Today I want to "double down" just a bit on the anchoring necessity of romantic connection within our everyday lives. Flourishing won't occur without it, and that's an empirical fact whether one likes it or not. So the question becomes, at least for about half the world's yearning souls, how can a person find it. How can I obtain what I so manifestly need and want? Case in point: Jane Wyman's grief-driven prayer in Miracle in the Rain (1956). Then there's Fred MacMurray's prayer in The Miracle o...
Feb 13, 2021•21 min
How should we think about God when faced with a massive, injuring disappointment? Or rather, how can a person of faith assimilate an experience in which you see, not God, but God's opposite, appearing to win? The question can apply to anyone, on any "side of the aisle". I have friends who were so upset by the election of 2016 that they basically retreated into a long-term depression for roughly four years. There will be people you know today -- tho' they may not be saying -- who feel the same wa...
Jan 14, 2021•23 min
Harold Pinter wrote a play once entitled "Betrayal" and he used a sort of trick to tell his story. He began the play at the end -- at the tragic finale of the events dramatized -- and ended the play at the beginning, at the touching and tentative start of those events. He reversed time, to tremendous effect. Today's brief cast is intended as a salutary instance of what often happens in life: Things start well and end badly. In addition to the startling music that begins and ends my story, I tell...
Jan 05, 2021•15 min
'Heinz' was short for Heinz Burt (d. 2000), a grocery clerk in Southampton, England, whom Joe Meek, an independent record producer, made into a star for a brief period in the early 1960s. The brilliance of the five or six singles that Meek produced for Heinz is an almost perfect instance of how straw can be converted into gold, a la Rumpelstiltskin. That is to say, Heinz Burt himself had little talent and almost nothing going for him, yet Meek created magic out of his voice and persona. Utter ma...
Jan 05, 2021•21 min
I was listening to a sermon concerning spiritual warfare and my mind went straight back to 1970, to the English film, a psychological thriller, entitled Crescendo . The film stars Stephanie Powers and James Olson and was directed by Alan Gibson. The preacher's passionate evocation of Ephesians 6:12 in connection with current events had brought considerable criticism from many quarters. I wanted to ask the critics, Didn't you ever see Psycho (1960) -- let alone read Agatha Christie or Dorothy Say...
Nov 19, 2020•27 min
I'm trying to understand, in Romans 7 and Mockingbird terms, a phenomenon I currently observe -- and feel -- all around me. It is as if the more control, medically and in terms of hospitalizations, that we are getting over COVID19, the more insistent and pressing are the visible measures a good citizen is supposed to be taking against it. To put it another way, as the actual threat is decreasing, the things I am supposed to be doing in order to be regarded as a good citizen in relation to it, ar...
Oct 28, 2020•23 min
There's a truth of life that more and more people are telling me about from their own experience. To be sure, these people are mostly my own age, so we are considering that last third of life with which my Boomer Handbook is concerned. The observed truth of life I am talking about is simply that when you reach a certain age, say from 55 or so on, if you don't move forward, you move backward. Sometimes I just want to stay where I am -- treading water in the memories and also the accomplishments o...
Oct 22, 2020•24 min
There's a terrific Sherlock Holmes movie from 1944 entitled The Scarlet Claw . Well, it's actually not that terrific, but the premise is great. In the movie a criminal disguises himself as a kind of glow-in-the-dark swamp creature out on the moors, who murders unfortunate travelers and terrorizes the village. Come to find out, the murderer is putting phosphorus on his hands, his feet and his face in order to frighten everyone, and Sherlock Holmes figures it out. Our detective ends up finding his...
Sep 05, 2020•23 min
It's a kind of personal discovery I made last week, when inventorying some more of the songs featured in Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers (Mockingbird, 2020). The discovery was that each song not only connects me with a person and/or connection with that person -- or disconnection from the person; but that each song connotes a place, an actual place. In other words, take "Reelin' in the Years", by Steely Dan. It's not just Mrs. Zahl, in a long ago springtime in Bos...
Sep 04, 2020•22 min
One of the best effects of a positive view of aging, which I have tried to offer in the Boomer Handbook (Mockingbird, 2020), is the unexpected appearance of new material. You find that faith in a "good outcome" to your life seems to bring with it fresh resources, and fresh product. It just happens! Well, thanks to Josh Retterer, to whom this podcast is dedicated , I've run straight into Margery Lawrence. Margery Lawrence (1889-1969) was an English writer of supernatural short stories, as well as...
Aug 27, 2020•28 min
I heard something very helpful recently in a sermon by John Zahl. He said that sometimes in life what seems like the end is really the middle . I think JAZ meant that when your situation feels like -- maybe is -- the end of the world, it may really be the hinge point to "A Whole New World" ( Aladdin , 1992). This insight is true in Christian experience. What looks like the end turns out to be the middle. Which made one immediately think of Los Straitjackets, that ever welling spring of inspirati...
Aug 24, 2020•22 min
I like Greg Townson very much! He's a guitarist who's been around for a while, but is now a leading member of Los Straitjackets. He combines that great Rockabilly sound of theirs with some really lyrical passages. Townson's track "Speed Bump", an excerpt of which begins this cast, got me started on the theme. It's a familiar theme, especially with Mockingbird; but should never be foregone. A speed bump is when an obstacle or blockage on the road on which you are traveling causes you -- if you ar...
Jul 06, 2020•24 min
This is a further thought on "narratives", tho' with a Biblical example (from Jeremiah) and a recent public incident that has me both "stunned and amazed" (Pretenders, 'My City Was Gone', 1984). The President of Harvard has issued a letter announcing the end of the University's sanctions against the undergraduate Final Clubs and all "single gender" organizations on or off campus. These sanctions, which brought with them a sort of "Stasi"-like network of anonymous informants and secret tip-offs c...
Jul 01, 2020•19 min
"Narratives", which used to be called "paradigms", and before that, "preconceptions", are like shackles on human necks. They force one to look down from what is before you, rather than at it. Narratives short-change reality because you either discard things that don't fit your narrative or you alter the facts in order to squeeze them in. I'm not talking about the ideological content of your narrative. (That varies from person to person.) I'm talking about the idea that we need narratives to unde...
Jun 29, 2020•19 min
Feelings cover both the personal and the general. They cover both the individual and the collective. So you feel deeply when you are loved and loved back, and you feel deeply when a cause -- political, social, or cultural -- captures your heart's allegiance. We are seeing this dramatically within the current mood and its fiery passions. But wait: I was here before! I was "here", in the Spring of 1968 when the match was lit by the assassination of Dr. King. I saw personally the inferno that becam...
Jun 07, 2020•24 min
Mrs. Zahl and I had a sort of 'Abraham/Sarah' moment (i.e., Genesis 17) this week, and it brought to mind an immortal song from 1974, performed by Paul Anka. But it was all because of the virus! This new cast, which is the 300th, talks about the supernatural Power of God in relation to the scourge that is whipping us all. I bring back an 'Oldie but Goodie', William Hale White (aka 'Mark Rutherford'), to witness concerning the Power of God through a remarkable short essay he penned in 1908. The e...
Mar 31, 2020•22 min
In the middle of what may be the worst week, or close to it, this cast offers hope of a real breakthrough -- and not just in mental attitude or "approach", but in the substance of the pandemic. At the start there is some slight use of the now-taboo word "over-reaction"; but hey, you can see it either way -- just as long you stay vigilant and wash your hands a lot. No question about that. Yet there remains the question of faith, as in the moment right after Christ stilled the storm, when He asked...
Mar 16, 2020•24 min
Our parish's Ash Wednesday service this year made me think of an old "Outer Limits" episode entitled 'Cry of Silence'. That episode concerned alien tumbleweeds -- no kidding -- and a scientist's attempts to communicate with them. What made me associate the Ash Wednesday liturgy with wind-blown tumbleweeds were the changes over the years of my ministry in that service. Now don't worry! This is not a 'Boomer's' reaction to contemporaneity. No, this is a reflection on the change-without-end that is...
Mar 01, 2020•24 min
There is this unexpected plethora of gems coming at me just now in a Mockingbird vein. Last week there was Journey into Light , from 1951; and also The First Legion , also from that year. Today there is Bright Road , also a Hollywood movie, which came out in 1953. I feel like the surface of the moon that is being bombarded by a meteor shower. How, one asks oneself, did one miss these many, explicitly Christian Hollywood movies? Were they literally hidden from view? Or was I simply asleep at the ...
Feb 12, 2020•20 min
Some startling new material has come down the pipeline this week, and I'm utterly bound to share it with you. Turns out that all sorts of explicitly Christian Hollywood movies have been hidden from view almost since they were made. It's almost as if a 'code' came into force, unspoken but more unwavering than the now notorious Hays Code of the 1930s, which banned directly Christian works of popular art from popular view. What am I talking about? Well, three remarkable movies that if you've ever h...
Jan 23, 2020•24 min
Just as alien invasion movies break down the "dividing walls of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14), almost invariably uniting the human race/s against the common enemy, so do four facts: 1) Lobo is big in Taiwan! 2) Tracy Hyde is still big in Japan! 3) Karen Carpenter is HUGE in The Philippines!! 4) Jacques Demy spent a lot of time, near the end of his run, making a Japanese movie about an anime heroine known as 'Lady Oscar'. Popularity in the above cases apparently has little connection with ethnicity...
Jan 20, 2020•21 min
One of the great things about UFOs and alien contact is that it unnerves and demoralizes the kind of thinking that qualifies everyone in terms of "identities" or predicates. The metaphor of alien-contact movies, from Starship Invasions (1977) to the original Day the Earth Stood Still _(1951) to _Cloverfield (2008), is that of our one planet, our one earth, being instantly united in the face of an extra-terrestrial presence. As 'Fox Mulder' announced in a late episode of The X-Files , in the face...
Jan 13, 2020•18 min
In the late 1970s The Trammps conceived a brilliant Disco Inferno, in which something would be burned down. Whether they meant the hot performance of a disco dance, or whether the torching of something big and malignant, it probably makes no difference. Something's gotta go, even if it's just lameness and dullness on the "disco round" (Alicia Bridges). This cast contrasts the passing nature of social and political anger and social/political circumstances with the things that endure. I take the s...
Jan 13, 2020•22 min
Sometimes I feel like... a motherless child. No, really: Sometimes I feel like I've been looking in almost all the wrong places for confirmations and traces of my Ur-existential Christian faith. One's been "trolling" almost one's whole life through Truffaut and Dinesen and Kafka and Isherwood and Seneca and H.G. Wells and Stephen King and Val Lewton and Rod Serling and and John Galsworthy and, golly, even Michael Reeves -- * panning for Christian gold! * What I mean is, one can make a lifetime o...
Jan 07, 2020•25 min
The secret that explains life -- I say "secret" because it's an open but denied truth, known most directly in popular music but suppressed in most "narratives" and conceptual systems -- is the aspiration for a connection of love with another human being. This aspiration transcends politics and affinities, affiliations and most "ultimate concerns", and almost all situational circumstances and historical contexts. The aspiration, whether lost, unrealized, or fulfilled, is the first thing you think...
Dec 20, 2019•26 min
A few words about faith, and the future -- and your future, in particular, in individual terms. I was struck recently by a meme I read on Instagram. It read like this: "Stop focusing on what 'wasn't' And start focusing on what will be!" What struck one about the meme was its departure from what one would almost always and everywhere ( semper ubique ) hear: Stop focusing on what 'wasn't' And start focusing on what is !' From the mid-1960s, when I first started harkening to the main-line Christian...
Dec 16, 2019•22 min
To respond to the opening invitation and make a gift in support of PZ's Podcast , click here . The most recent cast, entitled "GPF", has drawn a lot of response. This new cast develops the theme a bit more, and rounds it with memorable music by what Spencer Leffel once called my "house band". The last third of life is characterized, or should be, by increasing dis-engagement, increasing observation of the past, and hopefully by increasing peace of mind. Add to that a warmer faith, or hope, in wh...
Dec 02, 2019•19 min
This follows from Episode 286, entitled "Sine Qua Non" , and concerns the arrival of gratitude and peace at the end of life -- or, better, way before the end of life -- and the birth of faith for one's safe "arrival" after death. I speak at first about disillusionment with the world, and especially with the world's repetition. "The World Is a Circle" (Burt Bacharach/Hal David, 1973), and come to find out, it really is a circle. Trends rise and fall, and almost always, persistently come back. "Bu...
Nov 25, 2019•21 min
My subject is the birth of love in human relationships. What causes a person to love (as opposed to being indifferent, or even hostile)? What causes you and me to love another (as opposed to being merely dutiful, or resentful, for that matter)? I recorded the cast because one is bombarded these days, within mainstream Christian circles, with calls to love, summonses to embody the way of Jesus, His program, as it were, for this broken world. These calls are sincere and appropriate. But they lack ...
Nov 18, 2019•22 min
A scene near the beginning of the Russian movie version of War and Peace (1965-67) conveys the inner dialogue of a young woman as she lays dying after childbirth -- actually, as she has just died. Her spirit wonders to herself in sorrowful bewilderment: "I gave everything to everyone else, sought to love everyone else, but I was rejected by them, treated badly by them. I don't understand." The passage is moving, and also unsettling, because the character's inner reality comes to expression only ...
Nov 18, 2019•19 min
