The upcoming graduate and professional student retreat, “Rest, Recharge, Renew,” is being offered as an opportunity for busy students to take some time away from the pressures of work and school and enjoy each other’s company in a beautiful, natural setting. The motivation for organizing the retreat is as simple as the tagline: rest, recharge, and renew. Graduate and professional students are accustomed to daily and weekly routines that require rigorous time management in order to fulfill their obligations as students balancing lives outside of the classroom. Making the time and space for this kind of structured experience of relaxation in the company of other students is well worth the effort. Making space for retreat, a temporary interruption and dislocation from daily routines, is a healthy and fulfilling use of time.
The retreat has me reflecting on the nature of time and how graduate and professional students relate to time. If we take seriously the Spirit of Georgetown value of “contemplation in action,” which is the value that motivates retreat programs across the University, how do we make sense of the tension between these ideas? How does the seeming paradox of “contemplation” and “action” relate to the life of a graduate student at Georgetown? What from the many spiritual traditions represented at Georgetown can help us answer these fundamental questions?
Despite the disciplinary diversity of graduate and professional programs, I think a common trait of these students is the limited amount of time for activities that might be considered non-essential. The weekly calendar quickly fills up when school, work, home, and social activities are added. Economists tend to make a distinction between “leisure” and “work,” but this simple distinction does not seem to capture well the in-between range of activities. Perhaps unlike traditional residential undergraduate students taking four years to earn a degree, graduate students have a more utilitarian relationship to time. The stakes seem to be higher for older adult students with more responsibilities and the discernments about how to use their non-essential time for activity require lots of negotiation and planning. As someone with a full family and work schedule, I can appreciate these tensions.
But even busy adults who have important tasks to accomplish everyday can develop an unhealthy relationship to time. The theater critic Walter Kerr in the book The Decline of Pleasure captures the tendency to equate virtue with constant activity: “Only useful time is valuable, meaningful, moral. Activity that is not clearly, concretely useful to oneself or others is worthless, meaningless, immoral.” This utilitarian interpretation of the meaning of how we use our time has some negative consequences. For the purpose of this reflection, I think a concerning outcome of this mentality is that if time becomes a possession that we acquire, then it becomes more difficult to pause and make meaning of our lives in the midst of our activity. The questions that should be orienting our work and activity can be pushed aside if we don’t intentionally make time to ask our core questions: Who am I as a person? What matters to me? What is the “why” of my life? And what path do I need to travel in order to realize my deeper purpose?
This is where the value of contemplation comes in and can relate harmoniously with the life of action. It is important to note that there is not a single, universal way of naming and understanding a vast concept like “contemplation.” Various philosophical, religious, spiritual, and humanistic traditions have different understandings of this term and its implication for practices. I’ll be relying on an invitational and inclusive understanding of contemplation taken from the Jesuit tradition of education and spirituality. The Jesuit Walter Burghardt describes contemplation as a “long loving look at the real.” This is a way of considering contemplation and the practices it inspires as “experiential awareness of reality” and a “way of entering into communion with reality.” But what do the pieces of this definition mean for graduate and professional students? Let’s take each of these components.
Real: This is the stuff of your life that cannot be reduced to abstract concepts. The real is people, things, nature, objects, etc. Reality is living and pulsing, concrete and singular. Look: This is not analysis or interpretation, but communion with the stuff of our reality by noticing and engaging reality with all of our senses. For Burghardt, to look is to feel and to experience in our senses the fact of our whole person gazing at reality. To contemplate is to be aware that we are physical bodies in a world of other bodies. Long: This is not a recipe for length of time in contemplation, but an invitation to be unhurried about it. Burghardt describes the long nature of contemplation as rest: “[T]o rest in the real, not lifelessly or languidly, not sluggishly or inertly.” These long looks can happen on a walk, on a train ride to work, in the office or classroom, picking up our kids from school, etc. The point is that our contemplative gazing is “whole person enraptured” with full senses. And finally, loving: Contemplation is not always delightful or comforting and sometimes it surfaces the wounds and hurts of our lives. By lovingly entering into contemplation, we make it more likely that our response will be more generous and more compassionate toward others. Contemplation is not actually individualistic or indulgent navel gazing.
There is no monolithic way to translate this understanding of contemplation into meaningful practices. The “how” of contemplation depends on the individual person and their full context of life. Burghardt’s suggestions for how to do this are reflected in the upcoming graduate and professional retreat. He recommends that we can develop the capacity for long, loving looks at the real by 1) interrupting our ordinary patterns of life (by going on retreat!); 2) developing a feeling for festivity; 3) building habits of play and wonder; 4) learning not to expect profit from our contemplation or possession of our objects of delight; and 5) finding guides and mentors to accompany us along the way.
My hope is that the invitation to bring together “contemplation” and “action” sparks something for you. Find a retreat, spiritual companion, leadership coach, affirming community of peers, etc. And next time you feel yourself judging yourself for any empty pockets on your schedule, I invite you to reconsider your relationship with time. We can slow life down even in a few free moments with a long, loving look at the real.
This post relies on Walter Burghardt’s article, “Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real,” as reproduced in An Ignatian Spirituality Reader, edited by George Traub (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2008).