Holding a Candle to Macau’s A-Ma Temple

As a little girl it wasn’t difficult to get me to go to church. While the other kids had to be dragged down the block, Game Boys pried from their cold, sticky hands and mothers yelling Italian expletives across the avenue, I happily slipped on my white patent leather flats and my sweater and grabbed Grandma’s hand for the stroll to Our Lady of Guadalupe, our local Brooklyn Catholic church.

You see, I had other motives. When the singing and the painful kneeling were finished, I’d get to saunter up the marble walkway, listening to the click-clack of my shoes play against the drowning organ tune and slip into the dark, gilded prayer room behind the altar. There, I’d fold up the sweaty dollar bill that had been making paper cuts in my hands the entire hour, and jam it into the slit in the offerings box. Following that – and only following that- I’d get to pick from the statues of saints lining the little room and light the candle of my offering of choice.

Okay, it wasn’t a real candle, it was a simple button that lit a light below a fake red and yellow bulb, but it made me so happy to be a part of this ceremony. To pick from the baby Jesus, or Saint Anthony, or, my favorite, Saint Lucy, who gouged out her own eyes rather than give them up to a man she didn’t love. I forged a very real connection here, between an hour of Sesame Street and huge bowls of freshly made pasta, with the God who I decided would be my God and what that even meant to me.

Like a welcome flashback, I see this sort of thing everyday in my travels. Because we’re afraid to be rude, or are too stuck on absolute truths, or are just too pig-headed to understand the values of another man, we don’t have an open culture were religion is spoken about, here in the US. It happens behind closed doors, or is shouted at others to pound thoughts into their brains, or it doesn’t happen at all. It’s something I believe most Americans are used to, and we carry it on with us so that when we’re abroad, we allow ourselves to admire the beauty of a cathedral, but not the beauty of its followers; or the intensity of a tribal service, but not the kindness of its deity of honor. And it’s this way of thinking that I reluctantly carried with me during a visit to the A-Ma Temple in Macau, which along with Hong Kong, is a Special Administrative Region of The People’s Republic of China.

Built in 1488 for Mazu, tha Tao goddess of the sea, the temple is a far cry from the casino lifestyle on the other side of the peninsula; the small square surrounding the temple was packed with Asian visitors while most Europeans, I noted, stayed safe in the comforts of the mega-resorts. But I’m an addict for being pulled outside of my comfort zone and I wandered in, climbing the hundreds of steps to the top of the temple, passing altars and offering centers left and right before climbing yet more stairs.

At the first cliff a messy handful of visitors paid for long tapered candles and incense sticks, lighting them and waving them in the air, they completed the ceremony by sticking them deep into pots scattered on carved shelves, circling their arms back and forth over the billowing, sweet-smelling smoke. I smiled and nodded at the beauty of the blue flames against bright flowers, appreciating the aesthetics and wandering off within a few minutes. I pressed my dirty palms against Chinese characters chiseled into the wall and snapped photographs of children playing on the steps, and kept going. I reveled in stories of Mazu, who climbed and climbed her own mountain until she came to the top, then flew off in search of the sea and greatly enjoyed the theatrics of it all. But, two minutes from the gate (and the lunch table) I stepped through another offering area, this one larger, with benches for the visitors to kneel on, and candles already in place among the pots, ready to be lit, and statues of A-Ma lined up against enormous conical incense piles, and my brain faltered in it’s mission to keep me in the present.

For a brief minute, the twinkling bells were Italian chanting, the groups of candles became flickering colored bulbs, and I was surrounded by beeping horns and crooning neighbors, not the conversation of people who I didn’t understand; hadn’t even met. The temple stopped being a travel pomp and circumstance or a bucket list check mark, and became an actual place to communicate with God. God? Not just their god, my own God, too. The same God, after all.

My brief moment of touchy-feely clarity was ruptured when I became entangled in the middle of a charging group and was almost lifted clear out of the temple by force. Meeting back up with my group I was immediately engaged in conversations about clubs and lunch and didn’t have a second to process the small revelation that had occurred just teen feet away in a cloud of smoke. But maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe there’s a place for every thought. Even a child, entranced in the power of fable had to move on at some point.

After fifteen minutes of staring at the peeling statue of Saint Lucy, her eyes, two round balls on a golden platter in her left hand, I hopped down the marble stairs, took grandma’s hand and strode back up the block. The cast iron gate swung open with a creak and I bound through the thick wooden door of the house and up the stairs, taking in the sounds of numerous relatives piled into the small kitchen, cheese melting in the oven and wine and pears sloshing into a handful of glasses. I had moved on to the second half of Sunday, the half where I would be setting the table with folded napkins and plates of crusty bread; Saint Lucy was just a part of the past, and it would be up to someone else to fold that little soggy dollar bill and make her come back to life.