Dave Brisbin 7.31.22
I was recently asked why we don’t do altar calls at our church. It’s not that we don’t do them, but we don’t do them publicly. As de facto sacraments, altar calls have become every Sunday rituals at many Evangelical churches in the past hundred and fifty years. Named from the practice of calling people to the front/altar of a church to declare their conversion, the ritual has become encapsulated in saying the “sinners prayer,” which includes admission of sin, request for forgiveness, statement of orthodoxy, and intention of repentance. 

It’s a beautiful first step of vulnerability and intention, but which over time has culturally become the proof of salvation itself. If the saying of a prayer made of words, no matter how beautiful, could trigger the flow of God’s grace and approval where it was previously withheld, as Marcus Borg said, it would be “salvation by syllables.” Mere superstition—in the way carrying a rabbit’s foot brings good luck.

Jesus was very clear. He’s not superstitious. Though he carefully kept all the non-rabbinical rituals and practices of first century Judaism, he missed no opportunity to show and teach that obeying laws and practicing rituals can never magically gain God’s favor…we already have that and always will. But by engaging a radically different Way of living life, we come face to face with the truth of God’s pre-existing favor, freeing us from the fear of punishment right herenow. Salvation realized, not earned.

Doesn’t mean we stop doing altar calls, but any sacrament is an outward expression of an inward transformation. The ritual itself is meaningless. A transformed heart is what brings meaning to the ritual, and the ritual conveys that meaning to the community and binds us together in shared experience. We need that. But salvation is less an event and more a process of becoming, punctuated by events like our first admission of willingness to submit to a power greater than ourselves. Both are absolutely necessary. It’s a question of emphasis—which means we all have to decide, individually and communally, how best to keep that balance.

The Rite Rituals

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

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 Rite Rituals

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