Eleven Seniors Selected to Deliver Meditations in Phillips Church

Covering a wide range of topics from fire to music, senior meditations are a well-known and highly anticipated spring term tradition at Exeter. The senior meditation schedule was released recently, and seniors Oishi Banerjee, Anika Ayyar, Thomas Clark, Amina Kunnummal, Tyler Weitzman, Matthew Greaves, Tyler Courville, Nikhil Raman, Leo Liautaud, Kaelina Lombardo and Kieran Minor have been selected to read.All seniors are required to write a meditation as part of senior winter term English. To read their meditations to the school inside Phillips Church, students must be chosen by the meditation committee, consisting of English instructors Kelly Flynn, William Perdomo, Becky Moore and David Weber, Reverend Robert Thompson and Staff Assistant Linda Safford.Reverend Thompson explained the committee’s process in selecting meditations. The committee is divided into three groups, each consisting of two people, and each group reads a few meditations, he said. “Each group brings their top meditations, because usually there are a few [meditations] that are must-haves per group, and we also have a large number of ones that could work.”Thompson also described the factors that are involved when deciding on a meditation. “[We’re] looking for good writing, a good and interesting story. Some stories that may read well in a classroom might not strike us as well for the church. Maybe it’s too complicated, maybe too heavy, maybe too personal. It’s interesting, we read a lot that are great, but we might not choose them because we think maybe we have enough of that subject, or something else like that,” he said.Aside from deciding which meditations are read, the meditation committee also decides what order the meditations come in. Considerable thought is put into what meditation is read during Experience Exeter as well as which meditation is read during test week. Also, some meditations fit together well in succession.Committee member and English teacher David Weber emphasized the importance of the meditations and their ability to work together. “We’re looking for some variety, we’re picking a set of ten rather than just ten we think are necessarily the strongest written. With different tones, different subjects—they [meditations] can do so many different things,” Weber explained. “Look at the first two meditations, the first was about academics, while the second was about grandparents and storytelling. What they have in common is that they represent a few aspects of a student’s experience.”Weber also stressed the idea that multiple factors are involved in choosing a meditation. “It’s not purely qualitative, we get about 100 [meditations], and we read for 10. Readers imagine if it will work in Phillips Church, and if people will be able to follow…It’s not that you have a checklist that you use on each meditation,” he said.Selected senior Thomas Clark described the meditation process. “I personally found it really helpful to read a lot of meditations or meditation-like pieces,” Clark said. “My English teacher gave our class a lot of those, and I started just by brainstorming and writing a lot of material.”Clark added about the constraints that he felt come with writing a meditation. “My meditation was not extremely personal, so I felt comfortable submitting it to the church,” he said. “But I know some people who had amazingly well-written ones that were just too personal.”Senior Kieran Minor, who wrote about his relationship to home through the lens of music, agreed with this idea, describing the difference of a classroom to the church. “I tweaked things here and there, imagining the piece read aloud in front of the church as opposed to just the twelve people in my class.” Minor, after being selected to read, has also put extra work into perfecting his meditation. “I've been meeting with some of my mentors, previous English teachers, and even the Bennett Fellow,” he said. “ All the work is in the delivery, the oral presentation, from this point onward. It's a whole other process from when I was writing it. It's about making your words come to life.”Another selected senior Tyler Courville, who wrote about the idea of fire, has taken a similar approach. “To prepare I have been reading my paper over and over so that I can really know the words and express the truth in them,” he explained. “The meditation is a story so the delivery of it is almost as important as the writing. I want to do my piece justice and so I have been practicing my delivery.”Senior Amina Kunnummal considered this idea further. “The thing about a meditation is that you’re not only telling your story but you’re reading a written piece of work; and when I wrote my meditation I kept in mind that it’s a piece that’s meant to be read. It’s meant to be orally delivered—you have to use emotion and inflection, and you are performing it for your audience so they understand the emotion behind it as well as the words in it.”Kunnummal’s meditation, like those of many students, explores her cultural roots. “My meditation is essentially about the multiple identities I feel have applied to myself over the past three years—being from Saudi and India, being American, and also being a feminist and how those ideas tie together through my religion, Islam.”“There is a comment that I’ve heard several students make which is that my ethnicity, or my very strong belief in my religion can sometimes get in the way of my personality coming across to other people or in some senses, it being a block to my academic presence in the classroom,” Kunnummal further explained. “That’s really stuck with me and I’ve wondered if that’s really true or not so I wanted to use my meditation to explore those ideas of ethnicity, and religion, and my feminist identity and how those affect my life, and my personality.”There is no question of the importance and significance of writing a senior meditation—it is a significant landmark in an Exonian’s time at the school. A meditation tackles large and broad questions and ideas. As Kunnummal explained, “In my lower year, my first term here, my English teacher told me that a meditation is ‘why life matters’ according to me, and that’s pretty much stuck with me since.”