From Lori Stevens: A Message of Thanks

Dear friends,

Thank you for being a part of this wonderful HDS community. The community itself is a model much needed in the world today—people with a wide range of passionate beliefs and openhearted curiosity learning from and caring for one another. I am deeply grateful to be part of this community and for your investment in it—in many ways, including your financial generosity.

Religion, faith, and ethics shape every part of society, and now more than ever, there is deep need for ethical leadership—from the future ministers and scholars who hold space for the complexities of human existence to the future sector leaders in media, government, and humanitarian action facing issues that require a nuanced understanding of religion and faith. Your gifts address this need by creating new resources for teaching and learning, empowering ethical leadership, and deepening religious understanding that bridges cultural divides.

Your annual gifts create a cycle of support that sustains the good work of students, staff, and faculty. Your planned gifts make a long-term impact in financially prudent ways. Your gifts to the HDS Fund and beyond bolster key priorities of the School and allow the Dean to respond to new opportunities. Your gifts to financial aid enable students to come to HDS and alumni to pursue the pathways that call them. You give with intention. You give as a community. Every gift makes a difference.

Harvard Divinity School is poised to do so much more, and your giving makes so much possible. In the words of the poet Alberto Rios—whose poem I leave with you here—I hope that together we can make "something greater from the difference."

With gratitude,

Lori Stevens
Associate Dean for Development and External Relations

When Giving Is All We Have
By Alberto Rfos

             One river gives
Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is,first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.