Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2017
As human beings we cannot help but take life "personally." We filter experience through our personality. We cannot help but project anthropomorphic interactions between us and everything that is not human. Everything that is happening is much too mysterious for us to really understand negligible causation and so we look at the apparent causation of things that are very close to us and things that happen to us get apprised in various ways: Favorable, Unfavorable, etc. It is hard to separate how something affects us from what we perceived to cause the effect. Mislocation and mistiming may account for the "apparent" cruelness of Nature, as in being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a tornado hits. For the Greeks it was the Fates that had it in for humans in "determining" their conditions. If we as humans tend to anthropomorphize all that is not human, we might assume that the Divine Life has theomorphized everything in stamping degrees of divine likeness upon everything in terms of personality and freedom. Personality and freedom are two "high qualities" of humanity; we anthropomorphize God in saying these two high qualities must have originated in our Superior.
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2017
Something can be always, already and yet still seem to be freshly appearing in the linear, before and after sequence of how people experience history. To say that the Holy Spirit only achieved equal divine status on Pentecost would not be true to divinity. The always, already Spirit only came into human experience in uneven ways over time. The feast of Pentecost was the occasion of accounting for ecstatic uprising of God's omnipresence in marking the lives of the followers of Jesus with invisible but knowable presence using the metaphors of a mighty wind or living water from within. In Jesus, what became clear is that anthropomorphism became a valid way to declare theocentrism as accessible to human experience. In Jesus, one admits God is the best example of what it means to be a "person" and with Jesus, the Personhood of God was embraced with his articulation of his relationship between Father and Holy Spirit. If "personhood" is definitive of human experience, Christians came to believe that "Personhood" proceeded from divinity.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2017
The Gospels sometime prove that it is difficult to build theology for teaching around biblical narratives. When did the Holy Spirit arrive? The Gospel of John indicates that Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon his disciples on Easter, whereas the "general" descent of the Spirit happened on Pentecost. What about the Spirit of God moving over the face of the deep at creation? Was nothing of Spirit left in creation as God's Omnipresence and the trace of divine likeness upon all? One of the problems is that systemic synchronicity is attempted to be represented in linear historical cause and effect narratives. Linear cause and effect narrative does not do justice to the mystery of how mystical poets try to talk about the involvement of God in their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2017
The post-resurrection appearances of Christ gradually diminished to one final appearance of the Ascension. The Ascension is the event of Christ becoming invisible again and returning to a parallel yet present realm of the divine. The Ascension highlights the "glorification" of Christ in the heavenly realm even as this glorification was instantiated in the success of the mystical appearances of Christ becoming evident to more and more people. A glorification of Christ somewhere must have been the reason that the fame of Christ on earth was spreading.
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2017
Since John's Gospel is the last Gospel to come to writing, one can assume the last editor witness the significant effect of the Jesus Movement. Great after-effects create the notion of Providence, a sense of everything unfolded in such winsome ways that it became easy for the Gospel writer to declare providence. Biblical writer have providential outcomes for both great good and evil. For evil, the writers wrote about the anti-Christ and the Beast, seeming to make such infamy as inevitable in a divine plan. The Christ-effects within the Roman world came to be regarded as the elevation of Jesus into God's glory. The mutual divine esteem in the Trinity is called "glory" and this glory spilled into the experience of the energized early church. The language of "glory" is how the church accounted for the mystery of the success of the church.
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2017
The Johannine church wrote the oracle prayer of Jesus to his Father to promote "oneness" with God the Father as central to their message. John's Gospel writer writes that Jesus is the eternal Word of God, his words are spirit and life and they are words from his Father that are able to give and create this eternal life within his disciples. In John's mysticism, the shared family likeness with God is profound. Jesus said, "If you have seen me you have seen the Father" and Jesus prayed that his disciple would "be one with the Father even as he was one with the Father." The end of the mystagogy of John's Gospel is this: Don't be separated from God; be "one" with God in bearing the family likeness of the creator.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2017
In the prayer of Jesus in John's Gospel, Jesus asked to be glorified to return to his state of existence before the beginning of the world. That state, according to John's Gospel, was being the Word of God from the beginning. So the departure of the particular historical Jesus meant that he would return to the place of being WORD=GOD or the realm of the possibilisms of all things. Philosophically this would be a contrast between actual existence and All Possible Existences. If there is no actual word product then one does not know about the realm of all possible word products. One wonders if the writer of the Gospel of John was such a linguistic constructivist as to use this kind of philosophical speculation/meditation in the presentation of Jesus Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2017
In John's Gospel, God is the Word made flesh in Christ. Jesus said that his words were "spirit and life." We have quite some equivalencies in John: Word=God=Jesus Christ=Spirit=Life. And we have word products in John's Gospel, the writing about the words of Jesus which appear in rather long discourses and in the longest prayer of Jesus found in John 17, which is in fact the "real" Lord's Prayer since the other one was actually the Disciples' Prayer. John's Gospel is the most revealing about the nature of word and essentially instantiates that if anything is then it is because of being in language. Heidegger called language the house of Being and yet he needed to use language to indicate that completely reflexive statement about Language itself. In the Gospel of John word is used to establish word as what word establishes what word is and will be in it manifold discursive ways. Once one moves from discursive mode of word use back to the fact that one is using word, then discursive mode immediately is deconstructed. Time may imply a sequence in experience but the operation of word is coexistent with Time which in fact word creates in human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2017
Christian theology is a narrative version of the Great Chain of Being. One assumes that God as "none greater than can be conceived" is so rarefied as to be incomprehensible and we assume a translation of non-human divine life into the language of human experience. And what is most translatable? Humans have words. So the highest human metaphor for God is Word from the beginning of human experience and Word being God. God is emptied into Word and Word is emptied into particular human experience in the life of Jesus who exemplifies that even though we live in the prison of anthropocentrism we accept our prison because we believe God emptied the divine self into human terms as we presume to accept human experience as a valid way to know about the non-human being of God. So God takes a journey downward into Word, into the person of Jesus who plumbs the depth of human experience, including death, but not just death, but below death to the abode of the dead. And then God takes a journey upwards to rise again, ascend and then return to an exalted glory. All of this is done on the invisible background of the omnipresent Spirit the conducting Essence of mutual relationship that has always already been. And all of the above has been words about other words about other words since words reflexively refer to themselves even while we see rise within the world of words things like ego states of continuing identity and the rising of the human ability to name God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2017
There occurs religious language narrative for conducting experience between realms of "natural" existence and "heavenly" existence. We encounter a ladder from heaven, assumptions and the unique ascension of Jesus Christ. There are community narratives of the mystery of inter-realm communication and travel signifying a messaging system between the invisible realm and the visible realm. All of this takes place because we have words and word nuance the setting, the mood, the explanation and the very visionary seeing of interspatial communication. Words are invisible and they even create the "as if" of materiality since by words we name materiality. In biblical words Jesus is the one who ascended to another realm and he is also the ladder on which others can ascend and descend, even the angels or God's messengers (words themselves are messengers). When it comes to Jesus, as to any experience, one must not limit the kinds of discursive responses which can have meaningful insights.
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2017
One might say that Christianity became the triumph of Hellenistic philosophy over its Hebraic roots. Since Alexander the Great and the spread of Greek culture throughout the world, the superiority of what had happened in ancient Greece was distilled throughout the known world. When the Temple was destroyed the regrouped synagogue communities tried to "rid" Hellenistic influences from their Scripture, meaning that the books of the Apocrypha were excluded from their canon. The presentation of St. Paul on Mars Hill engaging the Stoics and the Epicureans is indicative of the synthesis between the Hebraic roots of Jesus and what the Risen Christ would become when the meaning of his life would be explicated using the philosophical metaphors of Greek philosophy. One could say that even though the Council of Nicaea seems to be a triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, it was also a triumph for Plato and Aristotle because the categories of Greek philosophy were used to "explain" the Trinity. The message of Christ certainly does baptize and Christianize cultural practices in its evangelizing wake, but the reverse happens as well, Christianity has become Hellenized, scholasticized, Enlightenized, modernized and now post-modernized. Mutual conversion can happen without the message of the Risen Christ about love and justice being lost.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2017
Living and moving and having being in God in the dynamic mode might be restated as "living and moving and have one's becoming in God, who is also the Omni-Becomer, who becomes, not as the sign of the imperfection of not yet being "complete" but as One who is Freedom who permits lesser free entities to contribute to that actual outcomes of future becoming. This view is compatible with a Big Bang creation and expanding guided becoming of the way things are and permitting genuine freedom. This gives the most cogent response to the theodicy problem of innocent suffering and allows God to be "weak" in not overriding genuine freedom to protect the moral integrity of the realm of human experience that is manifest in being beings who use language. This view avoids the deeply mechanistic view of a perfect God who has determined fatalistically a final outcome which would totally contradict the perfection of Freedom ever ceasing to have a static state of being. How could one view perfection as a static freeze frame state of cosmic harmony? Such a fossil may be good for a final museum but not true to the blessed and exciting dynamism of perfect freely becoming life.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2017
When in Athens do as the Athenians do. This was Paul's method of evangelism presented in the Acts of the Apostles when he quoted a Greek poet who wrote, "We are "his" offspring," referring to humanity being children of deity. That Paul was trying to make connections with traditions of ancient Greek and not just the Hebrew Scripture is an indication of his apologetic efforts to explain the faith of Jesus in varying contexts. People with "interpretation limitations" seal themselves off from all of the language products available in the experience of all humanity and pretend that their "exclusive" interpretations about Jesus cannot and do not have connection with the fullness human language experience. If one is not willing to let one's faith raft be afloat upon the entire ocean of every possible human linguistic product, then one does not really practice the universality, "catholicity" of one's beliefs.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2017
Jesus said, "I will not leave you orphaned." This seems to be place Jesus is the role of a foster parent or guardian for his disciple friends. Is this akin to the adjustment a baby has to make to leave the maternal body, to lose contact with the maternal body, to lose sight and sound connection with mother or another caregiver? How does a baby get weaned from the traces of maternal presence except to become confident that she has the maternal spirit being expressed through herself knowing the inner advocacy of her own divine likeness. Jesus is trying to teach the disciple that the loss of external presence is to result in the gain of being forced to experience profound inner advocacy.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2017
Being in the family of God is an important metaphor for the mysticism of the Gospel of John. Belief means having the power/authority (birth certificate) to be a child of God. One is born by water and the Spirit to realize one's membership in the family of God. And one is not left an orphan even when Daddy or big brother Jesus cannot be seen because the life of God the Spirit, the Advocate is the image of God through each family member. Daddy has a big house and a dwelling place forever for each child and Jesus came to remind the children of Adam and Eve that they are also children of God. And what is the rule and the commandment of God's family? Love.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2017
Jesus said, "I will not leave you orphaned." Was Jesus a parent who died or left this earth with children? St. Paul referred to Greek poets who said that we are God's offspring. The Gospel of John is about Jesus coming into a world that did not know that people were valued "children" of God. Sometimes we focus so much upon the "sole" sonship of Jesus as Son of God, we forget that the Sonship of Jesus was the particular reminder of the general reality of all people being children of God. Jesus came to say, "You are not an orphan, you never were an orphan and resist anything that would give you the disinformation about you not being a child of God." Knowing the image of God upon one's life is the Gospel of John.
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2017
According to the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul accepted the description of one of the poet for the human situation, "We live and move and have our being in God." In this model everyone and everything is "interior" to God. There is nothing "exterior" to God and so the divine being has no environment except the "divine Self" in a future state, a state that is expanding to acknowledge the genuine freedom which adds to a future not yet known as actual. Understanding God to be "vulnerable" to real freedom is perfectly expressed in Christ as the self-emptied divine into human experience even death on the cross. This expresses the fullness of God's vulnerability to the permitted freedom in the order of things. It is not conception of a weak God but of a profoundly superior God without rival in being Love, a Love inspiring us all to use our freedom rightly toward love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2017
"If you ask anything in my name, I will do it." World peace? Everyone fed? Cancer cured? We have asked for lots of things in the name of Jesus and things do not seem to have gotten done. It could be that "doing it" means that Jesus is asking with us continuously for good things as an expression of children of God who have child-like relationships with God to ask. What we cannot ask is that the nature of God as pure Freedom, sharing freedom, be overcome. Within the limitations of freedom, we have the freedom to ask for anything that comports with goodness and health and in asking we know that the Christ-nature within us is doing it. It is enough to know that we are being "asked through" for the well-being of the world, as long as we also are making ourselves available to become the quickest answer to most of our prayers.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2107
The body of a mother is the first house of every human being. But the babe before and after birth attains a place in the "heart house" of mom too. The metaphor of each perceiving being as a house of traces of perception is insightful for the mutual inner and memorial retention we have of each other. Analogically, we move to a great Perceiver who has retained and given a memorial place, a dwelling place within the great House of the "Body of God" as a Place of places wherein everyone and everything can dwell. The metaphor of a Father's House/Mother's House/Parent's House as containing dwelling places for us all is insightful regarding a divine holy family of God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2017
Jesus is quoted as saying about his Father: "In my Father's house are many dwelling places..." If we live and move and have our being in God, it would mean that coming into the world gives each person a dwelling place within the perceptual interior of God. Homelessness, having no dwelling place in this world is an abject condition; having no dwelling place in God would mean that we are not valued enough to be remembered by having a place in God's interior life. Jesus promised his disciples that they had a dwelling place prepared for them in God's house and that house is perpetually expanding as it surpasses itself in future states with many additions as each person attains a dwelling place in the One with the greatest memory of all, a memory so great as to be able to continuously re-constitute a continuing identity of each person passing through successive states of becoming.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2017
The Gospel of John is about the "Christ-traces" found in the community which was responsible for its writing. It is a mosaic of "traces" presented in ways that could inculcate the kinds of values and understandings that the mystics of the Johannine community used for the formation of their members. It is an apology for the Christ-identity of the community of those who saw the Gospel of John as their constitution.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2017
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus promised that his disciples would do greater works than he had done, because he was going to the Father. Let's see, that means healings, walking on water, resurrections, water to wine, opening the eyes of the blind should be an every day occurrence in the church. Or could greater works refer to the fact that the absence of Jesus' physical presence meant that the presence of the Risen Christ would be born into the lives of so many people that greater works would be accomplished because of what was regained in the presence of Jesus was a recovery of the "original" omnipresence of God from creation? In John's Gospel, the main work is "believing." And if a million people are believing after Jesus is gone, instead of a few handful of followers while he lived on earth, then the sheer quantity of believers is a much "greater works." It is useful to note the difference in the use of the notion of "works" and "signs" in John's Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2017
Jesus said, "“I am the way, and the truth, and the life." These words referred to the familial truth regarding Jesus. John's Gospel said we are given authority/status to know ourselves as children of God. Jesus is the way to understand God as heavenly parent. Jesus is the honest truth about bearing the image of God our heavenly parent. Jesus is the life of the Spirit, the essence of our divine likeness. Historically, the church has used the metaphors of the Gospel of John for church fights about the Trinity when in fact they are the metaphors of mysticism of John's Gospel as bespeaking the Christian mystic who has let the image of God become the primary identity of one's being.
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2017
Jesus said, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." In the mysticism of John's Gospel the Image of God upon Jesus being seen was regarded seeing the divine. Why? Because particular seeing cannot be separated from the entire universe of "All seeing." Only in the condition of alienation does one want to pretend that everything is not always already having been and will not always have been seen together. Why parse seeing to individual occasion when a moment cannot be isolated from being wit and, on the Ground of all Being, all of the time. The Gospel words of Jesus reveal the alienated state of trying to pretend an isolated ego state can exist alone on an island of perception.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2017
Being a good shepherd society means that there is an ethic of care for the strong and the fittest to actively take care of the vulnerable. In brute Nature, the survival of the fittest might be the "law of the jungle," but in the community of the Good Shepherd, those with knowledge, wealth and power legitimize their privilege by obeying the Good Shepherd who said "to whom much has been given, much is required." Justify one's knowledge, wealth and power today by being a "good shepherd."
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2017
The Good Shepherd allegory encapsulates three significant "power" positions in our lives. Two of the positions require significant choices. Sheep are metaphors for being vulnerable and needing care and guidance due to the limitation of sheeply nature and knowledge. The role of shepherd and hired hand bespeak power choices. If one has knowledge and wealth, one can use these assets of personal power for one's own advantage to exploit and take advantage of the vulnerable or one can use knowledge and wealth to care for the vulnerable. Each of us know situations in life of being like vulnerable sheep needing care. We don't like to be exploited in our time of need. Each of us has situations of when we have wealth, knowledge and ability to seek our own advantage due to the weakness of others, or we can use our power assets for the care of those in need. In our political life and economic life these power positions are instantiated in actions every day.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2017
Our education systems are filled with tests as we try to quantify knowledge for specific occupational standards. Wisdom may best be understood as knowledge hidden within human activity. The parables, allegories and proverbs of Jesus were discursive practices which hid knowledge within human actions included in a story and the goal was to inspire wise insights and wise actions. The story items instantiated human practice and was geared to becoming in human agency what the insights evoked. Wisdom insights are not measured in "tests" but experienced in human kindness and justice. We have been blessed to meet many people without degrees which proved that they had passed tests but who touched us with kindness beyond measurement.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2017
What about the shepherd/sheep metaphor in Holy Scriptures? Sheep are animals and a shepherd is a human persons. This is a stark distinction in the order of being. When shepherd is used for the divine and sheep is used for human beings, the function of the analogy is to indicate the great gap between the Being of God and human beings. The shepherd/sheep analogy has limitation if one tries to be too literal in analogical application. Some times the purpose of poetic imaginary is to give a glimmering glimpse for endearing insight and not to linger to make every possible empirical outcome of actual sheep/shepherd relationships.
Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2017
The Psalmist pens, "The Lord is my shepherd." Shepherd is used as a metaphor for the God the Great One. The Gospel of John appropriates the metaphor Good Shepherd as fitting of Jesus Christ. As pastorally romantic as the metaphor of shepherd might be on the surface, in reality a shepherd presides over the eventual loss of all of the sheep for sacrificial purposes. Their lives exist for someone higher on the food chain. God as shepherd is the one who presides over the death of every moment in time, a death that is sacrificial for the next moment in time. Such a Cosmic Shepherd is a confession of the permanence of a future that retains the sacrificial traces of all that is pass. The Cosmic Shepherd is the Cosmic Future retaining the traces of us in reconstituted ways such that we continue to believe that we always have a future because of the ache and the ecstasy of interior Hope.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2017
Vegans and vegetarians probably prefer "I am the Vine you are the branches" to "I am the Good Shepherd" because the role of the shepherd is presiding over the eventual sacrifice of the sheep for the life of others. Pruning in horticulture may seem to be "violence" against plant life even though the pruner who talks to her quasi-sentient plants may say, "I am doing this for the general good and it will hurt me more than it will hurt you." A shepherd presiding over "good deaths" in order to provide food for those "higher" on the food chain is not the metaphorical end of most preaching on the Good Shepherd. But it is meaningful to say all past life and the ending of the life of others becomes the sacrificial base of the now and the future. The traces of the sacrifice of people in the past who attain death is in fact the memorial foundation of all that is now and will come. A goal of any life is to attain a good death and we all need shepherds and mentors along the way to help us reach this goal. We may leave this life with the following responses of survivors, "I want to be like him." "I don't want to be like him."
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2017
As human beings we cannot help but take life "personally." We filter experience through our personality. We cannot help but project anthropomorphic interactions between us and everything that is not human. Everything that is happening is much too mysterious for us to really understand negligible causation and so we look at the apparent causation of things that are very close to us and things that happen to us get apprised in various ways: Favorable, Unfavorable, etc. It is hard to separate how something affects us from what we perceived to cause the effect. Mislocation and mistiming may account for the "apparent" cruelness of Nature, as in being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a tornado hits. For the Greeks it was the Fates that had it in for humans in "determining" their conditions. If we as humans tend to anthropomorphize all that is not human, we might assume that the Divine Life has theomorphized everything in stamping degrees of divine likeness upon everything in terms of personality and freedom. Personality and freedom are two "high qualities" of humanity; we anthropomorphize God in saying these two high qualities must have originated in our Superior.
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2017
Something can be always, already and yet still seem to be freshly appearing in the linear, before and after sequence of how people experience history. To say that the Holy Spirit only achieved equal divine status on Pentecost would not be true to divinity. The always, already Spirit only came into human experience in uneven ways over time. The feast of Pentecost was the occasion of accounting for ecstatic uprising of God's omnipresence in marking the lives of the followers of Jesus with invisible but knowable presence using the metaphors of a mighty wind or living water from within. In Jesus, what became clear is that anthropomorphism became a valid way to declare theocentrism as accessible to human experience. In Jesus, one admits God is the best example of what it means to be a "person" and with Jesus, the Personhood of God was embraced with his articulation of his relationship between Father and Holy Spirit. If "personhood" is definitive of human experience, Christians came to believe that "Personhood" proceeded from divinity.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2017
The Gospels sometime prove that it is difficult to build theology for teaching around biblical narratives. When did the Holy Spirit arrive? The Gospel of John indicates that Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon his disciples on Easter, whereas the "general" descent of the Spirit happened on Pentecost. What about the Spirit of God moving over the face of the deep at creation? Was nothing of Spirit left in creation as God's Omnipresence and the trace of divine likeness upon all? One of the problems is that systemic synchronicity is attempted to be represented in linear historical cause and effect narratives. Linear cause and effect narrative does not do justice to the mystery of how mystical poets try to talk about the involvement of God in their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2017
The post-resurrection appearances of Christ gradually diminished to one final appearance of the Ascension. The Ascension is the event of Christ becoming invisible again and returning to a parallel yet present realm of the divine. The Ascension highlights the "glorification" of Christ in the heavenly realm even as this glorification was instantiated in the success of the mystical appearances of Christ becoming evident to more and more people. A glorification of Christ somewhere must have been the reason that the fame of Christ on earth was spreading.
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2017
Since John's Gospel is the last Gospel to come to writing, one can assume the last editor witness the significant effect of the Jesus Movement. Great after-effects create the notion of Providence, a sense of everything unfolded in such winsome ways that it became easy for the Gospel writer to declare providence. Biblical writer have providential outcomes for both great good and evil. For evil, the writers wrote about the anti-Christ and the Beast, seeming to make such infamy as inevitable in a divine plan. The Christ-effects within the Roman world came to be regarded as the elevation of Jesus into God's glory. The mutual divine esteem in the Trinity is called "glory" and this glory spilled into the experience of the energized early church. The language of "glory" is how the church accounted for the mystery of the success of the church.
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2017
The Johannine church wrote the oracle prayer of Jesus to his Father to promote "oneness" with God the Father as central to their message. John's Gospel writer writes that Jesus is the eternal Word of God, his words are spirit and life and they are words from his Father that are able to give and create this eternal life within his disciples. In John's mysticism, the shared family likeness with God is profound. Jesus said, "If you have seen me you have seen the Father" and Jesus prayed that his disciple would "be one with the Father even as he was one with the Father." The end of the mystagogy of John's Gospel is this: Don't be separated from God; be "one" with God in bearing the family likeness of the creator.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2017
In the prayer of Jesus in John's Gospel, Jesus asked to be glorified to return to his state of existence before the beginning of the world. That state, according to John's Gospel, was being the Word of God from the beginning. So the departure of the particular historical Jesus meant that he would return to the place of being WORD=GOD or the realm of the possibilisms of all things. Philosophically this would be a contrast between actual existence and All Possible Existences. If there is no actual word product then one does not know about the realm of all possible word products. One wonders if the writer of the Gospel of John was such a linguistic constructivist as to use this kind of philosophical speculation/meditation in the presentation of Jesus Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2017
In John's Gospel, God is the Word made flesh in Christ. Jesus said that his words were "spirit and life." We have quite some equivalencies in John: Word=God=Jesus Christ=Spirit=Life. And we have word products in John's Gospel, the writing about the words of Jesus which appear in rather long discourses and in the longest prayer of Jesus found in John 17, which is in fact the "real" Lord's Prayer since the other one was actually the Disciples' Prayer. John's Gospel is the most revealing about the nature of word and essentially instantiates that if anything is then it is because of being in language. Heidegger called language the house of Being and yet he needed to use language to indicate that completely reflexive statement about Language itself. In the Gospel of John word is used to establish word as what word establishes what word is and will be in it manifold discursive ways. Once one moves from discursive mode of word use back to the fact that one is using word, then discursive mode immediately is deconstructed. Time may imply a sequence in experience but the operation of word is coexistent with Time which in fact word creates in human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2017
Christian theology is a narrative version of the Great Chain of Being. One assumes that God as "none greater than can be conceived" is so rarefied as to be incomprehensible and we assume a translation of non-human divine life into the language of human experience. And what is most translatable? Humans have words. So the highest human metaphor for God is Word from the beginning of human experience and Word being God. God is emptied into Word and Word is emptied into particular human experience in the life of Jesus who exemplifies that even though we live in the prison of anthropocentrism we accept our prison because we believe God emptied the divine self into human terms as we presume to accept human experience as a valid way to know about the non-human being of God. So God takes a journey downward into Word, into the person of Jesus who plumbs the depth of human experience, including death, but not just death, but below death to the abode of the dead. And then God takes a journey upwards to rise again, ascend and then return to an exalted glory. All of this is done on the invisible background of the omnipresent Spirit the conducting Essence of mutual relationship that has always already been. And all of the above has been words about other words about other words since words reflexively refer to themselves even while we see rise within the world of words things like ego states of continuing identity and the rising of the human ability to name God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2017
There occurs religious language narrative for conducting experience between realms of "natural" existence and "heavenly" existence. We encounter a ladder from heaven, assumptions and the unique ascension of Jesus Christ. There are community narratives of the mystery of inter-realm communication and travel signifying a messaging system between the invisible realm and the visible realm. All of this takes place because we have words and word nuance the setting, the mood, the explanation and the very visionary seeing of interspatial communication. Words are invisible and they even create the "as if" of materiality since by words we name materiality. In biblical words Jesus is the one who ascended to another realm and he is also the ladder on which others can ascend and descend, even the angels or God's messengers (words themselves are messengers). When it comes to Jesus, as to any experience, one must not limit the kinds of discursive responses which can have meaningful insights.
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2017
One might say that Christianity became the triumph of Hellenistic philosophy over its Hebraic roots. Since Alexander the Great and the spread of Greek culture throughout the world, the superiority of what had happened in ancient Greece was distilled throughout the known world. When the Temple was destroyed the regrouped synagogue communities tried to "rid" Hellenistic influences from their Scripture, meaning that the books of the Apocrypha were excluded from their canon. The presentation of St. Paul on Mars Hill engaging the Stoics and the Epicureans is indicative of the synthesis between the Hebraic roots of Jesus and what the Risen Christ would become when the meaning of his life would be explicated using the philosophical metaphors of Greek philosophy. One could say that even though the Council of Nicaea seems to be a triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, it was also a triumph for Plato and Aristotle because the categories of Greek philosophy were used to "explain" the Trinity. The message of Christ certainly does baptize and Christianize cultural practices in its evangelizing wake, but the reverse happens as well, Christianity has become Hellenized, scholasticized, Enlightenized, modernized and now post-modernized. Mutual conversion can happen without the message of the Risen Christ about love and justice being lost.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2017
Living and moving and having being in God in the dynamic mode might be restated as "living and moving and have one's becoming in God, who is also the Omni-Becomer, who becomes, not as the sign of the imperfection of not yet being "complete" but as One who is Freedom who permits lesser free entities to contribute to that actual outcomes of future becoming. This view is compatible with a Big Bang creation and expanding guided becoming of the way things are and permitting genuine freedom. This gives the most cogent response to the theodicy problem of innocent suffering and allows God to be "weak" in not overriding genuine freedom to protect the moral integrity of the realm of human experience that is manifest in being beings who use language. This view avoids the deeply mechanistic view of a perfect God who has determined fatalistically a final outcome which would totally contradict the perfection of Freedom ever ceasing to have a static state of being. How could one view perfection as a static freeze frame state of cosmic harmony? Such a fossil may be good for a final museum but not true to the blessed and exciting dynamism of perfect freely becoming life.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2017
When in Athens do as the Athenians do. This was Paul's method of evangelism presented in the Acts of the Apostles when he quoted a Greek poet who wrote, "We are "his" offspring," referring to humanity being children of deity. That Paul was trying to make connections with traditions of ancient Greek and not just the Hebrew Scripture is an indication of his apologetic efforts to explain the faith of Jesus in varying contexts. People with "interpretation limitations" seal themselves off from all of the language products available in the experience of all humanity and pretend that their "exclusive" interpretations about Jesus cannot and do not have connection with the fullness human language experience. If one is not willing to let one's faith raft be afloat upon the entire ocean of every possible human linguistic product, then one does not really practice the universality, "catholicity" of one's beliefs.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2017
Jesus said, "I will not leave you orphaned." This seems to be place Jesus is the role of a foster parent or guardian for his disciple friends. Is this akin to the adjustment a baby has to make to leave the maternal body, to lose contact with the maternal body, to lose sight and sound connection with mother or another caregiver? How does a baby get weaned from the traces of maternal presence except to become confident that she has the maternal spirit being expressed through herself knowing the inner advocacy of her own divine likeness. Jesus is trying to teach the disciple that the loss of external presence is to result in the gain of being forced to experience profound inner advocacy.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2017
Being in the family of God is an important metaphor for the mysticism of the Gospel of John. Belief means having the power/authority (birth certificate) to be a child of God. One is born by water and the Spirit to realize one's membership in the family of God. And one is not left an orphan even when Daddy or big brother Jesus cannot be seen because the life of God the Spirit, the Advocate is the image of God through each family member. Daddy has a big house and a dwelling place forever for each child and Jesus came to remind the children of Adam and Eve that they are also children of God. And what is the rule and the commandment of God's family? Love.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2017
Jesus said, "I will not leave you orphaned." Was Jesus a parent who died or left this earth with children? St. Paul referred to Greek poets who said that we are God's offspring. The Gospel of John is about Jesus coming into a world that did not know that people were valued "children" of God. Sometimes we focus so much upon the "sole" sonship of Jesus as Son of God, we forget that the Sonship of Jesus was the particular reminder of the general reality of all people being children of God. Jesus came to say, "You are not an orphan, you never were an orphan and resist anything that would give you the disinformation about you not being a child of God." Knowing the image of God upon one's life is the Gospel of John.
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2017
According to the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul accepted the description of one of the poet for the human situation, "We live and move and have our being in God." In this model everyone and everything is "interior" to God. There is nothing "exterior" to God and so the divine being has no environment except the "divine Self" in a future state, a state that is expanding to acknowledge the genuine freedom which adds to a future not yet known as actual. Understanding God to be "vulnerable" to real freedom is perfectly expressed in Christ as the self-emptied divine into human experience even death on the cross. This expresses the fullness of God's vulnerability to the permitted freedom in the order of things. It is not conception of a weak God but of a profoundly superior God without rival in being Love, a Love inspiring us all to use our freedom rightly toward love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2017
"If you ask anything in my name, I will do it." World peace? Everyone fed? Cancer cured? We have asked for lots of things in the name of Jesus and things do not seem to have gotten done. It could be that "doing it" means that Jesus is asking with us continuously for good things as an expression of children of God who have child-like relationships with God to ask. What we cannot ask is that the nature of God as pure Freedom, sharing freedom, be overcome. Within the limitations of freedom, we have the freedom to ask for anything that comports with goodness and health and in asking we know that the Christ-nature within us is doing it. It is enough to know that we are being "asked through" for the well-being of the world, as long as we also are making ourselves available to become the quickest answer to most of our prayers.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2107
The body of a mother is the first house of every human being. But the babe before and after birth attains a place in the "heart house" of mom too. The metaphor of each perceiving being as a house of traces of perception is insightful for the mutual inner and memorial retention we have of each other. Analogically, we move to a great Perceiver who has retained and given a memorial place, a dwelling place within the great House of the "Body of God" as a Place of places wherein everyone and everything can dwell. The metaphor of a Father's House/Mother's House/Parent's House as containing dwelling places for us all is insightful regarding a divine holy family of God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2017
Jesus is quoted as saying about his Father: "In my Father's house are many dwelling places..." If we live and move and have our being in God, it would mean that coming into the world gives each person a dwelling place within the perceptual interior of God. Homelessness, having no dwelling place in this world is an abject condition; having no dwelling place in God would mean that we are not valued enough to be remembered by having a place in God's interior life. Jesus promised his disciples that they had a dwelling place prepared for them in God's house and that house is perpetually expanding as it surpasses itself in future states with many additions as each person attains a dwelling place in the One with the greatest memory of all, a memory so great as to be able to continuously re-constitute a continuing identity of each person passing through successive states of becoming.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2017
The Gospel of John is about the "Christ-traces" found in the community which was responsible for its writing. It is a mosaic of "traces" presented in ways that could inculcate the kinds of values and understandings that the mystics of the Johannine community used for the formation of their members. It is an apology for the Christ-identity of the community of those who saw the Gospel of John as their constitution.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2017
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus promised that his disciples would do greater works than he had done, because he was going to the Father. Let's see, that means healings, walking on water, resurrections, water to wine, opening the eyes of the blind should be an every day occurrence in the church. Or could greater works refer to the fact that the absence of Jesus' physical presence meant that the presence of the Risen Christ would be born into the lives of so many people that greater works would be accomplished because of what was regained in the presence of Jesus was a recovery of the "original" omnipresence of God from creation? In John's Gospel, the main work is "believing." And if a million people are believing after Jesus is gone, instead of a few handful of followers while he lived on earth, then the sheer quantity of believers is a much "greater works." It is useful to note the difference in the use of the notion of "works" and "signs" in John's Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2017
Jesus said, "“I am the way, and the truth, and the life." These words referred to the familial truth regarding Jesus. John's Gospel said we are given authority/status to know ourselves as children of God. Jesus is the way to understand God as heavenly parent. Jesus is the honest truth about bearing the image of God our heavenly parent. Jesus is the life of the Spirit, the essence of our divine likeness. Historically, the church has used the metaphors of the Gospel of John for church fights about the Trinity when in fact they are the metaphors of mysticism of John's Gospel as bespeaking the Christian mystic who has let the image of God become the primary identity of one's being.
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2017
Jesus said, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." In the mysticism of John's Gospel the Image of God upon Jesus being seen was regarded seeing the divine. Why? Because particular seeing cannot be separated from the entire universe of "All seeing." Only in the condition of alienation does one want to pretend that everything is not always already having been and will not always have been seen together. Why parse seeing to individual occasion when a moment cannot be isolated from being wit and, on the Ground of all Being, all of the time. The Gospel words of Jesus reveal the alienated state of trying to pretend an isolated ego state can exist alone on an island of perception.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2017
Being a good shepherd society means that there is an ethic of care for the strong and the fittest to actively take care of the vulnerable. In brute Nature, the survival of the fittest might be the "law of the jungle," but in the community of the Good Shepherd, those with knowledge, wealth and power legitimize their privilege by obeying the Good Shepherd who said "to whom much has been given, much is required." Justify one's knowledge, wealth and power today by being a "good shepherd."
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2017
The Good Shepherd allegory encapsulates three significant "power" positions in our lives. Two of the positions require significant choices. Sheep are metaphors for being vulnerable and needing care and guidance due to the limitation of sheeply nature and knowledge. The role of shepherd and hired hand bespeak power choices. If one has knowledge and wealth, one can use these assets of personal power for one's own advantage to exploit and take advantage of the vulnerable or one can use knowledge and wealth to care for the vulnerable. Each of us know situations in life of being like vulnerable sheep needing care. We don't like to be exploited in our time of need. Each of us has situations of when we have wealth, knowledge and ability to seek our own advantage due to the weakness of others, or we can use our power assets for the care of those in need. In our political life and economic life these power positions are instantiated in actions every day.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2017
Our education systems are filled with tests as we try to quantify knowledge for specific occupational standards. Wisdom may best be understood as knowledge hidden within human activity. The parables, allegories and proverbs of Jesus were discursive practices which hid knowledge within human actions included in a story and the goal was to inspire wise insights and wise actions. The story items instantiated human practice and was geared to becoming in human agency what the insights evoked. Wisdom insights are not measured in "tests" but experienced in human kindness and justice. We have been blessed to meet many people without degrees which proved that they had passed tests but who touched us with kindness beyond measurement.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2017
What about the shepherd/sheep metaphor in Holy Scriptures? Sheep are animals and a shepherd is a human persons. This is a stark distinction in the order of being. When shepherd is used for the divine and sheep is used for human beings, the function of the analogy is to indicate the great gap between the Being of God and human beings. The shepherd/sheep analogy has limitation if one tries to be too literal in analogical application. Some times the purpose of poetic imaginary is to give a glimmering glimpse for endearing insight and not to linger to make every possible empirical outcome of actual sheep/shepherd relationships.
Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2017
The Psalmist pens, "The Lord is my shepherd." Shepherd is used as a metaphor for the God the Great One. The Gospel of John appropriates the metaphor Good Shepherd as fitting of Jesus Christ. As pastorally romantic as the metaphor of shepherd might be on the surface, in reality a shepherd presides over the eventual loss of all of the sheep for sacrificial purposes. Their lives exist for someone higher on the food chain. God as shepherd is the one who presides over the death of every moment in time, a death that is sacrificial for the next moment in time. Such a Cosmic Shepherd is a confession of the permanence of a future that retains the sacrificial traces of all that is pass. The Cosmic Shepherd is the Cosmic Future retaining the traces of us in reconstituted ways such that we continue to believe that we always have a future because of the ache and the ecstasy of interior Hope.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2017
Vegans and vegetarians probably prefer "I am the Vine you are the branches" to "I am the Good Shepherd" because the role of the shepherd is presiding over the eventual sacrifice of the sheep for the life of others. Pruning in horticulture may seem to be "violence" against plant life even though the pruner who talks to her quasi-sentient plants may say, "I am doing this for the general good and it will hurt me more than it will hurt you." A shepherd presiding over "good deaths" in order to provide food for those "higher" on the food chain is not the metaphorical end of most preaching on the Good Shepherd. But it is meaningful to say all past life and the ending of the life of others becomes the sacrificial base of the now and the future. The traces of the sacrifice of people in the past who attain death is in fact the memorial foundation of all that is now and will come. A goal of any life is to attain a good death and we all need shepherds and mentors along the way to help us reach this goal. We may leave this life with the following responses of survivors, "I want to be like him." "I don't want to be like him."
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2017
We sometimes forget the logical outcome of the sheep in the Good Shepherd metaphor in John's Gospel. The metaphor derives from a carnivorous culture. Indeed the shepherd takes care of sheep not because they are favored "pets" destined to die natural deaths which are mourned and remembered with burial chambers for their remains; sheep are products. While they live they can provide wool and milk but they are destined to be sacrificed for the life of the human community. We don't often highlight the notion of the Good Shepherd presiding over a flock to be sacrificed for others. An alternate meaning of Good Shepherd would be the one who presides over the eventual sacrifice of the lives of the sheep for others. In human terms, we need shepherds to guide us to "good deaths for others" in the sense that we should live our lives sacrificially for those who will come after us proving that we do not exist just for "now" but for the continuance of quality of life for others in the future.
