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.”

 

Bunker-isms for a parched land…

I am working on getting this David Bunker to write a book.  You see, what you read here today are basically chapter titles as far as I’m concerned.  If you sit in a room with him he can and will elaborate on each one of these.  He will breathe life into them until you feel as though they are sitting next to you sipping a glass of wine and asking you to pass the crackers.  One day, when you sit in a room with David Bunker just ask him about any one of these.  If you don’t get that chance then write him a note and tell him to write the book, yes?

-Replace your career with your life
-Make community the center
-Believe only the submitted and the obedient
-Practice Discernment Constantly
-Serve the stranger not as a strategy but as an act of love
-Losses are rights and entitlements in servanthood
-Let your sacrifice be wise and intentional rather than blind and passive
-Dispute the claims of pathological individualism
-The demands of the market & the ruthless pursuit of profit are not the same as gravity
-Competition generates a vision of massive disorder
-Moral obligation is not a lifestyle choice
-Success is not a moral demand
-The ever deepening cost of success is the annihilation of the self
-Imagine a future that is ambitiously modest
-Launch your criticism from a position of mutual searching
-Find direction in the needs of others
-Rejoice in your sense of inadequacy
-Favor ethics over creativity
-Consciously put on the exclusion of the silenced other
-Make room for regret
-View information as capital
-Regard technology as a principality
-Design your world as if it mattered
-Consider what cynicism excludes
-Morph into a gift
-Abandon yourself at least once to the rules of community and notice your perspective
-Exploit nothing
-Regard encyclopedic mastery as diversion from the essential
-Kill the urge to be mobile
-Resist incessant reassessment
-Beware of philosophical discussions given by non-practitioners
-Negotiate ways of loving better
-Distrust the posture of arrogant certainty
-Suspect your rhetoric

 

Making Sacrifice

making sacrifice

it is a simple thing
making sacrifice

choosing the finest lamb
without thought
of tender meals never eaten
of soft wool yet ungathered

binding the legs
as it kicks and bleats
it is easy to overpower
it does not go quietly

spilling the blood
on the altar
it is not clean
nor without stench

lighting the fire
wood stacked high
one upon another
reaching far inside
to place the match
hands soiled
with the oil
and blood
and the thought
of all that is lost
in the honoring
and all that is gained
in the uncertainty
to come

it is a simple thing
making sacrifice

 

Search String Poetry

I have found that I get the most interesting search string phrases for The Wellspring so in light of that I have decided to compose poetry based upon this. I have added only punctuation and perhaps a line break here and again.

—————

the search string: week 1

what did ponce de leon

find in his journey?

the gift of being yourself

the story of the golden thread

the soul has moments

of escape

the Jonah complex

 

How to Paint a Miracle

How to Paint a Miracle by David Bunker

First you take the vapor like membrane between realms
And ever so slowly
Pull it away from the soul
Hold it up to the sun
Make sure it is a day
Clear and warm with light
To the left of the entire sky
Outside the world’s frame
St. Francis is singing
You will not hear the melody
But its colors will resonate
With your outstretched soul
Move your hands away from your sides
And prepare to be stigmatized
From the wounds
Azure blue will pour
Retain this sound
For it is both tragic and glorious
Only the red finch
Was made aware of this revealing
He is so delighted and will
Trumpet your ecstasy
As you arise from this enlargement
Pay close attention to the sounds
Of trees and stones directly in your purview
Tears will flow freely
At first this may feel disquieting
Do not be afraid
Angels are withholding nothing
From this unveiling
As you see
Now you know
It is good
These witnesses
Are sacraments
And along with azure blue
Offer themselves up
The veil is now removed

Our miracle may now be painted

 

Questions Come With Knowing

-David Bunker

Questions come with knowing.

Maybe the agonizing believers experience over the desired certainty of their faith is less about certitude and more about the overwhelming sense of emptiness that can grab the soul unawares in fear. All my life, (I am the son of preacher man), I have been in proximity to the dissemination of truth claims. Right belief was offered to me as a spiritual prophylactic from the ways of the world and if I only would capitulate to the ways of the Spirit, I would find myself floating above the mundane struggles of the spiritual proletariat.

Now, in retrospect, I sense that as a small child I became skilled at the “storing up” of claims that bolstered my parents’ desired certainty. I did not ask many questions. Those matters of course were not on the radar of a small lad but in my teens for sure I was asking a lot. Many of the queries were submerged in teenage angst and pushed through the cipher of my emerging sexuality and individuation but my questions were real to me.

They were less about rebellion and more about a more nuanced reading of the story. It was as if I kept getting the “Cliff Notes” on this exquisite account of life, time, and Father God instead of the more graceful renderings offered by poets, story tellers and novelists. I was asking not merely for the right beliefs but the manner in which I could believe in the right way. At some point in my teen years I began to wonder if all the “talking” about God was the problem. All this incessant debating. Peter Rollins, undoubtedly one of the emerging churches most articulate theological philosophers brings this exchange into focus when he juxtaposes the words of Wiggenstien with his experience with charismatic evangelicalism.

On one hand our talk of God can become prattle and arrogant chattering void of depth and humility. To this tendency one might agree with Wittgenstein when he said, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” An homage to the shear incomprehensibility of the transcendent is alluded to here and my superficial entrance into mysticism tells me this is true. However, as Rollins, I am a child of evangelicalism and the charismatic renewal. Thus, God is one subject of whom I can never stop talking.

 

The Body

The Greek word used in the New Testament for the “body” of Christ is the same word used to describe the physical body as well…it is “Soma.”

As I re-read one of my favorite poems again today I was reminded of this…reminded that the “body electric” here refers to the body of Christ also,

to my sisters and brothers, to my family and friends, to the people who hold my feet to the fire…

This is another piece of it to mull over today:

I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them,

respond to them,

And discorrupt them,

and charge them full with the charge of the soul.…….

Today I am thinking of the armies of people who love me…and thanking God for being engirthed and the opportunity to do the same for them.

 

The Nature of Community…via Walt Whitman

“I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?

I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them,  that pleases the soul well,

All things please the soul well but these please the soul well.”

Walt Whitman  ”I sing the body electric”

 

I love this…

This is a very cool site.  For a long time I have HATED church signs.  I mean actual, literal, goofy slogan spouting, church signs.  I don’t know WHY the “church” has to engage in marketing.  I always figured that the power of what we DO there should be enough to draw people in.  Maybe that’s short sighted, I don’t know…I just know that if I had a church sign outside The WellSpring it would probably say something like this:   

 

Stone Soup

Today my friend Dave Bunker sent me to an intruiging pattern of thinking. He cited passages from a book he is reading called “The Lure of The Local”
by Lucy Lippard

“Place is a locus of desire…..Every time we enter a new place we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity which is what all “local places” exist of. By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we play a different role…..The lure of the local is a pull of a place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one anecdote to a prevailing alienation. The lure of the local is that undertone to modern life that connects it to the past we know so little and the future we are aimlessly concocting.

Every place name is a story, our outcropping of the shared tales that form the bedrock of community. Untold land is unknown land…Indigenous names tend to locate resources for common good-pointing out a place where a healing herb grows or the water is bad-or to say what happened there.”

Dave’s take on this quote is thus, “This is why local art’s ultimate power is the chronicalizing of time such that the communal construction of humans can manifest itself in a sense of sacred place or space.”

What I love about Lucy Lippard’s words above is that it was a good reminder to me, in the midst of our turmoil about WHERE we are going to live and WHOM we will “mix” with…finding our people in other words…it is a good reminder to me that we are but “ingredients” in the whole thing. We are not the fully realized 6 course meal, ready for immediate consumption. We are not the be all, end all…ready made community, just add water. We are a piece of what could be. We are all creating and cooking up our own brand of Stone Soup.

Hearing Dave’s connecting this to Local Art as the “chronicle keeper” and seeing the words, “sacred place or space” brought out an even richer understanding…one that transcends the “me” and moves into the “us,” the big C church, the body of Christ, the word made flesh. I’m thankful for that today.

I will say here that the last year in attempting to see The Wellspring come into being has been hard. I have made no secret about that I think. It has been disappointing and elating and hard and great and awful and thought provoking…all of this and much more. And yet, in the moment I do not believe I would have traded this experience. I can never trade away things like the past because to deny them means that I must deny so much of the good and deny that God worked AT ALL during that time and that, I cannot fathom.

The Wellspring has not yet seen it’s “place” but we have had some beautiful moments of the Sacred. I believe that God still has a great deal of work for us in The Wellspring. I continue to submit myself to the outworking of whatever that will be. I am willing to be whatever ingredient is needed most in this Sacred Feast even if all I can bring is the stone for the soup.

I will add in here some quotes that Dave included in his email to me this morning…all of which need some chewing, some rolling around on the tongue to reach their full meanings but I think it’s a good practice anyway so here you are:

Most educated people say,”Where is it written? Our people say where is it lived?
Steve Gonzales

We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in an epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side by side, of the dispersed.
Michael Foucalt

How will we know it is us without our past.
John Steinbeck

Community is local life aware of itself
Wendell Berry

The White man’s words are no good. They don’t give pictures to your mind
Anonymous Apache

One could say that when an old man or women dies in the Hispanic word, a whole library dies with that person.
Carlos Fuentes
Finally…
One small aside on this whole thing just to keep the randomness of things right in the forefront of our minds…this is a list, from Amazon.com of books which cite Lucy Lippard’s book…I thought it was pretty cool:

Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony (American Musicspheres) by Gage Averill

Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World by John Gillis

A Struggle For Holy Ground: Reconciliation and the Rites of Parish Closure by Michael Weldon

Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (Theater in the Americas) by Sonja Kuftinec

Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt by Carlo Rotella