Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, This morning I was ready to take my 2018 calendar off the wall and then realized I didn't recall where the new one is and then woke up further to 2018 not being quite over yet. This is what Christmas is, isn't it, if we take it to mean what it's meant to mean: a new year, a new start, the inception of God's most definitive speaking into our life--as is, as we hoped it be, would rather it not, and everything in between--the beginning of the end, the homeless carrying us home? If I take Jesus as God's most naked, first and final revealing of who He really is and say I now place my trust in that, then there are many I-don't-knows I can no longer say. I can no longer say I don't know hatred and violence never worked and never will, that love and compassion though seem to be forever elusive are choices I am empowered by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus to give one more try. I can no longer say I don't know scorn and con...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I walked to Chinatown, took me hours, and for the whole time listened to Christmas music very old and very new.  Somehow what went into my ears fitted what came into my eyes.  Elements extraneous were invited to take home, right here, close to my heart, and re-traditioned into a way that I might want to revisit next year, dust off, and make new again. I looked at houses, but saw almost no one in them, around them.  It was noon.  And this is Vancouver, Canada.  Christmas wreath on the door, I love those, and put myself inside.   The home I so wanted to build , I said to myself, is not the home I am building now.   My door has no wreath on it. No Christmas lights either.  The kids never asked for any.  I built a Christmas tree with old coat-hangers one windy November afternoon twelve years ago and it stands in my living room year round ever since.  The kids were young then and clothed its dry bones with...

Dear Eugene, How far do you want your kids to question your suggestions? Suggestions about what life is, how it should be lived, learn this to earn that, sow this to reap that, reject this to avoid that, accept this to be accepted for that... The assumption is, bad as sometimes things might seem, there is hope and real satisfaction to be found in the status quo, the way the world as is . One might want to be a change agent to dissect, to dispute, or to even disturb the way things are, but the common language must first be learned for one to at least survive and maybe thrive, to exchange genuine smiles with friends and passersby, to find one's place on planet earth without the need to justify one's coordinates all over again every new morning.  One must learn ABC before questioning why B must follow A and C should always be at the third place. We all know what happens when immature, impressionable minds start to question the order of things.  They can be easily rec...

Dear Eugene, I thought I saw my son on the bus so I texted him, Hey I saw you just now on the bus. I was at the skytrain station, just got off the train and waiting for my bus, number 144.  The number matters, but if one is to make out the digits by zeroing in the far corner where the bus would first emerge and become visible to one standing where I was, it would only be half success.  The name that comes after the numbers tells if your luck is true, if the world is spinning for or against you. I was almost lucky, I understood and accepted it way before the bus pulled close.  So slowly I walked out of the rain and back to the bus station shelter, happy to know I can't lose twice in row (not that it had never happened before). When I hope I dream.  When I dream I don't put my head down.  I saw this good looking boy on the bus sitting at a well-lit spot and it dawned on me he's my son.  As if he shouldn't be on the bus by himself, without...

Dear Eugene, I learned from you that C. S. Lewis penciled these words in the flyleaf of his copy of Friedrich von Hügel 's "Eternal Life": “It is not an abstraction called humanity that is to be saved. It is you…your soul, and, in some sense yet to be understood, even your body, that was made for the high and holy place. All that you are…every fold and crease of your individuality was devised from all eternity to fit God as a glove fits a hand. All that intimate particularity which you can hardly grasp about yourself, much less communicate to your fellow creatures, is no mystery to him. He made those ins and outs that He might fill them.  Then He gave your soul so curious a life because it is the key designed to unlock that door, of all the myriad doors in Him.” Is this good news or bad news?  We want to be "saved," but do we want to be known ? Christmas almost, talks and tunes about love peace and joy up in the air, stuffs we are supposed to breat...

Dear Eugene, There are many sad things in life, and I think one of the saddest has to be when no story can sustain our interest. This must be a very odd thing to say because obviously we love our superhero stories and there is always one showing in the cinema.  When all things fail, we'll just re-watch the ones that we really like, on demand.  There're genres and playlists, things we listen to only when we are in the gym, church lingo and tribal handshakes, all sorts of plots and threads to play over again and again, in our head, in our heart, even in our dream.  It is hard to say we're not   interested in at least  some stories. But isn't this, the re-watching, the re-making, the regurgitating of an agreeable meal served on our favorite plate, a sight into our plight? We are building a template for our life, and once it takes shape the remain of our days is all about putting stuffs in their right place.  Does the template slowly emerge or ...

Dear Eugene, Sharing with you words of Rowan Williams .  I don't think I can add to them. "Christ is killed every day by the injuries that we cannot bear. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows and our first emotion, our first reaction is relief. Christ who lifts responsibility from us, Christ who suffers for us, Christ who takes away our burden and our misery, who stands between us and the world’s dreadfulness, between us and the squalor of our lives, as he was once thought to stand between us and the wrath of his Father. Christ the substitute, Christ the surrogate, Christ who saves us the trouble of being crucified. God will forgive: that is his job; Christ will suffer: that is his. … And so Christ is killed every day by the injuries we refuse, by what we will not let ourselves feel and know, by the risks we refuse, the involvement we refuse. … Well, we are all realists to a greater or lesser degree, and there is therefore no avoiding the fact of our comp...

Dear Eugene, What makes a life comfortable? I don't need to speak about the obvious elements.  One aspect, though, is rarely, if ever, enunciated until its being undermined triggers inevitably the domino undermining of all other elements: moral comfort. Moral comfort: not feeling uncomfortable about feeling comfortable.  Not feeling bad for feeling good. Now say if I know my having a fabulous Christmas means someone needs to die for it, even if I so wanted and successfully executed a contracting out of my responsibility to someone or something else, when judgement day comes--as my nightly bad dreams keep reminding me--I will need to say, Yes, I knew it all along , and Yes, you caught me . And for that, I might be living a very comfortable life and having very comforting expectations of my Christmas, there is a discomfort in me that I can't quite kill.  I might need to redouble my efforts and kill something or someone else to cover up my first killing(s)....

Dear Eugene, What is the allure of shopping?  What is so comforting about buying things, things usually we have already many times over or certainly have no urgent need for? There are books of sociology on this topic.  The obvious reason is it gives us meaning, or distracts us from searching for the true meaning of life, and in that sense one can say it is a sort of ritual: buy, use, disuse, repeat. The counter-cycle (of reduce, reuse, recycle), like apophatic theology , to approach life's question by negation and speak only in terms of what should not be affirmed, is unsexy.  We might be utterly confused about what sex actually is but are convinced by marketers that unsexiness is deplorable, and thus should strive to negate the negatives as a way to lay claim to have achieved something positive.  We've been apophatic all along but who's keeping track? Today I wandered in a mall.  Rain and wind; what else can I do?  (Actually many other...

Dear Eugene, What is wrong with the way I am living?  Nothing major, most of us would answer--if we are conscious enough to even ask ourselves the question. You were a pastor.  You talked to people, many people, all time, I presume.  Did this question ever come up?  I suppose it might have with major sinners, those in bad need of big time salvation.  But with ordinary, decent folks like us?  What are you getting at?  What kind of question is that, pastor? You see, I don't believe the ending of " A Christmas Carol ." I don't believe Scrooge would change just because he's been shown his miserable end.  We know more than any generation before us the magnitude and extent of bad things we are doing to ourselves and to God's good creation, that we should realize beyond a shadow of a doubt we are asking for hellfire; does it make any difference to how we are living now?  Everything we read in the news is but a bad dream.  Scrooge w...

Dear Eugene, It is easy to speak about happiness and success.  When we speak about our weakness and failure, we speak for ourselves and would rather to ourselves--which means we often don't speak about them at all. So you meet some strangers at a dinner party and what are you going to say to them?  Things you would post on social media: happy thoughts, memorable vacations, pleasant foods, good purchases, health tips, recipes.  If you are lucky you will learn soon enough about enemies common with your new friends and sing together a harmonious tune of discordance, cut-price camaraderie pays off pronto, as expected.  A dash of self-deprecating humor here and there you could summon.  Mild embarrassment of your past you might generously offer.  Curable headaches.  Colorful pills everyone should try.  Mirroring life experiences as an engaging prism to speak for and to all sides. Shake hands first and shake hands last.  Then you go home. ...

Dear Eugene, I am now walking to work everyday.  If I am to walk on this same path daily for the rest of me I will have enough material to write the book of my life. It is a longer walk, a bit over an hour.  It all depends.  Rain is a bigger factor.  So is darkness.  Everyday is different.  If I was to begin only a few minutes later than the day before (like today, troubled by a clogged drain early morning), a different world would arise to greet me. Photo-journaling is a lazy way to write, I think.  But here you go, mine from the last two days.  I am busy reading Rowan Williams' new book.  Please forgive my laziness. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, December, finally. Things are iced up.  The spilled garbage bin of my neighbor and its ugly contents lost their menace: whatever they were saying, no one is listening now.  Home is the answer, and who cares how we get there.  Let the world freeze itself with its own frozen logic.  Human breath condensed, a shroud of mystery on window pane; let me contribute, be on the right side of December. Last night I dreamed about a man who would come to my church once in a while, a street man who exhibited a varying degree of streetness and despair, at the mercy of factors I don't pretend to know.  How are you? is about the only topic I can speak to him now, the most heartless thing a man like me can say to a man like that.  He would always answer Good  and nod his head like he meant it .  S ometimes he would elaborate.  Mostly I couldn't make out what he was elaborating. What if there is another Christmas meal in my stomach?...

Dear Eugene, A friend said he has no heart for literature, seeing an old book of novel in my hand, that he doesn't care for stories. I said, "But you do watch, what, Korean soap opera, right?" "Yeah," he replied, "but that's different." "I've tried literature before, and everything is so sad.  I would rather look at porn," and there he walked away from our short conversation. That final line has the clarity of fine poetry. What he meant was he wants a story to work for him, to be useful to him, with a narratival trajectory that lands not too far from where he's standing/sitting/lying, an outburst of happy ending guaranteed with no heavy lifting on his part, an easy and gratifying giving of oneself that is just as easy and inconsequential to throw away. "Literature, good literature, speaks for us, when we find no word to speak for ourselves," a few minutes later I continued, seeing how my friend exposed h...