Aphorism of the Day, October 31, 2015
In America the two most popular holidays are Christmas and Halloween. The reason: we want to bring cheer to the lives of children. We serve up gifts and candy galore for the children because we like ourselves best when we are doing things to bring smiles to the faces of children. While some very serious adult Christians seem to believe we should decry the crass secular commercialization of these holy days, why not be thankful about the message of care for children and for all vulnerable persons which could be taught from the "excesses" of these seasons. If secular culture is offended by our Christian Hall of Fame, the Saints then we can simply point out the secular obsession with heroes of all sorts. The Saints of our Hall of Fame offer different kinds of values to be modelled than all of our secular heroes. And why would anyone take offense with All Souls' Day as we remember the local and personal saints who have touched our lives? This is a very healthy psychological ritual of connection of the living with the dead with an orientation toward a better future. Instead of going all "bah humbug" on Halloween, it can be a teaching occasion for all.
Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2015
All Saints' Day is a celebration of the resurrection and we should be honest about such celebrations being something like an alchemical transformation of the grief of loss into the joy of thanksgiving. One could say that the profound impact of the life of Jesus upon his followers resulting in the deepest kind of grief at his death created the conditions for his post-resurrection appearances. Profound grief due to the loss of the ones who are the very best in our lives and in the life of the world could give rise to despair. This is why liturgy is the community alchemy to hold what is inspiring about the lives of those whom we have lost toward living better in the future knowing that saintliness creates and inspires more saintliness. Saintliness cannot die or be exhausted by the lives of the saints; the lives of the saints remind us that the source of all saintliness is closer to us than we are to ourselves in the Holy Spirit. The saints inspire us to access the Holy Spirit who is the source for what is saintly.
Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2015
The traditions pertaining to those who have come to be called saints are still alive because what has made certain people memorably are things which people did not want forgotten because their lives have been standards for living a blessed life. To become a standard is expressed in the word "canon" or rule. Saints are those who have been "canonized" because they set the standard for how life should be lived. The memory of their lives have been kept alive to inspire us with narratives of what can be attained in our lives. Just because a person has become designated as a holy person through the institutional processes of the church, does not diminish the saintly or telling example of one's holy grandmother or other special person who have made us better through their godly example.
Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2015
The feast of All Saints and the cult of saints represents the differentiation of the sharing of holiness which happened/happens because of the omnipresence of the Risen Christ. "Christ is all and in all," is a Pauline confession. How can people be like Christ without being Jesus of Nazareth? The cult of saints has given personal narratives to the meaning of the Pauline confession, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." One can view Jesus of Nazareth as an ascended person with a body, somewhere, containing all of perfection and glory, or one can see the Risen Christ as the result of an effusion of metaphorical language which created the constituting environment for people linguistically to begin to define their lives differently towards the values of love and justice espoused by Jesus. So the words of Jesus became always already spirit and life of people surprised by the reconstituting effect of their lives by the Gospel. Sainthood is born by appropriating the fact that God has shared all through Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2015
In a church which became feudal in structure and where elite priestly caste mediated relationship with God on behalf of those who at times were relegated to receive Holy Communion but once a year such a deprivation of "access" to Jesus created the conditions for the "cult of saints." Heroes who were not the perfect Jesus were approachable by the masses deprived of direct access to the perfect Jesus. Saints provided the psychic balance for the needed access to the sublime within the aspirations of prayer discourses tailored to the human psyche. Within the Enlightenment and the Reformation the "individual" was re-discovered and re-empowered to take the graceful ability to approach Jesus without the mediation of the priestly caste. Many Protestant churches with regard to the saints, "threw the baby out with the bath water" in a reactionary reduction of the "cult of saints" to papal superstitions. In the Anglicanism there are a variety of pieties regarding the saints which correspond to the strains of theologies present within Anglican. With our calendar of saints, though, we have retained the necessity to honor the effects of the Risen Christ in the lives of people who have become models worthy of imitation. Whereas some do not feel like it is worthwhile to use the imagination of prayer life to engage those whom we feel to live on in God because of the resurrection, others feel that it is psychologically and spiritually healthy to assume actual outcomes of the resurrection, i.e., our dear dead folk are still alive and so why not treat them in a way which honors their continued lives. Hence we find that All Saints' and All Souls' to be necessary celebrations of applying our faith in the resurrection.
Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2015
This week we approach the "triduum" of Halloween, All Saints' and All Souls. Christians have sometimes felt very superior to people of other cultures whom they criticized as being involved in "ancestor worship." But perhaps the "triduum" which is coming up is in fact how Christians have baptized "ancestor worship" through the prism of the resurrection of Christ. Of course, American Halloween has been co-opted by our retail economic machine. Like Christmas, in the name of children, we have let the candy and dress up festivities expand to monster cultural events with many secular "paraliturgical" events for adults. Lost is the All Hallows' Eve sense of preparation to contemplate the heroes of faith who left us stellar examples to imitate and celebrate. And there is virtually no liturgical energy or cultural energy for All Souls' except in the Latino Culture where the Day of the Day unifies the community around the local, personal and family departed souls remembered with colorful festivities around the places where remains have been laid to rest. Ancestor worship, adoration, veneration, honor, respect, remembrance by many Christians are seen to take away from the singular reverence that some believe should be directed to Jesus alone. The "triduum" calls us to be honest about grieving the ones whom we have lost and whose lives touched us with the graceful presence of God. The "triduum" should be celebrated as feasts of the resurrection and how the Risen Christ morphed into being born into the lives of the many people who touched ours. I suspect that Jesus is the proud Brother of a great family and is glad whenever we have found expression of love with one another.
Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2015
The word "again" expresses the reality of repetition in our lives. Things repeated establish the truths of the communities even though the passing of time precludes one moments activities ever being exactly the same as activities in a different moment. Time involves the experience of before and after sequences. The Bible is a book about "again." Yet a phrase like being born "again" does not me repeating a physical birth all over; it refers metaphorically to the reorientation of one's life because one has been exposed to new context, new people, new insights which forces one to change one's life in such a significant way that one can confess a new birth.
Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2015
Do abstractions have the same kind of meanings as the context specific pragmatic meanings in life? Modern science has tended to sway the value of meaning toward the things which are more context specific and pragmatic, like how do I get from here to there faster? We invent the automobile. This seems more immanently relevant to our lives than how does one get to heaven. Love is the word abstraction from the actual situations of actively being cared for; what is more meaningful, actively being cared for or the naming of all of the occasions of care to be what is called Love? In a similar way the word God might be seen as an abstraction from all of the states of becoming, an Omni-Becomer. Since we are only in a moment of time we are forced to be practical to deal with the current specifics of the state of becoming now and yet we still need the abstraction of words to give singular generalization of what essentially is unclassifiable for beings without language. As those who use word because that is who we are as worded beings, words themselves are metaphorical agents of taking non-worded entities and representing them in the abstractions of words themselves. So as specific and pragmatic and as descriptively precise as we think we might be we never escape the abstracting nature of words.
Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2015
Time deconstructs everything in that a worded statement about the nature of things only holds currency until it does not. God cares for the widow and orphan is deconstructed by the fact that God's care does not overthrow the freedom of people who do not care for the widow and orphan and let them go unattended. The Bible is full of wishful thinking about good things for good people because hope and future is not yet fully. Hope creates continuous Utopia, "no such places or no such conditions" and hope is the feature of time and Time's deferred narratives of a better world with a better state of being for us. Time is the rapidly switching transitions of occasions creating impressions of smooth transition or radical discontinuity which describe the appearance of a radical state of transformation. Death may be one of those moments of "radical transitions" in the experience of the appearance of things, or the appearance of a person. How does one conceive of a static and complete state of perfection when we live on the moving train of time? A rock might have the appearance of a static state even though it teems with unseen atoms in motion making the apparent solid rock always in flux too. As much as we hope for a perfect state of being that is not in flux, taking flux out of life means lifeless. Time adds another layer from the center of what first made it all happen and the expansion of Plenitude continuously creates a new and wider environment in space and in words and so everything which has its becoming inside of the Great Becomer is always already being "deconstructed." A wider environment always creates new relativity and so everything is "deconstructed" by new juxtapositions in relationships.
Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2015
It is written in Job that after all of his sufferings, "the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for his friends." The most obvious prayer of one's life is the prayer of simply being in one's own situation. Prayer is the intentional act of committing one's being and the body language acts and the interior states to God as receptor conditions of being identified with others who will face similar conditions. So through the prayer of being one accepts the solidarity with others and so part of the meaning of one's suffering is not why it happened but since it happened how can I accept the condition in solidarity with others who face the same situation. Instead of being tricked into a self-pity fest demanding all exemptions from what could happen to me, accept my life as given to be with others. In accepting such an intercessory life one can by faith be a transmitter of a different kind of energy to others in one's suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2015
The Gospel presentations of blindness and sight could be seen as a metaphorical continuum representing the blindness caused by the Awesomeness of Divine Plenitude, a blindness caused by excessive Light. Moving progressively from blindness to better seeing is the spiritual journey adjusting one's spiritual being to an ever more encompassing grasp of spiritual, intellectual and moral knowing.
Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2015
At the end of Job it is written that Job's family and friends comforted him for "all of the evil that God had brought upon him." This would seem like God is inclusive of the freedom in this world and is given personal responsibility for the effects of evil being applied to the life of Job. The entire book of Job could be seen as a satire on the presumption of the theology of people who think they know and can have actuarial certainty about why all particular good and bad things happen in our world. So the author of Job challenges the belief that only good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. The author writes the scenario of bad things happening to good people to force the discussion about the reality of freedom in the world. One could say that the buck stops with God if one conceived of God as being perfectly static and unchanging to the point of God's knowledge knowing the possible as actual and the future as present. But if we live and move and have our becoming in a God who is the Omni-Becoming one, then such a Great Freedom to Creatively Become as the Omni-Becomer with no rivals means that such a one is open to genuine freedom without pre-determining all outcomes. The author of Job writes satirically about assuming a finished and Closed Being, whereas we may be wiser to use the name God as a single name which is abstracted from total occasions of Becoming. In such a notion one can see how permissive such great Freedom is for all manner of things to occur, and life experience shows us, they do.
Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2015
In the Gospels, physical conditions and attributes are used to teach the significance of the transformation which occurred for followers of Jesus to comprehend a new way of looking at their lives. Through faith one passes from blindness to sight and this is experienced as a conversion. In modern Kuhnian terms, it represents a "paradigm shift." The interior lens are cleansed in such a way that one sees the "same" world in a different way because of this interior shifting of the shards of the kaleidoscopic lens through which one sees and places significant value upon the arising meanings of one's life. The inward turn of the shards of the kaleidoscopic lens get shifted through the rough and tumble of one's experience and in the hope of transformation one can act in faith and see through the lens of all of one's constituted experiences new meanings representing the transformation of perspective resulting in the ability to take new life action.
Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2017
When St. Paul looked for an ancient precedence for including Gentiles into the lineage of faith, he looked to the pre-Israelite Abraham as the Father of faith for all people. When the writer of the letter to the Hebrews looked for an ancient precedence for the "priesthood" of Jesus, he went totally pre-Levite in choosing Melchizedek as the model for an eternal priesthood. The grafting of Gentile Christianity into the tree of Judaism defines the New Testament writings even while all of the dispensations for Gentiles from having to honor Jewish ritual practices meant that Judaism and the Christian communities had to separate.
Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2017
"It's who you know, not what you know that matters." This might be a saying of the reality of many people regarding positions of employment. We might look at "political" appointments with jaundiced eyes because such do not seem to be based upon the merit of ability but upon proximity to the one who can appoint. James and John wanted a political appointment to sit at his right and left hand in his glory. The other disciples were indignant, perhaps because they were thinking, "Why didn't we think to ask before James and John?" Jesus said it was not his call and he deferred the decision to his Father. Perhaps it means that the record of what people do with God's grace is not yet complete. How many St. Francises or Mother Teresas are yet to come and they were people who did not want to sit next to Jesus because they were busy pushing the poor and needy to the front of the line. Perhaps Jesus is inviting us all to sit on ann equi-distant perimeter of circle around him as we seek to be equal in service to one another. People who are wanting to serve food to the hungry don't have time to worry about seating arrangements in heaven.
Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2015
In primary naïveté many read the Gospels as eye-witness exact accounts but they really present the teachings of the early church using narratives about Jesus and the various persons with whom he interacts. The Gospels as teaching literature invite us to have mirrored in the narrative of people and events the stages and stations of our own development in being "disciples" or "students" of Christ in the Christian educational program called Repentance, or the effort to surpass ourselves in a future state as we keep a hopeful eye on what future excellence means for each of us. Even biblical scholars miss the purpose of the Gospels because they tend to be motivated by modern notions of what is really historically true and they let their agenda be driven by Bible presenters who say it is all historically literally true. The Bible was written for the various teaching purposes and identity formation for various communities who believed God was relevant to their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2015
The Gospel writings do not often present the disciples in a very positive light. We often see Jesus ask people to become childlike as a way to understand God's realm but the disciples are presented as those who instead of being childlike are the peevish side of childlike called "childish." In a childish manner they fight over who gets to sit closest to Jesus in in Glory. Let the Gospel reader note: The Gospels are discipleship teaching manuals within the early churches. The narrative, people, characters, and events are used to teach the human condition to present the contrasts necessary for us to make the transition from being peevishly childish to become those who access the state of being childlike in being able to live in innocent wonder in the midst of some of the most awful situations. Actual people are lost in literature because singular and reductive events are extracted from the many occasions of their lives to be used as teaching occasions. Language is always reductive and metaphorical; it presents seeming extra-language incidents in words as a method of teaching insights through the lure of seeking readers to identify for their own growth process.
Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2015
Those who favored a final apocalyptic figure intervening to bring judgment at a future time may tend to literalize and crave resolutions something like what drives the fascination with action hero movies when the hero resolves the conflict in some final ways within a two hour framework. Archetypal and artistic, aesthetic time serves us in this way in ways in which dream time does and it can give the impression of time ending or being suspended. But does time ever end as long as there are moving bodies in time-space relationship like the ticking moving parts of the universe? There may be comfort in the dream space of a final Son of Man Messiah as salve in living with the injustice due to freedom, but we should perhaps heed the words of Jesus about the Son of Man, "For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." The apocalyptic Jesus is still a servant and not an enforcer or bouncer of the peoples of the universe. Some people lusts for a militaristic Messiah who will come and save their particular group and prove that they were correct in their beliefs presuming that because of their precise correct versions of Christ they will sitting at the right and left hand of Jesus in Glory. What is perhaps the lasting truth of the Son (Child) of Man (Humanity) is that he and she will always come in the guise of the one who serves and will be missed by those who lust for militaristic shock and awe intervention.
Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2015
God in the Bible is presented on a continuum of the total negative extending through an immanent positive. God as the total negative is the Mysterious Plenitude who was always beyond comprehension and is the Total Context able to deconstruct any temporary naming within the familiar vocabulary of human situations. God as the immanent positive becomes the one who is so friendly and accessible to one's situation that there is the temptation to presume that God is simply a rubber stamp for the temporal insights of oneself or one's tribe. Some religious leaders are so certain of their precise and exact knowledge of God and Jesus and Holy Spirit, they trivialize the Trinity for the purposes of their own administering and authority in organizing people in their communities. It is easy to cater to a herd instinct which involves taking simple catch phrase identities about God as being the exact equivalence of the God as the total Negative Mysterious Plenitude who inspires humility because one has no choice because of one's smallness lost in Greatness.
Aphorism of Day, October 12, 2015
In the final scene of Job, God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind rebuking all readers for presuming to know too much about precise causation of why good and bad things happen to good and bad people in the ways in which they do. The writer of Job had an appreciation for Plenitude which means that an infinite number of things all in mutual relationship makes the final details of causation inscrutable and so in faith we must leave lots of things to the wholly, holy Negligible God whose unknown traces influence without violating the freedom which is shared within the life of the world.
Aphorism of the Day, October 11, 2015
Excellence involves consolidating in practice living up to the best of the previous insights in our lives while not lingering too long in what has been achieved. At the same time one needs to have those who have attained excellence beyond our own to help us through their example, their advice and sometimes rebukes, to prod us to further excellence. Repentance is the Christian educational process of always asking "What is the next thing which I need to do to fulfill the Gospel?"
Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2015
Hebrews 4:12 "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart." The New Testament writers make the distinction between Word of God and Scriptures. Logos and Graphe. Graphe refers to the writings but the more embracing notion of Word is the Personified Logos or Word of God who creates. In fundamentalism there is a tendency to make Logos and Graphe the same and believe written words on the pages of a Bible exhaust what Word of God would be. Logos is omnipresence of God and the "sine qua non" of humanity being aware of having any kind of existence at all. Graphe could not even happen without the more embracing notion of Logos.
Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2015
It is quite simplistic to say that the "Bible is the Word of God" while having various "wink wink" agreements within religious community as to what this actually means. At very least one must realize that all of the contexts of the biblical words do not line up in a one to correspondence with all of the contexts and situations of anyone's life at any given time to make each and every word universally applicable to the circumstances of everyone's life all of the time. Since the Bible is language and it is translatable, it means it is a living document. Would the Bible be the word of God if it did not exist in living communities of people but were words written on papyrus hidden in clay jars in caves near the Dead Sea? How would we know it existed or how would it have the opportunity to "be the word of God" if it were not read in communities? At the very least, the Bible as the Word of God means that it is a living document; living because it is able to be continuously read and translated by people in various circumstances looking for surpassing insights in their lives to help them live better. The notion of "Word of God" is immediately deconstructed by the fact that we must admit that only imperfect people have ever written, read it, and "voted" its writings into canons and so how could imperfect people ever be able to make such judgment about the Perfect One and the written communication of the Perfect One to imperfect people? So let us be humble about the Word of God; yes we admit that humans can be inspired by the Surpassing One in word form accessible to humanity to help us be in the continual human vocation of repentance or surpassing ourselves in a future state.
Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2015
Jesus told a rich young man who was confident that he had kept all of the law, " Go and sell what you have and give to the poor." The path of perfection is humbling because there are always hard next things to do which most of us won't do because doing the most perfect things might mean climbing out of how we are so co-opted by our cultural situation. Prophets get killed because they expose "taken for granted" cultural habits which no one wants to give up.
Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2015
Hebrews 4:12 "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart." Lots of people would over-identify the "word of God" with the words written in one of the accepted canons comprising the books which at some time were voted on by councils of people to be included in the "official" textbooks of their community. To think that any collection of writing could be exhaustively the word of God would be to place limits upon the word the Great One. How could the Great One have any limitations on the amount of great words or inspiring words. The words of Scripture do co-exist and have a special status within all the words of God and they co-exist with Christ as the Supreme Word of God meaning that God co-exists intimately with all human experience in Jesus Christ. This means that in very context specific ways any words can become the word of God for you and me in the moment of their attaining inspiring conviction to move us to the act of repentance or educating our lives toward the excellence of God's love. Don't limit the word of God to letters in a book, even a holy book and don't presume to know the final meaning of biblical words, unless you do not think they have a further inspiring future.
Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2015
In the quest for excellence one can remain a perpetual child in seeking on affirmation from teachers and authorities about the attainments of one's life. At some point our coaches in life have to confront us with the things which we have not yet attained in life and help us to use the past achievements as a springboard to take on the things that yet seem impossible, but desirable for progression in excellence. Jesus was not against the religious people of his time, he simply was saying, "Don't stop to polish your trophies when there's another mountain to climb." In excellence, we must live toward the future and not camp out at "award ceremonies" for the past. And if we conversely think we are doomed to live in "failure pity parties" of the past, we also need to live toward the future next excellent step beyond our last failure.
Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2015
One of the challenges of wanting to be so self-consciously spiritual, as it were, a spiritual athlete, is that one eventually will be confronted to do something very difficult and it is particularly difficult because the discipline or the task catches one off-guard. And when we cannot plan in advance for what we must "give up" sometimes we lose heart in the spiritual journey and we become those who are not so sure that we want to be spiritual athletes anymore.
Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2015
The church has long used the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark to prohibit divorce but was this really the issue? Was not Jesus simply resisting the fact that love fails and that divorce can happen into being regarded as the norm? Did he not just restate the intention of a loving God who made men and women to love one another? Was he not just restating the affirmation of love as what is normal even while acknowledging the strategy of divorce as a way to deal with the deprivation of love expressed in divorce? That divorce occurs does not make it the norm; failure to love and the aftermath can subtly become the priority of focus in systems which become legalistic. That divorce happens does not dethrone the normalcy of God who is love who made us to be people who love.
Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2015
Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a child will never enter it. This is one of the child motif phrases attributed to Jesus. We like to regulate a child's doors of perception. When they see a boogey man in their bedroom we assure the child that it is not a real threat. When a child sees angels we are entertained or amused by their creative imaginations. We may initiate children into the adult life of "brute facts" and those facts become like the angel with the flaming sword who do not let Adam and Eve go back into the Garden of Eden after their sin. And so the world gets divided into the unattainable and lost Garden of Eden and the kingdom of this world. Reconciliation is about being able to perceive that God's kingdom encompasses both the Garden of Eden and the kingdom of this world. With the child aspect of one's personality one taps into the cleansing experience of wonder to see our location within the all embracing kingdom of God. One does not have enter what one has never left; the leaving has been the acquired alienation from the state of natural grace and blessing. So one needs to access child like wonder to rediscover the turf of God's creation which one has never left.
Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2015
What kind of Lapsarian are you? Lapsarian pertains to one's thinking about the great fall of Adam and Eve into sin. For people who read the Garden of Eden story literally, they hold that eating the forbidden fruit was an actual act of two first people which was a causative absolute act which cursed everyone after them to partake of the same tendency to keep on keeping on eating forbidden fruit until God could accomplish some act of redemption by sending his Son. We too easily read the Bible as being a story of salvation history unfolding in a very linear absolute causation pattern involving single individuals to be responsible for the total outcomes of all people. The writing down of anything that is insight into why we think we are the way we are does not make what we do or become happen. This causative absolute literalism used with biblical text may be an attempt to attain naïve control over the complex ambiguities thrown at us by the genuine freedom which causes everything and which is a freedom partially directed by the degree of freedom and power to execute free acts by each free agent in this world. Yes, there are profound inspired biblical insights about the human condition and the things we share because of the solidarity with all human beings but to make a single Lapsarian Event, a determining event for all people is forbidden fruitarian folly, even if it is great child-like story. Let us look for the inspiration found in the insights of how each soul is on a moral journey in the oft painful discovery of experiencing that things which provide us with the promise of temporary pleasure are not good for us in the long run. We have inherited unhealthy interpretations, particular the one which makes the insight about why we have moral agency into a causative absolute Lapsarian Event. Everyone's Lapsarian event is to encounter as a child the word, "no" when we are told by our higher authorities that something is bad for us even though we as innocent ones do not fully understand why.
Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2015
In America the two most popular holidays are Christmas and Halloween. The reason: we want to bring cheer to the lives of children. We serve up gifts and candy galore for the children because we like ourselves best when we are doing things to bring smiles to the faces of children. While some very serious adult Christians seem to believe we should decry the crass secular commercialization of these holy days, why not be thankful about the message of care for children and for all vulnerable persons which could be taught from the "excesses" of these seasons. If secular culture is offended by our Christian Hall of Fame, the Saints then we can simply point out the secular obsession with heroes of all sorts. The Saints of our Hall of Fame offer different kinds of values to be modelled than all of our secular heroes. And why would anyone take offense with All Souls' Day as we remember the local and personal saints who have touched our lives? This is a very healthy psychological ritual of connection of the living with the dead with an orientation toward a better future. Instead of going all "bah humbug" on Halloween, it can be a teaching occasion for all.
Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2015
All Saints' Day is a celebration of the resurrection and we should be honest about such celebrations being something like an alchemical transformation of the grief of loss into the joy of thanksgiving. One could say that the profound impact of the life of Jesus upon his followers resulting in the deepest kind of grief at his death created the conditions for his post-resurrection appearances. Profound grief due to the loss of the ones who are the very best in our lives and in the life of the world could give rise to despair. This is why liturgy is the community alchemy to hold what is inspiring about the lives of those whom we have lost toward living better in the future knowing that saintliness creates and inspires more saintliness. Saintliness cannot die or be exhausted by the lives of the saints; the lives of the saints remind us that the source of all saintliness is closer to us than we are to ourselves in the Holy Spirit. The saints inspire us to access the Holy Spirit who is the source for what is saintly.
Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2015
The traditions pertaining to those who have come to be called saints are still alive because what has made certain people memorably are things which people did not want forgotten because their lives have been standards for living a blessed life. To become a standard is expressed in the word "canon" or rule. Saints are those who have been "canonized" because they set the standard for how life should be lived. The memory of their lives have been kept alive to inspire us with narratives of what can be attained in our lives. Just because a person has become designated as a holy person through the institutional processes of the church, does not diminish the saintly or telling example of one's holy grandmother or other special person who have made us better through their godly example.
Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2015
The feast of All Saints and the cult of saints represents the differentiation of the sharing of holiness which happened/happens because of the omnipresence of the Risen Christ. "Christ is all and in all," is a Pauline confession. How can people be like Christ without being Jesus of Nazareth? The cult of saints has given personal narratives to the meaning of the Pauline confession, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." One can view Jesus of Nazareth as an ascended person with a body, somewhere, containing all of perfection and glory, or one can see the Risen Christ as the result of an effusion of metaphorical language which created the constituting environment for people linguistically to begin to define their lives differently towards the values of love and justice espoused by Jesus. So the words of Jesus became always already spirit and life of people surprised by the reconstituting effect of their lives by the Gospel. Sainthood is born by appropriating the fact that God has shared all through Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2015
In a church which became feudal in structure and where elite priestly caste mediated relationship with God on behalf of those who at times were relegated to receive Holy Communion but once a year such a deprivation of "access" to Jesus created the conditions for the "cult of saints." Heroes who were not the perfect Jesus were approachable by the masses deprived of direct access to the perfect Jesus. Saints provided the psychic balance for the needed access to the sublime within the aspirations of prayer discourses tailored to the human psyche. Within the Enlightenment and the Reformation the "individual" was re-discovered and re-empowered to take the graceful ability to approach Jesus without the mediation of the priestly caste. Many Protestant churches with regard to the saints, "threw the baby out with the bath water" in a reactionary reduction of the "cult of saints" to papal superstitions. In the Anglicanism there are a variety of pieties regarding the saints which correspond to the strains of theologies present within Anglican. With our calendar of saints, though, we have retained the necessity to honor the effects of the Risen Christ in the lives of people who have become models worthy of imitation. Whereas some do not feel like it is worthwhile to use the imagination of prayer life to engage those whom we feel to live on in God because of the resurrection, others feel that it is psychologically and spiritually healthy to assume actual outcomes of the resurrection, i.e., our dear dead folk are still alive and so why not treat them in a way which honors their continued lives. Hence we find that All Saints' and All Souls' to be necessary celebrations of applying our faith in the resurrection.
Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2015
This week we approach the "triduum" of Halloween, All Saints' and All Souls. Christians have sometimes felt very superior to people of other cultures whom they criticized as being involved in "ancestor worship." But perhaps the "triduum" which is coming up is in fact how Christians have baptized "ancestor worship" through the prism of the resurrection of Christ. Of course, American Halloween has been co-opted by our retail economic machine. Like Christmas, in the name of children, we have let the candy and dress up festivities expand to monster cultural events with many secular "paraliturgical" events for adults. Lost is the All Hallows' Eve sense of preparation to contemplate the heroes of faith who left us stellar examples to imitate and celebrate. And there is virtually no liturgical energy or cultural energy for All Souls' except in the Latino Culture where the Day of the Day unifies the community around the local, personal and family departed souls remembered with colorful festivities around the places where remains have been laid to rest. Ancestor worship, adoration, veneration, honor, respect, remembrance by many Christians are seen to take away from the singular reverence that some believe should be directed to Jesus alone. The "triduum" calls us to be honest about grieving the ones whom we have lost and whose lives touched us with the graceful presence of God. The "triduum" should be celebrated as feasts of the resurrection and how the Risen Christ morphed into being born into the lives of the many people who touched ours. I suspect that Jesus is the proud Brother of a great family and is glad whenever we have found expression of love with one another.
Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2015
The word "again" expresses the reality of repetition in our lives. Things repeated establish the truths of the communities even though the passing of time precludes one moments activities ever being exactly the same as activities in a different moment. Time involves the experience of before and after sequences. The Bible is a book about "again." Yet a phrase like being born "again" does not me repeating a physical birth all over; it refers metaphorically to the reorientation of one's life because one has been exposed to new context, new people, new insights which forces one to change one's life in such a significant way that one can confess a new birth.
Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2015
Do abstractions have the same kind of meanings as the context specific pragmatic meanings in life? Modern science has tended to sway the value of meaning toward the things which are more context specific and pragmatic, like how do I get from here to there faster? We invent the automobile. This seems more immanently relevant to our lives than how does one get to heaven. Love is the word abstraction from the actual situations of actively being cared for; what is more meaningful, actively being cared for or the naming of all of the occasions of care to be what is called Love? In a similar way the word God might be seen as an abstraction from all of the states of becoming, an Omni-Becomer. Since we are only in a moment of time we are forced to be practical to deal with the current specifics of the state of becoming now and yet we still need the abstraction of words to give singular generalization of what essentially is unclassifiable for beings without language. As those who use word because that is who we are as worded beings, words themselves are metaphorical agents of taking non-worded entities and representing them in the abstractions of words themselves. So as specific and pragmatic and as descriptively precise as we think we might be we never escape the abstracting nature of words.
Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2015
Time deconstructs everything in that a worded statement about the nature of things only holds currency until it does not. God cares for the widow and orphan is deconstructed by the fact that God's care does not overthrow the freedom of people who do not care for the widow and orphan and let them go unattended. The Bible is full of wishful thinking about good things for good people because hope and future is not yet fully. Hope creates continuous Utopia, "no such places or no such conditions" and hope is the feature of time and Time's deferred narratives of a better world with a better state of being for us. Time is the rapidly switching transitions of occasions creating impressions of smooth transition or radical discontinuity which describe the appearance of a radical state of transformation. Death may be one of those moments of "radical transitions" in the experience of the appearance of things, or the appearance of a person. How does one conceive of a static and complete state of perfection when we live on the moving train of time? A rock might have the appearance of a static state even though it teems with unseen atoms in motion making the apparent solid rock always in flux too. As much as we hope for a perfect state of being that is not in flux, taking flux out of life means lifeless. Time adds another layer from the center of what first made it all happen and the expansion of Plenitude continuously creates a new and wider environment in space and in words and so everything which has its becoming inside of the Great Becomer is always already being "deconstructed." A wider environment always creates new relativity and so everything is "deconstructed" by new juxtapositions in relationships.
Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2015
It is written in Job that after all of his sufferings, "the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for his friends." The most obvious prayer of one's life is the prayer of simply being in one's own situation. Prayer is the intentional act of committing one's being and the body language acts and the interior states to God as receptor conditions of being identified with others who will face similar conditions. So through the prayer of being one accepts the solidarity with others and so part of the meaning of one's suffering is not why it happened but since it happened how can I accept the condition in solidarity with others who face the same situation. Instead of being tricked into a self-pity fest demanding all exemptions from what could happen to me, accept my life as given to be with others. In accepting such an intercessory life one can by faith be a transmitter of a different kind of energy to others in one's suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2015
The Gospel presentations of blindness and sight could be seen as a metaphorical continuum representing the blindness caused by the Awesomeness of Divine Plenitude, a blindness caused by excessive Light. Moving progressively from blindness to better seeing is the spiritual journey adjusting one's spiritual being to an ever more encompassing grasp of spiritual, intellectual and moral knowing.
Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2015
At the end of Job it is written that Job's family and friends comforted him for "all of the evil that God had brought upon him." This would seem like God is inclusive of the freedom in this world and is given personal responsibility for the effects of evil being applied to the life of Job. The entire book of Job could be seen as a satire on the presumption of the theology of people who think they know and can have actuarial certainty about why all particular good and bad things happen in our world. So the author of Job challenges the belief that only good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. The author writes the scenario of bad things happening to good people to force the discussion about the reality of freedom in the world. One could say that the buck stops with God if one conceived of God as being perfectly static and unchanging to the point of God's knowledge knowing the possible as actual and the future as present. But if we live and move and have our becoming in a God who is the Omni-Becoming one, then such a Great Freedom to Creatively Become as the Omni-Becomer with no rivals means that such a one is open to genuine freedom without pre-determining all outcomes. The author of Job writes satirically about assuming a finished and Closed Being, whereas we may be wiser to use the name God as a single name which is abstracted from total occasions of Becoming. In such a notion one can see how permissive such great Freedom is for all manner of things to occur, and life experience shows us, they do.
Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2015
In the Gospels, physical conditions and attributes are used to teach the significance of the transformation which occurred for followers of Jesus to comprehend a new way of looking at their lives. Through faith one passes from blindness to sight and this is experienced as a conversion. In modern Kuhnian terms, it represents a "paradigm shift." The interior lens are cleansed in such a way that one sees the "same" world in a different way because of this interior shifting of the shards of the kaleidoscopic lens through which one sees and places significant value upon the arising meanings of one's life. The inward turn of the shards of the kaleidoscopic lens get shifted through the rough and tumble of one's experience and in the hope of transformation one can act in faith and see through the lens of all of one's constituted experiences new meanings representing the transformation of perspective resulting in the ability to take new life action.
Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2017
When St. Paul looked for an ancient precedence for including Gentiles into the lineage of faith, he looked to the pre-Israelite Abraham as the Father of faith for all people. When the writer of the letter to the Hebrews looked for an ancient precedence for the "priesthood" of Jesus, he went totally pre-Levite in choosing Melchizedek as the model for an eternal priesthood. The grafting of Gentile Christianity into the tree of Judaism defines the New Testament writings even while all of the dispensations for Gentiles from having to honor Jewish ritual practices meant that Judaism and the Christian communities had to separate.
Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2017
"It's who you know, not what you know that matters." This might be a saying of the reality of many people regarding positions of employment. We might look at "political" appointments with jaundiced eyes because such do not seem to be based upon the merit of ability but upon proximity to the one who can appoint. James and John wanted a political appointment to sit at his right and left hand in his glory. The other disciples were indignant, perhaps because they were thinking, "Why didn't we think to ask before James and John?" Jesus said it was not his call and he deferred the decision to his Father. Perhaps it means that the record of what people do with God's grace is not yet complete. How many St. Francises or Mother Teresas are yet to come and they were people who did not want to sit next to Jesus because they were busy pushing the poor and needy to the front of the line. Perhaps Jesus is inviting us all to sit on ann equi-distant perimeter of circle around him as we seek to be equal in service to one another. People who are wanting to serve food to the hungry don't have time to worry about seating arrangements in heaven.
Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2015
In primary naïveté many read the Gospels as eye-witness exact accounts but they really present the teachings of the early church using narratives about Jesus and the various persons with whom he interacts. The Gospels as teaching literature invite us to have mirrored in the narrative of people and events the stages and stations of our own development in being "disciples" or "students" of Christ in the Christian educational program called Repentance, or the effort to surpass ourselves in a future state as we keep a hopeful eye on what future excellence means for each of us. Even biblical scholars miss the purpose of the Gospels because they tend to be motivated by modern notions of what is really historically true and they let their agenda be driven by Bible presenters who say it is all historically literally true. The Bible was written for the various teaching purposes and identity formation for various communities who believed God was relevant to their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2015
The Gospel writings do not often present the disciples in a very positive light. We often see Jesus ask people to become childlike as a way to understand God's realm but the disciples are presented as those who instead of being childlike are the peevish side of childlike called "childish." In a childish manner they fight over who gets to sit closest to Jesus in in Glory. Let the Gospel reader note: The Gospels are discipleship teaching manuals within the early churches. The narrative, people, characters, and events are used to teach the human condition to present the contrasts necessary for us to make the transition from being peevishly childish to become those who access the state of being childlike in being able to live in innocent wonder in the midst of some of the most awful situations. Actual people are lost in literature because singular and reductive events are extracted from the many occasions of their lives to be used as teaching occasions. Language is always reductive and metaphorical; it presents seeming extra-language incidents in words as a method of teaching insights through the lure of seeking readers to identify for their own growth process.
Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2015
Those who favored a final apocalyptic figure intervening to bring judgment at a future time may tend to literalize and crave resolutions something like what drives the fascination with action hero movies when the hero resolves the conflict in some final ways within a two hour framework. Archetypal and artistic, aesthetic time serves us in this way in ways in which dream time does and it can give the impression of time ending or being suspended. But does time ever end as long as there are moving bodies in time-space relationship like the ticking moving parts of the universe? There may be comfort in the dream space of a final Son of Man Messiah as salve in living with the injustice due to freedom, but we should perhaps heed the words of Jesus about the Son of Man, "For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." The apocalyptic Jesus is still a servant and not an enforcer or bouncer of the peoples of the universe. Some people lusts for a militaristic Messiah who will come and save their particular group and prove that they were correct in their beliefs presuming that because of their precise correct versions of Christ they will sitting at the right and left hand of Jesus in Glory. What is perhaps the lasting truth of the Son (Child) of Man (Humanity) is that he and she will always come in the guise of the one who serves and will be missed by those who lust for militaristic shock and awe intervention.
Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2015
God in the Bible is presented on a continuum of the total negative extending through an immanent positive. God as the total negative is the Mysterious Plenitude who was always beyond comprehension and is the Total Context able to deconstruct any temporary naming within the familiar vocabulary of human situations. God as the immanent positive becomes the one who is so friendly and accessible to one's situation that there is the temptation to presume that God is simply a rubber stamp for the temporal insights of oneself or one's tribe. Some religious leaders are so certain of their precise and exact knowledge of God and Jesus and Holy Spirit, they trivialize the Trinity for the purposes of their own administering and authority in organizing people in their communities. It is easy to cater to a herd instinct which involves taking simple catch phrase identities about God as being the exact equivalence of the God as the total Negative Mysterious Plenitude who inspires humility because one has no choice because of one's smallness lost in Greatness.
Aphorism of Day, October 12, 2015
In the final scene of Job, God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind rebuking all readers for presuming to know too much about precise causation of why good and bad things happen to good and bad people in the ways in which they do. The writer of Job had an appreciation for Plenitude which means that an infinite number of things all in mutual relationship makes the final details of causation inscrutable and so in faith we must leave lots of things to the wholly, holy Negligible God whose unknown traces influence without violating the freedom which is shared within the life of the world.
Aphorism of the Day, October 11, 2015
Excellence involves consolidating in practice living up to the best of the previous insights in our lives while not lingering too long in what has been achieved. At the same time one needs to have those who have attained excellence beyond our own to help us through their example, their advice and sometimes rebukes, to prod us to further excellence. Repentance is the Christian educational process of always asking "What is the next thing which I need to do to fulfill the Gospel?"
Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2015
Hebrews 4:12 "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart." The New Testament writers make the distinction between Word of God and Scriptures. Logos and Graphe. Graphe refers to the writings but the more embracing notion of Word is the Personified Logos or Word of God who creates. In fundamentalism there is a tendency to make Logos and Graphe the same and believe written words on the pages of a Bible exhaust what Word of God would be. Logos is omnipresence of God and the "sine qua non" of humanity being aware of having any kind of existence at all. Graphe could not even happen without the more embracing notion of Logos.
Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2015
It is quite simplistic to say that the "Bible is the Word of God" while having various "wink wink" agreements within religious community as to what this actually means. At very least one must realize that all of the contexts of the biblical words do not line up in a one to correspondence with all of the contexts and situations of anyone's life at any given time to make each and every word universally applicable to the circumstances of everyone's life all of the time. Since the Bible is language and it is translatable, it means it is a living document. Would the Bible be the word of God if it did not exist in living communities of people but were words written on papyrus hidden in clay jars in caves near the Dead Sea? How would we know it existed or how would it have the opportunity to "be the word of God" if it were not read in communities? At the very least, the Bible as the Word of God means that it is a living document; living because it is able to be continuously read and translated by people in various circumstances looking for surpassing insights in their lives to help them live better. The notion of "Word of God" is immediately deconstructed by the fact that we must admit that only imperfect people have ever written, read it, and "voted" its writings into canons and so how could imperfect people ever be able to make such judgment about the Perfect One and the written communication of the Perfect One to imperfect people? So let us be humble about the Word of God; yes we admit that humans can be inspired by the Surpassing One in word form accessible to humanity to help us be in the continual human vocation of repentance or surpassing ourselves in a future state.
Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2015
Jesus told a rich young man who was confident that he had kept all of the law, " Go and sell what you have and give to the poor." The path of perfection is humbling because there are always hard next things to do which most of us won't do because doing the most perfect things might mean climbing out of how we are so co-opted by our cultural situation. Prophets get killed because they expose "taken for granted" cultural habits which no one wants to give up.
Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2015
Hebrews 4:12 "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart." Lots of people would over-identify the "word of God" with the words written in one of the accepted canons comprising the books which at some time were voted on by councils of people to be included in the "official" textbooks of their community. To think that any collection of writing could be exhaustively the word of God would be to place limits upon the word the Great One. How could the Great One have any limitations on the amount of great words or inspiring words. The words of Scripture do co-exist and have a special status within all the words of God and they co-exist with Christ as the Supreme Word of God meaning that God co-exists intimately with all human experience in Jesus Christ. This means that in very context specific ways any words can become the word of God for you and me in the moment of their attaining inspiring conviction to move us to the act of repentance or educating our lives toward the excellence of God's love. Don't limit the word of God to letters in a book, even a holy book and don't presume to know the final meaning of biblical words, unless you do not think they have a further inspiring future.
Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2015
In the quest for excellence one can remain a perpetual child in seeking on affirmation from teachers and authorities about the attainments of one's life. At some point our coaches in life have to confront us with the things which we have not yet attained in life and help us to use the past achievements as a springboard to take on the things that yet seem impossible, but desirable for progression in excellence. Jesus was not against the religious people of his time, he simply was saying, "Don't stop to polish your trophies when there's another mountain to climb." In excellence, we must live toward the future and not camp out at "award ceremonies" for the past. And if we conversely think we are doomed to live in "failure pity parties" of the past, we also need to live toward the future next excellent step beyond our last failure.
Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2015
One of the challenges of wanting to be so self-consciously spiritual, as it were, a spiritual athlete, is that one eventually will be confronted to do something very difficult and it is particularly difficult because the discipline or the task catches one off-guard. And when we cannot plan in advance for what we must "give up" sometimes we lose heart in the spiritual journey and we become those who are not so sure that we want to be spiritual athletes anymore.
Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2015
The church has long used the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark to prohibit divorce but was this really the issue? Was not Jesus simply resisting the fact that love fails and that divorce can happen into being regarded as the norm? Did he not just restate the intention of a loving God who made men and women to love one another? Was he not just restating the affirmation of love as what is normal even while acknowledging the strategy of divorce as a way to deal with the deprivation of love expressed in divorce? That divorce occurs does not make it the norm; failure to love and the aftermath can subtly become the priority of focus in systems which become legalistic. That divorce happens does not dethrone the normalcy of God who is love who made us to be people who love.
Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2015
Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a child will never enter it. This is one of the child motif phrases attributed to Jesus. We like to regulate a child's doors of perception. When they see a boogey man in their bedroom we assure the child that it is not a real threat. When a child sees angels we are entertained or amused by their creative imaginations. We may initiate children into the adult life of "brute facts" and those facts become like the angel with the flaming sword who do not let Adam and Eve go back into the Garden of Eden after their sin. And so the world gets divided into the unattainable and lost Garden of Eden and the kingdom of this world. Reconciliation is about being able to perceive that God's kingdom encompasses both the Garden of Eden and the kingdom of this world. With the child aspect of one's personality one taps into the cleansing experience of wonder to see our location within the all embracing kingdom of God. One does not have enter what one has never left; the leaving has been the acquired alienation from the state of natural grace and blessing. So one needs to access child like wonder to rediscover the turf of God's creation which one has never left.
Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2015
What kind of Lapsarian are you? Lapsarian pertains to one's thinking about the great fall of Adam and Eve into sin. For people who read the Garden of Eden story literally, they hold that eating the forbidden fruit was an actual act of two first people which was a causative absolute act which cursed everyone after them to partake of the same tendency to keep on keeping on eating forbidden fruit until God could accomplish some act of redemption by sending his Son. We too easily read the Bible as being a story of salvation history unfolding in a very linear absolute causation pattern involving single individuals to be responsible for the total outcomes of all people. The writing down of anything that is insight into why we think we are the way we are does not make what we do or become happen. This causative absolute literalism used with biblical text may be an attempt to attain naïve control over the complex ambiguities thrown at us by the genuine freedom which causes everything and which is a freedom partially directed by the degree of freedom and power to execute free acts by each free agent in this world. Yes, there are profound inspired biblical insights about the human condition and the things we share because of the solidarity with all human beings but to make a single Lapsarian Event, a determining event for all people is forbidden fruitarian folly, even if it is great child-like story. Let us look for the inspiration found in the insights of how each soul is on a moral journey in the oft painful discovery of experiencing that things which provide us with the promise of temporary pleasure are not good for us in the long run. We have inherited unhealthy interpretations, particular the one which makes the insight about why we have moral agency into a causative absolute Lapsarian Event. Everyone's Lapsarian event is to encounter as a child the word, "no" when we are told by our higher authorities that something is bad for us even though we as innocent ones do not fully understand why.
Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2015
One of the persistent temptation of living is to elevate human failure to be the model of the what is normal so that we end up celebrating juridical punishment or legal reparative action more than good conduct. If we believe in the goodness of creation, then all that is not good is a deprivation of that good, so why elevate the deprivation of the good to the "new norm?" When the words of Jesus prohibit divorce, it is not because he is unrealistic about the failure of charity; he simply restates charity as the norm rather than succumb to elevating the failure of charity to be the new norm for which divorce laws apply to "protect" both parties. One can very subtly misread Jesus and present him as representing the normalcy of human failure.
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