Aphorism of the Day, 2013

Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2013

The Book of Common Prayer is a book of time; it essentially is a strategy to invoke God's presence upon the times of our lives.  The Book of Common Prayer conforms to human psychological and social experience of time; regular time of sunrise and sunset in the daily offices.  Special experiences of time due to teaching anniversaries of the seasons, feast days, fast days and holy days.  And finally, rite of passage time known as the sacraments, when we invoke God in the differentiated times which comprise human life cycles, tasks and crises; birth into community, continuous re-constituting of community through a public "meal," vocation as it becomes differentiated by maturation and diversity of expression in orders of ministry, relationship covenant because we experience particular love of another, sickness and the reality of failing our self and our community.  On the last day of the year, it is good to have the humility to confess that our time is in God's hand; our few years are contained in the Everlasting.  Let us keep up with the prayer strategy of invoking God in the times of our lives, because we are "contained" by and within the Everlasting.

Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2013

Authority is whatever is the force or power working to sanction some behavior in one's life.  Most authority is known through the rather automatic redundancies which we have acquired in our cultural settings.  The authority works without us even thinking about it.  I see a stop sign; I stop.  Authority becomes more apparent and articulated in the educational process.  Sometimes education requires us to "change" our authorities.  When we are engaged by a new insight from a different source and we change our behavior accordingly, then we have become more conscious about how authority works.  When a source of authority has the power to attain a place of superior value in our lives we change our behavior to conform more closely to that value.  The changing of "authority" is what one may call conversion and hopefully education has given a person many many conversion experiences.  People who are devoted to the authority of the Bible can have had many conversions about the kind of authority which the Bible can have over the thinking and behavior of a person.  Please don't get stuck in just one experience of authority of the Bible; that would be such a limitation to the fluidity of interpretation which characterizes any growth relationship with the Bible or any book.

Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2013

"In the beginning is the Word," seems to me to be a major admission that even though words may refer to something more than themselves, there is no way to know this without using and having words in the first place.  Let's admit it; words are co-extensive with the creation of human life as we know it.

Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2013

For infallibility and divine inspiration to be maintained in the way in which some religious folks want to do it there also has to be an incredible presumption of a state of grace that allows one to filter out the "all too human" factors in processing information from anywhere.  It is probably more human to acknowledge that infallibility and divine inspiration function as a rhetoric of privileging the pragmatic functions of how a particular community organizes itself around its chief values.

Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2013

We feel quite fine with telling the story of Roger Maris in comparison with Babe Ruth.  It suddenly becomes unacceptable to tell the story of Jesus in comparison with Moses?  It could be that if a story is regarded to be modern "exact" journalistic writing then one creates a problem with comparative story telling that need not be there.

Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2013

Can "in the beginning" actually have any empirical validity?  Possibility expressed as the past tense uses in English, "might have been."  Empirical validity about a "beginning" assumes a Being with humanoid ability to have experienced a beginning and retained it and then made it known to a human community of people with the ability to receive such information and then pass it on through the worded technologies of memory that we have.  So even the supernatural phenomenon of what we call divine revelation is woefully all too human.  One cannot filter the experience of being human out of any event of interpretation.  So why not just a bit of humility in confessing that we humans have projected interpretations upon events and occasions of human experience which give them value and the values of greatness which draw from us the exclamation, "Wow!", an exclamation of being overwhelmed before we try to process what overwhelms us with all of the genres of the superlative which never cease.  Revelation by religious police is treated as something that settles meaning in a final precise way "according to the one" who is doing the settling.  What about being literal about revelation in being an "uncovering."  What about Truth as the largest Nude and we spend all of human time in a progressive undressing and uncovering and revealing of the nakedness of this Truth?

Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2013

I hope you can get some "baby magic" today. Let the lost memory of your being born into this world for the sheer joy of consciousness of life be projected today on the Holy Child. And let the gift of your life without qualification or interpretation be a mystical place of renewal for you today.

Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2013

Who is the genius who thought of this?  Let's take almighty God and hide God in a baby in an obscure family from Nazareth and see what happens.  The baby grows into a man and begins to meddle with our habits of hatred and injustice and gets himself killed.  And he becomes the most popular person in history and his birth date becomes the most popular festival in the history of the world.  The message remains; God is still hidden in vulnerability and still asks us to take care of the divine life found in the vulnerable.  Let the baby magic win us again to step up to our responsibility to the vulnerable.  Let us remember Whose Life we are tending to.

Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2013

The quest for meanings involve registering the impact of the sublime moment of meaning happening. When serendipity of meaning happens often one wants to share it and make it public but public sharing cannot replicate all of the particulars of the private event of serendipity. The primary naivete is lost in the public sharing but the quest for meaning involves the study of the modes of how meanings can and do occur. If you want to study cinema you have to look at all of the behind the scene tedium to see how the director and editors achieved their meanings. And you could lose interest in the cinema if you don't have the knack for behind the scene tedium of actually making a film. At Christmas time we want to live in the primary naivete of the Infancy Narratives and it may seem tedious to take apart the collection of writing appeals and styles that went into the making of those narratives, but it is comforting to know that even as we have styles for the use of language and media to speak about greatness so did the New Testament writers. The goal is not to get lost in the behind the scene tedium but to savor the inspiration of our own serendipitous encounter with the sublime. Sometimes the sublime is so private that all you can say is "It happened!" You had to "be there" to know it. At Christmas time we hope that there will be some occasions of the private sublime for you.

Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2013

With all of the recent talk about the whiteness of Christmas figures and the so-called war on Christmas, it might be interesting to reflect upon how ecumenical and secular Christmas has become in America. Persons who cite a war on Christmas can really only cite the dropping of the exclusive use of the word "Christmas" to be more inclusive of other holiday festivals. The commercial reality is that an obscure bishop of Myra came West, in history, and morphed into a Dutch Sinterclaus who morphed into the pot belly, full blown Santa Claus who now seems to upstage the baby Jesus at Christmas because of family traditions dominated by giving. Ironically, American Christmas is dominated by secular Christmas songs written in large part by American Jews. As we sing the wonderful Carols and Songs of Christmas let us be thankful that the story of the little Christ Child has grown to be an avalanche of a snow ball rolling through history and picking up steam and has become omnivorous as humanity makes solstice efforts to create interior light where the exterior light in the "northern hemisphere" has diminished winter hours. The story of the little baby Jesus has morphed into an incredible excuse for excess and such excess means that you and I have to filter out and select how we want to observe the festival of Christmas. Before we go all bah humbug on everything, do not go bah humbug upon one's own responsibility to observe the meaning of the birth of the Christ Child into history and into our personal history. Come and hear the lessons of Salvation and the Carols of Advent and Christmas.

Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2013

While the doubting Thomas stories seems to be about the disciple Thomas achieving belief in the resurrection of Jesus only by having his own encounter, the textual purpose of the story in John's Gospel is to affirm the blessedness of people who experience Christ without having been there.  In a subtle way the writer of John's Gospel used this story to say that by reading his account of Jesus could be an equally valid and blessed encounter with the risen Christ no less valid than the encounter of the eye-witnesses.  Re-read John, chapter twenty to discover the punchline reference to Gospel writing, "these things are written so that you may believe...and that through believing you might have life in His Name."

Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2013

In telling the Christmas Story, the Gospel writers employ many methods to trace the origin of a person who was such a human prodigy that the metaphors of the divine could only be used to describe his uniqueness, his "only begottenness."  The variety of explanatory language is quite stark: In the Gospel of Mark the Sonship of Jesus begins at his adoption by the heavenly voice at his baptism, "This is my Beloved Son."  But in the Gospel of John, there is no stable for baby Jesus since he resided in eternity as the "Word" with God who brought everything into being.  The long and short of it; the authors were using every sort of rhetorical device from Hebrew religious roots to paralleling Roman rhetoric which proclaimed the Caesar as son of a god and savior and one who brought peace to the world.  There is little doubt that the writers of the Gospel believed that Jesus was unsurpassed.

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2013

In our time we have such a flood of word products that we have sifted through and analyzed and classified and we unwittingly seem to practice the actual division of human consciousness into the categories of our language classifications.  A child and people of former times do and did not live their language experience with such division.  It is silly to ask a child if a Disney movie is true; they don't remove the engaging truth of the art as being untrue.  The people who lived during the generation of biblical writing also wrote and read their "scripture" in the same unifying and primary "naivete." We should respect this naivete and find this naivete in ourselves even as we don't deny the multi discursive truthful products of language.

Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2013

Perhaps a relevant cure for writer's block is to write about having writer's block and once one has written extensively about having writer's block one falsifies unwittingly one's having that condition.  So too in not feeling God, one writes extensively about not feeling God and can even be obsessively atheistic and suddenly wake up to the fact that the divine has bitten one on the behind all the while that one did not know it.

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2013

As we approach Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation we can understand the obviousness of the meaning of "God with us."  It is an exposure of human honesty about our being "merely" human in having "merely human experiences" about everything, including the experience about extra-human beings, even the Plenitude of the one who in English has the name God.  The incarnation is a confession that human experience is a valid way to know what we regard to be the most superlative in human experience.

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2013

Can we reach some common places of agreement when everyone has the humility to admit being smaller than Totality, Plenitude, or God?  And when everyone has the humility to admit not being able to be infallible and precise spokespersons for the Same?  But we should also admit that we have the propensity to speak categorically towards the admission of a Plenitude even if Plenitude meant the infinite number of ways in which Plenitude and the beings within Plenitude come to language.  We can then argue about the adequacy of our relationship to the genealogy of ideas within one's tradition and the degree of charity that we may have for those in our traditions who did not have the advantage of being the latest occasions and events of time.  Hindsight may dim the brilliance of a former paradigm just as future hindsight will dim our "brilliance."

Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2013

One of the functions of community of faith is to rally and bolster community morale in the face of the reality of the kinds of suffering that can occur within the community because the phenomenon of time. Human experience in time includes death and all of its acolytes of loss and pain. Such experiences are inescapable and individuals and community often have uneven distribution of ills which befall them. Knowing these conditions we still have to rouse ourselves with the command "Rejoice!" Why? Because things can get better and things could be worse but it is still important right now to make our very best shot at living as we respond with the hand in life we have been dealt.

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2013

Absence makes the heart grow fonder and such fondness spawns incredible supplemental reality which in turns becomes the formative reality.  Case in point; the Hebrew Scriptures are in some way built around a land, the land of Israel, but for most of the time it was a Promised Land which they were trying to attain, a possessed land which was managed poorly by their monarchy, and then a land which they wanted to return to in their exile.  In their imagination it became something more than it was because it became a future ideal place built by the poetic hope of what the prophets wanted to inspire for the identity of a people who had lost their land.  There would be a future ideal King like David but better than David.  And now we have a 2000 year old tradition built upon the interpretation that One better than David has come but never did lift a sword or build a palace to live and govern from.  The followers of Jesus as their Messiah have made reading the Hebrew Scriptures a requirement even as they interpret its inspiration from different teleological focus.  Fondness for land can be rather chimerical because time passes and so do the people who tread upon land; what remains is a formative literature which constitutes nomadic people of faith traditions.  The Bible remains as a repository of uncounted metaphors to interpret land and life story anywhere because hope keeps us seeking what we have not yet attained.

Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2013

The notion of the Word made Flesh has constant application relevance.  A verbal xray of word made flesh at any moment in our lives might ask us to analyze level of agreements within oneself.  What word would interpret feeling, what words would describe my body language in what I was doing and what words were coming from my lips to communicate and what words are causing one to float away in the reverie of a day dream or anticipation of something in the future that may or may not happen or be simply a wish.  In meditation one tries to silence all of the levels of words being active and this may be a strange mimicry of "death" in trying to cease the activity of words through the practice of silence.  Silencing all words and body language to one position is all coded with words too.  Attempting to restrict the flow of words may only be a brief respite from the subsequent barrage of words on all levels when we have to be dancingly deft at multi-tasking the main human activity: using words and being used by them.

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2013

One of the themes of Advent is the command to be "Prepared."  It sounds like the perfect season for devotees to Murphy's Law and to actuarial bean counters working on probabilities of mayhem.  One of the things we are to prepare for is the "Day of the Lord" which in its time meant some sort of significant end of life as we know it.  Since the rumors of the demise of the world have been greatly exaggerated and life has gone on, we've had to get used to the duration of some kind of life going on forever.  Human beings as individuals live within a range of probable occurrences and there are attending words to describe and cope with various occurrences in life.  Biblical literature generated among the suffering tended to be for surviving this "vale of tears."  Should we also not be prepared for the opposite of disasters, namely the glorious sublime and the blessed and fortunate experiences as well.  We should only wear the applicable discourse which fits our current experience.  Everything from the biblical pages is not applicable to our experience all of the time.  We may have to search for interpretative matches.  There is no reason to cope with suffering when we aren't suffering.  There is no reason to use apocalyptic visualization when the conditions don't require us to wish away our situation of suffering.  Being prepared during Advent can apply both to the suffering states and the states of blessing which make us wonderfully grateful.  Do not let Advent preparedness be just for Murphy's Law and mayhem.  Be prepared for the good as well or we may not be receptive to it when it is offered.

Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2013

  

The non-suffering churches when they have become associated with Empire and have had majority status in various societies, have often not given up the literal interpretations of apocalyptic end of the world intervention or utopian visions even though in situations of comfort and ease they have not needed such literature to function as visualizations for their pain management.  In the vision of the wolf lying with the lamb and the swords being beat into plowshares, which vision is actually achievable?   Human freedom can be converted to move from a military industrial complex to an agricultural feed the world mentality.  There is already greatness within creation; the problem involves the goals towards which greatness is used.  The repentance or spiritual education that we need is to come to persuasion towards love and justice in every human enterprise.  To start, we could begin with a benign "cause no harm" philosophy to appraise all human endeavor.

Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2013

We may be dismissive of the apocalyptic in biblical times even while we thoroughly entertain ourselves with our own genres of futurism. One might say that futurism has inspired discursive patterns both as individuals and as communities. We might say that modern science has added a different kind of extrapolative content to the futurism present within science fiction as teleporting may be given as a logical possibility where the biblical rapture and Assumptions seem rather fantastical. Futurism is individual in that the most accessible notion of our own personal apocalypse is one's own death. The thought of death and the possibility of afterlife functions for us now and provides us with the occasion of humility about the duration of the constitution of anything. Apocalypse on the level of the community is the generalization of individual dying to the death of the entire human community. What will life be like without human existence as we now know it to be constituted? We should be inspired to cherish the limited duration of our lives even while we avoid the hubris of temporal provincialism.

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2013

Supernatural or para-normal predictions have always fascinated people.  We want to know what will happen before it occurs.  It helps in gambling and in entertainment.  People in statistic and actuarial sciences deal more with limiting the range of probabilities and determining policy accordingly.  During Advent, one must deal with the method of New Testament writers explaining the events surrounding Jesus as having been foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures.  We also read about the "divinations" of the end or last day.   Modern people who perhaps do not understand the method of interpretation known as "midrash" import to this method the notion that hundreds of years earlier exactly precise predictions of events occurred.  After Roger Maris hit 61 homers in a season, sports writer said the spirit of the the "Babe" returned.  We know that the recorded history of Babe Ruth hitting home runs became the template and bench mark for the occupation of hitting home runs, though we also know that Babe Ruth did not predict or cause Roger Maris to hit home runs.  So too, the Hebrew Scriptures provided the templates of iconographic roles which had their own contemporary relevance but in becoming a part of official record of greatness, these templates would be used to retell the story of future great persons, not in the mode of precise prediction of those future people but in the mode of the eternal return of the same in human experience.  In the coil or spiral of history remembered themes of a previous era are repeated in interpreting the events in a subsequent circle of history.

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2013

During Advent we ponder utopian visions of the prophets.  But have we thought out the logical consequences of environments where there is no freedom at all except to be good and innocent.  If one is a robot or programmed being for doing good and being innocent in utopia is there any moral significance at all?  Can there be a genuine utopia without genuine freedom?  Utopia like Disneyland may minister to our child aspect of personality in telling ways to retain balance in our adult lives but let us not give up the adult counter part of innocence which is holiness derived through grappling with genuine freedom of continual choices some of which are very difficult.

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2013

Recently some have remarked upon the "wrong name for our planet."  It should be called "Water" instead of Earth because the waters cover more of the surface of the globe. Earth is where people mostly live and we cannot help but be anthropocentric in believing that our life as we know it revolves around us.  It could be that in the postmodern age Water might be a better metaphor than Earth to represent both a strong and fluid/adaptable way of conforming to life.  Water has strength but also conforms to the situation.  In postmodernism we have begun to see how the notion of style prevails over the notion of static content.  We are in a paradigm switch from the sense that philosophical propositions requiring assent hold human life together to understanding that that truths always need flexible and pragmatic application with relevant style to the people who need to have the truth function for them in life style ways.  In older views, style has been seen to be shallow and changing conformity and in the new view old philosophical and credal formula are regarded as simply old styles that have lost their current utility.  Functional relevance can be presented in styles of faith for people humble enough to disclaim being infallible spokespersons for precisely known final answers.  Style can be rhetorical flexibility in the art of living with faith.  Water is flexible but strong; so can be the stylings of faith.

Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2013

The ancient prophets in times of suffering wondered if there was any greatness left in humanity. The prophet thought if it would come from anywhere it would come from the line of Jesse whose son was David who gave Israel its most legendary times. Surely the Spirit can come upon one again from the line of Jesse? Today we look for the Spirit of greatness to come upon mere human beings and achieve the uncanny of every sort. If Nelson Mandela happened in this world (and Wow! he surely did), can there not be hope that the serendipity of such greatness in the face of such human systematic cruel misbehavior can happen again to save us toward closer approximations of justice and love wherever cruelty has become the acceptable banality of human practice? We seek the Messianic as the genius of Spirit who can help us toward our better selves and our world towards peace.

Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2013

Evangelism is a type of persuasion which at its best means that I am willing to share with you what I regard to be my best insight without coercion and leave it up to you as to the winsomeness of the insight. The adequacy of the insight would need to be judged based upon its utility and benefit for the common good. In our world the notion of "how common" becomes relevant. Kata holos or "on the whole" or "catholic" means that one promotes an insight as categorically beneficial to everyone but if force and gunboat evangelism is used to prove such a benefit, is it really beneficial? At what point does the good news of one culture conflict with the good news of another culture where the good news has a different history in providing identity in a different setting? How do we move from cultures of war and athletic contest where everything is judged as winning and losing to an equanimity where there is a "tie" with equal respect for my good news and your good news?

Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2013

Who is to say what is the valid truth of time?  As children and as people of maturity the memory film can get looped and so events of time can become superimposed over each other or double exposed.  A departed mother can suddenly be with one in the skilled nursing center.  This double exposure of events in time can happen in dreams and under the influence of pharmacological agents.  When modern historians and journalists adopt strict chronological sequence as what is "true" about the events in time it should not discount the truth of how time is regarded in ancient holy books like the Bible when "chronos" could not be king because the recording techniques were not available to make it an issue.  Stories time-lapsed the teaching truths which the communities used to inculcate the values and the identity of a person within a community.  It is silly to defend the Bible as being scientifically exact "chronos" just as it is silly to say that the "chronos" of modern journalism is the only way to impart truth to a community of people.  There would be less confusion if people could accept the truth differences of discursive practices.

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2013

The famous TV cop Joe Friday is quoted (wrongly) as having said, "Just the facts, ma'am."  Police forensic truth is a type of discourse and sometimes what the police are looking for is in conflict with how people remember what happened.  Remembering has already collapsed events of the past to a time-lapsed trace.  It is impossible for all time to be parallel and remembering is a way for us to have the past be a present trace.  Since the past is time-lapsed and made into a story which compacts event into presentable units it is edited memories with much left on the cutting floor.  It cannot be otherwise; can you imagine watching a continuous video of yesterday's twenty four hours?  What did you do today? "I watched a twenty four hour video tape of yesterday."  To try to literally experience the past would be to consume the present.  When one is reading the Bible or any book, one has to remember there are editorial motives for what gets included and what was left out.  As far distant readers we may be left to interpret a field of editorial motives which guided the presentation of what we come to believe to be the biblical points of instruction for us.

Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2013

Thomas More of "Man of All Seasons" redux who loyally opposed King Henry VIII, coined the neologism "Utopia" for the name of his imaginary island in his book with the same title.  Utopia is a word whose etymology means "no place" or "nowhere," or "no such place."  In Advent we get introduced to "utopia" through the Isaian prophet who imagines the no such places where wolves and lambs play together and where all people live to over a hundred years.  What is the function of Utopia or Uanthropos=no such people=ideal people?  Utopia functions like the unattainable carrot strapped on the donkey's nose.  It keeps us going through the lure of invention toward a more perfect life and toward the better angels of human living.  And if utopia offends one's misanthropic or dystopian inclinations due to having good reason to being devotees to Murphy's Law (if it can go wrong or bad, it probably will) then you may have your vision set in the wrong direction.  Where do we want to go? Utopia or dystopia?  Advent's Isaian visions teach us to at least look in the right direction for inspiring invention.

Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2013

Advent begins the new year in the church calendar which is another human arbitrary way of naming and qualifying time.  Time is qualified by the different activity and educational emphasis that we submit to as a discipline for reviewing the annual curriculum of Christian knowledge and practice.  We do so as a community to review our own understanding and to inculcate Advent values in the lives of our young.  The real challenge of Advent in our commercial climate is not to let it be treated as a mere pesty speed bump on the race track to Christmas.  The loud cry of human need around us should help us keep Advent somber.

Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2013

The season of Advent is about warnings.  Warning is motivational discourse which includes actuarial statistical information about probable worst case scenarios that need to be avoided with attainable behavior modification to secure better and more favorable outcomes.  During the season of Advent we can note that because of the change and differentiation in human consciousness due to the rise of modern science warning has moved from the ancient notions of unknowable, cosmic, narratives of world ending into the more knowable realm of what we as human beings can do to destroy our world through global warming, nuclear weapons or what Nature could do to us through a collusion with a meteor or a very big volcanic eruption.  Modern skeptics may decry the ancient apocalyptic narratives even as we dishonestly deny the same category of discourse that gives us sublime entertainment in science fiction and so many other genres of action adventures.  Because the discourse of cosmic ending has found its way into Hollywood only affirms its truth as a human discourse and mood of being towards the possibility of our not being.

Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2013

What is the "spirituality" of Black Friday?  Jesus told a parable about finding the pearl of great price.  As people we are "wired" to seek value and worth and on Black Friday the pursuit of the very best gifts at the very best price begins the Christmas shopping spree for many.  Let us remember to be the best gifts for each other in word and deed before any actual present is exchanged.  Let the gifts we buy be a celebration of the love and friendship that we already know.  Blessings to you as you find gifts for the important people in your lives; may we also seek to give gifts outside of our circle of family and friends where some very basic necessities of life are truly gifts of life.  For those who already have too much receiving a gift given on one's behalf to a charitable organization is the perfect gift.

Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2013

Thanksgiving involves checking the ego at the door and realizing how much we receive from the Plenitude of our environment consisting of the time environment of the absolute past from which we all have come and of the present time which is full of people and the surrounding world from which we subsist. Our relationship to Plenitude involves many occasions for which gratitude is the only response. Beauty, love, friendship and the ever possible sublime draws from us thanksgiving. But we don't stop with thanksgiving; we become agents of thanksgiving as we act in ways which makes thanksgiving easy for others to express as well.

Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2013

One of the aphorist's goal is to show how the place of the Bible in biblical communities commanded a greater place in the lives of people who had only the Bible and a few other writings as the organizing text of their lives.  It was their entertainment, their science, their science fiction, their politics and their spirituality.  Today, if one does not choose to be Amish and limit one's reading, one lives in a barrage of an omni-textual universe of incredible specializations in all areas of life.  As one who still uses the Bible, I would like to show how the various underlying human motivations that reside within biblical narrative and teaching have their counter-parts in the plethora of textual experience which also bear the same underlying motivations of the Bible.  The infatuation with comic book superheroes is much like the function of the apocalyptic genre in the Bible.  Apocalyptic genre is an expression of the impossible; we want quick and instant justice for all right now and the sub-text usually means "how I and my group define justice."  And while we pine for such instant justice do we really want a quick fix that ends up making us robotic heavenly angels of good without freedom to do anything but good?  Remember generalized wishes always have consequences and such consequences always reveal the limitation of metaphors, even the limitation of justice expressed as a "final" apocalyptic correction of the world.

Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2013

What happened when literal future prediction became the only way to interpret the apocalyptic genre of literature?  The apocalyptic became excommunicated from religion and became a proliferation of comic book superheroes in the culture at large because the truth  of hope getting interventionist narratives for realized justice never leaves the human condition.

Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2013

It is recommendable that Christians who have the Bible as their textbook to avoid having either a superiority or inferiority complex regarding the Bible.  Those who might think that it has diminished relevance in our age of endless proliferation of textual production should not bemoan the fact that the Bible does not include things like ipads and Cadillacs; rather one should see it as an ancient and venerated mother whose repository of human experience and metaphors has given birth to all of her textual children.  Expositors should spend their time tracing the underlying principle connections rather than bemoaning the fact that cultural details and artifacts are significantly different.

Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2013

Tomorrow: how will you have time-lapsed your memories of what happened today? What memorial events today will be the events which define the day? When so many events are are automatic, e.g. got out of bed, ate breakfast, etc, what will come to the foreground of your memory? This is why learning activity is important; being proactive to learn something new is how we can make each day memorable.

Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2013

The Feast of Christ the King was instituted in 1925 by Pius the XI after the Russian Revolution and other movements promoting forms of secular government.  It is hard to imagine a government with a perfect King who could be perfectly present to all  of the people in the world.  It is probably better to look to how the Christly can be interwoven with all of life.  If we are taking care of the vulnerable people of the world as those who are Christ incognito, then we are subscribing to the kind of human governance which was promoted in the words of Jesus of Nazareth.  They are kingly words from someone who did not look like a king when he dwelled among us.

Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2013

Spiritual practice might be regarded as a gradual education toward enlightened self-interest.  Such enlightened self-interest requires events of grace and when these events of grace occur they often have a narrative which arises in terms of the language which is accessible within the context of the graceful event.  Someone in recovery might speak of a graceful experience of a "higher power."  In the Pauline tradition, the narrative involved "being crucified with Christ" and receiving an inner relational power to live differently with different outcomes.  Those outcomes benefit both the person who has the event of grace and the people with whom that person lives.  We are better to ourselves and to others after these events of grace.

Aphorism of the Day, November 21 , 2013

 

Since each person is locked into one's own skin and is at the command central of one's own perceptual universe, one could make that case that selfishness is unavoidable.  We even seek salvation and grace for selfish reason; we embrace altruism in order that we might feel ethically good.  And if it is the case that everything in life is motivated by self-interest, then the question follows, "What are the very best forms of selfishness to have?"  And from there we would make the case that love, justice, compassion, and sacrificial living are the best forms of selfishness to prove that what is best for all is also what is best for me. Enlightened self interest truly has us all benefiting together.

Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2013

Parenting and early childhood training is important because the deep ruts of one's commonsense begin to be dredged.  Within these ruts we have learned some of the automatic rituals which govern us until we find life circumstances to get us out of these ruts of commonsense and form new habits for "automatically" responding to life.  At some point certain tastes had to be developed to change habits.  One probably does not like "coffee" initially but coffee can become the routine of one's life.  At any moment there is more than a fork in the road; a fork is an expression that seems to limit the number of possible choices for us.  Most of our choices are made on the basis of the system of commonsense which we have internalized to be kind of like the software which sets the menu of choices.  If we are looking for more radical discontinuities from common patterns then we have to pause and look for interpretations which do not seem to follow from our current system of commonsense.  Most often radical discontinuities are forced upon us by change in life circumstances, e.g., crises of loss.  In many ways the Bible is a story of people who were forced "nomads" and being forced to lose their location they developed a "traveling"  literature of identity for their community.  The literature represents their struggle with what they lost but also their triumph and hope in adjusting to the new.  The truth of underlying biblical patterns is the guideline to our faith today, not the details of ancient crises.  Let us look to the great patterns of faith, and not venerate the ancient cultural details that are found in the Bible.

Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2013

Sometimes it is hard to get people who are locked into a simple "either/or" thinking mode to appreciate the diversity of language and how language gets staged and presented and nuanced according to context specific situations.  This is made evident in how parents censor very truthful information for young children or present it with a carefully nuanced finesse, not because they want to lie or withhold but because the truth of their care and love and comfort is the truth that may not be a literal truth in the words which they use.  If either/or literalists could understand how the truthful intention of much of the Bible is language of comfort and visualization for people who were suffering, then the Bible could have a wider hearing with greater audience.  The Holy Spirit is called the "Comforter."  We need to be motivated by the Spirit of comfort when we read and present the Bible.  The words of comfort for situations of the ancient past may not be the exact words which are called for in our situations today and it is folly to force wrong words into a wrong time.  The Spirit of comfort should inspire us to make the appropriate translation of God's love and comfort to our own time.

Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2013

As we move toward the Last Sunday after Pentecost aka The Feast of Christ the King, we are forced to ponder how we have to rehabilitate the notion of "king."  As Americans whose identity is based upon rebelling against a king we hardly believe in "kings."  Perhaps the favorite royalty of Americans are found in the fantasy worlds that derived from Walt Disney.  Jesus did not live like any earthly or fantasy king that we know of and it could be that Christ as king derived from competing notions of the messiah.  Since Jesus was not a king like David or the Caesar those who left the synagogue used the image of the suffering servant as the fitting image for the earthly Jesus and to comport with more Davidic kingly correspondences, the followers of Jesus delayed to the future kingly correspondences for Christ.  The wonderful thing about the future is that it is a realm of possibilisms which can inspire faith anticipations for verifying or falsifying any notion at all.

Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2013

We often depend upon social context and loyalty to community reinforced meanings to guarantee and to maintain the sense of the stable meanings of what we say and believe.  Meanings can come under threat when we travel and allow ourselves to try to identify with the way other people see the world.  When we juxtapose our own favorite and privileged meanings with so many other meanings, there cannot be but saturating effects upon how we understand our own meanings.  The stability of meanings is challenged and our allegiance to our paradigm is weakened as we look for more adequate answers to the questions which are raised by new experience.  Paradigms changed like molasses flowing in January in the past; in the post-modern world the informational highway juxtaposes so many differences it begins to become difficult for many to know which paradigm they are living in.  Faith communities have paradigms too and the stability of these paradigms is being challenged by all of the data accessible on the information highway.  Our mode of living in our ancient biblical paradigm is more conducive to horseback travel when our informational culture is traveling at Mach speed.  We are challenged to adopt a mode of faith life which is at home and compatible with Mach speed.

Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2013

The difference between a major typhoon that happened two hundred years ago and one that happened recently is that today we know almost immediately from a distance when things happen.  What is the difference between knowing about things that we cannot control and not knowing about them?  Things that we do not know lack existence to us.  But if we know, there can be extra pressure to be super human and have omni-competent empathy on behalf of all of the people of the world. (O, wait that is more in line with God's role).  After an ant hill has been disturbed one can soon find the ants seeming to regroup and keep on, keeping on for the welfare of the population of the hill.  They seem to be wired that way without a choice.  As humans in the post-modern era with enhanced opportunity to travel to far away places quickly, each us us still has specific and limited location within the perimeter of our epidermis.  So we can but act in very local ways from within our own skin but in our local actions we can be a part of a chain and domino effect to see a gift given to Episcopal Relief and Development or to the Red Cross become transformed to planes in the air and ships on the sea filled with relief personnel and material.  And so we are reminded that when we cannot control things that happen, we can still respond to them when they do.  If a typhoon of relief giving meets the aftermath of a typhoon perhaps we can alleviate some suffering and give some comfort.  And wouldn't it be great if all of the world's military industrial complex could be converted to a massive standing Rescue Corps to respond to the many great disasters that will occur because the location of people in the wrong place at the wrong time will always be highly INCONVENIENT to quality of life.

Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2013

One of the great human failures is the general ignorance of the multi-faceted fullness of language.  We are often foolish in theory about language but we cannot help but be honest in practice.  Once we learned language, language makes us be honest about language itself when we use it or are used by it.  In theory we get ourselves locked into schools of thought where we are implying that "my use of language is "truthier" than yours."  In theory we limit truth to certain kinds of propositions that satisfy the group that has currently won our hearts in the areas of religion, politics, economics and culture.  In practice if one finds oneself engaged in the silly discourse of cheering football, one does not ponder the truth of that experience even though in practice it may be actually more fully unifying than being in church on Sunday.  Truth, because of language,  is made known in manifold ways and in multi-discursive ways and truth in language has an appropriate manner for each occasion.  We should get out of this ignorant and dishonest habit of the privileging the theory of truth of a specific propositional use of language.  That we have language and that it has us is the fuller truth and it is the truth that is evident even when we are theoretically narrow-minded.  The long and short of this is that language makes a place for faith and science, and lots of other stuff that is honest to life experience.

Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2013

Languages have ways to express things that have not yet happened. In grammar it is called the future tense. The future is based upon experience of memory of the past and current experience whereby predicable probabilities are extrapolated for that which has not yet happened. The probable not yet happened exists within a larger field of "not yet happened" possible. When it comes to adding the end of the world as we know it as a point on the field of the future possible, it involves a different kind of extrapolation. Scientists today can from current knowledge see nuclear disaster, environmental disasters and massive natural disasters as ending life as we know it. But if humans aren't here to know any life at all,  from our current knowledge of the rest of the universe we can assume other life would go on without us. It begs the question as to whether an unwitnessed universe by earthly humans exists. The irony of our age is that conservative religionists accuse modern scientists of being secular humanists (human centered) whereas it is modern science that has actually given us a truer view of how small we are as human beings. One could say that the Bible in purporting to have a God-centered or theocentric view of the world is really more human centered and more specifically Israel-o-centric in making all of the entire universe revolve around a place on the small planet earth that developed a literature which made that place in actual geography and in metaphor (new Israel?  new Jerusalem?)  the center of the universe, from creation to the mythical future apocalyptic world as we know it ending in the coming of the Son of Man.

Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2013

One could make the claim that a major principle of the Bible is that Word constitutes salvation or health, both individually and for a community.  Love and Justice express salvation most completely and since human life is "created" by Word-ability, a major function of word is to constitute health.  Word in the forms of science and pharmacology have extended health to the chemistry of health.  What has been losing is the "talking cure" of health since it is cheaper and quicker to apply written text to a prescription pad than to pay for long term of counseling a professional "friend" to help reconstitute one's life narrative so that it functions towards current interactive efficiency.   We in faith communities need to keep the Word as health tradition alive and keep befriending alive where narratives are not perfect, only shared so that new interpretations for new changing actions can occur.  Also we need to keep alive Word as an analgesic for pain management in life: Like comforting mothers to distressed crying children saying, "there, there, everything is going to be better."  We don't know with certainty that all will be better but we still offer the analgesic words because they are backed up with the assurance of our continual accessible presence.

Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2013

As Episcopalians we search for our epistemological (thinking about how we know what we know) identities in the broad territory between religious fundamentalism and atheistic fundamentalism. We are uncertain about most things and believe that since historical contexts gave rise to meanings, historical contexts can also change meaning and give rise to new meanings and new nuances to meaning. Within this broad territory, we accept lots of language products that are conduits for meanings. The Bible is a repository for lots of language products and textual discursive practices and it is a book that settled the fact that what is chief about human experience is that we are always already caught in a reflexive web of using language. Fundamentalists of all sorts would like to limit discursive practices to their own limited preferences and others of less certainty allow language to manifest the sublime in multi-faceted ways conducive to the ways in which we are still becoming fully human.

Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2013

There are as many ways to be a veteran as there are veterans. What unites them all is that in their service they said, "let it be now according to the will of my country and on behalf of my country." Veterans have served according to the will of the country and that will has been expressed in various and diverse ways throughout the history of the armed services. Even as we wish swords could all be beaten into ploughshares we are painfully aware that angelic harmony has yet to be universally attained. Struggles continue and so the the logic and logistics of protection of people is a chief human vocation. So on Veterans Day we offer our gratitude to those who first laid down their "ego" lives for the mystical body of their country and sacrificed their time and much more, even their lives in the justice of protection. May Veterans be best honored with current wisdom for the deployment of the "not yet veterans" who ever stand ready on our behalf.

Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2013

Christians have Christianized the notion of "redeemer" from the Hebrew Scriptures. In its Hebraic context redeemer involved a family member or relative becoming an advocate on behalf of another family member particularly in crisis events. A redeemer was like a folk practitioner of mediation. Each person at some time in life will come into the role of being a "redeemer" or one who mediates to help another person in a timely manner. Each person in life is often in the role of needing others to mediate on one's behalf. In the ultimate sense of redeemer, we hope for a grand redeemer who advocates on behalf of the life of the world even as we know that in freedom the Grand Advocate relies upon human delegated redeemers to do redeeming work within community.

Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2013

One can arrogate to oneself the air of being infallible since one sits upon the singular chair of perception within one's own perceptual universe. But since everyone sits upon one's own chair of interpreting the world there is no way to determine infallibility; there is only community interaction between interpretations to transact the business of the community. And we endeavor to have these transactions characterized and interpreted with such incredible words: Love and Justice. Love and Justice are infallible but not yet since we hopefully are limping toward them with our faint approximations of Love and Justice in how we are actually living together.

Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2013

In the interpretation of stories that are a part of the Bible some people take an "all or nothing" view in that if one believes in one natural law defying story then one must believe all of them.  Other people pick and choose, "Let's see, Virgin Birth, yes, Resurrection, yes, seven day literal creation, no."  When there is an inconsistency in applying interpretation one can see it has to do with when one chooses to import a modern scientific view of the world onto the people of the past and require that they too in some of their reporting had to have the same modern view that we have today.  Such practice makes us temporal provincial snobs who force our view upon people of the past but at the same time it exposes how we diminish other interpretative aesthetic modes of truth in dealing realistically with the truths of birth, loss, growth, sickness, failure, wonder and death.  With the important rites of passage in our lives we do not need the scientific truth of being detached from such personal phenomena; we need other interpretative modes of truth to traverse the rites of passage which sum up the significant crises of life.  We need not put modes of interpreting truths in opposition to each other and this is what happens in fundamentalism.

Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2013

The scientific method as a method of knowing and interacting with reality has become the preeminent way of knowing because of its pragmatic value; through the scientific method we are able to build all sorts of useful stuff.  Other methods of knowing have lost their relevance because they don't make "stuff."  Other ways of knowing pertain to the art of living and this is a very messy art.  Trying to get one's two year old child to behave consistently like water boiling at 212 degrees is unthinkable.  Human messiness involves loss, hurt, pain, death and dying, joy, and endless degrees of ambiguity.  From the loft of the scientific method one can criticize the inexactness and imprecision of methods that might be used to inspire the imaginations in coping with life in the ways needed for each person to craft one's own art of living.  There is no good reason to pit the mode of imagination needed for a scientific problem against the mode of imagination for which theology deals with in the art of living.  There may be questions of relevance of applications of modes of imagination if one is trying to use a strictly scientific mode where a theological or psychological or aesthetic mode of imagination is called for in achieving excellence in the art of living.

Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2013

Is having faith all about having insider information about God and the Bible?  The modern era with scientific method as the arbiter of "truth" has tricked some people of faith to treat the metaphors of the Bible as empirical statements of science.  Such apologists of the faith end up being fish out of the water as they insist on the world being but 6000 years old even when there is carbon and radioactive dating to the contrary.  It is not charitable to people in the past to insist that they had our world view just as it is not realistic to mix modes of discourses when understanding the value of biblical metaphors for our lives today.

Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2013

The notion of justice in valid faith should keep religious communities from getting distracted from the pragmatic and caught in a maze of legalism where the minutiae of the irrelevant takes over because there is too much time being taken to ask questions that need not be asked.  Justice requires pragmatism; laws of actions to get the "needed" thing done to honor the integrity of each person.  Justice for a starving person means getting food, for the sick, getting treatment.  What good is being certain that one has the best theology of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist if justice is not being done?  Jesus said that when we have taken care of the needy, we have taken care of Him.  Why isn't the real presence of Christ in the needy one of the sacraments of the church?  How is we find Christ in bread and wine and not so readily and easily in the needy?   When the church is willing to add this further sacrament maybe we will better approximate justice in our practice.

Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2013

What does it tell us about people who are more interested in the end of the world and the afterlife than they are about making sure that there is maximal quality of life for everyone in this life? a. they are people deeply suffering and need visualizations of alternatives to help them cope. b. they are peevish, narrow minded religionists who cannot convince with persuasive ideas and so they retreat to a sense of false persecution and pretend to know precisely that they are winners in the afterlife and like bratty children are threatening, "we're going to more than get even with you in the afterlife." What an ironic way to "use" the afterlife. A club to threaten those with whom one disagrees. Beware of apocalyptic fatalists who presume to know too much about the end and the afterlife. They literalize the apocalyptic genre of the Bible which served as coping visualization for deeply suffering people.

Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2013

Melvin, the zany reclusive, misanthropic writer in the romantic comedy, "As Good as It Gets," is being taught through falling in love with a person who gets him finally and honestly to confess, "You make me want to be a better man."  The Gospels are about people meeting Jesus and wanting to be better people, both in terms of goodness and wellness of mind and body.  A goal of the church might be the creation of the continual context for people to discover a community where everyone has the serendipity of "wanting to be better people."

Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2013

Somewhere between faith as adhering to the official teaching of the church or the totally individual and private experience of "asking Jesus into one's heart" has been lost the befriending tradition that Jesus started with his disciples.  People saw Jesus and some projected upon him such a regard and this regard involved a vision of themselves being better because of this projection.  They wanted to change their life to be better after seeing Jesus.  We should not lose this befriending tradition within the church and we should live as a disciple of Christ so that others can project a positive regard upon us to want to be better too.  This does not mean that anyone can be omnicompetent in receiving positive projections; it does mean that we aspire to be a befriending community where enough positive regard is projected for people to want to be better people.  Let's not "disembody" the church to be the private experience of the individual or to be the slavish following of the official public teaching of the church.  Let us make ourselves available to be an ever befriending community.

Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2013

How is it that we can come to have a feast of All Saints?  How is it that we have come to have Halls of Fame in any sport?  Every area of living has axiology of persons.  People come to have value for persons in individual ways and for the community in terms of their significant function and usefulness as perceived by the community at large.  Saints happen all of the time; at baptism.  People are made holy=saintly by the Holy Spirit.  Saintliness becomes articulated in as many ways as there are to be Christian or Christ-like.  Some manifestations of saintliness remain more personal, private and local while other manifestations through personal charisma become better known within a larger community.  Saints are serendipitous gifts to the community and part of the gift has involved a person's willingness to rise to the particular calling and ministry that is offered in a specific time or place.  Sainthood as the result of canonization process of the church hierarchy is a different kind of politics as the church leaders prayerfully try to decide on setting up people posthumously as examples of living well and whose lives call each of us to the saintliness of our baptismal grace.  Saints happen; accept it as you accept the indwelling of God's Holy Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, October 31, 2013

Halloween has become the occasion for all things macabre to coalesce and attain popular expression.  The genre of horror has a great following among many who like to have their brain chemistry altered with fright as an experience of sublime pleasure.  Our modern world of virtuality and cinematic special effects has enabled the details of nightmares to be made visible to us for "entertainment."  It is regarded to be a "cathartic" exercise for all of the shadows of the collective unconscious.  Since All Hallows Eve prepares to celebrate the lives of those who have crossed over, the departed have attained a mysterious charm and a state of knowing as yet unknown by those who remain alive.  The state of not knowing creates a realm of possibilisms to inspire all sorts of "monsters" who are figures who have states of being that deviate from our patterns of community normality.  The horror genre could be a surrogate replacement for religious subject matter after science taught us that the uncanny things of the Bible were unbelievable.  So the unbelievable has now attained a different sort of expression in the genre of horror as a way of protesting the radical certainty of scientific discourse.  Bible readers have been browbeat to either defend biblical matter as scientific truth (see American fundamentalism) or to move a discourse of childish wonder outside of the biblical church to the surrogates of culture.  If one truly has to be like a child to perceive the Kingdom of God, one can retain the discourse of wonder with all things biblical and still be a good scientist.

Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2013

Halloween is a time for the culture to put a costume on and sweeten up the ghoulish things that can come to language.  What has come to language and have been named are entities such as ghosts, spirits, angels, demons, witches and wizards.  The fictional presentation of a little boy wizard dominated the literary and film scene for years.  We have received traditions of speaking about the liminality between the visible and invisible worlds.  Perhaps a major task of life is to learn how to live with our interior lives and deal with all of the phenomena we find there and find ways to weave what is there with our exterior world.  Whether Hermes or angels as metaphorical beings who are iconic of this mystical communication express from interior to exterior the messengers seem to have personalities because they exact from us projections that contain personoid features to make us confess that they are enough like us to be known but different enough to evoke everything from awe to sheer terror.  Halloween in popular culture is a way to soften the extreme experience of the interior mysterious and dress up as personoid entities and bribe them with chocolate as a peace offering that we make with the mystery of what can come to language from the Interior.

Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2013

 Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead in Latino religious culture draws families together to honor and remember their departed loved ones and summarizes the Hallowmas triduum of All Hallow's Eve, All Hallow's Day and All Souls Day.  The practice is perhaps a catholicizing of a veneration of ancestors that preceded the arrival of the missionaries.   It could be with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern science a culture of suspicion of connection with the departed has come to be practiced.  As a result the more secular and less colorful All Souls is basically transferred to our Memorial Day when it is still the custom, particularly in small towns for residence to flower the graves, return home for family gatherings and honor with the war dead all faithful departed.  Some cultures are more expressive of connection with their departed.  It could be in our staid scientific culture we have basically let the expression become secularized into a social season of sweets and costumes for children and an occasion for adult excess in parties and being someone else in costume.  Speculation about the afterlife draws from humanity the bizarre and the excessive as a way of provoking the abstract as we whistle in the dark of thinking about not being accessible to each other in the same familiar ways.

Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2013

What is Halloween?  Could it be the popular feast that has taken such precedence that the two following days in the United States, All Saints' and All Soul's have become like yawning after thoughts?  The commercial co-opting of religious festivals distracts from something disturbing since we want to make life friendly to children.  All Hallow's Eve, All Hallow's Day and All Souls are really feasts of the resurrection as we remember the communion between life and afterlife with the heroes called saints and ordinary folk  or souls of our departed whose loss we grieve and whose continued destiny we wonder about.  We amass all souls and all saints into common days of remembrance because we know that live witnesses of each and every person die out too and we wonder if death means that everyone in the past becomes anonymous because there remains no one who knew them.  The trifecta of Halloween, All Saints' and All Souls are feasts/observerances of hope that the remembering mind of God is greater than all human memory and that Someone, Somewhere, still knows that each and everyone existed.

Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2013

There is generalization and particularization when it comes to the notion of "inspired word of God." Following John 1:1 we confess a foundational and creative Word of God who then is embodied in the life of Jesus. From this confession of the General Word of God we move to how it has become particular in the words that we have been inspired to adopt as our textbook, the Holy Scriptures. But the notion of inspiration has to be left open to the future as well because Christ as Word of God and the Bible as a text will still be interpreted to inspiring ends. To say that the Bible is inspired does not go far enough; in the future it will have been inspired in particular ways that we do not yet know. The notion of inspiration does not escape judgments either because we and many others have and perhaps will use the Bible in ways that turn out to be uninspiring. While we may confess the inspiration of "God's Word" we should not be too proud of knowing specifically what we mean by this because the words and deed of our lives end up being the interpretations which people know and see. And those interpretations often might be less than infallible.

Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2013

Today we might contemplate the notion of "being there."  We can go to a sporting event and watch the game on the jumbo screen.  One can go to a mega-church and watch the preacher and Holy Rock Band on the big screen.  We are in the virtual age; we can stay at home and watch sporting events and preachers in only the virtual mode and there is a kind of convenience to that with no ten dollar hot dog, traffic, expensive ticket and parking hassle and no one to pass the offering plate.  One can rail against virtuality today or simply realize that one has to be a steward of virtuality in one's life.  We may get too much air-brushed virtuality to provide a false and superficial comparison standard for the "all too human" actuality.  The future retreat may consist of getting back to the "live" as a break from the virtual.  We may all have to learn once again the beautiful "messiness" of live community.  Visit a local parish and give that kind of "live" experience a place in your life, for balance from an encroaching omni-virtuality.

Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2013

Religious movements in each time period arrogate to themselves the self-designation as being the last or final understanding of something.  Doctrines, creeds, canon laws are formed to consolidate this "final" understanding  and enforce a community social discourse for promulgating the "final" teaching.  If aging and time are obvious to us, we should know that openness to the future means that no teaching or understanding or doctrine or creed is ever final in the meanings that are attained in interpretations of future users of any word product.  So why pretend to have a final meaning, a final interpretation, a final word construct about anything?  If we keep ourselves and our meanings open to the changes that come whether we are honest about the changes or not, we admit our vulnerably to new occasions of becoming.  This seems to be the only humble and honest way to live.  Live with vulnerability to becoming different in the future.  Since the Godhead admits that one of the Person is a Godly Wind or Breath or Spirit, one needs to receive the spiritual climate changes that are always, already coming to our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2013

One of the teaching methods of Jesus involved over-turning the common assumptions of his audience. For example, religious professional are good and holy and tax collectors are bad and evil. When the parables of Jesus reveal a religious professional to be full of the pride of judgmentalism and the tax collector manifesting the conditions of contrition of the heart he over turns the obvious assumptions. He makes the religious professional to be in the role of a sinner and he presents the obvious sinner as the one who manifests the condition of heart that is most conducive to the experience of God's grace, namely the condition of needing and wanting God's mercy. Always wanting and needing God mercy such that we can't really judge the hearts of others is the recommended condition of heart proposed by Jesus.

Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2013

The Kyrie eleison or Lord have mercy has long been included in the Eucharistic liturgy especially during penitential seasons.  What is mercy anyway?  Is it clemency from someone with power who is holding us accountable for what we are not yet but should be?  Is it a sort of religious version of good luck and fortune?  Is it the reception of the ability to tolerate ourselves after circumstances of our lives have brought us to self loathing and self disillusionment?  Life is about learning how to be on the giving and receiving side of mercy, i.e., the practice of forgiveness within community.  The affected perfect ones, rotten with perfection are happy to cast the first stone at the ones who desire mercy. To touch perfection is to offer mercy.

Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2013

A man remarked to the old timer sitting in a rocking chair at the country store, "Bet you lived here all your life."  And the old timer said, "Not yet."  There is no need to become an absolute past before our time.  Everything that comes to language still has the qualification upon it as "not yet."  The nature of word and language keeps everything and everyone in play with the openness of "not yet."  The Romans and others thought at one time Jesus was really dead and yet the resurrection experiences of his followers has been the loudest shouted NOT YET in history.  Let us never be too proud about knowing or stating anything in any final or precise way.  Let "not yet" be our confession today as we are true to what will yet be invented in language acts.

Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2013

An inspired truth of the book of Genesis is the witness to the mystery of origin.  Origin or where we came from seems to be an enduring question.  Some are content to trace more knowable origins in the study of genealogy while others with a philosophical bent want to ask the question about how it all began.  What is true is that origin is told from the perspective of what will origins have become.  The creation story is told from a monotheistic point of view after the writers have chronicled a polytheistic world.  The creation story is told to affirm a seven day week and to confirm why there is a Sabbath rest.  The truth of origin is affirmed by both scientists and mythologists; one chooses the discursive practice of the truth of origin based upon the setting of the discourse.

Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2013

Jesus said always to pray and not lose heart.  It is one thing to have delayed gratification; it is another thing to know the continuous oppression of injustice.  Prayer in the face of injustice is how we maintain the sanity of the normalcy of justice over the conditions of injustice.  Prayer may seem like a helpless effort against injustice but it can be an internal bulwark for the one who prays never to accept injustice as what should be.

Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2013

The faith of theists is partially based upon the humility of accepting the fact that we are limited to human experience as our sole place of existence.  To say that one can have a non-human experience of the world or of anything is to deny being human in even saying such a thing.  The faith of a theist involves accepting our habits of anthropomorphism, viz., projecting humanoid features on everything that confronts us due to the fact that we cannot help but be "human centered" beings.  As humans we cherish the designation of "person" as a being who has value within a community.  So when we approach Totality or Plenitude as the Much More Existence within which we live, we confess a great Personhood and we do so because we think that which is much greater than us must necessarily consist in a superlative degree of that which we think is definitive of humanity, namely, personhood.  As a scientist tries to observe and chart the behavior of things, that scientist may not want to assume a "human-like" degree of freedom of the observed objects because such would add a fickleness to the behavior of things.  The purpose of science is to assume consistent laws and not regard inconsistent behavior as coming from willful personalities of atomic particles.  But in the grand wonder of Plenitude is there not a place for a valid confession of Great Personhood as one considers the ecstasy of being overwhelmed by ALL?  God could be IM-PERSONAL in the comparative sense of having a super-personality.

Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2013

The success of a profession is to convince the general populace to dabble with the main issue of one's profession.  If one is a gifted performing artist, a singer, then one of attributes is make music accessible to all for the benefit of all.  The role of a physician is not just to help people in the crisis of illness get better but to get all people to be interested in health.  So too, the ministry of a priest is to remind people that their lives are priestly as they live as intercessors or those who make an appeal to God continuously regarding the value of the people who are brought into their lives.  So, live your lives in a priestly way today.

Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2013

Imagination may be neglected as an important spiritual gift and viewed as a waste of time.  Imagination is what one exerts when  one attempts to do the impossible passing over into identity with another person to attain the state of empathy which allows one to act in way that recognizes the reality and needs of another person because one has tricked oneself for a moment to act as though one is not at the center of one's own perceptual universe.  It is as though connection wires are in place and it seems as though nerves and feelings are shared between people to attain the sense of "being there for one another."  Imagination can be the ruse of mere entertainment or it can result in compassionate acts and be expressive of perhaps the greatest spiritual gift of all, the gift of what St. Paul called love.

Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2013

In a time when politicians are giddy about government shut down because they believe it to hasten the end time events we need to appreciate again why separation of church and state is to protect the common good from the radical interpretation of the few. Our freedom of religion allows people to be apocalyptically fatal; but such fatalists should not be able to force such a view upon others who see this view as denying the goodness of people and creation. In their fatalism they believe themselves to be the rapturous few who will leave this earth soon to the sinful many. We simply wish that they would leave government so that employees could be paid and National Parks be re-opened. The Amish welcome anyone to their lifestyle without being in the halls of government forcing the rest of the nation to drive Amish buggies. Apocalyptic fatalists are so exclusive that they cannot seem to honestly serve the common good.

Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2013

Einstein is quoted as saying the most important question to ask is whether the universe is a friendly place. I'm sure he knew that it is not always experienced as a friendly place by human residents because we are often caught in the competition between conflicting systems where human pleasure and well-being goals are impossible to attain. Perhaps a more important questionwould be: how do we as human residents exercise our freedom in the best possible way in the midst of the freedom that we confront in all of the systems of the universe? I believe that the biblical question was this: Regarding personhood to be crucial to self-understanding, can we as human persons project an ultimate Personhood as expressive of the total milieu in which we live and move and have our being?

Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2013

Columbus Day is perhaps a day to do some reflection upon the nature of the kind of globalism that the voyages of Columbus initiated.  The well known sociologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote a book, "Triste Tropiques" reflecting upon the kinds of cross pollination of ideas that resulted in the loss of native cultures.  Someone's Promised Land may be another person's lost land or stolen land.  We always need to be reminded to preach good news, not as evidence of the superiority of our own culture or lifestyle but as winningly beneficial to people to whom we want to bring good news.  People can find good news without agreeing with our particular lifestyle or cultural practices.  How do we share our good news in such a ways as not to be "preaching ourselves?"  Becoming transparent in sharing good news is the challenge of those who are serious about the Gospel.  Too many people preach the Gospel with the prescriptions of their own political and cultural outlook.  Learning how to get out of the way and let the love of Christ be the telling good news is a life long Christian goal.

Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2013

When a preacher or anyone says, "The Bible says," they have taken quite a complex body of literature collected in diverse communities over a substantial period of time and personified it and reduced it to a unified self-consistent voice as though a text could be a presence of a person to enter into audible dialogue with.  When someone says, "The Bible says,"  they probably mean that they need a higher source of authority to support the particular point of view that comes after they say "The Bible says."  We often treat the sources of authority as those that in obvious self-evidential ways support the point of view that we take.  Sometimes we say the "U.S. Constitution says," and we forget to qualify it by saying "This is how the court or I have interpreted the U.S. Constitution to mean in this particular case."  The Bible cannot say anything, it can only be read by diverse people who interpret it diverse ways.  And if all interpretation is limited by the contexts of the readers, then it perhaps behooves the reader to read the Bible from the bias of finding justice and love for all people.

Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2013

Beware of the apocalyptic fatalists today in the pulpits and in politicians who believe they have precisely found out about the end of the world and presume to themselves a certainty about being on the winning and "all knowing" side.  Such fatalism exalts sin over the more optimistic proclamation attributed to God in the creation story, "And God saw that it was good."  We can declare the goodness of creation without being naive about our tendency to muck things up.  Apocalyptic fatalists have unwittingly elevated evil to a supreme position; instead of evil being the deprivation of the good, for them in their practice goodness has become their presumed deprivation from the the normative status of evil, which turns out to be anyone who disagrees with them.

Aphorism of the Day, October 11, 2013

With the ability to analyze DNA, tracing the direct relationship of generations is possible. In some Christian traditions a bishop stands as a symbol of connection of the church of today with the church of yesterday. Can the community of today be like the community of yesterday? Probably not because contexts are very imposing; but what is same is to be asking and trying to live the question what does love and justice mean in our context? A bishop's role is to make sure the questions of love and justice are still asked in the current and local context and to foster new narratives of the love and justice of Christ in our time.

Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2013

How does the abundance of subject matter compared with the paucity of subject matter affect community and individual behavior as to what we choose to inspire invention?  When we are dealing with ancient sources there is a paucity of subject matter and for years so much intellectual imagination has had to be applied to but a few sources.  Today, we are faced with so much subject matter that we tend towards micro-specialization.  It is difficult for a common social discourse to attain much more than but a short time of public notice.  The media has to find new subject matter to cure the attention deficit of the public.  A football game catches the attention of many because it purports to have an outcome in question that engages fans who have forged their identity around a team's "totemic" image.  What if the Sunday liturgies had that same sense of gripping outcome?   I suspect that the advantage of the ancient church was that it did not have to compete with so many other entertainment choices.  The Sunday liturgy still needs to be a place where faith is articulated as the chief attitude of life to integrate life today in the midst of the deluge of subject matter choices that we have today.  With faith, we hope to avoid the paralysis that could set in because of the dilemma of having too many choices.

Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2013

From the state of not having or using language we cannot have any direct communication. All we can do from the state of language is experience the invention of the contrast between the state of having language and not having it. So having language is the basis for thinking any thought at all and from language we ask the impossible question of what causes us to have and use language. One can see how in the beginning is the Word. If there is any before the Word, it actually begins as itself with the Word. The reflexive play of language forces us into its play.

Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2013

History is the imagination of the present.  We presume that we would recognize and know people in the past even though we have no actual access to their contexts.  We use artifacts, of which written texts seem to provide the most complete source for us to reconstruct the past.  We assume that because we exist in a continuous recognizable tradition that such continuity would guarantee mutual understanding and dialogue with people of the past.  Faith works with the imagination to assume connection with our past even while a tradition that gets saturated by the propensity of more knowledge bits in subsequent contexts to cause one to opine that the saturation would make people in the "same" tradition unrecognizable to each other if such face to face meeting could be arranged.  It might be safer to say that humans have a common ground in Language and historical context is but a rearrangement of how people are constituted in language.  Like John 1:1 we can confess that we are created by the Word, and Word is the oft forgotten elephant that lives everywhere and that provides us with a common universe even while it does not guarantee precision and success in how we interact as language users.

Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2013

There are some things that we get to do today that may seem like drudgery or bothersome community service or church responsibilities.  A dear longtime member of the altar guild who had a stroke and could no longer work on the altar bemoaned the fact that she could no longer do altar guild work which she had so much enjoyed.  It made me think about being thankful about being able to do what I can do.  With imaginary empathy of ourselves "not being able" to do something, we can embrace with faith, gratitude and cheerfulness what we are able to do today.  Let us be grateful for what we "can" do today.  We may not always be able to do it and come to regret our former lack of appreciation for having the ability to do things.  It really is a reward to be able to do and to give today and so we offer thanks.

Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2013

A seeming cruel punchline to a parable of Jesus: "When you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, `We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'"  This ironic rebuke could be message about us wanting congratulation for doing things that are good for our well-being.  Congratulations!  You ate a healthy meal and helped sustain your life.  Why should we be congratulated for having faith and acting with love if it is good for us?  Do we remain perpetual children in cultures of admiration of needing strokes for doing things that are basic to our own well-being?  The parable is about the self-reward of being faithful.  One does not get a reward subsequent for being faithful; the reward is that one gets to be faithful.

Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2013

It is quite obvious that memories of the past disrupt our present lives but it is also insightful that we can reinvent the past.  In one's current manifestation of self-care in trying to know oneself, one can be sailing within the seas of self-discouragement and self-disillusion and seek absolute causes in one's past that correspond to the current discomfort.  One can feel authorial control of current circumstances if one can agree to a specific cause for a specific current event of emotional discomfort.  Sometimes one even can invent a past to account for the current discomfort as a way of not yet dealing with the fact that there is never going to be a person or environment that will be seen as omni-competent to one's needs.  One of the reasons we are needy and desire so much is to teach us that there is no one or no thing that is omni-competent to our desire, so why build a idol which will only fail us?  Accepting the profundity of desire that can only have NO THING, aka, God as the only worthy goal of desire is continually learned as disappointment is a great teacher.

Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2013

80 % of the people of the world live on less than $10 a day.  Pope Francis chose his papal name because of St. Francis who took on a radical identity with the poor of the world.  Pope Francis took his name in order to ask the church to take on an identity with poor so that we might do something about the poor.  There are no easy answers to such overwhelming poverty but the cop out would be to say that we do not have the ability or the creativity to change the conditions of the world.  Such poverty is a major sin against human creativity which is a gift of God.

Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2013

Episcopalians are "bishoply" people.  Our very name Episcopal means "having bishops."  But we are more than just a community that "has bishops;" we are bishoply people ourselves.  Each member is bishoply in that one shares in the office of the bishops who stand symbolically and act officially as those who connect Christians in communion in our current age.  Bishops also represent the historic transmission of the Gospel from one age to the next.  A bishop cannot exhaust what it means to be a bishoply; all Christians are needed in their baptized ministry to live in fellowship and share the Gospel to the next generation of Christians.  Go forth and be bishoply today and you don't have to wear purple, the pointed hat or carry the shepherd's staff. You are a bishoply person today.

Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2013

Often people decry their "lack of experience" as being the chief factor in their sense of "lack of invention" or creativity.  Persons in prison cells or monastic simplicity with very limited experience of terrain have found ways to be inventive since consciousness does not allow us to leave life without experience; it is a constant vacuum of experiential occasions from without and from within.  Most of the time we are not inventive because we prejudge our experience as having no value and so we do not make the effort to articulate the obvious because the obvious seems too ordinary.  With faith, we do not have to over estimate our experience even while we value it and articulate it with the tingling embellishments of the imagination.  By faith some drink ordinary water and find that it tastes like wine.  Faith works with the imagination not to distort life into false illusion but to awaken all of the interpretive possibilities of any event.  Faith working with our imagination makes us responsible for our own entertainment as we look for divine enchantments everywhere.

Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2013

When one surveys the balance of weals and woes that directly affect a person, one can marvel and even make heroic those who bear up and excel under a disproportionate share of woes.  That some people are heroic in the midst of great woes does not give us the right to expect that all should be equally heroic particularly when some people who have woes still have incredible safety nets around them to make the worst less than it might be if one has no support group or financial means or access health care etc.   We are thankful for the heroic even though we wish conditions never required it and we pray for the faith to aspire for the heroic if and when it is needed and we should stand ready to forgive ourselves for being "less than heroic" even as we should be working for heroic societies to provide expanding safety nets for those who have affliction come upon them.  It is better to work to be heroic together as caring communities rather than to leave it up to the individual to be heroically necessary.

Aphorism of the Day, September 30, 2013

Life presents us with so many kinds of puzzlers that it sometimes seems as though the injunction to know oneself and God is a perpetual riddle.  We can live in ironies of many things seeming to be so joyous and yet one thorn can apparently undo the predominant joy.  On the other hand things can be generally bad but one particular compensatory accompanying experience makes it all seem worthwhile.  For those who are overwhelmed with grief one asks that they might have a great equalizing sublime; for those who have mostly joy and pleasure, we ask that the one irritation not undo them.  So, we offer the words of the Collect from Compline:  "Tend the sick Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake.  Amen."

Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2013

The parable of Jesus about the rich man and Lazarus presents the afterlife as a "trading places" situation. The rich man who ignored the poor Lazarus in life lives in eternal torment and poor Lazarus lives with the Father of faith Abraham. There is no bridge over this eternal "mega chasma" or Grand Canyon between Lazarus and Abraham and the tormented rich man. The parable is a warning about us being predestined entitled people in this life who may live as though life needs no intervention because it bestows what is supposed to be to each one. So we can live with our lives declaring, "If you see a poor person, kick him; why should you treat him better than God has." The point of the parable of Jesus is that the gap between poor and rich is not "God ordained."

Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2013

We can be like the proverbial jockey who just won the great Sweepstakes and he could only complain about how something in his saddle was poking him. While the winning blessings of life surround us with goodness, we can often not recognize or acknowledge the blessing because we are so focused upon the one little burr under the saddle that is commanding all of our attention. Let goodness and blessing right our perspective today and dethrone us from the presumption of total exemption from trouble today.

Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2013

What is the shelf life of the interpretation of your beliefs and highest insights?  It could be that we are too enamored and comfortable with our current insights something akin to never wanting to roll the chamber of the kaleidoscope and allow a new vision of light coming through re-positioned colored glass shards.  When the kaleidoscope of life is moving continuously through process, since time implies process and change, there may be some comfort in trying to fix a one time vision of a perceived "arrangement" of things but is that effort to hang on to one vision something akin of taking a security blanket from the past into a new environment because the new and changing are threatening?  Some ancient philosophical and religious thinking believed that change and becoming represented that which was imperfect, since someone who is perfect would need never change.  A more time friendly version of perfection might be to envision the Perfect One as Omni-Becoming who has no rival except the Perfect One in a future state.  In this vision of the Perfect One, one honors genuine freedom in the Perfect One and all other becoming beings, such as ourselves.  The kaleidoscope of life is constantly turning so today we are invited to new vision because while we slept, the entire furniture of the universe has been rearranged.  We may trip a few times over the new arrangement but perhaps we should just get accustomed to living with blessed vertigo.

Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2013

It is easy to forget--after building massive and intricate structures in language when we assume that each word we use can be an exact reflection of something that it is referring to with total identity between word and thing--that language use does not allow us to control exactness in imparting meaning.  I give a sermon on the love of God and a young boy feels compelled to tell me about stealing cookies from the cookie jars.  How did I not have such control over the meaning of my words so that the young boy got the wrong but right meaning?  Once I put my meanings out there, the circus of meanings begins and in humility I realize that I don't control meanings.  And if I'm honest, my own meanings change for myself as well.  Enforced meanings in totalitarian states are the worst meanings of all.  Meanings by their very nature partake of the freedom of things.

Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2013

Take time to stop and articulate your version of life today.  The way we see ourselves, others, events, things are so laden with value judgments and many of these value judgments have become such habits of mind, thought and action that they unconsciously direct us to do things that seem to now have unknown motivations for their origin of action.  An honest values review based upon being honest about where, how and on whom we project desire and the nature of preference and avoidance can help bring to the surface the motivations of some of our actions.  This is the beginning of interdiction in patterns of repetitions that began as ruts but repetition has made into canyons.  "The valleys shall be made level."  (Isaian prophecy) Getting back to level ground and free from the program of repetitions allow serendipity a new chance to be known and we may get rid of habits of not recognizing the sublime in our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2013

Thinking and thoughts are the invisible presence of language within us on the shore of consciousness giving definition and articulation to all of the possibilities that reside within the ocean of language itself.  The ocean of language includes everything that might have come to thought but didn't and this gives distinction and recognition to everything that does come to consciousness.  Our constitution in words is based upon the worded thoughts that arise from all language possibilities and become articulated in conscious performance/occurrence of thought.  Our ocean reservoir of language gets fed by the fact that our conscious and unconscious lives are like great vacuums sucking in everything which in turn becomes possible words awaiting the arising in the consciousness of distinct combination of words to build the meanings of our lives.  It is a mystery of how we are constituted by the words of our lives even though we spend much of our lives seeking the "talking cure" of having insights into what has "caused" us to be the way that we are and do the things that we do.  Introspection becomes morbid if it is not anchored on education and positive vision for what we will yet be.  With faith we can avoid morbid introspection to focus upon what new creating combinations of our worded lives will "articulate" us in our setting today.

Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2013

How do events, reports of events, teachings become worthy of reproduction in language in such a way that they become memorable and spiritual and moral exemplars for all future readers in the ways that they do in the Bible or any other significant account of events in the past?  Such reproductions in language had to be valued by continuing communities where they had pragmatic function for the maintenance and the forging of the identity of the community into its future.  St. Paul was probably loquacious enough to have written many more letters than actually were preserved to become a part of Holy Scriptures.  Providence is mostly a reflection upon the "divine" significance of past events as they brought us to current events.  Canonicity as the selection of worthy writings to include into the "official" Bibles is the later providence of the church in council determining the use and effect of various collection of writings for the identity and functional constitution of the church.

Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2013

The Isaian Suffering Servant was one who was afflicted and acquainted with grief and sorrow.  Affliction creates the conditions of chaos, a sense of disorientation from within and from without and the loss of the patterns of control that one once took for granted.  It is such a deprivation of the state of normalcy that all one can do is to protest and cry out and hope that those who do not know the direct hit of the affliction will understand that one's protest is not against them but against the severe deprivation of health that affliction reeks upon this world.  One is forced to embrace the "My God, why have you forsaken me" in the loneliness of affliction.  There seems to be no meaning to the state of affliction except that whatever can happen, will happen and at some time gain a narrative in a person's life.  "I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.  I believe in love even when feeling it not.  I believe in God even when God is silent.  I believe in the silence."  Sometimes affliction is so loud that even silence is not there.  Our faith does not let us sugar coat affliction.

Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2013

Stewardship is made a harder sell by the appearance of things which seems to affirm the legal adage, "possession is nine tenths of the law."  We can seem to possess what we have and the things in this world but in fact Plenitude possesses us and has us for the very short time that we live.  What is fourscore or five score compared with 13.77 billion years?  What is the motivation for us to live as though the things we have are not our own?  How do we care for this world as though everything belongs to us even while we know our ownership is not real in the sense of endurance?  How is justice related to stewardship?  When Nature seems to be very uneven in how goods and abilities are manifestly distributed among people, how do Cultures rise to the morality of laws that sets humane minimums for making available what is necessary to each person.  Kleptocracies, or rule based upon the usurping of the resources by the few who can do it seems to be happening in our world.  Kleptocracy is often promoted as meritocracy because everyone is "free" to be the kleptocrat.   Stewardship and justice are never easy questions in any age or culture and people of faith continue to be involved in the rigor of stewardship and justice because Jesus stated repeatedly care for the poor.

Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2013

The Sublime cannot be easily categorized.  What moves us and how we are moved changes and has many nuances.  We read what we read for the pleasure of the text and so pleasure is an aspect of the Sublime and yet if we are "required" to read something for our occupation the pleasure may be the delayed pleasure of a later paycheck and not the immediate engagement of interest.  The Sublime can be silencing, haunting, humorous, inspiring, ecstatic, physical and it can give us an indication that a Presence larger than we are is experiencing this world through us.

Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2013

Is the adoption of a metaphor by a biblical writer within a community or tradition in expository preaching capable of becoming the actual cause of some action?  Take a phrase such as "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."  This phrase is loaded with metaphorical meaning for early followers of Jesus who are trying to understand his life using the sacrificial tradition of their Jewish heritage.  But does the adoption of a metaphor in understanding how God compassion and forgiveness work limit God's compassion and forgiveness to the dynamics of that particular metaphorical understanding of God which derived from a particular historical setting?  Metaphors do have creative meaning and they seem to be causative in real ways in how they change our lives in moving us to be different people.  The effects of metaphors and the effects of poetry and art and faith literature are very real and scientists could even find physiological evidence in our brain behavior to measure such effects.  These effects should not be minimized by skeptics of faith discourse but at the same time people who know the sublime effects of faith discourse should not make the persuasive and winsome effects of certain metaphors mingling with one's life situation metaphors to create a cocktail of the sublime a standard or club to beat up those who don't identify with or know the same metaphorical effects.

Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2013

The Bible essentially is writing "taken out of context."  It is taken out of context since it is writing which is a technology of memory, writing events that represents the meanings of the authors who assumed that language is a universal enough medium to communicate meanings across time.  What we are involved in when we read the Bible is a conversation of meanings and meanings about meanings.  There are some who want to be final authorities about "the meaning" of anything in the Bible.  Others are happy to always be on the path of meanings about meanings and this is a path of continuous repentance, or education.

Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2013

Semantic evocality (probably a neologism meaning the conditions of being evocative) is what distinguishes different discourses.  A user's manual that states "Insert the CD into the A Drive" has a different referential semantic evocality about it than Leonard Cohen's "I ache in the places where I used to play."  It could be what distinguishes poetry from prose is the degrees of semantic evocality in that poetry appeals to that interior ambiguous dimension of mood.  "Insert the CD into the A Drive" could in a song attain a poetic mystique just as Warhol's Campbell Soup Can  becomes different on the canvas and so semantic evocality is indeed very contextual to the event of  performance and reception of the performance.  What makes the Bible still an interesting Book is that it still has potential for semantic evocality in new contexts and those contexts and new experience of meanings cannot be over-determined by the contexts of the original performance of the biblical writers or by all of the interpretations of the Bible throughout the ages.

Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2013

The silence of interior peace in meditation occurs when one embraces Desire as mere flow rather than the interior or exterior thoughts, objects, people, events on which Desire can be drawn to focus upon.  When one can give in to being drawn to no one or no thing or no thought then in contemplative peace one can become the invisible Desire that flows in and through all things back to the Source.  Such a state is a liminal state and in its aftermath one uses language to reflect upon a state of not consciously committing language.

Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2013

Maturity in faith has to do with learning to dance with one's notions of adequacy/inadequacy.  The sense of inadequacy may have to do with "superman" idealism telling us we should be more than we are now.  Superman is only a "story contextual figment of the imagination."  At the same time Superman is rescuing one child, countless others are wasting away in sickness or poverty and lots of other badness is going on while we are drawn to the stage of the one rescue event of Superman.  The very notion of Superman points to the fact that our fascination with the singular uncanny can be the balm for lots of other synchronous afflictions.  So we can never be omni-adequate to the challenges in our lives but that should not drive us to the opposite extreme of giving up and submitting to an equal illusion, the illusion of omni-inadequacy.  We live on a continuum of adequacy to inadequacy in how we rate our current performance in all aspects of life.  We should not over-estimate our "entitlement" to the status of our adequacy while at the same time we should not over-blame ourselves or all of the paper tiger figures of our past who were "responsible" for our current sense of inadequacy.  Tolerating ourselves in mysterious states of adequacy/inadequacy is the mystery of faith where humility is just the accident of honesty.

Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2013

We wish our Jewish friends a blessed and holy Yom Kippur as they give special emphasis in their lives to the meaning of sin and repentance. Sin in Hebrew and Greek is an archery term for "missing the mark." Repentance is the continual response to sin; educational and corrective responses to our realization of "missing the mark." Both sin and repentance are positive notions because we confess that we are not perfect but acknowledge that we are perfectible, viz., we can be better today than we were yesterday by the grace of the original blessing of God in declaring creation good.

Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2013

There is a human impulse of wanting to be the last in any area of life.  Religion communities proclaim their prophets and messiah as the last word on God as a way of giving finality to history because of the natural tendency to redefine everything that came before in light of what happened later.  We really don't know what pre-Christian history is because we cannot return there without knowledge of the Christian era. Aboriginal communities that were isolated from the modern world may have had a non-Christian history in the myths of their own locale.   Scientific thinking inspires us to believe there will be no finality, there is only be some More and some More.  We can speculate about a post-human era but we cannot attain identity with a "post-human subject" to have the empathy to reflect upon the human era.  The notion of a post-human era should frighten us about the conditions that threaten our eradication and teach us to cherish human life as we know it now. 

Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2013

9/11 has become for us a day that lives in infamy and as we remember those who lost their lives and those who gave us heroic response and service, we also generalize our remembrance to all of the people of the world who have lost their lives due to ignorance, hatred and desperation of terror.  We hold to the value of the lives of people in our own countries as we recognize that other countries value the lives of their fallen ones as well.  We really do not like the way in which 9/11 has changed our lives even as the fear of terror has forced upon us cultural practices that challenges us to no longer regard safety to be the normal condition of life; the deprivation of safety has risen to near normal status.  We, with the prophets of old, still imagine a better world where the conditions of life give no rise to the merchants of death.  Death needs no help to hasten it.  The prophet envisioned a world with the most incredible economic transformation: Swords beat into ploughshares.  In our day this would mean the Military Industrial Complex would be totally taken over by the Agricultural Industrial Complex dedicated to giving everyone enough to eat.  Dream on!  Pray on!  Work on!

Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2013

Baptism is often called a "christening" from its association as a naming ceremony.  A former Book of Common Prayer in the baptismal office has the celebrant say, "Name this child" at the presentation of the candidate, so we have the first name or Christian name.  Receiving a name is a responsibility; it is not as though we have to be so well-liked or popular to have people named after us as it is to live so that future parents would avoid our name because of us.  How many people name their daughters Jezebel?  The practice of baptism involves receiving our names as a gift and as we are marked as Christ's own forever, we hope that we live giving the name that we have a good reputation for its future use for all who have known us.

Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2013

We tend to be prisoners of our own time and place when we read the Bible by assuming there was the existence of the New Testament when it was actually being compiled and that all of the authors self consciously knew that they were writing inspired words when they were writing.  It is like imagining Paul thinking after he wrote a letter to Romans, "I think this is inspired enough to be read far and wide so that three hundred years later it will be regarded as Holy Scriptures, and people in church will be declaring these words to the "Word of the Lord."  The writings of the New Testament had to go through a gauntlet of "church meetings" for many years and gain approval and to get to final canonical editions one has to assume that God inspired the acceptance of a book in the judgment of some people who are like us, fallible indeed.  It is the great and enduring principle of God's love that won the vote for inspiration, not the changing details of cultural practices.  If we literalized all cultural practices then modern science and all results of it would be counter to the witness of Scripture.

Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2013

 You and I are going to go through many versions of our lives whether we want to or not.  Our physical bodies and the constant changes in life will force different versions.  By trying to keep a particular version will mean that sometimes we assume we’re still looking through binoculars at the Grand Canyon when the Grand Canyon is no longer in front of us.  So we cannot make the right judgments in our situation because we’re still seeing through the favorite memory of a different view of life.

Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2013

One could write a family systems commentary upon the Bible and entitle the book, "Family Dysfunction: The History of Humanity."  The First Family, not the one in the White House, but who began in the perfect Garden of Eden began with a dining faux pas; the fruit course was served before its time.  And then the sibling murder over religious matters: Cain was angry that God wanted a lamb offering rather than some wonderful garden produce. How could he have known God did not have vegetarian leanings?  The proto-story of the ancient rivalry between shepherds and farmers was born.  Why is family dysfunction a metaphor for life?  Totally individual snowflakes do not complain about where they land or end up; totally individual persons often complain about location and about most everything else.  Individuals have such uneven growth issues, not being robots, that such unevenness is bound to bring about conflicts that don't have immediate or obvious resolution.  Like the boy who said it really felt good when his brother stopped hitting him, the grace of events of family peace, convergence and harmony may be enhanced because dysfunction can seem so normal.  Peace really does feel good when dysfunction has temporary arrest.

Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2013

An inside jokes among church musicians is that they have often found themselves to be mercenaries of the Muses.  The church has provided the patronage for the gift and genius of music to be given a setting.  The ancient Greeks were aware of the profound effect and reality of music and arts to personify the source of music and art as nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne.  For many people, music provides the event of an encounter with the sublime and with recording technologies people try to surround themselves with these sublime effects as much as possible.  The portable sublime effect of recorded music is one of the major achievement of the modern world.  The therapeutic experience of music can be omnipresent. All sublime effects in how they are accessed and their outcomes still must be appraised and integrated into just outcomes for living.  All experiences in music, just as all "religious experiences" do not lead to loving and just outcomes.  So even the experiences of the sublime have to be scrutinized for their propriety and just outcomes.

Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2013

Another nuance of the word "spirit" can refer to the identity or cohesion that exist between a person and a group.  The group can be a family, team, country, gang or any peer group that draws from the individual the ability to convince the individual that allegiance to the group is for one's best interest.  It does not mean that it is for one's best interest just as long as it subverts the ego.  One see incredible feats done because of team spirit even as one also observes the horrendous mob types of behavior.  In the Book of Revelation, the author writes appraisals for the "seven spirits" of seven churches.  Group identity can result in shared "illusions" and such illusions can help people cope in their situation but group identity can also involve acting upon bias, prejudice and ignorance in the name of the group and forgoing individual responsibility for justice and accurate information.  When one speaks of unity of Spirit, I do not think this means submitting one's brains or freedom of independence to blindly following a group unity.  Better the messiness of diversity than blind mob spirit following the orders of a single leader, even if the leader seems to be mostly benign.

Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2013

What is spirit?  The word itself comes from words that mean wind or breath.  Breath is an unseen "wind" as evidence of human life and is like the breath at large in the world in the moving air that is called wind.  One can see how the ancients used moving unseen air as a metaphor for a Being that that could not be seen.  Jesus said that his words were "spirit" and they were life.  This association moves spirit from being an evidential unseen physical force into the realm of the unseen ways in which words create our human lives as we know them because language provides constellations of words in constituting the paradigms of our lives that set us upon the course of being perpetual Thesaurus practitioners for the rest of our lives.  We are born into context where our lives are passively coded with assigned meanings for our outsides and insides.  The effect is so profound we actually begin to think that things are one with the word that is assigned to them.  And yet when we try to say what something actually is, we end up being perpetual synonym makers as we endlessly use words to try to say what something is.  We find that word is the creating spirit of our lives and word is endlessly creative as we use words endlessly to refer to others words.  The pragmatic effect of words in being able to "manipulate" the things in our world that are labeled by word or words is proof of the creative power of words.  Even the pragmatic effect in making it seem as though we are hands on with the "real" world is actually the worded life of our body language.  We are word through and through.  Being worded being we are caught in hyper-Reflexivity. 

Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2013

Today we rewrite our lives based upon the fact that we have surpassed our previous occasions of having become.  Using the metaphor of an upward climb, the view from a higher spot gives us some insights on things that we missed from the trail below.  There were things happening that we did not know at the time.  And so we write the past as a function of living now, which is the only place we can ever be.  We use the discourse of the past to cope with our lives now and we use a discourse of the future to cope with the incomplete now.  In a sense the discourses of past and future are discourses of denial (times that are not now).  Faith is the ability to live in the now using these discourses of past and future for strategic life purpose.

Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2013

The parable of Jesus about the vineyard owner who hired workers to pick grapes at different hours of the day and all of the workers got paid the same because of their original contract is a good parable for Labor Day.  We have uneven situations in the world of work today.  We measure human worth in terms of ability to produce.  The point of the parable seems to be that God's justice makes us equal in dignity; dignity is not determined by work productivity.  A person with an impairment or illness, a child, an elderly person may not be able to produce the same as able-bodied, able-minded people and economically fortunate people but they deserve equality of dignity and the benefits that befit that dignity.  In a world with uneven work situations, it is our quest for a common good that expedites the dignity of people by looking to provide base line conditions of dignity in the areas of safety, health, and the conditions that pertained to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  A "free market" system which results in a kind of social Darwinism where only the fittest have the right to fair well does not represent the Jesus of the Gospel.

Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2013

On Labor Day weekend we remember that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness depends largely upon finding our calling for the labor or work of our lives. Just as human fulfillment lacks when persons do not find their "match" to express love, so too people need to find their "match" with the work. In our faith we call this prayerfully finding our vocation. In our economic thinking we today leave work availability to the "demands" of the market without taking into account the general good of society that occurs when people find adequate compatibility in their work. Work is not a figure on a "bottom line" chart; it is the joy of celebrating being needed and useful within a community of people.

Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2013

Ponder topography today:  What is the value of the places, the space, the locations of your lives?  Favorite places, places where you cannot go and why you can't go there, place of merit, places of invitation and many more.  There are restricted places for people because of who they are.  There are places we want to be and places we want to avoid.  Our topography has a system of values associated with the places of our life in this world.  Muse over the values of your life and then accept yourself as a favored place, a favored location of the dwelling of God's Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2013

Today we  again find ourselves in a flow of our worded life of our "version" of the world, of people, events and things.  In this flow we receive all of the traces of what we remember from yesterday; our freedom is limited by the number of choices we have to make and the ability which we have to carry out those choices. We hope for some genuine freedom in deploying towards action; we hope that we are not just automatic pawns of "group think" where we express uncritically and with a kind of plagiarism an allegiance to the sources from which we get the information to make our decision.  Faith and repentance means that we have the freedom to put in critical question everything in our lives towards what we honestly believe to be justice for us and for the common good. 

Aphorism of the Day, August 28 ,2013

What event of grace are we open to receive today that will allow our past to become something different for us so that it helps us today rather than hinder us? Can I admit that the people in my past and the events of the past were "my version of the people and events" serving the story-line that I was writing then?  So I may have given the people and events too much power in my story and they don't remember having that much power. With new authorial grace in our lives today, we can redeem memories and let people and events of the past serve different but winning outcomes for us not by denying memories of real hurt but neutralizing them with the incredible rich and broad context of the new things that have happened to us.

Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2013

History  is an effort to make past events significant in a way that they were not regarded as significant when they occurred.  If the resurrection appearances of Jesus had not been a factor in the lives of the disciples then the cross of Jesus would not have been remembered.  So from the future, the cross was given a different kind of remembrance and had a different kind of theological interpretation, one which no other crucifixion had for any of the forgotten souls who died on Roman crosses.

Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2013

The occasion of once negligible causal connection becoming discovered as significant is an event of insight.  Hmm. It was there all of the time and I did not know it.

Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2013

What we don't know in our ignorance is experienced by us as negligible or insignificant in causal effect upon us. Young children may be totally ignorant of how much they need their parents for survival.  Without the awareness to ask the questions about crucial factors in our lives, we can experience what we don't know as negligible.  Perhaps a metaphor for God would be the Holy, Wholly Negligible as what we are forced to call Mystery in our ignorance.

Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2013

Jesus was most critical of religious leaders who used religious activity as a replacement for doing justice and helping the least of those in the world. Religious piety is a very false security if I think it will make me feel secure towards God while I neglect the practice of justice and mercy.

Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2013

Within each today there runs a parallel world of language today of discourses in the language of thoughts, random thoughts, thoughts directed from external events, dreams, fantasies and much more. Most of this parallel world simply has a location of happening within our bodies. Lots of it is hope's vision of planning, some of it wistful might have been regret, and other is very intentional and deliberate attention to what we intend to bring to action through speech acts, writing or body language deeds of the day. A somewhat hidden and unawares language already is made flesh of the logic that determines and positions our body acts. We have this incredible task of being the censors of what and how the arisings in our parallel inner world make it to our external world in deeds, speech and action. Some of the stuff that makes it does not have a censor because it is in the repetition mode of a habit or ritual and so does not have to get fresh permission from the constituted censor of the day. Today we seek wisdom to deliver in creative ways our internal world to our external world knowing that "too much information" is not called for in most situations. We can be honest about our interior practice sessions without having to replay all of the rehearsal material to the public. As playwright and director we make editorial calls and hopefully love and justice are the criteria for the show that makes it to our exterior stage.

Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2013

Remember the Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments. Sabbatarian literalists believe that an entire day should be designated to worship and Sabbath rest. Perhaps today we should see this in a movable and cumulative way. There are 24 hours in a day with 8 hours given to sleep leaving 16 waking hours. Can we find 16 hours of the 112 waking hours during a week to do intentional God-ward stuff? That's 14 % of one's waking hours, giving us 8 hours of "sleep credit" towards fulfilling the Sabbath. How would our lives change in terms of being centered and at peace if we can adopt the 14 % rule of prayer, meditation, reading, outreach, church ministry, corporate worship attendance, private prayers, daily office etc. ? Perhaps you are already doing more than 14 %?

Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2013

Things and people unless significantly altered beyond recognition seem to remain the same, such that we say the same in all manners except age. With the passing of time things and people age; they add total number of chronological occasions and they can become to appear different yet they maintain an identity, a reduction to but a name or a word. Does a person derive from a "pre-exising" person or does a person derive from having a first occasion of becoming and then from the addition of all of the occasions of becoming, at some point is given a reductive and abstract singular designation, a name? We don't regard a person to be a random community of atoms and molecules; we assume quality of purpose in how a person is known and defined within community. A person is not a "blob" of occasions of becoming because of the "quality" of how the occasions of becoming fit together within a person in community. Process theology defines God as Pure Creativity, Pure Freedom and Omni-Becoming. In this notion God as Omni-Becoming would not just be the quantity and comprehension of all occasions of becoming; God would be the quality of how all things fit together as well. And in making a quality judgment, we say God is Love.

Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2013

Some ancient biblical "perceptual" truths have persisted and are used in modern science recording even when they are actually false. Case in point: The sun rises and and the sun sets. Charts still list times for Sunrise and Sunset. These metaphors of falsehood are retained even by scientists. Though it is convenient short hand for: the earth turned and people in a certain location were able to see sunlight. Sunset still carries with it the daily "death" of the sun as it travels underneath the flat earth in the netherworld. Long live ancient metaphors.

Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2013

When reading Holy Scripture one needs to remember that repentance is the higher principle of inspiration.  Repentance means education and it is an inspired attitude.  Too many people treat as absolute the particular cultural details of what repentance/education meant in the particular communities from which Holy Scriptures derived and so even today one can find biblical literalists claiming the world is just about 6000 years old based upon Hebrew Scripture genealogy.  Like the Amish one could establish 18th century technology as a "rule of life" for the piety of one's life and endeavor to maintain a community of 18th technology parallel with the "non-cloistered" post-modern world; to make the claim that Amish buggies are God's final word on transportation is a bit ridiculous.  What makes the Bible God's Word is that behind it is the Spirit that inspires endless education; an endless invitation to surpass ourselves in future states in every area of our lives. This means we will continuously be leaving obsolete cultural details, practices and metaphors behind for new ones.  I believe that God only asks that we remain humble and tentative about the finality of any of our discoveries in the education/repentance process.

Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2013

Division and unrest among peoples of the earth seem to be a fact of life because of uneven levels of social, economic, spiritual and educational development in the world. Ancient people often embraced the notion of a great refining purpose for all of the tragic wars in life. The individual seems to be lost in the collective "us." Individuals get caught in painful conflict because of this greater purifying purpose for all of humanity towards higher outcome. As individualists it does not seem fair to justify current suffering for a belief in the greater good of all particularly when the individuals do not have the choice to sacrifice. When there is painful conflict in the world, the hope that humanity as a whole is learning a greater lesson may be one of the explanations of those who are trying to cope with the situation in a hopeful way. It is still our duty to work to have a rule of law to mediate disputes with as little suffering as possible. This would seem to be the higher quest of humanity. Just because we look for coping explanations when human conflicts result in harm and suffering, the higher task is still the commitment to a justice giving us a vision of human evolution with a minimum of people causing harm to other people.

Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2013

One of the ironies of "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you" is that because of personalities differences this may not always have a simple straight forward application. Sometimes introverted person may want to simply be left alone because having people around depletes one's energy whereas other people need and want to have people around to help rally their spirits. So doing unto others within a community should also include the discernment of different personalities and an effort to honor dignity in difference.

Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2013

How is emotional intelligence related to faith? Faith is how we live towards the future with goals as milestones, goals that are accidental or not articulated and experienced as events that are part of being in the rut of our immediate context. Other goals seem to be a bit more visionary or deliberate and come to conscious intentionality. In achieving goals of faith, we must deal with the narratives of the energies of feelings which can be either an asset or liability in our embrace of the future. Emotional intelligence has to do with coming to awareness of how the manifestation of emotions interdict our experience and influence how we behave. We will never achieve the "why" of emotions; that may be lost in the waters of our gene pool or even in some pre-memory trauma beyond recovery. Faith means dealing honestly with the fact "that" we have emotions and working to deal with "how" we use the energy of them.

Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2013

Today on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we salute a stellar Person in the corporate psyche of the church. She has had to become so much as a figure bearing the projections of a humanity that has been imprisoned by human conditions where patriarchal patterns have kept feminine so private and without full expression in public roles of leadership. The Blessed Virgin has had to rise to a stellar place as a prophetic witness to end the subjugation of women and let her rise be seen as a pioneering break in that formidable glass ceiling, the unseen barrier to justice to those who have lived without the supporting environment to fully develop their creative gifts. BTW, congratulations to the Rev. Elizabeth Eaton, first woman presiding bishop elect of the ELCA.

Aphorism of Day, August 14, 2013

At the end of the day what does "might have been" thinking do for us? Might have been thinking is the effort to do the impossible, namely, to make hope work towards the past. I hope I win the lottery yesterday? It is probably better to think more redemptively about the past as in "what will a past event have become after one has successfully added to a past event an entourage of successive occasions to complement a pleasure or to paint past pain to be a contrasting shadow in one's overall beautiful picture?" Let us be converted from "might have been" regretful ones into editors in putting together a sublime story for today. Being editors of our past and integrating/tolerating/admitting/overcoming the ignorance that accompanied our past is the work of faith.

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Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2013

In a rather unusual twist that the appearance of an innovation makes the past something that is articulated as a future anterior (what will the traces of the past have become in the future).  Spoken language became spoken language when writing appeared because when there was no writing there would be no reason to differentiate language between spoken and written.  We cannot return to the pre-linguistic state of infancy as an adult and articulate what it means from the state of not having active language ability; we can only use imagination as it has already been colored by having full language use.  In religion, the future of the Scriptural traces have become different from how they came to  the world because of modern science and the result has been that the language of faith has had to become a different kind of discursive practice with no less validity than other kinds of discursive practices as long as it does not arrogate itself as scientific discourse but is regarded as a different but equal truth discourse that is able to relate the experience the sublime experience of faith, since it seems unavoidable that many people have encountered what can only be called "the holy."

Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2013

It is a good day to salute nurses and this wonderful profession. They are called to be with people who do not want to be in their situation caused by the vulnerability of pain and health issues. The conditions of pain and afflictions of all sorts force upon us a reliance upon others when we rather be self reliant and independent. Nurses have this calling to enter this liminal state of people adjusting to a state of temporary or permanent dependency and they have the task of bolstering modesty in conditions that require "immodest" procedures. The Isaian suffering servant was one who was to be "acquainted with grief and sorrow." A salute to graceful nurses who have learned to be "acquainted with grief and sorrow" and are wonderful Healers.

Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2013

In looking at one's emotional intelligence, one can note it to be constitute by its own kind of language in how it determines our responses in life.  The language of the talking energy of emotion is learned by both nurture and nature.  Events repressed and suppressed in one's nurture constitute one's emotional intelligence in such a way that one's emotions can hinder successful interaction in current situations. One's journey to wholeness may include a proverbial detour to the past whereby one does a sort healing of memories through a regressive care and one returns to the sites in memory of very imperfect situations and acknowledges that freedom was a real in the past as in the present and as unpredictable and as context specific as it is now.  Post-trauma means that the parallel etched memories continue to interdict successful emotional interaction in current events.  Knowing grace and forgiveness and higher power to deal with trauma is perhaps a chief encounter with the sublime and the presence of religious institutions is a witness to the fact that such graceful events of the sublime have happened, even as those institutions can sometimes become distracted from their own raison d'etre.

Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2013

Our life orientation is constituted by the Word and the Word in our life functions to manifest levels of intelligence: spiritual intelligence, emotional intelligence, mental intelligence, physical or body intelligence, growth, nature intelligence and social intelligence. We are caught in word play, caught because we had no choice to be languaged-beings within the particular context where we have taken on language and exercise our high degree of freedom with language use. We hope that our being caught in the Word will educate us in our recognition of the sublime, the holy. Also we hope to lose our ignorance about our emotions learning to name and own up to feelings which arise and understand the contexts from which they derive as our passionate response to life. We hope to be wise readers of our bodies; what are they telling us as the location of word events that occur within us. We hope to be enlightened about growth and change and lose the pretense of the static ego, invulnerable to becoming and evolving. We hope to be wise readers of our landscape which includes peopled environment and the confrontation with all non-human, extra-human entities which we encounter and make impressions upon us. We hope that word develops us in education of our thinking lives, fine-tuning every manner of critical thinking; doubting so that we might have dynamic faith. And we pray to have the experience of wisdom, which is to have an integrative Word experience happen in the steady but uneven growth of all of our intelligences: spiritual, emotional, body, growth, social, mental and nature. God grant us insights in all of our intelligences today.

Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2013

The word faith in the New Testament is the Greek word pistos, πιστός. This word in the later koine Greek of the New Testament (the lingua franca Greek spread by Alexander's world conquest) had developed other meanings from what it meant in classic Greek. In classic Greek "pistos" was a goal of rhetoric, namely to persuade one's listeners. One can see how "pistos" retains the persuasion nuance. To have faith is to believe or be persuaded about something. Faith is a creative risk based upon a vision that one has that gives one impetus to act toward something that has not yet been verified in actuality. Faith is the attitude of confidence that allows one to focus upon a possible outcome in such a way that one perseveres until it moves from hope's realm of the possible to the past tense of the actual where it has "come to pass." Faith is oriented toward the future as we live intentionally toward new goals provided to us by the vision of hope.

Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2013

We may ask a young child what he or she did during a certain day and often they don't remember unless it is fresh or really an impressionable event out of the ordinary, e.g. went to Disney Land. Sometimes our daily lives are so predicable that we don't feel like we have a story to tell except, "same ol' same ol'." Story and history is created by "memorable"events. Memorable events become the "metaphors" of our life as we re-tell our life story and the meanings that have come to constitute us. Sometimes our communities of faith can be seen as imposing upon us community metaphors in a manner that discourages us from "having our own personal metaphors" that arise within our own original experience. For our own original experience to be regarded as "heresy" by our community can drive us to silence or non-participation. The great stories of salvation history are not meant to deny or rob us from how metaphor of faith arise in original ways on the paths of our faith journey.

Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2013

Part of the reason for routine and ritual of both a personal and corporate nature comes from the need to have information filters in place to sort and organize and reduce the potential excess that could surely overwhelm our receptive capacity. The cyber world has resulted in so much more information; just living with Nature alone provides vast amounts of experiential data. A vacation may mean to turn off the access to artificial data and become acquainted again with just the ocean, the skies, the mountain, the trees, the mosquitoes, the spotted owl, the butterflies and the sunset. In busy lives one needs to work on a deliberate meditative practice of being able to nurse one's naked naturalness with the ways in which Nature can confront us without having to be filtered by the cyber screen. A pet, a walk, a garden, looking at the sky, yard work, can all help us realize that we not cultural products on cyber screens and though we've long been evicted from the Garden of Eden we can use our meditative imaginations to visualize our more Primitive Selves.

Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2013

On Monday one assesses what "needs" to get done in terms of the life maintenance goals that have been set by one's context in life, one's own choices and the unspoken and articulated contracts that are working in one's life.  "I'll do this for you; if you do this for me."  Maybe the summer vacation has allowed one "bucket list" item to be achieved (swimming the English Channel?).   And when we feel swamped with the little requirements of life we need to remember mustard seed faith; small little steps eventual add up to great distances and if the steps are seen as too bothersome, we truly will never get anywhere.  One can't be on a journey and get anywhere if habits have us in concrete boots.  One can dream big and move toward the dream in inches.  Having hope's direction is important.

Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2013

Today is a good day to leave the reign of quantity and commit oneself to the reign of quality. The faith issue is not about how much we have but about how we put together what we do have.

Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2013

The Preacher Qoheleth of Ecclesiastes was a wise skeptic who wrote about the human dilemma and concluded, "Vanities of vanity, all is vanity." The dilemma is that hope exposes humanity to possibilities that can never become actual because of human limitation. Possible experience taunts us who have limitations. We may want to visit distant planets but always live with the knowledge it will not happen. This gap between the realm of possibilisms where we desire more than we can actually attain is the experiential condition for human imagination to create liminal myths between the possible and the actual. Science fiction and superheroes are the liminal myths of our day creating the artistic space of "as if" we could actually defy our human limitations. Qoheleth was too much of a skeptic scientist to exercise his imaginations toward living beyond human limitations, though his conclusion was to "fear God" or after everything is said and done, stand in awe of Plenitude because Plenitude contains us and our days of life derive from Plenitude and Plenitude will survive us even as it will preserve continuously transforming traces of us "having been here."

Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2013

Value judgments ceaselessly are made and constitute every aspect of our lives.  There is an endless process of seeking worth and value in life.  Some things of worth seem to be obvious like the worth of water and food.  Other values seem totally individual, arbitrary or driven by fickle features of the "market," as in what makes a Warhol Campbell soup can worth millions.  We are driven by the value impulse because the pleasure principle aka the pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia to the Greeks) or desire is a magnetic force that finds attractive people, events, things and activities in life.  And when desire is engaged upon an attractive event, thing, person, or activity in life we have our values formed.  Values can change because our pleasure can diminish for things once loved.  Desire can be an engine of endless search for other value.   Fixated value can also be dangerous for us such as in addictions.  If we can embrace desire as a power engine of wisdom in search of the highest insights in life for better living then we can find desire to be like the powerful wave for the surfer.  Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was like finding the pearl of great price and selling all to purchase it.  Finding the great insight to organize our lives around is the journey of life as we pray that our desire will help educate us towards greater, higher and beneficial values of life.

Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2013

Reading has many levels of intensity; casual skimming to thorough reading and re-reading coupled with "support reading" of foot-notes and end notes and dictionary. Meditative reading may be the repeating a phrase as a way of working it into one's heart. On edge reading is reading as though one's life or another's life depended upon it. We read in so many ways the words of our lives and what is seen is actually picture words inscribed upon the optic screen in a pictographic way. We cannot but help to have our interior worded state of being continually reorganized by the flow of words in our life. In this flow of words there are variations of impressions which words have on us to create the values of our life. The practice of silence does not mean to escape the world of words; it only means that one resorts to be a passive sign of words or to enter a new mood or nuance of word. In our beginning is the Word and let us hope that the Word is with God and the Word is God as creator of consciousness of anything at all.

Aphorism of the Day, July 31, 2013

In our day, the sin of greed is a sin that seems to be ignored or valorized in the public. The five per cent who own disproportionately a significant portion of the resources of the world are put on a pedestal as those to admire. Greed has been transvalued to be called grace. Those who amass wealth are called blessed and meanwhile the creative ability to feed and educate everyone is not embraced as the significant task of humanity.

Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2013

Empathy and compassion require the kind of imagination of faith to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. Empathy and compassion also are social phenomenon and have not had even practice or implementation into the experience of people. The social evolution of compassion presented as innovation the abolition of slavery; it is incredible that humanity had to "evolve" in compassion to discover how demeaning this ancient practice was. Compassion and empathy manifested in actual just practice and equal inclusion still needs to evolve within churches and in society at large. It is to our shame that religious and faith communities often lag in the practices of social justice because they maintain ancient principles and traditions used to support discrimination. Religious groups innovate in uneven and inconsistent ways and so it really is a matter of "community acceptance" and the canon laws or church ordinances that embody such acceptance. Those who feel the pain of delayed justice sigh, "How long?" It is nice that a religious leader can say they don't judge people who honestly seek God; let non-judgment also become acceptance of the gifts and spiritual calling within our communities of those whom we purport not to judge.

Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2013

The drama of each day is learning how to conform to what is after trying to be an agent to determine what is with all of the gifts that one is given. We reach a place of passive acceptance of what is (since we don't have a choice) even while we live from our own parallel universe where Hope's archetypes of better versions of our world are continually being projected upon our world so that we are reminded that the creative process is not finished and resting in passive acceptance is the moment of humility of knowing that we are not God but within the limits of what we can do, we are to be co-creators with God.

Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2013

Prayer can sometimes be practiced from the premise that God is our own personal interventionist who should fix things for us. (Lots of people are disillusioned when interventions do not happen on their cues). Or prayer can be the continual practice of our voice to rearrange the word furniture of our soul lives to be able to accommodate the guest events that arrive in our lives within all of the probabilities of things that can occur in the life of any human being at anytime. If we are prepared to meet our guest events through prayer orientation of having found our voice, then we know the grace of surfing the random wave events of life knowing that wipe outs occur but so does reaching the shore, so that we can paddle back out and do it all again.

Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2013

A story or narrative is the attempt to reduce a series of life events into a presentation in words.  If a person actually witness the life events and read the narrative presentation, a person may want to add missing aspects of the events to the story.  For those who read the story and were not witnesses to the event; they cannot really add to the story; they have to accept the reductions; they have to admit that they do not know more of the attending elements of the event.  Biblical narratives are events reduced to language and we are not certain about any particular time when the events came into language form.  Scripture is literary art; it presents to us the illusion of "being there" even while the reader is not there but is confronted with the words based upon an incredible faith that stable or limits on meanings can be transmitted in the event of reading.  We have an incredible faith in humanity and that the words of humanity can be translated and that same meanings can assumed to be shared with people who lived in a completely different time.  We do have faith in words whether it is warranted or not.

Aphorism of the Day, July 26, 2013

In recognition of the annual Garlic Festival in Gilroy, we ponder the long tradition, even biblical tradition of this popular herb.  After the Israelites escaped from slavery in Egypt things got rough and they longed for their leeks, onions and garlic (Number 11:5).  Garlic deprivation made them think that they could tolerate slavery again?  That's quite an herb.  Garlic lovers reek the effects of this marvelous pungent herb through their breath and their skin and if you love it,  it has magical medicinal properties of the most effective placebo.  In the exchange of molecules and atoms we become what we eat and so some of us have transformed garlic into our personal physical beings more than others.  In terms of our subjectivity, our consciousness as individual beings, we have consumed words and become those words in how our lives are constituted.  Christ as the Word is a metaphor for consuming the best possible words for becoming people whose lives are given orientation towards excellence.  As we savor the garlic effect in our lives, let us also savor the Word effect as we seek to reek the sweet fragrance of love.

Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2013

How much of what we think we need is socially constructed? One can visit other cultures and see children exposed to foods and tastes that would be unthinkable in another culture. Needs get commodified in a market system; taste becomes an entire web of social arrangements. We begin to need things because of peer acceptance and participation within our community. What about spiritual need and commodification? In a market system religious communities are trying to promote a description of spiritual need along with their particular answer to that need. The spiritual supermarket has grown to have so many choices and immediate access to many choices. Used to be that the Midwest did not have access to avocados and artichokes and they were regarded to be exotic. A world made smaller by transportation and the information revolution and the massive movements of people has brought about a challenge to once chauvinistic homogeneous majorities which had exclusive right of defining spiritual need and spiritual answer to that need. One's faith experience today may involve the aesthetic balance between the simplicity of the one and the many. How do we "love the one we're with" without being chauvinistic or exclusive while at the same time appreciating the vast diversity of others who can actually help us to expand our own appreciation of our own tradition. Why did it take exposure to TM or Zen for Christians to become aware of their own meditation tradition?

Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2013

Amid the morass of incoming information how do we choose the bits that motivate the particular acts of our lives? Probably most of motivations of our acts are lost in a long tradition of how we came to build our habits to take care of what we regard our needs are and so a pleasure principle or blessing principle may be the original impulse. This original motivation may be soanonymous in the banal events of cultural practice that we find it hard to recognize motivations except when they manifest in obvious projections of desire upon things and people and activities whose inventory enshrine the actual values of our lives. The bedrock of any notion of social theory involves how groups of people can provide basic fulfillment of the pleasure principle, the blessing principle for the most number of people possible. Loving one's neighbor as oneself means that one is able to have empathy because one generalizes the pleasure principle as a common experience of all and works in community to ensure that supply meets demand.

Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2013

Experience does determine what we can see.  There are op art pieces with silhouettes of figures that could have ambiguous identity and children can see one image whereas adults will see another.  Our experiences in life have helped form our language on our taxonomic screens which we use to identify what we see.  This accounts for our all manner of bias and prejudice as well experiences of learning science, math, politics and aesthetics.  How do we escape rigid social construction in the determination of seeing and valuing events, things and people in life so that we take on appreciation of new values in life and as a result we can begin to see life differently.  Out of our landscape new things can arise because we refresh the inner screen of seeing through continuous conversion.  This inner continuous conversion, also called repentance or education is the work of faith.

Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2013

The singularity of the moment or event is always accompanied by what is near and recognized and what is near and unrecognized because only so much can register in the observer at any given moment.  When one tries to preserve or record a singular moment or series of moments into later history it is done by people with memory and who employ "technologies" of memory either as story units for oral tradition or through writing.  The moment or series of moments which get memorized and preserved involve only a selection of topics or items from those moments and so there is always an editor choosing what to remember and how it is to be relayed or remembered and it is tinged with an "ideology" or a reason why the editor thinks it should be remembered.  Literature such as the Bible is "as if" art in that it purports to put us before an actual event and we are entranced in a naive reading when we believe ourselves to be present at the recalled event.  This pristine child-like reading fascinates us even as we know that we need to move to the next level of critical analysis, namely, assuming that the writer and editor is in many ways just like we are with limitations and special interests of our own that motivate how we see life.

Aphorism of the Day, July 21, 2013

What happens in published literature and in canonical literature is single reported incidences become magnified as typology or as theology. Monastic styles are casts as either Mary or Martha types based upon one incident in the lives of these two sister friends of Jesus. Martha the worker and Mary the contemplative. An incredible reduction and time lapsing happens in the reporting and writing of events and though types and sweeping theological symbols may provide us with insights we cannot regard these reductions as truly representing a continuously flowing life.

Aphorism of the Day, July 20, 2013

The Christian Tradition perhaps is best summed up from the Pauline writings: "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Christ is the Greek translation for the Hebrew Messiah, or God's chosen anointed One. Who has more glory in a kingdom than the monarch? Herein is the mystery of Christian ideology, the democratization of royalty; if the Messiah is potentially in everyone then Christian spiritual methodology is all about the elevating of the dignity of every human being as royalty because the discovery of inherent worth. This worth can be known as "glory" or intensive self esteem or self worth which comes not by individual perfection but as the shared royalty of all.

Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2013

One often hears the word "karma" used as pop phrase to indicate how the order of things manifests a balancing system of justice and payback. One should be leery about presuming to know precise and specific cause and effect moral relationships. When an injured party sees something bad happening to the one who injured and says it's "karma," that same party will not admit that the original injury was also "karma." One should be careful about how one dispenses knowledge of "cause and effect." In a general sense, we may say one reaps what one's sows yet like the Psalmist one can perpetually be complaining about how the "bad guys" and "exploiters" are the ones who seem to be winning. It perhaps is best to find moral approbation in the act itself as in, "It is a reward in itself to be able to do good," and "It is punishment in itself that one does what is bad or evil." In this view the "karma" is already evident in the deed itself.

Aphorism of the Day, July 18, 2013

How are your information filters and sorters working today? It could be that we insulate ourselves and keep ourselves very, very local believing that there is enough trouble locally; one does not have to look beyond one's own neighborhood for trouble. If one can pretend through information neglect that the world outside one's precinct does not really matter in a telling way in one's life, then one does not burden oneself with a world-consciousness. When one has a loved one as a soldier abroad the world consciousness becomes a bit more personal. Travel and communications challenges us today as people who could really only comfortably live in a miles radius if left to mere human body mobility and whose information capacity is radically challenged by total world knowledge doubling each day. Our world is not like the world of Jesus. Our country is not like the country of George Washington. In nostalgia we long for the simplicity of the primitive even while we know realistically the primitive does not provide adequate strategies to confront the complexities of postmodern living. Serious translation of the structures evident in the Jesus-wisdom tradition into workable correspondences for postmodern life is the work of faith; trying to assume one to one correspondence with the details of primitive cultures results in an anachronism fueled by the pain of nostalgia.

Aphorism of the Day, July 17, 2013

Life involves the balance between contemplation and the ordinary busyness of life for essential maintenance of putting elements together that comprise our situation. The importance of contemplation involves knowing when to take the time "off" to be drawn toward the next new insight in our life that has the qualities of being an event profound enough to initiate a new paradigm or new interpretative framework for us to rework our entire life history. Contemplation is necessary to avoid burn out; contemplation is how we experience renewal. Contemplation is how we come to receive new vision on how to reinterpret everything in our lives towards redemptive outcomes. Contemplation gives us the ability to take on new worded models to re-present our lives and make ourselves more interesting to ourselves. The occasion of contemplation can come through happening upon a new book or a new mentor or finding someone who we are free to let ourselves be known to so that we can be appreciated and affirmed in a new way. We can't always make "contemplative events" happen but if we make our life orientation curiously directed toward new insights, we are more likely to know the serendipity of "contemplative" events.

Aphorism of the Day, July 16, 2013

Sin, may be known, as the condition of living in alienation to the gifts and creativity that are always already present for there to be life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, given the fact that all from birth are on a path toward death. That we have such vast inequities in the distribution of the gifts of creation among human beings is most of all a sin against creativity. There is an incredible abundance for everyone but greed and hoarding represent a sin against creativity.

Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2013

For a long time we perhaps lived under a cultural naivete about how neutral and transcendent and self evidential the "Law" was. This naivete becomes shattered when a society consists of the interaction of greater number of peoples with differences of ethnic, religious and other markers of social identity. When a nation consists of a strong majority of homogeneous public actors there can be the appearance that the Law is applied in very neutral ways. When diversity enters, it becomes evident that the Law does not avoid being thoroughly interpreted in context specific ways and it does occur that the famous quote of Tip O'Neill about politics becomes relevant about Law, as in, "All law is local." Local to the judges and the persons of any given jury and the talents and skills of the litigators and defenders. If it seems as the manifestation of law does not approximate justice adequately, we do not cease the practice of law nor the quest for justice. Justice is God's perfect love manifest in human living and this is an elusive quest; Laws and juridical process are our efforts to approximate Justice. In our imperfection, ignorance and prejudice we fail at Justice, but we should never cease to pursue justice, which is to give to each what is due as regards our highest notion of human dignity.

Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2013

We can get locked into our own schedules and our own time that people in need become inconveniences to us. So a person can be labeled as an inconvenience rather than a neighbor. But what happens when we become the "inconvenient one in need" for someone else? What happens when we need the kindness of the stranger? Jesus told a parable about a despised foreigner who was the only one who stopped to help a victim of crime. The victim was too inconvenient for the religious persons to help. What are we doing today about all of the "inconvenient" people in the world?

Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2013

Do you want to read the hidden aspects of your personality today? Focus upon the people and things onto which you are projecting attraction or positive value. Do the same with the things, events and people on whom negative value falls or aversions. These attractions and aversions reveal one's honest aspects of personality as life force has been shaped by a labyrinth of one's genetic make up plus one's developmental experiences and so one is etched in unique ways that seem to be hidden but can be read as we take progressive readings and reflections upon our attractions and aversions. If we are troubled by attractions that seem too close to obsession, idolatry or addiction on the one hand and by aversions that are characterized by by a paralyzing loathing of too much, we need to engage in an exercise to allow all our life force to be focused upon God who is the "no thing" beyond any object of attraction or aversion. In this exercise we learn to tolerate our own make up and history and to sort out the projected field of value through which we pass each day of life.

Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2013

One could test the degree to which a book such as the Bible provided the metaphorical underpinning of a culture by surveying the degree to which people understood the content and origin of a metaphor. For example, many people might understand the metaphor of a "David going against a Goliath" but how many people would know the specific biblical story from which it derived? The same with Shakespeare. There are many Shakespearean phrases in English that are used without us remembering the Shakespearean play of derivation. As the Bible has had to compete with the proliferation of books and word products it has lost its exclusivity as a place from which culture metaphors have been derived.

Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2013

We usually do not want discontinuities in a given day since that would imply that an event did not have an expected or predictable occurrence. We don't like the kinds of surprises that would initiate a crisis of loss forcing upon us major adjustments in life style changes. We more easily accept the surprising discontinuous event that involves delight and blessing. An event is something that in one way or another "deconstructs" our lives in calling into question previous meanings that we had for life experience and re-valuing every area of our life. An event has a domino effect since we are not people made up of isolated compartments; one area of life effect every other area. Our faith experience involves integration of life events which forces a re-structuring of our lives and words have to take on different meaning because they are forced to be used in different ways in their context with other words that arise because of an event. Faith involves seeing through words which are like the shards in a kaleidoscope. The words get shifted in relationship with each other as they filter the reality of light.

Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2013

Zoom in and zoom out. Some personalities are good at the zoom out view of life, taking in the big pictures. Other personalities are good at the zoom in view of life reveling in completing the details. Big picture, focused pictures; we need a balance in both even while our own personalities may tend us to be better in one or the other. Any community needs a balance of visionaries and "devil in the detail" expediters. Our faith lives need balance between the vision of hope disciplined not to get too dreamy and serious work ethic to get things done while asking for aerial support in getting through the maze of life.

Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2013

An ever widening referential environment has a way of making any specific referential statement untrue, limited or partial.  Statements that we make are very selected and edited but they also assume very limited and selective referential environments.  We are in the habit of just assuming that everyone knows exactly what our statements refer to.  If this were true then there would be no misunderstanding and perfect communication within our world.  It is rather naive to assume "self-evidential" knowledge or information anywhere even as it is comforting to rely upon our community's given definitions of things so that we do not have to rename everything at each moment of our existence.  When it comes to the language of aesethetics, religion, faith and love it is harder to convince people of the "evidence."  That I am moved by the sublime in a piece of music or art may not be understood by you.  Are you "defective" because you are not moved in the same way?  It is rather incredible that faith communities have institutionalized something that relies upon a radical subjectivity of serendipitous encounters with the sublime of religious experience.  And one wonders if there is the false assumption akin to thinking that one has actually "herded cats."

Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2013

We have not choice but to be people who use language. Even trying to resist manifesting language through silence or meditating to a the state of "no mind" is still to be formed by language. As we ponder meaningful words such as God, universe, desire, spirit, force, power, and others for which there is no empirically precise specifying evidence for all, the one thing common in all consciousness including the consciousness of consciousness is the use of words and language. Even as we might think that a baby has yet avoided language, we have already coded the baby with many, many meanings and insured the baby's place in a worded world. Welcome to another day of Word mysticism and as we try to escape language we will find that we are only creating synonyms for other words previously used that have our community's definition of their attachment to a "non-worded reality."

Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2013

Evangelism: living in such a way that people can positively transfer a sense of their well-being in such a way that they feel called to their fuller selves. If we are too conscious about our evangelism, we probably have made it into a competitive sport to gain people to own own opinion. If we are truly progressing in the fruits of the Spirit our bodies speak the language of good news without us knowing it.

Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2013

Since love and compatibility do not prevail and people have various degrees of love and compatibility, the condition of being unrequited is an experience that everyone has to learn to handle. Because one experiences rejection or does not receive reciprocity in relationships does one give up in putting out one's best to others? Faith means that we learn to find personal value irregardless of favorable response to us. This of course is different for children who need a different kind of reciprocity to build their esteem. In faith, as adults, we find our gifts in the sheer joy of creativity and if our gifts are received, it is an added blessing. But the reception of one's gifts by others at some point should not determine our sense of personal value even though it may help us determine the communities where we want to participate.

Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2013

Time accumulates occasions of living and one's life could viewed as quantity of occasions but the notion of mere quantity cannot do justice to the occasions that goes into compromising a human being in time. Consciousness with memory means that remnants of who we have been remain in some way as traces of a unitary person comprised of many occasions of becoming and our tracesinclude our own worded-reflections of the meanings of how the occasions of becoming fit together. Our traces loaded with our worded-meanings adds quality of life to quantity of life experience. Each day we look to revisit the meanings of our lives, two of which have to do with being loved and having the sense of one's life being worthwhile. Love and faith as terms of meaning involve community; loved by whom, worthwhile for whom? The greatest community of all that is, we in the English language use the word God. Since everything that is, is together, one way of characterizing "belonging together" is the magnetic energy of love. Life also involves in part the freedom of exploring and discovering "how" we belong together and as our piece of the cosmic puzzles find interlocking parts with other pieces we discover purpose to be able to confess that our life is worthwhile or expressing faith. We also know faith and love because of their opposites; things that don't seem to belong together and occasions whose juxtaposition seem to be characterized by pain and injustice. Such occasion invite us through aversion to continue to seek the belonging of love and the fitting purpose of faith.

Aphorism of the Day, July 4, 2013

On this day as we watch nations aspire for democracies even as we may not be hopeful since they may not have the ability but to become countries where ruling parties become tyrannical elites, we celebrate with gratitude the birth of our country and not with the pride of feeling superior but with the humility of knowing that we've been wounded in our efforts many times in our history. We are grateful for surviving as a country for this long and in the ways of freedom that we've attained. The future humbles us to seek grace and help this day because of the complexities which face us now in our lives. We cannot return to the comparative simplicity that comprised the situation of the American Revolution; we can return to the resolute spirit for inspiration to achieve the ideal that all are created equal and deserve the justice of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On the day of our birth we pray that our American democracy will not be filibustered to its incompetency. We pray that we can be an example to the world that democracy can truly be successful in promoting justice, expeditious, competent justice for all.

Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2013

In life we live both aphoristically and paragraphically. As a continuous aphorism we are never sure how we fit in some larger whole; we are a like the unique snowflake in every occasion. At the same time we are not so isolated and not so unique to preclude our being a piece in larger puzzles of community life. A person can live a total imitating life as a "ditto head" in aping a communal pattern. Or a person can live a life so unique as to be isolated and understood only by himself/herself alone and pretend such isolation is heroic. We need to balance our life as an "aphorism" or as a "paragraph." Baptism is a rite of passage that we live into every day because it expresses the main crisis of life, living as individual within community.

Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2013

What's the difference between an aphorism and a paragraph? The writer of an aphorism purports that it stands alone and is not part of some intended larger works as a building block in some greater conclusion. A paragraph does not stand alone; it is used to support a point in a larger system. The postmodern age is an age of skepticism about totalizing systems since it seems ultimately individuals have to be forced into the slot in a system for the sake of preserving a proclaimed validity of the system. One can find many religious systems because at some point someone did not "fit" in a previous system and had to "start" their own. Living aphoristically is both protest and affirmation of systems. It is an interstitial peep hole view between systems borrowing languages from all systems but not fitting in any. It is critique and affirmation at the same time. It is accepting mysticality of Word in how we become in the moment, not glorifying one's individual's perception but acknowledging that we always already need to be open to flickering insights that can get us through the moment and the day until the next flickering insight. Give us this day, each day, in the surprise of the moment our daily bread of flickering insight to sustain us in faith.

Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2013

The power of a novel was seen in the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Abraham Lincoln reportedly said to the author that "she was the little woman who wrote the book that started the Civil War." Written language and spoken language can come to be within us an irritant to action, even wider social action. We can note that Word creates but conversely we can only use words to speak about what creates Word.

Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2013

This aphorist's goal in life is to convince us about our multidiscursive nature of being human because of how we are layered and nuanced through and through in how we have taken on language. In religion one can lose perspective through misunderstanding the processes of language even when the contexts provides us with the codes on how we are to interpret. A Stop sign on the corner is different from the Stop sign that decorates a bedroom as a sort of Warholian piece of "pop art." The word Stop on the sign on the corner results in different body language acts than does the word Stop on the sign in a piece of "pop art." We understand the processes of language from the context of our cultures even as we always need to be in the learning process of how we use language and how we are "used" by it in how we take it on in so many passive ways in our culture. In our faith experience we need to understand biblical language more appropriately in the aesthetic category rather than as scientific method or eye-witness journalistic accounts. Failing to do so results in using the wrong discursive practice to interpret a text.Saturday,

Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2013

Multidiscursivity layers and intermingles and enlightens and confuses us in how we interpret or read our world. So a fundamentalist might acknowledge the "truth" of radioactive dating even while asserting that the world is just 6000 years old. After all, if God created an older man Adam, God also created "very old rocks." So the apparent conflict between science and literal myth is "resolved." Such is only one example of the interpretive knots that people tie themselves into as they fail to interpret the world and the interior self with the fitting discursive practice to process incoming information. To live according to all of the modern effects of knowing the laws of science while assuming the world is 6000 years old does manifest itself in a schizoidal disconnect from reality. And we see that in our public life today.

Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2013

Some people have a difficult time in believing because they do not recognize or accept that they are multidiscursive beings. So they are trying to receive square data through a round hole on their language interpretive screens. When things don't fit, they can't believe because they finally admit that the square stuff will not enter their round hole. This happens when people try to force matters that properly belong to aesthetics through the holes that are dominate in philosophical and scientific method thinking. Do we have to quit being moved by poetry or music just because we can't explain its effect upon us philosophically or scientifically? Or do we admit that we need all of the multidiscursive processing slots to give our experience the fullness of poignant truths. We may stop believing when we privilege one certain discursive mode as being the end all mode of defining truth. Let's adopt a new version of Descartes, "We multidiscourse, therefore we are."

Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2013

In the long effort to institutionalize the message of Jesus, the followers of Jesus have had to do much editing. First, there was the decision made about what to include and thus save in the collective memory. But the sayings of Jesus were saved in different ways to different groups of people. One version is "Blessed are the poor," and another is "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Why the difference? For a message to survive it must always be applied within a contemporary community who still find the message relevant and useful. We cannot time travel to the original contexts in the life of Jesus of Nazareth; we can study lots of historical background information. Today, there seems to be people who would rather say "my interpretation of Jesus is better than yours" rather than find insights to know God as worshipful and find inspiration to love all of our neighbors.

Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2013

Faith and hope are very contextual. For some it may be hopeful to merely rise in the morning do some very basic life tasks and be faithful in basic maintenance. But in other contexts where other levels of ability factor in hope raises the bar upon what we want to occur and hope can set what may be for us higher standards and faith for us then means being successful in meeting the standards of hope. Sometimes we hope for too much or hope does not seem to be grounded enough in realistic assessment of our situation and when our expression of faith does not reach hope's standard we may be tempted to feel "faithless" or not up to the task. Sometimes we have to accept the hope of being like a Cubs fan, living with the hope of "wait" till next year even while believing and working in the present towards hope's vision of excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2013

Dreams can allow one to return backward in historical reconstruction of an event carrying with one the sense of foreknowledge that all will be not only well but better, even marvelous, glorious. In a dream one can return to a former scenario with hindsight redemption and it can make the experience of former pain, meaningful in a different way. When one reads the Passion narratives, particularly in John's Gospel, one finds that the authors have returned to the Passion event from the dream of resurrection redemption and the Passion event is appropriated in a different way than it would have been originally experienced. The atmospherics of the internal kingdom allows this confusion of time when one returns to the past memory and reconstructs it with a "will have become" knowledge.

Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2013

Have the experiences of Jesus and St. Paul been recorded and institutionalized to be made the normative standard so that everyone else is to live second hand off the accounts of Jesus and Paul? Is the purpose of our faith to say Jesus and Paul already had all experiences of the godly, so why bother to embrace one's own with any originality? Or do the written records of Jesus and Paul exist so that we might embrace the originality of our own experience, not so new religions might be formed but to re-instantiate the Spirit again and again?

Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2013

"Please understand me" can be an unrealistic impossible request because of differences no two people harmonically converge in sharing precise "same meaning." In the euphorics of love we can share mutual impressionism in meanings and in mob or herd thinking we can unite behind what we believe to be a common idea. Being unique in one's understanding preserves our distinction but demanding that someone else be exactly where one is in understanding is a kind of insecure dictatorship. One way of understanding God's Spirit is to live in the impressionism of love in mutual respect holding to things in common while granting that everyone is is an "exception" to any cookie cutter singular pattern of how one should be loving.Saturday, 

Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2013

Live radio has a seven second delay device to allow the censoring of unwanted material from being heard. Language stands as a delay filter between us and the reality of what is outside and inside. Since we only learn the outside and inside from learning language we begin to assume the language filter and reality are one and the same and are unaware of the delay. In that delay and on the screen of Word, our world is created, being created and will be created and though Word is very communal we still have the freedom to articulate particular Word manifestation in our speech acts and body language. We need to look at what we have on automatic through repetition to interdict habits that we want to change even as we rely on repetitive habits to be memorized redundancies so that we can take on creating what is truly new for the day beyond our habits.

Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2013

We look to the future, both immediate and long term to verify or falsify the current details of how we would articulate hope.  And if hope's detail become falsified when future becomes the present our organ of hope can still churn out new details but do we put more realistic parameters on what we hope for if past hope details have been falsified?  Do we make Hope into  a person who can cause us to be often in the situation of an unrequited lover?  Do we give up hope on the grand scale?  Do we stop loving hope?  And what kind of word gymnastics is this having dueling virtues, love and hope?  Can the expression of one virtue be in competition with the expression of another virtue?  Loving to hope and hoping to love are rather theoretical unless they are attached to details in our lives where we add the third virtue of faith to be unafraid to let theory be incarnate in the details of our lives where desire is really projected and the rubber really hits the road.

Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2013

The mutual relationship of an uncountable number of beings, events, and things all sharing a degree of freedom is responsible for the experience what we call the "random." Randomness might get qualified as serendipitous fortune or blessing or as misfortune depending upon whose well-being is impacted by what is called "random." Where there is human behavior and human willfulness one can make judgments about "culpability," but even culpability is set up by a host of mysterious preconditions. If Godly salvation is the cosmic health insurance of living, we can be thankful that Grace comes to us even though we have many preexisting conditions. How's that for an affordable care act?

Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2013

As multi-discursive people we need to have all pathways to insights open and not limit how we are going to be greeted and welcomed to our next step in excellence by a particular lure in our path.  Wisdom as possible insights lurks everywhere; we can we awestruck by the form of a gnarled live oak tree, a swooping raptor, a piece of music, a phrase in a novel, the right spot on the palate, a quip of a friend, an inadvertent over-hearing of someone else's conversation or the smile of a child.  The sublime is an always already possibility if we've learned to turn all of our radar on.

Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2013

With all of the internet match-making sites, there is an effort to aid and assist the event of serendipity of love. The theory is that mutual love is more likely to happen if there are more "viewing" chances. One hopes that if God is love then there is possible in this life enough mutual people-whispering to happen so that everyone was befriended to one's heart content. How can we read our environment today as whispering us in befriending ways? Surely if everyone in this world had a significant other, there would be world peace? Timing is everything and we pray for propitious timing for all today.

Aphorism of the Day,  June 17, 2013

The Gospels portray Jesus as the ultimate People Whisperer to those who needed their lives brought into peaceful order. At the same time he is presented as one who did not whisper his religious opponents and the Roman authorities who were threatened by something other than his therapeutic presence to those who wanted and needed to be whispered to health. The realm or kingdom of Christ is seen as a parallel existence with other more obvious realms. The irony continues today; people can still be whispered by a risen Christ even when the outer realm and kingdoms indicate no peace at all.

Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2013

In what way is history and the Bible writings for entertainment? Only exciting events and people are deemed worthy of memory in literature that becomes public even though 99 per cent or more of life is merely events of the quotidian (so ordinary and everyday) that we don't deem them worthy to remember. History and the Bible are stories about our identities; they make us see ourselves differently and we need to continually ask how they make us see ourselves. Literature and history involve reducing massive amounts of information to "time-lapsed" stories so that we can get the impression in a short viewing of "what happened." And we do not get to know much of what happened about those in history on whom the camera of history writers were not focused. In patriarchal and paternalistic cultures women, children and working class (slaves) did not get to appear much in the history books. So massive amounts of quotidian experiences determining outcomes never got recorded. If Christianity has anything to do with liberation, it would mean that the once marginalized can now be given an equal place in how our stories are to be told in the future.

Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2013

Structuralism was based upon Saussurean lingistics which posited a signifer and a signifed. Post-structuralism came about because of the acknowledgment of not being able get to an unmediated signified; one simply ends up with an endless reference to synonym signifers. So words end up pointing only to other words and not to the "real thing," since "real thing" are also wordsignifers. One can appreciate the post-modern dilemma with words like God and love and hope and justice; they still have meaning, many meanings and different meanings for people who use these words in their experiences. One can appreciate the effort of science to simplify referential language for community agreement but at the same time one should not abandon the worded and aesthetic profundity of using words with feeling tones and moods because people in situ often use words like God, love, justice and hope as the only truly meaningful way to characterize their experiences. Post-modernism is an invitation to mysticism because we are people who are created in how we are significant by Word.

 

Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2013

One can find "fundamentalism" is perhaps a way in which one holds what one has come to regard as true. The insights "appear" to be so unique and so special to a person or to a group that it becomes exclusive. One takes the blessing of an insight and makes oneself or one's group so chosen, that others immediately become the impoverished "unchosen" who don't have the exclusive blessing of such insights. But what is the benefit of such an insight that separates one from humanity in such a judgmental way. Seems like it could be just as well characterized as a Folie à deux..trois,quartre, cinq.........

Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2013

Balancing excesses and austerity require wisdom in life. Excesses arise from the build up of desire that projects upon objects and people in the one's environment. They come easily because excess have the same energy of a pathology: It's easy to do things over which one does not seem to have much control as in "I have the gift of eating endless chocolate." The excess of worship comes from the deep sense of appreciation where one has come to take events of grace so personal that something of excessive devotion is drawn from within and after pinching oneself in disbelief regarding serendipitous grace, one offers prayers and acts of gratitude to Plenitude for coming into the arrangement of harmonic ambiance so as to permit such a state of well-being.

Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2013

Roland Barthes in his book "S/Z" introduced the notion of a writerly reader.  From this notion, I understood how little an author controls one's meanings when one's writes.  The reader is the writer of what is being read while it is being read because the reader is bringing the reader's meanings to the words on the page.  One could extend this notion to what would be called "speakerly listening."  Do we ever hear what someone is really saying or only how we filter it through our own meaning filters?  If we cannot own up to our own meaning filters in acknowledging that we are speakerly listeners, how do we do attentive listening?  Therapeutic listening involves a more intentional exercise, an impossible one, to withhold or practice deferring judgments upon what one's hear in order to let the speaker determine his or her own meanings before one rushes to interact with one's own judgments.  And if one's judgments are not asked for, then they need not be given.  This is a way of honoring a person with an attentive listening for the purposes of allowing a person to release pain through simply speaking.

Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2013

Take note today of the focus of intentional acts that are required to complete issues of life maintenance and work today and the ambient factors that do not grab your immediate attention. Constant sirens, chirping birds, drone of freeway traffic, running water, colors, access to windows and light, etc. The great environment is expressed as living and having our being in God.We can only imagine God as the greatest expansion on a concentric horizon. The smaller concentric environments that surround us seem to make the inaccessible horizon negligible in our knowledge of immediate cause and effect. We experience environment as both spacial and inter-spatial. As spiritual directors of our own lives we need to conduct many kinds of environmental relationships in our daily lives. How do we neutralize an offending factor in our environment? How do we integrate incredible diversity into an experience of beauty? How do we appropriate cacophony as a great hummmmm.....OMMMMMM of meditative support?

Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2013

Go forth and stylize your good news today. Use the typical rhetorical devices of ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos is the appeal to one's character; how we back up our words with our living. Pathos, is appealing to our knowledge of the emotions and sentiments of others; one size does not fit all and so sensitivity to others is needed. Logos is making the reasonable case for our good news. Wisdom is using our accumulated life experience (ethos) and presenting ourselves with emotional intelligence of ourselves and others (pathos) and grounded in accessible common sense (logos) appeals. You can make the case that you are loved by God today and be that agent of love today.

Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2013

If there is a God, God and the very notion of God is left to those who are not God to defend God's reality. One might question the wisdom of the Greatest to entrust the knowledge of divine existence to those who potentially could do it so poorly as to misrepresent the Greatest and cause people to disbelieve. This situation of great Creative Freedom being vulnerable to lesser but true freedom of human beings is our great epic in life. If we limit God to but phrases from the cultural details of the Bible, we can misrepresent the Greatness of a God of Creative Freedom who lures us to honor our lesser freedom through the practice of justice and care.

Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2013

The Psalmist wrote that the Lord God gives justice to those who are oppressed, and food to those who hunger. Skeptics ask how does or is God doing this since oppression and hunger have always existed. If the Lord God is giving justice and food then one must ask serious questions about what is falsifying the reality of those words. Or is it that God is the utopian impossibility of human quest as the structural personal necessity to set the direction of preservation of life because if the direction is toward injustice and hunger with no counter gravity towards goodness, indeed we are doomed.

Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2013

Let us strive to be converted to generosity, not because there are people and causes who let their needs be known to us all of the time; rather let us be converted to generosity for the personal benefit of our own health and heart. Generous people are never poor because they have eyes to see their collective wealthy everywhere and enjoy their wealth without the hassle or anxiety of maintenance. No one can steal the sunrise or sunset from one who takes time to enjoy them as a personal possession. A generous person can help others to discover the wealth that comes from seeing how much is freely bestowed upon us by mere existence itself.

Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2013

The word "style" often has come to mean shallow individualism in manner of expression. It can also mean that one simply has the money to buy the latest models of clothes or any product. In another sense style does not need to mean a showy, shallow individualism for getting crass attention; rather it can be the way in which a person has mobilized the desire of one's life to energize the grace or charisma of one's personality to make truths one's own in very personal and original ways. Style in this sense is like improvisation in jazz music; learning all of the music rules so that one can break them in a profound lyricism. Style can mean to learn lyricism in living as one moves from imitation to invention in one's life of faith. No one can "do" faith exactly like you if you are doing your faith with lyrical "style."

Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2013

Graduation ceremonies are called Commencements. It is a threshold event between one's life in school and the next phase of life. The threshold event is liminal; betwixt and between. The so-call "real world" of finding a job contrasted with the student world means that a significant re-socialization begins to take place in one's life and re-socialization re-brands us in how we have to begin to know ourselves in the future. Baptism is the sacrament of life and continual re-adjustment to know ourselves differently as an individual based upon the community within which we live and the one that provides for the highest vision of who we are and can become. Whether a student or newly hired engineer in one's first post graduate job, the baptismal issue is how to continue to know oneself as loved and gifted within a community and to let the community make its impact upon oneself even as one contributes to the growth in excellence of the community. A blessed commencement to all new graduates!

Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2013

Graduation events in our education systems are perhaps crucial rites of passage in the lives of students and are rightly celebrated. It is good to celebrate achievements in knowledge even though learning is never completely attained and what one has learned has to be returned to and integrated for the rest of one's life. The sacraments are not rules and requirements of the the church; they are rite of passage wisdom events which if properly understood and taught are rituals for the dynamic remembering and renewal of life orientation realities. Too bad the church often has taught them as control of the "herd" and people have thus seen them as requirements for church membership rather than dynamic personal and social faith process in continual life orientation.

Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2013

Monday Recipe?  A dash of blues.  A kick of "get real."  A teaspoon of affirmation.  A tablespoon of classical music.  A sprinkle of lucky kindness.  A cup of drudgery.  A ton of patience.  A pinch of forgiveness.  Drops of smiles.  A quart of friendship. Served with copious amounts of God's grace.

Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2013

What is the difference between having meaning or being meaningful and being true? Are unicorns true in terms of their empirical existence? Are unicorns meaningful for preschool girls? Truth cannot be limited to empirical verification unless one wants to deny poignant meanings of many unseen realities. Certainly if one's unseen realities do not connect one with what can be seen in ways other than fantasy then one's grip on reality and balance in life is in question. Truth may be a multi-faceted diamond with many showings corresponding to the many ways in which we express our humanity, all of which come to language in word and body language. Wisdom is worded pragmatism in doing justice to multi-discursive completeness in human experience.

Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2013

Without being permanent member of Procrastinator's Anonymous, we can be sure that when we arrive at the end of this day there will be some things left undone. The question of anxiety regarding things left undone may have to do with self-expectation and one's specific check list or the expectations of others or the expectations that we have learned to project upon God for what God expects of us. Life involves learning to live with things left undone since we will leave this world "undone" and "unfinished" in the call of the future to always be self-surpassing. What can we tolerate leaving undone today? The poor and the hungry? Justice? Cleaning one's desktop? Assess how you want to go to sleep tonight and the "undone" things of one's life. And don't let perfectionism condemn you; let perfectability invite you.

Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2013

Ecumenical from οἰκουμένη (oikoumene), refers to the efforts to reach unity among Christian churches that have been divided by doctrine and disputes. Interfaith dialogues refers to efforts of people of different faiths to find areas of common interest particularly where people of different faiths live in close proximity. Many atheists witness the behaviors and disunity of people of faith and assert that the God of such people cannot be so great. Chauvinism in thinking that one has the best church, the best faith, and the best interpretation such that one treats other people as inferior or impoverished does not do much to foster good relationship. Some believe in such exclusivity of their views that they actually look forward to a final conflict in the world and they believe that God's intervention will save their little remnant. It is as though they believe in a religious Darwinism where the fittest survive until God intervenes at the last minute for the weakened remnant. One has to ask if one's religious interpretation gives one adequate motivation for living in peace and love with others or whether religious interpretation constricts one to ignorance and a silly separatism of bearing the burden of being uniquely "correct?"

Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2013

Is it an alas "same old, same old" day resigned to quiet desperation of boredom or a reappropriation of the "same old, same old" as the consolidation and integration of all of the traces of yesterday into a routine or ritual that represents the success of cumulative achievement and put on automatic so that you can explore another original relationship with God and this world and your life and the people of your life because it is a new day?  Seize the new day because your success in the "same old, same old" provides the condition for the experience and giving attention to the new.

Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2013

Since we live in an environment of total Plenitude where we really cannot see where it ends and we are tempted to think the endlessness of Infinity which does not have another containing environment; we are faced with incredible overload of things from without and within that impinge upon our existence. We deal with this overload mainly through routine and daily rituals that do not require endless choice. The routines blocks out so much in our potential deluge of incoming data. But then we must create and make our lives interesting in the editorial selection of the incoming and arising stuff and so we create by redacting that which is given to us. That bits of life get process through us individually is how we express our co-creator role with God as Word. The sunrise seen by you and by me may be the same sun but it is a different sunrise in me than it is in you. Celebrate your creating difference today.

Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2013

Our life in the body in time is a symphony of various aging syndromes.  Each and every tissue of our body seems to be on its own clock; even in an adult there is renewal of tissue every 7-10 years but each person has unique renewal time tables of the various cells and tissues in the body.  The symphony of uneven aging that is going on within us at all times is a mystery of life and we continually have to learn to dance with our bodies in what it allows us to do; not trying to do too much or too little as we are always discerning to live according to our birth age (what we possibly can do) not our physical age (the charts of average of what we are told is our absolute range).  Faith with wisdom is the way we conduct the uneven aging symphony of our bodies and we always must be prepared for the mystery of unplanned lyricism of what can happen in our bodies.

Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2013 Memorial Day

They obeyed orders and more, some by choice some by the will of our country.  They did not get to call the shots, but they took the shots too deeply to their deaths.  They were trained for the chaos of war and yet chaos often takes its permanent prisoners.  They trained to be battle ready but how does one really train to be ready to die?  They faced unique context specific horror and they learned to love and think intuitively with their intimate band for whom they were willing to lay down their lives.  And many of them did.  Greater love has no one than to lay down one's life for one's friends.  Since war has meant the immense failure of love, we ask our warrior representatives to negotiate the painful divorce of nations and people and to do so with their lives.  We take not credit for their sacrifice but we feel humbly honored to build a Day of Memorial for them.  It's the very least that we can do.  God rest their souls in a place without war.

Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2013

Einstein's question, "Is the universe a friendly place?" has been answered with a strong "Yes" for a long time before the question was even asked since the confession of the Trinity at the very least implies a dynamic loving personalism as a supreme value of all life.

Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2013

On the eve of Trinity Sunday, let us walk back from the arcane topic of the mystery of the Trinity and see it from the perspective of the Gospel narratives. Jesus knew his guide to be his Father, thus making Jesus, Son. Jesus proclaimed that there would be a continuing relationship with God after he was gone through the Spirit. God, whom we know with different names in the ways in which we relate to God, is not diminished or lessened by a relating Name. A name which may have relevance to a "family" role does not make one any less the completely unique person that one is. Perhaps the issue at the Council of Nicaea was that God, Father, Son, or Holy Spirit cannot be lessened or diminished in the signifying importance in their expressive purposes for how Christians understand God and God's dynamic relating nature.

Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2013

As we near Trinity Sunday, we ponder the process that helped to establish the abbreviated statement of Christian faith known as the the Nicene Creed which is really the revised version more properly called the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 C.E. and in the Western Church with the added phrase "and the Son" for the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Creed is like what we might today call a mission statement defining in abbreviated form a language to guide how New Testament writings were to be interpreted regarding the nature of Christ. It was formed by bishops more steeped in Hellenistic philosophical formation than in Hebraic/Semitic roots, using the notions of substances and essences to speak about the nature of Jesus. The process of the church council set the discourse or the words that were to be proscribed to speak about a Trinitarian God. Looming behind the scene were leaders such as Constantine and others who wanted to lead the dance with members of the various doctrinal parties in various regions of the empire for their own political goals. Very few people who recite the creed today actually use or know what essences and substances are today in the philosophies which govern their everyday discourse. We retain the words of the Creed while we have had the furniture of our philosophical discourses rearranged many times since the Fourth Century.

Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2013

The Gospel of John teaches that the word of Jesus are Spirit and Life. This equivalence of Spirit and Life is insightful; it is consistent with John's foundation of everything being created for us as humans by the Word. This insight is relevant to us to understand our word life as our spirit life. Word can be the most accessible metaphor for how our lives are constituted. Word is even our so called physical lives too since our bodies speak a loud silent language of actions ordered by words and from birth our bodies have a grid of meanings already super-imposed upon them by our worded caretakers. So even in our pre-linguistic state we are the passive recipients of the word structures of those who raise us. Our care takers imprint us with the constitutions of their practice of words in their lives. Word is Spirit; Word is Life. To change one's life, one needs to become very intentional about one's Word-life.

Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2013

Can we imagine all beings as pipes in a great pipe organ with every pipe being different and through this great pipe organ is coursing the wind, the breath, the Spirit as continuously creating the total music of life.  Sometimes depending upon our location and music wisdom we hear dissonance and at other times marvelous harmonies and sometime a sort of random playing of the "same" note.  The Spirit is known in the manifest differences of the world as we listen in the conditions that create aesthetic continuum from the marvelous hum of one note to most incredible complexities of everything thing playing a different note.  We experience cacophonies that only seem to be apparent chaotic events that soon get contrasted with music of every other sort of order.  The air or breath of Spirit keeps us living in a "sound" world.  And I intend every kind of pun.

Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2013

Copper is used for wiring because it is a good conductor of electricity getting from one place to another. In the season of Pentecost try to see the Spirit as this cosmic connectivity between all things who conducts mutual experience of all things. We can hinder excellent conductivity with our choices. A goal in life is to know the connectivity of mutual experience as the excellence of love, compassion, care and stewardship. We are always already mutually connected by Spirit and we have the ability to know such mutual connections as mutually beneficial love.

Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2013

One can look at history of thoughts and ideas as linear or unfolding and this is rather mechanical or one can look at things as always already that keep being discovered again and seem to be new only because of the details of the new context in time. Does the Spirit who moved over the face of the deep and remain latently omnipresence feel slighted that Spirit personhood was only known at Pentecost? Why would we deny that Spirit has always been a contemporary presence?

Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2013

Albert Einstein, in the 20th Century: "The most important question a person can ask is, "Is the Universe a friendly place?” " Christians at First Century Pentecost: "The elementary omni-particle of life is Spirit who is indeed personally friendly, amongst other things like creative, and giving love, joy, hope, faith, gentleness, goodness and self-control. It is rather ironic for mere human beings to project such sublime features upon a Holy Spirit God unless those sublime features pre-existed any human projection of the same.

Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2013

Pentecost is a day that celebrates hearing the Gospel in one's own language. In our day we find it rather naive to assume that because people speak the same language they mean the same thing when they use the same words. There is such heterogeneity within communities which speak the same language that one wonders if people actually are experiencing the same thing. This is true in politics, religion and in science and it was a social phenomenon of change that was noted by Thomas Kuhn using the term "paradigms" to designate people who speak the same language but have nuances of different contextual meanings for the way they use words. Today a major work of Spirit and reconciliation has to do with translation between groups of people who speak the "same" language. Christians today are in fact people who are divided even though they confess a "common" Savior.

Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2013

The Bible as written word has presented some ironies about language; many languages came as the curse of God as related in the story of the Tower of Babel. Jesus is presented as Word made flesh as an insight about how the human world attains order and creation. John's Gospel presents written word as a textual presence from which belief in a invisible Christ can occur. The Acts of the Apostles presents the Day of Pentecost as a day when the Spirit of God can use all languages to present the message of Christ. But Christianity grew because of the then universal lingua franca koine Greek, a left over language from the conquest of Alexander the Great. Later the Roman Church was to elevate Latin as the lingua franca of the church as the sole liturgical language. Language can unite and separate, be used for controlling unity or expressive diversity. And today we as modern people still dance with the Word and language that "brung" us into the way we know our world to be created.

Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2013

The Rock Group of the 60's known as the "Doors" took their name from a William Blake poem.  “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”  Cleansing the doors of perception may be an unattainable ideal or may be what happens in dream space.   Some in the 60's believed that cleansing happened through psychedelic aids.  I do not think the doors of perception are ever cleansed in the sense of there being just one clear window upon the world within or without.  The door of perception is a taxonomic screen though which data from without and from within is processed.  It is more realistic about changing the categories of how we appraise information than simply wishing away all categories.  We cannot get away from Word constituted perception and perceptions embodied in how we live.  Wishing away all categories as a kind of imaginative return to a pre-linguistic oceanic womb state may be a constructive visualization technique for retreat and escape from all of our categories but it should only be rest from data overload just to get back into our fully worded lives after having given our linguistic muscles a little rest.

    

Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2013

Taking on language means that we have become incredible reduction specialists since we are perpetually faced with overwhelming overload of incoming "data."  We reduce and force the data into the words that we have learned.  Potentially everything we can see makes an imprint upon us but we can but focus upon bits that we organize for what we think we need for the moment.  Dreams allow us to live in realm where images are not so organized by spoken or written word and therefore we experience more interesting combinations of information in dreams.  Interesting to note that in ancient biblical cultures and other cultures where there is not general literacy, divine communication came through dreams.  Dreams seem to be so much from somewhere other than our ordinary lives they could easily attain status of the divine, or other world, or another realm or a delta space between worlds where a different kind of insight or communication was known.

Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2013

Ironically, often religious fundamentalists and atheists share something in common; they both limit truth and meaning to literal phrases while denying the expansive multidiscursive meanings and truths of language that relate to the many ways human  beings experience the quest for excellence. People of faith should not get caught making the wrong defense of their faith for the wrong reason.

Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2013

The events of the past are never empirical because as we relate the words about them, they are no longer here.  And everything before our eyes is rapidly becoming the immediate past tense much as looking at a river and assuming one is looking at the same water; oops, the water I was staring at has already gone downstream, the current flowing water only looks like what has already flowed past.

Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2013

The closest that anyone can ever get to a person is in fact when one actually "is" another person. In the gestational 9 months a person to be gets to be mom and mom is that person to be. One might even say that the nine months of gestation is the Garden of Eden from which all get evicted at birth. Happy Mothers Day, Moms, we were all once "you" (for around 9 months).

Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2013

With all of the incoming data that we receive today that gets sorted by our internal system of classification is there the possibility that something new will happen that will baffle our preconceived set of classifications and become the providentially Sublime to our lives today in opening to something new and cause a ripple effect in all of our categories of analysis such that from here on we will have to see the world differently? May such new doors of perception open today.

Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2013

On our taxonomic grids which categorize all incoming information from without and from within, the grid categories mean that we often have "bad" guy categories.  Some of short duration and some of longer.  One should not flatter oneself that one is "universally" loved or has only "good" designations on all other people's taxonomic grids; if one does it probably means one has not been exposed enough to enough people to be able to "disappoint" and gain an unfavorable status classification.  In our long term categories of classification we have those who for various reason are repugnant to us.  We may see that people with former classification of good can move to bad to good to bad to so-so.  If one is living closely in relationship and in family one has to go in and out of favorable status for each other because there is the dynamic of forgiveness that has to be operative for proactive relationships to maintain and survive.   Someone with a "bad rating" on our taxonomic grid who is not in our life can just make us a despiser from a distance and we let public figures in politics serve that role for us all of the time.  Someone with a "good rating" on our taxonomic grid who is not in our everyday life may indicate that we are a fan from a distance.  The psycho-therapeutic notion of transference is operative in the construction of our taxonomic grids of interpretation of others.  Sadly, some people have to fulfill the role of being in our "bad" categories so that we can feel good about ourselves in our own situation in life.  Such transference dynamic is a coping mechanism.  It does behoove us for our own emotional maturity to constantly ask ourselves about those who fulfills the "bad" role on our taxonomic screen, people whom we know and people who we are aware of in the public life.  Those who fulfill the "bad" role reveals to us our own taxonomic grid.

Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2013

If reality cannot avoid being interpreted through our communal and individual taxonomic grids that are in place to assign meaning in the filtering of information that we receive through our use of language, then the major issue in changing our life has to do with learning how to interpret or read differently.  How do we change the taxonomic grids through which we interpret life?  Sometimes they get changed through life experience in events of trauma or loss.  Through trial and error we find that we cannot force a proverbial "square" experience through our existing "round hole" grid on our taxonomic interpretive screen.  With experience we can learn to make our taxonomic screen more flexible to "incoming" experience and find more congruence between how we read life and what is actually happening to us.  Changing our taxonomic grids upon our interpretive screen is a phase of "repentance=education=transformation" because repentance in Greek is metanoia=the after mind or the new mind constitution that enables us to act differently and achieve the change towards the excellence which we seek.

Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2013

We are thrown into the carnival of word and language today. We don't even have to buy a ticket to get in; it has already gotten into us through and through. How will we interact with the carnival of language today? We will probably use language and be used by it today without being conscious of it. Our bodies are being choreographed by patterns previously learned but there is plenty of opportunity for us to do improvised behaviors with our body language today. What will those improvisations be? Toward excellence? Will we do anything today to move in degrees from being passively used by previous language possession and rote copy of previous patterns or stand in awe of the ways other use language or will we take steps to activate our own Voice today and articulate the gift of our lives to the situations of our lives today?

Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2013

The most ironic judgment is "judge not lest you be judged." A judgment about judgment. In another Gospel, Jesus said, "If I judge, my judgments are just." I guess one could make "just judgments" but it is impossible to make judgments without interpretation and so judgments will follow the way in which a person interprets a situation or a person. And we cannot avoid interpretation; our interpretations are full of our own training and politics. It could be that "judge not" has the nuance of not declaring someone as worthless or worthy of life because their immediate inconvenience to one's own taste or enterprise.

Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2013

St. Paul referred to the struggle against "principalities and powers in high places." This could be a reference to the functions in language of how power and control actually comes to work on people in any given situation and it is not easy to understand the interplay of all of the forces of how language is used to shape what actually happens in an event. The crucifixion of Jesus is presented as an interplay between Roman propaganda goals and the Jews trying to make political compromise living with their land occupied. The Gospels present the attempt to make meaning of principalities and power using language to name unseen forces that work behind seen events. The Gospels which name the highest forces as Father, Son and Spirit seem to indicate a blatant counter-logic: God is with the poor, the weak, the helpless, the obviously social marked sinner, the sick, the foreigner, the child, the infant. Now after a history of being with "empires" most Christian peoples are not very good at reading the Gospels from the experience of being on the margins of wealth and power.

Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2013

Did you ever think of the Bible as attaining significance because it was early writing in communities of few readers and it represented a technology of memory where oral tradition could be fixed into permanent place by text upon the page (papyrus scroll/codices)? Ancient texts provide the impression that things from the past live on into the future with a textual immortality even though what is completely lost are the specifics of the actual context of the writing and the editing. It takes much faith to believe that meanings retain exact today correspondence in words that have been read for thousands of years. Too many people believe that biblical words have self-evidential meanings which you can only truly know if you belong to the "correct" community of interpreters of self-evidential meanings. Such communities can say if you don't get the self-evidential meaning then you don't have the right Spirit of interpretation. How convenient to reduce Bible reading to church administration.

Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2013

We may be often like proverbial kids sailing on the ocean and when a great wave splashes water with a sardine into the bow of boat proudly exclaim that we've captured the ocean. We may be so proud and excited about discovering our seeming personal and serendipitous part of the ocean that we begin to overrate our experience of "our" ocean as universally valid and encompassingfor everyone else. The adults on the boat may chuckle at our loss of the ocean because of our "puddle." In religion our group experience can become but puddles to account for community solidarity and administration of "church order" but when administration and our feeble abbreviations of God become chauvinistically exclusive and prescriptive we have been tricked to replace the ocean with our puddle.

Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2013

Our fearful devotion to our limited affinities fools us into a false security of knowing what we like and prefer and thus liking what and who we know often means we cannot break free to love freely beyond our affinity and comfort level.  The result is that we can always feel plugged up, clogged up because our deep desire as a sublime gift does not have enough outlet just servicing our limited affinities.  Sadly our confessional communities teach us to love stingily to the hurt of the flow of love that is given without limitation.  Love expressed as justice in our society has become to mean work with only for those with whom we agree.  Love and justice as mutual compromise for the common good and as indication of the mutual conversion that takes place in relationship has been lost.

Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2013

Imitation, it is said, is the first step in invention. Choosing models to follow occurs within the constellation of word paradigms within which we live. We begin by "parroting" and "copying" others who represent excellence for us. Invention ultimately means internalizing what we learn from our mentors and building our own reservoir of words in the place where all of our words forms a collective place of what the future manifestations of word combinations can be in our lives in our word and deed. We seek be be life artists in articulating from our own reservoir of word possibilities in our body language and oral and written word use. Word becomes uniquely flesh in you and when you articulate word in deed and all other language products, you are creating by adding to the public the current event of your life. We are a blend of what seems to be on automatic in our behaviors and what we consciously articulate. By feeding our word reservoir with good data we can change our unconscious and automatic word behavior as well as build the palette of future word choice for conscious articulation. Go forth and know that word speaks you today even as you also can be a conscious artist with the words of your life today.

Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2013

Time for us is like lots of concentric spirals; the inner coils represent things that get repeated with greater frequency while the outer coils are things that happen once a year or decade. There are also unique and unrepeatable events which are not apart of the spirals of time but they create their own spiral of remembrances. That which begs to be remembered creates a cycle of memory. Certain events by their nature become personal or communal events of memory. History gets made and data for the eventual eulogy arises. History is the narrative of clothes for the proverbial invisible person.

Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2013

Where does creative synthesis lie today in the midst of so much routine? How can things done before become the occasion for freshness? Today is not to be a day when we go the frig of life for yesterday's left over from which has left vital energy. How do we access today as a new creation, remade , not just sustained? It could be that discovering just one new thing, one new idea will cause everything to need to be rearranged and engage the mind in creative ways until the next insight demands a further new arrangement. Look for the new reorganizing insight in life today.

Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2013

As human beings we have the mental software to simulate anticipated situations as a sort of practice run. This same simulation feature of our psyche helps us to bridge the impossible tasks of knowing exactly how another person feels with the gift of empathy. At the same time, this gift of simulation can also be over-bearing in assuming we know others too well and encroaching upon the uniqueness of their experiences. Nothing worse than having the story of your "four root canals" diminished by someone who says, "That's nothing, I've had six root canals." Wonderful gifts can be misused; empathy that becomes used to minimize or trivialize someone else's uniqueness is hardly caring.

Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2013

As humans we cannot help but anthropomorphize since we cannot but "see" things from the human perspective. Even when animals, angels and deity speak, they do so to us in human ways. We use extra-human qualifications to rate and place value upon human experience and it so happens that we call "divine" that which is the superlative experience of humanity.

Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2013

The pragmatic purpose of scientific discourse is different from the function of religious discourse. In scientific discourse there is an effort for more precision in agreement so that replication of task can yield same results. In religion as in aesthetics, the function of language chronicles the unique serendipity of the individual's experience. It is meaningful because of its uniqueness. You and I can have similar experiences of boiling water; we cannot have Paul's experience on the Damascus road. We must accept our own unique faith experience and the language that we use to share "uniqueness." Sharing uniqueness is oxymoronic but that is the nature of religious discourse.

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Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2013

An aphoristic way of living is the confession of the moment unsure about how and why one has actually retained the traces of former knowing and accepting of the insight of configured words to create a new prism of faith to claw for another insight. One is humbled by the magnitude of the Greater Environment, inner and outer and can only confess to be contained by the Container and sputter a phrase as another attempt at "Wow!"

Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2013

Being an Episcopalian is an orientation in life that is less about final or absolute understanding of God, Bible, the faith or Creeds than it is about the process of growing in how one is constituted in having and expressing faith by the various discursive practices that comprise the use of language in mediating our existence.   We do this as our current screen of words with meanings mingles all of the words of our life to evoke insights to get us through this day.   That we do not do it alone but within our commitment to fellow persons of faith within a worshiping community is what gives us our Episcopal flavor.

Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2013

In our life orientation, literally everything is in relationship with us and we cannot be aware of but a tiny portion the data of the universe that arrives to us and is processed by our filters of consciousness formed by our language use environments. The habits of our thinking routines can help us process information and consolidate it for effective action. Some times we may need to "change the filters" by which I mean we need to adjust the grids of how we read and interpret information so that we can process and consolidate the information for perhaps leaving a rut of personal actions that no longer is adequate to a new vision of excellence. We are always on the look out for new models of excellence so that we might conform our interpretive grids to our highest vision. Often people of faith believe that Bible locks into place a single correct interpretation that once found leaves one on a treadmill of sameness. The Bible really is read on the open road of changing environments and the biblical principles of love and justice need to be applied in new situations in new and creative ways. Trying to stop cultural/technological artifact time as the Amish have tried to do will only delay for generations some traumatic future catching up in finding ways for the Gospel to engage contemporary culture.

Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2013

In our life orientation within the shell of life, we probably need the irritants that interrupt our "normal" schedule in order to force upon us new creative responses. Lots of might have beens would not have become actual if we had not been required to respond in new ways. We may not like surprises but surprises are why history is written. Eventful times are times for building faith muscles.

Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2013

As we seek wisdom in life orientation for today we might ponder the irony of how more is often experienced as less in the aging process. In terms of sheer quantity of occasions of life one would think quantity would equal excellence and yet we find as we age each part of our being has its own code for determining longevity in quality functioning. In the symphony of the parts of our being, some players drop out sooner than others and other players can no longer hit the high notes or play forte fortissimo (fff). Faith involves tweaking the nuances of quality of life when quantity of years becomes a looming tyrant. The full orchestra of all of our parts of being may have to be down-sized to a chamber orchestra and then to an ensemble as we keep adjusting the score to the "players" who show up. But the music of our lives goes on and hopefully with the appreciating grace of acceptance.

Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2013

If I were to re-visit the Delphic oracle, I would use a different tense in the injunction, "Know thyself." This injunction may imply that one could actually achieve this endless task. It should be restated as "Always be in the process of knowing oneself," which in a postmodern world would mean the constant awareness of how one has been and is constituted by the words of one's life. One is never finished in knowing how Word is made, is being made, will be made flesh in one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2013

If life orientation for an individual is complex imagine the complexities involved in successively larger community orientation:  Family, town, city, state, nation and any other social group.  Recently in our national life orientation, we have had to deal with people who from the mystery of evil inflicted death and suffering upon the innocent. There has been successful pursuit to interdict offending persons through incredible cooperation. One could pray for more intense concern about other common good vital issues in our congressional life orientation for the good of the people.  When intensively individual "good" clogs the process in attaining effective common good, then there is the failure of community faith for an adequate promotion of the "worthwhileness" of life.  It is ironic that we allow ourselves to be regulated in some spheres of life based upon actuarial statistics but in areas where economic interest groups hold sway we allow unhealthy risks.  The faith perspective of our national orientation needs to promote general and rational programs for the "worthwhileness of life."

Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2013

One could call the life of faith the quest to have integrative wisdom in Life Orientation. What are the current elements of one's life orientation which require a "life chef-ery" in fixing the current food of sustenance to fulfill  life maintenance tasks with enough creative stewardship to have enough left over to enrich the life orientation of others?

Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2013

Keeping faith in light of probabilities that indicate the unfolding of events that are not favorable involves not feeling "picked on" by that which is not favorable or blaming or accept unnecessary blame.   With mature faith we hope that we can move to accept what we need to accept because we can't change it but resist fatal passivity to the things that are informed by logical probability.

Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2013

 Soter or Salus or salvation is really holistic heath whereby one hopes that competing systems do no harm to each other.  Health regimes include avoiding competitions of systems, e.g. the systems of germs, bacteria, viruses and cancers.  We try to inform ourselves to be conscious managers of our daily salvation, aka, holistic health.  Even has health trends change (eggs bad, eggs okay, eggs good, etc) the attitude of taking care of ourselves is how we participate in our own salvation as it is known in our daily lives.  We obviously  come into situations when one system become detrimental to another and when the community of “stuff” that goes into comprising a human being is threatened to be irreparably harmed beyond an actuarial average age expectancy then salvation becomes an afterlife matter and then in faith we must turn to a higher possibility of Preservation.

Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2013

The event in Boston yesterday once again instantiates the permissive freedom that is abroad in this world. Evil events at their impact arrogate to themselves a seeming greater authority because they are not normal and uncommon in the midst of an ocean of kindness that we "take for granted." There was so much good will, community joy, patriotism, fun, celebration, kids, running for charities, people of the world together celebrating and congratulating each other, all present in Boston yesterday and added to all of these was the intensive kindness of heroism in response to the couple of events of evil. Evil only continues to mark itself by its intense deprivation from the normalcy of Goodness. We celebrate Goodness and the life of 8 year old Martin whose life with us was finished at the finish line, terribly untimely. May he rise in glory! May his mom and sister recover and receive mystical comfort.

Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2013

On tax day one ponders the common good that has been done because Judeo-Christian tradition has influenced modern governments about their obligation to provide Health, Education and Welfare for those in need and infrastructure for all. Drive the roads, the bridges and turn on lights from hydro-electric dams; think about all of the products that move on our roads. Visit a National Park that has preserved incredible beauty and made it accessible. Embrace taxes as a patriotic privilege and as serving justice even if it is in imperfect and as yet incomplete ways. And perish the thought of going off-shore with one's business and money to avoid helping the common good. Tax day is a day to be proud about what we can do together.

Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2013

Is Christianity a landless religion? To be universal implies landlessness. It means that it is tied to universal facets of what it is to be human really well through love and justice. Love and justice always need people who live in any land to bring these notions into the details of their lives in their land and culture. The details will always be imperfect because the deeds of love and justice always require more in the future. Following Christ means never being finished in the work of love and justice. Love and justice creates a topographical land of the heart and this is not limited to geography.

Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2013

What is the big disclaiming elephant that is always in the room of knowing something? What I know or experience is always "my knowing" and "my experience" and so it is always my interpretation of what I perceive or experience. The apparent sharing agreement of what two or more experience is having the faith of an "as if" objective seeing or knowing the same thing. It takes more faith to hold things as objective and held in common than to believe or be loyal to one's subjective view. Though we may want to maintain that one cannot hold a subjective opinion about gravity; not believing in gravity as I step off the ledge may cause me to at least admit that the ground was rising up to me before it hit me. That the ground hits me when I "fall" is an opinion on gravity. The religious point might be is that everyone who is proud of one's objective orthodox position holds that position in very individual and interpreted ways. If I am more "orthodox" than thou it is but another form of "I know what I like and I like what I know."

Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2013

Even though physical proximity may be an indication of intimacy does physical proximity necessarily mean closeness?  The absence that makes the heart grow fonder creates a sense of experienced closeness in absence even while two people in close proximity can be the "taken for granted" two ships passing in the night sort of "absence" in closeness.  Is there a presence in absence?  What about this "presence in absence" foisted upon Christians under the narrative of resurrection, ascension and Spirit?  Is this presence in absence a "Brooklyn Bridge" that has been sold and bought for two thousand years?  Rate intimacy: Face to face and able to converse.  Memories of face to face and conversing.  Hearing someone who was face to face and conversed with the third party.  Having the writings of one who was face to face and conversed with a third party.  Writing from reports about people who were face to face and converse with a third party.  Reading the writings of those who were first hand or second hand to a third party.  Having a visionary experience with audible voices from one who purports in the message to be one who used to be seen and heard.  Having the experience of a presence of a Spirit of one who once was seen and heard.  Being told that someone guaranteed under certain eating conditions of an intentional gathering that his presence could be known in eating designated and particular bread and wine.  Does the mystical presence of Christ partake of a similar order of what we might call the mystical patriotic presence of one's country when one's sees the flag or sings the national anthem?  How is it that one can be moved to tears for the mystified presence of one's country?  Is esprit d'corps a real presence?  A true presence?  What makes it a presence, the emotions or sense of closeness?  What is the nature of Presence in what might be called "mystical body" traditions?  Is the presence guaranteed in an apparent experience or are such "apparent" emotions of a presence rather serendipitous to specific occasions?  If such "presence" is not apparent to all in the same way at any given time what does that say about the nature of the presence?  Can one be engaged in a way that is called love with someone who lived 2000 years ago?  What indeed is the nature of "presence?"

Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2013

We are live witnesses to what happens in our immediate surroundings and it is amazing how much our immediate surroundings involve virtual information now. I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a "virtual tree?" Stop and smell the "virtual roses" today. Go to the concert and watch the "virtual musician" on the big screen. Go to the football game and watch the "virtual game." Read virtual "aphorisms" on facebook. My vacation was ruined because I lost my "virtual experience" when my camera was lost. My real friend is sitting beside me; that same real friend is a virtual being to whom I'm texting in my smart phone. Virtuality, hyper-text is another way in which Word has morphed in the way in which our subjectivity is constituted today. And the Word became Virtual and dwelled among us. We can become religious Chicken Little "sky is falling" doomsayers or we can appreciate how endlessly discursive we are and will continue to be. Love and Justice and Faith are always looking for new discursive practices of all sorts. Let's not be threatened; let's seize the day!

Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2013

Eastertide is a time to ponder how the great absence of the physical Jesus is opportunity to know the real presence of the risen Christ. It could be that we remain in spiritual infancy like a baby who won't believe in mom unless mom is seen and present when we make all of the Gospel events into real and precisely known historical events rather than the method of parable to teach the soul how to let the Christ-nature be through us rather than focus on an "as-if" external Jesus of 2000 years ago. This sort of presumption of knowing things with precise modern scientific insights which we import from our own era has created the idols of fundamentalism and has detracted from piercing the purpose of the Gospels as spiritual manuals as one knows the life of Christ born in oneself through the encounter with the Sublime.

Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2013

We are live witnesses to what happens in our immediate surroundings and it is amazing how much our immediate surroundings involve virtual information now. I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a "virtual tree?" Stop and smell the "virtual roses" today. Go to the concert and watch the "virtual musician" on the big screen. Go to the football game and watch the "virtual game." Read virtual "aphorisms" on facebook. My vacation was ruined because I lost my "virtual experience" when my camera was lost. My real friend is sitting beside me; that same real friend is a virtual being to whom I'm texting in my smart phone. Virtuality, hyper-text is another way in which Word has morphed in the way in which our subjectivity is constituted today. And the Word became Virtual and dwelled among us. We can become religious Chicken Little "sky is falling" doomsayers or we can appreciate how endlessly discursive we are and will continue to be. Love and Justice and Faith are always looking for new discursive practices of all sorts. Let's not be threatened; let's seize the day!

Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2013

Eastertide is a time to ponder how the great absence of the physical Jesus is opportunity to know the real presence of the risen Christ. It could be that we remain in spiritual infancy like a baby who won't believe in mom unless mom is seen and present when we make all of the Gospel events into real and precisely known historical events rather than the method of parable to teach the soul how to let the Christ-nature be through us rather than focus on an "as-if" external Jesus of 2000 years ago. This sort of presumption of knowing things with precise modern scientific insights which we import from our own era has created the idols of fundamentalism and has detracted from piercing the purpose of the Gospels as spiritual manuals as one knows the life of Christ born in oneself through the encounter with the Sublime.

Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2013

The closest that one can get to another person is through words. What happens to words when they go into us? We know something of what happens when we take in food and how the food is transformed to become part of us; words do the same but perhaps at an even more intimate level than food. Words become forms of energy in our thinking and word become diffuse in our bodies in how they guide the actions of our lives both in unconscious redundant patterns of body memory but also in conscious new decisive choice. We cannot get closer to anything than word and word is inscribed like a text all over our insides and outsides. Word is made flesh and word is not seen in us in the process but word is our spirit and soul-life with regard to having any access at all to what we call spirit and soul-life. We have to get used to the circular self-reflexive habits of words endlessly signifying other words and not actually "things" in themselves, through a discursive practice. If you understand the above, you might catch a glimpse of post-modern deconstructionism. Deconstruction reveals the very habit of language to endlessly signify itself as a way of acknowledging that the present is fresh and new and "different" from the traces of the past even though the same word of today and the word of past trace seem to fix a meaning.

Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2013

Relative functional adequacy to surf the drudgery of routine, embrace the new catching event and always knowing that I share this world with lots of people who look for relative functional adequacy in their lives today too. Relative functional adequacy may not seem too exciting but it does express a modest faith and being lost in knowing how to compare oneself with anybody else.

 Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2013

If there is always a future, then doubt will be a necessary "virtue" of living. The future can always verify or falsify some currently held belief. Doubt is always a form of self-doubt; what we always put in question is the adequacy of what we think that we know when we know it. We must always sort out "my certitude" about God in the way that I think that I am certain, from the self certitude that the Divine Self possesses to which I have no full privileged access. Always questioning the adequacy of my knowing of any sort would seem to be the humble position to acknowledge.

Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2013

Does the safe predictable probabilities of this day have room for a surprise?  The surprise of the in breaking of the Sublime?  The gotcha of the Uncanny?  Underneath the vestige of what probable object is the Sublime lurking?  Will it be an eagle in the sky, a piece of music, a smile of a baby or friend, a memory that had no logic to return at a certain moment?  The Sublime can be missed if one is only looking for home runs and hat tricks and not the subtle.  Be ready for the subtle Sublime.

Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2013

One falsehood that we often accept is that death itself is not part of continuous creativity.  Though one can appreciate a preference for butterflies over cocoons and caterpillars; our preference cannot negate the creative process.

Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2013

The future can only be a future vision as it is always arriving to become now and not yet. Redundant traces have us on automatic to receiving the future as now even as in faith we "plan" for what is not yet. The not yet beyond our lives involves faith in the great Preserver who is One who is endlessly Creative.

Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2013

Resurrection is one of the words that was needed to explain how the Jesus movement survived and grew. When an uncanny force seems present in unlikely transformation of individual persons and the resilience of a persecuted and oppressed group of people an out-of-this-world phenomenon becomes the metaphor of choice. Why did not the Jesus Movement end with his death and departure? They had no army, no government and no organization. Resurrection life and Spirit become the words of choice to account for the experience.

 Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2013

The resurrection would invite two lists, a bucket list and a post-bucket list. What would be on your post-bucket list? Meeting Abraham Lincoln or St. Francis?

Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2013

Hope is the reality of having too many choices because we always have a future. In our youth we are enticed by all of the choices that Hope offers us and much like an actor who can play endless roles without being the person of the role, the actor accepts his or her own role of being an actor. The body does not have enough time or space to do all that Hope puts before us and we seek wisdom to choose what can creatively and pragmatically engage us and sustain us in our situation even as we supplement our lives with endless avocations of interests inspired by Hope's curiosity. I often tell people to be willing to be surprised by what Hope has for one at another age. At 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and beyond. Life experience creates new situations for Hope's products to attain actual events of wonder in knowing what the energy of Hope can do through a person at any time. Let Hope be the natural spiritual source of life energy today.

Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2013

An old man lived by the river and spent the day at the river filling a cup of water from the river; holding it for a few moments and then pouring it back into the river.  A curious little boy asked why he was doing it.  He said by taking a cup of water and then pouring it back in he was mixing early water with later water even as the newest water was connected with the oldest water.

We dip now into the resurrection river; we pour back into the resurrection river and we know that origin of the river and the meeting of the river with the delta are happening in synchrony even though our single location on the river makes it seem otherwise.  We are blessed to mingle the waters of the resurrection tradition as they flow past us.

Aphorism of the Day, March 30 2012

We are born within a community and so other people witness our existence. When we leave the community of the living unless we are really famous the memory of us diminishes. Think of how many people who have existed in the history of the world who are not remembered. Is not being remembered, not being valued? Can we believe in ONE with the greatest memory of all who witnesses our lives like no one else and values us enough to commit us to that omniscience? Since ultimately all efforts of human preservation fail, can we believe in one whose memory is so capable as to be able to preserve us? Living on in the memory of God is eternal life and the ultimate preservation. I would like to think that all of creation contains memorial traces of everything and everyone that has happened in the past so that nothing is lost, it is only continuously reconstituted.

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2013

A Friday, designated as Good is a retroactive designation. How could the loss of the best friend in people's lives by means of a cruel spectacle of torture be regarded to be good? Such a cruel death undergoes quite a transformation when actual history became providence in the subsequent spiritual methodology of people who discovered the power of a Presence of someone whom death could not kill out of the world. Today we stop to ponder the moment of death that could not make Jesus forgotten. He was to be dynamically remembered forever as Christians' most poignant proof of God's closeness.

Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2013

Maundy Thursday could be an event to prefigure the end of world hunger. Instead of making food into minimal religious sacred objects to venerate, how about the endless expanding of people eating together in groups so as to make sure that everyone is accounted for in having enough to eat? It has become much easier to reduce bread and wine to holy objects for the support of the institution than to see the Eucharist become the actual solution to world hunger. When people are hungry there is something very life giving about food; when people are excessively full of food then it becomes obvious that they are living too much by bread alone and not by the word of God which involves teaching us the body language, the ethics, to share with all until all have enough.

Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2013

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? A present effort of imagination about an event that is recorded with four different versions in the Gospels. We can only be "there" in the current version of our own imaginations of this event. Why do we focus our imagination upon the event of death instead of trying to imagine the many more moments in the life of Jesus? The predominance of the length of the Passion Narratives relative to the rest of the words of the Gospel forces us to fixate and ponder the death out of proportion with the rest of the life of Jesus. The way in which the Gospels present a performance liturgy of the Passion and Resurrection suggests a dramatic visualized spiritual methodology done in a poignant presentation that caters to the visual rather than to the Greek philosophical mind given to abstraction of ideas from narrative events. The Passion/Resurrection narratives suggest that the first intended audiences consisted of many people who did not read.

Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2013

It is not unusual for children to ask about the death of "God" in the Good Friday event. As we ponder the Passover lamb and the meaning of sacrifice we should remember that the prophets and the Psalmist remind us that God does not need the blood of sacrifice and if that is the case why is death involved? Let us embrace the notion that the Passover lamb is in the context of ameal and this celebrates the relationship of God with people. The association of the death of Jesus and the Christian sacrament of Eucharist means that Christians understood the life of Jesus to be a celebration of God's relationship with people. St. Paul urged that we become living sacrifice to emphasize the point, just as the prophets said that God asks that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before God. The only thing that gets bloodied in being a living sacrifice is the "ego being checked at the door."

Aphorism of the Day, Holy Monday, March 25, 2013

Holy Week to Easter is the story form of the process of transformation. One of the most significant transformation that we can make is on the screen of interpretations of each other. We need to see each other differently to love each other better. How do we get to the place of forgiving each other for being "ignorant" of each other or not knowing each other in helpful ways. How do we get to the view, "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do?"

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2013

Often in the views of people of different religious persuasion of each other it is common that they see each other as hypocrites. So when religious people judge each other as hypocrites what is the answer? The only answer is to be a hypocrite in recovery. HA, not a laugh, but Hypocrites Anonymous.

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2013

When my version of you doesn't fit you and your version of me does not fit me and when everyone's version of everyone else is totally individual, how do we actually live together? We have faith to give ourselves over to some community discourse that guides us in some common tasks. In this era of immediate communication and the proliferation of discourse possibilities it seems harder to find a community discourse to unite groups toward effective actions. Discourse perhaps is working in the most pragmatic way in science and in the economy when products have to be produced on schedule for a market. Religion and Politics have discourses with intangible topics and seem to be less practical in their utility. We can see how political discourse has ended in our current stalemate. In religious community one can find that the hierarchies who maintain the discourse do so in ways that are often at odds with the "vox populi" of lay people. The experience of the sublime is incredibly flexible to new details of current life; hierarchies and institutions tend to fix the sublime to ancient details even when it is evident that God has moved on to meet us in fresh ways. Just note: end of slavery, women's right, liturgy in common language, married clergy, women clergy. Where and how the sublime experience of God is manifest cannot be limited or exhausted by a particular detail of culture. Discernment of God's Spirit doing new things is very important.

Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2013

When my version of you doesn't fit you and your version of me does not fit me and we have to work together what do we do?  We assume good motives from each other.  We look at personalities differences, perhaps using the Myers-Briggs for some insights on how and why we might process the "same" experience differently.  And it could be that I'm a tuba player and you're a violinist.  We're playing the same musical piece but we have different parts, so to speak,  but we've got to learn to make music together and be thankful that the one Spirit inspires different gifts.

Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2013

If every person has one's own version of the world then theoretically each person has the authority of "one." This would be true democracy except authority becomes "mystified" in group identity and social process allows a person to aggregate authority beyond an individual version of the world. Authority also gets quantified in economic terms: Why is it that a person with a billion dollars has more authority than a person with a mere thousand dollars? Dignity of each person in idealistic terms is based upon the horizonal equity symbolized by people in a circle. Differences in human conditions create hierarchies of all sorts which is why Jesus said that if one was on a "higher rung" of authority, it was their duty to serve those of on a lower rung. Power was given to serve. Service transforms power. Service redeems the natural tendency toward the differences of hierarchy. If the hierarchy created by differences can be known as mutually beneficial relationships then hierarchy is redeemed.

Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2013

We sit in the "control room" of our perceptual universe in the captain's chair looking through the logistic screen of classification of everything and everyone and those grids of classification have been formed from our experience. How can those classification grids get changed so that we can act differently? A senator finds out his son is gay and he is converted to accept the legal freedom of his son to be with a person whom he loves. He had a conversion, a revaluing of his grid. Loving his son without full knowledge of his son and continuing to love his son when he attained a fuller knowledge of his son meant that he was able to generalize to all people who share a deep attribute of life with his son. Perfect love casts out fear and sometimes as more knowledge "comes out," love can cast out the ignorance that drives so many hurtful prejudices. God's Love seems much too patient in converting the ignorance and fear in humanity.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2013

How do we improve each other's versions of each other? Do personality difference cause people to have less than ideal versions of each other such that they want to avoid each other? Does the fact that some people have long memories and others have short memories affect our versions of each other? Does how we act and speak with each other determine how we see each other? We may be people divided by common spoken language and so not only do we have to learn to translate what we say to each other, we have to translate who we are to each other so that we don't impute bad motives to each other. When serendipity of harmonic convergence does not just happen between people, human relation is a major work of life unless we choose to live as hermits. We begin by assuming that God's version of all of us is Love.

Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2013

If my version of you does not fit your version of you and your version of me does not fit my version of me, do we call off community being fixed onto some certain knowledge about self and the other? By being too certain of our versions of self and the other we may not admit the mystery of allowing that we are not completely knowable and that the future still has many insights to run through both of us to give us new insights for living together. If we can accept the mystery of self and others as the mystery of being open to surpassability we may find that God has always met us on the horizon.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2013

Our heart's desire may be guilty and restless and thwarted and narcissistic and depressed and addicted because of the intense focus of it upon things and people in the wrong way at the wrong time or in hopes of being pleased with our own reflection. The experience of unrequited desire because suddenly idols in the form of people or things do not seem to have their reward is an education to us that our desire is made for God but God is not "up there;" rather God is the continual expanding universe of time as the horizon of hope of our future and resurrection is the ability to live in the imagination beyond when we think that we will have a body location from which to see anything at all.

Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2013

What will have happened by the time we go to bed tonight? For one, I will have written the question, "What will have happened by the time we go to bed tonight?" Secondly, I will have reported that I wrote the question, "What will have happened by the time we go to bed tonight?" Thirdly, I will have reported that I reported......you get the drift. Let us hope that I will have done more things than spin by wheels in reporting what I reported or it will be but a writing version of the movie "Ground Hog Day." What will have happened is the future anterior into which we live and let it be Hope for us today. Let's hope by the end of the day, you will have known that you are loved, cared for and prayed for today.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2013

Idus Martii or Idus Martiae, a day of infamy in the English language because of the soothsayer in Shakespeare warning, "Beware the Ides of March." It was the day of assassination of Julius Caesar. A mid-month day on the ancient Roman calendar and determined by the full moon and an observance day for Jupiter. Can events happening upon a certain day create fateful dread? We use anniversary time to mark or give value to special days of the year and there are days that are marked in infamy: 9-11, D-Day, Pearl Harbor, November 22nd, Good Friday. There are community days and personal days of "bad remembrance" such as the passing of a loved one. Not many of us are marking today with a remembrance for the late Julius Caesar and so a calendar also needs a living community of those who remember to keep the particular days alive. As survivors and contemporaries of a particular event pass from this life and their next generation passes what happens to the events of infamy? It is interesting to note the staying power of Good Friday as an event of infamy in the lives of a rather large number of people today. Ponder the lives of Julius Caesar and Jesus? Would you even of thought about Julius Caesar today if I had not mentioned him?

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2013

There has been theological discussion in the past about the change in being that takes place at an ordination, sometimes called an ontological change. How is Pope Francis different from being just Cardinal Jorge? It could be that the change is mainly a sociological ontological change. What changes us most is the way in which a community regards us. The Group "spirit" really does change every member including those in leadership. Really small children and outsiders to the group's leadership designation don't understand what all of the fuss is about. And Jesus said the kingdom of God was mainly about the child-like.

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2013

One can survey Christian Communions that still retain the vestiges of being Empire religions. Strict hierarchies with air tight canon law were borrowed from the genius of the Roman Empire's military and legal efficiency to consolidate the success of the Christian movement that went from being a small band of people in Palestine to a massive takeover of the religious life of the Roman Empire. Paternal systems work when the serf on the bottom is uneducated and has the Lord of the manor make all of the decisions for him including whether he should be baptized or not. The Enlightenment and the end of feudalism brought the rise/return of the value of the individual such that an individual could have a valid faith experience and not just be passively assimilated into a church where a mere baptized lay person was the equivalent of a "serf" in feudal society. Today baptism has to express full teleological freedom. In American Society if the possibility for anyone born here to be President does not exist, then we are not yet practicing justice; in the church if any baptized person does not have the teleological possibility of being archbishop or pope, then the justice of Christ who said that the kingdom God belongs to children has not yet been fulfilled. This is not a critique; it is an invitation to complete our mission.

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2013

The irony of making Christianity the religion of an Empire is that if the Empire wants everyone to be Christian and know the Gospel then conquered peoples ultimately find out about their own dignity and how unChristlike it is to be treated as a conquered people.

Aphorism of the Day March 11, 2013

Accept yourself today as a multidiscursive being, meaning we learn many subtle complexities of language use in knowing a language. We know when to be literal (stop sign), we know when an event of the senses evokes action (cold, put on a coat). We know how to accept traditions of meaning when they have no reference for us (what does apple of my eye really mean anyway?). We know how to use hyperbole/exaggeration (Americans call their sports heroes Great, like Ali and Gretzky; the English are blasphemous about their footballers and guitar players, they call them "God." ) We know how to make a word mean its opposite (with intonation of the voice or like when Michael Jackson made bad, good). We understand the complexity of humor with many subtle layers of irony. We understand youtube instructions for fixing things. We understand the language of ecstasy and how speechless it can leave us; mere screams or a "Wow!" Now don't forget multidiscursivity when you read the Bible; the writers were multidiscursive too and even though they lived before modern science and present a pre-scientific mode of consciousness in their writing there still is a way to distinguish between the commonsense of naive realism and the flowering language of embellishment because in love and faith language one colors outside the lines of mere empiricism.

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2013

Does the parable of the prodigal son glorify being notoriously sinful and rebellious as a way of showing how loving and forgiving God is? It could be that like most literature, the Gospel does not have a place for the boring quotidian of just being kind and every day faithful. Just because reckless lives do get reclaimed by seeming heroic turn-arounds, the rest of the faithful world often pays the emotional and physical cost of the phase of reckless living. The Gospel had limited textual space to include ordinary kindness and non-prejudicial living and Jesus is one who is seen taking on those with religious judgmental attitudes. On the other hand he seemed to hang around with some ordinary kind folk as well, Mary, Martha, Lazarus and Nicodemus.

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2013

Did you ever consider that the way in which Christians regard Jesus Christ is the attaining of an honesty about God and all things divine? If humanity is even going to speak about the extra-human Being of God then to admit that we speak about God using human experience as a valid way to do so seems obvious. Jesus Christ sums up the fact that we cannot help but speak anthropomorphically about God and use endless human analogy and metaphor to do so. Jesus Christ is our way of saying it is okay to be merely human in knowing God.

Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2013

In the New Testament slavery or servitude became a metaphor for what was dominating one's life. The New Testament spiritual method was to understand oneself to be serving sin or missing the mark but knowing the Christ-experience to be always an interdiction to missing the mark and brought to more excellent or abundant life. One way to understand this today is to accept the paradigm of learning that one currently lives in as the one that orders one's life. Seek to make known the value paradigm in which one is living and then be in the service the next higher value paradigm to which one is going. Being in Christ in a practical way means being and living towards oneself in a future state where one has surpassed oneself in more excellent values.

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2013

Having a common language does not mean that cooperative communication is actually taking place. The Shauvian saying that the English and Americans are peoples divided by having a common language has many corollaries. Many churches are proof that Christians are divided by having a common Savior and religion. The American people are those who are divided by having a common Constitution. Having the same language or source of national or religious experience does not guarantee either unity, understanding or ability to work together. The messy business of translating our "world views" must always be happening if purposeful actions are going be completed within communities where differences threaten to divide or at least stalemate effective action or thwart the compromising actions that are required of people participating in good faith.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2013

In our temptation to take on global angst and worry about things that we have no immediate control over, we forget that the small events of free acts create new pathways. Three dollars for a cup of coffee or for a mosquito net in Africa. What kind of domino effect is initiated by each small free act. Doesn't seem like much but we as people of faith are hoping to overwhelm the world with myriads of small free acts of kindness as we work to persuade ourselves about the cumulative effect of kindness. A terrible option is to minimize tiny acts of freedom and insist my acts don't matter at all.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5 , 2013

A writer of aphorisms is an impaired book writer; on the way to a book the aphorist gets side-track into too many digressions that ends up being trying to remake the foundations of the book over and over again.  Each foundation does not stand up in the quicksand of words.  This aphorist begs for the toleration of any current writing for what will have been written in the future as a "hopeful" filling out of what is dreadfully missing now.  One can project on the proverbial child facing parental disappointment: "Well mom and dad, what I will do and say in the future will make what I am doing now seem different."  Long live the hope of deferring to the future and as we always say about our losing team, "Wait till next year."  But tomorrow does not excuse current mediocrity if we aren't trying today.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2013

Aspire today for the impossible in trying to know how the hidden, tacit, take for granted, background dynamics of our lives actually direct what we think represents true agency in our lives on the public stage where the spot light shines and perhaps misleads us about motivations.  What are the hidden puppeteers that are active in determining our conscious acts, thoughts and deeds?  These are found within the paradigms that form how we think and act.  Some times our efforts to show what we want to show are exertions to cover what we really don't want to be known.  Thank God that we don't show everything, but in our faith lives we need to be practicing an honesty in understanding how our histories have helped to form the contexts of how we are expressing our current lives.  Lent is a season about trying with extra effort to get at honesty in our lives.  Lent is a time of living as though I could be wrong even as I am trying to seek what might be a better expression of me today.  Reality provides the occasion for humility the future provides the confidence for what can be better.

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2013

The calls of God in the Hebrew Scriptures lend themselves to cinematographer Cecil B. DeMille's productions. God speaking from a burning bush that does not really burn is too much for everyday life but it combined entertainment and the establishment of community identity for people who sat around the evening fire and heard these stories of beginnings told over and over until they were written down and re-edited. If the truths of our origins are fantastic and providential then it is a testament to how people build esteem and inculcate the value of one's community. That values of esteem and community participation are successful in providing the right support for children is the truth that is more important than particular detail of a story of origin. Truth was known before modern journalism adopted the criteria that something had to happened in a way that did not violate the laws of science in order to be true. Events and accounts of them are true in different ways.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2013

Why do you suppose that the Gospels present Jesus who sees himself sent by his Father and speaking what his Father wants him to speak? Could it be that knowing the parenthood of God marks the event of adulthood in a person when a person realizes that after all of the determination that one received from one's parents for better or for worse one becomes free to be one's own person in this experience. So to discover the mystical parent aspect of one's own personality is to begin to be authorized to be one's own person in a way that one was never before. This experience frees both earthly parents and a child from the results of over-determination by one's parents.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2013

How many disagreements in society and church are due to the uneven reception of change? Some think that things should only change after enough time of "total" reception. So several hundred years after Galileo, the church could admit a mistake about something that had pretty much a general acceptance for a long time. How long did it take for civil rights to become the law of our land? And why did it even have to become the law of the land when we had supposedly the "golden rule?" On things that pertain to justice and how people are affected in Golden Rule behavior it becomes more difficult to wait until everyone gets on board on how people are to be treated. Civil rights has a greater urgency for laws instantiating justice than other matters. It behooves the church to be on the forefront of civil rights.

Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2013

Why is it that biblical type signs and wonders and miracles don't seem to happen that much after the prevalence of modern science? Why is it that young children can see angels and boogie men but not their parents? Biblical people seem to get their direct communication with God from dreams? How much do we trust the literal reality of dreams today? How is it that signs and wonders in the modern age now appear in novels and the imaginations of cinema? In science fiction signs and wonders appear to be what future scientific progress will be and it makes our current science look primitive. Children and aboriginal culture perhaps have not yet been oriented into modern science where what is outside and what is inside is presented as two different kinds of reality. Without that division dream realities can be available to people awake something akin to seeing the moon during the daylight. The confusion in biblical interpretation is when literalists have bought into modern science and then read the magical realism of the Bible as modern science. People who are limited by modern science do not admit other kinds of truth and biblical literalists unwittingly try to force biblical imagery into the discourse of modern science. So we have two sides who have failed to admit the validity of various kinds of discourse of truth.

Aphorism of the Day February 27, 2013

Can one determine to make this day different from any other day? Not literally since by the mere passing of time it is an entirely different occasion. We assume it shares sameness with yesterday in the function of natural laws even though there may be infinitesimal changes due to an expanding over all universe causing subtle mutual influential factors in all of life. There is also the difference of real freedom with results that occur because of conscious choice and resulting actions and unknown causal factors. The difference of today is mainly in how it ends up being remembered and whether such events in our day makes it in our diary of whether the event was communal enough to create a corporate memory. Let us not today over-rate or under-rate our lives; over-rated by being obsessed by feeling under-appreciated and under-rated by thinking that one's life is not purposefully useful to others. Whether we are in the company of other people or not we are always with the people of this world by the unavoidable reality of existence. Our existence does not leave us as isolated islands; existence conducts mutual experience of people and so we are always connected. Let us use our entire lives as sensory instruments taking in ourselves the effects of mutual experience and using our imaginations to admit that the conditions of our life right now gives us a condition of prayer solidarity for many other people and so our lives always gives us the joy to accept them as being lives to be praying intercessor for others. So no matter what happens you and I can always choose to live our lives with and for others. Please choose to be connected today.

Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2013

One can note the uneven reception to change in our world on all manner of things. This uneven reception is found between countries, within countries, within states, cities and families and even within a person (sometimes a person has long internal debates.) There was a time when voting rights for women and people of color was not received by everyone. Ponder today the uneven patterns of understanding and reception of issues of justice for people throughout the world both in history and in our time and ask ourselves whether we or the church have always been on the forefront of justice and sound reason.

Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2013

Post-Oscar musing; how much has Hollywood as an American cultural mystical entity formed the ethos of us as American? Does it over-aggrandize the lone hero and over-hype the value of the individual to the diminishing of the way of more distributive or communitarian principles of how things get done by working together? Does Hollywood feed the belief that history should only be written from the point of heroes or those who can get their 15 minutes of fame? Does it feed a kind of social Darwinism in believing that the spoils really do belong to those with the strength to take them? Since the cinema anchors the cyber way of taking on our stories and stories are the basic time-lapsed units for social and cultural identity how is it that the church with less than cyber liturgies can compete with such presentations? Can we understand our faith as mystically embracing enough to integrate the great passions of American culture in cinema and sports and understand that an over-arching spirituality is needed to sort out and regulate our desires and energies of life?

Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2013

Lent can be trivialized by giving up favorite habit of food and drink. Lent can be an annual time when one takes on a discipline to add to one's life a new interest, skill or use of time. Rather than give up chocolate for the 40 days what about taking on a reading interest in history or poetry or mathematics or writing just to add to the rigor of doing something different with the mind? Whether it's true or not that we can delay eventual frailty of mind by challenging our minds with something new and different, it's worth a try to use Lent to really change our lives each year with a new learning adventure.

Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2013

"Are ye keepin' Lent?" asked the vicar.

"Past tense of lend," said the curmudgeon, "and I certainly have never done that."

Are ye keepin' Lent? asked the vicar.

"I try to keep lint off my clothes," said the matron.

"Are ye keepin' Lent?" asked vicar, "without homophonic punning interpretations?"

"Vicar, have you given up bad jokes for Lent?" asked the verger.

Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2013

The season of Lent is a time pondering our group sins, the ones for which we absolve ourselves of personal responsibility due to our feeling "helpless." We know that we are polluting our environment with personal habits that seem to be necessary for our daily lives, like driving. On the other hand we need to do all of the little things and also create the climate for new ways to do things that are safe and clean but also creative and economically viable. Sometimes we are willing to go along with the general view of "we can't" just for the short term profit. Stewardship of the earth can be made good for the economy too and we need to be a part of the gradual conversion toward creative thinking and turn our "we can't" into "we will with God's help."

Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2013

Temporal provincialism, a phrase used by T. S. Eliot refers to being a prisoner of one's own time period in terms of being so proud of our "progress" that we feel sorry for all of those poor blokes before us who had to live in such superstition. Those who are threatened by advances in one's own time might be nostalgic as indicating an inability to adapt to the present. A famous quote by Jaroslav Pelikan might give us insights about respecting every age with charity in our interpretation and understand how Spirit of the past can do new things in the present without contradiction: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."

Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2013

Lent can be about the redirection of life energy. Instead of watching a half hour to TV or sports give attention to reading the Bible or some other literature. In our conscious state we are consuming what we take in and so we ask, "How will what I take in be expressed in what I put out in terms of what I say and do in the future?" One does not live by bread alone but by word, including Word of God. Word impressions goes to the inner heart of your consciousness and mingles and lives forever within you in some way. So Lent is a time to be a different sort of gate keeper in the intentional selection of what one allows to pass into the portals of consciousness. Lent is a time to censor the flow of what comes into our lives. And this is indeed a good practice after and before the season of Lent too.

Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2013

Solipsism from the Latin 'solus' =alone and 'ipse'=self is a philosophy that states that only the individual mind exists. Of course once one states that one is solipsistic one falsifies such a belief because one is stating that one can share with others such an individual view. The insight that inspires people to profess solipsism is that individual world views are totally unique. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." That may be true because everyone has unique experience even with how one uses language that indicates a common sharing of experience. Just because everything that occurs in the mind and subconscious dream world of a person does not get published is still no reason for professing solipsism and because one does not have the opportunity to reduce to a conscious language everything that is confronting oneself at any given time does not free us from the ability of language to mediate what we call the mystery of all possibility. If every snow flake is unique, does that mean that there is just one snow flake? Should every snow flake have an individual name like every person? In solipsism is there the impulse to want to resist any community classification in order to proclaim uniqueness? The artist Prince tried to escape classification by inventing a symbol and introducing himself as the artist formerly known as Prince. What solipsism teaches us is that we are becoming and that we are not yet. As we become we add to the occasions of becoming and are always at the nexus of the trace of the past giving birth to what is new expressed by rearranging and re-using the symbols we inherit from the traces of the past. One of the reasons we confess God is to believe in Possibilisms or a Complete Memory that experiences all that is not published within all human beings.

Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2013

Lead us not into temptation or save us from the time of trial are versions of a request in the Lord's Prayer.  There seems to be nuances of difference between meanings of these translations.  Lead us not into temptation sounds like the little boys request that not too many cookies be put in his daily pathway to lure him into taking them.  Save us from the time of trial sounds more like encountering a harsh loss in life that might cause us to lose our faith.  This prayer could be simply our honest assessment of the probabilities of what could detract us from our best faithful response and so we are ever requesting God not to give us more than we can handle, even while we know that God is requesting us to use wisdom about knowing our vulnerabilities and avoiding probable vulnerable situations.  The teenager who was picked up at a night club at 2:30 a.m. said, "But Dad, I prayed, "Lead me not into temptation!"  Our prayers need to be offered with actuarial wisdom as well.

Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2013

Comedians say that timing is everything. When and how to deliver the punchline. Without timing really good joke material can be perceived like getting a root canal. Tomorrow we contemplate the temptations of Jesus and a chief ingredient in temptation has to do with "timing." Most everything in life has a time and place occasion to be the appropriate action or words spoken.Temptation has mainly to do with being ignorant, tricked or willful about the appropriate time or place for us to articulate or execute a spoken word or action. Finding God's will in our lives has to do with the art of finding the appropriate timing for what we do and say so that our actions can be creative, charismatic and generating of good for our situation. Sin is not about our badness or the evil in the world, it is about the timing in our stewardship of the good way that God created us and the things of the world. Let us find that inner rhythm of God's Spirit in giving us good timing in our words and deeds.

Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2013

Did you know that the temptation of Christ involved a serious hermeneutic (interpretation) dispute of Jesus with the devil over how to use the Bible, or the Hebrew Scriptures of his time? The temption event is presented as a Bible slinging showdown and it shows us that the Bible can always be used as proof texting for some very strange recommended behaviors. One temptation involves the devil asking Jesus to be literal about leaping from a tall place to be caught by angels because there is a poetic Psalm stating that angels will bear one up in a fall. One of the greatest temptation in use of the Scriptures is to try to make the beauty of poetry into a literal act.

Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2013

Valentine's Day is one of those days whose origins are obscure and  one wonders how the day for this martyr become associated with courtly or romantic love.  Some credit Geoffrey Chaucer of Canterbury Tales as one who helped to develop the love theme of this day.  We mostly know this day as a day of great commerce for chocolate, cards and flowers, and jewelry.  Romantic love is a powerful phenomenon; the theme of star-crossed lovers finding each other is still alive and well and the inspiration for song and cinema.  We should celebrate that love is not just a theory and that there is particular love for every person.  Love is so faceted that every society attempts to regulate it with vows so as to give stability and support for the social order.  One can note in the history of the practice of love that there have been many diverse practices.  It is important to support people who have found the love of their lives.  There is no time to be cynical about people who have found love.  If there was not a powerful force abroad in the order of all which did not draw us together in particular ways, we would be but individual isolated islands.  And we dare to say that the most profound definition of God, is Love.

Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2013

The season of Lent is meant to be a time of readjusting priorities as individuals and as worshiping communities. We may despair about our abilities to initiate changes in our lives but perhaps that despair is driven by our view of life that is dominated by cinematic time lapsing, viz., we want change to be evident within a short time frame. How about adapting a view more like the drop of water that over time erodes hard stone? How about being an incrementalist and do the small mustard seed deeds of faith that add up over time? Lent is no time to initiate quick fixes unless we can really consolidate such fixes as our permanent rule of life. We are locked in by some overwhelming social problems and instead of despairing about things we cannot change we need to tend to what lies at hand in our day to day lives where we should not minimize the importance or the cumulative effect of our acts of repentance.

Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2013

Did you ever wonder about the juxtaposition of the bacchanal and orgiastic festivals of Mardi Gras and Carnival with the highly restrictive and ascetic Ash Wednesday and Lenten Season? There were festivals that predated Christianity in Italy and were adapted within the catholic culture. Such festivals became unthinkable in puritanical contexts. One wonders if church business thrives by juxtaposing a season of rigorous guilt with the event of excess. Sublimation by "getting everything" out of one's system in an excessive event followed by a season of "paying for it" through penitential efforts; is this really a healthy way to monitor one's spiritual life? Or should one just regard the business cultures of places where Mardi Gras and Carnival account for the economic well being of a place? How does one monitor one's own spiritual life within the church within a particular culture? Is there always a price to pay spiritually for excess?

Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2013

The ashes of Ash Wednesday function in our liturgy as a reminder of the mortality of our bodies. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. In the creation story, the dust of the earth is taken by God and God's Spirit is blown into the dust to form the human living soul. So the human being has earthward and Godward/spiritual aspects in our constitution. The ashes also signify our bodies put on fast forward to their return to the dustly ashy state. We paint our foreheads with the ashes as a liturgical inoculation response to living with death as a part of greater life that survives anyone's individual death. With this symbol of our future body state, we remind ourselves to cherish our lives within our bodies and we embark on a Lenten season to ponder how we can live better in our bodily state.

Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2013

Light is a metaphor for Christ in the Gospel of John. Jesus is declared to be the light of the world. Epiphany is the season of the manifestation of the light of Christ to the world and the season ends with the climb up the Mount of the Transfiguration. In this theophany, the face of Jesus is filament that suddenly begins to glow as the Gospel writers tell the story of Jesus within a tradition that has Moses who also had a shiny face after his encounter with God on the mountain when he received the Law. New paradigms that occur because of founding events and figures borrow from former paradigms and expand the meanings of the former paradigms in making adaption for the new community of reception. The trace of our past influences the different new of the present. Sometimes the difference of the what is new seems so subtle as to be unrecognized until in retrospect one surveys how difference has taken place and is recognized. We always have more light to see in the future.

Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2013

Life needs punctuation marks to underline and differentiate. In the transfiguration, the face of Jesus became the filament that suddenly gets lit up for a showing to his disciples. We live our lives between latent presence of the sublime and the apparent presence of the sublime. Every occasion is a potential occasion for the sublime and suddenly in Peek a boo fashion the filament of ordinary experience get turned on and a showing occurs. What can be retained from these showings is the assurance that God's presence is always with us even when not "apparent" and a deep undercurrent of peace carries with it the calm latency of future events of light.

Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2013

When words don't seem to fit what one is feeling or how one is processing the world, that statement falsifies itself because the words "words don't seem to fit" are in fact the words that one uses to mediate a feeling or experience. And so even in not feeling like words can one escape words. One can imagine negating words but alas one uses words to do so. Word is omnipresent even we we try to pretend its absence. The word screen between the constructed "I" and the external world and in the mapping of the interior self remains in place.

Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2013

In film-making how much tape ends up on the proverbial cutting floor? In each person's life how many occasions of reflection end up unpublished? Certainly the majority of what occurs within the waking and dreaming life of each person. What is seen and heard is the proverbial tip of the iceberg and indeed when someone dies, a universe passes away, much of which was never known by others. This provides us the occasion to honor the mystery of each other since what we can know about each other is but the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps we are saving the best for an eternity when we have the capacity to know each other better and are freed from earthly inhibitions. The writer of Ecclesiastes states that God has planted eternity in our hearts and so we cannot see God; we must simply let God be through us. So our beings are particular vessels that do not have the capacity for containing God but we can be those who enjoy the continuous over flow through us.

Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2013

The vast growing ocean of information in our post-modern era means that there is such a dissolving effect upon all "classic literature," including the Bible. If the Bible is the only book that people read and have access to it has a different kind of authority than if it exists in a milieu of countless billions of other words that people have access to or that press upon people in their daily environment. We can Amishize by refusing to allow any words except the words of the Bible be in our word environment or we can find that the structuration of faith presented in the Bible can also be found in all of the other words that come to language in human experience. So our task is to find those correspondences and revere the Bible as a book that teaches us to look for those omni-present correspondences.

Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2013

As we move to the end of the season of the Epiphany we encounter the story of the transfiguration of Jesus Christ. Let us conjugate a rarely used word in the English language. He (Jesus) was transfigured, He transfigured the lives of others. So, we can say, I have been, am being transfigured and I am called to transfigure or help to transfigure the lives of others. Transfiguration comes from the Greek word metamorphosis μεταμόρφωσις, meaning transforming. We mostly think of metamorphosis in the very obvious and vivid states of the butterfly: egg, larva, pupa and butterfly. The same life force that seems absent in the cocoon is the same life force in the butterfly. We obviously have our preferences for how we like transfiguration to be apparent in our lives. Today with faith we embrace the One Transforming Spirit in all of ours states of becoming, including the details of our lives today.

Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2013

I remember hearing some students in my class in the 1990's use the word "paradigm shift" as though it was a "new" idea. The phrase was turning up in commercials. The phrase actually derived from a book written in 1962 by a historian of science (Thomas Kuhn) to "explain" how change took in the scientific community, e.g., moving from Newtonian physics to Einstein's Relativity. My point is that probably most of what we speak in terms of word constructs, we do not know the genealogy of how and when they came into the language community and so we borrow or become the oracle of thoughts and ideas whose origin we do not know and may be not even intend. We have words in our context put on our palette and we choose to create word pictures when we write or speak and with our intention we think we create and thus control "meaning." How can we really be in control if we do not know full derivation of what we speak? And how can we control meaning when it goes through the filters of hearers who filter words differently than we do? As a preacher, I gave up the sense of controlling meaning long time ago when I preached on the love of God and a young child felt like I was putting him under conviction for taking some cookies. So much for controlling the meaning of what I say or write!

Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2013

From the Love Chapter, 1 Corinthians 13

When St. Paul says that "Love believes all things" what could he possibly mean? It could mean that Love is all inclusive of everything that can come into language in the experience of everyone since it is unrealistic to deny that anything occurred. One may not have a UFO experience but can one deny that such an experience has occurred in human experience? Love as inclusiveness does not necessarily mean equality in the standard of being an empirical reality. If God is the Love about whom St. Paul is writing, does it not mean that such a permissive Love is the creative freedom of enveloping everything that has occurred, might have occurred, is occurring and might occur in the future? And such loving enveloping of everything is the Love that believes all things. In Love there is no denial of what has been or what is and so belief is based upon more than we actually experience or would want to experience. Individually, we do not have the capacity for such "broad" believing but St. Paul conceived of Love as the inclusive creative force of pure freedom bringing all to the occasion of some sort of existence and so everything with some sort of existence is to be believed in it own context of having that existence. Seeing a unicorn in a child's movie is different than being able actually to see one at a zoo.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2013

Parallel structuration of the High Feast of Professional Football. Domed Stadium=Basilica or Cathedral. Official with separate uniforms and law enforcers=clergy. Players=outstanding saintly people who perform the faith a bit better than the rest. Schedule=Liturgical Calendar. Super Bowl=High Feast Day. Touchdown=great virtue. Field Goal=lesser but good virtue. Penalty=Sin. Hall of Fame=Canonized Saints. Commentators=preachers. Ejection=Excommunication. Beer, Brauts, et al=Communion. Fans=vicariously faithful. Spouses not interested in the game but watch the big one=Christmas and Easter attendees. Being at the Game=Real Presence. Roar of the Crowd=Religious Ecstasy, but not very Episcopalian. Favorite Team=Angels and good people. Opponent=Devil and his demons. Blocking=sacrifice for the team. Tackling=stopping the advance of evil.

What is the point? We are always already totally structured with values everywhere. There are sports people and atheists who are much more "religious" in their practices than people who practice their belief in God, and is their structuration rational? Talk amongst yourselves.

Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2013

Juvenal wrote satirically about giving people "bread and circuses" (panem et circenses) as a policy to keep the populace unmotivated in their active citizenship (also preventing a revolt against the State). We have our big game this week and it begs a question of how much our games focus our attention and deflect from social problems and provides a "social analgesic" from the effects of uneven suffering in our world. We probably do not need to be satirical about the conditions that can prevent "revolutions," namely, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness coming in the form of food, education, health, employment, freedom, justice and indeed games. Let the games begin but not as mere social analgesic but as an expression of balancing our lives with a proper dose of the "playful" as it is coordinated by our faith and spirituality in our commitment to love God and our neighbor as our self.

Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2013

Happy New Year! Welcome to the condition of being the recipient of being socialized and constructed by the totally arbitrary mode of measuring time by the calendar of our culture. There are babies, people of other cultures, and generally uninformed people who do not know that it is a "new year." But we cannot avoid being "programmed" by our calendar if we are actively involved in our society and culture. We let the calendar determine our habits and rituals. We need to understand that we have been calendarized in so many ways today and our calendars are now in competition. It used to be that the "Christian calendar" giving Sunday a special day did not have any competition. Now the youth soccer calendar, baseball calendar, basketball calendar, and all of the professional sports calendars compete with Sunday worship time. We have to make choices on what calendar we honor on any given day. In 2013 we have to orchestrate between the competing calendars that are offered to organize or program our time. If the Sabbath rest is one day in seven, how do we manage within a week to give a day as designated as rest or silence or meditation or prayer to God? Can we spread 24 hours of "rest" time throughout the week as "God-time?" Can we be intentional about our God-time during the week and be creative in how we spend that time and not be worried about whether Father-Knows-Best is judging us for not being in church?

Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2013

I am unable to write a horoscope since I do not find a way to discern a precise one to one causal connection between relative position of stars and states of my being. On the more practical level I see that the position of my neighbor's garbage bins on the curb influences me directly to remember to put mine there too. Instead of horoscopes I write aphoroscopes in hopes of evoking an occasional insight, humor or even disagreement. Aphoroscopically speaking I may be as vague and as blindly faithful to a belief in God's love and care as an astrologer is to the stars. God's love and care; that's my line and I'm sticking to it.

Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2013

An aphorist gives up the belief in a single Empire of thought or a system that can "account" for everything. It is enough that one has the limitation of being at the center of one's own perceptual universe where one assigns actively or passively meaning to everything that one experiences. An aphorist is like one walking on a dark night with a flashlight and seeing only bits and pieces while not realizing the Grand Canyon of what the flashlight cannot yet shed light upon. Knowing and sensing that there is always More to be seen is what makes life humbling and awesome and provides the invitation to confess God as the EVERMORE.

Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2013

The magi symbolize the pilgrimage for new insight and new mentors. Sometimes we live such "taken for granted" lives that outsiders and foreigners come into our lives and find enlightenment from what we have taken for granted. The tacit knowledge of our setting dwells in our background so as not to be seen; it is seen better by people who have not been raised with that tacit knowledge. Travel and living abroad can lead to one being aware of how much "socially constructed" one is and one discovers this when one sees how differently other people are socially constructed. This insight alone can usher us into being a world citizen and a realization that God and Jesus love all the little children of the world, actually.

Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2013

The magi symbolize the journey in spiritual space that we often have to make to embrace new breakthroughs in our lives. Our familiar cultural baggage often will prevent us from seeing new things in new ways. Sometimes we only learn new things through the crisis of loss because such a crisis clears the way for us to see things in new ways. The Christian life is a life of continuous conversion and the travails of life are to be tapped as teaching events to open us up to new insights which can result in new decision. We are all fellow pilgrims on the journey just giving each other encouragement as we go from faith event to faith event.

Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2013

To have an epiphany means to have a sudden awakening or insight. ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, "manifestation." The Christian use of the term epiphany has to do with Christ becoming the occasion for people to have a new insight about God in their lives. The presentation of foreign magi (μάγος magos) having an encounter with the newly born Christ child was a message about the globalization of the Gospel understanding of God. God was not limited to borders or to ethnic group; the God-insight was available to all. A purpose in life is to seek new epiphanies of how God is born into human experience and sometimes we must travel far from our familiar in order to achieve the condition of soul to be receptive. We are always seekers and need to receptive to the "next" insight in our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2013

The fact that we use language and word helps us to discover that word and language are less than what we call Reality and even though it exists as one factor of reality, we cannot but filter and have filtered Reality through language. So life is the art of language use and language use is very complex and nuanced. If language is our only access to Reality it tries to do something it can never do: equal Really by trying fully to mirror or represent it. But in our attempts in language to "represent" Reality we fail but in trying we come to understand and practice so many wonderful levels of discourse. In a a moment of conversion or epiphany or insight we are inflated to think that we've discovered the Ultimate and the Absolute until the bubble is burst and we realize there is Some More and Again and Again. We who use language have to realize that Reality has us more than we "have" it.

Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2013

The significance of today's events may not fully occur to us today. The meaning of today when added with future occasions of our lives will become expanded beyond what we are often able to grasp in the moment. Remember the dreaming Jacob who dreamed about the angels ascending and descending upon a ladder. In an after thought he exclaimed, "God was in this place and I did not know/realize it." How do we realize God's presence in a retrospective way? Faith involves fulfilling the human proclivity of having purpose and meaning and through faith we discover the ordinary history of our lives to be providence. God was with us; and we did not realize it at the time.

Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2013

The experience of time and space creates the experience, the event, the place that one calls the threshold. The threshold is the place betwixt and between. In a sense the Now, is always a threshold between where we've been and where we are going. Thresholds are guarded; they are a narrowed entry place; they require a price of entrance. Try to get into a 49'er game or concert without a ticket. The threshold event is the hope that is built into us, a sense of expectation of what is next. What are we on the verge of today in our lives? Live your threshold today and enter expectantly to be touched by the Sublime.

Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2013

Baptism is a ritual washing and a celebration of a spiritual birth rite. As we are born from the amniotic waters of our natural births we are simultaneously born into the family of God or as written in John's Gospel, "born of water and the Spirit." The baptismal rite is a public remembrance for the entire community about how we belong to God as God's children. We believe that our lives are influenced in value and meaning because we live in this other "family of God" that parallels our earthly family. Remembering that we are children of God is a reminder to aspire to love everyone as our neighbor.

Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2013

In the baptism of Jesus we have a presentation of what early Christians believed about God, Jesus and humanity. In the baptism of Jesus is the narrative of an event in the series of teaching events about how God is emptied into the limitations of human life so as to validate the very reason that we can use our very limited human experience as an adequate way for us to know what is extra-human or Sublime. The baptism of Jesus is an expression of our belief that God submits on our behalf to take solidarity with human experience so that we use human experience as a way to know God. This is indeed circular reasoning; the More than Human embraces the human so that the human can experience the touches of the More than Human. And because we cannot avoid anthropomorphism (being human), every experience of God is a human experience, and that is what is implied by our belief in Jesus as God's Son.

Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2013

How do we move from regarding baptism as a magical but required entry into the church to understanding that baptism is a community rite that exposes how we always already live baptismally in our lives? Jumping through church hoops or satisfying grandma may be motivations for baptism but what about the wonder of knowing that one always, already lives in parallel worlds; one of the natural order and one of the sublime whereby we can discover the extraordinary within the ordinary? Baptism can become a celebration of the Sublime Possibility within the community.

Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2013

κατά ὅλος (kata holos). Definition: according to the whole, encompassing all, entire, complete, universal. kata holos are the Greek words from which we get the term "catholic." Ecclesiastically, it means whatever the church agrees to when it meets in a unified council. Aspiring for the entire world to agree with creed of a unified church council may be one thing; but there are already "catholic" substances, such as air and water. These substances are necessary for the lives of everyone. No one needs to be persuaded that they need water. So water as a truly "catholic" substance is the profound element of the baptismal rite. It is more catholic than those who are actually persuaded by what we believe.

Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2013

At each moment we are orchestrators of the productions of our lives. Some things are not so conscious or intentional since some learned patterns are on automatic but other productions require deliberate choice and the expression of intention. In our choices we rely upon our past experience in the formation of our judgments and discernments. Those judgments are influenced by how we have informed ourselves. We do not want to be crippled by indecision fearing lack of perfect information to make the perfect decision; at the same time we don't want to be so cocksure as to be rash and hasty. We also know that any decision can be influenced by the filter of a particular mood. Knowing our mood can also help to enhance how we make our decision as we learn to draw good energy from every mood of our life. So as composers of our daily lives, we need to be continual students of our selves. Remember the Delphic Oracle command: Know Thyself! The effort to know ourselves should bring us enough surprise and frustration to encounter the one beyond and within our self: God.

Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2013

Today is a day to interpret the current challenge in life as the proverbial irritating grain of sand or other foreign substance arriving between the shells of an oyster to begin the secreting responses that form the pearl. Sometimes things happen in life that tell us, "Deal with me!" A challenge, a crisis is one of the cards in the hand of life that is often dealt to us. How do we creatively play the hand in a way that can produce a pearl "outcome?" That is the work of faith and grace in our lives. And stating this marvelous true cliche does not make it any easier when we're in the throes. A person who wears an impressive "string of pearls" of life experience has earned them with a life of faith.

Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2013

The Gospel of John uses the word "sign" for miracle.  The sign was the "changing of water" into wine at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.  As a spiritual manual for those in spiritual formation, this event in literary form was a sign that one can come to see and experience the uncanny or the extraordinary in the ordinary.  One remembers the famous line from the movie, "When Harry Met Sally" of the woman in the restaurant who witnesses Sally's (Meg Ryan) acted out ecstasy. The woman said to her waiter:  "I'll have what she's having."  Sometimes when we see smiling babies or children we think the same thing, "I'll have what they're having."  The experience of new birth helps us to live in a way that others might say, "I'll have what she's having."

Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2013

Two ways of coping with present discomfort involves mentally relocating our interior life somewhere else besides the place where our body is now located. We do it by contemplating past possibility expressed by the verb tense what "might have been." Too much lingering in "might of been" states of mind is the unreality of regret. The other verb tense of mental escapism is "might be other than what is." We can use "might have been" and "might be other than what is" to brainstorm and find creative ways to deal with what is and what steps we might want to take in our future. Accepting what is in the most honest way that one can, and surveying the field of what might have been and the possibilities of what might be is the work of faith in taking the next actual step. The parallel life of our "worded insides" is always already active and with faith we see how word is made flesh in our actions.

Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2013

Christian Unity, what is it? Is is the Christendom of a Christian Empire where unity is mainly an issue of the canon law requirement that everyone be on the same page or else be declared a heretic? Or is it people sharing the differences of their relationships with God in mutual respecting ways? There can be different church orders, different hermeneutic circles (interpretative circles), different practices and different appeals and liturgies and customs to fit the diversity of humanity and still the Unity of mutual respect that comes from honoring the relationship that another person has with God.

Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2013

Have you ever figured the semiotics of your own life? What are meaning structures of your life? What are your chief positive and negative values that dictate your actions? Have you tried to understand how you came to have those values? Family, culture, aversion of an event or someone, attraction to someone? Sometime one has to reflect upon one's own system of meaning and understand it before one can "translate" that system in a way that can be understood and appreciated by others. Did you ever see life as continual active therapy? Therapy is not a bad word and should not be stereotypically limited to those who are wrongly called "crazy" or "disturbed" people. Therapy is the art of self-care and caring for others and should be a life long spiritual practice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2013

The changing of water into wine is the Gospel of John's account of the first Sign that Jesus did. The result of the sign, we are told, is that his disciples believed in him. The Signs of the Gospel of John are the events in the life of Jesus that persuade his disciple about him. What are the signs in our lives that inform how we have become persuaded about the people and beliefs in our lives? The events that evoke positive energy, attraction and a sense of the uncanny or the sublime end up being the Signs in our lives that influence what we do in our lives. Each person could write a book of Signs in one's own life based upon the telling events and people that have been most influential in helping one constitute the story of one's life. Try to write the Book of Signs of your life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2013

The juxtaposition of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the Inauguration is important in highlighting how the ideals of our Declaration of Independence were not and have not yet been fully realized in practice. So realized justice is still a beckoning ideal and delays are painful for many people even while the break through events that came as a result of Dr. King's witness and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are stunning for us to recall and remember. Hopefully, we are always on the way to actualized justice in practice. God bless us with thanksgiving for what we've achieved in our country but also give us humility to know that we have so much more to achieve.

Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2013

Today edit the story of your life using the theme of the most disappointing things that have happened in your life. Ask yourself if they happen because you had no control over them? Did you have control over them and so they resulted in perhaps some self disillusionment? Did they lead to self blame? Blame of others? And now that you are up the mountain a bit higher in the climb of your life, how do you look back and see how these events changed the course of your life to get you where you are now? What have you done as a result of these events? How has the the after-life of these sad events given meaning to them? Since we cannot know the domino effect of might have been events, we have to deal with what was. The past can seem to have an "absoluteness" about it. The sting of the past can have new meaning by what we call redemption and redemption isn't always automatic in being experienced; that is where faith weaves hard reality with golden hope to keep us going on to better things. The work of faith is the preferred work to the passivity of bitterness and depression.

Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2013

Today edit the story of your life using the theme of the most disappointing things that have happened in your life. Ask yourself if they happen because you had no control over them? Did you have control over them and so they resulted in perhaps some self disillusionment? Did they lead to self blame? Blame of others? And now that you are up the mountain a bit higher in the climb of your life, how do you look back and see how these events changed the course of your life to get you where you are now? What have you done as a result of these events? How has the the after-life of these sad events given meaning to them? Since we cannot know the domino effect of might have been events, we have to deal with what was. The past can seem to have an "absoluteness" about it. The sting of the past can have new meaning by what we call redemption and redemption isn't always automatic in being experienced; that is where faith weaves hard reality with golden hope to keep us going on to better things. The work of faith is the preferred work to the passivity of bitterness and depression.

Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2013

The German philosopher Nietzsche referred to truth as a "well used metaphors" meaning that something was treated as true simply because of long popular use. Even when we use the same words over time, we in various communities use the same words differently. Do you and I mean the very same thing at 60 when we use the word God and Jesus as we did when we were 10, or 16, or 20? Our "truth" communities change even when we remain in the same community though some change is more subtle or gradual over time. Emerson said "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." It could be that we need to give a much wider view of truth, not treating it as the rote reciting of popular words, but truth in the sense of the "honest" engagement of our hearts and minds in our continual quest towards excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, January 24, 2013

One of my favorite phrases from the Process Philosopher Whitehead: The laws of science are not causatively absolute; they are statistically approximate. Meaning that because we can state a scientific law based upon observed behavior of phenomenon; that does not make it happen. Language is not a mirror reflection of Nature or the Real and it does not make the Nature or the Real happen, however it "seems" to make it happen in ways in which we use language to socially construct ourselves in our constant response to Nature or the Real and in that construction we encounter what has come to be known as the Sublime and many people over a long time cannot but confess the ultimate cliche word, i.e., God. A theist is one who spends one's entire life in the quest of how to confess God, over and over again without ever being too proud of how one is actually doing the confessing. One can see Mount Everest in pictures, by satellite picture, in an airplane, in Katmandu, or by climbing it and in all of these experiences one is still small and Mount Everest still remains loomingly large.

Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2013

Today, the Feast of the Conversation of St. Paul, is a day to ponder the person who represents the first great paradigm shift among the people who followed Jesus of Nazareth. St. Paul, a devout Jew, came to understand the following of Christ meant the inclusion of those who did not share his own Jewish heritage or practices. At the same time, he did not see it necessary to break the continuity with his Jewish heritage. The Christian movements flourished and grew in the "Gentile" Roman World even as it retained the connection with Judaic roots in monotheism to give it a separatist distinction and a resistance to Roman omni-theistic practices that would accept any new god or divinized being as long as it could be integrated with the cult of the Caesar. The communities of St. Paul were liminal communities, between Judaism in the diaspora and the Roman pantheon willing to welcome another god to their theistic parliament. Christian communities and all communities have to risk exposure to their new settings and they have to deal with changes in the details of who they accept within their communities and that often goes against comfortable isolation of the past. Immediate communication with all sorts of people today is now forcing upon the people of faith the limits of their own understanding of who God loves and how that love is to be practiced in the details of daily life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2013

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard criticized the system of G.F. Hegel as being too abstract, as building a view of the world within which he himself could not live. This is the problem of presumption of almost speaking from an "as if" position of God. We who are "all too human" and who do not have "non-human" experiences of God can only speak in the artistic language of faith. Yes, we who see in part from our perspectives can conclude that there is an infinity of other parts that are "there" but as yet unknown. In the horizon of all of the other parts that we do not yet know, there is a Plenitude that allows us in humility to confess that there is much more than us and because our partial experience is juxtaposed with the sense of this Plenitude we experience what is called the "holy" and we reduce it to the word "God" who has a different linguistic variant in every language or culture.

Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2013

Gospel is much older than Jesus Christ. Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah who wrote, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the poor." In being very real about the full play of freedom that is evident in life to permit the range of possibilities that evoke from each person their own continuum of judgments ranging from the completely horrible to the ecstatic, the conditions on the horrible side need to be balanced with counter conditions on the ecstasy side. Those counter conditions would be a part of the ancient "good news" tradition. We live without exemption from a range of happenings and some things we want to end, i.e., sickness and some things we want to have duration, i.e., health. Living in the good news tradition probably means learning to dance with "Freedom" by seeking to cause as little harm as possible to others and our world by our own actions and seeking to relieve the results of harm for ourselves and as many others as possible. The Gospel is this sort of good news tradition and we have to discover each day how we can stop harm and relieve the results of harm.

Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2013

How will we live and write our own theology today? Theology is "God-Talk." How will we live and bring to language God in our lives today? The words of theology are already made flesh in our lives in that what we already have internalized about God in someway directs our actions. But we are aware that all of our actions are not yet worthy of being the kind of "God-talk" that we aspire to. We want our bodies continually to be trained to speak a more excellent version of "God-talk." We've awaken today and our conscious life is like a huge vacuum taking in experiential occasions and the traces of our internal structure are processing what we take in even while we add new internal word structure by what we take in. We hope that today what we take in can contribute to a better internal word structure that will be the trace to process tomorrow's experience. We hope and pray that the cumulative effect will result in wisdom.

Aphorism of the Day, January 30, 2013

How does a value get transferred from an original defining function to something totally unrelated in the evolution of a symbol? The pioneering gold panners of 1849 are forgotten, maybe even unknown but men in gold and red tight pants on a football field now have the name 49'er. The gold panner is a distant memory in the inspiring symbol for the football team. The cross was a cruel spectacle of capital punishment and now it adorns in gold and silver the necks of people and the ear lobes of baby. How did the value of this get so "romantically" altered? Human beings are symbol makers and symbols arise from associative events in human experience and get serendipitously valued and even after something attains value, that value can get altered and changed over time and even lose it connection with the originating event. So when we study a symbol, we look at the originating event and the entire history of the evolution of the many meanings that a symbol attained. A totem pole reflecting the forms of mythical animals experienced by the legendary founder of a tribe or village has current meaning for social identity even when the tribal members cannot replicate the originating experience with the mythical animals. Do a symbol survey of your own life today. What are the value and meanings of the symbols currently defining your existence?

Aphorism of the Day, January 31, 2013

The Super Bowl and the apparent passion for competitive games and the group identity or "esprit d'corps" happens. Human beings are "ludic" beings or having proclivities to play or create games. The frisky cub aspect of personality remains within us and our ludic projections are as diverse as the imagination. Liturgy also is an expression of this ludic aspect of being human. The music before the liturgy is aptly called, the pre"lude." The devotion to the pageantry and hype that is evident in the Super Bowl event could make the clergy jealous of this High Liturgy of the Sporting Culture, particularly when more time and money is spent on sports in our culture than religion. I suspect that religious ritual in times past accounted for a greater majority of people's interest because the ritual had less competition from other extra-ecclesiastical "liturgical" choices. Today in the era of expanding specialization, our ludic activities grow exponentially leaving the "ludic" activity in the church with less time and energy expended within the liturgical space. This "ludic" competition is consistent with the exponential growth of world knowledge that provides many more occasions of projection for the imaginations and the passions of people. This can either be a threat or an opportunity for faith; believing that God is truly everywhere and at all times would tend to dilute the significance of sacred space and sacred time. The challenge is to continue to build "micro-communities" to be places to counter the tendency to live only through virtuality.

S.A.T.-onics or Word Made Flesh

1 Christmas       December 29, 2013

Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21

Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link

Katie:  Well, here we are again in the pulpit.  Are you up for this gig today?

Connor:  I’m not sure.  I’m feeling rather laconic, how about you James?

James: I don’t know if I’m up to homiletic discourse today.

Katie:  Puh…..leeze guys….You’ve finished your S.A.T.’s.  You don’t have to throw around those fancy words anymore.  There should be a special dialect of English for the S.A.T. test.

Connor: What would you call it?

Katie:  I guess you could call it S.A.T.-onics.

James:  So S.A.T.-onics is a special dialect of English that High School juniors and seniors are forced to learn in order to pass a test to try to get into the college of their choice.

Connor: So surreptitious, recondite, arcane are all important words to know in S.A.T.-onics?

Katie:  Yes and in order to be a college freshman, a group of people have decided that we should know some words even though we will probably never have the occasion to use them.

James:  So the purpose of S.A.T.-onics is to learn language for the purpose of passing an exam.

Connor:  That’s about it.  But I guess it never hurts to increase our knowledge about more words and vocabulary.  It is like a painter looking for more color combinations to paint a picture.

James:  It could be that Word and Vocabulary are involved in life itself as a great test.

Katie: The Gospel of John opens with: In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

Connor:  This expression tells us that our human consciousness is created because of words and our language ability.

James: Using words then is the big test in life, even a greater vocabulary test than the S.A.T.

Katie:  Our language ability is what makes us as human being different from other animals.

Connor: If we are unique because of our ability to use language, then the biggest test in life has to do with how we use language.

Katie:  We need to learn how to speak well.

James:  Does that mean we have to have a big vocabulary?

Katie:  No, I think the purpose of the S.A.T. vocabulary is for reading and writing in an academic setting.  Speaking well means something else.

Connor:  Like what?

James: Speaking well probably means learning to say the right thing at the right time and in the right way.

Katie:  It takes our entire life time to learn how to do this.  Controlling our tongue can be very difficult.

Connor:  It can be difficult to speak the truth.

James: To learn how to speak well means that we need good models and examples.

Katie:  The writer of the Gospel of John believed that Jesus was a very good example to show us how to use our words.

Connor:  But there is a more profound use of words than even our speech.

James: What would that be?

Connor:  It is what might be called “body language.”

Katie:  Our bodies do speak a language.  Our bodies have something like a dance choreography about them.

Connor:  The Gospel writer said, “The Word became flesh and lived with us.”  The Word of God was expressed fully in the entire life of Jesus.

James:  It is very important that the words which speak agree with the things that we do.

Katie:  It is called walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

Connor:  Well, I find it quite easy to say, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

James:  Learning to walk the walk is the greatest word test in life.

Katie: Other names for our body language are morals and ethics.  What do the actions of our lives say to others?

Connor:  Once you think about it, learning S.A.T. vocabulary seems quite easy compared with the great word test of life itself.

James:  Well, it is about the end of the year.  And some people use this time to review what they have done during the past year.

Katie:  And other people use the end of the year to think about what kind of changes they want for their lives in the New Year.  Have you guys thought about your new year’s resolutions yet?

Connor:  New Year’s resolutions have to do with the great word test of life.

James:  How can we learn to say the right thing, at the right time and in the right way in the new year?

Katie:  And how can we let our bodies do some good talking in the New Year?  How can we let the good word be made flesh in the actions of our lives in the New Year?

Connor:  What should we use for the test of our word life in the New Year?

James:  Is what I say and do kind?  Is it creative?  Is it appropriate to the situation?

Katie:  I think this Gospel for today require all of us to ask this question:  How will the Word of God be made flesh in our lives in the New Year?  Let the love and kindness of Christ be our guide in the New Year.  Amen.

The Christmas Story Is not yet Finished; not yet Told

Christmas Eve         December 24, 2013  

Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectionary Link

   As a preacher, I can often be like the little boy who gets a new toy car.  It’s not good enough to just play with the car and enjoy it.   I have to take it apart and see how it works.  And when I do, I never sure whether I can get it back together again, or at least as the same working car it once was.  In reassembly, it may look like a chariot with lots of extra unused parts or it may be a space ship with lots of added parts.

  And as we have heard the Christmas Story again this year, you might tell me to just leave it alone preacher.  Let it function for us in its lovely primary naiveté so we can get home more quickly to the egg nog.

  But you know me; I cannot let this story stand without taking it apart and examining motive and provenance of its writing and reception in its own time.  I do so because I think that an ancient story can become violated by the temporal provincialism of us modern and post-modern people so thoroughly programmed by modern science.  We can be scornful of biblical writings even while we look for our truths in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.  We excuse ourselves because we say it is a different kind of truth than people found in biblical times.

   The Christmas Infancy narratives are actually quite diverse in their appeals to quite an eclectic audience.  They are rather sophisticated in their mode of composition even as the writers use the rhetorical devices of their time to deal with one of the plainest facts of human history, namely, who is this Jesus Christ, and why are we still talking about him and why did he not get discarded  in the dust bin of human history.

  The Christmas Story got written down in the eight or nine decades after Jesus lived because of the reality of his staying power in the lives of a growing community of people.  These people were baffled that a person had an ability to create a trans-historical presence.  But this was the occasion to continue to create new traditions about Jesus to new audiences. 

  Why did this Jesus happen?  Why won’t he go away?  Why does he continued to appear when his physical body was gone and affect the lives of people enough in compelling ways  to cause them to tell and retell his story again and again and in different ways?

  I would like for us to give credit to the Gospel writers for knowing their language methods and their audience.  They used Gospel narratives to tell the greatness of Jesus by trying to speak about his origin.  Where did this guy come from?

  In using the standard rabbinical methods of interpretation, known as midrash, the writers used the intermingling of plain fact, with allegorical or esoteric meanings and further they particularly used a method of comparative stories to wed the life of Jesus with the lives of others whose stories of greatness had been told.  What is also notable about the rhetoric of the infancy narratives is that the writers took the comparative stories method and used comparative themes from the Roman propaganda stories which accompanied the myths of the divinized Caesars.   In a community which had separated from the synagogue in a large part because of the success of the Jesus Movement among the Gentiles, the appeals of the rhetoric had to take into account the Roman Hellenistic audience. The Gospel writers were appealing to new audiences; they expanded rabbinical methods to extra-Judaic topics even as they made the Hebrew Scriptures more widely known and read in a Roman Empire audience.

  The plain fact of Christmas is that Jesus did not go away for lots of people after he died.  He stayed and his staying presence was accounted for under the reality of the Risen Christ.  Now how and why could Jesus stay around?  What is his origin?  How can we recount and tell his greatness?

  The earliest report tells us that Jesus was adopted as God’s Son at his baptism.  Mark is the earliest written Gospel; Mark does not have the Bethlehem birth story.  Jesus is adopted as God’s Son when a heavenly voice said, “This is my beloved Son; with him I am well pleased.” Christmas pageant directors certainly cannot get any scripts out of the Gospel of Mark.  The rabbinical method was not yet fully developed and applied in Mark.

  How can we find about the origin of Jesus and who is in his family tree?  We don’t have to go to the Salt Lake City data base of genealogy; we can go to Luke and Matthews.   The genealogy of Jesus begins with Abraham in Matthew.  And it begins with God, Adam and Eve in the Gospel of Luke.  The origin of Jesus is found in genealogy.  Genealogy is a rhetoric of origins.  The genealogies of Jesus expose fully his humanity but even as there were great people in his family tree, they were also very human in their imperfections.  The presence of the human imperfections meant that elaborating stories about Mary’s Immaculate Conception had to arise in the Catholic tradition to account for his surpassing greatness and perfection.

  The Gospel writers used comparative stories to align the birth of Jesus with miraculous birth stories tradition in the Hebrew Scripture such as the stories of the births of Isaac and Samuel. The Isaac birth story include angelic messengers.   The song of  a thankful Hannah, the once barren woman who became the mother of Samuel,  became the poetic model for the song of Zachariah and for Mary’s Magnificat.  

    The story of Jesus had to be told using the spiritual journey of Israel.  The people of Israel were trapped as slaves in Egypt and were led out by their hero Moses; the baby Jesus and his parents made a flight to Egypt and returned to the homeland as a symbolic story of the identity of Jesus with Jacob and Joseph and Moses.   Pharaoh was a baby killer of Hebrew boys in Egypt but the great Moses was spared when he was adopted by an Egyptian princess.    Herod was a baby killer but the baby Jesus survived as he was presented using the template of the baby Moses survival story.

  The Gospel writers also found in the poetry of the prophets the language to speak about Jesus. They borrowed freely the words of the prophets to speak about Jesus: Emmanuel, Counselor, Prince of Peace, Almighty God and many, many more.  The Psalmist wrote about kings of the earth coming to pay homage to a king in Judah.  The story of the magi fulfilled this alignment of Jesus with the poetic themes of the Psalms.

  What is further fascinating is that the Gospel writers appealed to readers who were familiar with the Roman political rhetoric.  Caesars were declared as gods and sons of gods by the Roman Senate.  Caesars were praised for being saviors and bringing peace to the world.  Stories were told about the mother of Octavian conceiving in a temple through an encounter with a Apollo.   There were comets and astronomical signs which accompanied births of Emperors.  In the Christmas narrative the heavenly senate of angels declared the birth of a savior and prince of peace.  There was a Christmas star which accompanied and was a sign of the birth of a royal Christ child.

  The Gospels in their original contexts were exclusive for the people converted to their communities; they were not read in a wider community.  They served as liturgy and even secret teaching for their communities.  The writers were subtle enough to encode deeper meanings within the narratives.  The earliest New Testament writings are from St. Paul and he set the theology of the church which was the proclamation of the risen Christ in you by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Christmas narrative presents Mary as a story example of everyone who has the life of the risen Christ born within them as they are over-shadowed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

  By the time John’s Gospel was written, Jesus the Christ came to be presented as the Eternal Word of God who was the word of God spoken to create the world from the very beginning.  In John’s Gospel, the origin of Jesus is as one who has no origin at all since he was from the beginning.

  And now after 2000 years the Christmas story has had so many collateral effects in so many times and cultures.  It has taken on evergreen trees and an obscure Bishop Nicholas of Myra has morphed into a Dutch Sinterclaus and a jolly grandfatherly Santa Claus of America commercial culture.

  Tonight we can say that what we learn about the Christmas Story is that it cannot be controlled, by limiting its meaning, its content appeals and its collateral cultural effects.  That may be disconcerting for people who want to be doctrinal police but it is also an affirmation that as long as there is time, there will more meanings for Christmas and more ways to tell and live the Christmas Story.

  The plain fact is Jesus was a historical person who has not gone away from the consciousness of the people of the world.  Dealing with this fact is how the Christmas story originated and why it still grows in its power to accrue new meanings today.

  The Christmas Story is large enough to encompass your life and my life and the kind of meanings which you and I need to surpass ourselves in excellence tonight.  You and I live with some of the harsh realities of our adult world.   Somewhere in our lives tonight we need rebirth and renewal.  Somewhere we need to re-capture the nascent and native state of being playfully joyful for no reason at all.   

  This Christmas Eve is as good a time as any to open ourselves up to renewal.  Being born again has become a mocking characterization of a type of Christianity but it should be seen as just good psychological practice of constant renewal into the original freshness of our births into this life.  Our memories of our original freshness are weak, obscure, even lost, which is why we need to be mystified by the Sublime Spirit to plumb our original blessed entrance into the world.  To aid our memories we have the magic of babies who have power over us because they live the state of being what we have forgotten.  We have babies and the Christ Child to bear our projections of the original blessing of our birth into this world.

  Tonight we let our projections go onto the great Child of History and the child in our history.  And this Child calls to us tonight to tend to him.  This child is found in the vulnerable in this world.  This Child is with us.  This Child is us.  And tonight we interpret the cooing of the Christ Child as a gentle whisper which says to us, “Merry Christmas.”  Amen.