Text of a homily offered at St. Andrew's, New Paltz, June 25, 2006:
(August 30 "editor's note": the market lane that I rhapsodize about in my homily is all but gone. As a Lanzhou friend observed, "The cars have won." Our merchants have been driven out to make way for the SUVs and taxis. The is some market activity in the evening, but I fear that will soon end as well. Change is precipitous in Lanzhou. This week the Second Hand Market nearby, a festive shanty town of market stalls, was torn down in the space of two days.)

First of all, thank you, thank you for your prayers and moral support and financial support over the past year. I truly could not have gotten through it without you.

I have been struggling all week to think what to say. Last year it was so easy to frame in idealistic message that would be easy on your ears and touch your hearts. Now that I’ve literally been there and back, it isn’t so easy. What stories should I tell, which places and people should I describe?

Let me begin by describing a couple of my favorite places in Lanzhou, Gansu. Lanzhou is a city of about three million people. The city snakes along the Yellow River between walls of mountains, so its geography is long and narrow. I live in the northeastern quadrant, where farms and orchards have recently been bulldozed to make way for city’s galloping development. My home is an older apartment complex on a narrow, rutted lane off a main thoroughfare. I love walking in the lane early in the day when the life of the street is just awakening, but my favorite time to be outside is in the late afternoon and early evening when the place is humming with life. Across from my gate a grandmother sits on her stool behind a cot spread with dried chili peppers, a few dry goods, and the embroidered baby shoes she makes and sells for pennies. Her neighbor is the baker, rolling out fresh dough on a wide wooden board and baking it on an iron griddle balanced over a fire in a 55-gallon drum. She teases me whenever I buy bread because I don’t understand local dialect she speaks. Next along the line is a vegetable girl with a round, friendly face and then a few noodle sellers who compete with our neighborhood noodle shop. On the other side of the lane are the cigarette lady with her grimy orange pay-by-the-minute telephone and the sticky rice lady with her pyramid of zongzi wrapped in palm leaves. Next come our seamstress, treadle sewing machine planted firmly on the pavement, and the shoe repair girl. Up and down both sides of the lane one can buy fruit and vegetables, have pork and lamb cut to order, get a key made, a bicycle repaired, even stock up on toilet paper. The merchants on both sides leave just a little room for the throngs of people, the bicycles, three wheelers, motorbikes, taxis, trucks and cars that clog the street. At least once a day the intersection of two lanes near my gate reaches true gridlock and all movement comes to a standstill. Cars are so tightly wedged that even foot traffic comes to a halt until the motorists, shouting invective all the while, sort out the mess.

Another of my favorite places in Lanzhou is Xiao Gou Tou Ziao Tong, the towering pink Roman Catholic church where I worship every Sunday. My home street is a community of bustle and chaos; the church is a community of peace and renewal. Even on the gloomiest winter Sunday light streams in through the huge windows. As families gather in the pews, there will always be a long line waiting near the confessional. A grizzled grandfather with a long stringy beard and toothless smile presses an image of the Virgin Mary into my hand. A young man helps me find my place in the missal, and a woman lends me a clean rag to wipe the week’s accumulation of desert dust from my pew. The candles, the incense, the sung mass, never fail to transport me to a home place that is neither Lanzhou nor New Paltz. Sometimes when I look around me at the sea of bowed heads, it’s difficult to believe that Christians are such a tiny, excluded minority in China. That congregation is so large, so multi-generational and so lively. I feel blessed each week to be there. Before I left China, I asked my friend Deacon Paul to let me know what he and Bishop Joseph would like me to bring back for them from New York. He emailed this week that they hope I will bring them each a portable communion kit. It will be a pleasure to do that for them, and the ease of finding and buying such a thing here is one more reminder of how much we take for granted.
We know this. One need only pick up a newspaper or flip on the TV to be reminded that the world is full of misery and deprivation. We know how lucky we are to live in peace, abundance and liberty. But for me, living in China has opened my eyes to the true meaning of “have” and “have not.” I’m constantly amused that my students at Gansu United University complain about the cafeteria food. The cafeteria food happens to be one and only thing they have that’s better than SUNY New Paltz. I never hear them complain that there is no library, no gymnasium, no computers. I never hear them complain when the electricity is off, when the broken windows let in the cold, when the classrooms are filthy, when there aren’t enough chairs or even chalk for the chalkboard. It’s as if they take hardship as much for granted as we do ease and convenience.
When I was a little girl, I was constantly being reminded to “remember the starving children in China!” I think this reminder was intended to make me appreciative of all the advantages I had; unfortunately, I understood it then to mean that I was supposed to feel guilty for being fortunate, that I shouldn’t enjoy my strawberry shortcake or my new shoes. Now that I’ve lived in the third world for a little while, I think perhaps neither gratitude nor guilt is the response God calls us to make when we consider what we have. Gratitude and guilt are just feelings. Gratitude and guilt are passive. I think when we consider inequality and injustice in the world, God calls us instead to activism. I got that call and responded to it in kind of an extreme way, but there are lots of safer and saner ways to respond. If nothing else, be a prayer activist.

The next time you take a drink from a water fountain, thank God for clean water and pray for those who have none.

The next time you visit a sanitary, well-equipped hospital, thank God for health care and pray for those who don’t have it.

The next time you enjoy a public performance of music or dance thank God for the arts and pray that they will some day be available everywhere.

The next time you read a dissenting opinion in the newspaper – even if you think the writer is a complete idiot – thank God for free speech and pray for people who are in prison for trying to exercise it.

I wish I could conclude by telling you about all that I’ve accomplished in my year in China, but I honestly don’t know what I’d say about that. I’ve loved some people and been blessed by their love. I’ve learned a bit about China and I’m grateful for the opportunity to go back and learn some more. Let me simply close with what has become one of my favorite prayers in our prayer book. You can find it on the bottom of page 100.

O God, you have made of one blood all the peoples of the
earth, and sent your blessed Son to preach peace to those
who are far off and to those who are near: Grant that people
everywhere may seek after you and find you; bring the
nations into your fold; pour out your Spirit upon all flesh,
and hasten the coming of your kingdom; through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen.