Keeping the Faith: Endless goodness is always with us; sometimes we just need a reminder

Like most of us, I’m a creature of habit, and I often begin my days in the same way – making the bed.

Part of it is the comfort of the familiar – doing the same thing every day – and part of it is a compulsive neatness – everything is in its place, so the day can begin.

It’s the nature of such comforting automatic tasks that one can do them without much thought – plump the pillows, smooth the coverlet – but sometimes in that repetition, little epiphanies occur.

It happened one morning, a few weeks ago, when in the midst of the daily plump-and-smooth restoration of order, my Buddhist prayer beads tumbled out from under the covers and onto the bedside table with a “clack.”

Looking at the dark, well-worn beads, I chuckled with a sudden realization: I had become my grandmother.

Let me explain.

As a child with two working parents, I often spent my sick days from school (and sometimes weekends) staying with my grandmother and grandfather.

They were typical of their era – he worked; she was a homemaker. And cleanliness was definitely next to godliness in her book.

She quickly learned that the best way to keep a rambunctious child busy was to show her how to clean. Dusting, polishing, bed-making all became part of my growing repertoire.

Often, while making the bed, I would discover my Grandmother’s rosary under her pillow. The black beads were lustrous, and the silver chains and yoke shone. In my child mind, it was as though the wood and metal had been invested with the aspiration, hope and concern of each of my Grandmother’s prayers.

But that fascination also was tinged with a childish disdain; putting a rosary under one’s pillow was a throwback to a long-gone time of reverence and anachronism – sort of like my Gran herself.

Gran wore those old-style black lace-up shoes like the women in the World War II dramas on television; she wore modest dresses all day every day, and white gloves and hat at church on Sunday. She also had a stern demeanor and firmly believed that children were best seen and not heard.

All of this contrasted with the lustrous black rosary beads and the picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that hung about their bed. She was obviously a believer and had special faith in the blessing of Christ’s mother Mary that came with the recitation of the Our Father and Hail Mary prayers of the Catholic rosary.

In that moment several weeks back when I was looking at my own Buddhist rosary that had popped out on the nightstand, I smiled because I realized I was oh so wrong about my Gran.

You see, I’d started reciting Buddhist mantras – essentially, names of great, enlightened beings of the past – as a form of nighttime prayer before bedtime.

My Buddhist teacher had told us that sleep was considered a neutral state, and that because it was neutral, we could “flavor” it in any way by what we think about before going to sleep.

“If you think thoughts of anger or resentment while going to sleep, that’s what you will be cultivating in your sleep,” our teacher had said. “But if you think thoughts of love and compassion or about the enlightened ones, that is what you will be cultivating in your sleep.”

So I’d started consciously cultivating thoughts of love (“Wherever I go in my dreams tonight, may I benefit beings there …”) and reciting mantras, such as the compassion mantra OM MANI PADME HUM, a form of the name of the compassionate bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.

Doing this cut down on my bad dreams and helped me wake in a better frame of mind. And it was another step in a larger effort to increase my “conscious contact with the higher power of my understanding,” part of my Al-Anon recovery studies.

Rather than being something superstitious - a mindless act to ward off a nameless danger - those prayers were yet another tool in creating a life built around faith and the Buddha’s teaching that “we are what we think” and can gradually become the best version of ourselves.

A rosary is a circle, after all; it implies infinity, continuity, a thread that can encircle and embrace everything - just like faith in the continuous presence of whatever we call the divine in our lives.

Our teachers tell us endless goodness is with us always; we just need reminders of its presence.

Thank you, Grandmother, for the reminder.

Lama Kathy Wesley is a Columbus native and a Buddhist minister at the Karma Thegsum Chöling Buddhist Meditation Center in Franklinton. 

Keeping the Faith is a column featuring the perspectives of a variety of faith leaders from the Columbus area. 

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Keeping the Faith: Becoming one’s grandparent lesson in love and faith