Once or twice a year in my childhood, our tiny Baptist Church’s congregation would join the Presbyterians up the street. They had “Reverend Mac”, a wryly smiling minister who acted Noel Coward and Charles Dickens on the side, made jokes during sermons, and never complained about our footballs and baseballs bouncing on to his front lawn. We had a tightly-wound young fundamentalist who’d have been shocked to know of my Mum’s bridge club, cards being the devil’s playthings. Coming from our plain, cramped sanctuary, the
Awesome as a kid, and still a fine small-town centre.
Presbyterians looked rich and their church seemed a soaring, grand and holy place. It had the highest bell tower in our little town, and in early adolescence I took to sneaky climbs inside the steeple that led to a view of houses, river, ball diamonds, trees, and the farmland beyond them. I’ve found holiness in forests and fields, in looking out over water, in song and in word, even sometimes in the steady rhythm of running or flinging a ball toward its home. I’ve loved, too, architectural prayers: shrines, cathedrals, temples, any place built to honour and inspire loftiness of mind, an enlarging of spirit. (Sometimes, even a gymnasium will do.)
In China, such places have been hard to come by. Before we leave, I hope we’ll get to one of the sacred mountains, but even those sound discouraging, given the masses of people that visit with little that I recognize as reverence; small-town Canuck that I am, I still equate spirituality with solitude, quiet, elevated language and, where possible, green-ness and sky. However, our teaching of English in Dalian does qualify us for more than visas, salaries, and our small service to the torrential societal change in our temporary Chinese home. As we beef up our world citizenship credentials, we also have the luxury of south Asian travel that we couldn’t have managed from Canada.