Aphorism of the Day, January 31, 2015
The term "mental health" basically can mean the way in which one's interior life is brought to interact with and cause one's external life behaviors in a manner appropriate to the particular social or cultural contexts where one's behavior is appraised or judged. There are entire lifestyles which are deemed poor "mental health" to outsiders who do not share in the "group craziness." During the time of Jesus there did not exist the classifications for dissociative identity disorders and the variety of seizure events and it was convenient to designate all seeming "impulse control" behaviors as due to "unclean spirits." Rather than centering in on the particular folk medicine cure offered by Jesus, it is probably more instructive to find the literary purpose for these encounter for presenting Jesus as an external suffering servant messiah but as an interior ghostbusting kingly messiah who won the battle of the interior in his own temptation vision quest and was thus the Ultimate Minister of the Interior in helping people deal with the great interior accuser who prevented access to abundant life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 30,2015
The term "mental health" basically can mean the way in which one's interior life is brought to interact with and cause one's external life behaviors in a manner appropriate to the particular social or cultural contexts where one's behavior is appraised or judged. There are entire lifestyles which are deemed poor "mental health" to outsiders who do not share in the "group craziness." During the time of Jesus there did not exist the classifications for dissociative identity disorders and the variety of seizure events and it was convenient to designate all seeming "impulse control" behaviors as due to "unclean spirits." Rather than centering in on the particular folk medicine cure offered by Jesus, it is probably more instructive to find the literary purpose for these encounter for presenting Jesus as an external suffering servant messiah but as an interior ghostbusting kingly messiah who won the battle of the interior in his own temptation vision quest and was thus the Ultimate Minister of the Interior in helping people deal with the great interior accuser who prevented access to abundant life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 30,2015
"For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and
flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic
powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the
heavenly places." This struggle against spiritual forces of evil which
characterize the Pauline cosmology is instantiated in the Gospel narrative of
Jesus who is a cure of souls. The
Zealots were fighting against the evil power of the Roman Empire; King Jesus
was a king who did not have the "authority" of armies but he did have
the authority to transform lives with the charisma of his manifested life
force.
My favorite way of appropriating the presentation of Jesus as an "exorcist" is as a People Whisperer. Sometimes children have "fits" and they act out their inability to reconcile their interior states of being within their social context. When such "fits" are found in adults we wonder why adults did not develop the skills to prevent such "fits." There is an entire range of interior states which gain acting out behaviors and some of them are so dark and shadowy that they attain the designation of being socially inappropriate, unhealthy, or harmful. Dealing with "controlling impulses" is a work of life; sometimes one's physiology or body chemistry or traumatic events in one's life result in significant loss of impulse control and one finds oneself in the state of needing to be "whispered" by a higher power who can help transform the energy of impulse into the energy of productive life work. A great blessing in life is to have been "whispered" at the right time and place by the right whisperer. May the Whisperer be with you, and may you learn to whisper the ones whom you are called to whisper.
Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2015
The DSM-V is the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which is the "Bible" for the modern counseling community. Every society has had their own classification system for "mental disorders" and there remains today classification systems for "disorders" which are not recognized by the "scientific" DSM-V. Ethnographers recognize what might be called today systems of "folk medicine" classifications of "disorders" and shamans, medicine men, and exorcists are the attending practitioners. These folk practitioners handle the ghostbusting ministry which arise in a distressed populace who are frightened by certain eerie manifestations from the vast interior life. Such folk medicine figured prominently in the time of Jesus as "demon possessed" or unclean spirit became the pre-DSM classification for persons whose interior lives were so disordered that they scared the bejeebers out of the general populace such that religious figures wanted them segregated from the public. The Gospels present Jesus as the ultimate "whisperer" of such persons and as such his exorcisms instantiated the cosmology of the fight against interior principalities and powers to prove that in the interior kingdom the battle over Satan and evil was won by King Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2015
What if the Christian churches only innovated whenever every church could ratify a particular change? If this were the case, we would still be waiting for permission to use the Book of Common Prayer. In the issue of the just participation of all baptized members in the ordained ministries of the church how can we delay and forbid people to bless us in ordained ministry just to wait on Christian bodies that have not changed liturgical details for centuries? How can we glorify patriarchal details of past cultural practice to the place of supreme practice? Would that the spirit of innovation as written about by Cardinal Newman be practiced when he wrote, "To be perfect is to have changed often." Perfection in the Greek includes the notion of "telos" which can be understood as a static, complete end or it can be the perfectability of always becoming and the greatness of self-surpassability. It would seem to me that a dynamic doctrine of the Holy Spirit inspiring people in Time, would have to include the wisdom of innovation.
Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2015
The conversion of St. Paul is perhaps the second most watershed event, after Jesus, in the history of Christianity. Paul, as Saul, opposed the rabbinical school of Jesus and his followers until his dramatic conversion. Paul as a astute sociological observer noted the effect of the message of Jesus on the Gentile populace as successful social clubs arose in the cities throughout the Roman Empire. Paul had to deal with this success: Should he require Gentile followers of Jesus to be fully complying "ritual Jews" or were the ritual aspects of Judaism too inaccessible to them? And in the relaxation of the "ritual purity" standard was the separation with Judaism an inevitable event? And how could a theology of divorce or separation of the Jewish and Christian communities be written? (see the Epistle of Romans) And how could the antiquity of Gentile faith be given biblical precedence? (see Romans and references to Abraham) The final coup de grace is seen when the Gospels arose fully incorporating in cryptic ways Pauline Gentile theology within the narrative of the life and ministry of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2015
A metaphor has limitation in conveying correspondences from one area to the next. Take for example the "fishing" metaphor for Christian evangelism. Do we really think that it is a preditorial act of Christians on non-Christians whereby with a net we trap unsuspecting people who do not know that they are being caught? Or is the metaphor simply a correspondence of craft or vocation? There are things that one learns to be good at fishing and so too in evangelism one needs to learn how to be a people person in learning how to serve people by giving them your best good news. Evangelism as an act of exploiting the vulnerable does give evangelism a bad name.
Aphorism of Day, January 24, 2015
St. Paul wrote, "Do not be conformed to this world..." The Amish community decided that the way to do this was to suddenly stop any technological advance, hence the perpetuity of buggy transportation. And we have an irony on the Amish and they on us. One might subscribe to the notion that effective evangelism involves some engagement with one's world. One can remember the time when Rock music was "Satan's music" in fundamentalist churches and now one can find both Christian Rock and Heavy Metal music in Christian communities. The second half of the Pauline verse reads, "but be transformed by the renewing of your minds." There is no mind without language and so we as consumers of what is happening in our world have to make our mind a place of world "laundering" as we use cleansing words to re-present and transform everything in our world so that we can be agents of the the Spirit in moving over the Void of Chaos in this world and present a creative Gospel which is good news about our world because it includes the wisdom of how to live within its dangerously exciting possibilities.
Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2015
The case for Christian unity might be over simplified to mean structural organizational unity, and this metaphor may be more apropos for the corporate gathering of a group of people that seems to be necessary in every society, namely, a standing army under a general. This kind of military unity is only one aspect of unity; a more enlightened and historically accurate view of Christian unity would find it being on a continuum with its opposite, namely division. A notion of aesthetic beauty, function and value involves the continuum of the simple and the diverse since what is really unifying in aesthetics is the personal experience of the sublime in the encounter called the artistic event. Aesthetics events are diversified to fit the diversity of people. The artistic unifying event in Christianity is knowing that one is "one with the Father" as Jesus was. The prayer of Jesus is a petition that his disciple know the sublime event of being "one with the Father." This is not a militaristic group unity, in fact the Gospel has to be fluid and diverse in its aesthetic manifestations so that as many people as possible can enter into the event of a sublime encounter when one knows that one is "one with the Father" and knows that one is a child of God. Unity is the experience of belonging to God's family as a unique child and knowing quite well that one's brothers and sisters also have their unique, original and unifying experience with their heavenly parent.
Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2015
Christian unity cannot be based upon a notion of truth being a static statement of common beliefs that existed in the time of the forms of rabbinical Judaism at the time when Jesus had his own school and followers. One can naively make a claim about the "faith once delivered to the saints" and then live pretending as though the members of the church through history have not gone through countless numbers of highly differentiated successive paradigms of thought and presume still to call themselves Christians. Christian unity has to include the openness to the future, which is openness to the Spirit to work creatively and innovatively in the pastoral seedbed of responding to human need which is the birth place of new systematic theology.
Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2015
The main issue of Christian Unity has to do with who has the power to define what that unity means in how it is practiced in community life. Every Christian body has struggled in history with its inability to be inclusive once it becomes known and evident to those who have been made to feel excluded from not only membership but from full rights and privileges of that group. If baptism does not mean openness to the fullness of teleological ministerial possibility (everyone may become a bishop but only a few will actually do so) then the full inclusive unity of Christianity is not yet achieved and a work in progress for which we must continue to pray.
Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2015
Some times we can be naive in thinking what "Christian Unity" would look like. We can generalize a false image from the priestly prayer of Christ asking that his followers all be one. Jesus realized that even a rather "homogeneous" group of Jewish males did not easily get along. "That they are may be one", could be a prayer of declaration of what one has no choice about within a collectivity. Can a proverbial snowflake pretend that it is not snow? As individual as a snowflake is in its uniqueness, it still is "one" in the snowiness of its nature. So when an individual clamors about individual uniqueness one can only do so as a "parasite" on the oneness of humanity which comprises a diversity. The prayer of Christian Unity is really about using our "special gifted individual identities" to enhance a better Christlike common humanity toward love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2015
We look to the narratives of the past to establish institutions and current legitimacy of practice. The narrative of the Petrine confession has been used to found the entire apostolic history complex of the church(es). When one looks at the actual narrative of the confession, it proves to an instructional "vignette" portraying how a famous church leader once did not really understand the meaning of the Messiah as the Messiah became to be understood in the Christo-centric Judaism which became so popular within the cities of the Roman Empire. Members of Christo-centric Judaic communities understood their Messiah to be a "suffering servant" Messiah whose triumphant "Davidic" overtones would be delayed until a future return. The actual confession of Peter could also be a reiteration of a poetic Royal Psalm when the court poet wrote admiringly about the king's self understanding of his anointed role: "The Lord said to me, "You are my Son, today I have begotten you.""
Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2015
The call of God can be known in the experience characterized by the great baseball accidental tautologist (one who says "this is this"), Yogi Berra as, "it's like deja vu all over again." It is the experience of such "harmonic convergence" that one feels such a fit in a moment of existence that one confesses the great and friendly Provident One. One is blessed in such moments to know intimately the experience of the personal purpose of one's life and one is humbled by the sublime in breaking of such moments of hope when it seems as though love and justice are truly triumphant.
Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2015
The most general call of life is the automatic call of life to a future. Life and all of its sub-nano particles are in motion and transformation. On the macro-level of human freedom and choice we have a degree of freedom to shape the future that we have no choice but to go into. How should we shape our futures? My future? Our future? Our beings have language facility and so we are equipped to listen and read signs found within the people and events of our lives. With language we are equipped to hear and read the call of God in manifold ways. If we have come to believe that God, definitionally is the One which none greater can be conceived and that God is love and justice, then if we act from a motive of seeking love and justice in our lives, we can be sure that we are answering the call of God, no matter what the details of our life circumstances are.
Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2015
The "Call" of life has more to do with the manifold "callings" of living. There are the everyday quotidian "calls" which are indications to us to direct and motivate acts of self-maintenance and care and the care of those in our lives, doing dishes, laundry, et al. And we can get bored with the necessary calls of the quotidian and we need "special" calls to activities or objects with are able to attract our life energy or desire to motivate repetitive behaviors of discipline toward a call to a vocation (from the Latin "vocare"=call). But we also need to a further sense of a call along with the requirements of quotidian and the special call; we need calls as Events of the Sublime to provide us a Ground and foundation stronger than the quotidian and vocational repetitional acts that are both vulnerable to the decay of disillusionment. The Events of the Sublime are important to establish us in holistic living for consolation in face of the inevitable decay of the disillusionment which is needed for educational re-illusioning.
Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2015
The season of the Epiphany is about the call of God or the call of Christ. One can get a very limited notion of the call of God if one just limits it to mean a call to ministry or a call to particular type of piety or faith community. There are as many calls of Christ as there are people and one could also say that the callings are also continuous because each person has to find the unique call manifested each days in one's life. Rather than letting the call of God glorify a particular religious profession why not saturate particular and exclusive notion of the call within the everyday religious faith adventure of putting oneself in the place of hearing what the call is for me now to do. We may want to glorify hierarchies of the call of God when what we really need to hear now is the holy call to "to the dishes."
Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2015
There is a real sense in which the Gospels could be read as a deeply ironic profound satire. Consider: A literature about a man and a movement claiming to be another kingdom in the kingdom of the world empire of the Caesar. It most likely was an underground literature whose kingdom premise was a mockery of the social empirical reality of the Caesar and his world kingdom. Recall the discussion in John's Gospel between Pilate and Jesus with Jesus essentially saying to Pilate, "You are but a puppet of God even when you give me the death penalty." This literature was written by people whose interior life was snatched by the Spirit of another order and speaking from this other order, other realm, other kingdom, they were satirically mocking the Caesar by having their king ruling from the cross of his death. The satire does not get any more profound. It is like the boy who trips in front of his friends and to save face says, "I meant for that to happen." The Gospel King Jesus is slap stick satire of another order.
Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2015
The Bible can be regarded as such a sacred book that readers are forbidden to think that the writers had a sense of humor. Words on the page can preserve as a technology of memory but they cannot impart the fullness of the original contexts when the words were generated or performed within a community. The Bible has a talking donkey, thoughts of men compared to a "puff of wind," Jonah angry with God about a worm and a bush et al. Because the Bible has some serious stuff, we should not prevent the truly comedic material being regarded as such. One can can hear humor in a eulogy at a very solemn burial liturgy because humor can co-exist with the seriousness of sorrow and loss. People are multi-faceted and humor is a facet of being human. Humor can be the automatic deconstructive response of not taking anything serious except the ONE who deserves to be taken serious and yet that ONE can't be grasp by those who are less than the ONE. Humor and satire are good for the habit we have of putting idols of all sort in the place the ONE who cannot be made into an idol of any sort.
Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2015
The most awful and permissive form of "free speech" is the body language acts of violence towards another. Societies in their competition for land and resources for their collective common good permit the violence of what is called war under various rationale of "just wars." We are more shocked by violence when it is more local and individual. When violence disrupts the quotidian, the everyday life, it is experienced as a more personally directed violence. When individuals can be held accountable for violence and not are anonymous within a collective army, the violence seems to be experienced as more of a threat because local violence does not happen within the "rules" of war. Violence seems more understandable when it is local and individual because we can seem to see the direct individual causal factors. What is baffling for us today is that when freedom of expression has grown to heretofore unmatched levels because we have thrown off the tyranny which once prevented it, socio-religio-pathological guerrilla death cults seek to stifle such freedom of expression through local acts of violence and the mystery of evil continues to play in our world. We know that there is connection between violence on both the macro and micro levels and the work of peace is to get us back to seeing each others as neighbors with names and not as anonymous people bearing a "collective" name of the "them" versus "us." The work of Peace is not yet done and as world population grows it is easier to get lost in collective identities. Blessed are the peace makers for they shall be call children of God. How we all aspire to be such children of God.
Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2015
The high regard for John the Baptist by the Gospel writers meant that he was treated as the respected and loved prophet “emeritus” in the community of Jesus Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2015
Did you ever consider the human person to be an amphibian in permanent exile from under water living? Our birth time eviction from living within the gestational amniotic waters meant a permanent change of environment and we went from living by water to living by breath. And water and breath (Spirit) are two prominent features of baptism as the occasion of celebration of our membership within the family of God.
Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2015
1 Cor. 10:23: "All things are lawful or permitted for me but not everything is beneficial." Comedic discourse of our postmodern era in Western countries is probably the most "permissive" of all discourses since the proliferation of comedic occasions has multiplied the juxtaposition of positions of ironic contrast between so many different styles of life experience in our world. Comedic events occur for people when ironic dissonance occurs, but comedy is very local and very personal. And if a particular comedic discourse does not make everyone laugh but is disturbing for people who don't wish for their sacred categories to be included in any ironic contrast then those people find comedic permissiveness not to be beneficial but harmful and disrespectful to how they constitute their own dignity. In the West we often have unspoken rules of "political correctness" which only permit people who are a member of a minority to "make comedic" jokes about themselves while it is seen to be offensive for "outsiders" to do so. So there is a huge question about "comedic" restraint if one knows that people could be offended. There is the question of free speech and the permissive versus beneficial issue which pertain to how people are going to live together in a global world which forces us to overhear each other more than we would choose. The question for a Christian would be resolved towards making decisions of beneficial respect for others even while Christians cannot demand in this world that all comedians be "Christ-like." The bigger question of freedom involves the freedom which each person has to freely censor what one chooses to allow entrance to the gates of one's perceptions. When all is said and done, even if one experiences comedy as being really truly bad taste or even repulsive or as sacrilege, violent acts of revenge are an even more permissive "body language" discourse in response and such acts cannot but falsify any true motive of a commitment to an all merciful, all compassionate God. Sticks, stones and bullets used as the vocabulary of one's body language in violent acts beget the same response and so we have the cycle of violence which needs heroic, merciful, miraculous reconciliation grace among people.
Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2015
The terrible events in Paris invite us to reflect upon how sacred topics and subjects in the different cultures and religions of our world can be treated with various sensitivity when it comes to satire, humor and comedy. In the Western modern world we have arrived at the place where freedom allows that everything that can come to language and pictures should actually do so because in free societies it is up to individuals to be their own censors as to what they choose to let into their perceptual portals. (Though this "free speech" has some limits when it comes to extreme prejudice or brutality to various groups or animals) Yet members of other countries who have known the years of colonization effects of Western countries have a different sensitivity about making their sacred topics objects of satire or scorn and with vigilante acts they decide to be the inquisitioners and the punishers of the comedic offenders. Comedy, humor and satire about the holy may be a way for people to shield themselves from the great Unknown Mystery of life which religionists have presumed to make known through "revelation." There is a kind of scorn about people who act as though they have "inside information" on what "really" the meaning of existence is. One wonders if religious vigilantes who decide to defend the honors of their religious "outer symbols" do not end up making them idols with their rotten purge. We all need humility; we in our past used to burn our heretics at the stake in the name of our "loving" God. We have slavery and the Holocaust on our historical resumes. And so we pray for peace and ways to manifest in our lives that God is love and promotes doing no harm of any sort to anyone.
Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2015
The first sign of Jesus presented in the Gospel of John was responding to his mother's request to deal with the shortage of wine at a wedding. This story was used by the writer to illustrate how the Risen Christ within the lives of people allows them to know the uncanny sublime within the apparent ordinary. When everyone seems to be drinking ordinary water, there is the awareness of some that faith is the alchemical ability to taste Delight within the ordinary. May you have those, "My, My" events today.
Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2015
Is the Epiphany really about the three kings from the East coming to Bethlehem or is it a story form instantiation of the reality that Christo-centric Judaism became more popular with Gentiles than Jews? The foreigners are the wise ones who came socially, ethnically and geographically far and wide into the community which gathered because of the mutual and effervescent experience of the risen Christ born in their lives. People were drawn from their "distances" to recognize Christ as the anointed or telling presence of God in their lives and they were regarded to be the wise ones who had celestial guidance.
Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2015
Sometimes the ways in which the church has presented the notion of God's grace has more to do with the administration and authority of it by church leaders to regulate who is in or out of their community. When the church has treated the story of the fall from creation grace as a "causative absolute event" of two people on behalf the entire human race, we have found the church locked in the impoverishment of creation grace which is always already expressive of the God of love. Even if one does not celebrate one's birthday, it does not effect whether a person was actually born or not. All people have existence and live and move and have their being in God as God's children; the fact that all people are not baptized does not negate their birth state as children of God. When Jesus said that the kingdom of God belongs to children, he did not mean just "baptized" children. Let us recover from this causative absolute notion of the fall and recover the grace of creation and yes, let us continue to have baptism as a community celebration of people living in the effective awareness of the grace of God that has always already been toward us.
Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2015
Jesus as a boy is recorded as discovering that he was needed to be in his Father's House and he was not referring to his home in Nazareth. The Gospels use a family metaphor and political metaphor for the Christian life. One is born into the recognition of one's membership into God's family with a heavenly parent and one inherits a "kingdom or realm" of God. These are Gospel metaphors for the awareness of living in parallel inner and outer realities with an understanding that the discovery of the inner kingdom and a heavenly parent are significant break throughs in one's life.
Aphorism of the Day January 3, 2015
Recently a report of actual statistics indicate that violence is down in our world in comparison with the past. We don't perceive it that way because "news" is decided on the basic of what is the current deprivation of the normal good. The news is now "business" and it is basically the business of appealing to the general public as mostly consisting of "rubber necking;" you know, the minor freeway fender bender, car on the side of the road and traffic backed up for miles because of our curiosity about the mystery of misfortune. News ends up magnifying evil, violence and misfortune beyond its statistic occurrence and is probably an incitement for further violence because of the fixated and glorified reporting. Ever notice how suddenly something so serious just drops off the news chart when something "bigger" comes and all of the media scrambles like lemmings to cover it? How do you and I in this year let our lives be under the control of Good News or Gospel while at the same time not being pollyannaish about the reality of the real problems in the world? Let us continue to assert that Gospel or Good News is the Norm and something which stands as a witness against any deprivation of the Norm.
Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2015
Take some time for silence and listen. With the practice of meditative silence one can open one's eyes and see things differently. One can see former background items become foreground and find basic joy in things that had been so taken for granted that one's joy-sensing mechanism had not reduced familiarity to contempt but to forgetting to be thankful.
Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2015
A phil-aphorific New Year to all. Aphorisms are for people who have short attention and can't put a book together because mid-sentence they have already self-deconstructed what they have written and the myriad contexts suddenly occur which falsify and so are like quick sand beneath which rapidly erases the lasting "solidity" of thought. I would re-write the biblical phrase about the holy God: No one can see God and live. No one can experience God except to be continuously deconstructed. Have a blessed deconstructed 2015. Deconstruction is a work of Hope because we always have a future and having a future means there is no finality.
