Podcast
The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast
Hosted by John Pavlovitz · EN
Authentic words for everyone trying to figure out the best way to be human.
johnpavlovitz.substack.com
johnpavlovitz.substack.com
82episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
An American Mourning
3d ago00:05:51Tap to summarizeAs someone whose life’s work is words, I confess that I’m increasingly at a loss for them. And even in the moments when the words do come, they almost immediately feel obsolete. It’s become nearly impossible to wake up and comment on any specific human rights atrocity, any precise illegality, any single bastardization of the Christian faith, any individual act of Congressional malpractice. In the time it takes to assess one unprecedented act of governmental malfeasance, stop the spinning storm inside my head, and string together something resembling coherent thoughts, a half dozen infuriating, nauseating, heretofore nonexistent abominations will have already swallowed them up.This is, of course, by design, yet knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to navigate.There’s very little that comes with any surety these days. The only thing I am certain of as I watch and listen and walk through this season alongside my 342 million neighbors is that there is mourning in America.The grief is ever-present, sitting like a boulder on our chests, crushing our hearts and rendering our breathing shallow. A heavy dread hovers in the background of our nervous systems, leaving us continually ping-ponging between fight, flight, and freeze.We vacillate wildly from heartbreak to outrage to hopelessness, battered by manufactured crises, curated madness, and genuine emergencies.And that’s just the damage coming from above, from the repugnant legion of sociopaths and predators who’ve hijacked the very sacred halls that their treasonous foot soldiers desecrated on a January afternoon. In any other iteration of our nation, those helming it would at least have feigned decency, offered some ceremonial lip service of unity, and provided a modicum of care for its constituents. Those days feel like a lifetime ago. The entirety of a Presidential Cabinet and its gutless Congressional coconspirators have abandoned any allegiance to the Constitution, to morality, to the common good. They are professional parasites, voraciously sucking every bit of progress and promise from this flawed but beautiful beacon of Democracy that the world once aspired to emulate. Bearing this alone would all be difficult enough. It would be a Herculean task to endure such prolific brutality from our alleged leadership and remain tethered to sanity.But then we look to our left and to our right; to the people around us who are, at best, silent enablers of this violent historic farce, or, at worst, willing collaborators. We inventory the ever-expanding list of human beings we share holiday tables with, make small talk with over the fence, work, study, and worship alongside, and once felt an easy affinity with, mourning the blackened hearts we’ve come to realize they harbor.And perhaps most devastating of all, there are the people who raised us to be human beings of empathy, who taught us to love our neighbors, who instilled us with a respect for the Rule of Law, who called us to lean upon our better angels. Over the past ten years, we have watched them abandon every ideal and precept they passed down to us, jettisoning God and Country, while continually broadcasting their supposed allegiance to both. We now find ourselves ridiculed, shunned, and demonized for becoming the very loving, open-hearted, generous humans they told us to become.The wreckage of this relational warfare is everywhere:In the room-clearing arguments, the protracted emotional cold wars, the social media disconnections, the text chain ghostings, the slow but now undeniable attrition of affection, the silences and empty holiday chairs. These are as heartbreaking injuries as anything this white supremacist vampire colony at the Capitol has thrown at us.I don’t know quite what to say to those of you reading this who grieve America as we approach its 250th year, because on most days, I’m not even sure what to tell myself. I wish there were words in our lexicon that I could string together that would magically lift the burdens from your shoulders, quiet the chaos in your mind, and swiftly usher peace into the warzones of your heart. All I can do today with any honesty is to name the grief and hope that will bring some comfort. Naming it helps me.In fact, perhaps, that shared sorrow is the connective tissue that will hold us all together as we endure this impossible to fathom or describe nightmare. Maybe, our collective tears over the America that is will water the seeds of the America we can still be. This morning, despite the losses that seem endless, I cling to the hope that we, the multitudes who lament how far we’ve fallen as a nation, will find a way to pull us from the seemingly endless darkness we’re immersed in and into the dawn of better days.To every American mourning, know you do not grieve alone.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
I'm Not Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence; I'm Afraid Of Natural Stupidity
5d ago00:05:26Tap to summarizeAI is inevitable.Well, at least, we're certainly being led to believe it is.The message is everywhere right now.It’s coming from tone-deaf University commencement addresses,from soulless techbro vampire startups,from morally bankrupt data center builders, from myopic local politicians,from woefully lazy journalists,and from massive organizations that have gutted their creative departments. They want us to believe that the mighty horse of progress has left the barn; that the inexorable march toward the future has begun, and we’re either gonna figure out how to ride it or be trampled to death trying to stop it. I’m calling BS on that.Yes, artificial Intelligence’s existence is guaranteed, but humanity’s response to it is still well within our hands, and that response will determine whether we allow our ethical and moral convictions to bear on the technology or remain silent and be swallowed up.Will we value the already-fragile environment enough to fight the fatal blow the current proposed proliferation of data centers presents?Will we continue to cheapen the work of human creators, whose art we’ve gradually been conditioned to believe we should get for free?Will we allow ourselves to be lured into the seductive shortcuts and quick solutions generative AI provides, or will we honor the creative process and the slower road to discovery?Artificial Intelligence evangelists insist that we’re afraid of this technology, but they’re misreading the situation and our response. I’m not afraid of generative AI; I’m morally opposed to it, and there’s a big difference.I don’t resist progress, but I do resist technological movements that pillage our natural resources, devalue human beings, harvest their creativity without compensating them, and enable talentless parasites to profit from the work of billions of flesh-and-blood people, who since the dawn of time have spent themselves on behalf of their art.Pushing back against the unethical rise of Artificial Intelligence isn’t as complicated as we’re led to believe. Some steps you can take right now:Stop sucking up thousands of gallons of drinking water just to turn your dad’s texts into a song for a 90-second Instagram reel.Turn off the AI assists on your search engines and email portals.Stop using ChatGPT, Claude, or other platforms to find information you already have near-immediate access to.If you’re a student, stop trying to cheat your way to knowledge and experience. Enjoy the long, often meandering but ultimately fruitful road of study, failure, and exploration.If you’re in charge of a creative project for a business, church, or organization seek out actual qualified, experienced human beings who’ve devoted their lives to their craft; investing in people who’ve earned their expertise and their price tag.Find out where data centers are being proposed in your area, and show up at town halls, board meetings, politicians’ offices, and wield your power as a resident and taxpayer.Stop using generative AI to make a meme that’s no one’s going to care about thirty seconds after they’ve seen it.Use your brain instead of your thumbs. A few quick prompts will give you immediate ideas which can be seductive, but it’s fool’s gold. Part of the creative process is to sit with the empty page, the frustrating silence, and the blinking cursor; the invaluable times when the wrestling and the waiting force you to go deeper than an Internet search.Partner with advocacy groups to hold CEOs, executives, employers, developers, and lawmakers accountable to the human beings in their midst. Financially support artists whose humanity feeds your soul. If you reject the threat of AI to creativity, one of the ways you can fight it is to support flesh-and-blood creators. If there are bands, writers, comedians, journalists, painters, jewelry makers, small businesses, or songwriters who make life more beautiful or bearable, please tangibly partner with them as you can. If financial support is not possible, please leverage your social media platform to share their work and help them break out of the prisons of the algorithms.Artificial Intelligence, like any new technology, can either be a useful tool or a deadly weapon. We shouldn’t be afraid of progress, but we should be very worried about sacrificing one another and ourselves on the altar of that supposed progress.AI’s replacement of humanity is not inevitable, but the greed, ignorance, and short-sightedness of human beings are, which means we’re all going to push back against it with urgency and ferocity to ensure that we don’t gain some time and a little ease, and lose our souls.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a fully human, non-AI, reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
On Memorial Day and Every Day, Donald Trump is an Insult to Those Who Died Serving This Nation
1w ago00:04:48Tap to summarizePicture someone you love who died serving this nation, or even someone you’ve never met.Imagine them wherever they took their final breath on this planet: Jumping into churning, frozen foreign seas in a screaming storm of artillery fire.Shivering in a filthy trench in the terrifying blackness of an insect-blanketed jungle floor.Leaping from a fire-engulfed plane into a disorienting maelstrom of explosions.Crouched in the blazing sun within the crosshairs of a sniper perched 500 meters away.Slowly withering away from malnutrition in anonymity and solitude.Try to place yourself in the company of one of the hundreds of thousands of eldest sons, sisters, husbands, fathers, wives, best friends, and favorite uncles, who, with a courage and selflessness we will never fathom, placed themselves in the path of bullets, bombs, torture, and brutality in the cause of America.Now, imagine telling those brave servicemen and women just before they gave their very lives for this nation, that it would one day be placed in the hands of a treasonous felon with abject disregard for the laws of this land; a man lacking a single noble impulse or patriotic thought.Imagine breaking the news to those beautiful souls facing certain death, that five or twenty or sixty or one hundred years later, America would be helmed by a billionaire insurrectionist who would ridicule their bravery, make a mockery of their sacrifice, and place those who followed them in harm’s way, by allowing a disgraced TV personality to oversee them.I wonder if they’d have reconsidered their path, if they’d have declared themselves conscientious objectors in his coming war on the Constitution, if they would have abandoned the road that would bring their lives to a premature and violent termination.Given their unfathomable courage, I don’t imagine they would, but as someone standing here today and living through this historic farce, I sure as hell wouldn’t have blamed them. We have allowed ourselves to have our freedom suffocated by the very fascism our forebears leveraged their very beings trying to defeat.Watching our current service members being unnecessarily placed in peril in Iran, used as disposable pawns in a reckless and illegal war of distraction by a morally bankrupt parasite, should be enough to make any actually patriotic American sick to their stomachs. As we witness our children being carelessly thrown into half a dozen conflicts around the world designed to pad the portfolios of billionaires and swallow up oil-rich real estate, we should be mourning our shared failure as U.S. citizens.By allowing our Military to be at the whims of this traitorous felon, we have failed our veterans; squandering their service and wasting their sacrifice. Donald Trump’s seditious presidency, his undeserved occupation of the Oval Office, and his very repugnant presence in the highest seat of power in America are a slap in the face of those we honor on Memorial Day who died so that we could endure. His kleptocratic Administration, populated by grifters and foreign assets, serves as a massive middle finger to the millions who lost years and careers and futures and limbs trying to protect a Republic that is now teetering on the edge of the abyss.And whether on Memorial Day or Veterans Day or Independence Day, or any day we wake up with such a small, cowardly, petty disgrace of a man leading this nation, we should be livid at the insult he is to those who truly loved and love America. We should collectively grieve our part in this mockery that is being made of their sacrifice, and openly and loudly stand in opposition to him as a way of properly honoring them.With our voices and circles of influence and financial resources and votes, we should stand on the front lines of our lives to continue their brave, sacrificial work of protecting this beautiful but beleaguered nation.It is the very least we can do for them, knowing they did the most they could do for us.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
Stephen Colbert and The Late Show's "Joy Machine" Won. Donald Trump and MAGA's Misery Movement Lost Again.
1w ago00:05:51Tap to summarizeStephen Colbert’s The Late Show is over. After 11 years and over 1,800 episodes, the final installment aired this week to great fanfare and emotion. The show’s premature demise was, of course, the direct result of Donald Trump’s eggshell-fragile ego and his complete inability to withstand criticism of any kind. The joyless, narcissistic Man-Child-In-Chief has always despised people like Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jon Stewart; guys who possess a comfort in their own skin that he will never know, a razor wit that will always escape him, and an easy humanity that he is simply incapable of. Though he positions himself as an overconfident Alpha Male, his raging insecurity and naked resentment have always exposed him as a terrified fraud who knows he doesn’t measure up.Trump has spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy during his two presidential terms trying to silence and de-platform any members of the media who do not bend the knee and kiss the ring: leveraging his social media platform, weaponizing the FCC, and begging his billionaire buddies to purge the airwaves of dissension or critique.With his surrogates now overseeing CBS, the thin-skinned wannabe despot was finally able to shutter The Late Show, something his similarly morose disciples have hailed as a kind of righteous victory. In reality, though, all it really did was illustrate why MAGA will always lose: it is a misery movement of deeply unhappy human beings.Colbert began his series finale with a poignant, heartfelt monologue, addressing the home and studio audiences simultaneously about the genuine gratitude he felt for those who have traveled this journey with him.Speaking about the small army of collaborators responsible for making The Late Show possible five nights a week for over a decade (writers, booking agents, crew members, musicians, artists), the host described their collective endeavor as ‘The Joy Machine,’ saying: ”We call it the Joy Machine, because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine, but the thing is, if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.”Manufacturing joy. When you hear Stephen Colbert deliver that simple, elegant mission statement, you can rewind through those 1,800 shows and realize that this is exactly what he and his team have been doing all along. The Late Show helped us all face the terrifying, infuriating, grief-worth reality around us by making sure we stayed emotionally buoyant enough to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Colbert, leading by example, never let his hateful adversaries win by becoming them. It has been his resiliency and optimism that have made him the perennially sanguine counterpoint to Trump’s unceasing nihilism.Continuing, the host said of his team:“I cannot adequately explain to you what the people who work here have done for each other and how much we mean to each other.”Joy. Gratitude. Affection. In just over two minutes, Colbert exhibited the kind of quiet, confident humanity that the current president has never had access to.Over the last decade, though he has quite literally never shut up, Donald Trump has never expressed any kind of genuine appreciation for other people, never centered anyone but himself, and never offered humility of any kind. He has never been anything but a sad, insult-hurling, grievance-wielding malcontent who will never find peace in this life because his self-hatred will not allow it.And this unrelenting unhappiness is something his followers are similarly afflicted with. It’s the reason that, although they have their president in the White House, a chokehold on Congress, a compromised Supreme Court, and a near-complete monopoly on the media, they are all still miserable. They continue to be in perpetual war with the world, and the rest of us need to pay attention.Yes, while Colbert’s cancellation is certainly a sad milestone, another tangible sign that we are approaching the throes of authoritarianism, we can take heart in being reminded that in inhumane times such as these, victory is found in holding onto our humanity. We are not fully defeated when we lose platforms, have rights stripped away, or face corrupt power’s persecution, but when we forfeit the love of life and of the people around us, that Trump and MAGA’s misery movement have long since discarded.Trump can continue to abuse his office to attempt to silence criticism. He can leverage the power of the presidency to try to steamroll dissenters. He can marshal every resource at his disposal to remove voices that ridicule him, and his hateful acolytes across this country can celebrate all of it. But none of these things will deter those of us who refuse to fall prostrate before him. They will not break us down or shut us up.We will continue to traffic in laughter and beauty and connection. We will continue to dance and dream and create.We will continue to give and celebrate and embrace.We will not become as miserable as the people who seek our demise. Friends, be encouraged, be courageous, stay human… and let the Joy Machine roll on.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
While "Woke" White People Were Sleeping, The Bigots Stole America
2w ago00:06:35Tap to summarizeIt’s morning here in America, and for many white people who fancied themselves as “woke,” it’s been a rude awakening.A lot happened while we were sleeping.Our prolonged repose actually began in November of 2008.Back then, we basked in the warm glow of what seemed like the dawn’s long-delayed arrival. Reveling in the once unthinkable reality of a black President, we all grew comfortable, nestling into a seductive complacency that only the blind spots of privilege and ignorance provide.The unfettered joy of that moment became a slow-acting emotional sedative that slowly squeezed the urgency from us, gradually dulling our senses and clouding our judgment. Day by day, naive jubilation numbed us into believing we may have finally arrived together at Martin’s glorious mountaintop, that the arc of the moral universe had bent permanently toward justice. If we had taken the time to ask black and brown people, they’d have warned us not to fall asleep, but we didn’t.Instead, we believed that the aspirational “we shall overcomes” that rang out over decades had become a fixed and unchangeable present. We exhaled too deeply; collectively, settling into that cozy space where the heart rate slows, and the limbs and eyelids grow heavy; where, without realizing it, slumber suddenly overtakes you: one blink awake, the next blink asleep.And for the next eight years, we sleepwalked through the world, physically here but not fully present, not entirely lucid, not truly seeing; caught between the actual and the unreal worlds, between the real nightmare and the imagined dream. Yes, we still planned and marched and campaigned and worked, but we did so slightly sedated in the haze of bad stories, willful ignorance, and wishful thinking.Meanwhile, the bigots were the ones who really woke up.Shaken violently from their sleep in November 2008 by the reality of what decades of irrational fear, inherited racism, and perverted theology taught them was the absolute worst place they could find themselves, they began to mount a fierce counterattack.They created news outlets and social media platforms designed to filter out everything except that which would fully trigger terror within the hearts of their intended targets and would-be allies:fantastical stories of a pervasive and coordinated Gay Agenda coming to convert their children;of violent, heavily armed, brown-skinned drug gangs overrunning our borders;of godless, abortion-mad progressives having indiscriminate sex without concern or care;of Muslim terrorist hordes infiltrating our neighborhoods and bodegas;of America-hating Democrats coming for their jobs and flags and prayers and guns.And we were still sleeping.They played the long game of local political wins, incrementally gaining footholds in the spaces where legislatures are commandeered, supermajorities are formed, districts are redrawn, courts are polluted, and democracy is slowly suffocated. And on we slept.The bigots leveraged thousands of Christian pulpits, where every seven days they’d wildly stoke the fires of people’s phobias and fears, weaponize the Scriptures against queer people and migrants and Muslims, and pervert the expansive Gospel of Jesus into a gated white community of rabid nationalism. Sermon by sermon, the opportunistic pulpit predators enlisted them all into service as passionate soldiers in the Army of the straight, white, American, male Lord.And we kept on sleeping.And then, in 2016, to inculcate the terror fully, they propped up an amoral sideshow carnival barker as their chosen one; a barren, narcissistic, empty husk of a man with no discernible moral convictions of his own. They recognized they could use this breathing void as a flesh-and-blood avatar to embody their grievances and perpetuate their phobias.The bigots erected a vile, blustery false idol of greatness and whiteness around which their easily-manipulated rank and file would fall prostrate; a shameless grifter who would daily dig into the putrid muck to find an ever-deepening moral bottom. In the sleep-induced state we were in we thought it was a joke at first. We laughed ourselves back into a dreamworld where everything would be fine and where decency would prevail and where the system would work; so much so that one hundred million of us slept all the way through an election cycle.You’d have thought that would be our ultimate wake-up call. Yet, somehow, over the next decade, despite horrors and abominations never visited upon America, though we imagined ourselves rightly woke, we still could not coalesce and leverage our voices and our influence enough to avoid our nation making this grievous, likely fatal error a second time. And here we are perilously close to theocracy, a hair’s breadth from authoritarianism, within inches of our Republic’s collapse, and still, I wonder if we’re fully awake now.I wonder if we’re ready to cast off the cobwebs of our complacency and enter fully into the bloody fray in front of us.I wonder if we’re willing to rouse ourselves into lucidity and step into the jagged trenches of the fight of our lives and for the disparate swath of humanity that we’ve let down.I wonder if we’re prepared to face our culpability and admit our failures and make amends with our time and our resources and our votes. I wonder if we have the intestinal fortitude to face what is ahead and what it will require from us.Or maybe we’ll just find another way to anesthetize; distracting ourselves with retail therapy and mindless scrolling, soothing ourselves with false hope, sedating our systems with American exceptionalism. Will we somehow find a way to again retreat into the comfortable places and once more grow so tired that we’ll nestle back into a deadly slumber?I wonder if there’s still time to undo the present nightmare.The only way we’ll have a chance to know is if we wake up and stay awake.It’s morning in America.There’s mourning in America.Time to rise and shine.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
Mediocre White Men in America Are Terrified of Being Replaced. They Should Be.
2w ago00:06:08Tap to summarizeI see scared people.There’s a niche panic rising across America right now, a collective desperation among an increasingly jittery demographic who call this place home; people who, up until recently, have been continually handed limitless opportunity and prosperity without ever needing to do much beyond the bare minimum of showing up. This pigment-specific terror shows up in a myriad of ways: in bottom-feeding dudebro podcast rants, in antagonizing racist influencers, in performative banners at baseball games, in violent xenophobic town hall tirades. You can see the distinct male-pattern hysteria in shamefully gerrymandered maps, in DEI program elimination, in truck and bicep overcompensation, in sky-is-falling megachurch sermons, and in shocking civil rights rollbacks.Throughout this ever-diversifying land, mediocre white men are petrified, and for good reason: America is passing them by, and they know it. As you can imagine, they’re not taking it well, either.Recently, I was contacted by a staff member at one of my host churches in advance of a speaking date there. She’d received a call from a man with a thick southern drawl, who said he wanted to know why they’d invited someone like me to their congregation, saying, “You know he supports white genocide, right?” Who knew? I certainly didn’t.After my emotional, anonymous Aryan admirer was rightly dismissed, I wondered if the call soothed him at all. I wonder if it stopped the sinking feeling in his gut that he carries around every day, if it quelled his rising and quite warranted sense of Imposter Syndrome, if it quieted the ubiquitous rage always bedeviling him and men like him.Something tells me it didn’t help. He’s likely beyond real comfort at this point. Most of these guys are. They’ve watched more and more people gain access to what they’ve been assured all their lives was their sole birthright, and this progress feels like persecution. And so, rather than leveling up, widening their understanding of the world, or, God forbid, looking in the mirror, they’ve created a new coping narrative that tells them everyone else is the problem. It’s the immigrants. It’s their black and brown neighbors. It’s transgender people. It’s women. It’s Muslims. It’s the Liberals. It’s the media. It’s the ever-present ghost of President Obama residing rent-free in their heads. Convinced that the entire world has conspired against them, they are responding with a steady torrent of emotional outbursts and mindless violence.In fact, living in the United States right now is what I imagine is what it would have been like observing dinosaurs in the days leading up to their extinction: seeing a frantic-but-surely-doomed species wildly thrashing and flailing about, all while being rapidly obscured by the shadow of a massive meteor of evolution plummeting toward them. Uninteresting, nondescript, base-level white guys who, for the past 250 years, have been the beneficiaries of every privilege and advantage their pigmentation and pronouns afford, are watching time, progress, and the inexorable demographic changes coming to swallow them up.Entitled, builder-grade man-children who’ve had the run of the house since exiting the birth canal into a land their great-great-grandaddies stole, subjugated, and murdered for, are starting to read the room and recognize that they are perilously close to losing their free pass to prosperity. After having failed up from the day they were born, they are facing the grim prospects of finally having to participate in a meritocracy, and they’re looking to drive everyone else out so as not to be humiliated by just how poorly they measure up when competition appears. It turns out that spending every waking moment buffered by privilege rots your brain, steals your ambition, and renders you incapable of doing the work to grow, evolve, or improve, which is why generations of low-melanin underachievers are now scrambling to cram for an exam they’ve always been handed the answers to. Having spent decades in the cloistered cocoon of white American maleness, these emotionally stunted, barely literate, Chud The Builder acolytes never learned how to apply themselves, never needed to do any real introspection, and certainly never were expected to earn their keep. This is why these Confederacy nostalgics are trying to resuscitate Jim Crow, scapegoat immigrants, and rewind the clock to a nation where their numbers ensured their dominance, but it’s all gonna be for not.If free and fair midterm elections happen here, the shifting populations and changing mores will prove their worry was justified, and the balance of power here may tip away from them for good. But even if a final, violent campaign of malfeasance and illegality allows them a few more days with the unearned spoils of this land, it will only be postponing the inevitable. As the playing fields here level and the pool of participation widens, they are naturally becoming obsolete, proven to have little to offer a world that no longer falls in line or bows in reverence. The days when this nation was their participation trophy are coming to an end, and instead of lashing out, they should turn inward. Instead of picking up protest signs and arms, they should try picking up a book. Instead of playing the victim, they should ask themselves why educated, hardworking human beings feel like a threat.This white fright isn’t unwarranted, but it is misplaced. It isn’t a targeted attack; it’s a self-inflicted wound. There is no coordinated effort to replace unremarkable white men in the United States, but an evolving, increasingly diverse nation is transcending them. And they have no one to blame but themselves.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
Dear MAGA Christians, Why Do You Hate Your Neighbor?
2w ago00:06:09Tap to summarizeTrump-Supporting Christian, maybe you can help me clear something up.You see, I used to think I was a Christian.I was raised in a Christian home and went to a Christian school. After a few meandering spiritual wilderness years, I attended a Christian seminary, became a Christian pastor, and served in Christian churches for most of the past thirty-five years of my life.I’ve read and studied and preached the Scriptures extensively, led community Bible studies and student retreats and overseas mission trips, ministered in tiny rural chapels and massive gleaming megachurches.As a result of these decades immersed in the Christian tradition both personally and vocationally, I thought I had at least the gist of Jesus.Now, I think maybe I’ve been doing this wrong all these years.For my entire life, I assumed something that perhaps I shouldn’t have: I thought Christians were supposed to care about people.Not necessarily agree with them or believe what they believe or even like them, but see them each as specific and unique image-bearers of the divine, to want and to work for Shalom for them: wholeness, happiness, peace, safety, rest.I grew up believing that one of the markers of a life emulating Jesus was a heart capable of being broken at the distress of other human beings around you: when they are hungry and hurting, when they are homeless and afraid, when they grieve and feel alone, when they believe they are unloved and forgotten, when tragedy befalls them, and when injustice assails them. These things are supposed to move the needle within us if Jesus is present.And in all my years of criss-crossing the Gospels in both study and reflection, I never once found a Jesus who piled burdens on already burdened people or rejoiced in their despair or tossed off insults and told them to go back to where they came from.I never read about a Jesus brandishing a “Don’t Tread On Me” bravado in the face of dire need.I didn’t see him lecturing the poor and the afflicted to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”I never found him inviting war or celebrating bloodshed or reveling in loss of life for any reason.I didn’t encounter him trolling people who expressed sadness, worry, or struggle.I didn’t see Jesus tossing off a defiant middle-finger contempt for those who came seeking refuge in him.I saw no arrogance that inflated his worth at the expense of someone else’s.I never once encountered a Jesus who celebrated others’ suffering.Which is why I simply can’t fathom Christians who are cruel and yet, I see so many of them right now.I watch you continually boasting about “winning” alongside a loveless, lawless, serial predator.I witness you repeatedly falling prostrate before the least Christlike person I’ve ever encountered.I see you actively harming the most already marginalized among us.I listen to your anti-immigrant chants of “mass deportations” and “send them back,” and I just have to ask you:“Do you care about people?”“Do you actually love your neighbor?””What is the point of your faith?”“Just what Jesus do you claim to follow?”I’m not talking about the beliefs you profess, the platitudes you proclaim, or the verses you parrot back, but the manner in which you treat other human beings: how you love or do not love your neighbor.I see countless proudly unloving people claiming to be Christians, and it’s baffling.If you profess to be a follower of Jesus, I’m not concerned with your politics, and I don’t care about your doctrine.I’m not interested in the Scriptures you can recite or the prayers you utter out loud.Show me a working theology of empathy.Show me that you actually give a damn about people: not just Republican people or American people or Christian people or white people, but the disparate parade of human beings in every way you encounter them, in every condition they arrive, with whatever backstory they’ve lived through.If you tell me you’re a Christian, be someone who (like Jesus) looks at the crowds and has a compassion for them that propels them into proximity with their pain.Because if you aren’t deeply burdened to live from a place of expansive, sacrificial, selfless love toward your neighbor, not moved to alleviate anguish or reduce suffering, not compelled to leave people better than you found them, honestly, I’m not sure what the point of calling yourself a Christian is.That’s what all my reading and prayer and ministering and living as a Christian have yielded: following Jesus should leave me more compassionate, not less. It’s really that simple.As far as I can see, it’s ridiculous to say I care about Jesus while not caring for the people placed in my path. I am called to live the greatest commandment, not to make any single nation “great.”I think most people walking the planet understand this, whether they’re Christians or not.They, too, get the gist of Jesus, and they see there is no bullying or malice or violence there. They recognize the disconnect between love and enmity when it shows up in the neighborhoods and on the timelines and in their living rooms, and they smell the putrid stench of hypocrisy a mile away.I believe in a God of abundance. I can’t comprehend a Christianity that sees others as in competition with me for jobs or healthcare or a home, because an infinite maker has infinite resources, and because I’m supposedly trying to emulate a Jesus who was the greatest expression of that abundance.Jesus told those who followed him that whatever they do to the least of these, they do to him.So maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I need to regroup on this whole Christianity thing.I thought we were supposed to care about people.I thought we were supposed to love our neighbors.What am I missing?The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
Dear David Byrne, Thank You. (A Message from Row G, Seat 112)
3w ago00:05:04Tap to summarize(This message is for David Byrne. If you’re not David Byrne, feel free to scroll away.)Dear David Byrne,(I hope it’s OK that I call you David.)You don’t know me, but I was row G, seat 112 at your performance in Durham on Monday night.(By the way, this is not a concert review, but more of a thank-you note, and a bit of a confession.)As you’re well aware, things here on the planet have been less than optimum lately for compassionate human beings. The cruelty has been unrelenting, the hatred never far away, the grief ever-present. Like most people, for a while now I’ve been getting up every day, doing my little bit, making my contribution, trying to bring a little light to the dark places where I can, but honestly, I haven’t felt like it’s amounted to much lately. The losses have piled up, the suffering has accumulated, and it’s left me feeling listless and lost. Fortunately, Me From A Few Months Ago had the foresight to know that Last Monday Me would need to find himself in that theater, on that night, in that seat, with my wife and daughter next to me, surrounded by a few thousand other similarly worn down souls.The house lights faded to black, the curtain opened, and there you were, bathed in white light, flanked by three of the unthinkably talented cohorts you’ve been traveling with over the past year, whose faces are so familiar now they felt like old friends.And in a millisecond, what struck me was the absolute silence in that space, as if an exhausted multitude had collectively leaned in to try and hear the whisper of hope beneath the ugly, hissing din of these days, and it came in the form of your voice, singing:Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven.Tears welled up in my eyes and I heard myself exhale loudly. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. As the song ended, you turned and faced an image of the earth, saying, “There she is: our Heaven; the only one we have,” and I remembered what this is all for, the gravity of these days, the urgency of living in such perilous moments.Seconds later, you launched into “Everybody Laughs” and the full band assembled from the wings, we all rose to our feet, not in obligation but in the involuntary pull of hearts that have been starved for jubilation, and we danced ourselves alive again.I often talk to people about art as activism, as a catalyst for social change, as inspiration and release, but there, for those two hours, I was reminded of art as medicine for the soul; the way words and melodies and voices and similarly-intentioned people can do the miraculous inside a human heart.A dozen times throughout the night, I’d catch myself thinking, “I wish she could see this,” or, “I wish he were there." But then I would quickly reply, “But you’re here, now. Be here, now.” You and your glorious ensemble didn’t give us an escape from the world outside, but the chance to hold all of it together: the grief and the fear, the celebrations and the sorrows. We appealed to our better angels while not turning away from the demons inside or around us.Yes, the night was (as I had been promised by many online), a joyful, life-affirming collective artistic experience like few in my life, but it was more than that for me. It was a reminder of what humanity is here for, it was the road back to a version of me I’d lost, a lifeline in a season that has often rendered me lifeless. I so wish the 8 billion other war-weary human beings on the planet could have found themselves in that theater, as I think it would have altered the trajectory of our shared journey. Yet, looking around at the radiant faces of the thousands surrounding me as the curtain closed and the houselights came up, it was clear that none of us were leaving as we arrived. I know i wasn’t.I share this with you because even with all the success you’ve had and the places your gifts have taken you, I imagine, like the rest of us, you also have moments when it doesn’t seem like the work you do makes a difference, like the effort isn’t changing anything, but I wanted to let you know that this isn’t true. In fact, David, that’s what I left the theater with on Monday: the assurance that doing my little bit matters, too, that it isn’t for nothing, that the efforts and offerings of every single weary but defiantly joyful person dancing around me haven’t been wasted.I realized that we were a beaming, dancing microcosm of the billions of people on this planet who still wake every morning, courageously making the case for kindness in the small and close of their lives, people who are excavating goodness out of the broken rubble left in hatred’s wake.One of the many lines I carry with me from the night is, “We're only tourists in this life, only tourists, but the view is nice.”Sometimes the view is nice.Sometimes, it is breathtaking.The path of my 56-year life led me to row G, seat 112 on that Monday night, and it was exactly the place I needed to be. I know you didn’t plan this entire tour for me, but it sure felt like it, which is the true gift of the artist. So, thank you, David, for reminding me why my being here matters, why each of us matters, why the world, as ugly as it can be, has too much beauty to give up on.I’ll keep getting up every day, doing my little bit, making my contribution, and trying to bring a little light to the dark places where I can.I hope our paths cross again, maybe on a future tour stop or another theater, but if not, then hopefully at the bar called Heaven.I hope you’ll let me buy you a round.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
The Trump Administration Just Declared War on Anti-Fascists... Because That's What Fascists Do.
3w ago00:05:51Tap to summarizeAccording to their latest propaganda performance art piece, The Trump Administration has announced a new “counterterrorism” strategy, targeting what they call “violent Left-Wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”Not the Patriot Front or the Proud Boys. Not Neo-Nazis. Not the Evangelical thugs crashing Pride parades, health clinics, and civil rights protests. Not homegrown, white, Conservative males (who comprise the lion’s share of our mass shooters).They’re coming for Americans who oppose fascism. Let me say that again: An American presidency is openly declaring war on Americans who oppose fascism. If there’s ever a moment that should finally rouse the last of us out of the thick haze of laziness, wishful thinking, and American exceptionalism, it should be this one.Career sociopath Sebastian Gorka, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, who authored the declaration, promises that they are setting their sights on what they describe as those whose ideology is “secular, anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist.”Let’s unpack that Right-Wing code language, a bit:Secular, in other words, those people not fully indoctrinated into the extremist Evangelical fundamentalism that mocks empathy, worships war, eradicates vulnerable people, and pines for Armageddon so their Conservative White Daddy God can return.Anti-American, as defined by a cadre of lawless grifters whose contempt for the Constitution is complete; traitorous insurrectionists with no allegiance to its precepts and no desire to uphold the elemental freedoms and inalienable rights it promises.Radically pro-transgender, meaning anyone who believes that people’s bodies, bathrooms, and healthcare decisions aren’t anyone’s damn business but their own, and that queer people should be allowed to live in peace from Evangelical theocracy. Anarchists, in other words, ordinary people who will not quietly comply with a brutal regime of supremacist White House squatters who are dragging this nation backwards, toward the days when women and people of color were legislatively and legally erased.Here’s the thing, friends, if opposing fascism amounts to terrorism, we’re now all facing a fascist regime, and we’re all going to need to respond to it the way Americans have for the past 250 years: we’re gonna have to fight it.I am anti-fascist, and I’m willing to bet that you are, too.This is not a declaration of membership in some non-existent group that our leadership has declared a phony holy war on, but a collective statement of intent. We are not claiming affiliation with an imaginary organization, but testifying to our purpose here in this beautiful land that we love dearly.We are fiercely, steadfastly, unapologetically anti-fascist, because Americans are supposed to be and have always been.We’re anti-fascist because that’s the whole reason this nation exists to begin with, the oppressive crucible of coercion that our freedoms were first born out of.We’re anti-fascist because the hundreds of thousands of our forebears who courageously fought and died on foreign soil were anti-fascist.We’re anti-fascist because up until recently, every single president we’ve ever had marshaled our nation’s military and economic power to defeat fascism, not to traffic in it.We’re anti-fascist because fascism is a mortal threat to free speech, to freedom of expression, to body autonomy, to cultural diversity, to life, liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness for every human being who calls this place home or wishes to.And simply by virtue of the fact that we are anti-fascist Americans, we are dangerous to this Administration, which actually says more about them than it does about us. We haven’t lost the plot here; they have.So, yeah, Trump and his sycophantic hate-mongers can run this false flag high up the partisan propaganda flagpole in the hopes that their fear-addled, easily manipulated, increasingly uninformed, miserable rank-and-file fall for it, and some of them may.But the rest of us: the vast, sprawling, disparate majority see through the facade and will not have our gaze diverted away from their criminality and inhumanity, and we will not shrink back in the face of their desperate, blustering bravado. We will not relent in our daily, unwavering, nonviolent opposition to authoritarianism, to theocracy, to illegality, to unconstitutional overreach, and to State-sponsored brutality.The Trump Administration needs to understand that the lion’s share of this nation is anti-fascist; that’s what Americans are supposed to be, it’s what most of their ancestors were.If they want to declare a white extremist holy war and take the side of fascism, I say, “bring it on.”And the decent, compassionate, truly spiritual, actually patriotic people here will remind them how Americans respond to violent authoritarian regimes.History is recording these days, friends. I want to go on record as being anti-fascist and fighting its attempts to destroy this flawed but beautiful experiment in Democracy.I hope we all do.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →
I Miss The Person I Used To Be Before Everything Went To Hell
3w ago00:05:07Tap to summarizeYesterday, a friend I hadn’t seen in a while sent me a text saying, “I miss you, John!”Immediately, I replied, “I miss me, too!”Like many truthful things, the reply arrived housed in humor but left a terrible lingering aftertaste of regret.I was joking, but I also wasn’t lying.I wonder if that resonates with you: the grief of remembering the person you used to be before this sickening season began; of wondering what in the hell happened to that previous iteration of yourself?When I think about the millions of people I’ve crossed paths with over the last decade doing this work, there is such a through line of loss. Whether it was saying goodbye to the idea of God or country or family, to a belief in the goodness of people, to their sense of optimism about the future, to relationships with people they once felt fully at home around, they have been attending a long-running funeral that never fully ends.But of the legion of lamentations they’ve shared with me, the greater mourning I have sensed in people is the loss of their former selves.There is a cost to enduring the unceasing storm of Constitutional crises, acts of treason, atrocities against vulnerable people, and cultic indoctrination of tens of millions of people we share a nation with.In our earnest and valiant efforts to confront this incessant ugliness, we have been transformed, and often not for the better. Oh, sure, these days have helped us clarify our convictions, distill what truly matters to us, and enabled us to tap into the strength and perseverance we’d likely never have discovered otherwise—but they’ve also rightly beaten the hell out of us in the process.As I consider the person I was a decade ago and compare him to the person in the mirror (well, aside from looking thirty years older), I can’t help but notice the latter doesn’t laugh as easily as the former. He is far less naive about his friends and family members, finds it far more difficult to give people the benefit of the doubt, and he doesn’t see the horizon of history as wide open as he used to.I begin to grieve that version of myself and feel a bit guilty for losing the earlier one along the way, but I also know exactly how it happened:He had to watch his former church friends collectively sell their souls to a vile, profane, serial predator, as if he were the Second Coming.He sat at dozens of holiday tables listening to uncles and in-laws deliver well-rehearsed racist rants as easily as breathing.He scrolled through hundreds of hours of the most asinine and baseless conspiracy theories about face masks, vaccines, rigged elections, and Democrat child trafficking networks.He overheard his white neighbors of stratospheric privilege, rambling about the dangerous immigrants supposedly overrunning our town.He began countless days reading about incomprehensible Supreme Court rulings, the passing of mindbogglingly hateful legislation, and the political victories of sociopaths and criminals. All that s**t leaves a mark.And as I inventory ten years of exposure to senseless cruelty and prolific discrimination, it suddenly makes perfect sense what happened to that previous incarnation of me: he gradually faded away in the face of too much hatred winning too many times.So, today, I am missing and mourning that younger, more hopeful version of myself, and I’m also worried that even this tired-but-not-ready-to-give-up iteration of me will also burn up in the inhospitable atmosphere of this national sickness, yielding someone whose heart is harder and whose sense of belonging in this place is even more tenuous than it is today.But future me is none of my business, because today is waiting on me.Right now, all I can do, all any of us can do, is to wake up within the day before us and appeal to the better still angels within our reach, to wield the damaged but still functioning humanity in our possession, to access all the goodness, courage, and faith we can still muster. If there’s any blessing in lamenting the version of ourselves and of the nation we’ve lost over the last ten years, it’s in realizing we can’t afford to squander a day, waste a moment, or allow a single act of inhumanity to go unchallenged.I miss the person I used to be before this nightmare began, but I’ll be damned if I let these heartbreaking days and the people authoring them take any more.In the comments, share the things you miss about your former self, and how you’re trying to hold on to the hope you still have.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe
Transcribe →