True North with Dave Brisbin

The Purpose of Life by Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 3.30.25

Burning bush is our cultural meme, idiom for a peak experience, a vision of God or from God. But for all its power, one burning bush is not enough. Standing on holy ground in front of the original burning bush, Moses argued with God, doubted God’s word right there, and for the rest of his life, oscillated between boldness and doubt. Just like any human. But how in the world is a burning bush not enough for permanent transformation? How could that not change us without a doubt?

A burning bush, a moment when ultimate reality breaks through the veil between heaven and earth, is a glimpse of life through God’s eyes—everything connected, everything literally one substance. The human view of individual form and function falls away. Seventeen years into his monastic experience, trying to find holiness through cloistered separation from secular life, Thomas Merton had an experience in downtown Louisville at the corner of 4th and Walnut. In the middle of the busy shopping district, he was “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that he loved all those people…that the whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream…”

I have friends who have described similar experiences. I’ve had my own, and we’ve all seen burning bushes of varying intensity at times of great love and great loss. They don’t last because they present a paradox, and our minds, ever dualistic, see every paradox as a threat to certainty, convert it to a contradiction, then choose a side to relieve the tension. But that tension is the whole point. Wrestling to fit a too-big God view into the too-small human experience of daily life keeps the vision alive while keeping us grounded in our daily activities.

We need burning bushes as ballast for our sacred tension, but they are rare, come unbidden. We can’t create them or control them, but we can become increasingly aware when they are happening while working to create the perfect environment in our hearts for them to occur. Ride the sacred tension, living each day as the possibility of another surprise, another burning bush moment of seeing life through God’s eyes. Always new, alive, one.

Dave Brisbin 3.23.25

Remember taking math tests in school? Remember how you had to show your work? Remember how you hated that? Wasn’t enough to get the answer, you had to show how you got to the answer. Yes, a right answer, or at least a functional one, is important. But showing your work signaled that you grasped underlying principles that would give you repeatable results, a platform on which to build.

Mathematics understands that the how is at least as important as the what. That any answer is only valid within the context of the process of the solution. How we do what we do defines us and our work.

In scripture, this process is symbolized by the number forty—a time of trial and testing leading to spiritual rebirth, the necessary work of transformation that just takes time. After Jesus’ baptism, he sees the spirit of God and hears God’s voice. A divine download if there ever was one. Yet he is immediately impelled into the wilderness for forty days to face his wild beasts. After the Damascus road vision, Paul spends fourteen years in Arabia for his forty. Elijah after Mount Carmel, the Israelites after the Red Sea crossing, Jacob after the dream of his ladder, the disciples after the resurrection…all faced fortyness after their downloads. But why? Shouldn’t a direct download from God be enough?

We can be converted in an instant. Accept a premise, have an emotional response to a mystical encounter, a view of heaven—life seen through God’s eyes—a breaking through the mind’s illusion of separateness to the realization that everything is one thing, that we are never separated or alone. Problem is, we’re still living here on earth. Gravity still rules, and that gravity-defying vision creates a nagging paradox we compulsively want to resolve. But life doesn’t resolve, and learning to fit God-reality into the too-small details of human life takes time. Forty.

However intense, any download is only momentary. Will not last unless we wrestle with the paradox long enough to assimilate, push into muscle memory a single view of two ever-oscillating realities: heaven and earth. There is no other way.

We have to show our work.

Dave Brisbin 3.16.25

Mid-century dancer Martha Graham said that no artist is ever satisfied with their work at any time. That there is a strange, “divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest” that keeps them marching and more alive than others. This is a blueprint for excellence and recipe for disaster depending on whether a balance can be maintained. We’ve been applying this blueprint to our spiritual lives, and balance is no less critical there.

The power in Graham’s statement lies in the paradox of living positively in a state of dissatisfaction and unrest. Far from blessed, we see those states as negative, and if we think of dissatisfaction as discontentment with our current circumstance, they are. But looking at dissatisfaction as the opposite of complacency—being so satisfied with our own abilities and situation that we see no need for improvement or possibility of growth—opens a door.

In spiritual terms, there is always more in heaven and earth than we can hold at any moment. Like drinking from a fire hydrant, we are aware of the flow, but our mouths can only hold so much. We see how much is getting past us, yet we’re not thirsty. Each moment is just enough; filled right to the brim, no more or less. But if we’ve avoided complacency, we can use our dissatisfaction, the awareness of the flow, to stoke our desire to grow and be able to hold more of that flow in the next moment, which will also be just enough.

Always a delicate balance. So easy for divine desire and anticipation to slide into obsession, where powerfully intrusive thoughts create distress that require compulsion, repetitive physical and mental behavior, to relieve the distress. But like compulsive hand washing over an obsession with germs—it’s never enough.

Every one of us needs dreams and goals, desire and hope, something to plan and work toward. Without a striving for excellence, human life loses the sense of meaning and purpose that makes life worth living. But if dreams become obsessive and work compulsive enough that we never experience our moments as enough, dissatisfaction is no longer divine. Merely discontented. Keeps us marching, but less alive.

Dave Brisbin 3.9.25

Years ago, at the lowest point in my life, a friend invited me to her church, marking a return to Christianity after fifteen years away. First thing, I booked a lunch with the pastor, and halfway through, across my untouched plate, he said he saw “divine dissatisfaction” in me. Strange phrase. I didn’t see anything divine in my dissatisfaction or speed-questions, but then, there I was. Asking a pastor.

Years later, I looked it up. I’m pretty sure he didn’t know he was quoting a dancer. He was much more a football quoter. But Martha Graham said that artists have a divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest, that keeps them marching and more alive than others. Pastor saw that unrest in me. Though it didn’t feel divine or blessed, it certainly was motivating. Kept me marching, desiring, seeking, doubting. I doubted everything I’d ever been taught about spiritual life, which only made me desire it more.

Remember Doubting Thomas?

When the rest of the Twelve of Jesus’ inner circle said they had seen Jesus risen and alive, Thomas says he would not believe until he literally put his hands in Jesus’ wounds. That one line has made Thomas a meme for faithlessness for two thousand years and counting. But is that fair? Every one of Jesus’ friends doubted. None of them recognized him when they first saw him again, their doubting minds filtering out the possibility of the impossible until they had a personal experience that broke them through to new reality. Thomas was the only one honest about his doubt, bold enough to state it, and we’ve punished him for it.

All Thomas said was that he was dissatisfied with a second-hand report, hearsay. That only a personal experience could break him through to trust the impossible. Thomas is our hero, showing us doubt as a gift. It stokes us with the dissatisfaction we need to admit that even the Bible is a second-hand report. It points us toward our own personal experience, but it’s not the experience itself.

This Lent, can we see our doubt and dissatisfaction not as weakness, but a gift…a divine call past hearsay to a personal experience of the new life Easter represents?

Dave Brisbin 2.23.25

Do people really change?

Seems maddingly rare, especially the older we get—the way is narrow and gate constricted—but it does happen. Why are some of us able to make fundamental, personal change, beat the odds that imprison the rest of us?

Joseph Campbell introduced the monomyth, the hero’s journey, the one plotline we use over and over in all forms: stories, poems, songs, movies. This universal story of transformation follows the three-part structure of a classic rite of passage. First, separation from the life and world we know, often forcefully through a wounding or traumatic event. Second, risky transition through an unknown and dangerous landscape where something is required of us before we can return home. And third, reincorporation back where we started, changed by the experience with a new role to play and ability to match.

Transformation stories are faithfully retold in all media, but especially in the case of movies, can be deceiving as they neatly wrap in two hours. We know life is messier, that one journey is not enough, not the end of the story. But even movies are relevant, distilling patterns of meaning that can make the difference between being a hero in our own story or not. If we’re paying attention, stories make us aware of these patterns in daily life, begin to see that fundamental change isn’t the result of grand adventure, but of pushing through resistance to change with small, simple choices that start a domino effect leading us to grand adventure.

Stories help us see that if we want fundamental change, we can intentionally work backward through the chain of events that leads to our goal until we arrive right where we’re standing, having now identified the beginning of the journey…a small choice we can make, a step we can actually take.

Can we begin to see in each moment, in our smallest decisions, the seeds of adventure? The whole of life in one uncertain step? Make friends with uncertainty as the engine of change? Say yes more than no and love the dead ends of our choices as much as the fruitful branches?

If we can, we can change. Beat the odds.

And that is the purpose of life.

Dave Brisbin 2.16.25

Life is big, loud, in your face.

Like an over-the-top extravert, life can suck all the oxygen out of the room, leaving little energy or attention for anything else. And against life’s overwhelming physical realities—whether personal or political, socio-economic or relational—the spiritual can seem like a whisper we’re not even sure we heard…naïve, even irrelevant to our most pressing needs.

I understand why spiritual leaders often change lanes into the socio-political, big macro issues. It’s like getting off the sidelines and into the game, something solid to grasp, a side to take, a cause to champion…all driven by the legitimate belief that spirituality is only as authentic as it is present in all our physical relationships—personal and communal.

It’s a chicken and egg thing.

Which comes first, spiritual formation or the championing of causes? Of course, they work hand in glove, but because life is pulling relentlessly to the physical, we need to act as our own counterweight, pulling back toward the spiritual. Not because spiritual awareness is better, “righter” than our physical lives, but because spiritual awareness is underrepresented in daily life and needs special attention. Spiritual formation builds the awareness of who we really are: not individual entities, but part of the whole of everything that is, including each other in all our diversity and disagreement. And when this awareness of oneness is informing our choices, it changes the way we approach the championing of our causes.

We can’t separate our spirituality from our physicality. Each is lived out in the presence of the other, defined in the context of the other. And neither is more important than the other as long we’re breathing here. Human life is a balancing act. Each of us needs dreams, plans, and the hard work of accomplishing them—the “not yet” side of the equation. But if we’ve not mastered the ability to live that work with a sense of grateful completion right now, to balance now and not yet, if we confuse our work with the spirituality that propels us to it, we remain billboards for the human problem.

Not a solution.

Dave Brisbin 2.9.25

Quote from a movie priest: There comes a time in man’s search for meaning that you realize there are no answers. When you come to that horrible, unavoidable conclusion, you either accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching...

I remember how obsessively important it was to get answers to the big theological and existential questions about religious doctrine, miracles, healings, prayer, heaven, hell, death, afterlife. At a certain point, in the midst of all the contradicting voices in my ear, I had to admit that I just couldn’t know for certain. I put a symbolic stake in the ground at the point of the Father’s love as a way to hold on to the one thing I did know.

But I wasn’t ready to stop searching.

Then life happened—marriage, divorce, births, miscarriages, achievements, failures, sitting with others facing cancer, amputation, suicides I never saw coming, healings and reconciliations I never saw coming—and those questions that had been so all consuming grew smaller, toothless, more and more irrelevant until only the love remained. I understood why Jesus boiled it all down to loving God and others, and then even further…love each other as I have loved you…as if even God didn’t require mention.

Mother Teresa described her work with the poor as loving God in his most distressing disguise. In her life-prayer-work, she had accessed momentary nondual states in which she glimpsed everything as one thing. God in everything, everything in God, no division or separation. We don’t love God directly or abstractly in prayer, ritual, worship. Those practices help us cultivate the nondual moments we need to see God in each other, to know we only love God by loving each other. There’s no other way.

We’d like to bottle those moments, store nondual data as certainty. But it’s like breathing. We breathe just enough for the moment, breathe again for the next. We can’t store air, but each breath is just enough for us. We can’t store answers to unanswerable questions. But all we know for sure, the oneness of love, is just enough for us, if we simply stop searching for answers that add nothing to life.

Dave Brisbin 2.2.25

Would Jesus have been a Republican or Democrat?

What seems like the setup to a joke is being asked in all seriousness. Two weeks into a controversial administration, I’m hearing people ask how a good Christian could possibly vote… How a Christian pastor could possibly support… An Episcopal bishop and a sitting president both state that God is on their side while remaining flatly opposed to one another. Near the end of the Civil War, Lincoln said that both North and South read the same bible, pray to the same God, invoke God’s aid against the other, but the prayers of both could not be answered, that of neither had been answered fully.

Once we see an enemy, we imagine God is on our side, because we only have an enemy if we are certain we are right. An enemy is the wrong one. God is never wrong, so God is on our side, because we are right. Blaise Pascal said that people never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Truth is, the real enemy is not the other tribe—

the real enemy is the certainty that makes the other tribe an enemy.

We’re all co-opting God to our side, our tribe. It’s natural for anyone who reveres Jesus, or the authority of his name, to imagine he is in their camp. But what does the record show? Jesus made his own followers crazy, over and over…every time they became certain of their positions, thought they had him figured out, domesticated, he rocked them back on their heels. For anyone with an agenda, he was frustrating, infuriating, unexpected, outrageous, an equal opportunity offender of anyone who was seeing the enemies of their certainty.

Jesus refused to be co-opted into any camp. Whatever political beliefs he had are not preserved in the gospels, meaning they were irrelevant to his message. They never created enemies for him because his primary identity was not in camp or tribe, but in oneness with his Father. If we can only see truth in our own tribe, we’ll see enemies everywhere, but we won’t see Jesus. He’s in the space between camps, where the real enemy is not another tribe, but the certainty that makes enemies of everyone else.

Dave Brisbin 1.26.25

One of the best-known stories from the gospels, one that has seeped into collective consciousness, is the story of Jesus walking on water. This and turning water to wine has become shorthand for divine power. It’s natural for us to focus on the literal, but all Jesus’ miracles have spiritual meaning as well, and since most of us will live full lives never walking on water, the spiritual meaning is more relevant. Especially when Peter asks Jesus to bring him out on the water, and we can suddenly see ourselves as participants in miracle making.

But Peter gets out a few steps, sees the waves from his new perspective, and starts sinking, screaming for help. Jesus puts him back in the boat saying, you of little faith, why did you doubt? How many times have Jesus’ words been aimed at us when we’ve expressed the least bit of existential uncertainty? But is doubt as uncertainty really what Jesus is rebuking? The word translated as doubt comes from a root that means twice or again, so we can understand it as second guessing ourselves, wavering in resolve as we ruminate.

The boat is our little island of rational thought floating on a chaotic sea of unconscious mystery. We take a breathlessly non-rational step out of the boat, a leap of faith, then immediately start thinking rationally again, fearing again. It’s our human cycle of surrender and refortification to embedded thought that limits our ability to follow Jesus to truth that liberates.

We don’t have little faith when we stop thinking we mentally believe. We have little faith when we start thinking again and stop acting. Faith is not thought. It’s acting as if what we say we believe is true enough to carry us on the surface tension of uncertainty. The nonrational ability to act in the presence of doubt, step out of the boat of all our very good reasons why not.

Little faith is not much doubt. It’s the need for much certainty. Keeping the faith is not steely-eyed adherence to mental concept. It’s the embrace of uncertainty, accepting we will never have enough information to step out of our boats. We just do. Over and over. Until trust replaces certainty.