February, 2008

Dear Friends,

I believe that all of life is a spiritual journey. This is because all of life belongs to God. If I was to write an outline for my life, it might begin something like this:

1. God
2. Creation
3. My life
4. My life is a spiritual journey
   1. coming to see things in a new way

As I continue to live my life which is a spiritual journey, because it belongs to God, I continue to add to the subcategories that are under the major heading of “My Life is a Spiritual Journey.” I am stopping with this subcategory for now because what I am going to write about has to do with coming to see things in a new way, because my life is a spiritual journey.

The East is different from the West.  I realized this for the hundredth time with a start when a week ago I traveled over the international boundary from mainland China to Hong Kong. It has been six months since I landed in Shanghai with six other Amity teachers on July 28, 2007. I did not realize the extent of the culture shock with which I have been living and adapting until I saw the modern structure of the Hong Kong airport. People were speaking English and there were white people in abundance. I have gotten used to having days go by when the only English I hear falls from the lips of the Chinese people with whom I communicate more frequently than Western people much of the time in Nanjing.

I thought I had gotten used to small things like having only one English-speaking television channel until I found out that Hong Kong has two of them. This in itself would not have been startling except that I then found out that on a Monday morning I was able to watch the CBS Sunday Evening News broadcasting with Katie Couric from New York. I was glued to the tube. For a few minutes I thought that she had been transferred back to morning news show until someone gently pointed out to me that while it was morning in Hong Kong, it was evening in the United States.

Ppeacock sculpture in a Hong Kong shopping mall. It was so big I had to take the picture in segments.

American television! Books in English in the bookstores! There is a foreign bookstore in Nanjing, but it’s nothing on the scale of the several bookstores that I saw in Hong Kong. The friends with whom I stayed during my two and a half day whirlwind even had boxed macaroni and cheese that they had purchased in Hong Kong. I was able to find basil and oregano—and, lo and behold, the oven mitts that have eluded me for six months.

Someone asked me recently what is the difference between living in secular America and atheist China This person wanted to know if secularism and atheism are not the same thing. No, I said, they are not.

In secular America most people, if they aren’t Jews or Muslims or a member of another religion, will say that they are Christians. America still appears to be regarded as a Christian nation. Popular opinion polls continue to show that Americans believe in God. Who that God is may be up for debate, but there does continue to be a spiritual dimension to American life.

In atheist China what I am noticing is that people quickly say that they are not a Christian, and they also quickly say that China is not religious. Buddhism is mentioned now and again, but unless a Chinese person is actually a Christian, being a Christian or having Christians in China is shunned in conversation.

I have a sense that the soul of China was ripped out of it when the attempt was made to replace Confucianism with communism. Confucianism was the root of this ancient civilization, its beating heart. It gave structure to its society and formed the underpinnings of its culture. While it is philosophical and not religious, nonetheless I believe that it gave a sense of spirituality to China, if in no other way than through the reverence of ancestor worship and care. To this day there continues to be a tomb-sweeping holiday.

The sculpture at the bottom of the hill at Baise.  The monument itself is at the top of the hill.

I was recently in a city in the south of China called Baise. In 1929 there was an uprising in Baise (then called "Bose") led by Deng Xiao Ping, who was 24 years old. There is a monument to this event on the top of a hill overlooking Baise. At the base of the stairs leading to the monument are sculptures depicting what appear to me to be the beliefs behind the events. The ones that struck me the most were the ones that showed the “old,” scholarly China handing China over to the new, revolutionary China. I was glad to see the acknowledgment of what China has been in the past, and I hope that it is also a statement that the old is not lost in or to the new.

Much of China’s culture is being lost because it’s considered a part of the old. Once it was realized that an important treasure would not be recoverable, attention began to be paid to its preservation. This attention may have come too late, as most youth today are not interested in things like traditional music and in the Peking Opera. Someone told me recently that a country cannot live without a history. Even if today’s youth are not interested, perhaps their children will be.

In a recent newsletter I shared with you how difficult it had been for me to see artificial Christmas trees in the Wal-Mart in Nanjing. This brought home to me how secular Christmas has truly become. To see the American secular Christmas appear in China, which is largely ignorant of the religious meaning of Christmas, was sorrowful for me. 

However, a Chinese friend pointed out to me that despite how secular this makes Christmas appear there are Chinese for whom Christmas is very special. There are Chinese Christians, and those Christians are delighted to have signs of Christmas in their stores, even if they are the secular aspects of this religious holiday.

This was the event and the word about China from a Chinese person that helped my vision to begin to change. Instead of looking with sorrow on the signs of secularism, I can appreciate that in atheist China some aspect of the truth of Christmas is coming to light and even while secular, the artificial trees can remind me of that!

What is the difference between a secular America and an atheist China? From the outside they might not be so clear. Both countries have become materialistic. To both countries, God is money and power. But America was founded as a country where people had the right to seek religious freedom, and the new China was founded as a country without God. Having begun on opposite ends of a religious spectrum—freedom of religion and no-God—both countries are philosophically moving towards the other. America is losing much of her religious underpinnings and China may be finding god, not as the triune God, but as the god of capitalism. So in a sense, the two countries are becoming more alike than different. But what initially drove the citizens of each country to found their country is worlds apart. It is in many ways reflective of the difference between East and West.

In the East, civilization is ancient. Waiting is not a problem. Wait long enough and change will happen. On the other hand, nothing will change. In the West, civilization is impatient. Wait long enough and we will all be dead. Create change. Make change happen. On the other hand, nothing will change. Nothing will change in either the East or the West because we all remain human beings. Everything will change because time moves on. We begin from two different places and perhaps end up in the same place in the end.

On the days when I feel an unbearable spiritual oppression in China I try and keep in mind that the triune God is here. The book of Romans tells us that nothing will ever separate us from the love of God in Christ. The Chinese people are just as beloved as children of God as the American people, or any other people of the earth, all of whom were created by God.

Thanks to my Christian Chinese friends I can continue to learn to look for hope in that which I would on my own see as the movement of secularism from West to East. Instead, those things may be signs of the East searching for the star again in her own way.

Secularism is a thirst for God that has been wounded by institutionalism. But God is at the core of the secular. The saying goes that Presbyterians don’t believe in atheism, after all, everyone worships something. The atheism I see in China is not a hunger or a thirst, it is a void. I sense that Chinese people do not see beyond what is. Today is what matters. Material comfort is what matters. There is indeed culture and tradition, but there is not an inner knowledge that God is the well from which these human enterprises spring.

China closed her doors in 1949 when the People’s Republic was founded. There were good reasons for this. Too many invaders, too many invasions. She needed time to become stable and recover from the destruction of imperialism. This time, however, Christianity was not killed—as it had been in the past when it became a threat in ancient China—it just went deep underground. There are Chinese who look for the star. But when the open and reforming movement took place in 1978, the West blew in greedily. We in America had gone through our own changes as we went from “religious” in the 1950s and 1960s to increasing secularism by the time we were allowed to re-enter China.  The individualism of secularism invaded China, and in a generation the moral climate of the East has become Western in tone and practice.

China is atheist and in terms of what the West has done to bring modernization to China we have also brought the gift of secularization to her. She is godless, worshipping money and security. But she does not have the same grounding in the practice of religion that we in the West have had.

This can be depressing to me some days. But again, I am thankful for the Chinese friends who point out their own hope to me. Foolish Christian that I am! I have so much to learn from those who love Jesus in the midst of persecution! I have so much to learn from those who search for the star in the midst of an ancient civilization from which they are radically departing.

Christianity is not easy in the United States because the winds of change have created new gods for Americans to worship. It is, however, still within the mainstream to attend church, to claim God as one’s Lord and Savior, and even to minister through the Word and Sacrament. In China, the star is much more obscure, must more difficult to see.

Please pray for the Christians of China as they grow in their faith and in their witness to Jesus. Please pray for me as I continue to live among them. I share the same faith with them and at the same time I learn from them each day.

And I continue to be thankful each day for the new ways that I am learning to see in this land that is so different from my own. Does this not sound like all Christian pilgrimages? A land different than my own, and I am learning to see what I could not see before. Thanks be to God!

In Christ,

Debbie

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 99