How Spiritual Collapse Happens
[Part 6] A theological look at Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” through attachment, false gods, wounded freedom, despair and grace.
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.
In part seven of the The Spirituality of Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” how to walk away from The Attachments That Quietly Rule Us.
Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up
Augustine, Confessions, X.29.40.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1849
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-I, 2
Robert Barron, “The Most Important Decision in Life,” Imprimis, June 2023
Pius XII, Humani Generis, 561
CCC 1739
Ibid
CCC 1740
CCC 2091
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 3
CCC 1
Augustine, Confessions, X.28.39.
Ex. 20:2-3
Ex. 32
Mt. 19:21
Jn. 18:38
Gaudium et Spes 16
John Henry Newman, “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” V
CCC 1777
CCC 1996
CCC 1997
CCC 1999
CCC 2001
CCC 2002
Is grace contingent on humility? There are many people today who use their supposed relationship to God as a cudgel. To claim God's authority to justify one's action seems to me an act of hubris. Those who do so seem puffed up with self importance. And claim knowledge. Which is far beyond their lived experience.
All this is to suggest that attachment to material goods is a barrier. So is attachment to celebrity. But for me, what's most important is to avoid attachment to certainty and perceived power. To say that one speaks for God is to suggest a level of comprehension. That I believe goes beyond our human ability to comprehend reality.