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- LIFE IN GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
Silence is more than an absence of noise. As we sit twice a day in the John Main Center for
Meditation and Inter-Religious dialogue at Georgetown University, smack in the middle of a busy
American campus, it is a drop of silence in an ocean of noise, a sliver of stillness in a flood of
activity. Planes fly overhead at regulated landing intervals, FedEx trucks crash gears on the road
outside. Students walk by to the library or dining room talking in groups or on cellphones. Usually
their important point occurs to them moments after they have separated, when they turn back to
shout their concluding remarks over the perilous flight paths of other conversations.
Meanwhile, in the meditation center, the oldest building on campus (built in the same year as the
White House), students enact what John Main believed until his death twenty-five years ago – ‘there
is nothing more important for men and women of our time than to rediscover the value and meaning
of silence’. It is grace for teachers of meditation to meditate with children or college students. They
don’t approach it with pre-meditated objections or doubts but accept it as a thirsty man takes a
glass of water. The meaning of their experience is subsequent to the tasting of it, as the real
enjoyment of food comes after you have begun to eat it. Most who come regularly don’t talk too
much about it. They are not being graded and don’t have to impress the teacher. Perhaps they don’t
have time to talk about it as older people don’t have time to do it. But they genuinely feel gratitude
for meditation and for the daily support to continue with it. Obviously many never do come to
meditate – too shy, too busy, or they never even think about it – while others check it out and don’t
return. Many students however are coming to the center alone outside the regular sessions when
their stressful schedules allow.
There is no doubt that the existence of a physical center of contemplation on campus, dedicated to
silence and complementing other kinds of campus ministry, is valuable and utilised. Yet it runs
counter to most of the forces that constitute university and other kinds of institutional life today. The
true silence of meditation has, therefore, a discomforting social impact. It exposes the false
silences that distort and disrupt human affairs.
Here in Washington, for example, there are large Afro-American and Hispanic populations. The vast
majority of them are servants, providing the manual or menial services the white elite don’t have
time or taste for. In the university they form most of the catering and maintenance staff and there is
– as elsewhere – a conventional wall of silence between the servers and those being served. There
is also silence about the existence of this silence. We are too busy to practice true silence and too
busy to notice how we are trapped in the negative silence where communication is stifled.
Apart from the mass of the population turning to daily meditation before the White House starts its
next war what hope is there to break out of this spiritual and cultural nosedive?
As the desert monks knew, greed and pride are greater enemies to contemplation than lust. It is
mammon that coordinates the forces of our insanity and locks us in our isolated envelopes of
indifference. Most of the snatches of conversations you pass through on an American street are
about money – prices of goods or personal debt. On campus most of the conversations,
refreshingly, seem about romance (ideas are mostly left in the classroom). Yet the silent
immigrants, noticed only when they ask for education and health services, and here out of real
poverty to support their families, teach something different and priceless.
Last week some Mexicans were painting in our house. When they finished their work I got into
conversation with one and asked him to do a small extra job in the kitchen. He told me frankly he
was here illegally, hoping to get his papers soon so he could visit Mexico for his parents to see their
five year old grandson for the first time. He had an openness and fluency in truth in his poor English
that sailed above the usual level of discourse. He seemed to enjoy breaking through the wall of
silence that normally divides him from his employers. When he did the job I offered him some
money. In a very un-American way he backed off and refused it with a gesture of human dignity far
greater than ordinary pride, utterly defiant of mammon. I was left purified in another kind of silence.
And I wondered if salvation for this self-strangulating society of North American will come, not only
from silence, but from the south.
Much love,
- Laurence Freeman,OSB
| MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, December 2007 |