Last night I spent some time on my knees.  No, I wasn’t being unchaste and violating my fast, pervert.  I was praying.  Usually when I pray I find a private place, my room on my days off or the washroom when I’m at work, wash my hands and face, turn towards the east, open my hands in front of me, and say a prayer.  Mostly it feels like I’m just mumbling words in the dark.  I feel a little something, but it isn’t something that I would call spiritual, or even terribly convincing, but it’s enough to let me know that I am doing something that feels… right.  I still don’t feel like I’m actually addressing anyone or anything, so when I pray it feels transparent.  It’s a like a put on, a con on the worst possible mark imaginable- God.

This issue of a diety is something I have to solve if I am going to genuinely experience these faiths.  I feel that there is some way that I can appraoch this belief, that there is a way that I can conceive of God that will bypass all the issues I have with a diety.  That He has a will, that He created life, that He is… anything other than intangible ideals of humanity.

Can one believe in a focus of all great and virtuous things?  Just without being an arbiter on worldly affairs, good without being dogmatic, incomprehensible and yet a source of inspiration and strength.  Something less mythical, more Platonic.  I need something to imagine, something to put in my mind’s eye as I pray and get through the month.  I think this is necessary to get at the core of these religious experiences, because speaking to nothing is not what these people are doing.  At least it isn’t what they think they are doing.  But any conception of God that I could try for would necessarily strip it of anything that makes theism what it is- the existence of a personal, loving creator. Therefore it would not be Baha’i.

So, paradoxically, I asked for help last night.  I think the act of falling to my knees helped to get the effect that I was looking for- supplication before a greater power.  Submission to His will seems like something God is big on.  It isn’t something that I am used to.  The idea that something or someone has a greater claim on my life than I do has been strictly anathema, until this point.  I thought it was something that I had to do.  It felt like the right time.

It was a lot like the first ritual I cast when I was a Satanist.  It was personal, mostly ad-libbed, and it was performed in order to better come to terms with something I really don’t understand.  It felt different.  The ceiling didn’t split open and no divine voice did bellow forth from on high, praising my prostrations, but it did feel different, and the day after went much the same.  Nothing really changed, except that I was more committed to what I’m doing, a little bit more vested in this project, a little bit more confident.

I’ve had this idea of God for a long time, this thing wholly separate from the deity that exists in the prayers and holy writings I read every day.  Maybe it will make a good stand-in until I can be convinced to buy into the real thing.  Maybe that will never happen.  In the meantime I think I’ll spend more time on my knees.  It encourages me to consider things that are higher than I am.