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HOMILY delivered at Throop Memorial Church In Canberra, at the 1991 World Council of Churches, a young Korean woman named Chung Hyun Kyung offers the conference a brilliant visual gift - a traditional Korean fire dance. Now, from what I know of Korean dance costumes, called han-bok, there would be brocaded silk of hot pinks, next to royal blues; vivid lemon yellows striped next to emerald green, embossed with either gold or silver. Contrasting this riot of color is a white sleeve of the most delicate silk, called han-ssam, worn like a bracelet. This han-ssam could be worn demurely to cover the dancer's face or undulate through the air; any small gesture would be accentuated. Drumbeat of traditional chang-goo (shaped like a sideways hourglass) segues into the plaintive sound of the Australian didgeridoo, ushering in the conference leaders through a smoky purification ritual. With such a beautiful beginning, you would think that this conference would have been blessed. I would have thought that too, but we would both be wrong. Most of the attendees agreed Chung's presentation was in bad taste. A majority of those people condemned it as Sinful. The sin most widely named was Syncretism, defined as "fusion of diverse religious beliefs and practices" . This deeply religious, newly ordained young woman offers her vision of what her Christian faith means as sinful. As a Korean womanist or feminist of color, Chung's longing is to be seen, as she had so often seen others worship in a context familiar to them. If Lois Derman-Sparks, an early Anti-Bias Curriculum developed had been in Canberra, she could have offered a metaphor. Her offering metaphor would have been Mirrors and Windows. People of the majority see versions of themselves everywhere, so they need a window to see through to other experiences. People who are different from that majority need mirrors - to see reflections of themselves, other versions of themselves. Chung Hyun Kyung offered the World Council of Churches a window experience; a view into her own Korean womanist Christian context. As a woman of mixed race, half-Korean, half-Norwegian, mirrors were my early obsession. I wanted to see people who looked like me. Movies and musicals like Flower Drum Song and South Pacific provided my youthful experiences. I could see, in the first, three ways of being an Asian female - lovely hard-working seamstress, show girl who enjoyed being a girl or docile, dutiful daughter, who gets the guy and "wins". The score of South Pacific holds an even more haunting mirror in the song "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught": You've got to be taught to be afraid In the readings from our API youth, there are two mirrors for me, windows for most of you into the Asian womanist experience. Here are deeper truths than Hollywood ever offered. In Suicide Note, Janice Mirikitani nearly drums out the inescapable 'not-good-enough, not-smart-enough. It is a poem of internalized oppression, something we dream of changing for our youth. I know that there is in me a hope that they will never feel ashamed of their heritage, that they will hear the words of Amy Tan's mother better than I did - "The only shame is to have shame". A/PIC after all represents in our amazing diversity, lands were major religions flourished; wisdom traditions we all as Unitarian Universalists claim as a source of our faith. As a student of world religions, the darshan of Hinduism honors the holy in its many forms, the interconnected web of life differs, for me, very little from what I know of the Tao, the Buddhist monks of Myanmar bore witness this year to what can be the ultimate costs of social justice. In this world-wide, mirror-connection to Asian/Pacific Islanders, I feel a personal loss this year in the death of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto. Her understanding of Islam as a pluralistic, liberating religion ran counter to our American stereotypes of Muslim women. This I appreciate, as I do the centuries old relationship between Unitarian and Muslim leaders. While we are from these places, we are also like almost 90% of Unitarian-Universalists. We come out of, for me, Lutheranism, I have heard Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians. In my spiritual journey, elements from all these religions
and spiritual disciplines resonate, rich source for the always further
contemplation and action in this Midwestern, middle-aged multi-racial
life I lead. You can recognize han, even when you cannot verbalize han. African-descent poet Lucille Clifton writes a han poem: won't you celebrate with me Thank you and Amen, Ashay and Blessed be. |