True North with Dave Brisbin

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 | 4.8.18

Moving past the Resurrection and anticipating the spiritual filling of Pentecost fifty days later, is there a model for the shape our days if we’re living a spiritually aware lifestyle? What does that look like? Jesus teaches and demonstrates all through the Gospels of course, but the nation of Israel itself shows most clearly the ideal of what day to day conscious connection to God looks like. Leaving Egypt, Moses establishes a law that takes Israel out of the death and next world obsession of Egypt and places all the emphasis on immersion in this world, herenow. And perhaps more to the point, the promised land the Hebrews eventually occupy in Canaan had no major river or natural water source that would support irrigation and agriculture as Egypt had. Israel had to rely on its annual rains, the Yoreh and Malkosh, the early and latter rains that fell in fall and spring and without which there was no sustenance. You can harness the flow of a river, but not the rains. To be completely dependent on the heavens, on God in heaven, to be deeply connected and aware of the movement of wind and weather herenow, to pray humbly for provision while working hard in preparation and celebrating gratefully for the blessing of the rains captures the post-Pentecost lifestyle as well as can be.

Dave Brisbin | 3.25.18

On Palm Sunday, what is the importance of the details of Jesus’ big entrance into Jerusalem that kicked off what turned out to be his last week before crucifixion? Do we focus on historical facts that occurred nearly 2,000 years ago or on spiritual truths as immediate as our next breath? Standing behind all the historical details are rich symbolic truths that point us in an inescapable direction: that Jesus was not coming as a conquering national hero, but a humble, spiritual servant of anyone and everyone in his path. But of the four main groups of people watching him ride by on the colt of a donkey, none saw who he really was. Each group saw what they wanted to see, colored by their needs and ambitions: a warrior messiah set to overturn the Roman occupation, threat to power and tax bases, the chance to rise to relevance and power... Shortly before all this, Jesus asks his closest friends: “Who do you say that I am?” That is still the central question today for anyone who sets off to follow Jesus. Are we just looking through our own need and ambition, or are willing to go through the painful, risky process of letting all that go so we can see who Jesus is emphatically telling us he is. And are willing to let that truth change us radically from the inside out?

Dave Brisbin | 3.18.18

The central question for any who calls themselves Christian or a follower of Jesus has to be the one Jesus asks his followers--and by extension all of us--in Mark 8, “Who do you say that I am?” The question has as many answers as there are followers most likely, but how do we come to the best answer that we can muster as a group? Leonard Sweet comes to our rescue with the term EPIC, which for him is an acronym standing for Experiential, Participatory, Image-based, and Communal. He has said that this is the way the youngest generations among us process information as opposed the older generations of the Modern world who are Propositional, Representational, Word-based, and Individualistic. The differences are profound in terms of worldview and attitude toward life, but the immense relevance really hits home, when we realize that the ancient peoples who wrote our scriptures were EPIC too. Our interpretation of ancient, EPIC scripture has been arrived at through anti-EPIC glasses and has been colored by attitudes and beliefs alien to the writing. If we are going to answer the central question of Jesus’ identity, we first have to tackle how it is we are asking and the means by which we ask.

Dave Brisbin | 3.11.18

On the fourth Sunday of Lent, trying to re-imagine Lent as time of sensory deprivation in order to clear away all that distracts and obscures God’s face, if we’ve begun practicing moment by moment awareness, if we’ve begun to confront our limiting beliefs and obsessive behavior patterns and become willing to overturn those interior tables, what truth starts to become apparent? Jesus gives us a big clue traditionally read on Maundy Thursday of Holy Week. During the Last Supper, he strips off his mantle and tunic, wraps a towel around himself and kneels in front of each of his friends to wash feet. It’s hard for us as modern Westerners to comprehend the full scope of this outrageous action, or to understand Peter’s violent reaction. But Jesus is showing us something absolutely profound, something we have to be prepared to see, as Peter and the rest of the room as yet were not. By showing as radically and graphically as possible that he was an unassuming, humble, servant leader, Jesus--as one and the same with the Father--is trying to convey that our God, the creator of heaven and earth, is also an unassuming, humble, servant leader who lives to serve us…to kneel and wash our feet. If we, like Peter, are outraged by this image of God, then we need to spend more time seeing what things look like from kneeling height.