When Despair Starts Making Sense
"Amazing grace sorta passed you by” is the cry of a soul that mistakes rejected grace for abandonment by God. (The Spirituality of Warren Zevon’s “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. 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, our hero in Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” 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. 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 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.
Coming in part five of the The Spirituality of Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” we look at the song’s theology in How Spiritual Collapse Happens.
Tagged: Warren Zevon | My Shit’s Fucked Up
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2002