Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2016
One does not like to support "censorship" in the reading of the Bible even though one might advocate age appropriate exposure to certain words in the Bible. One might want to even wait to present certain "words" of Jesus to young children such as "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." Children who might prefer "plain" meaning might have their faith baffled by such phrases. Adults too are baffled by such "family values" expressed by baldly presenting discipleship in the school of Jesus in competition with love of one's family members. Such words of Jesus perhaps show that the Gospels were originally not meant for general reading; they were disciple manuals for a few who were given "koans*" or seemingly contradictory or absurd word puzzles to confound the logical and commonsense mind to pierce a spiritual level of faith. The bald literalness of such phrases cannot be denied and their confounding connotations beg for interpretive contortions to find a rhetorical yogic posture to "align" the linguistic chakras of one's life.
*Koan=a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2016
The biblical issue involves the main issue of life, namely, we as people having language and being formed in the meanings derived by the fact that we possess language and it us. Having language problematizes everything; language marks individual events since it arises in contexts of human usage. Language purports to be "universal" in that when people use it they assume the ability to transfer meanings in functional ways to other people. Language is problematic because meanings are different for different people. If meanings are enforced by oppressive power then solidarity of meanings is but the dictators propaganda. Meanings which are charismatic and winsome in persuading people to embrace them can be as varied as the places where a fall leaf can be blown. The significant problem in declaring the Bible to be God's word is that there is no one accessible to us who is infallible enough to tell us what a "correct" meaning is. Language is so problematic because it becomes nuanced in the pragmatic contexts of people's life and truth becomes "contextual" for the group which describes what will be true for the solidarity of the particular community of one's significant and telling location.
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2016
The Gospel collection of "Jesus-speak" can drive the logician crazy. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. But you can't be my disciple unless you hate the members of one's family? This hard saying goes with cutting off offending hands and plucking out offending eyes, also recommended as a spiritual practice of "fasting." Could it be that "family fast" or taking a fast from one's family is a spiritual method when family frustration issues are actually detrimental to one's living in the spiritually centered place of being a child of God first. When one's family relationships are defeating spiritual life, one needs to find how to fast from one's family in order to appreciate and love them better. This can happen through finding one's primary relationship as a child of God. The words of Jesus are perhaps hyperbole (spiritual koans) to say if one finds one family relationship with God then one can find a way to negotiate the challenges which arise in family life. The spiritual "koans" of Jesus challenge "literal" interpretation, even the recommendation of the famed Irenaeus who said the "plain" meanings of the Gospel words are the preferred meanings. If read carefully, one should note that Gospel words actually overthrow plain meanings by challenging one to find literally consistent logic therein.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2016
The thesis of the book of Job is that good people suffer. Job's "friends" are compelled to eloquently argue about God not allowing a good person to suffer so that in order for God's image to be "saved" there has to be something willfully bad in Job's life to have caused his severe misfortune. The Psalmist often opined, "Why do the bad people have better luck than good people?" If the freedom abroad in the world does not match up good fortune with good living and punishing fortune for bad living, what is the purpose of life or morality or believing in God? People of faith learn how to honor Continuous Creative Freedom as what is truest about God and all derivation of such Freedom is what makes meaningful morality and suffering and people who comfort each other within suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2016
People can quit reading the Bible because it makes them feel guilty because modern day practice of justice seems to be more embracing than the extent of justice extended to various classes of people in the cultures which generated the biblical texts. How could an ancient cultural practice which seems to be "demeaning" to the lives of classes of people actually be an eternal principle. Such dilemma can occur because too many people absolutize the ancient cultural practices and do not accept the task of re-writing the meanings of love and justice within the contexts of our lives today. Reading the Bible is hard work; it is not passive acceptance of ancient cultural practices. It involves discerning the eternal principles of love and justice and responding to the omnipresent Holy Spirit to work out the meanings of love and justice in our current lives.
Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2016
Sometimes it is difficult to translate descriptions of social phenomena from the setting of the ancient world to our world. In the Gospel communities there was to be radical welcoming of the strangers and the outsiders. There are different kinds of strangers and outsiders. Some strangers and outsiders are actually people whose condition have made them thus, and yet they desire and have the ability to live and participate in covenantal relationship which allow them to make and keep baptismal vows within a community. In our modern world the stranger and outsider is often feared because the inability of people to even be able to achieve the reciprocity of covenantal practice. Some people have come to be described as "socially impaired" because of the events in their past which have constituted them in a way that leaves them living from one exigent need of the moment to the next exigent need of the moment. We often forget that the Christian Movement was founded by people who knew themselves to be strangers and outcast but who banded together expressing the ability to form covenantal communities practicing baptismal promises with each other. In our efforts to help the needy today, we need to realize that there is not a apple to apple comparison of the needy who eventually formed the early Christian communities and the needy on the streets today who are impaired in the ability to define their lives by the way in which we understand the baptismal covenant.
Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2016
Segregation and integration impulses are found within religious traditions and practices. Segregation in religion can be seen in the "call" to separation from other surrounding people so as to retain a certain doctrinal or ethnic purity. Such separatism is valorized as a call to be "holy" or special or uncompromised by "outsiders" who could dilute the purity of identity and purpose. The people of Israel vis a vis their neighbors were supposed to be separate or "holy" and not be tainted by interaction with those who had different religious and cultural practices. They developed a "holiness" or purity code to maintain their separation. Their prophets usually explained the woes which befell their peoples because they forgot to practice their holy separation and compromised with the polytheistic practices of their neighbors. Every religious organization practices a degree of separation or segregation to define their identity vis a vis who is not like them. Yet most every segregated group provides a universal gate of entrance as long as those who enter the community are willing to conform to the rules of the community. So most organization which will let others in who agree to the follows the rules are "catholic" in being open to all. The segregation and integration issue gets a bit more tricky when members of the group disagree about compromising what is crucial to the identity, the purity, the holiness code of a group. This issue is what separated Judaism and Christianity; St. Paul and St. Peter came to give up the ritual purity requirements for the Gentile followers of the teaching of Jesus. The integration of Gentiles into Christo-centric Judaism by dropping the ritual purity requirements for Gentiles eventually separated the two into distinct religions. In an Hegelian model the thesis of Judaism and the antithesis of the Roman citizen world resulted in the synthesis of the Christian faith which was neither Judaism nor Roman. It was something new; Christian Gentiles did not follow ritual Judaism nor did they engage in the cult of the Emperor.
Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2016
People in military intelligence use the feeds from satellites to study sites on the ground to make educated guesses about what kind of activity is happening on the ground. People who seek textual intelligence and wisdom about ancient biblical texts resort to the theory that words reveal the condition of the lives of those who generated the text. Loving one's enemy, welcoming the stranger and the poor characterize many of the Gospel words. This may reveal that the appeal of the Gospel took hold within the lives of people who did not have significant community in their lives due to a variety of reasons, such as sickness, being widowed, or nomadism in search of a better situation in a city of the Roman Empire. The Gospel practice had to become more diverse than the exclusive ritual practice of Judaism if this diverse group of people who were attracted to the Gospel message and communities were to become consolidated within a socio-religious movement which grew to become the institutional church.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2016
In the meeting of people of differences, the differences of ethnicity, places of origin, socio-economics, the nature of "meeting" involves various dynamics such as conformity, conversion, mutual sharing, mutual conversion, mutual appreciation or rejection and incompatibility. To make friendship or even fellowship a possibility there needs to be an ideological framework to foster a mutually beneficial fellowship between people who come from places of different orientation. Christo-centric Judaism of St. Paul as compared with traditional Judaism proved to be the framework for the birth and development of the Christian movement because it was more receptive to Gentiles retaining their cultural practices and still being included within the fellowship and community of faith. The purity codes of Judaism were supposed to keep the observant Jews in a state of "holy" separation from the world. St. Paul proclaimed a "holy" separation based upon "spiritual" separation and he was lenient about the physical signs of separation such as the ritual purity rules which were inaccessible to many of those who came into the Christian house churches of the cities of the Roman Empire. How radical can our welcome be without changing the deep "structures" of one's community identity? This issue is what contributed to the separation of the Jesus Movement from the synagogue. This dynamic is always involved in the offering of a radical welcoming of "different" people to one's fellowship since one deals with the fear of being changed by others more than one imprinting the values and practice of one's community upon the new arriving visitor. Sometimes tradition deeply rutted in institutional practice becomes like an automatic cookie cutter in turning out "institutional" copies and when this occurs the visitor is only free to be fed into the institutional cookie cutter process of making another conforming copy. Lots of people today fear what they will lose in the church as another institution of conformity. One must conform in one's society and job and so the postmodern individual (as a free economic agent) is choosing carefully and limiting the situations of conformity. Part of the mission of the local parish is to create a fellowship to celebrate the freedom of the individual gifted one within the paradigm of the love symbols promoted by connections of Christians in the geography of our world and in the succession of time involving revering and dynamically applying the identities of the past in the present.
Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2016
Sometimes we are so hung up about the superiority of our spiritual traditions, we discount the favorable conditions which support their growth and such conditions may actually have to do with sociological factors, particularly the phenomena of urbanization and immigration. The movements of people mean that people arrive in a new place with no established social connection and if there is a group which welcomes the "outsider" the beliefs of the welcoming group will be persuasive and winsome. This perhaps was a key ingredient in the growth of the church in the Roman cities just as it is an ingredient in the rise of "mainline" religions in Africa which has undergone urbanization. The practice of welcoming the stranger is the condition for effective evangelism.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2016
Jesus freed the Sabbath from being but a prescribed 24 hours of time on a weekly calendar. He healed on the Sabbath and so declared that healing makes any time as Sabbath time honoring God and our neighbors.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2016
Doctors and nurses practice healing arts on Sabbaths, Sundays and holy days. Firefighters put out fires on Sunday. First responders save lives on holy days and Sabbaths. If one removes healing and saving as being valid for the Sabbath, one defeats the purpose of having a Sabbath at all.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2016
The sabbath principle is based upon the time of one's life as a "possession" which one is given stewardship over. "Time is money" goes the phrase of valuable productive time within industry. Time is what everyone has equally even though we don't end up having equal duration in Time. The sabbath principle is like the "tithe" principle; by designating sacred and worship time, one then adds the quality of blessing on the rest of the time of one's life. Sabbath time is the logical result of the first commandment; loving God above all others, means actually putting in the time to do so. Sabbath time is taking intentional time to "love God."
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2016
The Peter Principle of human management states that persons often are promoted to the level of their incompetence. Sometimes the way in which religious authorities promote religious practice, they make religion rise to the level of it incoherence and ridiculousness. One can remember the Sunday Blue Laws in States which allowed the purchase of beer but not a baby bottle. Jesus noted that his religious competitors applied sabbath rules to censure the healing of a person on the sabbath. Religious minutiae can rise to greater importance for the convenience of controlling clergy and not be compatible with a genuine notion of salvation, namely, the good holistic health of people. We need to be aware of instantiating religion at its worst since some people identity God with the contradictory practices of Christ-like behaviors and use the hypocrisy of religious folks as good reason not to believe in God.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2016
Eternal threats, excommunication, shunning and heresy trials have been part of the juridical discourse of religions. In the history of the behaviors of religious people threatening people for their "own good" has been resorted to. Part of the modern revolt against the religious rhetoric of threats has been to deny the existence of a God who would validate the local bias of anyone who offered such threats. Threatening discourse may be a comfort to suffering people something akin to the little brother saying to a bully,"my big brother is going to get you!" The irony is that both powerless and powerful people use threats; the difference is that some have sticks and stones to hurt while others hopefully proclaim a future afterlife reckoning. What is actually validated empirically is the function of the discourse which reveals the ideology context of the users of such discourse.
Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2016
Good and holy things can be made into harmful stupidities. The sabbath rule is good and holy; strive to give one seventh of one's time to God. But if the sabbath is reduced to a set of picky rules about what cannot be done within a twenty four period of time then the sabbath can lose the function of being beneficial to humanity. If healing can be regarded as a forbidden work on the sabbath then the sabbath loses its salvatory effects. Jesus pointed out that good rules can be held and practiced wrongly.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2016
One does not like to support "censorship" in the reading of the Bible even though one might advocate age appropriate exposure to certain words in the Bible. One might want to even wait to present certain "words" of Jesus to young children such as "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." Children who might prefer "plain" meaning might have their faith baffled by such phrases. Adults too are baffled by such "family values" expressed by baldly presenting discipleship in the school of Jesus in competition with love of one's family members. Such words of Jesus perhaps show that the Gospels were originally not meant for general reading; they were disciple manuals for a few who were given "koans*" or seemingly contradictory or absurd word puzzles to confound the logical and commonsense mind to pierce a spiritual level of faith. The bald literalness of such phrases cannot be denied and their confounding connotations beg for interpretive contortions to find a rhetorical yogic posture to "align" the linguistic chakras of one's life.
*Koan=a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2016
The biblical issue involves the main issue of life, namely, we as people having language and being formed in the meanings derived by the fact that we possess language and it us. Having language problematizes everything; language marks individual events since it arises in contexts of human usage. Language purports to be "universal" in that when people use it they assume the ability to transfer meanings in functional ways to other people. Language is problematic because meanings are different for different people. If meanings are enforced by oppressive power then solidarity of meanings is but the dictators propaganda. Meanings which are charismatic and winsome in persuading people to embrace them can be as varied as the places where a fall leaf can be blown. The significant problem in declaring the Bible to be God's word is that there is no one accessible to us who is infallible enough to tell us what a "correct" meaning is. Language is so problematic because it becomes nuanced in the pragmatic contexts of people's life and truth becomes "contextual" for the group which describes what will be true for the solidarity of the particular community of one's significant and telling location.
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2016
The Gospel collection of "Jesus-speak" can drive the logician crazy. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. But you can't be my disciple unless you hate the members of one's family? This hard saying goes with cutting off offending hands and plucking out offending eyes, also recommended as a spiritual practice of "fasting." Could it be that "family fast" or taking a fast from one's family is a spiritual method when family frustration issues are actually detrimental to one's living in the spiritually centered place of being a child of God first. When one's family relationships are defeating spiritual life, one needs to find how to fast from one's family in order to appreciate and love them better. This can happen through finding one's primary relationship as a child of God. The words of Jesus are perhaps hyperbole (spiritual koans) to say if one finds one family relationship with God then one can find a way to negotiate the challenges which arise in family life. The spiritual "koans" of Jesus challenge "literal" interpretation, even the recommendation of the famed Irenaeus who said the "plain" meanings of the Gospel words are the preferred meanings. If read carefully, one should note that Gospel words actually overthrow plain meanings by challenging one to find literally consistent logic therein.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2016
The thesis of the book of Job is that good people suffer. Job's "friends" are compelled to eloquently argue about God not allowing a good person to suffer so that in order for God's image to be "saved" there has to be something willfully bad in Job's life to have caused his severe misfortune. The Psalmist often opined, "Why do the bad people have better luck than good people?" If the freedom abroad in the world does not match up good fortune with good living and punishing fortune for bad living, what is the purpose of life or morality or believing in God? People of faith learn how to honor Continuous Creative Freedom as what is truest about God and all derivation of such Freedom is what makes meaningful morality and suffering and people who comfort each other within suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2016
People can quit reading the Bible because it makes them feel guilty because modern day practice of justice seems to be more embracing than the extent of justice extended to various classes of people in the cultures which generated the biblical texts. How could an ancient cultural practice which seems to be "demeaning" to the lives of classes of people actually be an eternal principle. Such dilemma can occur because too many people absolutize the ancient cultural practices and do not accept the task of re-writing the meanings of love and justice within the contexts of our lives today. Reading the Bible is hard work; it is not passive acceptance of ancient cultural practices. It involves discerning the eternal principles of love and justice and responding to the omnipresent Holy Spirit to work out the meanings of love and justice in our current lives.
Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2016
Sometimes it is difficult to translate descriptions of social phenomena from the setting of the ancient world to our world. In the Gospel communities there was to be radical welcoming of the strangers and the outsiders. There are different kinds of strangers and outsiders. Some strangers and outsiders are actually people whose condition have made them thus, and yet they desire and have the ability to live and participate in covenantal relationship which allow them to make and keep baptismal vows within a community. In our modern world the stranger and outsider is often feared because the inability of people to even be able to achieve the reciprocity of covenantal practice. Some people have come to be described as "socially impaired" because of the events in their past which have constituted them in a way that leaves them living from one exigent need of the moment to the next exigent need of the moment. We often forget that the Christian Movement was founded by people who knew themselves to be strangers and outcast but who banded together expressing the ability to form covenantal communities practicing baptismal promises with each other. In our efforts to help the needy today, we need to realize that there is not a apple to apple comparison of the needy who eventually formed the early Christian communities and the needy on the streets today who are impaired in the ability to define their lives by the way in which we understand the baptismal covenant.
Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2016
Segregation and integration impulses are found within religious traditions and practices. Segregation in religion can be seen in the "call" to separation from other surrounding people so as to retain a certain doctrinal or ethnic purity. Such separatism is valorized as a call to be "holy" or special or uncompromised by "outsiders" who could dilute the purity of identity and purpose. The people of Israel vis a vis their neighbors were supposed to be separate or "holy" and not be tainted by interaction with those who had different religious and cultural practices. They developed a "holiness" or purity code to maintain their separation. Their prophets usually explained the woes which befell their peoples because they forgot to practice their holy separation and compromised with the polytheistic practices of their neighbors. Every religious organization practices a degree of separation or segregation to define their identity vis a vis who is not like them. Yet most every segregated group provides a universal gate of entrance as long as those who enter the community are willing to conform to the rules of the community. So most organization which will let others in who agree to the follows the rules are "catholic" in being open to all. The segregation and integration issue gets a bit more tricky when members of the group disagree about compromising what is crucial to the identity, the purity, the holiness code of a group. This issue is what separated Judaism and Christianity; St. Paul and St. Peter came to give up the ritual purity requirements for the Gentile followers of the teaching of Jesus. The integration of Gentiles into Christo-centric Judaism by dropping the ritual purity requirements for Gentiles eventually separated the two into distinct religions. In an Hegelian model the thesis of Judaism and the antithesis of the Roman citizen world resulted in the synthesis of the Christian faith which was neither Judaism nor Roman. It was something new; Christian Gentiles did not follow ritual Judaism nor did they engage in the cult of the Emperor.
Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2016
People in military intelligence use the feeds from satellites to study sites on the ground to make educated guesses about what kind of activity is happening on the ground. People who seek textual intelligence and wisdom about ancient biblical texts resort to the theory that words reveal the condition of the lives of those who generated the text. Loving one's enemy, welcoming the stranger and the poor characterize many of the Gospel words. This may reveal that the appeal of the Gospel took hold within the lives of people who did not have significant community in their lives due to a variety of reasons, such as sickness, being widowed, or nomadism in search of a better situation in a city of the Roman Empire. The Gospel practice had to become more diverse than the exclusive ritual practice of Judaism if this diverse group of people who were attracted to the Gospel message and communities were to become consolidated within a socio-religious movement which grew to become the institutional church.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2016
In the meeting of people of differences, the differences of ethnicity, places of origin, socio-economics, the nature of "meeting" involves various dynamics such as conformity, conversion, mutual sharing, mutual conversion, mutual appreciation or rejection and incompatibility. To make friendship or even fellowship a possibility there needs to be an ideological framework to foster a mutually beneficial fellowship between people who come from places of different orientation. Christo-centric Judaism of St. Paul as compared with traditional Judaism proved to be the framework for the birth and development of the Christian movement because it was more receptive to Gentiles retaining their cultural practices and still being included within the fellowship and community of faith. The purity codes of Judaism were supposed to keep the observant Jews in a state of "holy" separation from the world. St. Paul proclaimed a "holy" separation based upon "spiritual" separation and he was lenient about the physical signs of separation such as the ritual purity rules which were inaccessible to many of those who came into the Christian house churches of the cities of the Roman Empire. How radical can our welcome be without changing the deep "structures" of one's community identity? This issue is what contributed to the separation of the Jesus Movement from the synagogue. This dynamic is always involved in the offering of a radical welcoming of "different" people to one's fellowship since one deals with the fear of being changed by others more than one imprinting the values and practice of one's community upon the new arriving visitor. Sometimes tradition deeply rutted in institutional practice becomes like an automatic cookie cutter in turning out "institutional" copies and when this occurs the visitor is only free to be fed into the institutional cookie cutter process of making another conforming copy. Lots of people today fear what they will lose in the church as another institution of conformity. One must conform in one's society and job and so the postmodern individual (as a free economic agent) is choosing carefully and limiting the situations of conformity. Part of the mission of the local parish is to create a fellowship to celebrate the freedom of the individual gifted one within the paradigm of the love symbols promoted by connections of Christians in the geography of our world and in the succession of time involving revering and dynamically applying the identities of the past in the present.
Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2016
Sometimes we are so hung up about the superiority of our spiritual traditions, we discount the favorable conditions which support their growth and such conditions may actually have to do with sociological factors, particularly the phenomena of urbanization and immigration. The movements of people mean that people arrive in a new place with no established social connection and if there is a group which welcomes the "outsider" the beliefs of the welcoming group will be persuasive and winsome. This perhaps was a key ingredient in the growth of the church in the Roman cities just as it is an ingredient in the rise of "mainline" religions in Africa which has undergone urbanization. The practice of welcoming the stranger is the condition for effective evangelism.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2016
Jesus freed the Sabbath from being but a prescribed 24 hours of time on a weekly calendar. He healed on the Sabbath and so declared that healing makes any time as Sabbath time honoring God and our neighbors.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2016
Doctors and nurses practice healing arts on Sabbaths, Sundays and holy days. Firefighters put out fires on Sunday. First responders save lives on holy days and Sabbaths. If one removes healing and saving as being valid for the Sabbath, one defeats the purpose of having a Sabbath at all.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2016
The sabbath principle is based upon the time of one's life as a "possession" which one is given stewardship over. "Time is money" goes the phrase of valuable productive time within industry. Time is what everyone has equally even though we don't end up having equal duration in Time. The sabbath principle is like the "tithe" principle; by designating sacred and worship time, one then adds the quality of blessing on the rest of the time of one's life. Sabbath time is the logical result of the first commandment; loving God above all others, means actually putting in the time to do so. Sabbath time is taking intentional time to "love God."
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2016
The Peter Principle of human management states that persons often are promoted to the level of their incompetence. Sometimes the way in which religious authorities promote religious practice, they make religion rise to the level of it incoherence and ridiculousness. One can remember the Sunday Blue Laws in States which allowed the purchase of beer but not a baby bottle. Jesus noted that his religious competitors applied sabbath rules to censure the healing of a person on the sabbath. Religious minutiae can rise to greater importance for the convenience of controlling clergy and not be compatible with a genuine notion of salvation, namely, the good holistic health of people. We need to be aware of instantiating religion at its worst since some people identity God with the contradictory practices of Christ-like behaviors and use the hypocrisy of religious folks as good reason not to believe in God.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2016
Eternal threats, excommunication, shunning and heresy trials have been part of the juridical discourse of religions. In the history of the behaviors of religious people threatening people for their "own good" has been resorted to. Part of the modern revolt against the religious rhetoric of threats has been to deny the existence of a God who would validate the local bias of anyone who offered such threats. Threatening discourse may be a comfort to suffering people something akin to the little brother saying to a bully,"my big brother is going to get you!" The irony is that both powerless and powerful people use threats; the difference is that some have sticks and stones to hurt while others hopefully proclaim a future afterlife reckoning. What is actually validated empirically is the function of the discourse which reveals the ideology context of the users of such discourse.
Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2016
Good and holy things can be made into harmful stupidities. The sabbath rule is good and holy; strive to give one seventh of one's time to God. But if the sabbath is reduced to a set of picky rules about what cannot be done within a twenty four period of time then the sabbath can lose the function of being beneficial to humanity. If healing can be regarded as a forbidden work on the sabbath then the sabbath loses its salvatory effects. Jesus pointed out that good rules can be held and practiced wrongly.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2016
The Virgin Mary has had to be the feminine counter weight to the vast patriarchalism in Christian tradition. When women did not have power or position they took flight with Mary who was Assumed into heaven as Co-Redemptrix. Men could also pray to her and submit to her even as they by tacit cultural practice subjugated the women of their lives. But if God's will and Mary's dignity is to be regarded on earth, women need to be afforded full dignity on earth even as Mary has heavenly respect. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Let the exaltation of Mary truly exalt all women.
Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2016
We can understand being at peace and division when we encompass the contradictions within our own personal histories. I am not the same person I was at the age of 16; my beliefs and expressions have changed many times and yet in the unity of being a person of the same name for all these years, I am peacefully the same person who has encompassed the radical events of division within my stages of growth. We need to transfer this interior personal peace and division dynamic to the communal world. Institutions and societies continue to grow and change even while retaining the history of their disagreeable pasts. There have been painful breaking away from previous ideas which have come to be unworthy of continuing, e.g. slavery, subjugation of women et al. Some divisions within religious communities have been the result of a complete change of direction. Christo-centric Judaism became the churches which broke continuity with the ritual conformity to Judaism. This was a break and a division and not peaceful if one's family was on differing sides. And so the oracle words of Jesus about divided families is explanatory truth about what happens when faith stages are uneven and not unanimous within the lives of people who are growing at different paces. Peace and division co-exist because of the great patience of God.
Aphorism of Day, August 13, 2016
When Bible readers make the Bible into a Superhero who is an omnipresence, omnipotent, omniscience Person with Omni-relevance in everyone's life situations all of the time, they violate the nature of word and literature. They must then somehow defend the words of the Bible in making them over-identified with God. All of the words of the Bible are not context specifically relevant for all people all of the time. Difference reigns in the application relevancy of specific words to specific contexts in a person's life as they arise and as "match ups" are made in the particular insights at a particular time for a particular biblical passage in a particular person's life experience. The reading of the Bible can prove that inspired insights can and do occur and this means that the words of the Bible follow the contours of language itself in being the vehicle of meaningful practices of language in its many discursive practices. The Bible is made up of many texts which flow within the overall human practices of words which constitute human experience and having a "most favored" status for many human readers, the words do exert a significant function of forming values in the words and behaviors of people. But there is a danger; misinterpreting and making the Bible a false equivalence with God can lead to the cruelties which modern skeptics skewer all people of faith with. A chief task of postmodern readers of the Bible is to rescue it from cruel misreading of those who have divinized ancient cultural practices rather than seeking the relevant principle of love and justice which herald creative advance in humanity achieving a truer humaneness and "godliness."
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2016
A question from Jesus: "Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" "How to interpret" suggests that the issue is the quality of the life of the interpreter. Life is the process of being in situations of making continuous judgments followed by necessary actions. Some of those judgments and actions are the habitual rituals of our life and we hope that we have "made automatic through ritual" some wise regular responsible actions in our lives. But there are new events and new situations which require wise discernment. The goal of our lives of interpretation should be wise discernment as a prelude to wise actions. New situations sometime require invention and creativity and "thinking outside of the box" of previously ritualized responses. May God grant us wise discernment in our daily life task of interpreting the events of our lives and community.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2016
In the world of the computer and the internet, the word "cloud" is used to refer to the storage of data that can be made available to all retrieving devices which have access to the internet. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the writer uses the metaphor: "Cloud of witnesses" to refer to this memorial storage of the heroes of faith whom we can access as examples of what faithful living can be. We cannot be the heroes but their witness can inspire us to live faithful lives given the specifics of our own lives. Jesus is the one who is called the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. He is the teacher and we are his student in his school of faith. We seek wisdom to transform the memory of the good examples of faithful people into new and creative acts in our own lives. As great as the heroes of faith were, we only truly honor them by being faithful in the unique ways given to us in our own situations. We revere those in the "cloud of witnesses" by seeking to be in this "cloud" ourselves as the living reality of the "Communion of Saints."
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2016
In the writings about faith, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews connects the present and future with the past. The story of faith is a story of the continual unfolding of creative completeness. No one can be individually perfect or complete in the time of one's life; one must rely upon the future to complete who one is and what one has done. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews wrote: "Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect." Perfection at any given moment is the recent surpassing state of comprised totality (as it can possibly come to language) in Time meaning the latest time reinvents and recreates the significance of people in the past. Time means that all people are in this together and with lives of faith, we seek to add "quality" to the overall meaning of all people of all times. The total quantity of the deeds of faith deriving from the character of faith is what will always, already overcome evil and will prove the confession of Lady Julian of Norwich: All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well indeed.
Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2016
Our image palate of Jesus is often "Gentle Jesus meek and mild." What about this Jesus? "Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! " How is this Jesus quote representative of the Prince of Peace? For biblical interpreters who are devoted to harmonizing all of the words about Jesus and God into a neat perfectly consistent and perfectly comprehensive and internally coherent Being in the way in which God and Jesus are presented in the Bible, they must take up the hermeneutic contortion posture of a pretzel. For those who admit to just being human reading inspired writings as imperfect interpreters and imperfectly being inspired by the perfect Holy Spirit, we are not forced into making God or Jesus the expression of "hobgoblin of small minds" (see Ralph Waldo Emerson) demanding artificial consistency. We can be true to multi-faceted and multi-contextual ways in which biblical writings came to be received and also "ratified" by imperfect people voting on the canon of Scripture. The words of Jesus about division instead of peace is a contextual marker of the early Christian communities where a family might have members who were Pharisees, Zealots, followers of John the Baptist and followers of Jesus. All of these religious parties felt "passionately exclusive" about their beliefs and when such people because of familial relationship are forced to interact one can certainly know the demise of domestic tranquility. Creative advance often creates discomfort and uneven situations of faith development. Such are often the most poignantly painful because of blood relations. This is not unique to the time of the early church. How many families are divided over religious preference? How many parents have wanted wayward children go through "deprogramming" because of their embrace of a religious expression mildly or widely different from the parental religious expression? Ironically, a person may find the internal Peace of Christ even while experiencing the rejection by members of the former paradigm with previous ideological commitments.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2016
The words of Jesus: "Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" This is perhaps the question of dilemma for everyone all of the time. Our interpretation of the events of the present precedes our action. Interpretation derives from the filters we wear through which we process the information that we take in. We need to understand the value designators within the paradigm of our interpretive framework to understand our filters of interpretation. Value designators are formed by the exemplars which have gained the attachments of our hearts. So one can filter the world through the profit motives of Wall Street or through the preponderance of the words of Jesus on behalf of the poor. In one's interpretation one has to understand how one is pre-determined to arrive at one's conclusions. Values derive from where one's heart values are truly fixed. Prevenient values pre-determine one's interpretation of the present time.
Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2016
Everyone and everything has a future even if it is different manifestation of how we and all things are currently constituted. Having a future means that we live under the constraints of time and so we age and we change. Things can go wrong and things can go right; fixing our logic upon what can go wrong inspires fear. Fixing our logic upon things that can go right is the work of faith. We can do this if we accept the plethora of the normalcy of good vis a vis the fewer events of ill which deprive the normalcy of goodness for short periods of time. Focusing upon the normalcy of good now will help to develop our "faith organ" and teach us to anticipate the goodness of Hope's future.
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2016
Two events that might invite fretting and anxiety: Wedding planning and the burglary of one's home. Words of Jesus: Be ready, don't be afraid if your treasure is in heaven then what can be stolen from you? And if your relationship with the beloved is the main thing, why worry about the liturgy and the wedding party? Love and faith are the treasures which prepare one for living.
Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2016
Faith is a posture of living which one may adopt because one is so small in the face of Plenitude that one always has dreadfully limited knowledge about many things in life and especially about having actual knowledge of the future. Fear is the opposite of faith in that it is anxiety about what we don't know and then having anxiety about our very condition of having limited knowledge. Faith is living with hope and the exact outcomes of the visions of hope are not yet known and so we must choose to embrace an attitude of a friendly Plenitude ultimately assigning us with hopeful outcomes. Fear or Faith; choose today which way to be motivated today.
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2016
"By faith we understand that ......what is seen was made from things that are not visible." The writer of Hebrew places "faith and understanding" in an interesting relationship. One could say in a meaningful way that the present visible world always comes from the past invisible world. The past exists now in all of the variety of traces within the memory of humanity and in the memory technologies used to retain the pre-existing conditions of the present. The chief dynamic in bringing the visible present from the invisible past is Word. That we have Word in human language ability means we have the transmission of the present from the past. We cannot infallibly prove the past to anyone even while we might build meaningful objective communities of consensus about what happened in the past. Faith is the mystical element of understanding which is a confidence that what we think we know rests upon an ocean of unseen negligible phenomena in a Plenitude of what we cannot empirically verify. Humanity has confidently assert all sorts of consensual knowledge that later has been disproved by subsequent consensual communities. The consensus of any community does not negate the mystical function of faith which always is an indication that what we know resides within a plethora of More.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2016
Faith is never completed as a way of "being and acting in the world." Why? Because Time is not over and there is always a future because we posit an Everlastingness which always includes the Everbeforedness. Faith is related to hope and hope is always the possible which has not yet become the actual. With faith we act towards the targets given to us by hope and those targets represent the motives of justice, love and kindness as a way of providing orientation toward better actual events occurring in the future.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2016
Where is the affinity of one's heart? The heart is a physical organ but it is used to designate in a metaphorical way the center of one's desire. How and where one's desire is drawn from one creates the objects of desire and those objects, varied as they are, create what one values. How and what one desires create the treasures of one's life. Thus we have the saying of Jesus: "For where your treasure is, there your heart is also." This saying places the heart in identity with whatever one desires and reveals the values of one's life. As empirical literalists, we may believe that we can only value things that can be "seen." Yet God is not seen; how can God be valued? God is the plethora of all that was, is and shall be and thus eludes being a graspable place for our desire to land in any final way. But the striving of the heart for the plethora of God is what keeps us from allowing our desire to land upon any temporary thing which can become an idol. When we make an idol then we must serve it and we lose our freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2016
πιστός, "pistos" is the New Testament Greek (koine) word for "faith." In the classical Greek of Aristotle, the same word meant "persuasion." It is referred to in his work "Rhetoric," and persuasion is the goal of rhetoric. One can note quite an evolution in the use of this word "pistos" in different times and contexts, even though one can also see the connection. Faith is that which one is persuaded about such that one acts toward the meaning of such persuasion. Obviously, in the political climate when politicians are asking us to "trust them" and the promised meanings they bark, one might note that trust involves the character of the people who are producing the words. Faith in God, in Christ and in the Holy Spirit means that one has a relationship with the one in whom one has faith. I am persuaded about God because of the Freedom that exists in the created order. I have faith in Christ because the created order is only known to us by virtue of Word. I am persuaded about Holy Spirit because it seems undeniable that an Omni-presence allow mutual experience of all beings in their particular environments within that which is the Great Horizon of our environments.
We can understand being at peace and division when we encompass the contradictions within our own personal histories. I am not the same person I was at the age of 16; my beliefs and expressions have changed many times and yet in the unity of being a person of the same name for all these years, I am peacefully the same person who has encompassed the radical events of division within my stages of growth. We need to transfer this interior personal peace and division dynamic to the communal world. Institutions and societies continue to grow and change even while retaining the history of their disagreeable pasts. There have been painful breaking away from previous ideas which have come to be unworthy of continuing, e.g. slavery, subjugation of women et al. Some divisions within religious communities have been the result of a complete change of direction. Christo-centric Judaism became the churches which broke continuity with the ritual conformity to Judaism. This was a break and a division and not peaceful if one's family was on differing sides. And so the oracle words of Jesus about divided families is explanatory truth about what happens when faith stages are uneven and not unanimous within the lives of people who are growing at different paces. Peace and division co-exist because of the great patience of God.
Aphorism of Day, August 13, 2016
When Bible readers make the Bible into a Superhero who is an omnipresence, omnipotent, omniscience Person with Omni-relevance in everyone's life situations all of the time, they violate the nature of word and literature. They must then somehow defend the words of the Bible in making them over-identified with God. All of the words of the Bible are not context specifically relevant for all people all of the time. Difference reigns in the application relevancy of specific words to specific contexts in a person's life as they arise and as "match ups" are made in the particular insights at a particular time for a particular biblical passage in a particular person's life experience. The reading of the Bible can prove that inspired insights can and do occur and this means that the words of the Bible follow the contours of language itself in being the vehicle of meaningful practices of language in its many discursive practices. The Bible is made up of many texts which flow within the overall human practices of words which constitute human experience and having a "most favored" status for many human readers, the words do exert a significant function of forming values in the words and behaviors of people. But there is a danger; misinterpreting and making the Bible a false equivalence with God can lead to the cruelties which modern skeptics skewer all people of faith with. A chief task of postmodern readers of the Bible is to rescue it from cruel misreading of those who have divinized ancient cultural practices rather than seeking the relevant principle of love and justice which herald creative advance in humanity achieving a truer humaneness and "godliness."
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2016
A question from Jesus: "Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" "How to interpret" suggests that the issue is the quality of the life of the interpreter. Life is the process of being in situations of making continuous judgments followed by necessary actions. Some of those judgments and actions are the habitual rituals of our life and we hope that we have "made automatic through ritual" some wise regular responsible actions in our lives. But there are new events and new situations which require wise discernment. The goal of our lives of interpretation should be wise discernment as a prelude to wise actions. New situations sometime require invention and creativity and "thinking outside of the box" of previously ritualized responses. May God grant us wise discernment in our daily life task of interpreting the events of our lives and community.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2016
In the world of the computer and the internet, the word "cloud" is used to refer to the storage of data that can be made available to all retrieving devices which have access to the internet. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the writer uses the metaphor: "Cloud of witnesses" to refer to this memorial storage of the heroes of faith whom we can access as examples of what faithful living can be. We cannot be the heroes but their witness can inspire us to live faithful lives given the specifics of our own lives. Jesus is the one who is called the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. He is the teacher and we are his student in his school of faith. We seek wisdom to transform the memory of the good examples of faithful people into new and creative acts in our own lives. As great as the heroes of faith were, we only truly honor them by being faithful in the unique ways given to us in our own situations. We revere those in the "cloud of witnesses" by seeking to be in this "cloud" ourselves as the living reality of the "Communion of Saints."
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2016
In the writings about faith, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews connects the present and future with the past. The story of faith is a story of the continual unfolding of creative completeness. No one can be individually perfect or complete in the time of one's life; one must rely upon the future to complete who one is and what one has done. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews wrote: "Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect." Perfection at any given moment is the recent surpassing state of comprised totality (as it can possibly come to language) in Time meaning the latest time reinvents and recreates the significance of people in the past. Time means that all people are in this together and with lives of faith, we seek to add "quality" to the overall meaning of all people of all times. The total quantity of the deeds of faith deriving from the character of faith is what will always, already overcome evil and will prove the confession of Lady Julian of Norwich: All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well indeed.
Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2016
Our image palate of Jesus is often "Gentle Jesus meek and mild." What about this Jesus? "Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! " How is this Jesus quote representative of the Prince of Peace? For biblical interpreters who are devoted to harmonizing all of the words about Jesus and God into a neat perfectly consistent and perfectly comprehensive and internally coherent Being in the way in which God and Jesus are presented in the Bible, they must take up the hermeneutic contortion posture of a pretzel. For those who admit to just being human reading inspired writings as imperfect interpreters and imperfectly being inspired by the perfect Holy Spirit, we are not forced into making God or Jesus the expression of "hobgoblin of small minds" (see Ralph Waldo Emerson) demanding artificial consistency. We can be true to multi-faceted and multi-contextual ways in which biblical writings came to be received and also "ratified" by imperfect people voting on the canon of Scripture. The words of Jesus about division instead of peace is a contextual marker of the early Christian communities where a family might have members who were Pharisees, Zealots, followers of John the Baptist and followers of Jesus. All of these religious parties felt "passionately exclusive" about their beliefs and when such people because of familial relationship are forced to interact one can certainly know the demise of domestic tranquility. Creative advance often creates discomfort and uneven situations of faith development. Such are often the most poignantly painful because of blood relations. This is not unique to the time of the early church. How many families are divided over religious preference? How many parents have wanted wayward children go through "deprogramming" because of their embrace of a religious expression mildly or widely different from the parental religious expression? Ironically, a person may find the internal Peace of Christ even while experiencing the rejection by members of the former paradigm with previous ideological commitments.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2016
The words of Jesus: "Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" This is perhaps the question of dilemma for everyone all of the time. Our interpretation of the events of the present precedes our action. Interpretation derives from the filters we wear through which we process the information that we take in. We need to understand the value designators within the paradigm of our interpretive framework to understand our filters of interpretation. Value designators are formed by the exemplars which have gained the attachments of our hearts. So one can filter the world through the profit motives of Wall Street or through the preponderance of the words of Jesus on behalf of the poor. In one's interpretation one has to understand how one is pre-determined to arrive at one's conclusions. Values derive from where one's heart values are truly fixed. Prevenient values pre-determine one's interpretation of the present time.
Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2016
Everyone and everything has a future even if it is different manifestation of how we and all things are currently constituted. Having a future means that we live under the constraints of time and so we age and we change. Things can go wrong and things can go right; fixing our logic upon what can go wrong inspires fear. Fixing our logic upon things that can go right is the work of faith. We can do this if we accept the plethora of the normalcy of good vis a vis the fewer events of ill which deprive the normalcy of goodness for short periods of time. Focusing upon the normalcy of good now will help to develop our "faith organ" and teach us to anticipate the goodness of Hope's future.
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2016
Two events that might invite fretting and anxiety: Wedding planning and the burglary of one's home. Words of Jesus: Be ready, don't be afraid if your treasure is in heaven then what can be stolen from you? And if your relationship with the beloved is the main thing, why worry about the liturgy and the wedding party? Love and faith are the treasures which prepare one for living.
Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2016
Faith is a posture of living which one may adopt because one is so small in the face of Plenitude that one always has dreadfully limited knowledge about many things in life and especially about having actual knowledge of the future. Fear is the opposite of faith in that it is anxiety about what we don't know and then having anxiety about our very condition of having limited knowledge. Faith is living with hope and the exact outcomes of the visions of hope are not yet known and so we must choose to embrace an attitude of a friendly Plenitude ultimately assigning us with hopeful outcomes. Fear or Faith; choose today which way to be motivated today.
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2016
"By faith we understand that ......what is seen was made from things that are not visible." The writer of Hebrew places "faith and understanding" in an interesting relationship. One could say in a meaningful way that the present visible world always comes from the past invisible world. The past exists now in all of the variety of traces within the memory of humanity and in the memory technologies used to retain the pre-existing conditions of the present. The chief dynamic in bringing the visible present from the invisible past is Word. That we have Word in human language ability means we have the transmission of the present from the past. We cannot infallibly prove the past to anyone even while we might build meaningful objective communities of consensus about what happened in the past. Faith is the mystical element of understanding which is a confidence that what we think we know rests upon an ocean of unseen negligible phenomena in a Plenitude of what we cannot empirically verify. Humanity has confidently assert all sorts of consensual knowledge that later has been disproved by subsequent consensual communities. The consensus of any community does not negate the mystical function of faith which always is an indication that what we know resides within a plethora of More.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2016
Faith is never completed as a way of "being and acting in the world." Why? Because Time is not over and there is always a future because we posit an Everlastingness which always includes the Everbeforedness. Faith is related to hope and hope is always the possible which has not yet become the actual. With faith we act towards the targets given to us by hope and those targets represent the motives of justice, love and kindness as a way of providing orientation toward better actual events occurring in the future.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2016
Where is the affinity of one's heart? The heart is a physical organ but it is used to designate in a metaphorical way the center of one's desire. How and where one's desire is drawn from one creates the objects of desire and those objects, varied as they are, create what one values. How and what one desires create the treasures of one's life. Thus we have the saying of Jesus: "For where your treasure is, there your heart is also." This saying places the heart in identity with whatever one desires and reveals the values of one's life. As empirical literalists, we may believe that we can only value things that can be "seen." Yet God is not seen; how can God be valued? God is the plethora of all that was, is and shall be and thus eludes being a graspable place for our desire to land in any final way. But the striving of the heart for the plethora of God is what keeps us from allowing our desire to land upon any temporary thing which can become an idol. When we make an idol then we must serve it and we lose our freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2016
