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, There is no bad photographer in this day and age. Or there shouldn't be any. I don't know if you have a camera phone and had done this before: You took a picture without you knowing, pressed the screen by mistake as your arm swung.  And by the time you witnessed the result of the accident you said to yourself, Hey, that doesn't look too bad at all . In fact, it was downright beautiful. So I have a good phone, you said, with a good camera, high definition, great detail, automated luminosity balancing and color enhancement, all these, working together, and a fleeting, lucky happenstance.  You said. I said. What I failed to say is the (much) more obvious: That this world is just downright beautiful.  (And my camera just happened to call me out of my unawareness and forgetfulness.) And if the result of my many "accidents" looks purposeless or meaningless or lifeless, all it takes is a little reframing, cutting off distracting elements f...

Dear Eugene, I usually don't hunt for stuffs to write about and they'd just come to me when I walk up the hill with Sumi.  Nothing in my head is that interesting compared to all the things happening out there. Like this morning: There was sun; there was breeze.  Then the breeze became wind and the sun no more, and with that came a sudden shower.  I tried to connect the events and misunderstood--the shower was from a lawn sprinkler.  Sumi grunted. Always be wary of a man who thinks a world only out of his head and means it only out of his heart--even his whole heart.  He's a magician; he shows what seems to be interesting but hides what's even more interesting.  Soon he forgets where he hides his truly interesting things and becomes a true illusionist. " First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see ," your translation of the very first words in the Bible. The words are not giving us a "scientific" account....

Dear Eugene, Last night I rode my bike to the library.  I think my legs, weak as they are, are getting used to the biking motion.  I've found a new rhythm that works better for my aging body. I stopped halfway to look at a little league of little children playing soccer.  My son was once there. He knew not it was about competition then, and in fact we the parents and coaches did our best to say it is really all about health and character development.  Treacherous was too big a word then to describe the water they were called to navigate in. Soon enough in hassling and ruffling the ideas of competence justice and conquering would find their way to come out of our pores like blood sweat and tears.  Soon enough the parents would get across the sideline to join them in the ring. My son lost too much and got fed up and that's when he quit.  We move on to find new turf that we can finally call our own, a reign we deserve, small as it might be. You ...

Dear Eugene, "Well, the morning speaks for itself..." The conclusion that concludes nothing came to me first thing in the morning, and now I am working  backward to trace my steps in dream(s). (Last night in my dream I was surprised/confused by a restaurant owner who laid big platters of free food on my table, so many that finally other paying clients would come to take a share.  Then the restaurant had a power outage.  Then it turned into a story about jealousy.  Someone please get me Daniel.) The true meaning of the statement is: My morning speaks about my life . I woke up with sore limbs.  Hours of lawn work last evening.  " I ache in the places where I used to play.. ."   Every time Cohen got to this line in a concert, the audience would find fulfillment in turning their anticipatory smutty smirks to a collective bawdy roar, angels shot down to meet us at our place, desecration that points us to the sacred, classic Cohen modus ope...

Dear Eugene, This morning, still easy like last night's breeze, I feel priggish, like a scholar wanting to organize his stuffs in point form lest people miss the luster in the gold nuggets he has to offer. There was a time in my life when all I do is to show off my nuggets of truth, put them under the sun at a perfectly strategic angle to let out their unhinged glory, make them glow in a way to take shine off others' nuggets, to blind the world once and for all. " Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends ," Jesus told his disciples, those who claim to follow him and his way, to do things the way he does, who claimed to trust, to "have faith" in what the Father was and still is doing through him the Son. I say  I would die for truth... Jesus answers  I am the Truth and you have no need to die so that I can shine.  I shine all by myself.  I am not asking you to die for an ideology, a set of high moral, good doctr...

Dear Eugene, It's a soft Friday night.  Everything feels so right. Or so I feel. So I feel that the world is in the right with me.  Right in my book.  Suits my flow.  In my humble opinion. What if nothing is going right in a different person's life?  Would that make my right not right? I happen to know a lady who is, as I am typing away now feeling the spring night breeze on my left cheek thanks to a sliding door opening to my backyard balcony with a window screen in between winnowing out unwanted elements in the air, working the closing shift in a big-box store, making one-third of what I make, toiling three times as hard as I ever did, three hundred miles wide a gulf between us in our assessment of how right everything is this very evening, three lifetimes of difference in our access to education and resources, ingress to culture and community, entitlement to love and care. I wonder if what is alright with me tonight works for her too. My wife...

Dear Eugene, I read somewhere in the news now that Meghan Markle has the hoopla of the royal wedding behind her she can finally focus on doing feminism again.  I take that to mean she can now devote herself to saving women from men, from the ways of the world, or frankly just from themselves. I don't know her and even less about feminism.  If I do there should be an exponential reduction in my cynicism in relation to my knowing. One thing I do know though: If there really is something called feminism, whoever that is a real fighter for it is a nameless face that we shall never find on the front page, a face that is most likely haggard and ugly, one that no respectable cause would want to enlist as its advocate cover girl and neither would she allow a simple -ism  to circumscribe her call, her vocation, her very life. To say my life is now settled into a certain favorable, congenial pattern conducive to my activism is to say I am a lost cause to all causes alrea...

Dear Eugene, Last night a perennial question in the literary world was settled: Whether Philip Roth will ever win the Nobel. That needs not be asked any more; Roth passed away last night . I have a feeling he would have chosen to hold on if not for the Nobel being cancelled this year .  (They don't give the Prize to a dead man.  How thoughtful.)  But to wait till next fall to be disappointed all over again?  Nah, f*** it.   His words. Yes, the time that Roth could have won the Nobel has come but passed him by and there is no second round.  He knows.  He writes about that's how life is.  He whines.  Like a baby.  But he must admit it's the most fitting punchline to his sick joke of a life. I was saddened when I heard the news this morning, though I've expected it long time coming.  He's always been writing about sickness and dying anyway.  Like, dead already, dude.   I can hear him laugh. I feel like writing tw...

Dear Eugene, "You live with your parents, you hang with your buddies, and on Saturday nights you burn it all off at 2001 Odyssey. You're a cliché. You're nowhere, goin' no place!'' The "nice girl" tells the John Travolta character in " Saturday Night Fever ," an almost angelic, "dream girl" that is anything but cliché in the eyes of the boy.  And apparently that's also how she sees herself. When we live according to the world's prescription we are a cliché.  When we believe in the world telling us we are not a cliché we are a bigger a cliché.  As we grow older the burning sensation of such tragic irony subsides and we make peace to live and die with the contradiction.  There is no more need to single out who is what when the world is just the way it is and we'll forever be the way we are.  It is called acceptance, compromise, maturity. Learned helplessness. To not want to a live like a cliché is a testimony to...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I talked about truth and courage .  Yes , truth is courageous!  Or should I say truth gives us courage? A piece of truth revealed to me by, say, a scientist will necessarily call out something in me to respond to its truthfulness. I could respond by saying, Well, it's good to know, especially when I need to know stuffs like this to pass test.  I shall bury this knowledge in no time, unlearning it quicker than uninstalling a useless app in my phone... Or I could say, Let me exploit it; it's all about the moolah!  For me, for my kids, for my country, in the name of Me the truth-giver.  People shall remember me for upholding the truth and making mankind great again! Or I could say, Holy luck, how did I stumble into such truth?  I could have been blind all my life, but now I can see a creative potentiality in my new knowing, grand possibilities hitherto unbeknownst erstwhile unto this little me!  My shoulders are heavy, bec...

Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua...

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, What is there to speak when the truth chooses to remain elusive, anonymous, silent?  What is a preacher to preach when God chooses to not show up?  Can He?  Of course, don't you think? " Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known ," thus says the Lord who created heaven and earth. But what if the problem is not His?  That we think we are calling on the name of the One True Lord but we aren't?  What if we were just seduced and deceived by the "sweet poison of the false infinite," as C. S. Lewis puts it, and thought we were tasting the real thing? What if God doesn't show up because He wants us to wait?  What if the moment He asks for our waiting happens right in the middle of a sermon, at a tight or even dangerous cross-section where we would rather get out of asap? It's been a year since Leonard Cohen passed away.  (I am still surprised you've made no mention of him i...

Dear Eugene, The world does not take Hollywood seriously.  Never did, never will. She is easy to like, at times even to love.  But to trust her, to "put your faith in" her is to forget she has never meant to be more than flippant.  Her magnificent outpouring might sometimes be inspiring, but what must go on is only a show after all. The news headline asks: " As scope of Weinstein conduct widens, questions arise: who knew what and when? " We don't need Cohen to tell us, the answer is " Everybody knows ." " If there was ever an event that I was at and Harvey was doing this kind of thing and I didn’t see it, then I am so deeply sorry, because I would have stopped it ," Matt Damon said. Yes, of course, Jason Bourne, you "would have stopped it."  If only you knew.  You just didn't know that's all.  You would have if you could have. "This kind of stuff can’t happen," Damon proceeded to say.  As if he was bo...

Dear Eugene, Robert Pirsig passed away yesterday, you must have heard.  I suppose this is what is occupying your mind this morning? You liked his " Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance " quite a bit, I recall.  You are the only pastor I know who would recommend a "secular" book such as this.  Thank you.  You don't want us to "take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world," as Pirsig puts it. Of course the "faithfuls" would decry: That sounds a lot like a different kind of religion.  Something Oriental, maybe.  Humanist philosophy, maybe?  Jesus is the truth and what else do you need to know or ask about the world?  The Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it! If only we do really believe  it (whatever the "it" refers to), we wouldn't have sounded so glib, false, and scornful.  We often act like we are "saved" by knowing the right doctr...

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 ...