Dave Brisbin | 2.26.17 As we approach the Lenten season, many of us have not experienced the annual cycle of a liturgical church, and among those who have, many have never been taught what the liturgical traditions really mean to the spiritual life. This year, we want to try to make Lent, as preparation for the new life of Easter, come alive in a new way—really prepare us for that new life. What does Lent mean? What is Shove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday and how has the church celebrated these litur...
Feb 25, 2017•39 min
Dave Brisbin | 2.19.17 Living the balanced life of the Hebrew bride, between heaven and earth, between the reality of daily relationship and task and the promise of radically changed life at any moment is fragile and delicate and easily lost. In fact, it’s not so much about whether we’ll lose balance, of course we will; it’s about how quickly we can recover afterward. As Western Christians, we’ve been conditioned to see this life in a fallen state and our reward for finishing the race of this li...
Feb 18, 2017•44 min
Dave Brisbin | 2.12.17 Why try to understand Jesus’ message from a first century, Hebrew point of view? What will that change? There’s a question I get a lot. The answer is: mostly everything. Whatever we say about Christianity being a relationship rather than a religion, the truth is that Western Christianity has become heavily focused on an intellectual understanding of theology and a rational/literal understanding of scripture, a legal view of our relationship to God, a dualistic view of life...
Feb 11, 2017•45 min
Dave Brisbin | 2.5.17 Growing up, my church taught me to believe that a savior was coming—someone out there who would change me, save me from myself and my sin. I just had to believe and obey and wait. And that belief ordered the understanding of my faith, dictated day to day choices and attitudes. But reading through Hebrew eyes, Jesus is teaching something quite different…that no one is coming to save us. No one is coming because everyone and everything we’d ever need has always been and is al...
Feb 04, 2017•37 min
Dave Brisbin | 1.29.17 Just last week I was asked why churches and religions have to "always say that they are right and everyone else is wrong?" Great question from a young person looking at church from the outside in, trying to figure it all out: why the exclusion, the judgment. Why indeed? What is it about us that needs to build tall walls, delineate us from them, make our spirituality, which is inherently mysterious, an absolute certainty. In a word, it’s fear of course, and when we’re afrai...
Jan 27, 2017•45 min
Dave Brisbin | 1.22.17 We all want to be happy, don’t we? All our choices are arguably made in order to be happy, either in this moment or one further down the road in this life or the next. We’ve learned that certain things or activities make us happy so, we pursue them over and over looking to repeat the experience of happiness. One young man told me that happiness was opening a new can of Folgers coffee and just smelling that smell. Another person said that laughing made her happy. But if you...
Jan 21, 2017•40 min
Dave Brisbin | 1.15.17 Just completed the move of our family home of 17 years to a downsized house closer to work and faith community, and just about every nightmare scenario that I could imagine and project on to moving day and was working and praying to avoid came to pass. Escrow was delayed so that new flooring was only half completed when moving crew arrived with all our belongings in the hardest driving rain that southern CA has seen in years with cable and internet crew arriving in the mid...
Jan 13, 2017•39 min
Dave Brisbin | 1.8.17 The beginning of 2017 also marks the first anniversary of a dear friend’s death—his suicide to be truthful. Can’t help the re-flooding of mental images and emotion imprinted almost exactly a year ago on a rainy Wednesday night when I got that first phone call. And yet, a year later, an email from his sister says that after a year, having now been put into contact with me and all of us as result of her brother’s death, to lose a brother but gain new friends that have become ...
Jan 07, 2017•37 min
Dave Brisbin | 1.1.17 The beginning of each new year, with its imaginary line in time, has also become, or has always been, a time for reassessment and for resolutions for the new year. We all have made them and break them almost as quickly. Stats show that 97% of new year’s resolution won’t be kept and 30% will be broken in the first week. Why is it so hard to keep new year’s resolutions? Because they are lifestyle changes that can’t be kept solely in our minds. No matter how resolved we may be...
Dec 31, 2016•42 min
Dave Brisbin | 12.11.16 In the run up to Christmas, what does the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew have to tell us that is relevant to our day to day lives and choices? Especially, what are the details in those narratives that, understood from a first century, Jewish point of view, can not only make the story real, but clue us in to the central principles the authors were trying to convey? When we know what the word that has been translated as “inn” really means—start erasing our modern we...
Dec 10, 2016•41 min
Dave Brisbin | 12.4.16 With all the big news happening constantly, especially leading up to and from the presidential election, it’s easy to get caught up in the all these pressing macro events and even obsess over them, become the stereotypical political junkie, environmental junkie, or whatever. But regardless of what is happening in the macro, our lives are always lived in the micro—one moment and one person at a time. Often, focus on the macro becomes a way of avoiding our real life’s work i...
Dec 03, 2016•39 min
Dave Brisbin | 11.20.16 When a person gets up to accept and award or honor, whether a politician to a movie star, I’ve always wondered what exactly is meant when he or she inevitably says they are “humbled” to accept this award. That statement can be authentically heartfelt and can mean many things, but if we really break down what humility means, is it really humble? What is humility and why does Jesus hold it as such a primary value? In Jesus’ stories and parables, it is obvious to scholars th...
Nov 19, 2016•37 min
Dave Brisbin | 11.13.16 Nearing the end of a year of almost constant change, worn out, ready for some sort of plateau or break in the action, the realization reaffirms that there is no plateau. There is no time in life that change isn’t constantly in process. Sit for a few minutes and watch the shadows move across your living room—subtle reminder of just how fast things are really moving in our lives. Most of us don’t like change, but if we’re not changing and moving, we’re not part of the actio...
Nov 12, 2016•42 min
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 o...
Nov 04, 2016•41 min
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 ...
Oct 22, 2016•50 min
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 ...
Oct 15, 2016•45 min
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...
Oct 08, 2016•45 min
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 no...
Sep 30, 2016•48 min
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...
Sep 24, 2016•42 min
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 experientia...
Sep 17, 2016•50 min
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 t...
Sep 10, 2016•45 min
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 har...
Sep 02, 2016•46 min
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 infa...
Aug 27, 2016•42 min
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 tha...
Aug 19, 2016•44 min
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 S...
Aug 13, 2016•42 min
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 ...
Jul 29, 2016•52 min
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...
Jul 22, 2016•50 min
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...
Jul 08, 2016•48 min
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, ne...
Jun 25, 2016•52 min
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 call...
Jun 18, 2016•46 min
