Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2015
It is one thing to say the Bible is inspired; it is quite another to actually understand what that means. Is it inspired because it shows how deeply flawed people can receive a vision about behavioral requirements beyond their ability to fulfill with perfection? Is it inspired because it is the final word in exact detail about everything under the Sun? Is it inspired because it requires the faith of a perfect interpretive contortionist to harmonize everything in it as completely consistent, comprehensive and coherent? Is it inspired because of church administrative conventions making it the official "text book" of the church and so "inspiration" is something which can be voted on by imperfect people? Or is it inspired because it has within it a deferred inspiration status because it has a future still in bringing people to surpass themselves in the fulfillment of love and justice in this life and the one to come?
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2015
The problem with infallibility is that it is self-deconstructing. Who is able to be infallible enough to designated that which is infallible? An infallible truth needs an infallible interpreter. Who is presumptuous enough to volunteer to be in the role of the infallible one? It turns out that infallibility is the community's way of favoring an ideology to be standard for the administration of the community. Infallibility is a pragmatic political and administrative procedure to provide functional standards for the community. The distance between the nose and forefinger may be different for different people but the official measurement of a "yard" is the distance between the king's nose and forefinger. Infallibility is a community way of legitimizing authority. The infallibility of God, love and justice is always deconstructing because God, love and justice all partake of the freedom to have a hopeful future in human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2015
The writer of the Gospel of John includes the purpose of writing in the text: "These things are written so that you may believe..." Faith or "pistos" is the goal of the Gospel; in classic Greek rhetoric the word for the goal of rhetoric was "pistos" or persuasion. So faith or belief are those things about which one has come to be persuaded. The Gospel of John includes many rhetorical devices to coax persuasion in the readers and consistently has Jesus chiding the persons who take words literally. The purpose of John's Gospel is to evoke a sublime relationship with the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2015
With the verb "to be" language is something like a continual adjusting mathematical tautological equation. For the purposes of a word act in this moment I will take such and such to be equal or be equivalent to such and such. The famous "I am" sayings of the Oracle of Christ who is channeled in the writings of the Gospel of John shows the heuristic teaching formula for the Johaninne churches. The oracle Christ saying I am or I = Light, Truth, Way, Life, Resurrection, Good Shepherd, Gate, Vine is the significant tautological use of metaphors which takes mathematical equational formula away from the precision implied when referencing numbers and applies the formula in an understanding of the Risen Christ as an omni-competent Surpassing Person who models the goal of personal transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2015
Oppression, suppression, repression, authority, and self control are words of relationship with the power. When one is powerless one needs a different kind of care being exercised towards one. Powerlessness in the realm of knowledge is ignorance. Powerlessness in economics is poverty. The message of the Good Shepherd and sheep is about the nuances of power; giving and receiving of care in adequate reciprocity is the balance of justice which our world needs badly. There is too much exploitation in our world because inequities in knowledge, wealth and power are accepted as the a kind of social Darwinian fact of life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2015
One of the most famous projections of caring personality upon the Plenitude also known as God is the Twenty Third Psalm. The Lord is my Shepherd. The poet of this Psalm adopts a sheep's life as the metaphor of vulnerability for human existence. A sheep needs protection and there are enemies and a sheep dies. And yet the Shepherd is greater than the death of the sheep since the sheeply human poet professes to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. By faith each has to find a way to project a power of care towards oneself to be adequate to all of the vicissitudes of life, including the gate of death and imaginations of one's afterlife. Plenitude is a completely adjustable and pliable Freedom to whatever is. To live and characterize Plenitude as Caring Person larger than any single event or collection of events in one's life is the most important work of faith because if one can believe that ultimately one is cared for, then one will also be one who cares for others. It is a great work of faith to discover Plenitude as our caring Shepherd.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2015
On Genocide Remembrance Day when it seems so daunting to ponder the horrifying deaths of people who have become but grotesque statistics, one needs the hope of a powerful memory of God to be able to honor the individual beauty and value of each one who knew untimely human death. It also should teach us humility to know that tribalism and nationalism have resulted in using God to be the rubber stamp justification for some of the worst deeds of humanity. We should acknowledge that Holy Books can record that human beings misunderstood God in using God to justify human revenge and conquest in the competition for the use of the resources of this world.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2015
One of the strongest forces of causation is the force of interpretation. Through interpretation one collates meanings of the interaction of manifold events and contexts and by preparing the mind for action one has learned to deal with the expansive freedom which is abroad in our world. Through interpretation one is empowered to deal not mainly with why things happen, but what does one do and think now that something has happened. Through interpretation, events become providence through faith. Is the interpretative faith of Lady Julian of Norwich Pollyannish naivete when in the face of all she interprets, "All will be well indeed?" Or is interpretation with the power of hope-driven faith, the strongest force in human experience?
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2015
Earth Day is a day of acknowledging the most important relationship which we as humans have with our environment, the role of stewardship. In the past, a very large Earth gave us the ability to continually "run away" from our messes because there was always more land and always a future. As human population has grown and as our consumption of resources have increased exponentially there is less opportunity to escape our environmental repercussions of human consumptive activities. We live the dilemma of parasites whose lives may end if consumption takes the life of the host. Because we don't see God, we can treat God as the "absentee landlord" of the universe who will not punish our violation of tenant agreements, even though we know that our environment itself will punish us if we ruin it. How do we convert industry and free markets to truly "free" markets with a creative genius to survive in the pursuit of happiness and guarantee that people of the future will have the same quality of life in their pursuit of happiness on our Host Planet Earth? Let us not sin against creativity by saying "we can't" which really means "we won't."
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2015
Biblical scholarship involves reading the Bible beyond the "immediate" pleasure or "plain" meaning of the text in its artistic moment of interaction with the "meanings"of the words. In biblical scholarship one tries to come to be informed about how the text functioned within the context of a presumed original initial occasion and its functions within the communities which would have used the text to form their spiritual identities. Children who watch a Disney animated movie eventually understand the function of Disney movies in our entertainment constellation even though when they are watching the movie they don't really care for about functional analysis of the movie because they are engaged in the immediate pleasure of the watching event. A child might be totally bored to watch a documentary on the behind-the-scenes process of making an animated movie because it might "demythologize" the magic of the impact of the artistic moment. In biblical scholarship, one may have to study the function of a text with some lack of passion but eventually one finds the universal human patterns represented within an ancient text to have a current corresponding pattern within one's contemporary life and the passion of faith lives again in different details.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2015
St. Anselm taught us that it is better for a non-believer not to use the word "God" because it is incoherent to say that "there is no God." The incoherence occurs because by definition God means "that which none greater can be conceived" and so to even use the word God would mean that by definition greatness would at the very least assume existence. It could leave the atheist in the same mode as the rock musician Prince about his name; "the Being formerly known as "God.""
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2015
Aphorism or the Day, April 18, 2015
Disagreement in life among Christians or anyone mostly has to do with "how" one believes or thinks rather than what one is believing or thinking. Historically Christians have disagreed on how to understand and believe the resurrection of Christ, how to understand the nature of Christ, how to understand the miracles of Jesus, how to understand the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, how to ordain for ministry, how to regard the authority of the Scriptures, just to name a few. It would seem that the human tendency when faced with differences is to find an "official" reason or ideology for asserting why we are different and practice habits of mutual excommunication. It is interesting that religions which claim love as their chief value end up with such segregatory habits. The best spin we can put on it is that we are divided for diverse mission appeals to particular sectors of the human community because people's habits of thinking and practice go through transformation at very uneven consensual patterns.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2015
In language we use Physicality as a metaphor for intimate presence. An absent lover may read a passionate letter from the beloved and write, "I received your letter and felt as though you were right here with me delivering your loving words." We use the expression "it was as if he were really here." But often in our lack of language adroitness we will not let the biblical writers use Physicality as a metaphor for intimate presence. St. Paul wrote that if one was guilty of partaking of the Eucharist in an unworthy manner, one was guilty of the very body of Christ. Jesus said, "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood." We know the cannibalistic aspect of taking this with literal meaning. Why is it that readers of the Bible will not let biblical writers use an entire range of metaphors to speak about how intimate they felt about how the presence of God was known to them under the metaphors of the appearance of the Risen Christ? Christian have argued about Eucharistic presence of Christ: spiritual presence, symbolic presence, real presence, actual physical presence and so on. In such arguments we know less about the presence of Christ and more about how people use or misuse language in limiting the metaphorical expressiveness of language in human experience. Re-read the Gospel of John looking at how the writer presents Jesus as continually rebuking people who are limited to "literal" meaning rather than artistic metaphorical meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2015
St. Paul did not see Jesus during his life. St. Paul did not have a post-resurrection appearance of Christ contemporary with those of the remaining eleven disciples and the women disciples of Jesus. St. Paul had a visionary experience of Christ on his trip to Damascus when he was persecuting the followers of Jesus. St. Paul did not believe his experience of Christ was inferior to the experience of the disciples. This would indicate that the range of the experiences of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ were wide and varied and tailored to the individuals who received them. One wonders why a discussion was not raised as to whether St. Paul had an encounter with the bodily resurrected Christ. It would seem as though Paul's experience of the risen Christ would have been regarded with some skepticism by those who had a "true" encounter with the risen Christ, unless the validity of the encounters were established by the quality of life transformation rather than by exact scientific empirical definition of what a post-resurrection appearance of Christ entailed.
Aphorism of Day, April 15, 2015
How did the church account for its success in deriving from Jesus of Nazareth to successful communities popping up within the cities of the Roman Empire comprised of members who all claimed to have a spiritual experience based upon the continuing presence of the Risen Christ in their lives? They did so by writing about the transitional period of how Jesus went from being a person who walked and talked and then who died, but then who reappeared and then stopped reappearing in an Ascension event, except in the ascended state could reappear to people like St. Paul and who could be present in vital ways as the Holy Spirit to anyone who was open to experience this dynamic. The New Testament writers were trying to put in teaching form the progression of the success of their movement and the post-resurrection appearances are crucial explanatory links for the success of the Christian movement.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2015
Reincarnation, transmogrification, immortality of the soul, subjective immortality and objective immortality are the words in language we have in the history of humanity to characterize the afterlife, and there are others as well in other cultures. In objective immortality one believes that is it is enough to trust the memory of oneself as a continuing identifiable entity to the perfect memory of the God. That perfect memory would retain individual identity and keep it from being lost in the anonymity of dissipated and saturated energy forms that constitute the human person. In subjective immortality, one holds to a restorative and reconstituted personhood, including the body and so there is a belief in the retained identity of the human subject with the constitutive aspects of human life as we know it, except upon another "plane" of existence. Resurrection provides the necessary ideology for the presence of Hope and the anchor for the eventual triumph of Justice, since we hope for more than what can be achieved in life and Justice only gets variously approximated in human situations. Always having a definite future in some re-constituted state which retain differences in identity is a discourse of comfort. We should not dismiss the lack of verifying precision about any future states; if we're honest we cannot really attain any completely authoritative precision about our current state (we only know what we know about ourselves when we say we know it). The discourse of the future, even beyond life as we know it is unavoidable for humanity because we are constituted by Hope and always having a future.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2015
UFO-ologists developed classifications for close encounters with UFO or alien life form. First Kind: Visual Sighting of UFO about 500 feet away. Second Kind: Physical effects are evidenced. Third Kind: Animated Creature present. The Gospel writers have their own ways of classifying the post-resurrection appearances of Christ. The highest order of classification was that it had to seem to be an actual physical encounter. Physicality was the metaphor for "substantial" encounter or real encounter. Physicality was used in the words of Jesus when his words would be literally cannibalistic if one did not appreciate that Physicality was a metaphor for "substantial, and real relational encounter." Jesus said, "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part in me." Nothing is more obvious than the use of Physicality as a metaphor for the fact that relationship encounters with the Risen Christ had for the recipient a super-substantial reality. It is post-scientific fundamentalism which does not have regard for the wonderfully nuanced literary skills of the New Testament writers who wrote from genuine, undeniable transformational spiritual experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2015
Resurrection is an affirmation of everlasting life and invites us to have the humility to accept ourselves and the creative freedom alive in the world as the evidence of everything always being in an unfinished state of process. If process and change are evidence of eternal life, we may fear that the individual personal entity may eventually be so dissipated by the magnitude of change such that personality may be dissolved like a sugar cube in the ocean beyond recognition. A gift of being human and having language means that we attain memorial concrescence, that is a substantial state of constitutional esteem such that we are given hope of having self-hope about our continuous endurance in some way. That we have the hope of endurance and that we have memory in imperfect ways invites us to accept ourselves as lesser reflection of One who has perfect and Lasting Endurance and Perfect Memory and therefore is able to substantiate our future endurance within a Perfect Memory.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2015
If one reads carefully the "doubting" Thomas story one finds that is is less about Thomas and more about the validity of the faith of people who did not have eye-witness experience of Jesus. The punchline of the "doubting" Thomas story actually has to do with the experience of the real presence of Christ through writing. "These things are written so that you may believe..." All but a very few number of Christians have had to rely upon the validity of other kinds of "presences" of Christ which the writer of John's Gospel affirms as blessed as the writer has the oracle of the Risen Christ say, "Blessed are those who have not seen yet who have believed."
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2015
The disciples got rather immediate reparative resolution from the traumatic stress of the death of Jesus. We look for the instantiation of resurrection reparation in our own lives from the traumatic stress of our own losses and hurts in life. And since we all are going to die and often the path to death involves the progressive loss of things we took for granted during our youthful performance, we find that ultimate reparation has to be delayed to post-death or post-life imaginations. There are people who do not ever recover from traumatic events; how does the resurrection reparation get instantiated for them? Resurrection reparation does not involve us being just the recipients of renewing grace, it also means that we receive resurrection renewal to take care of those for whom the resurrection renewal is continuously delayed until their posthumous state. In short, the proof of the resurrection is that we use the energy of the Spirit of the resurrection to take care of each other until we attain posthumous substantiality in the preserving, reviving and perfecting Memory of God.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2015
The disciples of Jesus only had three days to suffer Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome because Jesus re-appeared to enough of them to help them not only recover but then to "glorify" the event of his torture and death on the cross. Would that everyone who suffers events of trauma could have reparative experiences which would nullify the terrible effects of traumatic events. Or better yet, if Easter living actually took over this world we could eliminate the severely traumatic events. Dream on Easter people but pray for all with Post Traumatic Stress suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2015
Artistic presence is perhaps a more evocative presence than actual presence. Actual presence has such immediacy when joy, fear, bafflement all conspire to create cocktails of brain chemistry which motivate reactionary behaviors. An artistic presentation of a previous event allows for the "impaired effects" of immediacy to have lost their ability to influence one's action. As to the post-resurrection appearances of Christ for the last two thousand years, one knows them as artistic presences and thus one is not frightened as if one has seen a "ghost;" one has the luxury of being moved toward a reflective experience of the Sublime which can be integrated into one's life transformation through faith energy driven by pure Hope.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2015
A goal of rhetoric is what one might call, "propriety," or saying the fitting and right thing for the occasion of the person(s) involved. Do the words of propriety make the event of empathy actually occur? Or are the words offered attractive enough to bear the projections of the hearer as being an adequate explanation of the state of one's being? How do any of us account for seeming mysterious states of euphoria or despair? Something we ate? Good news? Bad news? Or unknown? If one returned to one's car in a parking lot and find the door "keyed" one's experience of such an event might instigate or be the cause of a state of anger and one sees the connection between feeling and actual incident. The death and resurrection of Jesus occurred only once and yet suddenly many people are accounting for their states of euphoria because of knowledge or information about these one time events. How did these events become the hermeneutic (interpretive) lure to draw such projections of hope from so many people who did not even witness them? It is almost as though there is primeval hope native within the human heart which is waiting for the perfect narrative to release the energy of this profound hope. The release of that energy of hope was variously called the Holy Spirit or God's omnipresence being released because the balloon which kept the Air trapped within was pierced by knowledge of the perfect event to be the propitious accompanying interpretive narrative to explain a profound native Hope.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2015
Events such as are involved in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ create at least two classes of people, those who were there and those who were not. Can those who were not there claim equality of experience with those who were not there? The church has mainly consisted of those who "were not there" hence the church has been constituted by people who have a different order of experience with Jesus, perhaps mostly of the artistic type in the language/literary art of oral story telling and in the written form of the Scriptures. So essentially the church has formed among people who were "not there" and who have had to rely upon memorial traces presented by people who were there and on the evocative traces in "spiritual" experience which so many people seem to have and who have used the life, death and resurrection of Christ as an interpretive framework to understand the significance of those evocative "spiritual" experiences. Welcome to the season of Easter as we come to some honesty about how we negotiate through the many "Presences" of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2015
Easter Sunday is a good day for rapprochement honesty about the ubiquity of Hope, Hope's discourses and Hope's narratives. Christians who believe the hopeful narratives of the resurrection appearances of Christ should also note how hope is present in every possibility discourse which is unavoidable in human experience of even those who would call themselves atheist or agnostic. People who do not admit the relevance of the resurrection discourse to their lives should none the less admit the pervasiveness of hope in possibility discourses of all sort which do not yet have empirical verification. Easter is a good day for all to be open to the future and honestly admit that each person uses a variety of a "totalizing" hope discourses when one speaks. Things which are "total" such as love and justice and hope are quite meaningful even while they are eventually deconstructing of detailed statements and actual life practice. Easter is a good day for all to admit that we share in the meaningful discourses of hope, love and justice even though such discourses cannot be empirically verified unless the confession of one who feels hopeful, love and justice counts as proof.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2015
Are people who lived in the past hopelessly doomed because they did not have privileged access to the latest knowledge? What about all of the people who died with appendicitis or in child birth before C-sections or of the plagues before vaccines? They cannot receive retroactive treatment. Holy Saturday is the day of the descent of Jesus to the place of the dead; the Apostles Creed once stated that he descended to "hell." Jesus being the "latest" message in salvation was viewed as a missionary to the departed to help bring to currency those in the holding tank of the dead and allow those who would have received the knowledge of his Gospel to take advantage of it and gain release. Time travel is a common trope in movies and is based upon the imagination of people who do not have actual relationship in space and time to have such a relationship in the imaginations of art. This imagination is based upon the belief in enough of a shared humanity across time to allow that people could communicate in spite of the differences etched in them by their historical contexts. It could be that the risen Christ is so protean that He can be adopted to any time or place situation even when the appearance of Christ to sensitivities of an orthodox Christian amid incense and icons may be significantly different than the evangelical preacher who exhorts exclusively from the King James Bible. We can account for time travel and differences if we can appreciate the Art of faith. Art tolerates much more diversity than if one reduces an absolute Art of religion to the truth of logically consistent statements.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2015
We can live in such resurrection pride that we might be tempted to live detached or isolated from real profound loss. Good Friday is a day to observe the profound reality of death and loss; we cannot be detached from either. Perhaps our recent history in our country has left us in such prosperity that we don't know the events of people living a lifetime in having their countries occupied or a generation of people experiencing devastating plagues. Probably America's most sustained circumstance of grief was the Civil War, though one could also note that land evicted Native Americans and those who experienced the long and sustained indignity of slavery certainly have known the profundity of the sense of endless loss. Most of our loss for most Americans is personal loss, individual loss and that too should not be minimized. Good Friday is a time to read W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues," and resist a resurrection pride which would minimize the true reality of death and loss. One might say that the deeply profound grief of those who lost their best friend and mentor Jesus Christ was the magnetic energy which gave rise to the post resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2015
Peter thought that the messiah had much more important things to do than wash his feet. The message of Maundy Thursday is that we can spend so much time being fixated on great and important things we minimize or neglect the small tasks of hospitality which actually account for the survival of the community. Or if our lives are full of doing all of the small tasks which "keep the trains running on time," we can grow weary in well-doing and not "feel important" since society does not really give much recognition to quotidian kindnesses.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2015
What St. Paul called a reinterpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jews called a significant discontinuity with the Judaic tradition. St. Paul and early leaders who adapted the message of Christ to the Gentile populace "spiritualized" things, Judaic. Circumcision became circumcision of the heart; the church became the new "Israel;" the Eucharist became a weekly "Lamb of God" ritual meal compared with the once a year Passover Meal. This interpretative method of "spiritualizing" ancient practices made the message of Jesus more accessible to the Gentile population but it also meant that a continuing Judaic community who kept with a consistency a direct continuity with Judaic ritual practice could no longer regard the Christian communities as being within the fold of Judaism.
It is one thing to say the Bible is inspired; it is quite another to actually understand what that means. Is it inspired because it shows how deeply flawed people can receive a vision about behavioral requirements beyond their ability to fulfill with perfection? Is it inspired because it is the final word in exact detail about everything under the Sun? Is it inspired because it requires the faith of a perfect interpretive contortionist to harmonize everything in it as completely consistent, comprehensive and coherent? Is it inspired because of church administrative conventions making it the official "text book" of the church and so "inspiration" is something which can be voted on by imperfect people? Or is it inspired because it has within it a deferred inspiration status because it has a future still in bringing people to surpass themselves in the fulfillment of love and justice in this life and the one to come?
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2015
The problem with infallibility is that it is self-deconstructing. Who is able to be infallible enough to designated that which is infallible? An infallible truth needs an infallible interpreter. Who is presumptuous enough to volunteer to be in the role of the infallible one? It turns out that infallibility is the community's way of favoring an ideology to be standard for the administration of the community. Infallibility is a pragmatic political and administrative procedure to provide functional standards for the community. The distance between the nose and forefinger may be different for different people but the official measurement of a "yard" is the distance between the king's nose and forefinger. Infallibility is a community way of legitimizing authority. The infallibility of God, love and justice is always deconstructing because God, love and justice all partake of the freedom to have a hopeful future in human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2015
The writer of the Gospel of John includes the purpose of writing in the text: "These things are written so that you may believe..." Faith or "pistos" is the goal of the Gospel; in classic Greek rhetoric the word for the goal of rhetoric was "pistos" or persuasion. So faith or belief are those things about which one has come to be persuaded. The Gospel of John includes many rhetorical devices to coax persuasion in the readers and consistently has Jesus chiding the persons who take words literally. The purpose of John's Gospel is to evoke a sublime relationship with the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2015
With the verb "to be" language is something like a continual adjusting mathematical tautological equation. For the purposes of a word act in this moment I will take such and such to be equal or be equivalent to such and such. The famous "I am" sayings of the Oracle of Christ who is channeled in the writings of the Gospel of John shows the heuristic teaching formula for the Johaninne churches. The oracle Christ saying I am or I = Light, Truth, Way, Life, Resurrection, Good Shepherd, Gate, Vine is the significant tautological use of metaphors which takes mathematical equational formula away from the precision implied when referencing numbers and applies the formula in an understanding of the Risen Christ as an omni-competent Surpassing Person who models the goal of personal transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2015
Oppression, suppression, repression, authority, and self control are words of relationship with the power. When one is powerless one needs a different kind of care being exercised towards one. Powerlessness in the realm of knowledge is ignorance. Powerlessness in economics is poverty. The message of the Good Shepherd and sheep is about the nuances of power; giving and receiving of care in adequate reciprocity is the balance of justice which our world needs badly. There is too much exploitation in our world because inequities in knowledge, wealth and power are accepted as the a kind of social Darwinian fact of life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2015
One of the most famous projections of caring personality upon the Plenitude also known as God is the Twenty Third Psalm. The Lord is my Shepherd. The poet of this Psalm adopts a sheep's life as the metaphor of vulnerability for human existence. A sheep needs protection and there are enemies and a sheep dies. And yet the Shepherd is greater than the death of the sheep since the sheeply human poet professes to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. By faith each has to find a way to project a power of care towards oneself to be adequate to all of the vicissitudes of life, including the gate of death and imaginations of one's afterlife. Plenitude is a completely adjustable and pliable Freedom to whatever is. To live and characterize Plenitude as Caring Person larger than any single event or collection of events in one's life is the most important work of faith because if one can believe that ultimately one is cared for, then one will also be one who cares for others. It is a great work of faith to discover Plenitude as our caring Shepherd.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2015
On Genocide Remembrance Day when it seems so daunting to ponder the horrifying deaths of people who have become but grotesque statistics, one needs the hope of a powerful memory of God to be able to honor the individual beauty and value of each one who knew untimely human death. It also should teach us humility to know that tribalism and nationalism have resulted in using God to be the rubber stamp justification for some of the worst deeds of humanity. We should acknowledge that Holy Books can record that human beings misunderstood God in using God to justify human revenge and conquest in the competition for the use of the resources of this world.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2015
One of the strongest forces of causation is the force of interpretation. Through interpretation one collates meanings of the interaction of manifold events and contexts and by preparing the mind for action one has learned to deal with the expansive freedom which is abroad in our world. Through interpretation one is empowered to deal not mainly with why things happen, but what does one do and think now that something has happened. Through interpretation, events become providence through faith. Is the interpretative faith of Lady Julian of Norwich Pollyannish naivete when in the face of all she interprets, "All will be well indeed?" Or is interpretation with the power of hope-driven faith, the strongest force in human experience?
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2015
Earth Day is a day of acknowledging the most important relationship which we as humans have with our environment, the role of stewardship. In the past, a very large Earth gave us the ability to continually "run away" from our messes because there was always more land and always a future. As human population has grown and as our consumption of resources have increased exponentially there is less opportunity to escape our environmental repercussions of human consumptive activities. We live the dilemma of parasites whose lives may end if consumption takes the life of the host. Because we don't see God, we can treat God as the "absentee landlord" of the universe who will not punish our violation of tenant agreements, even though we know that our environment itself will punish us if we ruin it. How do we convert industry and free markets to truly "free" markets with a creative genius to survive in the pursuit of happiness and guarantee that people of the future will have the same quality of life in their pursuit of happiness on our Host Planet Earth? Let us not sin against creativity by saying "we can't" which really means "we won't."
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2015
Biblical scholarship involves reading the Bible beyond the "immediate" pleasure or "plain" meaning of the text in its artistic moment of interaction with the "meanings"of the words. In biblical scholarship one tries to come to be informed about how the text functioned within the context of a presumed original initial occasion and its functions within the communities which would have used the text to form their spiritual identities. Children who watch a Disney animated movie eventually understand the function of Disney movies in our entertainment constellation even though when they are watching the movie they don't really care for about functional analysis of the movie because they are engaged in the immediate pleasure of the watching event. A child might be totally bored to watch a documentary on the behind-the-scenes process of making an animated movie because it might "demythologize" the magic of the impact of the artistic moment. In biblical scholarship, one may have to study the function of a text with some lack of passion but eventually one finds the universal human patterns represented within an ancient text to have a current corresponding pattern within one's contemporary life and the passion of faith lives again in different details.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2015
St. Anselm taught us that it is better for a non-believer not to use the word "God" because it is incoherent to say that "there is no God." The incoherence occurs because by definition God means "that which none greater can be conceived" and so to even use the word God would mean that by definition greatness would at the very least assume existence. It could leave the atheist in the same mode as the rock musician Prince about his name; "the Being formerly known as "God.""
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2015
One could say that most of the New Testament writings are
writings of closure for the people who came to become a part of the messianic
movement centered on Jesus of Nazareth. Since
you and I do not need any closure from Judaism, we do not have to identify with
any of the negative relationships which are evident in the writing of
Christians who were both leaving Judaism at the same time they are being
excommunicated from the synagogues. It is important to understand the formation
of Christianity as a movement during a time of achieving closure from Judaism.
Aphorism or the Day, April 18, 2015
Disagreement in life among Christians or anyone mostly has to do with "how" one believes or thinks rather than what one is believing or thinking. Historically Christians have disagreed on how to understand and believe the resurrection of Christ, how to understand the nature of Christ, how to understand the miracles of Jesus, how to understand the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, how to ordain for ministry, how to regard the authority of the Scriptures, just to name a few. It would seem that the human tendency when faced with differences is to find an "official" reason or ideology for asserting why we are different and practice habits of mutual excommunication. It is interesting that religions which claim love as their chief value end up with such segregatory habits. The best spin we can put on it is that we are divided for diverse mission appeals to particular sectors of the human community because people's habits of thinking and practice go through transformation at very uneven consensual patterns.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2015
In language we use Physicality as a metaphor for intimate presence. An absent lover may read a passionate letter from the beloved and write, "I received your letter and felt as though you were right here with me delivering your loving words." We use the expression "it was as if he were really here." But often in our lack of language adroitness we will not let the biblical writers use Physicality as a metaphor for intimate presence. St. Paul wrote that if one was guilty of partaking of the Eucharist in an unworthy manner, one was guilty of the very body of Christ. Jesus said, "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood." We know the cannibalistic aspect of taking this with literal meaning. Why is it that readers of the Bible will not let biblical writers use an entire range of metaphors to speak about how intimate they felt about how the presence of God was known to them under the metaphors of the appearance of the Risen Christ? Christian have argued about Eucharistic presence of Christ: spiritual presence, symbolic presence, real presence, actual physical presence and so on. In such arguments we know less about the presence of Christ and more about how people use or misuse language in limiting the metaphorical expressiveness of language in human experience. Re-read the Gospel of John looking at how the writer presents Jesus as continually rebuking people who are limited to "literal" meaning rather than artistic metaphorical meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2015
St. Paul did not see Jesus during his life. St. Paul did not have a post-resurrection appearance of Christ contemporary with those of the remaining eleven disciples and the women disciples of Jesus. St. Paul had a visionary experience of Christ on his trip to Damascus when he was persecuting the followers of Jesus. St. Paul did not believe his experience of Christ was inferior to the experience of the disciples. This would indicate that the range of the experiences of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ were wide and varied and tailored to the individuals who received them. One wonders why a discussion was not raised as to whether St. Paul had an encounter with the bodily resurrected Christ. It would seem as though Paul's experience of the risen Christ would have been regarded with some skepticism by those who had a "true" encounter with the risen Christ, unless the validity of the encounters were established by the quality of life transformation rather than by exact scientific empirical definition of what a post-resurrection appearance of Christ entailed.
Aphorism of Day, April 15, 2015
How did the church account for its success in deriving from Jesus of Nazareth to successful communities popping up within the cities of the Roman Empire comprised of members who all claimed to have a spiritual experience based upon the continuing presence of the Risen Christ in their lives? They did so by writing about the transitional period of how Jesus went from being a person who walked and talked and then who died, but then who reappeared and then stopped reappearing in an Ascension event, except in the ascended state could reappear to people like St. Paul and who could be present in vital ways as the Holy Spirit to anyone who was open to experience this dynamic. The New Testament writers were trying to put in teaching form the progression of the success of their movement and the post-resurrection appearances are crucial explanatory links for the success of the Christian movement.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2015
Reincarnation, transmogrification, immortality of the soul, subjective immortality and objective immortality are the words in language we have in the history of humanity to characterize the afterlife, and there are others as well in other cultures. In objective immortality one believes that is it is enough to trust the memory of oneself as a continuing identifiable entity to the perfect memory of the God. That perfect memory would retain individual identity and keep it from being lost in the anonymity of dissipated and saturated energy forms that constitute the human person. In subjective immortality, one holds to a restorative and reconstituted personhood, including the body and so there is a belief in the retained identity of the human subject with the constitutive aspects of human life as we know it, except upon another "plane" of existence. Resurrection provides the necessary ideology for the presence of Hope and the anchor for the eventual triumph of Justice, since we hope for more than what can be achieved in life and Justice only gets variously approximated in human situations. Always having a definite future in some re-constituted state which retain differences in identity is a discourse of comfort. We should not dismiss the lack of verifying precision about any future states; if we're honest we cannot really attain any completely authoritative precision about our current state (we only know what we know about ourselves when we say we know it). The discourse of the future, even beyond life as we know it is unavoidable for humanity because we are constituted by Hope and always having a future.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2015
UFO-ologists developed classifications for close encounters with UFO or alien life form. First Kind: Visual Sighting of UFO about 500 feet away. Second Kind: Physical effects are evidenced. Third Kind: Animated Creature present. The Gospel writers have their own ways of classifying the post-resurrection appearances of Christ. The highest order of classification was that it had to seem to be an actual physical encounter. Physicality was the metaphor for "substantial" encounter or real encounter. Physicality was used in the words of Jesus when his words would be literally cannibalistic if one did not appreciate that Physicality was a metaphor for "substantial, and real relational encounter." Jesus said, "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part in me." Nothing is more obvious than the use of Physicality as a metaphor for the fact that relationship encounters with the Risen Christ had for the recipient a super-substantial reality. It is post-scientific fundamentalism which does not have regard for the wonderfully nuanced literary skills of the New Testament writers who wrote from genuine, undeniable transformational spiritual experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2015
Resurrection is an affirmation of everlasting life and invites us to have the humility to accept ourselves and the creative freedom alive in the world as the evidence of everything always being in an unfinished state of process. If process and change are evidence of eternal life, we may fear that the individual personal entity may eventually be so dissipated by the magnitude of change such that personality may be dissolved like a sugar cube in the ocean beyond recognition. A gift of being human and having language means that we attain memorial concrescence, that is a substantial state of constitutional esteem such that we are given hope of having self-hope about our continuous endurance in some way. That we have the hope of endurance and that we have memory in imperfect ways invites us to accept ourselves as lesser reflection of One who has perfect and Lasting Endurance and Perfect Memory and therefore is able to substantiate our future endurance within a Perfect Memory.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2015
If one reads carefully the "doubting" Thomas story one finds that is is less about Thomas and more about the validity of the faith of people who did not have eye-witness experience of Jesus. The punchline of the "doubting" Thomas story actually has to do with the experience of the real presence of Christ through writing. "These things are written so that you may believe..." All but a very few number of Christians have had to rely upon the validity of other kinds of "presences" of Christ which the writer of John's Gospel affirms as blessed as the writer has the oracle of the Risen Christ say, "Blessed are those who have not seen yet who have believed."
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2015
The disciples got rather immediate reparative resolution from the traumatic stress of the death of Jesus. We look for the instantiation of resurrection reparation in our own lives from the traumatic stress of our own losses and hurts in life. And since we all are going to die and often the path to death involves the progressive loss of things we took for granted during our youthful performance, we find that ultimate reparation has to be delayed to post-death or post-life imaginations. There are people who do not ever recover from traumatic events; how does the resurrection reparation get instantiated for them? Resurrection reparation does not involve us being just the recipients of renewing grace, it also means that we receive resurrection renewal to take care of those for whom the resurrection renewal is continuously delayed until their posthumous state. In short, the proof of the resurrection is that we use the energy of the Spirit of the resurrection to take care of each other until we attain posthumous substantiality in the preserving, reviving and perfecting Memory of God.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2015
The disciples of Jesus only had three days to suffer Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome because Jesus re-appeared to enough of them to help them not only recover but then to "glorify" the event of his torture and death on the cross. Would that everyone who suffers events of trauma could have reparative experiences which would nullify the terrible effects of traumatic events. Or better yet, if Easter living actually took over this world we could eliminate the severely traumatic events. Dream on Easter people but pray for all with Post Traumatic Stress suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2015
Artistic presence is perhaps a more evocative presence than actual presence. Actual presence has such immediacy when joy, fear, bafflement all conspire to create cocktails of brain chemistry which motivate reactionary behaviors. An artistic presentation of a previous event allows for the "impaired effects" of immediacy to have lost their ability to influence one's action. As to the post-resurrection appearances of Christ for the last two thousand years, one knows them as artistic presences and thus one is not frightened as if one has seen a "ghost;" one has the luxury of being moved toward a reflective experience of the Sublime which can be integrated into one's life transformation through faith energy driven by pure Hope.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2015
A goal of rhetoric is what one might call, "propriety," or saying the fitting and right thing for the occasion of the person(s) involved. Do the words of propriety make the event of empathy actually occur? Or are the words offered attractive enough to bear the projections of the hearer as being an adequate explanation of the state of one's being? How do any of us account for seeming mysterious states of euphoria or despair? Something we ate? Good news? Bad news? Or unknown? If one returned to one's car in a parking lot and find the door "keyed" one's experience of such an event might instigate or be the cause of a state of anger and one sees the connection between feeling and actual incident. The death and resurrection of Jesus occurred only once and yet suddenly many people are accounting for their states of euphoria because of knowledge or information about these one time events. How did these events become the hermeneutic (interpretive) lure to draw such projections of hope from so many people who did not even witness them? It is almost as though there is primeval hope native within the human heart which is waiting for the perfect narrative to release the energy of this profound hope. The release of that energy of hope was variously called the Holy Spirit or God's omnipresence being released because the balloon which kept the Air trapped within was pierced by knowledge of the perfect event to be the propitious accompanying interpretive narrative to explain a profound native Hope.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2015
Events such as are involved in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ create at least two classes of people, those who were there and those who were not. Can those who were not there claim equality of experience with those who were not there? The church has mainly consisted of those who "were not there" hence the church has been constituted by people who have a different order of experience with Jesus, perhaps mostly of the artistic type in the language/literary art of oral story telling and in the written form of the Scriptures. So essentially the church has formed among people who were "not there" and who have had to rely upon memorial traces presented by people who were there and on the evocative traces in "spiritual" experience which so many people seem to have and who have used the life, death and resurrection of Christ as an interpretive framework to understand the significance of those evocative "spiritual" experiences. Welcome to the season of Easter as we come to some honesty about how we negotiate through the many "Presences" of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2015
Easter Sunday is a good day for rapprochement honesty about the ubiquity of Hope, Hope's discourses and Hope's narratives. Christians who believe the hopeful narratives of the resurrection appearances of Christ should also note how hope is present in every possibility discourse which is unavoidable in human experience of even those who would call themselves atheist or agnostic. People who do not admit the relevance of the resurrection discourse to their lives should none the less admit the pervasiveness of hope in possibility discourses of all sort which do not yet have empirical verification. Easter is a good day for all to be open to the future and honestly admit that each person uses a variety of a "totalizing" hope discourses when one speaks. Things which are "total" such as love and justice and hope are quite meaningful even while they are eventually deconstructing of detailed statements and actual life practice. Easter is a good day for all to admit that we share in the meaningful discourses of hope, love and justice even though such discourses cannot be empirically verified unless the confession of one who feels hopeful, love and justice counts as proof.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2015
Are people who lived in the past hopelessly doomed because they did not have privileged access to the latest knowledge? What about all of the people who died with appendicitis or in child birth before C-sections or of the plagues before vaccines? They cannot receive retroactive treatment. Holy Saturday is the day of the descent of Jesus to the place of the dead; the Apostles Creed once stated that he descended to "hell." Jesus being the "latest" message in salvation was viewed as a missionary to the departed to help bring to currency those in the holding tank of the dead and allow those who would have received the knowledge of his Gospel to take advantage of it and gain release. Time travel is a common trope in movies and is based upon the imagination of people who do not have actual relationship in space and time to have such a relationship in the imaginations of art. This imagination is based upon the belief in enough of a shared humanity across time to allow that people could communicate in spite of the differences etched in them by their historical contexts. It could be that the risen Christ is so protean that He can be adopted to any time or place situation even when the appearance of Christ to sensitivities of an orthodox Christian amid incense and icons may be significantly different than the evangelical preacher who exhorts exclusively from the King James Bible. We can account for time travel and differences if we can appreciate the Art of faith. Art tolerates much more diversity than if one reduces an absolute Art of religion to the truth of logically consistent statements.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2015
We can live in such resurrection pride that we might be tempted to live detached or isolated from real profound loss. Good Friday is a day to observe the profound reality of death and loss; we cannot be detached from either. Perhaps our recent history in our country has left us in such prosperity that we don't know the events of people living a lifetime in having their countries occupied or a generation of people experiencing devastating plagues. Probably America's most sustained circumstance of grief was the Civil War, though one could also note that land evicted Native Americans and those who experienced the long and sustained indignity of slavery certainly have known the profundity of the sense of endless loss. Most of our loss for most Americans is personal loss, individual loss and that too should not be minimized. Good Friday is a time to read W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues," and resist a resurrection pride which would minimize the true reality of death and loss. One might say that the deeply profound grief of those who lost their best friend and mentor Jesus Christ was the magnetic energy which gave rise to the post resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ.
W. H. Auden's Funeral Blues
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 forever: 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 2, 2015
Peter thought that the messiah had much more important things to do than wash his feet. The message of Maundy Thursday is that we can spend so much time being fixated on great and important things we minimize or neglect the small tasks of hospitality which actually account for the survival of the community. Or if our lives are full of doing all of the small tasks which "keep the trains running on time," we can grow weary in well-doing and not "feel important" since society does not really give much recognition to quotidian kindnesses.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2015
What St. Paul called a reinterpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jews called a significant discontinuity with the Judaic tradition. St. Paul and early leaders who adapted the message of Christ to the Gentile populace "spiritualized" things, Judaic. Circumcision became circumcision of the heart; the church became the new "Israel;" the Eucharist became a weekly "Lamb of God" ritual meal compared with the once a year Passover Meal. This interpretative method of "spiritualizing" ancient practices made the message of Jesus more accessible to the Gentile population but it also meant that a continuing Judaic community who kept with a consistency a direct continuity with Judaic ritual practice could no longer regard the Christian communities as being within the fold of Judaism.
