Editor’s Note: Due to the pandemic, HDS made the difficult decision of continuing remote learning for fall and spring semester this year. In this post, HDS student, Malini Srikrishna, highlights the resilience and strength of the HDS community despite the challenge of distance.
Post by Malini Srikrishna MTS’21
We finally made it! I want to affirm and explore the confusion all current HDS students felt last semester because we were forced to be together and experience love in ways that were unfamiliar. I write this to record the monumental ability that has been displayed so all those who come after us can read this and enter with the hope of unrestricted possibilities. During the past year of being students and teachers during a global pandemic, our community displayed a remarkable commitment to being open to new experiences that have only become better over awkwardness, laughter and time. As has often been advised for endeavors such as this — it has been a time to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.
At the Harvard Divinity School, we each come here searching for unique opportunities to shape the world through love and move against the abundance of hatred that plagues it. All those who read this are likely searching for the same. We do this best at HDS by intertwining our unpopular paths which are paved by prayers, resilience and unconditional daring. I write this to celebrate the shared striving for truth displayed by this community I am so proud to be a part of — a mission we have not wavered from despite all the hurdles Life has placed in our way. As more students apply to join us in this ecosystem for love and learning, we will only expand in this undertaking.
This semester, our HDS community joined hands many times and worked hard to claim the responsibility of creating bridges when it felt like we were disconnected and drowning. While we no longer could embrace one another in hallways and bump into each other while stealing free coffee from the basement of Oxford Hall, we found ourselves forging new hallways and moments of nourishment through the strange spaces we now occupied together. We kept falling and we kept holding ourselves up. We now have created channels and bonds that allow us to seek each other out at any time so we may keep discovering resilience and new learnings.
The Harvard Divinity community has taught me that no matter what new hurdles may come our way; we need to keep believing in our collective ability to represent love in a world that is crying out for its representation. HDS keeps proving to be capable of creating new worlds and ways of loving — and we will expand that love far beyond the confines of Zoom rooms as we continue to adapt and grow. Our work is just getting started, and, despite how things may appear, it has been an unbelievable semester that we just pulled off! So, here’s to putting one semester of online learning to rest and embarking on a new one where we will continue figuring out this crazy thing, we call Life. Together.
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