Aphorism of the Day, December 2023

Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2023

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

 Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2023

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

 Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2023

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

  Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2023

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

Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2023

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

December 1, 2023

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

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.