A renowned Korean poet Kim Ji Ha has thus far gone through a dynamic course of life journey as he had to cope with the turbulent stage of Korean history from the late 1960s to 1970s onward. Sometimes as a social activist, or as a national thinker, but mostly as a ardent poet, he has illuminated the most sensitive concerns of people in his poetic works while shifting the colors of imagination in his experiences of historical transformation. This essay seeks to investigate the particular aspect of 'place' embedded in his various images of 'space', exploring them in a theological matrix. In his early poetries, roughly during the late 1960s-1970s, his poetic spaces centered around the images related to 'iron jail' and 'empty cottage', each reflecting the motif of the suppressed life and the desire of escape and rest. In 1980s, his sense of space moves to the contrasted, yet intertwined image of 'black mountain' and 'white room', channelling through the national tragedy in Korean history and a shamanistic touch on the pent-up sorrow of people. Since the late 1980s, Kim Ji Ha began to open his spiritual eyes by giving attention to the motif of 'chasm' as a narrow escape into a spiritual freedom and a resourceful seedbed of vitalizing all living beings. In a beautiful poem entitled "Anguish in center", he puts the image of 'chasm' in contrast with that of 'center' being analogous to a flower stalk and its petals. The way out of the contrasted disharmony he discovered is the constant motion of shattering the stalk and scattering the petals, so that the anguish in center can be relieved through a narrow chasm into marginal places. That is exactly the place, according to his poetic imagination, where salvation really happens. From this perspective, he also explored an image of the naturalized church in an ecological setting where all the heavenly beings would come down to the earth and dance together with all creatures. With a consistent interest in alternative spaces, Kim Ji Ha's poetic world seems to present a case in which one reflects our reality of placeless-ness in theological speculation, devising the potential chasms of life as a means to recover our authentic sense of place. Upon the assumption that theology of place is emergent in our day, it is further desperate to reconsider, and even to redesign our church buildings as a redemptive place, thus rejuvenating our faith journey in/out of the church as a building.

A renowned Korean poet Kim Ji Ha has thus far gone through a dynamic course of life journey as he had to cope with the turbulent stage of Korean history from the late 1960s to 1970s onward. Sometimes as a social activist, or as a national thinker, but mostly as a ardent poet, he has illuminated the most sensitive concerns of people in his poetic works while shifting the colors of imagination in his experiences of historical transformation. This essay seeks to investigate the particular aspect of 'place' embedded in his various images of 'space', exploring them in a theological matrix. In his early poetries, roughly during the late 1960s-1970s, his poetic spaces centered around the images related to 'iron jail' and 'empty cottage', each reflecting the motif of the suppressed life and the desire of escape and rest. In 1980s, his sense of space moves to the contrasted, yet intertwined image of 'black mountain' and 'white room', channelling through the national tragedy in Korean history and a shamanistic touch on the pent-up sorrow of people. Since the late 1980s, Kim Ji Ha began to open his spiritual eyes by giving attention to the motif of 'chasm' as a narrow escape into a spiritual freedom and a resourceful seedbed of vitalizing all living beings. In a beautiful poem entitled "Anguish in center", he puts the image of 'chasm' in contrast with that of 'center' being analogous to a flower stalk and its petals. The way out of the contrasted disharmony he discovered is the constant motion of shattering the stalk and scattering the petals, so that the anguish in center can be relieved through a narrow chasm into marginal places. That is exactly the place, according to his poetic imagination, where salvation really happens. From this perspective, he also explored an image of the naturalized church in an ecological setting where all the heavenly beings would come down to the earth and dance together with all creatures. With a consistent interest in alternative spaces, Kim Ji Ha's poetic world seems to present a case in which one reflects our reality of placeless-ness in theological speculation, devising the potential chasms of life as a means to recover our authentic sense of place. Upon the assumption that theology of place is emergent in our day, it is further desperate to reconsider, and even to redesign our church buildings as a redemptive place, thus rejuvenating our faith journey in/out of the church as a building.

, , , , , , , ,

Kim Ji Ha, poem, center, chasm, salvation, church, space, place, theology of place