PZ's Podcast
Mockingbird
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From "Telstar" to "Vault of Horror," from Rattigan to Kerouac, from the Village of Bray to the Village of Midwich, help PZ link old ancient news and pop culture. I think I can see him, "Crawling from the Wreckage." Will he find his way? This show is brought to you by Mockingbird! www.mbird.com
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Nov 16, 2023
Episode 370 - Serling's Miracle, and Ours
When I survey... not the Wondrous Cross, but the world as it's currently going, it's hard not to despair. So many things seem and feel wrong -- are wrong.
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 (https://archive.org/details/the-messiah-on-mott-street), 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?" (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/opinion/religion-christianity-belief.html). It has a Rod Serling quality to it. And a Simeon Zahl quality, too!
LUV U.
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Nov 1, 2023
Episode 369 - Don't You Care
God spoke to me recently.
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.
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Oct 20, 2023
Episode 368 - Straining Out Gnats and...
I've been much affected by the pictures of murdered and bombed children from Israel and Gaza in the last week, and found myself comparing these unutterably tragic losses with some of the other issues on which our world is fixed. It almost seems like there's no comparison between the bloody burial sheet of a five-year old child and the concerns that dominate much of public life.
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 (https://mbird.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/IMG_3610.jpg) in Cadeleigh Parish Church.)
https://mbird.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/IMG_3610.jpg
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Oct 10, 2023
Episode 367 - "Summer of '42"
If you want to get to the core, the very heart, of a person's -- say, your own -- experience of Grace, ask them (i.e., ask yourself) to tell you about an experience of acceptance or belovedness that came to them at a low point in their youth or childhood. Get them to tell you about that one experience of being loved personally, subjectively, for yourself, I mean, that changed... everything. Almost everyone you know can summon up a story, almost always when they were in a place of despair, when someone, usually unexpectedly, reached out and ... held them.
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!
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Sep 6, 2023
Episode 366 - Our Movie
Written by Jimmy Webb and performed by Glen Campbell, "Our Movie" is a very touching song.
It describes a fulfilled marriage from its beginning and right through. It really describes one's whole life in affectionate and thankful perspective. For me the song is pure Phosphorus!
In the cast I talk about soul and body, true self and false self, physical life and physical death: the promise of these things and the limitations of at least three of them. I have in mind my own marriage of almost 50 years, yet also the yearning we all have to not be alone. Remember the need for belovedness -- and its direct consequent, loving -- and the need to be connected to another person, which points directly, finally to God: these are not secondary needs. They are primary ones.
The cast concludes with a brief hommage to Olivia Newton-John, and also to our old friend and parishioner, Michael Beck(-Taylor). Episode 366 is dedicated, in warm thanksgiving and enduring affection, to David Babikow and Joey Goodall.
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Aug 14, 2023
Episode 365 - The Whole Loaf
So I was in Henley-on-Thames last week and there was this almost hidden bookshop next to a place called "The Ferret". (I kid you not.) High on a shelf there was an old leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens' lesser known Christmas stories. Not the long ones like "A Christmas Carol" or "The Chimes" or "The Haunted Man"; but short ones like "The Child's Story", "The Seven Poor Travellers", and "What Christmas Is As We Grow Older".
What these stories all reveal -- for I started reading them on the airplane home -- is an explicit (tho' never didactic nor even artificial) dynamic of Christian Grace and One-Way Love. The author makes it clear in every tale that the core transaction of life in this world is the possibility of new beginning, new birth, resurrected hope, and empathic out-reaching love.
Dickens always traces such dynamic beneficence specifically to Christ and His (Christmas) Goodness towards the lonely, the desperate, the poor, and even the rogues. In short, each story in this collection sets out the Whole Loaf.
For many years -- many decades, it feels like sometimes -- I was perpetually mining my movies, my novels and my TV shows for implicit Christianity -- implicit Gospel, implicit Grace. And it can be found!
But then one day I actually read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and found the Whole Loaf in that celebrated novel. And then one day I read Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection and again: the Whole Loaf. And now I read Charles Dickens' short Christmas stories and again, Behold: the Whole Loaf.
Part of the Loaf can be very good. Say, General Public (1980s), Nik Kershaw (ditto), Frankie Goes to Hollywood (ditto). But the Whole Loaf is better. And how the world needs it now. LUV U.
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Jul 7, 2023
Episode 364 - How to Survive Being in Full Time Ministry
Serving in full time ministry is as stress-full as any occupation can be.
You get hit from all sides -- unendingly -- and just when you think things are beginning to stabilize, you get hit again. Plus, there is the in-built transference that is projected on you as a 'father'-figure (if you are male) which keeps surfacing, at least to some extent, in just about every interpersonal exchange you have. To repeat: serving in full time ministry is as stress-full as any occupation can be.
I can't prescribe a way-of-being or way-of-doing to help you. (Prescribing rarely if ever works, even if it is accurate and worthwhile.) But I can describe what I have seen that works. I can tell you about the strengthening effects, for example, of The Crawling Eye (1959) -- aka The Trollenberg Terror -- in my own ministry. I can tell you about my fly-fishing colleague in North Carolina, whose pastorate benefits enormously from his serious dedication to that sport. I can tell you about John Zahl's DJ-ing or David Zahl's "Garbage Pail Kids" cards or Simeon Zahl's boxes and boxes of ... Orson Scott Card and friends. These things keep us sane. They are not primary -- the genuine self-giving of a redeemed human being is primary. But they are big-time secondary.
You, dear reader and listener, probably have your own big-time secondary interest. I hope you do. If you don't, let me send you a copy of, oh hey, "The New Outer Limits", Season 3. That should get things going. LOL.
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Jul 6, 2023
Episode 363 - In Quintessence
The quintessence of one's continuing love of popular culture that embodies heart-to-heart communication is the subject of this cast.
What makes a work of popular art "Christian"? Does it have to be explicit to qualify? Or implicit -- and therefore under the radar -- to really qualify?
One thing I know is that you have to love the work-in-question, whether a song, a novel, a movie, or a tv episode, on its own terms before you can communicate your particular personal attraction to its Christian element. (Seriously, I had to love Bride of Frankenstein (1935) for its own imaginative sake before I could go after -- and preach on -- the Christ-empathy in the sufferings of Boris Karloff. Similarly, I had to treasure the total coolness of the original "Outer Limits" (1963) before I could take advantage of the explicit sacrificial Christianity in its episode entitled 'Feasibility Study'.
In this cast I survey some powerful episodes of "The New Outer Limits" (1995-99) as a sort-of exercise in Gospel interpretation, at least in the way I've tried to do it over the years.
But again, remember: You have to like it first -- it has to connect with you heart-to-heart -- before you can theologize about it. Then, however, once it has won a place within your chest, it is ready for the pulpit. Or the breakfast table. LUV U.
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Jun 27, 2023
Episode 362 - Midsummer Night's Dream
It's interesting how far music drives this podcast.
Fer sher, I've been "out of pocket" for a month or so, but what drove me to record this new cast was one thing: music. I'd recently heard a section of The Carpenters' single "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (1977) and was made speechless by Karen C's vocal.
One simply had to find a place for it on PZ's Podcast.
Then another song came to mind, possibly even more explosive, from the Summer of '68. My friend Lloyd Fonvielle (R.i.P.) had played it for me in an apartment in the East Village. We were basically never the same after that. So I decided to excerpt it for "you, the living (this Mash was meant, too)".
Once the music was set, the substance of the cast came down. Two "memes" that I composed recently while sitting on a beach somewhere with Mrs. Zahl seemed worthwhile to present here. Which I have tried to do. One of the memes relates to the unconditional nature of God's Grace; the other, to the exemption-less reach of God's Hand in everything that happens to us. It's a stretch, conceptually, but a requirement for a happy... death. Chest Fever!
Listen to the Music (Doobie Brothers, 1972), and everything will probably turn out alright.
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May 17, 2023
Episode 361 - Outer Limits
Verticality is a make-or-break attribute of the Christian Church.
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.
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May 13, 2023
Episode 360 - Outta Gear
I think we probably all need to get "outta gear", at least to some extent.
'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…
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May 12, 2023
Episode 359 - Better Late Than Never
I think about it a lot: why isn't God intervening to make the world a less harsh and broiling place? 'Where are you, God? Come on, already.' Another way of putting it: What's taking You so long? And that's not just a question about "the world". It's a question concerning your individual world. As in, when are You going to help me out with this particular problem I'm having?
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 w…
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Apr 24, 2023
Episode 358 - The Wisdom of... Los Straitjackets
It just came down to me. Like the letter at the beginning of Forrest Gump. Like the chap who rescued Mary and me six years ago when we blew a tire in the most remote "track" to be found in all of England. It just came down to me:
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 fro…
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Apr 20, 2023
Episode 357 - 'Mockingbird' en France
We're always looking out for resources, mostly in the popular-art side of life, that embody the Belovedness that precedes all loving. Whether it's a Motown single or a novel no one's ever heard of or a TV show from last year, we're on the lookout for felt expressions, resonating with us inwardly, of the Love that precedes all 'Works of Love' (SK).
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 pr…
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Apr 12, 2023
Episode 356 - Happy Imputation Day
Gerry Rafferty's 1978 single entitled "Right Down the Line" is a pure classic on the experience of imputation. Imputation, for the record, is when someone lovingly regards you as different from the way you perceive yourself; and somehow in being thus regarded, you actually become the person someone sees you as. That's a lot of prepositions, but that's what imputation is.
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…
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Apr 5, 2023
Episode 355 - The Story of My Life (1957)
That title song is a quiet masterpiece. Sure, it's a little corny in the arrangement, but the message is universal. It never fails, at least in my case, to elicit tears -- of recognition.
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 d…
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Mar 21, 2023
Episode 354 - Beep Alonia
These podcasts are almost all dialogues with music.
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 Wel…
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Mar 20, 2023
Episode 353 - The Monster Swim
Good things, true things, lasting things have built-in repetition. They repeat in life because they are always valid. So they come back.
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 Tarkingt…
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Mar 1, 2023
Episode 352 - Thou Shalt Not Steal
Warning from Space, a Japanese sci-fi "thriller" from 1956, is an extremely ridiculous movie.
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…
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Feb 28, 2023
Episode 351 - "Been Invited to a Party"
There is so little one knows. Here one thought one had a "deep bench" when it comes to foreign films, and yet I knew nothing of Julien Duvivier!
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…
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Feb 21, 2023
Episode 350 - Don't Sell Me a Semi-Automatic
Sometimes I hear a 'Grace' sermon that is just terrific... until the last five minutes. During the last five minutes, the preacher seems pressed to tell me how I should respond, at least mentally, to the message of God's One-Way Love. The preacher -- in good faith and sincerity, to be sure -- tells me to "relax into the Message", "accept the Gift", "live into It", "let It sink in", "allow It to become part of you". And although that sounds good, it ends up, at least for me, feeling abstract. It may even convey a(n un-intended) sense of pressure, as there is still something to do. Which I can't seem to do. It's a little like what Roman Catholics sometimes describe as the need to perpetually return to the Confessional because they haven't quite taken it in, i.e., the forgiveness they were told they had last week.
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 r…
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Feb 21, 2023
Episode 349 - Atlantic Twist
This is a follow-up to "Joe Meek Is God", and observes the non sequiturs of one's life.
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 di…
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Feb 17, 2023
Episode 348 - Joe Meek Is God
I've talked about Joe Meek before, but think I've finally gotten to the spiritual wisdom that lies beneath his many records. (Meek was an English independent record producer in the 1950s and '60s.)
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 breakth…
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Feb 15, 2023
Episode 347 - Perpetual Motion
What could really do it? What could actually revive the beneficent influence of the Christian Gospel on our current masochistic/sadistic world? "What Does It Take/To Win Your Love for Me" (Junior Walker, 1969).
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 Ant…
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Feb 8, 2023
Episode 346 - Dumb Head
I'm not talking about dying these days in order to be a downer.
(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 b…
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Feb 4, 2023
Episode 345 - The KA of Gifford Hillary
Dennis Wheatley was an author "on the margins". In other words, he was a flawed (tho' very popular in his day) writer who was not taken seriously by most critics. But his distinctly marginal themes and observations gave him a kind of crossbow into truth that endow more than one of his novels with Inspiration. I am a big fan of Dennis Wheatley.
In 1956 he published a novel about the immediate aftermath of one's bodily death. It is called The KA of Gifford Hillary (https://amzn.to/3DBe4tx) 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…
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Jan 30, 2023
Episode 344 - The Israelites
The recent death of an old friend (i.e., of 52 years' standing) has brought vividly to mind, in the recollection of the person by their friends and family, a vital distinction: the distinction between what actually took place in one's life and the interpretation/s we place on events in retrospect.
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"…
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Dec 15, 2022
Episode 343 - Billion Dollar Brain
People conceal so much about themselves. They don't always mean to, but in one area or another they are afraid to say what's really going on -- especially inside themselves. Then, over time, they -- we! -- become habituated to not ever saying what they/we are really thinking.
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 conc…
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Dec 13, 2022
Episode 342 - Strange Conflict
Herein is a degree of pushing-the-envelope that I hope may speak to you, dear Listener.
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…
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Dec 4, 2022
Episode 341 - The Chinese Prime Minister
Three recent sudden deaths of old friends have called forth this Christmas podcast.
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 bu…
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Aug 29, 2022
Episode 340 - Tales of Hoffmann
What do our favorite songs, movies, and shows -- and even places -- say about us? Why do we like the media we do? What draws us to one form of art rather than another -- to one sort of setting rather than another? Why R.E.O. Speedwagon, for some strange reason, rather than Dylan? Why "Next Plane to London" rather than "A Day in the Life"?
Whatever the draw is, I think it has more to do with us than with the thing. Or rather, the object or medium that catalyzes one's deep feelings is less important than the feelings being catalyzed.
This cast starts with a reflection I first encountered through Mockingbird. It is from Frederick Buechner (R.i.P.). The cast then careens into George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead -- to which I dragged poor Mary back in '73 when we were courting. (That particular date was almost as much a disaster as when my friend Lloyd and I dragged her to see Jean-Luc Godard's Wind from the East in 1970.) But George Romero's Damascus-Road experience in t…
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Aug 2, 2022
Episode 339 - Anglican/'Anglican'
The Gospel of God's One-Way Love can find an appealing, commodious platform within the Anglican tradition. This is because when that tradition is allowed to be fully itself -- historically, theologically, and even aesthetically -- it supports the Good News and pastorally embodies it.
On the other hand, like any ancient tradition, 'Anglicanism' can become dry and even choking. When the tradition becomes an end rather than a means to an end -- a "thing" rather than a fountain -- then it can desiccate the very soil on which it was first planted.
In this cast I tell something of my own Anglican story, which goes back to 1960. There is within it some of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly -- and when it comes to the Church of England, mostly the Good.
If you're an Episcopalian, I hope you'll be encouraged. Mary's and my story within the Church is also quite funny (at least to me). Hope you'll laugh along.
Incidentally, the opening music is the very first song my suite-mates played for me when I…
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Jun 15, 2022
Episode 338 - Privilege (1967)
The vehement secularism all around us is no secret. I have seen its pointed perseverance in at least three settings recently, and most powerfully at my 50th Harvard College class reunion.
In all three settings, 'God' was sedulously left out of the discourse, and, it felt to me, conscientiously. Nothing new in that, to be sure; but it made me reflect on the Christian Church, at least in its traditional manifestation, and what is it that "triggers" the sharp antagonism.
But I came up with a slightly different answer.
Had recently read John Weaver's book Evangelicals and the Arts in Fiction from McFarland Books, that wonderful publishing house which specializes in sincerest monographs on subjects such as the history of wax-museum horror films or 1940s Mummy movies.
Weaver's book is counter-intuitive in the extreme, and contributes an insight that I have read nowhere else. So maybe we can learn from contemporary secularism, albeit from a different direction.
The cast concludes with one of…
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May 3, 2022
Episode 337 - Our M'bird Guest 2022
Mockingbird's 14th annual New York City conference, entitled "Hope for a Weary World", was a kind of summit for this utterly needed Word. I'll bet almost everyone there felt the same way.
Was it the fact that we hadn't met in person for two years? Is that what made this conference so refreshing? Was it the depth of the content, let alone the humor, the music and the sheer joy of the message? What was it?
For me it was the unique chord of utter realism with electric Hope. You could hear it in everything -- in Aaron's Zimmerman's timely video/s and tone, in David Zahl's Titian and St. Dismas, in the video by the German hardware company Hornbach that encapsulated base-line empathy, in Simeon (and Bonnie) Zahl's phrase "theory of change"; in the trenchant, applicable breakouts; in the delicious meals that we wanted never to end; in the tracks of JAZ's eternal 'Episco Disco'. The main thing was that chord of realism (even tragic realism) assimilated to us personally by means of Divine Hope.…
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Mar 11, 2022
Episode 336 - Death Star Portal
It seems as if almost everybody is a little like the "Death Star" in Star Wars. There's a way in to our inner reality, but it's very small -- tiny, in fact -- and it takes a sure shot to get inside.
With people, it is often serious stress or failure of some sort that opens up the portal; and even then, it seems rare that some healing hope makes contact with the real you.
I remember how gripping Dr. Frank Lake's essay was, from the mid-70s, entitled "The Presence of Christ in the Healing of Primal Pain". He pointed us, you might say, to the cure for one's profoundest trouble. But how many didn't take him up on it? Didn't take God up on it?
This cast starts with an illustration from Jacques Demy's despairing masterpiece A Room in Town ("Une Chambre en Ville") from 1982. A Communist labor organizer's "Death Star Portal" is pierced by an entrancing person -- and all his "primary" commitments turn "secondary" in exactly five minutes. His portal opens and his world explodes. Sadly for the a…
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Mar 11, 2022
Episode 335 - The Big Street
Can you ever "over"-impute? Can you treat a person as they actually are not to such an extent that you lose yourself and are ultimately taken advantage of?
The short answer to the question is No. Imputation can never go too far. Of course the 'imputor' may lose himself/herself in the act of treating someone as they are (objectively speaking) not. Christ did. But the effect of imputation in 99% of its enactions is transformative. Yes, you may have to take it pretty far. And yes, you may lose your "boundaries" and self-protections in loving someone the imputation-way. But it almost always, finally, works.
Case in point -- trying to sound like Rod Serling for a sec -- is the amazing movie The Big Street, which came out in 1942. Based on a short story by Damon Runyon entitled "Little Pinks", The Big Street stars Henry Fonda as a busboy who makes his life's work the enablement, protection, and care of an impossible woman, played by Lucille Ball. The woman could care less about him. Poor 'L…
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Feb 15, 2022
Episode 334 - Animotion II
The first cast, "Animotion I", laid the 'low-anthropology' groundwork for this new one. Carl Jung's typification of animus and anima diagnosed the male/female dynamic buried within us primordially -- _a la _"Quatermass and the Pit" (1967). Now comes the Hope, which for me is not only real but also empirical.
Damon Runyon (d. 1946) understood about men and women.
How could the author upon whose stories Guys and Dolls was based not have done so? Runyon's stories are vignette after vignette of oddly paired (but not to Jung) couples who find lasting love, grace and transformation. The context may be New York City streetlife of the Depression era, but the 'types' and situations are universal. The exterior framework is limited to a place and time, but the people inside themselves could be you and me. And in every case, or almost every case, grace triumphs, justice works itself out, and transformation occurs. (Thus you absolutely have to see the 1941 mini-movie of Runyan's short story "The Ol…
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Feb 15, 2022
Episode 333 - Animotion I
Amid the tidal wave/s of views and perspectives on men and women in relation to one another stand the enduring insights of Carl Jung. Much of what he wrote feels almost too complex and too layered to be true, for truth is simple. But what he observed over the years about men and women in their archetypal difference stands. I think it stands.
One used to scratch one's head, at least in the late '70s, when almost every Episcopal minister one knew became a Jungian therapist, or almost did! No kidding. Talk about a tidal wave.
Now I understand a little better. Not the going "whole hog" -- for the journey to health for most Jungians takes too long, like kind of forever. The therapy itself feels life long -- just much too long! But the diagnosis, especially concerning women and men in primordial perspective, is brilliant. Jung didn't make it up. He observed people, during thousands of hours of therapeutic dialogue, and his observations were acute.
In this podcast, I read a -- I guess we cou…
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Jan 27, 2022
Episode 332 - What Church Means to Me
This is one's ecclesiology, one's doctrine of the Church, after a lifetime's involvement with it and 47 years' ordained ministry within it. For what it's worth, I think I've "got it now" ("One Monkey Don't Stop No Show", The Animals, 1966).
Where I think it might help, dear Listener, is in the area of reactivity and also in the area of inclusivity.
To wit, if you are on 'The Canterbury Trail', say, as a former evangelical or former Baptist, you won't reach a final or satisfying destination until you reduce the reactivity to near nil. Most seekers after the right church are in reaction to where they started. That is quite normal, but it still won't get you to God in His Church. Your (fluid) "destination/s" will almost always be one-sided or partial. You won't stay there, in other words. Somehow, your initial reactivity has got to decelerate.
Secondly, in my own case the Church of England Evangelicals (and charismatics) answered the question of "Church" because they were Scriptural, ort…
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Jan 24, 2022
Episode 331 - Robert Nathan (So There!)
It's funny that in one's recovery from illness, the "band width" is still nowhere near what it used to be. I used to be able to read a novel by Dostoyevsky one week, then a book by Forde the next, then a novel by Cozzens the next.
*Sayonara to that! *Now one is fortunate to be able to read The Runaway Bunny.
So hey, I've gone back to reading in three-page spurts. And the perfect author for this "new way of walking, new way of talking" is... Robert Nathan.
You remember Robert Nathan. He wrote The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie, to name just two of his roughly 40 or so fantasy novels. But the thing is, Robert Nathan's novels are all short -- more like novellas -- and they read like pudding, because he was an excellent and simple narrator.
Anyway, I'm back to Nathan, like it or not; and today's cast updates you on this charming "Mid-Century" author.
It is good to note, too, that Robert Nathan was Jewish but had zero chip on his shoulder. That may be because he was born into a wealt…
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Jan 24, 2022
Episode 330 - Tulsa Turnaround
I was "thrown" a little recently by a liturgical service that felt confused at a pretty deep level, and maybe even untruthful. The service was trying to honor someone but "too many cooks" (theologically and personally) "spoiled the broth".
That is true of many services when they are not rooted in the Gospel. I mean the Gospel that brings together accurate, i.e. "low" anthropology and the hope of God's mercy. Most "celebrations of life" that Mary and I attend seem to almost capitalize on false encomium. You come away feeling that the person you knew wouldn't recognize himself if he had been there.
I'm not arguing for negativity, but I am pleading for accuracy, with humor and compassion -- Christ's compassion.
As I came away from the service I have in mind, I suddenly thought of The Music Man! That's a musical about a con man who specializes in imputation not rooted remotely in truth. And only when a woman falls in love with him, and really does impute goodness to him -- for she was the…
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Dec 15, 2021
Episode 329 - Rice Is Nice
You can respond to PZ's appeal and support the work of Mockingbird by clicking here (https://mbird.com/support/). All gifts are tax-deductible.
The Lemon Pipers captured something universal and actually moving in their second single, from 1968, entitled "Rice Is Nice". In the third and last verse of that song, the singer asks a question of her/his love and his/their feelings: "And when I get old and wrinkles appear/Will I still find some rice in my hair?"
This cast concerns long-term marriage and its possibility and also its enabling word. What makes it possible? How can you keep loving the same person you first met 30 years ago, or 40 or 50? I mean, people change, right?!
Well, think of all the answers you have heard to that question. Think of all the recipes and maxims and axioms.
All I am trying to do here is add my own, via The Lemon Pipers. The answer to the question of long-term continuity in love is, well, Go Back to the Beginning. How it started is the key to what is happening…
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Dec 10, 2021
Episode 328 - The Face Behind the Mask
It is easy ("It's So Easy" - L. Ronstadt, 1977) to talk about "going deeper" and the "journey inward" and the layers of human personality. But in practice it rarely happens.
It rarely happens that you actually let on to another person what you are thinking. As Joseph von Sternberg, the director of at least ten great movies, observed: "The average human being lives behind an impenetrable veil and will disclose his deep emotions only in a crisis which robs him of control."
That is a supremely important sentence from the great man.
I saw it this week -- on the track, of all places -- as I thought of something that has happened in a former parish of ours. I suddenly burst into tears as I thought of the people there -- the hundreds, honestly, whose faces I still remember -- and how they have been treated by Authority. It wasn't the presenting issue that touched my heart so much as the wonderful individuals who are being affected. My "face behind the mask" was a face of remembered mutual lov…
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Dec 7, 2021
Episode 327 - Magic Carpet Ride
Someone inscribed a book to me once, and wrote, "To Paul, In hope of transformation." (I didn't feel insulted, but rather moved.)
This podcast is about sudden transformation.
We are sometimes taught that change is gradual. I don't believe it, at least not in most cases. Transformation takes place when the vice (i.e., grip) of conflicting forces in our lives, both outwardly and inwardly, becomes so great that we simply have to make a decision.
There is a memorable illustration of this in the Jacques Demy movie Bay of Angels (1963), in which the gambling-addict heroine, played by Jeanne Moreau, is forced at the end to decide between the heroin of risk and the fact-on-the-ground of a man's one-way love for her.
The groundwork for change, especially inside a person, may well be gradual, but the moment itself is sudden -- what Paula White calls "your Suddenly". I agree with Pastor Paula.
This is especially important in the light of death. Two deaths recently hit us hard. Neither of the dec…
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Oct 25, 2021
Episode 326 - Kingdom of Heaven
I keep talking about life-resolution issues that are fairly elemental.
Part of the theme comes from recent personal experience, but part of it comes from popular music and movies. Today's entry point is a song from 1954 that almost won the Oscar that year, entitled "Hold My Hand". It is from an incredibly cool movie by Frank Tashlin, which you have got to see, entitled Susan Slept Here. This oddly titled movie starred Debby Reynolds and Dick Powell.
Anyway, I'm talking about physical touch at the end of life, but also about the self-revelation that serious stress almost inevitably presents one. Think H.G. Wells' three religious books that he wrote during the carnage of World War I. Later on, after the War, he wrote that he could no longer understand these books nor why he wrote them. In fact, the later, less-stressed Wells said he was actually bewildered by the fact that he had written them at all. He came very close to disavowing the books, tho' today we regard Mr. Britling Sees It Th…
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Sep 2, 2021
Episode 325 - Charade
When people ask you "How's it going?" or "Hey, what's on your mind these days?", I'd be surprised if you always give an honest answer. In fact, even if you decide to sound honest and authentic, you may be covering over the real facts. And under the "real" facts of your outward -- and more importantly, your inward -- life, you may even be covering something else. It's "Human Nature" (M. Jackson, 1982).
Human inwardness, let alone one's outward conversation and demeanor, can be a charade from top to bottom. I've seen more than one instance of this during my life, both personally and pastorally.
This cast begins with something that happened "Not Too Long Ago" (Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets, 2014). It pulled the curtain on a charade through a pretty dramatic chain of events. Guess I'm talking about the real shipwrecks of life, not the charades we pretty much construct to disguise them.
The cast ends with an excerpt from a piece of music by Jan Hammer, which he wrote to accompany a searin…
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Aug 21, 2021
Episode 324 - 'Apparently She Thought Not': Tyrone Davis and the End of the World
There used to be a monthly column in Reader's Digest magazine -- of which one number featured a photo of John Zahl on the back cover -- that was entitled "Laughter Is the Best Medicine". It was a fairly "middle-brow" column, but its heart was in the right place.
This new podcast explores the element of humor in resourcing one's detachment from the "boxing ring" of everyday life. (Did you wince at that 'English' use of "resource" as a verb?) I want to say that when you "lose your life and thereby gain it back" -- in the New Testament view of the world -- humor takes on an almost crucial role in smoothing the uncomfortable edges of withdrawal. Whuh?
When I was sick in the hospital recently, just about all one's previous attachments -- excepting, vividly, Mary, our sons, and their children -- faded away. Like, almost instantly. And when that happens to you, it kind of stays with you.
Thus humor, a la Tyrone Davis' impossible-to-make-sense-of lyric in "Something You've Got", becomes, well…
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Jul 22, 2021
Episode 323 - I Put a Spell on You
I know it may seem pretty far off in geography, but the "zero-case" policy of Australia, with its accompanying long and also 'snap' lockdowns, is arrestingly relevant to Mockingbird (and over-all Christian) concerns for human welfare.
What is going on officially in Australia is so striking in its steel mindset of fear over faith that it calls out for observation, let alone evaluation. In this podcast, I look at "zero-case" policy in its high(est) bar of risk aversion; in its seemingly complete disbarring of models for human fulfillment outside of physical survival of the body; and its implacable and surprising use of the "civil arm" to enforce the details of the average person's locked-down life.
I then ask, Where is the Church's voice being heard? One has spent almost one's whole ministry admiring a certain unusual brand of Australian Anglicanism associated with the Diocese of Sydney. Yet one seems to be hearing nothing from them in terms of faith over fear. I wonder if that Church ca…
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Jun 24, 2021
Episode 322 - Fifteen Percent
As I reported last time, I believe God gave me two words, or inspirations, as I struggled through an echo cardiogram during a recent illness.
But wait, there's more!
On the day after the echo cardiogram came a heart catheterization. In the midst of that -- Mary not being with me now, but in her place were six technicians and a surgeon, with the patient un-anesthetized -- three more words came. Seriously. Three more specific words... from Beyond.
The first had to do with the false narrative(s) I've attached to my life.
The second visualized an 'Outer Limits' episode from 1964, which featured an alien being called 'The Chromo-ite', from the Planet Chromo. I was compared with The Chromo-ite.
The third was an imperative consisting of three syllables.
This episode of PZ's Podcast says what the specific words actually were that I believe came from God, and states what they meant to me. I hope they will each mean something to you.
The cast is dedicated to the memory of Ali Hanna.
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Jun 11, 2021
Episode 321 - Subtract Then Add
I'm finally well enough to reflect, somewhat formally through this new podcast, on the recent illness I went through, and on what I heard at the nadir of it.
What happens when you are that sick -- and it happens in some form to everyone who has ever lived except those who die suddenly -- is that your body in its requirement to defend itself wipes out every thought, consideration and proper noun of your life other than what serves the body's need to survive. I mean, the preoccupation of your body with survival wipes out everything else. The word I use for this in the cast is negation.
Thus when things were at their worst in the hospital, it was as if everything and everyone in whom I have ever set store disappeared. So total was the focus at that point on physical survival.
Except -- except -- except -- two things:
1) I wanted Mary to hold my hand, and
2) I wanted to know where, if anywhere, I was going.
("Going", that is, if my heart stopped and my body died.)
Wonderfully, Mary was the…
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Apr 14, 2021
Episode 320 - Moot Point
What did Dr. Johnson say concerning one's imminent death?:
It wonderfully concentrates the mind.
While I was sick recently, a familiar feeling came "shining through". Nothing is really important except love and God.
That is not a cliche. Or better, it is a true cliche.
I call this cast "Moot Point" because I've been following a tempest in the Church of England; and every time I read a new major story about the pros and cons -- almost all cons -- of a once highly regarded priest who has had a mighty fall, I say to myself, But wait a minute. Church isn't even meeting now over there (at least until two weeks in England, but not yet in Northern Ireland and Scotland). I mean this headline story, with all its letters and accusations and interviews -- what meaning does it have when the Church is essentially shut down?
Remember the episode in the last season of X-Files, when Fox Mulder comes face to face really with a full-scale, in-the-now invasion of the Earth by aliens. No more bits and pie…
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Mar 25, 2021
Episode 319 - "My friend the..."
The excerpt at the start is from a song that was Number One in 1958 and to which I once got almost the entire support staff -- all of whom it turned out already knew the refrain -- of an institution of which I was the dean, to perform an inspired, spontaneous line dance. It was a high point of Mary's and my entire ministry.
Anyway, this podcast focuses on that extreme moment in life when you come to the end of your resources and finally have no choice but to reach out for succor. You don't first go for the prescription. You can't -- you have no idea what it is! You go to someone who can give you the prescription. The necessary step of faith when things are really bad is to reach out.
It's surprising sometimes how long it can take you to get to that point. A friend of mine once told me that it took him 40 years to get to the point of need from which he finally said 'Uncle'. As the saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
And your readiness is your point of need! Whe…
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Mar 23, 2021
Episode 218 - C'MON DAD
I've talked about "phosphorus" (https://pzspodcast.fireside.fm/272) before -- the ever-glowing points of connection that constitute a kind of trail within the story of our life. Today the subject is another kind of phosphorus, its other side of the coin, by which I mean rejection.
In late career I experienced a rejection so mighty in effect that it seemed to pull down the curtain on decades of ministry. This rejection came as an utter surprise.
So one day, during the lowest point, I'm in a Jewish deli in SE Florida. And the song "When Smokey Sings" by ABC comes on. The lilting 'Motown' sound carries me right back to former times, of happiness and joy. At the same time, the song becomes instant phosphorus to whatever trail of rejection I have trodden in life.
Rejection is decisive! Whether it comes in affairs of the heart, or at work, or in any relationship you want to name -- whether it comes in the form of cancer, self-sabotage, or an intrigue mounted against you -- rejection is impos…
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Mar 4, 2021
Episode 317 - Odessey and Oracle
The title of the Zombies' marvelous album from 1968/69 entitled "Odessey and Oracle" (sic) puts one's life in two-word perspective that means a lot to me.
We are all on an odyssey of sorts, as Odysseus/Ulysses was in Homer. There are headwinds, zephyrs, tailwinds; and more to the point, storms, whirlpools and icebergs. No one could really disagree with the picture of our human experience as an odyssey, the forms and circumstances of which are quite hidden to us -- as Thomas Cole's epic visual parable "The Journey of Life" conveys with jaw-dropping perspicacity and prescience -- at the start. And hidden almost all along the way, in fact! So yes, sans doute, life is an odyssey.
And we need -- I mean need urgently -- an oracle. Which is to say, we require a Word/words from outside ourselves to orient us and re-orient us. If we think that we ourselves can provide the required wisdom to understand and interpret our misfires, let alone our successes, that conception proves untenable over ti…
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Feb 23, 2021
Episode 316 - The Ballad of John and Walter
What a load of uncharted material is out there for people who are looking for Grace! Here I have spent almost 60 years "trolling" for redemptive material, words and music, especially the Seventh Art, that would speak, and hopefully heal. And now I find, near the advent of my 70th birthday, literally *TONS *of main-line examples of transformative Christian art that I never even knew existed.
Take movies like Journey into Light (1951), with Sterling Hayden and Viveca Lindfors. Or Miracle of the Bells (1948), with Frank Sinatra and Fred MacMurray. Or, just this week, Of Human Hearts (1938), with Jimmy Stewart and Walter Huston.
Where have I been? All I ever got, back in the day, was Sergei Eisenstein and Michelangelo Antonioni and Godard and ... The Graduate (1968). We worshipped The Graduate. I remember seeing it the week it opened.
But had anyone ever referenced Miracle in the Rain (1956) or Gabriel over the White House (1936). Are you kidding? Niemand !
It's funny, it's as if the Holl…
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Feb 13, 2021
Episode 315 - Top of the World
Today I want to "double down" just a bit on the anchoring necessity of romantic connection within our everyday lives. Flourishing won't occur without it, and that's an empirical fact whether one likes it or not.
So the question becomes, at least for about half the world's yearning souls, how can a person find it. How can I obtain what I so manifestly need and want?
Case in point: Jane Wyman's grief-driven prayer in Miracle in the Rain (1956). Then there's Fred MacMurray's prayer in The Miracle of the Bells (1947) -- read the book, by the way, which you can get on Kindle. Then there's my own prayer last month, which was answered by getting banged on the head.
This cast is an indicative reflection on prayer, specifically on the prayer that comes from abject and unconditional personal need. George Harrison promised its answer (let alone Isaiah, let alone Christ) in "Love Comes to Everyone" (1979).
Hear me. Oh, and inwardly digest The Seekers' hymn and psalm, "I'll Never Find Another You"…
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Jan 13, 2021
Episode 314 - Heinz Agonistes
https://mbird.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_5702.jpg
How should we think about God when faced with a massive, injuring disappointment? Or rather, how can a person of faith assimilate an experience in which you see, not God, but God's opposite, appearing to win?
The question can apply to anyone, on any "side of the aisle". I have friends who were so upset by the election of 2016 that they basically retreated into a long-term depression for roughly four years. There will be people you know today -- tho' they may not be saying -- who feel the same way about 2020. Disappointments and disillusionments can touch all parties!
Also, there's the COVID. Just after Mrs. Zahl and I received our vaccinations in Florida, articles started appearing stating that, vaccinated or not, we could still transmit the virus. (What?) In other words, there may not be an end to the ordeal, even if the "miracle Moderna/Pfizer" is given to everyone. (Would that mean,we still can't see our grandchildren?)
This…
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Jan 5, 2021
Episode 313 - Reverse Chronology
Harold Pinter wrote a play once entitled "Betrayal" and he used a sort of trick to tell his story. He began the play at the end -- at the tragic finale of the events dramatized -- and ended the play at the beginning, at the touching and tentative start of those events. He reversed time, to tremendous effect.
Today's brief cast is intended as a salutary instance of what often happens in life: Things start well and end badly. In addition to the startling music that begins and ends my story, I tell how I met a very old friend after almost 55 years of not having seen him. This friend, now dead, by the way, was once a charming, funny, open, dear young person, truly at the threshold of his life. After 55 years, however, he had grown humorless, disappointed, withdrawn, and turned in upon himself.
Just once, at one brief moment within our conversation, my friend came to himself -- and right then, he was all at once 15 again. I was hurtled back in time by the mere expression on his face, only t…
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Jan 5, 2021
Episode 312 - Hope From Heinz
'Heinz' was short for Heinz Burt (d. 2000), a grocery clerk in Southampton, England, whom Joe Meek, an independent record producer, made into a star for a brief period in the early 1960s.
The brilliance of the five or six singles that Meek produced for Heinz is an almost perfect instance of how straw can be converted into gold, a la Rumpelstiltskin. That is to say, Heinz Burt himself had little talent and almost nothing going for him, yet Meek created magic out of his voice and persona. Utter magic! I mean, these are not the greatest records in the history of music, but given the givens, they are striking examples of what effect/s an outside influence can have on you.
Now take this irregular but prodigious instance of what can be done to transform an everyday mediocrity -- he was a nice guy, to be sure -- and it can be seen what God can do for anyone -- like you and me, for example. I'm being completely serious.
Hug that "low anthropology"! We really cannot help ourselves very much, at…
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Nov 19, 2020
Episode 311 - Crescendo
I was listening to a sermon concerning spiritual warfare and my mind went straight back to 1970, to the English film, a psychological thriller, entitled Crescendo. The film stars Stephanie Powers and James Olson and was directed by Alan Gibson.
The preacher's passionate evocation of Ephesians 6:12 in connection with current events had brought considerable criticism from many quarters. I wanted to ask the critics, Didn't you ever see Psycho (1960) -- let alone read Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, or Conan Doyle, for that matter? I mean, almost all mystery novels, short stories and movies presuppose that the solution to a crime is unseen, that the events taking place on the surface are almost always driven by factors that are not seen or envisaged. In other words, the explanation for criminal, let alone curious behavior turns out to be an unexpected person or circumstance.
If a plot line such as that of Crescendo (1970) should intrigue and actually satisfy us, why would we close the d…
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Oct 28, 2020
Episode 310 - New Prince, New Pomp (c. 1605)
I'm trying to understand, in Romans 7 and Mockingbird terms, a phenomenon I currently observe -- and feel -- all around me. It is as if the more control, medically and in terms of hospitalizations, that we are getting over COVID19, the more insistent and pressing are the visible measures a good citizen is supposed to be taking against it. To put it another way, as the actual threat is decreasing, the things I am supposed to be doing in order to be regarded as a good citizen in relation to it, are increasing.
So Mrs. Zahl and I take a walk on the shoreline near where we live, and the beach is not crowded at all -- just several knots of two persons walking near the edge of Long Island Sound on a windy day -- and yet half the people, especially the younger half, are wearing masks the whole time. The wind is billowing and there is at least 50 feet between almost every "bubble" of two, yet still masks are tightly on.
And I feel badly, like I'm doing something wrong, so I put on my mask; or,…
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Oct 22, 2020
Episode 309 - Little Bit O'Soul
There's a truth of life that more and more people are telling me about from their own experience. To be sure, these people are mostly my own age, so we are considering that last third of life with which my Boomer Handbook (https://amzn.to/31vHjL8) is concerned.
The observed truth of life I am talking about is simply that when you reach a certain age, say from 55 or so on, if you don't move forward, you move backward.
Sometimes I just want to stay where I am -- treading water in the memories and also the accomplishments of my life's second third. But treading water is not what actually happens. Drowning is what happens! You regress, whether you want to or not, and it's easy to end up like Miss Bates's mother in Jane Austen's Emma, staring all day into space. You are somewhere but you're definitely not ... where you are.
This cast is about the anchorage and possibility of hope, hope for a real and concrete future. I get given some good counsel from a novel by Joyce Cary (d. 1957) -- who…
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Sep 5, 2020
Episode 308 - Phosphorus
There's a terrific Sherlock Holmes movie from 1944 entitled The Scarlet Claw. Well, it's actually not that terrific, but the premise is great.
In the movie a criminal disguises himself as a kind of glow-in-the-dark swamp creature out on the moors, who murders unfortunate travelers and terrorizes the village.
Come to find out, the murderer is putting phosphorus on his hands, his feet and his face in order to frighten everyone, and Sherlock Holmes figures it out. Our detective ends up finding his man by following the phosphorus.
The analogy is to our personal histories. If you want to find out the truth about yourself, follow the phosphorus! And the phosphorus can be found wherever and whenever your true inward heart-self came out -- whether in a relationship or a moment of stress or an incident of rejection, you name it. To understand yourself, follow the phosphorus to the places in your past where it stuck. And as I tried to say in Podcast 307, the phosphorus may well have stuck on a…
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Sep 4, 2020
Episode 307 - Sacred Space
It's a kind of personal discovery I made last week, when inventorying some more of the songs featured in Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers (https://amzn.to/2QX1NGW) (Mockingbird, 2020).
The discovery was that each song not only connects me with a person and/or connection with that person -- or disconnection from the person; but that each song connotes a place, an actual place. In other words, take "Reelin' in the Years", by Steely Dan. It's not just Mrs. Zahl, in a long ago springtime in Boston, with whom the song emotionally connects me. But it's a place there, i.e., Memorial Drive in Cambridge, down which she would drive her car fast, with me in it, and the radio would play ... "Reelin' in the Years".
My and your emotional, heart experiences are connected not just to a person, but to a place where we were with that person.
An analogy is in the experience of Christian pilgrimage. Why did certain places, such as St. Juan de Compostela or the Church of the…
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Aug 27, 2020
Episode 306 - For Our Dear Margary
One of the best effects of a positive view of aging, which I have tried to offer in the Boomer Handbook (https://amzn.to/2D3dxV1) (Mockingbird, 2020), is the unexpected appearance of new material. You find that faith in a "good outcome" to your life seems to bring with it fresh resources, and fresh product. It just happens!
Well, thanks to Josh Retterer, to whom this podcast is dedicated, I've run straight into Margery Lawrence. Margery Lawrence (1889-1969) was an English writer of supernatural short stories, as well as popular novels. She was also a committed spiritualist, who wrote within an explicitly Christian (tho' anti-clerical) world-view.
What Lawrence brought to her fiction was the insight that many relationships between men and women, and between children and their parents, are the workings-out of unseen forces, mainly of positive forces seeking to bring afflicted everyday people to better resolutions, and even victories, in relation to inherited paralyses. What Pastor Paula…
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Aug 24, 2020
Episode 305 - 'Wear a Mask' (Los Straitjackets)
I heard something very helpful recently in a sermon by John Zahl. He said that sometimes in life what seems like the end is really the middle. I think JAZ meant that when your situation feels like -- maybe is -- the end of the world, it may really be the hinge point to "A Whole New World" (Aladdin, 1992).
This insight is true in Christian experience. What looks like the end turns out to be the middle.
Which made one immediately think of Los Straitjackets, that ever welling spring of inspiration that consists of five (sometimes four) surfer/rockabilly musicians in Mexican wrestling masks. These chaps are a gift that keeps on giving. And what you come to find out is that their songs are pretty strictly controlled until the last third, sometimes even the last fourth. Los Straitjackets typically take the listener by surprise by "going crazy", in the best way, right at the end. It's almost a trick, but I call it inspiration. Their songs are the best at the end!
This podcast takes its cue fr…
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Jul 6, 2020
Episode 304 - Speed Bump
I like Greg Townson very much! He's a guitarist who's been around for a while, but is now a leading member of Los Straitjackets. He combines that great Rockabilly sound of theirs with some really lyrical passages. Townson's track "Speed Bump", an excerpt of which begins this cast, got me started on the theme.
It's a familiar theme, especially with Mockingbird; but should never be foregone. A speed bump is when an obstacle or blockage on the road on which you are traveling causes you -- if you are going too fast or not looking where you're going -- to crash, or at least shock you out of yourself.
In regular life, a speed bump is the unexpected loss or blow or intrusion that makes you stop. "Hey, what's that sound/Everybody look what's goin' down" (Buffalo Springfield, 1966). It can be the illness of your child, a sudden catastrophic interruption/lurch in your marriage, a notice that you've been fired, a pandemic (to say the least), or one's nervous collapse into absorbing anxiety.
Idea…
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Jul 1, 2020
Episode 303 - Jimmy Loves Mary Anne
This is a further thought on "narratives", tho' with a Biblical example (from Jeremiah) and a recent public incident that has me both "stunned and amazed" (Pretenders, 'My City Was Gone', 1984).
The President of Harvard has issued a letter announcing the end of the University's sanctions against the undergraduate Final Clubs and all "single gender" organizations on or off campus. These sanctions, which brought with them a sort of "Stasi"-like network of anonymous informants and secret tip-offs connected to the Dean's Office, were put into place in 2017. This week, however, due to a Federal Court ruling in Massachusetts, buttressed by a recent Supreme Court decision, Harvard admitted officially that its policy could not stand up in court, and it was therefore withdrawing the policy.
Whether you care or don't care about Ivy League colleges and their current policies and dicta, what stunned and amazed PZ was the fact that the organizations' deliverance came from "out of the blue" and from…
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Jun 29, 2020
Episode 302 - Narrative Schmarrative
"Narratives", which used to be called "paradigms", and before that, "preconceptions", are like shackles on human necks. They force one to look down from what is before you, rather than at it.
Narratives short-change reality because you either discard things that don't fit your narrative or you alter the facts in order to squeeze them in. I'm not talking about the ideological content of your narrative. (That varies from person to person.) I'm talking about the idea that we need narratives to understand what we are facing.
Take the narrative couched within the statement, "You've got to go toward the cannons". In order to deal with the negativities in your life, you have to confront them directly rather than flee them or deny them. Sounds good.
But here comes another narrative: "In this context there is no room for that idea." If someone is guilty of this or that objectionable action or idea, they have to be nullified, deleted.
So behold: two narratives, entirely in conflict. Yet sometime…
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Jun 7, 2020
Episode 301 - Emotional Rescue
Feelings cover both the personal and the general. They cover both the individual and the collective. So you feel deeply when you are loved and loved back, and you feel deeply when a cause -- political, social, or cultural -- captures your heart's allegiance. We are seeing this dramatically within the current mood and its fiery passions.
But wait: I was here before!
I was "here", in the Spring of 1968 when the match was lit by the assassination of Dr. King. I saw personally the inferno that became Northeast Washington (D.C.), and was even stopped and threatened because I broke the curfew. Everything "normal" came to a halt.
Then again, in the Spring of 1970, in the aftermath of Kent State, everything seemed to stop. Classes cancelled, round-the-clock demonstrations; and again I got stopped one night for breaking the curfew. That was twice in two years.
Yet oddly, it is not those famous events, Dr. King's assassination and Kent State, that I remember the most. What I really, indelibly, r…
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Mar 30, 2020
Episode 300 - (You're) Having My Baby
Mrs. Zahl and I had a sort of 'Abraham/Sarah' moment (i.e., Genesis 17) this week, and it brought to mind an immortal song from 1974, performed by Paul Anka. But it was all because of the virus!
This new cast, which is the 300th, talks about the supernatural Power of God in relation to the scourge that is whipping us all. I bring back an 'Oldie but Goodie', William Hale White (aka 'Mark Rutherford'), to witness concerning the Power of God through a remarkable short essay he penned in 1908. The essay is entitled "Little Nell". The conceit of White's elliptical piece is that actual conversion and authentic transformation is possible within the human situation. Not just "God with us" in our pain; but God come to reverse it, and heal it. In "Little Nell" William Hale White moves from Dickens' account of an old man's conversion to non-self-referenced love for his grand-daughter, to the conversion of St. Paul, to the power of outside love to alter the entire chemistry of the "inner man".
Th…
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Mar 16, 2020
Episode 299 - Kolchak and Corona
In the middle of what may be the worst week, or close to it, this cast offers hope of a real breakthrough -- and not just in mental attitude or "approach", but in the substance of the pandemic.
At the start there is some slight use of the now-taboo word "over-reaction"; but hey, you can see it either way -- just as long you stay vigilant and wash your hands a lot. No question about that.
Yet there remains the question of faith, as in the moment right after Christ stilled the storm, when He asked the disciples: "Where is your faith?"
I feel we need to not give up on actual faith. And by that I mean the faith that God is able to quell the storm, de-potentiate the virus, and heal those who have it -- let alone, shield those who don't.
I mean seriously, hasn't anyone seen War of the Worlds -- either the George Pal version (1953) or the Steven Spielberg one (2005)? Both of them end the way H.G. Wells ended the novel on which they are based. God killed the Martian invaders. Not the USAF nor…
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Feb 29, 2020
Episode 298 - Outer Ashen Limits
Our parish's Ash Wednesday service this year made me think of an old "Outer Limits" episode entitled 'Cry of Silence'. That episode concerned alien tumbleweeds -- no kidding -- and a scientist's attempts to communicate with them.
What made me associate the Ash Wednesday liturgy with wind-blown tumbleweeds were the changes over the years of my ministry in that service. Now don't worry! This is not a 'Boomer's' reaction to contemporaneity. No, this is a reflection on the change-without-end that is inherent within the human world and on the universal element that will always lie within the penitential core of Ash Wednesday.
Here is the prayer to be said by 'The Minister' at the end of the "Penitential Office for Ash Wednesday" as required by the 1928 Book of Common Prayer:
_O God, whose nature and property is ever to have mercy and to forgive; Receive our humble petitions; and though we be tied and bound with the chain of our sins, yet let the pitifulness of thy great mercy loose us; for…
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Feb 12, 2020
Episode 297 - Bright Road
There is this unexpected plethora of gems coming at me just now in a Mockingbird vein. Last week there was Journey into Light, from 1951; and also The First Legion, also from that year. Today there is Bright Road, also a Hollywood movie, which came out in 1953.
I feel like the surface of the moon that is being bombarded by a meteor shower. How, one asks oneself, did one miss these many, explicitly Christian Hollywood movies? Were they literally hidden from view? Or was I simply asleep at the switch, all wrapped up, for almost an entire lifetime, in Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut -- or whatever one's desired form of coolness might be?
Then again, maybe it's the times. Maybe in this unusual period, when lots of things seem up-ended and little seems able to be taken for granted, new (old) things can rise to the surface again. I don't know what it is exactly, but something is shifting.
Today PZ's Podcast focusses on Bright Road, a modest but transcendent movie about imputation, the setting…
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Jan 23, 2020
Episode 296 - Pre-Code
Some startling new material has come down the pipeline this week, and I'm utterly bound to share it with you. Turns out that all sorts of explicitly Christian Hollywood movies have been hidden from view almost since they were made. It's almost as if a 'code' came into force, unspoken but more unwavering than the now notorious Hays Code of the 1930s, which banned directly Christian works of popular art from popular view.
What am I talking about?
Well, three remarkable movies that if you've ever heard of even one of them I'll give you the Dean's Prize from days long ago at Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham.
Seriously, have you ever heard of or seen Journey into Light (1951) with Sterling Hayden, Viveca Lindfors and Thomas MItchell? What about The First Legion (also 1951) with Charles Boyer and Barbara Rush? And what about When in Rome (1953) with Van Johnson and Paul Douglas? And I'm not even going to mention Battle Hymn (1957), with Rock Hudson, or The Left Hand of God (1955)…
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Jan 20, 2020
Episode 295 - Lobo in Taiwan
Just as alien invasion movies break down the "dividing walls of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14), almost invariably uniting the human race/s against the common enemy, so do four facts:
1) Lobo is big in Taiwan!
2) Tracy Hyde is still big in Japan!
3) Karen Carpenter is HUGE in The Philippines!!
4) Jacques Demy spent a lot of time, near the end of his run, making a Japanese movie about an anime heroine known as 'Lady Oscar'.
Popularity in the above cases apparently has little connection with ethnicity. (Remember Cheap Trick, by the way, if you need more proof.)
Each of the popular artists featured in this cast tapped into something bigger than Florida (Lobo), bigger than Britain (Tracy Hyde), bigger than California (Karen C.), and bigger than Nantes (Jacques Demy).
What did they tap into?
Well, I try to answer that. And the answer has to do with human nature in its evenly distributed hunger for accompaniment, belovedness, and appreciation. Hope you like this.
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Jan 13, 2020
Episode 294 - World Contact Day
One of the great things about UFOs and alien contact is that it unnerves and demoralizes the kind of thinking that qualifies everyone in terms of "identities" or predicates.
The metaphor of alien-contact movies, from Starship Invasions (1977) to the original Day the Earth Stood Still _(1951) to _Cloverfield (2008), is that of our one planet, our one earth, being instantly united in the face of an extra-terrestrial presence. As 'Fox Mulder' announced in a late episode of The X-Files, in the face of a real alien incursion, "All bets are off!". In other words, the alien-contact metaphor -- or rather, in my case, at least, convinced reality -- relativizes every single human group-characteristic. Face to face with a truly other/Other, all persons on our planet become one -- instantly. St. Paul says this perfectly in Galatians 3:28.
The opening music is an excerpt from The Carpenters' immortal and unsurpassable version of "Calling Occupants of Inter-Planetary Craft". That track bursts the…
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Jan 13, 2020
Episode 293 - Disco Inferno
In the late 1970s The Trammps conceived a brilliant Disco Inferno, in which something would be burned down. Whether they meant the hot performance of a disco dance, or whether the torching of something big and malignant, it probably makes no difference. Something's gotta go, even if it's just lameness and dullness on the "disco round" (Alicia Bridges).
This cast contrasts the passing nature of social and political anger and social/political circumstances with the things that endure. I take the songs of The Carpenters as case in point! "Close to You" endures, while I can hardly remember the actual convulsions that were taking place on campus -- almost everywhere -- when we first heard it. "Close to You" doesn't bring to mind, at least for me, Watergate or "Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming"; but rather, cruising around Boston with my future wife (of now 46 years) or getting her to drive me to see Night of the Living Dead. I've basically forgotten what was happening in the big world then,…
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Jan 7, 2020
Episode 292 - Down Down
Sometimes I feel like... a motherless child.
No, really: Sometimes I feel like I've been looking in almost all the wrong places for confirmations and traces of my Ur-existential Christian faith.
One's been "trolling" almost one's whole life through Truffaut and Dinesen and Kafka and Isherwood and Seneca and H.G. Wells and Stephen King and Val Lewton and Rod Serling and and John Galsworthy and, golly, even Michael Reeves -- *panning for Christian gold! *
What I mean is, one can make a lifetime of gathering Christian-sounding crumbs from a master's table, i.e., the above artists and philosophers, while never seeing that the whole loaf is actually right in front of you.
I'm thinking of The Chain (1949) by Paul Wellman or I'd Climb the Highest Mountain with Susan Hayward (1951) or George Eliot's first novella "Janet's Repentance" or Passing of the Third Floor Back by Jerome K. Jerome.
What?!?
Well, it turns out there are some conscious Christian masterpieces out there, which were very succ…
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Dec 20, 2019
Episode 291 - Indiana Wants Me
The secret that explains life -- I say "secret" because it's an open but denied truth, known most directly in popular music but suppressed in most "narratives" and conceptual systems -- is the aspiration for a connection of love with another human being.
This aspiration transcends politics and affinities, affiliations and most "ultimate concerns", and almost all situational circumstances and historical contexts. The aspiration, whether lost, unrealized, or fulfilled, is the first thing you think about when you are born; and the last thing you think about when you die. It is the universal instantiation, in "real" time, of the urge to connect. I believe it is the mainspring of almost all our personal histories.
My cast unwraps the theme in a 1970 "One Hit Wonder", and also in a 1954 English movie about a bomber pilot in Burma during World War Two. It then switches to Smokey Robinson. But... "la plus ca change..."
Think with me about the mainspring of your decisions, from age six to age 6…
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Dec 16, 2019
Episode 290 - Christmas Day
A few words about faith, and the future -- and your future, in particular, in individual terms.
I was struck recently by a meme I read on Instagram. It read like this:
"Stop focusing on what 'wasn't'
And start focusing on what will be!"
What struck one about the meme was its departure from what one would almost always and everywhere (semper ubique) hear:
Stop focusing on what 'wasn't'
And start focusing on what is!'
From the mid-1960s, when I first started harkening to the main-line Christian thinkers around me, right down to the exact present day,
I would hear the second, corrected version of the meme:
And start focusing on what is!
The mindfulness people would tell me that, the MSW people would tell me that, the self-people would almost all tell me that, the therapists would tell me that, the trained priests and pastors would tell me that, the movies and television would tell me that, Mom and Dad would tell me that, probably PZ would have told me that. And it's true and right so far…
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Dec 2, 2019
Episode 289 - Saskatoon
To respond to the opening invitation and make a gift in support of PZ's Podcast, click here (https://mbird.com/support/donate/).
The most recent cast, entitled "GPF", has drawn a lot of response. This new cast develops the theme a bit more, and rounds it with memorable music by what Spencer Leffel once called my "house band".
The last third of life is characterized, or should be, by increasing dis-engagement, increasing observation of the past, and hopefully by increasing peace of mind. Add to that a warmer faith, or hope, in what lies beyond death for the individual self. (I'm not interested in resources for the aged and the dying that focus solely on the "process" of mortality. I need more than that! I need to know where I'm going, at least the core of it.)
Take my inventory of your own years, in the templates of gratitude, peace, and faith (for what lies jenseits, i.e., across the Jordan). If you find yourself feeling pretty low on the scale, there is no time to lose ("No Time" -- T…
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Nov 25, 2019
Episode 288 - GPF
This follows from Episode 286, entitled "Sine Qua Non" (https://pzspodcast.fireside.fm/250), and concerns the arrival of gratitude and peace at the end of life -- or, better, way before the end of life -- and the birth of faith for one's safe "arrival" after death.
I speak at first about disillusionment with the world, and especially with the world's repetition. "The World Is a Circle" (Burt Bacharach/Hal David, 1973), and come to find out, it really is a circle. Trends rise and fall, and almost always, persistently come back. "Burning" passionate concerns ebb and flow, but almost always re-enter the equation. Generations create and build and re-build, and then it's forgotten. Until, two generations later, the same vision is proffered and embodied, then shaken down, then re-embodied. Then bulldozed!
Where do I turn? "Where Do I Go/ Follow the river... Where is the something?/ Where is the someone/ That tells me why I live and die?" From the broken-down platform of disillusionment, wher…
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Nov 18, 2019
Episode 287 - Julie, Do You Love Me
My subject is the birth of love in human relationships. What causes a person to love (as opposed to being indifferent, or even hostile)? What causes you and me to love another (as opposed to being merely dutiful, or resentful, for that matter)?
I recorded the cast because one is bombarded these days, within mainstream Christian circles, with calls to love, summonses to embody the way of Jesus, His program, as it were, for this broken world. These calls are sincere and appropriate. But they lack something. They lack motive. They lack the motivational power to perform the deed!
The Gospel is summed up in one easy sentence from I John 4: "We love because He first loved us." A person can't love on his or her own steam. Love is birthed from prior love.
This is true for Bobby Sherman, in the somewhat dumb but overwhelmingly true song from 1970, entitled "Julie, Do You Love Me". If 'Julie' loves me, I can do anything. But if she doesn't (love me), I'm an unanchored buoy floating on the surfac…
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Nov 18, 2019
Episode 286 - Sine Qua Non
A scene near the beginning of the Russian movie version of War and Peace (1965-67) conveys the inner dialogue of a young woman as she lays dying after childbirth -- actually, as she has just died. Her spirit wonders to herself in sorrowful bewilderment: "I gave everything to everyone else, sought to love everyone else, but I was rejected by them, treated badly by them. I don't understand."
The passage is moving, and also unsettling, because the character's inner reality comes to expression only in her closing moments, and it is most definitely un-resolved.
As Mary and I watched this, we both thought to ourselves, May it not be so with us. Please let it not be so with us when our time comes -- whether that is sooner or later.
This podcast affirms three essentials, three sine qua nons, of the human heart -- really, the human self -- as we face death, whether "early", whether accidental, or whether "in the nature of things" in old age. Three essentials for a happy exit.
Each of these I wo…
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Nov 14, 2019
Episode 285 - Listen to the Music
There is so much talk just now about the decline of Christianity in this country. But try to listen to the right music on that score. Or rather, the more accurate music!
The fact is, young people and young families are flocking to churches where the Gospel is preached. From Charlottesville to Lower Manhattan to Bedford to Waco to Louisville to Winter Park to Rice to Bradford to "Baltimore and D.C. now (Don't forget the Motor City)" (Martha & The Vandellas, 1964)) to ... well, you fill in the blank: people are coming to church where mercy is offered, hope is proffered, and defeated persons succored. And it's not just "Back Row America". The Offer's being made everywhere.
And a further point. The poll takers of church attrition are not talking very much to Hispanic and other immigrant communities. The Hispanic pentecostal churches are thriving. I mean, booming! Go to Bridgeport. Go to The Bronx. Go to Orlando, near the Airport. Visit Guillermo Maldonado's church in Miami. Go to ... we…
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Oct 23, 2019
Episode 284 - They Came From Beyond Space
The subject of the cast is inspiration: where it comes from and how to get it. That may sound a little ambitious, but lots of us are looking for it, whether in our family and our marriage or in the pulpit and our ministry or just in the Wee Wee Hours of a stressed-out life.
Joe Meek, the odd independent English record producer from the late 1950s and early-mid '60s, is a moving example of an inspired person, a creator whose inspiration came within the context of mediocre performers and lame song-material. His records such as "Son, This Is She", performed by John Leyton, and "Paradise Garden", performed by Peter Jay, are bizarrely convincing marriages of eccentric material with inspired crafting. Sort of like us poor preachers, who are pretty flawed instruments but hope to be "produced" by God in such a way that we can do some good.
I also refer to a preacher I admire whose balletic body-language in the pulpit is as effective and appropriate to the substance of the Message as anyone…
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Oct 7, 2019
Episode 283 - Achilles Heel
It seems that human nature, or rather, one's understanding of human nature, is the Achilles Heel of theology -- and philosophy, too -- throughout the "Spin-Me-Round" (Dead or Alive, 1985) of cyclical human history and cyclical failed answers to the problem of being human.
If you have a high doctrine of human nature, and human potential, you'll generally opt for a low doctrine of God. (You don't need Him.) But if you have a low doctrine of human nature, and human failed expectations, you may well opt for a high doctrine of God. Or rather, you'll be more inclined to look for God outside yourself than to believe you've got intrinsically the answers.
Which is to say that the banana peel of Christian history seems to be a swelled inaccurate view of human agency and possibility. We slip, in other words, on the banana peel of exaggerated human potential.
My podcast reviews the doctrine of human nature, in broad terms, within the history of the American Episcopal Church. I see that doctrine as…
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Sep 24, 2019
Episode 282 - Under a Cloud
This is part two of a series on the arithmetic increase, as one grows older, in unchangeability within the human personality and yet the extraordinary palpable power of absolving grace to stop the decline!
In the same way that perceived personal rejection, especially at a young age, becomes a kind of iron straitjacket defeating almost all attempts to change oneself -- and certainly defeating attempts by other people to try to change you -- in the same way, personal affirmation and one-way love demonstrated towards you when you are "under a cloud" opens that straitjacket immediately and it drops away.
Not that echoes of a prime, early rejection won't be heard again. For they will! But absolving love cuts the cord on it, breaks it off you, unshackles you from its chains, and opens your pores and your veins.
I've seen this again and again, both in the hardening of rejection as an attitude to life and in the "My Chains Fell Off, My Heart Was Free" (C. Wesley) consequence, inside a person,…
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Sep 24, 2019
Episode 281 - Downhill Racer
The downhill momentum of inertia and prior woundedness in people begins early but seems to pick up speed the older you get. In other words, the more time elapses since an early rejection or early hurt was sustained, the more impact it seems to have on you as you age.
I keep seeing contemporaries of mine, most of them in fact, in whom what was an idiosyncrasy or "slight defect" in youth or early adulthood becomes more pronounced, and finally, quite alienating. This goes for addiction and over-eating and personal hygiene, but also includes resentments, bitterness, unforgiveness, and obsession. At this point in my observation, I would almost say that a person's temperamental negatives uniformly get bigger and more gross with the passage of time. Barring, that is, the intervention of a forgiving, absolving love that takes the person as he or she is. The result of a sincerely merciful intervention, so counter-intuitive in relation to the world's judgement but so luminously true in the Chris…
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Sep 6, 2019
Episode 280 - Susan
Human nature is extremely vulnerable. I'm thinking of one's inwardness, and the way a seemingly small rejection, loss or blow of some kind can be enough to unravel a person's entire equilibrium.
You can compare yourself, even if you're basically a coper -- many people aren't -- to the seemingly impregnable 'Death Star' in "Star Wars". That massive circular spacecraft/world is perfectly defended. Except, yes, there is a vulnerability. It is a tiny one, but it's there just the same. All Luke needs to do is find that opening, and one small rocket is sufficient to blow the entire thing "Sky High" (Jigsaw, 1975).
This cast understands most people as balancing their lives, both inwardly and outwardly, as if they were Charles Blondin, the celebrated French tightrope walker. At any point, we can get distracted or interfered with, lose our balance, and go plunging to our death. I believe we are sometimes closer to the edge than we think.
There's a rather "arty" Hollywood movie from 1964 entitle…
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Sep 6, 2019
Episode 279 - The Ballad of Marianne and Paula
I was dumbfounded, in a good way, when a pastor I respect prayed for God to hold Hurricane Dorian at the Central Florida coastline and not permit the storm to go inland.
In 44 years' ordained ministry, I have sedulously prayed never for the weather, "pro" or "con", believing that such a prayer would in all cases be extreme. After all, the Lord said that "it rains on the unjust and the just". Moreover, I had zero faith that such a prayer would ever be answered.
On the other hand, He said to the storm on the sea, "Peace! Be still."
In any event, neither I nor anyone I know personally, whether in formal ministry or not, has ever prayed for a hurricane to stop. Up until last week, I would have considered such a prayer to be out of bounds.
But then a pastor prayed ... out of bounds. And Lo and Behold: Dorian stopped moving west and started moving east.
Three days later a candidate for President prayed a similar prayer to the one that had dumbfounded me. Marianne Williamson tweeted thus (th…
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Jul 29, 2019
Episode 278 - Bonaparte's Retreat
An awful lot of truth is coming out just now, on several fronts. As to why exactly this is happening, I can't precisely say. But when the truth about anything, from ill-anchored relationships to cultural captivities to urban blight, comes out, "Some People" (Belois Some,1985) become threatened. And more than threatened.
This cast talks about Quentin Tarantino's movie "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" (2019), Baltimore (MD), and romantic beginnings (and new beginnings, or rather, re-beginnings). For the latter, the classic Preston Sturges movie "The Lady Eve" (1942) offers a striking instance concerning the anchor of romantic love that exists within the experience of male regression. Not to mention the romantic climax of "A Town Like Alice" (1950 novel, 1981 mini-series).
My point is that core truths of life are often suppressed, masked, covered over, hidden -- by "the powers and principalities, the spiritual forces of wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:12). They don't want you to…
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Jul 24, 2019
Episode 277 - Running a Losing Race
Tyrone Davis sort of says it all in the title track to this cast. He's "Running a Losing Race", and it sounds to me a lot like life.
As a person ages, they have to watch out not to 'diss' the legitimate aspirations and engagements of people who are still, by necessity shall we say, "in the world". It's way too easy from a retired perspective to pour cold water on the hopes and dreams of younger people.
The secret of wisdom, as you get older, would be to bring a perspective that embodies an accurate disillusionment with false hopes and inevitably disappointing projects while at the same offering hope in "the things that remain" (Dylan, 'When You Gonna Wake Up', 1981). To do that -- to portray life in its "True Colors" (C. Lauper, 1986) while at the same providing a better Palette -- well, such is the ambition of this podcast.
I like Greg Townson a lot. A brilliant musician on his own terms, he now plays with Los Straitjackets in the persona 'Gregorio El Grande'. He is a mature adult, mu…
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Jul 8, 2019
Episode 276 - Widow's Pique
There are certain subjects that seem verboten in the pulpit. I'm not referring to political issues, or contemporary social themes; but, rather, to pastoral situations/experiences that are so "close to home" that one's listeners literally rise up in fury against the preacher.
One of these subjects is suicide, if preached honestly and urgently from the pulpit.
Another is a familiar theme of this podcast, the dramatic influence of romantic love -- i.e., the aspiration and almost limitless hunger that exists in people for romantic connection -- on otherwise stable and rational persons. People protest against this subject when I broach it publicly, usually saying something like, "I would never EVER do such a thing", such as leaving my husband and children for somebody else. Yet you find out, just four months later, that the very same person has done exactly that! (I'm not kidding. It happens all the time, tho' there's a kind of embargo on mentioning it.)
This particular cast concerns widowh…
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Jun 24, 2019
Episode 275 - How, Exactly, Does Love Come Down?
We all want to know, when we are down -- I mean, when we are really down -- where we can turn for help. It happens to almost everyone, at least once in your life, that circumstances -- outward, inward, or a combination of both -- pull the rug out from under you and you find yourself flat on the ground. I don't write this to upset you, because you probably wouldn't be reading it if you didn't already know this.
But "Where Do I Go" ('Hair', 1969), when I have nowhere else to go?
Specifically, where do I go to find God? Or rather, where is God located that I might find him?
A recent BBC television series entitled "Mrs. Wilson" depicts a woman's descent into hell after she finds out that every safe harbor and mooring that her life has hitherto clung to is a lie. She finds out, very suddenly, that nothing in her life has been what it seemed. The rug is pulled out from under her life in almost every imaginable way. The story behind "Mrs. Wilson", by the way, is completely true.
She does find…
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May 28, 2019
Episode 274 - Tyrone Davis and the Future of Mankind
It's not just Tyrone Davis. It's almost any artist who captures the popular imagination. He or she is talking about real things, personal and individual issues, the things everyone is carrying. As opposed to abstractions and concepts.
I was looking at a church news service the other day and noted that every single item featured had to do with a "social-justice" or group-identity concern. And every single item was worthy, in the sense that the concern is real and the possibility of Christian moral input hopeful. But I also thought, not many people come to church for the first time looking for group-answers or conceptual constructions. People who come to church for the first time -- and most of us, probably -- are looking for relief from personal pain. We come to God -- when we really come to Him -- for relief and help in the now! This is an empirical fact from experience.
That is why Tyrone Davis speaks to me more than almost every religion news service put together. TD is right there i…
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May 16, 2019
Episode 273 - The Treasure
A little bit of surgery can compose the mind, right?
In any event, in my recovery I went back to Nevil Shute's novel The Rainbow and the Rose. It concerns the twilight of a man's life as he lies dying in an overturned airplane in remotest Australia, and the insights he has -- and someone else has -- about himself. These insights concern the inward man, not the outward man; and the reader learns to look at himself in the broadest possible and yet the truest possible strokes.
I've tried to say it before, but only one or two relationships that you have had will be on your mind at the end. It may be a child, possibly a lost child. It may be someone you've loved -- and who may be there still, by the grace of God. It may be one of your parents, or a father-figure or someone like that. But it will be a person, not a thing; an intimate connection, not an idea or "narrative".
This podcast invites the listener to review his or her own life in these terms. They are the terms that last, or last un…
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May 7, 2019
Episode 272 - The Bell That Couldn't Jingle
I'm wary of telling a story about myself unless it has potential resonance and carries some possible hope to a listener. Here I am giving a short witness of a counter-intuitive Word received in church the other day; and an even more counter-intuitive "Word" from the world of pop music, which came crashing through my windshield on the way home from church.
The initial Word related to chain-breaking and the possibility of a life-cycle completed rather than repeating. Moreover, this first Word came during the minister's Offertory Sentences! (I had come to hear a sermon, but the Word came via an Offertory Sentence.)
The second Word gave me an instrument through which the first Word could become real, a concrete thing. And that second Word was a rather pale-sounding Christmas perennial entitled "The Bell That Couldn't Jingle". So, much to one's surprise...
God's Word confounds one's most established and convinced narratives. He has a narrative -- or rather, is a narrative. But any narrative…
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Apr 19, 2019
Episode 271 - Lazy Susan
Imputation is the prime "agent" within the great dynamic of the Grace of God. As one need never tire of saying, imputation is when you regard someone as better (or finer or prettier or stronger or kinder) than they are. And the effect of imputation is to make the person actually become, in "real time" and real life, the way they are being regarded.
Often imputation is understood as a sort of "legal fiction", by which you just put a cloak over a wound and by not actually treating the wound allow it to fester and contaminate. This misunderstanding is dispelled when you demonstrate imputation from life -- which not enough exponents of it do! The fact is, romantic love as well as the love of parents for their children, and also the love of mentors and teachers to those in their charge, almost always, if it is to work, includes the "agency" or instrument of imputation. In other words, you're seen as if you were better than you see yourself; and the effect of this in practice is that you wor…
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Apr 1, 2019
Episode 270 - You Little Trustmaker
So I was looking high and low for a little peace the other day. An article I read had upset me, and I thought to myself, "Well, if that's true, then why not just go to sleep for the next ten years, say, and not be conscious."
Then suddenly, an hilarious Instagram post came up from a Mockingbird contributor, which sparked an old association: the 1973 single by The Tymes, entitled "You Little Trustmaker". And somehow, like the correct fork in Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", that made all the difference.
This podcast is in fact a reflection on love and trust, on love enacted as well as love sworn. I hope it will open a door on your own loves, let alone on your own isolation (when you feel it) -- a door on Love as it really is.
And please don't miss Tyrone Davis' 'story in music' at the end, entitled "I Had It All the Time". LUV U!
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Mar 20, 2019
Episode 269 - Soul Trajectory
As the human soul makes its trajectory through life, it "lights on" hoped-for objects of connection. From birth to death, the soul is looking for, urgently aspiring to locate, a substitute for the connection with God that it had before it was born.
Unfortunately, the soul is almost always disappointed. That is because no created entity and no living being can satisfy what only God can satisfy. No person that's been made can satisfy the longing for direct connection with Immortal Love which fills every human soul.
Thus hurts are born and wounds are made. Sorrows are indited and pain is pressed in. And, as my first Episcopal bishop said, the man of God I had known as a little boy on the Washington Cathedral Close, on his death bed -- shocking the Diocese of Washington in 1971 -- "Life is tragic."
How are the wounds of life healed?
Well, about 95% of them can be healed under the maxim, "Feel to heal". If the wounded individual will just stop suppressing, displacing, and swallowing the pai…
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Mar 2, 2019
Episode 268 - Seasons in the Sun
It was touching beyond words to attend and witness the Institution of Stu Shelby as Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, Winter Park, FL. Mary was a Presenter, and I had the chance to just take it all in. Sarah Condon preached the sermon, and it was an absolute home run.
The whole affair felt like "Mockingbird Embodied"; and the message of God's Grace in Christ was utterly tangible and fully fleshed. For me and Mary, this was a high point of our life in Florida.
So I thought about "seasons" in one's life. The word's a little over used -- sort of like "conversation" -- but there is still something to it. Stu and Sarah, and Josh and Crissy, and Dave and Cate, and many, many others we know, are right in the middle of life, of engagement. They are on the front lines of ministry, service, and witness.
Yours truly, on the other hand, is more on the margins. One can't help this for it is a part of aging. Nevertheless, one can give, and serve, in a different way.
Think about Nick Lowe and L…
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Feb 8, 2019
Episode 267 - Blowing Away
Huge -- Yuge -- feedback from the previous two casts, entitled "Surprise Surprise" and "Soul Searchin' Time".
So here I am looking at two basics, two core issues I have with current religion -- religion in the David Zahl/"Seculosity" sense, that is, every attempt to solve the problem of being human by conceiving a lever to fix it.
I see two core problems with most religion, let alone culture, today. This includes evangelical Christianity, which persistently shows, in the case of fallen pastors, disloyalty to its central warrant; and social-progressive Christianity, which also persistently shows, in the case of traditional believers in its own ranks, a failure to live up to its warrant of "inclusion".
My first point is that if one's anthropology is too high, if one's understanding of human nature underestimates the problem of inward inherent conflictedness (i.e., sin), then one's soteriology is routinely too low. In other words, if you believe human beings can produce a just society on…
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Feb 4, 2019
Episode 266 - Soul Searchin' Time
The previous cast, "Surprise, Surprise", raised the vexing question of exceptions in the practice of grace to sinners and sufferers. I spoke about the chronic inability of Christians who emphasize grace to embody it in relation to specific sinners and specific sins. One example I chose was from the Reformed world and one was from the Social Progressive world. The context of each was different, but the phenomenon is the same: "talking the talk" re grace and "radical welcome" but exempting certain individuals or groups of individuals from its "saving embrace".
My question now is How Come? How is it possible for Gospel-emphasizing Christians to still flee a particular sinner? And how is it possible for Inclusion-emphasizing Christians to make "traditional" Christians feel so un-included?
Well, one thing I know is that when you and I are loved -- really loved, concretely and personally -- at our worst point, then we almost cannot fail to extend that mercy to other people at their worst poi…
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Jan 30, 2019
Episode 265 - Surprise, Surprise
A friend recently surprised me with the observation that Christians he knows who preach a "theology of glory" seem to be more welcoming, and forgiving, of real actual sinners than Christians he knows who preach a "theology of the Cross". In other words, the folk who you'd think would be the most merciful to people who've fallen aren't! And people with whose theology you can't necessarily sign on the dotted line -- such as pentecostals or African-American evangelicals -- are!
I'd have to say that my own experience confirms what my friend said. I've spent my whole ministry in a denomination which avers passionately that the chief sign of a Christian Church is its Radical Welcome and Radical Inclusion. (I agree with this, in principle!) But the "rub" is that the welcome doesn't always apply, at least to traditional Christians.
The question I'm asking is why. Why do Christians who protest they are proponents of the "relentless love of Christ" and "the fierce love of God" not practice it i…
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Jan 7, 2019
Episode 264 - Tip for a Happy Marriage
Justin Hayward is a sort of archivist for romantic relationships. He is 72 and still going strong. Two 'Live' performances book-end this cast, which is intended as fresh therapy towards a happy marriage.
Appeals to grace, forgiveness, and empathy in relating to this impossibly different person with whom you are now living, are good. They are probably the only behaviors that will turn your ship around. That is, if it needs turning around.
But when the stresses involved in over-committedness and sheer over-work threaten not just to get you off course but to sink you -- that's when this tip for a happy marriage becomes, suddenly, decisive.
My tip is that you go back to the source, ad fontes -- back to where the relationship began. After all, what started the two of you? What was the juice, the fuel, the electricity, the sub-atomic reaction? Whatever it was partakes of the undying, of the eternal, of the soul. That may sound a little exalted, but "exalted" is how you felt.
You can clearly…
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Nov 19, 2018
Episode 262 - Magic
When it comes to rules or advice for long-term marriage, I often seem to hear words like "covenant" and "promise-keeping". These conceptions of keeping faith with another person are laudatory and fine -- and even necessary to keep the love going.
But "covenant" and "promise", excellent as they are in principle, are insufficient to give you the oomph, the power, to do the thing you both want so much to do. That is because if something comes along that you actually find you want more than the thing you "covenanted" to preserve, or "promised" to keep, the covenant and promise will go out of effect. Covenants and promises are susceptible to being superannuated in exactly one minute. "It Only Takes a Minute, Girl, To Fall in Love" (Tavares, 1975).
How else could you explain the thousands, even the millions of sincere people who made a covenant or exchanged a promise which they then broke? It's not that they wanted to be untrue. It's just that something presented itself that felt superior t…
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Nov 19, 2018
Episode 263 - Too Weak to Fight
One's Christian life will fail if it is not rooted in the truth of human nature, which we all share, like it or not. Similarly, everyone's life, whether Christian or non-Christian or anti-Christian, will fail if it's not rooted in reality. And reality, the reality of people, includes hidden drives, hidden emotions, hidden disappointments, and hidden resentments.
As the Rose Hobart character remarks, almost offhandedly, in "Susan and God" (1940), "No one ever says what they're really thinking." (I love Rose Hobart!)
The point of my Mockingbird podcasts that concern romantic love is to underline what's often really going on -- otherwise, how can you explain the extraordinary and seemingly uncharacteristic decisions about their relationships that otherwise "adult" people seem constantly able to make? If you don't know yourself, if you're unable to diagnose the drives and feelings that overtake you sometimes, then you'll just be blown about by the wind. And possibly blow your own life to s…
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Nov 12, 2018
Episode 260 - Transgressive Enough 4 U?
Experiencing a massive re-think just now concerning world cinema! This has been occasioned in part by watching every disc one can get one's hands on of the recently released catalogue of British "Vintage Classics". Have you ever heard of "Mandy" (1951)? Or "The Captive Heart" (1946)? Or "The Sound Barrier" (1952)?
Or "The Maggie" (1954)? Or "The Angry Silence" (1960)? Or "Melody" (1971)? -- which, incidentally, was the source material for "Moonrise Kingdom" (2012) by Wes Anderson.
What you find out as you view these priceless expressions of popular art is that you've probably been wrong to idolize, almost to the exclusion of other expressions, the "cool" movies of the French 'New Wave' or the British 'Kitchen Sink'/'Angry Young Man' school.
I, for one, got so mesmerized, "When I Was Young" (Eric Burdon and the Animals, 1967), by the narrative of art as "transgression", as the angry denunciation of boundaries and establishments, that I failed to recognize a whole host of other express…
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Nov 12, 2018
Episode 261 - Mountain of Love
This is a kind of "work-book" question for the listeners to this podcast. The issue of romantic love is to the fore again, but the question is other: Why is there general radio silence on the vital point; or rather, why is there not more active concurrence in relation to it?
The point I've been making is this: the dynamic in individual human beings that drives us to want to connect with another human being in a romantic experience of union is the core drive within people. It explains our search for God -- our life as a pilgrimage to know God personally -- and it underwrites almost every important decision, if the truth be known, that we ever make.
That is a strong point, I realize. But it is what I am saying.
My question is therefore this one: while no one is rushing to contest the point, why isn't almost everyone rushing to support the point? Am I saying something embarrassing, or possibly reductionist, by which I mean "people don't want to think of themselves as 'hopeless' romantics"…
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Nov 6, 2018
Episode 259 - Revenge of the Creature
We're talking about love today -- wouldn't ya know -- and the relation of divine love to romantic love. It's a familiar, but one that remains very fresh, at least as long as human memory and human loss remain conscious.
Here is the key line, from a kind of monologue that occurs towards the end of "Revenge of the Creature" (1955), a sequel that's even better than the original. The young female scientist, played by Lori Nelson, says to her junior-professor colleague, played by John Agar, who is much enamored of her: "I looked up the definition of love in Webster's Dictionary, and this is what Mr. Webster says: 'Love is a feeling of strong personal attachment induced by sympathetic understanding'."
That's a prime statement and I wonder if you identify. Does it nail down one's one-to-one attachments? Does it nail the relation we seek with God? In both cases I think it does. It distills the divine as well as the human.
With the account of a recent conversation I had with someone who plunged…
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Oct 3, 2018
Episode 258 - Sunshine of Your Love
Everyone was young once. Adolescence, which is roughly the period between ages 16 and 25, is THE time in your life when you experience the strongest emotions, emotions contingent on loss but also fulfilment, expression but also suppression.
You could almost say that one's adolescence is failed if you haven't felt the strongest degree of pain and also of pleasure that it is possible for a human being to feel.
When we attack someone for having fun in college -- I am not talking about sexual assault, which is always wrong -- we may be attacking our best selves! Moreover, we are failing to understand the crucial connection between a free-spirited adolescence and a later adulthood of stability, discipline, and delayed satisfaction. There's a direct relation between how much fun you had in college and how steady you are now. The Pharisees who are riled up about the Judge's being the life of the party during law school -- well, I think they're probably all vulnerable to falling off the wagon…
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Sep 17, 2018
Episode 257 - T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)
Mrs. Zahl recently used the word "periphery" to describe our attitude, mine and hers, to increasing numbers of institutions, groups, and schools of thought to which we have been attached and for which we have been engaged for a long time.
It's not that one has changed one's mind, or believes differently. Rather, it's just that human institutions and associations, over time, tend to disappoint. You begin to see you were attached to something quite malleable and even mercurial -- which you believed to be enduring and trustworthy.
Thus, for example, I have withdrawn my emotional connection to Harvard College. It's happened (on the basis of an ideological policy the administration has aggressively pursued). One didn't decide to stop feeling warmly about the Yard and its environs; I just woke up one day no longer feeling that way.
There are other examples. But maybe you can fill in your own.
Funny, given the atmosphere of malice and "gotcha" that permeates our politics, I sometimes wonder…
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Aug 15, 2018
Episode 256 - My Antediluvian Baby
Donovan's odd and brilliant song from 1970 entitled "Atlantis" is a good example of what PZ's Podcast is all about.
And what is that?: Well, if you get to the heart of what's really on your mind, what's really bothering you, then you are almost home. Moreover, if you can give it up to God, He always deals with it, and for your good. Making the connection between your reality and God's Reality: that's the presenting problem of life.
I like "Atlantis", by Donovan, because underneath the sententiousness of the first minute or so, what the singer really wants to talk about is "my antediluvian baby". Underneath the somewhat affected "history" lesson is the singer's drive to dive, his drive to locate the underwater object, the girl, of his dreams. (Think "Stella Fregelius", that most alarming novel of H. Rider Haggard. Don't ever read it, by the way -- that is, if you value your sanity.)
This cast, per usual yet with a fresh flare into the night sky of one's life, asks you to ask yourself wh…
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Jul 31, 2018
Episode 255 - The Letter
Pastorally -- and generally -- it is easy to miss the core of what's going on with a person in pain. You may see some symptoms -- tho' sometimes even the symptoms are hidden -- and may sub-rationally understand that something bad is taking place under the surface. But when it comes to the "Heart of Darkness" inside a sufferer, it may be very hard to fathom and to surface.
Yet surfacing that "Heart" is the essence of what love is all about.
How often in relationships have I missed the heart of the problem!
This cast takes as its text a letter that Eric Clapton once wrote to Pattie Boyd. It is as heartfelt and simply surgical as a letter to another person -- let alone God -- could possibly be. If only all of us could lay out our elemental pain in such an open fashion. For then the pain, through active and concerned empathy, could be felt, and maybe healed.
But that rarely happens. What happens instead is suicide, fatal irrational decisions, extreme actings-out, and interventions that ins…
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Jul 30, 2018
Episode 254 - Tupper
No finer Southern prep ever hit the scene than the Sewanee graduate Tupper Saussy. His two albums produced under the name "The Neon Philharmonic", with Don Gant, are supreme examples of symphonic rock. More than that, however, the songs are profound.
Saussy's track entitled "Something to Believe In" speaks the voice of a questing human soul, "riding the wind" of life and searching for "something to believe in". Needless to say, the soul finds "a girl", whom the soul believes in and worships, only to lose. Now what? At the end of the song, Tupper's soul prepares to die, still looking for that "something to believe in".
I think we're probably almost all in that boat. Life's a wholly engaged existential search for God, and it's quite dangerous, because "in the dark", which is life in the world, you can think you've found it but you haven't. And then, when what you thought was It turns out not to be It, one's disillusion, and dissolution, becomes terminal. Be careful, in other words, about…
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Jul 23, 2018
Episode 253 - Facing the Cannons (NOT!)
Shibboleth's are often true in part. Maxims are true in part. But they are never, or at least rarely, wholly true.
One such maxim is a current fashionable imperative, Face the Cannons. The idea is that when you are confronted with opposition or antagonism, your best bet is to look it squarely in the face and permit it to do its worst. Somehow in that acquiescent transaction, your foe will lose its power and kind of flow through you and get de-potentiated.
There is a truth to this. Frank Lake used to talk about "assimilating the negativity" of one's life. He had, in practice, an important therapeutic point.
And yet! There seem to be certain "antagonists", certain oppositional forces -- some of them inside a person, some of them outside -- that resist the treatment. Certainly, there exists pain in our lives so acute that the prospect of facing it directly is too heavy for words. In other words, facing it, practically speaking, is almost impossible.
This podcast talks about THAT particula…
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Jul 19, 2018
Episode 252 - Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life
In a quote that's been making the rounds recently, Rudolph Bultmann wrote, "When we encounter the words of Jesus in history, we do not judge them by a philosophical system with reference to their rational validity; they meet us with the question of how we are to interpret our own mode of existence. That we ourselves be deeply disturbed by the problem of our own life is the indispensable condition of our inquiry."
Note that word "indispensable".
I used to pussy foot some around this, trying to allow for "stronger" personalities or less either-or ways of putting the Christian Gospel. But all the time, I was really just scared to put it the full way I'd experienced it myself, afraid to do full (albeit excoriating) justice to the insoluble problem of being human -- insoluble, that is, on its own terms.
The truth is -- "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life" (from 'Naughty Marietta') -- you can't make an inch of progress in solving your problem until you state the problem with no holds barred. And at t…
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Jul 4, 2018
Episode 251 - The Spider and the Fly
Benjamin Britten's 'Spider and the Fly' number from his Suite for "Johnson over Jordan", by J.B. Priestley, takes you by surprise. It sounds like Gershwin at the start, then becomes a kind of danse, and is ultimately sinister. The composer meant it like that, for he was drawn to Priestley's play because it concerns life after death; and Britten was interested in life after death during this period of his career.
Priestley broke an English taboo, you might say -- but it's a taboo in our country, also, in practice -- in his 1939 reflection on purgatory, and salvation, which he entitled "Johnson over Jordan". There is little in 20th Century theater to rival the third redemptive act of "Johnson over Jordan", except maybe "A Christmas Carol" from the century before.
What I hope to have underlined in this podcast is the play's decisive concern for universals. It was written and produced in the period right before World War II, but you'd never know it. Priestley is interested in the poignant…
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Jun 21, 2018
Episode 250 - Bells Are Ringing
This is a short riposte to the politicization of basically everything just now; but not in the way of taking sides, but rather in the way of digging deeper. I mean, digging deeper to the best and true interests of human beings.
The best and true interest of human beings, the necessary condition for our welfare, exists in the direction of connection with another person; and, most typically (tho' not absolutely always), a romantic connection. The best interest of us does not consist in political concerns and goals. As Sting sang it, in "Spirits in the Material World" (1981), "There is no political solution. Have no faith in constitutions."
Sting did not mean, and this podcast does not mean, that politics is not important; or that social and political concerns are not worthy ones. But social and political concerns seldom partake of ETERNITY. They are passing away. By definition, they are passing away.
What doesn't pass away is the human aspiration for romantic connection. The reason one c…
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Jun 3, 2018
Episode 249 - Sanctification (Is Making Me Late)
Ellis Brazeal recently pointed out a clear-and-present fact about what we call "sanctification". Ellis observed that the moment we begin to think we have it, or have made it, it is completely nullified. In other words, the only actual sanctification at which one ever arrives is un-self-conscious.
Another way of putting this would be to say that no amount of or "espece de" virtue-signalling will ever cut it. The moment you draw attention to your "growth" or "discipleship", at that exact moment it gets disqualified as evidence of moral improvement. The only material sanctification is, to the evincer of it, unawares! Someone ELSE, maybe, sees you're a better man than you were before in some area. But the moment you see it, or glory in it even, it vanishes. It literally ceases to exist.
I would never in a million years have believed that the Top 40 song by the Canadian band Motherlode entitled "When I Die" would apply to me. At the time, which was the spring of 1970, I disregarded the so…
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May 25, 2018
Episode 248 - Dead Reckoning
Pastoral experience in hospital pre-op units provides abundant evidence for the existence of the soul. I first saw this evidence in Birmingham years ago, when someone we knew and loved was having to go into the operating room twice the same day, because the first "pass" that morning had failed. The situation was in fact do-or-die, and I had never before seen the look of fear which had come over the patient's face as she was being prepared for her second procedure.
Then another time, in Washington, as the gurney was being wheeled out to surgery, a kind of fluttering look of complete panic and "We Gotta Get Out of this Place"- NOW came over a man I knew. The inward person, i.e., the soul, was in absolute but completely failing revolt over what the outward person, i.e., his body, was being forced to endure.
This is not dualism. It's empiricism. There is a body and there is a soul, and the two will part -- the connection between them be dissolved -- at the point of death.
My podcast consid…
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May 11, 2018
Episode 247 - Shoe Horn
People are constantly trying to shoe horn their search for God into containers too tight for the Object of the search. This is probably true of some of your interests, whether it's food or Hammer horror films or "Philadelphia Soul" -- to name two of my current but chronic faves -- or you name it. On something or someone, you are probably pinning very high hopes.
The blogosphere is full of such shoe horns -- interests such as a movement or style or movie or type of music that attracts your "ultimate concern" (Tillich). But they don't actually produce for you what you need.
Take Joe Cocker. I love Joe Cocker, and think "Hitchcock Railway" is one of the irreducibly GREAT rock 'n roll songs of all time. Or Led Zeppelin 2, the album. I honestly thought once -- in practice, tho' I'd have denied it in theory -- that Led Zeppelin 2 could save me. Or for that matter, the movies of Jacques Demy. The latter are wonderful, but they can't save a person.
Nor can another person save a person. (Tho'…
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May 2, 2018
Episode 246 - Welcome to the Club
One of the best things about the recent Mockingbird conference in NYC was its unerring focus on universals and primary factors in human destiny and identity, rather than on contingencies and elements in life that do not endure, but pass away.
Hence one's love for Blue Magic.
Blue Magic were a Philadelphia group in the early and mid-1970s who stuck to absolute basics. Which is to say, Blue Magic stuck to romantic connection and romantic loss as the big drivers. Almost every song they performed is about acutest mourning (for a person) or ecstatic presence (of a beloved and loving person). I don't think "profound" is too strong a word for Blue Magic's output. (Never mind the Spinners, Stylistics, Delfonics, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes).
This cast talks about Home and the treasured feelings, some of them conflicted and unfulfilled, that almost everyone has concerning Home. Think "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Green, Green Grass of Home". In passing, I connect those feelings to curren…
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Apr 22, 2018
Episode 245 - How U Break a Soul-Tie
Well, the short answer, tho' not the whole answer, is: you can't. I wish you could. I can give you a hundred pointers and tips concerning it; and can even print out some prayers for you to say, in hopes of their breaking the soul-tie.
But they would all be "tweaks". They would all be wistful hopes that will let you down. This is because in "the natural" -- i.e., within the systems and interactions of this world -- the soul-tie is a tethering of something eternal, your endless soul, to a contingency. The chain of your soul to the memory or person or situation to which it is chained partakes of eternity. You can't break it. From your/our end, it is unbreakable.
On the other hand, it is nothing to God. Because God is in charge of your soul, He -- and He alone -- can unchain you. "Unchain My Heart" (Ray Charles, 1961). Exactly how God does this, exactly how and when and where God unfastens the unfastenable in your life -- I can't say. (Wish I could.)
But one thing I can say. And mean it! "…
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Apr 9, 2018
Episode 244 - Soul-Tie
This cast is a kind of summation of my thinking about romantic love in its relation to one's soul's salvation.
I have thought about the compelling nature of romance -- between two people, I mean -- in both its positive, inspiring importance and also its possible negative and undermining impact. In fact, one has long searched for a key, the 'haft' that actually opens the door and heals one of scarring memories and long-carried-over inward losses.
Not only has this theme of romantic love's long-term vicissitudes been with me for awhile, but I've often wondered what a cure for it would look like. Not that it's all about me, but it's definitely about people I love and know; and especially, let it be said, the older one gets and the more reflective one is forced to become as one gets physically older.
Thus when a spiritual adviser spoke recently about the vitiating power of a negative "soul-tie", I was all ears. She sounded as if she were on to something. (Why did no one ever tell me about…
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Mar 23, 2018
Episode 243 - Hitchcock Railway
This cast is about low anthropology, or rather, hidden anthropology.
Have you been struck by the comments concerning the Austin bomber in which people near and dear to the young man say they saw no signs or external evidence of any kind that he was thinking about doing this, or about anything, for that matter, out of the ordinary, let alone murderous?
My experience of people, especially act-outers in life, is that what they do often takes one by surprise. They didn't "advertise", in other words, their deeper, let alone their deepest feelings. The internal preoccupations of the acter-out -- or the surprise acter-out -- are rarely vouchsafed in advance. They may give you a hint or two if you are really looking or listening -- most people aren't -- but generally, as Jimmy Webb wrote the song, "I Keep It Hid".
This is important, because it means there may be a 'No Trespassing' sign over the most serious, wounded, hurt, vulnerable parts of a person. A person can actually go all the way thro…
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Mar 15, 2018
Episode 242 - Bay of Angels
I'm always surprised when proponents of One Way Love fail to apply it
in concrete cases. In other words, we can talk a good game -- about
how Christ is always there, gets there first (!), when we are at our
lowest ebb, in our worst place of sin and paralysis -- how no sin, no
sinner is ever beyond the reach of His "saving embrace" -- but when we
or someone close to us -- someone we really KNOW, in other words -- is
lying there bleeding to death from a self-inflicted wound, well,
then... I just don't know.
What I am saying is that One Way Love is easy to talk about, but
rarely happens in concrete instances. I almost wince now when I hear
or read bold expressions concerning One Way Love, because experience
has taught me that it's usually just words. And to tell the truth,
the institutional church is, formally, almost never the dispenser of
grace to sinners -- except maybe some particular category of persons
that fits a current "narrative".
Jacques Demy's movies display wondrous exampl…
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Jan 30, 2018
Episode 241 - Urgent
People are so good at minimizing the human situation. I've encountered this throughout Mary's and my ministry, right from the very start, in Silver Spring, MD.
The religious "professionals" detested my message, that the world was in incomparable conflict with itself, and that each human being experiences comparable conflict inwardly. People would say, your message is too "down", and I just don't like it. It's too dark, or depressing, or gloomy.
But what actually happened is that a majority of the people listening tuned in fast! And then they started inviting their friends.
It's not that the human condition is hopeless. With God it is never hopeless. But without God, yes, the human condition is hopeless.
And the older you get -- I know this can sound patronizing -- but the older you get, the more empirically evident it becomes that life stumps a person. An inflexible person becomes an impossible person -- and an impossibly unhappy person. A messy person becomes a hoarder. A depressed pe…
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Jan 25, 2018
Episode 240 - 8 Days a Week
I don't talk about romantic love because it is worshipful in its own right. I talk about romantic love because it is the closest signpost we have to God.
Whether it's the Beatles ("Eight Days a Week") or Hugo ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame") or Wagner ("Tannhauser") or Jimmy Webb ("Wichita Lineman") or James Gould Cozzens ("By Love Possessed"), the inspired listeners of the world have not failed to miss the Back Story, underneath all our 'narratives' and front stories, of the noble search for love and merger, the absolutely right and proper desire of every human person to merge with another human person. This Back Story underwrites every natural life. If you won't see it -- because
everybody can see it -- then your life will end on a note of unconquerable wistfulness.
Yet romantic life is never quite right! It is always a little "off". This is because it calls the almost-Absolute -- i.e., another human being -- the Absolute -- i.e., God. Romantic love, when not subsumed to God, i n…
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Dec 12, 2017
Episode 239 – A Disease I Do Not Have the Courage to Name
This Christmas cast is about communication between people, and God. Moreover, it’s about the cost of poor communication, which can be suicide, let alone habitual alienation. And the rich advantage of good communication, which can be the
difference between life and death, let alone satisfaction and personal happiness.
Recently, Tullian Tchividjian spoke at a ‘Broken Christmas’ service in Living Faith Lutheran Brethren Church at Cape Coral, FL. He spoke brilliantly, soberly, gravely, touchingly, humorously at points, and as affectingly as Mary and I have ever heard him speak.
To introduce Tullian, I took an illustration from William Inge’s 1970 novel entitled “My Son Is a Splendid Driver”.
In that novel, the author, a man in his mid-40s, is visiting his aging mother and father in the small Kansas town where they live and where he grew up. Uncharacteristically, his mother does not meet him at the station — ‘My Son’ takes place during the Great Depression — but only…
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Dec 12, 2017
Episode 238 – Motivate!
This is a short talk on motivation and love.
What motivates a person to do something — to REALLY do something.
As opposed to remaining endlessly exhausted and trapped,
within a cycle of inner conflict and desuetude.
As usual in PZ’s Podcast, love is the answer. But how? And why?
Karl Barth’s decisive mistake is exposed — without animus.
Parishioners’ failed self-knowledge, let alone my own failed self-knowledge,
is exposed — by experience.
You have to start with experience.
It doesn’t mean you have to end there.
But you have to start with your own experience..
Simeon Zahl never tires of saying this, and I agree with him.
If you don’t start with your own experience,
and hopefully a somewhat detached perspective on your own experience,
your own experience will continually surprise you,
and maybe one day destroy you.
My cast concludes with an interesting example of a person who seems to
be “disinterested” in relation to his own human embodied life
to…
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Oct 15, 2017
Episode 237 – One Monkey
You listen to the group Honey Cone, described today as early feminists, and they are talking about a universal truth and in memorable pop terms. No hatred of men here, just the emotional recognition that if you don’t love her, she can’t really love you. Love between a man and a woman is a two-way street. (Unlike God’s love for us, which at the center is a one-way street.)
If you don’t understand this and are a man, you are in for trouble “Further on Up the Road” (Clapton and the Band, 1978).
I learned this from more than one source, which I talk about in the cast; but the main source was Honey Cone. Or rather, they told me it before I could hear it. And now I am telling you.
Oh, and I also learned this (crucial) life lesson from “Atom Age Vampire”. “Atom Age Vampire” is one of those brilliant artistic and sadistic Italian horror movies from the early 1960s that if you saw it once, you never forgot it. (If you see it now, you’ll never forget it!) Those movies ar…
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Sep 27, 2017
Episode 236 – Psychosis
“Psychosis” is a very strong word for a cultural phenomenon. But it allows us to speak of a fissure over against reality, when groups of people see things around them in a way that is divorced from the facts.
You can apply the phenomenon of group fissure from reality, to anything you like. I can see it in the way a very specific historical reality, the Anglican Church as the English expression of legal and official Protestantism, has been so completely buried by a different “narrative” that it is as if the reality never was and never existed.
So completely, in other words, has a narrative concerning a development in church history taken over the historical facts that it has become AS IF THE REALITY NEVER WAS.
You see this sometimes in relationships. You thought somebody was totally wonderful, and sympathetically disposed towards you, and maybe even loved you. And then, in a single moment, you discovered you were wrong! Everything you thought about the person had been a misre…
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Sep 12, 2017
Episode 235 – The Year We Make Contact
I’m talking about pastoral contact, which is just another way of talking about personal contact. How do you get through to somebody? How do they get through to you? What establishes direct contact with the person that you really are?
The music of my casts almost all concerns that point of contact. Music can do it! Movies can do it. Cable can do it. It’s got to happen, by the way; or you perish from solitude.
There is a particularly instructive classic movie that deals head on with this question of making contact, and from a specifically Christian angle. It is called “Come to the Stable”, and stars Loretta Young and Celeste Holm. It came out in 1949.
“Come to the Stable” tells the story of two French nuns — one was born in America — who believe they have been directed by God to found a hospital for children in southern New England. They approach individuals whom they meet basically “by chance”, with their requests for concrete aid. They are never, finally turned a…
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Sep 11, 2017
Episode 233 – The Story in Your Eyes
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.…
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Sep 11, 2017
Episode 234 – Turning Point
This theme of the insuperability of at least one problem in your life continues to absorb me — and in the light of hope and hopefulness.
I tell the story of a woman who recently attended a meeting of church executives, almost all of whom are absorbed by current issues and questions of identity in political terms. This person said to me afterwards, “It seemed like a voice spoke to me, as I listened to the virtue-signalling: ‘This form of Christianity has no future.’ ” What she meant was that there was no SAVING being proffered, nothing related to the fear of death and the questions of regret and remorse that overwhelm individuals as they grow in age.
I have to agree with my friend.
Then I watched an old “war horse” of a Hollywood movie entitled “The Sign of the Cross” (1936). For all its age, “The Sign of the Cross” is utterly blunt and shockingly direct concerning the human and philosophical objections to faith, faith itself, and the inter-face between faith an…
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Sep 4, 2017
Episode 232 – Easier Said Than Done
Sometimes when I hear a sermon or address that stresses the presence of God in catastrophic situations, let alone God’s presence in the midst of sin and sinners, I want to stand up and ask (tho’ I never do): “Do you really believe what you are saying? Are you willing to go all the way with such pronouncements, placing God in such desperate company? Or rather, is it just ‘Easier Said Than Done’?”
One’s pastoral and personal experience is that such declarations can be hollow. That is because it seems there is almost always ONE exception, in one’s practice and subjectivity, to the statement that God lives in our tragedies, our discomfiture, and our self-created torments. Usually there is a personal exemption-principle at work, despite all the talk of God’s omni-Grace.
Mary and I used to scratch our heads sometimes when a faithful person whom we knew seemed to lose all his or her serenity and peace in the face of a crushing circumstances, and most notably, in the face o…
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Aug 28, 2017
Episode 230 – Question (LIVE)
The fact that the mainstream churches are hiding their Light under a bushel is the primary reason for their atrophy. The fact that most of our churches are “missing in action” when it comes to the seemingly insuperable pain of living that we bring to them and to their representatives — well, that, I believe, is the main cause of their numerical decline.
Today I want to posit an alternative to this almost willful but in fact mostly unconscious suppression of the Primary (i.e, the Gospel Word) in favor of the secondary (i.e., “issues” of the day) and the tertiary (i.e., endless announcements about meaningless, useless parish activities and functions, to which almost no one really wants to come).
The response to Episode 229, entitled “I Live on a Battlefield”, was astounding! It was as if that cast had pulled down the statue of Dagon, and with it the failed constructions of a generation.
All I was trying to say in that cast was that Mary and I had been “Crawling from th…
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Aug 28, 2017
Episode 231 – On the Road to Love
One more ‘riff’ on the paucity of mainstream church “address” to the hungry and hurt visitor, let alone the hungry and hurt regular; but with hope:
Justin Hayward is sometimes accused of sentimental romanticism. I don’t agree. I think he is on to something.
His songs locate the heart of human pain in the misses and defeats incurred within the elemental atmosphere of romantic love. I believe experience confirms this. Nobody dies thinking about Clemson vs. Alabama, or whether their career could have gone better, or whether Senator Muskie did or did not win the Presidency — or even how you acquitted yourself during a natural disaster.
But EVERYBODY dies thinking about love, or rather, who it is that loved you. That’s the Golgotha door to the next life! It’s the biggest thing that can hang you up at the end of death.
Songs like the two that conclude this cast, which are “It’s Up To You” and “Lovely To See You Again”, have the shoe on the right foot. In fact, I…
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Feb 13, 2017
Episode 228 - Eternal Return
I keep trying to make sense of the divisions we are almost all feeling currently.How can one get "under" them, i.e., in hopes of lessening them a little? Does anyone who is reading this enjoy feeling estranged from others, especially old friends, for example, because of political opinions? Very few, I'll bet. But it's happening.
Then the insight came:
Remember what it was like 47 years ago.
Remember what it was like in the Spring of '70.
Everybody, and I mean, everybody, was up in arms!
If you were a college student then, your campus was probably shut down.
You couldn't get to class, you couldn't get to the library, you
couldn't finish your work and get your transcript, you couldn't
basically do anything.
No kidding. It was a wild ride.
Many people believed it was the end of the world.
God help you if you were on the wrong side, or if you wanted to put
your head in the sand. You were not allowed.
What I am saying is that looking back on it now, after 47 years, the whole apocalyptic sce…
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Feb 8, 2016
Episode 211 - Son, This Is She
There is this amazing supposed contrast between the God Who comes to us from without, and the God Who speaks to us from within.
Historic Christianity generally hears the First.
Eastern religion generally hears the second.
Personally, I hear both -- by which I mean,
a lot of Love is "channelled" or "made flesh" in the inspirations I feel to love and to cherish that are indistinguishable from my own best self.
("I'd like to know where you got the notion" (Rock the Boat) -- The Hues Corporation, 1974).
Yet when I'm in a jam, when I am simply unable to be in touch at all
with my true and best self -- when I'm beset, alone, and without defense or protection -- then it's all about the God who Reaches Down and Helps.
(Like 'Delphine' at the end of The Green Ray.) "Save Me" (Fleetwood Mac, 1990).
This cast speaks of our deafness and blindness when it comes to hearing and seeing God in, well, what lies before us, in our purview -- with a little help from Howard Pyle, James Garner, Manly Wade W…
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Jan 31, 2016
Episode 210 - Saved!
When you were in a tight spot, how did help get through to you,
assuming help did get through to you?
Did God speak from out of the whirlwind -- of crisis, panic, and despair?
Or did aid come from inside yourself -- a 'how-to' or random thought that proved serviceable in the midst?
If you're a regular listener to PZ's Podcast, you may well answer, the former. That's certainly what happened to PZ!
Nevertheless, your source of inspiration, and help, and salvation in the imminent immanent sense of the word: what was it?
You won't be surprised that I've been thinking, in this connection, about UFOs.I saw a Big One in the early '80s -- as did John Zahl, who was with me at the time. And ever since Battle in Outer Space (1959) came out, I've been a kind of believer. But never mind.
What's interesting, though, is that Booth Tarkington was a kind of believer, also. As was Nevil Shute. As was Rudyard Kipling. (You have to read Kipling's short story "A Matter of Fact", just to name one.) Each…
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Jan 25, 2016
Episode 209 - How To Be Popular If You're a Guy
The answer to that question has to lie, somehow, in whatever explains
the popular success of Rodney Marvin ('Rod') McKuen.
Rod McKuen died a year ago, and did you know he sold 100 million records? No kidding. Rod McKuen sold 100 million records.
(He also sold 60 million books. But hey...) Here is a man who was universally dismissed, from day one of his earthly success, as being a "kitschy" Philistine and arch-sentimentalist. No critic had a word of praise for him. Ever, ever, ever. And that's been true right up to the present day.
And let the People say: He sold a hundred million records.
Here is a writer who when you actually take time to listen to his songs
wrote from a fetal position of complete understanding,.. of me and you.
Now let the People say: He sold a hundred million records.
Here is a man who, like Rudyard Kipling -- if it weren't for T.S. Eliot and George Orwell --
would have no friends in "high places" (at least after he died).
People loved his work. Critics hated…
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Jan 7, 2016
Episode 208 - Five O'Clock World
Now we think that reality, the "real world", is what happens "between nine and five", that is, what happens at work, in the office, at school, in career, and so forth. And a lot of people want to tell us that's true.
"But not The Vogues. They were from Pittsburgh and they understood about shifts and hourly pay. Yet they understand more than that!
"For the fact is, 'as you lay dying' (Faulkner), you won't give your "nine-to-five" life a single second thought. Not one single second thought! You'll forget it all, in the absolute blink of an eye.
That's just a fact of old age and death -- the fact of our mortality.
"What you won't forget, however, is "the long haired girl who waits for you/To ease your troubled mind". Or the one who did. Hopefully, it's the same person. As The Vogues observe: in light of her, ''Nothing else matters at all.'
"This cast explores the 'Five O'Clock World' in terms of romantic love.
Not sororal or fraternal love. Not even paternal and maternal love.
But…
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Nov 15, 2015
Episode 207 - Is Paris Burning? (1966)
Here are a few thoughts concerning the atrocity attacks in Paris.
I talk about Islam (and "Islamophobia"), Syrian migration into Europe,
Original Sin and "low" vs. "high" anthropology, reaction-formations among young men when drones are over their heads and they have no control, let alone "buy-in"; and finally, a threatening experience Mary and I had on Times Square recently. Call this PZ's perspective on a current (big) event.
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Nov 9, 2015
Episode 206 - The Rich Man and Lazarus
I keep getting requests for a sort of "early morning Bible study" -- giving the 'treatment', you might say, to a New Testament text that stings, and also helps. So that's what I'll do for a few episodes, beginning with this one.
Christ's Parable of the Rich Man (aka 'Dives') and Lazarus is given in St. Luke, Chapter 16. It's a scorcher, as rough and sand-paper-like as anything he ever said. It's got that devastating line, that between there (hell) and here (heaven) there is a great gulf fixed, an impassable, untraversable barrier.
I believe this. (My own experience confirmed it, tho' I wish it hadn't!)
That being the case, that "when you die, the time for doing is over" (Fr. Richard Ragni), what does it mean for a person in practice? Well, it mandates a careful review of your true situation: who do you think you are, and where are you? (Listen, I'm with you: would rather not deal! No, no, no. Just give me a new DVD daily, like Return of the Fly or Billion Dollar Brain -- there ar…
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Nov 9, 2015
Episode 205 - Unforeseen
It's not an abstraction! It's more than something just to talk about or consider. It could happen to you. In fact, it probably will.
I'm talking about unforeseen death.
Some people hold on for a long time, even when they don't really want to.
Other people want to hold on, but illness intervenes and they go a dozen years earlier than they expected. (You never expect it.)
Other people had a bad habit in youth and maybe adulthood, and it catches them later. They never thought they would be hooked up to a respirator personally.
"I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night" (Electric Prunes, 1967):
That is, I thought I was coughing myself to death.
A habitual "nervous" cough turned into an atomic reaction and I suffocated.
Sweet Dreams Are Made of This?
"Are You Ready?": Bob Dylan asked in 1980.
"No", I might answer, in 2015. "But I'd like to be."
Sunday after Sunday I hear sermons that seem completely to sidestep the one really big reason a person would go to church. John Wesley never sidest…
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Oct 1, 2015
Episode 204 - Honest to God
Pop songs about love are like a corkscrew for understanding the Bible.
Songs like "Hooked on a Feeling" and "Don't Pull Your Love Out on Me, Baby", together with a zillion co-belligerants that are written and performed "In the Name of Love" (Thompson Twins), reveal the nature of love and loss, undoings and exaltings, and painful stasis and buoyed forward movement.
Now just imagine if professional New Testament scholars "parsed" pop songs the way they want to parse the Gospels. You can't do it. Or rather, you don't need to do it. "She Loves You" (The Beatles) is so obviously true. "Tracks of My Tears" is obviously true. "My Girl" is obviously true.
Just like the Bible, or most of it. When you read the Bible through the lens of acknowledged pain and the deficits that come from being emotional human persons -- if you do that, the Bible makes sense. Doesn't need parsing.
William Tyndale was right! The "simplest ploughboy" can understand the Bible, or at least enough of the Bible to…
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Oct 1, 2015
Episode 203 - Pope Francis and the Historical Jesus
The music is "Good Vibrations" at the start, by The Beach Boys; and "I Knew Jesus (Before He Was a Super Star)", at the end, by Glen Campbell.
Here is the description for iTunes and also the blurb for Mockingbird:
So much has been written -- I mean, SO MUCH -- concerning the so-called Historical Jesus: a welter of books and "Untersuchungen". I've spent most of my career reading these books, and writing a few, too.
Then Pope Francis came along and put them all in a cocked hat. This is because if you want to see with your own eyes how Jesus operated in the New Testament -- how he acted, how he spoke, how he was desired, and how he was received -- all you need to do is watch Francis. Phrancis.
The way Christ was with Zacchaeus, Bartimaeus, the man at the Pool of Bethesda, the woman with the issue of blood, Jairus -- the beat goes on:
that's the way Francis acts, and acted while he was under the scrutiny of all of us.
Just watch him on the Philadelphia Airport tarmac, at the shrine to S…
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Sep 28, 2015
Episode 202: Pope Francis
Did you cry at any point as you watched Pope Francis in action during his visit? If you did, when was it? What made you cry?
"Now it wasn't just John Boehner! I noticed as I watched the Pope inter-acting with individuals, and especially with individuals in acute need or distress, that it was those encounters that touched me personally. (I was abreacting all over the place.)
I don't have spina bifida. I'm not in a wheelchair. I'm not six years old, nor 84 (yet). Nor am I homeless. But hey: Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child! My tears flow freely, and often not freely enough. In other words, I identify with distress and need. I identify with exclusion, tho' you might not know it. I identify with rejection and exile, tho' again, you might not know it.
The point is, everybody's at their own point of need. Everybody's got something they're thinking about that's painful.
Pope Francis, walking in the steps of the great Understander, the great Sympathizer, touched the core p…
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Sep 16, 2015
Episode 201: The Real Thing
Is there anything to it?
Is vertical religion -- not just calls to social justice, not just implied belief (system) -- but actual vertical religion rooted in anything resembling fact?
I'm utterly bummed these days by mainstream Christianity that just leaps over the religious element on the way to the "mission" element. There's nothing there, I mean nothing there -- to aid an everyday sufferer. Like me, for example.
On the other hand, evangelicals continue to fake it royally. They'll talk you blue in the face about God's being present in the worst and darkest moments of your life. But when it's you who is actually there, you who is sitting flummoxed in the Shadows of Knight (1966), they act as if they didn't mean a word of it. Grace? Real Grace? "You have got to be kidding." Book him!
The theme of this 201st podcast is Real Religion. Does it exist?
What is it like if it does?
Oh, and SEE The Sentinel (1976). Don't miss The Sentinel (1976).
It's about to be released on Blu Ray;…
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Aug 12, 2015
Episode 200: Catatonia
This is not the Who's Final Tour. (They always come back.)
So maybe it is the Who's Final Tour.
Whatever it is, it's Podcast 200, and that's a benchmark.
Somehow.
So I decided to sum up the two core themes of the last... 100 or so
casts, and also tell you something that's blown my mind recently.
It's an instance of catatonia by way of Catalonia.
Seriously, the two core themes of PZ's Podcast are the durability and necessity of romantic connection; and the presence of God when a person is at the end of his or her rope. 'God meets us at our point of need.'
Gosh, I've seen that happen a lot. Not least of all, to me.
And I know, too, from Mary -- 'Along Comes Mary' (The Association) -- that the boy-girl side of things is paramount. Nothing above it.
Now, for 23 short minutes, Come Fly With Me.
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Aug 8, 2015
Episode 199: What Actually Happens
If you don't factor in the element of romantic love -- or at least its possibility -- you'll surprise yourself when you start making decisions in life.
Sometimes I wish I could give a college commencement address. (No one is ever going to ask.) But I should like to talk about romantic love, and its over-riding, over-reaching, superseding strength as an element -- the decisive element -- in personal decision-making.
I can't really say that, though. Many people seem to want to "privilege" career and/or professional choices over their love life. They seem to want to, at least. But then you surprise yourself! You quit your job, or apply for a job in another city, or go back to school; and the real reason is that you've met someone, or want to. Even desperately want to.
Romantic love always wins. Tho' it takes too long these days.
So much romantic time is wasted by the effort, energy and time, g__dammit, given to careers that end up, eventually, feeling phony, futile, arbitrary, and…
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Aug 8, 2015
Episode 198: Mirage Fighter
Talk about being misunderstood!:
Artur London was one of the 11 most misunderstood men in the world,
at least at the end of 1951. London was a defendant in the Slansky Trial,
a "show trial" under Joseph Stalin.
After suffering the most inhuman torture and brainwashing, London was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes not one of which he had come 10,000 light years close to committing.
Later on, Arthur London was released, rehabilitated; and now they name streets after him.
Arthur London said that his life's struggle was to differentiate between the essence of an ideal, and the form in which that ideal had taken shape politically -- a debased and wicked form, it turns out. London also said that being a Communist in a Soviet prison was like being a Christian tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. Christians, like Communists, could only survive, and persist,
if they clearly separated the Thing Signified from the Sign -- the Substance from the Form.
Good luck, Arthur!
How'd it work fo…
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Aug 8, 2015
Episode 197: The Sacraments Rightly Understood
The church is today so vastly over-eucharisted that you can barely pause to catch your breath. This cast offers an alternative view of the Holy Communion, as well as of Baptism. The original Prayer Book definition of a sacrament was that it is 'an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace'. What a refined and powerful expression. So now Let Smokey Sing (ABC) and find... The Face Behind the Mask (1941). This cast is dedicated to Nancy W. Hanna.
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Jul 31, 2015
Episode 196: Cimarron
"The movie Cimarron, which was released in 1931, won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. (Did you know this?)
It's great blessing, Cimarron -- which was based on the novel Cimarron, written by Edna Ferber. But you'd never know it's a blessing if you relied on the critics.
Cimarron has become notorious in recent times for its racial and ethnic stereotyping. When you read contemporary descriptions of this movie,
it's as if you're being told to put your hands in front of your eyes and also cup them around your ears.
Yet the amazing thing is that Cimarron is actually the opposite of what it's accused of being. It's actually a definitive portrait of "Radical Hospitality",
as the pharisees and hypocrites are all smote; and the outsiders and excluded people are all promoted! Cimarron depicts the triumph of the "minority" in life.
You've got to see it.
But only if you aren't carrying so much presuppositional baggage that your eyes are already closed and your ears already shut.…
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Jul 28, 2015
Episode 195: Shag (The Movie)
Shag The Movie (1989) is a great little entertainment! It captures perfectly, and with high humor and enormous love and heart, the Beach Music phenomenon of the 1960s. Today, however, it touches a current issue -- right from the opening credits. What do you do with distressing material -- images and associations that relate to things you'd rather forget? The general answer seems to be, well, you burn them! You do away with them. You haul them down -- and out.
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Jul 24, 2015
Episode 194: Left Hand Path
I think I'm supposed to understand why right-wing people are intolerant. But it's harder for me to understand why left-wing people are intolerant. Guess I thought they were supposed to be about freedom and diversity. Come to find out, they're not. So I had to go back to a source that's almost been "blacklisted" itself. It's the movie My Son John (1952), starring Helen Hayes and Robert Wagner. Hey, but isn't that a reactionary movie from the Eisenhower movie? No, it's not. It's an excruciating journey into the cause of liberal intolerance. If I -- meaning PZ -- had a mother and a father like 'John' does in My Son John, I'd probably do what he did. I'm almost sure I'd want to.
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Jul 21, 2015
Episode 193: Cross Dressing
The Gallant Hours (1959) is one heuristic movie. Not only does it teach the Church a thing or two about how to honor faithful service, but it depicts an entirely ideal instance of how to dress properly if you're a minister -- or, Heav'n forfend, a "priest". The last scene of The Gallant Hours is one amazing illustration of the triumph of substance over form in connection with haberdashery. If you're a member of the clergy, or are close to one, PLEASE, help them dress down. We need clergy who dress down! The future of the world depends on it.
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Jul 20, 2015
Episode 192: How to Save the Church (But Our Lips Are Sealed)
The Church I have known all my life is in free fall numerically.
I'm talking about Sunday attendance in everyday parishes.
This is not conceptual: one parish Mary and I served for six and a half years has recently closed. (Yes, it's been there since 1832, and now is literally a shell, the congregation having gone formally out of existence!) Another church we served, also for six years but out on Long Island, has seen its attendance fall so drastically that its diocese wants to convert it into a different kind of ministry altogether.
But this podcast is not a list of what went wrong, but what could be done right. The lesson, dear reader, comes from a little movie called The Gallant Hours. This movie's got just about everything you need to know, about everything.
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Jul 20, 2015
Episode 191: Shakin' All Over
This talk concerns the indelibility of certain memories, and why they, and not other memories, are indelible. It also concerns a worrying vision I had in January. But it's all one! Here is my little attempt at some wise counsel: how to integrate indelible aspects of your grown life with the fact that you'll see it all again, up close and personal, the day you die. But again, it's all One. And hey, didn't Charles Reade say, "It is never too late to mend."
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Jul 6, 2015
Episode 190 - PZ's Fabulous New Dating Tips for Gals
This is a word to your future self. You probably can't hear it today.
But I predict you'll hear it loud and clear in five years, or maybe ten. This is a word to your future self. It's a new fabulous dating tip, and carries almost no exceptions, tho' I wish it did! It has to do with internet dating, with the aging process (especially in men), and with the poignant voice of experience.
If you can "Now Hear This", it could save you years of excruciating suffering. I mean years, maybe decades. Maybe the rest of your life.
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Jun 28, 2015
Episode 189 - Why Weepest Thou?
"What makes you cry? When you have an irruption of strong feeling -- and I mean tears in this case -- what is going on? This cast tries to get underneath some emotions we all feel, and in terms of music. It is a subjective "take" on one's music and one's highs and lows. And it's in the service of a Way Maker that tends in the direction of peace of mind."
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Jun 23, 2015
Episode 188 - Scuppernong
Tupper Saussy (1936-2007) was a musician behind The Neon Philharmonic, who produced two memorable albums in 1968-69. He was also a polymath who let himself get in the sights of the Internal Revenue Service,
and paid a heavy price for it. Moreover, he was a devout Christian, of old-fashioned Episcopalian provenance. This week he is on my mind because the fate of Tupper Saussy made me think of a friend who is in some trouble. "Handle Me With Care" is what Tupper Saussy needed. It is what my friend needs. And it's what the world never and the church rarely does
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Jun 15, 2015
Episode 187 - Norwegian Wood
Nevil Shute, whose proper name was Nevil Shute Norway, was a British novelist whose work took an odd turn in mid-career. He was a kind of parasitologist of human nature, always asking the big questions:
Why do people act the way they do? How does the past affect the present?
Is there something more to it that is beyond the apparent? Shute thought there was, but he was a tentative explorer. (He was also a churchgoer.) Did he pierce "the veil"? My answer to that is maybe.
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Jun 14, 2015
Episode 186 - Dead End (My Friend)
'No' is the worst word you can ever hear. (I realize the virtues of saying 'No', yourself, on certain occasions. But when 'No' is said to you, especially at an impressionable age, it's the worst.) This cast is about the
damage created by 'No', especially in romance.
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Mar 11, 2015
Episode 185 - One Toke Over The Line (Sweet Mary)
What think ye when I say that 95% of what you are doing
is futile and meaningless? Well, let's put it another way:
From the standpoint of the after-life, what you are doing is...
you fill in the blanks.
But you can still make it!
You've got to learn how to meditate, and learn how to throw a Crucifix.
Podcast 185 is dedicated to Mary C. Zahl.
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Mar 8, 2015
Episode 184 - Hysteria
In life you can be trapped by forces that are bigger than you are. Especially in professional life. It's possible to "wander in" -- or rather, bumble in -- to a situation in which you get used by somebody else to accomplish a plan of theirs of which you yourself are (at the time) unaware.
Here is my homage to Jimmy Sangster movies. In particular, behold Hysteria, a masterpiece of intrigue from 1965. Watch out! And take comfort, too
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Mar 6, 2015
Episode 183 - Dr. Syn
Oh, to encounter an integrated minister!
We all want to be integrated -- to be ourselves in the pulpit
and also out of it.
But it's tricky to pull off.
Pharisaical elements in the church -- usually one or two individuals
in the parish, who are present -- unconsciously -- in order to hide out themselves in some way or another -- can't long abide a minister who
is himself or herself.
Most of your listeners love it.
But there are one or two who, well, have an allergy.
(They are the ones that can get you every time.)
But then along comes someone like 'Mr. Tryan' in George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life. He breaks the mold.
Or, somewhat spectacularly, Dr. Syn. Dr. Syn, who was known in the movies as 'Dr. Bliss', is just about the most thoroughly integrated Anglican clergyman in history. Could any of us be like him? Dr. Syn is a brilliant swordsman, an agile swinger from church chandeliers, a powerful preacher,
a rousing music leader, a crafty smuggler, a loving father, a wily impeder o…
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Jan 25, 2015
Episode 181 - Dualism Clinic with James Bernard
Come to find out, dualism has a limited but necessary role in resolving the human dilemma, i.e., in living. The percentage is maybe 20% most of the time, but it's possibly 90% some of the time. The English composer James Bernard is Exhibit A here, and a most brilliant exhibit his work has become.
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Nov 21, 2014
Episode 180 - Metropolitan Life
]This is the tableau of a childhood memory,
a memory that came literally to life recently.
I entered a dream, but then the dream was real.
A little like the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but in reverse.
With help from Orpheus and, by way of backdraft,
the Warrens.
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Nov 14, 2014
Episode 179 - Ere the Winter Storms
Why are so many unchanged, I mean fundamentally unchanged,
by the red lights of life? What accounts for persons' resistance
to the lessons of catastrophe? This week Robert W. Anderson, not 'Sister Mary Ignatius', explains it all to us.
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Oct 29, 2014
Episode 178 - Without Which Not
Things recently got so bad somewhere that it looks like all hope is gone.
The thing "imploded", like 'Susan' in The Buckinghams' otherwise cheery pop single.
Poor Susan!
Is there still hope? PZ thinks there is. But it comes from over the border!
And from the year 1917.
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Oct 7, 2014
Episode 177 - Whipped Cream
Big explosions in Church!
Like at the beginning of "Cloverfield".
What do they mean?
Is there any hope in the aftermath?
Well, would I be recording this if I didn't think so,
from Lake Tahoe, as it turns out?
With help from Herb Alpert.
And Jane Austen.
This podcast is dedicated to Melina and Jacob Smith.
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Aug 26, 2014
Episode 176 - Everything Is Tuesday
August Coda.
Labor Day Coda.
General Johnson Coda.
Mergers Not Acquisitions Coda.
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Aug 26, 2014
Episode 175 - Does the Name Grimsby Do Anything to You?
An August summation,
from one explorer to hopefully others.
Rod Serling describes a unique case of one.
Then Armando Trovajoli puts into music the
secret of life. Yes, the secret of life.
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Aug 22, 2014
Episode 174 - Federal Theology in the Letters of Samuel Rutherford
"So, here's the thing." :
Wanna know what faith is?
Listen to ABBA.
Wanna arrest the decline of,
oh, let's say,
mainstream Protestantism?
Listen to ABBA.
Wanna understand yourself?
Listen to ABBA.
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Aug 21, 2014
Episode 173 - And the Winner Is
There is so much truth here.
So much emotional truth, I mean.
It could have been someone else.
It could have been something else.
It could have come from somewhere else.
But it came from
ABBA.
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Aug 20, 2014
Episode 172 - Phony Wars
The subject is reality vs. ideology. 'Pet' Clark wanted to be Superwoman.
I wanted to be a totally focussed pastor, great dad, and good husband.
'Helen' wanted to be "a woman of today". We all failed! "Sorry, it's not possible" (Petula says). And yet, a little child has led me. Lower case.
But upper case, too.
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Aug 7, 2014
Episode 171 - If You Can't Stand the Heat
Here is made a principled decision to opt out, of all manner of causes and notions. With the injunction, however, that in order to heal, you have to feel.
Eric Clapton starts us out. The House Band brings it on home.
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Jun 10, 2014
Episode 170 - Farewell to the First Golden Era
This is a podcast to celebrate: my 170th, in which are offered
some Summer reading, a Concluding Un-Scientific Postscript,
and the best track ever recorded by a certain Wonder.
Hope you like it!
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May 23, 2014
Episode 169 - Wooden Ships
This is about Meister Eckhart and Rudolf Otto, and CS & N.
But it's really about whether and how to engage the world,
given what we now know about it. Guess I'm skeptical, more than ever;
and was surprised to have to dissent from the Master.
First time!
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May 18, 2014
Episode 168 - "Generation Zahl"
A penetrating and courageous televison program from Germany opened me up recently. It was an instance of what Stefan Kolditz, the writer of the program, called a "non-ideological access" to a tragedy.
But not just their tragedy. My tragedy. Yours, too, maybe.
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May 9, 2014
Episode 167 - Emotion
This is all about one thing.
It didn't take Melanchthon to teach me about it,
nor Thomas Cranmer.
No.
It took Burton Cummings to teach me about it.
And life!
So Stand Tall; and for God's sake, don't do something foolish.
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Apr 30, 2014
Episode 166 - The House That Jack Built
Well, the glass ceiling is finally breaking.
It's happening right before our eyes.
But Aretha's going to help us see the "Kehrseite".
With a little help from Lesley Gore, too.
"Come and see." (John 1:46)
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Apr 11, 2014
Episode 165 - Cosmic Recension
Meister Eckhart,
meet Burton Cummings.
And Randy Bachman.
And me.
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Feb 19, 2014
Episode 164 - Happy Clappy
"No use calling, 'cause the sky is falling,
and I'm getting pretty near the end."
This concerns the practical consequences of
(near-)death in life. Join forces with Wolfman Jack (R.I.P.)
and The Guess Who; and 'Charlie Kane'.
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Feb 13, 2014
Episode 163 - Deetour
It's getting bigger. Bigger, at least, from where I sit.
The Contraption, I mean.
And thank you, Karen Young!
And thank you, Mike Francis!
This podcast is dedicated to JAZ, the Minister of Edits.
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Feb 5, 2014
Episode 162 - Rain Dance
Thinking about Obamacare got me onto this one.
But it's not about Obamacare!
It's about Reality.
And Guess What?
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Jan 9, 2014
Episode 161 - PBS
That's Percy Bysshe Shelley,
who gets a little help -- as if he needed it -- from Eric Burdon,
and B.T.O, and John Harris Harper.
And MAY this meditation on termination not be half-baked.
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Dec 20, 2013
Episode 160 - Who Is Going To Love Me?
How can we know God?
Where is God locatable?
With a little help from D. Warwick and a little from St. John,
I want to answer.
Podcast 160 is dedicated to Jono Linebaugh.
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Nov 17, 2013
Episode 159 - The Happiest Actual Life
It's really possible:
"the happiest actual life", I mean.
That was Booth Tarkington's phrase for the hope we could have
in real terms, even when circumstances went against us
and our intrinsic indelible nature went against us.
Case in point: his novel "Alice Adams" (1921).
Case in point: his character 'Alice Adams'.
I think the story is so real as to be Real.
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Nov 11, 2013
Episode 158 - Changing Social Conditions in Indianapolis
Boy, do we need a miracle.
Such things really happen.
As in Booth Tarkington, and as in John Galsworthy.
As in me and you.
And as in: The Buckinghams.
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Oct 19, 2013
Episode 157 - Every Mother's Son
Taking a break now for a couple weeks, but wanted to leave a little white-pebble trail -- not of tears, but of hope. "Come on down to my boat, baby"; and I'm talking about you, Miss Wyckoff; and you, Mr. Cardew; and you, Mr. Zahl.
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Oct 16, 2013
Episode 156 - I Am Curious (Orange)
A Protestant spin on a Golden Oldie from Sweden.
This is also a warning against categorization -- a very personal warning,
as I've suffered from categorization and feel it keenly still.
"Och du?"
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Oct 6, 2013
Episode 155 - Mandy
Alternate title: Mandy and the Episcopals.
Irving Berlin sets the stage;
Sandra Dee plays the lead,
together with Troy Donohue;
and James Gould Cozzens,
like Sister Mary Ignatius,
Explains It All for You.
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Oct 2, 2013
Episode 154 - Kramer
Kramer is my word for transmitted family dis-function and disease.
Kramer in this sense requires acute attention.
With help from The Contraption, Kramer actually can be reduced.
In this podcast, Richard Egan steps up to help us,
with a little help from Faith.
Percy, I mean.
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Sep 30, 2013
Episode 153 - Love in the 40s
When you're 'mature', you're sometimes not.
I learned this in my 40s.
I first learned it in a parish, in 'Cheever country'.
But it was also in 'Miami Vice', every Friday night.
Valerie and Tubbs taught me,
as did 'Sonny' and Theresa.
And Jan Hammer.
There was all this dread, too.
Was it a dream?
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Sep 29, 2013
Episode 152 - Groovy Kind of Love
The text is Isherwood's journal entry for August 3, 1967.
The topic:
How to grow in love for the people who are right around you.
Lesley Gore is going to help us, plus, naturally, William Hale White;
plus Gerald Heard; plus Wayne Fontana.
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Sep 27, 2013
Episode 151 - Girl Talk
I've just written a book.
It is called "PZ's Panopticon:
An Off-the-Wall Guide to World Religiion".
It's not about gender differences nor does it concern ideology.
It looks at the religions of the world in terms of one question:
What does this or that religion have to offer a dying person?
My book concerns religion for a person in extremis.
Dying seems to "concentrate the mind wonderfully" (Samuel Johnson).
I think it serves a most concentrating purpose in helping a person
sift through the wisdom of religion.
Oh, and by religion, I also mean religions that are not called religions,
such as celebrity, sex, things, one's children, one's life-partner,
one's ideology, and the power that you have and exercise in your life.
Power is a big religion.
Religion covers almost anything that habitually or functionally is
worshipped.
This podcast is dedicated to Ray Ortlund.
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Aug 28, 2013
Episode 150 - Early Roman Kings
This is about the Ancient Romans:
their psychic position, their spirit-world of augury,
and the effect of the birth of Christ.
With help from Bob Dylan.
Two corrections, too:
The Thornton Wilder book is "The Woman of Andros",
and 'Camulodunum' was the Roman name for Colchester.
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Aug 25, 2013
Episode 149 - A Heartache, A Shadow, A Lifetime
This is a reflection on 45 years of New Testament scholarship.
That's 45 years in 45 minutes -- one minute for every year.
And Dave Mason puts it all in perspective.
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Aug 4, 2013
Episode 148 - INGSOC
"A little trick with Dick" (The Name Game):
This is about language, control, and Purr-FEC
tion. With thanks to Eric Blair, too.
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Aug 3, 2013
Episode 147 - Transcendence
What can you do when you're face to face with The Antagonist?
I'll tell you this much: no one gets out of here alive.
Unless there are Martians.
This podcast is about suffering, and it's also about transcendence.
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Jun 28, 2013
Episode 146 - Sermon for the Feast Day of Hey Jude
It's about nervous breakdowns -- maybe your 19th.
It's about George's Way with us.
And it's about the music.
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Jun 24, 2013
Episode 145 - Soul Coaxing
What's really important?
"Soul Coaxing" is really important.
But not the practice.
The song!
By Raymond Lefevre and his Orchestra.
THAT's really important.
Gosh, I hope you like this.
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Jun 22, 2013
Episode 144 - Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff
Here we journey to the outer limits of compassion.
Will that suffice?
Or do we need a little help from our friends --
like Jeff Beck, maybe.
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May 16, 2013
Episode 143 - Old Man River
And now a word from our sponsor -- George!
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May 15, 2013
Episode 142 - Girl Can't Help It
In which I talk about George, my new hero.
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Mar 21, 2013
Episode 141 - Easter with Los Straitjackets
Here's the Gospel as I would put it this Easter.
It's never not been the Have Mercy on Me (Cannonball Adderley/
The Buckinghams) of God in relation to the Outta Gear (Los Straitjackets) of us. But it needs to not become a mental exercise.
It needs to be hooked into us, the whole being of our compounded selves.
If it's not making the connection, then it will fail.
(And it often does.)
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Mar 17, 2013
Episode 140 - Make It Easy on Yourself
This is a meditation on self-forgiveness.
I used to think that was a lame phrase,
an exercise in twaddle.
Not so!
Here we have The Walker Brothers,
Los Straitjackets, even Frankie (Goes to Hollywood).
The Lesson This Morning is from Isherwood's journal entry of
July 14, 1940, which is to say,
the Second of the Two Great Commandments.
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Feb 15, 2013
Episode 139 - Journey with Boo (Me and You)
It's here: that surgical song by Lobo, the balladeer's portrait of an ordinary, heart-rending tragedy. Because the picture's true to life, however, there may be room for hope.
Roll up for a magical mystery tour, -- with a Dog Named Boo.
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Feb 14, 2013
Episode 138 - Lobo's Dating Tips for Christian Guys
He has much to teach us!
This podcast, for me, is Camp.
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Feb 2, 2013
Episode 137 - Hero of the War
A short exegesis of personal pacifism.
Scott Walker's song "Hero of the War" made me do it!
Oh, and it's John Lennon in "Oh! What a Lovely War".
That's a correction.
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Jan 31, 2013
Episode 136 - Peaches La Verne
The La Verne Seminar, which took place in the Summer of 1941,
is the second most desired destination for PZ the Time Traveler.
If only one could have been there. It was the ultimate religious retreat!
But still, I think I'd choose, for first place, if I had to choose,
a trip to Universal Studios during the Great Depression,
to witness the filming of that most desired of all works of cinema art:
The Bride of Frankenstein.
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Jan 30, 2013
Episode 135 - Elevator
That's Where the Happy People Go!
Here is "a new way of talking, a new way of walking" --
about praying, about grace, about One Love and the
Underground River.
Jerry Lewis (but you won't like this) has a walk-on, too.
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Jan 24, 2013
Episode 134 - Pillar of Salt
The music! --
evoking Lot's wife and then the Lord's words to St. Peter.
I guess I think it's more and more about the music.
But let's here it for the Haiku,
tu.
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Jan 24, 2013
Episode 133 - Brandy Station
This is not a case of "interpretive signage" !
You'll have to make up your mind on your own.
But Looking Glass will be there to help you,
followed by, close by, Scott W.
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Jan 16, 2013
Episode 132 - Love in the First Degree
This is about forging forward
in the spiritual life.
Let Bananarama lead the way!
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Dec 19, 2012
Episode 131 - 52 Pickup
Here is a thought for the end of the year.
And Merry Christmas to all!
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Dec 14, 2012
Podcast 130 - OK, All Right! - Victor Hugo
Had to do this one.
Victor Hugo is great.
"Victor Hugo" the Phenomenon seems like another turn
of Journey's "Wheel". (Listen and you'll find out why.)
Nevertheless, I had fun doing this and hope you like it.
Karen Carpenter (R.I.P.) helped me. Mr. Leitch, too.
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Dec 12, 2012
Episode 129 - First Infinite Frost
This is an experiment.
It's a true story, from the true-life adventures,
tho' I truly wish it never happened.
Is PZ trying for a James Agee moment?
Maybe so.
Podcast 129 is dedicated to Adrienne Parks.
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Dec 11, 2012
Episode 128 - Dissociated Chef d'Oeuvre
This podcast is not just about another movie, the 1973 musical version of "Lost Horizon". It's about Reflections of yourself, the divine Approach when "I Come to You", and the Things I Will Not Miss. The movie's an incongruous knockout. This is because it's about Life.
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Dec 9, 2012
Episode 127 - Hotel Taft
Look within yourself, look inside the Black Cauldron.
If you take the time to Drag the Line, you'll almost definitely
find your hope, even joy. Let the bells ring, and let's
Listen to the Music.
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Dec 5, 2012
Podcast 126 - Amberley Wildbrooks
Suffering, Transitoriness, and Insubstantiality:
three marks of being that seem beyond dispute,
at least from the perspective of experience. To be sure, the last,
insubstantiality, takes some unpacking.
Podcast 126 drinks some Matthew's Southern Comfort, and
makes common cause with The Peanut Butter Conspiracy.
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Dec 4, 2012
Episode 125 - Now What?
In the spirit of the J. Geils Band, 'Sinuhe the Egyptian' spent his entire life looking for it. A proto-hippie, an inspired near-mad man (not across the water), gave Sinuhe the answer. The result was elation, and courage, and even creation. And for me. And for you?
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Nov 29, 2012
Episode 124 - Done
Here's a Sixth Sense!
Galsworthy sheds light -- but where did it come from? -- and
jump-starts us "Going Up The Country".
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Nov 28, 2012
Episode 123 - Saint's Progress
John Galsworthy's play "A Bit O'Love" (1915) and his novel "Saint's Progress" (1919) diagnose the problem and also the possibility inherent in parish ministry, and especially within parish clergy. Galsworthy gives his readers a shattering exercise but also a hopeful one.
So we just want to say: Goodbye, Columbus !
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Nov 9, 2012
Episode 122 - Worst That Could Happen
It's being labelled a "Zwinglian"!
And there's something even worse than that.
This podcast is a plea for the wheels to be put back on
religion.
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Nov 7, 2012
Episode 121 - Hold That Ghost
Freedom and Love:
Love can't exist from anything but, and
Freedom can't result in anything but.
This cast wants to consult St. Augustine, concerning human nature;
and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, concerning
intangibles.
Maxim Gorky makes an appearance, too.
I hope you'll like what he says.
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Nov 2, 2012
Episode 120 - The Black Castle
Here's a short talk about creativity, renewal, "work stoppage", and a couple of terrific movies. It's also a lesson in How to Empty a Room!
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Sep 16, 2012
Episode 119 - Over the River II
"Trouble in my way" is the name of the game. This podcast tells the story of how it came to me, and what it forced me to learn. Episode 119 of PZ's Podcast is a two part swan song.
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Sep 13, 2012
Episode 118 - Les Elucubrations de PZ
This is intended to be the opposite of a rant.
Even if I wanted to, I could not come a thousand light years close to
Antoine's great one, which once so delighed the French.
What I can try to give you instead is a little reading list, plus a little movie, a profound one, even a study in scarlet.
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Sep 11, 2012
Episode 117 - Horror Hotel
This tight expressionist outing is a study in egos prepared to take any measures in order to prolong (ego-) life. It's a sure fail, but most instructive. Then there's the fog, and the blocking of the characters in the fog. It endures in the memory.
There is also an outstanding note of psychotronic Episcopal haberdashery and service schedules. 'Mr. Russell' is a wonderful minister!
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Aug 27, 2012
Episode 116 - Wing Thing
Another meditation on hope (i.e., the Wing Thing), via death; yet
death concretely and in the now, death you can get your skull around
today and not tomorrow.
Akira Ifukube is here to help undress us, as is Diogenes the Cynic, and Ludger Tom Ring; and, wouldn't you know, Raymond Scott.
Podcast 116 is dedicated to Hewes Hull.
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Aug 25, 2012
Episode 115 - In the event of
"What makes the melon ball bounce?"
What makes you bounce?
This is an undressed talk about death,
and death's funny aftermath.
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Aug 13, 2012
Episode 114 - A Slight Shiver
Sequel to "Return to Form",
with a push from Serling and a lift from Dylan.
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Aug 11, 2012
Episode 113 - Return to Form
This is podcast one in a new "story arc" --
a study in defeatedness, and a new hope
I strangely feel.
You could call it cross-notes of a
theological psychologist.
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Jun 28, 2012
Episode 113 - The Two Geralds
Gerald Fried (b. 1928) and Gerald Heard (d. 1971): both were communicators of the non-rational, both were exponents of the subterranean echo. Fried did it through B-movie (and other) musical scores; Heard, through mystery novels and fantastic short stories. Jesus did it, too, through similes and parables. (If the second Gerald chose for his "nom-de-plume" 'H.F. Heard', I wonder what name Christ would have chosen, had His stories been published.)
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Jun 21, 2012
Episode 112 - Kipling's Lightworks
Kipling shed light!
From "Recessional" to "Children's Song",
this podcast sings his praise.
Kipling was also a 'both-and' thinker,
a rare eirenic gift, and
a Gift for Today.
Episode 112 is dedicated to Stuart Gerson.
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Jun 4, 2012
Episode 110 - Color Him Father
John Betjeman listed five masters of the English ghost story, or supernatural tale. All five of them were the sons of Protestant ministers.
What was going on with these sons, and their fathers.
'The Winstons' can tell us the answer,
in their 1969 45 that we loved so,
we sons of our fathers.
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May 25, 2012
Episode 108 - J.C. Ryle Considered
Bishop Ryle made at least three big mistakes during his long ministry.
If he were able to speak now -- he died in 1900 -- I believe he would admit them. To me they are revealing mistakes, from which there is something to learn.
J.C. Ryle also had a core strength:
He had been saved in his youth, when his world fell apart.
He was a Christian, in other words, for the right reason.
Yet like many spiritual people, there were still
"unevangelized dark continents" inside him.
Had these been "colonized" by the great Word that saved the young man, Ryle might have avoided the mistakes he made as an older man.
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May 25, 2012
Episode 107 - Bishop Ryle
John Charles Ryle, who lived from l816 to 1900,
was "a giant of a man with the heart of a child".
He was a Christian warrior in the Church of England,
who contended against High Churchmen and Liberals
for 60 years, concluding his ministry as the first Bishop of Liverpool.
J.C. Ryle is a fascinating character, a hero-type with some
interesting weaknesses.
This podcast tells the story of his life.
It is dedicated to my friend Fred Rogers.
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May 21, 2012
Episode 106 - Requiem
Alternate Title:
I Feel Like I Lose When I Win.
Also, there's a correction:
It was 'Fraulein Doktor', not the actress who played her (Suzy Kendall),
who died young, at age 52, in 1940.
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May 16, 2012
Episode 104 - What does it take (to win your love)?
A meditation on defense:
that's what this is.
Someone wrote that the inner being of a human being
is "covered by thirty or forty skins or hides, like an ox's or a bear's,
so thick and hard".
Too true!
What's to get through?
Is there an antipode, a blessed antipode,
to such a coverage from hope?
I honestly think there is.
(Even if you've only got a toe on the Road.)
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Apr 24, 2012
Episode 103 - Flowers for Algernon I
How does the ego actually die?
Or rather, what does a person look like when their ego has died,
or is dying?
Can we see this -- the "seed falling into the ground"?
Algernon Blackwood wrote about the dying.
He wrote about it vividly and concretely, not just symbolically.
This podcast quotes from two of Blackwood's "Eternity" stories:
"The Centaur" (1911) and "A Descent into Egypt" (1914).
The theme is healing, at the end of the day;
and even,
priesthood.
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Apr 24, 2012
Episode 102 - Flowers for Algernon I
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) knew a lot.
In reaction to his Sandemanian childhood, he still remained a religious person, all his life.
In his "weird tales" Blackwood tried to map a religious way
forward -- through an inspired imagination.
I used to put Arthur Machen at the top of the list
of writers of supernatural horror.
Because of a change in me, Blackwood is now number one.
This podcast, together with Episode 103, which comes next,
follows directly from "Eternity".
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Apr 14, 2012
Episode 100 - Eternity
What dies when we die, and what continues to live?
What should we fear in relation to physical death,
and what can we affirm?
Philip Larkin gives a little assist here,
but so does St. Francis.
This is Episode 100.
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Apr 12, 2012
Episode 101 - I feel like I win when I lose
Between "Waterloo" and "Lay all your love on me",
I don't see how you could achieve a purer pop moment.
Or just a purer moment period!
The insight within these two 45s is communicated to perfection.
What is that insight?
Well, two things:
first, "all I've learned has overturned" (note the 'Euro' English).
I thought I knew myself. Then LUV came knocking,
and "everything is new and everything is you."
That's the way people really are.
Second, "now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight...
I feel like I win when I lose."
This is good religion's word to the ego.
I feel like I win when I lose.
This is also the 101st (Airborne) Podcast.
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Apr 10, 2012
Previously Unreleased: Heinz
Heinz Burt, known as "Heinz", the Wild Boy of Pop, was, you could say,
Joe Meek's muse.
Meek did everything possible to make his "Heinz" into a star.
Although Meek failed to do that,
he produced a large body of fabulous music around his Golden Child.
This podcast, previously unreleased, deals with the alchemy of imputation; the theme of unrequited love and consequent melancholy in much of the gold that Meek created out of Heinz; and with the proximity, to almost all of us, of mental illness.
There are two factual mistakes in the cast:
The town of Eastleigh is in Hampshire, not "New Hampshire";
and the song connected to the movie "Circus of Horrors" was sung by Garry Mills. It is entitled "Look for a Star".
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Mar 23, 2012
Previously Unreleased: Joe Meek
"The Nazareth Principle" (Simeon Zahl) and Joe Meek:
they're synonymous.
Joe Meek was an improbable genius, who Hear(d) a New World.
His wondrous work, achieved under conditions so unusual as to make the mind boggle, is a pure example of Christ's being labelled
by the question, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
This podcast lay languishing in the vaults,
mainly because there are two mistakes in it:
the speaker confuses the guitarist Jimmy Page with the guitarist
Ritchie Blackmore; and,
'Screaming Lord Sutch', with 'Lord Buckethead'.
Other than that, he's satisfied with it.
Moreover, he believes in what he said.
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Mar 16, 2012
Episode 99 9/10 - Twisterella
When reality comes crashing in to call,
you've got to be prepared for a re-think.
It's what happens to 'Billy Liar', in another dazzling English rose,
the movie "Billy Liar" from 1963.
It's based on a novel then a play,
but the visuals bring it home.
A man of 19, who flees from his life, for his life, into a fantasy world,
begins to falter, then crumble, in the face of reality.
(O Lucky Man! -- at age 19, to begin to see.)
Like the English city in which he lives,
in which every building seems to be being bulldozed
in service of urban renewal,
'Billy Fisher' -- Billy Liar -- is watching "everything go".
"Not one stone" (of his plummeting life) "will be left on stone".
There's help, however, in the form of a girl,
a precious girl,
who is able to care and not care.
She's the hope!
She knows something Billy doesn't, and few do.
Can she save our phantastic hero?
Could she save you?
Listen to "Twisterella".
Or rather, see "Billy Liar", and SEE.
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Mar 13, 2012
Episode 99 5/8 - A Kind of Loving
This podcast is about categorization -- the pitfalls of categorization.
With people, with friends (and prospective friends), with husbands and wives (and prospective husbands and wives), with everybody.
It's also about possession -- the pitfalls of possession.
Especially with people you love.
My surface subject is a 1962 movie entitled "A Kind of Loving": an English rose. But the real subject is putting life into categories,
and love into objects.
Note the new intro, too.
It's got 45 RPM crackling noises.