Throwback: “Is any-body here?”
Inaugural Convocation and Installation Speech, delivered by Dr. Su Yon Pak, MA, EdD `99 on September 7, 2022
Introduction by Dharmacharini Upayadhi
For many of us, the end of an academic year has a strange way of propelling us forward at warp speed, as we complete various obligations and prepare for graduation ceremonies, sometimes in a state of semi-delirious exhaustion. Minds leap ahead to summer internships, job searches, and no doubt some well-deserved rest over the summer! Yet, as dorm rooms are emptied out and books are surrendered back to the library, there is merit in looking back, in recollecting and in considering how far we have come, and how much further we have to go.
In the Fall of 2022, Dr. Pak was installed as our Vice-President and Dean of Academic Affairs, yet another milestone in an already long and storied career at Union. She gave on this occasion a stirring and provocative speech––still discussed among us, some eight months later. It felt historic and significant for the entire Union community. It also had, arguably, a very particular salience for the Buddhist context of the seminary, and the future of the BIE (Buddhism and Inter-religious Engagement) program.
Dr. Pak has generously agreed to allow us to publish a transcription of her speech below. As we tumble into the summer and put to rest the 186th academic year of Union Theological Seminary, the 6th year of the BIE program and barely two years of the Collective, we invite our Buddhist Collective Students, Alumni and soon-to-be-Alumni, to return to Dr. Pak’s vision for the future of theological education. As we mark another revolution around the sun, we might ask ourselves, with rigorous honesty and curiosity: How are we tracking with this vision? Did we manifest a “body-full, body-honoring, heart-centered learning community” ? Are we “making”, “breathing,” and “caring” as she describes it? Are we “living queerly”? “This is hard and slow work,” she tells us. “It is not efficient work. Rather, it is faithful work.” So let us not lose the thread, let us not lose our srāddha (faith/confidence) and our Bodhisattva aspiration to realize this body-full, beautiful, Buddha-full vision.
Listen here for an audio version of the speech below.
Su Yon Pak, MA, EdD `99, Vice President of Academic Affairs & Dean and Associate Professor of Integrative and Field-Based Education (Photo by Mohammad Mia, MDiv '21)
Union community, new and returning students, new and returning faculty and staff, President Jones, the Board of Trustees, alums and friends, both present here in James Chapel and joining us remotely, I am honored to be standing here as the newly installed vice president of academic affairs and Dean of Union Theological Seminary. I ask for your prayers and your support as I step into this new expression of my vocation as a theological educator. No one takes life’s journey alone. Among my many companions, my family, friends, colleagues, teachers, and mentors, I am particularly grateful for my parents and my ancestors whose journeys have made my journey even possible. As this weekend is Chusok—the Korean Harvest Moon festival when Koreans for over millennia have paid respects and honored our ancestors—I remember them with gratitude and invite them into this space.
This occasion has given me an opportunity think more deeply about what matters to me—namely, what it means to be a learning community.
Is any-body here? [1]
I learned to read bodies. As a 10-year-old immigrant with no English except the first three letters of the alphabet, my first attempts to communicate were through my body. I took in the new and foreign world through images, movements, and gestures. In the playground and in the classroom, I became an avid reader of bodies—constructing meaning in my own head and creating narratives for myself, accurate or not. It became my third language. In time, my ears and tongue assimilated to the sounds of the dominant language, though this habit of reading bodies never left me. Even to this day, when I am in places like at a ball game, I habitually read the bodies around me—how they move and how they interact with each other. While my partner Kathy, is glued to the ball game, I tolerate the ballpark food and read bodies. I enter their world, or more accurately, my construct of their world as I imagine and narrate a story.
This skill served me well when my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and I became her primary caretaker. With her failing memory, her ordered, linear chronos was interrupted by disordered protrusions from the past. Her world was a fantastical reordering of events, relations, time, and space. In some days, she was back in the northern Korea of her youth; and other days, she was re-living the Korean War as a nursing student. In order to connect with her, I had to enter her world wherever she was and not demand that she be in mine (Pak, 2011; Talvacchia, 2019, 1-13).
While we first understand this disease to be that of the mind--that is, the loss of cognitive memory—it erased bodily memory to the extent that she forgot how to dress herself, to eat, and finally, to swallow. Entering my mother’s world was not just about tending to her mind—rather it was tending to her body that was progressively being transfigured by her illness. Bodily practices like holding her hand as she walked, feeding and bathing her, brushing her hair, changing her diaper, and tucking her into bed, became our lingua franca. It was about reading her body and her bodily needs when she could no longer communicate with words. At least the words that I could easily understand.
So, what does it mean to be in a world that your body does not occupy? To say it another way, how do I embody a world where the “natural laws” do not permit my bodily presence? As I struggled to remain present with my whole being to my mother’s emotional, mental, bodily, and spiritual needs, I later came to see where my body was in tending to her body. What happened to my body, when I entered her world? Did I leave it behind? Was there some sort of time-traveling transfiguration? How did this disrupt my linear and normative understanding of space and time? (And I would later understand that this is the stuff of contemplative practice.)
Well, you see, bodies are messy. They weep, they bleed. They extrude and expel. They hunger and thirst. They hold and respond to desires. They are sensual. They are miraculous wonders that break down. They are inconvenient and, we really need them. They are a site of deep intimacy and violence. And yet, or perhaps because of its messiness, we tend to ignore, deny, and denigrate the body. The millennia-long suspicion of the body in many Christian traditions has created a body-negative theology that breeds body-negative lived religion.
This leads to the dual invisible/hyper-visible body politics. For example, to have illness is to be painfully aware of the body. To be in a “non-normative” body, is to necessarily draw attention to the body. Whether that is a racialized body, a gendered body, a queer body, or a differently abled body, missing the mark of the white, straight, cis-gendered, male, abled body gets us either erased or noticed and targeted as the problem, and our embodiment as sin.
For the non-normative embodiment that I inhabit and I suspect this is also true for some of you not being in my body is not an option. I am perceived as having a body that does not fit the racialized and gendered norms. My Asian, woman-identified body is a target for random acts of violence especially during the last couple of years with the rise in violence against Asians particularly against women and the elderly. And being in a queer, racialized and gendered body means that my desires, and my sexuality become stigmatized markers. As such, I am noticed not only as having a body, but having a hyper-body, hyper-sexuality. I become reduced and noticed to acts that my body performs, of performing acts of non-normative sex. And in religious language, these body-acts are considered immoral, a form of disordered desire. It is another form of body denial and denigration which perpetuates violence.
Is any-body here?
To begin to chip away at this body denial, I suggest that we engage desire and eros. Desire and eros are significant elements for articulating queer theology of queer lived religious experience. To live queerly, is to live against established norms and requires the energy of eros, passion, and desire directing us toward a more authentic lived reality. For me, such queerness is essential in my vocation as a theological educator. It helps to foster the formative aspect of education in its goal to shape a deeper authentic empowered self. The erotic energy connects to the development of a selfhood, as Kathleen Talvacchia articulates it, “becoming-selfhood-in-relation” (Talvacchia, 2019, xi) [2] Thus, queerness is connected to teaching and pedagogy at its core. After all, education, educare, is a formation process that shapes people into becoming who they are called to be. It leads them out from the depths of their being and their desire which is also where God is.
I want to make a case here for a body-full, body-honoring, heart-centered learning community.
Dr. Su Yon Pak’s speech begins at 40:41 min.
Is any-body here in our teaching and learning? What does it mean to offer a body-centered classroom with a full-bodied pedagogy? What happens when students and teachers enter the learning space with their whole bodies (even in Zoom spaces)? What are the conditions necessary for “becoming-selfhood-in-relation” ¾that is to say, for an ongoing development of a self that is rooted in communal relations? What and how do we teach and learn that honors not only the life of the mind which has been privileged in the academy, but that honors the body, the bodily knowing? How do we train and cultivate our bodies so that we act from a place of discerned compassion instead of reacting from pain and fear?
What if we took the risk of creating a container that facilitates the bringing of our bodies (which include our minds) to this learning enterprise? And yes, this way of teaching and learning is slow, iterative, and is necessarily practice and context based. It embraces what David Orr calls, “slow knowledge” (Orr, 1996). It is community-based, relationship-based, shared, and connected to ecological and social contexts. It is heart-centered learning that leads to deeper understanding of our humanness in relation to the living world. It requires that we as teachers and learners are willing to risk vulnerability and be open to the slow unfolding of wisdom. It requires and cultivates compassion.
What I am advocating here is for radical embodiment to disrupt the supremacy of critical thinking in the academy to become more of an equal partner in the educational process. Radical embodiment makes explicit the null curriculum of the body in our teaching contexts. It is an attunement with the body not only as a repertoire of knowledge but as an agential constructor of knowledge. By cultivating body and emotional literacy, it calls attention to the embodied dimensions of power and privilege. Tending to places where our body holds memory and knowledge, emotions can be guideposts and partners to that unfolding wisdom. This is important as trauma is held and perpetuated in the body. For communities and people forged in the crucible of trauma, this body work honors the deep healing needed for both the individual and collective bodies.[3]
This work, ultimately, is spiritual work. While one can engage in various spiritual practices as necessary for this work, I want to advocate for contemplative practices because they are fueled by energies of eros at their core. The desire and yearning for deep intimacy with God in the world have been the mystics’ and contemplatives’ life journey. Centering eros as spiritual practice cultivates our capacity to live on the boundaries where we are opened and receptive to others with vulnerability and attentive presence. Contemplative practices open up our hearts and resist binary perceptions of the world. Whether it is a Buddhist “loving kindness meditation” or Tong Sung Ki Do – a Korean Christian ecstatic communal prayer, or an Orthodox Christian “prayer of the heart,” these practices cultivate wisdom and offer us an opportunity to recalibrate our relationships to each other. We enter into these practices with a desire to be connected to the Ultimate Other, whether the Other is God, the transcendent, or the natural world we live in. These practices are slow. They take time. They slow us down. But in our society where time is a commodity, (and to quote Douglas Christies here) where time “is mortgaged” to the point that we “experience time as unlimited indebtedness” (Christie, 2013, 19), contemplative practices are counter-cultural, queer, perhaps even revolutionary.
Is any-body here?
So what does this mean for us, Union community? I welcome your engagement with radical embodiment and invite you to offer your wisdom as we collectively figure this out together. For now, let me offer three suggestions:
First, Make: A Japanese American artist Makoto Fujimura in his book Art and Faith: A Theology of Making asserts that “making is a form of knowing.” For him, “making connects knowing with our acts of love, and with the greater reality behind materials and the body. Caring and loving are the fundamental elements of the act of making.”[4] Making is about living into this generative and generous love, eros, and desire. And whether your making is of painting, poetry, song, cooking, creating hospitable space, cultivating relationships, or having difficult conversations (which one really needs to pay attention to one’s body for), this art of making enfleshes our community. We are invited to be artists of everyday life.
Second, Breathe: I grew up in a Christian community whose motto was “A family that prays together stays together.” We were subjected to many many hours of family Bible reading and prayer meetings led by my father who was a Presbyterian elder with a secret calling to be a pastor. This, in time, I have come to appreciate as a formative spiritual experience of what makes a family. I want to revise that motto to, “A Community that breathes together flourishes together.” I’ve been moved by the writings of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Her book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, is a meditation of poetic wisdom gained from observing our aquatic cousins on breathing even when everything around us including our histories of oppression makes us unable to breathe. In fact, it makes us drown. Let me offer her beautiful words here: “I breathe in shape… I shape my breath to wind through winding paths ahead. I shape my head to fit the purpose of my breath. My breath is prayer, the shape of life, evolving name. All I can see is just the blur that says life moves. I stay in prayer, and reach to listen for your breath.”[5] And I would add, breathing is fundamental to our contemplative practice. It commits us to the slow way, closely attending to the inner life, and witnessing the sacred being revealed in each moment.[6] So, how might we breathe together as a community? How can we shape ourselves to fit the purposes of our breath? How might we listen for each other’s breath?
Third, Care: During new student orientation, we engaged around the theme community, care, and courage. There are a lot of resonances here. While there are different modes of care, I am drawn to Monique Moultrie’s framing of care, that is: care as a form of resistance. While primarily speaking as a woman of color scholar in the academy, her wisdom can be applied to other contexts where risk has been taken and are in need of care and healing. She lays out a useful three-fold paradigm of care: aftercare (including triage care, assessing the level of damage or hurt), long-term care (how someone prepares and sustains through the long haul), and collective care (which includes self-care in community and caring in, by, and for community). By attending to care, we resist the breathless push and pull of the neo-liberal, market driven economy of work—that we are what we produce and what we do—that our worth is necessarily tied to our usefulness to the unceasing mechanistic grind toward some notion of progress. We stop. We breathe. We make. And, we care. What might care look like at Union? Who is present and who is absent in this caring ecology? Do we share equal burden of caring? How might we commit to care in community?
With more questions than answers offered, I invite you to explore these concerns together as a community. Yes. This is hard and slow work. It is not efficient work. [7] Rather, it is faithful work. It requires radical embodiment and critical thinking. It requires a commitment to be in bodies together bringing our whole selves to this journey of teaching and learning.
Is any-body here?
REFERENCES:
Cheng, Patrick. 2011. Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology. New York: Seabury Books.
Christie, Douglas E. 2013. “The Eternal Present: Slow Knowledge and the Renewal of Time.” In Buddhist-Christian Studies, 33 (2013): 13-21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bcs.2013.0021
Eliot, T. S. 1943. “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Farley, Wendy. 2020. Beguiled by Beauty: Cultivating a Life of Contemplation and Compassion. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Liebert, Elizabeth. 2008. The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Menakem, Resmaa. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press.
Orr, D. (1996). Slow Knowledge. Conservation Biology, 10(3), 699-702. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2387090
Pak, Su Yon. 2011. “Coming Home/Coming Out: Reflections of a Queer Family and the Challenge of Eldercare in the Korean Diaspora.” Theology and Sexuality 17 (3): 337-352. doi.
Talvacchia, Kathleen T. 2015. “Disrupting Theory-Practice Binary.” In Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, edited by Kathleen T. Talvacchia, Michael F. Pettinger, and Mark Larrimore, 184-194. New York: New York University Press.
Talvacchia, Kathleen T. 2019. Embracing Disruptive Coherence: Coming Out as Erotic Ethical Practice. Eugene: Cascade Books.
NOTES:
[1] This title is inspired by the lecture Rev. Barbara Lundblad she gave on the occasion of her installation to the Joe R. Engle Professor of Preaching at Union Theological Seminary in the Fall of 2009.
[2] See also how Talvacchia connects eros, passion in a practical theological method for reflecting on her own coming out process (Talvacchia, 2015, 184-194). Patrick Cheng’s Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology (2011) is a helpful primer on queer theology.
[3] Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands (2017) is an indispensable resource that employs somatic healing practices for healing from racial trauma.
[4] Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making ( ), pg 61- 62.
[5] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020, 19.
[6] Christine Valters Paintner, The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom, (Notre Dame: Sorin Books, 2011), 4
[7] The idolatry of efficiency in our culture can feed into maintaining the white supremacy culture in our institutions. Characteristics such as perfectionism and sense of urgency have a way of undermining inclusive and democratic processes that require time, reflection, and willingness to learn from mistakes. For a full discussion, see Tema Okun, “White Supremacy Culture” https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/White_Supremacy_Culture_Okun.pdf.