The Hillsdale Memorization Club will offer an event for Holy Week and respite from studying with a night of recitations March 31 at 7 p.m. in the Heritage Room. 

Junior Evelyn Freedman organized this memorization event hoping to realign mindsets back to the weight of the Holy Week events. 

“At the Holy Week recitation, students will recite poems and scripture thematically involved with the events of Christ’s death and resurrection,” Freedman said. “These include prophecies from Isaiah and excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets.’” 

The Memorization Club gained official club status in the spring of 2024. Freedman said the goal of the club is absorbing and sharing the beauty of art. 

“The club puts on recitation events for people to share poetry, beautiful passages, or scripture that has been a gift for them with the community,” Freedman said. 

Junior Abigail Stonestreet has participated in past memorization recitations and will be reciting Isaiah 55 this Holy Week. 

“It’s a beautiful passage about the word of God as something that feeds the earth and his people,” Stonestreet said. “I have been fed by memorizing it, and it has made me reflect on the rich goodness of the word of God, and how it sustains all things. It is a very prevalent passage for Lent, Holy Week, and the resurrection.” 

Stonestreet said her favorite event she has been involved with since the founding of the club was their recitation of the gospel of Luke. 

“About 20 people each took a chapter or two and we just recited the whole thing,” Stonestreet said. “ It is a blessing to listen to people’s personal interpretation of something like that in the way they present it.”

Freedman said memorizing and reciting lines of a text builds a relationship between the reader and the material.”

“The reciter spends so much time with the poem or passage that they really incorporate the words into themselves,” Freedman said. “Through this practice, the reciter gets to co-create a unique experience as they deliver with all their own insight and affection seeped into it.”

Stonestreet said memorizing scripture helps her and others understand the language that God uses to talk to people. 

“Each of our relationships has its own language,” Stonestreet said. “The phrases and mannerisms we use tend to differ from person to person, and it is a beautiful aspect of human relationship, and God has given us a language for our relationship to him through scripture,” Stonestreet said. In my own walk with God, memorizing scripture has continually transformed me in the moment I am memorizing it, but he also tends to call different passages to my attention in different seasons of my life.” 

Anyone interested in delivering a piece at the Holy Week recitation can contact Freedman at efreedman@hillsdale.edu.