JOY ELLEN YOON — Exclusion & Embrace

In September, 2005, we were living in inner-city Los Angeles near Koreatown and serving a local immigrant congregation. And it was my birthday. For my birthday gift, I received a book from our recently-hired youth and young adults pastor. In the inscription, he wrote, “Joy, Happy Birthday! I love this book. I hope it blesses you.”

Although I appreciated the gift, at that point in my life I did not get very far into this theologically-rich book. The book had won the 2002 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, but I had trouble reading through the first few pages. I found some of the concepts to be too wordy and abstract. I have always been a practical kind of gal. But little did I know that this book would foretell a pivotal turning point in my life.

Skipping ahead more than 15 years, this book unexpectantly resurfaced in my life. More specifically it resurfaced in my husband’s life. As part of his studies for reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula, this book became part of his required reading. Once he started to dive into it, he emphatically told me that I needed to read it, too. To my surprise, I realized that I already had the book. It was still sitting on our bookshelf, after having traveled from the U.S. to Asia those many years ago. Despite not initially reading through it, listening in to my husband’s classes wet my own appetite for this seemingly theoretical book.

What I discovered was that the book had foreshadowed the discovery of joy that I had found while living ten plus years in North Korea. How? Because as the title implies, it was through my own exploration of who I was, that is my identity, as well as my discovery of the other, in this case North Koreans, that I discovered a path towards reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula.

Here I was reading through a theological explanation to my own real-life journey. In many ways, my own book is an application of Miroslav Volf’s theology. Volf poses an incredibly applicable question to Korea and our entire world today. Are we going to exclude others or embrace them? As you can read in Discovering Joy, I have chosen the later.

Volf’s book is backdropped against three on-going struggles. At the time he wrote, Rodney King had just been brutalized by white policemen in Los Angeles. Protestors in huge gangs looted entire blocks, laying waste throughout the city. Neo-Nazi skinheads marched through Berlin shouting, “Foreigners out!” in an attempt to purify their city. And in Sarajevo, intense blood-baths ensued between the Croats and the Serbs as Croatia claimed its independence from Yugoslavia.

Today our world is not all that much different. The same ugly history seems to repeat itself over and over again. Hatred and division continue to climb the ranks to rule society. Violence takes root once again because of ethnic, racial, or social differences.

These cultural conflicts go in cycles of resurgence and remission but are grounded primarily in greater problems of identity and otherness. And these are the same problems that we are dealing with on the Korean Peninsula today.

As a result, as part of my New Year’s resolution, I have decided to focus my blog on this issue. Of course, I will be writing from a perspective of an American having lived over a decade in North Korea. Incorporating our humanitarian organization’s experiences from on the ground in the nation is a critical aspect to understanding the “other”.

But ultimately, the question is left for each of us to answer. Are we wanting or willing to live in a world without the other? Do we choose to exclude those different from us? Or are we willing, dare I say even wanting, to embrace the other?

Thus far, the world has been bent on excluding the nation known as North Korea. If not the world, then perhaps at least the West. Indeed, North Korea is not the only country that is being excluded. And because of this exclusion, development of nuclear weapons and militarism have been on the rise. But what would it look like if we took the opposite approach and instead chose to embrace each other?

In the next several posts, I will attempt to answer these questions and more.