Feng Shui

This week Janey and her family are in England for a holiday. A certain member of the family is insisting on no museums, yet Stonehenge tops the list for sight-seeing. It’s fascinating how big stones put up by the ancients according to some pattern intrigues everybody.

Reminded me of the cheerful painting of flowers I have in my bedroom now. It’s bright, like I like things these days.  Hostess Mom saw it somewhere, realized it was a perfect fit for the room, and brought it home for Robert to put up (he’d been decorating the basement walls with all of Mom’s paintings that we’ve had in storage for 25 years). On the corners of the new painting were pieces of protective cardboard with the title Flowers (very original) and with advice on how to place the painting in order to achieve any number of good things--take your pick here: You could enhance Love and Romance in a Relationship (I wonder how one would have romance outside a relationship; that takes some thinking), you could Bring Positive Energy into your Home & Office (bosses should pay for this stuff), you could Attract Wealth & Love (now there’s a topic of discussion all in itself), Health & Longevity (I’ll have one of those, please)! or you could…Excellent for Family Luck & Personal Success! Right. (I should offer these guys my red hunting dogs for a price to bring in some positive energy into their editing.) All of this could be mine if I put this painting up on the south wall. Sounds like some tv evangelists.

This is Feng Shui Art, a 3500 year old practice of placing man-made things in spots with good energy, (which combines positive and negative life forces), orienting them so that they fit just right with their physical and chronological environment (I bet Stonehenge held the same purpose, more or less). Originally Feng Shui relied on astrolabes, taking into consideration the placement of stars. Originally, all ancients took into consideration the placement of stars. If you think about it, what else did they have? The movement of the sun and moon and stars looked like the movement of gods to them, and the very first pyramids, which were located in Ur and called ziggurats, had names like House of the Platform between Heaven and Earth. In Ur, up until the time of Abraham, all people could do was try to decipher and imitate the timing of the gods, hoping to catch some of their “positive energy” by timing human activities with the activities of the stars. The gods just did their thing, and we watched and took notes, hoping for some clues on how to live. The endless cycles of the heavens became the endless cycles of ancient history. The gods did not interfere.

Until God showed up. In sending Abraham away to a land he’d never seen and telling him he had a purpose, to bless all nations, God straightened out the endless circle of history and made it possible for humans to have a destiny, to hope for progress and change. The stars become created things to be counted, not gods to be copied. God became a Person who showed up for dinner and made bargains about the destruction of cities.

The ancient Chinese had some things right when they tried to make things fit into just the right spot. There is a plan. There is such a thing as good timing and good placement. That painting went up in my room in just the right spot (probably not the south wall; I wouldn’t know.  Never give me directions involving poles unless Robert is around), at just the right time. The difference it makes to be in relationship with the Creator is that we know his plan and feel cut loose from star-copying.

Someone visiting me when the little cardboard covers were still hugging Flowers commented, “I’d want to take those off,” which I did. But it reminded me of our wariness, sometimes even fear, of other religions’ solutions to age-old human problems. All of us know that things require just the right fit. All of us know that when things go wrong, it takes sacrifice to put them right. All of us know that mediators help straighten out bad relationships. Chinese feng shui, English  stonehenges, Canadian horoscopes, Mixe chicken sacrifices, and Mixtec sorcerer/priests are all responses to true problems. We can welcome finding such common ground while also recognizing that by grace we have found a much more effective and liberating solution. Paul even found common ground through a pagan altar, and that same Unknown god, that Treasure, as he pointed out, can be found Everywhere! Just look!