Fall 2023 - Issue 3
GREETINGS, FELLOW PILGRIMS!
Each issue of the Et Cetera has a theme to help prompt conversation. This issue’s theme is Navigating Faith, since many of us find ourselves getting disoriented (in good or not-so-good ways) while studying at Regent as God continually reveals Himself. Please let us know what you think, or better yet, let the writer know and start talking about any thoughts you had in response.
If you’re wondering what kind of content we accept: Most kinds of prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, or visual art is welcome. Prose pieces should be 1,000 words or less. These can include anecdotes, book reviews, movie reviews, thoughts spurred by your academic studies (no actual assignments, please), things you’d like to talk about with the community...et cetera! Visual art must be submitted in a digital format; printing will be in black and white, so do keep that in mind. Priority is given to students, staff, and faculty of Regent College.
All submissions must be sent to etcetera@regent-college.edu. Publication is not guaranteed. All submissions are subject to proofreading edits and may be returned for more substantial revision. Views expressed in the Et Cetera do not necessarily represent the views of Regent College, the RCSA Council, or the Et Cetera staff.
We can’t wait to read what you write this year!
Steven Gomez, senior editor
Tess Fuller, associate editor
A Different Room
By Xue Ting Fong
There was a time that I had a crisis of faith, and that was right before I came to Regent—and it also probably served as the impetus of my application. I think much of the world was having a crisis then, with the unpredictability of a global pandemic. How do you orientate yourself with your faith, and know that it is yours? For me, my faith was an anchor in the good, beautiful, and true. There were moments where it felt like the world was unveiled, and God was pressing deeper into my reality. I could count these experiences, and I noted them, each one different. But in the time of my faith crisis, it felt like all these carefully constructed thoughts, and my theology of God, were altogether demolished in one fell swoop.
Like today, the things that were happening in the world were terrible—and what was happening in my life then felt terrible, without rhyme or reason. With the addition of severe burnout, what was happening to me felt terrible. My brain and body were in overdrive. “There was no place for anything intentional, anything worthy… that fear, that lack of control, that uncertainty of the future, that faithlessness in humanity, and the frenzied searching for the Eternal, as if I could find the meaning of life running at a breakneck speed,” I wrote in my journal. “You can only see clearly when you are still.”
“Everything feels arbitrary,” was the only way that I could describe my experience honestly, as I talked to a friend who had, in her own words, ‘cycled through different worldviews’ in a faith crisis of her own.
“I’m not sure if I am a Christian anymore,” was the way that I told my parents about what I was feeling. This was not a small admission for me. Faith has always been—and I suspect, always will be—a very dear and cherished part of who I am. But deep down, I felt then what it was like to be an atheist. It is extremely disorienting, this total loss and destabilisation when you shed a worldview, probably because you are shedding a part of yourself in the process. My heart burned with anger when I listened to sermons. I was angry at God (if there was even one to be angry at). But at the same time, hearing lyrics written about God, like “You were the first, and You’ll be the last love of my soul” made me weep. I was grieving the loss of God, my nearest and dearest Friend. It felt as though, if God and I were living in the same house, He had walked into a different room and shut the door.
Disorientation and reorientation. These words may sound easy, like correcting a missed turn, but they are not. For me, it felt like almost two years of hovering in agony over a chair that I couldn’t trust enough to sit on. Like a constant throbbing pain in my neck from the dissonance of my beliefs. Like God and I no longer spoke the same language. And I don’t think I’ve even fully experienced the worst kinds of disorientation yet.
Since then, through no doing of my own, there have been times that I have experienced the curious reality of God again in different ways. But I will never look at unbelief in the same way as before. Now, I’ll look with eyes of compassion. And I think one day I will look back on my time here at Regent and find it to be transformative—I’m hoping, in the best of ways—because I think I’ve discovered again what it means to find faith: faith like a map tracing paths in which saints have gone before, faith clothed in living experience, faith in the lives of ordinary people keeping on in ordinary ways. Faith resting upon questions others have asked, and the experiences of those who have gone where I haven’t gone. Faith in a crisp winter morning, in a pressed flower, in the warmth of my two hands around a tea cup.
Disorientation feels like God walking into a different room, and shutting the door. But I am still watching. And though I’ve left many times, I haven’t seen Him leave yet. Sometimes, when I listen closely, I think I hear beautiful music coming through the door. ☩
Let Me Ask Anyway
By Kezia Cahyadi
Your thoughts are not my thoughts, O Lord
You ways are higher than mine
And yet I cannot help
But want.
So let me ask anyway
Knowing it’s not what’s best
Knowing it goes against Your mandate
To seek the kingdom of God
Not stability, comfort, or independence
But, let me ask anyway.
Let me ask anyway
An acknowledgement of my lack of understanding, imagination, and trust
An expression of the sin that still remains
In my weakness, Your grace abounds.
Let me ask anyway
Bringing You my broken and contrite heart
Bringing to you all my desires, the good and the bad
Let nothing be hidden
Not even one.
Let me ask anyway
Knowing it won’t change Your mind
Trusting that my relentless whining
Will never make You give me less
Than good and perfect gifts.
Let me ask anyway
With every plea may my grip loosen
Get weaker, get slacker, get flimsier, get laxer
Until it results in complete and utter
Surrender.
“What Are You Passionate About?”
Jean Pierre Nikuze, first year representative on the RCSA Council, has started asking first-year students this very question. The Et Cetera will publish their answers in each issue from now until the end of the academic year. Welcome, first-years! We’re delighted to get to know you better!
Amber:
I’m passionate about empowering people. Growing up, I didn’t always realize it, but looking back at the different things that excited me throughout my life, this has been the thread tying everything together.
When I was younger, my parents were missionaries in China, where they worked primarily with villagers, doing poverty alleviation projects. The projects fell under different categories, and included things like tree-planting, education, and healthcare.
As I followed them around the villages, the projects that excited me the most were those where the people were empowered. My parents would plant them fruit trees to give them a source of income, they would give them chicks or piglets, to rear and then sell. They would also build them clean water systems — and it was this particular project that sparked my interest in civil engineering. In all these things, my parents always involved the people, making sure they worked with them side by side.
These experiences were definitely in the back of my mind when after graduation, I joined the workforce back home in Singapore as project manager for a construction company. While I find civil engineering very exciting, the most exciting project I have worked on was unrelated to my project management job and to construction in general.
Singapore has a lot of migrant construction workers who come in search of greener pastures. Sadly, their voices are often ignored and they lack the freedom to speak up when they experience tough working conditions or are mistreated at work. As someone who believes in human dignity, I found myself involved in a fight for equality in the workplace for all employees, regardless of where they come from. This involved many players, including several NGOs and construction companies. By God’s grace I can say we made steps in the right direction, though the work is far from finished.
One of my dreams is to set up a mobile social enterprise that goes from village to village giving lessons in areas such as coding or 3D printing, and other courses which would otherwise be expensive to study in university. This will help ensure that even people in remote areas get equal opportunities as those in urban areas.
Although it’s my passion, I don’t think empowerment is the solution to everything. Looking at all the problems in the world today, I strongly believe that the most important thing is that people should know God and know God's love for them. ☩
WeiRong:
I’m passionate about engineering, and in particular, I’m interested in efficiency and making everyday things simple for people.
I don’t know how else to put it, but I tend to be lazy, which helps me find easier ways to do things. Whenever I encounter a problem or something that requires a lot of effort, my first instinct is to find an easier way to do it. This all started in university when I had to get to my classes. They were so far apart! You had to either walk or take a bus and this being in Singapore, it was very hot and I would usually be very sweaty when I got to class.
So I decided to build an electric skateboard; with it I would not have to sweat to get to my classes. I guess this was the first time I realized that I could actually build something to help with my laziness. It was pretty fun. And over the next few years, I began to do many different things to kind of find easier ways to live life. Something else I built was a smart home switch, which enabled me to control devices in my house with my phone.
I think it was the ultimate laziness: thanks to that switch, I could be in bed at night and turn off the lights and the same for the fans. Then in the morning I could turn everything back on from the comfort of my bed.
In time I realized that with this passion, I could also build things for other people and make their lives easier as well. I’ve done many projects already, and I get so much satisfaction watching people’s eyes light up when they see what my project can do for them. I hope in the future to continue using my passion to help others, not just in my home country, but in other countries as well. ☩
Where Else Do I Go, Lord?
By Rachel Hanna
I came to Regent just over two months ago in the wake of three harrowing years of grief and loss. My resilient, independent mum was diagnosed with Grade IV Glioblastoma (brain cancer) at the end of 2020. The year we all want to forget became the year I will never forget. My mum, my rock, was going to be taken away from me sooner than I’d ever anticipated. And I lost her almost instantly. The tumour changed her personality, so she was not the same person who had raised me, though she survived for two years.
How did I navigate faith in this situation? I’m not sure that I did. Looking back, Christ-in-me carried me in mysterious ways—that I couldn’t perceive at the time and struggle to explain now. I was learning to live on crumbs of nourishment, depending on God in ways I (quite honestly) hadn’t needed to before. Most days were a grinding blur of practical tasks, hospital phone calls, relational tension, and deep grief. I was trying to make the most of every day we had, but my idealism was out of step with reality, and I beat myself up for my incapacity to love well at all times. Shame was the ever-present enemy of my soul, and there was plenty of ammunition.
When I was consumed by words of condemnation, I started turning to Jesus—often out of desperation because there was no one else there who would listen. I began meditating on John’s Gospel and experienced how He saw and interacted with people like me—the broken, the grieving, and the outcast. I realized He, too, was an outcast—misunderstood and rejected by those back in Nazareth. He was kinder and gentler than I previously imagined, and I slowly learned to rest in His love.
When I got to John 6, I resonated with Peter’s words: “To whom else shall we go, Lord? You alone have the words of eternal life.” My paraphrase goes like this: “We’ve tried the other ways. Though this is not what we expected when we left our boats, we know you’re the one we’ve been waiting for. So, we’re staying with you. You’re our only hope.” It sounded like an honest declaration of desperation, unmet expectations, and unswerving devotion. I began to see that it is possible to hold all these things together—perhaps this is true faith—“the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). I began to trust Jesus despite my circumstances, and to anticipate His redemption of all that was broken. I am still waiting to see what beautiful things He will make from all the rubble.
Though I grew in intimacy with Jesus, I realized I needed other people, too. Friends carried me through the second year of my mum’s illness and through the hours, days, weeks, and months after her death. Reading The Soul of Desire by Curt Thompson helped me to see that we all need witnesses to remind us of who we are when we forget: we are children of God, radiating beauty that we cannot see in ourselves when shame creeps in. Knowing that I am still loved by Jesus and my friends—even at my worst—neutralizes the toxicity of shame and its twisted narratives.
I don’t know what storms you’re facing, the questions you brought to Regent or the anxieties that stalk you day and night…but I hope that Jesus will become your safe place. I also hope you have people walking alongside you. Our friends embody Christ; they are the hands, feet, and faces of His love. So, as you navigate faith, papers, and uncertain futures, may you be carried by Jesus and by the love of friends who see you, know you, and pull you out of the pits of shame, reminding you who you truly are and Who lives in you. ☩
Here I Raise My Ebenezer
By Steven Gomez
On the front of my journal, I put the image of a labyrinth. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth is a single path that twists and turns until it reaches the centre. There is no wandering, no getting lost, and you know going in what your destination is—and how to get back out. But labyrinths, I have found, can be disorienting in their own right; because the path is always curving, you can never see just what lies ahead or how far you are from the end point. The path will also feel like it’s doubling back on itself, and you will wonder if you’re making any real progress.
I put this on the front of my journal as a theme image for how life feels these days: heading down a path I was told to walk, but going slowly and nervously because I can’t tell what lies around the next bend. On such a journey it helps to retrace the steps in your mind, to reflect in your heart on the part of the path you already know: the part behind you. Setting up milestones sounds like a good idea; little memorial markers for the turning points.
Here I raise my ebenezer and write on it: ‘Changing Denominations.’
When I took History II with Don Lewis (and it occurs to me how many of you will not know or remember Don, who died unexpectedly two years ago) he asked an interesting question of the class as we were studying the Reformation: what would make you change your denomination? It’s something that tends to happen at Regent as people start learning how to question their understandings of church and modes of worship.
Most of us in the class were Protestants, so generally we were talking about moving to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. For my own part I mentioned the writers I most enjoyed, some of whom I’ve known since childhood—like Tolkien and Lewis—and others who have been more recent discoveries: G.K. Chesterton and Flannery O’Connor. They all carried within them the more ‘enchanted’ and sacramental outlook on the world that comes with a “high church” tradition. What would make me change denominations, I said, would be the writers.
In the end I think they were mostly the kindling, and perhaps some of the wood; the disruption of the pandemic was the real spark which lit the fire. The evangelical church in which I’d grown up began pre-recording its services to stream online for us. I hated it. I was in the rotation to do the communion prayer, and now I was taping it at home for that part of the video when people would be prompted to take their own juice and graham cracker in front of the screen. Never had I felt more separated from my church than in those moments. I started not logging in to watch the services, and going for walks around the neighbourhood. I began revitalizing my prayer life with scripted liturgies, which I’d not had experience with before.
On Ash Wednesday 2021 I decided to drop in on an Anglican church I knew about through Regent friends. Their service was going to be in the morning on Zoom. You weren’t as disconnected from everyone; you were seen to participate in something happening now. There was no taking your own bread and wine; instead we prayed a prayer for spiritual communion. Later that same day, I recorded another communion prayer for my own church that coming Sunday—but this time I’d been invited to the church itself where someone would film me at the front of the sanctuary. I got there and discovered that there was nothing in the cup or on the plate I was supposed to use for props. When I asked if anything could be done, they found some slightly stale crackers in the kitchen.
I had felt more full in the morning, when we acknowledged our lack of sacrament and asked Jesus to be with us anyway. I left my own church that evening hungry and discontent. In faith and worship, nothing is more hollow than pretence.
I kept visiting this Anglican church until Easter Sunday, when for the first time in the pandemic it met in person outside. In the crisp evening air we baptized a baby, and I noticed how similar the liturgy was to the dedications my own church would do. There were foam pads for kneeling on. We were given printed sheets with the whole service written out. The priests walked by us with a cross on top of a staff and swinging a censer. I went a few more times, but it became tiring to go to campus every Sunday afternoon.
My home church began meeting regularly again in the fall—not only in the wake of masks and health protocols, but also of learning our pastor carried cancer in his body. We were carrying our own burden of prayer and work to keep the church together. I felt keenly the pull to stay at such a critical moment; how could I leave my friends now? But that first Sunday, the sermon that was meant to propel all of us into a new season fell flat for me, droning on without landing home. I knew my church and I were out of sync.
That evening I went back to the Anglican church to witness friends of mine be confirmed. The bishop preached a homily that lasted all of twelve minutes, on finding and living out a vocation from your identity in Christ: the very theme my soul was anxious about in those days.
I had now been given the signs of both Word and Sacrament. I knew where my new home was supposed to be.
Not that it was a clean, simple transition. As beautiful as the liturgy was, I found myself uncertain about the things unwritten: making the sign of the cross, turning to face the processional as it went up the aisle, bowing to the altar whenever you passed it. Everyone else seemed to know just when to do these things and why, but I kept feeling like there were dance moves I didn’t know. There was a constant sense that I wasn’t doing anything properly.
It would be foolish to pretend I’ve fully settled into this new-to-me way of navigating faith. Infant baptism, bishops, the tensions between “high” and “low” styles (terms I now cringe at using); all of this needed to be wrestled with, and the wrestling is not really done. Living in the Anglican mode is not as simple as it looks, especially when you’ve started walking the labyrinth towards ordination. But more recently a spiritual director asked me to imagine what it would be like if Jesus were walking that labyrinth with me. Is He beside me? Behind me? Up ahead, leading the way? Does He hold my hand, or talk to me?
I put up milestones to mark the journey. Each one is a testimony to a turning point, and to those questions each one gives the same everlasting answer: Yes. ☩
Two Holy Sonnets
By John Donne
14
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy,
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthral me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
15
Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God, the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blessed,
And still begetting, (for he ne’er begun)
Hath deigned to choose thee by adoption,
Coheir to’ his glory, ’and Sabbath’s endless rest;
And as a robbed man, which by search doth find
His stol’n stuff sold, must lose or buy it again:
The Son of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom he had made, and Satan stol’n, to unbind.
’Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.