Disturb Us, Lord

Dave Brisbin 12.7.25 We all know when we go too far. That can be measured. When we cross a line, feel the negative reaction or outcome, we can evaluate and pull back. But how do we know when we haven’t gone far enough? How do you measure a negative, the absence of something? Can’t do it directly, but there is a way. We can measure our disturbance. Not going far enough, means something inside is resisting, slowing or stopping forward motion. Unfamiliar ideas and landscape challenge the way we believe things should look and feel. That’s disturbing and always seeks relief. Hard to remain in disturbing places. But we can’t grow in comfortable places, smack in the middle of everything we already believe. Something different always creates dissonance, which feels like disturbance; something radically different creates radical disturbance, which feels like anger, outrage, panic. No disturbance, no growth. We need rites of passage, to embrace all three phases: separation, transition, reincorporation. The movement from child to adult, from any perspective to another is always preceded by the painful separation from what is comfortable and familiar, followed by the disorienting transition through a new world of altered concepts and action. Only after such a journey can we reincorporate into our relationships, whitened like Moses by the experience, offering more. Nothing is more radically different than the impossible love, with all its implications, that Jesus is teaching and living in the gospels. But if our reading of it is not disturbing, if our attempts at applying it in our lives is not disorienting, then we haven’t yet separated from the world we imagined for ourselves. We haven’t let love be impossible. Let it take us far enough and not too far at the same time. In a prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake as he set sail to successfully circumnavigate the globe: Disturb us, Lord, when we are too pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little, when we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore… Measure your disturbance. If you can’t find any, you’re too close to the shore.