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

 

The Nurture Corner

Several years ago I attended a weekend “retreat” of sorts for women. It was not so much a retreat as it was a rite of initiation. It was called the “Woman Within” and it was a formative time for me. While not “christian” by design many of the principles were right in line with my faith and that was important. At the same time I was also moved by a number of the principles which were not strictly “christian.” I’ve long been drawn to Native American thought lines and this weekend borrowed strongly from this at times. I didn’t feel that it was against my religion to listen for God in the middle of this. It felt right. It was a safe place and I did some very good, strong and deep “work” there. God led me to that place and it’s set the stage, honestly for the deep moments of joy I have shared with Him since that time. It has made me a stronger follower of Jesus and for that I am eternally grateful.

The hard part came after the work. I was led to a soft, warm place where a very nice woman awaited. I had just gone through a very tough piece of soul work and this was a place apart from the “carpet work” room where I was meant to just…I dunno…emote, I guess. It was called the Nurture Corner although it wasn’t in a corner at all…more like a hallway. It was laden with soft comforters and tissues and bottled water and this nice mature lady presided over it all. It was all very….um, nurturing. Sadly, I was not able to really engage this part of me. I had not yet discovered this very good truth that to be vulnerable in safe places meant that I was restored, rather than humiliated. I didn’t know what “nurturing” in it’s very best context meant.

I did know that I could not be coerced into being nurtured. I had to actually allow that to happen. I had to submit to it. At that moment, I chose not to submit. I just sat there in the near dark with this nice person I did not know and waited til it seemed as though it had been “long enough” to be nurtured. Then I high tailed it out of there and moved on to the next thing.

When I returned home I felt some regret for this. I felt that I really ought to have given my full attention to that process and given myself over to it. In retrospect though, now 14 years later I understand this more deeply. I know now that my choice was probably a good one. It was the right choice at that moment.

As a mother of 4 now, I’m faced with this again, daily. What does it mean to be nurtured and to nurture. I muddle through. I think I do alright but there does seem to always be this sort of wall made of jello that comes between me and whomever I come into contact with. I press through and it presses back. I think, I am still not aware to the feminine, nurturing face of God. I’m always shocked at how adverse we Western Christians are to this idea…the idea that God is not “male” by default but rather a perfect mix of both masculine and feminine.

When I have spoken of this to fellow travelers on this Jesus road, especially FEMALE travelers from my era or earlier I am greeted with a lot of quizzical looks and downright suspicion. I wonder why it is that we cannot embrace the nurturing feminine from God? I suppose centuries of the male dominated mindset will do that to us but still, it is a shame that I feel so outside the circle and so unable to find mentoring in this.

Ironically, I hear the best stuff about this from a couple of male, theologian type friends of mine. This is comforting (read: nurturing) to me and at the same time it brings me sadness. I have prayed for many many years for God to bring a strong woman of God who sees things from all sides to mentor me and so far, I have not recognized anyone. I say, recognized because it is entirely possible that she stands before me and I have not had eyes to see or ears to hear. So, recently I’ve changed the prayer to my being ready and able to submit to this mentoring. In this way, perhaps I will see this tremendous woman when I meet her and I will recognize her through the dust when she opens Scriptures to me as on the road to Emmaus.

 

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

 

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.

 

Advent: The Golden Thread

We are nearing the beginning again. Each liturgical year we move through the circle of birth, death and new life. The Church year begins here, at Advent. The start of something new again.   I become so accustomed to looking toward January 1st as the new start that I have to force my head each December to move out of the culture of the American system and into the ancient work of God’s great plan for us all but it is necessary, it is real and it begins this weekend.

The word Advent  comes from the Latin, “adventus” meaning “coming” or “arrival.”  The entire story of the world begins in Advent…waiting in Hope….waiting for God to reveal Himself again to us, to come as the Messiah, to carry light back into the void.  It is not merely a celebration of what was, but rather an anticipation of what is to be as well. We are still waiting.  We still wait in Hope for the coming of Christ.  I suppose this is what I love about the Advent wreath as a symbol.  Each week we light another candle…the light comes gradually, over time, again and again.  It feels gestational, organic and gentle.

This explanation of the lighting of the first candle comes from Crivoice.org:

The first candle is traditionally the candle of Expectation or Hope (or in some traditions, Prophecy). This draws attention to the anticipation of the coming of a Messiah that weaves its way like a golden thread through Old Testament history. As God’s people were abused by power hungry kings, led astray by self-centered prophets, and lulled into apathy by half-hearted religious leaders, there arose a longing among some for God to raise up a new king who could show them how to be God’s people. They yearned for a return of God’s dynamic presence in their midst. 

This week as we enter into the season of Expectation, hold fast to that “golden thread” and find yourself in the story.  It is the story of us all and it is a love story.

 

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”

 

Nuggets…

If you want really deep deep thinking in daily posts on Written in My Flesh you will simply have to hold out for the illustrious Mr David Bunker and his Bunkerisms.  That is your 4 course meal thinking there.

Me, I’m more about nuggets…so here’s one today.  Probably most of you know this song, written by Charitie Lees Bancroft and Vikki Cook called “Before the Throne.”  Today, people…I had to post this verse because it strikes to the very soul.  It’s the part that I can never sing in a group of people because it hits me so hard in the chest that I cannot produce enough air in my lungs to overcome the tears.

 Behold Him there, the Risen Lamb

my perfect, spotless Righteousness

the great unchangeable I AM 

the King of Glory and of Grace.

One with Himself I cannot die

My soul is purchased with His blood

My life is hid with Christ on high

with Christ my Savior and my Lord

with Christ my Savior and my Lord 

Go out today knowing that the Great Unchangeable I AM…the God of Israel, the God of Abraham is with you…go out today knowing that deep, deep in your cells.

 

Proper context

I’m going to give you two quotes today from “Everything Belongs” by Richard Rohr. As I pour over this book, less than 200 pages…a quick read it would seem, I keep having to stop and back up. I keep having to read it again and again. Now I wish I lived next door to Richard Rohr and could borrow a cup of sugar every day so that I know there are other people in the world who think like this…it’s comforting in a weird way.

Here is your brain/soul shot for the day:

“The Gospel is not a competing idea. It’s that by which we see all ideas in proper context.”

and this one…chew this one well:

” Healthy religion is an enthusiasm about what is, not an anger about what isn’t.”

I have always thought that The Wellspring will only truly begin when we get to THIS point. That is, when we get to the point when our actions are born out of love and a desire to serve, to live together in authentic being rather than being a reaction AGAINST that which we despise. The Wellspring cannot be a “protest” against something else…it must be an exercise in love, only then will it reflect it’s given name.

 

Brain Food

Some days on this blog I’ll post really deep thinking, some days posts will emerge as cranky diatribes, some days I may even attempt humor. Today, I’m just tossing something out there, call it brain food. Roll it around in your head a little, see if it has any connection in your circulatory system.

A fellow blogger, Anthony North, mentioned this a few days ago. I am paraphrasing but he commented that when “religion” was done well it was both “sublime and innocuous.”

“Innocuous” I placed instantly, “harmless, benevolent.” I understand that thinking. I think it apt when applied to “religion” in light of how many misdeeds have been done historically and continue to be done even now in it’s name. Sublime, I confess I had to look up to be certain of my take on it as it is used in this context.

This is from dictionary.com

sub·lime /səˈblaɪm/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[suh-blahym] adjective, noun, verb, -limed, -lim·ing. –adjective

1.	elevated or lofty in thought, language, etc.: Paradise Lost is sublime poetry.

2.	impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inspiring awe, veneration, etc.: Switzerland has sublime scenery.

3.	supreme or outstanding: a sublime dinner.

4.	complete; absolute; utter: sublime stupidity.

5.	Archaic. a. of lofty bearing. b. haughty.

6.	Archaic. raised high; high up.

–noun

7.	the sublime, a. the realm of things that are sublime: the sublime in art. b. the quality of sublimity. c. the greatest or supreme degree.

–verb (used with object)

8.	to make higher, nobler, or purer.

While I would agree with Tony that “religion done well” would be sublime when used as an adjective,  what I LOVE is that as a verb…a doing word…religion is actually meant to “make higher, nobler or purer.” Frankly, I’m not entirely sure that “religion” knows that is in it’s job description and that’s really too bad.