The life story of Stephen Than Archbishop of

Alan Nichols

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Published in English by Acorn Press Ltd ABN 50 008 549 540 Office and orders: PO Box 258 Moreland VIC 3058 Australia Tel/Fax: (03) 9383 1266 International Tel/Fax: 61 3 9383 1266 Website: www.acornpress.net.au © Alan Nichols 2015 National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Creator: Nichols, Alan, 1937- author. Title: Dancing with angels : the life story of Stephen Than, archbishop of Myanmar / Alan Nichols. ISBN: 9780994254436 (paperback) 9780994254443 (ebook) Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Subjects: Stephen Than Myint Oo. Church of the Province of Myanmar. – Bishops – Biography. Bishops – Burma – Biography. Dewey Number: 283.092 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this work may be reproduced by electronic or other means without the permission of the publisher. Figures 1.1, 3.1 & 4.1 are used with permission, courtesy of the Than family. Figure 2.1 is reproduced with permission of the United Society in the UK (formerly USPG). Illustration is by Joan Chamberlin, in George West, Jungle Witnesses, SPG, London, 1948. Figures 6.1 & 7.1 are used with permission, courtesy of the Church of the Province of Myanmar. Figure 6.2 used with permission, courtesy of the Anglican Board of Mission, Australia. Editor: Owen Salter. Cover, text design and map: Ivan Smith. Typeset in 11 point Minion Pro. Printed in Australia by Openbook Howden Design & Print.

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Dancing with Angels text 515.indd 4 18-May-15 10:30:38 AM My hope is that people reading this book will appreciate that the world is very wide and huge, everyone in the world is very precious, everything is created by God. Everything has value, so we need to let it be. We need to live and appreciate everything in the world, at the same time as we maintain our core faith. We need to reduce hate. That is why I asked you to write my biography, because my story as a Christian leader is one part of the history of human beings. This is the way I want people to see the world and my religion.

Stephen Than Myint Oo

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Contents

Page List of Abbreviations...... vii List of Figures...... viii Notes...... ix Map of Myanmar...... x Introduction...... 1 1. Born on the Delta...... 3 2. School, Air Force and Prison...... 7 3. Marriage and Recovery...... 15 4. Study and Lecturing...... 25 5. Bishop of Hpa’an...... 31 6. The Context...... 39 7. Election as Archbishop...... 53 8. Imagining the Future...... 71 Appendix 1...... 95 Timeline of Modern Burmese History with Events from the Life of Stephen Than Myint Oo Appendix 2...... 100 Suggestions for Further Reading Acknowledgments...... 109 About the Author...... 110

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Dancing with Angels text 515.indd 6 18-May-15 10:30:38 AM Introduction

One night in 2013, Stephen Than, asleep in a guesthouse in Tadian, a small town in the mountainous area of the Philippines, is woken up by clouds of white smoke billowing towards him. Fearing a fire, he calls out, but nobody wakes up. He goes to the balcony of the guesthouse and yells out ‘Fire!’ but no one responds. He goes back inside, fearful of what it means. There is no fire. Then from within the still billowing smoke a huge figure moves towards him and says, ‘I am Michael.’ Now scared, Stephen Than leans on the wall. Another cloud of white smoke billows out towards him, and another very tall figure emerges, looms over him and says, ‘I am Gabriel.’ At breakfast he describes the experience to the other six men on this retreat for bishops from Myanmar/Burma. They say, ‘You have been hallucinating; forget it.’ But the next night the same two figures emerge from the smoke, and by the following morning, Stephen Than has worked out what it means. He tells the other bishops, ‘The angels are with us. God is with us on our journey. We have been keeping our heads down below the table, but we can now put our heads up, join civil society, and the angels are with us every step of the way.’ This time the others respond positively. They agree God is with them on their journey back home towards democracy. Who is this Stephen Than? He is Anglican Archbishop of Myanmar, facing the challenge of leading a minority church within ethnic minorities in a country of 60 million people that is moving towards democracy by two steps forward, one step back. Years before he had also been in prison for two years for ‘damaging the state’, but really as a hostage for his brother, a resistance fighter. This book is Stephen Than’s life journey.

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Stephen Than Myint Oo was born in a small village on the river bank in the Delta area of Burma in February 1958. His people were Po Karen.1 He has few memories of this place because by the age of four he had moved to for education. But whenever he went back to his village, he saw many dead bodies in the river. Some had died because the only way to travel from there to Yangon (then called Rangoon) was by small boat, and this was dangerous because of unpredictable tides and the water flow of the great Ayeyarwady River. Many lives were lost.

Figure 1.1. Stephen (left) and brother John in 1962.

1. Po Karen (also called Mon Karen because they came from Mongolia) are a different sub-tribe from the White Karen who live near the Thai border. All came originally from Mongolia in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Po Karen form a majority of the people living in the Delta area to the south.

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The Delta is a huge area of perfectly flat land to the south and west of Yangon, the capital. Flying on my fifth visit to Myanmar to write this story, I had a window seat on the plane and could see the dead flatness of huge tracts of land, and the seeming emptiness. Over 130,000 people were lost in 2008 when Cyclone Nargis devastated this edge of the Indian Ocean. The land seemed devoid of people and activity until, after half an hour of flying, rice farms and small towns started appearing. It is said that at high tide water envelops most of the Delta, while at low tide multiple rivers, inundating it from the north, turn it into hundreds of islands with no bridges or punts. The Karen who live here are tough survivors. Stephen’s father and grandfather were schoolteachers. His maternal grandfather, Mahn Antony, was trained by a British missionary and became a teacher and missionary among the . Stephen’s father was principal of the school in Boot Tan village. As a young boy, Stephen used to ask his parents about the dead bodies he saw in the water near their home. They said people were sometimes killed by the military, sometimes by the Karen militia. When he was seven or eight years old, Burmese military entered the village and asked for rice and chickens, and the villagers were forced to give the food to them. Sometimes there was fighting near the village, but he never saw it. On occasions the military asked villagers to look for Kawthoolei leaders so they could capture them.2 The military used boats to search in and around the large lake behind the village. Stephen remembers many stories from his childhood – so many Karen were caught and died. Around the time Stephen was four, his aunt had a vision about the village. It would be invaded, she said; their lives would be in danger and their people would become porters for the army. She felt it would be better to go to Rangoon. That is why Stephen and other children travelled to Rangoon to attend St John’s Diocesan

2. Kawthoolei was the name the Karen people gave to their future State, based in Hpa’an near the Thai border.

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Boys’ School. He remembers Bishop Shearburn, an Anglican British missionary and monk.3 Luke Po Kung was archdeacon at that time in the Delta area, and he sent many young Karen children to the school. He became a hero to young Stephen. Several of Stephen’s aunts were teachers there, and also lived in the bishop’s home compound. On his father’s side all were Christians, but on his mother’s side most were Buddhist. He clearly remembers the family’s Christian heritage. He recalls kindergarten one, two and three, and he remembers when the government refused to allow teaching in the Po Karen language. English and Burmese were the official languages until 1962, when the government decreed all education would be in Burmese. Although these changes were difficult, everyone suffered the same. They all had to have three languages. Stephen, the young boy, observed that it was harder for the parents than the children. They discussed it a lot. Did Stephen envisage a future as a Karen fighter? He never had that feeling, mainly because of his grandfather Mahn Antony, who always talked about love and reconciliation. Mahn Antony had a lot of influence on villagers to act with love. During the period following General Ne Win’s military coup in 1962, Stephen’s parents, though they obviously felt the impact of the takeover, protected their children from anxiety about it; consequently, Stephen did not see this as persecution by the government of the day. But it was a period of confusion, especially as his father was working as a government teacher. He remembers the teaching of English being cut, and he recalls missing the teachers who taught them to sing with a piano. Although most of his immediate family was Christian, thanks to British missionaries,4 he was surrounded by Buddhists in parts of his extended family and in the village where he lived. Buddhists

3. Victor George Shearburn, Bishop of Rangoon 1955–66. 4. The British in the colonial period favoured the Karen because they responded positively, many becoming Christians, and fought alongside the British in World War 2 against the Japanese invasion.

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at Christmas helped the Christians to celebrate; likewise, when the Buddhists celebrated, the Christians helped them. Later, he learned the situation was quite different in the Karen area near the Thai border.

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