A reasonably full account of your life. Include, for example, significant and important persons and events, especially as they have impacted, or continue to impact, your personal growth and development. Describe your family of origin, current family relationships, and important and supportive social relationships.
Before I begin an account of my life, I would like to express my deepest thanks to the admission committee members of CPE. I have never written an account of my life before, and my applying to CPE has provided an occasion for me to reflect on the story of my life. As I look back on my life, I realize that my life has been all about one big attempt to answer the question: What does it mean to be who I am? It is this question that drives my life, thus providing a structure to an account of my life. While this question adds more qualifiers as my life events unfold, the basic question of my life and the desire of my heart remain the same. There are three major qualifiers to the question as my life events unfold. 1) When I became a Christian in my junior year in high school, the question becomes the following: what does it mean to be a Christian? (My spiritual growth and development essay is a full answer to this question; please see that particular essay) 2) When I immigrated to the United States with my family in my sophomore year in college, the question adds another dimension to it, as follows: what does it mean to be a Korean-American immigrant living in the United States? 3) When I began considering becoming a healthcare chaplain, I posed the question as follows: what does it mean to be a healthcare chaplain?
Along with the original question, they make up the four questions of my life, according to which I will divide my life into four phases. While all the questions deepen and enrich the meaning of the original question, each one can be separately treated and answered. Moreover, it should be noted that no one of these questions I have fully answered yet. In other words, not only do I still ask all these questions, I also will keep asking all of them until the last moment of my life. Perhaps more questions will be added as my life goes on, but eventually they will all be adding colors and flavors to the original question: What does it mean to be who I am? Below I will give an account of my life based on the four questions I am still asking, looking forward to even more questions looming in the future.
What Does it Mean to be Who I am? — From Birth on
I was born in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, to a family of four, composed of my parents, my younger brother, and myself. My father was a general manager at a construction company and my mother was running a private piano academy. Religiously, my father was not so religious, while my mother was nominally Christian. My mother learned of her religious heritage from her father, my maternal grandfather, who was an elder at a church he had founded together with his church’s senior pastor in the early 1950s, right after the Korean war. He was known for praying fervently and assiduously, and he prayed for me regularly. Even though he did not explicitly encourage me to go to seminary or anything like that, I believe to this day that my studying theology and attending seminary was one of the fruits of his prayers for me.
At any rate, apparently for the first six to seven years of my life I have no memories. The only thing I vaguely remember from those times is the sight of a dead snake. My mother and I were taking a walk in a public park nearby our apartment, and I saw a dead snake lying on a street corner. A street cleaner was sweeping it into a big dustpan, and for some unknown reason, that scene was forever engraved in my long-term memories.
As far as I remember, that was when I began to be interested in animals, insects, birds, etc. Also, it was from that time on that I also began telling my parents that when I grew up, I would be either a zoologist or an entomologist. At such a young age, I was already trying to figure out what it means to be who I am. After setting my mind on accomplishing such a novel dream, I wanted to get myself exposed to as many living things as possible. Fortunately, my neighborhood, while located in an urban area, was surrounded by one of Seoul’s Greenbelt areas, so I had a lot of opportunities to enjoy nature, such as catching frogs, snakes, pheasants, and even rabbits in a small mountain nearby my apartment. One of the crazes shared among my friends in elementary school was their fascination with praying mantis. Beginning around the third grade up until my graduation from elementary school, every day right after school my friends and I got together to walk up to a small mountain in the back of my apartment complex to catch praying mantis. I do not know why we were so crazy about praying mantis, but I think that as boys we wanted to associate ourselves with something strong and masculine, and praying mantis was perhaps the symbolic object of our desires to be strong and masculine, besides my interests in anything living.
Once entering junior high school, I stopped catching praying mantis, as if it were a childish habit of mine to let go of, and my dream of becoming a zoologist or an entomologist changed into becoming a veterinarian. Concerned about their son’s economic future, my parents kept urging me that I should give up on becoming either a zoologist or an entomologist and start pursuing to become a medical doctor. Mediating between such parental wishes and my dream career, I suggested to them that I become a veterinarian and they conceded to my suggestion.
However, another problem reared its ugly face: Korean high school’s college preparatory system. In Korean SAT (scholastic aptitude test) system, there are two different tests: one for natural science/engineering majors and the other for humanities/social science majors in college. Thus, once a student becomes a junior in Korean high school, he or she needs to decide whether he or she will study to take a Korean SAT for natural science/engineering college majors or for humanities/social science majors. SAT for potential natural science/engineering majors have math and science tests much more difficult than that taken by humanities/social science majors, while SAT for potential humanities/social science majors have Korean and English tests much more difficult than that taken by natural science/engineering majors.
The issue was, not many teenagers really know either what they want or what they are good at, which resulted in many of them giving in to various social pressures coming from friends, teachers, and parents. That was the case for me. Since many of my close friends opted for preparing to take the SATs for natural science/engineering majors, besides my parents’ wishes for my having a profession in medicine, I blindly opted for the natural science/engineering track. To be sure, if I were to become a veterinarian, following the natural science/engineering track was the right choice, which is why I never questioned my remaining in the natural science/engineering track even with a series of bad test scores in math and science. I did not know who I was. Such pressures coming from my parents, friends, and even from myself were intense for me because I was an academically exemplary student. While I did not do well in math and science, it was only relative to my friends who were all aiming for the Seoul National University (SNU), the best university in South Korea. I was aiming to get accepted to the school of veterinary medicine at SNU (in Korea professional training are all part of undergraduate academic curriculum instead of those of graduate and professional schools), and my math and science scores were not good enough to make a cut for the school and the major, but still among the top 10% in the nation.
When the time came for me to take the Korean SAT, I did not do well. I failed to get accepted to the school of veterinary medicine at the college of my choice. Still, I ended up getting accepted to the college of natural science with a biology major at one of the well-known private universities. Upon becoming a college freshman, however, I did not like what I studied at college, while I loved reading books on philosophy and religion and taking courses on the subjects. My college was one of the few Jesuit colleges in South Korea, Sogang University, and the school offered an excellent philosophy and religion major. It was not until the second semester of my college freshman year that I became conscious of my academic aptitude in reading and writing, especially in philosophy and religion, and more broadly humanities and social sciences majors. I began to ponder what I really want amidst getting to know what I am good at. I wanted to switch my major from biology to philosophy and religion, for I enjoyed studying philosophy and religion much more than I do biology and science. In all these, I was in search of who I was, and I was struggling. At this point, I need to turn back the clock to my high school years and tell the story of my figuring out how I have found a new question—what does it mean to be a Christian? —and integrated it into the original question—what does it mean to be who I am?
What Does it Mean to be a Christian? —From Conversion on
Ever since I became a Christian at age seventeen, the question ‘what does it mean to be a Christian?’ has been part of the original question ‘what does it mean to be who I am?’ Since I have shared my answer to this question in much more detail in another essay on spiritual growth and development, I will make this sub-section short and focused on telling how the former question has been integrated into the latter, original question.
When I consciously recognized myself as a Christian, my church pastors and teachers encouraged me and my friends to serve God both through what we study at school and through what we do at church. Since I was hardworking at church and serving God fine (in my legalistic and moralistic eyes), it seemed to me that what remained unfulfilled for me to serve God more fully has to do with what I study. As I already indicated above, my college major was biology and I had little interests in it. After the first year of my college, I began to consider switching my major from biology to philosophy and religion. Many factors influenced this decision, such as my participation in a campus Christian club called the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, in which I read a lot of books on Christian life and theology, my academic interests in philosophy and religion (and getting excellent grades in all such courses), and, above all, my desire to find answers for both questions I kept asking: what does it mean to be who I am? And what does it mean to be a Christian?
While I was contemplating switching my major, South Korea was hit by the East Asian economic crisis, as a result of which my father had lost his job. My family’s economic situation became suddenly worsened than I could have ever imagined. In the face of this sudden change, I had no other option but to go serve in the military, a two-year national duty required of every Korean male. It was about that time that my father had informed my mother, me, and my brother that we are going to apply for immigration interviews to the United States. On the one hand, I was happy and worrisome at the same time. I was happy because studying in the United States has been one of the dreams of my life, and such possibility might come true soon, depending on how we do the interviews! On the other hand, I was worrisome because I was at a stalemate. I could not begin applying for switching major, yet there was no guarantee of immigrating to the United States. I could not begin the process of applying for entering military service, yet my prospect of moving to a new country was not certain at all. I had to wait for the immigration interviews and did participate in the interviews as faithfully as possible. Fortunately, my family had passed the immigration interviews. I completed a request form for dropping out of my current college. My family was ready to start a new life in the new country. I was excited for a new life in the United States. I was thinking of attending a college in the United States with a major in philosophy and religion, or at least some subjects in humanities or social sciences. Since I loved studying philosophy and religion, this has become one of the most important ways for me to respond to the two questions about who I am as a person and as a Christian, trying to find the meaning of my life. In my decision to pursue philosophy and religion major, I was following St. Augustine’s famous dictum: faith seeking understanding.
What Does it Mean to be a Korean American? –From Immigration on
Behind my family’s decision to immigrate to the United States was my uncle, who had immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. Back in the 1990s, family-based immigration was not so difficult, and my uncle had invited my father and his family through family-based immigration. His formal invitation had taken place in 1985, so we still had to wait for twelve or so years, but it was right around the time of the East Asian economic crisis (what a coincidence!) that we were notified of the USCIS (the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services)’s decision to grant all my family members the permanent resident cards (green cards).
With hopeful expectation, when my family first set foot on the arrival gate of the Los Angeles International Airport, we had to pass through the customs as new immigrants. Since I was the most fluent in English of all my family members, I was doing the work of the translator, only to fail to understand most of what the customs officer was asking me. I was in a major culture shock, and so were all my family members. One representative episode of such shock was that I was afraid of going to McDonald’s restaurant for the first six months of my life in the new country. I was so afraid of the restaurant crew members’ not understanding what I was saying to them because of my accents, as well as of my not understanding what they were saying to me because they tended to speak so fast.
Such episode shows that in the early months and years of my life in the new country I could not afford to think about anything else but assimilate myself into the culture. Suddenly I became a member of an ethnic minority and the pressure to fit myself into the mainstream culture was mounting quite high. Besides such culture pressure to fit in, I was pressuring myself to be hardworking in learning to speak in English. In hindsight, such pressure was coming from my perfectionism, which derived from my deeply held habit of shaming myself, which I discussed in detail as an obstacle to overcome for my spiritual growth, in my CPE essay (essay #2) on the spiritual growth and development.
As my brother and I were beginning to attend Golden West College, a local community college in Orange County, CA., we were getting better with understanding the culture and assimilating ourselves into it. My assimilation into the culture has gotten much better as I transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. At Berkeley not only did I have little chance to speak in Korean, but I joined an Asian American church whose members were predominantly college students and young adults living in the Bay Area and San Francisco. Many of these Asian American college students had a question deep in their hearts about their identity as Asian American, or more closely, as Korean American, Japanese American, Chinese American, and so on. Since I was one of the few people in my church who was able to speak in the language of their cultural descent (in my case Korean), I had a lot of opportunities to speak with them about Asian culture, living as an Asian in America, etc. Spending much time with them began to instill in me slowly the same question as they had, therefore, which I did not concern myself about until then. Before transferring to Berkeley, I thought of myself as a Korean and not as a Korean American, but as time went on, their questions slowly became my own question.
This question became more intensified in my first and second year at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. As I continued my theological studies, I was also a youth pastor at a small Korean immigrant church in Nashua, NH. In my youth group there were about a handful of kids whose fathers were former US army soldiers, and whose mothers were Korean who immigrated to the United States following their American husbands. The most common scenario of how their parents met and got married was that when their fathers were serving at an army base in Korea, their fathers met their mothers, dating, getting married, and moving back to the United States. When I met these kids in their teenage years, their most common struggles were that they were neither Korean nor American. Struggling with them in solidarity, I had to face the question myself once again: what does it mean to be a Korean American? More broadly, what does it mean to be an Asian American?
To be honest, I have not found the answer to the question; I think I will keep asking the question until the last moment of my life, but one thing I found is that my theological and personal struggles with shame could be the key to understanding and answering the question. Jung Young Lee, a Korean American theologian, wrote a book entitled Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology. I read the book in my seminary days and was deeply enlightened in such a way as asking my question anew and seeing my life as a Korean American living on the margins as a way to follow Jesus Christ. In brief, living on the ethnic margins of American society does not and cannot shame my being a Korean American because it is a creative calling of God for me to contribute to the common good for this country. Instead of recognizing such marginal status either as my own weakness or as the cause for my having victim consciousness, I approach it as God’s gift and begin to ponder in what ways such gift should be used for the common good of the community to which I belong. In this regard, it was highly encouraging to read Jeremiah 29:7: “Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Prayer to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” In this verse, God orders the Jewish exiles to work for the common good, even if it is not necessarily their own hometown. It is this spirit of seeking the common good that I see an initial hint for the question of being a Korean American. In other words, being a Korean American means that, with my unique cultural and ethnic heritage, I seek the common good of the society to which I belong—the United States, which is a nice segue to my most recent question of what it means to be who I am: what does it mean to be a healthcare chaplain?
What Does it Mean to be a Healthcare Chaplain? –From CPE on
I did not know that I was going to pursue the career path of healthcare chaplain when I first started studying theology. The reason I decided to study theology was simply because it was fun to do so. I did not have any career considerations in studying theology. Even so, the decision to study theology did have everything to do with my search for becoming who I am, which is now intertwined with all the questions discussed above. As I come closer to the completion of my formal theological studies in the Ph.D. program in practical theology in May of 2021, I am faced with the practical question of seeking a career path, added on to the question of searching for who I am. Since much of this still belongs to the future, I cannot say much about this as part of my life so far.
However, I can at least comment on two considerations in pursuing the career of healthcare chaplaincy. First, I know that I need to seek the common good of the society through my career, which is what I have realized through my explorations of what it means to be a Korean American, Christian, and eventually who I am. Second, my own personal fulfillment is just as important as seeking the common good of the society, and I have discussed in my essays on the spiritual growth and development that how the gospel message has helped me overcome my ingrained habit of shaming myself. (I will abstain from going into details here, as it will be nothing but repetition of what I have said in those essays.) Having been enlightened of the importance of my emotion such as shame, guilt, joy, and gratitude in being formed and shaped according to the image of God, I am drawn more and more to the psychological dimensions of theological studies. As I continued my studies, I learn that shame lies at the root of many other mental health issues such as depression, addiction, loneliness, mental stress from trauma, etc. Thus, my own experience of learning to resist shame has led me to seek the common good of society through helping others suffering from various mental health issues to experience healing. For me, no other career path seems more fit than to become a healthcare chaplain with mental health focus.
As I seek to become a healthcare chaplain with mental health focus, the image I envision myself as a future healthcare chaplain is that of the wounded healer, which Henri M. Nouwen coined through his well-known book The Wounded Healer. In the book, Nouwen defines the wounded healer as follows: “He is called to be the wounded healer, the one who must look after his own wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others” (82). As I have been taught how to resist my own shame, I would like to help those who suffer from shame and other mental health issues. In that regard, once I become a healthcare chaplain, I would like to pursue the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ Mental Health Integration for Chaplain Services (MHICS). Also, with my Ph.D. in hand after this May, I would like to contribute articles to the Journal of Healthcare Chaplaincy as I gain more experiences in the field.
I am on the starting line of my career journey, and I am looking forward to what God has in store for me. Thank you so much for reading. May God bless my journey as well as those who work as the providers of spiritual care for whoever are in need and for the world.