I visited a Buddhist temple today, which is something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, and the experience was interesting and quite personal for a few reasons.

First, the visit made me realize how deeply unreligious I’ve actually become. I watched the crowd of mostly older women going through their prayer rituals and leaving candles and bottles of water as offerings and it occurred to me how foreign such things are to me.

It wasn’t long ago that I was quite religious myself. I was raised Catholic and attended Mass regularly until about the beginning of last summer. At that point, I began to seriously examine questions and anxieties I had had about religion and about God and that eventually led me to become an atheist.

This post isn’t about my journey away from the faith, so I’m not going to go into the details here, but I think it’s worth mentioning because it has a lot to do with why today was kind of a strange experience for me.

The women laid the bottles of water and candles at the Buddha’s feet, and I tried to put this scene in perspective by thinking about flowers and other offerings I used to see made to God. I watched the women perform their prayer rituals of repeatedly standing up then kneeling down and bowing their head to the ground, and thought about the hundreds of times I had knelt and bowed my head in prayer.

During those times, I always wanted so much to feel deeply connected to God and above whatever anxiety and unhappiness were causing my stress at the moment. I wanted to offer those things up to God and focused as much energy as I could on those prayers. Today I wondered if the women at the temple were having the Buddhist equivalent of such an experience. I tried to remember the deep emotions I had when I used to pray, but I couldn’t really feel them at all.

When a monk in a light gray robe entered and began the Sanskrit chants, I stared up at the three enormous statues of Buddha in the center of the room and tried to imagine what the people around me thought and felt when they looked at him. Maybe it’s like when I used to look at Jesus on the cross and believed I felt a connection with him, I thought. When I look at the cross now, I still feel some odd sense of familiarity and several other emotions but of course I don’t feel the same sense of awe and reverence I once did.  And when I looked at the Buddhas in front of me this afternoon, all I could see were painted gold statues.

I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about that part of the experience. Even though I’m not religious anymore, I still have strong memories and feelings about it and I’m wondering if those will surface in the next few days.

It was also kind of refreshing, though. The experience did make me think a lot about my religious history, but I also felt completely outside of it and I realized that some of the anxiety I had about not being religious was finally gone. Deep as the memories go, the idea actually seems very foreign to me when I’m witnessing a religious ceremony.

So there was that aspect of the day. Then there was the element that I really enjoyed and felt drawn to.

Before going to the temple, I had had a romantic vision of a quiet place filled with chanting and the scent of incense where I could sit and meditate and think away from the rest of the world for awhile.

The temple was not quite as peaceful as I had hoped, but I think that might have been because it’s in the middle of a very busy neighborhood and I just didn’t feel especially removed from the noises and chaos of the city. It was very beautiful, though, and once the monk began chanting, I did find that it was a bit more of what I had expected.

I sat on a cushion on the floor and closed my eyes, letting my mind wander as I listened to the monk. The sound was gorgeous and it was ideal because I didn’t know what he was saying, so it was enough to help me relax and contemplate but it wasn’t distracting.

I’ve never seriously meditated before but I’m quite interested and want to try it out now. I’ve gotten into the habit of journaling fairly frequently but I think meditation might help me out as well.

I’ve always been a little fascinated by Buddhism and I would actually like to go back to this temple or go see another, and I’ve been thinking about going on a temple-stay at some point in the next few months. Apparently you can spend an entire weekend at one and I’m really intrigued by the idea of doing it, mostly to get out of the city and go to a quiet place where I can sit and reflect and recharge.

But then I wonder if it’s wrong for me to go back to the temple and even spend a weekend at one when I’m definitely not interested in becoming Buddhist and am not religious at all. It’s something I’ll have to think about, I guess. For the time being, I’ll keep listening to these gorgeous Sanskrit chants I’ve been finding on youtube and try to recreate the experience in my apartment.