Heaven and Hell (8/30)

At the Hangzhou Airport and while waiting to board, a little palette cleanser Chinese story I remembered the other day and confirmed with the group that this is indeed well known in China. (Apparently, it is.) It’s a powerful parable about the difference between Heaven and Hell. It goes something like this:

 

There is a banquet table filled with the most enticing and delicious dishes. All come to the table hungry and looking forward to the most wonderful meal of their lives. The excitement is made yet more inviting by the tantalizing smells wafting up from the plates, beautiful music played in the background, old friends and new acquaintances seated at the table, all looking forward to the pleasures to come. As of yet, the table is not set with the chopsticks needed to begin eating. The waiters come in with them, but to everyone’s surprise, each pair of chopsticks is over three-feet- long, making it impossible to get the food from the plate to one’s mouth. What to do?

 

In Hell, everyone keeps trying to make it work but no one can. All are so frustrated. By now they are so hungry and they can see and smell the amazing meal, but can’t eat a single morsel of it.

 

In Heaven, each picks up a piece of the food at the end of their long chopsticks and feeds it to the people across from them. A memorable meal is had by all.

In my prosperous country, people are starving for the food they deserve but can’t eat. We live in a place of abundance that has the natural resources, the economic resources, the educational resources, the intellectual resources, the democratic ideals of a government designed to be “of the people, for the people and by the people,” created to feed our secret hungers and nourish us with delicious delights. Yet in the midst of that abundance, we are starving ourselves. With the freedom to choose heaven, we opt for hell. Instead of feeding each other, we follow those who value nothing except their own personal profit, power and privilege, without a jot of concern for others. Heaven is available with such a simple act of turning the chopsticks around and yet we refuse it. 

 

Please tell this story to the children. If we can’t live its promise, perhaps they might.