PZ's Podcast: Recent Episodes
Mockingbird
From "Telstar" to "Vault of Horror," from Rattigan to Kerouac, from the Village of Bray to the Village of Midwich, help PZ link old ancient news and pop culture. I think I can see him, "Crawling from the Wreckage." Will he find his way? This show is brought to you by Mockingbird! www.mbird.com
Written by Jimmy Webb and performed by Glen Campbell, "Our Movie" is a very touching song. It describes a fulfilled marriage from its beginning and right through. It really describes one's whole life in affectionate and thankful perspective. For me the song is pure Phosphorus! In the cast I talk about soul and body, true self and false self, physical life and physical death: the promise of these things and the limitations of at least three of them. I have in mind my own marriage of almost 50 years, yet also the yearning we all have to not be alone. Remember the need for belovedness -- and its direct consequent, loving -- and the need to be connected to another person, which points directly, finally to God: these are not secondary needs. They are primary ones. The cast concludes with a brief hommage to Olivia Newton-John, and also to our old friend and parishioner, Michael Beck(-Taylor). Episode 366 is dedicated, in warm thanksgiving and enduring affection, to David Babikow and Joey Goodall.
So I was in Henley-on-Thames last week and there was this almost hidden bookshop next to a place called "The Ferret". (I kid you not.) High on a shelf there was an old leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens' lesser known Christmas stories. Not the long ones like "A Christmas Carol" or "The Chimes" or "The Haunted Man"; but short ones like "The Child's Story", "The Seven Poor Travellers", and "What Christmas Is As We Grow Older". What these stories all reveal -- for I started reading them on the airplane home -- is an explicit (tho' never didactic nor even artificial) dynamic of Christian Grace and One-Way Love. The author makes it clear in every tale that the core transaction of life in this world is the possibility of new beginning, new birth, resurrected hope, and empathic out-reaching love. Dickens always traces such dynamic beneficence specifically to Christ and His (Christmas) Goodness towards the lonely, the desperate, the poor, and even the rogues. In short, each story in this collection sets out the Whole Loaf. For many years -- many decades, it feels like sometimes -- I was perpetually mining my movies, my novels and my TV shows for implicit Christianity -- implicit Gospel, implicit Grace. And it can be found! But then one day I actually read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and found the Whole Loaf in that celebrated novel. And then one day I read Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection and again: the Whole Loaf. And now I read Charles Dickens' short Christmas stories and again, Behold: the Whole Loaf. Part of the Loaf can be very good. Say, General Public (1980s), Nik Kershaw (ditto), Frankie Goes to Hollywood (ditto). But the Whole Loaf is better. And how the world needs it now. LUV U.
Serving in full time ministry is as stress-full as any occupation can be. You get hit from all sides -- unendingly -- and just when you think things are beginning to stabilize, you get hit again. Plus, there is the in-built transference that is projected on you as a 'father'-figure (if you are male) which keeps surfacing, at least to some extent, in just about every interpersonal exchange you have. To repeat: serving in full time ministry is as stress-full as any occupation can be. I can't prescribe a way-of-being or way-of-doing to help you. (Prescribing rarely if ever works, even if it is accurate and worthwhile.) But I can describe what I have seen that works. I can tell you about the strengthening effects, for example, of The Crawling Eye (1959) -- aka The Trollenberg Terror -- in my own ministry. I can tell you about my fly-fishing colleague in North Carolina, whose pastorate benefits enormously from his serious dedication to that sport. I can tell you about John Zahl's DJ-ing or David Zahl's "Garbage Pail Kids" cards or Simeon Zahl's boxes and boxes of ... Orson Scott Card and friends. These things keep us sane. They are not primary -- the genuine self-giving of a redeemed human being is primary. But they are big-time secondary. You, dear reader and listener, probably have your own big-time secondary interest. I hope you do. If you don't, let me send you a copy of, oh hey, "The New Outer Limits", Season 3. That should get things going. LOL.
The quintessence of one's continuing love of popular culture that embodies heart-to-heart communication is the subject of this cast. What makes a work of popular art "Christian"? Does it have to be explicit to qualify? Or implicit -- and therefore under the radar -- to really qualify? One thing I know is that you have to love the work-in-question, whether a song, a novel, a movie, or a tv episode, on its own terms before you can communicate your particular personal attraction to its Christian element. (Seriously, I had to love Bride of Frankenstein (1935) for its own imaginative sake before I could go after -- and preach on -- the Christ-empathy in the sufferings of Boris Karloff. Similarly, I had to treasure the total coolness of the original "Outer Limits" (1963) before I could take advantage of the explicit sacrificial Christianity in its episode entitled 'Feasibility Study'. In this cast I survey some powerful episodes of "The New Outer Limits" (1995-99) as a sort-of exercise in Gospel interpretation, at least in the way I've tried to do it over the years. But again, remember: You have to like it first -- it has to connect with you heart-to-heart -- before you can theologize about it. Then, however, once it has won a place within your chest, it is ready for the pulpit. Or the breakfast table. LUV U.
It's interesting how far music drives this podcast. Fer sher, I've been "out of pocket" for a month or so, but what drove me to record this new cast was one thing: music. I'd recently heard a section of The Carpenters' single "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (1977) and was made speechless by Karen C's vocal. One simply had to find a place for it on PZ's Podcast. Then another song came to mind, possibly even more explosive, from the Summer of '68. My friend Lloyd Fonvielle (R.i.P.) had played it for me in an apartment in the East Village. We were basically never the same after that. So I decided to excerpt it for "you, the living (this Mash was meant, too)". Once the music was set, the substance of the cast came down. Two "memes" that I composed recently while sitting on a beach somewhere with Mrs. Zahl seemed worthwhile to present here. Which I have tried to do. One of the memes relates to the unconditional nature of God's Grace; the other, to the exemption-less reach of God's Hand in everything that happens to us. It's a stretch, conceptually, but a requirement for a happy... death. Chest Fever! Listen to the Music (Doobie Brothers, 1972), and everything will probably turn out alright.
What do our favorite songs, movies, and shows -- and even places -- say about us? Why do we like the media we do? What draws us to one form of art rather than another -- to one sort of setting rather than another? Why R.E.O. Speedwagon, for some strange reason, rather than Dylan? Why "Next Plane to London" rather than "A Day in the Life"? Whatever the draw is, I think it has more to do with us than with the thing. Or rather, the object or medium that catalyzes one's deep feelings is less important than the feelings being catalyzed. This cast starts with a reflection I first encountered through Mockingbird. It is from Frederick Buechner (R.i.P.). The cast then careens into George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead -- to which I dragged poor Mary back in '73 when we were courting. (That particular date was almost as much a disaster as when my friend Lloyd and I dragged her to see Jean-Luc Godard's Wind from the East in 1970.) But George Romero's Damascus-Road experience in terms of his future direction in life and art turns out to have been... Tales of Hoffmann. I mean... Then Jerry Garcia gets a hearing, with his Damascus-Road experience. Time and again, and I believe you can see it in your own life, the thing that moved you was accidental. You, however, and your vulnerability were not. Try to focus on the latter, not the former. We close with an immortal and illustrative song by Jimmy Webb, as performed by Johnny Rivers. Please hear it through to the very last line. LUV U.
The Gospel of God's One-Way Love can find an appealing, commodious platform within the Anglican tradition. This is because when that tradition is allowed to be fully itself -- historically, theologically, and even aesthetically -- it supports the Good News and pastorally embodies it. On the other hand, like any ancient tradition, 'Anglicanism' can become dry and even choking. When the tradition becomes an end rather than a means to an end -- a "thing" rather than a fountain -- then it can desiccate the very soil on which it was first planted. In this cast I tell something of my own Anglican story, which goes back to 1960. There is within it some of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly -- and when it comes to the Church of England, mostly the Good. If you're an Episcopalian, I hope you'll be encouraged. Mary's and my story within the Church is also quite funny (at least to me). Hope you'll laugh along. Incidentally, the opening music is the very first song my suite-mates played for me when I arrived at a C. of E. theological college in September 1973. It was counter-intuitive, to say the least. LUV U! P.S. The second song they played was... "China Grove" by the Doobie Brothers. (That one I knew.)
The vehement secularism all around us is no secret. I have seen its pointed perseverance in at least three settings recently, and most powerfully at my 50th Harvard College class reunion. In all three settings, 'God' was sedulously left out of the discourse, and, it felt to me, conscientiously. Nothing new in that, to be sure; but it made me reflect on the Christian Church, at least in its traditional manifestation, and what is it that "triggers" the sharp antagonism. But I came up with a slightly different answer. Had recently read John Weaver's book Evangelicals and the Arts in Fiction from McFarland Books, that wonderful publishing house which specializes in sincerest monographs on subjects such as the history of wax-museum horror films or 1940s Mummy movies. Weaver's book is counter-intuitive in the extreme, and contributes an insight that I have read nowhere else. So maybe we can learn from contemporary secularism, albeit from a different direction. The cast concludes with one of the most unusual Christian pop songs ever recorded, and filmed, from Peter Watkins' 1967 "anti-Establishment" movie Privilege, starring Paul Jones, the lead singer of Manfred Mann (i.e., "Doo Wah Diddy"). In brief, you can learn something about yourself by studying what others dislike about you. LUV U.
Mockingbird's 14th annual New York City conference, entitled "Hope for a Weary World", was a kind of summit for this utterly needed Word. I'll bet almost everyone there felt the same way. Was it the fact that we hadn't met in person for two years? Is that what made this conference so refreshing? Was it the depth of the content, let alone the humor, the music and the sheer joy of the message? What was it? For me it was the unique chord of utter realism with electric Hope. You could hear it in everything -- in Aaron's Zimmerman's timely video/s and tone, in David Zahl's Titian and St. Dismas, in the video by the German hardware company Hornbach that encapsulated base-line empathy, in Simeon (and Bonnie) Zahl's phrase "theory of change"; in the trenchant, applicable breakouts; in the delicious meals that we wanted never to end; in the tracks of JAZ's eternal 'Episco Disco'. The main thing was that chord of realism (even tragic realism) assimilated to us personally by means of Divine Hope. Oh, and there was also a special guest among us. Did you see him? Not sure you did. He's been dead awhile but he came back for Mockingbird 2022. He was actually there! He signaled to me, first, from the balcony. Then later, during "Drinks with PZ", from the back of the church. And he sent me something he had written ... to read to you. Which I include at the end of this cast. All My Love -- and in its after-glow, which I hope will never fade.
It seems as if almost everybody is a little like the "Death Star" in Star Wars. There's a way in to our inner reality, but it's very small -- tiny, in fact -- and it takes a sure shot to get inside. With people, it is often serious stress or failure of some sort that opens up the portal; and even then, it seems rare that some healing hope makes contact with the real you. I remember how gripping Dr. Frank Lake's essay was, from the mid-70s, entitled "The Presence of Christ in the Healing of Primal Pain". He pointed us, you might say, to the cure for one's profoundest trouble. But how many didn't take him up on it? Didn't take God up on it? This cast starts with an illustration from Jacques Demy's despairing masterpiece A Room in Town ("Une Chambre en Ville") from 1982. A Communist labor organizer's "Death Star Portal" is pierced by an entrancing person -- and all his "primary" commitments turn "secondary" in exactly five minutes. His portal opens and his world explodes. Sadly for the activist, known as 'Guilbout' , things happen too fast for him to understand what has happened. (Wish I'd been there in the script to try and help him towards a transformed life.) The cast proceeds to talk about Spotify and iTunes playlists. (I make a new one every single day, absurd as that sounds.) But there's a portal lurking there that is also probably important. Oh, and here's to brevity. Episode 336 is short. LUV U, PZ
Can you ever "over"-impute? Can you treat a person as they actually are not to such an extent that you lose yourself and are ultimately taken advantage of? The short answer to the question is No. Imputation can never go too far. Of course the 'imputor' may lose himself/herself in the act of treating someone as they are (objectively speaking) not. Christ did. But the effect of imputation in 99% of its enactions is transformative. Yes, you may have to take it pretty far. And yes, you may lose your "boundaries" and self-protections in loving someone the imputation-way. But it almost always, finally, works. Case in point -- trying to sound like Rod Serling for a sec -- is the amazing movie The Big Street, which came out in 1942. Based on a short story by Damon Runyon entitled "Little Pinks", The Big Street stars Henry Fonda as a busboy who makes his life's work the enablement, protection, and care of an impossible woman, played by Lucille Ball. The woman could care less about him. Poor 'Little Pinks' is taken gross advantage of by a scheming harridan who appears interested only in money, things and ruling over men -- but never 'Pinks'! The audience keeps wanting to shout at 'Pinks': "Leave her. Forget about her. She will only use you, for good, and then cast you off. You have no future with her." That's what the audience keeps wanting to, literally, scream. But watch the movie through. Even the Lucille Ball character has her limits -- that is, the limits of her resistance to self-sacrificing love. I think The Big Street is probably unique in the annals of Hollywood depictions of Christ-like romantic love. It goes all the way. I stand by my meme, which someone in Dallas has apparently placed behind the piano in an elementary school classroom: "ONE WAY LOVE IS THE CHANGE AGENT OF LIFE."
The first cast, "Animotion I", laid the 'low-anthropology' groundwork for this new one. Carl Jung's typification of animus and anima diagnosed the male/female dynamic buried within us primordially -- _a la _"Quatermass and the Pit" (1967). Now comes the Hope, which for me is not only real but also empirical. Damon Runyon (d. 1946) understood about men and women. How could the author upon whose stories Guys and Dolls was based not have done so? Runyon's stories are vignette after vignette of oddly paired (but not to Jung) couples who find lasting love, grace and transformation. The context may be New York City streetlife of the Depression era, but the 'types' and situations are universal. The exterior framework is limited to a place and time, but the people inside themselves could be you and me. And in every case, or almost every case, grace triumphs, justice works itself out, and transformation occurs. (Thus you absolutely have to see the 1941 mini-movie of Runyan's short story "The Old Doll's House". Mockingbirders will hardly believe what they see. You can pull it up on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZo6gL3CwrE).) What I am saying is that God works (a la Damon Runyan) within the framework He has made (a la C.G. Jung) . The inborn primordial framework of our personhood does not prevent God from working for our good. He is always doing something, even if it looks at first like the "back story". That is the point of this cast and I hope you like it. Oh, and see Guys and Dolls (1955), with Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, and Frank Sinatra. It's all there. LUV U.
Amid the tidal wave/s of views and perspectives on men and women in relation to one another stand the enduring insights of Carl Jung. Much of what he wrote feels almost too complex and too layered to be true, for truth is simple. But what he observed over the years about men and women in their archetypal difference stands. I think it stands. One used to scratch one's head, at least in the late '70s, when almost every Episcopal minister one knew became a Jungian therapist, or almost did! No kidding. Talk about a tidal wave. Now I understand a little better. Not the going "whole hog" -- for the journey to health for most Jungians takes too long, like kind of forever. The therapy itself feels life long -- just much too long! But the diagnosis, especially concerning women and men in primordial perspective, is brilliant. Jung didn't make it up. He observed people, during thousands of hours of therapeutic dialogue, and his observations were acute. In this podcast, I read a -- I guess we could say -- seminal passage from the Collected Works that concerns the embedded archetypes of anima and animus. What he wrote is clarifying and surgical. "Read, Mark, Learn and Inwardly Digest". Once the ground is laid, and it takes only three paragraphs from the master to lay the ground, we can move on to the hope of cure -- God's cure. But that comes next, in "Animotion II". LUV U.
This is one's ecclesiology, one's doctrine of the Church, after a lifetime's involvement with it and 47 years' ordained ministry within it. For what it's worth, I think I've "got it now" ("One Monkey Don't Stop No Show", The Animals, 1966). Where I think it might help, dear Listener, is in the area of reactivity and also in the area of inclusivity. To wit, if you are on 'The Canterbury Trail', say, as a former evangelical or former Baptist, you won't reach a final or satisfying destination until you reduce the reactivity to near nil. Most seekers after the right church are in reaction to where they started. That is quite normal, but it still won't get you to God in His Church. Your (fluid) "destination/s" will almost always be one-sided or partial. You won't stay there, in other words. Somehow, your initial reactivity has got to decelerate. Secondly, in my own case the Church of England Evangelicals (and charismatics) answered the question of "Church" because they were Scriptural, orthodox, and brave but at the same time tolerant of the other wings of the Church. (It's the 'left' wing, today, that is less tolerant in the main; and their distaste has probably got to decrease in order for the Church to be comprehensive again.) As I say in the cast, in an anecdote from Blackburn Cathedral that still makes me laugh after almost 48 years, the English Evangelicals learned how to "embed" and not stick out, yet still be true to the Gospel call. To watch them in action was a gift that even now is still giving -- to Mary and me, at least. So "Here 't'is" (Bo Diddley): an ecclesiology drained -- ideally -- of reactivity and thriving "between the sheets". Try it (if you can find it). You'll like it.
It's funny that in one's recovery from illness, the "band width" is still nowhere near what it used to be. I used to be able to read a novel by Dostoyevsky one week, then a book by Forde the next, then a novel by Cozzens the next. Sayonara to that! Now one is fortunate to be able to read The Runaway Bunny. So hey, I've gone back to reading in three-page spurts. And the perfect author for this "new way of walking, new way of talking" is... Robert Nathan. You remember Robert Nathan. He wrote The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie, to name just two of his roughly 40 or so fantasy novels. But the thing is, Robert Nathan's novels are all short -- more like novellas -- and they read like pudding, because he was an excellent and simple narrator. Anyway, I'm back to Nathan, like it or not; and today's cast updates you on this charming "Mid-Century" author. It is good to note, too, that Robert Nathan was Jewish but had zero chip on his shoulder. That may be because he was born into a wealthy Manhattan family and didn't feel he had to prove himself in the wider American scene. (We would say today that Nathan was a child of "privilege".) One corollary of Nathan's un-reactive growing up is that he was explicitly favorable to Christianity. You see this in several of his novels, and also in his poetry, which was much acclaimed on the home front during World War II. Well, that's lesson two for 2022, and I hope it's the second of many, for Mockingbird, in our New Year. LUV U.
I was "thrown" a little recently by a liturgical service that felt confused at a pretty deep level, and maybe even untruthful. The service was trying to honor someone but "too many cooks" (theologically and personally) "spoiled the broth". That is true of many services when they are not rooted in the Gospel. I mean the Gospel that brings together accurate, i.e. "low" anthropology and the hope of God's mercy. Most "celebrations of life" that Mary and I attend seem to almost capitalize on false encomium. You come away feeling that the person you knew wouldn't recognize himself if he had been there. I'm not arguing for negativity, but I am pleading for accuracy, with humor and compassion -- Christ's compassion. As I came away from the service I have in mind, I suddenly thought of The Music Man! That's a musical about a con man who specializes in imputation not rooted remotely in truth. And only when a woman falls in love with him, and really does impute goodness to him -- for she was the first person in the town to find out the truth about him -- does everything change. He, the con man, changes; the townspeople forgive and unite; and the "at-risk" young people of the town form a marching band that does, miraculously, find its true and powerful voice. The Music Man is about real transformation. For PZ, it was the antidote to the discomfiture I felt during the service. The Music Man healed me. This podcast is dedicated to David Zahl, Mockingbird, and the 2022 Tulsa Conference.
You can respond to PZ's appeal and support the work of Mockingbird by clicking here (https://mbird.com/support/). All gifts are tax-deductible. The Lemon Pipers captured something universal and actually moving in their second single, from 1968, entitled "Rice Is Nice". In the third and last verse of that song, the singer asks a question of her/his love and his/their feelings: "And when I get old and wrinkles appear/Will I still find some rice in my hair?" This cast concerns long-term marriage and its possibility and also its enabling word. What makes it possible? How can you keep loving the same person you first met 30 years ago, or 40 or 50? I mean, people change, right?! Well, think of all the answers you have heard to that question. Think of all the recipes and maxims and axioms. All I am trying to do here is add my own, via The Lemon Pipers. The answer to the question of long-term continuity in love is, well, Go Back to the Beginning. How it started is the key to what is happening now, and will happen. Remember how Meister Eckhart put it: "If you're trying to find God, go back to where you lost Him." Mammoth words. Now think of them in relation to your relationship. I had my own little breakthrough on this front the other day, concerning an airplane flight of all things. But it really happened. Oh, and listen to the short excerpt, for Christmas, of the song at the end at the cast. It's by The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, which is probably all you need to know. Merry Christmas and LUV U!
It is easy ("It's So Easy" - L. Ronstadt, 1977) to talk about "going deeper" and the "journey inward" and the layers of human personality. But in practice it rarely happens. It rarely happens that you actually let on to another person what you are thinking. As Joseph von Sternberg, the director of at least ten great movies, observed: "The average human being lives behind an impenetrable veil and will disclose his deep emotions only in a crisis which robs him of control." That is a supremely important sentence from the great man. I saw it this week -- on the track, of all places -- as I thought of something that has happened in a former parish of ours. I suddenly burst into tears as I thought of the people there -- the hundreds, honestly, whose faces I still remember -- and how they have been treated by Authority. It wasn't the presenting issue that touched my heart so much as the wonderful individuals who are being affected. My "face behind the mask" was a face of remembered mutual love. Episode 327 of this cast seems to have really connected with some of its listeners. Or maybe it was the music, Steppenwolf's immortal single "Magic Carpet Ride (1968), that did it. Somehow the cast got through! I hope that this new one will go even deeper. And at Christmas, when one can be utterly crushed by obligationism, that's probably a good thing. LUV U!! P.S. I dedicate Episode 328 to Don Menendez.
Someone inscribed a book to me once, and wrote, "To Paul, In hope of transformation." (I didn't feel insulted, but rather moved.) This podcast is about sudden transformation. We are sometimes taught that change is gradual. I don't believe it, at least not in most cases. Transformation takes place when the vice (i.e., grip) of conflicting forces in our lives, both outwardly and inwardly, becomes so great that we simply have to make a decision. There is a memorable illustration of this in the Jacques Demy movie Bay of Angels (1963), in which the gambling-addict heroine, played by Jeanne Moreau, is forced at the end to decide between the heroin of risk and the fact-on-the-ground of a man's one-way love for her. The groundwork for change, especially inside a person, may well be gradual, but the moment itself is sudden -- what Paula White calls "your Suddenly". I agree with Pastor Paula. This is especially important in the light of death. Two deaths recently hit us hard. Neither of the deceased was ready. Death came, as Christ said it often does, "like a thief in the night". Don't be like Scrooge! Or rather, don't be like Scrooge before Marley came to him. Marley opened the December night's window and showed his old friend the haunting vision of thousands upon thousands of individuals who had died weighed down and unready. They were outside in the cold ether, over-individuated shadows flitting uncomprehendingly through the ether.Please don't end up like those shadows. (Many people do.) Things can change right now. It's called a "mustard seed" (of faith), and I've never known it to fail. Think, I don't know, think ... "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf. LUV U, and God Bless Us Everyone !
I keep talking about life-resolution issues that are fairly elemental. Part of the theme comes from recent personal experience, but part of it comes from popular music and movies. Today's entry point is a song from 1954 that almost won the Oscar that year, entitled "Hold My Hand". It is from an incredibly cool movie by Frank Tashlin, which you have got to see, entitled Susan Slept Here. This oddly titled movie starred Debby Reynolds and Dick Powell. Anyway, I'm talking about physical touch at the end of life, but also about the self-revelation that serious stress almost inevitably presents one. Think H.G. Wells' three religious books that he wrote during the carnage of World War I. Later on, after the War, he wrote that he could no longer understand these books nor why he wrote them. In fact, the later, less-stressed Wells said he was actually bewildered by the fact that he had written them at all. He came very close to disavowing the books, tho' today we regard Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) as a masterpiece. Why do people seize on secondary things for help/support in everyday life? Especially when almost all of those things literally vanish into thin air when real stress hits. This podcast tries to take the listener to the rock-like essentials of human survival. LUV U.
When people ask you "How's it going?" or "Hey, what's on your mind these days?", I'd be surprised if you always give an honest answer. In fact, even if you decide to sound honest and authentic, you may be covering over the real facts. And under the "real" facts of your outward -- and more importantly, your inward -- life, you may even be covering something else. It's "Human Nature" (M. Jackson, 1982). Human inwardness, let alone one's outward conversation and demeanor, can be a charade from top to bottom. I've seen more than one instance of this during my life, both personally and pastorally. This cast begins with something that happened "Not Too Long Ago" (Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets, 2014). It pulled the curtain on a charade through a pretty dramatic chain of events. Guess I'm talking about the real shipwrecks of life, not the charades we pretty much construct to disguise them. The cast ends with an excerpt from a piece of music by Jan Hammer, which he wrote to accompany a searing honest talk between two detectives at the end of an episode in the first season of Miami Vice. The point of the excerpt is to give some meditative cover for the listener's own confession. Think the ending of Manon of the Spring (1968). LUV U.
There used to be a monthly column in Reader's Digest magazine -- of which one number featured a photo of John Zahl on the back cover -- that was entitled "Laughter Is the Best Medicine". It was a fairly "middle-brow" column, but its heart was in the right place. This new podcast explores the element of humor in resourcing one's detachment from the "boxing ring" of everyday life. (Did you wince at that 'English' use of "resource" as a verb?) I want to say that when you "lose your life and thereby gain it back" -- in the New Testament view of the world -- humor takes on an almost crucial role in smoothing the uncomfortable edges of withdrawal. Whuh? When I was sick in the hospital recently, just about all one's previous attachments -- excepting, vividly, Mary, our sons, and their children -- faded away. Like, almost instantly. And when that happens to you, it kind of stays with you. Thus humor, a la Tyrone Davis' impossible-to-make-sense-of lyric in "Something You've Got", becomes, well, important. The song's impermeable confusion about who is being addressed and to what end -- albeit in the context of a great 'Soul' arrangement -- is a matchless "Song Without End". I mean, I've studied this song for years and still can't tell you whether it's a dialogue between two people concerning a third person, or a trialogue with three persons in the room. The alternating pronouns stump me every time. Anyway, think for a minute about your own sense of humor. When do you find yourself losing it -- your sense of humor, I mean -- and what always works to (re-) "tickle your funny bone". You tell me. The cast ends with another Tyrone Davis track -- there are many contagious songs by this wonderful artist. "I Had It All the Time" is a perfect and delightful exercise in attractive insincerity. And where actually is the singer while he is addressing the girl? You tell me. LUV U. Podcast 324 is dedicated to Jim McNeely and Derek Nelson. P.S. One small correction: When I refer in the cast to Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, I really mean Battle in Outer Space (1961).
I know it may seem pretty far off in geography, but the "zero-case" policy of Australia, with its accompanying long and also 'snap' lockdowns, is arrestingly relevant to Mockingbird (and over-all Christian) concerns for human welfare. What is going on officially in Australia is so striking in its steel mindset of fear over faith that it calls out for observation, let alone evaluation. In this podcast, I look at "zero-case" policy in its high(est) bar of risk aversion; in its seemingly complete disbarring of models for human fulfillment outside of physical survival of the body; and its implacable and surprising use of the "civil arm" to enforce the details of the average person's locked-down life. I then ask, Where is the Church's voice being heard? One has spent almost one's whole ministry admiring a certain unusual brand of Australian Anglicanism associated with the Diocese of Sydney. Yet one seems to be hearing nothing from them in terms of faith over fear. I wonder if that Church can recover, after the lockdowns are over, from its silence. Of course there must be many Australian Christians who desire to place other goods beyond just the physical before the public eye. But one sees no evidence of that. Even Beyond the Beach (1959), the nuclear disaster film about the end of Australia (and the world), postulated a mass turning-to-God near the end. And remembeer the evangelical closing shot of that alarming movie: "Brother, there is still time." Where is that spirit "Down Under" now? Where is the Christian Church, and our Christian Hope? Je ne sais pas. Oh, and the opening and closing music today consists of excerpts from cover versions of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' song, "I Put a Spell on You". One grew up on that song, albeit its Tyneside incarnations. LUV U.
As I reported last time, I believe God gave me two words, or inspirations, as I struggled through an echo cardiogram during a recent illness. But wait, there's more! On the day after the echo cardiogram came a heart catheterization. In the midst of that -- Mary not being with me now, but in her place were six technicians and a surgeon, with the patient un-anesthetized -- three more words came. Seriously. Three more specific words... from Beyond. The first had to do with the false narrative(s) I've attached to my life. The second visualized an 'Outer Limits' episode from 1964, which featured an alien being called 'The Chromo-ite', from the Planet Chromo. I was compared with The Chromo-ite. The third was an imperative consisting of three syllables. This episode of PZ's Podcast says what the specific words actually were that I believe came from God, and states what they meant to me. I hope they will each mean something to you. The cast is dedicated to the memory of Ali Hanna.
I'm finally well enough to reflect, somewhat formally through this new podcast, on the recent illness I went through, and on what I heard at the nadir of it. What happens when you are that sick -- and it happens in some form to everyone who has ever lived except those who die suddenly -- is that your body in its requirement to defend itself wipes out every thought, consideration and proper noun of your life other than what serves the body's need to survive. I mean, the preoccupation of your body with survival wipes out everything else. The word I use for this in the cast is negation. Thus when things were at their worst in the hospital, it was as if everything and everyone in whom I have ever set store disappeared. So total was the focus at that point on physical survival. Except -- except -- except -- two things: 1) I wanted Mary to hold my hand, and 2) I wanted to know where, if anywhere, I was going. ("Going", that is, if my heart stopped and my body died.) Wonderfully, Mary was there, present physically in the room, and she held my hand. Throughout the very threatening test, she held my hand. It was an incomparably precious support -- the difference, I want to say, between getting through it and not getting through it. Moreover, I got an answer to my question about "destination". What came to me, quite loudly and unmistakably, was the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah. And not only that, but the version of the "Hallelujah Chorus" that comes at the end of The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). In other words, the music of Hope came to me in my way, in a form with which I could immediately identify. (I always loved the ending of that movie, with Pat Boone as the Angel at the Tomb.) God's Word of Hope came to me from a movie! En bref an experience of severe illness gave me the everlasting connection of Divine Love in the form of Mary's hand gripping mine, and in the words of the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah. Maybe I should be glad I got sick.
What did Dr. Johnson say concerning one's imminent death?: It wonderfully concentrates the mind. While I was sick recently, a familiar feeling came "shining through". Nothing is really important except love and God. That is not a cliche. Or better, it is a true cliche. I call this cast "Moot Point" because I've been following a tempest in the Church of England; and every time I read a new major story about the pros and cons -- almost all cons -- of a once highly regarded priest who has had a mighty fall, I say to myself, But wait a minute. Church isn't even meeting now over there (at least until two weeks in England, but not yet in Northern Ireland and Scotland). I mean this headline story, with all its letters and accusations and interviews -- what meaning does it have when the Church is essentially shut down? Remember the episode in the last season of X-Files, when Fox Mulder comes face to face really with a full-scale, in-the-now invasion of the Earth by aliens. No more bits and pieces, nor hints. No, Mulder turns to Scully and says, "Scully, now all bets are off." What Mulder means is, if this is really taking place, then just about everything is about to change. The episode is entitled "The Red and the Black". I feel the pandemic has consigned a large percentage of our everyday interests to the Buddhist category of "dependent arisings". A lot of things are just "Too Much of Nothing" (Peter, Paul and Mary). What matters? Well, personal love between two people matters. And the Love of Christ matters. And your children matter. And there are one or two other things that matter. But that's more or less it. COVID19 has rendered just about every enthusiasm and circumstantial anger of our lives a moot point! Except, maybe, a few movies (i.e., Bride of Frankenstein, 1935), together with Spanky and Our Gang (1969).
The excerpt at the start is from a song that was Number One in 1958 and to which I once got almost the entire support staff -- all of whom it turned out already knew the refrain -- of an institution of which I was the dean, to perform an inspired, spontaneous line dance. It was a high point of Mary's and my entire ministry. Anyway, this podcast focuses on that extreme moment in life when you come to the end of your resources and finally have no choice but to reach out for succor. You don't first go for the prescription. You can't -- you have no idea what it is! You go to someone who can give you the prescription. The necessary step of faith when things are really bad is to reach out. It's surprising sometimes how long it can take you to get to that point. A friend of mine once told me that it took him 40 years to get to the point of need from which he finally said 'Uncle'. As the saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And your readiness is your point of need! Whether it's David Seville (and the Chipmunks, as it turned out) telling us, or peerless Bishop Morris Maddocks in the C. of E., or Dr. Frank Lake, or John Stott, or Pastor Paula, the saying is sure: "oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang". It's not a 'road map' nor a 'how to'. It's God's specific and particular Word to you. As it was to the boy Samuel, the boy Timothy, the Syrophoenician woman, Saint Helena, and to ... LUV U tons!
I've talked about "phosphorus" (https://pzspodcast.fireside.fm/272) before -- the ever-glowing points of connection that constitute a kind of trail within the story of our life. Today the subject is another kind of phosphorus, its other side of the coin, by which I mean rejection. In late career I experienced a rejection so mighty in effect that it seemed to pull down the curtain on decades of ministry. This rejection came as an utter surprise. So one day, during the lowest point, I'm in a Jewish deli in SE Florida. And the song "When Smokey Sings" by ABC comes on. The lilting 'Motown' sound carries me right back to former times, of happiness and joy. At the same time, the song becomes instant phosphorus to whatever trail of rejection I have trodden in life. Rejection is decisive! Whether it comes in affairs of the heart, or at work, or in any relationship you want to name -- whether it comes in the form of cancer, self-sabotage, or an intrigue mounted against you -- rejection is impossible to swallow and assimilate, at least not in the initial instance. Some rejections -- like Charles Foster Kane's childhood rejection in Citizen Kane (1941) -- are never overcome. They can stay with you forever. Yet there is a way. There is in fact the promise of new love, which life, which God, almost always brings once you say goodbye to the rejecting love. As my friend Paula White says, When you say 'goodbye', God will bring you a new 'hello'. The Dave Clark Five told the truth back in 1964. You can hear their "take" on this at the end of the cast. But The Beatles did, too, on "Magical Mystery Tour": "I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello." LUV U.
The title of the Zombies' marvelous album from 1968/69 entitled "Odessey and Oracle" (sic) puts one's life in two-word perspective that means a lot to me. We are all on an odyssey of sorts, as Odysseus/Ulysses was in Homer. There are headwinds, zephyrs, tailwinds; and more to the point, storms, whirlpools and icebergs. No one could really disagree with the picture of our human experience as an odyssey, the forms and circumstances of which are quite hidden to us -- as Thomas Cole's epic visual parable "The Journey of Life" conveys with jaw-dropping perspicacity and prescience -- at the start. And hidden almost all along the way, in fact! So yes, sans doute, life is an odyssey. And we need -- I mean need urgently -- an oracle. Which is to say, we require a Word/words from outside ourselves to orient us and re-orient us. If we think that we ourselves can provide the required wisdom to understand and interpret our misfires, let alone our successes, that conception proves untenable over time. We need an oracle. Very recently I ran into an oracle -- a person, I mean, who stated an astonishing conviction concerning a current event, and whom I trust. In other words, I trust this person as a kind of oracle to interpret the present in the light of God's overriding Purpose. I was struck quite speechless by this preacher's certainty concerning something, shall we say, Very Big. Am still not sure whether I believe her, in fact -- she ministers at a small store-front church in west Orlando. But I take her seriously. The point is, I felt I was being addressed by an oracle. We need not only an interpreting confidence in the Divine Purpose behind our odyssey, but we also need an oracle to navigate us towards "Our Year" (The Zombies, 1968/69), that New Day of God's unfolding -- let alone shattering. LUV U!
What a load of uncharted material is out there for people who are looking for Grace! Here I have spent almost 60 years "trolling" for redemptive material, words and music, especially the Seventh Art, that would speak, and hopefully heal. And now I find, near the advent of my 70th birthday, literally TONS of main-line examples of transformative Christian art that I never even knew existed. Take movies like Journey into Light (1951), with Sterling Hayden and Viveca Lindfors. Or Miracle of the Bells (1948), with Frank Sinatra and Fred MacMurray. Or, just this week, Of Human Hearts (1938), with Jimmy Stewart and Walter Huston. Where have I been? All I ever got, back in the day, was Sergei Eisenstein and Michelangelo Antonioni and Godard and ... The Graduate (1968). We worshipped The Graduate. I remember seeing it the week it opened. But had anyone ever referenced Miracle in the Rain (1956) or Gabriel over the White House (1936). Are you kidding? Niemand ! It's funny, it's as if the Hollywood movies that depict Christian faith as it actually is ... got almost instantly forgotten, and even if they made a ton of money. At any rate, I wasn't supposed to know about them -- except maybe the Universal monster movies of the '30s and '40s, for the reverence due Dracula and Frankenstein overrode the explicit religious message behind those movies. "Put away the Cross, Miliza!" (House of Dracula, 1945). Well, maybe this cast can give you some reassuring TV time before you get vaccinated. Oh, and these vintage movies with their explicit good religion end up talking about real people and real impasses and real losses. Turns out I'll take The Mortal Storm (1940) over 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) any time.
Today I want to "double down" just a bit on the anchoring necessity of romantic connection within our everyday lives. Flourishing won't occur without it, and that's an empirical fact whether one likes it or not. So the question becomes, at least for about half the world's yearning souls, how can a person find it. How can I obtain what I so manifestly need and want? Case in point: Jane Wyman's grief-driven prayer in Miracle in the Rain (1956). Then there's Fred MacMurray's prayer in The Miracle of the Bells (1947) -- read the book, by the way, which you can get on Kindle. Then there's my own prayer last month, which was answered by getting banged on the head. This cast is an indicative reflection on prayer, specifically on the prayer that comes from abject and unconditional personal need. George Harrison promised its answer (let alone Isaiah, let alone Christ) in "Love Comes to Everyone" (1979). Hear me. Oh, and inwardly digest The Seekers' hymn and psalm, "I'll Never Find Another You" (1964). LUV U.
https://mbird.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_5702.jpg How should we think about God when faced with a massive, injuring disappointment? Or rather, how can a person of faith assimilate an experience in which you see, not God, but God's opposite, appearing to win? The question can apply to anyone, on any "side of the aisle". I have friends who were so upset by the election of 2016 that they basically retreated into a long-term depression for roughly four years. There will be people you know today -- tho' they may not be saying -- who feel the same way about 2020. Disappointments and disillusionments can touch all parties! Also, there's the COVID. Just after Mrs. Zahl and I received our vaccinations in Florida, articles started appearing stating that, vaccinated or not, we could still transmit the virus. (What?) In other words, there may not be an end to the ordeal, even if the "miracle Moderna/Pfizer" is given to everyone. (Would that mean,we still can't see our grandchildren?) This podcast is about the agonizing struggle to deal with acute personal disappointment in terms of faith. Do we just go along? Do we rationalize? Do we "look for Another"? Is God asleep? Is God dead? Or were we simply wrong about Him -- misled, seduced, hypnotized, something like that? This is my subject. And with some help from 'Heinz' the immortal (and Joe Meek), and also from John Milton the Immortal, I hope we can get somewhere. LUV U.
Harold Pinter wrote a play once entitled "Betrayal" and he used a sort of trick to tell his story. He began the play at the end -- at the tragic finale of the events dramatized -- and ended the play at the beginning, at the touching and tentative start of those events. He reversed time, to tremendous effect. Today's brief cast is intended as a salutary instance of what often happens in life: Things start well and end badly. In addition to the startling music that begins and ends my story, I tell how I met a very old friend after almost 55 years of not having seen him. This friend, now dead, by the way, was once a charming, funny, open, dear young person, truly at the threshold of his life. After 55 years, however, he had grown humorless, disappointed, withdrawn, and turned in upon himself. Just once, at one brief moment within our conversation, my friend came to himself -- and right then, he was all at once 15 again. I was hurtled back in time by the mere expression on his face, only to be hurtled back again into the present when his eyes went grey again. Reverse chronology! It doesn't have to happen. God is there, even as I write this and you read it, and... I have proof. Listen to the last track, by the way, of "Reverse Chronology". It's a gem. And remember what Gerald Heard said so memorably in 1941, quoting from Meister Eckhart, "If you want to find God, go back to where you lost Him." LUV U.
'Heinz' was short for Heinz Burt (d. 2000), a grocery clerk in Southampton, England, whom Joe Meek, an independent record producer, made into a star for a brief period in the early 1960s. The brilliance of the five or six singles that Meek produced for Heinz is an almost perfect instance of how straw can be converted into gold, a la Rumpelstiltskin. That is to say, Heinz Burt himself had little talent and almost nothing going for him, yet Meek created magic out of his voice and persona. Utter magic! I mean, these are not the greatest records in the history of music, but given the givens, they are striking examples of what effect/s an outside influence can have on you. Now take this irregular but prodigious instance of what can be done to transform an everyday mediocrity -- he was a nice guy, to be sure -- and it can be seen what God can do for anyone -- like you and me, for example. I'm being completely serious. Hug that "low anthropology"! We really cannot help ourselves very much, at least where it counts, i.e., where we are really in thrall; under the influence, bound and paralyzed, of drives, losses and resentments that prevent us from living -- living freely, I mean -- let alone, joyfully. We need someone to look out for us -- Joe Meek, for example. But actually I mean God. Heinz's singles -- "Just Like Eddie" went to Number 5 in England -- are a picture of God's creative work with losers. (Never thought of myself as a loser, by the way, until life put me there.) Heinz (Burt) spell Hope (Cert.).
I was listening to a sermon concerning spiritual warfare and my mind went straight back to 1970, to the English film, a psychological thriller, entitled Crescendo. The film stars Stephanie Powers and James Olson and was directed by Alan Gibson. The preacher's passionate evocation of Ephesians 6:12 in connection with current events had brought considerable criticism from many quarters. I wanted to ask the critics, Didn't you ever see Psycho (1960) -- let alone read Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, or Conan Doyle, for that matter? I mean, almost all mystery novels, short stories and movies presuppose that the solution to a crime is unseen, that the events taking place on the surface are almost always driven by factors that are not seen or envisaged. In other words, the explanation for criminal, let alone curious behavior turns out to be an unexpected person or circumstance. If a plot line such as that of Crescendo (1970) should intrigue and actually satisfy us, why would we close the door on a religious form of that uncommon explanation, that explanation for a mystery that calls into question our perceptions of the visible in favor of explanations from the invisible? This cast looks at the current drama/s unfolding in the aftermath of November 3rd in unseen rather than in seen terms. Not that I know personally what is happening -- but rather, what one sees is seldom what one gets. To put it another way, if I hadn't seen Hammer Studios' seemingly innumerable psychological thrillers -- most of them written by the indefatigable Jimmy Sangster -- I would probably be strongly attached to one outcome or another, unfolding on the surface of circumstance. Or, for that matter, if I hadn't been reading the New Testament... LUV U!
I'm trying to understand, in Romans 7 and Mockingbird terms, a phenomenon I currently observe -- and feel -- all around me. It is as if the more control, medically and in terms of hospitalizations, that we are getting over COVID19, the more insistent and pressing are the visible measures a good citizen is supposed to be taking against it. To put it another way, as the actual threat is decreasing, the things I am supposed to be doing in order to be regarded as a good citizen in relation to it, are increasing. So Mrs. Zahl and I take a walk on the shoreline near where we live, and the beach is not crowded at all -- just several knots of two persons walking near the edge of Long Island Sound on a windy day -- and yet half the people, especially the younger half, are wearing masks the whole time. The wind is billowing and there is at least 50 feet between almost every "bubble" of two, yet still masks are tightly on. And I feel badly, like I'm doing something wrong, so I put on my mask; or, if I don't, walk by the masked duos with my head bowed and my eyes downcast. There's some kind of first-class versus second-class citizen thing going on, and I'm back in East Berlin, say around 1958. A former STASI informant once told me that about 45 % of the East German population was spying on the other 55 %, and that she had to submit formal reports on all her neighbors every two weeks -- their habits, their idiosyncrasies, and especially their comings and goings. Is it maybe an analogy to St. Paul, where he talks about sin increasing as a result of the law? Like maybe, the burden of visible good citizenship increases to the extent that the actual need to do so is decreasing. I don't know quite how to put it, but something is going on. At the end of the cast, I talk a little about minorities of one and the peril of a situation when everyone you know and every institution you know is against one voice -- even if that voice is wrong and the forces against it are right. Something about the way the universe or Reality compensates in favor of the "You and Me Against the World" (Helen Reddy, 1974) could be happening. Sometimes mass judgments boomerang. If I felt as strongly as some of my friends feel this week, I would probably adopt an august silence, trusting the truth to come out. It's just a thought, though, and probably applies to both sides of every competition. LUV U.
There's a truth of life that more and more people are telling me about from their own experience. To be sure, these people are mostly my own age, so we are considering that last third of life with which my Boomer Handbook (https://amzn.to/31vHjL8) is concerned. The observed truth of life I am talking about is simply that when you reach a certain age, say from 55 or so on, if you don't move forward, you move backward. Sometimes I just want to stay where I am -- treading water in the memories and also the accomplishments of my life's second third. But treading water is not what actually happens. Drowning is what happens! You regress, whether you want to or not, and it's easy to end up like Miss Bates's mother in Jane Austen's Emma, staring all day into space. You are somewhere but you're definitely not ... where you are. This cast is about the anchorage and possibility of hope, hope for a real and concrete future. I get given some good counsel from a novel by Joyce Cary (d. 1957) -- who was, incidentally, a conscious Low Church Anglican -- and report on Pastor Paula's enduring gift to me. There's also some nice parsing, courtesy of Sheila Schwartz, of "Little Bit O'Soul" (The Music Explosion, 1967). Not to mention the last track, one of the most concise and delightful rock 'n roll hits of all time. Oh, and the Gospel of complete forgiveness comes into it, too. LUV U!
There's a terrific Sherlock Holmes movie from 1944 entitled The Scarlet Claw. Well, it's actually not that terrific, but the premise is great. In the movie a criminal disguises himself as a kind of glow-in-the-dark swamp creature out on the moors, who murders unfortunate travelers and terrorizes the village. Come to find out, the murderer is putting phosphorus on his hands, his feet and his face in order to frighten everyone, and Sherlock Holmes figures it out. Our detective ends up finding his man by following the phosphorus. The analogy is to our personal histories. If you want to find out the truth about yourself, follow the phosphorus! And the phosphorus can be found wherever and whenever your true inward heart-self came out -- whether in a relationship or a moment of stress or an incident of rejection, you name it. To understand yourself, follow the phosphorus to the places in your past where it stuck. And as I tried to say in Podcast 307, the phosphorus may well have stuck on a song. I listen to "Please Come to Boston" (1974), for example, by Dave Loggins, and I'm right there in our first year of marriage, in a foreign country, no car, no frig, no stove, no money. Just a little hope, faith, and charity. And I cry. For being moved and touched by that period, I cry. You may have something like that. All it takes to capture your entire emotional attention is to hear a song from a vulnerable time in your life, and you're right there again! It's phosphorus. It is also true that by means of the phosphorus you can become the main, lamed character in your own case of arrested development. That's no good. It is why uncompleted mourning of a loss can paralyze you for... well, almost... forever. Somehow, to live, you have to get off of square one. At the end of the cast, I offer a kind of blinder to the deceptive glow of your phosphorus. It's worked for me, and it can work with you. Think R. A. I. N. ... "Summer Rain", Johnny Rivers, 1968. LUV U!
It's a kind of personal discovery I made last week, when inventorying some more of the songs featured in Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers (https://amzn.to/2QX1NGW) (Mockingbird, 2020). The discovery was that each song not only connects me with a person and/or connection with that person -- or disconnection from the person; but that each song connotes a place, an actual place. In other words, take "Reelin' in the Years", by Steely Dan. It's not just Mrs. Zahl, in a long ago springtime in Boston, with whom the song emotionally connects me. But it's a place there, i.e., Memorial Drive in Cambridge, down which she would drive her car fast, with me in it, and the radio would play ... "Reelin' in the Years". My and your emotional, heart experiences are connected not just to a person, but to a place where we were with that person. An analogy is in the experience of Christian pilgrimage. Why did certain places, such as St. Juan de Compostela or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or Iona or Lourdes, become the objects of pilgrimage? Because someone very special was there once, and did something special while he or she was there. The power of that experience, which took place there within a moment in time, draws other people to the place. It is not the place as such which draws you. Rather, it is the connection of a healing, hopeful personality with the place which draws you. Like "Reelin' in the Years"! I hope you like Petula Clark. She knew a place once, too, in 1965. And she sang a touching love song two years later, in 1967, entitled "Don't Sleep in the Subway". Gosh, and I remember exactly where I was when I first received her kind and tender message. LUV U!
One of the best effects of a positive view of aging, which I have tried to offer in the Boomer Handbook (https://amzn.to/2D3dxV1) (Mockingbird, 2020), is the unexpected appearance of new material. You find that faith in a "good outcome" to your life seems to bring with it fresh resources, and fresh product. It just happens! Well, thanks to Josh Retterer, to whom this podcast is dedicated, I've run straight into Margery Lawrence. Margery Lawrence (1889-1969) was an English writer of supernatural short stories, as well as popular novels. She was also a committed spiritualist, who wrote within an explicitly Christian (tho' anti-clerical) world-view. What Lawrence brought to her fiction was the insight that many relationships between men and women, and between children and their parents, are the workings-out of unseen forces, mainly of positive forces seeking to bring afflicted everyday people to better resolutions, and even victories, in relation to inherited paralyses. What Pastor Paula denominates "divine set-ups", Margery Lawrence regards as the sometimes centuries-long -- and anguished -- pilgrimage of the human soul to sacrificial love and understanding. Lawrence's inventive ghost stories are fantastic analogies of the way God works, which is mainly through defeats and come-uppances in everyday life. From Amazon, you can download inexpensively The Floating Cafe and TheTerraces of Night. Maybe start with "The Shrine at the Crossroads" or "Tinpot Landing". Or maybe, "The Beauty Spot" or "The Crystal Snuff Box". Look for a kind of heroism from the past, which changes the present in actuality. Listen, too, to "Frosty the Snowman" by Los Straitjackets, which concludes this cast. It shows you exactly what a "good outcome" can mean!
I heard something very helpful recently in a sermon by John Zahl. He said that sometimes in life what seems like the end is really the middle. I think JAZ meant that when your situation feels like -- maybe is -- the end of the world, it may really be the hinge point to "A Whole New World" (Aladdin, 1992). This insight is true in Christian experience. What looks like the end turns out to be the middle. Which made one immediately think of Los Straitjackets, that ever welling spring of inspiration that consists of five (sometimes four) surfer/rockabilly musicians in Mexican wrestling masks. These chaps are a gift that keeps on giving. And what you come to find out is that their songs are pretty strictly controlled until the last third, sometimes even the last fourth. Los Straitjackets typically take the listener by surprise by "going crazy", in the best way, right at the end. It's almost a trick, but I call it inspiration. Their songs are the best at the end! This podcast takes its cue from our masked Mexican-wrestler guitarists. Your life, and maybe now more than ever, is bound to be pretty down in some ways. The pandemic, and also the divided climate in the country, is wrecking a lot of things, and some of them are very good. (Personally, I think the damage to the mainline Christian churches, with exceptions, will prove to be huge. Mary and I watch institutions and causes into which we have poured our whole lives just collapsing, like sand from a shattered hourglass. This is true especially in the Church of England, where things were bad enough before the virus. There was a massive failure of nerve there.) So hear the musical message of Los Straitjackets. When they sound like they are winding things down, Get Ready! The exuberant explosion is probably just around the corner.
I like Greg Townson very much! He's a guitarist who's been around for a while, but is now a leading member of Los Straitjackets. He combines that great Rockabilly sound of theirs with some really lyrical passages. Townson's track "Speed Bump", an excerpt of which begins this cast, got me started on the theme. It's a familiar theme, especially with Mockingbird; but should never be foregone. A speed bump is when an obstacle or blockage on the road on which you are traveling causes you -- if you are going too fast or not looking where you're going -- to crash, or at least shock you out of yourself. In regular life, a speed bump is the unexpected loss or blow or intrusion that makes you stop. "Hey, what's that sound/Everybody look what's goin' down" (Buffalo Springfield, 1966). It can be the illness of your child, a sudden catastrophic interruption/lurch in your marriage, a notice that you've been fired, a pandemic (to say the least), or one's nervous collapse into absorbing anxiety. Ideally -- and this is the Christian point of the cast -- your biggest speed bump should cause you to stop and re-evaluate, "Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)" [The Stylistics, 1971]. The old word for this is Repent. And always with a view to a fresh direction and a new beginning. At a key moment in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, something happens -- a proposal of marriage goes terribly wrong -- which causes both the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, and the hero, 'Mr. D'Arcy' individually to re-evaluate their whole lives. The "speed bump" of that catastrophic conversation causes each of them and both of them to see themselves in a new light -- really, to humble each of them in their own eyes. The result of their speed bump is lasting good and great blessing. What has been your biggest speed bump? Where are you with it now? Tell me.
This is a further thought on "narratives", tho' with a Biblical example (from Jeremiah) and a recent public incident that has me both "stunned and amazed" (Pretenders, 'My City Was Gone', 1984). The President of Harvard has issued a letter announcing the end of the University's sanctions against the undergraduate Final Clubs and all "single gender" organizations on or off campus. These sanctions, which brought with them a sort of "Stasi"-like network of anonymous informants and secret tip-offs connected to the Dean's Office, were put into place in 2017. This week, however, due to a Federal Court ruling in Massachusetts, buttressed by a recent Supreme Court decision, Harvard admitted officially that its policy could not stand up in court, and it was therefore withdrawing the policy. Whether you care or don't care about Ivy League colleges and their current policies and dicta, what stunned and amazed PZ was the fact that the organizations' deliverance came from "out of the blue" and from a quarter we didn't expect. That's the point: from a quarter and connected to a logic we didn't expect. I find this enormously strengthening, if also convicting. God can solve one's problem. But He's going to do it in His way and not mine or yours. Thus Jeremiah 27, a passage with which Mary and I have been wrestling of late, came abruptly to new life! My ideas concerning how my beloved undergraduate organization from decades past might survive the tyranny of Pharaoh -- my narrative of (despaired for) deliverance -- proved false. But deliverance came anyway! ("What a fool I was, what a dominated fool" -- My Fair Lady) Hope you like the cast. Hope it gives you new hope. And... hope it helps you appreciate Looking Glass. This cast is dedicated to Elder Harold Fuller of City of Destiny Church, Apopka, FL.
"Narratives", which used to be called "paradigms", and before that, "preconceptions", are like shackles on human necks. They force one to look down from what is before you, rather than at it. Narratives short-change reality because you either discard things that don't fit your narrative or you alter the facts in order to squeeze them in. I'm not talking about the ideological content of your narrative. (That varies from person to person.) I'm talking about the idea that we need narratives to understand what we are facing. Take the narrative couched within the statement, "You've got to go toward the cannons". In order to deal with the negativities in your life, you have to confront them directly rather than flee them or deny them. Sounds good. But here comes another narrative: "In this context there is no room for that idea." If someone is guilty of this or that objectionable action or idea, they have to be nullified, deleted. So behold: two narratives, entirely in conflict. Yet sometimes I hear the same person enunciating them both within the space of a single hour. Narratives are everywhere, and they are like heavy yokes, causing one to look down not_ at_. In my experience, only the Christian freedom of the New Creation, the New Being, is sufficient to un-yoke narratives. Only the New Being can act freely, love freely, give freely in emancipation from narratives. This is a lesson, incidentally, to be derived from Charles Dickens' (previously unknown to me) novel Our Mutual Friend. That book, by the way, is a total must. T O T A L M U S T. Oh, and talk about the New Being: Listen to the Wagnerian sounds of The Delfonics, with which this cast begins and ends. The Delfonics, together with their inspired producer Thom Bell, were not burdened by narratives, so they broke through to inspired heights. Just like the un-shackled you can.
Feelings cover both the personal and the general. They cover both the individual and the collective. So you feel deeply when you are loved and loved back, and you feel deeply when a cause -- political, social, or cultural -- captures your heart's allegiance. We are seeing this dramatically within the current mood and its fiery passions. But wait: I was here before! I was "here", in the Spring of 1968 when the match was lit by the assassination of Dr. King. I saw personally the inferno that became Northeast Washington (D.C.), and was even stopped and threatened because I broke the curfew. Everything "normal" came to a halt. Then again, in the Spring of 1970, in the aftermath of Kent State, everything seemed to stop. Classes cancelled, round-the-clock demonstrations; and again I got stopped one night for breaking the curfew. That was twice in two years. Yet oddly, it is not those famous events, Dr. King's assassination and Kent State, that I remember the most. What I really, indelibly, remember from that time is relationships at risk, reconciliations gone wrong, and driving in the rain listening to "No Time" by The Guess Who. Your life is like a Doppler map on your weather app. The Doppler shows where the storm and the front is at its most severe. You are able to see the "cells" of intense weather, and where the wind and rain are at their worst. Consider your life, from the day you were born right through to today, as a Doppler map. The times of greatest stress, looking back, show "sun spots" of intense activity -- good and bad. And while they may not have been the actual crises of political warfare and lockdowns that you weathered, those crises "brought up", from deep inside you, electric storms of anger, unfairness and rejection -- not to mention horizons of calm, justice, and connection. In assessing where you are right now, weigh the Big Issues of the current scene. They are Big. Bigger still, though, are the inward storms, both for shattering and for fulfilling. Listen to "Question" by The Moody Blues.
Mrs. Zahl and I had a sort of 'Abraham/Sarah' moment (i.e., Genesis 17) this week, and it brought to mind an immortal song from 1974, performed by Paul Anka. But it was all because of the virus! This new cast, which is the 300th, talks about the supernatural Power of God in relation to the scourge that is whipping us all. I bring back an 'Oldie but Goodie', William Hale White (aka 'Mark Rutherford'), to witness concerning the Power of God through a remarkable short essay he penned in 1908. The essay is entitled "Little Nell". The conceit of White's elliptical piece is that actual conversion and authentic transformation is possible within the human situation. Not just "God with us" in our pain; but God come to reverse it, and heal it. In "Little Nell" William Hale White moves from Dickens' account of an old man's conversion to non-self-referenced love for his grand-daughter, to the conversion of St. Paul, to the power of outside love to alter the entire chemistry of the "inner man". The cast concludes with an excerpt from Eddie James's track "Power", assisted by Ashley Brison and Patricia Miller, which, if this doesn't get you out of your seat, then the virus-panic really has gotten to you. LUV U!
In the middle of what may be the worst week, or close to it, this cast offers hope of a real breakthrough -- and not just in mental attitude or "approach", but in the substance of the pandemic. At the start there is some slight use of the now-taboo word "over-reaction"; but hey, you can see it either way -- just as long you stay vigilant and wash your hands a lot. No question about that. Yet there remains the question of faith, as in the moment right after Christ stilled the storm, when He asked the disciples: "Where is your faith?" I feel we need to not give up on actual faith. And by that I mean the faith that God is able to quell the storm, de-potentiate the virus, and heal those who have it -- let alone, shield those who don't. I mean seriously, hasn't anyone seen War of the Worlds -- either the George Pal version (1953) or the Steven Spielberg one (2005)? Both of them end the way H.G. Wells ended the novel on which they are based. God killed the Martian invaders. Not the USAF nor the British howitzers. But God... through an unseen.... virus. Stay open to God as Deliverer.
Our parish's Ash Wednesday service this year made me think of an old "Outer Limits" episode entitled 'Cry of Silence'. That episode concerned alien tumbleweeds -- no kidding -- and a scientist's attempts to communicate with them. What made me associate the Ash Wednesday liturgy with wind-blown tumbleweeds were the changes over the years of my ministry in that service. Now don't worry! This is not a 'Boomer's' reaction to contemporaneity. No, this is a reflection on the change-without-end that is inherent within the human world and on the universal element that will always lie within the penitential core of Ash Wednesday. Here is the prayer to be said by 'The Minister' at the end of the "Penitential Office for Ash Wednesday" as required by the 1928 Book of Common Prayer: _O God, whose nature and property is ever to have mercy and to forgive; Receive our humble petitions; and though we be tied and bound with the chain of our sins, yet let the pitifulness of thy great mercy loose us; for the honour of Jesus Christ,our Mediator and Advocate. Amen. _ Will you look at that?: "... and though we be tied and bound with the chain of our sins, yet let the pitifulness of thy great mercy loose us." Such is the nailed truth of the human condition, the inevitably defeated conflict between the ego and the id, by which the ego is bound and chained. Yet there is a way out. That is Ash Wednesday, no matter where the "Tumbleweed" innovations take us, It is the Heart and Soul (Huey Lewis and the News, 1983) of Lent. Podcast 298 is dedicated to the Rev. Stu Shelby, Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, Winter Park, FL.
There is this unexpected plethora of gems coming at me just now in a Mockingbird vein. Last week there was Journey into Light, from 1951; and also The First Legion, also from that year. Today there is Bright Road, also a Hollywood movie, which came out in 1953. I feel like the surface of the moon that is being bombarded by a meteor shower. How, one asks oneself, did one miss these many, explicitly Christian Hollywood movies? Were they literally hidden from view? Or was I simply asleep at the switch, all wrapped up, for almost an entire lifetime, in Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut -- or whatever one's desired form of coolness might be? Then again, maybe it's the times. Maybe in this unusual period, when lots of things seem up-ended and little seems able to be taken for granted, new (old) things can rise to the surface again. I don't know what it is exactly, but something is shifting. Today PZ's Podcast focusses on Bright Road, a modest but transcendent movie about imputation, the setting of which is so counter-intuitive -- because it transcends conventional narratives concerning identity and race -- that it is hard to believe it was ever made at all. Yet it stars Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge, and came right through the Hollywood studio system. I also talk about -- here's one that should make you laugh -- a short story by the English writer Jerome K. Jerome, entitled "The Passing of the Third Floor Back". Unbelievably, this was turned into a play in 1907 that was the absolute number one of the London season! Then later it was made into a movie, with top stars and production. "The Passing of the Third Floor Back". Yet it is an extraordinarily touching and perceptive dramatization of imputation, Christian imputation, in its fully orbed power. Podcast 297 is dedicated to Paul Walker.
Some startling new material has come down the pipeline this week, and I'm utterly bound to share it with you. Turns out that all sorts of explicitly Christian Hollywood movies have been hidden from view almost since they were made. It's almost as if a 'code' came into force, unspoken but more unwavering than the now notorious Hays Code of the 1930s, which banned directly Christian works of popular art from popular view. What am I talking about? Well, three remarkable movies that if you've ever heard of even one of them I'll give you the Dean's Prize from days long ago at Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham. Seriously, have you ever heard of or seen Journey into Light (1951) with Sterling Hayden, Viveca Lindfors and Thomas MItchell? What about The First Legion (also 1951) with Charles Boyer and Barbara Rush? And what about When in Rome (1953) with Van Johnson and Paul Douglas? And I'm not even going to mention Battle Hymn (1957), with Rock Hudson, or The Left Hand of God (1955) with Humphrey Bogart and Gene Tierney. Go on the internet and look up the first three. Each of them can be found and seen. I think you are in for a surprise. These films are all pure Christianity, pure Gospel, pure Grace. Moreover, they were all top "studio productions" with A-list stars and creators. Mary and I are in shock, having seen each one recently. And we're mostly in shock because they have been completely unknown to us -- no DVDs, no streaming (except_ The Left Hand of God_); and in the case of the first three, not a mention anywhere. I am saying they are all "pre-code', because they were banished from sight once explicit Christianity became almost invisible in "mainstream" popular art. Where have I been? I mean, Knife in the Water is great. Jules and Jim is great. But still!
Just as alien invasion movies break down the "dividing walls of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14), almost invariably uniting the human race/s against the common enemy, so do four facts: 1) Lobo is big in Taiwan! 2) Tracy Hyde is still big in Japan! 3) Karen Carpenter is HUGE in The Philippines!! 4) Jacques Demy spent a lot of time, near the end of his run, making a Japanese movie about an anime heroine known as 'Lady Oscar'. Popularity in the above cases apparently has little connection with ethnicity. (Remember Cheap Trick, by the way, if you need more proof.) Each of the popular artists featured in this cast tapped into something bigger than Florida (Lobo), bigger than Britain (Tracy Hyde), bigger than California (Karen C.), and bigger than Nantes (Jacques Demy). What did they tap into? Well, I try to answer that. And the answer has to do with human nature in its evenly distributed hunger for accompaniment, belovedness, and appreciation. Hope you like this.
One of the great things about UFOs and alien contact is that it unnerves and demoralizes the kind of thinking that qualifies everyone in terms of "identities" or predicates. The metaphor of alien-contact movies, from Starship Invasions (1977) to the original Day the Earth Stood Still _(1951) to _Cloverfield (2008), is that of our one planet, our one earth, being instantly united in the face of an extra-terrestrial presence. As 'Fox Mulder' announced in a late episode of The X-Files, in the face of a real alien incursion, "All bets are off!". In other words, the alien-contact metaphor -- or rather, in my case, at least, convinced reality -- relativizes every single human group-characteristic. Face to face with a truly other/Other, all persons on our planet become one -- instantly. St. Paul says this perfectly in Galatians 3:28. The opening music is an excerpt from The Carpenters' immortal and unsurpassable version of "Calling Occupants of Inter-Planetary Craft". That track bursts the confines of the late 1970s and will never die. The closing track is a song of conversion, by Robert Wyatt. Note that Jesus Christ gets a solid mention. Podcast 294 is dedicated to Charles Gaston.
In the late 1970s The Trammps conceived a brilliant Disco Inferno, in which something would be burned down. Whether they meant the hot performance of a disco dance, or whether the torching of something big and malignant, it probably makes no difference. Something's gotta go, even if it's just lameness and dullness on the "disco round" (Alicia Bridges). This cast contrasts the passing nature of social and political anger and social/political circumstances with the things that endure. I take the songs of The Carpenters as case in point! "Close to You" endures, while I can hardly remember the actual convulsions that were taking place on campus -- almost everywhere -- when we first heard it. "Close to You" doesn't bring to mind, at least for me, Watergate or "Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming"; but rather, cruising around Boston with my future wife (of now 46 years) or getting her to drive me to see Night of the Living Dead. I've basically forgotten what was happening in the big world then, tho' have not for a second forgotten what was happening inside me. That is the lesson of this podcast, and we end with an excerpt from the near-sublime Carpenters track, "Love Is Surrender". LUV U.
Sometimes I feel like... a motherless child. No, really: Sometimes I feel like I've been looking in almost all the wrong places for confirmations and traces of my Ur-existential Christian faith. One's been "trolling" almost one's whole life through Truffaut and Dinesen and Kafka and Isherwood and Seneca and H.G. Wells and Stephen King and Val Lewton and Rod Serling and and John Galsworthy and, golly, even Michael Reeves -- *panning for Christian gold! * What I mean is, one can make a lifetime of gathering Christian-sounding crumbs from a master's table, i.e., the above artists and philosophers, while never seeing that the whole loaf is actually right in front of you. I'm thinking of The Chain (1949) by Paul Wellman or I'd Climb the Highest Mountain with Susan Hayward (1951) or George Eliot's first novella "Janet's Repentance" or Passing of the Third Floor Back by Jerome K. Jerome. What?!? Well, it turns out there are some conscious Christian masterpieces out there, which were very successful in their day but have been almost completely smothered, in the reception, by This World. I mean, who has ever heard of The Chain by Paul Wellman? Yet it is simply the most touching story of a young Episcopal minister in Jericho, Kansas, who preaches and acts out Grace in a stratified and complacent city with great sacrifice yet great success. The Chain is a must read! Yet it's been almost completely buried, as have been many other works like it, by "the World, the Flesh and the Devil". Hope this cast gives you some new reading, and some fresh heart! Podcast 292 is dedicated to David Browder.
The secret that explains life -- I say "secret" because it's an open but denied truth, known most directly in popular music but suppressed in most "narratives" and conceptual systems -- is the aspiration for a connection of love with another human being. This aspiration transcends politics and affinities, affiliations and most "ultimate concerns", and almost all situational circumstances and historical contexts. The aspiration, whether lost, unrealized, or fulfilled, is the first thing you think about when you are born; and the last thing you think about when you die. It is the universal instantiation, in "real" time, of the urge to connect. I believe it is the mainspring of almost all our personal histories. My cast unwraps the theme in a 1970 "One Hit Wonder", and also in a 1954 English movie about a bomber pilot in Burma during World War Two. It then switches to Smokey Robinson. But... "la plus ca change..." Think with me about the mainspring of your decisions, from age six to age 60, and ask yourself whether or not it's true -- that the aspiration for belovedness is the main thing you have contributed to your journey. Your answer to the question should be sufficient to concentrate your mind at Christmas. Podcast 291 is dedicated to John Glover.
A few words about faith, and the future -- and your future, in particular, in individual terms. I was struck recently by a meme I read on Instagram. It read like this: "Stop focusing on what 'wasn't' And start focusing on what will be!" What struck one about the meme was its departure from what one would almost always and everywhere (semper ubique) hear: Stop focusing on what 'wasn't' And start focusing on what is!' From the mid-1960s, when I first started harkening to the main-line Christian thinkers around me, right down to the exact present day, I would hear the second, corrected version of the meme: And start focusing on what is! The mindfulness people would tell me that, the MSW people would tell me that, the self-people would almost all tell me that, the therapists would tell me that, the trained priests and pastors would tell me that, the movies and television would tell me that, Mom and Dad would tell me that, probably PZ would have told me that. And it's true and right so far as it goes. But it's also worldly wisdom, having almost nothing to contribute to the underlying question of life: What happens to me when I die? As well as, what happens to me when I make the biggest mistake of my life -- whatever that is -- and have to start over? "Where are you going? Can you take me with you?" (Godspell, 1973). That is why I was startled by the counter-intuitive meme: Start focusing on what will be! It's a better emphasis. It's an emphasis that can only fuel one, and nerve one, and give me hope. It's manna from heaven and balm in Gilead. Without it, one's all in for... P.(Physician) A.(Assisted) S.(Suicide). With it, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (M. Gaye/T. Terrell, 1967). LUV U.
To respond to the opening invitation and make a gift in support of PZ's Podcast, click here (https://mbird.com/support/donate/). The most recent cast, entitled "GPF", has drawn a lot of response. This new cast develops the theme a bit more, and rounds it with memorable music by what Spencer Leffel once called my "house band". The last third of life is characterized, or should be, by increasing dis-engagement, increasing observation of the past, and hopefully by increasing peace of mind. Add to that a warmer faith, or hope, in what lies beyond death for the individual self. (I'm not interested in resources for the aged and the dying that focus solely on the "process" of mortality. I need more than that! I need to know where I'm going, at least the core of it.) Take my inventory of your own years, in the templates of gratitude, peace, and faith (for what lies jenseits, i.e., across the Jordan). If you find yourself feeling pretty low on the scale, there is no time to lose ("No Time" -- The Guess Who, 1970). If you're experience yourself as higher up on the scale, well, you're probably not. In any case, don't wait! I mean, really -- don't wait. Podcast 289 is dedicated to Anthony Newman.
This follows from Episode 286, entitled "Sine Qua Non" (https://pzspodcast.fireside.fm/250), and concerns the arrival of gratitude and peace at the end of life -- or, better, way before the end of life -- and the birth of faith for one's safe "arrival" after death. I speak at first about disillusionment with the world, and especially with the world's repetition. "The World Is a Circle" (Burt Bacharach/Hal David, 1973), and come to find out, it really is a circle. Trends rise and fall, and almost always, persistently come back. "Burning" passionate concerns ebb and flow, but almost always re-enter the equation. Generations create and build and re-build, and then it's forgotten. Until, two generations later, the same vision is proffered and embodied, then shaken down, then re-embodied. Then bulldozed! Where do I turn? "Where Do I Go/ Follow the river... Where is the something?/ Where is the someone/ That tells me why I live and die?" From the broken-down platform of disillusionment, where do I turn? Podcast 288 moves to the question of hope, really the experience of Christian Hope. It's not a stretch, really. More like a trampoline. LUV U.
My subject is the birth of love in human relationships. What causes a person to love (as opposed to being indifferent, or even hostile)? What causes you and me to love another (as opposed to being merely dutiful, or resentful, for that matter)? I recorded the cast because one is bombarded these days, within mainstream Christian circles, with calls to love, summonses to embody the way of Jesus, His program, as it were, for this broken world. These calls are sincere and appropriate. But they lack something. They lack motive. They lack the motivational power to perform the deed! The Gospel is summed up in one easy sentence from I John 4: "We love because He first loved us." A person can't love on his or her own steam. Love is birthed from prior love. This is true for Bobby Sherman, in the somewhat dumb but overwhelmingly true song from 1970, entitled "Julie, Do You Love Me". If 'Julie' loves me, I can do anything. But if she doesn't (love me), I'm an unanchored buoy floating on the surface of the ocean towards the royal road to nowhere. With love, human and divine, everything hinges on the starting point. And that is the being loved, not the loving. But when you are loved, loving someone else becomes the most natural thing in the world. Oh, and listen to "Easy To Be Hard", by Three Dog Night (or "Hair", depending on your record collection). Those lyrics have never been bettered. LUV U.
A scene near the beginning of the Russian movie version of War and Peace (1965-67) conveys the inner dialogue of a young woman as she lays dying after childbirth -- actually, as she has just died. Her spirit wonders to herself in sorrowful bewilderment: "I gave everything to everyone else, sought to love everyone else, but I was rejected by them, treated badly by them. I don't understand." The passage is moving, and also unsettling, because the character's inner reality comes to expression only in her closing moments, and it is most definitely un-resolved. As Mary and I watched this, we both thought to ourselves, May it not be so with us. Please let it not be so with us when our time comes -- whether that is sooner or later. This podcast affirms three essentials, three sine qua nons, of the human heart -- really, the human self -- as we face death, whether "early", whether accidental, or whether "in the nature of things" in old age. Three essentials for a happy exit. Each of these I would say is necessary and primary, not optional nor secondary. Each is core and decisive. Each is "required". Wonder what you'll think. Hope you'll like the music, too, from an excerpt by Gordon Lightfoot, whose music has never appeared on the cast before, and from Livingston Taylor. Soft Rock, OK, but quietly profound, perhaps, in both cases. LUV YOU!
There is so much talk just now about the decline of Christianity in this country. But try to listen to the right music on that score. Or rather, the more accurate music! The fact is, young people and young families are flocking to churches where the Gospel is preached. From Charlottesville to Lower Manhattan to Bedford to Waco to Louisville to Winter Park to Rice to Bradford to "Baltimore and D.C. now (Don't forget the Motor City)" (Martha & The Vandellas, 1964)) to ... well, you fill in the blank: people are coming to church where mercy is offered, hope is proffered, and defeated persons succored. And it's not just "Back Row America". The Offer's being made everywhere. And a further point. The poll takers of church attrition are not talking very much to Hispanic and other immigrant communities. The Hispanic pentecostal churches are thriving. I mean, booming! Go to Bridgeport. Go to The Bronx. Go to Orlando, near the Airport. Visit Guillermo Maldonado's church in Miami. Go to ... well, again, you fill in the blank. There are not many white hairs (like mine) in those churches. So Listen to the Music. The music that's in tune, that is; the music that's on key and with the beat. The music you can dance to. And if 'Heinz' were looking for a church today -- hear the cast's closing track -- I think I know where he'd go. LUV YOU!
The subject of the cast is inspiration: where it comes from and how to get it. That may sound a little ambitious, but lots of us are looking for it, whether in our family and our marriage or in the pulpit and our ministry or just in the Wee Wee Hours of a stressed-out life. Joe Meek, the odd independent English record producer from the late 1950s and early-mid '60s, is a moving example of an inspired person, a creator whose inspiration came within the context of mediocre performers and lame song-material. His records such as "Son, This Is She", performed by John Leyton, and "Paradise Garden", performed by Peter Jay, are bizarrely convincing marriages of eccentric material with inspired crafting. Sort of like us poor preachers, who are pretty flawed instruments but hope to be "produced" by God in such a way that we can do some good. I also refer to a preacher I admire whose balletic body-language in the pulpit is as effective and appropriate to the substance of the Message as anyone I've ever seen. (My own gestures and expressions when I speak in church are enough to make me wince when I see pictures.) The conclusion of the cast refers to pilgrimage and the somehow decisive importance of going away from home and to somewhere in order to break out of ruts and fecklessness. It's as if the Inspirer almost waits to see how serious we are about getting help in order to break out.
It seems that human nature, or rather, one's understanding of human nature, is the Achilles Heel of theology -- and philosophy, too -- throughout the "Spin-Me-Round" (Dead or Alive, 1985) of cyclical human history and cyclical failed answers to the problem of being human. If you have a high doctrine of human nature, and human potential, you'll generally opt for a low doctrine of God. (You don't need Him.) But if you have a low doctrine of human nature, and human failed expectations, you may well opt for a high doctrine of God. Or rather, you'll be more inclined to look for God outside yourself than to believe you've got intrinsically the answers. Which is to say that the banana peel of Christian history seems to be a swelled inaccurate view of human agency and possibility. We slip, in other words, on the banana peel of exaggerated human potential. My podcast reviews the doctrine of human nature, in broad terms, within the history of the American Episcopal Church. I see that doctrine as the key to understanding where we've been, where we are, and also where we could be. And I'm not without hope. You'll also hear an AMAZING British hit from 1971, entitled "I Did What I Did for Maria". This odd, conflicted and brilliant song touches just about every raw nerve there is. (We LUV Tony Christie!)
This is part two of a series on the arithmetic increase, as one grows older, in unchangeability within the human personality and yet the extraordinary palpable power of absolving grace to stop the decline! In the same way that perceived personal rejection, especially at a young age, becomes a kind of iron straitjacket defeating almost all attempts to change oneself -- and certainly defeating attempts by other people to try to change you -- in the same way, personal affirmation and one-way love demonstrated towards you when you are "under a cloud" opens that straitjacket immediately and it drops away. Not that echoes of a prime, early rejection won't be heard again. For they will! But absolving love cuts the cord on it, breaks it off you, unshackles you from its chains, and opens your pores and your veins. I've seen this again and again, both in the hardening of rejection as an attitude to life and in the "My Chains Fell Off, My Heart Was Free" (C. Wesley) consequence, inside a person, of unconditional, one-way love. This is especially true, the latter transaction, when love is shown you during a period when you are "under a cloud". Not just depressed affect or "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues", but when the world snares you and shames you and humiliates you and un-forgives you (EVER). That's when the Grace of God, embodied characteristically in the grace of an intervening person, changes you. Personal, affective change that is the result of merciful treatment is the hydrogen-bomb change within a hardened. It is as "sure as the turning of the earth", which is John Wayne's line in 'The Searchers' (1956). The music for this cast is from Led Zeppelin's inspired second LP, "Led Zeppelin II"; and the cast is dedicated to David B.
The downhill momentum of inertia and prior woundedness in people begins early but seems to pick up speed the older you get. In other words, the more time elapses since an early rejection or early hurt was sustained, the more impact it seems to have on you as you age. I keep seeing contemporaries of mine, most of them in fact, in whom what was an idiosyncrasy or "slight defect" in youth or early adulthood becomes more pronounced, and finally, quite alienating. This goes for addiction and over-eating and personal hygiene, but also includes resentments, bitterness, unforgiveness, and obsession. At this point in my observation, I would almost say that a person's temperamental negatives uniformly get bigger and more gross with the passage of time. Barring, that is, the intervention of a forgiving, absolving love that takes the person as he or she is. The result of a sincerely merciful intervention, so counter-intuitive in relation to the world's judgement but so luminously true in the Christian Gospel, is a radical volte-face that we call New Birth and New Creation, or simply hope. In the cast, I reference Led Zeppelin II, that inspired astonishment of an LP from the late 1960s; the relationship of 'Pip' and 'Magwitch' in Great Expectations; and some recent situations that cry out for interruptive mercy. Note, too, the brilliant launch of Tullian and Stacie Tchividjian's new church in Florida. That church is what it's all about! "Downhill Racer" is dedicated to David V.
Human nature is extremely vulnerable. I'm thinking of one's inwardness, and the way a seemingly small rejection, loss or blow of some kind can be enough to unravel a person's entire equilibrium. You can compare yourself, even if you're basically a coper -- many people aren't -- to the seemingly impregnable 'Death Star' in "Star Wars". That massive circular spacecraft/world is perfectly defended. Except, yes, there is a vulnerability. It is a tiny one, but it's there just the same. All Luke needs to do is find that opening, and one small rocket is sufficient to blow the entire thing "Sky High" (Jigsaw, 1975). This cast understands most people as balancing their lives, both inwardly and outwardly, as if they were Charles Blondin, the celebrated French tightrope walker. At any point, we can get distracted or interfered with, lose our balance, and go plunging to our death. I believe we are sometimes closer to the edge than we think. There's a rather "arty" Hollywood movie from 1964 entitled "Lilith", starring Jean Seberg and Warren Beatty. It takes place in a private psychiatric hospital, and almost everyone in it has fallen or is in danger of falling... over the edge. Two characters actually do. At one point, a character played by Peter Fonda (R.i.P.) asks Warren Beatty, "Do you think insanity is really just a form of unhappiness?" This podcast, entitled "Susan", actually ends on a hopeful, religious note. And the song excerpt at the end... well, it's pure joy. LUV U.
I was dumbfounded, in a good way, when a pastor I respect prayed for God to hold Hurricane Dorian at the Central Florida coastline and not permit the storm to go inland. In 44 years' ordained ministry, I have sedulously prayed never for the weather, "pro" or "con", believing that such a prayer would in all cases be extreme. After all, the Lord said that "it rains on the unjust and the just". Moreover, I had zero faith that such a prayer would ever be answered. On the other hand, He said to the storm on the sea, "Peace! Be still." In any event, neither I nor anyone I know personally, whether in formal ministry or not, has ever prayed for a hurricane to stop. Up until last week, I would have considered such a prayer to be out of bounds. But then a pastor prayed ... out of bounds. And Lo and Behold: Dorian stopped moving west and started moving east. Three days later a candidate for President prayed a similar prayer to the one that had dumbfounded me. Marianne Williamson tweeted thus (tho' her staff counselled she remove the tweet): "Millions of us seeing Dorian turn away from land is not a wacky idea; it is a creative use of the power of the mind." In other words, Williamson, coming from a somewhat different place, theologically speaking, from my pastor, nevertheless had the same faith. She pumped for "Little Boy" (2015) boldness in calling off Dorian! This podcast is a personal summons to out-of-bounds faith. Don't generalize or conceptualize, as in "what about the Bahamas?'. Or what about the next big storm, or the one four storms back? Categorizations -- also known as "narratives" -- are the enemy of subjective advance. Remember what the blind man said to the Pharisees, "One thing I know: once I was blind, now I see" (John 9:25). For myself, I was heartened by a person I respect, to pray that God restrain His natural storm in this case. Next prayer: How 'bout Peace on Earth?
An awful lot of truth is coming out just now, on several fronts. As to why exactly this is happening, I can't precisely say. But when the truth about anything, from ill-anchored relationships to cultural captivities to urban blight, comes out, "Some People" (Belois Some,1985) become threatened. And more than threatened. This cast talks about Quentin Tarantino's movie "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" (2019), Baltimore (MD), and romantic beginnings (and new beginnings, or rather, re-beginnings). For the latter, the classic Preston Sturges movie "The Lady Eve" (1942) offers a striking instance concerning the anchor of romantic love that exists within the experience of male regression. Not to mention the romantic climax of "A Town Like Alice" (1950 novel, 1981 mini-series). My point is that core truths of life are often suppressed, masked, covered over, hidden -- by "the powers and principalities, the spiritual forces of wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:12). They don't want you to know. This cast exists for the sake of the truth as I see it, and is dedicated to Paula White-Cain, subjective friend to me and objective champion of the liberating Spirit of God.
Tyrone Davis sort of says it all in the title track to this cast. He's "Running a Losing Race", and it sounds to me a lot like life. As a person ages, they have to watch out not to 'diss' the legitimate aspirations and engagements of people who are still, by necessity shall we say, "in the world". It's way too easy from a retired perspective to pour cold water on the hopes and dreams of younger people. The secret of wisdom, as you get older, would be to bring a perspective that embodies an accurate disillusionment with false hopes and inevitably disappointing projects while at the same offering hope in "the things that remain" (Dylan, 'When You Gonna Wake Up', 1981). To do that -- to portray life in its "True Colors" (C. Lauper, 1986) while at the same providing a better Palette -- well, such is the ambition of this podcast. I like Greg Townson a lot. A brilliant musician on his own terms, he now plays with Los Straitjackets in the persona 'Gregorio El Grande'. He is a mature adult, much younger than I; but his playlist, which seems to get richer by the week, reveals a well of inspiration that could give hope to any artist previously unrecognized or unfulfilled. Greg Townson gives me hope, which is why I talk about him at the end of the cast. Oh, and Cicely Tyson, too. LUV U
There are certain subjects that seem verboten in the pulpit. I'm not referring to political issues, or contemporary social themes; but, rather, to pastoral situations/experiences that are so "close to home" that one's listeners literally rise up in fury against the preacher. One of these subjects is suicide, if preached honestly and urgently from the pulpit. Another is a familiar theme of this podcast, the dramatic influence of romantic love -- i.e., the aspiration and almost limitless hunger that exists in people for romantic connection -- on otherwise stable and rational persons. People protest against this subject when I broach it publicly, usually saying something like, "I would never EVER do such a thing", such as leaving my husband and children for somebody else. Yet you find out, just four months later, that the very same person has done exactly that! (I'm not kidding. It happens all the time, tho' there's a kind of embargo on mentioning it.) This particular cast concerns widowhood. I know of no more verboten subject in the pulpit than the disparity in life expectancy between men and women. Accurate statistics tell us that when you look out from the pulpit at your congregation, at least in most "main-line" churches, the number of widows likely to be present, as well as the number of likely widows, far outnumbers the number of widowers. Obviously I wish the statistic weren't true. (The chances of my being laid in the earth fairly soon are significantly higher than Mary's chances. That's why we both earnestly wish we could die in temporal proximity. Who wants to be alone in their oldest age?) But it is true, nonetheless. And now Mary and I see it actually happening, all around us. The husbands within the couples we know are dying at a much faster rate than the wives. Seems like widows are everywhere; and tho' there are widowers in existence, we only get a sighting on rare occasions. Just go to church, almost anywhere, and you'll see what I mean. So what is the problem? Why can't I talk about this publicly? (For people of both sexes get noticeably antsy when I do.) Especially, why can't we talk about it as Christians, since the New Testament frequently pleads for "widows and orphans" -- no NT references to widowers! -- and since we know that God is with us most profoundly when we are alone and feeling comfortless. Maybe you can help me with this disconnect. It seems painfully obvious the older I get. LUV U.
We all want to know, when we are down -- I mean, when we are really down -- where we can turn for help. It happens to almost everyone, at least once in your life, that circumstances -- outward, inward, or a combination of both -- pull the rug out from under you and you find yourself flat on the ground. I don't write this to upset you, because you probably wouldn't be reading it if you didn't already know this. But "Where Do I Go" ('Hair', 1969), when I have nowhere else to go? Specifically, where do I go to find God? Or rather, where is God located that I might find him? A recent BBC television series entitled "Mrs. Wilson" depicts a woman's descent into hell after she finds out that every safe harbor and mooring that her life has hitherto clung to is a lie. She finds out, very suddenly, that nothing in her life has been what it seemed. The rug is pulled out from under her life in almost every imaginable way. The story behind "Mrs. Wilson", by the way, is completely true. She does find a solution, or, better, a re-alignment of her life's attitude and position. She finds God's Love, in fact, coming down to aid her. But as I watched the moving and also Christian resolution of "Mrs. Wilson", I thought of all the ways that God is "advertised" as having come down, and therefore being available to a sufferer. And I thought of the shortcomings of at least some of those advertised ways. Then I thought of Frank Lake, and Paula White. And learned something in the process. The cast begins with an instrumental break by Los Straitjackets, which, for my money, is a solid instance of the Love that's come down; and ends with Eddie James, assisted by Ashley Brison and Patricia Miller, who root that Love in Pentecostal Power.
It's not just Tyrone Davis. It's almost any artist who captures the popular imagination. He or she is talking about real things, personal and individual issues, the things everyone is carrying. As opposed to abstractions and concepts. I was looking at a church news service the other day and noted that every single item featured had to do with a "social-justice" or group-identity concern. And every single item was worthy, in the sense that the concern is real and the possibility of Christian moral input hopeful. But I also thought, not many people come to church for the first time looking for group-answers or conceptual constructions. People who come to church for the first time -- and most of us, probably -- are looking for relief from personal pain. We come to God -- when we really come to Him -- for relief and help in the now! This is an empirical fact from experience. That is why Tyrone Davis speaks to me more than almost every religion news service put together. TD is right there in the arena of lovelessness, lovelornness, love abandonment and love recouping. Just listen to the opening phone call in "I Had It All the Time", which begins this cast. The man has flown 1000 miles to get something back that he lost. Love L-U-V, in other words. Tyrone Davis, and not the unspecific concerns of our momentary moment, represents the Future of Mankind. LUV U!
A little bit of surgery can compose the mind, right? In any event, in my recovery I went back to Nevil Shute's novel The Rainbow and the Rose. It concerns the twilight of a man's life as he lies dying in an overturned airplane in remotest Australia, and the insights he has -- and someone else has -- about himself. These insights concern the inward man, not the outward man; and the reader learns to look at himself in the broadest possible and yet the truest possible strokes. I've tried to say it before, but only one or two relationships that you have had will be on your mind at the end. It may be a child, possibly a lost child. It may be someone you've loved -- and who may be there still, by the grace of God. It may be one of your parents, or a father-figure or someone like that. But it will be a person, not a thing; an intimate connection, not an idea or "narrative". This podcast invites the listener to review his or her own life in these terms. They are the terms that last, or last until we are "swallowed up in death", or better, in the Light and New Jerusalem of God. Oh, and read Rupert Brooke's sonnet "The Treasure", from which the cast takes its title. Shute begins his novel under the rubric of that profound poem. You can find it anywhere. LUV U!
I'm wary of telling a story about myself unless it has potential resonance and carries some possible hope to a listener. Here I am giving a short witness of a counter-intuitive Word received in church the other day; and an even more counter-intuitive "Word" from the world of pop music, which came crashing through my windshield on the way home from church. The initial Word related to chain-breaking and the possibility of a life-cycle completed rather than repeating. Moreover, this first Word came during the minister's Offertory Sentences! (I had come to hear a sermon, but the Word came via an Offertory Sentence.) The second Word gave me an instrument through which the first Word could become real, a concrete thing. And that second Word was a rather pale-sounding Christmas perennial entitled "The Bell That Couldn't Jingle". So, much to one's surprise... God's Word confounds one's most established and convinced narratives. He has a narrative -- or rather, is a narrative. But any narrative I'm trying to project on my life soon stands in tatters on that "hill I chose to die on". Oh, and listen to Kim Walker Smith at the end of the cast. For me, she was a complete discovery! What do you do when you think you know a lot, and it turns out you know more or less nothing, or at least nothing about a very big something. LUV U.
Imputation is the prime "agent" within the great dynamic of the Grace of God. As one need never tire of saying, imputation is when you regard someone as better (or finer or prettier or stronger or kinder) than they are. And the effect of imputation is to make the person actually become, in "real time" and real life, the way they are being regarded. Often imputation is understood as a sort of "legal fiction", by which you just put a cloak over a wound and by not actually treating the wound allow it to fester and contaminate. This misunderstanding is dispelled when you demonstrate imputation from life -- which not enough exponents of it do! The fact is, romantic love as well as the love of parents for their children, and also the love of mentors and teachers to those in their charge, almost always, if it is to work, includes the "agency" or instrument of imputation. In other words, you're seen as if you were better than you see yourself; and the effect of this in practice is that you wordlessly change and get better. It just happens! And it happens all the time. This episode of PZ's Podcast begins with a 'Philadelphia Soul' instance of imputation, in a track by The Spinners entitled "Lazy Susan". The song is both improbable and wonderful. I can almost guarantee that on the second listen, you will tear up. (I feel certain Sarah Condon will. At least one hopes so.) Then I try to explain how imputation works in life, concluding with reference to Taylor Caldwell's 1960 novel entitled "The Listener" (https://amzn.to/2Xtzz7Q). I have to thank Stu Shelby for quoting that novel during his Palm Sunday sermon. (I had never heard of it before.) In the novel, a totally compassionate yet hidden 'Listener" evokes complete, unsparing self-disclosure and confession on the part of sufferers. And they are each changed. "The Listener" is a Run-Don't-Walk novel for Mockingbird -- let alone, everybody.. Episode 271 of PZ's Podcast is dedicated to 'Father Stu', Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, Winter Park, FL.
So I was looking high and low for a little peace the other day. An article I read had upset me, and I thought to myself, "Well, if that's true, then why not just go to sleep for the next ten years, say, and not be conscious." Then suddenly, an hilarious Instagram post came up from a Mockingbird contributor, which sparked an old association: the 1973 single by The Tymes, entitled "You Little Trustmaker". And somehow, like the correct fork in Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", that made all the difference. This podcast is in fact a reflection on love and trust, on love enacted as well as love sworn. I hope it will open a door on your own loves, let alone on your own isolation (when you feel it) -- a door on Love as it really is. And please don't miss Tyrone Davis' 'story in music' at the end, entitled "I Had It All the Time". LUV U!
As the human soul makes its trajectory through life, it "lights on" hoped-for objects of connection. From birth to death, the soul is looking for, urgently aspiring to locate, a substitute for the connection with God that it had before it was born. Unfortunately, the soul is almost always disappointed. That is because no created entity and no living being can satisfy what only God can satisfy. No person that's been made can satisfy the longing for direct connection with Immortal Love which fills every human soul. Thus hurts are born and wounds are made. Sorrows are indited and pain is pressed in. And, as my first Episcopal bishop said, the man of God I had known as a little boy on the Washington Cathedral Close, on his death bed -- shocking the Diocese of Washington in 1971 -- "Life is tragic." How are the wounds of life healed? Well, about 95% of them can be healed under the maxim, "Feel to heal". If the wounded individual will just stop suppressing, displacing, and swallowing the pain of the wound, and, rather, feel it and express it, the pain almost always diminishes. It may not diminish to the point of non-existence. But it very often, when abreacted, when felt, diminishes to the point of being able to be borne. And yet, and yet, there is about a 5% element within the pain of one's life that is just too deeply buried, too poorly stitched up when it happened, too "immediate" to the child-self inside you, to be healed by being felt. Some sicknesses, to quote SK, are "unto death". I have observed this fact of life (or death, rather) through years of pastoral ministry. Some problems are, it appears, incurable. And this is where the experience of spiritual warfare comes to the fore. (I often wish this second element of healing weren't true, because it threatens to cross over into the Twilight Zone or One Step Beyond -- the bizarre and potentially superstitious.) But it is still true! Some of the burdens you and I carry can be healed only through spiritual deliverance, the casting out of demons. But hey, Jesus did it. He was much less finicky about it, too, than I, for one, constitutionally, am. So "Come with Me, and Take a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". LUV U, PZ
It was touching beyond words to attend and witness the Institution of Stu Shelby as Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, Winter Park, FL. Mary was a Presenter, and I had the chance to just take it all in. Sarah Condon preached the sermon, and it was an absolute home run. The whole affair felt like "Mockingbird Embodied"; and the message of God's Grace in Christ was utterly tangible and fully fleshed. For me and Mary, this was a high point of our life in Florida. So I thought about "seasons" in one's life. The word's a little over used -- sort of like "conversation" -- but there is still something to it. Stu and Sarah, and Josh and Crissy, and Dave and Cate, and many, many others we know, are right in the middle of life, of engagement. They are on the front lines of ministry, service, and witness. Yours truly, on the other hand, is more on the margins. One can't help this for it is a part of aging. Nevertheless, one can give, and serve, in a different way. Think about Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets. They are just about to release a new album, "Love Starvation", and the early notices are raves. They are all now older versions of themselves, but still... themselves. Or Steve Perry. His recent album, "Traces", got a few complaints concerning the timbre and range of his voice. But listen to it: the emotion of his Journey songs is right there! The heart of his Journey songs is right there! He is right there. The same is true of you as you "grow in grace and you grow in years". You're the same but you're in a new season. That season has different doors and different possibilities. But you're not regressing! You're deepening. LOL, PZ
Huge -- Yuge -- feedback from the previous two casts, entitled "Surprise Surprise" and "Soul Searchin' Time". So here I am looking at two basics, two core issues I have with current religion -- religion in the David Zahl/"Seculosity" sense, that is, every attempt to solve the problem of being human by conceiving a lever to fix it. I see two core problems with most religion, let alone culture, today. This includes evangelical Christianity, which persistently shows, in the case of fallen pastors, disloyalty to its central warrant; and social-progressive Christianity, which also persistently shows, in the case of traditional believers in its own ranks, a failure to live up to its warrant of "inclusion". My first point is that if one's anthropology is too high, if one's understanding of human nature underestimates the problem of inward inherent conflictedness (i.e., sin), then one's soteriology is routinely too low. In other words, if you believe human beings can produce a just society on their own, then the tools you give them to do it will not be up to the task. The Gospel presupposes a low anthropology, which requires a high soteriology. You need to get your diagnosis right in order to get your treatment right. My second point is that if you think parity-of-power and/or economic security are the two necessary elements of social and individual satisfaction, then you are missing an element that's even more important than they. What's that, you ask? Romantic Love. Oh, no, you say, Paul's at it again! But no! Just listen to the songs you like on Spotify, review the records you buy (or download), and think about... what you're usually thinking about. Let's not even use the phrase "romantic love". Let's just say, relationships. Let's just say, connection with another human being. Let's just talk about moms and dads and children, boyfriends and girlfriends, 'Friend and Lover' ("Reach Out of the Darkness", 1968). These are the things -- the people -- that make your world go 'round, or make it crash! Two basics, then: the inviolable connection between low anthropology and high soteriology, and the irresistible claim on you of a relationship. Or the hope of same. (Sighted Sub. Sank Same.) LUV U!
The previous cast, "Surprise, Surprise", raised the vexing question of exceptions in the practice of grace to sinners and sufferers. I spoke about the chronic inability of Christians who emphasize grace to embody it in relation to specific sinners and specific sins. One example I chose was from the Reformed world and one was from the Social Progressive world. The context of each was different, but the phenomenon is the same: "talking the talk" re grace and "radical welcome" but exempting certain individuals or groups of individuals from its "saving embrace". My question now is How Come? How is it possible for Gospel-emphasizing Christians to still flee a particular sinner? And how is it possible for Inclusion-emphasizing Christians to make "traditional" Christians feel so un-included? Well, one thing I know is that when you and I are loved -- really loved, concretely and personally -- at our worst point, then we almost cannot fail to extend that mercy to other people at their worst point, no matter what it is. Mary and I have seen this time and again. You probably have, too. The cast concludes with an illustration from the 1935 movie version of "The Last Days of Pompeii", and a reference to the British TV mini-series "We The Accused" (1980). Each incident described mirrors the Real Thing. It is why we are Christians, after all. LUV U.
A friend recently surprised me with the observation that Christians he knows who preach a "theology of glory" seem to be more welcoming, and forgiving, of real actual sinners than Christians he knows who preach a "theology of the Cross". In other words, the folk who you'd think would be the most merciful to people who've fallen aren't! And people with whose theology you can't necessarily sign on the dotted line -- such as pentecostals or African-American evangelicals -- are! I'd have to say that my own experience confirms what my friend said. I've spent my whole ministry in a denomination which avers passionately that the chief sign of a Christian Church is its Radical Welcome and Radical Inclusion. (I agree with this, in principle!) But the "rub" is that the welcome doesn't always apply, at least to traditional Christians. The question I'm asking is why. Why do Christians who protest they are proponents of the "relentless love of Christ" and "the fierce love of God" not practice it in specific cases? Why the exemptions in practice? I mean, I can barely number any more the excellent rectors I have known who have felt it necessary to become Roman Catholics. These are good, loving, and experienced pastors -- not squeaky wheels -- who have concluded that they cannot be themselves in their old environment. The "hard wood of the Cross" seems to be applied to everyone but themselves. We are looking at un-integrated assertions concerning the Grace of God. The assertions are great. One agrees with almost everything being stated concerning the reach of God's Grace, whether it is stated on the theological right or the theological left. But they seem to find it hard to mercifully engage real sin, or real difference. Listen to William Hale White's reflection on this odd surprise in the following short passage from his novel "The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford" (1881): "It must be added that (the evening services in our evangelical chapel) afforded us many opportunities for walking home with certain young women, who, I am sorry to say, were a more powerful attraction than the prospect of hearing brother Holderness, the travelling draper, confess crimes which, to say the truth, although they were many according to his own account, were never given in that detail which would have made his confession of some value. He never prayed without telling all of us there there was no health in him; and everybody thought the better of him for his self-humiliation. One actual indiscretion, however, brought home to him would have been visited by suspension or expulsion."
Justin Hayward is a sort of archivist for romantic relationships. He is 72 and still going strong. Two 'Live' performances book-end this cast, which is intended as fresh therapy towards a happy marriage. Appeals to grace, forgiveness, and empathy in relating to this impossibly different person with whom you are now living, are good. They are probably the only behaviors that will turn your ship around. That is, if it needs turning around. But when the stresses involved in over-committedness and sheer over-work threaten not just to get you off course but to sink you -- that's when this tip for a happy marriage becomes, suddenly, decisive. My tip is that you go back to the source, ad fontes -- back to where the relationship began. After all, what started the two of you? What was the juice, the fuel, the electricity, the sub-atomic reaction? Whatever it was partakes of the undying, of the eternal, of the soul. That may sound a little exalted, but "exalted" is how you felt. You can clearly see this sub-atomic reality in Melody, a 1971 English film about a 12-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl who fall in love. Altho' the boy processes it a little differently than the girl, it all happens in "Just One Look" (The Hollies, 1964). Once that look is exchanged, there is almost no going back. I remember the exact moment in time when I first saw Mrs. Zahl. It was "across a crowded room", I mean, seminar room, in college. I don't think she saw me gleichzeitig; but for me, yes, it was "Just One Look". If your relationship's, let us say, a little strained just now -- or a little on-the-shelf due to the pressure of other things -- well, you probably have to go "Back to Where It All Begins" (Allman Bros., 1994). Note the presence tense: your relationship began there, but it also begins there! Oh, and listen again to "Question" (1970). Justin Hayward wrote it when he was not much more than 19. But the wisdom of it is ageless. LUV U!
One's Christian life will fail if it is not rooted in the truth of human nature, which we all share, like it or not. Similarly, everyone's life, whether Christian or non-Christian or anti-Christian, will fail if it's not rooted in reality. And reality, the reality of people, includes hidden drives, hidden emotions, hidden disappointments, and hidden resentments. As the Rose Hobart character remarks, almost offhandedly, in "Susan and God" (1940), "No one ever says what they're really thinking." (I love Rose Hobart!) The point of my Mockingbird podcasts that concern romantic love is to underline what's often really going on -- otherwise, how can you explain the extraordinary and seemingly uncharacteristic decisions about their relationships that otherwise "adult" people seem constantly able to make? If you don't know yourself, if you're unable to diagnose the drives and feelings that overtake you sometimes, then you'll just be blown about by the wind. And possibly blow your own life to smithereens one day. (That happens every day.) In the 1970s the vocal group Blue Magic recorded a song entitled "Stop and Get a Hold of Yourself". The song is good but not great. The lyrics, on the other hand, are for the ages. The singer realizes something's happened, and it's upset his world. Therefore he wants to "stop and get a hold of (him)self". Good luck! Wish he could have listened to this cast, which, incidentally, is DEDICATED TO DEBBIE BRAZEAL AND ROBIN ANDERSON.
When it comes to rules or advice for long-term marriage, I often seem to hear words like "covenant" and "promise-keeping". These conceptions of keeping faith with another person are laudatory and fine -- and even necessary to keep the love going. But "covenant" and "promise", excellent as they are in principle, are insufficient to give you the oomph, the power, to do the thing you both want so much to do. That is because if something comes along that you actually find you want more than the thing you "covenanted" to preserve, or "promised" to keep, the covenant and promise will go out of effect. Covenants and promises are susceptible to being superannuated in exactly one minute. "It Only Takes a Minute, Girl, To Fall in Love" (Tavares, 1975). How else could you explain the thousands, even the millions of sincere people who made a covenant or exchanged a promise which they then broke? It's not that they wanted to be untrue. It's just that something presented itself that felt superior to the prior thing. So the covenant got broken. This is why I major on romantic love as the key to a happy marriage. When romantic love is there, between two people, they don't need words of encouragement to stand by a prior agreement. They don't need one single pointer to a covenant. "(All I want to do is) Act Naturally" (Ringo/The Beatles, 1965). The one thing you can do to renew a relationship that's gotten stale or even repellent (God forbid) is go back, in your heart, mind and memory, to the point when the relationship was fresh, fantastic, and enthralling. And there was almost definitely a time when it was -- when it was fresh, fantastic, and enthralling. The magic was there. (Otherwise, why would you have come together in the first place?) Apply the incomparable insight of Meister Eckhart, by way of Gerald Heard: "If you can't find God, go back to where you lost Him." LUV U.
Experiencing a massive re-think just now concerning world cinema! This has been occasioned in part by watching every disc one can get one's hands on of the recently released catalogue of British "Vintage Classics". Have you ever heard of "Mandy" (1951)? Or "The Captive Heart" (1946)? Or "The Sound Barrier" (1952)? Or "The Maggie" (1954)? Or "The Angry Silence" (1960)? Or "Melody" (1971)? -- which, incidentally, was the source material for "Moonrise Kingdom" (2012) by Wes Anderson. What you find out as you view these priceless expressions of popular art is that you've probably been wrong to idolize, almost to the exclusion of other expressions, the "cool" movies of the French 'New Wave' or the British 'Kitchen Sink'/'Angry Young Man' school. I, for one, got so mesmerized, "When I Was Young" (Eric Burdon and the Animals, 1967), by the narrative of art as "transgression", as the angry denunciation of boundaries and establishments, that I failed to recognize a whole host of other expressions -- and in particular, expressions of human drama that were redemptive and optimistic rather than bitter and enraged. Just compare Matt Monro with Sid Vicious. Or Terence Rattigan with John Osborne. Or "Shag" (1989) with "The Graduate" (1968). (Boy, was I ever seduced by "The Graduate". Yet now I look at it, all brightly done up by the Criterion Collection, and see a superficial swipe at ... the Presbyterian Church!) So here's a little word in favor of happiness, fun, and seaside romance. Did you miss out?
This is a kind of "work-book" question for the listeners to this podcast. The issue of romantic love is to the fore again, but the question is other: Why is there general radio silence on the vital point; or rather, why is there not more active concurrence in relation to it? The point I've been making is this: the dynamic in individual human beings that drives us to want to connect with another human being in a romantic experience of union is the core drive within people. It explains our search for God -- our life as a pilgrimage to know God personally -- and it underwrites almost every important decision, if the truth be known, that we ever make. That is a strong point, I realize. But it is what I am saying. My question is therefore this one: while no one is rushing to contest the point, why isn't almost everyone rushing to support the point? Am I saying something embarrassing, or possibly reductionist, by which I mean "people don't want to think of themselves as 'hopeless' romantics". (It is sort of a blow to one's pride to think that, well, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" (C. Lauper, 1983) or "You're my Everything (you're my everything, you're my everything, you're my everything)" (Temptations, 1967) or "My World is Empty without You, Babe" (Supremes, 1965). I mean, maybe you don't want to think of yourself as that needy. But I beg to differ. I'm that needy!) So I am asking the question: Does my point shed light on your experience? Does it explains some things? Or is it a downer? Is it a "Light That Failed" (Kipling, 1891)? Or, maybe, does it amount to a "New Morning" (Dylan, 1970)? LUV U.
We're talking about love today -- wouldn't ya know -- and the relation of divine love to romantic love. It's a familiar, but one that remains very fresh, at least as long as human memory and human loss remain conscious. Here is the key line, from a kind of monologue that occurs towards the end of "Revenge of the Creature" (1955), a sequel that's even better than the original. The young female scientist, played by Lori Nelson, says to her junior-professor colleague, played by John Agar, who is much enamored of her: "I looked up the definition of love in Webster's Dictionary, and this is what Mr. Webster says: 'Love is a feeling of strong personal attachment induced by sympathetic understanding'." That's a prime statement and I wonder if you identify. Does it nail down one's one-to-one attachments? Does it nail the relation we seek with God? In both cases I think it does. It distills the divine as well as the human. With the account of a recent conversation I had with someone who plunged me back into the waters of Lake Waban after 47 years, and also a citation from Rose Hobart/Rachel Crothers, I try to apply the Gospel to the really hidden things, the hidden crevasses of dis-remembered glaciality within us, the things we think that no one else will ever know. The cast concludes with a brief, sharp, early example of English glam rock, "Tiger Feet" by Mud. LUV U.
Everyone was young once. Adolescence, which is roughly the period between ages 16 and 25, is THE time in your life when you experience the strongest emotions, emotions contingent on loss but also fulfilment, expression but also suppression. You could almost say that one's adolescence is failed if you haven't felt the strongest degree of pain and also of pleasure that it is possible for a human being to feel. When we attack someone for having fun in college -- I am not talking about sexual assault, which is always wrong -- we may be attacking our best selves! Moreover, we are failing to understand the crucial connection between a free-spirited adolescence and a later adulthood of stability, discipline, and delayed satisfaction. There's a direct relation between how much fun you had in college and how steady you are now. The Pharisees who are riled up about the Judge's being the life of the party during law school -- well, I think they're probably all vulnerable to falling off the wagon at any point now. An out-of-control 60-year-old is not very funny. Maxim: Indulge the adolescent so he or she can become ... a good citizen. Hey, and don't you love Katrina and the Waves? Case closed.
Mrs. Zahl recently used the word "periphery" to describe our attitude, mine and hers, to increasing numbers of institutions, groups, and schools of thought to which we have been attached and for which we have been engaged for a long time. It's not that one has changed one's mind, or believes differently. Rather, it's just that human institutions and associations, over time, tend to disappoint. You begin to see you were attached to something quite malleable and even mercurial -- which you believed to be enduring and trustworthy. Thus, for example, I have withdrawn my emotional connection to Harvard College. It's happened (on the basis of an ideological policy the administration has aggressively pursued). One didn't decide to stop feeling warmly about the Yard and its environs; I just woke up one day no longer feeling that way. There are other examples. But maybe you can fill in your own. Funny, given the atmosphere of malice and "gotcha" that permeates our politics, I sometimes wonder whether it's safer, emotionally, to shift one's natural patriotism to a place of indifference. Hence, Steve Perry's new song, counseling withdrawal from love, at the end of the cast. But no! Finding one's way to the periphery of engagement (with this world) could be the prelude to engagement to the everlasting world of Life. All you need to do is read "Pilgrim's Progress". And oddly, or ironically, you can sometimes return to "this" world, with your sleeves rolled up, when your ego is no longer tied to results.
Donovan's odd and brilliant song from 1970 entitled "Atlantis" is a good example of what PZ's Podcast is all about. And what is that?: Well, if you get to the heart of what's really on your mind, what's really bothering you, then you are almost home. Moreover, if you can give it up to God, He always deals with it, and for your good. Making the connection between your reality and God's Reality: that's the presenting problem of life. I like "Atlantis", by Donovan, because underneath the sententiousness of the first minute or so, what the singer really wants to talk about is "my antediluvian baby". Underneath the somewhat affected "history" lesson is the singer's drive to dive, his drive to locate the underwater object, the girl, of his dreams. (Think "Stella Fregelius", that most alarming novel of H. Rider Haggard. Don't ever read it, by the way -- that is, if you value your sanity.) This cast, per usual yet with a fresh flare into the night sky of one's life, asks you to ask yourself whether you're bringing out -- bringing out to God -- the core issue of your inwardness. If you are like me, you're probably not. In fact, the core issue of your life has become so habituated a part of you that it may not even occur to you to present it -- "a living sacrifice" (BCP) -- to God. You've been living with TNT buried inside you for so long that you've almost forgotten it's there. At the end of the episode, I tell a little story on myself, with which I hope you will resonate. And then there's the matter of the final song, one of the most satisfying and positive of all top 40 singles. LUV U.
Pastorally -- and generally -- it is easy to miss the core of what's going on with a person in pain. You may see some symptoms -- tho' sometimes even the symptoms are hidden -- and may sub-rationally understand that something bad is taking place under the surface. But when it comes to the "Heart of Darkness" inside a sufferer, it may be very hard to fathom and to surface. Yet surfacing that "Heart" is the essence of what love is all about. How often in relationships have I missed the heart of the problem! This cast takes as its text a letter that Eric Clapton once wrote to Pattie Boyd. It is as heartfelt and simply surgical as a letter to another person -- let alone God -- could possibly be. If only all of us could lay out our elemental pain in such an open fashion. For then the pain, through active and concerned empathy, could be felt, and maybe healed. But that rarely happens. What happens instead is suicide, fatal irrational decisions, extreme actings-out, and interventions that inspire life-long regret in their aftermath. I think Eric Clapton's letter to Pattie Boyd should be required reading for anyone in the helping professions, and particularly in the ministry. Listen to it -- I'm not Alexander Scourby, but I tried -- and think of yourself. Or think of someone you truly love. Who is suffering in silence. Podcast 255 is dedicated to CHARLOTTE B. GETZ.
No finer Southern prep ever hit the scene than the Sewanee graduate Tupper Saussy. His two albums produced under the name "The Neon Philharmonic", with Don Gant, are supreme examples of symphonic rock. More than that, however, the songs are profound. Saussy's track entitled "Something to Believe In" speaks the voice of a questing human soul, "riding the wind" of life and searching for "something to believe in". Needless to say, the soul finds "a girl", whom the soul believes in and worships, only to lose. Now what? At the end of the song, Tupper's soul prepares to die, still looking for that "something to believe in". I think we're probably almost all in that boat. Life's a wholly engaged existential search for God, and it's quite dangerous, because "in the dark", which is life in the world, you can think you've found it but you haven't. And then, when what you thought was It turns out not to be It, one's disillusion, and dissolution, becomes terminal. Be careful, in other words, about what you put your trust in. If you make an enduring, imprinting mistake, you may never find It! And the It -- call it by whatever name you will (HT Bill W.) -- is "the Rock that is higher than I". Just avow this, that YOU're not it -- nor is she and nor is he -- and you're almost home. Oh, and two other things: First, go out and find Enid Bagnold's play "The Chinese Ambassador" and read it from cover to cover. (It's quite short. It's just a play.) Second, this cast is dedicated to TAMARA SANSBURY, who understands my Instagram posts.
Shibboleth's are often true in part. Maxims are true in part. But they are never, or at least rarely, wholly true. One such maxim is a current fashionable imperative, Face the Cannons. The idea is that when you are confronted with opposition or antagonism, your best bet is to look it squarely in the face and permit it to do its worst. Somehow in that acquiescent transaction, your foe will lose its power and kind of flow through you and get de-potentiated. There is a truth to this. Frank Lake used to talk about "assimilating the negativity" of one's life. He had, in practice, an important therapeutic point. And yet! There seem to be certain "antagonists", certain oppositional forces -- some of them inside a person, some of them outside -- that resist the treatment. Certainly, there exists pain in our lives so acute that the prospect of facing it directly is too heavy for words. In other words, facing it, practically speaking, is almost impossible. This podcast talks about THAT particular and specific pain -- THAT concrete negativity which is simply too much for one to bear, let alone welcome. I submit that you may well be conscious of such an element in the composition of your life. It is an element that resists assimilation, and even the hope of assimilation. What then? Well, here I invoke our old ally Dennis Wheatley, not to mention America's most perceptive preacher; not to mention Jesus and St. Paul. There are some things, just a few but they're decisive, that resist acquiescence. Rather, they call for flight or, if worst comes to worst, that miraculous life's lesson known as "How To Throw a Crucifix". Hope you like the music for this one, too! Especially the last track, "Easy To Be Hard", which unmasks a certain fashionable form of hypocrisy in the now.
In a quote that's been making the rounds recently, Rudolph Bultmann wrote, "When we encounter the words of Jesus in history, we do not judge them by a philosophical system with reference to their rational validity; they meet us with the question of how we are to interpret our own mode of existence. That we ourselves be deeply disturbed by the problem of our own life is the indispensable condition of our inquiry." Note that word "indispensable". I used to pussy foot some around this, trying to allow for "stronger" personalities or less either-or ways of putting the Christian Gospel. But all the time, I was really just scared to put it the full way I'd experienced it myself, afraid to do full (albeit excoriating) justice to the insoluble problem of being human -- insoluble, that is, on its own terms. The truth is -- "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life" (from 'Naughty Marietta') -- you can't make an inch of progress in solving your problem until you state the problem with no holds barred. And at that point, at the point of total and indeed helpless admission, it's as if every window opens and every door! Somehow embedded in your true statement/admission of your case is the answer itself. This is why prayers of sincere apology, for example, are almost always instantaneously accompanied by radical new composure and peace. This is why sober assessments of what's actually going on in your beleaguered life -- your "Holy City" (John Bunyan; HT RKA) -- are almost always accompanied, within minutes, or even seconds, by external solutions. It is the truth of life: state the problem as it actually is, and the solution will hit you over the head. Episode 252 of PZ's Podcast imports the Holy Ghost at the end. Listen carefully to Eddie James and co's inspired song, "Power". Then listen to it again. Everything's there. Oh, and my podcast today is dedicated to DAVID BABIKOW, a hero and dedicated hearer of this Sweet Mystery of Life.
Benjamin Britten's 'Spider and the Fly' number from his Suite for "Johnson over Jordan", by J.B. Priestley, takes you by surprise. It sounds like Gershwin at the start, then becomes a kind of danse, and is ultimately sinister. The composer meant it like that, for he was drawn to Priestley's play because it concerns life after death; and Britten was interested in life after death during this period of his career. Priestley broke an English taboo, you might say -- but it's a taboo in our country, also, in practice -- in his 1939 reflection on purgatory, and salvation, which he entitled "Johnson over Jordan". There is little in 20th Century theater to rival the third redemptive act of "Johnson over Jordan", except maybe "A Christmas Carol" from the century before. What I hope to have underlined in this podcast is the play's decisive concern for universals. It was written and produced in the period right before World War II, but you'd never know it. Priestley is interested in the poignant memories and aspirations-to-love of an everyday person at the point of his (sudden) death -- and after death! As the 'Radio Times' reviewer wrote in 1965, when the play was revived on BBC television, "Priestley never allows himself to forget that wherever he takes us in the play, he is concerned with those emotions and problems, loves, hates, and ideas which are mankind's common property." Hear this: the world, under the aegis of Satan, is lying to the human race about what really matters. It's not politics (that really matters). It's not predicates (that really matter) relating to "identity", such as gender, skin color, race, or ethnicity. It's not even art (that really matters). What really matters is "those emotions and problems... which are mankind's common property." Or, to quote Justin Hayward, who rounds out my cast, we are all pilgrims "On the Road to Love".
This is a short riposte to the politicization of basically everything just now; but not in the way of taking sides, but rather in the way of digging deeper. I mean, digging deeper to the best and true interests of human beings. The best and true interest of human beings, the necessary condition for our welfare, exists in the direction of connection with another person; and, most typically (tho' not absolutely always), a romantic connection. The best interest of us does not consist in political concerns and goals. As Sting sang it, in "Spirits in the Material World" (1981), "There is no political solution. Have no faith in constitutions." Sting did not mean, and this podcast does not mean, that politics is not important; or that social and political concerns are not worthy ones. But social and political concerns seldom partake of ETERNITY. They are passing away. By definition, they are passing away. What doesn't pass away is the human aspiration for romantic connection. The reason one can aver that this is a knowable truth -- indeed, a universal truth -- is one's experience with dying people. When people are dying, or believe that their death is imminent, their interest in politics absolutely crashes down to nil. They "check out", as it were, in favor of more direct personal concerns, specifically the interest we all have in being loved (and cherished), and the interest we feel, by consequence, in loving and cherishing someone else. I used to say in Birmingham that no life-long "War Eagle" or "Crimson Tide" fan who was dying in UAB Hospital had ever once talked to me, or anyone else at that point, about football. When the Reaper was in sight, such just collapsed. Overnight. Instantly. The same is true of politics. Someone once said to me of his dying father, "He wants to stay around to see if McGovern can win." So I decided to 'try that out', at the hospital, and asked the dad what his thinking was about the upcoming election. I heard him say, right to my face, "Remind me, Paul, who Senator McGovern is, again." Do you see the importance of this? If you think politics is ultimate, then you are being deceived. (In my opinion, being deceived by Satan, who always wants to confuse us concerning our true welfare.) Politics is important, sure. But it is not ultimate. What is ultimate is love received and love given, and most commonly, romantic, emotionally connecting love that is mutual. That's what most people have on their minds when "The Train's a-Comin'". The music for this cast is 'Philadelphia Soul', specifically "When Will I See You Again", by The Three Degrees; and "Used Ta Be My Girl", by The O'Jays. The cast is dedicated to SPENCER LEFFEL.
Ellis Brazeal recently pointed out a clear-and-present fact about what we call "sanctification". Ellis observed that the moment we begin to think we have it, or have made it, it is completely nullified. In other words, the only actual sanctification at which one ever arrives is un-self-conscious. Another way of putting this would be to say that no amount of or "espece de" virtue-signalling will ever cut it. The moment you draw attention to your "growth" or "discipleship", at that exact moment it gets disqualified as evidence of moral improvement. The only material sanctification is, to the evincer of it, unawares! Someone ELSE, maybe, sees you're a better man than you were before in some area. But the moment you see it, or glory in it even, it vanishes. It literally ceases to exist. I would never in a million years have believed that the Top 40 song by the Canadian band Motherlode entitled "When I Die" would apply to me. At the time, which was the spring of 1970, I disregarded the song 100%, as I listened to it in the late-night fast food restaurant on the way home from the library. It could never ever be or become true of, well, me. On the other hand, "When I Die" made an indelible impression. On the soul, that is. (See Podcast 248, "Dead Reckoning (https://pzspodcast.fireside.fm/212)".) My soul knew, unconsciously, that the song was a point of inspiration. (Unlike 'Led Zeppelin II', which at the time, was the sole sustenance, in practice, of yours truly.) Some day I hope "When I Die" will be played at my funeral -- or the wake, like they played Lloyd Fonvielle's signature songs at his wake not so long ago. But I'll be maybe shadowing the place, wondering whether it really came true. I hope so much that it will have. And hope that my sanctification will not be "making me late" (Carly Simon). LUV U. THIS PODCAST IS DEDICATED TO ELLIS AND DEBBIE BRAZEAL.
Pastoral experience in hospital pre-op units provides abundant evidence for the existence of the soul. I first saw this evidence in Birmingham years ago, when someone we knew and loved was having to go into the operating room twice the same day, because the first "pass" that morning had failed. The situation was in fact do-or-die, and I had never before seen the look of fear which had come over the patient's face as she was being prepared for her second procedure. Then another time, in Washington, as the gurney was being wheeled out to surgery, a kind of fluttering look of complete panic and "We Gotta Get Out of this Place"- NOW came over a man I knew. The inward person, i.e., the soul, was in absolute but completely failing revolt over what the outward person, i.e., his body, was being forced to endure. This is not dualism. It's empiricism. There is a body and there is a soul, and the two will part -- the connection between them be dissolved -- at the point of death. My podcast considers that supreme and also sublime moment of dissolution. Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross comes into it. Humphrey Bogart and Lizbeth Scott come into it. And The Love Unlimited Orchestra comes into it. Please don't end up like Marley. Many do! End up like St. Paul, leaning on the Everlasting Arms. LUV U!
People are constantly trying to shoe horn their search for God into containers too tight for the Object of the search. This is probably true of some of your interests, whether it's food or Hammer horror films or "Philadelphia Soul" -- to name two of my current but chronic faves -- or you name it. On something or someone, you are probably pinning very high hopes. The blogosphere is full of such shoe horns -- interests such as a movement or style or movie or type of music that attracts your "ultimate concern" (Tillich). But they don't actually produce for you what you need. Take Joe Cocker. I love Joe Cocker, and think "Hitchcock Railway" is one of the irreducibly GREAT rock 'n roll songs of all time. Or Led Zeppelin 2, the album. I honestly thought once -- in practice, tho' I'd have denied it in theory -- that Led Zeppelin 2 could save me. Or for that matter, the movies of Jacques Demy. The latter are wonderful, but they can't save a person. Nor can another person save a person. (Tho' they can come close. Listen to the Spinners' songs at the beginning and the end of this cast.) We are just chronically trying to shoe horn our aspiration for unity with God, peace with God, into spaces that don't fit. They're too small! Can you think of a "space" within this world, within what Paula White calls "the natural", into which you are trying to shoe horn something inside you that is Ultimate. Luther would have called it an idol. But hey, I still like the Spinners. And then there's Blue Magic. LUV U.
One of the best things about the recent Mockingbird conference in NYC was its unerring focus on universals and primary factors in human destiny and identity, rather than on contingencies and elements in life that do not endure, but pass away. Hence one's love for Blue Magic. Blue Magic were a Philadelphia group in the early and mid-1970s who stuck to absolute basics. Which is to say, Blue Magic stuck to romantic connection and romantic loss as the big drivers. Almost every song they performed is about acutest mourning (for a person) or ecstatic presence (of a beloved and loving person). I don't think "profound" is too strong a word for Blue Magic's output. (Never mind the Spinners, Stylistics, Delfonics, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes). This cast talks about Home and the treasured feelings, some of them conflicted and unfulfilled, that almost everyone has concerning Home. Think "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Green, Green Grass of Home". In passing, I connect those feelings to current passions on the subject of immigration; and relate it all to ... college! (Did you have fun in college? Did you want to have fun in college? Yes or no.) If we could just frame our debates -- basically all of them -- in terms of primary and not secondary or even tertiary elements in the creation of personal happiness. Abstractions don't make you happy. Blue Magic understood this. Dorothy understood this. Paula White understands this. The Gospel and the Word of God understand this. Podcast 246 is dedicated to the Rev. Canon John Arthur Zahl, Rector-elect of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, Bedford, NY.
Well, the short answer, tho' not the whole answer, is: you can't. I wish you could. I can give you a hundred pointers and tips concerning it; and can even print out some prayers for you to say, in hopes of their breaking the soul-tie. But they would all be "tweaks". They would all be wistful hopes that will let you down. This is because in "the natural" -- i.e., within the systems and interactions of this world -- the soul-tie is a tethering of something eternal, your endless soul, to a contingency. The chain of your soul to the memory or person or situation to which it is chained partakes of eternity. You can't break it. From your/our end, it is unbreakable. On the other hand, it is nothing to God. Because God is in charge of your soul, He -- and He alone -- can unchain you. "Unchain My Heart" (Ray Charles, 1961). Exactly how God does this, exactly how and when and where God unfastens the unfastenable in your life -- I can't say. (Wish I could.) But one thing I can say. And mean it! "Once I was blind, now I see." I write as one for whom the soul-tie's been broken. I never thought it would happen. Had tried everything. Then BAM! Someone in whom the Spirit of God dwells broke my tie. Why it was she who broke it -- or better, was used to break it for my sake -- this I don't know. It's almost funny. I mean, given the context. But she did break it, and I now owe a debt I cannot repay. Listen to Eddie James' song again. And Tavares'. You can agree with Tavares: "It Only Takes a Minute, Girl." LUV U. PZ
This cast is a kind of summation of my thinking about romantic love in its relation to one's soul's salvation. I have thought about the compelling nature of romance -- between two people, I mean -- in both its positive, inspiring importance and also its possible negative and undermining impact. In fact, one has long searched for a key, the 'haft' that actually opens the door and heals one of scarring memories and long-carried-over inward losses. Not only has this theme of romantic love's long-term vicissitudes been with me for awhile, but I've often wondered what a cure for it would look like. Not that it's all about me, but it's definitely about people I love and know; and especially, let it be said, the older one gets and the more reflective one is forced to become as one gets physically older. Thus when a spiritual adviser spoke recently about the vitiating power of a negative "soul-tie", I was all ears. She sounded as if she were on to something. (Why did no one ever tell me about "soul-ties" before? But hey, now I know.) This podcast picks up on Gordon Lightfoot -- his songs will never die -- and that troubadour's insights into the heart of the vitiating soul-tie. But there is hope in the cutting of it. Major Hope!
This cast is about low anthropology, or rather, hidden anthropology. Have you been struck by the comments concerning the Austin bomber in which people near and dear to the young man say they saw no signs or external evidence of any kind that he was thinking about doing this, or about anything, for that matter, out of the ordinary, let alone murderous? My experience of people, especially act-outers in life, is that what they do often takes one by surprise. They didn't "advertise", in other words, their deeper, let alone their deepest feelings. The internal preoccupations of the acter-out -- or the surprise acter-out -- are rarely vouchsafed in advance. They may give you a hint or two if you are really looking or listening -- most people aren't -- but generally, as Jimmy Webb wrote the song, "I Keep It Hid". This is important, because it means there may be a 'No Trespassing' sign over the most serious, wounded, hurt, vulnerable parts of a person. A person can actually go all the way through their life -- right through to the moment of their death! -- without giving away what was really on their mind the whole time. It's odd, moreover, that you may feel more comfortable telling a perfect stranger what you are really thinking about, than telling it to someone who is close to you and intimate with you. Christianity, parenthetically, is the only religion that understands the hiddenness of the compelling and irrational part of a person. For that we have the Apostle Paul to thank, who in turn was simply verbalizing what Jesus demonstrated in his healings and his encounters "On the Road". My cast, entitled "Hitchcock Railway", locates the low anthropology of the New Testament in the unconscious layer of our deepest drive; and states that only if that drive is surfaced, by means of someone else's sympathetic hearing of it, will it not grow, metasticize, and finally ... well, blow up.
I'm always surprised when proponents of One Way Love fail to apply it in concrete cases. In other words, we can talk a good game -- about how Christ is always there, gets there first (!), when we are at our lowest ebb, in our worst place of sin and paralysis -- how no sin, no sinner is ever beyond the reach of His "saving embrace" -- but when we or someone close to us -- someone we really KNOW, in other words -- is lying there bleeding to death from a self-inflicted wound, well, then... I just don't know. What I am saying is that One Way Love is easy to talk about, but rarely happens in concrete instances. I almost wince now when I hear or read bold expressions concerning One Way Love, because experience has taught me that it's usually just words. And to tell the truth, the institutional church is, formally, almost never the dispenser of grace to sinners -- except maybe some particular category of persons that fits a current "narrative". Jacques Demy's movies display wondrous examples of total conversion, last-minute conversion, sudden but decisive change of heart within everyday people. "Bay of Angels" (1963), with Jeanne Moreau, concludes with the most dramatic of these sudden changes of heart. In that connection, an artist like Demy shows Christians what they themselves supposedly believe. Ask yourself, is all this (wonderful) talk of "radical grace" -- and it really is radical, tho' no more radical than the entire focus of the New Testament -- just words or do you mean it? The whole core of life, and the Gospel, is summed up in the once famous expression "Love Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry". It works in Eric Segal's novel, it works in the 1969 movie, and it works with your nearest and dearest. It's actually a whole new world ("Aladdin", 1992).
People are so good at minimizing the human situation. I've encountered this throughout Mary's and my ministry, right from the very start, in Silver Spring, MD. The religious "professionals" detested my message, that the world was in incomparable conflict with itself, and that each human being experiences comparable conflict inwardly. People would say, your message is too "down", and I just don't like it. It's too dark, or depressing, or gloomy. But what actually happened is that a majority of the people listening tuned in fast! And then they started inviting their friends. It's not that the human condition is hopeless. With God it is never hopeless. But without God, yes, the human condition is hopeless. And the older you get -- I know this can sound patronizing -- but the older you get, the more empirically evident it becomes that life stumps a person. An inflexible person becomes an impossible person -- and an impossibly unhappy person. A messy person becomes a hoarder. A depressed person becomes suicidal -- and actually DOES TAKE THEIR OWN LIFE. To put it mildly, nascent emotional tendencies in people become hard-and fast character assaults -- on everyone else! But you're not allowed to say this. Every time I pointed out the obvious, a couple incensed hearers would come up briskly, and accuse me of terminal pessimism. But we weren't. We weren't pessimists. We were realists, and had the rudiments, from the Bible and a few wise mentors, of applicable hope. Because with God, nothing is impossible. I can honestly say that and look you in the face. This podcast simply says that it's time we accepted the disappointments and impasses of our lives; and instead of fighting them, give them to God --- Jesus, really -- in a spirit of repentance and humility. Say "Uncle!" But don't carp. Don't "say it isn't so" (Hall and Oates). Be like 'Pilgrim', in Robin Anderson's favorite great Epic, and lay that burden, of the truth, down, at the foot of Someone. LUV U.
I don't talk about romantic love because it is worshipful in its own right. I talk about romantic love because it is the closest signpost we have to God. Whether it's the Beatles ("Eight Days a Week") or Hugo ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame") or Wagner ("Tannhauser") or Jimmy Webb ("Wichita Lineman") or James Gould Cozzens ("By Love Possessed"), the inspired listeners of the world have not failed to miss the Back Story, underneath all our 'narratives' and front stories, of the noble search for love and merger, the absolutely right and proper desire of every human person to merge with another human person. This Back Story underwrites every natural life. If you won't see it -- because everybody can see it -- then your life will end on a note of unconquerable wistfulness. Yet romantic life is never quite right! It is always a little "off". This is because it calls the almost-Absolute -- i.e., another human being -- the Absolute -- i.e., God. Romantic love, when not subsumed to God, i n e v i t a b l y disappoints, because it takes place between bodies, which decline and die; and it takes place in time, which "must have a stop" (Shakespeare/Huxley). In other words, romantic love is an almost exact dress rehearsal of the Real Thing, but not the Real Thing itself. That is why this podcast begins with "Eight Days a Week" but ends with "Tell Me Why (You Cry)". LUV U!
This Christmas cast is about communication between people, and God. Moreover, it’s about the cost of poor communication, which can be suicide, let alone habitual alienation. And the rich advantage of good communication, which can be the
difference between life and death, let alone satisfaction and personal happiness.
Recently, Tullian Tchividjian spoke at a ‘Broken Christmas’ service in Living Faith Lutheran Brethren Church at Cape Coral, FL. He spoke brilliantly, soberly, gravely, touchingly, humorously at points, and as affectingly as Mary and I have ever heard him speak.
To introduce Tullian, I took an illustration from William Inge’s 1970 novel entitled “My Son Is a Splendid Driver”.
In that novel, the author, a man in his mid-40s, is visiting his aging mother and father in the small Kansas town where they live and where he grew up. Uncharacteristically, his mother does not meet him at the station — ‘My Son’ takes place during the Great Depression — but only his father.
When the author arrives home, his mother is there, but looking thin and very worn. She informs her son, “Your father has given me a disease that I do not have the courage to name.”
What has happened is that his mother has been given what we today call an STD by her husband, who, like her, is in his mid-60s, and who contracted the disease from a prostitute during a business trip.
The mother is completely collapsed and ashamed. Her son reflects as follows: “Mother had stopped going to church. ‘ Church isn’t the place to go with your troubles. Church is just a place to go when you’re feeling good and have a new
hat to wear.’
“There was a little bitterness in what she said, but there was also truth. Our minister would have been the last person in the world she could have talked to, to have lifted the curse she felt upon her and saved her from feeling damned. She would have embarrassed the man into speechlessness had she gone to him with her story…
“Most of our morality, I was beginning to think, was based on a refusal to recognize sin. Our entire religious heritage, it seemed to me, was one of refusal to deal with it.”
William Inge’s thoughts are so germane. How many people do you and I know who have “dropped out” of Christianity because of their feeling that the church is judging them in some way? Your friend may feel judged by conservative or evangelical Christians. But I may feel judged by liberal or progressive Christians. Judgment “swings both ways” (Herman Hermits, 1966). It swings all ways!
Tullian focused some on suicide, in his talk. He reminded us that almost everybody contemplates suicide at some point, even if only for a minute. (“Did It in a Minute”, Hall and Oates, 1981) And the people that actually do take their own lives are usually people who have felt unable to confide their real thoughts and feelings to ANYONE, and for quite some time. You can become habituated, in other words, to suppressing yourself. And the long-term result of that?: POOF!
Listen to this cast in the light of your desire — very natural — to express yourself to somebody. Ultimately, your desire to express yourself, to God. The key is empathy. Tullian has it. I hope I have it, at least a little. And I know that the Burning Babe (Robert Southwell) has it, also. LOL at Christmas, PZ
This is a short talk on motivation and love.
What motivates a person to do something — to REALLY do something.
As opposed to remaining endlessly exhausted and trapped,
within a cycle of inner conflict and desuetude.
As usual in PZ’s Podcast, love is the answer. But how? And why?
Karl Barth’s decisive mistake is exposed — without animus.
Parishioners’ failed self-knowledge, let alone my own failed self-knowledge,
is exposed — by experience.
You have to start with experience.
It doesn’t mean you have to end there.
But you have to start with your own experience..
Simeon Zahl never tires of saying this, and I agree with him.
If you don’t start with your own experience,
and hopefully a somewhat detached perspective on your own experience,
your own experience will continually surprise you,
and maybe one day destroy you.
My cast concludes with an interesting example of a person who seems to
be “disinterested” in relation to his own human embodied life
to a degree that is almost impossible to imagine for oneself.
Yet it is the stuff that martyrs are made of, and sometimes saints.
As is fitting, Johnny Rivers will have the last word.
You listen to the group Honey Cone, described today as early feminists, and they are talking about a universal truth and in memorable pop terms. No hatred of men here, just the emotional recognition that if you don’t love her, she can’t really love you. Love between a man and a woman is a two-way street. (Unlike God’s love for us, which at the center is a one-way street.)
If you don’t understand this and are a man, you are in for trouble “Further on Up the Road” (Clapton and the Band, 1978).
I learned this from more than one source, which I talk about in the cast; but the main source was Honey Cone. Or rather, they told me it before I could hear it. And now I am telling you.
Oh, and I also learned this (crucial) life lesson from “Atom Age Vampire”. “Atom Age Vampire” is one of those brilliant artistic and sadistic Italian horror movies from the early 1960s that if you saw it once, you never forgot it. (If you see it now, you’ll never forget it!) Those movies are stocked with wisdom, communicated mostly in “Grand Guignol” situations of, shall we say, existential urgency. But the wisdom is there. “Atom Age Vampire” teaches us about the nature of real love, trustable love, and faithful love. Versus… well, you’ll see.
In short, we love because we are first loved, and then we love back.
LUV U!
“Psychosis” is a very strong word for a cultural phenomenon. But it allows us to speak of a fissure over against reality, when groups of people see things around them in a way that is divorced from the facts.
You can apply the phenomenon of group fissure from reality, to anything you like. I can see it in the way a very specific historical reality, the Anglican Church as the English expression of legal and official Protestantism, has been so completely buried by a different “narrative” that it is as if the reality never was and never existed.
So completely, in other words, has a narrative concerning a development in church history taken over the historical facts that it has become AS IF THE REALITY NEVER WAS.
You see this sometimes in relationships. You thought somebody was totally wonderful, and sympathetically disposed towards you, and maybe even loved you. And then, in a single moment, you discovered you were wrong! Everything you thought about the person had been a misreading on your part. They actually hated you and wanted to betray you — after they got what they wanted from you.
“Je repete”: This Happens All the Time.
In this podcast, I refer to a current narrative that is powerful around us. And you have to decide yourself whether you believe that narrative or not. But then I talk about Agatha Christie, and the
up-ending denouement of her famous story “Witness for the Prosecution”. So powerful is Agatha Christie’s narrative-shattering story that it was made into an excellent movie in 1957 by Billy Wilder, starring Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton, and Tyrone Power; and then got re-made by the BBC in time for last Christmas. “Witness for the Prosecution” is about a prominent divorce from reality.
And yet, there’s Palm Sunday. And yet, there’s Christ on the Donkey. And yet, there’s a narrative that explodes all ‘narratives’ — the narrative of the Incarnation. Thus the music for this cast: ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. I’d put that truth before Agatha Christie’s any time. Moreover, SHE’d agree with me!.
I’m talking about pastoral contact, which is just another way of talking about personal contact. How do you get through to somebody? How do they get through to you? What establishes direct contact with the person that you really are?
The music of my casts almost all concerns that point of contact. Music can do it! Movies can do it. Cable can do it. It’s got to happen, by the way; or you perish from solitude.
There is a particularly instructive classic movie that deals head on with this question of making contact, and from a specifically Christian angle. It is called “Come to the Stable”, and stars Loretta Young and Celeste Holm. It came out in 1949.
“Come to the Stable” tells the story of two French nuns — one was born in America — who believe they have been directed by God to found a hospital for children in southern New England. They approach individuals whom they meet basically “by chance”, with their requests for concrete aid. They are never, finally turned away. The reason they are never, finally turned away is that they have wisdom about people — about the losses and the unwilling hardnesses that people “grow” into. ‘Sister Margaret’, especially, is acutely sensitive to people’s hidden hurts. And when these hurts are touched, sympathetically, nothing is off the table.
During the podcast, which had to be recorded twice, I get choked up, also twice, while I talk about an incident in the movie. It could be my story. It could be yours. And you could be Sister Margaret to me, and I could be Sister Margaret to you. (You’ve got to see “Come to the Stable.”)
If you’re in any kind of pastoral care, or need pastoral care (Hands go up!), share this podcast around. And listen to the last song. It’s The Carpenters from their most pop-inspired period. LUV U.
We’ve all got a story in our eyes!
The Moody Blues, and in particular their inspired songwriter Justin Hayward, caught that “Silent-Running” fact in the 1971 single that starts this podcast. We’ve all got a story in our eyes.
Characteristically, the story results from pain, and, also characteristically, from pain suffered in earlier life. At the time, it seemed, at least in many cases, to be overcome-able. It seemed as though it, the loss or pain, could be counter-acted, or even superseded, by other, better experiences.
And so it seemed.
Until later, when that slight deviation east, of the hurricane against my life, by which that hurricane moved offshore, to the margin of my feelings, and just “sat there”, caught up with us. Later, sometimes decades later, the eye of the storm turned back on us, and constituted a direct hit! Then down we went, and with us the whole fragile architecture of our “Works and Days” (Hesiod).
So I’m talking about the story in your eyes.
But I’m also pumping for hope. I’m pumping for a step of faith. I don’t want you to give up. I don’t wish to give up, myself. Jesus often asked the individuals who came to him with incurable disease and insoluble problems, “Where is your faith?”.
Dr. Thomas Calhoun once asked me, after I’d proffered a long sob story, “But Paul, where is your faith?” My inward answer, right on the spot, was, “Well, nowhere. I have no faith.” That was an important moment. I saw what I didn’t have — at all! — and also saw the only thing I needed. Won’t tell you the end of that story, tho’ I sure bless Tom Calhoun.
On that note, the podcast ends; and with the snappy pop classic, also by the Moodies, entitled, “It’s Up to You”. And please don’t worry. It’s orthodox!
This theme of the insuperability of at least one problem in your life continues to absorb me — and in the light of hope and hopefulness.
I tell the story of a woman who recently attended a meeting of church executives, almost all of whom are absorbed by current issues and questions of identity in political terms. This person said to me afterwards, “It seemed like a voice spoke to me, as I listened to the virtue-signalling: ‘This form of Christianity has no future.’ ” What she meant was that there was no SAVING being proffered, nothing related to the fear of death and the questions of regret and remorse that overwhelm individuals as they grow in age.
I have to agree with my friend.
Then I watched an old “war horse” of a Hollywood movie entitled “The Sign of the Cross” (1936). For all its age, “The Sign of the Cross” is utterly blunt and shockingly direct concerning the human and philosophical objections to faith, faith itself, and the inter-face between faith and romantic love. The actors Frederic March and Elissa Landi pour all they’ve got into the decisive lovers’ disputes that create a highly affecting and dramatic, and to me completely plausible, conclusion. What is offered in “The Sign of the Cross” is a form of Christianity which has a very high and a very long future. Watch it.
And listen to Tyrone Davis now, great “torch song” singer of Soul Music, and hear how close he is to true experience.
HUGS always, PZ
Sometimes when I hear a sermon or address that stresses the presence of God in catastrophic situations, let alone God’s presence in the midst of sin and sinners, I want to stand up and ask (tho’ I never do): “Do you really believe what you are saying? Are you willing to go all the way with such pronouncements, placing God in such desperate company? Or rather, is it just ‘Easier Said Than Done’?”
One’s pastoral and personal experience is that such declarations can be hollow. That is because it seems there is almost always ONE exception, in one’s practice and subjectivity, to the statement that God lives in our tragedies, our discomfiture, and our self-created torments. Usually there is a personal exemption-principle at work, despite all the talk of God’s omni-Grace.
Mary and I used to scratch our heads sometimes when a faithful person whom we knew seemed to lose all his or her serenity and peace in the face of a crushing circumstances, and most notably, in the face of their death. At times it almost seemed that a person’s Christianity had been a kind of masquerade. Or at least, a masquerade in connection with one very BIG point of pain.
So my question in the cast is, Do you really believe what you say about grace? And do you really believe what you say concerning the theology of the cross?
Oh, and so you know: the cast ends on a strong note of hope, lifted directly from the gateway to the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, where the words stand engraved:
“The Dead Shall Be Raised.”
The fact that the mainstream churches are hiding their Light under a bushel is the primary reason for their atrophy. The fact that most of our churches are “missing in action” when it comes to the seemingly insuperable pain of living that we bring to them and to their representatives — well, that, I believe, is the main cause of their numerical decline.
Today I want to posit an alternative to this almost willful but in fact mostly unconscious suppression of the Primary (i.e, the Gospel Word) in favor of the secondary (i.e., “issues” of the day) and the tertiary (i.e., endless announcements about meaningless, useless parish activities and functions, to which almost no one really wants to come).
The response to Episode 229, entitled “I Live on a Battlefield”, was astounding! It was as if that cast had pulled down the statue of Dagon, and with it the failed constructions of a generation.
All I was trying to say in that cast was that Mary and I had been “Crawling from the Wreckage” (Dave Edmunds, 1979) of our lives, especially my professional life — crawling on our hands and knees — to “mainstream” churches near us — you name it, almost anywhere — and finding nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, to help us or sustain us. That is, unless we were victims of Hurricane Harvey, in the instance of which most local churches usually do well. (Paging pastoral Josh Condon and others like him!)
In today’s cast, in the aftermath of NOTHING — or almost nothing — proffered to a sufferer like me when he or she comes to church, drawn by pain, I sketch out the profundity of… The Moody Blues. Yes, the partly lame but more often inspired Moody Blues.
The Moodies’ single from 1969 entitled “Question” says almost everything there is to say — about life and living. One can be astonished, thinking about it now, that Justin Hayward composed that song when he was 23 years old. Would that I had met him, and been counseled pastorally by him — I fear he would have run the other way — in… 1969.
Hope this cast speaks to you. Hope this cast bears… a little empathy.
One more ‘riff’ on the paucity of mainstream church “address” to the hungry and hurt visitor, let alone the hungry and hurt regular; but with hope:
Justin Hayward is sometimes accused of sentimental romanticism. I don’t agree. I think he is on to something.
His songs locate the heart of human pain in the misses and defeats incurred within the elemental atmosphere of romantic love. I believe experience confirms this. Nobody dies thinking about Clemson vs. Alabama, or whether their career could have gone better, or whether Senator Muskie did or did not win the Presidency — or even how you acquitted yourself during a natural disaster.
But EVERYBODY dies thinking about love, or rather, who it is that loved you. That’s the Golgotha door to the next life! It’s the biggest thing that can hang you up at the end of death.
Songs like the two that conclude this cast, which are “It’s Up To You” and “Lovely To See You Again”, have the shoe on the right foot. In fact, I would almost defy you to hear them and not have them in your head for the next… week, at least.
From a theological point of view, Episode 231 is also a reflection on analogy, and how God is understand through analogy. But I don’t take Barth’s line. Would rather work from the bottom up.
There is also a moment of unguarded rhetoric near the end — not vulgarity but rather “Hercules Unchained” — that absolutely cracked me up when I heard it played back.
LUV U.
I keep trying to make sense of the divisions we are almost all feeling currently.How can one get "under" them, i.e., in hopes of lessening them a little? Does anyone who is reading this enjoy feeling estranged from others, especially old friends, for example, because of political opinions? Very few, I'll bet. But it's happening. Then the insight came: Remember what it was like 47 years ago. Remember what it was like in the Spring of '70. Everybody, and I mean, everybody, was up in arms! If you were a college student then, your campus was probably shut down. You couldn't get to class, you couldn't get to the library, you couldn't finish your work and get your transcript, you couldn't basically do anything. No kidding. It was a wild ride. Many people believed it was the end of the world. God help you if you were on the wrong side, or if you wanted to put your head in the sand. You were not allowed. What I am saying is that looking back on it now, after 47 years, the whole apocalyptic scenario which possessed our youthful world proved...forgettable and unimportant. What?! How can I say that? How can I aver the Vietnam war was forgettable and unimportant? How I can say that Richard Nixon or LBJ or Kent State was forgettable and unimportant? I'll tell you why: Because other things -- like girls or getting a date or making the all-important 4.0 -- were actually the Front Story of our lives. In retrospect, unless you were a total nerd and had nothing going -- except resentments -- that date, that girl ("That Girl" - Marlo Thomas), that grade were the Real Thing. We might have said at the time that demonstrating against the fascists who manufactured napalm is the the Front Story. But it only looked that way. The real Front Story was growing up, and suffering rejection, and "Looking for a Love (To Call My Own)" (J. Geils Band). This cast reflects on the current explosion of feeling in light of ... memory. And it comes out that its urgency dates. HUGS, PZ
There is this amazing supposed contrast between the God Who comes to us from without, and the God Who speaks to us from within. Historic Christianity generally hears the First. Eastern religion generally hears the second. Personally, I hear both -- by which I mean, a lot of Love is "channelled" or "made flesh" in the inspirations I feel to love and to cherish that are indistinguishable from my own best self. ("I'd like to know where you got the notion" (Rock the Boat) -- The Hues Corporation, 1974). Yet when I'm in a jam, when I am simply unable to be in touch at all with my true and best self -- when I'm beset, alone, and without defense or protection -- then it's all about the God who Reaches Down and Helps. (Like 'Delphine' at the end of The Green Ray.) "Save Me" (Fleetwood Mac, 1990). This cast speaks of our deafness and blindness when it comes to hearing and seeing God in, well, what lies before us, in our purview -- with a little help from Howard Pyle, James Garner, Manly Wade Wellman, Donald Trump, William Hale White, and Christopher Isherwood. It's Joe Meek, though, together with Geoff Goddard, who cuts the knot. The cast is dedicated to Ethan Richardson.
When you were in a tight spot, how did help get through to you, assuming help did get through to you? Did God speak from out of the whirlwind -- of crisis, panic, and despair? Or did aid come from inside yourself -- a 'how-to' or random thought that proved serviceable in the midst? If you're a regular listener to PZ's Podcast, you may well answer, the former. That's certainly what happened to PZ! Nevertheless, your source of inspiration, and help, and salvation in the imminent immanent sense of the word: what was it? You won't be surprised that I've been thinking, in this connection, about UFOs.I saw a Big One in the early '80s -- as did John Zahl, who was with me at the time. And ever since Battle in Outer Space (1959) came out, I've been a kind of believer. But never mind. What's interesting, though, is that Booth Tarkington was a kind of believer, also. As was Nevil Shute. As was Rudyard Kipling. (You have to read Kipling's short story "A Matter of Fact", just to name one.) Each of these writers left room, over on the margins, for the Unknown. Each was thusly religious. In your experience of crisis, from what source has "the power of God unto salvation" (Romans 1:16) come? "Tolle lege"? "My heart was strangely warmed"? "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" "I was wrong" (Robert Wyatt). Tell me about it. This podcast is dedicated to John Arthur Zahl.
The answer to that question has to lie, somehow, in whatever explains the popular success of Rodney Marvin ('Rod') McKuen. Rod McKuen died a year ago, and did you know he sold 100 million records? No kidding. Rod McKuen sold 100 million records. (He also sold 60 million books. But hey...) Here is a man who was universally dismissed, from day one of his earthly success, as being a "kitschy" Philistine and arch-sentimentalist. No critic had a word of praise for him. Ever, ever, ever. And that's been true right up to the present day. And let the People say: He sold a hundred million records. Here is a writer who when you actually take time to listen to his songs wrote from a fetal position of complete understanding,.. of me and you. Now let the People say: He sold a hundred million records. Here is a man who, like Rudyard Kipling -- if it weren't for T.S. Eliot and George Orwell -- would have no friends in "high places" (at least after he died). People loved his work. Critics hated it. Therefore let the People say: He sold a hundred million records. So listen up, guys: If you want to be popular, then say what you think, say it deep, say it real, and speak it... from the earthed position of the earliest human child.
Now we think that reality, the "real world", is what happens "between nine and five", that is, what happens at work, in the office, at school, in career, and so forth. And a lot of people want to tell us that's true. "But not The Vogues. They were from Pittsburgh and they understood about shifts and hourly pay. Yet they understand more than that! "For the fact is, 'as you lay dying' (Faulkner), you won't give your "nine-to-five" life a single second thought. Not one single second thought! You'll forget it all, in the absolute blink of an eye. That's just a fact of old age and death -- the fact of our mortality. "What you won't forget, however, is "the long haired girl who waits for you/To ease your troubled mind". Or the one who did. Hopefully, it's the same person. As The Vogues observe: in light of her, ''Nothing else matters at all.' "This cast explores the 'Five O'Clock World' in terms of romantic love. Not sororal or fraternal love. Not even paternal and maternal love. But romantic love. For that's the core of loving for men and women. That is "where the action is" (Freddy Cannon). "Moreover, it is the core of the Gospel. If you want to understand what Christ did, for you, look at your experience of romantic love. For better or worse, look at your experience of romantic love. Like my friend Lloyd Fonvielle, who put one brilliant experience that way underneath the microscope just a few weeks before he died. And what he came up with!: Golly, there's no doubting it. The Gospel is the historic, true and universal metaphor, allegory and analogy of that which romantic love instantiates to the core within human experience. If you want to understand the love of God, observe the 'Love-O'-(Men and) Women' (Kipling). "For many of my listeners, this will be a message from your future. You may not hear it -- you may rebuff it -- and I understand why. But hey, one day...
Here are a few thoughts concerning the atrocity attacks in Paris. I talk about Islam (and "Islamophobia"), Syrian migration into Europe, Original Sin and "low" vs. "high" anthropology, reaction-formations among young men when drones are over their heads and they have no control, let alone "buy-in"; and finally, a threatening experience Mary and I had on Times Square recently. Call this PZ's perspective on a current (big) event.
It's not an abstraction! It's more than something just to talk about or consider. It could happen to you. In fact, it probably will. I'm talking about unforeseen death. Some people hold on for a long time, even when they don't really want to. Other people want to hold on, but illness intervenes and they go a dozen years earlier than they expected. (You never expect it.) Other people had a bad habit in youth and maybe adulthood, and it catches them later. They never thought they would be hooked up to a respirator personally. "I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night" (Electric Prunes, 1967): That is, I thought I was coughing myself to death. A habitual "nervous" cough turned into an atomic reaction and I suffocated. Sweet Dreams Are Made of This? "Are You Ready?": Bob Dylan asked in 1980. "No", I might answer, in 2015. "But I'd like to be." Sunday after Sunday I hear sermons that seem completely to sidestep the one really big reason a person would go to church. John Wesley never sidestepped it. Nor did Luther. St. Ignatius didn't, either. Don't you.
I keep getting requests for a sort of "early morning Bible study" -- giving the 'treatment', you might say, to a New Testament text that stings, and also helps. So that's what I'll do for a few episodes, beginning with this one. Christ's Parable of the Rich Man (aka 'Dives') and Lazarus is given in St. Luke, Chapter 16. It's a scorcher, as rough and sand-paper-like as anything he ever said. It's got that devastating line, that between there (hell) and here (heaven) there is a great gulf fixed, an impassable, untraversable barrier. I believe this. (My own experience confirmed it, tho' I wish it hadn't!) That being the case, that "when you die, the time for doing is over" (Fr. Richard Ragni), what does it mean for a person in practice? Well, it mandates a careful review of your true situation: who do you think you are, and where are you? (Listen, I'm with you: would rather not deal! No, no, no. Just give me a new DVD daily, like Return of the Fly or Billion Dollar Brain -- there are always new blessings like Billion Dollar Brain waiting for you (you'll never run out even if you live forever) -- and I'm set. Unfortunately, I'm not set. For no one knoweth the hour. Don't delay. Billion Dollar Brain (1967) you can put off. Your stroke, your heart attack you can't. Have a Panic Attack instead. Based on this podcast.
The music is "Good Vibrations" at the start, by The Beach Boys; and "I Knew Jesus (Before He Was a Super Star)", at the end, by Glen Campbell. Here is the description for iTunes and also the blurb for Mockingbird: So much has been written -- I mean, SO MUCH -- concerning the so-called Historical Jesus: a welter of books and "Untersuchungen". I've spent most of my career reading these books, and writing a few, too. Then Pope Francis came along and put them all in a cocked hat. This is because if you want to see with your own eyes how Jesus operated in the New Testament -- how he acted, how he spoke, how he was desired, and how he was received -- all you need to do is watch Francis. Phrancis. The way Christ was with Zacchaeus, Bartimaeus, the man at the Pool of Bethesda, the woman with the issue of blood, Jairus -- the beat goes on: that's the way Francis acts, and acted while he was under the scrutiny of all of us. Just watch him on the Philadelphia Airport tarmac, at the shrine to St. Mary the Untier of Knots in Philadelphia, at Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem, and at the state prison near Philadelphia. Just watch! All your questions about the conduct and message of the historical Jesus -- or almost all of them -- will be answered. It just takes a few videos, a couple speeches, a few infants kissed, a few cripples blessed. Remember the song by The Fifth Dimension, "Blowing Away"? (George Harrison wrote a similar song.) So much of what I read and learned over 40 ytears just got, well, blown away -- by the Real Thing.
Pop songs about love are like a corkscrew for understanding the Bible. Songs like "Hooked on a Feeling" and "Don't Pull Your Love Out on Me, Baby", together with a zillion co-belligerants that are written and performed "In the Name of Love" (Thompson Twins), reveal the nature of love and loss, undoings and exaltings, and painful stasis and buoyed forward movement. Now just imagine if professional New Testament scholars "parsed" pop songs the way they want to parse the Gospels. You can't do it. Or rather, you don't need to do it. "She Loves You" (The Beatles) is so obviously true. "Tracks of My Tears" is obviously true. "My Girl" is obviously true. Just like the Bible, or most of it. When you read the Bible through the lens of acknowledged pain and the deficits that come from being emotional human persons -- if you do that, the Bible makes sense. Doesn't need parsing. William Tyndale was right! The "simplest ploughboy" can understand the Bible, or at least enough of the Bible to make sense of life, and loss. Read the Bible the way you listen to Motown. "Reach Out (I'll Be There)" is true, to life. As is... Luke 24. LUV U (PZ)
Did you cry at any point as you watched Pope Francis in action during his visit? If you did, when was it? What made you cry? "Now it wasn't just John Boehner! I noticed as I watched the Pope inter-acting with individuals, and especially with individuals in acute need or distress, that it was those encounters that touched me personally. (I was abreacting all over the place.) I don't have spina bifida. I'm not in a wheelchair. I'm not six years old, nor 84 (yet). Nor am I homeless. But hey: Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child! My tears flow freely, and often not freely enough. In other words, I identify with distress and need. I identify with exclusion, tho' you might not know it. I identify with rejection and exile, tho' again, you might not know it. The point is, everybody's at their own point of need. Everybody's got something they're thinking about that's painful. Pope Francis, walking in the steps of the great Understander, the great Sympathizer, touched the core pain. He touched the core pain of many, many people. It was busting out all over. I think we're each walking in "The Tracks of My Tears". (Thank God for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.) And when they bubble up, you can just smell the healing.
Is there anything to it? Is vertical religion -- not just calls to social justice, not just implied belief (system) -- but actual vertical religion rooted in anything resembling fact? I'm utterly bummed these days by mainstream Christianity that just leaps over the religious element on the way to the "mission" element. There's nothing there, I mean nothing there -- to aid an everyday sufferer. Like me, for example. On the other hand, evangelicals continue to fake it royally. They'll talk you blue in the face about God's being present in the worst and darkest moments of your life. But when it's you who is actually there, you who is sitting flummoxed in the Shadows of Knight (1966), they act as if they didn't mean a word of it. Grace? Real Grace? "You have got to be kidding." Book him! The theme of this 201st podcast is Real Religion. Does it exist? What is it like if it does? Oh, and SEE The Sentinel (1976). Don't miss The Sentinel (1976). It's about to be released on Blu Ray; and with all its memorable eccentricities, it is a total home run about The Real Thing. LUV U. (PZ) This podcast is dedicated to Melina Smith.
This is not the Who's Final Tour. (They always come back.) So maybe it is the Who's Final Tour. Whatever it is, it's Podcast 200, and that's a benchmark. Somehow. So I decided to sum up the two core themes of the last... 100 or so casts, and also tell you something that's blown my mind recently. It's an instance of catatonia by way of Catalonia. Seriously, the two core themes of PZ's Podcast are the durability and necessity of romantic connection; and the presence of God when a person is at the end of his or her rope. 'God meets us at our point of need.' Gosh, I've seen that happen a lot. Not least of all, to me. And I know, too, from Mary -- 'Along Comes Mary' (The Association) -- that the boy-girl side of things is paramount. Nothing above it. Now, for 23 short minutes, Come Fly With Me.
If you don't factor in the element of romantic love -- or at least its possibility -- you'll surprise yourself when you start making decisions in life. Sometimes I wish I could give a college commencement address. (No one is ever going to ask.) But I should like to talk about romantic love, and its over-riding, over-reaching, superseding strength as an element -- the decisive element -- in personal decision-making. I can't really say that, though. Many people seem to want to "privilege" career and/or professional choices over their love life. They seem to want to, at least. But then you surprise yourself! You quit your job, or apply for a job in another city, or go back to school; and the real reason is that you've met someone, or want to. Even desperately want to. Romantic love always wins. Tho' it takes too long these days. So much romantic time is wasted by the effort, energy and time, g__dammit, given to careers that end up, eventually, feeling phony, futile, arbitrary, and selfish. What am I saying? Put romantic love first. Hey, and then, work's a piece of cake. You'll probably be promoted at work the moment you start promoting yourself to her.
Talk about being misunderstood!: Artur London was one of the 11 most misunderstood men in the world, at least at the end of 1951. London was a defendant in the Slansky Trial, a "show trial" under Joseph Stalin. After suffering the most inhuman torture and brainwashing, London was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes not one of which he had come 10,000 light years close to committing. Later on, Arthur London was released, rehabilitated; and now they name streets after him. Arthur London said that his life's struggle was to differentiate between the essence of an ideal, and the form in which that ideal had taken shape politically -- a debased and wicked form, it turns out. London also said that being a Communist in a Soviet prison was like being a Christian tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. Christians, like Communists, could only survive, and persist, if they clearly separated the Thing Signified from the Sign -- the Substance from the Form. Good luck, Arthur! How'd it work for you, Paul? Way to go, Czech Communist Party. That's the way (O Mother Church)/ I Like It (KC & The Sunshine Band)
The church is today so vastly over-eucharisted that you can barely pause to catch your breath. This cast offers an alternative view of the Holy Communion, as well as of Baptism. The original Prayer Book definition of a sacrament was that it is 'an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace'. What a refined and powerful expression. So now Let Smokey Sing (ABC) and find... The Face Behind the Mask (1941). This cast is dedicated to Nancy W. Hanna.
"The movie Cimarron, which was released in 1931, won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. (Did you know this?) It's great blessing, Cimarron -- which was based on the novel Cimarron, written by Edna Ferber. But you'd never know it's a blessing if you relied on the critics. Cimarron has become notorious in recent times for its racial and ethnic stereotyping. When you read contemporary descriptions of this movie, it's as if you're being told to put your hands in front of your eyes and also cup them around your ears. Yet the amazing thing is that Cimarron is actually the opposite of what it's accused of being. It's actually a definitive portrait of "Radical Hospitality", as the pharisees and hypocrites are all smote; and the outsiders and excluded people are all promoted! Cimarron depicts the triumph of the "minority" in life. You've got to see it. But only if you aren't carrying so much presuppositional baggage that your eyes are already closed and your ears already shut. Cimarron is a portrait of that great House for All Sinners and Saints. Oh, and there's a mistake at the end of the cast: The music is not by Chrissie Hynde. It's by Talk Talk.
Shag The Movie (1989) is a great little entertainment! It captures perfectly, and with high humor and enormous love and heart, the Beach Music phenomenon of the 1960s. Today, however, it touches a current issue -- right from the opening credits. What do you do with distressing material -- images and associations that relate to things you'd rather forget? The general answer seems to be, well, you burn them! You do away with them. You haul them down -- and out.
I think I'm supposed to understand why right-wing people are intolerant. But it's harder for me to understand why left-wing people are intolerant. Guess I thought they were supposed to be about freedom and diversity. Come to find out, they're not. So I had to go back to a source that's almost been "blacklisted" itself. It's the movie My Son John (1952), starring Helen Hayes and Robert Wagner. Hey, but isn't that a reactionary movie from the Eisenhower movie? No, it's not. It's an excruciating journey into the cause of liberal intolerance. If I -- meaning PZ -- had a mother and a father like 'John' does in My Son John, I'd probably do what he did. I'm almost sure I'd want to.
The Gallant Hours (1959) is one heuristic movie. Not only does it teach the Church a thing or two about how to honor faithful service, but it depicts an entirely ideal instance of how to dress properly if you're a minister -- or, Heav'n forfend, a "priest". The last scene of The Gallant Hours is one amazing illustration of the triumph of substance over form in connection with haberdashery. If you're a member of the clergy, or are close to one, PLEASE, help them dress down. We need clergy who dress down! The future of the world depends on it.
The Church I have known all my life is in free fall numerically. I'm talking about Sunday attendance in everyday parishes. This is not conceptual: one parish Mary and I served for six and a half years has recently closed. (Yes, it's been there since 1832, and now is literally a shell, the congregation having gone formally out of existence!) Another church we served, also for six years but out on Long Island, has seen its attendance fall so drastically that its diocese wants to convert it into a different kind of ministry altogether. But this podcast is not a list of what went wrong, but what could be done right. The lesson, dear reader, comes from a little movie called The Gallant Hours. This movie's got just about everything you need to know, about everything.
This talk concerns the indelibility of certain memories, and why they, and not other memories, are indelible. It also concerns a worrying vision I had in January. But it's all one! Here is my little attempt at some wise counsel: how to integrate indelible aspects of your grown life with the fact that you'll see it all again, up close and personal, the day you die. But again, it's all One. And hey, didn't Charles Reade say, "It is never too late to mend."
This is a word to your future self. You probably can't hear it today. But I predict you'll hear it loud and clear in five years, or maybe ten. This is a word to your future self. It's a new fabulous dating tip, and carries almost no exceptions, tho' I wish it did! It has to do with internet dating, with the aging process (especially in men), and with the poignant voice of experience. If you can "Now Hear This", it could save you years of excruciating suffering. I mean years, maybe decades. Maybe the rest of your life.
"What makes you cry? When you have an irruption of strong feeling -- and I mean tears in this case -- what is going on? This cast tries to get underneath some emotions we all feel, and in terms of music. It is a subjective "take" on one's music and one's highs and lows. And it's in the service of a Way Maker that tends in the direction of peace of mind."
Tupper Saussy (1936-2007) was a musician behind The Neon Philharmonic, who produced two memorable albums in 1968-69. He was also a polymath who let himself get in the sights of the Internal Revenue Service, and paid a heavy price for it. Moreover, he was a devout Christian, of old-fashioned Episcopalian provenance. This week he is on my mind because the fate of Tupper Saussy made me think of a friend who is in some trouble. "Handle Me With Care" is what Tupper Saussy needed. It is what my friend needs. And it's what the world never and the church rarely does
Nevil Shute, whose proper name was Nevil Shute Norway, was a British novelist whose work took an odd turn in mid-career. He was a kind of parasitologist of human nature, always asking the big questions: Why do people act the way they do? How does the past affect the present? Is there something more to it that is beyond the apparent? Shute thought there was, but he was a tentative explorer. (He was also a churchgoer.) Did he pierce "the veil"? My answer to that is maybe.
'No' is the worst word you can ever hear. (I realize the virtues of saying 'No', yourself, on certain occasions. But when 'No' is said to you, especially at an impressionable age, it's the worst.) This cast is about the damage created by 'No', especially in romance.
What think ye when I say that 95% of what you are doing is futile and meaningless? Well, let's put it another way: From the standpoint of the after-life, what you are doing is... you fill in the blanks. But you can still make it! You've got to learn how to meditate, and learn how to throw a Crucifix. Podcast 185 is dedicated to Mary C. Zahl.
In life you can be trapped by forces that are bigger than you are. Especially in professional life. It's possible to "wander in" -- or rather, bumble in -- to a situation in which you get used by somebody else to accomplish a plan of theirs of which you yourself are (at the time) unaware. Here is my homage to Jimmy Sangster movies. In particular, behold Hysteria, a masterpiece of intrigue from 1965. Watch out! And take comfort, too
Oh, to encounter an integrated minister! We all want to be integrated -- to be ourselves in the pulpit and also out of it. But it's tricky to pull off. Pharisaical elements in the church -- usually one or two individuals in the parish, who are present -- unconsciously -- in order to hide out themselves in some way or another -- can't long abide a minister who is himself or herself. Most of your listeners love it. But there are one or two who, well, have an allergy. (They are the ones that can get you every time.) But then along comes someone like 'Mr. Tryan' in George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life. He breaks the mold. Or, somewhat spectacularly, Dr. Syn. Dr. Syn, who was known in the movies as 'Dr. Bliss', is just about the most thoroughly integrated Anglican clergyman in history. Could any of us be like him? Dr. Syn is a brilliant swordsman, an agile swinger from church chandeliers, a powerful preacher, a rousing music leader, a crafty smuggler, a loving father, a wily impeder of the taxation and revenue service, and a kindly pastor to his entire flock. He is Robin Hood and 'Fletcher of Madeley' rolled into one. Dr. Syn makes one wish to keep on going. Hope you like him. Maybe we can do a breakout in his honor at Mockingbird. But everyone who comes will need to bring preaching bands, and a phosphorescent mask.
Come to find out, dualism has a limited but necessary role in resolving the human dilemma, i.e., in living. The percentage is maybe 20% most of the time, but it's possibly 90% some of the time. The English composer James Bernard is Exhibit A here, and a most brilliant exhibit his work has become.
]This is the tableau of a childhood memory, a memory that came literally to life recently. I entered a dream, but then the dream was real. A little like the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but in reverse. With help from Orpheus and, by way of backdraft, the Warrens.
Why are so many unchanged, I mean fundamentally unchanged, by the red lights of life? What accounts for persons' resistance to the lessons of catastrophe? This week Robert W. Anderson, not 'Sister Mary Ignatius', explains it all to us.
Things recently got so bad somewhere that it looks like all hope is gone. The thing "imploded", like 'Susan' in The Buckinghams' otherwise cheery pop single. Poor Susan! Is there still hope? PZ thinks there is. But it comes from over the border! And from the year 1917.
Big explosions in Church! Like at the beginning of "Cloverfield". What do they mean? Is there any hope in the aftermath? Well, would I be recording this if I didn't think so, from Lake Tahoe, as it turns out? With help from Herb Alpert. And Jane Austen. This podcast is dedicated to Melina and Jacob Smith.
An August summation, from one explorer to hopefully others. Rod Serling describes a unique case of one. Then Armando Trovajoli puts into music the secret of life. Yes, the secret of life.
"So, here's the thing." : Wanna know what faith is? Listen to ABBA. Wanna arrest the decline of, oh, let's say, mainstream Protestantism? Listen to ABBA. Wanna understand yourself? Listen to ABBA.
There is so much truth here. So much emotional truth, I mean. It could have been someone else. It could have been something else. It could have come from somewhere else. But it came from ABBA.
The subject is reality vs. ideology. 'Pet' Clark wanted to be Superwoman. I wanted to be a totally focussed pastor, great dad, and good husband. 'Helen' wanted to be "a woman of today". We all failed! "Sorry, it's not possible" (Petula says). And yet, a little child has led me. Lower case. But upper case, too.
Here is made a principled decision to opt out, of all manner of causes and notions. With the injunction, however, that in order to heal, you have to feel. Eric Clapton starts us out. The House Band brings it on home.
This is a podcast to celebrate: my 170th, in which are offered some Summer reading, a Concluding Un-Scientific Postscript, and the best track ever recorded by a certain Wonder. Hope you like it!
This is about Meister Eckhart and Rudolf Otto, and CS & N. But it's really about whether and how to engage the world, given what we now know about it. Guess I'm skeptical, more than ever; and was surprised to have to dissent from the Master. First time!
A penetrating and courageous televison program from Germany opened me up recently. It was an instance of what Stefan Kolditz, the writer of the program, called a "non-ideological access" to a tragedy. But not just their tragedy. My tragedy. Yours, too, maybe.
This is all about one thing. It didn't take Melanchthon to teach me about it, nor Thomas Cranmer. No. It took Burton Cummings to teach me about it. And life! So Stand Tall; and for God's sake, don't do something foolish.
Well, the glass ceiling is finally breaking. It's happening right before our eyes. But Aretha's going to help us see the "Kehrseite". With a little help from Lesley Gore, too. "Come and see." (John 1:46)
"No use calling, 'cause the sky is falling, and I'm getting pretty near the end." This concerns the practical consequences of (near-)death in life. Join forces with Wolfman Jack (R.I.P.) and The Guess Who; and 'Charlie Kane'.
It's getting bigger. Bigger, at least, from where I sit. The Contraption, I mean. And thank you, Karen Young! And thank you, Mike Francis! This podcast is dedicated to JAZ, the Minister of Edits.
Thinking about Obamacare got me onto this one. But it's not about Obamacare! It's about Reality. And Guess What?
That's Percy Bysshe Shelley, who gets a little help -- as if he needed it -- from Eric Burdon, and B.T.O, and John Harris Harper. And MAY this meditation on termination not be half-baked.
How can we know God? Where is God locatable? With a little help from D. Warwick and a little from St. John, I want to answer. Podcast 160 is dedicated to Jono Linebaugh.
It's really possible: "the happiest actual life", I mean. That was Booth Tarkington's phrase for the hope we could have in real terms, even when circumstances went against us and our intrinsic indelible nature went against us. Case in point: his novel "Alice Adams" (1921). Case in point: his character 'Alice Adams'. I think the story is so real as to be Real.
Boy, do we need a miracle. Such things really happen. As in Booth Tarkington, and as in John Galsworthy. As in me and you. And as in: The Buckinghams.
Taking a break now for a couple weeks, but wanted to leave a little white-pebble trail -- not of tears, but of hope. "Come on down to my boat, baby"; and I'm talking about you, Miss Wyckoff; and you, Mr. Cardew; and you, Mr. Zahl.
A Protestant spin on a Golden Oldie from Sweden. This is also a warning against categorization -- a very personal warning, as I've suffered from categorization and feel it keenly still. "Och du?"
Alternate title: Mandy and the Episcopals. Irving Berlin sets the stage; Sandra Dee plays the lead, together with Troy Donohue; and James Gould Cozzens, like Sister Mary Ignatius, Explains It All for You.
Kramer is my word for transmitted family dis-function and disease. Kramer in this sense requires acute attention. With help from The Contraption, Kramer actually can be reduced. In this podcast, Richard Egan steps up to help us, with a little help from Faith. Percy, I mean.
When you're 'mature', you're sometimes not. I learned this in my 40s. I first learned it in a parish, in 'Cheever country'. But it was also in 'Miami Vice', every Friday night. Valerie and Tubbs taught me, as did 'Sonny' and Theresa. And Jan Hammer. There was all this dread, too. Was it a dream?
The text is Isherwood's journal entry for August 3, 1967. The topic: How to grow in love for the people who are right around you. Lesley Gore is going to help us, plus, naturally, William Hale White; plus Gerald Heard; plus Wayne Fontana.
I've just written a book. It is called "PZ's Panopticon: An Off-the-Wall Guide to World Religiion". It's not about gender differences nor does it concern ideology. It looks at the religions of the world in terms of one question: What does this or that religion have to offer a dying person? My book concerns religion for a person in extremis. Dying seems to "concentrate the mind wonderfully" (Samuel Johnson). I think it serves a most concentrating purpose in helping a person sift through the wisdom of religion. Oh, and by religion, I also mean religions that are not called religions, such as celebrity, sex, things, one's children, one's life-partner, one's ideology, and the power that you have and exercise in your life. Power is a big religion. Religion covers almost anything that habitually or functionally is worshipped. This podcast is dedicated to Ray Ortlund.
This is about the Ancient Romans: their psychic position, their spirit-world of augury, and the effect of the birth of Christ. With help from Bob Dylan. Two corrections, too: The Thornton Wilder book is "The Woman of Andros", and 'Camulodunum' was the Roman name for Colchester.
This is a reflection on 45 years of New Testament scholarship. That's 45 years in 45 minutes -- one minute for every year. And Dave Mason puts it all in perspective.
"A little trick with Dick" (The Name Game): This is about language, control, and Purr-FEC tion. With thanks to Eric Blair, too.
What can you do when you're face to face with The Antagonist? I'll tell you this much: no one gets out of here alive. Unless there are Martians. This podcast is about suffering, and it's also about transcendence.
It's about nervous breakdowns -- maybe your 19th. It's about George's Way with us. And it's about the music.
What's really important? "Soul Coaxing" is really important. But not the practice. The song! By Raymond Lefevre and his Orchestra. THAT's really important. Gosh, I hope you like this.
Here we journey to the outer limits of compassion. Will that suffice? Or do we need a little help from our friends -- like Jeff Beck, maybe.
Here's the Gospel as I would put it this Easter. It's never not been the Have Mercy on Me (Cannonball Adderley/ The Buckinghams) of God in relation to the Outta Gear (Los Straitjackets) of us. But it needs to not become a mental exercise. It needs to be hooked into us, the whole being of our compounded selves. If it's not making the connection, then it will fail. (And it often does.)
This is a meditation on self-forgiveness. I used to think that was a lame phrase, an exercise in twaddle. Not so! Here we have The Walker Brothers, Los Straitjackets, even Frankie (Goes to Hollywood). The Lesson This Morning is from Isherwood's journal entry of July 14, 1940, which is to say, the Second of the Two Great Commandments.
It's here: that surgical song by Lobo, the balladeer's portrait of an ordinary, heart-rending tragedy. Because the picture's true to life, however, there may be room for hope. Roll up for a magical mystery tour, -- with a Dog Named Boo.
A short exegesis of personal pacifism. Scott Walker's song "Hero of the War" made me do it! Oh, and it's John Lennon in "Oh! What a Lovely War". That's a correction.
The La Verne Seminar, which took place in the Summer of 1941, is the second most desired destination for PZ the Time Traveler. If only one could have been there. It was the ultimate religious retreat! But still, I think I'd choose, for first place, if I had to choose, a trip to Universal Studios during the Great Depression, to witness the filming of that most desired of all works of cinema art: The Bride of Frankenstein.
That's Where the Happy People Go! Here is "a new way of talking, a new way of walking" -- about praying, about grace, about One Love and the Underground River. Jerry Lewis (but you won't like this) has a walk-on, too.
The music! -- evoking Lot's wife and then the Lord's words to St. Peter. I guess I think it's more and more about the music. But let's here it for the Haiku, tu.
This is not a case of "interpretive signage" ! You'll have to make up your mind on your own. But Looking Glass will be there to help you, followed by, close by, Scott W.
Had to do this one. Victor Hugo is great. "Victor Hugo" the Phenomenon seems like another turn of Journey's "Wheel". (Listen and you'll find out why.) Nevertheless, I had fun doing this and hope you like it. Karen Carpenter (R.I.P.) helped me. Mr. Leitch, too.
This is an experiment. It's a true story, from the true-life adventures, tho' I truly wish it never happened. Is PZ trying for a James Agee moment? Maybe so. Podcast 129 is dedicated to Adrienne Parks.
This podcast is not just about another movie, the 1973 musical version of "Lost Horizon". It's about Reflections of yourself, the divine Approach when "I Come to You", and the Things I Will Not Miss. The movie's an incongruous knockout. This is because it's about Life.
Look within yourself, look inside the Black Cauldron. If you take the time to Drag the Line, you'll almost definitely find your hope, even joy. Let the bells ring, and let's Listen to the Music.
Suffering, Transitoriness, and Insubstantiality: three marks of being that seem beyond dispute, at least from the perspective of experience. To be sure, the last, insubstantiality, takes some unpacking. Podcast 126 drinks some Matthew's Southern Comfort, and makes common cause with The Peanut Butter Conspiracy.
In the spirit of the J. Geils Band, 'Sinuhe the Egyptian' spent his entire life looking for it. A proto-hippie, an inspired near-mad man (not across the water), gave Sinuhe the answer. The result was elation, and courage, and even creation. And for me. And for you?
Here's a Sixth Sense! Galsworthy sheds light -- but where did it come from? -- and jump-starts us "Going Up The Country".
John Galsworthy's play "A Bit O'Love" (1915) and his novel "Saint's Progress" (1919) diagnose the problem and also the possibility inherent in parish ministry, and especially within parish clergy. Galsworthy gives his readers a shattering exercise but also a hopeful one. So we just want to say: Goodbye, Columbus !
It's being labelled a "Zwinglian"! And there's something even worse than that. This podcast is a plea for the wheels to be put back on religion.
Freedom and Love: Love can't exist from anything but, and Freedom can't result in anything but. This cast wants to consult St. Augustine, concerning human nature; and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, concerning intangibles. Maxim Gorky makes an appearance, too. I hope you'll like what he says.
Here's a short talk about creativity, renewal, "work stoppage", and a couple of terrific movies. It's also a lesson in How to Empty a Room!
"Trouble in my way" is the name of the game. This podcast tells the story of how it came to me, and what it forced me to learn. Episode 119 of PZ's Podcast is a two part swan song.
This is intended to be the opposite of a rant. Even if I wanted to, I could not come a thousand light years close to Antoine's great one, which once so delighed the French. What I can try to give you instead is a little reading list, plus a little movie, a profound one, even a study in scarlet.
This tight expressionist outing is a study in egos prepared to take any measures in order to prolong (ego-) life. It's a sure fail, but most instructive. Then there's the fog, and the blocking of the characters in the fog. It endures in the memory. There is also an outstanding note of psychotronic Episcopal haberdashery and service schedules. 'Mr. Russell' is a wonderful minister!
Another meditation on hope (i.e., the Wing Thing), via death; yet death concretely and in the now, death you can get your skull around today and not tomorrow. Akira Ifukube is here to help undress us, as is Diogenes the Cynic, and Ludger Tom Ring; and, wouldn't you know, Raymond Scott. Podcast 116 is dedicated to Hewes Hull.
"What makes the melon ball bounce?" What makes you bounce? This is an undressed talk about death, and death's funny aftermath.
This is podcast one in a new "story arc" -- a study in defeatedness, and a new hope I strangely feel. You could call it cross-notes of a theological psychologist.
Gerald Fried (b. 1928) and Gerald Heard (d. 1971): both were communicators of the non-rational, both were exponents of the subterranean echo. Fried did it through B-movie (and other) musical scores; Heard, through mystery novels and fantastic short stories. Jesus did it, too, through similes and parables. (If the second Gerald chose for his "nom-de-plume" 'H.F. Heard', I wonder what name Christ would have chosen, had His stories been published.)
Kipling shed light! From "Recessional" to "Children's Song", this podcast sings his praise. Kipling was also a 'both-and' thinker, a rare eirenic gift, and a Gift for Today. Episode 112 is dedicated to Stuart Gerson.
John Betjeman listed five masters of the English ghost story, or supernatural tale. All five of them were the sons of Protestant ministers. What was going on with these sons, and their fathers. 'The Winstons' can tell us the answer, in their 1969 45 that we loved so, we sons of our fathers.
Bishop Ryle made at least three big mistakes during his long ministry. If he were able to speak now -- he died in 1900 -- I believe he would admit them. To me they are revealing mistakes, from which there is something to learn. J.C. Ryle also had a core strength: He had been saved in his youth, when his world fell apart. He was a Christian, in other words, for the right reason. Yet like many spiritual people, there were still "unevangelized dark continents" inside him. Had these been "colonized" by the great Word that saved the young man, Ryle might have avoided the mistakes he made as an older man.
John Charles Ryle, who lived from l816 to 1900, was "a giant of a man with the heart of a child". He was a Christian warrior in the Church of England, who contended against High Churchmen and Liberals for 60 years, concluding his ministry as the first Bishop of Liverpool. J.C. Ryle is a fascinating character, a hero-type with some interesting weaknesses. This podcast tells the story of his life. It is dedicated to my friend Fred Rogers.
Alternate Title: I Feel Like I Lose When I Win. Also, there's a correction: It was 'Fraulein Doktor', not the actress who played her (Suzy Kendall), who died young, at age 52, in 1940.
A meditation on defense: that's what this is. Someone wrote that the inner being of a human being is "covered by thirty or forty skins or hides, like an ox's or a bear's, so thick and hard". Too true! What's to get through? Is there an antipode, a blessed antipode, to such a coverage from hope? I honestly think there is. (Even if you've only got a toe on the Road.)
How does the ego actually die? Or rather, what does a person look like when their ego has died, or is dying? Can we see this -- the "seed falling into the ground"? Algernon Blackwood wrote about the dying. He wrote about it vividly and concretely, not just symbolically. This podcast quotes from two of Blackwood's "Eternity" stories: "The Centaur" (1911) and "A Descent into Egypt" (1914). The theme is healing, at the end of the day; and even, priesthood.
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) knew a lot. In reaction to his Sandemanian childhood, he still remained a religious person, all his life. In his "weird tales" Blackwood tried to map a religious way forward -- through an inspired imagination. I used to put Arthur Machen at the top of the list of writers of supernatural horror. Because of a change in me, Blackwood is now number one. This podcast, together with Episode 103, which comes next, follows directly from "Eternity".
What dies when we die, and what continues to live? What should we fear in relation to physical death, and what can we affirm? Philip Larkin gives a little assist here, but so does St. Francis. This is Episode 100.
Between "Waterloo" and "Lay all your love on me", I don't see how you could achieve a purer pop moment. Or just a purer moment period! The insight within these two 45s is communicated to perfection. What is that insight? Well, two things: first, "all I've learned has overturned" (note the 'Euro' English). I thought I knew myself. Then LUV came knocking, and "everything is new and everything is you." That's the way people really are. Second, "now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight... I feel like I win when I lose." This is good religion's word to the ego. I feel like I win when I lose. This is also the 101st (Airborne) Podcast.
Heinz Burt, known as "Heinz", the Wild Boy of Pop, was, you could say, Joe Meek's muse. Meek did everything possible to make his "Heinz" into a star. Although Meek failed to do that, he produced a large body of fabulous music around his Golden Child. This podcast, previously unreleased, deals with the alchemy of imputation; the theme of unrequited love and consequent melancholy in much of the gold that Meek created out of Heinz; and with the proximity, to almost all of us, of mental illness. There are two factual mistakes in the cast: The town of Eastleigh is in Hampshire, not "New Hampshire"; and the song connected to the movie "Circus of Horrors" was sung by Garry Mills. It is entitled "Look for a Star".
"The Nazareth Principle" (Simeon Zahl) and Joe Meek: they're synonymous. Joe Meek was an improbable genius, who Hear(d) a New World. His wondrous work, achieved under conditions so unusual as to make the mind boggle, is a pure example of Christ's being labelled by the question, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" This podcast lay languishing in the vaults, mainly because there are two mistakes in it: the speaker confuses the guitarist Jimmy Page with the guitarist Ritchie Blackmore; and, 'Screaming Lord Sutch', with 'Lord Buckethead'. Other than that, he's satisfied with it. Moreover, he believes in what he said.
When reality comes crashing in to call, you've got to be prepared for a re-think. It's what happens to 'Billy Liar', in another dazzling English rose, the movie "Billy Liar" from 1963. It's based on a novel then a play, but the visuals bring it home. A man of 19, who flees from his life, for his life, into a fantasy world, begins to falter, then crumble, in the face of reality. (O Lucky Man! -- at age 19, to begin to see.) Like the English city in which he lives, in which every building seems to be being bulldozed in service of urban renewal, 'Billy Fisher' -- Billy Liar -- is watching "everything go". "Not one stone" (of his plummeting life) "will be left on stone". There's help, however, in the form of a girl, a precious girl, who is able to care and not care. She's the hope! She knows something Billy doesn't, and few do. Can she save our phantastic hero? Could she save you? Listen to "Twisterella". Or rather, see "Billy Liar", and SEE.
This podcast is about categorization -- the pitfalls of categorization. With people, with friends (and prospective friends), with husbands and wives (and prospective husbands and wives), with everybody. It's also about possession -- the pitfalls of possession. Especially with people you love. My surface subject is a 1962 movie entitled "A Kind of Loving": an English rose. But the real subject is putting life into categories, and love into objects. Note the new intro, too. It's got 45 RPM crackling noises.
Harpo's Night at the Bardo -- but not Harpo's, actually. It was mine:. It was PZ's Night at the Bardo. From dusk till dawn. This is something that actually happened. I saw my own death, or rather, myself dying, on a reclining chair in an airplane, on March 1, 2012. It was an unpleasant, elucidating experience. It rattled me! Let me tell you all about it.
If you want to find out what true north is in your life -- in other words, where you are really going -- notice what books you are drawn to. Or what movies you really like. Or what music you're putting on your iPod these days. Or what television show you can't miss this week. Those things function as a truth north for your life's actual direction. This podcast looks at two revealing sentences, within two modern masterpieces, of this phenomenon of true north's revelation. Operationally, I am wondering where you ("the living" -- B. 'Boris' Pickett) will come down.
"Oops! I did it again!": it just came over me. Despite a break, a real break, very soon to come, Lola compelled one to speak. I mean, "Lola", the 1961 movie by Jacques Demy. This podcast is a memo on ego-less communication. It can really happen, and almost never does. But you can't beat it -- you can't beat it -- when it does. In just about any aspect of life you can name.
"Disputed Passage" (Lloyd C. Douglas) is what this podcast is not. There are any number of issues to talk about, yet so many are so particular, and rally around themselves all kinds of differing opinions. I'd rather do -- that is, try to do in a small way -- something of what Claude Berri actually did in "Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring" (1986), which was, in his own words, to scrape down to the universal: our human nature and suffering, in common -- the tie that binds. After this cast, I am taking a short break. But it's really just "pre-production" time, for the next season of, "Fireball XL 5".
Language changes, changes, changes. "Elle coule, coule, coule." Like a simple but undeviating "conversation" at the drive -through window of the bank. Or like the use of the word "program". "Program" doesn't mean a Lenten series anymore. It doesn't mean what it used to mean. It means something else now. So I need your help, to devise a more robust program than just another pot luck.
"Falsification" is another word for compartmentalization. When we falsify reality -- as in "being untrue", either to a person or to convictions that we (otherwise) hold sincerely -- we get, well, what we deserve. The New Testament gets falsified all the time; and the obloquy which falsification, when found out, gets us, clouds everything -- not to mention the very goods we actually could give. Those goods are Reality and Mercy. This podcast goes from Cozzens (don't worry) to Christians to lawyers to "Perfidia" to "Band of Gold". But mainly, it goes out to ... me and you.
"Kuh-hay-tchuh-pek". It means 'God', or rather G-d, in Martian. You can find out all about "Kuh-hay-tchuh-pek" in the now Criterioned 1964 movie "Robinson Crusoe on Mars". "Kuh-hay-tchuh-pek" is God, and a very right and proper God, too. He is Divine Order, but He is also a Nice Guy. This podcast is about G-d. I hope you'll like Him.
Sequels are strange: sometimes they're better than the original, most of the time they're worse. What makes a good sequel? "The Empire Strikes Back", for example; or "The Invisible Man Returns"; or "The Ghost of Frankenstein". Well, preaching -- I mean preaching in the formal sense, i.e., preaching in churches -- is a study in sequels. When you preach a sermon, you're in a long succession. It goes all the way back to the Sermon on the Mount. That was a good one. Most of its sequels, however, don't seem to have the same power. They tend to be soon forgotten. I want to learn from "The Invisible Man's Revenge", and "Ghost", and "Hand" (you know what I mean) in order to know what makes a good sequel. This is a podcast on the art and science of preaching.
I don't believe in "reality", or rather, I believe what looks like reality is seldom reality. This can be easily proved by a quick viewing of ... "The Mummy Ghost" (1944). One look at that wonderful movie is able to confer an accurate understanding of reality. This is because "The Mummy's Ghost" 's reality IS reality. Podcast 88 concerns Kharis, Tana Leaves, and the Arab Spring. P.S. From Kerouac: " 'Facts' are sophistries."
They are all, like Ray Milland, "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" -- these Huguenot heroes: Marot, Duplessis-Mornay, de Beze, de Coligny, de Rohan, d'Aubigne. That includes their English co-religionists, such as Whitgift and Abbott and Grindal. These are eyes of defeat, eyes that convey an end to self-reference, eyes of a markedly ego-less state. You simply have to undergo defeat, have to, in order to, well, become a little child. Old ancient wisdom.
This podcast tries to go a little deeper with Supermarionation. It is really about social class, and the kind of alliance that inevitably imperils a religion whose goal is emancipating the human race. We start with "It Happened One Night", then chart our way north, to an old surprising hymn.
Can the mind of man and woman conceive that the subject of Episcopal haberdashery in the movies might be interesting and meaningful? Well, yes, it might be, at least to me. This podcast surveys Protestant Episcopal clothing in the movies and television. We travel in our sound machine from "The Bishop's Wife" to "Family Plot" to "Night of the Iguana" to "The Sandpiper"; and we end up on British tv -- in Supermarionation. Maybe this is completely unimportant. Then again... I dedicate the cast to Fred Rogers, fellow pilgrim and dialogue partner.
Yvette Vickers played supporting roles in two unforgettable 1950's science-fiction movies: "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" and "Attack of the Giant Leeches". As far as I'm concerned, she stole the show both times. But, Yvette Vickers is now dead. Or rather, she was found dead, on the 27th of April last year (2011). The conditions under which she was found, and the conditions under which she apparently lived her life near the end of it, evoke floods of compassion. They simply have to. How could this have happened? How could Yvette Vickers, our once-and-future (saucy) flame, have ended that way? This podcast -- I wouldn't mind calling it pastoral -- is an attempt to understand.
This is a theme with me -- the pros and cons (there aren't many cons) of learning foreign languages. Also, how does it actually work? Why is one language easier for a given person to learn than another? Also, what's the relatiion between learning a language to read, and learning a language to speak? And why is psychology so important, personal psychology, in the acquisition of a foreign 'tongue'? Here is 50 years' experience of pain and suffering (and altered states) rolled up into a single half hour.
From our house to your house, at the Turning of the Year: a portrait of the dignity that is able to inhere within romantic love -- sometimes. The subject is a short scene, a musical number really, in a late Jacques Demy, "Une Chambre en Ville" (1982). You can YouTube it by typing in "Violette amoureuse". I have faith you will be richly repaid. Try to marry a 'Violette' if you possibly can -- or, if it's too late, tell your children about her.
Why am I "afraid to say what I really want to say" (Jack Kerouac)? That's a line from "Visions of Gerard", and many could echo it. This podcast is about changing mores, specifically the contrast between a sensational murder case of the 1930s and a sensational case of recent times. Then there's Ken Russell's "The Devils" (1971), a charming little movie -- and the shifting sands of killing inquisition. Maybe I should quit while I'm ahead.
What constitutes you, as a human being? What are the parts which make you the whole you are? A single sentence from Huxley's "After many a summer dies the swan" can help, together with Fritz Lang's "Woman in the Moon". It's not about the ego. I am so sorry that human education pumps up that flat tire. Is there another way to educate ... ourselves?
I'm shooting for quality today. In the spirit of earlier podcasts concerning Giant Crab Movies and Journey,this podcast concerns what might today be called "Lounge Crooner Classics". In their day, they were pop songs commissioned to be played over the credits of movies and then sold as singles. We're talking about "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" by Frankie Avalon; "Journey to the 7th Planet" by Otto Brandenburg; "The Lost Continent" by The Peddlers; and "The Vengeance of She" by Robert Field. These are absurd performances of human art and commerce pitched to the highest possible degree. At least in my opinion. Moreover, they can help you with your anger! Few things do more to diminish anger than a feel for the absurd. This podcast is intended to help the speaker, and the listener, with his or her anger. "Come with me, And take a Voyage, To the Bottom, Of the Sea."
I tried to follow the invitation of that song recently. Saw a lot of things, found out a lot of things, remembered a lot of things, heard a couple of new things. It was a definite pilgrimage. I would like to tell you about it.
Can the "young" be instructed by the "old"? Can Nigel Kneale's "Planet People" be even saved by the over 70s? To put this another way, are there two messages to life: one for the first half and another for the second? Ultimately, no. There is one message. Alack! : It comes through suffering. Pump up the volume.
Nigel Kneale (1922-2006) was absolute murder, in the Reggae sense. No writer of English science fiction thought more originally than Nigel Kneale, who mostly wrote teleplays for the BBC. His "Quatermass (pro. 'Kway-ter-mass') and the Pit" from 1959 attempted to explain the whole history of religion via Martians. It strangely works. Kneale's "Quatermass" (1979) showed how the "young" are unable to save themselves from generational self-slaughter. Only "seniors" can save 'em! There's a lot to Kneale, He's one other of those unusual humanists who understood about Original Sin. These rare birds -- they're all "murder" -- have much to tell us.
Rejoicing at someone's execution, in "disturbing images", is hard enough to absorb. To add the unaccountable silence of Christians in relation to such joy is almost impossible to absorb. What's to love in this world, in this planetary race of not so human beings? We're hoping to get a little help today from Harnack and Huxley. (Wonder what would have happened if they'd ever met? I feel almost certain that Holl, Harnack's A student, would have liked Huxley.)
This is about the use of language to cover an unpleasant reality. It's not just about the "removal" of an al awlaki or a "new chapter in the history of Libya" accomplished by means of the murder of a POW who was captured alive. It's about resigning yourself to something you cannot change.
Arthur Machen meets St. Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 11, Verses 16-19. You can try to make your voice heard with an engaging, danceable tune, and it will pass like a shadow over the water. (Think "Men Without Hats".) Or you can try it in a shrill, scratchy key, and it will still be forgotten, fast. (Think P.J. Proby.) Whether it flops or not, however, that's not the point . Someone will probably eventually hear it, and take it up. Think Joe Meek.
There is nothing quite like the Inward Voice of 'Mark Rutherford', the novelist whose real name was William Hale White. He wore a mask over a mask, and his six novels constitute a kind of ultimate Inward Voice within Victorian fiction. Today we look at his "Revolution in Tanner's Lane" (1890), which reveals the worst and also the best of the Romans 7 understanding of human nature. Cradled in this unique book -- "Revolution" -- is a message I think the world's gotta hear. I don't think it ever will, but STILL 'MarkRutherford' committed his Inward Voice to paper, and we know a lot more about ourselves because of him..
Here is a two-parter concerning your inward voice: What is it, and how do you find it? From a Romans 7 point of view, the inward voice (and voices) is almost all that matters. Now get it down! Write it down! Put it on paper, or else it'll probably just "Fade Away" (Rolling Stones). This is personal archaeology, yours and mine, and it involves digging, and lifting.
Now here's a find: a passage in the novel "Revolution in Tanner's Lane" (1890) by 'Mark Rutherford' (aka William Hale White), in which the author answers the question I set in the previous cast. If there is a word from religion to the middle-aged and "mature" -- i.e., a word of humbled acquiescence to the disillusioned and shaken -- what is religion's word to the young? Can the same message of experienced wisdom and non-identification, which seems able to communicate with immediacy to the shattered, have something to say to the young and engaged, to the active members of this world, all "wishin' and hopin'" and working and fretting? The Rev. Thomas Bradshaw, the genuine-article preacher in Mark Rutherford's great book, offers a word to "My young friends" (p. 268) that is a mighty dart to the young but shot from an old man's quiver. In this cast, let me read you what Mr. Bradshaw has to say, then you tell me whether it answers the practical question.
Does life-wisdom offer the same message to the non-disillusioned, who are often on the younger side, as it does to the disillusioned, who are often over-50? It's a live issue for me, since a gospel of hope to the shattered can sound depressing to people who are working on wresting something like success from life. Interestingly, many religious pioneers, from Pachomius to Zwingli, from Clare to the "Little Flower", were young when they received a message of negation, but also a new and different theme of affirmation. Is there a philosophical link between "Build Me Up, Buttercup" (The Foundations) and "The Levee's Gonna Break" (Dylan)? That's the subject of this podcast.
My new law firm is called "Scrambling, Rattled, and Bracing, P.A.". It is a firm devoted to the project of complete control. It helps me "scramble" to contain unexpected problems; prevents me from getting "rattled" by unexpected threats; and gets me "braced" in anticipation of feared outcomes. In other words -- you guessed it -- my new law firm helps me get control of my life. I pay it to get me ready for every eventuality. Oddly, though, it hasn't worked as well as I had hoped. I'm still scrambling, I still get rattled, and I spend every weekend bracing for Monday. But hey ! : I've got hopes. If I can just get a little control ...
This ancient show, much of which is now richly available on YouTube, let alone DVD, understood something important. It understood about the "collective unconscious" and the nature of the Love that exists underneath human loves. The several great episodes in this terse ancient treasure, from 1959 to 1961, depict reality so unflinchingly that you can barely look — and, the underlying reality of God. I actually think "One Step Beyond" is a profounder prototype for "Touched by an Angel". Plus, the music! - especially Harry Lubin's theme entitled "Weird". Not his "Fear", which you've heard a hundred times; but his "Weird". And here's the 'Dean's Question' for this podcast: How did William James decide to define God?
Anger -- it's everywhere. The question is, at whom or at what are you NOT angry? Well, you can't be angry at anyone or anything you love. Or rather, you can't be angry at that part of anyone or anything that you love. This podcast is about seismic anger -- into which the internet is just a current window. Every age has its window. This podcast hunts for an answer.
This gorgeous 1964 film is everything people say it is, and makes you wonder sometimes whether its director and writer, Jacques Demy, was too good for this world. Let's also hear it for Michel Legrand, who wrote the score. What I wish to eyeball, and what this podcast is about, is its vision of romance, for "Umbrellas of Cherbourg" is about first love, lost love, best love, et enfin, true love. The hero's "Je crois que tu peux partir" ("It's time for you to go.") is so wonderfully masculine, and faithful, and cognizant but 'he's not buying', that I truly wish every woman in the world who has lost faith in men could see this movie. My podcast is about True Love. It is dedicated to Nick Greenwood.
Lord Buckley broke down a barrier that is exceptionally hard to break down. He broke down the barrier between the Sacred and the Profane. Several of his 'hipsemantic' monologues, once you begin to study them, are fascinating expressions of Christian ideas, but expressed in the terms of an offbeat and wacky nightclub personality. I don't know of anything like them. In this second and concluding podcast on a genuine comic genius, I read, sitting on my white azz, Lord Buckley's riff on "Quo Vadis", entitled "Nero". Once again, My Lords and Ladies of the Court, I give you Richard Myrle Buckley , together with his affecting 'familiar', OO-Bop-A-Lap.
Lord Buckley (aka Richard Myrle Buckley, l906-1960) was a "way out" nightclub comic and monologist, who created "hipsemantic" routines based on famous people -- very famous! -- and famous works of literature. Lord Buckley's most famous monologue was called "The Nazz" and is a "hipster" re-telling of three miracles of Our Savior, which was Lord Buckley's frequently invoked term for Christ. "The Nazz" is a homage to Jesus that exists in a class by itself. If anything you've ever heard or read breaks the barrier between the Sacred and the Profane, "The Nazz" does it. In this podcast, PZ gives a public reading of Lord Buckley's "The Nazz". The reading can't fail to be sort of an atrocity -- I almost entitled this cast "The Nazz and My White Azz" -- as the original was performed entirely in African-American iidiom. Nevertheless, this readng could do the alternate thing of getting down to what Buckley actually wrote and actually said, for his substance is sublime. PZ owes his appreciation of Lord Buckley to Bill Bowman.
This is My Sharona of faith, a series of four theses, briefly explained, that express an approach to everyday living, and understanding. I hope you like them.
It's possible to tell the future. It's actually pretty easy. You have to know about human nature, and you have to know about fashion. You have to know that human nature doesn't change, and you have to know that fashion changes all the time. It changes right to left, then left to right, then back again. Then the same, again. And again. "My Ever Changing Moods" (Style Council) You, too, can be a fortune teller. Here's how.
William Inge (1913-1973) wrote plays of restrained optimism concerning broken families in small Kansas towns of the 1920's and '30's. He understood about the importance of sex in everyday life -- even in Protestant Middle-Western America during the Great Depression. He also understood about the Church and its disappointing failure to help people when the bottom fell out of their lives. Yet there a wistfulness to Inge. He seems to be saying, 'If only'. If only our religious tradition had not declined so from the teachings of Christ. This podcast talks about William Inge's perspective on the Church Defeated -- by itself ! He writes of sufferers with tender sympathy, with grace in practice.
It just may be the worst thing about America today: our view of human nature. If you listen to almost any -- and I mean, any -- commentator, speechmaker, pundit, or spokesperson, of literally any and every organization, institution, medium, or government office, you are going to hear about taking charge, and imposing control -- of everything and everybody. (I hate that they'll now ticket you if you're caught smoking in New York City. That's insane! No more "Shake Shack" for us, I am dashed to say.) The pitiful thing is, their idea of human nature is not true. It is simply not true. We are being fed an understanding of human nature that is inaccurate. It is innacurate from stem to stern. Therefore there is no HOPE being offered. Everything is rooted in a fallacy. "Shallow Hal" This is Episode 50 of "PZ's Podcast". Philip Wylie's going to help us out again, but so is wonderful William Inge, and inspired Frenchman Jacques Demy. I'm going to let them take us there, to Strawberry Fields ... Forever.
Another one of those unknown authors. But he has so much to tell us, first about sex and then about Christianity. About the former, he puts first things first. About the latter, he puts Jesus on the "Enola Gay". Would that Philip Wylie were here today, to put Jesus on a predator drone, or on one of those Navy SEAL helicopters which flew into Pakistan recently.
Philip Wylie was a prophet in the war between the sexes. His 1951 novel "The Disappearance", in which, through an unexplained 'cosmic blink', all the women disappear from the world of the men and all the men disappear from the world of the women, is so noble and so disturbing, so wrenching and so uplifting, so wise and so uncommonly religious, that it becomes required reading for everyone who is a man and everyone who is a woman.
Herman Wouk's 1985 novel "War and Remembrance" has a most prophetic minor character buried within its 1300 pages. This character is a philosophical and definitely sweet English aristocrat named Duncan Burne-Wilke, whom we meet in the "CBI" or "China Burma India" theater of the Second World War. Burne-Wilke envisages the end of Western colonialism on account of a massive disillusionment caused by the War. But he also thinks in religious terms concerning the future of America and England. He sees the future in terms of the "Bhagavad gita", and a "turning East" of which we are now aware and in relation to which the Christian churches are having to live, defensively. My podcast speaks of one small voice within a large contemporary epic. Burne-Wilke's disenchanted words are "crying to be heard" (Traffic), and also responded to. He haunts the bittersweet narrative of Wouk's marvelous book.
This is my favorite book. It's also Bill Murray's. It is called "The Razor's Edge" and was written by Somerset Maugham. It was published in 1944. It tells the story of some well-to-do Americans from Lake Forest, who all find what they're looking for in life. One of them, 'Larry Darrell', loses his life only to save it. He is the hero, and I think he could be yours. P.S. Who's "Ruysbroek"?
"The Green Pastures" is a 1930 American play, and 1936 Hollywood movie, that was once as famous as "Our Town". Now, for reasons of political correctness, it is rarely seen and seldom taught. Even the DVD has to carry a 'Warning' label. (Good Grief!) How dearly we have robbed ourselves of a pearl of truly great price. Marc Connelly's "The Green Pastures" deals theatrically with the transition in the Bible from Law to Grace. (It is not Marcionite!) Has God's Mercy, in relation to God's Law, ever been staged like this? I can't think of an example. You've got to see "The Green Pastures". The character 'Hezdrel', alone, will... blow... your... mind.
Bishop Bell appears as a main character in Rolf Hochhuth's 1967 play entitled "Soldiers". Bell confronts Churchill on the morality of murder from the air, especially when it involves the murder of civilians. Such a confrontation never actually took place, but the Bishop and the Prime Minister had the thoughts and stated them. The PM detested Bell. In Act Three of Hochhuth's play, Bell loses and Churchill wins. In the moral balance, Churchill lost and Bell won. "Soldiers" is a play about the massacre of this world that is repeatedly staged by Power. As in the case of un-manned drone aircraft today. Nobody seems to care. Nobody 'gives'. Yet one day...
George K.A. Bell (1883-1958) was the Bishop of Chichester during World War II. He addressed the House of Lords on February 9, 1944, questioning the Government on the use of "carpet bombing" of German cities. Bishop Bell regarded this kind of bombing, which was intended to destroy German morale and bring the war to an end, as a war crime. At the time, Bell was the only person in Britain willing to say such a thing in a 'national' forum such as the Parliament. He was attacked all across the board as being 'pro-German' and almost a traitor. (He had, incidentally, been the first public figure in the country to criticize Hitler's anti-semitic legislation. He had done so in 1934.) Because of his speech in the Lords, Bishop Bell lost all chance of promotion in the Church of England. Today, however, he is almost canonized there, and certainly within the Church. This podcast is about Bell's speech. It also relates his theme to the current use of un-manned drone aircraft to commit targed assassination from the air -- or rather, from Las Vegas.
Religious partisanship is normal, explicable, and terminal. It kills Christianity. It sure killed me. Or maybe it wised me up. This podcast concerns Charles Dickens' novel "Barnaby Rudge", which was published in 1841. Dickens' subject was the "No Popery" riots that took place in 1780 in London. They are also known as the "Gordon Riots". Dickens used this astonishing episode to observe the causes of theological hatred, and its consequences. Dickens was a conscious Protestant and heartfelt Christian, but he was upset by religious malice. "Barnaby Rudge" gets to the bottom of it, in 661 pages. This podcast gives you the Reader's Digest version in 36 minutes.
Life in a Final Club! "The Social Network" has made it high profile all of a sudden. What it was, was fun, delightful, blessedly un-serious in a way serious world, with a taste of Evelyn Waugh. We loved it. Why was the story never told? That's a story. Podcast 39 is published in loving memory of Page Farnsworth Grubb, '71.
This is an impression of The Yardbirds, the first avant-garde band we ever knew. With Eric Clapton to start, then Jeff Beck, then Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, then Jimmy Page only, their music, especially the guitar breaks, lived on the edge of INSANITY. To this day, I still have Yardbirds days. They are wonderful. There was also a personal Close Encounter, with Friends. In this podcast I tell a story and try to give an impression, followed by a few, well, theological comments. Podcast 37 is dedicated to William Cox Bowman.
This podcast is about professional titles: the more reduced in circumstances an institution, the more high-flown its titles. Did you know that until about 1970 Episcopal clergy were always called 'Mr." ? (They were never called 'Father', except in one parish, max two, per city.) The later Cardinal Newman was 'Mr. Newman', and Edward Bouverie Pusey was 'Mr. Pusey'. But don't take my word for it. Read W. M. Thackerey, read E.M. Forster. See 'Showboat', the 1936 version. An interesting principle seems to be at work: when things are going great, the leader is just a regular person, like everybody else. He's 'Mr. Irwine', as in Eliot's "Adam Bede". But when things begin to go south, and the world gets against you, the leader becomes: The Most Metropolitical and Right Honorable Dr. of Sacred Letters Obadiah Slope. Anyway, I'd sure rather be Mr. Midshipman Easy! Listen to this, and you may want to work for the car wash down the street. Oh, and no one will believe you anyway. Maybe if you tell 'em, Father Paul told you.
Here's a little gazetteer of Episcopal Protestant interiors. They're nice. Delaware's is in the middle of nowhere, and Boston's finest is Unitarian. George Washington sat beneath a central pulpit in Alexandria and "Low Country" farmers did the same. And don't forget the Motor City: I mean, Duanesburg, New York. But always remember this -- even if you are actually able to visit these places, no one will ever believe you when you get back home. They simply CAN'T exist!
This one is about Protestant aesthetics as expressed in architecture and design. It is 'a tale told by an idiot', however, for no one ever believes you. Only Henny Penny says the Episcopal Church was once Protestant and 'Low' -- right up to the Disco Era. Memory being what it is, this is the tale of a forgotten 200 years. The Song Remains the Same in about 200 precious survivals in England, as well as 50 or so on the East Coast of the U.S.A. There, the glass is clear; the design, simple; and the message, unmediated. There, less is more.
Late Saturday nights was a time for little boys to howl. "Shock Theater" came on around one! We learned every line of the 'original' "Dracula" (1931), memorized every release date of every Mummy movie from 1932 to 1945, and, most important, got married for life to: "The Bride of Frankenstein". This is the story of those late Saturday nights, which gave our mothers such trouble, since it was they who would have to ... wake us up for church.
The Circle was a movie theater in downtown Washington where two boys discovered foreign film. Boris Karloff and James Whale became superseded by Sergei Eisenstein and Francois Truffaut. Or mostly. (We were only 13 years old, for crying out loud.) This podcast tells our Tales from the Circle. Every word is true. It is Part III of The Moviegoer and is dedicated to Lloyd Fonvielle.
Part II of The Moviegoer, in which our ten-year-old hero discovers Edgar Allan Poe via Roger Corman in the downtown movie palaces of Loew's Capital, Loew's Palace, and R.K.O. Keith's. He comes face to face with a strange new Glynis Johns before encountering "The Vampire and the Ballerina" exactly one block from the White House.
This is the story of a conversion. It happened in the Fall of 1959, and I've never looked back. It happened in connection with some mountaineering in the Swiss Alps. Like the man in "The Crawling Eye", I lost my head. Still haven't found it.
We're not finished yet. Cozzens cuts to the core of Anglo-Catholicism yet without throwing stones. He wants to understand. And his account of a hijacked P.E. funeral in "Eyes to See" is so close to home, well, that it makes you want to scream.
"P.E." is for Protestant Episcopal. 35 years I've been ordained and it took Cozzens to teach me some sore lessons. For me they came late. But, "For you the living/This Mash was meant, too." "When you get to my house, Tell them 'Jimmy' sent you."
What's the greatest rock 'n roll band of all time? Could a group sum up everything that has gone before and thus WRAP the genre? Yes, it could. They did. Their name was "Journey". But Wait! Hear me out.
Dan Curtis went straight from Gothic Horror soap operas to the greatest epic ever made for television. His heart was always in his work, from "Dark Shadows" to "The Night Stalker" to... "The Winds of War". When it comes to his 29-hour genius production "War and Remembrance, Can't Touch This! Here is the story of an undepressed man.
New thoughts on 'the Gothic' in movies and literature -- from Irvin S. Cobb, whose Gothic story "Fishhead" was termed a "banefully effective tale" by H. P. Lovecraft; to Ray Russell, of "Sardonicus" fame; to Roger Corman, who brought the House down around Roderick Usher. Turns out it's all about bodily disintegration in an enclosed space, and the dead hand of the past upon the hopes of the present. The Gothic becomes a fascinating study in the quest for bookings on the Last Metro.
Hammer Horror is a beautiful thing -- everything movies should be, or almost everything. There is also this delightful religious dimension, in which the High Priest of Karnak prays in the language of the Book of Common Prayer and Peter Cushing is 'fighting evil every bit as much' as a Church of England etymologist/bishop in "Hound of the Baskervilles". Here is my little 'National Geographic Society lecture', on one of the nicest acres of filmdom and fandom. It was recorded at Constitution Hall in our Nation's Capital.
Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944) was famous in his day, but is unread now. Ours is the loss! His "Judge Priest" stories are as parabolic of grace as it gets. They exude peace, love, and understanding. And what's so funny about that? Here's your chance to bone up on Irvin S. Cobb! By the way, John Ford liked Cobb so much that he made two movies out of his stories, and then put him in a third. In 1961 Ford made a personal pilgrimage to Cobb's grave at Paducah, Kentucky. Two weeks from tomorrow I hope to do the same.
The Jansenists never declined. They got wiped out good. Think "End of the Line" by the Traveling Wilburys. Pascal enters and exits, assisted by Roberto Rossellini's tv show (1971) and Jack Kerouac's bar game (1969). The 'Sun King' plays his cruel part, while Our Ladies of Port-Royal hold the line. They really hold the line! As Sainte-Beuve wrote of the Jansenists, "They were from Calvary".
Jansenism was a religious movement in Seventeenth-Century France that threatened Church and State. Its apologists, including Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine, thought their movement, based on its re-discovery of the teachings of St. Augustine, could save Christianity from the Protestants. Its detractors thought Jansenism WAS Protestantism, but a Fifth Column of it, burrowing away within the Catholic Church. The two positions were irreconcilable. The Jansenists lost, and lost catastrophically. What an interesting lesson here in 'Church', and State.
James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978) observed life accurately. in 1957 he told 'Time' Magazine that "most people get a raw deal from life, and life is what it is". His novels "By Love Possessed" and "Guard of Honor" are among the greatest of 20th Century novels.
"By Love Possessed" was hailed at first as the great novel of its decade. A few months later it was traduced as a symbol of Eisenhower-era 'middle-brow' complacency. The second verdict stuck. The problem was its message: it praised acquiescence rather than transformation. It is indeed a 'novel of resignation'. Is that a good thing?
In this amazing weekend bonus episode, our hero must claw his way through the history of giant-crab movies. Does he survive? You be the judge!
"Man Gave Names to all the Animals" (Bob Dylan), meaning Eric Burdon and The Animals. Thoughts on true greatness, thoughts on Fun.
From a perfect movie comes a Version of the 25th Chorus of "Mexico City Blues": Is my own, is your own, Is not Owned by Self-Owner but found by Self-Loser -- Old Ancient Teaching". This podcast is dedicated to David Browder.
The subject is preaching, the Achilles Heel of American religion. We turn to Jack Kerouac's "List of Essentials" in spontaneous expression for help. Turns out it's the singer not the song.
The title of a song by the Go-Go's sets the stage for this second cast on the preaching art. Once again, it's the singer not the song. Or at least, that's where we start. Welcome to Beatnik Beach!
In which our hero introduces you to his search. "For you the living, this Mash was meant, too."
Our hero, incarnated as an ancient Greek princess, finds Love and Happiness, Thornton-Wilder style.
Our hero, again incarnated as the Queen of Thessaly, heads south, only to still find happiness.