2024

Dave Brisbin 1.7.23
Psychology tells us that all human neuroses are caused by our intolerance of uncertainty. Think about that for a minute. As children, everything is unknown, uncertain, but we don’t know we’re naked so we accept each moment as it presents without question. Everything is as it should be until we get hurt, and when old enough to conceive of tomorrow, we first fear the uncertainty of next time.

When fear is great enough that we can’t tolerate the uncertainties of life, the need to create or at least imagine certainty becomes overwhelming. The strategies we use, mostly unconsciously, are our neuroses—attempts at control that emotionally feel better than uncertainty. Intellectually, we know there are no certainties in life, at least not in the big things: life and death, health, wellness, relationship, spirit. But can’t we carve out little certainties for ourselves in the spaces between the big things that can add some tolerance for the rest?

Think of a child growing up in a home with solid family rituals—times for rising and resting, eating, playing, schooling, birthdays and vacations. Safe, comforting. Holds the world at bay. As adults we create our own rituals built around work and play and families of our own. Society and church build their rituals around a calendar of secular and religious events, while the world provides the clockwork of days, months, years, seasons, the interplay of sun and moon. Small comforts within larger uncertainty.

Repeated cycles imply a conscious creator, someone who set the cycle in motion and cares to keep it going for the sake of those who need a solid place to stand. And that care implies the love from which all else is derived. Once aware of such love, we can make friends with the uncertainty at the core of life and finally begin to let go of our neurotic attempts at control that keep us grounded in fear. It’s all about the balance. Celebrating the cycles of sun and moon that make life possible while creating cycles of daily ritual that hold life in place and make learning to love uncertainty possible—trusting the mystery that gives life its ultimate interest and meaning.

Trusting Mystery

Dave Brisbin 1.14.24
Dualism is a sneaky worldview. Worldviews themselves are sneaky. We don’t often realize we have one, that we experience life through cultural and self-imposed filters—it’s just reality as we’ve come to believe it is. Dualism divides our view of reality into opposed and contrasted aspects. The most obvious is mind and body or material and immaterial. But once you have drunk the dualist Kool-Aid, you see duality everywhere: right/wrong, male/female, now/not yet, secular/spiritual, heaven/earth. As if everything we experience is reducible to two opposing aspects.

Since we are focused on contemplation as a primary tool for spiritual growth and Jesus as a Hebrew contemplative—working interiorly to step away from cognitive and emotional distractions in order to experience pure presence—another dualism presents. Contemplation and action. If we’re focused inwardly, using silence, solitude, stillness, and simplicity to quiet our minds, hearts, and the world around us, how are we of any use in our relationships and communities?

Our world is falling apart, and we’re meditating in the corner? Inactive? Uncaring? 

One of the main benefits of contemplative practice is to strip away our preconceptions, both conscious and unconscious, to see reality as it really is. See past our worldview’s filter, past imagined dualities to the unity beyond. Life is not about either/or. It’s both/and. Contemplation is the preparation we must go through in order to see what is really needed, what love requires in our relationships and communities so that our action is appropriate and part of a true solution. Not just an expression of what our egos and unresolved traumas need.

Paul appears to uphold inaction toward slavery and subjugation of women in his biblical letters, but I see him trying to help people prioritize. To fight the interior revolution first, prepare hearts and minds before we strike off to fight the exterior revolution. Contemplation and action together. In that order. We train before we compete, wipe windshields before we drive. Must see reality as it is before we engage action that is clearly our duty to perform.

Engaged Contemplation

Dave Brisbin 1.21.24
Disciples of a spiritual master come to his home only to find him on hands and knees in the front yard. He tells them he lost something of great importance, so they fall in to help search, hands and knees, eyes straining. After some time, they ask where he had it last, where he might have lost it. Oh, he says, that was inside the house. Then why are we searching out here? Because the light is so much better…

We laugh, but as crazy as that sounds, isn’t this exactly what we do spiritually? The master is trying to teach his students that we all want to conduct our existential search where it's comfortable…how it’s comfortable. In our strong suit, under conditions where the light is good, and we can hold on to the illusion of control. We want to dictate the terms of the search, and even the nature of the thing searched for. Much safer to search for a god we imagine we understand.

In our need for absolute answers, we construct questions in the light of our dualistic worldview, setting up straw man opposites so we can knock one down as false and say we’re certain the other is true. Our human insecurity requires this manufactured certainty, but we’re setting up opposites in a world that Jesus says is one—a oneness that can only be seen once we’re searching in the house, where we can’t control the light and must trust a process and spiritual muscles that we can’t see.

In his famous love chapter, Paul said when he was a child, he acted and reasoned like a child, but when he became a man, he put away childish things. He places this metaphor against the fact that we can only see spiritual reality dimly, but when the “perfect” comes, face to face. We think he’s talking about heaven, but Jewish context is always this life herenow. When the perfect comes is any moment our house of cards, our world of opposites collapses, and for an instant we see the oneness, the sole substance behind our opposites. 

For Paul and Jesus that substance is what we call love, the ultimate reality we’ll never find until we grow up and out of the need for certainty—willing to search in mystery where the light is not so good.

Growing Up

Dave Brisbin 1.28.24
Familiarity breeds contempt usually means that the more we know people, the more we can lose respect and judge more harshly. If contempt seems too strong a word, at least the more familiar things become, the more they blend into the wallpaper until we don’t even see them anymore. And when those things are religious scripture and doctrine, we may be so saturated that we believe we know things we have never considered on our own: accepted as children or under group pressure, such teachings became familiar before ever teaching us how to live spiritual lives in a physical world.

And what is more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer? Even those not steeped in Christian tradition are familiar with it. We learned it as kids, recited it—but what is this wallpaper saying? Is there anything to learn beyond mere recitation? We know the words: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, as in heaven, so on earth…

But when Jesus’ friends asked him to teach them to pray, he would have said something like, abwoon d’bwashmaya, nethqadash shmakh, teytey malkuthakh, nehwey sebyanach, akanna d’bwashmaya aph b’arha. Transliteration alone gives a sense of the unfamiliar otherness of a teaching from as far out of modern Western experience as humanly possible. But beyond mere translation, when we put these Aramaic words back in their ancient Eastern context, we discover this “prayer” is actually a blueprint for living a spiritually aware life.

The five lines of the prayer form the steps of a process that starts with becoming unfamiliar again with everything we think we know. Clearing an interior space allows us to see the reality of the sacred in the ordinary details of life and begin to match our values to God’s, only knowable when our sense of separate self is lost in present action. Released from that sense of separateness, the victimhood of the past, we realize a new connection, always herenow. 

If we can become unfamiliar again, see these words again for the first time, we can stop reciting them and start living the path they describe. Or better, recite them as a reminder to really live.

Teach Us To Pray

Dave Brisbin 2.4.24
Some things are too big to grasp all at once. Like those Nazca lines in Peru…geoglyphs laid down on a windless plateau around the time of Christ—so big you can only see them from the air. Other things are too big to grasp within the limits of rational thought. You need greater perspective to see, not altitude, but a step outside conscious thought to the wordless awareness of pure presence. You still can’t grasp the thing intellectually, but you can experience its reality.

God’s radical, degreeless, indiscriminate love is just such a thing. This is why Jesus doesn’t give us a theology. More things to think about. We can understand the words that describe perfect love, but not its reality from words alone. So Jesus gives us a Way of living, the only way to experience the reality of a love so alien that it can’t be rationally understood. Alien. I hope that word is uncomfortable. Only if we are experiencing something uncomfortably unfamiliar at first, or even frightening or amoral according to our sense of justice, are we even in the neighborhood of God’s radical love.

Nowhere is this paradox more apparent than with the concept of forgiveness. Forgiveness is greatly misunderstood. We equate forgiveness with condoning the past, making restitution, even reconciliation, but it has nothing to do with any of these. Neither does it have anything to do with the person who hurt us…we can forgive the dead. In Aramaic, forgiveness descends from the same root word as freedom. To those who wrote the gospels, to be forgiven is to be set free from any victimization or unbalance that has occurred, to be restored to our original state. 

This is a completely interior process that only we can do for ourselves. No one, not even God can do it for us. God doesn’t forgive; God is forgiveness as much as God is love. God can’t withhold his own nature; it self exists. All we will ever get from God is love and forgiveness, but we will never know this reality until we live the Way, until we love and forgive those who haven’t earned it. Then we’ll know how real it is, how it had to first be given to us before we could ever give it away.

Radical Forgiveness

Dave Brisbin 2.11.24
What churches and religion inevitably forget—as does every human group—is that their laws, doctrine, and practice are not ends, truth in themselves, but pointers, guides to non-rational truth that must be personally experienced, never bestowed.

Thomas Huxley said that new ideas begin as heresy, advance to orthodoxy, and end in superstition. Belief systems practiced for a length of time follow this curve, and Christian thought is no exception. The practices that Jesus taught and his followers called the Way, heretical to most, were understood as a way of life that prepared individuals to experience the paradoxical truth of God’s love. But as the movement matured and institutionalized, life practice became ritualized, and the theological ideas that had grown around them were legalized into orthodoxy. Eventually, law and ritual were believed to have supernatural power, ends in themselves rather than pointers to spiritual experience.

The original Hebrew meaning of law—torah—was instruction, guidance, like training wheels on a bike. But that in no way diminishes its importance. Jesus said he was not abolishing the law, but fulfilling it—that even the smallest letter and stroke would remain until heaven and earth pass away, which in Aramaic means to cross a boundary. We need the guidance, restriction, and discipline of law and ritual until the oneness of heaven merges with the individuality of life on earth in our own hearts. When heaven and earth merge in us, we no longer need law and ritual as training wheels, but will live them from the inside out as expressions of the love we have experienced along the Way.

Jesus is teaching us that law is not fulfilled in obedience or righteousness in ritual practice. Legal compliance and ritual observance mean nothing in themselves, but everything when they have become the deepest purpose of a transformed heart. To believe otherwise is to miss the Way entirely, remain focused on conformance rather than transformance…as if training wheels are permanent, the highest expression of riding a bike, and not a limitation—the outward badge of an inward inability to fly.

Training Wheels

Dave Brisbin 2.18.24
We’re still in the first days of Lent. If you didn’t grow up in a liturgical church, you may not know about ashes on foreheads, confession and penance, fasting and giving up candy bars or some other treat for forty days. And even if such memories are part of your past, you may have as much to unlearn as others have to learn about Lent.

For nearly 1,800 years, the forty-day period before Easter is meant to be a time of preparation. Originally the preparation for baptism of new converts, it was ported over to Easter as an annual time of preparation for the new life of rebirth. Mirroring Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, the deprivation and suffering of Jesus’ experience is emulated, but why? As children, we understood it as punishment and penance for our sins, wiping our slates clean for God, but this relatively passive and vicarious approach is not what Jesus experienced during his fortyness.

Forty in the bible means a difficult time of trial and testing leading to a transformative rebirth. Think Moses on Mount Sinai, Noah in the ark, Hebrews wandering in the desert. Jesus faced three trials in the wilderness that correspond to every human’s biological needs for security and survival, power and control, affection and esteem. Jesus’ three temptations symbolize the unconscious drives every human must transcend far enough to gain the emotional regulation and awareness the rest of Jesus’ Way requires.

The fortyness of Lent is meant to be a similar, ritually difficult preparation for transformation. But if that’s our intent, we need to reframe it: not as a negative punishment or penance, but as positive, affirmative action we intentionally take to clear out distractions, take a dive into our shadow selves, and create an ideal interior environment for spiritual breakthrough. The fasting and deprivation of Lent is not punishment, but an opportunity to lower our egoic guards and awareness threshold—allow God’s presence to show through. We can use Lent as a crash course to silence and simplify enough to see what is really meaningful in our moments and any interior limitations keeping us from that meaning.

Ashes

Dave Brisbin 2.25.24
When Jesus rolls into Jerusalem the week of his execution, there are major mixed emotions in the crowd of onlookers. The common folk are chanting and cheering as the authorities, both Jewish and Roman, hang back, concerned over any shift in power. Jewish leaders tell Jesus to quiet the crowds, but Jesus replies that if these were silent, the very rocks would cry out. Just pretty poetry? Something deeper?

He seems to be echoing both King David and Paul who said that all creation testifies to truth and can’t be silenced or ignored. More poetic license? Astronomers say they have heard the sound of a black hole singing: a massive black hole in the Perseus cluster is emitting sound centered on a tone 57 octaves below middle C. And microwave background radiation, radiation from celestial bodies and nebulae can also be heard as sound, as music. Creation is singing. We just have to be tuned to the right frequency.

Obviously not being so technical, Jesus is recognizing that there is unceasing music, an expression of truth emitting from everything around us…all nature, even the rocks. How can we tune in? Paul calls it unceasing prayer, but as if knowing we’d misunderstand, couples his directive to pray with rejoicing always and being grateful in all circumstances. These three directives together create the context for understanding the nature of unceasing prayer. Not prayer of words or thoughts, but a state of awareness so tuned to each moment that we can participate at a level beneath words, thoughts, and the judgment that objectifies and separates. 

To engage our moments at this level is to become aware of the deeper connection that is experienced as a sense of wellbeing, a metaphysical ok-ness for which the automatic reaction is gratitude. When you feel the smile spreading across your face without your permission or thought, when you suddenly see in the smallest detail you may have seen a thousand times, the thrill of something deeper, you are praying this prayer. Significance in insignificance. Divine truth in the most ordinary moment when your prayer is your awareness—tuned to hear the rocks sing.

Listening To Rocks

Dave Brisbin 3.3.24
Decades ago, I met a Christian who converted to Judaism, eventually becoming a first century Jewish follower of Jesus. He spoke of his personal theology, a stated set of personal beliefs. I’d never considered such a thing. Growing up Catholic, theology belonged to the church, as if God had written it, and the church discovered it, parceling it out each Sunday. Unquestionably true, the idea of a personal theology was blasphemous. We had no permission to think personally.

Yet here’s Jesus overturning tables in the temple and cursing a fig tree for having no fruit. Both stories pointing to the fact that the Jewish system of his day had become bankrupt, fruitless, unable to guide its people to authentic spiritual encounter. Jesus gave himself permission to explore his own beliefs, lived and taught out of that conviction, exposing the defects of his tradition. And where did that tradition come from? If you roll back any religion to its inception, you get to one person. A person who had life changing spiritual experience, which they lived and taught and people followed.

All theologies begin as personal theologies—attempts to express an inexpressible experience of the infinite in a finite life. But when we come to that religion as a follower, what we experience first is the expression as it has been handed down, not the experience. Heresay…which won’t be useful unless or until it guides us to our own experience. Once theology becomes institutionalized, it becomes a closed loop, no longer pointing to life changing experience, but to its own law and ritual, as if they were such experience themselves.

Any theology only become useful once it has become personal.

Once you’ve memorized the phone number, you can burn the slip of paper. Once the law is written on your heart, you can forget the rules. The purpose of theology is to catch God. Once God is caught, theology can be forgotten—we can meet God without a middleman. But we’ll never know this until we give ourselves permission to get personal. Permission will never be granted to overturn our tables of old thinking or kill our trees of unfruitful action.

Tables And Trees

Dave Brisbin 3.10.24
The reality we believe is the reality we endure.

We don’t see reality as it is. We see reality as we are. Our minds are a necessary tool for survival, but keyed to survival, they are fear-based, making our thoughts overwhelmingly negative as they literally create the world in which we live. As long as we’re thinking, we’re enduring a world we believe we must control to survive. We’ll need our minds as long as we’re drawing breath, but our mistake is to take them literally. To believe our thoughts are true is to live in the anxiety of our own personal hell.

Jesus is acutely aware of the grip our minds have over us, that our minds can’t tell the difference between the thoughts it generates and sensory input coming from the outside. Always trying to engineer breaks in our stream of thought to allow something really real to break in, he never answers a question except with another question, a story or parable. He knows an “answer,” received as part of the mind’s drive to control the fear of uncertainty, is the problem. The solution is to take our thoughts by surprise so we can step away, become free of their self-created, fear-based world.

Sometimes Jesus doesn’t use words at all. When he washes his followers’ feet, he is breaking into their fear-world in the most intense way possible. As his followers jockey for positions of power in Jesus’ kingdom as they think it will be, Jesus shows them, through the most humiliating and disgusting act of service in ancient Jewish culture, the meaning of true power. The highest position is the lowest, because only in service, in laying down our lives for another, is the reality of love ever expressed.

Jesus is a footwasher. 

He says that he and the Father are one, which makes our Father a footwasher too. We have placed God high over our thought-worlds in positions of power and control. But if we really want to find our God, we have to look down, not up—not in the clouds, but in the standing height of a child, the kneeling height of a servant. 

Can you honestly accept and respect a God who washes your feet? And if not, what will it take to break into your thought-world?

When Down Is Up

Dave Brisbin 3.17.24
What do humans look like when they break through their own thought-created worlds—all about survival, controlling competition—and become present to the real world around them? 

I remembered the movie Chariots of Fire, based on a true story set around the Paris Olympics, 1924. It contrasts two runners, a British Jew, Harold Abrahams, and a Scottish Christian, Eric Liddel. Abrahams has been embittered by the prejudice he’s suffered as a Jew, and runs for revenge, driven to win and prove superiority over those who despised him. Liddel, China-born to missionary parents, has been preparing to return to the mission field even as he gained stardom in rugby. His sister, Jenny, just as driven as Abrahams in her religious zeal, is dismissive and critical of his athletics; they distract from God.

Liddel tells Jenny, “I believe God made me for a purpose, for China…but he also made me fast…and when I run, I feel his pleasure. To give it up would be to hold him in contempt.” Abrahams runs for revenge. Jenny runs for duty and obligation. When Liddel runs, he feels God’s pleasure. 

Liddel stands apart. Principled to the point he won't run his 100M race because it falls on a Sunday, he withstands withering fire from his elders including the Prince of Wales himself. Yet, when able to run the 400M instead, as the fastest runners in the world are tensely preparing to run, Liddel casually walks the lanes, sport coat over his running shorts, smiling, shaking hands, wishing each the best of luck. 

Liddel was only 22 years old. How’d he do that?

Running was just another place where he felt God’s pleasure: sheer oneness and connection. But seems he also felt God’s pleasure when he greeted his fellow runners, unconcerned at that moment for the race itself, until that became the source of God’s pleasure. Twenty years later, he was still feeling God’s pleasure in China, working with children in the WWII internment camp where he died. Wherever he went, whatever he was doing, he felt God’s pleasure, changing everything.

I don’t know how he felt all this at 22. But with intention and a bit more time, we can all feel it too if we wish.

Feeling God's Pleasure

Dave Brisbin 3.24.24
Western Christianity has largely failed us in its primary responsibility: to preserve Jesus and his teaching and help us engage. Focused on law and punishment to the point of legalism; ritual to the point of superstition; scarcity to the point of passive petition; outcome to the point of dismissed herenow, an authentic Jesus and his message have been left behind.

One little passage sums it up. “The eye is the lamp of the body. 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.” Lest we take the English too literally, in Aramaic, eye/aina means a person’s entire way of seeing, their worldview. Clear/p’shitta is clear in the sense of simple and sincere. Light/nuhrah is illumination, intelligence, order. Bad/bisha means unripe, immature, not fully formed. And darkness/heshuka is chaos, disharmony.

Jesus’ whole ministry was to show us how we can sincerely allow the order and clarity of ultimate reality penetrate the chaos of the immature thought-worlds we have created for ourselves out of fearful survival needs. And in following this only Way, to see the Good News of our reality—that we are already as loved and approved as we want to be. When Jesus rolls into Jerusalem on his last week before the crucifixion, his followers, the people, the Jewish and Roman authorities only see him through the filter of their own wants and needs. For those at the margins, he is savior. For those invested in the status quo, a threat to their powerbases.

Is Jesus a savior or a threat? We reflexively say savior, have grown comfortable with that image, but if we don’t also see Jesus as a threat, we will miss how he saves. The next day, Jesus overturns the money tables in the temple. If there is anything in our thought-worlds we have built up and rely on, if we let him anywhere near, Jesus will overturn it that our eye may be clear. It’s up to us to be outraged or intrigued. This is how Jesus saves—by showing us how to clear our eye. But until we accept his threat, he can’t save us.

Jesus is our savior and our threat. But not necessarily in that order.

Jesus Saves

Dave Brisbin 3.31.24  Easter Sunday
Ever wonder why the resurrection accounts in the gospels are written the way they are? We crave details and explanations for the event itself, but the gospels are uninterested in satisfying our obsession with certainty. The central event takes place offstage, and the story picks up after it happens, following Jesus’ friends, their reactions and choices. The gospels are focused on the effect of the resurrection on Jesus’ first followers, not on the resurrection itself. 

This is a huge distinction that shows us where to look…not at the miracle, but at how the miracle affects our lives. It’s fascinating that no one recognized the risen Jesus at first sight. We wonder if Jesus looked different or whether he was miraculously hiding himself for some reason, but the truth is that the followers’ minds, like any human mind, were not yet prepared to see what they considered impossible. The gospels are telling us that seeing the risen Jesus is more process than event, a process of becoming ready to see beyond the limitation of our programming. We focus on the external event. The gospels focus on the interior process.

In every gospel story of eventual recognition, the smallest, most intimate and familiar gesture breaks the spell our minds cast over our seeing. Mary hears her name called as she heard it a thousand times, Clopas sees the breaking of bread at supper in Emmaus, Peter feels the pulsing weight of fish in his nets after a catchless night. Intimate connections experienced over and over show us who we are, and those same tiny details prove our identity to each other, not big events. If we want to see the risen Jesus—the focus of Christian spirituality—where do we look? The women who come to find Jesus in the tomb are asked why they seek the living among the dead. What a question.

Life is defined by motion. No motion, no life. If Jesus is alive, he’s in motion too, not among the static dead, among set beliefs about past events. We will always find the risen Jesus in the center of all our motion. Among the living. In all the tiny, familiar, intimate movements of our own lives or not at all.

Life In Motion

Dave Brisbin 4.7.24
We just finished counting the forty days of Lent that ended with Easter, only to begin counting again, this time to 49 plus one that will take us to Pentecost. Each counting is a time of preparation, but for what?

Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, and Pentecost the moment his followers engaged the full weight of spirit, but these were superimposed on the Hebrew celebrations of Pesach and Shavu’ot. Originally agricultural festivals, the people would ritually count seven weeks of seven between Pesach at the spring barley harvest and Shavu’ot at the summer wheat harvest. Over time, simple timekeeping between harvests—seven, the number of spiritual perfection, times seven—became the perfect time of preparation between Pesach/Passover, the physical liberation of the people from slavery, and Shavu’ot, the giving of the Law, a new relationship with God and the spiritual liberation of the people.

We are now in this count, the time of preparation between Easter, physical liberation from death, and Pentecost, representing spiritual liberation. Jesus told Nicodemus he must be born again, that he was born of water, physical birth, but must be reborn of spirit. Ritually, baptism, represents birth, entry into the tribe, our physical liberation, but too often the story ends there. 

Many of us spend entire lives in this count, this time between physical and spiritual liberation, never experiencing another liberation that can only be realized after a descent that strips us down to as basic an existence as if being born all over again. For Jesus, the descent is represented in the wilderness and his time in the tomb. For Jesus’ followers, it is the shock and awe of Calvary that strips them bare of everything they thought they knew, leaving them counting the days to their individual Pentecosts, the moment they break into new relationship, their own spiritual liberation, second birth.

Our journeys have this same shape, and Calvary is the threshold between two liberations. The way to Pentecost begins at Calvary…the moment we think we’ve lost everything is the beginning of our ascent. It’s why we count.

Why We Count

Dave Brisbin 4.14.24
What would you say is the most damaging personal attitude to life in general and spirituality in particular? Fear, anger, hatred? What about passivity…and its close cousin, victimhood. Passivity is sneaky, because it isn’t immediately discernable as a vice, but the lack of will to respond actively, proactively, even to resist when that is necessary, keeps us from participating in life at all. Anger or hatred, if it’s active, is less harmful than passivity to a person’s return to life.

For someone who sees themselves as a victim, passivity is the norm. A victim isn’t just someone who was hurt, but someone who had no choice in the matter. Choice is key. Once choice returns, so does personal responsibility. How many of us hang on to victimhood as a way of absolving ourselves from the responsibility to change, heal, grow. Not consciously, maybe, but just as effectively passive.

The church has taught us a largely passive way of spiritual life. Unquestioning obedience to law and doctrine is passive. Yet Jesus questioned everything, resisting where necessary, risking consequences. Believing we must be saved, that God can’t accept us without a savior’s intervention is passive and contradicts Jesus’ life and teaching. He consistently pointed to the Father rather than himself, saw himself as the living Way to that unity, stressed that his followers were to do what he was doing, not be passively saved by his action. His first followers picked up that emphasis by calling themselves Followers of the Way. Not Christians or even followers of Jesus—an essential distinction pointing to the need for personal action.

Jesus’ life and message is all about removing any blocks between us and God, whether the religious authority of his or any generation, or our own fears and victimhood. He is showing us a non-passive Way to approach God directly—and telling that what we’ll find there is good news. That God has already chosen us, has chosen and accepted us since the beginning of time. 

There is nothing left for God to choose; nothing left for us to ask for, nothing left to wait for. 

God has made his choice. Now it’s our turn.

Our Turn

Dave Brisbin 4.21.24
When Thomas Merton gave a final address to his monastic community before retiring to a hermitage in 1965, he was famous worldwide for his spiritual writings. His speech was recorded on audio tape, and I ran across a short clip in which he was talking about the fact that we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, that God is always shining through. God is in everything and everyone, every event, and it’s impossible to be without God. Ever.

We don’t see this fact because we make the world opaque by becoming attached to, preoccupied with things we regard as individual objects—analyzing them as if unwrapping packages, layers of opaque paper, all while missing the larger transparent world. We get to bottom of the pile of paper, only to find nothing there; we were only unwrapping our own thoughts about something, not the thing itself. It’s not until we loosen our grip and lose ourselves in the experience of something that we can stop thinking of it as a thing in isolation and see it as part of the whole of creation, and all of creation, God, shining through its transparency.

Our attachments keep us from seeing the whole in all the parts. Constantly taking thought keeps our world opaque and hides the truth…no coincidence that taking thought is the literal meaning of the word translated as worry in a series of Jesus’ sayings. He tells us not to take thought, to worry about our lives, what we will eat, drink, or wear. He points to birds who work constantly but don’t store in barns, staying rooted in the present moment without taking thought.

To worry is to live in fear. Fear creates the obsessive need to acquire. In telling us that if we want life that is eternally alive we need to sell everything we own, Jesus is telling us we need to sever our attachments to individual objects in order to see the whole transparent world at once. No matter how essential a thing may seem, if we’re unwrapping it, the world is opaque. An ancient elder said that he sold the book—his treasured bible—that told him to sell everything and give to the poor.

When we can do that, God can shine through our transparent world.

Transparent World

Dave Brisbin 4.28.24
When Jesus says do not judge so you won’t be judged, that your way of judging will be used on you, we modern Westerners hear that in predictable ways. First, we think of judging in the sense of condemning or criticizing others, and we think of it punitively—that if we do wrong (judge), someone (God) will wrong us back as punishment. We also imagine our punishment happening sometime in the future, most likely after death. But thinking like this misses the essential point Jesus is making.

The reality we believe is the reality we endure.

Understanding that we live in a thought-world of our own creation is key to a life of meaning, purpose, and sense of identity. Unconscious beliefs programmed into us from earliest childhood form the way we think, our “judgment” of reality. As Jesus says, if our “eye” (way of seeing in Aramaic) is clear (not coloring reality) then we are full of light (harmony and clarity) but if not, we are “judged” by our own way of seeing. It all happens simultaneously. The limitations set by the whole of our belief system are already imposed on us before we ever try to impose them on anyone/thing else.

God isn’t judging us at some point in the future as retribution for our judgments now. We are doing it to ourselves unawares. Our judgments define our reality, which if our eye is not clear, can be a personal hell. Jesus is doing some cognitive behavioral therapy with us, helping us become aware of our judgments—thoughts and behavior—how they affect our experience and relationships, and how to begin clearing our eyes to see what is true.

When Jesus says do not worry or judge, he is pointing us to the symptoms of our belief systems. The judgments we make on others, conditions, and moments, are the consequence of unresolved fears that are really judging us, creating a world separated from the only place we’ll ever know the truth…that love, not fear, is the basis of life. Fear causes us to chase the horizons of past and future as substitute for meaning, but this moment right herenow is the only place we’ll ever meet the truth of God’s presence. 

If we’re judging it, we’re not here. Not now.

Judging Not

Dave Brisbin 5.5.24
Do we ever change another person? Save them? 

Sometimes people thank me or our community for saving them, placing them on a lifesaving path.  It’s wonderful to be recognized as part of their journey, and I thank them, but if the conversation goes on long enough, I’ll remind that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. That if they changed directions, it was because they were ready to change, and I was the millionth guy over their bridge, winning the prize of being present when the miracle occurred. They were a change waiting to happen, and if I hadn’t shown up, someone else would have.

This is not an attempt at false humility, but the realization that being saved is not the passive waiting for a savior, but the willingness to participate in the saving change our lives require. Important distinction for both saviors and save-ees. Must be careful about developing savior complexes. We can help people, help change circumstances, but all we can provide is support and information—no change until acted upon. The most important things in life can’t be transferred; they must be experienced.

You’re thinking we can give love? In those five love languages, we can give loving words, service, gifts, time, and touch…more support and information until we experience them as coming from love over time. Even Jesus never said he changed or saved anyone. He was careful, “Your faith has made you whole.” We pray for God to save us, but if God changed us unilaterally, violated free will, love would no longer be real—not God’s, not ours. Love is not love if not freely chosen, and God’s perfect love makes us perfectly free or it’s not perfect. God cannot make us love him and be love at the same time.

We can help create an environment for change, but we are no one’s savior. And no one is our savior, passively understood. If we’re waiting for a savior, we’re not ready to be saved, for the teacher to appear. Salvation is not God’s decision about us…that choice has always been made in our favor. Salvation is our decision about God. Whether to trust enough, risk the steps needed to experience the love that is already ours.

Savior Complex

Dave Brisbin 5.12.24
It’s heartbreaking that many women in the second halves of their lives would be expressing remorse, but after dedicating their first halves to child and home, they find no concrete way to calculate the value of their life’s work. No degrees or trophies, certainly no pensions or even social security payouts. 

Our society doesn’t reward the most important contributions we make to our children and each other, those made from the traditionally feminine traits of acceptance, compassion, vulnerability. We’re all over the traditionally masculine ones—performance, accomplishment, acquisition—and though our churches may praise vulnerability and acceptance, they still reward the performers, male or female. All institutions do. Performers make the material world go round.

Church is where we should be balancing the material and spiritual, masculine and feminine…especially when it comes to our notion of God. Yet God is almost exclusively portrayed as Father, with the implication of maleness, emphasis on roles of judge, jury, executioner. Though God is called Father in Judeo-Christian scripture, there is much more going on under the hood. Spirit and kingdom are feminine words in Hebrew, making spirit, “she” and kingdom, queendom. Wisdom is personified as female, and God anthropomorphized as a loving mother over and over. Jews understood God as the perfect balance, the perfect parent—knowledge balanced with wisdom, accomplishment with relationship. Jesus did too, calling Father God abba, underscoring intimate relationship, and always leading with mother before father at every human encounter.

We can only be healthy and balanced in Jesus’ order: mother before father, compassion before justice, acceptance before performance. Our minds are the repository for all the loss and fear that makes us believe we’re not worthy, so as long as God remains in our minds alone, he remains “he”—a distant father. Experiencing God as mother folds her into our embrace. 

Until we experience God from both sides, we are loved and lost at the same time—never knowing how we’re loved and never valuing what hasn’t earned degree or pension.

Both Sides Now

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.

The Whole In The Part

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.