<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;">Gethsemani and Golgotha</b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">I usually do some mundane chore during
my thinking time. From my second floor tenement
dwelling that I now occupy 30 days ago after I moved out of the faculty room at
Shenyang Aerospace University’s Friendship Villa, the chore takes the form of
sweeping the steps and mopping the dirt off three floor landings, at least, two
times a week. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Twelve steps down the ground level
are basement rooms used by local entrepreneurs to warehouse cartoons of goods. This week, I decided to tackle the bowels of
my buildings’ accumulation of dirt and years of stairs’ sweepings, and while I
was carting out mounds of dirt and trash from the basement floor to the ground
level landing on to the trash bin outside, a young businessman in leather
jacket came to retrieve a couple of huge boxes with his dolly.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">He might have noticed that he no
longer needed to gingerly avoid trash on his way down, and in fact, could feel
the cement steps under his shoes without worrying on slipping down from the
accumulated loose dirt. It was on his
second trip, after exchanging words with one of the tenants who might have
mentioned that I was the foreigner who lives on the second floor who has this
crazy obsession of wanting to keep the place tidy and clean, i.e., scrapping
the unsightly pasted ads on the stair walls and doors as well as leaving potted
plants on the stair’s windows and landings, that we connected.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">On his way out the young man motioned
to me and opened his jacket proudly pulling out from under his shirt a silver
crucifix necklace. He was not a
Protestant because the crucifix was not bare.
The icon of the suffering Jesus crowned with thorns made me suspect that
he’s run into a <i>padre </i>or two <i>madres </i>(they always seem to go by pairs)
in his wanderings, and had heard not a few catacomb stories when the faithful
were forced to keep identity a secret.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">I had mixed feelings. Raised in the evangelical/revival tradition,
I reflexively appreciate those who hold convictions. Yet, there was more pride than faith in his demeanor,
and I would not have been surprised had he attributed whatever success he had
on commerce, not unlike his Korean kindred, on the sunshine attributes of his
sovereign, “Thank You, Jesus!”</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">A few days before, I had lunch with
former students (who always insist on going Dutch), one named Kiwi who received
my former VA car tag “Kiwi One”, my <i>er
lao po </i> and I once got in honor of
our daughter Andrea conceived in Wellington NZ years back. The tag handover was delayed a month because
Kiwi broke her waist. Hospitalized, she
refused the surgery offered and in the process discovered the power of quiet meditation. Though influenced by Buddhists, she decided
to use the theistic language of the intervening other to describe her
“miraculous” healing and the source of her new strength.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Being a former theologian challenged
for half a century to shun the theistic metaphor, I was, nevertheless,
delighted that she articulated the existential sense of the awe and the
awesome, being herself an awed one. She
is in good company. In writing of the
events told them, Luke portrayed a wavering Jesus in his “let this cup runneth
not over me, but thy will, not mine, be done.”
Mark had a more plaintive and traditional cry on the cross: <i>“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” </i>(My Lord,
my Lord, why have thy forsaken me?)</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Our pictures of the vigil in
Gethsemani and the crucifixion at Golgotha (aka, the Skull), heavily influenced
by Iberia to pacify natives in their use of the sword to further the cause of
the cross, are the image of a quivering Jesus in deep doubt, on the one hand,
and a victim betrayed and forsaken, on the other. This is not a complete picture.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">In my own clarity, the image set in
this whole Holy Week scenario begins with a big hoopla of a triumphal entry
into the portal of powers, and then a willful demonstration of the coercive
inefficacy of death in determining the meaning of life. Put bluntly, Jesus was not a victim as wailed
many times over on the 14 stops to the Stations of the Cross. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Luke was clear about Jesus:</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;text-indent:.5in; mso-pagination:none"><i>“When you see a cloud rising in the west,</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none"><i>you
say at once that it is going to rain,</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none"><i>and so
it does.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none"><i>And
when you feel the south wind blowing,</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none"><i>you
say that it is going to be hot,</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none"><i>and so
it is.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none"><i>You
frauds! You know how to interpret the
look of the earth and sky.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none"><i>Why
can’t you interpret the meaning of the times in which you live?</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none"><i>And
why can’t you decide for yourselves what is right?”</i><span style="vertical-align:baseline"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">That, perhaps, was the
source of my discomfort with our proud young businessman with the crucifix
necklace. I do not think he ever got the
chance to plumb the depth of the cost of discipleship, as the Dietrich
Bonheoffer once did, and paid with his life for it. At the core of “faith” is the human
decision. Jesus decided. He chose to be crucified.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">Now, as for me, from
dust I might have come but in dust, I shall refrain. So please, pass the broom and the mop, and I
trust you will get those plastic wrappers off the street and into the trash
bins! To paraphrase old Mom, “tidiness
is next to awesomeness”!</span><span style="font-family:"></span></div>
<br>
<div style="clear:both"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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