Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, This past weekend has been... I wanted to say "otherworldly," but it was not.  My feet were still squarely planted on the same ground. But the ground was starting to transform, as heaven touched earth, even only so lightly, so preliminarily, tangentially.  Tentative but very tangible.  Through a glass darkly but the little light created a big contrast because of the deep darkness. I really want to write more, but I need to rest.  Rest my heart by first resting my pen.  I've written too much this past weekend.  I love to speak personal words to my friends.   For you only... Here is a photo-journal I've created, a very little part of it that I can share online with you anyway, of this past Sunday afternoon at a little church kind enough to include even me and my family in their mission to take down a heavy barrier between heaven and earth.  (Click on picture to see details, and there are many...) The harvest is ready... Neighbors coming t

Dear Eugene, How we need kerygma, Good News proclamation, to be evangelized to again and again! I know I need it.  Daily.  Badly. Last few days I've been acting like Grumpy Cat .  I don't know if people can tell when I was leading Bible Study group last night. You can't fake joy.  You can only go so far to pretend there's hope in you.  Love never dies but you can try killing it a million different ways. Evangelized me!  I cried. This morning God spoke a fresh word of the Good News to me, again through the mouth and life of his faithful servant.  I needed a strong kick in the rear, and God sent Rowan Williams . "(...) And then, supposing we have cleared away the fears that arise from the way religious people have failed to witness fully to their God – then the deeper fears can and do come to the surface, the fears of what faith may demand of a person. Nothing will take away the challenge here; we can only hope that there are enough lives showing joy an

Dear Eugene, The morning is dark and wet.  I looked out the window and tried to see something new. I sought not merely a new perspective, new depth, new scope, new discovery, but a new creation, a renewal of the old because history matters, a new birth because the old only matters in light of the new beginning. Christmas is the beginning of a new beginning. We opened our gift, liked, even loved what we saw.  But what are we to do with it?  The baby is so weak, fragile, vulnerable; what difference would it make in the scheme of things?  Three years of ministry, sayings, doings, a match barely stays lit and you can see the end coming fast and strong; let go of it quick lest you burn yourself. His friends let go of him when he needed them the most. Gift unwrapped.  Once liked 👍, even loved, now dispensable.  Like last December's Facebook post.  Meanwhile another war broke out, another child died, another bullet flied, another stomach left empty, another longing unsatisfie

Dear Eugene, Every morning I'd have a list of chores to do before writing. Only that they are not mundane tasks to me.  They are spiritual disciplines, firm habits, pilgrimage to reach a place where I'll be spoken to. Nothing and everything is necessary. My wife just called me upstairs in the middle of my last sentence; she spilled something on the ceramic stove top, Chinese porridge dessert, starch, sugar, something for tonight for Others sloshing into the morning of this Self. A nasty circle.  You know what that means if you ever had the pleasure to deal with one of those.  A crater on earth as it is on the moon.  Alien from space beyond my tranquil inner being to take my civility hostage.  Big green oblong face, dark convex eyes staring at me. Someone please hand me a laser gun. I took pinches of baking soda and methodically baptized the circle, a light sprinkle here, a full immersion there, all denominations welcome. Sand mandala , I thought. When I walked

Dear Eugene, What a tragedy to see no shape in our life. Or should I say to give no shape to our life? Or to know no shape of our life? Postmodernism tries to convince us the only shape to anything is the shapelessness of it all, the only truth no truth, the only objective fact our subjective imposition.  Postmodernism can't be true because it defeats itself by admitting even postmodernism is a subjective way of seeing. But who needs fancy philosophy?  We all see shape in our life, give shape to our life.  We need meaning to stay human. Some think the shape of our life is imposed from without; others think (or hope) it comes from within.  Our life experience tells us the reality is something in between.  (That's if we accept there is a "reality.") We don't follow Frodo for 450 thousand words (and that's just counting The Lord of the Rings trilogy) because his journey is shapeless.  Many of the greatest stories are literal travelogue: the hom

Dear Eugene, When you have too much feeling in you, you don't know how you should feel. That's what autumn does to me.  And it doesn't help that  Gord Downie passed away last night .  I feel sad and thankful.  For Gord.  For autumn. Last night before bed I was reading this remarkable collection of graphic journalism by the Russian artist/activist Victoria Lomasko , thanks to my local library for showcasing her little gem. You said in your book "Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work": "It is not the pastor’s job to simplify the spiritual life, to devise common-denominator formulas, to smooth out the path of discipleship. Some difficulties are inherent in the way of spiritual growth — to deny them, to minimize them, or to offer shortcuts is to divert the person from true growth. It is the pastor’s task, rather, to be companion to persons who are in the midst of difficulty, to acknowledge the difficulty and thereby give it significance, and to converse

Dear Eugene, Rain and wind, Sumi hates them. I don't mind them, sometimes even grow to enjoy them.  Still just as often hate them with the gusto of a mighty gust. I like them when I can afford to, such as when I was walking across the Granville bridge yesterday after a hearty lunch with a hearty friend, little umbrella in hand, head full of eager anticipation of what's waiting for me at the other end of the rainbow.  Usually a bookstore. "Raindrops keep falling on my head..." 🎵 The dreamy poet can afford to romanticize because the sickness in him only feels like dying but is nothing remotely close and his healthy steps know it. When he is up the roof in the rain and wind his sorry poetry would go down the clogged drain he's trying to fix, the word "hate" he spells in many different colorful ways. Peace in this world is a contingency.  It is the next autumn-themed specialty coffee in our warm hands, a vacation to escape from the hostility o

Dear Eugene, It's six in the morning now. I'm facing a forest, in the cold but not too cold, in almost complete darkness, scribbling on a page that hopefully I could make out the content when someone eventually shines a light on it, whoever that's "out there," taking care of this light-giving business. When you're standing at the edge between light and darkness, you wonder.  You imagine. You seek to see, to know, must to not fall into despair. The forest is dark.  Shapeless. Who's to know if light will ever come again?  No one can be sure.  No one promised us. Yet I'm standing here like a covenant was made, not least to me personally, and I'm banking on its fulfillment, for a miracle to come. It doesn't escape me that I can write in this state of blindness only because I've learned how to during the many previous gifted episodes of seeing.  Had I been in complete darkness all along I wouldn't be able to discern there's

Dear Eugene, The world does not take Hollywood seriously.  Never did, never will. She is easy to like, at times even to love.  But to trust her, to "put your faith in" her is to forget she has never meant to be more than flippant.  Her magnificent outpouring might sometimes be inspiring, but what must go on is only a show after all. The news headline asks: " As scope of Weinstein conduct widens, questions arise: who knew what and when? " We don't need Cohen to tell us, the answer is " Everybody knows ." " If there was ever an event that I was at and Harvey was doing this kind of thing and I didn’t see it, then I am so deeply sorry, because I would have stopped it ," Matt Damon said. Yes, of course, Jason Bourne, you "would have stopped it."  If only you knew.  You just didn't know that's all.  You would have if you could have. "This kind of stuff can’t happen," Damon proceeded to say.  As if he was bo

Dear Eugene, I'm good at love  I'm good at hate  It's in between I freeze Leonard Cohen, "A Thousand Kisses Deep" There are people who can only see the worst in a person, and there are those who seek to redress the imbalance of love and hate by saying we should always try to see the best. My understanding is that it's the dangerous water of in-between that we are called to navigate.  At least this is my reading of the Bible.  It has always been the reading of good literature.  Anything that attempts not to take in the full measure of human reality appeals to either cynicism or superficiality, both willful blindness. A person may not be doing a good job navigating the dangerous water of in-between, but at least he knows navigate he must to stay afloat in this human business. I guess this is one of the biggest qualms I have with social media, that people would keep telling stories on dry land about their loves and hates, rarely make an honest attemp

Dear Eugene, Imagination.  Seeing.  Faith. A trinity of words that if not synonymous in aspects are at least part and parcel of each others. We Christians talk a lot about faith, not enough seeing, almost never imagination.  I wonder why.  All the more perplexing when faith is the most abstract, seeing the most common, imagining the most pervasive. Maybe it's because by "faith" we mean merely an assent to a particular formulation of doctrine, especially one about soteriology (means and nature of "personal" salvation), that we either "get it" or not, take or leave, heaven or hell we go, nothing is left to the...imagination. Yesterday's sermon was about the "Insane Generosity" of the first church and ours, and how the world is to know us for our pathological hospitality, incorrigible to our very core, that nothing can stop us from giving and caring about the fullness, wholesomeness of our neighbors and neighborhood. Of course we

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.  Prejudices.  Ulterior mot

Dear Eugene, Nobel surprised yet again, this time with a "safe" choice , not obscure enough, not political either.  Come on, Nobel, get weird again! (For the record I like Ishiguro...but don't you think our Atwood has done something similar and did it more and better?  Just my humble opinion of course, and really no point to compare apple and orange; all great writers are strange fruit in their own rights.) I wonder if we should all be our own Nobel committee, take a step back and consider the stories that we are being told and keep telling ourselves, keep living into them as if for real? But they are real, aren't they?  We are living them; how can they be anything but real? Like, the invisible hand of the market, the endless prospect of ceaseless progress, the contradictory but equally real fatalism tried proven and true if by nothing else but the simple act of human dying tragically comically without-a-soundedly every hour every minute every second--aren&#

Dear Eugene, They are set to announce tomorrow this year's winner of Nobel prize in literature.  What is your guess?  Your wish?  I know you have one.  A few? Nobel Lit is notoriously hard to predict, all book lovers know.  I did pretty well, picking Alice Munro and Bob Dylan in the previous years and got lucky.  My wife can attest I am not making this up. This year?  My prediction is: either Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or someone one has never heard of from a country one will likely never visit.  My reason?  The former is a perennial favorite, the latter to compensate for last year's populist choice. Enough dumb fun.  Art is not a race--what is the finishing line to cross?  The Nobel committee has an agenda; as long as we know that, the dumb fun will remain clean.  If the purpose of giving out the prize is nothing more than for the world to hear a prophetic voice, then I am all for it. With that purpose in mind, I have three prophetic voices to nominate to the comm

Dear Eugene, Tom Petty has passed away. Still remember about 25 years ago in a concert celebrating Bob Dylan's 30 years as a recording artist, Petty with a few then and now still well known musicians were on stage doing Dylan's " My Back Pages ." Crimson flames tied through my ears, rollin' high and mighty traps Pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps "We'll meet on edges, soon, " said I, proud 'neath heated brow Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth, "rip down all hate, " I screamed Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull, I dreamed Romantic facts of musketeers foundationed deep, somehow Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now So to Dylan, and by extension to these once rebellious rockers, to "grow younger" is to learn to shut up and stop protesting. I can understand the sentiment, even th

Dear Eugene, Why do we find it so difficult to speak a meaningful word in face of something like the mass shooting in Las Vegas? Trump called the massacre "pure evil"--as compared to what less-pure ones?  Mistakenly opened your neighbor's mail and dumped the evidence in the garbage? The adjective "pure" is meaningless, because the words "evil" and "goodness" are both undefined.  We can't give a definitive meaning to either because we cannot face up to goodness and thus cannot face down evil. Facing up to goodness means we'll need to acknowledge how "purely evil" we all are; facing down evil means to recognize there's still a last semblance of goodness in us, however feeble in its evil-mitigating power, however impossible it often feels to make tangible again a long-lost memory of our first commitment. We were commissioned to be moral creatures.  A commitment was made in our inception--on our behalf?--just for