Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, There is something about loving Jesus that is different from loving anything else. Now you know how I am; I can get needlessly philosophical and start to dissect the above statement, define every word, validate the choice of a particular preposition, etc. But no, I must resist doing this.  There is a place for strenuous exegesis, but it is not here and not today.  I am going to let it come out of me and risk being ridiculed.  God help me to talk like a child. So here it is: When you love Jesus, you want to keep giving this love away, like you're totally surprised by the reckless gift and would love to see everyone else falling in the same love. Pretty unimpressive, right?  I am glad it is not impressive.  I am glad it sounds stupid.  It is so silly that like an Adam Sandler movie there must be something deeply truthful (and disturbing) about it. It goes like this: When I start to think about things and people that I love, stuffs I l...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I talked about truth and courage .  Yes , truth is courageous!  Or should I say truth gives us courage? A piece of truth revealed to me by, say, a scientist will necessarily call out something in me to respond to its truthfulness. I could respond by saying, Well, it's good to know, especially when I need to know stuffs like this to pass test.  I shall bury this knowledge in no time, unlearning it quicker than uninstalling a useless app in my phone... Or I could say, Let me exploit it; it's all about the moolah!  For me, for my kids, for my country, in the name of Me the truth-giver.  People shall remember me for upholding the truth and making mankind great again! Or I could say, Holy luck, how did I stumble into such truth?  I could have been blind all my life, but now I can see a creative potentiality in my new knowing, grand possibilities hitherto unbeknownst erstwhile unto this little me!  My shoulders are heavy, bec...

Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua...

Dear Eugene, What speaks to you?  Who shaped you the most? I asked my friends last week. The generation(s) before us, our background, culture, tradition--all these must be some of the most obvious answers, for good or for bad. For me, it also has to do with spoken words, literature in particular.  For others, it could be the language of science.  God the Spirit speaks to us in different ways. The vision we lack, as I said yesterday, is one that puts everything together, a Way that brings wholeness, not only restores our memory of how things used to be, but also makes true our dream of how things ought to be. That's why, the more I read science and theology, the more I've come to realize people who say science and theology cannot and should not be spoken in the same breath probably do not understand enough about either. There, a periodic table, an account of everything that there is in a breath. There, lovers kissing, breathing life into each other, soul...

Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of...

Dear Eugene, This morning I got to sleep in for another 20 odd minutes, just enough to finish up a nightmare. I was running around in UBC, my alma mater, trying to reach the room where I am going to take a math test.  I thought I knew my way but was all wrong.  Then I went into strange corridors and eventually fell into a bog.  A pretty standard, by-the-numbers bad dream. I woke up and thought, Well, I'm glad that was only a dream.  After all in real life I have only one math test to attend to, no call for such high-strung melodrama... Then I woke up from my waking up and realized, No, I don't even have one math test to attend to in real life! Then I woke up yet again from my waking up to the waking up and realized, No, in real life every step is a test.  The same way in The Odyssey  Penelope tests Odysseus to prove his identity, asking him (actually Eurycleia) to do something that the real Odysseus would know better the difficulty and...

Dear Eugene, On a day like today I walked out of the door with Sumi early in the morning and wondered if we could reach the end of the world if we find no reason to stop. Like a road movie.  Like the man who walks in the desert in " Paris, Texas ," possibly the greatest American movie ever made not by an American.  My heart is aching just now, thinking about this movie. Sometimes I think if I am to turn on a tape recorder and collect everything that has gone through my head during my long walks I could have written a book by the end of it. But ain't that true about everyone else's life?  Every life deserves its cinéma vérité treatment. What makes a story a story is that it has meaning. Even if we say the point of capturing a day in a life is to say how meaningless it all is, we are already trying to mount a meaningful narrative on the "meaningless" life and turn nihilism on its head. The "Preacher" of Ecclesiastes meant to say som...

Dear Eugene, Two days ago right before I started reading the new David Adams Richards novel , I read in the news about a young man killing himself. The headline says: " Shamed in his dog's death, Jeremy Quaile took his own life ".  And this is how the article started: "Jeremy Quaile's dog died alone, and it took several days for anyone to notice. Five months later, Quaile died in much the same way. He had no family and few close friends in Calgary. Like countless people who come to the city in search of opportunity, he left lifelong relationships behind and struggled to forge new ones as deep or as strong. But you might remember his name; it was in the news last summer. Or maybe you saw it on Facebook, alongside comments labelling him an "idiot," a "terrible person" and "human garbage." Strangers cast these judgments on him, knowing nothing of his life and little about the circumstances surrounding his dog's death...

Dear Eugene, What is the biggest human tragedy you've heard of?  I know this sounds very much like a rhetorical question to unveil what I think I know but others don't.  But, no, it is not like that. Maybe let me ask the question again: What is the worst tragedy you've experienced?---but hold there, I am not talking about a single personal experience, or an isolated incident.  I am asking, What is the biggest human tragedy as you experienced it ? In my line of work and various off-work involvements, I talk to people all the time.  And I listen more than I talk.  The question above emerged out of a more positive one--actually, probably the mother of all positive questions: "What is the meaning of life?" Let me tell you, my dear pastor, a sick joke.  Someone told me this; I have my own varied rendition.  But let me tell you the original...my way. There was this tough university professor who was handing out the toughest exam in the toughest ...

Dear Eugene, This past weekend has been a bit of a record, I guess.  I walked a lot.  So much it actually hurt last night. Sometimes I am afraid if I stop walking I may never walk again.  The only way to not die is to keep living.  I think the movie "Forrest Gump" is nonsense but I understand the running part (which, of course, is another way to say maybe I have not been fair to the movie). My next-door neighbor told me earlier this year that to keep herself moving she used to be able to trudge up two blocks and back but now could manage only one, and that she relies on the stop-sign post at the end of our block to recuperate for her return trip, a carrot-on-the-stick not for mere pleasure but for survival. "If I fall, that's it." I thought she exaggerated, even though I saw her leaning on the post many times. Then last week I saw another old man from around the corner doing the same to the post, trying to squeeze power out of it. That's whe...

Dear Eugene, Growing up is as much about unlearning as learning. No one can survive without learning to preserve one's all-important self.  No one can truly live without dying continually in ways big and small to one's petty little self.  One doesn't need to trumpet a great religion or tall calling to know this much is true about life on earth. So what is the fine balance--if to speak of a balance is even a correct frame of mind to comprehend this contradiction?  Is there a scale to adjust how much I should choose to keep or lose myself?  A spectrum of just the right mix of give and take?  And based on what?  If I cheat the scale and did what I didn't mean to do, does it still count favorably to my humanity, or am I risking a deep-down rotting of heart that will one day produce a stench indisputable and inexcusable? Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For ...

Dear Eugene, True theology looks like cathedral but sounds like lullaby.  (I can see you grinning already.) Actually I think any observation of truth more than skin-deep has the same quality.  I am thinking about literature and science, cinema and politics. I like to look at ripples in the water. On the ferry sometimes I would ask if one day mathematician can come up with a formula to account for the past and future journey of every ripple that has ever crossed path with another since the beginning of time and unto the end of (as we know) it. Other times I would think about Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Three Times," with the song " Rain and Tears " playing in my head, sometimes seeing myself as the boy character looking this way, sometimes as the girl looking the other way, always with the ripples keep coming together and breaking apart beneath me. Yet other times I couldn't escape that the phrase "ripples-in-the-water" also means "life go...

Dear Eugene, Don't you agree even if born under the most inauspicious skies a person would still strive for a better tomorrow, a brighter future, some impossible ideals? Oh, the good life, full of fun seems to be the ideal Mm, the good life lets you hide all the sadness you feel You won't really fall in love for you can't take the chance So please be honest with yourself, don't try to fake romance I love this Sacha Distel song, popularized by, of course, Tony Bennett .  There is a touch of irony in every turn of phrase. And I love how Bennett sings it, how the sadness oozes out of a wound of broken dreams with the triple unmitigated, inconsolable up-and-downs ( of-fun , to-be , i-deal ), a fatalism pervasive and powerful but you aren't quite ready yet to make up your mind and let it kill you. I was the one who said I will never let a dog roam in my house.  Yet having loved my own Sumi that is in this world, I would love her unto the end. There used ...

Dear Eugene, Today is garbage day, usually every Tuesday for my street. Every Tuesday morning I would dread looking out the window the first moment there's enough light to reveal the contour of my recycling bin, laid on the curb-side the night before. The thing grows overnight.  Burgeons. What happens is that my neighbors know I barely put anything in my recycling and garbage bins; I try not to create more waste than I need.  So one day during the lawn season after a neighbor asked if she could use the empty space in my compost bin, others took the cue and helped themselves to any empty space they could find in any of my bins. And I don't mind.  It is a great way to bless my neighbors, even though we might have a different level of consciousness about preserving our environment. That's until I started to get orange stickers on my recycling bin, warnings from city workers about wrong items being placed in the bin.  For a law-abiding tax-paying right-s...

Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make ...

Dear Eugene, What a fabulous night it was only 12 hours ago!  God sent angels my way, certainly not because I am holy, but because I am in bad need to see, to be kicked out of my WYSIWYG. Easter Monday was, strangely, a work day for me.  I climbed up the roof of my garden shack early in the morning to touch up on some unfinished business, a constant state of disrepair as steadfast as the possibility of rain and wind in our many tomorrows. Then I prepared some Sunday School material and worked an 8-hour shift, chewing my nails through it, as a symphony of roaring mowers outside kept me alert to my dread that I too need to engage my lawn in a first spring tussle, anxiety exacerbated by up-to-the-minute weather app updates prophesying what I could plainly see in the sky with my naked eyes.  The rain would stay for more than a week after tonight, a pathetic news broken to me apathetically. "Don't let the sun go down on me..." I moaned. My shift would end at 7, ...