Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2018
If a metaphor for the Eternal Christ is the Word being with God and being God, then our religious life is about finding the "signature" of the divine within the events of our lives. How are we at reading the divine authorship behind, under and within the events of our lives and the life of the world. The most awesome Signature of the Divine is called Freedom. The answer to almost any question is that Freedom permits it to come to be. But Freedom is so conforming, like the strength of flowing water around all objects; It can receive impressions and yet be much stronger than what it surrounds.
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2018
If human life as we know it occurs because it is created by Word, then we hope that the Author of such creation leaves a divine signature upon creation so that the sentient language users might be able to recognize the Playwright of their lives. Signs of the Playwright authorial status appear in the script of life where genuine freedom allows lots of ad libbing to be going on and when ad libbing threatens to ruin the preferred ending corrective signs or cues are given to get the "play" going in the right direction again.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2018
Events in history that represent significant change or turning points might be called milestones. In the Gospel of John, such turning points might be called signs. A sign identifies or places meaning on a event. When Jesus cleansed the Temple from the institutional commercialism, he was asked for a sign. He responded enigmatically that his body was the Temple that would be destroyed and restored in three day. Truly the cross of Jesus has become an historical sign.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2018
If the Bible is indeed a book for all humanity, those who use the Bible need to find a permissive place in the Bible for all humanity. Paul looked to the pre-Jewish Abraham to articulate the kind of faith the Gentiles could have without having the benefit of the traditions of the Mosaic Law. Paul found the Hebrew Scripture permissive for the kind of faith Gentile Christians were living out. If Scripture includes the phrase, "God is love," then it is a permissive and inviting book for everyone even if all the cultural details of the Bible are not universally applicable to all cultures.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2018
Tradition is a word that we use to speak about the words which have come to constitute our self-identities. We take on our traditions in passive ways because we don't have a choice for the situations that we are born into. Becoming an adult means the expression of greater freedom of choice in actively selecting, developing and participating within the traditions of identity in our lives. The Holy Scriptures provide the salvation history of many faith traditions that have used them to form their community identity.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2018
One might understand textual dynamics of the Gospel using concentric circles. The Gospel writers would be in the outer circle as final editors of story and traditions. They were already practitioners of traditions which they were teaching and passing on and so they told the story of the life of Jesus as a parable to instantiate and give authority to their church practices. Anything that originated in Jesus had authority. The stories about Jesus would be represented as a circle within the greater circle of the Gospel writers. And then the "parables" of Jesus would be a further interior circle. Subsequent church traditions have added other rings representing the editorial selection of inherited tradition to support the needs and the practices of the Christian community at any given time. Jesus told the parable about a Good Samaritan as though he were really a person who existed even though he was artistic invention for teaching purpose. The Gospel writers told parables of Jesus as artistic invention to illustrate and inculcate the liturgy, spirituality and values of the practice within their community. The difference between the Good Samaritan and Jesus in levels of story telling is that Jesus really existed as specific person and the Good Samaritan did not. Parables can be about fictional people and about actual people and both be "true" in the sense that they are honest to message of the story teller and the mode of telling.
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2018
Belief and confession can be held wrongly or incompletely. When Peter confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the ironic response from Jesus was both "flesh and blood did not reveal this to you," and "get behind me Satan." Peter wanted his messiah to be the superhero kingly bouncer of the universe. He did not understand how God's strength could be found in the suffering Jesus on the cross. And who could blame him? This Gospel vignette highlights the division regarding Jesus. The "human or natural" understanding was that a Messiah could not suffer the indignity of death on a cross. The divine understanding, i.e., that of the early church was that the cross and resurrection combination defined messiahship for Christians.
Aphorism of Day, February 21, 2018
The research of family trees is called genealogy. We are curious about where we came from. The New Testament, in part, is a genealogy of faith, belief and practice because the New Testament writers use the Hebrew Scriptures as a study in the genealogy of Christian ideas. Gospel, messiah, holy spirit, Son of God, Son of Man, suffering servant and much more had their roots in Hebrew Scripture. But all of these notions mean something completely different to the tradition of Judaism that was retained in the synagogue and did not convert to the Christian paradigm which redefined the meaning of Hebrew Scriptural notions in their innovations. Christians and Jews are people who are divided by having a common Hebrew Scriptures due to the fact that Christians have given the Hebrew Scripture a complete "make over."
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2018
Juridical practice, in part, is based upon the compilation of case law in what is called "precedence." This practice is the appeal to past practice of decisions in case law as a basis for determining present decisions. Precedence is how human community expresses continuity with past in establishing the authority for belief and practice in the new situations now. The writers of the books of the New Testament used the Hebrew Scriptures as "precedence" for establishing why they believed that Jesus of Nazareth and his followers, and even the devotees in the Gentile peoples, were in valid continuity with Hebrew Scripture traditions. Historically, one might say that the Jews who remained in the synagogue traditions of Judaism maintain a different "continuity" than did the Christian expositors. The differences in the use of the Hebrew Scriptures as "precedence" for current and future faith practice reveals ingredients of two different faith paradigms. Gentile Christianity represented the call and the evangelistic effort to make the faith tradition as universally accessible as possible and St. Paul used the Pre-Jewish Abrahamic (father of faith for many nations) covenant as the way to write new faith precedence into the traditions derived from Hebrew Scriptures.
Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2018
The New Testament is an "apology" for why Christians can consider themselves to be valid heirs of the Hebrew Scriptures even when the churches mainly became Gentiles in composition who were not required to follow the ritual purity codes of Judaism.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18,2018
Temptation and sin are mainly about timing and mistiming of what we do and say in our lives. When and what we do and say and how many times that we do and say something sum up the stewardship in our we articulate the energy of desire in our lives. Mistiming occurs because we fail to delay gratification for the benefit of our better selves and our community. Just as sports teams have training camps to work on their timing, the church has the annual season of Lent for us to look at together the timing and mistiming of what we do and say. We need this review to assess where the timing of what we say is askew with good stewardship for our personal lives, the lives of our immediate communities and the life of the world.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2018
If the events and circumstances of our lives are the "tea leaves" that we are reading to find meaning and purpose in our lives, there are lots of "tea leaves" to read onto which we project the meanings that are hidden but appear on the screen of our life events to give them an exteriority and become more obvious "handwriting on the wall." In our reading of the meaning of the events of our lives, we still have to interpret and we interpret based upon the models of interpretation that we have used to inform our lives. The Bible is a book that is full of interpretations about the meaning of events in the lives of the people whose words are recorded in the contexts of their life experiences. There is such a vast variety of biblical meanings, even contradictory because they represent the stark contrast between hope's vision of utopia and the "actual conditions" on the ground. The Plenitude of God is presented as the entire environment of Fate on which humans live and commit acts of language to represent diverse meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2018
One could call the church a para-liturgical entity, in that there are practices which arise within contexts and gain spatio-temporal manifestation in praxis and over time the praxis remains in liturgy when the originating "start up" intention is lost, forgotten and no longer accessible. Lent is a season which has accrued much in different times and places and ingredients of its recurring traces have lost their general relevance in the church, e.g., the catechumenate, except in places which deliberately have tried to retain it. Lent and the history of Lenten practice is a living body of resources and our space-time practice can add to its body of resources. Treat the season of Lent as a vital living resource that has no one perfect practice or practitioner. Try on some Lenten practices for yourself to make it fit your situation, now.
Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2018
In biblical numerology, 40 is the time of test and ordeal. The season of Lent is an annual presentation of the acknowledgement of the "ordeal with a purpose." It is based upon being called by God and being a disciple, a student, in the school of God. The ordeal with a person includes the faith to believe that the circumstances of one's life can be the curriculum which includes the teaching purposes of God towards excellence. The ordeal is the acknowledgement that life is often struggle and delayed gratification to achieve even the good things that one desires. Faith in the purposes of God being projected on the screens of our circumstances means that we are always looking for the messages of God for our betterment.
Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2018
Ash Wednesday: Fast forward the life of your body life into an icon of one of the states of it being broken down and dissipated and bear the marks of ashes on your forehead. Ponder that all the king's horses and all king's men could not put the broken Humpty Dumpty together again. Hope against hope that Someone can reconstitute you as a body-soul-spirit unity again.
Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2018
The Bible is the artistic literature of spiritual identity and it gave birth to theology as the queen of sciences until she was dethroned by modern science birthed in the Enlightenment. Those who did not want their queen dethroned had some choices to make: to make the continuing case for the sublime discourse of spiritual transformation or to defend biblical texts as empirically verifiable science and equal to modern historicism. Those who did the later went the way of "fundamentalism." Others were less intimidated by science because they are honest to the discursive difference of spiritual discourse versus scientific discourse. They are equal but different discourses with different goals and different resulting praxis. Those whose moral and spiritual lives are changed by spiritual discursive practice can still be brute fact scientists, just as a scientist can weep in the aesthetic sublime of musical and artistic performance. To confuse discursive practices and the inability to embrace language users as multi-discursive beings has been the curse of "fundamentalism."
Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2018
If every sub-atomic particle has its own development and process then what is the effect of belonging to the community of particles that form the visible entities which we come to name. In the community of particles which make up a human person, the particles which we call the will or volition still does not have complete control over all of the particles which make up the human being. When enough particles seem to conspire to effect the demise of the person the human will is brought to its helplessness. Are all of the particles of a human being constantly in process? But are they in process en masse to be a recognizable entity? In a sea of process what can preserve the collectivity of particles which we have come to call the human person as a body, soul, spirit entity?
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2018
The Christ who was transfigured is also the Christ whose "light" apparently went out in his forsaken state of death. But did light go out? The resurrection appearances of Christ meant that his Being was lit up again. The importance of the transfiguration is to believe in the midst of the chances and changes of life that hope resides as the light of the process of metamorphosis which describes the conditions of freedom and the passing of time.
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2018
We may have favorite experiences which the passing of time does not let us hang onto. Peter enjoyed the event of the Transfiguration; it was such a spiritual high that he wanted to build tents to dwell there. He had to go down the mountain to his own betrayal of Jesus whose states of suffering and death on the cross were quite in contrast to the transfigured Jesus on the mountain. Egg, pupa, cocoon, butterfly; which state of metamorphosis do you prefer? Your preference is irrelevant to the passage of time which give them all equal reality. We are always already going through metamorphosis and we may prefer a particular "climactic" event of enlightenment even while we must admit that its difference resides in the serial of the other phases of being in the cycle of metamorphosis. Can we learn to be content with all of the phases of metamorphosis in our personal and institutional lives? Things coming to pass is the chief reality of the life of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2018
Transfiguration or the Metamorphosis of the face of Jesus for his disciples on the Mountain highlights a phase in the lift of Jesus in being manifest in a special way to a select group. Peter, James and John had Jesus become manifest to them; the account of the same shared widely is the collateral effect which allows the Epiphany to become the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. The nature of something coming to language and writing means that it becomes accessible for all to be eligible for the manifestation of Christ to each person. The written literary art of the Gospel is what universalizes the manifestation of Christ. Christianity became "universal" because it was launched in the art of language because particular discourse assumes the existence of all discourse.
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2018
Electric lights have been one of the great inventions of the world. They are important because they come to their importance in darkness. The transfiguration present Jesus as the Light of world in the contrasting world of darkness about the universal availability of God. Jesus taught the world that if one is a user of language one can add the name of God to one's vocabulary as a valid and meaning discourse of totality. Just as the sun is available to all of the diversity of creation, so too is the divine accessible to all. This is meaning of Jesus as Light; the accessibility of God to all who use language.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2018
The transfiguration might be seen as the "confirmation" of Jesus. The confirmation involved the voice of God the Father saying "This is my Son." Earlier the voice of Father had said to Jesus at his baptism, "You are my Son." The confirmation is not for Jesus; it was the disciples who were having the identity of Jesus "confirmed" for them. This expression also echoes the Royal messianic poetry of the Psalmist who probably was lauding the "divine" right of the King by writing, "You are my son; today I have begotten thee." Was David a Messiah before he was anointed by Samuel? Are we what we have become before we become what we are? Was the tree a tree when it was a seed? The passage of time confirms for self and others identities.
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2018
Why did Elijah and Moses appear on the Mount of the Transfiguration? Why not King David since he was the most "proto-typical" representative of messiahship? Elijah did not experience death; he rode to heaven on a chariot of fire and Moses had an "irregular" death such that he, Elijah and Enoch became figures in the apocalyptic genre of literatures. It is as though they were "liminal" figures between the after life and life and as such liminal travelers they could be witnesses from former paradigms in the Hebraic/Judaic traditions to affirm the new paradigm that was beginning in Jesus Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2018
The event of the transfiguration is not found in the Gospel of John but the most uses of "light" as a metaphor for Christ and the work of Christ are found in John's Gospel. The churches theology of light is coupled with the comparison and surpassing of Moses by Christ in the transfiguration story. In the diversity of the life of Jesus something within him could make his face a filament showing light. His face could be turned on and off based upon the perceptual luck of favored viewers. In the human spiritual psychology of the New Testament the spirit essence of a person recreated by Holy Spirit essence of God becomes the Electric Power to "light" up our minds and brighten our faces as we seek to live as transfigured beings.
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2018
The Gospels include expansive statements which are hyperbole but which express the theology of the early church, as when the disciples came and said to Jesus, "Everyone is searching for you." That was not literally true in any original conceivable context; in the context it was shorthand for saying "an uncanny amount of people are interested in Jesus." But it was also the story form of the theology of Paul and the early church who believed that everyone was seeking for the Christ nature within the self and others as the fulfillment in articulating the image of God on each person's life.
Aphorism of Day, February 3, 2018
St. Paul: "I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some." The method of evangelism represents the conversion of St. Paul. He went from being a persecutor of the followers of Christ to become the apostle for the inclusion of the Gentiles in the community Christ. He believed that those who did not follow the purity rituals could still have the main qualification of being a child of God, namely, the evidence of the Holy Spirit. External religious practice did not make one holy; the inside job of the Holy Spirit did. For Paul, lots of things became negotiable matters of person taste and cultural differences while the main issue was the presence of the Spirit evident in the manifestations of the fruits of the Spirit. People who manifest the fruits of the Spirit find a way to get along with each other because that is the nature of the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2018
With more than 20,000 deaths from overdoses in the U.S., it behooves us not to think of our medicine as too highly superior to the "folk medicine" present in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus was more like a shamanic healer who did a guided "inside" job on people whose health involved bringing the insides and outsides of a person into a state of equilibrium. Health is more than achieving "temporary cures on the way to our deaths." Health is an embracing Salvation that includes the visions of an eschatological faith placebo of life after life in order inspire abundant life, abundant healthy living, in this present life.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2018
If a metaphor for the Eternal Christ is the Word being with God and being God, then our religious life is about finding the "signature" of the divine within the events of our lives. How are we at reading the divine authorship behind, under and within the events of our lives and the life of the world. The most awesome Signature of the Divine is called Freedom. The answer to almost any question is that Freedom permits it to come to be. But Freedom is so conforming, like the strength of flowing water around all objects; It can receive impressions and yet be much stronger than what it surrounds.
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2018
If human life as we know it occurs because it is created by Word, then we hope that the Author of such creation leaves a divine signature upon creation so that the sentient language users might be able to recognize the Playwright of their lives. Signs of the Playwright authorial status appear in the script of life where genuine freedom allows lots of ad libbing to be going on and when ad libbing threatens to ruin the preferred ending corrective signs or cues are given to get the "play" going in the right direction again.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2018
Events in history that represent significant change or turning points might be called milestones. In the Gospel of John, such turning points might be called signs. A sign identifies or places meaning on a event. When Jesus cleansed the Temple from the institutional commercialism, he was asked for a sign. He responded enigmatically that his body was the Temple that would be destroyed and restored in three day. Truly the cross of Jesus has become an historical sign.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2018
If the Bible is indeed a book for all humanity, those who use the Bible need to find a permissive place in the Bible for all humanity. Paul looked to the pre-Jewish Abraham to articulate the kind of faith the Gentiles could have without having the benefit of the traditions of the Mosaic Law. Paul found the Hebrew Scripture permissive for the kind of faith Gentile Christians were living out. If Scripture includes the phrase, "God is love," then it is a permissive and inviting book for everyone even if all the cultural details of the Bible are not universally applicable to all cultures.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2018
Tradition is a word that we use to speak about the words which have come to constitute our self-identities. We take on our traditions in passive ways because we don't have a choice for the situations that we are born into. Becoming an adult means the expression of greater freedom of choice in actively selecting, developing and participating within the traditions of identity in our lives. The Holy Scriptures provide the salvation history of many faith traditions that have used them to form their community identity.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2018
One might understand textual dynamics of the Gospel using concentric circles. The Gospel writers would be in the outer circle as final editors of story and traditions. They were already practitioners of traditions which they were teaching and passing on and so they told the story of the life of Jesus as a parable to instantiate and give authority to their church practices. Anything that originated in Jesus had authority. The stories about Jesus would be represented as a circle within the greater circle of the Gospel writers. And then the "parables" of Jesus would be a further interior circle. Subsequent church traditions have added other rings representing the editorial selection of inherited tradition to support the needs and the practices of the Christian community at any given time. Jesus told the parable about a Good Samaritan as though he were really a person who existed even though he was artistic invention for teaching purpose. The Gospel writers told parables of Jesus as artistic invention to illustrate and inculcate the liturgy, spirituality and values of the practice within their community. The difference between the Good Samaritan and Jesus in levels of story telling is that Jesus really existed as specific person and the Good Samaritan did not. Parables can be about fictional people and about actual people and both be "true" in the sense that they are honest to message of the story teller and the mode of telling.
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2018
Belief and confession can be held wrongly or incompletely. When Peter confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the ironic response from Jesus was both "flesh and blood did not reveal this to you," and "get behind me Satan." Peter wanted his messiah to be the superhero kingly bouncer of the universe. He did not understand how God's strength could be found in the suffering Jesus on the cross. And who could blame him? This Gospel vignette highlights the division regarding Jesus. The "human or natural" understanding was that a Messiah could not suffer the indignity of death on a cross. The divine understanding, i.e., that of the early church was that the cross and resurrection combination defined messiahship for Christians.
Aphorism of Day, February 21, 2018
The research of family trees is called genealogy. We are curious about where we came from. The New Testament, in part, is a genealogy of faith, belief and practice because the New Testament writers use the Hebrew Scriptures as a study in the genealogy of Christian ideas. Gospel, messiah, holy spirit, Son of God, Son of Man, suffering servant and much more had their roots in Hebrew Scripture. But all of these notions mean something completely different to the tradition of Judaism that was retained in the synagogue and did not convert to the Christian paradigm which redefined the meaning of Hebrew Scriptural notions in their innovations. Christians and Jews are people who are divided by having a common Hebrew Scriptures due to the fact that Christians have given the Hebrew Scripture a complete "make over."
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2018
Juridical practice, in part, is based upon the compilation of case law in what is called "precedence." This practice is the appeal to past practice of decisions in case law as a basis for determining present decisions. Precedence is how human community expresses continuity with past in establishing the authority for belief and practice in the new situations now. The writers of the books of the New Testament used the Hebrew Scriptures as "precedence" for establishing why they believed that Jesus of Nazareth and his followers, and even the devotees in the Gentile peoples, were in valid continuity with Hebrew Scripture traditions. Historically, one might say that the Jews who remained in the synagogue traditions of Judaism maintain a different "continuity" than did the Christian expositors. The differences in the use of the Hebrew Scriptures as "precedence" for current and future faith practice reveals ingredients of two different faith paradigms. Gentile Christianity represented the call and the evangelistic effort to make the faith tradition as universally accessible as possible and St. Paul used the Pre-Jewish Abrahamic (father of faith for many nations) covenant as the way to write new faith precedence into the traditions derived from Hebrew Scriptures.
Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2018
The New Testament is an "apology" for why Christians can consider themselves to be valid heirs of the Hebrew Scriptures even when the churches mainly became Gentiles in composition who were not required to follow the ritual purity codes of Judaism.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18,2018
Temptation and sin are mainly about timing and mistiming of what we do and say in our lives. When and what we do and say and how many times that we do and say something sum up the stewardship in our we articulate the energy of desire in our lives. Mistiming occurs because we fail to delay gratification for the benefit of our better selves and our community. Just as sports teams have training camps to work on their timing, the church has the annual season of Lent for us to look at together the timing and mistiming of what we do and say. We need this review to assess where the timing of what we say is askew with good stewardship for our personal lives, the lives of our immediate communities and the life of the world.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2018
If the events and circumstances of our lives are the "tea leaves" that we are reading to find meaning and purpose in our lives, there are lots of "tea leaves" to read onto which we project the meanings that are hidden but appear on the screen of our life events to give them an exteriority and become more obvious "handwriting on the wall." In our reading of the meaning of the events of our lives, we still have to interpret and we interpret based upon the models of interpretation that we have used to inform our lives. The Bible is a book that is full of interpretations about the meaning of events in the lives of the people whose words are recorded in the contexts of their life experiences. There is such a vast variety of biblical meanings, even contradictory because they represent the stark contrast between hope's vision of utopia and the "actual conditions" on the ground. The Plenitude of God is presented as the entire environment of Fate on which humans live and commit acts of language to represent diverse meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2018
One could call the church a para-liturgical entity, in that there are practices which arise within contexts and gain spatio-temporal manifestation in praxis and over time the praxis remains in liturgy when the originating "start up" intention is lost, forgotten and no longer accessible. Lent is a season which has accrued much in different times and places and ingredients of its recurring traces have lost their general relevance in the church, e.g., the catechumenate, except in places which deliberately have tried to retain it. Lent and the history of Lenten practice is a living body of resources and our space-time practice can add to its body of resources. Treat the season of Lent as a vital living resource that has no one perfect practice or practitioner. Try on some Lenten practices for yourself to make it fit your situation, now.
Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2018
In biblical numerology, 40 is the time of test and ordeal. The season of Lent is an annual presentation of the acknowledgement of the "ordeal with a purpose." It is based upon being called by God and being a disciple, a student, in the school of God. The ordeal with a person includes the faith to believe that the circumstances of one's life can be the curriculum which includes the teaching purposes of God towards excellence. The ordeal is the acknowledgement that life is often struggle and delayed gratification to achieve even the good things that one desires. Faith in the purposes of God being projected on the screens of our circumstances means that we are always looking for the messages of God for our betterment.
Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2018
Ash Wednesday: Fast forward the life of your body life into an icon of one of the states of it being broken down and dissipated and bear the marks of ashes on your forehead. Ponder that all the king's horses and all king's men could not put the broken Humpty Dumpty together again. Hope against hope that Someone can reconstitute you as a body-soul-spirit unity again.
Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2018
The Bible is the artistic literature of spiritual identity and it gave birth to theology as the queen of sciences until she was dethroned by modern science birthed in the Enlightenment. Those who did not want their queen dethroned had some choices to make: to make the continuing case for the sublime discourse of spiritual transformation or to defend biblical texts as empirically verifiable science and equal to modern historicism. Those who did the later went the way of "fundamentalism." Others were less intimidated by science because they are honest to the discursive difference of spiritual discourse versus scientific discourse. They are equal but different discourses with different goals and different resulting praxis. Those whose moral and spiritual lives are changed by spiritual discursive practice can still be brute fact scientists, just as a scientist can weep in the aesthetic sublime of musical and artistic performance. To confuse discursive practices and the inability to embrace language users as multi-discursive beings has been the curse of "fundamentalism."
Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2018
If every sub-atomic particle has its own development and process then what is the effect of belonging to the community of particles that form the visible entities which we come to name. In the community of particles which make up a human person, the particles which we call the will or volition still does not have complete control over all of the particles which make up the human being. When enough particles seem to conspire to effect the demise of the person the human will is brought to its helplessness. Are all of the particles of a human being constantly in process? But are they in process en masse to be a recognizable entity? In a sea of process what can preserve the collectivity of particles which we have come to call the human person as a body, soul, spirit entity?
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2018
The Christ who was transfigured is also the Christ whose "light" apparently went out in his forsaken state of death. But did light go out? The resurrection appearances of Christ meant that his Being was lit up again. The importance of the transfiguration is to believe in the midst of the chances and changes of life that hope resides as the light of the process of metamorphosis which describes the conditions of freedom and the passing of time.
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2018
We may have favorite experiences which the passing of time does not let us hang onto. Peter enjoyed the event of the Transfiguration; it was such a spiritual high that he wanted to build tents to dwell there. He had to go down the mountain to his own betrayal of Jesus whose states of suffering and death on the cross were quite in contrast to the transfigured Jesus on the mountain. Egg, pupa, cocoon, butterfly; which state of metamorphosis do you prefer? Your preference is irrelevant to the passage of time which give them all equal reality. We are always already going through metamorphosis and we may prefer a particular "climactic" event of enlightenment even while we must admit that its difference resides in the serial of the other phases of being in the cycle of metamorphosis. Can we learn to be content with all of the phases of metamorphosis in our personal and institutional lives? Things coming to pass is the chief reality of the life of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2018
Transfiguration or the Metamorphosis of the face of Jesus for his disciples on the Mountain highlights a phase in the lift of Jesus in being manifest in a special way to a select group. Peter, James and John had Jesus become manifest to them; the account of the same shared widely is the collateral effect which allows the Epiphany to become the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. The nature of something coming to language and writing means that it becomes accessible for all to be eligible for the manifestation of Christ to each person. The written literary art of the Gospel is what universalizes the manifestation of Christ. Christianity became "universal" because it was launched in the art of language because particular discourse assumes the existence of all discourse.
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2018
Electric lights have been one of the great inventions of the world. They are important because they come to their importance in darkness. The transfiguration present Jesus as the Light of world in the contrasting world of darkness about the universal availability of God. Jesus taught the world that if one is a user of language one can add the name of God to one's vocabulary as a valid and meaning discourse of totality. Just as the sun is available to all of the diversity of creation, so too is the divine accessible to all. This is meaning of Jesus as Light; the accessibility of God to all who use language.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2018
The transfiguration might be seen as the "confirmation" of Jesus. The confirmation involved the voice of God the Father saying "This is my Son." Earlier the voice of Father had said to Jesus at his baptism, "You are my Son." The confirmation is not for Jesus; it was the disciples who were having the identity of Jesus "confirmed" for them. This expression also echoes the Royal messianic poetry of the Psalmist who probably was lauding the "divine" right of the King by writing, "You are my son; today I have begotten thee." Was David a Messiah before he was anointed by Samuel? Are we what we have become before we become what we are? Was the tree a tree when it was a seed? The passage of time confirms for self and others identities.
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2018
Why did Elijah and Moses appear on the Mount of the Transfiguration? Why not King David since he was the most "proto-typical" representative of messiahship? Elijah did not experience death; he rode to heaven on a chariot of fire and Moses had an "irregular" death such that he, Elijah and Enoch became figures in the apocalyptic genre of literatures. It is as though they were "liminal" figures between the after life and life and as such liminal travelers they could be witnesses from former paradigms in the Hebraic/Judaic traditions to affirm the new paradigm that was beginning in Jesus Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2018
The event of the transfiguration is not found in the Gospel of John but the most uses of "light" as a metaphor for Christ and the work of Christ are found in John's Gospel. The churches theology of light is coupled with the comparison and surpassing of Moses by Christ in the transfiguration story. In the diversity of the life of Jesus something within him could make his face a filament showing light. His face could be turned on and off based upon the perceptual luck of favored viewers. In the human spiritual psychology of the New Testament the spirit essence of a person recreated by Holy Spirit essence of God becomes the Electric Power to "light" up our minds and brighten our faces as we seek to live as transfigured beings.
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2018
The Gospels include expansive statements which are hyperbole but which express the theology of the early church, as when the disciples came and said to Jesus, "Everyone is searching for you." That was not literally true in any original conceivable context; in the context it was shorthand for saying "an uncanny amount of people are interested in Jesus." But it was also the story form of the theology of Paul and the early church who believed that everyone was seeking for the Christ nature within the self and others as the fulfillment in articulating the image of God on each person's life.
Aphorism of Day, February 3, 2018
St. Paul: "I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some." The method of evangelism represents the conversion of St. Paul. He went from being a persecutor of the followers of Christ to become the apostle for the inclusion of the Gentiles in the community Christ. He believed that those who did not follow the purity rituals could still have the main qualification of being a child of God, namely, the evidence of the Holy Spirit. External religious practice did not make one holy; the inside job of the Holy Spirit did. For Paul, lots of things became negotiable matters of person taste and cultural differences while the main issue was the presence of the Spirit evident in the manifestations of the fruits of the Spirit. People who manifest the fruits of the Spirit find a way to get along with each other because that is the nature of the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2018
With more than 20,000 deaths from overdoses in the U.S., it behooves us not to think of our medicine as too highly superior to the "folk medicine" present in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus was more like a shamanic healer who did a guided "inside" job on people whose health involved bringing the insides and outsides of a person into a state of equilibrium. Health is more than achieving "temporary cures on the way to our deaths." Health is an embracing Salvation that includes the visions of an eschatological faith placebo of life after life in order inspire abundant life, abundant healthy living, in this present life.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2018
The association of demons and unclean spirits with every sort of sickness in the Gospels suggests the medical diagnosis during the time of Jesus involved a holistic notion of health or salvation. Rampant social ills can generate incredible psychosomatic conditions of very poor health for lots of people living in anxiety and helplessness who have been made sick by their environments. The health and salvation of Jesus was a holistic health involving a interior cleansing of the "heart" of a person who could become better as one knew the interior cleansing. The early church believed that the baptism of the Holy Spirit gave one a clean bill of health or salvation. The healing stories of Jesus instantiate the kind of holistic health promoted in the practice of the early church. Today, physicians use the mysterious diagnosis "stress related" as the cause of sickness and use pharmacopeia to "heal" these "stresses." One does not have to be anti-pharmaceuticals to live and believe in holistic health that has long been the staple of the church proclaiming a baptism with the Holy Spirit.
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