Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, How fragile we are.  How we need to consider this.  How do we consider this? Today I was reading again Rowan Williams' " The Wound of Knowledge ," and here he speaks about a Christianity that I suspect is foreign to most churchgoers, and I suspect not only in the West: "The final control and measure and irritant in Christian speech remains the cross: the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity is born out of struggle because it is born from men and women faced with the paradox of God’s purpose made flesh in a dead and condemned man. Without the cross there would be no New Testament. . . . What is at issue is that the first Christians were painfully aware that God’s chosen one and God’s chosen people had come into open and tragic conflict: that God seemed to be set against God. If God is to be seen at work here, he is indeed a strange God, a hidden God, who does not uncover his will in a straight line of development, but fully enters into...

Dear Eugene, This morning I was contemplating on what Rowan Williams said here: "So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark's narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John's Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there—to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see—with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God's delivers the world to us—and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are ...

Dear Eugene, This is what Jesus said, " Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.  Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. " How is one to understand this? One implication, I believe, is that no one can start to say one knows God without losing something of huge significance.  And to lose oneself bit by bit and finally completely is not the goal, even less the accomplishment, but the very beginning, the first baby step of loving God, finding life's true worth and living it. I am glad Jesus put it that way, allowed no false hope on false promises.  What he said wasn't even a demand, let alone a cruel one.  It'd be true cruelty if we are to find out the truth on our own, like a motherless child, a desert wanderer, knowing not what the hel...

Dear Eugene, Give me one verb. One verb that would have you, a Christian, to go before it as the subject of the sentence and make a definitive statement about your Christian faith.  Just one. What would that verb be? I suspect any Christian if asked would consider this a serious question and give it some serious pondering.  And I further suspect any serious pondering on religious matter would likely trigger in the religious person a recollection of sacred sayings, however fragmentary, "orthodoxy," the "official position" that would escape the shameful or, god forbid, the heretical. I suspect if we tally up the votes the number one choice among Christians (followers-of-Christ, I dare define) would be love . To love.  I love.  Love God and love people, that's where we start and that's where we end. I am not saying anyone is trying to be dishonest, but, really, is this our true answer?  Honesty has to do with actuality, what really is hap...

Dear Eugene, If a person is to keep collecting paper napkins and tuck them under his armpit, what would you say he's up to?  I can tell you he's not trying to dry himself.  He's certainly not stealing either for the napkins are free for all.  What kind of a past would his action betray? Today I dropped by a McDonald's for coffee.  When I was leaving the place a ketchup dispenser caught my eyes.  There's nothing wrong with it, nothing special about it; it pumped out free-for-all ketchup as it should.  It was a thought that caught my eyes catching the pump in action: would a person be so hungry to come in here and pump ketchup straight into her mouth? Of course there is.  War time.  Famine.  Tyranny.  Climate displacement.  Happening now as I speak. And do I know a person such as this?  No.  Never did.  Hard to imagine ever would.  The neediest person I know can drop into a McD and expect ketchup pumping...

Dear Eugene, Joy is a choice. Joy is a choice made necessary by sorrow and fear of often greater necessity. "Work is work," we say.  A burden happens to us as we happen to live up to some expectations that happen to be needfully this and necessarily that.   "It is what it is."  "What can you do about it?" A take-out office lunch followed by a customized bubble-tea, a favorite TV show to wind down a day, a dream vacation, a marriage vow bombastically made, decisions we choose to "enjoy" ourselves fill the cracks of a life with a built-in trajectory laden with assumptions rampant and fateful.  Imagine to have all our "necessary" burdens taken away and ourselves placed in the middle of an empty room, stripped down to our bare essence; would joy be there to accompany our nakedness?  What wasn't there before wouldn't magically show up after. True joy caulks no crack and paints over no surface.  It permeates and transfor...

Dear Eugene, My all-time favorite story is Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well . It is dangerous to have a favorite story: one can get very ungenerous with any other interpretation.   Almost every sermon on this story induced nausea in me.  Yes, I am a Pharisee. Good stories invite multiple readings and continual interpretation.  Any misinterpretation can only be to reduce what is living and generative to a few dogmatic of-courses and set-you-rights. I was thinking this morning: love is suffocating, especially that we claim to be true and deep.  No sincere lover sets out to make it so; all are genuinely surprised by the strangleholds that eventually (and often very soon) must be given and taken to resurrect what was once vouchsafed with ease and grace and assumed to be undying. Jesus loved the woman at the well.  It was no teddy-bear love.  There was firework right from the get-go, secrets and lies were revealed, in the uns...

Dear Eugene, I think I am finally getting some good traction with my novel after two false starts. I know you've read many novels but never written any.  Probably you didn't need to, already being so immersed in the stories of other.  Or you couldn't, being in the precarious position of a pastor, held accountable for your every word and often by ham-fisted literalism. But I know you would know what I mean when I say I was struggling with, for example, choosing the right point-of-view or which tense (past vs present) to use.  By "right" I mean right for the story, faithful to the voice of the character that I am speaking through and for.  The Word speaks the Man into existence. I am also busy helping my brother-in-law with home renovation, a great training for writer, hammered some good common sense into me.  And then there's the great generosity of the many people I've served and worked with in the past month.  It's been surreal.  I feel ve...

Dear Eugene, It's been a while since I last wrote to you.  It's because I've been busy and there's too much I want to say to you but don't know how to choose.  I've lived many days that's just like any other day, but now I've just lived a month that is unlike any other month, each day of it.  It feels like it's not my life that I am living, a life so new that I don't know what to make of it yet. Today I was looking at a tree and made the most banal comment, "This tree is going to outlast all of us."  We can point at any random tree and say the same thing and the comment will likely turn out to be true. If that's the case, aren't we all making too a big deal out of ourselves?  Stuffs we do to ourselves, stuffs we make ourselves do, just to live out what we call a life.  And what is this "life" but a handful of years, the first third in utter confusion, the last third in worry and pain, the middle years to recov...

Dear Eugene, A friend reminded me of a passage my hero Wendell Berry wrote in his essay "Discipline and Hope": The entire social vision, as I understand it, goes something like this: man is born into a fallen world, doomed to eat bread in the sweat of his face. But there is an economic redemption. He should go to college and get an education—that is, he should acquire the "right" certificates and meet the "right" people. An education of this sort should enable him to get a "good" job—that is, short hours of work that is either easy or prestigious for a lot of money. Thus he is saved from the damnation of drudgery, and is presumably well on the way to proving the accuracy of his early suspicion that he is really a superior person. Or, in a different version of the same story, the farmer at his plow or the housewife at her stove dreams of the neat outlines and the carefree boundaries of a factory worker's eight-hour day and forty-hour ...