church…

I’m revisiting Rohr’s “Everything Belongs” once again for a number of reasons.  The piece that hit me hard this morning as I am, again, unable to get into town to attend our chosen House of Worship is this idea that there are three things we must having in our ongoing relationship with God.

We must have teaching, community and “sitting.”  Sitting is an experience of the Holy One.  What I love about “going to church” so often IS that moment where I sit in the presence of the Holy One.  I suppose that each of us experiences this in our way if we’re seeking it; a walk in the woods or along a low hanging mist in a field, listening to the sound of a baby sleeping, just being still or even finding it in the eye of an emotional hurricane of life’s daily-ness.

What is most powerful though, I believe is to experience The Holy One not as an individual but IN community and IN the teaching…and there it is… does that answer the question of  “why go to church?”

There’s the piece I’ve seen today…and it makes me sad to realize how scattered my spiritual life has become…I get community, I get teaching, I get the “sitting” but it is so dis-integrated one from another.  I often wonder if in this modern (or post modern or post post modern) world being in the same place at the same time is possible.

so…that’s all I got today…questions…

sometimes it is enough, I think to ask the question…or perhaps more precisely it is that it’s a place to begin…it is enough for now.

 

moment

today…

take a moment

perhaps a silent moment

in a busy time

a busy life

and remember

remember

in the stillness

in the sorrow

in the breath you take

today

take a moment

and remember

what brings you to this place.

 

Dreams and Goals

Dreams and Goals

-David Bunker
1)      You must continually visualize this uncommon dream in your heart and mind.

2)      An uncommon dream will require uncommon patience.

3)      God is committed to the uncommon dream He is birthing whether you embrace it yet or not.

4)      An uncommon dream is often birthed from uncommon pain.

5)      An uncommon dream will require uncommon faith.

6)      The uncommon dream must be born within you, not borrowed from others.

7)      The uncommon dream will require uncommon focus.

8)      The uncommon dream will require uncommon passion.

9)      The uncommon dream will require uncommon favor from others.

10)  The uncommon dream will require uncommon preparation.

11)   The uncommon will qualify those who deserve access to you.

12)   The uncommon dream will birth uncommon habits.

13)  An uncommon dream creates uncommon adversaries.

14)  The uncommon dream will determine what you do first each morning.

15)  The uncommon dream is often the opposite of your current circumstances.

16)  The uncommon dream will require the miracles of God.

17)  The uncommon dream will always require the assistance of others.

18)   The uncommon dream may require uncommon negotiations with others.

19)  The uncommon dream will require an uncommon plan.

20)  When you announce your uncommon dream, those who believe in you will feel encouraged and energized to assist you.

21)  When you announce your uncommon dream, those who are tempted to oppose you may decide to join you because of your determination.

22)  When you announce your uncommon dream, you make it more difficult to fail.

23)  When you announce your uncommon dream, you will create an instant bond with those who have had a similar dream and goal.

24)  The uncommon dream will require will require careful & wise use of your time.

 

Staying Put to Get Somewhere

Staying Put to Get Somewhere by DAVID BUNKER

I believed the story. Go to school, study hard, get a job, work hard and you will be rewarded. On some fundamental level this is not a lie. However, like all truths, they sit contextually in time and space and this work/job narrative is not merely under attack but has probably not been true for at least a couple decades if ever.

As a boomer these kinds of stories die hard. “Be it Leave it to Beaver” or “Father’s Knows Best”, my early years of TV were the myths poured into a highly porous child’s soul. Years later I can be naively optimistic even to the point where I am abused and taken advantage of. I am a hopeless romantic and yet a practiced pragmatist to my core.

Doctor Phil’s mantra, “Is that working for you?” humorously reflects how my generation thinks about life;

Are you happy?

Are you fulfilled?

Is life working to your advantage?

Are your relationships adding something of value to you and your dreams?

This may not be all that Dr. Phil means in that question but the end result for me goes to the bottom-line.

Why am I here doing what I am doing?

Is it serving my ultimate goals, my ultimate direction in life?

Is this bringing clarity to the journey upon which I have pointed my life?

Oh, that life were so malleable that all one had to do is ask the right questions. Oh, that life was cooperative with us such that all our dreams and aspirations were in collusion with the universe and God was indeed our private concierge, life coach, or personal shopper. We may recoil at those statements attached to God but indeed we do come into the cosmic conversation with some highly untested assumptions about what we “want” out of life.

The past few decades have seen a rise in the Protestant interest in monastic orders. I, for one have been deeply interested in the lives of men and women like Thomas Merton and Mother Teresa but upon a more in-depth study of these individuals one finds an entirely different world beneath the biographies offered in the common parlance of the media and press. These people were not merely great individuals but people formed by commitments and vows. They were highly submitted believers to a rule that for most today would be repressive and indeed absurd and confining.

The paradoxical sense of these individuals’ lives reveals something about mine. Why would a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience seem so alien to me? Why would a lifelong commitment to one place seem not merely odd but dangerous and even wrong?

Once again I ask myself those same seemingly pragmatic questions;

Where am I going?

How do I intend to get there?

And….what is the road I must travel upon to arrive at this destination?

In Dennis Okholm’s most recent work “Monk Habits for Everyday People,” he explores the vow of stability in the lives of Benedictine monks. Okholm, a professor at Azusa Pacific University, teaches a course on spiritual formation and explores with his students the lives of monastic orders. Benedict is an interesting character who preceded the Reformation by a millennium. What is highly interesting to Okholm and to many who are now sensing this renewed interest in monastic orders is the similarity in cultural and historical happenings between then and now.

Okholm goes on to say, “….He was heir to the deteriorating political environment of the Roman Empire’s last days. The fifth century into which he had been born had in common with our twenty first a struggle to make sense of the troubled and torn world that people were experiencing. Rome had fallen and had been sacked several times, by the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards. The dismembered Western Empire, once ruled by the “eternal city,” was not only in political chaos but troubled by ecclesiastical dirty dealings and underhanded ploys to win theological battles over the crucial issues of grace and the divine nature of Christ.”

How much our times were like those times is always a projection but it is clear that Benedict and the monks of his age felt a need to withdraw and a need to preserve. They sensed that the times demanded a much more diligent and severe commitment to the call of Christ and were not convinced that the Church was carrying that call with clarity and power. Sound familiar?

There are many differing groups and contingencies that are engaged in a discussion about where the Church is headed. I would contend that we very well might be much worse off than we naively optimistic baby boomers can tolerate. We want to soften the blow, lessen the pain, and give it to people slowly. It may be that drastic times need drastic measures.

The title of this article was borrowed from a phrase Okholm used in his book on Benedict in which the issue of “remaining in a community” impacted one’s ability to receive and know the full depth’s of Christ’s call on one’s life. How can I grow into the character of Christ when I am always on the move, always looking for that place in which I can spread my wings? Maybe my wings need to be clipped. We have a saying in our community that the “self is communally constructed.”

We are a person comprised of varied peoples. Each day I walk with the same people is one more day I begin to know their hearts. That means I know the shadow as well as the light, the sorrow as well as the joy.
This tendency to run and avoid commitment seems to be a part of our age. It appears that the constant moving not only allows for the devout mask to remain but makes the removal nigh unto impossible. Rowan Williams puts it this way when he says, “The barriers of egoistic fantasy are broken by the sheer brute presence of other persons.” I am only conformed to the likeness of our Lord when I am in relationship with others and the reality of my sin and the beauty of my glory dawn upon my deepest parts. This is real conversion.

The constant search for fresh stimulation is the way a consumer society forms me. I want more. Be it actual goods or even spiritual experiences. Give me more and give me more when I want it. Being steadfast is a concept that is foreign to most of us today. What might it look like for me to remain? To stand firm, to stand beyond fear? To walk truly in faith when my sight is blinded by suffering and sacrifice?

Okholm offers us this pithy insight when he says, “We will discover our true selves as we patiently simmer in communities and relationships to which God has called us. And we will find God there as well, because if we cannot find God where we are, we will not find him elsewhere.”

Okholm says it well, “…the irony is that we must stay in the same community in order not to stay in the same relationship with God.”

As John Henry Newman wisely discerned, “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
Here’s to staying put to get somewhere!!!!!

 

The Jesus Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ

Son of God

Have mercy on me

a sinner

This is a place I’m inhabiting a lot these days…it comes almost automatically in times of stress and fear. It feels good, comforting, centering.

For more about the Jesus Prayer reach into this link.

The Jesus Prayer

 

The Soul as “Project”

The Dangers of the Regarding the Soul as a Project – David Bunker

When the Soul is a Project

We forbid the dance
We divide the room
We force the story
But He still has not arrived
So,
What to do?
What to do?

Grand, perennial ideas are so woven in the very fibers of our existence that they are hidden and elusive to our gaze. The perception of the soul as a project or an organism that needs to be nurtured and taken care of for the sake of its growth can have deleterious results on the quality of one’s life.

Science has so permeated our consciousness regarding the way in which the world works that we often subject our humanness to paradigms, equations, theorems, and stratagems, that unwittingly become crucibles in which we place our humanness or even more hidden, the very formative “stuff” out of which we know our selves. Our knowledge of ourselves is always strained thru this cipher.

To see the soul as a project is to in some ways disassociate oneself from oneself. It becomes a way in which we can divide ourselves into parts for observational purposes or in the case of spiritual growth, for the sake of regarding our estate.

When the soul is a project we find that much of experience is seen as though from above, or in cases where one sees themselves as weak or evil, as from below. There tends to be a disembodied regard for the “whole” of one’s humanity. Most theological camps engage biblical hermeneutics in regards to the compartments of our humanness if you will. Whether they are dichotomists or trichotomists (i.e. there is body and soul and spirit- there are three separate and distinct parts of our humanness.)

The downside of viewing the soul as a “project” :

We seek perfection as if it can be attained

We regard our current state as though not as important as to the destination

We regard our experience as highly untrustworthy

We regard our soul as though it were alien to us (something other than us)

We are constantly looking to the future for respite

We superimpose the language of science, therapy, evolution and mathematics over experience

We disengage from our emotions and bodily feelings as though “less than” the place or role they play in our “growth”

There is weariness to this age. The proclaimed prize of a “free self” has only served to hover like an irate schoolmarm over all our endeavors. The self must progress at all costs we say. We think we must grow, know more, expand our consciousness, transform our humanness into the divine.

This preoccupation of idea of the soul as a project to be nagged into its birthright only exacerbates our isolation from others as we constantly look for a people and place where our self is celebrated, lifted up, made special and honored

There is paradoxical tension here as we understand the preciousness of each individual self (body) in relationship with other selves. However, when the soul’s worth is always unfolding progressively as though through some observance of technique and specialized engagement, the moment gets lost and the divine has no portal into which to pour itself. God is left from the equation for that very reason.

It is a technical naming of the enchanted when the soul is a project. This is impossible. One cannot properly embody reality when that very place is desacralized through hubris and specialization. We are all children in regards to the vastness of the universe and have so little control. In our moments of clarity we sit in that weakness as gift. When the soul is a project we despair of this terrible truth and hide from its mystery once again attempting to explain the weeping.

 

Capable Flesh

This weekend I delighted in the sound of written word spoken clear and real.  I was able to attend the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  I attend this every two years and have been honored to have been able to hear some of my favorite authors and poets read their work, speak about their lives, their faith and their struggles with it all.

Scott Cairns, a remarkable poet and longtime favorite of mine read from a book he has completed called “Love’s Immensity” in which he has translated the teachings of early church mystics, desert fathers and mothers.  He has set them in verse, each one a delicious bite, a moment to savor.

I thought I would post one here, in part, for you today.  I hope that you will consider picking up this book and letting it walk alongside you.  It is a good companion on the road.  Read it slowly.  Read it often.

Capable Flesh

-Saint Irenaeus (c.125-c.210)

The tender flesh itself

will be found one day

-quite suprisingly-

to be capable of receiving,

and yes, full

capable of embracing

the searing energies of God.

Go figure.  Fear not.

For even at its beginning

the humble clay received

God’s art, whereby

one part became the eye,

another the ear, and yet

another this impetuous hand.

Therefore, the flesh

is not to be excluded

from the wisdom and the power

that now and ever animates

all things.  His life-giving

agency is made perfect,

we are told, in weakness-

made perfect in the flesh.

 

Hypernymity

Hypernymity ( as over against anonymity)

by David Bunker
In the midst of undecidability
When darkness shines in its brilliance
I am too far along this path to return
And to where would I go for respite?
I celebrate with tears the darkened night
For the first time in my life
I act recklessly with faith
I obey

Now I am lost
Or so its seems
Is this bleak empty merely terrain of the soul?
Or am I deluded
Following some grandiose beatific vision?

God You are free to do as You please
Your conjuring is not under my purview
You are a mystery in which I stand
There is an overflowing in this emptying
An overwhelming in this diminishment
This trust is ruthlessly received
All I know of You vaporizes
Now, I forsake You for You

 

The Color of Soul Making

The Color of Soul Making

by David Bunker

A blue flame
Slipped into my room last night
Sighed heavily
Illuminated my labored breathing
And the shallow rise and fall of sorrow’s chest
As if both color and flame could speak
Their words came forth
“We are you indigo angels.
In this place most call a desert
Your sister the white Iris blooms
In this dryness the soul flowers
Reverie fills the darkened cobalt horizon
Lovers held in suspension
Melt into each other
And weep with longing
Here imagination burns a cerulean glow
Melancholy marries Kandinsky
And all this pondering rekindles
A thousand years of exile
In the unreflective underworld of black and white.”

 

The Josiah Community

The Josiah Community is a co-housing community we’ve been considering if we move back to Chicago.  It pretty much encompasses EVERYTHING we have ever dreamt about in how we’d like to live.  We struggle about whether or not we are meant to be the catalyst for a community like this or merely participants at this point in our lives.  Perhaps it really does make more sense to come alongside a group of people who already have something going rather than attempting to convince people down here to help plant this in East Nashville.

It is a worthy endeavor.

check it out: