ORANGE — The northern part of town is full of trees, fields, well-kept houses and crumbling reminders of agrarian New England.
It’s not the sort of place you’d expect to find Korean filmmakers hot on the trail of a 7th-Century Buddhist saint’s legacy.
But that’s what’s happening.
The Rev. Don Erickson, pastor of the Community Church of North Orange, happens to have studied and been influenced by Wonhyo, a Korean sometime-Buddhist priest who left the priesthood to teach his view of the interconnectedness of faiths as a layman.
Erickson came to the area looking for a parish ministry after his post-seminary work as a hospice chaplain in Florida and New York, and found his niche.
“The church on the hill is kind of special; it’s a federated church, it’s Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ and nondenominational … it kind of fit me in that way,” Erickson said.
Erickson came across Wonhyo while researching the academically neglected Korean Buddhist tradition in college, and never lost interest.
He draws on three main examples set by Wonhyo; his nondenominational approach, his insistence on meeting people where they were — often in back streets and poverty — and his iconoclasm. Wonhyo liked to sing and dance in the streets, he said — whatever he had to do to help people understand.
On March 13, Korean filmmaker Sunah Kim and a small crew will be filming at the Community Church of North Orange’s Sunday service and interviewing Erickson for a documentary on Wonhyo.
The man, who Erickson said is something of an informally recognized saint in Korea, led an interesting life if the legends are at all on point. He left the priesthood after a transformative and possibly apocryphal experience involving an accidental drink from a human skull, and married a princess. Erickson said that part’s suspect too, but he certainly married and had a son who grew up to become an important Confucian teacher.
Erickson got involved in the film project through happenstance, stumbling across the film’s Facebook page while looking for a Wonhyo affinity group or something similar.
He credits Wonhyo’s teaching with laying the groundwork for a strong Confucian-influenced Christian church in Korea. “He really focused on the idea that we take religious tradition and we adapt it to our culture,” Erickson said. He sees Christianity adapting in similar ways to modern life in the West.
You can reach Chris Curtis at:
ccurtis@recorder.com