Information on International Pilgrimages with Youth

China Pilgrimage

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

After our night of merry-making with the Tibetan students, we awoke to snowflakes floating down on the mountain. The trees were covered with rime frost and our Global Ministries teacher in China, Liz Searles, who had joined us for our overnight trip to the mountains, informed us that once a year the mountain people hold a “Rime Festival”.  When all the trees covered in this crystal frost, the village looks like a fairyland.  Every village in every town in every province in China seems to celebrate what they have.  The Chinese are incredibly grateful people.

No less a part of the Chinese culture than steaming bowls of rice and green tea is xiongmao – “bearcat” – the Giant Panda.  Sometimes referred to by the Chinese as “the living fossil”, the panda can be traced back to the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.  At that time Panda was still a meat eater, but today the cute and cuddly-looking Panda is a vegetarian whose main staple is bamboo.  Unfortunately the panda is endangered, however, and fewer than 1,000 remain active in the wild.  The Chinese are working hard at preserving this symbol of welcome and friendship, and we were able to witness their efforts first hand on our visit to the Wolong Nature Reserve of Sichuan – a panda preserve containing sixty pandas that roam in a protected environment.  Forty of those are at one time or another housed in an enclosed observation facility for breeding and study.  This is also where the babies are raised, and we were fortunate enough to be able to watch a handful of them at play on their jungle gym. Believe it or not, we were also able to actually sit, and have a picture taken, with Ying Ying, one of the residents of the facility.  It’s an amazing feeling to put your arm around a wild and exotic species, and well worth it.

Liz and her husband and daughter joined us for the long bus ride down the mountain back to Chengdu, and we enjoyed a lively discussion about her work at Radio and TV University and her experiences living in Chengdu as a Christian American teacher.  From her perspective, there’s a fine balance between religion and politics, partly because her students are primarily Tibetans, but also because she has to be very careful not to appear to be influencing them with regard to anything other than their study of the English language.  One thing was very clear in our discussion:  being an American working in China is fascinating and challenging, but also a bit lonely, and we could tell that she was enjoying this time together as much as we were.  It was difficult to part with Liz; we, too, were happy to see another American face, but she had to get back to school and we had one more stop to make before leaving town.  We were being given one more opportunity to partake of Chengdu cuisine, widely noted as the finest food in all of China.  And so, before hopping our plane to Xi’an, we savored every bite of our last meal in the Sichuan Province.

Even our first few moments in Xi’an told us that this was an area rich in history.  On the one-hour ride from the airport to the hotel we saw several ancient tombs dating back more than 1,000 years.  We’ll spend the day tomorrow exploring some of that history.

At dinner our hosts, The Reverend Wang Huai Ren and The Reverend Wang Jun, of the Shanxi Christian Council, as well as a representative of the Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB) of the Shanxi Province greeted us with the warmest of welcomes.  The Reverends Wang presented our delegation with a beautiful carving of the risen Christ, and a rubbing of the Stone Tablets which we’ll be seeing on our travels tomorrow.  Our official from the RAB provided us with a bit of background about religion in the Shanxi Province.  There are five different religions here, and the attitude is:  it doesn’t matter what the chosen religion is, the important thing is that the people have freedom of religion.  As in all of the other places we’ve visited, Christianity continues to grow here:  in the 1950’s only 30,000 Christians lived and worshipped here; today there are 350,000, and we may get a chance to meet some of them before we hop our next plane tomorrow night.

As today’s journalist I’ve found that it’s quite easy to recount our events of the day and all of the new facts and statistics we’ve learned.  Not quite as easy, however, is the sharing of the depth of feeling we’ve experience – not only in worship or in the singing of hymns, but also in sitting down at one large table and sharing a meal together.  The brotherhood and fellowship these people exude is powerful, palpable—almost tangible.  I have been profoundly moved by these people and their traditions, and I feel forever changed by them.  A member of our team had the foresight to bring along some printed hymns to sing on the bus, and one of them has been playing over and over again in my head since the second or third day we arrived in this beautiful country.  The hymn is “This is My Song”, by Lloyd Stone, 1934, and the final line sings volumes in my heart:

     O hear my song, O God of all the nations, a song of peace, for their land and for mine.

God bless you all, and special blessings to Marc, Ted, June and Jan; we know you’re with us in spirit.

Respectfully submitted in peace and good wishes,

Megan Weymouth

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