Now isn't that funny, my relatives pretending to be on the other side of things and joining mainline churches? Our great-grandparents were not mainliners, at least not after Azusa Street. They were Pentecostals before there was a Pentecostal denomination to which to belong and later joined the Assemblies of God. I don't understand why George Wood is pretending to be a mainliner when obviously the AG is a Pentecostal denomination, one of several that developed out of the revivals of the early 1900s.
Now isn't that funny, the mainliners pretending that it was the Pentecostals who encouraged Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek to divorce his first wife, Mao Fumei, to marry the wealthy socialite Soong May-Ling in 1927, as if we had anything to gain from that? Soong May-Ling was mostly Methodist from what I understand, although her family's Christian roots went all the way back 300 years to the first Jesuit missions to China. Soong May-ling's own father was a Methodist minister who worked with missionaries so obviously they were mainliners.
It was mostly the mainliners who celebrated Madame Chiang Kai-shek
as the greatest hope for Christianity in China. But my great-grandparents were Pentecostal missionaries in China, not Methodists. It is true that they were Methodists before they became Pentecostals but that was before they went to China. In China they were Pentecostals and probably had not much opportunity for contact with such highly ranked people. It is true that we are not unaware of these politicians but we don't
really know very much about them. My grandmother said something about the maid but I don't know what she meant by that. Those people are certainly not our personal friends, make no mistake. It is true that some of my distant relatives have reverted to Methodism, and that my Dad's cousin attended the mostly Methodist USC maybe in the 1950s, not that I know anything about that. But we are not really a Methodist family, not even a mainline family, with some exceptions.
After all, this is not the first time in history that divorce has reared its ugly head as a . Yes, the story of Henry VIII and his wives comes to mind.
Several of his wives did not die of natural causes, and were in fact
beheaded, all in the name of Christianity. "Onward Christian Soldiers,"
the song says.
Now isn't that funny, some crazy person telling me that I must pay for all of this garbage. I must reenact the tragic story of Mao Fumei. I must be her. I must be Mao, the woman spurned by all. If the President of the United States tells me that I must be single and miserable, that I must give up my husband to the other woman, that I must allow the other woman to raise my son and tell him where to go, who am I to argue with the awesome power of the most powerful First World government on the planet? Who am I to argue with the generals who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima? If those guys tell me that I must die lonely and impoverished, a forgotten shadow in the annals of history, what of it? Why should anyone feel sorry for me? I think there is something twisted about this scenario, as if the U.S. were actually that powerful. One often sees these fantasies in Latin American newspapers, like the time a hurricane hit Central America and it was widely reported that U.S. tampering with the weather had diverted the hurricane away from U.S. shores. Yes, I remember reading the article about Hurricane Fifi in the Spanish newspaper. And I also remember reading about how the U.S. did not really land on the moon and that it was all staged in a Hollywood studio. Ha ha ha! As if we were the foreign devils. Ha ha ha!
