Rice Balls, Noodles, Fireworks, and Dragons

This is the text of the Reflections I offered on Sunday, February 10, 2019 to the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Whether we call it “Chinese New Year,” the “Spring Festival,” or the “Lunar Festival,” this major Chinese celebration (which began this past Tuesday and will continue on through a week from this coming Wednesday) is a really, really big deal.  It’s celebrated by more than 20% of all the people in the world – that’s something like 1 ½ billion people!  And you know how Lorie said that setting off firecrackers is a part of the celebrations?  More fireworks are set off all over the world that last night than at any other time of the year … anywhere.  And do you remember how much Yuan Xiao wanted to go home to be with her family?  Well … so many people travel home during this time that in 2015, they were selling 1,000 train tickets … every second.  Like I said, it’s a really, really big deal.

There is usually more than one great legend tied to any particular event, and this is true about the origin of the lantern festival.  Lorie told you one, and I’m going to tell you another.  The one I’m going to tell you is different than the one Lorie told you in two big ways – first, it doesn’t focus on Yuan Xiao and Dongfang Shuo, and the second is … the monster is real.  Which one is true?  Probably both.  (Oh, and the one I’m going to tell is a variation of the story Rob Craighurst has told here so marvelously.)

In this version of the story, as I said, the monster is real.  Its name is Nian.  Most of the time it lived out in the depths of the sea, but each year, as the end of the lunar year drew near, it would come out of the water and onto land, where it would proceed to kill people’s livestock – goats, pigs, chickens, cows … you know – it would hunt the people of the village, and would generally cause a mess.  It was scary.  Since this happened every year, the people of the village knew that when the lunar year was coming to an end, it was time to grab their things and run for the hills.  (And unlike here, when an evacuation order is given, nobody would stay behind and “ride it out.”)

Well … one year an old woman came into town just as the mad preparations for the exodus was taking place.  She had piercing eyes, long white hair, was dressed in rags, walked with a cane.  She stood in the center of the town, and she looked tired.  A kindly grandfather saw here there and brought her some food … and a warning.  “The sea monster Nian is coming here tonight and we’re all getting out of here to hide in the hills, you should too.”

The old woman just smiled, tiredly.  “I’m not afraid of any monster,” she said.  “I’ll tell you what.  If you let me stay the night in your house so that I can get a good night’s sleep in your bed, I will take care of old Nian for you in return.”

The grandfather looked at her thinking that she must not know what she was getting into, but he didn’t have any more time to talk with her.  He had to finish getting ready.  “I really suggest you come with us to hide,” he said.  “But if you’re really intent on staying, you are certainly most welcome to spend the night in my humble home.  But whatever you do, I implore you – keep the house dark, and don’t make any noise, and maybe Nian won’t know that you’re there.”   And with that, he left to join the rest of the villagers.

That night, when Nian came into the village, the monster noticed something different about the town.  Usually the houses were all dark and empty.  Everything was quiet.  This time, though, there was one house that was all lit up.  Nian went closer to the house to check it out, and found that all of the windows had been covered with red paper, and every window had a candle burning it in.  This made the monster angry; whoever lived in the house wasn’t giving it the proper respect.  Nian decided to get to the bottom of this.

But as it descended on the house, there was suddenly a lot of crackling and popping in the courtyard.  This made Nian a little nervous.  And just then the front door burst open.  The old woman was there, wearing all red and laughing raucously.  Nian was now kind of scared, that someone would stand there completely unafraid.  Maybe the monster had underestimated these villagers!  So it quickly beat feet and headed back to the safety of the sea.

The next morning the villagers came back to see that everything was just as they’d left it.  The grandfather realized that the old woman had been as good as her word.  He told everyone about it, and they all went to his house to thank the good woman.  When they got there, though, the woman was gone.  But they saw the windows all covered in red, the burnt candles in the windows, and the exploded firecrackers in the yard, and they understood what she had done.

So the next year, even though they were a little nervous about it, everyone stayed in the village the night Nian was due to come.  They all covered their windows in red paper; they all lit lights in their windows; and when the monster did show up, they all set off firecrackers in their yards.  And they all saw the monster turn tail and run, just like they used to.

Everyone came out of their houses, and they were so happy that they started celebrating.  People made sweet rice balls, delicious dishes of noodles (which you would eat in one long slurp without cutting or biting it, to signify a long and uninterrupted life), and all sorts of other special foods.  And every day they would celebrate like this, and the monster never came back.

Now … there are three lessons that I learn from these stories.

First, sometimes monsters are real, and sometimes they are not.  I don’t believe that there are monsters under our beds or in our closets, but sometimes there are monsters like bullies at school, at work, in our neighborhoods, even at the highest levels of government.  There are monsters like poverty, racial injustices, violence toward women and people in LGBTQ communities, and the decimation of our planet.  Sometimes the monsters aren’t real, though – they’re just things we’re expecting to see, assumptions we make, projections of our own prejudices, and fears about “what might happen if …?” with a worst-case scenario as our answer.  It is so important to be able to tell the difference.

The second thing I hear in this story is that running away and hiding isn’t the best solution.  Last week the reflections I offered were called, “Fear Never Fixed Anything,” and that’s absolutely true.  We can’t always be brave all the time, and sometimes we do have step back a little, to look away, to go to our “happy place” and pretend that there isn’t anything wrong.  We just can’t stay like that forever.

And that brings me to the third thing, and maybe most important thing.  I don’t think the real hero of the story is the old woman.  As important as she is.  The ones who really saved the village … are all the villagers themselves.  If they have said to one another, “That cool, smart, brave old woman scared the monster away and we never have to worry about it again,” that next year would have turned out very differently, and probably a lot worse.  The fact that they all faced down Nian that second year is what changed things.  It was them banding together, working together, being brave together, supporting each other, that made the difference.  Alone, there are things we just can’t handle.  There are problems that are too big, too scary, too dangerous.  Together, though, there’s nothing we can’t handle.

One more thing.  About that old woman.  The story doesn’t say so, but I think that she was a dragon in disguise.  These reflections are called, “Rice Balls, Noodles, Lanterns, and Dragons,” and I’ve only talked about the first three.  So .. about dragons.

In every Chinese legend I have ever heard, when there’s an old person, a stranger, with piercing eyes, long white hair, dressed in rags, and walking with a cane, it’s a dragon.  One of my favorite books is Everyone KnowsWhat a Dragon Looks Like.  In that story, it’s an old man who comes to a village to help the people there face The Scary Thing that’s threatening them. 

That’s the old man.

And in one of my parts of the story, the old man:

“sprang up into the air and his form changed.  He grew taller than the tallest tree, taller than the tallest tower.  He was the color of sunset shining through the rain.  Scales covered him, scattering light.  His claws and teeth glittered like diamonds.  His eyes were noble like those of a proud horse.  He was more beautiful and more frightening than [anyone] had ever seen.”

In the west, dragons are something to be feared.  In the east, not only do they look really different, but they’re considered symbols of power and wisdom.  In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear someone say to a parent, “May your child grow up to be a dragon.”

Each of us can “grow up to be a dragon.”  And there’s nothing we dragons can’t do … together.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Reflections on an Election Day Eve

It has been a long, grueling Presidential campaign.  I often think of how much worse it is for the candidates who are running than for those of us in the bleachers watching.  This time, though, I gotta say that it's been pretty hard on us in the stands, too.  And tomorrow it's all over.  Tomorrow the voting will take place, and while there will still be absentee ballots to count it's usually been clear enough by the end of election day to declare one of the candidates the winner.  Not always, but usually.  Perhaps we'll know by the end of the day how this long, grueling Presidential campaign will end.

Except, of course, most people know that what we've been through for the past 596 days isn't going to simply stop and go away once the results have been tallied.  I'm not thinking so much about the possibility of  one of the candidates refusing to accept those results and declaring the election fraudulent and the winner, illegitimate.  That might happen, of course, and there may well be suits and counter suits to go through before a final decision can be certified.  But that's not what I'm thinking about.

There is a divide, a rift in our nation that has perhaps never before been so vividly clear.  It's easy to portray either side in cartoonish caricature.  "We" think "they" are ignorant, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic bigots who can't even recognize their own self-interest when it's being threatened before their very eyes.  "They" think "we" are overly privileged fools who don't have any real understanding of how the world works and who are more concerned with being "politically correct" than about remaining true to bedrock American values.  Each "side" thinks the other is blatantly lying about nearly everything they say, and that their supporters are so blinded by ideology that they can't see it.

I recently wrote a piece about an essay I'd read, titled, "How Half of America Lost Its F**king Mind."  It's author, a man named David Wong who self identifies as having grown up in "Trump Country," opened my eyes to a different understanding of who "they" are and what motivates their support of Donald Trump.  Some, he notes, are what the caricatures are drawn from, but not all.  He helped me to see these people not as stick figures or straw men, but as real people who's politics grow out of real pain, real fear, and real frustration. 

The bitter ugliness that has characterized so much of this "election cycle" will not fade into a chorus of Kumbaya on November 9th.  Very real fears and pains have been exposed, like a raw nerve, and will not be so simply salved.  In fact, they may very well be exacerbated -- the loss of Donald Trump to Hilary Clinton could well be seen, for instance, as just one more proof that the system really is "rigged" against them.  That's why I say that this won't be over when the results have been tallied.  There is a lot to be healed in this country -- wounds both generations old and newly formed.

I have hope, though.  The experiment that is the United States of America is still young.  Make no mistake, it is an experiment -- what we've been trying to do here has never been done in quite this way before.  And while 240 years may seem like a pretty long time, it's worth noting that this past Rosh Hashanah celebrated the start of the year 5,777 for the Jewish people, and Chinese culture can trace back nearly 8,000 years.  By comparison, the U.S. is barely even a toddler.

I think often about the foundations on which this experiment was built.  One aspect, of course, was a brutal sense of colonial entitlement.  The people who had lived on this continent for over 10,000 years were consciously and intentionally exterminated, their lands stolen.  This "new" nation was literally built by the blood and the sweat, first, of Africans stolen from their homes and reduced to a chattel existence and, then, by wave after wave of minority immigrant.  The toxin of white supremacy (and, to be more precise -- white,cis-male, heterosexual, property owning, educated supremacy) has permeated the fabric of this nation since its "founding."

At the same time, though, there has been an antidote to that toxin -- a vision of freedom and equality that even those who espoused it did not fully understand.  In 1969 the band Steppenwolf personified this vision in their song "Monster," a song that is still extremely relevant.

I like the idea of that vision, that spirit, as being alive.  Martin Luther King, Jr. gave us another metaphor.  He referred to the stirring words about equality Jefferson had written in the Declaration of Independence as a "promissory note" that had now come due.  I've always liked that, too.  Jefferson may well have consciously intended to exclude from his "all men" anyone other than white, cis-male, landholders, but he was, to speak poetically for a moment, not writing on his own but channeling a larger vision, one which we have continued to grow into during our mere 240 year history.  The rancor of this election has laid bare how far we have yet to go, should anyone have not known it.  But although the road may be stony and hard, I do believe that we are treading it still.

Whenever I want -- or need to --  be in a patriotic mood, I turn almost immediately to the rendition of the song "America the Beautiful" that Ray Charles recorded on, Message from the People.   Charles had resisted recording the song for many years, but finally did so on this album.  I came across a fascinating paper (essay?  sermon?) titled, "The Soul of America:  Ray Charles Sings 'America the Beautiful,'" in which David Clyde Jones, Professor Emeritus of Theology and Ethics and Covenant Theological Seminary puts a rich context for Charles' decision.  It's worth reading.  In the liner notes to Message from the People, Charles commented, "I tried to describe the things that were out of tune in America ... I was saying, "Listen.  You need to clean up your shit, America ... but I still love you."

Maybe that's where my hope is rooted.  For all the shit, there is a lot to love.  Whatever the outcome of the election, I intend to play Ray's rendition of this patriotic song, to remind myself that there's a lot to love.  And then I'll remind myself that love is rooted in understanding, and I will strive to really understand those whose convictions have been so contrary to my own.  And I will pray that we continue living into that dream, that vision, that spirit.

Pax tecum,

RevWik