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Any historian worth her salt will tell you that discerning what is and is not factual is seldom as easy as these two sources make it out to be. And it is the historian in me that wants to say, "Gather round, kiddies, while your 'ole Uncle Herb tells you why it isn't that simple. I've lived in Minnesota, seen snow, and in your uncle's opinion the opinion that children should not have to go to school after it snows isn't an opinion at all, it's a fact. These folks who claim it's an opinion are obviously from California or Florida or someplace where it doesn't snow. So, trust me, kids. My opinions are factual."

Citation: Dave Kemper, Ruth Nathan, and Patrick Sebrank, Write on Track: A Handbook for Young Writers, Thinkers, and Learners (Wilmington, Massachusetts: Great Source Education Group, 1996).

a Christian "bone gathering ceremony" that embodied in ritual & worship an image of the church that is truly (northern) Thai and truly Christian.

The little cemetery where we bury our dead at Ban Dok Daeng has recently run out of room for more burials, and the church has been forced to begin to cremate its deceased members. The church leadership has had to work out thus a Christian approach to cremation, and the results so far have not been particularly satisfying. It is somehow awkward to have to stand away from the casket & not have a hole to stand around. Unlooked for, however, is the importance of the final "act" of a northern Thai cremation, the bone gathering (or collecting) ceremony that usually takes place two days after the cremation. At that time, relatives and friends return to the cemetery to reclaim the charred remnants of bones. I have not participated in such a ceremony for a Buddhist cremation and am not sure of all that goes on, but the ritual one of our elders at Ban Dok Daeng has devised is partly based on how our neighbors go about the process.

Briefly, our Christian bone gathering ceremony is divided into three parts. First, the relatives and friends use large bamboo "tweezers" to comb the ashes for bones, which are placed on a tray. Once the bones are collected, they are washed. Second, all participants in turn, beginning with the clergyman, place the bones one piece at a time in an earthen pot. Each person raises their hands in an attitude of respect (wai) both before and after they have put bones in the pot and then sprinkles scented water (nam som broi) on the bones. During this part of the ceremony, there is small talk and even joking going on in the background; this is not a distraction nor does it detract from the proceedings but seems almost to symbolize a sense of acceptance of the death of the person and integrating that acceptance into daily life. When everyone has put bones into the pot, the mouth of the pot is then covered with a white cloth and tied shut with thick white twine. Third, the participants then carry the pot to a freshly prepared grave, which has a cement cross above it that is the same size as all the other crosses in the cemetery. The hole, obviously, is very small. There, we engage in a Christian committal service. The pot is respectfully placed in the grave, the clergyman reads Scripture and prays, and then each participant in turn takes a small bag of dirt wrapped in mulberry paper, bends down, raises her or his hands in respect, drops the bag in the hole, and sprinkles more scented water on the mouth of the pot. A benediction is given and the process is complete. The whole ritual, from beginning to end, has a definite air of informality about it. It is done in the late afternoon so that people who work in the city can get back to take part. Some people wear black, others do not. The event also has a feeling of intimacy about it, involving just family and neighbors-roughly 30 some people both times we have done it at Ban Dok Daeng.

The first and second elements of this ceremony are unlike anything one normally encounters in northern Thai Christian funeral practices and, evidently, are very similar to the process used by our Buddhist neighbors. The third "movement" in the ceremony is distinctively Christian and recalls the way we bury caskets, but with important differences. Where caskets suspended above graves are difficult to approach in an attitude of personal respect, the tiny grave for the pot and the smaller number of people involved allows each person an opportunity to approach the remains of the deceased in an intimate attitude of respect. The whole committal ritual, that is, is clearly northern Thai in some of its elements and entirely northern Thai in the manner in which the remains are given the deference the living person once received. The lack of formality is in keeping with a northern Thai approach to such ritual. Yet, it

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recalls Christian images (dust to dust, ashes to ashes) and practices the northern Thai church inherited from the West so that the total ceremony is different from that of other northern Thais. The ceremony, that is, retains a Christian focus while reclaiming for the church a northern Thai sense of ritual and ceremony.

This form of committal service is more humane and pastoral than the somewhat cold, formal, and distant manner in which we usually lower caskets into holes. There is no trooping and tromping of the masses. The ceremony involves just those who were closest to the deceased. It is deeply respectful yet informal, a combination that allows those involved to take final leave while further integrating the fact of death into the reality of ongoing life. I must confess that I first greeted the prospect of combing through ashes for bones as being somewhat grizzly, but in actual practice, it is not at all. It is, perhaps, the most important part of the whole process. In a typical Western burial scenario, we last see the deceased as a body not unlike the body of the living person. The fact of death is further glossed over by the rich trappings of funeral home, lavish coffin, and the fine dress of the deceased. When you stoop over a large pile of ashes and search the pile for bones ("there's a piece there." "no, no, that's just ash." "see, here's a piece of her jaw.") the fact of death is real. A final leave-taking has to be made.

Over the last five years, the Suwanduangrit Church has been making a conscious effort to repair its relations with its neighbors, to live with them peacefully, lovingly, and without animosity or judgment. We have been criticized by some other Christians for "being soft on Buddhism" and warned by a few that we are in peril of losing our faith. In fact, our little church has reaped unlooked for blessings instead of danger. The elder who devised our Christian committal ceremony repeatedly consulted our Buddhist neighbors (in itself an exercise in peace-making), who also sat with us during the actual ceremony and at various points told us how they do things. Yet, what he finally came up with is by no stretch of the imagination Buddhist, whatever the similarity in form at some points. No chanting. No monks. The bone gathering ceremony as practiced by the Suwanduangrit Church, rather, blends certain Buddhist forms, northern Thai attitudes, and a Western Christian heritage into something that approaches being truly Christian and truly Thai.

#5 - Elephants, Magic, & Karen Theology

This past April, the Office of History sponsored a one-day seminar on church and culture as part of its hot season student-training project with the Zion Association of the Karen Baptist Convention (or, if you like, the Zion Larger Parish of the Nineteenth District, CCT). Lunchtime provided me with a fascinating opportunity to struggle with the challenges inherent in reflecting on Karen theology in Karen contexts. An elder shared a theological concern that he has concerning his work of raising and training elephants. An important part of the process is weaning young elephants from their mothers. If it is not done properly, a mother elephant may either kill herself or turn rogue while the young elephant may become impossible to train for work. As the elder explained it, the "proper" process is to give the mother and young elephant over to a Karen practitioner of northern Thai magical rites for a month. This "magician" (for want of a better term) uses rites and formulas repeatedly as he slowly weans the young elephant from his mother. The elder said that this process works every time. He also said that he has a Christian friend who tried to replace the magical rites and formulas with Christian prayer and only managed to ruin a perfectly good young elephant. He himself is not willing to take a similar risk and so has to

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tolerate the non-Christian rites in order to protect his investment in his elephants. It turns out that the "magician" is also an active Karen Christian.

A Karen pastor, trained in a conservative, evangelical Thai-language seminary, sat in on the discussion and helped me with translation. His own view was that the elder was in the wrong and should not allow himself to be party to the use of magic. The pastor insisted that the whole practice was satanic. Another pastor, self-trained and a convert to Christianity as an adult, insisted with equal intensity that the rites were not satanic and not even magical. They were simply Pail-language formulas and were relatively harmless. He tried to drive his argument home by telling how he performed an almost miraculous healing using traditional Karen medicines and rites before his conversion and, after conversion, used Christian prayer to effect another nearly miraculous healing. He avowed that the only difference was the greater power of God. The theologically trained pastor simply shook his head and repeated his rejection of all of this as being of the Devil.

I raised the question of whether or not the elder could use the "magical" forms but fill them with a Christian content. He said he would think about it but was clearly hesitant to try. The theologically trained pastor said that doing something like that was wrong and bound to fail. The converted pastor also did not think much of the idea, evidently for the more practical reason that it probably would not work.

The whole exchange lasted for nearly an hour. Voices were never raised. Confrontation was avoided. But, these three Karen Christians managed to represent three distinct theological positions concerning the church's relationship to non-Christian religious practices. The elder took a "practical" approach that accepted the necessity of using such practices because they worked. The self-trained pastor accepted the elder's willingness to use "magic" in raising his elephants and had no trouble accepting the fact that magical rites and formulas do work. His focus was on the greater power of God. The second pastor rigidly and repeatedly rejected any utilization of religious rites that are not identifiably Christian. He never dealt with the "fact" that the rites work and only repeatedly called on the elder to cease and desist. The self-trained pastor, interestingly enough, did not give the elder any advice as to whether or not he should use a "magician" to wean a young elephant from its mother. He did not seem scandalized by the prospect, however.

#6 - Human Origins

There is a theory regarding the origins of the human species that claims that primates were not able to appear until after the disappearance of the dinosaurs because they could not compete with the many species of dinosaurs. That would mean that primates did not show up on the face of the Earth until sometime after 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs are supposed to have died off. Now, scientists in Britain and the USA have conducted a computerized statistical analysis of all of the known primate species (235 living and 396 fossil species) and decided that primates probably appeared around 85 million years ago while the dinosaurs were still dominant. That analysis indicates that scientists have uncovered only about 7% of all the primate species that have existed, and when the computer seeks to fill in some of the gaps, the date for our origins is pushed back by an extra 20 million years. These findings support molecular biologists' arguments that primates go back roughly 90 million years, and if correct means that the human race evolved under very different conditions than previously thought. According to this still controversial theory, we started out as a small, nocturnal primate living in the treetops, eating fruit, and

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patiently waiting for all those humungous, bug-eyed reptile thingies to die off so we could take over.

(from Guy Gugliotta, "Suddenly, Humans Age 3 Million Years," Washington Post Website, 18 April 2002; and, "Primate ancestor lived with dinos," BBC website, 17 April 2002)

#7 - Origins of the Word "Heathen"

The word "heathen" was a key concept in 19th century thinking among English-speaking missionaries. If the Presbyterian missionary records for Thailand are any measure, missionaries applied the term frequently to people of other faiths, often in tandem with other terms such as "idolatrous," "benighted," and "superstitious." Where did we come up with such an apparently useful term?

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary describes the lineage of "heathen" as coming down to us from Old Norse by way of, first, Old High German, then Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and, last of all, Old English. The earliest example of its usage in the OED is dated 826, when the word meant anything pertaining to those persons or races that are neither Christian nor Jewish. The OED provides a fascinating brief description of the origins of the word, which states in part,

"As this word is used in all Germanic lang. in the sense 'non-Christian, pagan', which could only have arisen after the introduction of Christianity, it is thought probable that, like some other terms of Christian origin (e.g. church), it was first used in Gothic and thence passed to the other tribes..The word has generally been assumed to be a direct derivative of Gothic hipi, HEATH, as if 'dweller on the heath', taken as a kind of loose rendering of L. paganus (orig. 'villager, rustic', later, after Christianity became the religion of the towns, while the ancient deities were still retained in rural districts, 'pagan, heathen')."

By roughly the year 1000, "heathen" referred to any person or race that is not Christian, Jewish, or a Muslim.

The OED lists 15 related words besides heathen. They are: heathendom, heatheness; heathenesse; heathenhede (meaning heathendom); heathenhood, -hode; heathenish; heathenishly; heathenishness; heathenism; heathenist; heathenize; heathenly; heathenry; heathenship; and, heatheny, An important hint at the development in the concept of "heathen" is found under "heathendom," where the OED notes that heathendom originally referred to the beliefs and practices of the heathen and takes its earliest example of this usage from ca. 1000. The term fell out of use sometime before 1400 and did not re-appear again until the 19th century, when it was used as the antithesis of Christendom. In the 19th century, it also came to mean the "domain or realm of the heathen."

The reappearance of "heathendom" in the 19th century after an absence of more than 400 years raises a fascinating question. What did native-language speakers of English of those two eras have in common that both needed the word? Why did a word that was in vogue in the 9th century prove to be popular in the 19th century?

The answer to these questions seems to be that in both periods native-language speakers of English were heavily involved in major overseas missionary movements. International missions was an influential part of life in England twelve hundred years ago, and the word "heathen," with all of its many brother and sister terms, provided an important word for speaking about missions. Cantor explains that in the last decades

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of the 7th century and the whole of the 8th century, the English church conducted an active missionary movement on the Continent, esp. among the Frisians of the Low Countries. The greatest missionary of the age was an Englishman, St. Boniface. (p. 186). Mayr-Harting claims that English Christianity was "from the start strongly missionary in character." (p. 103)

Cantor quotes a letter sent by Boniface to the English church asking it to send assistants for his missionary work and also asking for their prayers so that God "may turn the hearts of the heathen Saxons to the Catholic Faith." (p. 187, emphasis added). This pushes the word back to the beginning of the 8th century and the time of the Venerable Bede, who finished his classic Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples in 731. According to Dohan, English was just emerging as a separate language in that period. (p. 35ff) The word "heathen," that is, has been with us for virtually the whole history of the English language.

Sources:

Cantor, Norman F. Medieval History: the Life and Death of a Civilization. 2nd. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Dohan, Mary Helen. Our Own Words. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1974.

Mayr-Harting, Henry. "The West: The Age of Conversion (700-1050)." In The Oxford History of Christianity, 101-29. Edited by John McManners. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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