Bunkerisms.

This is from an email my dear friend Dave Bunker sent a few of us. He's called me to some important new spaces with my heart, and my art. Enjoy some of his "bunkerisms."

-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

Unnatural Being.

Lent is weighing heavily upon me in the best way this morning. By limiting myself recently, I experienced everything necessary for a full-feeling life. Grace with my whole self. I wish it weren’t so hard sometimes, and that’s ok. That’s not to knock me from what I need right now.

My heart is alive today because of this work. Peck writes that “Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature – perhaps the one that makes us most human – is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.”

Just as I receive in my heart that life is hard, and immediately transcend that truth to see life get easier…the same is true here. When I live a discipline, it transcends human inclination to get what’s easy. I’m unnatural. Changed. That makes this a huge feat of heart.

It’s the vision of what’s ahead that makes this painful, especially as I confront that pain ahead of life’s schedule on my terms. I’m aching now for what I can only imagine and I’m aching for what’s around me now.

Did I mention this all feels like jogging in water?

In moments of pity, I want to rewrite, edit, and fracture my life into the version of myself I want only put forward. This is going to sound strange, yet I feel great regret for much of where life has gone. What do I do with that feeling?

God knows I want good things, and I get tired of the same conversations. But I’m not satisfied today. I keep with it this morning. It means even tonight, going and sitting in the presence of people that have their mind made up about me. That have me assessed and figured out. In the hope of a bigger story full of more beauty, some days with head down, I keep moving. Standing still looks like withholding forgiveness. It looks like anger. Moving is sadness, forgiveness, hope and authentic joy, all hard-fought.

"I only have this morning…I don’t want to stand still, I just wanna freewheel, I don’t wanna lose this."

Meanwhile...

I found this in my drafts folder. Somewhere in the robbery of my G4, and return from Africa, I failed to post this. I listened to this song often in Rwanda, especially bounding down the rough roads...and on the flights home. It helped make sense of some of the sadness and beauty I experienced. I'm reminded, almost 5 months later, that the beauty in this song travels well, and continues to bring to light an abiding hope in all things. Enjoy - and if you can, track this song down, it's out of print...(or you could try to contact me)

And in between we'll work it out
Wait for another scene to come about
'Cause we have our love and that makes us free
It's never over

Meanwhile, the sky will always be
Meanwhile, the birds will always fly
Meanwhile, the earth beneath my feet
We will always be

Take a quiet step to another life
With a gentle voice to clear my mind
I can feel your soul and that makes me free
It's never over

Meanwhile, the child will always be
Meanwhile, the love will keep us free
Meanwhile, the peace I hope we'll see
We will always be

We have our love and that's all we need
It's never over

Meanwhile, the sky will always be
Meanwhile, the dove will always fly
Meanwhile, the earth beneath our feet
We will always be

Meanwhile, the words will always be
Meanwhile, the sun will always shine
Meanwhile, the truth I pray we'll find
___

Richard Page/3rd Matinee "Meanwhile"

I go through a list...

Problem Solving and Time

My parents divorced as I entered my freshman year of high school. It was a pivotal moment in my story, and I've born my share of wounds as a result. Safe to say, that was when I was definitively thrown from the Garden of Eden. Everyone of us has had a moment or a season like that. The discovery that the world isn't right. It has produced a lot of work that I've had to do, especially as I desire to pass to my kids the best, and limit the amount of generational shit that can fall on them. I hope freedom for myself, and for them.

The last 3 or 4 years I've spent uncovering, confronting, naming, grieving and renaming much of what has happened. It's been a helpful step in my own journey and leads me to the truest things about myself. My dad and I have become closer over the years, and I think that's to speak highly of his process, and also that as adults the nature of our engagement changes from teacher/student to comrades-in-arms...well, he's given me a book recommendation that he read during that season of his life, and it's been great to read some of my dad in this book, and hear what it has for me today. From "The Road Less Traveled":



The inclination to ignore problems is..."a simple manifestation of an unwillingness to delay gratification. Confronting problems is, as I have said, painful. To willingly confront a problem early, before we are forced to confront it by circumstances, means to put aside something pleasant or less painful for something more painful. It is choosing to suffer now in the hope of future gratification rather than choosing to continue present gratification in the hope that future suffering will not be necessary."

How does this relate to me? Let me count the ways. Richard Rohr says (here we go again) all spirituality is about what we do with our pain. I pray for courage. Love through the fear. And a spirit that transcends the truth that life is difficult.

Given over to death...for life's sake.

I woke early today and made my way to Redeemer for the Ash Wednesday service. The message of this was so important to me this morning. I've been blindsided by a lot of fear that seems to come hourly. Turning this away means leaning into what I can't see right now. It's exposed some trust issues. It's revealed to me (via my friends) that I believe that I'm chronically unique. That's a very unhelpful place to be, and a harmful thing to believe for one so hungry for change. So hopeful for what's ahead I don't want to wait. Yes, yes, do you hear much fuel burning?



So, I stood today, with 10 others in a very quiet chapel. I took a mark that said in essence,"From dust I was made, and to dust I will return." It's a very important reckoning for really living life, as Richard Rohr has stated in a book I'm reading right now. It's a death and resurrection. Rohr says Jesus did not once ask us to worship him; he only told us to follow him on this necessary three-day journey. To love well, to find the life I hope for...I follow.