2019

Dave Brisbin | 1.6.19
January 6th has lost its significance in our non-liturgical, Western churches. Known as the feast of the Epiphany since ancient times, it celebrates the appearance of God to Magi and the rest of the world and sits in the transition between the 12 days of Christmastide and the 28 days of Epiphanytide—the 40 days of the full Christmas season. It is a season full of other feast days and colorful, even superstitious, activities and rituals of the ancient and medieval church. But though we see these now as curious and quaint, they held the people together in common cause and experience in ways our culture has lost. Rituals and practice repeated at the same time in the same order for lifetimes and centuries of lifetimes defines a people—not the outcomes of those actions, however spectacular. We judge our effectiveness by our accomplishments, but the spiritual life centers on what we do over and over each day, regardless of outcomes that remain outside our control.  Jesus shows us how this is done through his entire life, but encapsulated in his prayer at Gethsemane  is his willingness to let Father handle the outcome as he just shows up for the next indicated step. It’s all about acceptance. Holding lightly to our heart’s desires as we keep showing up to epiphany, the appearance of God-with-us in this moment.

Epiphany

Dave Brisbin | 1.13.19
The passing of Shirley Boone, Pat Boone’s wife of 65 years has had a big impact on many of us. A close personal friend and staunch supporter and member of our community for the past five years, she will be hugely missed here and of course worldwide. But watching Pat moving through the final months of her life and through the week following her death has been a great lesson for me. Pat prayed for healing ceaselessly, but prayed in such way that his faith and characteristically cheerful attitude toward life and God’s presence continues now unabated. He described his wife’s passing as a simple change of address, a moving to a place he will visit soon. He described his prayers in the last few weeks as a search for God’s intention in whatever direction that moved—as finding a direction he could cooperate with. When we are faced with impending loss, as we desperately desire a specific outcome, how then shall we pray? Looking at Jesus’ modeling and teaching of prayer, we see the instruction to pray “in my name” over and over, but until we unpack that tiny phrase from an Aramaic point of view, we can’t see how Jesus and Pat are on exactly the same page…praying in such a way that any outcome remains right in the center of our sense of God’s presence in our lives.

How Then Shall We Pray

Dave Brisbin | 1.27.19
Nearing the end of the liturgical season of Christmas that spans 40 days from Christmas Day until the feast of the Presentation on February 2, we are now living between Christmas and Easter, between Jesus’ birth and death. People have commented on the fact that a tombstone lists dates of birth and death with only a mere dash signifying the entirety of a person’s life. But Jesus didn’t even get a dash; he only got a comma. In the earliest creed of the church, the Apostle’s creed, Jesus’ birth and death are listed in a series of beliefs only separated by commas. Everything that Jesus lived and breathed and taught and loved is not mentioned in a list of events the church understood as theologically significant. But how can we understand the theological significance of an event in Jesus’ life without knowing the life of which those events are a part—the context for any event in his life? Early in its history, the church shifted from a focus on Jesus’ life and Way of living it, to a focus on his death as instrument of salvation and promise of resurrection. But Jesus’ life informs his death, and if we’re to be authentic followers of Jesus, we must find the balance between the two—learning to trace the shape of his life before we consider the significance of his death, or our own. Here, now, between Christmas and Easter, we’re living in his comma, the perfect time to consider our dash.

A Comma and a Dash

Dave Brisbin | 2.3.19
Situated on the liturgical calendar between Christmas and Easter, between Jesus’ birth and death, is a perfect time to look at Jesus’ life—to look at balancing what he lived and how he loved with the more theologically significant events of his birth, death, and resurrection. It’s a perfect time to consider how living as he lived would give theological significance to our own birth and death. But our western church roots go deep, and making that balancing shift can be difficult unless as Jesus says: we grow new ears to hear. Using parables to break through what we think we already know and how we already hear, Jesus gives us the story of the Sower, which is really more about the Four Soils. But as he speaks of seed falling on the beaten path, rocks, and thorns as well as on good soil, church ears have heard him speaking of four different types of people who break down to two basic groups: believers and non-believers, those who accept Jesus theologically and those who don’t, us and them. Digging deep into the Aramaic underpinnings of Jesus’ saying, we find layers of meaning that put us in the center of the story: that ultimately each one of us is all four soils all at once. That we all have the blind spots, the hard baked stubborn spots, and the unhealed hurting spots that keep us from fully embracing a new truth, even as our good soil embraces others. If we willing to give little ground, Jesus is showing us how to prepare our soil and grow new ears that will grow good crops.

Sower and the Soils

Dave Brisbin | 2.10.19
When I was in pastoral training, a pastor told me that no one should preach the parables until they’ve been in ministry for 30 years. Now I violated that right away, but approaching 20 years in ministry, I do see what he was driving at. There is a perspective that comes just from sheer years of having seen the panorama, the parade of years go by that creates a different way of looking at life—and parables need to be looked at the way we look at life--not text. For two thousand years, scholars and clergy have debated the meaning of Jesus’ parables, breaking them down into the smallest bits, trying to crack the code. But some parables absolutely resist such fine grained interpretation. As in the difficult parables of the unjust steward and judge, Jesus seems to be violating everything we know of our morality and ethics as well as his own. But parables aren’t meant to be understood through the lens of what we already think we know, they are meant to explode what we already think we know. They are meant to slap us in the face and wake us up or at least confuse us enough to stop trying to force familiar lines of thinking into radical new concepts. If we let go of trying to resolve each word and detail to make the parable fit our understanding, if we step back as from the vantage of 30 years’ experience and see the overall contours of the story, where it’s pointing, how it makes us feel--with just enough Aramaic context, we can begin to see where Jesus is pointing us. And if we’re willing to follow that new direction both mentally and relationally, we’ll find new ways of seeing and hearing that may begin with a parable, but will extend to every detail of our lives.

Staying Simple

Dave Brisbin | 2.24.19
Talking about the mental gymnastics involved in moving from dualistic thinking to unitive thinking, once again, it’s not about become wholly one or the other, but a realization of the need for the balance of middle ground. Ultimately all our brains do—our left brains at least—is to differentiate: compare and contrast, find the edges of things to define and distinguish them from the background and the next thing, to place them in categories, divide light from dark, past from future, us from them. Without this ability, we don’t survive. All the tasks along our journey of life are dependent on the ability to think dualistically, and we need to take the tasks of life seriously. If we don’t, we’ll never find our purpose, meaning, and identity as humans. But at the same time, if we take the tasks of life too seriously, if we never stop differentiating and judging, if we become defined and identified with our tasks and accomplishments, then we never find meaning, purpose, identity either. We’re on this hero’s journey of life not to find and acquire our purpose, but to reach the point of release of all that we think the journey is about, and in that clearing realize the purpose, meaning, and identity that had always been ours from before we began. From Abraham to Moses to Solomon, to Jesus to Dorothy Gale in Oz to each of us, the journey is the same in shape and infinitely different in detail. A hero is not the one who completes the journey, but the one whom the journey completes.

Release

Dave Brisbin 3.3.19
The shape of our life journey moves initially from the simplicity of childhood to the complexity of adulthood. But if it stops there, we’ve missed the point of it all. To push further, to let go of the complexity and dive back down into the simplicity of our essential spirituality brings us into real meaning and purpose. To illustrate from John’s Gospel, the story of Jesus’ first miracle, changing water to wine at Cana, can be read very simply as just that, Jesus’ first miracle that established him as more than a man, teacher, and sage—someone in whom his first followers placed their faith. But delving deeper into the imagery, the symbolic use of numbers, the historical context and relationships implied from an ancient Hebrew point of view adds complex layers of meaning and begins to show us much more of what John and his community understood about Jesus near the end of the first century. But to stop there in all that complexity, no matter how interesting and enlightening, is still to miss the essential message of Jesus’ work. To break through and find the simple and intimate connection with the story is what moves us from head to heart, from a two thousand year old narrative to the choices we will make in our next breath.

Cana

Dave Brisbin 3.10.19
On the first Sunday of Lent, we stop to consider what Lent has meant since the middle of the second century to millions of Christians from ancient to medieval to modern times. What is its place in the liturgical calendar and how did it and the other seasons of the church along with their cultural practices bind the people together in common experience? A common experience we no longer possess in our culture. But understanding Lent by understanding the model from which it came, Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, we begin to see that regardless of what the church taught and practiced, Lent was not about suffering or deprivation as some sort of sacrifice for God’s favor. Nor was it about penance for past sin. Looking at the model of Jesus, we see a voluntary sense-deprivation, a quieting and removal of all distraction and whatever fuels the ego-self that obscures real identity and meaning. Jesus didn’t go into the wilderness to suffer, he went to be purged of everything that hid the truth from his eyes, but he accepted suffering as part of the process. This Lent, this 40 day preparation for the new life of Easter, can establish a structure for our own journey toward our real selves, if we let it. Will we? Let it?

Living Lent

Dave Brisbin 3.17.19
Second Sunday of Lent: Trying to sit quietly in balcony chair and warm sunlight but shadows keep flitting across my closed eyes. Every time I look, nothing there, until finally I catch a smallish butterfly streaking by. Then another. And another, until I realize there’s a dense column all driving overhead in the same direction. Later I learn of the one billion butterflies migrating north to Oregon and beyond…because the rains this winter in the interior deserts dropped annual rainfall levels in single weekends, and dormant seeds and bulbs under the desert floor bloomed into carpets of flowers that caterpillars loved and survived into a billion butterflies going north. We notice a billion butterflies, but how often do we notice just one? Lent is about becoming people who don’t wait, like dormant, buried seeds for spectacular rains to bring a billion butterflies into our awareness, but actively search out the water and growth that allows us to see each and every butterfly that crosses our path. Jesus speaks of the cry of all creation showing us the truth, Paul gives us a three-part roadmap to the kind of awareness that really sees and celebrates whatever creation is right in front of us, right now. Whether a billion or just one, no longer waiting for a spectacular desert bloom, we make the desert bloom anytime any time we choose.

Desert Bloom

Dave Brisbin 3.24.19
Third Sunday of Lent: Flipping channels, ran across the movie Chariots of Fire. Hadn’t seen it in decades and got immediately pulled in. Story of two runners preparing for the 1924 Olympics—a British Jew and Scottish Christian who couldn’t be more different. As the Brit is using running as a weapon against the prejudice he’s endured as a Jew, the Scotsman simply “feels God’s pleasure” when he runs. And his whole life as both athlete and Christian missionary to China reflects his ability to do two things: to see through the surface task—whether running or teaching—to the deeper, spiritual task beneath, and to radically accept life as it presents in any moment. Whether the pressure of an Olympic event or the advance of the Japanese army into China, he remains himself, wholly committed to the welfare of either competitors or students. How did he manage to get to this kind of balance? In his early twenties, no less? And more importantly, how can we? When we read from sources as diverse as Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes, Jesus at Matthew 6, and dialectical behavior therapy skills, we see patterns forming that give us clues to the how of this balance between work for change and radical acceptance, between the task at hand and finding the evergreen task within the task. And by leaning in right there we can begin to live the difference between identifying with our work, using our tasks as weapons of self-worth and simply feeling God’s pleasure as we run.

The Task Within

Dave Brisbin 3.31.19
Fourth Sunday of Lent: Each liturgical day of Holy Week from Palm Sunday to Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday has a name and scripture passages designated that tell the story of the final week of Jesus’ earthly life. But each day and its passages also tell another story when we look beneath the literal meaning. They show us the internal experience of the Way of Jesus…the path he takes all the way to the cross. Focusing on Holy Tuesday and Spy Wednesday that tell of the wise and foolish bridesmaids and about Judas and Mary, we find stories about balance. Jesus tells us that the parable of the bridesmaids is about watchfulness and readiness, and the context of the Jewish wedding tradition balances the anticipation of new life to come with the immersion in the life that is now. Judas, whether conspiring to have Jesus arrested or sparring with Mary over whether the perfume she pours over Jesus should have been sold for the poor, is wholly focused on macro political and social issues. Mary is only focused on her relationship with Jesus—intimate and vulnerable. Jesus is quick to point out the disconnect, and we are left to see how the balance between anticipation of new life to come and presence to daily details, the balance between the big issues over which we have no control and the intimacy of our closest relationships is part of this week of keys to Kingdom life.

Tuesday and Wednesday

Dave Brisbin 4.7.19
Fifth Sunday of Lent: And so we come to Maundy Thursday as we work through the liturgical days of Holy Week.  The traditional scripture passages associated with Maundy Thursday are all the events and preparations for the Last Supper, the agony in the Garden, and Jesus’ arrest. It’s a busy day as Jesus gives a new commandment to his friends at supper—to love each other as he has loved them, institutes the Eucharist/communion, washes his friends’ feet, and prays a long prayer before going to the garden of Gethsemane.  But as we look at the deeper significance of each of these events, the principle at the core of all of them is the unity for which Jesus prays at the end of supper. The new commandment, the washing of feet, communion, the return to the Father’s will in the garden all point toward the need to be one in identity, meaning, and purpose. And as we add Thursday to the four preceding days of Holy Week, we can see an overlay with the four stages of spiritual growth that trace our progression from self to group to interior work to unity in the broadest sense. It is a beautiful and essential representation of both the final week of Jesus’ journey and the totality of our own.

Maundy Thursday

Dave Brisbin 4.14.19
Sixth Sunday of Lent, Palm Sunday: Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem that Jesus ironically sees as a tragedy for his people. Why? Because they miss the hour of their visitation, keeping them on a path leading to destruction. But how so? They greet him at the city gates with palm branches and shouts that signify the return of a king… As we look at the four main groups interacting with Jesus—the people and Zealots, the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Romans, and Jesus’ own followers—we see that each group only sees Jesus through the lens of their own expectation and desired outcomes. As Jesus comes riding into their lives, they don’t see him as he is or what he represents and teaches. They remain unchanged by his presence and message and look only to further their own agendas. Without recognizing the radical change Jesus represents, they miss the visitation of God that would change everything. And as it was then, it is now. The truth is, every moment is Palm Sunday in our own lives. Every moment, Jesus is riding into our lives, humbly, on the colt of a donkey. If we haven’t become people who celebrate the seemingly insignificant details of life, we will miss the entire point and presence of an unassuming God, one who lives to serve, not be served. And as we look for a mighty savior to fix all our circumstances, we’ll miss the quiet one by our side who only invites us to see the truth that is already right before our eyes.

The Way to the Way

Dave Brisbin 4.21.19
Easter Sunday: One of the most striking details of the post-resurrection narratives in the Gospels is that none of Jesus’ closest followers recognize him when they first see him risen from the tomb. What is going on here? How could they not recognize Jesus? Is this a literal fact being preserved, a deeper spiritual meaning being evoked, both? The two figures confronting the women at the tomb give us the best clue: why do you look for the living among the dead? Answer: they buried Jesus and expected him to stay put. Reasonable assumption, but they were looking for Jesus where they expected him to be and not where he always was…in motion. Life is defined by motion; something unmoving is by definition not alive. God’s spirit is defined by motion; the Hebrew word ruach means breath, wind, spirit—all only experienced in motion. As soon as we have a fixed idea about God, he is no longer there. Fixed ideas, like corpses, lie among the dead and can’t define a living God. As soon as we think we have Jesus figured out, he is not there, and we, like his closest friends need to let go of our preconceptions, let Jesus be himself, and stop the ultimate frustration and grief of looking for the living among the dead.

Among the Living

Dave Brisbin 4.28.19
On Palm Sunday, looking at how the various groups of people around Jesus couldn’t see him as he was, but only through the filter of their own agendas and desires and so didn’t recognize the hour of their visitation—and  then on Easter, looking at how the closest friends of Jesus didn’t recognize him at all after his resurrection—there’s a whole lot of unrecognition going around. So who is this Jesus we’re trying to follow and emulate? What do we really know and how close is what we think we know to who he really is? The New Testament doesn’t give a lot of detail, but when we dig into the language and context and the way the authors wrote their texts, a picture emerges, but it’s one that will challenge the view of Jesus that has come down to us traditionally. Can we really understand Jesus as lighthearted and playful, bold but vulnerable, and always completely integrated? When we look at Jesus through an Aramaic lens, how humor worked in the ancient world, the details that were put in and left out of Scripture, we’ll see how close we can get to really meeting Jesus.

Meeting Jesus

Dave Brisbin 5.12.19
Mother’s Day: Two scenes from a movie try to capture what the day to day relationship was between Jesus and his mother. They are touching scenes, one heartbreaking, but both underscore the power of a mother’s love that is the closest we will come to the love of our Father in this life. If mother’s love is closest to the Father’s love and the Father’s love is arguably the most important thing we can learn in our spiritual formation, then why do we refer to God as Father? Where’s mother? Looking at how the Hebrews understood their God as coded into their very language, we find that though God is referred to in the masculine, he is often portrayed as feminine by the prophets. The Hebrew words for spirit and kingdom are both feminine—and wisdom, a main attribute of God, is personified as female in Proverbs. How can God be both mother and father at same time? A perfect balance, perfect marriage? Just as we know the earth is round, but experience it as flat every day, we could say the earth is round in fact but flat in experience. And we could also say that God is Father in fact, but Mother in experience, and until we experience the compassion and acceptance of Mother God, we will never really know Father God, no matter how much we know about him.

Mom and Dad

Dave Brisbin 5.19.19
If you were asked to name Jesus’ main purpose in his ministry, could you do it? There will be many answers of course, but we don’t have to speculate. Jesus told us flat out in Luke 4 that his purpose was to preach the Kingdom of God to all the cities. So if the Kingdom of God is Jesus’ purpose, have we gotten the message? Do we know what the Kingdom is? Just as it was misunderstood by Jesus’ first followers, we misunderstand too, which is why Jesus goes to such lengths to tell us that the Kingdom is not a place but a quality of life to be lived, not future but now, not out there somewhere, but within and all around us, and one thing more that we tend to miss. When we look at Jesus’ life we see him in every possible emotional state, both positive and negative.  He often retreated from his work in order to reconnect with his Father, which tells us that the quality of life that is the Kingdom of God is something that is chosen, returned to each moment rather than a steady state entered just once. And if that is true, how do we enter Kingdom right herenow in this moment? And the next? If the Book is right and God is love and love is experienced as what we call grace, then it seems the Kingdom of God is really the Kingdom of Grace. And if that’s true, every time we choose graciousness—kindness, compassion, understanding, mercy—we enter into God’s grace, into the Kingdom of Grace.

Kingdom of Grace

Dave Brisbin 5.26.19
Medieval maps of the known world would often depict dragons in the water beyond where anyone had gone. Uncharted waters held both promise and unknown dangers, and some maps actually printed the words here be dragons to really hit the nail on the head. Those willing to sail beyond what was familiar were the ones who charted the maps in the first place and continued to push against the dragons until the entire globe was charted. You see, everything it means to be an explorer begins where the map ends.  It’s the same with the spiritual life. The same Book that tells us God’s love is the centerpiece of our existence also tells us such a love is too great for us to understand. But we need to understand something so central, don’t we? So Jesus addresses the dilemma with every teaching and story, consciously breaking down our attachment to what is familiar by calling us out beyond our maps of law, ethics, religion, justice, obligation, tradition, and even family and obedience-- whatever we grasp to make us feel safe and protected. Jesus knows that as long as continue to circle our ships in known waters, safely within the scope of what we think we know, we will never experience a love that is infinitely rooted in heaven and not earth. Jesus is leading where there be dragons, because everything it means to love as God loves begins where familiar love ends.

Here Be Dragons

Dave Brisbin 6.2.19
I sometimes get asked why I don’t talk more about the Spirit, and that question always surprises or at least reminds me of differing perspectives. Of course I understand why it comes up—the Spirit is central to any reading of the New Testament as that which draws us to God, informs and empowers us to a fullness in spiritual awareness. This week, I was asked when I would talk about the Trinity, so I thought I’d put the two together in the context of love and see what happened. It took the church 300 years after the crucifixion to decide how the Father and Jesus were related, and another fifty plus to add Holy Spirit to a trinity of persons in one God. But alongside those heady debates was a set of three eastern bishops who understood this threeness of God experienced as Father, Son, and Spirit in creation, reconciliation, and sanctification as inseparable from the constant movement, the alternating flow of giving and receiving between lover and beloved. They saw the three persons of the godhead as in perichoresis—a Greek word that literally means circle dance—the blur of motion that is the definition of the dance, the way the motion of breath and wind is the definition of ruha, Aramaic for spirit. The blur of motion is God, and a mention of any one person of God always includes every person in the blur because it’s the motion that defines the relationship. It’s when we enter the motion blur ourselves like kids jumping on a spinning merry go round to join their friends that the blur of faces resolves to individuals as we add ours to circle of the dance.

Love of Three

Dave Brisbin 6.9.19
We’ve been looking at love from God’s point of view: what is this love, what does it look like, how can we begin to grasp its infinite scope? But maybe what’s more important is beginning with the assumption of its reality and then asking what it means for us to be the beloved? To look at God’s love from our point of view. What does a person beloved of God look like? Fortunately, we have an example that jumps off the pages of scripture because his name actually means beloved—dead giveaway that we should be paying attention. David, the boy who became the king who united all the tribes of Israel is described as a “man after God’s own heart,” chosen to be king and God’s beloved. But a quick review of everything we know of David’s life and actions from the books of Samuel show us a man who looks anything but beloved. Capable of the greatest courage, loyalty, faithfulness, and exuberance, he is also capable of the greatest cruelty, selfishness, arrogance, and disregard for life. Which is the beloved part? Why was he chosen for belovedness? What does his story tell us about ours? It tells us that David wasn’t God’s beloved because he deserved it or earned it, but only because he believed it to be true so deeply that he never stopped coming back to God. No matter how far he strayed, he trusted that God was just a breath away, his own breath breathing his return to God’s presence. David represents the extremes of human behavior in a beloved package. And though our behavior may be much less extreme, the package is no less beloved.

Being the Beloved

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.