PZ's Podcast

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 confines of the late 1970s and will never die. The closing track is a song of conversion, by Robert Wyatt. Note that Jesus Christ gets a solid mention.

Podcast 294 is dedicated to Charles Gaston.

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, tho' have not for a second forgotten what was happening inside me.

That is the lesson of this podcast, and we end with an excerpt from the near-sublime Carpenters track, "Love Is Surrender". LUV U.

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 successful in their day but have been almost completely smothered, in the reception, by This World. I mean, who has ever heard of The Chain by Paul Wellman? Yet it is simply the most touching story of a young Episcopal minister in Jericho, Kansas, who preaches and acts out Grace in a stratified and complacent city with great sacrifice yet great success. The Chain is a must read! Yet it's been almost completely buried, as have been many other works like it, by "the World, the Flesh and the Devil".

Hope this cast gives you some new reading, and some fresh heart!

Podcast 292 is dedicated to David Browder.

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 60, and ask yourself whether or not it's true -- that the aspiration for belovedness is the main thing you have contributed to your journey. Your answer to the question should be sufficient to concentrate your mind at Christmas.

Podcast 291 is dedicated to John Glover.

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:

What struck one about the meme was its departure from what one would almost always and everywhere (semper ubique) hear:

From the mid-1960s, when I first started harkening to the main-line Christian thinkers around me, right down to the exact present day,

The mindfulness people would tell me that, the MSW people would tell me that, the self-people would almost all tell me that, the therapists would tell me that, the trained priests and pastors would tell me that, the movies and television would tell me that, Mom and Dad would tell me that, probably PZ would have told me that. And it's true and right so far as it goes. But it's also worldly wisdom, having almost nothing to contribute to the underlying question of life: What happens to me when I die? As well as, what happens to me when I make the biggest mistake of my life -- whatever that is -- and have to start over? "Where are you going? Can you take me with you?" (Godspell, 1973).

That is why I was startled by the counter-intuitive meme:

It's a better emphasis. It's an emphasis that can only fuel one, and nerve one, and give me hope. It's manna from heaven and balm in Gilead. Without it, one's all in for... P.(Physician) A.(Assisted) S.(Suicide). With it, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (M. Gaye/T. Terrell, 1967). LUV U.

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The most recent cast, entitled "GPF", has drawn a lot of response. This new cast develops the theme a bit more, and rounds it with memorable music by what Spencer Leffel once called my "house band".

The last third of life is characterized, or should be, by increasing dis-engagement, increasing observation of the past, and hopefully by increasing peace of mind. Add to that a warmer faith, or hope, in what lies beyond death for the individual self. (I'm not interested in resources for the aged and the dying that focus solely on the "process" of mortality. I need more than that! I need to know where I'm going, at least the core of it.)

Take my inventory of your own years, in the templates of gratitude, peace, and faith (for what lies jenseits, i.e., across the Jordan). If you find yourself feeling pretty low on the scale, there is no time to lose ("No Time" -- The Guess Who, 1970). If you're experience yourself as higher up on the scale, well, you're probably not. In any case, don't wait! I mean, really -- don't wait.

Podcast 289 is dedicated to Anthony Newman.

This follows from Episode 286, entitled "Sine Qua Non", 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, where do I turn?

Podcast 288 moves to the question of hope, really the experience of Christian Hope. It's not a stretch, really. More like a trampoline.

LUV U.

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 surface of the ocean towards the royal road to nowhere.

With love, human and divine, everything hinges on the starting point. And that is the being loved, not the loving. But when you are loved, loving someone else becomes the most natural thing in the world.

Oh, and listen to "Easy To Be Hard", by Three Dog Night (or "Hair", depending on your record collection). Those lyrics have never been bettered. LUV U.

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 would say is necessary and primary, not optional nor secondary. Each is core and decisive. Each is "required".

Wonder what you'll think. Hope you'll like the music, too, from an excerpt by Gordon Lightfoot, whose music has never appeared on the cast before, and from Livingston Taylor. Soft Rock, OK, but quietly profound, perhaps, in both cases. LUV YOU!

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 ... well, again, you fill in the blank. There are not many white hairs (like mine) in those churches.

So Listen to the Music. The music that's in tune, that is; the music that's on key and with the beat. The music you can dance to. And if 'Heinz' were looking for a church today -- hear the cast's closing track -- I think I know where he'd go. LUV YOU!