Our Eclectic Approach to Religion

When John and I pray together, it's actually like a small private ritual, mostly invented by me. We started this on the internet, when we were away from one another:

we used to do this through mic and webcam, but obviously it was so limited. But now that we are together, it's much better: John has got some nice small rugs from Turkey which can be used as praying mats, so we spread two of them, one for me, and one for John. We turn off the lights and light a couple of candles instead, I wear my white "maqna'e" and "chador", then we face "Qeble". I have a small praying book which contains part of these nice Shiite prayers, including "Doa-ye Tavassol" which is my favorite. Taking one of these candles in a way its light would spread on the pages, I read "Doa-ye Tavassol" aloud phrase by phrase (definitely the original Arabic version) and John tries to repeat it. It comes out so cute, because as an English native-speaker, John has a thick accent when trying to speak Arabic, but one thing he has a talent for, is doing different accents. He can do Hindi and Japanese accents, and he even knows phrases; he also loves Arabic a lot.

There is a part in the middle of this prayer when you're supposed to ask God what you want, and here we both silently ask for our wishes to be granted. My wish is always for John to get rid of depression and be healthy and happy unconditionally. Then I finish that prayer, and we hold eachother's hands and I say things in English like "God, help us be nice servants to You" and John repeats after me, then when we're done with that, we get so close, face on face as we are sitting and looking at the dancing candle flames (kinda spiritual smooching!) We just sit like that, listening to eachother breathing, sharing the peace and warmth for a few minutes. So basically, it's like a mixture of Islamic, Christian, perhaps even Buddhist rituals... but you know what? We just call it "praying together".