This is the last part of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Read the previous post and listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

The Spirituality of Rock looks at rock songs as if they were prayers. The song in this series uses vulgar language, which begs the question: Do we offend God’s ears with bad words?

I hope not for my sake (he’s heard more than a few from me). Still, if prayers are a dialogue with the Almighty, where we lift our hearts and minds to him, what if we don’t bring our best language to the conversation?

Good prayer requires honesty, courage and trust above all things. Expressing that takes many forms, and sometimes the wrong word is the right one to use. Besides, any prayer is better than no prayer, and I’m sure God has heard it all before.

Prayer also takes humility. For that we have the model of the tax collector in Luke’s Gospel: “But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, ‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner1.’”

In the presence of honesty, courage, trust and humility, bad words aren’t much of an issue. Jesus is brother and Lord, so our words, even when they’re rough, should be honest (but never careless).

In any event, our prayers are not perfect, and the holy Spirit does the translating for us. “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings2,” wrote St. Paul. I take comfort in that.

In this series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” we saw that our song’s hero’s suffering drove him to seek help, that his doctor gave him the diagnosis plainly, that he refused to believe it, and in the end, that he redoubled his efforts toward the goals that caused his suffering. He fell into despair. It turns out, this story, or parts of it, aren’t uncommon.

Considering all this, can we pray using Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” as a model?

We can, but let’s tweak it — more for its intentions than its language:

Dear Lord,

I feel kinda rough. Disappointed, too.

I’ve been looking for meaning in my life. My efforts haven’t worked out as I had hoped.

I need your help — not to turn my bad luck into good, but to lead me through this suffering to see where I went wrong. Help me to change for the better; to put you first in my life, so that I can love rightly and rightly see that I am loved.

And whatever you tell me along the way, by your grace I hope to keep my ears tuned to your voice. I will trust your guidance because I know you are with me at every step, even when I stumble.

Amen.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up

This is part seven of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Read the previous post and listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

Let’s talk about you.

I wrote in the first post of this series on the spirituality of Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” that it’s a sad story (read more in the first post →). And we saw in subsequent posts that our song’s hero’s suffering drove him to seek help (read more in part 2 →). His doctor gave him the diagnosis plainly (read more in part 3 →), he refused to believe it, and in the end, he redoubled his efforts toward the goals that caused his suffering (read more in part 5 →).

It’s a sad story, and not an uncommon one. Maybe it’s your story. Maybe you feel stuck like you “had a dream … [and] it’s shot to hell?” And maybe, after asking God for help, it is hard to face why you’re stuck. The truth of it can feel cruel, when what we want is at odds with what’s good for us.

Now we ask: what does this song’s tragedy reveal about our own attachments before God?

Before we go further, I need to acknowledge mental illness.

This song ends in despair, which is a spiritual condition related to a loss of hope. Depression can resemble despair, and even accompany or overlap it. If you are suffering from emotional distress or suspect you have mental illness, please see a qualified health professional. If you are in immediate danger or thinking of hurting yourself or others, seek emergency help now. God does perform miracles, and so often, those miracles are manifested through the help of caring people.

Now back to the spiritual side of things …

We saw that our song’s hero in “My Shit’s Fucked Up” misplaced love for good things that were not God. This was the pebble that started the avalanche (read more in part 6 →). It’s why he was miserable and it’s what kept him on the same track even after being given a path out. So, if there’s one thing we can take away from this song, it’s to look for and let go of our attachments, the things that displace or rival God.

Had our hero not been attached to something (and he gave us clues that money was the culprit), he would not have been stuck. He would not have been circling what writer Frank Sheed called the “abyss of nothingness at the very heart” of his being. That’s the insatiable emptiness we find when we try to find fulfillment in anything except God1. As St. Augustine said, a man’s “heart is restless until it rests in” God2. (Liner note: Did St. Augustine Rock? →)

Unless our first love is God — the one we were made for — rest will remain elusive.

And yet, this is normal stuff for most of us. Chasing good things as if they could make us whole strengthens the habit of looking to them for fulfillment. Every time satisfaction is found, it evaporates from our grasp, sending us on another quest to find it. Denying even the ephemeral comfort these things bring gets harder and harder, like we’re doom-scrolling our lives.

Wealth, for example, can make this clear. When “you play [life] as an individual,” wrote author William Poundstone, “… money is how you keep score3.” The problem is, how high a score is high enough?

It turns out that infinity isn’t high enough because it’s hard to walk away even when you’ve won the game.

Instead, we have to unlearn these lessons to learn that union with God is what we were made for.

How do we do that?

The first step is listening. If we interpret frustration as pointless suffering, we won’t get very far. But when we see it as an invitation to change our mind about the choices we make and how we’re living, a new path opens to us.

Then we have to retrain our will, but not on our own.

We saw that when our song’s hero heard the truth about his situation, he rejected it, thinking incorrectly that grace had passed him by.

But he was wrong. Grace hadn’t passed him by; he passed it by. Grace was already at work in the truth spoken through his conscience.

To avoid the same fate, we start by recognizing our inability to go it alone. In the first Beatitude – blessed are the poor in spirit4 – Jesus names the frame of mind required for conversion: total dependence on God. And that makes sense. If we forged our attachments, how can we expect not to pick them back up after we throw them down? We’re looking for conversion. That only happens when we let grace work to align our wants with God’s wants.

To be sure, we have to co-operate and do our part. Grace is divine help, not magic. We have to make substantive changes in our attitudes toward our attachments.

We can question our motives. Take career, for example. Ask yourself: Why do I want a career? The answer might be make money. Why do I want money? The answer might be to support your family. Why? Because you love them. The logical end of this conga line is God. This is love rightly ordered.

But what if you say you want money because that’s the only way people will love you? Or that money is power and influence, and you want people to do what you want? Or that it will prove that you’re not what people say you are? There are many others like these. All reveal a wounded love in need of healing.

We started this series with Dante’s Divine Comedy (read more in part 1 →). Dante’s Pilgrim had wandered from the straight path and into the dark wood of sin. He was in a spiritual crisis, and had lived the wrong way for so long, he could not reset without help.

Help came, and it wasn’t easy. He was led into hell to see and experience the suffering that comes from not living the way he ought to. Once in purgatory, he asked his guide how the shades there ended up on the seven-story mountain of purgatory instead of heaven. His guide’s answer: they loved wrongly:

Natural love may never be at fault; the other [rational love] may: by choosing the wrong goal, by insufficient or excessive zeal.

While it is fixed on the Eternal Good, and observes temperance loving worldly goods, it cannot be the cause of sinful joys;

But when it turns toward evil or pursues some good with not enough or too much zeal – the creature turns on his Creator then.

So, you can understand how love must be the seed of every virtue growing in you5.

The Pilgrim learns in Purgatory that sin is love aimed at the wrong thing, in the wrong way. Such was the problem of the Rich Young Man in Matthew’s Gospel, and such was the problem of our song’s hero in “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

If you find yourself in a similar predicament, let love become the seed of virtue growing in you. And let grace teach your heart to love rightly, turning you toward the one you were made for: God.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up

This is part one of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

If Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up”1 were a prayer, it would come from a man in deep spiritual crisis who discovers that the glitter he’s chased all his life has led to a dead end. If you’re expecting the angelic cavalry to ride to his rescue, think again. This song is a tragedy in miniature.

Sad story, right? It is. And it’s a common one.

Maybe it’s your story. Maybe you feel stuck, like you “had a dream … [and] it’s shot to hell.” And maybe, after asking God for help, you don’t like the reasons you’re stuck. The truth can feel cruel when what we want is at odds with what’s good for us.

The question is: When we ask God for help, are we willing to listen to what he says?

“My Shit’s Fucked Up” from Mr. Zevon’s Life’ll Kill Ya album is often understood to be about the difficulty and illness that come with aging (read about the song →). Our hero complains to a doctor that he’s feeling miserable. The doctor gives him the bad news: he can no longer live the same way — the way he operated won’t work.

It’s not hard to see Warren Zevon in this song. Mr. Zevon, a singer-songwriter who emerged in the 1970s, is best known for “Werewolves in London.” He lived the life of the self-destructive artist2. And while he was not the first songwriter to feel “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” he may have been the first to say it on the nose without glorifying it or sounding goofy. (Learn more in a liner note: Did Warren Zevon Rock? →)

We can speculate about what in Mr. Zevon’s life inspired these lyrics. But in Spirituality of Rock we’ll instead look through a spiritual lens to see what the lyrics say about our relationship with God.

Then let’s hear it as a prayer.

To be sure, you could see this as a song about facing illness, but it’s not a lock for me. The lyrics seem to point somewhere else. What if, heard spiritually, the “doctor” wasn’t an M.D. but God? And what if our hero’s ailment wasn’t physical or emotional, but spiritual? Listening this way points more strongly to a different kind of crisis.

Seeing it isn’t hard, but it is easier through the eyes of someone who rocked as hard as anyone: Dante Alighieri.

Dante, a fourteenth-century Italian poet, is best known for writing the Divine Comedy. Its first part, Inferno, is the one everybody remembers. (Learn more in a liner note: Did Dante Alighieri Rock? →)

Hell is not fun. But descending with Dante into the depths of human sinfulness and divine justice is a blast. Escape came only by climbing the hairy body of a three-headed Lucifer encased in ice, chewing on history’s greatest sinners.

Dante’s Pilgrim doesn’t stumble upon hell like Alice chasing a white rabbit. Rather, his life was leading him to a permanent residency in the underworld, and he couldn’t get out of it:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
For I had wandered off from the straight path3.

Have you been there? I have, both in the woods and in life. The feeling is the same. After walking mile after mile on what you think is the right trail, not really paying attention to the long green tunnel you’ve been chugging through, you suddenly hit a dead end of sharp branches. You have no idea how long you’ve been wrong.

Do you scramble back down the rocks and take a left? Or was it a right? Can you even get down that slope? Cue the anxiety sweats that come on like fever. Panic follows. The bad decisions, which come easy now, compound each other. When you’re lost in the woods, it’s hard to imagine getting back to the car. (Pro tip: GPS helps a lot.)

The same is true for a spiritual crisis. After walking the wrong path for so long, it can be difficult to reset. We keep making choices that aren’t good for us because that’s all we know.

A spiritual crisis has a terrain all its own. If you’re looking for a way out, Dante gives us the map, and the contrast with our song’s hero couldn’t be more stark.

Dante’s Pilgrim woke up (scriptural language for becoming spiritually aware) and realized he was lost. He did not react well — he went into what looks like a suicidal depression4 (“death could scarce be bitterer”). He wanted out and got his opportunity. It wasn’t an easy one. Escape had a cost — it meant facing and atoning for his own sins by traveling through hell and later purgatory. Warren Zevon’s hero followed a similar path but came to a very different end.

Both characters found themselves in dire spiritual straits. Both were offered God’s loving help. But while Dante’s Pilgrim later travels to heaven, the hero in our song does not. Where did he go wrong?

It turns out the path through a spiritual crisis can be “kinda rough.” So let’s hear Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” as a prayer from a spiritually lost soul crying for help. Maybe it can help us see why we get stuck — and where the way out begins.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up | Song Projects

This is part six of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Read the previous post and listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

The last post on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” ended on a dark, dissonant note. The song is not a happy one. Its hero experienced spiritual collapse. (About the song →)

So how does spiritual collapse happen? How does someone go from asking for help to refusing it, only to end up worse than when he started?

We started this series by looking at the song as if it were a prayer by a man in deep spiritual crisis and saw a tragedy in slow motion. What did it tell us? That when we chase lasting fulfillment in good things that cannot provide it, and then we refuse the help that would pull us away, we’re headed in the wrong direction. The right one, it turns out, is the opposite of that.

So let’s perform a theological autopsy on our song’s hero; a postmortem on where things went wrong and the prescription that might have brought him back to health.

Coroner Investigation Report

This statement has been prepared from the evidence collected to determine the victim’s cause of spiritual collapse. It is the opinion of this examiner that the collapse did not occur at once. Rather, the victim suffered from a malady that developed in stages, eventually leading to his demise. The evidence is as follows:

Stage 1: Misdirected love

Our victim had love all mixed up. He expected good things in life to bring him the kind of happiness and fulfillment only God gives. That is why loving God above all things, however good other things may be, is paramount. That’s loving in the right order. St. Augustine explains: “Anyone who loves something else along with you [God], but does not love it for your sake, loves you less1.”

Hoping for fulfillment in finite things, such as family, romance, career, achievement, or success, instead of pursuing a share in God’s life leads to a “failure in genuine love for God and neighbor.” When we love them as the ultimate end instead of receiving them as gifts from God, we wound our nature2. It happened to our victim, weakening him spiritually.

Stage 2: The false promises of false gods

With misdirected love as the default, the good things our victim pursued took God’s place in his life.

Like everyone, our victim desired happiness and fulfillment. He looked for it in the good things he loved. They could not give him what he wanted, but he pursued them anyway. After some time, they became the purpose organizing his life, and he could not escape their intoxication.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Scholastic medieval theologian, taught that we pursue many things that cannot make us happy, such as wealth, honor, glory, power, physical abilities, and pleasure3. They are fickle lovers. When we reach a milestone in pursuit of them, the good feeling doesn’t last and frustration drives us to pursue them more. We become like rats running a maze, always searching for the next crumb of cheese. They become our summum bonum, our highest good. In the broad sense, when your highest good is not God, that’s idolatry4. (Liner note: Did St. Thomas Aquinas Rock? →)

Stage 3: Rejecting the truth

When desire bends our senses and imagination toward things that cannot make us happy, they persuade us “that what [we] would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful5.” Our victim fell for similar self-deceptive logic. He rejected the facts of his spiritual condition, believing that self-directed autonomy, rather than assenting to the truth, was in his best interests.

For this, we can thank the first man, who set the pattern. Adam rejected the truth of God’s sovereignty over creation, figuring he himself should decide the difference between good and evil, right and wrong6. By this one act, one guy ushered sin into the human experience.

Our victim did the same thing. Under the influence of misdirected love, he believed the illusion of self-directed autonomy, refusing the truth that would have put him on the path to spiritual health.

Stage 4: Wounded freedom

Weakened by misdirected love, resistance to truth, and going his own way, our victim fell into habits that narrowed his freedom to choose the good7. He may have felt he was self-sufficient and free, but the more he looked to good things for fulfillment, the less able he became to pursue his true summum bonum. His vices bound him8 to his choices, and the self-sufficiency he trusted to navigate life could not heal the wounds his choices had made.

Stage 5: Despair

Imprisoned and encumbered, our victim slipped into despair. “By despair, man ceases to hope for his personal salvation from God, for help in attaining it or for the forgiveness of his sins9.”

Despair blinded our victim, preventing him from seeing any escape from his imprisonment. Clearly in pain, he wondered out loud if the only escape was death. In the end he resigned himself to his fate, continuing to chase the things that caused him so much suffering.

Could our hero’s story have ended differently? If collapse followed a certain spiritual order, then the remedy must follow one, too.

Had he listened to his spiritual doctor, the prescription might have looked like this:

We were made for God — All of us live toward a final destination. The ancient Greeks called this our telos. For human beings, our telos is union with God. It begins by grace and is fulfilled10 in God when we die. We call this fulfillment perfect happiness, or beatitude.

Why were you made? To know and love God11. The full capacity of your humanity is found only within your Creator. This is communion with God, where sorrow and trial yield to love, and we are complete12.

Properly directed love pursues God, and it doesn’t stop.

Breaking the power of false gods — Desiring things that cannot finally fulfill us leads to control — not us controlling them, but them controlling us. Freedom begins when we can see them objectively and hold them at a distance.

This is detachment, and it has its roots in the first commandment (“I am the Lord your God … You shall not have other gods beside me13”).

While this commandment may bring to mind the rebellious Jews worshiping the golden calf14 at the foot of Mt. Sinai, “other gods” aren’t always idols in the classical sense. They can be ideas, ambitions, relationships, fantasies, achievements — anything treated as ultimate.

The problem is, they are not gods. They aren’t even decent substitutes. Attaching ourselves to them leads to bad choices, the worst of which is making them our summum bonum. When that happens, idolatry follows and we get sidetracked from reaching our telos.

Jesus tells us in the Gospels to walk away from these attachments.

Consider the Rich Young Man who “went away sad, for he had many possessions15” after Jesus told him that to gain eternal life he had to sell his stuff and donate the proceeds. It wasn’t the man’s wealth that was an impediment to his salvation, it was his bond to it.

Where truth speaks — Pontius Pilate famously asked Jesus, “What is truth?16” He only got half of it right. He should have also asked, “Where is truth?”

Truth speaks to us in many ways. One of them is through our conscience.

Conscience is the “most secret core and sanctuary of a man,” taught St. Paul VI17. “There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths.” St. John Henry Newman called conscience “the aboriginal Vicar of Christ18.”

Even so, not every inner voice is conscience. This is especially true for the voice in our head. Our intellect is creative. It learns from our senses and can dream up all sorts of things. That is not God speaking in our conscience; that is us speaking in our mind’s eye.

The loud voice in our head often articulates what we want for ourselves, which can be far from God. But the quiet voice of God tells us what we need for our good. That message calls us away from attachments and toward love, which moves us to do right and avoid the wrong19.

That is — and only ever will be — a truth-telling message. What you hear in your conscience may be unpalatable or uncomfortable, but it is good for you. It doesn’t condemn us. But it does tell us how we ought to live to become the person we were made to be in pursuit of our telos. (And if you think that sounds like eating your vegetables, it is. But if your vegetables taste terrible, you probably aren’t cooking them right.)

Grace fosters hope — Finally we come to grace, which underpins everything.

For all the good things we ought to do — putting love in the right order, pursuing our telos, detaching from lesser things and encountering God in our conscience — not a lick of it is possible without grace, which precedes all of it.

Grace — the “free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become [his] children” — is the basis for everything. It makes us “partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life20.”

Through grace, we participate in the life of God21. He gives it to us at no cost, and on his own initiative. It sanctifies us — sets us apart and makes us holy.

It has effects. It heals the soul from sin’s disastrous effects22. Through actual graces, God intervenes in our lives. Even preparing our souls to receive grace is the work of grace23.

And yet it’s not a magical thing. The free gift calls for a free response24. We participate, effectively collaborating with God’s work in us. Not doing so is to refuse God’s generosity and to refuse the healing medicine that comforts and transforms the soul.

But when we do, God accomplishes things through us, for wherever grace is, there is hope. And hope is the antidote for despair.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up

This is part five of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Read the previous post and listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

That amazing grace sorta passed you by. You wake up every day and you start to cry. Yeah, you wanna die, but you just can’t quit. Lemme break it on down: it’s the fucked up shit.

Yeah, my shit’s fucked up.

Fucked up.

— Warren Zevon

In the last post reading Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” as if it were a prayer (about the song →), our hero was standing at the edge of a cliff. He had pushed God aside, sacrificed to a lesser deity, and received despair in return.

Now he’s at a decision point: Turn back or take one more step forward.

What does he do? He turns back and everything works out.

I’m kidding. He jumps off the cliff, headfirst.

In fact, he dives into a place so dark and empty that his eyes cannot adjust. And while the light of grace reaches him, he cannot see it. He says, “That amazing grace sorta passed you by.”

Why is grace so important to our hero at this moment? Grace heals our nature, even when it seems we are irreparably busted up, and he needs that healing. But grace isn’t magic and doesn’t just work on its own. God gives it freely, but it requires cooperation to heal us from the inside.

It’s like a sweater your mom gives you that you refuse to wear. It can’t keep you warm if you don’t put it on. God gives us grace out of love because it’s good for us. But when we refuse to receive it, it remains wasted, fruitless. For grace to work, you have to receive it and allow it to work in you1.

In this case, our hero was told by the doctor to take another path. He refused because he could not set his wants aside despite the unbearable pain they caused him (“You wanna die, but you just can’t quit.”). Even tears do not matter (“You wake up every day and you start to cry”).

He continues despite the suffering and failure, whether driven by his own wants or by the habits that weakened his freedom.

His despair is now full-blown. He’s locked in a box with no key — one he made through his decision to give up. He doesn’t believe he can change. He cannot stop, and he cannot choose a new path. His choices have so corrupted his freedom that he cannot imagine ever choosing the good again. Nihilism creeps in (“you wanna die”). Love has twisted in on itself.

* * *

That is a dissonant note for the song to end on. If Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” were a prayer, it would first seem to be a petition for help. But when help comes as revealed truth, and that truth is resisted and rationalized, hope becomes the victim and the remedy is never received. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but despair will fill it. This is how a heart that refuses grace offered in love ends up in spiritual catastrophe.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up | Song Projects

This is part four of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Read the previous post and listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

“Yeah-yeah, my shit’s fucked up, it has to happen to the best of us. The rich folks suffer like the rest of us, it’ll happen to you.”

— Warren Zevon

Welcome to spiritual catastrophe.

Our hero in Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” finally sees he has a spiritual problem. But instead of rallying around the flag to fight, he raises the white flag and surrenders. (Read about the song →)

Surrender of this kind is tragic. He fought, maybe even fought well, but hope for escape is lost, and self-preservation becomes the priority. Giving up looks like the only option.

In the last post, he rejected the truth about his situation. Now in surrender, he makes excuses, telling himself that his spiritual crisis was both inevitable and universal (“it has to happen … to the rest of us”). By pointing to the “rich folks,” he hints money fed his frustration. These are the first signs of despair.

Hope becomes the first casualty. Once hope slips, temptation sets in. He hears a new logic, one that speaks of surrender as the only path to preservation. It happens to everyone, he says to himself. That’s why it happened to me.

In the spiritual sense, he is acting as if there is no opening for God’s grace to work in him, and no mercy to receive. But grace and mercy are the lifeline he needs to escape the deep spiritual hole he’s about to jump into.

In the darkness closing around his soul, he thinks God will not pardon him. He thinks God will not offer the sanctifying grace1 that can turn his heart away from misguided goals and toward Love himself.

This is the spiritual catastrophe that can happen to the best of us and the rest of us — rich folks, too — when we think our beatitude is not found in God but in created things.

Our hero has two choices. Which one will he take? Does he, now standing at the cliff’s edge, turn around, or does he take just one more step forward?

In the next post, we find out.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up | Song Projects

This is part three of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Read the previous post and listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

“I said, ‘My shit’s fucked up? Well I don’t see how.’ He said, ‘The shit that used to work, it won’t work now.’

I had a dream, aw-shucks, oh well. Now it’s all fucked up, it’s shot to hell.”

— Warren Zevon

Some years ago I was playing in a band, and we weren’t getting along very well.

It came time for an audition. I arrived at the last minute because I didn’t want to hang around with the other guys. I tuned up in a hurry and ran on stage. The band sounded like garbage. I remember thinking: these guys really suck.

It turned out I was the one who sucked. The audition came to an end, and I was angry. They said to me, “What the hell were you thinking?” I said, “You’ve never played worse.” They said, “Play an E chord.” I did. It sounded like an F — I had tuned my guitar a half step up for the audition. Yeah, we didn’t get the gig we wanted.

Our hero in Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” is making the same mistake (read about the song →). When faced with the truth, he pushes back: Of all the possible causes of my suffering, how could I be the cause?

Many people describe life as not under our control: Same old, different day. Life is up, and then it falls. Fortune is followed by misfortune. The day starts with enormous potential, and by the end of it you’ve been smacked in the face by reality.

We all keep a mental balance sheet. When it shows too many negatives for too long, we feel it. The problem is: we’re often unable to understand why we feel terrible. When shown that the reasons are at odds with our expectations, we push back, saying, “No, it can’t be that.”

So it is with our hero. He thinks the old strategies, which once helped him flourish, still can. His life project seems to be laminated to his identity.

And yet, he sees that his dream is “shot to hell.” Never mind how much time might have lost, or what its cost him. It collapsed, and he feels it. He hit a spiritual dead end. The doctor tells him so.

When we hit that spiritual dead end, it feels like hell. And yet we keep going, trying other routes. No matter what we’re aiming for — wealth, honor, glory, power, physical ability, pleasure — if we look to these things to ultimately fulfill us, we end up circling what Catholic apologist Frank Sheed called the “abyss of nothingness at the very heart of our being1.” St. Augustine, a foundational theologian of the Catholic Church who suffered through his own spiritual crisis, would say this is what love out of order looks like. (Liner note: Did St. Augustine Rock? →)

But if our hero felt bad enough to seek help from a physician, why question the diagnosis?

I suspect he wants a fix that allows him to keep doing what he’s always done, to get it working again. I was in the same situation recently. I prayed to God for years to remove the spiritual fetters that were restraining me. He never did, and I couldn’t figure out why.

That is, until after deep reflection I understood something: had he helped, I’d walk just a few steps in my newfound freedom, find the chains on the ground, and lock myself up again. The suffering I had endured was caused by my own misdirected love and the strategies I used to pursue it. The failure was in my own will, and only after years of denial did I finally see it.

So it is with our hero. The doctor’s diagnosis, though difficult, is truthful. But our hero, in denial, thinks he knows better, even though his dreams remain unrealized. What does he do? In the next post, he takes one big step forward — toward despair.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up | Song Projects

This is part two of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Read the previous post and listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

“Well, I went to the doctor, I said, ‘I’m feeling kinda rough.’ He said, ‘Let me break it to you son, your shit’s fucked up.’”

— Warren Zevon

Here’s an old joke: What do you call a medical student who graduates at the bottom of his class?

Doctor.

(I hope you don’t have an appointment with that guy tomorrow.)

Still, what makes a good doctor? Two things: He gives you an accurate diagnosis and gives it to you straight.

We need doctors like that. Bedside manner aside, a good doctor’s goal is to make you better. Not telling you the truth, even when it’s painful, won’t get you there.

The same is true of our spiritual health. The attending physician, speaking through our conscience, knows the trouble and offers the diagnosis.

Our hero in Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” begins with a trip to the doctor because he isn’t feeling great (about the song →). And who is this physician? He’s not, as we see from time to time in rock, a drug dealer like Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood. No, this doctor knows illness, and he sees it in our hero.

People often identify with this song because they are sick or have suffered life-changing misfortune. The lyrics certainly fit.

I think spiritual crisis fits better. If so, the “doctor” is a spiritual physician, which fits the Catholic motif of Christ the Physician of bodies and souls1.

What does it mean to be spiritually healthy?

Spiritual health means sharing in God’s life through knowledge and love2. The result: You fully become the person God made you to be. God wants that for you. It’s why you were created.

Spiritual illness is the opposite of that. It comes when we settle for less, pursuing created things as if they could make us whole. We get attached to them and give them power over our hearts. St. Augustine, a foundational theologian of the Catholic Church who suffered through his own spiritual crisis, might call this love out of order. And if love is out of order, we are not sharing fully in God’s life. In fact, we’re missing something necessary for our own. We’re less free, our nature is incomplete, and we feel “kinda rough.” (Liner note: Did St. Augustine Rock? →)

Where do we meet this spiritual doctor? When we visit our primary doctor for a check-up, we end up in one of those small exam rooms. In this spiritual sense, the exam room is our conscience.

Our conscience is an intimate place where we meet God. “Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man,” taught St. Paul VI3. “There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths.”

Now, I’m never happy in the doctor’s little exam room. The waiting drives me nuts. I probably blew the blood pressure check given by the nurse, proving I suffer from White Coat Syndrome. To ease the waiting, I get on my phone to check email, which makes my blood pressure worse. Then I feel guilty when the doctor knock-enters the room and my blood pressure goes up again. All this before I get examined.

But conscience is different. It may be the little exam room where we are alone with Christ the Physician, but there’s no wait (and nothing to fear).

And this is where our hero stands — in front of God within his conscience. Something’s wrong, so he asks for help by describing his symptoms. He gets a diagnosis immediately.

And it’s disturbingly direct. Why? In love, God is kind, but not necessarily nice. Certainly Jesus was not being nice when he said, “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law4.” But he was being loving, making an appeal to conversion and warning of its consequences. The message, though difficult, is meant to be truthful, not cruel. The Gospel doesn’t hide the cost of love.

So it is with the “doctor” whose direct truth-telling diagnosis has a single goal: to heal the patient. Our hero’s problem is not a bad mood. There’s something about the way he lives that is throwing his life into disorder. The doctor tells him why: “Your shit’s fucked up.”

His bluntness is an act of love, not cruelty; it’s medicinal, not punitive. When God reveals the truth of our situation to us, what he reveals can be painful, especially when it reflects our own choices and behavior.

Consider the Judgment of the Nations5 in Matthew’s Gospel. When we hear that story, we wonder: am I a sheep or a goat? After a little thought, you might say, “I’m more goaty than sheepy.” (And OMG, you do not want to be a goat.)

But what was Jesus’s aim — to tell you how screwed you really are? No, not at all. He’s showing you the path to healing before it’s too late. He’s saying: I want you to be counted among my sheep. Serve me by serving my people in kindness, love and mercy. That’s how sinners become saints.

It’s a loving message, and not always easy to accept.

Does our hero accept it? In the next post, he reacts — and the consequences begin.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up | Song Projects

New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

Yeah, St. Augustine rocked. (Hey, Bob Dylan saw him in a dream.)

Have you ever asked yourself: Why did I do what I did? Where is God? How did I land on the wrong path so I could find my way back to the right one? You’re not alone, Augustine did, too.

A foundational theologian of the Catholic Church and one of the most influential philosophers of the Western world, Augustine’s work still resonates not just with the Church, but with everyday people.

He was, according to author Stephen Cooper, “a thinker who plumbed the depths of the human soul1.” In fact, his most famous work, Confessions, is a personal “odyssey of the soul, a story of one person’s pilgrimage through this life” that continues to resonate because many people recognize his story as their own

Augustine, born in what is now Tunisia in 354, was originally destined for Roman dignitas in the Western Empire. He was a smart kid, and his parents put him on track for an academic career that would lead to a good marriage and government job.

But things ended differently, and not for a lack of talent or effort. He eventually landed in the Imperial capital in Milan, achieving an appointment to the highest level of teaching Latin rhetoric.

And it was there he heard the call to conversion that would change the course of not only his life, but of the Church and Western thought.

Contrary to popular belief, Augustine was never a pagan. But he wasn’t a Christian either. Early in his life he fell in with a group of Manichees, a movement influenced by gnostic ideas. Looking to scratch the itch created by his growing intellect, their complex beliefs were more stimulating to him than the Christianity he knew.

He left them and Africa for Rome and later Milan to teach rhetoric. His mom, Monica, followed, hoping for his conversion. Her sustained prayers and relentless persistence eventually convinced him to take seriously the riskier social path of Catholicism over the safer career path offered by Roman society.

After fits and starts — along with questioning and skepticism — he turned a corner. His conversion came in a garden. He heard a child’s voice in the distance calling him to read. He opened Romans and happened to turn to the passage where Paul exhorts readers to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh2.” In that moment, Augustine changed.

Thank God he did.

Augustine would go on to become Bishop of Hippo, not far from his birthplace, and write more than 60 surviving texts, among them Confessions and City of God. He is known as one of the most prolific authors of Latin literature.

His theology continues to shape Catholic thought in such areas as grace, Christian anthropology and free will, original sin, just war, and the relationship between church and state. His approach to synthesizing ancient philosophy with emerging Christian theology laid the groundwork for the later Medieval theology further developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics. (Liner note: Did St. Thomas Aquinas Rock? →)

He also opposed Manichaeism, which he once embraced. And thanks to him we know about his mother, St. Monica.

He is a Church Father and Doctor of the Church, known colloquially as the Doctor of Grace, who famously declared to God: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

Tagged: Liner Notes

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Yeah, St. Thomas Aquinas rocked. Maybe harder than anyone else.

Aquinas (not his proper name, but a Latinized version of Aquino, his birthplace), was a 13th century theologian who “ranks among the three or four most influential thinkers in the history of … Western thought1.”

How influential was he? If you’ve ever talked about human rights, the laws of war, the Declaration of Independence, or debated whether there’s a conflict between faith and science, chances are you channeled Aquinas.

Born in 1225, Thomas was sent to a Benedictine monastery at 5 years old. It was in those quiet cloisters that he gravitated to the life of the mind. He was a smart kid who grew into a big man, both physically (he was apparently fond of food) and intellectually (he was reputed to have developed an encyclopedic memory). He would eventually enter the Dominican order.

But it wasn’t until he attended the University of Naples that he met his true intellectual hero — the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, whom he called “the Philosopher” and who would be the greatest influence on his work.

Aquinas’s greatest theological and philosophical contributions were in showing how arguments by this ancient pagan philosopher could shed light on God and support Christian beliefs. His weapon of choice was reason, which he wielded like no one else.

His greatest and most influential work, Summa Theologica, drew on Aristotle, Church fathers such as Augustine and Jerome, as well as Jewish and Muslim thinkers. He took insights from both monotheistic and pagan thought to reason through Christian theology. The Summa includes the famous arguments for God’s existence.

It was a brash strategy. “If the truths of the Bible and the truths of Christianity could be shown to have a rational basis … [Christians] can show their claims to be more than mere ‘beliefs.’ Christianity would become ‘truth,’ mandated by reason … After all, reason would only vindicate Christianity if Christianity were true,” wrote biographer Timothy Renick. The Summa certainly succeeds as a tool in that strategy.

The world is blessed to have had St. Thomas. It seems God was pleased with his work. Toward the end of his life (he died at 49 years old), Aquinas reportedly had a mystical experience. He heard a voice from a crucifix saying, “Thomas, you have written well of me. What do you want as your reward?” He said in response: “Nothing but You, O Lord2.”

The Church canonized him in 1323 and named him a doctor of the Church in 1567. He is known as one of the Church’s greatest theologians and colloquially called the “Angelic Doctor.”

Tagged: Liner Notes

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Yeah, Dante rocked.

How do we know that an Italian poet, born in 1265 and who wrote about sin, redemption and the soul’s search for God, rocked? The tip-off is his name — we refer to him by his first, like Bono, Sting, Cher, Prince or Madonna.

We can’t be sure he’d be writing rock songs today, but poems in his time were sung. Sometimes badly. We have a story, likely apocryphal but fun nonetheless, about Dante, who heard a blacksmith singing one of his poems out of tune and mutilating the words. Offended by the rendition, Dante grabbed some of the smith’s tools and threw them into the street. The blacksmith was furious, and Dante said to him: “If you don’t want me to ruin your things, don’t ruin mine1.”

Was Dante crazy? Imagine you were pulling into the Freehold Raceway Mall, singing Born to Run at the top of your lungs and botching it. You drive past Bruce Springsteen in the parking lot by Primark. He hears you destroying his song, carjacks you, and ditches your car under the Route 9/Throckmorton overpass, where he torches it so you can never sing Born to Run again. That’s basically what Dante was said to have done to the blacksmith.

Dante is most famous for writing the Divine Comedy. In this epic poem, the first part, Inferno, is best known. But “not much is known about Dante Alighieri,” according to Mark Musa in his 40-page introduction to Inferno2.

We do know that Dante was born in Florence to a noble family (Dante claimed to be a descendant of Roman nobility). He lived in the tumultuous sea of Italian politics that pitted Papal and imperial supporters against each other. This would eventually lead to his exile from Florence, under the threat of death. He wrote allies, enemies and other public figures of his time into the Divine Comedy.

He taught himself to write verse. The Roman poet Virgil was his artistic hero, and he studied Virgil’s work as if the ancient poet were his chief tutor. Dante was also versed in Scholastic theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, which is deeply interwoven into the Divine Comedy. (Sidebar: Did St. Thomas Aquinas Rock? →)

But however influential Florentine politics, Virgil and the Scholastics were on him, Beatrice dwarfed them all. An acquaintance he encountered in his youth, she became the emotional center of his work. She died young, and Dante’s fondness for her led him to characterize Beatrice as “a model of virtue and courtesy, a miraculous gift given to earth by God,” wrote Mr. Musa. She would appear many times in Dante’s work and plays a heavenly role in the Divine Comedy.

And while it’s over 700 years old, the Divine Comedy remains a very readable text, especially the Musa translation. He avoids rhymes, making it read like a narrative (though poetry fans will appreciate the text’s iambic pentameter rhythm). It is, for me, a treasure. If you read the Divine Comedy, which I really hope you do, Mark Musa in his three-volume edition (which includes Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso) provides what amounts to a college course on the text through his associated commentary. It is nothing short of excellent.

Tagged: Liner Notes

New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

“My Shit’s Fucked Up” is a 2000 song by American singer-songwriter Warren Zevon. It appears on his album 1, a 12-track meditation on aging, physical decline and mortality. Mr. Zevon said to David Letterman at his final public appearance that the album “is all about my phobia of doctors.2” (Read more about Warren Zevon →)

Mr. Zevon’s style on the album, while unflinching in its seriousness, slyly turns the unfunny not just into the approachable and relatable, but the singable. This is a master songwriter at work.

“My Shit’s Fucked Up” is no exception. Carried by an acoustic guitar riff and backed up by only bass and drums, the lyrics grab your attention. The song is so structurally simple it has no repeatable chorus.

At first listen, it sounds like a joke. But with each pass it gets more relatable, even prophetic. It was, in a sense, for Mr. Zevon. Just over three years after this song was released, he died from mesothelioma.

As of this writing, Spotify reports it as #6 by plays among his songs3. It was covered by Kinky Friedman in 2015, who stayed true to the original while giving it additional depth.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up | Song Projects

New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

Yeah, Warren Zevon rocked.

Mr. Zevon, a singer-songwriter who emerged in the 1970s and is best known for “Werewolves in London, “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” “Carmelita” and “Lawyers, Guns and Money” (and for a favorite of mine, “Even a Dog Can Shake Hands”), is “one of the great under-appreciated talents in modern America1.”

For sure he was. When Mr. Zevon sang, it was worth listening to what he had to say. It still is. He was a musician’s musician (or more like a rock composer’s composer), and a storyteller. Among his admirers were people from Bob Dylan to Steven King, Dwight Yoakam to Hunter S. Thompson. And no wonder; Mr. Zevon wrote songs about serious subjects with a stinging, dry humor. Bruce Springsteen wrote of him, “[Warren] would write something that had real meaning, and it was funny, too2.”

He also lived the life of the self-destructive artist. He drank a lot and sometimes got violent. When he stopped drinking, obsessive-compulsive disorder emerged. Old temptations were a constant struggle, as were relationships with the people he loved. He died in 2003 at the age of 56. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025.

Mr. Zevon left an incredible body of work. Once you jump into the pool with him, you discover you are swimming in the deep end. It’s worth staying there.

Read More About Warren Zevon:

• Official site

• His Wikipedia page

Tagged: Liner Notes | Warren Zevon

This is part one of an eight-part series on Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Listen to the song. New to Spirituality of Rock? Learn about this project.

If Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up”1 were a prayer, it would come from a man in deep spiritual crisis who discovers that the glitter he’s chased all his life has led to a dead end. If you’re expecting the angelic cavalry to ride to his rescue, think again. This song is a tragedy in miniature.

Sad story, right? It is. And it’s a common one.

Maybe it’s your story. Maybe you feel stuck, like you “had a dream … [and] it’s shot to hell.” And maybe, after asking God for help, you don’t like the reasons you’re stuck. The truth can feel cruel when what we want is at odds with what’s good for us.

The question is: When we ask God for help, are we willing to listen to what he says?

“My Shit’s Fucked Up” from Mr. Zevon’s Life’ll Kill Ya album is often understood to be about the difficulty and illness that come with aging (read about the song →). Our hero complains to a doctor that he’s feeling miserable. The doctor gives him the bad news: he can no longer live the same way — the way he operated won’t work.

It’s not hard to see Warren Zevon in this song. Mr. Zevon, a singer-songwriter who emerged in the 1970s, is best known for “Werewolves in London.” He lived the life of the self-destructive artist2. And while he was not the first songwriter to feel “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” he may have been the first to say it on the nose without glorifying it or sounding goofy. (Liner note: Did Warren Zevon Rock? →)

We can speculate about what in Mr. Zevon’s life inspired these lyrics. But in Spirituality of Rock we’ll instead look through a spiritual lens to see what the lyrics say about our relationship with God.

Then let’s hear it as a prayer.

To be sure, you could see this as a song about facing illness, but it’s not a lock for me. The lyrics seem to point somewhere else. What if, heard spiritually, the “doctor” wasn’t an M.D. but God? And what if our hero’s ailment wasn’t physical or emotional, but spiritual? Listening this way points more strongly to a different kind of crisis.

Seeing it isn’t hard, but it is easier through the eyes of someone who rocked as hard as anyone: Dante Alighieri.

Dante, a fourteenth-century Italian poet, is best known for writing the Divine Comedy. Its first part, Inferno, is the one everybody remembers. (Liner note: Did Dante Alighieri Rock? →)

Hell is not fun. But descending with Dante into the depths of human sinfulness and divine justice is a blast. Escape came only by climbing the hairy body of a three-headed Lucifer encased in ice, chewing on history’s greatest sinners.

Dante’s Pilgrim doesn’t stumble upon hell like Alice chasing a white rabbit. Rather, his life was leading him to a permanent residency in the underworld, and he couldn’t get out of it:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
For I had wandered off from the straight path3.

Have you been there? I have, both in the woods and in life. The feeling is the same. After walking mile after mile on what you think is the right trail, not really paying attention to the long green tunnel you’ve been chugging through, you suddenly hit a dead end of sharp branches. You have no idea how long you’ve been wrong.

Do you scramble back down the rocks and take a left? Or was it a right? Can you even get down that slope? Cue the anxiety sweats that come on like fever. Panic follows. The bad decisions, which come easy now, compound each other. When you’re lost in the woods, it’s hard to imagine getting back to the car. (Pro tip: GPS helps a lot.)

The same is true for a spiritual crisis. After walking the wrong path for so long, it can be difficult to reset. We keep making choices that aren’t good for us because that’s all we know.

A spiritual crisis has a terrain all its own. If you’re looking for a way out, Dante gives us the map, and the contrast with our song’s hero couldn’t be more stark.

Dante’s Pilgrim woke up (scriptural language for becoming spiritually aware) and realized he was lost. He did not react well — he went into what looks like a suicidal depression4 (“death could scarce be bitterer”). He wanted out and got his opportunity. It wasn’t an easy one. Escape had a cost — it meant facing and atoning for his own sins by traveling through hell and later purgatory. Warren Zevon’s hero followed a similar path but came to a very different end.

Both characters found themselves in dire spiritual straits. Both were offered God’s loving help. But while Dante’s Pilgrim later travels to heaven, the hero in our song does not. Where did he go wrong?

It turns out the path through a spiritual crisis can be “kinda rough.” So let’s hear Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” as a prayer from a spiritually lost soul crying for help. Maybe it can help us see why we get stuck — and where the way out begins.

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up | Song Projects