What can the Chapel offer me?
An Invitation
The Chapel of Meditation stands in the center of the campus, witness to the fact that Eastern Kentucky University holds to the centrality of the spiritual needs of any well ordered program of education.
The Sun of Knowledge, a woodcarving on the center panel of both north and south entrances, is a traditional religious symbol of learning and life-giving force.
Look often upon the spire. It is a symbol of the fundamental things for which religion and the Chapel stand. Love of truth, beauty, goodness and peace is its invitation to man.
An Altar
As you enter the chapel you leave on the outside the maze of things, the distracting noises, the constant demands of time schedules and appointments. We live in a busy world and we must seek not to be crushed by it. For a few moments we seek to detach ourselves in order to renew ourselves.
Into this quiet haven you may bring the supreme questions of life. Here you may sit and enjoy quiet, meditative inventory, or you may kneel alone in prayer or read of values and ideals from your Holy Book or some other devotional literature that centuries have bequeathed to you. Or in silence you may discover yourself and your God. Out of your silent meditation you may receive illumination. In this way, you will add reality and perspective to your daily life.
A Place of Refuge
Man, through all his history, has had faith that there is a God, that than which none is greater can be conceived or felt, and has erected the altar as a symbolic of the meeting place between man and God.
Your moments of quiet dedication and your quest for light and direction, for understanding and peace bring to the altar, in a weighty moment of decision, your broken promises, your battered conviction, and your unfulfilled resolutions. Meditating here, to petition or only to listen, you may gather inspiring thought and have your aimlessness and indecision transformed into purpose and power…your meaninglessness and despair transformed into courage and fruitful living.
A Time of Challenge
Do not leave this Chapel without homage and gratitude. Offer a prayer that out of meditation may come the link between faith and learning, contemplation and social service. Love thyself properly that you may love all men wisely.
The Chapel assumes the universality of religion, a unity in the midst of the world’s diversity. All religions have a word about the Supreme Reality and are concerned about man’s fundamental problems: the meaning of life, of self-affirmation and understanding. Each religion grapples with these problems in one way or another.
Here is a place to struggle with the problems of war and population, of racism and community, of force and persuasion, of freedom and determinism, of deceit and truth. The unity of man under one Supreme Being should inspire within each of us the honest and sincere search for truth.
“Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you.”