Aphorism of the Day, February 2022

Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2022

In the world of time and freedom, timing is everything.  Finding good timing in doing and saying things that are completely harmonized with well-being of the people and the situation.  That being said, one might present temptation as the insight about the forces of mistiming.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2022

One can hope that major cruel kleptocrats who rob the resources of a nation to live in singular luxury will come to the judgment of circumstances and be blessed by seeing their wealth be disbursed to give ordinary wealth to ordinary people.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2022

Butterflies lay eggs and die.  They have a continuing objective immortality in the eggs which become their offspring in a new cycle.  Such is an indication of the limitation of metamorphosis of speaking about the unknown afterlife of human post-life continuity.  Certainly because of the continuous transformation of energy, every aspect of human life has an objective immortality under different manifestations.  Does all energy become diffuse and separated?  Resurrection is a belief in that the diffusion of the energy of personal identity, the individual does not dissolve out of recognizable identity.  But we speculate.

Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2022

As we use the cycle of metamorphosis as a metaphor for human life, we have to use the analogical imagination for the the cycle beyond what we call death.  A butterfly lays egg to perpetuate a "this world" continuity even as the butterfly eventually dies.  There is something about death that takes one out of the visible cycle of metamorphosis and so one is left to hope which uses faith to anchor the analogical imaginations of afterliving.

Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2022

There are repetitive cycles in human behaviors.  Humans return to war and not always for the reason of justice or defense of the helpless.  When war occurs we pray for the butterfly event of the restoration of peace which includes the common freedom and dignity of all people.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2022

Ever notice how we say the life cycle of a butterfly, and not the life cycle of a cocoon?  The death of Jesus on the cross gets more emphasis than does a cocoon in the life cycle of a butterfly.  It is important to remember than no phase has significance without assuming the entire cycle, always already.

Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2022

Metamorphosis sums up the contradiction of sameness and difference which occur because of time.  The state of the cocoon and butterfly recur, but each new instance of a cocoon and a butterfly is different in time.  Note how we speak about the life cycle of the butterfly and not the cocoon.  The transfiguring moments in the life of Jesus are emphasized as what is definitive for the "Christ cycle" of life.  Birth, baptism, transfiguration, resurrection, ascension, and glorification; these are the butterfly moments in presenting the life of Jesus Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2022

Recurrence of similar states in a cycle is called metamorphosis.  Metamorphosis means that something has continuity of identity but comes to appear in a different shape or form or some other modified way.  Metamorphosis is the Greek notion used for transfiguration.  The life of Jesus as presented by the New Testament writers was a confession of his life values as they were explicated through his many modified states, modified in how he appeared to those who were viewing.

Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2022

One might think that writing in contrast with oral tradition would be a way of "stabilizing" or fixing meanings.  It turns out that language is more fluid and while text appears to be "fixed" the interpreters of text are continuously fluid because of their changing subject positions, their contexts.

Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2022

Because people have language, people are "meaning makers" who with words have come to assign value.  One value that we eventually see is a great lack of endless longevity and memory in language is how we simulate longevity as continuity of identity in community.  The Bible is a book of language coming to text as text became a "technology" of memory for perpetuating the identity for people who were understanding their meaning as perpetuity of community identity.

Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2022

Do the values of the beatitudes make more sense if in the context the people speaking and receiving the values believed the end was imminent? 

Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2022

Do not judge and you will not be judged.  There is a sense of impossibility about judgment, since judgment is involved in the linguistic assignment of values to everything that comes to language.  To use language is to assign value and make judgments.  The beatitude words of Jesus are followed by a parallel qualifying phrase, "Do not condemn and you will not be condemned."  So the judgment referred to is a condemning judgment which decries the worth of the life of a human being who is made in the image of God.  Judging means not to indirectly judge God for making someone the way he or she is.  A person might be judged for acts which betray the image of God on one's life, but the image-bearer of God cannot be condemned for being an image-bearer of God.

Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2022

The beatitudes in Luke's Gospel are words of radical love and forgiveness and they can be impossible and romanticized as elusive ideals, not to be achieved.  They could represent the lifestyle required, a non-violent one, to be able to survive oppressing situation.  It is better to continue to live and try to impress one's oppressor with love and goodness, than die trying to exact revenge for bad treatment.  The beatitudes should not be used to justify oppressive behaviors.

Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2022

For people who argue about material details of the resurrection body, consider Paul's writing as one whose encountered the resurrection of Jesus as a blinding interior event.  He said the spiritual body is raised because flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.  Spiritual body seems like a contradiction.  Is it spiritual or is it material?  Or is it both?  Or is the word body used as a metaphor of substantiality of saying it is "really real?"

Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2022

For people who have appropriated New Testament values as the values of those in control of empires one cannot help but notice the incongruence.  The beatitude values are like Christian martial arts tips for surviving oppression.  It is ironic how Empire Christians assume that they are actually living this way.

Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2022

Blessed are you when people hate you but woe are you when people speak well of you.  I think that this highlights the fact that "you" cannot ever equate yourself with people's versions of you.  The motives of hating or liking someone can be very selfish.

Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2022

Blessed are you who are weeping but woe are you who are laughing now.  These are seeming contradictory pronouncements upon weeping and laughing.  It challenges the view that all weeping is bad and all laughing is good.  Emotional intelligence involves knowing emotional congruence with actual life situations.  Laughing does not necessarily mean that all is well; weeping does not mean that all is bad.  By presenting contrasting pronouncement on emotional reaction, the words of Jesus asks us to live beyond "emotional" stereotypes.

Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2022

The shock factor of the Lucan beatitudes is to counter simplistic cliches like, "all poor people" are bereft of dignity.  Jesus said they belong to the kingdom of God.  All wealthy people are happy.  That too is wrong because they may see their wealth as their final or significant consolation of their worth in life which may be a curse of a "woe."

Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2022

The Lucan beatitudes present the extremes with counter-logic assessment.  Blessed are the poor; they partake of the realm of God.  Woe is the rich; they define wealth as their realm and miss the greater realm of God.  The method of extreme is a rhetorical way of saying don't fall into cliche assessments of anyone's life situation because the telling issue is how anyone is related to God within any circumstance.  Ergo: one must find God as the complementing immanence of all life.

Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2022

The word "God" is the most reductive abstract word of all because at the very least it stands in for "omni-becoming."  And that is quite a few occasions to be reduced to one name.

Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2022

"I am the Good Shepherd" is a metaphor.  Imparting the meaning of Jesus using something that he is not, namely a shepherd.  But such a metaphor happens within the very metaphorical nature of language itself.  A word, spoken or written, stands in the place of something that is not the word and is different.  When one looks deeper, word or language is but a synonymical system wherein words are the habit of language users to hint at an extra-linguistic signified while being limited to just more words to do so.  The Signified is always implied and taken for granted in how it has been conveyed in the words of our cultural setting, but the Signified or the Real is always Mysterious.

Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2022

What is the difference between "poor" and "poor in spirit?"  Poor would logical refer to actual economic conditions, and "poor in spirit" might refer to people who are interiorly disheartened.  This is the difference between the Matthean and Lucan words of Jesus.  Perhaps it pertains to the economic conditions of the original recipients of the text via oral sermon or written form to have particular Christ-community circa 70-85 C.E.?

Aphorism of Day, February 6, 2022

One of unavoidable devices of language occurs in biblical language as well.  It is what I would call abbreviation, when a reduced presentation stands in for something which empirically cannot be reduced.  The most significant abbreviation is the word "God," since it is a name used reductively for All and in All.  What gets lost in reductions and abbreviations is attention to details about life within the Big Container of All and it is easy to question a statement like, "The Lord cares for the poor and needy."  Poor and needy have existed perpetually, so what is the use of such care if it is not a reality? Such a statement then has to be nuanced, that indeed the Lord cares for the needy but people and nature with true freedom are not on the same "care" page as the Lord.  And so one can see how the Lord becomes reductively the statement for the ideal which is not yet actually attained.

Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2022

The biblical is written rhetoric with persuasion as a chief motivating engine of its writing.  The biblical writers want their "reader/listeners" to be persuaded about certain values, most often about the divine, but the details of how to express that persuasion in words and deeds changed across the vast amount of time during which the biblical writings came their accepted canonical status within various communities who "voted" on their canonical status.  For Aristotle, the Greek word "pistos" was the goal of rhetoric.  "pistos" for Aristotle meant persuasion.  That same classical word "pistos" in New Testament Greek is the word used for "faith and belief."  Faith and belief can be understood as that which one is persuaded about such that one organizes one's life around the chief values about which one is persuaded.

Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2022

One of the literary devices most used in biblical literature is "hyperbole," and this seen most in generalities of group identity.  Often generalities of group identity lack the precision of specificity even while they have important "meanings" for stressing a rhetorical point.  We are often told not to use "all" or "never" because such totalities are generally not true or  cannot be verified.  The literalization of biblical "hyperbole" has gotten many people mired in what is called "fundamentalism."

Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2022

The Word is always calling, it is always already and inescapable.  We are completely worded being and we don't have any choice about this.  What a Call from Divine Word would mean is the constitution of our worded life by the values of love and justice.  Any notion of God includes the notion of being called to love and justice.  And these notions have incredible competitors in our world like greed and manipulation of the weak by the powerful.  Love and justice always have competitors and a religious calling is a calling to always make the case for what is just and what is loving.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2022

The Presentation is a story about an event in the life of Jesus and his family.  Jesus as the Divine in particularity can seem unfathomable if it is removed from relationship with everything including the flow of everything that has happened, might have happened, is happening, might happen and will happen in the future.  Particularity cannot be separated from generality.  It seems to be so because of the limits of language users in what can be focused upon and such limited language users are experienced by Complete Synchronicity even while only having limited temporal aspects to a few shards in this grand kaleidoscope.

 Aphorism of the Day,  February 1, 2022

The theophany of Isaiah which created the response of "Holy, Holy, Holy...." is not such a separate experience that it avoided coming to language.  What does it mean for God and God-oid difference from humanity to come to language and thus be subject to representation in human language by a human language user.  Can anyone have a non-human experience of God and related to other humans in a "non-human and non-linguistic way?"  If God must always come to language to be identified as such, then is not God and Word co-extensive?