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Dave Brisbin 4.27.25
We’re back in count again.
We just finished counting forty days of Lent, and now we’re counting again. The count of Lent signifies a time of preparation for Easter, and the count now is also preparation for a second liberation on the fiftieth day after Easter—Pentecost.
Our liturgical calendar is overlaid on that of the Jews, who for 3,500 years have counted seven weeks of seven, forty-nine days plus one, from the second day of Pesach/Passover to Shavu’ot/Weeks. Originally a festival marking the barley harvest, Passover became linked with Exodus, the physical liberation of the people. Shavu’ot, at the wheat harvest, was linked with the giving of the Law on Sinai, the spiritual liberation of the people and the beginning of a deeper relationship with God.
Ancient Hebrews saw a shape to their spiritual journeys that passed through a wilderness between two liberations. That even when freed from physical bondage, humans are not fully prepared to live freely. Only time in the wilderness, the hard work of introspection and self-examination, shows us how free we really are. Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born a second time, that he was born physically of water, but would not be prepared for kingdom until born of spirit as well. After Easter, Jesus’ friends eventually recognize that he and God’s promises still live, but they were not yet prepared for the insanely radical nature of that reality. They needed another forty days plus ten—ten signifying integration and completion—before their Pentecost moment, the full impact of spiritual liberation, became apparent.
The shape of their journey is ours as well. If we answered the call to seek something greater than ourselves, joined new communities, accepted new beliefs and traditions, we’ve had our physical Exodus, liberation from the illusion of separation. But this is just the beginning. We remain in count. Calvary, the loss that begins the wilderness of stripping off all to which we cling, is the fulcrum between our two liberations.
The way to Pentecost begins at Calvary and is traveled living as if God and God’s promises are more alive than life itself. -
Dave Brisbin 4.20.25
Cross and resurrection form the crux of Christian tradition, but whatever these events were historically, if we merely revere them from a distance of two millennia, we are missing the point of the gospels. These events realigned every detail of the lives of Jesus’ closest friends and followers, but as long as they remain historical events and theological concepts, they won’t realign ours. If the resurrection is to have the power now that it had then, we need to know where to look for meaning.
We naturally focus on the supernatural event, fighting and debating, but have you noticed that the gospels don’t show us the event at all? Makes us crazy looking for literal details, for certainty, but in the gospels, the resurrection happens offstage, in the blink of a hard cut. The story picks up afterward, following those Jesus left behind and their all-too-natural, human reactions. The gospels show us exactly where to look for meaning—not in the miracle itself, but in how the miracle affects our lives.
The question isn’t whether you believe…it’s what difference it makes that you believe.
It’s fascinating that none of Jesus’ closest friends recognize him face to face after he rises. We wonder how that could be possible. Did Jesus look different, disguise himself somehow, for some reason? That line of thinking misses the gospels’ focus entirely, which is not on the Jesus incident, but our ability to see it…that seeing the risen Jesus is a process of becoming ready to redefine impossible, a process that is always based in intimacy. Mary recognizes him after he calls her name, Clopas after Jesus breaks bread for supper. Tiny, intimate moments they had to re-experience to break the spell of their expectations.
Whatever the resurrection literally was two thousand years ago, if we don’t re-experience intimacy with Jesus now, in prayer and every face and embrace, every detail of our lives, we may say we believe, but re-animation, rebirth, will elude. The meaning of resurrection, like kingdom, is not out there somewhere to be observed, but within us to be tasted and seen as life that is always new and always alive. -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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Dave Brisbin 4.13.25
Very few of us live in the real world.
Like avatars in a gamescape, we live in a world created by our own thought patterns, which are in turn created by our core beliefs—deeply held, fundamental assumptions about ourselves, others, and the world. Hiding in our unconscious, core beliefs are as unquestioned as the air we breathe, acting as filters through which everything in life is perceived, without our knowing they even exist.
Initial reactions to earliest experiences, core beliefs remain in place, shaping not just how we interpret life, but how we behave. When positive, core beliefs can be advantageous, but when negative, they stoke fears that create dysfunctional behavior that creates consequences that reinforce the core beliefs themselves—I am unlovable, worthless; people can’t be trusted, will always let me down; the world is dangerous, I will never be happy—self-fulfilling prophecies in an endless feedback loop.
Jesus said the eye is the lamp of the body, so 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. In his metaphoric way, Jesus is giving us the purpose of his entire teaching. In his language, eye/aina expands to include everything we believe and the way we see reality. If our way of seeing, our filter, is clear and true, our whole being will be full of order and clarity (light/nuhra) as opposed to chaos and dysfunction (darkness/heshuka).
Jesus riding into Jerusalem is an object lesson in only seeing what we are programmed to see. Four distinct groups all see Jesus filtered through the desires and attachments of their core beliefs. The Jewish people and Jesus’ followers see him as a savior coming to fix their problems. To the Jewish and Roman authorities, he’s a threat to their powerbases. Whether Jesus is savior or threat depends on our core beliefs.
We say Jesus is savior, but he’s not here to fix our problems. That’s our job. He’s here to clear our eyes. That’s how he saves. Our way of seeing, our core beliefs, are our powerbases. Until we let Jesus threaten our powerbases, he will never be our savior. -
Dave Brisbin 4.6.25
Just when you think the world can’t get any crazier, each week we get a whole new view of crazy. And the more the world pounds on our door through news and social media, the more our grip on spiritual reality can loosen. The silence and solitude of contemplative practice, the wordless knowing of God’s presence can feel impotent, incapable of meeting the screaming needs of life’s issues.
The world always has its thumb on the scale, so we naturally tilt that way, but a fulfilled life is all about balance. We need both contemplation and action. Focusing on interior spirituality, we can become complacent, blind to the needs and suffering around us. Focusing on exterior activism, even if we call our drives spiritual, we can become identified with the dysfunction we oppose—angry, biased, even corrupt. But while working to keep weight on both sides of the scale, we can’t forget that our spirituality is still the foundation of any action we could possibly call loving.
Liz Walker puts it this way: “Some people would not consider a (spiritual) healing community to be part of a social justice movement. They’d argue that our work is anemic—not the ‘on the ground’ activism necessary to catalyze social change. But the exterior work of social justice is only as strong as the interior work that births and fuels it. We can’t heal as a community if we do not concern ourselves with healing our inner lives.”
When out of overwhelming devotion, Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus with a pound of expensive ointment, Judas Iscariot derides her for wasting money that could have gone to the poor. Interior and exterior on display. Jesus provides the balance, rebukes Judas saying, “you will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.” The choices we make to act, whether micro or macro, are only as loving as the interior preparation that births and fuels them.
The interior work that Jesus did in the wilderness, the symbolic forty days of facing the wild beasts of his human compulsions, built his foundation of identity with God and informed his choices for the rest of his life.
He did his forty. And we must do ours. -
The Purpose of Life by Dave Brisbin
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Dave Brisbin 3.30.25
Burning bush is our cultural meme, idiom for a peak experience, a vision of God or from God. But for all its power, one burning bush is not enough. Standing on holy ground in front of the original burning bush, Moses argued with God, doubted God’s word right there, and for the rest of his life, oscillated between boldness and doubt. Just like any human. But how in the world is a burning bush not enough for permanent transformation? How could that not change us without a doubt?
A burning bush, a moment when ultimate reality breaks through the veil between heaven and earth, is a glimpse of life through God’s eyes—everything connected, everything literally one substance. The human view of individual form and function falls away. Seventeen years into his monastic experience, trying to find holiness through cloistered separation from secular life, Thomas Merton had an experience in downtown Louisville at the corner of 4th and Walnut. In the middle of the busy shopping district, he was “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that he loved all those people…that the whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream…”
I have friends who have described similar experiences. I’ve had my own, and we’ve all seen burning bushes of varying intensity at times of great love and great loss. They don’t last because they present a paradox, and our minds, ever dualistic, see every paradox as a threat to certainty, convert it to a contradiction, then choose a side to relieve the tension. But that tension is the whole point. Wrestling to fit a too-big God view into the too-small human experience of daily life keeps the vision alive while keeping us grounded in our daily activities.
We need burning bushes as ballast for our sacred tension, but they are rare, come unbidden. We can’t create them or control them, but we can become increasingly aware when they are happening while working to create the perfect environment in our hearts for them to occur. Ride the sacred tension, living each day as the possibility of another surprise, another burning bush moment of seeing life through God’s eyes. Always new, alive, one. -
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. -
Dave Brisbin 3.16.25
Mid-century dancer Martha Graham said that no artist is ever satisfied with their work at any time. That there is a strange, “divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest” that keeps them marching and more alive than others. This is a blueprint for excellence and recipe for disaster depending on whether a balance can be maintained. We’ve been applying this blueprint to our spiritual lives, and balance is no less critical there.
The power in Graham’s statement lies in the paradox of living positively in a state of dissatisfaction and unrest. Far from blessed, we see those states as negative, and if we think of dissatisfaction as discontentment with our current circumstance, they are. But looking at dissatisfaction as the opposite of complacency—being so satisfied with our own abilities and situation that we see no need for improvement or possibility of growth—opens a door.
In spiritual terms, there is always more in heaven and earth than we can hold at any moment. Like drinking from a fire hydrant, we are aware of the flow, but our mouths can only hold so much. We see how much is getting past us, yet we’re not thirsty. Each moment is just enough; filled right to the brim, no more or less. But if we’ve avoided complacency, we can use our dissatisfaction, the awareness of the flow, to stoke our desire to grow and be able to hold more of that flow in the next moment, which will also be just enough.
Always a delicate balance. So easy for divine desire and anticipation to slide into obsession, where powerfully intrusive thoughts create distress that require compulsion, repetitive physical and mental behavior, to relieve the distress. But like compulsive hand washing over an obsession with germs—it’s never enough.
Every one of us needs dreams and goals, desire and hope, something to plan and work toward. Without a striving for excellence, human life loses the sense of meaning and purpose that makes life worth living. But if dreams become obsessive and work compulsive enough that we never experience our moments as enough, dissatisfaction is no longer divine. Merely discontented. Keeps us marching, but less alive. -
Dave Brisbin 3.9.25
Years ago, at the lowest point in my life, a friend invited me to her church, marking a return to Christianity after fifteen years away. First thing, I booked a lunch with the pastor, and halfway through, across my untouched plate, he said he saw “divine dissatisfaction” in me. Strange phrase. I didn’t see anything divine in my dissatisfaction or speed-questions, but then, there I was. Asking a pastor.
Years later, I looked it up. I’m pretty sure he didn’t know he was quoting a dancer. He was much more a football quoter. But Martha Graham said that artists have a divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest, that keeps them marching and more alive than others. Pastor saw that unrest in me. Though it didn’t feel divine or blessed, it certainly was motivating. Kept me marching, desiring, seeking, doubting. I doubted everything I’d ever been taught about spiritual life, which only made me desire it more.
Remember Doubting Thomas?
When the rest of the Twelve of Jesus’ inner circle said they had seen Jesus risen and alive, Thomas says he would not believe until he literally put his hands in Jesus’ wounds. That one line has made Thomas a meme for faithlessness for two thousand years and counting. But is that fair? Every one of Jesus’ friends doubted. None of them recognized him when they first saw him again, their doubting minds filtering out the possibility of the impossible until they had a personal experience that broke them through to new reality. Thomas was the only one honest about his doubt, bold enough to state it, and we’ve punished him for it.
All Thomas said was that he was dissatisfied with a second-hand report, hearsay. That only a personal experience could break him through to trust the impossible. Thomas is our hero, showing us doubt as a gift. It stokes us with the dissatisfaction we need to admit that even the Bible is a second-hand report. It points us toward our own personal experience, but it’s not the experience itself.
This Lent, can we see our doubt and dissatisfaction not as weakness, but a gift…a divine call past hearsay to a personal experience of the new life Easter represents? -
Dave Brisbin 2.23.25
Do people really change?
Seems maddingly rare, especially the older we get—the way is narrow and gate constricted—but it does happen. Why are some of us able to make fundamental, personal change, beat the odds that imprison the rest of us?
Joseph Campbell introduced the monomyth, the hero’s journey, the one plotline we use over and over in all forms: stories, poems, songs, movies. This universal story of transformation follows the three-part structure of a classic rite of passage. First, separation from the life and world we know, often forcefully through a wounding or traumatic event. Second, risky transition through an unknown and dangerous landscape where something is required of us before we can return home. And third, reincorporation back where we started, changed by the experience with a new role to play and ability to match.
Transformation stories are faithfully retold in all media, but especially in the case of movies, can be deceiving as they neatly wrap in two hours. We know life is messier, that one journey is not enough, not the end of the story. But even movies are relevant, distilling patterns of meaning that can make the difference between being a hero in our own story or not. If we’re paying attention, stories make us aware of these patterns in daily life, begin to see that fundamental change isn’t the result of grand adventure, but of pushing through resistance to change with small, simple choices that start a domino effect leading us to grand adventure.
Stories help us see that if we want fundamental change, we can intentionally work backward through the chain of events that leads to our goal until we arrive right where we’re standing, having now identified the beginning of the journey…a small choice we can make, a step we can actually take.
Can we begin to see in each moment, in our smallest decisions, the seeds of adventure? The whole of life in one uncertain step? Make friends with uncertainty as the engine of change? Say yes more than no and love the dead ends of our choices as much as the fruitful branches?
If we can, we can change. Beat the odds.
And that is the purpose of life. -
Dave Brisbin 2.16.25
Life is big, loud, in your face.
Like an over-the-top extravert, life can suck all the oxygen out of the room, leaving little energy or attention for anything else. And against life’s overwhelming physical realities—whether personal or political, socio-economic or relational—the spiritual can seem like a whisper we’re not even sure we heard…naïve, even irrelevant to our most pressing needs.
I understand why spiritual leaders often change lanes into the socio-political, big macro issues. It’s like getting off the sidelines and into the game, something solid to grasp, a side to take, a cause to champion…all driven by the legitimate belief that spirituality is only as authentic as it is present in all our physical relationships—personal and communal.
It’s a chicken and egg thing.
Which comes first, spiritual formation or the championing of causes? Of course, they work hand in glove, but because life is pulling relentlessly to the physical, we need to act as our own counterweight, pulling back toward the spiritual. Not because spiritual awareness is better, “righter” than our physical lives, but because spiritual awareness is underrepresented in daily life and needs special attention. Spiritual formation builds the awareness of who we really are: not individual entities, but part of the whole of everything that is, including each other in all our diversity and disagreement. And when this awareness of oneness is informing our choices, it changes the way we approach the championing of our causes.
We can’t separate our spirituality from our physicality. Each is lived out in the presence of the other, defined in the context of the other. And neither is more important than the other as long we’re breathing here. Human life is a balancing act. Each of us needs dreams, plans, and the hard work of accomplishing them—the “not yet” side of the equation. But if we’ve not mastered the ability to live that work with a sense of grateful completion right now, to balance now and not yet, if we confuse our work with the spirituality that propels us to it, we remain billboards for the human problem.
Not a solution. -
Dave Brisbin 2.9.25
Quote from a movie priest: There comes a time in man’s search for meaning that you realize there are no answers. When you come to that horrible, unavoidable conclusion, you either accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching...
I remember how obsessively important it was to get answers to the big theological and existential questions about religious doctrine, miracles, healings, prayer, heaven, hell, death, afterlife. At a certain point, in the midst of all the contradicting voices in my ear, I had to admit that I just couldn’t know for certain. I put a symbolic stake in the ground at the point of the Father’s love as a way to hold on to the one thing I did know.
But I wasn’t ready to stop searching.
Then life happened—marriage, divorce, births, miscarriages, achievements, failures, sitting with others facing cancer, amputation, suicides I never saw coming, healings and reconciliations I never saw coming—and those questions that had been so all consuming grew smaller, toothless, more and more irrelevant until only the love remained. I understood why Jesus boiled it all down to loving God and others, and then even further…love each other as I have loved you…as if even God didn’t require mention.
Mother Teresa described her work with the poor as loving God in his most distressing disguise. In her life-prayer-work, she had accessed momentary nondual states in which she glimpsed everything as one thing. God in everything, everything in God, no division or separation. We don’t love God directly or abstractly in prayer, ritual, worship. Those practices help us cultivate the nondual moments we need to see God in each other, to know we only love God by loving each other. There’s no other way.
We’d like to bottle those moments, store nondual data as certainty. But it’s like breathing. We breathe just enough for the moment, breathe again for the next. We can’t store air, but each breath is just enough for us. We can’t store answers to unanswerable questions. But all we know for sure, the oneness of love, is just enough for us, if we simply stop searching for answers that add nothing to life. -
Dave Brisbin 2.2.25
Would Jesus have been a Republican or Democrat?
What seems like the setup to a joke is being asked in all seriousness. Two weeks into a controversial administration, I’m hearing people ask how a good Christian could possibly vote… How a Christian pastor could possibly support… An Episcopal bishop and a sitting president both state that God is on their side while remaining flatly opposed to one another. Near the end of the Civil War, Lincoln said that both North and South read the same bible, pray to the same God, invoke God’s aid against the other, but the prayers of both could not be answered, that of neither had been answered fully.
Once we see an enemy, we imagine God is on our side, because we only have an enemy if we are certain we are right. An enemy is the wrong one. God is never wrong, so God is on our side, because we are right. Blaise Pascal said that people never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Truth is, the real enemy is not the other tribe—
the real enemy is the certainty that makes the other tribe an enemy.
We’re all co-opting God to our side, our tribe. It’s natural for anyone who reveres Jesus, or the authority of his name, to imagine he is in their camp. But what does the record show? Jesus made his own followers crazy, over and over…every time they became certain of their positions, thought they had him figured out, domesticated, he rocked them back on their heels. For anyone with an agenda, he was frustrating, infuriating, unexpected, outrageous, an equal opportunity offender of anyone who was seeing the enemies of their certainty.
Jesus refused to be co-opted into any camp. Whatever political beliefs he had are not preserved in the gospels, meaning they were irrelevant to his message. They never created enemies for him because his primary identity was not in camp or tribe, but in oneness with his Father. If we can only see truth in our own tribe, we’ll see enemies everywhere, but we won’t see Jesus. He’s in the space between camps, where the real enemy is not another tribe, but the certainty that makes enemies of everyone else. -
Dave Brisbin 1.26.25
One of the best-known stories from the gospels, one that has seeped into collective consciousness, is the story of Jesus walking on water. This and turning water to wine has become shorthand for divine power. It’s natural for us to focus on the literal, but all Jesus’ miracles have spiritual meaning as well, and since most of us will live full lives never walking on water, the spiritual meaning is more relevant. Especially when Peter asks Jesus to bring him out on the water, and we can suddenly see ourselves as participants in miracle making.
But Peter gets out a few steps, sees the waves from his new perspective, and starts sinking, screaming for help. Jesus puts him back in the boat saying, you of little faith, why did you doubt? How many times have Jesus’ words been aimed at us when we’ve expressed the least bit of existential uncertainty? But is doubt as uncertainty really what Jesus is rebuking? The word translated as doubt comes from a root that means twice or again, so we can understand it as second guessing ourselves, wavering in resolve as we ruminate.
The boat is our little island of rational thought floating on a chaotic sea of unconscious mystery. We take a breathlessly non-rational step out of the boat, a leap of faith, then immediately start thinking rationally again, fearing again. It’s our human cycle of surrender and refortification to embedded thought that limits our ability to follow Jesus to truth that liberates.
We don’t have little faith when we stop thinking we mentally believe. We have little faith when we start thinking again and stop acting. Faith is not thought. It’s acting as if what we say we believe is true enough to carry us on the surface tension of uncertainty. The nonrational ability to act in the presence of doubt, step out of the boat of all our very good reasons why not.
Little faith is not much doubt. It’s the need for much certainty. Keeping the faith is not steely-eyed adherence to mental concept. It’s the embrace of uncertainty, accepting we will never have enough information to step out of our boats. We just do. Over and over. Until trust replaces certainty. -
Dave Brisbin 1.19.25
From someone going through a perfect storm of difficulties: I see no evidence of God, but plenty of evidence of the devil. Despite years as a devout Christian, she’s hit the point we all do, over and over in life, the point Karl Jaspers called a limit situation. The moment we realize we’re gonna need a bigger boat. Hitting the limit of our ability to cope, make sense, make meaning—everything that ordered our universe lying in a heap.
Why does God seem silent when evil is so loud?
We can walk into a dilapidated house and say we see no evidence of an architect, but the fact of the house, the space in which we could care for and maintain a home, is the architect’s fingerprint. If the consequences of human action or natural processes like extreme weather or viruses frustrate our agendas, security, and certainty, we label them evil. They overwhelm us, obscuring the order beneath. God is everywhere and everything, the foundation and bones of the house, the floor on which we act. But no matter how badly we neglect the floor, it still exists, if we’re still acting. We can say the news is always bad, but that’s good. Though loud, bad news is still the aberration against the backdrop of good.
Someone asked me how we know when God is speaking—looking for words, specificity, certainty. But God’s native language is silence, a non-specific, non-rational background radiation, the fabric of life vibrating in every person and landscape. God’s silence never overwhelms the noise we create, but when we allow ourselves to sink beneath the noise, we can reaffirm a wordless message that is always the same, like an audio loop we can enter at any moment: I am here. All I have is yours. All is well and will be well.
Such a non-specific message is not what we want, but all that we need.
The suffering always present in a limit situation is the only experience powerful enough to pull back the curtain of our certainties du jour and show us the next larger reality we may be ready to engage…a spiritual awakening. But as long as we equate our suffering with evil, let it blot out the possibility of good, it can’t show us anything. -
Dave Brisbin 1.12.25
I’m often asked about the big words...
The words of Christian doctrine that seem to contradict the nature of God that Jesus called Good News, love itself. Degreeless and indiscriminate love that can’t be altered or avoided, showering on everyone equally—just and unjust alike. Yet Christianity feels exclusive…acceptance withheld unless we believe in an orthodox Jesus, declare him as Lord, obey church rule and ritual. There is heaven for those who perform, the eternal torment of hell for the rest, and at the center of it all stands the cross. Ironically, the ultimate dividing line.
Here’s a big word: propitiation. An English word used to translate the Greek and Aramaic words used by John and Paul to describe Jesus’ death on the cross. It means to appease wrath, regain favor, change the mind of an angry God. In 1611, the King James bible translated the Greek hilasmos and Aramaic husaya as propitiation, but this has become controversial. Later translations use expiation instead—atonement, the extinguishing of guilt. The ancient words can mean both, so which?
If you’re a hammer, the world looks like a nail. Our concept of life determines what we see and understand, so if our focus is justice, we see propitiation—if love, expiation. Propitiation defines God’s nature as angry and apparently incapable of mercy without the mechanism of a perfect sacrifice. Expiation defines our nature, our need to extinguish “original sin/guilt,” the illusion of separation of which our minds are capable once we become self-aware as children. To extinguish that illusion is the true meaning of the cross. That Jesus could overcome his human sense of separation, remain one with the Father’s love even on the cross, is the salvation we seek. There is only reward and punishment in propitiation. In expiation, we find the degreeless and indiscriminate love that is never withheld.
None of the big words mean what we think when placed back in the language Jesus and his followers spoke and wrote. We must re-know what they knew. Jesus was laser-focused on love…
The meaning of any big word that contradicts that love is a mistranslation. -
Dave Brisbin 1.5.25
An angel was walking down the street carrying a torch and a pail of water. When asked what he was going to do with torch and pail, the angel said that with the torch he was burning down the mansions of heaven, and with the pail, putting out the fires of hell. Because only then would we see who truly loves God.
With no promise of reward or fear of punishment, what is the temperature of our love when there is nothing “in it” for us—no consequence for not engaging.
Everything in us rebels at this. We’re offended if there’s no reward for hard work. Yet Jesus tells us that no matter when we show up, we’re all paid the same at the end of the day—love is its own reward. We’re offended if there’s no punishment for failure, yet Jesus says that sun and rain fall on the just and unjust alike—love can never be other than what it is. We have to scale the wall of reward and punishment before we can ever hope to experience love without degree. Jesus relentlessly works to tear down this wall, knowing how deeply life has embedded it while giving no experience of something as alien as degreeless love.
When I stopped practicing Catholicism, my horrified mother told me it wasn’t enough to be a good person, implying that without conforming to correct doctrine and practice, punishment would be my only reward. Yet for Jesus, all law and scripture is summed by loving God and neighbor. His last commandment was to love as he loved, that his followers would be defined by love—not what we rationally understand, irrationally believe, or ritually practice. The only purpose of religious belief and practice is to guide us to the experience of degreeless love. If it does, it’s true. If not, it’s irrelevant at best.
Life is so uncertain and humans so fragile, we crave certainty as medication, and the paradigm of reward and punishment at least gives some illusion of control. That performing as we imagine God wills, binds God contractually to love and acceptance. But even the slightest vestige of meritocracy blinds us to the possibility of a love that can’t be withheld or altered, keeping us forever striving for what we already possess. -
Dave Brisbin 12.29.24
When a rich young man asks what he must do to experience eternal aliveness, and Jesus tells him to sell all he has, and the man walks away with head hung, Jesus tells his friends how hard it is for wealthy people. Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter aliveness. The Aramaic word for camel, gamla, can also mean rope, so take your pick of images, but…it’s really hard.
So how did the Magi beat those odds? Magi were wealthy, educated, astronomer/astrologers, influential advisors to power, yet when they saw the eastern rising of the prophetic star for which they had been searching for centuries, they jumped on their camels and headed west. So far, so good. All in the realm of accepted science and entrenched belief. But when that star “stood over” Bethlehem—when Jupiter went retrograde, signaling the end of their western push, and they found the one born at the rising of the king’s star—what could have prepared them for the abject poverty and insignificance of the infant? How were they able to see past centuries of expectation to the unassuming fulfilment of promise?
This is the always question. And the Magi are our best teachers because we are wealthy and educated too. We are the rich young man looking for eternal aliveness, not marginalized first followers. And however we see ourselves, even as middle class in the developed West, we are wealthier than 98% of the world’s population. More telling, we are invested in the status quo for our imagined survival and advantage. That investment is the eye of the needle.
What did the Magi have that the rich young man did not?
The Magi brought three gifts. Gold symbolizes desire, and frankincense, the action of faith. So far, so good. But desire and action along the certainty of our entrenched belief can only take us to the precipice of the manger. At the manger, we are asked to sell everything that expects something certain. The Magi have one gift left. Myrrh…surrender. Without surrender to the unexpected, impossible, improbability of God, all our other gifts don’t matter. They can’t squeeze us through the needle’s eye. -
Dave Brisbin 12.15.24
What is it we’re supposed to see in Christmas? Talk about a mixed message... Only two gospels mention Jesus’ birth at all, and the few details given depict a birth so ordinary to parents so poor that those closest didn’t even make room for them in the inn. Enter shepherds and Magi...here the gospels spend a bit more time, because their reactions were anything but ordinary.
What did they see that everyone else missed?
We only see what we’re prepared to see. Impoverished shepherds spending their lives in silence and solitude with their flocks, grew a consciousness that allowed them to see significance in the smallest detail. Magi—wealthy, educated advisors to the king—were used to power and influence. Yet these magi had retained a humility and vulnerability that allowed them to see the promise of their star while still unformed in a poor Hebrew infant. If we’re willing, the magi are showing us wealthy, educated ones how to get small enough to see Christmas.
Christmas has a way of bringing vague, submerged feelings to the surface the way hook and line bring up fish. We find ourselves grasping squirming emotions that should have nothing to do with what we think Christmas is supposed to mean, what we remember it used to mean. We imprinted the meaning of Christmas through a child’s eyes, then subtly mourn its loss each year through adult eyes.
Christmas hasn’t changed; the possibility of Christmas returns every December. We have changed. We’ve lost the pace of childhood, forgotten the smallest details. Maybe Christmas-as-remembered happens exactly when we stop trying to make it happen. Maybe when we stop running faster and faster, trying to catch the stored experience of Christmas, meaning has a chance to catch up and catch us.
We can’t choose the pace of life around us anymore than we can alter the course of a storm. But we can choose our own pace within it. Of course we will always find our God as a child. Unassuming. Unformed and always forming. Are we prepared to see?
Every time we meet our God is Christmas morning.
The babe is in the manger.
The star is in the east.
And we are the Magi, and they are us. -
Dave Brisbin 12.8.24
What does the story of Job have to do with Christmas?
Any story is a story about risk. We’ve all been at risk from our first breath, but we don’t like to think of ourselves balanced on a razor’s edge of circumstances we can’t control. We work really hard to manage risk, grow as big as we can, accumulate money and materials so risk will have to get through all our stuff before it ever gets to us. Illusion. Risk passes through stuff like ghosts through walls.
Job was big. Had everything a person could imagine—big hedges against risk. So when it all was taken, no one was more surprised than he. He cried out for answers, but when God finally speaks from the whirlwind of mystery and non-answer, Job finally admits his smallness. He had to lose everything to see himself as he was, that working to grow big is just another attempt at the control and invulnerability that will always elude. It’s not who we are as humans, and we’re never complete without accepting who we are. Only in our innate vulnerability do we find the connection that we call meaning and purpose. Job had to grow small to see this.
If you want to find something lost by a child, what do you do?
You get on your hands and knees so you can see all the little crevices and nooks hidden at adult standing height. The story of Christmas is the story of growing small. Jesus is born a helpless infant and also lying in a manger—code for poor, marginalized, powerless. Jesus started as small as is possible for a human…and he never grew out of his smallness. Even as his fame and influence grew, his attitude remained that of the anawim: people who have accepted smallness while retaining hope and gratitude.
Jesus and Job found what can only be seen from the standing height of a child, the kneeling height of a servant. Why are so many of us depressed at Christmas? Because we imprint the magic of Christmas from a perspective three feet off the ground and try to find it again from the height of an adult. Our God risks being small, vulnerable for the sake of connection. The only way to find what has been seen by a childlike God is to get on our knees and grow small. - Visa fler
