Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, What does it mean by a person living his/her true "vocation"? I've read enough books on the topic to give you more insightful answers, but I will spill my guts for you so beware of the smell: I think it means knowing the best way to live the next day and then go ahead to do just that. One time, years ago, in a youth fellowship sharing circle, I spoke those exact words (though we weren't talking about "vocation") and tears came down my cheeks.  It was embarrassing, especially when obviously no one else knew what I was crying about.  No one other than me and myself, Alex and his own funny business.  It's ok , they couldn't say, for they knew not what was "not ok" about the situation I portrayed. I don't think the statement is a good definition for "living one's vocation," but I am not going to revise it.  It is not good enough because, well, to begin with, we are given more than one day in our life.  ...

Dear Eugene, I've come to realize there is a lot of self-preservation in me.  I would like to say I love myself too much but really I am in fear of my own falling, soon and again.  God is mighty and I know he certainly cares, but it is always good to have something on the side. I am walking on a long dark road now.  There is a man in front of me, the cigarette between his fingers the only light guiding him and me.  He is careful with it to keep it burning.  It is good to hold something in your hand when the road is long and dark.  Smoke lingers in the air smells like a beast hungry for love. You wallow in the solace of its breath and at once everything is so painlessly simple. Rain is not falling heavily like yesterday and I count that as an extra blessing.  I can also see it as blessing withheld the day before.  Holding and withholding, we're playing tug of war with God. A flashing light is coming towards me, its rhythm interrupting my...

Dear Eugene, "No one can do to us what we are not already doing to ourselves."  Do you believe this? I am not sure. First I am not sure if I invented this line; I Googled it and couldn't find anything.  Then I am not sure if I actually believe it.  It is too general a claim for it to not be presumptuous. The statement came up in a conversation with a friend and since then I tried to test its truthfulness.  What answers for only me answers no one at all; so I tried to read it between the lines of other people's stories. Well, I am still not sure. I've made an assumption, that there is an irreducible humanity behind every human face, however distorted the face might once, sometimes, or even frequently be, for whatever reason, inflicted from within or imposed from without.  It is another way to say one can kill the body but not the spirit.  It also supposes the past matters in our future eternal.  It ultimately speaks about hope, that ...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday afternoon I worshiped and it was worship proper. It's in a church in a shady part of town.  When the heat ran (and it ran loud) stench from the street was called in and sang beauty with us.  At my own church in the morning my pastor preached about the thin gauzy space between heaven and earth where worship happens.  The space was that much thinner last afternoon, my milky eyes clear, cleared. Someone prostrated himself, risked being called a clown, or worse, "charismatic," and I joined him in vision but not in flesh; I was too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good, too clean to fall short of glory.  Others waved their arms, chanted, uttered cacophony that somehow blended in; everything all of one piece.  Someone pulled out a harmonica and it didn't shrill like mine. I looked up and saw a few black wires running across the ceiling, nylon cable ties marked the stations of its pilgrimage.  I'd have cut the end of the cable...

Dear Eugene, There's a change in my life and from now on I'll be a night writer. I will write you last thing of the day instead of first thing in the morning, reflections baptized by the vicissitude of waking hours, not fanciful beasts of yesternight. I've just installed a blue-light filter on this laptop because my eyes are tired, but it doesn't help my rapidly dying brain.  I can already feel a difference in my writing: my tongue is not as sharp.  Thoughts don't rush out to meet the sun, don't charge forward to seize the day.  I am composing a dirge. The change is neither good nor bad, asks for no appraisal; a change it simply is.  The life I live is what calls for sizing up, under a new metric, stretched to an unfamiliar dimension.  It is up to me to get down to the new shapes and strange colors, draw at night a picture that would hopefully survive the clear-eyed scrutiny of the next daybreak. Goodnight.  A night that closes with words has t...

Dear Eugene, I like the word "robust."  It means having a healthy strength, wholesome goodness, with a dynamic answering power to the complexities of life, things and people that make no sense to us from where we are standing now but we are open and attentive to the challenges of the strange and new, going from strength to strength  with a however hesitant honesty about our own flaws and failures past, present and very likely the very next minute. That's not the exact dictionary definition but how I meant it every time I used the word.  It is never a word of achievement to me but one of faith and yearning, a vision. The opposite of robustness is not cowardliness or powerlessness; it is brute force: twisting people and things out of their shapes into a contortion we deem right, cookie-cutting with a machete and we ain't chopping cookies either, and the most disgusting of all, in the name of love and goodness, God on our side.  " What would Jesus do? ...

Dear Eugene, Were you once like me, expecting bad things to happen all the time, especially when getting closer to Christmas, when everything is supposed to be nice? I think it has to do with the rain and possible snow.  The cold weather, this part of the world.  The shopping, people getting what they want and never keeping any.  People hopping on airplanes, leaving home to find home.  Friends gathering, in hope to present to each other a better past year than the one before.  Things are supposed to be on the up and up, to  progress .  Not that we are naive about life, but if we are to go down, we would like to be seen as doing so gracefully.  Nobody cries in a Christmas party, colors too bright for that.  Please leave your even most positive spin on a cancer tale at the door, where the slush is. But, man, look at the news.  I don't want to look at it.  I don't even know why I am looking at it.  Other people's trouble,...

Dear Eugene, A lousy poem I wrote today.  I might make it better, but that will take a worse day. Who wants to speak forever From a place of poverty? End of a rope you let me hang The long and short of my misery "Daddy, daddy, did you forget about me?" Melodrama in high key Is it music to your ears Pounds to the crash of tears? You give me Good News But can I do without the bad? A shade of darkness you insist A black bride I can't refuse In a village of the damned We exchange smiles, shake hands Not much crying going on To do that alone we stand An ounce of happiness Costs an ounce of the exact same A fair price I paid twice Now nothing left to my name To gain is to lose The gist of it I get To live is to die Can't get over that yet I walk in cemetery To learn from the experienced For every word I spoke for them They spoke a word to me I'd lack nothing If only you'd fill me up But how does it work With your gift of ...

Dear Eugene, A friend told me after reading Rowan Williams she could finally understand what she used to find incomprehensible about me. I'll need to elaborate on that, and, in Rowan Williams fashion, I think there are twenty different angles I could open things up but let me choose a few. Rowan Williams is a truth speaker.  He speaks in a way that honors the truth that he speaks about.  The fact that I suppose many will find my last statement having no true significance speaks about how untrue we often speak.  It happens on the pulpit as often as it does in a mall.  I tell it like it is and you should take it likewise.  Neither of us expect to be moved by my truth-speaking, not for even an inch, but please come again next Sunday.  Would that be debit or credit? How  we speak speaks about the  Whats  we speak about.  The medium is the message; the words are the deeds.  " The only preachers, the only lovers, with any...

Dear Eugene, As followers of Jesus, how do we want others to see us? It's a strange question, isn't it?  We think we know the answer and even lived the answer, but we have only acted out a set of assumptions. For example, we are supposed to be decent people.  We might not be "nice" people when it comes to insisting on what is "right," because, you know, (another assumption) being in the right is very important. In this age of compromise, we might or might not engage in vigorous lobbying to set the world right (even in matters of cardinal concern in the traditional "Christian agenda," such as sexuality and...well, sexuality), but, in order to honor God and make Christianity look good, we must direct the world's eyesight to what we are doing right, the dignified aspects of our life, if not stories of triumphs, at least a stubborn insistence on common decency.  Who are we to call ourselves Christians if we are not even half decent? Um...

Dear Eugene, Last year around this time did you plan to have a last Christmas?  Even if you were to know would you have had your last Christmas any differently? If everything's been well, no one would plan to change, even if one knows a change is overdue.  Yet it is a sad thing though, isn't it, to look ahead and see the next Wednesday as a repeat of today?  We make it sound like there is some good in staying put, stability and control, but how far can we wish to extend our streak of inertia before our life is set in stone for good?  We must look at the stone with serious intention and articulate what is so good about it. I do know one thing good, maybe two.  It gives us a capacity to give, when we know what to expect about our own life, a sort of freedom to set others free.  But free like what?  Free like us.  So if this first good is true, then we must be honest and confront our own unfreedom.  It's probably a good idea to not feed...

Dear Eugene, "Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home," so said Chesterton. I think it also works the other way, for those who have finally managed to come in from the cold, that Christmas celebration in every home overheat, for every body overstuffed, and with every sight and sound of yuletide promise oversold, is built upon a most tragic and intentional paradox that we are perpetually far from home and no ugly Christmas sweater can make the sick joke less sick just because we see virtue in self-deprecating humor. Yesterday I was in Richmond and took my in-laws to a new Chinese supermarket in a mall that's pretty much dead if not for that new corner.  It is a carved-out paradise: bubble tea, bubbling food, bubble jackets.  All safe to feel safe.  A man of a different race guarded the door but I didn't know what he was guarding against and he looked like neither did he.  I...

Dear Eugene, This past Saturday I walked to church.  Took me 3 hours, about my average when I took it slow.  I planned my time but didn't plan my way.  I tried to go on a different street every time. This Saturday was extra special though, the first time I started this--let's not call it "pilgrimage," but simply a longer walk--before sunset and walked into it.  It got cold pretty quickly and didn't take long for me to know I underdressed for the occasion in more sense than one.  Even the biggest street, the one I chose for the final part of my journey, felt lonely when everyone was in a hurry to abandon her to her own moonlit melancholy. It took about 45 minutes before I could start stop talking to myself, nonsense I regurgitated throughout the day with casual determination.  Then I became a-lone, which in Cantonese sounds exactly like "a hole," a receptacle with its bottom fell out.  So I just took things in as they came, acknowledging no dee...

Dear Eugene, November it is, still early, a time that I would always look back on, always with regret, by the time Christmas is over.  The longing and anticipation , I would say in my saying goodbye, I want them back.   More than I want back Christmas herself, that's how petty my love for her is. So here you are, Alex, right in the thick of longing and anticipation, high hopes and impatience, How do you feel?  What would you choose to do differently this year to finally regret not as deeply? Well, it's a rainy November morning: what's one to do about and with that?  I need faith to see good creation out of bad material.  And yes, I have long given up doing away with regret; the irony is if I ever can it's because I've never cared for her and would see no opportunity to care for her any better, to prophesy my missing her and fulfill precisely that. Christmas, my Alison , Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking When I hear the silly...

Dear Eugene, " There are plenty of subjects that Christians seem to treat with a consistent lack of seriousness, with a painful lack of imagination and sympathy.  One such subject is loneliness." There the wise man Rowan Williams began his sermon , and I knew right away I was standing on sacred ground so I stopped everything and held my breath. " Most of the time we are so caught up in a bland rhetoric of 'communion' and 'sharing' that we fail utterly to confront that more puzzling and disturbing fact of irreducible human isolation. 'We pray for the old and lonely' – words heard quite frequently in intercessions, implying that loneliness is an unfortunate condition from which some people suffer, like diabetes or color-blindness. But what about the loneliness of each one of us? Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we’re married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Lonelin...

Dear Eugene, It's getting colder.  Colder than yesterday, I think, for sure than two days ago.  For me it is easy to tell: heat is finally running in my house. What is the point to compare with the past?  Today is singularly cold, cold the way I'm receiving it as meaning and direction for the very present.  One can review what has gone on in the past days months and years in a weather app, but really, who does that?  Not until a hobby becomes a profession, something personal is at stake, money and reputation, we are responsible for and responsive to nothing but the sensations of the here and now. You see, Eugene, I don't even know where I am going with this.  I was thinking about something else when I walked up the hill this morning, and sometimes I would even record my own voice articulating early morning thoughts though I didn't today.  But that moment has gone; what mattered then doesn't matter now. What was useful once is now useless, li...

Dear Eugene, I'd love to write about Christmas for the next two months, for that's how long I want it to last.  From now till Dec 25 (or maybe a couple of days after that) I will play nothing but Christmas music, the best melodies mankind has created and so many of them.  I would love to outdo Chesterton , not in insight or volume of writing of course, but in earnestness to speak about Christmas. But where do I start?  I'll need time and space to compose a tune worthwhile, and I strained my back raking leaves.  I actually need to get off the keyboard, like, right now. So I will do only this today, to share my favorite Christmas song from Elvis, which also happens to be my favorite Elvis song. And maybe a few more words. I was in shops checking out Christmas stuffs yesterday.  The sight and sound and smell were all very familiar and superficial but I couldn't get enough of them.  Like the Elvis song.  And in that way I think Elvis really g...

Dear Eugene, Rowan Williams quoted Annie Dillard when he spoke about the last book of the Bible, Revelation: "Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return." But we are all growing, aren't we, growing differently and at different pace?  There needs to be grace and understanding, time and space, to allow the variance, inconsistency, even i...

Dear Eugene, Last night, Halloween, firecracker night. Earlier in the day, an umbrella with a big and heavy handle dropped on the floor of the bus I was riding, and Lady Worry beside me jumped like she was shot in the chest, hand on wound.  Before that she was staring at my big lunch bag like I was carrying a bomb. I am sure she didn't react the same last night to each of the many crackings.  Violence, once you get used to it, becomes a tedium, a default element to work with and work around in the new normal. Last night I pretended I was in a war zone, hid in my blanket and tried to fall asleep, the way a child in a war zone pretends it's just firecrackers on Halloween to fall upward to a feebly imagined heaven, the way the great British novelist R. C. Hutchinson pretended to have been one and many of the Poles in WWII driven like cattle in a long and most tedious train ride to Siberia wastelands and came up with a masterpiece that not many have read and probably wo...