PZ's Podcast

I’m feeling optimistic about our future — both mine, and Mary’s, personally; and also the future of our country and the world. This is

What is fundamental is love found, love lost, love abandoned, love

This is why, for example, the moods of Jimmy Webb, the famous

Now is a time to regain some composure by means of universal

Love in Restitution: That’s the Ticket.

A forthcoming book on the sacraments, edited by Justin Holcomb and David A. Johnson, has got me thinking about the “means of grace” — or rather, how do we know and recognize God’s grace in our actual personal lives. The history of the Christian Church could almost be reduced to a long timeline of disagreement over the sacraments as means of grace, and in particular, the Lord’s Supper/Eucharist.

In order to think about this today, I’ve had to travel back to basics: which is Jackie DeShannon, and a song she wrote, and performed and released in 1964, entitled “When You Walk in the Room”.

Almost everything you would want or hope a sacrament to be and to represent is covered in that song. Only thing is, the form of ‘sacrament’ portrayed in the song is instantiated in a relationship — an overwhelming emotional and corporeal encounter. The parallels, to me, are obvious.

I invite you to listen to the song (and to The Searchers’ version, too) “every time that you — Boom Boom Boom” — go into church.

I want to introduce Robert Nathan to you.

Why I present Robert Nathan to you is because he is after the one thing needful — ‘What is Love?’ (Foreigner). But he is also after God. God comes into almost all Nathan’s stories, directly and with a deep and loyal openness. Robert Nathan was a believer, but neither — tho’ he was Jewish by birth — a practising Jew nor a practising Christian. But also sort of both! Today he would be considered almost overly assimilated, as he seems to move effortlessly between a Christian thought-world and a Jewish-one. But above all a Love Story (1970) thought-world!

Read Robert Nathan! See Portrait of Jennie (1948)!

I think American Buddhists are missing in action.

They are missing in action in relation to an almost overwhelming contradiction with their teaching that exists in common public culture today.

I am talking about the notion of “narrative”.

“Narrative” is the word for a “story” — the usual term for it in mindfulness therapy — that collects the different realities in your life into one basket. Story, or narrative, is an attempt to understand as a single whole the different experiences you have in life. It is almost invariably imposed, or deduced, rather than discovered, and induced. According to many today, your life has to have a narrative (i.e., imposed upon it by your mind, or by someone else’s mind) in order for it to have meaning. You almost become one with your narrative.

Buddhism teaches something different.

I wish that Buddhists, who are pretty popular in a lot of circles by comparison with Christians, of whom I am one, would “come out” on this subject. Recently, I asked a Buddhist teacher whom I admire, “Why doesn’t anyone from your community ever challenge the prevailing ‘narrative’ about narratives? You disappoint me.” The teacher hung his head, literally.

This cast draws on two R & B ‘Soul’ ballads that, were they recorded today, would probably invoke a “narrative” to explain the voice — and problem — of the singer. But they weren’t recorded today. They understand the suffering they relate, and the deliverance from that suffering which both songs celebrate, in a different way.

The problems we all have are different, depending on the person and your history. Yet they are all urgent; and they all require, ultimately, urgent care.

This cast presupposes the universality of urgency, at least in one concrete area of your life. In other words, everyone is more or less circling for a landing.

But how to land? You didn’t go to flying school, did you? Most people didn’t. So how do you land?

The short answer is, you have to go elementary — you have to return to first principles. And for most people, this means going back to the past.

You can’t go forward in life — you can’t even begin to live in the present — if you haven’t abreacted your past.

I had a surprising chance to do this recently. In fact, I’m still in shock about it. This is because a college reunion grabbed me right back to … the Twilight Zone. I entered the Twilight Zone. Partly it was because where I was was unchanged, physically and emotionally even, in comparison to what it was, physically and emotionally, 45 years ago. ZHOOOM!: It’s 1971 again. Hey, and what’s that song blaring from the dorm windows? It’s “Roundabout”, by Yes.

If you don’t believe me now — and I’m actively hoping you will — you may one day. And then “you may ask yourself” (Talking Heads): Where did I file that podcast again, the one about memory and merger? LUV U.

Healing, one’s healing, doesn’t come from fiat, i.e., from declaration.

Healing comes from abreaction and merger, from engagement, even the ‘clash by night’, with the past and with your hurt, rejection and pain.

I saw this recently “up close and personal”

It was the centennial of my final club (i.e., fraternity), and the whole world

In a way, I saw the secret of institutional endurance — as opposed to institutional entropy. You keep up with the present people you serve or are intended to serve, and you keep faith with … the shoulders on which you stand. I beheld my old final club: the perfect instance of doing both, and with humor, delight, affection, and warm-heartedness.

But there was one more thing.

Come Fly with Me (1957), and, then again, with ‘Yes’, make “Your Move” (1971).

Gosh, I like Tommy Roe!

But why?

Well, partly, because his songs are catchy and sweet, and especially “Everybody” (1963). But “Dizzy” (1969) also makes me… dizzy.

The real reason a person likes a song — or really likes a song — is that it speaks for them. Or speaks to them. Or speaks from them.

All these things we like so much (i.e., pop songs, videos, movies, novels, television shows, poems, paintings) draw something out of us. Yes, they are apt “hooks”, for something inside us. But the bigger part of the transaction is the soul of me that I am hanging on the hook.

This cast talks about the “me” part — while all the time loving Tommy Roe!

Oh, and the second part of the cast, which I’m not going to preview here,

Put that in your pipe and…

This podcast is dedicated to Ray Ortlund.

Just how “effective” are collective expressions of grief?

Every time I see a vast concourse of people gathered at the site of a massacre, I honestly “feel with” the grief; and yet remain a little skeptical.

Do you think you’ll be thinking about instances of collective loss that took place in your life, when you are dying? I wonder. I know you’ll be thinking about instances of personal loss that you suffered.

This podcast asks you to consider “exiting from history” (Milan Kundera) in order, well, to really live. Focus on the individual instance — on you, in other words! I cite the novels of Rider Haggard in this connection, who understood as well as almost anyone the persistence of the eternal in the life of the individual. There’s the rub, and there’s why Haggard’s “Zulu” novels are a kind of summit of racial reconciliation in English literature. These novels understand human beings as one, due to shared suffering, shared loss, and the shared aspiration to love and be loved. I wish Haggard were here today to write about Orlando.

Oh, and listen closely, if you can, to Dave Loggins at the end. Loggins said that after he wrote the song — in one night — he realized he hadn’t written it. He didn’t know where it came from, but he knew it didn’t come from him.

We’re just awash — aground! — in “narratives” these days.

But “narratives” don’t work! They are seldom completely true; and more often, they are cataclysmically partial. In both senses! This cast examines two “narratives” — one regarding an apparently neglected English hymn writer and the other being racism — and comes up with a caution.

I then expand the caution to account for irrational experiences within personal relationships. I had a vision a year ago, at a lovely wedding on the Atlantic Ocean, which invalidated almost everything else in front of me. (And it happened to be a great wedding.) But my vision rendered null and void the entire situation. “Let me take you there.”

Let’s hear it, too, for General Johnson.

The text is from a leading Presidential candidate, but it applies to two of them — two persons who are ideologically apart but have one main thing in common.

That main thing is:

The New Testament is not a world-affirming document.

The Cook’d Book of the world is not only true of political parties. It is true of institutions generally, job environments generally, schools and universities generally (which is why youth is eternally looking for the ‘Mr. Chips’-type altruist — one in a million), you name it. (N.B. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGAV8wvYdVI)

I’m glad that Bernie and the other one are cutting to the nerve. Je repete: