Winning at the highest cost

Every year, International Place at the Claremont Colleges gets students and community volunteers to put together an international festival to showcase the various countries represented here. This year, for the first time in several years, Singapore will have a booth at the festival. I managed to rally about seven or eight Singaporean graduate and undergraduate students, and we will be serving chicken curry, and iced fruit cocktail. (If you're Singaporean, you won't need to ask what that is. If you're not, don't bother to ask. Just come and try it out.)

Two weeks ago, I placed an order with Prima Taste in Singapore for enough of its Singapore curry paste and spices to feed about 200 people. The box arrived a week ago, and it has been sitting in one corner of our house. Here's Prima Taste's description of "Singapore Curry": "Traders and immigrants during the early days of Singapore brought curry from India. With cross-cultural influences thriving in our multi-racial society, the dish has evolved into many versions and styles of cooking. The Singapore Curry boasts a smooth rich gravy infused with coconut milk, and a delightful aroma that will surely whet one's appetite!"



That got me hungry!

And it also got me thinking: what we have in that box in the corner of our house reminds me of our wonderful human capacity to adapt, to absorb new experiences, sights and tastes, and to create out of these experiences something new. My own convoluted cultural DNA bears that truth, in a slightly different way. My grandparents were impoverished farmers and fishermen from southern China who dared to dream of a different life and came to Singapore. My parents grew up in a British colony with British teachers, sang the national anthems of Great Britain, Malaysia, Japan (in my father's case), and finally, Singapore, and spoke English, Malay, Cantonese, Hokkien and some Mandarin. I grew up in an independent, sovereign Singapore, studied English and American writers, and went to the US for college, where I learnt to speak Russian (and where I began to regret not becoming a better Mandarin speaker).

It almost seems to me that as human beings, we need to absorb new things, to adapt, to integrate, to explore, and to create. To seek out, as my grandparents did a century ago, new horizons of experience, new worlds of meaning. To assimilate, as my parents did, different cultures, different perspectives, into the plenitude of their own identities. We are always seeking.

*

It is Easter Sunday today. Easter reminds me that God sought me out. He undertook the search, and he turned the world upside down to find me. Consider these words from Edmund Spenser's "Easter Morning":

Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day,
Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin,
And, having harrowed hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win.

God turned the order of things upside down to win me back to him. The writer Anne Rice describes the Maker dying on a Roman cross as "the great inversion". God paid the full price -- and more -- for me, to adopt me into his family. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in his classic articulation of "costly grace",

Costly grace is the hidden treasure in the field, for the sake of which people go and sell everything they have. . . It is costly, because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it cost people their lives; it is grace, because it gives them their lives. . . Above all, grace is costly, because it was costly to God, because it costs God the life of God's son . . . And because the life of God's son was not too costly for God to give for our lives.

God "won" me at the highest cost. Because of that, I have God's great promise of new life. God's promise to me is a creative, and re-creative one. Just as God confounded the natural order of things and neutered the mighty power of death on Easter, He will do the same with me. I will die, but I will live. I like the explanation by the theologian Michael Jinkins: "The faith we have in God to raise us up on the last day is the faith we have that God's ways are higher than humanity's ways and that all the subordinate powers that try to usurp the place of God will finally be subdued, that even the mighty power of death will be relativized by the power of God to re-create us from the dust of the earth. The resurrection of the body is the proclamation of God's creative and re-creative power over all inauthentic claims to power".

God adopted me at the highest cost, so that even though I die, I will live again.

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A few weeks ago, we reached a major decision: our next child will come to us through adoption. Paul's letter to church in Ephesus reminds me, I am adopted too. These following words will be my first love letter to our child:

My Father moved mountains for me. He cast off all he had to find me, because he knew that I was his and belonged to no one else.

Like my Father, I know that you belong to no one else but us. You are ours. Even before you were born, God intended you for us.

You are ours. And because I am unshakeably convinced of who you are and to whom you belong, I will move mountains to seek you out. I will empty myself for you. I will pursue you, because you are mine. Anything that stands in the way I will obliterate. Because you are mine, and I will give everything I have for you.

Welcome home.