True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin
  • 5.0 (8)
  • Religion & Spirituality
  • Biweekly

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

  1. 5d ago

    Standing Firm and Flowing

    Dave Brisbin 10.25.26 Jesus: If you want to find your life, lose it. James: Submit and humble yourself, and God will exalt you. Paul: Divine acceptance is a grace-gift—nothing we can control, earn, perform, obey. Karl Marx: Religion is the opium of the people… From a humanist perspective, that’s a reasonable assessment of the worldview of the New Testament. To make a virtue of humility, to value relinquishment over acquisition, to deny ability to control outcomes and accept ultimate dependence—a perfect formula for a docile population, willing to accept physical deprivation in pursuit of spiritual gifting, unlikely to rebel. But Jesus, James, Paul are addressing the paradoxical quality of human nature. We are physical creatures living in two contexts (micro and macro) simultaneously, which means even our personal relationships are experienced in and inflected by the communities in which we live…while our deepest spiritual needs can only be realized within ourselves, in the silence and smallness of pure presence. Seeking fulfillment in acquisition and exertion of influence misses the point just as entirely as looking within at the expense of caring for the needs of the relationships around us. So…if we’re to be humble, unassuming, accepting of dependence, do we still stand firm for our beliefs, fight to right the wrongs we encounter? When do we stop taking opium? Chuang Tzu: Heaven does nothing; its non-doing is its serenity. Earth does nothing; its non-doing is its rest. From the union of these two non-doings all actions proceed…heaven and earth do nothing, yet there is nothing they do not do. Another way of saying you must lose your life to find it. Until we’ve experienced the silence and smallness of our deepest self within, we remain unaware of the effortless flow of the unfolding moment, the only source of truly transformative action. And there must be action or there is no relationship, our love stillborn. Yet without complete relinquishment of self-concern and illusion of control, acceptance of the grace that defines us, any healing our action may create is only temporary—bound to greater division that is permanent.

    Standing Firm and Flowing

  2. Oct 18

    Transubstantiated

    Dave Brisbin 10.18.26 Ran across a quote from Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek: The more years that pass, the more I believe in the omnipotence of the human soul…I do not believe that there is any obstacle that cannot be transubstantiated into an instrument of victory. Transubstantiated. Why not just transformed? Why use six syllables where two would do? Nikos knew exactly what he was doing. Transubstantiation is a fundamental change of substance, the essence of something, while its outer appearance or the circumstance surrounding it—what Aristotle called “accidents”—remain the same. Aristotle knew what he was doing too. Specific details of birth, form, or circumstance are truly accidental. They happen without consent, often can’t be changed, and yet don’t describe or impose the essence of who or what we are, unless we never choose otherwise. When we do, we are transubstantiated, even as our accidents remain. This puts a finer point on the book of James, who counsels us to count it all joy when we encounter traumatic accidents of circumstance. That enduring them with cheerful patience produces a perfect result: maturity, completion, lacking nothing. Stoics say that an “accidental” obstacle is not in our way—it is the way itself, the reason we’re traveling. We can choose the meaning of the accident. Are we victim or student? Either way, the pain of the accident remains, but our meaning changes everything else. The deliberate choice of the word transubstantiation also alludes to the Catholic and Orthodox belief that at the moment of consecration, the elements of bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. Accidental bread and wine remain while unseen substance changes. Our intentional choices are sacramental, changing the substance of our experience. It’s our choice. Not to choose is to let accidents define us as victims of circumstance. By asking us not to judge ourselves, others, events by accidents of circumstance, James is ushering us into a room with God’s unseen substance. Once truly seen, it creates such oneing that a sense of separation is no longer possible. Transubstantiated.

    Transubstantiated

  3. Oct 11

    Living As If

    Dave Brisbin 10.11.26 You have not because you ask not…all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you…whatever you ask in my name, that I will do…if you ask the Father for anything in my name, he will give it to you. This is all more or less like putting a loaded pistol the hands of an eight-year-old. Between Jesus and James, misunderstandings abound. How are we supposed to understand sayings like these when our human needs scream so loudly our prayers can’t consist of much else? We want to believe our prayers, our askings, will be answered as formulated, yet they seem never to exceed the law of averages in desperately desired outcomes. We humans naturally see God in human terms, gauge God’s attributes—love, forgiveness, acceptance—as action verbs that God may or may not choose to give, as a human would. But scripture tells us God is love, unchanging, degreeless, as oblivious to the state of recipients as sun and rain. God doesn’t choose to give—what God is can’t be withheld. Approaching God is simply approaching every quality God is. God is what God has eternally chosen. The rest is up to us by whatever James and Jesus mean by asking. Jesus said in all things for which we pray and ask, believe that we have received them, and they will be granted. Problem is that last phrase is a translator’s addition. The ancient texts simply stop at believe you have received. This is no passive request for something withheld from a God who has eternally chosen. The word translated as belief includes both faith and trust: if we faith-act as if what we long for is already present, we will experience trust—the sensation of no longer being afraid. Jesus says if we ask in his name, it will be so. So we tack on in Jesus’ name to the end of our prayers like an incantation, but shem, name, is also essence, character. To ask in Jesus’ essence is to value what Jesus values, desire God’s eternal choice. There is no formula for making God give us what we want. True asking is the realization that by living as if the essence of God for which we long is already present, we find out it is.

    Living As If

  4. Oct 4

    Heaven First

    Dave Brisbin 10.4.26 A woman told me she had remarried and was having trouble blending families. She had two small children. Her new husband had a huge black Labrador named Tucker. Tucker and the kids left no spot unspotted, filling the house while her husband was working or work-traveling leaving her to remember she was not a dog person, didn’t like dogs, especially this huge thing everywhere at once shedding and smelling…like a dog. When she couldn’t stand the smell and shedding another day, figured a bath should help. Only way she could think to manage it was to put Tucker in the shower, get in with him, start the water, and pour on the soap. Tucker loved it. Biting at the water, shaking it off, wiggling and leaning into her scrubs, everyone soaked. A few showers later, he was following her around the house, and a bond she never thought possible was revealed right under the surface of her discontent. Changed the way she approached everything. So… What if heaven isn’t the end of our journey, but the beginning? What if heaven, understood as God’s approval and acceptance, isn’t awarded after our lives are spent and judged against standards that were never quite clear? What if we’ve lived whole lifetimes hoping to secure a heaven that has been right here all along, just under the surface of our uncertainty? Jesus says it’s not out there somewhere hiding, but within. No more waiting; it’s right here in this field—if we just sell all that obscures and buy the field. James says if we start acting as if this good news is true, we find that it is. Faith—acting as if—moves us from mere belief to trust. If heaven isn’t the end of our journey, but the beginning, if we were born non-rationally aware of the inseparable oneness of everything and then forgot in the rough play of growing up, then all of life is really just a remembering. Letting go of everything we learned in the forgetting. We started with heaven. It has never left us. We left it. Acting as if this is true, getting in the shower with the smelly dog is the first step to living heaven first, revealing a bond we never thought possible right under the surface of our fears.

    Heaven First

  5. Sep 27

    Doing the Word

    Dave Brisbin 9.27.26 Do you have faith? How do you know? Because you believe you believe? What if there’s the slightest doubt? Is it still faith? As long as we imagine faith as mental agreement, we can run round these questions forever without ever really knowing. So Jesus’ brother James comes to the rescue, holding up Abraham as a hero of faith. Promised by God to be the father of many nations and innumerable descendants, Abraham is still childless at age 100 with his wife Sarah who is 90. The miraculous birth of their son Isaac is the proof to which he clings that God’s promise will be fulfilled. But he’s not our hero until he agrees to sacrifice his miraculous son of promise at God’s order. Christians have seen Isaac as foreshadowing Jesus, made to carry the firewood as Jesus carried the cross to the top of the same hill on which Jesus died. In what are we placing our faith? Is God really so monstrously cruel as to require the death of a son only to pull back at the last instant? The overarching message of all Judeo-Christian scripture is that God is one and God is love—making oneness and love the same quality—the actual substance of God. So when any scriptural passage seems to refute that oneness/love, we can calmly know there is a message beyond the literal meaning that reasserts the One…that the literal story is also metaphor pointing to deeper truth. For thirty years, Abraham had been clinging to his son as the physical means of fulfilling God’s promise. Something he could touch, control. But the moment he is capable of killing the last thing to which he clings in fear, he has engaged the action of faith, passed into the experience of trust—a word for what it feels like when we’re no longer afraid. God didn’t require human sacrifice. Abraham’s idol happened to be his son, and the idol had to die for Abraham’s belief in God to grow into an ultimate risk-filled action, a relinquishment that realized his faith in unshakable trust. Trust that required no visible support. For James, faith without such works is dead. Hearing the Word means nothing until we become doers of the Word. Not in fearful obedience, in trust.

    Doing the Word

  6. Sep 20

    Beyond Judgment

    Dave Brisbin 9.20.26 In rhetoric—the art of persuasion—there are two basic ways to motivate someone to act. Protrepsis calls to another way of living or perceiving life, motivation to change. Paraenesis calls to continue a way of life already in motion, encouragement and advice to persevere. Biblical prophecy like that of Isaiah is protrepsis—calls to repent, change direction, avert the coming catastrophe. And when people don’t and are standing in the smoking crater of what once was everything they knew and believed, apocalyptic books like Daniel or Revelation are paraenesis—calls to remain steadfast, in faith that God remains present, all promises intact. Jesus and James share not only kinship, but their very Jewish teaching style as well. Even so, Jesus’ teaching is protrepsis, calling people to a relationship with God they could never imagine, to which their religion was no longer pointing. James, trying to hold the early movement together, taught through paraenesis, encouraging people to endure despite the difficulties they faced. Jesus’ teaching was intensely micro, bringing hearts and minds into an expanded awareness that would also serve community from the inside out. James, leading those already committed, was more macro, setting principles for living in community, correcting damaging behavior. We need both Jesus and James throughout our lives. Jesus calls us to awareness, to the unimaginably deep reality of life—the connection of everything as a degreeless, indiscriminate oneness that changes our perception and experience. But such experience is momentary. In the next breath, we question again, revert to the judgment that separates us subject from object, sending us back to the hell of our limitations. James tells us to speak and act as if we are to be judged by the law of liberty… The only “law” that liberates is a love that never separates. To live that love is to know we are judged only by standards we set for ourselves, chosen or instilled. Jesus and James work together: calling us to experience a perfect connection beyond our standards of judgment, then to keep choosing that connection in every relationship.

    Beyond Judgment

  7. Sep 13

    Persistent Presence

    Dave Brisbin 9.13.26 Years ago, a co-worker became a good friend—a man from India with very dark skin and big, white teeth. When he smiled it was exactly like snapping on a high-powered flashlight. And he was always smiling. I liked him immediately, and we’d go to lunch and meet after work hours as well. Just one fly in the ointment…he was always late. Not just a little. Sometimes an hour or more. I was developing an appropriate resentment, so I knew I had a choice to make…somehow grin and bear the tardiness or end the friendship. Neither was acceptable, so I found a third door. Without even telling him why, I’d always ask to meet at my apartment. That way, I just lived my life until he showed up, which was then always at the right time, often with homemade Tandoori chicken and the smile. He marched to a very different drummer and was always exactly himself, which is what I loved. I didn’t have vocabulary or concept for it then, but Chinese Daoists call it ziran, “self-so.” Means living or acting authentically, without constraint or ulterior motives, just as we naturally are and exist to be. My friend flowed to a different sense of time and lived accordingly. I could accept that and flow with, or not. But I couldn’t change him even if I’d wanted. Life is always self-so, always what it intrinsically is. Can’t change it, though we always want to, because life is difficult and full of challenges and trials. The whole point of life is to use those difficulties like a gravity assist to launch us into growth, but to do that we must first reframe life, see it not as a victim, but a student. Remain open to opportunities for growth, welcome them even if they hurt. And they always hurt—but are not always injurious. James tells us to count it all joy when difficulties come, because enduring them through gritted teeth is not the endurance James is talking about, that produces wisdom, maturity. When we let life be self-so, the universe no longer persecutes but teaches, life will still hurt, but is no longer difficult… Having learned that through each difficulty a smiling presence persists, we can enjoy our friends whenever they arrive.

    Persistent Presence

  8. Sep 6

    Alphabet of Life

    Dave Brisbin 9.6.26 I don’t usually do verse-by-verse scripture studies. Too easy to get lost in details, lose the forest for the trees. Too easy to be consumed with commentary and lose the application to everyday life. Without that application grounding scripture in human relationship and community, we lose relevant meaning. The exceptions are the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of James. Why? They’re all application. No coincidence that Matthew, containing the Sermon on the Mount, and James are the two most Jewish books of the NT and may have been originally written in Hebrew/Aramaic. Or that James was Jesus’ brother cut from the same Jewish cloth. Or that the Sermon on the Mount and James were used as catechisms for the early movement of Jesus followers. You won’t find high theology in the Sermon or James, only the building blocks of everyday life. James has been called the “Proverbs of the New Testament” and is filled with practical wisdom, aphorisms for living ethically in community along Jesus’ Way. Just as the Sermon opens with the Beatitudes, a multifaceted portrait of the finished product: a person transformed into the awareness of Kingdom life—James opens with a barrage of moral teachings, the attributes of communal life along Jesus’ Way. Starting with Endurance, accepting life’s hardships as teachers bringing us to completion, he then moves on to Wisdom, the by-product of Endurance, which is not “granted” but realized if we don’t Doubt—become paralyzed by our need for certainty. Then in quick succession, the Degreelessness of God’s love, Reward, Temptation, and Presence. The Sermon gives us the permission and means of stripping away the limitations that hold us in the hell of separation, and James, the ABCs of bringing that transformation back into everyday life in community. Greatly misunderstood in the West, James must be viewed with Jewish eyes. When we do, just as liquid takes the shape of any container into which it’s poured, we can distinguish the content of the message frozen in its Jewish container, and warmed to room temp, pour it fresh into the containers of our own lives. Same message, new shape.

    Alphabet of Life
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About

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

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