Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, What is the biggest lie of religion?  You are a pastor, a "religion practitioner" in the eye of the world; you must have an answer or two for this question, I suppose? I think the biggest lie religion tells us is that once we are "in", once we have god--or, more like, god-ideas--in our pocket, we could stop asking questions (and hence keep giving answers). Summer is the travel season.  Everyone looks forward to one's next "get away."  No Christian I know ever asks, But Jesus has never "gotten away" from his tiny backyard turf during his earthly life...how did he then find himself?  He didn't explore or experience enough of life to know enough, feel enough, live enough, didn't he?  How can such a provincial existence say or mean anything to anyone but his own petty, parochial self?  He didn't even have a place he could truly call "home"; he was in exile with his Jewish kinfolk, lorded over by a fo

Dear Eugene, I have done quite a bit of walking in the last two days and seen many beautiful things. Every beauty I see points me to something else, tells me that I don't belong here but must stay squarely at this place, where I am not ultimately made for yet am called to sojourn, to work out a vocation once forsaken yet never fully forgotten. Am I going home, or have I not even begun? Am I growing up or waiting to be born again? Am I striving to live or am I learning to die? I saw a house just now and I said how peaceful, warm and secure it must be to stay close to its heart of hearth in the winter months, Christmas time, how lucky one must be, how lucky I would be. And then I realized anyone who longs for what God longs for would want to see everyone be that lucky one. How far and away I am from the heart of God. Today in the park I heard someone singing in French. I didn't even know what he was singing but it drove me to tears. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, Today is a very special day.  I took the skytrain to meet up with a friend with whom I had a kind of fallout since last September. The "fallout," which I doubt either of us had given it such official label, was all the more regrettable because only a month before that we had a sort of breakthrough in our relationship, that after years of being "friends" we were able to probably for the first time speak heart to heart. A "kind of" fallout.  A "sort of" breakthrough.  Everything is so tentative and tenuous when it comes to breaking out of the self to relate to the other .  Like an under-rehearsed dance recital with angels looking on.  Somehow it feels like we are meant to fail and the angels are bound to sigh. The "fallout" was unexpected, by either of us, I suppose.  My friend was growing increasingly bitter towards pretty much everything and everyone, and I gave him a few words harsher than even the usual, perplexed

Dear Eugene, Today is Canada Day, a very special one.  When the next very special Canada Day comes I shall be no more. Today every Canadian wants to find his/her own little story in the big story of Canada, claiming that our own little piece can only find its true meaning within the big picture that goes way before us and shall hopefully continue to unveil after us. There is talk of injustice and reconciliation, steps we must trace back to find today's footing, to find a way forward--to find a way out. But are we just chanting idealistic slogans? We are told that we need to find ourselves, and that's the meaning of life, the grand narrative to make sense of it all.  I love literature and so do you.  We know how the idea of how there really is only one story to tell and that is a person's search for himself seems so naturally valid that we don't even know we have picked our assumption but there could be more than one. What other assumption could there be?  We