The thing about Chinese culture is that when they have a tradition (and there are more than a few), they make it a complete experience. There is a right way and many wrong ways to prepare for it, it takes some form of precision and dedication to master, and there is deep, profound (or at the least seemingly profound) life philosophy to be experienced and reflected upon during said tradition. Today I learned a new one – Kung Fu Tea.
In the partaking of Kung Fu Tea you use a special kind of tea set with, amongst other things, a small clay teapot and tiny espresso sized teacups (no handles though). The dry tea is placed in the clay teapot (clay to absorb flavor over time), which is only big enough to fill about 6 of these small cups. You drink shots of tea in batches, adding hot water to the teapot for each new batch. The trick is that you only steep the tea for about 30 seconds or so each time, and you go through 8 or so servings like this. Here’s the why: the part in tea that is not so good for the body does not (supposedly) steep into the water as quickly as the flavor and aroma, so this is supposed to be a much healthier way of drinking tea. Also, each batch changes the flavor and slightly changes the intensity of the aroma, much like an aging wine except that the tea is not what’s aging but the tea leaves are simply changing what they will lend to each new filling of water. You get an almost completely different experience with every cup. The philosophy, which is the point of describing all of this to you, is that each batch or shot of tea represents a decade of life. At first there is little flavor or aroma though you can detect these elements, like in children where you see the potential but not what shape it will take. As you continue, the aroma of the tea is strongest first while the flavor is not so smooth or as enjoyable as later on, becoming more so in the ’30s and 40s’ as the aroma seems to influence the flavor little by little. This changing carries on to the end which is usually around the 8th ‘decade’ depending on the quality of tea.
I saw one of those Nooma videos by Rob Bell awhile ago that was talking about the Hebrew words for breath – Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey – and how those words are the names for the letters which spell LORD, also translated as Yahweh or Yahveh. Rob talked about how the word for spirit and the word for breath is the same word, and how we come from dirt, return to dirt, and in between are sustained by the breath, or spirit, of God that Genesis tells us He breathed into us. What I kept thinking about while we drank the tea was how the aroma of the tea, while its intensity changes slightly, was the exact same all the way through to the last cup. How even through all our stages in life, our shortcomings and screw ups, our strongest and our weakest times, we still have that same breath in us just as the tea has the same smell. To God we have the same aroma from start to finish and He knows that if properly nourished the breath He put in us will seep into the flavor of our lives, mellow out the harshness, sweeten the bitterness, and smooth out all those finer edges we have as people. But it won’t happen if that breath isn’t nourished, if it’s treated harshly or with disdain, if it’s left without hope…We need to remember this. No matter what the current state of a person is, no matter what they’ve done or who they are, it’s the breath of God that sustains them. Nourish it.
