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Juliana Cohen, MDiv ’19

“A few months after my daughter was born, we moved to Colombia. My plan was to work part time, to take advantage of having my family around to help out with my daughter. But rather than working for pay, I ended up doing volunteer work. That year in Colombia informed and shaped the experience I would eventually have at HDS.”

Juliana is a mom and a football-soccer fan who loves listening and dancing to any type of music. She was born and raised in Colombia and studies women’s religious history in the Americas at HDS.

Revelation and Awakening

I started my undergrad degree in Bogotá, Colombia—that’s where I’m from. Halfway through my studies, I moved to Montreal to finish my degree in anthropology at Concordia University. There I realized I could study religion without enrolling in a seminary, which wasn’t an option in Colombia. When I started taking classes in religion, I became intrigued by the world of possibilities that had opened before my eyes. I felt extremely lucky to have the opportunity to ask questions about religion in a secular context and to study with people from different religious backgrounds. In Colombia, most people I knew were Catholic. Apart from a very few Jewish friends from childhood, I had never really been in an educational environment where I got to ask existential questions and discuss issues of religious identity with people from different religious backgrounds. I enjoyed every moment of it.

By the time I ended my program at Concordia, I knew I wanted to study religion for the rest of my life, and I wanted to go to a top tier university. But I didn’t have the discipline or the GPA. I also needed a break, because between the time I spent in college in Colombia, and my time at Concordia, it took me seven years to complete my undergraduate studies. Back then I never imagined that I would end up at a place like Harvard.

My interest in the academic study of religion coincided with an awakening in my spiritual life. I was raised Catholic but never really understood Catholicism. At a young age, I began asking questions about God and about what happened before we were born or after we died. By the age of 12, I declared myself an atheist.

While studying religion at Concordia, I took a class on the Hebrew Bible. My professor had a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and had also been ordained as a Rabbi. Looking back, I realize that his training as a scientist and as a theologian shaped the way he taught the Bible. I started reading the Bible for the first time, and everything about it felt like a revelation to me. My professor’s perspective was something I never expected to encounter in a scripture class. While studying for that class, I had many moments where I thought: “God exists. I just hadn’t understood before.”

Back then I was not thinking of converting to Judaism, but studying the Hebrew Bible changed the way I saw the world and God. One day I read a commentary that said that when God created the universe, God retreated and left creation contained in a vessel of darkness. Right now creation exists in the dark, and God is in exile until the time comes for God’s return. This explains why there is so much evil and suffering in our world. But there are cracks in this vessel, and through these cracks the light of God enters our world with the help of human agency. When humans act from a place of love, or show compassion toward all forms of life, or act selflessly and generously, we are contributing to God’s return. When I read this, I felt that many questions had been answered. I could reconcile the belief in a Higher Power and human suffering, and the cosmic obligation of human beings to be agents of loving-kindness and do good.

A New Direction

Around the year 2010, my personal life and intellectual life came together. Eventually I converted to Judaism and married my husband Mike, who is Jewish. That year I moved to New York where I worked as a teacher for a while. I taught English, Spanish, and French. The diversity of people I taught presented some of the most exciting challenges I have encountered, because I had to assess the needs of each student. I taught performers from the Cirque du Soleil, who would come to my class dressed as clowns. I taught teenagers from different countries, women who worked as nannies and cleaners for expat families, a female member of the Saudi Royal family. I taught all kinds of people, and it was fun!

But after a while I felt that I needed more intellectually, so I decided to go to graduate school. I had taken some classes at the New School and I had loved their faculty and the classes I took there, so I applied to the MA in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. During my time there, I focused my research on women’s intellectual history and on the study of women’s religious experiences. I took most of my classes in anthropology and philosophy. In a class on mysticism, I met a man who had served as the head bishop of Pennsylvania for several years and had a degree from HDS. He became a great mentor and a friend. He was the servant of God who directed me to HDS. When he suggested I apply to HDS, I just laughed because I thought, “There’s no way they’re going to take me.”

But I started looking into the programs at HDS and I came to visit in the spring of 2014. I attended a service led by a non-religious student organization (the “Nones”) and realized that here people could have religious experiences without believing in God. That experience made me really want to study at HDS. I went back to New York determined to apply and get accepted.

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Working in Bogotá

I got pregnant in the process of applying to HDS, and my daughter was born on December 31, 2014. Our plan had been to stay in New York City, but it was tough. It was too hard for me to be a first-time mom in New York while finishing my master’s degree at the New School. My family wasn’t around to help, and it was the winter of the polar vortex. I thought I could do everything myself because so many moms seem to be able to do everything by themselves. But then I realized I couldn’t. We needed support and warmer weather.

A few months after my daughter was born, we moved to Colombia. My plan was to work part time, to take advantage of having my family around to help out with my daughter. But rather than working for pay, I ended up doing volunteer work. That year in Colombia informed and shaped the experience I would eventually have at HDS.

I worked to help the men and women who are in charge of recycling most of the waste produced by the people of Bogotá. In Colombia, like in other developing countries, we lack infrastructure to treat recyclable waste, so most of the recycling is done by hand by people who walk the streets of our cities, usually at night, sorting through the garbage. They remove recyclable items and sell what they can for a small amount of money. In addition, the government pays them a tiny salary, about $15 USD a month. Fifteen dollars!

These workers used to have horses that pulled the carts that hold the recyclables, but because of animal rights activists, they no longer use horses to pull their carts. Now they have to pull the carts themselves. Most of these people are elderly. They walk for hours in the streets of Bogotá, a cold city where it rains all the time, in the middle of the night, pulling these carts with 250 kilos of recyclable material. We owe them so much.

A friend of mine has a consulting company for waste management in Bogotá and he had been in touch with Thiago Mundano, a street artist from Brazil who does graffiti work and leads a movement to give visibility to the important work of recycling workers. One day in 2007, the artist was doing graffiti work in Sao Paulo when he met a recycler worker. He asked him if it would be okay for him to paint his cart. The man said yes, so the artist painted his cart and they parted ways. A month later they happened to run into each other, and the worker told the artist, “You changed my life. After you painted my cart, my life got better. People seem to be more conscious about recycling, they see me, and they say hello to me.” Since then, the movement has reached different parts of the world.

My friend and his business partner had been working on bringing Mundano to Bogota. They were trying to put together an event to benefit some of the recycler workers in our city. I joined the project in an early stage and we ended up hosting an event for 50 recycler workers and their families. Initially, my role was mainly to help with fundraising, but as the project grew there were more things to take care of and I ended up doing a little bit of everything.

A group of street artists and industrial designers came together and fixed and painted over 50 carts while the recycling workers and their families enjoyed different activities we had organized for them. There were circus performers and a hip hop concert. Students from medical and dental schools came to give the workers medical and dental assistance. We also had a hairstyling station. There was even a veterinary station for the workers’ dogs and cats. It was amazing. I will always be very grateful to my friend for allowing me to be part of their project. Looking back, I realize that in addition to seeking my family’s support with motherhood, this was the reason I was supposed to spend that year in Colombia.

The year I spent in Bogotá was fulfilling. I could connect to my daughter in a positive way because I wasn’t stressed out living in New York, I had a support network, and I was doing this amazing volunteer work. But at the same time I was anxious because that year I realized I was not ready to settle down in Colombia and I still wanted to come to HDS. In the end, it worked out. I applied and got accepted, and in the summer of 2016, I moved to Cambridge with my husband, daughter, and dog.

WomenCircle

One of the reasons I came to HDS was to study what a spiritual home for women might look like. I also came to study the history of female religiosity and spirituality – how women have managed to have a relationship with God within the confines of institutionalized religion but without the intervention of male mediators. My long-term dream is to build a shelter for domestic violence survivors, a shelter co-housed with a retreat center for women who want to take a break from life but don’t want to go to a psychiatric institution. I came here hoping that I could learn some skills to apply later to my long-term dream.

During orientation week I saw there was a student organization at HDS called WomenCircle. I immediately knew I wanted to be part of it. I attended their gatherings during my first year, and toward the end of the spring semester 2017 one of the former leaders asked me if I wanted to be part of the leadership. I had never led a student organization and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. But even though I knew it was going to be challenging to juggle the leadership of WomenCircle with everything else, there was no way I could turn down this opportunity.

I reached out to Sophia Wolman (MDiv ‘19) and asked her if she would be willing to co-lead the circle with me, and she said yes. I trusted her intuition and knew that we would make a good team.

The premise of the group is that when women come together with an open heart and good intentions, magical things happen. The only rule we have is that cross talking is not allowed. Our gatherings are about bearing witness to others’ experiences rather than about giving advice. It’s beautiful. It’s also highly therapeutic. People share things that are difficult to talk about in other contexts.

The gatherings end, we leave, we run into each other throughout the week and say hello but we don’t talk about what happened at the gathering. We don’t have to make confidentiality a rule; it’s tacit. We all know that what happens in the Circle stays in the Circle.

The most amazing part is the diversity of the Circle. We have members from various religious traditions and we have atheists. That’s how it should be. Race, nationality, class, religious identity, sexual orientation—those don’t divide us. We are part of the Circle because we’re women and we know what it is to walk the world as a woman.

Being part of WomenCircle has been one the most life giving experiences at HDS, in part because of the moment in history that we are living right now. Co-leading this student organization the year that #metoo and #timesup exploded has been beyond inspiring, because I got to see how the power of these movements bled into small female spaces like our Circle. #Metoo and #timesup are not only about speaking up against sexual assault. These movements are about speaking up against all forms of silencing. It has been exciting to see that younger women are not afraid to raise their voices when they feel objectified, silenced, or diminished. Ten years ago it was not like that at all. We still have a very long way to go, but being part of WomenCircle this year was a daily reminder that every time we choose to speak up, we move a step forward.  

Photos by Jenna Alatriste