Sahana Narayan: Week 14 - A Connection to Prayer
Sahana Narayan - Week 14: A Connection to Prayer – 4/6 [7:40 PM]
The first “passage” I ever had to memorize was in a language I had never spoken before. Sanskrit. A language no one around me spoke, and a language that I had no interest in ever learning. My dad told me it was important to memorize it, however, so I did.
Three year old me struggled to sound out the vowels and tiny little marks that accompanied the alien words. Having just gained a somewhat rocky understanding of the English language, it didn’t seem fair that I also had to memorize something in a language no one uses anymore. But my dad told me it was important, so I continued.
When I hit elementary school, I learnt that there was not only one passage, but multiple. A total of 11 passages. My dad and I worked every day after I took my bath. He chanted the passage out loud, and I would sit there slowly repeating it. He would always tell me to sit up straight because prayer can only be done that way, but somewhere along my chanting of passages, I would slouch back down. We kept at it, though, and by fifth grade, I had completely memorized the first 6 passages.
It pains me to say that somewhere along the line, I stopped. Maybe it was because I got busy. Maybe it was because my dad got busy. Maybe it was simply because I never realized the importance of the passages myself, and so I just forgot them. My dad, unlike me, had continued to chant the passages every single day, come what may. He held the little red book with all the words and meanings in it, and recited from it after taking his daily shower.
1st passage from "the little red book"
Most recently, I was in a situation where I was given the chance to chant the passages. It had been almost 5 or 6 years since I had last even glanced at those words and marks. But as I uttered the first few words, “Om Namo Bhagavate Rudraya,” it suddenly came rushing back to me. And not only did I chant till the 6th passage, but I chanted all 11 passages. There was a difference in the way that I chanted also. A certain power I felt behind the words and sounds, a power that I never recognized before.
Afterwards, I came to realize that through all these years, it was my listening to my dad’s daily prayer routine that got all the passages to stick with me. It just subconsciously got stored in some part of my brain, and I didn’t know until now.
But I also came to another more important realization. Prayer is really what you make of it. Sure, it can be about healing the world, connecting to God, bringing peace, blah, blah. But for me, prayer reminds me of this simple connection that I will always have with my dad. And if I ever have to remember this connection, I simply will have to utter the first few words of the passage.
Hi Sahana! While I don't know any prayers, I had the same experience of having to memorize Chinese poems. Some of these poems were only four lines long with 6 characters each, while others were a whole page long, but they were equally mind numbing and, although I understand Chinese, all that registered in my brain were a collection of jumbled characters. Its cool that you felt power behind the words as you aged, but for me, even now, I cannot find beauty in Chinese poems and feel like its just old men using extremely fancy words just to leave behind a legacy.
ReplyDeleteHey Sahana, your blog post resonates a bit with me as well this week. When I was a lot younger, my mother would spend quite a bit of time teaching me some shorter prayers, which over the years have become ingrained into my mind ever since. I'd even learned some longer paragraphs of prayers, which I thought I would have forgotten by onw considering I was a lot younger an barely even recall now what the words mean. However, starting off reading the lines recently, I was able to recall an impressive amount of the passages, and quite easily at that. Repetition seems to be a crucial part of memory, especially when it comes to spoken material and substance. Even speeches I've given in the past seem to flow almost completely and naturally when I start off reading the first line or so. It's pretty crazy how much you can remember simply by repeating it out loud consistently.
ReplyDeleteI used to have to memorize things for Sea Cadets that I believed would be completely useless in the real world. I did it begrudgingly, but forgot it all once I was not being pushed into memorizing them. I regret it now. Those words, as you say, have great power behind them once you get older. While to me it was just a smaller speech, it would be later when I realized just how important the words behind what I had to memorize would be to me. They would dominate my life for the next several years positively: they would prove to extremely powerful in my future, and now I show it the respect it deserves. It just took me a couple years.
ReplyDeleteHi Sahana, your blog post was very cool because it gave me a new perspective on what prayer is actually is. I used to believe that prayer is just a way to get closer to god, but listening to your meaning behind prayer made me realize that the meaning behind all things is really just subjective. I also think that is really cool that all you had to do to remember all the passages was just say the first few words. Sometimes when we do something enough it becomes a part of us. For example, I remember playing basketball after several years and still having the same skill level.
ReplyDeleteHi Sahana! It’s such a coincidence that the language Sanskrit is the one you had to memorize because this is the one I had to work with when learning Carnatic music when I was younger. Although I was pretty hesitant to be willing to understand the language at first due to its unusual vowel sounds, I persevered to continue this interest of mine and eventually memorized large songs that were very lengthy in content. My dad and I used to wake up at 5 AM every morning, attempting to recollect and chant each of the twenty-five songs that were given by my teacher. Overtime, as I memorized more lines, I began to decipher the meaning behind various words and sound just like you. Thank you for your blog and I hope to read more!
ReplyDeleteHi Sahana, I loved your blog post. I think it is really admirable that you diligently chanted these prayers every day since you were three all the way through 5th grade. It makes sense that years later you still remember these chants because of how long and how repeatedly you practiced in the past. I think your point on how for you these prayers are a way to connect with your dad was really meaningful and beautiful, and it is great that you have this way to connect with and remember your dad. I guess, at the end of the day, that is what prayer is about: connecting with people around you and finding mental peace.
ReplyDeleteHi Sahana! I can personally relate to having a hard time memorizing languages as I grew up with Mandarin as my first language. I think having the advantage of being in an environment where the language was commonly spoken helped me as well because it was a more natural learning process. Nonetheless, I still believe Mandarin was harder to learn than English simply because of the sheer number of characters you have to memorize. I also found your point about your parents helping you to be relatable as speaking with my parents in Mandarin has definitely helped me retain it more even as I grew up and gradually began forgetting.
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