Stairway to Heaven

Stairway to Heaven: Fragments of a Christian Allegorical Interpretation

"...everything for me becomes an allegory, and my dear memories are heavier than boulders."
- Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne”

More than anything else, "Stairway to Heaven" has startled and edified me with its theological depth. Whoever said that theology (a word that doesn’t have to be as cumbersome or intimidating as it is made out to be) is to be found only in books? He has not left himself without witness, and there no speech or language where the voice of the knowledge of God is not heard.

Perhaps it may not be entirely unfounded to censure a show like "Stairway" for its melodramatic sappiness, excess of cheap tears, run-of-the-mill plot, exploitation of pretty faces, and the like. I would also confess that I have not watched enough Korean dramas (this is my first) to defend "Stairway" against such diatribes. But this is what I believe: whether an art form be “high” or “low,” as long as it speaks to our souls, as long as it engages some part of us – yes, even that of uneducated homemakers, lovesick schoolgirls, desperate aging bachelors, or bored old folks whiling their time away – there there is truth. All truth is God’s truth, the light that illumines and encourages our hearts.

In a few sentences, "Stairway" is a Cinderalla-esque story of how endearing childhood sweethearts Cha Song-Ju and Han Jung-Su, separated by time and space, struggle within a mimetic web of deceit, envy, covetousness, and murderous intent to be together. To live and have your being with another – how difficult, how tentative a thing that is! The lovers’ gravest vicissitudes (and the major part of the diegesis) begin when Jung-Su’s bitter stepsister, Yuri, surreptitiously runs her down just before she meets Song-Ju, after three years of anguished waiting for him to return from America. Thought by all to be dead, Jung-Su loses her memory, is delivered by Yuri into the hands of their kind but tormented stepbrother Tae-hwa who, obsessed with Jung-Su, smuggles her away into a fresh familial, quasi-ragamuffinly/bohemian existence with his dad.

Five years pass. Song-Ju returns again to Korea after more studying, ready to inherit the reins of Lotte World - all this while cherishing with melancholy adoration the memory of his beloved. Jung-Su is now leading a happily quotidian life of a street fashion designer, happily unaware of her previous life. Then one day, he sees her… That said, here are some assorted observations on the aspects of Christianity in "Stairway":

- Jung-Su’s stepmother Mira is the originary fount, the first cause, of perpetuating evil – she is an actress, whose job is to roleplay, to distort reality. Like Satan, she is the “father of lies,” deceiving the undiscerning (most of all, the media), masquerading as an angel of light. At the end divine poetic justice is meted out: after all her machinations to usurp the corporate place of the most high collapse, she goes mad - as she has been all along, for sin is irrationality – and is cast into the hell of an asylum to spend the rest of her days.

- As the general manager of Lotte World Song-Ju appears to hold in his hands all the power within heaven and earth, ordaining circumstances to draw her close to him; he forces Jung-Su from her little hole-in-the-wall streetstall of making mudpies into the brightlid, franchised security of his shopping center – a spiritual depiction of how God, in His omnipresent determination, pursues us with His love. In one especially spectacular scene, Song-Ju races in his BMW against a train (the impersonal, mechanized throng of history) to forge their individual destinies, for their happiness and glory.

- Like a soldier, Jung-Su suffers all sorts of trials and tribulations while in the world waiting for the return of her groom, buffeted repeatedly by Mira’s abuse. It is only when she has matured, and when she is emboldened by her intense passion for Song-Ju, that she is able to rise up to resist the satanic oppression. She is, however, unable to crush the serpent’s head – this occurs only towards the end when with the revelation of the truth Mira is exposed as the lawless one she really is.

- The memory that Jung-Su loses is that of the innocent, childlike love that she once shared with Song-Ju. As soon as they were born from their mothers’ wombs they are predestined to be together, to inhabit that blissful edenic existence by the sea. Were we not all meant to be with the Lord our God? Come what may, from the transcendent, distant universe of America where desire teemed for five long years, Song-Ju re-enters Christlike from the lonely wilderness of infinity into a crass world of dust and deceit: with fire in his heart, an unceasing anguish and sorrow in his soul, and his eye set as a flint towards the image of his beloved bride. He calls out to her – Han Jung-Su, Han Jung-Su, tenderly, gingerly, tentatively, desperately – his voice piercing the effects of her mnemonic fall, summoning from the forgotten abysses of her mind the memory of their covenantal Passion. How awesome is this lovely allegory, stronger than death, unquenchable by the tides of time and space.

- Nevertheless, in spite of the lavish moonshine of romantic details, "Stairway" ultimately pronounces that their love will only find its true consummation in heaven, where, as is reiterated throughout, there will be no more sorrow, no more parting, no more tears. Arguably, the ultimate sacrifice of the show is performed by Tae-Hwa, who willingly crucifies himself so that he may fulfill through posthumous eye transplant the blind Jung-Su’s final wish: that she may receive her sight to gaze upon the countenance of her beloved. Once lost, she now is found; once blind, she now sees. But by the end of the show (she eventually dies from congenital cancer), having realized that love, even at its noblest moments, cannot escape the corruption that reigns in the world, Song-Ju and Jung-Su find comfort in the confession that they will meet again in heaven. If this conviction were rooted in a Pure-land Buddhist worldview, there would have to be a palpable rejection of this-worldly passions, the purported cause of all suffering; but because it is, instead, decidedly Christian, what we feel is a balanced affirmation of the petrine call to "love life and see good days," behind the objective-spiritual reality of how they are but strangers and pilgrims in this travailing creation, awaiting a heavenly home.

And he thinks: how beautiful, how sweet it will be, to smother her cheeks against mine; to be intoxicated by the scent of her hair; to rub our noses together, plaintively, playfully tracing the shadow of a kiss; to curl her hair behind her ears in a gentle gesture; to caress and wipe away that teardrop sitting softly upon her cheeks - and to gaze deep into her eyes, to adore her knowing that she adores me too, saying in my heart of hearts, you, my bride, are so, so beautiful, I love you to bits, darling, and I bless our Father in heaven for giving me to you. This is the kind of love that, since the beginning of time, we've been looking, hoping, yearning, longing, dying, living, praying, waiting for. You are the love of my life, and I will never let you go.