The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Stephen 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, J...

It’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, nestlin...

I 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 b...

Trump-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...

(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 les...

According 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...

Yesterday, 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 b...

A few days ago, I opened my Threads feed and was greeted by the post of a young woman, featuring a couple of resolute carseat selfies, along with the caption: I AM….. PRO ICE PRO Military Pro Law Enforcement Pro Trump Pro Charlie Kirk Pro Voter ID Pro Accountability [sic] Immediately below that post was another, absolutely identical to the first, except for a different account handle. I continued...

Mother’s Day. For many people, that means flowers, handmade cards, Sunday brunches, and waves of laughter. It means celebration, and gratitude, and warm embraces, and great rejoicing. It means resting fully in loving and being loved. But not for some people. For some, it only means tears. For some, it just hurts. In the hearts of many, this day is a bitter, unsolicited reminder of what was but no...

To all the white Republican professed Christians across this country: To hell with you. To hell with you, as you have the unmitigated audacity to fill churches throughout this nation on Sunday, after celebrating the silencing of your black and brown neighbors all week, as you’ve applauded the erasure of six decades of civil rights progress. To hell with you as you stand before the Cross, singing s...

I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well. As a Christian for most of my life and a pastor for nearly three decades, I’m quite familiar with the Old Testament story: supposedly faithful people fashioning an idol made of gold and cravenly bowing before it, in complete contempt for the God they claimed to believe in because they had lost their collective minds and souls. This new American reb...

It’s easy to be brave in the past, when it doesn’t cost you anything. At some point in our journeys, we all found ourselves sitting in a classroom in middle school or high school and learning for the first time about pivot points in human history; days that precisely altered our collective story in beautiful or terrible ways. Like wide-eyed archeologists, we excavated past moments of great consequ...

Dear White Evangelical Church, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is you’re dying. If you’re paying attention, you’ve probably noticed the symptoms. Your buildings are slowly clearing, your pews gradually emptying, your congregations visibly aging away, your voice carrying less resonance than it used to. The reasons for this are complicated and interconnected, but here are a few...

Hey MAGAs and Trump Supporters, No Cinco de Mayo for you. Seriously, y’all need to sit this one out. No one wants to see you ICE-supporting, immigrant-slandering, landscaper-harassing fascist bootlickers in local Mexican restaurants throughout this country, cramming your faces with tortilla chips, pounding half-price margaritas, and pretending you haven’t spent the previous 364 days making life he...

It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Right now, I’d say that it’s stepping into a new day and expecting Republicans not to do something horrible. It happens to all of us. We wake up in the morning, eventually check our phones or turn on the news, and are greeted by some new abomination: an unprecedented legislat...

Recently, I was on a Zoom call with some of my Substack subscribers. We were processing our own miniature State of the Union, which at the time we deemed somewhere between sky-is-falling and Armageddon. The conversation (which, as you can imagine, was decidedly nihilistic) turned toward the suggested bright spot found in the prospect of some of Trump supporters finally being roused from the ten-ye...

Dear Supposedly Non-Racist White People in the United States, You realize what’s happening right now, don’t you? You have to see it at this point, right? I mean, they’re not hiding it anymore. This repugnant, racist President, his white supremacist party, and the soulless bigots he’s polluted the highest Court of our nation with aren’t even trying to pretend this is anything else but the desperati...

Boy, being in a cult really rots your brain. Watching the Right assembling online with virtual torches and pitchforks, engaging in wild histrionics and performative pearl-clutching, while calling for the head of television host Jimmy Kimmel, one has to marvel at his rank-and-file’s steadfast ability to defy reality. It’s staggering when you compare the man they’re crusading against and the one the...

We’re all getting contact insanity from proximity to this violent, kleptocratic Administration. There is no way for otherwise mentally well, emotionally stable human beings to exist in this kind of prolonged lunacy and extended predation without being internally altered, without losing some sense of normalcy, without developing a persistent PTSD that will likely never leave. It’s understandable. W...

I confess that I’m a little lost these days. I’ve become a restless, reluctant nomad moving through familiar places with a nagging internal dissonance. I am a lifelong American who is profoundly disoriented trying to navigate this nation now. I was born here and have spent most of my life here, and yet for a while now, I’ve begun to feel more and more like a stranger in my homeland. There are doze...

Lately, I’ve been getting sick of bad news. More accurately, I’ve been getting sick from bad news. And not figuratively or metaphorically sick, either. I mean that it’s been making me physically ill: showing up in ever-present headaches, a permanently clenched jaw, an enduring knot in the pit of my stomach, and a continual fight-or-flight, full-body Cortisol tsunami. I imagine you understand some...

Sometimes, in this life, you find yourself repenting for the sins of your past. Other times, you feel the need to repent for the sins of others’ present. I suppose I have a foot on each of these paths lately. I’ve spent a good portion of the past three decades pastoring in predominantly white churches along the East Coast of the United States. They ranged from tiny, unassuming wooden chapels to ma...

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called Life. And getting through is a heartbreaking slog right now. Now, I can’t quantify it, but I’m a firm believer that things really went to hell here after Prince died. A decade ago, losing both him and David Bowie within a couple of months was a collective gut punch I don’t think we’ve ever fully recovered from. I know I ha...

JD Vance continues his asinine, nonsensical crusade against Pope Leo for the Pontiff’s opposition to Trump’s wasteful war in Iran, the barbarism of ICE, and the continual weaponizing of Christianity by this Administration. Vance actually had the stratospheric gall to say with a straight face that the Pope “should stick to issues of morality.” This is an unintentional confession by the Vice Preside...

Warning: Content references sexual assault and may be triggering to survivors. There are days when you come upon something that shakes you to your core, a reality that is so antithetical to humanity, so sickening in its perversion, that you feel your guts twisting around themselves, your face heating, your blood pressure skyrocketing. I’m still not sure how to process this, but I’m trying, because...