Aphorism of Day, May 31, 2015
There is a Near Eastern story of the blind men in a room with an elephant as they explain to each other the presence of a large being from the perspective of their position, one at the trunk, another at a foot and another by an ear. They are all right and all wrong but lack an all seeing person to put together the vastness and the unity of the great presence. We speak about and feel God blindly and in part even as we confess the adequacy of the presentation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Even this confession has to be done with the humble confession of knowing and only seeing "in part."
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2015
Inquisitional faith is based upon the certitude of a controlling party which is more sure of its leadership than they are of God. Certitude of any sort is short sided since it involves setting a sort of finality at any point in time. A living faith is always open for new meanings to arise now and in the future. Any one who pretends to know in a final way what the Trinity means is one who has not considered the evocations of endless meanings in the future.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2015
The human linguistic skill of translation might be an apt metaphor for what happens in the relating of things divine to the human sphere. J.R.R. Tolkien was a "glossopoeiaist" in that he invented new languages and then translated them into English. The invention of language about God has happened in that people have known human experience to be sublimely marked or inscribed by an extra-human Being whose communication has been interpreted from such sublime markings. In Christianity, the Trinity has come to be known as the "best" translation of the divine into the human sphere with Jesus as Son of God being the best translator and interpreter of the life of the divine to humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2015
Want to solve most of the philosophical and theological problems of life? One can do so by accepting the priority of language because with language one can say A and non-A and Language embraces both and still has its unity as Being Language. Language is prior to being able to say God or non-God which does not mean Language is superior to God because Language is also able to state that there is something, some Being which is more than language even though that Being needs language to be relevant to human existence. The question for us remains to live by faith in proving the adequacy of how we state our beliefs in language in our speaking, writing and more importantly in our body language acts. With our body language acts are we proving the superior adequacy of love and justice for the well-being of this world?
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2015
Language can be playfully deconstructive which might be indicative that metaphors have a flickering shelf life and one needs to get the insight and move on to the next insight. An example: A spiritual leader says: Sometimes silence is the best response. Deconstruction: Even silence about silence sometimes being the best response? When one reads the Bible one needs to allow one's own language experience interact with the words found in the Bible to find these flickering insights. Too many people are reading the Bible looking for the words there to be cemented to a final meaningful referent and this is because of insecurity in need of "final" meaning. There is no final meaning as long as there is time and language. The words of the Bible partake of the versatility of language to be meaningful in new ways all of the time. Why be insecure and engage in building neurotic security blanket stable meanings when there is so much future and so many more meanings to provide more moments of "eureka?"
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2015
We use our facility in language to speculate about a "pre-word" existence even as we have to admit that we use words to do so. With our words we chart human experience and an aspect of human experience is contemplating the various responses to greatness and the superlative. This response has drawn from us the word God and the words about God. Enough of humanity have found Greatness to be friendly enough to be characterized as the Greatest Parent, or Father. When humanity has come to speak about God people do so because they believe or assume Greatness is reduced or made accessible to human experience and language and the coincidence of Divine and Human in Christ the Son is a celebration of that obvious unavoidable assumption. And it would follow that assuming a relationship with Personal Greatness and celebrating this relationship in the specific coincidence of humanity and divinity in a Person, would derive from a General coincidence of Greatness within everything and everyone as Personal Spirit. God is True because God has come into human language, just as everything is true which comes to language. What remains for us is to live and prove the adequacy of all truths which come to language and so we endeavor to discovery and know the omni-adequacy of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2015
Memorial Day: A day to remember that everyone might happen upon an occasion to lay down one's life for someone else but the probability of soldiers, sailors and marines to such an event of sacrifice is greater. Mostly it is a day to remember those who actually did lay down their lives in the defense of their country. It is a day to hope for the time when we "study war no more" and spiritualize death as learning to live the life of being "living sacrifices" for God and one another for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2015
Oddly, St. Paul writes that one of the signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit is the deep groans of the divine presence praying in and through us for the world. What if we could come to interpret the deep groans of our lives as the call to make ourselves available to God to intercede for all of the suffering in our world? Would we handle "depression" and "bad moods" in a different way? The juxtaposition of so much freedom of events in our world creates the conditions for some horrendous events of loss and suffering and for those who don't know the immediate impact of the events of suffering could be those who share the energy of the pain through the deep groans of God's suffering with us all of the time. And could it be that participating in those deep groans, we can share in part of the suffering in a creative way?
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2015
Stories are told with a linear logic to simplify causality and in primary naivete one can come to believe that the story being told actually causes things to happen. This occurs with the way in which many people read the Bible, and so because we read things in the Bible, the Bible story actually made things to happen as they did. What is more likely is that love and justice are eternal and they keep unfolding in history. That they do unfold and are recorded in stories does not mean that the story made them happen. Yes, we are very "event" oriented and events gives book end definition to stories as time-lapsed units within continuous time as a way of providing community identity and meaning, but we should not make a past event such a sacred idol that we do not attend to in-breaking of love and justice in our time to make them new event realities.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2015
Can views of spatial relationship change how we think? What about the change from a geocentric flat earth view of the world to a heliocentric view of the world? Both views were "wrong" since there would be no evidence for saying that either the earth or the sun is the geometric center of the universe. What modern science has taught us that the progressive discovery of our smallness in a vast universe means that the more we learn about vastness ends up relativizing what we previously have thought that we knew about ourselves. Even though we may think that we lost our center in the switch from a geocentric view to a heliocentric view, what we have never lost is the prison of our anthropocentric world. Even the extra-human reality of God is confessed from our anthropocentric position. Extra-human greatness at the very least means we came from Vastness and Vastness will survive us and the moral implication for us is how we treat each other in the time that we do have. Prior Vastness, Current Vastness and Future Vastness means that no human leviathan should exploit power, wealth and knowledge to dominate others in oppressive ways since specific dominance is only temporal and not permanent. Vastness should teach us to learn to leave the legacy of power, wealth and knowledge as the temporal legacy of caring for one another. Let the memory which Vastness has of us be the legacy of care.
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2015
Now that we have the ability of scientific self study of the human person to pinpoint brain activity and performance of human skills, we still cannot diminish the awe and the mystery of higher levels of sentient life being able to have mutual experience. What are the conditions which allow the "conduction" of mutual experience? A copper wire conduct electricity from point A to point B. What is the conductor between sentient beings who just take for granted the ability to inter-relate? I have the ability to recognize you; you can recognize me, but what is the Between-ness that allows this to occur? This Between-ness Conductivity has brought from us the confession of Omni-present Conducting Great Personality as the pre-condition for all sentient mutual experience and so the confession of the Holy Spirit as the every present Wind, Air, Breath of life.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2015
John 6:63: Words of Jesus, "My words are spirit and they are life." This is an interesting equivalence of Word and Spirit. An etiology of "spirit" and derivative notions point to the unseen breath in a person which is the mysterious sign of life. Or the great breath of nature called Wind. Wind is an unseen force whose effects are evident. Wind and Breath as metaphorical words for spirit and then the equivalence of words and spirit reveals some insights about language. We use words to represent mystery or what we cannot know in life and yet we know that which we cannot know effects what we can know. We are told in John's Gospel that Jesus breathed his spirit upon his disciples. This makes metaphorical sense when it refers to the life changing words of Jesus for his disciples. It is through words that we receive the abundant life, the life of new insight which propels us toward a hopeful future. Word is at the intersection of everything; with it we name God, mystery and spirit and everything which, as we confess using words, is more than words. Word is the human boat we live in to navigate everything which is not Word, even though I must use words to say what is not words. One can understand how word is co-extensive with spirit and life.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2015
It usually turns out that we don't have completely consistent linguistic environments consisting of words directed toward us which value us in completely consistent ways. We do not end up being everyone's favorite and maybe we don't end up being the favorite of the significant people in our lives which may cause us to engage in attention getting behaviors which are not successful. The "oneness" with the Father that the prayer of Jesus asks for his disciples is based upon the reality of the uneven experience of "being valued" that we know in our lives and so the major "prayer" break through is to know a heavenly parent who values us with even and consistent "spiritual" value beyond the inconsistent favor which we receive in our environments. Even being someone's favorite is distorted because one is "used" to cause someone else's pleasure. This is why it is safe to discover an esteem which comes from the heavenly Parent who is within our environment but beyond the changing politics of emotions and favoritism. We are blessed if we have had shielding mentors who protected our "linguistic" environments at the right time but who were also mature enough to model consistent valuing behaviors toward us.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2015
Prayer is a way of corralling one's voice. By virtue of having language and since we learned language when we were not really self consciously in control of learning it, our language often speaks us more than we it. So prayer involves an organization and bringing to conscious use our worded lives so that we can recognize the controlling patterns which have come to dominate our lives because of our naivete in the learning of our language use within the various learning contexts of our lives. Prayer can be a way of discovering the tacit patterns of our language coded lives and attaining a new honesty about how we are socially constructed. Prayer is attaining an honesty before God and ourselves so that we can receive new insights about understanding what is happening to us as preparatory assessment for making new choices and executing amendment of our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2915
Prayer is the continual practice of the voice inside of one's head toward God as a way of renewing memory and learning to take authorial self control because in the practice of prayer one taps into Higher Power.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2015
It is hard to say what prayer is except to say that it might be all human response directed toward God in an intentional way. And would that all of our intentions would be in a process of purification through the practice of prayer.
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2015
In the Christian sacred story, Jesus in his thirties returns to live permanently in his Father's House in heaven. He is seated at his Father's right hand and he is portrayed as one who intercedes on behalf of the world. Intercessory Prayer defines the central meaning of priesthood and everyone is called to the priestly ministry of intercessory prayer. If the risen Christ is called the Word of God from the Beginning, then the chief purpose of Word and words is prayer or understanding that we in being "worded beings" need to direct all of our words toward God as our confession that living and moving and having our created conscious existence in WORD means that we embrace the intentional relationship with RELATIONSHIP, because WORD is relationship. Word/language as unavoidable social practice means that we can have mutual experience conducted between us, and let the mutual experience conducted between us be prayerful.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2015
The event of the Ascension functions in Christian sacred story as a closure rite. It a rite of transition to living without the same accessibility to the physical Jesus. Jesus had died but the Risen Christ had become known in ecstatic reappearances. How could the transition to the unavailability of the Risen Christ in such dramatic modes be accounted for? Was the Ascension a rite that reiterates the Elisha/Elijah story? Elisha was to receive a double portion of his mentor's spirit if he saw him depart to the heavenly abode. So Elijah rode the chariot of fire to heaven as a validation that his spirit remained with his disciple Elisha. The Ascension event in sacred story involves the reiteration of the Elisha/Elijah departure scene. In this rite of departure there is a "letting" go of what can die but an intensifying of the presence of what can never die. Life Force remains no matter how many transfigurations it continually cycles through. The Risen Christ as Life Force can be a "peek a boo" presence anytime, anywhere and in anyone or anything, now that the disciples have been weaned from regarding God's exhaustive presence to be just in the physical aspect of Jesus of Nazareth.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2015
In biblical studies, prayer is regarded to be a literary genre, such as is instantiated in the Psalms. It is also sub-genre or discourse as found in the prayer of Jesus found in John 17. Prayer in a macro-sense may be the spiritual equivalent of the psychiatric "talking cure," based upon having faith to believe that a Great One is listening as we come to orient all of our language and perpetual inner dialogue to a great Friend of the universe who not only gives a damn for us but cares for us and who is perpetually saying to us, "how did that make you feel?" and "uh-huh" and "go on" and you don't get charged two hundred dollars an hour.
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2015
Did we ever consider that what is inspiring about the ancient people is what is also inspiring in today's world, namely an honest search for God while one concurrently ties that search to justice in one's setting with the truth of honest hearts? Why do some Bible readers absolutize details of things that were relevant in the ancient cultures of the Bible even though they don't have any relevant applicability to our world today? If the Bible is inspired because there is honest seeking of God in times past then details of past cultures should not keep our faith tradition in the straight-jackets of those details. It is honest seeking which instantiates the inspiration of the Bible; it is honest seeking in our time looking to find new practice of God's justice and love in the details of our lives which is the faithful witness to the God of the Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2015
In the week of the feast of the Ascension, it is difficult to import our modern astronomy and space travel into the accounts about the ancient travelers between the visible and invisible worlds. Angels were such travelers. Apocalyptic figures such as Enoch, Moses and Elijah were such travelers. In sacred story, Jesus ascends into heaven. In Roman Catholic sacred story, the Blessed Virgin Mary has been Assumed into heaven by her Son Jesus. We have narratives about inter-communication between the invisible and unknown and these narratives do not solve mysteries, they merely help us to be comfortable in living with mysteries and apparitions and reappearances of departed "travelers" are touches of personifying mystery. Images of Jesus or the Blessed Virgin in "toast" or "stains" on a garage floor or in cloud pictures mean that the human heart projects personal meaning and communication from the invisible to our visible world. The most embracing notion in all of this dynamic is Language: Language names the invisible and the visible and relates all human experience of both and makes the visible and the invisible seem actual in precise ways even while when one tries to explain precisely what is actual one has to use just more words to do so.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2015
The identity of the New Testament community was constituted by people like Paul and Peter who were quite exorcised by the fact that most of their fellow Jews could not identify with knowing Jesus as the Messiah while at the same time the spiritual experience of Gentile people who had no tradition of the Messiah came to the experience of Jesus the Messiah as "complete foreigners." The increasing number of non-Jews who embraced the Risen Christ as their totemic spiritual identity tipped the demographics of the churches in favor of Gentile majority and the further accommodation and facilitation of Gentile membership. The requirement of membership dropped some important rituals of Judaism when the church leadership validated spiritual and moral change in a person which opened the way for one's baptism as the main ritual of initiation.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2015
Often the Holy Scriptures have been read as a sort of "direct" communication from God pretending that there was no human interpretation involved and no human historical contexts involved in filtering God's words. What it turns out is that the notion of God's direct communication with singular meaning being evidenced in that direct communication is used as a legal stick by many pontificating preachers to declare God's absolute and final and only meaning to influence a community in the practice of their views of the world. So individual preachers in communities project their own interpretation upon the Holy Book and then disclaim by saying, "It is not my view, it is God's view." The Bible is a collection of writings which were interpreted in their reception by the writers, voted upon by humans to be regarded as the official holy textbook of various communities and have been read and interpreted and applied in so many various ways in the last 2000 years mainly for the pragmatic convening of the various communities where the writings have been influential in forming the identity of people. People who have read the Bible as their Holy Book have used it to justified slavery and the subjugation of women and geocentric flat earth views and lots of other behaviors which seem downright cruel. The Bible is inspired because it contains within it the divine principles for Bible readers to correct their former mis-readings and misinterpretations of the Bible evidenced in their former unjust and ignorant behaviors. The Bible has a future because we are still being inspired to recover from our mis-readings of it in our time in conjunction with the current comprising of the Wisdom of God in our midst.
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2015
How does one spiritually prepare to be with other people and allow them the integrity of their own identity within one's life? One can practice the imagination of the deconstruction of the one's ego. This is done by identifying all of the contextual features which reveal the personas, the masks of contextual identities with which one can become too over-identified and locked in and leave other people being locked out. With the imagination begin to de-contextualize oneself and as it were have the masks of one's ego lose their meaning without being moored within familiar contexts. To appreciate that one's personas might have been other than they are, is to begin to appreciate the differences of others in one's life and the contexts of their formation. This is an exercise in empathy and compassion; why be "just" an Episcopalian when one can be so many other identities as well as a method for appreciating others in real and vicarious ways? If we allow that every other person can stand as a valid representative for all of humanity, we will allow ourselves the same high responsibility of being a valid representative of all humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2015
Be both priest and temple today. Be a location of God's Spirit and be the interior priest who intercedes for the situation where you are placed today. As an interior priest one uses one's body, mind, emotions and will as a sort of gauntlet maze to be the receptor of occasions of experience and as those occasions of experience pass through one's interior maze one interprets with the discernment and insights that one has and presents them to God's Spirit. With the act of prayer we end us presenting life to God rather than just reacting with thoughtless projection and response to the people and events in our lives. As we let everything travel the interior gauntlet to the Spirit, the Spirit provides us with the energy and inspiration of the type of wise and peaceful response that needs to be forthcoming to give us the ability to participate in being part of the answer to our own prayers.
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2015
The finding of modern science regarding the universe brought confusion to the notions of vertical and horizontal since in a flat-earth view of cosmological order the horizontal limit was falling off the edge of the earth and the vertical had a true up and down. One could physically locate heaven and the abode of God beyond the domed sky on which rose and set the sun, moon and stars. In flat earth thinking up and down had both perceptual relevance and in ignorance there was an assumed actual relevance. In our understanding of the universe, up and down only has very limited contextual perceptual meaning. Up and down, horizontal and vertical in the physical realm have to be understood as expansive spatiality, the edge of which we've not seen by our best methods of observation. Up and down, the horizontal and the vertical have moved from the once literal significance to a different kind of metaphorical significance in relating the meanings of surpassibility and systems of poetic values which are a part of the constellation of worded meanings in the inner space of human beings.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2015
The New Testament writings exhibit a discourse of closure in the exit of Christians from the synagogue. Typical of "break away" movements, the early Christians who professed that the "Spirit" of faith in God was the determining identifier rather than the outer signs of ritual conformity to Judaism, began to spiritualize aspects of their Judaic roots. This in part was due to the success of the Gospel in the Gentile populace for whom the ritual purity of Judaism was inaccessible, or impractical. Christian movements went on to establish their own external acts of "ritual" conformity and Christian "reform" movements have challenged the perceived hypocrisy of mere external conformity with the "new" purity of Spirit of a new movement. The history of religious movements manifests the sociological habits of the advance of the practice of ideas common to the social phenomenon of ever switching governing paradigms which are the guiding principles which provide the new dictionary of meanings for the old words of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2015
The use of words also involves using them to describe the mood and the degree of attachment to one's word products and interpretations. People often remain in spontaneous fervor with the words of interpretation which arose at the time when they had a transforming insight which seemed in the moment to "save" their lives. So they return with repetition to the memory of the power of the saving moment which had attending words. Other people go on to have so many other kinds of saving moments in their faith life, that the impact of earlier interpretative products have less intensity since new interpretation with fresh insights have the relevance of currency. The fear of the sheer volume of new events of interpretation can make people fear leaving the scene of their original comfort in a break through moment. Some times we have to acknowledge the "pathology" of break through moments because they occurred at time when one was going through stress factors in life which created the very conditions for our spiritual break through. It is sad if one does not have further abundance of interpretations of new events which allows one the freedom to re-evaluate and admit the diminished value of a past event because the current insights are so surpassing. If one anchors one's identity on a break through in the past, one may not have anymore breakthroughs and be the equivalent of a old broken LP repeating the same thing endlessly.
Aphorism of Day, May 3, 2015
Word or Language reveals its omnivorous dominance with the magic of the metaphor. Through the magic of metaphor anything can be anything else. The use of the metaphor has an arbitrary aspect because the power to define creates the condition for meaning in a mathematical way as in for the purposes of this equation x=y. Metaphorical behavior reveals the fact that language itself is metaphorical, meaning that all of our insides and outsides gets reduced and filter into something other than what it is, namely words. And when one reduces insides and outsides into words one discovers that one is simply using more words to refer to other words. We live and move and have our being in self-referencing, reflexive omnivorous WORD, thus instantiating the insight of John 1:1: In the Beginning was the Word.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2015
One of life's frustration might be call the trial of the intermittent event. A piece of equipment malfunctions at unpredictable times and will not malfunction at command when the repair person shows up. In life, intermittent events challenge neat and predictable probabilities. The play of freedom within the world creates the conditions of "intermitency" and this experience is perhaps the greatest challenge to our lives of faith. If we have a sense of timing about bad things happening to us and a knowledge of how and when they might happen, we at least think that we have more measured control of a situation. Intermittent events will challenge us and we need to realize that intermittent good surprises often don't get the same recognition as the intermittent bad things which occur. May God deliver us or keep us in the ordeals of the intermittent.
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2015
The paucity of information which we have about biblical personalities means that the few vignettes of their lives get magnified into types and characters and so we really are dealing with the teaching ministry of the church through the literature of the Bible. Biblical literature as "art" provides us with the sense of "immediacy" and has the sublime effect of a "close encounter" with the person about whom we are reading. Fundamentalist and modern historicism fixation on whether things "really" occurred in the ways in which they did betray the purpose and the function of the biblical literature in providing the identity of members of communities in their quest for personal transformation towards excellence. Fundamentalism and historicism may be a side debate between adherents who may be missing the point of the literary art of the biblical writings.
There is a Near Eastern story of the blind men in a room with an elephant as they explain to each other the presence of a large being from the perspective of their position, one at the trunk, another at a foot and another by an ear. They are all right and all wrong but lack an all seeing person to put together the vastness and the unity of the great presence. We speak about and feel God blindly and in part even as we confess the adequacy of the presentation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Even this confession has to be done with the humble confession of knowing and only seeing "in part."
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2015
Inquisitional faith is based upon the certitude of a controlling party which is more sure of its leadership than they are of God. Certitude of any sort is short sided since it involves setting a sort of finality at any point in time. A living faith is always open for new meanings to arise now and in the future. Any one who pretends to know in a final way what the Trinity means is one who has not considered the evocations of endless meanings in the future.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2015
The human linguistic skill of translation might be an apt metaphor for what happens in the relating of things divine to the human sphere. J.R.R. Tolkien was a "glossopoeiaist" in that he invented new languages and then translated them into English. The invention of language about God has happened in that people have known human experience to be sublimely marked or inscribed by an extra-human Being whose communication has been interpreted from such sublime markings. In Christianity, the Trinity has come to be known as the "best" translation of the divine into the human sphere with Jesus as Son of God being the best translator and interpreter of the life of the divine to humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2015
Want to solve most of the philosophical and theological problems of life? One can do so by accepting the priority of language because with language one can say A and non-A and Language embraces both and still has its unity as Being Language. Language is prior to being able to say God or non-God which does not mean Language is superior to God because Language is also able to state that there is something, some Being which is more than language even though that Being needs language to be relevant to human existence. The question for us remains to live by faith in proving the adequacy of how we state our beliefs in language in our speaking, writing and more importantly in our body language acts. With our body language acts are we proving the superior adequacy of love and justice for the well-being of this world?
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2015
Language can be playfully deconstructive which might be indicative that metaphors have a flickering shelf life and one needs to get the insight and move on to the next insight. An example: A spiritual leader says: Sometimes silence is the best response. Deconstruction: Even silence about silence sometimes being the best response? When one reads the Bible one needs to allow one's own language experience interact with the words found in the Bible to find these flickering insights. Too many people are reading the Bible looking for the words there to be cemented to a final meaningful referent and this is because of insecurity in need of "final" meaning. There is no final meaning as long as there is time and language. The words of the Bible partake of the versatility of language to be meaningful in new ways all of the time. Why be insecure and engage in building neurotic security blanket stable meanings when there is so much future and so many more meanings to provide more moments of "eureka?"
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2015
We use our facility in language to speculate about a "pre-word" existence even as we have to admit that we use words to do so. With our words we chart human experience and an aspect of human experience is contemplating the various responses to greatness and the superlative. This response has drawn from us the word God and the words about God. Enough of humanity have found Greatness to be friendly enough to be characterized as the Greatest Parent, or Father. When humanity has come to speak about God people do so because they believe or assume Greatness is reduced or made accessible to human experience and language and the coincidence of Divine and Human in Christ the Son is a celebration of that obvious unavoidable assumption. And it would follow that assuming a relationship with Personal Greatness and celebrating this relationship in the specific coincidence of humanity and divinity in a Person, would derive from a General coincidence of Greatness within everything and everyone as Personal Spirit. God is True because God has come into human language, just as everything is true which comes to language. What remains for us is to live and prove the adequacy of all truths which come to language and so we endeavor to discovery and know the omni-adequacy of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2015
Memorial Day: A day to remember that everyone might happen upon an occasion to lay down one's life for someone else but the probability of soldiers, sailors and marines to such an event of sacrifice is greater. Mostly it is a day to remember those who actually did lay down their lives in the defense of their country. It is a day to hope for the time when we "study war no more" and spiritualize death as learning to live the life of being "living sacrifices" for God and one another for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2015
Oddly, St. Paul writes that one of the signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit is the deep groans of the divine presence praying in and through us for the world. What if we could come to interpret the deep groans of our lives as the call to make ourselves available to God to intercede for all of the suffering in our world? Would we handle "depression" and "bad moods" in a different way? The juxtaposition of so much freedom of events in our world creates the conditions for some horrendous events of loss and suffering and for those who don't know the immediate impact of the events of suffering could be those who share the energy of the pain through the deep groans of God's suffering with us all of the time. And could it be that participating in those deep groans, we can share in part of the suffering in a creative way?
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2015
Stories are told with a linear logic to simplify causality and in primary naivete one can come to believe that the story being told actually causes things to happen. This occurs with the way in which many people read the Bible, and so because we read things in the Bible, the Bible story actually made things to happen as they did. What is more likely is that love and justice are eternal and they keep unfolding in history. That they do unfold and are recorded in stories does not mean that the story made them happen. Yes, we are very "event" oriented and events gives book end definition to stories as time-lapsed units within continuous time as a way of providing community identity and meaning, but we should not make a past event such a sacred idol that we do not attend to in-breaking of love and justice in our time to make them new event realities.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2015
Can views of spatial relationship change how we think? What about the change from a geocentric flat earth view of the world to a heliocentric view of the world? Both views were "wrong" since there would be no evidence for saying that either the earth or the sun is the geometric center of the universe. What modern science has taught us that the progressive discovery of our smallness in a vast universe means that the more we learn about vastness ends up relativizing what we previously have thought that we knew about ourselves. Even though we may think that we lost our center in the switch from a geocentric view to a heliocentric view, what we have never lost is the prison of our anthropocentric world. Even the extra-human reality of God is confessed from our anthropocentric position. Extra-human greatness at the very least means we came from Vastness and Vastness will survive us and the moral implication for us is how we treat each other in the time that we do have. Prior Vastness, Current Vastness and Future Vastness means that no human leviathan should exploit power, wealth and knowledge to dominate others in oppressive ways since specific dominance is only temporal and not permanent. Vastness should teach us to learn to leave the legacy of power, wealth and knowledge as the temporal legacy of caring for one another. Let the memory which Vastness has of us be the legacy of care.
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2015
Now that we have the ability of scientific self study of the human person to pinpoint brain activity and performance of human skills, we still cannot diminish the awe and the mystery of higher levels of sentient life being able to have mutual experience. What are the conditions which allow the "conduction" of mutual experience? A copper wire conduct electricity from point A to point B. What is the conductor between sentient beings who just take for granted the ability to inter-relate? I have the ability to recognize you; you can recognize me, but what is the Between-ness that allows this to occur? This Between-ness Conductivity has brought from us the confession of Omni-present Conducting Great Personality as the pre-condition for all sentient mutual experience and so the confession of the Holy Spirit as the every present Wind, Air, Breath of life.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2015
John 6:63: Words of Jesus, "My words are spirit and they are life." This is an interesting equivalence of Word and Spirit. An etiology of "spirit" and derivative notions point to the unseen breath in a person which is the mysterious sign of life. Or the great breath of nature called Wind. Wind is an unseen force whose effects are evident. Wind and Breath as metaphorical words for spirit and then the equivalence of words and spirit reveals some insights about language. We use words to represent mystery or what we cannot know in life and yet we know that which we cannot know effects what we can know. We are told in John's Gospel that Jesus breathed his spirit upon his disciples. This makes metaphorical sense when it refers to the life changing words of Jesus for his disciples. It is through words that we receive the abundant life, the life of new insight which propels us toward a hopeful future. Word is at the intersection of everything; with it we name God, mystery and spirit and everything which, as we confess using words, is more than words. Word is the human boat we live in to navigate everything which is not Word, even though I must use words to say what is not words. One can understand how word is co-extensive with spirit and life.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2015
It usually turns out that we don't have completely consistent linguistic environments consisting of words directed toward us which value us in completely consistent ways. We do not end up being everyone's favorite and maybe we don't end up being the favorite of the significant people in our lives which may cause us to engage in attention getting behaviors which are not successful. The "oneness" with the Father that the prayer of Jesus asks for his disciples is based upon the reality of the uneven experience of "being valued" that we know in our lives and so the major "prayer" break through is to know a heavenly parent who values us with even and consistent "spiritual" value beyond the inconsistent favor which we receive in our environments. Even being someone's favorite is distorted because one is "used" to cause someone else's pleasure. This is why it is safe to discover an esteem which comes from the heavenly Parent who is within our environment but beyond the changing politics of emotions and favoritism. We are blessed if we have had shielding mentors who protected our "linguistic" environments at the right time but who were also mature enough to model consistent valuing behaviors toward us.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2015
Prayer is a way of corralling one's voice. By virtue of having language and since we learned language when we were not really self consciously in control of learning it, our language often speaks us more than we it. So prayer involves an organization and bringing to conscious use our worded lives so that we can recognize the controlling patterns which have come to dominate our lives because of our naivete in the learning of our language use within the various learning contexts of our lives. Prayer can be a way of discovering the tacit patterns of our language coded lives and attaining a new honesty about how we are socially constructed. Prayer is attaining an honesty before God and ourselves so that we can receive new insights about understanding what is happening to us as preparatory assessment for making new choices and executing amendment of our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2915
Prayer is the continual practice of the voice inside of one's head toward God as a way of renewing memory and learning to take authorial self control because in the practice of prayer one taps into Higher Power.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2015
It is hard to say what prayer is except to say that it might be all human response directed toward God in an intentional way. And would that all of our intentions would be in a process of purification through the practice of prayer.
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2015
In the Christian sacred story, Jesus in his thirties returns to live permanently in his Father's House in heaven. He is seated at his Father's right hand and he is portrayed as one who intercedes on behalf of the world. Intercessory Prayer defines the central meaning of priesthood and everyone is called to the priestly ministry of intercessory prayer. If the risen Christ is called the Word of God from the Beginning, then the chief purpose of Word and words is prayer or understanding that we in being "worded beings" need to direct all of our words toward God as our confession that living and moving and having our created conscious existence in WORD means that we embrace the intentional relationship with RELATIONSHIP, because WORD is relationship. Word/language as unavoidable social practice means that we can have mutual experience conducted between us, and let the mutual experience conducted between us be prayerful.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2015
The event of the Ascension functions in Christian sacred story as a closure rite. It a rite of transition to living without the same accessibility to the physical Jesus. Jesus had died but the Risen Christ had become known in ecstatic reappearances. How could the transition to the unavailability of the Risen Christ in such dramatic modes be accounted for? Was the Ascension a rite that reiterates the Elisha/Elijah story? Elisha was to receive a double portion of his mentor's spirit if he saw him depart to the heavenly abode. So Elijah rode the chariot of fire to heaven as a validation that his spirit remained with his disciple Elisha. The Ascension event in sacred story involves the reiteration of the Elisha/Elijah departure scene. In this rite of departure there is a "letting" go of what can die but an intensifying of the presence of what can never die. Life Force remains no matter how many transfigurations it continually cycles through. The Risen Christ as Life Force can be a "peek a boo" presence anytime, anywhere and in anyone or anything, now that the disciples have been weaned from regarding God's exhaustive presence to be just in the physical aspect of Jesus of Nazareth.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2015
In biblical studies, prayer is regarded to be a literary genre, such as is instantiated in the Psalms. It is also sub-genre or discourse as found in the prayer of Jesus found in John 17. Prayer in a macro-sense may be the spiritual equivalent of the psychiatric "talking cure," based upon having faith to believe that a Great One is listening as we come to orient all of our language and perpetual inner dialogue to a great Friend of the universe who not only gives a damn for us but cares for us and who is perpetually saying to us, "how did that make you feel?" and "uh-huh" and "go on" and you don't get charged two hundred dollars an hour.
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2015
Did we ever consider that what is inspiring about the ancient people is what is also inspiring in today's world, namely an honest search for God while one concurrently ties that search to justice in one's setting with the truth of honest hearts? Why do some Bible readers absolutize details of things that were relevant in the ancient cultures of the Bible even though they don't have any relevant applicability to our world today? If the Bible is inspired because there is honest seeking of God in times past then details of past cultures should not keep our faith tradition in the straight-jackets of those details. It is honest seeking which instantiates the inspiration of the Bible; it is honest seeking in our time looking to find new practice of God's justice and love in the details of our lives which is the faithful witness to the God of the Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2015
In the week of the feast of the Ascension, it is difficult to import our modern astronomy and space travel into the accounts about the ancient travelers between the visible and invisible worlds. Angels were such travelers. Apocalyptic figures such as Enoch, Moses and Elijah were such travelers. In sacred story, Jesus ascends into heaven. In Roman Catholic sacred story, the Blessed Virgin Mary has been Assumed into heaven by her Son Jesus. We have narratives about inter-communication between the invisible and unknown and these narratives do not solve mysteries, they merely help us to be comfortable in living with mysteries and apparitions and reappearances of departed "travelers" are touches of personifying mystery. Images of Jesus or the Blessed Virgin in "toast" or "stains" on a garage floor or in cloud pictures mean that the human heart projects personal meaning and communication from the invisible to our visible world. The most embracing notion in all of this dynamic is Language: Language names the invisible and the visible and relates all human experience of both and makes the visible and the invisible seem actual in precise ways even while when one tries to explain precisely what is actual one has to use just more words to do so.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2015
The identity of the New Testament community was constituted by people like Paul and Peter who were quite exorcised by the fact that most of their fellow Jews could not identify with knowing Jesus as the Messiah while at the same time the spiritual experience of Gentile people who had no tradition of the Messiah came to the experience of Jesus the Messiah as "complete foreigners." The increasing number of non-Jews who embraced the Risen Christ as their totemic spiritual identity tipped the demographics of the churches in favor of Gentile majority and the further accommodation and facilitation of Gentile membership. The requirement of membership dropped some important rituals of Judaism when the church leadership validated spiritual and moral change in a person which opened the way for one's baptism as the main ritual of initiation.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2015
Often the Holy Scriptures have been read as a sort of "direct" communication from God pretending that there was no human interpretation involved and no human historical contexts involved in filtering God's words. What it turns out is that the notion of God's direct communication with singular meaning being evidenced in that direct communication is used as a legal stick by many pontificating preachers to declare God's absolute and final and only meaning to influence a community in the practice of their views of the world. So individual preachers in communities project their own interpretation upon the Holy Book and then disclaim by saying, "It is not my view, it is God's view." The Bible is a collection of writings which were interpreted in their reception by the writers, voted upon by humans to be regarded as the official holy textbook of various communities and have been read and interpreted and applied in so many various ways in the last 2000 years mainly for the pragmatic convening of the various communities where the writings have been influential in forming the identity of people. People who have read the Bible as their Holy Book have used it to justified slavery and the subjugation of women and geocentric flat earth views and lots of other behaviors which seem downright cruel. The Bible is inspired because it contains within it the divine principles for Bible readers to correct their former mis-readings and misinterpretations of the Bible evidenced in their former unjust and ignorant behaviors. The Bible has a future because we are still being inspired to recover from our mis-readings of it in our time in conjunction with the current comprising of the Wisdom of God in our midst.
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2015
How does one spiritually prepare to be with other people and allow them the integrity of their own identity within one's life? One can practice the imagination of the deconstruction of the one's ego. This is done by identifying all of the contextual features which reveal the personas, the masks of contextual identities with which one can become too over-identified and locked in and leave other people being locked out. With the imagination begin to de-contextualize oneself and as it were have the masks of one's ego lose their meaning without being moored within familiar contexts. To appreciate that one's personas might have been other than they are, is to begin to appreciate the differences of others in one's life and the contexts of their formation. This is an exercise in empathy and compassion; why be "just" an Episcopalian when one can be so many other identities as well as a method for appreciating others in real and vicarious ways? If we allow that every other person can stand as a valid representative for all of humanity, we will allow ourselves the same high responsibility of being a valid representative of all humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2015
Be both priest and temple today. Be a location of God's Spirit and be the interior priest who intercedes for the situation where you are placed today. As an interior priest one uses one's body, mind, emotions and will as a sort of gauntlet maze to be the receptor of occasions of experience and as those occasions of experience pass through one's interior maze one interprets with the discernment and insights that one has and presents them to God's Spirit. With the act of prayer we end us presenting life to God rather than just reacting with thoughtless projection and response to the people and events in our lives. As we let everything travel the interior gauntlet to the Spirit, the Spirit provides us with the energy and inspiration of the type of wise and peaceful response that needs to be forthcoming to give us the ability to participate in being part of the answer to our own prayers.
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2015
The finding of modern science regarding the universe brought confusion to the notions of vertical and horizontal since in a flat-earth view of cosmological order the horizontal limit was falling off the edge of the earth and the vertical had a true up and down. One could physically locate heaven and the abode of God beyond the domed sky on which rose and set the sun, moon and stars. In flat earth thinking up and down had both perceptual relevance and in ignorance there was an assumed actual relevance. In our understanding of the universe, up and down only has very limited contextual perceptual meaning. Up and down, horizontal and vertical in the physical realm have to be understood as expansive spatiality, the edge of which we've not seen by our best methods of observation. Up and down, the horizontal and the vertical have moved from the once literal significance to a different kind of metaphorical significance in relating the meanings of surpassibility and systems of poetic values which are a part of the constellation of worded meanings in the inner space of human beings.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2015
The New Testament writings exhibit a discourse of closure in the exit of Christians from the synagogue. Typical of "break away" movements, the early Christians who professed that the "Spirit" of faith in God was the determining identifier rather than the outer signs of ritual conformity to Judaism, began to spiritualize aspects of their Judaic roots. This in part was due to the success of the Gospel in the Gentile populace for whom the ritual purity of Judaism was inaccessible, or impractical. Christian movements went on to establish their own external acts of "ritual" conformity and Christian "reform" movements have challenged the perceived hypocrisy of mere external conformity with the "new" purity of Spirit of a new movement. The history of religious movements manifests the sociological habits of the advance of the practice of ideas common to the social phenomenon of ever switching governing paradigms which are the guiding principles which provide the new dictionary of meanings for the old words of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2015
The use of words also involves using them to describe the mood and the degree of attachment to one's word products and interpretations. People often remain in spontaneous fervor with the words of interpretation which arose at the time when they had a transforming insight which seemed in the moment to "save" their lives. So they return with repetition to the memory of the power of the saving moment which had attending words. Other people go on to have so many other kinds of saving moments in their faith life, that the impact of earlier interpretative products have less intensity since new interpretation with fresh insights have the relevance of currency. The fear of the sheer volume of new events of interpretation can make people fear leaving the scene of their original comfort in a break through moment. Some times we have to acknowledge the "pathology" of break through moments because they occurred at time when one was going through stress factors in life which created the very conditions for our spiritual break through. It is sad if one does not have further abundance of interpretations of new events which allows one the freedom to re-evaluate and admit the diminished value of a past event because the current insights are so surpassing. If one anchors one's identity on a break through in the past, one may not have anymore breakthroughs and be the equivalent of a old broken LP repeating the same thing endlessly.
Aphorism of Day, May 3, 2015
Word or Language reveals its omnivorous dominance with the magic of the metaphor. Through the magic of metaphor anything can be anything else. The use of the metaphor has an arbitrary aspect because the power to define creates the condition for meaning in a mathematical way as in for the purposes of this equation x=y. Metaphorical behavior reveals the fact that language itself is metaphorical, meaning that all of our insides and outsides gets reduced and filter into something other than what it is, namely words. And when one reduces insides and outsides into words one discovers that one is simply using more words to refer to other words. We live and move and have our being in self-referencing, reflexive omnivorous WORD, thus instantiating the insight of John 1:1: In the Beginning was the Word.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2015
One of life's frustration might be call the trial of the intermittent event. A piece of equipment malfunctions at unpredictable times and will not malfunction at command when the repair person shows up. In life, intermittent events challenge neat and predictable probabilities. The play of freedom within the world creates the conditions of "intermitency" and this experience is perhaps the greatest challenge to our lives of faith. If we have a sense of timing about bad things happening to us and a knowledge of how and when they might happen, we at least think that we have more measured control of a situation. Intermittent events will challenge us and we need to realize that intermittent good surprises often don't get the same recognition as the intermittent bad things which occur. May God deliver us or keep us in the ordeals of the intermittent.
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2015
The paucity of information which we have about biblical personalities means that the few vignettes of their lives get magnified into types and characters and so we really are dealing with the teaching ministry of the church through the literature of the Bible. Biblical literature as "art" provides us with the sense of "immediacy" and has the sublime effect of a "close encounter" with the person about whom we are reading. Fundamentalist and modern historicism fixation on whether things "really" occurred in the ways in which they did betray the purpose and the function of the biblical literature in providing the identity of members of communities in their quest for personal transformation towards excellence. Fundamentalism and historicism may be a side debate between adherents who may be missing the point of the literary art of the biblical writings.
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