. I arrive in New York for an MDiv at Union Theological Seminary (my parents' alma mater and also mom's OT PhD) in 1986, fresh from the refugee camp in Philippines where I'd trained teachers and read Carter Heyward's lesbian manifesto, A Passion for Justice, and still flushed with People's Power on Manila's streets. It had been my first return since 1972 when I was the last to leave, a 17 year old kana Manila Girl at the start of Marcos' Martial Law. How glorious to be  present for the inauguration of Cory Aquino. 

But this, this, was needful now. I've come to do my own work, to disentangle my evangelical-charismatic-pentecostal Oregon-Chicago-Minnesota conjunction of the last 6 years.  To  "stand up" in a theology, no more crouching to fit in. To braid the strands of my life so far.  So while Union liberated -- engulfing us in the politics of queer caucus, social justice,  and Black, queer, feminist, third world. liberation theologies -- it was also allergic to the "spiritual" not to mention white girls speaking in tongues (Tagalog, no problem, it was that angelic kind).

Well.  One liberates while it isolates its version of the unpalatable.

Nonetheless, those Seminary years are an exhilarating chance  to weave my "three revolutions" together.  A year later, this paper, Convergence, written for Bev Harrison's  Feminist Theology course in Spring 1988 is the basis of an MDiv thesis on exile and my memoir blog Manila Days...

So let's begin with the poem that frames Manila Days...
                            
We hunch, my sister and I,
in the paunch of our acacia tree
(we are playing hide and seek)
but army ants are crawling over her and me.
She tugs at her red cotton dress.
She pulls at her panties,
"I want to swing on the tarzan vine."
"No you can't, they will see," 
but she grabs it, swings,
scampers back up the tree.
Laling runs out, scolding,
"Johanna come down!"
"ayaw ko!"
"halaka, your nanay said no! "
"Johanna go down before Laling gets mad."
"you come too."
"sige na, I'll go with you."
Kerry, 1969

The warp of my story is joy "filling up and spilling over."  Joy to know "my soul is rested."  Joy that does not neglect anger or suffering, but takes them in. Joy that is the strongest passion for justice, which is a serious business, but also deserves its humor.  And though joy might be someone else's strength,  it isn't mine til much later on this journey.

The woof is the tension between revolution/destiny as I have come to understand them. A revolution overturns the old order. After a revolution, a society must rewrite its history, it must, that is to say, recreate its identity."  says H. McCabe  My life has had three current revolutions: 1972, 1976, 1981.  Each revolution  forced me into a new relation to the world and alienated me from the earlier community.  But how do we reconstruct identity;  are there constructive ways to leave old paradigms and move into new ones?  What criteria do we use to determine what to keep and what to change?  What happens when the revolution is about the criteria itself? These have been perennial problems to me, and this essay provides the raw material for the questions, it doesn't intend to answer them.

My sense of destiny keeps me moving into the morning ("whither thou goest..."). I believe that there is a certain "meantness" to life.  Destiny is not as much pre-ordained action, as a deeper order that might not be discerned at first glance. It is a mystery that calls us into relation to it; it calls us into the revolution, and out of it. My great dread is to lose a sense of that inner call.

Though destiny can call us into uncharted waters, my sense of destiny is closely bound to my deep respect for the "old ways".  If a revolution says that the old gods are an empty cistern, and  destiny says:  dig deeper. I stay and dig, believing I will find springs in the old well.  I am fascinated with shamanism, Native American spirituality, and the "deep structure" of ritual.

This culture is so fragmented and unrooted that its spirituality and commitment sometimes feel like thin topsoil. A Filipino friend said to me once, "you Americans are so 'ningas kogon. You're like a grass fire that burns everything up so fast. You don't know how to wait, or how to bend like the bamboo.  You always have to change things, even if they're already working. And you think the new way is always better." 

And so I stand, between the old ways of fatalism  and the new ways of self-determinism. I choose to focus primarily on the second revolution - my religious conversion experience - not because it is the most conventional answer to a "spiritual journey" question, but because I see it as the crux of revolution and destiny.  In the intervening years, it has been the most difficult part to reconstruct.
 
Chicago, 1972-73
After seventeen years in the Philippines, I was joining my family  who had gone  ahead to Chicago the year before. I was with family friends when the violent typhoon ravanged Luzon and Martial Law violated democracy in the Philippines.   My first revolution had two faces:  first, the drastic change in the Philippine power base overnight. It destroyed any sense I'd kept that one could trust the media, goverment in power, and that private life was safe.
 
The second was a struggle with my identity as an American. I was back from exile, but uncomfortable with these foreign gods. White on the outside, I was a strange amalgam inside of "Manila girl" and missionary kid. In many ways more sophisticated than my peers, I was dreadfully afraid of Americans: their sexual habits, their brazen behavior, their ability to argue. In their strange confidence, they presumed that they were right.  To me the arbitary world was so full of relativity. Only politics in the "old world" was  uncompromising.

So, when I told my story through my poetry, it was a deep fracture between the old world and the new.  I defined myself as a misfit, a missionary kid who, like the Vietnam vets, represented  an ignoble experience that Americans did not want to hear about. My own pain had no place because it didn't have a category.
 
By this time last year,
sampaguitas were crazy with bloom.
Now, the sharpen-scissor man pedals on
the lawn and I don't come.
The itchy worms plumb empty lines.
And the heat begins to whisper
through the dying kogon grass: halika,
kailangan kita, bumalik na, mahal.
                                                    1972 (17)
 
Triste Tropiques
 
midnight white
with lizard moult,
the vagabond cicadas hum.
then come the rat-dank ranks
they scuttle on soft paws
like sabotage around
around the ledge
above my bed.  The same sound  
drags its crooked claws on glass
as frozen branches
 shudder. Ay!
I heave from tropique
heat to queasy snow
in this strange, uneasy gloom,
and cancerous, the white sky
blooms.
                  1974 (19)
 
My next revolution began at the University of Chicago in consciousness research.  Since the political world could not be trusted, all cultures relative, and my own intelligence so much more experiential than my peers, I found real consolation in an area I knew best - the psychic world. I participated in the Sleep Lab, dream research, tried LSD, and became a kind of hybrid "subject" for Erika Fromm's work with hypnotherapy.  I was "Billy Pilgrim" traveling to spaces where the old God was cast out.
 
Crack the panic-draining hourglass,
Spill the crystals, only sand.
Shatter angry condescending idols.
Gold-leaf halos flake to tin
and you are not a slave
to their command...
1974 (song)
 
But God happened to me anyway, during the month-long hypnosis research project of Erika Fromm.  We were supposed to hypnotize ourselves daily for an hour, and  keep a journal of our experiences.  I'd find a quiet spot and descend by visualizing a descent in water, counting downwards.  When I felt I'd "landed", I'd request a "state" from my subconsciousness.  A number would register, which I understood to be my depth.  I usually registered at around 40. 
 
I was a tomato, an eagle, I regressed to five. I travelled to wild, imaginary places, one where I met grey-furred creatures with wings and no faces.

Sometime during the second week, I "went down" to 70, the deepest I had ever gone.  Because I was so deep, I tried to hallucinate, and when it didn't work, I returned to my chair and waited.
I heard,  "Kerry."  
   "What do you want, Lord," I responded. 
And suddenly, as a flash of light broke, I began to weep. 
"Let me in," the voice said.
"I can't let you in, you know that," I said, "but you can choose to come in on your own."  "
Let me in" it said again.  By now, I was truly sobbing, 
"You know I can't let you in, "I said  "but you can come in."  I
t didn't try.  It left me.  And I "woke up" wailing for my mother in my childhood bedroom.
When that subsided, I went down some stairs (still in another world) and entered the home of an old woman named Shanti. 
She talked about life , death, and the stars, as we stood by her window in the underworld.  I don't remember what she said.
 
I returned to waking life truly shaken.  Had I gone so far "down" I'd unearthed my old religious fervor without any resistance, and it wanted to come back?  Or, was that really a Voice outside of me, my ego-skin so fragile that I could finally hear God, that old God I had been trying to escape. Or maybe it wasn't old material rising up in me, but something- someone-whole Other.

I was afraid to go too far down after that. Instead, I went into a deep depression.
 
blackbellied the beast
turns and  trembles
between frozen ground.
 
and I am tired of mad dreams
and I am weary of this enduring vagueness.
 
The river, the water,
the encumbering earth,
the dark air of posthumous glory
every bridge belongs, at end,
to Berryman.
                1975 (20)
*****
 
Months passed, and my depression and dreams grew worse. It was as though some pandora's box had unlatched.  I woke up one night with a disturbing sense that I was being  assessed by other presences. I was frozen with fear. Finally, the presences left, not my own growing realization that I was attracting craziness because I couldn't take in wholeness.

I decided to drop out of school and travel until I could resolve it. A series of powerful dreams punctuated my journey out to Oregon. The first occurred on a camping trip in Colorado.  We had picked a site that I knew had something evil about it.  Like witchcraft, I thought. That night, from our site, we watched a dry lightning storm.   

  I am lost in a lime forest of white and green-lined skeletons of trees.  Even the forest floor is white lime.  It's a place of death.  Two people are trapped here - a witch and me.  We know that only one of us can escape. As I realized this, witch holds a knife above us, as we wrestle, she plunges it into my chest.  I can feel it. I die. And rise out of my body. I stand beside it. That feeling, that grim feeling, is the same feeling I have when I take the knitting by the fire. Because when I turn, I see the witch disheveled, her head in her hands.  And I know - the only way out of the forest is to die by another's hands.  She know now too, that she's condemned to the forest forever.  So I pick up my body to leave the forest.  After a while,  the body's too too heavy, and I let it drop, and keep walking.
 
I awoke from that dream with a solemn sense of resolution, but I didn't really know what the dream meant.
 
In the following weeks, I hitch hike to Oregon, visiting a "woodswoman" friend  outside of Eugene who suggested I visit someone up in Portland and at Mount Hood.  Without much else to do, I hitched up there.  In Portland, on the second day, I had a vision.

   I'm lost in a forest, but this time, it's full of life. I can communicate with the trees and the animals by telepathy.  I understand how the forest is alive, what the birds mean when they sang, what the trees are saying when they "swish".  I understand that the forest has an ancient code, not  "good" or "evil"  but  just in an indifferent way. I ask for permission to use its power to shatter a stone.  Just to test it, and my request is approved for this trial only.  I focus on a rock, and it explodes, fragments flying through the air.
   Then, colors change, and I'm trapped in a net - caught by people from University of Chicago who think I"m a wild child.  I am "returned" to U of C, the light is was red and murky. I feel such deep despair. I still have power in my hands so I try to communicate with it.    I  put my hand on my friend Carol's chest. It exploded into light, and she's changed.  Then I go to Larry' Goldbaum's brilliant Physics professor and say "your language is so crude.  Is English all you can speak?"   I put my hand on him, and the same thing happens.  Tears rolled down his face.
Last scene, the power and ability to hear in the other language is fading.   My consciousness is murky.  
Last thought as I wake: "how will I ever get back to the forest;  I will be worse here than I was before."
 
My body is whizzing when I come out of the dream-vision, and I say "I have to clear my channels."  I think the answer is Mount Hood and to stay there for a few days. I have to do this,  no matter what it took.  I needed to get out of the city and settle somewhere. I felt lost, filthy spiritually, and deeply depressed.

So I hitched up to the top of Mount Hood, and found a way back down halfway to the store I'd been told where to meet people.  But it was closed on Tuesdays.  I heard voices around back, and found two men reading the bible.  I went up to one of them, the one with the scraggly blond beard, and said, "do either of you know Joe Farrel." He looked up at me and said , "I'm Joe". He took me to lunch at the Cooke Ranch.
 
I knew a man was holy once
and now is only Christian
he said, "you can stay and hear the word,
or you can eat and run. It rains here
all winter, and the winter's just begun.
 
Chorus:
It  comes to this:
when you got no place you can call your own,
you gotta find it in your soul
well, I've run the land like a contraband,
trying to escape the cold inside me.
 
I said "yes, lunch would be fine,"
began to eat before they prayed.
And Mother Cooke read from The Book
in a Hallelujah Voice.
They praised the Lord like aspirin
till I felt a little more like rejoicing.
1976  Song (20)
 
It can only be said that I fell in love with God, with Jesus.  I was swept away by such joy during worship that I danced and sang until I was full of light. The purity of my desire matched the single-mindedness of my direction. I wanted to be aflame with the spirit, to give my life over to that loveliness. And because the lifestyle was an anathema to my earlier political and intellectual instincts, I embraced the Cooke Ranch dogma as a form of self-humiliation. 

Oregon was the culmination of my deepest revolution. I retold my history from a classical conversion perspective.  I rediscovered hope and a future, something to live - and die - for.   I found a blushing intimacy that was also bold and empowering.  This Christianity was "magic"; it too knew spirits and visions.
 
I remembered the dream, and I was afraid that if I went back to Chicago too soon, I would be worse than when I left. So I tried hard to make the revolution take control, to change my intellectual framework.  I burned up my journals, I cut myself off from my past.  I thought: I will do this like spiritual surgery, I will just stop my critical thinking to make this 'take.'

So when I returned to Chicago and  to U of C  to "face my dragons",  I had become a stranger (the word was out that I'd "gone off the deep end").  The consciousness work ended. But in those two years, from 1977 -79, I reconstructed a religious identity and found a new community.  To adjust Oregon religiosity, I joined a Catholic Charismatic prayer group and another prayer circle composed of black Chicago women. I sat at Friends meetings.  My criteria was simple at first - is it polluting, will it give me too much freedom? But later, I returned to an old criteria: does it feel authentic? A different tentative version of that revolutionary spirit returned with seminarians at McCormick  Seminary, who were connected to my father's work.
 
Should I go to seminary?  It was too soon to have this fledging faith challenged.  At the invitation of family friends,  I moved to Minnesota to work in refugee resettlement. It was important to find somewhere "safe",  a like-minded group that would support my religiosity. My impulse to sample and assimilate such various experiences might distract me from my Christian destiny. So I  moved into a Christian community, a "house church" composed of  post-college white, middle-class evangelicals in most of whom had conversion experiences in college. But I had been to the moon and they were dabbling in its phases.

So I started a women's task force to look at the issue of women and ministry since the group was still too conservative.  So slowly, I returned to a more familiar progressive politics, but it was slow, and I stayed until it was too painful to bear. 

In 1981, The third revolution, which had been rumbling for some time, erupted. I fell in love with a woman. 
 
There is iron in our blood.
Enough for the letting and labor,
less left for matyrdom.
Then, past pretending,
let us speak of elemental urges -
what roots the mandrake,
who breaks the soil.
1981 (26)
 
 "Imagine my surprise," sings Holly Near. And yet, it was no surprise. It was a royal flush; it was like flushing qrouse out of the tall grass unawares, and gasping mid-step as they take to the air. I sorted through my past again, piecing clues, and quilting together a story of my lesbian sexuality (I couldn't say the word for a couple of years). I talked with my parents, sisters, and select friends, who were supportive and helpful. I was frightened, exuberant, head over heels in love.  We were in many ways opposites, and we were collegues. I revelled in the ability to learn without condescension and collaborate without competition.

But it was a relationship of triangles - she was an atheist in a long-term relationship with a man, I was in a life-long relationship with God.   I felt being with her meant that I had forfeited my destiny. It was a spiritual tourniquet. I prayed for an answer, release, but nothing came. Then, spiritual exile, a split and hidden life for one and a half years.

I was again outsider, this time in a comfortable community that treasured faithfulness, family and piety. After coming out to the church elders, a number of tearful meetings ensued. They really didn't know what to do with me, and since I wouldn't repent, they thought (and so did I) that it would be better for me to leave.

In our last meeting together, one of the elders had a vision. He said, We are sitting with our backs turned towards a great fire. Every once in a while, someone will furtively glance across the fire and lock eyes with someone else, and a charge of life will run through them. Only Kathryn is standing, facing the fire.  But her eyes are closed.

The vision haunted me.  I longed for a community that had no sexual rules, no god.  Jenise and my relationship lasted five crazy  years. After we had broken up, I went back to visit the cabin where we'd spent so much time together. As I walked down the dirt road, I was struck by a keen, clear silence - no lamentation, no anguished prayers, no raging jealousy to expel.  I'd faced that fire. 

It took coming to Union to begin to refine the fire, and to sort through my own revolutions, to find a place where they converged.
 
In the intervening years, I worked in a refugee camp in the Philippines, nestled in the mountains by the South China Sea.  It brought home the first revolution, and in fact, I was present for the "people's power" revolution in 1986!  It set me on the path to   reconcile with the second revolution:  I applied to Union Seminary on February 7th, election day.  And it brought the third revolution to its climax.  I realized that whatever work I was to do in life, it had to be with women.
 
Poles through horses,
straw through poles,
Dorothy, being Dorothy,
was late to the shelter and
found Oz.  And by her sheer
honesty, made strange
companions friends, broke
the witches' spell, won herself
a following, but being
Dorothy,  longed mostly
for the Kansan busom of Aunt Em.
  1984
 
***
I gave my grandmother yarn once, fushia, royal blue, magenta, egg-yellow, lots of colors. I said, grandmother, please knit me something that doesn't have symmetry, just let the spirit move you. She looked at me startled, she who knit by pattern and plan. I'll try, she said a little half-heartedly.  Well, the shawl that came back to me was exquisite, it was wild, cultivated  canopy of color.  She laughed delightedly as she described it. A statement on her life as much as mine.
 
The story is a weaving, but not Penelopes' skein, woven in the daytime, unraveled at night. At thirty-two, I can see some themes shaped in the warp and woof. I don't know what the full pattern will be, but it progresses, it progresses.  It's a beautiful piece, and better laid on the floor for story telling by the fire or wrapped around somebody's shoulders, than curled up in the attic or hung on the wall. And I need all its colors, and I treasure its textures. The knotted sorrow and struggle, the silken pleasure. And I love the woman who throws the shuttle, who shifts the pedals with her bare feet, who laughs with her fellow weavers as our cloth grows.
 

From May 26 - June 9, 2022, I attempted a more feminist camino, investigating and visiting Black Madonnas at Chartres, Clemont-Ferrand,Marsat and of course the most beautiful at Le-Puy-En-Velay before setting out on the Via Podiensis with Gerald Shenk for a tough, abbreviated 9 days.

Checking in with Samnang for our interviews with the dreamers of statues, 2013.

 I want to interrogate the Oikouménē, but let's just call it the ecumene. We know the ecumene as the “whole inhabited earth," but which bodies, what persons, inhabit it? Do we also include ethereal bodies – hungry ghosts, boramey, apparitions of Mary – as social beings? Sociologist Avery Gordon has noted that, "the ghost is not simply dead or a missing person, but a social figure" (Gordon 2008, 2 ).  

Latour (2005) has pressed us to "reassemble the social," to rethink what we mean by this over-used term. I ask, how can we “reassemble our ecumenes” to be more elastic with the boundaries of our real, to learn different ways of being, so that the worldviews of those we study, advocate for -- and resist --are constitutive of a range of personhoods?  I will suggest that we must account for other bodies: bodies of what we might call entities or actants. Some are gendered, but in multiple ways – asexual, dimorphic, hermaphrodite – some are not. Some are invisible, spectral, some appallingly visual, others are inorganic. Some entities occupy other bodies; some are aggregates of other entities.  I am interested in whether, or how, these bodies do what we humans call knowing and acting, but in different ways. This has methodological implications, and I focus here on Cambodia's spectral other-than-human world.

In refugee camps,  living rooms, and among friends, I’d heard personal refugee accounts of those who had endured Cambodia’s “travesty of history” from 1975-1979 when the Khmer Rouge walked into the capital Phnom Penh and declared “Year Zero, “ inaugurating a revolutionary communist regime in which a quarter of the population was exterminated or died of malnutrition.  While all cities were evacuated, the most stunning was Phnom Penh, where members of the former regime were assassinated or sent to interrogation centers such as Toul Sleng. Choeung Eck, a field of mass graves outside of town, is the most notorious of the hundreds of “killing fields.”  The regime ended in early 1979 when newly socialist Vietnamese invaded, occupying Cambodia for a decade until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1991.  

This political world -- saturated with violence -- is set within a Cambodian Theravada worldview. Interaction with supernatural creatures: boramay, neak ta, and preta, is integral to Cambodian cosmology. Boramey (or parami) are spirits associated with Buddhism and manifest benevolent supernatural power. Boramey can be the attribute of a statue, such as the Leper King (Hang, Gamlan and Deb 2004) or a manifestation of mytho-historic figures such as generals or kings who possess a medium (Bertrand 2001). The boramey often speak through dreams. Neak ta, on the other hand, are guardians of the land. Friends noted that during the Khmer Rouge era, neak ta were disrupted and the palm trees would not bear fruit. Preta, hungry ghosts, inhabited desecrated holy spaces such as Buddhist wats used for storage and torture (Chandler 2007). The “killing fields” were saturated with phantasmic terror, populated with roaming preta because the near-dead had been violated, and when dead, were not properly buried (Levine 2010). They could not continue on to the next life.

Are these creatures locked into Cambodian worldviews? Do they slip out of their "representation” and visit others?  I had encounters with preta and boramey in my time with Cambodians both in Asia and the United States. My spooky meet-up with a preta occurred on a travel seminar to Phnom Penh coordinated through San Francisco Theological Seminary in 1992.  A decade after the Khmer Rouge departure, the city still seemed bedraggled and slightly surreal, residents four-to-a-bicycle plying Monivong Avenue, dark nights interrupted by generator-driven pools of light.  Bats hung like overripe fruit in the naked trees near the UN Transitional Authority compound. Even the most prominent wats were derelict and forlorn, decapitated heads of the Buddha laid out near their stupas. So it was not entirely surprising that after a visit to Choeung Ek, my American roommate looked wan. She sat at the corner of her bed and shot me a nervous glance,   “When you lie down, do you see anything?”  When I said no, she hesitated, “When I lie down, I see three men with machine guns at the foot of my bed.”  Chills shot up my back. The room suddenly felt ominous and cold. We improvised an exorcism, and when we ran out of ideas, we went to sleep.  I was startled awake by the pressure of a ghostly body on top of me.  I plopped a pillow over my head, praying feverishly, until—whoosh—the room felt clear.  “A preta,”  mused a Cambodian friend when I relayed the story later.  There seemed to be many preta prowling around Phnom Penh.  

Ghosts, neak ta, devata as inhabitants of our worlds, are social actors often denied a voice in the stories we tell about war, survival, and post conflict, even though they are everywhere.   In theological work on conflict, I don’t often hear about prophetic dreams and signs that help survivors map catastrophic events, or statues, amulets or tatoos that protect border crossings, or apparitions of  Mary or Kwan Yin who appear to Vietnamese boat people when their engines stall or pirates trail them. What do we do with Jesus appearing to a Buddhist prisoner of the Khmer Rouge with advice that saves him? Family stories like these disappear from the “refugee narrative” upon arrival in the United States, and they are not (often) in our theological texts either.  Langford, in writing about Lao refugees struggling with American hospital protocols, asks, “How do we make sense of…ghostly figures…without “anthropologizing” or “psychologizing” them, that is, without reducing them to examples of cultural belief or psychic symbols of trauma?” (Langford 2005, 43; see also Chakrabarty 2000, 105). 

I, like most academics, dismissed interaction with the spirits, trees, and dreams as peripheral to the real revolutionary work of materialist theory and political theology. I argue here that scholars, activists, peace professionals of the North must develop a broader “ecology of knowledge”  (Santos 2004) to learn how certain communities interact with the invisible realms and employ different contours of being and knowing: that statues call out in dreams, for example, or hungry ghosts haunt.

Ecumene in search of an advocate
There is surprisingly little work in the field of religion, conflict and peacemaking that investigates the relationship of mythic texts, phantasmic realms, and non-rational epistemologies (dreams, apparitions, omens, and signs) that offer individual healing, community guidance, and help with coexistence. Embarking on an "anthropology of the imagination,” my current work takes seriously the social imaginary of local religious communities and those who seek out the invisible world for guidance and solace. It is focuses particularly on religious dreams in “undreamy times” (Mittermaier 2010). I am currently studying the role of epiphany dreams during and after revolutionary conflict. In the cases of Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Francis, the figures appeared in the dreams of Khmer Buddhists and Roman Catholic Vietnamese settlers, communities in tension.   

The field of conflict studies and various peacebuilding organizations has developed since World War II. Mennonite peacemaker John Paul Lederach’s (2005) concept of conflict transformation considers life-giving change processes to reduce violence,  increase justice in social structures, and transform human relationships.[1] Lederach now plays a key role in the academic field of religion and peacebuilding which emerged in the late 1990s. There are a growing number of Global North Christian, Jewish, and Muslim colleagues focusing on interfaith dialogue, just peacemaking, theological sources of peace, faith-based diplomacy, forgiveness and reconciliation, and transitional and strategic justice. [2]  But they do not refer to dreams, visions, apparitions and miraculous interventions as a part of their work. And what of religious violence? Mark Juergensmeyer (2003) is a proponent of “strong religion,” an argument for the unique nature of contemporary religious political violence and the role of “cosmic war.” In the minds of those engaged in religious conflict, these current wars are conducted simultaneously on earth and in heaven.[3] He and others writing on religious violence do not show how these religious forces also elaborate on the devils and hungry ghosts, the preta, in these cosmological worldviews.  Peg Levine, in Love and Dread in Cambodia. Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge argues that Cambodia trauma literature and “genocide literature” rarely refer to spirits, unfinished rituals and the attendant “cosmological angst"  (Levine 2010).

I have worked with resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States and a U.S. “processing center” in the Philippines from the late 1970s through 1990s and then studied post conflict reconstruction after Cambodia’s 1992 Peace Accords. From 2005 to 2010, I was a US faculty for an intensive, applied conflict transformation MA program in Phnom Penh. The Applied Conflict Transformation Studies program draws practitioners from peacebuilding programs throughout the region (Nepal, Burma, Sri Lanka, India, Cambodia, Philippines).  These peacebuilding programs are often faith-based INGOs such as World Vision, Mennonites, Quakers, Caritas and Catholic Relief Services with local NGOs that are Buddhist or Muslim. [4] Lederach in The Moral Imagination acknowledges the messy, inspired, and indeterminate ways conflicts often are resolved (2005).  But peacebuilding NGOs are driven by donors who have pressed to show measurable results, not an easy task in the field.  Because of this, NGO staff aren’t often encouraged to reflect “soft” problems of the conflict -- the cultural, psychological and religious dimensions of the social problems they are called upon to address.  In many way, my quest here to to ask what it would mean for peace practitioners, not only clergy and religious adepts, to consider a multivaried ecumene. 

Ecumene as an empire of exclusion
A claim to “reassemble” the oikouménē requires some attention to its genealogy.  Christianity refers to the oikouménē, a Greek term, as the church and the church’s intent to bring the gospel to the whole world. The ecumenical world is made up of churches united in their difference.  But the notion of the ecumene has an imperial history. On a conceptual level, it maps out the spaces we consider “inhabited.” It distinguishes between realms of the known and realm of the unknown. In this sense it foregrounds Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notion of Abyssal thinking, which I will refer to later. Greeks divided their oikouménē as “the inhabited world” into three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa (Libya in Greek sources) (Stewart 2012, 143). Beyond these worlds were barbarian lands. When Rome colonized the Hellenized world,  Romans took oikouménē to mean first “the entire Roman world,” then “the whole inhabited world,” and with it, their imperial practices (Horsley 2003, 22; Nadella 2016). In keeping with this, New Testament writers referred to the oikouménē as the imperial world fifteen times in the gospels. Joseph and Mary, for example, return to Bethlehem due to an imperial decree that “all the world” (oikouménē) be subject to census (Luke 2:1).

The Greek notion of ecumene as exclusion was also replicated by Rome. The "terra incognita," regions that were not  mapped, were populated by fantastic and grotesque people with heads like dogs and cannibals. When Constantine Christianized the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire's maps of political territories placed Jerusalem at the center and Christ overlooking the world, attended by angels (Stewart 2012; Romm 1992). This dynamic of dominance and exclusion continued through the middle ages. Cartographers inscribed imaginary creatures of the terra incognita at the margins of the map.  At the advent of modernity, one can see the “known world’s” mythology of the margin.  The famous Nuremberg Chronicle (or “Book of Chronicles”) appeared in 1493 at the triumph of Catholic Spain’s Reconquista over the Moors of Andalusia. Its biblical world history shows three continents populated by Noah’s sons: Shem in Asia, Ham in Africa and Japeth in Europe. Shunted to the terra incognita are the excluded races: one-footed Sciopods, reverse-footed Antipods, bearded women, and one-eyed monsters (Friedrich 2004, 749). In 1507, a decade after the Nuremberg Chronicles, Waldseemuller’s World Map redrew the known world.  One of the most important maps in the history of European cartography, it reveals a world ripe for conquest: a continent separated from Asia and a new ocean: the Pacific. Though not visually present, Incas, Mayans, and other New World “savages”  replace the Sciopods at the margins.

Dussel (1993) claims that the modern ecumene came into being when Europe advanced against the Islamic world to the east and “discovered” the Americas to the west. In so doing,  Europe was able to reposition itself at the very center of this newly conceived ecumene. He asserts that contemporary modernity was born when Europe, by posing against an “other,”  could colonize “an alterity [otherness] that gave back its image of itself.”  This “American crucible” forged our modern conceptions of ethnicity, race, gender, nation, labor, and economic development (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). For decolonial theorists, the architecture of this “coloniality of power” is based on an epistemic falsehood, a pensiemente unico  in which no alternative ways of thinking are possible, those "incognita" once again forced to the margins.

Ecumene beyond the Abyss  
Portuguese decolonial theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues for a “cognitive justice” that challenges this current pensiemente unico, a kind of cognitive ecumene that dominates what we claim to "know."  He offers the spatial metaphor of  “Abyssal thinking”  as an epistemological divide dominated by Western epistemologies that pose as valid, true, rational, and normal. On the non-Western side of the divide, a newer version of the medieval terra incognita, there is no real knowledge. “There are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific enquiry” (Santos 2007, 80).  This reality is particular and incomprehensible (Santos 2014, 120).  

To engage post-Abyssal thinking, says Santos, we must embrace the anti-imperial “epistemology of the South”  (2014).  This is not a geographical South, but a multiplicity of epistemological souths, counter-knowledges emerging from peoples’ struggles.  Taken together, they produce an “ecology of knowledge” that widens the territory of the knowable to collapse the divide between ways of knowing. De Sousa Santos concedes that preparing the conditions for a post-Abyssal thinking is a difficult, complex task. Western theory has to be deprived of its abyss(m)al characteristics, prominent among them a claim to universality and the monopoly of truth, what might call its empire of exclusion.

How do we offer a critical engagement with a post-Abyssal way of knowing, to develop an ecology of knowledge? How do we balance our incredulity, or temper the stories of others, or interrogate the inexplicable?  A post-Abyssal reflection on my encounter with the preta in Phnom Penh would set it within a rich discussion in academic circles about an affirmation of the “extra-ordinary” (Goulet and Miller 2007), the “super-natural” (Strieber and Kripal 2016; cf. Kripal 2010), and indigenous ways of knowing (Tinker 2004). These scholars ask how one investigates the invisible, ghosts, rocks, or extraterrestrial creatures --  entities outside modern rationality.

This wider ecology of knowledge must include a new ontologies, new notions of the social.  We return to Latour.  In his controversial critique of the fundamental basis of sociology, he defines the social “not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (Latour 2005, 7). This reassembling refers to a radical relationality best understood by Latour and others as an assemblage. An assemblage thus clusters every “thing,” such as a statue, God, a landmine, utterances, happenings, or events as composites rather than, as is traditionally held, isolated substances (Bonta and Proveti 2004).  In this sense, Latour reassembles all human action within a constellation of relation to other entities which are also attributed agency. This is very radical. Not only do humans or sentient beings have agency, but also what we've called "inanimate" entities (vinegar, guns, hammers, paper). He calls these "inanimate" entities quasi-agents or “actants” that (or who) participate in social interactions. Actants are anything that “modif[ies] other actors through a series of” actions (Latour 2004, 75). Agency is thus determined as one thing modifying another. Vital materialists and speculative realists argue that actants are garbage dumps, video games, and cyborgs. They are not objects but subjects of a flat, ontologically plural community. As political ecologist Jane Bennett argues, if they are subjects, then they are politically constituted and demand a hearing (Bennett 2010).  But what does this really mean? These particular actants  have agency in relation to other agents. But is there any communication between humans and other than human actants?

Dream worlds and metaphysical bodies
In this reassembled ecumene, which affirms an plurality of persons and bodies communicating within an ecology of knowledge, I have been investigating the cross-cosmological significance of statues who appear in dreams, requesting to be recovered from rivers, caves, and ricefields. The cases I offer are based on a particular kind of appearance: epiphany dreams. Epiphaneia means “manifestation” (Miller 1997). Epiphany dreams consist of the appearance to the dreamer of an authoritative personage who may be divine or represent a god, and this figure conveys instructions or information.  Dreams offer an epistemological access of encounter for overlapping ontologies, where humans and spirit languages can be understood. Western psychological language refers to a dimension “within” the person, while in other cultures are attributed to an exterior realm. Dreams are considered borderlands of the visible/invisible, dead/living, awake/sleep in which figures come ”from outside.”  As "porous selves" these dreamers consider their bodies available for such visitations. Integrated into the cosmos, the person with a detachable soul travels out of the body and spirits can travel into the dream.

Here is a brief overview of those stories.

I first learned about statue recovery from a Vietnamese Catholic priest at  a Vietnamese immigrant fishing village along the Mekong near Wat Champa. The priest relayed how, when Wat Champa was a Khmer Rouge commune in the 1970s, an elderly Khmer man was afflicted by a recurrent dream.  Each night, a “lok ta “ (old man) appeared, saying “Take me out of the river and I will help you.”  Deep into the third night, the man slipped to the Mekong and found a statue stuck in the mud. He hid it. The lustral water he poured over statue healed both humans and beasts.  Who was this powerful spirit? The statue’s identity was a mystery until a ragtag band of Vietnamese settlers arrived in Wat Champa and recognizing it, called out,  “St Francis Xavier!”  For several years, the embattled Khmer and Vietnamese communities shared admiration for the power of the saint and his statue.

In 2008, almost thirty years after the Khmer Rouge era, another Catholic statue, this time of Mary, was recovered from the waters. During the most auspicious days of the year—Khmer New Year—Buddhist Vietnamese fisher-folk pulled an encrusted, six-foot bronze statue out from the confluence of rivers that meet at the small village of Areykasat, across from Phnom Penh. When the Vietnamese fisher-folk saw what they pulled out of the river, they brought it to shore with the intention to sell it. Their Catholic Vietnamese neighbors immediately recognized the statue as Our Lady of Lourdes. The Buddhist fisher-folk set a price so steep (ten thousand riel) that their Catholic neighbors despaired. That night, in the Buddhist fisherman’s house, where Mary’s statue was kept, her spirit circled the ceiling, so frightening her host that he convinced his friends in the morning to donate their prize to the church before she cursed them. The Vietnamese Mary Queen of Peace parish built a high grotto for the statue and called her “Our Mother of the Mekong.” It was assumed that the statue had been dropped overboard by Vietnamese Catholics fleeing the violent anti-Vietnamese purges of the 1970s. Four years later, during the 2012 ASEAN meeting in Phnom Penh, another statue of Mary with the infant Jesus was recovered from the Mekong. In this case, a Buddhist Vietnamese fisherman dreamed the directive form Jesus  to pick up another statue near the place in the river where the first Mary was discovered. Both statues are now at Mary Queen of Peace church and are greatly venerated, drawing weekly busloads of pilgrims from Vietnam. Questions linger about these statues and the ways they have transformed this small Catholic Vietnamese fishing village, a community at the periphery of the Khmer political body.

In 2013, I interviewed key Catholic priests associated with both Wat Champa and Areykasat, attended the large celebration Mass of the first Mary on Cambodian New Year, April 16. One week after that mass celebration, my research shifted dramatically to include two dream recoveries of Khmer statues. My colleague Samnang Seng is a well known peace activist in Cambodia who has designed and directed interfaith projects. These two Khmer incidents of dream-inspired rescues occurred within a month of each other, the first on Cambodian New Year in Stung Treng, close to the Lao border. Stung Treng was originally part of two Lao kingdoms before the French ceded it to Cambodia.  A 14 year-old desperately poor settler dreamed that two monks guided him to a nearby cave to rescue statues. He found seventy-one small Buddhas high on a ledge in one of the cave’s caverns. Though he had strict orders from his dream visitors to “take the statues to the royal palace,” the statues languish in the Stung Treng Provincial museum.

Fourteen days later on tngai sel, Buddhist new moon day, a rice farmer was told in a dream to “take them out”. He went to his rice field in Banteay Meanchay, the far west of Cambodia and discovered two 12th century Bayon-era Hanuman statues with their pedestals. The dreamer and his wife were escorted to Phnom Penh by Venerable Monyreth, a high-ranking monk to deliver the statues to the Deputy Prime Minister.  Since then, the family has been deeply embedded in the Hanuman myth, particularly Mr. Lim’s son and sister-in-law, who have themselves become conduits for transmitting Hanuman’s wishes to the Cambodian people. Mr. Seng and I visited Stung Treng and Banteay Meanchay  since the initial meetings and Mr. Seng has returned to both sites to meet with family and government officials.

These five incidents of statue-rescue share several attributes. They occurred through dreams on auspicious days. The dreamer was not a religious specialist but a poor member of a marginal community. The dream recovery affected the dreamer, their family and community, affixing them to the mythic narrative of a statue rescue. That these statues are Catholic, Buddhist and Hindu, and the dreamers Khmer and Vietnamese offers an intriguing oneiric ecumene (cf Hannerz 1989) of cosmological détente, an assemblage of human, statue, and environmental actants.

Conclusion
This is an admittedly brief conclusion for so dense an argument. The ecumenes we have traveled have been the production of Eurocentric modernity, which has obscured other knowledges, peoples, and realities from our “whole inhabited earth.”  This is particularly problematic for marginal communities in conflict zones who rely on "invisible aid" but also experience spectral trauma when their cosmos is torn apart.  I have considered how Cambodia’s conflict zone in its post-conflict setting offers a critical decolonial challenge to that modernity.

If we consider this version of a reassembled ecumene, we are offered a radically different way to experience and interpret the world, one in which simultaneous other worlds coexist with the quotidian world we occupy. We are left with many questions. What is a post-Abyssal approach to those whose encounters with metaphysical worlds are rich and uninterrogated? Since the interpretation of dreams is such a long historic and varied practice across cultures, what criteria might we use to evaluate the veracity of a multi-faith epistemology? How do we “discern” the spirits in this pluriversal ecumene?  If we take as a form of real the intervention of spirits through their statues into our hybrid ecumene, how do we continue to interpret the statues as actants? How do we as scholars interact and interpret such a ecumene reassembled? 

*********************************************************************
*Adapted from Kathryn Poethig, "Reassembling the Oikoimene," Mission in Context, Vol 5, Theology in the Time of Empire Series, Edited by Jione Havea, Boston: Lexington / Fortress Academics, 2020
[1] John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation. (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003).  He distinguishes it from conflict resolution which is based on a negative assessment of conflicts which must be ended, inferring that they can actually be resolved in short-term interventions. He also critiques conflict management, which while understanding conflicts entrenched processes, assumes that communities can be controlled and that the purpose of this management is to take care of the conflict, not root problems.
[2] Raymond Hemlick and Rodney Peterson. Eds. Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, & Conflict Transformation (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002); In the United States, the key religion and peacemaking graduate programs include University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Eastern Mennonite University’s Peace Studies program, Fuller School of Theology, and Emory University’s Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding. New initiatives include the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s partnership with CDA Collaborative Learning and Search for Common Ground to convene leading global experts to develop better measure the effectiveness of inter- and intra-religious action for peacebuilding.
[3] Key works include Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999);  Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam: Theory and Practice (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003);  Marc Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000);  Douglas Johnston, Ed. Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003: and Daniel Philpott, Ed. The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation; The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice, (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); David Smock Ed. Interfaith Dialogue and Peacebuilding (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2002); Glenn Stassen, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War  (Pilgrim Press, 2008); Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, 1996), David R. Smock,  Religious Contributions to Peacemaking: When Religion Brings Peace, Not War, PeaceWorks, no. 55, ed. David R. Smock (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
[4] There are several ways that ecumenical peacebuilding has developed in Southeast Asia. There is the CCA School for Peace, now in Cambodia, and the Philippine-founded People’s Forum on Peace for Life, of which I have been a long-term member. Peace and development “regimes” develop differently in each country of conflict, which includes an amalgam of government entities, military, academic programs, institutes, multilateral funders, a range of civil society organizations which include religious organizations, and  international NGOs. I am most familiar with these in the Philippines through the CPP-NPA and post-conflict Cambodia.

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Excerpts of HORNE'S reflection on Courtney Work
Mekong Review, January 2017
mekongreview.com/ghost-stories/

In her article “The Persistent Presence of Cambodian Spirits: Contemporary Knowledge Production in Cambodia”,* Courtney Work argues that the presence of spirits in Cambodian culture has been made a subjacent subject in the dialogue of empire, but that the human culture of this complex nation cannot be properly explained without reference to the “other-than-human world”.  The subject of colonial discourse on spirit presence in Cambodia is a winding and absorbing story, with a number of French Orientalists of the early twentieth century reversing earlier negations of persistent beliefs in spirits. In Phnom Penh, in February 2016, I interviewed young Cambodians for a novel I was working on. I found strong patterns of spirit belief emerging through the interviews, but with evidence of impacts made by education and outside cultural influences.

Courtney Work’s article points out the absence of spirit power in the chronicles of colonisers. Early Indianologists, when confronted by Cambodian spirit practice, erased the matter from their studies, “attempting to purify lived practice to more closely match the texts they encountered”. But, while the merging of Khmer animism from the second century AD with Hinduism and later Buddhism was seen by many to pollute the introduced creed, its denial would never be universal. By the early twentieth century, some French colonial functionaries were letting the spirits back in. Indeed, some fell in love with otherworldly Khmer-ism and began collecting monks’ tales from pagoda schools and by the 1920s were publishing collections of Gatiloke stories for consumption both in Cambodia and France.

As Work writes, in practical respects, “spirit-energies continue to flow under the civilising veneer of empires”. Her article is organised around the boundaries between the living and the dead, which are crossed by the spirits and their living families, boundaries which are “in constant states of closure and opening, of blurring and resolving”. Neak ta spirits preside over a certain places and today farmers ask their permission before changing any aspect of the landscape. In other ages kings purchased land from these spirits and in exchange became accepted by peasant communities as arbiters of justice and healers. In the period of restoration following the mass desecration of spirit power under the Khmer Rouge, spirits of the land have been renewing their territories and have been present in fights against de-forestation. Work mentions two recent studies which claim that neak ta spirits are present at events of mass faintings in factories – showing outrage that a building was erected in their space and demanding compensation for distressed workers.

These spirits of place can merge with deceased persons. Even at the jungle tomb of Pol Pot, locals claim to be witness to his gradual transformation into an ancestral master-of-the-earth figure, which will protect future villagers. When reading this I was reminded of the folk story of the kounlok bird, where two sisters are abandoned in the jungle by their avaricious mother and metamorphose into spirit-birds with their haunting half-human cry. Interestingly, Work points out that, in the context of Buddhism, spirits can change from being amoral retributive powers to forces reflecting moral goodness. After death, all that remains is the spirit power, and Pol Pot had power. It is expected that all the dead will remain powerful forces in the Cambodian landscape and their efficacy is not restricted to Khmer people. Work reports that Cham, Chinese and Vietnamese spirits all merge and through spirit relationships, living ethnicities may co-inhabit territories.

The time when convivial long-term relationships of care and reciprocity can best be cultivated with the spirits of the recently dead is during the annual fifteen day Pchum Benh festival. Strong public acceptance of these processes was revealed in the forty interviews I conducted in Phnom Penh. All the participants were students and hospitality students aged between eighteen and twenty-nine years and had experienced at least five years of English-language training. I chose this demographic partly in order to investigate the impact that Western education was having on the beliefs of young people.

...77.5 per cent, support Work’s claim that there is a deep well of belief in the community, which may be flowing under the radar of official attention. When I asked about bad spirits resulting from violent death... Where at least one of the participant’s parents had completed the Certificate of Upper Secondary Education, the belief in spirits dropped to 40 per cent...Of the believers I interviewed, there were three who claim to have personally witnessed witness the death of a human being because of a raven visit...One interviewee claimed she had been close to three people who died after raven visits, all on the very day after the visit. Many related stories of strong belief, with their families throwing rocks onto house-roofs to scare away the birds...Participants held many different beliefs about where spirits lived. Some said in the toilet, some said under the house with the animals, another was clear that the spirit stayed outside where firewood was kept, and yet another said under the steps or anywhere that humans didn’t go.... all were clear that the proper maintenance of a spirit house and replenishment on a weekly basis – some said more often – with fresh fruit, coffee and maybe doughnuts and sweets, was essential to keeping spirits happy....

There was a rate of 95 per cent participation at Pchum Benh. This compares to the 60 per cent who believed that unhappy spirits needed extra attention and appeasement. Of the participants who attended the festival without strictly believing in its need, many expressed a feeling that attendance at the festival was a kind of community responsibility....

The research interviews I conducted show strong persistence, but Western education and culture are beginning to erode the unity of these beliefs. With enormous competition for advancement a present force in Cambodian society, the question remains whether spirit beliefs will prevail, and whether the ancient connections to place, the neak ta spirits and the environments they protect, will still be observed by the emerging generations.

World Social Forum was in Montreal in 2016 under the proposal: Another world is needed. (It seemed a more urgent call than the claim that is was "possible". )

But how do we get there? Conway's review of the WsF and the Edges of Global Justice  offers a good overview of a feminist response to pensiamente uno, a radical critique of the dominant epistemologies of the West. This feels particularly "needed" -- crucial and  urgent -- since we must continue to reassemble the way progressive orthodoxies structure revolutionary presents and futures. We are ever reforming. I am particularly concerned here with a radical imagination.  If our world is on its way to permanent disfigurement, and according to Bifo, semiocapitalism is blitzing our psyches ( just two of the "wages of sin"), what are our cognitive options?

One alternative: Boaventura de Sousa Santos' Epistemologies of the South,  a dense decolonial brew. This argument is about the coloniality of power - the power to decide what should be studied, civilized, patented, harvested, and litigated.  See below -- this is a good review of this work that includes de Landa, Dussel, Escobar, and others. All men, from a Latin American philosophical frame.

But where are we after we scale abyssal thinking?   Yes to a "postcolonial or postimperial conception of rights, and they are: the right to knowledge; the right to bring historical capitalism to trial in a world tribunal; the right to a solidarity-oriented transformation of the right to property; the right to grant rights to entities incapable of bearing duties, namely nature and future generations..." (Barreto, below, p 26). But are rights redeemable? 

Are there other ways to know "justice"? 

We're still in the middle of a massive shift from positivism, scientism, one-world-ism, but how does a paradigm dissolve to reset the next one? If this is post- post-modern, post-structuralist. What are we pre ?  We seem to be in the midst of parallel paradigms, or a mix of them interacting, like "scattered hegemonies."  I pick up Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  It's like Mr Toad's wild ride (a mix of Wind in the Willows and the ride at Disneyland.)

I keep asking the same questions: do all these new post-Western re-"orient"-tations shift the ways we act and be in the world?  Frame our problems? Who is included in the solutions? What happens to the way we live if our justice is hyper-dimensional and space/time is heterogeneous, if it circles in on itself? 

  1  Other citizens
 
     I met Sophal at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh.  We picked up our Angkor beers, and ambled through the scattered chairs to bar stools set at the long mahogany ledge by an open window overlooking the Tonle Sap river.  It was almost sunset, and we sat for a moment in silence, observing the flow of river vendors and new refugees arriving in the wake of flooded ricelands.

     We spoke of  this: Cambodia's relentless poverty, the deluge of foreign aid, its possibilities, and we reminisced on old times in Oakland as the moon rose over the rippling water.  He was Undersecretary in one of the Government ministries, and he talked about the heavy political  burdens of his party, the temptations of a $50/month salary, his upcoming trip to Singapore, his family in Oakland.  I plied him with questions about government corruption and exile.  This was, after all, the purpose of my work--a focus on Cambodian Americans who have returned to work in the government and NGO in Phnom Penh.

        Sophal and I  had worked in Oakland together at a Cambodian-based organization, meeting with probation officers and chasing after errant boys of Oakland's killing streets. Oaktown Crips, they called their gang because blues were their colors, and Bloods were red.  "Bloods, man, they the color of the Khmer Rouge."  We were now in the land of the Rouge.  "Imagine the Crips boys here?" I laughed, half serious.  He didn't even turn at the question.   "Those boys would not survive," he said.  Our talk meandered after this through the exquisite promise and pain that trans-locations inflict. "I call my daughter each week,"he said. (I concealed my shock--at $5 per minute.) " I remind her to do her homework.  She asked me if she could cut her hair.  O.K., I said, but talk to your mother. Sometimes I am so lonely," he said, "that I play the karaoke and sing aloud--500 miles, songs like that." I nodded,500 miles  was a popular song in Phnom Penh this fall.  "I feel too American," he said, and then forgot himself. "Maybe I will run for office in Battambang in the next election."  He is a big man in the Kingdom, with his cellular phone, Nisson Sentra, gucci gifts from friendly  investors.  In Oakland, we were small fry.

            Sophal's precipitous ascent followed the rise of FUNCINPEC, the royalist party that he'd organized in California.  When it won enough seats in the 1993 UNTAC-monitored election, it agreed to share power  with the Communist party of Hun Sen.  Sophal had been studying political science was at community college and looking for a better job to pay his many debts when the election promised him a future in Cambodia.

            I was thinking all this as Sophal pointed out the promises that FUNCINPEC's  Khmer French and Khmer Americans brought with them to government.  Was I momentarily distracted by the one-eyed headlights of mototaxis in the pool of dark below us?  I cannot remember, only that Sophal was saying, "-- and Lerb is dead."  I looked up, startled, and ashamed to be startled, that once again, the living and dead of the U.S. Cambodian community ebbed away from me, ever the outsider. Lerb, dead.

            He was my favorite bad boy; suspended from high school for an endless series of offenses, in juvenile detention for a year with extended probation afterwards.  He was tall and very dark, strutting on the hottest of days in his black Raider's jacket and Crips colors.  His junior league of "gangstas" would drop in during school hours when gang tensions were too high.  He was charismatic, but he didn't know how to hold it, too vulnerable, too rageful. Lerb had survived the worst of his “gansta’s” tragedies: nine boys in a Chevette out of control on the freeway.  Its toll--three dead (one decapitated), three unharmed (one flung from the car by the spirit of his dead father) and Lerb in a coma for weeks in the San Juaquin General Hospital.

            Several times a week, I would pick up Lai Lanh, Lerb's mother in the  most devastated of West Oakland projects for the hour drive to the hospital near Stockton.  She would enter the hospital room briskly and coax him to life with Mormon prayers, tossing rice secretly over his listless shoulder.  His recovery was excruciating and tedious.  I do believe her tenacous, ferocious love drew him back into ordinary time with vague cognitive failures, but willing to live.  When the worst was over, I lost touch with them as my own life gathered momentum.

            Two weeks before his first accident, he stood at our office door and announced triumphantly that his mother's  lost tribe of ten brothers and sisters were alive.  She'd immediately sent money through a courier and received in return a videotape of a family gathered to pay their respects to the sister, the lucky one who made it to America.  Sophal and Lerb are two signs of  "luck," two survivors who tricked the fates once, then twice.  But for Lerb, one time too many.

When I returned to Oakland from Phnom Penh, I asked casually about Lerb from other Cambodian-American friends. Don't you know, they said, vaguely accusing, the family left Oakland a year ago. Lerb was fishing with his brother. He stood up in the boat, fell over, and drowned. 
 

2 Theologizing after the last draft
A poet stops by a bare oak in the winter, “every limb sprouting” with starlings.  She tries to count, and then estimate,
 
but the leaves of this wet black tree at the heart of
            the storm--shiny--
river through limbs, back onto limbs,
scatter, blow away, scatter, recollect--
undoing again and again the tree without it ever ceasing to be
            full.
Foliage of the tree of the world's waiting.
Of having waited a long time and
            still having
to wait. Of trailing and screaming.
Of engulfed readjustments. Of blackness redisappearing
            into
downdrafts of snow. Of indifference. Of indifferent
            reappearings...
 
                        Jorie Graham from "The Dream of the Unified Field"

 
            If there is a passion for a unified field, it is a tree whose leaves have a single sum: full and then empty.  It has an apparent logic, this tree of the unified leaves, and the interlocutor is satisfied when its logic is unraveled and the problem has come to completion.   Jorie Graham looks up and sees a tree of black starlings, always full and yet uncountable, static and heaving.  One cannot apply logic to a koan, that is the koan's cunning.  Of course there is a satisfaction in completion, but it ends to begin again.  Completion's split second acts are summed up in motion; that itself is a koan.   The tree is there and yet always in motion, waiting and arriving, reassembling, dissembling, reminding the poet and ourselves that living is never so unified, logical, clean.  The birds of the world's waiting refuse to sit quietly while they're numbered and labeled.  This is the koan of a tree and its poet.  This is the way of territory and populations.

            The arrival of this project is a task of logic and completion, but it has been a theological process for me because of its koan-like motion.  It has been in these last four years a question that had no answer, hardly a question at all sometimes, and sometimes many questions darting in and out on the limbs of logic.  It sputtered and repeated itself, the same words over and over.  For months, I became inarticulate, unable to make the question speak.  Only when I returned to the matter at hand, to the tree's interaction with its chattering leaves, did I find the matter waiting; "speak me," it said.  The matter was a people who kept moving and how in their circling they trespassed fields of logic.  How their reasonings about this were versatile and contradictory.   How the tree held them and didn't, how though they sometimes moved in unison, it could not be predicted.   How my own questions informed their reasoning; how reason in motion is a mystery.

           In my earlier work I was interested with the subject position of Cambodians as refugees, whose  political subjectivity change numerous times as they moved across borders from Kampuchea to Thailand and into the UNHCR refugee camps, then to Western nations as third world refugees.  How did they collude in the manufacturing of their own identity?  In Oakland, the majority of Cambodian refugees are part of the underclass community mediating the institutional cultures of welfare state.  This is a particular form of cultural belonging, a cultural citizenship, in that the state creates its of cultural formations. 

         My first arrival in Phnom Penh had such elements: an encounter with ghosts in our hotel room, magic hair that gave me trouble.  I fell prey to the magic of tragic Khmerness.   My second visit to Phnom Penh was a great disappointment.  Returning and local Cambodians interpreted human rights with a baffling tautology.  Nothing seemed cultural   about its logic.  It took me a long time to realize that this surface resemblance was the koan and that magic was a lure for the prize of Khmerness which most of us in various stages of "return" were seeking.   

            I join the American "us" of Cambodian refugees returning, though the "us" of survivors is, I believe, incommensurable.  That I can join the "return" at all is up for contestation, being neither refugee nor Cambodian nor Asian American.  The  mesmerizing power of return is mine nonetheless.  Raised in Manila by progressive Protestant missionaries until my "return" to the US for college in the first months of Martial Law, my first conundrum was becoming American not as an exile but in situ.   Multiculturalism found me a quandary.  As one who had lived in the Philippines for as many years as hyphenated Americans had lived in the US,  would I not be entitled to the category of American-Filipino if one existed?  That it did not exist left me homogenous; that I was lesbian and Christian caused more confusions.  On the whole, I became wary of identity categories.  The return to the Philippines thirteen years later was a second discouragement.  I arrived as an American "expat" on staff at the large Refugee Processing Center in an ESL program whose teachers were Filipino.  This in itself offered up the bewilderment of cultural/national alliances and hierarchies (Vietnamese over Lao and Cambodian, Filipinos over SEA refugees,  US over all, but sabotaged by Filipinos, Philippine military over UN).  In the fifteen years surrounding that event my attention to refugees, exiles, and immigrants constantly rehearsed the crisis of arrival, integration, and the myths of national belonging.

            The overlap of politics and culture and its conjunction with category mistakes has informed my theology, sense of self, and anthropology.  It produces the questions I finally ask about multiple citizenships and national identities.  It informs my skepticism of a hierarchical framework of ethics that places disobedient local "moralities" under the supervision of a principled "ethic."  (Whose morality, which ethic?)  It requires a perspective in which the observer, the subject and structure interact -- the poet, the birds and the tree, so to speak.

            In the tree's trembling leaves, categories arrive and are forgotten.  Someone sees the hand of God.  Someone claims that this is the way of starlings.  Someone calculates the rate of chaos.  Someone forms a poem.