2024 Archives
Unreasonable Meaning
Dave Brisbin 7.21.24
I’ve said that Jesus’ teaching is not meant to give data, but point to an experience that changes everything. But what is the everything that changes? If we say our very understanding of life—how things are or should be—next morning, making coffee, what has changed? Life is same mix of work, pain, respite that we share with everyone else…like the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain only to endlessly roll back down.
French philosopher Camus believed that life is absurd, neither rational or irrational, just unreasonable. And with no reasonable answers, meaningless. Only two ways out: suicide or the manufacture of hope—both unacceptable. One giving in to despair, the other to illusion. Yet he found value in life in the constant, conscious revolt against the “lie” of meaning. That our consciousness of absurdity itself is what gives us a reason to continue, that Sisyphus is happy walking back down the mountain to his boulder, conscious of his choices.
read more
Irony is, from opposite sides of the spiritual divide, scripture and Camu agree. Outside of this conscious moment, full engagement in it, there is no meaning. Only in constant contact with life is there hope. It’s an unreasonable meaning, only experienced right herenow, within this day. Anything else doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. Accepting life on life’s terms is the first step of Jesus’ Way—to a meaning outside ourselves.
System Reboot
Dave Brisbin 7.14.24
We’ve all had to reboot our computers, phones, pads, anything with an operating system. Sometimes they just get so cluttered and confused, they slow to a crawl or freeze entirely. When in doubt, reboot, yes? Hit escape, control-alt-delete, shut down, restart, pull the plug, or if the system is sophisticated enough, restore to a point before the confusion set in.
In the movie Contact, a brilliant young astronomer uses science as both sword and shield. Orphaned at age nine, science was something solid, safe, something she could submit to controlled processes. She ditches a relationship the moment she feels vulnerable, scoffs at belief in God and human spirituality because there is no empirical proof. But in the experience of first contact with an alien intelligence, a solo journey from which she returns with no proof whatsoever, she meets the world’s disbelief and skepticism as any person must who has had an experience of the inexpressible.
read more
Conviction is certainty without proof. It’s always a solo journey, can never be transferred, and only feels certain in the first person, present tense.
Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount are not meant to give us data, answer rehearsed questions, or make us certain. Just the opposite. They are the first step in a system reboot. A challenge to whatever certainties we hold and a portal to a first-hand experience. An experience that requires the vulnerability and humility that allows real connection—the only power great enough to convince us we’re not alone.
No one can tell us such things. Only where to look. But if we’re willing to reboot, rebirth, we can restore to a moment before we were orphaned.
Spiritual Albedo
Dave Brisbin 7.7.24
Very few of us know the word albedo, yet we use it every day, and it’s a huge factor in climate change. From the Latin word for white (think albino), albedo is the amount of light reflected off any surface. We all know that light colors reflect sunlight, a cooling effect like those impossibly white houses on seacliffs in Greece. Dark colors absorb, storing heat, so the amount of snow, glaciers, and sand versus dark forests, ocean, and urban sprawl greatly determines the temperature of our planet.
Jesus tells us that we’ll know the quality of prophets—and by extension anyone—by their fruit. You can’t get figs from thorn bushes. Good trees produce good fruit and bad ones bad, so looking at the fruit gets at the heart of a person. But he also says that not everyone who calls out in his name will enter the kingdom of God, and when they protest that they prophesied and cast out demons, performed miracles and built 24/7 satellite networks, he’d simply say depart from me, I never knew you. If prophecy and miracles aren’t good enough fruit to be known by God, what is Jesus talking about?
read more
Growing Down
Dave Brisbin 6.30.24
Ever wondered what Jesus would have been like growing up? People have been wondering that ever since the generation who grew up with him died out. One of the many gospels that didn’t make it into the bible, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, assumes Jesus had all his powers from birth, but had to grow into them.
Portrayed at age five as a child who could be hot tempered, a boy bumps into him running by…Jesus calls out angrily, and the boy falls down dead. Days later, he is playing on a roof with other children when a boy falls off and is killed. Accused of pushing him, Jesus raises the boy from the dead asking him to tell his accusers the truth. But by age eight, we see him helping his carpenter father by pulling a board cut too short to the proper length, healing his brother James who was bitten by a viper, and raising his dead cousin back to life to ease his family’s suffering. Obviously, these stories are not to be taken seriously, but their point remains: Jesus had to grow up into a devoted member of his family and an empathic healer.
read more
Those who didn’t grow up with Jesus, imagined him powerful from birth, having to grow up into those powers. But those who did grow up with Jesus were amazed to see he had grown back down into childlikeness, into the apparent powerlessness of servanthood. They resisted the growing down, and we do too.
A child is pre-egoic; doesn’t know it’s naked. Until we grow back down into such spiritual unknowing, we’ll never trust the greatness in Presence.
Road Not Taken
Dave Brisbin 6.23.24
When we were kids, my sister did a paint-by-number of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. You know, where the image is preprinted as numbered areas you fill in with the matching-numbered paint. It looked ok squinting at it from across the room, but imagine the difference between painting by numbers and the original master, creating and mixing his own paints and working from the depths of his experience as a human.
Jesus is trying to take us from painting by numbers to true spiritual expression. The Pharisees of his day had created a numbered approach to God, matching behavior to legal codes that, squinting from a distance, looked like righteousness…but Jesus knew better. The gospels show him systematically dismantling that system, but every generation, left to its own devices, goes Pharisee, devolves to a paint-by-number mentality because it feels controllable. Risk-free behavior and reward. Jesus is practically shouting to all of us that our behavior has nothing to do with God’s love.
read more
When Jesus says the road to destruction is broad and the road to life is narrow and few find it, we imagine he’s talking about heaven and hell. But do we really think God created most of us for eternal torment? Is that the God Jesus says is good news? Critically, his context, Hebrew context, is always here and now. Few people are willing to risk the unknowns of the artist’s way of vulnerable transparency to find an experience of oneness, God’s love and good news, in their lives right herenow.
The road less traveled may seem risky—why it’s most often not taken. But it makes all the difference.
Finding Father’s Face
Dave Brisbin 6.16.24
Years ago, I remember thinking that if I could just have one burning bush moment, that would be enough. Talking with God like a friend, face to face as Moses did, would answer everything. Yet that wasn’t enough for Moses. He begs to see God’s glory, just as Jacob asks for God’s name and Philip asks Jesus to show him the Father. But such requests are always denied in scripture and in life.
Is God just being coy?
Whether looking into the smallest or largest of things, the closer we look at our universe, the more it seems to be revealing the nature of its creator. We all learned about electrons orbiting the nuclei of atoms like planets around the sun. But electrons actually resemble a cloud, a cloud of probability. An electron doesn’t orbit a nucleus at all…it surrounds it like a fog with only a probability of being here more than there. It has energy and momentum, but doesn’t move. The cloud is completely still. We know exactly where the cloud is, but the electron has no specific location.
read more
In the fear of our uncertainty, we want to see God’s face, pinpoint a location. Make it intellectually certain. But as the ancient Hebrews imagined, God’s presence is a cloud. A cloud of probability with no edge. We know exactly where the cloud is: always right here and now, yet God’s face has no specific location. Everywhere and everywhen we go, God is always experienced herenow, and we are always exactly in the center of God’s cloud of presence. No other position exists.
We know where and when to look—closer than our next heartbeat or breath. But the looking is not with sighted eyes and the finding not with geo coordinates. God’s face is the incomprehensible embrace of trust in love.
Falling to Heaven
Dave Brisbin 6.9.24
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Yeah, that’s a country song, but Joe Louis, the great boxer, said it first.
Death is the moment everything we can think of as ourselves, our entire sense of self, falls away. It’s the moment our minds stop thinking, stop imagining ourselves as individuals, separate from everyone and everything else. The irony is, we never feel better, more connected, loved, grateful, meaningful, fulfilled than moments when we lose our sense of self—whether in meditation, prayer, or an intense, peak moment, like falling in love. When our sense of self falls away, the anxiety of aloneness falls with it. And yet, that falling away of self is exactly what we fear in death, because we can’t imagine who we’d be when we can no longer think of who we are.
Heaven is the state of absolute connection, but we must die to get there—die to our sense of self. The mind is the sole repository of ourselves-as-separate, so as long as we’re in our right minds, we are not in heaven. An elder in an ancient monastic community of desert Christians taught that if you see a young monk by his own will climbing to heaven, take him by the foot and throw him to the ground… Early Christians knew that heaven is not a goal to achieve, but a reality to realize: we are all connected, always. We don’t acquire that, we relinquish all that obscures it. Climbing to something we already possess only intensifies our illusion of self and individual control, the opposite of heaven.
read more
The moment we become willing to stop clinging to an imagined identity as a separate self, become willing to die to all we think of ourselves, to all we think at all, we lean back and start falling.
Everything we fear we will lose or never gain is in the falling.
Clinging Not
Dave Brisbin 6.2.24
One of the most cinematic scenes in the gospels is at John 20 where Mary Magdalene is sobbing by the empty tomb, and the risen Jesus asks why she is weeping. She whirls to confront the voice but not until he calls her name does she recognize. She calls out to him, and Jesus immediately replies, stop clinging to me. We don’t need to be told that she runs to him, falls down sobbing and clasping his feet in the ancient eastern custom. Our minds connect those dots. We see it all on our inner screens.
Why would Jesus break off such a human response? Under the circumstances, to say it’s a cold reply is a world-class understatement. But like any good film, nothing is presented in the gospels without purpose—the real estate is far too precious. Jesus is hammering that though his love for Mary hasn’t changed, the nature of their relationship is now radically different. Just as Moses couldn’t enter the promised land because the people had begun relying on him rather than God, Jesus told his friends that he needed to leave them so they could experience God’s presence directly and graduate from vicariously clinging to becoming as one with Presence as he was.
Painfully, that process begins with a loss. It always does.
read more
But anything on which we rely short of pure Presence, even Moses or our image of Jesus, is limiting us, blocking us from that Presence. When Jesus says stop clinging, he is saying that holding on to what has sustained us, or at least soothed us to date, is now keeping us from what sets us free.
Release and Catch
Dave Brisbin 5.26.24
Carl Jung said that the first half of life is dedicated to forming a healthy ego; second half is going inward and letting go of it. We spend our first half looking for meaning, purpose, identity through accomplishment and acquisition—outward performances that mean less and less over time. We enter our second half when we realize that true meaning comes from a completely different direction. Jesus said that kingdom, his shorthand for second half spirituality, will never be found out there somewhere. It’s already within us.
Authentic spirituality isn’t acquired. It’s relinquished.
All the meaning and purpose we can stand is already within us, along with our true identities. It’s like ground water, deep and inexhaustible, always there, but not at the surface. You dig your well through layers of accrued illusions and patterns of thought and behavior. When Jesus says no one can follow him who doesn’t give up all they have; when he tells of men who find treasure in a field or at the market and run off to sell all they own to buy it, he is saying the same. Until we become willing to relinquish all we have gathered and count as our egoic identity, we’ll never find who we are not, so we can begin to know who we really are.
read more
Fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message, meaning that the means we use to communicate affects us more than the content itself. Jesus poured his message into the medium of a personal experience of perfect oneness—truth that would make us free once all illusion of separation was removed. The effect of that experience was recorded in the gospels, which we read and claim is true. But ink on paper is not truth, it’s a different medium. It becomes true once poured back into its original medium—the experience of our own lives.
The Whole in the Part
Dave Brisbin 5.19.24
So easy to lose the forest in the trees. Especially with scripture. We dig deep into the weeds of each verse, pull it apart, imagine meaning that may not have anything to do with the larger passage or chapter, let alone the whole book.
A famous writer says unless you can describe the whole of your book in one sentence, you won’t write convincingly. You’ll meander, each part not contributing to the whole. The bible is actually sixty-six books, an anthology. Even harder to pull back enough to see a single line capturing its meaning—each verse revealing more of the whole. I’ve heard said that the bible is a love letter from God. A bit overly simplistic and sentimental for me, but on the right track. Maybe this: the bible traces the nature, development, and realization of our relationship with God. And if God is love, and love is identification with the beloved, then what we’re realizing is the oneness at the core of all our relationships.
read more
When he tells us not to give what is holy to dogs or pearls of wisdom teaching to pigs because they will trample it or turn and tear us to pieces, it sounds condescending and has been used to exclude those not of our “faith.” But is that an interpretation consistent with the whole of Matthew’s gospel, with Jesus, the whole book? If we know the whole, we can reverse engineer the part, fine tune our interpretation of any part by never losing sight of the whole.
Jesus is one with the whole, never excludes, accepts everyone where they are, never judging where they should be. Takes the time presence requires to first establish connection before healing or instruction. If we seek kingdom first—presence and connection—the whole will always be in the part.
