Retitled and crossposted from Street Prophets
In 1866, in what would later be a sweet potato field that my wife would wander through as a child, Philip Kim, his wife Maria Pak, Philip Jung, Thomas Kim and possibly others were put to death with extreme pain for the crime of being Catholic.
This action was, as most religious wars and most religious persecution, more economic and political than sectarian in source and nature. Korea was still "The Hermit Kingdom" and these poor brave and faithful people suffered because the military governor of the area wanted to send a message to the French and the Americans.
In 1997, when I had to leave Melissa, we made a promise to each other in front of a statue of the Archangel Michael in a Rosary garden that is built on this land. At the time the landscaping was raw and some of the statuary so new that the concrete on their bases had not set yet.
Melissa, a Buddhist to her pure and sweet core, would come to the same statue through the fifteen months we were separated. She would meditate.
This morning I got up from bed in her parents' house. This house is constructed on land that used to hold her father's restaurant. That building was constructed during the Japanese occupation as a police station. Torture and death had occurred there as well. When my wife's family ran the restaurant, there were diners that actually ate dinner where their relatives and loved ones had been imprisoned, beaten, tortured, killed.
My father in law had the building razed, finally, and built his two story house on the site, with a little shop below where he can sell vegetables from his patch of garden when he has a mind to. Gardens are a great answer for torture.
This morning, after getting turned around a few times (the town has grown and changed in the twelve years I have been away), I crossed a footbridge over a swollen drainage canal (monsoon season here) and saw the Rosary Garden.
The whole lower garden was a flat stretch of naked dirt. There were earthmovers and graders parked there. I was a bit shocked.
...but the garden was intact, rising up the hill side behind, beads and decades of the rosary represented by standing stones, a statue of the Madonna in traditional common womens' clothes, her facial features like those of any number of young women you can see on the streets. Jesus portrayed as a small boy, tugging at the skirt of her Hanbok, like any number of little boys you see in the parks and playgrounds.
The trees were higher than I remembered, the grotto and chapel of perpetual devotion to the Eucharist was more comfortably appointed and seemed in good use. The paths were just steep enough that you knew you were climbing, and everywhere there were signs in pictograms and hangul asking politely for silence.
I do believe I was the only Catholic on the grounds. I certainly was the only foreigner. There were groups of older women exercising, and young people walking under the trees in the early morning light, but no one was making unnecessary sound.
Birdsong, the wind rushing between the two steep hills and down the saddle of land on which the garden stands, water flowing in the streams from the last few days of rain, was the only sound. The sound of the town was muted to the point where you had to concentrate to perceive it. Every visitor could hear their own footsteps, breath, and heartbeat, if they chose to.
The graders and earthmovers below were there because the garden is expanding; planting new grounds for more silent contemplation.
It occurs to me that this is how you deal with torture and violence and persecution. You deal with those things with gardens and silence.
Not the silence of denial, or of turning away; that is the kind of silence that feeds the powerful. You make a conscious effort to push this violent world enough to make a space (whether real, virtual, or inner) where you can contemplate, do penance, and look for right action. You take a seedling and plant it - literally or figuratively. You plant another.
You shell beans on the roof with your grandchildren. You knock down a police station; you convert a bloody sweet potato field into a place where all are welcome to be quitet and THINK; you stand before your love's patron and meditate on unfair government action; you make a heart's promise - and you COMMIT.
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are not the problem - they are a symptom of the problem. The problem is that too many times we, as a people, go for loud and violent and obvious and fearsome rather than waiting for the quiet truth that demands patience and courage.
Guantanamo was born of such a poisonous combination of power and fear. We should silence the power and mute the fear.
When you have released the prisoners, President Obama, and you know you must, you must somehow plant a garden, a place for thought and quiet, in that place - the one in Cuba, and the one in our hearts.