As I Read about The Society of Saint John the Evangelist monastery in Cambridge, Mass. I was reminded of something Walker Percy said about places and how they are constructed in the seer's mind prior to the actual experience of seeing.
Percy cites the instance of a typical tourist's experience of seeing the Grand Canyon (in an essay, "Loss of the Creature").
Before alighting upon the physical Canyon, the tourist typically has read and absorbed varieties of written and visual representations of the place.
Thus, when she sees the Canyon with her own eyes, she is unable to have an unmediated/authentic experience. She is either disappointed with the real Canyon because it can't measure up to a preexisting image of it in her mind, or she is elated but the elation is equally mediated by the preexisting hype surrounding the Canyon.
Percy says that a sightseer is inevitably unable to appreciate the Grand Canyon on its own merit. One sees haplessly through the lens of a "symbolic complex".
The Cambridge monastery isn't as iconic as the Grand Canyon, but as I read its representation I feel like I'm slipping into the symbolic complex already. It's as if the monastery is being slowly but surely branded in my mind as a particular place with a particular selling point.
The specific selling point of the Cambridge monastery is its promise of silence. Described as a "refuge silent enough to hear God's whisper," the monastery is then hyped into an extended embodiment of this alluring silence, a sort of silence which becomes a pricey commodity because it is in short supply in this world.
Situated in the bastion of "secular modernity" of Harvard and M.I.T. the monastery's coordinates are exceptional. Doubly exceptional is its ability to separate the visitor from the secular chatter while she is in the eye of that chatter:
People are drowning in words and drowning in information,” [said Brother Geoffrey Tristram, 58, the superior of the monastery’s order, who used to lead a congregation as a priest] [...] “Words are bombarding us from every side — to buy things, to believe things, to subscribe to things. We are trying to build a place to be still and silent. So many voices around us are shouting. God tends not to shout.
The monastery attunes one to God's voice which is the voice within.
An image of the place has already been implanted firmly in my mind, such that if and when I visit the monastery, I will be expecting to experience this cardinal silence that the monastery has morphed into in my mind's eye.
By the way, to be able to consume this rare form of silence, one would have to dish out a $100 per night.
