It is my understanding the California native and Arizona resident, now Protestant missionary, Robert Park, has been released from imprisonment by North Korea authorities.
He looks so young in the video clip.
If you weren’t following his adventures, this past Christmas Mr Park crossed the border into North Korea carrying a letter calling upon the dictator Kim Jong Il to stop suppressing (Christian) religion, to shut down the gulags and then to retire from office.
The twenty-eight year old Park has since issued a public statement explaining how he discovered he had been misled by Western propaganda, but thanks to his visit he had discovered the openness and generosity of the North Korean state, its wonderful Pongsu (Protestant) church in Pyonyang, and fervently apologized for his previous views.
When he first crossed over that frozen river on Christmas day, I wondered about what he was thinking.
St Francis famously went to Egypt and met the sultan Melek-el-Kamel, where he offered to show his faith by walking into a fire. And that’s just one story of the faithful witnessing their faith before infidels, even at the peril of their own lives. The litany is long.
And while not published, I suspect the litany of failed volunteer martyrs is rather longer…
The idea of being burned for one’s faith is one thing. The reality is a bit hotter.
I understand.
And I rather admire this young man both his reckless adventure and his subsequent abasement.
Discovering what one is actually willing to say or do to save one’s skin can be a shameful but also a valuable lesson.
Turns out one never knows.
As the sage said, “only don’t know.”
This discovery one doesn’t know can open the door to cynicism.
But I hope not.
Really not knowing can also open the way to compassion…
I know in my own life it hasn’t been my successes where I learned and became something deeper. It was my failures, my tumble into not knowing, really, really not knowing.
And of course, who knows what this experience of not knowing will lead to? That’s the glory and the mess of this experience. One doesn’t know…
Whether Mr Park goes on and pursues a public ministry or slips into a more quiet life, or finds a third way, I wish him well.
As I hope for all of us in this hurting world, but particularly for those willing to throw themselves into the great mess.
(May we use our heads as well as our hearts in the enterprise…)
And, most of all, may we each of us discover the deep way of not knowing, the way that actually opens the path to liberation for ourselves and others…
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