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.

Accepting God is a sign of maturity.  All morality has derived from religion.  Life is full of tests and it is during these times that a person who does not believe in God will act purely out of self-interest and the survival instinct.

Man is naturally impotent, ignorant, weak, wretched and imperfect, whereas all strength, power, knowledge, wisdom, ascendancy, virtue and goodness are from God, praised be His glory.  Therefore man should under all circumstances regard himself as imperfect, ignorant, and captive of self and passion.  He should not feel depressed or hurt if people impute to him these characteristics which, after all, are inherent within him.  On the contrary, he should be happy and thankful to them, while at the same time he should feel disappointed in himself, should take refuge in God and beg protection from his own base and appetitive nature.

-Revelation of Baha’u'llah Vol.2 p. 43

Through all of this all I could think was how wrong he was.  The word ‘no’ circled my head over and over again but it couldn’t settle on any one statement.  I brought up enough  questions to clarify that he thought people could be good without religion (a rarity he would insist) and that people in religion are rarely always saints, but this didn’t seem to prove anything to him.

Anyway, I came home to find one of my roommates playing a song on their guitar.  It didn’t sound familiar, turns out that they had composed it themselves, and it was beautiful.  It was soft, loving, and… well, just beautiful.  It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I thought that perhaps a real Baha’i would give thanks to God for such a perfect moment.  Not the singer and song-writer, not the instrument or all the human ingenuity necessary for the production thereof and not to mention the discovery of tones and the engineering of the fundamentals of music.  Just God, because it was good.  Because all good things come from God.

No.

No.

No.

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