Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, This morning I emailed my two teenage kids: "Let me invite you to spend some time this weekend to read this short story while you are praying for God's guidance about the burden of a vision I have shared with you just now, and see if you can find Jesus between the lines: 'Dimension' by Alice Munro ." I must've read this story more than ten times.  Yesterday morning I read the news and this morning I spend two hours to meditate on the story again.  Still hits me like nothing else. Praying for a new dimension breaking in. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, "People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again. I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!" So said Donald Trump.  Yesterday I read in a Christian magazine quoting him, saying something along the same line, about him being the savior of Christmas, if not Jesus himself.  I am ashamed to say I used to write for this magazine. I suppose I shouldn't be writing when I feel angry.  Especially on Christmas day.  I have no right to be angry.  A Desert Father once said the only reason to get angry at a brother is to bring him closer to Jesus, and no other reason is justifiable.  I need to stop writing and start praying. Let me share with you an excerpt from Rowan Williams' masterful little book " Being Christian " on baptism.  The best way to fight against the anti-Christ is to know, to love, and be like Christ. Merry Christmas, my dear pastor.  Thank you f...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I had a long breakfast conversation with a friend. Like many, instead of seeing the sacredness of questioning , she mistakes human's searching, a heart's yearning, for disloyalty to tradition and betrayal to her community, social expectations she has long suffered from but couldn't see a reason, wouldn't have the courage to stop their self-perpetuation. Since I shared the Gospel with her a while back, she started to ask questions.  Yesterday's breakfast was about looking for answers together.  Searching for food that satisfies. She said she couldn't accept the idea of God becoming a man, becoming the man that is Jesus.  I said I share her doubt wholeheartedly.  The day I stop to bewilder over it is the day I cease " to wonder like a little child, to find mystery in everything, every day, everywhere, to be surprised continually, to clap one's hands in glee as every brilliant hour flashes past. " Jesus' incarnati...

Dear Eugene, When you hear a prophecy so all-embracing that you don't want to add to or subtract from it a word lest you diminish its far-reaching vision, you have no choice but to present it whole to the world. This morning I am contemplating on a passage from Rowan Williams' little book "Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement."  He was talking specifically about the Church, but also spoke what this father finds no word to speak about his own family and his relation to it. “I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters.  I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God.  Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me—because what...

Dear Eugene, What does it mean to be hospitable in an inhospitable world?  This seems to be one of the many Christmas questions that haunts humanity still. I like my new kitchen, but I really would rather have my old one back.  Does wealth discredit a Christian's discipleship?  I am sure many wise people would have many wise things to say about this topic.  The reality for me, though, is simple: that my hospitality in this family sanctuary will now need to dance on the slippery veneer of vanity that is my sparkling new counter-top.  I love its singular uniqueness but am not too sure about where its grain pattern leads. Everything beautiful points towards Jesus.  It does until it doesn't. I fear I am too well-adjusted a person living too ordered a life for Christ to work through me.  I am not hospitable and am frequently afraid of its implication.  I am not saying this just to entice your consoling counter-argument and thus double down on m...

Dear Eugene, I think this is the first year that I really know what Christmas is about. I know, I know.  When you say something like this people think you are writing dialogue for a Hallmark movie (which really is a horror movie with fake tears wasted instead of strawberry jam).  But I am not granting myself a poetic licence to exploit. Let me vindicate me. I used to write a monthly column for a Chinese magazine, for years, and every December I would challenge myself to say something new about Christmas, something that would surprise even myself as  I was writing it. It is a tall call.  My self-talk, especially about my own writing, tends to be severe.  I don't know how Elvis did it with his Christmas songs, maudlin liquid fat with an air of authentic dignity, sacramental (sacred-minded) cheese-balls.  I was aiming for that every December. I think my Christmas piece did get better over the years (by the above non-standard).  Still, all thes...

Dear Eugene, I guess I get depressed quite often. I don't want to admit to it, I don't want to talk about it, not because of any stigma attached to depression, but because "depression" is not really the word to describe how I feel. There was a time in history that "depression" might have been the word, but its expansive and substantive meaning has since shriveled to a hackneyed buzzword, expropriated for our modern lexicon to print easy labels and sell wonder drugs, a bad state of being to keep under control but how far and to what possible good end we don't know.   There is a dent; it must be bad... “BLESSED ARE YOU WHO HAS given each man a shield of loneliness so that he cannot forget you. You are the truth of loneliness, and only your name addresses it. Strengthen my loneliness that I may be healed in your name, which is beyond all consolations that are uttered on this earth. Only in your name can I stand in the rush of time, only when this lo...

Dear Eugene, What is there to speak when the truth chooses to remain elusive, anonymous, silent?  What is a preacher to preach when God chooses to not show up?  Can He?  Of course, don't you think? " Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known ," thus says the Lord who created heaven and earth. But what if the problem is not His?  That we think we are calling on the name of the One True Lord but we aren't?  What if we were just seduced and deceived by the "sweet poison of the false infinite," as C. S. Lewis puts it, and thought we were tasting the real thing? What if God doesn't show up because He wants us to wait?  What if the moment He asks for our waiting happens right in the middle of a sermon, at a tight or even dangerous cross-section where we would rather get out of asap? It's been a year since Leonard Cohen passed away.  (I am still surprised you've made no mention of him i...