생각과 말과 행위로 죄를 많이 지었으며…
…내 탓이요, 내 탓이요, 나의 큰 탓이옵니다.
(“I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done… through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”)
Sometimes my strongest childhood memory is in hearing these words from my mom from above next to me in a church pew. It was at the parish San Juan Nam in Asunción, Paraguay in the late 90’s. I was anywhere between five and ten years old.
She would say it so earnestly, pounding her chest with her fist, her lowered head covered in a mantilla. Sometimes she would shed a tear. I would always be left at awe at the sight and sound of her like this. Where does this radically honest admission and feeling come from? How does such a heartfelt expression come in the midst of such structure and formality? What is she thinking about that she feels so bad?
Now that I think of it, these sets of curiosities were prompted by something else. I was trying to figure out what I should be doing. As a general rule, I was supposed to follow what my parents did. I would certainly muster up enough of a performance of guilt to dutifully carry out my good daughter role. But I might have also received mixed signals on this matter, like I did not have to copy her in this situation. In all, I generally remained confused as to where the mimicry should begin or end –the action, the belief, the feeling.
The sanctuary of church was grand, made of marble, rich wood, and incense. The silk details of the priest and the altar would change as appropriate for the church season. The green for ordinary time was most common. The purple for advent season was most worthy of veneration. My father directed the admired choir, given his praised part in a singing group in college, and a knack for instruction as a teacher. My grandmother was part of the Legion of Marie group of 할머니s (grandmothers) that was revered as the most devout –they had even traveled to Venice with the priest once, when traveling on vacation beyond the Iguazú falls was unheard of. My mother –I can only remember that she embodied in the way that she carried herself humility, goodness, and shame. I knew it most from attending nightly mass with my family, when we would all go in to play our roles –my older sister and I being altar girls, while my younger sister was just an infant. We were the only young family to attend nightly mass; everyone else was elderly.
On Sundays, when all the Korean Catholics of Asuncion gathered in our Korean dresses and nice clothes, I would be outside. My friends and I would play house by putting little leaves on big leaves and call it 밥 (rice; food), which we would eat before the kids of the make-believe household went off to school. While we younger girls occupied ourselves with play, the teenage girls would chat amongst themselves. Sometimes they dyed their nails with crushed balsam flowers wrapped in leaves tied with string. (It was not right to pick the flowers at church, but it was understood that so long as it was done discreetly, God would understand.) There is also the standalone matter that my mom says that I was rather mean to my best church friend 엘리사 (Elisa).
Long after having left Paraguay as an adult, I would remember the feeling of being giddy and happy without a care for the united voices of adoration and repentance inside during the adult Sunday mass. The remembrance would arrive most suddenly when I would spot the overflowing hot pink of bougainvillea, or smell the sweet scent of jasmine flowers, or the menthol-like smell of eucalyptus trees.
The Church, I would come to realize, was the beginning of much that continued on and off through long voyages through time and space, through beliefs, through peoples. The Church provided a young girl in me, thrown into the world, with order and structure in ritual and canon, pride and belonging in a Korean immigrant community, and affection for and closeness to ethereal beauty. For a young girl such as myself, coming from a small corner of the world, that was more than enough to find stability, meaning, and hope in a tumultuous world.
Until it wasn’t.
Then, it seemed to stand for false illusions –except for beauty, which sometimes only seems to assert the value of illusions.