True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 12.01.19

Why is there so much depression and anxiety at Christmas? One psychologist writes that there are three reasons: the demands of time, preparation, activities, and finances; family dysfunctional issues that are highlighted during the season; and inability to meet expectations placed on us both physically and emotionally. When you think about it, we first experience Christmas as children—learn what our culture says it’s supposed to be through a child’s eyes. And it’s a perfect storm for children: from three feet off the ground, the lights, decorations, candy, treats, magical beliefs, gifts, suspense, and anticipation create a breathless wonder. How do we expect to recreate all that through our adult eyes, looking at a different world from six feet off the ground? To recreate Christmas as our hearts remember it, is to recreate the world in our hearts as the child sees it. This is Jesus’ message to us—that the Kingdom he’s leading us toward is only experienced from three feet off the ground, from the standing height of a child or the kneeling height of a servant. And the genius of the Magi is that for all their learning and power, they retained enough of the attitude of a child to recognize in a poverty stricken infant the king for whom they traveled so far. For us, as in the O. Henry story, The Gifts of the Magi, we see how our full presence to each other in love recreates the abandon of the child that recreates the Christmas our hearts remember.

Dave Brisbin 11.24.19

In the run up to Thanksgiving, we take a pause to ask if anyone knows who established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in the first place. Our thoughts tend to go back to Pilgrims and Native Americans collaborating, but it was surprising to most that it was Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, who instituted Thanksgiving. This is ironic on two fronts: that Thanksgiving was born in the middle of the darkest period in American history, and born of Lincoln, a man of near constant depression at the most stressful time in his life. What allowed Lincoln, as he put it in his Thanksgiving proclamation to see the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies, and the continued beauty of the land and its people outside the theater of conflict? And how did he continue to acknowledge the divine source of that beauty and fullness in spite of his own personal loss and that of the country? Gratitude is an amazing thing. People choose to embrace or not, it seems, based on their ability to see gifts all around them that they could never have given themselves. And even as they work hard to earn their way through life, entitlement never takes permanent residence in their hearts as they come to understand that though we may rearrange the furniture, the house is still a gift beyond our imagination.

Dave Brisbin 11.17.19

Launching a new book is a crazy process. An all-consuming process. A process that takes on a life of its own and sweeps author and marketing team up into a whirlwind of deadlines, strategy, tasks, and emotion. But what does it all really mean? A book hopefully has meaning poured into its pages, but once it becomes a product to be sold, is there any real meaning left— to it and the process of selling it? As with all the tasks, causes, careers, and activities of life, where is the meaning? Maria Montessori said that play is the work of the child, and toys are the tools of that work. We dismiss child’s play as inconsequential and look to our work in the adult world as significant and meaningful. But just as the real meaning of child’s play lies in the motor skills, socialization, and problem solving being learned, the real meaning of the processes of the adult world lies in the humility, vulnerability, interdependence, and connection in relationship that we are learning if we’re paying attention to the tasks within the tasks we engage. The tasks themselves are like the play and toys of the child—inherently meaningless. But if we become aware of the inner task, of what we’re really doing as we do what we are doing, then a whole new world of meaning opens to us.

Dave Brisbin 11.3.19

If we really accept Jesus’ original challenge to “sell” everything we think we know and cling to for support and survival, what happens? What changes? The short answer is that we descend into a time of voluntary disorientation and disturbance sometimes bordering on panic as we realize our whole worldview wasn’t actually reality but just a set of beliefs, a filter on the world that we chose for ourselves or was chosen for us. And once we’ve looked behind the curtain, everything changes. But to be more specific, if we’re looking at the church and our faith, what changes and in which direction? In his book, a Quaker pastor describes ten new ways to look at Christian faith and church—ways that are possible to see and accept only after we’ve let go of our preconceptions and inherited beliefs. Can we find support for these new directions in the teachings of Jesus? And if we can, then these new ways of looking at church aren’t new at all. They are the reflection of Jesus’ original intent that we can only see with the new eyes we grow on the other side of Jesus’ challenge.

Dave Brisbin 10.27.19

In speaking about the pain and disturbance of breaking out into larger spheres of awareness—being born again intellectually and spiritually—an ancient Chinese philosopher says, “you can’t speak of ocean to a wellfrog, the creature of a narrow sphere; you can’t speak of ice to a summer insect, the creature of a season.” To that I would add, “you can’t speak of perfect love to a human being, the creature of a broken heart.” Our broken hearts, as surely as the frog’s well or insect’s lifespan, wall us off from something so far from our imagined reality as to be inconceivable. How is it possible for us to break through the hurt, trauma, and need for defensive posture just long enough to glimpse the ocean of God’s love? The quick answer is faith—reeling off from the book of Hebrews that without faith it is impossible to please God. But that verse, so often used as a club over the head of the slightest admission of doubt or vulnerability, as if faith was the power we wield over uncertainty and vulnerability, flies in the face of a careful look at what the writer of Hebrews is actually saying. Faith is not the end of doubt, but the beginning of trust—the action of living as if what we say we believe is actually and already true, which brings us out of the narrow birth canal of our limitations and into the bright hugeness of a bigger bite of truth.

Dave Brisbin 10.20.19

Continuing on the previous week’s theme of Playing the Scriptures—finding the inspiration of scripture in the real time connection between inspired author, God, and inspired reader—what is our real relationship with scripture? The Quran, Islam’s sacred book, calls Jews and Christians “people of the book,” noting our special relationship and reverence for the text. But this focus on the text of scripture itself, the need to intellectually understand it as God’s revelation to humanity, has only brought two thousand years of division and persecution, resulting in tens of thousands of Christian denominations worldwide today. Is there another way to read scripture that heals divisions and brings us back shoulder to shoulder in shared meaning and purpose? Seems that is exactly what Paul is trying to do in his first letter to the Corinthians as he tries to heal the divisions among people focusing on different teachers with different interpretations, pledging allegiance to different factions among themselves. Paul is pointing, as Jesus did before him, to a graduation from passive listening and mental assent to an active participation in God’s presence that begins where our understanding ends. That mere obedience to intellectual understanding is the milk of infancy, but the solid food of maturity lies in seeing the book, the teaching, as the reflection of a life that has experienced a conviction that can’t be contained in words.

Dave Brisbin 10.13.19

It is so interesting that bible scholars and commentators for two thousand years have agreed on very little that they read of God’s word and have violently disagreed often as not. And yet the mystics and contemplatives among us seem to unanimously agree on everything they know of God. Maybe it’s not so strange when you consider that scholars are reading words and mystics are experiencing presence, but do written words and unwritten experience necessarily lead to different results? Only when we get so immersed in the words that we lose sight of the experience they were originally meant to convey. Just as written music in notes and bar lines is not the music itself but a bridge between the sound in an inspired composer’s mind and the sound from the hands of an inspired performer, the words of written scripture are not God himself, but the bridge between the experience of an inspired relationship with God and the inspired experience of the reader. Both written music and scripture are meant to be performed, not merely read. Before there was scripture, the writers of scripture had dreams and visions and experiences with the presence of God and each other to guide them, and what they wrote of that experience became our scripture. We now have their scripture to guide us as well, but our experience—our dreams and visions and awareness of presence are all part of the way we must play the scriptures if we are ever to read God’s word the way it was written.

Dave Brisbin 10.6.19

Some twenty-five plus years ago, I walk into the office of a Franciscan priest, bible in hand, to debate a specific doctrinal issue, and before I can get more than a sentence out, he puts his big hand up in the universal stop sign and says: All I can tell you is what I’m convinced of. You go become convinced of what you’re convinced of. At the time, it seemed a supreme evasion, but as years went on, I realized it’s the only thing one person can say to another about the deep things that really matter and can only be proven to ourselves by ourselves. And now as a pastor these past seventeen years, how many times have I said the same to someone with bible in hand as an opening to a very different conversation? The genius of Jesus is to recognize that the truth that really sets us free can’t be transferred to our heads as second hand knowledge, but only applied directly to our hearts as first person experience. The Way of Jesus is an active partnership, a way of living with God, not a passive learning exercise. And he’s calling us to engage at every turn, to find out what we’re convinced of by living the effects of what we say we believe. To speak with the authority of Jesus or a brown-robed Franciscan priest means to have traveled the path ourselves to find the convictions of our own hearts—not someone else’s.

Dave Brisbin 9.29.19

If you ask anyone what they really want out of life, you’ll get a variety of answers from health, wealth, relationship, family, love to meaningful work, purpose, a cause, making a difference to peace and serenity. But why do we want all those things? Because ultimately we believe they will make us happy. But happiness may not be the right word because it implies emotions that are ephemeral. Contentment. Solid, reliable, evergreen contentment. Ultimately, if we have that, we have it all. But we know the stories: people who have most or all items on those lists, still don’t have contentment. So what is contentment made of? Where does it come from? What will reliably make us content? Imitating Jesus, the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the third and fourth centuries left their cities, towns, and villages to live in the seclusion of the deserts of Egypt and Judea in search of the truth that would make them free enough to be content. Their stories give us the clues we need to understand that contentment does not play by rules that are immediately apparent at the surface of life any more than the bedrock topography that keeps a dune field in place can be determined by studying the lines in the surface of a sand dune. As we stop trying to defend rules, laws, codes, theologies, and other standards—lines in the sand constantly blown about by God’s spirit—we can move deeper into the bedrock principles that even as they first appear to defy the lines we so desperately try to defend and obey, will bring us finally to the contentment we desire.

Dave Brisbin 9.22.19

Years ago, I drove all the way to Death Valley deep in the Mojave desert, arriving late at night so I could walk out into a dune field under a really dark sky to see the stars. I wasn’t disappointed. The vast canopy turned overhead with the band of the galaxy angling across, and from my dunetop perch, I felt close to the stars. But was I any closer there than here in the city where I can count the stars on a couple of hands, or during the day when no stars pierce the blue curtain at all? Truth is, the stars are just where they are all the time, whether we can see them or not. And more mind bendingly, there are stars beneath our feet as well. It’s just that the ball we’re standing on always obscures. God’s presence is like the stars—always there whether we see/feel it or not. To realize that God’s presence overhead can be obscured by the rising of our nearest star—our own consciousness, and God’s presence beneath our feet is hidden by our focus on the needs of our physical lives and our very worldview. To conceive of a presence that is everywhere at once, equal density and distribution like the stars in every direction, is a first step. But meditatively practicing the setting of our conscious thought stream to create a dark sky for God’s presence overhead, and mindfully practicing the sensing of God’s presence beneath our feet during the whirlwind of our daily lives is the experience of a presence that will remain real whether we feel it or not.