Always searching for the words to describe breakthrough -- opening doors -- divine intervention in our 'safe-rooms' of pain and loss. Always searching for words, and also actions. How can you and I, dear listener, become like Edwin Starr in 1965: our own "Agent Double-O-Soul" for the sake of ... the world?

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

Second, we need to (ultimately) perceive that everything which happens is part of the Plan. I cannot say that to someone who is in the midst of overwhelming pain and loss.

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

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

Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day (Squeeze, 1996) and that fact forever touched him. He wrote three scripts for the original 'Twilight Zone' that have a Christmas context, as well as the mother of all Christmas screenplays (of his genre) entitled "The Messiah of Mott Street". The latter he wrote for the 1969 anthology 'Night Gallery'.

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

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

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

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

Watch these Twilight Zone half-hours, and they will build you up (Buttercup).

To respond to the opening fundraising plea, click here.

How do you help someone who is being pummeled by a persisting circumstantial or psychodynamic problem? Do you "advise" them? (Don't Do It - The Band, '72) Do you try to talk them out of it? (Again, don't -- Talk Talk, '82-'84) Do you avoid them? (Again, don't -- Animotion, '84. They won't let you, anyway.)

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

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

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

Try it. Maybe it worked on you once.

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

I feel like I see more acutely than ever into the backing track of human experience. There is the "outside" of how our lives are going within givens and events, but then there is the "backing track" -- the enabling part, the staying part, the... well, the (kind of) Eternal Part. The two parts, the outside and the backing track, are separate.

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast 406 is dedicated to Sam Everette.

One has been thinking all week about those precious little girls from Camp Mystic. There's also a pastoral situation or two in which sharp suffering seems to have been "imposed" on people I love. Why and How and ... What?

I had a kind of visitation late one night this week. It came initially from ... Van Morrison.

Then something else happened:

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

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

How does someone who is living, like it or not, in the last third of life, address everybody else who is living in the second third? It's an important question, cuz most of the time it's like two ships passing in the night.

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

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

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

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

While one was within the second third of one's life, one had all these goals in view, of happy marriage, happy fathering, and (most of all, sadly) successful careering. That was the way it was -- and probably the way it is, at least for some who may be reading this. And in that (now) embarrassing order, too.

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

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

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

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

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

Every version or tradition of the Christian Faith offers an objective or corporealized dimension within a person's (longed for) relationship with God. For Roman Catholicism, it is the Real Presence of the Lord within the Elements of Bread and Wine. For pentecostalism, it is the embodied Gifts of the Spirit in miracles of healing and divine intervention, and often an accompanying gift of speaking in tongues. For many Protestants, it is the Written Word of the Bible -- the actual and specific words as dictated by God Himself.

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

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

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

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

It's been too long but here is my new episode.

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

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

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

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

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

This is a sort of "marker" podcast -- my 400th. It's kind of my summing up on the subject of human identity and the origin of human satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

Podcast 400 is dedicated to Mary Cappleman Zahl.