Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Last night I was reading science.  I've been doing quite a bit of that lately. My son asked me, "Dad, is that, like, science science that you are reading?" I knew what he meant.  As compared to "Christian" science.  Sunday-School science.  Young-Earth science.  Noah's-Ark science.  Jonah-in-a-whale science. "Oh, no worries, this is real science," I told him.  "I've already worked through that whale thing you are talking about before you were a sperm." Much of "Christian" science gives Jesus a very fishy name.  And whales are not fish, even a kindergartener knows. Anyway, this is not the can of sardines I am opening today. Science is fascinating, isn't it? But do you know what is just as fascinating?  That I would call science fascinating, as if it is a person, a beautiful, intelligent woman, a visionary man.  Who am I to put such value on... her ? When I was reading science, a questio...

Dear Eugene, What speaks to you?  Who shaped you the most? I asked my friends last week. The generation(s) before us, our background, culture, tradition--all these must be some of the most obvious answers, for good or for bad. For me, it also has to do with spoken words, literature in particular.  For others, it could be the language of science.  God the Spirit speaks to us in different ways. The vision we lack, as I said yesterday, is one that puts everything together, a Way that brings wholeness, not only restores our memory of how things used to be, but also makes true our dream of how things ought to be. That's why, the more I read science and theology, the more I've come to realize people who say science and theology cannot and should not be spoken in the same breath probably do not understand enough about either. There, a periodic table, an account of everything that there is in a breath. There, lovers kissing, breathing life into each other, soul...

Dear Eugene, This is going to be long; sorry.  I worked it out in my head just now while fixing my backyard.  Suffering helps. This morning I looked out my kitchen window and found big patches of my lawn being opened up like crude drug-store novels, folded and curled. Raccoon(s).  Skunk(s).  It was artfully done, I must say.  I dutifully spent an hour to remove and reinstall my stratagem of garden nets (which they outwitted), closing up all the scattered books, which, upon closer examination, looked more like failed open-heart surgeries. Mud splattered all over my legs. I tried not to swear (and failed).  What a bloody mess. And this was after being followed by a most pitiful looking coyote earlier and ran home holding Sumi in my arms.  I think I've used up my weekly allotment of heartbeat in one morning; now I am going to talk about science after giving you this likely unscientific claim. Doing science certainly cannot be about getting facts s...

Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua...

Dear Eugene, I think there's always some sort of benediction at the end of a worship service, sometimes a formal liturgy, sometimes a praying together; there is always a goodwill send-off. "Be Blessed and Go Bless," if there is a slogan for it. And I suppose a certain power is also expected to come out of these words and acts of blessedness. Yet most of the times there simply wasn't any.  (In fact sometimes we wish the preacher would shut up already and "let it go.") I suppose the reason for such lack of power could be me the beneficiary, or it could be the benefactor, or God just willed it that way that no energy was transmitted and no "benefit" created or exchanged. We could go into deep theology but I just want to step back and ask one question: If there truly is a state of blessedness to pass around, would it be conveyed only in the final declaration to send people off with a good send-off, or would it have already manifested itse...

Dear Eugene, Nothing drives us.  No thing  drives us. Of course the one who does the driving is never a What but a Who .  How can it be otherwise? This is no high philosophy or mere play on words.  A child can see that but most of us have effectively chased away the child. "What drives you?"  Again that's the question.  Career?  Ambition?  A will to survive?  Lust for life? The one who does the driving is never a What ; I feel silly to state something so obvious.  To say our life is fueled by, for example, ambition is to say a car is driven by gasoline, maybe the law of physics, maybe even human ingenuity. No.  A car is driven by a Creator who purposes the car's moving to achieve an end meaningful to the Creator.  If the Creator finds no reason to move, no meaning to go from A to B, there would have never been a car, not even the idea of giving something a "drive."  The Creator is driven; the drivenness in t...

Dear Eugene, This morning in half darkness I reconsidered the pattern on Sumi's back. I wondered how the pattern came to be in its present form, cosmos expanding since we first cradled her universe five-and-a-half years ago. There, a little brown spot that doesn't fit, a strayed star, wayward, like a speck of blemish, a specter from the past we failed to notice since...the beginning? Yes, and thanks,  for the trouble you took from her eyes I thought it was there for good so I never tried I recalled this line from a Cohen song, a favorite. Thanksgiving weekend.  I don't think we can ever be truly thankful without taking a step back to reconsider, to take a fresh look, like a child in wide-eyed wonder. Reconsider things.  Simple things, big things.  Life events.  Patterns discerned and still hidden.  Tangled threads.  Badly tangled.  Line-up at grocery checkout.  Bus trip exiles.  Facebook "Likes." Reconsider thoughts....

Dear Eugene, I haven't been writing to you for about a week now.  Whatz up with me?  Reading theology.  Serious hardcore reading. After all these years I am still in two minds about theology, whether it is the most fascinating science or biggest mind-numbing bore, especially when it has the tendency to be both simultaneously.  This morning at eight I swore I couldn't possibly squeeze another word of theology into my numbed-out brain, but lo and behold, a sentence into it there I was again carried away to la la land... Why do I read theology?  I have enough stuffs in my head.  There really is no reason to open cans of worms.  If not because God calls me to care for others, my family, my small group members, non-believers I meet in my volunteering, etc., there really is absolutely no reason. Theology is fascinating not because it works my brain up but because it calls me to work my heart out. Everyday I go by what you taught me: "PASTORAL WOR...

Dear Eugene, Summer morning, feeling something is missing is not the proper feeling for a day like today, right? Melancholy should be reserved and preserved for the rainy season, which will surely come, soon enough.  Getting sad too quickly is drinking hard on your youth; you empty your bottle to prophesy about emptiness. Now I need hardcore theology, I think, words that poke right into the wound of it all.  This Thomas is at the right place to give the finger. It's strange, if I stop to think about it, when I am really ready to get down and dirty about stuffs, of all the things I've read, science, literature, politics, history, it is theology that I would reach for. Everything is only partially true, even theology, but great theology allows, invites, and encourages the greatest impartiality to all partial truths. I pity those whose theology doesn't do that.  To poke around soft wound with hardened heart is a hell of a melancholy. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, True theology looks like cathedral but sounds like lullaby.  (I can see you grinning already.) Actually I think any observation of truth more than skin-deep has the same quality.  I am thinking about literature and science, cinema and politics. I like to look at ripples in the water. On the ferry sometimes I would ask if one day mathematician can come up with a formula to account for the past and future journey of every ripple that has ever crossed path with another since the beginning of time and unto the end of (as we know) it. Other times I would think about Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Three Times," with the song " Rain and Tears " playing in my head, sometimes seeing myself as the boy character looking this way, sometimes as the girl looking the other way, always with the ripples keep coming together and breaking apart beneath me. Yet other times I couldn't escape that the phrase "ripples-in-the-water" also means "life go...

Dear Eugene, Who can look at--even touch--Christ's resurrected body without asking this question: What could God possibly mean by... this ? We tend to think we have all the theology worked out and, for that, totally figured out what God has in mind. Well, for one, we have never worked out the theology; someone else did the hard work for us, after years and years of blood sweat and tears, certainly not merely in words and creeds, but much more importantly in living out the implications of God's revelation, which is often gradual and protracted.  It is pure arrogance to think we are the ones to discover the earth is a sphere, denying we are born ignorant if not for the first picture book on science read to us as kid. And who can "work out" all the theology anyway?  Who can "figure out" God entirely? When the Israelite were walking on the muddy bottom of Red Sea, they must have asked the same question: What could God possibly  mean  by... this ?  To ...

Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of...

Dear Eugene, The season is changing. This morning as I opened the kitchen window, just a little slit enough to invite in the first breath of daily baptism, I found myself again asking Why . Why does the season change? A strange little question, isn't it?  Didn't I learn the answer(s) from school already?  Haven't I experienced enough of the cyclical change to have gotten used to it by now? Let me guess, this must have happened to you too, that all of a sudden, in the middle of doing some very purposeful, fulfilling things, your mind would just be short-circuited by the strange little questions  Why?  What is the meaning of it all?  And you would draw a blank, trying your hardest to retrieve from within you a deep reservoir of ideas, doctrines and experience to no avail; not that there is no answer (in fact we have too many), but all the answers in the world putting together is not enough to tame that little feisty puppy of a yearning: Why? ...

Dear Eugene, " The Truth must dazzle gradually... " Sumi wasn't eating last night.  I gave her the food, normal food, same food for years and for years she loved and loves still.  My daughter said Go and then I followed up with a couple of the same syllable and still she looked another way, out the window, as if at something faraway not visible to us, something she lost. We worried.  I panicked.  Then theories abounded.  Toothache?  Maybe the dog-sitters did feed her something different against our instruction after all while we went away for camp this past weekend and now she's sick?  My wife said Sumi looked a bit different before dinner, moved a bit slower she said. I went to her and knelt down to pet her a bit and asked What's up?   She again looked away from her food and out the window.  So I petted her again and encouraged her to eat.  Finally she started to pick pieces of food out of the bowl, spat them on the ground ...

Dear Eugene, Last night I was explaining to my wife why without a doubt this is my favorite picture from this past weekend, probably one of my faves ever. Now of course she asked why.  Not that she didn't agree it looks fine, but she just didn't share my enthusiasm. I suggested, "Look at it as if it's the first time, that you don't really know what was happening.  Take a fresh look.  Wonder about things, as a child would." And it was hard.  Because she knew the context of the picture. Maybe. But does she know the full context of the picture?  Even if she does know some context, is there nothing more to discover? "Offscreen Space," the most special effect in the movies (moving, story-telling pictures).   Reach out to the Offscreen Space , I said. "Offscreen Space" refers to the six areas blocked from being visible on a movie frame, but still part of the space of the scene: to the left and right, above and below the frame...

Dear Eugene, I usually don't hunt for stuffs to write about and they'd just come to me when I walk up the hill with Sumi.  Nothing in my head is that interesting compared to all the things happening out there. Like this morning: There was sun; there was breeze.  Then the breeze became wind and the sun no more, and with that came a sudden shower.  I tried to connect the events and misunderstood--the shower was from a lawn sprinkler.  Sumi grunted. Always be wary of a man who thinks a world only out of his head and means it only out of his heart--even his whole heart.  He's a magician; he shows what seems to be interesting but hides what's even more interesting.  Soon he forgets where he hides his truly interesting things and becomes a true illusionist. " First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see ," your translation of the very first words in the Bible. The words are not giving us a "scientific" account....

Dear Eugene, I am still high on the news that yesterday Trudeau named David Adams Richards to Senate . Here I would like to share with you the spectacular opening paragraphs of David Adams Richards's " God Is. ". He is speaking in a language that I am still trying to learn.  I will let him speak for himself.  And for me. Enjoy! Yours, Alex ********************* Excerpt from the Hardcover edition of "God Is." Copyright © 2009 by David Adams Richards  Publisher: Anchor Canada A woman who recently started to read my books has asked me if I am a Christian. Strange how hard a question this is. If I say that I am not, the entire social fabric of my upbringing, of my parents’ and grandparents’ teachings and instructions, and the world and church in which I came to manhood, would make me a liar. But if I say I am a Christian, and a practicing Catholic, it very well might elicit a preconceived notion of what that means, which in itself is giving int...