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.”

A Dream Come True

The Chapel of Meditation is the realization of a dream begun in 1968 when the Eastern Kentucky University Alumni Association adopted the Century Fund project to finance a non-denominational chapel.

The Chapel stands as a testimonial of the love and devotion of the alumni, faculty, students and friends, a fit to commemorate the 100th anniversary of higher education on the Eastern campus.

The original $200,000 construction cost estimate was inflated upward throughout the planning and fund-raising stages of the Chapel project, but the campaign’s supporters responded by pledging the $375,000 necessary to build and appoint the structure.

The largest measure of support came from the 500 members of the Alumni Century Fund, individuals who contributed $500 or more toward the Chapel’s construction. One hundred and forty members of the University’s faculty and staff and 24 student organizations contributed more than $100,000 while numerous individual, smaller gifts aided substantially. In all, some 1,000 persons and groups representing 24 states and four countries made contributions to the drive to build the Chapel of Meditation. The dedication ceremony was held May 13, 1972.