True North with Dave Brisbin

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...

Dave Brisbin 3.8.26 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 tur...

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...

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 and God’s love. He’s t...

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...

Dave Brisbin 1.11.26 Back in Catholic grade school, the nuns would walk up and down the aisles drilling us through the Baltimore Catechism. We’d all recite answers from memory in that sing song way kids do. She’d ask, why are we here? We’d answer, to glorify God. Had no idea what that meant. Seemed to include praising God…all the time? I liked praise, assurance I was doing things right, right thin...

Dave Brisbin 1.4.26 The hardest thing to comprehend about Jesus’ Way—what I call the Fifth Way—is its utterly stark difference from the first Four Ways we use to get from here to there in life. They are as far apart as east is from west, which never meet or change direction at the poles like north and south. You’re just always going west until you turn and face east. The Fifth Way is like that. If...

Dave Brisbin 12.28.25 Before he sails off to the Trojan war, Thetis tells her son Achilles that if he stays home, he will find peace. Will marry a wonderful woman and have children and grandchildren who will love him and remember his name. But when they are all dead, his name will be forgotten. If he goes to Troy, he will find such glory that his name will never be forgotten. But he will not come...

Dave Brisbin 12.14.25 Christmas is our biggest cultural holiday, but even among those still celebrating Jesus’ birth, what do we really know about it? Only Matthew and Luke relate any birth narratives, but Matthew tells only of the visit of the Magi, leaving Luke to give all the birth details we have. And there aren’t many. Luke tells us Jesus was wrapped in cloths and laid in a manger because the...

Dave Brisbin 12.7.25 We all know when we go too far. That can be measured. When we cross a line, feel the negative reaction or outcome, we can evaluate and pull back. But how do we know when we haven’t gone far enough? How do you measure a negative, the absence of something? Can’t do it directly, but there is a way. We can measure our disturbance. Not going far enough, means something inside is re...

Dave Brisbin 11.30.25 Gratitude and thankfulness are not the same. I see thankfulness as a positive reaction to a specific gift or circumstance, and though gratitude begins there, it journeys on to a non-specific attitude, a view of life that is all-inclusive, sees everything around us as a gift we could never give ourselves. Once we’re aware that life is the free reception of what we could never...

Dave Brisbin 11.23.25 When I’d tell people the title of my book, The Fifth Way, first question was: what are the first four? That made perfect sense, because you can’t understand the fifth way of Jesus until you understand how the first four operate in our lives. There are several systems that try to explain human behavior in terms of personality types, unconscious ways we process experience and a...

Dave Brisbin 11.16.25 Have you noticed that people fight? Silly wabbit. Of course. Ever stopped to wonder why? Fear. Always fear. Even if it doesn’t feel like afraid-ness, unconscious, overriding concern for personal survival drives us fearward in a zero-sum world where there’s only so much oil in the ground, where the resources absolutely necessary for survival are finite. It’s basic envy and jea...

Dave Brisbin 11.9.25 The founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, was one of the most driven men of our time. His desire for more, his dissatisfaction with the status quo, created a lifelong willingness to strike out in radically new directions. Raised in the Lutheran church, by his teens he became disillusioned, dissatisfied with Christianity-as-practiced and non-answers to his existential questions. He emb...

Dave Brisbin 10.26.25 Book of Genesis tells us that God gave Adam permission to name all the animals in the Garden. It’s not a casual detail. For the ancient Hebrews, authority to name something like a child or an animal, was a symbol of dominion over that something. That’s the point. Control. To this day, Jews do not speak the name of God. But the rest of us continue to name everything in sight,...

Dave Brisbin 10.19.25 As we look farther into the observable universe, dig deeper into subatomic particles, science is coming full circle back to what contemplatives and mystics have always known. One aspect of quantum physics is especially revealing. Called superposition, it’s the mathematical concept that subatomic particles exist in a kind of cloud of probability—a continuous wave—where all sta...

Dave Brisbin 10.12.25 Watching a friend of twenty years wind her way through cancer treatment and now hospice care has been a master’s course in radical, serial acceptance. Just yesterday, to abruptly realize that the cause of her new pain was now moot—that no one was looking for causes anymore, only the management of pain—was another level of reality to absorb. I saw it in her eyes, but just for...