Dave Brisbin 6.13.21
As good Westerners, we approach spiritual formation with our minds. We see faith as correct thinking, a mental agreement with correct thoughts about God, theology, doctrine. But over the years, I’ve learned not to trust thoughts in my head. I know at best, they are incomplete and inaccurate more often than I’d care to admit. But this is no longer cause for concern: I don’t expect my thoughts to be complete and accurate anymore, and I don’t need them to be. When it comes to spiritual issues that by definition stand outside anything that finite thought and language can express, everyone’s thoughts are incomplete and inaccurate. Book of Proverbs tells us not to lean on our own understanding—to trust God with all our hearts, yet Paul tell us to become transformed by the renewing of our minds…so are we back to correct thoughts?

If we’re ever to understand the Way of spiritual transformation that Jesus taught, we need to come to terms with how our minds are renewed. When we lay Paul’s teaching in Romans and Philippians side by side, we see that renewing our minds is connected to presenting our bodies as living sacrifices, which he spends fifteen verses illustrating as life lived in intimate relationship. We accomplish this by forgetting all that lies behind: lessons learned in pain that only create more pain now, accepted beliefs that only cause more division and dysfunction now. Focusing instead on whatever is lovely and pure, honorable and good in this present moment, heals anxiety with gratitude for God’s presence. Paul is not talking about correcting our thoughts, but that we know our thoughts are correct by their effect on every moment of our lives. There comes a time when there are no more thoughts to think, no new ideas to discover—only the infinitely varied expression of the truth found in our daily lives. To drive our stake in the ground there, at the point of the Father’s love, is the renewal and transformation we seek.

Stake In The Ground

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.

Stake In The Ground

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