Phil (w)Rite

Thursday, December 25, 2025

Quiz of the Day, December 2025

Quiz of the Day, December 25, 2025

Which is true about the original observation of Christmas?

a. Christmas was in December

b. Christmas was in Gregorian calendar January

c. Christmas was Julian calendar December

d. all the above

Quiz of the Day, December 24, 2025

Which of the following is a similarity in the accounts of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke?

a. visitors to the birth

b. Actual physical place of birth

c. the appearance of the Angel Gabriel

d. the birth of Jesus to a virgin

Quiz of the Day, December 23, 2025

What person's hymn might be a model for the Magnificat?

Quiz of the Day, December 22, 2025

Which of the following of the twelve disciples did not have an or attributed to them?

a. Peter

b. John

c. Philip

d. Andrew

g. James

Quiz of the Day, December 21, 2025

A perhaps legendary tradition assigns the origin of the hymn Te Deum to what saints?

a. Augustine and

b. and

c. Aquinas and

Quiz of the Day, December 20, 2025

Which is not one of the colors of the ?

a. red

b. pale

c. brown

d. white

e. black

Quiz of the Day, December 19, 2025

The seals and the scroll in the

a. are the messages to the seven churches

b. are the progressive unveiling of God's plan in history

c. are the eventual Books of the Bible

d. are the plans to defeat the Roman Empire

Quiz of the Day, December 18, 2025

Where is Jesus referred to as the "?"

a. Jude

b. Genesis

c. Romans

d. Revelation

Quiz of the Day, December 17, 2025

is not mention in which of the following:

a. Matthew

c. Luke

Quiz of the Day, December 16, 2025

A survey of the is found where in the Bible?

a. Ezekiel

b. Daniel

c. Isaiah

d. Zechariah

e. Revelations

f. a, b, and d

g. d and e

Quiz of the Day, December 15, 2025

Where is it written about ?

a. Ezekiel

c. Revelations

d. Zechariah

Quiz of the Day, December 14, 2025

What New Testament book was written to comfort people who were worried about their departed loved ones who had died before the Lord had returned?

a. 1 Corinthians

c. Jude

Quiz of the Day, December 13, 2025

The are

a. located in modern day

b. located in modern day Turkey and Macedonia

c. all located in modern day Turkey

d. located in modern day Turkey, Greece, and Italy

Quiz of the Day, December 12, 2025

a. an

b. Latin title for a Psalm

Quiz of the Day, December 11, 2025

Which New Testament Book refers to ?

c. 1 John

d. Jude

e. Revelations

Quiz of the Day, December 10, 2025

The "" is found where in the Bible?

a. Zechariah

b. Revelations

e. all the above

f. a and c

g. b and c

Quiz of the Day, December 9, 2025

The Latin phrase which a priest using the says which receiving the ablutions of his hands comes from

Quiz of the Day, December 8, 2025

Where is the "" used as a metaphor in Hebrew Scripture?

b. Ezekiel

e. b and c

f. a and d

Quiz of the Day, December 7, 2025

Which person does not have a song in the ?

Quiz of the Day, December 6, 2025

What humble man from Turkey may be the most popular worldwide saint?

Quiz of the Day, December 5, 2025

What New Testament book makes a reference to a prophecy of which is not found in the ?

Quiz of the Day, December 4, 2025

Which of the following is found in more than one Gospel?

Quiz of the Day, December 3, 2025

a. was an

Quiz of the Day, December 2, 2025

did not make it to

Quiz of the Day, December 1, 2025

Who of the following was not a fisherman?

a. Peter

d. John

Aphorism of the Day, December 2025

Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2025

functioned in a more omni-competent way for ancient people. Today with the and the many genre and media, our discursive language practice had broken into many specialized areas of manifestation. Practically it means that the discourses of Scriptures have functionally moved into media of popular culture into , cinema, and the endless kinds of novel. There are many more outlets of the fantastic discourses of the day-dreaming sort.

Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2025

One a person is reduced to a text, that person becomes a community person on whom is projected all the things that human projectors can project. If you want someone to remain private and unknown, don't reduce such a person to a textual manifestation.

Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2025

is probably popular because of the experience of watching a "." The phenomena is irresistible.

Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2025

Stories and their language do not make things happen, they are merely ways in language of trying to explain in many different discursive ways which pertain to modes of human perception, what is happening in one's world through mainly reusing the traces in language that one has inherited in one's language traditions.

Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2025

Solstice is a time to remind ourselves how and has been. is and yet they have forced upon them with the European heritage out-of-season thinking.

Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2025

. The in using the Greek word parthenos for the Hebrew word in almah which means "young woman," was given the rhetorical option of using the "extra" meaning of parthenos, which can also mean "virgin." Rhetorically this meant the specialness of the concept of Jesus was without human intercourse and was a "" of . This was a superior way of presenting the earthly arrival of Jesus in contrast to the other divinized human figures of the time. It also was a way of presenting Mary as the paradigm "" Christian regarding the mystery of the ages, ""...having been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2025

, and force upon "preferred" if not required views of the various , even if the indicate that plethora of actual interpretations, many of which are contradictory. This means that interpretation is most often the administration function for community solidarity rather than to the actual conditions of diversity which exist around the interpretations of any text.

Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2025

The "" that is found in the words of , is an insight about accessing the state of "" as an accompaniment to the full range of what happens to humanity especially the sheer contradictions of wonderhood providing immunity/cluelessness about the truth of harshness. As in young children laughing playfully in a chasing a makeshift .

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2025

The past is really only "known" as traces of language products being made in the present or retained in passive storage form in written, video, or . The Bible is a book of of language products which is used to represent what happened to people in the past regarding their faith enshrined in language traditions. To engage language products of the past as memorial traces requires the impossible but imaginary tasks of visualization involving the transference of the present to a past assuming falsely a derivation from this present concrescence. (For example, one who believes currently that the can over ride the laws of gravity now, believes that such happened in the past. And one who believes in throughout time, interprets the records of the violations of uniformity of natural causes in the past in an artistic reading of the the fantastic). One can assume that others in the past like us in the past had "really real" experiences, but the contextual fullness of any really real experience was never accessible and only known through the continuous interpretive censorship and bias which anyone's limited experience is but an example of the reductionism forced upon us because words can never signify everything in a linguistic event.

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2025

includes designated text book words of human experience used as community abbreviations for extra-biblical life experience to help provide an interpretive framework for communities to form identities within the much greater extra-biblical life experience. The are further abbreviations with selectively interpret "biblical words" so that can be given modes of inculcating community identity and administer church order.

Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2025

is self contradictory since to name it and bring an individual view to language makes it "public." Solipsism might name the unpublished inner lives of anyone as being the unique perceiver interacting in a unique way with one's own information field. Such a perceiver is indeed unique and the solipsistic unpublished inner field may be the font of creativity of what may come to language products.

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2025

The word "" means on the whole before it refers to a worldwide strategy to convince all the people of the world about a worship tradition which centers on . The historic fact is that all will not be convinced for reasons of regional identities and the inaccessibility of the to many people. Catholicity in the literal meaning of the world should be centered upon what is truly accessible to all people, namely, things like , love, and justice. One apologetic way that have used to unite Christ and the universal is to acknowledge that the "unchurched" anywhere can be anonymous "Christian" in making Christ nature equal to behaving in the dignity of love and justice. Can one be humble about one's tradition if one implies that "my tradition" is identified with the universal virtues, instead of being one of many paths in manifesting the same.

Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2025

The are poetic anecdotes of the range of human feeling responses to a variety of situations stretching from agony to ecstasy with lots of quotidian in between. And the poems are composed with the premise that God of the composers is the main providence in the lives of composer and the people who are to share in the resulting .

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2025

is admitting that everything has not yet come to language products in what an individual or the entire human race can know at any given time while interpreting and being persuaded that the unknowable but influential great is friendly toward us.

Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2025

may be based partly upon the fear that some good things may die out, when good representatives of those good things die. Rituals are the communal way of remembering the good things that we believe should be retained into the future.

Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2025

is the continual collection of as many actual requiring the continual expansion of storage capacity. Still the comparison of the actual stored body of language products is minute next to the conceptual realm of what might be. However with the differences between the actual and possible becoming slightly less means that new mysteries of the former Possible are being solved with greater frequency.

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2025

One can conceive of a from which particular and context specific positive events of language use and the inherent structuration by language derives.

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2025

Often people of faith are people who seem to be proud of or privilege what cannot be known or said while people with more pragmatic leanings privilege the value of what can be known or said in the manipulation of the things and people of their environments for goals in history and time, and not for some unknown eternal or everlasting future of personal or communal continuity. But surely the assumes that the material world is to be cherished, valued, and stewarded for those higher purposes of love, justice, and all virtues?

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2025

and of religious perspectives are asking that their which pertain to how they believe they have accessed the be accepted in the world many discourses which pertain to human language endeavors. The modern problem for people of faith is that they pit discourse again the in ways which create perhaps the unnecessary situation of implying that one cannot be a at the same time. If we as know how to stay within our with truths appropriate to each discourse, then we will affirm a fully human art of living which allows us to be poets and scientists at the same time without contradiction.

Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2025

Human life is the language dance around what is not language in the continual compulsion to create language products which identify us mainly as language users with language as the prior assumption in anything being known or coming to consciousness including the reflexive use of language about itself as explaining it role in the continual dance around what is unknowable except through language.

Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2025

Does one ever escape the , that is, having to use words to say the "Real" while claiming to be unsayable? By naming as , is not apophatic already in the positive realm in naming it? Rather than calling the Real a negation why not call the Real an ? Rather than saying God is not anything that we can say, we can mean God is not any one particular thing that we can say, but the divine could be the community of an all-inclusive One. Wouldn't it be truer to our linguistic being to say that what is Real or Divine is everything that has been, is and will be all at once? Would not this most positive view be a more adequate representation of fullness than the subtraction to complete negation? is still relevant in the denial of an idolatrous identification of the divine with any one single isolate thing or word for a thing.

Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2025

Most are caught in the rut of their which precode how they must read the . They read with prior which preclude them being a "neutral" reader. Following , we are all of the text. A text "says" what is says according to our interpretive grid.

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2025

Something that we don't know and can't say with complete fullness seems to accompany everything that know in having come to language or to "feeling," but we still project upon this "anti-anything" endless words.

Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2025

is a choice and action of when one interdicts a regular habit of consumption by refraining for specific purposes like , , and perhaps with some social cause or personal protest.

Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2025

The paucity of information about means that we should read them a for for the listener/reader to project themselves upon for insights regarding being formed within the community's values.

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Christmas and Continuing Baby Bliss

Christmas Eve December 24, 2025
Is. 9:2-4,6-7 Ps.96:1-4,11-12
Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14

Lectionary Link

The ascendency of Christmas in popularity both within churches and within many different cultures over the more theologically important Holy Week and Easter liturgy, is due the topic being more child friendly than the Holy Week and Easter observances. Yes, Easter is indeed the happiest of endings; the Jesus who was born was brought to a cruel death, but he came back to life as the hero on whose wings the rest of us so choosing, can also have assurance of life after life, or life after the death which occurs in everyone's life.

And we certainly edit and censor the Christmas pageant not to include the slaughter of the holy Innocents by Herod, or the forced migration of the Holy Family to Egypt for fear of their lives. We too, are editors of how we tell the Christmas story, just as the original writers were editions of their perspective of what the continuing experience of the life of Christ meant for the people of the local guilds of people who gathered and who became so evident for their "new" beliefs that they are dubbed as "Christians."

Christians were "anointed" ones, in the Spirit people, who themselves were surprised by the effervescence and group dynamic of this catching infectious enthusiasm, that they had to to try to account for this effervescence, its origin and the genius of its effective working.

The group of Christians had to account for the dynamics of what they were experiencing. Experiencing this inward anointing and enthusiasm was like a genie that needed a bottle to contain it and to give it a concrete social reality, to teach it, to perpetuate a spiritual methodology, a mystagogy to initiate people into as a rule of life.

The didactic writings and mystagogy of St. Paul came before the Gospel writings in the institutional process of the burgeoning Jesus Movement. St. Paul's mysticism was founded upon the experience of coming into an identity with Christ, a losing of the notion of a separate identity from Christ by the power attributed to the death of Jesus. "I am crucified with Christ, but I live, not I but Christ lives within. The life I now life I live by the faith of Christ." Not the faith "in" Christ as some external person, but the faith of Christ within me as this new alter personality of being able to check my ego at the door. In the Pauline writings, this experience was the mystery of the ages, "Christ in you the hope of glory."

So how does this Pauline mysticism come to attain origin discourse and how is this mystical experience encoded within an actual narrative? It happens in the teaching modes of the Gospel writing. It uses narrative to encode mystagogy. The secret of the Gospel is not to read them literally but mystically, and spiritually. We are to read the Gospels as "parables" which means that one has to come to the inward experience of the mystery to understand the intended meanings or one is lost in a childish and even idolatrous literalism.

And if Christmas has been overly childified, the Christmas narratives reside within the overall child motif of the Gospels. The Christmas story encodes the orientation into Wonderhood which the Christian mystagogues were teaching to their initiates.

The brilliant but very literal Nicodemus did not understand the mystery, the one that oracle Rabbi Jesus proclaims: You must be born again. How does the literal Nicodemus respond? How can I get back into my mother's womb at my age. Can we appreciated that the child motif, namely, the birth motif is a chief metaphor of the Jesus Movement, a Movement that exists because people had, have had for centuries, and are having now, these new birth experience which have the contextual coding of this identity with Christ.

What we know within this great big world of diverse experiences and mutual happenings, we can experience a sleeping baby, and in the baby's dream state, the baby smiles and coos. And we're in wonder and we're jealous without admitting it. This baby bliss has power over us because this baby is experiencing the innocence of the pre-linguistic state where good and evil or anything at all have not yet been designated. And we want to get back to innocence; and it is within us an unretrievable memory and we can only access it in projecting on the baby in bliss.

Everything about a baby is not bliss as any parent knows who has to attend to such a vulnerable one, but the baby bliss experience co-exists in this world of experience of everything else, including the world of cruel tyrants, mystic magi, and peasant shepherds.

And what else did oracle Jesus say? He has hid the mystery from the wise and revealed it to infants. This is a rather enigmatic way of saying the pre-linguistic, the extra-linguistic, the oceanic meditative state of Wonderhood can be known within everything else that happens in life. And the one who knows initiation into this state of Wonderhood is blessed indeed to know a saving accompaniment to everything else which happens in one's life.

Let us tonight enter into the baby bliss tonight. Let us embrace the linguistically inaccessible blisshood that resides within us in our memorial vaults but has been neglected and repressed by the many cruel things which have happened on our way to the knowledge of good and evil.

The baby bliss hood which we have forgotten is still in and with us, and when our adult egos too often formed by the paranoia producing hard knocks of life repress the original oceanic wonder at the edge of our inner consciousness; when our egos can crack and soften and receive this babyhood bliss as the warmth which melts hardened egos, we can know the peace and bliss without having any external reason for doing so.

And this is the mystagogy which is hidden in the Christmas story for us. Let the baby bliss of Christmas be the warming and melting fire for our egos so hardened by life's harms and hurt, and let this bliss give us the hope of new agency of being about to be better to and for ourselves, to our families and communities, and peacemakers of love love and justice in our world today.

Merry Baby Bliss Tonight! Enter afresh into Wonderhood tonight. Amen.

Prayers for Advent, 2025

Wednesday in 4 Advent, December 24, 2024

God of anticipating eves, for newness to come from what has been; we ponder tonight the co-existence of complete vulnerability in the midst of empires with oft cruel actors, and we bemoan the truth of when champions of the vulnerable came to power they too partook of its corruption; give us the wisdom to find the golden mean of power caring for the vulnerable in the oft frightening world of what can happen. Amen.

Tuesday in 4 Advent, December 23, 2025

God, forgive our power mongering selves who wish for our empires to be your kingdom; help our lives to mirror your devotion and submission to the states of vulnerability, even to the infancy which demand that we be empires of care rather than empires of oppression. Amen.

Monday in 4 Advent, December 22, 2025

God with us, you have given us the wisdom insight that we are altogether with everything always already, and this massive impinging upon our existence though only locally mediated in very limited and give us the grace to accept our merely being human in the middle of all that is more than us. Forgive us for using our modes of reducing your immensity to not practice love and justice with the many other merely human. Amen.

Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 21, 2025

God, we want to be overshadowed by great wonder in oceanic ways, but our language forces us to live on contextual surface rafts to navigate the oft complicate morass of probabilities in what may happen; give us to access our source of Wonder even as we have to be committed to the concrete particulars required in the tasks of love and justice. Amen.

Saturday in 3 Advent, December 20, 2025

Overshadow our lives, , that the Christ nature might rise to be known in us as our of being made in the and always already a member of the . Give us grace to be good and caring family members with each other. Amen.

Friday in 3 Advent, December 19, 2025

, we are born into worded lives and we always already qualify previous worded states with new worded states within the worded conditions we have inherited which code our existence; within the many determinations of our lives by our inherited word condition, give us wisdom to become playwrights with freedom to determine future deeds for better love and justice. Amen.

Thursday in 3 Advent, December 18, 2025

God, you as the , bring us to admit that we live in a as we like sugar cubes are dissolving in the ocean honor the effect of your dissolving greatness and confess the limits of our influence; but yet let our sweet but small influence be the winsome flavors of love and justice. Amen.

Wednesday in 3 Advent, December 17, 2025

God, we don't profess you being with us to reduce the mystery of the greatness that we cannot know except in the unavoidable connection we have with everything; we confess Jesus as the One who was with us in the necessary humility that happens because the particular co-existing with you as the great . Amen.

Tuesday in 3 Advent, December 16, 2025

God, who has been and is and will be with us, through the mystery of , infancy, adulthood, death and beyond; give us grace to live in the with the All all the time. Amen.

Monday in 3 Advent, December 15, 2025

God, your immanence through the of Jesus Christ stands to us as our acceptance of our human experience as as having valid ways to access the beyondness to our human experience to project upon a what is best and greatest for what is good and just. Give us confidence to access the realm of hope rather than the realm of despair which is linked to what can go wrong in human experience. Amen.

, December 14, 2025

, the screaming outcomes of horrendous happenings in the free conditions cause us to doubt that health and salvation are truly statistically normal; give us the grace and the courage to exercise our freedom to do good things as the most hopeful way to live within a . Amen.

Saturday in 2 Advent, December 13, 2025

God of the and the ; give us the values of of the for the poor and , and let us in courage work to implement those values in our . Amen.

Friday in 2 Advent, December 12, 2025

God, by virtue of being persons who are language users, to use language is to project personal tones upon all that we bring to language in our primary mode of and we project personality, even greatest , because of the way in which personhood defines our reality; give us grace to do justice to our language use and our personhood as it is best expressed in love and justice which express superior harmonic connection. Amen.

Thursday in 2 Advent, December 11, 2025

Help us, Good God, when we fear that goodness is losing or will lose in our world especially when godly representatives of goodness die or are silenced; give us faith to believe in the even in environments of the apparent success of evil. Amen.

Wednesday in 2 Advent, December 10, 2025

Jesus, who proclaimed the , forgive us if we claim a Gospel which does not bring actual good news to people who are poor for whom the toleration of their poverty cannot qualify as good news. Give us honesty about the in action. Amen.

Tuesday in 2 Advent, December 9, 2025

, we await for the hungry to be filled with good things, even as the rich are sent away empty; let your mothering nurture be also a firm rebuke to those who amass so much of the goods of the world while so many are left with so little. Amen.

Monday in 2 Advent, December 8, 2025

who inspires patience because we cannot have everything we want exactly when we want it; let not our patience be in support of the and give us courage to work to persuade all who was delay justice for reasons of past traditions. Amen.

Second Sunday of Advent, December 7, 2025

God, we mourn continuously the awful use of to oppress people for their own greedy ends; give to the oppressed as we await the end of when justice might be evenly distributed for all. Amen.

Saturday in 1 Advent, December 6, 2025

, known by your in and through the ; your are so vast we can but create word funnels to reduce and categorize and teach your vastness in as in the which is about which surely is an from your . Give us receptive hearts for your comings. Amen.

Friday in 1 Advent, December 5, 2025

God, we confess Jesus as the One for us who best represented being bilingual in the ways of the and the ; give us grace to instantiate in our frail humanity things divine, the things of love and justice that we might be part of healing and . Amen.

Thursday in 1 Advent, December 4, 2025

Gracious God who is as vulnerable and weak to the free conditions of the world as we are because the ; give us the lure of your love to use best our freedom for goodness and love and prove the value of and justice because of unavoidable freedom. Amen.

Wednesday in 1 Advent, December 3, 2025

God, we stand before you as a humanity which has been incapable of as constantly swells to which compete for the resources of the world as if there were not enough for all; give us wisdom and grace to learn from the horrors of war and to fast from and to promote the basic health of all having enough to eat. Amen.

Tuesday in 1 Advent, December 2, 2025

God of , the supporting mentor and promoter of , give us grace but to be the outward and visible signs of the inward and invisible of the , who gives us an identity beyond our own limited egos. Amen.

Monday in 1 Advent, December 1, 2025

, you have given us for ; give us and initiative to use our energies for the alternative in what is good, lovely, and kind. Amen.

, as language users we can have of better futures for us and all people; give us grace not to but in a world which is often unloving and unjust. Amen.