The Attachments That Quietly Rule Us

[Part 7] At the center of Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” is a story about how loving the wrong things slowly warps our souls.

Warren Zevon depicted in stained glass (source: image generated by AI)

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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.

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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.

Coming up in the final post of the series, we pray Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up

1. Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity, ch. 28

2. Augustine, Confessions, I.1

3. William Poundstone, Priceless: The Hidden Psychology of Value.

4. Mt. 5:3

5. Dante, Purgatorio, XVII.96–104.