The NYT's "Modern Love" Column

   

These columns often seem to be about divorce: maybe that's where we are these days.  In any event, today's piece, by Rene Watabe, is about a Moonie marriage, or an attempt to make a Moonie marriage work.  She is of mixed heritage, American and Chinese, he is Japanese.  They do all the right Moonie things (celibacy and mission work for two years; procreation; adherence to church doctrine, etc.) but, in the end, they cannot find happiness together.  The key turning point for her (we do not really get his side of the story), seems to come when she looks more deeply inside herself:

        Finally I came to understand what was missing. The religious call to love your enemy included loving that enemy as you would love yourself, and I didn't love myself. In all the sacrificing I'd done for marriage, children and world peace, I'd lost a sense of who I was and what I wanted.

     This has a distinctly American ring to it: trying to find oneself.  It would be very easy to say that this American impulse was finally bursting through the quasi-Confucian strictures of the Moonie marriage.  I say "quasi" Confucian because there is a dimension of similarity.  Rev Moon, Watabe relates, stresses, in a manner reminiscent of Confucius, the social purpose of marriage: it is not about personal preference or, even, romantic love; but a matter of creating a new generation that will reproduce the moral life in the future.  Moon parts company with Confucius by centering the moral life on a Christian God, which is alien to Confucian thinking.

   There is another distinct dissimilarity between Moon and Confucius, however (and that is why I am writing this).  The seemingly "American" impulse to find oneself, has a striking resonance with Mencius, a fourth-third century B.C. follower of Confucius.  Take this passage:

    "There's a Way to bring joy to your family.  If you look within and find you aren't faithful to yourself, you'll never please your family.  But there is a Way to be faithful to yourself.  If you cannot render benevolence clear in the world, you'll never be faithful to yourself." (131)

    The notion of looking "inside" to discover how to cultivate personal and social relationships is expressed elsewhere in Mencius.  It reminds me of the "to thine own self be true..." sentiment in Hamlet.  It is not a call to selfish hedonism - that would hardly be possible from Mencius.  But, rather, a recognition that rendering "benevolence clear in the world" is a complex interaction of social responsibility and personal understanding.  Watabe's desire to know who she is and what she wanted, in the context of managing her family duties and feelings, stikes me as precisely the kind of thoughtful balancing of internal awareness and external performance that Mencius, as well as Confucius, talk about.  She tries to draw her husband into this sort of convesation but he resists.  Maybe he needs to look inside as well:

    "Mencius said: 'The ten thousand things [everything] are all there in me.  And there's no joy greater than looking within and finding myself faithful to them.  Treat others as you would be treated.  Devote yourself to that, for there's no more direct approach to Humanity." (236)
    

 

Comments

[Renee Watabe]

I find your quote by Mencius a beautiful one. I appreciate your discussion of
how the joy of the individual is, in fact inseparable from the joy of the
whole. The fear based interpretations of Christian teachings, and the
flagellation or denial of self became stumbling blocks for me, personally.
My intent is to manifest truth from within, in good faith that it will
benefit those around me. To do this requires a certain degree of trust and
non-judgemental soul searching. Thank you for reading my essay and for taking the time to comment.

[Michele Russomanno]

I am doing some soul searching myself after reading your essay. Very deep, I loved it. I especially love how you explain to the reader "...you'll never be faithful to yourself." So true you can not love others unless you love your self.

[Renee Watabe Folzenlogen]

Thank you for your kind comments, Michele.
Warmly,
Renee