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.

Dave Brisbin 12.1.24

Long ago, many people came to seek counsel and wisdom from a great Zen master. One day, a very important man, used to giving commands, came to him, “Teach me about Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” The master smiled and said they should discuss the matter over tea. When the tea was ready, he poured and the tea rose to the rim, then overflowed to the table and on to the robes of the man who jumped, “Enough! Can’t you see the cup is full?” The master smiled again, “You are like this cup, so full that nothing can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind.”

This is how we all come seeking enlightenment. So full of what is true and false, right and wrong, attractive and repugnant, that nothing gets in as it actually exists in the wild. Automatically transformed into something we think we already understand, everything slips into our premade categories, judged good, bad, beneficial, not.

Our cups are full.

Epictetus said it is impossible for anyone to learn what they think they already know, and Jesus teaches exactly the same way. His use of paradox—if you want to find your life, lose it; questions as answers—Good master what must I do?...Why do you call me good?; and story—Who is my neighbor?...and he tells about the Good Samaritan; are all meant to empty our cups. Stop our minds in their tracks and disrupt our neat categories, make space for something we haven’t considered. Bring us back to beginner’s mind, the open, teachable mind of the child that he always holds as a model for jaded adults.

When Jesus tells us not to judge, he means it in this most expansive sense. As long as our minds think they know, judging and placing everything we encounter into familiar categories, we will never see what really shares our moments with us.

We won’t see each detail as it appears, let it amaze and surprise us.

We won’t smile and send photos to our friends.

We won’t let this moment be enough and rest in it.

We won’t feel gratitude for tiny gifts we could never give ourselves.

It’s all about seeing past our mind’s understanding to the perfect enoughness of each imperfect moment.

Dave Brisbin 11.24.24

To ancient Hebrews, the number twelve signified the completion or perfection of earthly systems, rule, government. More than a literal number, this is the meaning being transmitted by the twelve patriarchs, tribes, apostles, every detail of the New Jerusalem. It symbolizes a complete cycle—twelve lunar orbits creating the twelve months of the solar year, the twelve constellations of the zodiac counting out the agricultural seasons. Even Gehenna, the word badly translated as hell, had a maximum stay of twelve months, a symbolic full cycle of purification.

Twelve reminds us that time is not a line, but a circle, that endings are beginnings, or in Eliot’s words: to make an end is to make a beginning; the end is where we start from. Like a snake eating its tail, we live endless circular cycles, arriving where we started in order to know the place and ourselves more and more deeply. To arrive at Step 12 of AA is a simultaneous ending and beginning, taking us back where we started with the wisdom and insight only a journey of serial surrender could give us.

The total surrender that is recovery, salvation, is too big to effect all at once. Step by step, cycle by cycle, the abrasion of our passage strips more and more of what is untrue from us, creating the spiritual awakening of Step 12 that gives us a message to carry to others and principles to practice in all our affairs. But coming full circle also reminds that we started in the humility of powerlessness…so how much more surrendered could we be? Powerlessness at Step 1 is rarely fully conscious. Not yet aware of its immensity, we use the concept to mark the end of resistance and beginning of submission that makes the rest of the steps possible.

The powerlessness of Step 1 is born of the desperation of an unmanageable life, the reality of our lack of control. It’s a painful, fearful admission that initiates the cycle of Steps leading to the spiritual awakening of Step 12—the realization of living in a world to which we finally know we belong. To which everything belongs. A belonging that makes powerless vulnerability in God’s embrace a joy to live.

Dave Brisbin 11.17.24

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Eliot’s iconic line reminds that time is not a line, but a circle. Beginning and end one and the same. That any authentic journey is a journey of awareness, bringing us back to ourselves expanded. And knowing…what?

Step 11 tells us it’s God’s will we seek through the prayer and meditation that makes conscious contact with God possible. Without that conscious part, what have we got? But what have we got when we’ve got God’s will? We crave what we imagine as God’s “what:” what he wants us to do, the perfect life he wills us complete to the last detail. Mistake-proof. But God’s will, sebyana in Aramaic, is deepest desire, pleasure, delight, purpose—the essence that paints God’s presence in the only colors we will ever see.

How do we come to know that? See those colors?

In circles. Circles within circles of growing intimacy. Knowing, yida, is not cataloging data points, but becoming intimately familiar, a process that takes time and for which our soil must be prepared. In the first circle journey of prayer we develop awareness by establishing the structure and framework of formal, word-based prayer. Without structure, we can’t practice awareness into the muscle memory that takes us to the second circle, the process of knowing as mindful, wordless meditation, the silence of God’s native language. Until we can get out of the way, become fluent in silence, we can’t know God’s essence, which we can then carry third circle into our lives with the practice of presence. A homecoming of realization that we don’t need to do anything other than whatever we do all day long to know God’s will—as the how of our doing, not the what. That with the how of God’s deepest purpose and delight, any what becomes the exact center of God’s will.

There is no substitute for traveling these circles within circles. Knowing as intimate familiarity can’t be transferred or bestowed. It can only be experienced, circle after circle, coming back to an expanded home…knowing ourselves and the place again and again for the first time.

Dave Brisbin 11.10.24

What do you think of as a miracle? Seas parting, walking on water, healings? Dictionaries tell us miracles are events not explainable by natural or scientific laws. But what if an event is not explainable to or by you personally? Or leaves inexplicable space between data points? When you raise your hand, can you explain that? What happened between unthought intention and action? When you think a thought, where did it come from? When you forget, where did it go?

A thing doesn’t have to be spectacular to be inexplicable. Common, everyday events are as well. Maybe a better definition of a miracle is a gift that we could never have given ourselves. Birth. Next breath. A friend’s forgiveness. Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish theologian, said that his greatest talent was his ability to be surprised. Jesus, another Jew, never gravitated far from a child’s point of view, and the genius of children is to live in a world that is magical—full of surprises and inexplicable gifts immune to the density of entitlement, the illusion we’ve earned all we have.

Children embody Jesus’ Kingdom as a state of amazed gratitude, but life works against our inner child.

Hard work breeds entitlement and familiarity breeds contempt. Still, some moments cut through: surprising enough that miraculous gifts reveal themselves—smiles spreading without permission. But a lot of life can slip by between such uncultivated moments, and if we’re waiting, we’re neither grateful nor amazed. The 10th Step of AA is continuing to take personal inventory; if we limit it to mere cataloging of defects and bad behavior, we miss it.

Chesterton said we see things fairly when we see them first…recovering the candor and wonder of the child, the unspoiled realism and objectivity of innocence. The 10th Step is the fulcrum on which the other eleven are balanced—the practiced ability to see ourselves and life as if for the first time is both the cause and effect of our transformation. It’s a swimming against the current of life that keeps us surprisable, seeing the miraculous in the commonplace, grateful and amazed at gifts we could never give ourselves.

Dave Brisbin 11.3.24

I’ve tried to make amends to people I’ve hurt in the past. Sometimes I felt reconnected. Sometimes my apology was flatly refused. Sometimes the words of forgiveness were spoken, but everyone knew nothing further was exchanged. In all of them, there was no reconciliation. We’ve not spoken since.

The 9th Step of AA tells us to make direct amends wherever possible except when doing so would injure someone. But what are these amends? Dictionary says putting things right, restitution, mending. But if our attempts don’t mend, is there still purpose in the process? Turns out, process is all we have, all we can engage, so if there’s any purpose, that’s where we’ll find it. And regardless of outcome, the process of making amends is all about forgiveness—properly understood as freedom from the limitations of victimhood.

For both victim and perpetrator, the freedom of forgiveness is essential. Whether a victim of someone else’s actions or our own, we’re not free to connect with anyone or God’s presence until we’re free enough of our limitations: the resentment, blame, fear, paralysis of victimhood. But amends themselves can’t make us free. So why make them?

Jesus said that if we forgive another, God forgives us, but if not, then not. Truth is, God doesn’t forgive at all. God is forgiveness itself…leaving to us the choice whether to accept the radical connection that is God—not mentally or verbally, but by engaging a gradual process of liberation. If we have created a victim, we can’t uncreate it. But making amends is a gift we give to help clear a path for our victim to free themselves—from us. Remove some of the debris blocking them from forgiving us. The beauty of amends is that in clearing the path for our victim, we are simultaneously clearing a path for ourselves. It’s the only way to do it.

I’ve hurt people who will never forgive me, or may never know if they do. Doesn’t matter. We can’t make our victims forgive us, and they couldn’t forgive us if they tried. But together, in the process of amends, we can help each other free ourselves with forgiveness. If we wish.

We are all as forgiven as we wish to be.

Dave Brisbin 10.27.24

When we hear the Hebrew word shalom, we think of peace, as in the absence of conflict. And when we hear the word forgiveness, we think of pardoning or excusing, even condoning a person’s harmful action. But shalom—selama in Aramaic—means the greatest amount of unity, wholeness, health, and prosperity possible. And sebaq, forgiveness, means to set free. To the Semitic mind, forgiveness is being set free from victimization, and the fear, anger, resentment that has metastasized as a result. But since we can’t free another person’s heart, when we forgive, we’re actually setting ourselves free. We’re the only ones who can.

In the 8th Step of AA, when we make a list of all the people we have harmed, we are going far beyond a mere list. We are recognizing our deep interconnectedness, maybe for the first time. How each choice and action we make ripples out, affecting others, just as theirs affect us. Not a problem when our actions are affirming, but can be devastating when not. And the closer a person is to us, the more they are affected.

Our interconnection creates a responsibility for each other, but accepting that is a tricky process because most of the people we’ve harmed have harmed us back—or at least we imagine they did. Becomes easy to justify our actions, wiggle off the hook by clinging to our own victimization. So when we become willing to make amends to them all, we are going far beyond a mere transaction, beyond apology or restitution. We are moving toward actual forgiveness, our own set-freeness…because we’ll never see the harm we’ve done until we’ve set ourselves free from the harm done to us.

AA’s own literature calls Step 8 the “beginning of the end of isolation.” Perfect description. Anything less than the perfect unity and wholeness of shalom is considered hataha—Aramaic for sin. Sin is separation itself. Harmful action takes us there, to the separation and isolation of compromised relationship. To become aware of our interconnectedness, to be freed from our sense of victimhood so we can see the harm we’ve done is the beginning of the end of our isolation. And the beginning of shalom.

Dave Brisbin 10.20.24

Ever try to give someone a compliment who couldn’t accept it?

I like your shirt. Oh this? I got it on the clearance rack. Good job! I could have done better, just got lucky. Or next level: It wasn’t me; it was the Lord. All glory goes to God. Maybe we feel unworthy…or think we’re being humble or more spiritual by deflecting praise. But in trying to be humble, we humiliate ourselves with deprecation and the giver by essentially saying we know better. True humility doesn’t reduce us or others to lower levels. It simply recognizes what is.

Humble people see themselves as they are. No more or less. Their relationships with others as they are—perfectly level. Their relationship with God—dependent, vulnerable, yet loved and accepted at the same time. But to be humble is to step outside your egoic mind that is always fighting to make you more or less than you are: defensive, fear-based positions, the ego’s will to survive. To be fearlessly humble—or gratefully realistic—is to have become entirely ready to see self and life from God’s, love-based position, where all is one and connected.

Our defects of character express our deepest fears of aloneness and inadequacy driving thought and behavior patterns that harm relationships and further isolate us, reinforcing fear. To humbly ask God to remove our defects is the culmination of having become aware of our deepest fears and how they drive our destructive behavior; to have admitted them to another person and experienced continued acceptance and love; and to have become entirely ready to see ourselves from God’s point of view.

To ask, in the Aramaic of Jesus’ language, is an expression of deepest longing and desire for change. A desire accompanied by the will to act now as if that change had already occurred—faith. To humbly ask is to cradle our desire in the awareness of the resistance our fears create and the reality of our connection to everyone and everything else. Humility balances fear with connection, unparalyzing us to take next steps as if the change we seek has already occurred…the only way to find that by asking in humble action, it actually has.

Dave Brisbin 10.13.24

When I went skydiving for the first and only time, I didn’t want a tandem jump—strapped to a jumpmaster—so that meant a full eight hours of training, and that the decision to jump was all mine. Fear grew all day through classes and videos; fitting for jumpsuit, helmet, goggles, pack; walking out to board the silver prop plane with its door-sized opening in the fuselage; takeoff and ascent to 12,500 feet; my name called; looking down at two miles of air with fear now in my throat.

All day long the fear was with me, breathlessly at the moment of decision, but once I jumped, hyperventilated through the first few seconds of acceleration, I was no longer afraid. The day’s fear, gone. I’d set in motion a sequence of events that would end the at the ground one way or another, and I couldn’t take it back. Fully committed, there was nothing left but what I was trained to do.

And enjoy the ride.

The 12 Steps of AA break the removal of our shortcomings, our obsessive-compulsive thought and behavior patterns, into two separate steps: to become entirely ready before we humbly ask God to remove them. Seemed redundant at first, but on reflection…when do we ever know we’re entirely ready to do anything? Start a workout routine or diet, marry, have a child? How did I know I was entirely ready to believe I could survive the jump? Only when I relaxed my fingers and let fall.

We have to act. Only in action do we know we’re entirely ready. And when it comes to removing the obsessive-compulsive symptoms of our lifelong fears, what keeps us from being entirely ready?

Arriving after a drive with my then four-year-old son, he jumped out of his car seat as if spring loaded, landed on the asphalt and declared, I’m happy! When I asked why he was happy, he said, You’re supposed to be happy. I’m a happy boy. Do we believe that? That happy is how we were born and our true default position? We’ve lived in fear so long, with our shortcomings so long, we’ve forgotten and made a virtue of suffering. Until we remember we’re supposed to be happy, it’s almost impossible to become entirely ready to act, to participate with God for change.