practicing presence

What we think of prayer and speaking with God and how we practice such things may have little to do with how God speaks or communicates with us. Learning more of the nature of God’s communication and native language from the ancient Christian tradition can tremendously help point us in the best direction when it comes to unceasing prayer.

Transparent World

Dave Brisbin 4.21.24

When Thomas Merton gave a final address to his monastic community before retiring to a hermitage in 1965, he was famous worldwide for his spiritual writings. His speech was recorded on audio tape, and I ran across a short clip in which he was talking about the fact that we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, that God is always shining through. God is in everything and everyone, every event, and it’s impossible to be without God. Ever.

We don’t see this fact because we make the world opaque by becoming attached to, preoccupied with things we regard as individual objects—analyzing them as if unwrapping packages, layers of opaque paper, all while missing the larger transparent world. We get to bottom of the pile of paper, only to find nothing there; we were only unwrapping our own thoughts about something, not the thing itself. It’s not until we loosen our grip and lose ourselves in the experience of something that we can stop thinking of it as a thing in isolation and see it as part of the whole of creation, and all of creation, God, shining through its transparency.

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Our attachments keep us from seeing the whole in all the parts. Constantly taking thought keeps our world opaque and hides the truth…no coincidence that taking thought is the literal meaning of the word translated as worry in a series of Jesus’ sayings. He tells us not to take thought, to worry about our lives, what we will eat, drink, or wear. He points to birds who work constantly but don’t store in barns, staying rooted in the present moment without taking thought.

To worry is to live in fear. Fear creates the obsessive need to acquire. In telling us that if we want life that is eternally alive we need to sell everything we own, Jesus is telling us we need to sever our attachments to individual objects in order to see the whole transparent world at once. No matter how essential a thing may seem, if we’re unwrapping it, the world is opaque. An ancient elder said that he sold the book—his treasured bible—that told him to sell everything and give to the poor.

When we can do that, God can shine through our transparent world.

Click here for video recording of full message.

Our Turn

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 in life at all. Anger or hatred, if it’s active, is less harmful than passivity to a person’s return to life.

For someone who sees themselves as a victim, passivity is the norm. A victim isn’t just someone who was hurt, but someone who had no choice in the matter. Choice is key. Once choice returns, so does personal responsibility. How many of us hang on to victimhood as a way of absolving ourselves from the responsibility to change, heal, grow. Not consciously, maybe, but just as effectively passive.

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The church has taught us a largely passive way of spiritual life. Unquestioning obedience to law and doctrine is passive. Yet Jesus questioned everything, resisting where necessary, risking consequences. Believing we must be saved, that God can’t accept us without a savior’s intervention is passive and contradicts Jesus’ life and teaching. He consistently pointed to the Father rather than himself, saw himself as the living Way to that unity, stressed that his followers were to do what he was doing, not be passively saved by his action. His first followers picked up that emphasis by calling themselves Followers of the Way. Not Christians or even followers of Jesus—an essential distinction pointing to the need for personal action.

Jesus’ life and message is all about removing any blocks between us and God, whether the religious authority of his or any generation, or our own fears and victimhood. He is showing us a non-passive Way to approach God directly—and telling that what we’ll find there is good news. That God has already chosen us, has chosen and accepted us since the beginning of time.

There is nothing left for God to choose; nothing left for us to ask for, nothing left to wait for.

God has made his choice. Now it’s our turn.

 

Click here for video recording of full message.

Why We Count

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 celebrations of Pesach and Shavu’ot. Originally agricultural festivals, the people would ritually count seven weeks of seven between Pesach at the spring barley harvest and Shavu’ot at the summer wheat harvest. Over time, simple timekeeping between harvests—seven, the number of spiritual perfection, times seven—became the perfect time of preparation between Pesach/Passover, the physical liberation of the people from slavery, and Shavu’ot, the giving of the Law, a new relationship with God and the spiritual liberation of the people.

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We are now in this count, the time of preparation between Easter, physical liberation from death, and Pentecost, representing spiritual liberation. Jesus told Nicodemus he must be born again, that he was born of water, physical birth, but must be reborn of spirit. Ritually, baptism, represents birth, entry into the tribe, our physical liberation, but too often the story ends there.

Many of us spend entire lives in this count, this time between physical and spiritual liberation, never experiencing another liberation that can only be realized after a descent that strips us down to as basic an existence as if being born all over again. For Jesus, the descent is represented in the wilderness and his time in the tomb. For Jesus’ followers, it is the shock and awe of Calvary that strips them bare of everything they thought they knew, leaving them counting the days to their individual Pentecosts, the moment they break into new relationship, their own spiritual liberation, second birth.

Our journeys have this same shape, and Calvary is the threshold between two liberations. The way to Pentecost begins at Calvary…the moment we think we’ve lost everything is the beginning of our ascent. It’s why we count.

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Feeling God’s Pleasure

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. Abrahams has been embittered by the prejudice he’s suffered as a Jew, and runs for revenge, driven to win and prove superiority over those who despised him. Liddel, China-born to missionary parents, has been preparing to return to the mission field even as he gained stardom in rugby. His sister, Jenny, just as driven as Abrahams in her religious zeal, is dismissive and critical of his athletics; they distract from God.

Liddel tells Jenny, “I believe God made me for a purpose, for China…but he also made me fast…and when I run, I feel his pleasure. To give it up would be to hold him in contempt.” Abrahams runs for revenge. Jenny runs for duty and obligation. When Liddel runs, he feels God’s pleasure.

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Liddel stands apart. Principled to the point he won’t run his 100M race because it falls on a Sunday, he withstands withering fire from his elders including the Prince of Wales himself. Yet, when able to run the 400M instead, as the fastest runners in the world are tensely preparing to run, Liddel casually walks the lanes, sport coat over his running shorts, smiling, shaking hands, wishing each the best of luck.

Liddel was only 22 years old. How’d he do that?

Running was just another place where he felt God’s pleasure: sheer oneness and connection. But seems he also felt God’s pleasure when he greeted his fellow runners, unconcerned at that moment for the race itself, until that became the source of God’s pleasure. Twenty years later, he was still feeling God’s pleasure in China, working with children in the WWII internment camp where he died. Wherever he went, whatever he was doing, he felt God’s pleasure, changing everything.

I don’t know how he felt all this at 22. But with intention and a bit more time, we can all feel it too if we wish.

 

Trusting Mystery

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 of next time.

When fear is great enough that we can’t tolerate the uncertainties of life, the need to create or at least imagine certainty becomes overwhelming. The strategies we use, mostly unconsciously, are our neuroses—attempts at control that emotionally feel better than uncertainty. Intellectually, we know there are no certainties in life, at least not in the big things: life and death, health, wellness, relationship, spirit. But can’t we carve out little certainties for ourselves in the spaces between the big things that can add some tolerance for the rest?

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Think of a child growing up in a home with solid family rituals—times for rising and resting, eating, playing, schooling, birthdays and vacations. Safe, comforting. Holds the world at bay. As adults we create our own rituals built around work and play and families of our own. Society and church build their rituals around a calendar of secular and religious events, while the world provides the clockwork of days, months, years, seasons, the interplay of sun and moon. Small comforts within larger uncertainty.

Repeated cycles imply a conscious creator, someone who set the cycle in motion and cares to keep it going for the sake of those who need a solid place to stand. And that care implies the love from which all else is derived. Once aware of such love, we can make friends with the uncertainty at the core of life and finally begin to let go of our neurotic attempts at control that keep us grounded in fear. It’s all about the balance. Celebrating the cycles of sun and moon that make life possible while creating cycles of daily ritual that hold life in place and make learning to love uncertainty possible—trusting the mystery that gives life its ultimate interest and meaning.

 

Crazy World

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 that knows that life only and ever resolves in death. That like ignoring a spoiler alert that makes a movie uninteresting and unwatchable, to know the end, the resolution of life would make it pointless and unlivable. The mystery, the crazy contradictions, the missing pieces keep us guessing, interested and alive…and afraid. There’s the rub. Our fear keeps us obsessing and grasping for the very certainty that would drain the life out of our lives if we could ever actually achieve it.

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So what’s a human to do? Forever caught between the horns of a paradox—between intolerance of uncertainty and a world specifically designed to make certainty impossible. We’ve known this at the quantum level for nearly a century, but what we know rationally and need emotionally are another paradox we can’t resolve. A forty-year-old song captures it: Crazy world, full of crazy contradictions like a child. Just when I believe your heart’s getting warmer, you’re cold and you’re cruel, and I like a fool try to cope, try to hang on to hope. Oh, how I love this crazy world.

Jesus said he came to teach us to live abundantly. How do we do that in a crazy world, a crazy new year full of contradictions? The world is built on the uncertainty of its smallest particles. To believe that the world is not as it should be is to live in scarcity. Waiting for the world to meet our expectations before life feels safe enough to live is a train that never comes. If we can’t accept the world as it is, the work we do for change will carry the obsession of scarcity.

Abundant life begins the moment we realize that we love this crazy world and its unresolvable contradictions. That it is as it must be, and even as we work for change, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

Moments Like These

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 could hear and understand. He leaves a big hole in my breakfast schedule, the conversations we’d have, and accepting that he’s no longer callable will take some time.

Moments like these call so much into question, maybe everything that matters to us as fragile humans. What is Bob doing now? Who is he with? Anyone at all? Does he know the answers to all the questions I have, that every human has ever had since we started this whole thing? Most of us are well steeped in religious and cultural doctrine, but moments like these have the power to strip all that away, undistract us, question everything we think we know and lay bare the reality of what we can’t.

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Truth is, there’s no certainty about the unseen parts of life. By definition, they are unprovable. Unseen, we can say they don’t exist, or we can let what we do see convince us of something more. Fear makes us crave certainty, but certainty is only mind deep; conviction goes all the way to the bone. We choose our convictions out of the experience of our lives—not as a certainty, but as the basis of how we live. Now. Not then.

All we have is now. All Bob has is now. I’m convinced it’s the same now, shared, at different frequencies.

Moments like these have convinced me that choosing to live based on love is to feel love’s eternal quality. That we come from love and return to it, that we as part of love are never lost, just change form. Like energy and matter, we remain constant while constantly changing. I’m convinced that Bob is not lost, just unseen to me. We often say that the dead are still present and alive in our hearts, but I’m becoming convinced that our hearts, tuned to the frequency of presence, can make us aware of unseen life in our one, shared now…moments like these.

Saved from Shame

Dave Brisbin 8.6.23
Thirty-some years ago, I was at retreat with a group that booked the same weekend every year. I’d just go, get a room, and participate in whatever was going on. Or not. This weekend was a large group of older men, and the retreat director, a Chinese-American Franciscan priest, was leading the session. I mention Chinese, not because he was first generation or could write beautiful Chinese script, but because he stood squarely between East and West in his approach to life and faith in a way that changed everything.

He was increasingly frustrated with this crusty old group, finally asking why they thought Jesus came to us humans. Hands went up and answers came right out of the Baltimore catechism: he came to die for our sins. The director let out a near wail of a no…clapping his big hands over his shaved head as if to hold it together. What kind of father sends his son to die? He sent him to live, to show us perfect love. He then said something like, if you are going to come here year after year and never change—next year, just stay home.

It took years for the full significance of that exchange to sink in.

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About the same time, another priest introduced me to Brennan Manning’s new book, The Ragamuffin Gospel. Here was another Franciscan, now lapsed and married, a struggling alcoholic writing about grace and love in a way I’d never heard or experienced. Brennan was open about the shame he collected as an abused child, his drinking, failings, inconsistencies, and yet he never ceased to see himself as God’s beloved.

All these years later, if I were to raise my hand, I’d say, Jesus didn’t come to save us from our sins. He came to save us from our shame.

Saving from sins is legal, a transaction that leaves us unchanged. Saving from shame is relational, the experience of a love we can never lose. It’s a longer way home, but to lose shame is to lose the fear of disconnection that makes all our sinful behavior necessary. Only unlosable love overcomes fear. To know we’re beloved not because we’re lovable, but because we keep showing up to Unlosable Love is all the salvation we’ll ever get. Or need.

Perfectly Imperfect

Dave Brisbin 1.1.23
First apartment Marian and I rented was near a nature reserve, and a colony of turkey vultures roosted in the tops of the eucalyptus all around us. Most people complained about the mess on the sidewalks, but I loved them. Waiting every morning for the sun to heat the updrafts that would take them aloft, like business people waiting for the train, they went to the office every day, all day, back home with the lowering sun. Day after day, seasons, weekends, holidays made no difference. No sense of time or the arbitrary lines we draw to mark our calendars.

On New Year’s Day, we celebrate an arbitrary line. A line drawn differently in different cultures at different times in history. In the West, we think of time as a series of line segments, but the new year we celebrate is really a circle. The universe is made of circles. Circles within circles. Stars, planets, orbits, rotations, all scribing the circles we call days, months, years, seasons. The earth has no more sense of time than a turkey vulture, but we do, and in the language of Jesus, when a circle is completed as on New Year’s Day, it is g’mar, perfected. 2022 is now a perfect year. Complete. Fulfilled.

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Hard to imagine any of us calling 2022 a perfect year because we think of perfection as without fault or blemish. No year is without blemish, but they all come full circle. None of us are without fault, but we can come full circle too. James says it best at the top of his letter: “Let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” When Jesus says, “Be ye perfect” and his brother James says,” be perfect and complete,” they are urging the perfection of homecoming after a difficult journey.

Perfection is not about working a process to a perfect result, but about the effect that process has on us…even if the result is imperfect. Outcome is irrelevant to the perfection of Jesus and James. We are perfected when we come full circle, home to our eucalyptus, having learned to be more fully present and aware, to more perfectly embrace whatever and whomever shares our homecoming. No matter how imperfect.

 

The Way of the Heart

Dave Brisbin 10.23.22
From third century Christian tradition…young hermit tells an elder: I know the objective of life, what God asks of us, and the best way of serving him—I’m just not capable of doing all that I should. The elder is quiet for while then says: You know about a city on the far side of the ocean, but you haven’t found a ship, loaded your bags, or crossed the sea. Why spend time imagining what it’s like to walk its streets? Knowing the objective of life and how to serve the Lord is not enough. Put into practice that which you think, and the way will be revealed all by itself.

Two hundred years earlier, the first Jewish followers of Jesus agreed. Calling themselves talmidey orha—Followers of the Way in Aramaic, they were making an emphatic statement. If their primary focus was on the Way Jesus lived and loved rather than the historical person himself, then their primary focus was on action rather than thought. A very Jewish trait. They were saying with their lives that they understood Jesus’ message to be a way of living, not just thinking or believing.

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Jesus said that we will be known as his followers by the way we love each other, that if we live as he lives and love as he loves we will do the things he has done and experience the truth that liberates. He is telling us flat out that our action defines us as followers, not our belief or belonging systems. He said he himself is the Way and Truth and Life and no one comes to the father but through him. This is the ultimate exclusionary statement for those of us who still see gospel as primarily a creed, a specific way of thinking and believing necessary for God’s approval, rather than the abandonment of self it takes to live the Way Jesus lived as necessary to realize we are approved already. Really good news.

The way of the mind—our thoughts and beliefs—can take us right to the door of the connected life Jesus calls Kingdom. But only Jesus’ Way—the way of the heart, contemplative practice—brings us through. It’s been seventeen hundred years since the Way of the heart identified Western Christians as followers of Jesus. It’s time.

 

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Everyone is recovering from something… Admitting this is the first step in spiritual life, because any unfinished business in our lives–trauma, unforgiveness, fear-based perceptions–fosters compulsive behavior and keeps us from connecting spiritually and emotionally.

Since we’re all recovering, we accept everyone right as they are—no expiration dates or deadlines. We don’t tell anyone what to believe or do. We present points of view that we hope will engage seekers in their own journey; help them unlearn limiting perceptions, beliefs, and compulsions; give opportunities to get involved in community, building the trust we all need to find real identity, meaning, and purpose. In other words, to engage the transforming Way of living life that Jesus called Kingdom…non-religiously understood from a first century Hebrew point of view.

 

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Our Sunday gathering starts at 10AM and includes worship with one of the best worship bands in the area. We also have online discussion and study groups on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at 6:30P PST. See our interactive calendar and our Facebook page to stay in touch with what is happening each week. You can also sign up on our elist for email enews updates.

 

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