2025

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.

Reward And Punishment

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.

The Big Words

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.

More Big Words

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.

Keeping The Faith

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.

The Real Enemy

Dave Brisbin 7.6.25
Leader of a retreat some thirty years ago, Catholic priest, asked the group—who attended same weekend every year—why Jesus came, why was he born. Hands went up to answer right out of the Baltimore Catechism—to die for our sins. Priest was so frustrated he said that after all their years of attending, if they weren’t willing to grow, learn anything new, next year just stay home. Wow.

I had also been drilled that Jesus came to save us from our sins, shocked by his intensity.

Christian writer and speaker, Brennan Manning, revealed in his memoir just before he died that he’d been an alcoholic since age 18, tried to be the good child stumbling into church every Sunday, ordained a priest, became a famous writer and speaker who fell in love, left the priesthood to marry, relapsed after 15 years sober. From motel to motel on speaking tours, drinking to blackout, all while inspiring so many, like me, with his writing on the radical, furious love of God…on grace. Philip Yancey wrote that we’re tempted to ask what might have been if Brennan had not given in to drink. Wrong question. Real question: what might have been if Brennan had never discovered grace?

How did Brennan discover grace? By continuing to show back up after every relapse, every failing, to find that God was still there waiting, completely unfazed, love undimmed. Our failings usher us into the presence of grace, never our successes. Only when we’ve embraced our failings, ourselves as imperfect, yet still bring ourselves back to Presence do we experience God’s love as unchanging, degreeless, graceful. Only when we have felt completely unworthy and yet completely accepted at the same time, can we see our shame for what it is—a fear of disconnection that keeps us disconnected.

Jesus didn’t come to save us from our sins. 

God understands those, loves right through them. But our shame keeps us from seeing the good news of that kind of love. It’s the long way home, but Jesus came to save us from shame. Only love can do that. He came to show us the perfection of God’s love. To experience that is to lose the shame, the fear that causes all we call sinful. 

Into Grace

Since I’ve been talking about the need to question everything, arrive at a personal theology that we’ve tested in the streets of our lives, become willing to be called heretic for our trouble, one of our members commented that I must have been called a heretic at some point and asked if I saw that as a badge of honor. 

Called heretic at some point? I’ve lost count. Along with being told I was going to hell and taking anyone along who’d listen to me, I wouldn’t call it a badge of honor. Surprising and painful at first, it now functions more as a grim validation of the process of spiritual formation. Always a cue to reevaluate, but without fear anymore. I know my God will never damn me for a wrong thought in my head, and constant questioning keeps me humbly aware that the quality of my relationships is always more important than abstract positions, just as Jesus taught.

Someone once called me a “functional heretic.” Not sure what he meant, but I took it to mean pushing the envelope just short of too far. I love that. Still functioning within the biggest Christian tent, but following Jesus as I’ve come to know him as first priority. With that definition, we should all be functional heretics, willing to question established systems and beliefs—our own or those around us—if they no longer reflect the life to which we are convinced Jesus is calling.

Heresy literally means to choose for oneself, even if it means departing from accepted doctrine. It’s only a negative for those invested in status quo, threatened by dissent. So, checking our motives to make sure we’re not chasing egoic desire for attention or gratification, we accept the responsibility of making our own choices. Just following orders, living off received beliefs, is never a mark of spiritual maturity.

When conscience bangs against doctrine that no longer makes spiritual or common sense, making our own choice also means accepting any punishment from orthodox power. But what’s the alternative? To never explore this life is not to live at all. Jesus may not have relished disruption, but he never shied from being called heretic. We can do no better.

Unashamed Heretic

I’ve always known I was adopted. 

From earliest memory, my adoptive parents so normalized it, it was just what it was. Why think more? Or maybe it was a guy thing. In her twenties, my also-adopted sister searched for her bio parents and found them. Was a brief, unfulfilling encounter, yet when my life imploded in my thirties, I put a waiver in my file at the agency that would release my identity if my bio parents did the same. Was a passive nod to a deeper need I was finally beginning to feel.

Three years ago, my oldest daughter did a DNA test. Found she had 19% Indian blood, which could only have come from me—a new ethnic identity beckoning. She asked if I could get more on my/her bio family, so I spent $163 to get all the “non-identifying” information I could. One document, the social worker’s narrative, riveted me.

My mother was a 23-year-old Hispanic girl in 1955, oldest of 13 siblings with a stay at home mother and father who was a barber by day and gigging musician at night. He couldn’t fully support his family, so my mother went to work, bringing home what she could. Deeply religious and pregnant, she and her mother kept the secret from her father, telling him she had decided to become a nun, but instead of convent, entered a Catholic home for unwed mothers. The social worker detailed her anguish that December, away from home at Christmas for the first time, how her eyes filled but she didn’t break down when deciding adoption was her only, best option for her baby and a family that couldn’t afford another mouth.

It was like a movie playing in my mind. I could see her and for the first time ached to meet her. But for her choice, grown up in a radically different family with a dozen aunts and uncles my own age…who am I really? Not that child...but how much the one I became? I know that who I most deeply am has nothing to do with family of origin, but this story, this unmooring of who I’ve always thought I was, is helping cut a path to identity like a machete in a rain forest. We don’t need a new origin story to begin remembering who we are, but we do need to learn to cling less to the one we have.

Remembering Who We Are

Dave Brisbin 9.7.25
How could we have known about the first week of September? My wife’s back pain had grown into numbness down her legs and feet, prompting an MRI, but still waiting for those results Tuesday morning, a feeling in my chest grew to what I could only imagine was a heart attack. Finally told Marian I needed to go to ER, and in the midst of endless cycles of testing and waiting, a text comes in telling her to go immediately to ER for emergency surgery. She didn’t even tell me until after I was discharged, no cause determined.

She wanted to wait one more day while I was still shaky—she’d waited this long after all. So Thursday morning, we drove to ER, and soon as the surgeon saw the images, scheduled surgery for that afternoon. If left any longer, she could lose all function below the waist. I waved goodbye, as they strapped her in the ambulance taking her to a surgical hospital, drove to meet her in preop, only to wave goodbye again as they rolled her off to OR. Would I see her again? Would she walk again? She smiled big, I smiled back, went off to wait out expected one-hour surgery. One hour, two hours, no text, no call. Found a nurse.

She was just coming out of surgery. Back to waiting area. Phone vibrates, surgeon saying all was good, that she came out of anesthesia with the biggest smile that made his day. That he found a bone spur knifing right into her spine, saw the nerves relax as he pulled it out. If she was doing well enough, could be discharged the next day. I stayed in her room until ten, went home but heart symptoms returned, forced me to drive back to ER. Still dark. Both of us in hospitals at same time. What if they admitted me? Who’d bring her home, care for her?

We’re both home now, trying to heal, but those moments remain—a wave goodbye, a smile from a gurney—when a fragile reality appears, a wire frame view of life you can’t unsee. If we don’t turn away too soon, keep looking, there’s something underneath. Solid state, no moving parts, irreducible. The everything behind the nothing. Can’t hold on to such glimpses, but they can hold you. Remind you.

Change how you see everything else.

A Week in the Life

Nothing like a nice existential crisis to dig up questions of identity. 

Who am I? Of course. But beyond that, who’s asking? And beyond that, what does it mean that I can even ask such a question? To be aware that I don’t know who I am, that I can conceive of myself in such a state?

The only word we have is consciousness. What is consciousness? What does it mean to be conscious? Dictionary answers: to be awake and aware of our exterior surroundings and inward psychological and spiritual states. Is that it all it means? All our waking moments we are aware of so many things, but we can only focus on one at a time. And when we do, who is it that is choosing where to focus? Is that us too?

Consciousness gets tricky fast. We can dig deeper and deeper through layers of what we call consciousness, but what is its essence? Where is it located? No one knows, of course, but one theory is that our brains are not so much transmitters as receivers. That we’re not transmitting our own consciousness located somewhere in our minds as much as receiving our sense of consciousness from one, great universal consciousness. Like computers without hard drives pulling our programs and memory from the cloud, we’re all individual manifestations of the same consciousness playing through endless personalities and egos.

Is this true? I have no idea, but when Jesus says that he and the Father are one, he’s placing his identity in the cloud, disregarding any local identity. When he says he can do nothing on his own initiative, that his actions don’t flow from his own consciousness but that of the Father, he seems to have let go of himself as a separate entity, and in that surrender, realized his true identity. He says if we follow his lead, we can do what he has done, and when he says if we want to find our lives, our consciousness, we need to lose them, he is telling us how.

Not in staking out a separate self, but in surrender to the vastness of the spirit, love, consciousness in each concrete act of authentic connection, we become smaller, emptier, simpler—and our identity with all that is conscious becomes unmistakable.

Who Is Asking

Dave Brisbin 9.21.25
When an event has the immense impact Charlie Kirk’s assassination is having on us collectively if not personally, we need to stop and take a look around and inside. I was shocked at the news of his assassination, but even more at the worldwide response—hadn’t realized the depth of his following. The political response was predictable, though, supporters and detractors alike making him a symbol for their respective positions. It was sad to see the real man, the complicated, imperfect human we all are becoming lost.

Within Christian circles, one group is becoming militant, vowing to fight to bring the country back into alignment with Christian values. A second appears to be growing despondent, expressing a sense of despair over both the situation and the Christian response, feeling disenfranchised by their church, questioning traditional faith and beliefs.

I can understand both camps. If you’re seeing cherished values slipping away, you instinctively want to consolidate, organize, fight. In the 4th century, the Roman Empire finally recognized Christianity, protected it, and ultimately declared it the state religion. Many Christians celebrated, but at the same time, others—the Desert Fathers and Mothers—fled to the deserts of Egypt and Judea to find a faith and church they felt they’d lost in a sea of Roman power. We seem poised at such a moment again.

Jesus taught in story and metaphor. Did he give us a primary metaphor for our spiritual lives? We seem to have decided as a church that it’s the image of the warrior that suits us best. But Jesus never uses it. He gives us image after image of the gardener—quietly bent over the soil, flowing with wind and weather—rather than armored opposition. 

Are we warriors or gardeners? 

Never either/or, we’ll need to be both over the course of our lives. But when it’s time to fight, are we characterized by anger and anxiety, or are we happy warriors, still capable of compassion and patience, aware that outcomes are not under our direct control? Are we humble warriors with a gardener’s heart, always looking longingly through the conflict to the silent fields of home? 


Silent Fields of Home

Dave Brisbin 9.28.25
If you want to protect and consolidate any institution, church, or state, the most effective one-two punch is to stigmatize doubt and proclaim dogma—belief accepted just because authority says so…which stigmatizes common sense. Then with enough power, you outlaw doubt and common sense altogether. Just about every religion and every political institution has done it. If we’re paying attention, it’s happening all around us. Orwell enshrined it in his novel 1984, though he was just mirroring totalitarian societies eighty years ago.

For 300 years after the crucifixion, everyone following Jesus was trying to interpret what he and his teachings meant theologically and personally. No one was in control, so no official dogma, but competing doctrines were everywhere, causing so much division that Emperor Constantine called the first church council in 325 CE. Christian orthodoxy was born, and with Roman power, the church enforced it. Apostle Thomas was marginalized as Doubting Thomas for being honest and courageous enough to demand his own personal experience, that he couldn’t base his faith on second-hand reports.

Doubt and common sense are our only footholds against a slide into superstition.

Scripture is careful to include the doubt that every hero of faith—from Abram to Moses to Apostles—used to springboard to the action of authentic faith. There is no faith without doubt, just as there is no courage without fear. Jesus had his moments of doubt and used the common sense of love-in-action to guide his people past prevailing dogma and practice to their own personal experience of God.

Some say human societies reset every 500 years. Five hundredish years ago, we in the West experienced Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, a time of great doubt and questioning. We are going through just such a time now with science, technology, and politics pulling every existential thread. Jesus also lived in such a time, modeled and gave us permission to question, to use doubt and common sense to build a first-hand faith never dependent on ignorance or capitulation…as essential to us as it is threatening to those in power. 

Doubt and Common Sense

After running a 7.5-million-year program, a fictional super computer says the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is…wait for it…42. For the forty-six years since that novel was published, fans have been speculating as to the meaning of 42. Looking so hard for certainty, we miss the point. The author said publicly that the number was completely random, chosen for its insignificance. Making the point that any rational answer to the meaning of life is itself meaningless.

My favorite part of a movie is the first third. The setup, bits and clues to new characters, all that is left unsaid, hidden. What is unknown is far more intriguing than any resolution. Can you ever thrill to a magic trick once you’ve seen how it’s done? What would an objective answer to the meaning of life actually give us? What would be the experience of a life to which you already knew the outcome? In our intolerance of uncertainty, we’re looking for an answer to life that would kill the experience of life.

Life is not a machine to diagram, a math problem to solve, or a task to complete. When Jesus says that he is the way, truth, and life, he is trying to teach us that meaning is not a thing to be thought, but a person to be experienced. Truth is a person. Life is a person. And the way to both is a person too. Knowing the meaning of life and truth is knowing a person, not a fact. It’s falling in love with the unfolding of personhood. Ours. Everyone’s.

“Your marriage begins the day you wake up and realize you married the wrong person.”

Once you get over the resistance to such a line, you realize that graduating from infatuation to love only happens after you see how the magic trick is done, that your beloved is not perfect after all. You fell in love with an image of a certain outcome, your resolution to life. But when that image shatters, if willing, you can fall back in love with the unfolding of a real person. When we stop trying to understand or fix, the meaning of life becomes a falling in love with the endless unfolding of life.

Better than asking the meaning of life…how do we learn to love the unfolding?

Loving the Unfolding

Dave Brisbin 10.12.25
Watching a friend of twenty years wind her way through cancer treatment and now hospice care has been a master’s course in radical, serial acceptance. Just yesterday, to abruptly realize that the cause of her new pain was now moot—that no one was looking for causes anymore, only the management of pain—was another level of reality to absorb. I saw it in her eyes, but just for a moment. Then an implied shrug, and the conversation continued.

It’s that ability to recover from the shocks of life that shows us who we are. You can call it resilience, but it’s more than that. We’re generally taught that spiritual maturity means moving beyond doubt, despair, anger—being untriggerable. Thank God the gospels show us Jesus wasn’t all that. We see his anger in the temple, his doubt at Gethsemane, his despair on the cross. But then we see his quick recovery back to center, reconnection with his deepest identity: not my will, but yours…forgive them, they don’t know what they do.

Life is an oscillation between constantly changing circumstance and neurochemistry. Between pleasure and pain, triggers and recovery. We have no control over emotional onset or the events and circumstances that trigger it. And we’re not responsible for what we can’t control. Spiritual maturity isn’t measured by a lack of triggers or negative emotion we can’t control, but the speed of our recovery. Return to center. Remembrance of who we really are.

And who is that? 

Looking in the eyes of a newborn, whose brain is still formatting like a new hard drive, there are no thoughts or concepts. But there is presence. A presence that can’t be defined in words because it precedes them. It’s this presence that simply accepts what it experiences, absorbs without labels or the weight of prior experience, reminds us of the vastness we’ve lost in adult preoccupation.

We can cultivate newborn eyes through spiritual discipline, or we can wait for life to drive us into serial acceptance. Or both. The eyes of a newborn and those of a friend in hospice…they are the same. They see what we’ve forgotten.

Death is not the tragedy. It’s not remembering while we live.

Newborn Eyes

Dave Brisbin 10.19.25
As we look farther into the observable universe, dig deeper into subatomic particles, science is coming full circle back to what contemplatives and mystics have always known. One aspect of quantum physics is especially revealing. Called superposition, it’s the mathematical concept that subatomic particles exist in a kind of cloud of probability—a continuous wave—where all states and properties are possible at the same time. But the moment an observer interacts with them, superposition collapses into a single state—a particle.

This mind-bending phenomenon mirrors the ancient Hebrew view of human life lived out between heaven and earth, between God’s realm of wavelike unity, of infinite potential and possibility, and earth, the place of individual form and function—particles. Our purpose is to bring heaven to earth and earth to heaven, to merge the oneness and infinite possibility of heaven with the diversity and finitude of daily life, without losing the essence of either.

The whole point of spiritual formation is to cultivate moments of superposition, re-experience the oneness of infinite possibility we lost growing up and bring that reality into every aspect of daily life. But our consciousness is superposition resistant. We won’t hold onto paradox, craving straight lines and answers, resolution. 

Donkey falls into a farmer’s dry well, and when he can’t get it out, decides to just fill in the well. First shovelfuls rain down. The donkey is frantic, braying hysterically, then goes silent. Farmer looks down. As each shovelful hits its back, the donkey shakes it off and steps up until he eventually steps up and out of the well. On earth, with our straight lines and particles, we fear the curved, indirect movement of spirit in superposition. But enlightenment is not a direct lifeline pulling us up into the light; it’s an indirect layering that feels like death at first, scares us until we see the way of it.

Quantum physics and Jesus’ parables teach the same message. 

That some things can’t be known with straight thought lines. Only by living them out, interacting, do they collapse and merge into meaning.

Between Heaven and Earth

Dave Brisbin 10.26.25
Book of Genesis tells us that God gave Adam permission to name all the animals in the Garden. It’s not a casual detail. For the ancient Hebrews, authority to name something like a child or an animal, was a symbol of dominion over that something. That’s the point. Control. To this day, Jews do not speak the name of God. But the rest of us continue to name everything in sight, including God…and the theology we build around God.

God told Moses from the burning bush that his name was hayah asher hayah. That is, I am that I am. How can we get any closer than that? How do we describe raw, ultimate existence any more clearly? How do we, using finite tools such as language and logic or even the mathematics of physics, describe what is by definition infinite? Our limited language, concepts, and equations melt all over the dashboard long before temperatures and velocities ever reach the neighborhood of infinity.

But we keep trying. Control is an aphrodisiac.

To be fair, the scriptures are always talking about knowing God. Ezekiel uses the phrase over seventy times in his short book. Jesus says that some of us, knocking on the door of kingdom, will be refused because God never knew us. Really? Once again, entering the Hebrew mind helps us square this circle. To know—yada in Hebrew—comes from the root for hand, so to know is not to think, but to handle. Jesus is saying that some of us, for all the religious work we do, have still never been intimate with God. Now God won’t throw us out for that, but God is intimacy personified. If we’re too unripe, immature, traumatized to enter the defenseless vulnerability that intimacy requires, we don’t know God. We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.

God occupies space beyond thought and performance. If we can stop naming God, trying to understand and dominate for just a moment, we enter God’s space and experience what we’ll never understand. Relax... Understanding is overrated. For Jesus, a precognitive child is the embodiment of kingdom. 

Trust beats certainty the way rock beats scissors. 
Once we experience God, there is no name that can hold or express what we know.

Knowing God

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.

Into Grace

True North with Dave Brisbin

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