As we enter the last ten days of Ramadan, there is much talk about “the best times for supplication,” and about hours in which the heavens are said to be “open,” or when “transmission goes through without interruption”—as if the relationship between human beings and God were like a communication network waiting for a moment of perfect signal.
I read, listen, and watch these ideas, and I find myself wondering about the way people imagine the Creator of the universe.
The last ten days of Ramadan, for example, are a great and meaningful time in the religious consciousness of people, and the Night of Decree is a deeply spiritual moment in the believer’s experience. But the question worth reflecting on is not the value of these moments, but how we perceive them when we speak about them.
Does God need specific appointments to open the door of hearing and listening?
Does the Absolute Creator wait for certain hours to receive the prayers of His creation?
We often fall into an old human mistake: we measure the Absolute by our limited standards. Human beings live within time, and so they imagine that everything is governed by time. But God—as we understand Him intellectually and spiritually—is the Creator of time itself.
Time, for us, is the succession of moments: past, present, and future. But for the Creator, it makes no sense to speak of “before” or “after.” The One who created time cannot be bound by it.
When we say that prayers are heard at one time and not another, we unknowingly turn God into a being who waits for working hours, and we turn our spiritual relationship with Him into a system of appointments.
But perhaps the deeper truth is much simpler.
God is not closer to us at one time than another. In the scriptural understanding, He is closer to us than our jugular vein. And if the closeness is of this degree, how could He need an appointment?
Perhaps the value of those special times—like the last ten nights or the pre-dawn moments—is not that they open God’s door, but that they open our hearts. It is the human being who needs seasons to remember, and rituals that help bring focus and clarity.
So these seasons are not meant to organize God’s relationship with us, but to organize our own awareness.
The danger begins when we forget this meaning and assume that God waits for those moments to hear us. At that point, we reduce our understanding of God from the level of the Absolute to that of a limited being who operates according to schedules.
The truth is that the Creator who brought this infinite universe into existence cannot be confined to an hour, nor reduced to a specific moment of the day or night.
God, at the core of the idea of faith, is a constant presence—uninterrupted, not bound by timing.
Perhaps what is required of us is to change the question. Instead of asking: When does God hear our prayers? we should ask: When are we ready to perceive His presence?
For it is the human being who becomes absent—not God.
It is the heart that becomes distracted—not the heavens.
That is why a sincere moment of supplication may come in the middle of the night, in the rush of the day, or in a brief silence between two thoughts.
It is the moment when a person is fully present.
Mature faith should not confine God within narrow human perceptions, but rather seek to free the mind from these small images.
God is not a temporal idea, nor a signaling system, nor bound by appointment times.
He is the Absolute Reality—beyond time, beyond all limits.
