Dave Brisbin 3.23.25
Remember taking math tests in school? Remember how you had to show your work? Remember how you hated that? Wasn’t enough to get the answer, you had to show how you got to the answer. Yes, a right answer, or at least a functional one, is important. But showing your work signaled that you grasped underlying principles that would give you repeatable results, a platform on which to build. 

Mathematics understands that the how is at least as important as the what. That any answer is only valid within the context of the process of the solution. How we do what we do defines us and our work. 

In scripture, this process is symbolized by the number forty—a time of trial and testing leading to spiritual rebirth, the necessary work of transformation that just takes time. After Jesus’ baptism, he sees the spirit of God and hears God’s voice. A divine download if there ever was one. Yet he is immediately impelled into the wilderness for forty days to face his wild beasts. After the Damascus road vision, Paul spends fourteen years in Arabia for his forty. Elijah after Mount Carmel, the Israelites after the Red Sea crossing, Jacob after the dream of his ladder, the disciples after the resurrection…all faced fortyness after their downloads. But why? Shouldn’t a direct download from God be enough?

We can be converted in an instant. Accept a premise, have an emotional response to a mystical encounter, a view of heaven—life seen through God’s eyes—a breaking through the mind’s illusion of separateness to the realization that everything is one thing, that we are never separated or alone. Problem is, we’re still living here on earth. Gravity still rules, and that gravity-defying vision creates a nagging paradox we compulsively want to resolve. But life doesn’t resolve, and learning to fit God-reality into the too-small details of human life takes time. Forty.

However intense, any download is only momentary. Will not last unless we wrestle with the paradox long enough to assimilate, push into muscle memory a single view of two ever-oscillating realities: heaven and earth. There is no other way. 

We have to show our work.

Showing Our Work

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

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

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

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

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

Unashamed Heretic

I’ve always known I was adopted. 

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

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

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

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

Remembering Who We Are

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

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

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

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

Change how you see everything else.

A Week in the Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Is Asking

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

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

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

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

Are we warriors or gardeners? 

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


Silent Fields of Home

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

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

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

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

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

Doubt and Common Sense

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loving the Unfolding

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

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

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

And who is that? 

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

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

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

Newborn Eyes

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

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

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

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

Quantum physics and Jesus’ parables teach the same message. 

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

Between Heaven and Earth

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

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

But we keep trying. Control is an aphrodisiac.

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

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

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

Knowing God

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