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Circles within Circles
Dave Brisbin 11.17.24
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
Eliot’s iconic line reminds that time is not a line, but a circle. Beginning and end one and the same. That any authentic journey is a journey of awareness, bringing us back to ourselves expanded. And knowing…what?
Step 11 tells us it’s God’s will we seek through the prayer and meditation that makes conscious contact with God possible. Without that conscious part, what have we got? But what have we got when we’ve got God’s will? We crave what we imagine as God’s “what:” what he wants us to do, the perfect life he wills us complete to the last detail. Mistake-proof. But God’s will, sebyana in Aramaic, is deepest desire, pleasure, delight, purpose—the essence that paints God’s presence in the only colors we will ever see.
How do we come to know that? See those colors?
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There is no substitute for traveling these circles within circles. Knowing as intimate familiarity can’t be transferred or bestowed. It can only be experienced, circle after circle, coming back to an expanded home…knowing ourselves and the place again and again for the first time.
Grateful and Amazed
Dave Brisbin 11.10.24
What do you think of as a miracle? Seas parting, walking on water, healings? Dictionaries tell us miracles are events not explainable by natural or scientific laws. But what if an event is not explainable to or by you personally? Or leaves inexplicable space between data points? When you raise your hand, can you explain that? What happened between unthought intention and action? When you think a thought, where did it come from? When you forget, where did it go?
A thing doesn’t have to be spectacular to be inexplicable. Common, everyday events are as well. Maybe a better definition of a miracle is a gift that we could never have given ourselves. Birth. Next breath. A friend’s forgiveness. Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish theologian, said that his greatest talent was his ability to be surprised. Jesus, another Jew, never gravitated far from a child’s point of view, and the genius of children is to live in a world that is magical—full of surprises and inexplicable gifts immune to the density of entitlement, the illusion we’ve earned all we have.
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Hard work breeds entitlement and familiarity breeds contempt. Still, some moments cut through: surprising enough that miraculous gifts reveal themselves—smiles spreading without permission. But a lot of life can slip by between such uncultivated moments, and if we’re waiting, we’re neither grateful nor amazed. The 10th Step of AA is continuing to take personal inventory; if we limit it to mere cataloging of defects and bad behavior, we miss it.
Chesterton said we see things fairly when we see them first…recovering the candor and wonder of the child, the unspoiled realism and objectivity of innocence. The 10th Step is the fulcrum on which the other eleven are balanced—the practiced ability to see ourselves and life as if for the first time is both the cause and effect of our transformation. It’s a swimming against the current of life that keeps us surprisable, seeing the miraculous in the commonplace, grateful and amazed at gifts we could never give ourselves.
As Forgiven as We Wish
Dave Brisbin 11.3.24
I’ve tried to make amends to people I’ve hurt in the past. Sometimes I felt reconnected. Sometimes my apology was flatly refused. Sometimes the words of forgiveness were spoken, but everyone knew nothing further was exchanged. In all of them, there was no reconciliation. We’ve not spoken since.
The 9th Step of AA tells us to make direct amends wherever possible except when doing so would injure someone. But what are these amends? Dictionary says putting things right, restitution, mending. But if our attempts don’t mend, is there still purpose in the process? Turns out, process is all we have, all we can engage, so if there’s any purpose, that’s where we’ll find it. And regardless of outcome, the process of making amends is all about forgiveness—properly understood as freedom from the limitations of victimhood.
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Jesus said that if we forgive another, God forgives us, but if not, then not. Truth is, God doesn’t forgive at all. God is forgiveness itself…leaving to us the choice whether to accept the radical connection that is God—not mentally or verbally, but by engaging a gradual process of liberation. If we have created a victim, we can’t uncreate it. But making amends is a gift we give to help clear a path for our victim to free themselves—from us. Remove some of the debris blocking them from forgiving us. The beauty of amends is that in clearing the path for our victim, we are simultaneously clearing a path for ourselves. It’s the only way to do it.
I’ve hurt people who will never forgive me, or may never know if they do. Doesn’t matter. We can’t make our victims forgive us, and they couldn’t forgive us if they tried. But together, in the process of amends, we can help each other free ourselves with forgiveness. If we wish.
We are all as forgiven as we wish to be.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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.
The Path to Grateful
Dave Brisbin 11.19.23
Important government official comes to a renowned Zen master and says, “Teach me the ways of Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” It’s more command than request. The master smiles, saying, “Let’s discuss it over tea.” When the tea is ready, he pours for his guest, and pours until the cup begins to overflow, creeping across the table until it runs off onto the man’s robes. He jumps up, “Stop! Can’t you see the cup is full?” The master smiles again, “You are like this cup. So full, nothing can be added. Come back when your cup is empty. Come back with an empty mind.”
As modern, Western people, our cups are now so full, overflowing with digital data, that a study has shown our attention spans have dropped from twelve seconds in 2000 before the mobile revolution to eight seconds today. Considering that goldfish have demonstrated attention spans of nine seconds, we have fallen below goldfish in our ability to hold the moment, to simply be present to what is rather than what projects on our screens and our minds.
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We can’t create gratitude, seek it directly or count blessings into it. Gratitude is what happens when we let go of the complexity in our minds in favor of the simplicity of an instant. It’s an umbrella term that covers all the positive emotions and excludes the rest. You can’t be grateful and anything negative at the same time. It’s a physical, mental, emotional impossibility. Maybe gratitude isn’t a thing itself, but the absence of anything that distracts from the ongoing gift—what it feels like to let the moment we’re in be enough for us, realize that anything added or taken away would only diminish.
Gratitude is what we call what we feel when we empty our cup and graduate from goldfish.
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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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.
