The fam at Doi Tung. Thirty minutes from our house, this mountain has a beautiful garden dedicated to the king's mother, "Mae Fah Luang." Everything grows well here on these mountains. A coffee plantation and a rose garden are just around the corner.
16.2.07
In the Neighborhood
Lately the rituals of Buddhism have been rather in our face. Yesterday an elephant walks into our driveway, and the owners ask Julie if she wants to make some good merit by feeding the elephant. What do you say when an animal bigger than your car is asking for money? Julie politely declined the invitation and took a pic of the elephant at our front door. Have you had an elephant show up at your door lately?
The culture in Thailand is quite fixated on this principle of merit. Merit is based on the Buddha’s philosophy that in order to get good in life or in death one must do good works now. From the Buddha’s teaching and from their own philosophizing, Thai people have come up with thousands of ways to get good from doing good. Giving food to hungry elephants is just the beginning. Giving food to hungry monks…even better.
During the holidays our neighborhood organized a huge festival at the Buddhist temple in the front of our village to cook up some good karma for our neighborhood. The leaders of our neighborhood gathered funds from families in our neighborhood to give to the temple in order to buy some relics to place in the chedi of the temple grounds.
If you are a Christian, you may recall a time in history when Christians believed that contact with the bones or precious items from holy saints like the apostles would alleviate unwanted illness or sin. The Christian leaders of the time were quite happy to allow a repentant sinner or a worried family member to brush up against or look upon these relics for a small offering to the church. This program was quite fortunate for the building program of the church at that time and for us now as tourists of the antique beauty of the age of relics and indulgences. I thank God for his revelation to men like Luther, and I humbly recognize that the respect of relics is not completely foreign to Christianity.
I will have to confess, I was quite surprised when I heard that our neighborhood used the funds they raised for the temple in order to buy some fragments of the bones of Siddhartha Gautama “The Buddha.” They told me they came from India and Nepal, but I think they may have gotten them off Ebay…you can get everything on the internet these days. They held a temple party for three days to celebrate the coming of these good luck relics to our neighborhood temple. The party included small concerts, dancing girls, dancing boys dressed as girls, Thai dramas, Muay Thai (Thai Boxing), imported discothèques (dance floors, lights, sound systems and disc jockeys), Ferris wheels, and lots of alcohol. It was kind of a carnival/fair atmosphere. At one place they seemed to be having a competition to see which dance floor was flashy, sexy and loud enough to attract the most customers/dancers for the 20 baht entrance fee. The dance floors were literally within 30 yards of each other.
The day before the culminating ceremony, Julie was stopped on the way home by the temple parade. For days, families had spent much time producing animal floats that looked like big rats and ostriches or royal Thai throne floats loaded with gifts of food, clothes, money, etc. Watching them work on these float creations reminded me of hours I have spent creating floats for parades when I was in college. I am struck by some of the interesting similarities. Parade day consisted of all the families joining in as the parade passed their houses carrying these floats of good merit to the temple. Julie and the kids waited in the car watching the parade and waving to neighbors or smiling politely to drunken men and women approaching the car. I would like to say that I saw some cultural good in this “fun,” unfortunately, the heavy alcohol use at these parties combined with the empty practice of making merit produce a rather heavy and sobering spiritual atmosphere. This was a good opportunity for Julie and the kids to pray for our neighborhood and Thailand. When they arrived home they were visibly tired.
The final day of the ceremony was a day for the entire neighborhood to dress in white and come out for the ritual of placing the relics in the chedi. Chedis are large, pointed structures that serve as holy places for safekeeping of relics (the bones of the Buddha or the ashes of a king). Wat (a temple) complexes are often built expressly to surround a sacred chedi. I was allowed to take pictures and observe the ceremony. This also gave me the opportunity to pray to Jesus about this event and for the people of my neighborhood. People sat with hands together in front of their faces in meditation and watched on as the monks pulled a rope attached to a sacred bird image carrying relics up to the high place of the chedi. My landlord was one of the important people who had the job of placing the sacred urns that housed the small relics on the sacred bird image. I love our landlord. You would love our landlord. I left the ceremony feeling sad.
I noticed two types of people that attended the ceremony. There was the person who was very interested in the ceremony bowing with reverence at all the right places. These people tended to be the older people. Makes sense really. Our older neighbors are approaching their curtain call and require high producing interest rates for their karma needs. Others seemed to be there because their family or culture expected their attendance. These people tended to be the younger people. Noticeably bored with the rituals they have seen time and again, the young Thais seemed to doubt the usefulness of this ceremony for their spiritual life as a whole. Neither group was a fortress of hope.
Before I criticize Buddhism too much, let me tell you that I watched the movie Luther with a friend, Jonathan Hance, visiting the other day (his visit is another story for another blog, but know that we were glad to have him come along on our Thai adventures for a few days). In this viewing, I was reminded that Christian religion also has a tendency to create performance and behavioral expectations that are apart from a relationship with Christ. Jesus told Nicodemus in John chapter 3, “Don’t be surprised when I tell you that you have to be ‘born from above’—out of this world, so to speak. You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s headed next. That’s the way it is with everyone ‘born from above’ by the wind of God, the Spirit of God (The Message).” This verse makes me nervous. My flesh is more comfortable with rituals and behaviors that I can “do” which will create positive religious merit visible and tangible to myself and others. Jesus seems rather comfortable with promoting a relationship over ritual and a redeemed spirit over religious habits. Don’t get me wrong, I have been blessed by Christian ritual in a variety of settings, but my desire for the merit or works righteousness that often goes with religion and ritual leaves me empty like my neighbors. Jesus says look at the trees (probably coconut trees for me) bending and remember the unseen power at work in you and for you. Power for a new birth…a new life…a new ritual. With new life comes redeemed works, but no ritual, no habit, and no work could birth this kind of “out of this world” hope that comes from the Spirit within. With this Wind in us, our works look a lot less like performances and a lot more like trees dacing in the powerful storm of His will.
So pray for my neighbors. Pray that the emptiness in these rituals would be replaced by the Spirit moving upon them to open their hearts to a new life in His Spirit and new rituals of hope in Jesus.
Also, please pray for these three things:
1. We need prayers for continued language study while beginning the process of implementing our strategy of church planting by entering this university community. Some new Thai Christian friends of ours who own CEC English language schools in Chiang Mai have opened up some small schools next to the campus. We are talking with them about how we might connect with them to reach students. Pray for more insight into opportunities like this as well as other opportunities to be and work on the campus.
2. Please pray for growth and open doors in our relationships with university students and neighbors. Pray for open hearts to Jesus.
3. Pray for fun. I know this sounds strange, but in Thai culture if it is not fun it is quite literally not going to happen. I just visited with a friend missionary who has been at this for 13 years in Thailand, and his first bit of advice was, “It needs to be fun or it is not going to work.” Pray that our family has fun and that we have fun with the people we meet. There is a bit of a learning curve in having fun in a different culture.
The culture in Thailand is quite fixated on this principle of merit. Merit is based on the Buddha’s philosophy that in order to get good in life or in death one must do good works now. From the Buddha’s teaching and from their own philosophizing, Thai people have come up with thousands of ways to get good from doing good. Giving food to hungry elephants is just the beginning. Giving food to hungry monks…even better.
During the holidays our neighborhood organized a huge festival at the Buddhist temple in the front of our village to cook up some good karma for our neighborhood. The leaders of our neighborhood gathered funds from families in our neighborhood to give to the temple in order to buy some relics to place in the chedi of the temple grounds.
If you are a Christian, you may recall a time in history when Christians believed that contact with the bones or precious items from holy saints like the apostles would alleviate unwanted illness or sin. The Christian leaders of the time were quite happy to allow a repentant sinner or a worried family member to brush up against or look upon these relics for a small offering to the church. This program was quite fortunate for the building program of the church at that time and for us now as tourists of the antique beauty of the age of relics and indulgences. I thank God for his revelation to men like Luther, and I humbly recognize that the respect of relics is not completely foreign to Christianity.
I will have to confess, I was quite surprised when I heard that our neighborhood used the funds they raised for the temple in order to buy some fragments of the bones of Siddhartha Gautama “The Buddha.” They told me they came from India and Nepal, but I think they may have gotten them off Ebay…you can get everything on the internet these days. They held a temple party for three days to celebrate the coming of these good luck relics to our neighborhood temple. The party included small concerts, dancing girls, dancing boys dressed as girls, Thai dramas, Muay Thai (Thai Boxing), imported discothèques (dance floors, lights, sound systems and disc jockeys), Ferris wheels, and lots of alcohol. It was kind of a carnival/fair atmosphere. At one place they seemed to be having a competition to see which dance floor was flashy, sexy and loud enough to attract the most customers/dancers for the 20 baht entrance fee. The dance floors were literally within 30 yards of each other.
The day before the culminating ceremony, Julie was stopped on the way home by the temple parade. For days, families had spent much time producing animal floats that looked like big rats and ostriches or royal Thai throne floats loaded with gifts of food, clothes, money, etc. Watching them work on these float creations reminded me of hours I have spent creating floats for parades when I was in college. I am struck by some of the interesting similarities. Parade day consisted of all the families joining in as the parade passed their houses carrying these floats of good merit to the temple. Julie and the kids waited in the car watching the parade and waving to neighbors or smiling politely to drunken men and women approaching the car. I would like to say that I saw some cultural good in this “fun,” unfortunately, the heavy alcohol use at these parties combined with the empty practice of making merit produce a rather heavy and sobering spiritual atmosphere. This was a good opportunity for Julie and the kids to pray for our neighborhood and Thailand. When they arrived home they were visibly tired.
The final day of the ceremony was a day for the entire neighborhood to dress in white and come out for the ritual of placing the relics in the chedi. Chedis are large, pointed structures that serve as holy places for safekeeping of relics (the bones of the Buddha or the ashes of a king). Wat (a temple) complexes are often built expressly to surround a sacred chedi. I was allowed to take pictures and observe the ceremony. This also gave me the opportunity to pray to Jesus about this event and for the people of my neighborhood. People sat with hands together in front of their faces in meditation and watched on as the monks pulled a rope attached to a sacred bird image carrying relics up to the high place of the chedi. My landlord was one of the important people who had the job of placing the sacred urns that housed the small relics on the sacred bird image. I love our landlord. You would love our landlord. I left the ceremony feeling sad.
I noticed two types of people that attended the ceremony. There was the person who was very interested in the ceremony bowing with reverence at all the right places. These people tended to be the older people. Makes sense really. Our older neighbors are approaching their curtain call and require high producing interest rates for their karma needs. Others seemed to be there because their family or culture expected their attendance. These people tended to be the younger people. Noticeably bored with the rituals they have seen time and again, the young Thais seemed to doubt the usefulness of this ceremony for their spiritual life as a whole. Neither group was a fortress of hope.
Before I criticize Buddhism too much, let me tell you that I watched the movie Luther with a friend, Jonathan Hance, visiting the other day (his visit is another story for another blog, but know that we were glad to have him come along on our Thai adventures for a few days). In this viewing, I was reminded that Christian religion also has a tendency to create performance and behavioral expectations that are apart from a relationship with Christ. Jesus told Nicodemus in John chapter 3, “Don’t be surprised when I tell you that you have to be ‘born from above’—out of this world, so to speak. You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s headed next. That’s the way it is with everyone ‘born from above’ by the wind of God, the Spirit of God (The Message).” This verse makes me nervous. My flesh is more comfortable with rituals and behaviors that I can “do” which will create positive religious merit visible and tangible to myself and others. Jesus seems rather comfortable with promoting a relationship over ritual and a redeemed spirit over religious habits. Don’t get me wrong, I have been blessed by Christian ritual in a variety of settings, but my desire for the merit or works righteousness that often goes with religion and ritual leaves me empty like my neighbors. Jesus says look at the trees (probably coconut trees for me) bending and remember the unseen power at work in you and for you. Power for a new birth…a new life…a new ritual. With new life comes redeemed works, but no ritual, no habit, and no work could birth this kind of “out of this world” hope that comes from the Spirit within. With this Wind in us, our works look a lot less like performances and a lot more like trees dacing in the powerful storm of His will.
So pray for my neighbors. Pray that the emptiness in these rituals would be replaced by the Spirit moving upon them to open their hearts to a new life in His Spirit and new rituals of hope in Jesus.
Also, please pray for these three things:
1. We need prayers for continued language study while beginning the process of implementing our strategy of church planting by entering this university community. Some new Thai Christian friends of ours who own CEC English language schools in Chiang Mai have opened up some small schools next to the campus. We are talking with them about how we might connect with them to reach students. Pray for more insight into opportunities like this as well as other opportunities to be and work on the campus.
2. Please pray for growth and open doors in our relationships with university students and neighbors. Pray for open hearts to Jesus.
3. Pray for fun. I know this sounds strange, but in Thai culture if it is not fun it is quite literally not going to happen. I just visited with a friend missionary who has been at this for 13 years in Thailand, and his first bit of advice was, “It needs to be fun or it is not going to work.” Pray that our family has fun and that we have fun with the people we meet. There is a bit of a learning curve in having fun in a different culture.
10.2.07
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Happy Birthday Samuel Jakarin! Two years old but first birthday with us. We are all happy about this. I think Jak is still trying to figure out what birthdays are all about.
IMG_0960
Neighbors paying respect at the ceremony for storing the Buddha's relics. Notice the white rope they all hold as a symbol of unity
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