Aphorism of the Day, July 31, 2023
In John's Gospel the Christ, according to Paul is "all and in all," is also Word, which is in all that is known, and Christ is Light of the world. Word is Light or that which allows seeing, and it reiterates the words, "let there be light." The Bible, like life itself, is being lost in words, and occasionally claiming to be "found in words" with insights or "light."
Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2023
In the kingdom of heaven parables, the words of Jesus encourage the most global type of thinking, namely, we live and move and have our being in the divine environment or realm. In practice we are forced to think and act locally in our respective lesser realms of nation, states, cities, neighborhoods, parishes, businesses, schools, jobs, and family. Thinking in such a global way should at the very least be humble contemplation about relative greatness and this is good for negotiating our local commitments.
Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2023
The kingdom or realm of heaven/God referred to in the parables of Jesus are not about Jesus announcing suddenly that the created order is now the location of the divine realm; the realm of God has always been the reality of the oneness of all with the divine image perpetuated in everything. The parables of Jesus are more about the events of recognizing that we live and move and have our being in God.
Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2023
Language invites continuous rhetorical versatility. Biblical leaven or yeast is used in contradictory ways. In one parable of Jesus, it used to connote the hidden divine within nature which swells to recognition and the tastiness of the sublime within the ordinary.
Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2023
The realm of God as a mustard seed and becoming an unimpressive shrub (when compared to other majestic trees) indicates that the divine is mostly invisible and really able to be missed in its ordinariness. One must ponder how greatness is an accumulation of very small things done and when small kindnesses are ordinary one does not obviously recognize the fact that cumulative kindness is what sustains the world.
Aphorism of the Day, July 26, 2023
The parable of the pearl of great value is about the discovery of the superlative around which to organize one's life. Too often the words used to organize one's life around that which is elusively great become the replacement for the superlative over which one does not have control. Institutionalized religion seems to pretend to domesticate God's wild presence. If the great is omni-present in time, then we spend each day re-arranging the furniture of words to revisit what we always must revisit in time.
Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2023
Some parables of Jesus are about sorting out the traces left us from the past. We cannot help but offer value judgments on what has happened, and different sorters use different criteria in appraising what has happened. What is the safe criteria? Using the criteria of the words of Jesus, justice for the forgotten, the poor, and the afflicted should be the main criteria, not the dogmatic minutiae of our particular party or church affiliation.
Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2023
The Bible is a dynamic textual event which includes its own undoing and re-doing. Textual idolaters seems to think that biblical texts not only fix words, but also a self evidential meanings which they as "insiders" know. But there are many contradictory "insiders" who know differently to debunk the "self evidential meanings" implication of the "there is only one true meaning crowd." The wisdom scribe is always bringing from textual treasure the syntheses of new and old because application of what is old in the new presents the old as differently new in a fresh setting.
Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2023
Most language product is inner dynamic within people and never reaches the empirically verifiable products of speech, writing, or body language deeds. One could say that each person as a language user is mostly unpublished. For every potential sublime literary production not realized, thankfully the most are have gone to be doubly deleted in the interior trash bin.
Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2023 (Anniversary of 11 years of daily aphorisms, 4015 straight days)
We should be humble about holding a final theory or answer for everything and content ourselves to find insights on the journey to share and help others in their journey. The quest to have the best and right answer for everyone stems from pride.
Aphorism of the Day, July 21, 2023
Many have failed to learn the lesson of reading Scripture about reading itself. Scripture teaches us to read and understand the contrast in the human discursive practices. Stories which include accounts of violating rules of empirical verification are meant for presenting the kinds of contrast which evoke abstract thinking. It encourages the reader in a conscious dividing of discursive genres. Human being are dreamers and day dreamers and create texts of accounts of things which cannot be empirically verified. Failure to learn this can trap people in crass literalism which gives birth to all sorts of conspiracy theories, i.e. taking the fantastical as literal.
Aphorism of the Day, July 20, 2023
Hope that is seen is not hope? The possible is not yet the actual. Wanting to know the future as the present is like the gambler who wants to know the outcome before it occurs. Hope isn't the guarantee of a specific future, but the evidence now of there always being a future. Hope is submitting to the reality of time. Pretending to know the specifics of the future means that one will be disappointed when it arrives.
Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2023
Even as we say that the mixture of stuff in life make it interesting, we would rather not be interested in the bad things which can befall us and so the mixture in life includes our displeasure of things we do not like. The mixture of life is a continuing compilation of everything including our reactions.
Aphorism of the Day, July 18, 2023
The field of probabilities is so diverse with good and bad happening in context specific ways to myriads of parties within that field, to fantasize about the destruction of the whole field would be to sacrifice the good and glorious just to remove their opposites. The good, the glorious, and the just may be so wonderful as to tolerate their opposites and live in the latest day to retrospectively designate the past evils to their dustbin in history.
Aphorism of the Day, July 17, 2023
In the cycles of life, the earlier cycles do not get resolved until a later time. Many weed survive until harvest when things get sorted out. The nature of interpretation is the sorting out of what happened earlier at a later time. The later brings into existence what happened before because the past become known as the past when it is contrasted with the present. The past is always becoming in the present. We go forth each day to make our past.
Aphorism of the Day, July 16, 2023
We confess randomness because we do not have the capacity to know the casual relationship between everything that was and is. There is plenty of room to confess that we don't know and with humility.
Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2023
Scientists declare as negligible the causal factors which cannot be observed or measured like the flapping of butterfly wings on weather patterns. What are the causes of specific beliefs? The answer to this is presented in the parable of the sower, though the answer is not so precise, it is a rather vague statement about probability: "It depends upon the conditions."
Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2023
The parable of the sower is an insightful allegory about the mystery of the conditions for persuasive message to gain success. Farmers and gardeners believe that they know the conditions for successful harvest, even as they know that there are enough things outside their control to keep the gardening mystery alive.
Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2023
You shall and you shall not. This is the law of recommended behaviors, and keeping them all are impossible especially the one regarding coveting. How does one cease desiring wrongly even if one does not act wrongly? Biblical jurisprudence seems to link the inevitability of sin with the inevitability o death as the punishment for the sinful condition. Paul introduces the life or law of Spirit as a way to live forever in a way that also is compatible with our sinful condition with an expire date in time on our bodies.
Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2023
Time means that nothing is ever complete and we ever await completion. In the meantime we must settle for ever better approximations of what love and justice means in actual life situations.
Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2023
The mystery of how one is persuaded and how one changes one's belief exorcised he early Jesus Movement. Why did some accept Jesus as Messiah and others did not? The parable of the sower presents an allegory that does not give final causal answers but does give insights about it happening.
Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2023
The parable of the sower is an attempt to provide insight about the serendipity of why people come to or arrive at persuasive experience in our lives. Serendipity remains a mystery and the parable provides insights about it even as it cannot indicate an infallible prediction, but only insightful explanations.
Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2023
For "sleep deprived" people, the words of Jesus promise rest for souls. The external strife for the people who were part of the early development of the Jesus Movement required a spiritual martial arts practice such as one can find in the Beatitudes and the other rather enigmatic words of Jesus. Spiritual martial arts was required for survival.
Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2023
John the Baptist's acetic practices did not give him fellowship with the kind of people whom Jesus came to have fellowship. It is not wise to make one's own lifestyle the norm for everyone else. Wisdom involves finding the lifestyle proper to oneself with regard to also being winsome with the people to whom one is called.
Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2023
Rest for the soul was the mystical program offered by the early Jesus Movement when their external world was all but restful.
Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2023
Rest for the soul was the promise from words of Jesus. Interior rest is different from physical rest and if learned is the state of existence to accompany whatever is happening in one's external life.
Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2023
"Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds." Wisdom is in part knowledge plus excellent action and is the kind of truth as pragmatism uniting synchronic knowing (frozen essentialism in words) with diachronic action, ie., truth in motion, truth in time, truth in process of becoming better.
Aphorism of the Day, July 4, 2023
People of faith always need to balance their citizenship in the universal family of God with their location and loyalties to their country of citizenship. The Declaration of Independence locates us in the universal family of humanity and so being an American invites us to be examples of what universal citizenship should mean in seeking justice for all.
Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2023
Some of the sayings of Jesus are so enigmatic as to defy attempts at understanding. One such is when Jesus purports to withhold knowledge from the wise and reveal it to infants. No one is more undeveloped and ignorant than a pre-language user baby. What is the state of wisdom of infanthood? Unreflective vulnerability without significant agency and left to the total care of caretakers. Our existence amid vast Plenitude is the wisdom of such vulnerability? But why should we not value the limited agency which we have?
Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2023
My life is unwittingly censored from the things that I do not yet know, perhaps things both glorious and horrifying. Even as I accept what I do know now, I must let such be gradually dissolved by the wider concentric circle of what I do not yet know.
Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2023
In the morass of words, we find ourselves located in stories given to us in our contexts. Many biblicists have come to assume the story of science does not consistently co-exist with the stories of the world's literature including biblical stories. Balance in life is learning the different discursive purposes of the stories of life in which we are located.
