Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2020
How does the After change the Before, if the Past is Absolute? Since the After includes more occasions of becoming, the entire field has increased and so through interpretation the enlarged contextual environment necessarily changes the Past. The Past is "re-contextualized" and so becomes something different in the state of Subsequency.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2020
Good shepherding, exploitation and being like a dependent sheep are three power mode positions which any person might find actualized in one's circumstance. Often we are in the "sheep" position of needing the care of one who can give it and in such situation we'd rather not have one who "exploits" our weakness. Using one's "power" for care rather than exploitation is an important message which the Good Shepherd discourse of John's Gospel promotes
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2020
The Good Shepherd metaphor needs to be a model generalized to be what anyone aim for in excellence in service in the utilization of one's gifts for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2020
Shepherds were symbolic of leadership in the Hebrew Scriptures and the metaphor was adopted for Jesus. The Good Shepherd Discourse highlights sheep in need and good shepherd to tend to the vulnerable and the "hirelings" who exploit the vulnerable for their own purposes. All leadership should be judge as to whether it results in care and service or self-serving exploitation of others.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2020
St. Paul believed that the Risen Christ was mostly incognito so that he could be known as all and in all.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2020
Notice in the Emmaus Road story, the Risen Christ has the ability to hide his identity but turn it on when he blesses bread. It could be an oracle in the early church illuminating the practice of Eucharist.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2020
A lesson of the Emmaus Road story is that the Risen Christ is mostly incognito until the serendipitous surprises. And the afterthought? Wow, he was walking with us all along.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2020
The Emmaus Road appearance of the Risen Christ was a "surprise." How does one prepared oneself for such "surprises" without it losing its very meaning. If one can prepare for a surprise then it is not a "surprise." Surprises are the serendipitous; they stand out from the normal, the probable, the predictable. Faith life, in part, involves adjusting "on the fly," based upon the deviations of the "surprises" of life of all sorts. Christ was known in the ordinary, in the breaking of the bread. Can we know the Risen Christ within the pandemic which has become our ordinary existence?
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2020
The post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ in the New Testament were written to be exemplars, not replacements for each person to have his or her own variety of the manifold appearances which Christ as All and in All can have.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2020
Time means difference. The difference of before and after, even is one is "doing or experiencing" something that is classified the same. The carrying over of "same" identity in time is a reductive abstraction of "being" from "becoming." The proliferation of the class of post resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ in time is a study in differences and they partake of such subjectivity that they cannot be tied down to replication except in the most general formula for mystical experience. Do two people ever experience the exactly same dream at the same time. No. Because they are different people it could not "be" the same dream. So too people have different experiences of what the appearance of the Risen Christ would be to them. The New Testament is full of such diversity regarding the appearances of the Risen and this instantiates the subjectivity of each experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2020
For those so certain about knowing precisely about the composition of the Risen Christ, they should read the Gospel accounts. His appearances are seen and involve interaction but it probably is better to defer to Paul to explain that his body was now an imperishable spiritual body. You can quote Paul on that, even though I doubt that anyone can explain precisely what an imperishable spiritual body is.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2020
Compare the post-resurrection appearances to Thomas and Paul. Thomas insisted to see and touch the Risen Lord. Paul had an involuntary, visionary experience of the Risen Christ which caused temporary blindness. Paul went on to have his writing achieve canonical status, so apparently his experience of the Risen Christ was blessed even though it was not empirical in the sense that Thomas experienced. The Doubting Thomas story is evidence that the early church understood a blessing conferred upon the manifold ways that they Risen Christ became known to people. Empirical encounter was not to define the validity and blessedness of encounters with the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2020
The great event of poetic license is Jesus of Nazareth becoming Christ who is all and in all. What this meant was that post-resurrection appearances of Jesus could happen under the many guises which can possibly occur for human seekers of God. The Doubting Thomas story is a "launching" story; a detaching from the physical body of Jesus and the filling of the plethora of occasions in which the Risen Christ might be known in blessed ways, some of which are presented in the Thomas story: experience of peace, being sent or having mission and purpose, forgiving rather retaining sins, the words of Jesus as Spirit being breathed into the disciples, and Gospel reading being a mode of coming to persuasion about Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2020
Part of the writing program of John's Gospel is to indicate that "Signs" of Christ and their meanings occur in the ordinary, (wine at a wedding) and in the extraordinary (death of Lazarus) and in loss of health and in Nature's fury. The writing purpose of including these Sign are intended for the mystical initiate in the community to understand the events which convert one to a new paradigm in being persuaded about how the Risen Christ is present within all the events of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2020
John Gospels teaches that Word permeates everything that can be known in knowing itself. Christ is the Word, signifying God speaking Word to make creation happen. Things are known to happen because we have language. By Word we know human life as language users and Word's best exemplar became flesh in Jesus. And Jesus said his words were spirit and life. The absent physical Jesus could still be validly and persuasively known (faith and belief) through another Word product, viz., writing. In fact, the Johannine author said about the Gospel itself, "these things are written that you might believe, be persuaded about..." So writing was the way to "freeze" Jesus in time for future believers and Word as interpretive process in time is the Spirit of application of the life of Christ in new settings.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2020
Text and Spirit. Text is fixed but interpretation of the text is always in application process. So to try to fix a text with a singular meaning in one time period is futile. Why? Because we can be there, literally; we can only be here. But one should be guided in all textual interpretation by does it promote love and justice of one's neighbor in the trying to please God.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2020
In John's Gospel, Christ is Word and he speaks words which he said were Spirit and Life. The writer of of John believes that his written word can lead to belief (being persuaded about) Jesus and from such persuasion one can know life. Get to know John's Gospel internal symbolism and how they repeat and permeate the entire Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2020
The Sunday after Easter might be called the "Feast of the Doubting Thomas." But if one reads it closely, one finds it to be a wisdom oracle of the Risen Christ declaring that experiences of the Risen Christ are different but equally blessed.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2020
Easter is the pure utopia, since it is "no such known event or place" for anyone and yet it ministers to the hope that each has for an endless personal continuity. Do we deserved to "live forever?" It is not a matter of deserving since one cannot apologize for having hope. Hope attained anecdotes in the reappearances of Christ in the many ways that such reappearances have been happening for two thousand years. Easter is the full artistic, deeply moving evidence of hope, the evidence of the faith we live by that we have a future of more completeness as persons and people.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2020
Why do we read so many of the Psalms of distress, Lamentations, and prophets' descriptions of afflicted people during Holy Week? These were the templates that the New Testament writers used to tell what happened to Jesus. And there is not a one-to-one correspondence of all things but enough to provide the vocabulary to indicate the unjust violence that has happened in every age in nearly every place. We see that Jesus "borrowed" the "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me from Psalm 22," but we can't find evidence of him dealing with bulls of Bashan unless they are figurative inner demons. The past is always generally predictive of the future, in that bad behaviors of violence repeat in different contexts in different ways. But it is a stretch to say that the past specifically predicts the future. We can content ourselves to know that the human repetoire tends to get repeated or as Nietzche called it, the "eternal return of the same."
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2020
A very bad thing happened to a very good person on Good Friday. This bad thing came to be regarded as meant to happen Providence by the followers of Jesus. The superlative Subsequent Outcome made the former event necessary. Providence is when a subsequent good overcomes and relies on a previous bad for its very goodness. This is the strange contradictory secret of living with a belief in redemption. A pandemic is a terrible uneven affliction over our world and even the subsequent human response of care and redistributing the assets of society to help people get through is already goodness at work to overcome this affliction. If we build up a track record of knowing redemption, it helps us to live knowing that Good Friday and Easter are coincidental realities. Faith allows us to view an event like the duck/rabbit optical illusion. We can switch and see Good Friday and Easter working separately but at the same time.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2020
Did it ever seem to you as though the Psalms were the release to the public of private therapy notes of patients recorded by the Therapist. "Did he really say he wanted to do that to his enemy?" "Was he really that paranoid?" "Was she really that depressed?" "But in a seeming bi-polar switch, he is high as a kite in ecstasy sometimes." "Was his chief gift in life complaining?" One way to use the Psalms is a model for one's "talking cure" with God, as catharsis. It is better than "acting out."
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2020
The Feast times on liturgical calendars are day when the crucial identity is markedly stamped upon the and new members are inculcated into the chief values. There are Christmas and Easter Christians who live on the collateral fumes of Christian identity and then there are persons who are on the mystical path of transformation because of the experience of the power of the Christ events.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2020
As we move toward the Easter Vigil, regard this week as a sort of ancestry.com read out of our spiritual genealogy. We are tracing our spiritual heritage as it has constituted us through the most relational DNA of humanity, language. In language, we have become constituted in our identity by the stories we have received and thus become the people who we are and responsible for passing on all of the traces of the stories we have received to next generation. Children are important at a Passover meal because the spiritual DNA in the story is being passed on. Children are important during Holy Week and Easter to represent those who will continue to bear our spiritual DNA in their storied lives in the future.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2020
In Holy Week through Easter with full participation, one gets a crash course in the biblical tradition. The Easter Vigil includes long readings in "Salvation History." The Hebrews Scriptures might be regarded as the writing attempt to form an identity of a people. It moves from general humanity to particular people, the Israelites, who in fact are supposed to host a House of Prayer for all people, but in particular practice, there are too many particular rules to allow everyone in. The Jesus Movement claimed to be a "more" universal movement in offering admission to the Gentiles, but churches have not been able to remove the dynamic between the general and the particular, because we tend to take on the temporal provincialism of our own time and place. Holy Week and Easter is a good time to explore what identities we have taken on and how we have taken them on, particularly in how we have innovated ourselves out of the synagogues even as our "innovations" are so dependent upon on the significant Christian make-over of the symbolic themes of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2020
The Palm Procession represents the same kind of logical foolishness which St. Paul said the Cross of Jesus was for the Greeks. How can this country bumpkin prophet march into a city under Roman control and allow a mob to declare him as a king and not be considered a threat of insurrection? Was this an instigating event for the crucifixion? It was a milestone on the journey of Jesus to become the king of the Interior of many lives of people without power in the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2020
In the conditions of freedom there is the juxtaposition and the volley of good and evil occurrences depending upon one location in Time. St. Paul used the notions of redemption as the potential counter-logic when one experiences good overcoming evil by the redemptive subsequent event which forces a re-valuation of an earlier event. So, the cross of Jesus was re-valued by the subsequent events which occurred to the followers of Jesus and the preponderances of the glorious value to those followers meant that they re-wrote the meaning of a particular event of capital punishment to be a "launching" pad to elevated life experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2020
In Hebrew Scriptures, the stories are presented of Nature being so symbiotic with God and with God's people that the "acts of Nature" as "acts of God" were seen to express God's providence on behalf of God's will for God's people. The Flood and the Plagues were told as God's providential response to the evil of people in general and the enslaving Pharaoh. The catastrophic acts of Nature which reek havoc have the magnitude of being "divine," even as our insurers refer to such as "acts of God." They are only acts of God in the sense of them having occasion of occurrence within the magnitude of the overall Becoming of the Divine Self. They are occasion within the total play of Freedom which characterizes God who shares freedom with everything that is and that means competition among the systems of weather, animals, et. al. and the goals of particular people in local places. Providence is the subsequent interpretation placed on such events of competition. We are aware of "presumptuous" prophets saying that hurricanes bring damage to a particular place because God is angry at the behaviors of certain people in that place. The use the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah story is given as validation for such pronouncements. One should be very wary of anyone who purports to know causative connections in precise ways of what happens in Nature and the behaviors of any certain people in certain place. Certainly one could look at the Covid19 pandemic as the Deluge of God's wrath if one is inclined to such silly and crassly literal biblical applications.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2020
The power of God is seen in the ability to empty the Divine Self into everything or as Paul wrote "Christ as All in All." Jesus was the witness to the emptying of God into everything and this accounts for God taking identity with the perpetual weakness which is always local and contextual but not comprehensive. The weakness of God, God's Achilles heal is that the One who is Most Free, subjects One's Most Free Self to the conditions of that freedom within the local contexts which make up everywhere. In poetic "double-speak" the weakness is the power to be all and in all and it allows those limited by context to confess that "God is with us."
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2020
April Fools Day. St. Paul called the cross foolishness to the Greeks. It may be counter-logic to think that a good person becoming a victim of capital punishment would be regarded as representing the "power" of God to empty the Divine Self to death or human lifelessness. Logically, it might have been regarded as a political necessity practiced by the Romans to quell any revolts in the Empire. But the Resurrection appearance subsequences that occurred to many people to change their moral lives resulting in verifiable behavioral changes as a result of these interior events gave them a different kind of wisdom than what one regards to be wise scientific method.
How does the After change the Before, if the Past is Absolute? Since the After includes more occasions of becoming, the entire field has increased and so through interpretation the enlarged contextual environment necessarily changes the Past. The Past is "re-contextualized" and so becomes something different in the state of Subsequency.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2020
Good shepherding, exploitation and being like a dependent sheep are three power mode positions which any person might find actualized in one's circumstance. Often we are in the "sheep" position of needing the care of one who can give it and in such situation we'd rather not have one who "exploits" our weakness. Using one's "power" for care rather than exploitation is an important message which the Good Shepherd discourse of John's Gospel promotes
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2020
The Good Shepherd metaphor needs to be a model generalized to be what anyone aim for in excellence in service in the utilization of one's gifts for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2020
Shepherds were symbolic of leadership in the Hebrew Scriptures and the metaphor was adopted for Jesus. The Good Shepherd Discourse highlights sheep in need and good shepherd to tend to the vulnerable and the "hirelings" who exploit the vulnerable for their own purposes. All leadership should be judge as to whether it results in care and service or self-serving exploitation of others.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2020
St. Paul believed that the Risen Christ was mostly incognito so that he could be known as all and in all.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2020
Notice in the Emmaus Road story, the Risen Christ has the ability to hide his identity but turn it on when he blesses bread. It could be an oracle in the early church illuminating the practice of Eucharist.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2020
A lesson of the Emmaus Road story is that the Risen Christ is mostly incognito until the serendipitous surprises. And the afterthought? Wow, he was walking with us all along.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2020
The Emmaus Road appearance of the Risen Christ was a "surprise." How does one prepared oneself for such "surprises" without it losing its very meaning. If one can prepare for a surprise then it is not a "surprise." Surprises are the serendipitous; they stand out from the normal, the probable, the predictable. Faith life, in part, involves adjusting "on the fly," based upon the deviations of the "surprises" of life of all sorts. Christ was known in the ordinary, in the breaking of the bread. Can we know the Risen Christ within the pandemic which has become our ordinary existence?
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2020
The post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ in the New Testament were written to be exemplars, not replacements for each person to have his or her own variety of the manifold appearances which Christ as All and in All can have.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2020
Time means difference. The difference of before and after, even is one is "doing or experiencing" something that is classified the same. The carrying over of "same" identity in time is a reductive abstraction of "being" from "becoming." The proliferation of the class of post resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ in time is a study in differences and they partake of such subjectivity that they cannot be tied down to replication except in the most general formula for mystical experience. Do two people ever experience the exactly same dream at the same time. No. Because they are different people it could not "be" the same dream. So too people have different experiences of what the appearance of the Risen Christ would be to them. The New Testament is full of such diversity regarding the appearances of the Risen and this instantiates the subjectivity of each experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2020
For those so certain about knowing precisely about the composition of the Risen Christ, they should read the Gospel accounts. His appearances are seen and involve interaction but it probably is better to defer to Paul to explain that his body was now an imperishable spiritual body. You can quote Paul on that, even though I doubt that anyone can explain precisely what an imperishable spiritual body is.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2020
Compare the post-resurrection appearances to Thomas and Paul. Thomas insisted to see and touch the Risen Lord. Paul had an involuntary, visionary experience of the Risen Christ which caused temporary blindness. Paul went on to have his writing achieve canonical status, so apparently his experience of the Risen Christ was blessed even though it was not empirical in the sense that Thomas experienced. The Doubting Thomas story is evidence that the early church understood a blessing conferred upon the manifold ways that they Risen Christ became known to people. Empirical encounter was not to define the validity and blessedness of encounters with the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2020
The great event of poetic license is Jesus of Nazareth becoming Christ who is all and in all. What this meant was that post-resurrection appearances of Jesus could happen under the many guises which can possibly occur for human seekers of God. The Doubting Thomas story is a "launching" story; a detaching from the physical body of Jesus and the filling of the plethora of occasions in which the Risen Christ might be known in blessed ways, some of which are presented in the Thomas story: experience of peace, being sent or having mission and purpose, forgiving rather retaining sins, the words of Jesus as Spirit being breathed into the disciples, and Gospel reading being a mode of coming to persuasion about Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2020
Part of the writing program of John's Gospel is to indicate that "Signs" of Christ and their meanings occur in the ordinary, (wine at a wedding) and in the extraordinary (death of Lazarus) and in loss of health and in Nature's fury. The writing purpose of including these Sign are intended for the mystical initiate in the community to understand the events which convert one to a new paradigm in being persuaded about how the Risen Christ is present within all the events of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2020
John Gospels teaches that Word permeates everything that can be known in knowing itself. Christ is the Word, signifying God speaking Word to make creation happen. Things are known to happen because we have language. By Word we know human life as language users and Word's best exemplar became flesh in Jesus. And Jesus said his words were spirit and life. The absent physical Jesus could still be validly and persuasively known (faith and belief) through another Word product, viz., writing. In fact, the Johannine author said about the Gospel itself, "these things are written that you might believe, be persuaded about..." So writing was the way to "freeze" Jesus in time for future believers and Word as interpretive process in time is the Spirit of application of the life of Christ in new settings.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2020
Text and Spirit. Text is fixed but interpretation of the text is always in application process. So to try to fix a text with a singular meaning in one time period is futile. Why? Because we can be there, literally; we can only be here. But one should be guided in all textual interpretation by does it promote love and justice of one's neighbor in the trying to please God.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2020
In John's Gospel, Christ is Word and he speaks words which he said were Spirit and Life. The writer of of John believes that his written word can lead to belief (being persuaded about) Jesus and from such persuasion one can know life. Get to know John's Gospel internal symbolism and how they repeat and permeate the entire Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2020
The Sunday after Easter might be called the "Feast of the Doubting Thomas." But if one reads it closely, one finds it to be a wisdom oracle of the Risen Christ declaring that experiences of the Risen Christ are different but equally blessed.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2020
Easter is the pure utopia, since it is "no such known event or place" for anyone and yet it ministers to the hope that each has for an endless personal continuity. Do we deserved to "live forever?" It is not a matter of deserving since one cannot apologize for having hope. Hope attained anecdotes in the reappearances of Christ in the many ways that such reappearances have been happening for two thousand years. Easter is the full artistic, deeply moving evidence of hope, the evidence of the faith we live by that we have a future of more completeness as persons and people.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2020
Why do we read so many of the Psalms of distress, Lamentations, and prophets' descriptions of afflicted people during Holy Week? These were the templates that the New Testament writers used to tell what happened to Jesus. And there is not a one-to-one correspondence of all things but enough to provide the vocabulary to indicate the unjust violence that has happened in every age in nearly every place. We see that Jesus "borrowed" the "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me from Psalm 22," but we can't find evidence of him dealing with bulls of Bashan unless they are figurative inner demons. The past is always generally predictive of the future, in that bad behaviors of violence repeat in different contexts in different ways. But it is a stretch to say that the past specifically predicts the future. We can content ourselves to know that the human repetoire tends to get repeated or as Nietzche called it, the "eternal return of the same."
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2020
A very bad thing happened to a very good person on Good Friday. This bad thing came to be regarded as meant to happen Providence by the followers of Jesus. The superlative Subsequent Outcome made the former event necessary. Providence is when a subsequent good overcomes and relies on a previous bad for its very goodness. This is the strange contradictory secret of living with a belief in redemption. A pandemic is a terrible uneven affliction over our world and even the subsequent human response of care and redistributing the assets of society to help people get through is already goodness at work to overcome this affliction. If we build up a track record of knowing redemption, it helps us to live knowing that Good Friday and Easter are coincidental realities. Faith allows us to view an event like the duck/rabbit optical illusion. We can switch and see Good Friday and Easter working separately but at the same time.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2020
Did it ever seem to you as though the Psalms were the release to the public of private therapy notes of patients recorded by the Therapist. "Did he really say he wanted to do that to his enemy?" "Was he really that paranoid?" "Was she really that depressed?" "But in a seeming bi-polar switch, he is high as a kite in ecstasy sometimes." "Was his chief gift in life complaining?" One way to use the Psalms is a model for one's "talking cure" with God, as catharsis. It is better than "acting out."
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2020
The Feast times on liturgical calendars are day when the crucial identity is markedly stamped upon the and new members are inculcated into the chief values. There are Christmas and Easter Christians who live on the collateral fumes of Christian identity and then there are persons who are on the mystical path of transformation because of the experience of the power of the Christ events.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2020
As we move toward the Easter Vigil, regard this week as a sort of ancestry.com read out of our spiritual genealogy. We are tracing our spiritual heritage as it has constituted us through the most relational DNA of humanity, language. In language, we have become constituted in our identity by the stories we have received and thus become the people who we are and responsible for passing on all of the traces of the stories we have received to next generation. Children are important at a Passover meal because the spiritual DNA in the story is being passed on. Children are important during Holy Week and Easter to represent those who will continue to bear our spiritual DNA in their storied lives in the future.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2020
In Holy Week through Easter with full participation, one gets a crash course in the biblical tradition. The Easter Vigil includes long readings in "Salvation History." The Hebrews Scriptures might be regarded as the writing attempt to form an identity of a people. It moves from general humanity to particular people, the Israelites, who in fact are supposed to host a House of Prayer for all people, but in particular practice, there are too many particular rules to allow everyone in. The Jesus Movement claimed to be a "more" universal movement in offering admission to the Gentiles, but churches have not been able to remove the dynamic between the general and the particular, because we tend to take on the temporal provincialism of our own time and place. Holy Week and Easter is a good time to explore what identities we have taken on and how we have taken them on, particularly in how we have innovated ourselves out of the synagogues even as our "innovations" are so dependent upon on the significant Christian make-over of the symbolic themes of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2020
The Palm Procession represents the same kind of logical foolishness which St. Paul said the Cross of Jesus was for the Greeks. How can this country bumpkin prophet march into a city under Roman control and allow a mob to declare him as a king and not be considered a threat of insurrection? Was this an instigating event for the crucifixion? It was a milestone on the journey of Jesus to become the king of the Interior of many lives of people without power in the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2020
In the conditions of freedom there is the juxtaposition and the volley of good and evil occurrences depending upon one location in Time. St. Paul used the notions of redemption as the potential counter-logic when one experiences good overcoming evil by the redemptive subsequent event which forces a re-valuation of an earlier event. So, the cross of Jesus was re-valued by the subsequent events which occurred to the followers of Jesus and the preponderances of the glorious value to those followers meant that they re-wrote the meaning of a particular event of capital punishment to be a "launching" pad to elevated life experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2020
In Hebrew Scriptures, the stories are presented of Nature being so symbiotic with God and with God's people that the "acts of Nature" as "acts of God" were seen to express God's providence on behalf of God's will for God's people. The Flood and the Plagues were told as God's providential response to the evil of people in general and the enslaving Pharaoh. The catastrophic acts of Nature which reek havoc have the magnitude of being "divine," even as our insurers refer to such as "acts of God." They are only acts of God in the sense of them having occasion of occurrence within the magnitude of the overall Becoming of the Divine Self. They are occasion within the total play of Freedom which characterizes God who shares freedom with everything that is and that means competition among the systems of weather, animals, et. al. and the goals of particular people in local places. Providence is the subsequent interpretation placed on such events of competition. We are aware of "presumptuous" prophets saying that hurricanes bring damage to a particular place because God is angry at the behaviors of certain people in that place. The use the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah story is given as validation for such pronouncements. One should be very wary of anyone who purports to know causative connections in precise ways of what happens in Nature and the behaviors of any certain people in certain place. Certainly one could look at the Covid19 pandemic as the Deluge of God's wrath if one is inclined to such silly and crassly literal biblical applications.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2020
The power of God is seen in the ability to empty the Divine Self into everything or as Paul wrote "Christ as All in All." Jesus was the witness to the emptying of God into everything and this accounts for God taking identity with the perpetual weakness which is always local and contextual but not comprehensive. The weakness of God, God's Achilles heal is that the One who is Most Free, subjects One's Most Free Self to the conditions of that freedom within the local contexts which make up everywhere. In poetic "double-speak" the weakness is the power to be all and in all and it allows those limited by context to confess that "God is with us."
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2020
April Fools Day. St. Paul called the cross foolishness to the Greeks. It may be counter-logic to think that a good person becoming a victim of capital punishment would be regarded as representing the "power" of God to empty the Divine Self to death or human lifelessness. Logically, it might have been regarded as a political necessity practiced by the Romans to quell any revolts in the Empire. But the Resurrection appearance subsequences that occurred to many people to change their moral lives resulting in verifiable behavioral changes as a result of these interior events gave them a different kind of wisdom than what one regards to be wise scientific method.
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