A CHINESE MAN GETS UP AND GOES
I have just
seen a delightful eleven minute film, YU MING IS AINM DOM,[1]
about a young Chinese
man who, bored by his routine job, searches the internet for appealing
prospects overseas. He decides on Ireland and, with Chinese determination, sets
about learning the language via the internet. There is a clip of him talking to
himself in the mirror in Irish while he shaves. He duly takes a plane and lands
in Dublin and is immediately puzzled why people cannot understand him.
At the end
of his tether he goes into a bar where they look at him quizzically as he
perseveres in asking where he can get work, where he can stay. The barman, who
happens to be Australian, tries to be helpful though he thinks the man is
speaking Chinese. But salvation is at
hand. Leaning on the bar with his glass of Guinness is one of the 1% of Irish
people who do speak Irish and he
engages the Chinese man in conversation – in Irish. The short film ends with
the Chinese visitor employed in the Irish speaking part of the country in a bar
himself where he becomes a local celebrity.
It is a
simple moving story but it does show up the saying we often hear: Have the
courage to be different! You do not have to settle for ‘what everyone does’. A
person can strike out on her or his own. If you don’t manage all the research –
you’d be excused for thinking they speak Irish in Ireland – it may add to the
adventure.
Our
pre-Covid 19 world was peer driven. There was a dominant culture which seduced
people into its ways. I am thinking of
the rise of fashions, like being wired to gadgets, to which many felt drawn to
conform. And, paradoxically, I am thinking of the assertion of individualism,
meaning a focus on one’s own life to the exclusion of compassion for others.
Along comes
Covid 19 with its ability to penetrate ‘locked doors’ and reach every corner of
the planet. Suddenly our lives are
utterly changed. All predictions of
economic growth wither and the opposite of growth is the norm even for the
richest societies on earth. Suddenly each of us is faced with questions about
our life style, the spontaneous choices we make and the values of which our
choices are the expression.
And it all
happens at Easter: a time when a seed was sown in the human family that would
take centuries, millennia, to mature. No longer was humankind to be swept along
by forces beyond its control. Individuals could make decisions that reversed
the headlong flow of evil forces which enticed people to slavery and despair.
In the first century an Ethiopian (Acts 8:32) ‘urged Philip to get in and sit
by his side’ and explain what this new way was all about and, in the last, a
young girl, Sophie Scholl, and her friends stood up to Hitler’s tyranny even if
it meant losing her life.
Easter is
the celebration of the gift of courage to ‘get up and go’. This has to be done
by free men and women. The young man from China, who ended up in the West of
Ireland, is a parable. That he comes
from China, the place where the virus originated, is coincidental but
fitting. He blundered into a new life where
found his true self – perhaps for the first time.
26 April
2020
Easter Sunday 3 A Acts 2:14, 22-28 1 Pet 1:17-21 Luke 24:13-35
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