Praying My S’s F-d Up
[Part 8] If prayer is honest conversation with God, then even the wrong words can be the right way to speak to the Almighty.
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.
This concludes the song series for Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”
Be sure to subscribe to the Spirituality of Rock to be notified when the next song series begins.
Subscribing and reading are free.
Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up
Lk. 18:13
Rom. 8:26