David Brisbin Podcast

Dave Brisbin 11.6.22 William Shatner, Star Trek’s original Captain Kirk, flew to space on a private suborbital flight a year ago, and like many astronauts, had a profound, worldview-shattering experience. Space was “unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth—deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Everything I had thought was wrong, everything I had expected to see was wrong.” Leaving the spacecraft after landing, he wept, and it took him some time to realize that he “was in grief for the Earth.” He saw Earth as we can never see it from the surface: an isolated, fragile spot of warmth and life set against vast darkness. On the surface, if we don’t like one spot, we can move to another, assume inexhaustible resources, distract ourselves, and take our home for granted. But from space, the realization that all we have and are, all human history and experience, love and life exists in

Dave Brisbin 10.30.22 It doesn’t take a prophet or a genius to see that the world is on a collision course with something out there. That everything can’t continue at this speed indefinitely. It’s a scary realization, and when we get scared, we start looking for something certain on which to stand. Which means I’ve been getting questions again on whether we are in the end times, whether the scriptures that describe them are true and when they will play out. Short answer: I don’t know. Longer answer: no one can possibly know, no matter their years of study or absolute certainty. Jesus tells us flat out that no one knows the day or hour when such end times will occur—not the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. Couldn’t be more blunt, but Jesus gives a clue here that can help us make sense of apocalyptic passages. Fear drives us to imagine certainty, some illusion of control, missing that the purpose of these passages is not what—the certainty we crave—but how to live in uncertain times. Prophe

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’ m

Dave Brisbin 10.16.22 A wealthy man asks a Zen master to write a text that will inspire and remind him of his love and devotion for his family. The master returns with a beautiful calligraphy that reads: The father dies. The son dies. The grandson dies. The man is furious, but the master calmly tells him that this is his blessing. If his son died first, it would be devastating. If his grandson died, unbearable. But if his family disappears in this order, he will be blessed and his family will continue for generations. There is a natural order that we see written in life or just in our own minds, and we are very attached to it as the way things should be. Any losses we suffer hurt, but when they violate the natural order, as the death of a child, we are devastated by both the loss itself and the offense against the natural order. We anguish and rage in a tragic gap between the way things are and the way we think they should be, a limit situation where we run headlong into the limit of our ability to control a

Dave Brisbin 10.9.22 Thirty years ago, living alone, I was trying to be a monk in the city. Maintaining silence in apartment and car, reading all I could find on spiritual life, up at 5AM, prayerfully running through dark streets, meditation cool down by the community pool, back up to my apartment to journal, getting ready for work. Day in and out. Put that way, sounds like I knew what I was doing, had a sense of confidence in direction and growth. A 1993 journal entry written after run and prayer asks, Where are you, Lord? Where do I go to listen? What do I listen for? How do I listen? Do I strain? Do I relax? Is it obvious? Subtle? Does it frustrate you that I am so deaf? A snapshot of the condition my condition was in: that despite all I was doing, I was not experiencing what I expected, feared I was doing it all wrong, anxious even despondent over ever getting it right. Yet the same entry also contained the seeds of answers breaking conscious ground—that God was not somewhere else to be found, but right

Dave Brisbin 10.2.22 Remember the Karate Kid movie? Has to be the original from 1984. Kid asks the master to teach him karate, and the master tells him to wax his cars. But with this exact movement—wax on, wax off. When that’s done, sand the floor, paint the fence, all with very specific movements. After weeks, the kid is fed up with slave labor, screams at the master, and turns to leave. Then there’s this great moment where the master puts all those movements into context with the punches he throws, the kid deftly blocking each one with muscles hardened by the memory of each defensive motion. Why didn’t the master tell the kid what he was really doing while he was doing all that work? Because the kid would have brought all he thought he knew about karate into the process and messed it all up. Only way to learn a pure motion is to separate the motion from the desired outcome, and only way to a desired outcome is to learn the pure motion. What a metaphor for life. What are we really doing when we do the thing

Dave Brisbin 9.25.22 From the desert monastic communities of Egypt and Judea in the 4th century: a young monk asks his elder how he can come closer to God. Elder tells him to go to the cemetery and insult the dead. Dutifully he goes, and upon return the elder asks: did you go to the cemetery? Yes. Did you insult the dead? Yes. Did they respond to you? No. Now go back and praise the dead. Upon return: did they respond to you? No. When you can respond to the insults and praises of men the way the dead do, you will be closer to God. The early church understood the value of unoffendability and unflatterability. Of learning that contentment, meaning, purpose, identity don’t depend on external opinion or circumstance, but a deep interior connection. Today, such values are not only lost, but our culture, both secular and religious, is built on noise, social approval, compulsive activity, and complexity. Re-establishing the deep interior connection Jesus calls being one with the Father means living salmon-like, swim

Dave Brisbin 9.18.22 A nurse, retiring after 44 years while also moving out of the home in which she raised her children, was feeling the anxiety of losing much of what had identified her entire adult life. I was telling her how important it would be to jump into the deep end of her new hometown, engage in community and really connect, when she flashed on her mother-in-law who had retired to Las Vegas seven years before. She had recently died, and the nurse was astounded by how many people attended the funeral…hundreds, including local store clerks and food servers. In seven years, in a city the size of Las Vegas, imagine the kind of impression she must have made with even the most casual encounters. How she broke through the daily noise of life to leave people feeling seen, heard, validated, encouraged, loved. I wish I’d known her. I want to be her when I grow up. What does it take to overflow a funeral service? What does it take to have the kind of presence that leaves people better than we found them? F

Dave Brisbin 9.11.22 How many people do you know who seem satisfied with their lives? Are you? Every ad and commercial you see is betting that you’re not. Betting they can get between you and your money by hammering your dissatisfaction with your haves or have nots, your looks, your health, your work, your ride, and a million other issues. What does it even mean to be satisfied with your life? Should you be satisfied? Isn’t there always something to work for, something that needs fixing, a hole that needs filling? Wouldn’t life be meaningless, purposeless, boring if we were satisfied with the way things are? I read an article that compared our lives to trees that shed their leaves in the fall, changing their priorities for the winter by deciding what to protect. Leaves take a lot of energy to maintain, and in the winter when energy is scarce, there’s only enough to protect the tree’s inner essence, to survive until spring. The tree is a lesson in choosing what to protect. I’m thinking that’s what being sati

Dave Brisbin 9.4.22 Jesus’ Way, the practice of presence, of stepping away from the verbal use and abuse of the mind, is impossible to put into words. Since we are putting words aside in order to experience real presence, words can never detail what we find there. At least not directly. One of the best attempts to describe a transcendent, contemplative experience is a poem of course, A Great Wagon by Rumi, a 13th century Sufi mystic. It’s the one with the famous line: Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Though that line gets all the attention, each line and metaphor points toward a going beyond everything we think holds life in place. Beyond law, morality, ethics, logic, theology, doctrine, material possessions, even the laws of physics and any illusion of certainty, there is a field. When we lie down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense. As humans, even after having such an exp

Dave Brisbin 8.28.22 Ever been frustrated by Jesus’ communication style? Get in line because even his first followers throw their hands up in the gospels and ask why he doesn’t just speak plainly. Why always in parables and figures of speech. Jesus is a poet. One of the best. He knows he can’t express spiritual truths directly, but only through stories and metaphors that point without limiting. I’m sure this is a big part of the allure of Buddhism in the West: Buddha is more engineer than poet, giving us Three Universal Truths, Four Noble Truths, an Eight Fold Path, all interconnected and breaking down into further sublists. Something to hold on to. Jesus never gives us lists or interlocking structure. He points toward the experience of top-level concepts and principles, what it feels like to live them. Frustrating, because he is always challenging embedded thought, always introducing paradox and mystery, attempting to take us beyond. Beyond where we are, beyond where we think we can go, even beyond what we

Dave Brisbin 8.21.22 Suffering is evil and wrong, isn’t it? The price we’ve been paying since Adam blew it in the garden? A sign of God’s disapproval, that something is wrong in our lives, that we need to repent and pray for God’s relief. How we view suffering has a lot to do with how much it hurts. I was taught to view suffering as evil, but what if I was misinformed? Jesus makes a cryptic statement that you don’t hear many pastors or priests discussing these days. When people were asking Jesus for a sign to prove his power came from God, he tells them they will get no sign but the Sign of Jonah. How to understand? Jonah is the Hebrew prophet swallowed by a big fish while trying to escape God’s command to save a city and people he hated as enemies of Israel. After three days and nights in the fish, Jonah reluctantly goes to them. The people repent, saving the city, but Jonah sulks outside the city walls praying for death. The story ends with God asking whether Jonah is doing well to be angry, and why should

Dave Brisbin 8.14.22 Most of us have heard the phrase, “ugly duckling,” but most of us no longer know the story from which it comes. We may think it refers to a face only a mother could love, but The Ugly Duckling was a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale published in 1843. After a mother duck’s eggs hatch, there is one duckling unlike all the rest, who is verbally and physically abused because of his looks. He goes through a series of isolating and humiliating incidents until, when fully grown, throws himself into a flock of swans preferring death to further rejection. He’s amazed that he is fully accepted until he sees his reflection in the water and realizes he’s been a swan all along. When Andersen was asked if he’d ever write his autobiography, he said it was already done. A tall, ugly boy with a big nose and feet, he was cruelly mocked and teased, but in addition to his musical and writing talents, there was evidence he was the illegitimate son of the king of Denmark. The swan was not just metaphor for

Dave Brisbin 8.7.22 What’s your first reaction to the words religious ritual? Positive? Negative? Typically, it’s a one-two punch of negatives: religion and ritual—both of which many people now denigrate, ridicule, as empty, meaningless, even cultish. Those criticisms are valid if ritual is performed thoughtlessly, without knowing the meaning of the symbols involved, as mere obedience or conformance to a group, to gain approval or status…but what if it isn’t any of those things? A sacrament is a religious ritual that we define as the outward expression of an inward transformation. When a person offers a transformed heart, with understanding of how the ritual expresses their transformation to the community, it’s filled with meaning—a shared experience and celebration that binds people together. We need ritual, but we need to expand it beyond the confines of church. In my twenties, as some point I realized that I always fell into deep depression on Sunday afternoons. Like clockwork. Not until my thirties when

Dave Brisbin 7.31.22 I was recently asked why we don’t do altar calls at our church. It’s not that we don’t do them, but we don’t do them publicly. As de facto sacraments, altar calls have become every Sunday rituals at many Evangelical churches in the past hundred and fifty years. Named from the practice of calling people to the front/altar of a church to declare their conversion, the ritual has become encapsulated in saying the “sinners prayer,” which includes admission of sin, request for forgiveness, statement of orthodoxy, and intention of repentance. It’s a beautiful first step of vulnerability and intention, but which over time has culturally become the proof of salvation itself. If the saying of a prayer made of words, no matter how beautiful, could trigger the flow of God’s grace and approval where it was previously withheld, as Marcus Borg said, it would be “salvation by syllables.” Mere superstition—in the way carrying a rabbit’s foot brings good luck. Jesus was very clear. He’s not superstitiou

Dave Brisbin 7.24.22 A dear friend and colleague suddenly diagnosed with stage four cancer brings everything to a halt. Not just in her life, but in ours as well—at least for a time. And when we start breathing again, I know what I’m thinking, but wondering what she’s thinking in the dark hours. Her voice sounds strong; she’s talking about fighting and treatment plans, but also logistics and last wishes for her children and all of us. She’s striking a strange balance between hope for life and admission of the possibility of death, the preparation for it. But isn’t that just a statement of the human condition? Don’t we all live out our lives, plan and dream, laugh and embrace, under the shadow of a death sentence? As long as there’s no date attached, no end in sight, we can pretend, but at times like these it all comes hissing in like a leak in a submarine. Her family is now experiencing an intensity they haven’t in some time. We all do this. Why do we wait until the possibility of losing someone becomes im

Dave Brisbin 7.17.22 We are fixated on answers. Our collective intolerance of uncertainty feeds a deep need to find absolute answers to all our questions, to be right while pointing out those who are wrong, to pretend that life can be made risk-free if we just know enough of the right stuff. Our minds become the tip of the spear that we believe will save us from our fears. This may work well for the physical sciences and train schedules, but when it comes to matters of spirit, we need to think again. Do you know how many questions Jesus asks in the gospels? It’s amazing that people actually count these things, but nice that we can look them up. Jesus asks 307 questions. More importantly, 183 questions are asked of him. Of those 183, he directly answers…three. Just three. For every question Jesus answers directly, he literally asks a hundred. He answers every question of course, but most often with another question. Sometimes with a story or an object lesson. But every answer is geared to stop questioners in

Dave Brisbin 7.10.22 What is the goal of our spiritual journeys? How would you answer for yours? Peace, love, enlightenment, wisdom, salvation? It’s unfortunate that we haven’t been clearer about Jesus’ answer to the question: that following his Way to the Father allows us to know the truth, and that truth will make us free. Freedom is the ultimate goal, because without freedom from the fear that is part of human nature, we will never risk dropping all our defenses—the only way to experience Father, love without degrees or prerequisite. There’s a catch: what is this freedom? What does it feel like? How do we know we’re talking about the same freedom Jesus tells us comes from knowing truth? In our culture, freedom is unencumbrance from anything that would limit our ability to say and do whatever we want, whenever we want. Our movie heroes are the antithesis of the modern middleclass—burdened by mortgages, debt, desk jobs, families, grinding daily and weekly routine. Movie heroes appear and disappear, ride int

Dave Brisbin 7.3.22 The 4th of July comes round again at a time when faith in our country has been deeply shaken. We are questioning our most enduring institutions right down to the Constitution and Founding Fathers’ motives and wisdom, with some saying we need to scrap the whole thing and start over. Second American Revolution. Considering the angst, seems appropriate to paraphrase Winston Churchill: the US is the worst country ever built by humans—except for all the other ones. Our country is flawed, of course. Though I’m convinced history will show we have been a force for much more good than evil, if we are committed to rising above the triggering of emotion, obsessive thought, special interest, and personal bias, we can occupy liminal space, the threshold between camps, and see clearly enough to praise and criticize as needed to make us better. Rising above personal triggers—that’s easier said. But fighting this interior revolution must happen first if we’re to wage an exterior one with any hope of leav

Dave Brisbin 6.26.22 If you’re serious about following a spiritual path, you have two major roadblocks to overcome: your mind and your body. Your mind, storehouse for the dualism of your egoic consciousness, constantly talks to you—comparing, contrasting, judging. Your body, storehouse of your emotions, drives unconscious behavior patterns with childhood conditioning, memories, guilt, shame. Necessary for survival, but left unchecked, mind and body keep us in a narcissistic bubble, apart from others and the reality of the moment. Admittedly oversimplified, the West has been in love with the mind, rational thought, for the past three hundred years since the Enlightenment, but in in the last fifty or so, has fallen in love with the body, with emotion. Emotion has become the sign of being authentic and in touch, empathetic and compassionate. Arguments now appeal to emotion, drowning out rational thought with feelings. Society needs a balance, but ancient wisdom tradition knows that true spiritual formation mean