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Empowered
Dave Brisbin 3.2.25
Jesus doesn’t save anyone passively, in spite of themselves, beyond their willingness to actively engage a way of experiencing transformed life he calls Kingdom. If we’re waiting for a savior, no one is coming. If we’re waiting for anything, we’re not in Kingdom. Waiting is passive, not yet; Kingdom is always in motion, herenow. Jesus saves by empowering us to act in ways we may have thought not possible or not allowed. He shows us the process of fundamental change, challenging us to make the small choices we can make now to start dominos falling toward radical transformation not yet.
The good news of the gospels is that God is all poured out.
Everything God is and has to offer is already herenow. Nothing withheld…Kingdom within, in our midst. Jesus’ message tells us that we are empowered to accept the everything of God any time and always, and his Way is the unavoidable process of realizing our empowerment, only and always experiential—the choice by increasingly audacious choice or trust.
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That is anathema to the Jews who wrote the scriptures from which we extract such a creature as Satan. For Jews, God is unopposable, the One without opposite. No battle is possible, and ha-satan, the adversary, is God’s agent—whether a person, spiritual being, or our own inclination to evil—providing us with the alternate choices that make free will real. But the choice is always ours, and ha-satan has no power over us that we don’t give.
Jesus is telling us we are not victims. Everything we need is right here. The choice is always ours to break through any resistance that would tell us otherwise. Empowered.
The Purpose of Life
Dave Brisbin 2.23.25
Do people really change?
Seems maddingly rare, especially the older we get—the way is narrow and gate constricted—but it does happen. Why are some of us able to make fundamental, personal change, beat the odds that imprison the rest of us?
Joseph Campbell introduced the monomyth, the hero’s journey, the one plotline we use over and over in all forms: stories, poems, songs, movies. This universal story of transformation follows the three-part structure of a classic rite of passage. First, separation from the life and world we know, often forcefully through a wounding or traumatic event. Second, risky transition through an unknown and dangerous landscape where something is required of us before we can return home. And third, reincorporation back where we started, changed by the experience with a new role to play and ability to match.
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Stories help us see that if we want fundamental change, we can intentionally work backward through the chain of events that leads to our goal until we arrive right where we’re standing, having now identified the beginning of the journey…a small choice we can make, a step we can actually take.
Can we begin to see in each moment, in our smallest decisions, the seeds of adventure? The whole of life in one uncertain step? Make friends with uncertainty as the engine of change? Say yes more than no and love the dead ends of our choices as much as the fruitful branches?
If we can, we can change. Beat the odds. And that is the purpose of life.
Balancing Act
Dave Brisbin 2.16.25
Life is big, loud, in your face.
Like an over-the-top extravert, life can suck all the oxygen out of the room, leaving little energy or attention for anything else. And against life’s overwhelming physical realities—whether personal or political, socio-economic or relational—the spiritual can seem like a whisper we’re not even sure we heard…naïve, even irrelevant to our most pressing needs.
I understand why spiritual leaders often change lanes into the socio-political, big macro issues. It’s like getting off the sidelines and into the game, something solid to grasp, a side to take, a cause to champion…all driven by the legitimate belief that spirituality is only as authentic as it is present in all our physical relationships—personal and communal.
It’s a chicken and egg thing.
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We can’t separate our spirituality from our physicality. Each is lived out in the presence of the other, defined in the context of the other. And neither is more important than the other as long we’re breathing here. Human life is a balancing act. Each of us needs dreams, plans, and the hard work of accomplishing them—the “not yet” side of the equation. But if we’ve not mastered the ability to live that work with a sense of grateful completion right now, to balance now and not yet, if we confuse our work with the spirituality that propels us to it, we remain billboards for the human problem.
Not a solution.
All We Know
Dave Brisbin 2.9.25
Quote from a movie priest: There comes a time in man’s search for meaning that you realize there are no answers. When you come to that horrible, unavoidable conclusion, you either accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching…
I remember how obsessively important it was to get answers to the big theological and existential questions about religious doctrine, miracles, healings, prayer, heaven, hell, death, afterlife. At a certain point, in the midst of all the contradicting voices in my ear, I had to admit that I just couldn’t know for certain. I put a symbolic stake in the ground at the point of the Father’s love as a way to hold on to the one thing I did know.
But I wasn’t ready to stop searching.
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Mother Teresa described her work with the poor as loving God in his most distressing disguise. In her life-prayer-work, she had accessed momentary nondual states in which she glimpsed everything as one thing. God in everything, everything in God, no division or separation. We don’t love God directly or abstractly in prayer, ritual, worship. Those practices help us cultivate the nondual moments we need to see God in each other, to know we only love God by loving each other. There’s no other way.
We’d like to bottle those moments, store nondual data as certainty. But it’s like breathing. We breathe just enough for the moment, breathe again for the next. We can’t store air, but each breath is just enough for us. We can’t store answers to unanswerable questions. But all we know for sure, the oneness of love, is just enough for us, if we simply stop searching for answers that add nothing to life.
The Real Enemy
Dave Brisbin 2.2.25
Would Jesus have been a Republican or Democrat?
What seems like the setup to a joke is being asked in all seriousness. Two weeks into a controversial administration, I’m hearing people ask how a good Christian could possibly vote… How a Christian pastor could possibly support… An Episcopal bishop and a sitting president both state that God is on their side while remaining flatly opposed to one another. Near the end of the Civil War, Lincoln said that both North and South read the same bible, pray to the same God, invoke God’s aid against the other, but the prayers of both could not be answered, that of neither had been answered fully.
Once we see an enemy, we imagine God is on our side, because we only have an enemy if we are certain we are right. An enemy is the wrong one. God is never wrong, so God is on our side, because we are right. Blaise Pascal said that people never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Truth is, the real enemy is not the other tribe—
the real enemy is the certainty that makes the other tribe an enemy.
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Jesus refused to be co-opted into any camp. Whatever political beliefs he had are not preserved in the gospels, meaning they were irrelevant to his message. They never created enemies for him because his primary identity was not in camp or tribe, but in oneness with his Father. If we can only see truth in our own tribe, we’ll see enemies everywhere, but we won’t see Jesus. He’s in the space between camps, where the real enemy is not another tribe, but the certainty that makes enemies of everyone else.
Keeping the Faith
Dave Brisbin 1.26.25
One of the best-known stories from the gospels, one that has seeped into collective consciousness, is the story of Jesus walking on water. This and turning water to wine has become shorthand for divine power. It’s natural for us to focus on the literal, but all Jesus’ miracles have spiritual meaning as well, and since most of us will live full lives never walking on water, the spiritual meaning is more relevant. Especially when Peter asks Jesus to bring him out on the water, and we can suddenly see ourselves as participants in miracle making.
But Peter gets out a few steps, sees the waves from his new perspective, and starts sinking, screaming for help. Jesus puts him back in the boat saying, you of little faith, why did you doubt? How many times have Jesus’ words been aimed at us when we’ve expressed the least bit of existential uncertainty? But is doubt as uncertainty really what Jesus is rebuking? The word translated as doubt comes from a root that means twice or again, so we can understand it as second guessing ourselves, wavering in resolve as we ruminate.
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We don’t have little faith when we stop thinking we mentally believe. We have little faith when we start thinking again and stop acting. Faith is not thought. It’s acting as if what we say we believe is true enough to carry us on the surface tension of uncertainty. The nonrational ability to act in the presence of doubt, step out of the boat of all our very good reasons why not.
Little faith is not much doubt. It’s the need for much certainty. Keeping the faith is not steely-eyed adherence to mental concept. It’s the embrace of uncertainty, accepting we will never have enough information to step out of our boats. We just do. Over and over. Until trust replaces certainty.
More Big Words
Dave Brisbin 1.19.25
From someone going through a perfect storm of difficulties: I see no evidence of God, but plenty of evidence of the devil. Despite years as a devout Christian, she’s hit the point we all do, over and over in life, the point Karl Jaspers called a limit situation. The moment we realize we’re gonna need a bigger boat. Hitting the limit of our ability to cope, make sense, make meaning—everything that ordered our universe lying in a heap.
Why does God seem silent when evil is so loud?
We can walk into a dilapidated house and say we see no evidence of an architect, but the fact of the house, the space in which we could care for and maintain a home, is the architect’s fingerprint. If the consequences of human action or natural processes like extreme weather or viruses frustrate our agendas, security, and certainty, we label them evil. They overwhelm us, obscuring the order beneath. God is everywhere and everything, the foundation and bones of the house, the floor on which we act. But no matter how badly we neglect the floor, it still exists, if we’re still acting. We can say the news is always bad, but that’s good. Though loud, bad news is still the aberration against the backdrop of good.
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Such a non-specific message is not what we want, but all that we need.
The suffering always present in a limit situation is the only experience powerful enough to pull back the curtain of our certainties du jour and show us the next larger reality we may be ready to engage…a spiritual awakening. But as long as we equate our suffering with evil, let it blot out the possibility of good, it can’t show us anything.
The Big Words
Dave Brisbin 1.12.25
I’m often asked about the big words…
The words of Christian doctrine that seem to contradict the nature of God that Jesus called Good News, love itself. Degreeless and indiscriminate love that can’t be altered or avoided, showering on everyone equally—just and unjust alike. Yet Christianity feels exclusive…acceptance withheld unless we believe in an orthodox Jesus, declare him as Lord, obey church rule and ritual. There is heaven for those who perform, the eternal torment of hell for the rest, and at the center of it all stands the cross. Ironically, the ultimate dividing line.
Here’s a big word: propitiation. An English word used to translate the Greek and Aramaic words used by John and Paul to describe Jesus’ death on the cross. It means to appease wrath, regain favor, change the mind of an angry God. In 1611, the King James bible translated the Greek hilasmos and Aramaic husaya as propitiation, but this has become controversial. Later translations use expiation instead—atonement, the extinguishing of guilt. The ancient words can mean both, so which?
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None of the big words mean what we think when placed back in the language Jesus and his followers spoke and wrote. We must re-know what they knew. Jesus was laser-focused on love…
The meaning of any big word that contradicts that love is a mistranslation.
Reward and Punishment
Dave Brisbin 1.5.25
An angel was walking down the street carrying a torch and a pail of water. When asked what he was going to do with torch and pail, the angel said that with the torch he was burning down the mansions of heaven, and with the pail, putting out the fires of hell. Because only then would we see who truly loves God.
With no promise of reward or fear of punishment, what is the temperature of our love when there is nothing “in it” for us—no consequence for not engaging.
Everything in us rebels at this. We’re offended if there’s no reward for hard work. Yet Jesus tells us that no matter when we show up, we’re all paid the same at the end of the day—love is its own reward. We’re offended if there’s no punishment for failure, yet Jesus says that sun and rain fall on the just and unjust alike—love can never be other than what it is. We have to scale the wall of reward and punishment before we can ever hope to experience love without degree. Jesus relentlessly works to tear down this wall, knowing how deeply life has embedded it while giving no experience of something as alien as degreeless love.
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Life is so uncertain and humans so fragile, we crave certainty as medication, and the paradigm of reward and punishment at least gives some illusion of control. That performing as we imagine God wills, binds God contractually to love and acceptance. But even the slightest vestige of meritocracy blinds us to the possibility of a love that can’t be withheld or altered, keeping us forever striving for what we already possess.
Through the Needle’s Eye
Dave Brisbin 12.29.24
When a rich young man asks what he must do to experience eternal aliveness, and Jesus tells him to sell all he has, and the man walks away with head hung, Jesus tells his friends how hard it is for wealthy people. Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter aliveness. The Aramaic word for camel, gamla, can also mean rope, so take your pick of images, but…it’s really hard.
So how did the Magi beat those odds? Magi were wealthy, educated, astronomer/astrologers, influential advisors to power, yet when they saw the eastern rising of the prophetic star for which they had been searching for centuries, they jumped on their camels and headed west. So far, so good. All in the realm of accepted science and entrenched belief. But when that star “stood over” Bethlehem—when Jupiter went retrograde, signaling the end of their western push, and they found the one born at the rising of the king’s star—what could have prepared them for the abject poverty and insignificance of the infant? How were they able to see past centuries of expectation to the unassuming fulfilment of promise?
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What did the Magi have that the rich young man did not?
The Magi brought three gifts. Gold symbolizes desire, and frankincense, the action of faith. So far, so good. But desire and action along the certainty of our entrenched belief can only take us to the precipice of the manger. At the manger, we are asked to sell everything that expects something certain. The Magi have one gift left. Myrrh…surrender. Without surrender to the unexpected, impossible, improbability of God, all our other gifts don’t matter. They can’t squeeze us through the needle’s eye.
