Border-Crossing Spirituality: Transformation in the Borderland

Border crossing is a significant experience in the global era when many people cross borders whether in cultural geopolitical relational or existential terms. Border crossing can provide a great opportunity for spiritual growth yet it is often a violent and dangerous process. Thus there is a need to explore border-crossing spirituality: to examine how various aspects of border crossing impact human life analyze why border crossing happens and explain how the act of border crossing provides transformation. Border crossing is an action undertaken to expand ones own boundaries and from it emerges the borderland--a third space where ones transformation can occur. This book primarily focuses on various teachings of border crossing and the notion of being in between. Almost every religious tradition has within it a spiritual teaching of border crossing and the importance of the borderland. This book is by nature cross cultural interreligious and interspiritual. Through the action of border crossing transformation occurs in the borderland and border-crossing spirituality can be crystallized as living a radical hospitality valuing friendship remaining in the present and reclaiming subjectivity. In these days of increasing globalization and interreligious contact Jung Eun Sophia Park has provided a powerful metaphor and process--borderland and border crossing--to guide our inevitable and necessary forays beyond our familiar communities. She points out the landmarks the dangers and the potentials of this journey helping us live into the creative growth that can be found in transitions of multiple kinds. Through texts (Christian Gospels and the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead) ritual (kut from Korean shamanism) and spiritual guidance from various traditions she invites us into the in-between space that is borderland and demonstrates the power of inter-spirituality for contemporary seekers. --Elizabeth Liebert Professor of Spiritual Life San Francisco Theological Seminary and Graduate Theological Union Jung Eun Sophia Park SNJM is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the Holy Names University in California. She is the author of A Hermeneutic on Dislocation as Experience: Creating a Borderland Constructing a Hybrid Identity (2010) and of Beauty of the Broken (2014) the latter published in Korea. Her research is on cross-cultural spirituality and religious life from a global feminist perspective.