David Brisbin Podcast

Dave Brisbin | 11.6.16 Walking my daughter down the aisle on her wedding day was just about everything I could have hoped for in such a moment. She was absolute beautiful in her dress, her mother and I love her groom, the setting and preparations couldn’t have been better. But even in a perfect moment such as this, I was of course aware of fractures between families and family members that had remained either unresolved or unspoken for years, and yet as the evening unfolded, there were moments of reconnection and reconciliation that deepened the experience. I couldn’t help thinking of all the mistakes we’d all made over the past twenty five years, all the hurts and resentments, anger that somehow led to this perfect moment of reconnection. We need to look again at our notion of sin and failure if we’re ever going to see what Jesus is telling us about Good News and the shape of the Way to his Father. Julian of Norwich, a medieval contemplative writer and visionary tells us that “sin is behovely,” meaning usefu

Dave Brisbin | 10.23.16 Why does Jesus speak in such paradoxical terms? Why is he always taking the world as we know it and turning it upside down, inside out, and backside front? There seems to be a way of seeing life from the Father’s perspective that turns it all around in a way that is essential to our spiritual growth and identity. Some people call this moving from a first half of life to a second half of life spirituality. The first half of life dealing with the external tasks and details of accomplishment and acquisition, of identity building from the outside in, and the second half learning to see the deeper task within the task, the universal task that builds identity from inside out. Second half spirituality understands that while the external task is ultimately unimportant in itself, the process of doing it, and doing it well, accomplishes an inner task that is eternally important. Just as the master in the Karate Kid makes his student wax cars in a very specific way—it’s not well-waxed cars that a

Dave Brisbin | 10.16.16 One of the most fundamental truths of life is that it all happens, is all contained, in one moment: this moment, this day. Like a person with amnesia who wakes every morning with memory washed, each of us must learn and live everything necessary to fulfill our purpose as humans in the space of just one day, one life, one generation. But because we have the capacity to think beyond the moment—into the abstract, into yesterday and tomorrow, and because we fear the finality of our deaths in this life, we project purpose and meaning into the future, into a legacy that exceeds our own space and time. We want to be remembered, revered, to make a mark that will last. We live our lives working to build, accomplish, impress, and grow, and we do this until we realize none of that matters, that what matters remains elusive in spite of all effort. In his book, Ecclesiastes, Solomon poetically expresses these concepts in his ruthless search for what is truly meaningful. And though the book at first

Dave Brisbin | 10.09.16 Any look at the contemplative way has to include a close look at what since Thomas Merton in the fifties has been called the “false self.” This sense of personal identity is based on the emotional programs for happiness and survival born out of basic human need and nature and as a by-product of self-awareness/consciousness. But it is tailored to each individual by our hurts and traumas, primarily from early life where our deepest fears, attitudes, and worldview are formed. How can we identify this false self that, just as the sun obliterates the nighttime stars, obliterates the true self that remains purely connected to God’s presence deep within. Looking at Pauls’s comments in Romans and Philippians; at the offline and online practice of meditation, centering prayer, and mindfulness; at the church’s and AA’s steps of self-examination and confession, we come closer and closer to Jesus’ goal of bringing us to the freedom that only comes from knowing the truth. And the truth is, that the

What worries you most? Honestly going through the pantheon of all that occupies our thoughts and disrupts our sleep not only shows us our fears, but what we expect will relieve them in terms of the outcomes over which we obsess. Now imagine that you were suddenly free of all that worry, anxiety, and stress. What would that actually feel like? Jesus says it feels like Kingdom. Maybe we’ve not had the experience since we were still in the garden of our childhood, not knowing we were naked, with nothing separating us from the moment of waking through the cool of the evening with Presence. Arguably, all of human life is a working through a return to the Garden of our childhood. How do we do this? What keeps us from seeing the journey clearly? An often overlooked passage in the New Testament has given the church fits trying to interpret why John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, sends his own disciples from his prison cell to ask Jesus if he is the “expected one,” or if they should look for someone else. It’s amazing th

Dave Brisbin | 9.25.16 How important is prayer? A kneejerk reaction says of course it’s important, essential to our spiritual lives. But a more important question may be what kind of prayer is essential to our spiritual lives? When you take all the different types of prayer that we commonly think of as prayer—recited prayer, freeform prayer, petition, intercession, thanksgiving, praise—what is common to all of them are words. Words form the basis of most if not all our prayers, and yet words can never capture the deepest parts of our spirituality or the relationship we have with a God who can’t be seen or expressed in any way. The Hebrew word for prayer, slotha, points back to the roots, sela, which is actually a hunting term for laying a snare or setting a trap. Prayer to an ancient Jew meant to incline toward, lean in, focus, adjust, tune in, or literally to set a trap for God--to clear a space interiorly and exteriorly and prepare to receive and connect with God’s presence. We need more of this kind of wor

Dave Brisbin | 9.18.16 The Bible makes a big deal about knowing God. There are dozens of references to knowing that tell us this is an area to which we should pay attention. And we have been, but the solution of Western Christianity for the past 500 years to search scripture for any and every bit and piece of data to add to our collected theology has nothing to do with what the writers of scripture had in mind. To know in Hebrew is something borne of long, close association. It is an experiential knowing that could never come out of a book. Our word for such knowing is intimacy, and tellingly both words also serve as euphemisms for sexual relations: the closest and most intense knowing we experience as humans. Jesus tells us that eternal life is the state of knowing God and himself, since he is one with Father. All these figures of speech—the best we can do in words to describe the infinite—now coalesce to form a picture of knowing as intimacy, the oneness that grows out of years of daily practice and simple

Dave Brisbin | 9.11.16 On the 15th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, we take a moment to remember the shock and grief of that day, how it changed us and the world, and just what kind of journey was begun that day for both our nation and for us as individuals. Especially for the 20% of the nation’s population that knew someone hurt or killed that day, 9/11 began a hero’s journey, a rite of passage for those who were willing to answer the call, and move through the pain and grief to enter a new place in their lives. When the returning Jewish exiles gathered within their newly rebuilt walls around Jerusalem, their elders read the law of Moses to them and explained what it meant to generations who had not heard it while in Babylon. And the people wept at all that had been lost to them as a people. But Nehemiah reminds them that this is a day of celebration, even in the midst of the pain and loss; that they need to eat and drink and remember that the joy of the Lord is their strength. So answering

Dave Brisbin | 9.4.16 Ever notice how Jesus is able to get out of every thorny situation the religious leaders of his day throw at him? They bring him a woman caught in adultery and ask whether to stone her knowing he’ll run afoul of either Roman or Mosaic law no matter how he answers. Or they ask whether it’s lawful to pay Roman taxes or which is the greatest commandment of all and many others with the same intent. Each question is a carefully crafted attempt to put Jesus between a rock and hard place where any answer would discredit or condemn him with the people. How does Jesus know what to say, how to wiggle off the hook? Is it just because he’s God’s son that he has special knowledge or is there some principle or perspective he’s using that can guide us as well. Jesus is showing us that whenever we’re caught on the horns of a dilemma, forced to choose between bad and worse, there is a third force or element that when brought into play, raises our perception above the rock and the hard place and shows a s

Dave Brisbin | 8.28.16 There are some days that are just hard. Hard to break through to meaning and purpose, hard to get up in the morning, hard to do what is required this day. On one such day, wondering if I could really do the day with my car at the intersection where a right turn took me to work and the day’s activities, I sat and thought and then turned left toward a local wilderness park. Not knowing what I was really looking for, I found a bench with a plaque dedicated to a child, an infant, Gavin, who had died fourteen years before. The parents’ pain screamed through the engraved words until I looked up through bright green leaves lit by a perfect morning sun to the flawlessly blue sky beyond and asked no one in particular, “Why does it have to be this way?” I asked for Gavin and his parents, but I was really asking for myself. This is life lived as a human. The juxtaposition of beauty and cruelty, joy and pain. How do we navigate between the two and keep our cars turning right toward the activities o

Dave Brisbin | 8.21.16 Most of us have heard the line that freedom isn’t free, usually in the context of supporting our military, but is there a truth in that slogan that can help us along Jesus’ Way? When we examine what the goal of Jesus’ Way really is, we start thinking of love, peace, tranquility, service to others, closeness or knowledge of God, but what are any of those without the complete freedom to be all of those? Jesus tells us that if we follow his Way, we will know the truth and that truth will set us free. It’s all about freedom, because any love, peace, service, relationship, or knowledge that is coerced or born out of fear is not part of Jesus’ Way. The Way to radical freedom costs us everything—everything we think we know about ourselves, life, the world, God, and until we are willing to “pay,” let those things go and die, we will never see the radical freedom to simply be that is right in front of us.

Dave Brisbin | 8.14.16 Before you can teach someone to practice presence, whether “online,” throughout the rough and tumble of each days details, or “offline,” in meditation, centering prayer, or silence—you first have to stoke the desire for presence, which means you have to show some benefit to the effort. The truth is, who we think we are in our minds, described to us by the voice that speaks in our heads, is not who we really are. We are not the voice in our heads that speaks in English or Spanish or any language. There is a deeper identity that remains hidden as long as we are listening to the voice. That deeper identity is the one that can play in Kingdom and follow where Jesus leads, but until we quiet that voice, we will never know what we are missing. We have literally forgotten who we are, who we were as the child that Jesus holds up as emblem of Kingdom. But these moments of pure presence, where the voice quiets or at least we stop listening, are the moments of unforgetting, moments we begin to rem

Dave Brisbin | 7.31.16 What are God’s greatest creations? When it comes right down to the nub, arguably, they would be space and time. Space, because matter doesn’t matter if you don’t have a place to put it, and time because nothing exists at all unless it has duration—exists for some time. Jesus said to seek first the Kingdom and all else would be added…in this life, apparently, we must seek that kingdom first through the experience of space and time before all else is added. To be present to what is now is at once the goal and practice of spirituality properly understood. Did Jesus practice presence? Absolutely. Reading between the lines of story after story of Jesus’ life and work and prayer, we see the unmistakable marks of deep presence both in the midst of a busy, detailed-filled ministry and at times of solitude and silence that he sought in the wilderness as respite. To read between the lines and understand the Way of Jesus from the point of view of presence to space and time is the first step to fol

Dave Brisbin | 7.24.16 Any look at the contemplative way of life eventually brings us right up against mystery, against the limit of what we can and can’t know in much the same way that science reaches the limit of its ability to describe phenomena edging closer and closer to infinite temperature, velocity, size. How much can we really know in this life? But more importantly how much is necessary to know in order to live in such a way that we can fulfill our purpose here as humans? If you really think about it, what would life be without mystery? The mystery in magic and stories, Christmas presents and each other is what keeps us interested and alive, guessing and engaged. To solve a mystery, to kill a mystery with an intellectual solution is to experience a momentary resolution and then the grief of the loss of the aliveness. The sin of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day was to kill mystery with the law—as if following the law perfectly gave us the understanding and control over life and God that we crave. In defen

Dave Brisbin | 7.10.16 What is the greatest impediment to gratefulness? To the trust of gratefulness? Seems it would have to be the hurts and traumas, the victimization, the evil that we encounter in our personal lives, and those of others either close or in the world at large. How do we continue to see God as compassionate and fair, how do we see life as fundamentally nurturing or safe, when there are monsters about hurting us and others? The problem of evil in our lives seems to contradict the portrait of God painted by Jesus as loving father. The oldest book of the bible, the book of Job, deals with these essential themes—as they’ve been questioned as long as there have been human being experiencing them. And the final answer to Job as God speaks to him from the whirlwind is that there is no answer that can be given to us in this life that will satisfy our minds, but there is an answer that can satisfy our hearts. A way of living that brings the paradox of the reality of perfect love and the experience of

Dave Brisbin | 6.26.16 In our society, and especially in the midst of a presidential election cycle, it is easy to become completely polarized—to “drink the kool-aid” and go all in with one group or another, one party or another, one religion or another. To become completely imprinted with the tenets, the groupthink of our choosing. From this perch, it is easy to imagine that we have the corner on truth, all the truth, and all others do not, that we are good and others are bad, are less than, need to be persuaded or controlled for their own good, and ours. It is a perch from which personal growth stops as we hunker down to convert the world to what we already know. In this mindset, there is no dialog or conversation, there is no relationship or love that is not conditioned on first meeting our standard of belief. But Jesus and the great contemplatives of the world show us another way: a way to live on the edge of inside, on the threshold between groups and belief systems that keeps us open and aware, watching

Dave Brisbin | 6.19.16 Fathers’ Day: Ancient Hebrews envisioned their God the way they experienced the patriarchs of their clans—as king, judge, executioner, administrator—as the strength of their houses, which is what the Hebrew word for father, Ab, actually means. And though they also had a balancing notion of God as mother too, as wisdom, compassion, love—the glue that held the family together, it was Ab by which they referred to God. Jesus had an ingenious solution to create balance. He called God his “abba,” the name children would use for their fathers…a term of intimacy and affection. It created the perfect balance of respect and connection, masculine strength and feminine compassion. Then he went on to illustrate in story after story how this played out. And in the story of prodigal son, if we’re really paying attention we realize that it’s not so much the extravagant, even wasteful spending of the son that is the focus, but that of the father who lavishes all he has on his son, no matter the quality

Dave Brisbin | 6.12.16 Speaking of the contemplative way of spirituality in conceptual terms is necessary at the outset, especially for those of us from the West, who are so intellectually based, but it is in many respects, a contradiction in terms. The contemplative way is not intellectually based at all—it is by definition a stepping away from the intellectual in order to non-judgmentally experience the lived moment. But how do we do this? How we step away? There is prayer and there is suffering that can guide us in intensive and specific ways, but there is another. Br. Lawrence called it the Practice of the Presence of God. Instead of specific times of prayer and devotion, there is a constant awareness of God’s presence that we can cultivate through all the daily details of our lives, an awareness that will give us the continual prayer, the constant contact that Paul speaks of. Today, this is sometimes called mindfulness—but mindfulness without the awareness of Presence may still not take us where we want

Dave Brisbin | 6.5.16 One of the words ancient Christians used to describe the contemplative way was the word “apophatic.” From the Greek, it literally means to deny speaking or saying. In Latin, it is sometimes called the “via negative” or negative way—negative in the sense of emptying the mind of words, images, ideas in order to rest in God’s presence. In our contemporary culture, this seems somehow perverse in terms of coming into a connection with God. But as we look as Jesus’ time in the wilderness, his staring down the temptations of the adversary from a place of emptiness, his wild, paradoxical sayings of accomplishing by letting go, finding our lives by losing them, his insistence in the Beatitudes of the centrality of “negative” aspects of poverty of spirit, mournfulness, meekness, hunger and thirst as characteristic of kingdom, we see the apophatic way illustrated. To sell all we have and give to the poor in order to follow Jesus into the father’s presence is a letting go of all we think we have and

Dave Brisbin | 5.22.16 As we dig deeper into the contemplative way of spirituality, we need to break down religious and cultural barriers. Contemplation, as we’re using it, is a stepping away from the all the thoughts, worries, concerns, and noise in our minds that keeps us from mindful presence right here and now—the only place we will ever meet our God: here and now. Modern Western Christian churches have expressed concern over contemplative practice, labeling it occult, but there is nothing occult about Christian contemplative practice that dates all the way back to the earliest generations of Jesus’ followers, and of course to Jesus himself. How did Jesus practice contemplative prayer and life? Where do we see this practice in scripture, and how do we enter into such practice in our lives today? We need to know more about a contemplative how.