Holier Thoughts

It wasn’t the first thought.

It wasn’t the second nor the third.
I had hoped it would come fourth, but it didn’t.
And that’s when the guilt started creeping in.

There I was, standing in front of God, with no thought of Him rowing through my mind.

Reciting prayer and scripture as if a purposely monotoned manuscript, with no emotion weaved into my inner voice.
But I felt culpable. I didn’t know what to think back then. I just knew it was wrong; it’s not supposed to be quiet in my head when I was praying, or at least, it wasn’t supposed to feel like an obligation that, in truth, just wasn’t.

I’d anger my holy thoughts to raise their voices, but it would only let out a half-hearted murmur instead of a roar. Out of desperation and fear of 'inevitable damnation', I’d try and try again, but I’d only find myself thinking of homework.

For a time, I set aside God’s silence in my head. I recited my prayers with unusual tenacity, pairing them with all the right movements, all the while recalling all the things that had happened at school that day.

To me, and my religion teacher at school, the devil was behind this exploit. But, I assure you, the devil didn’t have a hand to play in this, regardless of his preordained life goal.

It was easier to blame the devil than point out my falling out with faith.

Even when I knew it wasn’t the devil; I still allowed him to carry that burden while I kept struggling to jump onto the path of the righteous.

My moment of hope was always Salat Al doh’r; I felt it was my best chance at finding God’s voice again. My dad would urge me to pray out of islamic parental responsibility. That urge was almost always followed up by a phone call from my mom at work, reminding, not ordering, us to pray.
I’d usually run to my sister’s bedroom out of habit; she was away in France most of the time, during my teenage years.

I’d just sit there, door closed, prayer mat and sajdah laid out on the floor, and instead of getting it over with, I’d just wait it out, hoping to God, ironically, that my dad doesn’t decide to get off the sofa to check up on me.

Making side deals with a God I was no longer praying to seemed more fruitful to me than praying for about 10 minutes, even if I was supposedly mentally jumping in and out of it.

Sometimes, though, I’d give it a go.

I’d pray, with an ironclad conviction in my heart, to carry on with this resolve until the next prayer time, but my self-belief was quite ambitious.

It’d be self-critical of me to say that I wish it was more determined, but that line of reasoning feels soulfully insufficient. I make it out to seem like I had no role to play with orchestrating my own excommunication.

To further that point, I started putting together self-imposed incentives to get myself going. My choice of prayer mats and rooms would enter my mental fold. And sometimes, I’d watch my dad pray, hoping whatever he was doing would jump onto me and latch on to whatever’s left of my holy nerve-endings and manifest within me a stout pillar of faith.

By the end of it, it felt unnatural. Almost zombie-like. Even with a house filled with islamic faith, my own felt fleeting. And every time I’d give it an earnest attempt, it would only last a rakaa’, two if my mother’s voice was in my head, three if my guilt combined forces, and I’d get to the end of it if I had a test coming up.

I eventually gave up, though, as much as I’d like to continue resuscitating my relationship with God, I gradually made peace with keeping it on life-support. Even if I couldn’t hear Him, I figured he’d always hear me, at least.

It’s not that I don’t think God’s out there. Somewhere. He just stopped speaking to me in full sentences, and little by little, they digressed to words and phrases , as if to warn me.

Either that, or I stopped having the right ears to listen to everything He had to say, words or otherwise.

I take comfort, though, almost in secret, in the reality that there’s an open phone-tab with God, disregarding the truth that I may or may not believe in him.

I don’t know how my parents, or rather, every parent, grew up with reinforced faith. I see my father going up and down for hours, praying as if to chase down heaven and reassure himself that paradise definitely awaits.

In a way, I envy the situation he finds himself in every day, if there is a God and a heaven and hell, he’s definitely getting his ticket to paradise, and if not, at least he did his best at being pious.

They did a splendid job; it’s not on them that I became what I am today. They tried their best to right my trajectory. But as life went by, and as my days grew longer with age. I just couldn’t wrap my head around this prayer obligation to an all-loving God that left it to his whims, to the best of our knowledge, to dabble with our destinies.

All that stuff about God knowing what’s better for me went against everything that holds me together.

How do I not know better? But that’s not the real question here.
The great conundrum I face at the moment is the credibility of His foresight and my constant need to give thanks for His apparent gifts.

Elhamdella 3a kil hal.