I may not come to know what it is like to believe in a unified God this month, and I may never possess genuine faith or belief in any kind of deity. But by the end of this month I will definitely know what it is like to be hungry.

I have never fasted before, and aside from very irregular occasions I manage two meals a day (I rarely have breakfast) with regular snacking in between. So before this fast I only had a pitiful glimpse into what it was to really be hungry, to go any extended period of time without nourishment.

Before this experience, I would have said that I knew what it must be like to be starving. I would have told you that people would lie, cheat, and steal in order to feed themselves, but I did not actually know. What I had been trying to do was approximate a state of need and discomfort that I had never really experienced. I did not possess what some philosophers insist on for a definition of knowledge- I did not ‘genuinely believe’ in the power of hunger.

Now I have experienced ten days, barely without food, and I don’t even like these pitiful little reflections of what it is to be starving. Thoughts of eating intrude on my work, I begin to fantasize about what I will finally get to eat when the sun goes down. I am not thinking about God or about the Baha’i faith, mostly because university has been keeping me busy, but also because I am thinking of food and how much I miss regular meals.

This experience is teaching me that starvation has to be a really terrible state of being, which I had always assumed but never actually knew. In much the same way as I can now identify with the views of vegetarians, I think I can now identify with people who are forced to go without food for long periods of time. I have had the necessary experience in order to achieve genuine belief. And although I can think of plenty of reasons not to give money to people living in the street, people that must live amongst cardboard, garbage bags, and recyclables, I can’t think of a good reason not to give them food. I know what it is like to go hungry, and I would be failing as a person if I willingly let other people go through anything worse than this.