By Cyril Anderson

The most important and central aspect of religious experience is the feeling of direct spiritual connection with God.  Ritual is meant to act as a scaffold, as an established, tried, tested, and true guideposts to lead to these sorts of life changing and faith-affirming experiences.  Muhammad’s journey as a prophet began with such experiences, key experiences of closeness and oneness as it were with God.  The rituals and habits of life that were taught by Muhammad and his family were not ends in themselves, not simply empty arbitrary rituals, but are meant to be effective and efficient means taught by God to realize such experiences if properly practiced.  The Shariah, that is, the Divine Law that is the projection of general Divine principles of structuring human society and life projected onto the specifics of life conditions is meant as well to be a system to help ensure conditions where it will be easier to attain such experiences. 

 These experiences act as reinforcements in the religion, acting as direct internal proof of God’s existence, speaking to a person’s heart and soul.  Such positive experiences strengthen a person in the religion and maintain ones faith. 

It is unimaginable that a person can maintain himself in a religion over the long term without these sorts of experiences; the warmth and loving comfort of such experiences act to solidify faith where the coldness of reason sometimes can fail.

 It is when a person fails to experience such direct feeling of contact with the Creator in his life that faith can begin to fail, and hopelessness and a feeling of being lost can take hold.  Such is the likely source of much of the  existential despair that plagues our society.  The yearning and desperate need and desire for such experience is likely the reason why New Agers and similar charlatans find such a willing audience, and why New Age and Self-Help books sell off the shelves in bookstores.  There is something that is sorely missing in the lives of the people who buy these books that for some reason or another established religion was unable to provide them.  It is a hole in their hearts that money-seeking opportunists are only too willing to try to step in and try to superficially fill, like a quick patchwork solution on a broken road.

Such feelings of desperate emptiness in a widespread pattern amongst the population also explains the rise of, and later broad public attraction to existentialist trends in philosophy that occurred during the late 19^th through the mid 20^th century.    Many of these New Age solutions resonate in some way with people because they give bits and pieces of genuine insight and guidance.  But the gold is mixed in with much more common ore, and the lack of an established, comprehensive system given and blessed by God and the lack of the essential sense of a social community of believers are fatal shortcomings.

The beauty that many people in the West experience upon stumbling upon Islam is a marvelously detailed and complete system designed to bring these moments of experience of God in the midst of life.  It is a tried and tested system to guide the soul toward the experience of God.  The major rituals of Islam act to guide toward these experiences on a daily basis through the prayers, on a yearly basis through the annual fast of Ramadan, and on a once in a lifetime basis through the experience of the hajj pilgrimage.

 God willing, I will have the opportunity to talk in more depth in other articles about how prayer, the Islamic charities of zakat and khums, and the hajj pilgrimage, properly practiced, can also lead powerfully to such experience.  But for now, I will take this occasion of the blessed and generous month of Ramadan to focus on the beauty of the ritual of the fast as a way to reinforce and strengthen faith through the by stimulating direct experience of God’s presence and bounty.

Fasting helps to remove the sense of connection to the world and frees the mind thereby for attention to God.  Helps us to fight the material connections that hold us down to this world.  By loosening our selfish ties for this world, we free ourselves to build ourselves for the next, to break away from the chains of mortality to be able to build for the next.  Fasting causes us to undergo want through hunger, and so helps us to increase our understanding of the difficulties of those less fortunate and our sympathies for the weak and the helpless.

 Fasting keeps our stomachs free from food and thereby, after a bit of adjustment, this helps our minds to become clearer and better able to recognize the signs of God and thereby recognize and become opened to God’s bounty and blessing.  This teaches us to work to build our discipline and strengthen our ability to resist the temptations that often break our connection and nearness to God.  The fast requires us to clear our minds of inappropriate thought, to avoid looking at or hearing inappropriate things, and to avoid anger and be patient in the face of the stresses that can sometimes make us lose control ourselves.  Overall, the fast is a training program to teach us of the usually-unexplored yet powerful hidden capabilities within us to overcome and control the animal urges that usually limit us from reaching our full potential.  It helps us to put these animal urges under the control and mastery of the higher influences within us of the reason and the spirit so that these urges can be directed to more beneficial ends.

 These animal urges are not bad in themselves; they are signs from God, messages directing us to fulfill the material needs necessary for us to continue ourselves as individuals and as a species so as to be able to work towards serving God.  But they need to be in proper balance and control, subservient to our higher aspects.  Otherwise, they will wreak havoc on us, leading us to destruction.

 When the spiritual and intellectual aspect within us takes more central prominence and control, we become more rational and spiritual, and we thus draw closer to God by becoming more similar to God, who is the Purest, most Maximum and Infinite Reason and Spirit, totally unconstrained by the limits of the flesh.  As we become more and more an image of God, we draw nearer and nearer in ourselves to the purity of His Being, and in so doing, increase our ability to directly experience this Being. 

 It encourages us to come together with friends, families, and community, to spend time and strengthen our ties with each other, to meet people we have not seen all year and to strengthen our relationship and connection with those we have seen.  This helps to renew and build our connections with our family, friends and community. By increasing our connection and love for God’s other creatures, we gain an appreciation and love for God as well.