Cross-Cultural Spiritual Direction: To Construct a Borderland

Jung Eun Sophia Park, SNJM, Ph.D.

Once
By mistake
She tore a map
in half.
She taped it back,
but crookedly.
Now all the roads
ended in water.
There were mountains
right next to her hometown.
Wouldn't that be nice
If it were true?
I'd tear a map
And be right next
to you.

As the well-known Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye describes, a woman happened to tear a map and then taped it back together; now the line is crooked, so an unanticipated stranger can be a companion. Of course, in today's world, this event is not just one individual person's imagination. Rather, it is a common experience: to encounter the "other" in this way. In today's global world, one of the most remarkable phenomena is multiculturalism, and it designates cultural diversity in a society. Although the meaning and implication of multiculturalism are very ambiguous, people are already beginning to live in this multicultural way. That being the case, the consequential question regarding multiculturalism is how to deal with differences within the same culture. In a culture that includes different cultures, the cross-cultural aspect should be considered seriously unless multiculturalism means just separated cultural groupings. In this article, I want to apply the topic of cross-cultural encounter to spiritual direction, utilizing the concept of borderland. First, I will characterize spiritual direction as a borderland in which a spiritual director and a directee experience mutual transformation, without losing their own identities. Second, I will give an example of creating a borderland in a spiritual directors training program. In so doing, finally, I will delineate necessary elements for creating a borderland in spiritual direction.

Spiritual Direction: To Create a Borderland

There are many metaphors for spiritual direction. My preference is dance. Each dance can be different according to the rhythm and the partner. Thus, a good dancer needs to have the sensitivity to be aware of the rhythm of the dance itself as well as the unique rhythm that the other carries. Cross-cultural spiritual direction is a dance with a stranger who does not seem to have a rhythm familiar to me. It means that a spiritual director and directee who come from different cultures in terms of denomination or even religion itself, as well as any one or all of the following subcultures: ethnicity, gender, age, and class, sit together in front of the Holy Spirit and appreciate, understand, and examine how the Spirit guides the directee's life.

Very often, cross-cultural spiritual direction is considered simply as the case when the spiritual director meets a directee from another country. In this case, the director may see this as the sole difference, but in reality the range of foreignness can be much more diverse and complex. First of all, the spiritual director should examine what stage the directee is in: alignment with his or her home country; negating the home country; or in between the home country and the hosting country. Also, the directee's relationship with the mainline culture and/or with the diaspora community in the hosting country can determine the directee's spiritual life.

Furthermore, cross-cultural encounter is never limited only in terms of ethnicity and race. Cross-cultural encounter happens at almost every spiritual direction, considering the subcultures to which people can belong. Then, any spiritual direction, in a sense, is cross-cultural, and this element should be counted as an essential part, not as an addendum.

The concept of borderland is useful to enhance understanding of the crosscultural aspect of spiritual direction. The borderland itself is a place in between the two different national borders. Very often in this area, the border becomes porous, the division blurred, and in this way, the two cultures interact and create an alternative, a third culture. This "third space" is never dominated by one culture, nor simply a sum of the two cultures.

In cross-cultural spiritual direction, the space that a spiritual director and directee create is the third space, where two different cultures encounter one another. As a matter of fact, in studying borders, we can see how violent the border area can be. In general, border towns are dangerous and highly violent. For example, the Texas-Mexico border is notorious for its high rates of shooting by drug cartels and of human trafficking.

However, the same area creates a new culture, which can be transformative and life-giving. This transforming borderland is a heterotopia, which praises difference, rejecting any universal notion and embracing multiple and opposing messages. Hispanic, immigrant poet and feminist Gloria Anzaldua, in her Borderlands/La Fronterra, explains how her own inner conflicts prompted her to be an agent of transformation. The various disagreeing inner voices function as an agent of her own transformation, as well as that of the others. It is likely that a subculture that itself includes conflicting and dissonant elements has the energy to transform the whole culture.

In this borderland, mutual transformation happens, and it is of great merit to cross-cultural spiritual direction. In other words, cross-cultural spiritual direction assumes bi-directional, mutual transformation rather than a spiritual director's service to the directee. On the one hand, as Homi Bhabha contends, the residents who live in the borderland or the third space can experience empowerment and transformation when they can articulate their situation. Then, it is very clear that spiritual direction can be an agent to help a directee to articulate experiences, which include personal and internal conflicts as well as social and structural conflicts. In this way, the directee experiences empowerment.

On the other hand, for the director in a cross-cultural spiritual direction session, one of the most common experiences is to hold all the disagreement and oppositions created through the encounter in silence and prayer. As a partner with the directee, the director's horizon of understanding the world expands. In this way, the director experiences transformation.

The transformative power of borderland has been talked about in various areas beyond cultural studies and postcolonial discourse. In the theory of permaculture, related to eco-centered agriculture, difference and diversity are understood as essential elements to develop sustainable farming. The leading theorist of permaculture, David Holmgren, argues that edges are dynamic and productive parts of all natural systems where exchanges of materials and energy take place. According to Holmgren, increasing the edge is one important way to increase the system's intensity and productivity. When the different zones intersect, there is abundance and creativity. To do cross-cultural spiritual direction is to create a borderland in which each part can be transformed and experience sustainability and creativity.

A Model of the Borderland

As I said earlier, every spiritual direction is a cross-cultural encounter. In this section, I introduce a process to intentionally create a borderland community in a spiritual directors' training program. As much as spiritual direction has cross-cultural elements, so does the training program. In the discourse of spiritual direction, the variety of spiritual direction traditions have been discussed among denominations, such as Catholic spiritual direction, Pentecostal spiritual direction, etc. This denominational reference, however, assumes a set of people who share the same characteristic of spiritual tradition and compose a circle of spiritual direction ministry. This assumption comes from the notion that culture is quite static rather than dynamic, and homogeneous rather than diversified.

Then, how can we change the simplified mindset into a cross-cultural approach? There can be various creative ways, but I suggest that a fundamental change of modality should come from the training process. On a deep level, the identity of the spiritual director emerges from the formation process, and it is important to examine this formation process in terms of cross-cultural spiritual encounter. Generally speaking, in the US, spiritual direction programs have been heavily developed based on the lived experiences of the white middle class and do not pay much attention to this assumption and its consequences, grounding rules such as boundary and distance based on this assumption.

In cultural studies, assimilation is defined as a set of norms that require adherence to core principles and behaviors. Therefore, training or formation programs for spiritual direction can exist as assimilation models. Regarding the choice of a directee, A Code of Ethics for Spiritual Directors stipulates, "spiritual directors have a heightened consciousness of ecumenical, ethnic, and gender-related issues, as well as other contemporary concerns." This code of ethics suggests that the spiritual directors are not only aware of their own biases or prejudices, but are careful to choose not to work with such directees from different cultures, because of their possible lack of understanding of their particular needs, which could hurt the directees. At least, this ethics code signals any dangerous elements of discrimination. It does not, however, give any positive or active suggestions for the situation when the spiritual director experiences this cross-cultural encounter.

Although some training programs are more open to students from different minority groups, they have to adjust what they learn from their own cultures. The students who do not belong to the mainline culture not only suffer from the learning and evaluation, but also from applying it to their own practice. For example, Korean American spiritual direction trainees who want to serve the Korean community have to carry an extra burden to translate the cultural norms into Korean ways. Then, how can we create a cross-cultural training model, which is based on a spirit of mutual transformation? Let me share a good example of cross-cultural awareness.

I have taught in a spiritual director formation program for seven years at San Francisco Theological Seminary. My colleagues in this program who discerned the process to build a cross-cultural curriculum have been a great inspiration and encouragement for me to develop this essay. In 2009, the teaching faculty and staff sat together and pondered why this program does not have cultural diversity. As a result of this discerning process, faculty members admitted that the whole program does not reflect the multicultural reality of the Bay Area. This program has been a highly homogeneous group except for a few Korean students, and these Asian or Asian-American students are very passive and submissive.

After the discernment process, we launched a "black students' initiative project" and invited five African American students with full scholarships as a way to help create a cross-cultural learning environment. Through this process, all the learning community members recognized their own ignorance of cultural differences and, more importantly, that many parts of the teaching curriculum were constructed based on the dominant culture.

Through a process of the three years' reflection, the faculty recognized that there are various kinds of communicating and listening skills. In the first year, the tension among students was higher than ever imagined. Because the student group lives as a community for three weeks, cultural differences were brought to the fore, and there was a great depth of fear. Students did not feel comfortable talking about differences without fear of hurting others. However, through prayer and conversation, at least they were able to trust each other and retain their friendship.

In the second year, students and faculty felt more comfortable in talking about the differences and did not necessarily carry anger, fear, and frustration. For cross-cultural spiritual direction, it is pivotal to create a space for anyone to talk, express, and articulate personal experience without a feeling of rejection, judgment, or humiliation. Students later explained that it also required trust and respect.

After a three-year-long process, the staff and faculty concluded that it was a valuable learning tool to understand the cultural assumptions that had dominated this program. While keeping a tendency not to talk about politics and culture, it is easy to force new students to follow certain cultural norms without noticing it. Cross-cultural spiritual direction as mutual transformation between a spiritual director and directee only occurs when the two sides understand cultural differences and pay attention to the power dynamic in relation to these cultural differences.

Also, the best ways to show cross-cultural understandings are to have culturally diverse faculty, and demonstrate cross-cultural ways of being through teaching itself. This program has only a few minority teaching faculty members, although there are some minority students. As a result of this project, this program invited faculty from African American, Asian, and Mexican American communities to join them.

As a way of learning cross-cultural ways, I read a Korean poem to my class and later read the English translation. After that, I ask about students' feelings in response. Korean students feel more comfortable and confident while American students feel refreshed and challenged. Because American students rarely experience the appreciation of a poem recited in a foreign language and then translated into English, some American students feel uncomfortable. However, it is important to know that for other minority students whose mother language is not English, it is an ordinary experience. This cross-cultural teaching provides students opportunities to think about others' perspectives.

Out of the effort to create a cross-cultural environment, finally, our training program changed the curriculum by adding courses such as "Culture and Anthropology," "Gender, Class, and Race in Spiritual Direction," and "Body and Culture." These new courses emphasize pop culture, as well as power dynamics that can happen in spiritual direction. In this way, the curriculum itself changed and paid attention to multicultural reality and the possible emerging issues of justice and equality. Perhaps the curriculum needs to continue to change more in reflecting the cross-cultural encounter.

Tasks for Cross-Cultural Encounter

The challenge of cross-cultural spiritual direction is to create a borderland where all kinds of edges or marginality are invited and secured. In this sacred and safe space, all differences are considered as nurturing elements. However, in terms of practice, it requires certain knowledge. I will describe some concepts that can emerge through cross-cultural practices. The first one is difference. The concept of difference in terms of gender, race, and class carries various meanings, but in the context of cross-cultural encounter, the raised question is how to deal with difference in relation to power. As long as certain populations are defined as normative, those populations that are defined as different are also defined as deviant (emphasis mine). Cultural power gives a privilege to a group that belongs to the dominant culture so that they feel superiority; this consciousness brings patronizing or authoritarian attitude into cross-cultural encounter. Especially, in this case, the group of people who belong to the mainline culture has the power to name the experience and to select the content that will be remembered in cultural history. In this sacred space, all kinds of implication of difference can be deconstructed and the new way of seeing each other can emerge. In this new mode, difference should be a neutral term, not implying any superiority or inferiority.