Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Last Saturday we were building garden boxed in front of our church, and finally filled them with soil donated by the city.  Part of the condition of this most generous gift is that we'll involve the community in the garden planting, growing and flourishing. We worked hard non-stop all day, and at the end were left with maybe one-third of what was given us, which is a lot.  I wrote up a sign "Free Soil: Full of Grace" and staked it on the soil. People told me after I left that in about half an hour the soil was cleaned up.  Some related to me specifics about size of vehicle that came and the enthusiasm in the air, which smelt of PNE farmhouse. I wonder if Jesus were there, whether he would come up with a parable.  I wonder if it would go something like this (by the way, I was not there; so the following is a complete fabrication on my part): ******* There was a church at the fringe of a marginalized neighborhood, small in ways more than on...

Dear Eugene, This morning on my way walking back home with Sumi, we saw a young student running downhill in the rain, obviously trying to catch a bus. The road was slippery. Even from 20 feet away I could hear his (her?) heart babbling a prayer, "Oh, God, let me not miss this bus!"  His white umbrella looked miserable, defensive and defenseless, failing the one vocation it is called to. There I said a prayer, "In the name of Jesus and his coming alive, I pray that you will protect this young man from falling. I remember how you had sustained me more than once when I was in the same situation, and I know you love him just as much as you love me. So hear our prayers. I trust in you and how you have our best interests in mind, as shown in your Son's sacrifice and carrying the world to turn a corner for good. Amen." I must confess I walked out of my church's Easter service last year, crying. So much fanfare; all empty calories. Of course I judg...

Dear Eugene, I found out last week what I knew already, only I was expecting worse. My neighbor around the corner is a retired auto mechanic.  He walks his pit bull everyday, and for more than a few years since I moved here I would wave him a Hi from across the street while Sumi gives her usual panic bark that necessitates my tug on her leash as a token apology to shroud my habitual embarrassment.  His pit bull is too old to even sport a scorn. Cars would go in and out of his driveway pretty much all year round.  Two summers ago I walked up his driveway with Sumi and asked if I could have him for more than a neighbor; he said he would be honored to keep my car healthy.  Ms. Pit Bull, unleashed as always, lay low next to her boss, who emerged from the shadow of a car's belly, relishing the smell of napalm in the morning.  By then Sumi, loony as she is, have at last realized she is no more than a piece of dead meat to Big Missy and would reciprocate the ...

Dear Eugene, Two months ago I said this to you: " Lately I wrote a lot to you and threw away just as much. I am not happy with my sentences any more. I can't find the right prepositions, how one thing relates to another ." It wasn't because I had nothing to say.  I just had not the language.  I've lost my tongue.  Something new was emerging and the old wasn't adequate anymore. I was struck dumb by an angel. Then I read Rowan Williams and started to speak again: "Where there is salvation, its name is Jesus; its grammar is the cross and the resurrection.  (...) And one, very paradoxical, ground of this trust lies in the fact which Christian contemplatives constantly bring before us, the fact that Christian speech is  for ever  entering into and re-emerging from inarticulacy. There is not one moment of dumbness or loss followed by fluency, but an unending flow back and forth between speech and silence; and if at each stage the silen...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I was talking to my friends about Trump, and this is what I said: "Trump is like a mirror, or magnifying glass. He didn't make people turn into this or that. He simply helps to reflect, magnify what is already there. So what was already there (or not there) in this 'Evangelical Christianity' (that helped to put him there)? Do we find trace of such things (or absence of others) in our own particular brand of Christianity?" I shall begin to answer my own questions. Trump shouldn't surprise us. A fertile soil is cultivated to give growth to what we see today, and let me say my hands were in the soil too. Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world Has crossed the threshold And it has overturned The order of the soul A certain Canadian prophet told us a while back already. We don't have to go far; we don't even ha...

Dear Eugene, I've finally gotten myself a real camera. (Actually my cellphone is probably good enough.  But I allowed myself the little pleasure.  Just a little.) What a beautiful creature!  I exclaimed when I first took it out of the box. How much human ingenuity is involved to put this together, to make it not just functional, but also  beautiful , for one to not only see the world through it, but also see a world in it?!  Who put together the multitude of diverse expertise--engineering, resource procurement, finance, just to name a few--to speak it into existence, from conception to gestation to birth?  And which stork carried it across the ocean to find my clumsy hands? Who am I to deserve something so beautiful?  And how am I to respond to its beauty? I shall honor the Creator every time I lay a four-line boundary to capture a fragment of his boundless greatness. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, Yesterday at a dollar-store a song was playing, vociferous, drowning out cynicism by its sheer force. It sang of love, unfaltering devotion, something to beat the incredible odds against an eventual death.  It demands of me a suspension of disbelief, a poetic imagination, a great faith. A young lady dressed as a security guard leaned against the backdrop of toxically colorful cheap toys, on the strength of a pillar too narrow for product placement.   How much do they pay people to guard $1.25 products? She didn't hear the song.  (At least she didn't show it.) White noise.  Cacophony.  Something that does not concern her.  Like a Facebook post by a mother not yours about her lovely time with her lovely kids, an Instagram picture of a father getting a room ready for his almost born, name picked, technicolor dreamcoat on the cotton-candy-filtered bed, loved a thousand time over already even in the darkness of watery chaos. Her hai...

Dear Eugene, Heavy snow last Friday. Now less than a week later, after a couple nights of heavy rain, all is washed away, first beauty, then filth. All that remains is but a "shiny artifact of the past." Like last Friday didn't happen . Two years ago, I believe, I heard the story of a family that used to come to my then church's cafeteria where I served.  The father passed away while shoveling snow. The lady who related the story tried her best to describe to me this father, his face, his features, for I could recall not even a glint of him. Which is strange. I usually would soak up my surrounding.  For a face that I've seen more than once to vanish, be blotted out from my memory, there must be a deliberate act of sabotage. Then I realized I was looking out from a window.  I asked a rag doll in my arms, my best friend, Why is daddy sleeping in the snow?  He was facing down.  I knew the back of his green John Deere jacket.  I knew that'...