One day recently I woke up thinking about Jampa Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist Centre in Cavan and wondering why I’ve been frequenting the place for 30 years. And why so many other people go there, looking for spiritual peace, or just in flight from various traumas.
Not that much happens in Jampa Ling from one day to the next. Visitors remain as anonymous as they wish. They attend morning and evening prayers in a shrine room festooned with lavish images of various buddhas. They might buy a few prayer flags, incense sticks or other trinkets in the gift shop, or just stroll around the ample grounds.
There are a couple of ordained monks and a nun that guide the rhythm of the day but they remain largely in the background. Like yeast they provide a certain energy in the mix but it’s not initially obvious.
I visited recently for what is called the Long Life Prayers for the Teacher. These are extended prayers that the students of the resident lama recite together once a year; that their teacher will continue to enjoy good health for a long time to come. And as I drove up the new tarmac avenue I was still wondering what it is about the centre that keeps attracting me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
There’s a room where I find refuge from the demons afflicting me
The General and I used to go boating. Now we sit on the patio like characters in a Beckett play
The moment I assemble the flute, the cats dive off the sofa and claw the back door, screaming to be let out
Michael Harding: We had just finished the salmon when the row broke out. All had gone well until then
The long life prayers were recited over a period of three hours, and a procession of students brought symbolic gifts of gratitude into the shrine room.
As I stepped inside I was remembering all the times I had come to that same room with worries and anxieties, prostrating on that same carpet, as I tried to resolve various conundrums in my life. It’s a room where I often found refuge from the demons of mental agitation that afflicted me.
It’s corny to say “I’ll pray for you” but I’m always amazed at how many times I say, “I’ll be thinking of you”, or how often I put a heart emoji on the end of a text
Now 30 years later I have grown old and stiff so I sat at the back wall on a chair. But I could see lots of old friendly faces among the gathered crowd as they bowed before an image of the Buddha. Old friends and strangers scattered about the room, all seeking the same simple prize of inner peace. Everyone singing hymns and reciting mantras and reading the same phrases off the photocopied sheets before them.
It dawned on me that prayer is the pulse of the centre, the music that transcends not just age differences, but differences of gender, nationality and race. In Jampa Ling the rhythm of the day is prayer. The background noise is prayer. And the heart of the building is the shrine room.
Of course it’s not any different from what happens in monasteries across the country: in Kylemore, Glenstal, Glencairn or Portglenone. And I have a friend who occasionally stretches a prayer mat across the kitchen floor and turns his heart towards Mecca. And I know a fellow writer who for years has been chanting Hare Krishna and finding peace in various Hindu traditions.
Theologians may bicker and differ when they try to nail down ultimate truth in linguistic puzzles, and religion can be extremely divisive, yet prayer is the one key that opens the door of the heart in every religious tradition: to pray is as universal as singing.
And it’s consoling to know that no matter how isolated I feel, no matter how dark the night may be, emotionally or physically, there is always someone somewhere opening their mind and heart in the music of prayer.
It’s corny to say “I’ll pray for you” but I’m always amazed at how many times I say, “I’ll be thinking of you”, or how often I put a heart emoji on the end of a text, when in fact I mean that somehow my heart wishes to enfold the “You”, the Other, mindfully.
When I was taking off my shoes in the hallway just outside the door of the shrine room in Jampa Ling, an old friend touched my hand. She said, “would you sign this please?”
“What is it?” I wondered.
It was a card for a mutual friend who was in hospital.
“He can’t come today,” she said, “so we’re just sending him a note to let him know we are praying for him.”
Of course I signed. Not for any magical results that prayer might produce. Not even because I concur with any specific theological dogmas. It’s just that prayer holds friends, enemies and strangers in a single space. And nothing unites the world more clearly than the heart.