Difficulty in Forgiving

A high school student riding his motorcycle kills the fiance of the movie's main character in a hit-and-run  accident. This is the core plot of the movie Today. Is it possible to forgive such an act? This is the question the movie asks.
 
The director and screenwriter was asked why she  deals with such heavy material, and she answers that she wants to correct the commonly accepted understanding of forgiveness. The Peace Weekly journalist interviewed the director of the movie following its release in Seoul.

Our society expects the families of victims to be understanding and to forgive. She wants to examine what it means to forgive.
 
The heroine of the movie visits a church where she meets the priest and a religious sister, and is told to forgive the student for it is all God's will. She signs her name to a petition asking forgiveness for the student, but struggles with conflicting emotions and wonders if forgiving the student is the proper attitude. Why should she forgive? she asks herself.
 
The director says there are too many like the heroine of the movie in our society.  When a family loses someone because of some criminal act, there is no place to  complain about the injustice; everybody seems to believe that we should forgive. She recalls reading an article that said to forgive can at times be a sin, that we can't force forgiveness and shouldn't forgive indiscriminately.

It took her five years to write the scenario, and as time passed she became more convinced of what she wanted to say. She tried hard to  understand another way of seeing the issue but found it difficult. We tend to use, she says, the phrase, It's God's will, when bad things happen, making it easier for most of us to forgive and to convince others of the necessity to forgive. She explains that knowing that her religion wants her always to forgive, makes her uneasy. "I visited," she said, "with a priest who told me that 'forgiveness that does not have justice as a foundation is an evil'; this was a great consolation to me."

She intended the movie to ring an alarm to religions; before the scars are healed in the family of the victim, she believes that religions need to go slower in recommending forgiveness. The wrongdoer should have time to reflect on the result of his act, which will give time to the victim's family to start healing the  wounds.

That the director wanted to treat an important subject in a movie was laudable. Whether it can be dealt with dispassionately in this way is open to question. 'The will of God' is a phrase we throw around rather easily, but it is presumptuous to think we know God's will, and it should not be used to console another person. We as Catholics use the word providence, which skirts the question of God's will in any specific case. When it comes to forgiveness, more important than the forgiveness itself is to have the necessary disposition enabling one to be forgiven. In many cases, the forgiveness even if proffered can't be accepted because of a lack of sorrow and an unwillingness to change ones life.

Educating for Happiness

"When safety precedes happiness, maturity is hampered," according to an article in the Kyeongyang magazine. The writer, who is involved with Catholic cultural programs, considers most parents as being overly protective of their children, even though they don't want studies, among other things, to interfere with their children's happiness. However, they worry about their children being bullied at school, and also worry about the safety of young girls going and coming from school.
 
More knowledgeable parents know that this excessive concern for security limits the happiness of the child. What is happiness? he asks. We don't have to go back to the Romans or Greeks for an answer. Happiness, he says, is knowing who you are and conforming to this awareness in daily life.
 
Parents say they want their children to be happy even though knowing this emphasis on happiness may interfere with their education and lead to a difficult time getting a job later on. But being familiar with the many psychological and social scars that children routinely encounter growing up, they want to protect them. This is the dilemma with which they are faced.

This  happy life that we are talking about is relating with others--all kinds of others, which is the way we enlarge our vision and get to know ourselves. The time we  spend with ourselves, important as it is, we have to find time to spend with others. He goes on to talk about the boundaries between the world and religion, ourselves and others, money and meaning, desire and value. When we have the right balance between them, we will have happiness.
 
It is precisely in this area, however, that we have problems. For in desiring security for our children, we reduce the happiness they should be enjoying. In school and society, we keep the children away from that which is unknown and strange. In certain areas of a large city, those with similar lifestyles live together, which means the experiences will be similar. They become used to relating with others who have the same sensibilities and use the  same words.
 
To mature means that your world has become larger. And to adjust to this expanding world means that I am maturing, which is the foundation for my happiness. Consequently, without the child's desiring it, to overly protect the child from contact with the strange  is not wise. Better to encourage and instill in them a courage to meet the new.

Educating our children by expanding their experience of life with travel and on-the-spot programs, as important as they are, doesn't compare with allowing them to encounter the unexpected occurrences in daily life. When we make it difficult to be open to what's new and strange in life, our world becomes smaller, we become smaller, fixed in place by the old and familiar world of our past.

Changing Oneself

 Writing in his weekly column on spirituality, the columnist goes back to the time when, as a young religious working as the chaplain in a mental hospital, an incident at the hospital helped turn his life around.


The head male nurse came to him and asked if a bicycle could be provided for the patients. He told the head nurse he had recently received  two bicycles for patients in the process of leaving the hospital, and were outside in the yard.  The nurse responded: "Father, not that  kind of bicycle but the kind that can be used in the hospital."
 

I asked if it would be possible to use those bicycles in the hospital. "How can we use those bicycles in the hospital? he answered sharply. "I'm talking about the kind of bicycle that you use for exercise." Still not understanding, I then asked the nurse, "How about taking the bicycles and attaching them to  the wall of the hospital so that they can be used for exercise?" The nurse left, laughing.  It was only later that he realized the nurse was talking about training bikes used in health clubs.

He goes on to say that it seemed his head was even more confused than was the mental state of the patients he was counseling; he admits to being easily flustered by the demands of the new work. He thanks the patients for being a great consolation to him during those early years, during which he covered up his feelings of incompetence by pushing himself to appear as a responsible and capable person.
 
With the passage of time his relationship with the patients became closer.  He laughed and cried a lot listening to them. He heard about their struggles in regaining health, and watched their slow and graceful  manner of relating to others. They interacted with him without reservation, and they said Mass together. Seeing their simplicity, he reflected on his own bluster and uncontrollable human desires. Gradually, he felt the surface froth of his spirituality subside and finally disappear. The experience helped shed his impetuosity. He got over the desire to impress others, and began to have greater trust in others.
 
In the beginning of the work in the mental hospital, he felt he was there to help them, but on looking back on those years, he realizes they helped to heal him. He summed up his experiences by saying that when we give ourselves in earnest to help others, we are ultimately helping ourselves.

Why the Lack of Interest?

In the recent election for mayor of Seoul almost  49 percent voted, a large number compared to results from previous elections, but the priest-chairman of the  peace and justice committee of the diocese,  writing in the Catholic Times, would like to know why more are not voting. The answer, he says, apart from lack of interest and the distaste for the whole process, can be found in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.
 
From the Compendium: "The overcoming of cultural, juridical and social obstacles that often constitutes real barriers to the shared participation of citizens in the destiny of their communities calls for work in the areas of information and education. In this regard, all those attitudes that encourage  in citizens an inadequate or incorrect practice of participation or that cause widespread disaffection with everything connected with the sphere of social and political life are a source of concern and deserve careful consideration." (191)


"Among the obstacles that hinder the full exercise of the right to objectivity in information, special attention must be given to the phenomenon of the news media being controlled by just a few people or groups. This has dangerous effects for the entire democratic system when this phenomenon is accompanied by ever closer ties between governmental activity and the financial and information establishments." (414)

The priest-chairman  says we have to examine how objective, ethical and honest is the information we receive from the mass media, and that includes the religious media. Without objective, honest information we can't make the right decisions and the common good is harmed.

He reminds us of the time under the Japanese occupation when we were flooded with all kinds of propaganda, and again, not more than a few decades ago, when  a past government, using dubious information, swayed public opinion. Can any of us affirm, he asks, that even today we are not being swayed with misinformation?
 
How we face the crucial issues of life now and in the future will affect our dignity and the common good. This will not be easy. The issues are often too technical and complicated for us always to know the facts, and even to know whether the issues themselves are being honestly reported. Not infrequently the mass media is controlled by small groups that influence the way news is reported. Lack of honest news coverage may also occur when the media, apart from defending vested interests, is incapable of presenting objective, honest news, having lost touch with the perennial truths of life.
 
We are reduced, he maintains, to being passive, unquestioning consumers of the information we receive. And as passive consumers, we are opening the way for a few people and groups to take control and manipulate the politics, the finances, and the media of the country. This situation harms not only the efficient operation of our democratic institutions but works against human dignity and the common good.

The New Evangelization

New evangelization is a term we hear often, and often misunderstand. "The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith" will be the topic of discussion at the Bishops Synod next year. A sign that we have in a few years gone from using the words 'missionary work','evangelization' to 'new evangelization' a term that more accurately reflects our present concerns.

Pope John Paul II first used the term 'new evangelization' during a visit to Poland in 1979; it has been used often since then. The Peace Weekly has written up the instruction of the Seoul diocese on the subject, making it clear that it does not mean re-evangelizing, or merely going out to those who have not heard the Good News, but is a new way of evangelizing, and what this new way might mean for Korea.

We in the Church have all been exposed to the three ways of evangelizing: the re-evangelization of those who were once members of the Church and left, the evangelization of society, and the  evangelizing of those who do not yet know Christ. Pope John Paul by adding  new to  evangelization, the  essential message of the Gospel, asks that we preach the Gospel by the example of our lives, the Gospel message changing all facets of our lives, evangelizing ourselves as we work to evangelize others.
 
The article goes on to ask why is this necessary? And answers that in today's world it is getting harder to preach the Gospel, and that Christians are facing new circumstances in society, which requires not only a  new discernment but answers to the new questions in the light of the Gospel. In this new century, with the changing times, a new way of thinking is necessary. We as Christians have to read the signs of the times and respond in a new way. 

Concluding the article is a list of pastoral proposals for the new evangelizing approach:

              1) Begin with oneself

              2) Follow Jesus in the way of love

              3) Meet others with total sincerity

              4) Have a preferential option for the poor

              5) Encourage the search for justice

              6) Support the culture of life and respect our environment

              7) Fight against the culture of death

   

30 Years Teaching in the CCD Program

By Church law, all parishes are required to have CCD programs, which provide religious education for the children of the parish. CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) has a long history in the Church and depends for its successful operation on lay volunteers to teach its many programs.  Parishes have always had difficulty in getting volunteers for the programs; finding suitable candidates, says the Peace Weekly, is "like picking a star from the sky."

The Incheon diocese recently held a ceremony to thank those who have devoted themselves to this work over the years. Few have been in the program for three years, even fewer have been teaching for 10 years, and unique in the Incheon diocese was Sophia,  who has taught continually for 30 years. Sophia, now 54 years old, has been teaching for over half of her years in her parish CCD.
 
Baptized in 1981, only two years later she was asked to teach by the sisters of the parish. For many  reasons she did not go into the religious life, but always wanted to be a teacher. She manages her own art academy and teaches in the parish during weekends. Thoughts of marriage were put aside as something that was to be considered later.

Asked to divulge her secret for devoting so much time to volunteer teaching, she answered: "There is no secret; the teaching is God's mission to the likes of me. He gives me the grace for which I am thankful. I take pride that I can cooperate in the pastoral work that has brought me to this day."

After so many years of service, many would have passed on their work to others. But not Sophia. She works diligently, listening to her recorded sermons to improve them for the children at Mass. To improve her teaching methods she goes to seminars and programs conducted by the Protestants, and gets in touch with her students at least once a week by telephone or by text messaging. She also visits the neighboring schools to contact the students she's unable to reach by these methods.   

When her students graduate from high school and  come to her to offer to teach in the CCD program, she feels great pride and joy. The young people today, she says, because of work or preparing to find work, and tending to personal needs, find service to the Church by volunteering to teach catechism a great burden.

At frequent teachers' meeting, Sophia will often pray: "Lord, may I be convinced  that my compensation is not here in this world but with you in the next. May I on this earth make you known, and with the children I teach realize that one day we are destined to be with you in glory. Amen."

Korean Lay Missioners in Malawi

"At first they thought we were reckless, then considered crazy but happy crazies."  Francis and Sophia, recently profiled by the Peace Weekly, are a married couple working as missionaries in Malawi, Africa, one of the poorest countries in the world, and a country ravaged by the AIDS epidemic.

They are working with the Marianists in the Lusublio Orphan Care Project in the diocese of Mzuzu, where thousands of orphans live. The couple are presently involved in starting worker-managed farms that help feed the orphans and the poor. To date there are five such farms in operation, and they plan to put more farmland under cultivation soon.

They are planting crops on reclaimed wasteland; though they lack fertilizer and good seed, they have no lack of know-how. Francis has a back ground in farming and has taken college-level courses in horticulture. Their main crop is corn but also planted are rice, tomatoes, beans, and other vegetables, and using seeds brought back from Korea, cabbage and eggplants.
 
They have also started a Food  Bank, the idea coming from examples in their Korean history: when the harvest was poor, food was donated to the needy; and when the harvest was good, the food was returned to the Food Bank for others to take. They recently lent 100 sacks of food to 100 families, receiving back in due course 70 sacks. This approach is still new and will take some time before getting to a point of self-sufficiency.
 
In visiting homes, they found none that had food set aside for the next day. The Malawians are fortunate to have one meal a day, which is one reason life expediency is less than 40 years, and the main reason Francis and Sophia wanted to begin the Food Bank.

Korea is no longer a receiver of aid, but, as the lives of Francis and Sophia have demonstrated, is now a  giver of aid. The Korean Church is also no longer in need of missioners but is sending money and missioners to other parts of the world. These missioners are no longer just priests and religious; lay people are also very much involved.
 
Both Francis and Sophia did not entertain the thought of becoming missioners until recently. It was in 2005 that they decided to leave the typical average life and go to the missions. They finished the two-year course at the Suwon seminary, and in 2008 left for Africa, leaving behind their two sons, who were working their way through college with part-time jobs supplementing the revenue from their scholarships.
 
In Malawi, life is far from easy. Even though Francis and Sophia have to deal with the dry and raining seasons, with mosquitoes, lice and bedbugs, and the endemic diseases of the country, they are extremely happy. When the time comes, Francis wants to be buried in Malawi; Sophia says she doesn't want to be a burden to their friends in Malawi and wants to return to Korea. Francis answers that God will make the decision.