Conclusion: Free to Be

Abstract

Toward the end of the FS program, North Korean trainees take part in what the South Korean church calls P’asongsik, a ceremony that churches or missionary organizations hold for commissioning short- or long-term missionaries. P’asongsik signals the end of their ten-month-long training at the FS, and consequently the beginning of a new life journey as a model citizen. This much was expressed by the manager of the FS, and I consider this commissioning ceremony literally and metaphorically sufficient to allow for an open-ended discussion with which to conclude this book. The ceremony was, for the FS, the final stage of a rite of passage (van Gennep 1960), proclaiming a quality shift in the trainees’ status and identity into future missionaries and first unifiers. This is believed to be the ultimate condition of freedom in faith. The idea relates to the primary concerns of this book, namely, the transcendence and reconciliation that are aspired to through human-divine interactions in contact zones. In this vein, Webb Keane stresses that “transcendence haunts modernity in three unrealizable desires: for a self freed of its body, for meanings freed of semiotic mediation, and for agency freed of the press of other people” (2006: 310). As a key characteristic of Christianity, this mode of transcendence is premised on a state of separation and yet it is unrealizable.