Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Last night I and my pastor tried out a new Vietnamese eatery in my neighborhood. While I was saying our prayer (and I admit it was long as characteristically mine often is) the eponymous owner of the restaurant came with what we've requested, an extra bowl for sharing, and more, and spoke to us. I thought it was beautiful, hearing my own voice, hopefully touching corners of the trust and desire of my friend, my pastor, in close proximity with only lemongrass chicken and a shared appetite between us, and now a gentle interjection mixing in. The owner apologized right away, and I opened my eyes briefly to meet his and said it's perfectly fine.  Later he came back and apologized again in wide-eyed profusion, and we again affirmed him it's no problem at all. He was eager to explain why he was so apologetic but I was too busy to pardon what cost me nothing to forgive, and so there was a bit of genteel cross-talk and probably a lot lost in translatio...

Dear Eugene, When does a person become an adult, begin to come to terms with her own humanity and say to herself, Hey, this is starting to make some sense to me now  or Hey, this doesn't make any sense at all and I can no longer brush it off ? I think it is when he starts to question himself, the ways that were prescribed to him since day one and worked well enough for him to withhold his questioning until now. Until now . And what happened just now could be a drastic change of fate, or a quietly coalescing desperation finally making to the surface. Or whatever. Life becomes too much.  Life becomes too little.  Life needs to be questioned. My life.  Within the context of all lives. In that sense, growing up in a religion can be a real handicap.  One needs to declare loyalty before she knows what being loyal is about.  One needs to assume the prescribed way is right before it's proven wrong.  Or one needs to rebel against it by defaul...

Dear Eugene, Off since Apr 23, 1:33 a.m. Crew status Assigned Est. arrival Apr 23, 2:25 a.m. Details North of xxxx ST, South of yyyy ST, West of zzzz AVE, East of xyz PL. Cable fault Customers affected 120 Last updated Apr 23, 7:03 a.m. Such is the status of a very localized power outage in my area, with my house very uncannily situated right in the middle of the (in)action, like an epicenter.  I think the map marker actually aims at the very top of my skull. I walked my dog this morning and wondered if I should knock on a random door on the next street where it was just a normal night with taken-for-granted electricity, and ask for 4 minutes of microwave time to heat up my kids' lunch for their thermos. I know for some culture and at places usually much less affluent, it would be an honor for a person's door to be knocked on this way by one's neighbor.  But the struggle for honor here is of a different sort, such as having to wake my kids to the realizati...

Dear Eugene, To create a God who carries our burden without taking over is philosophically unwieldy.  It's like trying to sell a car that should run for you but you'll still need to run it with your legs, a Flintstones joke. A God like this needs a great deal of PR work whichever way you work him to make him work. If you are carrying a burden, you'll want to persuade yourself to suspend your disbelief in and dissatisfaction with him. If you are not carrying a burden, you'll want to drum up a different aspect of his value to keep him fresh and relevant, your loyalty to him valid and necessary. If someone else is carrying a burden which concerns you only as a thought curio, you'll be tempted to explain away your care-less-ness with such God's inaction or impotence. If someone else is looking with indifference at you carrying your burden, especially one who feels to you being a good person to blame for your trouble (and getting better every passing ...

Dear Eugene, If I am not a Christian, would I care enough to even ask what Easter is all about? The answer is a resounding No. It is one thing to question the truthfulness of a bodily resurrection, but quite another to not care enough to begin to question it.  The former is about resisting lunacy; the latter ignoring irrelevance. By "Christian" I mean the tradition that I grew up in, Protestant, evangelical.  There's an impoverishment of imagination in its moral universe that the living out of this particular brand of faith is like a rumpled plum: you know there once has been juice in it but now only joylessness--which is different from sadness.  At places where you expect to meet joy you see a vacuum. I feel nothing.  Nothing in my tradition speaks anything half meaningful to me during this supposedly most holy week.  Is there anything that I need to consider?  How am I supposed to feel, considering what Jesus was heading towards?  Th...

Dear Eugene, There was a time I'd read a lot of theology--and I still do, for being a layman, I suppose--but with the sole purpose to get things right. It is not a bad purpose; in fact a very important one.  Now, to this mind, Western, rational, it's clear when one gets the wrong idea everything else follows can't be right.  I can afford to be wrong about other stuffs but when it comes to God I don't want a second opinion but the best.  No, not even that--I need the Truth, the one single idea, or one single set of ideas about God that gets God right.  There must be some core stuffs that I can't get wrong about God or would risk eternal damnation. The line is pretty straight, you see: God leads to salvation.  At times I might love him more and others I might care about him less.  But to secure my place in heaven (which is what I've been told to be the final and most relevant payoff to receive the "Good News") I'd better get things in wri...

Dear Eugene, A premature baby who spent five months in the hospital without even one visitor was adopted by a pediatric nurse. A couple adopted six children just to finally kill them all with themselves, drove the whole family off a cliff in an SUV . If we can hold both of these together and say, Yes , it makes sense, it makes sense to me as a human being, seeing what I can in the mirror, that Yes , like the nurse I can love and fight for justice in a big way and for the long haul, and Amen , I can kill too, sometimes, if given the chance and reason, everyone in sight, myself included if necessary. Anything that holds these two pictures together is speaking truth about humanity--a novel, a sermon, a "holy book," a social media portrait of the Self, anything that proposes to say a word about human being.  Anything that wrestles not with such fundamental is evasive, dishonest, and ultimately self-defeating. It is not a matter of being "positive vs. negative,...

Dear Eugene, A heart opens, a flower blooms And we know the love is true Known to whom the heart opens  True to whom the flower blooms Love pours forth Never spills over Its limit stringent Knows no stranger A heart withholds, a flower folds Who's to know the love is doomed? Known to whom the heart withholds Doomed from when it first unfolded Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, A question came to me just now when I was in the washroom (such context should tell you the baloney you are about to partake): when a person dies, does the heart go first or does it go last? I am sure you know I am not speaking scientifically.  And more specifically I am speaking about a process of dying, needs not to be protracted but for sure felt through and digested.  You can call it an awakening to one's withering. So, the heart, the engine of our body, the wellspring of life, does it go first or last?  Do we turn the light off or stay bright until the sun goes down on us? I can see myself lusting after life until I no more can, and I would even say the no more is a very big maybe, a metaphorical language to speak about the unknowable.  " Let's go ," you said.  "Let's keep going," I am sure you meant. Dying needs not to be protracted, but it can be lifelong too.  Some can't wait for a day to end; other laments every nig...