The Colgate Scene
May 2004
In a silent way
Christine Susienka '07 and Brother Christian Walsh hustle up a corridor into an afternoon mass in the abbey's chapel. During a brief conversation, Walsh told Susienka he used to live near Syracuse and had visited Hamilton on a few occasions. "He didn't realize Colgate had gone co-ed," said Susienka. |
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"Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future," wrote the Trappist
monk Thomas Merton. "Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you
look for it in the present you will never find it." On a cold, blustery
February afternoon, a group that included 14 Colgate students and a handful of
faculty members arrived on the banks of the Genesee River in the western New
York town of Piffard to look for solitude at a retreat at the Abbey of the
Genesee. Waiting for them were 31 Trappist monks and a weekend of very little
conversation. During the next two days, the group (led by Mark Shiner, interim
Catholic chaplain) attended a dozen liturgies (which started daily at 2:30
a.m.) in between a combined 43 hours of silent reflection. "I don't know what I hope to achieve . . . I feel what will have to happen, will happen," responded Matthew Skrzynski '07 when asked what he hoped to accomplish that weekend. "I may not know what that is for a long time." |
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