Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Last night I dropped off my daughter at church early, had a few hours to myself.  I picked up some CDs from the library, Christmas music I didn't know exists until then.  I picked up a magazine about Canada's history and thought about Sears. So I wandered into Sears, soon to be out of business.  I was looking for a magazine of sorts, a final edition of the Sears Christmas catalog.  For keepsake.  To freeze a moment as it were. Well, there was none. There were empty shelves and fixtures for sale, hollow workers wondering about their last shift, how it will all go down right to the final minute, service for sale but to whom next. I still remember a conversation I had with a Zellers toy department personnel, very close to the store's final days.  It was around this time of the year.  My son was suffering from a high fever that wouldn't go away.  I was there to get him something to cheer him up.  (Ended up getting a Stor...

Dear Eugene, How hard it is for a person to change! (I feel stupid already for what I said just now because it is too obvious, too trite for the words to be even uttered.) And "born again"?  How elusive an idea, how utopian a dream, how unfeasible a proposition! I hate this rain and wind.  I absolutely detest driving in the dark in this rain and wind.  It could have been a much more reasonable affair if people are to be reasonable about their own life and others', to not dress in deep dark colors wearing headphone and sometimes thumbing their phone while on the road. But I can't change even my own kids.  It is not fashionable to dress bright.  It is pathetic to wear a flashing light.  I hope they don't look at their phone but I doubt my hope.  There's always something coming through the phone that they have to answer to.  How does one jump out of what is expected of him and look at life anew? The world is killing them softly if not fin...

Dear Eugene, Last night I took the ferry and then hopped on a bus that I knew only the general direction it was going.  I heard street name being called out one stop after another, none of them I knew, going through deep darkness, living fully at the mercy of others. Streaks of rain rolled down the window, further marring my haze-glazed view.  I saw a church and liked how it looked, even if only a fine distortion.  There's a quaint street-side café that I promised myself I will visit one day (though forgot its name right away).  I changed seat half-way to get a different perspective, one at a darker back corner; artificial light tends to dispel mystery. After about an hour of persistent reminder of the stranger that I was, I finally couldn't resist and used Google map to locate myself.  Maybe this time I have gone too far... Yesterday morning a lady told me about her experience serving the poor: We learned how to depend on each others--we need t...

Dear Eugene, Can a person truly love another person while hating someone else? Do you find my question weird?  Somehow I think if there's a person who would allow a question such as this to blaze across his mind that person might be you.  How lucky I am to have a weird pastor! Can a person truly love another person while loving someone else less?  Now this gets yet closer to what I am asking. And you know I don't mean a rival lover, a love triangle.  I mean to ask  Can a person truly love any person while loving anyone else less?  Can a mother truly love her child, any child, while loving some other child less?  Can I be fair to a human being while being unjust towards another human being, any human being, in all mankind? Undivided loyalty, fully completely given to everyone at all times, that seems to be what love is asking of us. How so? Christmas is a season of giving, they say.  But why?  Who says?  Why give?  T...

Dear Eugene, We are all Bible translators, aren't we, when we are serious about going on the Way that is Jesus? You taught me, " Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son ." In every conversation I had, even the most mundane ones-- especially the most mundane ones--I found myself reaching for the repository of God's words, tying up threads to form strands, reworking trite doctrines and esoteric lingoes into a peculiar particularity of the I-and-Thou in the here-and-now, creating with my conversation partner a unique pattern of a tapestry all about Jesus, with our quirks and flaws, warts and all, woven into a fabric of many loose ends, work-in-progress, to-be-continued...

Dear Eugene, I said I am not going to write about playing the piano... So here I am just posting what my dog wrote.  (Click to enlarge.) Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, Recently I've been busy fooling around with my piano. I think that's what I want to do for Christmas, as a gift to baby Jesus.  Songs would come out of you when you are ready to worship.  And I don't mean singing hymns.  I mean melodies would just naturally come out of you, sad or sweet and usually both. A character in Doctor Zhivago said it well, “Wait, I’ll tell you what I think myself. I think that if the beast dormant in man could be stopped by the threat of, whatever, the lockup or requital beyond the grave, the highest emblem of mankind would be a lion tamer with his whip, and not the preacher who sacrifices himself. But the point is precisely this, that for centuries man has been raised above the animals and borne aloft not by the rod, but by music: the irresistibility of the unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has been considered up to now that the most important thing in the Gospels is the moral pronouncements and rules, but for ...

Everybody I talk to is ready to leave  With the light of the morning  They've seen the end coming down  Long enough to believe  That they've heard their last warning  Standing alone  Each has his own ticket in his hand  And as the evening descends  I sit thinking 'bout Everyman   Dear Eugene, Last night I had a long and beautiful talk with a friend about poverty, the poverty of everyman. How our heart are ultimately barren, always thirsty.  Eat but not be satisfied --is there a picture sadder than this? "The Gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that in God's economy, the overflow of riches happens where the need is greatest; where human dignity is most obscured, grace blazes out in excessive and extravagant ways to remedy the balance." We sat there talking about ourselves, thinking about Everyman. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, I was again reading Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" last night, this time a new translation that came out not too long ago.   "While Lara, slowly going around the praying people, copper money clutched in her hand, went to the door to buy candles for herself and Olya, and went back just as carefully, so as not to push anyone, Prov Afanasyevich managed to rattle off the nine beatitudes, like something well-known to everyone without him.   Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness …    Lara walked, suddenly shuddered, and stopped. That was about her. He says: Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves. They have everything before them. So He thought. It was Christ’s opinion." Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden...some "opinion" Christ had... When I was young no one in church ever helped me to mak...

Dear Eugene, Have you ever woken up in the morning and felt like you've lost something near and dear to you, that you didn't know where it is...and worst of all, you didn't even know what it is? A sense of inexplicable loss that demands an explanation, in words but more than words. It's like after making love being sent away with a gesture to clarify you weren't really loved after all, desperate texts firing back and forth to salvage a teenage love that is growing older by the second, shriveling into a grotesque finality shivering on the roadside that a passerby can't help but look away. What have I lost?  Why is this loss so profound yet I don't even know what it is? In the movie "Leaving Las Vegas," the Nicolas Cage character sold everything, checked into a motel to drink himself to death.  He read the name of the motel on a sign, " The hole you're in... " I am missing Jesus, I know. When we don't care about wha...

Dear Eugene, This morning: " The bodies of 26 teenage women and girls have been found in the Mediterranean, Italian police said. " Were they tortured, sexually abused?   Does it still matter, now that they are no more?   Who is going to make such non-matter matter again?   Who is going to speak a word for them now that they are silenced? When did it happen?   When I was holding up my pious hands singing songs in church?   When I was articulating my sound theology out of my pizza breath on Saturday night?   When I was watching some Chinese Rocky movie for the umpteenth time with my family on Sunday night, followed right after by some ultra-HD nature "documentary" that tells of the same story of survival-of-the-fittest, over-eaten, over-talked, over a hill that I knew not the purpose to climb but did it anyway? The 26 teenage girls did not survive; I did.   I guess that's the story.   I guess I should be happy I came out on the winni...

Dear Eugene, Saturday almost evening I was waiting for the bus to meet up with some church friends, and, despite what my app told me, the bus managed to skipped a 30-minute-once round and arrived 10 minutes late for the next.  So 40 minutes in the cold was I. The world is waiting.  We all are, especially this time of the year, exuberance abound if we can take the malls' early Christmas decoration at face value, loneliness unhinged and slowly snowballing to December 25 and beyond Auld Lang Syne, sliding down the veneer of superficial good-cheer and well-wishing, descending to somewhere dark and blue. Sometimes the wait is too much, like Waiting for Godot, and a man becomes nihilistic and his existence absurd. Still remember the absurdity that was the  Starbucks red "holiday cup" two years ago?  An "inclusive" act they said; Political Correctness on steroid it was.  Since then last year they've reverted back to the usual Christmas motif, and I c...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I talked about reaching out to the "offscreen space," and I wonder if one might think it means just a clever way to look at things, to gain a skewed perspective for some twisted reason, obscure for the sake of obscurity. After all, isn't "offscreen space" the most stable and dependable vehicle of exploit in horror flicks cheap or not?  (And that's why they tend to be cheap; anyone can pull an OS thrill effectively--door creaking off-screen, camera pulled back oh-so-slightly to reveal a distorted shadow at a hidden corner...) So why reach out to the OS?  What are we seeking? The answer is, it all depends on the entire, fuller, holistic framework that one anchors his imagination on, within and without what is readily perceivable to us in our limited vision of the here-and-now.  WYSIWYG we adamantly resist.  There's something "out there"!   (Can you  see  what's in this picture?) Here's the transcript o...

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...