True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 9.15.19

Our main mission at theeffect is to reintroduce Jesus to Western people. To meet Jesus again for the first time is to meet an ancient, Eastern Jesus who can speak again for himself, stripped of two thousand years of Western commentary and interpretation. And looking at Jesus through the eyes of those who followed first, hearing him from his own context and worldview, what is the essence, the foundation of his life and message? That’s what we really want to know, but to simply know is only an open doorway. Jesus’ real message is about what happens when we walk through and what it costs to walk through. To say that Jesus’ essential message is love is both true and misleading at the same time. The Father’s love that Jesus is trying to convey is so absolute and radical that it levels each and every one of us in the sameness of its indiscriminate covering. We strive our entire lives to be different, to be above, beyond, better, bigger, than others in order to be noticed, loved, and accepted. But what Jesus is trying to show and tell us is that when love is perfect, we’re not loved because we’re different, we’re loved because we’re the same. God’s love levels us before it lifts us; we can’t have one without the other. And if we’re not willing to accept the leveling, the sameness of the love and ourselves, we can never experience the lifting. As we work so hard to get God to overlook our flaws and focus on our accomplishments, reeling off our justification for ourselves, God is simply waiting for us to take a breath so he can interrupt and say, relax, it’s alright, hush now…you had me at hello.

Dave Brisbin 9.8.19

One of my most indelible memories is freefalling from twelve thousand five hundred feet. All these years later, my skydive remains both a clear memory and a clear metaphor. To do an accelerated freefall— jump without a jumpmaster strapped to your back, meant eight hours of training on the ground. And all day long I felt the fear growing until it was at the base of my throat as I stood holding the edge of the open door of a plane looking down at over two miles of air. As long as I was holding the door, I had a choice to jump or not…and I also had fear. But as soon as I pushed off, after the initial shock, I settled down to the business of doing what I was trained to do. Once the choice of whether to jump was removed and a sequence of events started that would end at the ground one way or another, all that was left was to trust the people who had jumped before and survived, my training and the bedsheet on my back, and to simply enjoy the ride. The fear was gone. After my jump, I began to realize how much life is like this. We’re all skydivers; you’re freefalling right now, where you sit reading this. Since the moment we were pushed out of our mother’s fuselage, we’ve been falling to the ground of our death. We didn’t choose to jump, but we’re falling and the only thing left to do is what we know to do in terms of how to fall with those around us, trust those who have jumped before us who tell us we’ll survive our contact with the ground, and enjoy the ride. We crave clarity, but it’s really all about trust amid the breathless uncertainty of the fall.

Dave Brisbin 9.1.19

For past few weeks, we have been working through paradoxes, seeming contradictions—sticking points to being able to really trust our spiritual journeys. And nothing seems to stick us more than the difficulties, traumas, and sorrows of life. How are we supposed to understand them and their meaning in our lives? We’ve been programmed by church and culture to see them as evils in life, signs of God’s disapproval, chastisement, or correction—to be avoided or prayed away. But Jesus has a very different take that is illustrated well by Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet—that joy and sorrow are pulled from the same well, that joy is sorrow unmasked, and that the more that sorrow carves into our being, the more joy we can contain. What is Jesus saying when he tells us we’re blessed, fortunate, when we mourn—that our mourning is also the source of our comfort? There is a relationship between joy and sorrow that has nothing to do with the good and evil labels we typically attach. As we look deeper, we find that both joy and sorrow are not contained in the person, place, or thing in front of us, but in the condition of our own hearts. When we open our hearts to another, it is an absolute certainty that we will feel both joy and sorrow over time. And if we close our hearts to prevent the sorrow, we also prevent the possibility of joy and our ability to follow Jesus into Kingdom.

Dave Brisbin 8.25.19

My wife suggests I speak about hope, and I’d been given some hope this week, but in a way that is a bit harder to express than I’d like. Had a dream of a conversation with an old friend who took his own life just over three years ago. It was a full role reversal, where I—who’d been pastor and counselor in our time together—was now student as he was counseling me. And I can’t remember anything he actually said, but it was the way he said it that was arresting: with a presence, a calm assurance, gravity, and confidence that he didn’t display in life. And all the emotion that I realized I hadn’t fully processed in three years welled up in me, and all I could croak out was, “I miss you so much.” And his wordless reply was the centerpiece of it all. Just a look that didn’t include sadness or regret or even sympathy. There was a knowing in his eyes that said he recognized my pain and my fears, but that he was part of a different reality now, an unbroken connection that I could see as well, right now if I so chose. The dream has stuck with me, and as I think more on it, my friend’s wordless message restates the teachings of our Hebrew scriptures from Genesis to Jesus, and tells us that as bad as things can get here in this life, the whole universe was created for us as a nest in which to grow and find our purpose. And in that nest, nothing of what we really are is ever at risk. We have everything we need to find that different reality that looks like presence, calm assurance, gravity, and confidence in unbroken connection. Was pretty hopeful to me.

Dave Brisbin 8.18.19

It’s no secret that religious vocations and church attendance and membership continue to decline in the US and West in general. But even so, as religious affiliation and participation declines, more and more people, especially young people are describing themselves as spiritual and finding ways to express that spirituality. And the direction of the shift is nearly always in the same direction—toward a contemplative, even mystical spirituality. Considering three stories: a Carmelite order of nuns formally shifting back to ancient rites and rituals, a young Southern Baptist man who converted and became ordained into the priesthood of the Eastern Orthodox church, and a young Pentecostal man who moved to the Unitarian church and then on to discover the contemplative Christian tradition all tell this same tale of a need for a deeper, more rooted spirituality. It’s as if we in the modern West are feeling a collective need, the presence of a missing piece of ourselves, much like the phantom limb phenomenon in which amputees still feel their missing limbs. We know we’re missing an essential piece and are looking to find it in more rooted and ancient forms that anchor us to something much larger than ourselves. When we look again at Jesus from a Hebrew point of view, from the Beatitudes to his time in the wilderness, we see the same longing in Jesus to find the missing piece he found in his Father. If we desire, we can let our phantom limbs guide us back to the spirituality Jesus first practiced and taught and find what he found along the way.

Dave Brisbin 8.11.19

There is a persistent emphasis on submission and identity in Jesus’ teaching pointing to an obvious relationship between the two. Jesus is telling us that there is something that we can learn about identity from submission that we can’t learn from dominance—the constant focus and striving for dominance and power over others and our circumstances. And since Jesus always couches his teachings in the relational realities of daily life, especially the relationships within families, we can look at another basic reality of life for more clarity: eating and drinking…food. Food and the need to eat stands at the very center of life and culture. All our activities orbit the kitchen in our homes and meals in our relationships, but what can they teach us? In The Prophet, Khalil Gibran makes the statement that since we need to kill to eat, eating should be an act of worship and our tables an altar on which our food is sacrificed for what is purer and more innocent in mankind. What does it mean for our meals to become worship? What is worship really? And is there a more expanded meaning that Jesus calls worship in spirit and truth that can help us find another way to submit in life and point us more emphatically to our identity in Father?

Dave Brisbin 8.4.19

In trying to get his message across, Jesus doesn’t speak of abstract theological concepts but always couches his teachings in the relational realities of daily life. Starting with the basic relationships in each first century home—husband and wife, parents and children, master and servant—his implication is that if we can’t experience Kingdom there in those relationships, we won’t experience it anywhere else either. His emphasis on questioning the sense of identity these family roles give us, especially present in first century Jewish life, is the first step toward finding a deeper identity in unseen Father. Just as husband and wife need to maintain their own separate identities even as they join as one in marriage, parents need to respect and foster their children building identities separate from themselves. Jesus is showing us that taking our family roles as identities can both harm other members of our family and keep us from finding the freedom of true identity. To see roles as how we play out our spiritual identity in physical life, to allow ourselves to submit to each other within those roles, builds the humble servant leadership and vulnerability that is both Kingdom and our deepest identity—oneness with Father.

Dave Brisbin 7.28.19

I love our Jude-Christian scriptures. I’ve been studying them for the past twenty-five years or so and trying to live by their precepts. But I didn’t always love them. In fact they have baffled me, confused, angered, annoyed, and outraged me for decades until I learned to read them in a way that seemed closest to the way in which they were written. That required reading through an ancient, Hebrew context. When we do that, sense, common sense, and a hold on common decency returns to a text that otherwise appears too alien to be of much spiritual service. To take one example, a contemporary Christian woman, who is also a feminist, can’t accept Paul and Peter’s instructions for a woman to submit to her husband. Submission has become a four letter word in our culture especially among women, minorities, and those who’ve been marginalized in our society. And when such passages link submission in marriage to submission in first century slavery, how can we possibly read such passages in a way that retains the credibility of the books I say I love? It’s all about the context.

Dave Brisbin 7.21.19

A four day trip to the mountains with parents-in-law becomes contemplation by circumstance as everything slows and quiets down, adjusting to the pace and rhythm of our elders and the mountains. With everything we do and identify left down the mountain, without the noise, distraction, and activity that keeps us from considering the quieter, more interior parts of ourselves, what is left? Who are we then? What is the meaning of our lives here? The mountains remind that it has something to do with giving—the giving of ourselves to a moment and all who share that space. But giving is a loaded word in religious thought where it becomes a moral command to care for the poor or our church or the necessary mirroring of God’s nature that precedes a blessing back. But if giving is a command, then it’s just an obligation, and if it’s a prerequisite to a blessing, then it’s a transaction, and if there’s any amount designated, then it’s a tax. We need to look at the six aspects or traits of giving as Jesus taught and are illustrated in Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet to see how giving and a sense of meaning in the mountains are related.

Dave Brisbin 7.14.19

On the seventeenth anniversary of his ordination, Pastor Dave talks about the journey and what he’s learned about the meaning of following a spiritual path that only a certain amount of following can convey.