True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 4.14.24 What would you say is the most damaging personal attitude to life in general and spirituality in particular? Fear, anger, hatred? What about passivity…and its close cousin, victimhood. Passivity is sneaky, because it isn’t immediately discernable as a vice, but the lack of will to respond actively, proactively, even to resist when that is necessary, keeps us from participating...

Dave Brisbin 4.7.24 We just finished counting the forty days of Lent that ended with Easter, only to begin counting again, this time to 49 plus one that will take us to Pentecost. Each counting is a time of preparation, but for what? Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, and Pentecost the moment his followers engaged the full weight of spirit, but these were superimposed on the Hebrew celeb...

Dave Brisbin 3.31.24 Easter Sunday Ever wonder why the resurrection accounts in the gospels are written the way they are? We crave details and explanations for the event itself, but the gospels are uninterested in satisfying our obsession with certainty. The central event takes place offstage, and the story picks up after it happens, following Jesus’ friends, their reactions and choices. The gospe...

Dave Brisbin 3.24.24 Western Christianity has largely failed us in its primary responsibility: to preserve Jesus and his teaching and help us engage. Focused on law and punishment to the point of legalism; ritual to the point of superstition; scarcity to the point of passive petition; outcome to the point of dismissed herenow, an authentic Jesus and his message have been left behind. One little pa...

Dave Brisbin 3.17.24 What do humans look like when they break through their own thought-created worlds—all about survival, controlling competition—and become present to the real world around them? I remembered the movie Chariots of Fire, based on a true story set around the Paris Olympics, 1924. It contrasts two runners, a British Jew, Harold Abrahams, and a Scottish Christian, Eric Liddel. Abraha...

Dave Brisbin 3.10.24 The reality we believe is the reality we endure. We don’t see reality as it is. We see reality as we are. Our minds are a necessary tool for survival, but keyed to survival, they are fear-based, making our thoughts overwhelmingly negative as they literally create the world in which we live. As long as we’re thinking, we’re enduring a world we believe we must control to survive...

Dave Brisbin 3.3.24 Decades ago, I met a Christian who converted to Judaism, eventually becoming a first century Jewish follower of Jesus. He spoke of his personal theology, a stated set of personal beliefs. I’d never considered such a thing. Growing up Catholic, theology belonged to the church, as if God had written it, and the church discovered it, parceling it out each Sunday. Unquestionably tr...

Dave Brisbin 2.25.24 When Jesus rolls into Jerusalem the week of his execution, there are major mixed emotions in the crowd of onlookers. The common folk are chanting and cheering as the authorities, both Jewish and Roman, hang back, concerned over any shift in power. Jewish leaders tell Jesus to quiet the crowds, but Jesus replies that if these were silent, the very rocks would cry out. Just pret...

Dave Brisbin 2.18.24 We’re still in the first days of Lent. If you didn’t grow up in a liturgical church, you may not know about ashes on foreheads, confession and penance, fasting and giving up candy bars or some other treat for forty days. And even if such memories are part of your past, you may have as much to unlearn as others have to learn about Lent. For nearly 1,800 years, the forty-day per...

Dave Brisbin 2.11.24 What churches and religion inevitably forget—as does every human group—is that their laws, doctrine, and practice are not ends, truth in themselves, but pointers, guides to non-rational truth that must be personally experienced, never bestowed. Thomas Huxley said that new ideas begin as heresy, advance to orthodoxy, and end in superstition. Belief systems practiced for a lengt...

Dave Brisbin 2.4.24 Some things are too big to grasp all at once. Like those Nazca lines in Peru…geoglyphs laid down on a windless plateau around the time of Christ—so big you can only see them from the air. Other things are too big to grasp within the limits of rational thought. You need greater perspective to see, not altitude, but a step outside conscious thought to the wordless awareness of pu...

Dave Brisbin 1.28.24 Familiarity breeds contempt usually means that the more we know people, the more we can lose respect and judge more harshly. If contempt seems too strong a word, at least the more familiar things become, the more they blend into the wallpaper until we don’t even see them anymore. And when those things are religious scripture and doctrine, we may be so saturated that we believe...

Dave Brisbin 1.21.24 Disciples of a spiritual master come to his home only to find him on hands and knees in the front yard. He tells them he lost something of great importance, so they fall in to help search, hands and knees, eyes straining. After some time, they ask where he had it last, where he might have lost it. Oh, he says, that was inside the house. Then why are we searching out here? Beca...

Dave Brisbin 1.14.24 Dualism is a sneaky worldview. Worldviews themselves are sneaky. We don’t often realize we have one, that we experience life through cultural and self-imposed filters—it’s just reality as we’ve come to believe it is. Dualism divides our view of reality into opposed and contrasted aspects. The most obvious is mind and body or material and immaterial. But once you have drunk the...

Dave Brisbin 1.7.23 Psychology tells us that all human neuroses are caused by our intolerance of uncertainty. Think about that for a minute. As children, everything is unknown, uncertain, but we don’t know we’re naked so we accept each moment as it presents without question. Everything is as it should be until we get hurt, and when old enough to conceive of tomorrow, we first fear the uncertainty...

Dave Brisbin 12.31.23 Another new year that’s promising to be as crazy as they get. After the past three years, that’s saying something, but a contentious election on top of escalating world events make it a contender. Anticipating this, we wonder why things can’t just settle. We look for resolution to contentions and contradictions, but when does life ever resolve? There’s something deep in us th...

Dave Brisbin 12.17.23 We think we know Christmas. Bed-sheeted children reenact the details every year, so it’s shocking to go back to the gospels and see how little is there and how much is merely tradition. All we know about Jesus’ birth from Luke is that he was wrapped in cloths and laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn. All we get from Matthew is the story of Herod and the magi,...

Dave Brisbin 12.10.23 What do we really know about the birth of Jesus? There’s so little information in the gospels, just a few scant paragraphs in Matthew and Luke. Only Luke gives us details of the birth itself and the shepherds’ vision and visit, while Matthew tells of the Magi after Jesus’ birth. All we’re told of Jesus’ birth is that he was wrapped in cloths and placed in a manger because the...

Dave Brisbin 12.3.23 Amid the holidays, ‘tis the season for giving. Expectation and requests bombard from every form of media and family and cultural traditions. Trying to come up with perfect gifts for family, friends, clients, prospects, bosses, those who matter in your life, those who can give back, those who can’t—how much feels like obligation and how much freely blows like wind into the shop...

Dave Brisbin 11.26.23 My good friend these past eight years, a committed member of our faith community, Bob Lang, died last week. I was at his house the night before with his wife and daughter and again the next day after he had passed. Staying connected to him and his family during his illness, I was very glad that last night to have been able to say in his ear all I wanted him to know, hoping he...

Dave Brisbin 11.19.23 Important government official comes to a renowned Zen master and says, “Teach me the ways of Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” It’s more command than request. The master smiles, saying, “Let’s discuss it over tea.” When the tea is ready, he pours for his guest, and pours until the cup begins to overflow, creeping across the table until it runs off onto the man’s robes. He...

Dave Brisbin 11.12.23 You can understand much of human behavior by remembering that we are fragile little creatures living under a death sentence trying to survive and somehow thrive. Fear makes us crave certainty and control, which don’t exist in life but drive our thoughts and behavior in predictable directions, including our religious obsession with prophecy and end times speculation. All enthu...

Dave Brisbin 11.5.23 I’ve continued to receive questions about the war in Israel and related issues, and one of them was very specific and raised an ethical nightmare of conflicting moral imperatives. Got me thinking of the competing ethical systems I learned in school: categorical imperatives—universal laws and duties that are self-contained and always morally right without regard to consequences...

Dave Brisbin 10.29.23 The Israel-Palestine war is kicking up a lot of questions. How did we get here? Why for four or five generations has there been an active volcano in Israel/Palestine that can erupt at any moment? Israelis, Palestinians, and the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all claim the land. Whose land is it? Who is the occupier? Can we make any sense by looking...

Dave Brisbin 10.22.23 In the last line of Matthew 5, Jesus says, therefore be perfect as God in heaven is perfect. Wow. Hearing that for the first time, would it spur you to work harder? Try to hit imagined thresholds? Or feel completely defeated? Shake your head and walk away? Most of us know we’re not perfect, that the human condition doesn’t allow, so exactly what is he asking? Since Jesus said...