Pastorally -- and generally -- it is easy to miss the core of what's going on with a person in pain. You may see some symptoms -- tho' sometimes even the symptoms are hidden -- and may sub-rationally understand that something bad is taking place under the surface. But when it comes to the "Heart of Darkness" inside a sufferer, it may be very hard to fathom and to surface. Yet surfacing that "Heart" is the essence of what love is all about. How often in relationships have I missed the heart of th...
Jul 31, 2018•22 min
No finer Southern prep ever hit the scene than the Sewanee graduate Tupper Saussy. His two albums produced under the name "The Neon Philharmonic", with Don Gant, are supreme examples of symphonic rock. More than that, however, the songs are profound. Saussy's track entitled "Something to Believe In" speaks the voice of a questing human soul, "riding the wind" of life and searching for "something to believe in". Needless to say, the soul finds "a girl", whom the soul believes in and worships, onl...
Jul 30, 2018•20 min
Shibboleth's are often true in part. Maxims are true in part. But they are never, or at least rarely, wholly true. One such maxim is a current fashionable imperative, Face the Cannons. The idea is that when you are confronted with opposition or antagonism, your best bet is to look it squarely in the face and permit it to do its worst. Somehow in that acquiescent transaction, your foe will lose its power and kind of flow through you and get de-potentiated. There is a truth to this. Frank Lake use...
Jul 23, 2018•21 min
In a quote that's been making the rounds recently, Rudolph Bultmann wrote, "When we encounter the words of Jesus in history, we do not judge them by a philosophical system with reference to their rational validity; they meet us with the question of how we are to interpret our own mode of existence. That we ourselves be deeply disturbed by the problem of our own life is the indispensable condition of our inquiry." Note that word "indispensable". I used to pussy foot some around this, trying to al...
Jul 19, 2018•25 min
Benjamin Britten's 'Spider and the Fly' number from his Suite for "Johnson over Jordan", by J.B. Priestley, takes you by surprise. It sounds like Gershwin at the start, then becomes a kind of danse, and is ultimately sinister. The composer meant it like that, for he was drawn to Priestley's play because it concerns life after death; and Britten was interested in life after death during this period of his career. Priestley broke an English taboo, you might say -- but it's a taboo in our country, ...
Jul 04, 2018•23 min
This is a short riposte to the politicization of basically everything just now; but not in the way of taking sides, but rather in the way of digging deeper. I mean, digging deeper to the best and true interests of human beings. The best and true interest of human beings, the necessary condition for our welfare, exists in the direction of connection with another person; and, most typically (tho' not absolutely always), a romantic connection. The best interest of us does not consist in political c...
Jun 22, 2018•23 min
Ellis Brazeal recently pointed out a clear-and-present fact about what we call "sanctification". Ellis observed that the moment we begin to think we have it, or have made it, it is completely nullified. In other words, the only actual sanctification at which one ever arrives is un-self-conscious. Another way of putting this would be to say that no amount of or "espece de" virtue-signalling will ever cut it. The moment you draw attention to your "growth" or "discipleship", at that exact moment it...
Jun 04, 2018•23 min
Pastoral experience in hospital pre-op units provides abundant evidence for the existence of the soul. I first saw this evidence in Birmingham years ago, when someone we knew and loved was having to go into the operating room twice the same day, because the first "pass" that morning had failed. The situation was in fact do-or-die, and I had never before seen the look of fear which had come over the patient's face as she was being prepared for her second procedure. Then another time, in Washingto...
May 25, 2018•24 min
People are constantly trying to shoe horn their search for God into containers too tight for the Object of the search. This is probably true of some of your interests, whether it's food or Hammer horror films or "Philadelphia Soul" -- to name two of my current but chronic faves -- or you name it. On something or someone, you are probably pinning very high hopes. The blogosphere is full of such shoe horns -- interests such as a movement or style or movie or type of music that attracts your "ultim...
May 12, 2018•23 min
One of the best things about the recent Mockingbird conference in NYC was its unerring focus on universals and primary factors in human destiny and identity, rather than on contingencies and elements in life that do not endure, but pass away. Hence one's love for Blue Magic. Blue Magic were a Philadelphia group in the early and mid-1970s who stuck to absolute basics. Which is to say, Blue Magic stuck to romantic connection and romantic loss as the big drivers. Almost every song they performed is...
May 02, 2018•25 min
Well, the short answer, tho' not the whole answer, is: you can't. I wish you could. I can give you a hundred pointers and tips concerning it; and can even print out some prayers for you to say, in hopes of their breaking the soul-tie. But they would all be "tweaks". They would all be wistful hopes that will let you down. This is because in "the natural" -- i.e., within the systems and interactions of this world -- the soul-tie is a tethering of something eternal, your endless soul, to a continge...
Apr 23, 2018•23 min
This cast is a kind of summation of my thinking about romantic love in its relation to one's soul's salvation. I have thought about the compelling nature of romance -- between two people, I mean -- in both its positive, inspiring importance and also its possible negative and undermining impact. In fact, one has long searched for a key, the 'haft' that actually opens the door and heals one of scarring memories and long-carried-over inward losses. Not only has this theme of romantic love's long-te...
Apr 10, 2018•25 min
This cast is about low anthropology, or rather, hidden anthropology. Have you been struck by the comments concerning the Austin bomber in which people near and dear to the young man say they saw no signs or external evidence of any kind that he was thinking about doing this, or about anything, for that matter, out of the ordinary, let alone murderous? My experience of people, especially act-outers in life, is that what they do often takes one by surprise. They didn't "advertise", in other words,...
Mar 23, 2018•21 min
I'm always surprised when proponents of One Way Love fail to apply it in concrete cases. In other words, we can talk a good game -- about how Christ is always there, gets there first (!), when we are at our lowest ebb, in our worst place of sin and paralysis -- how no sin, no sinner is ever beyond the reach of His "saving embrace" -- but when we or someone close to us -- someone we really KNOW, in other words -- is lying there bleeding to death from a self-inflicted wound, well, then... I just d...
Mar 15, 2018•19 min
People are so good at minimizing the human situation. I've encountered this throughout Mary's and my ministry, right from the very start, in Silver Spring, MD. The religious "professionals" detested my message, that the world was in incomparable conflict with itself, and that each human being experiences comparable conflict inwardly. People would say, your message is too "down", and I just don't like it. It's too dark, or depressing, or gloomy. But what actually happened is that a majority of th...
Jan 30, 2018•25 min
I don't talk about romantic love because it is worshipful in its own right. I talk about romantic love because it is the closest signpost we have to God. Whether it's the Beatles ("Eight Days a Week") or Hugo ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame") or Wagner ("Tannhauser") or Jimmy Webb ("Wichita Lineman") or James Gould Cozzens ("By Love Possessed"), the inspired listeners of the world have not failed to miss the Back Story, underneath all our 'narratives' and front stories, of the noble search for lov...
Jan 25, 2018•23 min
This Christmas cast is about communication between people, and God. Moreover, it’s about the cost of poor communication, which can be suicide, let alone habitual alienation. And the rich advantage of good communication, which can be the difference between life and death, let alone satisfaction and personal happiness. Recently, Tullian Tchividjian spoke at a ‘Broken Christmas’ service in Living Faith Lutheran Brethren Church at Cape Coral, FL. He spoke brilliantly, soberly, gravely, touchingly, h...
Dec 12, 2017•24 min
This is a short talk on motivation and love. What motivates a person to do something — to REALLY do something. As opposed to remaining endlessly exhausted and trapped, within a cycle of inner conflict and desuetude. As usual in PZ’s Podcast, love is the answer. But how? And why? Karl Barth’s decisive mistake is exposed — without animus. Parishioners’ failed self-knowledge, let alone my own failed self-knowledge, is exposed — by experience. You have to start with experience. It doesn’t mean you h...
Dec 12, 2017•22 min
You listen to the group Honey Cone, described today as early feminists, and they are talking about a universal truth and in memorable pop terms. No hatred of men here, just the emotional recognition that if you don’t love her, she can’t really love you. Love between a man and a woman is a two-way street. (Unlike God’s love for us, which at the center is a one-way street.) If you don’t understand this and are a man, you are in for trouble “Further on Up the Road” (Clapton and the Band, 1978). I l...
Oct 16, 2017•21 min
“Psychosis” is a very strong word for a cultural phenomenon. But it allows us to speak of a fissure over against reality, when groups of people see things around them in a way that is divorced from the facts. You can apply the phenomenon of group fissure from reality, to anything you like. I can see it in the way a very specific historical reality, the Anglican Church as the English expression of legal and official Protestantism, has been so completely buried by a different “narrative” that it i...
Sep 27, 2017•23 min
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 ...
Sep 12, 2017•24 min
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 ther...
Sep 11, 2017•22 min
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 o...
Sep 11, 2017•20 min
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 se...
Sep 04, 2017•24 min
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 ...
Aug 29, 2017•24 min
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 ha...
Aug 29, 2017•25 min
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: Remember what it was like 47 years ago. Remember what it was like in the Spring of '70. Everybody, and I mean, everybody, was up in arms! If you w...
Feb 13, 2017•21 min
There is this amazing supposed contrast between the God Who comes to us from without, and the God Who speaks to us from within. Historic Christianity generally hears the First. Eastern religion generally hears the second. Personally, I hear both -- by which I mean, a lot of Love is "channelled" or "made flesh" in the inspirations I feel to love and to cherish that are indistinguishable from my own best self. ("I'd like to know where you got the notion" (Rock the Boat) -- The Hues Corporation, 19...
Feb 08, 2016•25 min
When you were in a tight spot, how did help get through to you, assuming help did get through to you? Did God speak from out of the whirlwind -- of crisis, panic, and despair? Or did aid come from inside yourself -- a 'how-to' or random thought that proved serviceable in the midst? If you're a regular listener to PZ's Podcast, you may well answer, the former. That's certainly what happened to PZ! Nevertheless, your source of inspiration, and help, and salvation in the imminent immanent sense of ...
Jan 31, 2016•26 min
The answer to that question has to lie, somehow, in whatever explains the popular success of Rodney Marvin ('Rod') McKuen. Rod McKuen died a year ago, and did you know he sold 100 million records? No kidding. Rod McKuen sold 100 million records. (He also sold 60 million books. But hey...) Here is a man who was universally dismissed, from day one of his earthly success, as being a "kitschy" Philistine and arch-sentimentalist. No critic had a word of praise for him. Ever, ever, ever. And that's be...
Jan 25, 2016•25 min
