synchronicities

Early morning flumped in front of the television.
I am watching a Catholic satellite channel called EWTN.
Occasionally I flick up and down to the Protestant channels which have buckets more oomph for your dollar.
The worst Protestant broadcaster is about a hundred times more televisual than the best Catholic one.
I return a wiser, weaker man, rather chastened in fact, to the channel God watches.

And lo!
EWTN is showing a most curious film from the 1960s.
It's part of some lost series called Father Peyton's Family Theatre.

Each episode features a poetic visual interpretation accompanied by a reading from the Book of Psalms.
In my cynicism nay defeatism, I can't help thinking that no other television station on the planet earth would dream of broadcasting this stuff now.
Nonetheless I am rather stunned by the symbolism of this week's episode.

The captions tells us we're about to hear Psalm 139 which the makers of the programme have entitled Once Upon A Morning.

There is darkness.

And then there is a campfire on the beach flickering in the darkness.

Then we see a boy and girl sitting at the campfire.

The filming is quite beautiful.

The boy breaks off a piece of fish which they have been roasting at the campfire and gives it to the girl.

Over all this a splendidly resonant narrator's voice begins declaiming Psalm 139.

Whoever he is, he's good.

The sun comes up over the crashing waves.
The children, now revealed as a cropped haired boy and a blonde girl are wandering through sand dunes searching for meaning.
No really.
They are luminously beautiful children.
The sea is rolling white topped in a glorious sun.
Everything is very Californian.

That anonymous unseen somebody with splendid intonation is still reading Psalm 139 from off camera.

And lo!
The kids have come upon two rocking horses on the beach.

It happens.
They are sitting on them now.
Their faces suffused with joy.
Their hair streaming.
The sea is a magnificent mythic backdrop.
Presently the kids get off the horses and stroll back among the sand dunes.
No words at all from them.
We are left contemplating the wild mystic ocean.
The ocean of truth?
The credits roll.
Most extraordinary.
I watched this thing with my jaw dropped. I couldn't make up my mind what the hell I'd just seen.
So the credits rolled.

And lo again!
It had been a young undiscovered William Shatner at the dawn of his career, reading the psalm,

I didn't recognise the other names in the credit list. But I could imagine that for each of them working on this film might have been a thrill, possibly the thrill of a lifetime.

A final credit appeared.
Typical of the Catholics.
They give a credit to everybody.
The final credit began: Assistant to the Cameraman...
Now this guy hadn't been Assistant Cameraman.
This guy was Assistant to the Cameraman.
An important distinction.
He didn't get to work the apparatus when the main man was chatting to Father Peyton.
What he did get to do was fetch the cameraman's sandwiches.
The Assistant to the Cameraman was George Lucas.

So the Catholic Church, way ahead of the posse, had in 1962 brought together William Shatner and George Lucas while Star Trek and Star Wars were still just a glint of unsuspected possibility in the yet 

to unfold future of both men.

Boy we're good.

Or more subtly stated... It all just goes to show, the Catholic Church can really pick em

By the way Raymond Burr was in another Psalm in the same series, long before he became world famous as the TV cop Ironside.

But ah.

That's another story.

(First published 2007)