David Brisbin Podcast

Dave Brisbin 12.27.20 It’s the Third Day of Christmas. What does that mean? Three French hens immediately comes to mind from the song. But what are the Twelve Days of Christmas for that matter? The ancient liturgies of Christianity dating back hundreds and sometimes thousands of years have created a yearly cycle of seasons and celebrations that have defined and bonded communities through their common cultural festivals and traditions. We have lost a common liturgical language and practice in the modern West. Strike one, because liturgy is the way a people respond and participate in public and communal worship, and there’s no less need for that now than ever. Strike two is that our culture celebrates the extremes: the biggest, fastest, youngest, first, last, most spectacular or most spectacular failure. Whatever is between those extremes is flyover country, like Kansas or Nebraska—something only on the way to something else, something important. This is the Third Day of Christmas. Like a middle child, not th

Dave Brisbin 12.13.20 How in the world could anyone have seen in a helpless infant, born to dirt-poor parents living in the back of beyond, all that Jesus was and would become? When you think about those who first recognized Jesus—Mary, Joseph, shepherds—the commonality is obvious. They are all as poor and invisible to the rest of the world as the infant in the manger. They have learned to be wholly reliant on God because in their lives, there has been no other constant. But there was one more group who recognized Jesus that at first glance couldn’t have been more different than these. Powerful, educated, wealthy, the Magi were all that these poor Galilean and Judean peasants were not, and yet there they are shoulder to shoulder with the rest in front of the child. Jesus said it would be harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. By Kingdom, Jesus meant the quality and consciousness of a life lived wholly reliant on God, aware of God’s presence and

Dave Brisbin 12.6.20 If you want to find something hidden by a child, how do you do it? After you’ve searched all over the house, you get on your knees, lower your point of view to three feet off the ground and see all the spaces you won’t see from standing height. And if you want to find the truth hidden in Christmas? Even from standing height, all the details of Christmas point to Jesus starting small. Not just a helpless infant like any other, but also an abjectly poor one, invisible to those fixated on the big and powerful. There are no random details in scripture. Every detail is there on purpose, and if we want to know what was hidden in Christmas by the infant Jesus, we need to get on our knees, lower our point of view to see the truth that can guide us through every moment of our lives. And the truth is, as in all the metaphors Jesus used to point to Kingdom—his overall metaphor for the quality of life and consciousness that is full connection with God’s spirit—small things can have huge effects. The

Dave Brisbin 11.29.20 Book of Hebrews tells us that our scriptures are living and active. What does that mean? It means the bible is more than ink on a page. More than the sum of the words. If it’s living, then something happens in the interaction with a reader…when the reader’s heart, author’s heart, God’s heart mix together. If it’s active, it means the words are a catalyst, but that there must be a readiness and willingness in the reader to partner with the words. It means it’s about us as engaged readers as much as God as inspirer. After all, if the message is love, then there must be a beloved. It’s the same with all our human communication. Any sharing is only as effective as the receiving. I used to think my job as pastor was to make others care as much as I did on any given topic. Now I know all I can do is arrange the meeting. Like a matchmaker, what happens after the meeting is entirely up to others. It’s a hard blow to our egos to admit such powerlessness: that like the gardener who works to bring

Dave Brisbin 11.22.20 We’ve always been taught not to mix our metaphors. We lose impact and don’t make sense if we say something like, “not the sharpest cookie in the jar.” Yet Jesus made a ministry out of mixing metaphors…ok, well, he wasn’t exactly mixing them…more layering them, piling them one on top of another. If your message is spiritual, you have no choice. Spirit can’t be quantified in words, only pointed toward. Metaphor is the language of spirit, and Jesus is masterfully fluent. His central and most expansive metaphor is the kingdom of heaven—his way of pointing to a state of consciousness, a quality of life as seen through the Father’s eyes where all things are one thing, completely connected. But knowing we would misunderstand, both then and now, he uses dozens of other metaphors to point to what it means and feels like to live that quality of life, approach it, sustain it. He piles them up and leaves it to us to sort through, to follow where they lead. Jesus may not have mixed his metaphors, b

Dave Brisbin 11.15.20 Last line of one of the great rock songs of all time: You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave… Just as Hotel California was referring to a state of mind, 2020 has become a metaphor as well. A state of mind, an attitude toward life that even if different for each of us, is now etched into our psyches, and will not just leave as we check out on New Year’s eve. The continuous losses of 2020: Covid infections, lockdowns, social unrest, never-ending elections, have become a virtual war of attrition—a war fought not to win, but to wear down the opponent through continuous loss of resources. Who wins a war of attrition? The one with the most resources. Or the ability to renew their resources. We’ve all been worn down by this year, sometimes devastated in our loss of spiritual presence, emotional regulation, psychological balance, sense of humor. For Jesus, renewal of these resources is contained in another metaphor he uses over and over when he talks about gardeners and the

Dave Brisbin 11.8.20 A contentious election is past and yet still continues. In a year like 2020, it seems nothing is straightforward. One thing is clear: we’re a 50/50 nation, divided on a razor’s edge over ideology and cultural issues. We lament the division and animosity on both sides, but politics by definition is managing divisions within a group, not erasing them. Erasing divisions requires totalitarian enforcement; short of that, people will always see things differently. It’s our human condition. Politics done well, focuses on the group’s common purpose—life, liberty, pursuit of happiness—to hold the center while compromising to make decisions for the good of all. But when politics loses its way, fear and corruption pulls the center apart until there is no more overlap, no apparent common purpose. There is talk now of healing and reconciliation. How? Waiting for our leaders may be waiting for a train that never arrives. If we want healing, we need to start with ourselves. We always need to start wit

Dave Brisbin 11.1.20 What happens to children growing up in a house with parents who hold such high standards that they are essentially impossible to please? How do children respond when the only acceptance and approval they know seem wholly based on their performance? When they can never know whether their performance will be enough? Faced with a graceless environment, they can either keep trying to earn acceptance and approval or stop—overachievers and dropouts. Of course, these are not hard categories; we move along a continuum between striving for lofty goals and giving up, but one is generally favored. And what is true for children and parents remains true for all of us in our relationship with God. Graceless churches and theologies produce a continuum from those who follow law, doctrine, and practice as perfectly as possible to be “right” with God, to those who eventually give up the fight. In one of the most vivid stories in the gospels, Jesus is placed squarely between the entitlement of an overachi

Dave Brisbin 10.25.20 Continuing with the theme of grace—the unmerited favor, unconditional love without which there is no gospel at all—we focus on why it is so hard for us to grasp and begin to trust in a way that changes our attitudes and experience of life. The opposite of the concept of unmerited favor is a legal understanding of our relationship with God. Reward from obedience to law is merited, earned, and kills grace because it places us in continuum thinking, seeing ourselves on a continuum or spectrum from good to evil, working toward the point at which we are acceptable to God. Continuum thinking is generally a better way to look at human relationships than categorical thinking that puts people in categories or boxes that can quickly become stereotypes and prejudices. But when it comes to God and God’s love, the continuum breaks down in the face of the infinite nature of spirit. To begin to trust a love that can’t be merited, earned, won, or lost is to take a leap off the continuum. All of Jesus’ t

Frank Billman 10.18.20 Grace is one of the cornerstones of the Christian faith. It is a concept that we all celebrate and eagerly accept because we all know that we need God’s grace desperately. The challenge comes in taking grace from a mental construct and making it experiential – moving it from our heads to our hearts. At the root of our difficulty is the nagging question of worthiness. Does God really love us unconditionally? Can the Good News really be this good? The message today will walk through the obstacles to accepting God’s grace and explore part of the process that takes us there because without grace there is no peace.

Dave Brisbin 10.11.20 A conversation with a friend who was just diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer rivets me. From stomach pain to hearing a doctor say that the metastasis was so extensive that she had maybe two weeks or two months with chemo, all in the space of one Covid-empty emergency room visit… Her twin sister flies in and takes her home cross-country to Pennsylvania where family surrounds. Best place she could be, but she tells me of the anger and depression. Wants to know what she did to deserve to die so young? She fears death and wants at least to make it through the holidays and see her nephew’s baby. She’s angry with God. Feels abandoned, and no amount of prayer brings a sense of his presence. I just listen, asking questions here and there, but mostly waiting for any cue or clue as to how I could possibly help besides just being on the other end of the line. Then she begins talking about her family—her sister and her sister’s children, how much she loves them and they her. Her nephew wh

Dave Brisbin 10.4.20 Have you ever been with someone who was so fully present and focused on you that you’ll never forget the moment? Someone who made you feel at that moment that you were the only person in the world? Or the room at least? Presence is an amazing thing. We can’t easily define it; it’s even harder to practice. But we know it instantly when it is trained upon us. Maybe because it is so rare these days that we instantly know it when we experience the difference. Years ago I had an elderly friend whose presence made me feel completely seen and accepted, and from that example, I can only image what it must have been to stand in Jesus’ presence and have those eyes trained on me. What a gift we give when we give our presence to another person. Why is it so hard for us? And how do become more present? If we look at the ways we can immerse ourselves in the day-to-day areas of our lives, maybe we can find the common thread between immersing ourselves in God, each other, in nature, and in our culture. I

Dave Brisbin 9.27.20 The poet Rumi writes that out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field…he’ll meet you there. When we’re thinking of right and wrong, duty and obligation, law and obedience, we’re assessing our behavior and performance against some standard, and that’s better than not doing so, but it doesn’t make us present to moment and circumstance and whoever shares them with us. Presence is the key to having law and fulfilling it too, as Jesus would say. But presence is elusive and easily misunderstood, because you can be present without being aware and aware without being focused. We need to bring human awareness to the undistracted herenowness we call presence for contemplative prayer, and we need to add focus to presence and awareness to be mindful—focusing only on the task at hand, the person in our path. Jesus said the law would remain until heaven and earth pass away. But the word he used for pass away means to cross a boundary or barrier, to merge into. That field beyond rightness and

Dave Brisbin 9.20.20 Still talking about presence as the foundation of Jesus’ Way and the contemplative prayer that will take us there. When Moses came down off the mountain with God, his face was shining, and when contemplatives and mystics come back from their experience of presence, they say strange things to try to express themselves: “Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.” (Rumi) What are we to make of such words? When Jesus says unless we hate our fathers and mothers, children and even our own lives, we can’t follow him, what are we to make of that? Truth is, trying to understand the words of those who come back from the experience of presence is like trying to understand the equations on Einstein’s blackboard—a dense wall of numbers and symbols that stops you in your tracks with its sheer incomprehensibility. It’s not until there’s enough of a change in our minds

Dave Brisbin 9.13.20 We’ve been talking about presence. Presence as the foundation of Jesus’ Way. Though Jesus doesn’t use the word presence in the gospels, he’s always talking about love, and love isn’t possible without presence. Love is the effect of being present—what it feels like to be present. To be fully present is to be in love. And what is the effect of being in love? Love understood as complete identification with another is a great definition of humility, fully realizing our position as equals in relationship. And what is the effect of humility? Service, of course. Jesus is always talking about service. For him, it’s the proof of a heart inclined toward his Way, kingdom. Service can be done for all sorts of reasons: duty, honor, obligation, reward. But service done for any reason not present in the moment of connection never reflects love or humility. When service is as automatic as breathing, as essential as good food, it becomes less what we do and more who we are. We won’t need to go looking for

Dave Brisbin 9.6.20 I have been talking with people, so many lately, who have suffered tremendous loss. Seems almost like a flood of loss floating on top of the collective loss we’ve all been experiencing this year. Loss of parents and children to death, overdose, loss of jobs, careers and vocations due to Covid and financial downturns. Losses that fundamentally change the ground of a person’s life. Losses that ask a common question of all of us: who are we when we lose a defining part of our lives? We naturally see our identity in terms of the roles we play, the accomplishments we achieve, and the attributes we display as humans, but anything that can be taken from us is not our identity, and everything it means to be human is taken at death, which is why we fear it—who are we then? If you think about it, all our fears in life stem from the basic fear of loss of identity. When we assume we are the voice that talks to us in our heads, the egoic mind, the “false” self or small self of Thomas Merton, we are co

Dave Brisbin 8.30.20 I was asked this week by someone who said he always asks this question of someone he’s meeting for first time: what is the most important thing you’ve learned in life? My answer was immediate. Presence. He was surprised and said that no one has ever answered that way before. I asked how most people answered, and he said either love or virtue. My spiritual journey has been many things over the years from truth to salvation to serenity and peace to love and joy, but at this point it’s all about presence. Without presence first, we won’t find anything else along the way. Presence is the foundation and the way to love—can’t have one without the other. But then, what is the way to presence? Prayer is the way to presence, but only prayer understood in the way Jesus actually taught and lived it. Jesus tells us not to make a show, not to use words, and not even to bring our needs to the table. To retreat to a secret place both interiorly and exteriorly and connect with a Father who knows what we

Dave Brisbin 8.23.20 There are two basic ways we make choices. The first is with judgment—applying all we have experienced and learned to a particular situation or circumstance. We’ve been taught all our lives that it is wisdom to exercise good judgment. Then Jesus tells us not to judge. Are we supposed to throw out all the programming, the learned and experienced data of a lifetime that has helped us survive? Of course not. But when it comes to personal relationships and spirituality, a preprogrammed response necessarily brings the biases and stereotypes that kill relationships by allowing us to make decisions about people without ever being present to them. Which bring us to the second way to make choices: to choose what love requires. What does love require? First and foremost, it requires presence. Love is not possible without presence: being connected, one with the beloved. When it comes to our relationships with the people around us all day long, our relationship with the unseen spirit in all of creatio

Dave Brisbin 8.16.20 Watching a spider hanging for days motionless in its web up in a remote corner of our ceiling gets me thinking about the purpose of a life lived only to keep on living. Obviously spiders have purpose in the ecosystem, but many people have been telling me during this pandemic lockdown that they feel caught in a Groundhog Day time loop, where every day is like every other, purpose and meaning falling away, depression taking their place. While it’s true that may of the activities that used to give us a sense of purpose whether related to work, church, sports, or entertainment have been restricted or eliminated, where does meaning and purpose really come from? Purpose that survives any difficult circumstance or loss in life? When Jesus is facing his own death, he shows us what he craves most in the garden of Gethsemane. He takes his three closest friends with him and asks them to be with him the way a child may ask someone to stay with them till she falls asleep. Jesus has lost a sense of pre

Dave Brisbin 8.9.20 When I first began working in recovery, I heard an AA oldtimer emphatically say that he was grateful to be an alcoholic, and I couldn’t process that statement. How could alcoholism be a good thing? But now a couple decades later, I see how for him, the pain and trauma of his alcoholism created a hinge moment, a point in his life, because of his choice for recovery, that angled the trajectory of his life in a new direction, like an alternate timeline in those time travel movies. Hinge moments are usually only seen in retrospect, years later, but what if we could get a sense of them when they are actually happening? How would that help us step up to the challenges we face and put purpose behind the pain that allows us to overcome? If we consider the shape of the Hero’s Journey—the one story plot we’ve been telling ourselves since we’ve been painting on cave walls—we can get a sense of the shape of our longest journey from birth to death. But we can also begin to see that life is a series of