theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin | 1.15.17

Just completed the move of our family home of 17 years to a downsized house closer to work and faith community, and just about every nightmare scenario that I could imagine and project on to moving day and was working and praying to avoid came to pass. Escrow was delayed so that new flooring was only half completed when moving crew arrived with all our belongings in the hardest driving rain that southern CA has seen in years with cable and internet crew arriving in the middle of it all to add to the chaos. Trying to just stay out of the way and survive the day, I slowly became aware of the undaunted moving crew taking the rain as an adventurous challenge: to keep our stuff dry and keep their schedule intact while being unfailingly energetic and personable. Then arriving at the new house, the Hispanic crew laying the floor was blaring their music in Spanish and singing along as movers stepped over them with wet shoes and furniture... What is happiness and how and when is it experienced? Does it come from circumstances matching our expectations and prayers or as Jesus is trying to tell us, from a completely different direction, a direction we can choose anytime, even in a driving rain watching muddy footprints trailing off on newly laid floor.

Dave Brisbin | 1.8.17

The beginning of 2017 also marks the first anniversary of a dear friend’s death—his suicide to be truthful. Can’t help the re-flooding of mental images and emotion imprinted almost exactly a year ago on a rainy Wednesday night when I got that first phone call. And yet, a year later, an email from his sister says that after a year, having now been put into contact with me and all of us as result of her brother’s death, to lose a brother but gain new friends that have become so important in her life carries its own “strange beauty.” That phrase, strange beauty, sticks with me like flypaper on the brain, and I realize that she had captured so much of what life is really about. Seeing the strange beauty all around us that is always present, but disguised or invisible because of the mental judgments we make on what is good or evil in the narrow window of our emotional vision. To breathe through the hardest times and keep breathing until the strange beauty of watching new life always following any ending, any death—giving it time to coalesce, trusting that it always will-- is another hallmark of Jesus’ Kingdom.

Dave Brisbin | 1.1.17

The beginning of each new year, with its imaginary line in time, has also become, or has always been, a time for reassessment and for resolutions for the new year. We all have made them and break them almost as quickly. Stats show that 97% of new year’s resolution won’t be kept and 30% will be broken in the first week. Why is it so hard to keep new year’s resolutions? Because they are lifestyle changes that can’t be kept solely in our minds. No matter how resolved we may be mentally, it’s only in living, day to day, in new directions that we remain resolved. And this is why it’s also so hard to follow Jesus. We’d like to believe that our spirituality is really a mental affair: a one-time pledge of allegiance to a creed or the correct reading of scripture leading to a permanently correct theology and doctrine, but Jesus’ Way is really a radically different lifestyle that can only be followed with ongoing movement. All day every day. Remaining resolved has to do with letting go of our fascination with “bucket lists,” those things we want to do once before we die. Jesus’ Way is not a bucket list and salvation is not what we do once. Because we are not defined by what we do once, but by what we do over and over, all day, every day.

Dave Brisbin | 12.11.16

In the run up to Christmas, what does the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew have to tell us that is relevant to our day to day lives and choices? Especially, what are the details in those narratives that, understood from a first century, Jewish point of view, can not only make the story real, but clue us in to the central principles the authors were trying to convey? When we know what the word that has been translated as “inn” really means—start erasing our modern western concepts—the story takes on new life. The essential details of mangers and inns begin pointing us in the right direction: toward the personal character and circumstances of Jesus and his family, their status as “anawim” those so destitute that they have only God as their provider…dependent, vulnerable, yet fully grateful and present even to their poverty. Francis of Assisi, who 800 years ago returned himself and his followers to the state of anawim, was also the first to recreate a nativity scene, a full nativity play, in order to recreate the experience of mangers and inns in a truly life-transforming way.

Dave Brisbin | 12.4.16

With all the big news happening constantly, especially leading up to and from the presidential election, it’s easy to get caught up in the all these pressing macro events and even obsess over them, become the stereotypical political junkie, environmental junkie, or whatever. But regardless of what is happening in the macro, our lives are always lived in the micro—one moment and one person at a time. Often, focus on the macro becomes a way of avoiding our real life’s work in the micro. What is our basic purpose in human life? What does Jesus have to say about our priorities and where our emphasis should be placed? If he’s really telling us that the quality of our lives is always determined by the quality of our micro relationships and our ability to be fully present to them, then questions and choices become much sharper in focus.

Dave Brisbin | 11.20.16

When a person gets up to accept and award or honor, whether a politician to a movie star, I’ve always wondered what exactly is meant when he or she inevitably says they are “humbled” to accept this award. That statement can be authentically heartfelt and can mean many things, but if we really break down what humility means, is it really humble? What is humility and why does Jesus hold it as such a primary value? In Jesus’ stories and parables, it is obvious to scholars that he is tapping into the ancient Jewish tradition of the “anawim…” those who are poor and lowly, meek and gentle, those who have been oppressed and marginalized to the point that they have nowhere left to turn except directly to God. Jesus was born anawim to anawim parents, and what he’s really pointing to is that we are all really anawim, completely dependent on God for every breath, if we would only see the truth. And that is the real point: that as AA puts it, humility really is stark raving honesty—the ability to see ourselves as we really are. Completely dependent and imperfect, yet completely loved and accepted at the same time.

Dave Brisbin | 11.13.16

Nearing the end of a year of almost constant change, worn out, ready for some sort of plateau or break in the action, the realization reaffirms that there is no plateau. There is no time in life that change isn’t constantly in process. Sit for a few minutes and watch the shadows move across your living room—subtle reminder of just how fast things are really moving in our lives. Most of us don’t like change, but if we’re not changing and moving, we’re not part of the action of God’s spirit, which is always in motion, always bringing change. How can we know if we’re resisting change in our lives? It can be pretty sneaky the way resistance creeps in and takes over our character, but there are three clues implied in scripture that we can use to apply to ourselves and see whether we’re free to blow about with God’s wind or if our heels are leaving dark skid marks behind us.

Dave Brisbin | 11.6.16

Walking my daughter down the aisle on her wedding day was just about everything I could have hoped for in such a moment. She was absolute beautiful in her dress, her mother and I love her groom, the setting and preparations couldn’t have been better. But even in a perfect moment such as this, I was of course aware of fractures between families and family members that had remained either unresolved or unspoken for years, and yet as the evening unfolded, there were moments of reconnection and reconciliation that deepened the experience. I couldn’t help thinking of all the mistakes we’d all made over the past twenty five years, all the hurts and resentments, anger that somehow led to this perfect moment of reconnection. We need to look again at our notion of sin and failure if we’re ever going to see what Jesus is telling us about Good News and the shape of the Way to his Father. Julian of Norwich, a medieval contemplative writer and visionary tells us that “sin is behovely,” meaning useful or necessary to the experience of God’s love. Is there a place in God’s plan even for our sins and failings? Paul seems to think so as he guides us away from law and into the realm of radical grace.

Dave Brisbin | 10.23.16

Why does Jesus speak in such paradoxical terms? Why is he always taking the world as we know it and turning it upside down, inside out, and backside front? There seems to be a way of seeing life from the Father’s perspective that turns it all around in a way that is essential to our spiritual growth and identity. Some people call this moving from a first half of life to a second half of life spirituality. The first half of life dealing with the external tasks and details of accomplishment and acquisition, of identity building from the outside in, and the second half learning to see the deeper task within the task, the universal task that builds identity from inside out. Second half spirituality understands that while the external task is ultimately unimportant in itself, the process of doing it, and doing it well, accomplishes an inner task that is eternally important. Just as the master in the Karate Kid makes his student wax cars in a very specific way—it’s not well-waxed cars that are the goal: it’s the ingrained movement, the muscle memory gained for a very different purpose that will take the kid where he really wants to go.

Dave Brisbin | 10.16.16

One of the most fundamental truths of life is that it all happens, is all contained, in one moment: this moment, this day. Like a person with amnesia who wakes every morning with memory washed, each of us must learn and live everything necessary to fulfill our purpose as humans in the space of just one day, one life, one generation. But because we have the capacity to think beyond the moment—into the abstract, into yesterday and tomorrow, and because we fear the finality of our deaths in this life, we project purpose and meaning into the future, into a legacy that exceeds our own space and time. We want to be remembered, revered, to make a mark that will last. We live our lives working to build, accomplish, impress, and grow, and we do this until we realize none of that matters, that what matters remains elusive in spite of all effort. In his book, Ecclesiastes, Solomon poetically expresses these concepts in his ruthless search for what is truly meaningful. And though the book at first glance reads as a deeply depressing and hopeless view of the human condition, little gems punctuate the raw reality of his observations. These gems, when uncovered, are our signposts to real, simple, and immediate purpose and meaning. To the realization that after all, this life is not an exterior journey, but an interior one that is always bounded by this moment, this day, and this generation.