theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin 7.5.26 Truth is messy. We like the beginning of things, especially big things like nations, to be neat and tidy events, so looking back, we compress them into just such neat narratives. Our histories and memories rely much more on poems we write about our heroes than actual happenings. True beginnings are most often a messy process that scatters and diffuses the points we want to reme...

Dave Brisbin 6.28.26 Eucharist—usually called communion—is the essential Christian sacrament, the centerpiece of Christian worship. When a sacrament persists for millennia as a defining ritual, it’s telling us something about how earliest followers understood their journey. It can also tell us what we’ve forgotten about ours. Eucharist means thanksgiving…because Jesus gave thanks over bread and wi...

Dave Brisbin 6.21.26 At the extremes, physical reality is utterly different than the world we perceive each day. Unlike our solar system with distinct planets neatly orbiting the sun, inside an atom, an electron doesn’t orbit a nucleus, but has a form that can only be described as a cloud of probability. It doesn’t orbit. It surrounds the nucleus like a fog. Quantumly speaking, electrons are in su...

Dave Brisbin 6.14.26 God is love. That’s not just a statement, it’s a principle. Attributes we experience as the infinite Source of everything go far beyond qualities we use to describe. They point at essence, a table of indivisible elements, commodities that comprise the whole. If God is love, then God is also everything else that supports the oneness that love is: restoration, reconciliation, sa...

Dave Brisbin 6.7.26 Man on his roof as flood waters rise. A boat paddles by—jump in, and we’ll save you. No, God will save me. Another boat—jump in, we’ll save you. No, God will save me. A helicopter hovers extending a rope ladder—climb up, and we’ll save you. No, God will save me. Flood comes up, and the man drowns. Face to face with God, he asks, why didn’t you save me? I sent two boats and a he...

Dave Brisbin 5.31.26 Sin is central to Western Christianity. From original sin—understood as a genetic state of depravity, a separation from God unbridgeable by human effort—to our own personal sins—understood as unlawful behavior—all we can do is wait to be saved by an outside power—understood as an event, a granting of approval triggered by ritual practice or mental assent to doctrinal beliefs....

Dave Brisbin 5.24.26 When Jesus says, do not judge, for in the way that you judge, you will be judged, and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you, he is saying something immense. But we don’t get it. Squeezed through our default perspective, which is always legal, we see life through a performance-based, reward and punishment paradigm that peels off just one of the possible meanin...

Dave Brisbin 5.17.26 Jesus never told his friends to worship him. He told them to follow him…not conceptually or theologically or even physically, but to follow his Way of living and seeing. To worship Jesus as savior is a passive waiting for transformation to be gifted from outside in, a static bestowal for which we conform, not transform. But Jesus insists that the awakening that is Kingdom is n...

Dave Brisbin 5.10.26 God is love. What does that even mean? If we define love as nondual presence, consummate oneness, then the scriptures are trying to tell us that God is fully identified with each and every speck of creation. That God, us, everything are ultimately of one and the same substance. Love is the experience of that oneness, awareness of that identity. To be in love is to be relieved...

Dave Brisbin 5.3.26 We think we understand the scriptures because we can read them in plain English. But just as we never want to see our sausage being made, we have no idea the interpretive choices being made to translate ancient Eastern texts for modern Western minds. A word for word translation between any two languages is not possible. We’re not just translating words, but an Agreement of mean...

Dave Brisbin 4.26.26 What’s worse than not knowing something really important, the trauma of uncertainty? Not knowing that you don’t know is worse. Complete unawareness of a really important thing is a step back from, a block to the ability to even begin seeking. And what’s worse than that? Thinking that you do know when you don’t. Thinking you already know closes your mind, creates resistance whe...

Dave Brisbin 4.19.26 When we beg Jesus to save us, we’re missing the point of salvation. Salvation is not given to us. Can’t be. Salvation is experiencing, remembering, the primal truth that we already have everything there is from a God who is love, withholds nothing. And what is that everything? Heaven? Understood as God’s acceptance, identification with us, yes, heaven. Right now? Here? Doesn’t...

In baseball, you count absolutely everything. Gets pretty obsessive, but if you love baseball, you learn to love counting too. Who knew it’s the same with religion? The “people of the book,” the ancient Hebrews who wrote the scriptures Christians cherish as well, counted everything. But their numbers didn’t have to be accurate to be true. Literal accuracy was not the point. Hebrew numbers, like th...

Dave Brisbin 4.5.26 There’s not a single tenet of Christian doctrine that’s not contested. Even within Christianity. The Resurrection is no exception. Christians agree that Jesus lives, but not how…physically, spiritually, collectively, some way we can’t imagine? Ultimately, it’s a matter of faith shaped by how literally we read scripture, but where can we go for guidance to meaning? Of course, th...

Dave Brisbin 3.29.26 Gospels show Jesus riding into Jerusalem not on a horse, as would a conquering king, not on a donkey, which would have meant peace, but on the colt of a donkey…even more unassuming. The people cheer, beg him to save them, lay their cloaks along his path, wave palm branches—greetings for a savior king—while Roman and Jewish authorities see threat of sedition and plan accordingl...

Dave Brisbin 3.22.26 I’ve been on the whole of Lent about how the holy grail of all spiritual work, of Jesus’ teaching, even our most ancient liturgical rites is…awareness. Waking up inside waking life. Until we can poke our heads above the waterline of our egoic selves, we’re only ever seeing the inside of our eyelids, nothing of the real that is not only all around us, but within as well. We can...

Dave Brisbin 3.15.26 The earliest followers of Jesus understood that his Way of spiritual formation was about subtraction not addition—that there is nothing to acquire, no kingdom out there to make us whole. That everything there is, is already within, herenow, if we will only relinquish everything in our minds that blocks us from experiencing that reality. Our uniquely human egoic consciousness i...

By all accounts, Eric Liddel, immortalized in the movie Chariots of Fire, was the embodiment of an old soul. At age 22, he won a gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the 400m race for Britain, and after over twenty years as a missionary to China, died there at age 43 in a Japanese internment camp at the end of WWII. But the real story lies beneath such events. The movie turns on the contrast b...

Dave Brisbin 3.1.26 A few years ago, a billion painted lady butterflies fluttered over our heads migrating from inland deserts to the Pac Northwest. Was a very wet winter, and the high desert that usually get three inches of rain in a year, got that in a weekend. All the dormant seeds waiting in the cracked soil burst open, blanketing the desert floor in a spectacular bloom. Started the cycle of l...

Many of us who grew up with Lent hold dark memories of being forced to give up favorite things as penance for our sinfulness—even before we could really sin—with the implied punishment of self-deprivation as preparation for Easter, but more deeply as appeasing an angry God. Whatever the doctrinal intent, without further teaching, this is what we kids absorbed: a cementing of the reward/punishment...

Dave Brisbin 2.15.26 The number of people in South America who say they no longer affiliate with a religion has doubled over the past decade, but unlike the US and Europe, the number of atheists and agnostics has not grown from a small part of the population. With no loss of faith, Latin people continue to pray, meditate, and participate in rituals drawing from Christian, Indigenous, African, and...

Dave Brisbin 2.9.26 There seem to be two Jesuses in the gospels. The first is the unconditional-love-Jesus who accepts and sits with anyone who will sit with him, regardless of moral or social standing. This is the Jesus who says: Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Then there’s another Jesus, a turn-or-burn-Jesus who sets performance criteria between us an...

Dave Brisbin 2.1.26 Asked by email: Do you believe the Bible? That the plagues of Moses, long day of Joshua, fiery furnace of Daniel really happened? Just the way the question was posed mirrored our view of scripture. In other words, if I don’t believe that each event literally happened, I’m not believing the bible. For the past five hundred years in the West, we’ve been equating accuracy and trut...

Dave Brisbin 1.25.26 Ever heard a line so impactful you thought, I wish I’d said that? Few days ago, I ran across a line attributed to the one-time road manager of the band ACDC…of all people. To be fair, he did become a pastor and a kind of pop theologian: God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape. Oh yeah, I wish I’d said that. The invisible man is standing in front o...

Dave Brisbin 1.18.26 Before Scott Adams—the creator of the Dilbert cartoon and pundit/podcaster—died recently after a long bout with cancer, he released a video stating that he “planned to convert” to Christianity. A lifelong religious skeptic, he had Christian friends imploring him to convert before it was too late. He appreciated their sincere concern and said if it turned out that at death he s...