Language of the heart

I suspect few people are as deeply aware of the threads between their present and past as my friend and pastor Jerulin Jones Sparks. She can’t talk about her ambition without talking about her father’s ambition, which saw him move to Merrylands in Sydney’s western suburbs from Chennai, India, without a single friend or family member on this continent.

Jerulin hasn’t lost her heart language, Tamil, and has gratitude for her mother, who banned English from their home.

We are in her office at the church we both attend, St. James Croydon, where she is an Assistant Minister. She tells me that most of the threads of her life weave together through the house church her family joined when she was a child.

Jerulin takes me back to when she was four. ‘One day, my mum and I were in Parramatta Westfield,’ she says. ‘I was running around more than I should have been, and Mum was calling after me in Tamil. This lovely man, Prabhakhar, recognised the language, came and said “hi”, and invited us to Bible study.’

On Saturday nights, between 20 and 40 people would gather at the house church in an apartment in Merrylands. ‘Everyone brought folding chairs. Lots of kids running around, lots of food, lots of South Indians.’ Jerulin remembers it as less of a traditional Bible study, more like a space for asking questions, for speaking one sentence in English and the next in Tamil, and to hang around for hours and have dinner. Importantly, it was a place in childhood where she wasn’t cordoned off to the side. ‘I was allowed to sit and listen. It felt like a place of belonging,’ she says.

What Jerulin saw on Saturday nights growing up formed the themes of her life. Her desire to give South Asians meaningful leadership in church spaces is born out of the respect shown to everyone who came to her house church. ‘It was empowering that every person could have a Bible in hand and ask questions about Jesus,’ she says. Jerulin describes Tamil as her heart language, saying it created a space for immediate mutual understanding between people who have only just met.

Jerulin’s vocation was sown in that apartment in Merrylands. When she was seven, an uncle at the house church asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. In reply, Jerulin asked ‘Are women allowed to be missionaries?’ to which the uncle said ‘Of course!’.

The bonds between her life now and her history give the sense that everything unique about her is borrowed. Jerulin shares a poem she wrote with me, it describes her ‘creases loaned | from the library of raucous fraternal joy’.

Her willingness to speak about her past is part of why she’s a good friend. Our friendship is full of conversations about high school friends who influenced us and the ways we process our histories through words: her poetry, my fiction. When Jerulin describes the relationship between language and access to culture, I feel drawn to talk about how my father cannot speak Tagalog.

As a pastor she is open about the questions she has had, including her difficulties with chronic pain, and her fear as a teenager that Jesus might find her unforgivable. She helps me see that faith is not just something stored in our heads — it lives in our words, our stories, our relationships.

Growing up, the church community took her family to Flemington Markets to buy food. They helped with buying a car, moving house. ‘They were always around for the important moments,’ she says.

Jerulin recalls one such occasion when, following the death of her biological uncle, she felt a little bit scared observing her mother’s grief. ‘You know how you feel responsible for your parent’s feelings?’ That went away, because the whole day different “aunts” and “uncles” from the Merrylands house church came to visit. ‘They just sat with Mum and cried, and occasionally prayed … that’s what family does.’

Perhaps projecting a sense of nostalgia and my own feelings about my father’s loss of culture, my questions turn to what Jerulin may have lost when she moved from her house church to a bigger church in her late teens, and then moved from Sydney’s West to Inner West in her twenties? Jerulin’s focus remains on who she belongs to. ‘We still get together with the people from that house church every Easter and Christmas.’

These celebration meals feel like going home. ‘Christmas smells like biryani,’ Jerulin says. Whoever is hosting the meal will usually make the biryani because it requires such a huge pot. She sees the uncles and aunties who back her no matter what, and the cousins who call her older sister and ask for help navigating being both Indian and Christian in Sydney.

Much of Jerulin’s life has this quality of returning. When she has time, she’ll shop in Merrylands, wanting the comfort of hearing people speak in her heart language. ‘Do you know Tamil doesn’t really have a word for goodbye? My dad will overhear someone speak Tamil in Harris Park and introduce himself and when they finish talking Dad will say, “போயிட்டு வரேன்” which means, “I’ll go and come”.’

Maintaining connections to people even when separated by distance or time is important to Jerulin. When I moved away from Sydney for a season, she messaged saying she missed me. Not long after coming back, she shared a poem she’d written about how her heritage is a gift from God. She thinks of her family when she looks in the mirror at home, and thanks God for them while washing her hands.

Jerulin is grateful for the way the community she grew up in has loved and still loves her. This has shaped the ways in which she loves. One of the uncles from Merrylands has a niece with Down Syndrome in Bangalore. Jerulin shares that typically in India there is ‘only care for people with disabilities who are extremely rich, otherwise you’re screwed’. She says that people from her house church have fundraised to help the school this girl attends grow from four to 40 students. Jerulin now chairs the board of the school, helping them through challenges as they attempt to keep growing.

When asked who she would be without her experiences in the house church, Jerulin is unable to answer — it would unweave too many threads. ‘I could never imagine a life where I didn’t share Jesus with people, or wasn’t part of God’s family, or wasn’t regularly going to India, or didn’t eat with my hands,’ she says. The past is not a burden or something Jerulin needs to balance with her present self, but a gift she carries with her every day. ‘I don’t feel like I have to grasp onto those things. I don’t feel like I’m rock climbing; I’m walking on this,’ she says. ‘Everything I can identify as valuable and good about me feels imparted in me from someone else’.

Jerulin's gratitude for what she has been given doesn’t detract from her uniqueness. She demonstrates via her leadership that she doesn’t want to maintain the status quo. At St. James she entrusts women with projects ‒ such as a community bootcamp ‒ and celebrates with them when they make meaningful decisions. She wants space for complex and diverse migrant stories, saying that she’s ‘wary of feeding into the narrative — look at this good group of Indians who came and kept to themselves and worked their jobs’. She’s ready to fight for an ideal. ‘I look at our local churches, especially the areas where South Asians are underrepresented, and think something’s wrong,’ she says.

We discuss how Sydney Churches might only make room for one type of person, as if Australian culture was neutral or homogenous. Jerulin is the director of Good News Course, a series of videos about Jesus made for a South Asian migrant audience. As she tries to create space at church for honouring different cultural backgrounds, she draws from her family. The videos adapt material her father has created and shared with friends and community members for more than a decade. Importantly, they’re in Tamil, and not a product of a translation. Jerulin says the series is about ‘centering the cultural group that heart language is tied to’. She knows firsthand that one person hearing another speak in Tamil in Parramatta Westfield, or in an apartment, or in a Church, can transform a family’s story, their community, their future.

Tyler Heesh is a writer of European and Asian descent studying Creative Writing at Western Sydney University. He lives on Gadigal land with his spouse and their friend.

Parramatta Profiles is a writing and photographic series that profiles individuals across Parramatta communities. Drawing on art, music, religion, activism and sport, each snapshot captures life in this dynamic city. A collaboration between Powerhouse and the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University, this project supports the development of student writers by providing an opportunity to work with professional editors and be published by Powerhouse online.