In memoriam Simon Preston CBE, ob. 13.V.2022 & James Bowman CBE, ob. 27.III.2023
I GREW UP IN AN AMERICAN suburb where virtually all of our friends and acquaintances were people who had fled Iran following the catastrophe of 1979. To be an Iranian — whether adult or child — in the 1980s was to be perpetually on the defensive, and the older people I grew up around looked forever worried and tired and somehow quietly, even patiently, ill at ease in their new country.
In a word, we were all traumatised. Whether out of genuine faith or from a need to give succour to their pain, a good many of them, my parents included, joined the Iranian congregation of a local Presbyterian church whose head pastor happened to have been a missionary in Iran and whose family spoke Persian. Our congregation met on Sunday afternoons in a minor chapel down the hall from the church library.
The services were a mixture of lessons largely from the Old Testament meant to connect to the sensibilities of converts from Islam and exhortations about Christ’s loving mercy for a people who had seen and experienced more than they’d ever dare to speak of.
Our sympathetic American pastor noticed my boredom during the services and did me two favours that proved invaluable to my subsequent life. He handed me a copy of
