True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 7.10.22 What is the goal of our spiritual journeys? How would you answer for yours? Peace, love, enlightenment, wisdom, salvation? It’s unfortunate that we haven’t been clearer about Jesus’ answer to the question: that following his Way to the Father allows us to know the truth, and that truth will make us free. Freedom is the ultimate goal, because without freedom from the fear that...

Dave Brisbin 7.3.22 The 4th of July comes round again at a time when faith in our country has been deeply shaken. We are questioning our most enduring institutions right down to the Constitution and Founding Fathers’ motives and wisdom, with some saying we need to scrap the whole thing and start over. Second American Revolution. Considering the angst, seems appropriate to paraphrase Winston Church...

Dave Brisbin 6.26.22 If you’re serious about following a spiritual path, you have two major roadblocks to overcome: your mind and your body. Your mind, storehouse for the dualism of your egoic consciousness, constantly talks to you—comparing, contrasting, judging. Your body, storehouse of your emotions, drives unconscious behavior patterns with childhood conditioning, memories, guilt, shame. Neces...

Dave Brisbin 6.19.22 Physical survival depends on how well we manage and compete for finite resources, a zero sum situation in which there’s only so much oil in the ground, and our share always comes out of someone else’s. Winners and losers. So we can be forgiven for embedding a scarcity mentality so deeply in our psyches that we pin it on God as well—keeping us forever fearful and defended, the...

Dave Brisbin 6.12.22 I’ve developed a three year rule: if you’ve been with someone for three years and still not sure you can commit, answer is no. Not absolute, but after three years, if you’ve been up close and paying attention undefendedly, you’ve seen enough to know a person’s nature. It’s the same with God. A mistake we make is thinking that Jesus’ Way is the way to heaven, the way to God’s a...

Dave Brisbin 6.5.22 Anything that can’t be measured always looks the same. Think on that for a second. All our minds really do is measure. Compare, contrast, create differences and distinctions. Without something to measure against, the measureless thing always looks the same: far out at sea—featureless water in all directions, cloudless sky, starfield. Always look the same. God’s love has no degr...

Dave Brisbin 5.29.22 In 1205, Francesco Bernardone, Francis of Assisi to us, had another worldview shattering moment. After a series of shattering events including being held prisoner of war and becoming deathly ill led him to renounce his father’s wealth and reconfirm his faith, he was praying in the crumbling chapel called San Damiano. In a vision, the painting of Jesus on the wooden panel cross...

Dave Brisbin 5.15.22 After twenty-nine weeks studying the Sermon on the Mount, can we say in one sentence what this masterpiece is all about? If not, we’ll be lost in detail and miss its intent. Speaking strictly for myself, the Sermon is a radical exercise in deconstruction: a ruthless and unapologetic tearing down, upside downing, of the world we think we know: life and love, ethics and spiritua...

Dave Brisbin 5.8.22 A woman who grew up in a painfully patriarchal Christian sect, told me she was uninterested in attending a Mother’s Day church service that simply gave roses to moms. She’s been trying to understand her place as a woman in a faith that seems to be all about men...subjugating women. Starting with God as Father. We know all about our Father. Why is there no mention of our Mother...

Dave Brisbin 5.1.22 It’s amazing how differently we hear things depending on our emotional and intellectual investments. Sometimes when counseling couples, I actually see words changing meaning in the air between one partner’s lips and the other’s ears. It’s all about what we’re prepared to understand. We hear what we’re prepared to hear. It’s the same with scripture. At the end of the Sermon on t...

Dave Brisbin 4.24.22 Jesus gave us just one Way to experience the oneness of the Father, which when followed looks like presence, emotional regulation, and vulnerability. But this Way remains elusive because it’s nothing less than the complete deconstruction of our egoic consciousness—everything we think we are and have—in favor of a truth we can only see when everything false is removed. Very har...

Dave Brisbin 4.17.22 It has always struck me that the gospels tell us nothing about the resurrection of Jesus. The central event around which Christianity orbits is left entirely offstage. The gospels pick up the story after the resurrection has occurred and focus not on the event itself, but the effect it has on Jesus’ friends. The gospels are telling us, with their own gaze, where to look, what...

Dave Brisbin 4.10.22 Our fears define us, make us see everything through the pain of our unmet wants and needs—or the compulsive need to hold on to what we think we already have. If we’re afraid of change, it’s because we’re invested in our status quo and see change as a threat to our powerbase. If we’re afraid of no change, we feel marginalized and oppressed, victims looking for a savior to fix o...

Dave Brisbin 4.3.22 When we were kids, my sister did a paint-by-numbers of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. You remember those…a canvas board with a printed outline of an image, jigsaw-puzzled into numbered patches to correspond with paint colors. She worked day by day, filling in the patches with the right colors, and when she was done, if you stood about a block away, the colors fused into a whole in you...

Dave Brisbin 3.27.22 Ever think about why you’re here? On this planet? Breathing? Maybe you have no idea, or maybe you have answers that will most likely have to do with accomplishment—things we do that give us a sense of meaning and purpose. But if Jesus and Brene Brown are right, we’re here to connect, to be at one with each other. All the rest is commentary. Could it be that simple? Could human...

Dave Brisbin 3.20.22 I’ve been going on about Jesus as a poet. A great poet. And if that sounds strange and unfamiliar, how about considering that Jesus was a great psychologist too? Jesus deeply understands the human condition and human psychological development, and in the poetic language of his day and choosing, articulates a Way to psychological health and balance for which we all crave and pa...

Dave Brisbin 3.13.22 Jesus is a very good poet. Like all good poets, he never tries to tell us what can’t be rationally told, but helps us sneak up on the feel of the experience. In short word-bursts full of image and metaphor, he shows us the effect of life lived as one with everyone and everything, while evoking the radical difference of the experience of getting there. He says, “the kingdom of...

Dave Brisbin 3.6.22 One of the world’s top psychiatry journals published a study on the source of emotional disorders, and the takeaway was that “depression and anxiety are linked to an intolerance of uncertainty.” Intolerance of uncertainty. Says it all. Don’t know if we needed a study for that, but good to know the science validates common sense. We can’t even know tomorrow’s weather with certai...

Dave Brisbin 2.27.22 A pastor came with us to Mexico to deliver food and supplies to one of the poorest areas along the US border. Our organization supplied five dining rooms that served before-school breakfasts, and the women who served the children every morning insisted on serving us lunch, because that was who they were. After lunch the pastor sat the women down and through an interpreter, led...

Dave Brisbin 2.20.22 Does anyone ever really change another person? Fix them? Lord knows we try. And though we can persuade, manipulate, even force people to do what we think they should, that’s compliance or obedience, but not change. We can help people: support them, talk to them, change circumstances, create the best environment for change, but any one of us changes only at the moment we’re rea...

Dave Brisbin 2.13.22 The reality we believe is the reality we endure. What we believe about reality becomes our experience of it and shapes our lives so profoundly that we don’t see reality as it is—only what survives the filter of our worldview. Because this is true, every responsible philosophy and religion on earth teaches some form of non-attachment, stepping aside from entrenched beliefs to m...

Dave Brisbin 2.6.22 A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it…from Frank Herbert’s Dune. But we won’t see the truth of this until we first see the process. Ancient Hebrews called God’s spirit ruach: breath, wind, and spirit all at once. Defined by motion. A process. Ancient Christians called God trinity, which...

Dave Brisbin 1.30.22 What is the goal of the spiritual life? After all, if you’re going to spend the time and energy to engage spiritual formation, don’t you want to be really clear on the goal? After counting off peace, love, joy, salvation, redemption—all of which would be really good to have, it’s clarifying to see how Jesus answers: if we follow his Way of living and loving life, we will know...

Dave Brisbin 1.23.22 Jesus is relentless. Never lets us rest in old ideas. Or even new ones that have become set and quickly growing old. Like a personal trainer always spurring us on to one more rep, he systematically deconstructs any thought or behavior pattern that, regardless of original value, has now become a limitation. Whenever we feel we’ve arrived: at right action, right thinking, or rig...

Dave Brisbin 1.16.22 We call people passive-aggressive so casually these days, it’s likely we’re no longer sure what it means. Just as guerrilla warfare is an indirect way of opposing a much greater force, passive-aggression is an indirect way of getting what we want or expressing anger and frustration without directly confronting another person. But where guerrilla warfare is a conscious tactic t...