Category Archives: The Zahl File

Remarks at the service by Rev. Paul F. M. Zahl

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What is the meaning of an individual human life? What counts, or lasts, or is enduring about it?

Out of the complete originality of Lloyd Fonvielle, what “stands”?

His aspiration to love and be loved.  This is probably the bottom line of any person’s life..

Lloyd’s aspirations concerning love – his ruminations on the nature, or possibility, of love – animated  his work, and all in a unique, ever-changing but also continuous-with-itself package.

Lloyd’s writings on photography, especially concerning William Eggleston; his writings on ballet and George Balanchine – and remembering especially Lloyd’s remarkable friendship with Lincoln Kirstein; Lloyd’s script for The Bride; elements in Lords of Discipline; Gotham (!); Circus, for sure; many of Lloyd’s Western short stories, his “noirs”, right through to the last one, Black Pearl..

Many if not most of these are ruminations on love and its sometime impossibility, and its devoutly to-be-hoped-for possibility.

Lloyd was extremely interested in the mercurial and at times hopefully enduring relations between men and women.

Lloyd also loved his family very much, and they were always a very large part of his life.  Mary and I often wished that Lloyd had been able to have children. As it was, Lloyd had a special heart for his nephews and nieces, each one of them!

I think everyone here would agree that Lloyd was lost to us too soon.

Here is the second of two points in this short memorial sermon:

Where is Lloyd now?

That’s a big one.  To me, it is the biggest one.

Whatever you think about the answer – I mean, whatever you think the answer to that question might be – every person has to engage the question somehow, simply because we all die.  As Lloyd has died.

Lloyd has pre-deceased every one of us who is here.  (I was always sure that Bob Dylan would pre-decease Lloyd, by the way, but it didn’t turn out that way.)  Lloyd now knows something, or has found out something, that none of us here today can answer with certainty. Lloyd now knows, or has found out, something that Bob Dylan doesn’t know.

Here is my simple answer to the question of where Lloyd is:

Lloyd is with the God of Love and Mercy.

Lloyd remained a Christian throughout his life, right up to the very end of it. He and I talked on the phone about faith and God and the person he called ‘Rabbi Jeshua bar Joseph’ only three days before he died.  Why did Lloyd remain religious? (He detested most human representations of Christianity.)  For one basic reason: Bob Dylan!  Just kidding.

No, but really:

Lloyd was drawn to Christianity because of the human life and actings-out-of-compassion that Lloyd saw in that person with the long Hebrew name.  That’s just a fact, about Lloyd.

So where is Lloyd today?

He is with that kind of God, within that kind of Reality.

PZ IN GOTHAM

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If you’re going to be in New York City tomorrow night you can hear Paul Zahl (above in Las Vegas) talk at Calvary-St. George’s Church on this intriguing subject — “An Odd Sighting of the Paranormal: ‘Penrod’ Crosses Over to the Great Beyond”.

He writes:

I think a sure sign of temperamental openness in a person is how open they are to the paranormal.  At times traditional Christians are quite closed to this, and it reflects something about them.  Martial atheists, too, can be tight as a drum when it comes to the “liminal”.  Tight as a drum.  But religion by definition is open to ‘The Borderland” (The Outer Limits 1963).   At least I hope it is.  Come to find out the American novelist Booth Tarkington opened his own door in 1918.  He “resolved” his famous saga of a declining family, The Magnificent Ambersons, by a direct entry, on the part of a lead character, into the Twilight Zone.  It’s an amazing denouement.  Orson Welles couldn’t film it when it came to making his inspired movie of the same.  How can you film what happens to ‘Eugene Morgan’ near the end of the Ambersons?   At the Olmsted Salon November 24th I would like to talk briefly about this little Tarkingtonian detour, and its implications for art as well as faith.

Details here.

THE DATING SCENE

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Paul Zahl finds the time to tell her and reports on it here:

About Paul and Mary’s Excellent Adventure

It came upon a midnight clear!  It came so suddenly clear that I knew I had to do something.

It was that song, that old forever song: “Can’t Find the Time to Tell You”.

I’ve always wanted to sing it to Mary, “in the morning, when we rise” (Donovan) and at “The End of the Day” (Kinks).  That single song’s enough to make babies and make you say, “I do”.

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What was the name of the group again?  Wait a minute.  It was Orpheus.  The name of the band was Orpheus.  So when a promo ad on WNEW (Boston) said that Orpheus,
seed-bed for the greatest love-song ever sung, was going to play a one-night set, with orchestra even, at the Berklee School of Music, well, “I’m already gone” (Eagles).

It had to be a surprise, though.  Mary couldn’t know.  If possible, she had to be swept off her feet.  At least that was my idea.

Well, I did get her to Boston.  It wasn’t easy, and she kept saying, “Why are we going north
on 95 when we’re supposed to be going south?”

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We finally arrived.  Just two blocks down from Commonwealth Avenue, which is pure Tarkington on the Back Bay, was the Berklee Performance Center.  The line wasn’t long — this wasn’t going to be The Last Waltz.  But there were enough people.  They were all Orpheus fans.

Can I just say something about Orpheus?  Orpheus was a band headed by Bruce Arnold and produced by Alan Lorber in the late 1960s.  Orpheus made four great records, the most popular single from which was “Can’t Find the Time to Tell You.”

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Bruce Arnold said that his two strongest influences were Elvis Presley and Henry Mancini.

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I’d say especially Henry Mancini.

These are hard songs to sing, hard songs to perform, hard songs even to understand.  Lots of orchestration, good melodic hooks, off-sides lyrics with a little mysticism thrown in,
and the steady theme of boy-meets-girl-and-is-changed-forever.

You listen to the songs for more than five minutes and you want to kiss somebody.  Just YouTube the other ones — “Big Green Pearl”, “Music Machine”, and “Love Over Here”.  Everything’s on iTunes.

The concert itself?   Mary and I were in the sixth row.  I would say it had its good points, especially the concluding signature number.  We’d both also say that the band’s resources were a little thin in relation to the aspiration.  Orpheus’s songs are big productions, with many elements inter-locking.  The Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and 30 guitars and keyboards could barely do these songs justice live.  So the hopes of the audience and probably the hopes of the performers were not quite realized.

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Except at the end, when sweet Bruce Arnold, basically alone on a tall stool, sang, and sang, then sang again, “Can’t Find the Time to Tell You”.  Every couple in the place was leaning into each other by the time he finished.

The ushers, too.

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Mary and Paul had their picture taken with Bruce, above, and Paul had a brief chat with him:

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“That’s just it!” Bruce is saying.  “I’m an Episcopalian, too!”

Which goes to show you never can tell, as Chuck Berry once reminded us, and it’s the same with kids today — you never can tell what they’re going to get up to, even when they’ve been married a zillion years, with three kids and enough grand kids to field a baseball team.

And so it goes . . .

Click on the images to enlarge.

THE PASTOR AND THE POP STAR

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PZ goes to see one of his favorite pop stars in concert, becomes a part of the event and writes about it below:

TAKE COURAGE — HE IS CALLING YOU

In the Bible a blind man calls persistently on the Lord to be healed. He finally gets the message back: “Take courage. He is calling you.” A good thing then happens.

I felt like the blind man recently, when someone I admire decided he wanted to see me.
Burton Cummings, who became famous long ago as lead singer and keyboard player of The Guess Who and later launched a solo career, is a rare artist who seems to me almost completely unfiltered. What I mean is, he rarely filters his emotions. His songs are full of unfiltered feeling — so much so that they are sometimes too hot to handle. Songs like “These Eyes”, “Stand Tall”, and “Sour Suite” are hard on the listener yet massively cathartic.

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“I’m Scared” made a special impression on me, because it tells the story of Cummings’s spiritual epiphany that he had while sheltering from the cold one day in St. Thomas Episcopal Church at 53rd and Fifth in Manhattan (above). Something happened that day, and the song is still one of his most popular, if not the most popular of anything he’s ever written.

Well, last week, at my wife’s suggestion, I went to see Burton Cummings at the City Winery on Varick Street in Soho. When I arrived, in the middle of a thunderstorm, I passed in a note, hoping against hope, to a member of Cummings’s team, that an Episcopal minister was there tonight who had an association with what the song “I’m Scared” refers to as “the Cathedral of St. Thomas”. (I’ve preached there several times over the years, and led forums there, and been good friends with two long-term rectors of the parish.)

Then suddenly, in his intro to “I’m Scared”, Burton Cummings said that he understood “there is a pastor in the audience tonight” to whom he wished to dedicate the song. He asked where I was sitting, and the teenager sitting two seats away from me, shouted, “He’s here! He’s over here!” I couldn’t believe it.

Then, at the end of the show, he announced that he wanted to see me as soon as possible.

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Like the blind beggar in the Old Story, I went forward. Cummings’s manager, Lorne Saifer, took me by the elbow straight into the inner sanctum. There, literally bathed in light — for Cummings’s videographer, Lil Sarafian, was filming our meeting — was the man himself.

What transpired was so lovely and so dear, and so personal, that I can barely believe it happened. We spoke for ten minutes about Cummings’s spiritual beliefs; what the song “I’m Scared” had meant to his mother, who died two years ago; and what he thinks about religion today and its purpose. He told me he had grown up in the Anglican Church of Canada, and when I mentioned that St. Thomas is an Episcopal (i.e., Anglican) church, he said, “Oh, you see! I thought it was Presbyterian!”

Then the seer put his arm around me and called for a photo. He gripped my hands in both of his, and in the most heartfelt possible way, thanked me for coming. He thanked me — as if.

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The manager escorted me out and twinkled, “You see, pastor, prayers are answered.”

Well, that’s it. Not only are the songs of Burton Cummings the very instance of unfiltered emotion in music, but our “splendid combination” (Gene Chandler) that night was unfiltered, too. Something passed between us.  To quote Cummings again, “I thought that stuff was invisible.”

POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER IN SUBURBIA

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PZ offers some thoughts on a novel and a film that have been regularly misunderstood, or at least mischaracterized:

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

This is an interesting movie (1956) and a very interesting book (1955).  Sloan Wilson, a master novelist who understood marriage and men, wrote the novel.  Darryl F. Zanuck produced the movie, and Nunnally Johnson scripted it and directed it.  It starred Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones.

I was drawn to the novels of Sloan Wilson in the aftermath of a personal trauma,
for, come to find out, Wilson’s characteristic protagonists are men who are trying to find themselves in the aftermath of a shock.  Wilson is not in fact the portraitist of 1950s “suburban conformity”, which is the usual critics’ tag attached to his work; but rather, a portraitist of men who live in the aftermath, as Wilson himself did, of trauma.  His heroes are usually early middle-aged “Everymen” who have seen disturbing action in wartime and are trying to re-adjust their lives to “account” for what they have been through.
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Tom Rath, the gray-suited Westport commuter of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, is carrying inside himself absolute shock at the things he had to do in France in l944 and the losses he suffered in the Pacific right after that.  No one knows this about Tom Rath — he is taciturn and diffident, like many survivors of that war.  Not even his wife knows. There is another aspect, too, of his time overseas that returns to haunt him.  Nothing can be compartmentalized, even on the New Haven Line.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a truly explosive novel and movie, nuclear but also abreactive.  It is not about conformity.  It is about engaging pain.  Fortunately, Tom and Betty Rath do engage the pain.  They are enabled somehow to go into it, rather than shy away from it.  They are literally saved by a kind of confrontation with their suffering.  Their story is almost ennobling.

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When you think about the Eisenhower years, or if you have experienced a trauma since the Eisenhower years — like maybe last week — you could learn from Sloan Wilson.  You could get something out of quiet Tom and not-so-quiet Betty Rath.  Life’s acuteness forces them to go towards, not suppress and flee — like my own tendency, for example.  It is not exactly “fight or flight” in the Raths’ case. But it’s certainly not flight.

While you’re at it, read Sloan Wilson’s Georgie Winthrop (1963) — the year of the Great Event we’ve been recently remembering.  Poor George Winthrop.  He is not allowed off the hook either.  But he comes into something, too.  Something good.  Or at least, survivable.

[PZ also points out a telling difference between the U. S. and the European advertising art for the film.  In the German poster above, the context of the tale is emphasized by the ghost of the soldier he once was standing behind and towering over the figure of Peck.  In American advertising art, this ghost figure did not appear.  This suggests that American audiences would not have been immediately attracted by an image of PTSD haunting returned American soldiers.  That subject had to be treated obliquely, in the guise of crime thrillers, for example, in the film noir tradition, or in the guise of a tale about “suburban conformity”.]

MOVING DAY

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That’s me on the left helping my friend Paul Zahl on the right move into his quarters at Grace Church in NYC, where he served as curate. His sister Eda stands behind the box. The year was 1976.

Click on the image to enlarge.

THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN

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PZ offers some thoughts on Edward Snowden from a religious perspective:

‘Edward Snowden’ by Howard Terpning

Viewing the 1968 movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, which was based on a 1963 novel by Morris West, made me think of Edward Snowden.  To my mind, Howard Terpning’s theatrical poster for that movie (above) of a good man dressed in formal whites, brings Snowden’s immortal sacrifice bunt into the world of popular art.

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Why would I say this?

Well, the hero of The Shoes of the Fisherman, a Russian-born pope and former political prisoner named Kyril Lakota, is a real Christian!  That sounds a little strange to me as I write it, but what the Pope in West’s novel and the movie does is so unexpected and counter-institutional that it could break the moral impasse of the world.  (You’ve got to see this movie.)

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The Pope suddenly starts to stand in the real shoes of the fisherman — the poor, broken and impetuous first head of the Church.  In doing so, Kyril kicks the legs out from under the set table of international politics and self interest that permeates the world. This is what I believe Edward Snowden has done — the wonderful illegal sin he has committed.  He has knocked the legs out from under a massive set table.

We talk sometimes about “speaking truth to power”.  Religious people will speak of the “principalities and powers of this world”.  But rarely does a religious person actually go there.  What usually happens is that religion “strains out gnats and swallows camels” (Matthew 23:24).  Which is to say, religion, in many forms, gets stuck on tertiary things — personal angers and giant nothings.

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In Snowden I see a man who has touched a nerve.  A really BIG nerve.  I say this because a country like ours would not be straining so hard to get him, using client states to force down a president’s plane and threatening every airport and state — every Middlesex village and farm — before he has even taken a single footstep to freedom, if he had not touched a really big nerve.

What is this nerve? It is Power and Control, the truth about Power and Control.

Edward Snowden has embodied George Orwell’s maxim, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

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As a religious man, therefore — Snowden himself has said he is an agnostic –I can’t help putting together this operation of personal sacrifice, truth-telling, and hitting the world’s open secret of Power and Control.  When I think of Edward Snowden, I can’t help thinking, of Kyril Lakota, and Howard Terpning’s picture.

THE EXHAUSTION OF THE WORLD

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My friend Paul Zahl introduces this talk by a guy named Tullian Tchividjian about the exhaustion of the world. It’s nominally a Christian message but you’d do better not to think of it that way because it’s a message you won’t hear preached by very many Christians these days — it’s too radical . . .

DRONES

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An Easter message to Barack Obama from various religious leaders, including my friend, and a contributor to this blog, Paul Zahl.

My personal objection to Obama’s drone policy has to do with its opacity and lack of judicial (or any other kind of) review but the more fundamental objections in this message need to be part of the conversation, too.

WHAT’S MISSING?

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Paul Zahl reflects on what’s not being talked about in this year’s campaign for President — basically, everything that’s really important:

In the 1982 movie entitled Missing, directed by Costa Gavras, the “Ed Horman” character, played by Jack Lemmon, says to two U.S. Embassy culprits, “At least I live in a country where people like you can be prosecuted for crimes like this one.”

The line becomes ironic, as no one from our country ever was prosecuted for complicity in the murder of Mr. Horman’s son, Charles, in the aftermath of the coup against Salvador Allende in l973 in Chile.  The complicity of United States officials in Santiago was later confirmed when a previously classified State Department memo was released during the Clinton administration.

Because Jack Lemmon’s performance as “Ed Horman” is so poignant and so real, it is hard not to identify with him, the grieving father, a devout Christian Scientist businessman from New York City, no matter what your politics are.  You identify with the human drama — it really happened, and I myself knew Ed Horman and Charles personally — and you are filled with feeling for him, and you agree with his indignation.  He left Chile with the faith that justice would be done, at least in America.  It wasn’t.  Justice was never done.  Mr. Horman died without seeing justice done on behalf of his son.

And what about the violators of habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay?  And the makers and approvers of the “hit lists” of people to be eliminated without capture during an undeclared war?  And the idea that extreme distanced combat, conducted by robots and therefore as impersonal as you could almost possibly get, is a good thing?  (I grant you, it is an expedient thing.)

Or our “hit makers'” confidence that the lynching of a North African dictator without a trial, in the immediate aftermath of a US drone attack, was justified?  (What did our forefathers and foremothers fight for in 1776? Why did they come here?)  Or the people who decided to assassinate a world-historical terrorist, no matter how heinous his crimes, without even the possibility of a trial?  (Why did this country take the trouble to try war criminals in 1945 and 1946 at Nuremberg?  We knew they were guilty.  Why try them?  I ask you.)

Poor Ed Horman in retrospect!  “I knew him, Horatio.”  I remember the week that Charles, the Hormans’ only child, was accepted at Harvard College.  Mr. Horman was as proud and beaming a father as you could ever see.

Last night, after my wife and I had watched Missing, viewing the movie doubles for people I grew up with, I went over to the bookshelf where I keep my childhood books.  There it was: Howard Pyle’s Men of Iron.

The plate inside simply reads: “This Book Belongs to Charles Horman.”  (I’d written my own name in pencil over his — I was about seven.)  Charles’ plate has a drawing of a dog over it, the kind of drawing he liked so much, the kind of drawing that his Jack Lemmon father, at the end of the tale, is gathering up to take back home, to his mother.

It seems that our two, or is it four candidates to become President of the United States agree on a point that cries out from the earth for debate.  They agree about drones, and Executive decisions to kill without trial (and without oversight), and “Let’s lock the door and throw away the key now” (Jay and the Americans).

Why is there no debate on the new American morality?  It has nothing to do with sex and nothing to do with food.  It has to do with Double O Seven — the license to kill.  On that point, on who exactly is “like a tree planted by the waters” (Psalm 1:3), there is no difference at all.

WINTER GARDEN

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My friend Mary Zahl, widely known as a professional designer of magical gardens, has been spearheading a beautification project in her hometown, Winter Garden, Florida.  In the midst of all the crap going down in America these days, here’s a little glimpse of green and hopeful dreaming about the future.