Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Last night I watched a movie that I've meant to watch for a long time.   In fact I almost passed it up again: busyness, what else? Father Leary : I didn't realise you hated me that much. Father James Lavelle : I don't hate you, at all. Father Leary : Then, why? Father James Lavelle : It's just you have no integrity. That's the worst thing I could say about anybody. Yes, not that he is a heathen, an adulterer, or even a killer.  The worst thing that can be said about a man is that he has no integrity. What is integrity? It has to do I think with a man's reverence (for what?), what he deems sacred and how he lives into that conviction despite all the confusion and convulsion in life posing imminent threat to his living humanly. In the movie there is a brief image of one man leaning on a casket that will soon be loaded onto an airplane to take the body "back home," and another man talking to him, casually and inaudibly to t...

Dear Eugene, It's not the first time I've called a book out of its morgue, a place to keep what is dead, pending final burial.  A morgue can also be a reference file in a newspaper office, collecting old clippings and books and such for future use, to move forward by looking back. Can you read the print on the sleeve?  It says: "Borrowers are responsible for returning this book in good condition.  Please examine before taking out and report any defacement."  Beneath it another line stamped on in all caps "OVERDUE FINES 10¢ PER DAY."  And the 10 was hand-printed over the original stamped 5.  That's an 100% increase. The world has become more user-friendly now, a kinder place.  The fine system still exists but only to embarrass the service-givers.  Nowadays if there's a late fee to collect a librarian would by default suggest it can be put off to the next visit in perpetuity.  We've paid enough tax to take care of matter of 5 and 1...

Dear Eugene, "So this is Christmas, and what have you done?"  There asked John Lennon , then a few others, but none with more moralistic authority than Celine Dion . The tune is ok, but I'm sorry, the question is wrong, adds itself to an all-wrong world. Not that it's not a worthwhile question.  Only that there needs being asked a few others, in fact a series of more fundamental human questions before we could arrive at a humble place--ourselves humbled, that is--to genuinely seek the true answer--answer in truth, that is. To begin with, Why should I do anything about anything?  If there's something wrong with this world, it's a wrong ongoing: it doesn't take a special season to sermonize ourselves into acknowledgement. And what if I acknowledged all along this world is wrong?    Still , what can I do about it?   It's hard to not read this question as pure cynicism, but really, just say the plain six words and try to answer:  What ca...

Dear Eugene, Tonight I recalled something I've been recollecting over the years, bits and pieces, all revolved around the something that I recalled yet again tonight. It was years ago during my early teen years in Hong Kong, in a church camp of some sort, for youths or for everyone I can't remember, and there was this young leader--how young?  Again I don't know, wasn't old enough to care about facts.  What I am seeing now is what I saw, that in my eyes then he was obviously young er than other church elders in his look and being more accessible to "kids" like me. I remember his face mostly for his high cheeks bones, deep dark eyes, almost all black with no sclera (is it even possible?), and his mouth moving constantly, all the time, always with a grin like he's sharing with you where he's hiding his treasures.  He prayed like an adult churchgoer, all serious, self-conscious, by-the-number-evangelical, but with a grin like God's love, stea...

Dear Eugene, If we are given the choice to choose all over again, are we going to choose any differently than how we have already chosen to live? Given the chance to choose the kind of bubble-tea we want, we are free to decide.  We are also free to imagine a single mother of three living off a bank account now carrying a balance not enough to pay for a bubble-tea, not even before tax, not even small size, but that is the sort of freedom we rarely, if ever, choose to exercise. If the choice is presented us, usually more readily this time of the year, we probably wouldn't mind making ourselves answerable to the obscenity of helplessness, however abstractly: to fill a shoe-box, hand in an "imperishable" food (as if there ever is one), free our closet of items that are needful enough for the needy but no longer nearly good enough for ourselves and our truly loved ones, the ones who shall never taste despair under our auspices and fine management. Once the choice is ...

Dear Eugene, It's only been a month since I first started to use a hand grinder to prepare coffee, and now it feels like it's just the way how coffee drinking is meant to be.  Now if I don't need to grind my own beans to make a cup, I'd just be using coffee, instead of making it, fashioning the creation of it, and, really, enjoying it. A program was already running when we first burst into the scene.  Bang , there we were, out of watery chaos into a strange world of order.  And it worked, a true blessing indeed, like a mother to a newborn.  We were given a place in the program without even knowing how badly we needed one. And the program has a strange built-in feature, that it invites us to question its legitimacy.  Life is good, in many ways, even to those who have been dealt the worst hand.  But still we search, still we ask: Why can't it be better? As if we know better . Grinding coffee beans with my own hands, the minute before I bring to ...

Dear Eugene, What is the meaning of life? You think I am so full of myself to actually attempt to answer it here?  No, of course I can't. But I also can.  I can say for sure it has a lot to do with the relationships that we have--no, more, nurtured and cherished. The past half year for me was a sudden detour on a magic carpet.  Yesterday I said goodbye to many staffs and very senior clients in a care facility where I served during this time, and it was bitter, and sweet, and I didn't know what else was boiling in my body numbed by an unspeakable loss. It's appropriate that I don't have a picture of any of these friends.  For privacy reason no picture is allowed.  They took pictures of me but only for the interiority of the place, chamber of their hearts. I shall continue to re-imagine them, their faces, their expressions, their gestures, their smiles and tears, and make them real all over again, for my days and nights to come. And for ever. Yo...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday when I was driving his friend home, my son made a comment that he hasn't found a way to grow out of since first making it a few years back: "Why do we have to learn Shakespeare?  Like someone's gonna ask you question about him in a job interview?" I suggested maybe one day he will find truth from the mouth of "King Lear," truth that might make a difference of life and death to him.  Or maybe without Shakespeare there's no Eminem . The preeminent Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye suggested, "Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at," and that "wherever illiteracy is a problem, it’s as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep." So in a world where eating and sleeping and reading are no problems, we tend to be ignorant of how problematic lacking any of these could be if we a...

Dear Eugene, Anyone who thinks there's genuine hope in this world hasn't gotten oneself a teenager.  Or two. Is it really that bad, being a parent of teenagers? Worse than my parents had had it, I say, for sure.  I kinda regret not giving my parents a run for their money and now can't even claim solace on the basis of karma. But I feel for the teenagers. Here I have words to make sense of my share of suffering, words that I can call my own and have taken years and tears to claim.  How about them? They want to be themselves, but in doing so must be like everyone else.  I am sure a case can be made that many of us never really grow out of our adolescence, but still the intensity of such contradiction, self-betrayal, finds no healthy language during teen years to modulate itself, especially when the lexicon and syntax of the quest is gladly and generously supplied by adults who know how to exploit the unhealth.  Mobile phone is the worse invention s...

Dear Eugene, “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”   Peter Handke , the latest Nobel Prize laureate in literature, said that. I asked Peter, What's worse, to lose your storytellers and childhood, or to be told your story isn't real or right and your childhood didn't exist ? I'd love to believe the Nobel Committee has committed a stroke of genius in choosing Mr Handke, a genocide denier , a way to smoke out the hypocrisy in all of us, to force on the world the question: Can we celebrate gunpowder for its pure dynamism?  (Can anything be good without being finally morally good or put into morally good use?) Words are the worst weapon: they create and re-create, fabricate and obliterate.  We are what we remember, in ink and blood, in zeros and ones. Yet after years of telling ourselves "What is good/right to you might likely be bad/wrong to me" and arguing this as our default moral position (which actually assumes itself to be...

Dear Eugene, Who is a "climate change denier"?  The name has been called so often that we tended to assume. I think there are two sorts. The first the obvious, those who are under-informed, mis-informed, stubborn or maybe stupid (a very big maybe, because many of them are very smart people).  No matter what, these people hold varying degrees of skepticism about the alleged change and/or its significance, and if they are to live according to their lack of conviction on the veracity of such "planetary emergency," they are not denying to themselves honesty or rectitude. The second would be those who allege to acknowledge the change, even at times joined a parade or jumped on a bandwagon, yet on a personal and daily level live as if the change is not significant enough after all to warrant the chest-thumping and siren-wailing.  The problem wouldn't be they might be just as under-informed, but that they are under-transformed by their alleged belief.  The...

Dear Eugene, How fragile we are.  How we need to consider this.  How do we consider this? Today I was reading again Rowan Williams' " The Wound of Knowledge ," and here he speaks about a Christianity that I suspect is foreign to most churchgoers, and I suspect not only in the West: "The final control and measure and irritant in Christian speech remains the cross: the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity is born out of struggle because it is born from men and women faced with the paradox of God’s purpose made flesh in a dead and condemned man. Without the cross there would be no New Testament. . . . What is at issue is that the first Christians were painfully aware that God’s chosen one and God’s chosen people had come into open and tragic conflict: that God seemed to be set against God. If God is to be seen at work here, he is indeed a strange God, a hidden God, who does not uncover his will in a straight line of development, but fully enters into...

Dear Eugene, This morning I was contemplating on what Rowan Williams said here: "So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark's narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John's Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there—to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see—with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God's delivers the world to us—and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are ...

Dear Eugene, This is what Jesus said, " Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.  Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. " How is one to understand this? One implication, I believe, is that no one can start to say one knows God without losing something of huge significance.  And to lose oneself bit by bit and finally completely is not the goal, even less the accomplishment, but the very beginning, the first baby step of loving God, finding life's true worth and living it. I am glad Jesus put it that way, allowed no false hope on false promises.  What he said wasn't even a demand, let alone a cruel one.  It'd be true cruelty if we are to find out the truth on our own, like a motherless child, a desert wanderer, knowing not what the hel...

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...

Dear Eugene, I think I am finally getting some good traction with my novel after two false starts. I know you've read many novels but never written any.  Probably you didn't need to, already being so immersed in the stories of other.  Or you couldn't, being in the precarious position of a pastor, held accountable for your every word and often by ham-fisted literalism. But I know you would know what I mean when I say I was struggling with, for example, choosing the right point-of-view or which tense (past vs present) to use.  By "right" I mean right for the story, faithful to the voice of the character that I am speaking through and for.  The Word speaks the Man into existence. I am also busy helping my brother-in-law with home renovation, a great training for writer, hammered some good common sense into me.  And then there's the great generosity of the many people I've served and worked with in the past month.  It's been surreal.  I feel ve...

Dear Eugene, It's been a while since I last wrote to you.  It's because I've been busy and there's too much I want to say to you but don't know how to choose.  I've lived many days that's just like any other day, but now I've just lived a month that is unlike any other month, each day of it.  It feels like it's not my life that I am living, a life so new that I don't know what to make of it yet. Today I was looking at a tree and made the most banal comment, "This tree is going to outlast all of us."  We can point at any random tree and say the same thing and the comment will likely turn out to be true. If that's the case, aren't we all making too a big deal out of ourselves?  Stuffs we do to ourselves, stuffs we make ourselves do, just to live out what we call a life.  And what is this "life" but a handful of years, the first third in utter confusion, the last third in worry and pain, the middle years to recov...