PZ's Podcast

I’m talking about pastoral contact, which is just another way of talking about personal contact. How do you get through to somebody? How do they get through to you? What establishes direct contact with the person that you really are?

The music of my casts almost all concerns that point of contact. Music can do it! Movies can do it. Cable can do it. It’s got to happen, by the way; or you perish from solitude.

There is a particularly instructive classic movie that deals head on with this question of making contact, and from a specifically Christian angle. It is called “Come to the Stable”, and stars Loretta Young and Celeste Holm. It came out in 1949.

“Come to the Stable” tells the story of two French nuns — one was born in America — who believe they have been directed by God to found a hospital for children in southern New England. They approach individuals whom they meet basically “by chance”, with their requests for concrete aid. They are never, finally turned away. The reason they are never, finally turned away is that they have wisdom about people — about the losses and the unwilling hardnesses that people “grow” into. ‘Sister Margaret’, especially, is acutely sensitive to people’s hidden hurts. And when these hurts are touched, sympathetically, nothing is off the table.

During the podcast, which had to be recorded twice, I get choked up, also twice, while I talk about an incident in the movie. It could be my story. It could be yours. And you could be Sister Margaret to me, and I could be Sister Margaret to you. (You’ve got to see “Come to the Stable.”)

If you’re in any kind of pastoral care, or need pastoral care (Hands go up!), share this podcast around. And listen to the last song. It’s The Carpenters from their most pop-inspired period. LUV U.

We’ve all got a story in our eyes!

The Moody Blues, and in particular their inspired songwriter Justin Hayward, caught that “Silent-Running” fact in the 1971 single that starts this podcast. We’ve all got a story in our eyes.

Characteristically, the story results from pain, and, also characteristically, from pain suffered in earlier life. At the time, it seemed, at least in many cases, to be overcome-able. It seemed as though it, the loss or pain, could be counter-acted, or even superseded, by other, better experiences.

And so it seemed.

Until later, when that slight deviation east, of the hurricane against my life, by which that hurricane moved offshore, to the margin of my feelings, and just “sat there”, caught up with us. Later, sometimes decades later, the eye of the storm turned back on us, and constituted a direct hit! Then down we went, and with us the whole fragile architecture of our “Works and Days” (Hesiod).

So I’m talking about the story in your eyes.

But I’m also pumping for hope. I’m pumping for a step of faith. I don’t want you to give up. I don’t wish to give up, myself. Jesus often asked the individuals who came to him with incurable disease and insoluble problems, “Where is your faith?”.

Dr. Thomas Calhoun once asked me, after I’d proffered a long sob story, “But Paul, where is your faith?” My inward answer, right on the spot, was, “Well, nowhere. I have no faith.” That was an important moment. I saw what I didn’t have — at all! — and also saw the only thing I needed. Won’t tell you the end of that story, tho’ I sure bless Tom Calhoun.

On that note, the podcast ends; and with the snappy pop classic, also by the Moodies, entitled, “It’s Up to You”. And please don’t worry. It’s orthodox!

This theme of the insuperability of at least one problem in your life continues to absorb me — and in the light of hope and hopefulness.

I tell the story of a woman who recently attended a meeting of church executives, almost all of whom are absorbed by current issues and questions of identity in political terms. This person said to me afterwards, “It seemed like a voice spoke to me, as I listened to the virtue-signalling: ‘This form of Christianity has no future.’ ” What she meant was that there was no SAVING being proffered, nothing related to the fear of death and the questions of regret and remorse that overwhelm individuals as they grow in age.

I have to agree with my friend.

Then I watched an old “war horse” of a Hollywood movie entitled “The Sign of the Cross” (1936). For all its age, “The Sign of the Cross” is utterly blunt and shockingly direct concerning the human and philosophical objections to faith, faith itself, and the inter-face between faith and romantic love. The actors Frederic March and Elissa Landi pour all they’ve got into the decisive lovers’ disputes that create a highly affecting and dramatic, and to me completely plausible, conclusion. What is offered in “The Sign of the Cross” is a form of Christianity which has a very high and a very long future. Watch it.

And listen to Tyrone Davis now, great “torch song” singer of Soul Music, and hear how close he is to true experience.

HUGS always, PZ

Sometimes when I hear a sermon or address that stresses the presence of God in catastrophic situations, let alone God’s presence in the midst of sin and sinners, I want to stand up and ask (tho’ I never do): “Do you really believe what you are saying? Are you willing to go all the way with such pronouncements, placing God in such desperate company? Or rather, is it just ‘Easier Said Than Done’?”

One’s pastoral and personal experience is that such declarations can be hollow. That is because it seems there is almost always ONE exception, in one’s practice and subjectivity, to the statement that God lives in our tragedies, our discomfiture, and our self-created torments. Usually there is a personal exemption-principle at work, despite all the talk of God’s omni-Grace.

Mary and I used to scratch our heads sometimes when a faithful person whom we knew seemed to lose all his or her serenity and peace in the face of a crushing circumstances, and most notably, in the face of their death. At times it almost seemed that a person’s Christianity had been a kind of masquerade. Or at least, a masquerade in connection with one very BIG point of pain.

So my question in the cast is, Do you really believe what you say about grace? And do you really believe what you say concerning the theology of the cross?

Oh, and so you know: the cast ends on a strong note of hope, lifted directly from the gateway to the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, where the words stand engraved:

“The Dead Shall Be Raised.”

The fact that the mainstream churches are hiding their Light under a bushel is the primary reason for their atrophy. The fact that most of our churches are “missing in action” when it comes to the seemingly insuperable pain of living that we bring to them and to their representatives — well, that, I believe, is the main cause of their numerical decline.

Today I want to posit an alternative to this almost willful but in fact mostly unconscious suppression of the Primary (i.e, the Gospel Word) in favor of the secondary (i.e., “issues” of the day) and the tertiary (i.e., endless announcements about meaningless, useless parish activities and functions, to which almost no one really wants to come).

The response to Episode 229, entitled “I Live on a Battlefield”, was astounding! It was as if that cast had pulled down the statue of Dagon, and with it the failed constructions of a generation.

All I was trying to say in that cast was that Mary and I had been “Crawling from the Wreckage” (Dave Edmunds, 1979) of our lives, especially my professional life — crawling on our hands and knees — to “mainstream” churches near us — you name it, almost anywhere — and finding nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, to help us or sustain us. That is, unless we were victims of Hurricane Harvey, in the instance of which most local churches usually do well. (Paging pastoral Josh Condon and others like him!)

In today’s cast, in the aftermath of NOTHING — or almost nothing — proffered to a sufferer like me when he or she comes to church, drawn by pain, I sketch out the profundity of… The Moody Blues. Yes, the partly lame but more often inspired Moody Blues.

The Moodies’ single from 1969 entitled “Question” says almost everything there is to say — about life and living. One can be astonished, thinking about it now, that Justin Hayward composed that song when he was 23 years old. Would that I had met him, and been counseled pastorally by him — I fear he would have run the other way — in… 1969.

Hope this cast speaks to you. Hope this cast bears… a little empathy.

One more ‘riff’ on the paucity of mainstream church “address” to the hungry and hurt visitor, let alone the hungry and hurt regular; but with hope:

Justin Hayward is sometimes accused of sentimental romanticism. I don’t agree. I think he is on to something.

His songs locate the heart of human pain in the misses and defeats incurred within the elemental atmosphere of romantic love. I believe experience confirms this. Nobody dies thinking about Clemson vs. Alabama, or whether their career could have gone better, or whether Senator Muskie did or did not win the Presidency — or even how you acquitted yourself during a natural disaster.

But EVERYBODY dies thinking about love, or rather, who it is that loved you. That’s the Golgotha door to the next life! It’s the biggest thing that can hang you up at the end of death.

Songs like the two that conclude this cast, which are “It’s Up To You” and “Lovely To See You Again”, have the shoe on the right foot. In fact, I would almost defy you to hear them and not have them in your head for the next… week, at least.

From a theological point of view, Episode 231 is also a reflection on analogy, and how God is understand through analogy. But I don’t take Barth’s line. Would rather work from the bottom up.

There is also a moment of unguarded rhetoric near the end — not vulgarity but rather “Hercules Unchained” — that absolutely cracked me up when I heard it played back.

LUV U.

A penetrating comment recently from a friend set up a chain reaction inside me that’s resulted in this new cast. After a long hiatus and with the support of Mockingbird, I’m starting back up and hope these new episodes may speak.

My friend, who is about my age, observed that everyone we know, without exception — that’s the “hard” part of the saying — has suffered some arresting impasse or insuperable loss, some decisive disappointment or unconquerable conflict, which they simply cannot get over.

I agree with my friend.

Moreover, people in situations of undeniable blockage often turn to God, or whatever/wherever they think God may be. And it is there, at this conscious point of need, that churches “come out” as being out of their depth and shockingly irrelevant to human suffering. Sadly, I know — Mary and I know.

In points of distress since 2007 we have tried so many parishes and churches. We have crawled on our knees to hoped-for altars of comfort and hope, and received… nothing. I mean, nothing! There are exceptions, such as All Saints, Winter Park (FL) and Calvary/St. George in New York City. And there are others. But for the most part, you abase yourself in search of a word of hope and grace, and you get a junior-choir awards ceremony; or a sermon consisting wholly of platitudes without a single illustration; or an exhausting summons to a social cause; or a public baptism of perfect strangers who are actually strangers to the parish but can fill up some pews on a given Sunday. “It’s like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder/How I keep from goin’ under” (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 1982)

So I’m talking today about the universal in-reach of pain, and some of the resources I have found in recent months to stanch it. And I promise you, this is “Only the Beginning” (Chicago, 1969)…

I keep trying to make sense of the divisions we are almost all feeling currently.How can one get "under" them, i.e., in hopes of lessening them a little? Does anyone who is reading this enjoy feeling estranged from others, especially old friends, for example, because of political opinions? Very few, I'll bet. But it's happening.

Then the insight came:

What I am saying is that looking back on it now, after 47 years, the whole apocalyptic scenario which possessed our youthful world

What?! How can I say that? How can I aver the Vietnam war was

I'll tell you why:

This cast reflects on the current explosion of feeling in light of ... memory.

HUGS, PZ

I keep trying to make sense of the divisions we are almost all feeling currently.How can one get “under” them, i.e., in hopes of lessening them a little? Does anyone who is reading this enjoy feeling estranged from others, especially old friends, for example, because of political opinions? Very few, I’ll bet. But it’s happening.

Then the insight came:

What I am saying is that looking back on it now, after 47 years, the whole apocalyptic scenario which possessed our youthful world

What?! How can I say that? How can I aver the Vietnam war was

I’ll tell you why:

This cast reflects on the current explosion of feeling in light of … memory.

HUGS, PZ

The animus expressed in connection with the Inauguration has made me think about events that happened almost 47 years. The catalyst was

A few of us were conservatives then. (Don’t blame me, please. It’sjust a statement “du fait”.) And did we get clobbered!

One night five or six of us were having lunch in Adams House. That particular residence hall was “crawling” with SDS (i.e., Students for

Are you the clothes you wear? Not mostly.

You’re a human soul. You’re Ivan Denisovich, and Paul Dombey, and Tevye in “Fiddler”; and you’re Kellyanne Conway. (Wait a minute! But seriously.) I am Ashley Judd.

All these typifications and classifications, these predicates and identity-markers:

This cast also the tale of something revealing which happened to me the other day. The person I saw and met was quite different from the person I had read about on the internet. What truth was the truth about her? Guess I would like to say, the person whom I saw and met.

Hope you like my music today. It’s a long track, mixed by the celebrated Tom Moulton and performed by The Trammps. It’s too good to cut. The cast ends with “Orange Air” by The 5th Dimension. David Zahl got me on to that one.