Every Sunday this blog features either sacred space or subject matter. Today you're looking at the Chapter Room in The Monastery of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the brethren meet together to worship and to discuss the workings of their order.
When T S Eliot was a student at Harvard he would visit with the brothers and it's said that he had an epiphany in this room. I spent time in the chapter room while on retreat and while I'm hardly the scholar that Eliot was I can say that the room was made expressly for the purpose of connecting with the Holy. The tableau was arranged by our retreat leader, Brother Timothy, for our last night. Our focus was meditating on God's heart as a path to peace. You would be very surprised to know what he suggested that path might be.
Today's song is "Come Sunday" by Duke Ellington.
6 comments:
Your first picture, is really nice catch. I like the light and the grain you have in this picture.
Lovely choices today PJ> The top one made me think Shaker. The bottom vignette is breathtakingly beautiful. Your music is the perfect compliment. I could stay here all day.
V
Ok, surprise me, what is that path??????Lovely pairing of pics.
I really liked the way you did the top photo PJ, very nice!
Well, Diana, the only way I can think to describe it here is to say that it involves seeing yourself as a co-participant with anyone that you feel has harmed you. It's hard to explain; the idea, I think, is to stop seeing people as us-vs-them, that too often we work against something and it ends up defining us. Does that make any sense?
One of the things I took away from it is that blame is not a very useful tool for creating a peacable life. Put another way, some Holocaust survivors have said that they couldn't move forward with their lives until they could admit to themselves that they were capable of committing atrocities under certain circumstances themselves. So, we all suffer from the human condition. It has been a very humbling process.
I'm not a religious person. Honestly, I just don't get it, even though I had a traditional Catholic education. Nevertheless, your last comment vibrates somewhere between Christianity and Buddhism, the latter being the religion that I can relate to the best. I think I do understand your point.
Just love the top photo. Like Virginia suggests, tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free, etc. I like how white linen covers horizontal surfaces, anything you might set something on, including yourself.
I re-edited my Sunday pic into B&W as you suggested and added it to the post. Looks better this way.
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