Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Today I am too tired to write.  I think I am going to steal. Here I want to share with you what Mike Higton wrote about the "difficult Gospel" in the theology of Rowan Williams.  It is so rich that I don't think I should add another word to it. We are, all of us, precarious creatures. We live in environments we cannot control, and are hedged about by limits we cannot overcome. We face frustration, we face competition for scarce resources, and we are jostled in a confined space by the egos of others. There is only a limited difference that we can make, and we have only a limited control over even that difference; our actions are inevitably shaped by what others have done to us, and they mix uncontrollably with the actions of others and the unpredictable resistances of our environment, and they escape us.  Our unavoidable dependence on and involvement with others is distorted by their selfishness, and the inevitable dependence of others on us and th...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday at a dollar-store a song was playing, vociferous, drowning out cynicism by its sheer force. It sang of love, unfaltering devotion, something to beat the incredible odds against an eventual death.  It demands of me a suspension of disbelief, a poetic imagination, a great faith. A young lady dressed as a security guard leaned against the backdrop of toxically colorful cheap toys, on the strength of a pillar too narrow for product placement.   How much do they pay people to guard $1.25 products? She didn't hear the song.  (At least she didn't show it.) White noise.  Cacophony.  Something that does not concern her.  Like a Facebook post by a mother not yours about her lovely time with her lovely kids, an Instagram picture of a father getting a room ready for his almost born, name picked, technicolor dreamcoat on the cotton-candy-filtered bed, loved a thousand time over already even in the darkness of watery chaos. Her hai...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I had a long breakfast conversation with a friend. Like many, instead of seeing the sacredness of questioning , she mistakes human's searching, a heart's yearning, for disloyalty to tradition and betrayal to her community, social expectations she has long suffered from but couldn't see a reason, wouldn't have the courage to stop their self-perpetuation. Since I shared the Gospel with her a while back, she started to ask questions.  Yesterday's breakfast was about looking for answers together.  Searching for food that satisfies. She said she couldn't accept the idea of God becoming a man, becoming the man that is Jesus.  I said I share her doubt wholeheartedly.  The day I stop to bewilder over it is the day I cease " to wonder like a little child, to find mystery in everything, every day, everywhere, to be surprised continually, to clap one's hands in glee as every brilliant hour flashes past. " Jesus' incarnati...

Dear Eugene, When you hear a prophecy so all-embracing that you don't want to add to or subtract from it a word lest you diminish its far-reaching vision, you have no choice but to present it whole to the world. This morning I am contemplating on a passage from Rowan Williams' little book "Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement."  He was talking specifically about the Church, but also spoke what this father finds no word to speak about his own family and his relation to it. “I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters.  I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God.  Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me—because what...

Everybody I talk to is ready to leave  With the light of the morning  They've seen the end coming down  Long enough to believe  That they've heard their last warning  Standing alone  Each has his own ticket in his hand  And as the evening descends  I sit thinking 'bout Everyman   Dear Eugene, Last night I had a long and beautiful talk with a friend about poverty, the poverty of everyman. How our heart are ultimately barren, always thirsty.  Eat but not be satisfied --is there a picture sadder than this? "The Gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that in God's economy, the overflow of riches happens where the need is greatest; where human dignity is most obscured, grace blazes out in excessive and extravagant ways to remedy the balance." We sat there talking about ourselves, thinking about Everyman. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, I was again reading Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" last night, this time a new translation that came out not too long ago.   "While Lara, slowly going around the praying people, copper money clutched in her hand, went to the door to buy candles for herself and Olya, and went back just as carefully, so as not to push anyone, Prov Afanasyevich managed to rattle off the nine beatitudes, like something well-known to everyone without him.   Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness …    Lara walked, suddenly shuddered, and stopped. That was about her. He says: Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves. They have everything before them. So He thought. It was Christ’s opinion." Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden...some "opinion" Christ had... When I was young no one in church ever helped me to mak...

Dear Eugene, How we need kerygma, Good News proclamation, to be evangelized to again and again! I know I need it.  Daily.  Badly. Last few days I've been acting like Grumpy Cat .  I don't know if people can tell when I was leading Bible Study group last night. You can't fake joy.  You can only go so far to pretend there's hope in you.  Love never dies but you can try killing it a million different ways. Evangelized me!  I cried. This morning God spoke a fresh word of the Good News to me, again through the mouth and life of his faithful servant.  I needed a strong kick in the rear, and God sent Rowan Williams . "(...) And then, supposing we have cleared away the fears that arise from the way religious people have failed to witness fully to their God – then the deeper fears can and do come to the surface, the fears of what faith may demand of a person. Nothing will take away the challenge here; we can only hope that there are enough lives s...

Dear Eugene, It's pretty heady stuff when one's carried by the wind that is the Spirit. I shall remember this past weekend for a long time, for always, set a stone to remember what God has done, things seen and unseen, things in full bloom and things yearning to be born, things the Lion roared and the Lamb whispered, things veiled in mystery and things out in the open. I am in fear.  Scared fear and awed fear.  It really is too much when the Spirit moves.  It really is not nearly enough for you crave for more. This past weekend the Spirit guided me through the gentle hands of faithful, obedient saints to learn how to love my neighbors.  People I don't understand, people I even despised by ignoring them all my life.  I was at Downtown Eastside.  I was talking to my Muslim neighbors.  I was talking to people that I knew from way back when.  I was talking to family I dine with every week.  I was talking to family I dine with every day. ...

Dear Eugene, Do you like the word "conversion," as in one holding up one's hand, "saying Yes to Jesus" when the music and moment feels right, as if the human heart changes like a flick of a switch, salvation a matter of having faith in one's faith? My question is too laden for it to be anything but rhetorical, I know.  And I am not trying to be cynical, even less to trivialize any Yes that is given to Jesus; we all rejoice with the angels with our own Yeses resounding in heaven when we see a life, any life, turning from darkness to light, from dying to living. But I suppose it is precisely because of how much we care about others, that we want to take a closer, honest look at the nature of how the Yeses are being called out. I know you love Anne Tyler's novels; so I assume you must have read Dorothy Allison's " Bastard out of Carolina "?  What an amazing novel, isn't it? When the protagonist of the story Ruth Anne tried t...

Dear Eugene, Years ago during his elementary school years one day my son announced to the family My friend is from Nineveh! You mean the city in the Jonah story? He answered in his typical way, then and now , Yes, like, literally. Who could blame him?  This friend got into fights, went to the Principal's office, like, everyday, and was known to be a Huckleberry Finn, only having not even a town drunk of a father, transit hopping by himself younger than any kid I know.  So he fits the bill to play the citizen of Nineveh.  On a few occasions when my son needed to be at school very early, I would see the boy's lonesome figure half-heartedly shooting hoops in the rain, his bicycle the only tired spectator, lying on the puddled gravel, not even looking his way. I am not too sure , I said.  He doesn't look Assyrian to me. But he told me so!  He goes to church too and he said that's it. Well... So for a while I went along.  On a handful of occ...

Dear Eugene, This morning I read in the news: Facebook helped advertisers target teens who feel "worthless ". And I wrote the following to my children: So this is the world that you are living in. The champion of anti-bullying big corporations are themselves the biggest perpetrators of exploitation. Of course, as Leonard Cohen says, "Everybody knows" already anyway. Every corporation on TV or the internet is out to exploit, especially the vulnerable ones, because it is easy money. If they are really smart, they could even position their exploitation and convince the world they are doing something good for the vulnerable, giving them a helping hand to come in from the cold. Make huge money and then crown themselves the messiah; wouldn't it be nice? (Heck, they might even enlist you to join their justice campaign.) My questions for you are: Before we talk about someone else, how do we conduct ourselves on the internet or in person? Do we also choo...

Dear Eugene, The world is supposed to be a different place since 6 pm last night. Or is it? Gospel is good news, not good advice, good alternative, or even good-to-know.  Something had happened, whether we like it or not, one way or another we will need to see ourselves and the world in different light. Or do we? Say, if my house is burning, everyone in it are bound to be affected.  A news would have been announced: "Fire!!! Get out now!!!"  One might not welcome the news, or might even resist believing it; but when the smoke gets in your eyes, you are bound to respond, regardless of your opinion or preference on the matter. That seemed to be the case with Peter the coward. Last night beside the fire he was looking from afar, half fearing if he was next in line to face the same merciless, humiliating treatment, half wishing if his teacher might just have another bunny in his hat, a "miraculous" act of vindication that would turn their losing into winn...

Dear Eugene, I can't quite get this song out of my head. Not that I like it; quite the contrary.  It is as banal as a Costco line-up, but in the same way it speaks about our time. The words go like this: "I am unwritten, can't read my mind, I'm undefined I'm just beginning, the pen's in my hand, ending unplanned Staring at the blank page before you  Open up the dirty window  Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find  Reaching for something in the distance  So close you can almost taste it  Release your inhibitions" This piece of elevator music forces itself into my ears everyday.  It played by itself in my head even as I was looking at the news and pictures of chemical attack in Northwest Syria.  The juxtaposing of sight and sound creates an obscene movie. There you see a character losing 22 family members in this chemical attack, including his wife and nine-month-old twin babies, but the movie director told him ...