Aphorism of the Day, August 2023

Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2023

So much of the New Testament is misappropriated by Christian readers who live in such comfort today, since it is mainly the literature of how to live under the conditions of oppression, as what I call a program of Christ-like martial arts.  The hermeneutic gymnastics of the so-called "prosperity Gospel preachers" would be laughable if they weren't such a misrepresentation.

Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2023

How does Peter go from confessing without understanding Jesus as being the Messiah and being rebuked by Jesus for being on the side of Satan, to the hero who died upside down on a cross?  St. Paul understood the cross/resurrection dynamic as a spiritual principle of transformation or repentance which happens in time.  The Gospel narrative ironically narrativizes the cross/resurrection metaphor for engaging the power of repentance or the ability to aways be dying to one's former states of mind and taking on the new or resurrection states of mind.

Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2023

Dying to one's self might be compared with the notion of detachment in Buddhism. Dying to one's self might be the prelude to being better available to care for others.  Detachment might be regarded as being too aloof from the needs of others as one attends to one's own "spiritual" well-being.  Any spirituality that becomes too personally quietistic and aloof from the needs of others under the guise of being a hidden care for others might be a bit delusional.  Certainly phases of living sometimes require more of a withdrawal, perhaps to learn strategic detachment so that one might attain control for strategic engagement to help others for the right motives.

Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2023

Time means the before dies and the after is born.  How is the after different from the before?  Meta-noia is the "after mind," the "new mind," or repentance.  The Gospel words of Jesus regarding losing one's life and the establishing of the cross by Paul as a metaphysical symbol of dying to the before, or former mind set, represents a transformation process which integrates the continual loss which time implies.  Our choice is involved in what kind of "after mind" that we want.  Resurrection is the metaphor for a better "after mind," a renewal or rebirth from what is always being lost, with the hope of surpassing ourselves in excellence in future states.

Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2023

There is the experience of Sublime as we see our focus on the particular gradually folding itself into the effect of the Great Containing Background of All.  We commit worship when we admit that the particular can never be separated from the All.  And in our reverence we confess the personality of the All because language implies personality.

Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2023

What is the fate of ancient texts which endure in written form but whose contexts are no longer available?  One can peruse the available succession of commentaries on such texts and note the similar and dissimilar interpretations.  In the end, we use intuition born from our current context to interpret the range of meanings of ancient texts even as we try to find ways to craft correspondences for their possible meanings in our own time.

Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2023

Subtle discursive shifts can take place within traditions.  Nietzsche said that truth was but well used metaphors, meaning with increasing popular use terminology becomes the "truth" of the people who use it, and with use the users generalize the truth to be omni-contextual, i.e. truth for every human context.  With the history of use, meaning structures attain "community objectivity," and a subtle shift happens when mystical discourse couched in narrative gets literalized into "it must have been empirically verified" happenings.

Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2023

Child of God, Child of Man, and the Anointed were titles of Jesus found in the Gospel writings of the Jesus Movement.  Each of these titles were definitive about what followers of Jesus believed about themselves, being children of God, being very human children, and yet being baptismally anointed by God's Spirit for human purpose as children of God.

Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2023

It is impossible to extract the present when writing about the past.  Matthew's Gospel has Jesus speaking about the church which did not actually exist during the time of Jesus.  Such an anachronism is consistent with the early Jesus movement speaking and writing in the name of Jesus in their own times and such speaking and writing were regarded to be Christ speaking and writing through the speaker and writer.

Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2023

With what we know now, we continually need to have the humility to admit that we don't fully know what anything means yet.  The future is only going to take our current meanings and put them in the tumbler of all other meanings and generate new insights.  And some of those future insights with contradict what we think we know now.

Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2023

If the Gospels present the disciples as not-yet-hero saints, appreciate that the authors (decades later) present them as persons in faith training in the appeal to their Gospel readers who are persons in faith training. 

Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2023

Empathy needs the constant work of information and education.  We cannot "walk in other people's shoes" toward effective just actions unless we hear their stories and inform ourselves about how they experience their lives within their specific circumstances.  The work of empathy requires the constant process of informing ourselves better about people, especially those whose experience is different than our own.

Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2023

Traditions based upon word meanings which purport to not let innovation or new thinking or new applications for justice to come into being, are museum traditions.  "Come and see what once was so that you will be enticed to live in the museum."  Language cannot be strait-jacketed into fixed meanings; it is as dynamic and as fluid as living experience.  We live in the motion of time and we must be open to new meanings and new applications of those meanings.

Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2023

Paradigms, traditions, tacit knowledge background involve group assumptions of things taken for granted and they involve massive abbreviations.  Life involves the continual exposure of the hidden assumptions which constitute our personal language from which flow the language products of writing, speaking, and body language deeds.

Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2023

Integrative thinking is based upon language use and using the appropriate discourse for the appropriate occasion.  A scientific law is not going to have language which pertains to poetry or mystical discourse.  Each person can be "imbalanced" in that one tends to use most the discourses of one's particular skillset calling, but it is incumbent to learn integration by learning the beauty of language having a discourse that fits different occasions of human experience.  And remember not to limit discourse to the language products of speech and words since body language is discourse as well as the interpretive grids used to process everything that we "see."   Seeing is discursive practice as well.

Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2023

Jesus is presented as being in conflict with the purity codes which pertained to purification rites, the washing of hands.  One can agree with Joseph Lister on the need for sanitation but one cannot equate outer cleanliness with the bigger problem of inward cleanliness from where the springs of our words and deeds flow.  Our inner lives are collages of words, images, feelings and thankfully all of our inner stuff does not come to word or deed because of learning impulse control.  Jesus was less concerned about externally influential cleanliness rules, and more concern about how we can surf all our inward stuff toward beneficial outcomes in love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2023 (St. Mary the Virgin)

St. Mary, Mother of Jesus, become the iconic feminine in the long history of patriarchalism both within the church and society even to become the most popular intercessor in the piety of the Catholic masses.  Historically, if Christ became too unapproachable because of his glorified deity, St. Mary became the accessible intercessor who had a special "in" with her Son.

 Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2023

Faith or being persuaded about something is a "selfish" act particularly when it is exercised toward things which benefits oneself or those closest to one.  Even having faith in "eternal life" might be the expression of everlasting self-interest.  To align personal favor with common good favor is perhaps the greater task of faith.

Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2023

When people say, "it's only words," they cheapen and limit the meaning of words.  Our entire existence is ordered because of words and so there is nothing "cheap" about words.

Aphorism of Day, August 12, 2023

When one tries to speak about interior life, one is using what is most profoundly interior about humanity, namely, having language.  Language is human spirituality; it is human inwardness.  A scientist who focuses upon the exterior field of "objects" observed and manipulated, is only doing so because the scientist first is completely constituted inwardly by having language.  Now one might want to say that there is "spiritual" genre within human language for people to speak about judgments on how best to be human language users, but let no one deny the basic spiritual inwardness of having language as the a priori.

Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2023

We have our awareness of existing through having language, passively as infants, but actively as language users.  Word is co-extensive with living, as Word is co-extensive with the divine, as stated, "The WORD was God."  While we believe in the topography which seems to be outside us, our engagement with it happens through the language which is inside us.  It is not surprising that "topos" or topics represents the attempt to externalize internal language.

Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2023

There is no reason to divide human nature from Nature of which it is a part.  God has arisen in the language nature of humans within Nature, as the mode of speaking about Superlative Greatness.  People may characterize Greatness in different ways even while it cannot be removed from human language in referring to the continuous inter-connectedness of everything.

Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2023

People who believe that divine communication happens are those who believe that everything is "God-bearing" and the God-bearingness of life renders particular contextual communication.  However, the people who are most often saying "the Lord told me" are more likely people who traffic in the echoing of their ego consciousness pretending that God rubber stamps their very limited whims.  The general divine presence and the particular divine presence probably coalesces with sheerness of silence which we name as peace.

Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2023

For those who believe in the divine selectivity of when a miraculous violation of natural law occurs, should not one also believe in the prior "miracle" of cancer not yet happening to the many people who do not yet have cancer?  Within the natural, the uncanny and wonderful can happen, but it would seem that the Gospel accounts of the "miraculous" are more about the presence of the Risen Christ before a problem situation, during a problem situation, and after a problem situation, no matter the outcome, whether the uncanny event or death itself.

Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2023

The proverbial "acts of God" of insurance companies refer to events in nature which are not "caused" by humans and the designation figures in insurance coverage.  In a continuously creating cosmos which generates the continuous interconnection of an infinite number of entities, the field of probable acts or occurrences is massive.  Some of those occurrences involve human beings caught in harms way of events like earthquakes, wind storms, and fire.  Biblical writers use these events of being in harms ways as defining the human condition.  They also expound what it is to be persuaded about a favorable higher Presence, One with a longer duration than any event, and One on whom personal duration depends.  God's greater becoming Presence is greater than any probable occurrence with but short temporal duration, even with intermittent recurrences of the same within the field of probability. 

Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2023

John's Gospel does not have the Transfiguration account.  The writer is content with saying Christ is the Light of the world without needing the narrative about the shining face of Jesus on the mountain.  Biblical writers chose different kinds of discourse as do we.

Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2023

Some people read the Scriptures treating biblical writers as those who did not know the difference between common sense reality and visionary discourse.

Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2023

Reading Scripture means study the systems of symbols within the contexts of the writers.  Too many readers accept empirical verification as the favored truth and import assumptions about modern eye-witness journalism on the biblical writers.  This negates the allegorical symbolic truths of the Bible.

Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2020

The Gospel of John from its beginning is about Word manifestations.  Spirituality and "having ears to hear" in John's Gospel is about knowing the discursive nuances of language.  Sleep=death, blind=sight, and a host of metaphors for Jesus.  The Gospel of John is about evoking "inwardness" and not being locked into just the common sense naive realism of empirical verification.  Spirituality is about learning a different kind of inwardness as language users.

Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2023

In reading the Bible one needs to learn the language of symbols, especially the language used to try to present Jesus as the superlative in human experience. What are the spiritual symbols in the Transfiguration story?  Elevation, Light, Glowing face, Clouds, and Heavenly Voice.  This theophany or Christ-epiphany has all the elements for how early Christ-communities were presenting their experience of Christ as their superlative.

Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2023

Visionary events like the account of the Transfiguration can reveal how the rise of modern science in appropriating biblical accounts created a split between observing subject and the external objective field.  Dream states tend to merge the within and the without, and as such are regarded as unreliable for predicating common cause and effect sequence, and don't make for doing good science.  But such "altered" realities are accepted in the realm of art and especially modern cinema.  Artistic vision is seeing in a different way with a different purpose than what science is trying to see and record.  Artistic/spiritual seeing can co-exist with scientific seeing in the same person.  Don't discount the "super" in nature, even the "super" that is accessible in our human nature.