Loading ...A few weeks ago, I had a brief Google Talk chat with Mogogo about prayer, and he encouraged me to turn it into a post. I was duly encouraged, but given my slothly habits when it comes to posting here, I made little practical headway.
I have, in the meantime, been especially ineffective in praying. Most days (say eleven or twelve out of every fortnight), I do say an obligatory prayer and repeat the Greatest Name. But, as has happened off and on in my Baha’i life, I do not discipline myself and enter a spiritually uplifted state. My mouth makes the motions, my vocal chords do their work, and meanwhile my brain flits in and out and all around, from my to do list at work to what I’m going to do with my Junior Youth group tonight. I find this annoying, but I don’t do anything about it.
Then, there are the days I don’t pray at all. I find, the day after those days, that I almost inevitably have a lackluster day. There’s no external cause for it, and it usually takes me until the afternoon to realise that I’ve been in a mental funk all day. Having noticed this pattern, I can at least do something about it, but I haven’t as yet.
The past few weeks have also provided me with an interesting intellectual context for all of this spiritual hand-wringing. I have been reading Shoghi Effendi’s World Order letters and The Promised Day is Come along with Karen Armstrong’s study of the rise of fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, The Battle for God. Then today I read this article about Turkey’s attempts to incorporate religious life and expression in an ostensibly secular polity.
Given what I understand about humanity’s individual purpose–to know and love God–and my personal struggles to focus on that in my daily life, I wonder about what the functional relationship between religion and government ought to be. In some form, both the Christian and Islamic traditions arrived at the notion of the separation of church and state. (According to Armstrong, this was especially true of Shi’i Islam, in which the Baha’i Faith has its origins.) Thinking of how this plays out in contemporary America, though–and perhaps played out in Iran before the revolution, though I know less about that–there seems to be a growing popular unwillingness to keep this separation intact.
So here’s a question: can there be any good in a government’s promotion of a religious (would spiritual be a better term?) atmosphere? There are, as history has amply documented, dangers in doing that. But is the complete separation of church and state the only solution? In Australia, where I live, representatives of religions are allowed to teach classes in public schools, provided that there is a demand among parents for that particular religion. This would never fly in America, yet Australia is still a thriving democracy. In Turkey, the Prime Minister has pushed for the creation of public pools with separate areas for women and men, so that observant Muslim women can exercise without wearing a headscarf. I don’t think that would fly in Australia, even if Christian women wore headscarves, yet Turkey has had a democratic government for nearly a century.
I wonder whether, given a more religious atmosphere in any country where I live, I would find it easier to focus on my spiritual life and thus make better progress in my spiritual development. Would living in a place where pictures of nearly naked women weren’t allowed in public spaces make my life better, for example?
It seems the people of the world are beginning to ask these kinds of questions anew, and to question the assumptions that have been at work in their societies for a number of decades. I welcome that questioning, without yet knowing what kind of answer is best.
Bookmark: 
Lincoln, there is a course called Towards World Order, based on the World Order Letters, that I find very very good.After studying each chapter, a group of us come together with our questions, there are always questions, and sometimes the answers are clear but at this point it seems un-imaginable.One of the people in this group, a doctor, was saying - imagine if prayers were prescribed in the same way that medicines are, that would be ideal.