Aphorism of the Day, February 29, 2020
After Jesus is declared to be God's beloved Son, the Spirit drives him to the voluntary fast and deprivation. It's like God was saying, "You're going to have to face the devil, and I'm going to put you at a disadvantage, like your hands being tied behind your back." Fasting opens up one interior state to conditions that are not known on a full stomach. 40 days of fasting means the interior portals would be completely open to angels and demons, and all kinds of hallucinatory states. One could not be in one's right mind if one fasted so long and still lived. Certainly this is a hero tale about the one who was the Second Adam and was successful against the serpent when First Adam and all humanity is not. Message: follow the hero in the midst of temptation.
Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2020
Symbols and Diabols. A symbol unites meaning and brings together. A diabol would rend apart. Jesus faced the one called "diabolos," or in the Spanish Diablo. This is one who was also called Satan or the accuser. The vulnerable Jesus in conditions of weakness caused by his voluntary fast was prey for the splitter of interior world from providential acting in the exterior world. The "one who throws apart," and the "accuser," tried to get Jesus to mistime his behaviors. The ministering angels to Jesus were the overcoming of the diabol by the symbol. Angels are God's messengers, God's Symbols for sewing together the peaceful meaning of the interior life into the exterior world.
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2020
The Garden of Eden story presents insights regard human life as moral life. How it that persons evolve from such perfect innocent being into those who know good and evil? One could see the perfect Edenic state being life in the womb and in immediate eviction one retains the pet like innocence, ignorant innocence, inculpable innocence until as an infant one has to deal with learning that people who are born 12 years too early because of such slow maturation to independence, have to be suppressed by their custodians to protect themselves and begin to learn self control. The royal baby can only be that for so long and then must learn impulse controls and learn habits of living in a community of fellow travelers in knowing good and evil.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2020 (Ash Wednesday)
Today one Goths oneself with the black paint of ashes as a prediction of the future of one's body life, unvivified by spirit and soul who will leave the building of one's home at death. Macabre deathly rite or and exercise in cherishing the current unity of body, soul and spirit? Before becoming resurrected, reconstituted, and reunited one of the future, cherish and make the most of body, soul and spirit now, and cherish that unity in those who now co-exist on this planet.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2020
One of the temptation of Jesus was trying to get him to be literal about the meaning of a poetic Psalm and attempt to throw himself from a high place to be caught by angels. For language users, it can be dangerous to literalize poetry.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2020
Temptation and sinning is about timing, doing something at the wrong time. If one is thrown off one's schedule of excellence to act in a way that isn't appropriate at the time then one has lost to temptation. The story of the temptation of Jesus is about the accuser trying to get Jesus to eat, be famous, do something marvelous, at the wrong time.
Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2020
Spiritual metamorphosis is a metaphorical way to process change. It incorporates an eternal return of the same in the spiraling patterns of self surpassing accumulation of the occasions of becoming. We can repeat phases even as we are never the same as we revisit the features of what we may be experiencing on the spiritual journey. Transfigured events are the lures which keep us going.
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2020
In life, we name the experience of change. Change is differentiation of life experience in time. Life is an experience of continuous becoming and since we cannot continuously invent new words for the uniqueness of each new occasion of becoming, we abstract a being-word from the states of becoming. One's name is a being-word abstracted from all of the states of becoming from conception to the continuous becoming identity of the one who bears the name. Words, as such, are abstract being identifiers to give the pretense of stability among the continuous change of becoming in life. Words conserve and preserve what we are losing each moment as time flees. And words even abstract the changing processes itself by naming it as the "being of becoming, the existence of becoming." One of the processes of repetitive change that we name is "metamorphosis." The appearance of what is called a butterfly changes several significant times. The Gospels might be called the metamorphosis of the life of Jesus: Birth, Circumcision, boyhood Temple appearance, baptism, ministry of various sorts, his Transfiguration, his rejection, his trial, betrayal, death, entombment, resurrection appearances, Risen Christ appearances. Transfiguration refers to both a special visionary Epiphany that Jesus had with his disciples and to the continuous process of the changing apparency of the Risen Christ in our lives. The metamorphosis of the Risen Christ in our lives continues and we live through the phases of the apparent Risen Christ in our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2020
The lighted faces of Moses and Jesus mean that they were able to surfaces their inner light. We are called to be transfigured by the activation of the inner part of us which bears the image of the divine and bring it to the surface of thought, word, emotion and deed.
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2020
In what why can metamorphosis in the life cycle of a butterfly be a metaphor of correspondence for human life? Do human rites of passage have any correspondence with the phases of the life of a butterfly? One can say that human life is a spiral of cycles, which include the return to similarity of repeated experience, only at a later time with the experience of having been through something similar before. In the cycle of human metamorphosis, do we attain transfiguring experiences of the Christ-nature within us becoming more apparent and providing higher insights for us to integrate and live by even as we must traverse the drudgeries of the egg, larva, caterpillar and cocoon phases on our transfiguring spirals of human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2020
In the cycle of metamorphosis for a butterfly, we may prefer the phase of the butterfly being born out of the cocoon even though we know that in each phase, the manifestation which appears, egg, larva, caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly, all contain the possibility for the endless repetition of all the phases in the future. The Gospels present the metamorphosis of the Christ nature: birth, childhood, baptism, ministry, befriending, mountain top experience, denied, betrayed, tried, crucified, buried, resurrection, ascended, glorified, returned to repeat the cycle in the lives of many. While transfiguration (metamorphosis in Greek) refers to an event of the surfacing of inner light upon the face of Jesus, it also denotes spiritual process, the spiral cycle of spiritual growth in each person.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2020
Scriptures have been written and they functions within their reading communities as "text books." When they are written the writing of the same instantiates institutional success and the corresponding attempts to promulgate the identity building goals of the Movement. Scriptures include a symbology to designate value and how the values came to be valued. In the writing, there is an effort to proclaim the root event which gave rise to the value. Scriptures are a language event which tries to colonize the linguistic universe of language users toward values which are believed to have risen to the top of the worded cauldron of life.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2020
What comes to language is the experience of differentiation and value systems. Values derive from differentiation and certain experiences come to be "valued" more than others. Valuing happens because the chief unavoidable human value is having and being had by language itself. Within the field of language in religious experience, the interior "inscape" is often articulated with metaphors from the exterior landscape. Elevation and mountains become metaphors of value for significant spiritual experience. The Transfiguration event is recounted as an event which manifests the value of Jesus in the Christ Movement and using the genre of mountaintop experiences, including the Mount Sinai event, as exemplars, the value of Jesus is underlined and punctuated and decreed in the visionary event of the Transfiguration.
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2020
As one might regard the scientific and mathematical methods of statistical approximation to be the very best ways to deal with probability in the external world, one might understand the progressive understanding of the law as being the insights to guide probable theories regarding human behaviors which approximate what is called justice. And though religions might declare certain iterations of law as final and absolute, the law is always becoming along with the becoming of more specific articulation of what is justice for every human being as it becomes known in new settings. Justice and law as probability living is never finished until the last human being is no longer.
Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2020
The law is based upon good probability theory in matters of human behavior. Odds are that one's life will be better if one follows probability theory regarding dignity toward God and one's neighbor. There are the great principles but if one regards the great principles to pertain to tithing mint and cumin, then wisdom of probable outcome becomes ridiculous. The Sermon on the Mount is a discourse about how to live in right relationship to the law and thus fulfill it as wise probability practice.
Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2020
The Sermon on the Mount discourse is an invitation to despair unless one can accept the perpetual need for repentance and continual forgiving grace.
Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2020
If your eye offends you pluck it out? If your right hand offends you cut it off? Jesus uses the method of ad absurdum to show the fallacy of legalism. What if God applied the lex talionis, the law of the claw, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?" Everyone short of perfection would be woefully maimed. What is needed if one is living toward a perfect God? Continually repentance and the continual forgiveness of God for not be "there" yet. How does one's righteousness exceed that of the legalistically inclined? Through God's intervening forgiving grace delivered in such a Christly way to tolerate ourselves in the "not yet" state.
Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2020
The Sermon on the Mount is a discourse for people who believe they must continually be surpassing themselves in excellence; it was also a discourse written for those who felt that righteousness was keeping religious rules and the keeping of the same allowed one to practice excommunicating behaviors for those who did not keep the religious rules.
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2020
In his genealogy of moral, Nietzsche suggests that people with money and power have the right to define what is god and what is bad, and derivatively the rules and laws function mainly on behalf of the people who have the most property. If rules and laws are primarily used to "keep" people out of one's society by being rules of exclusivism, then the great principle of law being the expression of justice for all is violated. Jesus was trying to re-establish the notion of law functioning on behalf of everyone rather than the qualifying elite who as it were had the money to buy the "required tuxedo for the banquet."
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2020
The Sermon on the Mount includes many hyperbolic phrases of Jesus to counter the tendency for religious people to use the attainment of their religious practice as a comparative resume for those poor bloke sinners on the street who are not in the religious club. "You keep the law good, but your interior life of motives really needs to be worked on." When it comes to comparing our relative goodness to others, Jesus is saying, "Don't!" "If you want to compare, compare yourself with the Father in heaven who is perfect and realize that there's plenty of room for Christian Education, i.e., repentance."
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2020
How is the Law, the Torah best lived and interpreted? When people see it as the description of the behavior of one's life. The infallible interpretation of the Bible is when people see one's light shining and seeing one's good works and glorifying God. Fighting about "correct" interpretation of the Bible as an academic church dispute is divorced from the living law of a life lived well before others.
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2020
In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus said all of the letter of the law should be fulfilled, yet in other places he seems to decry legalism about keeping the law. St. Paul, who allowed Gentiles to dispense with the ritual purity customs of the law, said that love was the fulfillment of the law. One can seek to harmonize all these seeming contradiction or accept that the writings were very contextually specific and it is difficult to make a generally consistent theology from contextually specific statements over a period of time.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2020
Replacing life with liturgy is the subtle disconnection of religion from the life. The Isaian prophet asked how can one have "religious fasts" when so many people in the neighborhood have the involuntary fast of starvation. If the holy bread on the altar is divorced from people in the neighborhood not having enough bread, then one's liturgy is divorced from life and one eats the "holy" bread to one's own spiritual sickness.
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2020
Paul wrote in a letter, "But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory." This is either rather presumptuous or it is an acknowledgment that what we can become enlightened about always, already pre-existed our coming into new understanding. God's wisdom as secret and hidden is always qualified in time with for whom and when in their life experience. Did the internet exist as God's wisdom before it became manifestly known or a part of our lives? God can be the perfect cause for whatever becomes and St. Paul was a hyperbolic poet when it came to the significant experiences of Risen Christ and Holy Spirit. With the Gospel message of the realm of God and Pauline notion a spiritual realm, one can assume that the interior life is a parallel life with the exterior life and there is a wisdom, which no longer is a secret when one is able to reorder the interior life as the created "clean heart" through an uncanny encounter with a re-valuing force of Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2020
Salt is perhaps the chief spice in the world. It is the great accompaniment which becomes intermixed with food and together with the food creates a better taste experience. Salty followers of Jesus are In-Spirited people who so mix Spirit with the food of life that it becomes distinctively tasteful to brighten eyes and cause the sighs of delight, "My, My!"
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2020
St. Paul distinguish between natural seeing and spiritual seeing. He suggested that there was another way to interpret life experience with inner insights which would be based on love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness and kindness. Natural seeing is most often based upon "might makes right." The natural law is Darwin's "survival of the fittest;" the spiritual law is that the weak have the right to survival and social progress.
Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2020
The state of sin is the state of self alienation according to biblical pyscho-spirituality. People have the ability to discover an interior governance, something like a divine GPS system which seems to not be fully activated or because external conditions distract from it being fully detected. This Divine GPS emitter is the divine image on humanity and the story of salvation is arriving to the conditions of finding one's divine location and orientation.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2020
Jesus, the one who expressed solidarity through participating in the ritual life of Judaism ended up inspiring new rituals for the Jesus Movement which morphed into institutionalized sacraments. What is the purpose of the ritual life of the church? To dynamically remember an identity with the Risen Christ or the apparent conscious re-surfacing of the always already presence of the All in All Christ. Such conscious re-surfacing needs to happen in-time because forgetting happens in time and ritual is a communal practice of refreshing one's identity with Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2020
The word ritual has its most common connotation within faith, religious or spirituality discourse, even though we mix contexts in literary license. One might say the routines of a baseball pitcher are "ritualistic," as away of imparting an analogical meaning from one context to the next. A rite is an established repetition with Godward orientation for human life and has the goal of interdicting wrong repetitions with practice of better ones. The goal of a rite is to inculcate value and originates because in root events someone has "stumbled" upon an experience of the holy and wants to put the "genie" in the bottle of a rite as an invitation for others to be able to "stumble" upon the experience of the holy. The experience of the holy is serendipitous, i.e., uncontrolled by the ego, and a rite is like a lottery ticket probability disclaimer, "you won't win (the serendipitous) if you don't play."
After Jesus is declared to be God's beloved Son, the Spirit drives him to the voluntary fast and deprivation. It's like God was saying, "You're going to have to face the devil, and I'm going to put you at a disadvantage, like your hands being tied behind your back." Fasting opens up one interior state to conditions that are not known on a full stomach. 40 days of fasting means the interior portals would be completely open to angels and demons, and all kinds of hallucinatory states. One could not be in one's right mind if one fasted so long and still lived. Certainly this is a hero tale about the one who was the Second Adam and was successful against the serpent when First Adam and all humanity is not. Message: follow the hero in the midst of temptation.
Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2020
Symbols and Diabols. A symbol unites meaning and brings together. A diabol would rend apart. Jesus faced the one called "diabolos," or in the Spanish Diablo. This is one who was also called Satan or the accuser. The vulnerable Jesus in conditions of weakness caused by his voluntary fast was prey for the splitter of interior world from providential acting in the exterior world. The "one who throws apart," and the "accuser," tried to get Jesus to mistime his behaviors. The ministering angels to Jesus were the overcoming of the diabol by the symbol. Angels are God's messengers, God's Symbols for sewing together the peaceful meaning of the interior life into the exterior world.
Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2020
The Garden of Eden story presents insights regard human life as moral life. How it that persons evolve from such perfect innocent being into those who know good and evil? One could see the perfect Edenic state being life in the womb and in immediate eviction one retains the pet like innocence, ignorant innocence, inculpable innocence until as an infant one has to deal with learning that people who are born 12 years too early because of such slow maturation to independence, have to be suppressed by their custodians to protect themselves and begin to learn self control. The royal baby can only be that for so long and then must learn impulse controls and learn habits of living in a community of fellow travelers in knowing good and evil.
Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2020 (Ash Wednesday)
Today one Goths oneself with the black paint of ashes as a prediction of the future of one's body life, unvivified by spirit and soul who will leave the building of one's home at death. Macabre deathly rite or and exercise in cherishing the current unity of body, soul and spirit? Before becoming resurrected, reconstituted, and reunited one of the future, cherish and make the most of body, soul and spirit now, and cherish that unity in those who now co-exist on this planet.
Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2020
One of the temptation of Jesus was trying to get him to be literal about the meaning of a poetic Psalm and attempt to throw himself from a high place to be caught by angels. For language users, it can be dangerous to literalize poetry.
Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2020
Temptation and sinning is about timing, doing something at the wrong time. If one is thrown off one's schedule of excellence to act in a way that isn't appropriate at the time then one has lost to temptation. The story of the temptation of Jesus is about the accuser trying to get Jesus to eat, be famous, do something marvelous, at the wrong time.
Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2020
Spiritual metamorphosis is a metaphorical way to process change. It incorporates an eternal return of the same in the spiraling patterns of self surpassing accumulation of the occasions of becoming. We can repeat phases even as we are never the same as we revisit the features of what we may be experiencing on the spiritual journey. Transfigured events are the lures which keep us going.
Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2020
In life, we name the experience of change. Change is differentiation of life experience in time. Life is an experience of continuous becoming and since we cannot continuously invent new words for the uniqueness of each new occasion of becoming, we abstract a being-word from the states of becoming. One's name is a being-word abstracted from all of the states of becoming from conception to the continuous becoming identity of the one who bears the name. Words, as such, are abstract being identifiers to give the pretense of stability among the continuous change of becoming in life. Words conserve and preserve what we are losing each moment as time flees. And words even abstract the changing processes itself by naming it as the "being of becoming, the existence of becoming." One of the processes of repetitive change that we name is "metamorphosis." The appearance of what is called a butterfly changes several significant times. The Gospels might be called the metamorphosis of the life of Jesus: Birth, Circumcision, boyhood Temple appearance, baptism, ministry of various sorts, his Transfiguration, his rejection, his trial, betrayal, death, entombment, resurrection appearances, Risen Christ appearances. Transfiguration refers to both a special visionary Epiphany that Jesus had with his disciples and to the continuous process of the changing apparency of the Risen Christ in our lives. The metamorphosis of the Risen Christ in our lives continues and we live through the phases of the apparent Risen Christ in our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2020
The lighted faces of Moses and Jesus mean that they were able to surfaces their inner light. We are called to be transfigured by the activation of the inner part of us which bears the image of the divine and bring it to the surface of thought, word, emotion and deed.
Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2020
In what why can metamorphosis in the life cycle of a butterfly be a metaphor of correspondence for human life? Do human rites of passage have any correspondence with the phases of the life of a butterfly? One can say that human life is a spiral of cycles, which include the return to similarity of repeated experience, only at a later time with the experience of having been through something similar before. In the cycle of human metamorphosis, do we attain transfiguring experiences of the Christ-nature within us becoming more apparent and providing higher insights for us to integrate and live by even as we must traverse the drudgeries of the egg, larva, caterpillar and cocoon phases on our transfiguring spirals of human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2020
In the cycle of metamorphosis for a butterfly, we may prefer the phase of the butterfly being born out of the cocoon even though we know that in each phase, the manifestation which appears, egg, larva, caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly, all contain the possibility for the endless repetition of all the phases in the future. The Gospels present the metamorphosis of the Christ nature: birth, childhood, baptism, ministry, befriending, mountain top experience, denied, betrayed, tried, crucified, buried, resurrection, ascended, glorified, returned to repeat the cycle in the lives of many. While transfiguration (metamorphosis in Greek) refers to an event of the surfacing of inner light upon the face of Jesus, it also denotes spiritual process, the spiral cycle of spiritual growth in each person.
Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2020
Scriptures have been written and they functions within their reading communities as "text books." When they are written the writing of the same instantiates institutional success and the corresponding attempts to promulgate the identity building goals of the Movement. Scriptures include a symbology to designate value and how the values came to be valued. In the writing, there is an effort to proclaim the root event which gave rise to the value. Scriptures are a language event which tries to colonize the linguistic universe of language users toward values which are believed to have risen to the top of the worded cauldron of life.
Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2020
What comes to language is the experience of differentiation and value systems. Values derive from differentiation and certain experiences come to be "valued" more than others. Valuing happens because the chief unavoidable human value is having and being had by language itself. Within the field of language in religious experience, the interior "inscape" is often articulated with metaphors from the exterior landscape. Elevation and mountains become metaphors of value for significant spiritual experience. The Transfiguration event is recounted as an event which manifests the value of Jesus in the Christ Movement and using the genre of mountaintop experiences, including the Mount Sinai event, as exemplars, the value of Jesus is underlined and punctuated and decreed in the visionary event of the Transfiguration.
Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2020
As one might regard the scientific and mathematical methods of statistical approximation to be the very best ways to deal with probability in the external world, one might understand the progressive understanding of the law as being the insights to guide probable theories regarding human behaviors which approximate what is called justice. And though religions might declare certain iterations of law as final and absolute, the law is always becoming along with the becoming of more specific articulation of what is justice for every human being as it becomes known in new settings. Justice and law as probability living is never finished until the last human being is no longer.
Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2020
The law is based upon good probability theory in matters of human behavior. Odds are that one's life will be better if one follows probability theory regarding dignity toward God and one's neighbor. There are the great principles but if one regards the great principles to pertain to tithing mint and cumin, then wisdom of probable outcome becomes ridiculous. The Sermon on the Mount is a discourse about how to live in right relationship to the law and thus fulfill it as wise probability practice.
Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2020
The Sermon on the Mount discourse is an invitation to despair unless one can accept the perpetual need for repentance and continual forgiving grace.
Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2020
If your eye offends you pluck it out? If your right hand offends you cut it off? Jesus uses the method of ad absurdum to show the fallacy of legalism. What if God applied the lex talionis, the law of the claw, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?" Everyone short of perfection would be woefully maimed. What is needed if one is living toward a perfect God? Continually repentance and the continual forgiveness of God for not be "there" yet. How does one's righteousness exceed that of the legalistically inclined? Through God's intervening forgiving grace delivered in such a Christly way to tolerate ourselves in the "not yet" state.
Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2020
The Sermon on the Mount is a discourse for people who believe they must continually be surpassing themselves in excellence; it was also a discourse written for those who felt that righteousness was keeping religious rules and the keeping of the same allowed one to practice excommunicating behaviors for those who did not keep the religious rules.
Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2020
In his genealogy of moral, Nietzsche suggests that people with money and power have the right to define what is god and what is bad, and derivatively the rules and laws function mainly on behalf of the people who have the most property. If rules and laws are primarily used to "keep" people out of one's society by being rules of exclusivism, then the great principle of law being the expression of justice for all is violated. Jesus was trying to re-establish the notion of law functioning on behalf of everyone rather than the qualifying elite who as it were had the money to buy the "required tuxedo for the banquet."
Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2020
The Sermon on the Mount includes many hyperbolic phrases of Jesus to counter the tendency for religious people to use the attainment of their religious practice as a comparative resume for those poor bloke sinners on the street who are not in the religious club. "You keep the law good, but your interior life of motives really needs to be worked on." When it comes to comparing our relative goodness to others, Jesus is saying, "Don't!" "If you want to compare, compare yourself with the Father in heaven who is perfect and realize that there's plenty of room for Christian Education, i.e., repentance."
Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2020
How is the Law, the Torah best lived and interpreted? When people see it as the description of the behavior of one's life. The infallible interpretation of the Bible is when people see one's light shining and seeing one's good works and glorifying God. Fighting about "correct" interpretation of the Bible as an academic church dispute is divorced from the living law of a life lived well before others.
Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2020
In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus said all of the letter of the law should be fulfilled, yet in other places he seems to decry legalism about keeping the law. St. Paul, who allowed Gentiles to dispense with the ritual purity customs of the law, said that love was the fulfillment of the law. One can seek to harmonize all these seeming contradiction or accept that the writings were very contextually specific and it is difficult to make a generally consistent theology from contextually specific statements over a period of time.
Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2020
Replacing life with liturgy is the subtle disconnection of religion from the life. The Isaian prophet asked how can one have "religious fasts" when so many people in the neighborhood have the involuntary fast of starvation. If the holy bread on the altar is divorced from people in the neighborhood not having enough bread, then one's liturgy is divorced from life and one eats the "holy" bread to one's own spiritual sickness.
Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2020
Paul wrote in a letter, "But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory." This is either rather presumptuous or it is an acknowledgment that what we can become enlightened about always, already pre-existed our coming into new understanding. God's wisdom as secret and hidden is always qualified in time with for whom and when in their life experience. Did the internet exist as God's wisdom before it became manifestly known or a part of our lives? God can be the perfect cause for whatever becomes and St. Paul was a hyperbolic poet when it came to the significant experiences of Risen Christ and Holy Spirit. With the Gospel message of the realm of God and Pauline notion a spiritual realm, one can assume that the interior life is a parallel life with the exterior life and there is a wisdom, which no longer is a secret when one is able to reorder the interior life as the created "clean heart" through an uncanny encounter with a re-valuing force of Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2020
Salt is perhaps the chief spice in the world. It is the great accompaniment which becomes intermixed with food and together with the food creates a better taste experience. Salty followers of Jesus are In-Spirited people who so mix Spirit with the food of life that it becomes distinctively tasteful to brighten eyes and cause the sighs of delight, "My, My!"
Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2020
St. Paul distinguish between natural seeing and spiritual seeing. He suggested that there was another way to interpret life experience with inner insights which would be based on love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness and kindness. Natural seeing is most often based upon "might makes right." The natural law is Darwin's "survival of the fittest;" the spiritual law is that the weak have the right to survival and social progress.
Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2020
The state of sin is the state of self alienation according to biblical pyscho-spirituality. People have the ability to discover an interior governance, something like a divine GPS system which seems to not be fully activated or because external conditions distract from it being fully detected. This Divine GPS emitter is the divine image on humanity and the story of salvation is arriving to the conditions of finding one's divine location and orientation.
Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2020
Jesus, the one who expressed solidarity through participating in the ritual life of Judaism ended up inspiring new rituals for the Jesus Movement which morphed into institutionalized sacraments. What is the purpose of the ritual life of the church? To dynamically remember an identity with the Risen Christ or the apparent conscious re-surfacing of the always already presence of the All in All Christ. Such conscious re-surfacing needs to happen in-time because forgetting happens in time and ritual is a communal practice of refreshing one's identity with Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2020
The word ritual has its most common connotation within faith, religious or spirituality discourse, even though we mix contexts in literary license. One might say the routines of a baseball pitcher are "ritualistic," as away of imparting an analogical meaning from one context to the next. A rite is an established repetition with Godward orientation for human life and has the goal of interdicting wrong repetitions with practice of better ones. The goal of a rite is to inculcate value and originates because in root events someone has "stumbled" upon an experience of the holy and wants to put the "genie" in the bottle of a rite as an invitation for others to be able to "stumble" upon the experience of the holy. The experience of the holy is serendipitous, i.e., uncontrolled by the ego, and a rite is like a lottery ticket probability disclaimer, "you won't win (the serendipitous) if you don't play."
