Angry Prayer: Tongsung Gido and Our Difficult Emotions
By Sara Kyoungah White
O
ne evening at church when I was a child, I left the children’s room to get a drink and passed by the closed doors of the sanctuary, where the Korean adult congregation was holding their mid-week prayer service. All of a sudden there was a loud eruption of wailing and the sound of a hundred people speaking at the same time. Mystified, and slightly worried about my parents’ well-being, I cracked open the door and peered inside.
Imagine someone you know, who is usually perfectly sane, standing red-faced in front of you, tears streaming down their face as they shout incoherently in strange ululations and make threatening physical gestures—chest pounding, fist slamming, arms waving, rocking back and forth. Multiply that by a hundred, and turn out the lights. To me as a child, tongsung gido, as I would later learn this uniquely Korean style of prayer was called, was absolutely terrifying.
I would experience it again and again, at retreat centers and in living rooms, in youth group and in college and in adulthood, in Ohio and New Jersey and California, in sanctuaries of Korean congregations that were Presbyterian, Reformed, Methodist, and nondenominational. Often it was accompanied by equally terrifying, usually male preachers who would shout at the congregation with red faces and whose rough hands pushed me into the ground in the name of Jesus.
As a child, I often wondered, “What is everyone so angry about?” I wondered what the reason was for their weeping, and how they could conjure such strong emotions almost as if on command. One moment, we would all be sitting pleasantly in someone’s living room; and the next moment, someone would shut off the lights, and everyone would peel back their masks to howl collectively into the void.
Many times when tongsung gido began, I left the room to hunt down some quiet corner, often a bathroom stall. To the sound of rushing waters—toilets flushing and faucets running—my own prayers would finally come. Usually it started with something inane, like, “God, I’m kind of scared right now.” I wondered if the delay of my prayers, and my bewilderment at tongsung gido, was because I wasn’t holy enough, or Korean enough, or maybe both.
The Pyongyang Revival of 1907 is considered the birthplace of tongsung gido, a founding element of Korean Christianity. During the revival, Western missionaries were surprised by the “mass confession and repentance, exorcism and healing, and intense corporate prayer, all of which were often accompanied by loud weeping,” writes Soojin Chung.
This style of prayer carried the Korean believers through the next century of grief. Pastor Yohang Chun writes that throughout “the Japanese colonization (1909–1945), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the institutionalized oppression caused by the military dictatorship (1961–1992)... Korean Christians prayed to God with their pains, sufferings, and broken hearts. They couldn’t pray silently and quietly. Rather, their pains, tears, and bitterness… made them cry out to God loudly.”
But growing up in Ohio as the child of Korean immigrants, I had no national holidays, no memorials to walk past each day, no history textbooks to tell me of these atrocities. The handful of fellow Korean American Christians I knew were like me, jaded by our parents’ faithful attendance at early morning prayer and really only interested in church retreats to snag a crush, saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning and watching Nick at Night in the evening.
I had only the seething scars of my parents and the stony silence of my grandparents, whom I saw twice in a decade. I had only the haunting sounds of tongsung gido, and the seed of anger springing up in my own heart.
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The thing with historic scars is that they only sound sentimentally tragic on paper; in real life, it looks like culturally-acceptable impatience and rage. Just watch a Korean drama and see how families scream at each other. As a child, I had learned that anger was meant to be expressed by only adults—unpredictably, frequently, and dramatically. As a teenager, I learned that if I stomped my feet up the stairs enough times, everyone would begin to ignore it. If a teenage girl hurls a Kleenex box at the wall and no one hears it, is she truly angry? As an adult, I learned to use my anger as a test to prove the loyalty of my friends and spouse. And most dangerous of all, I learned to hide my anger like burying dynamite, sowing a minefield in my heart.
When our daughter was born, and she lay purple-red and swaddled on my chest, I made a promise to myself that she would never have memories of my rage. Before she turns five, I figured, we would break the generational curse of my people. But five came, then six, then seven, then eight. I never could keep my promise.
I was still learning then to bring my anger into the prayer room. What tongsung gido had been saying all along is this: our negative emotions have a place in our relationship with God and with each other. We are all angry. We all know the contours of despair. We have only to direct our cries heavenward, together.
The idea of anger and other negative emotions finding a place in our prayers is not unique to tongsung prayer. In fact, there’s something distinctly Jewish about it. The psalms are full of people crying out to God, roaring in anger, weeping in suffering.
But today, “Christians are never angry enough,” writes Dan Allender and Tremper Longman in The Cry of the Soul. “We have learned to distance ourselves from anger, irrespective of whether it is righteous or unrighteous.” Instead, as Allender and Longman continue later, “Our pain is to be a bridge to comprehending the pain of God.”
It has taken me many years to learn that love, like praying, does not always need to be brimming with anger and pain. But love, like prayer, is also inseparable from rage and sorrow, because rage and sorrow are also in the heart of God. This is what the adults of my childhood modeled to me in their bewildering tongsung prayer. They were walking into the sanctuary with their anger and bitterness and pain in hand, unsure if they would be going home that night. The God they cried out to was a God who heard and saw, a God who was not taken aback by their complicated, difficult emotions. He is my God too.
I no longer pray that my daughter will not see me angry. Instead, I pray that she will see a well-worn path between my anger and the throne of my Father. I pray that she will see through my life the marks of God’s transforming love, which carefully uncovers all the explosives we’ve learned to bury and makes our minefields into gardens square by square. I pray that she will see me angry enough about the right things. I pray that she, too, will know the love of a Father to whom she can bring all her pain, sorrow, and rage. And I pray she will see that in His hand, what we buried in shame and fear can rise in beauty, like breathtaking fireworks.
I pray this like I’m bequeathing an inheritance. I pray it with tongsung prayer.
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One year during college, I lived in an apartment above a shoe store. In the middle of a bad breakup and a crisis in vocation, I went inside my closet, closed the door, and shouted myself hoarse. I told God everything with big, messy strokes, like a child scrawling madly with a crayon on a white wall. Only after I had unstuffed myself completely and lay limp on the floor did I hear the gentle whisper of God. I was surprised to find that I, too, held this heritage of tongsung gido like an heirloom in my lap, channeling anger like a blazing rocket path to heaven.
At college retreats, I began to look around more closely at those praying on the floor beside me. I realized that not everyone was shouting or weeping. Some were sitting quietly, hands clasped, eyes closed, lips barely moving. Some were sitting in groups of two or three, just talking. It made me feel like I could simply sit there too, in all my bewilderment and introversion, and know that God would hear me too.
I had a mentor who was like a spiritual mother to me. She went around and prayed for each of us in turn as we crouched on the floor. I was used to men shoving me into the ground with the force of their hands, shouting incoherently up into the air, coercing me into emoting tears, if only through fear. But when my turn came, I was surprised at how calm and quiet her voice was, how gentle her touch on my back, how reasonable, plain, and piercing her words.
When she rose and left, it was then I began to weep. I knew with certainty then that every word I had whispered in those bathroom stalls had been heard.
Sara Kyoungah White serves as the senior editor on staff with the Lausanne Movement. Her articles, essays, and poems have appeared in publications like Christianity Today, Reformed Journal, and Ekstasis.
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