When I need to get away, I go to a crypt. No, I don’t frequent tombs for kicks (Save a certain bar on 36th St.). It’s more chapel than crypt, but the solemnity remains the same. It was once the Crypt of the North American Martyrs; today it’s the Copley Chapel. Small as it is, it serves a very special function, for me anyway.
A bowl of holy water waits inside the doors. Next to it is a reminder—as if the dim lighting and Stations of the Cross weren’t enough—that this is a “Sacred Place.” Rows of chairs line the sides of the room, guiding your eyes forward to a cross hanging above an altar, a single lit candle and an urn, bronzed and medieval. During the day, sunlight ignites the colors of stained glass windows with a kaleidoscopic intensity. At night, the fire in the windows gone, golden orbs ringed with gemstones exude light from the ceiling; fluorescent lights bathe the altar in a gentle white. Save for the random cicada chirping outside and the occasional visitor, the rest is complete silence.
The Chapel is my escape. You won’t find any notebooks or laptops here, no designer clothing or cell phones, and no long wooden planks that double as an ironing board by day and—well, you know. The hurried life of the modern student is lost in the timelessness of a two thousand-year-old faith.
But as that faith sweeps away my daily worries, it also reminds me of something far more important. I’m not that religious. I don’t go to church every Sunday, I often take the Lord’s name in vain and I’m Episcopalian, which means my idea of seeing God requires one too many gin and tonics. But I don’t have to be a fervent churchgoer to see Christ on the cross and feel a little awed. Whether you believe it or not, the thought that one good man could die so that billions more could live is immensely humbling. And I need that. I get carried away here on the Hilltop, drunk on the possibilities a Georgetown degree will confer. I think we all do, every now and then.
That image of Christ on the cross throws your situation into sharp relief; in the face of such suffering the fortune of your life becomes finally obvious, and you catch a glimpse of a cruel reality behind the life of things: that as comfortable as you are in the West, there is still, in far-flung corners of humanity, pain of the sort Christ endured. In a world of pristine Georgetowns and Yales, there is also a world of suffering Darfurs and Iraqs, and you were lucky enough to enter into the former.
The Chapel is an often-harsh reminder of my, and our, absurdly lucky place in life. I don’t mean that as a boast, or as a spasm of liberal guilt. We are lucky to attend an elite university, to live in the United States, to be free from the poverty of a Somalia, the oppression of a North Korea. I think of that simple fact, and the mad-dash competition of college fades; the drama of late nights drops from sight; the worries about the future vanish. And I experience a deeper kind of escape than one of mere physical removal from schoolwork and weekend shenanigans: I experience a mental and spiritual one. All the “demands” on my time fall away, and I know nothing but gratitude.
No, this is not another diatribe against the injustice of the world—though injustice there is. Nor is it a sanctimonious call to arms against poverty, disease, and war—though such a call we need. It is, rather, a statement of the too-obvious, a fact we must remember but hear so much we forget: we students, here in this wealthy neighborhood, in this superpower capital, are blessed, and in no small way. And we would do well, from time to time, to thank God for it, and let it keep us humble.
I think so, anyway. But who am I to judge? I’m not even that religious.
