Chinglican Christianity: Sanctorum Communio

Tags

Alastair Sterne, classical Christian, communion, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Zizioulas, liberal, mass, N. T. Wright, orthodox, resurrection, Roger Revell, saints, Stanley Hauerwas, veneration

Roger Revell has hit the nail right on the head. There is nothing like full-bodied orthodox Christianity that elicits a rousing ‘Amen!’ from across the spectrum of those who are part of the diverse chorus of what St. Peter’s Fireside calls ‘classical Christianity.’

Revell’s brilliant response takes the wind right out of the sails of Douglas Todd’s suggestion that ‘conservative’ Christians are too heavenly minded for earthly good. Here’s Todd:

This might shock those who assume the main reason Christians become Christian, and embrace the Easter account of the resurrection of Jesus, is to be guaranteed a spot in heaven. But belief in heaven, or otherwise, is not a deal-breaker for entry into this camp. Some liberal Christians don’t think it is possible to have individual consciousness after death. That said, most liberal Christians appreciate how the story of Jesus’ resurrection exemplifies how “death is not the final word.” Even if they don’t believe Jesus physically rose from the grave, they buy into the metaphor. They accept Jesus’ followers had mystical visions of him after his death and that the love people show on earth lives on eternally after their body dies.

One might have expected that Revell’s ‘classically Christian’ answer would take us back to St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians where he castigates the Corinthian church for entertaining the idea that the bodily resurrection may not have happened. Certainly, within evangelical circles, a certain reading of this passage has yielded a cottage industry of apologetics (one thinks, for example, of Frank Morrison’s Who Moved the Stone?, Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and Lee Strobel’s Case for Christ) seeking to demonstrate from putatively incontrovertible evidence that Jesus in fact was raised bodily from the dead and that classically orthodox Christianity must be believed. For these people, ‘belief in heaven’ and the physical resurrection are indeed ‘deal-breakers,’ and a response from this camp would have dragged Todd through the coals for a seeming denial of the necessity of Jesus’ resurrection.

Not so Revell. Quite obviously influenced not only by N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope (which he cites), as well as Wright’s tome The Resurrection of the Son of God (which he is too modest to cite), Revell’s first argument is that Christians who are too heavenly minded for earthly good are in fact shirking their Christian obligation to be present and alive as, in the words of St. Irenaeus, ‘human beings fully alive’ and that ‘liberal Christians’ (say, Rob Bell) as well as their secular counterparts (say, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) are right to be disgusted at these freeloaders mooching off the rest of us who are working for the common good. As Revell explains, the only problem with applying this logic to all classically-oriented Christians is that that’s not how the logic classically works. Emphasizing that classically-oriented Christians are not completely agreed on what it means to share in the risen life (say, whether or not to venerate the saints who have fallen asleep but are still alive, or whether the Bible talks about only about life after death or a life after life after death), Revell suggests that one point of convergence is that, according to Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, the prize of eternal life is precisely what makes life in the present possible, exciting, and creative, making even prophetic statements in physical martyrdom (say, St. Perpetua or Dietrich Bonhoeffer) completely possible. Revell ends with a bang: life after life is not a ‘pleasant and fanciful idea’ but the path of full-bodied Christian discipleship.

Here, Revell is certainly influenced by orthodox theologian John Zizioulas’s Being as Communion. At the risk of oversimplification (I’m not going to deal with the whole hypostasis and ousios thing, for example, because it gave me a splitting headache), Zizioulas argues that human planes of existence can be divided between the ‘biological’ and the ‘ecclesial.’ At a basic ‘biological’ level of living, people tend to be concerned about their own survival, literally stayin’ alive (ah, ha, ha, ha, ha…sorry…). But what happens when one gets baptized is that one gets immersed into the risen life of Jesus Christ — one quite literally, and not just metaphorically, participates in the resurrection. Because the ‘death factor’ gets taken out of the equation, one’s existence is not merely biological and oriented toward survival; it is now ecclesial and eucharistic. In other words, one continues to participate in the risen life of Christ by sacramentally eating his flesh and drinking his blood. This doesn’t just happen at an individual level. It happens together with the whole church — the ekklesia — which makes one’s existence ecclesial, which means that one’s existence is not merely oriented toward biological survival, but toward communion with the other.

Drawing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian from a completely different theological tradition (and indeed, historical period!) from Zizioulas, this means that a Christian mode of social relations is marked by the sanctorum communio, the communion of saints. Indeed, Bonhoeffer goes as far as to say that the church is Christ literally and actually made manifest in the world: ‘Now the objective spirit of the church really has become the Holy Spirit, the experience of the “religious” community now really is the experience of the church, and the collective person of the church now really is “Christ existing as church-community”‘ (Sanctorum Communio, p. 288). As Revell suggests, a Christian is cut out to be the best kind of citizen, ‘the type who forgoes personal interest and entitlement because in due course, she will exist in a place devoid of want and lack.’ That’s because a Christian’s primary locus of existence is in the church, which is not a private voluntary association, but a public display of a new mode of social relations marked by always being for the other and not for one’s own survival.

Which brings us to that scandalous thing that Revell talks about halfway through his post: the veneration of the saints. Except that it’s not very scandalous…

In fact, that Revell seems almost unfazed by the scandal that his mentioning of this practice might cause indicates how central the veneration of the saints is to putting the resurrection to work. After all, when in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus defends the resurrection over against the Sadducees’ denial of it, he does it by saying that the reference to the God of the burning bush as the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ indicates that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not dead but alive, for God is God of the living, not the dead. What this means is that saints like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky, are not only alive, but can quite literally continue to intervene in the present world. A ‘classical Christian’ view, embraced by Catholic and Orthodox Christians especially, takes this radically catholic view, that the communion of saints not only comprises the living and the dead in Christ, but that all are in fact still alive by virtue of their participation in Christ’s risen life. That Jesus himself shows that this can be a validly Christian practice from the beginnings of the Scriptural tradition suggests that while Protestants may have historically found this practice problematic (idolatry! one hears them cry), every Christian should in fact find this practice relatively uncontroversial.

The beauty of politics called ‘church,’ as theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, is that not everyone has to agree with precisely how to articulate this sensibility. Indeed, Revell’s ‘classical Christianity’ makes room even for Todd’s liberal articulation of a spiritual resurrection, a rare feat in the currently polarized Christian theological landscape. If there is room in the Body for Protestants who cannot endorse the resurrection practice of venerating the saints, then there is certainly also room for those who may articulate the resurrection differently without actually denying its effects. After all, Todd does not deny the resurrection: even if some of Todd’s ‘liberal Christians’ do not believe in the resurrection, ‘they still buy into the metaphor’ and agree that ‘death is not the final word.’ While full-bodied ‘orthodox’ Christians might chafe at this, Revell is correct not to take Todd to task explicitly for this because he recognizes the reality that theology has never really only been about articulation — it’s about practice.

What Revell finally shows, then, is that ‘classical Christianity’ simply cannot be ideological. If indeed theology is about practice, then the comparisons between ‘classical’ and ‘liberal’ Christianity do not end with how Todd and St. Peter’s Fireside express their theology. What has happened over the course of our conversation, then, is that what started out as a debate between two polarized ends of the theological spectrum have been brought together by convergences in practice — the doing of justice, the doing of the contemplative life, the doing of confession, the doing of silent presence, the doing of the resurrection — have trumped whatever divisions we might have. As Pope Francis once declared, ‘ideological Christianity’ is a ‘disease.’ We must work together.

Now the theological discussion is at an end. We have come together more closely than we ever thought possible. We have discovered our unlikely affinities in the sanctorum communio. The liturgical formula from which we get the word ‘mass’ is Ite, missa est. After having partaken of the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood in a deep sharing in the risen life of the God who became human, the people are dismissed. Go forth in the name of Christ, the deacon sometimes says. Or, go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Or, go forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. Or, let us bless the Lord.

The people always respond: Thanks be to God.

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The Poet Who Dug in Bogs: A Tribute to Seamus Heaney

Tags

Beowulf, Bog, Christianity, death, Heaney, Ireland, Malcolm Guite, Old English, Poetry, Prince Albert National Park, Seamus Heaney, St. John of the Cross, Tribute

Conflict makes for good writing – or so goes the theory – and so our assignment in the intro to writing course I took to get into university (because I was homeschooled and the process was less than clear at that time) was to write about something we were conflicted about. I, being a little new to the production (though not the thought processes) of papers submitted a paper called, “You, My Friend, Need Bogs.” I have, I hope, since learned to write better titles. But the feedback I got was not on the title, but on the content. I had to do a rewrite because there was not enough conflict. My problem was that I chose the topic expecting there to be a struggle – between everything I love about bogs, and the feeling that I ought not to because being fascinated by a place where dead things don’t decay and the plants kill things does not jar well with a precious moments conception of Christianity. But I could not help myself. I really did love bogs.

The bog I loved in particular was a bog in Northern Saskatchewan called, plainly enough, Boundary Bog, being as it is on the boundary of Prince Albert National Park. I have visited this bog almost yearly, when we go up to the park for our family holiday; I have even hiked around it (off the boardwalk) in the very rare dry season when the sphagnum was dry enough that we did not sink. What I liked (and still like) about the bog is its indifference to progress – and I mean this as the highest of compliments. Stupid people could go around doing their stupid politics and saying stupid things about God, and many people could react and make big deals about things etc., and the bog didn’t care. What was preserved there didn’t change; it had been there long before, and would be there long after our own little dramas that we either took seriously or became too cynical to take seriously, as the case might be. The bog was for me a somewhat morbid version of the justly famous passage from The Lord of the Rings in which Sam sees the eternal light of a star and it reminds him that there is a world beyond Mordor.

Why all this about bogs? Because in this post I want to honor a poet whose chief accomplishment was digging in bogs. I am admittedly a latecomer to Seamus Heaney’s poetry, having as I do a general aversion to modern poets. But when I found him, I realized that here was someone who could explain the tension: why the conflict I thought I was writing about in my essay – the alleged conflict between Christian hope and a love of bogs – was in fact not a conflict.

My purpose here is not to analyze in detail all of Heaney’s bog poetry; that has been done elsewhere. What I do want to suggest, though, is that where most modern poets spend their time focusing on the present moment – either praising or lamenting an inescapable societal “progress” – Heaney dug; the place his poetry starts is always the piece of ground he stands on. What he does is different from a merely sentimental or escapist desire to go back to “the good old days.” Rather, he forces us to look at the bodies in the ground we have built and sold on. He himself sometimes seems as much at a loss about what to do with these bodies as we are – whether these bodies be literal bog sacrifices, or the metaphorical body of Ireland he wrote so much about. But he insists we must look at them. Try as we might to cover them with the tarp of modern progress, the bog, like death, will get us in the end – and its bodies will ever be our companions.

This I knew, or at least there was a part of me that felt it intuitively in my love for bogs. What Heaney does, however, is articulate through poetry the Catholic theological vision that lies behind this love. There are two particular ways I see this working out in his poetry. The first is in his interest in Old English poetry, for, in many ways, the Old English poetic tradition is grubby and earthy and bog-like. Try as we might to overwrite its foundations with all manner of Norman, scholastic, and imperial inventions, it remains a space of quiet darkness touching earth. I do not say this to be entirely pejorative; indeed, I have a deep appreciation for the scholastics. But when I am looking for a poetry and a theology that is equal to the raggedness and darkness of life, it is not to Arthurian legend that I turn, nor even (magnificent though he is) to Dante – it is to Old English poetry. Old English poetry, we might say, is the boggy morass over which the rest of English literary tradition is built – and the exploration of this boggy morass is chalk full of theology. Heaney, I think, saw this, that Old English tradition was a way of facing the darkness head on without succumbing to nihilism, and it could do this just to the degree that it tempered Northern pessimism with Christian hope. I can put it no better than Heaney himself in the prophetic lines from his poem, “North”:

“Lie down

in the word-hoard, burrow

the coil and gleam

of your furrowed brain.

 

Compose in darkness.

Expect aurora borealis

in the long foray

but no cascade of light.

 

Keep your eye clear

as the bleb of the icicle,

trust the feel of what nubbed treasure

your hands have known.”

Here we find Heaney, grubbing about in the boggy darkness of Old English poetry, refracted as it necessarily is through the Christian culture that preserved it – boglike, if you will. Such digging – in the Christian bog of Old English poetry – seems to me to run through his ongoing interest in Old English poetry, including his justly praised translation of Beowulf.

Of course, one might ask how I know this is not simply a reversion to a kind of pre-Christian darkness; after all, though the evocation of Old English poetry with words like wordhoard is inescapable, there is nothing immediately here about monks or Christians. But though it is not here in the immediate text, it is, I think, implied when read against the backdrop of Heaney’s poetic corpus; this is nowhere more clear than in Poem 11 of Heaney’s Station Island. The idea that this part of the poem is a central text in the spiritual development of Heaney’s canon is hardly my own – I borrow it from Malcolm Guite, who has a wonderful chapter on Heaney in his book, Faith, Hope, and Poetry. What I want to particularly focus on though is the way this section gives us something that we might call a theology of the bog body, a justification for the exploration of everything opposite to easy light, triumphalistic faith, and simplistic hope. In this section of the poem is a translation of a poem by St. John of the Cross; throughout, the poem weaves together imagery of faith and darkness, with a set of concluding lines that particularly bring home this theme:

This eternal fountain hides and splashes

Within the living bread that is life to us

Although it is the night.

 

Hear it calling out to every creature.

And they drink these waters, although it is dark here

Because it is the night.

 

I am repining for this living fountain.

Within this bread of life I see it plain

Although it is the night.

Here, then, Heaney works into his own poem St. John of the Cross’s understanding of theology in the dark, perhaps most famously know through his concept of the “dark night of the soul”. As Malcolm Guite notes,

“St. John titled this poem ‘Cantuar Del Alma que se huelga de consocer a Dios por Fe’, ‘The Song of the Soul Which Delights to Know God by Faith’; the significance is in the phrase about ‘knowing God by faith’. St. Paul contrasts faith and sight: ‘we walk by faith and not by sight’; to know God ‘by faith’ is to acknowledge the present darkness and yet to see beyond it, to see paradoxically what cannot be seen, for ‘faith is the evidence of things not seen’. To know God by faith is both to acknowledge his palpable absence from the world of the visible and yet at the same time to dare to see him ‘through a glass, darkly’. This paradox of finding that the visible may also be alive with ‘what’s invisible’ is at the heart of Heaney’s vocation as a poet.”

So, what does all this mean? It means that for Heaney, via St. John of the Cross, the poetic act of digging about in the dark murkiness of bogs is rendered a profoundly theological act, whether these bogs be literal or the more metaphorical kinds, Old English literature or Irish history. And it means for me that the conflict that so tied me in knots when I entered university – the problem of faith and bogs – is beautifully resolved in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. One of the last Old English poems Heaney translated was Deor, and there are few more fitting lines with which to end this tribute than the refrain of this poem: þæs ofereode, swa þisses mæg, or, in Heaney’s words, “That passed over, this can too.” Heaney wrote as one who knew the deep secret of this phrase: that the passing and death of worldly things does not underscore a despairing nihilism, as one might initially expect, but is rather a type of that other transient thing that Christian eschatology insists can and will eventually pass away: death itself.

Remembering Another Anniversary

Tags

death, Family, Gerard Manley Hopkins, God, Hobbit, John Donne, Poetry, Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

My prior post was in celebration of the anniversary of my wife and myself. But there is another anniversary that also occurs for me, my friends, and my family during this week. But let me backtrack. Two years ago, perhaps two or three weeks earlier than this date, my son and I dropped our dear friend A off at the airport. A was a particularly close friend of our family, living as she did next door and often sharing family life with us, and so my son, then three years old, knew her well. When we dropped her off, and she began to go through Customs, my son was worried and wanted to follow her through. I reassured him that it would be okay, and that A would be back in a few weeks. But a few weeks later we learned that A, ten minutes away from her friend’s wedding, drove into a water-filled ditch by the road and drowned. My words had been lies. Things would not be okay.

It is two years today since she died, and I still don’t really know what to say. Yes, one goes on with life and gets by the best one can, and yes, our very makeup ensures that we are not going through the initial shock of grieving perpetually, but – she is not here. And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that neither answers nor even lack of answers (the much appreciated “mystery” valued in emergent circles) is enough. It is not these I want. There was in her – as there is in every of God’s children – what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls haecceitas, a “thisness,” a particularity that was her. I do not long for answers. I look with longing for the resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the particularity that was her.

It also seems to me that grief is a mess, plain and simple. My own manner of grieving – after the initial shock – is silence, and this I imagine can be very disconcerting to those who mourn by speaking voluminously. Part of the process for me in fact has been learning to show grace to those who mourn in ways not as silent and not as tactful as myself. But my silence also makes me a horrible comforter, and very bad at extending empathy to others regarding her. There have been many a time when I have wished myself capable of some small gesture of help or comfort – the kinds of gestures by which practical people can be helpful – and I am paralyzed. I am paralyzed because anything I can think of doing seems so small and so insignificant in relation to the one who was lost. In my more rational moments I realize it is by very small things like these – by enacting the grace of Hobbits – that we get through both life and mourning; in fact this was one of the most important things I learned from A, who was stubbornly practical in the way she would hunt people down and help them. But I am so very often paralyzed, particularly when it comes to helping others of her friends and family who are mourning – what I can offer feels less than nothing.

And then there is all the “stuff” that comes with it. I really don’t want to be angry with God. Philosophically and theologically speaking, I don’t think I have good grounds (and I don’t say this flippantly – I have spent the last twelve years of my academic career researching, among other things, the theological problem of evil, and still longer thinking about it). But there is so often a difference between what we want and what we are. Emotionally speaking, when I am not raging Job-like, it is because I have abandoned my emotions as a lost cause, something doomed and waiting for the fix of heaven. No, it is not ideal. But neither was her death.

And as I consider concluding this, I am still not sure what to say. Part of me wants to wrap it up nicely and bring everything to a hopeful close; part of everyone longs for that because of the eschatological desire placed in them by God, and this longing, if not dealt with in patient prayer, makes us liars, as I was to my son – we make up answers because we are not willing to wait for the answer we were designed for. And then there is the part of me that just wants to end with tragedy and loose ends. The honesty of it is appealing. But this too can be a dodge. Because not only does death cast uncertainty on the things and people in life we take for granted; it also casts certainty on the things and people that do and did matter. I am more certain, perhaps even than I was at the time, of the way that our time with A taught us about real meaning in life – not the abstract, theoretical intangible kind, but the concrete kind that exists when you regularly share meals with someone. And so I find myself not only thrown by the uncertainty of life, but also, in an odd way, by the uncertainty of death. Life – her life – was too real (difficult though it often was for her), too tangible for death to be the final word. Some I imagine will take this as just a sop for my wishful thinking, but I think there is a little more to it. There is a reason that, in the Christian tradition, Job is considered one of the first prophets to proclaim the resurrection. Our lives are either meaningless or clues pointing to something else, something higher, and hers was the latter – something I cannot of course here prove but something that her friends and family will understand. In one of his sonnets, John Donne triumphantly proclaims, “Death, thou shalt die.” At the moment I cannot be quite so cocksure – whether it dies or not, it’s still pretty bloody awful to experience right now. But if I cannot at the moment say this with such great boldness, A lived Donne’s words. She knew much of death, and kept loving – and that, I think, is a legacy worth coveting.

Democracy

Tags

ballot, death, dust, Poetry, politics, queen of Sheba, resurrection, Solomon, vote

Given how annoyed I have been with all the voting stuff going on – and I am merely loving my neighbor as myself insofar as I am equally annoyed when stuff like that happens in Canada – I thought I should offer a Christian reflection on the occasion. I suppose I can see why people get frustrated when they try to talk to me about politics – the dithering probably gets annoying…

Democracy

Not indubitable debt to reason,

But fear is why we fly, as free,

From belief in the risen dead.

 

We are based in us

Inconvenienced if some corpse claws

Back up to say,

“Before you were,

And all your progress,

All your glory

All your sin –

Before you were,

And your progress –

There were people somewhere somehow living

Somehow somewhere living lacking

Knowledge of self-pity due.”

 

Yes, and to say,

“Progress could quit in a flash

Here today and

Tomorrow the sparkmist

Vain

Snuffed.”

 

Truth from the mouth

Of the Queen of the South:

“You unburied but one part of Solomon’s treasure –

Try and say which.”

 

But oh for a thousand tongues to sing

Exactly what we want them to sing

And then stay silent

In Death;

Dust will not judge –

Or will it?

 

Dread dust (the beginning of wit),

Shaken from Apostolic feet

In tomb-grounded townhouse and hovel high;

“Dust we are

And to dust we return,

And dust will inherit the earth,

And judge,” say saints.

 

Dust is the doomsmark

When death passes over,

Bewhispers a cross

Not sequestered in square

On a ballot.

A Day for Protestant Jokes

Tags

95 Theses, Anglican, Anglo-Catholic, Asian American, Chinese, Congregation of Holy Cross, death, denomination, Diet of Worms, ecumenism, Fun, funny, Halloween, humor, John Calvin, joke, Luther, Lutheran, Martin Luther, Michael Servetus, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Protestant, Rachel Held Evans, Reformation Day, Thomas Cranmer, Wittenberg

As CaptainThin pointed out, today is Reformation Day and All Hallows’ Eve.

I think it’s a good day for Protestant jokes.  Here’s one that my dad heard in seminary:

There was an interdenominational Protestant gathering, and a fire started in the sanctuary. The Pentecostals got up and screamed: “Fire!”  The Baptists shouted: “Water!”  And the Presbyterians said: “Order.”

Martin Luther once said that if he farted in Wittenberg, they smell it in Rome.  Recently, excavators found Luther’s famed cloaca, the secret place where he did a ton of writing.  It was a stone toilet.  Could this possibly mean that the 95 Theses originated from 95 feces?

More conservative Christians seem to be scared off by Halloween as a pagan holiday. This year, though, it’s not the Protestants but the Polish Catholic bishops who are decrying Halloween as a pagan holiday.

I think we could use a bit more holy humour on All Hallows Eve, though, and so does Fr. Jim Martin.

In light of this, I have a few suggestions:

1. Nail the 95 theses on somebody’s door.  This seems to be a yearly ritual between Valparaiso University (the Lutherans) and the University of Notre Dame (Catholic, Congregation of Holy Cross).  This year, Nashotah House even had this done in-house.  I guess this is what happens when you’re Anglo-Catholic.  Note, though, that they use Rite I.  Smells like Cranmer.
2. Tell a Protestant joke.  You know, for example, how some Protestants like to remember the Diet of Worms by portraying themselves as totally depraved worms in a fit of utter humility? Here’s Happy Reformation Day to them from Pope Benedict XVI.
3. Go buy Rachel Held Evans’s book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood.  Why? you ask.  For the simple fact that it came out yesterday.
   It also brings to mind Nadia Bolz-Weber being portrayed as a comic book “pastrix” in a pic worthy of both Reformation Day and Halloween.

1. Dress up as a morbid Reformation martyr.  For example, somebody could do Michael Servetus.

In the spirit of Chinglicanism, I’ll leave it at 4 things.  “4,” after all, is the Chinese superstitious number for death.

And that’s funny only if your hermeneutic for both Reformation Day and All Hallows’ Eve is the resurrection.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. at the Qingming Festival

Tags

Asian American, Benedict XVI, China, Chinese, civil rights, class solidarity, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, dissident, Eucharist, exodus, Glenn Omatsu, Holy Week, Hoodie Sunday, human rights, I Have a Dream, Lent, liberation theology, Malcolm X, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Moses, mountaintop, Promised Land, Qin Shihuang, Qingming Festival, radical, Sam Wells, Spring and Autumn Period, Third World Liberation Front, Tiananmen, Trayvon Martin

清明時節雨紛紛
路上行人欲斷魂
借問酒家何處有
牧童遙指杏花村

The drizzling rain at Qingming time
The rending flesh of the pedestrians
Where to find a pub to drink my sadness?
A cowherd points to Almond Flower Village.

–杜牧 Du Mu

Since before the days when Qin Shihuang conquered the various warring states that came to constitute the imperial Middle Kingdom, there has been the tradition of the Qingming Festival. Originally commemorated in memory of the accidental burning of a Spring and Autumn Period official’s servant, the festival has developed since the Tang Dynasty to be a day to honour the dead by sweeping the graves of ancestors, carrying willows and flowers to ward off evil spirits, and more recently, remembering the deaths of intellectual dissidents in twentieth-century Chinese history.

Typically, Qingming Festival falls on April 5.

But this year’s Qingming Festival falls on April 4.

And incidentally, April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think this warrants some theological reflection, particularly from Chinese North American Christians, about our solidarity in the struggle for human rights.

On the night before he died, King preached at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. His sermon came to be known as, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and his words that night foreshadowed his assassination the next day:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!  And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Incidentally, Sam Wells also has a great meditation on death and Steve Jobs through the Mountaintop speech as well.

Asian American scholar Glenn Omatsu protests the domestication of the Asian American participation in the civil rights movement. He points specifically to King and says that the invocation of his tradition of non-violence has overshadowed the radical actions taken by the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 to found ethnic studies departments in California universities. For Omatsu, it’s not the legacy of King that needs to be reclaimed for our solidarity for rights, but that of Malcolm X.

I take issue with Omatsu.

When King said that he had been to the mountaintop, it would be right to think that he’s invoking Moses climbing Mount Nebo to look over into the Promised Land that he wouldn’t be able to enter with the beloved community. Most would remember his dream articulated at the March on Washington that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” For Omatsu, it’s precisely this that has led to a neo-conservatism among Asian Americans who believe themselves to have made it economically as “the model minority.” America is finally colour-blind, say the suburban dwellers; the dream has been realized. Omatsu is disgusted.

But a closer look at King’s sermon complicates things. Sure, King is a Moses figure, but the Promised Land of which King speaks does not refer to a colour-blind nation. Rather, it’s about a global human rights revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, a call to freedom just like Moses called on Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

King had been to the mountaintop. He had seen the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, the Civil Rights Bill, the March on Washington, the March on Selma, and the action for which he was in Memphis. Like Moses, King had been to the mountaintop, and he had seen the Promised Land of justice and equality for the least of these, the coloured colonized by white supremacy and the impoverished trampled by an economic oligarchy. Interpreting the story of Exodus through the lens of solidarity, he sees that Pharaoh’s tactic for keeping the slaves enslaved is to divide them among themselves, to keep the ministers only thinking about themselves and preaching irrelevant airy-fairy hopes of white robes, milk and honey, and streets of gold over yonder while people here go naked, live in slums, and stay hungry. “But whenever the slaves get together,” King preached, “something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”

For King, at that moment, what was needed was direct action for the case at hand: justice for sanitation workers in Memphis wearing black T-shirts and holding signs that read, “I Am a Man”: “Let us keep the issues where they are,” he said. “The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”  Here, he fuses the Moses tradition with the Jericho Road in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. As he puts it in the speech, just like the Samaritan stopping on the “Bloody Pass,” we too must realize that the plight of the sanitation worker in Memphis is our plight as well. He imagines the priest and the Levite passing up the bloodied robbed man because they fear that he might be bait to lure them to bandits, or worse, he might be a con artist himself. King speculates that they probably thought, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” He then interprets the Good Samaritan as asking: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” King then continues:

That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

It was for this that King knew that he was going to his death. He talks about getting on the plane from Atlanta that morning, of the pilot’s voice coming over the public address system saying that because King was on board, they had had to take extra security cautions because of the threats on King’s life coming from Memphis. He remembers that before what we now know as the Civil Rights Movement happened, he had been stabbed while signing books, and the blade had come so close to his aorta that The New York Times reported at the time that if he had just sneezed, he would have died. He knew this because what he was doing was radical because he wasn’t just calling for everybody just to get along in a colour-blind nation. (And by the way, as James Cone points out, King and Malcolm X need not be pitted against each other, but can rather be seen as complementary figures in the black liberation movement.)

He was calling for class solidarity as the rubric of racial reconciliation and social justice. He had protested the Vietnam War, particularly because African Americans were disproportionately drafted, and now he was marching on poverty, calling for economic action on the part of everyone listening to him: “If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school–be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.” He was calling for both marches and outright boycotts on unjust corporations, “bank-ins” to take money out of mainstream banks and put them in black banks, and “insurance-ins” where black people could buy insurance plans from black insurance companies. He was calling for an Occupy movement before there was an Occupy movement; he was advocating precautions for the beloved community before the idea of subprime mortgages targeting African American populations was even invented. And for him, this Memphis case of sanitation workers was the perfect case where the rubber met the road because for King, the measure of a society was how the sanitation workers were treated. Radical? Yes. It’s what got King killed.

Perhaps it’s only right that the anniversary of the assassination of King and the Qingming Festival fall this year within Holy Week in the liturgical calendar. Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable was offensive precisely because as Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in Letters and Papers from Prison, it focused Christian practice on being “the Man [sic] for Others.” It was told to a lawyer who wanted to justify himself for having fulfilled the commandment of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. Jesus turned the lawyer’s world upside-down, telling him to go and do as a Samaritan would have done to go out of his way to help a bloodied stranger of the wrong geopolitical stripe on the Bloody Pass of the Jericho Road.

This was arguably what got Jesus, Bonhoeffer, and King killed. The offence was a radical view of the neighbour. Will we indeed love our neighbours as ourselves? What if the neighbour is of the wrong nationality? the wrong race? the wrong class? King’s words ring in our ears: The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

This is a question for reflection for Chinese North American Christians today. Qingming Festival is a day to honour the dead, yes. But to be Christian is not merely to honour our own dead, those within our own family or those within the diaspora that we call “Chinese.” King’s legacy–one that also garnered us civil liberties–begs us to come out of the convenient labels that we’ve constructed for ourselves–“Chinese,” “Asian,” “Asian American”–and realize that our solidarity with the poor for justice cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines. There is a saying among Chinese in the diaspora that we should only sweep beneath the awnings of our own homes. The irony of this year’s Qingming Festival is that it calls us precisely to repent of this notion.

Yes, we honour our ancestors today. Some of these, yes, are the Chinese political dissidents that we remember yearly. But one of these is also the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Try that, friends, for much-needed reconciliation between Chinese American and African American communities today. Perhaps our Chinese churches should bring hoodies and a bag of skittles to church too. It is, after all, the Qingming Festival.

But more than that, as the Qingming Festival and King’s assassination anniversary both fall in Holy Week, we also remember as Christians the one who has gone before us from death to life, Jesus Christ. We have hope in King’s vision not because of King’s death, but because the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end of this Holy Week reminds us that King’s blessed hope is ours as well. Strangely enough, this has been precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying to the faithful regarding charity during this Lenten season:

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation. Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse.

Qingming Festival and the assassination of King are not the end of the story of solidarity–indeed, of communion–with the least of these. They are the beginning: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”