Holiday message to all our followers

Dear Pizza Quest Followers,

The Quest goes on, and we’ve enjoyed expanding the scope of our journey with you our fellow Questers. Thank you so much for your support and appreciative feedback for the diverse variety of guests and topics of this past year. We’re in the process now of lining up a unique and exciting array of guests for the 2025 season, and plan to return in early January with all new shows.  This post is just to express our gratitude for your continuing support to wish you all a healthy and joyous holiday season. As a special thanks, I’m posting the holiday letter that my wife Susan and I are sending out this year to our friends and family. If you are reading it here, that makes you too part of our extended family, so I hope you will enjoy the following, which touches on the deeper theme of what Pizza Quest is really about: the longing for meaningfulness, purpose, and joy. I look forward to our ongoing moments together through the new interviews and podcasts coming your way soon.  I’ll be back in a few weeks with announcements and updates as we debut our new season, both here, on YouTube, and also via our audio-only platform host at www.heritageradionetwork.org.

Here’s the letter:

Dear Friends and Family,

       Our mentor and spiritual father, Fr. Maximos Rossi, was inspired by many elders but his hero of heroes was St. Maximos the Confessor, whose name he accepted as his patron saint. One of his other favorite sources of inspiration was C. S. Lewis, who was able to write about the spiritual journey in terms that were broad enough to reach people of all faiths and denominations. We have been thinking a lot about Fr. Maximos recently, celebrating his repose two years ago, and also reflecting on some of the teachings of both St. Maximos and C. S. Lewis and how they converge during this holy season, a time of the year in which our longing for greater understanding is magnified and amplified. Lewis called this reflectiveness “…an inconsolable longing in the human heart for we know not what.” He described in his other writings that this longing was a kind of nostalgia, but strictly in the classic origins of the word, derived from the Greek “nostos,” which means “a return home; a kind of homesickness.” For him, it was not just a sentimental yearning for a childhood home but, rather, for our original (and future) “true home.” 

      In previous holiday letters we’ve quoted Lewis’s description of where real beauty is found, and it bears repeating here: “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

       Which brings us back to St. Maximos, who fifteen hundred years earlier wrote: “Everything will cease its willful movement toward something else when the ultimate beauty that satisfies our desire appears.” 

       So what is this “ultimate beauty that satisfies our desire”? That’s what this season of reflection is all about, for each of us to grapple with that question. But to help us along the way, here are two final quotes from these wise elders: “Our best havings are wantings.” (C.S. Lewis), and ”Only wonder can comprehend His incomprehensible power.” (St. Maximos). 

      Have a wonder-filled Christmas and Hanukkah, and a New Year full of inconsolable longing for ultimate beauty. “Our best havings are wantings.” 

      Love to All,

      Peter and Susan Reinhart