Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2016
The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary by her cousin Elizabeth, the elderly expectant mother of John the Baptist is an event presented to show the community of John the Baptist how the movement of John the Baptist and the movement of Jesus dovetailed together and were not to be two separate movements. Elizabeth called Mary the "mother of my Lord" and so the surpassing community of Christ is verified in natal stage in the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary. It might be said that of all of the religious parties within Judaism, the followers of John the Baptist were most likely to become followers of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2016
St. Paul wrote, "the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin." He did not see Jesus in his physical body but he had a "revelation" of Jesus. Such a mode of reception invites some reflection. Does Paul who receives revelation remain a human being in the event of the revelation? Indeed he does, so revelation does not erase the human quality of the event. It does not erase the fact that even revelatory events involves the interpretation of that event by the receiver Paul himself. We know that everyone did not interpret the Gentile mission of Paul in the same manner in which he did. A further question involves whether revelatory events were reserved for the apostolic age and if so does that diminish the nature of revelatory events which have happen subsequently? Did Paul know that his recollection of his revelatory experience in a letter would become the infallible word of God in the Church? I doubt it; he was probably concerned about more immediate contemporary persuasion of others. Revelatory events indeed set the hierarchy of values for the community but we need to be careful about assuming that revelatory events include with them static, infallible, self-evidential, permanent interpretations of the same.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2016
In the Roman Catholic Mass the people's response to the "O Lamb of God..." is "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed." This phrase is taken from the centurion who wished Jesus to come and heal his slave and he had faith that it could be done remotely, i.e., without Jesus being physically present. One could wonder how this biblical phrase came into the Mass since it associates the sacrament of Eucharist with the sacrament of "healing." The Gospel passage clearly is not a "Eucharistic" setting from the early church so it can seem like an "out of place" non sequitur. Certainly the expectation that the Eucharistic presence of Jesus in the bread and the wine entering one's "bodily" house being treated as reconstituting healing words of Christ provides interesting poetic gymnastics. The logic of this phrase is solidified by the truth due to its continuous use, proving that truths are essentially the continuous repetition of a community. Truths are meanings with community validation in relationship and not transcendentally verified.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2016
Faith and prayer involve the experience of "remoteness" yet the sense of active engagement. Modern science has render things once thought to be in the visible world to the invisible world. The interior invisible world has its own reality within each person. Faith and prayer involves the acceptance of a "Divine Milieu" as everything has becoming and being within the every expanding in time of the divine environment. Faith and prayer involves a "conducting personal reality" creating the condition for the mutual relationship of all things visible and invisible. This "conducting personal reality" is the Omnipresent Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2016
The absolute banality of goodness might also be called the state of "innocence" where an agent always chooses to do something without a motive of ill intent. Such banality of goodness means that an agent is a "robot" of goodness because there is nothing evil which can be done since in a original state of the banality of goodness, goodness technically does not exists. Goodness only exists when an act of comparison comes about. One might question whether goodness can ever truly exists when there is more than one agent since when agents act they express their hierarchy of values and it is only a matter of time until the hierarchy of value of one agent clashes with the hierarchy of value of another agent. In the garden of Eden wisdom story, one finds the author pondering the birth of morality and the moral dilemma. God said, "Do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden..." If the lesser human egos could surrender to a higher and most wise Divine Ego then such an act of surrender to the "Law of the Creator" would create the conditions needed for people with different hierarchies in their expressions of their desires and needs to regulate and check their egos as the only way people could peacefully live together. Perhaps the banality of evil occurs when oppression, repression and suppression has occurred due to an agent of power who has systematically forced the ego of another or others to submit to the conditions of losing the power of any free agency towards one's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The purpose of Law is to add regulation to the tendency of the strong taking away the power of a personal agent to determine within the limits of personal freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2016
What is the difference between the banality of evil as opposed to the banality of goodness? Banality implies cultural habits which are so common and ordinary that they go unquestioned or unchallenged because "everyone" or almost everyone is doing it. Does one cite the fact that most mothers lovingly care for their children as banality of goodness? It goes without saying that "moms care for their babies." And when it becomes public that a mom displays behaviors of not caring for one's baby then such normal banality of goodness is deprived. When the banality of evil such as slavery is the "it goes without saying" socio-economic practice of a culture such banality gets exposed when exemplars of the practice of a higher sense of dignity calls into question the basic habit of culture. Banality hides both good and evil; it is the arising the opposite which exposes the hidden banality.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2016
A particular judgment which we in our time might want to make about the Gospel parables is the use of "slaves" in the words of Jesus. This suggests the banality of the practice of slavery in his time and we might want to try to smuggle our notions of what is inhumane back into the time of Jesus and couple the words to love one's neighbor as oneself and loving one's enemy with the practice of slavery, so unquestioned by society that it was virtually unseen, and therefore banal. The oppression of the Jews by the Roman forces was "banal" as well and Jesus disillusioned some by not being a messiah who would remedy the conditions of oppression. He was not like a Moses who would lead the Jewish nation out the oppression of the Pharaohese Caesar. Slavery appeared to be the "economic" necessity of the era and hence there was no one to expose the banality of its evil practice. We can be quite righteous about exposing the banality of evil practices of former ages and this does instantiate the fact that the Spirit of justice is always look for ways to innovate the practice of justice in the actual situations of people's lives. Today we still have banalities of our own, namely, our economic practices are destroying the environment for people of the future and the banality of but a few people controlling the majority of the world's resources, mainly for their own benefit. The banality of evil (see Hannah Arendt) or those "go without saying" practices of culture have to be balanced by the "banality of goodness" when faith energy expressed as the inherent "worthwhileness of life" in kind deeds promotes the survival of the human community. It is always good to seek the mirror of wisdom to show us the banalities in the background which support our foreground performances. How many years did societies live on the back of slave labor; how many years of child labor; how many years of the labor of subjugated and unrecognized women? Let us be open to the discoveries of the banalities of injustice.
Aphorism of Day, May 24, 2016
King Solomon asked that when foreigners came to pray in the temple that they would know God. If people of faith truly made their sanctuaries "houses of prayer for all people," then there would be more peace, love and understanding among the peoples of the earth. Too often houses of prayer become just expressions of local and regional interests.
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2016
In the Gospel, faith is shown to have the quality of remote activation. Most of our life runs by remote faith, i.e., doing and believing and causing things which we don't see or have visible causal agency.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2016
If our universe is expanding in time and if the number of signifying words increase in time it means that actual environment and linguistic environment are continually changing. As linguistic environments change there occurs slowly the change in meanings of each signifier because of the mutual affect words have on each other when they are placed together. We look for juxtaposition of words in the attempt to experience the sublime in the use of language. The Trinity is a Christian doctrine deriving from the Gospel recording of the relationship of Jesus with His Divine Father through the personal Conductivity of the Holy Spirit. Various paradigms of existent thoughts expressed in the words of any particular time have attempted to bring the meanings the Trinitarian relationship to the lives of people in their own temporal province. The Council of Nicaea did this by employing concepts of "substance/essence" from Greek philosophy. Greek philosophical notions were probably not a part of the signifying words used by Jesus in the context of being a native Aramaic speaker, raised with Hebraic/Judaic ethnic formation, in a Roman controlled province with the "low" Greek left over from Alexander the Great still in use. The final adequate knowledge of the anything and not the Trinity has not been arrived at yet because everything still has a different future within future signifying contexts. Most dismissive arguments about the "truth" of the Trinity simply expose that the one who dismisses does not find relevant personal meaning with Trinitarian notion of God. Sometimes disclaimers really mean: Because the Trinity is irrelevant to me, it should be to you and everyone else too. Conversely, those who experience a Trinitarian relationship should manifest the ethical results of love and justice in this world or the Trinity is but a "personal academic" exercise.
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2016
In the presentation of God, God sometimes is explicated through names or attributes. Or God can be the one who is so great and holy that one does not presume to be so intimate with God as to pronounce the "Divine Name." Since humanity is a necessary prisoner in the limitations of human experience to even presume a contact with knowledge of non-human or extra-human existence, such extra-human existence necessarily needs to be filtered through the filters of human experience. Further one could posit that language ability is the necessary condition of human awareness of themselves as human vis a vis non-human existence. Human language creates the anthropomorphic filters through which we process all experience. A prominent feature of human experience is the concept of personhood. Personhood is the subjective identity formed within the relationships of human community. Personhood is an expression of one's constituted subjectivity as concrescent , coalescing signifiers setting the pre-conditions for relationship. Since personhood is valued within human contexts as a supreme value, it would follow that if being worshipful for humanity was a criteria for one's understanding of God, then personhood would be a higher value to be found in the Divine existing One. We could arrive at an endless chicken and egg progression. Personhood is a supreme human value, so the divine must be a higher Personhood, who has imparted personhood to humanity, who in turn express this value and therefore proclaim that they came from Higher Personhood. Hence one can see how the Trinity arises.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2016
The doctrine of the Trinity is essentially a conclusion which derives from the presentation of Jesus in the Gospel. Jesus is recorded as a Son who talked with his Father, with whom He said He was One. And he used personal pronouns to speak about the Spirit who would continue to be with his followers. One can use the Gospels to say that the words are "causatively absolute" in making the "Trinity" the "Truth," but it perhaps makes more sense to posit Personality to a preceding Plenitude from which human personality derived. It makes sense to admit anthropomorphism in speaking about what is "not human only" so that the humanity of Jesus is an implicit recognition of human experience in language as a valid way to know about the otherwise mystery of a Great God. Further, we live in an environment where interpersonal relationship is possible because we are not a collection of solipsistic islands of entities; we live in an environment of "interpersonal conductivity" that allows for the mutual experience of each other. For humanity this mutual experience is known by the fact that we can bring experience to language. Everything shares in an essential "likeliness" and this "likeliness" of all things is God's image (imagoperson) who can be named as the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2016
In John's Gospel, Jesus is the Word of God and his Word are also Spirit and he told his disciple in preparation for his leaving that the Spirit would continue to tell them all of the things that he wanted to say. In short, humanity has a future as long as Word is the metaphysics of all human experience as we know it. Get on board with Word being the only valid human metaphysics. Word is the unavoidable metaphysics. Wordology precedes theology.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2016
The Gospel of John perhaps is the most prominent document of record for the rise of the Trinity in becoming the official doctrine of the church. Jesus, in the Gospel of John is an oracle of the early church in highlighting the "Fatherization" of God. Such pronounced "Fatherization" of God by Jesus is coupled with the unique self-identity as "God's Son." This Daddy-Son relationship included an equal personal partner of the Holy Spirit, who "conducts" the relationship. Daddy, Son and Holy Spirit became the dynamic model for the proclamation that those who received Jesus as their model of life would also know themselves to be sons and daughters of God. The pragmatic purpose of the implicit Trinity in John's Gospel is the mystagogy of each person receiving initiation into a relationship of heavenly parent, son or daughter, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity derives from relationship as the personal identities occur through relationship. Later the Hellenization of Christian theology brought about the Nicaean pronouncements in a paradigm which probably would have been unknown in the Hebraic/Aramaic linguistic context of the life of the historical Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2016
Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What do these have in common? They are all words in human language and in the English language for English speakers. Only one of the Trinity has "empirically verified" existence, namely the Son. The Son could refer to the historical figure Jesus who lived for 30-some years or it could refer to embracing of anthropomorphism as the only dynamic mode of any human knowing, including the knowledge of what is not human only, namely the divine. If one embraces Word use as the functional/pragmatic metaphysics of being human, then we have fewer issues with what actually comes to language, including the Trinitarian understanding of God. There is no reason to disbelieve anything which can come to language; but existence in language does not mean that something attains the functional superlative in language.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2016
In an explication of the Trinity, it behooves us to show why the Incarnation was a necessary insight. The incarnation exposed the fact that all experiences of the divine were in fact human experiences of the divine and so the human experience of the divine is necessarily embraced as co-extensive with there being an experience of the divine for human beings. It does no good to speculate about divinity prior to or without human experience because even such speculation is "human speculation." Even when one says that it is "spiritual" one is using human language regarding human experience. If human experience is an unescapable feature in human knowing of God, then the incarnation is the simple acknowledgement of what is always already in any "talk" about God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2016
In the orchestra, music consists of the balance of melodies and harmonies, solo and group performances. Pentecost is feast of being in the wind section of God's orchestra. The Spirit/Wind/Breath of God flows through us in various ways as those making all of the diverse music of life together with the end of all appreciating the music of justice and love of the Gospel. Yes, we need lots more practice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2016
Unity is hardly a blessing if it is the expression of oppression centering on the whims of a tyrant. Diversity is hardly a blessing if it is the chaos of everyone doing one's own thing without regard for any common good. The underlying principle of Pentecost is the reciprocity of Unity and Diversity, when the differences of freedom are honored even while freedom of different free agents is used to choose the unifying dynamics of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2016
Jesus said, "If in my name, you ask me for anything I will do it." Sounds like a carte blanche promise. The "fine print" or "disclaimer" in this promise probably are the words "in my name." How does anyone know to ask for things that are in the name of Jesus Christ? Surely world peace and health care and the hunger fed would be in His name? It would also seem that "in His name" includes identification with the entire human condition, namely genuine freedom which cannot be over-ridden by outside intervention, only altered by inner spiritual adjustment.
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 21016
The church forgot the meaning of Pentecost when it reduced the prayer language of the church to a single liturgical language for the priestly caste while laity were spectators of those who performed the prayers in a language foreign to all but the ordained and educated. The Book of Common Prayer and Vatican II were events which allowed people to participate in the public prayers in their "common" languages. It took a long time for the church in the captivity of "religious elites" to return to the linguistic "Spirit" of Pentecost. How many times are practices regarded "liberal" and progressive, simply the return to the original "Spirit?" Love and Justice are "progressively" most Conservative about God and the irony is that we have to rediscovery this.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2016
The event of Pentecost within biblical symbolism is seen as the healing of the sins of Babel. A polyglottic world was viewed as punishment for a city with one language being so unified that its leaders could proudly presume to be deity. So the people were cursed with many languages to break up the totalitarian unity. The state as a Leviathan forcing a common language and common meaning can be the tyranny of fascism or state communism or any organization which tries to limit and control meanings in order to manipulate people for purposes of injustice, suppression or oppression. Pentecost is a re-visit of the polyglottic reality of this world with a conversion of difference to the experience of unity known as harmony. Harmony honors differences while it is the playing of the music of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2016
In the Pentecost event, one can find a grappling with two counter dynamics: One from the Many and Many from the One. There are many different languages but can the speakers of the different languages ever understand each other or appreciate the one common humanity? What is the mathematical One? Is it the collection of all different things and occasions in Time? Is the One a Self-Surpassing Quantity of all that has been, is now and will be? Or is there a single thread within all of Divine Omnipresence, of Holy Spirit? And is this the most Interior Glue of all and is a Common Entity which allows for the conduction of mutual experience of the infinite number of things in relationship with each other? Could it be called Love and when unsought or undiscovered the energy of love is even used for unloving behaviors? Pentecost may be about discovering the most nascent Spirit of the universe to be a call to loving relationships in the rainbow of difference.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2016
"And the Word was God." How so? Can one name God without having words first? Can one name Spirit without having words first? Can one know the name of Jesus without having words first. "All things came into being because of the Word." Is not word the priority of everything that can be known, even in saying the words, "can be known?" It is silly to say we know things before and without words because we use the words "before and without words" to say so. Ludwig Feuerbach concluded, "All theology is anthropology." I conclude, "All anthropology and theology is wordology."
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2016
The practice of prayer is an exercise in the development of beneficial abstract thinking unless one settles for mere abstractions which do not relate to one's actual life. Learning to relate to the invisible and unseen which has no specific empirical reference opens the field of the abstract to "possibilisms" from which creative specifics can arise because one has taken the time to ponder new synthesis. If it sounds "crazy" consider all of the craziness in our world of people who actually "relate" to each other with disastrous interactions. Even in face to face dialogue interlocutors are dealing with their invisible word constructed versions of each other and because they "see" each other they assume a superior or correct knowing of each other. A person knows one's versions of others and that too is an invisible phenomenon.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2016
In the prayer of Jesus, found in the Gospel of John he desires to return to the glory he had before the world existed. In the poetics of John's Gospel, this means that he wanted to return to being WORD. Each of us has been created/constituted by words since there could be no awareness of life without words. We each are given the span of our lives to exercise some freedom in how we articulate the words of our lives in thought and deed and when we cease to be active and passive word channeling agents, we become the past tense of our words and we hope for the Great Word to receive us back as constituted beings within a Memory of words by the Word which is equal with God, echoing the poetics of "the Word was God."
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2016
The Gospel of John does not have an account of the Ascension. In the long discourses/prayer of Jesus in John one is given the impression that the ascended and unseen Christ has become made available as a living oracle. Within a consistent symbolic order of the writer of John, Jesus is seen as returned to the glory which he had before the foundation of the world, namely, to be the eternal Word which creates and sustains everything as worded existence. Jesus as a human manifestation of an Exemplary Worded Life, returned to the general state of Word as Ascended Christ who is the Glory of Word. It is the glory of Word which is always everywhere Omni-discursive in how words permeates, creates and re-creates human existence "as we can know it." There may be existence without word, but how could one know it without "words?" Out of the reservoir of the Ascended Christ as Eternal Word, humanity still has access to the oracles of Christ in specific words generated within context. The Ascended state of Christ in John's Gospel is appropriated as people look for the best, loving and just use of words in their lives which might qualify as the oracle of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2016
On the Feast of the Ascension, it might be important to clarify the modes of "spiritual space travel." The Ascension is not an Assumption as in the cases of Enoch, Elijah, (possibly Moses) and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Ascension is different in that it is an account of the lifting away of the visible appearance of the Risen Christ. Rather than literalize biblical events one should understand the symbolic purposes of the Ascension in the mystagogy of the faith communities who believed themselves to be able to climb the Ascension of Christ as an interior "Jacob's ladder" between the seen and unseen world. The Pauline mystics believed that they ascended on this Ascension ladder of Christ to be seated in heavenly places. This is the poetics of the interaction between the interior and exterior world. Reducing such things to a certain kind of "physicality" is to miss the point of prayer and the transformation process of one's life. I fear that too many people have made into idols a literal physicality of the Gospel events and thereby have missed the transformational purpose of mystagogy so represented in the Gospel texts.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2016
What does the Ascension mean in a post-Copernicus world? In Pauline writings, Paul uses the metaphor of being seated in heavenly places as a state of spiritual attainment, perhaps in prayer. The Ascension of Christ and being seated in heavenly places are metaphorical relatives in the post-Copernicus world. We can admit that the perceptual physicality in Gospel presentations e.g. Jesus rising in the Ascension, are metaphors of physicality to emphasize that transformative mystagogic events in the interior life of a person really happen. In poetic discourse one can use physicality as a metaphor to reinforce telling and kairotic significance. Being crassly literal and limiting meaningful truth to only what can be empirically verified is to deny the truthful meanings of a large portion of human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2016
One can read the Bible with many different reading strategies. One's preconceptions can force upon the Bible a harmony of meaning among all of the books. The basic harmony of the Bible is that that it is writing. The meanings are so desperate and contextual one should not force superficial agreements and harmonies but one can look for correspondences in discursive practices of the writers assuming that the writer of Genesis and Revelation shared a "common" humanity. A first strategy of reading might be to explore how a particular writer uses a consistent symbolic framework for the purposes of the particular developed theme. For example, one could trace the use of the notion of "word" as it is used throughout the Gospel of John. Differences in meanings in the Bible should not trouble people who appreciate the differences in human contexts which qualify meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2016
In the week of the Ascension, we should offer thanks for Kepler and Galileo. Why? They helped to restore heaven to the mystagogy of inner space. Lazy literalists had reduced spirituality to plain empirical perceptual description when the original excitement of the Risen Christ was following him in the path of transformation on the escalator of the Ascension to the metaphorical "seats in heavenly places" as articulated in the Pauline tradition. We should thank modern science for allowing us to return to the true poetry of our faith as it is known through the mystagogy of transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2016
The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary by her cousin Elizabeth, the elderly expectant mother of John the Baptist is an event presented to show the community of John the Baptist how the movement of John the Baptist and the movement of Jesus dovetailed together and were not to be two separate movements. Elizabeth called Mary the "mother of my Lord" and so the surpassing community of Christ is verified in natal stage in the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary. It might be said that of all of the religious parties within Judaism, the followers of John the Baptist were most likely to become followers of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2016
St. Paul wrote, "the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin." He did not see Jesus in his physical body but he had a "revelation" of Jesus. Such a mode of reception invites some reflection. Does Paul who receives revelation remain a human being in the event of the revelation? Indeed he does, so revelation does not erase the human quality of the event. It does not erase the fact that even revelatory events involves the interpretation of that event by the receiver Paul himself. We know that everyone did not interpret the Gentile mission of Paul in the same manner in which he did. A further question involves whether revelatory events were reserved for the apostolic age and if so does that diminish the nature of revelatory events which have happen subsequently? Did Paul know that his recollection of his revelatory experience in a letter would become the infallible word of God in the Church? I doubt it; he was probably concerned about more immediate contemporary persuasion of others. Revelatory events indeed set the hierarchy of values for the community but we need to be careful about assuming that revelatory events include with them static, infallible, self-evidential, permanent interpretations of the same.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2016
In the Roman Catholic Mass the people's response to the "O Lamb of God..." is "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed." This phrase is taken from the centurion who wished Jesus to come and heal his slave and he had faith that it could be done remotely, i.e., without Jesus being physically present. One could wonder how this biblical phrase came into the Mass since it associates the sacrament of Eucharist with the sacrament of "healing." The Gospel passage clearly is not a "Eucharistic" setting from the early church so it can seem like an "out of place" non sequitur. Certainly the expectation that the Eucharistic presence of Jesus in the bread and the wine entering one's "bodily" house being treated as reconstituting healing words of Christ provides interesting poetic gymnastics. The logic of this phrase is solidified by the truth due to its continuous use, proving that truths are essentially the continuous repetition of a community. Truths are meanings with community validation in relationship and not transcendentally verified.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2016
Faith and prayer involve the experience of "remoteness" yet the sense of active engagement. Modern science has render things once thought to be in the visible world to the invisible world. The interior invisible world has its own reality within each person. Faith and prayer involves the acceptance of a "Divine Milieu" as everything has becoming and being within the every expanding in time of the divine environment. Faith and prayer involves a "conducting personal reality" creating the condition for the mutual relationship of all things visible and invisible. This "conducting personal reality" is the Omnipresent Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2016
The absolute banality of goodness might also be called the state of "innocence" where an agent always chooses to do something without a motive of ill intent. Such banality of goodness means that an agent is a "robot" of goodness because there is nothing evil which can be done since in a original state of the banality of goodness, goodness technically does not exists. Goodness only exists when an act of comparison comes about. One might question whether goodness can ever truly exists when there is more than one agent since when agents act they express their hierarchy of values and it is only a matter of time until the hierarchy of value of one agent clashes with the hierarchy of value of another agent. In the garden of Eden wisdom story, one finds the author pondering the birth of morality and the moral dilemma. God said, "Do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden..." If the lesser human egos could surrender to a higher and most wise Divine Ego then such an act of surrender to the "Law of the Creator" would create the conditions needed for people with different hierarchies in their expressions of their desires and needs to regulate and check their egos as the only way people could peacefully live together. Perhaps the banality of evil occurs when oppression, repression and suppression has occurred due to an agent of power who has systematically forced the ego of another or others to submit to the conditions of losing the power of any free agency towards one's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The purpose of Law is to add regulation to the tendency of the strong taking away the power of a personal agent to determine within the limits of personal freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2016
What is the difference between the banality of evil as opposed to the banality of goodness? Banality implies cultural habits which are so common and ordinary that they go unquestioned or unchallenged because "everyone" or almost everyone is doing it. Does one cite the fact that most mothers lovingly care for their children as banality of goodness? It goes without saying that "moms care for their babies." And when it becomes public that a mom displays behaviors of not caring for one's baby then such normal banality of goodness is deprived. When the banality of evil such as slavery is the "it goes without saying" socio-economic practice of a culture such banality gets exposed when exemplars of the practice of a higher sense of dignity calls into question the basic habit of culture. Banality hides both good and evil; it is the arising the opposite which exposes the hidden banality.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2016
A particular judgment which we in our time might want to make about the Gospel parables is the use of "slaves" in the words of Jesus. This suggests the banality of the practice of slavery in his time and we might want to try to smuggle our notions of what is inhumane back into the time of Jesus and couple the words to love one's neighbor as oneself and loving one's enemy with the practice of slavery, so unquestioned by society that it was virtually unseen, and therefore banal. The oppression of the Jews by the Roman forces was "banal" as well and Jesus disillusioned some by not being a messiah who would remedy the conditions of oppression. He was not like a Moses who would lead the Jewish nation out the oppression of the Pharaohese Caesar. Slavery appeared to be the "economic" necessity of the era and hence there was no one to expose the banality of its evil practice. We can be quite righteous about exposing the banality of evil practices of former ages and this does instantiate the fact that the Spirit of justice is always look for ways to innovate the practice of justice in the actual situations of people's lives. Today we still have banalities of our own, namely, our economic practices are destroying the environment for people of the future and the banality of but a few people controlling the majority of the world's resources, mainly for their own benefit. The banality of evil (see Hannah Arendt) or those "go without saying" practices of culture have to be balanced by the "banality of goodness" when faith energy expressed as the inherent "worthwhileness of life" in kind deeds promotes the survival of the human community. It is always good to seek the mirror of wisdom to show us the banalities in the background which support our foreground performances. How many years did societies live on the back of slave labor; how many years of child labor; how many years of the labor of subjugated and unrecognized women? Let us be open to the discoveries of the banalities of injustice.
Aphorism of Day, May 24, 2016
King Solomon asked that when foreigners came to pray in the temple that they would know God. If people of faith truly made their sanctuaries "houses of prayer for all people," then there would be more peace, love and understanding among the peoples of the earth. Too often houses of prayer become just expressions of local and regional interests.
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2016
In the Gospel, faith is shown to have the quality of remote activation. Most of our life runs by remote faith, i.e., doing and believing and causing things which we don't see or have visible causal agency.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2016
If our universe is expanding in time and if the number of signifying words increase in time it means that actual environment and linguistic environment are continually changing. As linguistic environments change there occurs slowly the change in meanings of each signifier because of the mutual affect words have on each other when they are placed together. We look for juxtaposition of words in the attempt to experience the sublime in the use of language. The Trinity is a Christian doctrine deriving from the Gospel recording of the relationship of Jesus with His Divine Father through the personal Conductivity of the Holy Spirit. Various paradigms of existent thoughts expressed in the words of any particular time have attempted to bring the meanings the Trinitarian relationship to the lives of people in their own temporal province. The Council of Nicaea did this by employing concepts of "substance/essence" from Greek philosophy. Greek philosophical notions were probably not a part of the signifying words used by Jesus in the context of being a native Aramaic speaker, raised with Hebraic/Judaic ethnic formation, in a Roman controlled province with the "low" Greek left over from Alexander the Great still in use. The final adequate knowledge of the anything and not the Trinity has not been arrived at yet because everything still has a different future within future signifying contexts. Most dismissive arguments about the "truth" of the Trinity simply expose that the one who dismisses does not find relevant personal meaning with Trinitarian notion of God. Sometimes disclaimers really mean: Because the Trinity is irrelevant to me, it should be to you and everyone else too. Conversely, those who experience a Trinitarian relationship should manifest the ethical results of love and justice in this world or the Trinity is but a "personal academic" exercise.
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2016
In the presentation of God, God sometimes is explicated through names or attributes. Or God can be the one who is so great and holy that one does not presume to be so intimate with God as to pronounce the "Divine Name." Since humanity is a necessary prisoner in the limitations of human experience to even presume a contact with knowledge of non-human or extra-human existence, such extra-human existence necessarily needs to be filtered through the filters of human experience. Further one could posit that language ability is the necessary condition of human awareness of themselves as human vis a vis non-human existence. Human language creates the anthropomorphic filters through which we process all experience. A prominent feature of human experience is the concept of personhood. Personhood is the subjective identity formed within the relationships of human community. Personhood is an expression of one's constituted subjectivity as concrescent , coalescing signifiers setting the pre-conditions for relationship. Since personhood is valued within human contexts as a supreme value, it would follow that if being worshipful for humanity was a criteria for one's understanding of God, then personhood would be a higher value to be found in the Divine existing One. We could arrive at an endless chicken and egg progression. Personhood is a supreme human value, so the divine must be a higher Personhood, who has imparted personhood to humanity, who in turn express this value and therefore proclaim that they came from Higher Personhood. Hence one can see how the Trinity arises.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2016
The doctrine of the Trinity is essentially a conclusion which derives from the presentation of Jesus in the Gospel. Jesus is recorded as a Son who talked with his Father, with whom He said He was One. And he used personal pronouns to speak about the Spirit who would continue to be with his followers. One can use the Gospels to say that the words are "causatively absolute" in making the "Trinity" the "Truth," but it perhaps makes more sense to posit Personality to a preceding Plenitude from which human personality derived. It makes sense to admit anthropomorphism in speaking about what is "not human only" so that the humanity of Jesus is an implicit recognition of human experience in language as a valid way to know about the otherwise mystery of a Great God. Further, we live in an environment where interpersonal relationship is possible because we are not a collection of solipsistic islands of entities; we live in an environment of "interpersonal conductivity" that allows for the mutual experience of each other. For humanity this mutual experience is known by the fact that we can bring experience to language. Everything shares in an essential "likeliness" and this "likeliness" of all things is God's image (imagoperson) who can be named as the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2016
In John's Gospel, Jesus is the Word of God and his Word are also Spirit and he told his disciple in preparation for his leaving that the Spirit would continue to tell them all of the things that he wanted to say. In short, humanity has a future as long as Word is the metaphysics of all human experience as we know it. Get on board with Word being the only valid human metaphysics. Word is the unavoidable metaphysics. Wordology precedes theology.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2016
The Gospel of John perhaps is the most prominent document of record for the rise of the Trinity in becoming the official doctrine of the church. Jesus, in the Gospel of John is an oracle of the early church in highlighting the "Fatherization" of God. Such pronounced "Fatherization" of God by Jesus is coupled with the unique self-identity as "God's Son." This Daddy-Son relationship included an equal personal partner of the Holy Spirit, who "conducts" the relationship. Daddy, Son and Holy Spirit became the dynamic model for the proclamation that those who received Jesus as their model of life would also know themselves to be sons and daughters of God. The pragmatic purpose of the implicit Trinity in John's Gospel is the mystagogy of each person receiving initiation into a relationship of heavenly parent, son or daughter, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity derives from relationship as the personal identities occur through relationship. Later the Hellenization of Christian theology brought about the Nicaean pronouncements in a paradigm which probably would have been unknown in the Hebraic/Aramaic linguistic context of the life of the historical Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2016
Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What do these have in common? They are all words in human language and in the English language for English speakers. Only one of the Trinity has "empirically verified" existence, namely the Son. The Son could refer to the historical figure Jesus who lived for 30-some years or it could refer to embracing of anthropomorphism as the only dynamic mode of any human knowing, including the knowledge of what is not human only, namely the divine. If one embraces Word use as the functional/pragmatic metaphysics of being human, then we have fewer issues with what actually comes to language, including the Trinitarian understanding of God. There is no reason to disbelieve anything which can come to language; but existence in language does not mean that something attains the functional superlative in language.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2016
In an explication of the Trinity, it behooves us to show why the Incarnation was a necessary insight. The incarnation exposed the fact that all experiences of the divine were in fact human experiences of the divine and so the human experience of the divine is necessarily embraced as co-extensive with there being an experience of the divine for human beings. It does no good to speculate about divinity prior to or without human experience because even such speculation is "human speculation." Even when one says that it is "spiritual" one is using human language regarding human experience. If human experience is an unescapable feature in human knowing of God, then the incarnation is the simple acknowledgement of what is always already in any "talk" about God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2016
In the orchestra, music consists of the balance of melodies and harmonies, solo and group performances. Pentecost is feast of being in the wind section of God's orchestra. The Spirit/Wind/Breath of God flows through us in various ways as those making all of the diverse music of life together with the end of all appreciating the music of justice and love of the Gospel. Yes, we need lots more practice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2016
Unity is hardly a blessing if it is the expression of oppression centering on the whims of a tyrant. Diversity is hardly a blessing if it is the chaos of everyone doing one's own thing without regard for any common good. The underlying principle of Pentecost is the reciprocity of Unity and Diversity, when the differences of freedom are honored even while freedom of different free agents is used to choose the unifying dynamics of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2016
Jesus said, "If in my name, you ask me for anything I will do it." Sounds like a carte blanche promise. The "fine print" or "disclaimer" in this promise probably are the words "in my name." How does anyone know to ask for things that are in the name of Jesus Christ? Surely world peace and health care and the hunger fed would be in His name? It would also seem that "in His name" includes identification with the entire human condition, namely genuine freedom which cannot be over-ridden by outside intervention, only altered by inner spiritual adjustment.
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 21016
The church forgot the meaning of Pentecost when it reduced the prayer language of the church to a single liturgical language for the priestly caste while laity were spectators of those who performed the prayers in a language foreign to all but the ordained and educated. The Book of Common Prayer and Vatican II were events which allowed people to participate in the public prayers in their "common" languages. It took a long time for the church in the captivity of "religious elites" to return to the linguistic "Spirit" of Pentecost. How many times are practices regarded "liberal" and progressive, simply the return to the original "Spirit?" Love and Justice are "progressively" most Conservative about God and the irony is that we have to rediscovery this.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2016
The event of Pentecost within biblical symbolism is seen as the healing of the sins of Babel. A polyglottic world was viewed as punishment for a city with one language being so unified that its leaders could proudly presume to be deity. So the people were cursed with many languages to break up the totalitarian unity. The state as a Leviathan forcing a common language and common meaning can be the tyranny of fascism or state communism or any organization which tries to limit and control meanings in order to manipulate people for purposes of injustice, suppression or oppression. Pentecost is a re-visit of the polyglottic reality of this world with a conversion of difference to the experience of unity known as harmony. Harmony honors differences while it is the playing of the music of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2016
In the Pentecost event, one can find a grappling with two counter dynamics: One from the Many and Many from the One. There are many different languages but can the speakers of the different languages ever understand each other or appreciate the one common humanity? What is the mathematical One? Is it the collection of all different things and occasions in Time? Is the One a Self-Surpassing Quantity of all that has been, is now and will be? Or is there a single thread within all of Divine Omnipresence, of Holy Spirit? And is this the most Interior Glue of all and is a Common Entity which allows for the conduction of mutual experience of the infinite number of things in relationship with each other? Could it be called Love and when unsought or undiscovered the energy of love is even used for unloving behaviors? Pentecost may be about discovering the most nascent Spirit of the universe to be a call to loving relationships in the rainbow of difference.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2016
"And the Word was God." How so? Can one name God without having words first? Can one name Spirit without having words first? Can one know the name of Jesus without having words first. "All things came into being because of the Word." Is not word the priority of everything that can be known, even in saying the words, "can be known?" It is silly to say we know things before and without words because we use the words "before and without words" to say so. Ludwig Feuerbach concluded, "All theology is anthropology." I conclude, "All anthropology and theology is wordology."
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2016
The practice of prayer is an exercise in the development of beneficial abstract thinking unless one settles for mere abstractions which do not relate to one's actual life. Learning to relate to the invisible and unseen which has no specific empirical reference opens the field of the abstract to "possibilisms" from which creative specifics can arise because one has taken the time to ponder new synthesis. If it sounds "crazy" consider all of the craziness in our world of people who actually "relate" to each other with disastrous interactions. Even in face to face dialogue interlocutors are dealing with their invisible word constructed versions of each other and because they "see" each other they assume a superior or correct knowing of each other. A person knows one's versions of others and that too is an invisible phenomenon.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2016
In the prayer of Jesus, found in the Gospel of John he desires to return to the glory he had before the world existed. In the poetics of John's Gospel, this means that he wanted to return to being WORD. Each of us has been created/constituted by words since there could be no awareness of life without words. We each are given the span of our lives to exercise some freedom in how we articulate the words of our lives in thought and deed and when we cease to be active and passive word channeling agents, we become the past tense of our words and we hope for the Great Word to receive us back as constituted beings within a Memory of words by the Word which is equal with God, echoing the poetics of "the Word was God."
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2016
The Gospel of John does not have an account of the Ascension. In the long discourses/prayer of Jesus in John one is given the impression that the ascended and unseen Christ has become made available as a living oracle. Within a consistent symbolic order of the writer of John, Jesus is seen as returned to the glory which he had before the foundation of the world, namely, to be the eternal Word which creates and sustains everything as worded existence. Jesus as a human manifestation of an Exemplary Worded Life, returned to the general state of Word as Ascended Christ who is the Glory of Word. It is the glory of Word which is always everywhere Omni-discursive in how words permeates, creates and re-creates human existence "as we can know it." There may be existence without word, but how could one know it without "words?" Out of the reservoir of the Ascended Christ as Eternal Word, humanity still has access to the oracles of Christ in specific words generated within context. The Ascended state of Christ in John's Gospel is appropriated as people look for the best, loving and just use of words in their lives which might qualify as the oracle of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2016
On the Feast of the Ascension, it might be important to clarify the modes of "spiritual space travel." The Ascension is not an Assumption as in the cases of Enoch, Elijah, (possibly Moses) and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Ascension is different in that it is an account of the lifting away of the visible appearance of the Risen Christ. Rather than literalize biblical events one should understand the symbolic purposes of the Ascension in the mystagogy of the faith communities who believed themselves to be able to climb the Ascension of Christ as an interior "Jacob's ladder" between the seen and unseen world. The Pauline mystics believed that they ascended on this Ascension ladder of Christ to be seated in heavenly places. This is the poetics of the interaction between the interior and exterior world. Reducing such things to a certain kind of "physicality" is to miss the point of prayer and the transformation process of one's life. I fear that too many people have made into idols a literal physicality of the Gospel events and thereby have missed the transformational purpose of mystagogy so represented in the Gospel texts.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2016
What does the Ascension mean in a post-Copernicus world? In Pauline writings, Paul uses the metaphor of being seated in heavenly places as a state of spiritual attainment, perhaps in prayer. The Ascension of Christ and being seated in heavenly places are metaphorical relatives in the post-Copernicus world. We can admit that the perceptual physicality in Gospel presentations e.g. Jesus rising in the Ascension, are metaphors of physicality to emphasize that transformative mystagogic events in the interior life of a person really happen. In poetic discourse one can use physicality as a metaphor to reinforce telling and kairotic significance. Being crassly literal and limiting meaningful truth to only what can be empirically verified is to deny the truthful meanings of a large portion of human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2016
One can read the Bible with many different reading strategies. One's preconceptions can force upon the Bible a harmony of meaning among all of the books. The basic harmony of the Bible is that that it is writing. The meanings are so desperate and contextual one should not force superficial agreements and harmonies but one can look for correspondences in discursive practices of the writers assuming that the writer of Genesis and Revelation shared a "common" humanity. A first strategy of reading might be to explore how a particular writer uses a consistent symbolic framework for the purposes of the particular developed theme. For example, one could trace the use of the notion of "word" as it is used throughout the Gospel of John. Differences in meanings in the Bible should not trouble people who appreciate the differences in human contexts which qualify meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2016
In the week of the Ascension, we should offer thanks for Kepler and Galileo. Why? They helped to restore heaven to the mystagogy of inner space. Lazy literalists had reduced spirituality to plain empirical perceptual description when the original excitement of the Risen Christ was following him in the path of transformation on the escalator of the Ascension to the metaphorical "seats in heavenly places" as articulated in the Pauline tradition. We should thank modern science for allowing us to return to the true poetry of our faith as it is known through the mystagogy of transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2016
Sometimes the truths of the Scriptures are aspirations about God which do not have universal manifestation in the practice of humanity, such as: " Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, * for you judge the peoples with equity and guide all the nations upon earth." Confessing the nature of God as one who judges with equity and guides all the nations, has not made it so in actual practice. There is the need to proclaim the normalcy of justice and guidance since to do otherwise would be to set the standard lower and absolve inadequate attempts to realize the kind of justice and guidance for people for the common good.
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