woman couldn’t go out and get a job like people do nowadays. There was no town nearby or neighbors to turn to. No, she just had to make do with what she had, and that wasn’t very much.
But the woman was a very good woman, and never complained about her situation. Every day and every night she prayed to Almighty God and thanked God for what she had and asked God to help her live a right life. And then she would sing God’s praises and go to sleep. And in the days, she would scrub and clean and she would play with her son. And somehow, there was always enough.
But then things got harder, and there were days when there wasn’t enough to eat. Still, the woman didn’t complain. She would just give more of her portion to her son and work harder to make ends meet.
One day there was a knock at the door. And when she opened the door, an angel appeared before her.
“God is pleased with you,” the angel said, “and he knows your need. So He is sending a special gift so that your troubles will be over, and you will never have to worry again.” With that, the angel disappeared. The woman got very excited and quickly called her young son to tell him what had just happened. What could it be that the angel would bring? And they danced around imagining what the angel might bring so they would never have to worry again. They laughed and joked about the wonderful things they would do, and thanked God for their good fortune.
The next day, the angel returned. He again knocked at the door, and she ran to the door to open it. “Here is your gift,” the angel said, placing something before her, “the gift God promised you.” And again the angel disappeared.
Slowly the woman went forward to see the gift. It was a cabbage! Not a golden cabbage, not a silver cabbage, but a plain, ordinary green cabbage. A full green cabbage with nice crisp leaves – but still a cabbage! “Why, this is just a cabbage,” the woman said to herself. She wondered how this cabbage would end all her difficulties. As she took it in her hands, she thought, “Even if we are very careful eating it, the cabbage will only last three days before it is all gone.”
She began to wonder if she’d heard the angel correctly in the first place. Maybe he wasn’t even an angel. Maybe this was a terrible joke.
But then, she caught herself doing this and stopped, “I am complaining to God,” she said to herself. “I am sitting here thinking that I know better than God rather than accepting the very gift God chose for me.” She quickly begged forgiveness for being ungrateful. “Well, we have no food,” she thought. “The cabbage will feed us for now. So I shall wash the cabbage and cook it, and thank God for taking care of our needs.”
She went to the sink and began to wash the cabbage carefully in the cool running water. As she peeled the leaves back from the cabbage, she began to sing. Then, after she had peeled a few more leaves from the cabbage, she suddenly discovered that there – inside the cabbage, in its very heart – was a wondrous jewel. A jewel full of light.
The woman began to weep for joy for she knew this jewel was far more precious than a diamond that could be bought and sold in the market place. This jewel was a gift from God. This was a gift that would always belong to her, that she could keep inside herself, and whose light would shine outside her. It was a gift that could never ever be stolen or taken away.
And indeed, the woman’s troubles were over, and she knelt down with her son and praised Almighty God.
“You see,” said Ibu at the end of her story, “sometimes God sends us a gift, a gift that seems very ordinary — so ordinary we might not even notice. But sometimes, what seems very ordinary is, truly, very very special.” And then she was gone. But I knew she had come. And she gave me this story, and sometimes I still have that rose petal feeling.
NOTE: This story was told by Latifah at the opening session of the 2016 California Regional Congess. It also resonates with the theme of this issue’s letter from Robert Mertens, Chair of Subud California