David Brisbin's Blog, page 30
September 15, 2015
storm
Rain is falling outside the open window at my desk. Seems ages since I’ve heard the sound in the midst of this drought. I can almost hear the earth gratefully absorbing each drop, feel it slide all the way down like a cold drink on a hot day. Hard to work with my attention continually drawn outside. School children and parents walking to school under umbrellas; a little girl’s voice cuts through: my hair’s wet. So I give up for a few moments to write this. Reminds me of another moment just ov...
August 25, 2015
proof of love
Love isn’t love if not freely chosen.
Love isn’t perfect until it sets the beloved perfectly free.
So the ability to choose not-love is absolutely necessary for love to exist…
…which means the evil done in the world is really proof of love…
Have I overstated this? Maybe. Not sure. Increasingly don’t think so.
Since we’ve been writing on cave walls, evil has been a problem. Why do we do what we do? Why is it done to us? A whole branch of philosophy, theodicy, is dedicated to justifying God’s e...
July 10, 2015
faith and feet
Faith and feet. The feet of faith…now there’s an association we don’t normally make–dots we wouldn’t imagine connect. Faith and heart maybe…faith and mind, faith and church, creed, religion…but feet? We venerate our Hebrew heroes of faith in scripture, read their stories, try to emulate them without ever coming to understand the nature of their faith, what they meant by having faith, or the great gulf between our notion of faith and theirs. When it comes to faith, we vote with our heads; our...
July 3, 2015
a perfect song
Some songs are pretty much perfect.
Melody, lyric, arrangement, tempo, voice and instruments merge: no element drawing attention to itself, creating an immersion, an environment for an experience…an experience that writer, composer, and performer all grasped intimately enough to convey to each other first and us eventually. Driving home today, a song just like that comes on again for the first time since the last time quite a while ago, and it takes me where it always does…turn down the light...
June 23, 2015
expressing the inexpressible
Last Sunday after our gathering, as we were all milling about afterglowing, our little guy Brennan discovered the joys of a live microphone and began doing what he does best–talking. But what came out–just audible above the recorded music–silenced the knots of conversation around the room as we were all drawn one by one to that little voice. It didn’t make sense in the normal sense of that word…it wasn’t logical or sequential or even grammatical, but it created its own logic as it went along....
June 16, 2015
words without edges
When you think about it, the only way we can distinguish something visually is by its edges. We see the edges that outline, define, limit, separate one thing from another. Without edges, how could we say we are seeing anything at all? And when it comes to what we can think about, can mentally conceive, it’s the same: hanging on to edges… Definitions, memories, beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, expectations all form the edges of what we can possibly imagine. We love edges, crave them and cultivat...
January 5, 2015
blessing after
Haven’t been feeling particularly blessed last few days. It happens. Tempted to pray for God’s blessing as always when feeling disconnected, uneasy, overwhelmed. Seems we’re always asking for God’s blessing to change things we don’t like or to stave off things we don’t want. We bless hospitals and houses, babies and midterm exams–we bless our food before we eat it as if to transfer God’s holiness and goodness to something that doesn’t already have it. But Jesus and his followers never underst...
