Omnes Sancti et Sanctæ Coreæ, orate pro nobis.

Now Blogging Afresh at Ad Orientem 西儒 - The Western Confucian



Thursday, November 24, 2005

Happy American Chuseok!
Many Koreans refer to Chuseok (秋夕) as Korean Thanksgiving Day, so I refer to Thanksgiving as American Chuseok. I usually celebrate this day with a big family meal, but this year my wife and kids are in the US, so the samgyetang served today at the school cafeteria will have to count for my Thanksgiving feast. It was quite good! Chicken stuffed with ginseng and garlic is pretty close to turkey and stuffing.

Here's a Thanksgiving read: The Psychology Behind Giving Thanks.

My Korean Protestant students ("Christians, not Catholics," as they say here) informed me that last Sunday was Thanksgiving Day. I've never heard of this day being celebrated by Korean Protestants outside of those connected in some way to the international community, but it now seems to be part of the Korean Protestant, or at least Presbyterian, liturgical calendar. I talked about this with an American friend, whose Korean wife attends a Protestant church. He shared my disturbance at this co-option of an American holiday. I told him that Thanksgiving Day had not been mentioned at my Catholic parish. He said, "Of course, the Catholic Church has a history!"

Why adopt a foreign holiday, when you have a similar one of your own? Why not just "baptize" Chuseok, as the Catholics have done. Korean Catholics have special masses said for the dead on Chuseok, as well as on All Souls' Day. Korean Catholics have by and large enculturated the Faith in a way that their Protestant compatriots have not.

Yet, paradoxically, it is among Korean Catholics that I have found the least amount of nationalism and xenophobia, something I became aware of long before I ever became a Catholic. For years, I noticed that particularly friendly and open Koreans tended to be Catholics. I have encountered both nationalism and xenophobia among Korean Protestants, equal or greater to that of the general population. And, even in a friendly situation, a foreigner never forgets that he is seen as the "other" by Korean Protestants. This might manifest itself in some special, deferential treatment at church or in requests to teach English at Sunday School.

It is quite different among Korean Catholics, from my experience. Mass is the one time in Korea that I forget I am a foreigner. Even after Mass, the parishioners tend to treat me as just another Catholic, no better, no worse, no different. In my first year in Korea, in 1997, six years before I joined the Church, I volunteered at a Catholic soup kitchen. The nun who ran the operation and the youth who worked it saw me primarily as just another dishwasher, which was all I wanted to be.

Perhaps the lesson here is that to appreciate the universal, one must first appreciate the particular, or, in the language of pop-psychology, "before you love others you must first love yourself." Korean Protestants tend to share a nationalism that results from an inferiority complex with the rest of their compatriots. Korean Catholics know that it was essentially Koreans themselves who brought the Faith here, that the blood of 10,000 martyrs in the 19th Century nourished the soil of this land, and that this blood was spilled by their own compatriots. They also remember the French priests who joined their flocks on the execution grounds. With this knowledge, they tend to be healthily patriotic, not blindly nationalistic.

Today is Thanksgiving and I am most thankful for having been called into the Universal Church.