All theeffect audio messages for 2016 from most recent.

2016

Dave Brisbin | 6.12.16
Speaking of the contemplative way of spirituality in conceptual terms is necessary at the outset, especially for those of us from the West, who are so intellectually based, but it is in many respects, a contradiction in terms. The contemplative way is not intellectually based at all—it is by definition a stepping away from the intellectual in order to non-judgmentally experience the lived moment. But how do we do this? How we step away? There is prayer and there is suffering that can guide us in intensive and specific ways, but there is another. Br. Lawrence called it the Practice of the Presence of God. Instead of specific times of prayer and devotion, there is a constant awareness of God’s presence that we can cultivate through all the daily details of our lives, an awareness that will give us the continual prayer, the constant contact that Paul speaks of. Today, this is sometimes called mindfulness—but mindfulness without the awareness of Presence may still not take us where we want to go, so it’s a blending of the two that Br. Lawrence is showing us. How do we do it, what are some day to day exercises we can use to bring us another step closer to kingdom?

Mindfully Present

Dave Brisbin | 6.5.16
One of the words ancient Christians used to describe the contemplative way was the word “apophatic.” From the Greek, it literally means to deny speaking or saying. In Latin, it is sometimes called the “via negative” or negative way—negative in the sense of emptying the mind of words, images, ideas in order to rest in God’s presence. In our contemporary culture, this seems somehow perverse in terms of coming into a connection with God. But as we look as Jesus’ time in the wilderness, his staring down the temptations of the adversary from a place of emptiness, his wild, paradoxical sayings of accomplishing by letting go, finding our lives by losing them, his insistence in the Beatitudes of the centrality of “negative” aspects of poverty of spirit, mournfulness, meekness, hunger and thirst as characteristic of kingdom, we see the apophatic way illustrated. To sell all we have and give to the poor in order to follow Jesus into the father’s presence is a letting go of all we think we have and know and believe in order to stand like children in the father’s presence and see what is really before us again for the first time.

Apophatic Way

Dave Brisbin | 6.26.16
In our society, and especially in the midst of a presidential election cycle, it is easy to become completely polarized—to “drink the kool-aid” and go all in with one group or another, one party or another, one religion or another. To become completely imprinted with the tenets, the groupthink of our choosing. From this perch, it is easy to imagine that we have the corner on truth, all the truth, and all others do not, that we are good and others are bad, are less than, need to be persuaded or controlled for their own good, and ours. It is a perch from which personal growth stops as we hunker down to convert the world to what we already know. In this mindset, there is no dialog or conversation, there is no relationship or love that is not conditioned on first meeting our standard of belief. But Jesus and the great contemplatives of the world show us another way: a way to live on the edge of inside, on the threshold between groups and belief systems that keeps us open and aware, watching the comings and goings, alert to truth wherever it presents. This is sometimes called liminal space, but Jesus simply calls it Kingdom, the place where like children we are open to the moment as it presents and not always imagining it as we believe it should be.

The Edge of Inside

Dave Brisbin | 7.03.16
What is the effect of the mindfulness, the presence and awareness of the contemplative way? Living on the edge of inside, neither fully inside or outside, at the threshold, able to see what is really now and not just what we already think we believe, gives us a way of living life that simply can’t be experienced except with gratitude. Gratitude is the reaction, the state of living in the awareness of a gift given to us that we could never give ourselves. It is the sense of awareness in us that creates both a humility and sense of dependency, but also the sense of being cared for that leads to trust. Deeper than a mere feeling, gratefulness is the effect of beginning to know a truth about ourselves and God and the relationship between us. It is the sensation of the freedom that comes from knowing this truth. Jesus is insistent on knowing this truth that sets us free, and to bring this truth home, teaches us two basic principles, that if internalized and lived out, will bring us out along the way of gratefulness.

The Way of Gratefulness

Dave Brisbin | 7.10.16
What is the greatest impediment to gratefulness? To the trust of gratefulness? Seems it would have to be the hurts and traumas, the victimization, the evil that we encounter in our personal lives, and those of others either close or in the world at large. How do we continue to see God as compassionate and fair, how do we see life as fundamentally nurturing or safe, when there are monsters about hurting us and others? The problem of evil in our lives seems to contradict the portrait of God painted by Jesus as loving father. The oldest book of the bible, the book of Job, deals with these essential themes—as they’ve been questioned as long as there have been human being experiencing them. And the final answer to Job as God speaks to him from the whirlwind is that there is no answer that can be given to us in this life that will satisfy our minds, but there is an answer that can satisfy our hearts. A way of living that brings the paradox of the reality of perfect love and the experience of evil together in a way most unexpected.

The Answer

Frank Billman | 7.17.16
We have become so familiar with what we belief about God that we believe we know and understand him—who he is, what he does, how he works…that he is “he” at all. But the moment we define God, create edges that allow us to handle and carry him around, we have changed everything. God won’t fit into any definition or category or theology. God won’t fit into human thought at all, and the more we think on God the less we are open to his presence in our lives. How can we know God as God really is?

God in a Box

Dave Brisbin 9.20.20
Still talking about presence as the foundation of Jesus’ Way and the contemplative prayer that will take us there. When Moses came down off the mountain with God, his face was shining, and when contemplatives and mystics come back from their experience of presence, they say strange things to try to express themselves: “Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.” (Rumi) What are we to make of such words? When Jesus says unless we hate our fathers and mothers, children and even our own lives, we can’t follow him, what are we to make of that? Truth is, trying to understand the words of those who come back from the experience of presence is like trying to understand the equations on Einstein’s blackboard—a dense wall of numbers and symbols that stops you in your tracks with its sheer incomprehensibility. It’s not until there’s enough of a change in our minds to allow the beginning of a change of habit, habitual action in the direction of the practice of presence, that we’ll get our first inklings of what Jesus, the contemplatives and mystics, and perhaps even Einstein are trying to express.

Einstein's Blackboard

Audio podcasts delivered at theeffect church in San Clemente, CA. theeffect is a community of imperfect people working together to find the emotional recovery and spiritual transformation that is theeffect of God’s love by unlearning limiting perceptions, beliefs, and compulsions, and engaging a first century Jesus in a non-religious and transforming way. See more at theeffect.org.

Apophatic Way

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