Despair Begins as Rationalization
Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” captures the moment when suffering stops feeling temporary and starts feeling inevitable.
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.
Coming in part five of the The Spirituality of Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up”: When Despair Starts Making Sense.
Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 20, art. 1; CCC 1996.
I liked the cliff hanger: which one will he choose? I also liked how he now knows it's inevitable. Not if but when. Hard for all of us to try to imagine that "uh oh...I'm running out of time now for real and I wonder if God will give me Grace and Forgiveness after living a life I now regret." Looking forward to reading the next post.