Aphorism of the Day, August 2021

Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2021

"Loving our neighbor as ourselves," should be creative principle of all ventures in life.  What if the so called "free market" used all brain power to creatively take care of the economic needs of all people?  Would that be truly the greatest creative achievement?  We seem to think going to the moon or Mars is creative.  What about creatively taking care of everyone?

Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2021

People of the world live segregated lives because of differences magnified to a position of recognizing the areas of obvious unity.  Sickness and health are areas of "unity," since they are common experiences to all.   Yet economic and social conditions and religious preference can keep us segregated regarding the ministry to sick people.  When the woman from Tyre, a foreigner, had faith to overcome the Jew/non-Jew barrier in seeking the ministry of Jesus the healer, her faith was the the kind of health/salvation which the Jesus Movement was promoting.  If one's brand of "salvation" keeps one separated from other people, it is not the salvation of Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2021

Do we feel sorry for biblical people for not have computers and automobiles? No.  Do we think that they are inferior or simply accept that they lived under the conditions of their time.  The Amish seem to believe that technology should stop at a certain age and no longer develop.  We could take the same attitude in our thinking as well and dismiss all post-biblical thinking as unacceptable innovations.  If we accept automobiles and computers in the post-biblical times, we can update our thinking too and realize that biblical discourse is more aesthetic discourse and not scientific discourse or modern eye-witness journalistic writing.  There is no problem if one does not limit truth to either of these.

Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2021

No one including the great saints is omni-competent for all future promulgation of virtue.  As much as Augustine of Hippo is admired for many of his wise and profound spiritual writing, he was also an architect for how women and their roles were regarded for a long period of Christian practice, and some of the misogyny of his influence continues today. (Augustine did not regard himself to be a misogynist, he was simply tying cultural practice to what he regarded to be absolute biblical theology, which also represented cultural practice regarding women.  He saw himself as being faithful to a "tradition"). How do we deliver Augustine from the cultural influences of his time that he etched firmly in his writings about women?  What more recent obvious understandings in the full equality of women stands as a needed correction for biblical and subsequent cultures which did not regard the full capacity of women but kept them locked within limited cultural roles, most often in simply their necessity in the procreation role?  Certainly we know that women are more than their wombs; they have expansive capacities that bless the world if we allow them the opportunity to develop their full being.

Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2021

Any one who has attempted mediation can experience the mind as the "proverbial devil's playground" mocking the meditator's ability to "control" every sort of float thought which seems to enter the mental field.  All sorts of things can occur within oneself and one can despair of ever having a pure inward environment if one makes the presumption that one is supposed to be pure independent of God who can make us pure derived from God's own declaration in Christ of us being pure and having within us a pure Holy Spirit who is continuously from the beginning pure on our behalf within us.  Grace does abound in co-existence with sin, if we accept it.

Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2021

The fallacy of strong external religious control over people's lives is that such control can move from suppression to oppression on behalf of the clergy.  Strong external suppression does not deal with the morass within a person which has been coded by living with imperfect people.  Strong external controls means that "acting out" must happen in "private" and so the weak get exploited.  Religion as external control misses the point of the human dilemma, namely, that people need interior work of transformation in doing spiritual alchemy with base desire so that it can be redirected with intense valuing of God beyond all of the objects of projection on which desire logically falls.

Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2021

Jesus said, "All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person." The Bible includes a record of people struggling with their internal "defilement."  How is defilement known?  By the promulgation of standards of what is undefiled or "pure."  By "laws" or statutes or commandments of recommended best behaviors.  Law have a suppressing function in external nurture or environmental controls.  The fear of external punishment for bad behaviors creates a suppressing force to not act out on inward motives and desires which don't express the best behaviors.  The Gospel is about an internal conversion, a new creation in finding an original good source within oneself to generate the power to produce recommended behaviors.  This new birth is the capacity to experience one's original blessing in the deepest human memory.

Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2021

Jesus said, "All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."  These words indicate a problem with the inner lives of people.  Jeremiah said the heart was deceitful above all things. Freud said that the unconscious life is polymorphously perverse.  Jesus found the religious behavior of some to be akin to putting "lipstick on a pig."  How does one have a clean heart instead of performing religious acts to cover up the fact that there is nothing clean within?  How does the inner life become defiled, except that it gets coded with imperfect cultural patterns which determine selfish interactions with other people.

Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2021

Jesus said, "All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."  This was a response regarding the efficacy of ritual purification.  Through our language environment our inner word life gets polluted and our desires get misdirected in our interaction with our external world.  The spiritual work always has to do with reconstitution of our inner word life so that desire, our life force and engine, can be rightly directed.

Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2021

If the image of God is already on everyone's life, though most often unknown or forgotten, and if that image is renewed the experience of knowing the Risen Christ within oneself, what is the purpose of receiving the bread of heaven in the Eucharist as a presence of Christ?  Can one "amass" presences of Christ as a quantitative experience as in the more communions, the better?  The Eucharist is an "anamnesis" or a dynamic remembrance within a community.  It means that one is delivered from merely a "private" experience of presence as one is united in the group dynamic.  The image of the divine may seem to be "private" but one of the functions of the Eucharist is to deliver people from thinking that they "own" a "private" presence of Christ.  One can see people who think that they have "Jesus" in their pocket rubber stamping all kinds of their personal fancies, including who they think Jesus wants to wins elections.  The Eucharist is a witness against false approbations that occur in highly individualized experiences of Christ which express more individual ego than Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2021

There is one unavoidable theism of the Bible.  In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  Word or language is unavoidable in human life and if it is also God, then God is unavoidable.  To deny God is to deny Word and Language.

Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2021

In articulating one's faith, one needs to let come to language what one is persuaded about.  Faith is about being persuaded.  Our life patterns and values reveal what we are persuaded about and so everyone has faith.  It might be persuasion is mainly about what is best for oneself since each person is in some ways a prisoner to one's own version about everything in life even though one's version of everything else has been modeled by exemplars in one's environment.  The logic of dealing with the relative adequacies of persuasions within a community is setting standards for the common good and the best social strategies for those standard.  Are love and the incarnate love known as justice, the best things to be persuaded about?  The strategy of Jesus for love and justice seems to be inadequate in a social Darwinism when freedom is expressed as the strong and fit selfishly surviving to the detriment of the weak.  Advocates persuaded by love and justice need to persuasively make the case for the ultimate benefit of love and justice for the most people.  One can note that "Empire Christians" have sold their souls to social Darwinism by acting as though it is "God ordained" to be in league with those with wealth and political power.

Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2021

Think of the Bible as a book of the collection of the piety of people in the art of living with reference to a relationship with God and their community identity.  Don't treat it as science and eye witness journalism.

Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2021

In John's Gospel, many things which are not literally Jesus become metaphors for him.

Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2021

"In the beginning was the Word...."  This is the key to interpreting John's Gospel because the use of language in John's Gospel hides the secret of the mystagogy of the Johannine church.

Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2021

John's Gospel presents the physical world as a metaphor for the spiritual world to emphasize that the inner world has the equal substantiality of believability as the outer world.  The disciples who are "literal" and offended by the instruction to eat the flesh and drink his blood, are rebuked for being literal and failing to understand that the words of Jesus are Spirit and life.  The spiritual flesh and blood of Jesus made one with us through his words becoming us inside of us, captures the mysticism of John's Gospel and the Christ-base community which generated it.

Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2021

The role of Mary is surely a corrective of overly patriarchal society and church in the cosmic consciousness of humanity.  As long a women, children, and poor people exist Mary's role will remain as the holy reminder about God's concern for justice for all.

Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2021

The Eternal Word is the bread from heaven in John's Gospel.  The Eternal Word is consumed by each person as the language exposure of every developing language user activates the always, already inner language propensity.  How we consume the language influences in our lives in turn forms our inner language propensities as the scripts of our lives are always in formation.  And we are always active playwrights and hopefully, each time our plays get re-performed they manifest editing which add quality to life.

Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2021

When one takes an abbreviation, a limited metaphor standing in place of Plenitude, too seriously one is easily led to idolatry.  The Creeds are an "abbreviated" interpretation of biblical theology, and the Bible is a very limited abbreviation of relationship with Plenitude.  Let the abbreviations lead us to Plenitude and stand in humble awe rather than limited knowing pride.

Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2021

Ponder language as sub-atomic bits of electro-physical matter with the ability to encode memory and be accessible in a continual return to its traces and having the conveyance property to analyze its use and its physiological origin with amazing reflexivity and create the identity for a populace of word-constructed "egos" and before language, we could not know if language users or anything at all, ever existed.

Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2021

A human sign that there is only one great mediator is the evidence of Language.  Language mediates human existences as it can be known.  Language is omnipresent in human experience and structures it or only understands structure through it.  God appears on the Language radar screen of humanity because language users are forced to continue to use language in Time in anticipation of what will come to language next.  In language, we are always trying to name the yet unnameable and so in English we have given the yet unnameable the temporary or temporal name "God."

Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2021

The failure to recognize the difference between artistic and faith discourse of the Bible from common sense and empirical discourse by Christians seems to also make them vulnerable to all kinds current conspiracies regarding vaccinations.  Reading religious and faith discourse wrongly results in reading and interpreting the current events of the world wrongly as well leading to the deaths of many who refuse to get vaccinated.

Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2021

The writer of John's Gospel is presenting a vision of how flesh or physical world and spirit as inner world of human beings are united in Word or Language.  Word or Language is co-extensive with knowing what is outside and what is inside and Word unites everything in the entire body of what can occur within a discursive universe.  The writer of John uses the common sense obviousness of our habits of perceiving the world through our senses.  Common sense tells us, seeing is real, touching is real, hearing is real, smelling is real, tasting is real.  In common sense reality the empirical experience of the five senses is what is regarded to be substantial.  But with rhetorical counterpoint, the authors is asserting that common sense substantiality is only known because we assume the more basic substantial experience of word and language as language users.  The Word is made flesh and the flesh is only known through words and this means that one should not get trapped in the alienation of acting as though the physical perceptual world is somehow independent of the inner world of having words as language users.  John's Gospel writer is trying to coax readers back to quality of our inner word life as the spiritually and morally prior substantiality of human experience.

Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2021

Language organizes the world of people.  John's Gospel recognizes this by stating that Word is with God from the beginning and all things are created or having their recognized being because of Word.  Jesus as prime exemplar of how a language user's life should be lived came to deliver words as Spirit and life, namely to interdict the interior words of people that guided their behaviors manifest in their exterior worlds in their behaviors.  Words are our Spirit and life and we need continual pressure by words on the word constituted volitional center within us so that through words we choose the best words to guide our body language, i.e. our morals and ethics.

Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2021

In John's Gospel we learn that the world is created by Word or language in the way that existence can be made known to human language users.  John's Gospel states that the the Word is made flesh.  This is an incredible insight about the reality of language or words within a human body to in effect be the "spirit" in the the body.  And Jesus was a Worded being in an exemplary way so that all worded beings, i.e., language users, could be given a pattern of how to use words.  Jesus, in John's Gospel, also said, "My words are Spirit and they are life."  Words co-exist with everything that can be known to exist.  One of the further insights from this is that our word-life is our spirit-life.  They are the inward and invisible templates and paradigms which become our flesh in our word products of body language, speech and writing.

Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2021

We can often live like the physical world, the world exterior to us has an independent existence from individual and collective interior life.  The spirituality of Jesus and his teaching is about the priority of the inward life as being constituted by words to be scripted to live in integrated ways with the exterior world.  Christ as Eternal Word is the process of rearranging the prism of our words so that the energy of desire can shine through and energize the best and most appropriate words and deeds that we bring to our lives.  Jesus wants to do an inside job on us and shows us that the inward life is prior to the outward life.

Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2021

We often assume that physical instincts like hunger and thirst are natural and self evident but in fact they are processed within a community of people which is organized around satisfying hunger and thirst.  The inward morals which organize people to feed the infant and the dependent, precedes the actual feeding.  So humans do not live by bread alone, they live by the word which organizes their lives to partake of bread.  The inward moral, spiritual, or word life of people precede their interaction with the world to feed themselves.  This moral change on how to manipulate the world for the care of each other was the spiritual meaning that the words of Jesus indicate in his bread of heaven discourse.

Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2021

How do we convert perceptual presentation to poetic insight in understanding biblical phrases like "I have come down from heaven?"  It literally means "I have come down from the skies."   A perceptual "coming down from heaven" is a metaphor for an arising from an "inward and spiritual place" with "elevation" being a metaphor for "spiritual" as it contrasts to the physical.  The effort of literalists to maintain perceptual physical in a world which does not have the same cosmology of the peoples of the ancient world is to distort and sacrifice the ability to cite relevant corresponding metaphorical and meaningful truth for people in the postmodern age.

Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2021

The appropriation of the symbols of the Hebrew Scriptures by the early Christ-based communities is part of the liminal phase of the separation of the church from the synagogue.  How much of how Scriptures can be interpreted to explain Christ and the mission to the Gentiles and new liturgical practices be generated before the mission of Judaism and the mission of the church needed to be differentiated into two separate groups so that communal peace could happen in both?

Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2021

Bread from heaven finds it metaphorical signage in the daily rain of Manna from the skies in the continual feeding of the Israelites in the wilderness.  The bread of heaven was a "daily" bread  as in the famous prayer request, "give us this day, our daily bread."  Bread from heaven was/is a metaphor for the Eucharistic bread.  As pervasive as the identity of the bread of heaven metaphor has provided for Christian identity, one can't help but notice how these metaphors of communal identity do not take hold in society-at-large.  The proliferation of some many new poetical identities have eroded the stable identifying metaphors of traditional religion.  For a new hearing for old metaphors, we need new translators who understand the postmodern age well enough to create apt correspondences so that there can be an "eternal return of the same" in forming community identity in a new voice.

  Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2021

The classical Greek word "pistos" meant persuasion or confidence or trust.  These pertained to rhetoric or speech making.  Persuasion was a goal of speech making and success of persuasion was tied to the credibility that the speaker could promote to the listener.  Could the audience have trust and confidence in the speaker?  "pistos" in New Testament Greek is translated as faith both as noun and action.  Jesus said the work of God (for humans) is to have faith, to believe whom God has sent.  One can see how the nuances of the classic Greek word "pistos" were relevant in how it was used in the New Testament.  Persuasion, confidence, and trust directed toward the one who is the most trustworthy is our life vocation.  Or as the devotional classic is called, "My Utmost for the Highest."