Dave Brisbin 1.11.26
Back in Catholic grade school, the nuns would walk up and down the aisles drilling us through the Baltimore Catechism. We’d all recite answers from memory in that sing song way kids do. She’d ask, why are we here? We’d answer, to glorify God. Had no idea what that meant. Seemed to include praising God…all the time? I liked praise, assurance I was doing things right, right things, enough, part of the group. Was God that insecure?

Also seemed to include doing good works for God…the bigger and more spectacular, the better. But all these years later, I realize those works, however good, are ego-deep, and as mere accomplishments, God is not impressed if in the process, we still haven’t gotten to know him intimately. So, remembering that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, seems glorifying God is really reflecting God’s essence in our lives. Jesus came out of the wilderness saying that he and the Father were one. We glorify God by becoming indistinguishable from God in the way we choose and experience our lives.

We’re not here to do the things we do. We’re here to be so connected that we are indistinguishable from, one with, all that is. Does that mean that all our accomplishments are meaningless? Ecclesiastes says yes, all tasks are equally meaningless, unless through them we engage the task within every task: to fall back in love with the moment that contains the task, with the sensation of the work itself, with those and everything sharing it with us. Falling back in love is how we come to know God, is all God is hoping for in us.

This doesn’t mean we don’t pursue excellence in what we do. Without taking the task seriously, we won’t seriously engage the task within it. But Jesus is trying to rewire the way we look at the world, give us back our priorities. He said that there was no one born of woman greater than John the Baptist, but the least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than he. Even the least in the kingdom is still one who has fallen back in love with this moment.

God’s “greatest in the world” is anyone who realizes they’re nothing great except in their connection to everything else. 

Rewiring Worldviews

Dave Brisbin 1.18.26
Before Scott Adams—the creator of the Dilbert cartoon and pundit/podcaster—died recently after a long bout with cancer, he released a video stating that he “planned to convert” to Christianity. A lifelong religious skeptic, he had Christian friends imploring him to convert before it was too late. He appreciated their sincere concern and said if it turned out that at death he simply ceased to be, he would be no worse off for his belief, but if Christianity were true, he’d have a much better outcome than unbelief would allow.

Scott seemed more interested in comforting his friends than genuine conversion, which is Christlike itself, but his reasoning simply restates Pascal’s wager: that the best bet is to convert, since if Christianity is false, you lose nothing, but if true, unbelief means forever hell and paradise lost. Perfectly logical, unassailable even, but depends entirely on a contractual view of Christianity—a reward and punishment paradigm that is tightly focused on personal advantage, reducing faith to contractual terms.

It also keeps us word-based, only focused on and aware of what the mind can conceive. Like looking at a ball game through a hole in the fence or trying to capture a big sky on a cell phone, there’s too much to possibly fit in such small containers. Trying to capture spirituality in words is equally impossible. The infinite has no edges, nothing to hold on to, which scares us. But as soon as we put the infinite in words, it’s no longer infinite. Words have edges, defined limits, so the best we can do in words is poetry, which points to meaning without creating edges that limit the experience of all we can’t express.

The majority of the bible is poetry or poetic prose that points, never defines. Jesus is a poet. Genesis, Job, all the prophets are poets. They know anything we can think is limited to our hole-in-the-fence minds. The tools of poetry open us to vastness.

What kind of belief is a good bet? Not after death…here and now? Only non-contractual, belief-turned-conviction through experiences of awe, expressed in words without edges always pointing back to deeper experience.

Words Without Edges

Dave Brisbin 1.25.26
Ever heard a line so impactful you thought, I wish I’d said that? Few days ago, I ran across a line attributed to the one-time road manager of the band ACDC…of all people. To be fair, he did become a pastor and a kind of pop theologian:

God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.

Oh yeah, I wish I’d said that. The invisible man is standing in front of you. You sense him, but can’t see a thing. Throw a blanket over empty space, and drape a shape. No detail, but at least a shape, a spatial relationship. I’ve been saying forever that every theology is wrong. How could it be anything else? How could finite language ever define the infinite? Much as we crave that sort of certainty, theology was only ever meant to give shape to a relationship. To limit error and create a paradigm that allows us to navigate—accept life on life’s terms while holding a sense of hope and gratitude. 

He said all that…just much pithier.

We think we know God because we’ve read the book—words with edges that limit and restrict. But the word God is just a placeholder for infinite mystery, to which words can point but never describe. And if Jesus and the Father are one, then Jesus is mysterious too.  We think we know Jesus because he had a shape and seems to be saying something we read as concrete and certain in a language that wouldn’t exist for a thousand years. Jesus is the word we give to a man who was named Yehoshua, shortened to Yeshua in Hebrew. But to his friends, in Aramaic, the language of the street, he was Eesho. Eesho. Just the sound of it shatters our familiarity.

To look at Jesus from an Aramaic perch, to exhale all we think we know and see the shape that emerges as we throw our blanket out over empty space, is to begin to meet Eesho for the first time. A man who speaks in words without edges, in poetry and stories that invite us to confront all we’ve managed to avoid.

If your Jesus is familiar, comfortable, he is not Eesho. 

Eesho is always beckoning farther up and further in, never resolving mystery, but giving just enough shape that we can experience with him what words can never contain.

Meeting Eesho

Dave Brisbin 2.1.26
Asked by email: Do you believe the Bible? That the plagues of Moses, long day of Joshua, fiery furnace of Daniel really happened? 

Just the way the question was posed mirrored our view of scripture. In other words, if I don’t believe that each event literally happened, I’m not believing the bible. For the past five hundred years in the West, we’ve been equating accuracy and truth. For us, something is true if it’s accurate and accurate if it’s true, but to the ancients who wrote and interpreted scripture, truth and accuracy were not the same. Something could be true even if not accurate.

The ancients knew that spiritual truth existed beyond thought and words, that the infinite could only be experienced and pointed toward, never defined or rationally explained. So, with the experience of God ringing inside them, they pointed to that experience in every way they could—allegory, simile, hyperbole, metaphor. They played with numbers, using them symbolically to convey meaning rather than as literal renderings of factors and sums. And yes, sometimes they told stories exactly as they happened. Both Hebrew and early Christian theologians saw layers of meaning, from the literal to the mystical, that they understood to be simultaneously true, a pool of meaning creating the fullest possible pointing to truth.

The holy grail here is original intent. Believing the bible means believing the original intent of the authors, which means swimming in their pool of meaning, not just scraping off one layer, imagining it matches our cultural definition of truth. But as important as knowing how to read what the authors wrote, is knowing what they didn’t write. They wrote for each other, not for us. So if something was culturally understood by all, it didn’t need to be stated, however critical to meaning. We do the same. Context tells us where to put the missing pieces. Original intent means learning to read the silence too.

I believe the bible. That it is fully true. I also believe that much of it was never meant to be accurate…just the best humans can do to point to truth always residing a bit beyond what words can convey.

Reading the Silence

There seem to be two Jesuses in the gospels. 

The first is the unconditional-love-Jesus who accepts and sits with anyone who will sit with him, regardless of moral or social standing. This is the Jesus who says: Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Then there’s another Jesus, a turn-or-burn-Jesus who sets performance criteria between us and God’s love. He’s the one saying: Unless your righteousness exceeds that of your religious lawyers, there is no way you will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Will the real Jesus please stand up? Is God’s love unconditionally free or a reward for acceptable behavior? Seems it can’t be both, yet the contradiction stands. And therein lies the source of our religious dissociative identity disorder, the reason it is so hard for us to shake our existential fears of condemnation. 

But a contradiction is only impassable within a certain context. 
Change the context, evaporate the contradiction.

Jesus presents all his teaching within the context of the kingdom of heaven. If we misunderstand kingdom’s context, we misunderstand Jesus, and the contradiction stands. As Jesus tirelessly illustrates, the kingdom of heaven, malkhuta d’ashmaya, is not a future politically sovereign Israel, as his first followers believed, or future heaven of the afterlife, as we typically believe today. It’s the quality of life right herenow, reflecting a person’s experience of the connection of all life to God and each other. 

The context of a future kingdom, creates a permanent if/then contingency, as if our performance determines God’s decision to admit us. But in the herenow context of Jesus’ kingdom, everything resolves, yet both Jesuses stand. God loves and accepts unconditionally, but our “sinful” beliefs and behavior are those that create separation, not from God, but from the experience of oneness herenow, the only context in which kingdom exists.

Kingdom is never closed, never withheld—always now, always available. God doesn’t admit us or not. God is eternally open. God’s presence is kingdom itself. We admit ourselves whenever we’re ready to experience it.

Kingdom Decoded

Dave Brisbin 2.15.26
The number of people in South America who say they no longer affiliate with a religion has doubled over the past decade, but unlike the US and Europe, the number of atheists and agnostics has not grown from a small part of the population. With no loss of faith, Latin people continue to pray, meditate, and participate in rituals drawing from Christian, Indigenous, African, and Eastern traditions, redefining what constitutes a religion. More religiously unaffiliated people in Latin America say they believe in God, pray daily, and consider religion very important than do those who identify as Christian in European countries.

What is going on?

Scholars say Europe represents religion grounded in doctrinal belief and formal religious practice, while Latin Americans have an effervescence of religious experiences that go far beyond the purely rational. Latin American culture emphasizes believing in something beyond the material world, an enchanted reality, a dimension of life that we can’t explain only by what we can see. Their trend toward religious disaffiliation is not secularization, but a change in how they approach belief itself—an enchanted view of the modern world, creating a vibrant spiritual and religious society doing things to engage with the unseen world.

When Jesus says unless you become like children, you will never know the kingdom; when he always makes time to play with children, merge back into their enchanted reality, saying that such as these are kingdom itself, his is telling us that kingdom is not a place into which we are admitted if we believe or act correctly. It is the herenow experience of life when we merge back into the enchantment of the un-self-aware experience we once knew as children and forgot as adults.

We don’t need to practice a mixture of traditions as Latin Americans may, but we do need to unforget the enchanted reality of our children. Sixty years ago, a famous theologian said that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all. 

Rational belief will not sustain us. 
Only the personal experience of the enchanted reality of God’s presence can do that. 

One Enchanted Reality

Many of us who grew up with Lent hold dark memories of being forced to give up favorite things as penance for our sinfulness—even before we could really sin—with the implied punishment of self-deprivation as preparation for Easter, but more deeply as appeasing an angry God. Whatever the doctrinal intent, without further teaching, this is what we kids absorbed: a cementing of the reward/punishment paradigm that negates Jesus’ concept of a love that self-exists as the oneness at the heart of everything.

Lent, the forty days of fasting and prayer before Easter, was originally the rite of passage for those approaching baptism, the transition into new life requiring a complete change of values and perception. Meant to mirror Jesus’ forty days of exhausting deprivation in the wilderness, the church and its people gradually lost the meaning behind Jesus’ suffering, letting it fall into superstition as an end in itself, the penance needed to regain God’s favor.

What was Jesus really doing out there? 

He certainly suffered, but it was a means to an end, a self-imposed sensory deprivation to quiet the noise, remove all distraction to reveal what was true about himself, God, reality. His three symbolic temptations embrace the totality of human ego dissolution, effectively putting down the ego’s need to be relevant, powerful, and spectacular in advance of its own agenda.

What Jesus discovered in the fortyness of his wilderness was an agendaless love, indiscriminate and degreeless; that he was identified with that love; that he and that love, the Father, were one.

This is what Lent is really about. Deprivation, yes. Discomfort, disturbance of familiar routines, sure. Suffering, maybe. But not as penance in search of reward…as the only means by which we can realize the Father’s agendaless love already full-blown within ourselves. We don’t ascend to this love, perform for it or suffer for it. As William Butler Yeats wrote, we wither into the truth.

Lent is the ritual process of intentionally withering our noisy egoic minds to the point we can see what is really true. A process Jesus says is the only Way to the Father.

Withering into Truth

Dave Brisbin 3.1.26
A few years ago, a billion painted lady butterflies fluttered over our heads migrating from inland deserts to the Pac Northwest. Was a very wet winter, and the high desert that usually get three inches of rain in a year, got that in a weekend. All the dormant seeds waiting in the cracked soil burst open, blanketing the desert floor in a spectacular bloom. Started the cycle of life that sent a billion butterflies north.

Can’t miss a billion butterflies.

But we can miss one. Or two. We mostly take nature for granted in our concrete cities—only dimly aware of it turning in the background behind the urgency of our tasks and thoughts. But when nature becomes intense enough, it calls attention to itself, forcing us to see again and fall back into the wonder of the child. Should we have to be called? Wait for circumstance intense enough to break us open like desert seeds waiting for spectacular rains? Are we so husked over that we can’t just get up and go find water?

Desert seeds have no choice but to wait for rain. But there is water all around us, and we can bloom whenever we want. The question Lent is asking is how do we find the water? It has to do with deprivation, not as penance, but as a quieting. It has to do with prayer, not as words, but the awareness we need to be awed again by a single butterfly. Paul tells us to rejoice always, pray continuously, and in everything give thanks. Three directives that define prayer as falling into a constant state of gratitude, which always feels joyful by definition, present and aware by necessity.

Unceasing prayer is engaging our entire experience in any given moment. Full presence and participation, seeing everything with all our senses without naming them in our head, aware of the connection that is God flowing beneath the level of thought. It’s letting the smile spread across our face without permission, pulling the car over to take it all in.

What makes us smile, makes us pray.

It really is that simple. Our way out of the desert tomb. If we’re waiting for rain, we’re not blooming. But the waiting is over, kingdom is here. We can bloom any time we want.

No Longer Waiting

Dave Brisbin 3.8.26
By all accounts, Eric Liddel, immortalized in the movie Chariots of Fire, was the embodiment of an old soul. At age 22, he won a gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the 400m race for Britain, and after over twenty years as a missionary to China, died there at age 43 in a Japanese internment camp at the end of WWII. But the real story lies beneath such events.

The movie turns on the contrast between Liddel and his Olympic teammate Harold Abrahams and sister Jenny. Abrahams is obsessed with running, determined to win at any cost as revenge for antisemitic prejudice and proof of his superiority. Jenny is obsessed with religious duty and chastises her brother when he misses a prayer meeting, frivolously training for the Olympics. He tells her: I believe God made me for a purpose—for China. But he also made me fast, and I feel his pleasure when I run.

Minutes before the start of his Olympic race, while the other runners are stretching and digging starting blocks, brows furrowed, intent on maintaining focus, Liddel, with a sport coat over his running shorts, is smiling and casually walking among them, shaking hands and wishing each one luck. Years later in the Japanese camp, fellow internees wrote of him: I never heard him say a bad word about anybody…he was overflowing with good humor and love for life, with enthusiasm and charm...his last words were, It’s complete surrender…

Abrahams and Jenny are the same person with different agendas. Driven, anxious, identified only with what they could do. Liddel’s genius was to find within every physical task an eternal task always pointing to connection. That true meaning and purpose is found in that connection and nowhere else, and addressing that connection is to never let the hard work of change eclipse the radical acceptance of right now. That to celebrate the connections around us now is to accept ourselves and everything just as we are. Even as we train and strain toward not yet.

Everything we do is meaningless… 

Until the moment duty is no longer obligation and running is no longer winning. 
Just the feeling of God’s pleasure in the breeze of our passage.

Radical Change Radical Acceptance

Dave Brisbin 3.15.26
The earliest followers of Jesus understood that his Way of spiritual formation was about subtraction not addition—that there is nothing to acquire, no kingdom out there to make us whole. That everything there is, is already within, herenow, if we will only relinquish everything in our minds that blocks us from experiencing that reality. Our uniquely human egoic consciousness is all that separates us from everything else.

Jesus’ Way offers the experience of stepping outside the torrent of thoughts our minds constantly create and into the stillness where there is no separation. How could Eric Liddel train so hard to win the 1924 Olympic 400M race, yet be so relaxed before the race he could smile and wish each competitor luck? Even at age 22, he realized all that mattered was that he felt God’s pleasure as he ran.

When we’ve let go of outcomes to the point we can feel God’s pleasure as we run, what do we know we didn’t before? We know what has been called perennial wisdom, the universal truth that stands beneath all philosophy and theology, language and logic. This is the deep truth Jesus says will make us free. It can’t be put into words, but maybe we could point by saying: We are all one, and because we’re all one, nothing can exist outside of God—all that is seen and unseen is God. We emanated from and return to God, our source, and because of that, everything is truly good no matter how it appears.

From that worldview, Richard Rohr extracts five more truths: Life is hard, we are not that important, our lives are not about us, we are not in control, and we are going to die. Sound brutal, but once couched in the oneness and non-separation of everything, they become consoling extensions of universal goodness: 

We are all parts of larger whole. Any identity apart from that whole is illusion. We are fulfilled only in the hard work of staying connected to and aware of that whole. We emanated from it and will return, but our minds actively block this reality. To experience it is to relinquish our minds’ hold, surrender self to that larger whole.

Knowing this truth is feeling God’s pleasure as we run.

Pleasure as We Run

Dave Brisbin | 7.15.18
I almost don’t pick up the phone; it’s been ringing all day. Just getting into work flow again and don’t recognize the number…I watch it for several rings then grudgingly tap the screen. It’s a young Marine with a fellow corpsman driving around looking for and calling churches near the base. You’re the only one to answer the phone, he says, and goes on to tell me they are being deployed the next day for the first time and just wanted someone to pray with who “knew what they were doing…” There was a moment somewhere during this exchange when all the resistance and worry about work not getting done and any other distracting thoughts fell to the floor, and I knew exactly what I was going to do, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Do you know our address? Yes. What’s your ETA? Five minutes. Give me fifteen. What an honor to have picked up the phone, to have been at the right place and time when these two young men rode by. Jesus speaks of service, makes it a centerpiece of his ministry and worldview, and so we have made it a centerpiece of ours as well in a typically institutional way—with organizations, agendas, and mission statements. But is there another face of service to which Jesus is pointing? I’ve always been puzzled by the story in John 11 of Jesus raising Lazarus back to life. Jesus’ decisions and reactions just don’t seem to track. Why did he wait two more days to travel to his friend who was sick? And if he knew he was going to raise him, why did he weep with his sister just before? I see a video where a man speaks of “shoulder taps,” moments when it seems God is directing our attention to a need right in front of us, a need eclipsing all others by mere proximity. Maybe Jesus is pointing to a more organic and seamless view of service as simply being aware and present enough, open and vulnerable enough to feel the tap—to know exactly what to do when either an unknown number or a best friend calls.

Shoulder Taps

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.