Dear Eugene

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, I find artificial turf a very disturbing idea, one of the more unsightly anti-creation project of man.  (Wow, where does that rancor come from on a pleasant Friday morning such as now?) I don't mean a ball field.  I can see the function (though still have great reservation about the rude juxtaposition of human's spirited playing upon a blanket nonchalant to the baptism in blood sweat and tears.) I am talking about artificial turf for a home, what a person does to her "home turf." It is one thing to make things neat.  There is nothing more pleasant to my sight than the uniformity displayed on freshly mowed lawn, especially mine.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and my eyes were opened by sparkling fairies (with beautiful names like Endorphins, Adrenaline, Dopamine and Serotonin--bless the poets) descending, honoring me for my good hard work. Still, uniformity is not forced conformity. I am aware of--have nightmare of damaging my lawn ...

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, Yesterday I talked about reaching out to the "offscreen space," and I wonder if one might think it means just a clever way to look at things, to gain a skewed perspective for some twisted reason, obscure for the sake of obscurity. After all, isn't "offscreen space" the most stable and dependable vehicle of exploit in horror flicks cheap or not?  (And that's why they tend to be cheap; anyone can pull an OS thrill effectively--door creaking off-screen, camera pulled back oh-so-slightly to reveal a distorted shadow at a hidden corner...) So why reach out to the OS?  What are we seeking? The answer is, it all depends on the entire, fuller, holistic framework that one anchors his imagination on, within and without what is readily perceivable to us in our limited vision of the here-and-now.  WYSIWYG we adamantly resist.  There's something "out there"!   (Can you  see  what's in this picture?) Here's the transcript o...

Dear Eugene, "Is it me?  Please be honest and tell me, because I really cannot identify it!"  For the longest time that's how I've been pleading to my wife. I just couldn't figure out what it is about churches that suffocated me, time and again nipped my already-small flame in its bud.  I wanted to get along with people, move along the production line of God's Kingdom business, ride along the high tide of spirituality to reach high heaven.  But all I got was a bad case of sinusitis that lasted all seasons. "Could it be because it's a Chinese church?"  I didn't expect my wife to give me deep insight and sure enough she didn't. Later I came to realize, Yes, it might have something to do with culture, but, really, it goes much deeper and pervasive than that.  I am not a stranger to my culture's patriarchal, ham-fisted ways, but just because manhandling is carried out by another culture with more outward democracy, debonair finess...