Demands on our lives preclude us from so much that’s out there. I fantasize about being given a life sentence — confined to a large, well-stocked public library. What could be better than wiling away the rest of the hours of one’s life immersed in the best ideas recorded throughout human history? Oh, the amazing works that wait for the time and the opportunity to be devoured.I fret that KTAR (620 AM) airs its wonderful program, The God Show, with host Pat McMahon at 7 a.m. on Sunday mornings. That’s not only when NBC-TV’s Meet the Press comes on, but it about the time I am headed for church to handle an hour’s worth of campus chores and duties before heading to choir practice. So I miss The God Show.
I know, I could wear a Sony Walkman and hear it all. Some years ago, I mail-ordered a radio that could be programmed to come on at a certain time to record a couple hours of a radio program. I think I got it to work only once. After repeated tries to get that to happen again, I gave up. The radio is stuck on a shelf somewhere.
So I catch only a portion of “The God Show,” an incredible hour featuring some of the most thoughtful, bright minds in religion locally and nationally. McMahon, the dean of Valley radio-TV personalities and ever-so-eclectic in what he deals with in his various shows, has a remarkable talent for provocative questions. Thus, he elicits great answers from theologians, esteemed authors and scholars and activists from the trench of faith reform. McMahon needs to write his own book on religion.
The God Show is a fine hour of radio.
When I can get home from church on Sundays by 12:30 p.m., I watch the 30-minute PBS weekly program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. The newsmagazine, whose host and executive editor is Bob Abernathy, a one-time major network newsman, does a magnificent job covering cutting-edge issues about faith today. Last Sunday, it featured remarks from author-preacher Frederick Buechner, just turned 80. Buechner noted how little he goes to church these days because he is completely bored by shallow, insipid preaching. He said pastors need to do more to listen to your life and draw from those experiences the richness that lies there for imparting thoughts and ideas.
Buechner has tried all his life to pay attention to the occasional, fleeting glimpses that he has had of the holy. The novelist said that message of faith and hope is supreme even in the face of constant suffering on the planet. Whats lost is nothing to whats found. And all the death that ever was set next to life would scarcely fill a cup.
Oh, ideas. Wonderful ideas. Engage in them. Read them. Go beyond what you believe and know even if it make you change.
With whatever of life there is left for you, there is still time to come to know more of the important unknown.
