True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 10.4.26 A woman told me she had remarried and was having trouble blending families. She had two small children. Her new husband had a huge black Labrador named Tucker. Tucker and the kids left no spot unspotted, filling the house while her husband was working or work-traveling leaving her to remember she was not a dog person, didn’t like dogs, especially this huge thing everywhere at...

Dave Brisbin 9.27.26 Do you have faith? How do you know? Because you believe you believe? What if there’s the slightest doubt? Is it still faith? As long as we imagine faith as mental agreement, we can run round these questions forever without ever really knowing. So Jesus’ brother James comes to the rescue, holding up Abraham as a hero of faith. Promised by God to be the father of many nations an...

Dave Brisbin 9.20.26 In rhetoric—the art of persuasion—there are two basic ways to motivate someone to act. Protrepsis calls to another way of living or perceiving life, motivation to change. Paraenesis calls to continue a way of life already in motion, encouragement and advice to persevere. Biblical prophecy like that of Isaiah is protrepsis—calls to repent, change direction, avert the coming cat...

Dave Brisbin 9.13.26 Years ago, a co-worker became a good friend—a man from India with very dark skin and big, white teeth. When he smiled it was exactly like snapping on a high-powered flashlight. And he was always smiling. I liked him immediately, and we’d go to lunch and meet after work hours as well. Just one fly in the ointment…he was always late. Not just a little. Sometimes an hour or more....

Dave Brisbin 9.6.26 I don’t usually do verse-by-verse scripture studies. Too easy to get lost in details, lose the forest for the trees. Too easy to be consumed with commentary and lose the application to everyday life. Without that application grounding scripture in human relationship and community, we lose relevant meaning. The exceptions are the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of James. Why? T...

Dave Brisbin 8.30.26 Wait, Jesus had a brother? Scripture says he had four—James, Joses, Judas, Simon—and sisters too, unnamed and unnumbered. Not talked about much because Jesus with full siblings, DNA from both Mary and Joseph, blows up the doctrine of virgin birth that most Christianity accepts. If they were half-siblings, Mary having children after Jesus blows up the doctrine of Mary’s perpetu...

Dave Brisbin 8.23.26 Ever awaken at 3:30 in the morning? Doesn’t it always seem to be 3:30? Maybe coming out of a disorienting dream, disembodied in the dark with all it means to be you laid aside? It’s right there in that naked vulnerability that a lot of the work of Jesus’ Way is already done for you… Your clothes are in the closet. Your Rolex on the night stand. Maybe your teeth are in the bath...

Dave Brisbin 8.16.26 Are we human beings having a spiritual experience? Spiritual beings having a human experience? If you’ve been around the contemplative block, you know it’s never either/or, but both/and. Duality exists only in our minds, specifically, our left brains. Once immersed in momentary, right-brain experience, duality dissolves. Physical and spiritual can’t be separated as long as we’...

Dave Brisbin 8.9.26 You may be familiar with an elevator speech. Whatever you have to offer, if you can’t articulate who you are, what you do, why it matters in the time it takes to get to your floor in an elevator, you’ve lost the opportunity. Jesus’ Way is purely experiential, not cognitive, but we still need an elevator speech to concisely understand what it is and isn’t or we’ll be digging hol...

Dave Brisbin 8.2.26 We have always been taught that Jesus came to save us from our sins. Not true. Not sins plural as in all the harmful choices we make or actions we commit. God understands those, loves right through those. In John’s gospel, Jesus came to take away the sin of the world. Singular. Not choices or actions, but a state of being…separate. The universal sin of the world—the pervading i...

Dave Brisbin 7.26.26 Played high school football my first two years. Bookish kid trying to fit in, never got off the bench in league play. But I could learn that playbook. Knew it cover to cover better than the starters. Took some nerdy pride in that. Small and fast, they put me at tight end and during a training scrimmage, quarterback called an end around. I knew that play cold: two steps off the...

Dave Brisbin 7.19.26 A contemporary theologian and semiotician—how meaning is communicated—saw that our youngest generations process information differently than older Westerners in the modern era. He called it EPIC: experiential, participatory, image-based, and communal. Pretty much the exact opposite of our modern method: propositional, representational, word-based, individualistic. We propose a...

Dave Brisbin 7.12.26 If God were sitting next to you right now and you could ask one question, what would it be? Puts a pretty fine point on it, yes? To stop the ever-running assembly line of questions forming in your mind and pick just one… For adults, the questions were predictable: Why do you allow suffering? Don’t all religions lead to you? How can I trust the bible? If you’re really there, wh...

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 5.24.26 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 5.31.26 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 5.17.26 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...