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 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 -- 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.

Can't believe I got to see Irma Thomas in person a few years back.
(Saw The Stones performing the same song in 1965 on their first American tour. Have to pinch myself that that really happened. But it did.)

But time is on my mind just now. This is for two reasons:

1) Two old friends died under conditions that felt like almost the polar opposite of what we would have expected when we were all very young together. There was so much promise and so much hopefulness and so much enthusiasm and so much pluck.

But then 50+ years later, aloneness and physical distress and self-despair. Terminal, in fact. Who would have thought? Not I.

So I'm seeing each of these old friends as they were when they were 20, then comparing their circumstances at death decades later. Time was not on their side.

2) One of my heroes, J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), wrote plays about this. Especially his 1937 masterpiece Time and the Conways. He tried to understand the meaning, the constituent elements, and the implications of time, and us. I think he came very close. (Time and the Conways, incidentally, was filmed, and very well, in 1985. You can see it right now on YouTube.)

Oh, and just to show everyone that time really doesn't matter, within eternal perspective that is, I've put at the end of the cast the absolute best cover version ever recorded of Irma Thomas' famous song. You'll see. Or rather, you'll hear. LUV U.

Every day these days I seem to find out something important that I didn't know before.

For example, that Burton Cummings has just released a new album. Or that one of Joe Dante's favorite movies is a Spanish religious satire released in 1995. Or... that The Fantasticks is really good! Or that the creators of the latter wrote an uncommonly powerful musical about a Christian martyr.

As I say, every day is a rebuke to one's supposed deep bench.

This podcast looks at the abreactive power of music and the aspirations of live theater to get through to our real selves. Like a sermon is meant to do!

The vehicle is the off-Broadway play entitled Philemon, which first opened in 1975 and ultimately ran for about 55 performances. The lyricist was Tom Jones and the composer was Harvey Schmidt. Here, in Philemon, two mainstream Broadway artists tried to encapsulate the story of a radical Christian conversion in Third Century Antioch, and with just seven performers and maybe two+ instrumentalists. Funny thing is, they succeeded!

Sure, it could be cut by 40 minutes (!). Sure, the theology is a little sketchy, tho' entirely well meaning. BUT Philemon manages to capture the abreactive/cathartic form of "instant/automatic psychoanalysis" by which a converted person goes from death to life in concrete terms.

Philemon manages to get under the skin of Herr Moltmann's Tod-Auferstehung (i.e., Death-Resurrection) dynamic -- which IMO is the true dynamic of life. (We are in Frank Lake territory, but it's Greenwich Village and it's 1975.)

Oh, and the concluding track embodies the failure of the Law to create the response it intends -- Motown-fashion! LUV U.

Eliot's line from 'East Coker', "Old men ought to be explorers", never gets... old. It is inspiring, counter-intuitive, awesome, and, yes, within our reach. And everyone's -- not just that of "old men".

But I never understood it -- really -- until I met Los Straitjackets: their music, I mean.

How did Los Straitjackets "shine a light" (CCR) on Thomas Stearns Eliot?

Well, they did so because it doesn't take many listens to realize that Los Straitjackets are often at their best in the last 40 seconds of each track. At first you hear a fairly predictable riff on a familiar song, but then, in the last verse -- sometimes in the last 28 seconds -- they explode, and the song goes through the roof. Listen to "Christmas Weekend", which begins this cast; or "Linus & Lucy", or "Fury", or "Tempest" (which ends the cast), or "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah", or "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer (!), or... About 70% percent of their songs catch fire at the very end.

Now, if I want to be a T. S. Eliot kind of a man -- and play my life like Los Straitjackets play their songs -- what do I do? What makes this happen in one life, such as yours or mine?

The answer to the question comes in -- are you ready? -- the last third of this podcast.

The images are (1) putting your life on the right foot (i.e., death/resurrection) rather than on the wrong foot (i.e., action/consequence); and (2) assimilating the negativities of your "Voyage of Life" (Thomas Cole, 1842), which can only really happen if you are in the presence of the Compassionate Christ (Bertel Thorwaldsen/Church of the Advent, Birmingham, 1966). Without God's Mercy (as in "The Green Pastures", 1930) it can't happen. Within God's Mercy, it can happen. In the blink of an eye.

I never met T.S. Eliot. Would sure love to have. But I did meet Los Straitjackets! Really did. They all autographed my copy of their single, "The Sox Are Rockin'". One's still speechless. Wouldn't you be?

Mockingbirder Joey Goodall recently composed a public note of praise for 'PZ's Podcast', and his very act motivated this caster to record a new one. Joey's approbation instantly created within me the desire to put some fresh thoughts out there. Instantly!

That's the way love works -- which is to say, "We love" (i.e., embody the fruit of outreach to others) "because He first loved us" (i.e., embodied one-way Love in our direction). Herr Goodall's endorsement instantly and spontaneously birthed the effect of my immediate response.

Today's cast begins as an appreciation of a Joe Meek track from the days (in 1957) when he was not a record producer but just a lowly engineer. Yet even then, Joe was so possessed and inspired by Genius that his hand is all over this track. (You'll hear what I'm talking about. It comes in the last 30 seconds.)

But my Joe Meek appreciation is just a set-up to what I really wish to say, for the cast is really about Prior Love (Stevie Winwood, 1986)! The cast concerns the Center of Christianity, God's one-way love for us confused and seduced racketeers. Oh, and that is not one of three or four key affirmations. No, it is The Center of everything. It stimulates other ideas and other principles and other consanguine affirmations. But it is the Center.

Moreover, it is uniquely presented by -- are you ready? -- by the clumsy character named 'Ginnie Moorehead' in the movie Some Came Running (1958). Shirley MacLaine plays her. And 'Ginnie' oddly but perfectly embodies the sure and true character of One-Way Love. Which is anchored in Christ's Love. It's not a stretch.

Today's podcast is dedicated to David Babikow.

I often think about persisting impasses and persistent patterns in life.

How can you "live with" -- handle -- habitual defeats, whether from outward circumstance or inward personality, without wanting to throw yourself overboard; or, as Herr Moltmann used to say, without wanting to turn in your train ticket and get your money back. Seems there is almost always one thing, one situation, one frailty, which just won't go away.

St. Paul talks about this in Second Corinthians 12 when he invokes his own "thorn in the flesh", which even a three-times repeated prayer for release has failed to take away. Then he hears the Lord say, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness." Paul therefore concludes: "When I am weak, then I am strong."

I believe this. And not because one has come to idealize or enshrine persistent weakness for its own sake. But rather because I have seen God come in, time and time again, when I have given up, or rather, been forced by circumstance to give up.

In this episode I invoke a movie from 1942, entitled The Big Street (starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, and based on a story by Damon Runyan). The Big Street is an almost perfect instantiation of St. Paul. A character goes down to the lowest possible point of weakness and then discovers a kind of triumph (within one-way love) that not only moves the viewer, but elates the viewer. You are literally weeping and exulting at the same time! There's even a secondary character at the end who puts our bi-focal reaction into timeless words. (See The Big Street.)

If "I must decrease", as it says in John 3, Verse 30, then at the exact same time, "He must increase". Personally, that has proved consistently true in my own life. "Let me take you there, 'cause I'm going... to... Strawberry Fields". One now sees the tragic element within one's life ... optimistically.

This cast is dedicated to Brent White, man of God and true original.

John Zahl recently said that God seems to be interested not so much in preventing our suffering as in redeeming us from it. (I might add, through it, even.)

My long friendship with the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who died June 3rd at the age of 98, began with a somewhat dramatic "happening" that lines up with JAZ's statement. This new cast describes what happened.

When I went to Tubingen in early 1992 to begin doctoral studies in theology there -- with the warmest sacrificial encouragement of Mary, our three sons being "in tow" -- I got there only to find out that the actual man with whom I had hoped to study was pretty cool about the whole thing. He was perfectly nice, but it turned out his English was not up to his own standard. So he was (moderately) happy to help overseas students who came from other universities but was reluctant to take on a foreign student "full time" on his own ground. He was just cool -- in temperament, I mean. I did not know where I stood.

In any event, Herr Moltmann observed this; and one day, during a kind of barbecue in his garden, when he saw that I was wrung dry from studying Hebrew durch Deutsch and was also receiving little encouragement from the other Great Man, he piped up and said this: "Paul" -- addressing yours truly by his first name was a wonder in itself within that setting at that time --"Paul, I like you. He won't help you. Forget about him. I will take you on, and yes, it will be about Justification!" Herr Moltmann added the last sentence because he knew that I was not "about" his own celebrated specialty, the Theology of Liberation. He knew that I was really not "about" any _of his principal interests. But that didn't seem to matter. Apparently _I mattered.

Jurgen -- as he wanted me to call him forever and ever, amen -- never stopped helping me. And helping Mary, and helping John, and helping David, and helping Simeon. In fact, we made it! Our whole family made it.

Herr Moltmann (Jurgen!) was the subject of Glenda's "Run to Me", and I was the object. One is beyond thankful. Forever.

p.s. You can respond to the fundraising appeal by clicking here.

Now "here's a howdy-do" (The Mikado, Gilbert & Sullivan). How does Joe Meek shed light on that ascendant movement -- and it still is ascendant -- within New Testament scholarship and interpretation?

Let me say how.

Admirers of Joe Meek's amazing productions like to say that he was way ahead of his time in terms of technology and recording innovation BUT that the songs themselves, almost all of them, in their many hundreds, are sentimental, corny and juvenile.

But they're not! They may sound that way, but just listen to the words. They're about "guys and gals", the denizens of Grease and also of To Sir, with Love, and -- wait for it -- everybody. None of Joe's songs -- not a single one, except maybe, at the very end, one, entitled "It's Hard to Believe It" -- are about issues or groups or themes. Every song Joe ever chose to produce is about love: love gone wrong, love gone right, love fulfilled, love disappointed, love obstructed, love enabled. The evidence for this preoccupation is in the lyrics -- and oh, about 99.999 % of them.

The same is true in relation to the New Perspective on Paul. The evidence that that movement is founded on an imposed "story" or paradigm, is overwhelming. That is, if you actually read the Letters of St. Paul. Or the Book of Hebrews, from start to finish. Christ came to give us a New Covenant, not a sort-of "expanded" version of the Old. The Old is passed away, behold the New is come. For years and years, I have tried to say this. (One is instantly accused of "supercessionism" if one says it. And that seems to end the argument. But the accusatory term is arbitrary, linguistic, and freighted.) The evidence of the New Testament is in fact overwhelmingly contrary to the evisceration of Grace that has been dynamized by the New Perspective.

Joe Meek underlines this. His lyrics confirm it. A little "icky" at times they may be, but relationships that strive for mutual love can also be icky. Joe's songs mirror an odd truth: life is about individual men and women who are trying to find... belovedness, and therefore love in return.

Dear New Testament interpreters, read the Letters of St. Paul. Read the Letter to the Hebrews. Read the Gospels -- all of them. And read 'em again in the light of Joe Meek! The subject and meaning is staring you in the face. LUV U.

Consideration of these (thousands of) new "Tea Chest" tapes from Joe Meek is such a blow to old assumptions. For example, I thought I knew his music pretty well. Even dedicated a book to him once, despite his having been dead since 1967.

So now come out a Ton, a TON of new recordings by the Man Who Heard a New World. And almost all of them are fine. Many are actually spectacular. They have been sitting in cases, possibly deteriorating and entirely un-heard, for 57 years.

"Self Portrait", performed by Glenda Collins -- and this cast begins with her solo a cappella rendition of the song -- is beyond profound. It almost says the entire Bare Essentials of what it is to be a human being. I would only root the singer's vision of herself in God. Funny thing is, I think she would have, too. I am certain Joe would have. (He was a believer, and grew up in the Church of England. He is interred at the parish church of his childhood.)

We know very little, and whatever we do know -- really -- comes from outside ourselves. We know one thing, which we rarely know we know: we each need love, individual love for each one of us in our individuality. Everything else is "like the chaff which the wind blows away".

Joe Meek, the Tea Chests, and his lightning-like inspirations -- they are a part of the "staff of life". LUV U.