PZ's Podcast

This cast is a kind of summation of my thinking about romantic love in its relation to one's soul's salvation.

I have thought about the compelling nature of romance -- between two people, I mean -- in both its positive, inspiring importance and also its possible negative and undermining impact. In fact, one has long searched for a key, the 'haft' that actually opens the door and heals one of scarring memories and long-carried-over inward losses.

Not only has this theme of romantic love's long-term vicissitudes been with me for awhile, but I've often wondered what a cure for it would look like. Not that it's all about me, but it's definitely about people I love and know; and especially, let it be said, the older one gets and the more reflective one is forced to become as one gets physically older.

Thus when a spiritual adviser spoke recently about the vitiating power of a negative "soul-tie", I was all ears. She sounded as if she were on to something. (Why did no one ever tell me about "soul-ties"

This podcast picks up on Gordon Lightfoot -- his songs will never die -- and that troubadour's insights into the heart of the vitiating soul-tie. But there is hope in the cutting of it. Major Hope!

This cast is about low anthropology, or rather, hidden anthropology.

Have you been struck by the comments concerning the Austin bomber in which people near and dear to the young man say they saw no signs or external evidence of any kind that he was thinking about doing this, or about anything, for that matter, out of the ordinary, let alone murderous?

My experience of people, especially act-outers in life, is that what they do often takes one by surprise. They didn't "advertise", in other words, their deeper, let alone their deepest feelings. The internal preoccupations of the acter-out -- or the surprise acter-out -- are rarely vouchsafed in advance. They may give you a hint or two if you are really looking or listening -- most people aren't -- but generally, as Jimmy Webb wrote the song, "I Keep It Hid".

This is important, because it means there may be a 'No Trespassing' sign over the most serious, wounded, hurt, vulnerable parts of a person. A person can actually go all the way through their life -- right through to the moment of their death! -- without giving away what was really on their mind the whole time.

It's odd, moreover, that you may feel more comfortable telling a perfect stranger what you are really thinking about, than telling it to someone who is close to you and intimate with you. Christianity, parenthetically, is the only religion that understands the hiddenness of the compelling and irrational part of a person. For that we have the Apostle Paul to thank, who in turn was simply verbalizing what Jesus demonstrated in his healings and his encounters "On the Road".

My cast, entitled "Hitchcock Railway", locates the low anthropology of the New Testament in the unconscious layer of our deepest drive; and states that only if that drive is surfaced, by means of someone else's sympathetic hearing of it, will it not grow, metasticize, and finally ... well, blow up.

I'm always surprised when proponents of One Way Love fail to apply it

What I am saying is that One Way Love is easy to talk about, but

Jacques Demy's movies display wondrous examples of total conversion,

Ask yourself, is all this (wonderful) talk of "radical grace" -- and

People are so good at minimizing the human situation. I've encountered this throughout Mary's and my ministry, right from the very start, in Silver Spring, MD.

The religious "professionals" detested my message, that the world was in incomparable conflict with itself, and that each human being experiences comparable conflict inwardly. People would say, your message is too "down", and I just don't like it. It's too dark, or depressing, or gloomy.

But what actually happened is that a majority of the people listening tuned in fast! And then they started inviting their friends.

It's not that the human condition is hopeless. With God it is never hopeless. But without God, yes, the human condition is hopeless.

And the older you get -- I know this can sound patronizing -- but the older you get, the more empirically evident it becomes that life stumps a person. An inflexible person becomes an impossible person -- and an impossibly unhappy person. A messy person becomes a hoarder. A depressed person becomes suicidal -- and actually DOES TAKE THEIR OWN LIFE. To put it mildly, nascent emotional tendencies in people become hard-and fast character assaults -- on everyone else!

But you're not allowed to say this. Every time I pointed out the obvious, a couple incensed hearers would come up briskly, and accuse me of terminal pessimism. But we weren't. We weren't pessimists. We were realists, and had the rudiments, from the Bible and a few wise mentors, of applicable hope. Because with God, nothing is impossible. I can honestly say that and look you in the face.

This podcast simply says that it's time we accepted the disappointments and impasses of our lives; and instead of fighting them, give them to God --- Jesus, really -- in a spirit of repentance and humility. Say "Uncle!"

But don't carp. Don't "say it isn't so" (Hall and Oates). Be like 'Pilgrim', in Robin Anderson's favorite great Epic, and lay that burden, of the truth, down, at the foot of Someone. LUV U.

I don't talk about romantic love because it is worshipful in its own right. I talk about romantic love because it is the closest signpost we have to God.

Whether it's the Beatles ("Eight Days a Week") or Hugo ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame") or Wagner ("Tannhauser") or Jimmy Webb ("Wichita Lineman") or James Gould Cozzens ("By Love Possessed"), the inspired listeners of the world have not failed to miss the Back Story, underneath all our 'narratives' and front stories, of the noble search for love and merger, the absolutely right and proper desire of every human person to merge with another human person. This Back Story underwrites every natural life. If you won't see it -- because

Yet romantic life is never quite right! It is always a little "off". This is because it calls the almost-Absolute -- i.e., another human being -- the Absolute -- i.e., God. Romantic love, when not subsumed to God, i n e v i t a b l y disappoints, because it takes place between bodies, which decline and die; and it takes place in time, which "must have a stop" (Shakespeare/Huxley). In other words, romantic love is an almost exact dress rehearsal of the Real Thing, but not the Real Thing itself.

That is why this podcast begins with "Eight Days a Week" but ends with

This Christmas cast is about communication between people, and God. Moreover, it’s about the cost of poor communication, which can be suicide, let alone habitual alienation. And the rich advantage of good communication, which can be the

Recently, Tullian Tchividjian spoke at a ‘Broken Christmas’ service in Living Faith Lutheran Brethren Church at Cape Coral, FL. He spoke brilliantly, soberly, gravely, touchingly, humorously at points, and as affectingly as Mary and I have ever heard him speak.

To introduce Tullian, I took an illustration from William Inge’s 1970 novel entitled “My Son Is a Splendid Driver”.

In that novel, the author, a man in his mid-40s, is visiting his aging mother and father in the small Kansas town where they live and where he grew up. Uncharacteristically, his mother does not meet him at the station — ‘My Son’ takes place during the Great Depression — but only his father.

When the author arrives home, his mother is there, but looking thin and very worn. She informs her son, “Your father has given me a disease that I do not have the courage to name.”

What has happened is that his mother has been given what we today call an STD by her husband, who, like her, is in his mid-60s, and who contracted the disease from a prostitute during a business trip.

The mother is completely collapsed and ashamed. Her son reflects as follows: “Mother had stopped going to church. ‘ Church isn’t the place to go with your troubles. Church is just a place to go when you’re feeling good and have a new

“There was a little bitterness in what she said, but there was also truth. Our minister would have been the last person in the world she could have talked to, to have lifted the curse she felt upon her and saved her from feeling damned. She would have embarrassed the man into speechlessness had she gone to him with her story…

“Most of our morality, I was beginning to think, was based on a refusal to recognize sin. Our entire religious heritage, it seemed to me, was one of refusal to deal with it.”

William Inge’s thoughts are so germane. How many people do you and I know who have “dropped out” of Christianity because of their feeling that the church is judging them in some way? Your friend may feel judged by conservative or evangelical Christians. But I may feel judged by liberal or progressive Christians. Judgment “swings both ways” (Herman Hermits, 1966). It swings all ways!

Tullian focused some on suicide, in his talk. He reminded us that almost everybody contemplates suicide at some point, even if only for a minute. (“Did It in a Minute”, Hall and Oates, 1981) And the people that actually do take their own lives are usually people who have felt unable to confide their real thoughts and feelings to ANYONE, and for quite some time. You can become habituated, in other words, to suppressing yourself. And the long-term result of that?: POOF!

Listen to this cast in the light of your desire — very natural — to express yourself to somebody. Ultimately, your desire to express yourself, to God. The key is empathy. Tullian has it. I hope I have it, at least a little. And I know that the Burning Babe (Robert Southwell) has it, also. LOL at Christmas, PZ

This is a short talk on motivation and love.

As usual in PZ’s Podcast, love is the answer. But how? And why?

My cast concludes with an interesting example of a person who seems to

As is fitting, Johnny Rivers will have the last word.

This is a short talk on motivation and love. What motivates a person to do something — to REALLY do something. As opposed to remaining endlessly exhausted and trapped, within a cycle of inner conflict and desuetude.

As usual in PZ’s Podcast, love is the answer. But how? And why? Karl Barth’s decisive mistake is exposed — without animus. Parishioners’ failed self-knowledge, let alone my own failed self-knowledge, is exposed — by experience.

You have to start with experience. It doesn’t mean you have to end there. But you have to start with your own experience.

Simeon Zahl never tires of saying this, and I agree with him. If you don’t start with your own experience, and hopefully a somewhat detached perspective on your own experience, your own experience will continually surprise you, and maybe one day destroy you.

My cast concludes with an interesting example of a person who seems to be “disinterested” in relation to his own human embodied life to a degree that is almost impossible to imagine for oneself. Yet it is the stuff that martyrs are made of, and sometimes saints.

As is fitting, Johnny Rivers will have the last word.

You listen to the group Honey Cone, described today as early feminists, and they are talking about a universal truth and in memorable pop terms. No hatred of men here, just the emotional recognition that if you don’t love her, she can’t really love you. Love between a man and a woman is a two-way street. (Unlike God’s love for us, which at the center is a one-way street.)

If you don’t understand this and are a man, you are in for trouble “Further on Up the Road” (Clapton and the Band, 1978).

I learned this from more than one source, which I talk about in the cast; but the main source was Honey Cone. Or rather, they told me it before I could hear it. And now I am telling you.

Oh, and I also learned this (crucial) life lesson from “Atom Age Vampire”. “Atom Age Vampire” is one of those brilliant artistic and sadistic Italian horror movies from the early 1960s that if you saw it once, you never forgot it. (If you see it now, you’ll never forget it!) Those movies are stocked with wisdom, communicated mostly in “Grand Guignol” situations of, shall we say, existential urgency. But the wisdom is there. “Atom Age Vampire” teaches us about the nature of real love, trustable love, and faithful love. Versus… well, you’ll see.

In short, we love because we are first loved, and then we love back.

“Psychosis” is a very strong word for a cultural phenomenon. But it allows us to speak of a fissure over against reality, when groups of people see things around them in a way that is divorced from the facts.

You can apply the phenomenon of group fissure from reality, to anything you like. I can see it in the way a very specific historical reality, the Anglican Church as the English expression of legal and official Protestantism, has been so completely buried by a different “narrative” that it is as if the reality never was and never existed.

So completely, in other words, has a narrative concerning a development in church history taken over the historical facts that it has become AS IF THE REALITY NEVER WAS.

You see this sometimes in relationships. You thought somebody was totally wonderful, and sympathetically disposed towards you, and maybe even loved you. And then, in a single moment, you discovered you were wrong! Everything you thought about the person had been a misreading on your part. They actually hated you and wanted to betray you — after they got what they wanted from you.

“Je repete”: This Happens All the Time.

In this podcast, I refer to a current narrative that is powerful around us. And you have to decide yourself whether you believe that narrative or not. But then I talk about Agatha Christie, and the

And yet, there’s Palm Sunday. And yet, there’s Christ on the Donkey. And yet, there’s a narrative that explodes all ‘narratives’ — the narrative of the Incarnation. Thus the music for this cast: ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. I’d put that truth before Agatha Christie’s any time. Moreover, SHE’d agree with me!.