A Song of Arirang by St. Paul (Rom 8:22-25)

Sung Uk Lim (Yonsei University)

Several years ago, I was struck by a painting by a Korean comfort woman. It depicts the fruits about to be picked by greedy, rough, and ostensibly male hands. It comes as a surprise that the fruits are engraved with the images of two young Korean girls dressed in Hanbok, a Korean traditional attire.

             Without doubt, the comfort woman’s painting signifies the heartfelt agony of nature and women, both of whom are relentlessly exposed to the exploitation of the Man in the shadow of patriarchal colonialism. Historically speaking, I would rather alert you to the devastation of both the natural environment and the Korean population, in particular, Korean young women, under Japanese colonial rule.

At different but related levels, Paul in Rom 8:22 addresses the groaning of the creation, evoking the imagery of pain during labor. Worse, the combined imagery of the pain of creation, not to speak of nature, and women has conventionally been presented as pessimistic with special reference to the book of Genesis. At first glance, Gen 1:28 and 3:16 seems to justify the rule of the Man over nature and women.

Drawing on this imagery, Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French structural anthropologist, would go so far as to uncover binary oppositions of (hu)man(ity) and nature, and furthermore, between men and women on the symbolic dimension. Central to this is an ideology of androcentrism, an exercise to put the male standpoint at the center. The issue at stake is that men tend to alienate themselves from the female experience.

             At this point, I myself cannot help acknowledging my male perspective which is mostly concealed but operative in intimate relationships with my wife. A decade ago, my wife pregnant with her second child had to make probably the most onerous decision ever as to whether or not to have a Caesarean delivery a couple of months earlier than her due date. An OB-GYN warned us of a symptom of placental infection because she was occasionally bleeding in late pregnancy. Afraid of preterm birth, I, at the moment, expressed an idea of waiting for delivery until the due date. My wife agreed on my idea because we had already been informed by the OB-GYN that the baby had the serious problems of growth retardation in the womb. Mercifully, the baby was born healthy on the expected date of delivery. As you may probably imagine, my wife even in these times blamed me for taking lesser care of her health condition than baby’s. Looking back on that dire situation, I still feel a deep remorse for my formerly androcentric stance. What a miserable husband I was, who could not afford to notice the unspeakable anxiety of his wife as a mother!

In this connection, let me introduce a Buddhist key concept of dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskrit). Dependent arising means that a dharma, or phenomenon, is caused by another dharma. This means that a phenomenon exists only due to the reality of other phenomena like an infinite web of cause and effect. To put it simply, everything depends on everything else. Please do not forget the very fact that a life of one’s own is ceaselessly connected with those of others.

The notion of dependent arising lends insight on an intrinsic aspect of suffering. The principle is crystal clear: if one suffers, the other suffers as well. If men oppress women, then women will suffer. If women suffer from men’s suppression, then men will suffer from women’s suffering too. The same thing is true of the relationship between man and nature. If man represses nature, then nature will suffer. If nature suffers from man’s oppression, then man will suffer from nature’s suffering again. Take, for example, global warming as a boomerang effect of human destruction of nature. Dependent arising makes sure that the suffering of one’s own is mutually interdependent upon those of others.

By the same token, Paul brings to the fore the co-suffering of all beings on earth. Linguistically speaking, it is of premium importance to note that Paul in Rom 8:22 uses the Greek preposition συν, which means together, twice in the form of composite verb (cf. συστενάζειν; συνωδίνειν). Interesting enough, most of the English translations, nevertheless, pass over the togetherness of suffering. Paul’s original intent patently alludes to the shared suffering of the whole creation. A more correct rendering of Rom 8:22 into English would go as follows: “We know that the whole creation is co-groaning and co-suffering in labor pains until now.” In the following verse, Rom 8:23, Paul goes even so far as to aver that human beings themselves groan (στενάζομεν) along with the creation. For Paul, we (ἡμεῖς), human beings, suffer in unison with the creation beyond the gender binary. As a matter of fact, we all, across the distinction between men, women, and nature, live through shared suffering in a web of relationships. The reason is quite simple: all the lives in the world are seamlessly interconnected with each other, influencing, and being influenced by others.

From this it follows that the others’ suffering affects the self in the end. Consequently, if one desires to cease to suffer, one must take more responsibility for the others’ suffering. It is only when the self recognizes the others’ suffering like his/her own in order that the self may break out of chains of suffering.

Unexpectedly, however, intervening in the others’ suffering, wittingly or unwittingly, may give rise to ensuing problems. This is my personal story. Around the time when I had a chance to present a paper on the comfort women in an international academic meeting, a couple of my female colleagues approached me, alerting me to the hazard of men’s appropriating women’s issue such as sexual violence. For a moment, I was at a loss for words because it was not my intent at all to take over the women’s issues. Rather, the issue at hand concerns both men and women. It is not their issue alone, but our issue as well.

             Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza gives fresh insight into the social structure of oppression and domination beyond the gender binary under the aegis of what she terms kyriarchy. Schüssler Fiorenza defines kyriarchy as an intersectional augmentation of patriarchy interlocking with other oppressive systems such as sexism, racism, ableism, colonialism, and the like. In the kyriarchal society, those oppressed, including both men and women, or wo/men in an abridged form, remain vulnerable to exploitation, sexual or otherwise, by those privileged. This being the case, we have good reason to say that the suffering of the others can be our own in such a kyriarchal system. 

             Now the time has come for us to reconsider the significance of solidarity for the sake of “the redemption of our bodies” (τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν τοῦ σώματος ἡμῶν) (Rom 8:23). Remember that redemption cannot be entirely effective unless it is a collective one. To put an end to suffering, we have no choice but to take on more responsibility for the others in a mode of mutual support.    

In this vein, Paul addresses a collective redemption rather than an individual redemption, being well aware of the necessity to bond tightly with others. If it is true that we suffer together, we cannot solve suffering until we collaborate with each other.

Look around the world today. Currently, the whole world is in chaos, suffering together from the lack of justice and human dignity. Korea is struggling from the pain of division, being anxious about the probability of a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. Hong Kong is still desperately crying for political rights and civil liberties. Even worse, innocent citizens on the street in Myanmar, also formerly known as Burma, are being killed at protests for a return to democracy by security forces. Minority groups in the United States, especially African and Asian Americans, are in deepest distress with racism, losing their precious lives daily. These examples are sufficient to state that the entire world is suffering immensely together for various reasons, hoping for a recovery of the global community supporting each other.

We can live through suffering together with a view to restoring a global community in which we have the willingness to rejoice and mourn in unity (Rom 12:15). Let me conclude my sermon with arguably the most popular Korean traditional folk song called Arirang. Literarily, Arirang is a song of sorrow or suffering in a collective mode.

Interestingly, the song of Arirang has a plural version. Each region has its own version of Arirang. This means that Arirang is a collective song sung by so many different people based on their own life experiences. Arirang, song of suffering, may ring to all the ears of all people in the world. It’s because life is constantly replete with painful experiences and traumatic memories sufficient to crush our hearts. In this sense, Arirang must be a collective song in memory of our shared pains at the local, national, and international levels. Given a variety of pains we have in common within and across difference of cultures, we global citizens can all sing a song of Arirang on a global scale, being well aware that one’s own suffering is narrowly or broadly interconnected with the others’. Nevertheless, Arirang does not simply end by recalling our heart-felt pains, but rather hints at a glimmer of hope that life circumstances will be ultimately changed in positive ways. In this line of reasoning, Rom 8:22-25 would be called a Christian version of Arirang yet to be remembered and sung altogether with the hopes that the beloved one will come back sooner than later. Crucially, Arirang is a song of loss and recovery in solidarity. Once suffering is shared, its pains can be reduced at least or solved at most. It’s a lesson from the power of such a collective song of Paul’s Arirang in Rom 8:22-25.

Let us finish today’s worship by singing altogether a song of Arirang describing a series of events such as sorrow, parting, reunion, and recovery of love:

Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo.

You are going over the hill of Arirang.

My belove one, you are leaving me behind.

Your feet will be hurt before a long distance move.

Just as there are many stars in the blue sky,

there are also many dreams in our heart.

There, over there, is the Baekdu Mountain,

where, even in the middle of winter season, flowers bloom.