While the service was getting underway, students in language instructor Inna Sysevich's Russian class were filing down the back stairwell to help prepare a Russian dinner in the basement kitchen. The students wanted to listen to Dr. Harper speak about religion and science, so they turned on the speakers downstairs and listened to the service while they chopped vegetables. At the conclusion of the Protestant service, the worshipers streamed downstairs for brunch. Imagine this: The basement is large, and inviting, enough to accommodate the students preparing the Russian meal and the members of the church service eating sandwiches and hanging out together.
Restoration and renovation: The historic altar window (above) glows following restoration work, while a new spiral staircase (below) connects the church's three floors and encourages easy interaction among the various groups that use them.
A little after 1 p.m., Indu Chugani, English instructor and faculty adviser to the Hindu Society, met students in the small meditation room downstairs to go over their papers before Puja began at 1:30. Upstairs, senior Jon Ortloff was practicing the organ in preparation for a recital. At 5 p.m., a crowd of 50 students and teachers sat down to enjoy the sumptuous Russian dinner, serenaded by traditional Russian music piped in the basement's wonderful sound system. Elsewhere in the church, the ESSO antislavery group was holding a meeting while In Essence, an a capella singing group, rehearsed for their performance at Tuesday's Evening Prayer, and the Christian Fellowship met upstairs in the Wicks Room.
In the midst of all these activities, conversations happened, connections were made and insights shared. During the Russian dinner, I found out that Alex Gorodetsky, a lower who is a member of the Exeter Jewish Community, was hoping to become the percussionist for the gospel choir. Students are meeting each other as they cross paths in the church, and they find themselves talking about their values, their hopes and their passions. It reminds me of wise words from the Reverend Frederick Buechner, who served as school minister from 1961 to 1967: "There's a good rule for finding one's vocation. . . . it is the place where our deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meets." Students at Exeter have the opportunity to explore not only ideas, but also their gifts and their longing. What better place to explore than within the safety of a church that provides so many opportunities for students to meet and to learn from each other?
Blessing the Hockey Sticks
Thursday, February 20, I met seniors Elise Baran, Emily Kennedy and Mary Claire Walsh and upper Isabelle Forbes at 8:30 p.m. in the chancel of the nave. We meet every Thursday evening to light candles and, in the shadows of the night, read compline together. We closed our prayers by listening to a South African song sung by the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. As the final notes of the song were fading away, a second group of students entered the church to prepare for a special Evening Prayer entitled "Living in a Time of War." The event was organized by senior Kate Galassi and upper Joseph Sahid, two students with opposing views about the need to commence war in Iraq, but who wanted to provide a time for the community to reflect, to think and to pray about the devastation of war, no matter the politics.
The dramatically redesigned basement lends itself to gatherings like a poetry reading and potluck supper hosted by the Middle Eastern Student Alliance (above, with adviser Robert Azzi and senior Elizabeth Ricker).
While we were setting up the microphones and moving the lectern, the aroma of food wafted into the sanctuary: Someone was cooking. We all headed downstairs only to be met by Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan monk who was spending a week in residency at the Academy, along with his three companions, Tibetan nuns Choeying Kunsang and Sister Passang Llhamo, and their translator, Tseten, from Nepal. They were preparing momo, a meat dumpling, with senior Kalia Lydgate and lower Anne McGuinness as lead cooks. There were already many students with bowls of momo in hand, but still there was plenty to go around. And while we tasted the surprise late-night snack, Elise Baran asked me if I had heard that Shayan Abdullah, a senior from Pakistan, was blessing the hockey sticks for the big game with Andover.
"He's doing what?" I asked.
"He loves hockey," Elise replied, "and Emily Johnson, the trainer, is going to bring him into the locker room to bless the boys' sticks before they get out on the ice."
I called Shayan that night, and we spoke about his Muslim faith, his attempts to pray five times a day, his prayer rug, the compass he uses in order to find qibla, the direction toward Mecca-and his love of hockey.
"What made you think of blessing hockey sticks, Shayan?"
"On the day that I handed my mother my college apps, she recited something quietly from the Qur'an, blew into the envelopes and sealed them really quickly. When Taylor Evan's father dropped off two hockey sticks before the Deerfield game, I just naturally recited a prayer and blew on the sticks."
"Did the team beat Deerfield?"
"No, but it was a really good game, well played."
"Do you know about the college tradition in America of bringing in the school's priest or minister to pray with a team before a big game?"
"No."
"Well, Shayan, you are our school's chaplain this week for the Exeter-Andover games. Pray good and hard."
"Oh, I will, Ms. Hamilton, I will."
'Ubuntu' at Exeter
Something special is happening in Phillips Church. The Zulu tribe of South Africa would call it ubuntu. Ubuntu is the idea that our humanity can only be found as we embrace the other. And it is in this healthy connection among ourselves that the spaciousness of living, the breath of creation, is alive and forming us as we speak. In ubuntu, through each other, we live knowing that we have access to this power of creation and to our ideas. Ubuntu, our delight in each other, and our need for each other, is the inspiration that gives us the hope that we can be agents of change that will bring about the good, where our deep longing can meet the world's deep hunger.
Phillips Church is a place of beginnings and a place of stories, and maybe our precocious, articulate, fun-loving 4-year-old girl is right: God is trying to take our picture, all of our pictures.
Granite tile in the church nave means better acoustics for concerts, including a performance by the Chamber Orchestra and Concert Choir at the January 12 opening celebration.
Something to Celebrate
Song, prayer and a sermon from the Reverend William Sloan Coffin mark the reopening of Phillips Church.
The Reverend William
Sloan Coffin |
Phillips Church is home to many faith groups: not only Christian, but also Jewish and Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu, Quaker and others. It's also home to scores of concerts and guest speakers. Appropriately, all these things came together on the evening of Sunday, January 12, as the Academy community gathered to celebrate the church's reopening with multidenominational prayer; with music by the Academy's Chamber Orchestra, Concert Choir and African Drumming Ensemble; and with a sermon by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the former chaplain of Yale University and senior minister emeritus at New York's Riverside Church.
"Our hearts are so full, so full in this new place," a beaming Reverend Jamie Hamilton told the assembled crowd. She described the church as "a center of religious life that embraces us all, and a place where we can come to find meaning in our lives, a place where we can come to be transformed."
That embrace could be felt in the evening's readings, which included a traditional Zulu prayer of Thanksgiving read by the Reverend Gideon Khabela, instructor in religion; a Shanti mantra read in Sanskrit and English by senior Angel Desai and upper Shamit Desai; a meditation on world peace by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, read by senior Elisabeth Ramsey; the Lord's Prayer, read in Aramaic by senior Tamer Shabaneh; and selections from the Qur'an and the Old Testament, read, respectively, by lower Zeyed Ali in Arabic and upper Omer Shah in English and by upper Reid Singer in Hebrew.
Woven between the readings were powerful orchestral and choral works, including Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Grieg's Two Elegiac Melodies, Op. 34; Randall Thompson's setting of the Frost poem "Something Like a Star" and Ralph Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem; and Babatunde Olatunji's "Odun De," which featured an improvised dance solo by Kwabena Safo-Agyekum '02 that was like a shout to the heavens.
Reverend Coffin began his remarks by invoking Leo Tolstoy: "Certain questions are put to us not so much that we would answer them, but that we would spend our lives wrestling with them." Coffin then posed just such a question to the audience: "Who tells you who you are?" Do we, he asked, let money define us? Power? Our enemies? Our failures? But our value, he suggested, "is a gift to us from God, not an achievement. Never again do you have to prove yourself. You do have to express yourself, but what a world of difference. You don't have to make money, but you do have to make a difference. You don't have to be successful, but you do have to be valuable."
A veteran of the civil rights and antiwar movements, Coffin closed his remarks by saying, "If we give up on peace, we give up on God. The axis of evil is not Iraq, North Korea and Iran. The axis of evil is environmental degradation, pandemic poverty and a world awash with weapons."
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