PZ's Podcast

The first cast, "Animotion I", laid the 'low-anthropology' groundwork for this new one. Carl Jung's typification of animus and anima diagnosed the male/female dynamic buried within us primordially -- _a la _"Quatermass and the Pit" (1967). Now comes the Hope, which for me is not only real but also empirical.

Damon Runyon (d. 1946) understood about men and women.

How could the author upon whose stories Guys and Dolls was based not have done so? Runyon's stories are vignette after vignette of oddly paired (but not to Jung) couples who find lasting love, grace and transformation. The context may be New York City streetlife of the Depression era, but the 'types' and situations are universal. The exterior framework is limited to a place and time, but the people inside themselves could be you and me. And in every case, or almost every case, grace triumphs, justice works itself out, and transformation occurs. (Thus you absolutely have to see the 1941 mini-movie of Runyan's short story "The Old Doll's House". Mockingbirders will hardly believe what they see. You can pull it up on YouTube.)

What I am saying is that God works (a la Damon Runyan) within the framework He has made (a la C.G. Jung) . The inborn primordial framework of our personhood does not prevent God from working for our good. He is always doing something, even if it looks at first like the "back story".

That is the point of this cast and I hope you like it. Oh, and see Guys and Dolls (1955), with Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, and Frank Sinatra. It's all there. LUV U.

Amid the tidal wave/s of views and perspectives on men and women in relation to one another stand the enduring insights of Carl Jung. Much of what he wrote feels almost too complex and too layered to be true, for truth is simple. But what he observed over the years about men and women in their archetypal difference stands. I think it stands.

One used to scratch one's head, at least in the late '70s, when almost every Episcopal minister one knew became a Jungian therapist, or almost did! No kidding. Talk about a tidal wave.

Now I understand a little better. Not the going "whole hog" -- for the journey to health for most Jungians takes too long, like kind of forever. The therapy itself feels life long -- just much too long! But the diagnosis, especially concerning women and men in primordial perspective, is brilliant. Jung didn't make it up. He observed people, during thousands of hours of therapeutic dialogue, and his observations were acute.

In this podcast, I read a -- I guess we could say -- seminal passage from the Collected Works that concerns the embedded archetypes of anima and animus. What he wrote is clarifying and surgical. "Read, Mark, Learn and Inwardly Digest".

Once the ground is laid, and it takes only three paragraphs from the master to lay the ground, we can move on to the hope of cure -- God's cure. But that comes next, in "Animotion II". LUV U.

This is one's ecclesiology, one's doctrine of the Church, after a lifetime's involvement with it and 47 years' ordained ministry within it. For what it's worth, I think I've "got it now" ("One Monkey Don't Stop No Show", The Animals, 1966).

Where I think it might help, dear Listener, is in the area of reactivity and also in the area of inclusivity.

To wit, if you are on 'The Canterbury Trail', say, as a former evangelical or former Baptist, you won't reach a final or satisfying destination until you reduce the reactivity to near nil. Most seekers after the right church are in reaction to where they started. That is quite normal, but it still won't get you to God in His Church. Your (fluid) "destination/s" will almost always be one-sided or partial. You won't stay there, in other words. Somehow, your initial reactivity has got to decelerate.

Secondly, in my own case the Church of England Evangelicals (and charismatics) answered the question of "Church" because they were Scriptural, orthodox, and brave but at the same time tolerant of the other wings of the Church. (It's the 'left' wing, today, that is less tolerant in the main; and their distaste has probably got to decrease in order for the Church to be comprehensive again.) As I say in the cast, in an anecdote from Blackburn Cathedral that still makes me laugh after almost 48 years, the English Evangelicals learned how to "embed" and not stick out, yet still be true to the Gospel call. To watch them in action was a gift that even now is still giving -- to Mary and me, at least.

So "Here 't'is" (Bo Diddley): an ecclesiology drained -- ideally -- of reactivity and thriving "between the sheets". Try it (if you can find it). You'll like it.

It's funny that in one's recovery from illness, the "band width" is still nowhere near what it used to be. I used to be able to read a novel by Dostoyevsky one week, then a book by Forde the next, then a novel by Cozzens the next.

**Sayonara to that! **Now one is fortunate to be able to read The Runaway Bunny.

So hey, I've gone back to reading in three-page spurts. And the perfect author for this "new way of walking, new way of talking" is... Robert Nathan.

You remember Robert Nathan. He wrote The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie, to name just two of his roughly 40 or so fantasy novels. But the thing is, Robert Nathan's novels are all short -- more like novellas -- and they read like pudding, because he was an excellent and simple narrator.

Anyway, I'm back to Nathan, like it or not; and today's cast updates you on this charming "Mid-Century" author.

It is good to note, too, that Robert Nathan was Jewish but had zero chip on his shoulder. That may be because he was born into a wealthy Manhattan family and didn't feel he had to prove himself in the wider American scene. (We would say today that Nathan was a child of "privilege".)

One corollary of Nathan's un-reactive growing up is that he was explicitly favorable to Christianity. You see this in several of his novels, and also in his poetry, which was much acclaimed on the home front during World War II.

Well, that's lesson two for 2022, and I hope it's the second of many, for Mockingbird, in our New Year. LUV U.

I was "thrown" a little recently by a liturgical service that felt confused at a pretty deep level, and maybe even untruthful. The service was trying to honor someone but "too many cooks" (theologically and personally) "spoiled the broth".

That is true of many services when they are not rooted in the Gospel. I mean the Gospel that brings together accurate, i.e. "low" anthropology and the hope of God's mercy. Most "celebrations of life" that Mary and I attend seem to almost capitalize on false encomium. You come away feeling that the person you knew wouldn't recognize himself if he had been there.

I'm not arguing for negativity, but I am pleading for accuracy, with humor and compassion -- Christ's compassion.

As I came away from the service I have in mind, I suddenly thought of The Music Man! That's a musical about a con man who specializes in imputation not rooted remotely in truth. And only when a woman falls in love with him, and really does impute goodness to him -- for she was the first person in the town to find out the truth about him -- does everything change. He, the con man, changes; the townspeople forgive and unite; and the "at-risk" young people of the town form a marching band that does, miraculously, find its true and powerful voice. The Music Man is about real transformation. For PZ, it was the antidote to the discomfiture I felt during the service.

The Music Man healed me.

This podcast is dedicated to David Zahl, Mockingbird, and the 2022 Tulsa Conference.

You can respond to PZ's appeal and support the work of Mockingbird by clicking here. All gifts are tax-deductible.

The Lemon Pipers captured something universal and actually moving in their second single, from 1968, entitled "Rice Is Nice". In the third and last verse of that song, the singer asks a question of her/his love and his/their feelings: "And when I get old and wrinkles appear/Will I still find some rice in my hair?"

This cast concerns long-term marriage and its possibility and also its enabling word. What makes it possible? How can you keep loving the same person you first met 30 years ago, or 40 or 50? I mean, people change, right?!

Well, think of all the answers you have heard to that question. Think of all the recipes and maxims and axioms.

All I am trying to do here is add my own, via The Lemon Pipers. The answer to the question of long-term continuity in love is, well, Go Back to the Beginning. How it started is the key to what is happening now, and will happen. Remember how Meister Eckhart put it: "If you're trying to find God, go back to where you lost Him."

Mammoth words. Now think of them in relation to your relationship.

I had my own little breakthrough on this front the other day, concerning an airplane flight of all things. But it really happened.

Oh, and listen to the short excerpt, for Christmas, of the song at the end at the cast. It's by The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, which is probably all you need to know.

Merry Christmas and LUV U!

It is easy ("It's So Easy" - L. Ronstadt, 1977) to talk about "going deeper" and the "journey inward" and the layers of human personality. But in practice it rarely happens.

It rarely happens that you actually let on to another person what you are thinking. As Joseph von Sternberg, the director of at least ten great movies, observed: "The average human being lives behind an impenetrable veil and will disclose his deep emotions only in a crisis which robs him of control."

That is a supremely important sentence from the great man.

I saw it this week -- on the track, of all places -- as I thought of something that has happened in a former parish of ours. I suddenly burst into tears as I thought of the people there -- the hundreds, honestly, whose faces I still remember -- and how they have been treated by Authority. It wasn't the presenting issue that touched my heart so much as the wonderful individuals who are being affected. My "face behind the mask" was a face of remembered mutual love.

Episode 327 of this cast seems to have really connected with some of its listeners. Or maybe it was the music, Steppenwolf's immortal single "Magic Carpet Ride (1968), that did it. Somehow the cast got through!

I hope that this new one will go even deeper. And at Christmas, when one can be utterly crushed by obligationism, that's probably a good thing. LUV U!!

P.S. I dedicate Episode 328 to Don Menendez.

Someone inscribed a book to me once, and wrote, "To Paul, In hope of transformation." (I didn't feel insulted, but rather moved.)

This podcast is about sudden transformation.

We are sometimes taught that change is gradual. I don't believe it, at least not in most cases. Transformation takes place when the vice (i.e., grip) of conflicting forces in our lives, both outwardly and inwardly, becomes so great that we simply have to make a decision.

There is a memorable illustration of this in the Jacques Demy movie Bay of Angels (1963), in which the gambling-addict heroine, played by Jeanne Moreau, is forced at the end to decide between the heroin of risk and the fact-on-the-ground of a man's one-way love for her.

The groundwork for change, especially inside a person, may well be gradual, but the moment itself is sudden -- what Paula White calls "your Suddenly". I agree with Pastor Paula.

This is especially important in the light of death. Two deaths recently hit us hard. Neither of the deceased was ready. Death came, as Christ said it often does, "like a thief in the night".

Don't be like Scrooge! Or rather, don't be like Scrooge before Marley came to him. Marley opened the December night's window and showed his old friend the haunting vision of thousands upon thousands of individuals who had died weighed down and unready. They were outside in the cold ether, over-individuated shadows flitting uncomprehendingly through the ether.Please don't end up like those shadows. (Many people do.)

Things can change right now. It's called a "mustard seed" (of faith), and I've never known it to fail.

Think, I don't know, think ... "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf.

LUV U, and God Bless Us Everyone !

I keep talking about life-resolution issues that are fairly elemental.

Part of the theme comes from recent personal experience, but part of it comes from popular music and movies. Today's entry point is a song from 1954 that almost won the Oscar that year, entitled "Hold My Hand". It is from an incredibly cool movie by Frank Tashlin, which you have got to see, entitled Susan Slept Here. This oddly titled movie starred Debby Reynolds and Dick Powell.

Anyway, I'm talking about physical touch at the end of life, but also about the self-revelation that serious stress almost inevitably presents one. Think H.G. Wells' three religious books that he wrote during the carnage of World War I. Later on, after the War, he wrote that he could no longer understand these books nor why he wrote them. In fact, the later, less-stressed Wells said he was actually bewildered by the fact that he had written them at all. He came very close to disavowing the books, tho' today we regard Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) as a masterpiece.

Why do people seize on secondary things for help/support in everyday life? Especially when almost all of those things literally vanish into thin air when real stress hits.

This podcast tries to take the listener to the rock-like essentials of human survival. LUV U.

When people ask you "How's it going?" or "Hey, what's on your mind these days?", I'd be surprised if you always give an honest answer. In fact, even if you decide to sound honest and authentic, you may be covering over the real facts. And under the "real" facts of your outward -- and more importantly, your inward -- life, you may even be covering something else. It's "Human Nature" (M. Jackson, 1982).

Human inwardness, let alone one's outward conversation and demeanor, can be a charade from top to bottom. I've seen more than one instance of this during my life, both personally and pastorally.

This cast begins with something that happened "Not Too Long Ago" (Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets, 2014). It pulled the curtain on a charade through a pretty dramatic chain of events. Guess I'm talking about the real shipwrecks of life, not the charades we pretty much construct to disguise them.

The cast ends with an excerpt from a piece of music by Jan Hammer, which he wrote to accompany a searing honest talk between two detectives at the end of an episode in the first season of Miami Vice. The point of the excerpt is to give some meditative cover for the listener's own confession. Think the ending of Manon of the Spring (1968).

LUV U.