My Bio (May 25, 2014)

Bio: Ha Na Park

I first discerned my calling for ministry when I was nine years old. I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church in Korea and enjoyed being active in the Children’s Church as an accompanist. One day I thought, “I wish I could be a priest,” but I immediately realized that I could never be ordained in my church, because I was a girl. Wishing to be true to my childhood church, I buried that first sense of calling very deep, never revisiting it again until I gave birth to my first son, Peace, when I was 26 years old.

On a summer night in Korea, sitting on a bench in a small playground, I had two revelations: I had a bad case of the ‘baby blues’, and I was experiencing a form of marginalization as a young woman. With a newborn baby and no job, I was out of the mainstream in a society where success was measured only by achievements, jobs and wealth. In my husband’s church, I had to perform the role of a smiling angel in order to satisfy the expectations placed on a ‘good’ minister’s wife– a ‘shadow’ of the ordained husband. That evening, my husband Min Goo held me close and said, “Why don’t you become a minister?” - a suggestion that I hadn’t thought of as a possible path since my abandoned childhood dream. 

The next week, on a friend’s bookshelf, I happened to find a book, written by Chung Hyun Kyung, a Korean feminist and inter-spiritual theologian, entitled Struggle to Be the Sun Again, and read a poem that changed the course of my life forever:

“In the beginning, woman was truly the sun. An authentic person. Now she is the moon, a wan and sickly moon, dependent on another, reflecting another’s brilliance.”

The next year (2007), my family flew over the Pacific Ocean to move to Vancouver. I enrolled in classes at the Vancouver School of Theology and took a field placement at West Point Grey United Church in Vancouver until I moved to Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, in 2010. I continued my studies during a second pregnancy and the birth of my second son, Jah-bi, in 2011, and graduated in 2012. Those years of study and family life were very busy and very satisfying, and I felt God’s blessing very strongly. My joy was increased when, in 2012, I was appointed as a supply minister to Chemainus United Church, just nine kilometres down the road from the town where my husband ministered. (I will always remember my time at Chemainus United with great fondness.)

I am delighted to have received a provisional call to The United Church in Meadowood, Winnipeg. The church’s motto is Inclusive and Hospitable - words that speak to the warmth and ministry of a remarkable Christian community. Through the journey toward ordination and authentic and transformative ministry, I have learned the way to be ‘the sun again’ personally and spiritually; I want to help others who find themselves having become a moon to reveal their own truthful and beautiful light from the inside out.