PZ's Podcast

On December 29th, 2023 Mary and I have been married exactly 50 years.

What a marker for us! (I truly feel it and celebrate it.)

This marker-episode concerns the primacy of individual belovedness over any and everything else, including career and professional achievement. This primacy becomes instantly apparent whenever you get sick, or find yourself in the neighborhood of death, or experience a catastrophic fall from perceived security.

The cast goes on to echo Meister Eckhart's enduring maxim, that "If you cannot find God, go back to where you lost Him." Or, in everyday experience, If you cannot find belovedness in the marriage you have, go back to the point in time when you did have it, when you did feel it. That works in life-long marriage, and every time!

Finally I give a brief synopsis of Mary's and my own marriage, of 50 years, from its "Peter Pan's Ride" beginning, to the "Pallisers Theme" return-to-basics. I sure hope you like this.

Podcast 374 is dedicated to Mary Cappleman Zahl, the Girl I Married.

Bishop Colin Buchanan died November 29th in Leeds Infirmary, and there’s been almost no coverage of it — not even in the Church press. Astonishing!

Colin was one of the most influential ministers and scholars in the Church of England during the 20th Century. Yet it seems today as if he almost never existed.

This podcast is a reflection on the anonymity of death.

It also references Robert Blair’s superb poem from 1743 entitled “The Grave”, together with the sublime illustrative plates that William Blake created to accompany the poem.

And, believe it or not, this is a Christmas podcast!

The cast is dedicated to the Very Rev. Laurie Thompson.

This Christmas podcast is in honor of Mary's and my 50th Anniversary, which comes on December 29th. She and I are both in thankful awe of having made it thus far. And happily! To me this is worth celebrating.

The cast sets out two requirements, or better, signs, as I see it, for an enduring marriage. The first is the romantic connection. Our marriage began with that in first place. There simply has to be a romantic (i.e., male-female) connection for the relationship to start -- or, perhaps better, for a relationship to be able to turn towards marriage. And then, once married, you find yourself needing at almost regular intervals to return to that initial romantic foundation. It is not enough for him or her to be my "best friend". That is certainly true -- Mary is my best friend! -- but the romantic element is prior. Friendship is not marriage. (This is why, incidentally, boys and men wince to the core when a girl or woman tells them they want to be just friends. And believe me, even when your husband hears you saying that he's your best friend, he seizes up inside. He won't tell you that, but his heart is stopping the minute you say it. Even tho', as I report, he is in fact your best friend.)

So point one of ""We've Only Just Begun" (1973) is to underline the priority of the romantic connection over all else. (This is true, believe it or not, even when you're 75.)

The second foundation stone of an enduring marriage is faith in God. Natch', you may see the specifics of that in different terms from those of your wife or husband. He may be reacting against Five Point Calvinism and you may be reacting against Baptist rules concerning conduct. But a shared root-implanted faith in God who is "Higher Than I" is indispensable for the navigation of problems. For the record, Mary and I have read the Bible and prayed together every morning early for almost all the years of our marriage. It's not a law, and it's not even a recommendation. But it's an observation. I don't know where we would be -- especially in the stressful times -- if we hadn't had a shared faith in a personal God.

Like Mary's totally enchanting smile (and the response it created in me -- in the Fall of l969, in fact), Mary's openness to God was core for me. It is still core for me.

Oh, and listen to the closing track, a Christmas track of the highest magnitude. Do give it time until... that last third (per usual) with these artists.

Merry Christmas to us all, and Happy Anniversary to my wife of 50 years, Mary Cappleman Zahl.

This cast is dedicated to our three sons: John A. Zahl, David W.F. Zahl, and Simeon McLean Zahl.

That's a fun movie, from 1976, in which a group of Victorian English people are mistakenly rocketed into inner space, right down to the core of the earth. (What they find, well, you can probably imagine.)

But the title and the premise are good: There's newness to be found at the center of the earth -- our earth, our core.

This is the heart of the Christian Faith. God will always speak to beleaguered humans, but rarely until we get to the earth's core. The core is where we live; the core is where our "Heart and Soul" (Cleftones, 1961) feel (as one); the core is where our pain comes undisguised, unmasked. There, in the core, is where we meet God; or better, where the Saving God meets us.

The cast circles over 'Theron Ware', 'Babette', Lloyd Bridges as 'The Loner', right over to Rod Serling's superb "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar". But we are "Circl(ing) for a Landing" (Three Dog Night, 1968). I can never rest until we land -- land at the Earth's Core.

Merry Christmas to you all, and God Bless Us Every One.

Podcast 371 is dedicated to a true fellow traveler, Tom Agricola.

When I survey... not the Wondrous Cross, but the world as it's currently going, it's hard not to despair. So many things seem and feel wrong -- are wrong.

Providentially (as I see it), I've been directed back to Rod Serling. He was so focussed on justice, and especially social justice; and also on fate and impassable destiny. But he also believed in One Big Miracle. Rod Serling believed in the Miracle of Christmas!

This comes out in teleplay after teleplay, from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Serling honestly believed that One Miracle could change the fallen world.

Go back and watch the 1971 'Night Gallery' episode entitled "The Messiah on Mott Street". It's easy to find online, and is also free of charge. The episode not only enacts a first-class human miracle, but it is also a high point of Jewish-Christian reconciliation in a network TV show. In short, "The Messiah on Mott Street" is a wonder. It will give you fresh hope.

And not just hope in 'meta'-terms. But hope for that particular personal insolubility with which you are currently dealing. Oddly, Rod Serling has given me new hope today as I look out on the world.

Oh, and read Ross Douthat's terrific recent column in the New York Times entitled, "Where Does Religion Come From?". It has a Rod Serling quality to it. And a Simeon Zahl quality, too!

LUV U.

God spoke to me recently.

Not through a mediated form -- albeit it was through another human being. Not through concept nor reading nor paradox nor metaphor nor memory. But right Here and Now!

I was truly blown away. It was neither expected (at all) nor on a subject about which I'd been thinking.

This podcast gives the outline of what happened. There were even witnesses.

In the midst of an otherwise delightful walk down memory lane with companions whom I cherish, one of these companions suddenly uttered some truths so powerful and demanding of attention that we were all suddenly stopped in our tracks. Stopped in our tracks.

I still can't believe it happened. Mary's comment, when I told her the story, was simply: "You were sure plunged into very deep waters there."

Now they were Good Waters, True Waters, Healing Waters.

Moreover, they weren't "nuanced" or "complicated". It wasn't a case of "Both/And". It was a case of straight-up Either/Or.

I was suddenly, indubitably JUSTIFIED.

Listen to this cast and ask yourself if it's happened to you. Do you want it to happen to you? Do you care? Do you want me to tell you more? (I'll be glad to, and probably in another cast.)

Oh, and the closing music is an excerpt from "Jesus Says", by our favorite Northern Irish Protestant rock band, 'Ash'. I just like the riff. And the title. LUV U.

I've been much affected by the pictures of murdered and bombed children from Israel and Gaza in the last week, and found myself comparing these unutterably tragic losses with some of the other issues on which our world is fixed. It almost seems like there's no comparison between the bloody burial sheet of a five-year old child and the concerns that dominate much of public life.

So Christ's words in St. Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 23, verse 24 came to mind: "You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel." So much time and mental energy goes into straining out "a gnat" when there's a "camel" (for example the loss of a child) that's the real issue. The more contemporary phrase for this is "elephant in the room".

I thought about the way I seize on making the bed every morning. One's ridiculous mental focus on that "gnat" of a task has become habitual. It is almost as if, if the bombs were falling and Mary and I had to get out of the building, I would feel I had to stop and make the bed first. (Are you kidding me?)

So the point of this cast is to look at the "camel" that you're really needing and trying -- unsuccessfully, for sure -- to swallow (i.e., digest/assimilate) in relation to the ten thousand gnats that you actually spend your time ... processing.

Down with "process" and Up with proportional focus!

(Oh, and see that window in Cadeleigh Parish Church.)

If you want to get to the core, the very heart, of a person's -- say, your own -- experience of Grace, ask them (i.e., ask yourself) to tell you about an experience of acceptance or belovedness that came to them at a low point in their youth or childhood. Get them to tell you about that one experience of being loved personally, subjectively, for yourself, I mean, that changed... everything. Almost everyone you know can summon up a story, almost always when they were in a place of despair, when someone, usually unexpectedly, reached out and ... held them.

Similarly, ask them (i.e., yourself) about an experience of personal rejection, either as a child or an adolescent, that forever troubled the waters of their life's course. Someone rejected them -- personally, I mean, and not because of an "identity" or ideology, but for yourself personally -- and this has haunted them, like Poe's 'Lost Lenore', forever.

This podcast observes the power of personal rejection but, more importantly, the power of personal acceptance. Consider the relationship of 'Magwitch' to 'Pip' in "Great Expectations". (See the 1946 masterpiece movie of it!). Or consider the story I tell at the conclusion of the cast, of a two-hour ride being offered to yours truly by someone way back in 1972. And that, to quote Robert Frost, "made all the difference".

These are anchor instantiations of God's Grace in your life. They verify what St. Paul describes in Romans 7, and what Christ spent His life, and death, doing.

And then there's Michel Legrand... LUV U!

Written by Jimmy Webb and performed by Glen Campbell, "Our Movie" is a very touching song.

It describes a fulfilled marriage from its beginning and right through. It really describes one's whole life in affectionate and thankful perspective. For me the song is pure Phosphorus!

In the cast I talk about soul and body, true self and false self, physical life and physical death: the promise of these things and the limitations of at least three of them. I have in mind my own marriage of almost 50 years, yet also the yearning we all have to not be alone. Remember the need for belovedness -- and its direct consequent, loving -- and the need to be connected to another person, which points directly, finally to God: these are not secondary needs. They are primary ones.

The cast concludes with a brief hommage to Olivia Newton-John, and also to our old friend and parishioner, Michael Beck(-Taylor). Episode 366 is dedicated, in warm thanksgiving and enduring affection, to David Babikow and Joey Goodall.

So I was in Henley-on-Thames last week and there was this almost hidden bookshop next to a place called "The Ferret". (I kid you not.) High on a shelf there was an old leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens' lesser known Christmas stories. Not the long ones like "A Christmas Carol" or "The Chimes" or "The Haunted Man"; but short ones like "The Child's Story", "The Seven Poor Travellers", and "What Christmas Is As We Grow Older".

What these stories all reveal -- for I started reading them on the airplane home -- is an explicit (tho' never didactic nor even artificial) dynamic of Christian Grace and One-Way Love. The author makes it clear in every tale that the core transaction of life in this world is the possibility of new beginning, new birth, resurrected hope, and empathic out-reaching love.

Dickens always traces such dynamic beneficence specifically to Christ and His (Christmas) Goodness towards the lonely, the desperate, the poor, and even the rogues. In short, each story in this collection sets out the Whole Loaf.

For many years -- many decades, it feels like sometimes -- I was perpetually mining my movies, my novels and my TV shows for implicit Christianity -- implicit Gospel, implicit Grace. And it can be found!

But then one day I actually read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and found the Whole Loaf in that celebrated novel. And then one day I read Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection and again: the Whole Loaf. And now I read Charles Dickens' short Christmas stories and again, Behold: the Whole Loaf.

Part of the Loaf can be very good. Say, General Public (1980s), Nik Kershaw (ditto), Frankie Goes to Hollywood (ditto). But the Whole Loaf is better. And how the world needs it now. LUV U.