Practice of Morbidity

Sanneh's trenchant insight was helpful in reflecting on what is going on at DUKE and why I cannot be apart of such a morbid practice.

This indifference contrasts sharply with the flowering of interest in the Western missionary movement shown by departments of history, political science and anthropology. It's ironic that a divinity school can carry out its mission largely uninterested in Christianity's unprecedented expansion around the world. How do we understand this irony? Perhaps it's a measure of how much we have turned our back on the historical dimension of Christianity and on non-Western societies. Perhaps it also indicates how absorbed we are in our immediate context, which causes us to think in terms of decline and uncertainty rather than growth

Duke Divinity School is building, or rebuilding the European intellectual architecture of Christian faith. It is building a theological gothic architecture in a post-Christian world in a mistaken belief that the the beauty of theological aesthetic will draw people to the gospel. The effect of this enterprise will have same effect on the population as does beautiful old gothic cathedrals; a relic of the past. 

However, my dear black professors, J-Will, see this but they are so busy critiquing this that they miss out on what God is actually doing. They haven't turned their attention to the powerful work of God around the globe. It is a theological reflection of the cross, which I obviously think is central to our faith; however, as the Risen Christ spoke to me once on Easter in 2005, "Why are you looking for me among the dead?" 

The History of Huaquiao 화교 Church in Korea

This is an essay written by Helen Hyewon Lee, a PhD student at Yonsei University.

The Melancholy of Siddhartha

"You have learned my art well, Siddhartha. Some day, when I am older, I will have a child by you. And yet, my dear, you have remained Samana. You do not really love me -- you love nobody. Is that not true?" (59)

Siddhartha had maintained a control over himself. Wisdom, truth, and ethics, for Siddhartha comes in the way of self-control, possession, "they have not the wisdom and guide within themselves." The deepest insight, the organizing logic of his wisdom is stated in the following:

"But a few others are like starts which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path. "Meditation, thinking and fasting" for him helps him to possess himself and not to give over to others. Even in the sexual acts with the most beautiful Kamala. He never gives himself, he loves someone else, so says Kamala, and this love is directed towards the self as a way of finding the divine internally. The starting and the central node/locus of love is the self. Every experience, every care, every love is redirected towards the self and stays enclosed. Self-possession becomes the key. The vision of self-sufficiency becomes the doctrine/dogma by which the transcendence is realized. Hermann Hesse, a twentieth century German-born Swiss appropriates Eastern religion to realize the vision of the self. The reappropriation of all things Indian (true Aryan) has a long history in Europe. Buddhism is colonized to realize European vision of the self-sufficient self. 

In contrast, we read Psalm 42, there is a cry of dereliction. It is a cry that can only be made by those who have given themselves over to another. This is exactly what whiteness cannot do. The boundary of the self is never to be violated. To do so is death and such a death that is not self-possessed is Sheol, hell from which there is no return. 

Hope in a Fragile World, a Presentation to Christian World Service | Duke University

http://www.cws.org.nz/

Christian Church World Service | Hope in a Fragile World

March 11, 2010-02-15

Arnold Sang-Woo Oh

I was in Seoul, Korea couple of years ago at a conference for North Korea where there was a large gathering of international missionaries who were interested in North Korean missions. The first speaker who greeted the delegation was high profile leader of Korean missions. He said in 1985 there were 500 full-time Korean missionaries who gathered together in Wheaton Illinois and annual per capita income was $500. In 1992 there was 12,000 full-time missionaries and the annual per capita income was $12,000, and he said that by year 2025 (or in relative near future) he believed and was working towards a goal of 200,000 full-time missionaries and per capita income of the same. It begs the question how is the hope of the gospel flow seamlessly through the same channel of hope with capitalism? The mark of success of hope of peoplehood was framed in terms of nation-state, capitalism and missions. In short, he had a colonized vision of hope.

To borrow from Alasdair MacIntyre’s book Whose Justice, Whose Rationality we have to ask the question, “Whose hope, whose fragility?” These words, "hope" and "fragility" do not exist in a vacuum but have a significant historical and cultural cache. Justice, peace, equality, freedom are words that we often use without mind to the long history of development of sense of fragility in various parts of the world. Fragility is has a particular tradition in modernity (a systems of economic, political, and social governance in contemporary period) particularly since colonialism. They are often associated with words like colonialized, Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, black, feminine, dependent, poor, uncivilized, un-Christian, war-torn, or underdeveloped, developing, etc. Hope, conversely, has a mirror tradition. It is typically associated with white, European, American, masculine, self-sufficient, developed, modern, etc.

There is a colonialization of hope because there is a colonialization of identity. It is rooted in the exploitation of people's fragility, an inescapable condition of being a creature. To place ourselves in the role of mediation between people's experience of fragility and hope – vis-à-vis mission – is to say that we are translators of hope. This is task that requires much self-examination and incredible amount of humility. 

To help the poor, relieve disasters, etc. no doubt is helpful but we must uncover/unveil the ways in which we frame the problems of the world, and the motivations that drive us for actions. Who are we? What is my fragility? What is my risk? What am I risking in this process? 

Paradox of Power

I was reading an excerpt from Thomas Merton and I thought it was profound . . . so I thought I'd share it with you:

The saints love their sanctity not because it separates them from the rest of us and places them above us, but because, on the contrary, it brings them closer to us and in a sense places them below us. Their sanctity is given them in order that they may help us and serve us -- for the saints are like doctors and nurses who are better than the sick in the sense that they are healthy and possess arts of healing them, and yet they make themselves the servants of the sick and devote their own health and their art to them.

The saints are what they are, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else. It gives them a clarity of compassion that can find good in the most terrible criminals. It delivers them from the burden of judging others, condemning other men. It teaches them to bring the good out of others by compassion, mercy and pardon. A man becomes a saint not by conviction that he is better than sinners but  by the realization that he is one of them, and that all together need the mercy of God.

- Seeds of Contemplation

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Sainthood or discipleship (Kingdom citizenship) is realized not in our ability to achieve external conformity to standards of behavior but in a growing awareness of our own sinful condition (1 Tim. 1:15). It is our awareness of our wretched and limited conditions as creatures who are incapable of loving God and others as we love ourselves. The fruits of the Spirit is then not a busy activity of our souls but a growing awareness of our utter lack and receptivity to the movement of the Spirit. The power paradoxically is not realized in an inherent capacity but in our utter dependency.

my journey . . . [to be continued]

A Faith Journey│Arnold Sang-Woo Oh

There is a very strange picture of a very young me in a white gown looking very unhappy among thirty or so other unhappy looking children, also in white gowns. I remember asking my mom about the picture. She told me that it was a picture of my Catholic baptism! My mom, who was not a Christian, nor particularly a religious sort, decided to baptize me when I was four. She figured, “what harm could it do?” So I was given the Christian name Barnabas upon baptism, which in Korean is transliterated as bal-la-ba, which sounds a lot like Korean for “rubbing ointments”. My mom and I stopped attending Catholic mass as soon as I received the certificate of baptism which would now fend off, with questionable effectiveness, evil spirits.

It was not until I was 17 years old, after having moved to the United States, and having been arrested for robbing a store earlier that year, that I encountered something explicitly Christian again. I was tricked into going to a Young Life camp, an evangelistic ministry to high school students in Upstate New York, under the pretext that it was a summer camp with water skiing, parasailing, tubing, and the opportunity to meet girls. The very first night, the speaker told us that if we want peace in our hearts to accept Jesus. I did not know who Jesus was but I knew I needed peace from the turbulent experience of immigration and the chaos of my family life. I raised my hand and prayed the sinner’s prayer. Something happened to me at that moment. I cried like I had never cried before, but it was a different kind of crying than any previous experience. I wasn’t crying because I was sad, while I was; I wasn’t crying because I felt guilty, while I did; I wasn’t crying because I was filled with a new sense of joy, while I was; I was crying because the intense sense of alienation, experiences of racism, a deep sense of abandonment, the trauma of immigration, of being arrested and the deep fissures of existence were all somehow being brought forth into a cauldron of emotion that was stirring and pouring out of me through tears. When the process ended, I was at peace. I was at peace with my God, my neighbor and myself.

This experience brought me to a local Korean United Methodist church. I tried to share this new found joy in hope with as many people as possible. However, I soon found out through a series of events, including being expelled from high school and night school, that life with God is not life free from pain but life through pain. As I shared my struggles honestly with others I found that my pain and suffering did not have to end with me but could signify something more, that it could be missionally framed to speak of the crucified Jesus for others who also suffered. The pain in my life was being offered iconically to witness to the wounded Messiah. Through this process, I found myself starting and leading the largest ministry of its kind for Korean-American youth in the Southeastern United States, Living Water Ministry.

I threw myself into the ministry. I gave all that I knew of myself to all that I knew of God but I found out that being in ministry also did not preclude me from pain. After six years of leading Living Water, I had emotionally and spiritually burned out. I struggled through Bible college and seminary trying to hold onto the little foundation I had left and recover the hope I had previously had in Christ.

Through my attempt to understand what went wrong, I came to understand the forces that were corrosive to my faith and my life; racism, theological fundamentalism, individualism, nationalism, and so forth were not simply personal problems but were a part of much larger problems of the modern world. I tried to find a theological way out of the problems of modernity[r1] . Through my studies, travels, relationships and the process of reflecting upon my experiences, I came to conclude that my hope must come as Christ articulated through the other. The hope for Christianity rested with the growing churches in the global South.

After graduation from seminary, I found myself in Cambodia teaching and discipling future Cambodian pastors. I ate, slept, and shared my life with 56 Cambodian students in Phnom Penh for a year. What I experienced through my time in Cambodia, as well as my travels through other parts of Asia, was that missions still function very much within a colonial framework and structure. I came back to the States with a burning desire to re-imagine mission that escaped colonial violence. I believed that the future of the Church was at stake. At the same time, I was profoundly recommitted to my walk with Christ. However, two weeks after I’d come back to the States, my brother, after having struggling to find his place in the world and failing, took his own life.

It’s been a tough three years since that event. However, my sense of vocation has only grown broader and deeper through my struggle. In that time, I was nurtured particularly through the community which I now serve – Agape Korean United Methodist Church in Raleigh, NC. I have served as a youth/English ministry pastor for the past year and a half. During this period, I came to identity with and to understand the various struggles, joys and life of this exilic community of faith. They have reflected back to me my own struggles and hopes. My struggles with my own demons have, if not completely subsided, at least been put to rest by the joyful encounters with the members of my congregation each weekend. Gradually, I have been transformed by this encounter and vice versa. It has been my prayer that we would develop many full-time Christian workers. So far, we have six, and I am currently discipling and mentoring a young man who has come from Chicago to train with me to be a youth pastor. My life together with my congregation became the context from which I imagined the theological task of using mission to address the violence of modernity instead of perpetuating it. The pastoral questions that have risen from within my community have become the questions framing my academic reflection: How does theology narrate and provide guidance and hope for an immigrant community living in the American South. What does Jesus say about being an immigrant, legal or illegal? How do we, as Korean-Americans, theologically narrate the tragedy of the Virginia Tech shooting in relation to our community? As I sought to answer these questions, I realized that they are not only the questions for my ministry, but also the questions for my own faith journey. They were my questions. They were my brother’s questions. And, the answers to these questions may hold a key to resolving the broader problems of theology and mission trapped within modernity.

What my faith journey has taught me is that life free from pain is not an option for Christians. In fact, the moment that we try to gloss over it with our own strength is the moment when we fall deeply into the logic of the Fall. Jesus on the cross creates a new ontology in the world. The suffering bodies no longer signify alienation, rejection and ultimately, death. The marked body of Jesus becomes the new epistemological framework that translates other suffering bodies from being subjects of death into icons of Christ. And these subjects are not only located in the global South but also in exilic communities of Korean-Americans in the American South, blacks in inner cities, Latino/-as in borderlands, poor whites in Appalachia and all marginalized persons whose subjectivity has been misformed by the violence of modern structures. These bodies are material locus of God’s Spirit calling all of us back to our true identity in Christ and in Israel as non-national persons who find their identity only within the call and response of God. This is what I am called to expound upon and to teach. This is my mission. This is my call. This is my journey.

 

the cost of love

a friend told me that the people gathered for the sake of spreading the love of Christ refuses to go to smaller towns/cities in the us because it is not as exciting, it is not as sexy, it is not as . . . whatever . . . they did not give up living in la/nyc/chicago to go to durham, montgomery, kiln, etc. it makes me sick to know that we place preconceived conditions for love. this is not the covenant of love that Christ takes hold of for us. the burden of love is a heavy burden. it is a burden not for the faint hearted.

why is it so hard for us to love? it costs our lives too damn much. we cannot sacrifice little shit to care for things that really matter. we are so caught up in the stupid, pointless, worthless stuff that we see people dying around us and we stand pat. it makes no sense. we are Christians, people formed in the love of God -- people who's supposed to embody this love to BE the hope of the world -- and we turn away. we are to be the greatest force of love the world has ever seen; however, we have betrayed, sold our inheritance for worthless idols!

how frustrated God must be as he looks out into the landscape of humanity and glimpse and take in the suffering in his single omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent breath. He breathes it all in and holds it in his heart. the pain tearing at him . . . he exhales only when we, his people, carry forth his will obedience love. we become his breath speaking life into dead hearts, broken lives, and withering spirits. this is our act of faith in action. we embody in our lives, our emotions, etc. if you want to hold the broken, the destitute, the weak, the poor, and the desperate in the name of Christ -- then give me your hand, let's work together for the expansion of this Kingdom of God here and now.