Episode 306 - For Our Dear Margary

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 popular novels. She was also a committed spiritualist, who wrote within an explicitly Christian (tho' anti-clerical) world-view. What Lawrence brought to her fiction was the insight that many relationships between men and women, and between children and their parents, are the workings-out of unseen forces, mainly of positive forces seeking to bring afflicted everyday people to better resolutions, and even victories, in relation to inherited paralyses. What Pastor Paula denominates "divine set-ups", Margery Lawrence regards as the sometimes centuries-long -- and anguished -- pilgrimage of the human soul to sacrificial love and understanding. Lawrence's inventive ghost stories are fantastic analogies of the way God works, which is mainly through defeats and come-uppances in everyday life. From Amazon, you can download inexpensively The Floating Cafe and TheTerraces of Night. Maybe start with "The Shrine at the Crossroads" or "Tinpot Landing". Or maybe, "The Beauty Spot" or "The Crystal Snuff Box". Look for a kind of heroism from the past, which changes the present in actuality. Listen, too, to "Frosty the Snowman" by Los Straitjackets, which concludes this cast. It shows you exactly what a "good outcome" can mean!