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.

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