Dave Brisbin 5.18.25
Two events converged in my mind last week. 

My wife and I picked up the ashes of a friend we’d been helping take care of for the past few years…and our faith community turned eighteen years old. Nothing like an anniversary to open the memory faucet, and maybe because of our friend’s death, the serious illnesses of many others, and my own advancing age, my memories were not focused on timelines, but the long parade of people who have meant so much. Those who have stayed, moved on, and especially those who have passed on. 

They have been reminding me of the brevity of life, to make my time count. Not morbidly in a pressured way, but gratefully, aware of the gifts they gave me in our short spans together. Each of four men who helped found and lead our community had a particular gift he exuded, lived out most likely unintentionally, and of which I was unaware at the time. It’s perversely true that it’s harder to see the gifts others are giving while they live. Maybe because while ongoing they’re taken for granted, or because always mixed with inevitable faults and annoyances, the prophet is not honored if too familiar.

We don’t know what we got til it’s gone.

When a person is gone, we can reflect on their life in its entirety, stretch out, really see what that short time together gave us. Each of these four men had their faults, in some cases, mortal faults. Their gifts were packaged with their faults, but now, softened with time and reflection, only the gifts remain: one gave me his presence, the next showed me passion, the third how life was unlivable without humor, and the fourth, a constant devotion.

To live with presence, passion, humor, devotion is to immerse so fully in life, we step outside the container we will leave at death, realize that all our fear exists only in our minds. Not in life. Or in death. Fear is a mental construct that we can take off like a dirty shirt. We will always fear the unknown at first, but our teachers, living and dead, are showing us in their most unguarded moments, that we can loosen the bonds that hold us inside our fears and experience the life that exists even in death.

The Life in Death

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

Dave Brisbin 11.9.25
The founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, was one of the most driven men of our time. His desire for more, his dissatisfaction with the status quo, created a lifelong willingness to strike out in radically new directions. Raised in the Lutheran church, by his teens he became disillusioned, dissatisfied with Christianity-as-practiced and non-answers to his existential questions. He embraced Zen Buddhism, spending three years in India, returning with shaved head and traditional Indian garb, which translated to bare feet and jeans in the Apple offices as tech innovation became his driving force.

Couple decades later, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Fought it with everything he had for seven years but by 2011, had accepted he was dying. Friends and family created a stream of visitors to his home, and conversations slowly morphed from business back to those existential questions he had never answered to his own satisfaction. His sister said at his funeral that after making eye contact with everyone in the room, his gaze refocused beyond them, over their shoulders at something only he could see. His last words were, “Oh wow! Oh wow, oh wow!”

To overcome the fear and uncertainty that radical change represents, to persevere through the time it takes to assimilate radical change, we need a tremendous amount of desire. We need to feel a divine dissatisfaction, the blessed unrest such desire creates. But where does all that come from?

If you’re reading this, it’s because you desire something more or different. But at a level that motivates? You could say that the entirety of Jesus’ message was a series of shocks to the system, a constant overturning of the tables of our status quo. The shocks are what break through business as usual and present the possibility of something more. Like a beautiful face that promises new relationship or a loss that lays waste to old ones, motivating desire always follows.

Death is the ultimate shock to the system. 

Jesus taught and lived a constant laying down of life-as-practiced to create the shocking space for something more. Something that will make us say, Oh wow!

Shock to the System

Dave Brisbin 11.16.25
Have you noticed that people fight? Silly wabbit. Of course. Ever stopped to wonder why?

Fear. Always fear. Even if it doesn’t feel like afraid-ness, unconscious, overriding concern for personal survival drives us fearward in a zero-sum world where there’s only so much oil in the ground, where the resources absolutely necessary for survival are finite. It’s basic envy and jealousy: fear of not getting what someone else has, fear of not keeping what we already do. 

Fights are made of this. No fear, no fight.

Then why do religious people fight? Spirituality by definition is infinite, yes? Unlimited resource, enough for all. So when Christians fight, debate, defend, excommunicate, and they certainly do, they are saying they don’t really believe in infinite spiritual resources, or at least that the spiritual does not override the finite where we really live. Fighting Christians don’t trust that the perfect love Jesus lived and died to make real for us is enough. There must still be something we need to acquire or perform to gain the acceptance that is our eternal survival.

More revealing: how do Christians fight? With scripture. Always with scripture. Any fight among Christians is a fight over the book. We’re the people of the book. Even before the early church had the book, it fought over what should be in the book, and once it had the book, fought to defend and enforce it. Five hundred years ago, Western Reformers went even further, saying the book was the only source of revelation from God, that to literally understand the text was to understand God—or at least the terms of eternal survival.

Reducing faith to rational belief has put Westerners on a collision course with an Eastern text that is made of entirely different stuff. The ancients who wrote our book were not even trying to answer literal questions to satisfy our craving for certainty. 

The bible is the map of a journey to the experience of infinite resource, unlimited love. When we stop defending it, asking it questions it won’t answer, let it ask us who is asking…it can begin pointing us to trust what we can never understand—only experience.

Book of Unknowing

Dave Brisbin 11.23.25
When I’d tell people the title of my book, The Fifth Way, first question was: what are the first four? That made perfect sense, because you can’t understand the fifth way of Jesus until you understand how the first four operate in our lives.

There are several systems that try to explain human behavior in terms of personality types, unconscious ways we process experience and approach challenges in life: Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, DiSC, Kiersey…the four ways operate similarly.

In Jesus time, four sects dominated Jewish life, and each had a specific way of dealing with threats to their powerbases—specifically the Roman occupation. The Sadducees, yielded to Roman power; the Pharisees tried to influence or manipulate; the Essenes exited to build their own communities; and the Zealots tried to destroy Roman presence through rebellion.

To yield, manipulate, exit, and destroy, are the north, south, east, and west of ways we can deal with challenges in life. From dysfunctional marriages to nations and armies, these four ways, with all the combinations in between, are what we have to work with, and each of us has learned to favor one as primary in our personal lives. They aren’t bad or evil; they’re necessary for navigating life. Only when we apply them to spiritual growth do they become limiting, destructive, never taking us where we need to go.

The four ways answer physical needs we all have as humans, but until we become aware of them, they strip free will, reducing us to predictable, type-based behavior. When Jesus comes out of the wilderness, having overcome three temptations symbolic of all human need, he begins teaching a fifth way, turning the other four on their heads.

Everything Jesus teaches and models is a refutation of our normal, ingrained ways of meeting our needs. Starting within and working outward, from an awareness of inexhaustible presence rather than scarcity, we realize that all we really need is not gained through acquisition but in giving away all we have. In the giving, we learn what we really possess is inexhaustible, restoring free will—our ability to choose in love, not just in need.

A Different Way

Dave Brisbin 11.30.25
Gratitude and thankfulness are not the same. 

I see thankfulness as a positive reaction to a specific gift or circumstance, and though gratitude begins there, it journeys on to a non-specific attitude, a view of life that is all-inclusive, sees everything around us as a gift we could never give ourselves. Once we’re aware that life is the free reception of what we could never give ourselves or repay, that repayment is not even required, any sense of entitlement vanishes. 

Jesus said the highest form of love is loving the enemy: loving—identifying with—someone who had not earned the right to that gift. And the flip side: the highest form of gratitude is being thankful for something we believe we have already earned. We can’t know love until we know gratitude, the opposite of entitlement, the ability to see everything as a gift no matter how hard we work.

What blocks this ability? To help us survive, our brains have adapted to focus on anticipating and solving problems, to start from a base of scarcity and fear. This makes us quicker to react to challenges, but jealously entitled to what we can catch and kill. Jesus rejected scarcity, started from a base of abundance, that everything God has and is, is already ours, within us. Even as we struggle for the legal tender, using our minds as survival guides, our job spiritually is to learn the balance of remaining thankful for each gift we earn, let thankfulness incite the journey to gratitude.

Gratitude is an umbrella term, covers and includes all positive emotions, excludes the rest. You can’t be grateful and depressed at the same time. Or angry, anxious, envious, entitled, victimized. Literally impossible. So what does gratitude feel like? Like enough. No more or less than just enough. Enoughness is the feeling we call gratitude, which feels like happiness, fulfilment, meaning, purpose.

We can’t create gratitude. It’s what happens when we begin to see everything in our moments as gifts we could never give ourselves—let go of the complexity, calculations, judgment upon which our minds insist. Instead of scarcity, see the abundance of each moment as enough.

Gratefully Enough

Dave Brisbin 12.7.25
We all know when we go too far. That can be measured. 

When we cross a line, feel the negative reaction or outcome, we can evaluate and pull back. But how do we know when we haven’t gone far enough? How do you measure a negative, the absence of something? Can’t do it directly, but there is a way. 

We can measure our disturbance.

Not going far enough, means something inside is resisting, slowing or stopping forward motion. Unfamiliar ideas and landscape challenge the way we believe things should look and feel. That’s disturbing and always seeks relief. Hard to remain in disturbing places. But we can’t grow in comfortable places, smack in the middle of everything we already believe. Something different always creates dissonance, which feels like disturbance; something radically different creates radical disturbance, which feels like anger, outrage, panic. 

No disturbance, no growth.

We need rites of passage, to embrace all three phases: separation, transition, reincorporation. The movement from child to adult, from any perspective to another is always preceded by the painful separation from what is comfortable and familiar, followed by the disorienting transition through a new world of altered concepts and action. Only after such a journey can we reincorporate into our relationships, whitened like Moses by the experience, offering more.

Nothing is more radically different than the impossible love, with all its implications, that Jesus is teaching and living in the gospels. But if our reading of it is not disturbing, if our attempts at applying it in our lives is not disorienting, then we haven’t yet separated from the world we imagined for ourselves. We haven’t let love be impossible. Let it take us far enough and not too far at the same time.

In a prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake as he set sail to successfully circumnavigate the globe: Disturb us, Lord, when we are too pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little, when we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore…

Measure your disturbance. If you can’t find any, you’re too close to the shore.

Disturb Us, Lord

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.

The Life in Death

True North with Dave Brisbin

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