
Some people may ask, Why? I ask, Why not? I don’t even care why we deep-southern Chinese originally began to bury the dead and collect their bones seven years later for secondary burial 執骨: if it’s lawful and not burdensome, it should be done, because it’s been done for more than 2000 years, before the region was even Chinese. If we Christians need to, we can invent new Christian reasons for maintaining or reviving the practice. My instinct is just that we have to do this kind of thing to stand against globalist forces bent on destroying our culture.
Yes. But the rites necessarily involve a social component so that we can continually involve tradition in the process of structuration!
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I do hope we can find, in the process of the practice, particularly Christian reasons to do it, reïninterpreting the practice in such a way as to orient our hearts devotionally toward the Lord’s gospel. The very encounter with death, seven years after the event of death itself, is such as to draw us to the remembrance of our mortality and the hope of the resurrection in Christ.
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