Aphorism of the Day, June 2023

Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2023

Deconstruction is like refreezing ice cubes in lake water.  One holds to the illusion of the solidity of the text even while the text is being dissolved while in the process of re--texting new "solidity" from the surrounding lake of words.

Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2023

When writing about the "past" in the present, creeping anachronism of the present in text about the past is unavoidable.  One cannot avoid the place one is in time when one writes about "another" time. 

Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2023

Plain reading or meaning of Scripture assumes continuous unbroken universal same language contexts through time avoiding the specifics which influence how meanings are constituted in a reading situation.

Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2023

St. Paul's letter to the Romans includes a mystical practice to sublimate or rearrange one's desires to become an engine to do good things instead of bad things.  Finding the Holy Spirit, according to Paul, is the ability to experience agency toward what is good and better than we were before.

Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2023

Mutual welcome, mutual hospitality expresses what an ideal state of human communion might be.  The intentional expression of belonging together should be the human symphony of unity in differences.

Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2023

Texts like the Gospel can give the impression that writing as a technology of memory can fix the meanings of the words forever.  Texts as fixed meanings is the illusion of infallibility which some church leaders use to fix church administrative behaviors.  "This texts is saying what I need it to say for the authority of practice within my community."  Perhaps we should regard holy texts as open texts seeking to enlighten us toward what justice would mean in our new settings.

Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2023

Religious identity is mostly a poetic ideology which provides a story identity for cohesive formation and maintenance of community.  What is empirically verified by poetry is not the text but the effects upon the readers/participants behaviors.

Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2023

The word peace used by Jesus is contrastive; on one hand it can mean the lack of warfare and conflict, on the other, it can refer to a fruit of Spirit inner calmness which can be known within conflictive situations of life.

Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2023

Peace cannot be a static condition which denies becoming and change.  Peace needs to understood as an adjustment to the continual conditions of change and that also means some conflictive difference between conditions of injustice and better future justice.

Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2023

Dynamic peace needs to include the ability of adaptive change to new circumstances and new paradigm particularly when the issue is the application of justice in new situations.  Finding new application of justice does not always involve seeming peace.

Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2023

The words of Jesus in the Gospels highlight family discord regarding faith paradigms.  Each person has their own constitution regarding their pacing through the faith paradigms relevant to their own perceived progress.  Hence there always seem to be people divided over having a God in common.

Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2023

"I did not come to bring peace."  Peace as the status quo of conditions of injustice continually need to be disrupted with "good trouble."

Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2023

"Wise as serpents and innocent as doves."  This describes the need to be fully disillusioned with humanity in its weakness, but completely gentle without cynicism for being all too human.

Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2023

Something which belongs to all, especially when many are ignorant of their inheritance, needs executors of God's will to promulgate and inform the intended recipient.  Jesus was the executor of God's standing Will for all humanity and he found that many were not informed of their inheritance.

Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2023

Being languaged-beings means that we are multi-discursive and this means we can be poets and scientists at the same time.  The confusion and conflict happens when poets treat their discourse as science and when scientists deny the meaningful truth values of entertaining poetry.  Some religionists are afraid to admit that religious discourse is part of their aesthetic entertainment just as some scientists might dismiss the meaningful truth value of artistic products which benefit and inspire the morals and ethics of our cultures.

Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2023

The basic message of Jesus was about the always already Realm of God, the total field of Plenitude in which we live and move and have our being, and Jesus taught that we should not be isolated in our minds from knowing it.

Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2023

Love requires strategies, tactics, action plans, and actions, as well as spontaneous love acts, to keep from being a good theory of Christian living.

Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2023

Having faith is more accessible than saying "I am spiritual," because faith as persuasion is more easily known in what we are persuaded about.  With an inventory of one's values, one can find out rather easily one's persuasions.  Spiritual is a rather elusive term.

Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2023

The use of the word faith should be returned to its Aristotelian roots in his Rhetoric, meaning "persuasion."  Faith is what one is persuaded about and everyone lives a persuaded lives.  Once we acknowledge living persuaded live, we can look at the sources, goals, and objects of our persuasions.

Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2023

Sin and repentance involves accepting that we live in time and in sequence, we can be better than we have been before.  Time does not allow a static plateau of having been perfect, because perfection is always deferred to the future and know as simply being more complete.

Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2023

Human systems seem to reach their level of incompetence when they have to negotiate within too much diversity of interests and needs of constituents.  While we proclaim that Love will find a way, we must work hard at strategies of justice.

Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2023

The words of Jesus in the Gospels are mostly against people whose sense of entitled rightness did not allow others into their righteous club.

Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2023

Jesus said he came to call sinners and not the righteous.  But isn't thinking that one is righteous, a chief sin and therefore worthy to be called to be dislodged from the sin of thinking one is righteous?  The words of Jesus can be deconstructed from being simplistic binaries.

Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2023

Physician, heal thyself.  Sometimes one can be blindingly hypocritical in one's own profession, like doctors and nurses smoking outside hospital doors.  Learning to practice what we preach is a life long goal.

Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2023

One can easily retreat to mystery as an excuse not to act or do something, waiting for more perfect and fuller information.  Mystery is not supposed to suppress the actions for love and justice needed now.

Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2023

Is it an oxymoron to say a mystery is revealed, meaning that it is revealed that the Trinity is a mystery?   If something remains a mystery, has the content of the mystery been revealed?

Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2023

The Trinity is an insight which has come to language as a paradigmatic way of to conceive of the divine as relational essence.

Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2023

Trinity is a mode of relationship living which tries to unfold in sequential time something which can't be done with synchronicity, i.e., everything, everyone, everyone, all at one.

Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2023

The Trinity is an insightful metaphor in using language to speak about how Plenitude becomes particularized in human experience, particularly in the insights about the Jesus traditions about God.  We cannot make idols out of metaphors even as we cannot ignore their genuine insights.

Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2023

St. Paul wrote about the "communion" of the Holy Spirit.  Holy Spirit is the conducting essence between in the best mutual appreciative regard. 

Aphorism of the Day, May 2023

Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2023

Christians try to reduce Total Synchronicity to linear space time unfolding; hence the Trinity.  Let trinitarian thinking lead us back to incomprehensible Synchronicity.

Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2023

Personhood is known to be significantly meaningful in human experience because of language.  Language and personhood go together.  Everything which comes to language is personal, including the divine.

Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2023

Language is evidence of relationality within which personhood resides.  Personhood is a superlative of relationship.  It has become obvious to many to project personhood on "that which none greater can be conceived."  Why would greatness not possess supreme personhood?

Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2023

Spirit is the name we give to the impossible task of harmonizing diversity not to erase the immense differences but to celebrate the wholeness of peaceful functioning togetherness.

Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2023

Sometimes the stories and the poetry get old and do not speak in the say way in which they used to.  When the poetry gets old, write your own.

Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2023

The space between us is not empty, it is like a copper wire which conducts electricity, it is Holy Spirit Being conducting dynamic mutual reciprocal experience between beings.

Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2023

How can mutual experience happen in separating distances between beings?  The space between beings is not empty, it is a Reality that enables the conducting of mutual experience.  That Reality might be named Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2023

Is Spirit another Signifier of explaining the omnipresence of Word in all that can be known?

Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2023

The Jesus Movement was founded upon the resonance of the poetry of the Risen Christ within the hearts of so many, resonant enough to create social identity and cohesion.

Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2023

A meaning of Pentecost?  Turning the once held belief of polyglottic humanity into the blessed state of harmony amid diversity.

Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2023

The main relic of human existence is language.  It purports to carry traces of the past to the present with stability of meanings even when we know that what is stable is that all meanings evolve and change as they get altered with new contexts in time.

Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2023

The place to locate biblical discourse is mainly in aesthetic discourse, a language to move the heart.  If one is led to believe that only scientific discourse is meaningful, then one has to present biblical discourse as scientific discourse, or one can maintain the meaningful truths of beauty in its many discursive forms.  Religionists have been fighting wrong battles with science for years; there need not be a battle if multi-discursive being can walk science and chew aesthetic discourse at the same time.

Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2023

Persons who have had biblical words form their vocabularies from their childhood can go through adjustments of how to process those words.  Most of the words get relegated to poetic status as language of the heart rather than words which report empirically verifiable events.

Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2023  (Ascension Day)

The Ascension is the explanation for the absence of the historical Jesus and the transition to the mode of knowing the Risen Christ through inward "spiritual" experience.  The outer Jesus became the inward Christ within the Jesus Movement and the Ascension is the transition story from the particularly located Jesus in space and time to the Christ of being All and in all.  This is a crucial poetic explanation in Christian mysticism.

Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2023

The prayer of Jesus in John's Gospel comes from a liminal location as Jesus says, "I am no longer in the world."  It could be the inner world is always a liminal location since the inner world is a world of multiverses.  The words of the Gospel derived from the multiverses experienced by Gospel writers.

Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2023

Johannine belief was that Jesus was one with his Father-God.  In the prayer of Jesus as written by the Johannine writer, Jesus asks that his followers might be one with the Father-God too.  This might be called the ever emptying of the divine within the order of existence, the All that is within all.

Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2023

The Gospels mix the Risen Christ experience of the Jesus Movement decades after Jesus lived with a narrative of the life of Jesus.  It mixes the past life of Jesus with the present life of the Risen Christ.  In old film life, one would call it double exposure.

Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2023

For around nine months, in our pre-birth states, we lived, and moved, and had our being within our mothers.  If we live and move and have our being in God, we can never leave the God-womb.

Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2023

If we live and move and have being in God, we are contained.  And God as greatest conscious container perceives all that is contain with care, but an extremely mature care which does not violate the freedom which makes moral significance.  You and I contain in limited ways all that we perceive and yet we can't control all that we perceive.  We, too, are vulnerable, like God, to the genuine freedom which we perceive to be happening.  Perception as containment does not mean strict and coercive control.

Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2023

Can we accept the superiority of freedom with an entire field of probable occurrences even when specific events of freedom do not seem to favor us?

Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2023

When we forget time and process, we can present being bereft of becoming and assume a synchronous everywhere, everything, in an all at once fatalism.  Time and newness needs to be honored.  We need to understand "last days" as merely "latest days."

Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2023

In the account of St. Paul's response to the inscription "to an unknown God," Paul expounds his belief in a personal God, One who contains all, and One who can be a personal presence to all.  That language is the personal medium, means that all things including the Greatness of All is personally perceived.  Having language, in our anthropomorphic prison, we cannot help but project the personal on everything.  The degree of projecting reciprocal personal divine response toward us is to answer Einstein's question of "Is the universe friendly?" with a resounding "yes."

Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2023

If as St. Paul of the Acts of the Apostles is cited saying, "We are all God's offspring," the Jesus unique divine offspring serves as the one who calls us to realize our divine familial likeness.

Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2023

St. Paul understood God as being the outer most horizon creating the ultimate environment as expressed in a saying attributed to him in the Acts of the Apostles: "In God we live, and move, and have our being."   In the processive mode it would be stated as this: In omni-Becoming, we are all becoming.  This mode acknowledges continuous expanding creation.

Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2023

How could Jesus promise that his disciples would do greater things?  An endless future is quantitatively greater than the three years of his earthly ministry.

Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2023

"If you have seen me, you have seen the Father."  These words of Jesus in John's Gospel are model words which reflect the incarnational theology of Genesis of humanity being made in the image and likeness of God.  This likeness is the foundational basis for the validity of being anthropomorphic regarding the divine.

Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2023

John's Gospel presents Jesus as preparing his disciples for his eventual absence.  An orphan is one who might worry about having a future home.  Not only do the words of Jesus indicate that the disciples would not be left as "orphans," perhaps spiritual orphans and parentless; rather God as heavenly parent will continue to have many places for all to dwell.

Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2023

In Johannine metaphors, Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  These correspond to the signs in John's Gospel, of making a man ambulatory to walk in the way, of healing a blind man to see truth, and of raising Lazarus to life.  Reading John's as a self-referential work is crucial to understanding implied meanings.

 Gospel Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2023

The "fatherization" of God is most pronounced in the words of Jesus channeled in the Gospel of John.  "Show us the Father," says Philip.  As a child bears the genetic likeness of the parents, so the Jesus of the writer of John uses the Father/Son metaphor to indicate that the divine likeness can be seen in all that has being.  If we see anything, we see it in the context of Plenitude.

Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2023

Another name for God's house is time.  Everyone and everything always already lives in time.  Time is cumulatively everlasting making past and present synchronically equal in existence.  The present can never make the past to never have existed.

Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2023
The Johannine words of Jesus about his Father having dwelling places is the poetry of a homing God who indwells the people of this world. 

Aphorism of the Day, April 2023

Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2023

A shepherd was a symbol of leadership in ancient Israel since leaders had more resources to "manipulate" the more dependent masses.  If leaders today have more money and resources to "manipulate" the masses who are deprived of the same, good shepherd leadership does not exploit those who are weaker, less informed, and poorer.

Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2023

Taking advantage of one's strengths and assets to exploit for personal gain is the exact counter to what being a good shepherd means.

Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2023

If Jesus spoke in "figures of speech," then the Gospel writers want the readers to appreciate the differences in discursive practices, meaning the words are not an exact mirror reflection of the realities to which words are referring.  Understanding meaningful signification of a text is always an issue.

Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2023

The message of the metaphor of the Good Shepherd is to be a shepherd for the vulnerable.  If one is given ownership, power, wealth, and knowledge then those should be used to care for those who need it.

Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2023

Every metaphor has its signifying limitation and may deconstruct when expansive literalness is applied.  For example, the Lord is my shepherd, or Jesus as the Good Shepherd.  What is a shepherd's relationship to his sheep?  He owns the sheep and feeds and cares for the sheep in order to get food, wool, and milk products.  The ownership of sheep is essentially exploitive, with a sheep being a commodified animal.  Our view of God or Jesus would not want to tap the exploitive aspect of what shepherding means, so we limit the metaphor to God and Jesus caring for us like a favorite pet.

Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2023

Writings are made in specific times and places in language that is best known and interpreted within the specific times and places.  What happens when language contexts are no longer accessible to later readers of ancient words?  Can anyone claim to understand the meanings of ancient text as though meanings were "self-evidential" over time?

Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2023

The presentation of Jesus as the good shepherd is chiefly supported by the confessing words, "I lay down my life for the sheep."  Is any farm commodity worth the life of a worker, if threatened?  As a figure of speech, it refers to human leadership sacrificing life for followers.  This is counter to the norm of the people sacrificing their lives for the leader.  What CEO says, "I will give up my privileges and bonuses for the employees?"

Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2023

Resurrection is a poetry of the future.

Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2023

Faith is hoping the assessments of the future will make sense of the bafflements of the present.

Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2023

Present disappoint might be expressed in the phrase, "we had hoped that..."  Outcomes often reveal that we have had the wrong vision of what we hoped for or the wrong timing for when they might happen, or the wrong notions about how they might happen.  We live by the insight, "The future will give clarity to the past and to what is happening now."

Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2023

Serendipity is when something "random" gets experienced as favorable and blessed timing of something good happening to us.  Serendipity and surprise go together because one can't plan one's own serendipity.  What is often called a theophany is serendipitous.  If we can't plan theophanies, what does that tell us about the apparentness of God to each human being?  Most of life involves having faith while living with the general apparentness of God without all the thunderbolts and light shows.

Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2023

Like a light switch the Risen Christ could turn on or turn off his appearance.  He turned on his appearance suddenly in the breaking of the bread with the Emmaus road walkers.  Could this be a metaphorical story about Eucharistic presence?  The Gospel invites us to read with "inner eyes," poetic eyes.

Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2023

The resurrection is the explanation for the many reappearances of Christ after the death of Jesus.  Jesus became a rhetorical and poetic expansive feeling phrase of "Christ as all and in all."  Such a phrase is meant to proclaim divine personal omnipresence or divine immanence.

Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2023

The Bible as any text is "re-written" every time it is read because it becomes variation of meaning according to the version of the reader who have unique linguistic programming.

Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2023

Doubting is a good exercise to help us continual pan interpretative framework to find what is appropriate for the textual situation.

Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2023

The mysteries expressed by religious discourse thwart science proving that religion and science employ different discourses with different truth purposes.  The problem happens when religionists assert that the events of their poetry could have been empirically verified.  The scientists rightly say, "Stick to your mysticism."

Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2023

The so called "Doubting Thomas" story is really a wisdom parable to shed light on the blessedness, the validity, equality, and the affirmation of a wide variety of experiences of the Risen Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2023

Empirical verification or sensorial experience is the standard for to indicating something is really real.  And stories about such in the Gospels are a way of establishing the really "realness" of inward experience.  Just as Thomas saw and touched, so too those who did not see and touch had a really real encounter with the Risen Christ.  One's inward life is as true as one's outward life but in substantially different ways.  People of faith can be honest scientists.

Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2023

One of the subtle results of institutional religion is to assume that the presences of Christ can be limited to the administrative prerogatives of the leadership.

Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2023

In the "doubting Thomas" story, the writer of John's Gospel is claiming that modes of knowing the Risen Christ are blessed and equal in faith and truth status to eyewitness encounters with Jesus.  The post-death of Jesus encounters with the Risen Christ in various modes are the new norms.

Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2023

What role did grief play in bringing the apparitional appearances of Christ to his disciples?  Can extraordinary grief command extraordinary appearances?

Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2023

On Easter we ponder personal continuity beyond death.  Does the "software" of our inside stuff of self consciousness continue to function without the "hardware" of our bodies?

Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2023

The Sabbath rest of Jesus in Holy Week is the time that his body resided in the tomb and there is speculation about where the spirit of Jesus went when "separated" from his body.  The bringing to language of what really is unknowable and mysterious is the creative use of words to produce hope and the undeniability of the future.

Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2023

God's greatest attribute may be also how divine weakness manifests itself locally.  God is omnipresent Freedom and Great Freedom shares lesser freedom everywhere and does not interfere with it locally.  Why? True moral worth happens because of when occasions are not coerced.  Great freedom is weak when shared with local freedom as in an individual not wanting to choose to manifest the lure of love which rides upon Great Freedom.

Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2023

Rituals can lose their anthropological soundness when they become religious acts to simply follow rules.  The Maundy Thursday ritual highlights two crucial aspect for the survival of community: Eating and service.  We should not isolate Jesus as living bread from actual bread which gives people physical survival and eating together is a way of guaranteeing that each has enough to eat.

Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2023

Holy Week and Easter are the communal ways to deal with the reality of death and after-death.  Death is the brute reality of life.  Post-death resurrection is a discourse of hope for the unknown not yet.  Death is the failure to preserve the quality of life as we have known it.  We project an afterlife Preserver of the continuity of personal identity, not because we egotistically think that any of us deserves everlasting existence, but because any becoming is an absolute becoming in having happened, and having been absolute in having happened, such absoluteness can never be erased.  People can never be said to not having happened.

Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2023

In Holy Week we grapple with what Continuity means.  We get mixed signals; we're supposed to love life but not to the point of not being able to adjust when life is lost.  Continuity remains in life and death but we don't have the contemporaneous witness of the dead to have their views of the role of being dead within Continuity.  Death experienced as not have familiar access to someone has given birth the creative imaginations of the afterlife.  At death a person leaves the discourse of science and empirical verification regarding their "not in their body" becoming; about the afterlife one can only use artistic discourses of creative imagination.  When we speak about the afterlife, it is always translated into "this life" language and experience.

Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2023

Holy Week is the strategy of calendar time in the annual Christian curriculum used to build community identity with Christ through the corporate remembering of the root events of the Jesus Movement.

Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2023

The liturgical juxtaposition of the Palm Procession and the Passion Gospel highlights the crowds that one might belong to when viewing Jesus.  A Jerusalem crowd might be threatened by Jesus because the Romans building projects where providing employment in the city.  The outsiders from Galilee could come to town and put their hero on a donkey in a parade and threaten the tenuous relationship between the city's religious leaders and the Roman occupiers.

Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2023

St. Paul wrote about "glorying in the cross of Christ," and one can wonder if this is like trying to put lipstick on an ugly pig.  How could death become a necessary absence of Jesus in order for endless number of people to have experiences of the presences of the Risen Christ?  A "functional" resurrection seems to have happened only for Jesus and his followers; for us we don't have immediate post-resurrection experiences with our faithful departed loved ones, not unless we have our imaginations on apparitional overload.  In Christian lore, the death of Jesus is one-of-a-kind and the deaths of our loved ones are also unique but don't seem to have the same redemptive meanings as we inconsolably miss them even with gratitude for them having been in our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2023

Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2023

St. Paul made the death of Jesus into a mystical event of identity with the death of Jesus in becoming an ironic power to die to one's selfish self.

Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2023

St. Paul seems more hopeful about Judaism being united by the acceptance of Christ.  He wrote that the Gentiles received grace to make the Jews jealous.  By the later times when the Gospels were written, it seems as though the divisions within Judaism had become more deeply set

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2023

The presence of the Passion accounts in the Gospel is proof of the antipathy that had developed between parties of Judaism.  It involves a rather ironic message.  Those who were complicit in the lead up to the crucifixion were those who did not know they were setting up the climax, namely, the resurrection appearances.  So if one's sins are overcome by some subsequent and necessary good it leads to the guilty by ignorance plea and the absolution, "Father, forgiven them for they do not know what they do."  Was the Passion written in part to present the insight: "You can't plea ignorance anymore?"

Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2023

Palm Sunday and The Sunday of the Passion includes insights about the break down between parties within Judaism, the followers of Jesus and the parties who held positions with the Sanhedrin or the leadership group which negotiated with the Roman authorities.  The implication is that the Sanhedrin were complicit with the Romans in trying to crush Jesus and his followers.  The political truth is that the Roman authorities acted in their own interest.

Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2023

Jesus is perhaps the greatest "post-life savant" of all time.  Which other person of history can have so many people claim having with them a personal relationship?  Yes, many Buddhists will speak about realizing the Buddha nature within themselves, but does that characterization have the same "personal" overtones as those who claim  relationship with Jesus?

Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2023

When one writes about the past, one is super-imposing the present on the past, presenting a present version of the past.   The Gospels super-impose what was happening decades after Jesus upon a narrative Jesus.  The sub-text involves the dynamics of the communities which were responsible for the writing.

Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2023

Might be good to link image of the divine upon life with resurrection life.  The image of the divine is what propels the eternal return of the same or traces with surpassing differences.  Resurrection life should be seen as something impossible, namely static life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2023

Life and death are continuously juxtaposed in the mysticism of St. Paul.  They become metaphors for identifying with the life, death, and "re-life" of Jesus as the path of spiritual transformation.  The Lazarus story is a way to proclaim an identity with Christ while "dead in sins."  Lazarus is symbolic of the two resurrections, namely, the experience of resurrection life before we finally die, and the resurrection to come in our "re-life."

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2023

Lazarus the resurrected one, came back to life, only to die again.  Or is Lazarus a figurative one in a parable of Jesus told by the early Jesus Movement of the continuity of resurrection life that is present in all through God's omnipresence and made manifest with the Risen Christ known to be present in the lives of people who will die even while having resurrection life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2023

The Lazarus story emphasizes the resurrection is not a last day event but the experience of a new quality of life while we live.

Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2023

The disciples and interlocutors of Jesus in John's Gospel are often presented as literalists who don't understand the use of figurative language.  From the first word of John's Gospel, the writer is writing about Word and coming to nuanced use of language in perceiving "inner" meanings is one of John's writing goals.

Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2023

The Lazarus story encodes the teaching that while people are dead in sin, they can received the resurrected life of the Holy Spirit through the words of Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2023

The Gospels were written years after the first writing of St. Paul.  One can read them as manual wherein the reader puts oneself in identity with the disciples who are initially trapped in literal/plain understanding and being gradually trained in the "inner meaning" of things such as the meanings which Paul had from his mystical experiences.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2023

We see what we see and are "blind" to what we don't yet see and such seeing and blindness differences among people most often accounts for the conflicts between them.  Seeing and blindness are relative to ego construction based upon one's contexts and this involves education, cultural conditioning, and one's age and exposure to informational sources.  We can project a perfect outside arbiter for "correct or enlightened" seeing but whoever delivers such a perfect message colors the message by being an imperfect seer.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2023

Why do people who live in the same religious milieu disagree, and sometimes profoundly?  People belong to different paradigms or reside in different hermeneutic circles.  This means people can use the same words and yet do not share the same meanings of those words.  How does one move from on paradigm to the next? Conversion.  One is blind to the insights of another paradigm until one has a seeing conversion experience.  The Jesus Movement was another hermeneutical circles in first century Judaism.  Not ever member of the Jewish society could embrace the features which came to define the Jesus Movement.

Aphorism of the March 16, 2023

The future fruition may be the answer to past causation questions, like, why are there seeds?  So that they can become trees.  Why are people unenlightened or blind?  So that they can come to see and be enlightened.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2023

Blindness and sight are the metaphors used by the writer of John channelling the mind of Christ, to describe why persons in a former paradigm cannot "see" the wisdom of the new paradigm.  Nicodemus was a Pharisee of a former paradigm who was coming to "see" the wisdom of the Christ paradigm.

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2023

Biblically, looking only on "outward" appearances is called in the words of Jesus, "blindness," while looking and seeing inwardness virtues of gentleness, kindness, and pure motives is what the words of Jesus calls "seeing."  Literalism is blindness regarding the Scriptures and it assumes that writers did not know the difference between common sense naive realism and artistic presentations with langauge.

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2023

The inner languaged person can be multiverses with access to one's conscious life in actual time.  Such a realm of possibilisms can be a legion which is both a resource for creativity and the instincts for acting out wrongly.  The conscious life as being an ego orchestrator of one's multiverses calls each of us to enlightened insightful wise agency.  Such wisdom would include kindly acting with other people.

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2023

In the beginning was the Word.  John's Gospel tells us that human life distinctively is known because we are worded beings.  Without words, nothing that is known could have been known.

Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2023

In John's Gospel the physical or plain meaning is often the set up for the words of Jesus to relate the inward meaning.  The literal water of Jacob's well set up the living water phrases.  The disciples' reference to food to eat is the set up for Jesus to say, "I have food to eat that you do not know about."

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2023

One of the subtexts of the Gospel of John is this: Don't read it literally, because the physical is but a metaphor for the spiritual.

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2023

How is it that one might understand biblical words different at the age of 70 than one did at 16?  Could it be that learning and insights involve continuous conversion to new interpretative paradigms?  But aren't the words the same?  Or does time reduce words to but traces that have new meanings in time?

Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2023

Should we worry about the Mystery of all that is negligible in causing the events of our life?  What we don't and can't know isn't relevant?  Or should we remain humble about what we don't yet know?

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2023

The Samaritan woman at the well spoke about a messiah to Jesus.  Since the Samaritans only had their version of the Torah, which is pre-Davidic, who is the messiah of the Torah?  Is it the prophet who would be raised up?  In the development of ideas one wonders how the notion of messiah was wedded with the notion of a future prophet in Torah.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2023

One of the reading cues of John's Gospel is the cryptic presentation of non-literal reading as indicative of being spiritual or born from above.  Non-literal understanding of life does not eschew the empirical verification of science, it is but a complementing truth of how to be related to the fullness of reality.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2023

The writer of the Gospel of John unifies the faith or works debates by citing words of Jesus saying, "this is work, that you believe, i.e. have faith.  If having faith in the right object, i.e., the redeeming work of Christ, is the Christ appointed work, then faith and work are united.  A rather interesting twist on the issue since Paul is seen as making such a stark distinction between the two.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2023

From the words of Jesus, Bible readers have come to stereotypically shame the Pharisees as being those who act religious on the outside but when the cameras are turned off, behave differently.  This, of course, could be any of us.  However, the only three Pharisees who are named in the New Testament, actually get good reviews: Nicodemus, Gamaliel, and Paul.

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2023

One of the collateral military effects of reading the Bible is the model of people who heard God telling them that they have been given land that they did not previously possess.  "I'm taking your land because God told me too."

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2023

The writer of John's Gospel presents the contrast between earthly things and heavenly things.  The heavenly things in a practical sense referred to seeing from having been converted to a new paradigm of thinking.  The new thinking was thinking which surpassed the thinking of how previously the faith life was to be interpreted.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2023

An important way to read the Gospel of John is to note the scorning words of Jesus about literalism, eg. how can I an old man get back into my mother's womb, and Lazarus' sleep good, or that he is dead.  The Gospel of John does not invite us to the language of empirical verification  but the artistic language of poetic and moving spirituality.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2023

Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2023

The Gospel of John contrast heavenly things and earthly things.  Earthly things refers to literalism while heavenly things refers to spiritual or the inward interpretation of what life means.

Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2023

Some use the religious laws and recommended behaviors as a success and blessing formula.  If you do such and such, then God will bless you with wealth, success and happiness.  This simplistic formulaic method often proves wrong, especially because lots of bad things happen to good people.  Why not regard lawful living as simply good actuarial living.  In wise observation of probable outcomes, choose the statistically safer way of living.  Live toward probable likelihood, not in stubborn certitude about things which one cannot guarantee.

Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2023

It is a mystery to ponder how such an account the temptation of Jesus would be relayed so as to be part of the reading public.  It assumes that Jesus told a person who would orally transmit it so that it could eventually become text.  And this text was not included in John's Gospel.  It is the writer presentation of Jesus as the Second Adam, returning to the garden degraded into a wild place, and there the Second Adam resists the serpent to redeem First Adam's failure to do so.

Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2023

Before Jesus became a public minister, he is presented as having done his inner work.  Jesus was a people whisperer, because he had tamed the inward forces which tempt toward megalomania, exhibitionism, and even suicidal dying before one's time.  His inward conquest is presented in the temptation in the wilderness.

Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2023

Would Jesus today be characterized as someone with the abnormality of "savant syndrome?"  In his encounter with the devil, Jesus is presented as one who could change stones to bread, jump off high places and not get hurt, and possess all the kingdoms of the world.  Jesus was humanly abnormal, not the average bloke in terms of abilities.  What made Jesus "normal" was that he was for others in connecting with people.  He was supremely gifted and the way that he was gifted does not have the pathological pejorative that the modern "savant" designation has.  His gifts were integrated with humanity for the common good.   Yes, he was alone and unique in his gifts but thoroughly integrated with humanity in his sharing of the same.

Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2023

Jesus as the second Adam of early church retraces first Adam's confrontation with the serpent, only no longer in Eden but in a very wild threatening place, within and without.  Second Adam Jesus, was known to be hero Jesus in this encounter and initiate a new spiritual community, a new creation of how to be human going forward.

Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2024

Ash Wednesday, day of macabre face painting or a day of remembering to cherish and care for our lives in our bodies before they return to dust?

Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2023

The commercialization of Shrove Tuesday?  Carnivale and Mardi Gras celebrations are such public rituals of excess as if to enhance the fasting of Lent with its most extreme opposite.  Is the self control of moderation too boring?

Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2023

Israel faced their 40 years of temptation with many failures.  Jesus went through his 40 days of testing and passed.  Jesus is the representative of God's solidarity with the human condition of probability.  Humans are continuously tested in many ways by the freedom of probability condition including the interior conditions of being tempted to do things at the wrong time and for the wrong reason.

Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2023

The past is the only reservoir that we have to speak about what is new in the present.  Life is a continual process of comparing the past with the present.

Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2023

Everything which is not unknowingly used by me in interpreting the present might be considered negligible.  And it remains a mystery regarding the negligible pertinent factors missed in my interpretation.  The great Negligible is what is mysterious to humanity.  We cannot designate specific causation to what we don't know.  But we can assume that much of what we don't know influences our situation.

Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2023

Elevation, light, and clouds were landscape metaphors for speaking about interior events of epiphany with heighten closeness to the divine, seeing with wisdom, while living in the cloud of mystery signifying the humility of very limited human capacity in face of All.

Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2023

How should people practice living together if all diverse ideological parties realize that there will never be conversion to one view by all?  Can there be a faith in the common good beyond parochial interests?

Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2023

The transfiguration stories follow the tradition of how to communicate the Superlative in how the writers within the Christ communities felt about Jesus.  The New Testament is in fact a book of superlatives about Jesus.

Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2023

What is the metaphorical difference of light in the ancient world that did not have but fire as a way of artificially creating light during darkness, from the metaphor of light today when we light up the night to avoid darkness?  Light still functions as what is needed to see, and using the metaphor of Christ as light, the nuance is about how we see.  Mere physical seeing is not enough; we must see through orientation to love and justice, for enlightenment to be more than merely physical sight.

Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2023

The shiny face of Jesus on the Mount of the Transfiguration is the reuse of the Moses story motif whose face shone on Mount Sinai.  This motif is used to proclaim that Jesus is a God-ordained human like Moses but surpassing him in time and superlative significance for those who had come under his spell.

Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2023

The beatitudes promote the requirement that the inward life of thoughts, dreams, and emotion be completely pure and so everyone is disqualified from the presumption of perfection.

Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2023

Paul rebuked his Corinthian leaders for identifying themselves with their leaders.  Religious party identity seems to be the history of Christianity where ironically Christians are divided by having a "common" savior?

Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2023

The words of the beatitude reveal the impossibility of getting outer action and inner self in agreement.  People can to right things for wrong reasons and motives.  People can do really lawful things and yet inside not want to do them.  If perfect is always doing the right thing for the right and pure motive then everyone is left needing a "clean heart."

Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2023

Fulfilling the law in the words of Jesus seems to mean that right doing has to be accompanied by right "inner being."  You haven't murdered?  Have you been angry and desired to harm someone?  Gotcha!  Right being is the inward sphere and only the person knows about the inwardly secret life.  Fulfilling the law means discovering that one never can and so one needs the fulfillment of the grace of forgiveness.

Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2023

Why would an imaginary past be written, one consisting of examples of things happening which violate the laws of nature?  To spin an heroic past of how people survived serves the providence of the present when the tales are told.  Divine Fate must have intervened heroically for our survival.

Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2023

Let your "yes" be "yes," and your "no" be "no."  Does such a binary allow for any growth over time when one's future state surpasses and contradicts one earlier unenlightenment?  It probably means that one's oral contracts should be honored, i.e., do what you say you're going to do.

Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2023

Is hating one's brother different from killing one's brother?  Of course it is in the jurisprudence practice of society.  A deed is the telling thing which gets one convicted, not the inward feeling of hatred.  What about in the sphere of inner or spiritual perfection?  One can be proud about not murdering anyone while harboring continuing hatred.  This disjunction was cited by the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes reminding us that we cannot exempt our inner lives from the higher spiritual laws in our quest for transformation in excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2023

Although the words of Jesus indicate that he did not come to abolish the law, but fulfill it, that fulfillment was more than having the outer appearances of abiding by society's rules.  The inner life of the one keeping rules also had to comport with the rules, and this is a much more difficult hidden dilemma.

Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2023

What does humanity do with the great Negligible?  The Great Negligible being everything which might have existed, does, and will exists for which there is no human experience and yet co-exists with human experience.  What give human beings the right to speak with any certain knowledge about the vast unexperienced reality of All?  Whether we have the right to do so or not, the history is that people speak poetically about the Plenitude within which we find ourselves and such Plenitude has attained the Personal term of God, because humans find the personhood is what is highest about ourselves, and so the great One, as a very minimal aspect of greatness is regarded as Personal.

Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2023

How does one harmonize the words of Jesus about not abolishing the law and the prophets with Paul's provision that Gentile not required to keep purity laws.  It indicates the diversity of Christ-centered Judaism in the first century.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2023

Reading the Bible with hermeneutical charity means that one accepts the contexts of the writers, even citing the practices of slavery and subjugation of women.  However, one does not give up the advances that have been made in the applied justice to more people in our time and one must criticize harshly the use of biblical cultural practices to justify practice of injustice and inequity in our lives today.

Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2023

Light is a metaphor discovery which changes one's life for the better.  The sun is always shining but we don't see it at night.  Light has to be refreshed in its contrast with darkness.  In life process, light events need to occur as continuous insights since no singular seeing event is final.