The Quiet of the University

Since I stepped into the Multi-Faith Centre office a few hours ago I haven’t heard or seen a single person. The quiet of the summer semester is particularly evident on the top floor of a corner building on campus (where the MFC office is).

I’ve written about this in previous posts, but I can’t help returning to it: the summer quiet of a university. It feels very fitting, very in tune with the rhythm of the seasons. Right now the weather is warm, the sky is clear, and most students and faculty are doing all manner of summer activities: leading summer camps, enjoying creation, gardening, working outdoors, or anything else that beckons the human spirit outside its usual walls and into creation where the ceiling is the sky and the walls are oceans. The hard work of thinking and school can be rightly put on the backburner for these months.

And yet, the university remains. Libraries are shelved with books, classrooms stocked with desks, chairs, and blackboards. The task of learning and exploring through the life of the mind still invites us, even though it rightly releases us into the summer joys of a different sort. The fall will soon be here, the hallways filled, library carrels occupied.

I, admittedly, am a lover of school. The quiet waiting of the university intrigues and excites me. When the temperature cools and the rain (hopefully!) returns, the task of learning is always eager to open itself up to the human spirit which returns to books and lectures with new experiences to reflect upon. It’s sort of a natural progression of exploration and reflection; we go “out” to gather experiences, to test our learning in concrete realities, and then return “in” with fresh material of life to reflect upon.

As I enjoy the quiet of these summer semester hallways, though, I am reminded of both my own desire to invest my life in the “inward” movement, but also how these two movements of exploration and reflection bleed into one another and are not so easily isolated from each other. We gather experiences in the process of reflection, and we reflect in the process of having experiences.

So for that I treasure the university, not only for its ability to reflect on experiences but also how it provides its own experiences. The university is not just an “escape” from reality, it is its own reality, with its own rhythm of experience and reflection.

In some ways this mirrors the rhythm of the Christian life; prayer and worship leads to action and service and back again. However, here, too, the boundaries are not so neatly defined. Paul encourages believers to “pray without ceasing,” indicating the fluid nature of departure and return; prayer is an act of service, and service is a form of prayer. We ought not abandon either concrete practice, but realize that the Christian journey is one movement with different emphases at different moments of life. We are on one continuous journey of conversion, a conversion of our desire away from idols and towards the living God made know in Christ.