Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2022, The Visitation
The Visitation evokes some insights. It is two expectant mothers who are in a bonding event. The encounter is the later church presenting a parable of contrast between the marvelous and the miraculous in birthing, natural marvelous birth, and miraculous spiritual birth. Mary is also presented as a poet and the Magnificat can be seen as a song of feminist liberation. The uniqueness of women in the past was their child-bearing ability which left them often trapped in a "limited" role. Mary as poet was one who was inspired in wordsmithery and proclaimed that she was a "lowly one" lifted up. Women have long needed to be freed from their unique status as child-bearers and honored with equality for their multifarious gifts with which they might have blessed, can, and will bless this world. Women can do anything plus bear children. Let the Visitation be seen as gateway from child-bearing to poet prophetess anticipating the full liberation of women.
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2022
The writer of Genesis thought that having a world with many languages was a curse to prevent a monoglottic society from being united in challenging God. There is a naivete in thinking that people who speak the same language are actually united in how they interpret life. Language itself is about differentiation in time, and there being different languages, means that there is differentiation within differentiation and such is the source of creativity, the very possibility of "some more" language products in the future.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2022
As one might say that everything has equality in having existence itself, we say this because everything has equality in and when it comes to language. Valuation within language is a further feature of the differentiation which takes place because language and because language users come to assert value systems of how we might be best language users. Common good, harmony, cause no harm, love and justice are value terms and ways of being language users which we associate with the life of Jesus and we are called to promote these values as the chief values.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2022
One can notice that language outcomes, products in speech, thinking, and writing seems to make everything into a "surface." This may account for the use of "topic" to speak about language products. Topic come from "topos" as site or place in "topography." We can't see soul or spirit or heart but somehow we come to name them. We give our interior geography "surfaces" when they come to language. And the most reflexive self spoof of language? Language makes itself a surface in how it comes to language about itself.
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2022
To presume to know exactly what an author, artist, painter, or poet means might be a presumption of appreciation for their work. But it is crossing the boundary in that one cannot assume the same interior space of the artist or author. The Bible is the artistic writing of inspired artists in different times and different places and the words became public for shared empathy, but even with the sharing we cannot presume to know any final original meanings implied in the inspired writing. Art is always open for projections upon the work for further meanings to be known by those who are projecting the meanings from their subjective situations. Artistic meaning cannot be "controlled" and neither can biblical meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2022
It is curious to note how the language of the church still uses the language of altitude to speak of the Ascension in our time when we know we don't live in a three-tier universe of netherworld, flat earth, domed sky with a trap door opening to the heavenly abode. Elevation as a metaphor is one of superlative location within the importance index for human values. The Ascension is the place of assignment for Christ who has gone beyond in being a valued being who set the standard of values for humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2022
The longest prayer of Jesus includes the words of Jesus, "while I was with them." That could mean that his prayer is actually a "channelled prayer of his post-Ascension" by the Johannine writer, a "what would Jesus pray" exercise of one who was inspired by Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2022
Many interpreters of the Bible write about a second and final coming of Christ. We should perhaps be interpreting another and other comings of Christ as being more accurate. We can be so "selfishly" temporally provincial in thinking that our age and our suffering and our sin is worthy of a catastrophic interventional end. Most of the interpreters who confidently "predict" this final coming are those who think that they are the "favored and special ones" for whom Christ is going to intervene. Many have "martyr" complexes even while not practicing love and justice for their neighbors.
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2022
In the poetic mystagogy of the early church, language as the interior realm was given a parallel reality to complement and supplement common sense exterior reality. It provided its own topography for the inter-realm movement of Jesus as he morphed to the Risen Christ. In this topography, the Ascension was a spiritual explanation for the variation in the impending appearances of Christ. Ascension and glorification are words for two post-resurrection appearance events to account for the future kinds of human experiences of the Christ aspect of the no longer present Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2022
Are we worried that the Christ-identity in this world might become dissociated from groups which call themselves churches and when churches lose their "social" success? What about "churches" which invert the teaching of Christ by behaving as though the love and justice of Christ were "liberal" propaganda? The Christ-identity is incognito wherever love and justice is manifest in human practice even when it does not have "church" subtitles on it.
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2022
The transfer of the physical presence of Jesus of Nazareth to the transhistorical spiritual identity of the Risen Christ in myriads of presences is one of the greatest phenomenon of human history.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2022
The New Testament is a literature of building the identity of a movement becoming an institutionalized community on the absence of Jesus of Nazareth, and the presence of the phenomenon which comes to language in the interpretation of inward experiential events as being God-touched by the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2022
It could be said that the New Testament is in short a persuasion literature about how the real absence of Jesus equals the real presence of the Risen Christ through the experience of the Holy Spirit. And it is mediated and understood through word, since language is way in which human beings have any orientation within life. Before one interprets an "event" of the Holy Spirit, one assumes living, moving, and having being within the language matrix which comprises consciousness which has the specificity of awareness.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2022
Everyone needs a lawyer. The Holy Lawyer, is the one called the Advocate. Sometimes we need an Interior Advocate, to the make the case for ourselves to ourselves, unless we suffer from the narcissism of the worship of our own uniqueness. Sometimes we need an Advocate to stand against an interior Accuser, the one who intertwines as a parasite on every bad thing that has happened to us and been said about us.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2022
Homing is the ability of an animal to return to the from which it has been displaced. This could be metaphor for the human animal learning to return to the "home identity" of having been made in the image of God. Jesus promised that the heavenly Parent would come and make a home with us. So God says to us, "You are my dwelling place," and we should say to God, "I want to be at home with you."
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2022
In an equality of Trinitarian persons, why would Jesus be quoted as saying the "Father is greater than I am?" It could be words of Jesus regarding how he was in his "emptying phase of his equality with God," as the Pauline Christological hymn suggest.
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2022
Transferring visionary literature to the world of empirical verification is impossible since the correspondences between the experiences which occur in a dream versus commonsense reality are very inexact and not transferable. One can funnel some "insights" from dreams and visions which seem to have the advantage of having been experienced by the unconscious mind which seems to take in more and different kind of data. Much of biblical writing is visionary writing and to read it as we do modern history which assumes empirical verification is to misread the Bible badly.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2022
What does it mean to say that time will be no more? From being in time, it is difficult to falsify our context. It could be that "timelessness" is really poetic hyperbole to reflect the experience of time, such as one might experience in a dream or in the phrase, "time flies when one is having fun." Eternality or timelessness is poetry for the experience of theophany, the sense of the sublime.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2022
It is said that "hindsight is 20/20. However, the mere fact of "seeing" the past because one is perched in being the "latest,' does not make the seeing of the past particularly insightful. Hegel wrote that we learn from the writing of history that people don't learn from the reading of history. The conclusions which biblical readers arrive at from reading the Bible seem to be as diverse as the number of readers, proving that people are often trapped within their hermeneutical circle, their "group programming."
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2022
By its very nature language is a reduction to language products of speech and writing vast amounts of experiential data which impinges upon us from within and without. Language is a filtering system within us which works with both involuntary and voluntary selection capacity. Everything which is not selected to come to language within us still exists. Dreams and visionary language occur when in Blakean terms, the doors of perception have been "cleansed" or opened and threatens the egos control of the data. The plenitudinous overload creates the dream-state or mystical experience, if you will. Insights can come from such incidents, as what came to language in the Revelation of John the Divine. But to try to reduce such overloaded events to empirical verification of prediction of specific future history is the folly of misappropriation.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2022
Is what we call providence the reflection of hindsight? If after many years, one begins to reflect upon some good outcomes from some previous horrendous events, what does this mean? And what if in telling the story of those horrendous event, the "historian" inserts the positive outcomes as being presaged by the participates in the the horrendous events. What is missing in the providence reflections? All the actual terrible outcomes besides the good outcomes, on which the "historian" of providence choses to reflect. What such reflections on one's favored providence misses is all of the other "might have beens" as well as the subsequent pain caused in the lives of those directly affected by horrendous events. Those who write "providence" end up censoring or neglecting what does not fit with the positive features of the focused providence.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2022
John the Divine's vision included a "new heaven and a new earth" and no more death. In short, his vision seemed to imply "timelessness," but is a static state a kind of death itself with the cessation of teeming changing life? Is the deathless state, simply the removal of harsh transitions? Will everyone attain the ability to live in always already synchronicity so that time and the ineffable are "reconciled." His vision is impossible to convert into the categories of time, because even the sequencing of visions and word imply "befores and afters."
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2022
By the time John's Gospel is written, the story of Jesus is mainly a "heavenly" story, a story of continuous spiritual providence, provoking the continuous irony between the physical and the logical and the spiritual. John's Gospel seems to present a superseding of the wills of Judas and Pilate, implying that the great Puppeteer of Heaven was merely allowing Judas and Pilate to have the appearance of "free will" when in fact they were but following a "salvation plan script." No better exemplified than when at supper Jesus exposes the betraying Judas who leaves, and the saying occurs, "Now the Son of Man is glorified." There is no logical/visual/empirical reason for that to be said. I hope we appreciate that the Johannine church is quite sure that the Risen Christ is here to stay and the heavenly history is written to tell why they believe it is so.
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2022
Interesting that the lectionary of the church often has Jesus saying on Good Shepherd Sunday and American Mother's Day, "the Father and I are one." The irony is that Jesus and his Mother Mary were "one" in a very literal way for the nine months of gestation.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2022
It is a misinterpretation of the Gospel of John to read it with crassly literal eyes assuming that everything presented was empirically verifiable. What is verifiable is that it was mystagogy of the Johannine communities trying to show how parables of physicality were used to carry spiritual interpretation. Seeing, walking, tasting, drinking, living again; all are modes of perception of the mystical experience of Christ in us.
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2022
We can live meaningfully and mystically by the poetry of the Bible even while we can't live by the very "out-dated" science of the past. And we should not try to import modern science with empirical verification into biblical contexts. We can accept the meaningful truths of mystical poetry and the meaningful truths of modern science as an effective method of living by actuarial wisdom.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2022
The senses in John's Gospel are metaphors of perceptions of encounter with the Risen Christ. When the channeled Christ in the Johannine says, "My sheep hear my voice," it means that they have understood the non-literal spiritual or inner and experiential aspect of the life of the Holy Spirit. The writer of the Gospel of John tells us over and over again, to be spiritual is to be non-literal.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2022
In the metaphorical fluidity of the New Testament the Lamb can also be the Shepherd, indicating that the Jesus Movement is more of a poetic meaningful presentation of the life of Jesus rather than the empirical verification mode. To mistake poetry for empirical verification is a misuse of both science and poetry. Empirically, Jesus was never a shepherd or a lamb, but in the poetic continuity with the themes of Hebrew Scriptures, he was meaningfully both in the lives of people who were forging their spiritual identity around their mystical experiences with the Risen Christ through Holy Spirit inward events.
Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2022
How far does the shepherd-sheep metaphor go? It works as long as we can regard ourselves as "God's favorite pets" under divine control and care. It does not work in actual animal husbandry because sheep are not pets, they are livestock to be used for wool and meat. Hence a scheduled death on behalf of the shepherd is the economic plan. I guess each person has an eventual death and one may hope that the "commodity" products of one's life are beneficial to others who can use such products, and that one's spirit-essence is retained in reconstituted ways in the memory of the Divine, which is the "dwelling in the house of the Lord forever?"
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2022
Shepherd-sheep relationship was a Gospel metaphor. About the relationship, the channeled words of Jesus state that "my sheep know my voice." There were sheep who did not know "the voice." Apparently there were many different voices to hear. In fact, John the Divine noted at least seven different spirits of the churches in different locale. The many voices of many shepherds and the voices contradict each other to the point of the seeming cacophony of the Christian religion. What voice should be listened to today is an issue for us and how does one discern what to follow? Love justice, do mercy and walk humbly before God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2022
Epiphany, revelation, apocalypse, showing, theophany, seem to be synonyms for the events when the inward parallel world of Spirit-Word provides an experiencer with an event of the Sublime which touches one with the manifestations of hope.
