It is easy ("It's So Easy" - L. Ronstadt, 1977) to talk about "going deeper" and the "journey inward" and the layers of human personality. But in practice it rarely happens.

It rarely happens that you actually let on to another person what you are thinking. As Joseph von Sternberg, the director of at least ten great movies, observed: "The average human being lives behind an impenetrable veil and will disclose his deep emotions only in a crisis which robs him of control."

That is a supremely important sentence from the great man.

I saw it this week -- on the track, of all places -- as I thought of something that has happened in a former parish of ours. I suddenly burst into tears as I thought of the people there -- the hundreds, honestly, whose faces I still remember -- and how they have been treated by Authority. It wasn't the presenting issue that touched my heart so much as the wonderful individuals who are being affected. My "face behind the mask" was a face of remembered mutual love.

Episode 327 of this cast seems to have really connected with some of its listeners. Or maybe it was the music, Steppenwolf's immortal single "Magic Carpet Ride (1968), that did it. Somehow the cast got through!

I hope that this new one will go even deeper. And at Christmas, when one can be utterly crushed by obligationism, that's probably a good thing. LUV U!!

P.S. I dedicate Episode 328 to Don Menendez.