Listen to audio file - Courage to live a Lent
Before the great Feast of Easter when we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Church goes through a period of preparation by prayer and fasting. We call this Lent. In the northern hemisphere, where Christianity started, it was celebrated in Spring and slowly, throughout that time, the dead of winter burst forth into the luxuriance of new growth, signifying life and the resurrection.
Xiao Ai is a young friend of mine. She was left at the steps of a convent about seven years ago in a remote village of Shan Xi Province. She was born with clubbed feet and abandoned. Xiao was brought to Shanghai where a group of foreigners provided money and logistical support for multiple operations.
During that period she was taken in by a family who took great care of her and eventually wanted to adopt her as their own. However there were many hurdles to be overcome. Xiao Ai did not have any identification as the convent was not a registered orphanage and so the convent was not in a position to register her.
Indeed people could only guess at her actual birth date. She was really a “non-person”.
After years of effort Xiao Ai has had all her paperwork completed and she now has a Chinese passport that will allow her to travel with her adopted family to Singapore. What happiness followed the long and anxious wait where a wonderful outcome was hoped for rather than to be expected.
Xiao’s struggle to me is a Lenten story that has become an Easter story; a fast that turned into a feast; a long journey in a desert that ended in freedom; a near death that heralded a resurrection, a new life.
Shanghai is a city of tinsel and glitter. Most people recognize the image of its iconic buildings and towering structures along the Huang Pu River. There are myriad neon signs and a yuppie lifestyle for many ex-pats who ride the wave of economic frenzy. But it has its under-belly.
The construction of this city has been done on the backs of migrant workers - currently seven million - who have travelled to the city to find work. They left their villages and often their families in order to make a little money on construction sites and in restaurants and factories.
These people do not have residency permits in Shanghai and so they cannot settle down where they work. Often they leave their children back in the village in the care of grandparents and may only get home once a year – during the Chinese New Year – to see how the family is going.
Children can resent their absence and may not appreciate the sacrifice of the parent or parents in order to better the whole family economically.
In the cities where they work they do not have equal access to medical and educational opportunities that are open to the local population.
Their sacrifice is a sort of “lent” lived in the hope of a better future for their family. Like Xiao Ai’s adopting parents or the migrant parents, they in fact live the admonition of God in Isaias 58: 6-7.
“Is not this the fast that I choose: to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him."
God brought the slaves out of the land of Egypt where they had made bricks for the ostentatious buildings of the Pharaohs. This same God made a covenant with them and subsequently with us that we treat each other differently because in one way or another we have all been freed. The worship of the market and the God of money has caused many to suffer. May we all have the courage to live a Lent that will usher in true life for the world.
Warren Kinne now works at You Dao Foundation.