Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Give me one verb. One verb that would have you, a Christian, to go before it as the subject of the sentence and make a definitive statement about your Christian faith.  Just one. What would that verb be? I suspect any Christian if asked would consider this a serious question and give it some serious pondering.  And I further suspect any serious pondering on religious matter would likely trigger in the religious person a recollection of sacred sayings, however fragmentary, "orthodoxy," the "official position" that would escape the shameful or, god forbid, the heretical. I suspect if we tally up the votes the number one choice among Christians (followers-of-Christ, I dare define) would be love . To love.  I love.  Love God and love people, that's where we start and that's where we end. I am not saying anyone is trying to be dishonest, but, really, is this our true answer?  Honesty has to do with actuality, what really is hap...

Dear Eugene, If a person is to keep collecting paper napkins and tuck them under his armpit, what would you say he's up to?  I can tell you he's not trying to dry himself.  He's certainly not stealing either for the napkins are free for all.  What kind of a past would his action betray? Today I dropped by a McDonald's for coffee.  When I was leaving the place a ketchup dispenser caught my eyes.  There's nothing wrong with it, nothing special about it; it pumped out free-for-all ketchup as it should.  It was a thought that caught my eyes catching the pump in action: would a person be so hungry to come in here and pump ketchup straight into her mouth? Of course there is.  War time.  Famine.  Tyranny.  Climate displacement.  Happening now as I speak. And do I know a person such as this?  No.  Never did.  Hard to imagine ever would.  The neediest person I know can drop into a McD and expect ketchup pumping...

Dear Eugene, Joy is a choice. Joy is a choice made necessary by sorrow and fear of often greater necessity. "Work is work," we say.  A burden happens to us as we happen to live up to some expectations that happen to be needfully this and necessarily that.   "It is what it is."  "What can you do about it?" A take-out office lunch followed by a customized bubble-tea, a favorite TV show to wind down a day, a dream vacation, a marriage vow bombastically made, decisions we choose to "enjoy" ourselves fill the cracks of a life with a built-in trajectory laden with assumptions rampant and fateful.  Imagine to have all our "necessary" burdens taken away and ourselves placed in the middle of an empty room, stripped down to our bare essence; would joy be there to accompany our nakedness?  What wasn't there before wouldn't magically show up after. True joy caulks no crack and paints over no surface.  It permeates and transfor...

Dear Eugene, My all-time favorite story is Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well . It is dangerous to have a favorite story: one can get very ungenerous with any other interpretation.   Almost every sermon on this story induced nausea in me.  Yes, I am a Pharisee. Good stories invite multiple readings and continual interpretation.  Any misinterpretation can only be to reduce what is living and generative to a few dogmatic of-courses and set-you-rights. I was thinking this morning: love is suffocating, especially that we claim to be true and deep.  No sincere lover sets out to make it so; all are genuinely surprised by the strangleholds that eventually (and often very soon) must be given and taken to resurrect what was once vouchsafed with ease and grace and assumed to be undying. Jesus loved the woman at the well.  It was no teddy-bear love.  There was firework right from the get-go, secrets and lies were revealed, in the uns...