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Why does one love rock 'n roll so dearly? Well, of course, the quality of a given favorite song -- its bass line, the vocals, the guitar solo, etc. -- connects with you(r ears) and makes you love it. But there's more to it than that: The real ground of one's love for a particular song is *Where you were when you first heard it. * And by that I mean: Where you were emotionally when you first heard it. The actual song itself -- superb as it may be -- is made a thousand times more powerful by where you were in experience -- and especially in emotional experience -- when you first heard it. The song itself, in other words, is secondary to the placement of your psycho-dynamic soul when it was first playing in the background of your life. I cannot overstate this truth (of experience): It is not the song itself -- nor, for that matter, the play or the movie or the poem or the painting, even -- which carried "The Weight" (The Band, '68). It was, rather, the contact which the song made with your innermost person, whether you were being loved and accepted at the time, or repulsed and rejected. Therein lies the power of art. (Tell me if this isn't true.) Amazing response recently to an excerpt I played on the cast of an ELO single. It just seemed to blow up one's audience with empathy and exclamatory rejoicings. Note, finally, that there is an explicitly Christian anchorage here: The union we wish so much to feel with another person is the embodiment, in felt experience, of the union we need with God -- that belovedness I talk about so much. I can almost say that a memorable rock song is for many persons the bearer of Christ's One Way Love. Oh, and for the record, the paragraph I read at the conclusion of this episode is from James Hilton's stirring novel from 1934, entitled "Without Armor". LUV U.

Always searching for the words to describe breakthrough -- opening doors -- divine intervention in our 'safe-rooms' of pain and loss. Always searching for words, and also actions. How can you and I, dear listener, become like Edwin Starr in 1965: our own "Agent Double-O-Soul" for the sake of ... the world? Well, first, you need to be an object of love. Not the subject of love -- i.e., the lover. No, we need to be the object of love. Belovedness is the First Law of Physics when it comes to the human heart. All else is resistible exhortation. Being loved engenders love in return. That goes for about 99 % of the human race. Second, we need to (ultimately) perceive that everything which happens is part of the Plan. I cannot say that to someone who is in the midst of overwhelming pain and loss. But experience has taught yours truly, at least, that in most cases of personal suffering, there is something beyond the initial facts which is purposive. Please, don't stone me! It's just that life has turned out that way. And not just for Mary and me, but for almost everyone to whom we have sought to bring empathy in the midst of insuperability. Third, and finally, it turns out that God often needs us to take the first step. It's often a small step, even a tiny step -- but it is a step nevertheless. Can't quite yet integrate this with my Reformation theology, but it is true empirically. The mountain doesn't seem to move until and unless we have taken a step towards it -- i.e., from out of our inertia. This is just a fact. Maybe you, dear listener, can find a way to say it better. Oh, and Podcast 409 is dedicated to Brad Knight, a minister to whom I feel warmly close, and closely linked. LUV U.

Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day (Squeeze, 1996) and that fact forever touched him. He wrote three scripts for the original 'Twilight Zone' that have a Christmas context, as well as the mother of all Christmas screenplays (of his genre) entitled "The Messiah of Mott Street". The latter he wrote for the 1969 anthology 'Night Gallery'. During the next two weeks I will be showing the two best of them (IMO) -- "The Changing of the Guard" (1962) and "The Messiah of Mott Street" -- on successive Thursday evenings at Cranmer House in Homewood, AL. In each of these scripts Serling unfolds, out of imminent tragedy, rejection and loss, the possibility of Renewal, Redemption, and Hope. And each time in less than a half hour! Personally, I believe life is like that. What I mean is, Christians are not nihilists. Nor is life always "complicated". We believe -- from personal experience and not just from "teaching" -- that God answers prayers. Mary Zahl teaches this. Pastor Paula teaches this. And I have come to believe it. Watch these Twilight Zone half-hours, and they will build you up (Buttercup). LUV U. Oh, and this cast is dedicated to the Rev. Aaron Zimmerman. To respond to the opening fundraising plea, click here (https://wl.donorperfect.net/weblink/WebLink.aspx?name=E353807&id=2).

How do you help someone who is being pummeled by a persisting circumstantial or psychodynamic problem? Do you "advise" them? (Don't Do It - The Band, '72) Do you try to talk them out of it? (Again, don't -- Talk Talk, '82-'84) Do you avoid them? (Again, don't -- Animotion, '84. They won't let you, anyway.) What do you do? How do you actually help someone you love -- maybe it's you ("Baby It's You" -- The Beatles, '63)? "Magic cancellation"! That's the thing. It's a phrase used by English novelist James Hilton in his first novel "Ill Wind" ('32). Hilton was describing the power of altruistic love on the part of a Soviet diplomat (of all people) on a French chambermaid (who is actually a Russian aristocrat on the run from people just like him). The diplomat's entirely genuine love for the chambermaid demolishes her "architecture of misery" -- again Hilton's phrase -- which had confined her 100% up to that moment. "Magic" (i.e., outwardly interventionist, Holy Spirit-inspired) cancellation" is what it takes to "open the door to your heart" (Pete Townshend, '81). That's what it takes: one-way love from outside yourself. (And note, this is not antinomian. It is not rooted in denial. It is rooted in the Graceful determination of the one who loves. And in about four fifths of all cases, such "cancellation" opens the door to ... response, and -- here's the rub -- personal renewal and Hope. Try it. Maybe it worked on you once. (In the Fall of '72, all it took, in the case of yours truly, was someone offering a Sunday evening lift from 72 Mt. Auburn Street, Cambridge Mass down to -- hey it wasn't even far (geographically) -- Narragansett Bay. And it worked. I mean, forever.) LUV U.

I feel like I see more acutely than ever into the backing track of human experience. There is the "outside" of how our lives are going within givens and events, but then there is the "backing track" -- the enabling part, the staying part, the... well, the (kind of) Eternal Part. The two parts, the outside and the backing track, are separate. "Phosphorus" is a word one sometimes uses for this, but listening to an old Beach Boys song from 1973 brought it home so beautifully. You hear a number of "stanzas", and then (at least twice, maybe three times) a keyboard-driven bridge -- a melody that puts you right through the roof emotionally. It summons almost automatically the mood you'd want to have surrounding you when you are dying. Moreover, the voiced imperative at the end, "Sail on, sail on, sailor", is exactly what I need. I don't need someone to help me find 'new purpose', something to plant me in the now again, when my spirits are low. I need, as Meister Eckhart wrote in 1312, to experience the following: "If you are looking for God, go back to where you lost Him." To put that in slightly more horizontal terms -- tho' even its horizontal transcription is really Vertical -- "If you are looking for who you are meant to be, go back to where you really were yourself". Incidentally, that was probably not in connection with your career or your cause. It was more likely in connection with a certain someone. People sometimes think I'm overdoing it when I underline the centrality of romantic connection in life. I don't believe I am. The main reason one underlines that dimension is, well, ... popular music. It's not news to anyone reading this, that 97.5% of all rock songs, from the very beginning (i.e., Elvis and Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and Link Wray and Joe Meek), concern romantic love. Not 65% or even 85%, but 97.5%. Think about that. I mean, really, let that sink in. Anyway, if you want to find God (i.e., your way forward, as opposed to your way backward -- to inertia, bitterness, and cascading negativity as the years go on), go back to... the song you remember from that time you first came out of yourself. Whether the person you were with when you first heard that song is alive or dead, present or out there (Moody Blues, 1988), that moment is eternal. It is still present. It is still your empirical guide to... the New You. Podcast 406 is dedicated to Sam Everette.

One has been thinking all week about those precious little girls from Camp Mystic. There's also a pastoral situation or two in which sharp suffering seems to have been "imposed" on people I love. Why and How and ... What? I had a kind of visitation late one night this week. It came initially from ... Van Morrison. His song "Into the Mystic", from 1970, started to play inside my mind. Then a phrase came down: And Yet! I was looking at all the tragedy, regression and loss -- really seeing it and feeling it... And Yet. Then something else happened: A 'Republic Picture' from 1949 came across my screen. It was a Western I had never seen before but it stars Marie Windsor, so it had to be... at least... watchable. But then something began to come clear: the movie came to me from, well, Heaven Above (Peter Sellers, even). Seriously, the ending of Republic Pictures' Hellfire (1949) was intended to help us. It was made (back then) to help us (now). It embodied And Yet. The Christian response to darkest tragedy is probably not explanation or interpretation, but rather superimposition. It's impossible to explain away a certain reality, let's say. And yet what happened is not the whole reality. There is another reality. You might almost say, there are two realities. But isn't this true of our life histories, even of our personalities? The Old Creation is alive and potent. The New Creation is eternal and more potent. See what you think. Hope you'll maybe try it on.

How does someone who is living, like it or not, in the last third of life, address everybody else who is living in the second third? It's an important question, cuz most of the time it's like two ships passing in the night. An older Episcopal priest used to come up to me about once a week -- he was assisting in a busy parish where I was rector -- and say, "Hey, Paul, relax. You're working too hard. Please, relax." Every time he did that -- and his "intentions were good" (The Animals, 1965) -- I'd get a-fib! Literally, my heart would jump and I'd get a-fib. What this nice man said was kindly intended, but it always had the opposite effect....: a-fib. So hey, how can Hewes Hull, my conversation partner this week, and yours truly say what our experience and our faith has taught us -- mostly through impasse and insuperabilities -- in such a way that it can get through to a normal, busy (i.e., stressed) listener? That is the Question. I think the podcast probably works. And mainly because of a story Hewes tells, from his own life, near the end. Oh, and there's the music, too, and especially the last, eternal track. So, hey, you out there,... Relax. LUV U, PZ

While one was within the second third of one's life, one had all these goals in view, of happy marriage, happy fathering, and (most of all, sadly) successful careering. That was the way it was -- and probably the way it is, at least for some who may be reading this. And in that (now) embarrassing order, too. But at this point it's beginning to look a little bankrupt -- at least the order of valuation. Maybe "superficial" is a better word. So "What Now, My Love?" (H. Alpert/M. Ryder/Sonny & Cher... ad infinitum). Is the last third of life, i.e., for those of us among the "new demographic", disillusionment and moping; or compulsed repetition; or possibly/impossibly "Behold, I do a New Thing" (Isaiah 43:19)? Today, and again next week, my friend Hewes Hull and I will be discussing this (to us, core) theme: What Now, My Love? Is it Marcus-Aurelian grinning-and-bearing it? Or maybe assisted suicide, even? Or again, "Something Better Beginning" (The Kinks, 1965)? Hewes has had a fine career practising law and then in private equity finance. He has an extraordinary wife, Trent, of 31 years. Hewes himself is 57 years of age. (A young man, as I now pronounce him.) His chief hobbies are theology, jujitsu and hunting/fishing. Hope you'll enjoy our conversation. Oh, and I hope you'll LUV the closing track, by... wait for it... Bobby Sherman! LUV U.

Every version or tradition of the Christian Faith offers an objective or corporealized dimension within a person's (longed for) relationship with God. For Roman Catholicism, it is the Real Presence of the Lord within the Elements of Bread and Wine. For pentecostalism, it is the embodied Gifts of the Spirit in miracles of healing and divine intervention, and often an accompanying gift of speaking in tongues. For many Protestants, it is the Written Word of the Bible -- the actual and specific words as dictated by God Himself. Personally, I like all of these 'doors' to experiencing God. During Covid I almost switched to Catholicism because only the Catholic parish where we lived at the time kept its doors open. So I could go there every day and pray. Earlier I had sort of already become a pentecostal Christian, partly because of a vision I received during a sermon preached by a pentecostal pastor. And I have always loved -- treasured! -- the Old and New Testaments as the continuing Word of God to one's hungry heart. Then, too, I have on three occasions seen dead people. Three times I have interacted with people I had known who were now dead. Each time I was being addressed by individuals who were speaking to me from God's Heaven. So Pixie Dust. Like in the Disney Peter Pan, animated - classic - perfect: Pixie Dust. We need Pixie Dust. As Ringo sang in "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band": 'I Get By with a Little Help from my (Pixie Dust)'. It's not an optional extra. It's essential. LUV U.

It's been too long but here is my new episode. It started with the second-to-last scene in an 'Outer Limits' episode from 1963 entitled "The Human Factor". Brought yours truly straight to tears. Then we hurtled through time to 1996, to Cliff Robertson's touching redemption at the end of another 'Outer Limits' episode, entitled "Joyride". The combination of these two genius moments equipped PZ to talk about... yes... Anglicanism... and yes... the Episcopal Church... and yes... contemporary parish ministry. But I couldn't go there until my heart was ready. And that work was achieved by Sally Kellerman and Gary Merrill in 1963. Incidentally, I recommend you begin your sermon preparation -- maybe any public preparation -- by getting in touch with your heart. (People aren't really that interested in your mind.) Get in touch with your heart and you might actually convince somebody. Oh, and by the way, I'm an Episcopal minister and still glad to be one. (And we go to a great church.) LUV U.

This is a sort of "marker" podcast -- my 400th. It's kind of my summing up on the subject of human identity and the origin of human satisfaction. The cast cites a recent interview (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/im-a-new-kind-of-christian-jordan-peterson-on-faith-family-and-the-future-of-the-right/) with Jordan Peterson, and do note that the interviewer is almost as interesting as the interviewee I also quote John Zahl's distillation sermon from December 29th (https://events.locallive.tv/events/148984) -- which happened to be Mrs. Zahl's and my 51st Anniversary. The cast finishes with a little James Hilton (i.e., one's current fave) and... a 1978 cover of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs. You'll see. I want you to think about the origins of your own psychic self. From where does "self-hood" come? Did you create yours? What do you want for yourself more than anything else in the world? What would you do anything to acquire? Oh, and is satisfaction in life about loving or being loved? When have you been happiest? (When have you been happy at all?) "All You Need Is (Be-)Love(dness)". Nothing else really matters -- or at least at the start of life (I mean infancy), and also at the end of (mortal) life (I mean death). Oh, and also at every felt point of need you have ever had to face. At the end of the day, a baby, a "disheartened" person (to quote Jackie Wilson from '68), and a dying person need one thing: Love From Outside. And may that Love ever "STAY" (J. Browne, '78). Podcast 400 is dedicated to Mary Cappleman Zahl.

Everyday I see how little I know. Everyday I see how little I've read, or seen, or heard. (Thought I had, but hadn't.) A prime example of this is Agnes Sligh Turnbull. Have you ever heard of Agnes Sligh Turnbull? (You probably have.) She wrote very successful novels in the 1940s and '50s, and later, too. But she was an optimist, she was a Christian, and she believed in redemption. (So she's more or less been "cancelled" by critical opinion, even tho' she sold millions of novels in her day.) Now you've got to read Agnes Sligh Turnbull's 1947 novel entitled The Bishop's Mantle. It's the inside story of a young Episcopal rector in a northeastern city -- "inside story", in that the author gets inside the heart and mind of a sincere man of God who is still completely human and vulnerable. Almost every page of The Bishop's Mantle has a moment of total insight into what it is like to be parish priest. The man happens also to be in love with a high flying young woman who is reluctant to marry a "parson". That problem needs to be worked out. Oh, and one more thing: The Bishop's Mantle describes a denomination that was, prior to 1979, about 90% "low church". The church observed by Agnes Sligh Turnbull is just so refreshingly not high church. (I think you'll love that aspect.) Oh, and it's 'Sligh' not 'Sly' -- tho' we sure loved Sly back in the day. LUV U.

There is a roughly four-minute sequence in the middle of the first Superman movie (1978) that hits the stratosphere of movie emotion -- and of real-life emotion, too. It is the scene in which Superman takes Lois Lane's hand and flies her leisuredly over Manhattan Island. As the pair glide over the city, Lois Lane (played by Margot Kidder) confides her innermost thoughts to the viewer: she has fallen completely in love with Superman, and that is because he has singled her out as the object of his most personal regard. The sequence is monumental in feeling and memory because it sums up the sequence of romantic loving -- and also the sequence of God's loving of poor us. Because Superman has singled out Lois for his most tender regard, she responds with her entire self. She voices her feelings in this way: "Here I am like a kid out of school. Holding hands with a god. I'm a fool. Will you look at me? Quivering. Like a little girl shivering. You can see right through me. Can you read my mind? Can you picture the things I'm thinking of? Wondering why you are all the wonderful things you are. You can fly! You belong in the sky. You and I could belong to each other. If you need a friend, I'm the one to fly to. If you need to be loved, here I am. Read my mind." What this demonstrates is that love does not start with loving someone, but rather with being loved by someone. I need to be the object of someone's love before I can actually love someone myself. Now capitalize the 's' - S - and the analogy to the Christian Gospel becomes palpable. Instantly palpable! All love begins as One-Way Love: not love from me but love to me. So go now and look up that sequence in Superman from 1978. It's easy to find. And it's the truth of life. And not a truth of life. But the truth of life. LUV U.

I so want to connect with my hearers when I preach or speak. Yes, one has a Message -- the One-Way Love of God embodied in the Compassionate Christ. But if it doesn't really connect with the listener -- with the sufferer! -- it is not able to do its job. J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), who had basically lost whatever faith he had been exposed to as a child, spent a lot of years looking for... something. He would gladly have capitalized "something" (i.e., Something). In 1960 Priestley wrote specifically about the decline of Christianity in the West. He wrote that the only way the "Church" could 'come back' -- which he would have welcomed given the cultural despair and nihilism he observed everywhere around him -- was to get through to the unconscious. Christianity's original, great and contagious strength had been to reach individuals in their depth/s. I agree with JBP. For many years Mary and I have listened to sermons that are sincere, sound theologically, and well prepared exegetically. Yet we often leave the service untouched, un-addressed, un-healed. As Herr Kaesemann said once, after listening to a sermon during a conference at Yale Divinity School: "Es gibt keine Anrede!" In other words, the Word has to address me in the deeps. The preacher's "deeps" need to be calling out to mine (Psalm 42:7). This cast draws on Priestley's "Presence of the Absence"; a John Wyndham paperback from 1953; and -- wait for it -- Spanky & Our Gang. The last track, from 1969, is IMO pure perfection. Oh, and "Out of the Deeps" is dedicated to Mary Zahl, whose recent talk to the Women of the Advent in Birmingham, entitled "The Things That Remain" (https://talkingbird.fireside.fm/400) is as fine as anything I have ever heard her present. LUV U.

I'm thinking about ecclesiology today. Rarely do. But a combination of J.B. Priestley's "low anthropology", a couple of recent lightning bolts from outside space and (present) time, and a fresh glimpse of the touching statue of "The Compassionate Christ" outside Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham: Well, they got me thinking of what the Christian Church is centrally and anchoredly about. Add to that the third verse of Lou Christie's number-one song from 1966, "Lightnin' Strikes"; and it's probably all there. One's ecclesiology, I mean. "Dangerous Corner" by J.B. Priestley, which was first performed in London in 1932, unmasks the human tragedy of self-serving, manipulation, and deception in about as unrelieved a manner as could be imagined. The last scene but one, which leads directly to a character's suicide, surely rips the curtain off our world's endemic conspiratorial malice. It is almost a pure enactment of the "low anthropology" that is endemic to us. But the playwright offers us no hope. He actually, explicitly dismisses the antidote of faith in God. I so want to enter that scene myself, speaking sincerely and personally, and address the desperate "hero". He's got it mostly right, you see; his diagnosis is accurate. But we believe in God -- and not a "deistic"/hands-off sort of force, but rather: Pure Empathy, Pure Sympathy, Pure Mercy, Pure Grace. Our ecclesiology, therefore, is the Church, in whatever form, as Embodiment of One-Way Love. That's PZ's ecclesiology. That's Lou Christie's "chapel in the pines" (1966). That's the churches of refuge at the end of War of the Worlds (1953), that's 'Mr. Carpenter' in Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), that's the Isaiah 2, verse 4 climax of The Colossus of New York (1958), that's the hymn chorale at the end of The Space Children (1958), that's the Christ-figure at the conclusion of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). And so it goes. When the curtain is ripped away on life as it really is and people as they really are, all that's needed is One Helping Hand, One "Next Voice You Hear" (1951), One... Man from Galilee (Ocean, 1971/Elvis, 1972), One Jesus Christ Superstar. LUV U.