Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2018
The uneven pacing of innovation or conversion to new paradigms across different communities accounts for the lack of unity. What does Amish Christianity have to do with Eastern Orthodox Christianity or with churches that have gone completely digital? Innovation is relative to the context of the innovators and some are more receptive to technical innovation than innovation in the realm of ideas, doctrine and church practices. The Amish are technological conservatives; they have conserved old technologies. Other communities are conservatives in trying to set in concrete ideas forever, assuming that once something is "written" down it achieves a permanency that is perpetuated with each repetition even while they lose sight of the fact that the changing tacit epistemological contexts do not allow a permanence of any idea or belief.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2018
The crucible of the writings of the New Testament involved a community of faith being born which decided to "deal" with the Roman situation rather than try to be like Amish-like synagogue communities resisting significant assimilation into participation in Roman citizenry requirements. The Jesus Movement became a vanguard off shoot of Judaism which decided that "being separate" from the world was not a matter of external separation; it was a matter of interior separation of the Spirit of Christ rather than the spirit of the world. The result was that the ritual purity rules of separation were made optional for Gentiles members of the churches. This great paradigm switch in ritual practice brought the separation of Christians from the synagogue and since the New Testament writings were being written in this coming to practice of a new paradigm, the witness of Jesus in the Gospel was told and presented with this eventual outcome as the telos. Christians were more adaptable to the reality of the Roman Empire and they welcomed the conversion of the culturally diverse peoples to the Gospel and the conversion did not require all the ritual purity practices that were required of Jewish proselytes.
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2018
The writer of the book of James declared that one could not be religious if one did not practice justice. Lot of people think that the commandment about "taking the Lord's name in vain" is about using God's name in scatological utterance; taking the Lord's name in vain is really about presenting oneself as being "religious" and not doing justice in the practice of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2018
I tried to exist without using words but then "not using words" was using words.
Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2018
When prescribed religious behaviors lose their connection with training the inward being to let one's body language speak love and justice, then religious rules for the benefit of ceremony might be nice to build community identity and determine "who's in" and "who's out," but the great purposes of God's law are missed.
Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2018
Ironic how many regard the various canonical collections of the Bible to be exhaustively the "word of God." So when Paul was referring to the "word of God," one has to guess that he already knew that centuries later his letters would become part of a collection of writings which would be called the "word of God." The Bible cannot exhaust the notion of word of God. John's Gospel relates that in the beginning the Word was God and it became humanly instantiated in the life of Jesus, even while Word is the very fullness of all human life as it can ever be known. Word of God would have to mean the very ground of human existence as it could ever be known. As such a ground, it also is a ground of freedom and in the freedom that we have with how we articulate our words and deeds we need Exemplars of Word in human flesh and so we have Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2018
The disagreements about how Jesus is present in the Eucharist are long-standing. They can be found in the Pauline church in Corinth and in the Johannine Community. Regarding "eating flesh and drinking blood," many decided no longer to follow Jesus. Christians have been forever fighting over Eucharistic language and so there are terms like transubstantiation, consubstantiation, receptionism, Real Presence, symbolic and spiritual presence and more. The Gospel of John relates that there is nothing more substantial or concrete than "Word" from the beginning which is the very basis for physical or concrete experience. If we remove the "Word" basis of Eucharistic presence, we do not have anything. Language has discursive habits of "literal" reference and figurative reference as well as many other kinds of references. What is most literal is having the real presence of "Word" as the distinguishing basis of all human experience, without which, I could not have written "the distinguishing basis of all human experience."
Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2018
"Eat my flesh, drink my blood." To this some said, "This is a difficult teaching." And they walked away. John's Gospel in part teaches people that they can be poets and scientists at the same time. The writer mocks through the oracle of Jesus, the crass literalists who want to be scientists when they are unable to awaken to the reality of their inner poet. John's Gospel seeks to convert us to Christ and in the process one discovers the fullness of being a multi-discursive user of language. Poetry is the ability to drink the ordinary water of life and taste it as extraordinary wine.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2018
St. Paul used the metaphor of a soldier's protective gear to teach about what he regarded to be the battle of life. He first claims that we are not fighting against flesh and blood or exterior foes; rather we are fighting an interior battle. Each piece of exterior bodily armor is used to illustrate an interior armor of virtue that much "clothe" the spiritual person in order to undertake the interior battle. The interior battle involves the formation of the "concrescences" of words that form and expedite the forces that guide our speech and deeds. Prayer is the use of words to invoke the power of God as an interior organizing power toward the kind of peace and order which is the preparatory posture for how we act and speak. The real battle in life happens in the battle of words within us and prayer is a sorting out method in mapping the word geography of our inner lives. This mapping is the prelude to articulate the speech and deeds which become the exterior manifestation of our inner lives.
Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2018
Truth is in the news and it wakens the differences of how people see the world. The Greek notion of truth evolved to be consistent logical phrases in language which could purport to be universal and objective standards or principles. Truth in the Hebraic sense tended to be more about continual pragmatic honesty in action as one is forming the character of one's life. The more current notion of truth has to do with what can be "proven" in a juridical setting. The ideal of juridical practice is that court procedures can arrive at juridical truths to execute juridical actions of declarations of guilt or innocence or the no-action of a hung-jury. Juridical truth has both salutary and cynical outcomes and we have to live with both. The cynical outcome is that some people have better access to better sophists to defend them through the kinds of persuasions to "win" their case. Juridical truth can be a very isolated notion of simply "winning a court" case. The greater ideal of law makes appeal to the Greek ideals of principles with categorial imperatives as well as the Hebraic notion of honesty in personal action and growth, and this highlight the "teaching" function of the law. In the public world, truth as winning a court case seems to prevail and in the "he said, she said" disagreements, juridical truth is also political persuasion of getting votes for either "he said," or "she said." Truth as coming to honesty in the deeds of one's life in forming the ethos or character of one's life does not always seem to matter in the juridical setting. When the character of a person is a glaring issue in juridical events, there is often the necessity for multiple witnesses and unimpeachable evidence to counter the person who is unwilling to be honest. The practice of the law is also often the ugly sausage making procedure of legally manipulating one unethical and dishonest person to achieve the goal of bringing another more prominent unethical and dishonest person to the justice of getting what is "deserved" because of the harm caused by dishonest and illegal actions.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2018
If the Eucharist has become unmoored from the actually eating of a meal for sustenance it cannot be unmoored from the ethical practice of making sure that all people have the most basic medicine of life, namely, adequate food and clean water.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2018
"Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood..." The writer of John's Gospel was trying to impart the belief that Eucharist is a very "physical" experience. The Eucharist is a liturgical event which encodes through bread and wine taken within the mystical reality of the life of Christ being born in one and being renewed in one in the Eucharistic event because we exist in time. The Christ becoming born in us must happen continually because we are "in time." Because in the beginning the Word was God and is God, Word is able to create or designate in human experience "physicality." The human experience of physicality is what makes scientists privilege the "empirical" experience as what is "really real" and most meaningful in the pragmatic sense of what can get done in the physical world. The writer of John's Gospel takes this "physicality" and uses it to promote how really real and physical the mystical union with Christ is, a union that is celebrated in the Eucharistic event. For the writer of John's Gospel, the mystical of the word and the physical cannot be separated; the mystical experience of Christ must become the physical experience of Christ as one's body, soul, and spirit begins to channel Christ physically in the world in doing love and justice to one's brothers and sister whom one sees to authenticate one's love of God whom one does not see.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2018
Once John's Gospel proclaims that Word is the beginning of life as we know it, then the question becomes a question of the quality of word life in speech and deeds as body language. We don't have any choice about being in Word; we get to have many choices about how we organize and constitute ourselves in words and how we help to constitute others in the values which we regard to be worthy to pass on.
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2018
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and all things came into being through the Word. Word is co-extensive with the knowing of anything. One might say that an infant and animals "know" things in their own way without word, but that is only our projection upon word-impaired states of being from the positions of already living, moving and having our being/becoming within Language. The co-extensive insight about Word in John's Gospel is in my view, the most simply and yet most profound insight of all. Word is the beginning of our entire anthropomorphic adventure.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2018
In John's Gospel, Jesus says, "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." John's Gospel is a teaching about the error of crass literalism and the Signs are an interpretive goad to get with the Spirit and the spiritual or other metaphorical meanings of the kind of abundant life that is being taught in the early church. We are told that the "literalists" are offended by the cannibalistic implication and Jesus replies, "My words are spirit and they are life." Physicality is a metaphor for emphasizing something being really real since in our preference for sensorial verification, we privilege "seeing is believing" even though everything happens because of the unseen configuration of words within us which creates the lens for seeing and interpreting meaning because as we told in John, Great Word is from the beginning of human life as we can know it and Great Word is God, and privileged as the essence of the anthropomorphism which dictates all that humanity can produce. We do and see in human ways because it is the human way to have Language. And Language is so wonderful to have a rainbow of discourses which co-exist and complement and we can be scientists and aesthetes at same time without contradiction. Such complementarity amongst the discursive employment of having language is celebrated in the Gospel of John. We are invited to be more than "one trick discursive ponies" with our understanding of language and our being language users.
Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2018
Inebriation alters the state of mind and can evoke a sense of joyous enthusiasm (even though others states not so friendly can occur too). St. Paul wrote don't be drunk with wine but be filled with the Spirit. One might say that he was speaking about a "natural" high in that it was unaided by any mind altering substances, but it would be truer to say that he was writing about a "spiritual" high. Certainly the experience of Paul was a "charismatic" experience, the experience of being enthused because one's having accessed something or Someone within oneself who provided the ecstasy of a kind of love which altered the brain's chemistry to render one euphoric in word, mood and deeds. Many people's lives are missing the access to the kind of ecstasy and euphoria which can happen without resorting to addictive substances or behaviors. Part of one's own adventure involves learning the experience of being "filled with Spirit" and accessing euphoria and ecstasy to accompany all of the other things that one must face, like drudgery, affliction, suffering, and the repetitive quotidian events of life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2018
It is a good day to remember that the Virgin Mary is the chief paradigm of all Christians in that she exemplifies the use of physicality as a metaphor for emphasizing that something is really Real. What was really Real in the mystagogy of the early church? That the life of Christ is born into each Christian and it happens when one is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. Mary as Mystagogue teaches the Pauline mystery of identity with Christ: "Christ in you, the hope of glory." In the Tersteegen hymn there is a prayer request: "Let my soul like Mary's be thy earthly sanctuary...."
Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2018
Writing and the passing of time. Words are written in a sequential before and after and the sequences represent the passing of time. Writing is done by an author in his or her "present tense," which means the general time of his or her existence when he or she is writing within a situation and location. And writing involves one writing in a present tense about the past events when the people in the past had their own "present tense" yet it is only accessible to a later writer through memory and the evidence. The writers/editors of John's Gospel in its development had many "present tenses" and each of those writing occasion reflected the exigent needs of the community for whom they were writing. The past life of Jesus was presented in a way to serve the current explanatory needs of the church to teach the significance of the practice of Eucharist. The bread of life discourse in John's Gospel is a presentation of the Eucharistic practices of a later church using the authorial and oracle voice of Jesus to teach the significance and the symbolism of the Eucharist using the Hebraic tradition regarding heavenly bread and the Torah as something that was to be "consumed" as sweeter than honey in the honey comb. Jesus was the bread come down from heaven in the symbolism of the early church. It would not make sense if the church was not a Eucharistic church.
Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2018
The writer of the Proverb uses the seductive qualities of women over men in rather contradictory ways. Young men are warned about the seduction of the harlots in the street, even while the writer of the Proverb proclaims the seductive qualities of Lady Wisdom who is trying to attract followers.
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2018
The Gospel of John is a recommendation for initiates in a new symbolic order. Each person should do a review of the symbolic order in which they live. How have you taken on language to derive the values and meanings of your life as they are manifested in the value expressions of your words and deeds? If you can understand how your language codes your existence, you can understand your symbolic order. Understanding one's symbolic order is a necessary prelude to working on changing things in one's symbolic order which do not measure up to the expressions of excellence that one may want because one has seen superior exemplars who have made one want to be a much better person in many ways.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2018
Because we are worded-beings, each is born into a symbolic order of how words constitute one's life. As infants we are linguistically impaired but we are the passive recipient of the linguistic codes of our culture and as passive recipients we are taught how to value what we experience from within and without. As we progress to more fully claim agency in language use, we seek to become more the "authors" of our own lives. Attaining greater agency in language also means that in the phases of our being passive recipients of language, we took on the benefits and the curses of our linguistic exemplars. We can find ourselves wanting to have the power of agency to re-write the deep scripts of our lives which seem to determine us in ways that we've come to eschew. One of the most profound ways to attain new authorial agency to change one's life is to be inspired by laudable exemplars who give us the power to convert toward the scripts of life which we want to act out towards what we regard to be excellence.
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2018
The Gospel of John includes a Book of Signs. God as Word is the Author of life as it can be known and as God-Word as author, Jesus is the sign-ature of God within the known creation of everything through living and moving and having being in and because of Word.
Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2018
To belong to a culture one needs to understand the codes and symbols of the culture. Symbols often are very arbitrary and attain commitment without any obvious reason. The Bald Eagle and the flag clad Uncle Sam are symbols for America and insiders understand, appreciate, love, cherish and defend the "codes." John's Gospel includes codes and signs regarding how Jesus fits within salvation history. All codes and symbol reside in having language, and so the Word which is God sets the foundation for all codes and symbols. Within Word which is God, there arises the specific symbols or codes which pertain to Jesus Christ and his continuity with the symbols of the Hebrew Scriptures but also his being a bridge to a new future of the Gospel going global beyond the "cultural boundaries" of Judaism.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2018
In the living bread discourse Jesus identifies himself with the living bread from heaven. In the Hebrew Scriptures there is a relationship between the manna or bread from heaven and the Torah as God's Word from heaven by which people are supposed to live. In John's Gospel this parallel between heavenly bread and physical bread is taught. Christ is the Eternal Word of God from heaven make physically personal in Jesus. And humanity in fact lives by the organization of Word; one could not even eat bread or prepare it if one was not already organized by the words that has taught humanity to make bread and eat it. God as Word is therefore the actual "soul food" of humanity. Jesus identified himself with this "soul food" which organizes all of human existence. Eating the Eucharistic bread is admitting dynamic identity with Word, the mystical pre-substance of human life itself. The bread of life discourse is about the relationship between bread and the Word that is responsible to its creation or being a part of human life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2018
Bread of life eaten makes one live forever? John's Gospel is about how things that are external are made into things internal. Hunger and thirst are not to be taken literal. Eating the flesh of Jesus is not to be taken literal. John's Gospel is about an internal make over and events in the landscape are mere metaphorical signs of the internal transformation to see life in an enhanced "poetic" way. John's Gospel is based upon the prologue priority that Word creates and changes our lives from within and it is word which structures our interaction within our external environments. John's Gospel is a poetry of the inner life of rearranging the furniture of words within so that we don't trip up in the changing arrangement of furniture of events in our external world.
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2108
It is easy to forget that the Bible is about the art of living with faith. It is a book of "art" not science and not exact historical writing. It is collage of metaphors to get us repeated opportunity to view and find insights to help us in the art of living with faith now. The chief inspiration of faith is hope which is a sense of always having a future and knowing this one acts in accordance with this hope, one act in faith.
Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2018
Seeking a sign from God usually means that one wants in an experiential occasion something to come into such a obvious foreground distinguishing itself from the ordinary background of everything else that is happening and goes without notice as signs. When no fire is the ordinary experience then smoke in the air becomes a sign that marks and announces something. Some people live with the redundancies of the background as an aid for the ever arising new to mark the new adventure of the day and which was noticed because of just doing the faithful background stuff and having a good portion of one's life on good automatic habits precisely so that one can notice how one's life is being marked by the new "sign of God."
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2018
One of the writing issues present in all of the Gospel has to do with informing Gentile members of the churches about the Judaic roots of Jesus in his time without anachronistically in blatant ways, imparting too much of the hint of the Gentile mission into the actual narrative of the life of Jesus. It is done in subtle ways like with the foreign magi visit and the confession of the Roman Centurion or Greeks visiting a feast in Jerusalem asking to see Jesus. But then there is also the evangelical charge of Jesus to go into all of the world and preach the Gospel, which surely implied the peoples beyond the Jewish diaspora.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2018
Through word and language, naming of everything has come to be, even the naming of God in various specific languages, and John's Gospel even names Word as God. Word is reflexive in that it uses itself to acknowledge that it is and word is used to acknowledge that there are language users. Everything that is and can be humanly known starts with the assumption of language, language use and language users. We even use language to speak about pre-linguistic states of being as an infant and so with language we pre-code every so called non-linguistic state of being. Language is the human origin of all in that it is coextensive with awareness of existence and language has been used to even make such a claim.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2018
Jesus said that he was the bread of life come from heaven to give life to the world. Certainly this is metaphorical in the Gospel of John in that it refers back to the fact that Word is God that brings all human life into existence including knowing that existence is something to be known. Word comes mysterious from the human inward world, a heavenly place and gives life as it can be known by human beings. The witness that any specific use and manifestation of word products is referential back to the fact that we have Word as the basis of human life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2018
Everything happens or becomes because of language, even the past. Because we have language, we ponder an infinite regress. An infinite regress comes into being when people have language to ponder the same and posit there was some everlasting pre-existing Great Language User who was a Plenitude from which there has been generated little limited language users as proof that existing in the web of Word is the unavoidable human trap that also provides us the imagination of freedom in pondering that words always signify the imaginable extra-linguistic Reality.
The uneven pacing of innovation or conversion to new paradigms across different communities accounts for the lack of unity. What does Amish Christianity have to do with Eastern Orthodox Christianity or with churches that have gone completely digital? Innovation is relative to the context of the innovators and some are more receptive to technical innovation than innovation in the realm of ideas, doctrine and church practices. The Amish are technological conservatives; they have conserved old technologies. Other communities are conservatives in trying to set in concrete ideas forever, assuming that once something is "written" down it achieves a permanency that is perpetuated with each repetition even while they lose sight of the fact that the changing tacit epistemological contexts do not allow a permanence of any idea or belief.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2018
The crucible of the writings of the New Testament involved a community of faith being born which decided to "deal" with the Roman situation rather than try to be like Amish-like synagogue communities resisting significant assimilation into participation in Roman citizenry requirements. The Jesus Movement became a vanguard off shoot of Judaism which decided that "being separate" from the world was not a matter of external separation; it was a matter of interior separation of the Spirit of Christ rather than the spirit of the world. The result was that the ritual purity rules of separation were made optional for Gentiles members of the churches. This great paradigm switch in ritual practice brought the separation of Christians from the synagogue and since the New Testament writings were being written in this coming to practice of a new paradigm, the witness of Jesus in the Gospel was told and presented with this eventual outcome as the telos. Christians were more adaptable to the reality of the Roman Empire and they welcomed the conversion of the culturally diverse peoples to the Gospel and the conversion did not require all the ritual purity practices that were required of Jewish proselytes.
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2018
The writer of the book of James declared that one could not be religious if one did not practice justice. Lot of people think that the commandment about "taking the Lord's name in vain" is about using God's name in scatological utterance; taking the Lord's name in vain is really about presenting oneself as being "religious" and not doing justice in the practice of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2018
I tried to exist without using words but then "not using words" was using words.
Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2018
When prescribed religious behaviors lose their connection with training the inward being to let one's body language speak love and justice, then religious rules for the benefit of ceremony might be nice to build community identity and determine "who's in" and "who's out," but the great purposes of God's law are missed.
Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2018
Ironic how many regard the various canonical collections of the Bible to be exhaustively the "word of God." So when Paul was referring to the "word of God," one has to guess that he already knew that centuries later his letters would become part of a collection of writings which would be called the "word of God." The Bible cannot exhaust the notion of word of God. John's Gospel relates that in the beginning the Word was God and it became humanly instantiated in the life of Jesus, even while Word is the very fullness of all human life as it can ever be known. Word of God would have to mean the very ground of human existence as it could ever be known. As such a ground, it also is a ground of freedom and in the freedom that we have with how we articulate our words and deeds we need Exemplars of Word in human flesh and so we have Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2018
The disagreements about how Jesus is present in the Eucharist are long-standing. They can be found in the Pauline church in Corinth and in the Johannine Community. Regarding "eating flesh and drinking blood," many decided no longer to follow Jesus. Christians have been forever fighting over Eucharistic language and so there are terms like transubstantiation, consubstantiation, receptionism, Real Presence, symbolic and spiritual presence and more. The Gospel of John relates that there is nothing more substantial or concrete than "Word" from the beginning which is the very basis for physical or concrete experience. If we remove the "Word" basis of Eucharistic presence, we do not have anything. Language has discursive habits of "literal" reference and figurative reference as well as many other kinds of references. What is most literal is having the real presence of "Word" as the distinguishing basis of all human experience, without which, I could not have written "the distinguishing basis of all human experience."
Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2018
"Eat my flesh, drink my blood." To this some said, "This is a difficult teaching." And they walked away. John's Gospel in part teaches people that they can be poets and scientists at the same time. The writer mocks through the oracle of Jesus, the crass literalists who want to be scientists when they are unable to awaken to the reality of their inner poet. John's Gospel seeks to convert us to Christ and in the process one discovers the fullness of being a multi-discursive user of language. Poetry is the ability to drink the ordinary water of life and taste it as extraordinary wine.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2018
St. Paul used the metaphor of a soldier's protective gear to teach about what he regarded to be the battle of life. He first claims that we are not fighting against flesh and blood or exterior foes; rather we are fighting an interior battle. Each piece of exterior bodily armor is used to illustrate an interior armor of virtue that much "clothe" the spiritual person in order to undertake the interior battle. The interior battle involves the formation of the "concrescences" of words that form and expedite the forces that guide our speech and deeds. Prayer is the use of words to invoke the power of God as an interior organizing power toward the kind of peace and order which is the preparatory posture for how we act and speak. The real battle in life happens in the battle of words within us and prayer is a sorting out method in mapping the word geography of our inner lives. This mapping is the prelude to articulate the speech and deeds which become the exterior manifestation of our inner lives.
Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2018
Truth is in the news and it wakens the differences of how people see the world. The Greek notion of truth evolved to be consistent logical phrases in language which could purport to be universal and objective standards or principles. Truth in the Hebraic sense tended to be more about continual pragmatic honesty in action as one is forming the character of one's life. The more current notion of truth has to do with what can be "proven" in a juridical setting. The ideal of juridical practice is that court procedures can arrive at juridical truths to execute juridical actions of declarations of guilt or innocence or the no-action of a hung-jury. Juridical truth has both salutary and cynical outcomes and we have to live with both. The cynical outcome is that some people have better access to better sophists to defend them through the kinds of persuasions to "win" their case. Juridical truth can be a very isolated notion of simply "winning a court" case. The greater ideal of law makes appeal to the Greek ideals of principles with categorial imperatives as well as the Hebraic notion of honesty in personal action and growth, and this highlight the "teaching" function of the law. In the public world, truth as winning a court case seems to prevail and in the "he said, she said" disagreements, juridical truth is also political persuasion of getting votes for either "he said," or "she said." Truth as coming to honesty in the deeds of one's life in forming the ethos or character of one's life does not always seem to matter in the juridical setting. When the character of a person is a glaring issue in juridical events, there is often the necessity for multiple witnesses and unimpeachable evidence to counter the person who is unwilling to be honest. The practice of the law is also often the ugly sausage making procedure of legally manipulating one unethical and dishonest person to achieve the goal of bringing another more prominent unethical and dishonest person to the justice of getting what is "deserved" because of the harm caused by dishonest and illegal actions.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2018
If the Eucharist has become unmoored from the actually eating of a meal for sustenance it cannot be unmoored from the ethical practice of making sure that all people have the most basic medicine of life, namely, adequate food and clean water.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2018
"Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood..." The writer of John's Gospel was trying to impart the belief that Eucharist is a very "physical" experience. The Eucharist is a liturgical event which encodes through bread and wine taken within the mystical reality of the life of Christ being born in one and being renewed in one in the Eucharistic event because we exist in time. The Christ becoming born in us must happen continually because we are "in time." Because in the beginning the Word was God and is God, Word is able to create or designate in human experience "physicality." The human experience of physicality is what makes scientists privilege the "empirical" experience as what is "really real" and most meaningful in the pragmatic sense of what can get done in the physical world. The writer of John's Gospel takes this "physicality" and uses it to promote how really real and physical the mystical union with Christ is, a union that is celebrated in the Eucharistic event. For the writer of John's Gospel, the mystical of the word and the physical cannot be separated; the mystical experience of Christ must become the physical experience of Christ as one's body, soul, and spirit begins to channel Christ physically in the world in doing love and justice to one's brothers and sister whom one sees to authenticate one's love of God whom one does not see.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2018
Once John's Gospel proclaims that Word is the beginning of life as we know it, then the question becomes a question of the quality of word life in speech and deeds as body language. We don't have any choice about being in Word; we get to have many choices about how we organize and constitute ourselves in words and how we help to constitute others in the values which we regard to be worthy to pass on.
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2018
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and all things came into being through the Word. Word is co-extensive with the knowing of anything. One might say that an infant and animals "know" things in their own way without word, but that is only our projection upon word-impaired states of being from the positions of already living, moving and having our being/becoming within Language. The co-extensive insight about Word in John's Gospel is in my view, the most simply and yet most profound insight of all. Word is the beginning of our entire anthropomorphic adventure.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2018
In John's Gospel, Jesus says, "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." John's Gospel is a teaching about the error of crass literalism and the Signs are an interpretive goad to get with the Spirit and the spiritual or other metaphorical meanings of the kind of abundant life that is being taught in the early church. We are told that the "literalists" are offended by the cannibalistic implication and Jesus replies, "My words are spirit and they are life." Physicality is a metaphor for emphasizing something being really real since in our preference for sensorial verification, we privilege "seeing is believing" even though everything happens because of the unseen configuration of words within us which creates the lens for seeing and interpreting meaning because as we told in John, Great Word is from the beginning of human life as we can know it and Great Word is God, and privileged as the essence of the anthropomorphism which dictates all that humanity can produce. We do and see in human ways because it is the human way to have Language. And Language is so wonderful to have a rainbow of discourses which co-exist and complement and we can be scientists and aesthetes at same time without contradiction. Such complementarity amongst the discursive employment of having language is celebrated in the Gospel of John. We are invited to be more than "one trick discursive ponies" with our understanding of language and our being language users.
Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2018
Inebriation alters the state of mind and can evoke a sense of joyous enthusiasm (even though others states not so friendly can occur too). St. Paul wrote don't be drunk with wine but be filled with the Spirit. One might say that he was speaking about a "natural" high in that it was unaided by any mind altering substances, but it would be truer to say that he was writing about a "spiritual" high. Certainly the experience of Paul was a "charismatic" experience, the experience of being enthused because one's having accessed something or Someone within oneself who provided the ecstasy of a kind of love which altered the brain's chemistry to render one euphoric in word, mood and deeds. Many people's lives are missing the access to the kind of ecstasy and euphoria which can happen without resorting to addictive substances or behaviors. Part of one's own adventure involves learning the experience of being "filled with Spirit" and accessing euphoria and ecstasy to accompany all of the other things that one must face, like drudgery, affliction, suffering, and the repetitive quotidian events of life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2018
It is a good day to remember that the Virgin Mary is the chief paradigm of all Christians in that she exemplifies the use of physicality as a metaphor for emphasizing that something is really Real. What was really Real in the mystagogy of the early church? That the life of Christ is born into each Christian and it happens when one is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. Mary as Mystagogue teaches the Pauline mystery of identity with Christ: "Christ in you, the hope of glory." In the Tersteegen hymn there is a prayer request: "Let my soul like Mary's be thy earthly sanctuary...."
Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2018
Writing and the passing of time. Words are written in a sequential before and after and the sequences represent the passing of time. Writing is done by an author in his or her "present tense," which means the general time of his or her existence when he or she is writing within a situation and location. And writing involves one writing in a present tense about the past events when the people in the past had their own "present tense" yet it is only accessible to a later writer through memory and the evidence. The writers/editors of John's Gospel in its development had many "present tenses" and each of those writing occasion reflected the exigent needs of the community for whom they were writing. The past life of Jesus was presented in a way to serve the current explanatory needs of the church to teach the significance of the practice of Eucharist. The bread of life discourse in John's Gospel is a presentation of the Eucharistic practices of a later church using the authorial and oracle voice of Jesus to teach the significance and the symbolism of the Eucharist using the Hebraic tradition regarding heavenly bread and the Torah as something that was to be "consumed" as sweeter than honey in the honey comb. Jesus was the bread come down from heaven in the symbolism of the early church. It would not make sense if the church was not a Eucharistic church.
Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2018
The writer of the Proverb uses the seductive qualities of women over men in rather contradictory ways. Young men are warned about the seduction of the harlots in the street, even while the writer of the Proverb proclaims the seductive qualities of Lady Wisdom who is trying to attract followers.
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2018
The Gospel of John is a recommendation for initiates in a new symbolic order. Each person should do a review of the symbolic order in which they live. How have you taken on language to derive the values and meanings of your life as they are manifested in the value expressions of your words and deeds? If you can understand how your language codes your existence, you can understand your symbolic order. Understanding one's symbolic order is a necessary prelude to working on changing things in one's symbolic order which do not measure up to the expressions of excellence that one may want because one has seen superior exemplars who have made one want to be a much better person in many ways.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2018
Because we are worded-beings, each is born into a symbolic order of how words constitute one's life. As infants we are linguistically impaired but we are the passive recipient of the linguistic codes of our culture and as passive recipients we are taught how to value what we experience from within and without. As we progress to more fully claim agency in language use, we seek to become more the "authors" of our own lives. Attaining greater agency in language also means that in the phases of our being passive recipients of language, we took on the benefits and the curses of our linguistic exemplars. We can find ourselves wanting to have the power of agency to re-write the deep scripts of our lives which seem to determine us in ways that we've come to eschew. One of the most profound ways to attain new authorial agency to change one's life is to be inspired by laudable exemplars who give us the power to convert toward the scripts of life which we want to act out towards what we regard to be excellence.
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2018
The Gospel of John includes a Book of Signs. God as Word is the Author of life as it can be known and as God-Word as author, Jesus is the sign-ature of God within the known creation of everything through living and moving and having being in and because of Word.
Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2018
To belong to a culture one needs to understand the codes and symbols of the culture. Symbols often are very arbitrary and attain commitment without any obvious reason. The Bald Eagle and the flag clad Uncle Sam are symbols for America and insiders understand, appreciate, love, cherish and defend the "codes." John's Gospel includes codes and signs regarding how Jesus fits within salvation history. All codes and symbol reside in having language, and so the Word which is God sets the foundation for all codes and symbols. Within Word which is God, there arises the specific symbols or codes which pertain to Jesus Christ and his continuity with the symbols of the Hebrew Scriptures but also his being a bridge to a new future of the Gospel going global beyond the "cultural boundaries" of Judaism.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2018
In the living bread discourse Jesus identifies himself with the living bread from heaven. In the Hebrew Scriptures there is a relationship between the manna or bread from heaven and the Torah as God's Word from heaven by which people are supposed to live. In John's Gospel this parallel between heavenly bread and physical bread is taught. Christ is the Eternal Word of God from heaven make physically personal in Jesus. And humanity in fact lives by the organization of Word; one could not even eat bread or prepare it if one was not already organized by the words that has taught humanity to make bread and eat it. God as Word is therefore the actual "soul food" of humanity. Jesus identified himself with this "soul food" which organizes all of human existence. Eating the Eucharistic bread is admitting dynamic identity with Word, the mystical pre-substance of human life itself. The bread of life discourse is about the relationship between bread and the Word that is responsible to its creation or being a part of human life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2018
Bread of life eaten makes one live forever? John's Gospel is about how things that are external are made into things internal. Hunger and thirst are not to be taken literal. Eating the flesh of Jesus is not to be taken literal. John's Gospel is about an internal make over and events in the landscape are mere metaphorical signs of the internal transformation to see life in an enhanced "poetic" way. John's Gospel is based upon the prologue priority that Word creates and changes our lives from within and it is word which structures our interaction within our external environments. John's Gospel is a poetry of the inner life of rearranging the furniture of words within so that we don't trip up in the changing arrangement of furniture of events in our external world.
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2108
It is easy to forget that the Bible is about the art of living with faith. It is a book of "art" not science and not exact historical writing. It is collage of metaphors to get us repeated opportunity to view and find insights to help us in the art of living with faith now. The chief inspiration of faith is hope which is a sense of always having a future and knowing this one acts in accordance with this hope, one act in faith.
Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2018
Seeking a sign from God usually means that one wants in an experiential occasion something to come into such a obvious foreground distinguishing itself from the ordinary background of everything else that is happening and goes without notice as signs. When no fire is the ordinary experience then smoke in the air becomes a sign that marks and announces something. Some people live with the redundancies of the background as an aid for the ever arising new to mark the new adventure of the day and which was noticed because of just doing the faithful background stuff and having a good portion of one's life on good automatic habits precisely so that one can notice how one's life is being marked by the new "sign of God."
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2018
One of the writing issues present in all of the Gospel has to do with informing Gentile members of the churches about the Judaic roots of Jesus in his time without anachronistically in blatant ways, imparting too much of the hint of the Gentile mission into the actual narrative of the life of Jesus. It is done in subtle ways like with the foreign magi visit and the confession of the Roman Centurion or Greeks visiting a feast in Jerusalem asking to see Jesus. But then there is also the evangelical charge of Jesus to go into all of the world and preach the Gospel, which surely implied the peoples beyond the Jewish diaspora.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2018
Through word and language, naming of everything has come to be, even the naming of God in various specific languages, and John's Gospel even names Word as God. Word is reflexive in that it uses itself to acknowledge that it is and word is used to acknowledge that there are language users. Everything that is and can be humanly known starts with the assumption of language, language use and language users. We even use language to speak about pre-linguistic states of being as an infant and so with language we pre-code every so called non-linguistic state of being. Language is the human origin of all in that it is coextensive with awareness of existence and language has been used to even make such a claim.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2018
Jesus said that he was the bread of life come from heaven to give life to the world. Certainly this is metaphorical in the Gospel of John in that it refers back to the fact that Word is God that brings all human life into existence including knowing that existence is something to be known. Word comes mysterious from the human inward world, a heavenly place and gives life as it can be known by human beings. The witness that any specific use and manifestation of word products is referential back to the fact that we have Word as the basis of human life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2018
Everything happens or becomes because of language, even the past. Because we have language, we ponder an infinite regress. An infinite regress comes into being when people have language to ponder the same and posit there was some everlasting pre-existing Great Language User who was a Plenitude from which there has been generated little limited language users as proof that existing in the web of Word is the unavoidable human trap that also provides us the imagination of freedom in pondering that words always signify the imaginable extra-linguistic Reality.
