Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2015
John the Baptist is the Advent figure who is supposed to give us a taste of austerity as we rush into the excesses of Christmas. Jesus of Nazareth and his community overshadowed John and his community because the message of Christ turned out to be more adoptable to more lifestyles. The severity of John the Baptist made his appeal to be limited to perpetual monastics. Being in but not of the world has been expressed on a continuum of faith responses to God and the success of the Christian message is probably due to its hermeneutic flexibility, even though if one is stuck within one interpretive paradigm one probably is not willing to admit other valid interpretations in teachings and lifestyles influenced by the witness of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2015
Sometimes Christians use Advent and Christmas as a way of exhausting the number of times that Christ "comes" to us. Christmas refers to the "first" coming and Advent is preparation for the "second" coming. Why should we single out two comings of Christ in the continuous occasions of the "comings" of Christ? If Christ is the word of God which created everything, then Christ is always already present in creation. How does one come if one has never left? The comings referred to in Christmas and Advent may simply be special "coming" to the foreground in the specific salvation history as it arises from the background of the omnipresence Christ as the Word within all of creation as we know it. We say that Christ comes to us in the gift of the Holy Spirit. We say that Christ comes to us in sacramental presence. So there is a dynamic process between the backgrounding and foregrounding of Christ in our lives. General presence is the context for specific and particular presence. Time as being a stream of the everlasting does have focused moments even though those focused moments are not really distinct from the general stream of time. The stream of the general presence of Christ does come to focused moments of awareness from which the seasons of Advent and Christmas attain their teaching relevance.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2015
The apocalyptic readings of the Bible come to appointment for public reading in the Advent lectionaries. They were generated within situations of suffering people and provided visualization therapy for coping with their oppression as they held onto the normalcy of justice and interdicting judgments for the oppressors in the future. Now there are Christian apocalyptic obsessed people who use the threat of the second coming of Christ as a judge to be against people who do not agree with them in doctrine and life style. How can one be so sure of one's doctrinal purity that one could assume to be able to be know precisely the mind of a perfect judge over other people? And why would one even want to assume one could know final judgments upon other people? Apocalyptic Christianity might often be expressed as an unhealthy pathology of extreme self righteousness and is expressed as being in the unfalsifiable position assuming precise perfect judgments untroubled by any contrary facts.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2015
In healthy community there is present explicit and implicit mutual vows of accountability. The explicit vows are the articulated laws some common and casual and others with specific juridical procedures of enforcement. Accountability is an archetype of human community and as a universal archetype it has been manifest in many narratives of origin and legitimization. In accountability narratives there is the figure of a Judge or one who has the authority to enforce through teaching and through reward and punishment. All religions and all cultural accountability situations has the figure of the Judge. Christianity and other religions have a "delayed" great Judge and many of the Advent biblical narrative pertain to meeting the Judge at the end of one's time, in one's latter days. One of the functions of having a teleological Judge is to affirm justice with a narrative of accountability so as to influence current behaviors. While much of the biblical apocalyptic seems to be the future threat of punishment, the rejoinder is simply, "if one is fearful about judgment" then one should examine one's behaviors. If one has already developed a friendship with JUDGE JUSTICE, one can look to the final Judge for a narrative of reward, not in the sense of having been perfect, but in the sense of having been a student of the Judge who was always wanting to become better in the practice of justice.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2015
Thanksgiving has many facets. In faith's inspired imagination we identify with a Creating God who called and calls creation and us Good and assuming the Creating One had pleasure with creation, we identify this pleasure as the gift of original thanksgiving for life itself in all of its complex diversity. We identify thanksgiving in the receiving mode as we acknowledge the specific occasions of goodness which have come to us in experiences of beauty, family, friendship and provision. We accept preveniently the ultimate winsomeness of health, justice and goodness because goodness is often deprived of its sense of normalcy in the occasions sin, evil, badness caused by human willfulness or by the random conflict of the systems of Nature. We are thankful for the reconciling power of forgiveness and reconciliation. We acknowledge the power of thanksgiving to create other occasions of thanksgivings, since thankfulness is validated when we in turn create the conditions for other people to be specifically thankful. Finally, we look forward in faith to eschatological thanksgiving as we have faith to confess that we will have been thankful because everything will have been becoming resolved.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2015
What is the nature of the identity between how one is constituted by one's language paradigms at an early age and how one becomes constituted by one's language paradigms at a later age in life? One is quite different in mind, body and spirit after accruing many years and occasions of personal experience. How is one different but the same? And what defines difference and sameness when one is reflexively speaking about oneself and one's own self identity? One's current life means that one has used memory to reuse traces of what one remembers how one has been before now but all of those traces have been reused in a new time and place and re-calibrated based upon their location within a wider range of human experience. If one compares images of God that one had as a child and one's current view of God, how does one reconcile having a mature view of God as opposed to having an immature view of God? And what if many people still use the same images that once characterizes what one regards for oneself to be an immature view of God? Since the world is comprised of people with so many articulations of divinity due to various developmental stages in diverse contexts, one can see if passion is expressed about diversity instead of unity the cause of so much anger often expressed by "religious" people. Wouldn't it be easier simply to say that what is unifying in life is not God but is that all humanity uses language and the enlightened human task is the work of translation among language of cultural and experience toward learning how to live together peacefully?
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2015
In Behaviorism, theories of psychological conditioning has been explored and articulated. The Bible includes discourses which could be construed to be positive and negative reinforcement in promoting both personal and social behaviors. We perhaps all think that we are better motivated through positive reinforcement with promises of God's grace, forgiveness and beatific visions. At the same time we can experience such horrendous patterns of human behaviors it would seem that only "bad cop" interventional discourse is effective to stem the tide of such behaviors. The Apocalyptic genre in the Bible is part of the God as the "bad cop" interventionist motivational discourse. "Clean up your act or this is what could happen, because here comes the judge." One of the problems of the apocalyptic genre is that those who tout it the loudest often are those who use it as justification to enforce their own doctrinal narrowness. Many Christians who do not suffer persecution are those who scream "apocalyptic" the loudest presuming an angry God against all of their presumed sinful enemies.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2015
Advent is a season of the church year when the church contemplates the function of accountability in our lives. We obviously are accountable to the freedom of Nature over which we don't always have lots of control, even while we are responsible for reading the signs of probable outcomes in making choices in our lives. Spiritual accountability which governs how we behave towards each other is a particular theme of Advent. We are asked to use this imagination: What will have been the summary of my life work and deeds before the most credible Judge of all? Will that summary include continuous repentance and amendment of life? Will that summary include availing myself of receiving mercy and forgiveness to live another day to improve in the right direction given all of the details of my situations?
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2015
People wrongly assume because we have English versions of the Bible, that English speakers understand the Bible. There is a more difficult work of biblical translation which has to occur for telling and applicable corresponding meanings to arise in our modern lives. The cultural instantiation of universal issues in ancient cultures often have little relevance in our lives today. Americans find the notion of a "king" to be repugnant to our democratic sensibilities. To say that there is a good king is oxymoronic if one regards monarchy to be a dehumanizing form of governance. There needs to be a quest for other meanings in saying that Christ is a King if one is to live beyond Disneyesque notions of good kingly figures. The quest for surpassing ideal person and surpassing realization of justice might be good starting places to translate the notion of Christ the King into believable relevant modern practice.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2015
The quest for the kingly or the messianic is a human aspiration for the utopian person who could be an always already Omni-competent interventionists on our behalf and able to command perpetual harmony amongst all people and within their place in Nature. Utopian people do not exist in the flesh because being located in a body is a spatial limitation to act in omnipresent ways. The messianic is due to hope inspired human projection about much better Selves in future states and those better Selves receive definition from the Messianic One.
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2015
Everyone is looking for a kingly or royal person onto whom one can project unrealized perfection. Jesus Christ is given as a kingly one on whom one can project the unrealized perfection of one's life as one is perpetually in the state of becoming. By having a hierarchically superior one to project on, one is given a the right direction towards one's completion in perfectability. So Christ as King gets shared through other people in one's life because other people often take the "alter Christus" in-place-of-Christ role to give us a vision of the direction of perfectability.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2015
The meaning of "kingdom" would imply the geographical area over which the influence and rule of a king held sway. A confession of a Creating God would imply that all creation is the realm of the Creating One. Kingdom has become a metaphor for the realm of an earthly king. The belief in Jesus occurs within a realization that an unseen God-Ruler of creation opened the way for humanity to practice the popular legal maxim, "possession is nine tenths of the law." If we can't see the Landlord-Ruler-Owner of the universe then we can assume the ownership ourselves. Jesus is the insertion of a wisdom to inform humanity to cease the practice of "possessing" what is not ours by burning our "phony deed of possession" through an interior event of recognizing to whom we belong.
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2015
"If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would be fighting...." said Jesus to Pilate. The kingdom of God is within or among us, is what Jesus is quoted as saying in other Gospels. Does this mean that the kingdom of God is a parallel existence to the external world of politics? Though it may seem to be a completely parallel interior world, it is a world which intersect within the bodily life of each person who has the freedom to act and speak with love and justice. So the kingdom of God becomes externalized in the acts and words of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2015
In the day of privileging democracy, the metaphorical value of someone being a king is diminished. How does one appropriate even the spiritualized notion of Christ as King in our day of disfavor for the notion of "king?" Perhaps one can embrace the unavoidable event of hierarchies happening within life. Language is a medium of value; we live by differentiation in valuing things and so things become our "favorite" whether we know it or not. Christ as the King or as a kingly one is the instantiation of the value of a surpassing person on whom one can project one's aspiration for becoming better today than one was yesterday. And to make it uniquely personal, one keeps the ideal future self as an hierarchical goal to aspire towards in recognition of the Risen Christ in one's life being able to be instantiated in a future surpassing self.
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2015
For biblical literalists, there is no early way in which Jesus was a King. As we approach the feast of Christ the King, we do so knowing that the earthly notion of king has been spiritualized to an interior kingdom where king is the king of those who wish to be a part of this interior kingdom. And if this spiritualizing seemed to be an avoidance of an incarnational king on earth, the Christian answer was to delay the earthly kingship of Jesus until his Second Coming. This deferral has been an interpretive necessity to unify prevailing notions of the messiah. One wonders why God would ever give up the freedom for people to choose love and justice in their behaviors rather than be forced to do so by a conquering external king. Other interpreters might simply see all of this as the always already battle between justice and injustice which has incarnational instantiation in actual human circumstances. Final eschatology may express the hope that justice eventually is universally persuasive.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2015
It is time to reclaim apocalyptic thinking from the literalists or doubting Thomases who crave for the physical bodily presence of Jesus. How can this be done? First assert the universality of apocalyptic thinking which occurs in the events of oppression or violence. This apocalyptic impulse is to bring to language a narrative to help cope with conditions of oppression or violence as a way of assert some sense of creative control against the chaos of oppression and violence. Recognize that the apocalyptic in modern times has been moved into the realm of politics and entertainment due to secularization and specialization of avenues of human cultural discursive expression. Recognize that in the oppressed communities which generated biblical apocalyptic literature combined religion, politics and entertainment into one discourse. And don't be unfaithful to the current real presence of Christ by exclaiming every time some global or local disaster occurs: "Jesus is coming." Jesus came, he has come, he is here, he will be coming and that is all part of the mystagogy of the Gospel of the continuing presence of the Risen Christ. People who over-lust for a physical Jesus are people who do not accept the current reality of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2015
A Prayer for the People of Paris
Gracious God we acknowledge the conditions of vulnerability which exists within the expression of freedom of permitting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We descry the actions of those who would violate the glory of freedom by depriving the goodness of life with the terror of violence against the innocent. Give the people of Paris and of our world the grace to reassert the primacy of goodness with acts of rescue, comfort and the healing of the effects of evil. Increase our diligence and wisdom to realize the safety and protection of all. And let this terrible act be overcome with a witness to the superior use of human freedom as kindness and care for one another. Amen.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2015
Eventful time occurs when something happens which stands out from the ordinary regular events of the day. Eventful time is what creates what journalists call "News." The News is eventful time. News represents events which are a minority within all of the other ordinary background happenings. We can even create mock or comedic News by celebrating the sixty thousandth time someone brushed their teeth as an attempt to elevate the quotidian to the eventful. Such a comedic effort only is effective because of the normative view of "News." Even though the Gospels are called Good News, they really aren't News in the journalistic sense of the word today. The Gospels are the narratives about the life of Jesus in which the deeds and words of Jesus are used to instantiate the spiritual practices which had come to prevail in successfully comprised Christian communities. The Gospels are the mystagogy (teachings of the spiritual mysteries) of communities inculcating their values in the lives of their members.
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2015
What is it that defines "eventful" time? Eventful time becomes historic time because some event or events occur which rise out of a background of ubiquitous regular ordinary experience. What if the ordinary experience of people is oppression and suffering? There is an anticipation for the End of oppression and suffering. If oppression and suffering has lasted for generations, oppressed people do not know fully what freedom would be. The anticipation for the event or events of sudden intervention from oppression is what characterizes apocalyptic thinking. It is ironic that so many American apocalyptic Christians desiring an Event of the end, actually are living in the relative lap of luxury and even purport to feel seriously persecuted. Such is an indication of how biblical hermeneutics can become an expression narrow self interest assuming that God will intervene suddenly on behalf of those so self-certain of their biblical interpretation.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2015
Does Time allow for there to be any real end or beginning? Or only transitions? Is the notion of eternal simply the abstraction from the total states of everlasting becoming? Eternality is but the abstraction of an Omni-Temporality, a having come from All Previous Occasions? Apocalyptic time, the End Time, and Death pertain to the experience of certain time as "eventful" time because they stand out and force upon us a definitional difference from the background of the quotidian.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2015
The discovery of a very great universe has forced us out of the narrow "anthropocentricism" of the ancient Scriptural interpretive paradigms. No, the universe does not revolve around humanity or any group of humans like a "chosen" people. The literary trope of God as a world ending, life ending catastrophic interventionist has served religious people for many years. Certain theo-politicians and preachers take a daily political climate reading in Israel and boldly proclaim that Jesus is coming tomorrow or shortly. Just as one might use the thought of death to add intensity to daily living so the fatal apocalyptic crowd want to use the narrative of a great catastrophic end to motivate the conversion of people toward their own very narrow religious beliefs. Their loving God is one who would frighten people into heaven with such horror therapy and not see any contradictions in such a presentation. If a person can step back and admit one is governed by certain interpretive paradigm about the nature of things one can learn to be humble about the "group ego" that one conforms to at any given time. Knowing this means that one might humbly admit that one has many future conversions ahead in one's life to reveal today's wisdom as tomorrow's ignorance.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2015
History records many failed predications both religious and secular. Many of the failed predication involve the end of the world, the Second Coming, The Rapture and when those do not happen they still have a degree of unfalsifiability about them since they can always be deferred to the future. Anything future is unfalsifiable. So if something has not yet happened, it still could. So, could we be honest and translate the human fixation with the End, to a fixation upon "Endings?" Each person who arrives at a cognitive maturity comes to contemplate one's own personal apocalypse of death. Such death contemplations projected socially and environmentally renders great stories about the End or about Endings. One could say that modern cinema has given us many more versions of Endings than those provided by the Bible or apocalyptic genres around the turn of the first millennium. Let us make a hermeneutic paradigm switch to understand fixation on The End as human imagination creating narratives for Endings and so let us confess in the words of the Burial Preface: Life is not ended but only changed, or life will not end but only be changed. The nature of Time means that Endings and Beginning are only contextual and arbitrary interpretive perspective driven by the observer's state of mind and human condition. The post-humus perspective is only the imagination of the living but hope does create narratives of life after life after life after life.....
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2015
The Gospel way of measuring how much we give is by measuring how much we have left after we have given. Perhaps this is why St. Francis and those adopting true vows of poverty came to appease their consciences regarding giving. Those of us who retain much in material possessions and money after giving, know that we have to spend our time maintaining what we own, even to the point of knowing that sometimes we end up serving our possessions because of the maintenance time required. In the situation of giving and still having lots left over, it is better to discover the true treasures of health, friendships, clean air, beautiful environment, peace of mind and a good conscience.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2015
Most people would not make this confession: "I am not a generous person." Perhaps everyone practices selective generosity. One can be generous in self-care tending to all that inhabit the territory within one's epidermis. One can practice local and family generosity by accepting responsibility for the care of one's own One can practice "value" generosity, by supporting causes and institutions which support the values which one espouses. Perhaps one can practice wasteful or unenlightened generosity by indiscriminate giving. The ways in which one knows oneself to be generous is important in self awareness. One aspect of generosity is that one has the fortunate feeling of being thankful for an intangible sense of spiritual wealth, a sense of grace from which the many expressions of thankful generosity can flow.
Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2015
Immediately after the record of the poor widow giving her last coin to the temple treasury there is a predication by Jesus of the destruction of the temple. The temple was an ultimate symbol of an institution which was going to be changed after its destruction. The juxtaposition of a poor widow who was giving to the temple when she perhaps should have been a chief recipient of the alms of the temple perhaps highlights the irony of poor, religious, faithful people who are generous because of obedience even when it does not personally help their financial position. Generous, poor people are perhaps the strongest rebuke against institutions which have lost their purpose to serve the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2015
An irony of religious revelation is that what we believe about God is often limited by the conditions of freedom to fulfill. The Psalmist confessed that "The Lord cares for the widow and orphan." One assumes that to mean, "The Lord cares for all widows and all orphans." It happens in this world that many widows and orphans and other needy people go without apparent care so whatever one believes about God, one is forced to admit that God does not exert power to make universal the care of widows and orphans. This confession then is but the expression of an ideal which requires the freedom of human beings to fulfill. Freedom means God accepts powerlessness in allowing human beings to neglect each other. The purpose of religion is to persuade human beings to behave towards the ideals which we proclaim as "God's will."
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2015
As much as we value individual excellence and achievement in that we are oft inclined to honor those who have the most, the message of the prophets and Jesus asks us to be converted to the values of a loving mother in viewing perfection and excellence as a completeness which attained when everyone in the family is doing well. Let us be converted to perpetual prayerful discomfort until all are doing well. We can have peace and a sense of personal well-being even while living with the uncomfortable wait of helping others to get the basics of what they need for human dignity.
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2015
Stewardship observation: Generous people are never poor because no matter how much they have or do not have they are motivated to give from their perceived abundance. Generous people can be "reckless" in their giving and they are very often taken advantage of by the wealthy and powerful who do not believe they got their wealth and power by being generous.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2015
John the Baptist is the Advent figure who is supposed to give us a taste of austerity as we rush into the excesses of Christmas. Jesus of Nazareth and his community overshadowed John and his community because the message of Christ turned out to be more adoptable to more lifestyles. The severity of John the Baptist made his appeal to be limited to perpetual monastics. Being in but not of the world has been expressed on a continuum of faith responses to God and the success of the Christian message is probably due to its hermeneutic flexibility, even though if one is stuck within one interpretive paradigm one probably is not willing to admit other valid interpretations in teachings and lifestyles influenced by the witness of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2015
Sometimes Christians use Advent and Christmas as a way of exhausting the number of times that Christ "comes" to us. Christmas refers to the "first" coming and Advent is preparation for the "second" coming. Why should we single out two comings of Christ in the continuous occasions of the "comings" of Christ? If Christ is the word of God which created everything, then Christ is always already present in creation. How does one come if one has never left? The comings referred to in Christmas and Advent may simply be special "coming" to the foreground in the specific salvation history as it arises from the background of the omnipresence Christ as the Word within all of creation as we know it. We say that Christ comes to us in the gift of the Holy Spirit. We say that Christ comes to us in sacramental presence. So there is a dynamic process between the backgrounding and foregrounding of Christ in our lives. General presence is the context for specific and particular presence. Time as being a stream of the everlasting does have focused moments even though those focused moments are not really distinct from the general stream of time. The stream of the general presence of Christ does come to focused moments of awareness from which the seasons of Advent and Christmas attain their teaching relevance.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2015
The apocalyptic readings of the Bible come to appointment for public reading in the Advent lectionaries. They were generated within situations of suffering people and provided visualization therapy for coping with their oppression as they held onto the normalcy of justice and interdicting judgments for the oppressors in the future. Now there are Christian apocalyptic obsessed people who use the threat of the second coming of Christ as a judge to be against people who do not agree with them in doctrine and life style. How can one be so sure of one's doctrinal purity that one could assume to be able to be know precisely the mind of a perfect judge over other people? And why would one even want to assume one could know final judgments upon other people? Apocalyptic Christianity might often be expressed as an unhealthy pathology of extreme self righteousness and is expressed as being in the unfalsifiable position assuming precise perfect judgments untroubled by any contrary facts.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2015
In healthy community there is present explicit and implicit mutual vows of accountability. The explicit vows are the articulated laws some common and casual and others with specific juridical procedures of enforcement. Accountability is an archetype of human community and as a universal archetype it has been manifest in many narratives of origin and legitimization. In accountability narratives there is the figure of a Judge or one who has the authority to enforce through teaching and through reward and punishment. All religions and all cultural accountability situations has the figure of the Judge. Christianity and other religions have a "delayed" great Judge and many of the Advent biblical narrative pertain to meeting the Judge at the end of one's time, in one's latter days. One of the functions of having a teleological Judge is to affirm justice with a narrative of accountability so as to influence current behaviors. While much of the biblical apocalyptic seems to be the future threat of punishment, the rejoinder is simply, "if one is fearful about judgment" then one should examine one's behaviors. If one has already developed a friendship with JUDGE JUSTICE, one can look to the final Judge for a narrative of reward, not in the sense of having been perfect, but in the sense of having been a student of the Judge who was always wanting to become better in the practice of justice.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2015
Thanksgiving has many facets. In faith's inspired imagination we identify with a Creating God who called and calls creation and us Good and assuming the Creating One had pleasure with creation, we identify this pleasure as the gift of original thanksgiving for life itself in all of its complex diversity. We identify thanksgiving in the receiving mode as we acknowledge the specific occasions of goodness which have come to us in experiences of beauty, family, friendship and provision. We accept preveniently the ultimate winsomeness of health, justice and goodness because goodness is often deprived of its sense of normalcy in the occasions sin, evil, badness caused by human willfulness or by the random conflict of the systems of Nature. We are thankful for the reconciling power of forgiveness and reconciliation. We acknowledge the power of thanksgiving to create other occasions of thanksgivings, since thankfulness is validated when we in turn create the conditions for other people to be specifically thankful. Finally, we look forward in faith to eschatological thanksgiving as we have faith to confess that we will have been thankful because everything will have been becoming resolved.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2015
What is the nature of the identity between how one is constituted by one's language paradigms at an early age and how one becomes constituted by one's language paradigms at a later age in life? One is quite different in mind, body and spirit after accruing many years and occasions of personal experience. How is one different but the same? And what defines difference and sameness when one is reflexively speaking about oneself and one's own self identity? One's current life means that one has used memory to reuse traces of what one remembers how one has been before now but all of those traces have been reused in a new time and place and re-calibrated based upon their location within a wider range of human experience. If one compares images of God that one had as a child and one's current view of God, how does one reconcile having a mature view of God as opposed to having an immature view of God? And what if many people still use the same images that once characterizes what one regards for oneself to be an immature view of God? Since the world is comprised of people with so many articulations of divinity due to various developmental stages in diverse contexts, one can see if passion is expressed about diversity instead of unity the cause of so much anger often expressed by "religious" people. Wouldn't it be easier simply to say that what is unifying in life is not God but is that all humanity uses language and the enlightened human task is the work of translation among language of cultural and experience toward learning how to live together peacefully?
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2015
In Behaviorism, theories of psychological conditioning has been explored and articulated. The Bible includes discourses which could be construed to be positive and negative reinforcement in promoting both personal and social behaviors. We perhaps all think that we are better motivated through positive reinforcement with promises of God's grace, forgiveness and beatific visions. At the same time we can experience such horrendous patterns of human behaviors it would seem that only "bad cop" interventional discourse is effective to stem the tide of such behaviors. The Apocalyptic genre in the Bible is part of the God as the "bad cop" interventionist motivational discourse. "Clean up your act or this is what could happen, because here comes the judge." One of the problems of the apocalyptic genre is that those who tout it the loudest often are those who use it as justification to enforce their own doctrinal narrowness. Many Christians who do not suffer persecution are those who scream "apocalyptic" the loudest presuming an angry God against all of their presumed sinful enemies.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2015
Advent is a season of the church year when the church contemplates the function of accountability in our lives. We obviously are accountable to the freedom of Nature over which we don't always have lots of control, even while we are responsible for reading the signs of probable outcomes in making choices in our lives. Spiritual accountability which governs how we behave towards each other is a particular theme of Advent. We are asked to use this imagination: What will have been the summary of my life work and deeds before the most credible Judge of all? Will that summary include continuous repentance and amendment of life? Will that summary include availing myself of receiving mercy and forgiveness to live another day to improve in the right direction given all of the details of my situations?
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2015
People wrongly assume because we have English versions of the Bible, that English speakers understand the Bible. There is a more difficult work of biblical translation which has to occur for telling and applicable corresponding meanings to arise in our modern lives. The cultural instantiation of universal issues in ancient cultures often have little relevance in our lives today. Americans find the notion of a "king" to be repugnant to our democratic sensibilities. To say that there is a good king is oxymoronic if one regards monarchy to be a dehumanizing form of governance. There needs to be a quest for other meanings in saying that Christ is a King if one is to live beyond Disneyesque notions of good kingly figures. The quest for surpassing ideal person and surpassing realization of justice might be good starting places to translate the notion of Christ the King into believable relevant modern practice.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2015
The quest for the kingly or the messianic is a human aspiration for the utopian person who could be an always already Omni-competent interventionists on our behalf and able to command perpetual harmony amongst all people and within their place in Nature. Utopian people do not exist in the flesh because being located in a body is a spatial limitation to act in omnipresent ways. The messianic is due to hope inspired human projection about much better Selves in future states and those better Selves receive definition from the Messianic One.
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2015
Everyone is looking for a kingly or royal person onto whom one can project unrealized perfection. Jesus Christ is given as a kingly one on whom one can project the unrealized perfection of one's life as one is perpetually in the state of becoming. By having a hierarchically superior one to project on, one is given a the right direction towards one's completion in perfectability. So Christ as King gets shared through other people in one's life because other people often take the "alter Christus" in-place-of-Christ role to give us a vision of the direction of perfectability.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2015
The meaning of "kingdom" would imply the geographical area over which the influence and rule of a king held sway. A confession of a Creating God would imply that all creation is the realm of the Creating One. Kingdom has become a metaphor for the realm of an earthly king. The belief in Jesus occurs within a realization that an unseen God-Ruler of creation opened the way for humanity to practice the popular legal maxim, "possession is nine tenths of the law." If we can't see the Landlord-Ruler-Owner of the universe then we can assume the ownership ourselves. Jesus is the insertion of a wisdom to inform humanity to cease the practice of "possessing" what is not ours by burning our "phony deed of possession" through an interior event of recognizing to whom we belong.
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2015
"If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would be fighting...." said Jesus to Pilate. The kingdom of God is within or among us, is what Jesus is quoted as saying in other Gospels. Does this mean that the kingdom of God is a parallel existence to the external world of politics? Though it may seem to be a completely parallel interior world, it is a world which intersect within the bodily life of each person who has the freedom to act and speak with love and justice. So the kingdom of God becomes externalized in the acts and words of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2015
In the day of privileging democracy, the metaphorical value of someone being a king is diminished. How does one appropriate even the spiritualized notion of Christ as King in our day of disfavor for the notion of "king?" Perhaps one can embrace the unavoidable event of hierarchies happening within life. Language is a medium of value; we live by differentiation in valuing things and so things become our "favorite" whether we know it or not. Christ as the King or as a kingly one is the instantiation of the value of a surpassing person on whom one can project one's aspiration for becoming better today than one was yesterday. And to make it uniquely personal, one keeps the ideal future self as an hierarchical goal to aspire towards in recognition of the Risen Christ in one's life being able to be instantiated in a future surpassing self.
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2015
For biblical literalists, there is no early way in which Jesus was a King. As we approach the feast of Christ the King, we do so knowing that the earthly notion of king has been spiritualized to an interior kingdom where king is the king of those who wish to be a part of this interior kingdom. And if this spiritualizing seemed to be an avoidance of an incarnational king on earth, the Christian answer was to delay the earthly kingship of Jesus until his Second Coming. This deferral has been an interpretive necessity to unify prevailing notions of the messiah. One wonders why God would ever give up the freedom for people to choose love and justice in their behaviors rather than be forced to do so by a conquering external king. Other interpreters might simply see all of this as the always already battle between justice and injustice which has incarnational instantiation in actual human circumstances. Final eschatology may express the hope that justice eventually is universally persuasive.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2015
It is time to reclaim apocalyptic thinking from the literalists or doubting Thomases who crave for the physical bodily presence of Jesus. How can this be done? First assert the universality of apocalyptic thinking which occurs in the events of oppression or violence. This apocalyptic impulse is to bring to language a narrative to help cope with conditions of oppression or violence as a way of assert some sense of creative control against the chaos of oppression and violence. Recognize that the apocalyptic in modern times has been moved into the realm of politics and entertainment due to secularization and specialization of avenues of human cultural discursive expression. Recognize that in the oppressed communities which generated biblical apocalyptic literature combined religion, politics and entertainment into one discourse. And don't be unfaithful to the current real presence of Christ by exclaiming every time some global or local disaster occurs: "Jesus is coming." Jesus came, he has come, he is here, he will be coming and that is all part of the mystagogy of the Gospel of the continuing presence of the Risen Christ. People who over-lust for a physical Jesus are people who do not accept the current reality of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2015
A Prayer for the People of Paris
Gracious God we acknowledge the conditions of vulnerability which exists within the expression of freedom of permitting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We descry the actions of those who would violate the glory of freedom by depriving the goodness of life with the terror of violence against the innocent. Give the people of Paris and of our world the grace to reassert the primacy of goodness with acts of rescue, comfort and the healing of the effects of evil. Increase our diligence and wisdom to realize the safety and protection of all. And let this terrible act be overcome with a witness to the superior use of human freedom as kindness and care for one another. Amen.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2015
Eventful time occurs when something happens which stands out from the ordinary regular events of the day. Eventful time is what creates what journalists call "News." The News is eventful time. News represents events which are a minority within all of the other ordinary background happenings. We can even create mock or comedic News by celebrating the sixty thousandth time someone brushed their teeth as an attempt to elevate the quotidian to the eventful. Such a comedic effort only is effective because of the normative view of "News." Even though the Gospels are called Good News, they really aren't News in the journalistic sense of the word today. The Gospels are the narratives about the life of Jesus in which the deeds and words of Jesus are used to instantiate the spiritual practices which had come to prevail in successfully comprised Christian communities. The Gospels are the mystagogy (teachings of the spiritual mysteries) of communities inculcating their values in the lives of their members.
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2015
What is it that defines "eventful" time? Eventful time becomes historic time because some event or events occur which rise out of a background of ubiquitous regular ordinary experience. What if the ordinary experience of people is oppression and suffering? There is an anticipation for the End of oppression and suffering. If oppression and suffering has lasted for generations, oppressed people do not know fully what freedom would be. The anticipation for the event or events of sudden intervention from oppression is what characterizes apocalyptic thinking. It is ironic that so many American apocalyptic Christians desiring an Event of the end, actually are living in the relative lap of luxury and even purport to feel seriously persecuted. Such is an indication of how biblical hermeneutics can become an expression narrow self interest assuming that God will intervene suddenly on behalf of those so self-certain of their biblical interpretation.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2015
Does Time allow for there to be any real end or beginning? Or only transitions? Is the notion of eternal simply the abstraction from the total states of everlasting becoming? Eternality is but the abstraction of an Omni-Temporality, a having come from All Previous Occasions? Apocalyptic time, the End Time, and Death pertain to the experience of certain time as "eventful" time because they stand out and force upon us a definitional difference from the background of the quotidian.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2015
The discovery of a very great universe has forced us out of the narrow "anthropocentricism" of the ancient Scriptural interpretive paradigms. No, the universe does not revolve around humanity or any group of humans like a "chosen" people. The literary trope of God as a world ending, life ending catastrophic interventionist has served religious people for many years. Certain theo-politicians and preachers take a daily political climate reading in Israel and boldly proclaim that Jesus is coming tomorrow or shortly. Just as one might use the thought of death to add intensity to daily living so the fatal apocalyptic crowd want to use the narrative of a great catastrophic end to motivate the conversion of people toward their own very narrow religious beliefs. Their loving God is one who would frighten people into heaven with such horror therapy and not see any contradictions in such a presentation. If a person can step back and admit one is governed by certain interpretive paradigm about the nature of things one can learn to be humble about the "group ego" that one conforms to at any given time. Knowing this means that one might humbly admit that one has many future conversions ahead in one's life to reveal today's wisdom as tomorrow's ignorance.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2015
History records many failed predications both religious and secular. Many of the failed predication involve the end of the world, the Second Coming, The Rapture and when those do not happen they still have a degree of unfalsifiability about them since they can always be deferred to the future. Anything future is unfalsifiable. So if something has not yet happened, it still could. So, could we be honest and translate the human fixation with the End, to a fixation upon "Endings?" Each person who arrives at a cognitive maturity comes to contemplate one's own personal apocalypse of death. Such death contemplations projected socially and environmentally renders great stories about the End or about Endings. One could say that modern cinema has given us many more versions of Endings than those provided by the Bible or apocalyptic genres around the turn of the first millennium. Let us make a hermeneutic paradigm switch to understand fixation on The End as human imagination creating narratives for Endings and so let us confess in the words of the Burial Preface: Life is not ended but only changed, or life will not end but only be changed. The nature of Time means that Endings and Beginning are only contextual and arbitrary interpretive perspective driven by the observer's state of mind and human condition. The post-humus perspective is only the imagination of the living but hope does create narratives of life after life after life after life.....
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2015
The Gospel way of measuring how much we give is by measuring how much we have left after we have given. Perhaps this is why St. Francis and those adopting true vows of poverty came to appease their consciences regarding giving. Those of us who retain much in material possessions and money after giving, know that we have to spend our time maintaining what we own, even to the point of knowing that sometimes we end up serving our possessions because of the maintenance time required. In the situation of giving and still having lots left over, it is better to discover the true treasures of health, friendships, clean air, beautiful environment, peace of mind and a good conscience.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2015
Most people would not make this confession: "I am not a generous person." Perhaps everyone practices selective generosity. One can be generous in self-care tending to all that inhabit the territory within one's epidermis. One can practice local and family generosity by accepting responsibility for the care of one's own One can practice "value" generosity, by supporting causes and institutions which support the values which one espouses. Perhaps one can practice wasteful or unenlightened generosity by indiscriminate giving. The ways in which one knows oneself to be generous is important in self awareness. One aspect of generosity is that one has the fortunate feeling of being thankful for an intangible sense of spiritual wealth, a sense of grace from which the many expressions of thankful generosity can flow.
Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2015
Immediately after the record of the poor widow giving her last coin to the temple treasury there is a predication by Jesus of the destruction of the temple. The temple was an ultimate symbol of an institution which was going to be changed after its destruction. The juxtaposition of a poor widow who was giving to the temple when she perhaps should have been a chief recipient of the alms of the temple perhaps highlights the irony of poor, religious, faithful people who are generous because of obedience even when it does not personally help their financial position. Generous, poor people are perhaps the strongest rebuke against institutions which have lost their purpose to serve the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2015
An irony of religious revelation is that what we believe about God is often limited by the conditions of freedom to fulfill. The Psalmist confessed that "The Lord cares for the widow and orphan." One assumes that to mean, "The Lord cares for all widows and all orphans." It happens in this world that many widows and orphans and other needy people go without apparent care so whatever one believes about God, one is forced to admit that God does not exert power to make universal the care of widows and orphans. This confession then is but the expression of an ideal which requires the freedom of human beings to fulfill. Freedom means God accepts powerlessness in allowing human beings to neglect each other. The purpose of religion is to persuade human beings to behave towards the ideals which we proclaim as "God's will."
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2015
As much as we value individual excellence and achievement in that we are oft inclined to honor those who have the most, the message of the prophets and Jesus asks us to be converted to the values of a loving mother in viewing perfection and excellence as a completeness which attained when everyone in the family is doing well. Let us be converted to perpetual prayerful discomfort until all are doing well. We can have peace and a sense of personal well-being even while living with the uncomfortable wait of helping others to get the basics of what they need for human dignity.
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2015
Stewardship observation: Generous people are never poor because no matter how much they have or do not have they are motivated to give from their perceived abundance. Generous people can be "reckless" in their giving and they are very often taken advantage of by the wealthy and powerful who do not believe they got their wealth and power by being generous.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2015
All Souls' Day, the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed is the third day of three day to remember the famous saints and all of the local and personal saints in one's life. The two days provide an imagination for the afterlife and much of the narrative of the state of the afterlife seem to indicate that church authorities knew more about the afterlife even when they did not know about or travel to far places upon the globe which was not yet a globe but a "flat earth." The great saints were those who were believed to be granted an immediate beatific vision of God at their deaths while the not yet designated saints were souls deemed needy of making further progress from faith to faith in the purgatorial journey of the afterlife. Interesting that saints could be appealed to for intercessory help while Masses were said and prayers offered for the souls still in their purgatorial journey. All of this is a living admission that we are all too human. We want to know things we cannot know and traditions of holy imagination have arisen to give us comfort to deal with living in the state of wanting to know things we cannot know. People want to have comfort dealing with the loss of their loved ones who have died. This is universal; the details of changing narratives are many based upon time, place and culture and individual experience. Instead saying, "my narrative is more valid than yours," we should be simply saying, "I hope you have found comfort and support in you loss."
How one regards the saints of All Saints' Day might be an indication of the resurrection theology of a person. Does one regard the faith departed to still be alive and able to be addressed as if they are such? Does one feel free to ask a saint to pray for one even as one might ask a Christian friend who is still alive? Many people treat the faithful departed as people who are finished with their Christian work and so they are just ignored in favor of going straight to Jesus. All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day are days of treating the faithful departed with the respect of honoring their actual life in their afterlives. Such feast days are good ways for us to gain closure with the inevitable transition caused by the event of death.
