Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2022
St. Paul was forward looking, so much so that he regarded his past resume to be rubbish. Something in the past that we are "proud" of would not seem to be rubbish in the way that things we regret might be more easily classified in that way. Why do we remove rubbish? So it does not build up to hinder us now and in the future. If we live too much in the past of either failure or achievement we may be taking our eyes off the importance of future self-surpassing. Thus Paul said that he was always "pressing on" to a higher call.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2022
It is not a little curious that John's Gospel has an exclusive scoop on Lazarus coming back to life at the command of Jesus. One would think that such a notable event would have been known to those who edited the synoptic traditions. "Yes, we knew about Lazarus, but we did not think it noteworthy to include in our Gospels." It points to the different parables of the life of Jesus and the teaching purposes in the various Gospel communities.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2022
In the Johannine unique presentation of the Bethany family of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, the extreme act of devotion by Mary at the feet of Jesus seems like an appropriate act given that Lazarus had been brought back to life. This bespeaks the condition of early church members who had been "resurrected" from the death of sin, before they physically died. Let the non-literal eyes understand the Johannine meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2022
Mary of Bethany washing the feet of Jesus with perfume and drying them with her hair? Love can be illogical, non-hygienic, socially inappropriate, irrational, and expensive. Each person needs to discover when, where, and how to be excessive in love's expression. The feet of Jesus can be found in the Christ nature within each person.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2022
According to Paul, "Christ who knew no sin became sin, that we might be the righteousness of God." This bespeaks of the identity with the human condition which Paul believed about God. Only the one who encompasses and contains all is the great one who can properly contextualize everything within the divine environment. The rest of us? We only see in part.
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2022
Paul wrote that we have the task of reconciliation. What does that mean practically? It probably means learning to live in harmony, making room for each other, and not causing one another harm.
Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2022
There is a privilege in being the latest, since there is no one yet after you to throw what you think and say back into the mix of the past. The last shall be first and the first last. Those who are last deconstruct those who came before even as their pronouncement are on the solidity of quicksand, since they too will be deconstructed, dissolved by plenitude.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2022
The wrong impression from the New Testament is that one has to be a notorious out of control sinner and convert bad impulse control into zealous, fanatic ministry, in order to be a "valid" follower of Christ. Not everyone is given to lose their impulse control due to their personality or their socialization. Not everyone has to have been "prodigal" to have come to valid faith.
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2022
The set up for the parable of the Prodigal Son is the observation by religious leaders that Jesus was eating with publican and sinners. The "sinners" group was everyone who was not ritual adhering Jews. That is quite a large group. The Prodigal Son parable in the historical "macro-sense" means that the original head of the human family lost some members and was delighted that they were coming back.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2022
A parable like the Prodigal Son, requires that a listener interact and have internal judgment evoked regarding the situation, the father, the older brother, and prodigal younger brother. One gets trapped in one's socially programmed "conscience" and judges accordingly. Since the Prodigal Son has become such a cliche, our judgments are often the regular cliches that we've been taught. And we perhaps need to resist our own programming in rushing to conclusions about the "good guys" and the "bad guys" of the parable. If we're open, it may expose beyond how we've been taught to interact with the three persons of the parable.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2022
Don't bother considering yourself really Christian, if you have not been a prodigal and notoriously sinful and a reach the bottom sort of person. This can be the view that one receives from reading the New Testament. Only notoriously sinful people who misused their life energy and hit the bottom and in turn become as "obsessive" about their faith life are the "heroic" Christians. We can unwittingly believe that only massive changes of sublimated wrong behaviors into right behaviors qualifies for true faith. It is perhaps wiser to read the story of the Prodigal son with the Father, the elder son, and the younger son, all representing aspects of our own personalities. This is more balanced rather than a tendency to think that only notorious sinners need apply for redemption.
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2022
How about the metaphor of our lives being compost(Jesus used the word for manure) for a fruitful future world? That's better than being toxic waste that can destroy or need to be isolated, or forgotten.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2022
If we can't die perfect, what is the perfect way to die? In repentance, meaning we are ever trying to surpass ourselves in excellence in a future version of ourselves.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2022
St. Paul promised an escape from temptation or trial. What would be the escape? The escape is always the passing of time. The next moment can be "different" and looking for the best kind of difference in the next moment is the way that repentance helps us escape temptation and trial.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2022
I am what I am, is perhaps an abstraction of being from becoming. Becoming is the dynamic state and it is more compatible with Time, since the word being can imply the impossible static state. Nothing ever remains the same but being-in-time is continual differentiation of the the aftermath with the "fore-math." The proliferation of occasions of becoming in time still has "as it were" a horizontal exterior expanding boundary and the omni-becoming God always remains the Container and the environment for everything having becoming within the divine environment. Since God represents the totality, God has no environment, God only provide the boundary for everything else to have environment and be located in their own time-space relative situations.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2022
It could be that the notion of deconstruction proposed by Derrida is instructive in understanding the unpronounceable name of the holy God, the I am that I am God or I become what I become God. A creating omni-becoming God perpetually deconstructs everything that has come before since in becoming a contextual field always changes the omni-relative interacting meanings. Time and Becoming create perpetual difference. To contradict-speak, God's unchanging nature is always to contain perpetual differencing. To be perfect is to be omni-becoming.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2022
In light of causation being a long chain of antecedent occurrences with each being necessary for what comes after, one can get bogged down on causation arguments and it is appropriate to do forensics on the past to try to improve future behavior, but in a free system, it is better to be in the constant state of repentance rather can being obsessed by the mystery of the causes of many things in life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2022
Compost and manure are metaphors for dead and decomposed things being added to intentional soil plots to foster new growth for fruit. Such a metaphor bespeaks of having wisdom to use the "dead and gone" before of the past, to foster new growth in the now and the future. Jesus told a parable about manure.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2022
Jerusalem, a city that kills the prophet? Probably not anymore than other cities where the politics of power and greed will eliminate those who stand up for those who do not have power.
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2022
On the large scale, language cannot be very precise because sensorial data is arriving in such large quantities that language itself is a reductive filter. That filter is programmed by one's cultural context which indicates to the receiver what is to be received. When the Bible was the only read book that people had, it dominated the reductive filters of how people received their reality, how they defined their existence to themselves. But in the informational age, there are so many more kinds of contextual reductive language filters and this means that the biblical filters are no longer dominate. For people who are trying to limit their filters to but the Bible in how they understand reality, they have come to be like the Amish buggy being the only preferred method of transportation. This is why fundamentalists should wear their slow moving vehicle triangle on the information highway.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2022
We live by the "time-lapse story" since the reality which confronts us outside our eyeballs and other senses is too massive to represent in language except in the "story filter" contexts of the cultures within which we are raised. The quotidian does not really get represented in too many stories and yet it is "drudgery" that makes up most of life. Should brushing one's teeth go into one's life story, or for editorial space, one leaves that out? This means that we want the "different" transitions to be definitive of our lives. We read the Bible looking mainly for the different and the heroic and probably because of the entertainment needs in our lives. We don't make the entertainment stories of cinematic fiction into empirical reality, yet Bible readers often do this with biblical story events which are empirically impossible. This is based upon the lie that only empirically verified stuff is meaningful truth and this unwittingly diminishes the meaningful truths of the multifaceted artistic presentations.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2022
Many Bible readers like fans of all story-based entertainment, do not adjust well in the presentation of a time-lapsed story representation of life-oid situations because it is easy to get addicted to the few "transition" high points and forget that everyday life is made up of more seemingly "forgettable" moments. So it is easy to live by the "reductions" of the transition high points. If Jesus lived for thirty-three years, 17,344, 800 minutes, how many of those minutes get represented in his "story?" Only highly selective and edited portions and presented using existing templates of how great biblical figures are presented.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2022
What does patriotism, citizenship, and tribal identity have to do with faith? Features of ethnic identity, history, and the association with specific land are involved in Jewish identity. What about when the land is taken away during the exile or after the crushing Roman occupation of the land and destruction of the holy Jerusalem? The Christ-movements became Christ-centered Judaism which eroded devotion to the ritual purity identity and the "land" identity of Judaism. It perhaps appealed more to diaspora Jews who had long lived in exile from the land and the language. The Jerusalem, prophet killing city speech channeling the Risen Christ in the aftermath of a destroyed Jerusalem, is perhaps the eulogy to the end of "land identity" for Christians and that land identity in their religion. There occurred the adoption of the passport of the Pauline "heavenly" citizenship which was portable and adjustable to the many places which Christians came to live in. The Holy Spirit as living in the parallel heavenly realm was very portable.
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2022
Jerusalem as a "killer of the prophets" is an ironic designation, since locations don't kill, only certain people kill prophets, and in the case of Jesus the prophet, he was killed by Roman authorities in Jerusalem, even as the Gospel presents the religious leaders in Jerusalem as complicit in presenting Jesus as such a controversial "rabbi" in their tradition who was having the kind of public attention which the Roman authorities disapproved of.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2022
"Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets." These words are attributed to Jesus and they are hyperbolic, exaggeration, abbreviation, and involve massive stereotypes. Jerusalem is the reductive name for a city that included millions of people over the ages, and not every citizen of Jerusalem was a "prophet killer," probably only a few power brokers who were offended by the challenges presented by various prophets.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2022
In a world of freedom and time, timing is everything. Doing and saying at the appropriate time the things over which we have control would be the Christian vocation, or the human vocation. To be thrown off our timing by other factors is what might be called temptation.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2022
In political leadership, the world is being taught by the example of narcissistic leaders, the importance of psychological sanity which includes a deep empathy for the well-being of people. This means leadership must be done from a service motive if justice will prevail. The leaders of ancient times were called shepherds. Jesus is the good shepherd and a model for the leadership of care.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2022
When war occurs, there arises the question of the justice of war and whether an attacked party should just "turn the other" cheek and allow an aggressor to dominate without resistance. In the Hebrew Scriptures, "holy wars" of both offensive and defensive sorts seem to be promoted. The beatitudes which are more martial arts behaviors proposed for people living under oppression, may not be the model for determining whether a free country has the right to defend itself from an attacker and whether allies can to a full degree assist with the defense of an attacked country. If one is already alleging war crimes of an attacking country, one might think that defense in the face of war crimes would be called for.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2022
The history of the world shows us that mad man leaders drunk with power and narcissism are willing to sacrifice innocent people for their desperate need for attention. The temptation narrative of Jesus indicates the inner Satan anti-Christ wanted Jesus to be a megalomaniacal narcissist for power and fame.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2022
Ashes to inoculate us from death's effects? Or to remind us to cherish our pre-ashen bodies which still have a volitional command center to chose to be better?
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2022
Shrove Tuesday has to do with confession and absolution. This has often been so reduced to a liturgical obligation that it has lost it true signification. Confession is really based upon honesty about the willful mistimings of choices and actions in our lives that have come to be revealed as unworthy for our advance in excellence and also in the promotion of the well-being of others. It is less important to jump through the hoops of the church regarding confession and absolution, and most important to achieve the kind of honesty in one's life that allows the opening for amendment of life.
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