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2021 Archives

Interior Revolution

Dave Brisbin 7.4.21
Fourth of July, 2021. 245th anniversary of what? Start of the revolution? Birth of the US? Signing the Declaration of Independence? The revolution started a year before, the Constitution wouldn’t be adopted for another twenty, and the Declaration wasn’t fully signed until the following year. But on July 4th, 1776, the rough draft of the Declaration was approved by congress…we like our history neat and tidy, but truth is messier. Jesus was a revolutionary too. When did his revolution begin? At his birth, death, baptism, ministry, resurrection, Pentecost? Truth is much messier. Jesus wasn’t trying to overthrow his religion or society, but reform both by fostering interior revolutions in as many individuals as possible. But those willing to follow Jesus through their own revolutionary transformations, changed the Roman world as they grew in number—a slow-motion revolution for 245 years until Christianity became the state religion of Rome.

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But the moment Christianity became a state religion, the revolution ended. Allied with Roman power, wealth, status, the church could no longer teach and foster interior revolutions—the radical transformation of a person’s heart—but would teach and demand conformity to the institution it had become. It was the moment that the purest of heart fled to the deserts of the eastern empire to continue the revolution by starting the monastic movement in the Christian tradition. And a thousand years later, a little man in Italy named Francis restarted a revolution within himself that through his followers changed their religion and society for a time, until they too became an institution. Eight hundred years later, we need another restart. To follow Jesus is to follow the Way of interior revolution: becoming willing to overthrow the institutions we have built in our personal lives. But the shape of exterior revolutions give us clues to the shape of our own, and the words of the Declaration of Independence perfectly articulate both the blockage to and the boldness needed to reclaim our unalienable right to the love that safeguards those we hold to be self-evident: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
 

Out of Control

Dave Brisbin 6.27.21
A priest says that some of the most egotistical people he knows are clergy. A friend asks why people who believe in a loving, abundant God are not living happy, healthy, abundant lives. Digging down, the reasons are related. True transformation is the merging of enlightenment and maturity, our state of consciousness and our stage of consciousness. The two are connected, but not the same. We can gain insight, understand deep, spiritual principles long before we have the maturity to live out the life of service that is the effect of those principles. We can have a peak or conversion experience at any stage, but our insights are always received at the current stage of development, will have to funnel through the ego, processed and filtered by its vision of reality at that stage.

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Stages take time and repeated action to develop, and at lower levels, we are all egotistical: stuffed in the shell of our own personal needs, using the tools of fight and flight to minimize risk and maximize advantage. In the holy name of avoiding pain, we believe we need control, but pain hurts largely to the extent we try to control it. And ironically, suffering (in its original meaning of allowing or enduring) our pain is to crack our ego open to new stages of consciousness that will show us the truth of ourselves as part of a larger organism to which we are in service. Everything Jesus shows and teaches is designed to crack open our egos, let go of the obsessive need for control that keeps us within egotistical shells. Yet if we’re not careful, even these deep insights, funneled through shallower ego stages, become mere religious attempts at control of ultimate outcomes, and the religious among us can remain the most egotistical. And bound egotistically, whatever insights we receive won’t crack the shell that keeps us from the truth of the abundant love and life God offers—that it can only be seen when we’re finally out of control.
 

Extravagance Personified

Dave Brisbin 6.20.21
What does everything we experience in life teach us about life? What does everything that our fathers, our culture, and institutions demand from us show us about the way life works? That any approval we receive is always based on performance? That the basis of life is legal and transactional? That not only is there no free lunch, there are only so many lunches to go around, and we must fight for finite resources if we want to survive. In other words, life teaches us a scarcity mentality. And we learn that lesson so well that it colors every aspect of life, including our concept of spiritual growth and God.

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But Jesus is painting a very different picture because he knows if we apply our transactional view of life to God, as long as we’re fighting for our own piece of God or salvation, love or acceptance, we’re defeated before we begin. Jesus tells us he came so we could have life and have it abundantly. His stories of huge catches of fish that threaten to break nets and sink boats; feeding thousands from a few loaves and fishes leaving baskets full of leftovers; tiny seeds that grow into great trees for nesting birds and yielding crops a hundred fold all point to an abundance beyond belief. The first two Aramaic words of his prayer, abwoon d’bashmaya—our Father in heaven—tell us that heaven, all creation, is the outer face that reveals God’s inner essence. With science calculating up to two trillion galaxies in the known universe and up to 700 billion stars per galaxy, most with planets of their own and up to one trillion species of lifeforms per habitable planet, the heavens show us an insanely extravagant God for whom scarcity is unknown. God is extravagance personified. Like rain and sun, he pours everything he has and is on every one of us all the time, whether we have performed well or not. Realizing that abundance, not scarcity, is the ultimate reality of our lives changes our starting point, ending point, and every point in between.
 

Stake in the Ground

Dave Brisbin 6.13.21
As good Westerners, we approach spiritual formation with our minds. We see faith as correct thinking, a mental agreement with correct thoughts about God, theology, doctrine. But over the years, I’ve learned not to trust thoughts in my head. I know at best, they are incomplete and inaccurate more often than I’d care to admit. But this is no longer cause for concern: I don’t expect my thoughts to be complete and accurate anymore, and I don’t need them to be. When it comes to spiritual issues that by definition stand outside anything that finite thought and language can express, everyone’s thoughts are incomplete and inaccurate. Book of Proverbs tells us not to lean on our own understanding—to trust God with all our hearts, yet Paul tell us to become transformed by the renewing of our minds…so are we back to correct thoughts?

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If we’re ever to understand the Way of spiritual transformation that Jesus taught, we need to come to terms with how our minds are renewed. When we lay Paul’s teaching in Romans and Philippians side by side, we see that renewing our minds is connected to presenting our bodies as living sacrifices, which he spends fifteen verses illustrating as life lived in intimate relationship. We accomplish this by forgetting all that lies behind: lessons learned in pain that only create more pain now, accepted beliefs that only cause more division and dysfunction now. Focusing instead on whatever is lovely and pure, honorable and good in this present moment, heals anxiety with gratitude for God’s presence. Paul is not talking about correcting our thoughts, but that we know our thoughts are correct by their effect on every moment of our lives. There comes a time when there are no more thoughts to think, no new ideas to discover—only the infinitely varied expression of the truth found in our daily lives. To drive our stake in the ground there, at the point of the Father’s love, is the renewal and transformation we seek.
 

Seeing Through Cracks

Dave Brisbin 6.6.21
Jesus said that no one can see Kingdom—the quality of life lived in awareness of God’s presence—until born again in spirit. In the same breath he says those born of spirit are like wind, which you can hear but never see or know where it’s coming from or going to. Not very helpful if you’re trying to get there. And that’s the point. Spirit can’t be controlled. The more we try to control it, the more we deny its presence. There is spiritual work, but that is about subtraction, not addition, about removing obstacles that stand in the way of an otherwise uncontrollable encounter. Like the farmer, we can create the ideal circumstances for a harvest, but the plants grow while we sleep. So what is the greatest impediment to our gradual Pentecost of spiritual breakthrough?

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Legalism…understood as performance-based approval by any human group: church, society, business, family. It is the reality of the world in which we live, so we can be forgiven for imputing it to God as well. But as long as we’re thinking legally in spiritual directions, we will never see Kingdom, because legalism is just another form of control. We only need control when we’re afraid, and while legalism appears to guarantee security, it perpetuates the fear that is the opposite of the trust of Kingdom experience. A person born of water, performing in the physical world, is entitled to compensation and reward. Those born again of spirit are simply grateful for gifts they can’t see and know they could never give themselves. This radically different way of looking at life is only visible as cracks form in the physical world around us. The way to Pentecost begins as the world begins to crack and reveal a deeper truth: that Kingdom lived between heaven and earth is a balance of performance and powerless dependence. Life and age will begin cracking the world open for us, but our spiritual work brings a sledgehammer to finish the job.
 

Father’s Eyes

Dave Brisbin 5.30.21
Two questions last week: How do we come to know God, see life as the Father sees it? And how is Jesus the only way to the Father? Great questions, and related—two parts of the same question. Knowing God is central in scripture, but knowing in the Hebrew minds that wrote scripture was not intellectual; it was intimate experience. To them, knowing God couldn’t be separated from the process of experiencing intimacy. Jesus’ Way is the process of experiencing God, seeing our lives through God’s eyes. Jesus can’t be separated from this Way because he lived it, became the shape of the Way—the only Way to experience unseen God in a physical life. And this muscular spirituality that Jesus lived and taught can’t be separated from the physicality of life. If we can’t find God, find the spiritual in the midst of the physical, we aren’t seeing with the Father’s eyes.

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Life on earth is all about we as individuals interfacing with all the other individuals we encounter, looking at life through the separation our individuality creates in our minds. Life in heaven is the experience of everything as just one thing, all connected. Seeing with the Father’s eyes is seeing past the illusion of separation to the unseen oneness beyond, literally merging heaven and earth. But as long as we’re breathing here, heaven and earth don’t mix any more than oil and water. They remain distinct…only and until they mix in us. Only in our hearts, in a moment of intimate experience, do heaven and earth mix like paint colors on an artist’s palette. Scripture seems to be showing us five ways to mix our colors, see unseen unity in a world of diversity, and they all have to do with the simplest of daily experience. It couldn’t be any other way. There is no other way. We won’t know or see God out there somewhere. The colors don’t mix in the air. Only in us, in the physical, intimate experience of unseen connection in each moment and each other do we see through Father’s eyes.
 

Between Tribes

Dave Brisbin 5.23.21
Jesus says that if we believe in him, we will do the works he did and greater works than those. Most commentators say that those works are Jesus’ miracles and the greater works are not in quality but quantity—that Jesus’ followers had more time to do more works for more people. But the bible is a spiritual book conveying spiritual truths and principles, and if we take it too literally, we can miss its primary points. Of all the works Jesus did, what did he primarily do? Ask us to do? He tells us over and over, but most clearly in his simple commandment to love each other as he loved us, that we would be known as his followers by our love. Love. Not doctrine or theology or any other litmus test we can imagine.

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And to make sure we understand, Jesus shows us and tells us that it’s love of the enemy—in his language, someone of a different tribe, someone you don’t see as your own—that defines the love he’s talking about. Pentecost marks the entrance of Jesus’ closest friends into the freedom of spirit that allowed them to love tribelessly. Baptized in water, they were still thinking in physical and literal terms and living in fear. But at Pentecost, they are baptized again in fire, born again in spirit. What changed their limited, tribal thinking to encompass borderless spirit? The road to Pentecost begins at Calvary—the trauma of the loss of our exterior object of faith. For them, it was Jesus himself. For Abraham, it was Isaac. For the Hebrews, it was Moses. Jesus said it was to their advantage that he go so the spirit would come. An idiomatic way of saying that as long as we are focused on physical objects for our faith, we’ll never see our Helper. Jesus spent his life breaking through ethnic, social, and religious barriers to show us the extent of his love. After he is risen, he passes through walls as if they are not there. He occupies a borderless place between tribes from which he can love indiscriminately and see the oneness of spirit that connects us all. That is work we can do if we wish to follow.
 

Seeing the Wind

Dave Brisbin 5.16.21
Imagine living in a world where you didn’t understand the workings of nature…where thunder, lightning, earthquakes, eclipses were literally the voice, hands, and face of God? Where impossibly dark nights exploded with stars and the only entertainment were the chants, drums, and dance around community fires at night. Where you never saw your own reflection in a mirror and only knew the faces of those around you? How would you experience life and identity in such a world? Slow, earthy, magical, communal. This is the world from which our scripture comes and when Jesus describes people born of spirit as the wind blowing where it pleases, that we can hear the sound of it but don’t know where it’s coming from or going to, we understand the words, but not the radically different world that gives them deepest meaning. The ancient Hebrew world was amazingly parallel to indigenous cultures today, and we can crawl through a window to that world most easily by looking at those cultures still alive now.

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In Hawai’ian, the word “ha” means breath, wind, and spirit all at the same time in just the way that Hebrew ruach and Aramaic ruha do. We can’t say them without making the sound of breath and wind, being connected to them. The Hawai’ian word “alo,” means in the presence of, so aloha means in the presence of breath, wind, spirit—a description of life. To the ancient Polynesians who first discovered the Hawai’ian islands on tiny koa canoes across thousands of miles of blue water, the incessant trade winds always blowing east to west were the breath of God that made life possible. We can’t understand Hebrew or Hawai’ian spirituality without understanding breath and wind and the culture that experienced life in breath. And if we don’t understand life in breath, how can we understand Jesus’ words? As we continue to prepare for our own Pentecost—a breakthrough to trust in unseen spirit experienced as a great wind rushing through the upper room of Jesus’ first followers—there are five principles of Hawai’ian spirituality that define their world, describe Jesus’ world, and can help us make sense of our own, help us learn to see the wind.
 

The Perfect Parent

Dave Brisbin 5.9.21
Mother’s Day. A few years ago I was asked: I know God loves me, but how do I know he likes me? Made me smile immediately, as it cut right to the heart of things.

Love can means so many things to us, but like is pretty specific—implies affection, genuine delight, pleasure, desire to be with, playful attention, fun. God’s love may hold the fabric of the universe together, but God’s like is what makes us feel loved. Knowing we are liked is one of our most basic needs and is usually what we experience first from our mothers. If we’re not sure God likes us, it’s because we’ve never experienced him as mother, maybe never admitted the possibility of such a thing as Mother God to ourselves or each other. Yet scripture teaches just that. Though God is referred to as Father, there is a perfect balance between ideal masculine and feminine qualities conveyed throughout both Old and New Testaments.

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Hochkmah, God’s wisdom, is personified as female in the book of Proverbs, and the Hebrew words for spirit and kingdom, ruach and malkutha, are both feminine, meaning we could literally refer to God’s spirit as “she” and kingdom as queendom. God is often portrayed in feminine terms as in Hosea where God takes his people in his arms, picks them up and holds them to his cheek, draws them with affection, feeds them and cares for them. In the gospels, Jesus always leads with touch, connection, affection before teaching and instruction, showing us it’s only when we have experienced the touch of Mother God in our day to day lives that we can begin to understand the love of Father God at all. God is a perfect God only when both justice and mercy, knowledge and wisdom, discipline and relationship, male and female, mother and father are equally honored and present. The perfect parent is dad acting like mom and mom acting like dad…acceptance and change balanced in a love that contains liking as well.
 

A Portable Heaven

Dave Brisbin 5.2.21
What kills our ability to trust our lives to the action of unseen spirit? Our fears, of course. We fear death because of the ultimate unknown it represents: whether anything we imagine ourselves to be continues. We fear God’s judgment and hell because we’ve been taught to look at God legally and hell literally. But that is not what Scripture teaches. Corrected by context, Scripture presents a heavenly God, connected, always unbalancing the scales of justice in favor of the beloved—the living definition of grace. And of the five words in the bible that have been translated as hell in English, none of them mean the hell we imagine—a word borrowed from medieval Germanic tribes and a concept borrowed largely from Dante’s fourteenth century poem, Inferno. The closest the bible comes to our notion of hell, the Aramaic word gehenna, like Catholic purgatory, is a temporary place for the wicked dead where the fires are more for purification than punishment. When purified, even the wicked move on.

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Does this mean there is no hell? Of course not. But it does mean that if God is not a legal God, then hell is not what we think it is. Hell is not so much a thing as the absence of a thing—the way cold is absence of heat and dark is absence of light, hell is absence of…heaven. We’ll never have a healthy understanding of hell until we understand heaven. Scripturally, heaven and God are the same: to know the consummate oneness and connection of God is to know/enter heaven, right here and right now. The oneness of heaven is the reality of our universe, but our conscious minds create the illusion of separation; our minds create hell and keep us there as long as we identify with our minds more than each other. But once we’re fully involved in life, we stop fearing death, and once we’re fully involved in heaven, we stop living in hell. We have learned to imagine heaven as a place of ideal circumstances. But what if it’s not? What if heaven is the learned ability to see our circumstances as ideal? Connected. Unified. Anywhere. Anywhen. What if, at the end of all our searching, we find that heaven is portable? We don’t go there, we carry it with us wherever we go.
 

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