[Author’s Note: My personal encounter with Mary Daly, a U.S. post-Christian feminist thinker, goes back to 1994, if not earlier. I stayed in Korea from 1994-1997 during which I translated two of Mary Daly’s early books, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation 하나님 아버지를 넘어서 (Seoul: Ewha Women’s University Press, 1996) and Church and the Second Sex 교회와 제 2의 성 (Seoul: Women’s News Press, 1997) in Korean. I carried with me to the U.S.A. our correspondences in the form of letters and documents mostly faxed to each other for the period of more than two decades. Later at one point I digitized them in images. Through these memoir series, I share some highlights of my memories with Mary Daly, her influence on my feminist thinking, and my own radical feminist journey to Magoist Cetaceanism.]
As I reread her recommendation letter (shown in part 6), a deep sense of sisterly bond between us resurges in me. I am deeply touched by the realization that we indeed met at the core of our beings. The course of our lives proceeds spirally. We never stand at the same place where we were. Life flows and grows. Our vision is getting deeper and bigger. For many years, I wondered about what my friendship with Mary meant to me and to her. I was “objective” to my understanding of Mary. Seeing and hearing about too many contradictory sides of Mary, I refrained myself from commenting about her personally and in public. Today in 2022, I am reaching the core of our bond, immutable sisterhood, by rereading her initial correspondences and writing the series of my memories of her.
Her recommendation letter comes to me as a text written in our hearts connected through the unbreakable bond. Now I can see with clarity who she was when she related to me, what she was thinking in terms of my unfolding academic career, and what our bond meant to us. In her letter, Mary foresees the storm building up on my way in the coming years and prepares me for it.
Simply because Harvard Divinity School was near where she lived, I was excited with the thought of being accepted there. However, Mary was realistic. She strongly warned me against my innocent hope. That was the beginning of her warning that awakened me to the harsh reality of entering and staying in academia over the course of years to come. I understood at that time that she warned me for two reasons. First, she did not want me to be deluded by the name that “Harvard” carried. Mary was keen about the worldly (read patriarchal) fame that was taken at face value by feminists. Her shrewdness would catch a tinge of deception. I was not surprised, however. My respect for her grew bigger because of her candidly poignant caution. After all, I knew deep inside of me that academia was only a means to achieve my goal. I was about to pursue higher education concerning feminist studies out of my need to gain self-affirmation; I wanted to understand myself, a woman of Korean origin, in cultural, historical, and philosophical contexts. Whether the goal of a Korean feminist self-affirmation would be compitable with an academic job or not was the question that put me in test for many years after I attained a Ph.D. degree. It was a painful ordeal for approximately 10 years. I finally stopped seeking an academic job and began shaping The Mago Work (referring to my matriversal intellectual/spiritual endeavor for the world including myself) primarily through social media including WordPress, Facebook, and Google etc. I was jumping off, one more time, the cliff in the dark, throwing myself to the course of my life’s destination. I can say that my teaching for universities meant to be transitory. But I could not believe it for many years. Feeling left alone to survive, I did not know elsewhere to stand beyond academia. I was divided. Ironically, what I actually did was to prepare myself to be free from academia. I was getting ready to be on my own feet, as an independent scholar, publisher, and activist.
Secondly, Mary knew that there was little chance that I would be accepted to it. She took writing her recommendation letter seriously. She was real, not hiding anything from me or trying to feed my own fantasy about her. She took me to her side and had me understand her predicaments. We both knew that I did not come from an academic background, as she described in her letter, “She has traveled widely and learned from her many experiences as a former Maryknoll Sister as well as from her formal studies. However, her intellectual drive and desire to address the needs of Korean women are now propelling her to pursue her education on a higher level” (shown in part 6). Thus, Mary’s recommendation letter held a great importance in my application. Mary was not the right person whom one would ask such a letter. But I dared to ask her. It was ever clear to me that she was in isolation among mainstream academics, as she wrote in her letter to me that I shared in Part 5, “I am quite cut off from that world at this time, however.” Morerover, she was being scapegoated among feminists. She wrote in the same letter:
About the horrors of white western society, I agree completely. Within this context, not only racism itself but accusations of racism and scapegoating of Feminists have been used to kill the Feminist movement. Old stuff–divide and conquer! And the women do it to each other (see Part 5).
In retrospect, Harvard Divinity School’s Theological Program would have been too confining for me. I would have never been happy there due to my intellectual inclination to be overly critical about Christianity. Dealing with Christianity would mean to make myself a post-Christian. After all, feminist Christian theology soon lost my interest. I am thankful that I was not accepted there. If I were admitted to it, I would have made myself a scholar of Mary Daly, a post-Christian feminist scholar, only if ever possible. I would have been silently mocked by many on all sides including pseudo-feminist academics. I don’t mean to blame them. Where would you end up with Daly’s scholarship in the academic job market? I may have been saved from that pit of my lot by not being accepted to Harvard’s theological program. But I had to face the similar plight with the study of my life’s joy, Magoism, ancient Korean Goddess tradition. In fact, I had no place to go either with Dalyan scholarship or Magoism.
Deep inside me, I did not wish to remain a post-Christian. I chose to dwell in the positive force. I did not need more patriarchal plots and dramas. By 1997, I was already indifferent to the teaching and church of Christianity. Being of Korean origin, I was culturally free from Christianity once I unswitched myself from its church. That was the difference between Mary and myself. Mary could not escape Christianity. A post-Christian or an anti-Christain is defined by Chrisitanity. She was culturally Christian. Her U.S. and Western identity did not leave room to be free from Christianity. It was not accidental that Mary did not opt out from teaching for a Catholic university. Boston College was a Jesuit run Catholic institution.
Patriarchy, controlling the means of human resources with the threat of physical lives, wouldn’t allow the powerful presence of feminists in their institutions including religions. Daly’s life proved it. And my life has proven it as well.
Daly’s recommendation letter was not a ticket to my success in any way. Rather, it marked my own fate to be bonded with her in eternal sisterhood. Her recommendation letter worked like a double-edged sword. While it was honor and joy on my part, it worked against my initial interest of seeking academic recognition. I don’t mean to say that Mary’s recommendation letter worked against me in any manner. On the contrary. I was someone who did not fit the metabolism of academia by nature. [This is the thought of Zhuangzi, the base of philosophical Daoism. One time I explained the Zhuangzi to Mary but did not impress her. She was unfamiliar with it. Who would be among Western feminist scholars? But she was interested in Buddhism, a topic to which I shall return somewhere.] Such irony constituted the dynamic of my connection to Mary Daly. Caught in the crossfire on multiple levels, Mary was bigger than the academic world or the Christian religion. Yet, she forced herself to the world of academics by choice. She also stayed with Christianity as a post-Christian or anti-Christian thinker.
Her chance for survival and thrival lay in the fact that she made herself “controversial” in academia and Christianity. That was the sad part about her fate. Such fate would be too tough for anyone. She could have left an academic position sooner. Or she could have made herself a feminist thinker beyond Christianity. But she did not. I wondered why she did not do so. It possibly was her Western cultural identity that did not give her an option. [Mary was not Nietzsche’s sister but the closest one whom I knew.] She did not have an alternative background to escape from her Western identity.
(To be continued)