Heard a sermon last night that cut to the quick. It evoked the image of a "new priesthood" -- a new movement of God in the New Year. The preacher's vision of life and the work of God in the world felt inspired to the first power. And then I thought of Jack Kerouac -- right in the middle of her sermon. I thought of his amazing book, on practical Buddhism no less, entitled Some of the Dharma . Kerouac and the preacher were on the same line. Then something else came to mind: the jaw-dropping last a...
Jan 01, 2024•21 min
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, ...
Dec 29, 2023•24 min
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 Willia...
Dec 18, 2023•21 min
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 bette...
Dec 04, 2023•20 min
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...
Dec 03, 2023•18 min
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....
Nov 16, 2023•18 min
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...
Nov 01, 2023•23 min
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 ...
Oct 20, 2023•21 min
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 s...
Oct 10, 2023•23 min
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 ye...
Sep 06, 2023•19 min
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 a...
Aug 14, 2023•23 min
Serving in full time ministry is as stress-full as any occupation can be. You get hit from all sides -- unendingly -- and just when you think things are beginning to stabilize, you get hit again. Plus, there is the in-built transference that is projected on you as a 'father'-figure (if you are male) which keeps surfacing, at least to some extent, in just about every interpersonal exchange you have. To repeat: serving in full time ministry is as stress-full as any occupation can be. I can't presc...
Jul 07, 2023•23 min
The quintessence of one's continuing love of popular culture that embodies heart-to-heart communication is the subject of this cast. What makes a work of popular art "Christian"? Does it have to be explicit to qualify? Or implicit -- and therefore under the radar -- to really qualify? One thing I know is that you have to love the work-in-question, whether a song, a novel, a movie, or a tv episode, on its own terms before you can communicate your particular personal attraction to its Christian el...
Jul 06, 2023•20 min
It's interesting how far music drives this podcast. Fer sher, I've been "out of pocket" for a month or so, but what drove me to record this new cast was one thing: music . I'd recently heard a section of The Carpenters' single "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (1977) and was made speechless by Karen C's vocal. One simply had to find a place for it on PZ's Podcast. Then another song came to mind, possibly even more explosive, from the Summer of '68. My friend Lloyd Fonvielle (R.i.P.) ha...
Jun 28, 2023•18 min
Verticality is a make-or-break attribute of the Christian Church. When we put horizontality before verticality, we run out of gas. Always. People cannot "keep up" horizontal good works and outreach if they are not being, as the English say, resourced. I saw this vividly last week. A men's prayer breakfast and Bible study was powerfully taught by a local pastor. He talked directly and winsomely about various problems with which the men present are dealing, in one form or another. I suddenly found...
May 17, 2023•15 min
I think we probably all need to get "outta gear", at least to some extent. 'Gears' are the attitudes, narratives, and exterior values that shape and define most of what we spend our time doing. We are trying to be successful, trying to win love, trying to be some image of ourselves that someone else has made us covet, trying , basically, to get nowhere fast! When you get sick -- which we all do at some point -- the gears fall off. When somebody breaks up with you -- which happens to almost every...
May 13, 2023•24 min
I think about it a lot: why isn't God intervening to make the world a less harsh and broiling place? 'Where are you, God? Come on, already.' Another way of putting it: What's taking You so long? And that's not just a question about "the world". It's a question concerning your individual world. As in, when are You going to help me out with this particular problem I'm having? Our friend Susannah Leighton helped me a few years ago when she opined, quite spontaneously, during an after-church youth-g...
May 12, 2023•23 min
It just came down to me. Like the letter at the beginning of Forrest Gump . Like the chap who rescued Mary and me six years ago when we blew a tire in the most remote "track" to be found in all of England. It just came down to me: I realized that the rockabilly-surfing band Los Straitjackets had something to teach me that had been camouflaged for years. FYI Los Straitjackets are a Nashville-based instrumental rock band that specialize in somewhat weird yet most accomplished covers of mostly anci...
Apr 24, 2023•22 min
We're always looking out for resources, mostly in the popular-art side of life, that embody the Belovedness that precedes all loving. Whether it's a Motown single or a novel no one's ever heard of or a TV show from last year, we're on the lookout for felt expressions, resonating with us inwardly, of the Love that precedes all 'Works of Love' (SK). Thanks to my college friend, Steven Berzin, I've gotten hooked on a French mystery program -- in episodes of an hour and a half -- entitled "Murder in...
Apr 20, 2023•22 min
Gerry Rafferty's 1978 single entitled "Right Down the Line" is a pure classic on the experience of imputation. Imputation, for the record, is when someone lovingly regards you as different from the way you perceive yourself; and somehow in being thus regarded, you actually become the person someone sees you as. That's a lot of prepositions, but that's what imputation is. It's like when the frog, having been kissed by the beautiful princess, becomes, in the twinkling of an eye, a prince. Or when ...
Apr 12, 2023•19 min
That title song is a quiet masterpiece. Sure, it's a little corny in the arrangement, but the message is universal. It never fails, at least in my case, to elicit tears -- of recognition. This cast is a hymn to life-long marriage. (That's just what it is.) It is also my attempt to say better what I almost always tried to convey to engaged couples in pre-marital counselling, especially at the start of the second session of the three we would have. I would highlight the importance of a shared spir...
Apr 05, 2023•16 min
These podcasts are almost all dialogues with music. The music, such as "Beep Alonia" from 1964, touches a soft or sensitive spot in my heart -- and also one's brain, maybe -- and suddenly "the waters flow". Here I am thinking about contact with the supernatural, with God, really: the curtain coming down between "God and man" ('Modern Love', David Bowie 1983). Are you, dear listener, actually open to divine encounter? Or do you simply dismiss such a possibility, at least in practice? (I believe y...
Mar 21, 2023•21 min
Good things, true things, lasting things have built-in repetition. They repeat in life because they are always valid. So they come back. Like "The Monster Swim"! That major contribution was the follow-up, by the same artist/s, to "The Monster Mash". We all know about the latter. It was the Best Song of 1964, hands down. Recently, an appearance to me several years ago of the soul of my oldest friend, who had died, had a sequel. The soul of another, more recently departed friend appeared to me the...
Mar 21, 2023•20 min
Warning from Space , a Japanese sci-fi "thriller" from 1956, is an extremely ridiculous movie. But I had confused it with Message from Space , also Japanese but from 1978, which is in fact not as good. (What is he talking about?!) I had wanted to entitle this cast "Message from Space". That is because the messages we need so urgently to receive from Space, i.e., from God, come in often ridiculous, and certainly unexpected forms. ("O Little Town of Bethlehem") One is constantly trying to shoehorn...
Mar 01, 2023•21 min
There is so little one knows. Here one thought one had a "deep bench" when it comes to foreign films, and yet I knew nothing of Julien Duvivier! Yes, there is his 'classic' Poil de Carotte , and Criterion put out Pepe le Moko a while back. And they are both outstanding. But it took an almost accidental viewing recently of Duvivier's Flesh and Fantasy -- for he had a Hollywood phase -- followed by his all-star (sort of) epic Tales of Manhattan , to put it through my head that his was a distinctly...
Feb 28, 2023•16 min
Sometimes I hear a 'Grace' sermon that is just terrific... until the last five minutes. During the last five minutes, the preacher seems pressed to tell me how I should respond, at least mentally, to the message of God's One-Way Love. The preacher -- in good faith and sincerity, to be sure -- tells me to "relax into the Message", "accept the Gift", "live into It", "let It sink in", "allow It to become part of you". And although that sounds good, it ends up, at least for me, feeling abstract. It ...
Feb 21, 2023•22 min
This is a follow-up to "Joe Meek Is God", and observes the non sequiturs of one's life. I believe they are Providential, those decisive non sequiturs ; and are best observed in the absence of a "narrative" or personal story-line. What has happened in your life has happened. The turning points, the "pivots", both for 'good' and for 'ill', were not rationally conceived -- or at least few of them were. They came upon you. Just look! Be a scientist for a minute. Study the data of your actual experie...
Feb 21, 2023•19 min
I've talked about Joe Meek before, but think I've finally gotten to the spiritual wisdom that lies beneath his many records. (Meek was an English independent record producer in the 1950s and '60s.) The wisdom of Joe Meek, which is a prolific and dramatic instance of the wisdom of the Biblical God, consists in the power of non sequiturs . Meek's almost innumerable pop-music productions are almost all examples of the non sequitur . To wit, he generally takes a lame lyric (and a lame artist or grou...
Feb 17, 2023•19 min
What could really do it? What could actually revive the beneficent influence of the Christian Gospel on our current masochistic/sadistic world? "What Does It Take/To Win Your Love for Me" (Junior Walker, 1969). That is the question of this cast: What might need to happen in order for the unique vision of New Testament faith and hope to "re-enchant" the world? One's attention was drawn recently to the martyrdom at Carthage, in 203 A.D., of St. Perpetua. Her journal, the personal account of her tr...
Feb 15, 2023•19 min
I'm not talking about dying these days in order to be a downer. (For years one has tuned out all sorts of devotional books that major on death and dying. Especially R.C. ones, which felt morbid. They seemed both remote from one's actual life and almost intentionally depressing.) What I am talking about now, though, is the question of where one goes immediately after death. Not Too Long Ago (Nick Lowe/Los Straitjackets, 2015) I was preaching at a funeral and ended the sermon by asking the questio...
Feb 08, 2023•21 min
