Aphorism of the Day, November 2023

Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2023

The apocalyptic genre is writing about conceiving endings for the sake of imagining justice, especially to survive current conditions of injustice.

Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2023

What is the relation of a handful of water taken out of the river to the entire river?  What is the relation of a story taken out of the entire universe of possible continuous discourse?  It is but arbitrary book ends to try to give the location of identity within the morass of all.  Apocalyptic endings are but tropes used to provide definitions within the realm of infinite differences.  Apocalyptic is a way of confessing that our duration and endings have meaning.

Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2023

Modern day cinematic apocalyptic imagination is much more prolific than the biblical apocalyptic could achieve in writing.

Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2023

The apocalyptic is a discursive response by powerless people who are threatened with collateral damage when powerful people fight with each other for control of world resources.  The discourse is an exercise in imagining that impending threats of the tyrants can be stopped by the greater cosmic God.  It is a shame when people with significant social power misappropriate the apocalyptic discourse either for sheer entertainment, e.g. super hero cinema, or worse yet when comfortable Christians wish for the end of the world for their God to show everyone that they were "right" and people who disagreed with them were wrong and deserved punishment.

Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2023

Having a Shepherd King means that kingly power is used to tend to the vulnerable.  Power in service is the meaning of Christ the King.

Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2023

Apparently the Son of Man is hidden within poor and needy people of the world to incentivize people to tend to them.  Apparently, Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, and a very small percentage of Christian people got the message.

Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2023

What most Christians do not practice?  Finding the real presence of Christ in the needy.  It is easier to have faith to find Christ in bread and wine than in the homeless and the poor.

Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2023

How does life often feel?  Like the Big Ref in life is not dealing out realtime penalties to big time offending cruel tyrants and greed vacuums for most of the goods in life, while penalizing the more moderately bad and selfish people who don't sin boldly enough to get away with it.  The timid sinners survive by having faith in a pan-optic seer who will punish the realtime unpunished at some later time with catastrophic reversal of fortune.  The wise might simply opine that it will have been better to have been assigned more roles of goodness in life than roles of wicked cruelty and greed.

Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2023

The notion of King and monarchies in liberal democracies is relegated to nostalgic national identity function as in the case the English monarchy or fairy tale status in the various cinematic Disney kingdoms.   The notion of a singular benevolent omni-competent person ruling over the entirety of humanity past, present, and future is inconceivable unless such a figure is Word as the All and in All that can be humanly known.  Word is what is King of kings, in an unavoidable way.

 Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2023

How can Christ as King have significance as a symbol within the post Enlightenment Era when many nations have come to see democracies as a needed correction to monarchies and totalitarian regimes?  Perhaps the Risen Christ is best understood as the surpassing Self of every person beckoning each to future excellence in love and justice.  So much thinking about Christ as King is an external forceful powerful future authority rather than the possibility of the interior lives of all people being swamped with irresistible love.

Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2023

Being Christ the Kingly does not mean be a benevolent dictator; it means using one's ability, knowledge, and power to tend those who need care the most.

Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2023

The most telling realm of God is to be the realm within the epidermal borders of the human body.

Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2023

Stewardship does not always mean that one is successful in terms of certain public metrics of success; it means that one is always already at the work of developing and using one's gifts.

Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2023

Would that the world was full of just moderately bad and selfish people, and not the monsters of greed and power who ruin the lives of so many people.  Just because we can't be angels doesn't mean that few should be demonic in their greed and exploitive and destructive power.  Why can't everyone just be moderately selfish people?

Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2023

Fear is a powerful motivator causing paralysis.  Transformed fear might be called faith or being persuaded about positive outcomes inspired by hope.

Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2023

The motivation for failure to invest might be fear.  Fear of failure might keep us from developing our gifts, and the result is that we lose because some things can only be done at the available time.

Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2023

The parable of the talents indicates that the divine has given everyone assets to invest/develop and the stewardship task is to continually develop what we've been given to avoid atrophy of our assets.  Atrophy is the cruel built in punishment of inactivity.

Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2023

The parable of the talents is about avoiding this epitaph on one's tombstone: "He had lots of potential."

Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2023

Why do we extol being prepared for the future so much so that we don't regard how we are responding now as being completely adequate?  Time is always moving with another after what was before, and so we make attending to the future the main task of living.  We, of course, differentiate the immediate future of the moments before in the now from the more long term future for which we believe that we have more time for strategic planning.  And strategic planning involves connecting the location and direction of current footsteps with the desired destination many miles of time away., even without the current assurances of ever attaining the destination.

Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2023

What do we need to be prepared and ready for?  The next.  The next is always a not yet actual field of probabilities.  We synthesize from what has already happened a logic for what might yet happen.  From that logic, if we are wise we prepare for what is next, without certain guarantee of success but it is still wise to act from statistical approximations.

Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2023

The notion of precedence is used as a method of comparison.  A past incidence is used or cited in the present to impart authority to something in the present.  Difference uses of language for history, jurisprudence, academic writing use precedence differently with different standards of application.  The New Testament writers use "identity precedence" to establish the belief about the surpassing greatness of Jesus.  Heroes from the Hebrew Scriptures and phrases regarding divine designation are used to present Jesus in a surpassing comparative way the significance of Jesus for those who follow him.  This use of precedence is not the kind of precedence used in science with a dependence upon statistical approximation and the replicable requirement for scientific facts.  Spiritual experience accounts and anecdotal experiential precedence is a different order of precedence and the two should not be confused.  Spiritual discourse is aesthetic discourse and its truth/beauty criteria is different from the requirements of science.

 Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2023

Being asleep and awake are metaphors in the parable of Jesus about the bridesmaids.  The common phrase of "being asleep on the job" evokes something similar.  Obviously, we are not made to be awake 24 hours a day but the metaphor refers to being awake about the presence of the realm of God.  If one can be awake about the realm of God, then one can enjoy the rest of sleep as needed.

Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2023

Modern readers of the Bible can treat the writers of the Bible as those who did not know the difference between discursive uses of language.  Bible writers, like us knew how to be poetic, ironic, hyperbolic, and common sense reporters as well.  To treat poetic and hyperbolic discourse as naive realism is a misreading of the Bible.

Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2023

The injunction of the word of Christ about being ready is really about probability theory, actuarial wisdom, scientific thinking, meaning we take into account all past and current experience in being best prepared for what might happen.  There is no wisdom in making the word of Jesus impractical and then calling it "spirituality."

Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2023

"The kingdom of heaven will be like this."  Perhaps this should be understood as the continuous future tense, since the now is always on the cusp of what will be and time itself is a feature of the kingdom of heaven since the kingdom of heaven is the realization of everlastingness itself.  The words of Jesus can also be the future anterior tense in the sense that the realm of God is an always already awaiting the in-breaking  into one's awareness, in which case the kingdom of heaven will have been realized experientially.

Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2023

The New Testament word for hypocrite means "actor."  In many ways we become those acting out the scripts of our situation, including our pieties and religious behaviors.  We have roles to play, the persona as a mask which we wear to appear to the public.  Learning agreement between our inside feelings, our speech, facial expressions, body language is very difficult.  We can live mostly divided lives because we may be performing for people in contexts in ways that betray our inward feelings.  And is it a bad thing to act pleasant and be seemingly kind to people even when we don't feel like it?   When are we acting bereft of having feeling for the role?  We might redeem the role of being hypocrites by aspiring to be recovering hypocrites, which means the script says we must be "perfect" as the Father in heaven is perfect, yet we don't feel, act, or speak perfectly as actors.  We don't give up the perfect script as our goal even as we continue to attempt to align with Spirit as inward goodness with acts and words of goodness, and so we labor to be recovering hypocrites.

Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2023

Finding one's calling in a vocation can lead one to become over-identified with the profession which gives one esteem within society.  The words of Jesus remind us that our child of God identity is primary and this should keep us humble no matter what kind of success or failure we have in our professions.

Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2023

The Bible does not exhaust God's word, because in the beginning was the Word, which was with God and was God.  Word is the embracing All in all that can be known and is coextensive with everything that can be known.

Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2023

Religious communities tend to reduce and limit "God's word" to "holy texts," which of course have gone through years of having been interpreted when written, read and used and "voted" into official canons designating them as the "official God's word textbook."  The fuller notion of God's word is Word itself being one with God, thus meaning that any word in time and in timeliness can be a God-word to the one who experiences its piercing relevancy.

Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2023

The words of Jesus about having no rabbis, fathers, or instructors is a warning about relying upon one's written resume and title of office and not manifesting the inner charism of ministry.  Through winsome service one verifies the presence of the messiah in one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, September 2023

Aphorism of the Day, September 30, 2023

In the time of Jesus, what kind of authority did Jesus have?  Caesar had authority through his soldiers and agents, the authority of power to coerce and oppress.  The authority of Jesus was seen in his charismatic winsomeness, but winsomeness in itself can be horrendous mob authority.  The success to comprise a mob is the dark side of charismatic authority.  Winsomeness as ability to unite people is a kind of self evidential authority of a cohesive group.  It can be a dark and violent authority.  The Christ-like authority has the standard of peace, justice, love, kindness offered to all.  What is rightful authority has to be continuously judged by the standard of justice outcomes.

Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2023

Kenosis refers to the emptying of the divine into Jesus even as he became emptied of his life in death.  The incarnation evokes the insight of the always already continuum between everything thing and every occasion which ironically expresses the fullness of the divine in everything.  God's emptied Self into omnipresence is the filling of all things with the divine presence.

Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2023

The interrelationship of all beings and all occasions is so vast the cumulative effects on one is hard to know precisely and in the great field of probability we confess the mystery of the great Negligible.  We rightly engage in what most can be gained for effective actions through statistical approximation even while being baffled that a member of the family had a cancer that has never been in the family tree.  Probability theory still must honor the negligible.

Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2023

The incarnation is a phase on the continuum of the General and the Particular.  Any moment on the continuum only has meaning because the entire continuum is always the dynamic between individual and the synchronic Whole in time becoming.

Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2023

Saying what we are going to do for future good and doing what we said we would do is to bring congruence between one's words and deeds.  This agreement between speaking what is just and loving and doing what is just and loving is goal of recovering hypocrites who are committed to strive for the ideals, while bemoaning failures to do so, and maintaining the high standards of the ideals to establish the direction for moral improvement.

Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2023

"Kenosis" or emptying was the Pauline way of saying the particular cannot be erased without erasing the whole.  There is an equality of identity between the particular and the whole because if one assumes the whole, one assume the particulars, and if one assumes the particulars, they are assumed only within and in identity with the whole.  The incarnation is the nuanced identity insight between particular manifestation of divinity and Plenitude.

Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2023

Justice can seem unfair, even as forgiveness might seem like it is not justice. Justice is the adaptation of what is appropriate to the situation of the person.  So, not all justice looks equal.  We don't let ten year old lawfully drive on the road.

Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2023

Knowing the realm of God in life means promoting the equal dignity of all in the middle of the messiness of differences.  It means not tolerating injustice.

 Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2023

The latest is always the first in currency.  Since we cannot but only "be" in the "now," the now is always the latest and that makes "we in the now primary."  The question is how we use our "now" for a better future, for those who need to be "first" in dignity which they don't have now.

Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2023

The kingdom of heaven is always already access that we have to justice known as the equality of equalizing dignity offered to persons whose resumes are not so long and whose experience and skillsets and talent and wellness status do not determine their inherent worth or lovability.

Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2023

In interpretation, the latest has the "first" place.  The latest interpreter of all that is former has the ability to designate all that has been in order to serve what is now from one's own point of view.  The last shall be first is true, until the next "latest" arrives.  Time means that one can only be "last" for limited time because we are all succeeded.

Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2023

The message of Paul is that Christ suffered, meaning that God suffers, and he wrote that this privilege of suffering with Christ is given to his followers.  Suffering is valorized by giving it a cosmic meaning of suffering with God on behalf of the world.  Solidarity in suffering is the identity of the oppressed who are forced to live a Christ-martial arts to survive.  The alternatives to suffering is to live ignoring the suffering of others or to be part of the group which causes suffering for others through lifestyle choices.  And most of us have intermittent loss and suffering while living the other alternatives to suffering.

Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2023

Why is justice so difficult?  Justice is the wise negotiation within infinite differences.  When it is said that all are equal such equality cannot mean negating manifold differences among people in their DNA, their abilities, and the environments of their upbringing.  It is our perpetual spiritual art to discern what justice means in specific cases.  Laws, customs, traditions and the body of precedence helps prepare us for the new moment of discerning and applying justice in the new situation.

Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2023

Everlastingness is the evidence of continual forgiveness.  All that is, is allowed to become again in time, but differently only bearing traces of all that was.  The crucial part for creatures with higher volition is whether we will choose to become better in response to the continual forgiveness of having been sustained.

Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2023

The words of Jesus asks his followers to practice forgiveness in a world of oppression.  Slaves were enslaved, women were subjugated, and the Empire had the legal right of terror against any rivals.  It's as though the words of Jesus are asking church members to practice the act of reconciliation known as forgiveness in hopes for a moral osmosis into the world outside their micro-community.

Aphorism of Day, September 15, 2023

The writers of the Bible called sin or evil what we probably call acts of psychopathology or social pathology today.  The practice of forgiveness was recommended assuming that members of the church were not psychopaths or sociopaths but sometimes inclined to be in conflict with hurtful behaviors.

Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2023

The notion of forgiveness and unconditional love can be romantically promulgated basic upon an assumptions of "normal" mental health.  What does forgiveness mean when dealing with sociopaths or psychopaths?  Does forgiveness require that two parties actually understand the concept?

Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2023

We are not supposed to judge one another and we are supposed to forgive one another.  How do we live with our versions of each other?  Our versions of each other are the assessments we have of each other and one's version of another is probably not the one intended by the other.  Each person is inescapably at the center of one's own perceptual universe at the motherboard of incoming data.  Forgiveness, in part, begins by recognizing that each of us have megalomaniacal potential by being "prisoner" masters of our own perceptual universes.  Each is trying to cope with the incoming data through assessments learned from our previous experience.  Forgiveness begins by acknowledging that each of us is a "coping" being.

Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2023

Can forgiveness be endless?  Is forgiveness conditional?  If you confess and admit your wrong deed, clean up your act, do penance, and promise amendment of life, then forgiveness can happen?  Is forgiveness only possible with punishment and reparations for what has been done wrong?  Can forgiveness happen for the people whom one loathes?  Is the result of forgiveness a forced tolerance of each other?  Forgiveness is a mystery which the early followers of Jesus quoted him on as a requirement for them to exist as a community.  Forgiveness is not so easy to be precise about except to say that when it has occurred, the offender and the offended have the grace of sensing the meaning and significance of it.

Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2023

One of the alternatives to forgiveness today is what is called "ghosting."  The offense, the disillusionment, the perceived negative impingement of a person on one's existence results is an avoidance and a pretending that the other person no longer exists.  People "ghost" the church because forgiveness does not happen.  When our versions of each other are not favorable, ghosting can be an alternative to forgiveness.  Forgiveness can happen without equating love with "like."

Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2023

Our group provides us with language context to constitute our life meanings.  It is difficult to see our life meanings which we take for granted until we see other contrasted meanings for comparison.  Education in time is the constant contrasting of meanings so that we can make better choices in flooding the inner word reservoir from which we act out the meanings of our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2023

One is not just geographically located; one is located within a group and a group provides identity and context for value constitution.  The formation of a new group with successful institutional presence is a mystery.  The early Christians believed that church was successful because in the early days of member disagreement they believed that loyalties to the values of Jesus allowed them to experience him as another presence when they gathered.  That presence provided the practical group wisdom to resolve conflict.

Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2023

Can the mob energy be sanctified?  Does absolute power within a mob corrupt absolutely?  Do actions as a result of mob energy absolve the individual of wrong doing because one is doing it for the group?  The notion of the church and Spirit within Church is based upon the belief that corporate good can amplify and expand over what any individual can do.  But corporate power can result in corporate leaders acting out wrongly.  Ironically, the phrase "two or three gathered in my name and the presence of Christ," actually contextually refers to the group body realizing the presence of Christ in the practice of disciplining or censuring of a member.  One should always be mindful about the potential blindnesses of one's group and what is done on behalf of the group.

Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2023

Deconstruction as negation.  "Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."  One person is not a gathering, does that mean Christ is not with the individual when the individual is alone?  This might be a hint at the presence which occurs because of what Weber called "collective effervescence."   We personify in language group wisdom, and in the early church the absent Risen Christ was another kind of corporate presence which enhanced the strength in numbers phenomenon.  Mob numbers can strengthen evil; how can the mob mentality be sanctified to render Christly good?

Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2023

Ponder the body of Christ.  It would refer to the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth.  It was used by Paul as a metaphor for the church.  It is the Eucharistic bread.  It represents the transference of the substantial physical presence of the body to Jesus to another kind of presence of the Risen Christ within the members who claimed to know such a mystical experience of presence.  The New Testament writers use physicality to denoted that something is "really real" or substantial.  The body of Christ highlights the substantial experience which occurs in the event of social fellowship.

Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2023

Since we are language users and we can call language personal, then we cannot help but personalize our universe and God whom we name as All.

Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2023

St. Paul's "body of Christ," represented the mystification of the social reality of the church.  Christ as all and in all, was particular all and in all members of the church as the infleshment of the Risen Christ.  In Matthew, it is represented as "two or three gathered in the name of Christ" verifies the presence of Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2023

What most Christians in Western Christianity today have not really grasped is that the New Testament is basically written from and for people who were oppressed and did not have much political or economic power in their world.

Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2023

Our lives are full of lots of "wishful thinking."  We want favor and goodness, safety and protection, the bad guys to be restrained and punished, and we want to live forever in some way.  Wishful thinking is true; it's empirically true that people are wishful thinkers.  So why might we be offended if the Bible among all kinds of literature includes much wishful thinking.  All of the scenarios of wishful thinking do not actually occur.  Why would we demand that all wishful thinking in biblical wishful thinking actually occur?  Why should we be embarrassed about humanity being wishful thinkers, people of hope who spin scenarios of hope even if they don't actually occur?  Wishful thinkers, people of hope create scenarios which have no proven empirical reality, except the reality of being hopeful.  This is only a problem for people who don't accept the human discursive practices that don't involve the requirement that everything be empirically provable to have legitimate human hopeful meanings.

Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2023

Much of the biblical writings do not seem to apply to most Bible readers today, especially to those who know the comfort of power, wealth, and privilege.  It is quite fascinating to watch Christians of privilege try to fit their square peg of privilege into the round hole of the Gospel writing to and for oppressed people.  Clue to resolving the poor fit: work tirelessly on behalf of the poor and underprivileged.  And there is that embarrassing word of Jesus, "Sell all you have and give to the poor and follow me."

Aphorism of the Day, July 2023

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.

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.