Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Last evening after dinner I was working on my lawn again.  The shrub hedges around my backyard can now be properly called trees.  I am no arborist but I know if I am to ask a little child she'll point at them and call them "big trees." Well, it's too late now.  I know I will need to hire someone to do the cutting.  My Green Bin can't contain the fell of even one cut and my green thumbs are getting old. Yeah, I felt old last night.  When a heart is tender the limbs go with it. This past weekend God broke my family down so to grant us a breakthrough.  Now we are entering, opening up a new field that is strangely familiar, if we have only taken a glimpse of it in our dream individual and collective, to recover a lost memory.  Things are righted but there will still be wrongs.  It got easier and it will get harder. You, Jesus , I said, the Master of everything .  Even of irony. Cynicism and stoicism are the two main r...

Dear Eugene, Last night during her birthday dinner my daughter dropped her phone and gave it a good spider-web crack, a split-second tragedy with lasting and irreversible consequence. My initial response was to look for a new phone (and indeed I did, the easiest thing for this father to do), but finally I decided to put boxing tape over the web and asked her to live with it and find meaning right where it hurts. "Many girls your age, and I can even so confidently say, a vast majority of human living right now shall wake up to a new morning of old brokenness, yesterday's loss that they-- no one --will ever get used to the losing." Years ago, my daughter's birth-year to be precise, the year of 9/11, Rowan Williams said the following: "Islam has a wonderful vision of divine majesty, generosity and glory, and its demand for unreserved loving obedience has great nobility.  But it is a faith that cannot readily find room either for the idea that God longs ...

Dear Eugene, "[Jesus'] disciples said, “What are you talking about? With this crowd pushing and jostling you, you’re asking, ‘Who touched me?’ Dozens have touched you!” Possibly the funniest line in the whole Bible, from definitely one of the best short stories I've ever read any where.  If Alice Munro is asked to hand over her Nobel Literature Prize for this piece of " Markan Sandwich ," I think she well might take the bite. Mark's storytelling is savagely succinct, to-the-point; yet every next line opens up a new human universe, with big enough off-screen space to give account to a cosmic tragedy but told like a sit-com.  You could almost hear the rimshot and laugh track right after the zinger. If I am to re-imagine the scene and have the stage-light go off at the right moment, all the characters freeze their action, leaving only a spotlight on the disciple, I can hear his soliloquy going something like this: Who touched you?  Are you serious...

Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of...

Dear Eugene, Last night my heart was disturbed.  A  Leonard Cohen song gave her solace and she finally gave in and gave way. She gave in to give way to The Way. "Every time someone tells a story, and tells it well, the gospel is served," you once said . "I think the key word (...) is served .  I didn't mean (the gospel) is proclaimed every time someone tells a story; (I mean) it is served . When stories are told people begin to get a sense that life has value and meaning, and that they are significant. And then they start looking for the significance, 'Where's the meaning?' 'Where can I find significance?' But until people begin to realize their embededness in creation, and in suffering, that they aren't just accidents along the way, they really don't hear the gospel story. So, the important word is served ." Again I cried last night when I heard the lines : Behold the gates of mercy In arbitrary space And none of us de...

Dear Eugene, I think I am too angry to write.  Or is it sadness?  No matter what I will need to pray before going further. I will need to pray through this piece. Last night as I was out getting medication refill for Sumi, our dog, I received a cascade of text message, coming through like the rapping beats of telegraph machine, digital sound inorganic, distress just as genuine.   Someone is choking up , I though. Going at this machine-gun rate. My son informed me he broke his phone.  His first phone.  A bit more than a week since having it.  He said he was sorry.  Felt stupid.  More stupid than sorry.  His jeans pocket shallow.  Like lady's pants.  Who'd have expected that.  And he ran cos someone called him over.  Phone fell out.  Gravity. He related the shallow reality to me, all the while very aware of the deeper reality: that he refused to put on the case cover I gave him, despite my repeated pleads, eve...

Dear Eugene, These past two weekends have to be among the most meaningful, beautiful in recent memory. The week before we've made new friends who are like long-lost family, reunited in the Adamic wilderness where we've first lost sight of one another, only to be able to make out the others' face once again when we are finally found in Christ. This past weekend my family was busy serving at church to kick off a new season of ministry.  The cry for God, for the Good News in this Bad News World is overwhelming.   Thank you for making us see , we prayed, but this is really too much!  Please help us do your will...like, Big Time Help! Yet despite all the beauty and blessing, joyful toil and exuberant hope, before yesterday was soon over I've lost my temper with...you guessed it, my son.  Again. And it was over absolutely nothing.  Really, no false modesty here; one shouldn't waste even a Meh on it.  Of course I can say this now.  But when it was h...

Dear Eugene, Last night before Small Group I and my wife strolled around the church neighborhood.  The spring flowers are fragrant, houses pretty, people behind every door often broken.  This is our Father's world. Standing under the shadow of a crabapple tree I pulled out my phone. "Do you really need another picture of this?" my wife asked, genuinely curious. "This one is different." I didn't mean the tree in and of itself is more special than any other of the same species.  It was how the soft evening glow of spring sun casting its serendipitous gleam to bring out the nuance in fifty shades of pink. (My wife made an overstatement.  I've just counted; only fourteen pictures of trees and flowers I have taken this spring, everyone special in its own way.) Two days ago my son complained how the weather forecast has not been accurate in the past recent days. "Have you been looking at only one picture or one number that claims to repres...

Dear Eugene, Today I saw something so beautiful that I was in a way reinvigorated and another haunted by it even now. It was Youth Ministry Sunday at my church.  My kids are both in the band, and thus we arrived really early for practice.  One of the vocalists girl arrived late, not terribly, but she felt bad enough that the "I'm sorry" came out of her lips was baptized with tears. What a beautiful sight to behold!  “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them! For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."  How true!  How true! The girl is not a "child" anymore, more like in her late teens.  Cynics and marketers take advantage of youth's being impressionable; Jesus loves them for their being impassioned. If being an adult means I would never feel sorry for something as small as being late, or apologize without meaning it, then let me never grow up!  We adults might have our "atonement theology" all worked out in...

Hi Eugene, I walked up the mountain yesterday after church, on the day of our Lord's rising.  Knowing you, I am sure you must have done the same. O gather up the brokenness And bring it to me now The fragrance of those promises You never dared to vow The splinters that you carry The cross you left behind Come healing of the body Come healing of the mind And let the heavens hear it The penitential hymn Come healing of the spirit Come healing of the limb This Cohen song played as I ascended.  It was the first moment in a long time that I was allowed to feel the world's pain. During the morning's church service, when every single song is about "personal salvation," I felt like by "atonement" we meant For God so hated the world that he killed his only son. Like how a Dylan song goes, "Nobody feels any pain..." Behold the gates of mercy In arbitrary space And none of us deserving The cruelty or the grace O solitude of...

Dear Eugene, I was sorting my garbage this morning and my neighbor walked by with her dog and said Hi. We'd usually greet each others over a longer distance just to avoid a barking contest between our dogs.  As it happened that I was sans dog today she was able to squeeze in more than a How are you. "How does your son enjoy high-school?" I said He loves it, dressing himself up everyday.   Like an addiction I didn't say. She replied as she had before, not to my response but to complete her point, "It's very different; isn't it?" She meant high-school.  (Or teenage?  Or the world according to my son?  Or my perception of my son's perception of himself or the world?) Yesterday in California a man killed his estranged wife inside an elementary school classroom, right in front of a group of special needs children.  Then right there he killed himself too.  Two students were injured, and one later died.  The police said the man walked int...

Dear Eugene, “Life is too busy and complicated for me to hear the cry of every person in my community. As a matter of fact, I struggle to find time to even hear the cries of my own family. If I had to listen to the cry of everyone in New York City, you may as well ask me to listen to the sound of every blade of grass growing and to the heartbeat of every squirrel. The noise would be deafening on the other side of silence.” One time a councilman, agonizing over the pervasive pain in the city, painted the above picture that is all too real. Today a mom told me she needs to distract herself from the unbearable burden that is her daughter, and I echoed her cry with a confession of my own, that sometimes I felt like I could stay in my cave of silence for the next ten years and might actually try it.  I also confessed I have a huge stockpile of intellectual arsenal to justify my anger and frustration and thus shutting-off, and I could probably get away with still appearing upright ...