Authoring a Multiplicity of Selves and No-Self

I deeply appreciate this opportunity to read Mary Engel's provocative, evocative, and honest essay. I hope I can respond in kind: honestly with a mixture of personal and intellectual self-reflexivity. The education I received in North America privileged individuality and the virtue of progress of the individual—constantly becoming something better. For me, this emphasis on the progress of the individual's interior life, while seemingly virtuous to my Methodist upbringing, verges dangerously at times on becoming not too different from Western capitalist consumption. It can even consume and "colonize" ways and practices of others in the unconscious bid for constant renewal and self-improvement of the interior life.

The work of decolonizing the Western imaginary, in this case theological and spiritual, is something that I grew up with and has shaped the ways I navigate my feminist critique of the separate but relational self and of the dominant ethos of the Korean American immigrant church, which tends to be strongly committed to what Engel refers to as the "no-self," which comes from a mixture of Daoism and Mahayana Buddhism. Growing up in a religiously pluralistic context, I was well aware of the practice of no-self making its way and hybridizing with the Christian understanding of kenosis. As postcolonial thinkers have often noted, colonization dynamics leave their marks upon both colonizers and colonized, leaving nothing untouched. The interstitial site of the colonial divide is fraught with imprints of conflicting and colliding ways of being in and relating to the world and with one another. Saying that this is merely the "clash of civilizations" is too simplistic. Rather, colonization is also marked with what Homi Bhabha has termed practices of spectacular resistance.¹ Such practices emerge through a refusal to foreclose ways of being in the world that colonizers disavow but also through openness to excavating and reclaiming already foreclosed practices.

As a Christian growing up in North America, I learned that this self-improvement or "sanctification" followed a linear progression, whereby one improved the self more and more as time went on. This theological simplicity was allowed to make its dent in my consciousness. Along with this was also a significant but simple caricatured form of Calvinism.

In reading Engel's journey of the self into no-self, I found many shared experiences but also aspects that were probably very different. She refers to her up-bringing in the Dutch Calvinist immigrant church. The differences in our experiences become much more crystallized for me in this regard. I was nurtured in a Korean American immigrant church. My church context, and by default my education, was almost always multivalent and assumed a multiplicity of spiritual practices due to the presence of both cultural and religious plurality.

I felt during my youth that the Korean American immigrant church had its own theological interpretations and practices. These practices were always very much like the white "Methodist" practices but there were also aspects that were at the same time "not quite" like those of white Methodist churches. Of course, we shared in the larger denomination's theological heritage but I always understood that there were nuanced theological differences present shaped not only by our immigrant experiences but also by our experiences as the other.

My observations and questions regarding Engel's essay emerge out of my own particular spiritual journey as a Korean American feminist theologian, one deeply committed to the project of decolonization of the Western imaginary of religious and spiritual practices. In no way do I assume any position of "purity" or "authenticity," but through my reading of Engel's essay, I want to suggest that perhaps we must be attuned, open, and awakened to a multiplicity of spiritual ways of being in the world that the colonization project might previously have foreclosed through its matrices of power shaped by patriarchy, heteronormativity, imperialism, or racism. Below, I offer some general observations and questions that my mind generated in response to Engel's essay that I believe warrant further conversation.

In her journey of finding a way of "being and living with God," Engel...