Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2015
The loss of a "flat earth" view of the cosmos forced in a progressive way the loss of the ability to visualize the former physical approximation of heaven as a physical location somewhere through the trap door at the top of the big dome over us. The further awareness of the expanse of outer space has meant that if there is an edge to the universe at all we have perhaps given up trying to imagine the empirical and physical reality of a heaven as a repository of those who receive an afterlife location of the "saved." The change in cosmological reality has forced a change in emphasis on what is meant by "salvation." Salvation as the arrival at a place of reward in the afterlife functioned as a belief in how justice and mercy would ultimately be anchored in an actual ideal state of justice. The result of losing the actual physical place of heaven has forced us to understand salvation as more of a here and now coming to the health of our lives as we promote the health of our lives within the actual communities where we do have actual physical location. This does not invalidate the function of the utopian notion of a realm where justice and mercy do actually maintain, since the assertion of normative justice and mercy is what inspires us to continue to resist the deprivation of justice and mercy in the dystopic threats to the quality of the experience of salvation in the lives of people today. Long live the utopian notion of heaven but let it not be divorced from bringing as much health to as many as we can today.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2015
How could a most graphic love story poem which does not mention the name of God be found worthy to be a part of Holy Scriptures? Such inclusion is so embarrassing that a person who is literal and puritanical is forced to read it as a allegory of a love relationship between God and the human soul. One could see a group of wisdom teachers pondering the condition of how boring religious life had become and decided that the seduction of the soul by the notion of God's love should have all of the interesting features of a passionate romantic relationship. When religion becomes just the prohibition of Desire rather than the redirection of its wonderful energies, then religion can become boring, lifeless, obligatory rituals. The wisdom writer who wrote Song of Songs must have thought that if God is that which none greater can be conceived, the relationship with God should at the very least be as engaging as the very best of romantic love. It is easy to forget that ecstasy is an important part of being truly engaged by Divine Presence. Song of Songs is an invitation to a tryst with God: "Arise my love, my fair one, come away."
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2015
One of witnesses of Jesus in his ministry was to show that all laws are not equal. It is so easy to elevate minor rules to the place of maintaining one's influence and position and to distract people from the big rule of love and justice. Take all of the minor rules in our Congress which are procedural and can thwart major legislation for the betterment of the general good. Christians can argue about the amount of water needed for valid baptism or work to make clean water available for all in this world. Christians can argue about Eucharistic presence or make sure that everyone has enough to eat in this world. The witness of Jesus is this: Pick the rules which you regard to be most conducive for the actualization of God's love and justice. The lesser rules may be the effort to legitimize non-performance of the great rules of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2015
St. Augustine is perhaps a chief example of how one's personal autobiography widely read can set the tone for subsequent theological thinking. His life fits the pattern of the Gospel preference for heroic turn around in one's life. People who are just "boringly good" and faithful in their day to day lives and don't have dramatic conversion from dissolute living and expressions of their "evil inclined" natures don't seem to be very interesting to the general public even if their consistent living "make the trains run on time." From the Prodigal Son to St. Paul to Augustine we inherited the trope of heroic conversion as somehow being more proof of God's grace and power to convert people. In America it seems we really like to forgive famous people who let the cheese slip off the cracker of good behavior. Augustine's own reflections upon his sense of his own evil tendency resulted in churches adopting the severity of the great Fall. As wonderful as the biography of Augustine is, there is the need of balance. Ordinary people without "great sins" still know they need the same measure of God's grace on the path of being perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect. Augustine's famous autobiography ends up determining judgments upon everyone's biography and those judgment may not apply in all or most cases.
Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2015
When Jesus said, "there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile," one wonders if this a definitive strike against the power of nurture over the power of inherent nature. One wonders if this statement attributed to Jesus is what accounts for the belief in the severity of the original fall from innocence and for the depravity of humanity? One wonders if God can still call creation "good" after the fall. For those who find wisdom in the social construction of a person as a sort of "garbage in, garbage out" dynamic the belief that the inherit "evil" in any person is stronger than any of the imprint that is done by one's environment which has the power to form feelings and behaviors. It might be wise to look at the context: Jesus was commenting upon the tendency of religious behaviors to be something like the equivalent of obsessive compulsive disorder behaviors as external acts to cope with an irrational sense of always feeling dirty. In the Gospel context there also has to be understood grace as a recovery of access to the original grace of creation, the deeper Heart of God's Holy Spirit to begin the work of creating in us a clean heart. Perhaps Jesus is saying that our social standing may help or hinder us, but one still has to find the deeper original Grace.
Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2015
One lives in a perceptual orb and one's attention is gained toward people and events, some by personal choice and others by happenstance. Happenstance events sometimes reveal the true constitution of our life values and motivation. We react and do not have proper time to formulate a controlled presentation of our values in our actions. The things, people and event onto which we our attention is drawn are also given meaning values because of our past experience. And so we are like the playwrights of the story happening before our eyes and we cannot avoid the values and meaning which we cast upon the characteristics of happenings in our lives. As we observe the story of our daily life unfold before us we can learn from it being a mirror of the image of how we have been constituted. Understanding with honesty how one is constituted by one's value is a preliminary step toward learning how we can be re-educated into the higher values of faith, love and justice to which we aspire. As playwrights of our lives we often need to ask why we are writing the plays of our lives in the ways that we do. We are often hidden playwrights as well; outsiders think that we are writing winning scripts when we are seeing losing scripts and vice versa. Or more honestly our scripts are open to lots of ambiguous and contradictory elements living in coalescence.
Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2015
Three topics in ancient Greece for a successful speech: Speak well of the gods, patriotism and of the dead especially dead heroes. The Hebrew Scriptures could be organized around these three topics as well with gods being replaced with a strict monotheism. The Jesus movement became a Christo-centric international movement and ultimately this brought about the dilemma between one's faith and one's patriotism. The history of the world involves periods when Christians are fighting and killing other Christians for patriotic loyalty. Religious factions in democracies often like to think theocratically and believe that their own version of piety should be the preferred one by the State. The early Christians lived the ambiguity of "obeying God rather men" even while they prayed for the Emperor. It could be that the notion of God is to deconstruct any pretentious replacing idols including hero worship and the severe nationalism which deifies one's own country identity or even one's ideal view of one's country. In this way the worship of God should make us better citizen of country and the world in the pursuit of justice for all.
Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2015
Hypocrisy essentially is the division within oneself between two significant operations of language. On the level of writing, speech and in our theoretical thinking we can state our allegiance to all manner of love and justice but if our body language does not agree with our speech, writing and theoretical thinking we have significant disagreement. And isn't that the gap which we try to overcome, at least, if we are recovering hypocrites trying to make our body language come into performance agreement with the ideals to which we aspire. Charlie Brown said, "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand." Recovering hypocrites are committed to perform justice as love for the people we can't stand.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2015
The church has had difficulty and disagreement when it has come to trying to articulate how Christ is present in the Eucharistic event. The problem may be that church authorities have wanted to put "controls" on the meanings so as to define understanding and practice within their particular religious gathering. Why not just admit that Eucharistic presence is an experienced presence with it own unique defining features so as to be "sui generis." What can we say about it? It is not the presence of Jesus of Nazareth in his earthly body. It is not the Christ in is post resurrection appearances but it is in a causal continuity with both of these since Eucharistic presence would not occur and recur if there was no Jesus of Nazareth and no traceable Afterlife made known to those who remained. Eucharistic presence is particular since it does not happen when people are gathered without the intention elements of obeying Christ and following the words of its institution. Eucharistic presence has the nuance of receptionism in the sense that if it is not convened by people in the intention reception mode then it does not happen. The church needs to humbly admit that the metaphor of physical presence is not actual physical presence. Eating flesh and drinking blood is the extreme language of physicality to denote that people's physical and bodily lives change because of the Eucharistic event. The ultimate physical presence that happens is the mystification of the person of Jesus into the corporate body of the church as the hearts, minds, and limbs of each member becomes Word made flesh in preaching and living the Gospel of the love of God in Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2015
Language use means that there is an endless process of interpretations of previous interpretations of previous interpretations and the amazing things is that various communities attain the event of coming to meanings of interpretations to form their constituting identities. We have so many different Christian communities because meaning paradigms gain followings in uneven ways and for different reasons for so many different historical contextual reasons. The particular star or constellation of meanings of our particular religious community still has to admit with humility that the plenitude of the skies of outer space is the One Continuum which is shared by all.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2015
Perhaps one of the reason that Word ability can be manifest in so many discursive practices is for us as human beings not to put strict limitation on what can have significant meanings and be truthful for us. A scientist who is committed to a strictly empirical method may actual have a theoretical break through because of a dream, even though it seems like a juxtaposition of the "irrational" with the "rational." Being multidiscursive means that we have many different ways of processing all of the insights of life stretching from the highly comedic to the experience of the rapture of the sublime. Even if we think that there is a "scientific" explanation for experiencing the Sublime, it does not change the fact that human beings can be constituted as "receptors" of a diversity of kinds of experience. The confusion arises mainly when one presumes empirical method is the way to validate all meaningful truth. In this way deniers of the Sublime are dishonest about the reality of the meanings of the Sublime and those who try to defend the specific narratives of religious truth as empirical truth tend to come off as being a bit kooky, like the chairperson of HR Committee on Science believing the earth is just over 6000 years old because the Bible told him so. And one asks why does such a person want to defend the truth of the Bible so poorly.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2015
Reading the Gospel of John closely one finds a continuous rebuke of literal reading. Physicality is used as a metaphor for saying that salvation events in one's life are really real and actual and they do change every part of one's being down to one's very physical existence. John's Gospel could be called the miracle of salvation by Word, because it is the continual reconstitution of our word lives which changes us deeply in our inner most constituted self, even to the depths of our Desire which converted become an engine of Spirit animation of our lives towards hopeful ends even in the midst of the appearance of events which do not seem very logically hopeful.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19,2015
Watching television medical dramas from the 1960's compared to medical dramas now is like watching a band aid being put on. Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare seem to be quaintly out of date. Imagine the culture gap when we read the Bible; and we are so locked off from the contexts to be able to decipher all of the idioms of language within their contexts. Some interpreters of the Bible try to pretend that the Bible can be read today with exact correspondence in all meanings which were implied at the time of the writing of the books which span hundreds of years. As readers and interpreters of the Bible we try to do as much background study of the writing context as we can from the various fields of study which throw light on biblical contexts. We also have to have faith that humanity was created by Word and we live by the words of our lives which embeds intuitions about human experience which instantiate that we can connect in adequate and important ways to attain inter-personal meanings. We seek through intuition embedded in the biblical language to arrive at the relevant principle which can be translated into the corresponding details of our own life experience in our own time. Medicine has advanced since Casey and Kildare; lots of the details of the cultural and intellectual landscapes have advanced since biblical time but those details are still transparent to underlying principles of love and justice which we are committed to allow to surface within our lives today.
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2015
History has proven that one of the greatest hindrances to repentance is ignorance. Living in ignorance about the demeaning conditions of slavery, the subjugation of women, the mistreatment of the impaired, the declaring of a natural orientation of one's life to be sinful means that repentance has not been an option for people living in such ignorance, particularly when the holy books are treated as enshrining ancient cultural practices as "divinely ordained." There has been very uneven recovery from such ignorance among people and the result has been very uneven practice of justice for the people who have continued to be the brunt of such ignorant practices. The New Testament notion of sin is a positive notion; it comes as a metaphor from archery and means "missing the mark." Sin is a positive notion if we have the knowledge of the right target to aim for. Jesus told religious folks that they were aiming for the wrong targets in how they victimized the people who did not follow their own prejudices. For "archer" followers of Jesus, he gave a different target: "Be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect." With eyes on such a perfect target one is always "missing the mark" but in the right direction. If we can be cured of our ignorance, it means we at least learn to begin shooting in the right direction and at the right Target. Sadly there are countless number of people who have been maimed and killed by the wrongly directed arrows of our ignorant practice of life archery.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2015
Arguing about the presence of Christ is as old as the bread of heaven discourse in the sixth chapter of John. How is the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic event real? It does not fit well with the Gospel of John to diminish the notion of Word, by saying real presence is only words. In John's Gospel, words are all we are? We are created by Word to be worded beings through and through. Eucharistic presence involves words, the words which Jesus said were spirit and life. If one makes the argument that physicality is more intimate than words one is but creating an artificial division between body language and the forms of language manifested in speech and writing. With a notion of physical presence or the appearance of presence one does not escape the fact that we live and move and have our being in Word. Disagreement about Eucharistic presence can be explained by personal preference for discursive practices in how we use language. Probably the most telling aspect of Eucharistic controversy is the group body language issue when people separate from each other and begin to call each other less than faithful or impoverished in their faith because of their particular discursive practice regarding the Eucharist.
Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2015
The present seems to determine the past because the present is where we are perpetually stuck. We have different knowledge than the people who lived in the past because from our vantage points we know of outcomes which they did not live to see and so we reflect upon their lives in light of what happened. We declare providence in events which at the time of their occurrence seemed like anything but providence. The writer of the Gospel of John wrote from the experience of a practicing Eucharistic church but as one who could not just openly pretend that Jesus practiced Eucharist in his three or so years of ministry. The bread of heaven discourse of Jesus is a cryptic discourse on the practice of the Eucharist in the Johannine church because the writer of the Gospel of John believed that the Spirit of Jesus while he lived continued as the Spirit of Jesus in oracular form in churches trying to come to grips with the success of their message, the Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2015
On the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary it is a good day to celebrate her elevation by elevating the justice of women in their lives within the church and in the society at large. One could note that St. Mary's historical popularity had to occur because of the loss of archetypal balance in the social psyche of humanity trapped in patriarchalism within society and the church. The Holy Spirit has always gifted people equally; it has taken human society long ages to be able to recognize the equal gifts for ministry within the church of women. The Feast of the Virgin Mary should mean women are free to climb the ladder left by Mary's Assumption to her exalted role to places of winsome authority in all ministries of the church. Women have, they are and they will continue to climb the ladder left by the Assumption of Mary and justice for women is a most proper veneration of Mary.
Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2015
The writer of the Gospel of John anchors the Gospel upon the universality of Word being the creator of human life as we can know it. After acknowledging of Word as the true universal in human experience then John's Gospel writer uses the construction of a narrative of the life of Jesus Christ as the human particular way in which Divine Word could fully inhabit a human person to be the sign for people to know that they live and move and have their being within the kingdom of God. Jesus Christ is Word personified as a Sign to allow us to find the spiritual beyond and within what just seems merely material because of the pull of our flesh to limit us to but the physical level of our existence. Christ as Word and Sign is the interpretive key for us to have an interior change in what we see in this world through the Light of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2015
Sometimes one can have emotional intelligence until one does not have it. Emotional intelligence may be very context specific because one can get caught off guard by the sudden effect of an event or person who gets under one's skin in an irritating way. Various people and events can be the cause of losing one's emotional intelligence but it could be that a crisis of some kind of loss either in dignity or personal attachment can render us ineffective in the state of having lost one's emotional intelligence. This is where third party help is needed to gain clarity from those not under the strange spell of episodes of lost emotional intelligence. It is okay to be "all too human" in such vulnerability; it is also wise human faith to seek help in such times of stress.
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2015
Michelangelo is to have said, "Every block has a statue in it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." Such a view highlights the relationship between culture and nature. A block of stone is its own beauty even before the vision of a human being sees other arising creations from this block of stone. There is an aspect of human culture which involves a violence against natural beauty in order to bring into existence the human artifacts of what we broadly call "civilization." The task today is to make sure that civilization leaves enough of the native stone of nature needed for the people of civilization to survive. One can also use the same analogy for time. Time is the block of nature for us called to the art of living to discover the statues of our creation. The natural stone of human nature could be but the untamed and wild instincts without the sculpting provided by the art of faith oriented toward love and justice. It is the practice of love and justice towards all and towards nature which is orchestration of the roles for all people and all agents of nature to play in our continual perpetuation into the future with hope. Go forth and sculpt from the block of the Time of your life the statues of your creation today.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2015
What is it which determines the meaning of "art?" Is it market value? If something sell does that make it art or does it qualify it as art with public commercial value? What about private and personal art? A child's painting or water color might be a kind of "art" valued by a parent or grandparent. The term art has many different qualifications and we have unwitting systems of determining the "accidental" amateur "artist" and the ones who have attained a wider audience and have entered the artificial and psychological valuing of art with a commercial value to become another "commodity." When one looks at a painting of a "Master" one is wowed by both its artistic style and the looming fact that it is under high security and worth millions of dollars. What about the "art" of Christian living? Is using the term "art" in this way too pedestrian? Does it cheapen the notion of art? In a sense all living is a language art because we are constituted by words and the Bible is a book of words for the art of spiritual living. We are ever hopeful that the words of our lives can continually be interdicted by biblical words and other inspiring words at a deep level so as to affect the body language of our lives towards actions of kindness, love and justice. If we are trying to approximate in word and deed kindness, love and justice then we may be involved in the "high art" of trying to live like Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2015
Outsiders to the Eucharist heard rumors of "eating flesh and drinking blood" and wrote about the practice of cannibalism of Christians. These literal words are very shocking and they function within the Johannine community using stark physicality as a metaphor for the emphasis of something that was known to be "really Real" in the experience of the gathered church partaking of Eucharist. The subsequent churches divided over the experience of Eucharist have argued about the meaning of these words and spoken about Eucharistic presence of Christ as being "real," "actual changed substance into the body and blood of Christ," "changed substance under the appearance of bread and wine," spiritual presence, symbolic presence and mysterious presence. Some churches of the Reformation regarded existing practices of Eucharist to be almost superstition and used to enhance the power of the priests to confect the change of the Eucharistic elements. In practice they de-emphasized the Eucharist as an event to gather the church on the first day of each week in favor of the reading and proclamation of the Bible as the Word of God with a different kind of power of Presence. For many churches the Eucharist became a minor occasional supporting liturgy to the preaching of the word which is why the sermon seems to be the center of liturgy in "non-Eucharistic" churches. In The Episcopal Church Word and Sacrament are a both/and experience of the Real Presence of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2015
The Gospel of John includes a belief in eternal life. And one can ponder whether this means the reconstitution of body-soul-spirit person and if one does what would characterize such a reconstitution? The best of each stage of human life in hybrid form? Why would one want to be reconstituted in a youthful body without the wisdom gained through aging? It could be that eternal life is unavoidably the valuing of human life in such a way that it would seem inconceivable that such life would not have some endless continuity in some way. It is probably safe not to know too much about the specifics of eternal life even though it is important to experience such value of one's life now that one could easily conceive of God as the Great one who would preserve what is truly valuable.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2015
Reporting an event is always someone's version of an event and all reports are replete with the motives of the reporter. Reporters cannot assume that they are privy to the motives of the agents whose acts they are reporting. The further in time one gets from an event and the more that one borrows from previous reports, the more a report begins to represent the concerns of the later editor than the agents of the original event. The Gospels are narratives of the life of Jesus by the later Christian communities who are shaping the narratives for the teaching purposes of their communities. They also are collections of views prevalent at different times in the experiences of the followers of Jesus. A prime example is the notion of the imminent end of the world. There were those who thought it would and should happen at anytime and then there were those who believed that the kingdom of God occurred in the life and ministry of Jesus and through the presence of the Holy Spirit who made the kingdom of God "realized" in each person.
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2015
The Transfiguration event is story version of the Gospel of John's metaphor of Christ as the Light of the world. The story conforms to the practice of presenting Jesus as the one who is in the tradition of Moses and the prophets by presenting Jesus through the common story themes. Moses went upon the mountain and received the Law and his face shone from his proximity to the divine. The face of Jesus shone on the Mount of the Transfiguration where Jesus was the revelation as the grace of God in a person instead of on the written tablets. An interesting sidelight about the revelation of the Law and the revelation of Christ; neither are exempt from the interpretations of the observers. The naivete of people who hold fast to revelation is to assume that the revelation includes a self evidential interpretation of their meanings to those who experienced them. Interpretation was present in the presentation of biblical stories and interpretation cannot be avoided in the reading of biblical stories. The interpretation of the Bible or of anything is never finished as long as there are people and time to confront the event or the text about the event. We can all conclude that the life of Jesus was very important to our lives and to the world; we cannot make a final conclusion about "how" his life has been important because people in time continue to exist.
Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2015
When the writer of the Gospel of John uses so many different poetic metaphors for Jesus it is also necessary to realize that the time narrative within the Gospel is used for metaphorical and teaching purposes and does not have much to do with actual chronological time sequence. The writer of the Gospel of John is attempting to be very inventive about how people in their worshiping community express their relationship with Christ. Anyone who has been in love knows that strict empirical language cannot due justice to love and faith. It is the habit of fundamentalists to reduce the language of love to dull literal empirical presentation even while their irrationality does partake of their real love for God and Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2015
John 1:14 "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." This is where the doctrine of the Incarnation comes from. We are so used to assuming the words and doctrines refer to an external causation of things rather than simply being arising insights in metaphor to provide us with a way to live by faith guided by hope. Since we are "worded" beings we assume that through the use of words we can be led to insights about how to best live our worded lives. We assume that God who beyond words allows the MORE THAN WORDS DIVINE SELF to be known in the human words of our lives. And so even though we as human beings live in our "worded prisons" we can through guided and enlightened words attain greater adequacy of life knowledge because of hope directed toward the ONE greater than we are or our use of words. The Incarnation is a stating of the obvious, namely, that our worded lives are valid ways to know the One who is greater than our worded lives.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2015
It is really easy through familiarity to assume that mystical identities can be reduced to empirical reality and location. We assume the mystical identity of our nation America even though we cannot reduce it to simply geographical location within borders. "America" does not have exhaustive and precise empirical reality even though we certainly know it is real and and engaging in manifold ways. The same is with the church and Christianity; some people would like to reduce mystical identity with administrative boundaries or specific doctrinal formulations of a particular period. We believe that mystical identity is real and we get so comfortable with the poetics of such mysticality that we treat them with the same reality as we do empirically verified realities. And so an American flag can be a poetically reductive symbol of the entire mystical experience of being an American even though we know it does not have empirical equality. The New Testament writers were generating the symbols of Christian mystical participation in the esprit de corps of the church through specific narratives of Jesus as they registered the fellowship building effects of the witness of his life. It is very easy for us to assume that mystical participation has an empirical and physical reality about it because it is the assumed tacit knowledge of a Christian paradigm long born and grown up.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2015
The Gospel of John is written against people who rush to literal meanings in their life. To be born from above or born again means that one has activated through the inner creation of one's life through the words of one's life a different way of seeing things. The writer of John is telling the stories of Jesus to encourage the life of faith, not in the obviousness of the literal but in the meaning of events of life because one has arrived at some inward persuasions. Seeing, blindness, eating,sleeping, light, life, sheep, shepherd, vine, branches and death all have other meanings in John other than their empirical reality.
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2015
One might ponder the future of a regularly "gathered" church. Since the advent of modern science it seems that the largest church bodies have been contented to keep their members with a presentation of Christian knowledge through catechism, sermon and liturgy in the mythic literal phase of faith development and minds of people who have grown in creative interpretation are no longer engaged. A group of cultural Christians have been created for Christmas joy and sometimes Easter and baptism, confirmation, church wedding and burials are rituals of nostalgia. (A sort of, "wasn't it nice when God used to exist?") Economic parity for more people has meant that people are more "free agents" and less reliant on engagement with extra-family communal ties. Immigrant and poorer people are more reliant upon gathering to network for their well being in their social settings and since they don't have adequate personal space, they rely more on the public space of the parish church to be places of gathering to express their group solidarity. Distance and the automobile and modern transportation have created the opportunity for the "virtual" church as individuals receive their catechism during their nomadic ways. There could be a future for the gathered church again for educated people. The church needs to move instruction beyond the mythic literal minimalism and embrace creativity in hermeneutics, the kind of hermeneutics that we find entertaining and embracing elsewhere. The future and energy shortage may make the city again to be the place to live and so the accessibility of the parish church and the lack of "energy" to travel long distances will give shaking of hands, looking eye to eye and the embraces of hugs a rediscovered intimacy after a long sojourn in virtuality. The creative church needs to take the Bible from being trapped in ancient cultural details, mine the universal principles which are always imperfectly expressed in any specific cultural context and expound the inspiring genius of the Bible in anthropological sound ways freshly in new settings.
The loss of a "flat earth" view of the cosmos forced in a progressive way the loss of the ability to visualize the former physical approximation of heaven as a physical location somewhere through the trap door at the top of the big dome over us. The further awareness of the expanse of outer space has meant that if there is an edge to the universe at all we have perhaps given up trying to imagine the empirical and physical reality of a heaven as a repository of those who receive an afterlife location of the "saved." The change in cosmological reality has forced a change in emphasis on what is meant by "salvation." Salvation as the arrival at a place of reward in the afterlife functioned as a belief in how justice and mercy would ultimately be anchored in an actual ideal state of justice. The result of losing the actual physical place of heaven has forced us to understand salvation as more of a here and now coming to the health of our lives as we promote the health of our lives within the actual communities where we do have actual physical location. This does not invalidate the function of the utopian notion of a realm where justice and mercy do actually maintain, since the assertion of normative justice and mercy is what inspires us to continue to resist the deprivation of justice and mercy in the dystopic threats to the quality of the experience of salvation in the lives of people today. Long live the utopian notion of heaven but let it not be divorced from bringing as much health to as many as we can today.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2015
How could a most graphic love story poem which does not mention the name of God be found worthy to be a part of Holy Scriptures? Such inclusion is so embarrassing that a person who is literal and puritanical is forced to read it as a allegory of a love relationship between God and the human soul. One could see a group of wisdom teachers pondering the condition of how boring religious life had become and decided that the seduction of the soul by the notion of God's love should have all of the interesting features of a passionate romantic relationship. When religion becomes just the prohibition of Desire rather than the redirection of its wonderful energies, then religion can become boring, lifeless, obligatory rituals. The wisdom writer who wrote Song of Songs must have thought that if God is that which none greater can be conceived, the relationship with God should at the very least be as engaging as the very best of romantic love. It is easy to forget that ecstasy is an important part of being truly engaged by Divine Presence. Song of Songs is an invitation to a tryst with God: "Arise my love, my fair one, come away."
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2015
One of witnesses of Jesus in his ministry was to show that all laws are not equal. It is so easy to elevate minor rules to the place of maintaining one's influence and position and to distract people from the big rule of love and justice. Take all of the minor rules in our Congress which are procedural and can thwart major legislation for the betterment of the general good. Christians can argue about the amount of water needed for valid baptism or work to make clean water available for all in this world. Christians can argue about Eucharistic presence or make sure that everyone has enough to eat in this world. The witness of Jesus is this: Pick the rules which you regard to be most conducive for the actualization of God's love and justice. The lesser rules may be the effort to legitimize non-performance of the great rules of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2015
St. Augustine is perhaps a chief example of how one's personal autobiography widely read can set the tone for subsequent theological thinking. His life fits the pattern of the Gospel preference for heroic turn around in one's life. People who are just "boringly good" and faithful in their day to day lives and don't have dramatic conversion from dissolute living and expressions of their "evil inclined" natures don't seem to be very interesting to the general public even if their consistent living "make the trains run on time." From the Prodigal Son to St. Paul to Augustine we inherited the trope of heroic conversion as somehow being more proof of God's grace and power to convert people. In America it seems we really like to forgive famous people who let the cheese slip off the cracker of good behavior. Augustine's own reflections upon his sense of his own evil tendency resulted in churches adopting the severity of the great Fall. As wonderful as the biography of Augustine is, there is the need of balance. Ordinary people without "great sins" still know they need the same measure of God's grace on the path of being perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect. Augustine's famous autobiography ends up determining judgments upon everyone's biography and those judgment may not apply in all or most cases.
Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2015
When Jesus said, "there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile," one wonders if this a definitive strike against the power of nurture over the power of inherent nature. One wonders if this statement attributed to Jesus is what accounts for the belief in the severity of the original fall from innocence and for the depravity of humanity? One wonders if God can still call creation "good" after the fall. For those who find wisdom in the social construction of a person as a sort of "garbage in, garbage out" dynamic the belief that the inherit "evil" in any person is stronger than any of the imprint that is done by one's environment which has the power to form feelings and behaviors. It might be wise to look at the context: Jesus was commenting upon the tendency of religious behaviors to be something like the equivalent of obsessive compulsive disorder behaviors as external acts to cope with an irrational sense of always feeling dirty. In the Gospel context there also has to be understood grace as a recovery of access to the original grace of creation, the deeper Heart of God's Holy Spirit to begin the work of creating in us a clean heart. Perhaps Jesus is saying that our social standing may help or hinder us, but one still has to find the deeper original Grace.
Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2015
One lives in a perceptual orb and one's attention is gained toward people and events, some by personal choice and others by happenstance. Happenstance events sometimes reveal the true constitution of our life values and motivation. We react and do not have proper time to formulate a controlled presentation of our values in our actions. The things, people and event onto which we our attention is drawn are also given meaning values because of our past experience. And so we are like the playwrights of the story happening before our eyes and we cannot avoid the values and meaning which we cast upon the characteristics of happenings in our lives. As we observe the story of our daily life unfold before us we can learn from it being a mirror of the image of how we have been constituted. Understanding with honesty how one is constituted by one's value is a preliminary step toward learning how we can be re-educated into the higher values of faith, love and justice to which we aspire. As playwrights of our lives we often need to ask why we are writing the plays of our lives in the ways that we do. We are often hidden playwrights as well; outsiders think that we are writing winning scripts when we are seeing losing scripts and vice versa. Or more honestly our scripts are open to lots of ambiguous and contradictory elements living in coalescence.
Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2015
Three topics in ancient Greece for a successful speech: Speak well of the gods, patriotism and of the dead especially dead heroes. The Hebrew Scriptures could be organized around these three topics as well with gods being replaced with a strict monotheism. The Jesus movement became a Christo-centric international movement and ultimately this brought about the dilemma between one's faith and one's patriotism. The history of the world involves periods when Christians are fighting and killing other Christians for patriotic loyalty. Religious factions in democracies often like to think theocratically and believe that their own version of piety should be the preferred one by the State. The early Christians lived the ambiguity of "obeying God rather men" even while they prayed for the Emperor. It could be that the notion of God is to deconstruct any pretentious replacing idols including hero worship and the severe nationalism which deifies one's own country identity or even one's ideal view of one's country. In this way the worship of God should make us better citizen of country and the world in the pursuit of justice for all.
Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2015
Hypocrisy essentially is the division within oneself between two significant operations of language. On the level of writing, speech and in our theoretical thinking we can state our allegiance to all manner of love and justice but if our body language does not agree with our speech, writing and theoretical thinking we have significant disagreement. And isn't that the gap which we try to overcome, at least, if we are recovering hypocrites trying to make our body language come into performance agreement with the ideals to which we aspire. Charlie Brown said, "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand." Recovering hypocrites are committed to perform justice as love for the people we can't stand.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2015
The church has had difficulty and disagreement when it has come to trying to articulate how Christ is present in the Eucharistic event. The problem may be that church authorities have wanted to put "controls" on the meanings so as to define understanding and practice within their particular religious gathering. Why not just admit that Eucharistic presence is an experienced presence with it own unique defining features so as to be "sui generis." What can we say about it? It is not the presence of Jesus of Nazareth in his earthly body. It is not the Christ in is post resurrection appearances but it is in a causal continuity with both of these since Eucharistic presence would not occur and recur if there was no Jesus of Nazareth and no traceable Afterlife made known to those who remained. Eucharistic presence is particular since it does not happen when people are gathered without the intention elements of obeying Christ and following the words of its institution. Eucharistic presence has the nuance of receptionism in the sense that if it is not convened by people in the intention reception mode then it does not happen. The church needs to humbly admit that the metaphor of physical presence is not actual physical presence. Eating flesh and drinking blood is the extreme language of physicality to denote that people's physical and bodily lives change because of the Eucharistic event. The ultimate physical presence that happens is the mystification of the person of Jesus into the corporate body of the church as the hearts, minds, and limbs of each member becomes Word made flesh in preaching and living the Gospel of the love of God in Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2015
Language use means that there is an endless process of interpretations of previous interpretations of previous interpretations and the amazing things is that various communities attain the event of coming to meanings of interpretations to form their constituting identities. We have so many different Christian communities because meaning paradigms gain followings in uneven ways and for different reasons for so many different historical contextual reasons. The particular star or constellation of meanings of our particular religious community still has to admit with humility that the plenitude of the skies of outer space is the One Continuum which is shared by all.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2015
Perhaps one of the reason that Word ability can be manifest in so many discursive practices is for us as human beings not to put strict limitation on what can have significant meanings and be truthful for us. A scientist who is committed to a strictly empirical method may actual have a theoretical break through because of a dream, even though it seems like a juxtaposition of the "irrational" with the "rational." Being multidiscursive means that we have many different ways of processing all of the insights of life stretching from the highly comedic to the experience of the rapture of the sublime. Even if we think that there is a "scientific" explanation for experiencing the Sublime, it does not change the fact that human beings can be constituted as "receptors" of a diversity of kinds of experience. The confusion arises mainly when one presumes empirical method is the way to validate all meaningful truth. In this way deniers of the Sublime are dishonest about the reality of the meanings of the Sublime and those who try to defend the specific narratives of religious truth as empirical truth tend to come off as being a bit kooky, like the chairperson of HR Committee on Science believing the earth is just over 6000 years old because the Bible told him so. And one asks why does such a person want to defend the truth of the Bible so poorly.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2015
Reading the Gospel of John closely one finds a continuous rebuke of literal reading. Physicality is used as a metaphor for saying that salvation events in one's life are really real and actual and they do change every part of one's being down to one's very physical existence. John's Gospel could be called the miracle of salvation by Word, because it is the continual reconstitution of our word lives which changes us deeply in our inner most constituted self, even to the depths of our Desire which converted become an engine of Spirit animation of our lives towards hopeful ends even in the midst of the appearance of events which do not seem very logically hopeful.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19,2015
Watching television medical dramas from the 1960's compared to medical dramas now is like watching a band aid being put on. Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare seem to be quaintly out of date. Imagine the culture gap when we read the Bible; and we are so locked off from the contexts to be able to decipher all of the idioms of language within their contexts. Some interpreters of the Bible try to pretend that the Bible can be read today with exact correspondence in all meanings which were implied at the time of the writing of the books which span hundreds of years. As readers and interpreters of the Bible we try to do as much background study of the writing context as we can from the various fields of study which throw light on biblical contexts. We also have to have faith that humanity was created by Word and we live by the words of our lives which embeds intuitions about human experience which instantiate that we can connect in adequate and important ways to attain inter-personal meanings. We seek through intuition embedded in the biblical language to arrive at the relevant principle which can be translated into the corresponding details of our own life experience in our own time. Medicine has advanced since Casey and Kildare; lots of the details of the cultural and intellectual landscapes have advanced since biblical time but those details are still transparent to underlying principles of love and justice which we are committed to allow to surface within our lives today.
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2015
History has proven that one of the greatest hindrances to repentance is ignorance. Living in ignorance about the demeaning conditions of slavery, the subjugation of women, the mistreatment of the impaired, the declaring of a natural orientation of one's life to be sinful means that repentance has not been an option for people living in such ignorance, particularly when the holy books are treated as enshrining ancient cultural practices as "divinely ordained." There has been very uneven recovery from such ignorance among people and the result has been very uneven practice of justice for the people who have continued to be the brunt of such ignorant practices. The New Testament notion of sin is a positive notion; it comes as a metaphor from archery and means "missing the mark." Sin is a positive notion if we have the knowledge of the right target to aim for. Jesus told religious folks that they were aiming for the wrong targets in how they victimized the people who did not follow their own prejudices. For "archer" followers of Jesus, he gave a different target: "Be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect." With eyes on such a perfect target one is always "missing the mark" but in the right direction. If we can be cured of our ignorance, it means we at least learn to begin shooting in the right direction and at the right Target. Sadly there are countless number of people who have been maimed and killed by the wrongly directed arrows of our ignorant practice of life archery.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2015
Arguing about the presence of Christ is as old as the bread of heaven discourse in the sixth chapter of John. How is the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic event real? It does not fit well with the Gospel of John to diminish the notion of Word, by saying real presence is only words. In John's Gospel, words are all we are? We are created by Word to be worded beings through and through. Eucharistic presence involves words, the words which Jesus said were spirit and life. If one makes the argument that physicality is more intimate than words one is but creating an artificial division between body language and the forms of language manifested in speech and writing. With a notion of physical presence or the appearance of presence one does not escape the fact that we live and move and have our being in Word. Disagreement about Eucharistic presence can be explained by personal preference for discursive practices in how we use language. Probably the most telling aspect of Eucharistic controversy is the group body language issue when people separate from each other and begin to call each other less than faithful or impoverished in their faith because of their particular discursive practice regarding the Eucharist.
Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2015
The present seems to determine the past because the present is where we are perpetually stuck. We have different knowledge than the people who lived in the past because from our vantage points we know of outcomes which they did not live to see and so we reflect upon their lives in light of what happened. We declare providence in events which at the time of their occurrence seemed like anything but providence. The writer of the Gospel of John wrote from the experience of a practicing Eucharistic church but as one who could not just openly pretend that Jesus practiced Eucharist in his three or so years of ministry. The bread of heaven discourse of Jesus is a cryptic discourse on the practice of the Eucharist in the Johannine church because the writer of the Gospel of John believed that the Spirit of Jesus while he lived continued as the Spirit of Jesus in oracular form in churches trying to come to grips with the success of their message, the Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2015
On the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary it is a good day to celebrate her elevation by elevating the justice of women in their lives within the church and in the society at large. One could note that St. Mary's historical popularity had to occur because of the loss of archetypal balance in the social psyche of humanity trapped in patriarchalism within society and the church. The Holy Spirit has always gifted people equally; it has taken human society long ages to be able to recognize the equal gifts for ministry within the church of women. The Feast of the Virgin Mary should mean women are free to climb the ladder left by Mary's Assumption to her exalted role to places of winsome authority in all ministries of the church. Women have, they are and they will continue to climb the ladder left by the Assumption of Mary and justice for women is a most proper veneration of Mary.
Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2015
The writer of the Gospel of John anchors the Gospel upon the universality of Word being the creator of human life as we can know it. After acknowledging of Word as the true universal in human experience then John's Gospel writer uses the construction of a narrative of the life of Jesus Christ as the human particular way in which Divine Word could fully inhabit a human person to be the sign for people to know that they live and move and have their being within the kingdom of God. Jesus Christ is Word personified as a Sign to allow us to find the spiritual beyond and within what just seems merely material because of the pull of our flesh to limit us to but the physical level of our existence. Christ as Word and Sign is the interpretive key for us to have an interior change in what we see in this world through the Light of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2015
Sometimes one can have emotional intelligence until one does not have it. Emotional intelligence may be very context specific because one can get caught off guard by the sudden effect of an event or person who gets under one's skin in an irritating way. Various people and events can be the cause of losing one's emotional intelligence but it could be that a crisis of some kind of loss either in dignity or personal attachment can render us ineffective in the state of having lost one's emotional intelligence. This is where third party help is needed to gain clarity from those not under the strange spell of episodes of lost emotional intelligence. It is okay to be "all too human" in such vulnerability; it is also wise human faith to seek help in such times of stress.
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2015
Michelangelo is to have said, "Every block has a statue in it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." Such a view highlights the relationship between culture and nature. A block of stone is its own beauty even before the vision of a human being sees other arising creations from this block of stone. There is an aspect of human culture which involves a violence against natural beauty in order to bring into existence the human artifacts of what we broadly call "civilization." The task today is to make sure that civilization leaves enough of the native stone of nature needed for the people of civilization to survive. One can also use the same analogy for time. Time is the block of nature for us called to the art of living to discover the statues of our creation. The natural stone of human nature could be but the untamed and wild instincts without the sculpting provided by the art of faith oriented toward love and justice. It is the practice of love and justice towards all and towards nature which is orchestration of the roles for all people and all agents of nature to play in our continual perpetuation into the future with hope. Go forth and sculpt from the block of the Time of your life the statues of your creation today.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2015
What is it which determines the meaning of "art?" Is it market value? If something sell does that make it art or does it qualify it as art with public commercial value? What about private and personal art? A child's painting or water color might be a kind of "art" valued by a parent or grandparent. The term art has many different qualifications and we have unwitting systems of determining the "accidental" amateur "artist" and the ones who have attained a wider audience and have entered the artificial and psychological valuing of art with a commercial value to become another "commodity." When one looks at a painting of a "Master" one is wowed by both its artistic style and the looming fact that it is under high security and worth millions of dollars. What about the "art" of Christian living? Is using the term "art" in this way too pedestrian? Does it cheapen the notion of art? In a sense all living is a language art because we are constituted by words and the Bible is a book of words for the art of spiritual living. We are ever hopeful that the words of our lives can continually be interdicted by biblical words and other inspiring words at a deep level so as to affect the body language of our lives towards actions of kindness, love and justice. If we are trying to approximate in word and deed kindness, love and justice then we may be involved in the "high art" of trying to live like Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2015
Outsiders to the Eucharist heard rumors of "eating flesh and drinking blood" and wrote about the practice of cannibalism of Christians. These literal words are very shocking and they function within the Johannine community using stark physicality as a metaphor for the emphasis of something that was known to be "really Real" in the experience of the gathered church partaking of Eucharist. The subsequent churches divided over the experience of Eucharist have argued about the meaning of these words and spoken about Eucharistic presence of Christ as being "real," "actual changed substance into the body and blood of Christ," "changed substance under the appearance of bread and wine," spiritual presence, symbolic presence and mysterious presence. Some churches of the Reformation regarded existing practices of Eucharist to be almost superstition and used to enhance the power of the priests to confect the change of the Eucharistic elements. In practice they de-emphasized the Eucharist as an event to gather the church on the first day of each week in favor of the reading and proclamation of the Bible as the Word of God with a different kind of power of Presence. For many churches the Eucharist became a minor occasional supporting liturgy to the preaching of the word which is why the sermon seems to be the center of liturgy in "non-Eucharistic" churches. In The Episcopal Church Word and Sacrament are a both/and experience of the Real Presence of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2015
The Gospel of John includes a belief in eternal life. And one can ponder whether this means the reconstitution of body-soul-spirit person and if one does what would characterize such a reconstitution? The best of each stage of human life in hybrid form? Why would one want to be reconstituted in a youthful body without the wisdom gained through aging? It could be that eternal life is unavoidably the valuing of human life in such a way that it would seem inconceivable that such life would not have some endless continuity in some way. It is probably safe not to know too much about the specifics of eternal life even though it is important to experience such value of one's life now that one could easily conceive of God as the Great one who would preserve what is truly valuable.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2015
Reporting an event is always someone's version of an event and all reports are replete with the motives of the reporter. Reporters cannot assume that they are privy to the motives of the agents whose acts they are reporting. The further in time one gets from an event and the more that one borrows from previous reports, the more a report begins to represent the concerns of the later editor than the agents of the original event. The Gospels are narratives of the life of Jesus by the later Christian communities who are shaping the narratives for the teaching purposes of their communities. They also are collections of views prevalent at different times in the experiences of the followers of Jesus. A prime example is the notion of the imminent end of the world. There were those who thought it would and should happen at anytime and then there were those who believed that the kingdom of God occurred in the life and ministry of Jesus and through the presence of the Holy Spirit who made the kingdom of God "realized" in each person.
Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2015
Which metaphorical nuance do you think "eat my flesh and drink my blood" has? The cannibal nuance or the endearment nuance as when one cuddles the foot of a baby and says, "you are so delicious, I could just eat you?"
Which metaphorical nuance do you think "eat my flesh and drink my blood" has? The cannibal nuance or the endearment nuance as when one cuddles the foot of a baby and says, "you are so delicious, I could just eat you?"
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2015
The Transfiguration event is story version of the Gospel of John's metaphor of Christ as the Light of the world. The story conforms to the practice of presenting Jesus as the one who is in the tradition of Moses and the prophets by presenting Jesus through the common story themes. Moses went upon the mountain and received the Law and his face shone from his proximity to the divine. The face of Jesus shone on the Mount of the Transfiguration where Jesus was the revelation as the grace of God in a person instead of on the written tablets. An interesting sidelight about the revelation of the Law and the revelation of Christ; neither are exempt from the interpretations of the observers. The naivete of people who hold fast to revelation is to assume that the revelation includes a self evidential interpretation of their meanings to those who experienced them. Interpretation was present in the presentation of biblical stories and interpretation cannot be avoided in the reading of biblical stories. The interpretation of the Bible or of anything is never finished as long as there are people and time to confront the event or the text about the event. We can all conclude that the life of Jesus was very important to our lives and to the world; we cannot make a final conclusion about "how" his life has been important because people in time continue to exist.
Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2015
When the writer of the Gospel of John uses so many different poetic metaphors for Jesus it is also necessary to realize that the time narrative within the Gospel is used for metaphorical and teaching purposes and does not have much to do with actual chronological time sequence. The writer of the Gospel of John is attempting to be very inventive about how people in their worshiping community express their relationship with Christ. Anyone who has been in love knows that strict empirical language cannot due justice to love and faith. It is the habit of fundamentalists to reduce the language of love to dull literal empirical presentation even while their irrationality does partake of their real love for God and Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2015
John 1:14 "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." This is where the doctrine of the Incarnation comes from. We are so used to assuming the words and doctrines refer to an external causation of things rather than simply being arising insights in metaphor to provide us with a way to live by faith guided by hope. Since we are "worded" beings we assume that through the use of words we can be led to insights about how to best live our worded lives. We assume that God who beyond words allows the MORE THAN WORDS DIVINE SELF to be known in the human words of our lives. And so even though we as human beings live in our "worded prisons" we can through guided and enlightened words attain greater adequacy of life knowledge because of hope directed toward the ONE greater than we are or our use of words. The Incarnation is a stating of the obvious, namely, that our worded lives are valid ways to know the One who is greater than our worded lives.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2015
It is really easy through familiarity to assume that mystical identities can be reduced to empirical reality and location. We assume the mystical identity of our nation America even though we cannot reduce it to simply geographical location within borders. "America" does not have exhaustive and precise empirical reality even though we certainly know it is real and and engaging in manifold ways. The same is with the church and Christianity; some people would like to reduce mystical identity with administrative boundaries or specific doctrinal formulations of a particular period. We believe that mystical identity is real and we get so comfortable with the poetics of such mysticality that we treat them with the same reality as we do empirically verified realities. And so an American flag can be a poetically reductive symbol of the entire mystical experience of being an American even though we know it does not have empirical equality. The New Testament writers were generating the symbols of Christian mystical participation in the esprit de corps of the church through specific narratives of Jesus as they registered the fellowship building effects of the witness of his life. It is very easy for us to assume that mystical participation has an empirical and physical reality about it because it is the assumed tacit knowledge of a Christian paradigm long born and grown up.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2015
The Gospel of John is written against people who rush to literal meanings in their life. To be born from above or born again means that one has activated through the inner creation of one's life through the words of one's life a different way of seeing things. The writer of John is telling the stories of Jesus to encourage the life of faith, not in the obviousness of the literal but in the meaning of events of life because one has arrived at some inward persuasions. Seeing, blindness, eating,sleeping, light, life, sheep, shepherd, vine, branches and death all have other meanings in John other than their empirical reality.
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2015
One might ponder the future of a regularly "gathered" church. Since the advent of modern science it seems that the largest church bodies have been contented to keep their members with a presentation of Christian knowledge through catechism, sermon and liturgy in the mythic literal phase of faith development and minds of people who have grown in creative interpretation are no longer engaged. A group of cultural Christians have been created for Christmas joy and sometimes Easter and baptism, confirmation, church wedding and burials are rituals of nostalgia. (A sort of, "wasn't it nice when God used to exist?") Economic parity for more people has meant that people are more "free agents" and less reliant on engagement with extra-family communal ties. Immigrant and poorer people are more reliant upon gathering to network for their well being in their social settings and since they don't have adequate personal space, they rely more on the public space of the parish church to be places of gathering to express their group solidarity. Distance and the automobile and modern transportation have created the opportunity for the "virtual" church as individuals receive their catechism during their nomadic ways. There could be a future for the gathered church again for educated people. The church needs to move instruction beyond the mythic literal minimalism and embrace creativity in hermeneutics, the kind of hermeneutics that we find entertaining and embracing elsewhere. The future and energy shortage may make the city again to be the place to live and so the accessibility of the parish church and the lack of "energy" to travel long distances will give shaking of hands, looking eye to eye and the embraces of hugs a rediscovered intimacy after a long sojourn in virtuality. The creative church needs to take the Bible from being trapped in ancient cultural details, mine the universal principles which are always imperfectly expressed in any specific cultural context and expound the inspiring genius of the Bible in anthropological sound ways freshly in new settings.
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