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@aol.com> wrote:
FYI
j'aime la vie
*Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!*
-----Original Message----- From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031@aol.com> To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera@saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago < mark_rabago@saipantribune.com>; editor <editor@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@gmail.com