“You’re welcome.”
“I’M WELCOME? For—for—for what?”
“You were an okay chef when you started with me. And you left an excellent chef. So, you’re welcome.”
“You gave me ulcers, and panic attacks. And nightmares. You know that, right? You understand that?”
“Yeah. I gave you confidence, and leadership, and ability … You wanted to be great. You wanted to be excellent … You concentrated, and you got focused, and you got great. You got excellent.”
This dialogue is an excerpt from a Season Three episode of The Bear, between chefs Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and his former mentor/tormentor David Fields (Joel McHale). This brief encounter doesn’t end with reconciliation and there is no clear resolution. It’s one of the most unsatisfying scenes in the series. In allowing it to be so, I believe The Bear gives us a uniquely realistic approach to our own trauma and how God repurposes it in ways that often leave us with more questions than answers.
The critically acclaimed FX/Hulu show centers around Carmy as he learns to process his mental state in the aftermath of his older brother’s suicide. His older brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), was the owner-proprietor of The Original Beef of Chicagoland. The restaurant was a sloppy over-the-counter establishment specializing in Italian hot beef sandwiches, served with an even sloppier side of customer service. The employees are crass and undisciplined and their customers loved it. The Original Beef was a beloved staple of the community even as it was poorly managed to the brink of closure.
Carmy, a rising star in the culinary world, comes home to Chicago to manage the restaurant, and its rag-tag crew, after Mikey’s death. In the first two seasons, he partners with a chef de cuisine, Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and together they transform The Original Beef into a fine-dining establishment called The Bear. His employees undergo a massive transformation of their own. They learn communication skills, coping methods, and lean into the craft of their work. Their progression in the midst of their own personal dysfunctions is a highlight of the show—and one of the main reasons the second season has been nominated for a record 23 Emmys. They all progress and grow—except Carmy. He’s stuck in old patterns and well-worn paths that have habitually led to depression, doubt, and self-sabotage.
The duality between the restaurant’s outward-facing front-of-house service and the chaos behind the scenes in the kitchen runs parallel to the truncated compartmentalization that exists in Carmy’s own life. To the public, he is the owner of a successful restaurant. He’s one of the brightest new talents in the country. Yet his inner life is a discombobulated mess. He combats his panic attacks by chain-smoking cigarettes and torpedoes any and all meaningful relationships before they can blossom into real joy.
Through three seasons, we discover that much of his inner chaos is caffeinated into overdrive by a traumatic relationship he had with the aforementioned David Fields—whose method of training was based on intense fear and degradation which, according to Fields, produced the desired result.
As I watched their conversation play out—Fields wearing a smug demeanor that was equal parts sociopathic and sadistic—I was transplanted to my own experience as a young Korean American pastor, working as a subordinate under people who might have had the same approach as Fields when it came to training their underlings.
In many ways, Korean immigrant theology is akin to a theology of suffering. The older generations believe, whether they admit it or not, that any pastor worth their salt must endure suffering. If they haven’t, then suffering must be manufactured. Not unlike the ascetic Desert Fathers, Korean pastors and elders are renowned for their ability to withstand turmoil and hardships, some of it self-inflicted. There is a Korean word, cham-uh, which roughly translates to “suppress, bite your tongue, to endure and bear,” and it might as well be the unofficial slogan of our orthopraxy. I wrote about this superhuman ability to endure, especially focusing on its beauty and its necessity for survival—as cham-uh has helped three consecutive generations of Koreans endure and thrive in the midst of extreme persecution, slavery, and war. But The Bear has prompted me to revisit some of my unsavory experiences as a Korean American pastor.
My first pastoral experience was wrought with hardships for which my only path was to cham-uh. It was a difficult ministry for me and my wife. More than the physical toil it took on my body, it was the mental and emotional burden that was overwhelming. Without getting into specifics, the ministry expectations for me as an assistant pastor were to run a marathon as if it were a sprint.
I wrestle with this scene from The Bear, specifically Fields’ justification of his treatment of Carmy. “You were an okay chef when you started with me. And you left an excellent chef. So, you’re welcome.” I left my first ministry dejected, feeling like I’d failed, and worse yet, feeling unsure of my calling because I’d abandoned my cultural orthopraxy. But I’m also certain it has shaped me into a better pastor. The overarching question I keep asking myself now is, “Was Fields right?”
I loathe this question because I fear it might be true. I believe I’m functionally a better leader and pastor because of my trauma, not in spite of it. At least when it comes to the front of the house. My spiritual food service is in order. I am prepared for a wide assortment of workplace hazards. My congregation eats meals that have been forged in the fire and the public face of my restaurant projects health and vitality. And in the end, I keep going. I know I can endure. I can cham-uh well past the point of exhaustion, even delirium.
But it comes at an expense. The hidden and compartmentalized kitchen of my psyche is a jumbled mess. Chaos, doubt, self-sabotage. I go weeks at a time where I do not sleep more than three hours a night but then crash in bed for the next few days. I overeat one night, then have panic attacks the next. I bite off skin from the ends of my fingers on one hand, while grabbing bandages for the impending blood with the other.
Like Carmy, my issues go well beyond a previous working environment. But also like Carmy, it has been caffeinated into overdrive because of it. So as I finished watching this latest season of The Bear, it’s unclear which aspects of my training were vital for my pastoral growth and which have been unnecessarily damaging. The show offers no simple conclusions. Perhaps it will be addressed in Season Four but my guess is that the two are inseparable. Trauma and triumph. There is no clear delineation. It’s a bittersweet pairing that attracts as it repulses—like a home-cooked meal that reminds someone of their childhood years spent in an orphanage.
In the meantime, we are given a bit of gospel reprieve in the form of another dialogue from the same episode. In this scene, Chef Luca (Will Poulter) and Chef Sydney are sitting around a table at a dinner party, eating a dish with peas in it. Luca looks at the dish. It’s one that he made a thousand times as an apprentice. After the first few bites, he tells Sydney, “I shucked, probably, ten million of these peas. Day in, day out, like robots.”
“It’s kind of like a trauma-dish then?”
“Yeah. Big time trauma-dish. The messed up thing is I currently make a dessert version [at my own restaurant]. Sweet pea panna cotta.”
“You, kind of, repurposed your trauma then.”
“That’s all we can do, right?”
There is an unassuming dollop of biblical wisdom in those scripted words. The psalmist writes of God turning “wailing into dancing” (Psalm 30:11) and I see it play out in real life in the processes that constitute a repurposing. I imagine Chef Luca in his test kitchen, shucking peas while conceptualizing a new dish. Poking and prodding, tweaking and testing. Exploring flavors and evaluating how they sit on the palette. Eventually, after many test runs, the dish comes out as he likes it, and it is in this entire process—from conceptualizing to plating—that he finds a bit of reprieve. Sweet pea panna cotta for the soul.
If we allow ourselves to be attuned to it, our Creator God gives us opportunities to go through a similar process while engaging in a variety of activities—art, music, writing, therapy, counsel, meditation, and prayer. We poke and prod. We revisit our pain. We allow ideas to fester and ferment. We explore a variety of word pairings, brush strokes, and harmonies. We test flavor combinations as they sit on the palette of our hearts. And somewhere along the way, God gives us increasing moments of respite. Wailing is transformed into dancing—or at least a slight rhythmic shuffling of our feet. Perhaps a clap or two.
Personally, the process of writing this piece has been like starting a new restaurant. I’ve been envisioning it as an open-kitchen concept. The intent of this space is to seek equal transparency between the back-of-the-house and the front. This restaurant undergoes construction with the hopes that opening up the kitchen will not only help me in my own repurposing, but to invite others to see how the dish gets made. And maybe somewhere throughout this entire process, we might find reprieve. A repurposing of cham-uh.
Maybe that’s all we can do.
Daniel Jung is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary and a teaching elder in the Korean Northwest Presbytery. He lives in Northern California, where he serves as an associate pastor at Home of Christ in Cupertino. In his spare time, Daniel loves the 49ers, good coffee, and writing media reviews for Think Christian. You can find more of his work here.
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