Thanks Bruce. Now that Reyes-Chow is the moderator for the PC(USA), he decided to pass on the Faith Perspective column at AsianWeek to someone else. I took a first shot at it this month.

Enjoy here or on the original site…and feel free to comment there.

I think the president should be an atheist,” my sixteen-year-old cousin said plainly over the breakfast table. She is my cousin from my wife’s side of the family, who is Indian American — Hindu Brahmins — steeped in politics and well aware of problems at the intersection of church and state, or at least mosque, temple and state.

She was responding to my question of what would make a great president. It surprised me that she viewed atheism as the foremost and presumably a desirable requirement for political leadership, particularly as her devout Hindu father sat at the table across from me, a Korean American Christian.

Yet, I think I understand what she’s getting at. Religion and spirituality are personally good things, but in politics and real life, they seem to be what economists call inefficiencies. And we’re too pragmatic to tolerate these persistent inefficiencies, aren’t we? We value stoicism and precision. Religion, while perhaps not the opiate that Marx considered, can simply be dismissed as impractical for many of us. We were raised on criticism and discipline (arguably, a religion of a different sort), which leads to the question: What place does something so impractical as faith have in Asian American life?

Pragmatism has a cost as well, which is also to say faith and spirituality are not all bad. Life and love cannot only exist on spreadsheets. It’s possible the richness of our spirituality, while not always efficient, could deepen the ways in which we Asian Americans express ourselves. Asian spirituality tends to emphasize the individual meditative and self-control aspects (it’s little wonder the individualistic American consumerist culture latches onto piecemeal religious practices), but do Asian Americans enrich the greater community compelled by our faith? Asian Americans have always been viewed as wonderful technicians, professionals and creatives, but when do we inspire the nation by our acts of compassion and justice?

I wonder if Asian America could produce someone who exudes confident and competent leadership in the spiritual sense. Does our penchant for the practical and profitable lend itself to the formation of an Asian American version of a Martin Luther King Jr., or aMother Teresa, or a Mahatma Gandhi? A Bono or an Albert Schweitzer? Asian Americans are spiritual in the privatized, mind-your-own-business sense, but have we the conviction and strength of character to alter the public landscape because of our beliefs?

I’ve found faith and spirituality a compelling dimension of Asian American culture and life requiring further exploration, not because atheists or theists need to be convinced otherwise, but because faith has yet a meaningful role in private and in public. The answer is not simply to toss our faith aside, but to understand where we can integrate spirituality in our own lives and in the lives of others in inefficient, yet significant ways.

I don’t surf YouTube as much as some others. I did watch this entire 6-minute clip from The View. I get to watch The View maybe once a quarter, and like it for being a talk show that sometimes candidly addresses about the world we live in and its culture, especially allowing different opinions to be voiced without neatly tidying it up at the end.

Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck were singled out on this one episode, for being the most vocal. The whole 5-women crew addressed the issue of Jesse Jackson using the “N” word. While it sounded like a double-standard for African-Americans to have the right to use the word in public and/or private, Caucasians didn’t have the right to use the word.

What caught my attention and prompted me to post, is the remarks that surfaced at the 3:45 mark. Whoppi explains how “… we live in different worlds!” while Elisabeth wants us to live as if we were in the same world.

To some degree, we all live in the same society and the same nation. BUT, there are differences for those who live in the world as a minority vs. one who lives as the majority ethnicity/race. It is this majority cultures’ insensitivity (aka “white privilege“) and lack of acknowledgement of these differences that is particularly troubling. Troubling to some, anyways. This blind spot spills over into the church and into how we do theology.

When my fellow Asian Americans don’t acknowledge the differences of being a minority in a majority culture, that disappoints me all the more.

I’ve been thinking a lot in terms of excavation and imagination. Excavation is the act of going back to seek, to uncover that which has been cast under the skyscrapers of modernization and urbanization in order to re-trace our steps as Asian Americans to be more ourselves. Imagination is the act of stepping forward into what can be and could be, based on where we’ve come from.

For some time now, I’ve been sure that this process is a long one, and rather difficult at that. In my personal explorations, I find myself running up against a ceiling (or floor, if you choose to stay with the excavation metaphor) where both excavation and imagination seem to stop short, where the road seems to end.

I wonder what happened before my parents’ generation. And where it has led in the land which they have left. It begs the question of what kind of collective trauma the nation went through when Japan occupied the country and when the country was torn in two when the Korean War broke out. So much of our dysfunction seems to stem from these events.

It doesn’t seem very hard to assume by looking at that trajectory of crisis, Korean/Korean American churches reflect the trauma made to the society and nation as a whole. It’s not merely that Korean American churches are at a loss for how to contextualize the Christian message and implications therein, it’s that Korea as a whole has lost its sense of self somewhat.

I was doing some loitering on the Internet and found The Western Confucian, who confirmed some of my suspicions with the following article (originally posted on Seoul Times).

For those who like to skim, the emphasis marks are mine.

It seems that I’m not the only one who’s run into this ceiling…er…floor.

South Korea’s old Taegukki (太極旗), national flag

The Taegukki (太極旗), the national flag of the Republic of Korea, is perhaps the world’s most beautiful. It is certainly the world’s most philosophical. At its center is the Taegeuk, known in Chinese as the Taichi (太極), symbolizing the “Supreme Ultimate.” Thus, an idea first formulated by the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu (莊子) in the fourth century before Christ is symbolically represented on the flag that flies over the world’s most Confucian country. Yet, the people who live under this flag seem to have lost touch with this “Supreme Ultimate.”

The Tao (道) is difficult to define in English and is thus left untranslated. “The Way” is its literal translation, but unmodified by other nouns perhaps “The Way of Nature” is a better. Perhaps it is best to think of the Tao in terms of what it is not. Koyaanisqatsi, “life out of balance” in the language of the Hopi Indians, is its polar opposite. Yet koyaanisqatsi is precisely what one finds in modern Korea, once known as “The Lang of Morning Calm.” How, then, did Korea lose her Way?

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