Obligatory Confessions

            There is no prayer I love more, connect with more, feel most in the presence of God when reciting, or lose myself in more than the Long Obligatory Prayer.  But wait, that’s not the confession.  Here it comes:  in spite of what I have just written, I have never, not even once, recited it unless the sun has set, rendering the recitation of the Short Obligatory Prayer invalid.  Am I a hypocrite?  You tell me.  My defense is that though I love it, it is daunting, it is spiritually and emotionally exhausting, and my blood does boil in my veins.  But soft!  It gets worse.  Circumstances are not always conducive to enough privacy at night that I can do the prayer sufficient justice, so in rare instances, I have deferred it to the following morning.  Is this allowed?  It is to be recited once in twenty-four hours, and in Islam this similar obligation is stipulated as being from one noon until the following noon.  Bahá’u’lláh says nothing to confirm or abrogate this, so only God knows whether it is accepted or not.  I confess that fear and trembling overtake me and it never happens twice in short order.

            One other confession about obligatory prayer.  On weekends I sometimes find time to recite it in beautiful natural settings, on an open road, or in private chambers, but during the week the overwhelming majority of instances find me mouthing those sublime words in, of all places, bathrooms – school bathrooms, public washrooms, and worse (I live in a third world country).  It is often the only place where I can shut out the outside world confidently enough to recite those seventy-two glorious syllables without which my day becomes abysmal.  I am reasonably certain that I am facing the Qiblih whether penetrating clean walls or with eyes closed to avoid seeing words contrary to my purpose, but again no one inside or outside that room is the judge of acceptability of those searing supplications.