When My Piety Collapsed in a Muslim Prayer Room
What I found there humbled me and exposed the cartoon faith I had been given.
In 2005 I prayed in a room full of Muslims for the first time. I walked in thinking my devotion would glow a little. Crossing myself. Dropping into prostrations. Pretending I was bringing a hint of St. Francis into the space.
It took about ten seconds for reality to correct me.
The room was already thick with devotion. Not dramatic. Not forced. Just steady. The kind of faith that lives in the bones. People who bowed with no hesitation, no self-consciousness, no need to be seen.
It hit me hard.
The same way Francis was hit when he crossed into the Sultan’s camp and realized the “enemy” had a real spiritual life. Not the cartoon he had been fed. Not the fear story. Actual faith. Actual presence.
I thought I was walking in with something to offer.
Turns out I was walking into something I had never understood.
My picture of Islam snapped in half.
I saw how thin it had been.
How inherited.
How shaped by people who never stepped into a room like this.
Prayer rooms do not lie.
Theology can.
Teachers can.
Fear absolutely can.
But the body knows when it is standing in the middle of real devotion.
I walked out quieter than I walked in.
And any time I tell this story, the room reacts the same way.
The honest ones nod. They have been undone before. They know what it is like to meet God in a place they were taught to mistrust.
The ones who cannot tolerate being wrong tighten their grip. They defend the cartoon. They pretend the world is safer when they keep the borders in place.
But this is where spiritual life actually begins.
Not in certainty.
In being humbled.
I learned that day that God is not waiting for any of us to bring Him anywhere.
He is already present in places we fear.
Already alive in the people we misunderstand.
Already known under Names we never learned to pronounce.
You are not the only one who knows the Name.
You never were.
And once you let that truth undo you, the real path finally opens.
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I find so much resonance with this. Holy ground. As healthcare chaplains we often find quiet, sincere worship in those cast aside, outside the frame, or misunderstood.
Humility is the moment you give yourself to ground properly, IMHO it is both modest and beautiful 😍 I can sure feel your entrance to that prayer room✌️