Everything was at the ready.
It was about to begin, waiting for the gong to sound.
Where have I felt this before?
That was where…
In a way I had two majors, the one that while interesting to
me was aimed at finding employment after graduation, and the other was where my true ambitions laid.
For those four years I led two parallel lives on campus.
With that, the courses it was suggested I take regarding
that second pursuit where only offered in the early morning hours. That
particular professor would only teach at that time, and as I was a commuter
student with the train, I’d often arrive on campus just after 7 AM.
Most of the campus was still closed and locked shut, my
on-campus friends were still sleeping, and the computer lounge was quite
lacking.
I found the Blue Chapel by wandering Keating Hall looking
for a place to quietly sit before class, and it was quite a happy accident as
it was always open even outside of Mass for reflection.
The first thing I noticed was the silence.
Not as in quiet, but as in a complete lack of sound. A
combination of stone architecture and arrangement that blocked out the New York
City sounds that were even outside in the early morning.
Naturally my mind would fill the silence with its own thoughts,
assignments that needed to be done, friends, other activities, et al.
Yet in time, even these would fade to the silence of the Chapel.
When was the first time I noticed it?
The Chapel was empty as it always was at that time, but this
time it was set up for the morning Mass.
Sitting in the back, overtaken by the silence, my own mind running
out of thoughts, and suddenly the silence was broken.
Not by an audible noise, but by a different noise, a resonance.
It was all about the Chapel, but the origin was the altar
and the objects on it.
Objects that when arranged in a particular manner, combined
with the architecture of the Chapel, created a kind of geometry, that created a
specific resonance that existed outside of space and time.
That was where I had felt this same experience before.
