I discovered the work of John Pavlovitz following the 2016 election. With his column “Stuff That Needs to Be Said,” his decisive, no-nonsense verbiage was a healing balm and a call to action. Much of his work addresses those, who like him, intended to follow the teachings of Jesus. Some, he found, strayed away from the original message of love, compassion, and acceptance. He has no problem standing up to those who found his work threatening to their values and moral code. That being said, his work is universal and can be embraced by anyone of any faith tradition or none at all.
His soon to be released book, Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty is Trending, offers continues where his previous columns and volumes left off.
What you said in the introduction to your latest book Worth Fighting For, brought to mind the song “Hope in a Hopeless World.” Where do you find hope in the midst of so much turmoil?
For me, it’s always about remembering that we always have access to two things: proximity and agency. To phrase it another way, we are always somewhere, and we can always do something. That means that as disheartening and alarming the big and distant things get, we are not passive participants in the world. We can change the small world within our reach. This truth helps sustain me when I feel overwhelmed. That proximity and agency are the core of this book and of the work I do.
How did you as a minister come to believe that there is no external God in the clouds who is going to come to our rescue?
No matter who we are, how educated we are, and how earnestly we seek to comprehend the massive existential questions, we are always dealing with incomplete information. There will forever be a great deal of mystery in this endeavor. The existence of a creator will never be a certainty for any of us. However, what we can be sure of is our presence here, and the passions and burdens we carry. And whether we believe those prompts come from a divine being or simply our specific humanity, we can act in such a way that we incarnate what we believe.
Was there a pivotal moment when you walked away from traditional Christian teachings and formulated a new way of embodying spirituality?
I wouldn’t say my faith deconstruction came in a single instant, but as for many people, it was a slow, gradual realization that things were shifting: a theological question here, a divergence from orthodoxy there, an unresolved conflict between the faith story I inherited and the world around me. I often say that life begins to argue with your theology, and if you allow that new information in, it will renovate you. That doesn’t mean abandoning belief altogether, but it means you reinterpret the story.
How can we each be the change?
It’s elemental and yet not easy. We simply have to enter into the fray each day and do what we are able to do in the here and now and small and close of our lives: leveraging our circles of influence, our time, voices, resources, social media on behalf of what matters to us. And it’s critical to do this individually and collectively, to make sure that we are doing the work of empathy and justice on our own as well as in community with like hearted people, whether that is in the context of a faith community, social network, local service projects, etc.
What are the ‘warning lights’ in our lives and in the world that we ignore and should pay attention to?
To be a person with empathy is to be easily injured. I often share that we always need to pay attention to two wounds: the wounds of the world and the wounds we sustain attending to those wounds. To operate with compassion is to spend something of yourself on behalf of other people. There is a subtraction of resources, whether physical, emotional, or of time or energy. We need to make sure we’re paying attention to our bodies and our minds, to recognize when we are fatigued or in deficit. This attrition might manifest in physical symptoms, lack of sleep, irritability, relational stress, or heavy depression. While it’s important to fight for what we love (which is the heart of the book), we need to fight for our own health and wholeness so that we can do this work for the long haul.
How can we channel painful feelings and sometimes devastating realities into something productive and even uplifting?
It’s really a matter of persevering, of getting up and facing a day that we may not want to walk into but that we decide to anyway. We cannot protect or exempt ourselves from trauma, but it is in those injuries, losses, and setbacks that we discover who we are, and we have our purpose clarified. More than that, as we transform our pain into something productive, we find ourselves able to reach people facing similar struggles in ways we never could before. In that way our past becomes the greatest teacher we have for ourselves and for others.
What drives you to continue to speak out in the face of so much that seems insurmountable and that has earned you pushback?
I don’t think about it all that much, to be honest, it’s simply what I do. At times, people have said they are grateful for what they perceive as courage or strength, and I remind them that it’s always about sharing with clarity and specificity what you have seen and experienced. It all comes down to stewarding the stories. Early on in my journey as I started to get better stories about the world and intentionally spent time with people whose lives and experiences were different from my own, those stories changed me. Not speaking out was simply never an option because so many people can’t sidestep their pain or opt out of urgency, so none of us should be able to.
How can we avoid getting sucked into verbally parrying with people on social media whose aim is to wear us down and spew cruelty?
Social media is both beautiful and terrible. At its best it allows us to find our tribes of affinity, to be informed, and to amplify any message will believe is important. At its worst, social media can artificially enlarge the bad news, it can weigh us down with hopelessness, and it can distract us from the vital work. Ultimately, I think most people intellectually realize that social media conversations rarely change minds, especially among people who don’t come with a posture of curiosity and a genuine desire to understand a different perspective. If you’re encountering someone who is only intent on draining and distracting them, you owe it to yourself and to the cause and people you care about—not to let them.
It occurred to me that Trump needs his followers to feed off of and they need him to validate their grievances. Any thoughts on that?
The entire MAGA movement is grievance-based. Politics and religion at their worst (which created the current GOP) require an adversary. They desperately need an encroaching enemy, an urgent threat to rally their base. Trump and the Republican Party have evolved into a fear-generator for their people. That’s why they pass no legislation, provide no redemptive vision, have no platform beyond culture wars and battle posturing. They have declared war on everything: women, trans teenagers, public school teachers, immigrants, doctors, the FBI, books, and on and on and on.
How can we take justifiable anger and use it as a tool and not a weapon?
Anger is a necessary initial emotional prompt. It is an alarm telling us that something is not right. This is not only normal but critical, as all movements of social change have been born out of that initial outrage. The challenge lies in transforming that anger into something else: something positive, something tangible, something life-affirming. If we simply nurture the anger and hold it, it will always become toxic within us. Letting anger fuel us into something redemptive is the key.
How can we overcome resistance fatigue? I feel it daily and I imagine you do as well.
Yes, it’s a daily, almost hourly challenge, and again it’s about realizing that taking time for self-care: to rest and eat well and get good sleep and hydrate, and to create and exercise, to cultivate our close relationships, is critical. It’s important to remember that temporarily withdrawing from the fight in order to pause and recalibrate isn’t a betrayal of our activism but a respecting of it; of realizing we are finite beings whose resources are not inexhaustible. As we care for ourselves and remain whole and healthy human beings, we are better able to do the work we feel passionate about.
How can we find a ‘big enough God,’ who embraces all people, rather than just those we think God should embrace?
No matter our religious tradition or theological perspective, we all make God either slightly or substantially in our own image, which means God will often ratify our prejudices, reinforce our politics, or reiterate the story we tell ourselves. Because of this, we are constantly in danger of imaging that God loves who we love and despises who we despise. For myself as someone raised on the teachings of Jesus, I realize that the people I am most hesitant to love are the people I am being challenged to see differently, or to have a curiosity about. I’m a firm believer in learning someone else’s story, especially when we feel like we know the story already. Proximity with an individual may not cause us to like them more or agree with them on the fundamental issues, but we will see them as fully complex human beings and we will be less likely to operate in stereotypes and caricatures.
I was moved by the actions of your friend Genesis Be. I offer FREE HUGS, as the founder of Hugmobsters Armed With Love. Sometimes I do them at rallies, vigils, and protests. In my area is a man who is an avowed Trump supporter, wearing the regalia. He asked me if he could have a hug. I willingly embraced him, but I drew the line with taking a picture together as he requested. I reminded him to open his heart. Have you had encounters like that?
No, most people recognize me and flip me off or tell me I’m going to hell! (Ha-ha). Seriously, there are often exchanges with people where I am challenged to stretch the muscles of my compassion, and that’s a huge part of the book and of the work I do. I think we’re always trying to decide what constitutes seeing someone’s humanity, respecting their story, and not being punitive—and when we have reached beyond kindness and into tacit approval. My goal in personal exchanges is to not leave with someone else feeling dehumanized.
Please tell us about The Church of Not Being Horrible?
It’s the vision of a spiritual community or religious presence that strives not to injure. While we are immersed in so much tribalism, perhaps in the Church more than anywhere, I realize asking conservative Christians to fully embrace people they’ve been conditioned to condemn and exclude is a tall order. The Church of Not Being Horrible is a lower bar, but a good first step: wielding a faith that does no harm. Kindness, generosity, respect, compassion. These things should be no-brainers but unfortunately many people do not experience them in their exchanges with professed Christians. That simply shouldn’t be.
How can we become what you call ‘damn-givers?
America is facing a poverty of empathy, with a movement of unrepentant cruelty gaining traction. The only hope we have is to create a powerful countermovement, one born out of compassion and by what I call a “ferocity for humanity.” To be a damn-giver is to be awake and alive in the world, to look for the places where injustice and suffering exist and to move toward them in some way. It’s about cultivating a lifestyle of sustainable compassion. If you care about human beings, about this nation, about the Church, about the planet—live in such a way that this is unmistakable.
What is your response when people refer to you as ‘woke,’ a label that people have plastered on me as well?
Woke is a dodge. Conservatives lament, castigate, and decry wokeness. They passionately warn against it. They fiercely condemn it. They work themselves into fevered hysterics over it. The only thing they can’t do—is define it. When asked for specifics regarding exactly what woke is and precisely why it’s such a supposed danger, there is no response: just a swift regurgitating of talking points, buzzwords, dog whistles, and vague non sequitur warnings.
“Woke” is Republican-speak for anyone who gives a damn about other human beings or the planet. It is a dog-whistle slur against expressions of humanity that seek to make a vulnerable community less vulnerable, or to spread resources, opportunity, power, and a voice to more people. My response to the word ‘woke’ as a slur is to remember that it is compassion that they are ultimately attacking and resisting. So, I don’t hide from the term, I embrace it.
What is your vision for the future?
I hope we here in America can survive this moment of unprecedented urgency and defeat this rising movement of cruelty so that we can focus on collaboratively creating a nation where all people are seen and heard and welcomed in. We need to make courage and compassion trend again. If we can leave the world more empathetic, diverse, and just than we found, that will be a huge win for humanity. I hope that we can leave those who follow us with something worth inheriting and that’s worth fighting for.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Author
