I’ve been having some interesting conversations lately with people about the meaning and purpose of prayer, and it’s led me to reflect on my own religious practice and why, despite my own doubts, questions and tensions, I still find something in that practice that is worth returning to.
We often say, especially within the tradition of Islam that I belong to, that part of the meaning of prayer is to be humble before God – after all, that is the significance of the gesture of prostration, and even more so the idea of islam itself as submission to God. Yet how often is that humility just an act, a way of showing other people that you are humble? It’s very easy, I think, for people who pray regularly, especially in congregation, to become slightly self-righteous about this, to take it as evidence that they are good people, better than those who do not find it so easy to pray regularly.
The shifts and turns of my own personal life in recent weeks have made me alive to the many and varied ways in which it’s possible to fall prey to self-deception, to try and make myself seem better than I am, to portray myself as a victim rather than as someone who made bad decisions, or who acted in bad faith. I am sure that I am not the only one who, when talking about the difficulties that I face, somehow finds it easier to express how others’ actions have hurt me, but finds it hard to admit that I have also hurt others, sometimes even deliberately. I don’t want people to think less of me, even people who are supposed not to judge those things. And even to myself, in the stories that I tell myself, I am of course always the heroine, never the villainess. In some ways, counselling plays into exactly that. While the best counsellors will cut through some of the self-deception, it’s all too easy to simply go into counselling to seek validation for my feelings and actions, even when I know that they were wrong or misguided. Very rarely do I willingly ask myself the hard questions about how much I am responsible for my own difficulties, even though I know that for counselling to be successful, this is what I should do, that really it should be about me taking responsibility for my own weaknesses and working on those. But it’s far easier to blame those weaknesses on someone else, on my childhood, on my past experience, on anything other than my current choices and behaviour.
For me, this is where religious practice, if it is to be meaningful, has to play a role. In front of God, how can I lie to myself? If it is true that in some sense (and I tend to think of these things metaphorically rather than literally) God knows everything that there is to know about me, then I cannot hide from that. I have to strip away the layers of self-deception, of pride, of arrogance and come completely clean about my own weaknesses, my own bad choices. I have to look at myself with clear eyes, and ask myself the hard questions about whether I truly acted with the best of intentions. For me, prayer and remembrance of God, when I do remember, help me to see myself more clearly and face the worst of myself. Sufi sources tell us that remembrance of God is a polish for the heart, and I at least try (though often I fail) to pray and to remember in that spirit.
This is where, I think, rituals of forgiveness become so important. Once I have become aware of my own bad choices, how do I move on from them? The ritual of forgiveness within my own tradition, which sees me asking that “if the community forgives, may God forgive,” is, for me, one of the most powerful and moving rituals of the whole tradition, perhaps because it’s so hard for me to forgive myself, and to ask forgiveness from others. There is a sense, across different religions, that our sins must be acknowledged, and somehow purged, and then we free to move on. I wonder whether that sense of humility, of asking for forgiveness, and then of trying to move forward and to continue to battle with our lower selves, has a secular counterpart. What forms of reflection exist as a mirror, as a check against self-deception, outside of a religious community? Is this one way to explain the increase in psychotherapy - that it does in fact provide a space for this kind of reflection? It seems to me that as an increasingly secular society, and one in which people often display striking arrogance and lack of willingness to admit their faults, these forms of reflection have a crucial role to play.
Edited to add: I wish I'd looked at this BBC article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13154300 before posting this!
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