True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin
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  • RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY
True North with Dave Brisbin Podcast

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. Betwixt And Between

    SEP 1

    Betwixt And Between

    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 the positions we hold for power and control. On the eve of the liminality of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln stunned the nation by beating three bitter rivals on his way to winning the presidency. What he did next was even more stunning. He appointed all three of those rivals to his cabinet, seeing them as strong, essential men that the country needed to survive the coming war. His ability to stand on the threshold, see past his truth to his rivals’ truth, his rivals’ ability to accept his hand, built stronger leadership and eventually fast friendship between the four men. In his second inaugural address, he pointed that liminal ability South, “With malice toward none and charity for all…let us bind up the nation’s wounds…achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace…” The bitterness over this election shows we haven’t yet gone liminal. Life itself is the liminal transition between birth and death, but the personal and collective transitions life continually presents mark our passage along the way. We imagine we get wiser as we get older. Some of us just get older. The conscious betweenness of liminality is the difference.

    54 min
  2. Power Of Powerlessness

    AUG 25

    Power Of Powerlessness

    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 of intellectual belief labeled as faith, losing the original Aramaic understanding. So we turn to the 12 Steps—structure built on Jesus’ original principles. We’re all recovering from something, and the Steps take us on the circular path of any rite of passage: the first three separating us from our egoic thought-worlds, the middle six a liminal transition of becoming, the last three reincorporating us back into daily life. But the first step: admitting we were powerless over our compulsions, that our lives had become unmanageable, is the key to them all. Our minds create thought-worlds with illusions born out of a lifetime of hurt and trauma. We are captive to these worlds, including illusions of personal power wielded alone against the forces around us to fill implied survival needs. No one gives up power voluntarily, but in Step One we begin to see the truth—that our illusions of power are really our compulsive addictions themselves. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but connection. The illusion is that power is personal, isolated. The truth is that power is shared in connection. We can give up an illusion.

    57 min
  3. Healing Happiness

    AUG 18

    Healing Happiness

    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 situations, we’re really most present to our resistance to the pain—that it is wrong, unfair, cruel—and it often is. But once acknowledged, it’s our level of acceptance that will allow us to extend presence beyond resistance to everything else that shares the painful moment. To be more present to the connections that remain than the ones missing is the beginning of healing. Doesn’t happen all at once, but in cycles of acceptance and presence. Does this mean we just accept everything that happens without working for change or praying for healing? Of course not. But not everything that happens can be changed, and if we can’t accept that, we can’t be present, and we won’t be healed. Though we focus on the physical, in all his healings, Jesus focuses on connection first—presence. Blind see, deaf hear, lame walk, dead rise—all images of restored presence returning to new life. Regardless of whether painful circumstances can be changed, healing comes with acceptance that allows presence that feels like a return to hope and gratitude. This is the healing with which Jesus is most concerned, and ultimately, the only one that matters.

    52 min
  4. Happiness Is

    AUG 11

    Happiness Is

    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 inevitably say laughing, family, food, music, sports…one guy said when he opens a brand new can of coffee, breathes it in. But like moving and flooring in the rain, some find happiness, others can’t. What really makes us happy? When your head is back, laughing from your toes, there’s not another thought in your head. Laughing doesn’t make us happy…laughing makes us present, and presence feels like what we call happiness. We chase things hoping they will lead to happiness, unaware that we’re really chasing what clears our heads. Presence doesn’t lead to happiness—it is happiness itself. A theologian once prayed eight years for God to send him someone who could teach the way of true perfection. He sees a beggar on the steps of the church and wishes him a good day. Beggar replies that he does not remember ever having a bad day…so present with God, he is always happy. Young tatted men and Hispanic workers were fully present to rain and music. I was thinking of a hundred other things. It took a theologian eight years to become ready to be taught by a beggar. How long before I’m ready to learn from those God constantly sends?

    47 min
  5. Graduating Certainty

    AUG 4

    Graduating Certainty

    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 most misunderstood. From the standpoint of certainty, it is a literalist’s nightmare. Why would God command Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac? God promised that Abraham would be father of a nation too large to count, but he remained childless into old age. When the miracle child, Isaac, is born, the promise becomes real to Abraham, only to have God command him to kill the only means of its fulfillment. Literally, what kind of God is insecure enough to test a father’s loyalty in such a way? To Abraham, the fact of Isaac was his certainty that God’s promise would be fulfilled. But he became the father of faith for the three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the moment he graduated from that certainty. To sacrifice the certainty in his mind, move from mere ethnicity to trust in an unprovable God, changed everything in his heart. God is not testing us. Life itself is the test. To graduate from the need for literal certainty, embrace an extended metaphor for the experience of truth as a person is no less traumatic than losing a child. And no less essential to knowing truth that makes us free.

    51 min
  6. Jesus' Rudiments

    JUL 28

    Jesus' Rudiments

    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 skills like the basic stick patterns that lay a drummer’s foundation for everything that follows. If we’ve forgotten how Jesus operated, we’ve forgotten his rudiments. Hard to argue that Jesus’ essential principle is love, understood as oneness, connection with everything and everyone, but… There are two basic ways people approach God: through God’s love or sovereignty (absolute authority). God is both, but we will focus on one over the other depending on our primary motivation: connection or fear. Interviewee said we must fear God, the one who could kill both body and soul. Fear always boils down to fear of punishment. 1John 4 tells us God is love, and anyone who fears punishment hasn’t known a love that neither punishes nor abandons. Interviewee tells what he’s convinced of. All anyone can do. We can debate or go back to our rudiments. If Jesus’ rudiment is that everything in life is one, connected, and equally loved, then certain interpretations of seemingly contradictory passages can’t describe the God of Jesus. Driving a stake in the ground at Jesus’ rudiments gives us our north star, and a push in Jesus’ direction.

    46 min
  7. Unreasonable Meaning

    JUL 21

    Unreasonable Meaning

    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, meaning transcends physical life, but does that make life any less absurd? There are two absurdist books in the bible. Job points at the absurdity; Ecclesiastes calls it right out. At the end of his life, the Teacher, traditionally Solomon, king of Israel, writes, “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” For all his accomplishments, he realizes that all humans are alike in death. There is no meaning in anything we do in life. His question, “What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?” is answered with, “There is nothing better for people than taking meat and drink and having delight in their work…for anyone who is joined to the living, there is hope.” Irony is, from opposite sides of the spiritual divide, scripture and Camu agree. Outside of this conscious moment, full engagement in it, there is no meaning. Only in constant contact with life is there hope. It’s an unreasonable meaning, only experienced right herenow, within this day. Anything else doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. Accepting life on life’s terms is the first step of Jesus’ Way—to a meaning outside ourselves.

    48 min
  8. System Reboot

    JUL 14

    System Reboot

    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 of her rehearsed questions. It rebooted her system. In an instant, it irrevocably changed her entire perspective on life and meaning. To realize that she was not alone, that we are all rare and precious, belonging to something greater than ourselves, lifted the limits her trauma had imposed. Gave newfound awe, humility, and hope at the expense of the frustration of being convinced, but unable to share with anyone else. Conviction is certainty without proof. It’s always a solo journey, can never be transferred, and only feels certain in the first person, present tense. Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount are not meant to give us data, answer rehearsed questions, or make us certain. Just the opposite. They are the first step in a system reboot. A challenge to whatever certainties we hold and a portal to a first-hand experience. An experience that requires the vulnerability and humility that allows real connection—the only power great enough to convince us we’re not alone. No one can tell us such things. Only where to look. But if we’re willing to reboot, rebirth, we can restore to a moment before we were orphaned.

    47 min
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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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