Episode 259 - Revenge of the Creature

About this Episode

We're talking about love today -- wouldn't ya know -- and the relation of divine love to romantic love. It's a familiar, but one that remains very fresh, at least as long as human memory and human loss remain conscious.

Here is the key line, from a kind of monologue that occurs towards the end of "Revenge of the Creature" (1955), a sequel that's even better than the original. The young female scientist, played by Lori Nelson, says to her junior-professor colleague, played by John Agar, who is much enamored of her: "I looked up the definition of love in Webster's Dictionary, and this is what Mr. Webster says: 'Love is a feeling of strong personal attachment induced by sympathetic understanding'."

That's a prime statement and I wonder if you identify. Does it nail down one's one-to-one attachments? Does it nail the relation we seek with God? In both cases I think it does. It distills the divine as well as the human.

With the account of a recent conversation I had with someone who plunged me back into the waters of Lake Waban after 47 years, and also a citation from Rose Hobart/Rachel Crothers, I try to apply the Gospel to the really hidden things, the hidden crevasses of dis-remembered glaciality within us, the things we think that no one else will ever know.

The cast concludes with a brief, sharp, early example of English glam rock, "Tiger Feet" by Mud. LUV U.