Aphorism of the Day, July 31, 2020
The Eucharistic church presented the multiplication of loaves event with lots of left over food. The implication would be that it was available for those who were not at the original feeding event and so it was food looking for more hungry people. The abundance of leftovers in our world in the supply chain indicates that there is plenty of food for everyone. The moral issue is having the motivation to implement strategies of delivery to see that the abundant leftovers get to those who need it. The frightening alternate is more often the case: spoilage. Lots of leftover food never finds the hungry and that is an indictment of human creativity in our delivery system.
Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2020
The multiplication of the loaves stories in the Gospel should be a reminder that the Eucharist as a multiplication of the events of Christ-Presence through history should not be divorced from making sure that everyone gets enough food. To make Eucharist a disconnected liturgical spiritual event from the hunger of the world is to not understand the intent of Jesus who saw a multitude and said, "You give them something to eat."
Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2020
St. Paul says he wished that he was accursed (could go to hell) if only the Jews who couldn't go along with the message of Jesus as the Messiah would change their minds. When we wish to share what has been insightful for us with people who do not and cannot appreciate the insights in the ways in which we do, we can bemoan the lost fellowship, even while those who have previous and other insights might mourn the loss of our departure from a previous paradigm. Paradigm change results in a whole range of reactions, some emotional and deeply personal. People in different faith paradigms need to remember the winsome ways in which they came to insights and new persuasion and appreciate that one's insights cannot be forced on others.
Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2020
The disciples wanted to send the hungry crowd away. Jesus said to them, "Give them something to eat." This is still the divine command to everyone who has an abundance, "Give them something to eat."
Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2020
Ever notice how people like to be conservative and progressive at the same time. St. Paul had progressed with his new experience of God in Christ, yet he wanted to "conserve" the Hebrew Scripture tradition as belonging to him in an enlightened way and he wrote that he was very sad that many of his fellow Jews could not get with the new program. Being a progressive conservative in the Christo-centric Judaism of Paul meant retaining the Hebrew Scriptures, whereas more "progressive" Christians who expressed Christ traditions with more Hellenistic influence later came to be called heretics and gnostics. "Orthodox" Christianity considered itself moored in the Hebrew Scriptures tradition while those who continued in the synagogue believed the church had "innovated" itself completely out of the Hebrew Scripture tradition. It is easy to see how one's image is "deconstructed" by someone living in a different paradigm with a different hermeneutic circle of meanings for shared words.
Aphorism of the Day, July 26, 2020
How can Paul writer, "all things work together for good for those who love the Lord?" He suffered incredible hardship and eventually was martyred. He like everyone resorted to a rhetoric of "totality" not because he could actually know totality as totality, but because he believed that he was a pebble in a pond rippling endlessly, always, already and he expressed the attitude of faith in thinking that everything would eventually have it place in the community of all occasions happening. He had in interior experience which allowed him to be an optimist without being a masochist. It is good to arrive at the sense of goodness of existence itself.
Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2020
The writer of John's Gospel was a scribe of the kingdom of heaven and was as such a grammatologist in that he declared WORD as co-extensively equal with every thing that has come to being and with the divine Being. The grammatologist of John was saying that one cannot know anything, including knowing itself without the positing of the prior condition of "having words."
Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2020
One might find some correspondence in Derrida's deconstructive grammatologist and the scribe of kingdom of heaven spoken of by Jesus in Matthew. Such a scribe was like the owner of an estate who would bring forth treasure (insightful meanings) from the old and the new. The old is always presented as new because time always keeps us completely current, living not in the latter days, but in the latest days. Deconstruction of so called "stable" meanings which written texts seem to "fix" happens because of the interplay of what is called old and what is called new. The new always reinvents the old because the old as old does not exist until the new arrives to create the contrast and the new identity of the old. Such is the process of deconstruction for all who embrace being a scribe of the kingdom of heaven.
Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2020
The meanings of the Torah were not "closed" in the sense of their being a final interpretation. The Torah was a living document and the commentaries were evidence of the Torah living into new situations of application. Jesus said that a scribe of the kingdom of heaven was able to be like a master who brings out treasure, old and new. This image befits the notion of Word of God as creating living word products in a never ending stream of new applicable meaning in the new life situations the stream of life.
Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2020
The kingdom of heaven includes the sequence of events in the discovery of what is valued and worshipful such that one reorganizes one's entire life to serve the supreme value discovered. It is the discovery of the One, who can allow one to leave competitors behind because one is won over.
Aphorism of the Day, July 21, 2020
Kingdom of heaven parables indicate that God as unseen is uncanny in how the divine becomes known. Small and almost unnoticeable like a mustard seed or yeast and yet becomes manifests in the lives of people in significant ways. Yeast or leaven was regarded in its time to be a negative; Jesus used a negative to illustrate the hidden way of the Spirit in propagating the Gospel kingdom. If Jesus was here today, he would probably said, the kingdom of heaven is "like the Covid-19 virus." Really invisible but the disease can really spread. We can hope that the kingdom values of love and justice for all will be spreading like the Covid-19 virus.
Aphorism of the Day, July 20, 2020
A scribe of the kingdom brings out of one's treasure, that which is old and new. A writer is imbued with the "oldness" of language but also with the new occasion of language in the writing event. Time means that the traces of the old morph into new traces-to-be as language co-exists with the being of Time.
Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2020
In the presentation of the parables, there is a parable and then an "insider" interpretation for the disciples. A difference between the parable and the immediate interpretation is that the parable lives time as open and cyclical whereas the interpretation seems to indicate that time as we know it will end. I'm sure time as I know will end at death even as my death and the deathly me will still be subject to the time. Apocalyptic people seem to posit the end of time without really being able to think about a situation of not ever being a continuous before and after.
Aphorism of the Day, July 18, 2020
Much of biblical writing was written under the conditions of general oppression or suppression of the communities for whom the writings were intended. They are kind of like a "faith martial" arts for surviving tough times. For people of faith who have always lived with the privilege of social power, it is hard to identify truly with the "biblical situations of oppression." It is easy to salve our consciences with "bandaid charity," while systemic poverty and racism happen around us. Many people of faith use the injunction, "Come out and be separate," as a way to practice segregation from the harsh realities which are faced by so many people.
Aphorism of the Day, July 17, 2020
St. Paul called the conditions of freedom, being subjected to futility. What is the futility? Lots of time it seems like evil is winning. It's obvious that death seems to be winning, eventually for everyone. The sense of futility occurs because St. Paul partook of hope which gave him the imagination of not dying even while he was dying. Hope gave him the vision of things which were "utopian," no such place. The experience of time and hope means that the future is always before us as the "not yet" escape from the play of good and evil conditions in the field of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, July 16, 2020
Patience involves the kind of faith to live with the co-existing conditions of wheat and weed, pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy, light and darkness, wellness and sickness, and good and evil. One lives with faith in asserting the normalcy of the favored while accepting the deprivation of the opposition as having a time and season under the sun because freedom is what assures us that we are not pre-determined robots, as mere play things for the divine.
Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2020
Weeds in the Bible are symbols of Nature working against our agricultural efforts in the post-Edenic world of lost innocence. Weeds might be useful to prevent erosion on the hillside and even produce some lovely "wild flowers," but when they compete with the deliberate gardening efforts they are considered to be an enemy. When weeds and wheat grow together, one hopes the preponderance of wheat will rival the weeds and not result in a significantly diminished wheat harvest. The parable of the wheat and the weed is an allegory about the permission of freedom in the world where good and evil co-exist and are so interwined because relative perspectives pit my good against your evil. The rain that hinders my baseball game is the rain that waters your crops. Lots of things in Nature are good or evil simply based upon relative timing of events and the resulting competition of systems. God is seen as the one who is Patient because of the greater Good and in knowing God's kingdom as a result of living in the faith realm is to also receive the fruit of patience. But such patience does not keep us from doing lots of weeding in our garden in the meantime, since we must try to remove the weeds of hatred and injustice always. Such weeding is always context specific because one cannot take the entire system of Freedom away.
Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2020
Life as it has been and is, is permissive of all that has been and is and one cannot surgically remove what has been or is or smart bomb out of existence what has been and is. Permissive endurance of the order of all things might attain the designation as the fruit of patience. We with our "smart bombing" impulse to rid the world of what we think is evil and bad are trying to do something that Permissive Plenitude is not. How do we "smart bomb" what we think is evil in the world? How do we overcome evil with good without the "goodness" partaking of the destructive cruelty of evil. The parable of the weed and the wheat provides some insights upon the patience that is needed to tolerate evil as the deprivation of good within the order of things. And each as a microcosm of all can know how one is a mixture of good and evil such that to try to completely remove the engine which generates one's evil, would be to remove the engine which empowers good as well. Can we have faith to live with extremes of good and evil without committing a wicked rage of the cure being worse than the disease?
Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2020
One can note that in the editorial process of the parables in the Gospels, that they editors are not comfortable with the mysteries that are not resolved by the actual parable and so specific application have to be tagged on. Many people are uncomfortable to admit that we will always live in the condition of the mystery of not having everything accessible to us.
Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2020
To be free is the freedom to evolve and surpass oneself in a future state. One of the ways in which some biblical interpreters use the Bible is to use the biblical text to "as it were" fix something in time and presume that time and evolving should not occur especially in the realm of thought and interpretation. So those who say one cannot change in how one interprets and applies the words of the Bible, is patently false, if one has in practiced overturned many of the ancient practices of biblical people, e.g., slavery et. al. The Spirit is "against" the letter if better approximation of love and justice are shown to us for more people, than what was actually practiced in the biblical witness. The great principles of love and justice are always in need of better application for more people.
Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2020
A parable is like a cluster metaphor; one can violate the parable by presuming to make it solve mysteries rather than to provide some insights about how to live with mysteries. Parables bring us to the liminal place of what we cannot know because so much of the universe is out of our reach and such liminal space is a threshold from the quantifiable stuff which we think we do know. Poetry and faith discourse partakes of this liminal realm and so does the parable.
Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2020
The parable of the sower give a very imprecise reason for the success and failure of the Gospel message in a person's life: The conditions have to be right. Well, duh. What one can appreciate in this answer is the realization that conversion to a paradigm is governed by things that one can recognize but also by many mysterious negligibles, many flapping butterfly wings affecting weather patterns around the globe, i.e., the mystery of the collateral effects of everything we don't and can't know. In our probability thinking it is enough for us to measure what is relative to our immediate perceptual environments but we should not be over confident about any conclusions be the final word about anything.
Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2020
For gardening and farming, one wants to control the conditions which will guarantee maximum yield. The parable of the sower is not about highly controlled farming methods. One can have a hybrid seed but if the location of planting is not ideal, the hybrid seed cannot produce. The parable of sower is a "market" assessment about the success of the Gospel and the answer is the vagueness of the mystery of the mix of free conditions: Success depends upon the conditions. The Gospel occurs within sociological and psychological conditions of people and so interior and exterior factors influence how and when the Gospel is successful in becoming the motivating idea of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2020
The parable of the sower is an effort to account for the obviousness of difference of people in what and how they believe. Why isn't the way in which I believe universally irresistible? Differences are contextually specific to the situation of each person's life experience and the freedom of difference due to change as a product of time, means that people are not robots in lock step with one exact belief system and expressions of the same at any given time. If one is universally irrelevant, one is pretty lonely; if one is omni-relevant, such could only come with totalitarian control. A seed is planted and is subject to all of the exigent factors which affect the success of the eventual fruit produced or its failure. The parable is an exercise in probability thinking about the success of the Gospel. The parable presents the mystery of outcomes due to the freedom of what may happen.
Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2020
The parable process in the Gospel writings often involve the presented parable and a follow up interpretation for the "insiders." The interpretation presumes to direct specific meaning to the items in the allegory in real life. And yet a parable resists specific interpretation since the purpose of a parable is to be an engine of continuing insights about Mystery which cannot be put in a bottle and corked off, as if one could control the meaning of Mystery.
Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2020
In the art of persuasion, there is an interest in the anatomy of why things seem rhetorically successful in the response gained from the various audiences. Advertisers and political analysts are interesting in why things, ides, products are successful. The Gospel communities were interested to know why Jesus Christ was not universally irresistible. Why do some people just don't "get" Jesus Christ and his obvious genius, the way in which we do? The parable of the sower is an analysis of why persuasion happened for some and not for others. Why are some persuaded by the paradigm and get fully into the logic of the hermeneutical circle of the Jesus Movement? The parable of the sower concedes that it is the element of organic randomness and freedom as to why some are at the psychological and sociological state of receptivity to be fully persuaded. Remember, "pistos" or koine (NT) Greek for faith or belief, means persuasion in the Greek of Aristotle. How does one become so persuaded about something that it becomes what one believes or has faith in?
Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2020
Cryptic quote of Jesus channelled within the Jesus Movement and coming to text in the Gospel:" I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. " This is consistent with the hyper child motif for spiritual break through: being "born again, anew, from above." But such an event may actually be the psycho-depth access of one's only birth into the world unshackled by the hyper-coding of the language of one's culture. Such first event of birth is in our memories and yet one has no conscious access to it even while we can see that in the depth psychology of Jesus/his Movement, they had come to believe that awareness of inner life aka one's spirituality, gave one a different view of one's life. We need to continually appraise the outcome in thinking and behaviors which such psycho-depth experiences produce within the communities which provide the hermeneutical framework to specify what the valid behaviors and thinking attend such psycho-depth experience.
"Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds." This is another way of say the best way that Word is made flesh is when love and justice and kindness are made body acts within human community.
Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2020
It is always good to review what is proclaimed in our name as "self evident" truths. The Black Lives Matter Movement is provoking Americans to ponder whether the "self evident" truths of the Declaration of Independence are evident in social practice for everyone equally. It is a good day to reflect upon the "self evident," the tacit, the background beliefs of our lives to see if we are really "foregrounding" the self evident with integrity and congruence. We may need to consciously work on "trueing up" our background self evident with our foreground behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2020
Jesus said that things had been hidden from the wise and intelligent but revealed to infants. This is kind of like the Arab proverb regarding the hundred names of God but only 99 of the names are known to human beings. So why does the camel have the silly grin? He knows the 100th name of God but he is not telling. A babe lives close to the original blessing of birth and is not yet "polluted" by language use that has to place names as mediation with Immediacy, so the inability to use any signifiers for the Signified is a blessed state and remains as always already but as adults we are condemned to have it die the death of a thousand qualifications with a never ending stream of signifiers about signifiers hoping to feign identity with the Signified.
Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2020
The words of the Bible can sometimes be so inscrutable that one ends up projecting the words derived from one's own word tradition to create a dialogue with a range of possible meanings. Part of the inscrutable experience is due the fact that we weren't there and there is not an unbroken continuously specific chain of interpretation to specify the intended meaning of the agents and speakers in the original contexts of derivation. One can be stuck within a "tradition" of interpretation such that anyone outside of that tradition is a godless heretic or one can accept the play of the clash of hermeneutic circles as contributing to the continuous deconstructions of meanings, and in this play there occurs "aha" insights which catch one's attentions and which please. But rather than try to hammer one's insight into syllogistic logic of a final propositional truth, one simply lets the insights go as a flickering aesthetic moment which inspires one in significant ways, even to the point of sharing the insight with others to see if the insight works for or is pleasing to others too. The vast field of the universe of all discourse should make us very humble about or very limited participation is the small personal linguistic field of our insights.
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