beet poetry

There is no doubt of the connection

between food and poetry.

A well-cooked meal is a muse--

paeans on paella, scones of scorn,

the turn of verse as marinated

steaks sear with grill lines,

the iamb from shaking sea salt on lamb.

Good food renders us speechless and,

in that moment, the ingredients for poetry.

The poet, like the chef, wakes up in the morning

and goes to the market, finding choice

and fresh edibles, before the others get to them.

We could live off of intravenous

glucose pumped into our stomachs,

pre-digested concepts that pass for food,

sustenance that does merely that: sustain.

We could shuffle off our mortal coils

without ever having crispy onion rings

or kielbasa covered in sauerkraut.

We could manage with newspaper

fat, tablets of tabloids, three-second

sound bites, snippets that impress upon us

less speech rather than leaving us speechless,

the instantly accessible loaf of banality.

We could,

but we find room, always room,

for that everyday indulgence,

for that which is utterly beautiful,

for that which sings

like bread still quivering from the oven.

Once you have tasted gourmet,

there's only one way.

Once a verse touches your language,

salts your understanding, brightens your eyes

like honey does after a fast,

you know what hunger and poverty is.

O how much flavor, breadth, and depth we lack!

How little we feast and how much we snack!

O beet poet, standing on stage

reading your recipe for life,

peppered with reality, looking at us

with your glazed glare,

stop starving art with your open mic-

rowaved slam.

getting my leaven's worth

Just had to put up some photos of my bread-baking craze of late:

Special thanks to jamie for her recipe on how to make delicious artisan bread in less than 5 minutes a day. truly, your leaven's worth.

Man does not live on bread alone. It needs oil and salt.

our church home: a genius?

I've just finished skimming through Deymaz's book, Building a Healthy Multi-Ethnic Church, and what I found was disappointing. Not that Deymaz's book isn't a well thought out book, but I couldn't find any resources for how to take a homogenous non-White church (e.g. a Korean-American church) into the multi-cultural river. It makes sense that Deymaz is writing for the majority culture, but it did strike me as ironic that the practical application of the book was geared totally towards White churches that are seeking to become multi-cultural. Ironic because it doesn't really seem like a multi-cultural approach.

What I am struggling with is the tension between ethnic-specific ministry and multi-cultural ministry. I see the need for both. (Throw in multi-socio-economic factors, and you get a picture of what my ideal church looks like.)

Is this a question about being relevant? Am I unsatisfied with ethnic-specific churches because they don't accurately reflect their surrounding communities (in cities that I live in, like Shoreline, WA)? Or is it about being prophetic, staying true to the vision we see in the book of Acts and Revelation?

To be quite honest, one of the reasons why I desperately desire a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-socio-economic church is because of evangelism. I remember when I was back in youth group. Zealous as I was, I wanted to invite a few of my high school friends out to church. They were and still are good friends of mine. But they aren't Asian. And while they respectfully and graciously made their visits to my church, there was no place for someone like them. It had made my heart heavy to realize that as much as I could pray for them, I did not have a church that I would even feel comfortable welcoming them into and having them call it home.

Yes, there are many Asian Americans that still need reaching out to, still need to be welcomed to the church. And there are many that have left the church as well. But perhaps if those Asian Americans saw a church that practiced reconciliation and that more accurately reflected the communities they live and work in, maybe there would be more that would come.

Everyday I meet people in coffeeshops, at the grocery store, in and around my neighborhood, who have a relationship with me but don't have a relationship with Jesus. And I want to invite them to church, but feel somewhat hindered by the fact that my congregation is entirely Asian American. In other words, our homogeneity, while a strength in building a church home, seems to be a detriment to being gracious hosts. Our homogeneity affects our hospitality. It also affects our theology. (A tangent that deserves another post: what happens to your spirituality if your communities on Monday-Saturday look different from your Sunday morning community?) And this should not be.

What, then, is our way forward? One church, homogeneous? Help.

I need plastic surgery

The Asian concept of saving-face is a kind of face-lift.

And like face-lifts, there is a specific aspect to saving-face that has always struck me as odd. It is in the realm of gifts. I didn't know what all the hubbub was about. When somebody brought over a gift, there was always an outcry, something like "oh, you really didn't have to do that!" And there was the initial refusal, the vigorous thrusting of the gift back into the hands of the giver, and only when the giver nearly appeared insulted, was the gift reluctantly received.

A gift tiff, if you will.

It took me several years (and I am still learning how) to say the words "thank you" whenever anyone gave me a gift, even a compliment. I began to wonder if I was never taught this elegant solution for fear it might seem like I wouldn't take the gift seriously enough. Of course, all the noise drew more attention to the recipient than the gift, or the giver for that matter! Or if it was because we didn't want to feel indebted to the giver because of the gift. Gifts always came with strings attached.

(Ironically, "gift" in German means "poison.")

But I am wondering, and I think C. S. Lewis would agree (cf. "Weight of Glory"), if wanting to appear self-less is not the point. Being grateful is beautiful, because it shows a receptive heart.

My heart is still a shy host, unsure if gifts require something of me. I am conditioned to think that I must at least play puppet to the strings of the gift. So when something is given to me, I hide my blush, and vigorously prove that I should never receive such a gift, if only to show that I do not go down without a fronted fight. If only to show that even in receiving, I can still hold up my nose job of pride.

re:metamorphosis

If you have ever read anything by Kafka, you'll understand why his surname has been adjectivized: kafkaesque, as in something senseless, complex, and menacing. Like his story "Metamorphosis," where, if you recall, a man wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a cockroach the size of a divan.

When I read it back in high school, I didn't understand it one bit. But after having just read the first several parts of Lewis' Miracles, some light has been shed upon the story. Lewis contends that what makes Reason so distinctive in human beings is that it is separate from Nature. Many believe that Reason is natural, that is, the result of an evolutionary process of natural selection. Reason remained in the gene pool because it was useful and helped certain creatures survive better than others. But we have a problem when we claim Reason to be the descendant of Nature. For if this is so, then how can we at all distinguish between them? To say that your reasoning or mine is nothing but the effect of natural causes is to say that we have no 'Reason' at all, but that we are doing just what we have been naturally programmed to do.

I am not trying to lay out the entire treatise here, but I am trying to explain how fascinating Kafka's story is with regards to Reason and Nature. What makes Kafka's "Metamorphosis" so, um, kafkaesque is how a rational, sensible man devolves into an unintelligible and gross carapace with legs. It is a story of a man turning into an animal, while retaining the reason and psychology of a man. And for that matter, it is a horrific story.

He wakes up one morning to find himself metamorphosed into a giant cockroach. If he hadn't had his reasoning powers, he would have never known he had turned into a cockroach. He would just be a cockroach. End of narrative. But he can describe his feelings. He is aware of himself. He has thoughts. But he's just in a body that doesn't quite suit him or the others around him. And his ability to communicate is severely degenerated. He's a rational being in a seemingly irrational body.

But that picture is a picture of humanity, no? Why should it horrify us to find Reason hidden within an animal? Isn't that the picture the evolutionists give us? And who is to say that cockroaches do not have rational powers? After all, they have survived far longer than we have, according to biologists.

All this has been intriguing to me, because what people have considered kafkaesque is actually quite natural according to science and anthropology, except, of course, that it is a caricature of natural. Shocking what you find when you look at a mirror, yes? Furthermore, it is intriguing to me because what Kafka and others have suggested is that when Reason exists within a human body, when a human exercises reason, it is so refreshingly right. It is as if Reason has always existed in humanity, which is indeed what I believe.

Imagine Kafka's reversal: a cockroach becoming a man. Whereas, in the original, there involved a great loss--namely, that of the human body-- this fiction would involve an incredible gain: that of reason, among many other things. The body and the mind fit. Mens sana in corpore sano.

There are days when I wake up and find myself but a little better than a cockroach. David Cockroach Ro. I can't seem to communicate. I dislike the way I look. I get apples thrown at me, and I feel like rot and scum. And the question that buggers me is this: is everything I do simply the product of my natural self? Have I no control whatsoever?

But the fact that I have even written thus, the fact that I know that I am a man stuck inside a cockroach and not just a cockroach with no sense or sensibility at all, is hopeful. For even to long for something like true humanity, a resurrected humanity if you will, is to show that Reason exists outside of Nature. Not everything is fated by my biology or physiology or even my sociology.

Reason, I am finding, is reason enough to hope that there is something more than just Nature.

Towards a Blogging Ministerium

What if I could get a bunch of pastors together to blog for a particular generation of blog-readers? Why pastors? One, we need each other. The pastoral outfit is not a solo mission. There is so much that bearing the cross and the cloth demands that one person is not meant to handle it. A crass way of putting it would be that if you think you are able to take it on all by yourself, either your cross is too small or your ego is too big. Maybe that's saying the same thing.

Two, sometimes the most effective rhetoric is not soliloquy or one-man-versus-the-world (ala Athanasius) sort of speaking, but rather dialogue. Or a concert of voices. For example, take the way we study the Bible. Fruitful study comes not only when I have my own interpretations and thoughts, but when I also check them--converse--with commentators and scholars who have studied the same passage with more rigor. We stand, if not on the shoulders of giants, at least shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow stone-slingers against them.

Lastly, and on a personal note, I need motivation to write. The idea of blogging on my own seems daunting, like trying to write a novel. Too many days separate my last blog entry from my current one. Too many thoughts spoil my literary kitchen. Too many distractions exist in an already technolopolized world (to borrow from Postman). Writing, nowadays, has the invitation to being utterly exposed on the Internet. You were taught not to spew out just mere rambling (this is the traditional view of writing), but yet that sort of rambling is what has made blogging so accessible and popular (the contemporary view of writing). For someone with traditionalist leanings like me, blogging and Internet publishing has that kind of paradoxical hindrance. People might actually like your unfiltered thoughts. They might actually connect with you and write a response. And so the blogosphere turns.

On the whole, we need to write. And I need to write. So, help us write together in the midst of generational turmoil, neuroses, and angst. And writing our wrongs, we may just right them, Lord-willing.

Initial Observations

Funny. I don't feel like a lumberjack, but that's okay. They used to call them loggers. And if you have the tendency to spew, then, blumberjack, it is apropos that we call you 'blogger.'

And that is what I am now: a blogger in this blogosphere. All sorts of studies could be done on me, and could be neatly labeled under the category 'blogology.'

Just what sort of word is 'blog'? Originally from web-log, I suppose, the initial, communal prefix has been excised to create it; although it could also be said that 'we blog.' And that is what we bloggers do: blog. For a bit, I shall compose some neo-blogisms.

I'd like to say that I go blogging once every morning, when the air is crisp and I have just stretched my fingers and straightened my back and tied my laces. Just a brisk blog, nothing more. Afterwards, I have my coffee.

Or perhaps I go check out the next city blog, which is ten blogs away, swinging on my world wide webs from post to post.

Maybe I accidentally drip some blog onto my shirt after taking a bite of my egg-blog sandwich. Its golden, congealed yolk makes for some amusement at the neighborhood blog party.

Once, I got blogged out of my house. The firemen were not happy when they had to knock the door down for me. I had gone blogging without my keys. Silly me.

Blog! That tastes horrible! Get me some water.

At any rate, I b-log to you, and you b-log to me. That's how this sort of thing works. We b-log to each other.

Blog. Blog. Blog. Captain's Blog, Stardate 03112011:

Hello fellow bloggers. I am living da vida roca. Ricky Martin, watch out.