Aphorism of the Day, 2014

Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2014

Resolved to make no more resolutions because of self disappointment regarding previous failure or being comfortably inured to one's repetitions aka accepting oneself?  Ain't going teach this dog new tricks? How about framing resolutions with a the positive:  Instead of fasting, or giving up or changing, how about saying, "I am going to take a vacation from such and such behavior which will allow me to explore alternate behaviors to take the time and place of former behaviors which for reason of health or boredom created some conditions of minor self-loathing?"   Resolution is part of the deliberate process of repentance, also known as education.  Repentance and education are the intentional efforts we make to add personal structure to the inevitability of change.  If everything is changing, then what are we going to do to be those who give deliberate direction to this inevitability?  When we arrive at our latter days, sometimes the judgment about our preparation for the process of change gets rendered.  The judgment often has to do with being stuck in mindsets which don't fit the age specific tasks which have been forced upon us by change.  May God grant us wisdom to know how to ride the energy of the  inevitability of change not as an entropy or the losing of energy but of the sucking positive energy of death and beyond as motivational inspiration to cherish our time with timeliness of appropriate actions.

Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2014

As people we can be uneven and inconsistent in how we interpret all manner of events and texts in life and we can rapidly shift what we regard to be validating criteria for authenticity.  Sometimes authenticity is reduced to what is convenient for the moment.  Ironic that when people read the Bible sometimes they retreat to the interpreting principle, "it literally happened and therefore is true!"  Literally true has many meanings too.  Literally true probably means literately true or artistically meaningful in how it engages one in the moment. Ironically fundamentalists imported the limited "truth" criteria of logical positivism to Bible reading by implying that the words of the Bible are true and meaningful if and only if they could have been verified empirically.  This of course, would discount the aesthetic mode which would account for the experience of the sublime encountered in an artistic text. A painting or piece of music may have aesthetic meaning and truth for us and still be "representative" art.  One can note there is often confusion in "interpretative" modes when people read the Bible.

Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2014

The Feast of the Holy Innocents is a reminder to us how children sometimes are the victims of those who crave absolute power or revenge or who are driven by the worst sociopathological impulses which allow them to inflict innocent suffering without consciences.  The Holy Innocents portion of the Gospel Story is a re-visiting of the story of the infanticide event which threatened Moses.  Also the Christmas Story as one which encodes the new birth of Christ within a person by the action of the Holy Spirit, included the Holy Innocent story as the proof of one of the terrible outcomes for those who experienced the birth of Christ within their lives.  We pray for the end of direct and collateral assaults which might take in an  "untimely" manner the innocent from our world because of the terrible abuse of power of any sort.

Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2014

The writer of the Gospel of John rewrote the Creation Story with six words: "In the beginning was the Word....."  Ironically that means since both creation and evolution are words, neither have any existence without the pre-condition of Word since positing the reality of either creation or evolution depends first upon Word being the pre-condition.  So that argument is settled.  Extra-ironically, "In the beginning was the Word" is a phrase that depends upon Word and so when we utter such a thing we are assuming we have Word as a pre-condiition of such an utterance.  Word is honestly reflexive about the basis of all word products.  The most honest absolute universal is what could be called Wordism, because it confesses itself for its own existence without which it could not have existence.  How does one assume existence of any sort without the existence of words?  The most obvious verb of Word is "to be" or the existence or creation acknowledgment word.  Word with the "verb to be" makes all language into what generates language word products as a continuous mathematical tautology whereby we are always already assuming a sort of "x=y" situation or otherwise stated, "For the sake of this conversation we are assuming the use of these words which refer to and mean this."  Word introduces the verb "to be" which then makes language a perpetual tautological performance or creation, because we are perpetually saying what "is" given the prior understanding of the meaning of our terms.

Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2014

Being an advocate for a special feast for St. John the Divine since scholars do not think John the Evangelist and St. John the Divine are the same person, one can note how a vocabulary become a reductive code word for a cluster of associations.  We use the word apocalypse to mean a gloom and doom catastrophic end of the word.  It's literal meaning is "revelation" or "uncovering" or "unveiling."  Because the Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine is seen to be an "unveiling" of things that will happen at the end, Apocalypse has become the short-hand term for the end of the world as we know it.  One could make the case that after reading the book of Revelations, nothing is revealed because it all remains inscrutably covered within the vivid dream-like imagery of the writer who brought the vision to language. To unveil or reveal a dream does not mean that there is a self-evidential meaning that comes along with the dream.  Beware of those who claim that they know precisely what St. John the Divine uncovered through his writing of The Apocalypse.

Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2014

Go forth today being honest about the fact that one is going to interpret and be interpreted and in fact it will be impossible to determine the meaning of one's life in the eyes of others.  We like the Bible and God are always already vulnerable to be interpreted and acted towards by others in ways in which we cannot control.  Genres are going to be cross pollinated; you can tell Andy that it's a Campbell soup can but that did not stop Andy from making the soup can an icon of expensive art.  Who controls the standards of the value and function and meaning of "art" anyway?  So as we are always already caught in the whirlwind of the proliferation of endless meanings, how then should we act?  We cannot presume to act in a final "absolute" way unless we do not believe ourselves to have a future when we might surpass our previous "final" meaning.  So how do we live with such profound openness to many meanings?  The best we can do is always seriously to ponder what love and justice means in our thought and deed and endeavor to live from a "do no harm" motive and pray that one's blessing does not mean a wake of hurt for someone else.  We are riding the surf of dynamic meanings so let's do our best to stay on our boards.

Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2014

In the midst of Christmas excess note that babies often prefer to play with ribbons and boxes rather than their expensive toys and surveys tell us that "the stick" is still the most popular play thing for children until we program them to want expensive video games. Underneath the mountain of Christmas wrapping the crawling babies are fascinated by just the colors on the wrapping.  Christmas is about accessing the totally "free" birth which still resides within us.

Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2014

Let us resist the notion that the excess of the Christmas season requires that we be excessive.  Yes, make it special for children but let charity be excessive and since capitalism is not an automatic philosophy of altruism, being excessive in Christian charity means that we truly have to exercise "freedom" in the so-called "Free Market."  The best way to Christianize the Free Market is to be excessive in charity.

Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2014

Getting to the Christmas event is like the field of archaeology.  One can only dig a limited trench to get a feeling for the entire terrain and culture of the time.  And one cannot avoid temporal provincialism and anachronism because one can't help but ask questions of outcomes which were not posed in the original setting.  Since the past is gone we can only dredge it for historical imaginations in the constitution of our present identity and in the Gospels, the infancy narrative was a spiritual archaeology for the church to enter into the imagination of how "Christ in me" was the hope of glory.

Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2014

Christmas is about a story to transport the memory to a common event: the grace of one's birth=the retained memory of it=the return to the original blessing of one's birth as a being born again as one projects upon the features of the Christmas Story especially the birth of Christ into one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2014

We like Christmas because of the "birth narrative" and so we go all out to make Christmas special for children, and rightly so.  But, we should not childify the Christmas story to the point of "dumbing" down the writing program of the Gospel writers.  Each element represents didactic points and spiritual methodology for the early Christians.  It behooves us to look beyond the mere childification of Christmas.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2014

With cultural, seasonal and family calendars we force upon the very neutral passing of time a social experience of time and with notions of recurring anniversaries when we return to events which gather family and people who are close to us and such anniversaries such as Christmas can be both joyful and sorrowful.  Mostly joyful, or mostly sorrowful depending upon our current adaptive state to the various losses in our lives.  Memories can inflict upon us in the now the pain of the loss of the people whom we are missing.  It can also be remembrances of broken relationships.  But it is also the inspiring renewal of current friendships.  "Gaudete" is a command to "Rejoice!"  This often means, "Rejoice! in spite of....."   How can one rejoice in the experience of what is lost and irreplaceable?  So Christmastide requires that we go deep within to find the centering place of Peace and Joy which does not depend upon what actually happened to us.  Here we can find the power to rejoice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2014

Use the conical spiral as a metaphor for one's life. Begins with a dot and becomes  ever widening connected concentric circles symbolizing the passing of time and the expansion of the occasions of becoming in one's life and also indicates that we return to similar places but on a different rings of the conical spiral.  Each place has its own grace and challenge.  To be born again is to be able with the imagination to move in reverse direction back to the original dot when one was not coded by knowing anything when one had sheer "animal instinctive" joy and for no reason at all except for the occasion of one's conception and eventual birth.  Tapping the memory of the original states of blessing gets accessed at Christmas and in the Christmas story because we are willing to set aside ponderous adult coding and access the source of our birth and we do it through the Christmas story and hopefully in the presence of infants and children who can draw from us the projections of the mysterious aspect of ourselves which we seem to have lost.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2014

The Gospel of John does not include the infancy narratives of Jesus but contains the eternal pre-gestational State of Christ as the Word of God who was busy bringing the human world as we know in into being since human consciousness and Word are co-extensive beginnings of human life as we know it.  Christmas has a date on our calendars but what is the date of eternity?

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2014

Nobody seems to know the trouble that I know, but when they do a bond is forged and befriending empathy occurs.  The church exists to witness to the reality of befriending empathy even while the church does not have to be threatened if such befriending empathy happens outside of "churchy" contexts.

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2014

Experiences of the Sublime are serendipitous and most often individual and not often communal.  So it is very easy for us to be dismissive about the uncanny experiences of others and want to give alternate explanations.  Religious movements have been founded because the root events have uncanny events which are communal in nature so that the originating effervescence is bound to be remembered and to have the power of becoming a repeatable trace in subsequent history.

Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2014

The Christmas narrative is not in the earliest Gospel of Mark or in the latest Gospel John. It is of relative late composition when compared to the first writing of St. Paul.  Why didn't St. Paul write about the babe in the manger?  Could it be that the theology of Paul regarding the birth of Christ within each person who is over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit becomes the birth narrative story of Jesus which encodes the spiritual program of members being taught the tradition of spiritual transformation?  Bethlehem is a spiritual "topos" or eventful place of new birth.

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2014

It is the nature of institutions to be conservative because of the need to provide stable structures and to promulgate them to create the conditions for members to work together through the sharing of common topics and themes and identities.  The challenge of institutions is to include a dynamic aspect which allows for the constant testing of the goals of the institution and their adequacy within their setting in being able to be relevant to new members. If the pragmatic criteria is not present in one's truths then an institution may be headed toward an arcane obsolescence of but a few eccentrics who gather to be "precious" about their ideas. The Christian movement was a dynamic movement which threw off "conserving" aspects of its Judaic context to become dynamic welcoming "clubs" in the cities of the Roman Empire.  Christo-centric Judaism in the Roman cities was so innovative and dynamic in it openness to Gentiles that it had to be separated from the synagogues unable to tolerate the changes required to welcome a diverse new membership.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2014

"Being there when it happened" is the most intimate connection with an event.  History becomes the oral and written transmission of what happened.  Some think that the words of the Bible can actually fix the exact and precise meaning of what happened.  When we read the Bible we are actually getting an account of the interpretation of the writers about previous events which may or may not have been experienced by the writers but more likely were the received oral traditions within the writers' communities.  So when we are speaking about the "authority" of the Bible, in practice it means the interpretations of those whom one regards to be a competent authority.  One short-sighted notion of biblical inspiration seems to be influenced by a philosophical method which says a "statement or event is true and meaningful if and only if it can be or was empirically verified."   Aesthetic truths regarding beauty and moral and spiritual truths regarding justice and love would not qualify as being inspired under the aforementioned criteria.  However, if one moves the words of the Bible into the realm of aesthetics and ethics then one can find ample inspired meaning as one endlessly uses intuition to engage the eternally returning manifestations of the  structures of the archetypes of human consciousness.  The structures of the archetypes of human consciousness will always come to new detail in one's own context.  So biblical words can morph into constant contemporary relevance and one does not have to pretend that one understands the particular consciousness of people living in the first century.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2014

There is an interesting ambiguity in Christian tradition; one is not supposed to be conformed to the image of the world, even though Jesus Christ is the icon or image of God in complete conformity to humanity, namely God as a human person.  It is convenient for people to be able to perceive the reality of God within their own cultural contexts.  If revelation cannot be "morphed" to be relevant to people in their own contexts, then there would be no revelation at all.  So in the 1600's God could be made known in the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe to someone living in Mexico.  It does no good to make all of the contextual details of one era as the criteria for valid revelation in another era.  It is silly to say that if Jesus were omniscient why didn't he speak about car and space ships.  Jesus in his own context told stories about slaves and servants; the Jesus of our context condemns slavery as a terrible evil.  So we accept the morphing of the Sublime into modes which can be honestly perceived by us in our own times.  St. Paul called this "morphing," kenosis or the self-emptying of the divine into human palatable forms of recognition.  We should let the great Events of the Sublime and their accounts be a witness to us that fresh encounters of the Sublime within our own contexts are to be expected.  The process of "kenosis" is the validation of the unavoidable habit of anthropomorphizing of the divine.

Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2014

Regression is regarded to be a defense mechanism of reverting to earlier behaviors as a way of dealing with a current threat.  Such behaviors are regarded to be escape mechanisms.  But what about accessing memories and integrating them in a way which serves more effective action in the present?  Being born again or accessing one's child aspect of personality as an internal source of having joy in the face of some harsh adult realities can be a spiritual practice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2014

Today creative tasks involves re-integrations of one's past not by denying what has happened but truly inventing the past and make new things arise because of the contrast with how one has surpassed oneself in a subsequent state.  The ways in which one formerly knew oneself have only become known now because of subsequent experience and knowledge.  Faith is the ability to know one's past as serving one's presence with excellence, especially if it involves the proverbial making a "silk purse with a sow's ear."

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2014

In the history of religion and thought, sometimes one is limited in thinking what is latest is the best, when it is only the latest or the current context of which one cannot help be a prisoner.  It is hard to have humility about those who might supersede us. Early Christians claimed that Jesus completed Judaism and the church was the "New Israel."  Some Muslims claim that Muhammad was the promised Paraclete referred to by Jesus.  One can see in the Gospels an effort of the writer to show how Jesus was the logical successor of John the Baptist.  Certain religious adherents today can be very angry about their apparent "obsolescence" in the face of modern science and human science insights about the human conditions.  Has religion been superseded by modern ways of knowing?  This is why the work of articulating how one's faith can have current relevancy in an adequate way is a most important work of faith.  Faith still has a discourse relevant to a certain experience of the Sublime which has the power of transforming one's life in the midst of modern day up to date information and endless "self help" literature.  We need to be wise about how we articulate the Sublime in operation in people of biblical times and how the Sublime can have very current and different detailed outcomes in our lives today.

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2014

The post-resurrection and post-ascension afterlife of Jesus is a reality of the success of those home-club meetings throughout the cities of the Roman Empire, known as churches. The members of these churches were able in hindsight to reflect upon and write about the significance of the life of John the Baptist, whose community dwindled while the communities of Jesus flourished in their extra-Palestine settings.  From the position of success of the early Christ-centered communities, their preachers and writers were able to assign John the Baptist the historical "set up" role for Jesus of Nazareth even though small communities of John the Baptist followers survived in some places.  The synthetic and adaptability of the message of Jesus within the Roman city environment propelled a Christo-centric Judaism beyond the synagogue and the community of John the Baptist.  We often forget that the New Testament writings were written from the perspective of a rising successful movement possessing a winsomeness in its appeal to people who could not conform to the pieties of the synagogue or of John the Baptist.

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2014

While people like John the Baptist and members of monastic orders are called to the ascetic life, the ascetic principle is valid for all of us.  It is the "fasting grace."  It is the grace to give up and  quit things which are harmful to me and my community when I recognize being on a path of addiction. 

December 6, 2014

We often censor the Christmas narrative for children.  We don't really think it good to reveal the elements of the story which put the life of the baby Jesus in jeopardy causing the flight to Egypt.  We don't really want to tell our children about the death of the holy innocents, an infanticide.  The morphing of the St. Nicholas into Santa Claus represents the effort to cloister children in a "child's utopia" because the harshness of events in the world threaten that utopia all of the time.  Santa Claus represents the belief that there is an age appropriate time and place for children becoming adults to wrestle with the reality of harshness in our world.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2014

The humble St. Nicholas of Myra each year becomes perhaps even better known than Jesus at Christmas time because he has undergone quite a cultural cosmetic make over in successive cultures.  Santa Claus is an imaginative effort to remove all harsh elements from the lives of children; no Herod, no poor Holy Family relegated to a stable.  Santa Claus represents the effort to censor for a time all harshness from the lives of children and let them believe that the pursuit of happiness and temporary achievements of the same are important for establishing optimism and hope in a child's life.  Pursuit of happiness seems to be more universal than religious doctrines of faith communities so Santa Claus has an appeal beyond the borders of the church of which Nicholas of Myra was a bishop.

Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2014

John the Baptist adopted a life style which allowed him the freedom to have an "unbribed soul."  Advent is a season to find the place within us which is unbribed, and by this I mean the born again experience of not knowing ourselves to be in compromise with all of the "pipers in our lives who must be paid."

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2014

John the Baptist pops out each year in the Advent lectionary as a sort of ideal Advent police. One can get the idea that his message of repentance is harsh but really repentance is not harsher than any education.  Education is the progressive removal of ignorance some of which we are so entrenched in that it is painful to let go of.  Repentance is "meta-noia," or the after mind or the new state of mind after the previous state of ignorance.  Let the season of Advent be the achievement of new states of "after mind" or the over coming of comfortable but unhealthy ignorance about all manner of living.

Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2014

What would be a truly Christian "free" market?  As Christians we believe in freedom, but we do not believe that such freedom allows us to do what we want or do things because we can do them without being punished.  We have rules and regulations so that those with power and strength don't use their "freedom" to dominate.  So freedom does not mean license; it needs to be expressed with moral and ethical living according to rules for the common good. Many have come to believe that a free market means a market without regulations and without regulation those with the power to dominate do, but usually for the benefit of a few people in one sector of the economy.  A Christian free market would mean that freedom means choices can be made for the general good and not just for an isolated sector. Let us begin to ask what a truly Christian "free market" would mean.

Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2014

I propose that we brand the holiday giving spirit to those in need as the Spirit of Advent.  We are reminded by a parable that when we practice kindness to least of these, we are doing it to Christ, the Son of Man.  Thanksgiving and Christmas are celebrated as times of "excess" and sometimes there may be a guilt about others not being able to have the same excess and so the spirit of giving may seem like crumbs from the tables of our sumptuous feasts.  While we commit to Advent giving for the mere necessities of the needy let us also pray and work for the best free and creative capitalism of all, when people freely choose to practice a marketplace philosophy with systematic commitment to make a life income for all the norm.  For all to have enough would be the best freedom in a creative capitalism.  What if the alleviation of human need were to be a major profit motive?

Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2014

The season of Advent reminds us of how much the Christian Calendar provided to secular and commercial culture the topic matter to transform and then force back upon the Christian community to alter the ways in which we used to observe seasons. The Commercial Calendar is New Years Eve and New Years Day, Valentines Day, Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  The seasons of Advent and Lent which invite abstinence conflict with commercial excess and so they do not get much attention in advertisement.  Perhaps the best way that Advent is observed is through the increased giving to charitable organizations during the Thanksgiving-Christmas Seasons.  Many charitable organization rely on the Thanksgiving-Christmas giving season for the majority of their annual receipts to spread throughout the rest of the year.  So why don't we begin to claim the Thanksgiving-Christmas charitable mood as the spirit of the Advent Season?

 Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2014

We are inundated by so many calendars and each calendar asks us to organize our time according to their schedule, eg., NFL, NCAA, PTA, School, Youth Sports, MLB, Bocce Ball League, et al.  The church has a calendar too with seasons and days.  The purpose of the church calendar is to give annual cycle of seasons which are punctuated with anniversaries of "God-events"  derived from the events in the life of Christ and the church and structured around corresponding teaching emphases. For your convenience, aesthetic variation  and your visual natures, we color code the seasons.  Advent is the first season of the Church Year and it is important for trying to be a calendar season for the not yet future; Advent is a season of anticipation for the not yet, Big One.  It is a season of anticipation and properly charts the Future as the big one.  And as the formerly detailed "Big One" is perpetually delayed, we are taught that the purpose of the Big One is the lure of future Excellence to generate hope and anticipation.  This helps us to add spice of hope to  each of our "little one" events of our present time.  Let us learn to live expectantly now because the "Big One" Future gives us present intensity, intensity to hearken to the call of excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2014

Black Friday, crass commercialism, generous gift giving, fellowship of shoppers, jobs for the unemployed, cultural habit and much more.  If one is "against" it avoid it; if one embraces the gift of shopping, go for it.  If one is "too good for it," savor one's "superiority; each survives and rationalizes by one's own convenient delusions.  Whatever one's judgments on this day, don't forget the Great Giver and thanksgiving and generosity and don't be limited to one's view of any of the three.  Be open to new views on the Great Giver, thanksgiving and generosity.

Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2014

Thanksgiving and generosity go together.  People often are most thankful when they perceive themselves as being recipients of generosity.  In our hyper-commercial and consumer cultures we have become desensitized in knowing what being recipients of generosity means.  Thus, we have the cynical, "The best things in life are free, but you can give it to the birds and bees, I'll take the money!"  The commercial cultures of advertisement create the conditions of worrying about what we don't have and we forget the basics, a glass of water, a sunset, good health, freedoms of all kind, family, friends, safety, a really tasty piece of bread....We become more aware of the basic conditions of generosity when we lose something basic or are threatened with the loss of things taken for granted.  Let us resist the commercial culture with its propaganda about the things that we don't have and reside in the basic condition of having been the recipients of incredible generosity.  And let us work to make this world a place where all can know that they too are recipients of the generosity of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as equal children of God.

Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2014

The theology of blessing and prosperity espouses that one's wealth is a sign of God's favor and blessing.  The irony is that one would imagine that God who cares for the poor, the widow and orphan would impart with blessing and favor the gift of generosity such that poverty would be eliminated because those who were blessed with the most wealth would also be blessed with an equal measure of generosity and the ability to strategically apply such generosity.  Be careful about espousing the logic that God must love me because I'm wealthy and fortunate.  The God presented by Jesus Christ is the One who would inspire generosity to be equal with one's wealth.

Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2014

Embrace the second movement of Thanksgiving.  What is that?  Create the conditions for other people to have a peaceful sigh and whisper, "Thank you God."  It is very nice to be thankful but thanksgiving becomes an active ministry when thankful people help to make other people thankful.  Thanksgiving is the perfect sealing of a serendipitous contract between the one who needs and the one who supplies. 

Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2014

The Bible in the various ages of its compilation had to be much more to the communities of derivation than it does today when the deluge of words carrying world knowledge leave the words of the Bible in much different contexts.  The Bible represented in its own times of compilation a much greater portion of  the world knowledge in written words of those who read the words.  It was their science or "scientia" =knowledge, but it was also their science fiction of a hopeful future, their utopian literature, their laws and legal thinking, their politics and propaganda, their literary tradition and entertainment, humor, wisdom and satire.  With the exponential expansion of world knowledge that has come to language there has been radical specification to categorize the deluge of words and the human consciousness has been divided up in specialized ways and so we do not expect the Bible to be omni-competent as a literary event in the ways that it was when world knowledge in written language was so sparse.  So, give the Bible and its words a break!  Don't make it serve or be something it never was intended to be.  If one looks for the universal structures of human consciousness which generated the word details in the various settings of the biblical writers one can find no shortage of inspired writing.

Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2014

On the Feast of Christ the King, one can note that Jesus of Nazareth was not like any earthly king and that he did more in his Risen State as a king of hearts with the subtle propaganda of the Holy Spirit to wins hearts one by one and inspire people to found communities or clubs of care for each other and these communities became "self-perpetuating."  It is amazing how this king of heart gradually took over the Roman Empire and how the political rulers then co-opted the kingdom of Christ as their own stamp of legitimazation.  And so this persecuted group of people who lived the interior kingdom were able to come out in the open and not only have protection but then have their message used by political forces which generated the Crusades and Inquisitions and burnings at the stake of heretics.  We need to be on the alert against an "empire" of Christ the King because the association of Jesus with the absolute corruption of power is the most unfortunate association of all.

Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2014

The literal and the linear thinking mind tries to reduce the parables of Jesus to actual people and events whereas the universal and inspired natures of the parable may better be appropriated as the work of a wise mind who tries to take a slice of fast moving life and freeze frame it in an allegory so that we might attain some wisdom about ourselves. In projecting upon the story we have aspects of ourselves represented by each aspect of the story.  So we can resist the temptation to over-identify ourselves with the good guys.  We can also resist the temptation in thinking that we know who the bad guys are.

Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2014

Did ever wonder why so much of what is confessed about God does not seem all that obvious as in, "The Lord cares for the poor and needy."  And yet the prevalence of poverty in our world seems to falsify such a confession.  As we move toward the Last Sunday of Pentecost or the Feast of Christ the King, we must confess that the realm or kingdom of God where Christ is "King" is a parallel and sometimes not very obvious one to us whose lives are dominated by the realms, dominions and powers of this world.  The power of God in Christ is to do an "inside job" on us and give us the task of doing the "outside" job on our environments, not by power of army or politics but with the winsome behaviors of kindness, justice and love. The will of the "incognito" kingdom of God needs to be worked through the likes of you and me. Good Lord, Have mercy!

Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2014

There is a parable of Jesus which seems to expose a seeming banality of both charitable response to those in need and a neglect of those in need.  "When you did it or did not do it to the least of these, you did it or did not do it to me."  It is good that we practice kindness as so ordinary that we don't know that we're doing anything special.  But when we are practicing neglect of others without recognizing it then we need interdiction and exposure as to how and why neglect of others has become so unrecognized.  When lack of empathy becomes an expression or practice which cannot be seen it needs to be interdicted as a serious deprivation of the normalcy of empathy and compassion.  But just think about how long the condition of slavery was a banal habit of human cultures.

Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2014

Consider the Matryoska, Russian Nesting or Babushka dolls as a metaphor for one's life.  These are the dolls within dolls in a sort of concentric circle fashion.  The outer doll or the outer ring of a concentric circle comprehends or contains everything within it.  The doll or concentric circle metaphor may be inadequate because their parallel borders would not admit any contact between the borders which would signify a degree of discontinuity between rings.  Some times there may appear to be discontinuities in our own personal histories because of conversion to new thought paradigms which radically changes the direction and choices of our lives.  A more apt adaption might be a conical spiral which links all rings but successive occasions of experience would represent a growing ring.  If one is to do an "archaeological" assessment of one's past lives, one should try to articulate the rings of thought which defined one's lives at various stages of life.  Try to remember what God, Jesus and the Bible meant to you at various phases of your life and the differences which you cite will help give insights into the particular paradigm which informed your life.  Doing such an intellectual self-archaeological analysis can provide one with insights into how one became how one has become to be now.

Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2014

Basically the human vocation is being interpreters of other interpretations of other interpretations....of life and sorting through judgments in the momentary choice which immediately sets the hierarchy of value expressed as "I chose to do and say this and in this way" instead of doing and saying everything else.  We manifest hierarchies of values with each choice and word and action based upon interpretation even though most seem like the redundant repetitions of the traces of already learned patterns of speech and action.  The seeming automatic actions which we perform represent the consolidated base of our characters which hedge our tendencies and such redundancies help us to attend to what is truly new in our lives today.  However, it is good not to leave the character of our tendency to be left completely unexamined  since sometimes we need a sea change for new direction.   Often we need a graceful event of the sublime to give us a new orientation in our lives or we need a progressive adaption and redirection forced upon us because of an event, causing temporary irritation and inconvenience but having the potential to be the grain of sand to spawn a new pearl.

Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2017

We are on our way to the end of the season of Pentecost or Ordinary time of the church calendar, the last Sunday of Pentecost being the Feast of Christ the King.  While many churches have the afterlife all figured out about who is going to inhabit better real estate based upon notions of pure doctrinal communities and exclusive and closed communions, one should trust the words of Jesus on how the nations will be judged, viz., namely on orthopraxy.  Did you feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the prisoners?  According to Jesus, these are the criteria of judgment by the Son of Man.  Humanity would truly be united if we made these the criteria for living a good life.

Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2014

Since no one is an omni-competent person and has personality proclivities which makes one better at some things than at other things, could one not regard the parable of the talents to instantiate aspects of one person?  A person can have strengths, moderate abilities and weaknesses all at the same time.  A major faith conclusion of the parable of the talent is the recognition that we need each other to complement each other and manifest the fullness of the talents of the community.

Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2014

Rather than viewing the parables of Jesus as designating who the good guys and bad guys are as though one could make such specific interpretive judgments; what about viewing parables as wisdom vignettes which honestly portray the uneven and ambiguous conditions of living under the conditions of freedom, and doing it with faith which at the day of one's death mean that one acceptingly encompasses all of one's own life experience with the integrative experience of God's grace, because we know that the largesse of God encompasses us and everything else.

Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2014

Meanings can be deconstructed because meanings are not stable because they exist within the details of the context of life experience.  Biblical meanings are not and cannot be stable because there are no survivors from biblical writers to tell us their exact intended meanings. Biblical words do not freeze within themselves exact meanings to survive for thousands of years because the most unstable of all is the person who reads and interprets.  Thankfully each person is "unstable" in achieving fixed meanings of texts because a person grows and develops and has interpretive lenses influenced by the perspectives gained from the successive nurturing contexts of a person's life.  Meanings are living entities and we can be thankful that meanings change and adopt and convert and deepen as we the readers grow and change.

Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2014

One should pray each day to get out of "interpretive ruts" for life and the Bible.  "Give us this day our daily bread" means something different to the one who does not know when and where the next meal is coming as opposed to the one who has so many food choices that he takes food for granted.

Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2014

We have be taught to read the parable of the talents as being condemnatory of the poor bloke who believed his master was harsh and so out of fear he hid his one talent in the ground to give back to his harsh master on his return.  What if we were to do an interpretive switch and see this parable as one which portrays what happens to human beings when they live with the view of God and fate being harsh and one who inspires a fear-causing atrophy? The parable then becomes understood differently if it centers upon how God has been presented in misrepresenting ways.  If one is taught that the creator is a harsh one who inspires craven fear then one can expect the atrophy of many of the gifts of life.  How much creativity has been stifled in this world because the wrong view of God has been promoted?  Indeed many people have experienced weeping and gnashing of teeth because they had no freedom of development under the presentation of a harsh and fearful God.

Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2014

The parable of the five, two and one talent reveals the harsh reality of the principle of atrophy.  Use it or lose it.  The insight of the parable indicates that the failure to invest a resource was caused by fear of losing it.  The energy of fear has to be transformed to the energy of faith always to believe in a future as one is at the work of investing all that one is and has toward surpassing oneself in a future state.

Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2014

Weeping and gnashing of teeth, removed from a wedding because of wrong wedding clothes, not letting late bridesmaids into the wedding, taking the one talent from the poorest man and giving it to the one with the most talents.  These are the apparently cruel endings in the parables of Jesus.  In the parables Jesus anthropomorphizes the uneven interaction of the play of the freedom of circumstances with the degrees of human freedom which people have.  The fate of circumstances can be experienced as cruel and the wisdom parables of Jesus hint that to counter the great freedom of events which confront us we have to exercise great wisdom to execute the degree of freedom which we actually do possess.  That bad things can happen in the competition of the systems of nature means that we have to be even better in exercising our freedom through the practice of wisdom.

Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2014

Did you ever consider that wisdom has to do with appreciating life as a truly big game?Wisdom has to do with knowing the range of probable outcomes and preparing for as many eventualities as possible knowing that one applies skill to try to win even though one also knows that some losing events can happen.  And in Christian gaming we know we can always say, "Wait till next year," since there is always a future and always a bigger game.

Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2014

One of the most obvious features of wisdom could simply be called probabilistic thinking. This kind of thinking collates in statistically approximate ways past experience as preparation for future action.  It is the effort to make sure that really bad history does not repeat itself.

 Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2014

Can one create a spatial metaphor for the experience of time?  Is time the flowing river and we are in one place with upstream being the past, the ford in front of us  the present and downstream the future?  Or is the experience of time more like us floating in the river and passing the shoreline landscape?  Probably time as floating in a moving river is more representative of the present time as always being moving.  The words of the famous hymn states, "time as a never ending stream bears all its sons away..."  If this defines our experience in time, we need to have wisdom to become good swimmers and floaters and boat and barge builders so that we can navigate among the flotsam and jetsam in the experience of time.  The problem with the river metaphor is that it assumes that the river is moving and the land is not.  With the experience time, everything is moving and it is language which seems to provide solid identities for milestones and memorial traces of repetitive human behaviors.  If all there is, is the Great Flowing River one assumes that God is both farthest downstream and also at the source to encompass all.

  Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2014

How do we measure future time?  Can one measure what has not yet occurred?  Yet we have projected calendars and we make assumptions about the sameness of our instruments of charting time whether astronomical or atomic.  Measuring future time is one story of our relationship to the future; in our personal and community life we often call the story of our experience of future time, the wisdom of planning.  People for centuries have imagined all sorts of stories as a way of planning for the future, that which we project as near future and more distant future.  And we are so anthropocentric that we really are only concerned about earthling stories since even aliens have to conformed to our human ways of processing their possible being.  Salvation History includes communities of old ever imagining many different kinds of future as they sought to live with faith in the "nowness" of the time when they were imagining a future.  We are moving toward the end of the season of Pentecost and arriving at Advent when we re-visit the ways in which those of our tradition have imagined the future.  And we are living their future which falsifies most of their imaginations if one falls into crass literalism which happens when readers lose the genius of the inspired stories.  If one literalizes biblical stories of future prediction one gets it wrong; if one understands the universal truth of pondering imaginations of the future for living in the present one witnesses to the same truth which drives most of our science fiction today.

Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2014

The future cannot yet be rendered as having occurred yet and so it remains as a beckoning time, an eventful time.  The future is the possible not yet actual time and it is open to many different kinds of narratives which are projected from past and current experiences of the moods of people now.  Much of the Bible record projections of an anticipated "day of the Lord" and this day was given images of salvation and rescue.  And these images have not ever become actual in human history.  Many people still like to literalize the narratives of the future which people of biblical time used to assuage their conditions of suffering and injustice. It is a biblical absolute that there will be a future and every generation has a future; what is not absolute is the precise knowledge and details of the actuality of the future.  We can be visionary about the future without acting like carnival people with special insider's information about what will be actual before it happens.  There may be some sense of asserting control by pretending to know the future but such is probably more of a defense mechanism of insecurity.  And that is okay as long as we know it is for our current pain management.  But there may be other visualizations for current pain management.

Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2014

The ancient prophets envisioned a day when the Spirit of God would write the laws of God upon the hearts of all people.  This is a vision of universal literacy when each individual is empowered by knowledge and free from the conditions of ignorance.  The message of John the Baptist and Jesus was the empowerment of the individual but in actual practice the individual got lost in collectivities headed by paternal figures who made the big choices of government for everyone.  The Enlightenment and the Reformation reinvigorated the notion of the individual empowered by learning and knowledge to be able to make individual judgments and decisions for oneself.  One person, one vote is one of the outcomes of the return of the individual.  And even if we feel like our votes are limited by the choices we have when candidates have to have so much money to run and are pressured to act on behalf of their major donors, we cannot lose heart.  We risk selling out the freedom of the individual once again to "paternalistic" figures who decide for special interests and not the common good.  Is it freedom if we vote ourselves towards "special interest" feudalism? Vote and pray for the Common Good.

 Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2014

The atrophy of democracy occurs when people do not vote.  The transformation of democracy to corporatocracy occurs when people seem to have only the choice to vote for leaders influenced by opposing corporate interests.   And corporate interests often influence the public to vote against their own common good.  The biblical writings do not give much guidance on voting or democracy since democracies are relatively recent forms of government.  No age or country has achieved the perfect and elusive state of love and justice but voting is the best tool we have to seek to approximate love and justice for all as we hope to hold our leaders accountable not to what is best for "me" but what is best for the common good.  Please exercise your vote not because it will be a magical action but because it is the way that you express belonging to a group of people with whom you are seeking to express freedom and process for the common good.   Voter apathy means that almost every election result is effected by those who do not vote.  The collective "my vote does not matter" often characterizes our country which prides itself on its democracy.

Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2014

If the cult of saints arose in a time of the extreme paternalism of feudal societies when significant individual choice was reserved for people in power who made decisions for the impoverished masses, what does the role of saints become when individuals are empowered through education and learning and the sense of integrity to have their own original relationship with God and Jesus and not mediated through clergy of the church or through heavenly saints?  The role of the saints is to be examples of excellence and establish the moral direction for our lives.  The role of the saints is to remind us not so be so temporally provincial in being arrogant about the "superiority" of our own time.  The role of the saints is to remind us of a profound communion of all things seen and unseen and all people seen and unseen.  The role of the saints is to remind us that each person has an absolute past and if my present will soon be an absolute past, I need to ponder the kind of trace which I want my life to leave.  The saints left good traces and they call us to do the same.

Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2014

It could be that the rise of hagiography and the cult of saints happened in times when there were lots of "little" suffering people who were ruled over by major feudal kleptocrats and the official church sometimes functioned as witting or unwitting agents of those kleptocrats.  The saints arose in popular culture as a way to provide regional totemic identity for people but also to express a compensatory balance provided by the Collective Unconscious.  And so when women were subjugated and powerless, the Virgin Mary could rise to be a co-Redemptrix in heaven and be attended by a host of women saints who attained status which they were not allowed to attain in their earthly lives.  The saints provided a compensatory heavenly place where justice was realized and the saints were specialized to be accessible to the mostly lowly folk who inhabited the earth.  When Jesus became too associated as a heavenly monarch, he was treated as being inaccessible like earthly monarch kleptocratic counterparts.  The role of saints became an expression of the Collective Unconscious to balance the impoverish expression of the feminine in a patriarchal world and also give the poor and the meek ascendancy in a world whose resources were held in the hands of but a few kleptocrats.  In the post-Enlightenment world with the gradual ascension of the independence of the individual and more opportunities for women, one can note that the saints have lost their previous compensatory function in the lives of people.  We need to be careful today as kleptocrats ascend to power everywhere and the people who are left out of significant independent power resort to much more violent compensatory expressions than those devotional responses to the irenic communion of saints of old.

Aphorism of the Day, October 31, 2014

On All Saints' Day the appointed Gospel is the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew.  The beatitudes or the blessed state or the beatific state describes the sanctity achieved by the saints.  Nietzsche called such expression of saintliness a "transvaluation of values" because it valorized the values of the slaves (a seeming toleration of oppression as a strength) over the values of the masters and was an attempt to over-turn will to power expressed in social Darwinism as the fittest or the masters being the ones who survive.  Hence there evolved another set of values called the values of the nobles when the masters or the strong of society actually try to expound these slave values of the weak and the oppressed but they cannot do so without hypocrisy.   On All Saints' Day we need to broaden the scope of saintliness to encompass the genuine expression of power as the power of creativity which results in creative advance and this advance should also involve the power of care for all who cannot compete at the same level.  Kenosis or the self-emptying of Jesus of his divinity in order to express the identity of God with humanity is perhaps the most powerful transvaluation of values of all.

Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2014

As we near All Saints' day we ponder the how and the why of certain people attaining a notoriety beyond their time and place because of the telling significance of their Christ-like behavior.  The proliferation of the cult of saints and the writing of hagiographies are evidences of how people attained totemic significance for certain places.  Saints functioned like the "alma mater" and became the rallying icons for a profound sentimentality of regional identity. Today saints for the most part have lost out to the totemic icons of college and professional sports teams.

Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2014

Interpretation is the on-going process or play between words which are made to rise into a foreground when they are produced by speaking, reading or re-reading.  But when words do not receive intentional focus or recognition they do for a person recede into the background where they get re-shuffled or saturated in the background of all possible words to await being called forth in a distinctive foregrounding pattern like actors upon a stage, the stage created by the intentions formed by the users, speaker or reader.  Biblical words were brought to the foreground by the intentions of those who initially used them, re-read them or edited them.  The words of the Bible have receded into the background many times and have been brought forth in new contexts with new readers and even when we think that we have continuity within worshiping communities, the words have accrued many different meanings because different settings bring forth different judgments based upon the articulated needs of the reading person or community.

Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2014

The biblical stories and Gospel records come to us with the remnants of the labyrinth of historical contexts in which they have been read and interpreted and today we cannot be certain of what remnants have been retained in how we have come to read the biblical texts. And it seems most wise to look for the universal archetypal patterns which eternally return in every human society and with care use our intuitions to re-read the biblical writings as guided by what is the highest and best expressions of justice and love.  We then re-read the Bible with charity for the situations of previous readers but also with honesty about what is regarded to be the highest expression of love and justice in our own time.

Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2014

As the kids prepare to hit the streets in their costumes of princesses and superheroes, it is a good time for Christians to focus upon the resurrection and the communion of saints which we profess to believe in.  When we value people for salutary reasons, it happens because they are models for us in such a way that they draw from us admiration and praise and mimicry of their virtuous deeds.  The Saints, the ones known more worldwide and across history, and the more local "all souls" who have been standard setters in our own lives are worthy of three days of festivals.  Let the children enjoy the costumes and the candy but let us not forget how we are connected with the excellent people who have preceded us in death.

Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2014

What the record of history shows is that Jesus was not received as the messiah for those who continued in the synagogue and who excommunicated the followers of Jesus.  What the record of history shows is that non-Jewish people took over a completely unfamiliar notion, the notion of the messiah from the Jewish story and adopted it as the winning motif within the Roman Empire.  This is one of the most baffling ironies of human history.

Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2014

Sometimes the way in which Christians have come to regard the inspiration of Scripture they forget the long history of the councils which also have to be regarded to have been inspired to know which writings were to included within the "official" collection.  Once writings were agreed by human vote to be inspired they in turn were treated as words which caused meanings to be in an absolute sense.  It is probably better to take a more humble view by noting what is inspired is the continuous interpretation of God in human life with the Scriptures being normative for this process of interpretation.

Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2014

Did you ever notice how the second half of the summary of the law is simply a different way of stating the Golden Rule and both are presented as sayings from the mouth of Jesus even though the summary of the law predated him in his Hebrew tradition.  Do unto others as you would have them to unto you=Love your neighbor as your self.

Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2014

Woody Allen's "80 % of success is showing up" could refer to the fact that good things or inventive opportunities would never occur if we didn't make the effort to show up.  How we show up today is also important because attendance as simply passive presence might mean that we could be "dead weight" to a creative enterprise.  Prayer, meditation and study means that we prepare ourselves to "show up" each day ready to take advantage of surprises.

Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2014

The histories of biblical people or any people  are the histories of the paradigms of temporal "objectivities" or systems of ideas which have the gravitational effect upon the desires of enough people to draw them from completely individual views and action into agreement with a "communal" truth which enables them to act with and for other people and to promote a "group" cause.  All such "objectivities" are temporal truths though some seem to have everlastingness because they are not susceptible to any conditions which would admit their falsity. (Would the extinction of all adherents of a truth, extinguish the truth?  Where have all of the Manicheans gone or the proponents of Zeus and Hera?)  Some scientific truths seem durable as long as the context and instruments for measurement have contemporary use.  So water boils at 212 degree Fahrenheit at sea level until the measurement of heat standard changes to something more reliable and when sea level is proven to be an unreliable stable global condition.

 Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2014

It should not surprise us that the Bible is a book of interpretation of previous interpretations. People cannot help but repeat or elaborate or apply within a new situation what they have already received within their learning contexts.  There is a degree of inventive inspiration of foregrounding out of all of the linguistic possibility the actual words of speech and writing. Writing and Speech acts are like re-arranging words as though they were furniture in the house of being.  One can take a notion like "messiah" in the Bible and in extra biblical writings and find such diverse reflections one can often wonder if people are speaking about the same thing.  With interpretation one can never be certain that different people mean "precisely" the same thing.  Pretending that we do makes for community peace and joint action but such agreement can only be a pragmatic "objectivity."   When pragmatic "objectivity" is given the force of divine or infallible certainty then one can be sure that the administrative control of people is involved.

Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2014

The Bible is a book of interpretation.  It is the writings of people who continuously updated and edited previous writing to fit a new time.  This why the Bible may be likened to an old family quilt consisting of cloth pieces from the garments of family sewn together and added to over time.  The quilt-like Bible serves as literary art as well as words to keep the heart warm with evocative insights about the human condition.

Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2014

The book of Genesis write that men and women were created in the image (eikon=icon) of God.  Various modern philosophers lacking the kinds of proofs they thought that they needed for God, reversed this by saying God is a projection or an image of humanity so God is made in the image of men and women.  Both positions manifest themselves as language products and by language we represent the human activity of thinking.  Whether one is a theist, atheist, or agnostic one cannot help but be a Wordist and I believe that the writer of John's Gospel stated that the Word creates everything or is co-extensive with every Becoming.

Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2014

Sometimes it is painful to be right as in stating the obvious such as a crew member on the Titanic shouting, "The ship is going down!"  Other truths do not always sounds so obvious particularly in counseling when one person is sure that "the ship is going down" while the other person counters, "but dear, we are on a submarine."  We interpret individual events in our lives often through the mood which characterizes our overall orientation to our environment. So how can we embrace knowing our environment as "living and moving and having our being in God?"

Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2014

Rather than divide life experience into radically dual categories of secular or sacred one can simply see the categories as functioning as expressions of parallel interpretive filtering of life experience.  One might to designate sacred as an intentional performance of something regarded to be special and once the performance is over, it is not really over because its sublime effects linger backstage, off stage and evokes at anytime and in any place a memory of that makes a past event a current reality.  Sacred and secular can be but the continuous play between the foreground of consciousness and the background of consciousness.

  Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2014

Bishops Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake.  One can be thankful that we live in a time and a place where one's enemy heretics cannot simply be removed from life. Yet our world still has religiously sanctioned ignorance which permits or even encourages the persecution of "religious" opponents.  Our modern and secular world has its own blind ignorances where we may be persecuting without knowing it.  Would that we could spend more money on ridding this world of ignorance through universal education rather than through military spending.  One could say that the conditions of ignorance allow those who control knowledge and resources to exploit those who are ignorant.  Those who have been given knowledge and resources are required to bring up the level of knowledge and resources of people who have less but in their own ignorance they fear future competition.

Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2014

If creation is in the image of God then each person derives creative freedom in bearing God's image.  Each of us stamps our own image on one's own world because of the unique version of the world which gets channeled through each person.  It's as though God is the vast open end of a vast funnel with seemingly endless smaller funneled reductive openings to reduce Great Experience to the smaller perspectives of each of our versions of Experience itself.  The question for us is how we choose to shape personal expression and interpretation the flow of God's great Life through us.

Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2014

The book of Genesis states that humanity was made in God's image (icon in the Greek translation εἰκών).  The Caesar's icon was upon the coinage of his time and they were used in part to pay taxes.  Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, i.e.,the things on which his "icon" is stamped.  But render unto God the things which are God's, i.e., everything on which the "divine icon" is stamped.  In short, Caesar thinks he can have his coins, but Caesar belongs to God.  Whose image or "icon" is stamped upon us?  God's.  Why should we pretend about the ownership of the "coins" of our lives which we have stamped with the "icons" of our life when we ourselves are stamped with the "icon," the brand of ownership by God?  Let us render ourselves unto God for to God we belong.  We cannot remove the "icon" or branding of our lives from our lives, even if we don't live worthy of our divine owner.

Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2014

Everything written in the Bible is now distant past for us but everything that was written in the Bible was written in a "then present."  Each present event requires a new configuration of writing of the past because each present event creates a new target for the past to be headed towards.  And so writing in the present about the past makes writers with hindsight confidence re-write the past as though it was actually predictive of the present time during which they were writing.  We can have such pride of the present time as being the "latter day" when it is just really the latest day that we live "temporal provincial" (a phrase used by T.S. Eliot) lives proclaiming that all of the roads of the past lead to us right now.  If all of the roads of the past are now interpreted as converging upon us now, we can over-estimate our importance by our provincial reductionism of what we think is important.  If we can imagine all of the roads of the past also converging on each of the 7.125 billion people in the world now, the sheer interpretive quantity of all of that converging should humble us with a sense of smallness.  We are prisoners of our time and place and cannot but be so but by presuming to dominate the stage of what will appear in history as truly worthy to be remembered can be the temptation to the megalomanical.

 Aphorism of the Day, October 12, 2014

Excommunication is rare in the church except its most common form, self-excommunication or freely neglecting the sacraments.  The parables of the kingdom of heaven in some ways are about the practice of self-communication of all people who are invited to the heavenly party but refuse to come because they have better things to do and they know that God's freedom is not a context specific intervention to our misdeeds.  It may appear to be okay to pretend that we own the property because the landlord of the universe is apparently absent in any divine intervention response to our neglect.  Our self-excommunication from God's presence is the alienation of being on divine ground and not recognizing it.  This is often our sad condition otherwise known as sin.

Aphorism of the Day, October 11, 2014

A cruel parable?  A man shows up at a wedding feast in the wrong clothes and is "thrown into outer darkness?"  And you thought the devil wearing Prada had strong fashion opinions?  What's the point?  Sometimes individualism and individual expression is not called for, it can be an expression of a pride against human fellowship.  Try showing up in a different uniform to play for the team and see if the team approves.  Try showing up in your own clothes at boot camp and see if the drill sergeant approves.  By wearing a team uniform it means that one accepts an all embracing identity which is preveniently given.  There is plenty of opportunity for individual excellence even while one wears the "team uniform."  God's grace is the team uniform given to all; wear the uniform with pride and express that grace with wonderful individual excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2014

Stewardship for many people has to do with standing with with honesty before all of humanity without implying "I did all of this by myself, I willed it and I did not get help from anyone or any social context or any favorable circumstances and therefore I totally deserve it more than anyone else."  Another stewardship posture might be the struggle of living with one's own prosperity in light of so many not having anything close to what one has. And so a humble generosity can arise and a prayer that one's prosperity might in various ways benefit the world even if it is done through taxes, charitable giving or provision of jobs simply by one's spending habits.  One can hope that prosperity would inspire a humble generosity and a discovery that it is at least more blessed to be in situation of being able to give than to be in the situation of having to receive for the basic necessities of life.

Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2014

Everything that we do and say today is coded with value even if we do not think that we are consciously intending an action or thought or choice.  Much of what we do seems to be following the established ruts of the pre-coded rituals of life.  We often let the general scenario of lifestyle absolve us of individual responsibility of the specific deed or word, as if everything which is on "automatic" is not my personal responsibility because I did not specifically think about it before I did it.

Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2014

How do we live with inventiveness today?  Our experience with language can present us with the "same ol' same ol' " today so how does invention happen?  I have the same Bible which I had when I was sixteen but I read it much differently today than I did when I was sixteen, in fact, so differently one could question whether it was the same book.  The difference is so great it would be like comparing a picture of me when I was sixteen with the current manifestation of my appearance.  Integrating new occasions of experience, constant awareness of the background of one's cultural setting in giving the meaning tones to words one uses to live and speak one's meanings plus a curiosity for new insights renders the occasion for invention in interpretation.  When we can read and see differently and interpret new meanings then we can begin to live new meanings.  So much of "group" and "mob" religion is stuck on merely the first phase of invention, which is imitation.  But merely aping the phrase of another is only a beginning.  Consuming the words of another, internalizing them and then making them part of one's seeing lenses is how progressive interpretation moves toward invention.  And with invention, we really are different people transformed by the freshness of new insights.

Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2014

"Many are called but few are chosen."  This is a punchline to a Gospel parable and it sounds like a rather exclusive club.  Each group often lives in the esteem of being the exceptional and the "chosen ones."  The process of living is the dynamic between being called and being chosen.  All fruit upon a tree is bound to be harvested but each piece of fruit may be picked at the time when it become optimally ripe.  God's grace is universal but the conditions of the heart and souls of each person have to be in the chosen state of ripeness for the grace to become fully active.  A baby may not appreciate the gift of a large amount of money for not having developed the value system to know the meaning of the gift.  The state of being "chosen" occurs when we arrive at the condition in life to understand and appreciate the value of the experience of God's grace.  So the state of being called and the experience of being chosen are not incompatible.

Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2014

In the uneven circumstances which come to people the great fate of life events can make it seem as though some are on God's "A" guest list with seeming preferential treatment by being "brilliant" enough to be in the right place at the right time.  And yet people who seem to be on the "A" list of life in terms of social privilege and wealth are often those who live as though they are proverbial Darwinian fit ones made not just for survival but entitled by means of the circular argument, "because they are entitled."   The most awesome thing about God is a permissive freedom which is the only way to account for the vast unevenness of human experience.  What Jesus asked us to believe is that God invites all to the divine banquet no matter what the conditions of freedom have dealt a person.

Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2014

The main experience of life is being within a tumbler of language and in this tumbler language assigns values to all things.  We participate in the valuing process and we should be trying to move our values upward towards what we define as what is excellent for the life, health and well being of community life expressed as the common good.  Because we know our tendency to be forgetful and selfish it is necessary for us to have laws as safety nets to articulate behavioral boundaries and consequences so that we don't fall below the minimum for how we have come to understand love and justice in practice.  The 10 Commandments are an articulated and promulgated code of behavior and they are articulated in such a way as to state minimum behavioral requirement but at the same time they do not set any limit on exceeding the minimum with ever more excellent behaviors.

Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2014

If St. Francis of Assisi was one of the few people in history who most literally imitated the life of Jesus does that mean the bar has been set too high for the rest of to be regarded as Christ-like Christians?  Probably.  How are we to live knowing that we only aspire to live "sub-Christian" lives in face of such a high standard?  How do we tolerate ourselves? We have to make peace with a more embracing notion of what being "Christ-like" can mean? If everyone were homeless like Jesus and Francis, such homogeneity of life circumstance would leave us all starving.  We must embrace a heterogeneity or differences of life circumstances in articulating the call of God's love to us to reach every corner of human experience.  So the wealthy and the poor are to be complementary as the strong uphold the weak just as the teacher is to complement and give knowledge to the student who does not yet know.  Let us embrace our calling today to complement the human community by giving what is required from what we have been given.

Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2014

Great laws do not always result in the practice of justice if the actual context does not include people with the gift of true and honest empathy to apply the laws fairly.  The Ten Commandments came to a society with slaves and the treatment of women and children not equal to the treatment of men.  The American Constitution came to a people which had slavery and did not allow women to vote.  The belief that all are created equal cannot be practiced fully if there is not a contextual empathy to really know to whom such a belief should be applied.  And it might be said that angelic laws require angelic citizens for full compliance.  But it also should be noted that a belief in repentance is a belief that we are always perfectible if we are open to more empathy for the people for whom the laws of equality need to be applied.  We cannot love our neighbor if we cannot see who our neighbor is.  In tacit situations of hierarchical inequality, inequality is often unseen because societies can be blinded within their own definitions of the order of things.

Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2014

In an unavoidable manner, we  anthropomorphize animals, i.e, we assume our pets are like us in significant ways and we may express this on a continuum of empathy stretching from the gifted animal whisperer to those who are on the negative or cruel side of animal empathy.  And one might want to clarify the anthropomorphizing impulse by stating that it is not so much that animals are human but they are "personal."  We personalize animals as we acknowledge their unique quirks in their behavior towards us.  They seem to manifest to us a very individualized interest toward us.   We do the same with God; we believe that Jesus as God was actually an affirmation of the human prison of perpetually anthropomorphizing from our human limitations but probably what is telling in our anthropomorphizing of God is the designation of God as Person, and hence able to be in an individualizing relationship with us.  I don't know about you but I take all of my experience, personally, not in the sense of wearing a hyper-sensitive chip on my shoulder but simply owning up to my unique location for my experience.  If by definition God is greater than human experience, God would have to at least be a Person or Personable in some way to be worthy of the definition of God as the Supremely Valued One.

Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2014

"Paranoia will destroy ya'" as the song go.  But metanoia will renew you.  Metanoia is the Greek word for repentance and it means "after" mind or could be understood to be a persuasion to a new state of mind.  We have in colloquial English the phrase to "change one's mind" to indicate the after mind notion of metanoia or repentance.  Paranoia, is the same "noia" root with the prefix "para," or beside or along with.  Paranoia is the manifestation of another mind.  I would also use the prefix "para" to characterize words and language and designate language as a "para-existential" in that it always goes along piggy back with existence itself since existence has no consciousness of itself without language and language users.  Words or language is another kind of positive "para-noia" since language piggy backs with mind and thinking to reveal mind and thinking as language continually manifests itself in all.  So language is always along for the ride.  And to update toDerrida, "language as "para-noia" (= mind revealer) will not destroy you but it will continually deconstruct you as more language contexts are generated to expand the field of language products which means all previous language products are "deconstructed" because they are given different relational value within a new field of comparative results.  To illustrate this in the field of biblical interpretation:  It is hard to read St. Paul's Epistle to Romans without being influenced and clouded by the interpretive emphasis of Martin Luther in the Reformation.

Aphorism of the Day, September 30, 2014

In case you have not noticed it, I confess that my aphorisms betray a bias of linguocentricism (neologism?).  I could say that I am anthropocentric yet in saying this I am resorting to my linguistic aspect of human experience to mediate and characterize all of human experience, hence in honesty I am always, already resorting to language in looking at humanity and I must confess a fixated and I would say unavoidable bias of linguiocentrism.   I could say that it is thinking that comes prior to language but I am using language to speak about thinking so language and thinking must be co-extensive, and therefore all of the manifold aspects of human experience whether in an active way or passively as in the "pre-linguistic" state of a child passes through language skills on its way to having intentional conscious recognition.   I think that the language aspect of human experience mediates the rest of human experience and this acknowledgment shares good company with the writer of John's Gospel who wrote that all things come into being by the Word.  In all reflexive honesty we use words to say that "all things come into being by the Word."  It is this kind of reflexive honesty that compels me to be a linguiocentrist.

Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2014

The belief in the Trinity developed as a result of the experience of people feeling as though they live in a personalized universe. (Not the least is the experience of Jesus in calling God His Father).  One certainly could claim that this could be characterized as an echo of anthropomorphism, humanity seeing Humanoid Reactivity within one's occasions of existence.  A scientist may want to simply say one's occasions of existence are impersonal events and forces to be observed and measured and not to be assigned any motive of how they comport themselves towards us.  I would say that any response to the occasions of existence involves the use of language and the impossibility of escaping language means that existence within the human community and from without the human community will be personal because being linguistic beings is the definitive feature of personal existence.

Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2014

Our current life cannot escape but being a languaged event which relates our previous constitution of life events by language.  The Gospels are literary or worded explanations of the phenomenon of discovering God to be an immanent dynamic personal presence as Holy Spirit and although God was always already such, the narrative for such a discovery on such a wide scale to so many people was placed in an origin narrative in the life of Jesus who made God known is such a way.  Placing God in a human narrative as someOne who parses the Divine Self in bits and pieces is only the human limitation of historical evolution; it should not be regarded as a Divine withholding.

Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2014

Authority, power, ability are expression of one's life force.  Such can be made "official" by one's definitional status within the context of one's living situation in having social position because of wealth, job or family ties.  And one certainly can get one's identity from "office."  "I am important because I have a certain office or position in society."  We can subtly be tempted to over-identify with the "persona" (mask) of the office and live completely "surface" lives.  The interior side of authority, power and ability is personal charisma or the grace of one's interior life which has been discovered and mobilized and sends energies through one's being to express an attractive art of living.  I think that the authority of Jesus is of this transformational charismatic order and He knew that this stuff would live beyond his life on earth.  He fully activated his charismatic authority in knowing that this charismatic condition could be discovered as the basic spiritual condition of humanity.  And he left this with his followers who developed it into a Trinitarian understanding of God.

Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2014

The authority of Jesus is perhaps the most baffling authority of human history.  How could a Person's Life Force be so constituted and mobilized as lightning charismatic intervention in so many people's lives in such telling and winsome ways to effect them to believe that they actually have a "real relationship" with a person who could no longer be seen or heard or touched?  In psychology the madness shared by two is called Folie à deux;  how does one account for a Folie à milliards (billions)?  When something happens to billions of people then those billion tend to want describe what experiences are mad and which could be called "normal" by sheer volume of adherents.  The continuing personal authority of Christ as interpreted by those who still claim to be under it might best be lived by those who have learned the transformational process of mobilizing one's life force to be expressed as a grace in action or "charisma" to care for others.  This may be the best expression of one's "authority."

Aphorism of the Day September 25, 2014

Authority is defined contextually.  Parents by virtue of experience have "authority" over their children and that authority also presumes a responsibility of care.  When one hears about the "authorities" on the news, it refers to political, legal or police actions within the definition of their various roles within the state.  Religious authority in the canonical sense refers to office and professional aspects of the practice of ministry within religious bodies.  The authority of Jesus was an issue and the issue was not just about his lack of sanction by the religious bodies of his time.  His authority was not like that of the Caesar's or Caesar's representatives in Palestine complete with military authority.  The authority of Jesus might be more "charismatic" in that he whispered people to know their better selves and people who knew these salvific effects from interaction with him felt themselves to be under his authority, but is such authority to be called the effects of a psychological charming of people?  Did the charm of Jesus exert towards some social and political gains such that Jesus "used" people for his political goals?  Or was Jesus authentic because he invited people to be their original selves as sons and daughters of God and to claim such an identity was a discovery of personal authority, power and ability to be who they were supposed to be?   To be charmed toward one's best self seems to be the very best and purest expression of authority.  Today we can simply reduce authority to submitting to the influence of a denomination or Gospel personality but the authority of the risen Christ happens when a person is "charmed" toward their better self for no political aim of the One who did the charming.

Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2014

When one looks a people who are famous or influential one can be baffled by how seemingly untalented or unworthy people get much more than their fifteen minutes of fame. The early Christians had to deal with the effects of the authority and influence of the risen Christ as it spread as a social movement throughout the cities of the Roman Empire. The Gospels did not create the success of the Jesus Movement; they were written as a result of the posthumous-post-resurrection success of the authority and influence of Christ. Christians who were baffled by the exponential success of the message of Christ in quite diverse settings from the original settings of Jesus of Nazareth, wrote the Gospels as origin discourse for why they thought that Jesus became who he became in the minds of many people as the risen Christ.

 Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2014

The Gospels often present the opponents of Jesus exorcised about the apparent "authority" of Jesus.  Authority can come from sheer social position in having wealth, political power or physical brute force.  It can come by the designation of public office through which one has the juridical power to exact consequences from others.  Authority can come from psychological coercion.  Authority due to oppression, suppression and repression are authorities which make full use of fear as a psychological "big stick."  I think the authority of Jesus which threatened his opponents was due to his winsome charisma with which he whispered himself in persuasive healing ways into the lives of people to show them that he was really with them and for them and did not want to get "something" from them.  It is easy to recognize the authority that a person has over one when his or her care is so obvious and selfless.

Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2014

Jesus told a parable about the relationship between one's actions and one verbal "contracts."  Saying I will and then not doing.  Saying I won't but doing it anyway.  The parable does not cover the two agreement positions: Saying I will and doing it.  Saying I won't and not doing it.  St. Paul also wrote about the unconscious force of what he called sin which influenced his action.  He did things that he did not want to do and he did not do things which he wanted do.  Apparently sin is remembered patterns of desire projected on things, people or actions which function as a compelling force for us to do habitual behaviors, the consequences of which can be a loss of control if one has become an addict to some idol created by patterns of fixated desire.  Any spiritual transformation has the goal of the equilibrium of the agreement of one's inner desire with the comportment of one speech and one's body language.  Learning to experience desire as a good engine and life force and not as the force of addiction is the goal of spiritual transformation and is the secret to finding peaceful equilibrium.

Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2014

When we encounter the new often we respond with "What this?"  We experience something outside of our heretofore paradigm, our local constellation of meanings where everything had familiar names.  "What's this?" can be the exciting and curious embrace of new discovery.  It can be a forced transition to a new situation accompanied with a great deal of skepticism because of unwillingness to adjust to the new.  "What's this or What is it" in Hebrew is the phrase "Manna."  The writers had enough of a sense of humor to call the new diet of daily heavenly bread, "What is it?" in recognition of the surprised response of the wary people who weren't so sure of their new culinary experience.  Do we have to name or identify everything before we embrace an experience of something?  Most of the time we do but sometimes we have to embrace the newness of discovery with the excitement of "What is it?" And then go for it.

Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2014

Everyday is a good day to work on finding one's voice.  One does not have a choice as to whether one is a "worded" being.  We are; deal with it.  The eternal Christ was called the Word which is always already creating human existence as we know it in its manifold meanings.  John's Gospel has Jesus saying, "my words are Spirit and they are life." Word and Spirit are the two metaphors of agency in the creation story, "God said and the Spirit moved."  An infant's life can be chaotic until the young one possesses words to organize previous pain or delayed gratification.  In finding our voice one uses one's own words to translate one's experience and so puts an individual creative touch upon one's experience, not to over emphasize one's own mastery of what happens to one but to exercise the full degree of human agency in the moments of life.

Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2014

That we exist in Time means that we are sequential becomers.  The phenomenon of time means that there cannot be an experience of a final answer.  Truth expressed in the language of the past can still have current relevance but not in any final sense because the future will require further application of the traces and TRACES of the past.  By TRACES, I mean the WORDS venerated by significant and continuous communities of people who pass on their "inspired wisdom" in the TRACES which survive in linguistic form.  It can be exhilarating to be under the influence of some inspiring great words; this does not call for the exclusive pride of believing that such words perceived in an occasion of truth is a final truth or meaning.  Why should one ever proclaim a final truth; rather one should use an inspired occasion to whet one's anticipation for SOME MORE.

 Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2014

The sequence of occasions known as Time means that one moment is "different" from all previous occasions.  The current moment in our experience of time means we have memorial traces of previous moments which promote "sameness" of identity even when we are in a "different" time.  Memorial traces provide for us a predilection for the current moment, but predilection cannot be fully determinate of the details of the current occasion.  The notion of Justice includes the statements of the practice of law for valuing human communal behaviors but such laws are predilections for the current applications afresh within the details of the moment.  Cumulative human experience can come to make ancient virtue, current vice, as in the case of slavery and the subjugation of women.  I think that witness of Jesus regarding the ancient law is that the future of Justice means that the fulfillment of the law is always an open question, open to new application in the discovery of virtue in context.

Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2014

What are we asking the magic mirror of reality today?  "Magic mirror who is the fairest of all?" asked the vain queen.  She was fine with the answer as long as she could get the mirror to give her the wanted answer but her world got darker when she thought she had a significant competitor.  It is true that what I see today will be a reflection of me, because I will see my version of the world.  When Jesus took bread and said, "this is my body" he identified himself with his version of the entire world.  He was not looking for a reflection to echo that he was the fairest, he took an identity with his version of what he saw for the love and care of what he saw.  Everything we see today we should take identity with as our body because it is "our version" of what we are seeing.  As the playwrights of our version of the world can we authorially assert ourselves as those who are designating the characters and events of what we are seeing with wisdom, love and care?  We can be narcissists wanting to see only our fair image reflected or we can with faith do the impossible, have the empathy of knowing a peaceful co-existence of our version of life with the versions of life that others have too.

Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2014

The injunction of the Delphic Oracle was, "Know Thyself."  Knowing oneself is partly deliberate and partly accidental.  The accidental knowledge comes from unplanned events of the day which force upon us to manifest a version of oneself in a situation which exposes one to oneself in a new and different way.  And one may be surprised or disillusioned with what one discovers.  The Psalmist said that one is "fearfully made" and one could expand that to a process of becoming fearfully made by the way in which one's worded existence becomes manifest in one's body language, speech and writing.  Go forth and surprise yourself as you see yourself in the mirror of projection which bears your own version of the world which you are casting upon your experience today.

Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2014

What is the value of a person and how does one value a person when each person is like the unique snowflake?   How can personal value be generalized when everyone is uniquely different?  There is the value of equality which is a proclamation as something self-evident by virtue of having a Creator God.  This equality faces the challenge of quantification and qualification in human contexts where the worth of a person requires the articulation of justice. Justice has to have the strength and flexibility of water since the requirements for an infant, an elderly person, a teenager, an impaired person, an "abled body adult" are all different. The honoring of differences while upholding the dignity of equality is the often complicated but necessary work of wise justice.

Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2014

The story of Joseph forgiving his brothers when they came to Egypt seeking to buy food during the famine is what one could call forgiveness as providence.  In the event of forgiveness the family of Jacob was reconciled and saved.  Living in the state of unforgiveness leaves people divided and always speculating about what others are going to do for revenge.  The worst conditions in the world are probably dominated by people living without forgiveness and reconciliation.  Such a state could be called "hell on earth" because it is such a waste of the human spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2014

Did you ever notice how we "auto-anthropomorphize?"  All of the cells within our epidermis become little people who inhabit the territory of our bodies.  "My heart feels", "my head hurts" are expressions of anthropomorphized body parts. One could declare one's body as its own nation of entities that have feelings.  Each part could be analyzed as mere cells constructed of atoms but we use the words soul and spirit to speak about the integration of parts into a single being.  Because of the mystery of personal being we anthropomorphize all of the little beings which make up the one personal being.  Because of the mystery of personal being we allow each part of the body share in that "personality" and so body parts should not be treated as mere machine parts.  We also know that our body parts often age in uneven patterns  (I had early death of hair to prove that) and so within one's overall desire for health one can find that the entities of our body manifest their own willful aging patterns. From our own anthropomorphizing of our bodies, one could expand this to be metaphor for the Great Personal Container of All who by virtue of letting us move and have our being within this great Containing Personality, allows each part to share in "divinity."  And that divinity is exalted expression of personal being.

 Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2014

Forgiveness and justice exist in a negotiated reciprocity.  Forgiveness does not mean carte blanche to do whatever one wants and get one's slate wiped clean with no consequences. To wrong oneself and another through a manifestation of personal freedom is auto-punishment in the act itself, but such acts also pay forward with some devastating collateral damage.  Experiencing forgiveness is reciprocal with accountability for one's freely performed acts.  One's past acts are absolute and one's subsequent behavior is what determines their "absolute" effects into the future.  The accountability of receiving forgiveness results in amendment of life and where possible reparations.  Clemency in the political realm belongs to kings and presidents; in the personal realm to be clement means that one also attains the great gift of being able to forgive as well.  It is not easy to be great in forgiving others but when we do become agents of forgiveness we ascend to the realm of kings and presidents in handing out a gift that is not our own doing but arrives from the compensatory Higher Power.

Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2014

Forgiveness has many nuances.  There is the religious notion that God as the holy and perfect one can require the same of humanity.  By definition humanity would be in the perpetual need of forgiveness for not being "perfect as the Father in heaven is."  In community, forgiveness has to do with social and personal offending acts and how people continue to live together with the quality of life called "fellowship" after an offending act has occurred.  St. Paul rhetorically asked, "What can separate us from the love of God in Christ?" In community life we ask, "What can separate us from each other such that we no longer practice fellowship?"  There is often offense taken by people living in community and offenders and the offended ones often have different standards of sensitivities which register and define what counts for an offense.  We need to experience both general forgiveness and specific forgiveness and offer both general forgiveness and specific forgiveness because I might think that you need forgiveness for something which you don't think matters and vice versa.  Forgiveness is the way we live together in fellowship and not let mere individual differences be interpreted as sinful behavior.  Forgiveness is a better way to live than to live in passive aggression where I am acting out this message, "You have hurt me; therefore I am going to respond by avoidance, by absenting myself from your company."

Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2014

There would seem to be a built in contradiction between love and justice.  If God is just then there should be some equal system of application of response to every behavior and human situation.  If God is loving then a loving God would allow the application of forgiveness to all because Time means everything is a work in progress since nothing is created as finished but only as in the process of becoming.  If all is Becoming together, including God as a expanding Container of all free beings, then forgiveness is both benign and active tolerance of past states because of the hope of amendment of life in the future.  People and groups with radical notions of perfection are usually "rotten" with perfection and cannot tolerate those who do not "precisely imitate" their notion of perfection.  They often work with rage and violence to remove the "imperfect ones" from their midst.  Forgiveness is based upon "coming to the unity of faith" in the sense of accepting completeness together as the goal rather than some individual static state of perfection.  Completeness is all of us being together all of the time and tolerating the roles that were played yesterday even while being called and lured to the self surpassing excellence of tomorrow.

Aphorism of Day, September 9, 2014

The logic of forgiveness is something like the logic of washing dishes and clothes.  Dishes and clothes get used and need to be cleaned if they are going to be used again.  In the human sphere the very nature of freedom means that the "shelf life" of a person cannot be used up because of single "soiling" events.  Forgiveness is something like the equivalence of "washing" as a person is brought again into fellowship and given yet another chance to express the image of God stamped upon one's life that temporarily gets forgotten in moments in the not knowing ignorance for which Jesus prayed from the cross, "Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing."

Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2014

Forgiveness is a dynamic which requires that we recover from "disillusionment" with another person.  Forgiveness may be for specific deeds but the harder part of forgiveness is if offense has come from the general character of behavior of someone and so one may make strategic and tactical decisions not to interact with one whose character seems to be rather incompatible with one's own.  The nature of forgiveness is tailored to the nature of the previous relationship that one has before the offending event(s).  One can imagine a forgiveness of God who certainly could be disillusioned with the human race but as a parent has shared enough of the divine DNA image in humanity to wait eternally for our improvement from our ignorance.  "Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."  Forgiveness is based upon recovering from "not knowing" so that we know and to know involves acting with love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2014

There is a quote from Jesus which is often used to comfort those who are present at a poorly attended church service: "Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."  As much as this Christly quorum might comfort the preacher to very few, the actual context of this phrase indicates that Christ is present when people gather to collaborate and resolve in matters of disagreement among church members.  Sometimes when people are in disagreement they seem to lose the graceful motive for gathering. Woody Allen said, "Showing up is 80 per cent of life."  Showing up in the name of Christ is the Christly quorum.

Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2014

One's life today is a version upon countless traces in the memory of previous versions as new experience gets processed staring through a gauntlet of previous versions. Each previous version influences a new version of what we are seeing now.  The operation of Word within us makes today a new creative event.  There is no reason to be bored unless one is stuck upon the lie of static sameness.

Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2014

The Gospels were written for very pragmatic purposes within groups of people who were quite surprised and elated by the success of their movement.  Success required pragmatic consolidation of new members who were finding a social and spiritual identity within these new "clubs" springing up in cities of the Roman Empire.  When an esteemed founder or leader is not present then a conjuring literature is generated to answer the question: "What would our founder do or say if here now?"  The narrative accounts of the ministry of Jesus were used as an oracle of Jesus who in his "Risen" state was bringing order to these new "clubs of identity" for persons who found that their life together attained the poetic corporate identity of being "in Christ" and He "in them."

Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2014

If every conscious event in like involves partially intentional and lots of memorized redundant performance of interpretation, the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" means that what and how we take in experience will color and influence our interpretive filters.  Interpretation can be influenced by emotional states and moods caused by body condition e.g. tired, hungry, sick, in love, et al.  One tries to anchor one's general character of interpretation based upon the most inspiring practitioners of wisdom and survive the moments of "sporadic mis- or dys-interpretation due to mood of a bad event.  The logic of participation in a spiritual or wisdom tradition involves intentional feeding and consuming "good stuff" so that one's interpretive acumen can read experience artfully for excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2014

Can you even imagine an original speech or written text that could be delivered without a previous interpretation?  Perhaps glossolalia or psychography (automatic writing), but most language acts even if they are articulated in a spontaneous manner come from learned patterns and so they have been previously meditated through the human instrument of language and the language processing that we call "thought or thinking."   Some people may regard revelation of Scripture to be like some sort of substance injected into one'e life vein of experience and retaining original meaning.  The revelatory words of the Bible were interpreted words in their event of delivery because they reveal actual human contexts of culture or an individual's interior life. We read Holy Scriptures now through all known subsequent translations and interpreters who have influenced our field of knowledge.  As I write even now, it may seem as an original encounter with new or fresh occasion with words but I am from my experience chock full of interpretive funnels which help me selectively pick out word combinations from something like an para-conscious pool or aquifer of possible words.  Written products are given shape by a rather rapid intentional selection of combinations of words.  In specific contexts and perspectives, words are interpreted even as I write and as anyone reads.  Let us not be shocked by interpretation, aka, hermeneutics.  Hermeneutics cannot not really be regarded as radical if it is unavoidable in living.  A modern day rejoinder to Descartes might be: I interpret, therefore I am, interpreted.

Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2014

How will I interpret the events of the day?  What will evoke knee jerk reactions from me and reveal a learned pattern of reaction based upon some unhealed emotional wound?  Why am I coded emotionally in the way that I am?  Surely by now the "talking cures" should have least built new patterns of response?  Today, as every day, we have to deal with how we have come to be emotionally coded to respond and in the work of doing serious re-coding of deeply grooved patterns within the electrical circuitry of emotions we look in our narrative memory traces for origin events of the emotional patterns.  And if Word is what creates and re-creates we are called each day to find our voice for the day and become the authors of our day in making our new found voice also body language actions.  Today is a day to speak afresh, be the playwright in scripting and finally being the actor of the script, leaving plenty of room for creative improvisation.

Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2014

Labor Day can evoke many different kinds of meaning.  Labor Day itself can be understood within the history of "classism" which the American experiment was supposed to erase under the guise of wealth through meritocracy and individual "hard work."  The greatest source of wealth in the American colonies and for a substantial period of our history was slave labor.  People were commodity and valued for being the "machines" of the labor intensive work of agriculture.   Labor Day evolved as an acknowledgement about the benefit of maximal employment to allow each person to be sustained in the necessities of life.  Labor was called "vocation" in the traditional professional classes of divinity, law, medicine and teaching although now only divinity retains the notion of "calling."  The professional classes now speak of their labor as "career" and now careers involve the manifold expressions of "management."  Modern science transformed the ancient "craft guilds" into modern industrial production created through the invention of products by pragmatic scientists called engineers.  Today in the information age labor is widely variegated and global and we most often live through absence of empathy for those who labor to make the things we eat, wear and use.  The benefits of the products of labor are very unevenly distributed in our world today.  Labor Day is an annual reminder that it is our Christian duty to work for justice in labor.  We are at a time when we need to pray that corporatocracy will awaken to prove creatively that profit and the most widespread humane concern are not incompatible.

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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Aphorism of the Day, August 2014

Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2014

In the Hebrew Scriptures the God of the burning bush theophany to Moses is named as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, ehyeh ašer ehyeh, translated as "I am that I am" or "I will be what I will be."  Some believe this name of God deriving from the verb "to be" is related to the unpronounceable YHWH or as we presume to pronounce, Yahweh, formerly pronounced as Jehovah.  There might be a significant insight in knowing God as "I will be what I will be" since such futurism always expressed in the present implies an Omni-Becoming God whose nature is pure creativity and freedom and as the expanding Container of All is greatest because Such a One has no significant rival in greatness except the Divine Self in a future state.  Such expanding greatness actually allows for the genuine lesser freedoms of the universe which account for the full range of agonies to ecstasies.

Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2014

The passing of time means that we live in the swirls of coming to meanings about meanings in worded forms.  A meaning may seem to survive and it does as a remembered trace which becomes different in the next occasion of a meaning about a previous meaning.  We have faith that our corporate identities of church and country have retained same or similar meanings but we also can observe that previous religions and countries have had their meaningful existence dissolved.  So the mystical bodies of corporations which have the ability to perpetuate their meanings across history depend upon the chains of transmission to keep the traces of meanings from the past alive in the present enough to legitimize the identity of the mystical body in the present.  Present legitimacy seems to be the only relevant issue since meanings of the the past do not have the same people around to make the case for the nature of their meaning and identity.  People of the past have left their writings but such writings live today as interpretations of interpretations and surely subsequent interpretations have unmoored the reading today from their original identities.

Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2014

Truth is a process in one's life which involves the continual sorting out of meanings.  The adventure of life and of this day is to seek new meanings and hopefully be surprised to discover a new meaning that will shuffle the hierarchy of values in our lives and re-value our existing values because we've had a fresh encounter with the Sublime.  A fresh encounter with the Sublime can truly re-shuffle our hierarchy of values and I wish and pray for you many such fresh encounters.

Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2014

Humanity comes to distinction in how we use words or how we have come to have facility of language.  We have come to name experiences and "experiences" is a word name too. Words keep naming other words for what we have named to be "experience" and "consciousness." We have passed on generational knowledge in clusters of words called paragraph or stories. The Bible includes these clusters of words called story.  Our use of words and how we organize our encounter with being, or our encounter with being as experienced in time known as becoming, means that we escape enough from totally individual experiences to forge paradigms of communication or stories.  Faith in the freedom from individual aloneness through the words and stories of language is known in the process of relative objectivity. From our relatedness we attain enough agreement upon community views also known as objectivity.  This faith in "objectivity" allows us to get things done and getting things done is not always easy because of the freedom of individual interpretation and action can challenge the community's view and objectivity.  Such challenges can be disrupting before they eventually become integrated into the ever changing "objectivity" of the community.   The biblical traditions have always been changing traditions because the "objectivity" of the communities which derived from those traditions keeps changing because individual interpreters still encounter the sublime "burning bush" events which inspire them to offer another view upon a tradition which is best when all people of the biblical tradition see themselves in the process of a better love and justice.

 Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2014

It was said by Emerson that "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."  We think that we love consistency when it comes to predictability of the actions of the ones with whom we live because we may be comfortable with reliability's redundancies.  If we are wanting to "toe the party line and want others to do the same" then consistency is a requirement for "party loyalty."  I think that I would rephrase the quote in various ways:  Consistency might be a hobgoblin if one never wants to learn anything new or act in significantly different ways. A proclaimed "consistent person" might be a person who is too literal and who cannot embrace the fact that situations bring forth from us words and actions which contradict themselves. Who does not comport themselves differently in communications with young children than when addressing adults?  Context draws from us different discursive practice and discursive products coming from the same person can be necessarily contradicting and inconsistent based upon context specific situation.  Many people try to force a consistency upon biblical writings which in honesty is not there.

Aphorism of Day, August 26, 2014

The consideration of the ventriloquist/dummy relationship as a metaphor for God "speaking" within the created order?  A dummy is made in a human or animal image and has lips and parts animated by the speaker who throws a voice in synchronicity with the moving parts. The gap between God and the created may be similar in magnitude between the ventriloquist and the dummy.  However, the degree of freedom of actual human beings and all things in creation may be more significant than the total lack of freedom of the ventriloquist's dummy.  It could be that the communication of God with created order is based upon the total field of Word and Language making Word co-extensive with the knowledge of God or anything and it seems as though the author of the Gospel of John had an incredible insight: In the beginning was the Word...all things were created by the Word....the Word was with and was God.  Being panentheistically in the tumble of all Word could be a way of stating something of the mystery of living and moving and having our being in Word and the total reflexivity of Word and all of Word's instances.

 Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2014

There are some obvious assumptions behind the notion of the Bible as "God's Words." One may assume that one is reading words that were received and given by someone who could interpret a given human situation and offer words through a "human dummy" with God being the Ventriloquist or something like the One causing "automatic writing" or psychography.  One might want to assert that no biblical writer had one's personality so erased as to be God's "dummy" for some Ventriloquist's event.  It is more believable that persons committed to finding Divine or Superhuman insights in the art of living in their situations spoke and wrote these words which became a part of an inspired record due to their antiquity and longevity of use in forming and re-forming successive communities.  What is most inspiring about the Bible is the big elephant fact in the room, namely, Word becoming words in speaking, writing and body language constitutes our lives as human, and great words can form communities still and nurture people within those communities in love and justice.

 Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2014

When Peter had the "revelation" that Jesus was the Messiah, he still did not understand the revelation.  This is an indication that all revelation still has to be interpreted by very fallible people who see through lenses constituted by their own experience.  It has been the custom in the public reading of Scripture to announce at the ending of a reading: "The word of the Lord." It should also be proclaimed: "The interpretations of humanity."  Revelation may seem to have a "self-evidential" meaning to one person that is not all that obvious to another.  Being our own judges of "correct" interpretations may divide us into different Communions and Confessions but it does humility no justice to presume that one is "most" correct.

Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2014

Motion picture messianism aka superhero and action adventure flicks feed our anxiety about needing quick and certain intervention in the great threats of life.  With language we spin stories; the reporting stories of language are infinitesimally less than actual experience and provide only time-lapsed units making it seem as though experience occurs and happens faster than it does.  Stories are the time-lapsed presentation of the seemingly telling crucial events.  We can get addicted to the big events of stories and live the false hope of wanting only the big events of catastrophic final apocalyptic intervention to "fix" the world once and for all.  What about the "mustard seed" messianism of Jesus?  What about baptismal messianism when each is "anointed with Chrism" or made to participate with the reality of the Messiah and sent into this world to live messianically in all of the little "mustard seed" acts of faith to change gradually and subtly this world toward the character of love and justice while it seems as though no one is watching, because the crowd is craving but the highlights of the story and misses all of the little events which take place between the "time-lapsed" frames?

 Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2014

St. Peter is presented in the Gospel as one who did not understand the meaning of the messiah.  He could confess the messiah as a revelation but he did not know what it meant. Peter is presented as one who assumed the messiah was going to be a kingly intervening messiah while Jesus tried to instruct him about messiah being a suffering servant messiah.  The early church had to have a narrative of explanation for how the crucifixion of Jesus was compatible with an existing tradition regarding the messiah, namely the suffering servant tradition from the prophet Isaiah.

Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2014

Messiah is used as a designation for King Cyrus the Great of Persia by the prophet Isaiah. This is a rather ironic use of the word "messiah" because Cyrus conquered Israel and carried many Israelites into exile.  This notion of "messiah" is used by one who retroactively notes that God's people survived the very worst in a providential way and Cyrus had the wisdom to let captured people maintain their cultural and religious identity and for such he was deemed "anointed" by God.  This is an indication of how flexible the biblical notion of "messiah" was.

Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2014

Messiah is a notion that arose in a context of designating that which came to be chosen and marked by God as a particular vehicle of God's activity or expression of God's will in the life of humanity.  It is best known as a rather informal investiture rite of pouring of oil from a horn over the God's king, the first being Saul and the one who divined the selection was the Judge Samuel.  This is in the same genre as the ancient notion of the "divine right of kings" and was an appeal to divine authority to legitimize particular earthly authority.  In the Hebraic Scriptures we read that God did not really want a king for Israel but gave into the people's request. The developed notion of messiah came in the post-Davidic deprived conditions of people who yearned and speculated for a more super-figure designated by God to become evident in intervening in human affairs to cause people to comply with the teachings of the Torah.  The notion of messiah had readjustment in the early Christian communities; the messiah came to be associated with a suffering servant figure from the prophet Isaiah whose triumph over suffering was evident in his ability to appear alive to many followers after his death.  Since these two notions of messiah did not comport with the fullness of a Davidic messiah, the notion of a delayed re-appearance or returning messiah arose in the understanding of Christians who were increasingly Gentile and did not have have the same continuity with messianic tradition as did those who were born Jews.  If the notion of the development of meanings of messiah is so evident in the Scriptures one cannot avoid the fact that there have been and will be further developed meanings of messiah beyond the texts of Scripture.  Interpretation and application are unavoidable and interpretation is different than what is interpreted because meanings are not universally self-evident in any text.

Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2018

The messiah?  Outdated thinking?  Hardly.  The messiah trope has long been the favorite trope of Hollywood under the genre of superheroes.  Our cultural entertainment is completely inundated with superheroes.  If I were to put our postmodern culture upon the analytic couch, I would suggest that such fascination with superheroes is similar to the messianic obsessions of biblical people who had serious cosmic angst about their life conditions.  We are obsessed with superheroes because we fear the threat of being able to extinguish ourselves and the power to be incredibly inhumane with each other.  So the superhero genre functions as a analgesic hope for quick intervention in difficult circumstances.  Our superheroes have all of the aspects of the messiah; they have incognito modes and they are suffering servants before they are victorious rescuers and saviors.  We, who are "so advanced" over people with "biblical myths" hypocritically embrace the messiah trope, perhaps even more than biblical people.  The hidden trope of the messiah is all around us because we truly fear our greed and inhumanity.

Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2018

The Gospels present Peter as one who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah without knowing what that really meant.  The Gospels were written in times when there was a disagreement about the meaning of messiah.  If utopia is a universal aspiration for a perfect place, messiah represents the universal aspiration for a perfect person to make the perfect place happen. Utopia and messiah may elusively mean "no such place" and "no such person" but function as the narratives of hope for people in places and situations of always needing to surpass themselves in love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2014

One of the writing goals of the Gospel writers which arose after the success of Gentile Christianity was to highlight in the presentation of the life of Jesus the occasions when faith of non-Jewish foreigners is elevated as what is key in an relationship with God.  Jesus was presented as a prophet who in the prophetic tradition of Jonah was taking the message of faith beyond the ethnic borders of Judaism.  He was in the tradition of the prophet Elijah who healed the foreign Aramaen General Naaman.

 Aphorism of the Day,  August 16, 2014

Jesus seemed to oppose dietary rules and purification rules such as the fixation on hand washing.  Lister, Pasteur and our moms were quite certain about hand washing.  Jesus opposed the system of declaring things external as "defiled" in themselves and thus inanimate things be accorded the power to defile.  He was aware of the profound prayer request, "Create in me a clean heart, O God."  True defilement came from an interior projection in how we have learned to be constituted in our motives toward everything in life.  So defilement should not be just a "religious public health system" designating exterior impurity, it should be an understanding that the human condition of the interior life is the source of a more crucial projected "defilement."  When it came to the Holiness Code of what was pure or impure, we can say that Jesus was the Minster of the Interior.

Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2014

The life of the Virgin Mary is celebrated today.  She has drawn from Christians many devotional reflections and has become known as the ideal intercessory Mother who unconditionally and always loves her children.  She had to be the Queen to give some feminine balance in a world of patriarchy.  She has had to be the one who has made God's grace accessible when patriarchy has practiced an exalted and unapproachable divinity of Jesus over his humanity. In the story of her Holy Child-bearing she encodes the Christian mystery, "Christ in us after having been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit."

Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2014

Nationalism and regional pride means that we often discount something that comes from another place, hence when Nathaniel heard about Jesus he said, "Can any good come out of Nazareth?"  The shocking reality of the early Christian communities is that non-Jewish people embraced the foreign message about Christ more than his fellow country folk and the popularity of Jesus in the Gentile  populace had to be written.  The New Testament writing is essentially this writing of a universal Christo-centric Judaism into the Hebraic Scripture tradition because foreigners gave up their regional religious pride for the message of this Jesus, a "foreign messiah."

Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2014

Did you ever consider that the Gospels which were written after the writings of Paul and the success of the early Christian communities are narrative presentations of the life of Jesus which embed in cryptic ways the reality of Gentile Christianity and the practices of the Christian communities?

Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2014

We mourn the loss of a comedian today who amazed us by thinking and saying things that we are not supposed to think and say with an oracular wit that came at us with Tourette Syndrome-like uncensored delivery.  His comedic mind juxtaposed combinations of human behaviors in such a way that we laughed.  He gave us the insight that God must have a sense of humor and comedy is a gift, even a prophetic gift against idolatry, which is taking something much more serious than one should, even our idols about the God we love.  In the mockery of idols we let the new encounter with the sublime arise for this day and we mock ourselves if we think that our religious encounter has made us better than others to judge them wrongly.  We wish his ability to create the laughable gaze and make us laugh had been enough to keep him with us longer. The time of life is borrowed time and having Robin on loan to us was a blessing. Rest in Peace and holy laughter.

Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2014

With the current really bad news in our world which magnifies evil beyond its actual strength and value, it is wise to remember the creation story words about God after the arising of each order of creation: "And God saw that it was Good."  Good has been deprived in many, many ways but not defeated because life itself is Good and it is a Good on which evil lives as but a parasite. From the local effects of parasites one can get disheartened to believe that they are taking over but it is even more cause to believe in original Goodness and to work to expel the depriving parasites with the best friend of Goodness, Justice.

Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2014

In more recent science there has been the acknowledgment that the observer always influences what is being observed.  There can be no completely "rational" impartial observer since scientists can only have their versions of what they are observing.  They have a prior agreement within their community on how to qualify and quantified what they are observing so that even an anomaly is defined as such because it did not conform to the anticipated patterns of observation.  The presence of Language allows us always to admit that we are using it and using it differently according to mode of applied discourse.  Religious discourse of faith is different than scientific discourse and the same person can use both discourses without denying the unity of being that one has because of language.

 Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2014

One of the results of the success of the Enlightenment with the replacement of revelation with reason and the rise of modern science is that biblical modes of seeing began to be regarded as childish, primitive and superstitious.  Religionists often feeling inferior and defensive in light of the obvious pragmatic truth of science and the effects of science defended biblical modes of seeing as possessing the same kind of outcomes as a scientist would observe.  They did this by stating there were different "dispensations" when the actual universe was "different" or by appealing to the unique case dispensation of the miraculous.  And unique cases cannot be replicated scientifically.  Modern science resulted in a rather abrupt separation between a viewing subject possessed by this near infallible "transcendental reason" and the exterior objects in the field of vision.  In the pronounced split between subject and object of modern science, the altered state kind of seeing of people with biblical faith was discounted.  There is no reason for people of faith to defend the Bible wrongly just as there is no reason to apologize for my completely unscientific response to a piece of music, art or poetry.  If we understand the moving truths of faith in their aesthetically truthful modes we need not be apologetic.  We need the kinds of truths which are aesthetically and  ethically moving enough to inspire all of the world to build more ploughshares than bombs.  Isn't it interesting to note how many "religious" people in the world have been seduced towards weaponry rather than towards ploughshares?  It probably is an indication of how much easier it is to believe in the evil of humanity than the irresistiblility of God's grace to convert to goodness, love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2014

Adrenaline is a hormone and neurotransmitter.  It's release can be determined by "fight or flight" situations.  Faith is the existential effort to assess all of the components of one's interior life as well as assess through existential anticipation of one's exterior life and perform with rapidity the moment by moment re-calibration of response towards what one deems as most excellent for the situation.  Faith sometimes means we are acting on over-ride of interior factors of hormone levels and pain and emotional residue in order to make our best response in the moment.  A singer or actor has to deal with the physical conditions and emotional conditions pre-coded by what has happened off stage and still perform on stage.  Faith requires performance and often the interior and exterior conditions are not always ideal.  One prepares for the ideal but one also has to be ready for continuous re-calibration in actual performance.

Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2014

When one speaks about an "altered state" one might ask "altered from what?"  In a changing world every state of perception is different from a previous state and so one could equate difference with "altered."  Probably an altered state refers to an interior condition which is expressive of an entire constellation of ideas sometimes called a "paradigm" which one uses to filter or process the world that one is seeing.  Conversion to an altered state is being able to see the world differently so as to be able to make new choices and perform different acts. Repentance is a renewal of the mind (Greek: metanoia or an "after mind).  The goal of faith is this continual conversion in the renewal of the mind and as the mind accumulates and renews it gains a constellation of ideas which results in the "altered states" to provide a significant new seeing of one's world.

Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2014

One can wonder why there is so much interest today in "altered states" for which we use pharmaceuticals of the legal and illegal varieties to attain.  Being born of the Spirit is the "altered state" which was recommended in the Gospels.  And it is not a magic pill; it involves wisdom work in re-comprising one's interior "word life" such that one tames the interior energies through the creative work of "naming" so that energy can be surfaced in actions to assist one in the attainment of joy and peace.  The work of reconstituting our interior lives through words is on-going and is something akin to re-arranging the furniture of the house to allow ideal flow of traffic and living convenience.  Our interior homes sometimes get out of efficient arrangement through being programmed by living in less than affirming paradigms which define our worth and the worth of how we emote and act.  Finding the "altered state" of new birth is the challenge for each day but yesterday's success will help today and tomorrow.

 Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2014

One of the consistent themes of Post-modernism is the critique of modernism.  This critique is based upon a disillusionment with some of the worst fallout of "progress," namely advanced weapons of mass destruction and the destruction of the environment because of "progress." Religion also made adjustments to modernism feeling it necessary to present biblical stories and church tradition as being consistent with scientific methodology, so creationism is a fundamentalist's way of "being scientific" by affirming that God created "old rocks" to account for why rocks date very old in radioactive and carbon dating techniques.  This strange mixture of scientific "correctness" mixed with ancient biblical wisdom stories has created something akin to the ancient Faun, a half-goat and half-human figure.  The Faun is a creation of fanciful imagination which attempts to be a compromise between humanity and goathood while being neither.

Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2014

The classical Greek word for the New Testament word meaning faith meant "persuasion." πιστις  pistis.  In classical rhetoric one of the purposes of composing a political speech was "persuasion."  Persuasion was a subsequent goal.  In New Testament Greek the same word is used to characterize the state of being already persuaded such that one acts now and into the future from that state of persuasion.  A major philosophical problem deals with whether commitment precedes reason for having the commitment.  I believe and then I find good reason for my beliefs or I study and as a result of finding good reason, I believe.  I am not sure that it is such an either/or regarding our conversion to what we believe and the particular reasons we have for having such a belief.  I think that language is versatile in its expressiveness to be honest to our mongrel condition of being significantly constituted by different paradigms even contradictory paradigms.  A hard core scientist can also have "irrational" phobias.  As much as we think that we are completely responsible for our faith and every reason we give for our faith, there still needs to be an acknowledgment of how we have been involuntarily "thrown" into many of the paradigms which condition our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2014

A very young child could not help but tell the truth about the Emperor, "Dad, why isn't the Emperor wearing any clothes?"  A very young child after receiving the communion host cried, "Okay, now let's have doughnuts."  The communion event as a sort of hors d'oeuvres for coffee hour doughnuts expresses the dilemma of the loss of sign value when Holy Communion became a stylized devotional event divorced from actual eating, i.e., it becomes easier to have faith to discern the presence of Christ than to believe that one is actually eating food.  The multiplication of loaves story links the Eucharistic practice with the miraculous and continuous feeding of the people of Israel in surviving the long and arduous wilderness journey.  Eucharist is no longer a "real meal" but it needs to be re-connected with real eating like making sure children on the border get fed because when we feed the "least of these" we are told by Jesus we experience his Real Presence.  Knowing the Real Presence in receiving the Eucharistic Manna is coupled with knowing the Real Presence of Christ in the person who receives bread and drink from us.

Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2014

Survival in this world in the future because of global closeness will mean we will need to stop using religious justification for the aggression which is expressed for each other.  Interesting that most all religions have apocalyptic endings with their own hero being the final winner. So peace comes through every opposition being beaten into submission.  It might be time to start promoting the message of religion that love and justice will ultimately be persuasive and winsome enough for people brought close to live well together and no longer fighting over land which belongs to the One whom they say they love the most.

Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2014 

Sometimes we set process and evolution and becoming against the perfection of being complete and finished.  By assuming the nature of God's perfection to be a completeness within which every other imperfect being simply unfolds in imperfect becoming by having a beginning and an end seems to make the perfection of God to be an all-knowing being who knew what was going to happen anyway.  As those who become we know that the sheer accumulation of age does not make a person qualitatively better in all manner because we often experience with aging the loss of quality and dealing with the loss of quality as we age is a chief life task.  In a sort of "big bang" notion of an expanding Omni-becoming, the Omni-Becomer surpasses the former Omni-Becomer by incorporating the states and conditions of all lesser becoming beings and no matter what the age or state of the being, that being shares with the fullness of the Omni-Becomer who is the great One who remembers and embraces all of the agony and ecstasy of what it means to live a timed-existence.  The Great One who is the Oldest One is the most inclusive of everyone living freely.  Please do not conceive God as a being who already knows the future as an absolute past.

Aphorism of the Day, July 31, 2014

The failure to admit the determining presence of Language contributes to false arguments.  One such is this:  Theists claim that atheists do have not basis for moral and ethical absolutes because they do not have any higher authority than humanity to establish their judgments about the relative goodness of anything.  The setting of the argument means that arguments miss the point.  Both theist and atheist share the one absolute, namely, Language.  Through language theists and atheists use a "totalizing" or "surpassing" reference in their discourse because they assume through language that what they say has relevance outside of their own epidermis.  What is "total" or "surpassing" is a meaningful place for making moral judgments by people of any persuasion even while what is "total" or "surpassing" cannot be empirically verified with any precision.  So, theists and atheists, please recognize that you both share Language as your common absolute through which you make "relative absolute" judgments which are always open to future falsification in the details of applied justice within a cultural setting.  Relative absolute is the oxymoron which rightly characterizes the ambiguity; relative because like St. Paul, we only see "in part" in a perspectival way, but absolute in that language includes the ability to speak with aspirations of universality.

Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2014

A parable to illustrate the desirability of collaborative "seeing."  Imagine life to be lived around a grand hall that has many entry doors on the perimeter of the hall and on the other side of each door is a hall way.  Each door way has its own hall way into the great hall.  All of the doors are locked and each door has a key hole.  Each hall way has a person who has only visual access to the great hall through his or her individual key hole.  Each viewer has a slot on each side of the place of keyhole viewing so after looking into one's key hole one can describe what one is seeing to the viewers on either side.  So if I am going to know what I cannot see I am going to have to start a chain request to ask the peeper who sees opposite me what the gaze is like toward my viewing location in the great hall.  So life is a collaborative seeing and this seeing occurs through efforts and sharing and translating and constant checking and re-checking particularly if things and events happening within the great hall are always changing.  One's individual view is limited to one's direct seeing plus an imaginative collage of the reported views of others.   From one's individual seeing location one may imagine one from above with a pan-optical seeing location without ever knowing whether such an pan-optical observer actually exists.  With a limited individual seeing one hopes to keep expanding toward the imaginative unattainable pan-optical seeing from above.

Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2014

One of our ancient and persisting human follies is to assume we can say things from a subject position where language does not exist.  We can presume to "speak" for God from God's place outside of language.  If the post-modern era has given us any gift, it has brought us not to deny the big elephant in the room, namely language and our inability to articulate existence in a pre- or post- linguistic  sense without using language.  Having language means that we are but language products mediating other language products but we should not see this as diminutive or dismissive of supreme values and the recording of the Sublime.

Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2014

The reason that people of the same faith traditions can be so divided and in disagreement about most every theological notion is that people inhabit different life paradigms which have been constituted by their own voluntary and involuntary exposure to the influences of their lives. But one could even fine tune paradigms down to the micro-paradigm of a single person who is so unique that he or she is bound to disagree with everyone else about an entire variety of subjects.  The purposes of a paradigm fit the contours of language because language exists as proof that we are social beings.  Language allows us to do things together in collective and pragmatic ways and the "truths" of our collective paradigms are "administrative" truths and mathematical in the sense that involve prior agreement on the "definition" of terms.  For the sake of living together we are agreeing that x=y or Christian faith means = such and such. One still cannot discount the completely micro-paradigm of the unique person as perhaps the most obvious source of creativity.  After all, probably no one dreamed the very same dream that you dreamed last night.  You are unique and inscrutable.

Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2014

Jesus said,"Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."  Wisdom is a practice and a process in understanding that the tradition is not a restricting strait-jacket; it is place for synthesis whereby the new and the old find a place for the creative and inventive process. The practice of wisdom is not conservatism but the practice of wisdom conserves the old which can give rise to the invention of what is new.  So the practice of wisdom does not pit the present against the past which no longer is; the practice of wisdom involves integrating in the now the memories of the past in ways to make creative advance in the present.

 Aphorism of the Day, July 26, 2014

Like any story, the sacred story of salvation history comprised of many stories contains the efforts of many writers to understand the reality of the purpose of God in their own times.  Writers take the traditions and re-edit them to show how their current situation derived within the tradition.  Writers try to maintain a logical symbolic consistency with some of the great themes of the story.  If Jesus had a miraculous conception and was perfect then his mother "had to have" an immaculate conception.  A story or metaphor has limited application which invites the reductio ad absurdum; if Mary needed to be immaculately conceived to prevent imperfection in the bloodline, what kind of conceptions did her parents Joachim and Anne need to prevent the same?  Reductio ad absurdum can be invoked for any statement of meaning in its contextual re-qualification to the point of deconstruction.  As people of faith, we use the Bible stories for evoking flashing insights for transforming our lives not to make biblical phrases as universally applicable to all human beings in every situation.  Some people use the Bible as a book of meaningful statements which are universally always already applicable for all people in every situation of their lives and thus try to force the Bible to have an impossible relevance.  In having a prayerful relationship with the meanings of the Bible one can look for serendipitous meanings to arise which inspire and aid the transformation of one's life. This is a more than adequate notion of "divine inspiration."

Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2014

One of the literal naivete that one must encounter in Scripture is the pre-history and post-history states of innocence beyond good or evil.  The great sin of Adam of Eve was wanting to "be like God" and know good and evil.  Rather than being an actual event which caused the moral situation it is a wisdom story to give us insights about the fact we cannot avoid making value judgments.  As much as we may want to become children again without any culpability for making judgments, it does not solve actual life situations by wishing away the state of having any judgments at all.  Does anyone really want a heavenly state where only good people can only make good choices?  Automatic goodness is not worth anything.  The wisdom of the pre-history and post-history bookends of life is that they reveal insights on how we are unavoidably people who make judgments in life and the post-history insight is about Now always being the latest and last day and therefore it is a day of judgment; we continuously sort out what we regard to be good or evil.  We cannot avoid the judgments of the last day; it is now and we judge and are always already being judged.  One can use the Scriptures as a sort of "happily ever after" Disney movie script or one can find in the transforming insights of wisdom the inescapable now as an always already state of judgment as agents of the same and as targets as well.

Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2014

The ultimate state of alienation is to be somewhere and not know it.  The message of the kingdom of heaven was a message to help people recover from their state of alienation. We live in the Caesar's kingdom, David's former kingdom, a future "David's kingdom," a family realm; no we live in the parallel kingdom of heaven and one needs new interpretative sensitivity to see and understand nuances of the always already kingdom of heaven.  Jesus as the wisdom teacher of parable came to give us a re-orientation so as to recover from the state of alienation from our true location in the kingdom of heaven.

Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2014

Some of the parables of Jesus relate equivalent situations of what we might call "insider trading."  Knowing about the kingdom of heaven is like happening upon something of great value which not everyone knows.  The insider trading metaphor indicates to us that even though something is available to everyone it still has to be perceived in a very individual way and discovered as the supreme value.  Grace means we expend everything in our lives to access and receive that which is free, yet most valuable to our well-being.

Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2014

Perhaps the basic message of Jesus was about the kingdom of God or heaven.  (That Jesus is quoted as using both kingdom of God and kingdom of heaven reveals to us how edited his words were by Gospel writers to fit community situations later than in the time of Jesus himself). A kingdom, a realm is more than just physical environment; it is one's relationship and attachments to that environment which allows one to be and see things which others may not see.  Just as a geologist sees rocks differently so too those who have had a conversion to the realm of God see the same things as everyone else but they see differently through participating in a parallel universe which processes life experience with the sublime filter of faith.  Faith is an enhanced seeing.

Aphorism of Day, July 21, 2014

By virtue of having language, we live with the capacity to value.  Language allows the labeling of all things good and evil.  With language we cannot avoid the use of  the verb "to be" and with this verb we create the valuing formula of life almost as a mathematical tautology.  "For the purpose of this equation X = (is) Y. " With the verb "to be," the existence verb, we not only assume existence but we use this grammatical sign to assign value.  Some values are regarded to be benign or indifferent in their cultural relativity, as in the "sky is blue."  Rather benign unless one is a rather precise artist who wants to further assign specific kind of blue.  The crux of value is found when one's body language indicates value in interaction with everything.  Body language acts reduced to language is what is called the sphere of moral and ethics.  The laws and rules of society are corporate recommendations in how body language should be articulated to value the important things regarded by society for the justice and well-being of the citizenry.  The supreme way to value is expressed by Jesus and St. Paul: loving one's neighbor.  Love is a value word in that it states the "appreciative way" to be towards others but it is such an open word because it is not just a series of completed deeds, it involves an open future to surpass oneself in living appreciatively.

 Aphorism of the Day, July 20, 2014

Last days and end times of biblical story book time have lost their meaning in the world of modern science.  As humanity remained unaware of an expanding universe and could naively believe that we were the actors upon the only stage that there was then our stories of beginnings and end had the kind of transitions which were appropriate to child-like naivete. Modern science is a different kind of "adult story" forensically imploring, "just the facts ma'am." Modern science is still open to the mystery of what we do not know and is not willing to speculate about the specifics of the open mystery until specifics can comport to the methods of the scientific gaze.  A person of faith will claim that mystery can inspire analogical imaginations such that events of aesthetical sublimity can occur to be meaningful events that equal and rival what we can surely appreciate from what as been achieved due to the scientific gaze.

Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2014

Often people comment about how "history" --meaning future interpreters of the past-- will regard a particular event, person or series of event.  This would mean that the meaning of a person or event does not get finished in its own time.  It also means that important links in the chain of history get forgotten or are not remembered.  Consider that the technologies of memory were so few in the distant past that the importance of a few events were magnified out of proportion because of the paucity of information from the past.  Fast forward to today where the amount of quotidian (everyday life, private) events can be recorded and published through all of the technologies and private publishing formats of the internet.  Historians of the future will be lost in a sea of information and what they select to remember in this sea of information will be the result of such a great censorship because so much information will not be regarded.  The Bible and other holy books were born in times when writing was so magical that as a rare medium it almost had divine status because of its happening.  The post-modern Flood or Deluge is not rain from the heavens; it is being flooded in so much information that some people of faith want to retreat to the ark of much simpler times and a time of just a few facts.  This is the nostalgia of denial; great pain in facing this flood and so one regresses to pretend the details of ancient literature give us all we need for post-modern life.  Indeed there may some comfort for the ostrich to live with it's head in the ground; much less to see there.

 Aphorism of the Day, July 18, 2014

After Jacob had the well-known  "Jacob's ladder" dream at Beth-el (house of God) he said, "Surely God is in this place and I did not know it."  The sublime Presence which renders the confession of God is always already and continuous and is dressed up in diverse circumstantial manifestations, hidden to the point of being unknown by those who do not have their "God-seeing glasses" on.  It is difficult to associate everything now with the everything of the past and the everything of the future to make confident and certain confession in the now, but in faith we gradually learn not to disassociate the interpretation of the now with every possible interpretation that could possibly exists.  Within the plethora of all interpretations our interpretation takes on the contiguous and derivative identity with God's presence such that we too can make the hindsight confession in faith, "God was in this place and I did not know it."  Faith is being able to live at all times with the reality of the future anterior tense, "God will have been with us."

 Aphorism of the Day, July 17, 2014

Pets are to animals as gardens are to plants and are the results of the efforts of human culture to "tame" or domesticate Nature for human goals and purposes.  When the taming or domestication of Nature is expressed as domination to the point of literally biting the hand that feeds us by destroying Nature which provides us our environmental homes we come to learn our lesson the hard way, and the lesson we learn is what every recovering addict learns, the need of a graceful intervention due to the presence of a Higher Power.   Stewardship is based upon acknowledging a Higher Power to keep our addiction for things from destroying us.

Aphorism of Day, July 16, 2014

Weeds get a bad rap in the Bible.  They are regarded to be the curse of the Fall for the ancient farmers.  They are inconvenient intruders and pests in fields and gardens.  Ironically, they save the soil of the world from being eroded especially as the great forests of the world are cut down. Biblical weeds are metaphors for the interpretation of events and people becoming to be regarded as on a continuum of inconvenient pests to outright evil.  As such, weeds represent the inescapable conditions of freedom which include the ordeal of faith in living with the weeds of life.  Apocalyptic fatalists would like to torch the entire field of life to get rid of the few weeds.  Faith involves the patience to work at the weeds in our own gardens (compost them and put them to work) even as we face the humbling realization that for some other people we may be regarded as their "weeds."  The faith of Jesus the wisdom teacher does not let us be simplistic "either/or" thinkers.

Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2014

Since language ability results in language events of speaking and writing and reading and the having been named of what one is seeing from the outside and thinking from the inside, language can seem to present successive freeze-frame representations of a great Reality which cannot really be freeze-framed because of time.  Time means everything is moving and yet language events seem to "freeze-frame."  A freeze frame event of language is the attempt to retain over time the "sameness" of detail of what one is experiencing.  That sameness seems obvious except when one compares freeze-frames of the "same" with great time gaps. "No I don't look like my high school graduation pictures anymore, even less than my baby pictures!"  The freeze-frame event of language cannot fix the details of a "moving reality."  Hence we have what seems to be a conflict between the structural view of life and an evolutionary view of life.  Structure and evolution are resolved by language because with language we are aware of both even as we know that language itself is both structured and evolving itself.  It could be that the More than language, which we access only through language is such a eternal realm of possibilisms that it continuously deconstructs all products of language as a way to teaching language users humility about what can be said, written or known.  Read the book of Ecclesiastes for some graceful skepticism.

Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2014

In the parable of the weeds and wheat, the weeds are spared until harvest because to pull them earlier would mean pulling the wheat whose roots were intertwined with the roots of the weeds. In the play of freedom there is a great mixture of experiences alternatively being experienced as good or bad and by different people in different ways at different times.  There is posited a great sorting out which takes place at the end by God's angels.  The bad is thrown away and only the good remains.  This could be the mystery of providence; a great Subsequent re-values everything as good and thus "bad" as a classification of anything in creation is dispensed with in the vision of Providence.  The only summation which remains is the conclusion of Dame Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well."  Such faith is the ultimate alchemy of life and alchemy is a very questionable "science."

Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2014

The parable of the sower is an allegory which does not so much specify the cause and effect for why a good message is successful or not; it is a wisdom vignette of observing the nature of things and honors the elements and agents of freedom which operate in the nature of the process of life.

Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2014

The wisdom of Jesus as known in his story parables is not about explaining to us the causes of why things happen; rather the wisdom of Jesus reveals to us "that things happen" and provides us insights in relating to the things that happen.

Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2014

Reading the Bible or anything can be frustrating if one is motivated by a chimerical quest to find the one and only true meaning of a phrase.  Why should one limit truth to the historical conditioning which goes into the construction of a linguistic artifact bearing all of the conditions of a particular perspective context?  I think there is the temptation to fame in the form of a megalomanical human impulse based upon the pride of wanting to be the most correct and therefore the most adequate judge of everyone and everything.  We can be modestly relevant in our truth efforts in justice and love to those near us without aspiring to bear the false burden of perfection for the rest of the world.

Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2014

One is in some ways so trapped within one's individual experience that one cannot help but be what Roland Barthes called a "writerly reader."  (see his "S/Z")  We may think that we share "wink wink" exact meanings with other people and the approximations of common meanings such as the ones which pertain to a STOP sign seem to allow us pragmatic functional agreements in society.  But as we exert the fine tuning of exploring what I mean and what you mean, one can find that there is enough variation in how we learned our words in our individual contexts as to make us in some ways the "writer" of everything we read and interpret.  Sometimes we absolve ourselves of being "writerly readers" when we passively say I agree with the one to whom I give my allegiance as my chief explainer of my reality.  The notion of writerly reading which the New Testament writers did when they read the Hebrew Scriptures only instantiates the unavoidable practice of writerly reading.  Official meanings can attain administrative infallible meanings for the organization of a community but writerly reading cannot be denied since every person cannot help but bring the subjectivity of one's experience to the act of reading and interpretation.

Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2014

Intention, applied specific attention and focus cannot make what is not intentional go away.  What we choose to place in our foreground does not make the background disappear. The unperceived world still exists and is sustained even when no human being is looking or watching or caring.  Our intentional conscious perceptions are mostly edited by the space-time location in the choices which our cultures have set up like a smorgasbord of possible thought events.  There are some cultural habits which are not humanely beneficial which cannot be seen because they are so commonly accepted.  And so we in the present must wait for the future generations to expose what was wrong about us which we could not see because it was such a tacit part of our background.  We make all kinds of judgments about the cultural practices of the biblical time cultures even while we valorize Scripture as possessing timeless divine inspiration.  We always hope that something much better than us gets revealed even while it has to be filtered through the merely human.  We go forth to live and think and speak anthropomorphically because we can't do other.  If humanity is like at big house in which we live with the walls being our limits, the house still has windows to more than human reality which we speculate about in human ways.

Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2014

The parable of the sower as told by Jesus seems to indicate that God is a really bad farmer because of the indiscriminate casting of the seeds to the wind, to fall where they may.  Could this not but be in story form the natural theology of God's generous giving to every context and situation without partiality but honoring the conditions of freedom which persist everywhere?  Any results which do not respect the conditions of freedom are not worthy of God.

Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2014

If the very nature of the Great One is Creativity and Freedom then we might posit that everything and everyone shares in a degree of that creativity and freedom in keeping with their capacities to express freedom.  If the divine is pure freedom whose very nature is to allow genuine relative freedom, then randomness and divine control, aka divine freedom are very compatible and account for the diversity and serendipitous adaptation which are always already occurring in minute incrementalism implied in the difference of a subsequent appearance of things in contrast with a previous appearance of the state of things.  Scientific laws are human versions of how we describe the behaviors of the freedom of things according to the apparent consistency of behaviors based upon how we the observers define consistency.

Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2014

When wisdom comes to language it is not philosophical logical statements and not scientific laws and not sheer poetry; the language of wisdom combines aspect of all of these to evoke pragmatic nuances of living.  Words of wisdom flicker with insights and create beckonings to want to be better in the art of living.

Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2014

With wisdom we can bear contradictions and ambiguity.  With wisdom we can understand that each context specific event is constituted in the versions of the viewer and interpreter.  Wisdom includes the ability to think intuitively and to factor the motive of the heart into judgments.  Wisdom is knowledge in free form dance using deftness to adjust with each movement which is required to make knowledge beautiful in application.

Aphorism of the Day, July 4, 2014

Our nostalgia for primitive America can parallel our nostalgia for the primitive church.  In that nostalgia is expressed as our current maladjustment to the complexity of modern problems such that we may want to use our imaginations to hearken back with sentimentality to "simpler" times.  The complexity of our world today with our global economies makes the situation in the colonies seem like doing business out of a "cigar box."  Our Founders generated some great principles and ideals which they themselves could not attain in the details of their lifetime but these principles have proven to have continuing application in our lives as we strive to become our "better angels" in the practice of justice.  We celebrate the birth of our country and the church because we want our highest ideals to find new application in the details of our lives today.  Happy Birthday America!  May the details of realized justice ever find a place in thee.

Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2014

We can often note that people in power use ignorance of people for their own financial and political advantage.  There are religious people who believe so strongly that the world is going to end soon that they see no need to be committed to take care of the environment.  People in positions to make a difference in the care of our environment use that "stewardship ignorance" to maintain policies which harm the environment but delay the conversion of our economies to more eco-friendly practices.  Apocalyptic fatalism of religious folks seems to absolve them from caring for the earth and leaving it a fit place for those who come after us.

Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2014

Emma Lazarus' "New Colossus" became associated with The Statute of Liberty and our country as a "mothering welcoming country."  "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddling masses yearning to breathe free."  Jesus said, "Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest."  Hospitality and welcome as the response to fear, anxiety, need and uncertainties of being in a new place are human excellences to pursue as individuals and as a country.

Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2014

The totally ironic Jesus: "Father you hide these things from the wise but revealed them to infants."  How much more anti-intellectual can one be?  Or is this an expression of the born-again theology of Jesus who believed that adults had so lost their access to the joy and wonder of their native births because they had become all head with no heart?  Surely the immensity of all can teach us to access mystery and wonder and we become the infants in whom original wonder lives again?

Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2014

Sometimes it seems as though the final editor of the various Gospel present Jesus as an accidental aphorist or one who generates koan-like phrases which stand alone because they seem to lack fuller qualifying contexts to give them more "limited" meanings.  Without fuller contexts readers and scholars have to dig to try to find surround contextual knowledge to come to meanings or rely upon the intuitions inspired by the language itself.  Isolated phrases lacking context are not necessarily aphorism even though they function that way in the way which they come to be read.  In the macro-view aphorisms also have context which is the context from which the writer writes.

Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2014

To whom much is given, much will be required.  There is an irony in this because one can be given "much" in diverse ways.  One can be given much loss, sorrow and tribulation.  If one is given much loss and tribulation the alchemy of faith involves sharing the much of loss and grief with others and as private people who eschew public show, our loss can draw the gaze of those who send healing energy of prayer even as loss draws the very energy of prayer. Loss in the community of faith does not make for anonymous "rubber-necking;" it can be the occasion for bearing grief and sorrow.

Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2014

The stewardship words of Jesus: To whom much is given, much will be required or expected. What has one been given?  Who will require and expect from the one who has been given? One is given life in various forms of quantity and quality manifestations.  The variety of the much of what has been given is great.  No matter what we have been given in the benefits of life, we have the requirement to the common good to the same degree.  This does not sound like a "flat tax."  These words were not meant for generous people because they already know the wonderful joy of giving everything away.  These words can only be words of Jesus negatively perceived by people who had not discovered generosity, for whom giving is a anxious and taxing obligation.  Those who have discovered generosity do not experience giving as an obligation or requirement.  It but the generous flow of God's abundant life.  One can live under the drudgery of giving as a divine, social or religious requirement or be fortunate to have had a conversion to generosity.

Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2014

Our personalities and our bodies may at times seem to be our destiny in that they project from them the seeming limits of what we are to do or become.  And as much as it is easy comfort to settle into the what is easiest for body and personality to allow to come to performance, we need to live by faith which allows us to surprise ourselves because what a calling from God can do is bring forth from us some responses which we never thought would be possible.  The calling from God certainly involves development of natural gifts but it also involves the self experience of what one did not think could happen.  Think about when you have surprised yourself and that may be the evidence of God doing what did not occur to one as possible.  As one ages then one is more likely to succumb to the body as destiny, and as limiting destiny; allow oneself to be open to God's call to continue to surprise oneself.

Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2014

One of the most ironic but foundational biblical stories is when Abraham perceived God to ask him to sacrifice his son Isaac.  Without telling Isaac's mom, Abraham set out to obey the command.  Kierkegaard called this faithful obedience of God the time of the "teleological suspension of the ethical."  Abraham took a "leap of faith" in obeying God.  As wonderful as Kierkegaard's philosophical contortion is, I think that this story probably chronicles the ancient paradigm shift when a sector of humanity began to believe that their God no longer required placation by human sacrifice.  We should celebrate stories of creative advance which are chronicled in the Bible even as we cannot regard that creative advance in applying God's love and justice in the details of our lives today and in the future to ever be finished or final.  It may seem like an advance in its time that God permitted an animal sacrifice in place of human sacrifice; it would not register as such an advance today. What does God require?  Justice, mercy and walking humbly.  No killing of anything except asking the selfish self to make a place for all others.

Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2014

Jesus told a parable about laborers hired to work in a vineyard.  They were hired at different hours of the day but all at the same wage for the entire duration of their work.  Those who worked longer got paid the same as those who were hired on late in the day and they of course thought it was unfair.  The circumstances of each person has such difference that one can very often see life as the seeming chaos of the unevenness of people's situation.  What is the equalizer?  God's grace, justice and love are given freely to even out all that is uneven and allow us to hold on to the dignity of all people in a world where it seems the dignity of some is not regarded.

Aphorism of the Day, June 24,2014

It is one thing to declare a final stable meaning, it is another thing to fool oneself that stable meanings can be enforced.  When things are "written down or written in stone" it seems to assume that writing solidifies the stable meaning.  After all the meaning seems to be written in the same way with the same letters.  Even as writing seems to be a technology of memory to retain the seeming stability of written words, written words do not guarantee the stability of the meanings of those words because all words have to be read and interpreted by readers who have individually unique "reading filters" through which those words have to be distilled. The religious issue in this has to do with the impulse of religious authority presuming to declare final meanings for great principles which still have a future.  So we should never presume to declare the final meaning of God, love and justice because these have a future and will still need to be interpreted into new details of human living.

Aphorism of Day, June 23, 2014

Providence may be based upon whether a previous event ever comes to have favorable outcomes.  And if it does one might ask for whom and how many and how long did it take to become so?  Providence as the meanings of an event attained in its aftermath is layered with many nuances based upon who has been directly or indirectly affected by a previous event.  One could also say that providence can be known in the very performance of an event.  If one practices kindness and generosity, then that act itself rewards the doer and the receivers in a providential way that is immediately experienced.  Other providence is not always so self evident and so readily known.  Some providence can only be the teaching method of recommended aversion, as in remember Hitler and Pol Pot?  Don't be like them!!!!!  Providence in the negative is based upon such bad events that one would never want them repeated in a similar way.  The rhetoric of providence is quite diverse but is based upon attaining wisdom of trying to learn from everything.

Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2014

Providence can be how we re-write history when subsequent events events help us re-write such an acceptance of a past event we confess that such event had to be.  Providence is the way we integrate the past experience into our present life but not in a way which trivializes the genuine pain of the past.  Providence is not bravado as when when a youth might trip and face the laughter of colleagues and respond, "I meant for that to happen."  Acting as though one had control over a previous mishap is not the bravado of genuine providence.  I think events have some redeeming outcomes even as some events are not providentially redeemable, e.g. the Holocaust.  Providence does not justify the fact that free acts of evil have occurred; providence is a way of asserting that things on the whole, all together are good even when an individual event or certain events do not manifest the qualities of love and justice.  Providence is the imaginations of faith inspired by hope as we reconcile what we wished might have been with what was and now begin to live in the wake of the past knowing that hope is the Sun which continues to rise each day.

Aphorism of Day, June 21, 2014

Modern Bible readers have had their difficulties with this book.  Thomas Jefferson took scissors to cut out parts which offended his rational mind.  Others want to harmonize the writings in the Bible as the work of a seamless unified mind.  Yes, we may want to pick and choose and come around at Christmas and decide we only want "holy Jesus, meek and mild" but if we encounter his words, "I did not come to bring peace but a sword," we are left scratching our heads.  Holy books include the messiness of life; they include the build up and aftermath of paradigm shifts and chronicle how people who disagree treat each other very badly.  We can get all huffy about how the Old Testament is going all "medieval" on us and forget that we have drones which do anonymous killing.  We can be proud about overcoming the ancient woe of slavery even as we use smart phones and wear clothes put together by persons eking out subsistence.  There are messy things in the Bible which we would like to keep locked in a basement like a crazy uncle or we can admit that when we read the Bible we are people who are all too human reading about people who were all too human; only the details are different.  But we are also reading about people who ask questions of faith and hope in the various and sundry conditions of life and we too are in a like way human enough to ask those same questions of faith and hope.

Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2014

Philosophers often have problems with biblical narrative because it is a challenge to convert narratives into neat logical syllogisms.  Socrates, as we know him from Plato his ventriloquist in the "Dialogues", had the same problem with the ancient poets' versions of the gods.  The gods were presented in such bald anthropomorphic ways that is was hard not to see their behaviors as less recommendable than humans who lived just and upright.  Socrates was forced to drink hemlock because of his impiety; he proposed a more perfect realm, the realm of the idea. One of the ways in which the Bible has been made more readable for the philosopher and the aesthete is to prefer the allegorical reading of narrative.  Story is understood as wisdom vignettes to illustrate the complexities of human life and the complexity of understanding the relationship between human life and the more than human life known as the divine life.  Modern science has also forced people to read the Bible differently since to accept the consistency in the performance of the natural world according to how natural laws are now stated means that we believe these laws were the same in the past.  Biblical narratives don't lose their truth status because they don't comport to how we understand scientific laws; they retain truth functions in inspiring transformation in peoples lives.

Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2014

There is a game in which the absolutist tricks the relativist about his shared absolutist's folly.  It goes:

Absolutist:  God exists.

Relativist: Are you sure?

Absolutist: I'm positive.

Relativist: Only fools are positive.

Absolutist: Are you sure?

Relativist: I'm positive.

Absolutist: Only fools are positive.

The interlocutors end up pronouncing foolishness on each other ad infitnitum.  It is safer to say that all human knowledge including the knowledge of God is partial knowledge but the nature of human language is based upon omni-linguistic meanings promulgated to all linguistic communities such that we have built within us as language users the presumptive discursive practice to make broad and general statements with potential meaning for all language users.  The absolutist/relativist dilemma is resolved by the nature of having language and having no choice but to use it and be used by it in the way that humanity does and is.  An absolutist is invited to have humility about certitude regarding a partial but limited view of God, however personally meaningful it is.  The relativist has to regard the proclamation of  "only partial"" knowledge as having relevance outside of the relativist's epidermis even to the entire linguistic community.

Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2014

What would pragmatic truth be for us today?  Constituting the most intentionally adequate meaningful words and deeds which would express what we regard to be kind, beneficial, just, creative and loving.  And let us not be fearful about always being on the way of messy truth.  Adequate meaning is very often messy.

Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2014

An aphorist is like one who was fired from being a headline composer because of wordiness.  A theological aphorist is one who presumes that God is so humble that God allows the voice of the aphorist to be thrown into the divine "dummy" who is forced to have the voice of the clumsy aphoristic ventriloquist, the real dummy.  A God of love bears all things which is a sign of great humility.  Plenitude must be parsed in bits of partial insights so contextually limited by the aphoristic seer even while presuming to speak for the plenitude which ultimately dissolves the concentrated effects of any partial insight. particularly of those who presume to speak for the whole.   Aphorisms may be the appropriate medium for those claiming only limited partial flickering knowledge.   Plenitude deconstructs every partial insight even as it is a realm of possibilisms to inspire new insights for new moments in new contexts.  And though we can not attain either love or justice perfectly, in the human frame of reference let love and justice be for us the divine criteria in all things.

Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2014

On our visual screens today we encounter the situations in which we are "thrown" today. Our screens are not like video images in frames which can be frozen.  Our frames are the continuous experience of everything which is moving and alive.  Most of the things which arise do not have to be "re-named" by us because of previous encounters or because we assume them with the redundancies of our life habits.  What will stand out is the "new" for which we hope that our redundant practices will have provided us with enough of the right preparation to make a creative innovative response and so add to our experience.  If all does not seem to go well, it still is well in that it has added sheer quantity of life experience to prepare us for the next similar but new challenge of life.  Faith is the ability to live integrating past experience into creative innovation for the new event.

Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2015

The origin of the Trinity arises more from the narrative of Jesus as his followers understood and came to confess his uniqueness in his context and believed him to be definitive of a categorical imperative worthy of universal affirmation.  When Jesus became the standard for "superlative" humanity, then his words about his relationship with God became the source for making Trinitarian confession.

 Aphorism of Day, June 14, 201

The adventure of life is the reflexive play of the valuation and re-valuation of words as we continually are constituted by the meanings of words and as we exert a small effort in the constitution of those meanings ourselves.  The "now" forces us into being a pragmatic user of words and sail upon the sea of meanings.  We are always already testing the utility of the meanings we have achieved even as we are blind to some of the meanings which sweep us along in the tacit background of our lives.  There are many meanings of being American which are in the background and don't become known until they are confronted by people who are not American.  Most of our meaningful differences from other people are not even known to us because we cannot regard ourselves as different except in contrast.  The history of God in humanity is the history of words of meaning about One who is so exponentially Different than we are and yet we presume that the exponential Difference is not so great as to prevent us from using human words about such a great one even though one wonders about meaning of the hyper-superlative.  If the hyper-superlative is an expanding Container then the interior environment is always changing and thus any "final" meaning is always being destabilized.

Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2014

If God is beyond words and description why would we choose the Trinity as the way to speak about God?  1-We have no choice but to use words.  2-There is a plenitude which is more than words and human experience. 3-The one who arose among us and became most quotable because of his stand-out rarity used Trinitarian words about God.  4-Because of the witness of Jesus we have embraced Trinitarian words as our most adequate way to understand and speak about God.

Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2014

Before the formulation of the understanding of God as Trinity of persons, the followers of Jesus in the first three centuries had to come to an understanding of what books constituted the New Testament.  The Trinity is essentially the conclusion derived from the words of Jesus as they appear in the Gospels which did not come to writing in the language which Jesus spoke, Aramaic, but in the existing lingua franca of the time, koine Greek.  The Trinity is a conclusive abbreviation of an understanding of God derived from a reading of the books becoming part of the New Testament and used for teaching standardization in a religious social movement that went from a few people to sweep through the Roman Empire.  Standardization for community coherence and comprehensive promulgation of the message was crucial for organizational unity.   The Trinity is evidence that "truth" is communal and extensive promulgation creates the conditions of "objectivity."

Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2014

There may be lots of ways and methods of achieving favorable brains states such that one would confess blessed feelings and the benefit of such.  Having favorable brain states could not be a final goal of Christian faith unless it included being a part of the social environment of other people to help and assist them to achieve blessed brain states through having enough to eat, freedom from pain, living in safety and the practice of justice.  The validity of blessed brain states is certified if one is also able to befriend others towards those blessed states as well. Being blessed and being an agent of blessing go hand in hand.

Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2014

Consenting to life today is mostly being on the seeming automatic processes of biological life and so do we really consent to what we have no choice in?  Consenting to life has more to do with the specific intentional acts of the day even if lots of them are the given protocols of culture, family and life occupation.  Consenting to the Abundant Life of God's Presence is about convincing oneself that it is there; it is not about convincing God to provide it.  Which one us could convince God not to be today?  Forgetting that God is, does not change God's abiding presence but it could mean that in forgetting God there are parts of our brain which will not get activated today for our benefit and the benefit of our world.  Remembering God's presence will change the chemistry of our brains today.  Remembering God and others will activate the mutual transmission of the energy of prayer.

Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2014

There is a rather ironic rapprochement between the Hebrew Scriptures as written word and the declaration of Christ as the Word from the beginning.  It would seem as though a Person is a more embracing notion than Word or text but it just so happens that Person and Word are co-extensive because the only way to get to a Person is through Word.  Word is the interpretive Filter for everything even of itself in the most delightful reflexive play.  There is the opportunity for understanding Oneness if one can accept the Oneness of everything in having been constituted by Word.

 Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2014

From the many, One.  E pluribus unum.  This is an apt motto for the feast of Pentecost as an acknowledgment of the mystification which happens when diverse people behave for the benefit of the common good.  There is evidence of a higher force when the individual interests and difference are subjected to a unity called harmony.  Ants seem by instinct to serve the purposes of the colony; humans have the capacity for freedom such that their diverse desires can project their self interests to be at odds with the common good.  What is the force that calls us to a common good, not just for pragmatic purposes of social function, but for the higher purposes of justice and love?  We seek the Holy Spirit as the higher force that enables us not just to be social for self preservation but to be just, kind and sacrificial.

Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2014

Probably the great challenge of biblical relevancy in the future is to move beyond both pre-modern and modern readings of the Bible.  It was written and first read in times when interior life and exterior life was not riven by the subject/object split of modern science.  After the modern era too many readers of the Bible wanted to defend it as legitimate science and journalistic eye witness writing because being "cryto-modernists" they bought into the modern criteria for superior truth, i.e., scientific method and journalistic writing which purports to indicate what "really" happened.  The future of reading the Bible involves us understanding the Bible as literary art constructed by people whose lives were constituted by literary/word art.  If we can admit that we are textually/word constituted then we can find the sublime from interaction of the texts which we call sacred with the texts or words of our own constituted selves.  The sublime and mystical possibilities of the Bible re-appropriated as words which are Spirit and life is the invitation to biblical reading in the future.

Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2014

On the 70th anniversary of D-Day we might reflect both with horror and gratitude; horror because the human conditions brings us to the situations such as the Normandy Invasion. Gratitude because many people were asked to show that they could manifest the "greater love" in laying their lives down for their friends.  The persons of that era were called the "greatest generation" even though that generation still had residues of the injustices that plagued them because of the inherited conditions left by the "sins of their fathers."   Eisenhower warned us that the future would not only be about "studying war" but about the perpetual race to finance war with a standing "industrial military complex."  Would that we had wisdom to convert the "industrial military complex" into a standing force to respond to all of the disasters which occur because of weather, climate, earthquakes, fires and the environmental disasters caused by our own efforts to exploit the resources of this earth.  A prophet might predict that there is going to have to be a "greater generation" after us to be great because of the great problems which we are leaving them.  We are saying, "Here, take this world and be greater than we have been!"  One can hope that a ever creating God will inspire an ever greater creativity to help that greater generation to arise.

Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2014

Unity and diversity are both relevant meaningful insights which we often simplify and overuse. They are complex and contradictory and can both be expressions of the worst of human group behaviors.  Corporate unity, diverse people "tamed" to unite for a goal can unite for some terrible goals.  Celebrating absolute diversity in "respecting" differences as final can be the very expression of disintegrating chaos.  God's Spirit as the omnipresent condition of life which allows for the conduction of mutual experience of all that live and move and have being in God also allows for the relative freedom of individual people.  Each person can say and act "I am not like anyone else in any way."  Or, "I am like other people in all ways."  These express the extreme alienation of diversity and extreme symbiosis of unity that has not found the wisdom of moderation of the two.

 Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2014

The Day of Pentecost answers the ancient story of the tower of Babel, when people spoke the "same" language to achieve a unity to "vote" God out of the city and install mere human divine surrogates.  A world with people of many languages starts at a disadvantage in mutual understanding unless there can be a "uniting" topic.  The Spirit as a Divine Force helped to focus the topic upon the risen Christ and so unite people.  It is a nice way to complete a theme in sacred story but we know that to speak the same language today does not guarantee unity among people, and certainly not in faith.  The Spirit as God's abiding presence unifies not by stamping out differences but by charming the ego to be checked at the door so people make a place for each other.

Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2014

Many people try to defend biblical faith in by assuming that the standards of meaning of modern eye-witness journalism and modern scientific observation are the standards of meaning which governed those who wrote the Bible.  On the other hand if one subscribes to the wisdom mode then one understands the language of the heart found in the Bible and one embraces the goals of transformation of life that are evoked by the sacred stories.

Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2014

One can see in the history of religion people discovering experiences which from biological analysis may be certain brain states with specific chemical composition.  These states may be characterized as peace, joy, euphoria, ecstasy et. al.  The attainment of such states coincide with socio-linguistic contexts sometimes call liturgy.  Liturgy is not just what happens in corporate worship settings; liturgy is the overall socio-linguistic contexts which orientate and inculcate the conditions for the brain states of religious experience to be achieved.  Word being made flesh can also mean Word inducing the brain states which get interpreted as being religious experience. 

Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2014

The function of the Ascension in the sacred story is to honor the substantiality of the life of Jesus in his history.  He had a particular past that was an absolute past and as such it could not ever be dissolved or made not to have happened.  While ascension seems to be a mode of deposition of departure to be "out of sight," it actual functions as confession regarding the substantiality of the earthly life of Jesus.  The past retains the individual as an absolute "Was" and so each of us becomes an "absolute Was" who will remain forever.

Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2014

We travel in dimness on the long continuum of perfectability.  Gains toward perfection are made through repentance, or becoming better each day though on some days it may seem that we are taking steps backward.  We travel in dimness because even if we think that we see the sins of other with clarity, we do not.  We do not fully understand where others are at in their journey on the continuum of perfectability.  And even though we cannot avoid making judgments on others and ourselves, let us accept those judgments as very temporal and not as final or divine.  Let us after our judgments sigh, "I could be wrong and so I defer to God who offers a grace that makes the distance to perfection the same for everyone on the continuum."

Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2014

Someone was complaining about the behavior of G.K. Chesterton's friend and he responded, "You should have known him before he was a Christian."  The continuum of perfectability is very long.  Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all others." We often excuse ourselves based upon comparing ourselves with behaviors that are regarded as worse than our own.  Election wisdom often is based upon choosing the "lesser of two evils."  We often judge the gory parts of the Bible by the same standard.  We can ponder many unsavory things that have been done in the name of religion and the divine and we might excuse religious traditions by saying, "you should have known humanity before having the benefit of faith and religion."  One of the quotes from the wisdom of Jesus encourages us to change the direction of our moral vision.  We are not to applaud our moral superiority because we think that we are better than really "bad" or "ignorant" people; rather we are to be perfect as the one in heaven is perfect.  We should not be practicing self-congratulations for ending slavery, we should be looking in the direction of more perfect expressions of justice.

 Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2014

To say and believe the Bible is "God's Word" is one thing; to know exactly how it is so is another.  The general notion of in the beginning was the Word which created everything is a more embracing notion than all of the particular words which are found in the Bible.  And it is difficult to decide how  specific or a particular biblical text manifests inspiration.  One can remember the sketch of the vicar in a Monty Python sketch in the pulpit saying, "My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man."  Pondering the Bible as God's word and specifying how a particular portion of it is so is another thing.  Each group of religious adherents actually practices a disregard for most of the Bible by censoring their reading of the Bible because they cannot find fitting relevance of the words to their contemporary lives.  God is completely vulnerable to words written in the Bible and the incarnation of God in human words means that God opens the divine self to endless translation and endless interpretations and translations of translations and interpretations of interpretations.  With councils and popes humans have attempted to "fix" biblical meanings which in fact cannot be fixed because councils and popes and their fixed meanings are open to endless translation and interpretations.

Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2014

Historically, Christians have labored in a fearful fidelity to the what, how and why of the words of the Bible and biblical inspiration.  Christian biblical expositors in their fear have limited God to being One who would inspire the use of language akin to the phase of when a child is learning one by one the words for new things.  Why not admit that the lyricism of language is in full play within the Bible as people were inspired in their own times to deal with great nagging questions and in doing so we are inspired to keep the conversation going?  The Bible did not seal final answers on the conversation; it is inspired because it honestly raises lots of the questions that pertain to the art of living.  To treat the Bible as an instruction manual on the human machine is to reduce the Bible to less than what it is in its manifold and multivalent display of language. Human councils have maintained canonical collections of "official" books of the Bible and these councils have decided to retain two books of a "divinely" inspired book which don't even mention the name of God.  Believing in an inspired Bible is like believing in the Incarnation; God made the divine vulnerable to anthropomorphisms in the form of human language because in humility(?) humans arrogate the right to speak about the One way beyond their pay grade.  We do so because hope always gives us visions of horizons to surpass ourselves.

  Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2014

We are in the week of the Ascension, the event of Jesus rising like an elevator into the sky covered by the clouds.  Sacred stories have their purpose and their own logic.  In the Ascension event the logic of the sacred story is that Jesus had to be alive in the particular sense of still having a location of a person with a body even while the Risen Christ had become again the Eternal Word from the beginning who was in all and who made all.  The Eternal Word creates for us sacred story to fit what the psyche needs when it needs us.  At time it suffices to say God remembers all in such a way to preserve all; at other times word gives particular meaning such as "grandmother is baking cookie in heaven."  Eternal Word is flexible enough to move from general to particular based upon the need of the moment.  The truth of Word is the greater truth than any particular word product.  We always, already are submitted to the greater truth of Word, even when we produce inferior word products, even the ones called lies.

Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2014

Memorial Day is a time for dreaming not to have to study war no more and to hope for a creativity to ascend to inspire all to beat swords into plowshares.  A vision to sublimate all warring impulses into the creative feeding of all is a vision to continue to have.

Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2014

If we live and move and have our being in God, then God has no environment since there is nothing "outside" of God to move or affect the Divine.  God provides the divine environment for everything.  The environment that is interior to God does affect God because genuine freedom exists for all that lives and moves and has being in God.  So we need to be careful with our freedom because we are affecting all outcomes.

Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2014

The African American Spiritual "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home" expresses the feelings of isolation of one who is without advocate or mentor.  The writer of the Gospel of John presents Jesus as a parental figure when he says to his disciples, "I will not leave you orphaned."  The sure sign of God's Spirit is when advocacy and mentoring occurs for the benefit of those who need it the most.  We at times need advocates and mentors and we also need to be advocates and mentors for those whom we are the Spirit's agents to serve.

Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2014

How does one harmonize a "flat-earther" notion of heaven being the abode above the dome in the sky on which the sun and stars rotate around the earth with the notion of everything  living and moving and having its being in God?  The divine realm as being the highest or outer most place in the universe?  Topos or "place" was and is a figure in language and biblical language includes the inspired attempts to add approximate statistical insights to how we view the world. We can be inspired by the quality of our heart's searching today even as the details of our resulting insights may not be any final answer but represent the "partial" knowing of people who are honest about "partial" knowing from their own limited place of viewing.  Often we want to believe that our "partial" knowledge is better than your "partial" knowledge when we should always be placing what we know and do under this judgment:  Is what we know, do and say approaching a more adequate approximation of love, justice and kindness?

Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2014

In evolution that which has the ability to adapt is able to survive but such a view seems to to limited to earthlings alone.  No matter what happens on earth there is a Plenitude which adapts and survives even while allowing permissive freedom of entities which have freedom only to the extent of their limited capacities.  There is always a greater sustaining Divine Milieu as Pere Teilhard de Chardin called it.

Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2014

If we "live and move and have our being in God" as it is suggested in the dialogue in Acts between Paul and the Athenians, then God is not an outside interventionist but rather God events arise from the divine ground of being itself.  To say, "He came down from heaven" is something which needs to have a translation from perceptual elevation to interior elevation. Elevation is used as a metaphor of high sublimity and not as referring to literal space.

Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2014

Meditation is learning the art of "self whispering" to reach the experience of knowing that one is being whispered by God's Holy Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2014

"Living and moving and having one's being in God," is a phrase which St. Paul reportedly borrowed from Greek poets to make connections with the Athenians.  In the Process theological model of God, all things are living and becoming in a God who is also becoming but remains the greatest with no significant rival except the Divine Self in a future state.  This notion of an expanding Becoming Divine Being means that there is genuine freedom of all "becoming beings" who contribute to the overall Becoming and thus are not pre-programmed/determined by a God who is often conceived in other theologies as being all-powerful and all-knowing (if God knows the future as actual where is freedom?)  God as one with Greatest Freedom allows all of the created order to share in a degree of creative freedom.  The becoming God without rival attempts to lure us toward love and justice and equality but such freedom also allows the one percent to control ninety percent of all worldly possession as proof of God's permissive freedom as humans resist the divine lure towards love, justice and equality with fearful greed.  Sin is not responding to the lure of God to use our freedom for the practice of love, justice and equality.

Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2014

Edith Hamilton's book on Greek Mythology was once standard for secondary school Humanities classes.  It seemed easy to study ancient Greek religions in the public school since there were not many contemporary Zeus-ites/Jovians to rise up and protest the misrepresentations of their religion.  The study of contemporary religious beliefs and practices of active faith communities in a public school is a bit more controversial because "living religions" have many confessional adherents who disagree publicly about how their faith traditions and customs should be appropriately presented.  The solution in a society with the freedom to practice one's faith openly is to invite specific religious teaching to be done in houses of faith and not let public schools be the forum for "confessional" views of any particular religion.  When one tries to do general summaries of religious beliefs and practices even from a academic view point, it is hard to maintain presentation neutrality to the satisfaction of any religious adherent.  One can see the wisdom of why educators in public schools for children refrain from getting into "confessional" specific aspects of religions.  It is done out of respect for all and honors the "golden rule" which seems to be common to most religions.

Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2014

Should creationism be taught in the public schools?  Definitely, yes, but not as a part of a natural science curriculum.  It should be taught in the human science classes which study human behaviors including what people believe.  The scientific method is based upon the tentativeness of any law or theory and so "creationism" is not open to any further condition that would be allowed to alter or falsify its main assumption.  But people are multi-discursive and can hold contradictory rhetorical paradigms in their manifold ways of living.  Anthropology is a very liberal field in that all topics of human behavior are open for study.  Creationism as a doctrine of folk religion is very much a valid topic matter for anthropological study and thus can be taught as such in any school open to freedom of dialogue.  Creationism can be taught with respect for the people who hold these views.  However, the disciplines and genres for the study of the subject matter should not be confused.

Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2014

Often in the history of religion the experience in this world is so horrendous, the focus turns to the state of the afterlife as a sort of therapeutic coping regime.  Such other-worldliness has led to emphasizing salvation as being "saved" in the afterlife.  And some have become quite certain of their specific knowledge of the states of the afterlife.  This emphasis detracts from the notion of salvation as the continual effort for health and healthiness for all people in this life. For people  who focus on salvation as healthy living for all in this life, there are an abundance of biblical metaphors to articulate transformational states of living in this life.  One can in fact understand the Gospel of John as writings which contain the reality of transformational states on this side of death.

Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2014

It is probably true that propaganda works best on plain and direct meanings of words when words are treated as meaning only one thing and one thing only.  Words are reported over and over again to make the ruts of the metaphor so deep as to guarantee its "truth" by the sheer number of times that it is "used."  The actual situation of the world does not let such simple one to one connection between word and single referent persist; in honesty the complexity of the universe by reason of sheer volume means that the words of language will always be inadequate and one can be brought to the wisdom that knows that words essentially only refer to other words as they dance as screen across the Reality we think we are seeing.  This situation is cause for humility in the face of our lack of control because of the vastness of mystery.  Propaganda is built upon simplistic meanings for people in power to keep people in their preferred state of persuasion for some product or prescribed behavior.  The holiness of God is an invitation to think outside of the box of words which can too easily become idols when they serve as but propaganda to "get people to do one's bidding".

Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2014

Today, one may have to be a rigorous editor of the version of what one chooses to read and see in this life.  So much will seem to be just "thrown" at us to make us the pawn of unchosen circumstances.  Information will be flung at us today over which we do not have any control and yet we need to exert editorial control in selecting and giving nuance and style to all information.  Editing is the art of living with faith.  Let us go forth and be artistic in how we edit; be creative with words in how we read our circumstances and how we "write" our interactions in the manifold ways in which we can.  There's lots of lemonade that needs to be made from the lemons of human experience.

Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2014

The father-ization of God reaches its height in John's Gospel in the words of Jesus.  In those words, Jesus, father-izes himself: "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father."  It could be that for one to discover one's own supreme Parent aspect of personality, is to arrive at a higher state of consenting to be determined by a different kind of authority than the imperfect authority that earthly parents often turn out to be.  Earthly parents are not omni-competent and so they need to be complemented by the discovery of that Higher determining Parent.

 Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2014

Imagine the function of language in one's life as an invisible impressionable screen in the center or one's consciousness and this screen has grids to classify every sort of human phenomena.  This invisible screen allows one magically to see/read/interpret the world outside but also see one's inner world as well.  This screen constitutes the seeing through versions of the world and the self and how the two interact with each other.  Repentance or the changing of our "mind" or word screen means that we take on new impressions on our word screen which enables us to see things and one's self differently and therefore make different decisions.

Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2014

The only empirical union between persons or the only time of people actually being "one flesh" occurs in the nine months of gestation when two persons really are one.  Only women can experience being the container and the contained in the mode of delivering new people into the world.  The time of mother-to-be and child-to-be is perhaps the mysterious state that inspires the story of the Garden of Eden as the perfect world.  We all had a perfect world before we were evicted at birth.  And one is blessed if after the eviction the one that became two can experience the love, nurture, care and love of a special friendship.

Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2014

The metaphor of Jesus as door or gate of the sheepfold is taken from the practice of shepherds actually sleeping in the open space that permits entrance and exit from a sheepfold.  So a shepherd functioned as the door and the body of the shepherd kept the sheep from going out and any animal that attempted to come in had the shepherd arise with an "over my dead body" defense.  As a metaphor it behooves us to consider the people who stand in the threshold of our life experiences.  The people "doors" in our lives are those who protect us in life stage appropriate paradigms, but they are also people who open up to us other "worlds" outside of our current particular "safe and comfortable" paradigms.  Gateway people are those who have the wisdom to regulate our progressive exposure to the type of world knowledge needed in our progressive creative advance.

Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2014

The very nature of language does not support a literal connection between a particular word and what the word is supposed to refer to.  Words give us the approximations of events experienced as we have been taught to see things by the communities and cultures where we have been raised and how these approximations have been further individualized through our own micro-family history and within the unknowable ways of how a specific person has become formed by his or her language.  We rely upon having faith in our community meanings even as we know that community meanings change over time.  With faith we believe that the living experience of time is like being on a merry-go-round which gives time to make out images in our landscapes which seem to change continually.  As we apply Scripture to our lives, we are not trying to pretend that time has stopped; we are trying to receive momentary insights which will help prepare us for the next arising events in our turning lives.

Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2014

A subtitle for the writings of the New Testament might be: "Metaphors Gone Wild on Jesus Christ."  The kind of experience which people profess to have with Christ is the justification for the extreme and superlative use of metaphors, most of which involve poetic license without closeness of actual empirical verification in the actual experience of Jesus.  Jesus is Lamb of God, Good Shepherd and yes, even the Sheep-fold Gate.  He's King and King of Kings, Vine, Light, Word, Priest and Great High Priest.  He is Life, Truth and the Way.  Surely there are enough metaphors about Christ in the New Testament to convert any literalist from their fundamentally limited ways of interpreting Scripture?

Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2014

One of the classic stories about how our partial knowing results in conflict about what is true is the story about the group of blind men who touch different parts of an elephant and so they all explain their truth differently.   There is also a humility which is required about partial knowing; do we even have the competence to affirm the nature of what might be total and absolute, because even revelation has to be given to us in human insights and so revelation is interpreted through human filters?  The humble confession that we can make is that there is Much More than I or we or everyone together can know.  We should always be humble regarding having infallible precision  in defining what is "Much More."

Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2014

If word or language is very condition for us knowing anything as human beings, then the next most basic topic which is assumed in language is "existence" itself.  If Descartes said "I think, therefore, I am," it was already implied in the writing of the Gospel of John, "I am because I am already constituted by the Word."  The existence of people having words and language precedes the consciousness of existence itself.  In this way existence is created by the Word which has existence itself.  In one of the eight "I am" statements attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John, it is written that Jesus said, "Before Abraham was, I am."  In the Gospel of John this refers to his pre-existence as the "Word" from the beginning.  It is humanly impossible to separate Word from existence or as Heidegger wrote, "Language is the house of being." Being and becoming would be unrecognized without language.

Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2014

Cinco de Mayo is a reminder to us that biblical people experienced a nomadic existence and could not help but carry with them memories formed in one place to another place.  When people are forced into exile or leave for better economic opportunity it is impossible to avoid our former life identities.  The Native Americans did not have the power to force the European immigrants to give up their European customs and traditions and observe Native American language, customs and traditions.   Is it power only which determines what customs are valid to celebrate?  If the ancient Hebrews had been forced to relinquish their traditions in exile in the Babylon and Persian exiles, there would be no Hebrew tradition at all.  The feast of Pentecost teaches us that we can be united even as we honor the languages and cultures of all people. The American Ideal at its best seeks the Pentecostal reality; unity among the many differences.

Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2014

The risen Christ was unrecognized by the disciples when he walked with them to Emmaus and then suddenly in the breaking of the bread, "Poof," he appeared.  Like a baby being weaned from the continuous physical presence of the mother the early followers of Jesus recounted the transition in being weaned from actual presence of Jesus of Nazareth to the apparent presence of the risen Christ under the modes of Word and Sacraments.

Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2014

The resurrection stories trace the transition period between the presence of a walking and talking Jesus of Nazareth and the risen Christ who seems to be able to morph and be known in an endless varieties of serendipitous encounters.  When there is endless variety of potential encounters with the sublime risen Christ, there arose an administration of the sublime particularly for the public gathering.  The sacraments became the mode of finding the risen Christ within the actions of a gathered church.  Administrative Christianity for purposes of control tended to lean toward viewing the presence of Christ as somehow "limited" to the sacraments.  Administratively limiting the "presence" of Christ to "official" church practice has led to the sacred being "forbidden"  or invalid in the "secular" experience of people.  The loss of connection between sacrament and everyday lives has meant that people dabble in the serendipity of their own experiences of the sublime without making sacred connections anymore.  The sublime which derive from the risen Christ have the built in lure to draw one closer to God and have the proven effects of justice, love, forgiveness and peace.  The sublime as defining certain experience can occur without the proven effects of justice, love, forgiveness and peace.  Discerning the sublime of the presence of the risen Christ is the art of resurrection living.

Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2014

The music referred to as "Ode to Joy" of Beethoven's Ninth has been used as an anthem of choice by incredible diverse people including the worst sort of totalitarian regimes.  What right do dictators have to "steal" and use such a sublime piece of music as if sublimity could be used as a validation for inhumanity?  Isn't that the completely ironic nature of humanity?  God, resurrection and the Bible have often been used by people who have not known how to be related to the sublime.  If we use not the sublime for purposes of love, kindness and justice, we fail miserably at the task of stewardship.

Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2014

St. Paul's letter include his teaching and theology.  His writing on the death and resurrection of Jesus are the earliest writings but his writings were more didactic.  When it came to making the meaning accessible to a wider audience, the Gospels proved to be the genre of choice.  By putting the theology, liturgy and spiritual practice into a narrative of the life of Jesus the early communities solidified their unity around a celebration of the risen Christ.  A narrative allows many meanings to arise and churches for many years have tried to reduce narratives to didactic "doctrines" but these reductions have been mainly for the administration of the people by their leaders. 

Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2014

What is the difference between Jesus being the Word from the beginning, the Vine, the Good Shepherd, the Gate, the Way, the Truth, the Life, The Resurrection, the Bread of Life, The Bread from Heaven, One who healed, Walked on Water, One who wept, Changer of Water to Wine, Baptizer and many more.  The difference is only in the use of different metaphors and some metaphors have poetic purposes while others purport to be words that actually refer to possible actions or deeds.  Other words refer to impossible actions or deeds with the designation as Signs which are markers about  someone who was experienced as a very rare person.  The New Testament provides us with an entire range of discursive practices as a written art to evoke the sublime meanings of a rare person, Jesus Christ.  We can get the message about the sublime rarity of the person of Jesus without using language with the kind of symbolic confusion which would make Jesus unfit for our scientific age.

Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2014

Death is not a rare event except it is experienced as rare in the life of a person, viz, it happens one time.  It is rare enough in the life of a person who is loved within a community to necessitate the unlearning of actual habits trained to include regular accessibility to the presence of a person.  The resurrection of Christ was so rare and unique because what is called death was a short duration and a new vocabulary had to be invented about the continuing accessibility to Christ in some many new ways.   There is an incredible interpretive miracle if the prophet formerly known as Jesus of Nazareth is now a protean Christ able to morph into endless reappearances to be a higher power to fit the unique personal history of each person. While we confess one Christ, the light of Christ has so many diverse rays it appears that we live with poly-Christian manifestations of endless presences of Christ.  Why has this happened?  Because we have endless words about words about words about words...... And words about words really do matter because they bear the reality of creation/becoming continuously.

Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2014

The author of John's Gospel in the Doubting Thomas pericope states that those who don't see Jesus and yet believe are blessed.  This should be an affirmation of what might be called the "refilling of Christ" in contrast to the emptying of Christ to take on the human role in Jesus of Nazareth.  By the "refilling" of Christ, it would mean Christ as Word from the beginning or the very basis for any relationship or consciousness at all.   The Risen Christ as the Word means the endless proliferation of "presences" of Christ, since all of the words which come from the Word are but endless signification efforts for the Word behind all words.  In the use of one word is included the one mathematical formula which is the synonym implied in every word: This word=not every other word.  Not being every other word is implied in the use of one word.  The writer of John's Gospel wrote so that the reader could appreciate that each person has a different but equal experience of the Risen Christ.   The writer of John's Gospel was saying, "Welcome to language mysticism."

 Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2014

The doubting Thomas resurrection appearance story is actually used by the author of John's Gospel to set up the affirmation of the faith of people who did not experience such re-appearances of Jesus.  The empirical Thomas wanted "proof" and his "seeing is believing" faith is diminished by the words of Jesus who comments, "Blessed are those who have not seen yet who believe."  The early church moved quickly to other modes of how the Risen Christ was affirmed as being in the lives of his followers.

Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2014

Resurrection is hope's narrative because hope and desire put into us visions of much more than we can humanly accomplish given our bodies in space/time limitations.  Resurrection is hope's narrative about the truth of never being finished with anything in life.  There is always some MORE.  People with a wrong relationship with hope may adopt the false pride of actually thinking that they should "finish" themselves and all of their relationships.  Such pride means going to the grave with unnecessary guilt.  Let us not be embarrassed by hope's narrative or all of what is poured through the creative imaginations of these earthen vessels.

Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2014

Resurrection is a word like love, a word that evokes powerful emotional meanings even though it is difficult to provide specific and precise empirical content to resurrection.  Resurrection as a concept existed in the extant religious context in the time of Jesus in various religious communities, Jewish and other mystery religions.  It attained the place of a constellation of ideas and meanings which derived from the various experiences of the afterlife of Jesus within a community of followers who knew the death and resurrection of Jesus to be symbols of the dynamic of their daily spiritual practice which in turn became New Testament writings and liturgical practice.  We don't believe anything from a presumption of knowing everything about the item of belief; if such were the case we would discount the future as providing future occasions for verifying or falsifying what we think we know.  When the old timer was asked if he had lived in his hometown all of his life, he responded, "Not yet."  Have we attained the full meaning of the resurrection?  Well, not yet!

Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2014

If the wordsmiths of the Creeds had read St. Paul who wrote, "If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body," why doesn't the Creed read, "I believe in the resurrection of the spiritual body?" Was it is because they believed that a human person was inseparable except for a state of "temporary" separation of death?  And why is it so important to think that we have the right to make some final pronouncements upon the "unknowable?"  Or is it because any body of people has the right of council to declare which "poetic utterances" are valid for community beliefs.  And isn't it difficult to control poetic meanings and the proliferation of meanings as they become unmoored and impossible to return to the harbor of the original contexts of formulation and utterance?  What we think ancient things mean becomes a present day adjudication by contemporary interpreters.

Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2014

When one states in the Creed that one believes in the resurrection of the body, one can understand "of the body" to have a metaphorical meaning of "substantiality" since from a merely physical point of view it is having bodies which seems to establish substantiality of existence, even though we know that in duration a physical body does not hold up very long in the scheme of time.  One wonders why the Creed wordsmiths did not want to include believing in the resurrection of the soul or spirit which might be regarded as more substantial than the body.  Easter season is a good season to let Mystery dissolve all intellectual idols of certitude about how one thinks one knows and believes the resurrection. 

Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2014

In the duration of the forms of being and life, one can wax philosophical about how everything and every being are in transitional states of existence.  Such philosophical facticity cannot represent the degree attachment that we humans have to life such that death represents such a pronounced degree of difference in accessibility to another person the imaginations of the unseen portion of a person living on forever are but the natural narratives of hope.  People of faith live believing that hope is not a cruel hoax but having hope is anchored in something very enduring.

Aphorism of Day, April 21, 2014

In an Easter mood one helpless anthropocentric anthropmorphizer takes poetic license in assuming that the lovely hummingbirds are playing and dancing around the backyard while from the perspective of the hummingbird I may be the idiot human seeing aesthetic dance patterns when they are but working to keep alive, seeming to say, "you try to move your wings 80 times a second and not work your tail off to get calories for energy!"  The Psalmist wrote in a brand of anthropomorphic theocentrism," There goes that Leviathan whom God has made for the sport of it."  Easter is a time to accept mere humanity, even when we aspire to get out of ourselves and see things from the point of view of different species altogether, say a hummingbird, or God?  We are inspired to imagine help and insights from other beings/Being in life because we have faith to believe that everything and everyone is all together.  We have faith to believe in a freely expanding Container big enough for everything and everyone all together and that Container shares influences with all that is contained.

Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2014

Easter is a persistent celebration which has continued because of the appearance of a very rare person who had a rare re-appearance.  Such rarity of person and event results in new use of language and the superlative case of human uniqueness means that we delve into the vocabulary of the divine because we are baffled.

Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2014

What one discovers in the practice of meditation is similar what one knows about about the computer; what you put in has a way of being stored and being retrieved.  Meditation often opens the floodgates of what will be retrieved from what has been "saved" through programming.  The human interior life has more flexible and protean ways of mixing what has been saved internally in the creation of new inventions.  Interiority has so many ways of morphing its own equivalences to exterior "multimedia" events with discursive nuances of moods, interior colors and sounds.  One can discover one's Interior as cavernous and confess like the Psalmist to be "wonderfully made."  While one practice of meditation may be fasting from all discursive activities, I am a believer in the aesthetic complement of the simple, viz., an incredible sound and light show with mind-boggling aurora borealis-like interior events.  People who meditate can get stuck into a style and make idols out of particular methods and prescriptions of how one should or others should attain some "non-existent' and non-repeatable state.  The "waters" of one interior state have already flown to the ocean and that same water state cannot be retrieved.

 Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2014

Today might be a good day to meditate on a W.H. Auden's, "Stop All the Clocks."  Meditate upon the sheer power of profound grief.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2014

The practice of meditation should lead to an unconscious "forgetting of oneself" even in such a religious practice because the result of meditation should be a contemplative unity of life where there is no distinction between secular and sacred.  Once the line between what used to be regarded as natural or spiritual has been dissolved, then contemplation is the outcome of accepting the symphony of energies which dance and plays within oneself.

Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2014

Meditation is a good way to honor the notion of Sabbath throughout the week.  If the Sabbath means 1/7th of one's time is to be dedicated holy rest, then the post-resurrection Sabbath occurs in one's body as a nomadic tabernacle.  With meditation one takes time to attend to what might be stirring in one's holiest of holy inner being.

Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2014

Meditation means adjusting to the reality of all the conditions which impinge upon one's life and looking to gently choreograph the dance of the interior energies of one's life as they generate texts, worded thoughts, worded pictures asking for one's consent to let them linger.  But one lets them go into mist and shadows as one surrenders with an abject passive resistance.  One submits to all at the same time one looks for the rising of strength to change everything with wisely directed thoughts and actions which arise from a surrendered ego willing to say not I because I am carried on the Wave of Someone greater.

Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2014

There is a difference between visualization and meditation.  One can use visualizations to create profound sentiments about certain events in the life and suffering of Jesus.  Visualizations tend to excite and awaken many more areas of the brain.  Meditation is moving about from visualizations which are simply words that are hidden in pictures.  Visualization is more for those who are in need of iconography of the mind.  Meditation is more about being seen through and being prayed through by the Mysterious One and meditation is a method of getting rid of mind clutter to allow it to happen.

Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2013

Meditation can be like "self-help" therapy where one is in search of one's "truer" self and where one is trying to encounter an interior Therapist who can offer peace and silence as the invitation to honor the mystery of both who one is and who God IS.

Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2014

Meditation for beginners may be a shock for people who have been living as though everything really takes place "out there."  "Out there" pain, loss and failure may eventually be the impetus to begin to go "in there."  And if meditation contra-Freud purports to be an "untalking cure," it does not always happen because suddenly the shouting voices of the interior of exploding emotional bombs trapped in interstitial crevasses of the interior want the attention which they did not get when the events happened and so the trapped energy accrued to become the legions of the repressed.  The legions of the repressed include the memories formed by being raised by imperfect people while being imperfect because one can only always already be in the state of being perfectible.  One of the goals of learning to consent to the depths below the sentiment of emotional energy is to hope to participate in the flow between the members of the Trinity.  To discover Father or Parent at a profound depth is to be born into the freedom of a different kind of determinism than the kind proposed by Freudian determinism.  To discover the Perfect, is to forgive oneself and nurturers for not being such.  The discovery of the Perfect is to embrace one's life long task of perfectability.

Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2014

Meditation has the collateral effect of training the brain.  The science of meditation has to do with attaining some brain wave states and attaining those states with practice and with ease means having the ability to carry over the effects of a "peaceful" brain to things like better sleep, less stress and better concentration in other work tasks.  But beyond the sheer practice which meditation is, one looks for the faith event or the arising of the Spirit who prays within. The practice of meditation is also the training of one's ego to become fluid, but strong enough to willingly get out of the way and recognize and cooperate and be accessed by the Higher Power.

Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2014

Meditation like prayer can consist of preparation as one makes the intentional effort to "line things up" inside of oneself in such a way for the fresh draft of breath or wind of Spirit to arise through oneself and the very few moments of having felt "prayed through" makes all of the preparation worth it.

Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2014

The realm of every possible word for anyone at any given time provides the word-scape background for any particular articulation of a word act.  Anyone who meditates is already being articulated and articulating in their body posture and location because one exists in a pre-coded world of time/space meanings.  Through meditation one tries to imagine a retreat back into the realm of the possible word-scape background where individual word product loses identity something like a drop of water in the splash of an ocean waves falls back into the deep and loses it public "showing."  Meditation is trying to be received back into the realm of every possible word so that no particular word has a showing and find in that practice a sense of the fullness of silence because it is really the loud silence of the hum of all of the possible.

 Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2014

Aesthetic vision arises on a continuum of one to the many.  We are overwhelmed by a sense of the many to be able to believe in One of anything.  In monotheistic religions there is the confession of One God as the Sameness in the many which connects everything and also is the basis for conduction of mutual experience among the many.  Meditation is a way of a metaphorical melting back to the simple non-dual One.  From the One, we arise to affirm and discover the place for "everything" under the Sun is the swirling freedom which is so evident. 

Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2014

Meditation is a way of knowing the divine presence through the still small voice.  Elijah the prophet saw a display of wind, fire and earthquake but only recognized the divine in the still small voice.  The whisper of peace as the over-all calming effect throughout one's being may be a better way of affirming a belief that it is better that we know that God knows us rather than being over-confident about how we think that we know God.

Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2014

Why should one meditate?  Why would one want to shut down brain states instead of activating as many as possible to practice a full cerebral exercise?  Meditation may be but one exercise on a continuum between the overload of a "brainstorm" to the simple one thought or one breath. The entire continuum is needed for invention and creativity to arise and coalesce to become creative advance from the attending insight which can arise because of the complexity of the brain states continuum.  One needs to find the naked faith state of "No Thing" but God as the state of awesomeness which can occur when one dwells on threshold of the foreground and the background and on that threshold distinctions do not arise.

 Aphorism of Day, April 5, 2014

People who meditate can get the reputation for being "navel-gazing" passive quietists.  It is good to remember that meditation is a daily time of "Sabbath within a Day" rest and dynamic meditation should yield impressive collateral effects to promote optimal performance in very active lives because meditation as if it were is a fine tuning of the body's energy with God's Spirit.

Aphorism of Day, April 4, 2014

Meditation is the practice of mapping one's interior.  Through surgery and dissection of the epidermal exterior, the interior can be made into an external object for viewing and manipulative procedures but this is only an exterior interior.  We have an interior life that is inaccessible to physical manipulation though we try to locate brain centers which seem to have regulatory influence upon moods, feelings and behaviors.  Freud's "talking cure" and lots of other psychiatric hermeneutics (interpretative practices) have treated the conscious and the unconscious as languages to be interpreted to bring understanding of how the interior life interacts with exterior life. Meditation in the Christian practice is like naval sonar practices.   We send metaphor waves into our depth and see how they return.  One metaphor is that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.  In sending this metaphor into our depths with a meditative sonar blip, we seek to discover that God, the Spirit is praying through us.  We meditate with hope and faith that we are being so "used."

Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2014

Meditation functions like a rest sign in the system of music.  The rests in music give content, definition, context and meaning to what is sounded.  Meditation or the practice of silence from language is what can give our faith lives in worded existence of text and phonic events individual meaning.  In meditation we attempt to erase the textual border between foreground and background and in so doing we hope that God's whisper within us can come to birth in a new and fresh foreground appearance.

Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2014

Meditation is a neutral way to alter brain states and brain chemistry; so what makes it a contemplative Christian practice and not just a practice for attaining peak performance in life? Does meditation have to have Christian mantras or Lectio Divina and other Christian subtitles to be a valid Christian spiritual practice?  One can imagine criminals to use meditation to help them in "peak performance" of crimes.  The pragmatic judgment of meditation is not proficiency in attaining ideal brain wave states of peace, but attaining just and loving action in one's life.  If one divorces meditation from love and justice and peace then it can simply be a neutral amoral practice.

Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2014

Meditation: Fasting from Words even knowing that one lives thoroughly by words so that one punctuates one's life with intentional rest from words so that one can Be, Be Still,  Be Still and Know, Be Still and Know that I am,  Be Still and Know that I AM GOD.  Meditation is obeying God when God says, "Shut up, in the nicest possible way."

Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." St. Paul wrote in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male and female.  Yet religion has been used to uphold differences to be used for purposes of bigotry, shunning and exclusive practices for years.  Perhaps the "spirit" of Christ is no longer to be found in religious organizations which still practice such shunning and so the "spiritual" has gone extra-ecclesiastical in a world of global closeness that hardly needs religion to be divisive. It is a good time for the welcoming "Spirit of Christ" to be evident in churches without making people pass through such "narrow" doctrinal "detectors" at the door.

Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." The late John C. Lilly of dolphin study fame and friend of Ginsberg and Leary, wrote a book, "Simulations of God: The Science of God" in which he explicates from his own experience multiple ways to achieve the "brain states" of spiritual experience.  This scientific approach of believing that the human being is always already open to experience of "optimal states,"  "peak events," and ways to be in the "zone" or "flow" of things without religious tradition narrative content seems to be attractive to people who are wearied by religious organization being exclusive and seemingly wanting to prove that Freud was right about lots of religious behaviors being disorders.

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  This expression may be an indication of the loss of anthropological soundness of the rites of the church because the rites were not experienced as connected with true life events and they have not always been taught as transformational practice.  So the spiritual has become "supplemental" extra-religious "self-help" individual strategies.  Religion needs to find its re-connection to life in helping people explicate the realities of the stage of life that they are in and promote practices which help toward the achievement of "optimal" states of being within the variety of occurrences within any stage of life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  For many people of faith, the terms religious and spiritual may not have any relevance.  They don't seem to apply to people in their own self-understanding of faith because they do not live in some "academic and pollster" wake of analysis of what they are doing and feeling when they say that they believe in God.   Such people live in the continuous primary naivete of what is a personal relationship with Persons of Greatness whom they know to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  And they are not sure about the academic value of characterizing such a vital relationship, in fact, such academic aloofness seems to be the untrue analysis of people outside of and foreigners to the type of relationship which they think that they have with God.  So religious and spiritual can simply be the linguistic coats which academics and pollsters force people to wear.  Some people of faith believe such coats don't fit their experience and so they refuse to don them as how they would show their faith in the public.

Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  Some analyze religion as consisting of exoteric and esoteric aspects, the the former being all of the externals of religion and the latter being the spiritual center for which religious tradition and institutions actually exist.  So the external aspects of religion can seem to be mainly about "crowd" control and administration of people in having a significant "club" for social integration in a larger society.  And the kernel of of religion is the call of the path to the beatific vision of God which only the saints and the holy ones seem to want to travel on.  In the bifurcation of religion and spiritual, one might use the analogy of having body without spirit or being simply ghostly without a body.  It may mean that we live in a situation of double alienation; religion alienated from spiritual life and religious life inapplicable to everyday life.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  Such an expression seems to be nostalgic aspiration for the Presocratic notion by Anaximenes who essentially held that "spirit" =pneuma= (πνεῦμα) was the basic matter of the universe.  As the metaphorical term accrued meanings in the theological and psychological mappings of the interior terrain of the unknowable but metaphor inspiring inner self there developed massive institutional and social structures around the many notions and practices of the "spiritual" within successive social contexts.  And some have thought that the institutional shell is now "empty" of "spirit" or the institutional furniture has become like idols distracting  away from the spirit that seemed to be the founding spring.  So a post-institutional spirituality is expressed in more local or individual modes until post-institutional spiritual gatherings become their own institutions.  It could be that such spiritual institutions are and will be more a part of the "for-profit" economic structures, e.g., every yoga based spiritual establishment.  When one pays for yoga classes one may be paying for the way in which one chooses to learn how to map one's spiritual-psychological-physical being.

Aphorism of Day, March 25, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  To assume people of faith to be saying, "I'm not spiritual; I'm a religious person," is something like the rotund baseball player John Kruk who was eating, drinking and smoking in a restaurant and a shocked woman asked him if he was an athlete.  To which he replied: "Lady, I'm not an athlete, I'm a baseball player."

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  It could be that we got to this commonly expressed belief by social process.  Modernity in wealthier societies allowed more individualism, more nomadic freedom and the proliferation of all kinds of products for every kind of entertainment.  Sports and entertainment have become more specialized and expansive.  Church as once having an exclusive place on weekly calendars had fewer things to compete with and church fulfilled a major socio-entertainment aspect of a person's life.  Bible words have a much greater ocean of words in the modern era where world knowledge doubles daily; Bible words have had more difficulty in avoiding "saturated meanings" in the plethora of word products including modern historical scholarship where scholars purport to know more about the Bible than Jesus did in his time, i.e., that Moses did not write the Torah and that David did not write all of the Psalms.  Can there be a rapprochement between the notion of the religious and the spiritual?  It could be that Sabbath time in the past was structured around "market time" so that trading of products did take place before after the time of prayer.  So even Sabbath "fit" in with the local economy.  Can we think outside of the box and return to the "individual body as temple" theology of Jesus and Paul in times when actual Temple was destroyed or church buildings did not exist?  If each person's body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit, then there is the collective body of Christ as a Temple in its gathering together but there are also satellite and connected altars in each person's body as a Temple of the Holy Spirit.  A rapprochement strategy would mean that the religious authorities would give up their guilt production by acknowledging that the enforced obligatory regular group gathering in the group's building may not be omnicompetent to the spiritual/social/psychological needs of persons and families. At the same time the satellite spiritual people, freed from those who would make them feel guilty about church, would understand the importance of preserving the religious gatherings and its locally adapted accoutrements to their lives and their society.

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  For people who claim this it means that there was some point in their lives when religion and spirituality became separated.  What has happened to a person for religion no longer to be regarded as spiritual.  Such experience must have been widespread enough for it now to be a common claim.  Could it be that churches have been perceived as lagging behind society at large in willingness to extend justice of full inclusion to lots of people who were willing to consider themselves religious Christians but did not feel welcome?  Was spirituality a refuge to find inclusive justice?

Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  Being religious in a day when we like to believe that each person is a free agent and not caught in a web of obligations and commitments either to church rules  which seem out of date or with forced ways to read the Bible which contradict all of the scientific ways of one's life;  it seems easy to latch upon a spirituality which provides visualizations of the insides of one's being to re-organize one's life to the hum of the the Om of the universe and find "peace."  But there may be some things which atrophy by "going it alone."  What about a religion which totally understands the aesthetic sublime of religious and biblical discourse, allows you continuity with a tradition which you can "doubt, disagree with and argue with" (one doesn't agree with grandpa and grandma about everything and yet one still loves and does not deny the continuity)?  What about a religion with expressions that are not regarded to be absolutes and one which reforms and adjusts to how love and justice is perfected in life situations?  What about a religion which keeps our social natures from atrophy by being an intergenerational mentoring community, in part organized to help those who need help?  And what about a religion which encourages as much private prayer and extra-ecclesiastical meditation as one wants?  How about the Episcopal Church?

 Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  The words "religious" and "spiritual" are words which give us good reason to avoid pollsters.  Pollsters use words which have thousands of nuances and could easily "die the deaths of a thousand qualifications" but one is put on the spot in a "religious poll" to be "either/or" for the sake of the rhetorical purpose of the poll to enlighten the American people on the nature of religious life.  Church leaders do fear irrelevance and obsolescence of their "totemic" traditional forms being able to continue to inspire a participatory identity for people.  And it could be for many that "spirituality" expresses for some a moment of discontinuous break from the religious traditions which have been so formative in the "story" background of our society even as actors in the foreground have lost vital touch with that background.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  Does this have some historical roots in the "Boomer" generation who experienced a disillusionment with public institutions including  churches when such institutions seemed to support or tolerate war with less than pure motives and racial discrimination and social inequality for women and minorities?  A naive bubble of our false national righteousness got burst and there was the reception of a wave of meditating gurus from the East who provided more religious neutral modes of spiritual, physical and psychological practice (yogic practices)  that could be done alone without having to live in church communities which upheld social practices which were no longer regarded to be just.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2019

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  This may parallel the general disillusionment with public institutions and may express the irony of our political sector: "I'm an American; I don't vote." Meanwhile people with "skin" in the game and wanting more are fanatic about controlling all public institutions including religious organizations.  Being spiritual can be used as a naive excuse for political quietism (passivity).  We may only awaken from the quietism when we realize atrocities that are done in the public sector while we slept politically, did not vote, but consoled ourselves that we were spiritual.

Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  In case you haven't noticed for sometime now spirituality has been quite a "cottage industry" and has gone from extra-institutional supplemental support to becoming separate "spiritual" institutions.  Wisdom teachers and gurus, sheikhs and masters have come from around the world; Edgar Cayce, Madame Blavatsky, Guerdijeff, Ouspensky have generated eclectic and syncretistic styles of spiritual practice coloring widely outside of the lines of religious institutions.  Religions can become more popular in "other" countries; the global South is now the center of Christianity.  Spiritual people ultimately realize they have bodies too and that they are not just spirit and so they develop institutions to support their physical existence in this world.  Today the world has many "spiritual" institutions which have all of the signs and indications as replacement for the traditional religious institutions.  Meanwhile many plumb their own religious institutional traditions for the spiritual practices found in the rich devotional practices of the Quakers or the profound monastic traditions of the various churches.  And what is spiritual?  Spirit is wind or breath.  Breath is an invisible but real sign of life.  To be spiritual, in a metaphor, is to be the "wind instrument" of divine presence.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  Frankly the word "spiritual" can have as many accrued meanings as the word "religious."  Spiritual or spirituality can be a modern day marketing label tool like "natural" and "organic" is to the food sector.  It can be an unwitting way of saying that I am eccentrically special from the rest of the herd who are only "religious."  One needs to be careful that "spirituality" does not become an identity worn like the person who is proud of their humility.

Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  To be religious probably means for most that one makes a commitment through regular attendance and participation with a religious organization or church in one's locale.  Such a commitment was more obvious when people lived in the area for the duration of their lives.  Modern life and modern economic life has actually helped to diminish the participation in religious life through a forced nomadic lifestyle.  Corporations do not want commitment to home and local institutions to compete with "all out" loyalty to the profit line of the company.  Moving people means that people don't make commitments to "local" situations since they know that they can at anytime be moved.  Others, like migrant workers are forced to move to wherever the work is.  One can see how people have been forced to become more isolated "spiritual" islands to adjust to a continual uprooted existence.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  It could be that religion is often presented with such rigidity for "community" belief controls that what gets covered up is the fact that sacrament, dogma, sermon,  creed and holy biblical writings are but highly funneled abbreviations and reductions for the great mystery of God and the incredible Plenitude of All.  God or mystery cannot be domesticated for our control of either.  If God and mystery are reduced to proposition then we have fooled ourselves with inadequate replacements and lost the posture to be in "awe," which one would imagine is the very basis of what might be called "spirituality."

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  Is this a way of saying that one can love God without going to church?  Is it because one has never tried church because one was not raised that way or has heard all of the bad press that religion gets?  Has one tried church and not found the serendipity of the kind of engaging fellowship that one looks for?  Do we need to have matchchurch.com and eharmonychurch.com for churches and people to find good matches for serendipitous commitment?

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  Is this expression revealing of the post-modern tendency to oppose "totalizing" views of life?  Religion would be such a totalizing view in that it would include the entire person in society.  Is the modern world of specialization characterized by dividing the human person into constitutive "parts" and then treating those parts something like the offerings of a cafeteria.  "Hmm...I'll have spiritual but I don't want sacraments, or priests or pastors and I don't want creeds or doctrine or dogma or religious community or too much Bible, just the good parts about love."

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  People may say this because they may think that religious organizations have accrued too much baggage in the long years of their existence.  And they find that the institution is tending too much to the baggage rather than the people for whom the baggage is supposed to be supplying the necessities for the life journey.  So, this metaphorical stripping oneself down to but the "spiritual" seems to be their individual response. If one is going to go alone to summit one cannot carry all of the baggage and it could be that the quest alone characterizes how "people weary" some have become.

Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  But I will bask in the collateral effects of the religious witness in the world, like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Mardi Gras; not to mention the conversion of modern governments to be responsible for Health, Education and Welfare.  The results of religion in society have given people the freedom to see themselves as individual spiritual persons who can deny the parentage of religion in their very formation.  Religions as "Mom and Dad" organizations have certainly not been perfect parents in all of their activities but they do represent the attempts at having a social effect and formation by being fellowship gatherings for societal cohesion.  That everything has not been perfect is not the issue; finding a social boat to make it through the full play of freedom in the morass of particulars in our world is a significant mission.  "Spiritual" people who pretend to be free agents unwittingly ignore all that they have and do receive from the effects of religion.

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  What other rejoinder to this might one generate?  I'm not religious, I'm natural?  I'm a Democrat?  I'm Libertarian?  I'm Republican?  I'm scientific?  I'm Vegan?  I'm superstitious?    I'm an agnostic?  I'm a Cubs fan (talk about faith?) I'm Musical, I believe in the Muses.  One can be religious and be lots of other things too, including spiritual.  It is a no-brainer to include spirituality as an inherit part of the Christian religion, but not just by title but also by practice.

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  This is what many tell the pollsters about their religious preference.  This expression should be a wake up call to churches about an aspect of faith which is not being fostered by the church.  As the extra-religious identity features of religious commitment break down, chiefly the ethnic religious tradition identity, and as modern individualism has happened to make it seem as though everyone is truly a "free agent" because of the seeming economic independence, the individual may be asking oneself, "What's missing in the midst of my apparent self-reliance?"  It could be that disillusionment with all human organizations makes the individual seek an unattainable "utopia" or "perfection" and it goes under the name of "spirituality."  Such is probably chimerical but still a valid impulse that should be a concern of churches.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  This phrase might unwittingly assume the following words from the mouths of religionists:  "I'm not spiritual; I'm religious."  But how many people who find themselves within religious community would assume that they are not spiritual in any way. If spirituality cannot be separated from religion either religion is being presented wrongly or those who are "spiritual without being religious" missed the message.  It is our responsibility to awaken people who are religious to the spirituality that is found within the religious tradition.

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  There may be a subtle judgment in this confession that people who are "religious" are not "spiritual."  It may be the case the religious people are religious for the "wrong reasons" but "spiritual" persons may be spiritual for the "wrong reasons."  The relevant question might be how a person is filling out the fullness of one's humanity in one's acknowledgment of God.  Religious people balance their spirituality with corporate prayer and the community context to practice intergenerational mentoring and outreach.  Religious people may not "toot" their spirituality on street corners and leave that as the secret side which they perform in their prayer closets.  Spirituality as merely individual religion may leave a person impoverished in the social dimensions which are provided by religious community.  Why would one want to leave the social dimension of spiritual maturity out of a full definition of "spirituality?"

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  As modern science has become the main criteria for determining "truth," traditional religious literature has been "demythologized" and the old truths have been diminished in comparison with scientific truths and historicism.  Oddly enough we find spirituality of UFO's and healing crystals and much more New Age re-mythologizing of all sorts. Wonder has not disappeared it only looks for new topics once traditional topics have been condemned as no longer worthy for the projection of our wonder.  Religionists have defended their books on the grounds of "scientific" truth and come across as being silly, e.g. the world is only a few thousand years old.  Having scientific truth does not necessarily make us better moral beings, as our "marvelous?" inventions of weapons of mass destruction prove.  We need to look to the life transforming truths of our traditions in gaining better integration of excellent living for persons in society today.  Some forms of modern spirituality are as   eccentric and exclusive as the expressions of the "old" religions which have been abandoned.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2014

Ash Wednesday Haiku

Body on fast forward

as ashy paint

on canvas forehead

God's Art?

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  This can be a form of the subtle oxymoronic misanthropism of Charley Brown when he said, "I love Mankind; it's people I can't stand."  The writer of the Epistle of John counters, "how can we say we love God whom we can't see if we don't love our brothers and sisters whom we see." Theory is less messy than practice.  Religion expresses a devotion to God; a "binding" connection but religion is done collaboratively since Word and Language make us necessarily always already oriented toward collaboration.  Spirituality as an individual "impossible" retreat from the always already of collaboration as a given because we are languaged beings, is a dishonest way of living.

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  How did religion and the spiritual ever get to be so antithetical? Has religion become associated with the organizations of people who mostly are known in the news as people who fight over arcane religious topics or about who is welcome to their churches?  To say, "I'm spiritual" may mean that I want to be a political quietist or passive about some important issues of justice and inclusion of people in our society.  We need to be careful about using "spiritual" as an excuse for non-involvement because it may represent a real naivete about the truth of the "messiness" of life.  The whole point of the Good Samaritan story is that the so-called spiritual people did not want to get involved in helping the man who was left beaten by the road.  Let not the spiritual be an unrealistic escape from the messiness of life.  Being spiritual means that we work to clean up some of the mess.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  A child may feel so pressured by the family baggage of being over-determined and want to "escape" a family heritage.  Something similar may happen in how people want to leave their religious tradition for a new start.  This new start may happen with cursory brushes with imported aspects of Eastern religions.  The most accessible contact with other religions has been what we call "meditation" technique.  The appeal of meditation technique perhaps has to do with the presentation of Christianity as being something that happens from the outside in.  Even the Spirit is supposed to come upon one from outside. The meditative traditions seem to emphasize an arising from within of Life that has always been. This should be a signal that Christianity should see redemption and salvation as a progressive recovery of what already was within us.  Salvation is allowing original grace to arise within us to new events.  The apparent external stories of our faith are the screens of the interior arisings. The disillusionment with "religion" may only be with religious practices that have radically bifurcated the interior and exterior worlds.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  This attitude might be symptomatic of frustration with established religious bodies and a revolt against the hegemonic mediating tendencies of church hierarchies.  It might be healthy and phase specific in one's spiritual life to "go it alone" in the sense of taking personal responsibility for one's creative advance in integrating the spiritual into one's overall life but it would seem that in healthy adult psychological development the end result of spiritual development is a giving mentoring within a community, which in the thinking of the church is stated as, baptism is also ordination to ministry.  If the notion of being religious is divorced from baptism as ministry then we do have a problem.  Even when infants are baptized, they minister.  How many have been won and converted to goodness by a baby's smile?

Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual."  This could mean practicing a purely individualistic religious belief which may be oxymoronic since religion imply traditions.  How does one then become the infallible pope in a church of me, myself and I?  Or does it mean that I am the ultimate consumer in cafeteria religion?  I simply pick and choose from different religious offerings without the insight of knowing the profound social experience which brought each tradition into existence and without the commitment to get myself dirty in the continuance of a tradition particularly if the tradition needs to be reformed.  Being in a church of one is a way of saying, "I am really only going to tolerate one imperfect person, namely, myself." 

Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2014

"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual." This self description often given to religious preference pollsters bespeaks of the loss of the church as a significant society where spirituality has been replaced with jumping through hoops to maintain the institution.

Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2014

What does "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual" really mean?  It probably means something different for anyone who uses the phrase.  Does it mean "I am so eccentrically and individually spiritual that I cannot tolerate the rules and the social strictures of religious organizations?"  Does it mean that religious organizations have too much "old" baggage and cannot adjust to the rapidly changing new world?  Does it mean that the modern era has allowed me the illusion of being an individual and self reliant free agent so that I don't have to rely on religious community to negotiate my existence within a larger society?  Does it mean that work society and family are enough of a social hassle; why should I add another social unit like the church to my "hassle" schedule?  The challenge for the church today is to make the human fellowship of religion and spirituality completely compatible.  Spirituality without religion might be a bit disconnected or "disembodied;" religion without spirituality might be boringly lifeless.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2014

It could be that modern science and socialization into cultures where scientific discourse is the chief criteria for what is regarded to be "sound" has resulted in the loss of seeing from what is projected from within.  Children who are not completely "scientize" seem to be able to see from within.  We are taught how to segregate our dream life material from our conscious life. It would seem that the theophanies of the Scriptures whether on Sinai or Mount the Transfiguraiton relate events where interior seeing is merge with exterior event or Inscape and Landscape merge to bring to discourse what was regarded to be significant.

Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2014

The Last Sunday of the Epiphany recounts the transfiguration of Jesus upon the mountain and this event reprises the story of how Moses was transfigured in receiving the law on Mount Sinai. Transfiguration or metamorphosis could be a metaphor for the progressive process and change towards transformational excellence in our lives of faith.  Metamorphosis implies cycles of growth or returning to similar faith issues in order to be deepened through subsequent experience of repetitive crises and joys of living.  If our lives sometimes seem like a eternal return of the "same" it is because the journey of transformation involves a path something like a rising spiral.  We return to "same" place but at a higher elevation with the memory of the insight from having been there before.

Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2014

The words of Jesus to "love one's enemies" seem very radical unless the people who related the words were already instantiating that love in their inclusive community centered around the teachings of Jesus.

Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2014

If the Gospel writing came to their final editions long after the Christian Movement became primarily Gentile, then the narrative about the life and words of Jesus would be presented in a way to shows the seeds of why rabbi Jesus became a big hit in the cities of the Roman Empire. When the words of Jesus were written, "Love your enemies," the Roman/Gentile enemies were on their way to being converted by this "movement of love."

Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2014

History has ironic moments for transvaluing innovation as being conservative.  A chief example is the most famous convert to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, Cardinal John Henry Newman.  When living as an Anglican Newman and the Reformers believed that the Roman Catholic Church had "innovated" in matters of doctrine and departed from the ancient precedence of Holy Scripture.  To make peace with the notion of doctrinal innovation, Newman wrote a treatise on innovation with the punchline, "to be perfect is to have changed often."  And this unwittingly establishes innovation as what is "conserving" about the church of one's preference. In the Episcopal Church we have had innovating impulsing towards conserving the dignity and justice of people and their full participation within the FULL sacramental life of the church. There is something very conservative about applied justice to people.  The blindness of some cultures do not allow the freedom of justice to be realized and ironically the very practice of justice is seen to be as innovative.  An irony indeed.

Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2014

One of the results of living in the modern world of instant communication is that we can be informed about all of the bad news.  In fact, we can be completely inundated by the situations of war and human inhumanity.  We can be afflicted with global angst and feel uncomfortable and guilty about "having it so easy" when so many have it so difficult.  We also lose faith in the human ability to bring quick resolutions to situations of suffering.  Like turtles in distress we can retract our heads into our shells or we can go on our soap boxes and expound about what should be done.  We can become those who give to charitable organizations who are trying to bring aid and comfort.  We can become political activists to help promote systemic changes.  Whether we like it or not we are connected with each other in this world and everything we do has reciprocal and collateral consequences even as we do not have precise knowledge of all of the collateral consequences which may have added up because of the collection of small responsible or irresponsible human actions.  Welcome to the faith situation of our world today. One can understand why the superhero instant fix genre is so popular in public culture. In faith, we need to take care of what lies within the parameters of our epidermis.  We need to find peace within ourselves so that we can be mobilized as peaceful dominoes in effecting how we fall in our causative actions in our immediate situation.  We can pray and give and hope that some domino of suffering will eventually be affected by how we live.

Aphorism of Day, February 19, 2014

The law of the claw, "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" can seem to be a pragmatic system of literal justice and reparative justice but it often means trying to correct a bad with a bad and reparation is not often really equal in societies where there is poignant class distinction. The moral justice of the Sermon on the Mount seems to be acknowledging the perfect God as the one from whom imperfect beings receive constant reparative grace to tolerate their imperfections as they explore perfectability through continuous transformation and who discover that their main social purpose is to aid others in this path of transformation.

Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2014

With the knowledge of genocide occurring in the world one feels helpless and embraces the fact that the divine one is not a self-consistent continuous synchronous omniscient, omnipotent, omni-loving Being because one embraces that Freedom and genuinely shared freedoms and consequences of the same throws the monkey wrench into the notion of a Divine One with machine like efficiency.  In sharing Freedom with us as free ones, God has to share in our helplessness as well which is what we subscribe to when we believe that the Divine One said to the Divine, "My God why have you forsaken me?"  Genuine Freedom means that within the total divine milieu the divine can give occasions of forsakenness to the divine.  We in our helplessness enter into that feeling even as in our limited freedom we cannot give in to passivity or political quietism in the face of such forsakenness.

Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2014

Those who pine for mixing public law and religious law would like Sharia law to rule society or the 10 Commandments to be enshrined in a National Constitution.  The rather ironic fulfilling of the law suggested in the Sermon on the Mount involves Jesus thinking outside of this box and proposing impossible standards for his followers.  If one were going to establish "case law" exemplars one might as well shoot for the stars and make them impossible as in the injunction to "be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect."  Jesus was thinking less about how religious groups could control societies and more about setting the moral direction for people who wanted to be upon the continual path of transformation.  There is no final moral exemplar when one is on the continuous path of transformation.  Laws for society are necessary for pragmatic business but Jesus was more about the transformations of individual lives as the personal path to make a significant indirect difference in societies.

Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2014

There is something reflexively deconstructive about the injunction of Jesus to "judge not lest you be judged."  This is in fact a judgment against those who judge.  This would be an indication that we cannot live except through a continual interior process of worded thinking which causes us to always already make all kinds of judgment.  The question then is not whether we make judgments but whether they are made with benign or venomous intent.  And if the latter, we can be sure that at some point we will also be the object of our venomous judgment aimed at someone else.  If we cannot help but be constantly judging, let our judgments be neutral for the conducting of daily business or let them be merciful in our interactions with others.  The most transformative mantra prayer in Orthodox Christianity is the Jesus Prayer which goes, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner."  If we use our time asking for continuous mercy, then we have less time to don the black robes of the judge.

Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2014

There is a subtle change that can occur when religious or covenantal law meant for the transformation of lives is reduced to juridical law for punishing people who do not live up to the standards in a given society; the change is that covenantal law becomes a form of legalism and manifests practices of puritanical fundamentalism.  The results is that one or two examples of so-called "moral failure" in a particular historical context become elevated to be the very identity of the people who elevate them.  In the clamor for enforcement and punishment, such people become known only for what they are against and the transformation potential of law as the reorganization of our life energy in our efforts to love God is lost.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2014

Valentine is an obscure saint of the third century who had the curious fate of becoming ever associated with the release of oxytocin in the body or the "love chemical" which creates the magnetic force known by the Hallmark poets as "love."  Love is the cliche that if one is fortunate, one has been able to use the word with the sense of it being a personally experienced truth.  Love, or the Romantic Love of Valentine's Day is a witness against love being just a general good theory about the omnipresent collective glue of the cosmos which keeps everything together; it is more relevant if it has been particularized in the experience of mutual projection between two persons which has inspired among other things vows and a whole array of lodging behaviors.  Valentine has the lucky fate of being associated forever with love; may we all have the lucky fate of particular love too.

Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2014

Forgiveness probably in practice means making some serious editorial changes or re-writes. We live and interact according to the versions we have of each other since the real me is cut off from the real you.  If we have unfavorable versions of each other, we at least need to be open to some re-writes of the versions of each other which do not open the way for reconciliation and new relationship.  This does not deny the fact that actual performance of word and deeds toward each other actually contributed significantly to the formation of incompatible versions of each other that prevent significant relationship which is often required by the context. Forgiveness is based upon the hope of new starts and instead of relying upon a disappointing version, we need to be open to new versions to occur.

Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2014

Ever wonder why getting everyone enough food and enough employment is not seen as a major goal of our economy.  It could be that we have become so "individual" in our thinking that we believe it is the sole responsibility of the adult individual to be completely responsible for bread winning and employment even as we know that everyone has different individual conditions which help or hinder their efforts to be employed and earn a living to feed themselves.  Loving God and our neighbor as ourselves means that we make things basic to adequate lifestyle a major goal of human creativity in all sectors of society.

Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2014

Some of the words of Jesus are not for the literalists as in "if your right hand offends you, cut it off."  If one understands this as a hyperbolic way of affirming that sometimes one can only gain self-control through fasting then it makes sense.  Fasting may be short term or it may have to be forever as is practiced in 12 step programs for those who have been honest about their addictions.

Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2014

Why is it that in the incredible genius which is given to humanity that we have arrived to solve so many complex problems and invented so many wonderful things that it has not occurred to the so-called private business sector to solve the issue of poverty and unemployment.  Why do we build artificial antagonism between government and private sector?  Why do we create the double-bind of "Why doesn't the government do something and at the same time curse the government for spending to do things because they don't do it in the right way, i.e., my right way.  It does not do Wall Street any favors to have a growing under class of people living with resentment.  If capitalism is based upon a "free-market" it means that people can make free decisions to be creative about things like universal employment and health care.  There are enough resources for "profit and people to co-exist" towards maximizing common good. Why does a "robber baron" want the title?  Why not, a "creative economic genius" who solved the employment and health dilemma in the private sector?  Why do we leave Health, Education and Welfare to a parent government?  Because we believe so strongly in human greed that we don't trust the private sector to really care for common good.  Here's a thought:  Why don't we ask Wall Street and all captains of industry to humanize, moralize, or Christianize their enterprises?  Why don't we ask them to make part of their goal to be economically creative for the greatest common good.  If it truly is a free-market, then we all can choose the maximum common good in freedom. 

Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2014

We know that change is the accompanying interpretation of the passing of time.  Things and people age and we interpret meaning about how things and people age.  We ride two counter principles, the obvious effects of the aging of the body and the attending body-moods inflicted upon our interior lives of soul (mind, emotions and choice).  The other principle is the principle of the immortality of the soul/spirit which is why denial is so easy; we feel in some place of our being endlessly young.  And so the work of transformation in the life of faith is bringing the energy of spirit into a mixture with the stuff of our existence which is in demise.  This mixture, this collision of stuff accounts for the agony and ecstasy of human life.  We know that at some point our bodies will no longer respond to the immortal soul and have to be abandoned and left behind and be but the launching pad for the always already Phoenix of our Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2014

If one tries to prove that Newton, Einstein and Planck were all saying the same thing because they used the same terms such as energy, mass and matter then one would have to force a harmony of paradigms which is not there.  The same compulsion exists among some who have taken upon themselves the role of being the "true" keepers of the truth of the Bible.   Instead of acknowledging  the incredible diversity of language and thought paradigms that are present in a collection of writings from over hundreds of years there is a compulsion to assume a unified message.  Such forced harmonization upon the biblical writings tries to pretend that God could be revealed without human meditation.  In trying to uphold a skewed view of the divine inspiration of the Bible, they unwittingly deny it obvious humanity.  Some of us like the Bible because it is "all too human" but invites us to expand us to our full humanity expressed in love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2014

Archaeologists have discovered that camels were introduced into Palestine much later than the supposed era of Abraham yet the Abraham stories have camels in them.  Is this a big problem for one's faith?  It should not be since what we think is history was never the mode of writing of biblical writers.  Why force the Bible into a writing genre that didn't exist at the time and make it function as something it was never intended to be?  One falsifies the "truth" of the Bible by forcing it to be a work in the mode of modern history writing.  We are to be "fools" for Christ's sake by using the practice of transformation of our lives toward love and justice.  This transformation of our lives is to be our "foolish" truth, not really foolish thinking about the Bible.

Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2014

We are always already being conducted by word because word is made flesh in us in active and passive ways.  Passive ways since we get ourselves stamped deeply with assumptions and ideologies of the cultural locations where we are born and live.  Part of us becoming aware of knowing that we are surfing within this ocean of words is to know how to conduct the energies of words as they are known to comprise our lives with different modalities and frequencies. A first time conscious experience of something gets marked with a remembering and even though the feeling in its uniqueness does not have a word, it does become a word equivalent in the feeling tone of memory.  Music and emotion are their own nuances of our worded-existence and it is the way in which we conduct our multi-discursive practice of words which calls forth our most profound artistic gifts in the the art of living.

Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2014

You are the light of the world.  How can and does one's life live up to this charge?  Jesus provided his disciples with teaching and practices which taught them to mobilize all of their human capacity such that the witness of their lives became a way for others to see life differently and be invited to explore the life practices which could change their own lives toward a winsome excellence.  Jesus said that we could live to glorify our Father in heaven.  In saying this he was hinting at the discovery of a different realm of parenting to which we have access as we rid ourselves of seeing ourselves as being completely determined by our earthly parents. 

Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2014

Salt and light people; Jesus said his friends were to be salt and light.  The metaphor of salt would be an invitation for us to learn how we can live "spicy" and preserving lives.  Learning how to be spicy means that we learn how to enhance the food of ordinary experience.  Living as complements of life we help people find how the sublime has broken into what seems an ordinary fare.  Our lives should also have a preserving effect upon the life of our world; the life of love promotes the endurance of this world and we are called to have preserving effect upon our world because we believe God called and calls the world "Good."

Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2014

Sometimes we can use "success" as the only criteria for validity.  Success seems so obvious that it seems that we need to just add a blessing to success to help it spread like wildfire. But in our study of history, there have been "successful" movements in society that have been horrifying for the common good of humanity or to significant minorities.  The notion of success begs the question, "Success for whom?"  A prime function of the God-notion is the imagination beyond mere humanism in specific contexts when we aspire to a seemingly elusive notion of universal justice.  Universal justice is the ultimate success, and indeed the "devil" is in the details of applying it in our contexts.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2014

What are elements of the mystique of sports in our society with general devotion that seems to rival religious piety?  We have on Super Bowl Sunday a game that sublimates the ancient warrior impulses when the contest meant protecting one's tribe or feeding them through attacking competing tribes for resources.  Now we have specialized the ancient impulse in a game with enough rules to "protect" the warriors but enough freedom to require individual excellence.  The individual is playing for concentric spheres of glory, self, team, regional city, "the world."  The story happens on the field and there is a resolution, which holds up for one year.  People live with such open and unresolved issues of life, there is great public projection upon the resolution of a game.  After the high school level, most players are "mercenary" in that they lose their actual regional ties in where they play.  Lots of players go completely cosmic in the game by getting God and Jesus involved in the struggle and their personal narrative of the game.   Lots of money gets exchanged, lots of secular "communion" libations are offered.  And lots of empty Cathedrals witness in envious silence that modern passion has the leisure contexts to support such diverse specializations of passions.  The spiritual is still the great regulator and happens mostly outside of church walls, which is why the dismissal is the most profound proclamation of the Mass.

Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2014

Simeon, the composer of the "Song of Simeon," said to Mary at the presentation of her son Jesus in the Temple, "and a sword will pierce your own soul too."  Perhaps the worst sword which could pierce the soul of any parent is to see one's child suffer and die before a parent leaves this world.  As the spear pierced the side of Jesus on the cross, so too the sword of loss and grief must have gone into Mary.

Aphorism of the Day, January 31, 2014

One could make the case that when the Gospel message proved successful in building many semi-private faith social gatherings in the cities of the Roman Empire and attracted people for whom the ritual customs of Judaism were impractical and thus inaccessible, it became necessary for a rhetorical presentation of showing the paths of transitions for the Christ communities to become inclusive of Gentiles.  The song of Simeon is one such subtle rhetoric of transition; the Christ Child is to be a light to the Gentiles.  The Song of Simeon encodes in an origin rhetoric what was already happening within the Pauline churches.

 Aphorism of the Day, January 30, 2014

When differences become overwhelming and too difficult for us negotiate effective action it is easy to reduce differences to binaries, either/or simplicity.  The Bible can reduce all of the people of the earth to two classes of people Jews/Gentiles even though most of the peoples of the earth for most of history did not even know they were on the Gentile side of the binary system.  We/they can become the easy division when diversity is not appreciated for the complexity which is desirable for aesthetic combinations for creativity.  What was God before the Divine Self took on reduction to the human situation to be Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu et al in order to be the supreme organizing Value to call people to excellence in their situation through their various traditions?

Aphorism of the Day, January 29, 2014

We are taught to pray "deliver us from evil," and when bad things happen to us we pray for healthy and favorable outcomes, which may not always come.  So we might think God is not all powerful or not willing or loving enough towards us always to both prevent evil or give us the preferred outcome.  We might assume then that prayer is but a method of adapting and accepting what actually is happening to us.  Or we might assume that God is pure Creativity and as such the Divine Self honors freedom as the condition which gives meaning to our lives as being much more than mere robotic existence.  In the human condition our mission of faith is to live by the vision of health and freedom from pain as the way things should be.  Our very lives are crafted and forged by asserting, begging for, living toward what is good and does not cause harm.   Pain of all sorts is the cry within the conditions of freedom to seek what is not painful and so prayer is how we orientate our lives toward the normalcy of health and salvation, even while we honor the conditions of freedom which define God and the way divinity is known in our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2014

The same person (Paul) who wrote "don't be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind" also wrote, "I have become all things to all people so that I might by all possible means save some."  The "world" can be a peer pressured setting which makes it a challenge to practice Christ-like love and justice and hence some flee to cloistered communities or adhere to customs to counter the "outside" world as the Amish and others do.  It may be the harder mission to regard everything in the world as potentially good and therefore useful in promoting the good health of the Gospel.  Having the responsibilities with all of the choices in uncloistered living is the challenge of transforming our minds.  The work of words and interpretation of words and how they become flesh is part of dangerous excitement of living the Gospel.

Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2014

We highly praise innovation in science and technology.  We readily allow scientific paradigms to shift if new ways of thinking can provide more adequate and pragmatic solutions to problems. Before his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church from Anglicanism, John Henry Newman wrote a treatise on doctrinal innovation and he wrote, "to be perfect is to have changed often."  He needed to justify the innovations in doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church for which the Reformers decried as not being biblical.  Yet one can note how slow churches are to innovate and perhaps it is hegemonic behaviors which prevent innovation or even prevent the church from being at the forefront of justice in realizing the full dignity of many people.  In the history of the church it could be that hegemonic central authority squelched diverse expressions but in squelching diversity what was lost was the full range of topics to provide for more occasions of synthesis.  Heuristics, invention is hindered through the limitation of scope of human research.   To suppress diversity results in the loss of creativity because some areas of potential inspiration are marked as forbidden territory.

Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2014

The sublime in writing involves the writer bringing forth from the reservoir within where words exists as every possible combination to come forth to represent events in human experience. The birth of the words from the writer's reservoir of possible words involves those words becoming actual as chameleon or protean representatives in such a way as to make the reader believe that people have cohabited a soul space and connected in a significant way to make the proverbial sparks happen.  Writers set out to prove that words are spirit and they are life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2014

On the day commemorating the conversion of St. Paul it may behoove us to ponder some collateral significance of this event.  The Gospel and New Testament writings present the origin of the Jesus Movement in an intra-Judaic dispute setting.  Saul as a Pharisee was presented as a chief inquisitor in pursuing the punishment and death of followers of Jesus. Paul's conversion involved such an immediate change in his life direction  it became an exemplar of the Spirit of the Jesus Movement.  Rabbi Saul knew the commandment, "thou shalt not kill;" when it dawned on him that he was killing he was indeed vulnerable to the psychological conditions conducive to a dramatic conversion.

 Aphorism of the Day, January 24, 2014

Words are spirit and they are life and words in community and setting are the living dynamic force in the constituting of values and functions.  It is easy to use the argument of longest duration of a set value or function to justify its continued perpetuation and promulgation in practice.  If duration of practice guaranteed all future practice we would still be using horse and buggies like the Amish.  Words and the spirit of words inspire innovations and innovations become established orthodoxy and then "heresies," vanguard movements or reforms challenge the "pragmatic" truth of orthodoxy and the "raison d'etre" becomes the most causative absolute statement of social truth: "We've always done it this way!"  Take the ordination of women to the priesthood; Jesus was a man, his "official" twelve disciples were men, therefore all priests have to be men even though Christian priesthood did not exist in the time of Jesus.  It is hard to use the "we've always done it this way" when social practices have beginnings and changes in their expressions.  Fortunately, some Christians have returned to the nature of the church being seen as priestly because Christ is priestly in standing between humanity and God in an intercessory way.  Women have been priestly people within the church long before they were allowed to serve as priests at the altar and it is exposed that people in power are the ones who get to pick and choose to use as justification the really bad argument: "We've always done it this way."

Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2014

Word Colorists admit that words can be like colors in that colors can evolve from the mixtures with other colors giving the colors new appearances some of which are even named and replicated in paint stores.  Words attain subtle variations based upon their contexts with other words and in how they arise to represent what we think we are seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, hearing and tasting.  And since the origins of how each of us takes on the language of our lives is rather mysterious, each of us have our own word colorings of our own versions of the world and how we experience it.  Our world has been painted and colored into pragmatic functional existence by the way in which we use words and the way they use us particularly when we were young and unable to resist how they began to imprint and encode our existence before we became more active word users ourselves.  Part of our adult life is to try to understand all of the coding which we received in the state of simply being a passive recipients of the imprint of language in defining our existence.  We will never finish with Word being made flesh in our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2014

Sometimes we want to treat religion and revelation and the divine as  things so miraculous and so wonderful that we regard them as too special to include any taint of humanity.  Alas! We have to admit finally it is always human beings bringing perceptions to language, even things about the divine.  There is a false wish to certify that "my" religious view is untainted by human filtering (spiritual without being human) and therefore better than yours.  This too is an all too human wish.

Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2014

The New Testament include origin writings about Jesus Christ, but also about the beginning of the clubs of people which arose that came to be called churches.  The origin of these churches occurred in the befriending dynamic which is known as the "Call" of Christ.  During the season of the Epiphany we hearken back to the original befriending of the disciples by Jesus Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2014

As we grow and have to accommodate ourselves to new social settings we can lose something of the "wild" energy of our curiosity.  By conforming to group values we can sometimes end up censoring the expressions of our curiosity and so suppress wonder that we lose our energy for optimism in life.  The call of Christ, if it means being born again, means that we can unleash the original flames of our curiosity and ride the energy of joy which comes from owning up to native curiosity.  It does not mean that we cease to exercise a monitoring of desire and how we let our desire manifest itself towards objects on which it is projected.  Perhaps the metaphor of surfing is called for; the waves are very powerful and we harness their power to propel us in the delight of surfing.   And when we wipe out, we paddle out to do it again.

Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2014

The call of Christ involves for you and me the significant self-love of curiosity.  Curiosity is being drawn to a vision of who I am and what I can do and become in the future.  People like Jesus had such mentoring charisma that people said, “I don’t know what I really want to be, but I do know that I want to be more like that man Jesus in the art of living.”

Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2014

When athletes are at peak performance they often say that they are "in the zone."  This is a state of being where one senses such a "no miss" lyricism in one's athletic actions.  The call of God is learning to be "in the zone" in the art of living.  How does one get to lyricism in life such that it just seems like it was always meant to be.  The sense of synchronous connectedness can attend one's sense of the call of God in Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2014

One of the themes of the Season of the Epiphany is what is known as the call of God.  One aspect of the call of God is the coming into sense of having functional and beneficial value to other people in such a way that one has the proverbial cliche experience of "deja vu."  One entes the so-called zone of "sensing" one's purpose of existence.

Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2014

In belle lettres a particular movement in rhetoric, one of the goals of writing and speaking was propriety.  Propriety can be seen as protocol or decorum to fit in to a social class situation or it could be what one is attempting to do with one's life in the art of living, namely, doing, speaking, writing, and being "appropriate" to the situation.  There would seem to be so many standards of appropriateness today and the first stage of attempting appropriateness is to discern a situation.  St. Paul wrote that he had become all things to all people.  This could be seen as a crass political trick to say things to "get" votes or it could be the humility to take into account the situation of the people for whom one wants to wants to the share the very best thing of one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2014

We can read the Bible in uninspired ways and present it to others in ways in which it was not intended.  If we import modern scientific thinking and modern journalistic writing into the era when the writing of the Genesis stories were written we can get the silliness of thinking that the Earth is but a few thousand years old.  But if we understand the inspiration of having the basic moral questions of life presented to us in an inspired wisdom Origin story we be thankful for the elevated insights which come from inspired biblical writing.

Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2014

Growing up in life has much to do with dealing with all of the important things over which we had no choice.  Things like the fact that we were born with the particular parents we had in a place and in a certain time.  For a long time in our lives, we may believe that we had freedom but freedom took place within our "guided ignorance."  It may seem like freedom if the menu has six choices but six choices does not seem like freedom when you subsequently discover that the menu could have had hundreds of choices.  It does no good to be angry retroactively about the choices which you never knew could have been offered.  At some point in adulthood one can reach the point of significant "authorship" of one's own life when one does not deny the absoluteness of the past but one begins to tap the authorial potential for the current story that one is living now.  Providence is a work of faith; providence is the hindsight editorial reworking of the memories of one's past in living one's current life by faith. 

Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2014

Death and all of its painful acolytes of suffering, sickness and demise have the power to cause segregatory behaviors within the community.  In subtle and not so subtle ways we quarantine the sick and the dead in "public health" efforts to protect the healthy from "infection" but also to distract attention away from the negative actuarial probabilities in life.  We certainly would like to "censor" exposure to such to our children.  One of the distinctive things about the ministry of Jesus was to bring back into community those who were declared to be ritually impure due to their condition or exposure to conditions in life.  Psychological quarantine is perhaps the one of the most poignantly painful consequences of any illness.  In ancient times, the container that death left was the human body, the corpse which ironically was to be respected with burial but at the same time contact with the corpse made one ritually impure.  Consider perhaps a consequence of the belief in the resurrection of Christ: Death no longer was a state of "ritual impurity" but a gateway to something which would make death simply another incident in one's greater and more embracing life.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

 Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2014

Something can lose its function in a subsequent period of time.  Flint arrowheads are now artifacts of the past while new modern archery arrowheads are being made.  Cultural practices such as rites of passage can change over time based upon the way in which they are used by communities.  Baptism is one such rite of passage that has undergone many changes.  Baptism is in continuity with the mikveh rituals of Judaism and it is difficult to know what sort of official "religious" office that John the Baptist held within Judaism when he practiced baptism in the Jordan River.  The practices of baptism in the many forms of Christianity have been quite diverse in the way in which communities have understood baptism and the modes in which it has been carried out.  And even when a church teaches baptism in a certain way it does not guarantee that the meaning is received and practiced that way by the recipient.  At the heart of baptism is expressed a desire to belong to a community which is organized around the person of Jesus Christ.  And one's being is changed by the values of one's community.  One's life is interpreted by the words of value derived from one's community.  Linguistic social ontology is the word in the depth of a person forming one's being.

Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2014

As we head to a baptismal Sunday and contemplate the baptismal rite most often practiced as a water minimal rite with less than half a shot glass trickled over the head of an infant, we must do massive imaginative expansion on the sign value of that little trickle of water.  Water is massive in our lives and in our traditions.  The death caused by water of the great Flood is matched with the salvific death of Jesus where the power of a good death is seen to be the power to stop and interdict the harmful addictions of idolatry.  Water has cleansing effects; water has thirst quenching effects as we baptize our interior life every time we drink.  Water attends birth; we are born from amniotic waters formed in the gestation environment.  Water has playful and sporting delight.  Water supports transportation even as it can impede travel requiring a bridge or fording behaviors.  Water shapes life through the power of erosion.  Water transmute to become rock hard ice and gaseous air.   Indeed, water is a universal substance in human experience, truly a worthy substance to celebrate an initiatory rite where the initiated is invited to hear the voice of God declare the foundation of ultimate esteem, "You are my son, you are my daughter and I am pleased with you."

Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2014

Baptism and the urbanization factor is something to consider.  As a rite of initiation, a person is initiated into a significant community which functions on behalf of the person and negotiates the identity of the person within a setting.  Urbanization happens because of the movement of peoples and in such movements significant stable social groups such as family, clan and tribe get disrupted.  A person or family could find themselves in a new location and the home church or synagogue in the Jewish Diaspora could provide a "club" identity within an oft hostile environment.  Baptism as initiation into a home church could provide significant social identity and account for the success of the Jesus Movement within the cities of the Roman Empire.  Baptism in a more hostile environment might function a bit differently than it does today when baptism is already an accepted social reality of the culture at large.

Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2014

There can be quite a gap between the baptismal living and the aspirations expressed in the baptismal vows.  It does set up some interesting probabilities: We are bound to fail.  Wait, the promise of forgiveness is a built in fail safe to failure.  We don't take the vows seriously since it is just a cultural ritual for family obligation and solidarity.  The vows do not require perfection; only the admission of perfectability.  The vows give us the perfect opportunity to be "recovering hypocrites" because we preach a standard higher than we can live, but we're still committed to it.  I'd rather be with a group of "recovering hypocrites" than with those who declare no standard of future perfectability at all.

Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2014

Baptism is a rite of passage and the rite expresses the basic crisis in life, viz., how does an individual live within a community artfully.  It expresses something like a "group marriage" in that it is a rite of vows: vows a person to God and Christ, vows of a person to one's community, vows of the community to the person taking a vow, vows to the people beyond one's community in the promise to seek dignity and justice and finally a belief that God makes a vow to the person in the bestowing of the Holy Spirit.  The baptismal rite only freezes in a liturgy the basic dynamic of life itself.  Too often churches have argued about baptism as a juridical procedure of administrative control of their communities when we should be centering upon the dynamic covenant of baptismal living.

Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2014

There is birth in general and there is the particular birth of an individual person from a specific mother and father.  There is general membership in the kingdom God by virtue of having no choice at all but to live within the general grace of living and moving and having our being in God.  There is specific and particular membership with the intentional and purposive community of faith to celebrate and transact with the "always, already" grace of God.  Membership process in a Christian community stretches from birth to death and one of the celebratory gates that one goes through is the rite of baptism because one makes very particular one's location in the discipleship process to fully access the grace of God in one's life within a community.  Baptism is a way of moving grace from the theory of something that happens in general to an acknowledgment that it has happened to me and I am given a milestone in my own narrative of accepting God's grace.

Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2014

Today, the Feast of the Epiphany derives from the surprise of a historical fact: Jesus Christ gained a following in the Gentile population.  In hindsight we look for mystery of why the uncanny happens.  How did this small movement deriving from a populist rabbi in Galilee end up sweeping the Roman Empire?  How does this Christ still engages us today?  The Feast of the Epiphany is still a feast of jaw-dropping wonder.

Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2014

The story of the visit of the magi to the Christ Child arose after the historical fact of the success of Christocentric Judaism in the cities of the Roman Empire.  Urban centers arise because people leave places and by various necessities come to be located in a metropolis.  The replacement factor for family, tribe and clan brought about extra-individual and extra-family clubs or churches and some were synagogue influenced in their organizational patterns where there was a gathering of Jews in the Diaspora.  But the success of an organization where Jews and Gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, slave and free negotiated for each other a communal existence which mediated their identity in a city was due to the realization of the mystical presence of Christ.  The magi story symbolized the pilgrimage of Gentiles to the spiritual reality of "Christ born in them, " the hope of glory.

Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2014

One can note in sociology the pizza effect; a word for spiced flat bread/open pie that derives from Italy and goes around the world and morphs to include all of the hybrid brands of American pizza all claiming authentic descent from the homeland.  The ultimate gall is to then sell American pizza back in the homeland.  The Jesus Movement began as a rural Galilean movement against the "urban" Jerusalem religious establishment but essentially became a world wide movement in the cities of the Roman Empire.  Today there are so many hybrid varieties of the Jesus Movement and when it tries to "go home" to Palestine as an authentic rabbinic messianism, it meets with resistance, like trying to sell American pizza in Naples.

Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2014

The use of language by human beings provides for humanity the illusion of immortality by seeming to establish stability or duration.  Everything that exists becomes in time and so everything ages and everything changes.  When we assign singular words to changing entities we are seemingly establishing duration by retaining a single word for a changing entity in time.  Language as the human technology of memory purports to establish permanency and we trick ourselves by hiding the mortality of words with words, viz., words become and age and change just as the entities which they supposedly fix with singular meanings.  So, rather than trying to assume we could grasp some final perfect Static State of Being, it might be better to conceive of the almighty as Omni-Becoming, permanent Creativity.  An Omni-Becoming Being would be more conducive to any notion of genuine freedom as well as more intuitive with the way in which life is, namely one of time and change.

Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2014

The narrative form of truth so much a part of biblical textual presentation suffered a misrepresentation when its expositors seemed to be embarrassed with the art of living in the form of story and translated narrative into didactic logical propositions of creed and doctrine and into juridical practices for community order.  What was lost was the art of Judaeo-Christian living except in the mystics who still cherished the mystery of not controlling the presentation of God through creed or regimented communities under canon law.  Let's get back to the art of living even if it is messy in accepting each person as a unique artist of life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2014

The name of Jesus has a meaning and it is our belief that he lived up to his name.  One who has been named "lover of horses" has not yet manifested much equine preference and so as far as horses go he has been "misnamed."  But names themselves cannot be limited to singular meanings since names themselves are supreme reductions; all of the occasions that have gone into a person becoming is reduced to a single identifying word, a name, as if the name could realistically represent the wealth of the community of occasions which go into a person.  Naming as identity is sometimes used to violate the mystery of a person by presuming to know someone because one knows their name.   The greatest reduction of all is the name: G-d, a name, that is regarded to be so utterly full of Occasions of Becoming that it is presumptuous to even try to accomplish the greatest reduction of all by presuming to speak the Holy, yet Plenitudinous, Name.  The reduction of What Was, What Might Have Been, What Is, and What Will Be to a mere name, is the presumption of naming.  We cannot but continue to name; but let not naming violate the profound mystery of all of the becoming for which thds.

Daily Quiz, December 2014

Daily Quiz, December 31, 2014

What are other names for the Feast of the Holy Name?

a. the churching of women
b. the Purification of the Virgin Mary
c. the Circumcision of Christ
d. New Year's Day


Daily Quiz, December 30, 2014

"Angels We Have Heard on High" is a Christmas carol which originated in what country?

a. England
b. Belgium
c. France 
d. Germany

Daily Quiz, December 29, 2014

The Coventry Carol begins "Lullay, Thou little tiny child"  and is based upon a 16th Pageant portrayal in Coventry of what event?

a. the birth in Bethlehem
b. the Holy Innocents
c. Mary's struggle in child birth
d. the slaughter of male babies by Pharaoh 

Daily Quiz, December 28, 2014 

"What Child Is This" has a tune that was supposedly composed by whom as a love song?

a. Elizabeth I
b. Thomas Tallis
c. Henry VIII
d. Louis XIV

Daily Quiz, December 27, 2014

Why could it be said that St. John the Divine is a saint without a feast?

a. Scholars believe he was not the same person as John the Evangelist
b. he was decanonized in 1952
c. the members of the church who believes John of Patmos and the evangelist are the same can live in denial
d. parishes of John the Divine patronage, claim December 27th for him


Daily Quiz, December 26, 2014  

December 26th is known for what?

a. Boxing Day in the U.K.
b. The day good King Wenceslaus went out 
c. Feast of St. Stephen  

d. all of the above

Daily Quiz, December 25, 2014

"Adeste fideles" is the Latin title for what famous Christmas Carol?

a. The First Nowell
b. O Come All Ye Faithful
c. What Child Is This
d. Hark, the Herald Angels Sing

Daily Quiz, December 24, 2014

In the Carol, "Away in a Manger" the words in the second verse, "the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes" got the writer accused of what heresy because such infant stoicism  seemed to imply the human nature of Christ was an illusion?

a. Pelagianism
b. Arianism
c. Docetism
d. Donatism


Daily Quiz, December 23, 2014

From what country did the Christmas carol, "Silent Night, Holy Night" derive?

a. Germany
b. Austria
c. Switzerland
d. The Netherlands

Daily Quiz, December 22, 2014

The game played at Hanukkah involves a dreidel with four Hebrew letters on the 4 faces of the top.  They are נ (Nun), ג (Gimel), ה (Hay), ש (Shin), an acronym for what phrase?

a. light the menorah each night
b. the Maccabees brought deliverance
c. a great miracle happened there
d. next year in Jerusalem



Daily Quiz, December 21, 2014

"Veni Emmanuel" is

a. an Advent hymn
b. the name of the tune associated with the hymn "O come, come Emmanuel"
c. the Latin for " Come, Emmanuel"
d. the Latin name for the Advent hymn
e. all of the above

Daily Quiz, December 20, 2014

Who is the composer of the familiar tune "Antioch" used with the words, "Joy to the World?"

a.Hoyt Axton, for the Three Dog Night Band
b.G.F. Handel
c. J.S. Bach
d. J. Pachelbel

Daily Quiz, December 19, 2014

How recent is the singing of the common Christmas Carols within the church?

a. 3rd Century
b. 15th Century
c. late 19th Century
d. Early 20th Century

Daily Quiz, December 18, 2014

What American Episcopal Bishop and famous preacher wrote the Christmas Carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem?"

a. John E. Hines
b. James Pike
c. Phillips Brooks
d. Samuel Seabury

Daily Quiz, December 17, 2014

The most referred to book of the Bible for the words of Handel's oratorio, Messiah is what?

a. Malachi
b. Isaiah
c. Romans
d. The Psalms

Daily Quiz, December 16, 2014

The words of the "Hallelujah" Chorus of Handel's "Messiah" come from which book of the Bible?

a. Zechariah
b. Isaiah
c. Revelations
d. The Psalms

Daily Quiz, December 15, 2014

What is the name of the mother of the famous judge Samuel?

a. Sarah
b. Ruth
c. Hannah
d. Naomi

Daily Quiz, December 14, 2014

The Third Sunday of Advent is called "Gaudete" or Rose Sunday or Refreshment Sunday.  What does "gaudete" mean?

a. Laetare, in Latin
b. Rejoice
c. Rose
d. Relax
e. a and b

Daily Quiz, December 13, 2014

Who is the patron saint of Syracuse in Sicily?

a. Rosalia
b. Agatha
c. Lucy
d. Dominic

Daily Quiz, December 12, 2014

Who is St. Juan Diego?

a. a 16th century Spanish Carmelite saint
b. a mission Padre of California
c. the man who received the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe
d. the man for whom San Diego, CA was named

Daily Quiz, December 11, 2014

Who is the popular modern monk who entitled his biography, The Seven Storey Mountain?"

a. Basil Pennington
b. Thomas Keating
c. Thomas Merton
d. Henri Nouwen


Daily Quiz, December 10, 2014

Natural theology begins with an assumption that the divine can be found within Nature; Neo-Orthodoxy challenges this by saying God is known only through "revelation."  Which of the following has been associated with "Neo-Orthodoxy?"

a. Thomas Aquinas
b. Karl Barth
c. Paul Tillich
d. J.A.T. Robinson

Daily Quiz, December 9, 2014

The writer of the Gospel of Luke reported that Jesus spent his nights where?

a. in the home of Mary and Martha of Bethany
b. on the Mount of Olives
c. in the Garden of Gethsemane
d. in the home of his disciples

Daily Quiz, December 8, 2014

The earliest New Testament writing is believed to be a letter of Paul to Christians who were worried that some of their members had died before the Lord had returned.  Which church was this?

a. Corinthian
b. Ephesian
c. Colossian
d. Thessalonian


Daily Quiz, December 7, 2014

The life occupation of Zechariah, father of John the Baptist was what?

a. a priest in the line of Aaron
b. a shepherd
c. a rabbi
d. an elder in the desert Essene community where John was raised

Daily Quiz, December 6, 2014

St. Nicholas of Myra is not the patron saints of which of the following?

a. children
b. sailors
c. falsely accused
d. falconers
e. broadcasters
f.  merchants
g. fishermen


Daily Quiz, December 5, 2014

Which of the following is not true about St. Clement of Alexandria?

a. his name was removed from the Roman Catholic Calendar of saints
b. he was a teacher of Origen
c. he was the fourth Pope
d. he wrote against persons who have come to be called gnostics

Daily Quiz, December 4, 2014

What saint was perhaps the last Church Father, lived in a city under Islamic Caliph control, read the Qur'an and Greek philosophy and defended the veneration of icons against the iconoclasts?

a. St. Thomas Aquinas
b. St. John of Damascus
c. St. Juan de Ribera
d. St. Alphonsus Liguori 

Daily Quiz, December 3, 2014

A college or universities with Loyola or Xavier in its name would be associated with what religious order?

a. Dominican
b. Benedictine
c. Franciscan 
d. Jesuit
e. Lasallian


Daily Quiz, December 2, 2014

Which of the following was a chief architect in the formation of the Holy Catholic Church of Japan, the Nippon Sei Ko Kai?

a. Robert Nobili
b. Henry Martyn
c. Channing Moore Williams
d. Francis Xavier

Daily Quiz, December 1, 2014

How did St. Andrew become the patron saint of Scotland?

a. according to a William Blake ode, he traveled there
b. his relics were brought to Scotland in the mid 10th century
c. it was a Links golf tradition which started in the 15th Century
d. his intercession was deemed important in the defeat of invaders 
e. b and d

New Scripts for the New Year

1 Christmas       December 28,2014

Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21

Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link

    What is the biggest elephant in the room which we all take for granted and because we do,  we miss the most obvious thing about human life as we know?  And what is the elephant?  It is Word or language.  We are people who have language and through language our human world is completely created.

  And so you ask?  A baby does not yet have language and does a baby exist?  Indeed a baby has potential language ability but is a passive recipient of the language of the parents. Parents impose language upon a baby's world and Sigmund Freud tried to build a narrative around how parents treat certain sensual areas of the body in the very formation of their personal narratives.

  For the author of the Gospel John it was not enough that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.   One could infer that the community where John's writer preached and wrote no longer used the Christmas narratives for their main liturgy or their method of teaching spiritual transformation. 

  The community of John were further away in time from the actual presence of Jesus on earth. The Jesus of Nazareth, a very historical figure had given way to the corporate body of Christ.  The Jesus of Nazareth was gone, but the risen Christ had become an omnipresence metaphor for the immediate and intimate awareness of God’s presence known to people in a very engaging and personal way.

  The physical birth of Jesus was not adequate to account for the Christ of the resurrection who had returned in the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Risen Christ was such an experience of omnipresence of God's personal presence, the writer of John's Gospel could only confess in very poetic terms that the Risen Christ was the very basis for human life being aware of anything at all as  the Word which is before all human existence and which is within all human existence.

  If something is known or it is experienced, awareness of something being known or being experienced has to have passed through language or Word.  So Word is what is omnipresent in organizing and creating all of human life as we know it.  And this Word is pervasive and the confession of the Risen Christ as the  Word accounts for our belief that we live in a personal universe.  The world is totally Christianized by identifying the Risen Christ with the eternal Word, who had a phase of fleshly existence in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

  You and I might think that we have unworded states of existence, or pre-linguistic states of existence, but in thinking that we have already used words to identify such states of existence.

  Word is the like the nano-second time delay on every human experience consciously articulated.  Word products exist passively in all of the products and actions of human civilization.    And if we did not have words, we would not even be aware that we had consciousness or existed.

  We are beings with language.  This is inescapable so don't try to escape it.  Language like music has rests, and silence is but a programmed features of having language.  By the time we learn to speak and use language we have already been thoroughly pre-coded with many meanings in our lives, and so we have already been passively formed by the value words which our nurturing environments have provided for us.

  In many ways, language uses us more than we use it because of this unconscious cultural coding of every aspect of our lives.

  One of the reason that the Word became Jesus Christ was because the worded scripts of humanity were losing scripts.  People were living out scripts of alienation from God and from each other.

  There needed to be an intervention into the human community.  And so the Word became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and he became dynamic word in actions and in teaching.

  Jesus of Nazareth came to show us that we don't have to be passive slaves in the great play of life with fixed and rigid scripts.

  Jesus of Nazareth was new playwright.  He came to show us that even though we have inherited some very losing scripts, we in our lives can learn to write and live new outcomes, better outcomes for our lives.

  Even though we are always pre-coded with certain habits of thought and actions, the very notion of repentance and education means that there is always a great task before us to overcome our many ignorances.

  If we understand that we are pre-constituted and coded by the word paradigms within which we live, Jesus as the preacher was one who showed us that we can receive progressive intervention in our Word lives so as to learn new acts and new habits and ways of thinking which will change our lives and the lives of our families and communities.

  Even though we are highly determined by our pre-coding in our cultural settings, Jesus was the Word of God made flesh to show us that we still have lots of freedom to exercise in our word lives.

  We are on the verge of a new year.  Where do you and I want some intervention today in the scripts of our lives which we are living right now?  Where do we want to have the freedom to know and act differently in the New Year?

  Words are power.  We know the power of words in political and commercial propaganda which seeks to guide and persuade the various behaviors of our lives.

  Let us today link up the Risen Christ with the power of Words in our lives and seek to find the words of power which can change our lives in the direction of love and justice in our world.  Let the Risen Christ as the eternal Word of God be the power to write and perform new scripts in our lives in the New Year.

  So, you and I are not going to escape language and Word.  We are going to be barraged by the words of our culture, by all sorts of persuasive propaganda.  The reason we gather here today is because we confess the need to have resistance against harmful words and we need the intervention of good and powerful words which can give us new and winning scripts of love, joy, hope and justice in our future.

  Let us submit today to the risen Christ whom we can know today as persuasive and powerful words of change in our lives today.  Happy New Year and God bless us as we find new and better scripts for our lives in the coming year.  Amen

Called to Be Christmas Midwives

Christmas Eve         December 24, 2014  

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

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectionary Link

  Imagine tonight that you and I are like trees who are constituted by layers or rings of experiences.  And so tonight we are constituting our outer most layer of the occasions of our personal experience, fortunately I am speaking of the expansion of our consciousness and not of our waist lines because of all of the Christmas time sweets.

  People who study trees can look at a cross section of the successive layers of rings of a tree and measure age and they can also tell by analysis something about the weather and climactic condition which the tree faced in a certain annual cycle.

  Let us look at ourselves tonight and at the life of church as comprising successive but expanding concentric circles of something like a conical spiral.  We are ever surpassing ourselves in future and subsequent states in the sum total occasions of existence.  (This is the subtle and poetic way of saying that we age and get older.)

  To provide us a visualization of ourselves as the outer container of all previous states of our becoming, I would like to use the Russian nesting dolls also call Babushka dolls.  They are dolls within dolls

  I would like to use these Babushka dolls to illustrate a two parallel trips to the Christmas birth event in Bethlehem.  The first of the two parallel trips to Bethlehem is the corporate trip of the church in how the Christmas story came to functions within the church.  The other is the personal trip to Bethlehem which we make in our own spiritual lives.

  For the outer nesting doll, I have used a word and picture collage to represent the presence of Christ by the Holy Spirit in the Christian communities of over 1900 years.  Indeed this is quite a collage.  It includes Luther, Calvin, Cramner, Aquinas,   Baptists, Amish, St. Francis, Pope Leo the Great, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mennonites, Episcopalians, Crusades, Martyrs, Monastics, Mormons, Monophysites, Martin Luther King, Jr. Shakers and Methodists, Presbyterians, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and more, because the outer container has to include all of the historical manifestations of the Christ event.

    We take the outer shell off to see what is contained beneath.  What we find beneath are some of the earliest communities of the Jesus Movement.  What we find is a Christ-centered Judaism within the various cities of the Roman Empire.  This Christ center Judaism caught on with a significant number of Gentiles.  This Christ-centered Judaism provided social identity clubs for people involved in the migration to cities as significant urbanization was taking place in the cities of the Roman Empire.  This age of the church includes people who were surprised by the very success of the message of Jesus Christ and the authentic spiritual experience which took root in people's lives to bring about moral and spiritual change.   This experience also provided such an excitement of discovery that people wanted to share this excitement with others.  This age includes the collection and distribution of  Christian writings including the collection of the writings of the apostle Paul and his disciples and other writing which later became accepted as books of the official textbook of Christianity, The New Testament.  In this phase of the church we find martyrs who died for their faith.  The conversion of the Gentiles to the Gospel led to the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea.  

  In an earlier phase of the Jesus Movement, we find persecuted minorities communities who found great hope in holding on to justice in the form of narratives about an imminent apocalyptic ending of the world with a super hero Son of Man and Messiah coming to the rescue at any time. This was the time leading up to the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.  The followers of Jesus were forced into exile out of Jerusalem and portions of their homeland.  Could the Christian movement survive if it lost its birthplace and homeland?  This exile proved providential for the Christian movement but it also became crucial in the separation of the followers of Jesus from the synagogue, since the success of the Jesus Movement came to reside in the Gentile converts who lived in the cities of the Roman Empire.

  The next layer is the layer of the theology of St. Paul found in his writings which are the earliest writings of the New Testament.  This time was also the era of the collection of authentic oral traditions which surrounded the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.  St. Paul did not write a biography of Jesus of Nazareth and he did not meet him in the flesh.  St. Paul had a spiritual encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus and his life was changed.  And he preached this message of spiritual encounter with the risen Christ.  He used the great Christ events as a spiritual metaphors of personal transformation.  He said that he had been crucified with Christ and that Christ had come to live within him.  He wrote that he had been raised with Christ into heavenly places and so the ascension of Christ was also an experience of being transported to another reality which was both parallel and interactively influential with the material reality of his world.  St. Paul wrote that Christ dwelled in each believer, not by natural means but through the experience of a person becoming overshadowed or baptized by the Holy Spirit of God.

  And that brings to us the Christmas Event.  The event which would have been first chronologically, was in fact a later addition to the writings of the Christian communities.  The Christmas stories are not even included in the earliest written Gospel of Mark.  So why do we have the Christmas Stories and why do we arrive to encounter the infant Jesus in Bethlehem?  If we have the Christmas stories of Jesus, why not his early childhood and stories of his young adulthood?  The success of the Jesus Movement in incorporating new members meant that something happened which happens to all successful movements or businesses.  They become institutionalized.  Popularity and growth necessitates institutionalization and incorporation.  How does one teach the message that Christ is born within the human person by the power of the Holy Spirit?  How does one encrypt this message and encode it within a story which is only for the eyes of the ones being initiated into what was called the "mystery" of the revelation of Christ?

  So we have the Christmas Story.  It purports to come first but really it was the spiritual genre to provide the encrypted reality of "Christ within us" the hope of glory.  Blessed Mary is the paradigm of every believer.  She has the encounter with the angelic messenger from the parallel heavenly realm with the annunciation of conception and birth events which would not come by natural inducement.  Sure enough, the birth happened and there were many midwives to that birth event.  Did you know that St. Paul wrote that he "was in travail of birth" while he waited for Christ to be born within the members of his community.  The birth of Christ as a spiritual event attracted the foreign Gentile community as signified by the magi who came from afar.  The birth of Christ into a believer was not limited by socio-economic conditions; it could be witnessed and experienced by peasant shepherds and it could be witnessed and experienced by those wealthy enough to provide gold, frankincense and myrrh.  The birth of Christ within the life of a believer was not without consequences; one's life might be threatened by those who were opposed to this life change. The Christmas story includes the temporary flight to Egypt to escape death. This encodes the flight from Jerusalem for many during the time of  Roman siege.  And those who were newly born might die because of this spiritual birth of Christ within them. Martyrdom was a possibility.  This reality is encrypted in the events of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents.  The Christmas story writers used the genre of story-telling which was known by the Roman audiences.  Roman readers knew the miraculous stories of the immaculate conceptions of the divine Emperors who had comets arrive at their births and who had propaganda which proclaimed them as bringers of peace and saviors of the world.  The Emperors had the Roman senates who voted to make them divine beings and sons of gods.  In contrast, angelic hosts proclaimed Christ to be the Savior and Son of the Most High.  One could understand how such Christian literature could have been perceived as a threat to the Emperor in its composition.  This is why it was a literature read within the communities of Christ and it proclaimed this parallel kingdom of God which silently was happening at the same time as the kingdom of the Caesars.  This was a rich literature of spiritual transformation as each person came to find this supernatural birth of Christ within one’s very own being.

  And so we seek the reality of the birth of Christ again tonight, not locked up in the cute little story; rather the Christmas story is evidence of the reality which we share with all Christians, namely, Christ has been born in us.   The birth of Christ is the mystery of the life of God and the life of this parallel kingdom becoming a reality within our lives.  It is a true incarnation because it changes the flesh and blood of our being; it changes our body language to be and act differently.  Do not let anyone say to you that the spiritual birth of Christ is without material or bodily effect.  The effect is real and certain.

  What about you and I and the birth of Christ and our own layers of experience within us?  Can we with imagination take our histories apart something like the layers of nesting dolls?  How have you and I been constituted to arrive to be all of the stages and phases of our history which we now contain in ourselves?

  Are we constituted by nagging doubt about the personal relevance of God, Christ, the church, love and justice?  Are we constituted by uncertainty about grace and blessing because we have experienced or seen too much harshness and cruelty to be able to believe in the normalcy of goodness and justice?  Do we bear the wounds and the scars of our own failures and the failure of other people to be perfect or even adequate to our needs?   Are we constituted by our own American Episcopalian self-reliant success and we have the power and wealth to negotiate our own independent well-being and the well-being of our family so that we don't think we "need" others and we often show that we don’t need that troublesome body, the church, except for a few social functions?  It is ironic that the church grew among people migrating to a new identity in the Roman cities.  It is ironic that the church is still strongest with immigrating people trying to survive in a new country or place and the church is the place for networking of people who don't have the means of independent survival.

   As you and I assess our currently constituted spiritual existence tonight, I would ask us to ponder two things?  Have we lost freshness in life because we have limited ourselves to sheer intellectual and the brute factual methods of science tonight?  Have we forgot the aesthetic genres which enable us to cry, and giggle and play and access the memory of our being born as smiling, joyful babies who were that way for no reason at all?  The Christmas story invites us to access and recover our native joy tonight.

  The second thing that we need to ponder is that because we have the power and wealth to be self-reliant and independent, can we repent of this self-reliance and independence which has caused us to forsake our roles within community?  Can we repent of our self-reliance and use power and strength and wealth to become midwives for the birth of the Holy Child of Jesus into the lives of people in this world who exist in various states of vulnerability?

  The Christ child is found in the conditions of vulnerability; the story of the Christ child includes a host of midwives, Mary, Joseph, the angels, the shepherds, the magi, the star of Bethlehem and the sheep and the cows.  We are all together in the midwifery of the birth of Christ into the lives of people in our world.  The chief alternative to self-reliance is ministry which is being present to help others who cannot be so self-reliant.

  So my friends, let us find in the Christmas Story, the new experience of our native joy of birth and let it be for us tonight a renewal.  But also my friends, let us forsake our self-reliant and independent ways which our power and wealth has allowed us to attain, and let us embrace this ministry of midwifery, of being those who are present to help others find and discover the birth of Christ in their lives in this wonderful experience of joy.

  Tonight as we live in the latter days, or in our latest days, but let us return to the impossible, the event of our births.  We can do this as we project upon the story of the birth of Christ and as we behold in the eyes of infants and children this state of nascent joy.

  Merry Christmas, to all who have had the Christ born within you.  And Merry Christmas to all of us who now are called to be midwives for the birth Christ in others and who are also called to tend to those who are in the state of vulnerability.  Let us become midwives for the birth of Christ, tonight.   Amen.

Beyond the Childification of Christmas

4 Advent         December 21, 2014

2 Samuel 7:4,8-16     Ps.89       

Romans 16:25-27     Luke 1:26-38  

Lectionary Link

  We all love the fact that Christmas is for children and we have childified Christmas to the hilt.  We've done it in many ways.  We taken St. Nicholas of Myra and dressed him up with a fancy red duds and given him the perpetual grandfatherly role of making children happy.  We elevated the new St. Nicholas to a status which rivals the status of Jesus and we often wonder if Jesus get upstaged by Santa Claus at Christmas.  The elevation of Santa Claus allows Christmas to have relevance way beyond the church walls but Santa Claus is mainly associated with the commercial efforts to drive the giving of gifts and help boost the economy at the end of the year.  Apparently, our economy is really bad if people are not maxxing out their credit cards and completely in debt.  Go figure.
  With the extreme childification of Christian we can diminish the fact that the Gospel writers actually had specific purposes in writing what they did.  And because of fact checking and science we would like to keep the Christmas stories in being read only in the state of "primary" naivete (see Paul Ricoeur), the same kind of state which fascinated children have when they watch a Disney movie.  And that is a good state and not to be all bah hum bugged on.  But there is more to the Christmas stories and some of the more concerns what Americans are supposed to be best at, "pragmatism."  Truth has to have actual function, pragmatic function for people who use "truths."
  And what could be the pragmatic function of the story of an Angel who comes to the Virgin Mary and tells her that she is going to have baby.  And this baby is going to be a ruler of the house of Jacob, also known as Israel because he is going to be like David.  And Mary, "you will not come to have this baby by regular means, you will be over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit."  Surprise?  Well, nothing is impossible with God.  Mary's response was, "Let it be."
  Let us talk about literal prediction.  Was Jesus ever King of the house of Jacob?  Did he ever reign over Israel?  And did the Jews of his time all embrace him as a King?  In fact, he was mocked as a "false and pretending King" when over his head on the cross were written the words "This is the King of the Jews."
  What is going on in the writing of the Christmas stories?  What is their actual pragmatic function of the stories during the time of their writing and promulgation?
  Since the stories are collections and represents subsequent editing and redacting, one can assume that the stories had more than one function depending upon how they were applied and used as teachings within the various communities which read them and used them for liturgy and teaching.
  The earliest writer of the New Testament writings was St. Paul.  St. Paul did not write about Jesus of Nazareth or his early life.  We have no record of St. Paul meeting Mary or Joseph, but one assumes that  if he met James, the brother of our Lord that he would have at least asked for some historical background about Jesus.
  Paul, the earliest writer of the writing which appear in the collection of New Testament writings, wrote mainly letters giving instructions about his spiritual experience and how it changed his life and how this experience could also change the lives of others.
  This experience of spiritual change happened in this way:  A person had an encounter, an interior event which included the understanding that the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Risen Jesus was present after he had died and rose again.  The Spirit of Jesus was a higher power which could change one's life morally and socially.  The Spirit of Jesus could unite a person with like minded people to form a new community of people who could support each other as they faced the stresses of living in the cities of the Roman Empire.
  So what does one do with the theology of St. Paul's spiritual experience of the risen Christ?  What does one do as one notices how successful it has become in forming communities within the Roman Empire?  The leaders of the Christian Movement had a growing audience and they needed to have methods of inculcating and teaching this spiritual practice such as had been experienced by St. Paul, who said that Christ was born in us as the hope of glory and that this happened by the power of the Holy Spirit.
  So in the program of mystagogy or the teaching about the mystery of Christ being born within us by being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, the early Christian spiritual directors Christianized genres of stories which were present in their cultures and they presented the Virgin Mary as the example of every Christian who received the birth of Christ within them, not by the natural human means, but by presence of the Holy Spirit.  And when one knew this birth of Christ, one was initiated into the program of the Kingdom of God, the new House of Jacob and the New Israel.  It was a hidden but profound and omnipresent kingdom but it was a sure and certain kingdom because everyone in this kingdom had the uncanny experience of knowing Jesus as the kingly and transforming power of their lives.
  And so do you understand the very pragmatic function of the annunciation story in the mystagogy of the early church?  It took the didactic theology of St. Paul and put it into a story form and hid the spiritual mysticism because the Christ event was not something that happened by thinking or by external force;  it was an inward event of being over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit.
  And how did one know that it had happened?  One could know that it had happened in the event of being so persuaded that one completely acquiesced even while not understanding fully what and why it had happened.
  This acquiescence is expressed perfectly in the words of Mary to Gabriel: "Let it be to a servant of the Lord according to your word."  Let it be, let it be, let it be.  The result of persuasive faith is acquiescence when we cannot help but say, "Let it be" because we have been over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit in having Christ be born within us.
  So as we encounter all of the childification of Christmas this year, let us not forget the Christmas events of our souls when God's annunciation to us brought our acquiescence and we said to God, "Let is be."  Christmas becomes an every day event when we acquiesce to God's birthing presence and say to God, Let it be, let it be, let it be.  Amen.