Chapter Sixty Six: Thanksgiving Retreat (~jinghan)

Okay, so you’ve probably been very disappointed with the amount of touristy behaviour I so far have (failed to) display. But in fact, I have been out of Davis! I’ve just usually been too tired by the time I get back to blog about it (sorry!) so here’s all the backfill =D

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It’s the 11/11/11 – a date that I like because I do not have to think about where I write the month and the date (or the year for that matter.) It’s veteran’s day (known as remembrance day in Australian) and two weeks until thanksgiving, but since there is no classes today Jinghan is off to a Thanksgiving retreat with a Christian fellowship.

Having not found much culture shock based on standard Davis culture, at least not from the perspective of a math (Sorry, I mean: maths) major, I have somehow managed to search out my own culture shock by learning about Christianity. After coming out of a Catholic school I thought I had a pretty okay handle of religion and what it meant to people. But ever since I’ve started going to bible studies out of curiosity, I’ve spent most of my time learning about just how much I don’t know about religion. This is probably what I would have felt when I went to kindergarden not speaking a word of English but thinking everyone else could understand if I just talked to them in Chinese as loud and often as I could, if it wasn’t for the fact that at that age you don’t realise the world doesn’t center on your own perspective so you don’t actually notice any culture difference.

I’m with a car full of other “junior” girls driving past cargo dockers that look like something out of star wars* and oil refinery with it’s pale green skeleton and eerily beautiful white flowing smoke. I have a feeling that if I had any expectations of what the retreat will be like I’d be most likely wrong.

I have only ever seen this many people in such dense proximity while visiting the great wall of China during peak tourist season. There was the buzz of people excited to see old friends and new. Over the next couple of days we listen to reviews of what all the different church plants started by the group and I am amazed by what the church group has been able to achieve.

They started out in Berkley as a college (university level) ministry to students of mostly korean ethnicity with the vision to give students at this age a real intellectual basis for their faith as well as somewhere to share themselves and make deep friendships. Since then the church has now branches in Davis, San Diego in Southern California, Austin in Texas, Minneapolis in Minnesota and even Hsinchu in Taiwan. They send volunteers out to nursing homes to minister there, they send volunteers out to other small local immigrant churches to give their younger generation english-speaking mentors, they build their own retreat lodge entirely with labour from members, they give the youth guidance and a chance for leadership, they work with elementary students, middle-school students and high-school students, they have enough of a community that mothers with infants always have someone to look after their children so they can continue working with college students. It’s elaborate and yet successful.

The reaction of the few friends whom I was daring enough to tell about my adventures into religion immediately warned me to be careful of what might turn out to be a cult. But it is in bible studies, and not always lectures, that I have been pushed to base my world view on rational thinking and evidence rather than merely a feeling of passion. They tell me that religious faith fuelled only by passion and “feeling of faith” is not belief in a real god but something more like an imaginary friend. If you’re anything like me that’ll take you a while to get your head around.

As I hear more and more about what the church community has been able to achieve I am more and more in awe of how much they are achieved. But as I have become accustomed to feeling when learning about religion, I find an idea that is very challenging. There is no individual glory, no one person is praised for putting in such and such work, although any due work is certainly acknowledged and appreciated un-explicitly, but all the thanks that is given at this Thanksgiving Retreat is given to God. The message is: to work for the glory of God and not for your own personal glory.

To a little agnostic like me, there is something hard to grasp about the first part. But I could not ignore the profound humility of the latter notion: not to work for your personal glory and yet achieve so much? This is something relevant to us even if you do not care for the existence of God. If you are lucky enough, you can look at the actions of your parents and grandparents and realise how much work they have done and how much of their own personal glory they have sacrificed for us – and have done it gladly too. As the youngest generation currently trying to find fulfilment in our lives, this is perhaps a gladness we have yet to fully understand and certainly have not honestly experienced. But since it is thanksgiving let us at least acknowledge and be grateful for it.

Well it wasn’t all talk and no play that weekend. We spend the evening piling into the school gym in Alameda – imagine arranging 1400 people into groups to come up with dances and skits to “compete” against the other year levels. I cheered and shouted so much I lost my voice by the next morning! Lots of food was consumed, riddles and talk shared in the road trip to and from Davis and Alameda each day (priority for home stay was given to students coming to North California for students from further away) and shared exhaustion as we slept together in one of our leader’s lounge-rooms. We brought good business to the local bubble tea shops. Oh and we took an accidental detour to see the skyline of San Francisco at night.