The next miracle (v11.0): Owen Youngman

(A change of pace, from the Libertyville Covenant Church newsletter)

Giving anything up for Lent?  I even read last month about a church in Minneapolis that is giving up committee meetings!

via Libertyville Covenant Church newsletter, 3/02: Owen Youngman.

(A version was originally published in Pietisten, Summer 2000)

By Owen Youngman

Homebound families are all alike; but every traveling family tends to travel in its own way.

(I would suppose that this is no longer true in the era of the back-seat VCR-outfitted television and the backlit full-color GameBoy, since now the properly equipped traveling family need never resort to license-plate bingo or cow-counting or indiscriminate chorus-singing in order to maintain order or create interest in a wider world. But I digress, and anyway there are plenty of other people writing about those phenomena – bibliography available upon request.)

Through occasional but Tolstoyan observation, I have come to recognize that the particularity of traveling families also includes the paying of attention to particular kinds of things. Those clans whose members include students of junior-high age note the size of junior high schools; those including runners remark upon the form, good or ill, of sidewalk joggers; those composed of newshounds brake for New York Times honor boxes.

In our family, we noticed churches.

The trip could be 5 miles, or 50, or 500. Sometimes we would get off the highway in order to identify the affiliation of an interesting and/or heretofore unnoticed structure that appeared to be a house of worship. Once investigated and committed to memory, the identity could be revisited by all hands on subsequent drive-bys, especially if the signage was too small or poorly placed to be easily read from the roadside.

A variation on this theme, of course, was to seek out the Covenant church in a town we never before had visited. Done without benefit either of road map or advance phone call, these voyages of discovery ideally ended with a congenial visit with the pastor, invariably pleased by the chance for some shoptalk. (If only we had had access then to a book like “Swedish-American Landmarks,” Alan H. Winquist, Swedish Council of America, 1995, which includes a generous helping of Covenant churches among said landmarks and is well worth the $25 or so it’ll cost you to order it from the Hemslöjd in Lindsborg, Kansas – or from amazon.com, where its current sales ranking is No. 874,390.)

And oh, if an interesting-looking building turned out to be the Covenant church!

Childhood habits are hard to break, and so it is that even today it is the churches we notice when visiting a new location, and the churches we seek out when selecting which landmarks to fit in while exploring. In fact, it’s true even in old locations; one of my favorite Christmas gifts last year was a book of photographs of churches around Chicago, handsome enough to ensure I crane my neck while getting off the expressway to avoid a traffic jam, or make a mental note while not getting off.

And oh, if a landmark turns out to be a Covenant church!

The lure of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s are by no means restricted to preachers’ kids, I freely admit. The California missions of Father Serra, the adobe churches of the American Southwest, the ruined missions of San Antonio; the remarkable National Cathedral in Washington, the austere and imposing Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York – all are on the maps and lists of “attractions,” waiting to be checked out or checked off by tourists and pilgrims alike.

As for myself, I doubtless have missed more chances than I’ve visited churches. I’ve never gone into the Moody Church or Fourth Presbyterian in Chicago; we toured a Mormon temple in Glenview before it was consecrated but drove on by the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City; we didn’t stop at the Princeton, Ill., Covenant church the one time we drove by (sorry, Doug).

What engages me about all these churches, visited or unvisited, is the faith they represent: as conveyed in simplicity or grandeur, as communicated through artistic genius or stolid, solid craftsmanship, they tell of gatherings of God’s people – first to build, then to worship.

How many of them were begun by people who knew they were building for future generations, not their own. How many were raised by people who knew they were memorializing the struggles of past generations, not their own.

We made a brief trip to Sweden last year – staying, as many Covenanters are wont to do, in the Hotel Birger Jarl, owned by, operated by, and co-located with Immanuelskyrkan, downtown Stockholm’s Covenant church and one of the largest in the Svenska Missionsförbundet. We of course went in, finding it just as we had expected after our visit to the church’s wonderful Web site (http://www.immanuel.se; if it’s not a landmark, it’s at least worth a bookmark).

The church we didn’t expect, however, and the one that left the lasting impression, was elsewhere in town, located not on a busy street corner but in a clearing in a park, the open-air museum known as Skansen. It was a rainy late September afternoon, and the park was quiet. Tourist season was all but over, and many of the buildings on the site were closed, their Colonial Williamsburg-/Sturbridge Village-like guides in period garb having gone home for the winter.

The map we picked up at the entrance explained how buildings had been moved here from all over Sweden, beginning in the late 19th Century, by a fellow named Artur Hazelius who was seeking to preserve something of the country’s rural past. It explained what most of these buildings were. Not too surprisingly, one of them was a conventional-looking church, and it was still open.

Another was labeled Missionshuset. It was smaller and out of the way. It was closed. And, a quick cross-check of the park’s guidebook showed, it was a Missionsförbundet – Mission Friends – meeting house.

That old-time travelin’ feelin’ of Covenant discovery set in, and a view of the exterior was not going to be enough. We had to go inside, even though there’d be no preacher to visit with. So after a brief negotiation, and while we waited for someone with a key, we read the legend on a sign outside the front door:

“The meeting-house was erected in 1898 by the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden parish at Svenshult in the province of Östergötland.

“It consists of the main hall, with a little gallery, and a small kitchen which during some periods was lived in by a married couple, rent-free on the condition that they acted as caretakers. It contains benches, a dais with a lectern, an organ and a heating-stove. It is lit by paraffin lamps hanging from the ceiling. . . .

“The first half of the 19th Century saw the emergence of the Free Church movement, which wanted to create congregations that were free of the State in doctrine, worship and finances. With the 1726 Conventicle Act, a royal statute forbidding people to gather together outside the State Church for the purpose of prayer and religious worship, repealed in 1858, the Free Church movement got a new lease on life, there being an intensive building of chapels all over Sweden between 1860-1900.”

Rustic though the red-painted exterior might be, the whitewashed lectern and communion table fairly gleamed even in the dim light of an autumn afternoon. Their prominence powerfully communicated their importance in worship, worship now clearly and freely in the open. So did the Bible verse about the cleansing power of Jesus’ blood, painted on the facing of the small balcony at the sanctuary’s rear – a balcony not unlike those in some of the older, “tabernacle-style” Covenant churches I had seen on childhood journeys.

It was a powerful and moving moment, all the more so for having been unexpected. But then again, should it have been

“The Covenant,” it says on our bulletin folder back here in Illinois, “has often been described as a family of faith.” And, sure enough, every traveling family tends to travel in its own way.

From Hong Kong to Hershey
(Or, I Liked the Thick Chocolate Shake More Than the Thick Soup of Snake)
Originally published in Pietisten, Summer 1997

“We Chinese eat everything in the sky that is not an airplane, everything under the sea that is not a submarine, and everything on land with four legs that is not a table.”
–Endlessly repeated aphorism in Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China

By Owen Youngman

It seems like a long way from the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, a few miles from the coast of China, to the small-town serenity of Hershey, Pa., a few miles from the border of Harrisburg.

In fact, it is. Visiting both places (and a few others) in the space of a fortnight may not be the most common way to draw sweeping conclusions and make broad generalizations about the world in the late 20th Century, but it’s a fairly efficient one.

Point of view is what a visit to see Hong Kong in the first half of 1997 was all about. The emphasis of a visit during the second half of the year remains to be seen–which, of course, is the reason that point of view was the point in February.

Every event in Hong Kong could be seen in at least three ways: through the eyes of its soon-to-be-former British protectors; through the eyes of the Chinese governors-in-waiting; and through the eyes of someone affiliated with neither side–a journalist, say, or a merchant. And that’s the bare minimum, of course; the residents of Taiwan, Korea, or nearby Macao all need to interpret everything in Hong Kong by refracting it through their own prisms.

The most striking juxtaposition was that of the British and Chinese points of view, and it was best summed up by their view of the calendar. In speaking of the impending turnover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese control, Christopher Patten, governor of Hong Kong, referred often to “June 30.” Rita Fan, speaker of the Beijing-backed provisional legislature that will take over soon, talked about “July 1.”

Ms. Fan made herself available for an interview at the unassuming high-rise offices of the Committee for the Celebration of the Reunification of Hong Kong with China, a suite with fewer rooms than there are words in the committee’s name and equipped with eight-foot tables like those found in church basements everywhere. Gov. Patten held forth over a full circle of polished tables in a magnificent briefing room at Government House, a bastion of British colonialism where tea was served from china cups (Noritake. We checked).

In this world about to be turned upside down (or not), you are where you sit (or don’t): The British bemoan the end of democracy; the Chinese wonder what kind of democracy is this, where all power is vested in a governor appointed half a world away? The Chinese complain that their every parliamentary move is subject to outside criticism; the British worry that complaining by its nature is ineffectual.

And on the streets of Hong Kong–a city that resembles none other so much as New York, from its towering high-rises to its downtown parkland–the merchant class waits to see if “one country, two systems,” the solution for Hong Kong (and Taiwan) espoused by the late Deng Xiaoping, will mean that the system on which their wealth is built is permitted to flourish, untrammeled by China’s brand of socialism.

Hong Kong itself is wealthy, with billions of U.S. dollars on its balance sheet, billions more of its residents’ money invested in China and throughout Asia, and who knows how much constantly changing hands among tourists, shopkeepers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, and tailors. It’s hard not to mine the sights and sounds of the city for metaphors about its uncertain future.

Take this appetizer from a Monday night meal as an example: “drunken shrimp on fire.” Several dozen shrimp, flipping their tails from side to side, are dumped into a clear casserole filled with a clear Chinese liquor. Soon they are flipping even more wildly, as they involuntarily imbibe. And then, sated (or saturated), they’re flipped into a wok and torched (alcohol sure makes for a good fire!).

So let’s see: drunken shrimp are the Hong Kong merchants. The liquor is free trade. And fire is . . . and the restaurant patrons are . . . Oh, let’s not get too carried away here, or we might start substituting “speech” for “trade” and “politicians” for “merchants.”

The food was just as interesting in Guangzhou (formerly Canton), where the road to capitalist investment seemed paved with big McDonald’s. Not that we ate any Big Maos–er, Big Macs. But there was that thick soup of snake–not thick as in creamy, but thick as in absolutely chock full o’ serpent. Well, with 1.2 billion mouths to feed and only 7 percent of your land arable, you’re not going to be too choosy about cuisine overall.

An afternoon in the public market in Guangzhou was equally instructive, where it turned out dog was not in season, but a wide variety of other semi-domesticated rats, cats, fish and fowl were available for your evening repast. Here were the post-soup snakeskins, dried and ready to be ground into medicine, and the odd-looking roots and plants that a Chinese handler said smilingly were “for the men.” Through an interpreter I learned that one shrimp salesman was clearing about $9 a day–an excellent wage in a country where income per capita of $1,000 is a national goal for early next century.

Guangzhou was only a border crossing and a train ride away from Hong Kong, where a Big Mac did indeed seem like a good idea. Not so Hershey, where Milton Snavely Hershey, “the Henry Ford of chocolate,” perfected his own formula for milk chocolate around the same time as the British took control of Hong Kong. The Hershey Chocolate Co. dates to 1894, the Hershey Bar to 1900, and the expiring British lease on Hong Kong to 1898, just after the Opium Wars; draw your own addiction parallels.

With its chocolate-kiss-shaped streetlights and pervasive aroma of, well, Hershey Bars, the little Pennsylvania town is almost aggressively cute; probably the only enemy anyone there ever thinks about is M&M/Mars, that other noted purveyor of things mostly brown and mass-marketed. What borders on exotic is the occasional fruit dessert (I admit I passed up the Season’s Wok restaurant at the Darrytown Mall).

Having buttressed its original tourist attraction with a zoo, an amusement park, a museum and a convention center–not to mention mascots for most of its eponymous company’s candy bars–Hershey seems almost Disney-like in its determination to make sure its visitors leave town smiling. (I know the chocolate shake at the Chocolate Town Cafe inside Chocolate World had that effect on me.) One city, one system, stable as Milton Hershey’s formula for low-cost chocolate, Hershey is–in more ways than at first evident–at least a world away from the Far East. It certainly leaves a far different taste in a visitor’s mouth.

As for the promised sweeping generalization: Despite the differences, these cities both exist as monuments to enterprise, and as such are likely to retain their essential characters.

Admittedly, to force more parallels would be to strain credulity beyond all reasonable bounds. Still, there is this thought with which to conclude:

The largest Hershey’s Kiss ever made weighed 400 pounds, was 30 inches tall and 3 feet in diameter. It was used in a marketing promotion in . . . Hong Kong.