Faerie Christianity In China
by Larry McAneny
Service at UUCSS on September
3, 2000
Lighting of the Chalice & Uniting Statement
Free is our fellowship, freely affirming
All are wondrous and worthy. Our welcome is wide.
Our home is a haven for questing and caring,
For sorrow and sharing, for justice and joy.
By words and by worship our community consecrates
Our church and our chalice, our faith and our fire.
-- Larry McAneny
Song of Exultation
Our roots go deep; our wings are broad;
Our revelation never sealed.
Our faith goes on thru fear and fraud,
Though often wounded, often healed.
-- Larry McAneny
Civil War Quiz
(Who Wants to be a Millionaire)
Larry McAneny
Here is the last round, million dollar question. Listen closely.
It is the spring of 1864. The bloodiest conflict
of the 19th Century is coming to a close. A double
line of earthwork fortifications rings the Rebel
capitol, bolstered by 120 forts bristling with
sharpened poles and cannon, protected by deep
ditches. Anyone who sticks his head above ground
is a target for a musket ball. The besiegers
are digging tunnels underneath the rebel breastworks.
From the river nearby, armored shallow draft
steamships pound the city with rifled cannons
and huge smoothbores.
General Li, the most competent and charismatic
of the Rebel generals, has attempted to breach
the investment but failed. Reluctantly, he reports
to his commander in chief that the city faces
starvation and should be evacuated.
For a million dollars, what is the name of
the city?
Richmond? No. Atlanta? No.
[Larry quizzes the congregation]
…………………………….........
The name of the city is Nanjing (or Nanking),
the capitol of Anwhei Province. It is located
on the Yangtze river. General Li's full name
is Li Xiu Cheng, famous throughout China as the
Chung Wang, the Loyal King of the Tai Ping Rebellion.
And the purpose of this quiz was not to enrich
the undeserving, but to emphasize the striking
parallels between our western history and that
of the Orient. For the histories diverge in ways
that are even more dazzling:
The commander in chief, to whom Li reported,
the Tien Wang, or Heavenly King, refuses to evacuate.
Instead, he announces that, as in the Book of
Exodus, God will provide manna to feed the soldiers
of Nanjing; and to prove the point, he gathers
weeds from his courtyard and eats them. Within
a week he is sick. Within a month he is dead;
in his last moments he tells his followers that
he is departing for Heaven to seek celestial
reinforcements. Within a year the Great Rebellion
of the Tai Ping has collapsed, leaving the Manchu
dynasty fatally weakened and much of China in
devastation. Such is the fate of the Tien Wang,
Hong Xiu Quan, self-taught biblical scholar and
religious visionary, the man who believed himself
to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
Responsive Reading
Psalm 19 (Hong Xiu Quan's Favorite Psalm)
One:
The heavens declare the glory of Shangdi.
The expanse shows His handiwork.
Day after day they pour forth speech,
And night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech nor language,
Where their voice is not heard.
All:
Their voice has gone out through all
the earth,
Their words to the end of the world.
In them He has set a tent for the sun,
Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his
chamber,
Like a strong man rejoicing to run his course.
His going forth is from the end of the heavens,
His circuit to its ends; there is nothing hidden
from its heat.
One:
Ye-huo-hua's law is perfect, restoring
the soul.
Ye-huo-hua's testimony is sure, making wise the
simple.
Ye-huo-hua's precepts are right, rejoicing
the heart.
Ye-huo-hua's commandment is pure, enlightening
the eyes.
The fear of Ye-huo-hua is clean, enduring
forever.
Ye-huo-hua's ordinances are true, and righteous
as Quan.
All:
More to be desired are they than gold,
yes, than much fine gold;
Sweeter also than honey and the extract of the
honeycomb.
Moreover by them is your servant warned.
In keeping them there is great reward.
One:
Who like Quan can discern his own
errors?
Forgive me from hidden errors.
All:
Keep back your servant also from presumptuous
sins.
Let them not have dominion over me. Then I will
be upright,
I will be blameless and innocent of great transgression.
One:
Let the words of my mouth and the
meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in your sight,
Ye-huo-hua, my rock, and my redeemer.
Sermon
Faerie Christianity in China
by Larry McAneny
Games and religions
share a paradox: Their defining characteristics
require a certain rigidity to be valid-even
in this church, where we are required to take
an offering in order to hold a valid service.
It's in our by-laws. Yet the rigid characteristics
of games and religions are, at some point,
invented. It is necessary to draw an arbitrary
line, to avoid chaos by curbing further invention.
If you have ever played cards with a three-year-old,
the necessity of curbing invention to avoid
chaos should be very clear.
No two scholars agree on the origins of chess.
Maybe China, maybe Persia, maybe India, maybe
Egypt. I like the theory that starts with the
Pharaoh sitting his heir down at a table and
lining up stones. "Over there, boy, the dark
stones, that's your enemy. These light stones
are our soldiers. The battle is about to start,
boy, and you are in command. What do you do?" This
simulation of battle was pleasant enough that
the pastime migrated to other cultures, each
culture adding its own contribution.
From Egypt the Greeks acquired a game called Petteia,
meaning "pebbles." Each side had one line of
stones; the game was played on a grid to regulate
movement. The Romans called this game Latrunculi,
and added a second row of stones to each side.
When the Roman game migrated to their adversaries
in Persia, the Persians carved the stones and
gave them separate functions. One piece became
the Rukh, or warrior. The Persians ended
their game when the King was surrounded, saying, "The
King is dead" "Shah ma't" Checkmate.
In the East, proto-chess was modified repeatedly.
The same cultural forces that produced classical
Chinese strategy transformed the primitive tactical
game into the more complex and strategic game Wei-chi,
which the Japanese call Go. The Indian
game of Chaturanga, played with dice to
regulate movement, may have been the true precursor
of all tactical games. It is the precursor of
Chinese Chess, Shiang-chi, the elephant
game. The Shiang-chi chessboard is divided
down the middle by a river, and one piece, called
the elephant, cannot cross the river. Chinese
rivers, swift and broad, have always been a major
factor in Chinese tactics. The Japanese tactical
game, Shogi, dispenses with elephant and
river both; but since samurai battles occurred
during civil wars, treachery is an indispensable
element. Therefore in Shogi one may capture
an enemy piece, turn it over, and reinsert it
as one's own, anywhere on the board, even mating
an opponent with his own man in the very heart
of his castled position.
Chess, an enthusiasm of the Arabs, passed into
Western Europe during the Moorish conquest of
Spain. The pieces we know today each represent
an item dear to a Medieval nobleman's heart:
horse, castle, clergyman, and trophy wife. During
the Renaissance, Spaniards, Italians, and Frenchmen
devised the last rules of our modern game: the
enhanced Queen and Bishop; one-move castling;
the capture en passant. In 1924, the newly
formed World Chess Federation officially codified
the rules. The evolution of chess is done, finished,
fully developed, complete. Today two strangers,
unable to speak to each other or comprehend each
other's way of life, may sit down and play chess
with board, pieces, rules and conventions they
both know.
In this short history of chess I have left
out most of the boards and pieces which did not
evolve into modern chess, the dead ends and blind
alleys of evolution. There were many: Courier
chess, Dice Chess, Great chess-played on a 100
square board, Citadel chess, which had an extra
square at each corner of the board. These games
blossomed while the cultures that spawned them
lived but failed to survive into the modern era.
Human invention cannot really be stopped, not
even at the command of the World Chess Federation.
With a little bit of searching in odd places
one may uncover recent modifications.
Here is a board 16 X 16 squares, even larger
than Great Chess. Here is chess in three dimensions.
Here is a game which features, among the traditional
medieval pieces, some of our delightful modern
innovations, such as land mines. Move your Queen
to the wrong square and Boom! She is blown away.
You just can't have any fun with a game that
doesn't have land mines.
Serious chess players refer to such
variants as "faerie chess", as if the designers,
or perhaps the players, were elves or trolls
or pixies. Chess from the land of faerie is fantastical
and perhaps dangerously magical. If chess were
a religion, these variants would be heresies.
Christianity is a religion, and much
plagued by variants. Over a century ago, Theodore
Parker pondered what elements might be permanent
to Christianity and what might be transient.
The evolution of Unitarian-Universalism was already
underway. As a denomination we no longer refer
to ourselves as Christian, but our religion is
really Protestantism modified by the culture
of New England. We are "faerie Christians".
Since there is an
analogy between the evolution of chess and
the evolution of Christianity, it is useful
to look at the way Christianity was modified
when it went East. That journey was slow to
begin. Chess spread quickly because it was
an Islamic enthusiasm. Islam was far less enthusiastic
about Christianity. Christian proselytizing
had to wait for Christian seamanship to develop
a long-range capability.
Actually, China developed that capability first.
In 1405, before the Portuguese had begun to creep
timidly along the west coast of Africa, the Ming
Emperor Yung Lo took an interest in sea faring.
At his command the Chinese built a huge fleet
of 400 ships, including a treasure ship 444 feet
long with nine masts. But the treasure ship brought
no treasure to China, because the Emperor was
not interested in looting or trade-the activities
of bandits and lowly merchants. The Emperor's
fleet boldly sailed the Indian Ocean to the east
coast of Africa demanding tribute of each local
chieftain-by which was meant some interesting
token of obeisance, such as an offering of the
local livestock. In return the Emperor would
then shower upon that chieftain far greater gifts-gold
and silver and silks and perfumes-until the chieftain
was forced in amazement to admit that China was
truly the greatest and richest and most generous
of all nations on earth.
Chinese exploration died when Yung Lo did.
Confucian officials, sharp lads with an abacus,
calculated the cost of seafaring and discovered
an unfavorable balance. A few more nations paying
tribute and China would be bankrupt. Giraffes
in the Peking zoo were all very well, but they
were neither edible nor useful in a rice paddy.
The mood in China turned against maritime adventures.
The fleet was broken up; further construction
was forbidden. Sailing offshore was punishable
by death. At the time Columbus sailed on his
first voyage, Chinese seafaring was entirely
criminal, limited to smuggling and piracy. China
had turned inward and wanted nothing the world
had to offer.
The Ming Dynasty fell to wild horsemen from
the north, and the Manchu dynasty rose, but the
basic mindset of China did not change. In 1792,
when a British envoy arrived, the Manchu emperor
told him: "There is nothing we lack. We have
never set much store on strange or indigenous
objects, nor do we need any more of your country's
manufactures." A nation clad in silk had no desire
to trade for British wool.
It took the British 30 years to find a response
to Chinese stonewalling, but then it was devastating:
opium. Mandarins resistant to trade succumbed
either to the addictive drug itself or to the
huge bribes that could be made from ignoring
the drug traffic. The wealth of China poured
out once again, and in return the Chinese obtained
only poison. When the Manchu realized what was
going on, they attempted to intercept the supply.
But the British took the position that the Chinese
were firing on the British flag-never
mind what was in the cargo holds-and after a
short war forced the Manchu to open more ports
and allow still more "trade".
The average Chinese, the Han, had never been
fully reconciled to the Manchu conquest. Even
before the flood of opium the Tartar mandarins
had proved to be corrupt administrators. Confucian
doctrine allowed for military conquest, calling
it "the mandate of Heaven". It was a sort of
king of the hill mentality. The Manchu were justified
in maintaining their position at the peak of
Chinese society as long as they had the military
power to stay there; but once the British trounced
them, the Han perceived that the Manchu had retained
the arrogance of conquerors but lost the muscle.
Secret societies sprang up all over China and
muttered of overthrowing the northern conquerors
and restoring the Ming.
Thus Hong Huo Xiu
is born, in 1814, into a stable and well-regulated
society, which has half disintegrated by the
time he reaches young manhood. Hong is from
a Hakka family, a group of migrant farmers
not unrespectable but having less status than
the Han. His elder brothers work the fields,
but Hong is a good student, and is exempted
from farm labor in the hope that he can pass
the examinations to enter the Confucian bureaucracy.
Three times Hong tries, and three times he
fails, possibly because his family cannot provide
the fragrant grease that makes the wheels of
Chinese education turn smoothly. During his
third attempt in 1836, at age 22, he meets
a foreigner in the streets of Canton outside
the examination halls. The man says "You will
attain the highest rank, but do not be grieved,
for grief will make you sick." He shoves a
small book into Hong's hands.
Most likely this foreigner is the Rev. Edwin
Stevens, a graduate of Yale College and the New
Haven Theological Seminary, and chaplain of the
American Seaman's Friend Society. Stevens often
bribes his way past the guards of Canton in order
to distribute religious tracts. The Manchu have
outlawed Christianity- particularly American
Christianity, which stinks of popular democracy,
the very essence of barbarism as far as the mandarins
are concerned. Christian missionaries, under
threat of death just like opium smugglers, make
common cause with those criminals. Some of them
even smuggle a little opium to pay for their
missionary work, and report that they are using
the Devil's money to spread God's good news.
Stevens leaves no account of the transaction
with Hong, since he does not live to see Hong
become famous. He contracts a raging fever that
same year of 1836 and dies.
Hong too contracts a fever. He is carried home,
sick and once again a failure. Hong bids his
family farewell, goes to his bed, and falls into
a sleep from which he cannot at first be roused.
Hong is dreaming. In his dream a sedan chair
arrives for him, and he takes a long journey.
Men in dragon robes slit him open, remove his
soiled intestines, and give him new innards,
sewing him up to leave no scar. An older woman
bathes him, saying "Let your mother cleanse you
in the river, after which you can go to see your
father." His father proves to be tall, with a
huge beard. Father is angry because the people
of earth have been lured astray by demons. Father
gives him a great sword, and Hong battles demons
all through the thirty-three layers of Heaven,
helped by his older brother who stands behind
him bearing a golden seal. When Hong is done,
Father tutors him on morality and theology and
gives him a new name, Hong Xiu Quan, and the
title Heavenly King, Tien Wang. Hong begs to
go back to earth and fight more demons. Hong
wakes up. His family tells him that he has been
shouting and leaping around.
In China dreams have meaning, but only if you
can interpret them. Hong cannot, so he simply
goes back to his work of being a country schoolteacher.
For a fourth time he goes to Canton for the examinations,
and, for a fourth time, fails. After he returns,
a friend borrows that small book Hong had gotten
from the foreigner, reads it, and urges Hong
to read it. Seven years after his dream, in 1843,
Hong reads the book. The book is a combination
of incomplete Bible stories and commentary by
one Liang Afa, a Chinese tutored by Scottish
Protestants. For Hong, the book is the key to
the dream. His Heavenly Father in the dream had
to have been the Highest God of the Christians,
and the elder brother had therefore to be Jesus.
In the heavenly realm, Hong is Jesus' younger
brother.
What do you do with a great revelation? Hong
consults his colleagues, other country schoolteachers
who have also failed examinations. In the book
Liang Afa preaches the futility of idol worship,
and illustrates his point with scholars who sacrifice
to idols in order to pass exams, yet still fail.
Hong and his friends can relate to that point.
Liang has also translated the 19th Psalm,
and the Chinese translation is full of Hong's
new name, Quan, meaning whole or complete. Hong
believes that the Psalm orders him to bear witness
to his newly discovered truths. To bear witness,
Hong and his friends wander among the backcountry
farmers. They devise simple religious ceremonies.
They make converts.
In 1847 a Tennessee Baptist named Issachar
Roberts hears about Hong, and invites him to
visit Canton and study the Bible. Hong makes
the journey, studies for several months, and
asks Roberts to prepare him for baptism. Hong
writes out a profession of faith and Roberts
approves it; but before the baptism can take
place,
Roberts withdraws his approval. Hong goes back
to his followers, and during the journey, baptizes
himself in a mountain stream. From now on, he
interprets the Bible by his own lights and draws
his own conclusions.
However, Hong is not unwilling to take guidance
from Heaven. His followers among the Hakka have
gathered around a place called Thistle Mountain
and formed the God Worshippers Society. The God
Worshippers, with Hong, are waiting for the Great
Peace of Heaven, the Tai Ping, to come upon earth;
and while they wait visions and portents come
to them. Regularly during services, God Worshippers
fall to the ground and obtain glimpses of the
Heaven Hong has described. Contingents of angels
save a couple local villages from bandits. A
charcoal burner falls into a trance; God the
father uses him as a mouthpiece, speaking commands
to the faithful. Hong accepts all these occurrences
as authentic; if he can have visions, why not
everyone else? In any case, Hong has had only
the one vision, eleven years ago. It has been
a long time since he himself has seen God, and
it is good to hear from the Old Man, however
indirectly.
Hong is actually pleased when another Hakka
peasant, Xiao Chao Gui, takes on the personality
of Jesus, his heavenly elder brother. (If you
have been breathlessly waiting for the Second
Coming, you can relax. It has already happened,
and you missed it.) Hong and Xiao-as-Jesus have
long conversations. Jesus has all the news from
home. Hong himself has a son, conceived in Heaven
and born there in his absence; Hong is thrilled,
since he has only daughters here on earth. Hong
politely inquires about Jesus' own family, and
is pleased to hear that all are well. Jesus has
five children, born at respectable two-year intervals.
The oldest boy is fifteen now, and getting so big;
the oldest daughter is eleven. Everyone lives
together in the Great House. There are no mother-in-law
problems in Heaven: Hong's wife and Mrs. Jesus
both get along well with Mrs. God. None of this
talk is in the least facetious or blasphemous.
Neither of these men claims to be a deity;
there is only one God. For Hong and Xiao, far
from their own homes and beginning to come under
attack by a hostile government, a peaceful Chinese
household is the essence of Heaven.
One reason that the government is hostile is
that the God Worshippers have been advocating
the destruction of traditional idols. The appointed
guardians of the idols have complained to the
authorities, and local magistrates have published
poems critical of Hong and his religion. Hong
is a trained classical scholar; he retorts with
poems of his own. (At this distance, in translation,
it is hard for me to judge literary merit, but
as far as I can tell Hong gives as good as he
gets.) When poetry fails to quell the disturbance,
the authorities call for military backup.
There are soldiers in the area anyhow. You
recall that secret societies have sprung up to
plot the overthrow of the Manchu. One such outfit,
called the Heaven and Earth Society, operates
in the vicinity of Thistle Mountain. Long before
the God Worshippers arrived, they needed a way
to identify each other. As a password and special
recognition code they chose the word for flood,
which is "hong".
You will also recall that seafarers were outlawed.
The Western Powers have a need for outlaws; they
pay smugglers to carry opium up the rivers for
distribution. The Western Powers do not have
a need for pirates. The world's most powerful
navy, the Royal Navy, undertakes the suppression
of blue water piracy and is partially successful;
Chinese pirates are driven far up the rivers
to a point where seagoing vessels cannot get
at them. The West, by a combination of gold and
gunboats, has driven a populace of criminals
deep into the interior of China, into the mountains
where the great rivers begin, and where Hong
is. These criminals settle down; they become
tongs, controlling villages and ruling by terror
and extortion. They are not particularly friendly
to the God Worshippers; Hong himself is mugged
a couple times. But eventually the tongs figure
that it might be helpful to take on some political
and religious coloration. For the rest of the
history of the Tai Ping, the religious movement
will take place inside a cloud of smugglers and
bandits who can neither be dispersed nor fully
converted.
The Manchu soldiers are not interested in subtle
distinctions. Criminals, revolutionaries, visionaries-they
are all just troublemakers. Some of Hong's people
are arrested and never seen again. Some of the
soldiers are ambushed and killed. Manchu captains
feel themselves outnumbered and call for reinforcements.
The advisors to the Manchu emperor see a threat,
and the reinforcements are sent, and sent again.
This military pressure makes a connection for
Hong. His Heavenly Father trained him to fight
demons. Where are the demons? The hostility of
the Manchu troops provides the answer. Hong organizes
his followers along military lines and begins
preparing for war. Since the Hakka farm women
would be useless if they bound their feet, Hakka
women are able to march and fight just like Hakka
men. Hong creates separate regiments for them,
and, to keep his followers pure, issues a death
decree for anyone who defies the separation,
even husbands and wives. Hong orders the acquisition
of weapons and gunpowder. Bandits and revolutionaries
are accepted into the ranks after a short theological
test. All earthly property is God's; individual
property is not allowed. Hong will distribute
property to each person as needed. Insubordination
is punishable by death. Drinking and opium are
punishable by death. Martial law is swift and
merciless. Due process is unknown to the Tai
Ping: Public execution can follow half an hour
after accusation.
These stern measures turn farmers into soldiers.
In 1851, at Jintian, the Tai Ping, now about
ten thousand people under arms, win their first
battle. The fact of victory is itself meaningful:
Many Chinese begin to speculate that the Mandate
of Heaven has in fact left the Manchu. Hong thinks
so, and he knows where it goes. He begins to
wear yellow, a color reserved to the Emperor
alone. The Manchu emperor is a young man but
notoriously dissolute, interested only in alcohol
and concubines. Hong, perhaps in imitation, begins
to add courtesans to his retinue, each with a
yellow parasol.
The Tai Ping do not always win, and they are
always, in the beginning, outnumbered and surrounded.
Hong comes to believe that they must leave the
area of Thistle Mountain. He preaches that the
Chinese nation, like the biblical nation of Israel,
will break up into small holdings; and his prediction
is, on the whole, accurate for the next hundred
years. Despite his imperial trappings, Hong does
not really want to prevent the weakening of the
central government and found a new dynasty. Instead
he plans to find a suitable location and create
a kingdom of Heaven on Earth where his followers
can live by God's word until the inevitable end.
He leads his followers down the great rivers
in a journey not unlike the Long March, under
attack by the Manchu all the way, searching for
a place where he may found his City of God. During
the journey, Xiao is killed in battle. There
will be no more chats with Elder Brother
It takes two years for Hong and his people,
now a vast throng, to arrive in Nanjing, the
former capitol of the Ming. Hong is in a good
strategic position to march on Peking and overthrow
the Manchu. But something about Nanjing clicks.
Hong declares that they have found the location
for the earthly paradise. The Tai Ping will send
some forces toward Peking, but never enough.
Their fate will be determined at Nanjing, their
stronghold, their center of gravity. Hong rings
the city with fortifications and begins building
palaces.
The Manchu, reprieved, send army after army
to besiege Nanjing. Each time the Tai Ping break
the siege and smash the Manchu armies; but Tai
Ping offensives against Peking and Shanghai also
fail. For thirteen years the war is a stalemate
brimming with the blood of more than twenty million
Chinese dead. By contrast the American Civil
War, playing concurrently at theatres closer
to you, costs not quite one million. The Tai
Ping Rebellion, as it is called, becomes the
bloodiest conflict of the Nineteenth Century,
and the second bloodiest conflict in human history,
ever.
Hong applies to the Western Powers to support
the Tai Ping as fellow Christians and end the
slaughter. The West seems oddly unwilling to
believe that the Tai Ping are true Christians.
As the true nature of Tai Ping rule leaks out,
British ambassadors begin to report with horror
that Tai Ping leaders have no concept of civil
bureaucracy. And then, Hong is very firmly against
the opium trade. In 1860, already at war with
the Manchu near Peking, the West begins to fight
the Tai Ping around Shanghai.
An American adventurer from Salem, Massachusetts
crystallizes the determination of Western Christianity
to wipeout Eastern Christianity. Although Frederick
Townsend Ward has little military experience,
he talks frightened Shanghai merchants into bankrolling
a small force and placing it under his command.
Ward buys modern rifles and later modern artillery.
He employs European officers to teach European
tactics to Chinese recruits. After Ward wins
a battle at long odds, his force is expanded
and renamed the Ever Victorious Army. Partly
in order to control Ward, the Manchu make him
a mandarin of the third rank. After he is killed,
they promote him further: Ward becomes the war
god Hua, and the graves of Ward and his dog are
housed in a small temple. Now there are gods
from the west on both sides of the conflict.
The Ever Victorious Army gets a new British commander,
Charles Gordon. Soon there is a French imitation,
the Ever Triumphant Army, and then another American
force, the Ever Secure Army. All these forces
become the southern pincer of the last siege
of Nanjing.
Poor Hong is unable to communicate with his
god. His old friends, whose divine voices supplied
Hong with inspiration, are dead; Hong has had
to kill one of them himself just to stay in power.
He has no more dreams. He deduces what he can
from the Bible, but his people, who have come
so far with him, fear the end, and desert. As
his enemies close in upon his city, Hong meditates
upon Moses, whose followers also deserted, and
whose vision took him to a promised land he could
never enter.
What are we to make
of this tale? Most Western writers dismiss
the Tai Ping religion as quasi-Christianity
at best, and a megalomaniac cult at worst.
It is not an unreasonable view. Clearly Hong
Xiu Quan fell prey to his personal failings.
All of the Tai Ping leaders were farmers, hardly
up to the challenges of running a nation, nor
likely to resist the corrosive effects of power.
There is more than a hint of David Koresh and
the Branch-Dividians in the Tai Ping story.
One can view the affair as tragic mental aberration
writ large.
I find that I cannot label Hong a lunatic.
He seems a lot like me: Quiet and scholarly,
no great success but apparently well respected
in his locality, devoted to the life of the mind
and to family. I can get no hint that he seeks
out the feverish dream which changes him, or
that his thought processes afterwards are distorted.
Hong is simply unfortunate enough to receive
a great lump of stimuli, as vivid and as real
as any stimuli we receive from our senses. He
cannot dismiss it, though he tries. His life
and his writings become an attempt to comprehend
that data and to act on it, to reconcile his
dream with information he gets from his environment.
Hong's appeal is that he is engaged in a spiritual
quest, a search for truth and meaning to which
he brings all the reasoning power and scholarship
that he can muster.
After joining the search committee, I heard
the spiritual life stories of many UUs, both
ministers and laymen. Few of those lives are
reasoned out at an even pace. Often there is
moment of epiphany, a time when, camping in the
mountains or stuck in traffic, a person comes
to some realization that changes the direction
of his or her life. I see those epiphanies also
as I poke through my dusty histories, though
few so spectacular as Hong's. Sudden mental redirection
is an objective, demonstrable phenomenon, no
more to be disparaged than other personal disasters
like cancer or puberty. People are more vulnerable
to such an occurrence at times of high emotion,
and the occurrence is more likely to have a visual
character if a person is asleep, sick or suffering
from sensory deprivation, darkness, or fog. But
no one is safe, not the most confirmed atheist,
not the most cynical free-thinker. One moment
you are a well respected scientist, mulling privately
over a problem in physics; the next moment you
are shouting Eureka and running naked through
the streets, and your neighbors will be telling
reporters that you seemed so calm and ordinary.
Personally, I hold that the chess players are
not wrong: There is something dangerous
and magical about human invention, inspiration,
revelation-call it what you will. It does not
always come when wanted, and then it comes at
other times unexpected and unbidden, inconvenient
and clouded as to its purpose or usefulness.
My inspirations are sometimes poetical, and I
choose to personify them as my muse-a figure
whom I do not actually see, but a convenient
image (and a single syllable for which useful
rhymes exist). She embodies my inspiration-flighty
and impatient, sarcastic, unreliable, unmistakably
and endearingly feminine--a reassuringly trivial
demigoddess, not as fearsome as most from the
land of faerie. I do fear her dark sister, the
blind sibyl who rules over the more powerful
revelations, those that shatter lives and families
and nations. If Unitarian-Universalism is a religion
all sunshine, penetrating everywhere, then unsealed
revelation is the shadow within the sunbeams;
and there the blind sibyl waits, ready to spring
forth without warning and carry us as she carried
Hong to heights or depths beyond our present
conception.
Closing Words
Additional Verse Larry McAneny
Blind sister God,
Stormy and serene,
Sending searchers visions that are binding,
Seekers ruined by finding Truth’s tormented
queen.
Hail & Hosanna, Blind sister God.
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