December 2021
We asked our writers to reflect on going to a collage in remote location.
The cocoon on the mountain
Jack Daly
Class of 2025
At the beginning of the school year, our Vice President Dr. Bernard Franklin asked the student body gathered at the convocation to consider the university to be our cocoon. During their college careers, it is hoped that every student will undergo a metamorphosis, in which they will shake off the last vestiges of adolescence and emerge as a responsible citizen ready for their role in the world. Mount St. Mary’s is just that, a cocoon hidden in the forested hills of Maryland. A university found in any other setting would invite the dangers of the broader society to adulterate its ability to accomplish its mission: to form good men and women.
The campus has long been watched over by the great, golden statue of Our Lady. Her two arms were outstretched, gesturing down the mountainside to the activity taking place below her. It seemed as if all of the buildings of the school had sprouted from the wake of the grace she broadcast with her hands, like the roses that fell from St. Juan Diego’s tilma. While her image is currently down for repairs, we, her children, know that we are never truly without our Holy Mother, and we await the return of her delightful likeness.
Just beside that wonderful monument is, of course, the renowned Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, and it is truly a treasure. It is full of many beautiful pictures and statues of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints; works of art made with such exquisite skill and style, that it would take pages to adequately reflect their beauty and ability to move. The site is always busy with pilgrims, many from foreign homes. Where my words fail, let their pious hearts stand as a testament to the location’s magnetic spiritual quality. It is truly a privilege that so many young people are allowed the chance to spend their college years close to such a beautiful place.
While the campus itself is full of visual reminders honoring salvation history, not an hour away students can find some of the most impressive reminders of human history. Anyone with proficient knowledge of the nation’s history is assuredly aware of the Battle of Gettysburg, but few get to see for themselves the amazing monuments of the destruction and bloodshed that the country was witness to just over one and a half centuries ago. The battlefield is, and shall remain, one of the favorite spots for students to visit. It is a place for us to remember the sacrifices of our forefathers, which allow us to live in the country we do today.
In addition to the battlefield, the town of Gettysburg is also noteworthy. Visitors to the area can see many of the buildings that have been preserved from the time of the Civil War, a great contrast to the newer kind of town that we call home to today.
In the opposite direction, the city of Frederick can be found South of the University. Like Gettysburg, Frederick continues to be blessed with many old and awe-inspiring buildings. These houses were built mainly from brick and lend a wonderful nineteenth century charm to the town. This is not to say that Frederick is stuck in the past; any one with the chance to see the place for themselves will find a vibrant and modern community, but one that has not forgotten the origins of its identity.
While these larger towns are perfectly good spots for students to drop by on occasion, the real honor is our school’s location within Emmitsburg. Since many students after graduation are likely to find themselves living in one of the nation's cramped, busy, and noisy cities, they will surely look back fondly upon their days in quiet Emmitsburg. The town is a snapshot of rural, small-town America, the memory of which will likely gain a Romantic, pastoral appeal when we look fondly back on our time here.
One cannot stress enough the beauty of the countryside within this region. During early fall, in the evenings, when half the sun is obscured by the hills, the green fields that we can see just across the way are tinted gold by the light of the dusk, so that the whole area looks like a landscape painting.
Among the most defining features of this rural beauty are the many farms around us. When coming or going from the University, one will see countless fields of crops and pastures of animals. Farms like Good Soil, run by Professor Stephen McGinley, serve as sites where students can find an authentic, direct connection to the world through meaningful, tangible work.
There is also an important spiritual aspect to our school’s location on a mountainside. Mountains have been associated with a closeness to the divine since time in memorial. Sinai, Zion, Calvary are a few mountains that are within the Judeo-Christian religions, and the ancient Greeks had Mount Olympus and the Athenian Acropolis. It is fitting, then, that we should spend our years studying the higher things on a place that is itself elevated. Here we are able to survey the many subjects of the world just as easily as we can survey our physical surroundings.
Another famous mountain that we can compare our university to is Mount Purgatory, the setting, and subject of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio. On the mountain, the souls of those guilty of venial sins purify themselves in order to reach Heaven above. The mountain is separated into levels where souls are freed of specific vices, with the most severe at the bottom, and the less so towards the top.
As one of the souls newly arrived to this mountain, it is my hope that I will undergo a similar purgation and perfection here, that I will find my path forward growing easier as I let go of old vices that have handicapped me, so that I can at last move higher up the mountain. May this cocoon within the countryside really be the place where all of us can see a metamorphosis in ourselves.
Read other articles by Jack Daly
Liveliness in the balance
McKenna Snow
Class of 2024
I am from the South; I was born in Texas, lived in Tennessee, and am currently stationed in Kentucky. There’s always been something I’ve loved about the openness of the southern landscape. Skies I can see, that aren’t obscured by city skyscrapers—though beautiful in their own way—are something I truly love. I love open space, long stretches of road that give a wide view of the plots of land local farmers own, and towns that are spaced out enough from each other that the twenty-minute drive to get to them feel like fun road trips.
But I don’t just like a flat landscape; I like the rolling mountains of West Virginia that display magnificent collections of trees all changing color in the autumn, too. And I like the cities, but I like my distance from them.
So, when I was in my senior year of high school, these were all things I liked in surrounding areas of where I lived, and they were things I did consider in my search for the right college. Was a place like University of Louisville, which is in the heart of the city, the place I wanted to reside in? The school is laced throughout the streets of downtown, and I’m sure students who flourish in the urban lifestyle consider it perfect—but not for me.
And what about a place like the school I considered out in Kansas? I liked this school’s remoteness, and its location in the big open skies out there—but it was too removed from surrounding towns. So where was the balance?
I found the balance in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Though far from home, and though geographically more northern than my southern roots expected me to gravitate to, this little town where the Mount resides has a balance I really love.
The campus is about five minutes from the town of Emmitsburg, and yet it remains individual and unique, with the special ability to call the mountainside its home. The campus is also right by the highway which runs by the foot of the mountain, and I like it because the highway poses the opportunity for that twenty-minute road trip with friends into town. Actually, not just one town; depending on the direction you take, you’ll be whisked to Gettysburg, a beautiful rustic town with a rich history, or to Frederick, a more modern experience with tons of little stores and restaurants that entrepreneurs have brought to its center. There are lots of things to do within short driving distances, but the Mount’s location isn’t overwhelmed by it. It retains its beauty, its rural charm, its connection to the Catoctin mountains, and its ability to offer its students wide open skies.
If the Mount were in an urban setting, I think its uniqueness would feel stifled. The sight of the historic chapel is interwoven with the backdrop of the mountain trees. The science building’s classical architecture deserves its standalone plot of land on the flatter part of campus, with its several iconic trees adorning its perimeter. The rugby field is wide and stoutly at a more elevated part of campus’ edge, making it conducive for the Astronomy club’s stargazing events when light pollution needs to be at a minimum. Yet, it is not so far removed from the campus that it feels too unsafely far from the buildings—in fact, almost everything on the Mount’s campus is within a five to fifteen-minute walking distance.
Does this make the campus feel too small, if I can be almost anywhere on campus in a matter of minutes? Certainly not. It’s helpful on cold days, when I have places to be and not much of a desire to freeze on my way. It’s also a highly conducive campus for solid community-building. Everyone’s classes are close to one another’s. Everyone seeking food obtains it from either the café, the food truck, or the cafeteria. You become comfortable with the regulars you see every day, even if you don’t know their names. You recognize them, see them in the class halls, or in the elevator up to your dorm. Once in a while, someone who you see often finally breaks the ice, and they introduce themselves—just so you can put a name to the familiar face. Yet, it can be the start of some of the best friendships. You find that the person also knows your friend, and you agree that you should all
get lunch together sometime.
The longer the semester goes on, the more it starts to resemble the feel of a broken-in Birkenstock shoe. It’s sturdy, dependable, well-made, and worn in. All the corners of campus, being as close as they are, become familiar—in one corner, there’s the mailroom, and in the other are the rugby field and cafeteria.
Something I really love about the experience of campus life on a mountain is going beyond the perimeters of campus as you ascend the mountain, discovering the hiking trails students have been utilizing for years. I’ve taken many beautiful hikes up to Indian lookout with my friends, making joyful memories with them in the forest.
I will say that I think my college experience would have been different if it had been in a more urban setting. Perhaps an urban setting would have been livelier, in a certain sense, with a higher student body and more immediate, literal connection to the city. But the Mount has shown me its own sort of liveliness, in the rustle of the colorful trees, and in the busy highway inviting me to explore the surrounding towns. It’s shown me the liveliness in the stars, in the gathering of friends at the Astronomy club who look for planets through the science department’s telescopes. The liveliness is in the small details you become attached to in the everyday experience; it’s even in the sidewalks everybody uses. It’s in the café when the regulars swing by to grab coffee ordered before class, and your friends stopping by the booth at which you’re doing homework. The liveliness is in
the potential of it all and where you decide to find it—and in this balance of mountain air and local communities, I’ve embraced all the little moments of it.
Read other articles by McKenna Snow
Rainy days and Mondays
Emmy Jansen
MSMU Class of 2023
I sat down to write this article on one of the worst days to be reflecting on the scenery surrounding us. Wafting over the mountains and through the color-changing trees was the pungent odor of fresh manure being laid. At some points during the year, you can smell the surrounding farms while walking through campus. Sometimes we become so immune to it that we stop recognizing the smell; it wasn’t until my mom remarked on the scent during a visit last year that I started to understand what it was.
When I think about the area we live in, I don’t want to focus on only the beauty. Nature is not always beautiful: leaves can poison, algae growth turns water murky and dark, and mud gets caked onto everything it touches. Even the prettiest rose decomposes and the leaves that color the horizon now will be bare and dead in a few weeks.
When I think about how ugly nature can be, I think about the floods from the remnants of Hurricane Ida back in September. Massive amounts of rainfall on top of saturated soil from earlier storms caused flash flooding down the side of the mountain through campus, which eventually breached all the storm barriers the university had put in place. I live in Bradley Hall, the main administrative building of the university with one floor of female students at the very top. The river of flooding came down from the Grotto past Bradley until it hit the roads and lower dorm buildings. We were put into shelter in place because there were no safe walkways around Bradley, and everyone inside would just have to wait. From my fourth-floor view, I watched rainwater not cascade but rush down the mountainside, moving rocks, debris, and even parked cars. The heavy rain and wind leaked through our windows, as it always does, and the humidity soaked the rooms
even more.
I do not tell you this to simply display how nature can become destructive and to pride the university on preventing a small disaster from becoming a much larger one. I reflect on this moment because staring out of the dorm windows, watching water and floods drown the campus and leave destruction in its wake, I cannot describe it as anything less than beautiful.
The common connotation of rain is that it pours sadness along down with it. People hate rainy days, and I have never understood this sentiment. One rainy day last spring, I was having a tremendously hard time and that day was bringing a lot of challenges. When getting counseled by a staff member, she apologized that this already-hard day would be made worse by the clouds and rainy weather. I was very quick to assure her that I loved rain and that the dampness would not add any more weight. Her response has stuck with me ever since: "Well, I guess the sky is raining for you then!"
Rain promises growth, as the flowers we find so beautiful would shrivel without water soaking into their roots. We’re thankful for rain when pollen cakes onto our cars in the spring or when August humidity is getting too much to bear. Little kids love jumping in puddles, and I’ll be remiss if I don’t mention that college students love it too, only when no one is watching. I love getting my hair soaked with rainwater, making pictures with droplets on my window, and the feeling of being compressed inside buildings with the rest of humanity as we all seek shelter. I do not undermine the grace of a sunny day, but if we can love rain only when we see how it benefits us, I believe we should love rain all the time. I also think adults should jump in more puddles, even when others are watching.
No one can argue that Mount St. Mary’s is anything less than beautiful. Coming around the bend on Route 15 and seeing Mary’s arms open to welcome you back is one of a Mount student’s favorite views. Looking down from the mountaintop at the fields and trees down below is a close second. It’s what draws many students to study here and spiritually enriches the seminarians next door. I think the reason this has been an institution of higher learning and faith for more than two hundred years is because of the scenery it is built into. If preserved, it will be what keeps us open for the next two hundred years.
There are six chapels spread all throughout campus for students, staff, and seminarians to reflect and be in the presence of God. But my favorite is none of these; I feel a much deeper spiritual connection while walking through the Grotto. If I could put my finger onto why, although there are a multitude of reasons, I think it has to do with the unchanging nature of nature. Seasons come and go, which see plants and trees through various cycles and changes. But when Winter ends, you know Spring will come. There is something to be expected from nature and how even if it doesn’t look the same, it will always be the same in its essence. The forest I walk through around the Grotto is the same forest St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and Fr. John Dubois walked through hundreds of years ago. Nature does not change, but nature changes us.
This scenery has real significance for all who study here. I could’ve gotten a similar education at a big state school in a large college town or a downtown city university. But I would not be the same person I am today, and I credit that not only to the university but to the community and scenery in which it is embedded. I would not want to go to college anywhere else but on the side of a mountain, where I can see the world of potential I will enter into after graduation. The impact of the environment surrounding the Mount cannot be understated. I love nature, especially this nature, even when manure stinks, rivers flood, and cicada carcasses cover the sidewalks.
Read other articles by Emmy Jansenl
A land of gift
Harry Scherer
Class of 2022
Snuggled on the eastern slope of the Catoctin Mountain sits a small university. For anyone who has stepped foot on the Mount’s campus, it is clear that there is something different about this place. But what makes the place distinct for the university, and what makes the university distinct for the place?
From my perspective, the notion that this difference is "clear" is often shrouded in the realm of an imprecise but sustained feeling. This feeling is sustained because my presence at this place is sustained. If the feeling were but transitory, I could be charged with not being present with and for and in my place, and therefore not really being present with myself. If there is anything that I have learned and have become so surely convinced of through my years in university, it is that there are few stations so miserable as not being present in one’s place. There is a sure interrelation between a disconnection with one’s place, a disconnection with oneself, and a disconnection with others; hopefully the inverse is the case as well.
Of all places to be with oneself and to be with others, the mountain campus is surely a delightful one. As Jack suggests so eloquently in his piece this month, the mountain bears a spiritual, geographical, and eschatological significance. The act of rising up onto, against, and with the mountain is one of fortitude and determination. There is a perpetual struggle in a mountainous place between reality as perceived and reality as such.
This year’s flood, as Emmy mentions, is one such example. Through that event, our community was simultaneously reminded of the privilege of typicality and the demands of responding to and engaging with the natural world. While these irregular occurrences burden the university with certain constraints of time and finances, there is a certain blessing imbedded in their manifestations. Our daily routines are ripped of their relative sterility and are thrown into the domain of uncertainty. The technological age in which we find ourselves assures us that our lives are in our control, that we can customize, amplify, and regulate to our exact specifications; the suggestion of specifications implies that we know what we want in the first place, which shouldn’t necessarily be taken for granted.
A mountainous place allows for this sort of engagement with reality that is not necessarily allowed for in a different kind of place. This is not to say that this engagement with reality is demanded on those who live on a mountain; some can choose to avoid it, to pretend that it does not exist for the sake of some convenience. To cover both those who choose to engage and those who choose to evade, the mountain provides a sort of physical protection from the elements. The university is hidden from the west, and from some angles, the north and the south. As a concession for this protection, it is completely exposed when viewed from the east. In this way, we are pleasantly hidden from most of the world, but are put under the spotlight for that sliver of the world that is graced with a view toward our land.
One practical ramification of this orientation is that those who live on campus can view a sunrise every morning, but never a sunset. We are repeatedly gifted with a view of the rising sun, with the opportunity to greet new days. These frequent opportunities are yet further reasons to appreciate the gift of living on a mountain, especially during college. While college students are frequently tempted by the lure of "new and exciting opportunities," it is good to be able to regularly welcome the most natural opportunity, namely, the gift of a new day.
As a response to these regular gifts, the historical placement of this university institution must have contributed something to its land over the centuries. Thousands of students, faculty, administration, and staff have invested their bodies and souls into work at this mountain campus since 1808. Surely, the land over the centuries has been abused by our people in ways that we cannot imagine. This abuse might have manifested itself in an obvious waste of our natural resources, or in some of the institutional sins like slavery. Is it possible that this work and presence altered the character of the mountain itself? If so, did they alter it for the good or ill?
I would argue that the mountain is better from our being on it. Imagine no architecture on this part of the Catoctin Mountain. Imagine no people traveling from place to place at all hours of the day and night. It seems that our presence here on this mountain vivifies the land itself. If we were absent, would all of the aesthetic benefits of this place still be present?
Granted, the campus architecture varies in its respect for the land on which is sits. It would be foolish to suggest that the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception, or the Terrace, or Bradley Hall can be compared to the PAC, the pavilion behind Delaplaine, or the apartment towers. The former demand permanence and respect and suggest that thought and intentionality preceded the laying of each stone. By both a quick glance and thorough review, the latter do not demand the same permanence or respect.
This is all to say that the things that we put on this mountain, and the actions that we complete on and for it should serve as a response to all that the mountain has given its people. Architecture and action, in this way, can be thought of as evidence of gratitude. The IC Chapel, the statue of Our Lady at the Grotto, and the Grotto cave itself are all proper and eminently grateful responses to the land which has been given to us as a gift.
As this year draws to a close, I am overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for the land that has welcomed me and hope to cherish the short time that I have left with it.
Read other articles by Harry Scherer
Read Past Editions of Four Years at the Mount
