Ghost Festival

There are things that you encounter in your life that you just aren't able to absorb at the time.  Maybe that's how some people are with strange food or new surroundings.  I don't know.  I love new strange things.  I love interesting viewpoints and differences of opinion.  I remember reading about ethnocentrism before going to Holland to be an exchange student.  That's a good word to learn the meaning of when you are barely a teenager.  It can help you have an open life. 

There's one thing though, one custom that I  came across in Hong Kong that took a while absorb.  And now, 20 years later, I really understand it, almost to the point I could embrace it.  In the fall, coinciding with the full moon and the harvest, there is a religious holiday called the ghost festival. 

It is a day when  Chinese faithful feast, pray and take care of their dead.  That means they buy gifts and necessities and give them to loved ones.  There are elaborate paper houses that stand 3 feet tall. 

There are paper cars and jewelry, as well as full sets of paper clothing. 

The money--hell bank notes are bought by the boxful. 

These items, along with all kinds of food, are burned--turned to ash, so they enter the realm of the dead.  (I guess in a place where most people are cremated, you could believe that it was possible for other things to be able to go to the same place through burning.)  Believers say that they must help their ancestors leave hell by providing for their needs.

It takes time to really wrap your head around the idea.  On it's face it's just a smoky version of our Halloween--ghosts, demons, lots of treats.  But when you really ponder it, it's about the love that needs a place and time to continue.  If I subscribed to it,  I could still buy Ian T-shirts.  I could pick out a car for him and make sure he had plenty of spending money.  I know I'm still his mom and love endures and there are things we have done--like temple work--to ensure him  blessings.  I actually look at this Chinese tradition as a version of the scripture in Hebrews 11:40 

"God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect."

On a more temporal level though,  I can't cook for Ian or do his laundry and give him dating advice or 9 million other things.  I can see why shopping and cooking and then burning at ghost festival gives Chinese families comfort.