Prayer invites God to let His presence suffuse our spirits, to let God's will prevail in
our lives.
Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, cannot mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a
ruined city.
But prayer can water an arid soul, a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.
Prayer is sort of an expression of your heart, an expression of your soul for the Almighty.
Prayer can be any righteous desire. It is a longing to know God, and whether you verbalize
it, you vocalize it, or you do it silently in your mind, if you're asking for the deep
connection with something that you either call a God or infinite or the manifestation,
that's prayer.
To me, prayer is like forgetting everything around me and just being in that state, just
talking to God and expressing Him my feelings, and forgetting all my worries and problems
and everything in the world.
It is a way to show our humility towards God, saying that God exists. In Christianity,
we believe that Christianity is not a religion, it's actually a relationship, and in a relationship
we need communication, and prayer is a way for man and God to commune.
To me, prayer is a conversation with the Divine. That's the time when I can come down and I
visualize the Divine in the form of Krishna, and I see Krishna as my friend, and prayer
is more of a conversation with Krishna.
So for me specifically, prayer is a way to connect with God, and it can be in many forms
in the Islamic religion. We have five times where we actually pray, when we're actually
prostrating to God and supplicating the different verses from the Qur'an, but it doesn't always
have to be in Salah and prayer. You can always just recite the verses and ask God to bless
your day, to bless your family.
In our tradition, prayers are for talking to God or the Divinity. Prayers are also for
thanking the Divine for all the gifts that we have, that we cherish in our daily life.
Be it in Old Testament or New Testament, it's a means where a human being can engage themselves,
surrender themselves to a being much greater than themselves.
As children, when you were growing up, the first thing you would do is you would go in
front of the altar and you would do pranam there before you do anything else, before
you even have your breakfast. Then you will touch the feet of your elders in the family,
which would typically be your mom and dad. Then you will sit down and have your breakfast.
In fact, the way we grew up is when you get up from the bed, you start with a prayer.
In the kaya, we have our songs, we have our traditions, we have our dance, and that's
how we celebrate. It's how we celebrate it since the sun dance. It's how we celebrate
today. On the Jesus road, we do have our Christianity, our spirituality. Any time that
something would happen, we always take it to the prayer. I mean, that's one of the reasons
why we do embrace Christianity so well, because we do understand the concept of prayer.
Upanishad, which are our scriptures, means secret teaching, and it also means sitting
near devotedly. So the teacher gives the mantra. It's not something you take. And when you
cultivate it by repeating it, the roots go deep and the tree grows within. And we begin
to sense that there is an internal life. So prayer, in our tradition, has different aspects.
We adore God for who he is. Adoration is the first part. Thanksgiving is a major part
of it. Gratitude. After the confession, we go to a prayer of the communion. And that's
where the highest stage of that prayer is. Great mental concentration is what this is.
This is called a prayer bead in Islam. And as I touch each bead, I say a prayer like,
God is great. God is great. God is great. Okay, so I say the same routine. So if my
mind is wandering on to something else, this keeps me focused.
One of the things that each Zoroastrian child goes through early in life is they go through
this initiation ceremony called the Naujut ceremony or the Sudre Pushi ceremony. The
child is initiated with this white garment called a Sudre. It has a little square in
front of it, which is called the pocket of good deeds. And around the Sudre, we tie a
thread called a kusti. Some of us wear the Sudre in the kusti at all times.
Because of my prayer all these years from childhood up, it's been an answer. I live
73 years, and that's the best prayer I ever had. You know, just, I praise the Lord with
that. If I'm not reciting my prayers for a number
of days, there's a sense of negativity that develops in my mind. And in order to clear
that, when I start reciting my prayers again, it gives me a lot of optimism, a lot of confidence
to do what I'm supposed to do. And especially we pray together as a family
at night, and that gives a lot of peace in our family life.
I would say that prayer has never failed me, and I've always kind of, you know, gone to
prayer and it's always given me something good back. You know, I've never had a bad
experience. Prayers can help in times of difficulties,
but I do feel that when I'm praying and when I continue, I feel calm, the calmness in my
mind, and it gives me the courage to move forward in life.
Well, there are times when I feel peace. I think most often, that's the feeling that
I would describe having when I know that God is listening and hearing my prayers.
Throughout my lifetime, I've had several significant life-changing moments. For myself, it's been
the loss of my father. I think prayer was the only thing that got me through it.
Prayer is the only thing that humbles me, that grounds me. It gives me hope.
So for me, the prayer is something very strong, something that you pray with your heart and
you ask for things, not just for you, for everybody.
When we pray together, it's this energy that everybody we want the same. We want peace,
we want understanding to each other, and we want unity.
We have an Instagram page and we basically go on and post about prayer requests, whether
we need healing or to pass a test that's coming up. We just go and we just post and
we all come together and pray at the end of the week about it.
I'm currently in a group message with my entire family and everybody posts or sends prayers
of the day and just little tidbits of knowledge and stuff. I think it's very efficient to
have technology. Even Facebook, people will be like, I need my prayer warriors and I'm
just like, okay, I'll pray for you.
Actually, there's an app that lets me know when it's time for prayer for the five times
a day and there's daily duos, like little prayers that they tell you every day. There's
a new one that you can read. I try to read the Koran every day and there's also apps
for that.
There's one that I just recently discovered, Igarbani. Garbani is a reference to the text
and it basically is a search so you can go in and you can search a set of texts and read
and kind of gain a better understanding of what's within.
Sometimes I will have a thought where I'm just like, this is a prayer that's in my heart
and I will post that as a status. I'm able to share that and then have other people,
even people that are not of my faith, be able to relate to it or feel like, you know what,
I need it to hear that today. So I love social media for that. It's a great tool to be able
to share God's word.
Actually using the iPhone to pray was a little uncomfortable. You know, it didn't feel as
natural as opening a prayer book or sitting by yourself with no noise and no device. But
now we surprisingly use it quite often.
The mindfulness of the consciousness, as I see it, I think, is getting difficult not
only for the younger generation, I think it's also for my generation as well. In the sense
that, you know, life tends to be much faster than it was before. Clearly, you know, I think
that a younger generation might be challenged for the reasons I mentioned before.
More people now are out there for just themselves and maybe are not so in tune with what's going
on in their faith or with God or may not have a relationship with God, unfortunately. I
would attribute that to that. There's just so many distractions and so many things that
we are trying to fill our lives with.
So we want our daughter's spiritual practice to be organic, something that responds to
them. We've encouraged them to pray, of course, with kids. So who am I praying to? So we try
to work a little bit on that and just saying thank you. I mean, you know, the idea of expressing
gratitude for the biggest or littlest things in your life.
I want them to understand the primary principle that it is our privilege to be able to communicate
with God, that we should not ever take that for granted, and that if nobody else is ever
around to always remember that God is present, so that even if mommy and daddy are not there,
God is there and you can always communicate with God.
You know, I'm very optimistic about them. I'm amazed when I hear young people and how
certain they are about things that are bigger than themselves. I don't think they need my
guidance.
I like the one that starts creating me a pure heart of my God and renew within me a tranquil
conscience. From the first time I said it, I just felt such peace, you know.
There's one prayer that I would always like to look up to. It's the Lord's Prayer, because
it captures everything. It gives us a format on how we need to pray and Jesus himself thought
that this is how you should pray. We have a tradition of ending our personal prayer with
the Lord's Prayer.
That would be the Lord's Prayer, because I actually use that, I'd say, before I go to
bed or during certain times of the day, just to get a nice little reminder that I'm always
with God and with God's love.
Jesus is saying thank you to me is probably the greatest that we can do in prayer form,
but you know, my favorite prayer was just accepting what is given every day in the moment.
Definitely be the prayer that you heard previously, Hashem Vahu, which basically describes to
do good things for the sake of doing good, not expecting anything else in return.
My one prayer would be, Lord, let that will be done in my life and around my life and
through my life for Your glory.
It would probably be a prayer called the Meshubara, and it's the Prayer for Healing, and there's
a beautiful song that goes with it, and it has the prayer in Hebrew, it has the prayer
in English, all to this beautiful melody.
Meshubarachavotaynu Mekoravrachavayimotaynu
May the source of strength, who blessed the ones before us, help us find the courage
to make our lives a blessing, and let us say Amen.
And let us say Amen.
Amen.
