Fumitaka Matsuoka argues in his book The Color of Faith that conversation across racial differences has become so difficult that we are gradually reduced to silence. “Where there is a loss of conversation, human life withers and dies,” writes Matsuoka. He is also firmly convinced that only a reconciliation between peoples under the power of the gospel of forgiveness and love can break down the walls of hostility, and get people talking to each other again.1
Reconciliation is indeed at the heart of the gospel. The God of the Christian faith demands of human beings more than a mere coexistence. The very purpose for which God created the world was to repeat the inner-trinitarian communion in time and space. Human life, therefore, has an ultimate meaning only as it gets caught up in the divine energy toward the communion of human beings with God and among themselves. Asian American Christians, therefore, by virtue of their communion with the triune God incarnated in Christ, have as their vocation to work toward a reconciliation and a communion of all persons, including those who marginalize and oppress others.
Reconciliation, however, especially from the perspective of the oppressed victims, is a difficult proposition. James H. Cone, speaking from the African American context, passionately argues in his book God of the Oppressed that liberation is the precondition of reconciliation. Cone’s insistence on the priority of liberation stems from his theological presupposition that God’s redemptive act in history was an event of liberation, liberation in the political, economic, and social sense. At the same time, however, Cone draws from the practical experiences of African Americans in the United States. Cone was writing at the time when African Americans were becoming acutely aware of the fact that white people’s talk of “integration” really meant an integration on white people’s terms. He insists that there first has to be a fundamental change in the power relations between whites and blacks. He writes: “We must let them know that there can be no communication between masters and slaves until the status of master no longer exists.” Cone continues, “A word about reconciliation too soon or at the wrong time to the oppressors only grants them more power to oppress black people.”2
Other theologians have suggested a more realistic view of what can be realized on this side of the eschaton. Miroslav Volf points out that what Christians can achieve in this history is imperfect and penultimate when compared with the perfect reconciliation to be actualized in the New Heaven and New Earth. What can be achieved in this life is “a nonfinal reconciliation based on a vision of reconciliation that cannot be undone.” “The final reconciliation,” says Volf, is the backdrop against which Christians engage in the struggle for peace under the condition of enmity and oppression.”3 John de Gruchy also finds it necessary to make a distinction between the “language of the penultimate and that of the ultimate, between the secondary and primary expressions of reconciliation.” Reconciliation in the second sense, according to de Gruchy, “is work in progress, a dynamic set of processes into which we are drawn and in which we participate.”4
Miroslav Volf also points out that an eschatological perspective is needed in regard to the notion of justice. Justice has to be universal. God’s justice is, of course, universal. Human ideas of God’s justice, however, are not universal. Human reason cannot help justice overcome the particularity, Volf points out, “because unable to survive suspended in mid-air, it always situates justice within a particular vision of the good life.” He continues, “Unable to transcend particularities, justice must continue to struggle against justice.”5 Our account of justice cannot be universal.
In discerning what is just, a Christian therefore must practice what Volf calls a “double vision,” a seeing “with the eyes of the others, accepting their perspective, and discovering the new significance of one’s own commitments.” Volf explains further: “We need to see our judgment about justice and struggle against injustice through the eyes of the other—even the manifestly ‘unjust other’—and be willing to readjust our understanding of justice and repent of acts of injustice.” In order to practice this “double vision,” one must care about the other as other. In other words, Volf says, “There can be no justice without the will to embrace.”6 Love, in other words, shapes the very content of justice. Volf says, “true justice will always be on the way to embrace.” Using the theological terms of Jonathan Edwards, we can say that since God’s ultimate end in creation is loving communion, justice is true justice only when it serves loving communion. To discern justice with love for the other is to realize that one’s notion of justice is always provisional.
A Christian’s realization of the provisional character of the historically achievable reconciliation and justice, however, should not dampen his or her commitment to work for reconciliation and justice. The eschatological qualification should free Christians from being disillusioned by the imperfections of reconciliation and justice that they do achieve. They should also be encouraged in their work for reconciliation and justice by the knowledge that the ultimate realization of reconciliation and justice is promised in the future and will be brought about by God Godself.
I return here for a moment to James Cone’s insistence that liberation or the establishment of justice must precede reconciliation. Although I may not agree with Cone that one must “precede” the other, I certainly agree with the spirit of his assertion: namely, reconciliation and work for justice must go together. As John Calvin insisted, “Christ justifies no one whom he does not sanctify at the same time.”7 If an African American and a white American shook each other’s hands over a racist act by the white person, and if the white person did absolutely nothing actually to change his or her racist attitude and the racist nature of American culture, such a handshake could not in any way be thought of as an act of reconciliation. If the handshake were called an act of reconciliation, it would be empty of any meaning. Reconciliation and work for justice cannot be separated from each other.
THE ROLE OF LIMINALITY IN RECONCILIATION
Reconciliation is a restoration of human relationship, and liminality is the condition out of which communion between human beings emerges. Liminality, therefore, can lead to reconciliation. Ultimately, human reconciliation is the work of the Holy Spirit as the mutual love between the Father and the Son. But liminality can function as a means of grace, as an instrument that the Holy Spirit uses. Liminality may indeed be a necessary facilitator of reconciliation, although it cannot be a sufficient facilitator.
Miroslav Volf identifies four essential elements in the movement from exclusion to embrace: repentance, forgiveness, making space in oneself for the other, and healing of memory. What Volf describes as “making room in oneself for the other” seems very similar to what I mean by liminality. The process of reconciliation or embrace moves on beyond forgiveness to the stage of making room in oneself even for one’s enemies. In doing so, Volf explains, we imitate the triune God who in the agony on the cross lets there be an opening or “fissure” through which estranged humanity can come in and join the divine dance of the triune communion. God’s love that “sustains non-self-enclosed identities in the Trinity seeks to make space ‘in God’ for humanity.” And, “having been embraced by God, we must make space for others in ourselves and invite them in—even our enemies,” writes Volf.8
After discussing the four elements in the movement from exclusion to embrace, Volf turns to the story of the prodigal son in the New Testament (Luke 15:11–32), which he interprets as a “drama of embrace” consisting of four acts. In his discussion, Volf explains further what is meant by “making room in oneself.” Act I of the drama is the opening of the arms. “Open arms,” says Volf, are “a sign that I have created space in myself for the other to come in.” Volf describes the meaning of the self’s “making room in itself” as “withdraw[ing] from itself … away from the limits of its own boundaries,” and also creating “a fissure in oneself” or “an aperture on the boundary of the self through which the other can come in.”9
Act II is “waiting.” Volf explains, “after creating space in itself and coming out of itself, the self has ‘postponed’ desire and halted at the boundary of the other.” Volf continues: “We can describe waiting as the work of desiring self on itself for the integrity of the other—the other who may not want to be embraced but left alone.”10 Act III is “closing the arms.” This part of the embrace is reciprocal. “In an embrace a host is guest and guest is a host,” explains Volf. Volf also insists that “In an embrace the identity of the self is both preserved and transformed, and the alterity of the other affirmed as alterity and partly received into the ever changing identity of the self.”11 Act IV is “opening.” The opening of the arms signifies that the integrity of the other as outer must be preserved, and merging of both into an undifferentiated “we” must be avoided. The open arms of the fourth act are the same open arms of the first act in which the self made a room for the other and desired the other’s presence. The open arms in the fourth act also open up the boundary of the self and issue an invitation for the other to return.
All of Volf’s descriptions of the meaning of “the self’s making room in itself,” as indicated earlier, leave the impression that what Volf has in mind here is very similar to what I mean by “liminality” or “liminal space,” which one enters by leaving behind structures and boundaries. The embracing self goes beyond the boundaries of the self, makes an opening for the other, and thereby enters a liminal space. In this liminal space, the embracing self and the embraced self meet, and there emerge communitas and reconciliation.
After his discussion of the steps taken in the act of embrace, Volf engages in a brilliant analysis of the parable of the prodigal son, as an illustration of what goes into the act of embrace. Volf concludes his analysis by stating that “guided by the indestructible love which makes space in the self for others in their alterity, which invites the others who have transgressed to return, which creates hospitable conditions for their confession, and rejoices over their presence, the father keeps re-configuring the order without destroying it so as to maintain it as an order of embrace rather than exclusion.”12
I suggest that a close reading of the text reveals an even greater role of liminality in the prodigal son’s story than Volf notices. The text includes the following words: “But while he [the returning son] was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The important words are: “he [the father] ran.” In traditional Jewish culture, as in Asian, fathers do not run to greet their children. The father waits in his room while the son greets his mother and other members of the family. Only then does the son respectfully walk into his father’s room and greet him. It has also been pointed out to me that when a Jewish father runs, his ankles would be exposed bare, and that any respectable father would not let this happen. So the prodigal son’s father, moved by his compassion for his son, ends up acting in such a way that takes him out of his social structure, role, and status. He enters a liminal space, in which he is freed from the social order and mores that were his boundaries. The prodigal son is already in a liminal condition. The son confesses that he has sinned and that he is not worthy to be with his father. The son meets his father with no status in his house and family and thus in the social structure. In this liminal space, the father and the delinquent son meet, and communitas and reconciliation happen. The story repeats the story of how God in Christ entered an extreme liminal space on the cross, and how in that space redeeming communion between God in Christ and sinners happens.
Two cases illustrate well how liminality plays a key role in bringing about reconciliation and communion. The first has to do with a multicultural-multiethnic church in a midwestern city and the other with the pilgrimages conducted to the sites of the Japanese Americans’ internment during World War II.
The Church of All Nations in Minneapolis, mentioned earlier, began as a Korean American church with senior pastor Jin S. Kim, himself a Korean American, as the founding pastor. Now, white Americans are the congregation’s fastest-growing group.
Pastor Kim knew from the start that if one group played a dominant and normative role, then the church would not really be multicultural or multiethnic. So he strongly challenged the two largest groups, the white Americans and Asian Americans, to give up any ideas of their supremacy and normativity in the church’s life and work. Pastor Kim’s idea was that each and every group should think of itself as a particular group, with no one claiming to be the dominant group.
This challenge from the pastor hit the white American members especially hard because they were accustomed to being the “normative” Americans in U.S. society. White American members were being asked to stop thinking in terms of “white supremacy,” because of which all racial and ethnic minority people in this country have been marginalized for a long time. The pastor challenged the white members of the church to give up their very identity as the dominant group both in the church and in the society at large.
During one weekend in November, 2009, I flew to Minneapolis and visited the church. After the Sunday morning service, I interviewed several white American members of the church and asked them how the pastor’s challenge affected them. A few of them mentioned the word displacement. They felt they were “displaced” from their normative and superior status in American society. What they were used to assuming in American culture the people at the church now questioned. In this way, a white person is thrown into a no-man’s land where his or her identity is going to have to be reconstructed. White persons are thrown into the liminal space. A very sensitive white person whom I interviewed talked about the pain that accompanies his feeling of displacement and his reexamination of his identity.
The liminal space, however painful and disorienting it may be at times, is a creative space from which new identities may emerge and also communitas may be formed. Through a phone conversation that I conducted sometime after my visit to the church, the same white person whom I had interviewed before said to me, “I was displaced but also more deeply placed—more deeply placed into my particularity. I was now placed beyond my whiteness into my particular ethnic background.”13 He went on to say that the experience of displacement was liberating and made him more open, and that this kind of openness led to community with others.
The liminal space opened up by displacement functioned as a liberating space in which a white person’s authentic and particular (not universal and dominant) self-identity (such as Italian American, English American, French American, etc.) could be owned for the first time and a new communal relationship based on equality with others could be formed. The person on the phone also said, “There are so many layers in the whiteness in American culture, and I am having to deal with them one at a time. It is an ongoing process.” This church has put this young man on a sometimes painful and disorienting but ultimately liberating journey toward his authentic self.
It is not possible to tell, of course, how many of the white church members go through painstaking introspective reflection about the meaning of a white person’s identity. But there is no question that the entire church is aware of the pastor’s demand that everyone who joins this church is choosing to be “a minority” and to “ ‘lay down the sword’ of power and privilege.” One white American intern at the church expressed it this way: “Multicultural means submission. Even though you don’t want to give up [your own way], you do, because you love your brother.”14
So white Americans become liminal when they come to this church. The nonwhite members of the church were already marginalized and liminal before they joined the church, and this multicultural and multiethnic church provides them with a safe place to be aware of their minority status and their liminality. Out of liminality emerges communitas. In the Church of All Nations, I had a genuine impression that everyone there had a sense of belonging to each other. Pastor Jin Kim says, “In this church, there is more community than any of the members’ preexisting social networks.”15
Before the Sunday morning worship, people in the pews talked softly to each other. Some got up from their seats and went over to their friends to chat. The talk was subdued. But the conversation was not the sort of empty talk that people sometimes engage in before a worship service. The conversations all seemed serious and about some concrete and important matters. The talk was a family talk. It was conversation among the best of friends. This family talk went on until just before the service. It was a most interesting and moving sight to observe. This was a reconciled people—or, at least, friends on the way to reconciliation.
The complexity of the issues of justice and reconciliation is nowhere more apparent than in the case of the U.S. internment of Japanese American residents and citizens during World War II. In the midst of the hysteria created by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. government, under Executive Order 9066, blatantly violated the Constitution by forcibly evacuating 120,000 Japanese residents and American-born Japanese American citizens out of their homes and businesses and by imprisoning them in hurriedly constructed so-called relocation centers located in uninhabited, desolate areas of several western states.
The magnitude and depth of the pain and shame that this “concentration camp” experience inflicted upon the internees will probably never be completely understood. The Japanese American internment experience is complex especially because of the reluctance of the Issei and Nisei (the first and second generation) internees to talk about their camp experiences. Their silence has frustrated and in some cases alienated Sansei (third generation) Japanese Americans. Some have appealed to the Japanese cultural concept of shame as the reason for the internees’ “silence.” But their silence may also be their way of communicating the unspeakable nature of their pain and shame.
In face of this complex reality of the interment and its aftermath, one very healing and constructive activity has been the pilgrimages that have been conducted to former campsites. This project originated in 1969 when students from the University of California at Davis organized the first pilgrimage to the former internment campsite in Newell, California, near the Oregon border, bringing together students, community activists, and former internees.
Pilgrims leave their homes and the structure of their social existence and join the fellow pilgrims in a transitional, in-between space of the journey. By being placed in such a liminal space, the pilgrims can be expected to experience an openness to ideas and realities to which they had not been open before, an emergence of communitas among them, and the motivation to try to effect an change when they return to structure. Joanne Doi, a theologian and Asian American studies scholar, has led the pilgrimages and has done a careful study of the pilgrimage to Tule Lake, California.
The in-between or liminal nature of pilgrimage, according to Doi, provides the Japanese American participants an opportunity to become self-consciously aware of the liminal nature of their existence in American society and to embrace it for what it is without trying to resolve, solve, or transcend it. In the openness and freedom of liminality, there occurs a kind of reconciliation between Japanese American pilgrims and the truth of their liminal predicament in the United States. The reconciliation is between the self that does not wish to face up to the ambiguous reality of liminality and the self that knows the truth.
The liminality of the pilgrimage gives rise to communitas which, according to Doi, includes a “communion with the dead.”16 In liminality, which is like the state of timelessness inhabited by the dead, the pilgrims hear the dead, and the stories of the dead become the pilgrims’ own stories. Or, put differently, the stories of the dead and their suffering help the pilgrims in weaving their own life stories into some meaningful whole. In liminality, the pilgrims learn to live with the whole tragedy of internment by owning it as a part of the stories of their own lives. This is yet another kind of reconciliation that occurs in the liminality of the pilgrimage.
So liminality facilitates reconciliation and communion among persons. Asian Americans can utilize their liminality to work for reconciliation and communion. Asian American Christians by virtue of their faith have as their particular responsibility to use their liminality to participate in God’s own work of repeating in this world God’s own inner-trinitarian communion.