PZ's Podcast

The question can apply to anyone, on any "side of the aisle". I have friends who were so upset by the election of 2016 that they basically retreated into a long-term depression for roughly four years. There will be people you know today -- tho' they may not be saying -- who feel the same way about 2020. Disappointments and disillusionments can touch all parties!

Also, there's the COVID. Just after Mrs. Zahl and I received our vaccinations in Florida, articles started appearing stating that, vaccinated or not, we could still transmit the virus. (What?) In other words, there may not be an end to the ordeal, even if the "miracle Moderna/Pfizer" is given to everyone. (Would that mean,we still can't see our grandchildren?)

This podcast is about the agonizing struggle to deal with acute personal disappointment in terms of faith.

Do we just go along? Do we rationalize? Do we "look for Another"? Is God asleep? Is God dead? Or were we simply wrong about Him -- misled, seduced, hypnotized, something like that?

This is my subject. And with some help from 'Heinz' the immortal (and Joe Meek), and also from John Milton the Immortal, I hope we can get somewhere. LUV U.

Harold Pinter wrote a play once entitled "Betrayal" and he used a sort of trick to tell his story. He began the play at the end -- at the tragic finale of the events dramatized -- and ended the play at the beginning, at the touching and tentative start of those events. He reversed time, to tremendous effect.

Today's brief cast is intended as a salutary instance of what often happens in life: Things start well and end badly. In addition to the startling music that begins and ends my story, I tell how I met a very old friend after almost 55 years of not having seen him. This friend, now dead, by the way, was once a charming, funny, open, dear young person, truly at the threshold of his life. After 55 years, however, he had grown humorless, disappointed, withdrawn, and turned in upon himself.

Just once, at one brief moment within our conversation, my friend came to himself -- and right then, he was all at once 15 again. I was hurtled back in time by the mere expression on his face, only to be hurtled back again into the present when his eyes went grey again.

Reverse chronology! It doesn't have to happen. God is there, even as I write this and you read it, and... I have proof.

Listen to the last track, by the way, of "Reverse Chronology". It's a gem. And remember what Gerald Heard said so memorably in 1941, quoting from Meister Eckhart, "If you want to find God, go back to where you lost Him." LUV U.

'Heinz' was short for Heinz Burt (d. 2000), a grocery clerk in Southampton, England, whom Joe Meek, an independent record producer, made into a star for a brief period in the early 1960s.

The brilliance of the five or six singles that Meek produced for Heinz is an almost perfect instance of how straw can be converted into gold, a la Rumpelstiltskin. That is to say, Heinz Burt himself had little talent and almost nothing going for him, yet Meek created magic out of his voice and persona. Utter magic! I mean, these are not the greatest records in the history of music, but given the givens, they are striking examples of what effect/s an outside influence can have on you.

Now take this irregular but prodigious instance of what can be done to transform an everyday mediocrity -- he was a nice guy, to be sure -- and it can be seen what God can do for anyone -- like you and me, for example. I'm being completely serious.

Hug that "low anthropology"! We really cannot help ourselves very much, at least where it counts, i.e., where we are really in thrall; under the influence, bound and paralyzed, of drives, losses and resentments that prevent us from living -- living freely, I mean -- let alone, joyfully. We need someone to look out for us -- Joe Meek, for example. But actually I mean God.

Heinz's singles -- "Just Like Eddie" went to Number 5 in England -- are a picture of God's creative work with losers. (Never thought of myself as a loser, by the way, until life put me there.) Heinz (Burt) spell Hope (Cert.).

I was listening to a sermon concerning spiritual warfare and my mind went straight back to 1970, to the English film, a psychological thriller, entitled Crescendo. The film stars Stephanie Powers and James Olson and was directed by Alan Gibson.

The preacher's passionate evocation of Ephesians 6:12 in connection with current events had brought considerable criticism from many quarters. I wanted to ask the critics, Didn't you ever see Psycho (1960) -- let alone read Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, or Conan Doyle, for that matter? I mean, almost all mystery novels, short stories and movies presuppose that the solution to a crime is unseen, that the events taking place on the surface are almost always driven by factors that are not seen or envisaged. In other words, the explanation for criminal, let alone curious behavior turns out to be an unexpected person or circumstance.

If a plot line such as that of Crescendo (1970) should intrigue and actually satisfy us, why would we close the door on a religious form of that uncommon explanation, that explanation for a mystery that calls into question our perceptions of the visible in favor of explanations from the invisible?

This cast looks at the current drama/s unfolding in the aftermath of November 3rd in unseen rather than in seen terms. Not that I know personally what is happening -- but rather, what one sees is seldom what one gets.

To put it another way, if I hadn't seen Hammer Studios' seemingly innumerable psychological thrillers -- most of them written by the indefatigable Jimmy Sangster -- I would probably be strongly attached to one outcome or another, unfolding on the surface of circumstance. Or, for that matter, if I hadn't been reading the New Testament...

I'm trying to understand, in Romans 7 and Mockingbird terms, a phenomenon I currently observe -- and feel -- all around me. It is as if the more control, medically and in terms of hospitalizations, that we are getting over COVID19, the more insistent and pressing are the visible measures a good citizen is supposed to be taking against it. To put it another way, as the actual threat is decreasing, the things I am supposed to be doing in order to be regarded as a good citizen in relation to it, are increasing.

So Mrs. Zahl and I take a walk on the shoreline near where we live, and the beach is not crowded at all -- just several knots of two persons walking near the edge of Long Island Sound on a windy day -- and yet half the people, especially the younger half, are wearing masks the whole time. The wind is billowing and there is at least 50 feet between almost every "bubble" of two, yet still masks are tightly on.

And I feel badly, like I'm doing something wrong, so I put on my mask; or, if I don't, walk by the masked duos with my head bowed and my eyes downcast. There's some kind of first-class versus second-class citizen thing going on, and I'm back in East Berlin, say around 1958. A former STASI informant once told me that about 45 % of the East German population was spying on the other 55 %, and that she had to submit formal reports on all her neighbors every two weeks -- their habits, their idiosyncrasies, and especially their comings and goings.

Is it maybe an analogy to St. Paul, where he talks about sin increasing as a result of the law? Like maybe, the burden of visible good citizenship increases to the extent that the actual need to do so is decreasing. I don't know quite how to put it, but something is going on.

At the end of the cast, I talk a little about minorities of one and the peril of a situation when everyone you know and every institution you know is against one voice -- even if that voice is wrong and the forces against it are right. Something about the way the universe or Reality compensates in favor of the "You and Me Against the World" (Helen Reddy, 1974) could be happening. Sometimes mass judgments boomerang. If I felt as strongly as some of my friends feel this week, I would probably adopt an august silence, trusting the truth to come out. It's just a thought, though, and probably applies to both sides of every competition.

LUV U.

There's a truth of life that more and more people are telling me about from their own experience. To be sure, these people are mostly my own age, so we are considering that last third of life with which my Boomer Handbook is concerned.

The observed truth of life I am talking about is simply that when you reach a certain age, say from 55 or so on, if you don't move forward, you move backward.

Sometimes I just want to stay where I am -- treading water in the memories and also the accomplishments of my life's second third. But treading water is not what actually happens. Drowning is what happens! You regress, whether you want to or not, and it's easy to end up like Miss Bates's mother in Jane Austen's Emma, staring all day into space. You are somewhere but you're definitely not ... where you are.

This cast is about the anchorage and possibility of hope, hope for a real and concrete future. I get given some good counsel from a novel by Joyce Cary (d. 1957) -- who was, incidentally, a conscious Low Church Anglican -- and report on Pastor Paula's enduring gift to me.

There's also some nice parsing, courtesy of Sheila Schwartz, of "Little Bit O'Soul" (The Music Explosion, 1967). Not to mention the last track, one of the most concise and delightful rock 'n roll hits of all time.

Oh, and the Gospel of complete forgiveness comes into it, too.

LUV U!

There's a terrific Sherlock Holmes movie from 1944 entitled The Scarlet Claw. Well, it's actually not that terrific, but the premise is great.

In the movie a criminal disguises himself as a kind of glow-in-the-dark swamp creature out on the moors, who murders unfortunate travelers and terrorizes the village.

Come to find out, the murderer is putting phosphorus on his hands, his feet and his face in order to frighten everyone, and Sherlock Holmes figures it out. Our detective ends up finding his man by following the phosphorus.

The analogy is to our personal histories. If you want to find out the truth about yourself, follow the phosphorus! And the phosphorus can be found wherever and whenever your true inward heart-self came out -- whether in a relationship or a moment of stress or an incident of rejection, you name it. To understand yourself, follow the phosphorus to the places in your past where it stuck. And as I tried to say in Podcast 307, the phosphorus may well have stuck on a song.

I listen to "Please Come to Boston" (1974), for example, by Dave Loggins, and I'm right there in our first year of marriage, in a foreign country, no car, no frig, no stove, no money. Just a little hope, faith, and charity.

You may have something like that. All it takes to capture your entire emotional attention is to hear a song from a vulnerable time in your life, and you're right there again! It's phosphorus.

It is also true that by means of the phosphorus you can become the main, lamed character in your own case of arrested development. That's no good. It is why uncompleted mourning of a loss can paralyze you for... well, almost... forever. Somehow, to live, you have to get off of square one.

At the end of the cast, I offer a kind of blinder to the deceptive glow of your phosphorus. It's worked for me, and it can work with you. Think R. A. I. N. ... "Summer Rain", Johnny Rivers, 1968.

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 (Mockingbird, 2020).

The discovery was that each song not only connects me with a person and/or connection with that person -- or disconnection from the person; but that each song connotes a place, an actual place. In other words, take "Reelin' in the Years", by Steely Dan. It's not just Mrs. Zahl, in a long ago springtime in Boston, with whom the song emotionally connects me. But it's a place there, i.e., Memorial Drive in Cambridge, down which she would drive her car fast, with me in it, and the radio would play ... "Reelin' in the Years".

My and your emotional, heart experiences are connected not just to a person, but to a place where we were with that person.

An analogy is in the experience of Christian pilgrimage. Why did certain places, such as St. Juan de Compostela or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or Iona or Lourdes, become the objects of pilgrimage? Because someone very special was there once, and did something special while he or she was there. The power of that experience, which took place there within a moment in time, draws other people to the place. It is not the place as such which draws you. Rather, it is the connection of a healing, hopeful personality with the place which draws you.

Like "Reelin' in the Years"!

I hope you like Petula Clark. She knew a place once, too, in 1965. And she sang a touching love song two years later, in 1967, entitled "Don't Sleep in the Subway". Gosh, and I remember exactly where I was when I first received her kind and tender message. LUV U!

One of the best effects of a positive view of aging, which I have tried to offer in the Boomer Handbook (Mockingbird, 2020), is the unexpected appearance of new material. You find that faith in a "good outcome" to your life seems to bring with it fresh resources, and fresh product. It just happens!

Well, thanks to Josh Retterer, to whom this podcast is dedicated, I've run straight into Margery Lawrence. Margery Lawrence (1889-1969) was an English writer of supernatural short stories, as well as popular novels. She was also a committed spiritualist, who wrote within an explicitly Christian (tho' anti-clerical) world-view.

What Lawrence brought to her fiction was the insight that many relationships between men and women, and between children and their parents, are the workings-out of unseen forces, mainly of positive forces seeking to bring afflicted everyday people to better resolutions, and even victories, in relation to inherited paralyses. What Pastor Paula denominates "divine set-ups", Margery Lawrence regards as the sometimes centuries-long -- and anguished -- pilgrimage of the human soul to sacrificial love and understanding. Lawrence's inventive ghost stories are fantastic analogies of the way God works, which is mainly through defeats and come-uppances in everyday life.

From Amazon, you can download inexpensively The Floating Cafe and TheTerraces of Night. Maybe start with "The Shrine at the Crossroads" or "Tinpot Landing". Or maybe, "The Beauty Spot" or "The Crystal Snuff Box". Look for a kind of heroism from the past, which changes the present in actuality.

Listen, too, to "Frosty the Snowman" by Los Straitjackets, which concludes this cast. It shows you exactly what a "good outcome" can mean!

I heard something very helpful recently in a sermon by John Zahl. He said that sometimes in life what seems like the end is really the middle. I think JAZ meant that when your situation feels like -- maybe is -- the end of the world, it may really be the hinge point to "A Whole New World" (Aladdin, 1992).

This insight is true in Christian experience. What looks like the end turns out to be the middle.

Which made one immediately think of Los Straitjackets, that ever welling spring of inspiration that consists of five (sometimes four) surfer/rockabilly musicians in Mexican wrestling masks. These chaps are a gift that keeps on giving. And what you come to find out is that their songs are pretty strictly controlled until the last third, sometimes even the last fourth. Los Straitjackets typically take the listener by surprise by "going crazy", in the best way, right at the end. It's almost a trick, but I call it inspiration. Their songs are the best at the end!

This podcast takes its cue from our masked Mexican-wrestler guitarists. Your life, and maybe now more than ever, is bound to be pretty down in some ways. The pandemic, and also the divided climate in the country, is wrecking a lot of things, and some of them are very good. (Personally, I think the damage to the mainline Christian churches, with exceptions, will prove to be huge. Mary and I watch institutions and causes into which we have poured our whole lives just collapsing, like sand from a shattered hourglass. This is true especially in the Church of England, where things were bad enough before the virus. There was a massive failure of nerve there.)

So hear the musical message of Los Straitjackets. When they sound like they are winding things down, Get Ready! The exuberant explosion is probably just around the corner.