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The following feature story appeared in the campus publication Mosaic in March, 1997.
Melissa Kerin '94
Single step begins a journey to divinity school
Melissa Kerin '94 is not an accidental tourist. Purposeful traveler is a much more accurate description of someone who spends a semester of her junior year exploring and experiencing Tibetan culture in India and Nepal, returns there following graduation as the recipient of a prestigious yearlong Watson Fellowship to study Tibetan sacred art, and who is now pursuing a master's degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School. She hopes to earn her doctorate and then teach at the college level. "I had no idea it would ever spiral into this," Kerin says of her interest in Buddhism.She was exposed to Eastern culture at the age of 8 by her mother who practiced meditation. Kerin was captivated when she witnessed a Tibetan Buddhist monk create a mandala, or sand painting used in meditation, at Trinity when she was a senior. "I was there every day for two weeks talking to him about Buddhism," Kerin recalls. Several months later, Kerin found herself in Dharamsala, India beginning her study of the religious and cultural traditions that are at the core of mandala making. Last fall her continuing journey brought her to Harvard, where, by concentrating on world religions, Tibetan studies, and Buddhism, she hopes to share with others the tenets of the philosophy she has come to embrace.
Seeing the world untraditionally
According to Kerin, she was drawn to Trinity because of the opportunities it afforded to see the world in untraditional ways. For Kerin, that meant combining her existing interest in acting with two new interests: performance art and women's studies. She credits her participation in Professor of Theater and Dance Judy Dworin's Freshman Seminar, which focused on people ostracized from society, with helping to guide her toward her study of Tibetans, now in exile from their native country. "Judy was a huge factor in my life. She helped shape my vision of life, theater, art, and self-expression," Kerin says.
As a freshman Kerin discovered women's studies and ultimately graduated from the program with honors. "Women's studies is crucial to all the work I've done. It made me develop sensibilities to race and class, especially in different cultures," she contends. Performance art helped her bring feminist theory to a more "visceral level," Kerin believes.
For her senior thesis, she drew upon the experiences of female African-American performance artists and examined how they use their bodies in their art. Women's Studies Professor and department chair Joan Hedrick, one of Kerin's advisers for the project, says Kerin's ability to combine her "artistic and imaginative capabilities with analytical and speculative capabilities produced unusual and impressive results." Professor Dworin, who remains in contact with her former student, says, "From the beginning, Missy was a really creative spirit who was able to take information and combine it with her heart and her mind and find a wonderful integration of art, religion, and women's studies."
Exploring culture through sacred art
In 1993 as a junior, Kerin got her first taste of the culture that would capture her imagination. It was then that she traveled to India and Nepal, where she spent a semester studying with the School for International Training and learning about the creation of thangkas, precise, iconographic paintings on canvas which feature Buddhist deities and are used for meditation. After graduating, she returned as a Watson Fellow to take her interest in the sacred art form to a new level. She devoted herself to the exploration of the social and cultural constraints surrounding the creation of thangkas. Although religious law does not restrict women from creating such art, women have not historically created thangkas and mandalas, she explains. "Cultural influences of the outside world and questions being raised by Western feminist scholars about gender roles have started to affect these religious traditions," Kerin says. To promote awareness of these changing traditions, Kerin is working with the College to bring six Buddhist nuns to campus in 1998 to create a mandala. This would mark the first time women have created such a painting in the West.
Last year, in another attempt to promote awareness and share the mandala's message of impermanence and unattachment, Kerin organized the creation of a mandala at Hartford's Sanchez School. She recalls seeing one boy, who had just lost his father, watch as the mandala was being made and realized that she was not only helping to teach others about impermanence but was learning about it herself.
"I have a strong interest in learning about what seems esoteric," she observes. "If I can make the basic tenets of compassion and impermanence accessible and alive to people, that would be ideal for me."
-- Suzanne Zack