PZ's Podcast

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 see this sub-atomic reality in Melody, a 1971 English film about a 12-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl who fall in love. Altho' the boy processes it a little differently than the girl, it all happens in "Just One Look" (The Hollies, 1964). Once that look is exchanged, there is almost no going back.

I remember the exact moment in time when I first saw Mrs. Zahl. It was "across a crowded room", I mean, seminar room, in college. I don't think she saw me gleichzeitig; but for me, yes, it was "Just One Look".

If your relationship's, let us say, a little strained just now -- or a little on-the-shelf due to the pressure of other things -- well, you probably have to go "Back to Where It All Begins" (Allman Bros., 1994). Note the presence tense: your relationship began there, but it also begins there!

Oh, and listen again to "Question" (1970). Justin Hayward wrote it when he was not much more than 19. But the wisdom of it is ageless. LUV U!

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 smithereens one day. (That happens every day.)

In the 1970s the vocal group Blue Magic recorded a song entitled "Stop and Get a Hold of Yourself". The song is good but not great. The lyrics, on the other hand, are for the ages. The singer realizes something's happened, and it's upset his world. Therefore he wants to "stop and get a hold of (him)self". Good luck! Wish he could have listened to this cast, which, incidentally, is DEDICATED TO DEBBIE BRAZEAL AND ROBIN ANDERSON.

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 to the prior thing. So the covenant got broken.

This is why I major on romantic love as the key to a happy marriage. When romantic love is there, between two people, they don't need words of encouragement to stand by a prior agreement. They don't need one single pointer to a covenant. "(All I want to do is) Act Naturally" (Ringo/The Beatles, 1965).

The one thing you can do to renew a relationship that's gotten stale or even repellent (God forbid) is go back, in your heart, mind and memory, to the point when the relationship was fresh, fantastic, and enthralling. And there was almost definitely a time when it was -- when it was fresh, fantastic, and enthralling.

The magic was there. (Otherwise, why would you have come together in the first place?) Apply the incomparable insight of Meister Eckhart, by way of Gerald Heard: "If you can't find God, go back to where you lost Him."

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". (It is sort of a blow to one's pride to think that, well, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" (C. Lauper, 1983) or "You're my Everything (you're my everything, you're my everything, you're my everything)" (Temptations, 1967) or "My World is Empty without You, Babe" (Supremes, 1965). I mean, maybe you don't want to think of yourself as that needy. But I beg to differ. I'm that needy!)

So I am asking the question: Does my point shed light on your experience? Does it explains some things? Or is it a downer? Is it a "Light That Failed" (Kipling, 1891)?

Or, maybe, does it amount to a "New Morning" (Dylan, 1970)? LUV 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 expressions -- and in particular, expressions of human drama that were redemptive and optimistic rather than bitter and enraged.

Just compare Matt Monro with Sid Vicious. Or Terence Rattigan with John Osborne. Or "Shag" (1989) with "The Graduate" (1968). (Boy, was I ever seduced by "The Graduate". Yet now I look at it, all brightly done up by the Criterion Collection, and see a superficial swipe at ... the Presbyterian Church!)

So here's a little word in favor of happiness, fun, and seaside romance. Did you miss out?

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 me back into the waters of Lake Waban after 47 years, and also a citation from Rose Hobart/Rachel Crothers, I try to apply the Gospel to the really hidden things, the hidden crevasses of dis-remembered glaciality within us, the things we think that no one else will ever know.

The cast concludes with a brief, sharp, early example of English glam rock, "Tiger Feet" by Mud. LUV U.

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 at any point now. An out-of-control 60-year-old is not very funny.

Maxim: Indulge the adolescent so he or she can become ... a good citizen.

Hey, and don't you love Katrina and the Waves? Case closed.

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 whether it's safer, emotionally, to shift one's natural patriotism to a place of indifference. Hence, Steve Perry's new song, counseling withdrawal from love, at the end of the cast.

But no! Finding one's way to the periphery of engagement (with this world) could be the prelude to engagement to the everlasting world of Life. All you need to do is read "Pilgrim's Progress". And oddly, or ironically, you can sometimes return to "this" world, with your sleeves rolled up, when your ego is no longer tied to results.

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 whether you're bringing out -- bringing out to God -- the core issue of your inwardness. If you are like me, you're probably not. In fact, the core issue of your life has become so habituated a part of you that it may not even occur to you to present it -- "a living sacrifice" (BCP) -- to God. You've been living with TNT buried inside you for so long that you've almost forgotten it's there.

At the end of the episode, I tell a little story on myself, with which I hope you will resonate. And then there's the matter of the final song, one of the most satisfying and positive of all top 40 singles.

LUV U.

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 inspire life-long regret in their aftermath.

I think Eric Clapton's letter to Pattie Boyd should be required reading for anyone in the helping professions, and particularly in the ministry. Listen to it -- I'm not Alexander Scourby, but I tried -- and think of yourself. Or think of someone you truly love. Who is suffering in silence.

Podcast 255 is dedicated to CHARLOTTE B. GETZ.