Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2015
The church has always had to learn to find the glorious median between respecting the differences of people in affirming each person's gift and at the same time expressing a unified sameness of a paradigm so that different people can accomplish things together. A forced unity of an "empire church" quenches the gift of the Spirit to individuals, while if individuals believe spiritual innovation means simply "doing one's own thing" then chaos can ensue. How can one express individual and gifted difference within the community processes of a unifying paradigm? How can the processes of a unifying paradigm accept and discern individual differences which may help to saturate and eventually change the nature of the "unifying" paradigm itself. The group paradigm provides the framework for individuals to create and in reciprocity individual creativity can progressively change the paradigm even to the point of the birth of a new paradigm. The birth of Gentile Christianity out of a Christo-centric Judaism was perhaps the first major paradigm shift in the history of "Christianity."
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2015
By the time that Gospels were written, "take up my cross and follow me" as words of the oracle of the Risen Christ within the Gospel communities, had become an abbreviation for a spiritual process because the resurrection appearances of Christ and their reports had made the crucifixion from an awful event of capital punishment into a metaphor of spiritual transformation. A disciple of Christ saw the death of Jesus as a power to die to unworthy things in the "psuche" or soul life and the resurrection was the power to perform the new acts of repentance, the "meta-noia," the after mind of the former state of mind from which one did unworthy things.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2015
We are enchanted by the possibility of people being able to predict the future. Nostradamus still is a curiosity to many as are many astrologers who give people possible narratives for their future. Knowing the future as actual and not as possible is often how it seems that the New Testament writers regarded the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures or is it that we do not not understand that humanity through language has just so many limited topics such that we in the present eventually line up with a previous themes manifested in details of a former time and in identity exclaim "deja vu." The interpretive methods of the New Testament writer involved aligning their current events with Hebrew Scripture topics and then declaring the former spirit involved in a previous event was somehow involved in a current event. This dynamic remembering of the "spirit" behind a previous event recurring as the "spirit" behind a current event was the interpretative method of making sense of current events and it provided a providential narrative of hope in the lives of people. We do the same thing today with some different rhetorical practices. We align the present with past and know that the sameness of the present with past seems to make the past predicative while at the same time being completely new and different.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2015
One person's heresy is another person's inspired innovation. Did you ever consider early Christians as such liberals and reformers of Judaism that they went too far and were "excommunicated" by the leaders of synagogues who insisted that in compromising the ancient ritual aspects of Judaism, the core of Jewish practice would be compromised beyond recognition? The innovators, particularly St. Paul wrote an apology for the many persons who could not become ritual Jews and yet followed the teaching of Jesus. Jesus as a Jewish male and rabbi, most likely performed the basic ritual practices of Judaism although he is presented like an ancient prophet in being a critic of "legalistic" Judaism and the ignoring the great laws of justice and compassion. St. Paul, in order to avoid being seen as a heretic reformer, appealed to the pre-Israel and pre-Mosaic figure of Abraham as a father of faith to trace the spiritual lineage of Gentile Christians. He was writing that the basic DNA of God in the human community is Spirit who can be known by all and is not limited to the particulars of one's cultural or religious coding received in one's upbringing.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2015
From the Gospel accounts it is obvious that one of main issues of discussion, division and speculation was about the nature of the Messiah. We in our modern area divide up entertainment, politics and religion and then import these kinds of specialized categories of life to the analysis of ancient cultures. I would suggest that in the ancient cultures which did not have that much "total world knowledge" available, entertainment, politics and religion were more unified as every day subject matter. Try to imagine the combination of hopes for someone like Superman as an ethical and religious hero whom everyone is hoping will show up and run the country. If we bifurcate a "spiritual" Messiah from the political and entertaining aspirations for the superhero, we might fail to appreciate the Gospel contexts regarding the Messiah.
Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2015
The writing of the historic past is art of making us feel like we were there when past events occurred but this is only a guise because when we live after an event we ask different kinds of questions about an event than the people who lived the event would have asked. When we read the various Gospels we are reading the layers of how the various Christ communities who were preaching about Jesus understood the significance of his life as it concerned the later comprised communities where the preaching was occurring. So there are layers of anachronisms in the Gospels because the early Christ communities responsible for comprising the various Gospels believed that the Risen Christ was an oracle in their midst. For the communities which were comprising the Gospels, the traditions of Jesus of Nazareth were being interpreted, edited and preached under the inspiration of the oracle of the Risen Christ in their midst. The early churches did not see the applications of the oracles of Christ as being contradictory just different because different circumstances required different applied interpretations of the life of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2015
In a world where people of "faith" use their Holy Books to justify all manner of horrendous practices as well as really bad and incoherent and inconsistent thinking, it is interesting to note that in the temptation of Jesus by Satan, Satan tried to get Jesus to interpret Scripture wrongly. Because the poetic Psalmist wrote about angels bearing someone up, Jesus was supposed to jump and defy gravity. If we can be tricked into applying modern science methods of empirical verification to obvious aesthetic and artistic texts written to inspire us in the art of living, then one can use the Bible to promote all sorts of bad thinking and even harmful behaviors. Our world suffers greatly from the harmful behaviors of people interpreting their Holy Books badly.
Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2015
Elijah's fast was for forty days. Moses stayed on Mount Sinai for forty days. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness for forty days. Rather than being literalists about chronological time, one should note that biblical writers used the number forty to denote "eventful time" or in Greek, "kairos" time. In the function of the Gospels as spiritual manuals for initiates to the faith, each initiate returns to the temptation of Jesus to project upon it as one finds the Risen Christ as the Higher Power within to meet the current temptations in the life of the Christian initiate who is always already being initiated in the life of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2015
During Lent it might be useful to think very small in terms of change and amendment of life. The phrase "Rome was not built in a day but they were laying bricks" might be apropos. By setting fantasy goals of change one can get easily disappointed in early and often failure and the gap between the goal and the reality of actual behaviors too formidable. Mustard seed faith is about performing the very small things which can add up to the formation of one's character and when character has become formed one has the acquired inclination to variegate performance of reforming deeds to many other areas of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2015
One can observe both a private and public season of Lent. Join with the family of faith in the public commitments of the Lenten season, but each is invited to observe their own private Lenten season in the "closet space of one's life." Plan actions of a different sort of discipline and tailor it to challenge one's own growth in excellence. Someone's private Lenten goal was to do each day 10 things a day that he really did not want to do because their tedious and boring effects and when he committed to it, he found out by Easter that his procrastination had been dealt a blow. Lent is the opportunity for each to undergo a simulated ordeal of one's own choosing and to complete this ordeal one will have faith muscles to bear the involuntary ordeals which come one's way.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2015
It is common for groups which share a mission to differentiate the kinds of things which they do with their communal time to provide variety and to stimulate excellence by changing routines. Lent is something akin to "making a retreat" within one ordinary life schedule by doing some things differently as an individual and as a community. One participates in this Lenten "retreat" as a way of solidarity with one's community and as an obligation to examine one's life practices and values to assess whether they are serving one's vision of excellence which one has for oneself and whether one is committed in sacrificial ways to one's faith community to bring excellence to the common mission. Take time for value review during this season of Lent.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2017
Shrove Tuesday is known now more for pancakes and the last day of the bacchanal Mardi Gras than it is for Shriving, a more commonly used word in the mid-1900's. Making a confession, receiving absolution and a penance has been a religious obligation and by making it an obligation regulated by the clergy the practice was made "official" and probably became detached from the obvious anthropological soundness of the every day practice of confessing to one another, receiving forgiveness and practicing immediate amendment of life as one's penance. It is not healthy for a community of people to "retain" the sins of each other just as it is not healthy to make the private criteria of "I'm not hurting anyone" as the significant justification for what one is doing. Accepting that everything one does affects in some way the community of people means that confession, forgiveness and amendment of life are the works and education in love towards a more just world.
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2015
One's interior life can conjure up many moods and feelings and sometimes one wants to know the "cause" of why one feels the way in which one feels. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to "interpret" the cause of a feeling based upon what one has experienced with another person as a moment of slight or awkwardness. It is important to avoid judgments about knowing precisely why one feels the way one feels at any given moment. One can carry feelings of having been slighted from a previous situation into reacting unwittingly towards people in another situation. Hyper-sensitivity can often lead to wrong interpretation and impute wrong motives to others who are clueless about one's interior dynamic. The Psalmist prayed, "Create in me a clean heart, O Lord." Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." Inside cleanliness perhaps is about learning to refrain from rushing to judgment about others and about oneself and having the ability to see "God" as the providence of all because conferring power of ultimate causation of all things being as they are is to confer too much power to others and ourselves.
Aphorism of Day, February 15, 2015
You and I may have favorite phases to observe in the life cycle of butterflies, a cycle which we call metamorphosis. Having favorite phases should not keep us from an appreciation and acceptance and even fascination with the entire cycle. The Gospels present us with phases of the life of Jesus Christ which correspond to the spiritual discipline, the spiritual metamorphosis of the life of risen Christ being born within us and growing within us. We may prefer the birth and resurrection of Christ over the death of Christ and his lonely temptations in the wilderness but in faith we have to integrate the full cycle of spiritual metamorphosis in our lives. Remember this on the day when we read about the Transfiguration of Christ. Transfiguration is the word that is used to translate the Greek word from which we get metamorphosis. We are always already in spiritual metamorphosis. By accepting the Gospel we can aid this process of spiritual metamorphosis because it is better to integrate and accept this process rather than having the sense that we are forced into this process and not having a clue about what is happening to us. The Gospel provides us with a program to understand and appreciate and abet the process of spiritual metamorphosis in one's life. It is happening whether one knows it or not, so it is better to seek wisdom about the process to which we are already unconsciously pre-committed.
Aphorism of Day, February 14, 2015
On Valentine's Day one could quote the Belle of Amherst, "That love is all there is, is all we know of love..." Or one could quote the Epistle of John, "God is love..." or the Gospel of John, "For God so loved the world that God gave....." Valentine's Day has become the most popular day to celebrate the human experience that is called "love." Love is perhaps the "most natural drug" of the universe in its attractive effects. We have such a day of love because enough people have come under the addictive effects of love to make them comport themselves in specific and intentional and committed ways toward another person for "varying" periods of duration. Sadly, specific relationship love often ends the experience of the repetition of loving acts, even while the memory of the profound magnetism and gravitational pull towards another is never lost. Such a memory invites consistent repetition of loving acts or people without someone to draw from them such projected desire may live in the forlornness of something akin to an edited phrase of Led Zeppelin poetry, of always "looking for the one who has never been born." As we confess that God is love, we are confessing that there is a great magnetic force which will always keep everything together, even if we cannot always experience being together as compatible or mutually beneficial matches. Since, God is love, we are all together whether we want to be or not and so in accepting togetherness we accept that justice is the work of love in honoring the differences which exist in the Togetherness of Love.
Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2015
We can read the Gospels wrongly as modern journalistic eye-witness accounts of the life of Jesus or we can read them as spiritual manuals for a growing movement in the Roman Empire at the end of the first century. As spiritual manuals, and rather private to their communities, they used the re-presentation of events in the life of Jesus to correspond with the transformational events in the lives of Christian devotees who had been initiated into the process of the life and light of the risen Christ being born into one's being and growing as a metamorphosis of one's life within the church as a family of support within cultural settings where they often faced opposition.
Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2015
Alain de Botton in his analysis of news reporting claims that "artistic" presentation is important in whether people will pay attention to the news. Apparently people don't like just plain "boring" facts. This may disappoint the more scientific sanguine mind with the guise of "just the facts ma'am." Mcluhan told us that the "medium" is the message and that supports the irony that lots of people prefer to get their news through comedians who actually satirize the "official" news presenters. The goal of science seems to be to squeeze the "aesthetic" presentation out of everything for "just the facts" purposes. We pretend to buy this as the most profound truth criteria even as we reject it in the practice of how we take on most of the information of our lives. Fundamentalists take the wonderfully aesthetic presentation of the salvation history present in the Bible and try to present it as modern "just the facts" kind of material. It does not work for mature faith to present wonderful aesthetic matter as scientific description. Persons who know and are honest about discursive differences found in the Bible, can have faith and read it too in the Bible, like having one's cake and eating it too.
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2015
Elevation and light are used as metaphors for inner religious experience. During the season of the Epiphany, Light is a metaphor for the effect of Jesus Christ in the lives of the people of the world. The Transfiguration climax of the season of the Epiphany is an event of light whereby the inner light of the divine makes the face of Jesus to be but a filament. Just as the Sun is the external light of the world, we look for interior light as a source of divine light within us to bring us to the benefits of this interior shining, namely, wisdom to practice love and justice in our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2015
Why do we use the phrase "mountain top" experience? In the experience with external landscapes those who have made treks to hills and mountain tops know the exhilaration of the panorama and the details of everything which looks small get merged into the grandeur of a Macroscopic Oneness and one has the wonder of being one who gazes upon things seemingly fitting together because one is above the fray of witnessing the details of microscopic competition. Everything seems to fit together in the grand view. We take the external elevation of a mountain top and make it a metaphor for an interior experience because we designate peak experiences and other events of euphoria as hierarchically superior. Great events recorded in the Bible happened on mountain tops, the giving of the law on Sinai and the Transfiguration on perhaps Mount Tabor (?). Our lives are transformed and transfigured by the insights and inspirations of our peak experiences. The Christian discipline involves intentional practices of putting ourselves in the place of knowing peak experiences so that we can ever surpass ourselves in excellence in a future state and learn to teach others the way to their own peak experiences.
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2015
The modern scientific method which limited valid scientific meanings to events which could only be empirically verified or at least admitting to be open to future falsification threw religionists into a defensive tizzy. When modern science influenced news writing and historical writing then only events which complied with empirically verifiable events were regarded to be true and meaningful. Events which could not comply with empirical verification were called myths and myths came to mean in a pejorative sense, untrue or meaningless or childish and for weak minds. The writer of the letter of Peter states about Jesus, "We did not follow cleverly devised myths/fables..." This is a pejorative use of the word "myth" and is a way of saying that the experience of Jesus is not like the myths of the Greeks. Biblical apologists need to quit being defensive about the nature of biblical literature in the face of modern science and modern news reporting, unless such apologists are trying to defend the Bible as being exactly same kind of meaningful literature as the language found in a scientific law or an eye-witnessed event which could be corroborated by thousands of viewers in the very same way. Accepting the various kinds of writing styles and art forms present in the Bible within many different contexts does not mean that the truths of biblical meanings cannot be held at the same time as the truths of scientific meanings. A scientist can enjoy the writings of Dr. Seuss by not confusing and conflating genres. Why would a person of faith want to sacrifice the unique and personal ways in which a transformational literature has made an impact upon one's life? One needs only to feel defensive about biblical literature if one's resulting lifestyle has not been productive of sound reasoning, love and justice. People who reject the faith of religious communities mostly do so because they have been exposed to such people behaving and thinking badly.
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2015
"I have become all things to all people that I might by all means save some." This sounds like the words of a chameleon politician willing to say and do anything to get a vote, but it is the words of the most famous apostles to the Gentiles. To save someone means to offer the best health for someone's soul that one has to offer. If one wants to give out the best that one has, one has to check one's ego at the door on things that are non-essential such as matters of style, habits and taste. Sometimes Christians are offensive to others because they wear their pieties on their sleeves as the criteria for even approaching them. Calling one's mole hills, mountains gives people nothing to climb, only something to stamp on and ignore. Winning friends for how one wants to give them one's Gospel=Good News may mean that one does not place so many barriers of individual taste in the way as censoring guards to the gateway of one's approval.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2015
Christians articulate different nuances of salvation. Some group emphasize the notion of "final salvation" or being saved from eternal damnation in the afterlife. They believe that a funeral is the perfect occasion to "scare" people into the salvation of eternal life. No one can have empirical verification of the afterlife and yet we know that imaginations of subjective immortality can influence how we live with faith now especially in accepting that the gift of hope is not just some kind of cruel hoax. Other Christians prefer to emphasize the more holistic notion of salvation as the cradle to grave quest for ever self-surpassing excellence. Social salvation means it is not a selfish individual quest but individual salvation involves adding excellence to the lives of as many others that we can. Individual salvation cannot be divorced from getting the basics of healthy necessities of life to as many people as possible. Being so focused on individual final salvation as the main event can result in a callous neglect of letting lots of people in this world go to hell in the hand basket of their impoverished life circumstances. If final salvation does not start with holistic excellence in this life then a correction is needed to integrate the imaginations of hope in the afterlife with actual events of progressive experiences of salvation for us in this life.
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2015
Why is the placebo effect so important in health? Probably because the attitude of faith is an important complement to all other health treatments. Faith arouses the native grace of one's spiritual energy so that one's interior forces provide the orientation to health. "They may have just been sugar pills, but I still got better." Healing within the community of faith takes into account the energies of the unseen which are not revealed on x rays. The energies of faith counter the forces of stress which is often the "if I don't know what it is, I can blame stress" diagnosis of medical scientists.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2015
We have gotten used to defining ourselves by the statistical "normal" distribution often called the bell shaped curve. Statistical approximation is highly dependent upon how one defines the coordinates. So based upon what one is defining for identity factors one may fall in the fat or "normal" part of the curve in some areas of identity and in the "narrow" edges in other areas of identity. As one cries out for uniqueness one finds that one is tethered to humanity by having to come to someone else's statistical approximation of self definition. One might think that one can avoid being another statistic by avoiding people implying that if one is not seen one is not a statistic. It could be that creativity arises in the quest for a sort of solipsistic uniqueness even though as soon as one shares the products of of uniqueness, one becomes liable to be data of statistical approximation of defining humanity. The future of the fullness of God means that God will come to language in the endless statistical approximations of those who live out the divine image. So God's icon-bearers help bring to language God's own becoming known by us.
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2015
Does one have to be inspired to believe or does one believe in order to receive inspiration? Or is this a "what-comes-first-chicken-or-the-egg?" type of question? Prepare yourself for inspiration simply by looking intently. Native beauty in the form of a tree or the spider web. Native beauty in the brilliant ordinary of people. Part of the deception of our virtual media is to regard their special effects exaggerations to set the hierarchy of our beauty values. One can begin to let the "special effects" do the seeing for us and we inadvertently lose the ability to see glorious native beauty until we perhaps make a pilgrimage to the ocean to be overwhelmed by its sheer grandness. Sheer grandness is all around us if we can learn to see with the child-like wonder lenses of the kingdom of God. Go forth and see everything for the first time, again today.
Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2015
The inner life is the realm of the principalities and powers referred to by St. Paul. Our inner lives have to be "colonized" and we assume that one of the effects of civilization and culture is this process of colonization of the interior forces. Chief in colonization is the creative use of language and we first need to understand how language in our unintentional and passive taking on of the definitions of everything in our lives have left us with some automatic repetitional patterns which we discover to be unhealthy controlling impulses resulting in us acting out in ways in which we wish we didn't. Interdiction of automatic controlling scripts can only occur when we discover, acknowledge and name them and we have ourselves revealed more clearly to ourselves as we are exposed to model people who present to us new authorial potential in the re-colonization of our interior lives. Jesus as the "interior ghostbuster" is the model of one with the charismatic effect to impact the interior lives of others. We are to develop the charismatic effects of our baptismal ministries to help each other attain ever increasing soundness of mind, emotion, body and spirit. Let us open the gates of our interior lives to be colonized by the charismatic effects of Jesus and learn how to be people who help people take new authorial control of their own interior lives.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2015
When conquering people take over territory they often rename the places which they conquer. Colonists did this in America, the Romans did it as did the people of Israel when they conquered the land of the Canaanites. Sometimes the colonists made faint efforts to transliterate indigenous name places into their own languages. In the Bible story there is also an interior colonization which takes place; in Hebrew Scriptures the God El attains the head position in the heavenly court of the gods of the conquered peoples. In the arising of the Christian movement, its success was first an "inside" job long before it became the preferred religion of the Roman Empire. The ancient wise man Socrates had an inner spiritual guide called a "daimon." In the time of Jesus this same term became synonymous with "unclean" spirits who disrupted as personal and controlling and chaotic impulses within a person. St. Paul theology of "principalities and powers" was presented clearly in the ministry of Jesus in some Gospels when he as King of the Interior has the authority to recolonize and rename the interior life and cast out the old rulers of the interior life. Modern science, pharmacology, and psychology have recolonized the interior life by naming the cause of interior forces as events of genetics, physiology and traumatic events in the development of a person. Yogic traditions which have come West, re-colonize the interior in terms of energy zones or chakras which need to be "aligned" through yogic practices. Chinese Taoists have colonized the interior life in terms of life force of "chi." The post-Enlightenment re-invention of the "individual" as a "free agent" due to education and participatory democracies means that today an individual has access to an entire global smorgasbord of names for the interior of one's life. Each is called to be a "manager" in how one uses models of configuring what is happening within oneself. Probably the determining criteria is, "what works." If pragmatic criteria is what determines, then pragmatic criteria also has to be defined. For some, "what works" means whatever makes me wealthy or happy. It would seem that we should define the pragmatic criteria in terms of love, justice and common good and hope that happiness and having enough attends love, justice and the common good. Go forth and colonize your interior life today, carefully.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2015
One can find in the life of Jesus a study in power and authority. Power can be understood as the ability to do and all of the gradations of the energy used in doing. Authority can be the power which is defined based upon the quality of the relationship with the one whom one perceives to have power. Power can be negative and coercive as expressed in the notions of suppression and oppression. Power can be miraculous as in the experience of the grace of a higher power in being freed from addictive impulses. Power and authority have the nuances of the nature of the trusting relationship between the one with authority and power and the one receiving the results of power and authority. People can submit to authority through the ignorance caused by misinformation given by one who presents oneself as being a reputable person. The authority of Jesus is what one would call charismatic authority based upon empathetic active power towards the recipient of his powerful and healing acts. Jesus did authoritative and powerful acts to people for their own health and benefit and not to trick them to join some campaign. The best power and authority of all is done from the motive of genuine care for the recipients of power and authority. This kind of power is non-political and non-commercial because it involves the power of empathy of teaching people to become their own true selves.
The church has always had to learn to find the glorious median between respecting the differences of people in affirming each person's gift and at the same time expressing a unified sameness of a paradigm so that different people can accomplish things together. A forced unity of an "empire church" quenches the gift of the Spirit to individuals, while if individuals believe spiritual innovation means simply "doing one's own thing" then chaos can ensue. How can one express individual and gifted difference within the community processes of a unifying paradigm? How can the processes of a unifying paradigm accept and discern individual differences which may help to saturate and eventually change the nature of the "unifying" paradigm itself. The group paradigm provides the framework for individuals to create and in reciprocity individual creativity can progressively change the paradigm even to the point of the birth of a new paradigm. The birth of Gentile Christianity out of a Christo-centric Judaism was perhaps the first major paradigm shift in the history of "Christianity."
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2015
By the time that Gospels were written, "take up my cross and follow me" as words of the oracle of the Risen Christ within the Gospel communities, had become an abbreviation for a spiritual process because the resurrection appearances of Christ and their reports had made the crucifixion from an awful event of capital punishment into a metaphor of spiritual transformation. A disciple of Christ saw the death of Jesus as a power to die to unworthy things in the "psuche" or soul life and the resurrection was the power to perform the new acts of repentance, the "meta-noia," the after mind of the former state of mind from which one did unworthy things.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2015
We are enchanted by the possibility of people being able to predict the future. Nostradamus still is a curiosity to many as are many astrologers who give people possible narratives for their future. Knowing the future as actual and not as possible is often how it seems that the New Testament writers regarded the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures or is it that we do not not understand that humanity through language has just so many limited topics such that we in the present eventually line up with a previous themes manifested in details of a former time and in identity exclaim "deja vu." The interpretive methods of the New Testament writer involved aligning their current events with Hebrew Scripture topics and then declaring the former spirit involved in a previous event was somehow involved in a current event. This dynamic remembering of the "spirit" behind a previous event recurring as the "spirit" behind a current event was the interpretative method of making sense of current events and it provided a providential narrative of hope in the lives of people. We do the same thing today with some different rhetorical practices. We align the present with past and know that the sameness of the present with past seems to make the past predicative while at the same time being completely new and different.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2015
One person's heresy is another person's inspired innovation. Did you ever consider early Christians as such liberals and reformers of Judaism that they went too far and were "excommunicated" by the leaders of synagogues who insisted that in compromising the ancient ritual aspects of Judaism, the core of Jewish practice would be compromised beyond recognition? The innovators, particularly St. Paul wrote an apology for the many persons who could not become ritual Jews and yet followed the teaching of Jesus. Jesus as a Jewish male and rabbi, most likely performed the basic ritual practices of Judaism although he is presented like an ancient prophet in being a critic of "legalistic" Judaism and the ignoring the great laws of justice and compassion. St. Paul, in order to avoid being seen as a heretic reformer, appealed to the pre-Israel and pre-Mosaic figure of Abraham as a father of faith to trace the spiritual lineage of Gentile Christians. He was writing that the basic DNA of God in the human community is Spirit who can be known by all and is not limited to the particulars of one's cultural or religious coding received in one's upbringing.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2015
From the Gospel accounts it is obvious that one of main issues of discussion, division and speculation was about the nature of the Messiah. We in our modern area divide up entertainment, politics and religion and then import these kinds of specialized categories of life to the analysis of ancient cultures. I would suggest that in the ancient cultures which did not have that much "total world knowledge" available, entertainment, politics and religion were more unified as every day subject matter. Try to imagine the combination of hopes for someone like Superman as an ethical and religious hero whom everyone is hoping will show up and run the country. If we bifurcate a "spiritual" Messiah from the political and entertaining aspirations for the superhero, we might fail to appreciate the Gospel contexts regarding the Messiah.
Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2015
The writing of the historic past is art of making us feel like we were there when past events occurred but this is only a guise because when we live after an event we ask different kinds of questions about an event than the people who lived the event would have asked. When we read the various Gospels we are reading the layers of how the various Christ communities who were preaching about Jesus understood the significance of his life as it concerned the later comprised communities where the preaching was occurring. So there are layers of anachronisms in the Gospels because the early Christ communities responsible for comprising the various Gospels believed that the Risen Christ was an oracle in their midst. For the communities which were comprising the Gospels, the traditions of Jesus of Nazareth were being interpreted, edited and preached under the inspiration of the oracle of the Risen Christ in their midst. The early churches did not see the applications of the oracles of Christ as being contradictory just different because different circumstances required different applied interpretations of the life of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2015
In a world where people of "faith" use their Holy Books to justify all manner of horrendous practices as well as really bad and incoherent and inconsistent thinking, it is interesting to note that in the temptation of Jesus by Satan, Satan tried to get Jesus to interpret Scripture wrongly. Because the poetic Psalmist wrote about angels bearing someone up, Jesus was supposed to jump and defy gravity. If we can be tricked into applying modern science methods of empirical verification to obvious aesthetic and artistic texts written to inspire us in the art of living, then one can use the Bible to promote all sorts of bad thinking and even harmful behaviors. Our world suffers greatly from the harmful behaviors of people interpreting their Holy Books badly.
Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2015
Elijah's fast was for forty days. Moses stayed on Mount Sinai for forty days. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness for forty days. Rather than being literalists about chronological time, one should note that biblical writers used the number forty to denote "eventful time" or in Greek, "kairos" time. In the function of the Gospels as spiritual manuals for initiates to the faith, each initiate returns to the temptation of Jesus to project upon it as one finds the Risen Christ as the Higher Power within to meet the current temptations in the life of the Christian initiate who is always already being initiated in the life of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2015
During Lent it might be useful to think very small in terms of change and amendment of life. The phrase "Rome was not built in a day but they were laying bricks" might be apropos. By setting fantasy goals of change one can get easily disappointed in early and often failure and the gap between the goal and the reality of actual behaviors too formidable. Mustard seed faith is about performing the very small things which can add up to the formation of one's character and when character has become formed one has the acquired inclination to variegate performance of reforming deeds to many other areas of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2015
One can observe both a private and public season of Lent. Join with the family of faith in the public commitments of the Lenten season, but each is invited to observe their own private Lenten season in the "closet space of one's life." Plan actions of a different sort of discipline and tailor it to challenge one's own growth in excellence. Someone's private Lenten goal was to do each day 10 things a day that he really did not want to do because their tedious and boring effects and when he committed to it, he found out by Easter that his procrastination had been dealt a blow. Lent is the opportunity for each to undergo a simulated ordeal of one's own choosing and to complete this ordeal one will have faith muscles to bear the involuntary ordeals which come one's way.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2015
It is common for groups which share a mission to differentiate the kinds of things which they do with their communal time to provide variety and to stimulate excellence by changing routines. Lent is something akin to "making a retreat" within one ordinary life schedule by doing some things differently as an individual and as a community. One participates in this Lenten "retreat" as a way of solidarity with one's community and as an obligation to examine one's life practices and values to assess whether they are serving one's vision of excellence which one has for oneself and whether one is committed in sacrificial ways to one's faith community to bring excellence to the common mission. Take time for value review during this season of Lent.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2017
Shrove Tuesday is known now more for pancakes and the last day of the bacchanal Mardi Gras than it is for Shriving, a more commonly used word in the mid-1900's. Making a confession, receiving absolution and a penance has been a religious obligation and by making it an obligation regulated by the clergy the practice was made "official" and probably became detached from the obvious anthropological soundness of the every day practice of confessing to one another, receiving forgiveness and practicing immediate amendment of life as one's penance. It is not healthy for a community of people to "retain" the sins of each other just as it is not healthy to make the private criteria of "I'm not hurting anyone" as the significant justification for what one is doing. Accepting that everything one does affects in some way the community of people means that confession, forgiveness and amendment of life are the works and education in love towards a more just world.
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2015
One's interior life can conjure up many moods and feelings and sometimes one wants to know the "cause" of why one feels the way in which one feels. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to "interpret" the cause of a feeling based upon what one has experienced with another person as a moment of slight or awkwardness. It is important to avoid judgments about knowing precisely why one feels the way one feels at any given moment. One can carry feelings of having been slighted from a previous situation into reacting unwittingly towards people in another situation. Hyper-sensitivity can often lead to wrong interpretation and impute wrong motives to others who are clueless about one's interior dynamic. The Psalmist prayed, "Create in me a clean heart, O Lord." Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." Inside cleanliness perhaps is about learning to refrain from rushing to judgment about others and about oneself and having the ability to see "God" as the providence of all because conferring power of ultimate causation of all things being as they are is to confer too much power to others and ourselves.
Aphorism of Day, February 15, 2015
You and I may have favorite phases to observe in the life cycle of butterflies, a cycle which we call metamorphosis. Having favorite phases should not keep us from an appreciation and acceptance and even fascination with the entire cycle. The Gospels present us with phases of the life of Jesus Christ which correspond to the spiritual discipline, the spiritual metamorphosis of the life of risen Christ being born within us and growing within us. We may prefer the birth and resurrection of Christ over the death of Christ and his lonely temptations in the wilderness but in faith we have to integrate the full cycle of spiritual metamorphosis in our lives. Remember this on the day when we read about the Transfiguration of Christ. Transfiguration is the word that is used to translate the Greek word from which we get metamorphosis. We are always already in spiritual metamorphosis. By accepting the Gospel we can aid this process of spiritual metamorphosis because it is better to integrate and accept this process rather than having the sense that we are forced into this process and not having a clue about what is happening to us. The Gospel provides us with a program to understand and appreciate and abet the process of spiritual metamorphosis in one's life. It is happening whether one knows it or not, so it is better to seek wisdom about the process to which we are already unconsciously pre-committed.
Aphorism of Day, February 14, 2015
On Valentine's Day one could quote the Belle of Amherst, "That love is all there is, is all we know of love..." Or one could quote the Epistle of John, "God is love..." or the Gospel of John, "For God so loved the world that God gave....." Valentine's Day has become the most popular day to celebrate the human experience that is called "love." Love is perhaps the "most natural drug" of the universe in its attractive effects. We have such a day of love because enough people have come under the addictive effects of love to make them comport themselves in specific and intentional and committed ways toward another person for "varying" periods of duration. Sadly, specific relationship love often ends the experience of the repetition of loving acts, even while the memory of the profound magnetism and gravitational pull towards another is never lost. Such a memory invites consistent repetition of loving acts or people without someone to draw from them such projected desire may live in the forlornness of something akin to an edited phrase of Led Zeppelin poetry, of always "looking for the one who has never been born." As we confess that God is love, we are confessing that there is a great magnetic force which will always keep everything together, even if we cannot always experience being together as compatible or mutually beneficial matches. Since, God is love, we are all together whether we want to be or not and so in accepting togetherness we accept that justice is the work of love in honoring the differences which exist in the Togetherness of Love.
Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2015
We can read the Gospels wrongly as modern journalistic eye-witness accounts of the life of Jesus or we can read them as spiritual manuals for a growing movement in the Roman Empire at the end of the first century. As spiritual manuals, and rather private to their communities, they used the re-presentation of events in the life of Jesus to correspond with the transformational events in the lives of Christian devotees who had been initiated into the process of the life and light of the risen Christ being born into one's being and growing as a metamorphosis of one's life within the church as a family of support within cultural settings where they often faced opposition.
Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2015
Alain de Botton in his analysis of news reporting claims that "artistic" presentation is important in whether people will pay attention to the news. Apparently people don't like just plain "boring" facts. This may disappoint the more scientific sanguine mind with the guise of "just the facts ma'am." Mcluhan told us that the "medium" is the message and that supports the irony that lots of people prefer to get their news through comedians who actually satirize the "official" news presenters. The goal of science seems to be to squeeze the "aesthetic" presentation out of everything for "just the facts" purposes. We pretend to buy this as the most profound truth criteria even as we reject it in the practice of how we take on most of the information of our lives. Fundamentalists take the wonderfully aesthetic presentation of the salvation history present in the Bible and try to present it as modern "just the facts" kind of material. It does not work for mature faith to present wonderful aesthetic matter as scientific description. Persons who know and are honest about discursive differences found in the Bible, can have faith and read it too in the Bible, like having one's cake and eating it too.
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2015
Elevation and light are used as metaphors for inner religious experience. During the season of the Epiphany, Light is a metaphor for the effect of Jesus Christ in the lives of the people of the world. The Transfiguration climax of the season of the Epiphany is an event of light whereby the inner light of the divine makes the face of Jesus to be but a filament. Just as the Sun is the external light of the world, we look for interior light as a source of divine light within us to bring us to the benefits of this interior shining, namely, wisdom to practice love and justice in our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2015
Why do we use the phrase "mountain top" experience? In the experience with external landscapes those who have made treks to hills and mountain tops know the exhilaration of the panorama and the details of everything which looks small get merged into the grandeur of a Macroscopic Oneness and one has the wonder of being one who gazes upon things seemingly fitting together because one is above the fray of witnessing the details of microscopic competition. Everything seems to fit together in the grand view. We take the external elevation of a mountain top and make it a metaphor for an interior experience because we designate peak experiences and other events of euphoria as hierarchically superior. Great events recorded in the Bible happened on mountain tops, the giving of the law on Sinai and the Transfiguration on perhaps Mount Tabor (?). Our lives are transformed and transfigured by the insights and inspirations of our peak experiences. The Christian discipline involves intentional practices of putting ourselves in the place of knowing peak experiences so that we can ever surpass ourselves in excellence in a future state and learn to teach others the way to their own peak experiences.
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2015
The modern scientific method which limited valid scientific meanings to events which could only be empirically verified or at least admitting to be open to future falsification threw religionists into a defensive tizzy. When modern science influenced news writing and historical writing then only events which complied with empirically verifiable events were regarded to be true and meaningful. Events which could not comply with empirical verification were called myths and myths came to mean in a pejorative sense, untrue or meaningless or childish and for weak minds. The writer of the letter of Peter states about Jesus, "We did not follow cleverly devised myths/fables..." This is a pejorative use of the word "myth" and is a way of saying that the experience of Jesus is not like the myths of the Greeks. Biblical apologists need to quit being defensive about the nature of biblical literature in the face of modern science and modern news reporting, unless such apologists are trying to defend the Bible as being exactly same kind of meaningful literature as the language found in a scientific law or an eye-witnessed event which could be corroborated by thousands of viewers in the very same way. Accepting the various kinds of writing styles and art forms present in the Bible within many different contexts does not mean that the truths of biblical meanings cannot be held at the same time as the truths of scientific meanings. A scientist can enjoy the writings of Dr. Seuss by not confusing and conflating genres. Why would a person of faith want to sacrifice the unique and personal ways in which a transformational literature has made an impact upon one's life? One needs only to feel defensive about biblical literature if one's resulting lifestyle has not been productive of sound reasoning, love and justice. People who reject the faith of religious communities mostly do so because they have been exposed to such people behaving and thinking badly.
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2015
"I have become all things to all people that I might by all means save some." This sounds like the words of a chameleon politician willing to say and do anything to get a vote, but it is the words of the most famous apostles to the Gentiles. To save someone means to offer the best health for someone's soul that one has to offer. If one wants to give out the best that one has, one has to check one's ego at the door on things that are non-essential such as matters of style, habits and taste. Sometimes Christians are offensive to others because they wear their pieties on their sleeves as the criteria for even approaching them. Calling one's mole hills, mountains gives people nothing to climb, only something to stamp on and ignore. Winning friends for how one wants to give them one's Gospel=Good News may mean that one does not place so many barriers of individual taste in the way as censoring guards to the gateway of one's approval.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2015
Christians articulate different nuances of salvation. Some group emphasize the notion of "final salvation" or being saved from eternal damnation in the afterlife. They believe that a funeral is the perfect occasion to "scare" people into the salvation of eternal life. No one can have empirical verification of the afterlife and yet we know that imaginations of subjective immortality can influence how we live with faith now especially in accepting that the gift of hope is not just some kind of cruel hoax. Other Christians prefer to emphasize the more holistic notion of salvation as the cradle to grave quest for ever self-surpassing excellence. Social salvation means it is not a selfish individual quest but individual salvation involves adding excellence to the lives of as many others that we can. Individual salvation cannot be divorced from getting the basics of healthy necessities of life to as many people as possible. Being so focused on individual final salvation as the main event can result in a callous neglect of letting lots of people in this world go to hell in the hand basket of their impoverished life circumstances. If final salvation does not start with holistic excellence in this life then a correction is needed to integrate the imaginations of hope in the afterlife with actual events of progressive experiences of salvation for us in this life.
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2015
Why is the placebo effect so important in health? Probably because the attitude of faith is an important complement to all other health treatments. Faith arouses the native grace of one's spiritual energy so that one's interior forces provide the orientation to health. "They may have just been sugar pills, but I still got better." Healing within the community of faith takes into account the energies of the unseen which are not revealed on x rays. The energies of faith counter the forces of stress which is often the "if I don't know what it is, I can blame stress" diagnosis of medical scientists.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2015
We have gotten used to defining ourselves by the statistical "normal" distribution often called the bell shaped curve. Statistical approximation is highly dependent upon how one defines the coordinates. So based upon what one is defining for identity factors one may fall in the fat or "normal" part of the curve in some areas of identity and in the "narrow" edges in other areas of identity. As one cries out for uniqueness one finds that one is tethered to humanity by having to come to someone else's statistical approximation of self definition. One might think that one can avoid being another statistic by avoiding people implying that if one is not seen one is not a statistic. It could be that creativity arises in the quest for a sort of solipsistic uniqueness even though as soon as one shares the products of of uniqueness, one becomes liable to be data of statistical approximation of defining humanity. The future of the fullness of God means that God will come to language in the endless statistical approximations of those who live out the divine image. So God's icon-bearers help bring to language God's own becoming known by us.
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2015
Does one have to be inspired to believe or does one believe in order to receive inspiration? Or is this a "what-comes-first-chicken-or-the-egg?" type of question? Prepare yourself for inspiration simply by looking intently. Native beauty in the form of a tree or the spider web. Native beauty in the brilliant ordinary of people. Part of the deception of our virtual media is to regard their special effects exaggerations to set the hierarchy of our beauty values. One can begin to let the "special effects" do the seeing for us and we inadvertently lose the ability to see glorious native beauty until we perhaps make a pilgrimage to the ocean to be overwhelmed by its sheer grandness. Sheer grandness is all around us if we can learn to see with the child-like wonder lenses of the kingdom of God. Go forth and see everything for the first time, again today.
Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2015
The inner life is the realm of the principalities and powers referred to by St. Paul. Our inner lives have to be "colonized" and we assume that one of the effects of civilization and culture is this process of colonization of the interior forces. Chief in colonization is the creative use of language and we first need to understand how language in our unintentional and passive taking on of the definitions of everything in our lives have left us with some automatic repetitional patterns which we discover to be unhealthy controlling impulses resulting in us acting out in ways in which we wish we didn't. Interdiction of automatic controlling scripts can only occur when we discover, acknowledge and name them and we have ourselves revealed more clearly to ourselves as we are exposed to model people who present to us new authorial potential in the re-colonization of our interior lives. Jesus as the "interior ghostbuster" is the model of one with the charismatic effect to impact the interior lives of others. We are to develop the charismatic effects of our baptismal ministries to help each other attain ever increasing soundness of mind, emotion, body and spirit. Let us open the gates of our interior lives to be colonized by the charismatic effects of Jesus and learn how to be people who help people take new authorial control of their own interior lives.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2015
When conquering people take over territory they often rename the places which they conquer. Colonists did this in America, the Romans did it as did the people of Israel when they conquered the land of the Canaanites. Sometimes the colonists made faint efforts to transliterate indigenous name places into their own languages. In the Bible story there is also an interior colonization which takes place; in Hebrew Scriptures the God El attains the head position in the heavenly court of the gods of the conquered peoples. In the arising of the Christian movement, its success was first an "inside" job long before it became the preferred religion of the Roman Empire. The ancient wise man Socrates had an inner spiritual guide called a "daimon." In the time of Jesus this same term became synonymous with "unclean" spirits who disrupted as personal and controlling and chaotic impulses within a person. St. Paul theology of "principalities and powers" was presented clearly in the ministry of Jesus in some Gospels when he as King of the Interior has the authority to recolonize and rename the interior life and cast out the old rulers of the interior life. Modern science, pharmacology, and psychology have recolonized the interior life by naming the cause of interior forces as events of genetics, physiology and traumatic events in the development of a person. Yogic traditions which have come West, re-colonize the interior in terms of energy zones or chakras which need to be "aligned" through yogic practices. Chinese Taoists have colonized the interior life in terms of life force of "chi." The post-Enlightenment re-invention of the "individual" as a "free agent" due to education and participatory democracies means that today an individual has access to an entire global smorgasbord of names for the interior of one's life. Each is called to be a "manager" in how one uses models of configuring what is happening within oneself. Probably the determining criteria is, "what works." If pragmatic criteria is what determines, then pragmatic criteria also has to be defined. For some, "what works" means whatever makes me wealthy or happy. It would seem that we should define the pragmatic criteria in terms of love, justice and common good and hope that happiness and having enough attends love, justice and the common good. Go forth and colonize your interior life today, carefully.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2015
One can find in the life of Jesus a study in power and authority. Power can be understood as the ability to do and all of the gradations of the energy used in doing. Authority can be the power which is defined based upon the quality of the relationship with the one whom one perceives to have power. Power can be negative and coercive as expressed in the notions of suppression and oppression. Power can be miraculous as in the experience of the grace of a higher power in being freed from addictive impulses. Power and authority have the nuances of the nature of the trusting relationship between the one with authority and power and the one receiving the results of power and authority. People can submit to authority through the ignorance caused by misinformation given by one who presents oneself as being a reputable person. The authority of Jesus is what one would call charismatic authority based upon empathetic active power towards the recipient of his powerful and healing acts. Jesus did authoritative and powerful acts to people for their own health and benefit and not to trick them to join some campaign. The best power and authority of all is done from the motive of genuine care for the recipients of power and authority. This kind of power is non-political and non-commercial because it involves the power of empathy of teaching people to become their own true selves.
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