Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Yesterday afternoon the moment I stepped out of my front door to walk Sumi I heard a voice calling my name.  It was from the other side of the street, two houses down, where my neighbor whom I had visited only this past weekend resides. Only that it was not his voice.  And he is definitely not the yell-across-the-street-two-houses-up type. Hey Alex, have you seen the coyo(te)?   It's the whistling postman.  I don't know if it's the beard that made him look jolly or his bright whistling indeed carefree; he has a Christmas presence.  I could never make out the song he whistles, sometimes so loud that you could hear from the other side of a street, like a moving pin on a Google map that you could pinpoint which house he was at without seeing him. Of course he knows my name , I murmured, Of course!  He's the mail man, duh! But I didn't expect him to call me by my very name.  He could have just said, Hey, there! But why not? ...

Dear Eugene, Today there is sun, very pleasant yet again.  Tomorrow there'll be rain. So they say. Who are "they"?  Someone who knows .  Someone who knows the rainmaker. My friend, the one I told you about yesterday, said he will try to go to church again. But you do know it is not about an obligation, right?  I said gently.   That God doesn't need us to be in a square building to feel happy about us. God doesn't need anything; the least of it our religiosity.  There exists no currency for us to barter with him. And, by the way, I think you are now properly disillusioned enough to know many church-folks are not really...let's just say, "nice folks," right? He knows.  First-hand.  People closest to him.  Family. We go to church, among many others things, to wait on God.  To wait on God will always involve waiting on our neighbors, even our enemies, ready to serve, ready to give and forgive, ready to love.  Despite ...

Dear Eugene, I need to write this down quickly. I must write it all down now, can't let a single detail go unrecorded.  Let me mince not and with a single stroke summon the words into existence! Yesterday morning I texted a colleague, a long time friend.  I said Welcome back to the classroom, dear fellow student.   It was our in-joke, like we are little kids going to school rather unwillingly.  He went to the US for a marathon race this past weekend. I crossed the border with my friend of 15 years , he texted back, and came back by myself. My friend passed away on foreign soil. I asked  What happened?  An accident?  He said he will call me at night and tell me about it.  I texted back, OK.  Stay strong. I checked his schedule: off at 6:30.  So after work I quickly finished my dinner, asked my family to pray for my friend and for the conversation we were going to have.  I walked my dog at 6.  By 6:30 I was beside my ...

Dear Eugene, Of all the words you have spoken to me, I think the passage that I've played over the most in my head over the years is the opening paragraphs from your book "Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work": "PASTORAL WORK takes Dame Religion by the hand and drags her into the everyday world, introducing her to friends, neighbors, and associates. Religion left to herself is shy, retiring, and private; or else she is decorative and proud—a prima donna. But she is not personal and she is not ordinary. The pastor insists on taking her where she must mix with the crowd. When pastoral work is slighted, religion tends, among some, to become gaudy with ceremonial, among others to get cubbyholed as a private emotion. In either case she still does many things well: her theology can be profound, her meditations mystic, her moral counsels wise, her liturgies splendid. But until she is dragged into the common round she is not alive with Good News nor does she have a cha...

Dear Eugene, It's pretty heady stuff when one's carried by the wind that is the Spirit. I shall remember this past weekend for a long time, for always, set a stone to remember what God has done, things seen and unseen, things in full bloom and things yearning to be born, things the Lion roared and the Lamb whispered, things veiled in mystery and things out in the open. I am in fear.  Scared fear and awed fear.  It really is too much when the Spirit moves.  It really is not nearly enough for you crave for more. This past weekend the Spirit guided me through the gentle hands of faithful, obedient saints to learn how to love my neighbors.  People I don't understand, people I even despised by ignoring them all my life.  I was at Downtown Eastside.  I was talking to my Muslim neighbors.  I was talking to people that I knew from way back when.  I was talking to family I dine with every week.  I was talking to family I dine with every day. ...

Dear Eugene, Last night my heart was disturbed.  A  Leonard Cohen song gave her solace and she finally gave in and gave way. She gave in to give way to The Way. "Every time someone tells a story, and tells it well, the gospel is served," you once said . "I think the key word (...) is served .  I didn't mean (the gospel) is proclaimed every time someone tells a story; (I mean) it is served . When stories are told people begin to get a sense that life has value and meaning, and that they are significant. And then they start looking for the significance, 'Where's the meaning?' 'Where can I find significance?' But until people begin to realize their embededness in creation, and in suffering, that they aren't just accidents along the way, they really don't hear the gospel story. So, the important word is served ." Again I cried last night when I heard the lines : Behold the gates of mercy In arbitrary space And none of us de...

Dear Eugene, Years ago in a residential basement where a fledgling young church was praying together for her highly anticipated take-off, an earnest young man basking in the collective enthusiasm nevertheless allowed an instance of uncynical clear-headedness to break open a little crack of imagination, seeing well into a future that sadly did eventually come to pass, a vision articulated then in these simple words: "I wonder how long this is going to last..." By this he meant peace and harmony among people, a like-mindedness all too rare even in church, not unheard of, not unexperienced either, only that the prophesy of its eventual demise always self-fulfilling, often with great efficiency and grand efficacy.  His words of simple lamentation shook me and since then in my recollection never ceased to. "Good things never last, Mr. Denham." Ann Darrow said that.  Ann is the scream-queen in the "King Kong" movie.  It doesn't take the father of En...

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, Do you like the word "conversion," as in one holding up one's hand, "saying Yes to Jesus" when the music and moment feels right, as if the human heart changes like a flick of a switch, salvation a matter of having faith in one's faith? My question is too laden for it to be anything but rhetorical, I know.  And I am not trying to be cynical, even less to trivialize any Yes that is given to Jesus; we all rejoice with the angels with our own Yeses resounding in heaven when we see a life, any life, turning from darkness to light, from dying to living. But I suppose it is precisely because of how much we care about others, that we want to take a closer, honest look at the nature of how the Yeses are being called out. I know you love Anne Tyler's novels; so I assume you must have read Dorothy Allison's " Bastard out of Carolina "?  What an amazing novel, isn't it? When the protagonist of the story Ruth Anne tried t...

Dear Eugene, I think I am too angry to write.  Or is it sadness?  No matter what I will need to pray before going further. I will need to pray through this piece. Last night as I was out getting medication refill for Sumi, our dog, I received a cascade of text message, coming through like the rapping beats of telegraph machine, digital sound inorganic, distress just as genuine.   Someone is choking up , I though. Going at this machine-gun rate. My son informed me he broke his phone.  His first phone.  A bit more than a week since having it.  He said he was sorry.  Felt stupid.  More stupid than sorry.  His jeans pocket shallow.  Like lady's pants.  Who'd have expected that.  And he ran cos someone called him over.  Phone fell out.  Gravity. He related the shallow reality to me, all the while very aware of the deeper reality: that he refused to put on the case cover I gave him, despite my repeated pleads, eve...

Dear Eugene, We talk about the doctrine  Sola gratia , Grace Alone, that we could comprehend God's saving act only and entirely as a favor unmerited, a mercy undeserved, a gift given out by the Holy Spirit according alone to Jesus Christ's redemptive sacrifice. But isn't it also true, as I looked around even within just the small confine of my study room, about everything else in God's creation?  What have we done to deserve our next breath? The other day I was walking through a big mall--I like to park far away from the library to make every outing a pilgrimage (and give myself an excuse to excurse to the bookstore)--and I saw couples walking hand-in-hand, some lovingly, some habitually, some reluctantly.  Many held together with only a weak magnetic pull, not enough for touching each others, good enough for acknowledging there is an other . And I thought, How many of us swaggering man could swagger no more if not for the women who are there for us in spite of...

Dear Eugene, Last night as I was sitting on a bench in my church basement waiting for my daughter and her friends, I stared down a corridor probably for the one hundredth time in my life and suddenly recalled one of the most iconic cinematic images about loneliness, the hallway shot in Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." My youth wasn't that happy , I talked under my breath and myself, as the sound of merrymaking however muted trickled through from the end of the long corridor, where another alley t-bones it and delves deep into the right, from where cheery talk of cleaning up after potluck, eager and earnest hope about the future can be made out in the airy draft of jingly laughter. My youth wasn't happy at all. Token .  All of a sudden this word emerged from nowhere.  But of course I knew right away where it came from. When I was a visa student in Toronto, first time leaving family, knowing no more than a few dozen English words and certainly not how to arrange ...

Dear Eugene, Have you read John Williams' " Stoner "?  Do it now if you haven't; you will love it--and I won't apologize for its inevitable rustling of your pastoral heart. No, it is not about potheads; it is more "stoned" than that.  It is one of my favorite novels, thanks to the Burnaby Public Library years ago for dusting it off and showcasing on a high shelf where it deserves.  The cover looks boring --and of course I will read it! Even now I'd take it off my shelf and read a random page from time to time.  Any page in it is a great page.  Any passage is a great passage.  It's like reading the Bible, every verse opens up a window to a much bigger view, its strength firmly anchored on the controlling, overarching narrative that has over the years worked its way to permeate this reader's imagination.  My heart would ache over a word. "Stoner" is called " The Greatest American Novel You've Never Heard of. "  ...

Dear Eugene, These past two weekends have to be among the most meaningful, beautiful in recent memory. The week before we've made new friends who are like long-lost family, reunited in the Adamic wilderness where we've first lost sight of one another, only to be able to make out the others' face once again when we are finally found in Christ. This past weekend my family was busy serving at church to kick off a new season of ministry.  The cry for God, for the Good News in this Bad News World is overwhelming.   Thank you for making us see , we prayed, but this is really too much!  Please help us do your will...like, Big Time Help! Yet despite all the beauty and blessing, joyful toil and exuberant hope, before yesterday was soon over I've lost my temper with...you guessed it, my son.  Again. And it was over absolutely nothing.  Really, no false modesty here; one shouldn't waste even a Meh on it.  Of course I can say this now.  But when it was h...

Dear Eugene, Sometimes I wish my family is very poor.  Or we are in the middle of a war.  A famine.  Slavery.  Whatever.  Just something really really bad.  Bad enough that we would beg for deliverance, cry for salvation, that we could have a true exodus experience. And I know the thought is despicably crass, because much of the world is really in such really really bad shape.   If you so want it, why don't you just go there, there, or there?  I would look at the news and say to myself.   Don't you wear your first-world guilt on sleeve like it's a virtue. But I have nowhere to go but here.  Maybe one day God will call me to somewhere else, but as of this moment, God puts me here, gives me and my family much more than we need, and we must learn how to obey Him and do His will within the very particulars of our  here and now .  Affluence makes faithlessness all the more inexcusable.  Our cross to bear. As expec...

Dear Eugene, Once a friend said to me, "Ever since the pastor in my previous church told me about the doctrine of 'predestination,' I found myself not telling the gospel to people as much as before, sometimes not at all.  I think, Well, if God has done his choosing already, maybe things are just gonna be what and how they are gonna be..." I stared him in the eyes and said, "Let's say this together:  Get thee behind me, satanic doctrine!  Whatever takes us away from doing God's will is not from Him.  I am not saying the doctrine is from the Satan, far from it; it is how the Satan has twisted it out of shape to work against God--and we allowed it! Talk about choosing: we have to make a choice to let the Satan do that to the doctrine and do its evil will to us.  We haven't been faithful in learning the historical context/burden of the doctrine's formulation, which is convoluted and still continual.  We want to use it as if we are the one...

Dear Eugene, Praying is waiting. Did I just say something hackneyed?  Or is it too obvious that we replaced the truth with a counterfeit?  Instead of waiting, praying is often, to me, an unwilling compromise during times of extreme impatience. Yesterday I finally gave my son a cell-phone after much thoughtful and prayerful gestation.  I made it sound wholesome and edifying, but the experience was more like relinquishing a razor to a monkey. When we were working out the terms and conditions of use, there were times I would just stare at the lump of worked-up hormones that is my son with a blank face, wondering when God will stop the deluge of insult gushing out of his mouth and give this father a square-inch of dry land to stand on. The phone looks cheap, the phone looks old,  the phone looks slow, the phone will crash like my friend's old tablet, the protective case ain't cool, my friends all have thousand-dollar phone without a case... My son writes...

Dear Eugene, Back to school for the kids; back to the grind for the parents. Not exactly how my family feels.  Yesterday as we were walking around Buntzen Lake, together we looked back at a summer full of joy, tinted by sorrow, tragedy that there was, tragedy that almost was, tragedy still in the making.  We wondered what God has in mind for our new year together and in our own life, in our friend and family's life, in our church's life. We sat on a huge boulder looking down at a fisherman, a parable-infused image that calmed and beckoned us. "Let's sit here until he catches a fish," I murmured.  Surprisingly no one objected.  They must also have murmuring of their own.  There without words our family had a great conversation. Last night when I laid my head on the pillow I was excited, almost agitated by vision of the many tomorrows.  Yet this morning I woke up to trepidation, a fear that I cannot quite identify. " Do not banish me from your pre...

Dear Eugene, Recently you said this, "I’ve never performed a same-sex wedding. I’ve never been asked and, frankly, I hope I never am asked." I love you, as always, for your honesty.  You know the world is ready to stone you whichever way you answer.  But you didn't answer them.  You answered God. You proceeded to say, "This reporter, however, asked a hypothetical question: if I were pastoring today and if a gay couple were Christians of good faith and if they asked me to perform their wedding ceremony— if, if, if. Pastors don’t have the luxury of indulging in hypotheticals...And to be honest, no is not a word I typically use." I’ve never given my son a cell-phone. I’ve never been asked and, frankly, I hope I never am asked. Well, that hope is over.  Recently he asked for one.  He asked for one right now .  He wanted me to give him an one-word straight answer right away, justification not welcomed if it is not the one word he sought. Yes, I c...

Dear Eugene, The morning is soft and gentle.  It need not be, certainly not for Vancouver, not in September. I feel secure and easy this morning, like a rich man. A rich man who knows no God would say to himself, This is nice, how can I keep it nice longer?  Forever?  For myself, my kids, for as many generations after me as I can live to see? He forgets the others in this world.  He forgets his neighbors who do not feel secure and easy, who might never be rich like him.  He reads the newspaper and sees numbing statistic, reads his neighbors' face and sees blank paper.  He knows no one, not even himself, most of all not God.  He thinks about his next meal shortly after the last, but shall never be satisfied.  He lusts after his next weekend, his next getaway, his next moment of pleasure and relaxation, but shall forever find no rest.  Anxiety and fear shall never leave him.  He wants to kiss someone, anyone, and feels ashamed and...