David Chen
David is currently a resident physician in a combined internal medicine and pediatrics program. At Princeton, he majored in electrical engineering, and, afterwards, went to UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School where he received a combined MD/MPH degree in Health Systems and Policy. He is a proud alumnus of Manna Christian Fellowship.
Hands and Feet
The patient came in for a refill of pain medications even though it was his first visit to the family medicine practice. The front desk staff had a letter for the supervising resident from the patient’s previous doctor, which the resident read out loud to me: “Due to difficulties in our doctor-patient relationship, we regret to inform you that we can no longer serve as your primary care physician office.”
The Lack of College Christian Humanitarianism
This article was originally published in the Fall ’07 issue of Revisions, The Least of These.
What is the tradeoff between spiritual and physical care? How can an organization be culturally sensitive while adhering to a set of religious beliefs? more…
The Pursuit of Suffering
This article was originally published in the Spring ’08 issue of Revisions, The Pursuit of Happiness.
Toni Morrison once said that humans react to fear by naming it. But in the end, a name is not much. more…
Christ, Culture, and Compassion
This article was originally published in the Summer ’06 issue of Revisions, Has American Culture Killed Christ?
Evil is an insidious thing. Though we may often imagine evil as a benign little devil perched on our shoulder, its influence is hardly as subtle as that.1 Experience dictates that, if evil exists at all, it is a malignant entity that spreads like an undetected cancer. It manifests itself in the viciousness of our dark desires, but we also sense its effects in the perversion of our best intentions. We suspect that evil creeps into our relationships and communities, even poisoning the best of our cultural systems and governing bodies. Though such an assessment sounds paranoid, modern history seems to agree. We are no longer surprised to see well-behaved, decent citizens condoning and participating in the evil of genocide. We readily note that cultures and governments are even more fallible to corruption than their constituent citizenry, often creating a systemic framework that protects evil practices instead of punishing them. Even religion and religious people can be co-opted by evil’s perversity. Perhaps we would do well to be wary of evil.
- David Kim, “On Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” Revisions (Winter 2006). <http://webscript.princeton.edu/~manna/revisions/?p=276> [↩]
Politics and Christianity
This article was originally published in the Fall ’08 issue of Revisions, Church and State.
Recently the political ticker has been focusing on attempts by both McCain and Obama to court evangelical voters: a powerful and large class of voters that helped put President Bush in office not once but twice. I always raise an eyebrow when I hear speakers proclaiming the need for America to “return to God”. What does it mean to return to God? Does it mean lobbying to Congress to “protect marriage”? Does it mean pressuring the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade (the case that legalized abortion in the US)?
On Mental Illness
This article was originally published in the Spring ’09 issue of Revisions, Christ and Mental Illness.
When I was in middle school, I thought it was funny to pretend to talk to myself and walk around as if I was hearing voices. Schizophrenics were easy people to poke fun at since I didn’t know any; in my tidy suburban community, they were the subjects of tasteless jokes in the same way that dead babies or Nazis or Martha Stewart were. There were other jokes too, about bipolar kids and narcissists and anorexics and ADD and OCD and PTSD and other acronymed psychopathologies, about drug abusers and sex addicts, about Freud and the sikowanalists, about neurotic housewives popping anxiolytics like M&Ms and the shrinks that tended to them. They were jokes about people I couldn’t understand beyond the wild caricatures on television. It was the same phenomenon that goaded my peers to laugh at tuneless sax players at the train station or the antics of children with special needs; the only difference was that schizophrenics only deserved half of the impropriety and guilt. Like death and poverty, mental illness was a harsh element of reality that was more easily identified and understood in the context of awkward and black humor. But, as much as I tried to ignore it, psychological disorders found their unwelcome way into my life. One person literally burst into my life.
The Artistry of Love
This article was originally published in the Spring ’10 issue of Revisions, Gender and Christianity.
In the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), the doors are nothing more than large, sliding windows. They’re designed that way to let people on the outside see what’s happening in a glance, but it’s easy to forget that the communication of information can go both ways. I was only half listening to the clustered group of attendings and nurses gathered outside the door. They spoke and gestured to one another animatedly as they caught each other up on the patient’s condition but the thread of the conversation skipped around, so my attention wandered through those window-doors and to the daughter we were here to see. She lay limply in the hospital bed with a corrugated tube running out of her throat and into a breathing machine nearby. Her eyes were unfixed but her lips moved purposefully, mouthing silent words of… what? Pain? Fear? Was she suffering from “ICU psychosis”? Did her words have any meaning at all?
On Mythologies in Romance and Community
This article was originally published in the Fall ’06 issue of Revisions, Sex is Good.
One of the most profound words of wisdom I’ve heard about love came from my roommate. I had been describing to him all of the dazzling and inspiring characteristics of a certain person I was attracted to, and after some careful thought he said, “I wonder if sometimes we fall more in love with our perceptions than the person.”
A myth is born when our belief in its truth becomes more important than the truth itself. Most often we find myths at work in the way we understand the grand themes of faith and life. We want rational explanations for both the bizarre and the mundane. We want life to be profound and meaningful, but we also want it to be something we can interpret, perhaps even something we can manipulate. We actively seek to denounce myths in our beliefs of God but seldom realize their manifestations in our affections for other people, romantically as well as communally.
Romantically speaking, I tend to be attracted to a woman’s beauty, passion, and character. I’m attracted to her as long as she remains these things to me. But when reality begins to contradict the myths, the attraction evaporates. I find myself disillusioned: inexplicably betrayed by something I vaguely suspect had never been promised to me in the first place.
When we speak about the “perfect girl” or the “ideal guy,” we have already perverted our search for love into a quest for a holy grail. Hollywood and the hapless hopes of the heart play effectively on these ambitions, convincing us that, somewhere out there, we can find the mortal incarnation of kindness or charm or depth or love. Romance paints people as stereotypes with excep¬tions, virtues with occasional flaws. But which of us can stand up to such crushing expectations?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers a piercing perspective on love; one that I was surprised to find in his classic study of Christian community, Life Together:
There is a human love of one’s neighbor. Such passion is capable of prodigious sacrifices. Often it far surpasses genuine Christian love in fervent devotion and visible results. it speaks the Christian language with overwhelming and stirring eloquence. But it is what Paul is speaking of when he says: ‘and though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned’—in other words, though I combine the utmost deeds of love with the utmost of devotion— ‘and have not charity [that is, the love of Christ], it profited me nothing’ (I Cor. 13:3). Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desires to be irresistible, to rule…
Human love makes itself an end in itself. it creates of itself an end, an idol which it worships, to which it must subject everything. it nurses and cultivates an ideal, it loves itself, and nothing else in the world. Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ, it serves him alone; it knows that it has no immediate access to other persons.1
Bonhoeffer’s distinction between “human love” and “spiritual love” is not a new concept. Neither is that of idolatrous or mythological love. But let us encourage one another to periodically examine our relationships—romantic or otherwise—to see if they have become perverted by dark desires and unreasonable expectations. Let us examine our extravagant sacrifices and noble ambitions to see if they are really self-serving manifestations of human love, and let us remind each other that the distinction between human and spiritual love is not always a clear one.
Consider community. I like to think of my friendships as a network of genuine relationships built on a foundation of unconditional love. This is easy for me to believe when I am among familiar faces. But when I am alone, I must ask myself how utilitarian my “friendships” really are. I look for a love that is unconditional yet find that I favor people conditionally. I look for something worthy of noble and chivalrous desires yet find my own sentiments to be self-seeking and base. I am ashamed to say that when I walk into a room full of people, I often begin classifying them into the dichotomies of preferable and non-preferable, friendly and unfriendly, likeable and unlikable. Even date-able and un-date-able! It’s easy for me to treat people as disposable commodities. If I need an encouragement, I go to X with a frown on my face; if I need a guilt trip, I chat with Person Y; if I need to vent frustration, I unwind with Z. But if I don’t provoke the “right” response from any one of them, all is not lost. Surely one of the other letters in the alphabet will respond in a way that panders to my self-esteem.
Sometimes I wonder if I am being too harsh on myself. Am I over-thinking the concept of community? Is such brutal self-examination merely an expression of insecurity? Am I simply afraid to let others love me? Perhaps. I often let insecurity dictate my relationships. But that is no explanation for my tendency to avoid certain clingy, needy, malformed people. It doesn’t explain why I gravitate towards the friendly, the powerful, the beautiful, and the intelligent. Insecurity is an insufficient explanation for the high expectations I place on my community or for my tireless efforts to mold them into people I find more tolerable and acceptable. Bonhoeffer described me well when he wrote: he who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.2 I am constantly rebuked by scripture for my selfishness in attempting to pick and choose whom I want to associate with or whom I want to learn from. Scripture reminds me that once I am part of a community, each and every person becomes a visceral part of my new identity, whether I find it “preferable” or not (Romans 12:3–8). It is not for me to dictate how a community should operate; what kind of people should be installed as leaders over me; or whom I should serve. Instead, I am called to develop a grateful spirit and a sense of indisposable community: the radical notion that the presence of each person is both sacred and indispensable. Not only must I learn to sacrifice my preference for individuals, but my mythological ideals for romantic community at large.
But how will I know what spiritual love is like? Whom can I love—and be loved by—without fear of crushing him or her with the weight of my unreasonable, human love? Whom can I trust to correct the errors that are certain to exist in the context of romance and community? The answer is: who else but Christ himself? Christ, the ultimate mediator between God and man, also stands as the perfect mediator between the believers: as only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others, too, can be saved only by Christ himself. This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. the other person needs to retain his independence of me; to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ became man, died, and rose again, for whom Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to be Christ’s; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ’s eyes. This is the meaning of the proposition that we can meet others only through the mediation of Christ. Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men … human love lives by uncontrolled and uncontrollable dark desires; spiritual love lives in the clear light of service ordered by the truth. Human love produces human subjection, dependence, constraint; spiritual love creates freedom of the brethren under the Word. Human love breeds hot-house flowers; spiritual love creates the fruits that grow healthily in accord with God’s good will in the rain and storm and sunshine of God’s outdoors. The existence of any Christian life together depends on whether it succeeds at the right time in bringing out the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and human community.3
On Technology, Thanksgiving & Patience
This article was originally published in the Spring ’07 issue of Revisions, Can Technology Save Us?
We have become impatient, unfulfilled, and perpetually fixated on the future. We have filled our lives with so much hardware and noise that it makes us wonder if we too will waste away into a dull obsolescence. more…
In Their Own Words
This article was originally published in the Spring ’07 issue of Revisions, Can Technology Save Us?
The statistic is that roughly 18,000 children die each day from hunger and malnutrition alone. This does not include those who die from preventable diseases like rotavirus (which causes severe diarrhea and kills approximately 600,000 children a year even though it is vaccinatable, preventable, and treatable) and cholera, or the treatable ones like malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. This does not include the children who are caught in the genocide of Sudan, or the vicious military crossfire of civil conflicts as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or those whose limbs have been blown off by landmines designed to look like toys, or those who have been conscripted into military service in Uganda or the Congo. It does not include those who are pressed into the sex trafficking industry, like the 100,000 or so children in Cambodia. It does not include those who die alone, cold, and friendless in the streets of Calcutta or New York City or those who are shot to death in the gang fights of Newark. It does not include the upper-middle class teenager or celebrity that died from a drug overdose or drunk driving or any other death we might consider as a tragic consequence of wealth.