True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 5.18.25 Two events converged in my mind last week. My wife and I picked up the ashes of a friend we'd been helping take care of for the past few years…and our faith community turned eighteen years old. Nothing like an anniversary to open the memory faucet, and maybe because of our friend's death, the serious illnesses of many others, and my own advancing age, my memories were not focused on timelines, but the long parade of people who have meant so much. Those who have stayed, moved on, and especially those who have passed on. They have been reminding me of the brevity of life, to make my time count. Not morbidly in a pressured way, but gratefully, aware of the gifts they gave me in our short spans together. Each of four men who helped found and lead our community had a particular gift he exuded, lived out most likely unintentionally, and of which I was unaware at the time. It's perversely true that it's harder to see the gifts others are giving while they live. Maybe because while ongoing they're taken for granted, or because always mixed with inevitable faults and annoyances, the prophet is not honored if too familiar. We don't know what we got til it's gone. When a person is gone, we can reflect on their life in its entirety, stretch out, really see what that short time together gave us. Each of these four men had their faults, in some cases, mortal faults. Their gifts were packaged with their faults, but now, softened with time and reflection, only the gifts remain: one gave me his presence, the next showed me passion, the third how life was unlivable without humor, and the fourth, a constant devotion. To live with presence, passion, humor, devotion is to immerse so fully in life, we step outside the container we will leave at death, realize that all our fear exists only in our minds. Not in life. Or in death. Fear is a mental construct that we can take off like a dirty shirt. We will always fear the unknown at first, but our teachers, living and dead, are showing us in their most unguarded moments, that we can loosen the bonds that hold us inside our fears and experience the life that exists even in death.

Dave Brisbin 5.11.25 Our English words patriarchal and paternal descend from the Latin word pater, father. We know about patriarchy—society organized around male domination, often to the point of excluding women—but paternalism is restricting the freedom and autonomy of others under the guise of protecting their own welfare. The US started out patriarchal but not paternal. We didn't allow women to vote until 1920 but also didn't collect income tax until 1913, generally leaving people to fend for themselves for better or worse. Today, we're thankfully much less patriarchal, but much more paternal. On Mother's Day, this is something to consider, because the church also been shamefully patriarchal, reflecting the culture around it. But since scripture does appear to portray God as male, is God patriarchal and/or paternal? We may wish God to be more paternal, happy to give up freedom for better risk control…but patriarchal? Male? Though we won't find Mother God in the scriptures, the Hebrew mind couldn't conceive of father without mother. In their very language, father meant “strong house” and mother, “strong water,” the glue that held the family together. There could not be one without the other. God was seen as father in creating the heavens and earth around us, but the Hebrew words for spirit, kingdom, wisdom, presence, were all feminine—spirit was “she” and kingdom was “queendom.” There was no God short of the full spectrum of attributes we see between father and mother, and the wisdom, compassion, intuition, devotion of God is portrayed over and over in both testaments as a God in labor, giving birth, nursing, comforting, caressing. Jesus always led with mother first, breaking ritual and social barriers in order to establish compassionate relationship before he ever instructed paternally. Father may symbolize strength, but without Mother, there is no reason to be strong. Scripture shows us a necessary and complementary balance, but more essentially, that we will never know Father God until we first experience God as Mother. All of God. God is an eternal oscillation between mother and father, a paradox we can never resolve.

Dave Brisbin 5.4.25 The most damaging attitude toward life and spirituality is…wait for it…passivity. Passive people feel their actions are insufficient or that they have no real choice at all, which makes them victims—defined by choicelessness. Victims are always waiting, never in the present, looking toward some other moment when circumstances may change or someone, God, saves them from their circumstances. People with victim mentalities are passive-aggressive in their interactions with others, finding indirect ways of meeting needs and expressing anger or frustration without ever directly confronting core issues. As damaging all this is to human relationships, it's catastrophic to spiritual ones. And yet, a passive, victim mentality is seductive, as comforting as a warm blanket, often nurtured for lifetimes. Having no choice also means no blame, no responsibility or need to act. Innocent of all charges. An innocent is not responsible either—kind of the flip side of a victim, and it's comforting to imagine ourselves as innocent. But we were not created to be innocent. Certainly not to stay innocent. The garden of Eden was never meant to be our finished state any more than is our childhood. We are innocent as children because we have no choice to be any other way, but a child is innocent only until the age of reason. The part of us that is created in God's image is the part that can freely choose, because love is only love if it is freely chosen. We don't reflect God's image until after we eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only then can we choose, fully responsible for our choices and actions, no longer innocent, no longer victim. Capable of love. It's scary to be responsible. Overwhelming at times. We all become victims when personal choice is removed, and as much as that hurts, the relief it can offer in ongoing passivity, the luxury of not having to choose or act, can bewitch us. If we're waiting for God to save us, he's not coming…because he is already here. All poured out. If we're waiting, we'll never see the truth. That we're already free to choose what has already and always been freely given.

Dave Brisbin 4.27.25 We're back in count again. We just finished counting forty days of Lent, and now we're counting again. The count of Lent signifies a time of preparation for Easter, and the count now is also preparation for a second liberation on the fiftieth day after Easter—Pentecost. Our liturgical calendar is overlaid on that of the Jews, who for 3,500 years have counted seven weeks of seven, forty-nine days plus one, from the second day of Pesach/Passover to Shavu'ot/Weeks. Originally a festival marking the barley harvest, Passover became linked with Exodus, the physical liberation of the people. Shavu'ot, at the wheat harvest, was linked with the giving of the Law on Sinai, the spiritual liberation of the people and the beginning of a deeper relationship with God. Ancient Hebrews saw a shape to their spiritual journeys that passed through a wilderness between two liberations. That even when freed from physical bondage, humans are not fully prepared to live freely. Only time in the wilderness, the hard work of introspection and self-examination, shows us how free we really are. Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born a second time, that he was born physically of water, but would not be prepared for kingdom until born of spirit as well. After Easter, Jesus' friends eventually recognize that he and God's promises still live, but they were not yet prepared for the insanely radical nature of that reality. They needed another forty days plus ten—ten signifying integration and completion—before their Pentecost moment, the full impact of spiritual liberation, became apparent. The shape of their journey is ours as well. If we answered the call to seek something greater than ourselves, joined new communities, accepted new beliefs and traditions, we've had our physical Exodus, liberation from the illusion of separation. But this is just the beginning. We remain in count. Calvary, the loss that begins the wilderness of stripping off all to which we cling, is the fulcrum between our two liberations. The way to Pentecost begins at Calvary and is traveled living as if God and God's promises are more alive than life itself.

Dave Brisbin 4.20.25 Cross and resurrection form the crux of Christian tradition, but whatever these events were historically, if we merely revere them from a distance of two millennia, we are missing the point of the gospels. These events realigned every detail of the lives of Jesus' closest friends and followers, but as long as they remain historical events and theological concepts, they won't realign ours. If the resurrection is to have the power now that it had then, we need to know where to look for meaning. We naturally focus on the supernatural event, fighting and debating, but have you noticed that the gospels don't show us the event at all? Makes us crazy looking for literal details, for certainty, but in the gospels, the resurrection happens offstage, in the blink of a hard cut. The story picks up afterward, following those Jesus left behind and their all-too-natural, human reactions. The gospels show us exactly where to look for meaning—not in the miracle itself, but in how the miracle affects our lives. The question isn't whether you believe…it's what difference it makes that you believe. It's fascinating that none of Jesus' closest friends recognize him face to face after he rises. We wonder how that could be possible. Did Jesus look different, disguise himself somehow, for some reason? That line of thinking misses the gospels' focus entirely, which is not on the Jesus incident, but our ability to see it…that seeing the risen Jesus is a process of becoming ready to redefine impossible, a process that is always based in intimacy. Mary recognizes him after he calls her name, Clopas after Jesus breaks bread for supper. Tiny, intimate moments they had to re-experience to break the spell of their expectations. Whatever the resurrection literally was two thousand years ago, if we don't re-experience intimacy with Jesus now, in prayer and every face and embrace, every detail of our lives, we may say we believe, but re-animation, rebirth, will elude. The meaning of resurrection, like kingdom, is not out there somewhere to be observed, but within us to be tasted and seen as life that is always new and always alive.

Dave Brisbin 4.13.25 Very few of us live in the real world. Like avatars in a gamescape, we live in a world created by our own thought patterns, which are in turn created by our core beliefs—deeply held, fundamental assumptions about ourselves, others, and the world. Hiding in our unconscious, core beliefs are as unquestioned as the air we breathe, acting as filters through which everything in life is perceived, without our knowing they even exist. Initial reactions to earliest experiences, core beliefs remain in place, shaping not just how we interpret life, but how we behave. When positive, core beliefs can be advantageous, but when negative, they stoke fears that create dysfunctional behavior that creates consequences that reinforce the core beliefs themselves—I am unlovable, worthless; people can't be trusted, will always let me down; the world is dangerous, I will never be happy—self-fulfilling prophecies in an endless feedback loop. Jesus said the eye is the lamp of the body, so if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. In his metaphoric way, Jesus is giving us the purpose of his entire teaching. In his language, eye/aina expands to include everything we believe and the way we see reality. If our way of seeing, our filter, is clear and true, our whole being will be full of order and clarity (light/nuhra) as opposed to chaos and dysfunction (darkness/heshuka). Jesus riding into Jerusalem is an object lesson in only seeing what we are programmed to see. Four distinct groups all see Jesus filtered through the desires and attachments of their core beliefs. The Jewish people and Jesus' followers see him as a savior coming to fix their problems. To the Jewish and Roman authorities, he's a threat to their powerbases. Whether Jesus is savior or threat depends on our core beliefs. We say Jesus is savior, but he's not here to fix our problems. That's our job. He's here to clear our eyes. That's how he saves. Our way of seeing, our core beliefs, are our powerbases. Until we let Jesus threaten our powerbases, he will never be our savior.

Dave Brisbin 4.6.25 Just when you think the world can't get any crazier, each week we get a whole new view of crazy. And the more the world pounds on our door through news and social media, the more our grip on spiritual reality can loosen. The silence and solitude of contemplative practice, the wordless knowing of God's presence can feel impotent, incapable of meeting the screaming needs of life's issues. The world always has its thumb on the scale, so we naturally tilt that way, but a fulfilled life is all about balance. We need both contemplation and action. Focusing on interior spirituality, we can become complacent, blind to the needs and suffering around us. Focusing on exterior activism, even if we call our drives spiritual, we can become identified with the dysfunction we oppose—angry, biased, even corrupt. But while working to keep weight on both sides of the scale, we can't forget that our spirituality is still the foundation of any action we could possibly call loving. Liz Walker puts it this way: “Some people would not consider a (spiritual) healing community to be part of a social justice movement. They'd argue that our work is anemic—not the ‘on the ground' activism necessary to catalyze social change. But the exterior work of social justice is only as strong as the interior work that births and fuels it. We can't heal as a community if we do not concern ourselves with healing our inner lives.” When out of overwhelming devotion, Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus with a pound of expensive ointment, Judas Iscariot derides her for wasting money that could have gone to the poor. Interior and exterior on display. Jesus provides the balance, rebukes Judas saying, “you will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.” The choices we make to act, whether micro or macro, are only as loving as the interior preparation that births and fuels them. The interior work that Jesus did in the wilderness, the symbolic forty days of facing the wild beasts of his human compulsions, built his foundation of identity with God and informed his choices for the rest of his life. He did his forty. And we must do ours.

Dave Brisbin 3.30.25 Burning bush is our cultural meme, idiom for a peak experience, a vision of God or from God. But for all its power, one burning bush is not enough. Standing on holy ground in front of the original burning bush, Moses argued with God, doubted God's word right there, and for the rest of his life, oscillated between boldness and doubt. Just like any human. But how in the world is a burning bush not enough for permanent transformation? How could that not change us without a doubt? A burning bush, a moment when ultimate reality breaks through the veil between heaven and earth, is a glimpse of life through God's eyes—everything connected, everything literally one substance. The human view of individual form and function falls away. Seventeen years into his monastic experience, trying to find holiness through cloistered separation from secular life, Thomas Merton had an experience in downtown Louisville at the corner of 4th and Walnut. In the middle of the busy shopping district, he was “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that he loved all those people…that the whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream…” I have friends who have described similar experiences. I've had my own, and we've all seen burning bushes of varying intensity at times of great love and great loss. They don't last because they present a paradox, and our minds, ever dualistic, see every paradox as a threat to certainty, convert it to a contradiction, then choose a side to relieve the tension. But that tension is the whole point. Wrestling to fit a too-big God view into the too-small human experience of daily life keeps the vision alive while keeping us grounded in our daily activities. We need burning bushes as ballast for our sacred tension, but they are rare, come unbidden. We can't create them or control them, but we can become increasingly aware when they are happening while working to create the perfect environment in our hearts for them to occur. Ride the sacred tension, living each day as the possibility of another surprise, another burning bush moment of seeing life through God's eyes. Always new, alive, one.

Dave Brisbin 3.23.25 Remember taking math tests in school? Remember how you had to show your work? Remember how you hated that? Wasn't enough to get the answer, you had to show how you got to the answer. Yes, a right answer, or at least a functional one, is important. But showing your work signaled that you grasped underlying principles that would give you repeatable results, a platform on which to build. Mathematics understands that the how is at least as important as the what. That any answer is only valid within the context of the process of the solution. How we do what we do defines us and our work. In scripture, this process is symbolized by the number forty—a time of trial and testing leading to spiritual rebirth, the necessary work of transformation that just takes time. After Jesus' baptism, he sees the spirit of God and hears God's voice. A divine download if there ever was one. Yet he is immediately impelled into the wilderness for forty days to face his wild beasts. After the Damascus road vision, Paul spends fourteen years in Arabia for his forty. Elijah after Mount Carmel, the Israelites after the Red Sea crossing, Jacob after the dream of his ladder, the disciples after the resurrection…all faced fortyness after their downloads. But why? Shouldn't a direct download from God be enough? We can be converted in an instant. Accept a premise, have an emotional response to a mystical encounter, a view of heaven—life seen through God's eyes—a breaking through the mind's illusion of separateness to the realization that everything is one thing, that we are never separated or alone. Problem is, we're still living here on earth. Gravity still rules, and that gravity-defying vision creates a nagging paradox we compulsively want to resolve. But life doesn't resolve, and learning to fit God-reality into the too-small details of human life takes time. Forty. However intense, any download is only momentary. Will not last unless we wrestle with the paradox long enough to assimilate, push into muscle memory a single view of two ever-oscillating realities: heaven and earth. There is no other way. We have to show our work.

Dave Brisbin 3.16.25 Mid-century dancer Martha Graham said that no artist is ever satisfied with their work at any time. That there is a strange, “divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest” that keeps them marching and more alive than others. This is a blueprint for excellence and recipe for disaster depending on whether a balance can be maintained. We've been applying this blueprint to our spiritual lives, and balance is no less critical there. The power in Graham's statement lies in the paradox of living positively in a state of dissatisfaction and unrest. Far from blessed, we see those states as negative, and if we think of dissatisfaction as discontentment with our current circumstance, they are. But looking at dissatisfaction as the opposite of complacency—being so satisfied with our own abilities and situation that we see no need for improvement or possibility of growth—opens a door. In spiritual terms, there is always more in heaven and earth than we can hold at any moment. Like drinking from a fire hydrant, we are aware of the flow, but our mouths can only hold so much. We see how much is getting past us, yet we're not thirsty. Each moment is just enough; filled right to the brim, no more or less. But if we've avoided complacency, we can use our dissatisfaction, the awareness of the flow, to stoke our desire to grow and be able to hold more of that flow in the next moment, which will also be just enough. Always a delicate balance. So easy for divine desire and anticipation to slide into obsession, where powerfully intrusive thoughts create distress that require compulsion, repetitive physical and mental behavior, to relieve the distress. But like compulsive hand washing over an obsession with germs—it's never enough. Every one of us needs dreams and goals, desire and hope, something to plan and work toward. Without a striving for excellence, human life loses the sense of meaning and purpose that makes life worth living. But if dreams become obsessive and work compulsive enough that we never experience our moments as enough, dissatisfaction is no longer divine. Merely discontented. Keeps us marching, but less alive.

Dave Brisbin 3.9.25 Years ago, at the lowest point in my life, a friend invited me to her church, marking a return to Christianity after fifteen years away. First thing, I booked a lunch with the pastor, and halfway through, across my untouched plate, he said he saw “divine dissatisfaction” in me. Strange phrase. I didn't see anything divine in my dissatisfaction or speed-questions, but then, there I was. Asking a pastor. Years later, I looked it up. I'm pretty sure he didn't know he was quoting a dancer. He was much more a football quoter. But Martha Graham said that artists have a divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest, that keeps them marching and more alive than others. Pastor saw that unrest in me. Though it didn't feel divine or blessed, it certainly was motivating. Kept me marching, desiring, seeking, doubting. I doubted everything I'd ever been taught about spiritual life, which only made me desire it more. Remember Doubting Thomas? When the rest of the Twelve of Jesus' inner circle said they had seen Jesus risen and alive, Thomas says he would not believe until he literally put his hands in Jesus' wounds. That one line has made Thomas a meme for faithlessness for two thousand years and counting. But is that fair? Every one of Jesus' friends doubted. None of them recognized him when they first saw him again, their doubting minds filtering out the possibility of the impossible until they had a personal experience that broke them through to new reality. Thomas was the only one honest about his doubt, bold enough to state it, and we've punished him for it. All Thomas said was that he was dissatisfied with a second-hand report, hearsay. That only a personal experience could break him through to trust the impossible. Thomas is our hero, showing us doubt as a gift. It stokes us with the dissatisfaction we need to admit that even the Bible is a second-hand report. It points us toward our own personal experience, but it's not the experience itself. This Lent, can we see our doubt and dissatisfaction not as weakness, but a gift…a divine call past hearsay to a personal experience of the new life Easter represents?

The Pupose of Life by Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 2.23.25 Do people really change? Seems maddingly rare, especially the older we get—the way is narrow and gate constricted—but it does happen. Why are some of us able to make fundamental, personal change, beat the odds that imprison the rest of us? Joseph Campbell introduced the monomyth, the hero's journey, the one plotline we use over and over in all forms: stories, poems, songs, movies. This universal story of transformation follows the three-part structure of a classic rite of passage. First, separation from the life and world we know, often forcefully through a wounding or traumatic event. Second, risky transition through an unknown and dangerous landscape where something is required of us before we can return home. And third, reincorporation back where we started, changed by the experience with a new role to play and ability to match. Transformation stories are faithfully retold in all media, but especially in the case of movies, can be deceiving as they neatly wrap in two hours. We know life is messier, that one journey is not enough, not the end of the story. But even movies are relevant, distilling patterns of meaning that can make the difference between being a hero in our own story or not. If we're paying attention, stories make us aware of these patterns in daily life, begin to see that fundamental change isn't the result of grand adventure, but of pushing through resistance to change with small, simple choices that start a domino effect leading us to grand adventure. Stories help us see that if we want fundamental change, we can intentionally work backward through the chain of events that leads to our goal until we arrive right where we're standing, having now identified the beginning of the journey…a small choice we can make, a step we can actually take. Can we begin to see in each moment, in our smallest decisions, the seeds of adventure? The whole of life in one uncertain step? Make friends with uncertainty as the engine of change? Say yes more than no and love the dead ends of our choices as much as the fruitful branches? If we can, we can change. Beat the odds. And that is the purpose of life.

Dave Brisbin 2.16.25 Life is big, loud, in your face. Like an over-the-top extravert, life can suck all the oxygen out of the room, leaving little energy or attention for anything else. And against life's overwhelming physical realities—whether personal or political, socio-economic or relational—the spiritual can seem like a whisper we're not even sure we heard…naïve, even irrelevant to our most pressing needs. I understand why spiritual leaders often change lanes into the socio-political, big macro issues. It's like getting off the sidelines and into the game, something solid to grasp, a side to take, a cause to champion…all driven by the legitimate belief that spirituality is only as authentic as it is present in all our physical relationships—personal and communal. It's a chicken and egg thing. Which comes first, spiritual formation or the championing of causes? Of course, they work hand in glove, but because life is pulling relentlessly to the physical, we need to act as our own counterweight, pulling back toward the spiritual. Not because spiritual awareness is better, “righter” than our physical lives, but because spiritual awareness is underrepresented in daily life and needs special attention. Spiritual formation builds the awareness of who we really are: not individual entities, but part of the whole of everything that is, including each other in all our diversity and disagreement. And when this awareness of oneness is informing our choices, it changes the way we approach the championing of our causes. We can't separate our spirituality from our physicality. Each is lived out in the presence of the other, defined in the context of the other. And neither is more important than the other as long we're breathing here. Human life is a balancing act. Each of us needs dreams, plans, and the hard work of accomplishing them—the “not yet” side of the equation. But if we've not mastered the ability to live that work with a sense of grateful completion right now, to balance now and not yet, if we confuse our work with the spirituality that propels us to it, we remain billboards for the human problem. Not a solution.

Dave Brisbin 2.9.25 Quote from a movie priest: There comes a time in man's search for meaning that you realize there are no answers. When you come to that horrible, unavoidable conclusion, you either accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching... I remember how obsessively important it was to get answers to the big theological and existential questions about religious doctrine, miracles, healings, prayer, heaven, hell, death, afterlife. At a certain point, in the midst of all the contradicting voices in my ear, I had to admit that I just couldn't know for certain. I put a symbolic stake in the ground at the point of the Father's love as a way to hold on to the one thing I did know. But I wasn't ready to stop searching. Then life happened—marriage, divorce, births, miscarriages, achievements, failures, sitting with others facing cancer, amputation, suicides I never saw coming, healings and reconciliations I never saw coming—and those questions that had been so all consuming grew smaller, toothless, more and more irrelevant until only the love remained. I understood why Jesus boiled it all down to loving God and others, and then even further…love each other as I have loved you…as if even God didn't require mention. Mother Teresa described her work with the poor as loving God in his most distressing disguise. In her life-prayer-work, she had accessed momentary nondual states in which she glimpsed everything as one thing. God in everything, everything in God, no division or separation. We don't love God directly or abstractly in prayer, ritual, worship. Those practices help us cultivate the nondual moments we need to see God in each other, to know we only love God by loving each other. There's no other way. We'd like to bottle those moments, store nondual data as certainty. But it's like breathing. We breathe just enough for the moment, breathe again for the next. We can't store air, but each breath is just enough for us. We can't store answers to unanswerable questions. But all we know for sure, the oneness of love, is just enough for us, if we simply stop searching for answers that add nothing to life.

Dave Brisbin 2.2.25 Would Jesus have been a Republican or Democrat? What seems like the setup to a joke is being asked in all seriousness. Two weeks into a controversial administration, I'm hearing people ask how a good Christian could possibly vote… How a Christian pastor could possibly support… An Episcopal bishop and a sitting president both state that God is on their side while remaining flatly opposed to one another. Near the end of the Civil War, Lincoln said that both North and South read the same bible, pray to the same God, invoke God's aid against the other, but the prayers of both could not be answered, that of neither had been answered fully. Once we see an enemy, we imagine God is on our side, because we only have an enemy if we are certain we are right. An enemy is the wrong one. God is never wrong, so God is on our side, because we are right. Blaise Pascal said that people never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Truth is, the real enemy is not the other tribe— the real enemy is the certainty that makes the other tribe an enemy. We're all co-opting God to our side, our tribe. It's natural for anyone who reveres Jesus, or the authority of his name, to imagine he is in their camp. But what does the record show? Jesus made his own followers crazy, over and over…every time they became certain of their positions, thought they had him figured out, domesticated, he rocked them back on their heels. For anyone with an agenda, he was frustrating, infuriating, unexpected, outrageous, an equal opportunity offender of anyone who was seeing the enemies of their certainty. Jesus refused to be co-opted into any camp. Whatever political beliefs he had are not preserved in the gospels, meaning they were irrelevant to his message. They never created enemies for him because his primary identity was not in camp or tribe, but in oneness with his Father. If we can only see truth in our own tribe, we'll see enemies everywhere, but we won't see Jesus. He's in the space between camps, where the real enemy is not another tribe, but the certainty that makes enemies of everyone else.

Dave Brisbin 1.26.25 One of the best-known stories from the gospels, one that has seeped into collective consciousness, is the story of Jesus walking on water. This and turning water to wine has become shorthand for divine power. It's natural for us to focus on the literal, but all Jesus' miracles have spiritual meaning as well, and since most of us will live full lives never walking on water, the spiritual meaning is more relevant. Especially when Peter asks Jesus to bring him out on the water, and we can suddenly see ourselves as participants in miracle making. But Peter gets out a few steps, sees the waves from his new perspective, and starts sinking, screaming for help. Jesus puts him back in the boat saying, you of little faith, why did you doubt? How many times have Jesus' words been aimed at us when we've expressed the least bit of existential uncertainty? But is doubt as uncertainty really what Jesus is rebuking? The word translated as doubt comes from a root that means twice or again, so we can understand it as second guessing ourselves, wavering in resolve as we ruminate. The boat is our little island of rational thought floating on a chaotic sea of unconscious mystery. We take a breathlessly non-rational step out of the boat, a leap of faith, then immediately start thinking rationally again, fearing again. It's our human cycle of surrender and refortification to embedded thought that limits our ability to follow Jesus to truth that liberates. We don't have little faith when we stop thinking we mentally believe. We have little faith when we start thinking again and stop acting. Faith is not thought. It's acting as if what we say we believe is true enough to carry us on the surface tension of uncertainty. The nonrational ability to act in the presence of doubt, step out of the boat of all our very good reasons why not. Little faith is not much doubt. It's the need for much certainty. Keeping the faith is not steely-eyed adherence to mental concept. It's the embrace of uncertainty, accepting we will never have enough information to step out of our boats. We just do. Over and over. Until trust replaces certainty.

Dave Brisbin 1.19.25 From someone going through a perfect storm of difficulties: I see no evidence of God, but plenty of evidence of the devil. Despite years as a devout Christian, she's hit the point we all do, over and over in life, the point Karl Jaspers called a limit situation. The moment we realize we're gonna need a bigger boat. Hitting the limit of our ability to cope, make sense, make meaning—everything that ordered our universe lying in a heap. Why does God seem silent when evil is so loud? We can walk into a dilapidated house and say we see no evidence of an architect, but the fact of the house, the space in which we could care for and maintain a home, is the architect's fingerprint. If the consequences of human action or natural processes like extreme weather or viruses frustrate our agendas, security, and certainty, we label them evil. They overwhelm us, obscuring the order beneath. God is everywhere and everything, the foundation and bones of the house, the floor on which we act. But no matter how badly we neglect the floor, it still exists, if we're still acting. We can say the news is always bad, but that's good. Though loud, bad news is still the aberration against the backdrop of good. Someone asked me how we know when God is speaking—looking for words, specificity, certainty. But God's native language is silence, a non-specific, non-rational background radiation, the fabric of life vibrating in every person and landscape. God's silence never overwhelms the noise we create, but when we allow ourselves to sink beneath the noise, we can reaffirm a wordless message that is always the same, like an audio loop we can enter at any moment: I am here. All I have is yours. All is well and will be well. Such a non-specific message is not what we want, but all that we need. The suffering always present in a limit situation is the only experience powerful enough to pull back the curtain of our certainties du jour and show us the next larger reality we may be ready to engage…a spiritual awakening. But as long as we equate our suffering with evil, let it blot out the possibility of good, it can't show us anything.

Dave Brisbin 1.12.25 I'm often asked about the big words... The words of Christian doctrine that seem to contradict the nature of God that Jesus called Good News, love itself. Degreeless and indiscriminate love that can't be altered or avoided, showering on everyone equally—just and unjust alike. Yet Christianity feels exclusive…acceptance withheld unless we believe in an orthodox Jesus, declare him as Lord, obey church rule and ritual. There is heaven for those who perform, the eternal torment of hell for the rest, and at the center of it all stands the cross. Ironically, the ultimate dividing line. Here's a big word: propitiation. An English word used to translate the Greek and Aramaic words used by John and Paul to describe Jesus' death on the cross. It means to appease wrath, regain favor, change the mind of an angry God. In 1611, the King James bible translated the Greek hilasmos and Aramaic husaya as propitiation, but this has become controversial. Later translations use expiation instead—atonement, the extinguishing of guilt. The ancient words can mean both, so which? If you're a hammer, the world looks like a nail. Our concept of life determines what we see and understand, so if our focus is justice, we see propitiation—if love, expiation. Propitiation defines God's nature as angry and apparently incapable of mercy without the mechanism of a perfect sacrifice. Expiation defines our nature, our need to extinguish “original sin/guilt,” the illusion of separation of which our minds are capable once we become self-aware as children. To extinguish that illusion is the true meaning of the cross. That Jesus could overcome his human sense of separation, remain one with the Father's love even on the cross, is the salvation we seek. There is only reward and punishment in propitiation. In expiation, we find the degreeless and indiscriminate love that is never withheld. None of the big words mean what we think when placed back in the language Jesus and his followers spoke and wrote. We must re-know what they knew. Jesus was laser-focused on love… The meaning of any big word that contradicts that love is a mistranslation.

Dave Brisbin 1.5.25 An angel was walking down the street carrying a torch and a pail of water. When asked what he was going to do with torch and pail, the angel said that with the torch he was burning down the mansions of heaven, and with the pail, putting out the fires of hell. Because only then would we see who truly loves God. With no promise of reward or fear of punishment, what is the temperature of our love when there is nothing “in it” for us—no consequence for not engaging. Everything in us rebels at this. We're offended if there's no reward for hard work. Yet Jesus tells us that no matter when we show up, we're all paid the same at the end of the day—love is its own reward. We're offended if there's no punishment for failure, yet Jesus says that sun and rain fall on the just and unjust alike—love can never be other than what it is. We have to scale the wall of reward and punishment before we can ever hope to experience love without degree. Jesus relentlessly works to tear down this wall, knowing how deeply life has embedded it while giving no experience of something as alien as degreeless love. When I stopped practicing Catholicism, my horrified mother told me it wasn't enough to be a good person, implying that without conforming to correct doctrine and practice, punishment would be my only reward. Yet for Jesus, all law and scripture is summed by loving God and neighbor. His last commandment was to love as he loved, that his followers would be defined by love—not what we rationally understand, irrationally believe, or ritually practice. The only purpose of religious belief and practice is to guide us to the experience of degreeless love. If it does, it's true. If not, it's irrelevant at best. Life is so uncertain and humans so fragile, we crave certainty as medication, and the paradigm of reward and punishment at least gives some illusion of control. That performing as we imagine God wills, binds God contractually to love and acceptance. But even the slightest vestige of meritocracy blinds us to the possibility of a love that can't be withheld or altered, keeping us forever striving for what we already possess.

Dave Brisbin 12.29.24 When a rich young man asks what he must do to experience eternal aliveness, and Jesus tells him to sell all he has, and the man walks away with head hung, Jesus tells his friends how hard it is for wealthy people. Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter aliveness. The Aramaic word for camel, gamla, can also mean rope, so take your pick of images, but…it's really hard. So how did the Magi beat those odds? Magi were wealthy, educated, astronomer/astrologers, influential advisors to power, yet when they saw the eastern rising of the prophetic star for which they had been searching for centuries, they jumped on their camels and headed west. So far, so good. All in the realm of accepted science and entrenched belief. But when that star “stood over” Bethlehem—when Jupiter went retrograde, signaling the end of their western push, and they found the one born at the rising of the king's star—what could have prepared them for the abject poverty and insignificance of the infant? How were they able to see past centuries of expectation to the unassuming fulfilment of promise? This is the always question. And the Magi are our best teachers because we are wealthy and educated too. We are the rich young man looking for eternal aliveness, not marginalized first followers. And however we see ourselves, even as middle class in the developed West, we are wealthier than 98% of the world's population. More telling, we are invested in the status quo for our imagined survival and advantage. That investment is the eye of the needle. What did the Magi have that the rich young man did not? The Magi brought three gifts. Gold symbolizes desire, and frankincense, the action of faith. So far, so good. But desire and action along the certainty of our entrenched belief can only take us to the precipice of the manger. At the manger, we are asked to sell everything that expects something certain. The Magi have one gift left. Myrrh…surrender. Without surrender to the unexpected, impossible, improbability of God, all our other gifts don't matter. They can't squeeze us through the needle's eye.

Dave Brisbin 12.15.24 What is it we're supposed to see in Christmas? Talk about a mixed message... Only two gospels mention Jesus' birth at all, and the few details given depict a birth so ordinary to parents so poor that those closest didn't even make room for them in the inn. Enter shepherds and Magi...here the gospels spend a bit more time, because their reactions were anything but ordinary. What did they see that everyone else missed? We only see what we're prepared to see. Impoverished shepherds spending their lives in silence and solitude with their flocks, grew a consciousness that allowed them to see significance in the smallest detail. Magi—wealthy, educated advisors to the king—were used to power and influence. Yet these magi had retained a humility and vulnerability that allowed them to see the promise of their star while still unformed in a poor Hebrew infant. If we're willing, the magi are showing us wealthy, educated ones how to get small enough to see Christmas. Christmas has a way of bringing vague, submerged feelings to the surface the way hook and line bring up fish. We find ourselves grasping squirming emotions that should have nothing to do with what we think Christmas is supposed to mean, what we remember it used to mean. We imprinted the meaning of Christmas through a child's eyes, then subtly mourn its loss each year through adult eyes. Christmas hasn't changed; the possibility of Christmas returns every December. We have changed. We've lost the pace of childhood, forgotten the smallest details. Maybe Christmas-as-remembered happens exactly when we stop trying to make it happen. Maybe when we stop running faster and faster, trying to catch the stored experience of Christmas, meaning has a chance to catch up and catch us. We can't choose the pace of life around us anymore than we can alter the course of a storm. But we can choose our own pace within it. Of course we will always find our God as a child. Unassuming. Unformed and always forming. Are we prepared to see? Every time we meet our God is Christmas morning. The babe is in the manger. The star is in the east. And we are the Magi, and they are us.

Dave Brisbin 12.8.24 What does the story of Job have to do with Christmas? Any story is a story about risk. We've all been at risk from our first breath, but we don't like to think of ourselves balanced on a razor's edge of circumstances we can't control. We work really hard to manage risk, grow as big as we can, accumulate money and materials so risk will have to get through all our stuff before it ever gets to us. Illusion. Risk passes through stuff like ghosts through walls. Job was big. Had everything a person could imagine—big hedges against risk. So when it all was taken, no one was more surprised than he. He cried out for answers, but when God finally speaks from the whirlwind of mystery and non-answer, Job finally admits his smallness. He had to lose everything to see himself as he was, that working to grow big is just another attempt at the control and invulnerability that will always elude. It's not who we are as humans, and we're never complete without accepting who we are. Only in our innate vulnerability do we find the connection that we call meaning and purpose. Job had to grow small to see this. If you want to find something lost by a child, what do you do? You get on your hands and knees so you can see all the little crevices and nooks hidden at adult standing height. The story of Christmas is the story of growing small. Jesus is born a helpless infant and also lying in a manger—code for poor, marginalized, powerless. Jesus started as small as is possible for a human…and he never grew out of his smallness. Even as his fame and influence grew, his attitude remained that of the anawim: people who have accepted smallness while retaining hope and gratitude. Jesus and Job found what can only be seen from the standing height of a child, the kneeling height of a servant. Why are so many of us depressed at Christmas? Because we imprint the magic of Christmas from a perspective three feet off the ground and try to find it again from the height of an adult. Our God risks being small, vulnerable for the sake of connection. The only way to find what has been seen by a childlike God is to get on our knees and grow small.

Dave Brisbin 12.1.24 Long ago, many people came to seek counsel and wisdom from a great Zen master. One day, a very important man, used to giving commands, came to him, “Teach me about Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” The master smiled and said they should discuss the matter over tea. When the tea was ready, he poured and the tea rose to the rim, then overflowed to the table and on to the robes of the man who jumped, “Enough! Can't you see the cup is full?” The master smiled again, “You are like this cup, so full that nothing can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind.” This is how we all come seeking enlightenment. So full of what is true and false, right and wrong, attractive and repugnant, that nothing gets in as it actually exists in the wild. Automatically transformed into something we think we already understand, everything slips into our premade categories, judged good, bad, beneficial, not. Our cups are full. Epictetus said it is impossible for anyone to learn what they think they already know, and Jesus teaches exactly the same way. His use of paradox—if you want to find your life, lose it; questions as answers—Good master what must I do?...Why do you call me good?; and story—Who is my neighbor?...and he tells about the Good Samaritan; are all meant to empty our cups. Stop our minds in their tracks and disrupt our neat categories, make space for something we haven't considered. Bring us back to beginner's mind, the open, teachable mind of the child that he always holds as a model for jaded adults. When Jesus tells us not to judge, he means it in this most expansive sense. As long as our minds think they know, judging and placing everything we encounter into familiar categories, we will never see what really shares our moments with us. We won't see each detail as it appears, let it amaze and surprise us. We won't smile and send photos to our friends. We won't let this moment be enough and rest in it. We won't feel gratitude for tiny gifts we could never give ourselves. It's all about seeing past our mind's understanding to the perfect enoughness of each imperfect moment.

Dave Brisbin 11.24.24 To ancient Hebrews, the number twelve signified the completion or perfection of earthly systems, rule, government. More than a literal number, this is the meaning being transmitted by the twelve patriarchs, tribes, apostles, every detail of the New Jerusalem. It symbolizes a complete cycle—twelve lunar orbits creating the twelve months of the solar year, the twelve constellations of the zodiac counting out the agricultural seasons. Even Gehenna, the word badly translated as hell, had a maximum stay of twelve months, a symbolic full cycle of purification. Twelve reminds us that time is not a line, but a circle, that endings are beginnings, or in Eliot's words: to make an end is to make a beginning; the end is where we start from. Like a snake eating its tail, we live endless circular cycles, arriving where we started in order to know the place and ourselves more and more deeply. To arrive at Step 12 of AA is a simultaneous ending and beginning, taking us back where we started with the wisdom and insight only a journey of serial surrender could give us. The total surrender that is recovery, salvation, is too big to effect all at once. Step by step, cycle by cycle, the abrasion of our passage strips more and more of what is untrue from us, creating the spiritual awakening of Step 12 that gives us a message to carry to others and principles to practice in all our affairs. But coming full circle also reminds that we started in the humility of powerlessness…so how much more surrendered could we be? Powerlessness at Step 1 is rarely fully conscious. Not yet aware of its immensity, we use the concept to mark the end of resistance and beginning of submission that makes the rest of the steps possible. The powerlessness of Step 1 is born of the desperation of an unmanageable life, the reality of our lack of control. It's a painful, fearful admission that initiates the cycle of Steps leading to the spiritual awakening of Step 12—the realization of living in a world to which we finally know we belong. To which everything belongs. A belonging that makes powerless vulnerability in God's embrace a joy to live.

Dave Brisbin 11.17.24 The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Eliot's iconic line reminds that time is not a line, but a circle. Beginning and end one and the same. That any authentic journey is a journey of awareness, bringing us back to ourselves expanded. And knowing…what? Step 11 tells us it's God's will we seek through the prayer and meditation that makes conscious contact with God possible. Without that conscious part, what have we got? But what have we got when we've got God's will? We crave what we imagine as God's “what:” what he wants us to do, the perfect life he wills us complete to the last detail. Mistake-proof. But God's will, sebyana in Aramaic, is deepest desire, pleasure, delight, purpose—the essence that paints God's presence in the only colors we will ever see. How do we come to know that? See those colors? In circles. Circles within circles of growing intimacy. Knowing, yida, is not cataloging data points, but becoming intimately familiar, a process that takes time and for which our soil must be prepared. In the first circle journey of prayer we develop awareness by establishing the structure and framework of formal, word-based prayer. Without structure, we can't practice awareness into the muscle memory that takes us to the second circle, the process of knowing as mindful, wordless meditation, the silence of God's native language. Until we can get out of the way, become fluent in silence, we can't know God's essence, which we can then carry third circle into our lives with the practice of presence. A homecoming of realization that we don't need to do anything other than whatever we do all day long to know God's will—as the how of our doing, not the what. That with the how of God's deepest purpose and delight, any what becomes the exact center of God's will. There is no substitute for traveling these circles within circles. Knowing as intimate familiarity can't be transferred or bestowed. It can only be experienced, circle after circle, coming back to an expanded home…knowing ourselves and the place again and again for the first time.

Dave Brisbin 11.10.24 What do you think of as a miracle? Seas parting, walking on water, healings? Dictionaries tell us miracles are events not explainable by natural or scientific laws. But what if an event is not explainable to or by you personally? Or leaves inexplicable space between data points? When you raise your hand, can you explain that? What happened between unthought intention and action? When you think a thought, where did it come from? When you forget, where did it go? A thing doesn't have to be spectacular to be inexplicable. Common, everyday events are as well. Maybe a better definition of a miracle is a gift that we could never have given ourselves. Birth. Next breath. A friend's forgiveness. Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish theologian, said that his greatest talent was his ability to be surprised. Jesus, another Jew, never gravitated far from a child's point of view, and the genius of children is to live in a world that is magical—full of surprises and inexplicable gifts immune to the density of entitlement, the illusion we've earned all we have. Children embody Jesus' Kingdom as a state of amazed gratitude, but life works against our inner child. Hard work breeds entitlement and familiarity breeds contempt. Still, some moments cut through: surprising enough that miraculous gifts reveal themselves—smiles spreading without permission. But a lot of life can slip by between such uncultivated moments, and if we're waiting, we're neither grateful nor amazed. The 10th Step of AA is continuing to take personal inventory; if we limit it to mere cataloging of defects and bad behavior, we miss it. Chesterton said we see things fairly when we see them first…recovering the candor and wonder of the child, the unspoiled realism and objectivity of innocence. The 10th Step is the fulcrum on which the other eleven are balanced—the practiced ability to see ourselves and life as if for the first time is both the cause and effect of our transformation. It's a swimming against the current of life that keeps us surprisable, seeing the miraculous in the commonplace, grateful and amazed at gifts we could never give ourselves.

Dave Brisbin 11.3.24 I've tried to make amends to people I've hurt in the past. Sometimes I felt reconnected. Sometimes my apology was flatly refused. Sometimes the words of forgiveness were spoken, but everyone knew nothing further was exchanged. In all of them, there was no reconciliation. We've not spoken since. The 9th Step of AA tells us to make direct amends wherever possible except when doing so would injure someone. But what are these amends? Dictionary says putting things right, restitution, mending. But if our attempts don't mend, is there still purpose in the process? Turns out, process is all we have, all we can engage, so if there's any purpose, that's where we'll find it. And regardless of outcome, the process of making amends is all about forgiveness—properly understood as freedom from the limitations of victimhood. For both victim and perpetrator, the freedom of forgiveness is essential. Whether a victim of someone else's actions or our own, we're not free to connect with anyone or God's presence until we're free enough of our limitations: the resentment, blame, fear, paralysis of victimhood. But amends themselves can't make us free. So why make them? Jesus said that if we forgive another, God forgives us, but if not, then not. Truth is, God doesn't forgive at all. God is forgiveness itself…leaving to us the choice whether to accept the radical connection that is God—not mentally or verbally, but by engaging a gradual process of liberation. If we have created a victim, we can't uncreate it. But making amends is a gift we give to help clear a path for our victim to free themselves—from us. Remove some of the debris blocking them from forgiving us. The beauty of amends is that in clearing the path for our victim, we are simultaneously clearing a path for ourselves. It's the only way to do it. I've hurt people who will never forgive me, or may never know if they do. Doesn't matter. We can't make our victims forgive us, and they couldn't forgive us if they tried. But together, in the process of amends, we can help each other free ourselves with forgiveness. If we wish. We are all as forgiven as we wish to be.

Dave Brisbin 10.27.24 When we hear the Hebrew word shalom, we think of peace, as in the absence of conflict. And when we hear the word forgiveness, we think of pardoning or excusing, even condoning a person's harmful action. But shalom—selama in Aramaic—means the greatest amount of unity, wholeness, health, and prosperity possible. And sebaq, forgiveness, means to set free. To the Semitic mind, forgiveness is being set free from victimization, and the fear, anger, resentment that has metastasized as a result. But since we can't free another person's heart, when we forgive, we're actually setting ourselves free. We're the only ones who can. In the 8th Step of AA, when we make a list of all the people we have harmed, we are going far beyond a mere list. We are recognizing our deep interconnectedness, maybe for the first time. How each choice and action we make ripples out, affecting others, just as theirs affect us. Not a problem when our actions are affirming, but can be devastating when not. And the closer a person is to us, the more they are affected. Our interconnection creates a responsibility for each other, but accepting that is a tricky process because most of the people we've harmed have harmed us back—or at least we imagine they did. Becomes easy to justify our actions, wiggle off the hook by clinging to our own victimization. So when we become willing to make amends to them all, we are going far beyond a mere transaction, beyond apology or restitution. We are moving toward actual forgiveness, our own set-freeness…because we'll never see the harm we've done until we've set ourselves free from the harm done to us. AA's own literature calls Step 8 the “beginning of the end of isolation.” Perfect description. Anything less than the perfect unity and wholeness of shalom is considered hataha—Aramaic for sin. Sin is separation itself. Harmful action takes us there, to the separation and isolation of compromised relationship. To become aware of our interconnectedness, to be freed from our sense of victimhood so we can see the harm we've done is the beginning of the end of our isolation. And the beginning of shalom.

Dave Brisbin 10.20.24 Ever try to give someone a compliment who couldn't accept it? I like your shirt. Oh this? I got it on the clearance rack. Good job! I could have done better, just got lucky. Or next level: It wasn't me; it was the Lord. All glory goes to God. Maybe we feel unworthy…or think we're being humble or more spiritual by deflecting praise. But in trying to be humble, we humiliate ourselves with deprecation and the giver by essentially saying we know better. True humility doesn't reduce us or others to lower levels. It simply recognizes what is. Humble people see themselves as they are. No more or less. Their relationships with others as they are—perfectly level. Their relationship with God—dependent, vulnerable, yet loved and accepted at the same time. But to be humble is to step outside your egoic mind that is always fighting to make you more or less than you are: defensive, fear-based positions, the ego's will to survive. To be fearlessly humble—or gratefully realistic—is to have become entirely ready to see self and life from God's, love-based position, where all is one and connected. Our defects of character express our deepest fears of aloneness and inadequacy driving thought and behavior patterns that harm relationships and further isolate us, reinforcing fear. To humbly ask God to remove our defects is the culmination of having become aware of our deepest fears and how they drive our destructive behavior; to have admitted them to another person and experienced continued acceptance and love; and to have become entirely ready to see ourselves from God's point of view. To ask, in the Aramaic of Jesus' language, is an expression of deepest longing and desire for change. A desire accompanied by the will to act now as if that change had already occurred—faith. To humbly ask is to cradle our desire in the awareness of the resistance our fears create and the reality of our connection to everyone and everything else. Humility balances fear with connection, unparalyzing us to take next steps as if the change we seek has already occurred…the only way to find that by asking in humble action, it actually has.

Dave Brisbin 10.13.24 When I went skydiving for the first and only time, I didn't want a tandem jump—strapped to a jumpmaster—so that meant a full eight hours of training, and that the decision to jump was all mine. Fear grew all day through classes and videos; fitting for jumpsuit, helmet, goggles, pack; walking out to board the silver prop plane with its door-sized opening in the fuselage; takeoff and ascent to 12,500 feet; my name called; looking down at two miles of air with fear now in my throat. All day long the fear was with me, breathlessly at the moment of decision, but once I jumped, hyperventilated through the first few seconds of acceleration, I was no longer afraid. The day's fear, gone. I'd set in motion a sequence of events that would end the at the ground one way or another, and I couldn't take it back. Fully committed, there was nothing left but what I was trained to do. And enjoy the ride. The 12 Steps of AA break the removal of our shortcomings, our obsessive-compulsive thought and behavior patterns, into two separate steps: to become entirely ready before we humbly ask God to remove them. Seemed redundant at first, but on reflection…when do we ever know we're entirely ready to do anything? Start a workout routine or diet, marry, have a child? How did I know I was entirely ready to believe I could survive the jump? Only when I relaxed my fingers and let fall. We have to act. Only in action do we know we're entirely ready. And when it comes to removing the obsessive-compulsive symptoms of our lifelong fears, what keeps us from being entirely ready? Arriving after a drive with my then four-year-old son, he jumped out of his car seat as if spring loaded, landed on the asphalt and declared, I'm happy! When I asked why he was happy, he said, You're supposed to be happy. I'm a happy boy. Do we believe that? That happy is how we were born and our true default position? We've lived in fear so long, with our shortcomings so long, we've forgotten and made a virtue of suffering. Until we remember we're supposed to be happy, it's almost impossible to become entirely ready to act, to participate with God for change.

Dave Brisbin 10.6.24 Longtime friend sent a text just long enough to tell me that his wife had died and could we set up a time to talk. I was shocked—knew she was fighting cancer, but no idea so advanced. On the phone, he didn't want to talk about her death as much as what it had stirred up. Any death raises awareness of our own, but the death of a spouse takes it through the roof. He asked if he could tell me about things in his life that he wasn't proud of, that he'd never told anyone. He said, you may not like me after you hear what I have to say. What is our greatest human fear? Being alone. Whether in personal relationships or existential vastness, alone is terrifying. All our compulsive, dysfunctional behavior is aimed at soothing that fear, so it's perfect irony that such behavior only creates more aloneness by killing our presence—our ability to connect. My friend was alone in his home now and afraid that his deeds over decades would end our connection once spoken and maybe his connection with God if not. But life had brought him to the point he was willing to risk confession, essentially doing a 5th Step with me. He'd been carrying his 4th Step moral inventory around like a boulder in a backpack for decades and had long ago admitted to himself and God the exact nature of his wrongs. But that wasn't enough to ease his fears. Fear of what makes us alone only has the power of a blackmailer…once the secret is out, the power is gone. Only in the eyes of another person who knows our deepest secrets, can we know our connection remains. I liked my friend just as much after he told me what he needed to say. He had lived most of his life imagining his secrets to be unforgiveable, that if people really knew him, they would leave him. But in the breathless vulnerability and humility of letting another really see us, we reenter the herd of humanity and find the truth... …that the default reality of life is unaloneness, that everything and everyone are connected and nothing can separate us from the love of God that holds us all in place…that the fears that make us feel alone and unconnectable exist only in our minds.

Dave Brisbin 9.22.24 If the first three Steps of AA are a serial surrender of the illusion that we can manage our lives isolated from the greater power of community and God, then Steps 4-7 are a serial healing of the damage those illusions have done. Just as surrender is too big to happen in one step, so is our emotional and psychological healing. Stages. Cycles. When the 4th Step speaks of making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, we think of lists of defects and shortcomings. A moral inventory is much more than a list. Defects and shortcomings are surface symptoms that expose deep, unconscious fears. Until we face those fears, the source of our dysfunction, we blame everyone and everything outside ourselves for our pain. We live as unconscious victims of circumstance…under the myth that circumstance determines well-being. The circumstances of Polish Jews in 1940 were horrific. After the German invasion that started WWII, they were concentrated and walled off in a tiny section of Warsaw—the ghetto. Over 460,000 Jews, 30% of the population, were crammed into 2.4% of the city's space. Rationed under 200 calories a day, compared to over 2,600 for Germans, disease and starvation were rampant. Under such circumstances, these people should have been destroyed. Instead they built an underground society of hospitals, soup kitchens, orphanages, schools, libraries, workshops synagogues, recreation centers, a symphony orchestra. A smuggling ring of children aged 4-8 crawled through openings in the walls to bring food and other necessities from gentile sympathizers. Their writings reflect the need to find themselves by finding God in every detail of life. They kept their humanity, sanity, and faith by staying in contact with life, with God and God's creation beyond the ghetto walls, beyond circumstance…aware that their thoughts and emotions, however intense, were not the whole of themselves, that they had a choice. This is Step 4 lived out, not listed out. Becoming aware of the whole of ourselves, the unresolved fears that if not fearlessly faced, will keep us in our own personal ghetto whatever our circumstances.

Dave Brisbin 9.15.24 Made a decision to turn our lives and will over to God, a power greater than ourselves…Step Three of AA…sort of a let go and let God. Sounds so easy, but it's only as easy as our grip on whatever we're holding on to. And if we believe we're holding on to the only way we'll ever experience security and survival, affection and esteem, power and control—just how easy a grip are we expecting? I remember a scene from a movie where a man is dangling off a cliff, clinging to the end of a rope with those at the top calling down to let go. He's screaming back, eyes squeezed shut, face contorted. Exhausted, he finally lets go and falls about eighteen inches, lands in sitting position. That's each and every one of us, clinging for dear life to illusions of power and control that blind us to the fact that in God's care, it's a very short fall. Once upon a time, I went skydiving. Jumped out of a plane at 12,500 feet with a bedsheet in a pack on my back. I decided to turn my life (literally) over to the care of those around me, the greater power that said I could survive the fall. I had to trust the people who taught me and packed my gear enough to jump, but couldn't prove them trustworthy until I did. Classic Catch-22. How did I gain enough trust to let go? It started early in the morning with the decision to drive to the center, to sign the legal release of liability, to attend each class all day long about the gear and techniques that would brake my fall. Gearing up with jumpsuit, helmet, goggles, getting on the plane—each small act taken as if I believed I could survive, made the next act possible until I was staring out at two miles of air... As in skydiving, so in life. Belief is not enough. We won't let go until we trust enough. But trust is experiential, only exists after we act on our beliefs. That's faith—acting as if what we say we believe is already true. Faith is the bridge between belief and trust. We start small, day by day, in every living moment, until we're staring down a sheer drop that after a deep breath, faith lets us realize is only eighteen inches. We can let go for a short fall like that.

Dave Brisbin 9.8.24 Looking at the 12 Steps of AA as a rite of passage: separation from the now too-small world we knew, to a disorienting transition, to reincorporation—a changed person returning to community. It's the shape of every human life, but the trick is to make it conscious, our steps intentional. The danger is substituting the ritual for the real thing—talk about it or work through a book—useful in mapping our way, but never the journey itself. A Roman centurion approaches Jesus and implores him to heal his servant. Jesus says sure, take me to him. Centurion says I'm not worthy to have you in my home, just say the word. Jesus is amazed, has never seen such faith in all Israel. So much happening in so few words. A military commander of a ruthless empire, hated by the Jews, loves his servant enough to publicly humiliate himself before a ragtag Jewish healer…compassion cutting through rank and status. Aware of the blood on his hands, the military atrocities…remorse has opened him to a vulnerable humility. Understanding how authority works, he sees it in Jesus…discernment, submission to the point Jesus is amazed. The centurion's whole life has propelled him to this moment. To admit that he was powerless to help himself, that all his authority was useless. To come to trust that he was standing before a power greater than himself that could and cared to restore. To make a decision to publicly display vulnerability, to submit his will over to that care…these are the first three Steps in real life. It's a serial surrender of everything we have imagined ourselves to be. Too big to happen all at once, but over time, life events and our own growing self-awareness conspire to take us down the steps our ego would never allow. And the steps do go down…until we're stripped of all that obscures the truth. As with the centurion, life will do its job, breaking us open, exposing us to bigger and bigger truth. But we have to help. Will we remain defended, reinforce the illusions we've built about ourselves? Or let that truth grow into a fearless vulnerability that brings us face to face with a power that cares and restores?

Dave Brisbin 9.1.24 Think of this election as the extension of a collective rite of passage into which we were plunged with the pandemic. A rite of passage is a three-part experience that grows us from one stage of human development to another. Being separated, by life event or ritual, from the world we knew; thrown into a difficult, even traumatizing transition; reincorporated back into community with new perspective is exactly what we're facing together. Rites of passage only “work” when we allow the middle transition part to take us liminal—the space between no longer and not yet, the willingness to embrace the disorientation we feel on the threshold between worlds and beliefs. We're there right now. The world we knew before the pandemic, social unrest, divisive elections, is gone. A new world is coming, and that scares us. But liminality only “works,” whether from cancer, divorce, pandemic, elections, when we let loss and ambiguity help us release hard judgments, see ourselves and others again behind the positions we hold for power and control. On the eve of the liminality of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln stunned the nation by beating three bitter rivals on his way to winning the presidency. What he did next was even more stunning. He appointed all three of those rivals to his cabinet, seeing them as strong, essential men that the country needed to survive the coming war. His ability to stand on the threshold, see past his truth to his rivals' truth, his rivals' ability to accept his hand, built stronger leadership and eventually fast friendship between the four men. In his second inaugural address, he pointed that liminal ability South, “With malice toward none and charity for all…let us bind up the nation's wounds…achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace…” The bitterness over this election shows we haven't yet gone liminal. Life itself is the liminal transition between birth and death, but the personal and collective transitions life continually presents mark our passage along the way. We imagine we get wiser as we get older. Some of us just get older. The conscious betweenness of liminality is the difference.

Dave Brisbin 8.25.24 We don't have real rites of passage in our culture anymore. At least not conscious rituals that take us through the three essential stages of separation, transition, and reincorporation. In true rites of passage, we are taken from the familiar world we know and plunged into a transitional experience that is betwixt and between the life we knew and the life we will enter when ready. It's a liminal, threshold experience that disturbs and disorients as it teaches, and when the transition is complete, there is a reincorporation that recognizes our new place in the community. Babies losing their teeth and debutante balls don't count, but joining the military certainly does, especially if deployed. But we don't ritually reincorporate our soldiers back home as other cultures do, leaving us with such high veteran addiction and suicide rates. We still have two traditions that preserve rites of passage—the Way of Jesus and 12 Steps of AA. Unfortunately, we have reinterpreted Jesus' Way as a system of intellectual belief labeled as faith, losing the original Aramaic understanding. So we turn to the 12 Steps—structure built on Jesus' original principles. We're all recovering from something, and the Steps take us on the circular path of any rite of passage: the first three separating us from our egoic thought-worlds, the middle six a liminal transition of becoming, the last three reincorporating us back into daily life. But the first step: admitting we were powerless over our compulsions, that our lives had become unmanageable, is the key to them all. Our minds create thought-worlds with illusions born out of a lifetime of hurt and trauma. We are captive to these worlds, including illusions of personal power wielded alone against the forces around us to fill implied survival needs. No one gives up power voluntarily, but in Step One we begin to see the truth—that our illusions of power are really our compulsive addictions themselves. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but connection. The illusion is that power is personal, isolated. The truth is that power is shared in connection. We can give up an illusion.

Dave Brisbin 8.18.24 Woman tells me her daughter just left to go back to college after the summer home. How's she doing with that? Sad, but ok. Truthfully, she'd gotten used to the freedom of an empty nest. Missed that freedom with her daughter back at home. But when daughter is away, misses her as well. We all do this. Mourn things missing to the point we miss things present. Trick is to be present to daughter when daughter is home, and when thoughts of missing freedom intrude, come back to daughter. And when daughter is gone, be present to freedom and keep coming back to it when daughter intrudes. Staying present to the ever-changing circumstances of the moment is the definition of happiness, understood as accepting moments as simply being enough. As they are. But what if current circumstances are painful, even traumatic? Will staying present still equal happiness? Presence to painful moments will hurt, but can also contain the awareness that life is still as it must be. If we're honest, in painful situations, we're really most present to our resistance to the pain—that it is wrong, unfair, cruel—and it often is. But once acknowledged, it's our level of acceptance that will allow us to extend presence beyond resistance to everything else that shares the painful moment. To be more present to the connections that remain than the ones missing is the beginning of healing. Doesn't happen all at once, but in cycles of acceptance and presence. Does this mean we just accept everything that happens without working for change or praying for healing? Of course not. But not everything that happens can be changed, and if we can't accept that, we can't be present, and we won't be healed. Though we focus on the physical, in all his healings, Jesus focuses on connection first—presence. Blind see, deaf hear, lame walk, dead rise—all images of restored presence returning to new life. Regardless of whether painful circumstances can be changed, healing comes with acceptance that allows presence that feels like a return to hope and gratitude. This is the healing with which Jesus is most concerned, and ultimately, the only one that matters.

Dave Brisbin 8.11.24 Moving days are always stressful, but our last move was off the hook. My wife sick, cleaning and packing until 1:30A, then up again at 6A to pouring rain that lasted all day. Delays at the new house meant they were still laying floor on moving day. The moving crew showed up, men in their twenties with tats and knit caps, seemed energized by the rain, made a game of seeing how efficiently they could load and keep water off everything that mattered. Fast and loud, calling out to each other, working as if trying to set a rain record. At the new home, rain still driving, they unloaded in a kind of dance, stepping over stacks of laminate and the crew laying floor who were laughing and dodging the movers, singing at the top of their lungs in Spanish to a boom box blaring traditional Mexican music. Everyone was happy in the rain. Except me. Yes, it was our house and our stuff; we were paying; they were being paid, but it was more than that. When I've asked people what makes them happy, they inevitably say laughing, family, food, music, sports…one guy said when he opens a brand new can of coffee, breathes it in. But like moving and flooring in the rain, some find happiness, others can't. What really makes us happy? When your head is back, laughing from your toes, there's not another thought in your head. Laughing doesn't make us happy…laughing makes us present, and presence feels like what we call happiness. We chase things hoping they will lead to happiness, unaware that we're really chasing what clears our heads. Presence doesn't lead to happiness—it is happiness itself. A theologian once prayed eight years for God to send him someone who could teach the way of true perfection. He sees a beggar on the steps of the church and wishes him a good day. Beggar replies that he does not remember ever having a bad day…so present with God, he is always happy. Young tatted men and Hispanic workers were fully present to rain and music. I was thinking of a hundred other things. It took a theologian eight years to become ready to be taught by a beggar. How long before I'm ready to learn from those God constantly sends?

Dave Brisbin 8.4.24 When Christians fight, you can bet it's going to be over the book. No matter the issue at hand, it will always come back to the book, or more specifically, interpretation of the book, which is all we really have. No matter what a text was meant to say, all that survives our reading is interpretation. To be certain of our interpretation enough to fight, is to accept the assumption that such certainty is possible at all. That there exists a single, literally accurate interpretation of a sacred text that renders all others false. Psychologists tell us that all human neuroses are rooted in an intolerance of uncertainty. If uncertainty is too terrifying, to what lengths will we go to create a sense of certainty or distract ourselves if we fail? This is the crux of Jesus' teaching. To graduate us from the illusion of certainty in spiritual matters so we can experience truth as a person—an unfolding connection—not data to analyze. One of the most iconic stories in the bible is also one of the most misunderstood. From the standpoint of certainty, it is a literalist's nightmare. Why would God command Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac? God promised that Abraham would be father of a nation too large to count, but he remained childless into old age. When the miracle child, Isaac, is born, the promise becomes real to Abraham, only to have God command him to kill the only means of its fulfillment. Literally, what kind of God is insecure enough to test a father's loyalty in such a way? To Abraham, the fact of Isaac was his certainty that God's promise would be fulfilled. But he became the father of faith for the three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the moment he graduated from that certainty. To sacrifice the certainty in his mind, move from mere ethnicity to trust in an unprovable God, changed everything in his heart. God is not testing us. Life itself is the test. To graduate from the need for literal certainty, embrace an extended metaphor for the experience of truth as a person is no less traumatic than losing a child. And no less essential to knowing truth that makes us free.

Dave Brisbin 7.28.24 A friend sent me a link to a podcast interview that rambled, but was mostly concerned with end times prophecy. Confused and concerned, he wanted to know what I thought. In one of their tangents, the interviewee flatly stated: God doesn't love everyone. Now that's often implied, but rarely declared, and in case there was any doubt, he added there's a lot Christians are confused about, that they've forgotten how Jesus operated. His reasoning was internally consistent. Starting with Psalms 6 and a list of the “people” (actually actions) God hates, he qualified Jesus' statement in Mt 5 that we should love our enemies by saying that our enemies are not the same as God's enemies, that David in Psalms 139 hated God's enemies with a perfect hatred…concluding we must love our enemies, but not God's. It's fascinating how reading the same text, we can end up at such wildly different conclusions, all based on our assumptions…our rudiments. Rudiments are basic principles, elements, fundamental skills like the basic stick patterns that lay a drummer's foundation for everything that follows. If we've forgotten how Jesus operated, we've forgotten his rudiments. Hard to argue that Jesus' essential principle is love, understood as oneness, connection with everything and everyone, but… There are two basic ways people approach God: through God's love or sovereignty (absolute authority). God is both, but we will focus on one over the other depending on our primary motivation: connection or fear. Interviewee said we must fear God, the one who could kill both body and soul. Fear always boils down to fear of punishment. 1John 4 tells us God is love, and anyone who fears punishment hasn't known a love that neither punishes nor abandons. Interviewee tells what he's convinced of. All anyone can do. We can debate or go back to our rudiments. If Jesus' rudiment is that everything in life is one, connected, and equally loved, then certain interpretations of seemingly contradictory passages can't describe the God of Jesus. Driving a stake in the ground at Jesus' rudiments gives us our north star, and a push in Jesus' direction.

Dave Brisbin 7.21.24 I've said that Jesus' teaching is not meant to give data, but point to an experience that changes everything. But what is the everything that changes? If we say our very understanding of life—how things are or should be—next morning, making coffee, what has changed? Life is same mix of work, pain, respite that we share with everyone else…like the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain only to endlessly roll back down. French philosopher Camus believed that life is absurd, neither rational or irrational, just unreasonable. And with no reasonable answers, meaningless. Only two ways out: suicide or the manufacture of hope—both unacceptable. One giving in to despair, the other to illusion. Yet he found value in life in the constant, conscious revolt against the “lie” of meaning. That our consciousness of absurdity itself is what gives us a reason to continue, that Sisyphus is happy walking back down the mountain to his boulder, conscious of his choices. For spiritual people, meaning transcends physical life, but does that make life any less absurd? There are two absurdist books in the bible. Job points at the absurdity; Ecclesiastes calls it right out. At the end of his life, the Teacher, traditionally Solomon, king of Israel, writes, “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” For all his accomplishments, he realizes that all humans are alike in death. There is no meaning in anything we do in life. His question, “What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?” is answered with, “There is nothing better for people than taking meat and drink and having delight in their work…for anyone who is joined to the living, there is hope.” Irony is, from opposite sides of the spiritual divide, scripture and Camu agree. Outside of this conscious moment, full engagement in it, there is no meaning. Only in constant contact with life is there hope. It's an unreasonable meaning, only experienced right herenow, within this day. Anything else doesn't exist in any meaningful way. Accepting life on life's terms is the first step of Jesus' Way—to a meaning outside ourselves.

Dave Brisbin 7.14.24 We've all had to reboot our computers, phones, pads, anything with an operating system. Sometimes they just get so cluttered and confused, they slow to a crawl or freeze entirely. When in doubt, reboot, yes? Hit escape, control-alt-delete, shut down, restart, pull the plug, or if the system is sophisticated enough, restore to a point before the confusion set in. In the movie Contact, a brilliant young astronomer uses science as both sword and shield. Orphaned at age nine, science was something solid, safe, something she could submit to controlled processes. She ditches a relationship the moment she feels vulnerable, scoffs at belief in God and human spirituality because there is no empirical proof. But in the experience of first contact with an alien intelligence, a solo journey from which she returns with no proof whatsoever, she meets the world's disbelief and skepticism as any person must who has had an experience of the inexpressible. Her experience gave her no data, answered none of her rehearsed questions. It rebooted her system. In an instant, it irrevocably changed her entire perspective on life and meaning. To realize that she was not alone, that we are all rare and precious, belonging to something greater than ourselves, lifted the limits her trauma had imposed. Gave newfound awe, humility, and hope at the expense of the frustration of being convinced, but unable to share with anyone else. Conviction is certainty without proof. It's always a solo journey, can never be transferred, and only feels certain in the first person, present tense. Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount are not meant to give us data, answer rehearsed questions, or make us certain. Just the opposite. They are the first step in a system reboot. A challenge to whatever certainties we hold and a portal to a first-hand experience. An experience that requires the vulnerability and humility that allows real connection—the only power great enough to convince us we're not alone. No one can tell us such things. Only where to look. But if we're willing to reboot, rebirth, we can restore to a moment before we were orphaned.

Dave Brisbin 7.7.24 Very few of us know the word albedo, yet we use it every day, and it's a huge factor in climate change. From the Latin word for white (think albino), albedo is the amount of light reflected off any surface. We all know that light colors reflect sunlight, a cooling effect like those impossibly white houses on seacliffs in Greece. Dark colors absorb, storing heat, so the amount of snow, glaciers, and sand versus dark forests, ocean, and urban sprawl greatly determines the temperature of our planet. Jesus tells us that we'll know the quality of prophets—and by extension anyone—by their fruit. You can't get figs from thorn bushes. Good trees produce good fruit and bad ones bad, so looking at the fruit gets at the heart of a person. But he also says that not everyone who calls out in his name will enter the kingdom of God, and when they protest that they prophesied and cast out demons, performed miracles and built 24/7 satellite networks, he'd simply say depart from me, I never knew you. If prophecy and miracles aren't good enough fruit to be known by God, what is Jesus talking about? Jesus is constantly trying to get us to graduate from accomplishment and reward as motivation. It's not that our accomplishments, however motivated, aren't good in that they can benefit others, but that they are meaningless in terms of gaining what can't be acquired—a connection as primal as the air we freely breathe. Though God would never banish us because we haven't yet graduated, the more we work to distinguish ourselves to gain approval, the more we believe the illusion of our own separation, banishing ourselves. How do we know we're living a life that is graduating? By our own fruit, of course. Not our accomplishments, but our spiritual albedo…total reflectivity. With God as spiritual sunshine, how much are we reflecting? With God as connection itself, how much connection do we leave in our wake? Are we leaving people better than we found them? Are our closest relationships intimate? Knowing God is the only criteria Jesus gives. To know God is to reflect God, and until that is our only motivation, we can't do either.

Dave Brisbin 6.30.24 Ever wondered what Jesus would have been like growing up? People have been wondering that ever since the generation who grew up with him died out. One of the many gospels that didn't make it into the bible, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, assumes Jesus had all his powers from birth, but had to grow into them. Portrayed at age five as a child who could be hot tempered, a boy bumps into him running by…Jesus calls out angrily, and the boy falls down dead. Days later, he is playing on a roof with other children when a boy falls off and is killed. Accused of pushing him, Jesus raises the boy from the dead asking him to tell his accusers the truth. But by age eight, we see him helping his carpenter father by pulling a board cut too short to the proper length, healing his brother James who was bitten by a viper, and raising his dead cousin back to life to ease his family's suffering. Obviously, these stories are not to be taken seriously, but their point remains: Jesus had to grow up into a devoted member of his family and an empathic healer. Jesus grew up, yet spends his entire ministry telling us to live like children, that if we can't be childlike, we will never enter God's presence. In his wilderness experience, Jesus learns to be a child again, bringing his grown-up empathy with him as he grows back down into his Father's childlike presence. In overcoming the three symbolic temptations—to be relevant, powerful, spectacular—he learns that we are not great because of our accomplishments, we are great when present to God's presence. But we can't be present as long as we're seeking great accomplishment as prerequisite for meaning in life and approval by God. Those who didn't grow up with Jesus, imagined him powerful from birth, having to grow up into those powers. But those who did grow up with Jesus were amazed to see he had grown back down into childlikeness, into the apparent powerlessness of servanthood. They resisted the growing down, and we do too. A child is pre-egoic; doesn't know it's naked. Until we grow back down into such spiritual unknowing, we'll never trust the greatness in Presence.

Dave Brisbin 6.23.24 When we were kids, my sister did a paint-by-number of Da Vinci's Last Supper. You know, where the image is preprinted as numbered areas you fill in with the matching-numbered paint. It looked ok squinting at it from across the room, but imagine the difference between painting by numbers and the original master, creating and mixing his own paints and working from the depths of his experience as a human. Jesus is trying to take us from painting by numbers to true spiritual expression. The Pharisees of his day had created a numbered approach to God, matching behavior to legal codes that, squinting from a distance, looked like righteousness…but Jesus knew better. The gospels show him systematically dismantling that system, but every generation, left to its own devices, goes Pharisee, devolves to a paint-by-number mentality because it feels controllable. Risk-free behavior and reward. Jesus is practically shouting to all of us that our behavior has nothing to do with God's love. Nothing we do or don't do can change what God is—oneness, love itself. But our behavior has everything to do with whether we will experience the oneness of God's love. It's inside out, like the artist's way. Creative expression can't be numbered. It flows from the whole of the artist's being onto the canvas. It's undefended, unhindered, vulnerably transparent, or it won't connect with others. Not now, certainly not centuries later. You can't obey your way to a masterpiece. You allow its flow. How many of us risk that permission? When Jesus says the road to destruction is broad and the road to life is narrow and few find it, we imagine he's talking about heaven and hell. But do we really think God created most of us for eternal torment? Is that the God Jesus says is good news? Critically, his context, Hebrew context, is always here and now. Few people are willing to risk the unknowns of the artist's way of vulnerable transparency to find an experience of oneness, God's love and good news, in their lives right herenow. The road less traveled may seem risky—why it's most often not taken. But it makes all the difference.

Dave Brisbin 6.16.24 Years ago, I remember thinking that if I could just have one burning bush moment, that would be enough. Talking with God like a friend, face to face as Moses did, would answer everything. Yet that wasn't enough for Moses. He begs to see God's glory, just as Jacob asks for God's name and Philip asks Jesus to show him the Father. But such requests are always denied in scripture and in life. Is God just being coy? Whether looking into the smallest or largest of things, the closer we look at our universe, the more it seems to be revealing the nature of its creator. We all learned about electrons orbiting the nuclei of atoms like planets around the sun. But electrons actually resemble a cloud, a cloud of probability. An electron doesn't orbit a nucleus at all…it surrounds it like a fog with only a probability of being here more than there. It has energy and momentum, but doesn't move. The cloud is completely still. We know exactly where the cloud is, but the electron has no specific location. Stephen Hawking said the universe is finite but has no edge. If you flew in one direction long enough, you would never get to where the stars thin to black, but would end up back where you started like an ant walking inside a ping pong ball. Space curved in on itself, every spot in the universe looking exactly the same—same distribution and density of stars—and you would always be exactly in the center, because no other position exists. In the fear of our uncertainty, we want to see God's face, pinpoint a location. Make it intellectually certain. But as the ancient Hebrews imagined, God's presence is a cloud. A cloud of probability with no edge. We know exactly where the cloud is: always right here and now, yet God's face has no specific location. Everywhere and everywhen we go, God is always experienced herenow, and we are always exactly in the center of God's cloud of presence. No other position exists. We know where and when to look—closer than our next heartbeat or breath. But the looking is not with sighted eyes and the finding not with geo coordinates. God's face is the incomprehensible embrace of trust in love.

Dave Brisbin 6.9.24 Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Yeah, that's a country song, but Joe Louis, the great boxer, said it first. Death is the moment everything we can think of as ourselves, our entire sense of self, falls away. It's the moment our minds stop thinking, stop imagining ourselves as individuals, separate from everyone and everything else. The irony is, we never feel better, more connected, loved, grateful, meaningful, fulfilled than moments when we lose our sense of self—whether in meditation, prayer, or an intense, peak moment, like falling in love. When our sense of self falls away, the anxiety of aloneness falls with it. And yet, that falling away of self is exactly what we fear in death, because we can't imagine who we'd be when we can no longer think of who we are. Heaven is the state of absolute connection, but we must die to get there---die to our sense of self. The mind is the sole repository of ourselves-as-separate, so as long as we're in our right minds, we are not in heaven. An elder in an ancient monastic community of desert Christians taught that if you see a young monk by his own will climbing to heaven, take him by the foot and throw him to the ground... Early Christians knew that heaven is not a goal to achieve, but a reality to realize: we are all connected, always. We don't acquire that, we relinquish all that obscures it. Climbing to something we already possess only intensifies our illusion of self and individual control, the opposite of heaven. Have you ever fallen in love? Did you work at it? Climb to it? More likely, you worked against it, at least after your heart was broken. But at some point when you weren't looking, you lost yourself in your beloved. Your sense of self fell away, merged with another. That's why they call it falling. We don't and can't ever climb to heaven. We fall to heaven. The moment we become willing to stop clinging to an imagined identity as a separate self, become willing to die to all we think of ourselves, to all we think at all, we lean back and start falling. Everything we fear we will lose or never gain is in the falling.

Dave Brisbin 6.2.24 One of the most cinematic scenes in the gospels is at John 20 where Mary Magdalene is sobbing by the empty tomb, and the risen Jesus asks why she is weeping. She whirls to confront the voice but not until he calls her name does she recognize. She calls out to him, and Jesus immediately replies, stop clinging to me. We don't need to be told that she runs to him, falls down sobbing and clasping his feet in the ancient eastern custom. Our minds connect those dots. We see it all on our inner screens. Why would Jesus break off such a human response? Under the circumstances, to say it's a cold reply is a world-class understatement. But like any good film, nothing is presented in the gospels without purpose—the real estate is far too precious. Jesus is hammering that though his love for Mary hasn't changed, the nature of their relationship is now radically different. Just as Moses couldn't enter the promised land because the people had begun relying on him rather than God, Jesus told his friends that he needed to leave them so they could experience God's presence directly and graduate from vicariously clinging to becoming as one with Presence as he was. Painfully, that process begins with a loss. It always does. Is there anything Jesus would tell us to stop clinging to? He's pretty clear. He says flat out that anyone unwilling to give up all they have can't go where he is going. What part of everything don't we understand? This may sound pathological, but he's exposing a reality of life. Since the moment our primary needs as humans were first frustrated in early childhood, we've been building unconscious programs for happiness and survival that we don't even know exist. We become addicted to our intelligence, talent, family, career, mission, theology, politics, wealth, as essential elements of control over uncertainty. But anything on which we rely short of pure Presence, even Moses or our image of Jesus, is limiting us, blocking us from that Presence. When Jesus says stop clinging, he is saying that holding on to what has sustained us, or at least soothed us to date, is now keeping us from what sets us free.

Dave Brisbin 5.26.24 Carl Jung said that the first half of life is dedicated to forming a healthy ego; second half is going inward and letting go of it. We spend our first half looking for meaning, purpose, identity through accomplishment and acquisition—outward performances that mean less and less over time. We enter our second half when we realize that true meaning comes from a completely different direction. Jesus said that kingdom, his shorthand for second half spirituality, will never be found out there somewhere. It's already within us. Authentic spirituality isn't acquired. It's relinquished. All the meaning and purpose we can stand is already within us, along with our true identities. It's like ground water, deep and inexhaustible, always there, but not at the surface. You dig your well through layers of accrued illusions and patterns of thought and behavior. When Jesus says no one can follow him who doesn't give up all they have; when he tells of men who find treasure in a field or at the market and run off to sell all they own to buy it, he is saying the same. Until we become willing to relinquish all we have gathered and count as our egoic identity, we'll never find who we are not, so we can begin to know who we really are. It's an inside-out gospel that's easy to miss because we want to miss it. Most churches are more concerned with finding power in God that will vanquish enemies, fix circumstances, right wrongs, armor against vulnerability, create prosperity... Jesus' descent, letting go, powerlessness, vulnerability, invisibility of servanthood is not attractive. Fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message, meaning that the means we use to communicate affects us more than the content itself. Jesus poured his message into the medium of a personal experience of perfect oneness—truth that would make us free once all illusion of separation was removed. The effect of that experience was recorded in the gospels, which we read and claim is true. But ink on paper is not truth, it's a different medium. It becomes true once poured back into its original medium—the experience of our own lives.

Dave Brisbin 5.19.24 So easy to lose the forest in the trees. Especially with scripture. We dig deep into the weeds of each verse, pull it apart, imagine meaning that may not have anything to do with the larger passage or chapter, let alone the whole book. A famous writer says unless you can describe the whole of your book in one sentence, you won't write convincingly. You'll meander, each part not contributing to the whole. The bible is actually sixty-six books, an anthology. Even harder to pull back enough to see a single line capturing its meaning—each verse revealing more of the whole. I've heard said that the bible is a love letter from God. A bit overly simplistic and sentimental for me, but on the right track. Maybe this: the bible traces the nature, development, and realization of our relationship with God. And if God is love, and love is identification with the beloved, then what we're realizing is the oneness at the core of all our relationships. The gospels are all about this oneness. Jesus is one with the Father and the Way to the Father. He calls his Way kingdom, the quality of a life lived in full presence and connection…oneness. Everything he teaches relates back to kingdom and kingdom to the oneness at the heart of relationship. He tells us not to worry—focusing on the future destroys presence. He tells us not to judge—objectifying others destroys connection. When he tells us not to give what is holy to dogs or pearls of wisdom teaching to pigs because they will trample it or turn and tear us to pieces, it sounds condescending and has been used to exclude those not of our “faith.” But is that an interpretation consistent with the whole of Matthew's gospel, with Jesus, the whole book? If we know the whole, we can reverse engineer the part, fine tune our interpretation of any part by never losing sight of the whole. Jesus is one with the whole, never excludes, accepts everyone where they are, never judging where they should be. Takes the time presence requires to first establish connection before healing or instruction. If we seek kingdom first—presence and connection—the whole will always be in the part.