The privacy of the obligatory prayer is one of the faith's more counter-intuitive design decisions. Bahá'í life is intensely communal — the Nineteen Day Feast, devotional meetings, study circles, elections, consultation — and yet the single devotional act that is actually required is performed alone, in a room, facing Bahjí, with no congregation and no possibility of one. Bahá'u'lláh states explicitly that congregational prayer has been set aside, with the single exception of the Prayer for the Dead. The reasons offered relate to the abolition of clergy — congregational prayer implies someone leading it — and to the direct, unmediated relationship between the individual and God that follows from having no intercessors. Converts from Christianity and Islam consistently report this as the strangest adjustment, since in both traditions the communal prayer is the centre of religious life and the private prayer is supplementary, and in the Bahá'í Faith the relation is inverted.