David Brisbin Podcast

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 dens

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. For both victim and perpetrator, the freedom of forgiveness is essential. Whether a victim of someone else’s actions or our own, we’re not free to connect with anyone or God’s pr

Dave Brisbin 10.27.24 When we hear the Hebrew word shalom, we think of peace, as in the absence of conflict. And when we hear the word forgiveness, we think of pardoning or excusing, even condoning a person’s harmful action. But shalom—selama in Aramaic—means the greatest amount of unity, wholeness, health, and prosperity possible. And sebaq, forgiveness, means to set free. To the Semitic mind, forgiveness is being set free from victimization, and the fear, anger, resentment that has metastasized as a result. But since we can’t free another person’s heart, when we forgive, we’re actually setting ourselves free. We’re the only ones who can. In the 8th Step of AA, when we make a list of all the people we have harmed, we are going far beyond a mere list. We are recognizing our deep interconnectedness, maybe for the first time. How each choice and action we make ripples out, affecting others, just as theirs affect us. Not a problem when our actions are affirming, but can be devastating when not. And the closer a

Dave Brisbin 10.20.24 Ever try to give someone a compliment who couldn’t accept it? I like your shirt. Oh this? I got it on the clearance rack. Good job! I could have done better, just got lucky. Or next level: It wasn’t me; it was the Lord. All glory goes to God. Maybe we feel unworthy…or think we’re being humble or more spiritual by deflecting praise. But in trying to be humble, we humiliate ourselves with deprecation and the giver by essentially saying we know better. True humility doesn’t reduce us or others to lower levels. It simply recognizes what is. Humble people see themselves as they are. No more or less. Their relationships with others as they are—perfectly level. Their relationship with God—dependent, vulnerable, yet loved and accepted at the same time. But to be humble is to step outside your egoic mind that is always fighting to make you more or less than you are: defensive, fear-based positions, the ego’s will to survive. To be fearlessly humble—or gratefully realistic—is to have become ent

Dave Brisbin 10.13.24 When I went skydiving for the first and only time, I didn’t want a tandem jump—strapped to a jumpmaster—so that meant a full eight hours of training, and that the decision to jump was all mine. Fear grew all day through classes and videos; fitting for jumpsuit, helmet, goggles, pack; walking out to board the silver prop plane with its door-sized opening in the fuselage; takeoff and ascent to 12,500 feet; my name called; looking down at two miles of air with fear now in my throat. All day long the fear was with me, breathlessly at the moment of decision, but once I jumped, hyperventilated through the first few seconds of acceleration, I was no longer afraid. The day’s fear, gone. I’d set in motion a sequence of events that would end the at the ground one way or another, and I couldn’t take it back. Fully committed, there was nothing left but what I was trained to do. And enjoy the ride. The 12 Steps of AA break the removal of our shortcomings, our obsessive-compulsive thought and beh

Dave Brisbin 10.6.24 Longtime friend sent a text just long enough to tell me that his wife had died and could we set up a time to talk. I was shocked—knew she was fighting cancer, but no idea so advanced. On the phone, he didn’t want to talk about her death as much as what it had stirred up. Any death raises awareness of our own, but the death of a spouse takes it through the roof. He asked if he could tell me about things in his life that he wasn’t proud of, that he’d never told anyone. He said, you may not like me after you hear what I have to say. What is our greatest human fear? Being alone. Whether in personal relationships or existential vastness, alone is terrifying. All our compulsive, dysfunctional behavior is aimed at soothing that fear, so it’s perfect irony that such behavior only creates more aloneness by killing our presence—our ability to connect. My friend was alone in his home now and afraid that his deeds over decades would end our connection once spoken and maybe his connection with God

Dave Brisbin 9.22.24 If the first three Steps of AA are a serial surrender of the illusion that we can manage our lives isolated from the greater power of community and God, then Steps 4-7 are a serial healing of the damage those illusions have done. Just as surrender is too big to happen in one step, so is our emotional and psychological healing. Stages. Cycles. When the 4th Step speaks of making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, we think of lists of defects and shortcomings. A moral inventory is much more than a list. Defects and shortcomings are surface symptoms that expose deep, unconscious fears. Until we face those fears, the source of our dysfunction, we blame everyone and everything outside ourselves for our pain. We live as unconscious victims of circumstance…under the myth that circumstance determines well-being. The circumstances of Polish Jews in 1940 were horrific. After the German invasion that started WWII, they were concentrated and walled off in a tiny section of Warsaw

Dave Brisbin 9.15.24 Made a decision to turn our lives and will over to God, a power greater than ourselves…Step Three of AA…sort of a let go and let God. Sounds so easy, but it’s only as easy as our grip on whatever we’re holding on to. And if we believe we’re holding on to the only way we’ll ever experience security and survival, affection and esteem, power and control—just how easy a grip are we expecting? I remember a scene from a movie where a man is dangling off a cliff, clinging to the end of a rope with those at the top calling down to let go. He’s screaming back, eyes squeezed shut, face contorted. Exhausted, he finally lets go and falls about eighteen inches, lands in sitting position. That’s each and every one of us, clinging for dear life to illusions of power and control that blind us to the fact that in God’s care, it’s a very short fall. Once upon a time, I went skydiving. Jumped out of a plane at 12,500 feet with a bedsheet in a pack on my back. I decided to turn my life (literally) over to

Dave Brisbin 9.8.24 Looking at the 12 Steps of AA as a rite of passage: separation from the now too-small world we knew, to a disorienting transition, to reincorporation—a changed person returning to community. It’s the shape of every human life, but the trick is to make it conscious, our steps intentional. The danger is substituting the ritual for the real thing—talk about it or work through a book—useful in mapping our way, but never the journey itself. A Roman centurion approaches Jesus and implores him to heal his servant. Jesus says sure, take me to him. Centurion says I’m not worthy to have you in my home, just say the word. Jesus is amazed, has never seen such faith in all Israel. So much happening in so few words. A military commander of a ruthless empire, hated by the Jews, loves his servant enough to publicly humiliate himself before a ragtag Jewish healer…compassion cutting through rank and status. Aware of the blood on his hands, the military atrocities…remorse has opened him to a vulnerable

Dave Brisbin 9.1.24 Think of this election as the extension of a collective rite of passage into which we were plunged with the pandemic. A rite of passage is a three-part experience that grows us from one stage of human development to another. Being separated, by life event or ritual, from the world we knew; thrown into a difficult, even traumatizing transition; reincorporated back into community with new perspective is exactly what we’re facing together. Rites of passage only “work” when we allow the middle transition part to take us liminal—the space between no longer and not yet, the willingness to embrace the disorientation we feel on the threshold between worlds and beliefs. We’re there right now. The world we knew before the pandemic, social unrest, divisive elections, is gone. A new world is coming, and that scares us. But liminality only “works,” whether from cancer, divorce, pandemic, elections, when we let loss and ambiguity help us release hard judgments, see ourselves and others again behind t

Dave Brisbin 8.25.24 We don’t have real rites of passage in our culture anymore. At least not conscious rituals that take us through the three essential stages of separation, transition, and reincorporation. In true rites of passage, we are taken from the familiar world we know and plunged into a transitional experience that is betwixt and between the life we knew and the life we will enter when ready. It’s a liminal, threshold experience that disturbs and disorients as it teaches, and when the transition is complete, there is a reincorporation that recognizes our new place in the community. Babies losing their teeth and debutante balls don’t count, but joining the military certainly does, especially if deployed. But we don’t ritually reincorporate our soldiers back home as other cultures do, leaving us with such high veteran addiction and suicide rates. We still have two traditions that preserve rites of passage—the Way of Jesus and 12 Steps of AA. Unfortunately, we have reinterpreted Jesus’ Way as a system

Dave Brisbin 8.18.24 Woman tells me her daughter just left to go back to college after the summer home. How’s she doing with that? Sad, but ok. Truthfully, she’d gotten used to the freedom of an empty nest. Missed that freedom with her daughter back at home. But when daughter is away, misses her as well. We all do this. Mourn things missing to the point we miss things present. Trick is to be present to daughter when daughter is home, and when thoughts of missing freedom intrude, come back to daughter. And when daughter is gone, be present to freedom and keep coming back to it when daughter intrudes. Staying present to the ever-changing circumstances of the moment is the definition of happiness, understood as accepting moments as simply being enough. As they are. But what if current circumstances are painful, even traumatic? Will staying present still equal happiness? Presence to painful moments will hurt, but can also contain the awareness that life is still as it must be. If we’re honest, in painful sit

Dave Brisbin 8.11.24 Moving days are always stressful, but our last move was off the hook. My wife sick, cleaning and packing until 1:30A, then up again at 6A to pouring rain that lasted all day. Delays at the new house meant they were still laying floor on moving day. The moving crew showed up, men in their twenties with tats and knit caps, seemed energized by the rain, made a game of seeing how efficiently they could load and keep water off everything that mattered. Fast and loud, calling out to each other, working as if trying to set a rain record. At the new home, rain still driving, they unloaded in a kind of dance, stepping over stacks of laminate and the crew laying floor who were laughing and dodging the movers, singing at the top of their lungs in Spanish to a boom box blaring traditional Mexican music. Everyone was happy in the rain. Except me. Yes, it was our house and our stuff; we were paying; they were being paid, but it was more than that. When I’ve asked people what makes them happy, they i

Dave Brisbin 8.4.24 When Christians fight, you can bet it’s going to be over the book. No matter the issue at hand, it will always come back to the book, or more specifically, interpretation of the book, which is all we really have. No matter what a text was meant to say, all that survives our reading is interpretation. To be certain of our interpretation enough to fight, is to accept the assumption that such certainty is possible at all. That there exists a single, literally accurate interpretation of a sacred text that renders all others false. Psychologists tell us that all human neuroses are rooted in an intolerance of uncertainty. If uncertainty is too terrifying, to what lengths will we go to create a sense of certainty or distract ourselves if we fail? This is the crux of Jesus’ teaching. To graduate us from the illusion of certainty in spiritual matters so we can experience truth as a person—an unfolding connection—not data to analyze. One of the most iconic stories in the bible is also one of the

Dave Brisbin 7.28.24 A friend sent me a link to a podcast interview that rambled, but was mostly concerned with end times prophecy. Confused and concerned, he wanted to know what I thought. In one of their tangents, the interviewee flatly stated: God doesn’t love everyone. Now that’s often implied, but rarely declared, and in case there was any doubt, he added there’s a lot Christians are confused about, that they’ve forgotten how Jesus operated. His reasoning was internally consistent. Starting with Psalms 6 and a list of the “people” (actually actions) God hates, he qualified Jesus’ statement in Mt 5 that we should love our enemies by saying that our enemies are not the same as God’s enemies, that David in Psalms 139 hated God’s enemies with a perfect hatred…concluding we must love our enemies, but not God’s. It’s fascinating how reading the same text, we can end up at such wildly different conclusions, all based on our assumptions…our rudiments. Rudiments are basic principles, elements, fundamental skill

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. For spiritual people

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. Her experience gave her no data, answered none o

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 pr

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 devo

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. Nothing we