A Meditation on the Presence of the Truth & Reconciliation Garden at Mepkin Abbey
By Frank C. Martin Ph.D
The activity of Contemplation; that is, the act of engaging in profound, reflective thought about our experiences, has become a challenge for so many of us in our often urgent, fast-paced post-modern society.
At Mepkin Abbey, a monastic site established, in part, to permit its visitors to engage in a search for spiritual and emotional serenity, Contemplation is an important activity intended to enhance both our inner and outer awareness of our individual selves and of the world, which we share.
Our experiences in the world are vastly different, and in order to empathize with our fellow human travelers, we must often extend ourselves into the emotional, psychological, and social positions of those quite different from ourselves.
Our empathy may provide a path to improved human understanding, and the sustaining vision of the Meditation Garden of Truth & Reconciliation at Mepkin Abbey is to allow visitors to reflect upon both the beauty visible in the present as part of the setting of this wonderful site, combined with an understanding of the suffering that has helped make the beauty we may all experience an actual possibility.
The site is the final resting place of enslaved Americans of African descent, whose labor fed the wealth of a burgeoning nation without being provided with any means to access that wealth for their own, individual, or collective benefit or even to gain their own personal freedom.
The site is also situated upon land that had served to sustain the Indigenous peoples of the area, who were displaced by incursions of European outsiders who laid claim to the site to the exclusion of the needs of the Indigenous.
We, in the present, cannot revise, recreate, erase, or correct actions of the past, however, by facing, and seeking to understand the character of that past, and thinking carefully about its impact and effects, it is possible, and appropriate for us to plan a more just, equitable, and mutually advantageous shared future.
Toward this end, as a site intended to facilitate Contemplation. The Truth & Reconciliation Garden at Mepkin Abbey is potentially a socially useful, and culturally transformative instrument.
An academic, an educator, writer, and curator, Frank C. Martin is a Visiting Professor in the History & Theory of Art at South Carolina State University and a lecturer in art history and theory. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History of Art Philosophy-Aesthetics from Yale University, a Master’s Degree in History of Art from Hunter College, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina.
