Yes, I’m a Chinglican Who Celebrates Corpus Christi

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academia, Anglican, Asian American, Audrey Assad, baptism, Catholic, charismatic, Chinese, Christian, communion, Congregation of Holy Cross, Corpus Christi, Eucharist, Flannery O'Connor, forgiveness, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius of Loyola, Jesuit, neo-Calvinist, neo-Reformed, Pentecostal, Real Presence, reconciliation, sacred heart, social science, Tobit

Today is Corpus Christi Sunday. The evangelical Anglican church that I attend probably doesn’t care very much, but I do. In fact, I care quite a lot, even though, unlike Churl and Audrey Assad down below, I actually don’t feel much need for myself to actually become Roman Catholic, much as I hunger and thirst for greater catholicity and for the Anglican and Roman Catholic communions to keep getting blown together by the Spirit. But still, I do believe in the Real Presence, I am looking forward to Pope Francis’s worldwide eucharistic adoration, and I celebrate Corpus Christi Sunday.

Why? especially because I’m not planning on becoming a full-blooded Catholic, remaining instead as what Churl calls a ‘knock-off Mars bar’ (don’t you worry, Churl, no offence given, no offence taken). My answer: Corpus Christi Sunday changed my life.

About four years ago, I was in a very similar predicament that I am currently in: I was doing a graduate degree in the social sciences while longing to study Christian theology. I hope I’ve made progress in both, especially in bringing the two together, but as it happened, my journey–in the middle of thesis writing that time, no less–took me to a retreat at a Congregation of Holy Cross house of studies in Berkeley, CA. I knew the house superior, as he was my creative writing mentor when I attended a Holy Cross high school in the Bay Area, and as soon as I got there, he piled on the Balthasar, O’Connor, and Hopkins and told me to read it all. I was very obedient, or so I think I was. I also read some Michael Ramsey during that time, I think, but shh.

In any case, during those two weeks, I had to do something I’d never done before: attend daily mass. I had served as a pastoral apprentice for three years at various Chinese Anglican churches before that, so I had some vague idea of what the liturgy was going to be like (not that I could do it from memory, like my pre-new rites Catholic brothers and sisters). Those two weeks, we read through the Book of Tobit for the first reading; though the Thirty-Nine Articles (#6) knocks off St. Jerome to say that it’s a book that ‘the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine,’ I have to say that the story of Tobias and Sarah, the demon Asmodeus, and the archangel Raphael made for a lot of good fun at 8 AM every morning, especially among people who saw the book as part of the canonical Hebrew Scriptures. One of the mass attendees, a staff worker at the Jesuit theological school across the street, told me after mass one day, ‘I love it every time we get around to Tobit. It’s such a thrilling story, don’t you think?’ (Confession: I then went and read Judith to see what that was like. Even more scandalous.)

I also wore a black hoodie to mass every morning to see if I could be mistaken for a Franciscan monk and given communion; I was asked if I was an ordained Anglican priest (I’m not, and don’t plan on being one), but no, unfortunately, it didn’t work. But it did get me, good evangelical Anglican that I was, exposed to Corpus Christi, a solemnity I’d never heard of (OK, at that point, I hadn’t heard of a lot of stuff; I had no idea, for example, what the heck the ‘sacred heart’ was, even).  I was exposed to Corpus Christi because the last Sunday I was at this retreat was Corpus Christi Sunday that year. Yes, I know that Corpus Christi is usually celebrated the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, but like many Catholics, the Holy Cross Center did it on the Sunday.

I didn’t actually go to mass that day, and I didn’t take part in any procession (true story: the first Corpus Christi procession I ever saw was in The Godfather, Part 2). Instead, I went to a Chinese charismatic church (gasp!). My fifth-grade Sunday school teacher was a children’s pastor at that church, and come to think of it, it was pretty meaningful that I got to see her on Corpus Christi Sunday because she was the first to teach me a high view of communion. She even advocated (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) for us kids to be able to go downstairs whenever the adults had communion and to simply observe if we weren’t baptized yet (we were credo-baptists, and I was baptized when I was nine, but that’s a long story–the short version is that my best friend was getting dunked, so I wanted to as well). She told us that communion is a sacred moment that we should get to observe and even partake of, as it’s a moment of being very close to the Lord. If my charismatic auntie didn’t know how close she was to the Real Presence, I hope she finds out some day that she set me on a sure course toward acknowledging the Real Presence in the Eucharist.

In any case, that year was a particularly difficult year for me because three years in the ministry apprenticeship meant that I had made a lot of enemies. This is not to say that everyone who does ministry makes enemies this early on in their career, but in case you couldn’t tell, I can be fairly outspoken, and I was confused on where I stood in relation to the neo-Reformed tribe, so that made for a fairly combustible combination. Suffice it to say that I lost some friends, managed to alienate others, had others alienate me, and suffered a few dating rejections too (as the kid in Love Actually says, there’s ‘nothing worse than the total agony of being in love’). As Corpus Christi Sunday was coming to a close, this charismatic auntie took me into her home for a session of healing prayer.

Yes, now that I’ve said the two words ‘healing prayer,’ you now know how deep in the bowels of Pentecostalism I was at this point. I saw my priest friends at the Catholic house of studies the next day and tried to explain why I had missed not only mass, but pizza and movie night, and I said that it was some kind of Ignatian thing where you imagine rooms and people who have hurt you, etc. etc. The priests looked at me really funny, like I had gotten involved in some kind of crock science, and if you know what ‘healing prayer’ is, I’ll bet at least one eyebrow has gone up on your face in both curiosity and ridicule. Let me confirm for you your worst fears. ‘Healing prayer’ is indeed sort of like the Ignatian exercises, except that you never get out of the first week and you focus on sins done to you, which is why you need ‘healing.’ Most people I’ve seen come out of ‘healing prayer’ thus have this sort of euphoric feeling of having dealt with everything bad in their lives, only to sink into a complete malaise and paralysis the week afterward because you just raised your awareness of stuff, given it a hurtful hermeneutic, and said that you dismissed it when you really didn’t. As a warning to the wise, then, if anyone ever approaches you to do ‘healing prayer,’ just go find a proper Jesuit spiritual director.

I had no such warning, but God is both humourous and gracious. I won’t describe to you in lurid detail what I imagined or saw or confessed, but suffice it to say that while my charismatic auntie wanted to keep taking me to the agony in the garden because my ministry experience was apparently very agonizing (it was, to be sure, but that’s a different post), I didn’t want to leave the Upper Room. I think as I described what I saw in the Upper Room and all the people I wanted to forgive (turns out, in hindsight, that I should probably have been asking for their forgiveness…OH WELL), she was like, ‘OK, can we finally go downstairs now? What’s with the Upper Room?’

It takes time to reflect on these things, but as I think back on that healing prayer session now, I think I was just basking there in the Real Presence, at least virtually speaking. Indeed, during those two weeks, a lot of eucharistic things happened. Yes, I was introduced to daily mass, the sacred heart, and Corpus Christi. Yes, I couldn’t get out of the Upper Room during healing prayer. But probably the most significant thing was this: the week prior, on Trinity Sunday, I returned to the church of my childhood after years of not having darkened its doors, after its multiple scandals had devastated many of my childhood friendships, and in an act of forgiveness and reconciliation, I took communion there.

It was in that act that I learned what a schismatic I had been for so long. Having left that childhood church after my friendships were devastated by Toronto Blessing crazies, a sex scandal, a leadership crisis, and the ostracization of our entire Cantonese congregation, I had been wandering, looking for a home, a place that I could agree with and a place where no more bad political stuff would ever happen. I never found it. So I wandered from church to church, even working at some of them, and in time, I also took on a sort of neo-Reformed persona to be able to articulate a theology of why I wasn’t about to stay at a church that failed to preach the Gospel. As my theological system lay in tatters, my social science thesis in disarray, and my personal church history littered with skeletons, I finally realized in that moment of deep forgiveness that I was the schismatic.

And that is why, as a Chinglican, I celebrate Corpus Christi.

And Yet He Has Not Left Himself Without Witness: A Retrospective Look at Catholicism and Evangelicalism with Special Guest Flannery O’Conner

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Catholic, Catholic Church, Christ, Eucharist, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Flannery O'Connor, Holy Spirit, Protestantism

Yesterday’s post was a cry of pain. I state this, not as an evaluation, but as a description. It is as much a cry of pain as those of Job, or the groans of the Israelites that provoked God to bring about the exodus from Egypt. That it was a cry of pain is certain. What we do with that – and how we interpret it is another thing. So I would like to take a moment to perform a little exegesis on that post and add some clarification.

The two points I was trying to make – and ones I still support – are these:

1) Evangelicals who have been complicit in pastoral neglect in the past have no right to suddenly become the theological police when someone speaks of leaving. There are people who do have a right to speak, and those are the people who have been with one from the beginning and intentionally walked with one a long way. Indeed, I would worry if someone became Catholic without speaking to such people. What annoys me are the people who suddenly become interested when they need to tow a party line they have not explored themselves, and do not bother to familiarize themselves with the person involved or the facts. Indeed, I do even admit it is fair for a latecomer to the conversation to offer input, provided they do so respectfully and with the proper awareness that there is a large part of the story they have not lived through. Indeed, part of why I wrote the post was to help myself understand who I should and should not trust as I discuss these things with people.

2) Staying with the Church in the midst of corruption and believing God is still there often in spite of his ministers is in its strongest form a Catholic doctrine. It may I suppose also be found in some versions of Anglican and Lutheran theology, but of the three the Catholic church has the strongest doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist, and it is this belief that Christ is really (rather than just symbolically) present that suggests faithfulness to the church – we go, so to speak, because it contains the conditions needed to really partake of Christ’s body and blood, not because of good or bad customer service. For instance, imagine I want a real Mars bar. If I am to actually get it, I will have to get something made in the original Mars bar factory. Even if all the staff are rude and the service is terrible there, there is no way around it – I’m sure I could find companies that produce knock-off brands with much better customer service and much better manners – but all my griping about this will not turn a knock off into real Mars bar. This is a somewhat poor comparison because I do not want to denigrate Protestant communion by referring to it as a “knock off” – even in its most symbolic form, it certainly does not deserve to be called that. But I do think the analogy gets at my point. A Catholic theology says there is Something there regardless of the ministers. An Evangelical says the Church is a meaningful body just to the degree that there is a certain level of vibrance, dynamism, etc. If these are wanting, the only conclusion I can come to from an Evangelical perspective is that I should leave and find somewhere where they are not – and I will never find that place because the world and churches are broken. It is not a question of finding a healthy church. It is a question of finding a church that tethers us to Christ in the midst of its unhealthiness. Not that unhealthiness is ever an ideal. But the Catholic I think would say that the beginning of the cure for that unhealthiness lies in Christ’s presence in the church – it comes from outside and into us – whereas for an Evangelical the cure is posturing oneself – emotionally, intellectually, etc. – in a certain way toward Christ and his word. The latter really do want to make their faith their own.

I also want to clarify what I did not mean to say. As Father J wisely clarified in the comment section, it would be imprudent to suggest that one simply become Catholic because the pastoral care in Protestant circles is flagging. Indeed, if this were the reason, it would just make sense to find a Protestant church with better pastoral care – and who in any case can tell if the pastoral situation on the Catholic side is better or worse? No, what I am looking for is a church with a doctrine that suggests radical faithfulness to the Church regardless of one’s experience with it. It is the Church where I may find myself sitting beside Judas and Peter at the Last Supper Table, knowing that I could follow the paths of either of these figures, both of whom denied Christ, but had different ends.

In addition, another thing I did not intend to say (and don’t think I did if one reads the post carefully) is that there were no blessings, or graces, or support in the Evangelical church; God, I am confident, was there. Perhaps not in all the places I was looking for him – particularly not in my inner emotional self so ravaged by sadness and fear – but He was there. I was blessed to be born to a mother with a deep sense of piety and a father with a good deal of heroic endurance, surviving as he was with depression in Evangelical circles. From my mother I have the capacity to feel, and from my father I have the capacity to think. I was blessed to be born into a house jam-packed with books, the books I could turn to when there was no one else, and the seeds of what has become my academic career, tied also very closely to my faith. I was blessed with friends – yes, we were outliers, but we were friends. I was blessed by Bible Quizzing (long story, ask me sometime); the huge chunks of Scripture I memorized through this program are still with me, and the Biblical orientation of the program meant that real Christian friendships could be formed more gently, unlike the more intense Youth Conference deals from which one was expected to go away changed. I was blessed by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and the friends who took pains to draw me out of myself; I was blessed to meet my wife there, with whom I have been now for seven good years. The intent of the last post, then, was not to say that nothing was there, but rather that it puts me out of sorts when a good number of people who have not bothered to be supportive suddenly show up and start asking questions when one mentions Catholicism. And maybe in some ways these people are less likely to show up than I expect. I got a surprising amount of encouragement and feedback on the post – sometimes from unexpected sources – and I also have to consider the “amplification factor” of OCD, which I will explain in another post – the part that will take a criticism one heard no matter how long ago and cling to it burr-like so that it is always in my head as fresh as the day it was said, and as menacing.

This of course will leave most people puzzled. If God is in some way in the Evangelical church in spite of problems, why not just stay there? And my answer must be that it can offer no solid reason for staying with a corrupt church, which the church militant will always in some way be. In the face of corruption, it will seek exclusion and perfection (with the illusion that somehow drawing another circle will keep those in that circle from problems) – it is as if one had auditions to decide who could get into a hospital, and those who were healthiest were given precedence while the sick were bumped lower in the line or bumped off entirely (dare I say this sounds like social Darwinism?).

But how can God be both in both the Catholic and Evangelical Church? For an answer to this – and I expect no one to like it – I turn to Flannery O’Conner. O’Conner was in the interesting position of being a Catholic in the southern U. S., which meant she probably saw far more extreme incarnations of Protestant Christianity than I ever have up in the less heated reaches of Canada. And I like her response to these Christians because it was complex. From a certain perspective, one might imagine she was in a perfect place to support her own Catholicism by showing up the sheer lunacy of some of these Protestant extremes. But she doesn’t. In fact, often in her stories it is very strange kinds of Christians – Christians of the sort I am certainly not comfortable with – that are vehicles of grace. For instance, in “Greenleaf,” Mrs. Greenleef collects newspaper clipping of tragedies and crimes, buries them in the dirt, and prays over them in what can only be describe as a charismatic way. She is not the Christian we want her to be. We want the exemplar of Christianity to be sane, reasonable, like (or so we imagine) us. But that is not what we get. I had the pleasure of taking a class on O’Conner in Vancouver, one of the more secular cities of Canada and somewhat correlative to the “north” often criticized by O’Conner. It was extremely interesting watching the students – many of whom had come to this particular theological seminary to escape such “crazy” Christians – squirm at the thought of such an embarrassing person being a conduit of grace. And O’Conner also holds the converse – being Catholic is not a free ticket to assumed superiority. This she shows in “The Temple of the Holy Ghost,” where the main character must learn to be chastened of her pride, much of which consists in her assumption of her “superiority” over uncultured low-church Christians. She critiques where we think we are safe, and sees grace where we can only think of shame.

And this, I suppose, is how I have come to see the Evangelical church. From a Catholic perspective, God works both in and outside the Church. In the Church he largely works through revelation, the synthesis of this revelation (tradition), and participation in the sacraments. Outside he works more generally if less directly and in a less immediately perceivable way through all sorts of things in the world – the theological distinction here would place revealed theology within the Church and natural theology without. What I want to suggest – and it is bound to make some angry – is that Evangelicals exist in a twilight zone between these two theologies. Whatever else it wants to claim, much of what Evangelicals have by way of spirituality, theology etc. is a pared down minimalist version of broader Catholic tradition – Evangelicalism doesn’t have the entirety of the tradition, but there are lots of points Evangelicals and Catholics agree upon – the Catholics are different not so much in overt disagreement, but rather in that they have an extra helping of tradition and the real presence etc. This, as far as I can tell from the Catechism, is perfectly good Catholic doctrine, though I will be happy to accept clarification on that point from someone who knows better what they are talking about.

On the natural theology side lies experience. Evangelicals, I suggest, cannot be such without it – the strange warming of the heart – and it seems to me impossible to have such a thing as a negative theology in Evangelicalism, or at least the modern incarnations I am talking about. We are probably not used to talking about spiritual experience as “natural theology” per se, but strictly speaking I think it fits the definition – theology gotten from things that happen in creation, and this includes spiritual experience because such experience is never disembodied (that is, outside creation).

And this leads me to the way I, via Flannery O’Conner, interpret Evangelicalism. Let us start with natural theology. Nature in some way points to God, but the exact way this works out is often circuitous and confusing – nature is both beautiful and brutal by turns – and the character of God is hardly self evident from nature. So natural theology involves interpreting signs that point to God, but also the recognition that these do not always point to God in any kind of straightforward way.

And it is something similar I would suggest with Evangelicalism, but one step up. If nature points to God, how much more a group of Christians? But, I would argue, this group of Christians does not point to God in exactly the way it supposes. Lacking what must always be the first commentary on Scripture, tradition, the signs they produce are often broken, angular, and hard to read. But, as Flannery O’Conner suggests, these signs are nonetheless still signs, no matter how twisted. They may not be perfect, and in many cases may be something we will not want to emulate at all, but we have a strange God who will speak by strange means, through the mouth of an ass if need be. And so, much as I am uncomfortable with the undisciplined and emotive character of Evangelicalism, I cannot deny God’s grace in it. He has, after all done stranger things, not the least of which is stooping down to earth to visit someone like me.

What I Do Not Mean by the Catholic Thing

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Anglican, baptism, Catholic, commodification, communion, confiteor, contemporary Christian music, creed, ecumenism, Eucharist, fundraising, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, James Alison, Jefferson Bethke, Jesuit, John Piper, liturgy, Lutheran, Mark Driscoll, market, Martin Luther, Mary, Pope Francis, Protestant, Rachel Held Evans, religion, saints, schism, youth ministry

It has become a truism of late that some disaffected evangelicals want to become Catholic because Catholicism has so much more of a robust faith than Protestantism. (A few years ago, Eastern Orthodoxy was a big deal too–arguably still is!) While many more have a more informed account than the hipster one I will provide (I have some smart Catholic convert friends, you see), a typically recent narrative often goes something like this:

Unlike the format of rocked-out worship songs followed by a lengthy sermon, Catholicism (it is said) has a liturgy, a call-and-response between people and priest. Unlike the marketing ethos that pervades much of evangelicalism, Catholicism is like coming home to what Tolkien might call the ‘Last Homely Home.’ Unlike the cheesy literature that fills Christian bookstores that won’t let Rachel Held Evans use the word ‘vagina,’ Catholicism is the religion of what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls the ‘lay styles,’ the people like Dante, Péguy, and Hopkins who saw the glory of the Lord, got sucked in, and wrote it all down in sublime poetry. Catholicism rocks these evangelical converts’ socks because it’s just everything that they were looking for in evangelicalism but couldn’t find because evangelicalism has become corrupted by the free market and its chief political proponents, the Republican Party and their hard neoliberal equivalents in other countries.

As someone who grew up as a non-denominational evangelical and was confirmed into the Anglican Communion (what those who have jumped the Tiber might call the Americano version of Catholic espresso; I’d like to state for the record, however, that the primate who confirmed me had apostolic succession), I can attest to the feeling that Catholics have something that evangelicals don’t have. Catholic theologian James Alison talks about being blown into the Catholic Church from his evangelical Anglican background by falling in love with a classmate who had a grace that he associated with being Catholic (apparently, as a child, his family had John Stott as a close family friend). I remember living in a Catholic house of studies where the daily mass’s liturgical homily was more Christocentric than I had ever heard at an evangelical church. I also always go back to that time I attended mass at a Catholic church where the cantor led worship from guitar with a full band and took us to sublime heights (he even slipped in a Hillsong piece); incidentally, that day was the first day they used the new rites, and while everyone was sufficiently confused about the ‘and with your spirit’ and ‘under my roof’ lines, my sister described the music as giving her an ‘eargasm’ (Rachel Held Evans would like that). Even before that, I recall first partaking of the Anglican Eucharistic liturgy–which, incidentally, reminded me a lot of Catholic school (as one priest reminded me, you know who stole from whom)–and realizing that the Gospel that evangelicals always tried to articulate in fresh ways was already fully expressed in the liturgy.

Readers of this blog will be tempted to channel everything I say through those personal experiences. Fully aware of positionality issues, however, I’d like to state for the record that they are not what I mean by the Catholic thing, that is, the central theme that some readers have identified in my contributions to this blog: everybody seems to be a closet Catholic. In other words, however readers may assess the motives behind my Catholic gymnastics, I am categorically not trying to impose my own aesthetic fetishes on other brothers and sisters in Christ.

That said, the readers of this blog should not be blamed for thinking that I engage in frequent psychological imposition.  This is really my fault, my own grievous fault: I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have committed a great sin of omission, for I have failed to define two very key terms. They are Protestant and Catholic. While most readers will take these terms’ meanings to be obvious, the crisis in theology and religious studies around terms like religion, secular, ritual, and myth suggests that I shouldn’t assume that everyone agrees about what these terms mean. Certainly, as we saw in the Anglican post, I’m inclined to a certain understanding of what it means to be ‘Anglican,’ one which, as I noted in the post, other Anglicans might recognize as a validly different form of Anglicanism and proceed to insult it accordingly. In like fashion, I’d like to say exactly what I mean by these two other terms. By Catholic, I simply refer to churches who recognize their communion with the see of Rome such that the see of Rome likewise recognizes its communion with those churches. By Protestant, I refer to churches that were once in communion with the see of Rome but fractured that communion in the sixteenth century for this, that, and the other ideological reason. As you can see, the theological method I’m using here is not very different from my assessment of Anglicanism, that is to say, the form of communion takes primacy over substantive confessional points. (Here, if you are an evangelical, can I beg you to hold your fire for a sec? I’ll get to the confessional points by the end.)

You can see now why I think so many people are closet Catholics. Schism is never pretty, and as Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac argues in his book Catholicism (with the cheesy English subtitle Christ and the Common Destiny of Man), the Holy Spirit gives Christians a ‘Catholic spirit,’ a desire for union with the rest of humanity. The fact that Protestants are out of communion with Rome should be cause for grief for the sheer fact that there are Christians (not to mention other humans) with whom we are not in communion, for the ontological reality in Christianity (well, the orthodox versions, at any rate) is that communion is what we’re made for. To say that the confessional differences on the Virgin Mary, the communion of saints, and the primacy of Rome are sufficient to erect boundaries should still be cause for ontological pain because plainly put, regardless of the reasons, schism still sucks.

This is, of course, why you have to laugh when an evangelical tells you they became Catholic for substantive confessional reasons. After all, everything I just said doesn’t give you much substantive confessional difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, per se. Take, for example, the typical conversion narrative that an evangelical Protestant might rehearse: tired of the market commodification of evangelical Protestantism, they became Catholic to practice a fuller form of the faith. This narrative, however, raises all sorts of questions. For one thing, don’t Catholics also participate in the market commodification of their own faith at times? I mean, have they ever visited a Catholic bookstore? Luther might also have one or two things to say about coupons, building projects, and cheesy jingles about hell and purgatory in the sixteenth century.

To drive home the point, I often scratch my head at the actual substantive difference between a Catholic youth ministry and a Protestant youth ministry. For every evangelical who tells me that they grew up in a big youth group, did the big flashy youth ministry thing, and have now resigned in disgust because it’s not about numbers but truly contemplative faith, I’m tempted to ask if they’ve ever heard of World Youth Day. For every evangelical who tells me that they’re sick of Christian music, I’m curious to know if they’ve ever listened to Audrey Assad, Jackie François, and Matt Maher, much less heard that selections of Hillsong, Vineyard, Maranatha, and even that classic evangelical hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ have all been imported wholesale and oftentimes unproblematically into Catholic worship. (In fact, given this all of this awesomeness–I happen to really, really enjoy listening to Assad, François, and Maher, thank you very much–I’m really rooting for Brooke Fraser to join this Catholic musical dream team, as she and André Crouch would say, ‘soon and very soon.’) For every evangelical who feels disillusioned with Christian media, I wonder if they’ve ever heard of EWTN and whether they know that Bishop Fulton Sheen donned in all of his episcopal regalia was really America’s first televangelist. For every evangelical sick of evangelical fundraising, I’d like to know if they’ve ever heard of a diocesan capital campaign.

The only real difference that I can really think of between Catholics and Protestants is this: being ‘Protestant’ is often tied to ‘maintaining a Protestant identity’ or holding onto ‘denominational distinctives.’ Sometimes this means adding a Latin ‘sola’ before everything and an English ‘alone’ after translations. Other times, it means abstracting Scripture from its historical canonization process and debating whether it’s scientifically inerrant (talk about form over substantive confession!). Still other times, it requires explaining why Catholics are wrong about everything, a favour that Catholics used to return by explaining why Protestants were wrong about everything (thankfully, the tone has softened). This, of course, is where the complaint about ‘protestantization’ in theology and religious studies comes from: over time, these ideological distinctives, formed through cognitive belief and emphasizing individual interiority, began to be believed by Protestants as that which composes religion itself. It’s little wonder that Jefferson Bethke decided to take a potshot at this account of religion; whatever complaints you might have about his oversimplification of religion and his ties to the neo-Calvinist crowd, his return to praxis, as well as his likely unintentional repudiation of overly ‘protestantized’ religion, should be welcomed as a surprisingly ‘catholicizing’ statement of faith. (Oops, I did it again.)

Ecumenical movements also provide excellent counterweights to how these variants of ideological maintenance don’t have to run the show, which means, thankfully, someone like me can still be a Protestant because I started out that way journeying toward greater communion. You could arguably say ditto about folks like Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank. In fact, if you look at the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) reports, you might find it a bit interesting, amusing, and (to some) troubling that the Anglicans end up basically agreeing with the Catholics on the historic primacy of Rome and the special role of Mary in the Church. As has been noted on this blog, relations between Catholics and confessional Lutherans are also getting mighty friendly. And this ecumenism isn’t just something ‘liberals’ or ‘conservatives’ do; there are progressive ecumenical conversations going on about social justice even while there are conservative ecumenical conversations happening about confronting secularization. The trouble is, with ecumenism also came some (and let me stress: only some) fundamentalists and evangelicals who accused ecumenists of being modernists caving into a culture of relativism and failing to uphold biblical standards and doctrinal statements, that is to say, letting the Protestant guard down.

It’s people in the latter camp that my Catholic gymnastics target. While I’d argue that most Christians (if they’re honest) have seen the light on communion and ecumenism–whether or not they actually become Catholic or not is another story (I haven’t)–there are some who seem to insist that this is not the light. My tack is to argue that because they are Christian, they simply don’t know that they have already seen the light. To this end, I am not saying that they want to become Catholic for substantive confessional reasons. In fact, I’m saying that those who become Catholic to get away from all the evangelical hype and give substantive confessional reasons for doing it might be jumping out of the fire into the frying pan (I certainly think that’s true of those who become Anglican, myself included). However, I am also saying that I believe in the Holy Spirit, and if indeed the Spirit guides us into all truth–the truth that God in Christ is making all things new and reconciling things in heaven and things on earth into a Christological unity–then why wouldn’t anyone in their right mind not at least long (even secretly so) to participate in the greater catholicity of the church, even (oh, my) with Christians in the see of Rome?  Why would anyone think that schism is a good thing to maintain?  And if one truly confesses belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, why wouldn’t one at least entertain the possibility that God being God of the living and not the dead allows us to converse with the saints across time and space, including the Blessed Virgin?

What I mean by the Catholic thing, then, is nothing short of wanting to be part of the whole communion of saints, which incidentally usually acknowledges the primacy of the see of Rome in some way, shape, or fashion; at least it has as early as Clement of Rome’s first letter to Corinth in the late first century. In fact, nobody in recent times has recognized this interesting formulation better than Pope Francis himself. In his first appearance on the Loggia, Pope Francis never referred to his papal office as having primacy, per se. Instead, speaking as the newly elected Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis spoke of the see of Rome as ‘the church that presides in charity over all the churches.’ To be in communion with Rome is not so much to acknowledge papal infallibility, per se (much as Vatican I would make us believe that we have to). It’s to be in communion with the see that has historically held primacy as the unifier of all the Christian churches since the first century. Being in open communion with that see is technically what’s supposed to make you fully Catholic. Being formerly in communion with that see, but having broken it off for this, that, and the other reason is technically what makes you Protestant (unless, of course, you are the Society of St. Pius X).

What follows from this, finally, is that any charitable and gracious reading of Christians who actively make schismatic remarks is that they really don’t intend to do so. Assuming the best of the Spirit’s work in their lives, we must assume that what they are really longing for is to become fully Catholic. As Rachel Held Evans reminds us today, there is a season in our journey toward questioning and then re-establishing communion. We are looking forward to the season when we all realize that we long for communion. After all, Catholic or Protestant, we still recite the baptismal creed where we say that we ‘believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church and the communion of saints.’ I promised that I’d get to a substantive confessional point, and I finally have: if we say that the creed sums up the substantive teaching of the Apostles from whom we derive the ecclesial form of succession, we’d better mean what we say in that creed, and if we love our brothers and sisters, we’d better believe that everyone else who says it means it too, some of them more than they know. Together, we all long for the end of schism, for a church that is perfectly one, even as the Father is with the Son, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son.

The Mockingjay and the Dove

Tags

church-state relations, comic, Eucharist, horror, Hunger Games, Job, Lent, messianic figure, salvation, Stanley Hauerwas, state, temptation, truth, violence

By way of beginning this post, I want to clarify what I am and what I am not doing.  I am not claiming that Suzanne Collins is a Christian or has a Christian message, though this may well be true.  Nor am I offering “the gospel according to the Hunger Games” – I am satisfied enough with the gospel according to the gospels, and it strikes me as wrongheaded and potentially heterodox to claim that other stories are the gospel; we must let the gospel be the gospel and stories be stories.  What I am claiming though is that the works of good authors reflect something true in creation, and what is true in creation reflects (albeit elliptically) truth about God.  Indeed, we should not be surprised if we find in creation and the stories that arise therefrom what Stanley Hauerwas describes as a Christological “grain of the universe.”  Therefore, through interpretive scansion of the Hunger Games series and the universe it describes, I am looking for what Hopkins called the inscape that points back to the instress on creation caused by God.

First of all, I want to clear something up about the series.  If you read it and thought “this could happen in (insert favorite dictatorship) or a galaxy far, far away,” you have missed the point.  Do not let this minor detail interrupt important affairs such as eating and drinking, marrying and being married.  Considering such details will only put out your day.

For the rest, one of the latent questions will have to do with the brutal violence, some of which leads in the story to the deformation of identity (I here think of Peeta).  Should Christians think about such things?  To tell the truth, I was impressed that they were included.  There are kinds of unspeakable suffering that will not fit in brown paper packages tied up in string.  And some of these experiences we will not understand this side of heaven.  Generically, the entire scope of the cosmos is comic.  But this does not mean that every story in between is comic, and it does not mean we should work as hard as possible to make every story comic.  Horror is horror, and sometimes we just have to let it be without pretending we can redeem it on our own terms by making up stories that we intend as consolations but that only end up making God look evil or like a fool.  God does not insult Job by offering him a narrative of “how everything worked out for best in the end,” and we might do well to follow His example.

But to get to the heart of my argument, the book is primarily an exploration of what constitutes salvation.  In the series, we encounter a world very much in need of salvation, and it offers two different messianic models, the rebel warrior and “the boy with the bread.”  This strikes me as particularly resonant of the Christian story, for these two figures embody the messianic crisis encountered at the advent of Christ.  Many were hoping for the rebel warrior, who would in fact overthrow the government and establish political salvation.  Instead, they got a Christ who revealed himself in the Eucharistic breaking of bread.  Moreover, I would suggest that Christians still face this temptation.  We are perennially tempted to take charge and “change the world” in ways that conflate sociopolitical power and Christianity – and we are perennially called back gently to “the breaking of bread and to prayer.”  Because I don’t want to ruin the series for anyone who hasn’t read, I will not spoil it by giving away the ending, but I will say that, given this typology, the conclusion thoroughly accords with Christian faith.  Whether Suzanne Collins intended this or not, I don’t know – what I do know is that her story taps into the innate human longing for salvation not by power but by the Bread of Life.

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!”

A Chinglican Chinese New Year Table

Tags

Asian American, Asian values, Chinese New Year, church potluck, communion, dragon, eating disorder, Eucharist, Evangelium Vitae, forgiveness, gnostic, Hyphen Magazine, incarnation, Lisa Lee, Lynn Chen, The People I've Slept With, Thick Dumpling Skin, weight

We’re up, both here at A Christian Thing, and at my blog, Chinglican at Table. It’s the week of Chinese New Year and the auspicious Year of the Dragon. My mother-in-law asked me if the dragon could be correlated with the Satanic figure in Revelation. I pleaded the Fifth. I’m sure, having invoked the dragon in Evangelium Vitae, the late Pope John Paul II would have pleaded equal ignorance, not least because it might have ruined his interfaith Assisi dialogue initiatives.

Theologically interesting as dragons may be, then, I’m going to take a pass at reflecting on them this zodiac year. Stay tuned twelve years later for a reply to my mother-in-law.

Meanwhile, I’ll take this chance to wish Thick Dumpling Skin a happy one year birthday, a momentous event that coincides with Year of the Dragon celebrations.

Thick Dumpling Skin is a blog started by Hyphen magazine publisher Lisa Lee and Asian American actress and food blogger Lynn Chen to explore body image issues in Asian America. They noted a paradox that they’d both experienced, that when they came home to their families, they would receive comments about how much weight they had gained or lost and then, as if there were no contradiction, be told to eat more. As they rightly point out, Chinese New Year epitomizes this madness, with relatives commenting on weight over a big meal where it’s rude to abstain. Such eating schizophrenia within their own families, they suggest, can lead to eating disorders, being insecure about the way one’s body looks and self-medicating by avoiding food, binge eating, or the bulimic combination of both. One year and 50 posts later, and with the recent introduction of a psychotherapist in the person of Ashley Solomon, their site has made it clear that there are resonances with the Asian American community on this issue.

What I’d like to suggest is that what Lisa and Lynn have hit upon is also a theological issue. To bring up theology here might tempt you to hear me as turning into Juliet Yang, Lynn Chen’s character in The People I’ve Slept With, a hilariously caricatured treatment of an Asian North American evangelical with “a family straight out of the Gap catalogue.” If I were to to do this, I’d go straight into a moralizing treatment of why you should take care of your body because it’s made in the image of God. Then, after telling you that keeping your body holy because it’s a temple of the Holy Spirit means that you need to exercise, eat well, and find balance (just as any other self-help guru would say), I’d say that you then need to dress it modestly (which is probably not what just any old self-help guru would say). I wouldn’t put it past Juliet Yang to go in that direction, but I’m also confident that Lynn Chen herself would take a pass on such an imitation.

Juliet Yang (Lynn Chen, right) confronts her sister Angela (Karin Anna Cheung, left) for her promiscuity

I don’t want to take a faux progressive moralizing tack either, telling you that because there are starving people all over the world, we should take all the food that we binge on and give it to the poor. There is a place for this line of thought, especially around issues of food security and the unjust socio-economic-political structures that keep people hungry, but this isn’t the point of Thick Dumpling Skin. And besides, unless this progressivism is pursued with clear-headed thoughtfulness, it can come out sounding awfully paternalistic and colonizing.

Instead, I want to lightly interrogate what Thick Dumpling Skin means by “Asian culture” that leads to the crazy contradicting messages we get about our bodies from family and community. It’s not like Confucius says that Asians have to be thin. It’s rather the discourse that partly is spread in popular media, Asian and American alike, that unlike white people, Asians can keep eating and be skinny as a stick. It’s also the constant comments from friends and family, sometimes subtle, often not, about weight vis-a-vis the perfect body shape an Asian “should” have. Culture, in short, is simply code for the narratives of the body that are communicated in families, churches, and community networks. They are stories about what Asian bodies should look like, which, by the way, means that whether they are deployed by a white mainstream media or our Asian families, they also happen to be deeply racist because they are orientalizing.

By providing a safe space to air out the destructiveness of these orientalizing stories, Thick Dumpling Skin tells a different story, summed up by their tagline: “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” There are numerous posts about taking a different tack–learning to love yourself for what’s on the inside, complete with spiritual, psychological, and emotional exercises to embrace who you are as a person as opposed to what you look like in hopes that you’ll be actually able to embrace what your body actually looks like because of the radiance of your inner beauty. It’s about pursuing a healthy identity in defiance of the discourses of the skinny Asian proliferating in media and family, to metaphorically “grow some thicker skins, and learn to love them as well.”

I might venture to say that Thick Dumpling Skin is implicitly–and probably without themselves knowing it–offering a theological alternative for bodily practices in Asian American churches. In one place on the blog, Lisa writes that some of the more destructive comments as well as the site for the greatest binge eating to be had around Chinese New Year was the infamous church potlucks. As she elaborates on BlogHer:

Chinese Lunar New Year is just around the corner. What this usually means for me is another one of those potlucks at church, where there’s way too much food prepared by way too many aunties, or a yis as I fondly call them. Like most people, I can’t wait for the hot pots and steamed fish, but as a person who has struggled with my body image, the huge feast brings up complications. In order for me to get my hands on the delicious dishes that they’ve prepared, I have to brace myself for the string of, “Lisa! You’re back! You ______ (insert either lost/gained in blank) weight!”

Lisa Lee (far right) at an “infamous church potluck”

The real question is: what alternatives does the church have to the weighty auntie discourse on the week of Chinese New Year? I’m inclined to take the tack that the Christian faith is a deeply incarnational one with a theology profoundly interested in embodiment. After all, what seemed to piss the early church fathers off the most was when spiritual elitists broadly labeled “Gnostics” denied the importance of the body to Christian spirituality. What Thick Dumpling Skin reveals about the racialized discourse of Asian thin is that it may well be another destructive gnostic ideology that makes no sense in terms of how the human body actually works. You can’t binge eat and stay thin, you can’t starve yourself and stay out of the hospital, and yet this is precisely what this schizophrenic ideology would have us believe. The theological implication that Thick Dumpling Skin may be communicating unawares is that God weeps with us when we destroy our bodies for a gnostic ideology, especially because he welcomes us to his table no matter what our body shape is.

In short, Asian North American churches can really be the church when it moves away from offering a Chinese festival meal where gossip about weight rules the conversation toward the table of the Lord where the gospel reaches those marginalized by the racist discourse of Asian thin. I imagine Jesus extending arms of welcome to the readers of Thick Dumpling Skin. To be a Christian family and a Christian church is precisely not to reproduce practices of patriarchy and orientalization, racist colonial legacies and consumer objectifications of the body. If anything, it is to embody the announcement of the kingdom of God that is itself a proclamation of the end of these regimes of exclusion and the beginning of an age when my body and your body matter because they are cherished members of the Body of Christ. And because of that, when we worship at church, we are sitting at table with Jesus where he offers us his own body and blood to eat and drink.

What I like about Thick Dumpling Skin is that it is simply a forum for stories about body image and eating disorders among Asian North Americans. But what is particularly Christian about this approach, though likely unintentional, is that once these stories get aired, there is something and someone to forgive (which, incidentally, is #7 on a list of 12 things happy people do differently copied from Marc and Angel Hack Life on November 21, 2011). It is as if they were reciting the words of Jesus, that when a brother or sister sins against you, go and show them their fault so as to encourage reconciliation. If family and friends, church and community, have sinned by perpetuating these gnostic narratives that lead to eating disorders, then what better way is there than to put it all out in the open in hopes of a tearful reunion laced with forgiveness?

That’s what a Chinglican Chinese New Year table could really look like. In good Christian fashion, when we air out these stories, they paradoxically are not myopically self-centered. If we’re speaking specifically to Asian North American churches (let’s limit the audience tentatively for practicality’s sake), we’re not just saying, “You hurt me with your comments about my weight.” We’re saying, “These subtle hints about body image constitute a gnostic ideology that we together should consider abandoning for a more orthodox practice of incarnational welcome.” Part of that welcome is forgiveness, which is why at a Chinglican Chinese New Year table, you might look around the table, and it’s all of these people you’ve had to forgive, not least because they’ve probably also forgiven you too for something else unrelated. After all, Chinglicans do pray with the rest of the church, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Thick Dumpling Skin reveals the trespasses that must be forgiven so that you can pass the roasted pig, the abalone, the sea cucumber, the hairy fat choy, and your parents’ Chinese soup without the shame of conforming to an impossible and racist body image and the guilt of being complicit in proliferating this discourse.

Also at ChinglicanatTable as A Chinese New Year Table.