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.

Graduating Certainty

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?

Happiness Is

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.

Healing Happiness

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.

Power Of Powerlessness

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.

Betwixt And Between

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?

Centurion Moment

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.

A Short Fall

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.

A Personal Ghetto

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.

Unaloneness

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.

Supposed To Be Happy

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

A Personal Ghetto

True North with Dave Brisbin

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