foreword for Return

귀//Return: Korea's Rituals of Death, Spirit, & Ancestors. Photo-essay book by Chanho Park published in April 2022 by Alpha Sisters Publishing Press 그러나 우리는 우리를 사랑하시는 그분의 도움으로 이 모든 시련을 이겨내고도

남습니다. 롬 8:35-37

Perhaps it is incongruous or even jarring to include a bible verse in this visionary project that

honors Korea’s age-old spiritual rites through the magic of photography, poetry, and prose.

After all, attempts to Christianize Korea have directly resulted in the suppression and

demonization of indigenous spiritual practices that have sustained the Korean people for

millennia.

That was certainly true for me, growing up as a Protestant pastor and missionary’s kid in Korea, Philippines, and later in the United States. I was taught to fear and shun Korean shamans and be dismissive of our ancestral rites. Our home library included conversion narratives where a formerly “lost” shaman could only be reformed and “saved” when s/he converted into Christianity.

Yet here I am now, writing these words today as a professor of Christian preaching and pastoral

theology at an episcopal seminary. While I confess a Christian faith myself, it is one that comes

alongside and celebrates the faith practices and beliefs of my ancestors.

Each of the photographs offered in this gift of a book serves as a portal, an invitation to a world

that I can only describe as strangely familiar even as I recognize and grieve my own

estrangement from it. While I sat in a cloud of rage, despair, and grief at the ways I was

separated from these timeless rituals of and for my own people, the aforementioned verse – in

Korean – kept echoing in my heart. I love the Korean translation of this verse because it

proclaims that even after death and destruction, we remain. We are yet here because of the power of divine love that has seen us through even death and annihilation. My people and the practices of my people have persevered despite death-dealing onslaughts of hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword to borrow Paul’s litany of grievances.

Chanho Park, endearingly referred as “the shaman photographer” by the shamans he portrays in

his photography, first picked up the camera to memorialize his daughter’s dol, a beautiful Korean

rite that honors the sacred worth of a child. And he continues to document with the same tender

love the sacred rituals that celebrate and honor the dignity and worth of our peoples.

The photographs in this book present us with fleeting glimpses of age-old rites and bear witness

to a particular people’s Ways of living, dying, and loving. These photo-poems reflect the sacred

prayer and power of our foremothers and forefathers as they embody the great Dance of life and

death.

The name of this project bespeaks a beautiful intent and bespeaks magic. The sound of the word

(돌아갈) 귀 歸 which signifies return, a reversion, is identical to (귀신) 귀 鬼 which signifies

ghost and haunting and (귀하다) 귀 貴 which means precious, noble, valuable. I found

myself repeating, like a mantra: We return to what haunts us and what haunts us is what

remains, what is precious.

Waiting for us in these pages - in the photography and the poetry - is an invitation, a call

for us remember and return to what is precious.

Peace Pyunghwa Lee

6/15/2021

Berkeley, CA