Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Cave Children, resurfaced I wonder what they have seen? Deep darkness, deep truth     shallowed again What you see is what you get is what you see: Life full of promises, propositions--     true possibilities? The light is strong, the sun true;     the farmers, where? They've prayed their way out of Garden     to play somewhere else     encrusted by the surface of things     waiting for a message From the Cave Children. Yours, Alex

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, If you can pick a season to experience a life-changing tragedy (that you must face by the end of the year), what would your choice be? Hopeful spring?  Youthful summer?  Dreamy autumn?  Cosy winter? Around Valentine's?  Just before/after Christmas?  Back to school week?  Tax season?  Mother's Day? Don't worry, I have nothing heavy or profound to say today; it only sounds like so.  In fact, I think the weight of this question (which I personally have not heard asked) is in how matter-of-fact it all is when tragedy strikes. It just happens; what are you going to do about it? Not that you have not heard of something like this happening before.  Not that anyone has pledged to make you the exception.  Not that the possibility never crossed your mind.  It kind of just happens, like in the final scene of " The Departed ," which in the script reads: COLIN (accepting it, sort of,but only in a COLIN way) ...

Dear Eugene, I was playing in my garden last night, giving all the hedges around my house bad haircut.  If they are teenagers they'd swear to never talk to me again. I don't mind, cos people talk to me when I am out in my garden. Old folks.  Older folks.  Some I have seen before working on their own garden, others in their eyes I saw them looking at me seeing themselves once working on their own garden.  Sometimes they'd stop to talk, if our eyes met, if the beast in my hands wasn't roaring.  More often though they would just give me a big, approving grin, telling me, among many other things, to not take things for granted. Even my toil. I've finally got a chance to talk to the wife of my neighbor, the auto mechanic who suffered a big stroke .  She was walking her pit bull.  I've learned more about him in this 15-minutes conversation with his wife than with all the conversations I had with him over the years added together then times by tw...

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 ...