I can’t adequately express, in words, the hope I have for the God-breathed story of The Chosen. It was a sacred calling and wild idea of Dallas Jenkins, birthed through the brilliance and commitment of Angel Studios, and ushered in by the wise, authentic, dangerous and poetic narrative of Ryan Swanson, Tyler Thompson and Dallas’ pens. All while a city of people create a world of wonder that lights up our imaginations, as our composers, Matt Nelson and Dan Haseltine, underscore it with such beauty and intuition. The music pierces our hearts with longing, as this sacred story seeps into our souls.
David Bunker’s poetry so gorgeously paints a picture of what our writers, composers, cast and crew are magically and spiritually pouring into the world, a world so desperately in need of this new telling of the ancient story…
The Disquieting Chaos Between Stories
By David Bunker, Storyville Collective
Here we are
Living in an age between stories
Breathless we gasp and begin to faint
For the stories our lungs truly crave
Are touched by the ancient and the new
And represent a kind of awakening to the magical present
Where the presence of a living fable captures us
Forms us and speaks us into being
Offering a sacramental breath to our story hungry lungs
A poetic oxygen to our starving imaginations
But alas,
We are a people who have become strangers in a familiar place
Without ritual or an enchanted present
We have grown weary in the waiting
Weary in our yearning for a story that is anxious to pierce us
With a beckoning message from the past and the future
Lacking the poetic emissaries to usher in the age
Our larger collective commons
Has silenced and disempowered the creative couriers
Who know the difference between the chattering of the muse
The silence of the prophets and the very voice of God
It has been decades or longer
Since we have sat in the radiance of a world creating story
And in this breathless moment many feel written out of the future
Fighting tooth and nail for their dominant role in the narrative
But to enter the generative world between stories is a sacred calling
And in this moment no one appears compelled
Merely bothered and angry
Caught up in the disquieting chaos of dominance and control
As we easily see the failures of our foes
Mocking their stories as propaganda
All the while our cynicism is shutting down our imagining
Making revelation impossible
For God breathed stories create worlds
Shape who we are
Constrain us to act out our dreams and aspirations
And bring alive our beliefs through obedience and acts of love
But the truthfulness of our stories
Is only born anew in our lived narration
Formed and made manifest through brokenness
So the story can have its way with us
But the ushering in of this new story
Will not come as a sign of our own acumen
Proven superior via some contemporary polemic or moralistic point
But as a wild idea
One the Divine Scapegoat has proclaimed dangerous
Only made real in the laying down of all our sufficiency
As we are miraculously made clean again by the story and its telling