theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin | 6.17.18

On Father’s Day: Though the ancient Hebrews who wrote our scripture always referred to God in the masculine as Ab/Father, there is much in scripture that also refers to a feminine nature as well. Hebrews understood that God encompassed both ab and em, father and mother—both are embedded in their language, sacred writings, and world view. But here in the modern West, looking at scripture more literally as we do, God as father eclipses God as mother and presents us with the unbalanced view of God primarily as king, judge, executioner, administrator—all the functions of ab at the expense of the mercy, compassion, intimacy, humility, and vulnerability of God as em/mother. But Jesus comes to our rescue with an ingenious solution: “Abba.” This word for father carried the intimacy, familiarity, and belovedness of a child for her daddy and by using it, Jesus was conveying that he had seen his father’s face and news was good about the nature of our relationship with him. When did he see his father’s face? Contrary to the common view of Western Christianity, the gospels imply that it was during an intense struggle, a wrestling in the wilderness where Jesus stripped his life down to the ground in order to see what was really true. The shape of this wrestling is mirrored over and over in scripture, in Jacob, Moses, and even Philip as they struggle to see their father’s face. It will be no less a wrestling for us to put down whatever we carry that blocks our view so that we can move from ab to abba and see both father and mother in our father’s face.

Dave Brisbin | 6.10.18

My wife tells me she keeps seeing the number 11:11 everywhere. I start seeing 11:11 as well. She does some research and finds that seeing repeating numbers is a “thing,” a phenomenon sometimes called “angel numbers,” with an intricate system of meaning based on numerological values. But since any actual meaning can’t be verified or falsified, it’s all easy to dismiss, even mock as mere coincidence or selective perception—as it probably is, factually. But seeing the numbers has become a touch point for me and my wife, a running connection between us, a reminder of a greater unseen world, a source of playful attention and smiles, a call to prayer and a return to center. Seeing, being aware of these numbers has become full of meaning for me and my wife—it’s become a middle way, a third way through the details of life. A business coach has me read a book giving permission to be completely obsessed with business success, which appears to stand in complete contradiction to the contemplative principles I’ve studied for decades, calling us to a quiet center and a detachment from outcome. And though it would be easy—and comforting—for me to dismiss, even mock that celebration of “obsession” so that I didn’t have to stretch to consider it, I’m thinking there is a third, middle way between these two poles, any two poles that life presents. Jesus tells us the last shall be first, to take the seat at the foot of the table, and yet his life was radical and extreme and his family thought he was crazily obsessed when he began his ministry. Where we think we may have to choose between being an obsessive warrior and a happy contemplative, maybe our tradition is really showing us the middle way of the happy warrior.

Dave Brisbin | 6.3.18

Dialogue from movie: “You’ll never believe what just happened!” “If it’s bad news, I generally do believe it…” Unfortunately true. Why is it that we generally do believe the bad news over the good? If you think on it, we’re shaped much more by the hurts and traumas we’ve experienced in life than by the joys and pleasures. Pain demands strategies for survival that we build from earliest childhood—strategies that become perceptions, attitudes, behavior, and beliefs that are sturdy and persist indefinitely after the painful circumstances are gone. How do we pull our personal pendulums back to a centered position? In Romans, Paul speaks of presenting ourselves as living sacrifices and renewing our minds to prove God’s will. What does that mean? How does it help? To put that into practical terms is to line it up with Jesus at Matthew 6, when he tells us not to worry about the future but to seek Kingdom first, right now. Putting it all together is to realize that all life is always today and that the Kingdom to which Jesus and Paul are pointing is always now/today as well—in fact it’s a momentary Kingdom. The choice to renew our minds and behavior and attitudes is always now, always a moment by moment proposition. There is no super switch we throw or prayer we say to enter Kingdom once and for all. There is only this moment and the choice we make to be fully here, present to God’s spirit infused in each other and everything around us or not. It’s like a string of pearls—it only becomes a necklace the moment there are more pearls than string.

Dave Brisbin | 5.27.18

I’ve watched a friend over the nearly ten years I’ve known her, fight her way back from the depths of traumatic loss to new life only to find out that she has cancer. When we last connect, she’s just coming out of eight hours of chemo. Eight hours for one treatment. I had no idea it could take so long. You’d think after all the years down and the all years climbing back up to new job, house, friends, and fiancé, there’d be some sort of plateau for a while at least, but the crest for her was just the beginning of the next trough, and the oscillation continues. One week out of Pentecost, it’s important to realize that it was ever thus. We want to believe that when we attain a peak experience like the filling of the Spirit at Pentecost, things will stay peaked from that point on. But that’s not the picture scripture is painting. Looking at Peter after Pentecost, Paul after Damascus, David after Goliath, Elijah after Carmel, peaks that should have remained only form the crest that defines the next valley in their experience…and the oscillation continues. There is nothing wrong with the shape or our lives, the shape of the oscillation. There is nothing they or my friend or we have done wrong to deserve it, but not to expect it, amplifies it. Life will always carry us up and down as we live here between heaven and earth, and the mark of the truly successful life is the one that has learned to love the oscillation. Or if that’s not fully possible, to at least learn to love through the oscillation.

Dave Brisbin | 5.20.18

On the day of our 11th Anniversary as a ministry, we listen to an excerpt of the last audio recording our co-founder, Bob “Bubba” Beauchamp delivered in 2015. When Bubba died in January, 2018, we excerpted a short clip of what was the essence of how he and we at theeffect approach our spirituality: experientially over intellectually and relationally over religiously. Jumping off from Bubba’s anecdotal delivery, we take a look at the components of a personal spiritual “program” and how critical it is to make our spiritual practice personal. Our churches and religious traditions give us an external structure, if we choose to shelter within it, but until and unless we begin building an interior structure within the larger structure, we will have nothing that is really our own and portable—able to be taken with us where ever life leads. The model of Jesus’ life gives us the shape of this structure, and Bubba confirms it with his: the community, accountability, structure, discipline, and service that gives us the sense of meaning and purpose and identity that allows us to see God everywhere as Bubba did: in his parrot who greeted him by calling his name, every crashing wave, cloud and bird in the sky, the memory of his parents, and every face in his path. By approaching the altar within, we find a seamless presence in our lives where every smile becomes a prayer.

Dave Brisbin | 5.13.18

On Mothers’ Day, we’re recalling a question posed last year: I know that God loves me, but how do I know that he likes me? It’s a brilliant question if you think about it, but at first blush, why would it even come up? If we know God loves us, isn’t that enough? No, not really… We’re commanded to love one another, even to love our enemies. But liking implies affection, genuine delight and pleasure, desire to be with, a playful attention that is beyond any commandment. We can choose who we love, but no one can choose who they like—any more than we can choose whether we like broccoli or bacon (I know, everyone likes bacon). We have so focused on God as Father and love as duty and justice, that we have lost the connection with God as Mother and love as compassion and affection. The notion of God as mother pushes all the wrong buttons in our culture, even sounds blasphemous to some, but can our scriptures, placed back in their original Hebrew context come to our rescue? When we look at the original meanings of father and mother in Hebrew, the non-dual continuum through which Hebrews viewed what appear to us a polar opposites, when we see how Hebrews personified Holy Wisdom and God as female, how Spirit and Kingdom are feminine nouns in Hebrew, a balance begins to appear. And when we consider that Jesus always led with mother’s love—acceptance and connection—before he ever taught father’s love— justice and law—we begin to see that God is the perfect balance of father and mother, loving and liking. We may well want to be liked more than loved, but as long as God remains centered in our minds and thoughts, he is Father only—loving and judging at the same time. When we step away from our thoughts about God and simply live our moments with full awareness, we begin experiencing the connection and acceptance of God as our Mother and the answer to our question.

Dave Brisbin | 5.6.18

You’ve heard of heat seeking missiles…truth is, we humans are all pleasure seeking missiles. We seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Necessary trait for survival of the species. It guides us spiritually too, as long as we honestly consider in what we ultimately take pleasure. You could say that the spiritual journey is really an ongoing refining of our pleasure centers. Chinese proverb—to suffer yourself when all under heaven suffer, to enjoy only when all under heaven enjoy—implies an ultimate refining of our notion of pleasure that Jesus seems to affirm as he leads us to further and further expansion of our sense of relationship and connection. To love the enemy equally with our friends and neighbors and then to see even our attachment to family as a barrier to the fullness of unity are among the most difficult teachings of Jesus. A view of the perfect lover as a mirror that faithfully reflects the beloved without agenda or distortion, a mirror that is empty of self until the beloved steps into frame and empty again as the beloved moves on, seems to be where Jesus is leading: that such a laying down of self is the only way we will ever see that we are intimately connected to everything—not just some things—and that our life is the connection itself. And that apart from everything that is, we don’t actually exist. It’s a disturbing notion for us rugged individualists…the thought of our sense of self returning as a drop to the ocean. But as the poet Rumi wrote, we are not a drop in the ocean, we are the entire ocean in a drop.

Dave Brisbin | 4.29.18

From the account of Pentecost in Acts 2, it can seem that the Spirit descending on Jesus’ followers like tongues of fire on each was an event that happened at a particular place and time as they passively waited. But the truth is, there’s nothing passive about the spiritual life. We need to resist the temptation to think of Pentecost or baptism of the spirit or the born again experience as the moment when Spirit is unleashed, no longer withheld. Spirit is always unleashed, permanently permeating everything all the time—never withheld. Pentecost is a conscious choice to return to unity with Spirit as we become aware of its presence in a fundamentally new way. It can be a gradual process, a process of becoming more and more aware until we realize at some point we have a very different relationship with Presence. What is this process? How does it work? Jesus’ Way to Father can be looked at as a return to the Garden of Eden, a return to the kind of connection with which each of started as children. And Jesus’ insistence on loving the enemy, the willingness and practice of embracing what is different and difficult in our lives—people, ideas, circumstances that offend—is the process itself. Each time we love enemy as Jesus did by breaking through the ritual, theological, and social barriers we have set up to keep ourselves safe, we are returning to the borderless relationship beyond tribe and self that is Pentecost.

Dave Brisbin | 4.22.18

If we’re serious about getting to Pentecost, experiencing the full awareness of spiritual presence, there’s a basic truth about the journey with which we have to come to grips…that the way to Pentecost begins at Calvary. Jesus said that it was to his closest followers’ advantage that he go away, so the Helper could come. Moses, after 40 years of faithfully leading his people, is not allowed to enter the promised land, but dies within sight of it. What is being communicated? Moses himself and Jesus himself had become physical impediments to their followers’ ability to take the next step in their spiritual journeys. As long as they clung to their leader as provider and deliverer, they would not find the direct connection with unseen Spirit that is Pentecost. Calvary is the moment all Jesus’ followers’ hopes and expectations, the entire world they’d been building is killed right before their eyes. It is the moment of Jesus’ greatest display of vulnerability, which forces the choice of his followers to see vulnerability for what it really is: the flip side of love. Without embracing the vulnerability of their apparent abandonment, they would never be able to experience the fact that to be deeply in love is to be deeply vulnerable and to love perfectly is to literally or figuratively lay down your life for the beloved. That moment, that Calvary moment, is the beginning of the path to a filling of the Spirit of love through its flip side…vulnerability.

Dave Brisbin | 4.15.18

Between Easter and Pentecost, or more specifically, between Pesach/Passover and Shavu’ot, stretches a period of fifty days called in Hebrew sefirat ha-omer—the Counting of the Omer. Jews were told to make a grain offering on the second day of Pesach, then count each day for seven Sabbaths, add one day, and make another grain offering. Starting as celebrations of the barley and wheat harvests, Pesach and Shavu’ot respectively grew into celebrations of the physical liberation of the people from Egypt and their spiritual liberation from slave mentality at the giving of the Law. Hebrews made a distinction between the physical liberation first and the spiritual liberation that naturally followed a people living in intimate relationship with God. The counting of the omer is their structure for an interior preparation for spiritual deliverance. Jesus makes the same distinction to Nicodemus—that he must be born again in spirit before he can see God’s kingdom. And though Nicodemus cannot understand such language at John 3, by John 19 he has broken through to the boldness and freedom that Jesus’ followers will also experience on Shavu’ot, Pentecost fifty days later. For us, whether we call this being born again or baptism of the spirit, we need to understand that such spiritual empowering is not passively bestowed, but actively unveiled—we must become ready to see. We are in the liturgical middle of the counting right now, and we need to find our own way to count the omer, to live as if kingdom is already present before we can become people who can see that it actually is.