This month is Hungry Ghost Festival. Ghost Day was on August 14, so I missed the biggest day of the festival. To give you a better idea of what this means, let me start from the beginning.
According to the Chinese, when you die, you enter the next life with nothing. You need people to burn things to you so that you will have things in your next life. Funerals often consist of people burning houses, cars, clothes, money, and many other things. Now, they don't burn actual houses or cars or money or clothes. They buy them in paper form...specifically designed to burn to ancestors.
Then, you must continue to burn to your ancestors so that they continue to get things. Don't forget to burn food. This is very important to them. If you do not satisfy your ancestors desires, they will come and give you bad luck. Luck is a very touchy subject in Asia, especially the Chinese countries.
Those who die who do not have anyone burning for them are believed to turn into ghosts. They are often called hungry ghosts. They come and give bad luck to everyone because they are angry, and hungry.
During Hungry Ghost Festival, all people are to burn stuff to the hungry ghosts. They burn lots of money, especially. Ghost Day (which was August 14) is the main day of the festival, where there are places set up all over to burn. The first day I arrived, I saw people burning things, but I was naive and thought that they were burning trash. Far from it--they were burning treasures.
What do we as Christians think of this? Well, it's simple, really. Christ has power over life and death. He has won the victory through dying on the cross and rising again from the grave. We know that when you die, you go to heaven or hell. You cannot take your earthly possessions with you. We see that in Luke 12.
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”
We know that only through belief in God do we have eternal life in heaven. Otherwise we are damned to eternal life in hell. Let me assure you--Hell is not pretty. It's the absence of God. Without God, there is nothing good, for God is Good.
As for burning to our ancestors: besides the fact that they are in heaven or hell already and cannot receive the earthly possessions, burning to ancestors is putting your faith not in God, but in your ability to provide for your ancestors in the afterlife. That is a sin.
As for the ghosts: we know that our souls are taken to heaven or hell. There is no in-between. When we die, we do not stay around the earth and haunt people, and we cannot meddle with their lives. We will be in heaven, where we wouldn't even want to come down to give people bad luck, or in hell, from where there is no escape.
So how do we reach out to them? Ancestor worship is so engrained in the Chinese Culture that it is almost one and the same. This proves such a difficult obstacle for Christianity. It is hard to say that you cannot worship your ancestors when you have known all your life that if you do not worship them, they will give you bad luck. The Chinese culture is so superstitious. It's hard to suddenly quit worshiping them and burning things to them. It's like telling them that 2+2 does not equal 4. A 'truth' that they have known for their whole life is being challenged.
Please pray for the Holy Spirit to work in their hearts to come to the knowledge of and belief in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, son of God the Father, through whom we are saved.
