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 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.

 

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

 

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.

 

Gratitude is Heaven Itself

(This piece comes from David Bunker today….it seems fitting as we approach Thanksgiving. Enjoy)

A blind man was begging in a city park. Someone approached him and ask him whether people were giving generously. The blind man shook a nearly empty tine cup.

His visitor ask him, “Let me write something on your card.” The blind man agreed. That evening the visitor returned. “Well how were things today?”

The blind man showed him a tin cup full of money and asked him, “What on earth did you write on the card?”

“Oh,” said the other, “I merely wrote ‘Today is a spring day, and I am blind.’

The experience of grace always comes unrequested. That is why we call is grace. With this “gift” comes release which some might call gratitude. Gratitude in some ways is the root of all virtues. It is indeed the lense through which the eyes of the heart sees.

We are entering g season where many gifts will be exchanged. In a culture of commodity and the exchange of said goods, gifts have seemed to take on another meaning. Can one acquire a gift by their own will? If so it would not be considered a gift would it?

My prayer is that our community will begin to develop economies of the creative spirit such that gratitude and gift giving begin to merge into synonymous acts. There is a power and grace that comes when someone offers life to another with grace and a sense of personal abundance. I must say that the outpouring I have received since being ill has given my soul rise and release. I therefore want to make sure gratitude fills my soul.

One of the main principles of gift giving is the clear nature of its power. There is a delight that comes with its giving and receiving. There is a near heavenly responsibility to give this gift its wings by passing it on. True gratitude and gift giving always moves beyond itself. That is when we know it is gratitude rising up within our soul. This is not merely a feeling, transient and ephemeral, nor something conjured through thankfulness although there are elements of all the above. For you philosophers this is more ontological. This release of spirit is a reflection of the nature of our soul. It says something about how we are made and how we are living. It says something about the very nature of our being.

Our community is full of artsy types. For artists, seeing things truly and deeply is essential. I have met many artists over the years who labor under the weight of their calling to be an artist. This is due in part to their unwillingness to create under the shadow of triviality and shallowness. An artist’s service to their gift in some ways demands a degree of submission to gift integrity thus making capitulation to market forces highly improbable if not impossible. But the artist works out their giftedness and salvation as it were under the canopy and cultural contradictions of capitalism. How does one live when an undisciplined acquisitional spirit is allowed to run rampant? How does one carefully guard the integrity and the spirit of the gift such that it continues to bear the fruits of beauty truth and goodness? And if art is made as gift how can it embrace its very purpose in being if it is not given as such?

This last paragraph may seem to be a side bar to my original topic i.e. gratitude. But I beg to differ. To truly see, hear, or grasp realty with spiritual clarity, we must see all of life as “gift.” We must see God as the ultimate artist seeking to give His beauty with near scandalous abandonment.

As we enter into the fullness of this season I am once again reminded that it is Jesus who now allows us “saints” ( gutter saints that we are really), to have this vision of the world through His eyes, through His life, through His way of being.

Through the gift of our Savior we can now see each other as gifts. We can see life in all its fullness as gift. Why? Because I did not have to win this gift, earn this gift, or retain ownership of this gift through continued actions and rule following.

The great teachers have always asked the ultimate question.”What do you have that you have not received?” Let me clearly say that I am daily convicted of my tendency to be ungrateful. Much like a little child at Christmas, my real heart comes out and I say, “This is all that you gave me? I wanted something else. I wanted something more”

Gratitude is a posture. I must continue to position my soul such that I see and hear and receive life as it really is. I am so blessed this season with friends. Friends who have stood by me and my wife through a hard time, family that has offered their prayers and assistance and even doctors and hospitals who have come along side. I would mention their names but most would feel a bit violated as the gifts that were given were given as such.

A few musings back I spoke of the audacity of hope. This season let our gratitude keep our hearts soft and able to receive the blessings that are at hand. I have found in the last month that there is so much on the cosmic table that Christ sets for me (us).

We Christ followers are gift(ed). We are so blessed with the friendships and the family of friends that come along side during times of joy and sorrow. This is a spirituality of imperfection but its wisdom allows us to turn the season of gift giving into a life of gratitude.

Have a great holiday and thank you for being in my life.

Here’s poem….

The Circle Gift

To posses is to give
To own is to share
A trustee, I receive
I dispense
I distribute
I keep the circle round
As the gift moves
From hand to hand
From heart to heart
No bartering here
I offer up my gift in silence
Not wondering aloud what will return
A part of my very soul travels with the gift
I keep the circle round
I give you what you did not give me
And you likewise do the same
Passing it around the circle
No reciprocation here
Only blind gratitude
For the circle gift keeps growing
Not from an ego of one
Or two lovers opened at the heart
But a trinity who keep the motion going
So the gift circles into mystery
Leaves our hands and returns in jubilation
Enlarged by its abundant exchanging
The passing from hand to hand its divine replenishment
Keep the gift alive and well!!

-David Bunker

 

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

 

Burning Man and the Church

Belonging

From Lollapalooza to Burning Man, secular culture has created some powerful symbols of community in recent years. Regardless of the pagan elements that deify art hedonism and the individuals, there is apparently something powerfully primal & spiritual that takes place at these gatherings. They serve as profane signposts of God hunger.