I was born in a real common farmer's family in Northern China. My parents were illiterate and secular too, except that my mother would routinely make food offerings to ancestors during New Year's seasons and she occasionally would also appear in temple's fair.

When I was a first grader, our teacher told us that we were the happiest children in the whole world, and that we were supposed to liberate the other two-thirds of the people who lived in the darkness of capitalist society.

At that time, it was quite a task for my family to save enough for my tuition, which was merely a dollar or two for each semester.

Entering middle school, we were made to prove in our own intellectual brain that socialism was the most scientific ideology and that it was historically inevitable for socialism to replace capitalism.

Along with quite a bit of high-school melancholy, I made my way into college in the Chinese Department. It was the beginning of the eighties when there were a lot of ideological activities and open-mindedness. What made into the headlines were numerous behind-the-scene affairs during the Cultural Revolution, or the Anti-Rightist Movement, or the Hu Feng Affair or even affairs before the establishment of Communist power. I was shocked and found myself completely stuck in terror and desperation. I felt like I had fallen into a gigantic meat processor which, despite your talent or capability or desperate struggle, would not allow anyone to escape the fate of being crushed and devoured.

We were made to criticize Western humanitarianism, but I quickly adopted what I was supposed to criticize. In fact humanitarianism and democracy became hot topics in the Chinese ideological field throughout the 1980s. I finally threw myself into the democratic movement in 1989, not without the Confucius philosophy of "trying out the impossible".

Then came two years of silence in political movements before the dawn of economic reform in 1992. Hard to imagine as it was but people who had been accustomed to oppression almost instantaneously woke up and rushed out, and the entire society became abnormally noisy. My intimate college campus was no exception. Many of those who were three years before democratic fighters or self-esteemed scholars now abandoned their ideology one after the another because they believed they had found their own true value of life. Economic poverty was considered far more detestable than corruption or immorality.

Toward the end of 1980s, the works of Max Weber (1864-1920), a German sociologist, caused quite a stir among Chinese intellectuals. His book entitled The Ethics of New Religion and the Spirit of Capitalism convincingly illustrated that Christian ethics had effectively guaranteed capitalist development in Germany. Deng's economic reform was positive in itself. The problem was that his reform was not based on cultural or ethical premises. Consequently, money, which was supposed to be the means to achieve certain goals, became a goal itself, a goal that everybody was anxious to reach by all means. What, then, could be the ethical premises for China's economic development? I dived into books of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Christianity before I finally confirmed that Christianity was the most appropriate because it was able to write its laws into the heart of the believers. At the same time, I believed the Bible shared a lot of ideas with the concepts of freedom, equality and brotherhood, all of which were necessities in a modern democratic society.

So I shared with my friends an insight that an average person could transcend his own sins and reach moral perfection through Christian belief. When I was asked if I wanted to believe in Christ, however, my answer was negative because I considered myself as an intellect who was able to reach moral perfection through intellectual meditation: it was impossible for an intellect to adopt belief of any kind. Some people accused me of being obscurant. I admitted it was true.

Since I was a college student, I had occasionally read some of the Biblical stories as Western literature was closely tied to Christianity. In our Oriental literature class, we studied the first few chapters of Genesis as mythical writings, the book of Ruth as a short story, and Song of Songs as ancient love songs. By the way, it was extremely difficult to obtain a copy of the Bible at that time. Our literature teacher told us he had to submit an application to get approvals from departmental officials, school officials as well as the Public Security Bureau before he was allowed to buy a copy from the Provincial Religion Committee. Luckily, a friend of mine gave me a copy of the Bible two years later. My favorite book in the Bible was Ecclesiastes; verses like "There is nothing new under the sun", "I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind" echoed in me as they seemed to reflect my inner emptiness and melancholy. Nevertheless, I was completely dumbfounded when I was told many famous western novelists, poets, philosophers and artists were also Christians. I felt sorry for T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the two of the greatest 20^th century poets I liked the most, for their conversion to Christianity in their final years. What I appreciated the most was the type of solitary heroes like Albert Camus (1913-1960) who dared to challenge everything and who neither killed themselves nor asked for help from God despite their realization of meaningless life. Gradually, I found myself slipping from a positive humanitarianist to a negative existentialist.

I was very disappointed at that time. Since my school years I had thought that intellectuals were the essence of human society. When I became one of them, however, I discovered that I couldn't really become part of them: I was alienated. A few lines of poem often came to my mind, these lines from Niki Giovanni, an American black poetess:

I went to the Notre Dame and the Church of the Holy Heart. I was deeply touched by the noble atmosphere produced from mass and singing. The amazing architecture of the church building as well as the beautiful color windows in it made me become skeptical about what I had learned about the Middle Ages being considered the dark ages. On Christmas Eve of 1995, I attended the celebration at Notre Dame. I was deeply moved when I heard "Un Fils nous en donne" (To us a child is born) and when I heard the story of Jesus who died for us and who loved us so that we should also love one another. I even participated in the Holy Communion. I remember we all shook hands with each other to express our love. In a letter to my graduate school advisor I said: "I believe Christian love was the origin of the western fraternity."

One day after I came to France, I found in my mailbox a brochure from The French Bible Institute. The brochure was about a program of Bible study via correspondence. Since Christianity was the most important foundation upon which western culture was built, and since Biblical stories were constantly referenced in a lot of literary works, I believed I couldn't even start to talk about western literature without understanding the Bible first. Therefore I started to study the Bible with the purpose to enrich my own knowledge base.

It was toward the end of April when my Bible study class raised the issue of sins. The term sinful nature was not unfamiliar to me but I was not able to admit I was also a sinner. As a result, I was not able to complete my homework on the subject of sins for as long as two months because I couldn't admit I was a sinner nor could I deny it either.

Near the end of April I made a trip to the south along with a student from Hong Kong. The student was a Christian and she was able to memorize a lot of Bible verses in French. In Montpellier, we met a middle-aged Christian named Helene and a French-born Chinese woman by the name of Micheline. Helene was a Christian with enthusiasm. She had a wish and that was to help every single Chinese student in Montpellier, regardless of their origin, to get to know Jesus. As soon as we met, we immediately started a debate. I brought up a lot of what I considered self-contradictions in the Bible. For instance, I accused God of His selfishness and obscurantism when He prohibited Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit; I accused God of being the director of the first murder case in human history when He applied double standards toward the offerings from Cain and Abel; I accused God of His cruelty when He raised flood to extinguish human species; I accused God of His injustice when He saved the Israelites and slaughtered the Egyptians and He allowed the Israelites to kill the Caananites too. I proclaimed, with a little bit of arrogance, that intellectuals like myself were able to obtain the true meaning of life through reasoning and to reach the heights of Christians through self-cultivation. I proudly claimed that I was perhaps spiritually superior to a lot of Christians. Helene, however, asked me to read the Bible, not just word for word, but with profound understanding. At the same time she firmly said: "You will never step out of darkness if you try to reach the way of life through reasoning. Reasoning can help you understand what is good, but it cannot give you strength to do what is good." My arrogant intellect indeed received a big blow. All the corruption and wickedness I observed when I was at college immediately came back to my memory. There were times when I myself failed to do what was good. I hesitated but I refused to admit failure.

I came back to Paris in early May. A week later, I got a letter from home, telling me that my father had passed away and had been buried. I was told not to be too distressed about it, but I still fell into desperate agony. My father had had a hot temper and we had had a lot of conflicts. Since I came to France, I had thought about my father a lot. Indeed, he had had a lot of problems, but, as a son of his, I had seldom attempted to understand him. Instead I had been too egocentric and had had too much complaints about my father. I had planned to say to him, when I would go back to China, that I knew he had always loved me and that I had always loved him as well. I had dreamed we could some day re-establish our father-and-son relationship. My father's sudden death, however, made my dream remain a dream forever, for which I would feel extremely regretful in the years to come. My self-confidence and self-cultivation, which had started to be weakened since my visit to Montpellier, were now completely shattered. How could I talk about self-cultivation when I couldn't even improve the relationship with my father?

The next day was Sunday. For the first time in my life I attended the Sunday service. I was amazed that hymns in Chinese could also be full of serenity and grace. The same evening for the first time I attended the Joseph Fellowship, which was the first truly friendly Chinese circle I had ever participated in since I left China.

I took home a few booklets and a Chinese Bible. So many unknowns and so many difficulties prompted me to read the Bible anxiously in the next couple of weeks, especially the New Testament and those booklets. I completely understood what the Bible had to say about sinful nature and I truly admitted I was a sinner. The verse "What is man that you are mindful of him?" (Ps. 8:4) often came to me. I realized that I was so unworthy of salvation and I was full of gratitude from the bottom of my heart.

Christianity is supposed to be the truth. Why is it, however, that European countries, of which Christianity was the state religion, were full of scandals and wickedness in the Middle Ages? Why had these countries departed from God since the Enlightenment? I did a research on church history and was able to find the answer. The fear of the Lord in the Middle Ages was pretty artificial; physical desire still ruled, resulting in common phenomena like the sale of sin redemption tickets, trifling politics and adultery. What shocked me the most was that even in the 18^th century the Vatican still forbid general believers to possess the Bible. The reason was ridiculous and yet understandable: If believers had access to the Bible they would not listen to the Pope any more. All this corruption directly led to the advent of Martin Luther's reform. And it is pretty obvious that the Enlightenment movement logically resulted in the increasingly serious social phenomenon of departing from God. It is no coincidence that the Enlightenment movement originated in Italy where the Pope was. Throughout the entire Middle Ages, Italy was the Vatican territory only on the surface; sumptuousness and immorality inherited from the later stage of the Roman Empire remained the society's main stream. The Enlightenment movement did nothing more than proclaiming what had been immoral as humanity's justifiable pursuit. Human beings were formally pronounced as the center of the world and as their own happy designer and executor. A notorious slogan stemmed from this social main stream was Pleasure In the World. It is quite natural, therefore, that this era produced historical figures like Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), who would indiscriminately try every single means to achieve goals and whose short story series were full of adultery, sexual immorality and fraud, Erasmus (1469-1536), the popular humanist who proclaimed "The more madness the more happiness", and Thomas More (1478-1535), who was known for designing the Utopian ideology. Since the Enlightenment movement, astonishing progress had been made in the areas of human intelligence, science and technology. Far from being proportionate to this progress, however, was materialistic prosperity. On the contrary, we saw treacherousness and indifference among men and wars among nations. The entire earth seemed to have fallen into deeper wickedness. Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), a German artist in the same historical age as the ones listed above, expressed his feeling in his famous copperplate etching Melancholy that science and technology had driven human beings into profound melancholy and doubt. This was clearly a wake-up call to those with excessive optimism. It was also made clear to me why Shakespeare, the great literary figure in the age of the Enlightenment Movement, produced such anti-climatic works as Hamlet, which depicted the impotence and hesitation of humanists , Macbeth, which described a tragic ending for individual ambition, Othello, whose main character was a war hero but also a victim of human jealousy, Romeo and Juliet, in which death became the ultimate destination for pure love, and Antony And Cleopatra, in which Antony thought he was experiencing remarkable love but he didn't know Cleopatra was merely playing games in order to keep the throne. What filled Shakespeare's tragedies was widespread disappointment rather than praise to human life. "Life is like the crazy talk of a fool, extravagant but meaningless" (Macbeth). I also understood why Shakespeare came back to Christianity in his later years and talked about forgiving the enemies in his The Tempest.

Thanks to the Lord, I also understood the cause of the ill-fated Chinese culture. Three thousand years ago, from Zhou Gong's "Deeds determine all" to Xunzi's "Defeat nature", our ancestors had gradually begun to rely on themselves. Some people find a lot of similarities between the western Enlightenment Movement and China's "All schools contend" movement three thousand years ago. When human beings walk their own way, they tend to end up in the same path.

There is an field irreplaceable and unreachable by philosophy and science: it is religion. There is something more important than intellect and wealth: it is love. Having realized this, I asked to be baptized. Then on November 24, 1996, I was baptized in Paris and I formally became the Lord's follower.

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Abridged from page 24-27, June 1997 issue of Overseas Campus Magazine.