Tiananman Sao Wei Yi

“I died and went to Hawaii.” That’s not how the standard Christian evangelical line goes but my nephew has got that sentence emblazoned on one of his T-shirts being hawked on eBay, (the original version had “Heaven” crossed out and replaced with “Hawaii”). The fact that it is not selling well may mean that our brethren and sistern of the faith do not find humor in making a pun and fun of the traditional Easter line.

The words on our title, Tiananman, “safe sky door” (or Heaven’s gate as applied to the entrance to the forbidden city in Beijing), and Sao Wei Yi, Putonghua for “Hawaii,” describes our Aloha land of long ago, 1965 in my case, when I landed on an SS President liner on my way to school from Pea Eye to the N. A. continent. The tallest building in Waikiki Beach then was the Royal Hawaiian, now a member of the Sheraton family of hotels, with an adjacent towering structure. There is a sense in which Oahu became a suburban extension of L.A. with the east-west highway on the leeward side not unlike traffic on Pasadena heading east-west on U.S. 10 to Palm Springs.

Geography is, of course, not our intended topic for this reflection. Though it is worth noting that the new satellite city of Kapolei has grown as the city metro rail service is projected to traverse one end of the leeward side to the other, and the UH West is about to be built. Our concern is our propensity to treat tomorrow as progressing into something better than today, the hope of an inevitable forward improvement of the human condition in the evolutionary process. It is so un-American to be a doomsayer; we pride ourselves as a nation of positive thinkers, if not here on earth, at least, in the promise of a just, equitable, tranquil and equaniminous heaven!

Our Christian background as a nation has given us two basic elements in our societal story: original sin at the entrance door doctrinalized in the Catholic tradition by the guilt-ridden Augustine of the fifth century CE, and heaven at the exit door, a component of the Egyptian escape into the pie-in-the-sky imagery enshrined in Alexandria. In the Middle Ages, Thomas de Aquino added a third in his Summa Theologica, defining the interaction between the two as the rule of the mysterious and awesome supernatural realm over the natural order.

It is the metaphors in this story that have guided the conduct of Western civilization since the empires appropriated “the cross and the empty tomb,” and as the American empire wades and fades under the weight of its own skepticism of the prevalent orthodoxy, its remnants decay in the sunset of its years.

We are steeped in the traditions both of the Roman Catholic Church (mother) and Midwest American Methodist Missions (father), and gaining academic knowledge of both at a theological seminary and school of religion, so whatever critique we might raise on both metaphorical systems stem from an insider rather than an outsider.

Last Sunday, we attended a plebian Methodist worship service at the foyer of the Kapolei High School campus, an experience that pleasantly threw us back to the days of our youth when our sociality was defined by church fellowship. Two months before, we attended an English Mass in Shenyang where the Chinese priest chanted the prayers, awakened memories of the monastic Thomas Merton and the practices of silence in the Abbey of Gethsemane.

Part of what we see as an irrelevance in the religious practices of both is converting the word “Christ” as the family name of Jesus rather than the role he played, witnessed by his followers who wrote of his memory two generations after he was crucified. “Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior” is a liturgical formula defining one’s piety. Jesus is the historical figure (Yoshua Ibn Nazareth), Christos (Messiah) was his role, Lord was his status in the royalty-prone social stratification of Europe’s Middle Ages, and Savior is the existential meaning of the vocational impact to his disciples.

The focus on Jesus the historical figure in Christian iconography dominates common piety and it is anything but worship-full; it is, in fact, idolatrous. In the modern creedal affirmation of the Methodist Church, one of the lines is “…this faith should manifest itself in the service of love as set forth in the example of our blessed Lord, to the end that the kingdom of God may come upon the earth.” Demythologized, that means that a Christian called to follow Jesus is a mini-Christ to the time and location of his/her discipleship.

Focused on Jesus, we create idolatrous practices idolizing a pseudo-historical figure, Methodists and many others do. Focused on the service of love, we stand the chance of creating a genuine fellowship of those who care and who serve others (the “neighbor” in Biblical language) to manifest the “kingdom of God.”

Alas, the idolatry of Jesus is rampant at houses of Christian worship on Saipan (except perhaps, Manalos and Mormons). Some may have replaced physical icons with mental ones, but they are still icons subject to religious idolatry.

Well, we did not die and came to Hawaii. We came to Hawaii and was reminded of our constant need to die to our illusions, religious and/or otherwise. Not surprisingly, Tiananman’s angelic chorus cried out: Amen!