I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee. I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth.
There is none other God but Thee, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting.
Three sentences. That's all it is.
And yet it is the foundation of so much.
Just in case you don't recognize it, and I'd be surprised if you don't, it's the Short Obligatory Prayer from Baha'u'llah. One of the three that Baha'is are to recite every day.
Oh, not that we have to recite all three every day. No, we get to choose which of three, the long, the medium, or, you guessed it, the short.
Anyways, this is the short one. I mean, you can't really get much shorter, can you?
But what a powerhouse prayer it is.
As you may have noticed, I've been thinking a lot about prayer as tool for recalibrating how we view the world. So what about this one? It's short enough to be able to really dive into it and not take up too much of your time, dear Reader.
Oh, and just in case I haven't mentioned it in a while, these are just my own personal thoughts on this. Nothing official. That's why this blog is called One Baha'i. It's just one Baha'i. Me. Feel free to take it or leave it. I won't be offended, I promise.
So, why would Baha'u'llah mandate this prayer? What is it about it that makes it worthy of being said every day?
What really strikes me about it today is that we are not asking for anything in it. There is no request at all. It's just a statement of reality.
It starts by acknowledging why we were created, then moves on to a statement of our reality, and concludes with an understanding of God.
That's actually fairly simple. Profound, yet simple.
We begin by publicly stating, bearing witness, that we have been created to know God. That's the first thing. Why do we exist? To know God.
After knowledge comes worship. For honestly, once we come to get a beginning understanding of God, how can we not worship Him? And this is not the simplistic view of God that we've had in the past, neither the old man in the garden nor the old dude sitting on a throne on a cloud. No, this is the God of which Baha'u'llah says that the All-Possessing "is but a vassal dependent upon Thee", and the All-Compelling "is but a suppliant fallen upon the dust, awe-stricken by Thy dreadful might, Thy sovereignty and power". This is a God that is far beyond what we have ever conceived before, and one that is far more believable than those gods that people decry as mere myth.
This is a conception of God that we can truly worship with our rational mind, not to mention our soul. For if our rational mind cannot come to terms with it, then it would be irrational to worship.
No, this opening statement is a very straightforward line about why we exist, and is asking us to be conscious of that fact.
From there we get into a simple statement of our relationship to our Creator. We are powerless, and He is mighty. We are poor, and He is wealthy.
We are not asking for relief from our poverty. We are not asking for any help in anything we may desire to accomplish. It is just stating a reality.
And why is this important? Because it resets our understanding of ourselves. We often think we have power, but in reality we are powerless. We cannot stand up against a hurricane or an earthquake, no matter how much we might prepare. We can never stop, not even for a moment, the gentle tread of time. When it comes to the things that truly matter, we are all powerless before God.
Some may think themselves wealthy, either because they might have a few more grains of sand than another, or a few more rocks in their pocket. But in the grand scheme of things, we are all impoverished before the illimitable wealth of our Creator.
And then it concludes with a reminder that we can always call on God if we do require assistance. He is our helper when we are in peril, and it is good to remember that.
As I said, most prayers ask for something, but this one doesn't. It merely bears witness. It tells us why we exist. It doesn't ask for any assistance. it just says that it's there if we need it. It doesn't request any wealth, it just acknowledges our state of poverty. It reminds us that the problem isn't that we are poor, only that we imagine ourselves rich. And once we've recognized that, both our purpose and our limitations, as well as God's reality, then who else could we turn to?
I love the logic of it.
And once these things fall into place, so, it seems, does everything else.
Oh, and in case you thought I forgot about my commitment, 79 left to go.
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