Friday, December 8, 2017

The Church in China is booming.

On my last day, I paid a visit to the headquarters of the government department that oversees all officially sanctioned religious activity in China, called the Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM). In order to receive license to function openly, in addition to being vetted to ensure they pose no threat to the State, religious organizations must be self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating. These criteria came into being when the TSPM was originated in 1952, to ensure that foreign religious entities (e.g. the Vatican) would not interfere in Chinese affairs, and that religious activity would not undermine the goals of socialism.

The TSPM has had its ups and downs. Churches were tolerated or suppressed at different periods, crushed during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, allowed to grow beginning in 1979, and treated with a strange mix of encouragement and disapproval since the 1990s. On the one hand, there has been an exponential growth in “underground churches” – a house-church movement with Baptist and Pentecostal roots that is illegal and severely opposed by the government. On the other hand, with China’s transition to a hybrid economy, there is a renewed emphasis on moral education, and the government appreciates the possibilities offered by “official churches” to strengthen the spiritual and ethical fabric of the nation.

I knew some of this before my meetings in Shanghai. I had travelled to Guangzhou fifteen years ago as part of a study tour, and learned a fair amount about the Church in China. What I did not know was the extent of the growth and the increased security of the churches’ official position. This became apparent when I met with the Reverend Dr. Melissa Lin, the Deputy Head of the China Christian Council (CCC), and her assistant Meiying Shi. Dr. Lin is also dean of the seminary in Nanjing, the country’s largest. Her MDiv is from an Episcopal Seminary, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and she has a PhD from the Graduate Theological Union in Claremont, California.

The CCC is the umbrella organization for all the recognized churches in China. I did not ask for the number of congregations, but the “official” estimate of Chinese Christians is about forty million and growing. This does not include members of underground churches, so the actual number could be nearly twice that. There are 23 established seminaries. A state-of-the-art plant in Nanjing is printing Bibles at capacity, and still cannot keep up with demand.

After our conversation, I was given a tour of the church next door, the former Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral. Neglected for years, it has now been meticulously restored, including stained glass windows in the apse donated by the Episcopal Church. The renovation has won a UNESCO world heritage award, and the CCC hopes to plant a worshiping congregation here next year.

Over lunch, Dr. Lin and I talked about the challenges facing the Church here, the two largest being ecclesiology and liturgy. The CCC is officially “post-denominational.” They call themselves Christians, not Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian. However, those churches which had been planted by missionaries before the revolution still retain something of the flavor of the denominations that founded them. Worship in a formerly Presbyterian church may still feel markedly Presbyterian, for example. It is no surprise that with so many doctrinal and liturgical streams flowing together into one huge lake, it is a real challenge to bring about a common understanding of the marks of the Church, or a common liturgical practice.

Of course, I found myself volunteering to help. Dr. Lin smiled. In China, she said, we think it important to make friendships first, before we embark on any projects together. Americans always want to sign contracts right away. That’s not our style. She offered one of the marvelous dishes on the table in front of us. Would you care for more fish, she asked. I appreciated the gentle reproof, and had to laugh at myself for being a “typical American.”

Nevertheless, we did discuss the possibility of my leading a trip back to China in 2019, and I am thinking specifically of bringing a team from the diocese including some of our younger clergy. I think they would benefit greatly from the experience of seeing what mission looks like from a “post-denominational Church,” particularly in the context of a secular and sometimes hostile culture.

Tengchong, Yunnan Province, China; December 7, 2017

His name is Joseph Kowalick.

Where he was born? Cleveland, maybe. Or Chicago. Maybe even Pittsburgh. A Polish boy. Catholic, no doubt.

Was he called Joey? Or Little Joe? Or was he the big brother? Did his mom insist everyone call him Joseph, so he would always be respected? Was he the oldest son in the household of a widow, raising his siblings until he went to war? Or was he the delinquent kid his family hoped would straighten out once he joined the army? Or was he, like thousands of others, just a quiet young man who answered his country’s call because it was the right thing to do?

Who could tell? Nothing on the stone in front of me gave those answers.

What I do know is this. After the ceremonies of gift-giving at the War Museum in Tengchong, after the group photos and the tour, after we had come to some appreciation of all that had taken place here in the worst days of 1945, we were led to the National Martyrs Cemetery, to a quiet little square paved with flagstones, surrounded by a grove of bamboo, and 19 gravestones laid flat in the earth, with the names of the Americans who died in the final assault to take back this strategic town.

Each of our party was given a chrysanthemum and told where to stand. Then we were asked to place the flower on the grave in front of us, to honor them the way the Chinese honor their fallen sons.

And Joseph Kowalick, Private First Class, United States Army, was my son.

Were he alive, he would be by now an old man and full of years, aged 93 or thereabouts, perhaps with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It is hard to imagine a life cut down so young, harder still to think he had almost made it to the end. A few more months and the war would be over. Hard to die here, so far from home, yet so near to the rest of his life.

And the Chinese knew that, even in those days of chaos and violence. By the end of the battle, there was not a single building in Tengchong that was undamaged by artillery or small arms fire. Over 100,000 Chinese troops and civilians died in the last months of fighting in western Yunnan. Close to 1,500 American pilots and crew members died flying the “Hump” to support and supply them. And thousands of other Americans gave their lives in the final days of the Chinese campaign.

But these 19 were special. They died for this town. And even as the Chinese were burying their own dead, they wanted to give these boys their due.

The bodies had been given to their American commanders. Some were buried in U.S. military cemeteries abroad. Others were repatriated and now lie in hometown graves in places like Kansas and Vermont and Mississippi.

But the Chinese asked for the soldier’s clothing, the bloodied combat uniforms worn when they were killed. And these, they buried in the same way they buried their own sons, the blood forever mixing with the soil for which they died — a special honor, in this quiet grove of bamboo.

I laid the flower on Private Kowalick’s grave. And then all of us solemnly bowed three times. It is the way Chinese people honor their ancestral tombs. It is their way of saying, “Joe, you’re family now. Now and always.”

And maybe this further explains the welcome we have received, the kindness we have been met with from the moment we landed. I have had this strange sense that I have been adopted, without fully knowing why, until going outside this quiet enclosure and venturing through the Martyrs’ Cemetery, up a narrow staircase on a steep hill towards the shrine.

On either side, as far as can be seen, are the gravestones of more than 3,200 Chinese troops killed in the last days of the Western Campaign. They represent a small fraction of those who died. They are buried among the trees, in the beautiful forest, much like the landscape they last saw.

Inscribed on each stone is a name. I ask Colonel Ma, “Are there many unknowns?”

He is serious. “No,” he says, “they are all accounted for. We know the name of each and every one.” He thinks a moment. “Of course,” he says, “we cannot be certain that the bones and ash buried under each stone actually belong to the name inscribed above them. There may be remains of two or three soldiers in one plot.”

He pauses. Then he continues solemnly, “What does it matter? They are all together now.”

And that is the moment when I know I have not been walking here alone, that I am in the company of Nicodemus who was on my mind as I made my way here, that I am touching the wounds and holding the shroud of the Crucified — Americans and Chinese and, yes, Japanese — those buried here and those who sleep for a time in unmarked graves in the impenetrable forests around us. I know that if we were more able to grasp in life the truth that we are all together now, there would be less need to grasp it in death.

And I wonder if it is that lesson the Lord is hoping we will take to heart before He returns, as He patiently listens to the squabbling of the living, and the breathing of the dead, their blood at rest in their shrouds here in this garden, waiting for the stones to be lifted and life to begin at last.

Tengchong, Yunnan Province, China; December 7, 2017

You know by now, from Parts 1 & 2 of this saga, that this story centers around a saddle blanket, from Mongolia, presented to my father from Chairman Mao Tse-tung in September 1945, in gratitude for getting him out of Chongqing alive.

The most important part of the blanket is the image of a deer. He is reaching upward with his neck toward a tree branch, trying to nibble a leaf just out of reach — a moment of longing and promise.

For years, this blanket hung in our den on the back of a small rocking chair where I always sat as a little boy. I was fascinated by it, and I worried for the deer. I asked my mother, “Will he ever reach the leaf?” She smiled and said, “Someday, perhaps.”

This past week, as we gave the blanket back to the Chinese people after more than 70 years of our stewardship, I have thought of this more and more.

Over those decades, the friendship of our two peoples has been tested by wars and hardships, and torn by terrible conflicts of ideology and interest. Another war, in Korea, pitted American troops against Chinese troops. Allies became enemies, casualties in the struggle between Communism and the West. Today, with Mao gone, China rising, and America in a state of re-definition, now what does this blanket mean?

I think of China as the deer and America as the tree.

The deer, occupying most of the frame, is full, vigorous, and expansive, one hoof lifted in an energetic and ambitious pose. But for all his strength, the leaf is still out of reach. The tree defines its boundaries. It is only partially visible, but with all its leaves, obviously very fruitful.

The deer yearns for what the tree possesses. He depends on the tree. The fact that the tree also depends on the deer is implied — they are made of the same colors — but the nature of that dependence is not so obvious.

Here, I am not speaking about economic ties but of a spiritual stake, the kind that one people might have in another — as Americans have with the English and French, with West Africans, and the native tribes of our continent — a stake forced on us by history and inescapable, no matter how we may think of ourselves and them, whether we like it or not.

How can this relationship be made clearer? What if there was some way to illuminate this bond? What if the tree bent down a little so that the deer could feed? Might the tree discover its purpose? Might the deer discover its peace?

Enter with me the War Museum in Tengchong. Its ceremonial room is the sort you would expect in official China, with overstuffed armchairs and doilies, side-tables with small pots of tea and, in the background, a large landscape scroll. Unexpectedly, a banner surmounted the entire wall. It reads, “General John Paul McConnell,” in English and Chinese.

The deputy mayor and the local Communist Party secretary were there, along with Madam Zhang Wu Zhen, the daughter of a heroic local leader during the Second World War. Our translator, Colonel Ma, was there, and several other of our sudden friends. Together, we had banqueted wonderfully the night before, with toasts and counter-toasts, in bewildering and carefully prescribed order.

I have never been treated with so overwhelming a display of affection and gratitude from people I had never met. There were warm speeches, in order, and gifts exchanged, in careful balance. My brother, Bruce, and I gave appropriate remarks. His focused on the necessity of international agreements, on a global partnership for sanity. Mine centered on the opportunity at hand for reconciliation and deeper relationship.

I was called to speak of these things, I told them, as a Bishop of the Church, sent not only to Christians but to all people as an ambassador for Christ and a minister of reconciliation.

Bruce and I were both a bit nervous about that part of my speech. Official China can be a bit sensitive to matters of religion. We sent Colonel Ma a draft in advance, suggesting that he could amend any part he thought might be awkward or inappropriate. His response was clear, “Your speech is perfect, sir.” I have since learned that his translation followed my text exactly.

After the ceremony, there were many group photos, an obsession in China. Our little blanket was proudly at the center of everything. “Such a small leaf,” I thought. “Such a large and lovely deer. Why should they care so much about his reaching this?”

The museum held the answer. It documented the suffering of millions of people under foreign enslavement, the years of brutal occupation, martial law, war crimes, and “comfort women” — a compendium of human cruelty. Yet all around were testimonies to the liberators, especially Americans like my dad who flew the “Hump,” who trained and supported, and fought and died with Chinese troops.

Our VIP tour ended in the museum’s Great Hall, a vast space at the front entrance, where a monumental bronze sculpture depicts three figures in the foreground — a Chinese civilian official, a Chinese officer, and an American general — while in the background, American C-47s and B-24s roar out of the mountains. Around them, mounted on the walls, are more than 2,000 helmets of Allied troops who gave their lives.

I understood, in that moment, that the price of this friendship has been paid in blood. When my hosts greet my brother and me, they greet those who gave their lives more than 70 years ago. They are deeply moved that we have not forgotten what they have always remembered. When their eyes well up at the airport as they see us off, when they say they want us to come back, they are not only speaking for the deer, they are speaking for the tree.

There is something very deep in this for us, both as Americans and as Church. Saint Paul is always clear that our identity as members of the Body of Christ is always to be found in each other — that the secret to our own existence lies in the calling of someone else. Put simply, we need one another. In that great official room, as I spoke of the reconciliation won in Jesus Christ, I saw in the eyes of those who listened, one of the most attentive audiences I have ever faced, nodding their heads, feeding on the Word, knowing that they were now tasting something that they had been hoping for all these years. I wondered, how many years has God been preparing the hearts of this people for this? And how much have I yearned for them without even knowing it?

Tengchong, Yunnan Province, China; December 7, 2017

Dear friends and honored hosts. My elder brother, Bruce, and I are overjoyed to be with you on this occasion. As you all know, in September of 1945, a month after the Japanese surrender, a peace conference took place in Chongqing between the Communists, under Mao Tse-tung, and the Kuomintang. Mao was granted safe conduct under American protection to and from the conference. Our father, General John Paul McConnell, was the pilot who flew him from his base in Yunnan province. At the end of the return journey, Mao presented our dad with this saddle blanket from Mongolia as a token of his thanks.

The blanket has now been in our family for nearly seventy years, and it has been well loved. Sometimes, when I was a little boy, I would just stare at it. I was fascinated by its portrait of a deer stretching its neck upward trying to eat a leaf hanging from a tree, just out of reach. I was worried for the deer. One day I asked my mother, “Will he ever reach the leaf?” She smiled. “Someday, perhaps,” she said.

I think that when Chairman Mao gave my father this blanket, he was expressing a hope that, though circumstances might separate us for a time, one day the people of China and the people of the United States would again share deep bonds of friendship. My brother and I believe that goal is now within our reach. And so we have joyfully put back in your hands the sign of the hope that Mao and our father shared, and that we share today.

As a bishop of the Church, I am an ambassador for Jesus Christ and a minister of reconciliation; I am sent not only to Christians, but to all people. In my own churches, I have seen that when people turn away from each other in pride or jealously or fear, they destroy their own work, and they break God’s heart. But when they turn again and embrace one another in forgiveness and compassion, they release a creative power that nothing can stop. For the Lord is gracious and merciful, and He loves humankind and desires that all His children should flourish.

Some may think this blanket is a small thing, and in some ways it is. But we have offered it as a small stone which we believe will be part of a great bridge of reconciliation, and the road across that bridge will carry the hopes of all humanity. We know the task is great. The world is still a fearful and violent place, and changing it is entirely up to us. And yet, as the writer Lu Xun put it, “Hope … is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.” My brother and I are thankful for your friendship and hopeful that many others will choose to join us as we walk together this road of partnership and peace.

Far western China, December 6, 2017

The city of Kunming reminds me somewhat of Denver, except the weather is better and the scale is massively bigger. At an elevation of over 6,000 feet, it has for centuries been a trading center on the ancient Silk Road. By some counts, about six million people now live here. When my father served here during World War II, it was a lot smaller and dominated by the American air base. From there, US and Chinese fighters and bombers mobilized to battle Japan.

After a brief morning visit, we boarded a flight on the final leg to Tengchong, near the border with Myanmar. These flights are in modern aircraft, efficient, clean, packed with locals, and managed by courteous attendants. They are smooth and quiet and on time. They sail well above the ragged peaks and turbulent winds of the mountain ranges below.

The planes my father flew were the opposite in every respect. He guided bombers and C-47s from the Allied bases near Karachi, India, across the infamous stretch of the Himalayas known as the “Hump.” Those machines were loud, slow, unpressurized and freezing cold, threading the mountains at 20,000 feet. If strafed by Japanese ground fire or fighter planes, as they often were, the blood of the dead and wounded could freeze in puddles on the flight deck.

And yet, I have no idea what my father actually went through, because he never talked about any of it. When asked what it was like in the war, he just said, “We got shot at a lot.”

I know I am flying in close proximity to routes he often flew, likely at times even following the same flight path. But the distance between now and then is immeasurable, with such incongruity between this commercial aircraft’s serene interior and that of the shuddering war machines filled with terror and courage that were his daily bread. Perhaps it is in order to understand something of what he and his Chinese comrades endured that I am making this trip, to revive a sense of connection between their world and mine.

This doesn’t mean my making sense of their suffering. War, like sin, is hideous. Sometimes we choose it against all reason. Other times, we stumble into it. On occasion, we have no choice, unless we want a greater evil to triumph. Regardless the reason, lives are cut short, families devastated, nations and cultures cut to pieces, and God’s fragile creation is scarred and desecrated.  One can only marvel that a conspiracy of pride, greed and stupidity – a perfect storm of the worst in human nature – should reveal the best, the love, the sacrifice, and the sheer bravery of so many, including those whose children I am about to meet and whose stories I am about to hear. So this pilgrimage is a Via Crucis, a journey in the Way of the Cross. I am seeking to bind my heart to this far-away world and carry it back into my own, because I know I have something to learn in this, about what it means to bear the name of Christ Crucified, to be His witness, in my own time and place.

In John’s Gospel, Nicodemus occupies this role. Before he meets Jesus, he is a comfortable man, well-born, educated and elite, a first-class politician. He comes to Jesus early on, by night, to see if there isn’t some comfortable way of following Him. What he gets instead is a crisis. Unless a man be born again…(Jn. 3:3). As soon as he hears it, he struggles, jokes, backs away. But the game is already over. He keeps his comfort for a time, hears the Lord preach, perhaps even invites him to his home, sees Jesus immerse Himself in the lives of the desperate, learns of His miracles, but Nicodemus keeps his distance. He is part of those who judge and condemn Jesus, even raising his voice in protest, yet still he is an observer – until after the work of the Cross is finished.

Then the distance disappears. Nicodemus braves shame and disgrace, pays for the burial spices, and goes by night again, this time to wrap with his own hands the pierced and beaten body of Christ, and lay it in a new tomb. It is hard to imagine a closer union with the Crucified One.

The Eastern Churches revere Nicodemus as an evangelist. I am sure he could never forget how the Christ had broken open his existence, how his personal landscape of council meetings, fashionable dinners, political jockeying in comfortable rooms, was shaken by his first visit to Jesus and shattered by his second. He was forever after a creature of two worlds – one very much the world of privileged human life, expecting smooth flight above the jagged peaks and howling winds of sorrow and loss, and the other, a life with the blood of Christ always on his hands, and with it a solidarity with those who suffer, with those who voyage through the unspeakable, the intolerable, the immeasurable dark.

As I flew toward Tengchong, I wondered if Nicodemus might be my companion in this most personal visit, to know in some measure the unspeakable things my father knew – the crews he lost, the death he averted while seeing others die, the senselessness and the carnage, and the strange emergence into light and peace on the other side. I had no idea what I might find. But even so far, I had learned this: that preaching the Gospel to the ends of the earth also means bringing the good news of Christ into the extremes of human experience, into houses of comfort and rooms of sorrow, into the days of our complacency and the hours of our terror, to find the Christ there, always with his word, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

Somewhere over the North Pole, on the way to Shanghai, 12/4 – 12/5/2017

During World War II, my father was a young brigadier general in the Army Air Corps, serving in the Pacific theater. He flew bombers over “The Hump,” a particularly treacherous section of the Himalayas, and helped organize the composite wings of the Fourteenth Air Force, merging teams of Chinese and American airmen into a single unit against the Japanese over a front that stretched more than 700 miles. In Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka), he met my mother, a young Army major assigned to the staff of the Supreme Allied Commander for Southeast Asia, Lord Louis Mountbatten. My parents married in 1946 in Nanjing and continued to serve in China for two more years.

In our home, we have several pieces of art and furniture from China, part of my parents’ legacy. One of these is a small saddle blanket from Mongolia, a gift to my dad from Mao Tse-tung.

In September of 1945, a month after the Japanese surrender, American diplomats organized a conference between the Chinese Communists under Mao and the Kuomintang, or Nationalists, under General Chiang Kai-shek. Mao, considered a rebel and criminal by the Nationalists, was granted safe conduct under American protection to and from the conference in Chongqing. My father was the pilot who flew him from his base in Yunnan province. At the end of the return journey, Mao presented my dad with this blanket as a token of his thanks.

In October, my older brother Bruce, who spends a fair amount of time in China on business, called me up and informed me that the World War II museum in Tengchong was planning to honor our father on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course, we both would need to be there, so I made plans to spend 72 hours in China. And, of course, we needed to bring a present of some kind. What better gift than Mao’s blanket? It’s in my suitcase, in the compartment above my seat, as I write this.

I confess I am a little ambivalent about giving it up. I have seen this blanket nearly every day since my childhood, with its twin portraits of a reindeer stretching its neck upward to reach a leaf hanging from a tree. When I was very young, it hung over the back of the little rocking chair in the den, from which I used to watch cartoons nearly every Saturday morning. It is a piece of my father – really of both my parents. They have passed on, so letting go of this now stabs me a bit. But the blanket is also a piece of history, and a part of the Chinese people. If I kept it, I’m afraid that over the next few generations the story behind it would be forgotten. I don’t want to see it go for five bucks should a future great-grandchild offer it at a garage sale. And it needs to be taken care of – cleaned up and restored a bit – so making it a gift to the museum seems the perfect thing.

Once we let this gift be known to the Chinese, the blanket turned out to be more cause for excitement than the party for my dad. I mean, sure, Pa was a war hero, but we are bringing back a relic of Chairman Mao! There is talk of an interview with the China Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and there will be more than one banquet, I suspect.

Two other things about this trip.

First, its crazy route: Pittsburgh to Minneapolis to Toronto to Shanghai. That gets me only into China. Then add another 3,000 kilometer trek west to Kunming and a final flight to Tenchong on the border with Myanmar. And back again. In six days. It is an odyssey, as if filmed in fast-forward.

Second, I am going not only as my father’s son, but also as a bishop of the Church. It turns out our hosts are very interested in this piece of who I am, and on Friday (December 8) I will have meetings with government officials and members of the China Christian Council in Shanghai.

All this makes it a pilgrimage, a sacred journey of huge import for my soul. Beginning with Nestorius, through the period of Mateo Ricci and the great Catholic missionaries, into the work of the China Inland Mission and the Anglican presence in Shanghai and elsewhere, those Christians who ventured to China must have felt as if they were fulfilling the command at the end of Matthew’s Gospel – to be Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth.

Over the centuries, there have been thousands of saints and thousands of martyrs in China. Since 1979, the Church has gradually been allowed to re-assert its life in the Gospel, under careful government oversight. And now, in a turbulent and dangerous world, perhaps the Christian mission to be ambassadors for Christ and ministers of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5) may be more urgently needed than ever. Perhaps God will use this visit as a small but important addition to that work, a single stone in a bridge of His own making.

So, yes, I go to remember and honor my father – an act of filial piety the Chinese may particularly appreciate. I go to spend a little time with my brother, whom I love very much and don’t get to see often enough. I go to meet Christ, who is waiting for me in those who welcome me. And I go to learn from my sisters and brothers at the ends of the earth, to learn more about what our mission might look like in Pittsburgh, as God leads us on the road to love, teach and heal in the Name and power of Jesus.