Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2015
Some events are remembered and have come to words in the experience of people because of sustained efforts by political powers and commercial hucksters of products. We call political efforts to sustain remembrance, propaganda and commercial words we call, advertisement. Some events are so uncanny that they contain in themselves such charismatic power and effervescence that they create the experience of sublime and the attending words which have the ability to continue to transmit both the charisma and the effervescence of the original event. Jesus and the events of his life could not be invented by mere propaganda or advertisement; his uncanny uniqueness created the experience and the inspired and compelled words to name this uniqueness. We still live in the succession of the success of the train of the words of faith from the event of Jesus in this world and the relevance of the Risen Christ has varied and uneven relevance in our lives often based upon the conditions of receptivity which attend the rites of passage of our lives when certain aspects of the Risen Christ become more apparent to us. The church keeps Holy Week and Easter as a way for the word of the risen Christ to become apparent to us when the conditions of receptivity are prepared by the exigencies of where we are in a particular phase of a rite of passage.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2015
It turns out that the most substantial and enduring thing about actually "being there," are the words which enshrine an event which has passed and absolute in the sense that it can't be repeated in the same way and at the same time. The words regarding an event end up being more lasting and eternal than the event itself. So truly great events have the ability to colonize and make a word Empire out of the great event such that it remains in the words of enough people to form their identity. The old spiritual asks us "if we were there when they crucified my Lord or when they laid him in the tomb?" Of course, we were not except in the collective humanity which we share with the people who were actually there. John's Gospel declared Christ as the Word who was God and it proves that Word is more eternal than any individual event because the Word is the parallel universe present in any actual event and it is the eternal return of Word which perpetuate the event into the future and results in the ability and power of an event to effect emotions and empathy as an artistic event. Some people are in quest for the reality of "being really there" while others know that all of this is already pre-coded by the eternality of Word. Let us acknowledge that we have been totally colonized by the Word Empire which has been the aftermath of the events of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2015
The event of the Passion of Christ highlights what happens almost every day in the conflict of human competitive desires. People with wealth, power and influence often use their power mainly to make sure they keep their wealth, power and influence and the seemingly powerless people who have only the power of goodness and justice often end up getting crushed in the public show of the wealthy and powerful. The Romans crushed Jesus because they "could" and it was the banality of their system for Pilate and everyone simply to do their duty for the Empire. The irony of the perfection of goodness is that it can only come back; it is deathless; Jesus was deathless. The deaths of Caesars have not been marked by public liturgies for 2000 years but the Death of Jesus has. Would that all with wealth, power and influence would pause at the Passion and embrace the witness of sacrifice as the befitting virtue for the common good of all.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2015
One needs to be aware that the Passion presentations have been used by some to justify anti-Semitic actions. The Gospels present Jesus, as a Jew, being presented over to death by other Jews. (As if, the Romans were just complying bystanders?) The presentations seem to cover up the fact that Jesus himself was an observant Jew. Remember the Gospels and New Testament writings derived from a period when "Christians" were still a part of synagogue communities to the time when "Christo-centric" Judaism became in the Gentile settings a significant departure from Jewish ritual practice that it became necessary and practical for the separation of the two communities into two "religions." New Testament writings bear the strong passions of this division. One can liken it to the some of the passionate and hurtful expressions which have occurred in noted Christian disputes as what happened in the Reformation. There is no justification for Christians to make the polemic language of the New Testament of disagreements between the Jews and the developing Christo-centric Judaism as the basis for persecution or discriminatory behaviors between members our communities of faith. It is shameful that we have a history of such persecutions justified by the appeal to New Testament language. We should not absolutize the details of ancient disputes as being formative of how we should act towards each other. We are not bound by ancient disputes to justify injustice or actions contrary to love and respect. One could update the Pauline expression: In Christ (messiah), there is no North or South, East or West, Jews or Gentile, or Christian or Muslim, or male or female, or gay or straight, but a new creation. The Messiah is the one who helps us love beyond our differences and within our differences and we prove this love with the practice of justice.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2015
Art is based upon the longing for a lost intimacy and so the imagination has to re-create replicatable traces of what one has lost. How does one convert absence into the absence which makes the heart grow fonder to the point of a poignant kind of another presence of the absent one, or thing, place or experience? Fondness in absence occurs and the absence of the actual physical presence of Jesus in the lives of his followers did not prevent a condition of fondness to make them vulnerable for other kinds of traces of the many Risen presences of Christ. We too live in continuity with an entire succession of the traces of the risen Christ in the Art of Christian practice which we have inherited. Our Christian Art of the presence of Christ is logically foolish to the single dimensioned person who does not yet appreciate the truth of the many meanings of Art and is stuck in the stubbornness of not believing unless my individual ego can confer valid meanings for all by my eye-witness verification. As if it were a shame that other people attained valid and moving and meaningful experiences without "my" sanction. The meanings of experience cannot escape mutual judgments within the community of people and we might want to place some judgment criteria upon how meaningful an experience is, like does it produce joy, faith, love, justice, discernment and sacrificial action on what is best for the common good?
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2015
The inspiration for art may be partly born from the experience "lack" or loss. From the experience of the womb when one is surrounded by touching presence, birth requires that such total surrounding water presence is lost and a newborn experiences touching presence on certain parts of one's body. When a baby is not in contact with touching presence, visual images and audible experience of the presence of another must suffice and then when these are gone, the memory of the same has to create imagination to become the artistic and entertaining presence of another. Imagination must create in adequate and sufficient ways to deal with the progressive loss of these higher "degrees" of intimate presence. We are about to enter the High Art of the Christian year in the death, burial, resurrection literary presentation of the life of Jesus. The presence of Jesus of Nazareth is lost forever to us but a different kind of "Real Presence" is artistically made that way as our imaginations are inspired to know ourselves as inundated and saturated with the surrounding and internal presence of the Risen Christ by God's Spirit and we interpret this by embracing endless artistic metaphors of presence. The baby in a crib "alone" at night has to rely on the imagination of parental presence as being "real" even in apparent absence. We in our always already infantile aloneness have to create the art of the real presences of Christ. This is the artistic work of faith as it requires the full talent and assistance of the imagination.
Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2015
When one says, "Art," the first association which comes to mind is painting or pictures even while one admits other "genres" or artistic expressions such as music. We also admit that there is literary art and one assumes like Longinus that certain writing can effect the experience Sublime. There are many different styles of "artistic" writing which pertain to the various disciplines. We have come to have a bias toward "true" writing as being the privilege of science with its requirement of empirical verification or philosophical logical writing representing "sound" thinking. Often biblical writing gets relegated to something like children's literature used mainly by people who have not graduated to the adult literature of science or philosophy. Worse, people who read and defend the Bible as being science and philosophy end up misrepresenting the discursive purposes of biblical writing. Biblical writing is writing to be evocative of social, moral and spiritual change and partakes of aspects of "wonder" discourse" in story form to illustrate and engage direction of the transformation of one's life towards love and justice. Often biblical apologists spend their time defending details of ancient cultural practice and miss the universal and relevant quest for love and justice which inspires us to find new details of cultural practice in our own time. Fundamentalism absolutizes details of ancient cultural practices and misses the great principles of love and justice which call out for new details of practice in our own lives and time.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2015
With the success of modern science, Christian apologists intimidated by the fact that subsequent knowledge and experience can seem to falsify the explanations for previous knowledge and experience decided to commit themselves to a modern science presentation of Christianity which has resulted in various forms of "fundamentalism." Can we locate our apology for our faith experience in the "art" of Christianity as a discipline for personal and corporate transformation? If we locate ourselves within "art" rather than "science" we don't have to get involved in the interpretative confusion of the heart versus the mind, the aesthetic impulse versus the empirically tested and able to be replicated in a future event. In the artistic event of the sublime, the events are not replicated because they are new, serendipitous and yet they are meaningful, real and true because they inspire us to change our lives. Why would anyone want to live one's life as being either just artistic or just scientific? Let us accept the versatility of the human adventure and realize that we have discursive practices to represent complex differences in perceptions and moods. Please accept the rhetorical beauty of human experience and our ability to hold together seeming contradiction and ambiguities in seamless ways.
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2015
The Gospel writer for the Gospel of Mark is truly a ventriloquist for a Gentile church when he presents the Roman Centurion making a climactic confession at the death of Jesus on the Cross: "Truly, this man was God's Son." A Roman Centurion would know that the Caesar was a "divi filius" or son of a divine being, i.e. Caesar's father who had been proclaimed as divine (august) by the Roman Senate. The writer of Mark's Gospel wrote with profound irony in surveying the effects of Jesus in the Gentile world and then returning to a presentation of his death.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2015
The immediacy of a current happening does not let an event yet have its full meaning. The meanings of an event, especially telling events, continue to grow into the future as one exercises the art of living which includes painting and coloring past events by placing them in the context of new events which were triggered by an earlier event. So we are approaching the re-coloring of the Cross of Jesus by the post-resurrection appearances of Christ and the subsequent success of the Christian church. The Christology or essence of who Christ was becomes defined by the Soteriology or the saving effects of who the Risen Christ became as He was known in the effects in the transformation of lives through a life style which had the Risen Christ as the metaphor for the common encounter with the Higher Power involved in their changing lives.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2015
On the day we commemorate Cranmer's death at the stake, we note the history of religions being involved in very cruel practices and intolerant of freedom of thought. Our country was founded to prevent religious intolerance being inflicted through the expression of government and we assume things should always be this way even though we know that religions in our world do not protect individual rights and still punish their opponents in cruel and inhumane ways. Justia, the goddess of Justice has her eyes blind-folded as the scales of justice weigh reasoned arguments for juridical procedure. The blindfolding of divinity is indicative of God not playing any partisan favor when it comes to justice. And in not playing favors, the Reason of Law is allowed to function. We are committed to the reason of law prevailing and not allowing religious kangaroo courts to prevail when one party assumes that they know precisely how God sees and pretends that they have removed the "blindfold" of God and therefore do not need the reasoned process of law. (footnote...we also know that if one has money, one can buy better presenters of reasoned law)
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2015
Today, go forth and as one creates in the present one also re-creates the past since today one is a part of the expanding age of life and with each expansion in time the past is given a wider context and so each individual event in the past will change in light of new outcomes. Let us go forth then in faith and redeem everything in our past with the wide context of Hope.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2015
Long before the Gospel of John was written, we assume the apostle Paul went to many places, including Athens the "philosophical" capital of the ancient world. One assumes there were Greek converts to Paul's message. Much later, when the Gospel of John is written, it is reported that Greeks were in Jerusalem asking the followers of Jesus, "We wish to see Jesus." One can understand this to be a cryptic reference to the origin of "Greek" Christianity and a trumpeting of Gentile Christianity within a narrative presentation of the life of Jesus. The writers of John understand Jesus' response to the Greeks seeking Him to be, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified." The glorification of Jesus is partly to be understood in how popular Jesus became within the Gentile world. The writer of John's Gospel can only understand Jesus within the context of the success of Gentile Christianity.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2015
If Jesus was not a member of the family of priests in Israel, the Levites, how is it that he is called by certain New Testament writers, a Great High Priest? As Paul appealed to Abraham as the "origin" and validity of Gentile faith, the writer to the Hebrews presents the the ancient priest of Salem, Melchizedek, the mysterious priestly figure in the Torah who was a priest before there were levitical priests, as the model for the "eternal" priesthood of Jesus. Melchizedek's status is verified by the fact that Abraham paid tithes to him. "Priestliness" is a recognition of the relation between humanity and the divine. The priestly aspect of humanity is how we represents the needs of humanity before God on behalf of each other. We have particular ordained priests to remind the church that her nature is priestly. Ordained priest do not exhaust the "priestliness" of the church since each person has the ministry of prayer in carrying the needs of our world before God. If you pray then you are a priestly Christian person. That the total life of Jesus was understood to be given over to humanity so that humanity could be represented before God is what brought the early church confess Him to be the Great High Priest.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2015
One of the most fascinating features of Pauline Christianity is his theology of the cross whereby a horrible event of capital punishment gets transformed into a glorious event of sacrifice, but not just sacrifice but a metaphor which imparts "dying" energy in the lives of spiritual initiates to end unworthy impulses of addictive forces. Paul appraised powerful inner impulses which drove the behaviors he called "sins" or things which were not expressive of excellence in his life. He needed an inner alchemical force to transmute and transform the force driving him towards doing things he did not want to do and the narrative expression of the interdicting Higher Power he referred to was to be found in an identity with the death of Jesus. So, the Cross, not just any crucifixion, but The Cross of Jesus and His Death on it became such an Associative Power, it became an expression of the best thing about death, namely death can mean the cessation of some bad things as well as good things. So Paul was going to ride the power of the death of Jesus to end bad behaviors and ride the resurrection of Christ to initiate the new preferred behaviors. How Paul and others began to characterize their transformation using the life cycle events of Jesus is what made a very bad Friday into a Good Friday. And each day, each person assesses what needs to die or end so that something more educative and creatively advancing can occur.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2015
How does one feel about using cycles of plant life as metaphors for human life? The Johannine Jesus says, "unless a seed of wheat dies, it remains alone, if it dies it bears much fruit." Yes, as gardeners we don't mourn the death of the seeds which we bury in our gardens. We do however mourn profoundly the deaths of the people in our lives. That the Johannine churches could make the comparison of the death of a seed with the death of Jesus is proof that the "fruits" of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ resulted in burgeoning and spreading communities of people. The Johannine churches believed that the death of Jesus meant that people everywhere could become "in-Christed" beings and Christliness was no longer limited to the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. The New Testament writings are metaphors gone wildfire regarding how people believed Christ was still present to them.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2015
We often have been fooled to read the accounts of the Gospel as exact history or as precise eyewitness accounts when in fact they are a presentations of the narratives of Jesus as a method of participating in the theology of identity with the Risen of Christ; this theology is one which is expressed in non-narrative form in the writings of St. Paul and others in the early churches. The theology of identity with the risen Christ was written before it was taught through the narratives found in the Gospels.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2015
On 3.14 consider that that one can never finish precisely representing pi in numbers. There are always "some more" numbers to add to attaining a more precise numerical representation of pi. So humanity will not ever be able to experience a finished representation of pi. So pi is an unfinished, opened ended tautology: pi= 3.14........... When one adds a new decimal to pi, one changes one's experience of pi. In language deconstruction works in a similar way; we keep saying and adding some More and what we add contextually changes everything that was said before. Hence we in the faith community should be very careful about pronouncing "final words and final meanings" about anything, including God. Like pi, God still has a history in our lives and we will keep adding decimals to our experience of God and as such deconstruct our former selves with self-surpassing repentance toward the continuing mystery of God.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2015
It seems as though some kinds of evangelism have simply become so adapted to American commercial marketing methods that the methods and the marketers take precedence over what they offer. With so much religion in the media it almost can seem like competing "burger" chains wanting you to taste their product, because they have added the latest taste fad. What about the "plain old" neighborhood parish church which invites us to struggle with the use of Scripture, Tradition and Reason in finding corresponding application in our postmodern lives rather than entertaining preachers and rock bands? What about being quiet and faithful Christian ministers in and out of the pews with no fanfare? Fads come and go; a burger shop may have Sriracha today but it will be gone tomorrow. How about being the type of Christians who are just faithful and keep the Christ-like train of love and justice running well and on time?
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2015
One difference in the understanding of salvation among Christians has to do with what the word salvation means. In churches which do not practice baptism as a sacrament of realized grace for the baptized and the church, salvation is essentially "knowing" or having the feeling of assurance that one is not going to hell. I think this is a limitation to primary naivete in interpretation since such thinking eschews any metaphorical/imaginative thinking about places of the afterlife which arose in communities with traditions for speaking about the afterlife. For this group of "evangelical" Christians salvation is simply the event of being saved from hell in the afterlife through an experience of "being born again," or asking Jesus into one's heart. After salvation, one then hopes to grow in one's life of holiness in a further process of sanctification. Other Christians do not place as much emphasis upon the either/or finality of "salvific events" and view salvation on a continuum from Jesus saying that the kingdom of God belongs to children,(and one assumes "all children)" to many more salvific events in the realizations that we always, already live in God's kingdom. Salvation is the continuous process of realizing that we belong to God. I do think that some people need the security of being certain about their "salvific" event from hell because of their fearfulnesss due to their belief in their literalness about the afterlife estate. I also think it follows from people who believe more in the greatness of humanity to Fall away from God than in believing in the Good God who created us and called us "good" and stuck with calling us "good" sinner even in our fallen behaviors. This God did not make us as mistakes and continued with us enough to continue to offer good redemption events as we struggle through the obstacle course of the free conditions of life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2015
Some events are remembered and have come to words in the experience of people because of sustained efforts by political powers and commercial hucksters of products. We call political efforts to sustain remembrance, propaganda and commercial words we call, advertisement. Some events are so uncanny that they contain in themselves such charismatic power and effervescence that they create the experience of sublime and the attending words which have the ability to continue to transmit both the charisma and the effervescence of the original event. Jesus and the events of his life could not be invented by mere propaganda or advertisement; his uncanny uniqueness created the experience and the inspired and compelled words to name this uniqueness. We still live in the succession of the success of the train of the words of faith from the event of Jesus in this world and the relevance of the Risen Christ has varied and uneven relevance in our lives often based upon the conditions of receptivity which attend the rites of passage of our lives when certain aspects of the Risen Christ become more apparent to us. The church keeps Holy Week and Easter as a way for the word of the risen Christ to become apparent to us when the conditions of receptivity are prepared by the exigencies of where we are in a particular phase of a rite of passage.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2015
It turns out that the most substantial and enduring thing about actually "being there," are the words which enshrine an event which has passed and absolute in the sense that it can't be repeated in the same way and at the same time. The words regarding an event end up being more lasting and eternal than the event itself. So truly great events have the ability to colonize and make a word Empire out of the great event such that it remains in the words of enough people to form their identity. The old spiritual asks us "if we were there when they crucified my Lord or when they laid him in the tomb?" Of course, we were not except in the collective humanity which we share with the people who were actually there. John's Gospel declared Christ as the Word who was God and it proves that Word is more eternal than any individual event because the Word is the parallel universe present in any actual event and it is the eternal return of Word which perpetuate the event into the future and results in the ability and power of an event to effect emotions and empathy as an artistic event. Some people are in quest for the reality of "being really there" while others know that all of this is already pre-coded by the eternality of Word. Let us acknowledge that we have been totally colonized by the Word Empire which has been the aftermath of the events of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2015
The event of the Passion of Christ highlights what happens almost every day in the conflict of human competitive desires. People with wealth, power and influence often use their power mainly to make sure they keep their wealth, power and influence and the seemingly powerless people who have only the power of goodness and justice often end up getting crushed in the public show of the wealthy and powerful. The Romans crushed Jesus because they "could" and it was the banality of their system for Pilate and everyone simply to do their duty for the Empire. The irony of the perfection of goodness is that it can only come back; it is deathless; Jesus was deathless. The deaths of Caesars have not been marked by public liturgies for 2000 years but the Death of Jesus has. Would that all with wealth, power and influence would pause at the Passion and embrace the witness of sacrifice as the befitting virtue for the common good of all.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2015
One needs to be aware that the Passion presentations have been used by some to justify anti-Semitic actions. The Gospels present Jesus, as a Jew, being presented over to death by other Jews. (As if, the Romans were just complying bystanders?) The presentations seem to cover up the fact that Jesus himself was an observant Jew. Remember the Gospels and New Testament writings derived from a period when "Christians" were still a part of synagogue communities to the time when "Christo-centric" Judaism became in the Gentile settings a significant departure from Jewish ritual practice that it became necessary and practical for the separation of the two communities into two "religions." New Testament writings bear the strong passions of this division. One can liken it to the some of the passionate and hurtful expressions which have occurred in noted Christian disputes as what happened in the Reformation. There is no justification for Christians to make the polemic language of the New Testament of disagreements between the Jews and the developing Christo-centric Judaism as the basis for persecution or discriminatory behaviors between members our communities of faith. It is shameful that we have a history of such persecutions justified by the appeal to New Testament language. We should not absolutize the details of ancient disputes as being formative of how we should act towards each other. We are not bound by ancient disputes to justify injustice or actions contrary to love and respect. One could update the Pauline expression: In Christ (messiah), there is no North or South, East or West, Jews or Gentile, or Christian or Muslim, or male or female, or gay or straight, but a new creation. The Messiah is the one who helps us love beyond our differences and within our differences and we prove this love with the practice of justice.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2015
Art is based upon the longing for a lost intimacy and so the imagination has to re-create replicatable traces of what one has lost. How does one convert absence into the absence which makes the heart grow fonder to the point of a poignant kind of another presence of the absent one, or thing, place or experience? Fondness in absence occurs and the absence of the actual physical presence of Jesus in the lives of his followers did not prevent a condition of fondness to make them vulnerable for other kinds of traces of the many Risen presences of Christ. We too live in continuity with an entire succession of the traces of the risen Christ in the Art of Christian practice which we have inherited. Our Christian Art of the presence of Christ is logically foolish to the single dimensioned person who does not yet appreciate the truth of the many meanings of Art and is stuck in the stubbornness of not believing unless my individual ego can confer valid meanings for all by my eye-witness verification. As if it were a shame that other people attained valid and moving and meaningful experiences without "my" sanction. The meanings of experience cannot escape mutual judgments within the community of people and we might want to place some judgment criteria upon how meaningful an experience is, like does it produce joy, faith, love, justice, discernment and sacrificial action on what is best for the common good?
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2015
The inspiration for art may be partly born from the experience "lack" or loss. From the experience of the womb when one is surrounded by touching presence, birth requires that such total surrounding water presence is lost and a newborn experiences touching presence on certain parts of one's body. When a baby is not in contact with touching presence, visual images and audible experience of the presence of another must suffice and then when these are gone, the memory of the same has to create imagination to become the artistic and entertaining presence of another. Imagination must create in adequate and sufficient ways to deal with the progressive loss of these higher "degrees" of intimate presence. We are about to enter the High Art of the Christian year in the death, burial, resurrection literary presentation of the life of Jesus. The presence of Jesus of Nazareth is lost forever to us but a different kind of "Real Presence" is artistically made that way as our imaginations are inspired to know ourselves as inundated and saturated with the surrounding and internal presence of the Risen Christ by God's Spirit and we interpret this by embracing endless artistic metaphors of presence. The baby in a crib "alone" at night has to rely on the imagination of parental presence as being "real" even in apparent absence. We in our always already infantile aloneness have to create the art of the real presences of Christ. This is the artistic work of faith as it requires the full talent and assistance of the imagination.
Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2015
When one says, "Art," the first association which comes to mind is painting or pictures even while one admits other "genres" or artistic expressions such as music. We also admit that there is literary art and one assumes like Longinus that certain writing can effect the experience Sublime. There are many different styles of "artistic" writing which pertain to the various disciplines. We have come to have a bias toward "true" writing as being the privilege of science with its requirement of empirical verification or philosophical logical writing representing "sound" thinking. Often biblical writing gets relegated to something like children's literature used mainly by people who have not graduated to the adult literature of science or philosophy. Worse, people who read and defend the Bible as being science and philosophy end up misrepresenting the discursive purposes of biblical writing. Biblical writing is writing to be evocative of social, moral and spiritual change and partakes of aspects of "wonder" discourse" in story form to illustrate and engage direction of the transformation of one's life towards love and justice. Often biblical apologists spend their time defending details of ancient cultural practice and miss the universal and relevant quest for love and justice which inspires us to find new details of cultural practice in our own time. Fundamentalism absolutizes details of ancient cultural practices and misses the great principles of love and justice which call out for new details of practice in our own lives and time.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2015
With the success of modern science, Christian apologists intimidated by the fact that subsequent knowledge and experience can seem to falsify the explanations for previous knowledge and experience decided to commit themselves to a modern science presentation of Christianity which has resulted in various forms of "fundamentalism." Can we locate our apology for our faith experience in the "art" of Christianity as a discipline for personal and corporate transformation? If we locate ourselves within "art" rather than "science" we don't have to get involved in the interpretative confusion of the heart versus the mind, the aesthetic impulse versus the empirically tested and able to be replicated in a future event. In the artistic event of the sublime, the events are not replicated because they are new, serendipitous and yet they are meaningful, real and true because they inspire us to change our lives. Why would anyone want to live one's life as being either just artistic or just scientific? Let us accept the versatility of the human adventure and realize that we have discursive practices to represent complex differences in perceptions and moods. Please accept the rhetorical beauty of human experience and our ability to hold together seeming contradiction and ambiguities in seamless ways.
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2015
The Gospel writer for the Gospel of Mark is truly a ventriloquist for a Gentile church when he presents the Roman Centurion making a climactic confession at the death of Jesus on the Cross: "Truly, this man was God's Son." A Roman Centurion would know that the Caesar was a "divi filius" or son of a divine being, i.e. Caesar's father who had been proclaimed as divine (august) by the Roman Senate. The writer of Mark's Gospel wrote with profound irony in surveying the effects of Jesus in the Gentile world and then returning to a presentation of his death.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2015
The immediacy of a current happening does not let an event yet have its full meaning. The meanings of an event, especially telling events, continue to grow into the future as one exercises the art of living which includes painting and coloring past events by placing them in the context of new events which were triggered by an earlier event. So we are approaching the re-coloring of the Cross of Jesus by the post-resurrection appearances of Christ and the subsequent success of the Christian church. The Christology or essence of who Christ was becomes defined by the Soteriology or the saving effects of who the Risen Christ became as He was known in the effects in the transformation of lives through a life style which had the Risen Christ as the metaphor for the common encounter with the Higher Power involved in their changing lives.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2015
On the day we commemorate Cranmer's death at the stake, we note the history of religions being involved in very cruel practices and intolerant of freedom of thought. Our country was founded to prevent religious intolerance being inflicted through the expression of government and we assume things should always be this way even though we know that religions in our world do not protect individual rights and still punish their opponents in cruel and inhumane ways. Justia, the goddess of Justice has her eyes blind-folded as the scales of justice weigh reasoned arguments for juridical procedure. The blindfolding of divinity is indicative of God not playing any partisan favor when it comes to justice. And in not playing favors, the Reason of Law is allowed to function. We are committed to the reason of law prevailing and not allowing religious kangaroo courts to prevail when one party assumes that they know precisely how God sees and pretends that they have removed the "blindfold" of God and therefore do not need the reasoned process of law. (footnote...we also know that if one has money, one can buy better presenters of reasoned law)
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2015
Today, go forth and as one creates in the present one also re-creates the past since today one is a part of the expanding age of life and with each expansion in time the past is given a wider context and so each individual event in the past will change in light of new outcomes. Let us go forth then in faith and redeem everything in our past with the wide context of Hope.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2015
Long before the Gospel of John was written, we assume the apostle Paul went to many places, including Athens the "philosophical" capital of the ancient world. One assumes there were Greek converts to Paul's message. Much later, when the Gospel of John is written, it is reported that Greeks were in Jerusalem asking the followers of Jesus, "We wish to see Jesus." One can understand this to be a cryptic reference to the origin of "Greek" Christianity and a trumpeting of Gentile Christianity within a narrative presentation of the life of Jesus. The writers of John understand Jesus' response to the Greeks seeking Him to be, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified." The glorification of Jesus is partly to be understood in how popular Jesus became within the Gentile world. The writer of John's Gospel can only understand Jesus within the context of the success of Gentile Christianity.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2015
If Jesus was not a member of the family of priests in Israel, the Levites, how is it that he is called by certain New Testament writers, a Great High Priest? As Paul appealed to Abraham as the "origin" and validity of Gentile faith, the writer to the Hebrews presents the the ancient priest of Salem, Melchizedek, the mysterious priestly figure in the Torah who was a priest before there were levitical priests, as the model for the "eternal" priesthood of Jesus. Melchizedek's status is verified by the fact that Abraham paid tithes to him. "Priestliness" is a recognition of the relation between humanity and the divine. The priestly aspect of humanity is how we represents the needs of humanity before God on behalf of each other. We have particular ordained priests to remind the church that her nature is priestly. Ordained priest do not exhaust the "priestliness" of the church since each person has the ministry of prayer in carrying the needs of our world before God. If you pray then you are a priestly Christian person. That the total life of Jesus was understood to be given over to humanity so that humanity could be represented before God is what brought the early church confess Him to be the Great High Priest.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2015
One of the most fascinating features of Pauline Christianity is his theology of the cross whereby a horrible event of capital punishment gets transformed into a glorious event of sacrifice, but not just sacrifice but a metaphor which imparts "dying" energy in the lives of spiritual initiates to end unworthy impulses of addictive forces. Paul appraised powerful inner impulses which drove the behaviors he called "sins" or things which were not expressive of excellence in his life. He needed an inner alchemical force to transmute and transform the force driving him towards doing things he did not want to do and the narrative expression of the interdicting Higher Power he referred to was to be found in an identity with the death of Jesus. So, the Cross, not just any crucifixion, but The Cross of Jesus and His Death on it became such an Associative Power, it became an expression of the best thing about death, namely death can mean the cessation of some bad things as well as good things. So Paul was going to ride the power of the death of Jesus to end bad behaviors and ride the resurrection of Christ to initiate the new preferred behaviors. How Paul and others began to characterize their transformation using the life cycle events of Jesus is what made a very bad Friday into a Good Friday. And each day, each person assesses what needs to die or end so that something more educative and creatively advancing can occur.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2015
How does one feel about using cycles of plant life as metaphors for human life? The Johannine Jesus says, "unless a seed of wheat dies, it remains alone, if it dies it bears much fruit." Yes, as gardeners we don't mourn the death of the seeds which we bury in our gardens. We do however mourn profoundly the deaths of the people in our lives. That the Johannine churches could make the comparison of the death of a seed with the death of Jesus is proof that the "fruits" of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ resulted in burgeoning and spreading communities of people. The Johannine churches believed that the death of Jesus meant that people everywhere could become "in-Christed" beings and Christliness was no longer limited to the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. The New Testament writings are metaphors gone wildfire regarding how people believed Christ was still present to them.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2015
We often have been fooled to read the accounts of the Gospel as exact history or as precise eyewitness accounts when in fact they are a presentations of the narratives of Jesus as a method of participating in the theology of identity with the Risen of Christ; this theology is one which is expressed in non-narrative form in the writings of St. Paul and others in the early churches. The theology of identity with the risen Christ was written before it was taught through the narratives found in the Gospels.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2015
On 3.14 consider that that one can never finish precisely representing pi in numbers. There are always "some more" numbers to add to attaining a more precise numerical representation of pi. So humanity will not ever be able to experience a finished representation of pi. So pi is an unfinished, opened ended tautology: pi= 3.14........... When one adds a new decimal to pi, one changes one's experience of pi. In language deconstruction works in a similar way; we keep saying and adding some More and what we add contextually changes everything that was said before. Hence we in the faith community should be very careful about pronouncing "final words and final meanings" about anything, including God. Like pi, God still has a history in our lives and we will keep adding decimals to our experience of God and as such deconstruct our former selves with self-surpassing repentance toward the continuing mystery of God.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2015
It seems as though some kinds of evangelism have simply become so adapted to American commercial marketing methods that the methods and the marketers take precedence over what they offer. With so much religion in the media it almost can seem like competing "burger" chains wanting you to taste their product, because they have added the latest taste fad. What about the "plain old" neighborhood parish church which invites us to struggle with the use of Scripture, Tradition and Reason in finding corresponding application in our postmodern lives rather than entertaining preachers and rock bands? What about being quiet and faithful Christian ministers in and out of the pews with no fanfare? Fads come and go; a burger shop may have Sriracha today but it will be gone tomorrow. How about being the type of Christians who are just faithful and keep the Christ-like train of love and justice running well and on time?
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2015
One difference in the understanding of salvation among Christians has to do with what the word salvation means. In churches which do not practice baptism as a sacrament of realized grace for the baptized and the church, salvation is essentially "knowing" or having the feeling of assurance that one is not going to hell. I think this is a limitation to primary naivete in interpretation since such thinking eschews any metaphorical/imaginative thinking about places of the afterlife which arose in communities with traditions for speaking about the afterlife. For this group of "evangelical" Christians salvation is simply the event of being saved from hell in the afterlife through an experience of "being born again," or asking Jesus into one's heart. After salvation, one then hopes to grow in one's life of holiness in a further process of sanctification. Other Christians do not place as much emphasis upon the either/or finality of "salvific events" and view salvation on a continuum from Jesus saying that the kingdom of God belongs to children,(and one assumes "all children)" to many more salvific events in the realizations that we always, already live in God's kingdom. Salvation is the continuous process of realizing that we belong to God. I do think that some people need the security of being certain about their "salvific" event from hell because of their fearfulnesss due to their belief in their literalness about the afterlife estate. I also think it follows from people who believe more in the greatness of humanity to Fall away from God than in believing in the Good God who created us and called us "good" and stuck with calling us "good" sinner even in our fallen behaviors. This God did not make us as mistakes and continued with us enough to continue to offer good redemption events as we struggle through the obstacle course of the free conditions of life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2015
Isn't it interesting to note how many biblical interpreters want to import modern biology for their interpretation of Virgin Birth theology while at the same time ignoring the biology of the human effects on climate change in our current world as well as the scientific methods of dating the age of the universe? So the same people proof text the Bible to support their views are often the same people who proof text modern science to support their biblical views. Go figure.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2015
I offer everyone a reading alert for the Gospel of John; read it looking for Jesus rebuking people who are literal about his words. His disciples interpret the "sleep" of Lazarus as meaning sleep instead of death. Nicodemus interpreting "new birth" as climbing back into his mother's womb. Such a method of writing should be a indication to us that the truth of the Bible does not involve the confusion of modern scientific methods of empirical verification writing with the literary, metaphorical and evocative writing of the Gospel writers whose purpose is to transform a person from within so that their lives can make an empirical difference within the world, especially towards love, peace and justice outcomes. Fundamentalism reduces the Bible to something it is not, namely, a book with strictly empirically verifiable events. At the same time one does not discount the empirically verifiable engagement of the inner lives of people with spiritual experience and the verifiable aftermath of transformation of their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2015
Christians need to ponder how the New Testament writers used the Hebrew Scriptures to establish "correspondence" for presenting the meanings of the life of Jesus. When Israel complained about miserable food, poisonous snakes came as a punishment. Moses made a bronze snake, placed it on a pole and asked the people to look at it to be healed. The writer of John's Gospel compared the lifting up of Jesus on the cross to Moses' snake on a pole. Not a very exact correspondence, except the one: a gaze in the direction of God's healing provision is the saving gaze of faith. So one can see how inventive New Testament writers were in co-opting the stories of Hebrew Scriptures. The stories and their correspondence connections became teaching metaphors for faith in the early Christian community.
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2015
A question today for those interested in the legitimacy of the law is this: Does there need to be an appeal to God as a higher source to establish the validity of a law or any ethical practice? Does a secular ethicist have any validity for requiring that one keep a rule or making a judgment if there is no source of "final" judgment? A person might think that the well-being of the society in how it comes to define its own rules is adequate to establish their validity. I do not think laws occur without using a rhetoric which includes the mystification of justice to divine status and for the "secularist" they end up endowing their notion of "Justice" with all of the self evidentiary status of God, even as they try to make laws to conform to this mythical Justice. Lady Justice is actually the goddess "Justitia" whose blinded eyes and scales in hand statutes grace the "secular" courts of our country. So American law which derives more perhaps from Roman Law and English Common Law traditions than from the Torah, seeks to please Lady Justitia and appeal to Her while perhaps cynically denying that any Higher Sublime experience is needed to tame the human selfish ego toward peace and reciprocal existence with others.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2015
The clue to the necessity of the Law may be found in the 10th commandment, "Thou shalt not covet." Such an injunction is a recognition that humans have a profound engine of desire which can be "out of control." Desire may be known as pleasure and in early life is localized onto three pleasure zones, the zones around which Freud built his body narrative. But pleasure zones get dissociated from the body when the objects, people, events, become targets of our projection and so someone and something or some event which is not located on our bodies is able stimulate the pleasuring receptors thereby giving rise to the possibly of coveting; something external to us is able create a void and lack in our pleasuring receptors. Coveting gone wild, necessitates the need for controls and if it does not come in personal and willful self control, then the external suppressive controls need to be exerted in one's social situation. Through long experience the development of humanity into cultured humanity included the birth of laws to be standards of controlling acting out behaviors compelled by the engine of desire. Because of nature or nurture different people have varying ability to comply with the cultural laws. Today, we know that those who recover from extreme addictive behaviors confess an experience of a Higher Power to do so. The ancient 10 Commandments asks us in the first commandment to seek the Higher Power; this is the first commandment. We are to let our engine of desire and all of coveting intensity focus on the Higher Power of God first, as a way to learn the healthy and beneficial control of our "coveting" energies.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2015
We have become cynical about "law-making" when it appears that laws are being made on behalf of protecting the economic interests of certain sectors of society whereas the greatness of "law-making" should be the Holy Spirit inspiring continually laws which will more closely approximate the expression of justice in the new situations which arise, including the new insights which we have about people. The laws of the Torah are not final in the details of their one to one correspondence of ancient situations to our modern situation, but they are final and absolute in being a manifestation of the Holy Spirit within the community of people to inspire always already more pragmatic applications of justice in new contexts.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2015
We praise the importance of the Ten Commandments and being "law abiding" citizens but one can observe that the presence of rules perhaps reveals the natural proclivities of people with temperaments inclined to keeping or not keeping the law. Keeping the law and the practice of conformity seems to come easier to some. Early on the "Suzie good shoes" and the "rotten Robbies" become known and elementary school teachers praise conformity and sometimes the ones with nonconformist tendencies get pushed further into reactionary self-justification. The parable of the Prodigal Son seems to valorize the rotten Robbie who repents and seems to be a bit dismissive about the conforming older brother who is angered about all of the attention given to his young reprobate brother. Law, even as profound as the Ten Commandments, state a pragmatic mean to achieve but the giving of the law does not forbid us from continuously "raising" the standard of excellence in making new laws of excellence toward being "perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect." The higher laws which the "Susie good shoes" need to embrace may include patience and forgiveness for those who seem to be born with temperaments of non-conformity. The laws of patience and forgiveness are higher laws and attaining them makes us more like God, who tolerates too much from happening in this world because the Divine Nature is best expressed as Freedom. The Completely Free One, has shared freedom completely with the created order and in the cacophonous combinations there are glimpses of chaos and beauty because of the shared freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2015
A code of law is regarded to be high achievement of human culture and for this reason the Torah is such a significant ancient document. One needs to understand the difference between the "letter of the law" and the "spirit of the law." The letter of the law pertains to the legal and juridical practice in specific situations to approximate the practice of justice. One must realize the practice of justice always involves defining what justice means for whom within particular situations. What the "spirit of the law" implies is that in our commitment to that "spirit" we are always seeking to articulate what justice means for the common good in a situation. The details of legal reasoning, of necessity, change to fit new situations. The laws for the treatment of slaves are obsolete if a current legal system condemns as inhumane the past social and economic practice of slavery. Biblical contexts prove that situations of past inhumanity can have their "rules and laws." The founders of our country believed themselves committed to the "spirit" of the law as a way of formation towards our "better angels" even while they too were blind to the yet systematic subjugation of women and black persons. Some people would rather make permanent statutes to the "letter of law" and dismiss the "spirit" of the law as being too tolerant for people they don't believe to be equal in their own understanding of human dignity. According to Jesus, the "Spirit" of the law is very conservative; because it is as old as the belief that God is love.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2015
Many of the Ten Commandments are stated in the negative rather than the positive, e.g, you shall not murder instead of you shall respect life. The second commandment forbids the having of idols and the last commandment hints at why we might have idols when it forbids the action of "coveting." Understanding the dynamic of coveting might be crucial to understanding how to comport oneself with the structures recommended by the law. Coveting has do with with the reality of "life force," "desire," or "libido" or "will to power." The secret of being law abiding is to learn how to surf the desire of life force so that it does not become expressed as "coveting" which is a worshipful projecting of desire upon a person or object such that it becomes an "idol" and causes one to lose control of one's life with "addictive" or harmful behaviors to self or others. To love God means one discovers that God is great beyond any object, person, or situation of fame and power and so one's desire finds Someone worthy of worship. Surfing the waves is learning to use the power of the waves to propel one landward; surfing desire is to discover it as positive life force which can be regulated toward goodness, pleasure and enjoyment if we learn that is is given to us to be directed toward God whom is the only worthy object of our profound desire.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2015
Axiology is the study of values and laws and legal codes are efforts of people to make pragmatic sets of values for how people should live together. Laws and value come to legal practice because charity is not automatic and even innocence can involve people hurting each other in ignorance. Laws can be written in incredible details and become so specialized to various areas of life that one cannot possible know all of the rules. In the moral sphere communities try to make the laws accessible so that they can actually be practiced. The many laws of the Torah got reduced to the Big 10 as a way to help people to learn think and act in ways which would respect others. Jesus restated the summary of the law: "Love God, love one's neighbor as oneself." This incredible reduction of all of the details of legal minutiae to great principles make the law accessible to all and help to promote moral and ethical thinking by weighing every act by how our motives measure up to "loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves." Our laws in society often are geared simply to enforce conformity; the law of Christ is to make us into persons who are committed to continuous transformation in our ethical and spiritual lives.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2015
When Peter misunderstood Jesus regarding the suffering of the Messiah/Son of Man, Jesus rebuked Peter by saying, "Get behind me Satan!" These strong words would indicate how the oracle of the Risen Christ in the early Christian community was charting the disagreement about the nature of the Messiah which eventually separated the followers of Jesus from the synagogue. Peter, a Jew, is presented as one who misunderstood the nature of the Messiah and he made the conversion to understanding the suffering servant Messiah. Those who understood the Messiah to be more of a kingly Davidic figure were the ones who continued in not compromising the ritual traditions of Judaism. The Gospel narratives actually encode the separation of the Christ communities from the synagogues.
