Aphorism of the Day, December 2023

Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2023

Our calendar way of being in this world imposes an arbitrary last day of the year revealing that we need time-lapsed stories to hang the meaning of our lives on.  Language reduces the morass of the infinite into timed stories.

Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2023

One of unavoidable things which all can agree on is that everyone has language.  The issue is how we use language in being persuaded about things.  Being persuaded is "having faith," and everyone is persuaded about the things, the ideas, which motivate their lives.  Jesus came to reinforce persuasions about loving God, loving our neighbors, and loving self as the best persuasions to have.  If we can balance loving our neighbors with loving ourselves from a regard of the horizon of God, we will seek a just place for everything and everyone in life.

Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2023

The world of having language, also has the experience of silence, not to pretend that we never had words, but to create the gaps of rests, like the spaces between musical notes.  So such silence is the boundary of differentiation between all things which really share oneness of continuity with each other with only the illusion of contiguity.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2023

I sat down to meditate and contemplate myself into a wordlessness, a cosmic silence, which turned out to be a comic silence when I remembered that everything was always already pre-coded by having had language.

Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2023

Life is a meaningless void without Word to be the naming ordering phenomenon of language users.  Having language ability brings into known existence everything in human life and as language users we even name what we don't know, by simply using words to designate large portions of infinity as being unknown by us, which probably means they are not within our realm of intimate perceptual control.

Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2023

In the Beginning was the Word.  Language is the tacit assumption for intuition, consciousness, music, math, thinking, conceiving, enlightenment, dreams, and everything.  Having language retroactively brings everything that is known to exist.  Language is always already hidden within everything that is experienced.  Babies and animals escape language?  Not in the gaze of the language users who make such states known.  Everything/one either actively or passively becomes within language which reflexively gives rise to the self-knowing language user.  So the creation stories (Genesis and John 1:1) posit the divine as the ultimate Language User.

Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2023

The Christmas story might be seen as God's shell game in hiding intensive divine presence within a baby so that we might be practiced in finding the divine presence everywhere so that we treat each other and our world with the appropriate reverences of care, love, and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2023

"All theology is anthropology."  Perhaps a phrase from L. Feuerbach.  Another way of saying this is that "no one has an non-human experience of God."  The divine is a mode of relaying the humanly sublime.  So what is revealed in the "Word made flesh" metaphor?  Anthropomorphism is a valid way to come to know what we anthropomorphically say is "beyond human."

Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2023

It is unavoidable and unrealistic to deny the greatness of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, even when we don't find specific occasions within the multiverse consistent with love, justice, and personal favor.  Such a view might be one of the insights behind the composition of the Psalms.

Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2023

Everything is temporal and temporary, including everlastingness.  Our vocation is to be a part of new justice arising in new time.

Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2023

An insightful way to read the infancy narrative is to find the spiritual encoding of the mystagogy of the early churches which was summarized in the Pauline phrase, "Christ in you, the hope of glory."  How does Christ get in you?  Through an overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2023

Getting to the "real" in Scripture or in anything means sorting through layers of interpretations of memorial traces of memorial traces proving that what is real is the unavoidable always already "sorting of traces."

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2023

With language and time and memory, we are left with linguistic traces about other linguistic traces and some of them attain the status of origin, made so by what has subsequently happened so as to be able to designate a former event as an origin.

Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2023

People of colonial and "empire" Christianity need to be honest about how to appropriate biblical readings which were mainly generated by and for oppressed.  If the preponderance of Scriptures is ideology on behalf of poor people, then Christians with knowledge, wealth, and power need to quit pretending having an honest identity with the "blessed state of the poor."

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2023

The endless task of the New Testament writers was to try to tell their readers who Jesus was.  They resorted to all the language of surpassing human figures in their vocabulary.  In their loss of what to say, they poetically understood him to be Word itself, and all and in all.  

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2023

Ponder the words serendipity, providence, bad luck, favor, and fortune and analyze one's relation to probability.  What will happen and how will we label it once it has happened, while it is happening but also after it has happened.  A future reassessment of a regarded serendipitous current event may overturn such evaluation.  Time can seemingly alchemize the good into bad and the bad into good and leave lots of so-so as merely so-so.  Is Time really alchemizing anything or is it simply language using interpreters from changing subject positions always already reinterpreting life according to oneself?

 Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2023

Any understand of God has to include ultimate diversity across time.  Wisdom in humanity involves orchestrating diversity for common good.

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2023

Old wineskins can't retain the new wine?  The accumulation of more occasion of human experience means that old models cannot handle the diversity.  Churches are splitting because many do not believe the old can handle the diversity of persons who want to belong.  America is polarized because some Americans do not believe our "old" system can handle the diversity of people who want to enjoy equality in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness within our borders.

Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2023

The New Testament writers believed the world as they knew it would end.  They believed that such an end would be the realized justice of punishment for the bad guys, even retroactive for the those who had died.  In our time, it is hard for us to visualize a hard end of anything since remnant energy only reconstitute a different future, even if that future is humanless.

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2023

John the Baptist identified himself as "the voice."  He was not the Messiah, or Elijah or The Prophet.  As "the voice," he had the role akin to an announcer who is not the main news or the main player, but the one who describes the chief person of the event.

Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2023

The New Testament is about classifying someone who became famous.  What language was available to speak superlatives about Jesus particularly after he became better known as a spiritual phenomenon.  Terms from religious writings and Roman emperor propaganda were used to write about the comparative greatness of Jesus, who at the time of writing was essentially a inward "spiritual" occurring among those who gathered to know such group effervescence.

  Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2023

The songs of Mary and Zechariah in Luke's Gospel are songs for those in the condition of oppression but they assert the belief in the actions of God in spite of the obvious dire circumstances.  If we ask how it is possible to have faith and optimism when there is no apparent reason, one has to look to the very depth of the grace of awareness itself.

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2023

Bible stories involve time-lapsing, or the reduction of thirty plus years of John the Baptist and Jesus into but a few lines.  We cannot know about the unwritten and missing records about John and Jesus.  The few words we have about them stand as what the early Jesus Movement writers wanted us to know about them.

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2023

A basic clue to reading the Gospels: when the information about a person like John the Baptist is so sparse, one read less for historical information and more for his functional role in the coming to identity of forming communities who regard Jesus as the inspiring originator.

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2023

John the Baptist is presented in the Gospels as a "set up" man for Jesus.  The community of John the Baptist was probably the "proto-church" and the Gospel writers were coaxing members of that community to discover Jesus as the completion of the ministry of John.  John was the water man and Jesus was the Spirit Man.

Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2023

If the divine image is on all people, shouldn't it be possible for some universal cosmic rising of that image within everyone to convince them of love and justice?   And why doesn't such universal heart conversion by the divine image occur?  Or is it always already occurring and being freely resisted?

Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2023

Advent as a season of fasting is a positive fast if normal excess is given to those who have the involuntary fast of daily hunger.

Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2023

In the department of reinventing the wheel, intermittent fasting is a current health and diet recommendation.  Fasting is an important self-control principle of life whose patron saint might be John the Baptist whom we bring out each Advent.  For the addicted, fasting must become permanent even as it must be a continuing discipline in the task of impulse control.  Advent is a season of highlighting fasting.  Meanwhile early Christmas parties tempt us to much too early excess.

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2023

The supposed last stage in the grief process is acceptance.  Circumstances force the reality of acceptance as soon as things happen no matter what happens within us when events occur.  The apocalyptic was a literary and preaching mode of accepting that some really bad things are happening when they happen as a way of saying that the God of freedom upholds freedom of things to happen whether they are favorable or unfavorable to me at the time.  The apocalyptic tries to encourage us to accept the "weakness" of God who won't over ride the freedom in the world which is the basis for true moral worth.  Without genuine freedom, morality has no value.  We'd be but robots or puppets of some great puppeteer.

Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2023

The human experience of time makes us "futurists," since in the succession of befores and afters, we live toward the afters and in language we have genres of the future.  In biblical language the apocalyptic is one genre of the future which had functional purposes within the communities which generated writing products of this genre of the futuer.  

December 1, 2023

Biblical writings include both apocalyptic and utopian imagery as a way to continue to believe in justice as well as continue to set the direction of self-surpassability toward what is ideal.