Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2020
The full time ascetics are people who are called to make a continuous witness to the "fasting impulse" which is needed to remind us that sometimes to interdict a bad habit is to fast from it always in the condition of perpetual sobriety. John the Baptist is a witness to the fast impulse which is needed to meet the power of coveting desire to enslave into the idolatry of addiction in so many areas of life. But even fasting can be an addiction when it leads to the pride of "I fast better and more often than you do." We even need to learn how to "give up things" for the right reason.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2020
There is a saying in rabbinical Judaism that when a person dies, an entire universe dies. There is something unique about the universe of an individual's experience that is so "snowflake life" that it cannot be replicated or even entered into. The part of a person above the water line of consciousness is so much smaller than what lies beneath and unknown. Death is an ending of one, but also the ending of access for the community to ever be able to have dialogue with the deceased. The apocalyptic is the imagination of the ending of the conscious lives of the entire collectivity of people. Who has the memory capacity to store and access all of the individual universes which pass from conscious life. In computer language, one might posit that God, the great One has the memory capacity to store, sort out, and access all of the human experience files of every person. In our belief in grace, we hope for significant post-life editing our our files for re-presentation in worthiness.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2020
Part of the Advent program is the apocalyptic which makes preachers squeamish to the point of avoiding such topics. Others don't avoid and jump right into literalism. The apocalyptic of Scripture is the artistic and imaginative ways in which people of the biblical times dealt with maintaining justice within oppressive conditions and imagined justice outcomes that would bring "after life" corrections. Such apocalyptic yearnings are universal in all times; the art and the imaginations are different and so are the stories which are generated in different cultures at different times. (Secular America has relegated the apocalyptic to Hollywood; be honest about that). So, absolutize as inspired the "apocalyptic impulse" which engages imaginations and artistic visualizations, but don't try to overlay historical thinking which involves "empirical verification" on the apocalyptic spiritual artistic imaginations. One can believe that Bible is inspired (heuristically unique in its time and its canonical modeling for the future) and still have one's feet on the ground in science.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2020
The most realistic way to appropriate the "day of the Lord," is one's own death. If one adds up all of the death of the past and present and contemplates every death in the future, then one has a collective day of the Lord, or the day when really one's life in one's body finishes and the traces of everything that one has done or said or thought or dreamed contribute to having formed one's character. One does not want to be judged in a final way on individual occasions and maybe not on the character patterns which have come to dominate one's life. Perhaps, one wants to be judged on whether one has embraced kindness and has constantly been aware of having needed the kindness of all Others to supplement one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2020
Please don't feel intellectually superior to the ancient people who derived comfort in their oppression from the apocalyptic writings about intervention and justice being meted to make things right. Our secular culture is more apocalyptic as we have moved it from religion into our entertainment. We are obsessed with sci-fi and super heroes who really are just surrogates for the Messiah and action adventure heroes who bring justice within a two hour movie, and save the planet while they are at it. It is artistic to want heroes and justice; the biblical people incorporated such justice into the art of the apocalyptic genre. Do you feel superior to ancient people because you have modern things and they didn't? One can exhibit hermeneutic charity to the ancients for not being us, even while we can accept being us who can be poets and people of faith at the same time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2020
The identity of Jesus as the "Son of Man" is based upon a rather vague reference in the book of Daniel, but more upon the "extra-biblical" writings like 2 Enoch which gave more specifics about this apocalyptic figure. It is important to know that taking identity with an ideal person means association with the meaning of how such an ideal "final judging Son of Man" embodies justice. Just as Paul who identified with Christ to the point of saying, "I no longer live, but Christ lives within me," is a poetic spirituality which does not mean that Jesus of Nazareth has now become Paul. There is much confusion caused by trying to literalize the poetic spirituality of the biblical words. This is not to diminish the actual physical effects of such identities, since these identities bring about body language behaviors of love and justice and spiritual poetry attains literality when love becomes bodily action.
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2020
Remember the first century for people of various parties in Judaism, including the Christo-Judaic party, was a time of living in an occupied land. How do people whose land is occupied by the rulers and the soldiers of the Empire live? They live "apocalyptically" and they live with a non-violent passive resistance. The "apocalyptic" is an art of visualization to give hope that justice will prevail through a "visualized" divine intervention. The non-violent passive resistance strategy is the martial arts lifestyle of the Beatitudes, helping persons to maintain in situations of constant threat. It is a shame that we who live in Empire Christianity with social privilege, still have Christians who pretend they need "apocalyptic" intervention when they live in the lap of luxury. It is a shame that such Empire Christians are actually forcing the poor to live the lifestyle of the Beatitudes because Empire Christians, ironically have become the oppressors, even while assuming they are living the "Beatitudes."
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2020
In the beginning of human life as it can be known, is having language. And reflexively by having language, we can know that we have language and are language users. And as language users we speculate about language use, one of which involves being in meaningful relationship with other language users. And we experience awareness of how language structures our existence by noting the portals of our senses to record traces of the outer world into inner memorial traces to be reused and create redundant patterns. We find the portals of our senses confronted with a river of continuous exterior events and we attempt to stop an unstoppable river with language units like sentences, subject and predicates and periods, paragraph and stories: little stories and big stories. Biblical big stories are entitled with the impossible: Beginning and End. How can there be Beginning and End within Pure Continuity? We cannot speak Pure Continuity in Its Fullness; the big stories help us build identity within "arbitrary" structures. My birth and death don't seem arbitrary but they do not nullify the Continuity before I was born or after I have died. Jesus lived within meaningful stories of big endings, like the coming of the Son of Man and the trope of judgment regarding how we practiced of justice. Such big ending stories were motivational big sticks to enhance the urgency of always attempting the highest practice of justice for all in the NOW.
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2020
Christ as King is part of the apparent "unreality" of there also being a kingdom of heaven/God. The perception of a parallel interpretation of the earthy kingdoms of power, force and politics could be seen as an illusory invention of oppressed people needing to find a way to survive. Marx was distressed enough by the pervasiveness of religion to call it the "opium" of the people. Frankly, many religious adherents so live and teach the "irrational foolishness" of the kingdom of heaven by rejecting science, we are left with skeptics denying that people of faith can be poets and scientists at the same time. The subtle reign of God is hidden in the obvious fact that the survival of the human world necessarily depends upon sacrifice, love, kindness and justice. Even when tyrants seem to rule, their buffoonery prances upon the scaffolding of myriads of acts of kindness that have to be done, even to support their aggrandizing delusion that they are the cause of their own "success." Tyrants live on the "opium" of their own "self cause delusion."
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2020
Why would any Christian want the world to end if the work of justice is not yet finished? Does anyone think that they are going to be guiltless in the neglect of those who need care in our world? "Well, Judge Jesus, I've just ignored the poor and the stranger most of my life. I've not been an activists to deal realistically with the wide systemic poverty in the world but I have gone to Mass and gave modest tithe to the church, so Jesus, I'm ready for your judgment?" Apocalyptic Christians would do better to turn their attention to the here and now and minister to the "Christ" who is hidden in the poor, the prisoner and stranger. Apocalyptic Christians (those who hope for next day return of Jesus because they see the world as too evil) have given up the Christly ministry of justice.
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2020
The trope of God-incognito within the vulnerable of the world is the motivational lure for people to care for the least of these, the "little ones." Society builds hierarchical preference for the rich, the famous and important people and Jesus said the really important One can be found in the poor, the hungry, the prisoner and the stranger.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2020
Apocalyptic Christians want to hasten the end of the world and seek the triumphant return of Christ to judge the earth and perhaps they may be a bit too over-confident about how they will fare in the judgment event. If Christ the judge came now, according to one of his parables, he has hid himself as a suffering servant in the stranger, the prisoner, the poor and the hungry. The world is full of people in these conditions; the world is full of the presence of the suffering servant Christ who is missed by people who want to find Jesus as their king at the end assuming that he will make them "Lords and Ladies" in his heavenly court. And the punchline is that if the suffering servant Christ is missed in the lives of people today, then we will not receive a reward for recognizing him when he is "Kingly obvious." The message: start by ministering to the suffering servant Christ here and now in the stranger, the hungry, poor and prisoner. Such a one may be nearly omnipresent in the world conditions.
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2020
We can interpret the parables of Jesus as only being relevant to an individual at a time and so the individual is responsible for seeing Christ in the poor, the hungry and the prisoner. Sometimes an individual in our world may not be situated to see many poor, hungry and the imprisoned without a deliberate effort to seek them out, and individuals and churches often do minor "band aid charity" effort in face of such systemic problems. Our social selves through our state and Federal government also need to respond in systemic ways to find the Christly presence within the poor, the hungry and the imprisoned. And if one thinks that state and federal policy should not be "Christly," just substitute justice and justice crying out in people who need it is the anonymous Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2020
Did you ever notice how it seems to be in the church, much easier to find the Real Presence of Christ in a small communion host than it is to find the Real Presence of Christ in the lives of the poor? What kind of logic is in this kind of faith? Not the logic of justice and love. Could it be we look for Christ in the bread as a way to avoid finding Christ in the poor?
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2020
In the taxonomy of the judging king, the goats are the bad guys and the sheep are the good guys. How easy it is for us to see such sweeping generalizations as if someone was always already either good or bad. Could it be that everyone is a sheep or goat depending upon the moment of their actions? When we do not recognize the identity of the "king" in the socially neglected we manifest the selfish goat behavior and such behavior is cause for the "weeping and gnashing of teeth." But when we find the revealed "king" incognito in the poor and treat the poor as the presence of the king, then we become the good sheep. What if all of the "apocalyptic Christians" waiting and hoping for the big entrance of a king who will come and knock heads and affirm that they have been correct in their views; what if such apocalyptic Christians actually accepted the revealing of Christ within the life of the poor and the oppressed and treated them as they would treat a returning triumphant Christ? If this actually happened, it would mean that the will of heaven was done on earth.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2020
If we freeze frame the parable of Jesus, and look closely and want to present a correspondence for today by saying how would Jesus present a parable today? We would say that he would not use the demeaning word slave because he would in our time understand how demeaning such a notion is. When one is "conserving" biblical words, one has to ask what one is conserving, the great principle of love and justice which ever need new applications in time, or the ancient cultural practices.
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2020
Nostalgia: freeze framing in one's memory a time that one regresses to when one is stressed out by the present. Look at the background of the freeze frame: the good ol' days were not so good as to have left much, much unfinished business in the work of love and justice. Invest in the now and the future with the legacy of the good that you remember from the past.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2020
Finality is like a period at the end of a sentence. It is punctuation in the words of life which don't and won't stop at a period. It gives a temporary capsulized meaning insights. One can go to bed with a sense of finality but it is erased because one wakes up in the morning. What happened to finality overnight? Ending, telos, perfection should be seen as meaning milestones in maturation toward the elusive but beckoning ideals of love and justice which can never be finally reached? Why? Because there is always tomorrow for some more steps toward what the will of heaven of what love and justice looks like in the times on earth. The man with the one talent buried in the ground resembles persons who think they can "free frame" their favorite states of "being gifted" and they fail to use the "gifted now" occasion as an investment in more gifted occasions of the future. Believing that one can freeze frame life is the illness of nostalgia, an illusion that anything in life can remain static. Even the solid rocks of life are changing on levels that we cannot easily see, except when the volcano melts them.
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2020
In the parable of the five, two and one talents, the person given one talent buried it in the ground because he feared loss. Those who received the five and the two talents invested and doubled their talents. The fearful one wanted to conserve and so didn't invest and so he eventually lost what he had tried to "conserve." Those who invested, doubled their total and by doing, they "conserved" the original gift total and added to it. As this relates to time and change, those who try to "freeze frame" the world as it is in a particular time, find out that when they "unfreeze" the frame, the living conditions of the world have passed them by. Those who were unafraid of investing in the "now," conserved their past by integrating it within the new gains. They were double winners since they applied the wisdom of the past and used it to make a new, yes and different future. A good lesson on "fear," faith, and Time and Change.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2020
A way of looking at the parable of the talent might be from the insights of the stewardship of time and how we process change. The servant who received the one talent and buried it in the ground out of fear of loss, is representative of those who fear time and change and so they resort to the illusion of "staticity." Everything must remain always, already as it always has been. Institution which should be constructed for dealing with change, often are constructed only to "conserve" things the way they are. And meanwhile, slaves need to be freed, women need to be welcomed and encouraged into their full potential, mind, body, spirit, and social, and LBGTQ persons need full inclusion into society and church. In fear, the talent is buried in the ground to preserve things the way they were. And others are investing time and change with new and fuller application of love and justice for more people, and eventually the talent of the "fearful conserving one," is taken away and given to those who understood creative freedom and time and the true nature of faith interweaving with Time and change.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2020
One wonders about the exposure of Jesus to first century investment, with the parables of the talents and the shrewd manager. Growth and time mean that the stuff of life, human stuff, is subject to change as "growth" or as the loss of entropy. Faith is the attitude of seeing growth as an investment of transformation such that one does more than one ever thought possible even while picking up all of the work of those who let fear bring them into the loss of atrophy.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2020
The parable of the talents is a wisdom story about the truth of outcomes within the conditions of freedom. It is presented as an "investment" story, but it highlights that in the realm of freedom, people have a different kind of freedom than the other creatures and created things. We call the freedom of created things or creatures either the process of natural laws or randomness. The parable highlights that the state of fear can motivate the eventual loss known as atrophy. Atrophy means something is taken way, and what is taken away has to then be accomplished by others who have been motivated by faith instead of fear.
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2020
In the use of language, the "story" has been a unit used to process meaning, and stories have beginnings and endings. Yet when one tries to force stories upon Time as continuity, the beginning and endings are deconstructed as arbitrary "meaning markers" for interpretive communities. With Time and continuity, the question of what was before the beginning and what will be after the ending still remains. Stories are like building two dams in a river, and calling the first dam, the beginning and the second dam, the end. We can swim in the "meaning lake" created between the two dams as an illusion because the river is still flowing and changing above and below the dams. Time as the river remains continuous, no matter how many meaningful stories we place upon it with beginnings and endings.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2020
As humanity has evolved, the mythological state within which humanity lived because of having no means of empirical verification has slowly had to yield to modern science as the best form of the statistical approximation for knowing probability outcomes. Science has not eliminated mystery, the unknown and unknowable stuff, which people still "consult" for meaning in life; however the "truth" status of the mythical vis a vis the scientific has undergone the logical reassessment, meaning that the discursive language of faith has to be assessed as being more like the truth of art rather than the truth of science. And one can certainly make the case for the complementary truth of art within the "spiritless" machine that science seeks to observe. "Spiritless" science has often been proven to be bereft of "morality" because scientific practitioners live within societies say that everything that can be achieved in science, should be pragmatically achieved in societal practice, hence we have bombs to blow up the entire earth.
Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2020
The kingdom of heaven will be like this. The Gospels communities seem to play ping pong between it as already happened and is realized by the Holy Spirit as initiating the interior kingdom of Christ and the apocalyptic return of a Christ as a conquering hero. This is the tension between how the kingdom of God as God's will has been done on earth already and the arc of justice telos being visualized in a persuasive intervening perfect judge.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2020
The kingdom of heaven will be like this. What is this? The high point of the arrival of the bridegroom is unknown and life is about being prepared for the unknown events of the future, or in actuarial planning, for the good, the bad and the benign ordinary. Rather than just be emergency planners attending to our Murphy's Law tendencies (if something bad can happen, it probably will), we also need to plan for the arrival of good events. People beat up with the bad things in life forget to plan for the good things and miss recognizing them even when such things are "right under their noses."
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2020
We should understand science and moral and ethical laws as guidelines on probability. With science we look at the statistical approximation of what will likely happen? With moral and ethics, we attempt to deal with how should we act in face of what will likely happen. So the parable message for the bridesmaids who ran out oil while sleeping pertains to their failure at both science and behavioral preparation. Failure to factor in their supply of oil and the uncertainty of the time of arrival of the bridegroom, they were not prepared to fulfill their function at the wedding feast. Moral and ethics which pertain to best behaviors is related to scientific thinking which is the best of probability thinking.
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2020
As "glass half empty" people we can read the bridesmaid parable as being prepared for the fortunate event. And rather reading it with eyes on the unprepared, we can read it as those who are called to be prepared and ready for the wonderful event. Or as one once said, "The harder I pray, the luckier, I seem to get." Meaning, we have to be prepared to actual recognize the good fortunes which are arriving all of the time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2020
The parable of the bridesmaids seems to be a wisdom parable about being prepared. Actuarial or statistical wisdom means having the insight to survey the field of probable outcomes or events, and then adjust one response readiness to one's understanding of a hierarchy of probably outcomes. Be ready for kingdom of heaven events. Historically and contextually, the understanding of events have changed.
Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2020
The cloud of witnesses is a belief that the continuing immortality of those beyond the grace also has a corresponding objective immortality for those who continue to live. In the absolute fact of their having existence, they have left varying traces of their having been here, some that have come to greater general consciousness and some that is very local and personal to specific people who were touched by the holy special people of their lives. All Saints' and All Souls' are feasts where we proclaim to the departed: You were here and you are here, if only in the mist of the clouds hiding the mystery of how the effects of lives linger for us now in holy hauntings.
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