Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2014
Resolved to make no more resolutions because of self
disappointment regarding previous failure or being comfortably inured to one's
repetitions aka accepting oneself? Ain't
going teach this dog new tricks? How about framing resolutions with a the
positive: Instead of fasting, or giving
up or changing, how about saying, "I am going to take a vacation from such
and such behavior which will allow me to explore alternate behaviors to take
the time and place of former behaviors which for reason of health or boredom
created some conditions of minor self-loathing?" Resolution is part of the deliberate process
of repentance, also known as education.
Repentance and education are the intentional efforts we make to add
personal structure to the inevitability of change. If everything is changing, then what are we
going to do to be those who give deliberate direction to this
inevitability? When we arrive at our
latter days, sometimes the judgment about our preparation for the process of
change gets rendered. The judgment often
has to do with being stuck in mindsets which don't fit the age specific tasks
which have been forced upon us by change.
May God grant us wisdom to know how to ride the energy of the inevitability of change not as an entropy or
the losing of energy but of the sucking positive energy of death and beyond as
motivational inspiration to cherish our time with timeliness of appropriate
actions.
Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2014
As people we can be uneven and inconsistent in how we
interpret all manner of events and texts in life and we can rapidly shift what
we regard to be validating criteria for authenticity. Sometimes authenticity is reduced to what is
convenient for the moment. Ironic that
when people read the Bible sometimes they retreat to the interpreting
principle, "it literally happened and therefore is true!" Literally true has many meanings too. Literally true probably means literately true
or artistically meaningful in how it engages one in the moment. Ironically
fundamentalists imported the limited "truth" criteria of logical
positivism to Bible reading by implying that the words of the Bible are true
and meaningful if and only if they could have been verified empirically. This of course, would discount the aesthetic
mode which would account for the experience of the sublime encountered in an
artistic text. A painting or piece of music may have aesthetic meaning and
truth for us and still be "representative" art. One can note there is often confusion in
"interpretative" modes when people read the Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2014
The Feast of the Holy Innocents is a reminder to us how
children sometimes are the victims of those who crave absolute power or revenge
or who are driven by the worst sociopathological impulses which allow them to
inflict innocent suffering without consciences.
The Holy Innocents portion of the Gospel Story is a re-visiting of the
story of the infanticide event which threatened Moses. Also the Christmas Story as one which encodes
the new birth of Christ within a person by the action of the Holy Spirit,
included the Holy Innocent story as the proof of one of the terrible outcomes
for those who experienced the birth of Christ within their lives. We pray for the end of direct and collateral
assaults which might take in an
"untimely" manner the innocent from our world because of the
terrible abuse of power of any sort.
Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2014
The writer of the Gospel of John rewrote the Creation Story
with six words: "In the beginning was the Word....." Ironically that means since both creation and
evolution are words, neither have any existence without the pre-condition of
Word since positing the reality of either creation or evolution depends first
upon Word being the pre-condition. So
that argument is settled.
Extra-ironically, "In the beginning was the Word" is a phrase
that depends upon Word and so when we utter such a thing we are assuming we
have Word as a pre-condiition of such an utterance. Word is honestly reflexive about the basis of
all word products. The most honest
absolute universal is what could be called Wordism, because it confesses itself
for its own existence without which it could not have existence. How does one assume existence of any sort
without the existence of words? The most
obvious verb of Word is "to be" or the existence or creation
acknowledgment word. Word with the
"verb to be" makes all language into what generates language word
products as a continuous mathematical tautology whereby we are always already
assuming a sort of "x=y" situation or otherwise stated, "For the
sake of this conversation we are assuming the use of these words which refer to
and mean this." Word introduces the
verb "to be" which then makes language a perpetual tautological
performance or creation, because we are perpetually saying what "is" given
the prior understanding of the meaning of our terms.
Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2014
Being an advocate for a special feast for St. John the
Divine since scholars do not think John the Evangelist and St. John the Divine
are the same person, one can note how a vocabulary become a reductive code word
for a cluster of associations. We use
the word apocalypse to mean a gloom and doom catastrophic end of the word. It's literal meaning is
"revelation" or "uncovering" or "unveiling." Because the Book of Revelation of St. John
the Divine is seen to be an "unveiling" of things that will happen at
the end, Apocalypse has become the short-hand term for the end of the world as
we know it. One could make the case that
after reading the book of Revelations, nothing is revealed because it all
remains inscrutably covered within the vivid dream-like imagery of the writer
who brought the vision to language. To unveil or reveal a dream does not mean
that there is a self-evidential meaning that comes along with the dream. Beware of those who claim that they know
precisely what St. John the Divine uncovered through his writing of The
Apocalypse.
Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2014
Go forth today being honest about the fact that one is going
to interpret and be interpreted and in fact it will be impossible to determine
the meaning of one's life in the eyes of others. We like the Bible and God are always already
vulnerable to be interpreted and acted towards by others in ways in which we
cannot control. Genres are going to be
cross pollinated; you can tell Andy that it's a Campbell soup can but that did
not stop Andy from making the soup can an icon of expensive art. Who controls the standards of the value and
function and meaning of "art" anyway?
So as we are always already caught in the whirlwind of the proliferation
of endless meanings, how then should we act?
We cannot presume to act in a final "absolute" way unless we
do not believe ourselves to have a future when we might surpass our previous
"final" meaning. So how do we
live with such profound openness to many meanings? The best we can do is always seriously to
ponder what love and justice means in our thought and deed and endeavor to live
from a "do no harm" motive and pray that one's blessing does not mean
a wake of hurt for someone else. We are
riding the surf of dynamic meanings so let's do our best to stay on our boards.
Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2014
In the midst of Christmas excess note that babies often
prefer to play with ribbons and boxes rather than their expensive toys and
surveys tell us that "the stick" is still the most popular play thing
for children until we program them to want expensive video games. Underneath
the mountain of Christmas wrapping the crawling babies are fascinated by just
the colors on the wrapping. Christmas is
about accessing the totally "free" birth which still resides within
us.
Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2014
Let us resist the notion that the excess of the Christmas
season requires that we be excessive.
Yes, make it special for children but let charity be excessive and since
capitalism is not an automatic philosophy of altruism, being excessive in
Christian charity means that we truly have to exercise "freedom" in
the so-called "Free Market."
The best way to Christianize the Free Market is to be excessive in
charity.
Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2014
Getting to the Christmas event is like the field of archaeology. One can only dig a limited trench to get a
feeling for the entire terrain and culture of the time. And one cannot avoid temporal provincialism
and anachronism because one can't help but ask questions of outcomes which were
not posed in the original setting. Since
the past is gone we can only dredge it for historical imaginations in the
constitution of our present identity and in the Gospels, the infancy narrative
was a spiritual archaeology for the church to enter into the imagination of how
"Christ in me" was the hope of glory.
Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2014
Christmas is about a story to transport the memory to a
common event: the grace of one's birth=the retained memory of it=the return to
the original blessing of one's birth as a being born again as one projects upon
the features of the Christmas Story especially the birth of Christ into one's
life.
Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2014
We like Christmas because of the "birth narrative"
and so we go all out to make Christmas special for children, and rightly
so. But, we should not childify the
Christmas story to the point of "dumbing" down the writing program of
the Gospel writers. Each element represents
didactic points and spiritual methodology for the early Christians. It behooves us to look beyond the mere
childification of Christmas.
Aphorism of the Day,
December 20, 2014
With cultural, seasonal and family calendars we force upon
the very neutral passing of time a social experience of time and with notions
of recurring anniversaries when we return to events which gather family and
people who are close to us and such anniversaries such as Christmas can be both
joyful and sorrowful. Mostly joyful, or
mostly sorrowful depending upon our current adaptive state to the various losses
in our lives. Memories can inflict upon
us in the now the pain of the loss of the people whom we are missing. It can also be remembrances of broken
relationships. But it is also the
inspiring renewal of current friendships.
"Gaudete" is a command to "Rejoice!" This often means, "Rejoice! in spite
of....." How can one rejoice in
the experience of what is lost and irreplaceable? So Christmastide requires that we go deep
within to find the centering place of Peace and Joy which does not depend upon
what actually happened to us. Here we
can find the power to rejoice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2014
Use the conical spiral as a metaphor for one's life. Begins
with a dot and becomes ever widening
connected concentric circles symbolizing the passing of time and the expansion
of the occasions of becoming in one's life and also indicates that we return to
similar places but on a different rings of the conical spiral. Each place has its own grace and
challenge. To be born again is to be
able with the imagination to move in reverse direction back to the original dot
when one was not coded by knowing anything when one had sheer "animal
instinctive" joy and for no reason at all except for the occasion of one's
conception and eventual birth. Tapping
the memory of the original states of blessing gets accessed at Christmas and in
the Christmas story because we are willing to set aside ponderous adult coding
and access the source of our birth and we do it through the Christmas story and
hopefully in the presence of infants and children who can draw from us the
projections of the mysterious aspect of ourselves which we seem to have lost.
Aphorism of the Day,
December 18, 2014
The Gospel of John does not include the infancy narratives
of Jesus but contains the eternal pre-gestational State of Christ as the Word
of God who was busy bringing the human world as we know in into being since
human consciousness and Word are co-extensive beginnings of human life as we
know it. Christmas has a date on our
calendars but what is the date of eternity?
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2014
Nobody seems to know the trouble that I know, but when they
do a bond is forged and befriending empathy occurs. The church exists to witness to the reality
of befriending empathy even while the church does not have to be threatened if
such befriending empathy happens outside of "churchy" contexts.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2014
Experiences of the Sublime are serendipitous and most often
individual and not often communal. So it
is very easy for us to be dismissive about the uncanny experiences of others
and want to give alternate explanations.
Religious movements have been founded because the root events have
uncanny events which are communal in nature so that the originating
effervescence is bound to be remembered and to have the power of becoming a
repeatable trace in subsequent history.
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2014
The Christmas narrative is not in the earliest Gospel of
Mark or in the latest Gospel John. It is of relative late composition when
compared to the first writing of St. Paul.
Why didn't St. Paul write about the babe in the manger? Could it be that the theology of Paul
regarding the birth of Christ within each person who is over-shadowed by the
Holy Spirit becomes the birth narrative story of Jesus which encodes the
spiritual program of members being taught the tradition of spiritual
transformation? Bethlehem is a spiritual
"topos" or eventful place of new birth.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2014
It is the nature of institutions to be conservative because
of the need to provide stable structures and to promulgate them to create the
conditions for members to work together through the sharing of common topics
and themes and identities. The challenge
of institutions is to include a dynamic aspect which allows for the constant
testing of the goals of the institution and their adequacy within their setting
in being able to be relevant to new members. If the pragmatic criteria is not
present in one's truths then an institution may be headed toward an arcane
obsolescence of but a few eccentrics who gather to be "precious"
about their ideas. The Christian movement was a dynamic movement which threw
off "conserving" aspects of its Judaic context to become dynamic
welcoming "clubs" in the cities of the Roman Empire. Christo-centric Judaism in the Roman cities
was so innovative and dynamic in it openness to Gentiles that it had to be
separated from the synagogues unable to tolerate the changes required to
welcome a diverse new membership.
Aphorism of the Day,
December 13, 2014
"Being there when it happened" is the most
intimate connection with an event.
History becomes the oral and written transmission of what happened. Some think that the words of the Bible can
actually fix the exact and precise meaning of what happened. When we read the Bible we are actually
getting an account of the interpretation of the writers about previous events
which may or may not have been experienced by the writers but more likely were
the received oral traditions within the writers' communities. So when we are speaking about the
"authority" of the Bible, in practice it means the interpretations of
those whom one regards to be a competent authority. One short-sighted notion of biblical
inspiration seems to be influenced by a philosophical method which says a
"statement or event is true and meaningful if and only if it can be or was
empirically verified." Aesthetic
truths regarding beauty and moral and spiritual truths regarding justice and
love would not qualify as being inspired under the aforementioned
criteria. However, if one moves the
words of the Bible into the realm of aesthetics and ethics then one can find
ample inspired meaning as one endlessly uses intuition to engage the eternally
returning manifestations of the
structures of the archetypes of human consciousness. The structures of the archetypes of human
consciousness will always come to new detail in one's own context. So biblical words can morph into constant
contemporary relevance and one does not have to pretend that one understands
the particular consciousness of people living in the first century.
Aphorism of the Day,
December 12, 2014
There is an interesting ambiguity in Christian tradition;
one is not supposed to be conformed to the image of the world, even though
Jesus Christ is the icon or image of God in complete conformity to humanity,
namely God as a human person. It is
convenient for people to be able to perceive the reality of God within their
own cultural contexts. If revelation
cannot be "morphed" to be relevant to people in their own contexts,
then there would be no revelation at all.
So in the 1600's God could be made known in the appearance of Our Lady
of Guadalupe to someone living in Mexico.
It does no good to make all of the contextual details of one era as the
criteria for valid revelation in another era.
It is silly to say that if Jesus were omniscient why didn't he speak
about car and space ships. Jesus in his
own context told stories about slaves and servants; the Jesus of our context
condemns slavery as a terrible evil. So
we accept the morphing of the Sublime into modes which can be honestly
perceived by us in our own times. St.
Paul called this "morphing," kenosis or the self-emptying of the
divine into human palatable forms of recognition. We should let the great Events of the Sublime
and their accounts be a witness to us that fresh encounters of the Sublime
within our own contexts are to be expected.
The process of "kenosis" is the validation of the unavoidable
habit of anthropomorphizing of the divine.
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2014
Regression is regarded to be a defense mechanism of
reverting to earlier behaviors as a way of dealing with a current threat. Such behaviors are regarded to be escape
mechanisms. But what about accessing
memories and integrating them in a way which serves more effective action in
the present? Being born again or
accessing one's child aspect of personality as an internal source of having joy
in the face of some harsh adult realities can be a spiritual practice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2014
Today creative tasks involves re-integrations of one's past
not by denying what has happened but truly inventing the past and make new
things arise because of the contrast with how one has surpassed oneself in a
subsequent state. The ways in which one
formerly knew oneself have only become known now because of subsequent
experience and knowledge. Faith is the
ability to know one's past as serving one's presence with excellence,
especially if it involves the proverbial making a "silk purse with a sow's
ear."
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2014
In the history of religion and thought, sometimes one is
limited in thinking what is latest is the best, when it is only the latest or
the current context of which one cannot help be a prisoner. It is hard to have humility about those who
might supersede us. Early Christians claimed that Jesus completed Judaism and
the church was the "New Israel."
Some Muslims claim that Muhammad was the promised Paraclete referred to
by Jesus. One can see in the Gospels an
effort of the writer to show how Jesus was the logical successor of John the
Baptist. Certain religious adherents
today can be very angry about their apparent "obsolescence" in the
face of modern science and human science insights about the human
conditions. Has religion been superseded
by modern ways of knowing? This is why
the work of articulating how one's faith can have current relevancy in an
adequate way is a most important work of faith.
Faith still has a discourse relevant to a certain experience of the
Sublime which has the power of transforming one's life in the midst of modern
day up to date information and endless "self help" literature. We need to be wise about how we articulate
the Sublime in operation in people of biblical times and how the Sublime can
have very current and different detailed outcomes in our lives today.
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2014
The post-resurrection and post-ascension afterlife of Jesus
is a reality of the success of those home-club meetings throughout the cities
of the Roman Empire, known as churches. The members of these churches were able
in hindsight to reflect upon and write about the significance of the life of
John the Baptist, whose community dwindled while the communities of Jesus
flourished in their extra-Palestine settings.
From the position of success of the early Christ-centered communities,
their preachers and writers were able to assign John the Baptist the historical
"set up" role for Jesus of Nazareth even though small communities of
John the Baptist followers survived in some places. The synthetic and adaptability of the message
of Jesus within the Roman city environment propelled a Christo-centric Judaism
beyond the synagogue and the community of John the Baptist. We often forget that the New Testament
writings were written from the perspective of a rising successful movement
possessing a winsomeness in its appeal to people who could not conform to the
pieties of the synagogue or of John the Baptist.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2014
While people like John the Baptist and members of monastic
orders are called to the ascetic life, the ascetic principle is valid for all
of us. It is the "fasting
grace." It is the grace to give up
and quit things which are harmful to me
and my community when I recognize being on a path of addiction.
December 6, 2014
We often censor the Christmas narrative for children. We don't really think it good to reveal the
elements of the story which put the life of the baby Jesus in jeopardy causing
the flight to Egypt. We don't really
want to tell our children about the death of the holy innocents, an
infanticide. The morphing of the St.
Nicholas into Santa Claus represents the effort to cloister children in a
"child's utopia" because the harshness of events in the world
threaten that utopia all of the time.
Santa Claus represents the belief that there is an age appropriate time
and place for children becoming adults to wrestle with the reality of harshness
in our world.
Aphorism of the Day,
December 5, 2014
The humble St. Nicholas of Myra each year becomes perhaps
even better known than Jesus at Christmas time because he has undergone quite a
cultural cosmetic make over in successive cultures. Santa Claus is an imaginative effort to
remove all harsh elements from the lives of children; no Herod, no poor Holy
Family relegated to a stable. Santa
Claus represents the effort to censor for a time all harshness from the lives
of children and let them believe that the pursuit of happiness and temporary
achievements of the same are important for establishing optimism and hope in a
child's life. Pursuit of happiness seems
to be more universal than religious doctrines of faith communities so Santa
Claus has an appeal beyond the borders of the church of which Nicholas of Myra
was a bishop.
Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2014
John the Baptist adopted a life style which allowed him the
freedom to have an "unbribed soul."
Advent is a season to find the place within us which is unbribed, and by
this I mean the born again experience of not knowing ourselves to be in
compromise with all of the "pipers in our lives who must be paid."
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2014
John the Baptist pops out each year in the Advent lectionary
as a sort of ideal Advent police. One can get the idea that his message of
repentance is harsh but really repentance is not harsher than any
education. Education is the progressive
removal of ignorance some of which we are so entrenched in that it is painful
to let go of. Repentance is
"meta-noia," or the after mind or the new state of mind after the previous
state of ignorance. Let the season of
Advent be the achievement of new states of "after mind" or the over
coming of comfortable but unhealthy ignorance about all manner of living.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2014
What would be a truly Christian "free"
market? As Christians we believe in
freedom, but we do not believe that such freedom allows us to do what we want
or do things because we can do them without being punished. We have rules and regulations so that those
with power and strength don't use their "freedom" to dominate. So freedom does not mean license; it needs to
be expressed with moral and ethical living according to rules for the common
good. Many have come to believe that a free market means a market without
regulations and without regulation those with the power to dominate do, but
usually for the benefit of a few people in one sector of the economy. A Christian free market would mean that
freedom means choices can be made for the general good and not just for an
isolated sector. Let us begin to ask what a truly Christian "free
market" would mean.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2014
I propose that we brand the holiday giving spirit to those
in need as the Spirit of Advent. We are
reminded by a parable that when we practice kindness to least of these, we are
doing it to Christ, the Son of Man.
Thanksgiving and Christmas are celebrated as times of "excess"
and sometimes there may be a guilt about others not being able to have the same
excess and so the spirit of giving may seem like crumbs from the tables of our
sumptuous feasts. While we commit to
Advent giving for the mere necessities of the needy let us also pray and work
for the best free and creative capitalism of all, when people freely choose to
practice a marketplace philosophy with systematic commitment to make a life
income for all the norm. For all to have
enough would be the best freedom in a creative capitalism. What if the alleviation of human need were to
be a major profit motive?
Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2014
The season of Advent reminds us of how much the Christian
Calendar provided to secular and commercial culture the topic matter to
transform and then force back upon the Christian community to alter the ways in
which we used to observe seasons. The Commercial Calendar is New Years Eve and
New Years Day, Valentines Day, Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving
and Christmas. The seasons of Advent and
Lent which invite abstinence conflict with commercial excess and so they do not
get much attention in advertisement. Perhaps
the best way that Advent is observed is through the increased giving to
charitable organizations during the Thanksgiving-Christmas Seasons. Many charitable organization rely on the
Thanksgiving-Christmas giving season for the majority of their annual receipts
to spread throughout the rest of the year.
So why don't we begin to claim the Thanksgiving-Christmas charitable
mood as the spirit of the Advent Season?
Aphorism of the Day,
November 29, 2014
We are inundated by so many calendars and each calendar asks
us to organize our time according to their schedule, eg., NFL, NCAA, PTA,
School, Youth Sports, MLB, Bocce Ball League, et al. The church has a calendar too with seasons
and days. The purpose of the church
calendar is to give annual cycle of seasons which are punctuated with
anniversaries of "God-events"
derived from the events in the life of Christ and the church and
structured around corresponding teaching emphases. For your convenience, aesthetic
variation and your visual natures, we
color code the seasons. Advent is the
first season of the Church Year and it is important for trying to be a calendar
season for the not yet future; Advent is a season of anticipation for the not
yet, Big One. It is a season of
anticipation and properly charts the Future as the big one. And as the formerly detailed "Big
One" is perpetually delayed, we are taught that the purpose of the Big One
is the lure of future Excellence to generate hope and anticipation. This helps us to add spice of hope to each of our "little one" events of
our present time. Let us learn to live
expectantly now because the "Big One" Future gives us present
intensity, intensity to hearken to the call of excellence.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2014
Black Friday, crass commercialism, generous gift giving,
fellowship of shoppers, jobs for the unemployed, cultural habit and much
more. If one is "against" it
avoid it; if one embraces the gift of shopping, go for it. If one is "too good for it," savor
one's "superiority; each survives and rationalizes by one's own convenient
delusions. Whatever one's judgments on
this day, don't forget the Great Giver and thanksgiving and generosity and
don't be limited to one's view of any of the three. Be open to new views on the Great Giver,
thanksgiving and generosity.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2014
Thanksgiving and generosity go together. People often are most thankful when they
perceive themselves as being recipients of generosity. In our hyper-commercial and consumer cultures
we have become desensitized in knowing what being recipients of generosity
means. Thus, we have the cynical,
"The best things in life are free, but you can give it to the birds and
bees, I'll take the money!" The
commercial cultures of advertisement create the conditions of worrying about
what we don't have and we forget the basics, a glass of water, a sunset, good
health, freedoms of all kind, family, friends, safety, a really tasty piece of
bread....We become more aware of the basic conditions of generosity when we
lose something basic or are threatened with the loss of things taken for
granted. Let us resist the commercial
culture with its propaganda about the things that we don't have and reside in
the basic condition of having been the recipients of incredible
generosity. And let us work to make this
world a place where all can know that they too are recipients of the generosity
of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as equal children of God.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2014
The theology of blessing and prosperity espouses that one's
wealth is a sign of God's favor and blessing.
The irony is that one would imagine that God who cares for the poor, the
widow and orphan would impart with blessing and favor the gift of generosity
such that poverty would be eliminated because those who were blessed with the
most wealth would also be blessed with an equal measure of generosity and the
ability to strategically apply such generosity.
Be careful about espousing the logic that God must love me because I'm
wealthy and fortunate. The God presented
by Jesus Christ is the One who would inspire generosity to be equal with one's
wealth.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2014
Embrace the second movement of Thanksgiving. What is that?
Create the conditions for other people to have a peaceful sigh and
whisper, "Thank you God." It
is very nice to be thankful but thanksgiving becomes an active ministry when
thankful people help to make other people thankful. Thanksgiving is the perfect sealing of a
serendipitous contract between the one who needs and the one who supplies.
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2014
The Bible in the various ages of its compilation had to be
much more to the communities of derivation than it does today when the deluge
of words carrying world knowledge leave the words of the Bible in much
different contexts. The Bible
represented in its own times of compilation a much greater portion of the world knowledge in written words of those
who read the words. It was their science
or "scientia" =knowledge, but it was also their science fiction of a
hopeful future, their utopian literature, their laws and legal thinking, their
politics and propaganda, their literary tradition and entertainment, humor,
wisdom and satire. With the exponential
expansion of world knowledge that has come to language there has been radical
specification to categorize the deluge of words and the human consciousness has
been divided up in specialized ways and so we do not expect the Bible to be
omni-competent as a literary event in the ways that it was when world knowledge
in written language was so sparse. So,
give the Bible and its words a break!
Don't make it serve or be something it never was intended to be. If one looks for the universal structures of
human consciousness which generated the word details in the various settings of
the biblical writers one can find no shortage of inspired writing.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2014
On the Feast of Christ the King, one can note that Jesus of
Nazareth was not like any earthly king and that he did more in his Risen State
as a king of hearts with the subtle propaganda of the Holy Spirit to wins
hearts one by one and inspire people to found communities or clubs of care for each
other and these communities became "self-perpetuating." It is amazing how this king of heart
gradually took over the Roman Empire and how the political rulers then co-opted
the kingdom of Christ as their own stamp of legitimazation. And so this persecuted group of people who
lived the interior kingdom were able to come out in the open and not only have
protection but then have their message used by political forces which generated
the Crusades and Inquisitions and burnings at the stake of heretics. We need to be on the alert against an
"empire" of Christ the King because the association of Jesus with the
absolute corruption of power is the most unfortunate association of all.
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2014
The literal and the linear thinking mind tries to reduce the
parables of Jesus to actual people and events whereas the universal and
inspired natures of the parable may better be appropriated as the work of a
wise mind who tries to take a slice of fast moving life and freeze frame it in
an allegory so that we might attain some wisdom about ourselves. In projecting
upon the story we have aspects of ourselves represented by each aspect of the
story. So we can resist the temptation
to over-identify ourselves with the good guys.
We can also resist the temptation in thinking that we know who the bad
guys are.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2014
Did ever wonder why so much of what is confessed about God
does not seem all that obvious as in, "The Lord cares for the poor and
needy." And yet the prevalence of
poverty in our world seems to falsify such a confession. As we move toward the Last Sunday of
Pentecost or the Feast of Christ the King, we must confess that the realm or
kingdom of God where Christ is "King" is a parallel and sometimes not
very obvious one to us whose lives are dominated by the realms, dominions and
powers of this world. The power of God
in Christ is to do an "inside job" on us and give us the task of
doing the "outside" job on our environments, not by power of army or
politics but with the winsome behaviors of kindness, justice and love. The will
of the "incognito" kingdom of God needs to be worked through the
likes of you and me. Good Lord, Have mercy!
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2014
There is a parable of Jesus which seems to expose a seeming
banality of both charitable response to those in need and a neglect of those in
need. "When you did it or did not
do it to the least of these, you did it or did not do it to me." It is good that we practice kindness as so
ordinary that we don't know that we're doing anything special. But when we are practicing neglect of others
without recognizing it then we need interdiction and exposure as to how and why
neglect of others has become so unrecognized.
When lack of empathy becomes an expression or practice which cannot be
seen it needs to be interdicted as a serious deprivation of the normalcy of
empathy and compassion. But just think
about how long the condition of slavery was a banal habit of human cultures.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2014
Consider the Matryoska, Russian Nesting or Babushka dolls as
a metaphor for one's life. These are the
dolls within dolls in a sort of concentric circle fashion. The outer doll or the outer ring of a
concentric circle comprehends or contains everything within it. The doll or concentric circle metaphor may be
inadequate because their parallel borders would not admit any contact between
the borders which would signify a degree of discontinuity between rings. Some times there may appear to be
discontinuities in our own personal histories because of conversion to new
thought paradigms which radically changes the direction and choices of our
lives. A more apt adaption might be a
conical spiral which links all rings but successive occasions of experience
would represent a growing ring. If one
is to do an "archaeological" assessment of one's past lives, one
should try to articulate the rings of thought which defined one's lives at
various stages of life. Try to remember
what God, Jesus and the Bible meant to you at various phases of your life and the
differences which you cite will help give insights into the particular paradigm
which informed your life. Doing such an
intellectual self-archaeological analysis can provide one with insights into
how one became how one has become to be now.
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2014
Basically the human vocation is being interpreters of other
interpretations of other interpretations....of life and sorting through
judgments in the momentary choice which immediately sets the hierarchy of value
expressed as "I chose to do and say this and in this way" instead of
doing and saying everything else. We
manifest hierarchies of values with each choice and word and action based upon
interpretation even though most seem like the redundant repetitions of the traces
of already learned patterns of speech and action. The seeming automatic actions which we
perform represent the consolidated base of our characters which hedge our
tendencies and such redundancies help us to attend to what is truly new in our
lives today. However, it is good not to
leave the character of our tendency to be left completely unexamined since sometimes we need a sea change for new
direction. Often we need a graceful
event of the sublime to give us a new orientation in our lives or we need a
progressive adaption and redirection forced upon us because of an event,
causing temporary irritation and inconvenience but having the potential to be
the grain of sand to spawn a new pearl.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2017
We are on our way to the end of the season of Pentecost or
Ordinary time of the church calendar, the last Sunday of Pentecost being the
Feast of Christ the King. While many
churches have the afterlife all figured out about who is going to inhabit
better real estate based upon notions of pure doctrinal communities and
exclusive and closed communions, one should trust the words of Jesus on how the
nations will be judged, viz., namely on orthopraxy. Did you feed the hungry, clothe the naked and
visit the prisoners? According to Jesus,
these are the criteria of judgment by the Son of Man. Humanity would truly be united if we made
these the criteria for living a good life.
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2014
Since no one is an omni-competent person and has personality
proclivities which makes one better at some things than at other things, could
one not regard the parable of the talents to instantiate aspects of one
person? A person can have strengths,
moderate abilities and weaknesses all at the same time. A major faith conclusion of the parable of
the talent is the recognition that we need each other to complement each other
and manifest the fullness of the talents of the community.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2014
Rather than viewing the parables of Jesus as designating who
the good guys and bad guys are as though one could make such specific
interpretive judgments; what about viewing parables as wisdom vignettes which
honestly portray the uneven and ambiguous conditions of living under the
conditions of freedom, and doing it with faith which at the day of one's death
mean that one acceptingly encompasses all of one's own life experience with the
integrative experience of God's grace, because we know that the largesse of God
encompasses us and everything else.
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2014
Meanings can be deconstructed because meanings are not
stable because they exist within the details of the context of life
experience. Biblical meanings are not
and cannot be stable because there are no survivors from biblical writers to
tell us their exact intended meanings. Biblical words do not freeze within
themselves exact meanings to survive for thousands of years because the most
unstable of all is the person who reads and interprets. Thankfully each person is
"unstable" in achieving fixed meanings of texts because a person
grows and develops and has interpretive lenses influenced by the perspectives
gained from the successive nurturing contexts of a person's life. Meanings are living entities and we can be thankful
that meanings change and adopt and convert and deepen as we the readers grow
and change.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2014
One should pray each day to get out of "interpretive
ruts" for life and the Bible.
"Give us this day our daily bread" means something different
to the one who does not know when and where the next meal is coming as opposed
to the one who has so many food choices that he takes food for granted.
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2014
We have be taught to read the parable of the talents as
being condemnatory of the poor bloke who believed his master was harsh and so
out of fear he hid his one talent in the ground to give back to his harsh
master on his return. What if we were to
do an interpretive switch and see this parable as one which portrays what
happens to human beings when they live with the view of God and fate being
harsh and one who inspires a fear-causing atrophy? The parable then becomes
understood differently if it centers upon how God has been presented in
misrepresenting ways. If one is taught
that the creator is a harsh one who inspires craven fear then one can expect
the atrophy of many of the gifts of life.
How much creativity has been stifled in this world because the wrong
view of God has been promoted? Indeed
many people have experienced weeping and gnashing of teeth because they had no
freedom of development under the presentation of a harsh and fearful God.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2014
The parable of the five, two and one talent reveals the
harsh reality of the principle of atrophy.
Use it or lose it. The insight of
the parable indicates that the failure to invest a resource was caused by fear
of losing it. The energy of fear has to
be transformed to the energy of faith always to believe in a future as one is
at the work of investing all that one is and has toward surpassing oneself in a
future state.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2014
Weeping and gnashing of teeth, removed from a wedding
because of wrong wedding clothes, not letting late bridesmaids into the
wedding, taking the one talent from the poorest man and giving it to the one
with the most talents. These are the
apparently cruel endings in the parables of Jesus. In the parables Jesus anthropomorphizes the
uneven interaction of the play of the freedom of circumstances with the degrees
of human freedom which people have. The
fate of circumstances can be experienced as cruel and the wisdom parables of
Jesus hint that to counter the great freedom of events which confront us we
have to exercise great wisdom to execute the degree of freedom which we
actually do possess. That bad things can
happen in the competition of the systems of nature means that we have to be
even better in exercising our freedom through the practice of wisdom.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2014
Did you ever consider that wisdom has to do with
appreciating life as a truly big game?Wisdom has to do with knowing the range
of probable outcomes and preparing for as many eventualities as possible
knowing that one applies skill to try to win even though one also knows that
some losing events can happen. And in
Christian gaming we know we can always say, "Wait till next year,"
since there is always a future and always a bigger game.
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2014
One of the most obvious features of wisdom could simply be
called probabilistic thinking. This kind of thinking collates in statistically
approximate ways past experience as preparation for future action. It is the effort to make sure that really bad
history does not repeat itself.
Aphorism of the Day,
November 7, 2014
Can one create a spatial metaphor for the experience of
time? Is time the flowing river and we
are in one place with upstream being the past, the ford in front of us the present and downstream the future? Or is the experience of time more like us
floating in the river and passing the shoreline landscape? Probably time as floating in a moving river
is more representative of the present time as always being moving. The words of the famous hymn states,
"time as a never ending stream bears all its sons away..." If this defines our experience in time, we
need to have wisdom to become good swimmers and floaters and boat and barge
builders so that we can navigate among the flotsam and jetsam in the experience
of time. The problem with the river
metaphor is that it assumes that the river is moving and the land is not. With the experience time, everything is
moving and it is language which seems to provide solid identities for
milestones and memorial traces of repetitive human behaviors. If all there is, is the Great Flowing River
one assumes that God is both farthest downstream and also at the source to
encompass all.
Aphorism of the Day,
November 6, 2014
How do we measure future time? Can one measure what has not yet
occurred? Yet we have projected calendars
and we make assumptions about the sameness of our instruments of charting time
whether astronomical or atomic.
Measuring future time is one story of our relationship to the future; in
our personal and community life we often call the story of our experience of
future time, the wisdom of planning.
People for centuries have imagined all sorts of stories as a way of
planning for the future, that which we project as near future and more distant
future. And we are so anthropocentric
that we really are only concerned about earthling stories since even aliens
have to conformed to our human ways of processing their possible being. Salvation History includes communities of old
ever imagining many different kinds of future as they sought to live with faith
in the "nowness" of the time when they were imagining a future. We are moving toward the end of the season of
Pentecost and arriving at Advent when we re-visit the ways in which those of
our tradition have imagined the future.
And we are living their future which falsifies most of their
imaginations if one falls into crass literalism which happens when readers lose
the genius of the inspired stories. If
one literalizes biblical stories of future prediction one gets it wrong; if one
understands the universal truth of pondering imaginations of the future for
living in the present one witnesses to the same truth which drives most of our
science fiction today.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2014
The future cannot yet be rendered as having occurred yet and
so it remains as a beckoning time, an eventful time. The future is the possible not yet actual
time and it is open to many different kinds of narratives which are projected
from past and current experiences of the moods of people now. Much of the Bible record projections of an
anticipated "day of the Lord" and this day was given images of
salvation and rescue. And these images
have not ever become actual in human history.
Many people still like to literalize the narratives of the future which
people of biblical time used to assuage their conditions of suffering and
injustice. It is a biblical absolute that there will be a future and every
generation has a future; what is not absolute is the precise knowledge and
details of the actuality of the future. We can be visionary about the future without
acting like carnival people with special insider's information about what will
be actual before it happens. There may
be some sense of asserting control by pretending to know the future but such is
probably more of a defense mechanism of insecurity. And that is okay as long as we know it is for
our current pain management. But there
may be other visualizations for current pain management.
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2014
The ancient prophets envisioned a day when the Spirit of God
would write the laws of God upon the hearts of all people. This is a vision of universal literacy when
each individual is empowered by knowledge and free from the conditions of
ignorance. The message of John the
Baptist and Jesus was the empowerment of the individual but in actual practice
the individual got lost in collectivities headed by paternal figures who made
the big choices of government for everyone.
The Enlightenment and the Reformation reinvigorated the notion of the
individual empowered by learning and knowledge to be able to make individual
judgments and decisions for oneself. One
person, one vote is one of the outcomes of the return of the individual. And even if we feel like our votes are
limited by the choices we have when candidates have to have so much money to
run and are pressured to act on behalf of their major donors, we cannot lose
heart. We risk selling out the freedom
of the individual once again to "paternalistic" figures who decide
for special interests and not the common good.
Is it freedom if we vote ourselves towards "special interest"
feudalism? Vote and pray for the Common Good.
Aphorism of the Day,
November 3, 2014
The atrophy of democracy occurs when people do not
vote. The transformation of democracy to
corporatocracy occurs when people seem to have only the choice to vote for
leaders influenced by opposing corporate interests. And corporate interests often influence the
public to vote against their own common good.
The biblical writings do not give much guidance on voting or democracy
since democracies are relatively recent forms of government. No age or country has achieved the perfect
and elusive state of love and justice but voting is the best tool we have to
seek to approximate love and justice for all as we hope to hold our leaders
accountable not to what is best for "me" but what is best for the
common good. Please exercise your vote
not because it will be a magical action but because it is the way that you
express belonging to a group of people with whom you are seeking to express
freedom and process for the common good.
Voter apathy means that almost every election result is effected by
those who do not vote. The collective
"my vote does not matter" often characterizes our country which
prides itself on its democracy.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2014
If the cult of saints arose in a time of the extreme
paternalism of feudal societies when significant individual choice was reserved
for people in power who made decisions for the impoverished masses, what does
the role of saints become when individuals are empowered through education and
learning and the sense of integrity to have their own original relationship
with God and Jesus and not mediated through clergy of the church or through
heavenly saints? The role of the saints
is to be examples of excellence and establish the moral direction for our
lives. The role of the saints is to
remind us not so be so temporally provincial in being arrogant about the
"superiority" of our own time.
The role of the saints is to remind us of a profound communion of all
things seen and unseen and all people seen and unseen. The role of the saints is to remind us that
each person has an absolute past and if my present will soon be an absolute
past, I need to ponder the kind of trace which I want my life to leave. The saints left good traces and they call us
to do the same.
Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2014
It could be that the rise of hagiography and the cult of
saints happened in times when there were lots of "little" suffering
people who were ruled over by major feudal kleptocrats and the official church
sometimes functioned as witting or unwitting agents of those kleptocrats. The saints arose in popular culture as a way
to provide regional totemic identity for people but also to express a
compensatory balance provided by the Collective Unconscious. And so when women were subjugated and
powerless, the Virgin Mary could rise to be a co-Redemptrix in heaven and be
attended by a host of women saints who attained status which they were not
allowed to attain in their earthly lives.
The saints provided a compensatory heavenly place where justice was
realized and the saints were specialized to be accessible to the mostly lowly
folk who inhabited the earth. When Jesus
became too associated as a heavenly monarch, he was treated as being
inaccessible like earthly monarch kleptocratic counterparts. The role of saints became an expression of
the Collective Unconscious to balance the impoverish expression of the feminine
in a patriarchal world and also give the poor and the meek ascendancy in a
world whose resources were held in the hands of but a few kleptocrats. In the post-Enlightenment world with the
gradual ascension of the independence of the individual and more opportunities
for women, one can note that the saints have lost their previous compensatory
function in the lives of people. We need
to be careful today as kleptocrats ascend to power everywhere and the people
who are left out of significant independent power resort to much more violent
compensatory expressions than those devotional responses to the irenic
communion of saints of old.
Aphorism of the Day, October 31, 2014
On All Saints' Day the appointed Gospel is the Sermon on the
Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. The
beatitudes or the blessed state or the beatific state describes the sanctity
achieved by the saints. Nietzsche called
such expression of saintliness a "transvaluation of values" because
it valorized the values of the slaves (a seeming toleration of oppression as a
strength) over the values of the masters and was an attempt to over-turn will
to power expressed in social Darwinism as the fittest or the masters being the
ones who survive. Hence there evolved
another set of values called the values of the nobles when the masters or the
strong of society actually try to expound these slave values of the weak and
the oppressed but they cannot do so without hypocrisy. On All Saints' Day we need to broaden the
scope of saintliness to encompass the genuine expression of power as the power
of creativity which results in creative advance and this advance should also
involve the power of care for all who cannot compete at the same level. Kenosis or the self-emptying of Jesus of his
divinity in order to express the identity of God with humanity is perhaps the
most powerful transvaluation of values of all.
Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2014
As we near All Saints' day we ponder the how and the why of
certain people attaining a notoriety beyond their time and place because of the
telling significance of their Christ-like behavior. The proliferation of the cult of saints and
the writing of hagiographies are evidences of how people attained totemic
significance for certain places. Saints
functioned like the "alma mater" and became the rallying icons for a
profound sentimentality of regional identity. Today saints for the most part
have lost out to the totemic icons of college and professional sports teams.
Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2014
Interpretation is the on-going process or play between words
which are made to rise into a foreground when they are produced by speaking,
reading or re-reading. But when words do
not receive intentional focus or recognition they do for a person recede into
the background where they get re-shuffled or saturated in the background of all
possible words to await being called forth in a distinctive foregrounding
pattern like actors upon a stage, the stage created by the intentions formed by
the users, speaker or reader. Biblical
words were brought to the foreground by the intentions of those who initially
used them, re-read them or edited them.
The words of the Bible have receded into the background many times and
have been brought forth in new contexts with new readers and even when we think
that we have continuity within worshiping communities, the words have accrued
many different meanings because different settings bring forth different
judgments based upon the articulated needs of the reading person or community.
Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2014
The biblical stories and Gospel records come to us with the
remnants of the labyrinth of historical contexts in which they have been read
and interpreted and today we cannot be certain of what remnants have been
retained in how we have come to read the biblical texts. And it seems most wise
to look for the universal archetypal patterns which eternally return in every
human society and with care use our intuitions to re-read the biblical writings
as guided by what is the highest and best expressions of justice and love. We then re-read the Bible with charity for
the situations of previous readers but also with honesty about what is regarded
to be the highest expression of love and justice in our own time.
Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2014
As the kids prepare to hit the streets in their costumes of
princesses and superheroes, it is a good time for Christians to focus upon the
resurrection and the communion of saints which we profess to believe in. When we value people for salutary reasons, it
happens because they are models for us in such a way that they draw from us
admiration and praise and mimicry of their virtuous deeds. The Saints, the ones known more worldwide and
across history, and the more local "all souls" who have been standard
setters in our own lives are worthy of three days of festivals. Let the children enjoy the costumes and the
candy but let us not forget how we are connected with the excellent people who
have preceded us in death.
Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2014
What the record of history shows is that Jesus was not
received as the messiah for those who continued in the synagogue and who
excommunicated the followers of Jesus.
What the record of history shows is that non-Jewish people took over a
completely unfamiliar notion, the notion of the messiah from the Jewish story
and adopted it as the winning motif within the Roman Empire. This is one of the most baffling ironies of
human history.
Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2014
Sometimes the way in which Christians have come to regard
the inspiration of Scripture they forget the long history of the councils which
also have to be regarded to have been inspired to know which writings were to
included within the "official" collection. Once writings were agreed by human vote to be
inspired they in turn were treated as words which caused meanings to be in an absolute
sense. It is probably better to take a
more humble view by noting what is inspired is the continuous interpretation of
God in human life with the Scriptures being normative for this process of
interpretation.
Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2014
Did you ever notice how the second half of the summary of
the law is simply a different way of stating the Golden Rule and both are
presented as sayings from the mouth of Jesus even though the summary of the law
predated him in his Hebrew tradition. Do
unto others as you would have them to unto you=Love your neighbor as your self.
Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2014
Woody Allen's "80 % of success is showing up"
could refer to the fact that good things or inventive opportunities would never
occur if we didn't make the effort to show up.
How we show up today is also important because attendance as simply
passive presence might mean that we could be "dead weight" to a
creative enterprise. Prayer, meditation
and study means that we prepare ourselves to "show up" each day ready
to take advantage of surprises.
Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2014
The histories of biblical people or any people are the histories of the paradigms of
temporal "objectivities" or systems of ideas which have the
gravitational effect upon the desires of enough people to draw them from
completely individual views and action into agreement with a
"communal" truth which enables them to act with and for other people
and to promote a "group" cause.
All such "objectivities" are temporal truths though some seem
to have everlastingness because they are not susceptible to any conditions
which would admit their falsity. (Would the extinction of all adherents of a
truth, extinguish the truth? Where have
all of the Manicheans gone or the proponents of Zeus and Hera?) Some scientific truths seem durable as long
as the context and instruments for measurement have contemporary use. So water boils at 212 degree Fahrenheit at
sea level until the measurement of heat standard changes to something more
reliable and when sea level is proven to be an unreliable stable global
condition.
Aphorism of the Day,
October 21, 2014
It should not surprise us that the Bible is a book of
interpretation of previous interpretations. People cannot help but repeat or
elaborate or apply within a new situation what they have already received
within their learning contexts. There is
a degree of inventive inspiration of foregrounding out of all of the linguistic
possibility the actual words of speech and writing. Writing and Speech acts are
like re-arranging words as though they were furniture in the house of
being. One can take a notion like
"messiah" in the Bible and in extra biblical writings and find such
diverse reflections one can often wonder if people are speaking about the same
thing. With interpretation one can never
be certain that different people mean "precisely" the same
thing. Pretending that we do makes for
community peace and joint action but such agreement can only be a pragmatic
"objectivity." When pragmatic
"objectivity" is given the force of divine or infallible certainty
then one can be sure that the administrative control of people is involved.
Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2014
The Bible is a book of interpretation. It is the writings of people who continuously
updated and edited previous writing to fit a new time. This why the Bible may be likened to an old
family quilt consisting of cloth pieces from the garments of family sewn
together and added to over time. The
quilt-like Bible serves as literary art as well as words to keep the heart warm
with evocative insights about the human condition.
Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2014
The book of Genesis write that men and women were created in
the image (eikon=icon) of God. Various
modern philosophers lacking the kinds of proofs they thought that they needed
for God, reversed this by saying God is a projection or an image of humanity so
God is made in the image of men and women.
Both positions manifest themselves as language products and by language
we represent the human activity of thinking.
Whether one is a theist, atheist, or agnostic one cannot help but be a
Wordist and I believe that the writer of John's Gospel stated that the Word
creates everything or is co-extensive with every Becoming.
Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2014
Sometimes it is painful to be right as in stating the
obvious such as a crew member on the Titanic shouting, "The ship is going
down!" Other truths do not always
sounds so obvious particularly in counseling when one person is sure that
"the ship is going down" while the other person counters, "but
dear, we are on a submarine." We
interpret individual events in our lives often through the mood which
characterizes our overall orientation to our environment. So how can we embrace
knowing our environment as "living and moving and having our being in
God?"
Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2014
Rather than divide life experience into radically dual
categories of secular or sacred one can simply see the categories as
functioning as expressions of parallel interpretive filtering of life
experience. One might to designate
sacred as an intentional performance of something regarded to be special and
once the performance is over, it is not really over because its sublime effects
linger backstage, off stage and evokes at anytime and in any place a memory of
that makes a past event a current reality.
Sacred and secular can be but the continuous play between the foreground
of consciousness and the background of consciousness.
Aphorism of the Day,
October 16, 2014
Bishops Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake. One can be thankful that we live in a time
and a place where one's enemy heretics cannot simply be removed from life. Yet
our world still has religiously sanctioned ignorance which permits or even
encourages the persecution of "religious" opponents. Our modern and secular world has its own
blind ignorances where we may be persecuting without knowing it. Would that we could spend more money on
ridding this world of ignorance through universal education rather than through
military spending. One could say that
the conditions of ignorance allow those who control knowledge and resources to
exploit those who are ignorant. Those
who have been given knowledge and resources are required to bring up the level
of knowledge and resources of people who have less but in their own ignorance
they fear future competition.
Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2014
If creation is in the image of God then each person derives
creative freedom in bearing God's image.
Each of us stamps our own image on one's own world because of the unique
version of the world which gets channeled through each person. It's as though God is the vast open end of a
vast funnel with seemingly endless smaller funneled reductive openings to
reduce Great Experience to the smaller perspectives of each of our versions of
Experience itself. The question for us
is how we choose to shape personal expression and interpretation the flow of
God's great Life through us.
Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2014
The book of Genesis states that humanity was made in God's
image (icon in the Greek translation εἰκών).
The Caesar's icon was upon the coinage of his time and they were used in
part to pay taxes. Render unto Caesar
the things which are Caesar's, i.e.,the things on which his "icon" is
stamped. But render unto God the things
which are God's, i.e., everything on which the "divine icon" is
stamped. In short, Caesar thinks he can
have his coins, but Caesar belongs to God.
Whose image or "icon" is stamped upon us? God's.
Why should we pretend about the ownership of the "coins" of
our lives which we have stamped with the "icons" of our life when we
ourselves are stamped with the "icon," the brand of ownership by
God? Let us render ourselves unto God
for to God we belong. We cannot remove
the "icon" or branding of our lives from our lives, even if we don't
live worthy of our divine owner.
Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2014
Everything written in the Bible is now distant past for us
but everything that was written in the Bible was written in a "then
present." Each present event
requires a new configuration of writing of the past because each present event
creates a new target for the past to be headed towards. And so writing in the present about the past
makes writers with hindsight confidence re-write the past as though it was
actually predictive of the present time during which they were writing. We can have such pride of the present time as
being the "latter day" when it is just really the latest day that we
live "temporal provincial" (a phrase used by T.S. Eliot) lives
proclaiming that all of the roads of the past lead to us right now. If all of the roads of the past are now
interpreted as converging upon us now, we can over-estimate our importance by
our provincial reductionism of what we think is important. If we can imagine all of the roads of the
past also converging on each of the 7.125 billion people in the world now, the
sheer interpretive quantity of all of that converging should humble us with a
sense of smallness. We are prisoners of
our time and place and cannot but be so but by presuming to dominate the stage
of what will appear in history as truly worthy to be remembered can be the
temptation to the megalomanical.
Aphorism of the Day,
October 12, 2014
Excommunication is rare in the church except its most common
form, self-excommunication or freely neglecting the sacraments. The parables of the kingdom of heaven in some
ways are about the practice of self-communication of all people who are invited
to the heavenly party but refuse to come because they have better things to do
and they know that God's freedom is not a context specific intervention to our
misdeeds. It may appear to be okay to
pretend that we own the property because the landlord of the universe is
apparently absent in any divine intervention response to our neglect. Our self-excommunication from God's presence
is the alienation of being on divine ground and not recognizing it. This is often our sad condition otherwise
known as sin.
Aphorism of the Day, October 11, 2014
A cruel parable? A
man shows up at a wedding feast in the wrong clothes and is "thrown into
outer darkness?" And you thought
the devil wearing Prada had strong fashion opinions? What's the point? Sometimes individualism and individual
expression is not called for, it can be an expression of a pride against human
fellowship. Try showing up in a
different uniform to play for the team and see if the team approves. Try showing up in your own clothes at boot
camp and see if the drill sergeant approves.
By wearing a team uniform it means that one accepts an all embracing
identity which is preveniently given.
There is plenty of opportunity for individual excellence even while one
wears the "team uniform."
God's grace is the team uniform given to all; wear the uniform with
pride and express that grace with wonderful individual excellence.
Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2014
Stewardship for many people has to do with standing with
with honesty before all of humanity without implying "I did all of this by
myself, I willed it and I did not get help from anyone or any social context or
any favorable circumstances and therefore I totally deserve it more than anyone
else." Another stewardship posture
might be the struggle of living with one's own prosperity in light of so many
not having anything close to what one has. And so a humble generosity can arise
and a prayer that one's prosperity might in various ways benefit the world even
if it is done through taxes, charitable giving or provision of jobs simply by one's
spending habits. One can hope that
prosperity would inspire a humble generosity and a discovery that it is at
least more blessed to be in situation of being able to give than to be in the
situation of having to receive for the basic necessities of life.
Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2014
Everything that we do and say today is coded with value even
if we do not think that we are consciously intending an action or thought or
choice. Much of what we do seems to be
following the established ruts of the pre-coded rituals of life. We often let the general scenario of
lifestyle absolve us of individual responsibility of the specific deed or word,
as if everything which is on "automatic" is not my personal
responsibility because I did not specifically think about it before I did it.
Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2014
How do we live with inventiveness today? Our experience with language can present us
with the "same ol' same ol' " today so how does invention
happen? I have the same Bible which I
had when I was sixteen but I read it much differently today than I did when I
was sixteen, in fact, so differently one could question whether it was the same
book. The difference is so great it
would be like comparing a picture of me when I was sixteen with the current
manifestation of my appearance.
Integrating new occasions of experience, constant awareness of the
background of one's cultural setting in giving the meaning tones to words one
uses to live and speak one's meanings plus a curiosity for new insights renders
the occasion for invention in interpretation.
When we can read and see differently and interpret new meanings then we
can begin to live new meanings. So much
of "group" and "mob" religion is stuck on merely the first
phase of invention, which is imitation.
But merely aping the phrase of another is only a beginning. Consuming the words of another, internalizing
them and then making them part of one's seeing lenses is how progressive
interpretation moves toward invention.
And with invention, we really are different people transformed by the
freshness of new insights.
Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2014
"Many are called but few are chosen." This is a punchline to a Gospel parable and
it sounds like a rather exclusive club.
Each group often lives in the esteem of being the exceptional and the
"chosen ones." The process of
living is the dynamic between being called and being chosen. All fruit upon a tree is bound to be
harvested but each piece of fruit may be picked at the time when it become
optimally ripe. God's grace is universal
but the conditions of the heart and souls of each person have to be in the
chosen state of ripeness for the grace to become fully active. A baby may not appreciate the gift of a large
amount of money for not having developed the value system to know the meaning
of the gift. The state of being
"chosen" occurs when we arrive at the condition in life to understand
and appreciate the value of the experience of God's grace. So the state of being called and the experience
of being chosen are not incompatible.
Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2014
In the uneven circumstances which come to people the great
fate of life events can make it seem as though some are on God's "A"
guest list with seeming preferential treatment by being "brilliant"
enough to be in the right place at the right time. And yet people who seem to be on the
"A" list of life in terms of social privilege and wealth are often
those who live as though they are proverbial Darwinian fit ones made not just
for survival but entitled by means of the circular argument, "because they
are entitled." The most awesome
thing about God is a permissive freedom which is the only way to account for
the vast unevenness of human experience.
What Jesus asked us to believe is that God invites all to the divine
banquet no matter what the conditions of freedom have dealt a person.
Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2014
The main experience of life is being within a tumbler of
language and in this tumbler language assigns values to all things. We participate in the valuing process and we
should be trying to move our values upward towards what we define as what is
excellent for the life, health and well being of community life expressed as
the common good. Because we know our
tendency to be forgetful and selfish it is necessary for us to have laws as
safety nets to articulate behavioral boundaries and consequences so that we
don't fall below the minimum for how we have come to understand love and
justice in practice. The 10 Commandments
are an articulated and promulgated code of behavior and they are articulated in
such a way as to state minimum behavioral requirement but at the same time they
do not set any limit on exceeding the minimum with ever more excellent behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2014
If St. Francis of Assisi was one of the few people in
history who most literally imitated the life of Jesus does that mean the bar
has been set too high for the rest of to be regarded as Christ-like
Christians? Probably. How are we to live knowing that we only
aspire to live "sub-Christian" lives in face of such a high
standard? How do we tolerate ourselves?
We have to make peace with a more embracing notion of what being
"Christ-like" can mean? If everyone were homeless like Jesus and
Francis, such homogeneity of life circumstance would leave us all
starving. We must embrace a
heterogeneity or differences of life circumstances in articulating the call of
God's love to us to reach every corner of human experience. So the wealthy and the poor are to be
complementary as the strong uphold the weak just as the teacher is to
complement and give knowledge to the student who does not yet know. Let us embrace our calling today to
complement the human community by giving what is required from what we have
been given.
Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2014
Great laws do not always result in the practice of justice
if the actual context does not include people with the gift of true and honest
empathy to apply the laws fairly. The
Ten Commandments came to a society with slaves and the treatment of women and children
not equal to the treatment of men. The
American Constitution came to a people which had slavery and did not allow
women to vote. The belief that all are
created equal cannot be practiced fully if there is not a contextual empathy to
really know to whom such a belief should be applied. And it might be said that angelic laws
require angelic citizens for full compliance.
But it also should be noted that a belief in repentance is a belief that
we are always perfectible if we are open to more empathy for the people for
whom the laws of equality need to be applied.
We cannot love our neighbor if we cannot see who our neighbor is. In tacit situations of hierarchical inequality,
inequality is often unseen because societies can be blinded within their own
definitions of the order of things.
Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2014
In an unavoidable manner, we
anthropomorphize animals, i.e, we assume our pets are like us in
significant ways and we may express this on a continuum of empathy stretching
from the gifted animal whisperer to those who are on the negative or cruel side
of animal empathy. And one might want to
clarify the anthropomorphizing impulse by stating that it is not so much that
animals are human but they are "personal." We personalize animals as we acknowledge
their unique quirks in their behavior towards us. They seem to manifest to us a very
individualized interest toward us. We
do the same with God; we believe that Jesus as God was actually an affirmation
of the human prison of perpetually anthropomorphizing from our human
limitations but probably what is telling in our anthropomorphizing of God is
the designation of God as Person, and hence able to be in an individualizing
relationship with us. I don't know about
you but I take all of my experience, personally, not in the sense of wearing a
hyper-sensitive chip on my shoulder but simply owning up to my unique location
for my experience. If by definition God
is greater than human experience, God would have to at least be a Person or
Personable in some way to be worthy of the definition of God as the Supremely
Valued One.
Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2014
"Paranoia will destroy ya'" as the song go. But metanoia will renew you. Metanoia is the Greek word for repentance and
it means "after" mind or could be understood to be a persuasion to a
new state of mind. We have in colloquial
English the phrase to "change one's mind" to indicate the after mind
notion of metanoia or repentance.
Paranoia, is the same "noia" root with the prefix
"para," or beside or along with.
Paranoia is the manifestation of another mind. I would also use the prefix "para"
to characterize words and language and designate language as a
"para-existential" in that it always goes along piggy back with
existence itself since existence has no consciousness of itself without
language and language users. Words or
language is another kind of positive "para-noia" since language piggy
backs with mind and thinking to reveal mind and thinking as language
continually manifests itself in all. So
language is always along for the ride.
And to update toDerrida, "language as "para-noia" (= mind
revealer) will not destroy you but it will continually deconstruct you as more
language contexts are generated to expand the field of language products which
means all previous language products are "deconstructed" because they
are given different relational value within a new field of comparative
results. To illustrate this in the field
of biblical interpretation: It is hard
to read St. Paul's Epistle to Romans without being influenced and clouded by
the interpretive emphasis of Martin Luther in the Reformation.
Aphorism of the Day, September 30, 2014
In case you have not noticed it, I confess that my aphorisms
betray a bias of linguocentricism (neologism?).
I could say that I am anthropocentric yet in saying this I am resorting
to my linguistic aspect of human experience to mediate and characterize all of
human experience, hence in honesty I am always, already resorting to language
in looking at humanity and I must confess a fixated and I would say unavoidable
bias of linguiocentrism. I could say
that it is thinking that comes prior to language but I am using language to
speak about thinking so language and thinking must be co-extensive, and
therefore all of the manifold aspects of human experience whether in an active
way or passively as in the "pre-linguistic" state of a child passes
through language skills on its way to having intentional conscious recognition. I think that the language aspect of human
experience mediates the rest of human experience and this acknowledgment shares
good company with the writer of John's Gospel who wrote that all things come
into being by the Word. In all reflexive
honesty we use words to say that "all things come into being by the
Word." It is this kind of reflexive
honesty that compels me to be a linguiocentrist.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2014
The belief in the Trinity developed as a result of the
experience of people feeling as though they live in a personalized universe.
(Not the least is the experience of Jesus in calling God His Father). One certainly could claim that this could be
characterized as an echo of anthropomorphism, humanity seeing Humanoid
Reactivity within one's occasions of existence.
A scientist may want to simply say one's occasions of existence are
impersonal events and forces to be observed and measured and not to be assigned
any motive of how they comport themselves towards us. I would say that any response to the
occasions of existence involves the use of language and the impossibility of
escaping language means that existence within the human community and from
without the human community will be personal because being linguistic beings is
the definitive feature of personal existence.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2014
Our current life cannot escape but being a languaged event
which relates our previous constitution of life events by language. The Gospels are literary or worded
explanations of the phenomenon of discovering God to be an immanent dynamic
personal presence as Holy Spirit and although God was always already such, the
narrative for such a discovery on such a wide scale to so many people was
placed in an origin narrative in the life of Jesus who made God known is such a
way. Placing God in a human narrative as
someOne who parses the Divine Self in bits and pieces is only the human
limitation of historical evolution; it should not be regarded as a Divine
withholding.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2014
Authority, power, ability are expression of one's life
force. Such can be made
"official" by one's definitional status within the context of one's living
situation in having social position because of wealth, job or family ties. And one certainly can get one's identity from
"office." "I am important
because I have a certain office or position in society." We can subtly be tempted to over-identify with
the "persona" (mask) of the office and live completely
"surface" lives. The interior
side of authority, power and ability is personal charisma or the grace of one's
interior life which has been discovered and mobilized and sends energies
through one's being to express an attractive art of living. I think that the authority of Jesus is of
this transformational charismatic order and He knew that this stuff would live
beyond his life on earth. He fully
activated his charismatic authority in knowing that this charismatic condition
could be discovered as the basic spiritual condition of humanity. And he left this with his followers who
developed it into a Trinitarian understanding of God.
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2014
The authority of Jesus is perhaps the most baffling
authority of human history. How could a
Person's Life Force be so constituted and mobilized as lightning charismatic
intervention in so many people's lives in such telling and winsome ways to
effect them to believe that they actually have a "real relationship"
with a person who could no longer be seen or heard or touched? In psychology the madness shared by two is
called Folie à deux; how does one
account for a Folie à milliards (billions)?
When something happens to billions of people then those billion tend to
want describe what experiences are mad and which could be called
"normal" by sheer volume of adherents. The continuing personal authority of Christ
as interpreted by those who still claim to be under it might best be lived by
those who have learned the transformational process of mobilizing one's life
force to be expressed as a grace in action or "charisma" to care for
others. This may be the best expression
of one's "authority."
Aphorism of the Day September 25, 2014
Authority is defined contextually. Parents by virtue of experience have
"authority" over their children and that authority also presumes a
responsibility of care. When one hears
about the "authorities" on the news, it refers to political, legal or
police actions within the definition of their various roles within the
state. Religious authority in the
canonical sense refers to office and professional aspects of the practice of
ministry within religious bodies. The
authority of Jesus was an issue and the issue was not just about his lack of
sanction by the religious bodies of his time.
His authority was not like that of the Caesar's or Caesar's
representatives in Palestine complete with military authority. The authority of Jesus might be more
"charismatic" in that he whispered people to know their better selves
and people who knew these salvific effects from interaction with him felt
themselves to be under his authority, but is such authority to be called the
effects of a psychological charming of people?
Did the charm of Jesus exert towards some social and political gains
such that Jesus "used" people for his political goals? Or was Jesus authentic because he invited
people to be their original selves as sons and daughters of God and to claim
such an identity was a discovery of personal authority, power and ability to be
who they were supposed to be? To be
charmed toward one's best self seems to be the very best and purest expression
of authority. Today we can simply reduce
authority to submitting to the influence of a denomination or Gospel
personality but the authority of the risen Christ happens when a person is
"charmed" toward their better self for no political aim of the One
who did the charming.
Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2014
When one looks a people who are famous or influential one
can be baffled by how seemingly untalented or unworthy people get much more
than their fifteen minutes of fame. The early Christians had to deal with the
effects of the authority and influence of the risen Christ as it spread as a
social movement throughout the cities of the Roman Empire. The Gospels did not
create the success of the Jesus Movement; they were written as a result of the
posthumous-post-resurrection success of the authority and influence of Christ.
Christians who were baffled by the exponential success of the message of Christ
in quite diverse settings from the original settings of Jesus of Nazareth,
wrote the Gospels as origin discourse for why they thought that Jesus became
who he became in the minds of many people as the risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day,
September 23, 2014
The Gospels often present the opponents of Jesus exorcised
about the apparent "authority" of Jesus. Authority can come from sheer social position
in having wealth, political power or physical brute force. It can come by the designation of public
office through which one has the juridical power to exact consequences from
others. Authority can come from
psychological coercion. Authority due to
oppression, suppression and repression are authorities which make full use of
fear as a psychological "big stick."
I think the authority of Jesus which threatened his opponents was due to
his winsome charisma with which he whispered himself in persuasive healing ways
into the lives of people to show them that he was really with them and for them
and did not want to get "something" from them. It is easy to recognize the authority that a
person has over one when his or her care is so obvious and selfless.
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2014
Jesus told a parable about the relationship between one's
actions and one verbal "contracts."
Saying I will and then not doing.
Saying I won't but doing it anyway.
The parable does not cover the two agreement positions: Saying I will
and doing it. Saying I won't and not
doing it. St. Paul also wrote about the
unconscious force of what he called sin which influenced his action. He did things that he did not want to do and
he did not do things which he wanted do.
Apparently sin is remembered patterns of desire projected on things,
people or actions which function as a compelling force for us to do habitual
behaviors, the consequences of which can be a loss of control if one has become
an addict to some idol created by patterns of fixated desire. Any spiritual transformation has the goal of
the equilibrium of the agreement of one's inner desire with the comportment of
one speech and one's body language.
Learning to experience desire as a good engine and life force and not as
the force of addiction is the goal of spiritual transformation and is the
secret to finding peaceful equilibrium.
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2014
When we encounter the new often we respond with "What
this?" We experience something
outside of our heretofore paradigm, our local constellation of meanings where
everything had familiar names.
"What's this?" can be the exciting and curious embrace of new
discovery. It can be a forced transition
to a new situation accompanied with a great deal of skepticism because of
unwillingness to adjust to the new.
"What's this or What is it" in Hebrew is the phrase
"Manna." The writers had
enough of a sense of humor to call the new diet of daily heavenly bread,
"What is it?" in recognition of the surprised response of the wary
people who weren't so sure of their new culinary experience. Do we have to name or identify everything
before we embrace an experience of something?
Most of the time we do but sometimes we have to embrace the newness of
discovery with the excitement of "What is it?" And then go for it.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2014
Everyday is a good day to work on finding one's voice. One does not have a choice as to whether one
is a "worded" being. We are;
deal with it. The eternal Christ was
called the Word which is always already creating human existence as we know it
in its manifold meanings. John's Gospel
has Jesus saying, "my words are Spirit and they are life." Word and
Spirit are the two metaphors of agency in the creation story, "God said
and the Spirit moved." An infant's
life can be chaotic until the young one possesses words to organize previous
pain or delayed gratification. In
finding our voice one uses one's own words to translate one's experience and so
puts an individual creative touch upon one's experience, not to over emphasize
one's own mastery of what happens to one but to exercise the full degree of
human agency in the moments of life.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2014
That we exist in Time means that we are sequential
becomers. The phenomenon of time means
that there cannot be an experience of a final answer. Truth expressed in the language of the past
can still have current relevance but not in any final sense because the future
will require further application of the traces and TRACES of the past. By TRACES, I mean the WORDS venerated by
significant and continuous communities of people who pass on their
"inspired wisdom" in the TRACES which survive in linguistic form. It can be exhilarating to be under the
influence of some inspiring great words; this does not call for the exclusive
pride of believing that such words perceived in an occasion of truth is a final
truth or meaning. Why should one ever
proclaim a final truth; rather one should use an inspired occasion to whet
one's anticipation for SOME MORE.
Aphorism of the Day,
September 18, 2014
The sequence of occasions known as Time means that one
moment is "different" from all previous occasions. The current moment in our experience of time
means we have memorial traces of previous moments which promote
"sameness" of identity even when we are in a "different"
time. Memorial traces provide for us a
predilection for the current moment, but predilection cannot be fully determinate
of the details of the current occasion.
The notion of Justice includes the statements of the practice of law for
valuing human communal behaviors but such laws are predilections for the
current applications afresh within the details of the moment. Cumulative human experience can come to make
ancient virtue, current vice, as in the case of slavery and the subjugation of
women. I think that witness of Jesus
regarding the ancient law is that the future of Justice means that the
fulfillment of the law is always an open question, open to new application in the
discovery of virtue in context.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2014
What are we asking the magic mirror of reality today? "Magic mirror who is the fairest of
all?" asked the vain queen. She was
fine with the answer as long as she could get the mirror to give her the wanted
answer but her world got darker when she thought she had a significant
competitor. It is true that what I see
today will be a reflection of me, because I will see my version of the world. When Jesus took bread and said, "this is
my body" he identified himself with his version of the entire world. He was not looking for a reflection to echo
that he was the fairest, he took an identity with his version of what he saw
for the love and care of what he saw.
Everything we see today we should take identity with as our body because
it is "our version" of what we are seeing. As the playwrights of our version of the
world can we authorially assert ourselves as those who are designating the
characters and events of what we are seeing with wisdom, love and care? We can be narcissists wanting to see only our
fair image reflected or we can with faith do the impossible, have the empathy
of knowing a peaceful co-existence of our version of life with the versions of
life that others have too.
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2014
The injunction of the Delphic Oracle was, "Know
Thyself." Knowing oneself is partly
deliberate and partly accidental. The
accidental knowledge comes from unplanned events of the day which force upon us
to manifest a version of oneself in a situation which exposes one to oneself in
a new and different way. And one may be
surprised or disillusioned with what one discovers. The Psalmist said that one is "fearfully
made" and one could expand that to a process of becoming fearfully made by
the way in which one's worded existence becomes manifest in one's body
language, speech and writing. Go forth
and surprise yourself as you see yourself in the mirror of projection which bears
your own version of the world which you are casting upon your experience today.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2014
What is the value of a person and how does one value a
person when each person is like the unique snowflake? How can personal value be generalized when
everyone is uniquely different? There is
the value of equality which is a proclamation as something self-evident by
virtue of having a Creator God. This
equality faces the challenge of quantification and qualification in human
contexts where the worth of a person requires the articulation of justice.
Justice has to have the strength and flexibility of water since the
requirements for an infant, an elderly person, a teenager, an impaired person,
an "abled body adult" are all different. The honoring of differences
while upholding the dignity of equality is the often complicated but necessary
work of wise justice.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2014
The story of Joseph forgiving his brothers when they came to
Egypt seeking to buy food during the famine is what one could call forgiveness
as providence. In the event of
forgiveness the family of Jacob was reconciled and saved. Living in the state of unforgiveness leaves
people divided and always speculating about what others are going to do for
revenge. The worst conditions in the
world are probably dominated by people living without forgiveness and reconciliation. Such a state could be called "hell on
earth" because it is such a waste of the human spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2014
Did you ever notice how we
"auto-anthropomorphize?" All
of the cells within our epidermis become little people who inhabit the
territory of our bodies. "My heart
feels", "my head hurts" are expressions of anthropomorphized
body parts. One could declare one's body as its own nation of entities that have
feelings. Each part could be analyzed as
mere cells constructed of atoms but we use the words soul and spirit to speak
about the integration of parts into a single being. Because of the mystery of personal being we
anthropomorphize all of the little beings which make up the one personal
being. Because of the mystery of
personal being we allow each part of the body share in that
"personality" and so body parts should not be treated as mere machine
parts. We also know that our body parts
often age in uneven patterns (I had
early death of hair to prove that) and so within one's overall desire for
health one can find that the entities of our body manifest their own willful
aging patterns. From our own anthropomorphizing of our bodies, one could expand
this to be metaphor for the Great Personal Container of All who by virtue of
letting us move and have our being within this great Containing Personality,
allows each part to share in "divinity." And that divinity is exalted expression of
personal being.
Aphorism of the Day,
September 12, 2014
Forgiveness and justice exist in a negotiated
reciprocity. Forgiveness does not mean
carte blanche to do whatever one wants and get one's slate wiped clean with no
consequences. To wrong oneself and another through a manifestation of personal
freedom is auto-punishment in the act itself, but such acts also pay forward
with some devastating collateral damage.
Experiencing forgiveness is reciprocal with accountability for one's
freely performed acts. One's past acts
are absolute and one's subsequent behavior is what determines their
"absolute" effects into the future.
The accountability of receiving forgiveness results in amendment of life
and where possible reparations. Clemency
in the political realm belongs to kings and presidents; in the personal realm
to be clement means that one also attains the great gift of being able to
forgive as well. It is not easy to be
great in forgiving others but when we do become agents of forgiveness we ascend
to the realm of kings and presidents in handing out a gift that is not our own
doing but arrives from the compensatory Higher Power.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2014
Forgiveness has many nuances. There is the religious notion that God as the
holy and perfect one can require the same of humanity. By definition humanity would be in the
perpetual need of forgiveness for not being "perfect as the Father in
heaven is." In community,
forgiveness has to do with social and personal offending acts and how people
continue to live together with the quality of life called
"fellowship" after an offending act has occurred. St. Paul rhetorically asked, "What can
separate us from the love of God in Christ?" In community life we ask,
"What can separate us from each other such that we no longer practice
fellowship?" There is often offense
taken by people living in community and offenders and the offended ones often
have different standards of sensitivities which register and define what counts
for an offense. We need to experience
both general forgiveness and specific forgiveness and offer both general
forgiveness and specific forgiveness because I might think that you need
forgiveness for something which you don't think matters and vice versa. Forgiveness is the way we live together in
fellowship and not let mere individual differences be interpreted as sinful
behavior. Forgiveness is a better way to
live than to live in passive aggression where I am acting out this message,
"You have hurt me; therefore I am going to respond by avoidance, by absenting
myself from your company."
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2014
There would seem to be a built in contradiction between love
and justice. If God is just then there
should be some equal system of application of response to every behavior and
human situation. If God is loving then a
loving God would allow the application of forgiveness to all because Time means
everything is a work in progress since nothing is created as finished but only
as in the process of becoming. If all is
Becoming together, including God as a expanding Container of all free beings,
then forgiveness is both benign and active tolerance of past states because of
the hope of amendment of life in the future.
People and groups with radical notions of perfection are usually
"rotten" with perfection and cannot tolerate those who do not
"precisely imitate" their notion of perfection. They often work with rage and violence to
remove the "imperfect ones" from their midst. Forgiveness is based upon "coming to the
unity of faith" in the sense of accepting completeness together as the
goal rather than some individual static state of perfection. Completeness is all of us being together all
of the time and tolerating the roles that were played yesterday even while
being called and lured to the self surpassing excellence of tomorrow.
Aphorism of Day, September 9, 2014
The logic of forgiveness is something like the logic of
washing dishes and clothes. Dishes and
clothes get used and need to be cleaned if they are going to be used
again. In the human sphere the very
nature of freedom means that the "shelf life" of a person cannot be
used up because of single "soiling" events. Forgiveness is something like the equivalence
of "washing" as a person is brought again into fellowship and given
yet another chance to express the image of God stamped upon one's life that
temporarily gets forgotten in moments in the not knowing ignorance for which
Jesus prayed from the cross, "Father forgive them for they do not know
what they are doing."
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2014
Forgiveness is a dynamic which requires that we recover from
"disillusionment" with another person. Forgiveness may be for specific deeds but the
harder part of forgiveness is if offense has come from the general character of
behavior of someone and so one may make strategic and tactical decisions not to
interact with one whose character seems to be rather incompatible with one's
own. The nature of forgiveness is
tailored to the nature of the previous relationship that one has before the
offending event(s). One can imagine a
forgiveness of God who certainly could be disillusioned with the human race but
as a parent has shared enough of the divine DNA image in humanity to wait
eternally for our improvement from our ignorance. "Father forgive them, for they do not
know what they are doing."
Forgiveness is based upon recovering from "not knowing" so
that we know and to know involves acting with love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2014
There is a quote from Jesus which is often used to comfort
those who are present at a poorly attended church service: "Wherever two
or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them." As much as this Christly quorum might comfort
the preacher to very few, the actual context of this phrase indicates that
Christ is present when people gather to collaborate and resolve in matters of
disagreement among church members.
Sometimes when people are in disagreement they seem to lose the graceful
motive for gathering. Woody Allen said, "Showing up is 80 per cent of
life." Showing up in the name of
Christ is the Christly quorum.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2014
One's life today is a version upon countless traces in the
memory of previous versions as new experience gets processed staring through a
gauntlet of previous versions. Each previous version influences a new version
of what we are seeing now. The operation
of Word within us makes today a new creative event. There is no reason to be bored unless one is
stuck upon the lie of static sameness.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2014
The Gospels were written for very pragmatic purposes within
groups of people who were quite surprised and elated by the success of their
movement. Success required pragmatic
consolidation of new members who were finding a social and spiritual identity
within these new "clubs" springing up in cities of the Roman
Empire. When an esteemed founder or
leader is not present then a conjuring literature is generated to answer the question:
"What would our founder do or say if here now?" The narrative accounts of the ministry of
Jesus were used as an oracle of Jesus who in his "Risen" state was
bringing order to these new "clubs of identity" for persons who found
that their life together attained the poetic corporate identity of being
"in Christ" and He "in them."
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2014
If every conscious event in like involves partially
intentional and lots of memorized redundant performance of interpretation, the
phrase "garbage in, garbage out" means that what and how we take in
experience will color and influence our interpretive filters. Interpretation can be influenced by emotional
states and moods caused by body condition e.g. tired, hungry, sick, in love, et
al. One tries to anchor one's general
character of interpretation based upon the most inspiring practitioners of
wisdom and survive the moments of "sporadic mis- or dys-interpretation due
to mood of a bad event. The logic of
participation in a spiritual or wisdom tradition involves intentional feeding and
consuming "good stuff" so that one's interpretive acumen can read
experience artfully for excellence.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2014
Can you even imagine an original speech or written text that
could be delivered without a previous interpretation? Perhaps glossolalia or psychography
(automatic writing), but most language acts even if they are articulated in a
spontaneous manner come from learned patterns and so they have been previously
meditated through the human instrument of language and the language processing
that we call "thought or thinking."
Some people may regard revelation of Scripture to be like some sort of
substance injected into one'e life vein of experience and retaining original
meaning. The revelatory words of the
Bible were interpreted words in their event of delivery because they reveal
actual human contexts of culture or an individual's interior life. We read Holy
Scriptures now through all known subsequent translations and interpreters who
have influenced our field of knowledge.
As I write even now, it may seem as an original encounter with new or
fresh occasion with words but I am from my experience chock full of
interpretive funnels which help me selectively pick out word combinations from
something like an para-conscious pool or aquifer of possible words. Written products are given shape by a rather
rapid intentional selection of combinations of words. In specific contexts and perspectives, words
are interpreted even as I write and as anyone reads. Let us not be shocked by interpretation, aka,
hermeneutics. Hermeneutics cannot not
really be regarded as radical if it is unavoidable in living. A modern day rejoinder to Descartes might be:
I interpret, therefore I am, interpreted.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2014
How will I interpret the events of the day? What will evoke knee jerk reactions from me
and reveal a learned pattern of reaction based upon some unhealed emotional
wound? Why am I coded emotionally in the
way that I am? Surely by now the
"talking cures" should have least built new patterns of
response? Today, as every day, we have
to deal with how we have come to be emotionally coded to respond and in the
work of doing serious re-coding of deeply grooved patterns within the
electrical circuitry of emotions we look in our narrative memory traces for
origin events of the emotional patterns.
And if Word is what creates and re-creates we are called each day to
find our voice for the day and become the authors of our day in making our new
found voice also body language actions.
Today is a day to speak afresh, be the playwright in scripting and
finally being the actor of the script, leaving plenty of room for creative
improvisation.
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2014
Labor Day can evoke many different kinds of meaning. Labor Day itself can be understood within the
history of "classism" which the American experiment was supposed to
erase under the guise of wealth through meritocracy and individual "hard
work." The greatest source of
wealth in the American colonies and for a substantial period of our history was
slave labor. People were commodity and
valued for being the "machines" of the labor intensive work of
agriculture. Labor Day evolved as an
acknowledgement about the benefit of maximal employment to allow each person to
be sustained in the necessities of life.
Labor was called "vocation" in the traditional professional
classes of divinity, law, medicine and teaching although now only divinity
retains the notion of "calling."
The professional classes now speak of their labor as "career"
and now careers involve the manifold expressions of
"management." Modern science
transformed the ancient "craft guilds" into modern industrial
production created through the invention of products by pragmatic scientists
called engineers. Today in the
information age labor is widely variegated and global and we most often live
through absence of empathy for those who labor to make the things we eat, wear
and use. The benefits of the products of
labor are very unevenly distributed in our world today. Labor Day is an annual reminder that it is
our Christian duty to work for justice in labor. We are at a time when we need to pray that
corporatocracy will awaken to prove creatively that profit and the most
widespread humane concern are not incompatible.
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Sunday, August 31, 2014
Aphorism of the Day, August 2014
Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2014
In the Hebrew Scriptures the God of the burning bush
theophany to Moses is named as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, ehyeh ašer ehyeh,
translated as "I am that I am" or "I will be what I will
be." Some believe this name of God
deriving from the verb "to be" is related to the unpronounceable YHWH
or as we presume to pronounce, Yahweh, formerly pronounced as Jehovah. There might be a significant insight in
knowing God as "I will be what I will be" since such futurism always
expressed in the present implies an Omni-Becoming God whose nature is pure
creativity and freedom and as the expanding Container of All is greatest
because Such a One has no significant rival in greatness except the Divine Self
in a future state. Such expanding
greatness actually allows for the genuine lesser freedoms of the universe which
account for the full range of agonies to ecstasies.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2014
The passing of time means that we live in the swirls of
coming to meanings about meanings in worded forms. A meaning may seem to survive and it does as
a remembered trace which becomes different in the next occasion of a meaning
about a previous meaning. We have faith
that our corporate identities of church and country have retained same or
similar meanings but we also can observe that previous religions and countries
have had their meaningful existence dissolved.
So the mystical bodies of corporations which have the ability to
perpetuate their meanings across history depend upon the chains of transmission
to keep the traces of meanings from the past alive in the present enough to
legitimize the identity of the mystical body in the present. Present legitimacy seems to be the only
relevant issue since meanings of the the past do not have the same people
around to make the case for the nature of their meaning and identity. People of the past have left their writings
but such writings live today as interpretations of interpretations and surely
subsequent interpretations have unmoored the reading today from their original
identities.
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2014
Truth is a process in one's life which involves the
continual sorting out of meanings. The
adventure of life and of this day is to seek new meanings and hopefully be
surprised to discover a new meaning that will shuffle the hierarchy of values
in our lives and re-value our existing values because we've had a fresh
encounter with the Sublime. A fresh
encounter with the Sublime can truly re-shuffle our hierarchy of values and I
wish and pray for you many such fresh encounters.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2014
Humanity comes to distinction in how we use words or how we
have come to have facility of language.
We have come to name experiences and "experiences" is a word
name too. Words keep naming other words for what we have named to be
"experience" and "consciousness." We have passed on
generational knowledge in clusters of words called paragraph or stories. The
Bible includes these clusters of words called story. Our use of words and how we organize our
encounter with being, or our encounter with being as experienced in time known
as becoming, means that we escape enough from totally individual experiences to
forge paradigms of communication or stories.
Faith in the freedom from individual aloneness through the words and
stories of language is known in the process of relative objectivity. From our
relatedness we attain enough agreement upon community views also known as objectivity. This faith in "objectivity" allows
us to get things done and getting things done is not always easy because of the
freedom of individual interpretation and action can challenge the community's
view and objectivity. Such challenges
can be disrupting before they eventually become integrated into the ever
changing "objectivity" of the community. The biblical traditions have always been
changing traditions because the "objectivity" of the communities
which derived from those traditions keeps changing because individual
interpreters still encounter the sublime "burning bush" events which
inspire them to offer another view upon a tradition which is best when all
people of the biblical tradition see themselves in the process of a better love
and justice.
Aphorism of the Day,
August 27, 2014
It was said by Emerson that "consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds." We
think that we love consistency when it comes to predictability of the actions
of the ones with whom we live because we may be comfortable with reliability's
redundancies. If we are wanting to
"toe the party line and want others to do the same" then consistency
is a requirement for "party loyalty."
I think that I would rephrase the quote in various ways: Consistency might be a hobgoblin if one never
wants to learn anything new or act in significantly different ways. A
proclaimed "consistent person" might be a person who is too literal
and who cannot embrace the fact that situations bring forth from us words and
actions which contradict themselves. Who does not comport themselves
differently in communications with young children than when addressing
adults? Context draws from us different
discursive practice and discursive products coming from the same person can be
necessarily contradicting and inconsistent based upon context specific
situation. Many people try to force a
consistency upon biblical writings which in honesty is not there.
Aphorism of Day, August 26, 2014
The consideration of the ventriloquist/dummy relationship as
a metaphor for God "speaking" within the created order? A dummy is made in a human or animal image
and has lips and parts animated by the speaker who throws a voice in
synchronicity with the moving parts. The gap between God and the created may be
similar in magnitude between the ventriloquist and the dummy. However, the degree of freedom of actual
human beings and all things in creation may be more significant than the total
lack of freedom of the ventriloquist's dummy.
It could be that the communication of God with created order is based
upon the total field of Word and Language making Word co-extensive with the
knowledge of God or anything and it seems as though the author of the Gospel of
John had an incredible insight: In the beginning was the Word...all things were
created by the Word....the Word was with and was God. Being panentheistically in the tumble of all
Word could be a way of stating something of the mystery of living and moving and
having our being in Word and the total reflexivity of Word and all of Word's
instances.
Aphorism of the Day,
August 25, 2014
There are some obvious assumptions behind the notion of the
Bible as "God's Words." One may assume that one is reading words that
were received and given by someone who could interpret a given human situation
and offer words through a "human dummy" with God being the
Ventriloquist or something like the One causing "automatic writing"
or psychography. One might want to
assert that no biblical writer had one's personality so erased as to be God's
"dummy" for some Ventriloquist's event. It is more believable that persons committed
to finding Divine or Superhuman insights in the art of living in their
situations spoke and wrote these words which became a part of an inspired
record due to their antiquity and longevity of use in forming and re-forming
successive communities. What is most
inspiring about the Bible is the big elephant fact in the room, namely, Word
becoming words in speaking, writing and body language constitutes our lives as
human, and great words can form communities still and nurture people within
those communities in love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day,
August 24, 2014
When Peter had the "revelation" that Jesus was the
Messiah, he still did not understand the revelation. This is an indication that all revelation
still has to be interpreted by very fallible people who see through lenses
constituted by their own experience. It
has been the custom in the public reading of Scripture to announce at the
ending of a reading: "The word of the Lord." It should also be
proclaimed: "The interpretations of humanity." Revelation may seem to have a
"self-evidential" meaning to one person that is not all that obvious
to another. Being our own judges of
"correct" interpretations may divide us into different Communions and
Confessions but it does humility no justice to presume that one is
"most" correct.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2014
Motion picture messianism aka superhero and action adventure
flicks feed our anxiety about needing quick and certain intervention in the
great threats of life. With language we
spin stories; the reporting stories of language are infinitesimally less than
actual experience and provide only time-lapsed units making it seem as though
experience occurs and happens faster than it does. Stories are the time-lapsed presentation of
the seemingly telling crucial events. We
can get addicted to the big events of stories and live the false hope of wanting
only the big events of catastrophic final apocalyptic intervention to
"fix" the world once and for all.
What about the "mustard seed" messianism of Jesus? What about baptismal messianism when each is
"anointed with Chrism" or made to participate with the reality of the
Messiah and sent into this world to live messianically in all of the little
"mustard seed" acts of faith to change gradually and subtly this
world toward the character of love and justice while it seems as though no one
is watching, because the crowd is craving but the highlights of the story and
misses all of the little events which take place between the
"time-lapsed" frames?
Aphorism of the Day,
August 22, 2014
St. Peter is presented in the Gospel as one who did not
understand the meaning of the messiah.
He could confess the messiah as a revelation but he did not know what it
meant. Peter is presented as one who assumed the messiah was going to be a
kingly intervening messiah while Jesus tried to instruct him about messiah
being a suffering servant messiah. The
early church had to have a narrative of explanation for how the crucifixion of
Jesus was compatible with an existing tradition regarding the messiah, namely
the suffering servant tradition from the prophet Isaiah.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2014
Messiah is used as a designation for King Cyrus the Great of
Persia by the prophet Isaiah. This is a rather ironic use of the word
"messiah" because Cyrus conquered Israel and carried many Israelites
into exile. This notion of
"messiah" is used by one who retroactively notes that God's people
survived the very worst in a providential way and Cyrus had the wisdom to let
captured people maintain their cultural and religious identity and for such he
was deemed "anointed" by God.
This is an indication of how flexible the biblical notion of
"messiah" was.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2014
Messiah is a notion that arose in a context of designating
that which came to be chosen and marked by God as a particular vehicle of God's
activity or expression of God's will in the life of humanity. It is best known as a rather informal
investiture rite of pouring of oil from a horn over the God's king, the first
being Saul and the one who divined the selection was the Judge Samuel. This is in the same genre as the ancient
notion of the "divine right of kings" and was an appeal to divine
authority to legitimize particular earthly authority. In the Hebraic Scriptures we read that God
did not really want a king for Israel but gave into the people's request. The
developed notion of messiah came in the post-Davidic deprived conditions of
people who yearned and speculated for a more super-figure designated by God to
become evident in intervening in human affairs to cause people to comply with the
teachings of the Torah. The notion of
messiah had readjustment in the early Christian communities; the messiah came
to be associated with a suffering servant figure from the prophet Isaiah whose
triumph over suffering was evident in his ability to appear alive to many
followers after his death. Since these
two notions of messiah did not comport with the fullness of a Davidic messiah,
the notion of a delayed re-appearance or returning messiah arose in the understanding
of Christians who were increasingly Gentile and did not have have the same
continuity with messianic tradition as did those who were born Jews. If the notion of the development of meanings
of messiah is so evident in the Scriptures one cannot avoid the fact that there
have been and will be further developed meanings of messiah beyond the texts of
Scripture. Interpretation and
application are unavoidable and interpretation is different than what is
interpreted because meanings are not universally self-evident in any text.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2018
The messiah? Outdated
thinking? Hardly. The messiah trope has long been the favorite
trope of Hollywood under the genre of superheroes. Our cultural entertainment is completely
inundated with superheroes. If I were to
put our postmodern culture upon the analytic couch, I would suggest that such
fascination with superheroes is similar to the messianic obsessions of biblical
people who had serious cosmic angst about their life conditions. We are obsessed with superheroes because we
fear the threat of being able to extinguish ourselves and the power to be
incredibly inhumane with each other. So
the superhero genre functions as a analgesic hope for quick intervention in
difficult circumstances. Our superheroes
have all of the aspects of the messiah; they have incognito modes and they are
suffering servants before they are victorious rescuers and saviors. We, who are "so advanced" over
people with "biblical myths" hypocritically embrace the messiah
trope, perhaps even more than biblical people.
The hidden trope of the messiah is all around us because we truly fear
our greed and inhumanity.
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2018
The Gospels present Peter as one who confessed Jesus to be
the Messiah without knowing what that really meant. The Gospels were written in times when there
was a disagreement about the meaning of messiah. If utopia is a universal aspiration for a
perfect place, messiah represents the universal aspiration for a perfect person
to make the perfect place happen. Utopia and messiah may elusively mean
"no such place" and "no such person" but function as the
narratives of hope for people in places and situations of always needing to
surpass themselves in love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2014
One of the writing goals of the Gospel writers which arose
after the success of Gentile Christianity was to highlight in the presentation
of the life of Jesus the occasions when faith of non-Jewish foreigners is
elevated as what is key in an relationship with God. Jesus was presented as a prophet who in the
prophetic tradition of Jonah was taking the message of faith beyond the ethnic
borders of Judaism. He was in the
tradition of the prophet Elijah who healed the foreign Aramaen General Naaman.
Aphorism of the
Day, August 16, 2014
Jesus seemed to oppose dietary rules and purification rules
such as the fixation on hand washing.
Lister, Pasteur and our moms were quite certain about hand washing. Jesus opposed the system of declaring things
external as "defiled" in themselves and thus inanimate things be
accorded the power to defile. He was
aware of the profound prayer request, "Create in me a clean heart, O
God." True defilement came from an
interior projection in how we have learned to be constituted in our motives
toward everything in life. So defilement
should not be just a "religious public health system" designating
exterior impurity, it should be an understanding that the human condition of
the interior life is the source of a more crucial projected
"defilement." When it came to
the Holiness Code of what was pure or impure, we can say that Jesus was the
Minster of the Interior.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2014
The life of the Virgin Mary is celebrated today. She has drawn from Christians many devotional
reflections and has become known as the ideal intercessory Mother who
unconditionally and always loves her children.
She had to be the Queen to give some feminine balance in a world of
patriarchy. She has had to be the one
who has made God's grace accessible when patriarchy has practiced an exalted
and unapproachable divinity of Jesus over his humanity. In the story of her
Holy Child-bearing she encodes the Christian mystery, "Christ in us after
having been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit."
Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2014
Nationalism and regional pride means that we often discount
something that comes from another place, hence when Nathaniel heard about Jesus
he said, "Can any good come out of Nazareth?" The shocking reality of the early Christian
communities is that non-Jewish people embraced the foreign message about Christ
more than his fellow country folk and the popularity of Jesus in the
Gentile populace had to be written. The New Testament writing is essentially this
writing of a universal Christo-centric Judaism into the Hebraic Scripture
tradition because foreigners gave up their regional religious pride for the
message of this Jesus, a "foreign messiah."
Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2014
Did you ever consider that the Gospels which were written
after the writings of Paul and the success of the early Christian communities
are narrative presentations of the life of Jesus which embed in cryptic ways
the reality of Gentile Christianity and the practices of the Christian
communities?
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2014
We mourn the loss of a comedian today who amazed us by
thinking and saying things that we are not supposed to think and say with an
oracular wit that came at us with Tourette Syndrome-like uncensored
delivery. His comedic mind juxtaposed
combinations of human behaviors in such a way that we laughed. He gave us the insight that God must have a
sense of humor and comedy is a gift, even a prophetic gift against idolatry,
which is taking something much more serious than one should, even our idols
about the God we love. In the mockery of
idols we let the new encounter with the sublime arise for this day and we mock
ourselves if we think that our religious encounter has made us better than
others to judge them wrongly. We wish
his ability to create the laughable gaze and make us laugh had been enough to
keep him with us longer. The time of life is borrowed time and having Robin on
loan to us was a blessing. Rest in Peace and holy laughter.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2014
With the current really bad news in our world which
magnifies evil beyond its actual strength and value, it is wise to remember the
creation story words about God after the arising of each order of creation:
"And God saw that it was Good."
Good has been deprived in many, many ways but not defeated because life
itself is Good and it is a Good on which evil lives as but a parasite. From the
local effects of parasites one can get disheartened to believe that they are
taking over but it is even more cause to believe in original Goodness and to
work to expel the depriving parasites with the best friend of Goodness,
Justice.
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2014
In more recent science there has been the acknowledgment
that the observer always influences what is being observed. There can be no completely
"rational" impartial observer since scientists can only have their
versions of what they are observing.
They have a prior agreement within their community on how to qualify and
quantified what they are observing so that even an anomaly is defined as such
because it did not conform to the anticipated patterns of observation. The presence of Language allows us always to
admit that we are using it and using it differently according to mode of
applied discourse. Religious discourse
of faith is different than scientific discourse and the same person can use
both discourses without denying the unity of being that one has because of
language.
Aphorism of the Day,
August 9, 2014
One of the results of the success of the Enlightenment with
the replacement of revelation with reason and the rise of modern science is
that biblical modes of seeing began to be regarded as childish, primitive and
superstitious. Religionists often
feeling inferior and defensive in light of the obvious pragmatic truth of science
and the effects of science defended biblical modes of seeing as possessing the
same kind of outcomes as a scientist would observe. They did this by stating there were different
"dispensations" when the actual universe was "different" or
by appealing to the unique case dispensation of the miraculous. And unique cases cannot be replicated
scientifically. Modern science resulted
in a rather abrupt separation between a viewing subject possessed by this near
infallible "transcendental reason" and the exterior objects in the
field of vision. In the pronounced split
between subject and object of modern science, the altered state kind of seeing
of people with biblical faith was discounted.
There is no reason for people of faith to defend the Bible wrongly just
as there is no reason to apologize for my completely unscientific response to a
piece of music, art or poetry. If we
understand the moving truths of faith in their aesthetically truthful modes we
need not be apologetic. We need the
kinds of truths which are aesthetically and
ethically moving enough to inspire all of the world to build more
ploughshares than bombs. Isn't it
interesting to note how many "religious" people in the world have
been seduced towards weaponry rather than towards ploughshares? It probably is an indication of how much
easier it is to believe in the evil of humanity than the irresistiblility of
God's grace to convert to goodness, love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2014
Adrenaline is a hormone and neurotransmitter. It's release can be determined by "fight
or flight" situations. Faith is the
existential effort to assess all of the components of one's interior life as
well as assess through existential anticipation of one's exterior life and
perform with rapidity the moment by moment re-calibration of response towards
what one deems as most excellent for the situation. Faith sometimes means we are acting on
over-ride of interior factors of hormone levels and pain and emotional residue
in order to make our best response in the moment. A singer or actor has to deal with the
physical conditions and emotional conditions pre-coded by what has happened off
stage and still perform on stage. Faith
requires performance and often the interior and exterior conditions are not
always ideal. One prepares for the ideal
but one also has to be ready for continuous re-calibration in actual
performance.
Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2014
When one speaks about an "altered state" one might
ask "altered from what?" In a
changing world every state of perception is different from a previous state and
so one could equate difference with "altered." Probably an altered state refers to an
interior condition which is expressive of an entire constellation of ideas
sometimes called a "paradigm" which one uses to filter or process the
world that one is seeing. Conversion to
an altered state is being able to see the world differently so as to be able to
make new choices and perform different acts. Repentance is a renewal of the
mind (Greek: metanoia or an "after mind).
The goal of faith is this continual conversion in the renewal of the
mind and as the mind accumulates and renews it gains a constellation of ideas
which results in the "altered states" to provide a significant new
seeing of one's world.
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2014
One can wonder why there is so much interest today in
"altered states" for which we use pharmaceuticals of the legal and
illegal varieties to attain. Being born
of the Spirit is the "altered state" which was recommended in the
Gospels. And it is not a magic pill; it
involves wisdom work in re-comprising one's interior "word life" such
that one tames the interior energies through the creative work of "naming"
so that energy can be surfaced in actions to assist one in the attainment of
joy and peace. The work of
reconstituting our interior lives through words is on-going and is something
akin to re-arranging the furniture of the house to allow ideal flow of traffic
and living convenience. Our interior
homes sometimes get out of efficient arrangement through being programmed by
living in less than affirming paradigms which define our worth and the worth of
how we emote and act. Finding the
"altered state" of new birth is the challenge for each day but yesterday's
success will help today and tomorrow.
Aphorism of the Day,
August 5, 2014
One of the consistent themes of Post-modernism is the
critique of modernism. This critique is
based upon a disillusionment with some of the worst fallout of
"progress," namely advanced weapons of mass destruction and the
destruction of the environment because of "progress." Religion also
made adjustments to modernism feeling it necessary to present biblical stories
and church tradition as being consistent with scientific methodology, so
creationism is a fundamentalist's way of "being scientific" by
affirming that God created "old rocks" to account for why rocks date
very old in radioactive and carbon dating techniques. This strange mixture of scientific
"correctness" mixed with ancient biblical wisdom stories has created
something akin to the ancient Faun, a half-goat and half-human figure. The Faun is a creation of fanciful
imagination which attempts to be a compromise between humanity and goathood
while being neither.
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2014
The classical Greek word for the New Testament word meaning
faith meant "persuasion." πιστις
pistis. In classical rhetoric one
of the purposes of composing a political speech was "persuasion." Persuasion was a subsequent goal. In New Testament Greek the same word is used
to characterize the state of being already persuaded such that one acts now and
into the future from that state of persuasion.
A major philosophical problem deals with whether commitment precedes
reason for having the commitment. I
believe and then I find good reason for my beliefs or I study and as a result
of finding good reason, I believe. I am
not sure that it is such an either/or regarding our conversion to what we
believe and the particular reasons we have for having such a belief. I think that language is versatile in its expressiveness
to be honest to our mongrel condition of being significantly constituted by
different paradigms even contradictory paradigms. A hard core scientist can also have
"irrational" phobias. As much
as we think that we are completely responsible for our faith and every reason
we give for our faith, there still needs to be an acknowledgment of how we have
been involuntarily "thrown" into many of the paradigms which
condition our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2014
A very young child could not help but tell the truth about
the Emperor, "Dad, why isn't the Emperor wearing any clothes?" A very young child after receiving the
communion host cried, "Okay, now let's have doughnuts." The communion event as a sort of hors
d'oeuvres for coffee hour doughnuts expresses the dilemma of the loss of sign
value when Holy Communion became a stylized devotional event divorced from
actual eating, i.e., it becomes easier to have faith to discern the presence of
Christ than to believe that one is actually eating food. The multiplication of loaves story links the
Eucharistic practice with the miraculous and continuous feeding of the people
of Israel in surviving the long and arduous wilderness journey. Eucharist is no longer a "real
meal" but it needs to be re-connected with real eating like making sure
children on the border get fed because when we feed the "least of
these" we are told by Jesus we experience his Real Presence. Knowing the Real Presence in receiving the
Eucharistic Manna is coupled with knowing the Real Presence of Christ in the
person who receives bread and drink from us.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2014
Survival in this world in the future because of global
closeness will mean we will need to stop using religious justification for the
aggression which is expressed for each other.
Interesting that most all religions have apocalyptic endings with their
own hero being the final winner. So peace comes through every opposition being
beaten into submission. It might be time
to start promoting the message of religion that love and justice will
ultimately be persuasive and winsome enough for people brought close to live
well together and no longer fighting over land which belongs to the One whom
they say they love the most.
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2014
Sometimes we set process and evolution and becoming against
the perfection of being complete and finished.
By assuming the nature of God's perfection to be a completeness within
which every other imperfect being simply unfolds in imperfect becoming by
having a beginning and an end seems to make the perfection of God to be an
all-knowing being who knew what was going to happen anyway. As those who become we know that the sheer
accumulation of age does not make a person qualitatively better in all manner
because we often experience with aging the loss of quality and dealing with the
loss of quality as we age is a chief life task.
In a sort of "big bang" notion of an expanding Omni-becoming,
the Omni-Becomer surpasses the former Omni-Becomer by incorporating the states
and conditions of all lesser becoming beings and no matter what the age or
state of the being, that being shares with the fullness of the Omni-Becomer who
is the great One who remembers and embraces all of the agony and ecstasy of
what it means to live a timed-existence.
The Great One who is the Oldest One is the most inclusive of everyone
living freely. Please do not conceive
God as a being who already knows the future as an absolute past.
Aphorism of the Day, July 31, 2014
The failure to admit the determining presence of Language
contributes to false arguments. One such
is this: Theists claim that atheists do
have not basis for moral and ethical absolutes because they do not have any
higher authority than humanity to establish their judgments about the relative
goodness of anything. The setting of the
argument means that arguments miss the point.
Both theist and atheist share the one absolute, namely, Language. Through language theists and atheists use a
"totalizing" or "surpassing" reference in their discourse
because they assume through language that what they say has relevance outside
of their own epidermis. What is
"total" or "surpassing" is a meaningful place for making
moral judgments by people of any persuasion even while what is
"total" or "surpassing" cannot be empirically verified with
any precision. So, theists and atheists,
please recognize that you both share Language as your common absolute through
which you make "relative absolute" judgments which are always open to
future falsification in the details of applied justice within a cultural
setting. Relative absolute is the
oxymoron which rightly characterizes the ambiguity; relative because like St.
Paul, we only see "in part" in a perspectival way, but absolute in
that language includes the ability to speak with aspirations of universality.
Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2014
A parable to illustrate the desirability of collaborative
"seeing." Imagine life to be
lived around a grand hall that has many entry doors on the perimeter of the
hall and on the other side of each door is a hall way. Each door way has its own hall way into the
great hall. All of the doors are locked
and each door has a key hole. Each hall
way has a person who has only visual access to the great hall through his or
her individual key hole. Each viewer has
a slot on each side of the place of keyhole viewing so after looking into one's
key hole one can describe what one is seeing to the viewers on either
side. So if I am going to know what I
cannot see I am going to have to start a chain request to ask the peeper who
sees opposite me what the gaze is like toward my viewing location in the great
hall. So life is a collaborative seeing
and this seeing occurs through efforts and sharing and translating and constant
checking and re-checking particularly if things and events happening within the
great hall are always changing. One's
individual view is limited to one's direct seeing plus an imaginative collage
of the reported views of others. From
one's individual seeing location one may imagine one from above with a
pan-optical seeing location without ever knowing whether such an pan-optical
observer actually exists. With a limited
individual seeing one hopes to keep expanding toward the imaginative
unattainable pan-optical seeing from above.
Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2014
One of our ancient and persisting human follies is to assume
we can say things from a subject position where language does not exist. We can presume to "speak" for God
from God's place outside of language. If
the post-modern era has given us any gift, it has brought us not to deny the
big elephant in the room, namely language and our inability to articulate
existence in a pre- or post- linguistic
sense without using language.
Having language means that we are but language products mediating other
language products but we should not see this as diminutive or dismissive of
supreme values and the recording of the Sublime.
Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2014
The reason that people of the same faith traditions can be
so divided and in disagreement about most every theological notion is that
people inhabit different life paradigms which have been constituted by their
own voluntary and involuntary exposure to the influences of their lives. But
one could even fine tune paradigms down to the micro-paradigm of a single
person who is so unique that he or she is bound to disagree with everyone else
about an entire variety of subjects. The
purposes of a paradigm fit the contours of language because language exists as
proof that we are social beings.
Language allows us to do things together in collective and pragmatic
ways and the "truths" of our collective paradigms are
"administrative" truths and mathematical in the sense that involve
prior agreement on the "definition" of terms. For the sake of living together we are
agreeing that x=y or Christian faith means = such and such. One still cannot
discount the completely micro-paradigm of the unique person as perhaps the most
obvious source of creativity. After all,
probably no one dreamed the very same dream that you dreamed last night. You are unique and inscrutable.
Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2014
Jesus said,"Therefore every scribe who has been trained
for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of
his treasure what is new and what is old."
Wisdom is a practice and a process in understanding that the tradition
is not a restricting strait-jacket; it is place for synthesis whereby the new
and the old find a place for the creative and inventive process. The practice
of wisdom is not conservatism but the practice of wisdom conserves the old
which can give rise to the invention of what is new. So the practice of wisdom does not pit the
present against the past which no longer is; the practice of wisdom involves
integrating in the now the memories of the past in ways to make creative
advance in the present.
Aphorism of the Day,
July 26, 2014
Like any story, the sacred story of salvation history
comprised of many stories contains the efforts of many writers to understand
the reality of the purpose of God in their own times. Writers take the traditions and re-edit them
to show how their current situation derived within the tradition. Writers try to maintain a logical symbolic
consistency with some of the great themes of the story. If Jesus had a miraculous conception and was
perfect then his mother "had to have" an immaculate conception. A story or metaphor has limited application
which invites the reductio ad absurdum; if Mary needed to be immaculately
conceived to prevent imperfection in the bloodline, what kind of conceptions
did her parents Joachim and Anne need to prevent the same? Reductio ad absurdum can be invoked for any
statement of meaning in its contextual re-qualification to the point of
deconstruction. As people of faith, we
use the Bible stories for evoking flashing insights for transforming our lives
not to make biblical phrases as universally applicable to all human beings in
every situation. Some people use the
Bible as a book of meaningful statements which are universally always already
applicable for all people in every situation of their lives and thus try to
force the Bible to have an impossible relevance. In having a prayerful relationship with the
meanings of the Bible one can look for serendipitous meanings to arise which
inspire and aid the transformation of one's life. This is a more than adequate
notion of "divine inspiration."
Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2014
One of the literal naivete that one must encounter in
Scripture is the pre-history and post-history states of innocence beyond good
or evil. The great sin of Adam of Eve
was wanting to "be like God" and know good and evil. Rather than being an actual event which
caused the moral situation it is a wisdom story to give us insights about the
fact we cannot avoid making value judgments.
As much as we may want to become children again without any culpability
for making judgments, it does not solve actual life situations by wishing away
the state of having any judgments at all.
Does anyone really want a heavenly state where only good people can only
make good choices? Automatic goodness is
not worth anything. The wisdom of the
pre-history and post-history bookends of life is that they reveal insights on
how we are unavoidably people who make judgments in life and the post-history
insight is about Now always being the latest and last day and therefore it is a
day of judgment; we continuously sort out what we regard to be good or
evil. We cannot avoid the judgments of
the last day; it is now and we judge and are always already being judged. One can use the Scriptures as a sort of
"happily ever after" Disney movie script or one can find in the
transforming insights of wisdom the inescapable now as an always already state
of judgment as agents of the same and as targets as well.
Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2014
The ultimate state of alienation is to be somewhere and not
know it. The message of the kingdom of
heaven was a message to help people recover from their state of alienation. We
live in the Caesar's kingdom, David's former kingdom, a future "David's
kingdom," a family realm; no we live in the parallel kingdom of heaven and
one needs new interpretative sensitivity to see and understand nuances of the
always already kingdom of heaven. Jesus
as the wisdom teacher of parable came to give us a re-orientation so as to
recover from the state of alienation from our true location in the kingdom of
heaven.
Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2014
Some of the parables of Jesus relate equivalent situations
of what we might call "insider trading." Knowing about the kingdom of heaven is like
happening upon something of great value which not everyone knows. The insider trading metaphor indicates to us
that even though something is available to everyone it still has to be
perceived in a very individual way and discovered as the supreme value. Grace means we expend everything in our lives
to access and receive that which is free, yet most valuable to our well-being.
Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2014
Perhaps the basic message of Jesus was about the kingdom of
God or heaven. (That Jesus is quoted as
using both kingdom of God and kingdom of heaven reveals to us how edited his
words were by Gospel writers to fit community situations later than in the time
of Jesus himself). A kingdom, a realm is more than just physical environment;
it is one's relationship and attachments to that environment which allows one
to be and see things which others may not see.
Just as a geologist sees rocks differently so too those who have had a
conversion to the realm of God see the same things as everyone else but they
see differently through participating in a parallel universe which processes
life experience with the sublime filter of faith. Faith is an enhanced seeing.
Aphorism of Day, July 21, 2014
By virtue of having language, we live with the capacity to
value. Language allows the labeling of
all things good and evil. With language
we cannot avoid the use of the verb
"to be" and with this verb we create the valuing formula of life
almost as a mathematical tautology.
"For the purpose of this equation X = (is) Y. " With the verb
"to be," the existence verb, we not only assume existence but we use
this grammatical sign to assign value.
Some values are regarded to be benign or indifferent in their cultural
relativity, as in the "sky is blue."
Rather benign unless one is a rather precise artist who wants to further
assign specific kind of blue. The crux
of value is found when one's body language indicates value in interaction with
everything. Body language acts reduced
to language is what is called the sphere of moral and ethics. The laws and rules of society are corporate
recommendations in how body language should be articulated to value the
important things regarded by society for the justice and well-being of the
citizenry. The supreme way to value is
expressed by Jesus and St. Paul: loving one's neighbor. Love is a value word in that it states the
"appreciative way" to be towards others but it is such an open word
because it is not just a series of completed deeds, it involves an open future
to surpass oneself in living appreciatively.
Aphorism of the Day,
July 20, 2014
Last days and end times of biblical story book time have
lost their meaning in the world of modern science. As humanity remained unaware of an expanding
universe and could naively believe that we were the actors upon the only stage
that there was then our stories of beginnings and end had the kind of transitions
which were appropriate to child-like naivete. Modern science is a different
kind of "adult story" forensically imploring, "just the facts
ma'am." Modern science is still open to the mystery of what we do not know
and is not willing to speculate about the specifics of the open mystery until
specifics can comport to the methods of the scientific gaze. A person of faith will claim that mystery can
inspire analogical imaginations such that events of aesthetical sublimity can
occur to be meaningful events that equal and rival what we can surely
appreciate from what as been achieved due to the scientific gaze.
Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2014
Often people comment about how "history" --meaning
future interpreters of the past-- will regard a particular event, person or
series of event. This would mean that
the meaning of a person or event does not get finished in its own time. It also means that important links in the
chain of history get forgotten or are not remembered. Consider that the technologies of memory were
so few in the distant past that the importance of a few events were magnified
out of proportion because of the paucity of information from the past. Fast forward to today where the amount of
quotidian (everyday life, private) events can be recorded and published through
all of the technologies and private publishing formats of the internet. Historians of the future will be lost in a
sea of information and what they select to remember in this sea of information
will be the result of such a great censorship because so much information will
not be regarded. The Bible and other
holy books were born in times when writing was so magical that as a rare medium
it almost had divine status because of its happening. The post-modern Flood or Deluge is not rain
from the heavens; it is being flooded in so much information that some people
of faith want to retreat to the ark of much simpler times and a time of just a
few facts. This is the nostalgia of
denial; great pain in facing this flood and so one regresses to pretend the
details of ancient literature give us all we need for post-modern life. Indeed there may some comfort for the ostrich
to live with it's head in the ground; much less to see there.
Aphorism of the Day,
July 18, 2014
After Jacob had the well-known "Jacob's ladder" dream at Beth-el
(house of God) he said, "Surely God is in this place and I did not know
it." The sublime Presence which
renders the confession of God is always already and continuous and is dressed
up in diverse circumstantial manifestations, hidden to the point of being
unknown by those who do not have their "God-seeing glasses" on. It is difficult to associate everything now
with the everything of the past and the everything of the future to make confident
and certain confession in the now, but in faith we gradually learn not to
disassociate the interpretation of the now with every possible interpretation
that could possibly exists. Within the
plethora of all interpretations our interpretation takes on the contiguous and
derivative identity with God's presence such that we too can make the hindsight
confession in faith, "God was in this place and I did not know
it." Faith is being able to live at
all times with the reality of the future anterior tense, "God will have
been with us."
Aphorism of the Day,
July 17, 2014
Pets are to animals as gardens are to plants and are the
results of the efforts of human culture to "tame" or domesticate
Nature for human goals and purposes.
When the taming or domestication of Nature is expressed as domination to
the point of literally biting the hand that feeds us by destroying Nature which
provides us our environmental homes we come to learn our lesson the hard way,
and the lesson we learn is what every recovering addict learns, the need of a
graceful intervention due to the presence of a Higher Power. Stewardship is based upon acknowledging a
Higher Power to keep our addiction for things from destroying us.
Aphorism of Day, July 16, 2014
Weeds get a bad rap in the Bible. They are regarded to be the curse of the Fall
for the ancient farmers. They are
inconvenient intruders and pests in fields and gardens. Ironically, they save the soil of the world
from being eroded especially as the great forests of the world are cut down.
Biblical weeds are metaphors for the interpretation of events and people
becoming to be regarded as on a continuum of inconvenient pests to outright
evil. As such, weeds represent the
inescapable conditions of freedom which include the ordeal of faith in living
with the weeds of life. Apocalyptic
fatalists would like to torch the entire field of life to get rid of the few
weeds. Faith involves the patience to
work at the weeds in our own gardens (compost them and put them to work) even
as we face the humbling realization that for some other people we may be
regarded as their "weeds." The
faith of Jesus the wisdom teacher does not let us be simplistic
"either/or" thinkers.
Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2014
Since language ability results in language events of
speaking and writing and reading and the having been named of what one is
seeing from the outside and thinking from the inside, language can seem to
present successive freeze-frame representations of a great Reality which cannot
really be freeze-framed because of time.
Time means everything is moving and yet language events seem to
"freeze-frame." A freeze frame
event of language is the attempt to retain over time the "sameness"
of detail of what one is experiencing.
That sameness seems obvious except when one compares freeze-frames of
the "same" with great time gaps. "No I don't look like my high
school graduation pictures anymore, even less than my baby pictures!" The freeze-frame event of language cannot fix
the details of a "moving reality."
Hence we have what seems to be a conflict between the structural view of
life and an evolutionary view of life.
Structure and evolution are resolved by language because with language
we are aware of both even as we know that language itself is both structured
and evolving itself. It could be that
the More than language, which we access only through language is such a eternal
realm of possibilisms that it continuously deconstructs all products of
language as a way to teaching language users humility about what can be said,
written or known. Read the book of
Ecclesiastes for some graceful skepticism.
Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2014
In the parable of the weeds and wheat, the weeds are spared
until harvest because to pull them earlier would mean pulling the wheat whose
roots were intertwined with the roots of the weeds. In the play of freedom
there is a great mixture of experiences alternatively being experienced as good
or bad and by different people in different ways at different times. There is posited a great sorting out which
takes place at the end by God's angels.
The bad is thrown away and only the good remains. This could be the mystery of providence; a
great Subsequent re-values everything as good and thus "bad" as a
classification of anything in creation is dispensed with in the vision of
Providence. The only summation which
remains is the conclusion of Dame Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well
and all manner of things shall be well."
Such faith is the ultimate alchemy of life and alchemy is a very
questionable "science."
Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2014
The parable of the sower is an allegory which does not so
much specify the cause and effect for why a good message is successful or not;
it is a wisdom vignette of observing the nature of things and honors the
elements and agents of freedom which operate in the nature of the process of
life.
Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2014
The wisdom of Jesus as known in his story parables is not
about explaining to us the causes of why things happen; rather the wisdom of
Jesus reveals to us "that things happen" and provides us insights in
relating to the things that happen.
Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2014
Reading the Bible or anything can be frustrating if one is
motivated by a chimerical quest to find the one and only true meaning of a
phrase. Why should one limit truth to
the historical conditioning which goes into the construction of a linguistic
artifact bearing all of the conditions of a particular perspective
context? I think there is the temptation
to fame in the form of a megalomanical human impulse based upon the pride of
wanting to be the most correct and therefore the most adequate judge of
everyone and everything. We can be
modestly relevant in our truth efforts in justice and love to those near us
without aspiring to bear the false burden of perfection for the rest of the
world.
Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2014
One is in some ways so trapped within one's individual
experience that one cannot help but be what Roland Barthes called a
"writerly reader." (see his
"S/Z") We may think that we
share "wink wink" exact meanings with other people and the
approximations of common meanings such as the ones which pertain to a STOP sign
seem to allow us pragmatic functional agreements in society. But as we exert the fine tuning of exploring
what I mean and what you mean, one can find that there is enough variation in
how we learned our words in our individual contexts as to make us in some ways the
"writer" of everything we read and interpret. Sometimes we absolve ourselves of being
"writerly readers" when we passively say I agree with the one to whom
I give my allegiance as my chief explainer of my reality. The notion of writerly reading which the New
Testament writers did when they read the Hebrew Scriptures only instantiates
the unavoidable practice of writerly reading.
Official meanings can attain administrative infallible meanings for the
organization of a community but writerly reading cannot be denied since every
person cannot help but bring the subjectivity of one's experience to the act of
reading and interpretation.
Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2014
Intention, applied specific attention and focus cannot make
what is not intentional go away. What we
choose to place in our foreground does not make the background disappear. The
unperceived world still exists and is sustained even when no human being is looking
or watching or caring. Our intentional
conscious perceptions are mostly edited by the space-time location in the
choices which our cultures have set up like a smorgasbord of possible thought
events. There are some cultural habits
which are not humanely beneficial which cannot be seen because they are so
commonly accepted. And so we in the
present must wait for the future generations to expose what was wrong about us
which we could not see because it was such a tacit part of our background. We make all kinds of judgments about the
cultural practices of the biblical time cultures even while we valorize
Scripture as possessing timeless divine inspiration. We always hope that something much better
than us gets revealed even while it has to be filtered through the merely
human. We go forth to live and think and
speak anthropomorphically because we can't do other. If humanity is like at big house in which we
live with the walls being our limits, the house still has windows to more than
human reality which we speculate about in human ways.
Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2014
The parable of the sower as told by Jesus seems to indicate
that God is a really bad farmer because of the indiscriminate casting of the
seeds to the wind, to fall where they may. Could this not but be in story form the
natural theology of God's generous giving to every context and situation
without partiality but honoring the conditions of freedom which persist
everywhere? Any results which do not
respect the conditions of freedom are not worthy of God.
Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2014
If the very nature of the Great One is Creativity and
Freedom then we might posit that everything and everyone shares in a degree of
that creativity and freedom in keeping with their capacities to express
freedom. If the divine is pure freedom
whose very nature is to allow genuine relative freedom, then randomness and
divine control, aka divine freedom are very compatible and account for the
diversity and serendipitous adaptation which are always already occurring in
minute incrementalism implied in the difference of a subsequent appearance of
things in contrast with a previous appearance of the state of things. Scientific laws are human versions of how we describe
the behaviors of the freedom of things according to the apparent consistency of
behaviors based upon how we the observers define consistency.
Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2014
When wisdom comes to language it is not philosophical
logical statements and not scientific laws and not sheer poetry; the language
of wisdom combines aspect of all of these to evoke pragmatic nuances of
living. Words of wisdom flicker with
insights and create beckonings to want to be better in the art of living.
Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2014
With wisdom we can bear contradictions and ambiguity. With wisdom we can understand that each
context specific event is constituted in the versions of the viewer and
interpreter. Wisdom includes the ability
to think intuitively and to factor the motive of the heart into judgments. Wisdom is knowledge in free form dance using
deftness to adjust with each movement which is required to make knowledge
beautiful in application.
Aphorism of the Day, July 4, 2014
Our nostalgia for primitive America can parallel our nostalgia
for the primitive church. In that
nostalgia is expressed as our current maladjustment to the complexity of modern
problems such that we may want to use our imaginations to hearken back with
sentimentality to "simpler" times.
The complexity of our world today with our global economies makes the
situation in the colonies seem like doing business out of a "cigar
box." Our Founders generated some
great principles and ideals which they themselves could not attain in the
details of their lifetime but these principles have proven to have continuing
application in our lives as we strive to become our "better angels"
in the practice of justice. We celebrate
the birth of our country and the church because we want our highest ideals to
find new application in the details of our lives today. Happy Birthday America! May the details of realized justice ever find
a place in thee.
Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2014
We can often note that people in power use ignorance of
people for their own financial and political advantage. There are religious people who believe so
strongly that the world is going to end soon that they see no need to be
committed to take care of the environment.
People in positions to make a difference in the care of our environment
use that "stewardship ignorance" to maintain policies which harm the
environment but delay the conversion of our economies to more eco-friendly
practices. Apocalyptic fatalism of
religious folks seems to absolve them from caring for the earth and leaving it
a fit place for those who come after us.
Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2014
Emma Lazarus' "New Colossus" became associated
with The Statute of Liberty and our country as a "mothering welcoming
country." "Give me your tired,
your poor, Your huddling masses yearning to breathe free." Jesus said, "Come to me all you that are
weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest." Hospitality and welcome as the response to
fear, anxiety, need and uncertainties of being in a new place are human
excellences to pursue as individuals and as a country.
Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2014
The totally ironic Jesus: "Father you hide these things
from the wise but revealed them to infants." How much more anti-intellectual can one
be? Or is this an expression of the
born-again theology of Jesus who believed that adults had so lost their access
to the joy and wonder of their native births because they had become all head
with no heart? Surely the immensity of
all can teach us to access mystery and wonder and we become the infants in whom
original wonder lives again?
Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2014
Sometimes it seems as though the final editor of the various
Gospel present Jesus as an accidental aphorist or one who generates koan-like
phrases which stand alone because they seem to lack fuller qualifying contexts
to give them more "limited" meanings.
Without fuller contexts readers and scholars have to dig to try to find
surround contextual knowledge to come to meanings or rely upon the intuitions
inspired by the language itself.
Isolated phrases lacking context are not necessarily aphorism even
though they function that way in the way which they come to be read. In the macro-view aphorisms also have context
which is the context from which the writer writes.
Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2014
To whom much is given, much will be required. There is an irony in this because one can be
given "much" in diverse ways.
One can be given much loss, sorrow and tribulation. If one is given much loss and tribulation the
alchemy of faith involves sharing the much of loss and grief with others and as
private people who eschew public show, our loss can draw the gaze of those who
send healing energy of prayer even as loss draws the very energy of prayer.
Loss in the community of faith does not make for anonymous
"rubber-necking;" it can be the occasion for bearing grief and
sorrow.
Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2014
The stewardship words of Jesus: To whom much is given, much
will be required or expected. What has one been given? Who will require and expect from the one who
has been given? One is given life in various forms of quantity and quality
manifestations. The variety of the much
of what has been given is great. No
matter what we have been given in the benefits of life, we have the requirement
to the common good to the same degree.
This does not sound like a "flat tax." These words were not meant for generous
people because they already know the wonderful joy of giving everything
away. These words can only be words of
Jesus negatively perceived by people who had not discovered generosity, for
whom giving is a anxious and taxing obligation.
Those who have discovered generosity do not experience giving as an
obligation or requirement. It but the
generous flow of God's abundant life.
One can live under the drudgery of giving as a divine, social or
religious requirement or be fortunate to have had a conversion to generosity.
Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2014
Our personalities and our bodies may at times seem to be our
destiny in that they project from them the seeming limits of what we are to do
or become. And as much as it is easy
comfort to settle into the what is easiest for body and personality to allow to
come to performance, we need to live by faith which allows us to surprise
ourselves because what a calling from God can do is bring forth from us some
responses which we never thought would be possible. The calling from God certainly involves
development of natural gifts but it also involves the self experience of what
one did not think could happen. Think
about when you have surprised yourself and that may be the evidence of God
doing what did not occur to one as possible.
As one ages then one is more likely to succumb to the body as destiny,
and as limiting destiny; allow oneself to be open to God's call to continue to
surprise oneself.
Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2014
One of the most ironic but foundational biblical stories is
when Abraham perceived God to ask him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Without telling Isaac's mom, Abraham set out
to obey the command. Kierkegaard called
this faithful obedience of God the time of the "teleological suspension of
the ethical." Abraham took a
"leap of faith" in obeying God.
As wonderful as Kierkegaard's philosophical contortion is, I think that
this story probably chronicles the ancient paradigm shift when a sector of
humanity began to believe that their God no longer required placation by human
sacrifice. We should celebrate stories
of creative advance which are chronicled in the Bible even as we cannot regard
that creative advance in applying God's love and justice in the details of our
lives today and in the future to ever be finished or final. It may seem like an advance in its time that
God permitted an animal sacrifice in place of human sacrifice; it would not
register as such an advance today. What does God require? Justice, mercy and walking humbly. No killing of anything except asking the
selfish self to make a place for all others.
Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2014
Jesus told a parable about laborers hired to work in a
vineyard. They were hired at different
hours of the day but all at the same wage for the entire duration of their
work. Those who worked longer got paid
the same as those who were hired on late in the day and they of course thought
it was unfair. The circumstances of each
person has such difference that one can very often see life as the seeming
chaos of the unevenness of people's situation.
What is the equalizer? God's
grace, justice and love are given freely to even out all that is uneven and
allow us to hold on to the dignity of all people in a world where it seems the
dignity of some is not regarded.
Aphorism of the Day, June 24,2014
It is one thing to declare a final stable meaning, it is
another thing to fool oneself that stable meanings can be enforced. When things are "written down or written
in stone" it seems to assume that writing solidifies the stable
meaning. After all the meaning seems to
be written in the same way with the same letters. Even as writing seems to be a technology of
memory to retain the seeming stability of written words, written words do not
guarantee the stability of the meanings of those words because all words have
to be read and interpreted by readers who have individually unique
"reading filters" through which those words have to be distilled. The
religious issue in this has to do with the impulse of religious authority
presuming to declare final meanings for great principles which still have a
future. So we should never presume to
declare the final meaning of God, love and justice because these have a future
and will still need to be interpreted into new details of human living.
Aphorism of Day, June 23, 2014
Providence may be based upon whether a previous event ever
comes to have favorable outcomes. And if
it does one might ask for whom and how many and how long did it take to become
so? Providence as the meanings of an
event attained in its aftermath is layered with many nuances based upon who has
been directly or indirectly affected by a previous event. One could also say that providence can be
known in the very performance of an event.
If one practices kindness and generosity, then that act itself rewards
the doer and the receivers in a providential way that is immediately
experienced. Other providence is not
always so self evident and so readily known.
Some providence can only be the teaching method of recommended aversion,
as in remember Hitler and Pol Pot? Don't
be like them!!!!! Providence in the
negative is based upon such bad events that one would never want them repeated
in a similar way. The rhetoric of
providence is quite diverse but is based upon attaining wisdom of trying to
learn from everything.
Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2014
Providence can be how we re-write history when subsequent
events events help us re-write such an acceptance of a past event we confess
that such event had to be. Providence is
the way we integrate the past experience into our present life but not in a way
which trivializes the genuine pain of the past.
Providence is not bravado as when when a youth might trip and face the
laughter of colleagues and respond, "I meant for that to
happen." Acting as though one had
control over a previous mishap is not the bravado of genuine providence. I think events have some redeeming outcomes
even as some events are not providentially redeemable, e.g. the Holocaust. Providence does not justify the fact that
free acts of evil have occurred; providence is a way of asserting that things
on the whole, all together are good even when an individual event or certain
events do not manifest the qualities of love and justice. Providence is the imaginations of faith
inspired by hope as we reconcile what we wished might have been with what was
and now begin to live in the wake of the past knowing that hope is the Sun
which continues to rise each day.
Aphorism of Day, June 21, 2014
Modern Bible readers have had their difficulties with this
book. Thomas Jefferson took scissors to
cut out parts which offended his rational mind.
Others want to harmonize the writings in the Bible as the work of a
seamless unified mind. Yes, we may want
to pick and choose and come around at Christmas and decide we only want
"holy Jesus, meek and mild" but if we encounter his words, "I
did not come to bring peace but a sword," we are left scratching our
heads. Holy books include the messiness
of life; they include the build up and aftermath of paradigm shifts and
chronicle how people who disagree treat each other very badly. We can get all huffy about how the Old
Testament is going all "medieval" on us and forget that we have
drones which do anonymous killing. We
can be proud about overcoming the ancient woe of slavery even as we use smart
phones and wear clothes put together by persons eking out subsistence. There are messy things in the Bible which we
would like to keep locked in a basement like a crazy uncle or we can admit that
when we read the Bible we are people who are all too human reading about people
who were all too human; only the details are different. But we are also reading about people who ask
questions of faith and hope in the various and sundry conditions of life and we
too are in a like way human enough to ask those same questions of faith and
hope.
Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2014
Philosophers often have problems with biblical narrative
because it is a challenge to convert narratives into neat logical
syllogisms. Socrates, as we know him
from Plato his ventriloquist in the "Dialogues", had the same problem
with the ancient poets' versions of the gods.
The gods were presented in such bald anthropomorphic ways that is was
hard not to see their behaviors as less recommendable than humans who lived
just and upright. Socrates was forced to
drink hemlock because of his impiety; he proposed a more perfect realm, the
realm of the idea. One of the ways in which the Bible has been made more readable
for the philosopher and the aesthete is to prefer the allegorical reading of
narrative. Story is understood as wisdom
vignettes to illustrate the complexities of human life and the complexity of
understanding the relationship between human life and the more than human life
known as the divine life. Modern science
has also forced people to read the Bible differently since to accept the
consistency in the performance of the natural world according to how natural
laws are now stated means that we believe these laws were the same in the past.
Biblical narratives don't lose their
truth status because they don't comport to how we understand scientific laws;
they retain truth functions in inspiring transformation in peoples lives.
Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2014
There is a game in which the absolutist tricks the
relativist about his shared absolutist's folly.
It goes:
Absolutist: God
exists.
Relativist: Are you sure?
Absolutist: I'm positive.
Relativist: Only fools are positive.
Absolutist: Are you sure?
Relativist: I'm positive.
Absolutist: Only fools are positive.
The interlocutors end up pronouncing foolishness on each
other ad infitnitum. It is safer to say
that all human knowledge including the knowledge of God is partial knowledge
but the nature of human language is based upon omni-linguistic meanings
promulgated to all linguistic communities such that we have built within us as
language users the presumptive discursive practice to make broad and general
statements with potential meaning for all language users. The absolutist/relativist dilemma is resolved
by the nature of having language and having no choice but to use it and be used
by it in the way that humanity does and is.
An absolutist is invited to have humility about certitude regarding a
partial but limited view of God, however personally meaningful it is. The relativist has to regard the proclamation
of "only partial""
knowledge as having relevance outside of the relativist's epidermis even to the
entire linguistic community.
Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2014
What would pragmatic truth be for us today? Constituting the most intentionally adequate
meaningful words and deeds which would express what we regard to be kind,
beneficial, just, creative and loving.
And let us not be fearful about always being on the way of messy
truth. Adequate meaning is very often
messy.
Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2014
An aphorist is like one who was fired from being a headline
composer because of wordiness. A
theological aphorist is one who presumes that God is so humble that God allows
the voice of the aphorist to be thrown into the divine "dummy" who is
forced to have the voice of the clumsy aphoristic ventriloquist, the real
dummy. A God of love bears all things
which is a sign of great humility.
Plenitude must be parsed in bits of partial insights so contextually
limited by the aphoristic seer even while presuming to speak for the plenitude
which ultimately dissolves the concentrated effects of any partial insight.
particularly of those who presume to speak for the whole. Aphorisms may be the appropriate medium for
those claiming only limited partial flickering knowledge. Plenitude deconstructs every partial insight
even as it is a realm of possibilisms to inspire new insights for new moments
in new contexts. And though we can not
attain either love or justice perfectly, in the human frame of reference let
love and justice be for us the divine criteria in all things.
Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2014
On our visual screens today we encounter the situations in
which we are "thrown" today. Our screens are not like video images in
frames which can be frozen. Our frames
are the continuous experience of everything which is moving and alive. Most of the things which arise do not have to
be "re-named" by us because of previous encounters or because we
assume them with the redundancies of our life habits. What will stand out is the "new"
for which we hope that our redundant practices will have provided us with
enough of the right preparation to make a creative innovative response and so
add to our experience. If all does not
seem to go well, it still is well in that it has added sheer quantity of life
experience to prepare us for the next similar but new challenge of life. Faith is the ability to live integrating past
experience into creative innovation for the new event.
Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2015
The origin of the Trinity arises more from the narrative of
Jesus as his followers understood and came to confess his uniqueness in his
context and believed him to be definitive of a categorical imperative worthy of
universal affirmation. When Jesus became
the standard for "superlative" humanity, then his words about his
relationship with God became the source for making Trinitarian confession.
Aphorism of Day, June
14, 201
The adventure of life is the reflexive play of the valuation
and re-valuation of words as we continually are constituted by the meanings of
words and as we exert a small effort in the constitution of those meanings
ourselves. The "now" forces us
into being a pragmatic user of words and sail upon the sea of meanings. We are always already testing the utility of
the meanings we have achieved even as we are blind to some of the meanings
which sweep us along in the tacit background of our lives. There are many meanings of being American
which are in the background and don't become known until they are confronted by
people who are not American. Most of our
meaningful differences from other people are not even known to us because we
cannot regard ourselves as different except in contrast. The history of God in humanity is the history
of words of meaning about One who is so exponentially Different than we are and
yet we presume that the exponential Difference is not so great as to prevent us
from using human words about such a great one even though one wonders about
meaning of the hyper-superlative. If the
hyper-superlative is an expanding Container then the interior environment is
always changing and thus any "final" meaning is always being
destabilized.
Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2014
If God is beyond words and description why would we choose
the Trinity as the way to speak about God?
1-We have no choice but to use words.
2-There is a plenitude which is more than words and human experience.
3-The one who arose among us and became most quotable because of his stand-out
rarity used Trinitarian words about God.
4-Because of the witness of Jesus we have embraced Trinitarian words as
our most adequate way to understand and speak about God.
Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2014
Before the formulation of the understanding of God as
Trinity of persons, the followers of Jesus in the first three centuries had to
come to an understanding of what books constituted the New Testament. The Trinity is essentially the conclusion
derived from the words of Jesus as they appear in the Gospels which did not
come to writing in the language which Jesus spoke, Aramaic, but in the existing
lingua franca of the time, koine Greek.
The Trinity is a conclusive abbreviation of an understanding of God
derived from a reading of the books becoming part of the New Testament and used
for teaching standardization in a religious social movement that went from a
few people to sweep through the Roman Empire.
Standardization for community coherence and comprehensive promulgation
of the message was crucial for organizational unity. The Trinity is evidence that
"truth" is communal and extensive promulgation creates the conditions
of "objectivity."
Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2014
There may be lots of ways and methods of achieving favorable
brains states such that one would confess blessed feelings and the benefit of
such. Having favorable brain states
could not be a final goal of Christian faith unless it included being a part of
the social environment of other people to help and assist them to achieve
blessed brain states through having enough to eat, freedom from pain, living in
safety and the practice of justice. The
validity of blessed brain states is certified if one is also able to befriend
others towards those blessed states as well. Being blessed and being an agent
of blessing go hand in hand.
Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2014
Consenting to life today is mostly being on the seeming
automatic processes of biological life and so do we really consent to what we
have no choice in? Consenting to life
has more to do with the specific intentional acts of the day even if lots of
them are the given protocols of culture, family and life occupation. Consenting to the Abundant Life of God's
Presence is about convincing oneself that it is there; it is not about
convincing God to provide it. Which one
us could convince God not to be today?
Forgetting that God is, does not change God's abiding presence but it
could mean that in forgetting God there are parts of our brain which will not
get activated today for our benefit and the benefit of our world. Remembering God's presence will change the
chemistry of our brains today.
Remembering God and others will activate the mutual transmission of the
energy of prayer.
Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2014
There is a rather ironic rapprochement between the Hebrew
Scriptures as written word and the declaration of Christ as the Word from the
beginning. It would seem as though a
Person is a more embracing notion than Word or text but it just so happens that
Person and Word are co-extensive because the only way to get to a Person is
through Word. Word is the interpretive
Filter for everything even of itself in the most delightful reflexive play. There is the opportunity for understanding
Oneness if one can accept the Oneness of everything in having been constituted
by Word.
Aphorism of the Day,
June 8, 2014
From the many, One. E
pluribus unum. This is an apt motto for
the feast of Pentecost as an acknowledgment of the mystification which happens
when diverse people behave for the benefit of the common good. There is evidence of a higher force when the
individual interests and difference are subjected to a unity called harmony. Ants seem by instinct to serve the purposes
of the colony; humans have the capacity for freedom such that their diverse
desires can project their self interests to be at odds with the common
good. What is the force that calls us to
a common good, not just for pragmatic purposes of social function, but for the
higher purposes of justice and love? We
seek the Holy Spirit as the higher force that enables us not just to be social
for self preservation but to be just, kind and sacrificial.
Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2014
Probably the great challenge of biblical relevancy in the
future is to move beyond both pre-modern and modern readings of the Bible. It was written and first read in times when
interior life and exterior life was not riven by the subject/object split of modern
science. After the modern era too many
readers of the Bible wanted to defend it as legitimate science and journalistic
eye witness writing because being "cryto-modernists" they bought into
the modern criteria for superior truth, i.e., scientific method and
journalistic writing which purports to indicate what "really"
happened. The future of reading the
Bible involves us understanding the Bible as literary art constructed by people
whose lives were constituted by literary/word art. If we can admit that we are textually/word
constituted then we can find the sublime from interaction of the texts which we
call sacred with the texts or words of our own constituted selves. The sublime and mystical possibilities of the
Bible re-appropriated as words which are Spirit and life is the invitation to
biblical reading in the future.
Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2014
On the 70th anniversary of D-Day we might reflect both with
horror and gratitude; horror because the human conditions brings us to the
situations such as the Normandy Invasion. Gratitude because many people were
asked to show that they could manifest the "greater love" in laying
their lives down for their friends. The
persons of that era were called the "greatest generation" even though
that generation still had residues of the injustices that plagued them because
of the inherited conditions left by the "sins of their fathers." Eisenhower warned us that the future would
not only be about "studying war" but about the perpetual race to
finance war with a standing "industrial military complex." Would that we had wisdom to convert the
"industrial military complex" into a standing force to respond to all
of the disasters which occur because of weather, climate, earthquakes, fires
and the environmental disasters caused by our own efforts to exploit the
resources of this earth. A prophet might
predict that there is going to have to be a "greater generation"
after us to be great because of the great problems which we are leaving them. We are saying, "Here, take this world
and be greater than we have been!"
One can hope that a ever creating God will inspire an ever greater
creativity to help that greater generation to arise.
Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2014
Unity and diversity are both relevant meaningful insights
which we often simplify and overuse. They are complex and contradictory and can
both be expressions of the worst of human group behaviors. Corporate unity, diverse people
"tamed" to unite for a goal can unite for some terrible goals. Celebrating absolute diversity in
"respecting" differences as final can be the very expression of
disintegrating chaos. God's Spirit as
the omnipresent condition of life which allows for the conduction of mutual
experience of all that live and move and have being in God also allows for the
relative freedom of individual people.
Each person can say and act "I am not like anyone else in any
way." Or, "I am like other
people in all ways." These express
the extreme alienation of diversity and extreme symbiosis of unity that has not
found the wisdom of moderation of the two.
Aphorism of the Day,
June 4, 2014
The Day of Pentecost answers the ancient story of the tower
of Babel, when people spoke the "same" language to achieve a unity to
"vote" God out of the city and install mere human divine
surrogates. A world with people of many
languages starts at a disadvantage in mutual understanding unless there can be
a "uniting" topic. The Spirit
as a Divine Force helped to focus the topic upon the risen Christ and so unite
people. It is a nice way to complete a
theme in sacred story but we know that to speak the same language today does
not guarantee unity among people, and certainly not in faith. The Spirit as God's abiding presence unifies
not by stamping out differences but by charming the ego to be checked at the
door so people make a place for each other.
Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2014
Many people try to defend biblical faith in by assuming that
the standards of meaning of modern eye-witness journalism and modern scientific
observation are the standards of meaning which governed those who wrote the
Bible. On the other hand if one
subscribes to the wisdom mode then one understands the language of the heart
found in the Bible and one embraces the goals of transformation of life that
are evoked by the sacred stories.
Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2014
One can see in the history of religion people discovering
experiences which from biological analysis may be certain brain states with
specific chemical composition. These
states may be characterized as peace, joy, euphoria, ecstasy et. al. The attainment of such states coincide with
socio-linguistic contexts sometimes call liturgy. Liturgy is not just what happens in corporate
worship settings; liturgy is the overall socio-linguistic contexts which
orientate and inculcate the conditions for the brain states of religious
experience to be achieved. Word being
made flesh can also mean Word inducing the brain states which get interpreted
as being religious experience.
Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2014
The function of the Ascension in the sacred story is to
honor the substantiality of the life of Jesus in his history. He had a particular past that was an absolute
past and as such it could not ever be dissolved or made not to have
happened. While ascension seems to be a
mode of deposition of departure to be "out of sight," it actual
functions as confession regarding the substantiality of the earthly life of
Jesus. The past retains the individual
as an absolute "Was" and so each of us becomes an "absolute
Was" who will remain forever.
Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2014
We travel in dimness on the long continuum of
perfectability. Gains toward perfection
are made through repentance, or becoming better each day though on some days it
may seem that we are taking steps backward.
We travel in dimness because even if we think that we see the sins of
other with clarity, we do not. We do not
fully understand where others are at in their journey on the continuum of perfectability. And even though we cannot avoid making
judgments on others and ourselves, let us accept those judgments as very
temporal and not as final or divine. Let
us after our judgments sigh, "I could be wrong and so I defer to God who
offers a grace that makes the distance to perfection the same for everyone on
the continuum."
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2014
Someone was complaining about the behavior of G.K.
Chesterton's friend and he responded, "You should have known him before he
was a Christian." The continuum of
perfectability is very long. Churchill
said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all
others." We often excuse ourselves based upon comparing ourselves with
behaviors that are regarded as worse than our own. Election wisdom often is based upon choosing
the "lesser of two evils." We
often judge the gory parts of the Bible by the same standard. We can ponder many unsavory things that have
been done in the name of religion and the divine and we might excuse religious
traditions by saying, "you should have known humanity before having the
benefit of faith and religion." One
of the quotes from the wisdom of Jesus encourages us to change the direction of
our moral vision. We are not to applaud
our moral superiority because we think that we are better than really
"bad" or "ignorant" people; rather we are to be perfect as
the one in heaven is perfect. We should
not be practicing self-congratulations for ending slavery, we should be looking
in the direction of more perfect expressions of justice.
Aphorism of the Day,
May 29, 2014
To say and believe the Bible is "God's Word" is
one thing; to know exactly how it is so is another. The general notion of in the beginning was
the Word which created everything is a more embracing notion than all of the
particular words which are found in the Bible.
And it is difficult to decide how
specific or a particular biblical text manifests inspiration. One can remember the sketch of the vicar in a
Monty Python sketch in the pulpit saying, "My brother Esau is an hairy
man, but I am a smooth man."
Pondering the Bible as God's word and specifying how a particular
portion of it is so is another thing.
Each group of religious adherents actually practices a disregard for
most of the Bible by censoring their reading of the Bible because they cannot
find fitting relevance of the words to their contemporary lives. God is completely vulnerable to words written
in the Bible and the incarnation of God in human words means that God opens the
divine self to endless translation and endless interpretations and translations
of translations and interpretations of interpretations. With councils and popes humans have attempted
to "fix" biblical meanings which in fact cannot be fixed because
councils and popes and their fixed meanings are open to endless translation and
interpretations.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2014
Historically, Christians have labored in a fearful fidelity
to the what, how and why of the words of the Bible and biblical
inspiration. Christian biblical
expositors in their fear have limited God to being One who would inspire the
use of language akin to the phase of when a child is learning one by one the
words for new things. Why not admit that
the lyricism of language is in full play within the Bible as people were
inspired in their own times to deal with great nagging questions and in doing
so we are inspired to keep the conversation going? The Bible did not seal final answers on the
conversation; it is inspired because it honestly raises lots of the questions
that pertain to the art of living. To
treat the Bible as an instruction manual on the human machine is to reduce the
Bible to less than what it is in its manifold and multivalent display of
language. Human councils have maintained canonical collections of
"official" books of the Bible and these councils have decided to
retain two books of a "divinely" inspired book which don't even
mention the name of God. Believing in an
inspired Bible is like believing in the Incarnation; God made the divine
vulnerable to anthropomorphisms in the form of human language because in
humility(?) humans arrogate the right to speak about the One way beyond their
pay grade. We do so because hope always
gives us visions of horizons to surpass ourselves.
Aphorism of the Day,
May 27, 2014
We are in the week of the Ascension, the event of Jesus
rising like an elevator into the sky covered by the clouds. Sacred stories have their purpose and their
own logic. In the Ascension event the
logic of the sacred story is that Jesus had to be alive in the particular sense
of still having a location of a person with a body even while the Risen Christ
had become again the Eternal Word from the beginning who was in all and who
made all. The Eternal Word creates for
us sacred story to fit what the psyche needs when it needs us. At time it suffices to say God remembers all
in such a way to preserve all; at other times word gives particular meaning
such as "grandmother is baking cookie in heaven." Eternal Word is flexible enough to move from
general to particular based upon the need of the moment. The truth of Word is the greater truth than
any particular word product. We always,
already are submitted to the greater truth of Word, even when we produce
inferior word products, even the ones called lies.
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2014
Memorial Day is a time for dreaming not to have to study war
no more and to hope for a creativity to ascend to inspire all to beat swords
into plowshares. A vision to sublimate
all warring impulses into the creative feeding of all is a vision to continue
to have.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2014
If we live and move and have our being in God, then God has
no environment since there is nothing "outside" of God to move or
affect the Divine. God provides the
divine environment for everything. The
environment that is interior to God does affect God because genuine freedom
exists for all that lives and moves and has being in God. So we need to be careful with our freedom
because we are affecting all outcomes.
Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2014
The African American Spiritual "Sometimes I feel like a
motherless child, a long way from home" expresses the feelings of
isolation of one who is without advocate or mentor. The writer of the Gospel of John presents
Jesus as a parental figure when he says to his disciples, "I will not
leave you orphaned." The sure sign
of God's Spirit is when advocacy and mentoring occurs for the benefit of those
who need it the most. We at times need
advocates and mentors and we also need to be advocates and mentors for those
whom we are the Spirit's agents to serve.
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2014
How does one harmonize a "flat-earther" notion of
heaven being the abode above the dome in the sky on which the sun and stars
rotate around the earth with the notion of everything living and moving and having its being in
God? The divine realm as being the
highest or outer most place in the universe?
Topos or "place" was and is a figure in language and biblical
language includes the inspired attempts to add approximate statistical insights
to how we view the world. We can be inspired by the quality of our heart's
searching today even as the details of our resulting insights may not be any
final answer but represent the "partial" knowing of people who are
honest about "partial" knowing from their own limited place of
viewing. Often we want to believe that
our "partial" knowledge is better than your "partial"
knowledge when we should always be placing what we know and do under this
judgment: Is what we know, do and say
approaching a more adequate approximation of love, justice and kindness?
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2014
In evolution that which has the ability to adapt is able to
survive but such a view seems to to limited to earthlings alone. No matter what happens on earth there is a
Plenitude which adapts and survives even while allowing permissive freedom of
entities which have freedom only to the extent of their limited
capacities. There is always a greater
sustaining Divine Milieu as Pere Teilhard de Chardin called it.
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2014
If we "live and move and have our being in God" as
it is suggested in the dialogue in Acts between Paul and the Athenians, then
God is not an outside interventionist but rather God events arise from the
divine ground of being itself. To say,
"He came down from heaven" is something which needs to have a
translation from perceptual elevation to interior elevation. Elevation is used
as a metaphor of high sublimity and not as referring to literal space.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2014
Meditation is learning the art of "self
whispering" to reach the experience of knowing that one is being whispered
by God's Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2014
"Living and moving and having one's being in God,"
is a phrase which St. Paul reportedly borrowed from Greek poets to make
connections with the Athenians. In the
Process theological model of God, all things are living and becoming in a God
who is also becoming but remains the greatest with no significant rival except
the Divine Self in a future state. This
notion of an expanding Becoming Divine Being means that there is genuine
freedom of all "becoming beings" who contribute to the overall
Becoming and thus are not pre-programmed/determined by a God who is often
conceived in other theologies as being all-powerful and all-knowing (if God
knows the future as actual where is freedom?)
God as one with Greatest Freedom allows all of the created order to
share in a degree of creative freedom.
The becoming God without rival attempts to lure us toward love and
justice and equality but such freedom also allows the one percent to control
ninety percent of all worldly possession as proof of God's permissive freedom
as humans resist the divine lure towards love, justice and equality with
fearful greed. Sin is not responding to
the lure of God to use our freedom for the practice of love, justice and
equality.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2014
Edith Hamilton's book on Greek Mythology was once standard
for secondary school Humanities classes.
It seemed easy to study ancient Greek religions in the public school
since there were not many contemporary Zeus-ites/Jovians to rise up and protest
the misrepresentations of their religion.
The study of contemporary religious beliefs and practices of active
faith communities in a public school is a bit more controversial because
"living religions" have many confessional adherents who disagree
publicly about how their faith traditions and customs should be appropriately
presented. The solution in a society
with the freedom to practice one's faith openly is to invite specific religious
teaching to be done in houses of faith and not let public schools be the forum
for "confessional" views of any particular religion. When one tries to do general summaries of
religious beliefs and practices even from a academic view point, it is hard to
maintain presentation neutrality to the satisfaction of any religious
adherent. One can see the wisdom of why
educators in public schools for children refrain from getting into
"confessional" specific aspects of religions. It is done out of respect for all and honors
the "golden rule" which seems to be common to most religions.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2014
Should creationism be taught in the public schools? Definitely, yes, but not as a part of a
natural science curriculum. It should be
taught in the human science classes which study human behaviors including what
people believe. The scientific method is
based upon the tentativeness of any law or theory and so
"creationism" is not open to any further condition that would be
allowed to alter or falsify its main assumption. But people are multi-discursive and can hold
contradictory rhetorical paradigms in their manifold ways of living. Anthropology is a very liberal field in that
all topics of human behavior are open for study. Creationism as a doctrine of folk religion is
very much a valid topic matter for anthropological study and thus can be taught
as such in any school open to freedom of dialogue. Creationism can be taught with respect for
the people who hold these views. However,
the disciplines and genres for the study of the subject matter should not be
confused.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2014
Often in the history of religion the experience in this
world is so horrendous, the focus turns to the state of the afterlife as a sort
of therapeutic coping regime. Such
other-worldliness has led to emphasizing salvation as being "saved"
in the afterlife. And some have become
quite certain of their specific knowledge of the states of the afterlife. This emphasis detracts from the notion of
salvation as the continual effort for health and healthiness for all people in
this life. For people who focus on salvation
as healthy living for all in this life, there are an abundance of biblical
metaphors to articulate transformational states of living in this life. One can in fact understand the Gospel of John
as writings which contain the reality of transformational states on this side
of death.
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2014
It is probably true that propaganda works best on plain and
direct meanings of words when words are treated as meaning only one thing and
one thing only. Words are reported over
and over again to make the ruts of the metaphor so deep as to guarantee its
"truth" by the sheer number of times that it is
"used." The actual situation
of the world does not let such simple one to one connection between word and
single referent persist; in honesty the complexity of the universe by reason of
sheer volume means that the words of language will always be inadequate and one
can be brought to the wisdom that knows that words essentially only refer to
other words as they dance as screen across the Reality we think we are
seeing. This situation is cause for
humility in the face of our lack of control because of the vastness of
mystery. Propaganda is built upon
simplistic meanings for people in power to keep people in their preferred state
of persuasion for some product or prescribed behavior. The holiness of God is an invitation to think
outside of the box of words which can too easily become idols when they serve
as but propaganda to "get people to do one's bidding".
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2014
Today, one may have to be a rigorous editor of the version
of what one chooses to read and see in this life. So much will seem to be just
"thrown" at us to make us the pawn of unchosen circumstances. Information will be flung at us today over
which we do not have any control and yet we need to exert editorial control in
selecting and giving nuance and style to all information. Editing is the art of living with faith. Let us go forth and be artistic in how we
edit; be creative with words in how we read our circumstances and how we
"write" our interactions in the manifold ways in which we can. There's lots of lemonade that needs to be
made from the lemons of human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2014
The father-ization of God reaches its height in John's
Gospel in the words of Jesus. In those
words, Jesus, father-izes himself: "If you have seen me, you have seen the
Father." It could be that for one
to discover one's own supreme Parent aspect of personality, is to arrive at a
higher state of consenting to be determined by a different kind of authority
than the imperfect authority that earthly parents often turn out to be. Earthly parents are not omni-competent and so
they need to be complemented by the discovery of that Higher determining Parent.
Aphorism of the Day,
May 12, 2014
Imagine the function of language in one's life as an
invisible impressionable screen in the center or one's consciousness and this
screen has grids to classify every sort of human phenomena. This invisible screen allows one magically to
see/read/interpret the world outside but also see one's inner world as
well. This screen constitutes the seeing
through versions of the world and the self and how the two interact with each
other. Repentance or the changing of our
"mind" or word screen means that we take on new impressions on our
word screen which enables us to see things and one's self differently and
therefore make different decisions.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2014
The only empirical union between persons or the only time of
people actually being "one flesh" occurs in the nine months of
gestation when two persons really are one.
Only women can experience being the container and the contained in the
mode of delivering new people into the world.
The time of mother-to-be and child-to-be is perhaps the mysterious state
that inspires the story of the Garden of Eden as the perfect world. We all had a perfect world before we were
evicted at birth. And one is blessed if
after the eviction the one that became two can experience the love, nurture,
care and love of a special friendship.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2014
The metaphor of Jesus as door or gate of the sheepfold is
taken from the practice of shepherds actually sleeping in the open space that
permits entrance and exit from a sheepfold.
So a shepherd functioned as the door and the body of the shepherd kept
the sheep from going out and any animal that attempted to come in had the
shepherd arise with an "over my dead body" defense. As a metaphor it behooves us to consider the
people who stand in the threshold of our life experiences. The people "doors" in our lives are
those who protect us in life stage appropriate paradigms, but they are also
people who open up to us other "worlds" outside of our current
particular "safe and comfortable" paradigms. Gateway people are those who have the wisdom
to regulate our progressive exposure to the type of world knowledge needed in
our progressive creative advance.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2014
The very nature of language does not support a literal
connection between a particular word and what the word is supposed to refer
to. Words give us the approximations of
events experienced as we have been taught to see things by the communities and
cultures where we have been raised and how these approximations have been
further individualized through our own micro-family history and within the
unknowable ways of how a specific person has become formed by his or her
language. We rely upon having faith in
our community meanings even as we know that community meanings change over
time. With faith we believe that the
living experience of time is like being on a merry-go-round which gives time to
make out images in our landscapes which seem to change continually. As we apply Scripture to our lives, we are
not trying to pretend that time has stopped; we are trying to receive momentary
insights which will help prepare us for the next arising events in our turning
lives.
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2014
A subtitle for the writings of the New Testament might be:
"Metaphors Gone Wild on Jesus Christ." The kind of experience which people profess
to have with Christ is the justification for the extreme and superlative use of
metaphors, most of which involve poetic license without closeness of actual
empirical verification in the actual experience of Jesus. Jesus is Lamb of God, Good Shepherd and yes,
even the Sheep-fold Gate. He's King and
King of Kings, Vine, Light, Word, Priest and Great High Priest. He is Life, Truth and the Way. Surely there are enough metaphors about
Christ in the New Testament to convert any literalist from their fundamentally
limited ways of interpreting Scripture?
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2014
One of the classic stories about how our partial knowing
results in conflict about what is true is the story about the group of blind
men who touch different parts of an elephant and so they all explain their
truth differently. There is also a
humility which is required about partial knowing; do we even have the
competence to affirm the nature of what might be total and absolute, because
even revelation has to be given to us in human insights and so revelation is
interpreted through human filters? The humble
confession that we can make is that there is Much More than I or we or everyone
together can know. We should always be
humble regarding having infallible precision
in defining what is "Much More."
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2014
If word or language is very condition for us knowing anything
as human beings, then the next most basic topic which is assumed in language is
"existence" itself. If
Descartes said "I think, therefore, I am," it was already implied in
the writing of the Gospel of John, "I am because I am already constituted
by the Word." The existence of
people having words and language precedes the consciousness of existence
itself. In this way existence is created
by the Word which has existence itself.
In one of the eight "I am" statements attributed to Jesus in
the Gospel of John, it is written that Jesus said, "Before Abraham was, I
am." In the Gospel of John this
refers to his pre-existence as the "Word" from the beginning. It is humanly impossible to separate Word
from existence or as Heidegger wrote, "Language is the house of
being." Being and becoming would be unrecognized without language.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2014
Cinco de Mayo is a reminder to us that biblical people
experienced a nomadic existence and could not help but carry with them memories
formed in one place to another place.
When people are forced into exile or leave for better economic
opportunity it is impossible to avoid our former life identities. The Native Americans did not have the power
to force the European immigrants to give up their European customs and
traditions and observe Native American language, customs and traditions. Is it power only which determines what
customs are valid to celebrate? If the ancient
Hebrews had been forced to relinquish their traditions in exile in the Babylon
and Persian exiles, there would be no Hebrew tradition at all. The feast of Pentecost teaches us that we can
be united even as we honor the languages and cultures of all people. The
American Ideal at its best seeks the Pentecostal reality; unity among the many
differences.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2014
The risen Christ was unrecognized by the disciples when he
walked with them to Emmaus and then suddenly in the breaking of the bread,
"Poof," he appeared. Like a
baby being weaned from the continuous physical presence of the mother the early
followers of Jesus recounted the transition in being weaned from actual
presence of Jesus of Nazareth to the apparent presence of the risen Christ
under the modes of Word and Sacraments.
Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2014
The resurrection stories trace the transition period between
the presence of a walking and talking Jesus of Nazareth and the risen Christ
who seems to be able to morph and be known in an endless varieties of
serendipitous encounters. When there is
endless variety of potential encounters with the sublime risen Christ, there
arose an administration of the sublime particularly for the public
gathering. The sacraments became the
mode of finding the risen Christ within the actions of a gathered church. Administrative Christianity for purposes of
control tended to lean toward viewing the presence of Christ as somehow
"limited" to the sacraments.
Administratively limiting the "presence" of Christ to
"official" church practice has led to the sacred being
"forbidden" or invalid in the
"secular" experience of people.
The loss of connection between sacrament and everyday lives has meant
that people dabble in the serendipity of their own experiences of the sublime
without making sacred connections anymore.
The sublime which derive from the risen Christ have the built in lure to
draw one closer to God and have the proven effects of justice, love,
forgiveness and peace. The sublime as
defining certain experience can occur without the proven effects of justice,
love, forgiveness and peace. Discerning
the sublime of the presence of the risen Christ is the art of resurrection
living.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2014
The music referred to as "Ode to Joy" of
Beethoven's Ninth has been used as an anthem of choice by incredible diverse
people including the worst sort of totalitarian regimes. What right do dictators have to
"steal" and use such a sublime piece of music as if sublimity could
be used as a validation for inhumanity?
Isn't that the completely ironic nature of humanity? God, resurrection and the Bible have often
been used by people who have not known how to be related to the sublime. If we use not the sublime for purposes of
love, kindness and justice, we fail miserably at the task of stewardship.
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2014
St. Paul's letter include his teaching and theology. His writing on the death and resurrection of
Jesus are the earliest writings but his writings were more didactic. When it came to making the meaning accessible
to a wider audience, the Gospels proved to be the genre of choice. By putting the theology, liturgy and
spiritual practice into a narrative of the life of Jesus the early communities
solidified their unity around a celebration of the risen Christ. A narrative allows many meanings to arise and
churches for many years have tried to reduce narratives to didactic
"doctrines" but these reductions have been mainly for the administration
of the people by their leaders.
Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2014
What is the difference between Jesus being the Word from the
beginning, the Vine, the Good Shepherd, the Gate, the Way, the Truth, the Life,
The Resurrection, the Bread of Life, The Bread from Heaven, One who healed,
Walked on Water, One who wept, Changer of Water to Wine, Baptizer and many
more. The difference is only in the use
of different metaphors and some metaphors have poetic purposes while others
purport to be words that actually refer to possible actions or deeds. Other words refer to impossible actions or
deeds with the designation as Signs which are markers about someone who was experienced as a very rare
person. The New Testament provides us
with an entire range of discursive practices as a written art to evoke the
sublime meanings of a rare person, Jesus Christ. We can get the message about the sublime
rarity of the person of Jesus without using language with the kind of symbolic
confusion which would make Jesus unfit for our scientific age.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2014
Death is not a rare event except it is experienced as rare
in the life of a person, viz, it happens one time. It is rare enough in the life of a person who
is loved within a community to necessitate the unlearning of actual habits
trained to include regular accessibility to the presence of a person. The resurrection of Christ was so rare and
unique because what is called death was a short duration and a new vocabulary
had to be invented about the continuing accessibility to Christ in some many
new ways. There is an incredible
interpretive miracle if the prophet formerly known as Jesus of Nazareth is now
a protean Christ able to morph into endless reappearances to be a higher power
to fit the unique personal history of each person. While we confess one Christ,
the light of Christ has so many diverse rays it appears that we live with
poly-Christian manifestations of endless presences of Christ. Why has this happened? Because we have endless words about words
about words about words...... And words about words really do matter because
they bear the reality of creation/becoming continuously.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2014
The author of John's Gospel in the Doubting Thomas pericope
states that those who don't see Jesus and yet believe are blessed. This should be an affirmation of what might
be called the "refilling of Christ" in contrast to the emptying of
Christ to take on the human role in Jesus of Nazareth. By the "refilling" of Christ, it
would mean Christ as Word from the beginning or the very basis for any
relationship or consciousness at all.
The Risen Christ as the Word means the endless proliferation of
"presences" of Christ, since all of the words which come from the
Word are but endless signification efforts for the Word behind all words. In the use of one word is included the one
mathematical formula which is the synonym implied in every word: This word=not
every other word. Not being every other
word is implied in the use of one word.
The writer of John's Gospel wrote so that the reader could appreciate
that each person has a different but equal experience of the Risen Christ. The writer of John's Gospel was saying,
"Welcome to language mysticism."
Aphorism of the Day,
April 27, 2014
The doubting Thomas resurrection appearance story is
actually used by the author of John's Gospel to set up the affirmation of the
faith of people who did not experience such re-appearances of Jesus. The empirical Thomas wanted "proof"
and his "seeing is believing" faith is diminished by the words of
Jesus who comments, "Blessed are those who have not seen yet who
believe." The early church moved
quickly to other modes of how the Risen Christ was affirmed as being in the
lives of his followers.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2014
Resurrection is hope's narrative because hope and desire put
into us visions of much more than we can humanly accomplish given our bodies in
space/time limitations. Resurrection is
hope's narrative about the truth of never being finished with anything in life. There is always some MORE. People with a wrong relationship with hope
may adopt the false pride of actually thinking that they should
"finish" themselves and all of their relationships. Such pride means going to the grave with
unnecessary guilt. Let us not be
embarrassed by hope's narrative or all of what is poured through the creative
imaginations of these earthen vessels.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2014
Resurrection is a word like love, a word that evokes
powerful emotional meanings even though it is difficult to provide specific and
precise empirical content to resurrection.
Resurrection as a concept existed in the extant religious context in the
time of Jesus in various religious communities, Jewish and other mystery
religions. It attained the place of a
constellation of ideas and meanings which derived from the various experiences
of the afterlife of Jesus within a community of followers who knew the death
and resurrection of Jesus to be symbols of the dynamic of their daily spiritual
practice which in turn became New Testament writings and liturgical
practice. We don't believe anything from
a presumption of knowing everything about the item of belief; if such were the
case we would discount the future as providing future occasions for verifying
or falsifying what we think we know.
When the old timer was asked if he had lived in his hometown all of his
life, he responded, "Not yet."
Have we attained the full meaning of the resurrection? Well, not yet!
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2014
If the wordsmiths of the Creeds had read St. Paul who wrote,
"If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body," why
doesn't the Creed read, "I believe in the resurrection of the spiritual
body?" Was it is because they believed that a human person was inseparable
except for a state of "temporary" separation of death? And why is it so important to think that we
have the right to make some final pronouncements upon the
"unknowable?" Or is it because
any body of people has the right of council to declare which "poetic
utterances" are valid for community beliefs. And isn't it difficult to control poetic
meanings and the proliferation of meanings as they become unmoored and
impossible to return to the harbor of the original contexts of formulation and
utterance? What we think ancient things
mean becomes a present day adjudication by contemporary interpreters.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2014
When one states in the Creed that one believes in the
resurrection of the body, one can understand "of the body" to have a
metaphorical meaning of "substantiality" since from a merely physical
point of view it is having bodies which seems to establish substantiality of
existence, even though we know that in duration a physical body does not hold
up very long in the scheme of time. One
wonders why the Creed wordsmiths did not want to include believing in the
resurrection of the soul or spirit which might be regarded as more substantial
than the body. Easter season is a good
season to let Mystery dissolve all intellectual idols of certitude about how
one thinks one knows and believes the resurrection.
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2014
In the duration of the forms of being and life, one can wax
philosophical about how everything and every being are in transitional states
of existence. Such philosophical
facticity cannot represent the degree attachment that we humans have to life
such that death represents such a pronounced degree of difference in
accessibility to another person the imaginations of the unseen portion of a
person living on forever are but the natural narratives of hope. People of faith live believing that hope is
not a cruel hoax but having hope is anchored in something very enduring.
Aphorism of Day, April 21, 2014
In an Easter mood one helpless anthropocentric
anthropmorphizer takes poetic license in assuming that the lovely hummingbirds
are playing and dancing around the backyard while from the perspective of the
hummingbird I may be the idiot human seeing aesthetic dance patterns when they
are but working to keep alive, seeming to say, "you try to move your wings
80 times a second and not work your tail off to get calories for
energy!" The Psalmist wrote in a
brand of anthropomorphic theocentrism," There goes that Leviathan whom God
has made for the sport of it."
Easter is a time to accept mere humanity, even when we aspire to get out
of ourselves and see things from the point of view of different species
altogether, say a hummingbird, or God?
We are inspired to imagine help and insights from other beings/Being in
life because we have faith to believe that everything and everyone is all
together. We have faith to believe in a
freely expanding Container big enough for everything and everyone all together
and that Container shares influences with all that is contained.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2014
Easter is a persistent celebration which has continued
because of the appearance of a very rare person who had a rare
re-appearance. Such rarity of person and
event results in new use of language and the superlative case of human
uniqueness means that we delve into the vocabulary of the divine because we are
baffled.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2014
What one discovers in the practice of meditation is similar
what one knows about about the computer; what you put in has a way of being
stored and being retrieved. Meditation
often opens the floodgates of what will be retrieved from what has been
"saved" through programming.
The human interior life has more flexible and protean ways of mixing
what has been saved internally in the creation of new inventions. Interiority has so many ways of morphing its
own equivalences to exterior "multimedia" events with discursive
nuances of moods, interior colors and sounds.
One can discover one's Interior as cavernous and confess like the
Psalmist to be "wonderfully made."
While one practice of meditation may be fasting from all discursive
activities, I am a believer in the aesthetic complement of the simple, viz., an
incredible sound and light show with mind-boggling aurora borealis-like
interior events. People who meditate can
get stuck into a style and make idols out of particular methods and
prescriptions of how one should or others should attain some
"non-existent' and non-repeatable state.
The "waters" of one interior state have already flown to the
ocean and that same water state cannot be retrieved.
Aphorism of the Day,
April 18, 2014
Today might be a good day to meditate on a W.H. Auden's,
"Stop All the Clocks."
Meditate upon the sheer power of profound grief.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2014
The practice of meditation should lead to an unconscious
"forgetting of oneself" even in such a religious practice because the
result of meditation should be a contemplative unity of life where there is no
distinction between secular and sacred.
Once the line between what used to be regarded as natural or spiritual
has been dissolved, then contemplation is the outcome of accepting the symphony
of energies which dance and plays within oneself.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2014
Meditation is a good way to honor the notion of Sabbath
throughout the week. If the Sabbath
means 1/7th of one's time is to be dedicated holy rest, then the
post-resurrection Sabbath occurs in one's body as a nomadic tabernacle. With meditation one takes time to attend to
what might be stirring in one's holiest of holy inner being.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2014
Meditation means adjusting to the reality of all the
conditions which impinge upon one's life and looking to gently choreograph the
dance of the interior energies of one's life as they generate texts, worded
thoughts, worded pictures asking for one's consent to let them linger. But one lets them go into mist and shadows as
one surrenders with an abject passive resistance. One submits to all at the same time one looks
for the rising of strength to change everything with wisely directed thoughts
and actions which arise from a surrendered ego willing to say not I because I
am carried on the Wave of Someone greater.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2014
There is a difference between visualization and
meditation. One can use visualizations
to create profound sentiments about certain events in the life and suffering of
Jesus. Visualizations tend to excite and
awaken many more areas of the brain.
Meditation is moving about from visualizations which are simply words
that are hidden in pictures.
Visualization is more for those who are in need of iconography of the
mind. Meditation is more about being
seen through and being prayed through by the Mysterious One and meditation is a
method of getting rid of mind clutter to allow it to happen.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2013
Meditation can be like "self-help" therapy where
one is in search of one's "truer" self and where one is trying to
encounter an interior Therapist who can offer peace and silence as the
invitation to honor the mystery of both who one is and who God IS.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2014
Meditation for beginners may be a shock for people who have
been living as though everything really takes place "out there." "Out there" pain, loss and failure
may eventually be the impetus to begin to go "in there." And if meditation contra-Freud purports to be
an "untalking cure," it does not always happen because suddenly the
shouting voices of the interior of exploding emotional bombs trapped in
interstitial crevasses of the interior want the attention which they did not
get when the events happened and so the trapped energy accrued to become the
legions of the repressed. The legions of
the repressed include the memories formed by being raised by imperfect people
while being imperfect because one can only always already be in the state of
being perfectible. One of the goals of
learning to consent to the depths below the sentiment of emotional energy is to
hope to participate in the flow between the members of the Trinity. To discover Father or Parent at a profound
depth is to be born into the freedom of a different kind of determinism than
the kind proposed by Freudian determinism.
To discover the Perfect, is to forgive oneself and nurturers for not
being such. The discovery of the Perfect
is to embrace one's life long task of perfectability.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2014
Meditation has the collateral effect of training the brain. The science of meditation has to do with
attaining some brain wave states and attaining those states with practice and
with ease means having the ability to carry over the effects of a
"peaceful" brain to things like better sleep, less stress and better
concentration in other work tasks. But
beyond the sheer practice which meditation is, one looks for the faith event or
the arising of the Spirit who prays within. The practice of meditation is also
the training of one's ego to become fluid, but strong enough to willingly get
out of the way and recognize and cooperate and be accessed by the Higher Power.
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2014
Meditation like prayer can consist of preparation as one
makes the intentional effort to "line things up" inside of oneself in
such a way for the fresh draft of breath or wind of Spirit to arise through
oneself and the very few moments of having felt "prayed through"
makes all of the preparation worth it.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2014
The realm of every possible word for anyone at any given
time provides the word-scape background for any particular articulation of a
word act. Anyone who meditates is
already being articulated and articulating in their body posture and location
because one exists in a pre-coded world of time/space meanings. Through meditation one tries to imagine a
retreat back into the realm of the possible word-scape background where
individual word product loses identity something like a drop of water in the
splash of an ocean waves falls back into the deep and loses it public
"showing." Meditation is
trying to be received back into the realm of every possible word so that no
particular word has a showing and find in that practice a sense of the fullness
of silence because it is really the loud silence of the hum of all of the
possible.
Aphorism of the Day,
April 8, 2014
Aesthetic vision arises on a continuum of one to the
many. We are overwhelmed by a sense of
the many to be able to believe in One of anything. In monotheistic religions there is the
confession of One God as the Sameness in the many which connects everything and
also is the basis for conduction of mutual experience among the many. Meditation is a way of a metaphorical melting
back to the simple non-dual One. From
the One, we arise to affirm and discover the place for "everything"
under the Sun is the swirling freedom which is so evident.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2014
Meditation is a way of knowing the divine presence through
the still small voice. Elijah the
prophet saw a display of wind, fire and earthquake but only recognized the
divine in the still small voice. The
whisper of peace as the over-all calming effect throughout one's being may be a
better way of affirming a belief that it is better that we know that God knows
us rather than being over-confident about how we think that we know God.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2014
Why should one meditate?
Why would one want to shut down brain states instead of activating as
many as possible to practice a full cerebral exercise? Meditation may be but one exercise on a
continuum between the overload of a "brainstorm" to the simple one
thought or one breath. The entire continuum is needed for invention and
creativity to arise and coalesce to become creative advance from the attending
insight which can arise because of the complexity of the brain states
continuum. One needs to find the naked
faith state of "No Thing" but God as the state of awesomeness which
can occur when one dwells on threshold of the foreground and the background and
on that threshold distinctions do not arise.
Aphorism of Day,
April 5, 2014
People who meditate can get the reputation for being
"navel-gazing" passive quietists.
It is good to remember that meditation is a daily time of "Sabbath
within a Day" rest and dynamic meditation should yield impressive
collateral effects to promote optimal performance in very active lives because
meditation as if it were is a fine tuning of the body's energy with God's Spirit.
Aphorism of Day, April 4, 2014
Meditation is the practice of mapping one's interior. Through surgery and dissection of the
epidermal exterior, the interior can be made into an external object for
viewing and manipulative procedures but this is only an exterior interior. We have an interior life that is inaccessible
to physical manipulation though we try to locate brain centers which seem to
have regulatory influence upon moods, feelings and behaviors. Freud's "talking cure" and lots of
other psychiatric hermeneutics (interpretative practices) have treated the
conscious and the unconscious as languages to be interpreted to bring
understanding of how the interior life interacts with exterior life. Meditation
in the Christian practice is like naval sonar practices. We send metaphor waves into our depth and
see how they return. One metaphor is
that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
In sending this metaphor into our depths with a meditative sonar blip,
we seek to discover that God, the Spirit is praying through us. We meditate with hope and faith that we are
being so "used."
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2014
Meditation functions like a rest sign in the system of
music. The rests in music give content,
definition, context and meaning to what is sounded. Meditation or the practice of silence from
language is what can give our faith lives in worded existence of text and
phonic events individual meaning. In
meditation we attempt to erase the textual border between foreground and
background and in so doing we hope that God's whisper within us can come to
birth in a new and fresh foreground appearance.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2014
Meditation is a neutral way to alter brain states and brain
chemistry; so what makes it a contemplative Christian practice and not just a
practice for attaining peak performance in life? Does meditation have to have
Christian mantras or Lectio Divina and other Christian subtitles to be a valid
Christian spiritual practice? One can
imagine criminals to use meditation to help them in "peak
performance" of crimes. The pragmatic
judgment of meditation is not proficiency in attaining ideal brain wave states
of peace, but attaining just and loving action in one's life. If one divorces meditation from love and
justice and peace then it can simply be a neutral amoral practice.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2014
Meditation: Fasting from Words even knowing that one lives
thoroughly by words so that one punctuates one's life with intentional rest
from words so that one can Be, Be Still,
Be Still and Know, Be Still and Know that I am, Be Still and Know that I AM GOD. Meditation is obeying God when God says,
"Shut up, in the nicest possible way."
Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." St. Paul wrote
in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male and female. Yet religion has been used to uphold
differences to be used for purposes of bigotry, shunning and exclusive
practices for years. Perhaps the
"spirit" of Christ is no longer to be found in religious
organizations which still practice such shunning and so the
"spiritual" has gone extra-ecclesiastical in a world of global
closeness that hardly needs religion to be divisive. It is a good time for the
welcoming "Spirit of Christ" to be evident in churches without making
people pass through such "narrow" doctrinal "detectors" at
the door.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." The late John
C. Lilly of dolphin study fame and friend of Ginsberg and Leary, wrote a book,
"Simulations of God: The Science of God" in which he explicates from
his own experience multiple ways to achieve the "brain states" of
spiritual experience. This scientific
approach of believing that the human being is always already open to experience
of "optimal states,"
"peak events," and ways to be in the "zone" or
"flow" of things without religious tradition narrative content seems
to be attractive to people who are wearied by religious organization being
exclusive and seemingly wanting to prove that Freud was right about lots of
religious behaviors being disorders.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This expression may be an indication of the
loss of anthropological soundness of the rites of the church because the rites
were not experienced as connected with true life events and they have not
always been taught as transformational practice. So the spiritual has become
"supplemental" extra-religious "self-help" individual
strategies. Religion needs to find its
re-connection to life in helping people explicate the realities of the stage of
life that they are in and promote practices which help toward the achievement
of "optimal" states of being within the variety of occurrences within
any stage of life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." For many people of faith, the terms religious
and spiritual may not have any relevance.
They don't seem to apply to people in their own self-understanding of
faith because they do not live in some "academic and pollster" wake
of analysis of what they are doing and feeling when they say that they believe
in God. Such people live in the
continuous primary naivete of what is a personal relationship with Persons of
Greatness whom they know to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And they are not sure about the academic
value of characterizing such a vital relationship, in fact, such academic
aloofness seems to be the untrue analysis of people outside of and foreigners
to the type of relationship which they think that they have with God. So religious and spiritual can simply be the
linguistic coats which academics and pollsters force people to wear. Some people of faith believe such coats don't
fit their experience and so they refuse to don them as how they would show
their faith in the public.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." Some analyze religion as consisting of
exoteric and esoteric aspects, the the former being all of the externals of
religion and the latter being the spiritual center for which religious tradition
and institutions actually exist. So the
external aspects of religion can seem to be mainly about "crowd"
control and administration of people in having a significant "club"
for social integration in a larger society.
And the kernel of of religion is the call of the path to the beatific
vision of God which only the saints and the holy ones seem to want to travel
on. In the bifurcation of religion and
spiritual, one might use the analogy of having body without spirit or being
simply ghostly without a body. It may
mean that we live in a situation of double alienation; religion alienated from
spiritual life and religious life inapplicable to everyday life.
Aphorism of the Day,
March 26, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." Such an expression seems to be nostalgic
aspiration for the Presocratic notion by Anaximenes who essentially held that
"spirit" =pneuma= (πνεῦμα) was the basic matter of the universe. As the metaphorical term accrued meanings in
the theological and psychological mappings of the interior terrain of the
unknowable but metaphor inspiring inner self there developed massive
institutional and social structures around the many notions and practices of
the "spiritual" within successive social contexts. And some have thought that the institutional
shell is now "empty" of "spirit" or the institutional
furniture has become like idols distracting
away from the spirit that seemed to be the founding spring. So a post-institutional spirituality is
expressed in more local or individual modes until post-institutional spiritual
gatherings become their own institutions.
It could be that such spiritual institutions are and will be more a part
of the "for-profit" economic structures, e.g., every yoga based
spiritual establishment. When one pays
for yoga classes one may be paying for the way in which one chooses to learn
how to map one's spiritual-psychological-physical being.
Aphorism of Day, March 25, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." To assume people of faith to be saying,
"I'm not spiritual; I'm a religious person," is something like the
rotund baseball player John Kruk who was eating, drinking and smoking in a
restaurant and a shocked woman asked him if he was an athlete. To which he replied: "Lady, I'm not an
athlete, I'm a baseball player."
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." It could be that we got to this commonly
expressed belief by social process.
Modernity in wealthier societies allowed more individualism, more
nomadic freedom and the proliferation of all kinds of products for every kind
of entertainment. Sports and
entertainment have become more specialized and expansive. Church as once having an exclusive place on
weekly calendars had fewer things to compete with and church fulfilled a major
socio-entertainment aspect of a person's life.
Bible words have a much greater ocean of words in the modern era where
world knowledge doubles daily; Bible words have had more difficulty in avoiding
"saturated meanings" in the plethora of word products including
modern historical scholarship where scholars purport to know more about the
Bible than Jesus did in his time, i.e., that Moses did not write the Torah and
that David did not write all of the Psalms.
Can there be a rapprochement between the notion of the religious and the
spiritual? It could be that Sabbath time
in the past was structured around "market time" so that trading of
products did take place before after the time of prayer. So even Sabbath "fit" in with the
local economy. Can we think outside of
the box and return to the "individual body as temple" theology of
Jesus and Paul in times when actual Temple was destroyed or church buildings
did not exist? If each person's body is
a Temple of the Holy Spirit, then there is the collective body of Christ as a
Temple in its gathering together but there are also satellite and connected
altars in each person's body as a Temple of the Holy Spirit. A rapprochement strategy would mean that the
religious authorities would give up their guilt production by acknowledging
that the enforced obligatory regular group gathering in the group's building
may not be omnicompetent to the spiritual/social/psychological needs of persons
and families. At the same time the satellite spiritual people, freed from those
who would make them feel guilty about church, would understand the importance
of preserving the religious gatherings and its locally adapted accoutrements to
their lives and their society.
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." For people who claim this it means that there
was some point in their lives when religion and spirituality became
separated. What has happened to a person
for religion no longer to be regarded as spiritual. Such experience must have been widespread
enough for it now to be a common claim.
Could it be that churches have been perceived as lagging behind society
at large in willingness to extend justice of full inclusion to lots of people
who were willing to consider themselves religious Christians but did not feel
welcome? Was spirituality a refuge to
find inclusive justice?
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." Being religious in a day when we like to
believe that each person is a free agent and not caught in a web of obligations
and commitments either to church rules
which seem out of date or with forced ways to read the Bible which
contradict all of the scientific ways of one's life; it seems easy to latch upon a spirituality
which provides visualizations of the insides of one's being to re-organize
one's life to the hum of the the Om of the universe and find
"peace." But there may be some
things which atrophy by "going it alone." What about a religion which totally
understands the aesthetic sublime of religious and biblical discourse, allows
you continuity with a tradition which you can "doubt, disagree with and
argue with" (one doesn't agree with grandpa and grandma about everything
and yet one still loves and does not deny the continuity)? What about a religion with expressions that
are not regarded to be absolutes and one which reforms and adjusts to how love
and justice is perfected in life situations?
What about a religion which keeps our social natures from atrophy by
being an intergenerational mentoring community, in part organized to help those
who need help? And what about a religion
which encourages as much private prayer and extra-ecclesiastical meditation as
one wants? How about the Episcopal
Church?
Aphorism of the Day,
March 21, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." The words "religious" and
"spiritual" are words which give us good reason to avoid
pollsters. Pollsters use words which
have thousands of nuances and could easily "die the deaths of a thousand
qualifications" but one is put on the spot in a "religious poll"
to be "either/or" for the sake of the rhetorical purpose of the poll
to enlighten the American people on the nature of religious life. Church leaders do fear irrelevance and
obsolescence of their "totemic" traditional forms being able to
continue to inspire a participatory identity for people. And it could be for many that
"spirituality" expresses for some a moment of discontinuous break
from the religious traditions which have been so formative in the
"story" background of our society even as actors in the foreground
have lost vital touch with that background.
Aphorism of the Day,
March 20, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." Does this have some historical roots in the
"Boomer" generation who experienced a disillusionment with public
institutions including churches when
such institutions seemed to support or tolerate war with less than pure motives
and racial discrimination and social inequality for women and minorities? A naive bubble of our false national
righteousness got burst and there was the reception of a wave of meditating
gurus from the East who provided more religious neutral modes of spiritual,
physical and psychological practice (yogic practices) that could be done alone without having to
live in church communities which upheld social practices which were no longer
regarded to be just.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2019
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This may parallel the general disillusionment
with public institutions and may express the irony of our political sector:
"I'm an American; I don't vote." Meanwhile people with
"skin" in the game and wanting more are fanatic about controlling all
public institutions including religious organizations. Being spiritual can be used as a naive excuse
for political quietism (passivity). We
may only awaken from the quietism when we realize atrocities that are done in
the public sector while we slept politically, did not vote, but consoled
ourselves that we were spiritual.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." In case you haven't noticed for sometime now
spirituality has been quite a "cottage industry" and has gone from
extra-institutional supplemental support to becoming separate
"spiritual" institutions. Wisdom
teachers and gurus, sheikhs and masters have come from around the world; Edgar
Cayce, Madame Blavatsky, Guerdijeff, Ouspensky have generated eclectic and
syncretistic styles of spiritual practice coloring widely outside of the lines
of religious institutions. Religions can
become more popular in "other" countries; the global South is now the
center of Christianity. Spiritual people
ultimately realize they have bodies too and that they are not just spirit and
so they develop institutions to support their physical existence in this
world. Today the world has many
"spiritual" institutions which have all of the signs and indications
as replacement for the traditional religious institutions. Meanwhile many plumb their own religious
institutional traditions for the spiritual practices found in the rich
devotional practices of the Quakers or the profound monastic traditions of the
various churches. And what is
spiritual? Spirit is wind or
breath. Breath is an invisible but real
sign of life. To be spiritual, in a
metaphor, is to be the "wind instrument" of divine presence.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." Frankly the word "spiritual" can
have as many accrued meanings as the word "religious." Spiritual or spirituality can be a modern day
marketing label tool like "natural" and "organic" is to the
food sector. It can be an unwitting way
of saying that I am eccentrically special from the rest of the herd who are
only "religious." One needs to
be careful that "spirituality" does not become an identity worn like
the person who is proud of their humility.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." To be religious probably means for most that
one makes a commitment through regular attendance and participation with a
religious organization or church in one's locale. Such a commitment was more obvious when
people lived in the area for the duration of their lives. Modern life and modern economic life has
actually helped to diminish the participation in religious life through a
forced nomadic lifestyle. Corporations
do not want commitment to home and local institutions to compete with "all
out" loyalty to the profit line of the company. Moving people means that people don't make
commitments to "local" situations since they know that they can at
anytime be moved. Others, like migrant
workers are forced to move to wherever the work is. One can see how people have been forced to
become more isolated "spiritual" islands to adjust to a continual
uprooted existence.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." It could be that religion is often presented
with such rigidity for "community" belief controls that what gets
covered up is the fact that sacrament, dogma, sermon, creed and holy biblical writings are but
highly funneled abbreviations and reductions for the great mystery of God and
the incredible Plenitude of All. God or
mystery cannot be domesticated for our control of either. If God and mystery are reduced to proposition
then we have fooled ourselves with inadequate replacements and lost the posture
to be in "awe," which one would imagine is the very basis of what
might be called "spirituality."
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." Is this a way of saying that one can love God
without going to church? Is it because
one has never tried church because one was not raised that way or has heard all
of the bad press that religion gets? Has
one tried church and not found the serendipity of the kind of engaging
fellowship that one looks for? Do we
need to have matchchurch.com and eharmonychurch.com for churches and people to
find good matches for serendipitous commitment?
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." Is this expression revealing of the
post-modern tendency to oppose "totalizing" views of life? Religion would be such a totalizing view in
that it would include the entire person in society. Is the modern world of specialization
characterized by dividing the human person into constitutive "parts"
and then treating those parts something like the offerings of a cafeteria. "Hmm...I'll have spiritual but I don't
want sacraments, or priests or pastors and I don't want creeds or doctrine or
dogma or religious community or too much Bible, just the good parts about
love."
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." People may say this because they may think
that religious organizations have accrued too much baggage in the long years of
their existence. And they find that the
institution is tending too much to the baggage rather than the people for whom
the baggage is supposed to be supplying the necessities for the life
journey. So, this metaphorical stripping
oneself down to but the "spiritual" seems to be their individual
response. If one is going to go alone to summit one cannot carry all of the
baggage and it could be that the quest alone characterizes how "people
weary" some have become.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." But I will bask in the collateral effects of
the religious witness in the world, like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Mardi
Gras; not to mention the conversion of modern governments to be responsible for
Health, Education and Welfare. The
results of religion in society have given people the freedom to see themselves
as individual spiritual persons who can deny the parentage of religion in their
very formation. Religions as "Mom and
Dad" organizations have certainly not been perfect parents in all of their
activities but they do represent the attempts at having a social effect and
formation by being fellowship gatherings for societal cohesion. That everything has not been perfect is not
the issue; finding a social boat to make it through the full play of freedom in
the morass of particulars in our world is a significant mission. "Spiritual" people who pretend to
be free agents unwittingly ignore all that they have and do receive from the
effects of religion.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." What other rejoinder to this might one
generate? I'm not religious, I'm
natural? I'm a Democrat? I'm Libertarian? I'm Republican? I'm scientific? I'm Vegan?
I'm superstitious? I'm an
agnostic? I'm a Cubs fan (talk about
faith?) I'm Musical, I believe in the Muses.
One can be religious and be lots of other things too, including
spiritual. It is a no-brainer to include
spirituality as an inherit part of the Christian religion, but not just by
title but also by practice.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This is what many tell the pollsters about
their religious preference. This
expression should be a wake up call to churches about an aspect of faith which
is not being fostered by the church. As
the extra-religious identity features of religious commitment break down,
chiefly the ethnic religious tradition identity, and as modern individualism
has happened to make it seem as though everyone is truly a "free
agent" because of the seeming economic independence, the individual may be
asking oneself, "What's missing in the midst of my apparent
self-reliance?" It could be that
disillusionment with all human organizations makes the individual seek an
unattainable "utopia" or "perfection" and it goes under the
name of "spirituality." Such
is probably chimerical but still a valid impulse that should be a concern of
churches.
Aphorism of the Day,
March 8, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This phrase might unwittingly assume the
following words from the mouths of religionists: "I'm not spiritual; I'm religious." But how many people who find themselves
within religious community would assume that they are not spiritual in any way.
If spirituality cannot be separated from religion either religion is being
presented wrongly or those who are "spiritual without being
religious" missed the message. It
is our responsibility to awaken people who are religious to the spirituality
that is found within the religious tradition.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." There may be a subtle judgment in this
confession that people who are "religious" are not
"spiritual." It may be the
case the religious people are religious for the "wrong reasons" but
"spiritual" persons may be spiritual for the "wrong
reasons." The relevant question
might be how a person is filling out the fullness of one's humanity in one's
acknowledgment of God. Religious people
balance their spirituality with corporate prayer and the community context to
practice intergenerational mentoring and outreach. Religious people may not "toot"
their spirituality on street corners and leave that as the secret side which
they perform in their prayer closets.
Spirituality as merely individual religion may leave a person impoverished
in the social dimensions which are provided by religious community. Why would one want to leave the social
dimension of spiritual maturity out of a full definition of
"spirituality?"
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." As modern science has become the main
criteria for determining "truth," traditional religious literature
has been "demythologized" and the old truths have been diminished in
comparison with scientific truths and historicism. Oddly enough we find spirituality of UFO's
and healing crystals and much more New Age re-mythologizing of all sorts.
Wonder has not disappeared it only looks for new topics once traditional topics
have been condemned as no longer worthy for the projection of our wonder. Religionists have defended their books on the
grounds of "scientific" truth and come across as being silly, e.g.
the world is only a few thousand years old.
Having scientific truth does not necessarily make us better moral
beings, as our "marvelous?" inventions of weapons of mass destruction
prove. We need to look to the life
transforming truths of our traditions in gaining better integration of
excellent living for persons in society today.
Some forms of modern spirituality are as eccentric and exclusive as the expressions
of the "old" religions which have been abandoned.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2014
Ash Wednesday Haiku
Body on fast forward
as ashy paint
on canvas forehead
God's Art?
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This can be a form of the subtle oxymoronic
misanthropism of Charley Brown when he said, "I love Mankind; it's people
I can't stand." The writer of the
Epistle of John counters, "how can we say we love God whom we can't see if
we don't love our brothers and sisters whom we see." Theory is less messy
than practice. Religion expresses a
devotion to God; a "binding" connection but religion is done
collaboratively since Word and Language make us necessarily always already
oriented toward collaboration.
Spirituality as an individual "impossible" retreat from the
always already of collaboration as a given because we are languaged beings, is
a dishonest way of living.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." How did religion and the spiritual ever get
to be so antithetical? Has religion become associated with the organizations of
people who mostly are known in the news as people who fight over arcane
religious topics or about who is welcome to their churches? To say, "I'm spiritual" may mean
that I want to be a political quietist or passive about some important issues
of justice and inclusion of people in our society. We need to be careful about using
"spiritual" as an excuse for non-involvement because it may represent
a real naivete about the truth of the "messiness" of life. The whole point of the Good Samaritan story
is that the so-called spiritual people did not want to get involved in helping
the man who was left beaten by the road.
Let not the spiritual be an unrealistic escape from the messiness of
life. Being spiritual means that we work
to clean up some of the mess.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." A child may feel so pressured by the family
baggage of being over-determined and want to "escape" a family
heritage. Something similar may happen
in how people want to leave their religious tradition for a new start. This new start may happen with cursory
brushes with imported aspects of Eastern religions. The most accessible contact with other
religions has been what we call "meditation" technique. The appeal of meditation technique perhaps
has to do with the presentation of Christianity as being something that happens
from the outside in. Even the Spirit is
supposed to come upon one from outside. The meditative traditions seem to
emphasize an arising from within of Life that has always been. This should be a
signal that Christianity should see redemption and salvation as a progressive
recovery of what already was within us.
Salvation is allowing original grace to arise within us to new
events. The apparent external stories of
our faith are the screens of the interior arisings. The disillusionment with
"religion" may only be with religious practices that have radically
bifurcated the interior and exterior worlds.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This attitude might be symptomatic of
frustration with established religious bodies and a revolt against the
hegemonic mediating tendencies of church hierarchies. It might be healthy and phase specific in
one's spiritual life to "go it alone" in the sense of taking personal
responsibility for one's creative advance in integrating the spiritual into
one's overall life but it would seem that in healthy adult psychological
development the end result of spiritual development is a giving mentoring
within a community, which in the thinking of the church is stated as, baptism
is also ordination to ministry. If the
notion of being religious is divorced from baptism as ministry then we do have
a problem. Even when infants are baptized,
they minister. How many have been won
and converted to goodness by a baby's smile?
Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This could mean practicing a purely
individualistic religious belief which may be oxymoronic since religion imply
traditions. How does one then become the
infallible pope in a church of me, myself and I? Or does it mean that I am the ultimate
consumer in cafeteria religion? I simply
pick and choose from different religious offerings without the insight of
knowing the profound social experience which brought each tradition into
existence and without the commitment to get myself dirty in the continuance of
a tradition particularly if the tradition needs to be reformed. Being in a church of one is a way of saying,
"I am really only going to tolerate one imperfect person, namely,
myself."
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2014
"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This self
description often given to religious preference pollsters bespeaks of the loss
of the church as a significant society where spirituality has been replaced
with jumping through hoops to maintain the institution.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2014
What does "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual"
really mean? It probably means something
different for anyone who uses the phrase.
Does it mean "I am so eccentrically and individually spiritual that
I cannot tolerate the rules and the social strictures of religious
organizations?" Does it mean that
religious organizations have too much "old" baggage and cannot adjust
to the rapidly changing new world? Does
it mean that the modern era has allowed me the illusion of being an individual
and self reliant free agent so that I don't have to rely on religious community
to negotiate my existence within a larger society? Does it mean that work society and family are
enough of a social hassle; why should I add another social unit like the church
to my "hassle" schedule? The
challenge for the church today is to make the human fellowship of religion and
spirituality completely compatible.
Spirituality without religion might be a bit disconnected or
"disembodied;" religion without spirituality might be boringly
lifeless.
Aphorism of the Day,
February 25, 2014
It could be that modern science and socialization into cultures
where scientific discourse is the chief criteria for what is regarded to be
"sound" has resulted in the loss of seeing from what is projected
from within. Children who are not
completely "scientize" seem to be able to see from within. We are taught how to segregate our dream life
material from our conscious life. It would seem that the theophanies of the
Scriptures whether on Sinai or Mount the Transfiguraiton relate events where
interior seeing is merge with exterior event or Inscape and Landscape merge to
bring to discourse what was regarded to be significant.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2014
The Last Sunday of the Epiphany recounts the transfiguration
of Jesus upon the mountain and this event reprises the story of how Moses was
transfigured in receiving the law on Mount Sinai. Transfiguration or
metamorphosis could be a metaphor for the progressive process and change
towards transformational excellence in our lives of faith. Metamorphosis implies cycles of growth or
returning to similar faith issues in order to be deepened through subsequent
experience of repetitive crises and joys of living. If our lives sometimes seem like a eternal
return of the "same" it is because the journey of transformation
involves a path something like a rising spiral.
We return to "same" place but at a higher elevation with the
memory of the insight from having been there before.
Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2014
The words of Jesus to "love one's enemies" seem
very radical unless the people who related the words were already instantiating
that love in their inclusive community centered around the teachings of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2014
If the Gospel writing came to their final editions long
after the Christian Movement became primarily Gentile, then the narrative about
the life and words of Jesus would be presented in a way to shows the seeds of
why rabbi Jesus became a big hit in the cities of the Roman Empire. When the
words of Jesus were written, "Love your enemies," the Roman/Gentile
enemies were on their way to being converted by this "movement of
love."
Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2014
History has ironic moments for transvaluing innovation as
being conservative. A chief example is
the most famous convert to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, Cardinal John
Henry Newman. When living as an Anglican
Newman and the Reformers believed that the Roman Catholic Church had
"innovated" in matters of doctrine and departed from the ancient
precedence of Holy Scripture. To make
peace with the notion of doctrinal innovation, Newman wrote a treatise on
innovation with the punchline, "to be perfect is to have changed
often." And this unwittingly
establishes innovation as what is "conserving" about the church of
one's preference. In the Episcopal Church we have had innovating impulsing
towards conserving the dignity and justice of people and their full
participation within the FULL sacramental life of the church. There is
something very conservative about applied justice to people. The blindness of some cultures do not allow
the freedom of justice to be realized and ironically the very practice of
justice is seen to be as innovative. An
irony indeed.
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2014
One of the results of living in the modern world of instant
communication is that we can be informed about all of the bad news. In fact, we can be completely inundated by
the situations of war and human inhumanity.
We can be afflicted with global angst and feel uncomfortable and guilty
about "having it so easy" when so many have it so difficult. We also lose faith in the human ability to
bring quick resolutions to situations of suffering. Like turtles in distress we can retract our
heads into our shells or we can go on our soap boxes and expound about what
should be done. We can become those who
give to charitable organizations who are trying to bring aid and comfort. We can become political activists to help
promote systemic changes. Whether we
like it or not we are connected with each other in this world and everything we
do has reciprocal and collateral consequences even as we do not have precise
knowledge of all of the collateral consequences which may have added up because
of the collection of small responsible or irresponsible human actions. Welcome to the faith situation of our world
today. One can understand why the superhero instant fix genre is so popular in
public culture. In faith, we need to take care of what lies within the
parameters of our epidermis. We need to
find peace within ourselves so that we can be mobilized as peaceful dominoes in
effecting how we fall in our causative actions in our immediate situation. We can pray and give and hope that some
domino of suffering will eventually be affected by how we live.
Aphorism of Day, February 19, 2014
The law of the claw, "eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth" can seem to be a pragmatic system of literal justice and reparative
justice but it often means trying to correct a bad with a bad and reparation is
not often really equal in societies where there is poignant class distinction.
The moral justice of the Sermon on the Mount seems to be acknowledging the
perfect God as the one from whom imperfect beings receive constant reparative
grace to tolerate their imperfections as they explore perfectability through
continuous transformation and who discover that their main social purpose is to
aid others in this path of transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2014
With the knowledge of genocide occurring in the world one
feels helpless and embraces the fact that the divine one is not a
self-consistent continuous synchronous omniscient, omnipotent, omni-loving
Being because one embraces that Freedom and genuinely shared freedoms and
consequences of the same throws the monkey wrench into the notion of a Divine
One with machine like efficiency. In
sharing Freedom with us as free ones, God has to share in our helplessness as
well which is what we subscribe to when we believe that the Divine One said to
the Divine, "My God why have you forsaken me?" Genuine Freedom means that within the total
divine milieu the divine can give occasions of forsakenness to the divine. We in our helplessness enter into that
feeling even as in our limited freedom we cannot give in to passivity or
political quietism in the face of such forsakenness.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2014
Those who pine for mixing public law and religious law would
like Sharia law to rule society or the 10 Commandments to be enshrined in a
National Constitution. The rather ironic
fulfilling of the law suggested in the Sermon on the Mount involves Jesus
thinking outside of this box and proposing impossible standards for his followers. If one were going to establish "case
law" exemplars one might as well shoot for the stars and make them
impossible as in the injunction to "be perfect as the Father in heaven is
perfect." Jesus was thinking less
about how religious groups could control societies and more about setting the
moral direction for people who wanted to be upon the continual path of
transformation. There is no final moral
exemplar when one is on the continuous path of transformation. Laws for society are necessary for pragmatic
business but Jesus was more about the transformations of individual lives as
the personal path to make a significant indirect difference in societies.
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2014
There is something reflexively deconstructive about the
injunction of Jesus to "judge not lest you be judged." This is in fact a judgment against those who
judge. This would be an indication that
we cannot live except through a continual interior process of worded thinking
which causes us to always already make all kinds of judgment. The question then is not whether we make
judgments but whether they are made with benign or venomous intent. And if the latter, we can be sure that at
some point we will also be the object of our venomous judgment aimed at someone
else. If we cannot help but be
constantly judging, let our judgments be neutral for the conducting of daily
business or let them be merciful in our interactions with others. The most transformative mantra prayer in
Orthodox Christianity is the Jesus Prayer which goes, "Lord Jesus Christ,
Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner."
If we use our time asking for continuous mercy, then we have less time to
don the black robes of the judge.
Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2014
There is a subtle change that can occur when religious or
covenantal law meant for the transformation of lives is reduced to juridical
law for punishing people who do not live up to the standards in a given
society; the change is that covenantal law becomes a form of legalism and
manifests practices of puritanical fundamentalism. The results is that one or two examples of
so-called "moral failure" in a particular historical context become
elevated to be the very identity of the people who elevate them. In the clamor for enforcement and punishment,
such people become known only for what they are against and the transformation
potential of law as the reorganization of our life energy in our efforts to
love God is lost.
Aphorism of the Day,
February 14, 2014
Valentine is an obscure saint of the third century who had
the curious fate of becoming ever associated with the release of oxytocin in
the body or the "love chemical" which creates the magnetic force
known by the Hallmark poets as "love." Love is the cliche that if one is fortunate,
one has been able to use the word with the sense of it being a personally
experienced truth. Love, or the Romantic
Love of Valentine's Day is a witness against love being just a general good theory
about the omnipresent collective glue of the cosmos which keeps everything
together; it is more relevant if it has been particularized in the experience
of mutual projection between two persons which has inspired among other things
vows and a whole array of lodging behaviors.
Valentine has the lucky fate of being associated forever with love; may
we all have the lucky fate of particular love too.
Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2014
Forgiveness probably in practice means making some serious
editorial changes or re-writes. We live and interact according to the versions
we have of each other since the real me is cut off from the real you. If we have unfavorable versions of each
other, we at least need to be open to some re-writes of the versions of each
other which do not open the way for reconciliation and new relationship. This does not deny the fact that actual
performance of word and deeds toward each other actually contributed
significantly to the formation of incompatible versions of each other that
prevent significant relationship which is often required by the context.
Forgiveness is based upon the hope of new starts and instead of relying upon a
disappointing version, we need to be open to new versions to occur.
Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2014
Ever wonder why getting everyone enough food and enough
employment is not seen as a major goal of our economy. It could be that we have become so
"individual" in our thinking that we believe it is the sole
responsibility of the adult individual to be completely responsible for bread
winning and employment even as we know that everyone has different individual
conditions which help or hinder their efforts to be employed and earn a living
to feed themselves. Loving God and our
neighbor as ourselves means that we make things basic to adequate lifestyle a
major goal of human creativity in all sectors of society.
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2014
Some of the words of Jesus are not for the literalists as in
"if your right hand offends you, cut it off." If one understands this as a hyperbolic way
of affirming that sometimes one can only gain self-control through fasting then
it makes sense. Fasting may be short term
or it may have to be forever as is practiced in 12 step programs for those who have
been honest about their addictions.
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2014
Why is it that in the incredible genius which is given to
humanity that we have arrived to solve so many complex problems and invented so
many wonderful things that it has not occurred to the so-called private
business sector to solve the issue of poverty and unemployment. Why do we build artificial antagonism between
government and private sector? Why do we
create the double-bind of "Why doesn't the government do something and at
the same time curse the government for spending to do things because they don't
do it in the right way, i.e., my right way.
It does not do Wall Street any favors to have a growing under class of
people living with resentment. If
capitalism is based upon a "free-market" it means that people can
make free decisions to be creative about things like universal employment and
health care. There are enough resources
for "profit and people to co-exist" towards maximizing common good.
Why does a "robber baron" want the title? Why not, a "creative economic
genius" who solved the employment and health dilemma in the private
sector? Why do we leave Health,
Education and Welfare to a parent government?
Because we believe so strongly in human greed that we don't trust the
private sector to really care for common good.
Here's a thought: Why don't we
ask Wall Street and all captains of industry to humanize, moralize, or
Christianize their enterprises? Why
don't we ask them to make part of their goal to be economically creative for
the greatest common good. If it truly is
a free-market, then we all can choose the maximum common good in freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2014
We know that change is the accompanying interpretation of
the passing of time. Things and people
age and we interpret meaning about how things and people age. We ride two counter principles, the obvious
effects of the aging of the body and the attending body-moods inflicted upon
our interior lives of soul (mind, emotions and choice). The other principle is the principle of the
immortality of the soul/spirit which is why denial is so easy; we feel in some
place of our being endlessly young. And
so the work of transformation in the life of faith is bringing the energy of
spirit into a mixture with the stuff of our existence which is in demise. This mixture, this collision of stuff
accounts for the agony and ecstasy of human life. We know that at some point our bodies will no
longer respond to the immortal soul and have to be abandoned and left behind
and be but the launching pad for the always already Phoenix of our Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2014
If one tries to prove that Newton, Einstein and Planck were
all saying the same thing because they used the same terms such as energy, mass
and matter then one would have to force a harmony of paradigms which is not
there. The same compulsion exists among
some who have taken upon themselves the role of being the "true"
keepers of the truth of the Bible.
Instead of acknowledging the
incredible diversity of language and thought paradigms that are present in a
collection of writings from over hundreds of years there is a compulsion to
assume a unified message. Such forced
harmonization upon the biblical writings tries to pretend that God could be
revealed without human meditation. In
trying to uphold a skewed view of the divine inspiration of the Bible, they
unwittingly deny it obvious humanity.
Some of us like the Bible because it is "all too human" but
invites us to expand us to our full humanity expressed in love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2014
Archaeologists have discovered that camels were introduced
into Palestine much later than the supposed era of Abraham yet the Abraham
stories have camels in them. Is this a
big problem for one's faith? It should not
be since what we think is history was never the mode of writing of biblical
writers. Why force the Bible into a
writing genre that didn't exist at the time and make it function as something
it was never intended to be? One
falsifies the "truth" of the Bible by forcing it to be a work in the
mode of modern history writing. We are
to be "fools" for Christ's sake by using the practice of
transformation of our lives toward love and justice. This transformation of our lives is to be our
"foolish" truth, not really foolish thinking about the Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2014
We are always already being conducted by word because word
is made flesh in us in active and passive ways.
Passive ways since we get ourselves stamped deeply with assumptions and
ideologies of the cultural locations where we are born and live. Part of us becoming aware of knowing that we
are surfing within this ocean of words is to know how to conduct the energies
of words as they are known to comprise our lives with different modalities and
frequencies. A first time conscious experience of something gets marked with a
remembering and even though the feeling in its uniqueness does not have a word,
it does become a word equivalent in the feeling tone of memory. Music and emotion are their own nuances of
our worded-existence and it is the way in which we conduct our multi-discursive
practice of words which calls forth our most profound artistic gifts in the the
art of living.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2014
You are the light of the world. How can and does one's life live up to this
charge? Jesus provided his disciples
with teaching and practices which taught them to mobilize all of their human
capacity such that the witness of their lives became a way for others to see
life differently and be invited to explore the life practices which could change
their own lives toward a winsome excellence.
Jesus said that we could live to glorify our Father in heaven. In saying this he was hinting at the
discovery of a different realm of parenting to which we have access as we rid
ourselves of seeing ourselves as being completely determined by our earthly
parents.
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2014
Salt and light people; Jesus said his friends were to be
salt and light. The metaphor of salt
would be an invitation for us to learn how we can live "spicy" and
preserving lives. Learning how to be
spicy means that we learn how to enhance the food of ordinary experience. Living as complements of life we help people
find how the sublime has broken into what seems an ordinary fare. Our lives should also have a preserving
effect upon the life of our world; the life of love promotes the endurance of
this world and we are called to have preserving effect upon our world because
we believe God called and calls the world "Good."
Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2014
Sometimes we can use "success" as the only
criteria for validity. Success seems so
obvious that it seems that we need to just add a blessing to success to help it
spread like wildfire. But in our study of history, there have been
"successful" movements in society that have been horrifying for the
common good of humanity or to significant minorities. The notion of success begs the question,
"Success for whom?" A prime
function of the God-notion is the imagination beyond mere humanism in specific
contexts when we aspire to a seemingly elusive notion of universal
justice. Universal justice is the
ultimate success, and indeed the "devil" is in the details of
applying it in our contexts.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2014
What are elements of the mystique of sports in our society
with general devotion that seems to rival religious piety? We have on Super Bowl Sunday a game that
sublimates the ancient warrior impulses when the contest meant protecting one's
tribe or feeding them through attacking competing tribes for resources. Now we have specialized the ancient impulse
in a game with enough rules to "protect" the warriors but enough
freedom to require individual excellence.
The individual is playing for concentric spheres of glory, self, team,
regional city, "the world."
The story happens on the field and there is a resolution, which holds up
for one year. People live with such open
and unresolved issues of life, there is great public projection upon the
resolution of a game. After the high school
level, most players are "mercenary" in that they lose their actual
regional ties in where they play. Lots
of players go completely cosmic in the game by getting God and Jesus involved
in the struggle and their personal narrative of the game. Lots of money gets exchanged, lots of
secular "communion" libations are offered. And lots of empty Cathedrals witness in
envious silence that modern passion has the leisure contexts to support such
diverse specializations of passions. The
spiritual is still the great regulator and happens mostly outside of church
walls, which is why the dismissal is the most profound proclamation of the
Mass.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2014
Simeon, the composer of the "Song of Simeon," said
to Mary at the presentation of her son Jesus in the Temple, "and a sword
will pierce your own soul too."
Perhaps the worst sword which could pierce the soul of any parent is to
see one's child suffer and die before a parent leaves this world. As the spear pierced the side of Jesus on the
cross, so too the sword of loss and grief must have gone into Mary.
Aphorism of the Day, January 31, 2014
One could make the case that when the Gospel message proved
successful in building many semi-private faith social gatherings in the cities
of the Roman Empire and attracted people for whom the ritual customs of Judaism
were impractical and thus inaccessible, it became necessary for a rhetorical
presentation of showing the paths of transitions for the Christ communities to
become inclusive of Gentiles. The song
of Simeon is one such subtle rhetoric of transition; the Christ Child is to be
a light to the Gentiles. The Song of
Simeon encodes in an origin rhetoric what was already happening within the
Pauline churches.
Aphorism of the Day,
January 30, 2014
When differences become overwhelming and too difficult for
us negotiate effective action it is easy to reduce differences to binaries,
either/or simplicity. The Bible can
reduce all of the people of the earth to two classes of people Jews/Gentiles
even though most of the peoples of the earth for most of history did not even
know they were on the Gentile side of the binary system. We/they can become the easy division when
diversity is not appreciated for the complexity which is desirable for
aesthetic combinations for creativity.
What was God before the Divine Self took on reduction to the human
situation to be Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu et al in order to be
the supreme organizing Value to call people to excellence in their situation
through their various traditions?
Aphorism of the Day, January 29, 2014
We are taught to pray "deliver us from evil," and
when bad things happen to us we pray for healthy and favorable outcomes, which
may not always come. So we might think
God is not all powerful or not willing or loving enough towards us always to
both prevent evil or give us the preferred outcome. We might assume then that prayer is but a
method of adapting and accepting what actually is happening to us. Or we might assume that God is pure Creativity
and as such the Divine Self honors freedom as the condition which gives meaning
to our lives as being much more than mere robotic existence. In the human condition our mission of faith
is to live by the vision of health and freedom from pain as the way things
should be. Our very lives are crafted
and forged by asserting, begging for, living toward what is good and does not
cause harm. Pain of all sorts is the
cry within the conditions of freedom to seek what is not painful and so prayer
is how we orientate our lives toward the normalcy of health and salvation, even
while we honor the conditions of freedom which define God and the way divinity
is known in our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2014
The same person (Paul) who wrote "don't be conformed to
the world, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind" also wrote,
"I have become all things to all people so that I might by all possible
means save some." The
"world" can be a peer pressured setting which makes it a challenge to
practice Christ-like love and justice and hence some flee to cloistered
communities or adhere to customs to counter the "outside" world as
the Amish and others do. It may be the
harder mission to regard everything in the world as potentially good and
therefore useful in promoting the good health of the Gospel. Having the responsibilities with all of the
choices in uncloistered living is the challenge of transforming our minds. The work of words and interpretation of words
and how they become flesh is part of dangerous excitement of living the Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2014
We highly praise innovation in science and technology. We readily allow scientific paradigms to
shift if new ways of thinking can provide more adequate and pragmatic solutions
to problems. Before his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church from
Anglicanism, John Henry Newman wrote a treatise on doctrinal innovation and he
wrote, "to be perfect is to have changed often." He needed to justify the innovations in
doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church for which the Reformers decried as not
being biblical. Yet one can note how
slow churches are to innovate and perhaps it is hegemonic behaviors which
prevent innovation or even prevent the church from being at the forefront of justice
in realizing the full dignity of many people.
In the history of the church it could be that hegemonic central
authority squelched diverse expressions but in squelching diversity what was
lost was the full range of topics to provide for more occasions of
synthesis. Heuristics, invention is
hindered through the limitation of scope of human research. To suppress diversity results in the loss of
creativity because some areas of potential inspiration are marked as forbidden
territory.
Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2014
The sublime in writing involves the writer bringing forth
from the reservoir within where words exists as every possible combination to
come forth to represent events in human experience. The birth of the words from
the writer's reservoir of possible words involves those words becoming actual
as chameleon or protean representatives in such a way as to make the reader
believe that people have cohabited a soul space and connected in a significant
way to make the proverbial sparks happen.
Writers set out to prove that words are spirit and they are life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2014
On the day commemorating the conversion of St. Paul it may
behoove us to ponder some collateral significance of this event. The Gospel and New Testament writings present
the origin of the Jesus Movement in an intra-Judaic dispute setting. Saul as a Pharisee was presented as a chief
inquisitor in pursuing the punishment and death of followers of Jesus. Paul's
conversion involved such an immediate change in his life direction it became an exemplar of the Spirit of the
Jesus Movement. Rabbi Saul knew the
commandment, "thou shalt not kill;" when it dawned on him that he was
killing he was indeed vulnerable to the psychological conditions conducive to a
dramatic conversion.
Aphorism of the Day,
January 24, 2014
Words are spirit and they are life and words in community
and setting are the living dynamic force in the constituting of values and
functions. It is easy to use the
argument of longest duration of a set value or function to justify its
continued perpetuation and promulgation in practice. If duration of practice guaranteed all future
practice we would still be using horse and buggies like the Amish. Words and the spirit of words inspire innovations
and innovations become established orthodoxy and then "heresies,"
vanguard movements or reforms challenge the "pragmatic" truth of
orthodoxy and the "raison d'etre" becomes the most causative absolute
statement of social truth: "We've always done it this way!" Take the ordination of women to the
priesthood; Jesus was a man, his "official" twelve disciples were
men, therefore all priests have to be men even though Christian priesthood did
not exist in the time of Jesus. It is
hard to use the "we've always done it this way" when social practices
have beginnings and changes in their expressions. Fortunately, some Christians have returned to
the nature of the church being seen as priestly because Christ is priestly in
standing between humanity and God in an intercessory way. Women have been priestly people within the
church long before they were allowed to serve as priests at the altar and it is
exposed that people in power are the ones who get to pick and choose to use as
justification the really bad argument: "We've always done it this
way."
Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2014
Word Colorists admit that words can be like colors in that
colors can evolve from the mixtures with other colors giving the colors new
appearances some of which are even named and replicated in paint stores. Words attain subtle variations based upon
their contexts with other words and in how they arise to represent what we
think we are seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, hearing and tasting. And since the origins of how each of us takes
on the language of our lives is rather mysterious, each of us have our own word
colorings of our own versions of the world and how we experience it. Our world has been painted and colored into
pragmatic functional existence by the way in which we use words and the way
they use us particularly when we were young and unable to resist how they began
to imprint and encode our existence before we became more active word users
ourselves. Part of our adult life is to
try to understand all of the coding which we received in the state of simply
being a passive recipients of the imprint of language in defining our
existence. We will never finish with
Word being made flesh in our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2014
Sometimes we want to treat religion and revelation and the
divine as things so miraculous and so
wonderful that we regard them as too special to include any taint of
humanity. Alas! We have to admit finally
it is always human beings bringing perceptions to language, even things about
the divine. There is a false wish to
certify that "my" religious view is untainted by human filtering
(spiritual without being human) and therefore better than yours. This too is an all too human wish.
Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2014
The New Testament include origin writings about Jesus
Christ, but also about the beginning of the clubs of people which arose that
came to be called churches. The origin
of these churches occurred in the befriending dynamic which is known as the
"Call" of Christ. During the
season of the Epiphany we hearken back to the original befriending of the
disciples by Jesus Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2014
As we grow and have to accommodate ourselves to new social
settings we can lose something of the "wild" energy of our
curiosity. By conforming to group values
we can sometimes end up censoring the expressions of our curiosity and so
suppress wonder that we lose our energy for optimism in life. The call of Christ, if it means being born
again, means that we can unleash the original flames of our curiosity and ride
the energy of joy which comes from owning up to native curiosity. It does not mean that we cease to exercise a
monitoring of desire and how we let our desire manifest itself towards objects
on which it is projected. Perhaps the
metaphor of surfing is called for; the waves are very powerful and we harness
their power to propel us in the delight of surfing. And when we wipe out, we paddle out to do it
again.
Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2014
The call of Christ involves for you and me the significant
self-love of curiosity. Curiosity is
being drawn to a vision of who I am and what I can do and become in the
future. People like Jesus had such
mentoring charisma that people said, “I don’t know what I really want to be,
but I do know that I want to be more like that man Jesus in the art of living.”
Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2014
When athletes are at peak performance they often say that
they are "in the zone." This
is a state of being where one senses such a "no miss" lyricism in
one's athletic actions. The call of God
is learning to be "in the zone" in the art of living. How does one get to lyricism in life such
that it just seems like it was always meant to be. The sense of synchronous connectedness can
attend one's sense of the call of God in Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2014
One of the themes of the Season of the Epiphany is what is
known as the call of God. One aspect of
the call of God is the coming into sense of having functional and beneficial
value to other people in such a way that one has the proverbial cliche
experience of "deja vu." One
entes the so-called zone of "sensing" one's purpose of existence.
Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2014
In belle lettres a particular movement in rhetoric, one of
the goals of writing and speaking was propriety. Propriety can be seen as protocol or decorum
to fit in to a social class situation or it could be what one is attempting to
do with one's life in the art of living, namely, doing, speaking, writing, and
being "appropriate" to the situation.
There would seem to be so many standards of appropriateness today and
the first stage of attempting appropriateness is to discern a situation. St. Paul wrote that he had become all things
to all people. This could be seen as a
crass political trick to say things to "get" votes or it could be the
humility to take into account the situation of the people for whom one wants to
wants to the share the very best thing of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2014
We can read the Bible in uninspired ways and present it to
others in ways in which it was not intended.
If we import modern scientific thinking and modern journalistic writing
into the era when the writing of the Genesis stories were written we can get
the silliness of thinking that the Earth is but a few thousand years old. But if we understand the inspiration of
having the basic moral questions of life presented to us in an inspired wisdom
Origin story we be thankful for the elevated insights which come from inspired
biblical writing.
Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2014
Growing up in life has much to do with dealing with all of
the important things over which we had no choice. Things like the fact that we were born with
the particular parents we had in a place and in a certain time. For a long time in our lives, we may believe
that we had freedom but freedom took place within our "guided ignorance." It may seem like freedom if the menu has six
choices but six choices does not seem like freedom when you subsequently
discover that the menu could have had hundreds of choices. It does no good to be angry retroactively
about the choices which you never knew could have been offered. At some point in adulthood one can reach the
point of significant "authorship" of one's own life when one does not
deny the absoluteness of the past but one begins to tap the authorial potential
for the current story that one is living now.
Providence is a work of faith; providence is the hindsight editorial
reworking of the memories of one's past in living one's current life by
faith.
Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2014
Death and all of its painful acolytes of suffering, sickness
and demise have the power to cause segregatory behaviors within the
community. In subtle and not so subtle
ways we quarantine the sick and the dead in "public health" efforts
to protect the healthy from "infection" but also to distract
attention away from the negative actuarial probabilities in life. We certainly would like to "censor"
exposure to such to our children. One of
the distinctive things about the ministry of Jesus was to bring back into
community those who were declared to be ritually impure due to their condition
or exposure to conditions in life.
Psychological quarantine is perhaps the one of the most poignantly
painful consequences of any illness. In
ancient times, the container that death left was the human body, the corpse
which ironically was to be respected with burial but at the same time contact
with the corpse made one ritually impure.
Consider perhaps a consequence of the belief in the resurrection of
Christ: Death no longer was a state of "ritual impurity" but a
gateway to something which would make death simply another incident in one's
greater and more embracing life. That's
my story and I'm sticking to it.
Aphorism of the Day,
January 12, 2014
Something can lose its function in a subsequent period of
time. Flint arrowheads are now artifacts
of the past while new modern archery arrowheads are being made. Cultural practices such as rites of passage
can change over time based upon the way in which they are used by
communities. Baptism is one such rite of
passage that has undergone many changes.
Baptism is in continuity with the mikveh rituals of Judaism and it is
difficult to know what sort of official "religious" office that John
the Baptist held within Judaism when he practiced baptism in the Jordan
River. The practices of baptism in the
many forms of Christianity have been quite diverse in the way in which
communities have understood baptism and the modes in which it has been carried
out. And even when a church teaches
baptism in a certain way it does not guarantee that the meaning is received and
practiced that way by the recipient. At
the heart of baptism is expressed a desire to belong to a community which is
organized around the person of Jesus Christ.
And one's being is changed by the values of one's community. One's life is interpreted by the words of
value derived from one's community.
Linguistic social ontology is the word in the depth of a person forming
one's being.
Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2014
As we head to a baptismal Sunday and contemplate the
baptismal rite most often practiced as a water minimal rite with less than half
a shot glass trickled over the head of an infant, we must do massive
imaginative expansion on the sign value of that little trickle of water. Water is massive in our lives and in our
traditions. The death caused by water of
the great Flood is matched with the salvific death of Jesus where the power of
a good death is seen to be the power to stop and interdict the harmful
addictions of idolatry. Water has
cleansing effects; water has thirst quenching effects as we baptize our
interior life every time we drink. Water
attends birth; we are born from amniotic waters formed in the gestation
environment. Water has playful and
sporting delight. Water supports
transportation even as it can impede travel requiring a bridge or fording
behaviors. Water shapes life through the
power of erosion. Water transmute to
become rock hard ice and gaseous air.
Indeed, water is a universal substance in human experience, truly a
worthy substance to celebrate an initiatory rite where the initiated is invited
to hear the voice of God declare the foundation of ultimate esteem, "You
are my son, you are my daughter and I am pleased with you."
Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2014
Baptism and the urbanization factor is something to
consider. As a rite of initiation, a
person is initiated into a significant community which functions on behalf of
the person and negotiates the identity of the person within a setting. Urbanization happens because of the movement
of peoples and in such movements significant stable social groups such as
family, clan and tribe get disrupted. A
person or family could find themselves in a new location and the home church or
synagogue in the Jewish Diaspora could provide a "club" identity
within an oft hostile environment.
Baptism as initiation into a home church could provide significant
social identity and account for the success of the Jesus Movement within the
cities of the Roman Empire. Baptism in a
more hostile environment might function a bit differently than it does today
when baptism is already an accepted social reality of the culture at large.
Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2014
There can be quite a gap between the baptismal living and
the aspirations expressed in the baptismal vows. It does set up some interesting
probabilities: We are bound to fail.
Wait, the promise of forgiveness is a built in fail safe to failure. We don't take the vows seriously since it is
just a cultural ritual for family obligation and solidarity. The vows do not require perfection; only the
admission of perfectability. The vows
give us the perfect opportunity to be "recovering hypocrites" because
we preach a standard higher than we can live, but we're still committed to
it. I'd rather be with a group of
"recovering hypocrites" than with those who declare no standard of
future perfectability at all.
Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2014
Baptism is a rite of passage and the rite expresses the
basic crisis in life, viz., how does an individual live within a community
artfully. It expresses something like a
"group marriage" in that it is a rite of vows: vows a person to God
and Christ, vows of a person to one's community, vows of the community to the
person taking a vow, vows to the people beyond one's community in the promise
to seek dignity and justice and finally a belief that God makes a vow to the
person in the bestowing of the Holy Spirit.
The baptismal rite only freezes in a liturgy the basic dynamic of life itself. Too often churches have argued about baptism
as a juridical procedure of administrative control of their communities when we
should be centering upon the dynamic covenant of baptismal living.
Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2014
There is birth in general and there is the particular birth
of an individual person from a specific mother and father. There is general membership in the kingdom
God by virtue of having no choice at all but to live within the general grace
of living and moving and having our being in God. There is specific and particular membership
with the intentional and purposive community of faith to celebrate and transact
with the "always, already" grace of God. Membership process in a Christian community
stretches from birth to death and one of the celebratory gates that one goes
through is the rite of baptism because one makes very particular one's location
in the discipleship process to fully access the grace of God in one's life
within a community. Baptism is a way of
moving grace from the theory of something that happens in general to an
acknowledgment that it has happened to me and I am given a milestone in my own
narrative of accepting God's grace.
Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2014
Today, the Feast of the Epiphany derives from the surprise
of a historical fact: Jesus Christ gained a following in the Gentile
population. In hindsight we look for
mystery of why the uncanny happens. How
did this small movement deriving from a populist rabbi in Galilee end up
sweeping the Roman Empire? How does this
Christ still engages us today? The Feast
of the Epiphany is still a feast of jaw-dropping wonder.
Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2014
The story of the visit of the magi to the Christ Child arose
after the historical fact of the success of Christocentric Judaism in the
cities of the Roman Empire. Urban
centers arise because people leave places and by various necessities come to be
located in a metropolis. The replacement
factor for family, tribe and clan brought about extra-individual and
extra-family clubs or churches and some were synagogue influenced in their
organizational patterns where there was a gathering of Jews in the
Diaspora. But the success of an
organization where Jews and Gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, slave and
free negotiated for each other a communal existence which mediated their
identity in a city was due to the realization of the mystical presence of
Christ. The magi story symbolized the
pilgrimage of Gentiles to the spiritual reality of "Christ born in them,
" the hope of glory.
Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2014
One can note in sociology the pizza effect; a word for
spiced flat bread/open pie that derives from Italy and goes around the world
and morphs to include all of the hybrid brands of American pizza all claiming
authentic descent from the homeland. The
ultimate gall is to then sell American pizza back in the homeland. The Jesus Movement began as a rural Galilean
movement against the "urban" Jerusalem religious establishment but
essentially became a world wide movement in the cities of the Roman
Empire. Today there are so many hybrid
varieties of the Jesus Movement and when it tries to "go home" to
Palestine as an authentic rabbinic messianism, it meets with resistance, like
trying to sell American pizza in Naples.
Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2014
The use of language by human beings provides for humanity
the illusion of immortality by seeming to establish stability or duration. Everything that exists becomes in time and so
everything ages and everything changes.
When we assign singular words to changing entities we are seemingly
establishing duration by retaining a single word for a changing entity in
time. Language as the human technology
of memory purports to establish permanency and we trick ourselves by hiding the
mortality of words with words, viz., words become and age and change just as
the entities which they supposedly fix with singular meanings. So, rather than trying to assume we could
grasp some final perfect Static State of Being, it might be better to conceive
of the almighty as Omni-Becoming, permanent Creativity. An Omni-Becoming Being would be more
conducive to any notion of genuine freedom as well as more intuitive with the
way in which life is, namely one of time and change.
Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2014
The narrative form of truth so much a part of biblical
textual presentation suffered a misrepresentation when its expositors seemed to
be embarrassed with the art of living in the form of story and translated
narrative into didactic logical propositions of creed and doctrine and into
juridical practices for community order.
What was lost was the art of Judaeo-Christian living except in the
mystics who still cherished the mystery of not controlling the presentation of
God through creed or regimented communities under canon law. Let's get back to the art of living even if
it is messy in accepting each person as a unique artist of life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2014
The name of Jesus has a meaning and it is our belief that he
lived up to his name. One who has been
named "lover of horses" has not yet manifested much equine preference
and so as far as horses go he has been "misnamed." But names themselves cannot be limited to
singular meanings since names themselves are supreme reductions; all of the
occasions that have gone into a person becoming is reduced to a single
identifying word, a name, as if the name could realistically represent the
wealth of the community of occasions which go into a person. Naming as identity is sometimes used to
violate the mystery of a person by presuming to know someone because one knows
their name. The greatest reduction of
all is the name: G-d, a name, that is regarded to be so utterly full of
Occasions of Becoming that it is presumptuous to even try to accomplish the
greatest reduction of all by presuming to speak the Holy, yet Plenitudinous,
Name. The reduction of What Was, What
Might Have Been, What Is, and What Will Be to a mere name, is the presumption
of naming. We cannot but continue to
name; but let not naming violate the profound mystery of all of the becoming
for which thds.
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