The real ground of one's love for a particular song is
*Where you were when you first heard it.
*
And by that I mean: Where you were emotionally when you first heard it.

The actual song itself -- superb as it may be -- is made a thousand times more powerful by where you were in experience -- and especially in emotional experience -- when you first heard it. The song itself, in other words, is secondary to the placement of your psycho-dynamic soul when it was first playing in the background of your life.

I cannot overstate this truth (of experience): It is not the song itself -- nor, for that matter, the play or the movie or the poem or the painting, even -- which carried "The Weight" (The Band, '68). It was, rather, the contact which the song made with your innermost person, whether you were being loved and accepted at the time, or repulsed and rejected. Therein lies the power of art. (Tell me if this isn't true.)

Amazing response recently to an excerpt I played on the cast of an ELO single. It just seemed to blow up one's audience with empathy and exclamatory rejoicings.

Note, finally, that there is an explicitly Christian anchorage here: The union we wish so much to feel with another person is the embodiment, in felt experience, of the union we need with God -- that belovedness I talk about so much. I can almost say that a memorable rock song is for many persons the bearer of Christ's One Way Love.

Oh, and for the record, the paragraph I read at the conclusion of this episode is from James Hilton's stirring novel from 1934, entitled "Without Armor". LUV U.

Well, first, you need to be an object of love. Not the subject of love -- i.e., the lover. No, we need to be the object of love. Belovedness is the First Law of Physics when it comes to the human heart. All else is resistible exhortation. Being loved engenders love in return. That goes for about 99 % of the human race.

Second, we need to (ultimately) perceive that everything which happens is part of the Plan. I cannot say that to someone who is in the midst of overwhelming pain and loss.
But experience has taught yours truly, at least, that in most cases of personal suffering, there is something beyond the initial facts which is purposive. Please, don't stone me!
It's just that life has turned out that way. And not just for Mary and me, but for almost everyone to whom we have sought to bring empathy in the midst of insuperability.

Third, and finally, it turns out that God often needs us to take the first step. It's often a small step, even a tiny step -- but it is a step nevertheless. Can't quite yet integrate this with my Reformation theology, but it is true empirically. The mountain doesn't seem to move until and unless we have taken a step towards it -- i.e., from out of our inertia. This is just a fact. Maybe you, dear listener, can find a way to say it better.

Oh, and Podcast 409 is dedicated to Brad Knight, a minister to whom I feel warmly close, and closely linked. LUV U.

During the next two weeks I will be showing the two best of them (IMO) -- "The Changing of the Guard" (1962) and "The Messiah of Mott Street" -- on successive Thursday evenings at Cranmer House in Homewood, AL.

In each of these scripts Serling unfolds, out of imminent tragedy, rejection and loss, the possibility of Renewal, Redemption, and Hope. And each time in less than a half hour!

Personally, I believe life is like that. What I mean is, Christians are not nihilists. Nor is life always "complicated". We believe -- from personal experience and not just from "teaching" -- that God answers prayers.

Mary Zahl teaches this. Pastor Paula teaches this. And I have come to believe it.

Watch these Twilight Zone half-hours, and they will build you up (Buttercup).
LUV U. Oh, and this cast is dedicated to the Rev. Aaron Zimmerman.

To respond to the opening fundraising plea, click here.

What do you do? How do you actually help someone you love -- maybe it's you ("Baby It's You" -- The Beatles, '63)?

"Magic cancellation"! That's the thing. It's a phrase used by English novelist James Hilton in his first novel "Ill Wind" ('32). Hilton was describing the power of altruistic love on the part of a Soviet diplomat (of all people) on a French chambermaid (who is actually a Russian aristocrat on the run from people just like him). The diplomat's entirely genuine love for the chambermaid demolishes her "architecture of misery" -- again Hilton's phrase -- which had confined her 100% up to that moment.

"Magic" (i.e., outwardly interventionist, Holy Spirit-inspired) cancellation" is what it takes to "open the door to your heart" (Pete Townshend, '81). That's what it takes: one-way love from outside yourself. (And note, this is not antinomian. It is not rooted in denial. It is rooted in the Graceful determination of the one who loves. And in about four fifths of all cases, such "cancellation" opens the door to ... response, and -- here's the rub -- personal renewal and Hope.

Try it. Maybe it worked on you once.

(In the Fall of '72, all it took, in the case of yours truly, was someone offering a Sunday evening lift from 72 Mt. Auburn Street, Cambridge Mass down to -- hey it wasn't even far (geographically) -- Narragansett Bay. And it worked. I mean, forever.) LUV U.

"Phosphorus" is a word one sometimes uses for this, but listening to an old Beach Boys song from 1973 brought it home so beautifully. You hear a number of "stanzas", and then (at least twice, maybe three times) a keyboard-driven bridge -- a melody that puts you right through the roof emotionally. It summons almost automatically the mood you'd want to have surrounding you when you are dying.

Moreover, the voiced imperative at the end, "Sail on, sail on, sailor", is exactly what I need. I don't need someone to help me find 'new purpose', something to plant me in the now again, when my spirits are low. I need, as Meister Eckhart wrote in 1312, to experience the following: "If you are looking for God, go back to where you lost Him."

To put that in slightly more horizontal terms -- tho' even its horizontal transcription is really Vertical -- "If you are looking for who you are meant to be, go back to where you really were yourself". Incidentally, that was probably not in connection with your career or your cause. It was more likely in connection with a certain someone.

People sometimes think I'm overdoing it when I underline the centrality of romantic connection in life. I don't believe I am. The main reason one underlines that dimension is, well, ... popular music. It's not news to anyone reading this, that 97.5% of all rock songs, from the very beginning (i.e., Elvis and Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and Link Wray and Joe Meek), concern romantic love. Not 65% or even 85%, but 97.5%. Think about that. I mean, really, let that sink in.

Anyway, if you want to find God (i.e., your way forward, as opposed to your way backward -- to inertia, bitterness, and cascading negativity as the years go on), go back to... the song you remember from that time you first came out of yourself. Whether the person you were with when you first heard that song is alive or dead, present or out there (Moody Blues, 1988), that moment is eternal. It is still present. It is still your empirical guide to...
the New You.

Podcast 406 is dedicated to Sam Everette.

I had a kind of visitation late one night this week. It came initially from ... Van Morrison.
His song "Into the Mystic", from 1970, started to play inside my mind. Then a phrase came down: And Yet! I was looking at all the tragedy, regression and loss -- really seeing it and feeling it... And Yet.

Then something else happened:
A 'Republic Picture' from 1949 came across my screen.
It was a Western I had never seen before but it stars Marie Windsor, so it had to be... at least...
watchable. But then something began to come clear: the movie came to me from, well, Heaven Above (Peter Sellers, even). Seriously, the ending of Republic Pictures' Hellfire (1949) was intended to help us. It was made (back then) to help us (now). It embodied And Yet.

The Christian response to darkest tragedy is probably not explanation or interpretation, but rather superimposition. It's impossible to explain away a certain reality, let's say. And yet what happened is not the whole reality. There is another reality. You might almost say, there are two realities. But isn't this true of our life histories, even of our personalities? The Old Creation is alive and potent. The New Creation is eternal and more potent.

See what you think. Hope you'll maybe try it on.

An older Episcopal priest used to come up to me about once a week -- he was assisting in a busy parish where I was rector -- and say, "Hey, Paul, relax. You're working too hard. Please, relax." Every time he did that -- and his "intentions were good" (The Animals, 1965) -- I'd get a-fib! Literally, my heart would jump and I'd get a-fib. What this nice man said was kindly intended, but it always had the opposite effect....: a-fib.

So hey, how can Hewes Hull, my conversation partner this week, and yours truly say what our experience and our faith has taught us -- mostly through impasse and insuperabilities -- in such a way that it can get through to a normal, busy (i.e., stressed) listener? That is the Question.

I think the podcast probably works. And mainly because of a story Hewes tells, from his own life, near the end. Oh, and there's the music, too, and especially the last, eternal track.

So, hey, you out there,... Relax. LUV U, PZ

But at this point it's beginning to look a little bankrupt -- at least the order of valuation. Maybe "superficial" is a better word.

So "What Now, My Love?" (H. Alpert/M. Ryder/Sonny & Cher... ad infinitum). Is the last third of life, i.e., for those of us among the "new demographic", disillusionment and moping; or compulsed repetition; or possibly/impossibly "Behold, I do a New Thing" (Isaiah 43:19)?

Today, and again next week, my friend Hewes Hull and I will be discussing this (to us, core) theme: What Now, My Love? Is it Marcus-Aurelian grinning-and-bearing it? Or maybe assisted suicide, even? Or again, "Something Better Beginning" (The Kinks, 1965)?

Hewes has had a fine career practising law and then in private equity finance. He has an extraordinary wife, Trent, of 31 years. Hewes himself is 57 years of age. (A young man, as I now pronounce him.) His chief hobbies are theology, jujitsu and hunting/fishing.

Hope you'll enjoy our conversation. Oh, and I hope you'll LUV the closing track, by... wait for it... Bobby Sherman!
LUV U.

Personally, I like all of these 'doors' to experiencing God. During Covid I almost switched to Catholicism because only the Catholic parish where we lived at the time kept its doors open. So I could go there every day and pray. Earlier I had sort of already become a pentecostal Christian, partly because of a vision I received during a sermon preached by a pentecostal pastor. And I have always loved -- treasured! -- the Old and New Testaments as the continuing Word of God to one's hungry heart.

Then, too, I have on three occasions seen dead people. Three times I have interacted with people I had known who were now dead. Each time I was being addressed by individuals who were speaking to me from God's Heaven.

So Pixie Dust. Like in the Disney Peter Pan, animated - classic - perfect: Pixie Dust. We need Pixie Dust. As Ringo sang in "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band": 'I Get By with a Little Help from my (Pixie Dust)'.

It's not an optional extra. It's essential. LUV U.

It started with the second-to-last scene in an 'Outer Limits' episode from 1963 entitled "The Human Factor". Brought yours truly straight to tears.

Then we hurtled through time to 1996, to Cliff Robertson's touching redemption at the end of another 'Outer Limits' episode, entitled "Joyride". The combination of these two genius moments equipped PZ to talk about... yes... Anglicanism... and yes... the Episcopal Church... and yes... contemporary parish ministry.

But I couldn't go there until my heart was ready. And that work was achieved by Sally Kellerman and Gary Merrill in 1963.

Incidentally, I recommend you begin your sermon preparation -- maybe any public preparation -- by getting in touch with your heart. (People aren't really that interested in your mind.) Get in touch with your heart and you might actually convince somebody.

Oh, and by the way, I'm an Episcopal minister and still glad to be one. (And we go to a great church.) LUV U.

The cast cites a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, and do note that the interviewer is almost as interesting as the interviewee I also quote John Zahl's distillation sermon from December 29th -- which happened to be Mrs. Zahl's and my 51st Anniversary. The cast finishes with a little James Hilton (i.e., one's current fave) and... a 1978 cover of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs. You'll see.

I want you to think about the origins of your own psychic self. From where does "self-hood" come? Did you create yours? What do you want for yourself more than anything else in the world? What would you do anything to acquire? Oh, and is satisfaction in life about loving or being loved?
When have you been happiest? (When have you been happy at all?)

"All You Need Is (Be-)Love(dness)". Nothing else really matters -- or at least at the start of life (I mean infancy), and also at the end of (mortal) life (I mean death). Oh, and also at every felt point of need you have ever had to face.

At the end of the day, a baby, a "disheartened" person (to quote Jackie Wilson from '68), and a dying person need one thing: Love From Outside. And may that Love ever "STAY" (J. Browne, '78).

Podcast 400 is dedicated to Mary Cappleman Zahl.

A prime example of this is Agnes Sligh Turnbull. Have you ever heard of Agnes Sligh Turnbull? (You probably have.)

She wrote very successful novels in the 1940s and '50s, and later, too. But she was an optimist, she was a Christian, and she believed in redemption. (So she's more or less been "cancelled" by critical opinion, even tho' she sold millions of novels in her day.)

Now you've got to read Agnes Sligh Turnbull's 1947 novel entitled The Bishop's Mantle. It's the inside story of a young Episcopal rector in a northeastern city -- "inside story", in that the author gets inside the heart and mind of a sincere man of God who is still completely human and vulnerable. Almost every page of The Bishop's Mantle has a moment of total insight into what it is like to be parish priest. The man happens also to be in love with a high flying young woman who is reluctant to marry a "parson". That problem needs to be worked out.

Oh, and one more thing: The Bishop's Mantle describes a denomination that was, prior to 1979, about 90% "low church". The church observed by Agnes Sligh Turnbull is just so refreshingly not high church. (I think you'll love that aspect.)

Oh, and it's 'Sligh' not 'Sly' -- tho' we sure loved Sly back in the day.

LUV U.

The sequence is monumental in feeling and memory because it sums up the sequence of romantic loving -- and also the sequence of God's loving of poor us. Because Superman has singled out Lois for his most tender regard, she responds with her entire self. She voices her feelings in this way:

"Here I am like a kid out of school. Holding hands with a god. I'm a fool. Will you look at me? Quivering. Like a little girl shivering. You can see right through me. Can you read my mind? Can you picture the things I'm thinking of? Wondering why you are all the wonderful things you are. You can fly! You belong in the sky. You and I could belong to each other. If you need a friend, I'm the one to fly to. If you need to be loved, here I am. Read my mind."

What this demonstrates is that love does not start with loving someone, but rather with being loved by someone. I need to be the object of someone's love before I can actually love someone myself. Now capitalize the 's' - S - and the analogy to the Christian Gospel becomes palpable. Instantly palpable! All love begins as One-Way Love: not love from me but love to me.

So go now and look up that sequence in Superman from 1978. It's easy to find. And it's the truth of life. And not a truth of life. But the truth of life. LUV U.

Yes, one has a Message -- the One-Way Love of God embodied in the Compassionate Christ. But if it doesn't really connect with the listener -- with the sufferer! -- it is not able to do its job.

J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), who had basically lost whatever faith he had been exposed to as a child, spent a lot of years looking for... something. He would gladly have capitalized "something" (i.e., Something).

In 1960 Priestley wrote specifically about the decline of Christianity in the West. He wrote that the only way the "Church" could 'come back' -- which he would have welcomed given the cultural despair and nihilism he observed everywhere around him -- was to get through to the unconscious. Christianity's original, great and contagious strength had been to reach individuals in their depth/s.

I agree with JBP. For many years Mary and I have listened to sermons that are sincere, sound theologically, and well prepared exegetically. Yet we often leave the service untouched, un-addressed, un-healed. As Herr Kaesemann said once, after listening to a sermon during a conference at Yale Divinity School: "Es gibt keine Anrede!" In other words, the Word has to address me in the deeps. The preacher's "deeps" need to be calling out to mine (Psalm 42:7).

This cast draws on Priestley's "Presence of the Absence"; a John Wyndham paperback from 1953; and -- wait for it -- Spanky & Our Gang. The last track, from 1969, is IMO pure perfection.

Oh, and "Out of the Deeps" is dedicated to Mary Zahl, whose recent talk to the Women of the Advent in Birmingham, entitled "The Things That Remain" (https://talkingbird.fireside.fm/400) is as fine as anything I have ever heard her present. LUV U.

But a combination of J.B. Priestley's "low anthropology", a couple of recent lightning bolts from outside space and (present) time, and a fresh glimpse of the touching statue of "The Compassionate Christ" outside Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham:

Well, they got me thinking of what the Christian Church is centrally and anchoredly about. Add to that the third verse of Lou Christie's number-one song from 1966, "Lightnin' Strikes"; and it's probably all there. One's ecclesiology, I mean.

"Dangerous Corner" by J.B. Priestley, which was first performed in London in 1932, unmasks the human tragedy of self-serving, manipulation, and deception in about as unrelieved a manner as could be imagined. The last scene but one, which leads directly to a character's suicide, surely rips the curtain off our world's endemic conspiratorial malice. It is almost a pure enactment of the "low anthropology" that is endemic to us.

But the playwright offers us no hope. He actually, explicitly dismisses the antidote of faith in God. I so want to enter that scene myself, speaking sincerely and personally, and address the desperate "hero". He's got it mostly right, you see; his diagnosis is accurate. But we believe in God -- and not a "deistic"/hands-off sort of force, but rather: Pure Empathy, Pure Sympathy, Pure Mercy, Pure Grace.

Our ecclesiology, therefore, is the Church, in whatever form, as Embodiment of One-Way Love. That's PZ's ecclesiology. That's Lou Christie's "chapel in the pines" (1966). That's the churches of refuge at the end of War of the Worlds (1953), that's 'Mr. Carpenter' in Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), that's the Isaiah 2, verse 4 climax of The Colossus of New York (1958), that's the hymn chorale at the end of The Space Children (1958), that's the Christ-figure at the conclusion of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). And so it goes.

When the curtain is ripped away on life as it really is and people as they really are, all that's needed is One Helping Hand, One "Next Voice You Hear" (1951), One... Man from Galilee (Ocean, 1971/Elvis, 1972), One Jesus Christ Superstar. LUV U.

But time is on my mind just now. This is for two reasons:

1) Two old friends died under conditions that felt like almost the polar opposite of what we would have expected when we were all very young together. There was so much promise and so much hopefulness and so much enthusiasm and so much pluck.

But then 50+ years later, aloneness and physical distress and self-despair. Terminal, in fact. Who would have thought? Not I.

So I'm seeing each of these old friends as they were when they were 20, then comparing their circumstances at death decades later. Time was not on their side.

2) One of my heroes, J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), wrote plays about this. Especially his 1937 masterpiece Time and the Conways. He tried to understand the meaning, the constituent elements, and the implications of time, and us. I think he came very close. (Time and the Conways, incidentally, was filmed, and very well, in 1985. You can see it right now on YouTube.)

Oh, and just to show everyone that time really doesn't matter, within eternal perspective that is, I've put at the end of the cast the absolute best cover version ever recorded of Irma Thomas' famous song. You'll see. Or rather, you'll hear. LUV U.

For example, that Burton Cummings has just released a new album. Or that one of Joe Dante's favorite movies is a Spanish religious satire released in 1995. Or... that The Fantasticks is really good! Or that the creators of the latter wrote an uncommonly powerful musical about a Christian martyr.

As I say, every day is a rebuke to one's supposed deep bench.

This podcast looks at the abreactive power of music and the aspirations of live theater to get through to our real selves. Like a sermon is meant to do!

The vehicle is the off-Broadway play entitled Philemon, which first opened in 1975 and ultimately ran for about 55 performances. The lyricist was Tom Jones and the composer was Harvey Schmidt. Here, in Philemon, two mainstream Broadway artists tried to encapsulate the story of a radical Christian conversion in Third Century Antioch, and with just seven performers and maybe two+ instrumentalists. Funny thing is, they succeeded!

Sure, it could be cut by 40 minutes (!). Sure, the theology is a little sketchy, tho' entirely well meaning. BUT Philemon manages to capture the abreactive/cathartic form of "instant/automatic psychoanalysis" by which a converted person goes from death to life in concrete terms.

Philemon manages to get under the skin of Herr Moltmann's Tod-Auferstehung (i.e., Death-Resurrection) dynamic -- which IMO is the true dynamic of life. (We are in Frank Lake territory, but it's Greenwich Village and it's 1975.)

Oh, and the concluding track embodies the failure of the Law to create the response it intends -- Motown-fashion! LUV U.

But I never understood it -- really -- until I met Los Straitjackets: their music, I mean.

How did Los Straitjackets "shine a light" (CCR) on Thomas Stearns Eliot?

Well, they did so because it doesn't take many listens to realize that Los Straitjackets are often at their best in the last 40 seconds of each track. At first you hear a fairly predictable riff on a familiar song, but then, in the last verse -- sometimes in the last 28 seconds -- they explode, and the song goes through the roof. Listen to "Christmas Weekend", which begins this cast; or "Linus & Lucy", or "Fury", or "Tempest" (which ends the cast), or "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah", or "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer (!), or... About 70% percent of their songs catch fire at the very end.

Now, if I want to be a T. S. Eliot kind of a man -- and play my life like Los Straitjackets play their songs -- what do I do? What makes this happen in one life, such as yours or mine?

The answer to the question comes in -- are you ready? -- the last third of this podcast.

The images are (1) putting your life on the right foot (i.e., death/resurrection) rather than on the wrong foot (i.e., action/consequence); and (2) assimilating the negativities of your "Voyage of Life" (Thomas Cole, 1842), which can only really happen if you are in the presence of the Compassionate Christ (Bertel Thorwaldsen/Church of the Advent, Birmingham, 1966). Without God's Mercy (as in "The Green Pastures", 1930) it can't happen. Within God's Mercy, it can happen. In the blink of an eye.

I never met T.S. Eliot. Would sure love to have. But I did meet Los Straitjackets! Really did. They all autographed my copy of their single, "The Sox Are Rockin'". One's still speechless. Wouldn't you be?

That's the way love works -- which is to say, "We love" (i.e., embody the fruit of outreach to others) "because He first loved us" (i.e., embodied one-way Love in our direction). Herr Goodall's endorsement instantly and spontaneously birthed the effect of my immediate response.

Today's cast begins as an appreciation of a Joe Meek track from the days (in 1957) when he was not a record producer but just a lowly engineer. Yet even then, Joe was so possessed and inspired by Genius that his hand is all over this track. (You'll hear what I'm talking about. It comes in the last 30 seconds.)

But my Joe Meek appreciation is just a set-up to what I really wish to say, for the cast is really about Prior Love (Stevie Winwood, 1986)! The cast concerns the Center of Christianity, God's one-way love for us confused and seduced racketeers. Oh, and that is not one of three or four key affirmations. No, it is The Center of everything. It stimulates other ideas and other principles and other consanguine affirmations. But it is the Center.

Moreover, it is uniquely presented by -- are you ready? -- by the clumsy character named 'Ginnie Moorehead' in the movie Some Came Running (1958). Shirley MacLaine plays her. And 'Ginnie' oddly but perfectly embodies the sure and true character of One-Way Love. Which is anchored in Christ's Love. It's not a stretch.

Today's podcast is dedicated to David Babikow.

How can you "live with" -- handle -- habitual defeats, whether from outward circumstance or inward personality, without wanting to throw yourself overboard; or, as Herr Moltmann used to say, without wanting to turn in your train ticket and get your money back. Seems there is almost always one thing, one situation, one frailty, which just won't go away.

St. Paul talks about this in Second Corinthians 12 when he invokes his own "thorn in the flesh", which even a three-times repeated prayer for release has failed to take away. Then he hears the Lord say, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness." Paul therefore concludes: "When I am weak, then I am strong."

I believe this. And not because one has come to idealize or enshrine persistent weakness for its own sake. But rather because I have seen God come in, time and time again, when I have given up, or rather, been forced by circumstance to give up.

In this episode I invoke a movie from 1942, entitled The Big Street (starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, and based on a story by Damon Runyan). The Big Street is an almost perfect instantiation of St. Paul. A character goes down to the lowest possible point of weakness and then discovers a kind of triumph (within one-way love) that not only moves the viewer, but elates the viewer. You are literally weeping and exulting at the same time! There's even a secondary character at the end who puts our bi-focal reaction into timeless words. (See The Big Street.)

If "I must decrease", as it says in John 3, Verse 30, then at the exact same time, "He must increase". Personally, that has proved consistently true in my own life. "Let me take you there, 'cause I'm going... to... Strawberry Fields". One now sees the tragic element within one's life ... optimistically.

This cast is dedicated to Brent White, man of God and true original.

My long friendship with the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who died June 3rd at the age of 98, began with a somewhat dramatic "happening" that lines up with JAZ's statement. This new cast describes what happened.

When I went to Tubingen in early 1992 to begin doctoral studies in theology there -- with the warmest sacrificial encouragement of Mary, our three sons being "in tow" -- I got there only to find out that the actual man with whom I had hoped to study was pretty cool about the whole thing. He was perfectly nice, but it turned out his English was not up to his own standard. So he was (moderately) happy to help overseas students who came from other universities but was reluctant to take on a foreign student "full time" on his own ground. He was just cool -- in temperament, I mean. I did not know where I stood.

In any event, Herr Moltmann observed this; and one day, during a kind of barbecue in his garden, when he saw that I was wrung dry from studying Hebrew durch Deutsch and was also receiving little encouragement from the other Great Man, he piped up and said this: "Paul" -- addressing yours truly by his first name was a wonder in itself within that setting at that time --"Paul, I like you. He won't help you. Forget about him. I will take you on, and yes, it will be about Justification!" Herr Moltmann added the last sentence because he knew that I was not "about" his own celebrated specialty, the Theology of Liberation. He knew that I was really not "about" any _of his principal interests. But that didn't seem to matter. Apparently _I mattered.

Jurgen -- as he wanted me to call him forever and ever, amen -- never stopped helping me. And helping Mary, and helping John, and helping David, and helping Simeon. In fact, we made it! Our whole family made it.

Herr Moltmann (Jurgen!) was the subject of Glenda's "Run to Me", and I was the object. One is beyond thankful. Forever.

p.s. You can respond to the fundraising appeal by clicking here.

Let me say how.

Admirers of Joe Meek's amazing productions like to say that he was way ahead of his time in terms of technology and recording innovation BUT that the songs themselves, almost all of them, in their many hundreds, are sentimental, corny and juvenile.

But they're not! They may sound that way, but just listen to the words. They're about "guys and gals", the denizens of Grease and also of To Sir, with Love, and -- wait for it -- everybody. None of Joe's songs -- not a single one, except maybe, at the very end, one, entitled "It's Hard to Believe It" -- are about issues or groups or themes. Every song Joe ever chose to produce is about love: love gone wrong, love gone right, love fulfilled, love disappointed, love obstructed, love enabled. The evidence for this preoccupation is in the lyrics -- and oh, about 99.999 % of them.

The same is true in relation to the New Perspective on Paul. The evidence that that movement is founded on an imposed "story" or paradigm, is overwhelming. That is, if you actually read the Letters of St. Paul. Or the Book of Hebrews, from start to finish. Christ came to give us a New Covenant, not a sort-of "expanded" version of the Old. The Old is passed away, behold the New is come. For years and years, I have tried to say this. (One is instantly accused of "supercessionism" if one says it. And that seems to end the argument. But the accusatory term is arbitrary, linguistic, and freighted.) The evidence of the New Testament is in fact overwhelmingly contrary to the evisceration of Grace that has been dynamized by the New Perspective.

Joe Meek underlines this. His lyrics confirm it. A little "icky" at times they may be, but relationships that strive for mutual love can also be icky. Joe's songs mirror an odd truth: life is about individual men and women who are trying to find... belovedness, and therefore love in return.

Dear New Testament interpreters, read the Letters of St. Paul. Read the Letter to the Hebrews. Read the Gospels -- all of them. And read 'em again in the light of Joe Meek! The subject and meaning is staring you in the face. LUV U.

So now come out a Ton, a TON of new recordings by the Man Who Heard a New World. And almost all of them are fine. Many are actually spectacular. They have been sitting in cases, possibly deteriorating and entirely un-heard, for 57 years.

"Self Portrait", performed by Glenda Collins -- and this cast begins with her solo a cappella rendition of the song -- is beyond profound. It almost says the entire Bare Essentials of what it is to be a human being. I would only root the singer's vision of herself in God. Funny thing is, I think she would have, too. I am certain Joe would have. (He was a believer, and grew up in the Church of England. He is interred at the parish church of his childhood.)

We know very little, and whatever we do know -- really -- comes from outside ourselves. We know one thing, which we rarely know we know: we each need love, individual love for each one of us in our individuality. Everything else is "like the chaff which the wind blows away".

Joe Meek, the Tea Chests, and his lightning-like inspirations -- they are a part of the "staff of life". LUV U.

Did any of us have any idea of how much good material is contained within these acetate tapes that were packed up in the aftermath of Joe's horrible death? Probably not. We either feared that the tapes had deteriorated over many decades of storage OR that the substance of them would disappoint us. Neither fear proved true!

The surprise-factor within almost everything Joe Meek recorded is without equal. Everything -- and I mean, everything -- he touched came off strange, oblique, jaw-dropping, unexpected, contradictory, and memorable. His artistic achievement -- maybe like Mozart's -- reveals ceaseless inspiration from outside himself. His work is Sibylline.

Now that the tea chests are giving us a chance to hear again, to hear anew, Joe's "New World" (1960), the triumph of "our" world, its flesh, and its devil over God's fire and Truth is seen through anew. All the world's "narrative"-making collapses in the light of Joe's uncommon fire. The Bible is confirmed, the New Testament is revealed, the fecklessness and "Wheel in the Sky" despair of everyday human life that is lived on its own terms -- all of that is lit and revealed anew.

And, dear listener, do not forget to listen to the next cast. It is entitled "Self-Portrait". LUV U.

Gosh, I learned something that day.
As in, appearances can deceive.
As in, things are often felt more strongly than a person wants to let on.
As in, "in bref", things inside are considerably more serious -- let's say, wounded -- than you (or anyone else) would ever wish to let on.

This cast describes the human condition as more serious than we sometimes imagine -- maybe than we ever imagine. At least until it happens to us!

ABBA makes a fresh appearance, via the refrain to "S.O.S."; and Rudyard Kipling, too. T. S. Eliot wrote once that some of Kipling's short stories feel divinely inspired. "On the Gate" may be one of them. You decide.

Dear Egg Hurled Against the Kitchen Wall:
I am with you. More importantly, He is with you. He doesn't turn away. (This eggman has experienced that Miracle himself!)
LOL

What the word hides is institutional attrition. It is a way of putting a brave face on empirical defeat. (It's a little like the adjective "nuanced". Watch out.)

I saw so clearly at the recent Mockingbird Conference that the renewal of the Christian Church is not tied to a horizontal strategy or even a quality of enterprise. The renewal of the Church consists in its re-affirmation of the One-Way Love of the Gospel of God. The pain of individual experience is so widespread that all it takes is a word -- a pastoral "position", we might say -- of empathetic attentive love for the person in pain to be helped beyond measure. Because the word of empathy and compassion is the Word of God's Grace.

One saw this in almost innumerable one-to-one conversations at the Mockingbird Conference. (Didn't you?) Personally, I could not feel less "nimble" -- tho' you may remember that I was a total jock in PZ's school days!

The fact is, helping is not about nimble. It's about One-Way Love and the Divine Compassion for sufferers in all shapes and sizes. That's the ticket.

Oh, and even if Noel Coward was a committed agnostic, the scene between disconsolate mother and ghostly son in Scene Two of Coward's play "Post-Mortem" (1930) touches on the Greatest Thing in the World. I don't think he ever wrote a greater paragraph than the speech which the grieving mother makes to her ghostly son.

LUV U. (And it's not "complicated".)

Mary listed three core themes of enduring motherhood/fatherhood that feel utterly right to me. They are (1) complete dependability when your child is little; (2) no control or pressure when your child is growing -- let them or her pursue their own interests; and (3) try to detach from your grown child's life most of the time, tho' not always. Sometimes -- if very occasionally -- you may have to intervene.

I was awed by my wife's reflections, the mother of our three grown sons.

I also couldn't help theologizing a little, for each of her three themes has a direct relation to the Christian Gospel. (1) mirrors the One-Way Love of God's Grace. (2) suggests the continuing solution of Grace to the problem of Law. (3) connects the "Eastern"-sounding insight of non-attachment with the Christian fact of God's Incarnation -- God's personal intervention in this septic world.

This cast is also a sort of pre-op moment for the Mockingbird Conference, which begins this Thursday in Manhattan. Do join us if you can. Mary and I will be there, and hundreds of others, too. I'll speak about parenting, tho' Mary (by my side) is the best authority on that front.

This cast is dedicated to Larry Brudi and Bob Smith, and reverentially, to Dickey Betts.

In an earlier day, it might have been: "Paper or plastic?"; or, even earlier, "VHS or Beta?"

I believe these everyday reflexive questions are an expression of the World, the Flesh and the Devil's active desire to shut down anything that might resemble or enable a real exchange between persons.

In this cast I tell some stories of interchanges at the 'cash point' in which the reflexive words of the cashier suddenly fell apart, and the real person came through. The truth was out!

Now here's an either-or statement: Everybody all the time is sitting on a major inward issue.

I used to think that was an overstatement, and should be diluted to something like: Most people at some point in their lives find themselves sitting on an engrossing inward concern that they are reluctant to share with anyone else. But experience has taught me the further truth:

Everybody all the time is sitting on a major inward issue.

You the Listener will need to decide what you think about that. But one thing I do know and for absolute sure: The answer to life is not bound up with the question of whether I need a receipt.

LUV U!

There is a connection between the mandatory and aggressive atheism of Communism and the definite exile of any trace of openness to extra-terrestrial life. It's just an observable fact.

So while you may enjoy Iron Curtain sci-fi for its pragmatism and occasional heroism, it is also totally un-cool, un-fun and un-hopeful.

Where would you and I be without the possibility of answers that come from outside ourselves?

As I say in the cast, relevant to a recent movie review of an old (but now Blu-Rayed) "film noir", nihilism, whether New or old, is ultimately suicidal. It is also self-sufficient in principle and therefore a crash-landing in real life -- with no survivors, by the way.

So, hey, keep your mind open. Keep your heart open. And moreover, as Holy Week really teaches, God is Good; We Are Not Alone; and everything has a Purpose. LUV U.

Not mentally or intellectually accessible, but feeling-accessible -- heart-accessible -- and therefore actually and experientially accessible!

Karl Barth promulgated what was called a "theology from the top down". He saw himself as opposing theologies "from the bottom up". But it was a false dichotomy. We start from where we are -- and in base-level terms, where our hearts live (and die, sometimes daily); and then we are in a position to listen to Hope that travels from the top down. Theology, in other words, is neither from the top down (solely), i.e., entirely vertical; nor is it from the bottom up (solely), i.e., entirely horizontal. Christian theology is Up the Down Staircase!

Oh, and I hope you like ABBA. "SOS" is one of the great songs of the Glacial Age. Not to mention Ash's track at the end of the cast, which is moving straight from the top end.

Now note its difference with the sentence quoted in part one of this cast by my old episcopal acquaintance in Australia: "Nothing can be loved at speed" (M. Leunig).

But the heart always loves at speed!

Perseverance and steady, thoughtful loving exists, yes, but as a fruit of heart-love: Its fruit -- its consequence -- its effect.

And the heart, I say again, always loves at speed.

You could almost say this is the secret of life. Cranmer certainly said it. You and I know it from experience. Almost all our core decisions were made "at speed". We didn't think them through before making them. Our heart was "caught", and so it went and "So It Goes" (B. Joel, 1990).

When we said 'yes' to God, or when we first said a real prayer, it "Only Took a Minute, Lord'.

We didn't "count the cost". We probably should have, but we didn't in fact. By the Grace of God, our hearts were so "warmed" (John Wesley on May the 24th) that the warm lasted. The warm kept heating us as long as life went on. "Listen to the Warm" (Rod McK., 1967).

So, um, well, OK, I, ... Listen to your Heart. LUV U.

When I heard my old colleague quoting Mike Leunig, a 1975 disco hit by Tavares flashed instantly into my mind: "It Only Takes a Minute, Girl (To Fall in Love)".

What this sudden flash told me was: It's not true -- it is not true that "nothing can be loved at speed". One's heart in fact always loves at speed. Almost every big decision you've ever made was made "at speed"! The heart moves no other way. The heart loves at speed.

Incidentally, people rarely say this, at least where they could be heard. You don't want to be thought to believe that "It Only Takes a Minute, Girl". That sounds un-wise, un-"nuanced" -- the worst possible thing you could ever be regarded as being -- and imprudent. Nevertheless, it is the way life is. When you review your life, how many decisions you made were actually made in a flash, in a lightning-like "AHA" ('Take on Me') moment? Please tell me.

You didn't choose the college you went to based on ... thoughtful ratiocination. You didn't choose the profession you chose based on... weighing all the pros and cons. You didn't marry the gal/guy you married on the basis of... thought. (Did you?)

This cast is about inward (heartfelt) truth vs. outward (rationalizing) truth. When you are dying, I believe you will only know the former. LUV, PZ

You hear a Pretenders single and it calls you instantaneously back to the person you were when you first heard it. "Don't You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds has the power to instantly recreate the mood you were in when you first saw The Breakfast Club in the theater. Or maybe it brings to mind and heart the person you were with when you saw it!

I seriously ask you, Why do you like the music, and especially the rock 'n roll music, that you still like? Why does a particular song have the power to evoke tears -- like in two seconds? Why? Tell me, please -- I'm deeply interested. And why interested? Because I care about you. I care about your heart. I care about the assimilation of both your negativity -- which often has its origin in long ago experience of pain -- and your positivity -- which can boost you up when other things pull you down.

How would you begin this podcast? I mean, with what music would you open it? And conclude it?

Incidentally, the Spirit of God spoke to me during the recording of it. You'll notice a change which takes place near the end. So I left it in -- the unexpected change -- because, well, it witnesses. LUV U!

Rod McKuen (d. 2015) was a magician of the borderland. His songs, performed with that hoarse, breaking voice of his, are almost all addresses to the borderland of human feeling. They are almost all slightly "abnormal", expressing laconic extremes of feeling.

Their "kitsch" -- as they are sometimes pigeonholed -- is only as kitschy as extreme states of feeling are kitschy. We want to jump off a bridge or call up everyone we know to announce our euphoria or whisper our disappointment to the ends of the earth.

Rod McKuen's songs are hymns to the borderland. You could almost say they are a little "off". But who is not a little off? His songs actually carry huge promise.

Note that this cast references a recent sermon from Brad Knight, who spoke from his own borderland to the borderlands inhabited by his hearers. He hit the mark!

Podcast 377 is dedicated to the Very Rev. James G. Munroe.

They light up the sky in the last third -- sometimes even the last fifth -- of their covers and their songs.

Like you and me could do!

And especially if we could take the heartfelt learnings of the last third of our lives and import them retroactively into our lives' stressful, burdened second third. Now that's what PZ is trying to do for you today. "For you the living/This Mash was meant, too".

I am trying to impute what I believe has inspired me in recent times to one's listeners' stressful and demanding adult lives.

I can't tell you, as my now deceased colleague in South Carolina used to tell me almost every time he saw me: "Relax, Paul!" He meant well, yes, but it only made me feel always worse when he said it.

What I want to say is more like this:

"Let me take you there" ('Strawberry Fields', 1967). Let me take you in your now to a place of focus on the Big Things, the Big Heart, the Big Connection/s. I feel sometimes like the character 'Emily' says she feels in the last act of "Our Town". Recently dead, she returns to the scene of her 12th birthday, and longs for her parents and brother -- and herself back then- - to see what's really going on. Not to-ings and fro-ings and "process", but rather real love and real care and real gestures and real connection and real feeling -- real heart!

Will you let me be to you today, dear Listener, a surrogate for Emily?

"Let me take you there" -- to a life not of obvious burden and exhaustion, but a life of optimism and promise and satisfaction and joy. That's what PZ's Podcast is all about. LUV U.

And then I thought of Jack Kerouac -- right in the middle of her sermon. I thought of his amazing book, on practical Buddhism no less, entitled Some of the Dharma. Kerouac and the preacher were on the same line.

Then something else came to mind: the jaw-dropping last act of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town".

Each of these three 'productions', i.e., Paula White's sermon, Jack Kerouac's spiritual diary, and TNW's seminal play: they were all saying the same thing.

To wit, the Truth of life lies in every case under the surface of the world. What you see, and even what you think you want to see, is not the Lasting Thing. God's work is infinitely higher than our desires and our ratiocination, tho' at times linked with those things.

Ultimately, what God is doing is different from what we think is going on.

What a relief! What a redemption (of our pasts)! What a Promise of real action!

So I'm hopeful for 2024. Hope you can be, too. LUV U.

PZ

What a marker for us! (I truly feel it and celebrate it.)

This marker-episode concerns the primacy of individual belovedness over any and everything else, including career and professional achievement. This primacy becomes instantly apparent whenever you get sick, or find yourself in the neighborhood of death, or experience a catastrophic fall from perceived security.

The cast goes on to echo Meister Eckhart's enduring maxim, that "If you cannot find God, go back to where you lost Him." Or, in everyday experience, If you cannot find belovedness in the marriage you have, go back to the point in time when you did have it, when you did feel it. That works in life-long marriage, and every time!

Finally I give a brief synopsis of Mary's and my own marriage, of 50 years, from its "Peter Pan's Ride" beginning, to the "Pallisers Theme" return-to-basics. I sure hope you like this.

Podcast 374 is dedicated to Mary Cappleman Zahl, the Girl I Married.

Colin was one of the most influential ministers and scholars in the Church of England during the 20th Century. Yet it seems today as if he almost never existed.

This podcast is a reflection on the anonymity of death.

It also references Robert Blair’s superb poem from 1743 entitled “The Grave”, together with the sublime illustrative plates that William Blake created to accompany the poem.

And, believe it or not, this is a Christmas podcast!

The cast is dedicated to the Very Rev. Laurie Thompson.

The cast sets out two requirements, or better, signs, as I see it, for an enduring marriage. The first is the romantic connection. Our marriage began with that in first place. There simply has to be a romantic (i.e., male-female) connection for the relationship to start -- or, perhaps better, for a relationship to be able to turn towards marriage. And then, once married, you find yourself needing at almost regular intervals to return to that initial romantic foundation. It is not enough for him or her to be my "best friend". That is certainly true -- Mary is my best friend! -- but the romantic element is prior. Friendship is not marriage. (This is why, incidentally, boys and men wince to the core when a girl or woman tells them they want to be just friends. And believe me, even when your husband hears you saying that he's your best friend, he seizes up inside. He won't tell you that, but his heart is stopping the minute you say it. Even tho', as I report, he is in fact your best friend.)

So point one of ""We've Only Just Begun" (1973) is to underline the priority of the romantic connection over all else. (This is true, believe it or not, even when you're 75.)

The second foundation stone of an enduring marriage is faith in God. Natch', you may see the specifics of that in different terms from those of your wife or husband. He may be reacting against Five Point Calvinism and you may be reacting against Baptist rules concerning conduct. But a shared root-implanted faith in God who is "Higher Than I" is indispensable for the navigation of problems. For the record, Mary and I have read the Bible and prayed together every morning early for almost all the years of our marriage. It's not a law, and it's not even a recommendation. But it's an observation. I don't know where we would be -- especially in the stressful times -- if we hadn't had a shared faith in a personal God.

Like Mary's totally enchanting smile (and the response it created in me -- in the Fall of l969, in fact), Mary's openness to God was core for me. It is still core for me.

Oh, and listen to the closing track, a Christmas track of the highest magnitude. Do give it time until... that last third (per usual) with these artists.

Merry Christmas to us all, and Happy Anniversary to my wife of 50 years, Mary Cappleman Zahl.

This cast is dedicated to our three sons: John A. Zahl, David W.F. Zahl, and Simeon McLean Zahl.

But the title and the premise are good: There's newness to be found at the center of the earth -- our earth, our core.

This is the heart of the Christian Faith. God will always speak to beleaguered humans, but rarely until we get to the earth's core. The core is where we live; the core is where our "Heart and Soul" (Cleftones, 1961) feel (as one); the core is where our pain comes undisguised, unmasked. There, in the core, is where we meet God; or better, where the Saving God meets us.

The cast circles over 'Theron Ware', 'Babette', Lloyd Bridges as 'The Loner', right over to Rod Serling's superb "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar". But we are "Circl(ing) for a Landing" (Three Dog Night, 1968). I can never rest until we land -- land at the Earth's Core.

Merry Christmas to you all, and God Bless Us Every One.

Podcast 371 is dedicated to a true fellow traveler, Tom Agricola.

Providentially (as I see it), I've been directed back to Rod Serling. He was so focussed on justice, and especially social justice; and also on fate and impassable destiny. But he also believed in One Big Miracle. Rod Serling believed in the Miracle of Christmas!

This comes out in teleplay after teleplay, from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Serling honestly believed that One Miracle could change the fallen world.

Go back and watch the 1971 'Night Gallery' episode entitled "The Messiah on Mott Street". It's easy to find online, and is also free of charge. The episode not only enacts a first-class human miracle, but it is also a high point of Jewish-Christian reconciliation in a network TV show. In short, "The Messiah on Mott Street" is a wonder. It will give you fresh hope.

And not just hope in 'meta'-terms. But hope for that particular personal insolubility with which you are currently dealing. Oddly, Rod Serling has given me new hope today as I look out on the world.

Oh, and read Ross Douthat's terrific recent column in the New York Times entitled, "Where Does Religion Come From?". It has a Rod Serling quality to it. And a Simeon Zahl quality, too!

LUV U.

Not through a mediated form -- albeit it was through another human being. Not through concept nor reading nor paradox nor metaphor nor memory. But right Here and Now!

I was truly blown away. It was neither expected (at all) nor on a subject about which I'd been thinking.

This podcast gives the outline of what happened. There were even witnesses.

In the midst of an otherwise delightful walk down memory lane with companions whom I cherish, one of these companions suddenly uttered some truths so powerful and demanding of attention that we were all suddenly stopped in our tracks. Stopped in our tracks.

I still can't believe it happened. Mary's comment, when I told her the story, was simply: "You were sure plunged into very deep waters there."

Now they were Good Waters, True Waters, Healing Waters.

Moreover, they weren't "nuanced" or "complicated". It wasn't a case of "Both/And". It was a case of straight-up Either/Or.

I was suddenly, indubitably JUSTIFIED.

Listen to this cast and ask yourself if it's happened to you. Do you want it to happen to you? Do you care? Do you want me to tell you more? (I'll be glad to, and probably in another cast.)

Oh, and the closing music is an excerpt from "Jesus Says", by our favorite Northern Irish Protestant rock band, 'Ash'. I just like the riff. And the title. LUV U.

So Christ's words in St. Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 23, verse 24 came to mind: "You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel." So much time and mental energy goes into straining out "a gnat" when there's a "camel" (for example the loss of a child) that's the real issue. The more contemporary phrase for this is "elephant in the room".

I thought about the way I seize on making the bed every morning. One's ridiculous mental focus on that "gnat" of a task has become habitual. It is almost as if, if the bombs were falling and Mary and I had to get out of the building, I would feel I had to stop and make the bed first. (Are you kidding me?)

So the point of this cast is to look at the "camel" that you're really needing and trying -- unsuccessfully, for sure -- to swallow (i.e., digest/assimilate) in relation to the ten thousand gnats that you actually spend your time ... processing.

Down with "process" and Up with proportional focus!

(Oh, and see that window in Cadeleigh Parish Church.)

Similarly, ask them (i.e., yourself) about an experience of personal rejection, either as a child or an adolescent, that forever troubled the waters of their life's course. Someone rejected them -- personally, I mean, and not because of an "identity" or ideology, but for yourself personally -- and this has haunted them, like Poe's 'Lost Lenore', forever.

This podcast observes the power of personal rejection but, more importantly, the power of personal acceptance. Consider the relationship of 'Magwitch' to 'Pip' in "Great Expectations". (See the 1946 masterpiece movie of it!). Or consider the story I tell at the conclusion of the cast, of a two-hour ride being offered to yours truly by someone way back in 1972. And that, to quote Robert Frost, "made all the difference".

These are anchor instantiations of God's Grace in your life. They verify what St. Paul describes in Romans 7, and what Christ spent His life, and death, doing.

And then there's Michel Legrand... LUV U!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When we put horizontality before verticality, we run out of gas. Always.

People cannot "keep up" horizontal good works and outreach if they are not being, as the English say, resourced.

I saw this vividly last week. A men's prayer breakfast and Bible study was powerfully taught by a local pastor. He talked directly and winsomely about various problems with which the men present are dealing, in one form or another. I suddenly found myself taking notes. Hadn't intended to take notes, and even the notes themselves were not directly related to the actual content of his message.

But I was being exposed. I was a being who found himself in the direct presence of God.

When horizontality and even excellent words like "community" and "outreach" become privileged in the church, then the cart can easily overtake the horse.

One saw this years ago in Westchester County. A woman from down the Hudson started to attend our parish in Scarborough. I asked her why she was willing to make the long trip from her house on Sunday mornings. She said that her Presbyterian home church had completely exhausted her with its endless calls for volunteers in the community. Then something really happened: her commuting husband threw himself in front of a train one day, and she was instantly widowed.

In that moment, and in its aftermath, all the horizontality in the world didn't speak. She needed God.

Today's cast ends with one of the great classics of exterior help in the face of interior need. It is probably enough in itself to make you fall down on your knees. LUV U.

'Gears' are the attitudes, narratives, and exterior values that shape and define most of what we spend our time doing. We are trying to be successful, trying to win love, trying to be some image of ourselves that someone else has made us covet, trying, basically, to get nowhere fast!

When you get sick -- which we all do at some point -- the gears fall off. When somebody breaks up with you -- which happens to almost everyone at some point -- the gears fall off. When you get fired unexpectedly -- which happens, again, to almost everyone at some point -- the gears fall off. Rejection of almost any kind pries off the gears of your life, and they fall off.

For me, getting older has tended to feel like I'm getting "outta gear".

Moreover, Los Straitjackets are outta gear in over half their covers. The wheels come off at the end of each song -- tho' that turns out to be great. Sparks fly and the music ascends. Like the big black cadillac driven by John Travolta at the end of Grease (1978). There's fireworks followed by Ascension.

That's what I am talking about: the inspiration that comes when you get... outta gear.

This episode marks a 360 degree history of PZ's Podcast. We're not done yet, but I'd like to give thanks for it anyway. And here's a shout-out, on Mother's Day 2023, to my Bride of almost 50 years, Mary Cappleman Zahl. The cast is dedicated to Mary.

Our friend Susannah Leighton helped me a few years ago when she opined, quite spontaneously, during an after-church youth-group meeting: "God never seems to come early". I drunk that in! What an insight.

More recently, Mary and I were reading Psalm 103 when we came to verses eight and nine: "The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide: neither will he keep His anger for ever."

What I heard from that is that while God's Grace is his predominant characteristic, His righteous indignation -- His Justice -- will also express itself at some point. Even God, in other words, has His limits.

That feels encouraging. So when I ask, 'How long, O Lord?', the answer is, 'At some point'. Not today (apparently), but possibly tomorrow. And certainly at some point.

Remember 2001 A Space Odyssey? Last weekend I made a pilgrimage to the theater in Washington D.C. where it had its world-premiere on April 3rd 1968 -- which is where and when I saw it. (The theater is closed now but the facade is preserved.) Well, there's that moment towards the middle of the movie when scientists on the Moon discover that the 'Monolith', the incarnation of Alien intelligence and control, has been sitting there, in the Crater Clavius, for four million years.

The Aliens apparently take a long view.

So yes, pray with me for some relief, for Heav'n's sake. But human humility requires us to give the timing to God. This podcast is dedicated to Susannah Leighton.

P.S. To respond to the appeal for financial support, please click here.

I realized that the rockabilly-surfing band Los Straitjackets had something to teach me that had been camouflaged for years. FYI Los Straitjackets are a Nashville-based instrumental rock band that specialize in somewhat weird yet most accomplished covers of mostly ancient rock 'n roll hits from the USA and Mexico. Songs like "Itsy Bitsy Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", "Telstar", "Perfidia" and basically anything by Duane Eddy. The band has changed personnel some over the years, but not too much. Dave Zahl and I got to see them live in 2015.

But quite seriously, Los Straitjackets specialize in a structure or form of most of their songs that majors on the last third of what they play. It's odd. They play two verses of a somewhat conventional sounding dinosaur hit from the surfing/sci fi/rockabilly past; but then, in the third verse, the band goes crazy. Another way of saying it might be this: the band ascends near the end to St. Paul's seventh heaven -- or at least something like that. You'll hear it. Always wait for the third verse. It's never ever over 'til it's over.

This cast is heavy on the music. To me their sound is in a class by itself. To me it gives hope for... the last third of life. To me it's an actual musical exposition of my Handbook for Boomers (Mockingbird 2020). "Go now, therefore, and make all men... disciples of Los ..."

LUV U.

Thanks to my college friend, Steven Berzin, I've gotten hooked on a French mystery program -- in episodes of an hour and a half -- entitled "Murder in...". The producers fill in the blank with a stunning regional locale each week -- Albi, Carcassonne, Blois, Colmar, you name it.

What's hooked both Mary and me is the way the mystery plot uncovers the personal pain and inward conflicts of the police investigators. There's the rub! Each episode uses the "low anthropology" of the crime being investigated to unearth issues and hurts within the investigators themselves. And yet -- and yet -- these conflicts, brought into the light, almost always presage healing and hope, newness and restitution.

What I love about "Murder in..." is its ideal equilibrium of realistic diagnosis with hope of new life. You see this in almost every episode.

Moreover, the natural beauty of the locales is intoxicatingly captured by the rich photography.

It's "Mockingbird" en France!

P.S. The Mockingbird Conference is at the end of next week in NYC. Mary and I would luv to greet you there. (Walk-ins are welcome!)

It's like when the frog, having been kissed by the beautiful princess, becomes, in the twinkling of an eye, a prince. Or when the Beast, having been embraced by Beauty, turns into a shining knight.

Or it's like when you, at a low directionless point in your love, met a girl who loved you as if you were fine, self-confident and purposeful. And what happened then? To your own surprise, let alone that of everyone else, you became... fine, self-confident and purposeful. It's like Magic. It is Magic, God's magic.

This cast reflects on "The Power of Love" (Huey Lewis & the News, 1985), and specifically the mind-blowing power of imputing love to create (unlooked-for) change. It's been done to me, and I'll bet it's been done to you. LUV U.

This cast is a hymn to life-long marriage. (That's just what it is.) It is also my attempt to say better what I almost always tried to convey to engaged couples in pre-marital counselling, especially at the start of the second session of the three we would have. I would highlight the importance of a shared spiritual life.

I realize that could sound a little preachy, and one tended to soften it some over the years, especially when the couples who would come were less "churched" and more secular in experience. But that doesn't mean I stopped believing it. ("Don't Stop Believin' -- but hey!...)

What you observe empirically, both in others and typically in yourselves, is that the closer you feel to God, as a married couple, the closer you feel to each other. Moreover, a shared vertical commitment offers decisive help to your relationship when the storms start coming and the losses begin to add up.

Bottom Line: Praise the One who brought you together in the first place, and please don't lose touch with him. (If you do, go to a conference at Tullian's church in Jupiter -- he's got the Answer to lostness.) Read the Bible together, and, well, you'll be looking in the same direction. LUV U (both).

The music, such as "Beep Alonia" from 1964, touches a soft or sensitive spot in my heart -- and also one's brain, maybe -- and suddenly "the waters flow".

Here I am thinking about contact with the supernatural, with God, really: the curtain coming down between "God and man" ('Modern Love', David Bowie 1983). Are you, dear listener, actually open to divine encounter? Or do you simply dismiss such a possibility, at least in practice? (I believe you probably don't.)

Booth Tarkington's explicit regard for Charles Fort and Fort's writings is an almost unique instance of a mainstream writer's being open to the Beyond. And Tarkington was!

The ending to his novel The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) is beyond unusual. It shatters almost every preconception you have ever had instilled in you -- about life, let alone death.

Moreover, that ending is universally unread by the critics, and especially by the thousands of persons interested in Orson Welles' movie version. Why is this?

Why the complete and IMO willful neglect of the entire "twist"-event that enables the resolution and ending of a great work of art? (I think it has something to do with "the world, the flesh, and the devil"...)

Well, read the ending of The Magnificent Ambersons. It's just nine pages, and doesn't really need an intro.

And then... then... consider a trip to Beep Alonia!

Like "The Monster Swim"! That major contribution was the follow-up, by the same artist/s, to "The Monster Mash". We all know about the latter. It was the Best Song of 1964, hands down.

Recently, an appearance to me several years ago of the soul of my oldest friend, who had died, had a sequel. The soul of another, more recently departed friend appeared to me the night he died, far away and alone. I didn't even know he was dead. Only three days later did I get the news. But he actually came to me the night he died. I write in earnest.

The supernatural is real. It is not the only means of navigating our lost and fallen world. But it is true nevertheless, at least in my opinion. When we die, our souls go somewhere. Loose ends need to be tied up; explanations, offered; assurances, given. I know this for sure now.

It's also made me go back to Booth Tarkington. Anyone remember an essay in Mockingbird at the Movies (2015) concerning "The Magnificent Ambersons". That celebrated Orson Welles follow-up film to "Citizen Kane" is marked by an ending that omits entirely the most important thing about the novel. In the novel -- not the movie -- the main character is directly confronted by the soul of a woman who has died. That really happens. Tarkington describes it as empirical fact, not psychological fantasy. And all the good of his novel's beautiful resolution hinges on this "para-normal" encounter.

I believe in such encounters, tho' only because they have happened to me. Not every day. But twice. And that's enough. LUV U.

But I had confused it with Message from Space, also Japanese but from 1978, which is in fact not as good. (What is he talking about?!)

I had wanted to entitle this cast "Message from Space".

That is because the messages we need so urgently to receive from Space, i.e., from God, come in often ridiculous, and certainly unexpected forms. ("O Little Town of Bethlehem")

One is constantly trying to shoehorn reality into a preconception. So I want to believe a particular person is_ this_ way, i.e., my way; but he or she is not. They are their way. I'm desperate for someone to approve of me who doesn't, while all the time not seeing the person who does approve of me and who is actually right there in front of me.

This is why I love Ritchie Blackmore -- or the Ritchie Blackmore whom Joe Meek kept calling on in the early 1960s to insert flashy guitar solos into otherwise lame material. It happens again and again! 'God' -- in this case equivalent to Ritchie -- shows up and blows away the "reality" of the dumb song and makes it into something... well, transcendent.

I invite you to listen to the Ritchie Blackmore oddnesses in your own personal history -- and even now. "That's what the Good Book says": Remember.

Yes, there is his 'classic' Poil de Carotte, and Criterion put out Pepe le Moko a while back. And they are both outstanding.

But it took an almost accidental viewing recently of Duvivier's Flesh and Fantasy -- for he had a Hollywood phase -- followed by his all-star (sort of) epic Tales of Manhattan, to put it through my head that his was a distinctly Christian view of reality.

Then Lo and Behold! Turns out all of Duvivier's films from the 1920s have just been packaged to BluRay. So Mary and I sit down to watch them -- and, well, the tears roll, because three of them are Christ-centered epics of the highest quality, visually, theatrically, and emotionally.

Where have I been all these years? The answer is: nowhere near as close to full truth as you thought. How did these remarkable Gospel movies escape you, Paul? You know so much less than you thought you did.

Part of it is the critics. The critics one grew up with -- from the New Yorker to the Village Voice to the NY Times: well, they were almost all secular. Or, if they had Christian belief, they tried to hide it. Maybe they would tout a movie for being "humanist" -- which for JAZ and me is shorthand for "probably Christian" but SHHHH. The specifically Christian content needs to be hushed up, or just ignored. That is true again and again in the history of movie criticism.

Anyway, Duvivier shatters the narrative. And not just in the '20s, but in the '30s -- when he produced and directed Golgotha -- and the '40s -- when he made Tales of Manhattan -- and then again in the '50s, when he directed the 'Don Camillo' movies, which are milestones of Christian encomium, albeit painted with humor.

Now seriously, "Can't You Hear the Beating of my Heart?" LUV U.

Luther taught something different. (As did St. Paul.) They both taught that one's response to the Gospel is automatic. When you are "One-Way-LUV'd", you automatically wish to respond -- with love! Belovedness engenders loving back.

I mean, look: it's true in Romantic Love. When you are sincerely loved by another person, no one needs to tell you how to respond. You always, or almost always, respond by desiring to love the other altruistically -- selflessly -- empathetically. That just happens. You don't need imperatives, even subtle ones; nor instructions.

That's the point of this 350th Episode of PZ's Podcast. I am particularly proud of it.

It is dedicated to Tullian Tchividjian and his remarkable ministry of One-Way Love. "Bleib bei Mir fuer alle Zeiten."

I believe they are Providential, those decisive non sequiturs; and are best observed in the absence of a "narrative" or personal story-line.

What has happened in your life has happened. The turning points, the "pivots", both for 'good' and for 'ill', were not rationally conceived -- or at least few of them were. They came upon you. Just look! Be a scientist for a minute. Study the data of your actual experience. It's all a bit of a mystery in terms of the whys and the wherefores.

Yet over time a kind of odd observed plan -- not your plan, but God's Plan -- becomes apparent.

As Dr. Tom Calhoun says with Doric profundity: "It had to be that way". My call on the listener to this cast is this: Study the way your life's actually been. You'll very possibly see a larger Purpose, albeit caused by non sequiturs. Your entire life, within stops and starts, under extrusions and intrusions, had an individual direction that added up to a supernatural Non Sequitur Who is God.

I hope you like the concluding track, too. It is entitled "Tom Tom Cat" as performed by The Tom Cats, i.e., one of Joe Meek's "bands" in 1961. "Tom Tom Cat" out-Los Straitjackets Los Straitjackets -- which is Saying Something. "Tom Tom Cat" is an inspired non sequitur. Like you and me. LUV U.

This cast is dedicated to Ryan Alvey.

The wisdom of Joe Meek, which is a prolific and dramatic instance of the wisdom of the Biblical God, consists in the power of non sequiturs. Meek's almost innumerable pop-music productions are almost all examples of the non sequitur. To wit, he generally takes a lame lyric (and a lame artist or group of artists) and inserts inconsistent instrumentals or sound-elements that completely transform the original raw material. (In this cast, I have given four (4) excerpts of this "technique" -- tho' it was not really a technique for it came from Meek's all-over-the-place personality rather than from a conscious artistic strategy.) Joe's jaw-dropping interruptions/interpolations are an instance of what we used to call, at least in the 1970s, "the God of Surprises".

Just look at oneself: the breakthroughs and providential turns in our lives are almost always caused by something that came out of nowhere. There was the unexpected phone call, the off-sides note or e-mail, the chance bumping-in to someone, the car accident or illness that put everything in a new perspective, the loss which turned into a gain (!). You name it. Fill in the blank. My own life, let alone my ministry, has been like a Joe Meek single: the best part/s are the odd guitar bridge or the "reverb". Isn't this true of your life?

So the point is, if you want to understand the nature of life as it is actually lived, listen to the odd productions of Robert George Meek. He probably didn't know it, but his fingers in the control room were just like the Fingers of God.

This cast is dedicated to Mary C. Zahl, with whom I have walked, for coming on 50 years, in Paradise Garden.

That is the question of this cast: What might need to happen in order for the unique vision of New Testament faith and hope to "re-enchant" the world?

One's attention was drawn recently to the martyrdom at Carthage, in 203 A.D., of St. Perpetua.

Her journal, the personal account of her trial for the capital crime of being a Christian in that place and time, is the only document of its kind preserved from Classical (i.e., Greco-Roman) culture that was written by a woman. It is entirely genuine and also entirely unique. Plus, the final chapter, which was written by an observer of Perpetua's death in the arena, is as shocking, in my opinion, as almost anything you will ever read concerning the physicality of martyrdom. What happened to Perpetua is a certain confirmation of "Low Anthropology".

Perpetua's death -- she was a single mother, aged 22 -- made a huge difference in the perception of Christianity by the people of North Africa. In fact, the difference it made was decisive. Thousands of everyday people were shaken by her courage and her explicit faithfulness.

I believe the fortunes of the Church would change overnight if someone were willing to die for their faith, were willing to give up even their physical life for it. This doesn't seem to be happening in the West. I hope it will -- tho' I recognize that's easy to say. (What if the lot should fall on Mary's and my door? "Fuh-get about it!"?)

Listen to Billy Preston now, from 1971. "(God) promised to exalt us/But low is the way."

Podcast 347 is dedicated to my friend Steven Berzin.

(For years one has tuned out all sorts of devotional books that major on death and dying. Especially R.C. ones, which felt morbid. They seemed both remote from one's actual life and almost intentionally depressing.)

What I am talking about now, though, is the question of where one goes immediately after death.

Not Too Long Ago (Nick Lowe/Los Straitjackets, 2015) I was preaching at a funeral and ended the sermon by asking the question: Now where is our friend? Where is he right now?

People almost jumped out of their pews. But not in a bad way. It proved an arresting question. "Everybody's Talkin'" (Nilsson, 1970).

That is the purpose of this cast. Who wants to be a Dumb Head at the end of your life?

Believe me, at that moment, all your attention will be on the question, Where am I going? "To San Francisco, with a Flower in your Hair" (Scott McKenzie, 1967)? Maybe something like that.

One is required to deal with this. You become less interested in the vagaries of the "dying process", terrible as they are, than in the question of Final Destination. Into the arms of Whom or What am I falling when I am pushed off the cliff of physical life? Nothing else matters. At least in my opinion.

We conclude with a swift journey into the Unknown, Joe Meek's production of "Message from Venus" by The Tornados. It's German-language, tho' produced in a third-floor flat in North Islington, London; and has to be... from God. Right? LUV, PZ

In 1956 he published a novel about the immediate aftermath of one's bodily death. It is called The KA of Gifford Hillary and I can't recommend it highly enough. In it, the narrator is murdered, and his 'KA', or immediate soul -- not exactly his Soul in the Christian sense, but the sum of accretions and experiences had by his human ego -- is suspended, as it were, before he can proceed towards Ultimate Destiny. Gifford Hillary's KA is put on hold, you might say, because there is a crime, a heinous crime, of which he was the victim; and the unresolved nature of the crime has to be resolved before he can move ahead.

Whether this makes any sense to you or not, I think there is something to it.

Why? Well, because three times in my life I have seen, or sensed directly, the KA of persons I loved. First was a college roommate who drowned in our sophomore year but appeared to me four months later on an escalator in Grand Central Station. Second was my best friend, who after his sudden and all-alone death appeared to me during Centering Prayer in All Saints Episcopal Church, Winter Park. And third was a close college friend who caused me recently, one day after her sudden, unexpected death, to find a letter she had written exactly 50 years that was the pure essence of sincere upbuilding.

So three times I have met a KA. And three times an unresolved death was, at least for me, given "peace at the last" (BCP). Oh, and I'd rather encounter a KA than become one at the point of death. Look to yourself now!

I saw this clearly when my mind, upon hearing the news of their death, turned almost instantly to the music I was listening to when I first knew the person. It was the album "Who's Next" by The Who, which had just come out and featured "Baba O'Riley" and "Behind Blue Eyes", to name just a few. Whenever I think of my now deceased friend, my mind first fixes on "Who's Next".

But if you had asked the person, they would have said, "Oh no, I wasn't listening to The Who back then. I was listening to "Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding, not to mention "Ram" by Paul and Linda McCartney."

The point is, "Who's Next" was my interpretation, albeit contemporary with the events. "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" was the music to which my friend was listening. So if I want to understand them, I need to "Stick with the facts, Ma'am".

This principle, of distinguishing, especially in personal recollection, between what actually happened and one's interpretation of what happened is crucial. It is crucial to understanding the true facts of one's life, let alone that of another. I see this quite clearly in trying to recollect -- let alone evaluate -- the old friend who has died.

This cast proceeds to unlock the so-called "Synoptic Problem", let alone the historicity of ... the Israelites in the Old Testament, from Dan to Beersheba. [Whuh?]

I hope your own gaze personally will sharpen as a result of listening to this podcast. And I hope that my assessment of an unexpectedly deceased old friend will grow not only more accurate, but richer, kinder, more hopeful, and more faithful.

Listening to the Michel-Legrand-like title theme for the 1967 spy thriller _Billion Dollar Brain _put me in mind of so much. Its urgent, lyrical theme made me want to talk somehow. I don't know what sort of music does that for you, but I'll bet you there's something that does. 

From this stirring "signature" piece at the start of the cast, I talk about four different kinds of conversations that go on in people as we go about our day -- from the weather or the traffic, to concrete circumstances and concerns, to internal emotional stresses and anxieties that govern those concerns, to the innermost drives of being and surviving as a human being. Which leads me to Carl Jung and his enduring if humbling insights concerning why men and women "do the things they/we do" (Temptations, 1964). I hope you will identify, at least a little.

The episode closes with another "signature" piece: Los Straitjackets' rendition of the 'Linus and Lucy' theme from Vince Guaraldi's "Peanuts" soundtrack. (With Los Straitjackets, always wait until the last third of the track. That's when it goes through the roof.)

LUV U, and Merry Christmas 2022.  

One was struck recently when someone announced, "Your problem's been solved". "Come again?", I said. He added, "Your problem's been solved on the astral plane."

Well, normally, that would not have computed. Or at least one's jaw would have dropped. But I did remember Strange Conflict, and the effect that novel had had on me just a few years ago. You remember Strange Conflict. Dennis Wheatley wrote it during the Blitz and published it at the height of WWII. It concerns a French mystic who confounds the Nazis by ascending, during his sleep, to "the astral plane" of consciousness, where he is able to observe and investigate the 'soul'-lives of the people around him. 'Le Duc de Richleau' is able, on the astral plane, to discover the source of the espionage by which English shipping lanes are being betrayed to Nazi submarines. It is a terrific book.

I hadn't realized, though, that I'd sort of become a character in it.

When my mystical friend informed me that my problem had been solved on the astral plane, I was both surprised, encouraged, and mystified. It turned out to be true! I found this out in my dreams subsequent to his announcement. You'll see. Listen to the cast and you'll see.

I told you I would push the envelope. "No Regrets" (Edith Piaf).

Episode 242 of PZ's podcast is dedicated to Paul Walker, who is in the top 5 Episcopal clergy of the 21st Century.

In two of the cases, the family, let alone the deceased, have been completely unprepared. I mean, completely. No service, no faith, no comfort, no hope. Only shock and abandonment, unsuppressed bewilderment and surprise.  

So I decided to describe two ladies I know, both characters in Enid Bagnold's late plays "The Chinese Prime Minister" and "A Matter of Gravity". Enid Bagnold was an English playwright who once had a string of stage and movie successes. Near the end of her life, she decided to look backward and forward at the content of her life. She portrayed -- these characters were acted by Margaret Leighton and Katherine Hepburn -- two women in their 70s who are given to resolve their lives through visits from their adult children and one estranged husband; and who do! Not only that, but the supernatural suddenly comes into it. The heroine of "The Chinese Prime Minister" is confronted by her butler's literal resurrection from the dead; and the heroine of "A Matter of Gravity", by her cook's repeated levitations to the ceiling of her house. Each of these women comes to terms with their physical lives, and each of them is thus enabled to move forward towards a new beginning. These are astonishing, surprising plays.

I end with a Dedication to Brent White. Brent is a Mockingbirder who serves a parish in Toccoa, Georgia, and who has a wide-ranging pop sensibility that is a total treat. Recently he has helped me re-discover Los Straitjackets' Christmas tracks. With one of these, "Christmas Weekend", I close this cast. I have often toyed with the idea of having "Christmas Weekend" played as the postlude at one's funeral. It is just so 'up up and away' in feel. I want you to soar after you abreact.  

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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."

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.)

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.

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.

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.

**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.

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.

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 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.

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 !

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.).

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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". 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.

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!

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

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

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!

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.

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."

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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".) 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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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).

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

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!.

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.

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

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!

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

"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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

"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 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

damage created by 'No', especially in romance.

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.

Here is my homage to Jimmy Sangster movies. In particular, behold Hysteria, a masterpiece of intrigue from 1965. Watch out! And take comfort, too

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Labor Day Coda.
General Johnson Coda.
Mergers Not Acquisitions Coda.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eric Clapton starts us out. The House Band brings it on home.

some Summer reading, a Concluding Un-Scientific Postscript,
and the best track ever recorded by a certain Wonder.
Hope you like it!

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!