Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year: Year of the Pig
Sunday morning. February 18.
My friend Amy invited us to Sunday morning service at the Buddhist Temple where she and her family attend. Her son is in Alison's class, and I really like Amy, so we decided to accept her invitation. It is Chinese New Year, the Year of the Pig. Chinese New Year is a big deal. There are celebrations that go on for days, and many wishes of good luck. It is a new beginning. A new opportunity for good things to happen. Anymore, it seems as though our celebration of the New Year, on December 31/January 1, comes too closely on the heels of a hectic and exhausting Christmas season. We seem to drag into the New Year already worn out, and our wishes for a year filled with joy, blessing, good fortune, new beginnings, etc., seem halfhearted at best. That's why I like the Chinese New Year. It seems fresh.
Our first time at a Buddhist Temple was in China, when we had our babies blessed at the Temple in Nanning. One couple in our group declined to join in the blessing because they were uncomfortable with the whole idea. We're not Buddhist either, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to experience part of the culture of our daughter's birth country. I accepted the invitation this time because, as I said, I like Amy and if I invited her to my church on Sunday morning, I don't think she would decline because she is a Buddhist. I don't know, maybe she would, but Asians tend to be much more polite about those kinds of things than we are. The idea of not going, simply because I don't adhere to the Buddhist religion seems terribly closed-minded. I don't plan on converting, but I also don't want to stick my head in the sand and refuse to learn anything about how other people worship, believe and live. If I'm going to talk about loving others, then it seems hypocritical to go around building walls.
So we went. It was heavy on the incense, and Alison's eyes watered the entire time. Other than that, she sat through the entire hour and fifteen minutes like a trooper. It was all in Vietnemese. The young mother in front of me made her infant a bottle in the middle of the monk's talk (not sure if it was a sermon, or liturgy, since I couldn't understand it), and one little boy played his Game Boy throughout the service. Many people were engaged and quite worshipful - some looked tired, bored and ready to go from the beginning. I didn't find it to be unlike the service at my own church with respect to the diversity of interest.
Instead of a stained glass with Jesus stretching out his arms, there was a giant gold Buddha statue. Instead of praise choruses there was chants and gongs. Instead of bread and wine (juice in my church) there was apples and oranges and a red envelope for good luck. When Alison looked inside the envelope, there was a dollar bill. She liked that. It's much cooler to a six year-old to get paid to come to church than to put part of your allowance in the offering plate.
But I missed my church. I missed the Bible reading and the Apostle's Creed and the exhortation to love other people and make the world a better place spoken in a language I can understand. If could have understood the monk, perhaps this is the message he was giving through the haze of the incense. It might have been. We were welcomed with open arms, smiles and greetings of Happy New Year, and we returned them with smiles of our own. And maybe we knocked a few bricks out of some walls, at least in our own lives.
Happy Year of the Pig!