Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2015
When faith becomes associated with religious people acting badly, it is very difficult for evangelism to be effective because all people get associated with the misbehaviors of the few. The collateral damage of misbehavior of religious persons or people who present their faith with attending bigotry or lack of apologetic finesse to reason and common sense creates the climate of disbelief. It has not been useful for religious people to be associated with the slow movement of justice for all persons.
Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2015
The Gospel motif of Jesus not being received favorably by his own hometown became a model of explanation for why it was that more Gentiles came to the message of Christ than Jews. One could also note that Jews already had established mediating communities throughout the cities of Roman Empire whereas Gentiles who were part of the urbanization movement of the time found the "church communities" to be a good holistic fit in their integration to a new place. Sometimes paradigm shifts occur because the message and the social expression of fellowship meet the needs of the people. The risen Christ was the right message within the offering of apt fellowship at the right time for many people. It still is today. One should never discount the context of fellowship as the ideal conditions for the working of God's Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2015
We understand parables of Jesus to be story allegories that encode some insights of Jesus about how this parallel realm or kingdom of God could be perceived. Why is it that we cannot regard the Gospel narratives as parables of the life of Jesus encoding the basic teachings in the experiences of this new growing religio-social movement inspired by the life of Christ? Why must we reduce Gospel narrative to modern "eye-witness" journalistic reporting when it is clearly not? Why do we often let a very modern discursive practice over-whelm the mode of inspired presentation which characterizes the Gospels?
Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2015
The Christian message is anchored upon the hope of ultimate preservation and healing, namely, resurrection as the healing response to death. Resurrection as healing and salvation is to be the golden thread which is interwoven with the other threads of entropy due to the continual process of change and transformation of substance and energy which occurs because everything has a "before and after" within time. On our way to death we can experience a great variety of weal and woe and in the throes of apparent woe we need to know that woe does not have the final say but only offers the stark contrast and value of future good. Faith is the ability to live with the vision of hope, an anticipatory panorama upon the incredible diversity of the tapestry of life. Faith is the ability to make the future anterior confession about one's life: "It will have been good, very good."
Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2015
A woman with a issue of blood got close to Jesus in a crowd and touched his garment and he stopped and said, "Who touched me?" Christ shares healing sacramental presence with the church in that people are able to project their hope for healing=salvation=well-being upon each other in particular ways. This means that we need to be willing to fit ourselves to be signs of hopeful and healing presence in our world so that we can be unknowingly "touched" and have the hopeful healing energy go out of us. If we are not prepared to be peaceful and centered presence some times we can be off-putting with our own brand of grumpiness. With prayer, we seek to put ourselves in peaceful and healing hopefulness. "I'm mad because I'm hurt or I didn't get my way" is no way to be a healer within the community.
Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2015
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had what was often called a "short session." A client would come to talk and suddenly it was told that his or her session had ended. If a client did not understand "short session" then one could feel cheated of one's counseling time. The method behind the "short session" was to acknowledge that most of analytic work happens outside of the counseling session and the pulling of the plug on the session often was a catalyst to build up of "stuff in the interior life" and resulted in even more fruitful sessions later. This notion of the short session perhaps casts some insights upon the "apparent" delay of the presence and desired actions of Christ in our lives. Christ is never absent or inactive; that Christ seems to be so is only apparent and not actual. It it in the waiting moments when Christ registers as apparently absent and inactive that some real interior work is going on in us to be made evident in in-breaking of more apparent insights to mark our integration of the stuff of our life into wisdom action plans of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2015
The delay trope in the Gospel presented as the gap in time between Jesus finding out about a human need and his ultimate response to the need, is a device that represents the reality of waiting in life and the regular experience of "delayed" gratification. Waiting adds intensity and can be cause for losing one's faithful response. "God's not here; Jesus did not show up in time so, I'll just stop believing." Delayed gratification can be simply the delays in attaining some very basic things, food, clothing, shelter, a job or good health. Is God with us the same when we go through these periods of delayed gratification as God is with us when we seem to have the blessing of a fulfilled gratification? The time of delay is also a time for wisdom to inform faith and an ingredient of wisdom is coming to actual honesty about freedom in time meaning perpetual change. Perpetual change means perpetual loss of states of beings and relationships with the people and the conditions of life. Sometimes we want to be gratified with things that really would not be good for us and the delays help us to clarify our vision of the truly worthy thing for which we should be hoping. Delay forces us to clarify our values and with wisdom informing our faith during delays we can come to see how Christ has been present with us as a gratifying presence in the times when we have been narrowly focusing upon some other "object" of gratification.
Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2015
Hope creates vision of what we are called to. Faith is acting in the moment toward the vision of hope. Sometimes the actual conditions of life make the gap between what one hopes for and tasks of faith seem insurmountable. Life is much about not actually attaining what one has hoped for. Many of the stories of hope about Jesus in the Gospel include the great delays of Jesus. Jesus did not arrive always on time to do the hopeful healings before death. Delays to achieving hopeful ends challenge one's faith. I think the great sub-text of the Gospel of Jesus is that it is always better to live by and with faith towards hopeful ends, even if some hopeful ends are delayed simply because our capacity for Hope far outstretches our human abilities to achieve all of the visions of Hope. Faith is learning how to live with a profound Hope which is in fact the profound for desire for God, for which temporary achievements like success or health cannot be a replacement. The greatness of our hope for God is best expressed in time by living with faith because faith is living by applying hope to the messiness and glories of life.
Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2015
Sickness and death are major issues of disruption in human life. They are related in that sickness is anticipatory of eventual death in being a manifestation of the temporary failure of one or more systems of the body and mind without being yet pronounced enough to end the life of a person. The sacraments of the church are anthropologically sound in that they express rite of passage issues for real human living, e.g. sickness and death. The Prayer for the Sick is a sacrament, also called Unction or Holy Unction and formerly in some practice seemed to be most associated with Extreme Unction otherwise known as "Last Rites." Sickness and Death partake of the freedom of telling events of what can happen to a person and the effects of sickness and death are both personal and communal. The presence of Jesus in the life of the world is witness that "God is with us" in the free conditions of things which can happen to us. Sickness and death are crises and crises create rites of passages which are meant to totally retain an afflicted person within the care of the community/communion of saints. In the sacrament of the Prayer for the Sick, the community is flattered to be asked to be present and corporately invoke the presence of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. The sickness or death of a person make them a corporate model of what can happen to any of us and the sacrament of the prayer for the sick draws us into the identity with them and stirs us toward expression of healing empathy or in the case of death, to host a Requiem Mass, which is a celebration that one has passed over into the heavenly banquet of their continuing community of the Communion of saints.
Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2015
The book of Job is often seen to be the quintessential biblical statement on suffering and it does deal with this issue but behind the theme one can see a polemic against the people who think that they have precise knowledge of the correspondence between the good and bad things which happen to a person and the specific deeds of their lives. Indeed how one lives and specific deeds have outcomes but that does not mean we can fine tune our causal understanding to understand the effect flapping of all butterfly wings upon our weather patterns. Even when our commonsensical and actuarial probability living helps us live in ways to prevent a certain amount of harm, there still remains numberless factors beyond our control which occur over which we have had not direct or even remote influence.
Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2015
We remember the martyrs of Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. One takes for granted that studying the Bible in one's church being a very safe and life affirming place. That one would violate the lives of people living in the haven of God's word because of the color of their skin is incomprehensible even though we know that we have the conditions in our country which foment ignorance, racism and fear and they are coupled with easy access to ways to expedite mass killings. Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us. And may the souls of the Charleston martyrs rest in peace but may they also disturb the sleep of our consciences towards the equal safety provisions for all of our people.
Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2015
I have designated the terms cluster chaos to avoid scatological language but to admit to the velocity of freedom in the world which allows that motivations and actions and performance of sentient and non-sentient agents to be in such conflict that humans and animals can be caught in the harm's way because of such situations. People who go to war experience the "hell" of war of such cluster chaos. People caught in the wrong place for hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, tsunamis, fires and earthquakes can experience the event of cluster chaos characterized by the significant loss of the power of one's personal freedom to control to one's own health and benefit in a situation. Persons who have known the parasitic growth of cancer within their being know the situation of cluster chaos. It is very difficult not to take events of cluster chaos as a personal threat. Job is the biblical figure who represents one who was a seeming target of cluster chaos. He is written into Scripture as the poster child of suffering in order to criticize those who dispensed easy answers about who was suppose to suffer and who had a bullet proof vest against suffering because of "most favored status" with God. It is rather ironic that God spoke to Job out of a whirlwind and Jesus of Nazareth said to the stormy wind, "Peace be still." The velocity of freedom is the condition which permits events of cluster chaos to occur even though cluster chaos events represent the deprived expression of the many other events of harmonious and lovely interactions between different agents of nature. Jesus said, "Peace be still" as an indication to mark the end of duration of an event of cluster chaos. And if death is the most humanly profound event of cluster chaos, the resurrected Christ has said to death, "Peace be still."
Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2015
It is easy for success to tempt one to elevates the apparent success of certain principles into an absolute system of probability and then prescribe such a formulaic system as one which guarantees the keeper of such a system protection from all evil. It is a full proof system since if something bad happens to one of the followers of such a "full proof" system then one does not blame the system, one blames the person for being one who has secretly broken the rules and so God as the judge and punisher exacts appropriate justice on the one who must have broken the rules even if he or she did not know it. This is the story of Job. We need to be careful about elevating our own practical preventative systems of behavior into infallible systems. Preventative systems based on wise probability thinking still cannot be made into absolute causative certitude guaranteeing outcomes. The velocity of cluster chaos which can occur in the freedom which is always already a condition in our world will eventually deconstruct any system of certitude. Ask anyone who has suffered with the discovery of cancer in their lives or the lives of loved one. The profound disruption of life may actually conform to statistical patterns even as one personally eschews being one who instantiate the unfortunate statistical category.
Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2015
In the book of Job, which is literary satire about people who believed that there was a sort of one-to-one correspondence on God's blessings and the good deeds of one's life such that if bad things happened to a person, even a presumed good person, it meant that the person really was a sinner being punished. The author of the book of Job testifies that bad things do happen to good people because of the velocity and greatness of freedom which is aboard in this world which permits every thing to have a limit and degree of freedom and even with limited freedom systems come into irreconcilable conflicts catching people in all manner of moral development and performance in harm's way. In the end, Job converses with God who uses the whirlwind as the site of the divine oracle. The whirlwind symbolizes the velocity of freedom from which God speaks. The Gospel writers present Jesus as calming the winds and so he as Son of God is a whirlwind whisperer. Faith is to be able to accept and live within the manifestations of the velocity of freedom which is present in this world.
Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2015
The passing of time creates the binary of before and after. The after continually redefines what has come before. The before is not fully defined as what it is in its own time because it received new contrast definitions only though what comes after by the people who review the before and pick and choose for pragmatic ways the seeming causal genealogy to the present. But another after will re-shuffle the meaning of everything which came before. What comes after appropriates what came before because the originators of what came before are not around to defend their contribution in a future time. There also is disagreement about the meaning of what has come before and perhaps the chief example of this is the Christian Bible where the Hebrew Scriptures is designated as the "Old" Testament. The "New" Scripture for the continuing communities of synagogues are the continuous commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures in the rabbinical application of the Hebrew Scriptures to daily life. Subsequent communities of faith take on the right to define how their past tradition will be regarded in the present.
Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2015
In the play of biblical metaphors, the Spirit is the Breath of life or the Wind which moves over the abyss in how Word creates human life as we know it. In the book of Job we are told that God speaks to Job after all of his suffering from a Whirlwind. Whirlwind and Super Wind as represented in the power of the storm represents the Freedom of this world in its poignant velocity such that systems in conflict often catch human beings in harm's way. The storm becomes a metaphor for the smallness of humanity in the face of the greatness of Nature expressed toward us when we cross paths with Nature's forceful manifestations. Storm becomes the metaphor for events of freedom over which we have no control and where we need the courage to do what we can to abide and exercise the wise limits of our freedom to survive. And in those moments we need to learn how to let the Great Wind of the Spirit within us be an Equal to the threatening external whirlwinds expressing the velocities of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2015
Jesus was killed by representatives in Palestine of the Roman Empire, possibly because it became known to the authorities that his followers were calling him a "king" and because perhaps his basic message was about the "kingdom" of God/heaven. Having a "Christian" Empire has not always resulted in kings and leaders and their peoples behaving in "Christ-like" ways. Christians Empires are corrupted by the same Will to Power (benignly stated as "our interests in the region") to which all Empires have succumbed. The kingdom of God parables of Jesus bespeak a state of awareness of the hidden omnipresence of God known in the myriads deeds of sustaining kindness which is the expression of the power of care and not the power of dominance. While it might be comfortable to be Christian and a member of a dominant military and economic world power, one should not over-identify the kingdom of God spoken about by Jesus with any particular earthly nation or government.
Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2015
Everything might be indistinguishable background or foreground without language. There might be a true sense of "equality" if things were not distinguished from one another almost like the one hum of everyone sounding together and not allowing for the recognition of the individual voice. Language adds the contours of value to human experience and creates the bas relief distinction of foreground and background, hills, plains, and valleys of the world of differences. Because we have language the world of differences is created in that we cannot help but grapple with the human vocation that is forced upon us because we have language. What is that human vocation? Valuing and being valued through the interaction of differences. In the valuing vocation religion, ethics, faith, love and justice have been born in the attempt to articulate what is most adequate to our highest values in each moment.
Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2015
You would think that listeners and translators of the most basic words of Jesus could get a quote correct especially if you were self consciously knowing that you were directly quoting God's holy words which would be canonized as "The Word of God" in 3-4 centuries. The difference between "kingdom of heaven" and "kingdom of God" is a real problem for those who do not regard the writings of the Bible to be an organic process of translating and interpreting insights about Jesus and God within various communities which collected the writings and the edited versions and the redactions into "final" forms (i.e. there is really no "final" edition of the Bible) to be voted on by church councils as being worthy of being in the church's Holy Book. What is infallible is the inspiring Spirit while interpretation and application of words can actually be contradictory because Protean Spirit is able to come along side people in their various situations to inspire the meanings which work for them in the given situation. This Omni-Protean Spirit able to make God translatable to the need of the moment is much grander than limiting God to an earthly word authority who tries to tell us exactly what the final meaning is of words found in the Bible. A preacher preaches on the love of God; a young boy hears that he should confess stealing cookies. How come the Spirit of God did not get the literal message of preacher through to the boy? How come the boy got the message which worked for him? So one can see the limitation of both the "fundamentalist" interpretation of biblical words and their blind faith in human councils which voted on the "final" books and words of their Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2015
Quotidianism in matters of faith would be the belief in the importance of everyday faithfulness in all of the small matters of living in things necessary to the infrastructure of justice and love. The trains of justice and love only run on time with quotidian efforts and not growing weary in well-doing is what forms character on both the corporate and personal level. I think Jesus called it "mustard seed" faith.
Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2015
Mustard seed faith is about how the unnoticed background really upholds the foreground stage actors who are taking all of the bows.
Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2015
The use of parables by Jesus could be called a wisdom and indirect method of teaching. With the presentation of a scenario, there is an attempt to imagine virtual atmospherics which require the listener to interact with the characters and the events presented in the scenario. Many meanings can arise with this method of evoking "participatory" insights. It is a shame when theologians and experts try to limit meanings of the parables and reduce "in situ" experience to mere premises and conclusions parading as exact, precise and final meaning.
Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2015
Often the parables of Jesus are followed by the insider's interpretation of the parable which try to assign specific people or agents to the otherwise enigmatic elements of the parable. Gospel redaction is probably responsible for the attempts at interpretation. The parables themselves manifest a wisdom which respects ambiguity and imprecision regarding cause and effect of why the Gospel is successful here and not there. In gardening, one knows that "Crops happen" and they do so in various way and one can speculate endlessly about why different crop performance happened under seemingly same conditions. The parables preserve something of the uniqueness of the Gospel event for the one who finds it successful in one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2015
What is the difference in learning from our sins and errors and learning by never sinning and erring because we always listened and obeyed authorities and mentors and followed their advice? In the parable of the prodigal son, the latter group seems to be often presented as those who end up committing the greater sins of pride and judging of others. It could be that the Bible is often read as being a final prescription rather than simply as description about the variety of human dilemma of life in process within which we often find ourselves looking for meanings which can help us survive the day.
Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2015
The great story of the human fall into knowing good and evil included the trickster serpent who has more knowledge than the naive and innocent Adam and Eve. This trickster is able to prey on their ignorance and get them started wrongly into basing their moral system upon responding to the projection of their desires upon pleasing objects. If morality is based upon simply responding to the projection of our desire upon the pleasing objects presented to us, then we will live our lives perpetually trying to recover from our ignorant acting out towards the objects of the projection of our desire. The insights of law, knowledge and wisdom are that desire needs to be filtered so that we know how to direct its energy so that we don't get hurt by harmful addiction to "pleasing" objects. The great question then is: How do we achieve contented enjoyment pleasure and common good without harmful addiction and hoarding beyond what we need to the detriment of the quality of life of others.
Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2015
It would seem that the only thing which cannot be deconstructed in life would be language. Any attempt to deconstruct language would have to use language to do so and therefore make it an impossibility. So deconstruction is a inseparable habit of language and to imagine non-worded existence, one has to use words to do so. If John 1:1 is the chief insight of faith, "In the Beginning was the Word" then the life of faith is the life of Wordology or the perpetual constituting of the hierarchy of values using our worded lives. With word, God, love and justice can come to language and the adventure of value exploration is journey of life. The worded life is the perpetual valuing of Value systems.
Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2015
On the day of remembering the architect of Vatican II, it might be appropriate to deconstruct the notion of "catholicity." "Catholic" comes from the Greek meaning on the whole but it can be used to designate imposed administrative boundaries of a particular church. If God is the creator, then God is most "catholic" whose omnipresence would definitely instantiate the literal "on the whole" meaning of the word catholic. The administrative or strategic catholicism of various churches or communions or fellowships should be the evangelical invitations for people to fulfill the prayer of Jesus for his disciples that each of them should be "one" with Father as He was One with Father. Strategic catholicism should serve the prayer of Christ for the Union relationship of each with God. Let us try to be the best strategic catholics today.
Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2015
The Gospel sayings of Jesus reveal the painful conditions of the separation of the Jesus Movement from synagogue Judaism. The pain is revealed in the expressed "family values" statements of Jesus that reveal the conditions of divisions within families regarding community loyalties in matters of faith. So we have the saying about who is a family member of Jesus: Whoever does the will of the Father. This is a statement of closure for people trying to make sense of the break down between the followers of Jesus and those who remained in the synagogue and did not follow Jesus. We need not maintain ancient feuds as our own "feuds" have a different sort of currency. A person who is growing in insights has the "feuds" with the "former self" which one has surpassed in future excellence. As we embrace new insights in new paradigms of faith, we often need to experience closure with "old" ideas and the people who still wear those ideas with relevant comfort. One should gain a growth maturity not to make one's new state of growth a personal "us" against "them" event. Some insights that one has left still may have a life long currency for people with different intellectual, spiritual and faith growth patterns. It could be that a sign of maturity is to be able to interact with people who inhabit different faith paradigms without losing one's charity for people who express faith differently.
Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2015
History is written inspired by a muse who should be named "Subsequence." Why? It is what has happened after the facts which guides the selection and the interpretation and the presentations of what has happened previous to the writing of history. So, if there had been no successful Jesus Movement and widespread churches popping up in cities throughout the Roman Empire, there would have been no Gospel and no reason to remember something which had no subsequent consequences. What might be called "success" accounts for the selection of the topics and presentation of history.
Aphorism of Day, June 1, 2015
Jesus as a reformer was called "mad" and one who performed "exorcisms" because he had made a pact with Beelzebul, and his own family members tried to do an "intervention" for his condition. Reformers often show how cultural practices have reached the level of their actual incompetence to humane values and the inhumanity of accepted cultural practices goes unnoticed. Slavery, subjugation of women, mistreatment of children, the sick and impaired and neglect of the poor have often been the "it goes without" saying practice of societies until someone points out the obvious neglect and then gets criticized for being mad, which begs the question, "if Jesus or anyone could bring relief to a tortured soul, why would they be regarded to be mad?" Madness can be the ad hominem counter-attack of the Cultural Empire striking back at the one who has revealed the inhumanity of the practices of the Cultural Empire.
When faith becomes associated with religious people acting badly, it is very difficult for evangelism to be effective because all people get associated with the misbehaviors of the few. The collateral damage of misbehavior of religious persons or people who present their faith with attending bigotry or lack of apologetic finesse to reason and common sense creates the climate of disbelief. It has not been useful for religious people to be associated with the slow movement of justice for all persons.
Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2015
The Gospel motif of Jesus not being received favorably by his own hometown became a model of explanation for why it was that more Gentiles came to the message of Christ than Jews. One could also note that Jews already had established mediating communities throughout the cities of Roman Empire whereas Gentiles who were part of the urbanization movement of the time found the "church communities" to be a good holistic fit in their integration to a new place. Sometimes paradigm shifts occur because the message and the social expression of fellowship meet the needs of the people. The risen Christ was the right message within the offering of apt fellowship at the right time for many people. It still is today. One should never discount the context of fellowship as the ideal conditions for the working of God's Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2015
We understand parables of Jesus to be story allegories that encode some insights of Jesus about how this parallel realm or kingdom of God could be perceived. Why is it that we cannot regard the Gospel narratives as parables of the life of Jesus encoding the basic teachings in the experiences of this new growing religio-social movement inspired by the life of Christ? Why must we reduce Gospel narrative to modern "eye-witness" journalistic reporting when it is clearly not? Why do we often let a very modern discursive practice over-whelm the mode of inspired presentation which characterizes the Gospels?
Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2015
The Christian message is anchored upon the hope of ultimate preservation and healing, namely, resurrection as the healing response to death. Resurrection as healing and salvation is to be the golden thread which is interwoven with the other threads of entropy due to the continual process of change and transformation of substance and energy which occurs because everything has a "before and after" within time. On our way to death we can experience a great variety of weal and woe and in the throes of apparent woe we need to know that woe does not have the final say but only offers the stark contrast and value of future good. Faith is the ability to live with the vision of hope, an anticipatory panorama upon the incredible diversity of the tapestry of life. Faith is the ability to make the future anterior confession about one's life: "It will have been good, very good."
Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2015
A woman with a issue of blood got close to Jesus in a crowd and touched his garment and he stopped and said, "Who touched me?" Christ shares healing sacramental presence with the church in that people are able to project their hope for healing=salvation=well-being upon each other in particular ways. This means that we need to be willing to fit ourselves to be signs of hopeful and healing presence in our world so that we can be unknowingly "touched" and have the hopeful healing energy go out of us. If we are not prepared to be peaceful and centered presence some times we can be off-putting with our own brand of grumpiness. With prayer, we seek to put ourselves in peaceful and healing hopefulness. "I'm mad because I'm hurt or I didn't get my way" is no way to be a healer within the community.
Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2015
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had what was often called a "short session." A client would come to talk and suddenly it was told that his or her session had ended. If a client did not understand "short session" then one could feel cheated of one's counseling time. The method behind the "short session" was to acknowledge that most of analytic work happens outside of the counseling session and the pulling of the plug on the session often was a catalyst to build up of "stuff in the interior life" and resulted in even more fruitful sessions later. This notion of the short session perhaps casts some insights upon the "apparent" delay of the presence and desired actions of Christ in our lives. Christ is never absent or inactive; that Christ seems to be so is only apparent and not actual. It it in the waiting moments when Christ registers as apparently absent and inactive that some real interior work is going on in us to be made evident in in-breaking of more apparent insights to mark our integration of the stuff of our life into wisdom action plans of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2015
The delay trope in the Gospel presented as the gap in time between Jesus finding out about a human need and his ultimate response to the need, is a device that represents the reality of waiting in life and the regular experience of "delayed" gratification. Waiting adds intensity and can be cause for losing one's faithful response. "God's not here; Jesus did not show up in time so, I'll just stop believing." Delayed gratification can be simply the delays in attaining some very basic things, food, clothing, shelter, a job or good health. Is God with us the same when we go through these periods of delayed gratification as God is with us when we seem to have the blessing of a fulfilled gratification? The time of delay is also a time for wisdom to inform faith and an ingredient of wisdom is coming to actual honesty about freedom in time meaning perpetual change. Perpetual change means perpetual loss of states of beings and relationships with the people and the conditions of life. Sometimes we want to be gratified with things that really would not be good for us and the delays help us to clarify our vision of the truly worthy thing for which we should be hoping. Delay forces us to clarify our values and with wisdom informing our faith during delays we can come to see how Christ has been present with us as a gratifying presence in the times when we have been narrowly focusing upon some other "object" of gratification.
Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2015
Hope creates vision of what we are called to. Faith is acting in the moment toward the vision of hope. Sometimes the actual conditions of life make the gap between what one hopes for and tasks of faith seem insurmountable. Life is much about not actually attaining what one has hoped for. Many of the stories of hope about Jesus in the Gospel include the great delays of Jesus. Jesus did not arrive always on time to do the hopeful healings before death. Delays to achieving hopeful ends challenge one's faith. I think the great sub-text of the Gospel of Jesus is that it is always better to live by and with faith towards hopeful ends, even if some hopeful ends are delayed simply because our capacity for Hope far outstretches our human abilities to achieve all of the visions of Hope. Faith is learning how to live with a profound Hope which is in fact the profound for desire for God, for which temporary achievements like success or health cannot be a replacement. The greatness of our hope for God is best expressed in time by living with faith because faith is living by applying hope to the messiness and glories of life.
Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2015
Sickness and death are major issues of disruption in human life. They are related in that sickness is anticipatory of eventual death in being a manifestation of the temporary failure of one or more systems of the body and mind without being yet pronounced enough to end the life of a person. The sacraments of the church are anthropologically sound in that they express rite of passage issues for real human living, e.g. sickness and death. The Prayer for the Sick is a sacrament, also called Unction or Holy Unction and formerly in some practice seemed to be most associated with Extreme Unction otherwise known as "Last Rites." Sickness and Death partake of the freedom of telling events of what can happen to a person and the effects of sickness and death are both personal and communal. The presence of Jesus in the life of the world is witness that "God is with us" in the free conditions of things which can happen to us. Sickness and death are crises and crises create rites of passages which are meant to totally retain an afflicted person within the care of the community/communion of saints. In the sacrament of the Prayer for the Sick, the community is flattered to be asked to be present and corporately invoke the presence of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. The sickness or death of a person make them a corporate model of what can happen to any of us and the sacrament of the prayer for the sick draws us into the identity with them and stirs us toward expression of healing empathy or in the case of death, to host a Requiem Mass, which is a celebration that one has passed over into the heavenly banquet of their continuing community of the Communion of saints.
Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2015
The book of Job is often seen to be the quintessential biblical statement on suffering and it does deal with this issue but behind the theme one can see a polemic against the people who think that they have precise knowledge of the correspondence between the good and bad things which happen to a person and the specific deeds of their lives. Indeed how one lives and specific deeds have outcomes but that does not mean we can fine tune our causal understanding to understand the effect flapping of all butterfly wings upon our weather patterns. Even when our commonsensical and actuarial probability living helps us live in ways to prevent a certain amount of harm, there still remains numberless factors beyond our control which occur over which we have had not direct or even remote influence.
Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2015
We remember the martyrs of Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. One takes for granted that studying the Bible in one's church being a very safe and life affirming place. That one would violate the lives of people living in the haven of God's word because of the color of their skin is incomprehensible even though we know that we have the conditions in our country which foment ignorance, racism and fear and they are coupled with easy access to ways to expedite mass killings. Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us. And may the souls of the Charleston martyrs rest in peace but may they also disturb the sleep of our consciences towards the equal safety provisions for all of our people.
Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2015
I have designated the terms cluster chaos to avoid scatological language but to admit to the velocity of freedom in the world which allows that motivations and actions and performance of sentient and non-sentient agents to be in such conflict that humans and animals can be caught in the harm's way because of such situations. People who go to war experience the "hell" of war of such cluster chaos. People caught in the wrong place for hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, tsunamis, fires and earthquakes can experience the event of cluster chaos characterized by the significant loss of the power of one's personal freedom to control to one's own health and benefit in a situation. Persons who have known the parasitic growth of cancer within their being know the situation of cluster chaos. It is very difficult not to take events of cluster chaos as a personal threat. Job is the biblical figure who represents one who was a seeming target of cluster chaos. He is written into Scripture as the poster child of suffering in order to criticize those who dispensed easy answers about who was suppose to suffer and who had a bullet proof vest against suffering because of "most favored status" with God. It is rather ironic that God spoke to Job out of a whirlwind and Jesus of Nazareth said to the stormy wind, "Peace be still." The velocity of freedom is the condition which permits events of cluster chaos to occur even though cluster chaos events represent the deprived expression of the many other events of harmonious and lovely interactions between different agents of nature. Jesus said, "Peace be still" as an indication to mark the end of duration of an event of cluster chaos. And if death is the most humanly profound event of cluster chaos, the resurrected Christ has said to death, "Peace be still."
Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2015
It is easy for success to tempt one to elevates the apparent success of certain principles into an absolute system of probability and then prescribe such a formulaic system as one which guarantees the keeper of such a system protection from all evil. It is a full proof system since if something bad happens to one of the followers of such a "full proof" system then one does not blame the system, one blames the person for being one who has secretly broken the rules and so God as the judge and punisher exacts appropriate justice on the one who must have broken the rules even if he or she did not know it. This is the story of Job. We need to be careful about elevating our own practical preventative systems of behavior into infallible systems. Preventative systems based on wise probability thinking still cannot be made into absolute causative certitude guaranteeing outcomes. The velocity of cluster chaos which can occur in the freedom which is always already a condition in our world will eventually deconstruct any system of certitude. Ask anyone who has suffered with the discovery of cancer in their lives or the lives of loved one. The profound disruption of life may actually conform to statistical patterns even as one personally eschews being one who instantiate the unfortunate statistical category.
Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2015
In the book of Job, which is literary satire about people who believed that there was a sort of one-to-one correspondence on God's blessings and the good deeds of one's life such that if bad things happened to a person, even a presumed good person, it meant that the person really was a sinner being punished. The author of the book of Job testifies that bad things do happen to good people because of the velocity and greatness of freedom which is aboard in this world which permits every thing to have a limit and degree of freedom and even with limited freedom systems come into irreconcilable conflicts catching people in all manner of moral development and performance in harm's way. In the end, Job converses with God who uses the whirlwind as the site of the divine oracle. The whirlwind symbolizes the velocity of freedom from which God speaks. The Gospel writers present Jesus as calming the winds and so he as Son of God is a whirlwind whisperer. Faith is to be able to accept and live within the manifestations of the velocity of freedom which is present in this world.
Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2015
The passing of time creates the binary of before and after. The after continually redefines what has come before. The before is not fully defined as what it is in its own time because it received new contrast definitions only though what comes after by the people who review the before and pick and choose for pragmatic ways the seeming causal genealogy to the present. But another after will re-shuffle the meaning of everything which came before. What comes after appropriates what came before because the originators of what came before are not around to defend their contribution in a future time. There also is disagreement about the meaning of what has come before and perhaps the chief example of this is the Christian Bible where the Hebrew Scriptures is designated as the "Old" Testament. The "New" Scripture for the continuing communities of synagogues are the continuous commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures in the rabbinical application of the Hebrew Scriptures to daily life. Subsequent communities of faith take on the right to define how their past tradition will be regarded in the present.
Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2015
In the play of biblical metaphors, the Spirit is the Breath of life or the Wind which moves over the abyss in how Word creates human life as we know it. In the book of Job we are told that God speaks to Job after all of his suffering from a Whirlwind. Whirlwind and Super Wind as represented in the power of the storm represents the Freedom of this world in its poignant velocity such that systems in conflict often catch human beings in harm's way. The storm becomes a metaphor for the smallness of humanity in the face of the greatness of Nature expressed toward us when we cross paths with Nature's forceful manifestations. Storm becomes the metaphor for events of freedom over which we have no control and where we need the courage to do what we can to abide and exercise the wise limits of our freedom to survive. And in those moments we need to learn how to let the Great Wind of the Spirit within us be an Equal to the threatening external whirlwinds expressing the velocities of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2015
Jesus was killed by representatives in Palestine of the Roman Empire, possibly because it became known to the authorities that his followers were calling him a "king" and because perhaps his basic message was about the "kingdom" of God/heaven. Having a "Christian" Empire has not always resulted in kings and leaders and their peoples behaving in "Christ-like" ways. Christians Empires are corrupted by the same Will to Power (benignly stated as "our interests in the region") to which all Empires have succumbed. The kingdom of God parables of Jesus bespeak a state of awareness of the hidden omnipresence of God known in the myriads deeds of sustaining kindness which is the expression of the power of care and not the power of dominance. While it might be comfortable to be Christian and a member of a dominant military and economic world power, one should not over-identify the kingdom of God spoken about by Jesus with any particular earthly nation or government.
Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2015
Everything might be indistinguishable background or foreground without language. There might be a true sense of "equality" if things were not distinguished from one another almost like the one hum of everyone sounding together and not allowing for the recognition of the individual voice. Language adds the contours of value to human experience and creates the bas relief distinction of foreground and background, hills, plains, and valleys of the world of differences. Because we have language the world of differences is created in that we cannot help but grapple with the human vocation that is forced upon us because we have language. What is that human vocation? Valuing and being valued through the interaction of differences. In the valuing vocation religion, ethics, faith, love and justice have been born in the attempt to articulate what is most adequate to our highest values in each moment.
Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2015
You would think that listeners and translators of the most basic words of Jesus could get a quote correct especially if you were self consciously knowing that you were directly quoting God's holy words which would be canonized as "The Word of God" in 3-4 centuries. The difference between "kingdom of heaven" and "kingdom of God" is a real problem for those who do not regard the writings of the Bible to be an organic process of translating and interpreting insights about Jesus and God within various communities which collected the writings and the edited versions and the redactions into "final" forms (i.e. there is really no "final" edition of the Bible) to be voted on by church councils as being worthy of being in the church's Holy Book. What is infallible is the inspiring Spirit while interpretation and application of words can actually be contradictory because Protean Spirit is able to come along side people in their various situations to inspire the meanings which work for them in the given situation. This Omni-Protean Spirit able to make God translatable to the need of the moment is much grander than limiting God to an earthly word authority who tries to tell us exactly what the final meaning is of words found in the Bible. A preacher preaches on the love of God; a young boy hears that he should confess stealing cookies. How come the Spirit of God did not get the literal message of preacher through to the boy? How come the boy got the message which worked for him? So one can see the limitation of both the "fundamentalist" interpretation of biblical words and their blind faith in human councils which voted on the "final" books and words of their Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2015
Quotidianism in matters of faith would be the belief in the importance of everyday faithfulness in all of the small matters of living in things necessary to the infrastructure of justice and love. The trains of justice and love only run on time with quotidian efforts and not growing weary in well-doing is what forms character on both the corporate and personal level. I think Jesus called it "mustard seed" faith.
Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2015
Mustard seed faith is about how the unnoticed background really upholds the foreground stage actors who are taking all of the bows.
Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2015
The use of parables by Jesus could be called a wisdom and indirect method of teaching. With the presentation of a scenario, there is an attempt to imagine virtual atmospherics which require the listener to interact with the characters and the events presented in the scenario. Many meanings can arise with this method of evoking "participatory" insights. It is a shame when theologians and experts try to limit meanings of the parables and reduce "in situ" experience to mere premises and conclusions parading as exact, precise and final meaning.
Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2015
Often the parables of Jesus are followed by the insider's interpretation of the parable which try to assign specific people or agents to the otherwise enigmatic elements of the parable. Gospel redaction is probably responsible for the attempts at interpretation. The parables themselves manifest a wisdom which respects ambiguity and imprecision regarding cause and effect of why the Gospel is successful here and not there. In gardening, one knows that "Crops happen" and they do so in various way and one can speculate endlessly about why different crop performance happened under seemingly same conditions. The parables preserve something of the uniqueness of the Gospel event for the one who finds it successful in one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2015
What is the difference in learning from our sins and errors and learning by never sinning and erring because we always listened and obeyed authorities and mentors and followed their advice? In the parable of the prodigal son, the latter group seems to be often presented as those who end up committing the greater sins of pride and judging of others. It could be that the Bible is often read as being a final prescription rather than simply as description about the variety of human dilemma of life in process within which we often find ourselves looking for meanings which can help us survive the day.
Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2015
The great story of the human fall into knowing good and evil included the trickster serpent who has more knowledge than the naive and innocent Adam and Eve. This trickster is able to prey on their ignorance and get them started wrongly into basing their moral system upon responding to the projection of their desires upon pleasing objects. If morality is based upon simply responding to the projection of our desire upon the pleasing objects presented to us, then we will live our lives perpetually trying to recover from our ignorant acting out towards the objects of the projection of our desire. The insights of law, knowledge and wisdom are that desire needs to be filtered so that we know how to direct its energy so that we don't get hurt by harmful addiction to "pleasing" objects. The great question then is: How do we achieve contented enjoyment pleasure and common good without harmful addiction and hoarding beyond what we need to the detriment of the quality of life of others.
Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2015
It would seem that the only thing which cannot be deconstructed in life would be language. Any attempt to deconstruct language would have to use language to do so and therefore make it an impossibility. So deconstruction is a inseparable habit of language and to imagine non-worded existence, one has to use words to do so. If John 1:1 is the chief insight of faith, "In the Beginning was the Word" then the life of faith is the life of Wordology or the perpetual constituting of the hierarchy of values using our worded lives. With word, God, love and justice can come to language and the adventure of value exploration is journey of life. The worded life is the perpetual valuing of Value systems.
Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2015
On the day of remembering the architect of Vatican II, it might be appropriate to deconstruct the notion of "catholicity." "Catholic" comes from the Greek meaning on the whole but it can be used to designate imposed administrative boundaries of a particular church. If God is the creator, then God is most "catholic" whose omnipresence would definitely instantiate the literal "on the whole" meaning of the word catholic. The administrative or strategic catholicism of various churches or communions or fellowships should be the evangelical invitations for people to fulfill the prayer of Jesus for his disciples that each of them should be "one" with Father as He was One with Father. Strategic catholicism should serve the prayer of Christ for the Union relationship of each with God. Let us try to be the best strategic catholics today.
Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2015
The Gospel sayings of Jesus reveal the painful conditions of the separation of the Jesus Movement from synagogue Judaism. The pain is revealed in the expressed "family values" statements of Jesus that reveal the conditions of divisions within families regarding community loyalties in matters of faith. So we have the saying about who is a family member of Jesus: Whoever does the will of the Father. This is a statement of closure for people trying to make sense of the break down between the followers of Jesus and those who remained in the synagogue and did not follow Jesus. We need not maintain ancient feuds as our own "feuds" have a different sort of currency. A person who is growing in insights has the "feuds" with the "former self" which one has surpassed in future excellence. As we embrace new insights in new paradigms of faith, we often need to experience closure with "old" ideas and the people who still wear those ideas with relevant comfort. One should gain a growth maturity not to make one's new state of growth a personal "us" against "them" event. Some insights that one has left still may have a life long currency for people with different intellectual, spiritual and faith growth patterns. It could be that a sign of maturity is to be able to interact with people who inhabit different faith paradigms without losing one's charity for people who express faith differently.
Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2015
History is written inspired by a muse who should be named "Subsequence." Why? It is what has happened after the facts which guides the selection and the interpretation and the presentations of what has happened previous to the writing of history. So, if there had been no successful Jesus Movement and widespread churches popping up in cities throughout the Roman Empire, there would have been no Gospel and no reason to remember something which had no subsequent consequences. What might be called "success" accounts for the selection of the topics and presentation of history.
Aphorism of Day, June 1, 2015
Jesus as a reformer was called "mad" and one who performed "exorcisms" because he had made a pact with Beelzebul, and his own family members tried to do an "intervention" for his condition. Reformers often show how cultural practices have reached the level of their actual incompetence to humane values and the inhumanity of accepted cultural practices goes unnoticed. Slavery, subjugation of women, mistreatment of children, the sick and impaired and neglect of the poor have often been the "it goes without" saying practice of societies until someone points out the obvious neglect and then gets criticized for being mad, which begs the question, "if Jesus or anyone could bring relief to a tortured soul, why would they be regarded to be mad?" Madness can be the ad hominem counter-attack of the Cultural Empire striking back at the one who has revealed the inhumanity of the practices of the Cultural Empire.
