Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, "What drives you?" I was asked this question this past weekend, a question, I suppose, we've all been asked, in different settings, by different people, under different shades of moonlight. It's about time I give an answer.  I'd usually question the questioner's question, at least three questions thrown back his/her way; but none of that evasion today. I came up with something worse. My answer is: This question ( not the questioner) disgusts me, that whenever I hear it I feel this strong repulsion in me to expose its wrongheadedness, by doing exactly the opposite of what it suggests I should be doing to wake up meaningful the next morning, specifically by resisting what proposes to make claim on my will and hope and energy and the very next step I take, and I would slam on the brake to grind my every action to a halt and see if my non-drivenness would kill me.  And if it does, then I shall meet the Person who drives me in my dying. ...

Dear Eugene, What a brilliant morning, happening in the here and now, as brilliant as I have ever taken any in. I meant to question with the last statement if the brilliance is in what's happening out there or how I absorb this morning and make it so in the sanctuary of my heart. No one should philosophize on a Monday morning.  But I do know my kids had problem waking up so whatever that was out there had no chance to break in.  The breeze they'll feel on their face walking to school won't be the same that blessed me. That is if there is still any breeze at all. I believe in the Kingdom come Then all the colors will bleed into one Bleed into one But yes, I'm still running You broke the bonds and you loosened chains carried the cross of my shame, of my shame You know I believe it But I still haven't found What I'm looking for I remember U2 doing one of their signature songs "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for" ...

Dear Eugene, You might think I don't like going to the mall but I do.  And if I am to ask you to take a wild guess what I like to look at I bet you can't get it right :) Books, of course, that's easy.  No.  I am talking about something other than books. I like to look at toys, play with them. Last night I dropped off my daughter at church and got a couple of hours to burn.  Library first, no doubt.  Then I went to the toys. I saw an anime cat figurine that can sing three different raps songs at the push back of her hip-hop flat cap and of course I pushed it three successive times to release the full-length magic.  A father with his carbon-copy toddler laughed and I think they finally found what they were looking for right in my hands.  I should get a cut of the profit. The mall is a colorful place, isn't it?  Contrary to our cynical self-denial (not that it happens too often), there's happiness to be found among the colors. In his...

Dear Eugene, Last night I was reading science.  I've been doing quite a bit of that lately. My son asked me, "Dad, is that, like, science science that you are reading?" I knew what he meant.  As compared to "Christian" science.  Sunday-School science.  Young-Earth science.  Noah's-Ark science.  Jonah-in-a-whale science. "Oh, no worries, this is real science," I told him.  "I've already worked through that whale thing you are talking about before you were a sperm." Much of "Christian" science gives Jesus a very fishy name.  And whales are not fish, even a kindergartener knows. Anyway, this is not the can of sardines I am opening today. Science is fascinating, isn't it? But do you know what is just as fascinating?  That I would call science fascinating, as if it is a person, a beautiful, intelligent woman, a visionary man.  Who am I to put such value on... her ? When I was reading science, a questio...

Dear Eugene, On a day like today I walked out of the door with Sumi early in the morning and wondered if we could reach the end of the world if we find no reason to stop. Like a road movie.  Like the man who walks in the desert in " Paris, Texas ," possibly the greatest American movie ever made not by an American.  My heart is aching just now, thinking about this movie. Sometimes I think if I am to turn on a tape recorder and collect everything that has gone through my head during my long walks I could have written a book by the end of it. But ain't that true about everyone else's life?  Every life deserves its cinéma vérité treatment. What makes a story a story is that it has meaning. Even if we say the point of capturing a day in a life is to say how meaningless it all is, we are already trying to mount a meaningful narrative on the "meaningless" life and turn nihilism on its head. The "Preacher" of Ecclesiastes meant to say som...

Dear Eugene, What is the biggest human tragedy you've heard of?  I know this sounds very much like a rhetorical question to unveil what I think I know but others don't.  But, no, it is not like that. Maybe let me ask the question again: What is the worst tragedy you've experienced?---but hold there, I am not talking about a single personal experience, or an isolated incident.  I am asking, What is the biggest human tragedy as you experienced it ? In my line of work and various off-work involvements, I talk to people all the time.  And I listen more than I talk.  The question above emerged out of a more positive one--actually, probably the mother of all positive questions: "What is the meaning of life?" Let me tell you, my dear pastor, a sick joke.  Someone told me this; I have my own varied rendition.  But let me tell you the original...my way. There was this tough university professor who was handing out the toughest exam in the toughest ...

Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make ...

Dear Eugene, Two months ago I said this to you: " Lately I wrote a lot to you and threw away just as much. I am not happy with my sentences any more. I can't find the right prepositions, how one thing relates to another ." It wasn't because I had nothing to say.  I just had not the language.  I've lost my tongue.  Something new was emerging and the old wasn't adequate anymore. I was struck dumb by an angel. Then I read Rowan Williams and started to speak again: "Where there is salvation, its name is Jesus; its grammar is the cross and the resurrection.  (...) And one, very paradoxical, ground of this trust lies in the fact which Christian contemplatives constantly bring before us, the fact that Christian speech is  for ever  entering into and re-emerging from inarticulacy. There is not one moment of dumbness or loss followed by fluency, but an unending flow back and forth between speech and silence; and if at each stage the silen...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I was talking to my friends about Trump, and this is what I said: "Trump is like a mirror, or magnifying glass. He didn't make people turn into this or that. He simply helps to reflect, magnify what is already there. So what was already there (or not there) in this 'Evangelical Christianity' (that helped to put him there)? Do we find trace of such things (or absence of others) in our own particular brand of Christianity?" I shall begin to answer my own questions. Trump shouldn't surprise us. A fertile soil is cultivated to give growth to what we see today, and let me say my hands were in the soil too. Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world Has crossed the threshold And it has overturned The order of the soul A certain Canadian prophet told us a while back already. We don't have to go far; we don't even ha...

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, Last night I was explaining to my wife why without a doubt this is my favorite picture from this past weekend, probably one of my faves ever. Now of course she asked why.  Not that she didn't agree it looks fine, but she just didn't share my enthusiasm. I suggested, "Look at it as if it's the first time, that you don't really know what was happening.  Take a fresh look.  Wonder about things, as a child would." And it was hard.  Because she knew the context of the picture. Maybe. But does she know the full context of the picture?  Even if she does know some context, is there nothing more to discover? "Offscreen Space," the most special effect in the movies (moving, story-telling pictures).   Reach out to the Offscreen Space , I said. "Offscreen Space" refers to the six areas blocked from being visible on a movie frame, but still part of the space of the scene: to the left and right, above and below the frame...

Dear Eugene, The season is changing. This morning as I opened the kitchen window, just a little slit enough to invite in the first breath of daily baptism, I found myself again asking Why . Why does the season change? A strange little question, isn't it?  Didn't I learn the answer(s) from school already?  Haven't I experienced enough of the cyclical change to have gotten used to it by now? Let me guess, this must have happened to you too, that all of a sudden, in the middle of doing some very purposeful, fulfilling things, your mind would just be short-circuited by the strange little questions  Why?  What is the meaning of it all?  And you would draw a blank, trying your hardest to retrieve from within you a deep reservoir of ideas, doctrines and experience to no avail; not that there is no answer (in fact we have too many), but all the answers in the world putting together is not enough to tame that little feisty puppy of a yearning: Why? ...

Dear Eugene, What is the biggest lie of religion?  You are a pastor, a "religion practitioner" in the eye of the world; you must have an answer or two for this question, I suppose? I think the biggest lie religion tells us is that once we are "in", once we have god--or, more like, god-ideas--in our pocket, we could stop asking questions (and hence keep giving answers). Summer is the travel season.  Everyone looks forward to one's next "get away."  No Christian I know ever asks, But Jesus has never "gotten away" from his tiny backyard turf during his earthly life...how did he then find himself?  He didn't explore or experience enough of life to know enough, feel enough, live enough, didn't he?  How can such a provincial existence say or mean anything to anyone but his own petty, parochial self?  He didn't even have a place he could truly call "home"; he was in exile with his Jewish kinfolk, lorded over by a fo...