Dave Brisbin 12.28.25
Before he sails off to the Trojan war, Thetis tells her son Achilles that if he stays home, he will find peace. Will marry a wonderful woman and have children and grandchildren who will love him and remember his name. But when they are all dead, his name will be forgotten. If he goes to Troy, he will find such glory that his name will never be forgotten. But he will not come back, and his mother will never see him again.
Obviously, he went or we wouldn’t be talking about him. The world remembers those who do great things, leave a legacy of spectacularly big things. But such legacies always come at a price. Did Achilles make the right choice? Is the building of a legacy that lives beyond the generations we actually touch more important than what happens within them? Such choices are not binary, of course. If we’re consciously careful, we can have at least some elements of both.
But where do we find real meaning in life?
If all our focus is on not yet, imaginings of a great legacy, Solomon, traditional writer of Ecclesiastes has a Hebrew word for all our efforts: hevel. Vain, futile, meaningless, of no purpose or profit…chasing after the wind. After acquiring and accomplishing everything possible in a human lifetime, he writes, Meaningless! Everything is meaningless. Generations come and generations go…no one remembers the people of old, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. Sounds brutally depressing. Sounds like giving up, but it’s not.
It’s redirection.
Where do we find real meaning? In a legacy the world remembers even as we, the builders, are forgotten? Something more immediate? The question places us right at the crux of life. Solomon realizes that there is nothing better than for us to be glad and do good while life is in us, take our food and drink and have joy in our work. He’s saying all that matters is contained in this moment and nowhere else. Even if we work to build a lasting legacy, if we’re immersed in the joy of the work itself and those with us, we find meaning. Because in the end, the only legacy that matters is a legacy of little things.
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Dave Brisbin 12.28.25
Before he sails off to the Trojan war, Thetis tells her son Achilles that if he stays home, he will find peace. Will marry a wonderful woman and have children and grandchildren who will love him and remember his name. But when they are all dead, his name will be forgotten. If he goes to Troy, he will find such glory that his name will never be forgotten. But he will not come back, and his mother will never see him again.
Obviously, he went or we wouldn’t be talking about him. The world remembers those who do great things, leave a legacy of spectacularly big things. But such legacies always come at a price. Did Achilles make the right choice? Is the building of a legacy that lives beyond the generations we actually touch more important than what happens within them? Such choices are not binary, of course. If we’re consciously careful, we can have at least some elements of both.
But where do we find real meaning in life?
If all our focus is on not yet, imaginings of a great legacy, Solomon, traditional writer of Ecclesiastes has a Hebrew word for all our efforts: hevel. Vain, futile, meaningless, of no purpose or profit…chasing after the wind. After acquiring and accomplishing everything possible in a human lifetime, he writes, Meaningless! Everything is meaningless. Generations come and generations go…no one remembers the people of old, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. Sounds brutally depressing. Sounds like giving up, but it’s not.
It’s redirection.
Where do we find real meaning? In a legacy the world remembers even as we, the builders, are forgotten? Something more immediate? The question places us right at the crux of life. Solomon realizes that there is nothing better than for us to be glad and do good while life is in us, take our food and drink and have joy in our work. He’s saying all that matters is contained in this moment and nowhere else. Even if we work to build a lasting legacy, if we’re immersed in the joy of the work itself and those with us, we find meaning. Because in the end, the only legacy that matters is a legacy of little things.
Dave Brisbin 10.26.25
Book of Genesis tells us that God gave Adam permission to name all the animals in the Garden. It’s not a casual detail. For the ancient Hebrews, authority to name something like a child or an animal, was a symbol of dominion over that something. That’s the point. Control. To this day, Jews do not speak the name of God. But the rest of us continue to name everything in sight, including God…and the theology we build around God.
God told Moses from the burning bush that his name was hayah asher hayah. That is, I am that I am. How can we get any closer than that? How do we describe raw, ultimate existence any more clearly? How do we, using finite tools such as language and logic or even the mathematics of physics, describe what is by definition infinite? Our limited language, concepts, and equations melt all over the dashboard long before temperatures and velocities ever reach the neighborhood of infinity.
But we keep trying. Control is an aphrodisiac.
To be fair, the scriptures are always talking about knowing God. Ezekiel uses the phrase over seventy times in his short book. Jesus says that some of us, knocking on the door of kingdom, will be refused because God never knew us. Really? Once again, entering the Hebrew mind helps us square this circle. To know—yada in Hebrew—comes from the root for hand, so to know is not to think, but to handle. Jesus is saying that some of us, for all the religious work we do, have still never been intimate with God. Now God won’t throw us out for that, but God is intimacy personified. If we’re too unripe, immature, traumatized to enter the defenseless vulnerability that intimacy requires, we don’t know God. We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.
God occupies space beyond thought and performance. If we can stop naming God, trying to understand and dominate for just a moment, we enter God’s space and experience what we’ll never understand. Relax... Understanding is overrated. For Jesus, a precognitive child is the embodiment of kingdom.
Trust beats certainty the way rock beats scissors.
Once we experience God, there is no name that can hold or express what we know.
theeffect Podcasts
Dave Brisbin 12.28.25
Before he sails off to the Trojan war, Thetis tells her son Achilles that if he stays home, he will find peace. Will marry a wonderful woman and have children and grandchildren who will love him and remember his name. But when they are all dead, his name will be forgotten. If he goes to Troy, he will find such glory that his name will never be forgotten. But he will not come back, and his mother will never see him again.
Obviously, he went or we wouldn’t be talking about him. The world remembers those who do great things, leave a legacy of spectacularly big things. But such legacies always come at a price. Did Achilles make the right choice? Is the building of a legacy that lives beyond the generations we actually touch more important than what happens within them? Such choices are not binary, of course. If we’re consciously careful, we can have at least some elements of both.
But where do we find real meaning in life?
If all our focus is on not yet, imaginings of a great legacy, Solomon, traditional writer of Ecclesiastes has a Hebrew word for all our efforts: hevel. Vain, futile, meaningless, of no purpose or profit…chasing after the wind. After acquiring and accomplishing everything possible in a human lifetime, he writes, Meaningless! Everything is meaningless. Generations come and generations go…no one remembers the people of old, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. Sounds brutally depressing. Sounds like giving up, but it’s not.
It’s redirection.
Where do we find real meaning? In a legacy the world remembers even as we, the builders, are forgotten? Something more immediate? The question places us right at the crux of life. Solomon realizes that there is nothing better than for us to be glad and do good while life is in us, take our food and drink and have joy in our work. He’s saying all that matters is contained in this moment and nowhere else. Even if we work to build a lasting legacy, if we’re immersed in the joy of the work itself and those with us, we find meaning. Because in the end, the only legacy that matters is a legacy of little things.
