Maria Liu Wong, an experienced curator, regards her new book On Becoming Wise Together: Learning and Leading in the City as itself a work of curation—“of memories, artifacts, and experiences that has made my own journey and that of City Seminary one that continues to be interrogated and celebrated, in the act and fact of its existence” (130). The book reminds me of the work of designer and organizer Rosten Woo, who so often does something more like curation instead of traditional urban planning. That is, instead of imposing, converting, or implementing from the outside, these curators immerse themselves in what is already there—listening, attending, grounding, waiting, caring—and while doing so they participate in the community’s own becoming.
On Becoming Wise Together is a book in which the form and method match the thesis. Liu Wong argues that theological education is about “forming a wise community that daily embodies God’s peace in the city and also points others to it” (8, italics in original). These are two sides of the same coin. To do theological education involves seeking the peace of the city together. Seeking the peace of the city is done through theological education, understood as “learning as a way of life” (80). Throughout the book, Liu Wong references the slowness of this work. In the chapter “Friends” she indicates that “this kind of slow, stumbling, stretching, and at times painful working out of relationships and communication is what forms us theologically as the collective imago Dei” (image of God) (71). This slow, stretching, working out is the form that the book itself takes, moving back and forth between story and reflection and questions. Liu Wong writes about the work of learning together in a way that invites the reader into the very relationship of learning together.
In chapter 4, “Learning,” she tells the story of showing up with her children on a 99-degree day at the church and food pantry of Pastor Vivian for a prayer walk. This is an activity that could be more discursively recounted. But the story is told in such a way that you feel the heat, you sense the relational complexity and dynamics between the author, her children, the pastor, the community members. As such, an activity that has always struck me as something of a rote Christian practice (the prayer walk) is transformed into a robust ritual of becoming sensitive to the city, of listening and relating to a community. Liu Wong writes, “sensing the city with our bodies honors the experience of life and people in the neighborhood, and reminds us what we are doing and why we are doing it” (91-2).
Many contemporary writers use references to identity to convey their perspective, and Liu Wong also anchors her stories in her own identity. The author refers to herself as “a woman, British-born, with ethnic ties to Hong Kong and China, raised on the continuum of the suburbs and the city” (13). However, Liu Wong’s narrativization of experiences in which identity is at play allows identity to function less as a referential category and more as a deep weave of experience and perspective, a thickened standpoint that the reader is welcomed into through doors that the author hospitably opens through stories.
As any critical reader trained in recent decades, I had some initial suspicions about the text. Is it too therapeutic? Are the reflection questions patronizing? Is there really a distinction between critical autoethnography and memoir? However, by the time I was halfway through the book, exposed to so much rich narrative, I had developed what I can only describe as a sense of trust for the author. This trust neutralized my cynical narrowing and allowed the “signs of life” in the book to really blossom before my eyes. (In the work Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler quotes Michel Foucault dreaming of a kind of critique that multiplies the signs of life in a text [Fordham University Press, 2005]). And there are many such signs. With more space, I’d discuss the way the book sets our relationally constituted nature against our worn-out theories of separateness and individual isolation. Or I would talk about the author’s treatment of the necessity of forgiveness as a dimension of intimate, communal learning together, of seeking a community’s flourishing within a world where trauma, injustice, and human imperfection continue to abound. But here in closing, I’ll limit myself to what I found most compelling and timely in the author’s account of waiting, a central theme in this book that acts as an urgent call to slow, just, work in community.
Liu Wong combines the impulses of resistance and patience in a passage where she describes, with reference to a rally against anti-Asian violence, raising her voice to “say ‘no more,’ as we wait” (120). Patience has a pejorative slant in conversations about justice. But for Liu Wong, patience is not a tepid excuse for inaction. Waiting is an eschatological orientation, full of expectation and receiving, that is encoded into the character of just action. Waiting receives the other with hospitality. It is a tuned and refined sensitivity to the complex differences of life in the world and in so much relationship. It slows the work in a way that is necessary for the work to be just and to not multiply new forms of domination. Waiting secures the place for the possible, for the surprise of the other, and thus keeps the “no more” from overrunning itself into despair, even nihilism, making it an ever so timely source of wisdom. On Becoming Wise Together will pay dividends for those who patiently take in its many lessons.
Nick Mitchell is a PhD candidate in ethics and theology at Loyola University Chicago.
Nicholas Mitchell
Date Of Review:
July 19, 2024
