Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 22

22

Praying for Everybody:

Being a pilgrim on Holy Mountain was a spiritually focusing period for me. Besides the simple daily chores to help the monks and the handyman assistant work with Max: “chopping wood—carrying water” as Buddhists might say––I did a lot of praying–more concentrated praying than I ever did in my life. I guess being surrounded by men practicing their religion in a life-and-death serious way and in a place where generations of men had sought spiritual comfort or illumination stimulated me to try harder myself.

I am still not sure what “prayer” is exactly because I suspect it is a different thing for everybody, but, since I had a lot of time with nothing much else to do, I did some, what was for me, intensive praying.

I thought at first it would be a good idea to pray for forgiveness for every wrong act I had ever committed against any other person I could remember which I did for several days. Then I changed the focus and started to pray for everyone I could remember from my past life. I started writing names in my notebook—literally everybody’s name that I could remember—relatives, friends and enemies, teachers, employers, just everybody—and then I would read through the list every day; “lifting them up in prayer”, as they say.

After a while though, even this did not seem enough and eventually I found myself praying for everybody in the whole world. I don’t really know if it did anybody, including myself, any good, but I did give it the Old College Try.

Tomasito, 2009


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