Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2019
Transfiguration or metamorphosis had both total and phase specific meaning in the event on the mount of the "transfiguration." Metamorphosis is the entire cyclic change process in life; the eternal return of the sameness in the repetitive of subsequent events which are like what has happened before. The disciples experienced a "change" in Jesus; they perhaps got a glimpse of what his resurrection body of like before the resurrection. St.Paul referred to the human spiritual body which would not see corruption. In the Transfiguration event, perhaps the spiritual body of Jesus was surfacing or shining through his physical body even as the spiritual eyes of the disciples were seeing him through their physical eyes. What happened immediately after the transfiguration event? They went down the mountain to the "demon possessed" valley. We'd rather be in the transfiguration event of butterflies being born out of cocoons rather than the "ugly" phases of larva, pupa and cocoon. The life of Jesus ran the gamut of metamorphosis but the resurrection proved that the spiritual was driving all of the phases of appearances of the continual transfiguration of life experience. We can't live on the mountain top but we can know that the spiritual drives the changing becoming of our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2019
"This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him." This is what the heavenly voice was heard to said in the mystical state in the event of the transfiguration. Why did Jesus have to be announced as "chosen?" What does "chosen" mean in the Scripture traditions? Was Abraham chosen? Jacob chosen? Joseph chosen? Moses chosen? Saul chosen? Gideon chosen? David chosen? Is being chosen how the dynamic aspect of the messianic is described? The divine is manifest within the human and when it happens, it is declared as "God chosen." Scriptural chosen means that people understand the divinization of someone or something accessible to human beings to elevate humanity toward the higher purposes for humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2019
Theophanies/Epiphanies in the Bible have their won symbolic order. Mountain top experience representing "high" experience or establishing a hierarchy of valued events in the experience of humanity. When is a mountain not a mountain? When it is the symbolic place designated closeness to God which in turn set the hierarchy of value for the person or event which is "on the mountain." Often biblical mountain means interior "inscape" and not necessarily external "landscape." With language one can make things more than they seem to be.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2019
Imagine a stack of transparencies with the traces of the events and descriptions of the past visible to those who are adding a new transparency to the top of the stack to relate a current event. The Hebrew Scriptures provided for the New Testament writers the templates to use to tell the story of Jesus. The Transfiguration unites many of the traces of the figures and the theophanic atmospherics of the Hebrew Scriptures. Glory, Shekinah, Light, Clouds, God's Voice, Glowing Faces, Moses, Elijah, Sinai, Carmel, Mountain Top. The message was the the "old" was affirming the "new," and the New was Jesus Christ for the New Testament Communities.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2019
Imagine translating the beatitude way of living given to oppressed people who had to learn to survive and be winsome with their oppressors to people who are not oppressed. The beatitudes for non-oppressed people means that such people should be champions against any sort of oppression of people at all.
Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2019
St. Paul: "Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good." This is instantiated in the beatitude sayings of Jesus in his recommendation of non-retaliatory forgiveness as the response to hate and curse. When evil is embodied in the oppressor of any kind, there is the impatience of "justice delayed is justice denied." Why should we wait for something so important as justice especially if it means protection from bodily harm? We do not want the terrible dilemma of having to delay justice to wait for the oppressor to be convinced of his ways by the goodness of whom he oppresses. The passive resistance of Gandhi, Mandela and King had a "good" response in times of delayed justice. Sometimes the biblical witness seems to look at things in the long run and not the short run. The belief that God is everlasting meaning that all things will pass, in not a comfort for those who live as the victims of delayed justice. Pushing the rectification of injustice to eschatological justice in another "afterlife" can wrongly be used as justifying the present injustice. Patience can be strength to wait for the tyrant to die but who has to be most patient if there is a very slow arc of history towards justice?
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2019
One should note that St. Paul was not too "carnal" about the resurrection. The resurrection of the body for him meant the resurrection of the spiritual body. Such a body would be the belief of the unity of the identity of a person through the changes of time which get fully registered in the demise of the perishable physical body. One might suspect that many hold the subjective immortality of Christian resurrection in carnal ways wanting a new body in the same way that one had the old body only free from the ticking clock of time and time's effect. Does one wish for an afterlife of static perfect being or of endless future becoming of surpassing oneself in a future state? It is always good to pose questions regarding the comprehensiveness, cohesiveness, and consistency of one's metaphorical understanding of the afterlife.
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2019
The beatitudes express the freedom of living beyond the tyranny of being determined by one's past affinities. I know what and whom I like, and I like whom I know and what I like. The beatitudes are the moral practice a a new inclusive community; a new experiment in bring Gentile and Jews together in the closeness called fellowship when previous practices of segregation kept people from each other based upon the habits of judging others from one's bias, condemning others as having no future, and loving only those who were familiar.
Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2019
The beatitudes are the spiritual martial arts attributed to Christ for the winsome behaviors of a minority and persecuted group of people to survive and gain favor with the people who have the power to oppress them. Forgiveness and the practice of non-retaliation were the winsome rules which required a different kind of personal discipline. People who turned the other cheek and carried the soldiers' gear for not just one mile but the second mile, willingly, showed the strength of serving without servitude. The spiritual martial arts of the beatitude was based upon serving the Higher Spirit within in hopes that even the oppressor would be impressed by the God who was being served by the oppressed, so impressed as to be lured to join them.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2019
The "turn the other cheek" advice of the beatitudes is part of the spiritual martial arts and peaceful passive resistance program that the followers of Jesus needed for their survival when they were in a minority. Fast forward to inquisitional hegemonic Christianity and the times when competing Christians burnt their heretics at the stake. What happened? It is easier to romanticize Christians in the minority being forced to practice beatitudinal methods than the Borgia papal Christianity of sheer power in the name of God. Bad behavior, bad thinking of religious people have created the response of atheists to dismiss all religious discourse as foolishly contradictory and therefore not believable or worthy to embrace.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2019
The Beatitudes in Modern Urban: Let me make lemonade with life's lemons and sugar me Jesus!
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2019
To understand the beatitudes one should think about how one has been rebuked in one's comfortable melancholy by a person who is impaired by social or physical circumstances and yet seems to be exuding unspeakable joy. How can that person seem to be so content, when I in my comfort can't seem to choose to enjoy my comfort? The blessed state is being able to channel such contentment when it really seems that one has no visible reason to do so. This says something about the abundant life program that the early church received from Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2019
Blessing and curses used to be more open and acceptable as is seen in biblical accounts. The beatitudes seem to overturn the obviousness of the blessing and cursing verification. One would think that the well-fed, the rich, the powerful are the ones who "verify" the signs of "success" or "blessing." The words of Jesus in the beatitudes overturns the blessing and curse formula. Those who seem cursed with poverty, persecution and hunger are those who are declared as blessed. What's going on in the transvaluation of the blessing and curse formula? The word of Jesus play havoc with typical human preference for "ideal" conditions. I suspect this is the appropriation of the "contentment" practice of Paul being expressed in the narrative of Jesus for some people learning how to cope in some difficult times.
Aphorism of the February 14, 2019
The Bible is a collection of writing written in different times and places. The purpose of the writing was to inculcate a faith identity into the people to whom the writings were written. People's identities are often formed by what is beneficial and what is woeful. Blessing and curse are conferred in biblical writings. Sometimes in appropriating the eternal return of themes embedded in language there are hooks onto which we want to hang our identity and so we appropriate the Bible as being favorable to one's own perspective and condemning of those who disagree with me. If the Bible can be an "international" book, the interpreters must resist ethnocentric tribalism and understand that like the ideals of the American Declaration Independence, it invites to better selves not found in the peoples of the Bible or in human history. If we don't understand the invitation to a better future of the Bible we can get bogged down in co-opting for ancient cultural details of chauvinistic practices of all sorts.
Aphorism of the February 13, 2019
One of the areas of dishonesty through avoidance by Christians with wealth is there assertion of fidelity to the beatitudes. Affirming the "blessed" state of wealth and comfort and stating the beatitudes as one's "ideals" might leave one in the state of hypocrisy. It is better not to claim all things biblical as a reflection of one's life, there is however an obvious injunction of Jesus that should be relevant to people of wealth and comfort: To whom much is given; much is required.
Aphorism of the February 12, 2019
About the prehistoric and origins and about extra, non and pre linguistic beings it must be noted that they have human significance because of this phrase in the future anterior tense: They will have come to become language events.
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2019
We in American Christianity need to be careful about how casual we are in appropriating the words of the beatitudes as being constituting of our experience. Such words were called by Nietzsche the "transvaluation" of value; the promotion of slave experience to be definitive of noble values. We should perhaps appreciate the beatitudes as "coping and survival" values of oppressed people who had to adopt spiritual jujitsu methods of finding dignity in the conditions of mere survival when the social conditions did not allow the free and open practice and expression of their faith. Oppressed people trying to find dignified survival can relate to the beatitudes more truthfully than the triumphant Christians who now live as those who have "co-opted" the values of the oppressors and don't realize it.
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2019
We often romanticize the Gospel fishermen because we project upon them our notion of fishing as a relaxing recreational activity. So, anyone who would give up the love of fishing to follow Jesus is seen as one with heroic love. But when hauling fish nets in the family business is the apparent occupation that one is trapped in for the rest of one's life even when one has intellectual and skill sets that remain underdeveloped in the fishing business, seeing Jesus and following him would provide a spiritual mobility, even an escape from an over-determined life. Jesus surely was a pied piper who called some people from what they perceived was the curse of a "boring" life script.
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2019
It turns out that God seems to call people for failure in their own situation even while the traces of their call are revived to find significant relevance many years later. Isaiah was an unrequited prophet; his message fell on deaf ears, yet many years later Jesus of Nazareth understood the "good news" program of Isaiah to be definitive of his life and the followers of Jesus came to call the life of Jesus "superlatively messianic."
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2019
People who are given insights before the time for public acceptance of those insights are called to public irrelevance and being ignored. After Isaiah's fantastic vision of God and his response to God's call, he realized that he was called to say things that would be ignored and not understood by his audience. It takes a visionary faith to be called to be irrelevant to people in one's own time and place but it is the lot of some people to initiate the tomorrow which they themselves will never see.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2019
Ponder the accounts of the "appearings" of Jesus/Christ. One notes that Jesus was present to Pontius Pilate but to what effect? St. Paul wrote about the appearings or re-appearings of Christ after he had died on the cross. How Christ appeared to him was significantly different than how Christ re-appeared to others. St. Paul did not regard the appearance of Christ to him to be an "inferior" sighting because of the way it changed his life. We do not hear about appearances of Christ to people who then say they reject the significance of him to their lives. The appearings of Christ are nuanced with the effects of what these appearances did to the lives of the people who experienced them. The sacraments involve the linking of the appearances of Christ within the regular "rites of passage" issues of people, not to exhaust how Christ can appear to anyone; rather the sacraments encourage anticipation of the serendipitous sublime presence to arise with God's playful "peek a boo, I see you."
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2019
An adjective for God is "holy," which means to be set apart. So God is so difference as to be unique in the most unique sense of the word unique. And if every snowflake is unique, then God is the biggest in snowflake-like uniqueness. Each person in claiming holiness is to discover how one is unique or set apart. But if being set apart means that there is no inter-communication between beings then we would not even be able to speak about being set apart. Being set apart happens within the myriad community of all different things and beings. Life is learning how to be holy in the sense of being unique toward the maximum benefit of the whole.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2019
From now on you will be fishing for and catching people. This is a Jesus saying for evangelism, certainly not a metaphor to be taken literally since a fish would not be one who would want to be caught and served up as the food for humans. But when a grand child charms a grandparents one might remark that the winsomeness of the child, "hooks the doting grandparents and reels them in" and with such winsomeness is able to manipulate grandparents to perform copious acts of reward by being charmed. Evangelism might be simply learning how to be winsome in the presentation of God's love to other people such that they are "charmed" by the charismatic encounter to make a decision to respond to the love of God.
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2019
Epiphany is another name for a "call" from God. The Bible gives examples of such epiphanies and we can conclude that there are as many epiphanies and calls as there are people and times and places. Such assumption would follow from divine omnipresence or Christ being all and in all.
Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2019
Paul's "poem" to love may as well be a poem to what is humanly impossible and refer to possible omni-presence of God who is love and lures us to understand more and more what it means to be loving in better ways.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2019
St. Paul wrote about love and "omni-faith" in the phrase "love believes all things." This is not to say that "love believes all things have equal value." Such great love is an inclusive belief because it expresses an honor for the Freedom of everything to happen; it is the freedom of everything coming to language that can come to language in the experience of any theoretical language user. Such great love is honor the honest conditions of freedom but such love can also inspire the best values of the conditions of freedom, like justice itself.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2019
The way in which one tolerates the reading of much of the Bible is through the lens of hermeneutic charity, which means we are forgiving of people in the past who have not attained the same level of justice which we have regarding the dignity and equality of all people. When we read Scriptural rules regarding women and slaves, we engage in comparative horror. We reflect that if this is the way people were treated in the past as a matter of their "law," what must life had been for people before they had such laws. That such laws governing the treatment of women and slaves was seen as an advance, means something much worse must have preceded it. We moderns will need hermeneutic charity from our future readers as well. One can think about what was regarded as an era of peace and liberation in the 1960's in culture and songs, and as we look at the words and songs of that time we now see patriarchal sexism there as well as many views of the world that have come to be regarded as not fully enlightened. We can have hermeneutic charity without perpetuating the virtue of the past that has become today's vice. (Joseph Campbell: Yesterday virtue is tomorrow's vice).
Transfiguration or metamorphosis had both total and phase specific meaning in the event on the mount of the "transfiguration." Metamorphosis is the entire cyclic change process in life; the eternal return of the sameness in the repetitive of subsequent events which are like what has happened before. The disciples experienced a "change" in Jesus; they perhaps got a glimpse of what his resurrection body of like before the resurrection. St.Paul referred to the human spiritual body which would not see corruption. In the Transfiguration event, perhaps the spiritual body of Jesus was surfacing or shining through his physical body even as the spiritual eyes of the disciples were seeing him through their physical eyes. What happened immediately after the transfiguration event? They went down the mountain to the "demon possessed" valley. We'd rather be in the transfiguration event of butterflies being born out of cocoons rather than the "ugly" phases of larva, pupa and cocoon. The life of Jesus ran the gamut of metamorphosis but the resurrection proved that the spiritual was driving all of the phases of appearances of the continual transfiguration of life experience. We can't live on the mountain top but we can know that the spiritual drives the changing becoming of our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2019
"This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him." This is what the heavenly voice was heard to said in the mystical state in the event of the transfiguration. Why did Jesus have to be announced as "chosen?" What does "chosen" mean in the Scripture traditions? Was Abraham chosen? Jacob chosen? Joseph chosen? Moses chosen? Saul chosen? Gideon chosen? David chosen? Is being chosen how the dynamic aspect of the messianic is described? The divine is manifest within the human and when it happens, it is declared as "God chosen." Scriptural chosen means that people understand the divinization of someone or something accessible to human beings to elevate humanity toward the higher purposes for humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2019
Theophanies/Epiphanies in the Bible have their won symbolic order. Mountain top experience representing "high" experience or establishing a hierarchy of valued events in the experience of humanity. When is a mountain not a mountain? When it is the symbolic place designated closeness to God which in turn set the hierarchy of value for the person or event which is "on the mountain." Often biblical mountain means interior "inscape" and not necessarily external "landscape." With language one can make things more than they seem to be.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2019
Imagine a stack of transparencies with the traces of the events and descriptions of the past visible to those who are adding a new transparency to the top of the stack to relate a current event. The Hebrew Scriptures provided for the New Testament writers the templates to use to tell the story of Jesus. The Transfiguration unites many of the traces of the figures and the theophanic atmospherics of the Hebrew Scriptures. Glory, Shekinah, Light, Clouds, God's Voice, Glowing Faces, Moses, Elijah, Sinai, Carmel, Mountain Top. The message was the the "old" was affirming the "new," and the New was Jesus Christ for the New Testament Communities.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2019
Imagine translating the beatitude way of living given to oppressed people who had to learn to survive and be winsome with their oppressors to people who are not oppressed. The beatitudes for non-oppressed people means that such people should be champions against any sort of oppression of people at all.
Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2019
St. Paul: "Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good." This is instantiated in the beatitude sayings of Jesus in his recommendation of non-retaliatory forgiveness as the response to hate and curse. When evil is embodied in the oppressor of any kind, there is the impatience of "justice delayed is justice denied." Why should we wait for something so important as justice especially if it means protection from bodily harm? We do not want the terrible dilemma of having to delay justice to wait for the oppressor to be convinced of his ways by the goodness of whom he oppresses. The passive resistance of Gandhi, Mandela and King had a "good" response in times of delayed justice. Sometimes the biblical witness seems to look at things in the long run and not the short run. The belief that God is everlasting meaning that all things will pass, in not a comfort for those who live as the victims of delayed justice. Pushing the rectification of injustice to eschatological justice in another "afterlife" can wrongly be used as justifying the present injustice. Patience can be strength to wait for the tyrant to die but who has to be most patient if there is a very slow arc of history towards justice?
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2019
People of faith who believe that the correct moral behavior need to be established from some transcendental revelation or humanity has no basis for criticizing atrocity, have to acknowledge that transcendental means the surpassing horizontal quest for universality as each of us speak from a located solidarity with aspirations for declaring what is the best universal behavior for all. One can say I know how God wants me to behave and the Bible tells me what God wants. But in saying this, one can naively assume knowing what God wants is so self-evidential that it does not require that one interpret the "universal" from a personal location in history within a particular community that has provided the interpretative framework for understand what is "universal." Who has the right to speak as an infallible spokesperson for the universal and then assume that all that he or she says will be self evidential in the hearing audience? Having human discourse means that we have body language actions that comport to the fact that we have and are guided by how we have taken on language. Having language is the universal and when we use one word, we assume the entire universe of discourse even though we cannot exhaust it because it contains us and not we IT. From our limited and partial vision within the particular human solidarity, we commit "universal" aspiration in our discourse because we assume the relevance of our particular within the universe of all other particulars, and in so doing we make the case for the maximal benefit for as many language users as possible and so the Golden Rule is uttered as well as the Categorical Imperative of Kant: "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." What remains is locally adapting the categorical imperative in time and space and in body language actions. We are always already in need of deciding what is the universal common good beyond local person, family, tribal and national interests.
Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2019
One should note that St. Paul was not too "carnal" about the resurrection. The resurrection of the body for him meant the resurrection of the spiritual body. Such a body would be the belief of the unity of the identity of a person through the changes of time which get fully registered in the demise of the perishable physical body. One might suspect that many hold the subjective immortality of Christian resurrection in carnal ways wanting a new body in the same way that one had the old body only free from the ticking clock of time and time's effect. Does one wish for an afterlife of static perfect being or of endless future becoming of surpassing oneself in a future state? It is always good to pose questions regarding the comprehensiveness, cohesiveness, and consistency of one's metaphorical understanding of the afterlife.
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2019
The beatitudes express the freedom of living beyond the tyranny of being determined by one's past affinities. I know what and whom I like, and I like whom I know and what I like. The beatitudes are the moral practice a a new inclusive community; a new experiment in bring Gentile and Jews together in the closeness called fellowship when previous practices of segregation kept people from each other based upon the habits of judging others from one's bias, condemning others as having no future, and loving only those who were familiar.
Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2019
The beatitudes are the spiritual martial arts attributed to Christ for the winsome behaviors of a minority and persecuted group of people to survive and gain favor with the people who have the power to oppress them. Forgiveness and the practice of non-retaliation were the winsome rules which required a different kind of personal discipline. People who turned the other cheek and carried the soldiers' gear for not just one mile but the second mile, willingly, showed the strength of serving without servitude. The spiritual martial arts of the beatitude was based upon serving the Higher Spirit within in hopes that even the oppressor would be impressed by the God who was being served by the oppressed, so impressed as to be lured to join them.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2019
The "turn the other cheek" advice of the beatitudes is part of the spiritual martial arts and peaceful passive resistance program that the followers of Jesus needed for their survival when they were in a minority. Fast forward to inquisitional hegemonic Christianity and the times when competing Christians burnt their heretics at the stake. What happened? It is easier to romanticize Christians in the minority being forced to practice beatitudinal methods than the Borgia papal Christianity of sheer power in the name of God. Bad behavior, bad thinking of religious people have created the response of atheists to dismiss all religious discourse as foolishly contradictory and therefore not believable or worthy to embrace.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2019
The Beatitudes in Modern Urban: Let me make lemonade with life's lemons and sugar me Jesus!
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2019
To understand the beatitudes one should think about how one has been rebuked in one's comfortable melancholy by a person who is impaired by social or physical circumstances and yet seems to be exuding unspeakable joy. How can that person seem to be so content, when I in my comfort can't seem to choose to enjoy my comfort? The blessed state is being able to channel such contentment when it really seems that one has no visible reason to do so. This says something about the abundant life program that the early church received from Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2019
Blessing and curses used to be more open and acceptable as is seen in biblical accounts. The beatitudes seem to overturn the obviousness of the blessing and cursing verification. One would think that the well-fed, the rich, the powerful are the ones who "verify" the signs of "success" or "blessing." The words of Jesus in the beatitudes overturns the blessing and curse formula. Those who seem cursed with poverty, persecution and hunger are those who are declared as blessed. What's going on in the transvaluation of the blessing and curse formula? The word of Jesus play havoc with typical human preference for "ideal" conditions. I suspect this is the appropriation of the "contentment" practice of Paul being expressed in the narrative of Jesus for some people learning how to cope in some difficult times.
Aphorism of the February 14, 2019
The Bible is a collection of writing written in different times and places. The purpose of the writing was to inculcate a faith identity into the people to whom the writings were written. People's identities are often formed by what is beneficial and what is woeful. Blessing and curse are conferred in biblical writings. Sometimes in appropriating the eternal return of themes embedded in language there are hooks onto which we want to hang our identity and so we appropriate the Bible as being favorable to one's own perspective and condemning of those who disagree with me. If the Bible can be an "international" book, the interpreters must resist ethnocentric tribalism and understand that like the ideals of the American Declaration Independence, it invites to better selves not found in the peoples of the Bible or in human history. If we don't understand the invitation to a better future of the Bible we can get bogged down in co-opting for ancient cultural details of chauvinistic practices of all sorts.
Aphorism of the February 13, 2019
One of the areas of dishonesty through avoidance by Christians with wealth is there assertion of fidelity to the beatitudes. Affirming the "blessed" state of wealth and comfort and stating the beatitudes as one's "ideals" might leave one in the state of hypocrisy. It is better not to claim all things biblical as a reflection of one's life, there is however an obvious injunction of Jesus that should be relevant to people of wealth and comfort: To whom much is given; much is required.
Aphorism of the February 12, 2019
About the prehistoric and origins and about extra, non and pre linguistic beings it must be noted that they have human significance because of this phrase in the future anterior tense: They will have come to become language events.
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2019
We in American Christianity need to be careful about how casual we are in appropriating the words of the beatitudes as being constituting of our experience. Such words were called by Nietzsche the "transvaluation" of value; the promotion of slave experience to be definitive of noble values. We should perhaps appreciate the beatitudes as "coping and survival" values of oppressed people who had to adopt spiritual jujitsu methods of finding dignity in the conditions of mere survival when the social conditions did not allow the free and open practice and expression of their faith. Oppressed people trying to find dignified survival can relate to the beatitudes more truthfully than the triumphant Christians who now live as those who have "co-opted" the values of the oppressors and don't realize it.
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2019
We often romanticize the Gospel fishermen because we project upon them our notion of fishing as a relaxing recreational activity. So, anyone who would give up the love of fishing to follow Jesus is seen as one with heroic love. But when hauling fish nets in the family business is the apparent occupation that one is trapped in for the rest of one's life even when one has intellectual and skill sets that remain underdeveloped in the fishing business, seeing Jesus and following him would provide a spiritual mobility, even an escape from an over-determined life. Jesus surely was a pied piper who called some people from what they perceived was the curse of a "boring" life script.
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2019
It turns out that God seems to call people for failure in their own situation even while the traces of their call are revived to find significant relevance many years later. Isaiah was an unrequited prophet; his message fell on deaf ears, yet many years later Jesus of Nazareth understood the "good news" program of Isaiah to be definitive of his life and the followers of Jesus came to call the life of Jesus "superlatively messianic."
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2019
People who are given insights before the time for public acceptance of those insights are called to public irrelevance and being ignored. After Isaiah's fantastic vision of God and his response to God's call, he realized that he was called to say things that would be ignored and not understood by his audience. It takes a visionary faith to be called to be irrelevant to people in one's own time and place but it is the lot of some people to initiate the tomorrow which they themselves will never see.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2019
Ponder the accounts of the "appearings" of Jesus/Christ. One notes that Jesus was present to Pontius Pilate but to what effect? St. Paul wrote about the appearings or re-appearings of Christ after he had died on the cross. How Christ appeared to him was significantly different than how Christ re-appeared to others. St. Paul did not regard the appearance of Christ to him to be an "inferior" sighting because of the way it changed his life. We do not hear about appearances of Christ to people who then say they reject the significance of him to their lives. The appearings of Christ are nuanced with the effects of what these appearances did to the lives of the people who experienced them. The sacraments involve the linking of the appearances of Christ within the regular "rites of passage" issues of people, not to exhaust how Christ can appear to anyone; rather the sacraments encourage anticipation of the serendipitous sublime presence to arise with God's playful "peek a boo, I see you."
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2019
An adjective for God is "holy," which means to be set apart. So God is so difference as to be unique in the most unique sense of the word unique. And if every snowflake is unique, then God is the biggest in snowflake-like uniqueness. Each person in claiming holiness is to discover how one is unique or set apart. But if being set apart means that there is no inter-communication between beings then we would not even be able to speak about being set apart. Being set apart happens within the myriad community of all different things and beings. Life is learning how to be holy in the sense of being unique toward the maximum benefit of the whole.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2019
From now on you will be fishing for and catching people. This is a Jesus saying for evangelism, certainly not a metaphor to be taken literally since a fish would not be one who would want to be caught and served up as the food for humans. But when a grand child charms a grandparents one might remark that the winsomeness of the child, "hooks the doting grandparents and reels them in" and with such winsomeness is able to manipulate grandparents to perform copious acts of reward by being charmed. Evangelism might be simply learning how to be winsome in the presentation of God's love to other people such that they are "charmed" by the charismatic encounter to make a decision to respond to the love of God.
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2019
Epiphany is another name for a "call" from God. The Bible gives examples of such epiphanies and we can conclude that there are as many epiphanies and calls as there are people and times and places. Such assumption would follow from divine omnipresence or Christ being all and in all.
Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2019
Paul's "poem" to love may as well be a poem to what is humanly impossible and refer to possible omni-presence of God who is love and lures us to understand more and more what it means to be loving in better ways.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2019
St. Paul wrote about love and "omni-faith" in the phrase "love believes all things." This is not to say that "love believes all things have equal value." Such great love is an inclusive belief because it expresses an honor for the Freedom of everything to happen; it is the freedom of everything coming to language that can come to language in the experience of any theoretical language user. Such great love is honor the honest conditions of freedom but such love can also inspire the best values of the conditions of freedom, like justice itself.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2019
The way in which one tolerates the reading of much of the Bible is through the lens of hermeneutic charity, which means we are forgiving of people in the past who have not attained the same level of justice which we have regarding the dignity and equality of all people. When we read Scriptural rules regarding women and slaves, we engage in comparative horror. We reflect that if this is the way people were treated in the past as a matter of their "law," what must life had been for people before they had such laws. That such laws governing the treatment of women and slaves was seen as an advance, means something much worse must have preceded it. We moderns will need hermeneutic charity from our future readers as well. One can think about what was regarded as an era of peace and liberation in the 1960's in culture and songs, and as we look at the words and songs of that time we now see patriarchal sexism there as well as many views of the world that have come to be regarded as not fully enlightened. We can have hermeneutic charity without perpetuating the virtue of the past that has become today's vice. (Joseph Campbell: Yesterday virtue is tomorrow's vice).
