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Transcript

Joy Marie Clarkson: Hello and welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough magazine. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson. And today I am delighted to be joined by two very thoughtful guests. I’m welcoming to the show Haejin Shim Fujimura and Mako Fujimura. Welcome to the show.

Makoto Fujimura: It’s great to be here.

Haejin Shim Fujimura: Thank you for having us.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So today we’re going to talk about your beautiful new book, which is Beauty and Justice. It was very easy to want to do this particular interview because as I was dreaming about what I wanted to have in this series on beauty, that question of the relationship between beauty and justice was something that I wanted to address. You address this a bit in the book, but beauty can often be treated as something that’s impractical or, if we think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we think we’ll get to beauty once the issues of justice are settled. But as you explore in the book and like many of the authors that you draw on (such as Elaine Scarry) show, there are so many connections between beauty and justice. Beauty is something that motivates us; beauty is something that can sometimes conceal injustice; and beauty even is something like a state of justice toward which we strain. So, I’m so excited to talk to you all about that today and about how you address that in your book. For our listeners, a little bit of context and we’ll talk more about this I’m sure throughout the interview. But Haejin, you’re a lawyer if I’m correct, right?

Haejin Shim Fujimura: Yes!

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yes, and Mako is an artist. So, you come at this question from different angles, but with perspectives that are really harmonizing and interesting.

Before we get into that, I always like to begin these interviews by asking where this interview finds you physically. I am doing this interview from my little East London flat. It has been a stereotypically drizzly day in London. And so, I have indulged in lighting candles and using lots of non-overhead lights, although you can see that I have finally given in to the overhead lights now. So that is where you find me. Where do our listeners find you?

Haejin Shim Fujimura: We are in the Princeton area in New Jersey on the Stateside. We’re right now actually sitting in one of Mako’s studios. We’re surrounded by beautiful paintings that Mako created. And it’s just white all over. We have so much snow, and it has not melted. So, it’s a winter wonderland here.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Wonderful. I have watched the news and seen that there has been a never-ending, slightly frightening storm going on in the United States. So, while we’ve been bearing with our drizzly, never-ending gray, I’ve been thinking of you all and hoping that power stays on and trips to the grocery store go as they can. And I will say that it’s almost unfortunate that the listeners can’t see our video because I can see behind you some paintings and some beautiful, exposed wood. It’s very fun to get to do this interview from here.

So, I want to dive into talking about this book that you wrote together, a labor of love that you worked on together. And you begin by talking about your shared devotion to a passage in Isaiah. (I always have to code-switch. In the United Kingdom, they call it Isaiah, but I grew up calling it Isaiah.) So, in Isaiah, which I’m going to read now, it says, “to comfort all who mourn and provide for those who grieve in Zion, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”

So, one of the special parts about your story together and independently is this was a life verse for both of you. Something that motivated your sense of vocation and purpose and that’s a part of your lives coming together was finding that you have this shared purpose around this verse. So, I’d love to hear from each of you, just tell us a bit about what this verse meant for you and what work it has done in your life.

Makoto Fujimura: That’s a great place to begin this conversation. Isaiah 61 has been my life verse. In fact – I talk about this in this book and several other books – when I began my career as an artist in New York City, I did an artist talk and I quoted Isaiah 61. Imagine a typical art world scene in which the idea of a biblical base for what you do as an artist would be certainly alien to a lot of people especially in the '90s. Beauty even as a word was exiled, and people specifically told me that you shouldn’t use the word beauty, and that it’s a suspect imperialistic word. So, this was a bold gesture. But when I thought about beauty, I had to start with Isaiah 61, and this connection between mercy and beauty. But how God creates in a way that only makes sense if we are echoing this divine gesture to the world by first God is beauty, and God is mercy, and so God is love. And so, I began with that and when we met it certainly was surprising that both of us had this marker throughout our lives that pointed to this passage.

Haejin Shim Fujimura: Isaiah 61 starts with the spirit of the Lord. And it sets the tone from the very beginning that this is not just our work, but the Holy Spirit needs to be with us to do any of the things that is mentioned in Isaiah 61. So, I think that’s always a big reminder for me to have the Spirit of the Lord upon me as I approach my stewardship responsibilities today to do the work of justice.

Isaiah 61, I think, starts by humbling me, reminding me that this is not just our own, but this is a co-creation with the Holy Spirit. And then the picture that is laid out in 61 is not just about doing the limited sense of justice, but it’s actually creating something that is holistic, much more beautiful. It’s about mending, but not just correcting the wrong, but creating something new out of that. When we do our justice work in general, we don’t think about giving the crown of beauty to people who have been broken. We want them to be out of a situation of injustice and into a place of safety, but actually the work does not end there. It’s about creating something beautiful onto their head and elevating them and honoring them. And this is just a beautiful picture of what God really desires in our world.

So, Isaiah 61 is just an anchor, I think, for most justice advocates who also follow Christ. And for Mako to actually have this passage as an artist, to prophetically share with the world of art, that was surprising to me, first of all. But also, what a bold and courageous artist he is. And what I have found, although Mako has been known as an artist and speaker and author throughout his life, he actually has been an advocate, a very clear advocate, in my opinion, not only in the art world, but also for anyone who’s a cultural catalyst in this world, and those who are misunderstood, and those who Mako calls border stalkers but who are also creating beauty into this world because that is a path towards justice. So, in that sense, Isaiah 61 is an appropriate passage for Mako as well.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I’d love to hear a bit more practically, Haejin, about what you do in your work as a lawyer.

Haejin Shim Fujimura: I have been a business lawyer and litigator for over twenty years now. So in my legal practice, I represent companies and business owners in their disputes, as well as in their season of new opportunities. So I serve them to mend the relationships and also create something new into the new season. So it’s really exciting work.

You know, ultimately, law is all about relationship. Whether you practice business law, environmental law, nonprofit law, human rights law, family law, it’s all about one party to another, maybe multiple, and you come in as a lawyer to really help them understand their rights and responsibilities, obligations and boundaries, and therefore they can be in a space in this relationship, have the best way forward.

And that may be about restoration and mending, or you could be creating new opportunities or relationships. So if we think about lawyering from that perspective, it’s super exciting because you’re not just applying black-letter law to a situation, but you are seeing with your imagination a future of these parties that is involved to be in a mended state or to be in a new relationship and sometimes parties have to go separate ways but how do you do that in a way that closes that season really well – as well as possible?

So as a business lawyer, I just love practicing law and helping these clients to have their season in the best way possible, most redemptive way possible. And sometimes, you know, my clients will listen and that’s really exciting. Sometimes they’ll be a little stubborn, then there’s a lot of persuasion that have to go in there. So I’ve learned to navigate interesting, difficult, high-level relationships and how to be a kind of navigator for them. But then that experience and practice actually really helped me start and create my nonprofit Embers International and create structures and programs and organizational governance around it. So unbeknownst to me the fact that I am a business lawyer actually served really well to create an organization for people who are suffering from violence.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Hmm, tell us a little bit about what you do with Embers.

Haejin Shim Fujimura: Yeah, so I serve as a CEO of Embers International and I’m actually in a new season. I have been serving as a part-time CEO to really help the organization launch into its incredible mission to end intergenerational exploitation and prevent human trafficking or especially victims who have been left behind and have had to be in that violent situation for decades. So when I cofounded the organization and started the operation about six years ago, I always thought I was going to help this organization come to a season of having a full-time CEO. So I was really supporting all of that work while practicing law.

And this year, my board and our senior staff have really invited me to serve as a full-time CEO. So yeah, it’s a very new season for me. And I’m really excited that I can talk about Embers much more intentionally because of the role that I have been invited into, along with this book, Beauty and Justice, because I do talk about Embers’s work in there.

But I lead the organization as chief of staff and build not only structures, but strategy into the next couple of decades as we are envisioning a really long journey for people who are still suffering and also leaving the situation, being rescued from the situation of violence. We have a very particular

population that we get to serve. And I am so grateful for our friends who have been in this anti-trafficking and justice work for a long time, paving the way, rescuing and providing a lot of care for people who are survivors of this violent situation. But what God has called me to store is a particular group of people who have been left behind from the rescue. So these are children who had to grow up as trafficking victims in the brothels and have been suffering through their childhood into their womanhood and now have become mothers in the brothels. So now we have Families created in the brothels with a second generation, third generation, trafficking victims.

So it’s a very complex situation where now you are not just thinking about individual rescue, but you are thinking about rescue of an entire family. Therefore, this intergenerational cycle of exploitation can be stopped.

Embers’s work is to really focus on the families who are still trapped in the red-light district and help them be rescued from the situation and journey – this very long journey of restoration for each generation together so that the family does not have to be separated. The children do not have to experience being orphaned, being separated from their family, from their siblings and mother, and walking different kinds of restoration pathway, but together as a family. So that involves education, counseling, vocational training, literacy training, while really balancing that with the community infrastructure that we accompany them and not turning them into a codependent group of people. So it’s a very fine balance, but it is possible. It is being done with Embers’s work. So we’re trying to create a replicable model where we can teach also other communities how to actually journey with the survivors, understanding

each survivor’s relationship that is connected intimately with their family and their community and without severing that relationship, helping them restore those broken relationships into a full humanity. So that’s work of Embers and I’m so honored to serve it. Mako also serves as an artist advocate council. So it’s been an incredible journey together.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Thank you so much for sharing about that. It strikes me how much relationship is kind of a common theme through your professional life, both with your service as a lawyer and in Embers. And it reminds me of a few episodes ago, I spoke with Professor Ben Quash, who looks at theology and literature and theology and the arts. And the metaphor that he used for beauty that he found most personally compelling was the English garden, which he sees as this kind of untamed, slightly excessive, extravagant kind of mess of loveliness. But the thing that he described about it is that there’s this sense that in English gardens, things are competing for their space. And that a part of what makes it beautiful is that competition in relationship is held well, that it’s negotiated well, that things are able to kind of find their right place and find enough sun and nourishment. And it’s the kind of balance of those relationships and their tensions and their needs and their entwinement working well together. And that strikes me as being kind of similar to both how you were thinking about your work with businesses, that you’re kind of basically helping them do the garden negotiations as peaceably and fairly and beautifully as you can, but also about the kind of beautiful justice that it takes to restore not just one person’s life, but a whole generation. And to make it such that, you know, the name of this podcast is Another Life is Possible, but to open up new possibilities for a family’s life, that what seemed impossible can become possible

And that reminds me of something that relates to your artwork, Mako. So something you’ve written about in this book, but also elsewhere, and I think it’s a part of your artistic practice, is the Japanese concept of kintsugi, which is when you mend broken pottery with gold. And I actually have, I don’t think it’s actual kintsugi, but when I got married a few years ago, my sister got me this beautiful kind of bowl that has this beautiful dark pottery that runs through it, this kind of vein.

That is this reminder of brokenness, but it’s something that makes, as you were saying earlier, Haejin, it’s not just making something, it’s not just restoring something, it’s bringing beauty out of something that was broken before. I teach theology and when we talk about the incarnation, we say, is the point of the incarnation and Jesus’ death and resurrection just to bring us back to a point of equilibrium? or is it always a part of God’s plan to bring us even further into relationship, to bring beauty even beyond what the brokenness was. So you note that the word tsugi means both to mend and to pass on to the next generation, that it has that kind of double meaning. So I’d love to hear just your thoughts on this, but also how it relates to how we approach personal trauma and injustice.

Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, coined this term “culture-care” a long time ago as an artist navigating these fractures in culture to this day. “Culture wars” is the main metaphor and how we talk about culture as a battleground. And I thought that was not only unproductive, you know, you’re talking about destroying things and demonizing the other side and you’re pouring toxins into, poison into the very soil that you’re standing on. So really no one wins that way. You win by destroying something or someone. And that to me that didn’t really make sense. And the problem for an artist is that artists are always conscripted into the front lines. And we have to decide which side are we going to be on or at least straddle that way. And it’s not a very helpful metaphor, simply.

And I thought, well, as you noted, garden metaphor is so much better and ecosystem metaphor is so much better for culture because culture is an ecosystem. It’s a very delicate system that needs to be preserved, that needs to be advocated for, that has many, many complex elements operating simultaneously. So it is not black and white. It is prismatic. It is complex.

And artists are the ones that have been trained, whether you’re s jazz musician or a theater practitioner or a visual artist, we have been trained to think this way in understanding the complexity of something that is beautiful and brokenness as an entry point to storytelling. And kintsugi is part of that. I think Japanese tradition has given us so much ways of understanding fractures and the very practice of what I do here in the studio is I pulverize minerals or have it pulverized by artisans, generations of artisans who serve artists in Nihon-ga, Japanese painting. And they pulverize so that each pulverized mineral is literally prisms. So any work that you see on my website or Instagram, they cannot be captured by digital media. And so you see them in the subtlety and prismatic light, shifting light. You see multiple colors operating on the surface. It’s very complex.

Our eyes can see it, but our brain tends to shut down and say, “well, that’s blue” and move on. But people who stay with my work for let’s say ten minutes in a museum setting, they will report back to be astonished by the prismatic complexity of the surface. And just like kintsugi holds this promise of something that is broken as a generative beginning into beauty, into something that for us is not just fixing something that is broken, but it celebrates the way, the path of beholding and generationally doing so in Japanese culture.

The practice of kintsugi depends on the practice of urushi or Japan lacquer, which is a generational craft. Literally, it takes ten years for urushi trees to grow to produce ounces of sap that is used in this Japan lacquer technique. And so there’s a multi-generational way, literally, art that is a collaboration with nature. So you’re looking at ecosystem. You have to begin there with Japanese culture. And so everything I do is tied with that aesthetic of slowness, of seeking to create beauty through fractures, through generational journey.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Thank you. So your marriage itself sort of represents this, a kind of beauty born out of the fracture of sister nations, given the kind of history of Japan and Korea and their rather painful histories together. So how has navigating that cross-cultural complexity helped form how you think about the idea that justice and beauty should go together?

Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, I am profoundly influenced, especially now, from Korean culture. But it turns out that when you look back into sixteenth century, seventeenth century Japanese history, it is just filled with connection with Korean culture. In fact, I would say Japanese culture would not exist without the Korean.

Even the idea of kintsugi, urushi, papermaking, brush making, all these things flowed out of Korean peninsula into Japan, unfortunately, as part of the invasion of Korea at that time by warlords ransacking and really exiling Korean artisans into Japan.

Many Japanese artists and artisans have taken great care to push back against that violence. So, many of the examples of the refinement of all crafts in Japan bases itself on taking what comes through Silk Road past into Japan and not only preserving them, but refining them. And this created Japanese culture. Japanese, for example, if you look at ceramics, Japanese national treasure ceramics, 80 percent of them are Korean, preserved in Japan. So there’s no denying that these are two sister nations.

And the acrimony and violence that has been done to Koreans, especially by the Japanese, has to be reckoned with. This is a path toward truth and reconciliation that the Japanese need to take that initiative in order that this new unity can occur and these cultural pathways that has been severed and hidden can become, I believe, a new path into the future of not just art and culture, but also global politics and so many other ways. So we have been obviously thinking about those things a lot as we journey together.

Haejin Shim Fujimura: I think historic fracture, of course, is real. And even current division and a relationship between these two nations is also real. But I think what we have found is that because we love our respective mother nations so much, and we have love for each other, that gives us, I think, eyes to see beyond, beyond the fracture into the hope of the future. And again,

this is where sanctified imagination must play a part because we have to be able to see the future that is really hopeful despite the current condition. But a lot of times we like to separate them, right? So we have this fracture, but we can get to a beautiful future together somehow. But I think what kintsugi teaches us is actually it’s not in spite of the fracture. It’s actually through those fractures. And what I have found over the years, because we get to travel together to our respective mother nations, is that it has been actually a lot of artists and justice advocates who are forefront in reconciliation movement and who are outspokenly sharing the fact that indeed, you know, the Japanese artisans, like we learn how to make ceramics and how to make paper from Korean artisans. And we need to honor that.

And so, and I think it’s very similar, even when I went to India for Embers’s work for the first time, it was, it’s a very complex country. And you see a lot more brokenness and darkness because you’re from outside. And so you become very overwhelmed by that. Yet, I met so many beautiful, nameless people who are stored in what they are, where they are called to in a most loving and sacrificial way. And doing their part to mend those situations into making something new, bringing something new out of that. So I think when we have the people...who are motivated by love towards others and the nation and the neighbors, I think we begin to see through those fractures the light that comes through. And so in our daily, I think, living, I’ve seen Mako just trying to honor my motherland so much and showing the kind of respect. think it’s a beginning of a healing towards that future.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So something that both of you seem to have referenced is a sense of resistance to beauty sometimes in your respective fields. So I’d love to hear for both of you how that manifests and whether you see any signs of a further openness to beauty in your fields, whether that’s in justice work or in artistry.

Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, it’s definitely related actually. We both operate in places where we’re pushing against the boundaries. Certainly art is a process in which every artist is trying to do something new. And so there are established paradigms or norms that are accepted as norms, but really when you think about it, it doesn’t really make sense. For instance, if beauty is exiled from the conversation, or creativity or imagination is something that you don’t talk about, which is true in our world of art schools today, then you’re missing a whole realm of discoveries that students can make. And we find this in different ways, even definitions of justice. And you do have to begin to define these terms, and we try to do that in our book. And I hope they are helpful guideposts, because beauty, as I found, is very difficult term to define.

When you do a definitional perspective on beauty, you kind of kill the very good life that any work of art or nature or life has. And it has to be spoken of. We have to keep telling its stories, sing the songs, and allow it to manifest itself in our lives as the highest quality. Going back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he revamped the triangle at the end of his life and placed beauty on top, which is really interesting. After years of creating psychological lists, he had determined, and I can understand this shift from a Western mindset of identifying categorically what is needed to realizing which is our practice in going into the slums is that we have found the most beautiful things there, beautiful people, resilient ways that people have lived their lives. And there’s literally beauty – visual beauty of sari, women wearing sari when they have nothing, to painting the walls blue to, you know, there are these things that’s, it’s to me, so much more meaningful in terms of capturing beauty than the contemporary art world of New York, which I love. I am not dismissing what, to celebrate what that is – I love going into museums and galleries, but I don’t see the kind of holistic beauty that is regained by some of the people that we know in the slums. And to be sure, it is dark, it is broken, it is violent, it is dangerous, and it is not, you know, the aroma of the area is, the stench is incredible, but there is beauty there.

Haejin Shim Fujimura: I think beauty is probably entirely absent in the world of justice, right? And even to talk about beauty and justice together, I hope it’s shocking to some people because it is a radical idea, yet it is such a fundamental idea. Because again, if we understand justice to be much more than just correcting the wrong, but creating a future that actually injustice can be prevented and wounds can be healed. The only way forward to do so is when justice is beautiful. And beauty is, you know, we talk about in our book, it’s like two sides of the same coin. Because when we think of one, I think we have such a shallow understanding of what justice means.

But when we truly understand the justice being the state of shalom, when all relationships are created, I think the DNA has what it’s supposed to be operating out of. So when we have a world that is full of flourishing relationships, That is a site of beauty. And in order to get there, we have to actually journey along with beauty. We have to carry beauty with us because we have to be kept reminded of who we really are meant to be, the true humanity at core. I think doctrine or information has a limitation as to the way that it reminds us of who we are supposed to be. But I think beauty reaches our core to remind us of the kind of humanity that we are meant to be. And that’s the place where we want to see justice going. So I think the conversation of beauty must be accompanied with the conversation of justice. If we are really looking forward to a future where injustice has been corrected and then we have a better future forward where justice is flourishing even more than what we have now. And it’s always future forward, right? So justice is always thinking about where we’re going, where we could be. And that requires imagination. And we don’t have, I think, a place where we practice this imagination, but I think beauty and the practice of art teaches us how to imagine that. So therefore, we can move forward toward that state of justice that we are really hoping for. And ultimately, injustice is the brokenness of beauty, as a definition, because injustice means there is some violence happening – exploitation or abuse or promises not met. So these are people, creation, nature, or relationships that have been broken. That is a state of injustice. So that means something that is supposed to be beautiful, that was created to be beautiful, has been damaged and there has been some wrong that was done. So in order for us to create justice out of that situation, we have to think about restoration of that beauty that was broken. So that interplay between justice and beauty, I think the more we talk about it, understand it, I think we can see the kind of justice that we envision together.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Thank you, that’s really helpful. It makes me think of, sometimes, I, in my own work on literature and things like that, there can be this kind of attitude of, how can you sit and think about a beautiful poem or about a novel that you want to write when there are all these terrible things happening in the world? And I think, to me, this may seem like a silly illustration, but I always think of the Lord of the Rings scene in the movies, I don’t actually think it is technically in the books, but where Frodo and Sam were at the very kind of edge of Mount Doom and Frodo’s about to give up and Sam says, but think of strawberries in the spring and think of . . . and it’s this kind of very simple distillation of something beautiful and that attentiveness to, and awareness of, and memory of, something beautiful even in the midst of this great sea of brokenness and injustice is actually what helps motivate him to make the final steps. And that seems to me to be some of what you’re saying that there’s this sense that our resistance of injustice should be based out of this awareness of a more fundamental beauty or a more fundamental kind of unity at the core of life. And that’s something that both our efforts for justice and our works of artistic creation or cultural care, both are kind of motivated by that underlying sense of there being something fundamentally good and beautiful that’s worth restoring and preserving and nurturing. And you’re looking like you have something to say, Mako.

Makoto Fujimura: Oh, one of my favorite books is Frederick the mouse. I don’t know if you know that story. It’s children’s book. highly recommended. Highly recommended. It’s very much what you’re talking about. About this mouse who dreams and he’s an artist and how important beauty is when the winter darkens our hearts and we run out of our food, you know, and what keeps us going. As we find out in many stories of the Holocaust and even Auschwitz people who had humor and theater, these stories kept them alive. So I think those are truly, it’s not just children’s stories, it’s fundamental to how we view the future. As Haejin was noting, there’s something about our imagination that feeds us, literally feeds us. And we need to have practitioners of this. You know, the messianic composer who composed music, Quartets for the End of Time in the concentration camps. We need that, not just so that, you know, we are distracted from darkness, but that this is the portal through which we get to see and create the future.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I love that. And that brings me to something I wanted to ask you all as we close this conversation. I hope that listeners will go and pick up a copy of your book, having experienced some hors d’oeuvres of what they might experience within the book. But something that I always ask guests as we close our conversations is what is one thing, whether it is a person, a daily practice, or a work of art, perhaps even a children’s book – sounds like Frederick the mouse might in fact be one of these things. What is one thing that helps you remember that another life is possible?

Makoto Fujimura: Well, certainly that’s what I think about all day. Every time I come into the studio, you know, I think about the privilege and this remarkable miracle that I get to do what I love and create what I call portals into new creations through my work. Every time I get to exhibit them – I have an ongoing exhibit, a museum in Taiwan right now – I think about the reality of total strangers coming into the museum and encountering these works, my prayer is that they not only see beauty manifested on the surface, but they see beauty beyond, to see beyond that, the surface, as a portal into new creation. And that’s the promise of art. Every enduring art has this quality, whether religious or not, that there’s something about art itself that manifests future hope into the very practice of, in the language and material. And that’s why I think the arts fundamentally should be at the heart of education, because it allows students to see that there’s somatic knowledge of learning to craft anything, even making a salad, because that requires gardening and raising the vegetables and the slowness of how things grow, right? That has to be manifested in how we learn things, how we understand the world.

Any of that will point to a certain reality that makes us realize we are here to create, we’re here to make the future.

Haejin Shim Fujimura: For me, it will be my mom. Because she has taught me throughout my life what it means to give extravagant love. And of course, you know, I feel so fortunate to have received and continue to receive that extravagant love. But what I also understand, I think more and more is that humanity is actually created for extravagant love. Anything less actually makes us less human. If we believe, if you listeners, you know, if you guys believe that we’re created by God, for example, the very fact that the almighty creator God created human by hand, right, and shared his breath with us. It’s extravagant. You know, the very beginning, that is in our DNA. Even if you don’t believe in biblical creation story, the fact that we get to be human, right, with the of worship responsibilities that we have in the world, we are created for what we consider extravagant love.

But that’s actually what we need. I think because of how my mom loves me and how she has made choices and decisions throughout her life, that led me to believe that she loves me extravagantly. Through education, through locating me to a safer place and better communities. That is all actually reflected in Embers’s programs.

And the theory of change, everything that I intuitively created for this organization and for the people that we have the privilege to serve is reflective of what my mom has done for me. And so when I see Mako paint with his extravagant materials, it’s actually what we are called to do every single day. So unless the work of justice is with extravagant love. We won’t actually have the kind of shalom that we are called to, that we desire. The mission of the organization and the group of people that get together to seek justice, we won’t be able to achieve that. So I’m really grateful for my mom and she really reminds me that another life is possible and I’m living that and I am so grateful for that and I hope we get to do more of that, of sharing that extravagant love.

Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, we’re indebted to her as she has lived out her life in scarcity and severe scarcity of Korean experience and grew up in Korea and then came to the United States. So that traversing of cultures, I have done myself. And I know that that cannot be done without the sacrifice of parents willing to take a risk and to really give themselves away so that we can have a future. And both of us, we understand that responsibility coming from those sacrifices. And we are not only grateful, but we see everything that we’re doing with Embers as a result of that as well.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Not to overuse the word, but that is a really beautiful example to be able to see that your mother is someone who embodies the idea that another life is possible and that that life has been lived out in your own life. So thank you both so much for joining us. As I said, hope that listeners will pick up a copy of this book, Beauty and Justice by Haejin and Makoto Fujimura. It’s been such a pleasure to speak with you both.

Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, great. Thank you so much. Great to be with you. Yeah.

Haejin Shim Fujimura: Blessings to you, Joy.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Thank you. All right, thank you guys.