Episode 367 - "Summer of '42"

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 someone, usually unexpectedly, reached out and ... held them. Similarly, ask them (i.e., yourself) about an experience of personal rejection, either as a child or an adolescent, that forever troubled the waters of their life's course. Someone rejected them -- personally, I mean, and not because of an "identity" or ideology, but for yourself personally -- and this has haunted them, like Poe's 'Lost Lenore', forever. This podcast observes the power of personal rejection but, more importantly, the power of personal acceptance. Consider the relationship of 'Magwitch' to 'Pip' in "Great Expectations". (See the 1946 masterpiece movie of it!). Or consider the story I tell at the conclusion of the cast, of a two-hour ride being offered to yours truly by someone way back in 1972. And that, to quote Robert Frost, "made all the difference". These are anchor instantiations of God's Grace in your life. They verify what St. Paul describes in Romans 7, and what Christ spent His life, and death, doing. And then there's Michel Legrand... LUV U!