[Oe List ...] Fwd: OpEd Good Friday

Thu Mar 28 10:28:20 PDT 2013

Amen, brother Herman.

Marilyn and Joe

Marilyn R. Crocker, Ed.D

123 Sanborn Rd

West Newfield, ME 04095

From: oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net
[mailto:oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Herman Greene
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 12:43 PM
To: Order Ecumenical Community
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Fwd: OpEd Good Friday

I have been to Harbin twice and vivid images arise as you write of life,
spirituality or confusion thereof in China.

Much could be written of the theology of Easter. The story/drama will always
mean different things to different people. This much we know. There is no
resurrection without the cross.

Herman

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 7:12 PM, Jaime R Vergara <svesjaime at aol.com> wrote:

FYI

j'aime la vie 

Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all,
Celebrate!

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031 at aol.com>
To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera at saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago
<mark_rabago at saipantribune.com>; editor <editor at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Thu, Mar 28, 2013 7:03 am
Subject: OpEd Good Friday

GOOD FRIDAY

It’s a bleak Holy Week in Dong Bei.  If the Siberian winds are not howling
like midnight on a New England Halloween, the skies are overcast that hardly
a ray of sunlight gets through while the shadow of Batman nooks on midday’s
corner.  

We are not alone.   London was a frozen mush early on in the week, and the
Kremlin made it to the tundra without moving an inch.  The freeze is
expected to lash out through America’s northeast from Bar Harbor to the
Chesapeake Bay.

We had a respite of a sun last Sunday.  Young men braved the elements and
bounced the ball on twenty hoops in the courtyard.  I was not yet ready to
let go of mitt, muff, and muffler.  The dudes dribbled on nearly bared
chests in the still frozen air.  My instincts paid off.  Within two hours
Sunday afternoon, while at the street market, what started as flakes
meandering down like pillow puffs turned quickly into a snowstorm.  

North of us in the Harbin Winter Festival, the ice sculptures are still
intact and its tourist trade is doing brisk business as the “Moscow of the
East” lives off intricate remnants of its Byzantine past, its central
commercial district with its cobblestones reminiscent of horse drawn
carriages of bygone days, converted into pedestrian traffic, leaving an old
world feel to the revelers of overflowing malt brew on brightly lit ice
lanterns.

The solemnity of the Christian Holy Week is, however, hardly evident in
post-1949 China of secular humanism, in spite of the cultural resurgence of
its three major philosophies – Confucianism (ru), Buddhism (shi), and Taoism
(dao).  Artifacts and sacred sites have taken in of late considerable market
values.  The Chinese vaunted aptitude for mathematics has ¥uan coloration.

Today, ours is a quietude of the soul as years of conditioning in Christian
dramaturgy revives images of Hosanna’s palm fronds to early sunrise
religious services singing hymns of joy on the triumph of the empty tomb.
Protestants, inured to the automatic happy ending of Hollywood celluloid in
the era of Ike, tend to skip the high point of this weeks paradoxically
titled “Good Friday”.

Penitent souls and flagellating bodies trek to the top of Mt. Tapuchao this
day, as some barren field in Guagua, Pampanga grossly reenact the Roman
crucifixion so vividly portrayed in Mel Gibson’s overwrought movie, the
Passion of the Christ, turned into a community spectacle in Bavaria’s
Oberammergau as it relives every decade since the 1600s the stations of the
cross.

In Christian dramaturgy, the week’s high point is the innocent Jesus
willfully allowing the sword and the lance to let him hang, “for the sins of
the many” (in the guilt-ridden language of Paul).  The Roman Catholic Church
drapes its altar black at 3 pm on Friday, and calls the day “Good”.
Rational minds of the Reformation raise an eyebrow having forsaken the
practice of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as barbaric, with
cynics seeing the practice no different from fathers sending their sons to
war.  Still, the modern world has also condemned the virtue of martyrdom as
a mere justification of the Empire oppressing the outcast, the rebel, and
the marginalized.

But the English “Good”, of the same etymology as the word “G-O-D”,
derivative of the Teuton’s “Gott”, is used in the King James translation of
the Biblical YHWH, (literally means, self-evident) the highest good, summum
bonum of Aquinas and Kant.

Cut to the chase.  Good Friday is an affirmation that life is good just the
way it is, woof, warts and all.  In today’s language, it is a mishmash of
cause, chance, and choice.  The religious seeks cause in a Supreme deity.
The dice-thrower lights incense for good fortune, fate and destiny.  The
democratized human looks at the power of choice.  The diversity and the many
combinations of the three mark the current state of our humanity.

Europe, preoccupied with Time, sought clarity on one’s relationship to
yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  It came up with yesterday as done,
irretrievable and finished.  It is “forgiven”.  Tomorrow is open.  One needs
only to decide.  Today is in the pulse of “amazing grace”, unconditionally
accepted.  Its totality can be lifted high, like the ostia and the vino, and
celebrated.  The Christian’s common meal of the Upper Room invokes: “this is
my body, 
 this is my blood, that is given for you”.  It constitutes the
Christian essence of what has since become the Eucharist. 

East Asia is not as preoccupied with Time as it is with Space.  The taiji of
ancient China has the yin-yang in the middle surrounded by 8 trigrams
covering all points of the compass.  The important words are geographical in
meaning, thus, bei = north and jing = city, gives us Beijing.  But there is
a fifth cardinal point to the familiar east, west, north, and south
designation.  The fifth direction is the wu fang, the Center.  It is no
accident that Chinese call themselves Zhongguoren, the people of the middle
realm!

Silence at the tranquil center is the Good Friday of East Asian
spirituality.  The dynamic stillness in the middle of the taiji is the loci
of profound humanity since discovered in the interfaith exchange of the East
and the West.  The blackout of Christendom’s Good Friday echoes in the
sounds of silence of meditation and contemplation.

My humanness this day is bowed.

 j'aime la vie 

Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate.  In all,
Celebrate!

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-- 
__________________________________________________

Herman F. Greene

2516 Winningham Road

Chapel Hill, NC 27516

919-942-4358 (ph & fax)

hfgreenenc at gmail.com

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