Writer, speaker and pastor John Pavlovitz is a featured speaker at Austin Seminary’s MidWinter Lectures

LOUISVILLE — John Pavlovitz, a popular writer, speaker and pastor with a passion for both listening and storytelling, kicked off the MidWinter Lectures at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Tuesday with a pair of Currie Lecture talks designed to help his large in-person and online audience to become agents of empathy in days when cruelty is prevalent.

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“I consider myself primarily a collaborator of stories, a war correspondent. I enter into the trenches of life with people,” asking them to “tell me what’s happening so I can tell the folks back home,” Pavlovitz said during his engaging talks from Wright Hall. Increasingly, “people give me proximity to their pain.”
“I sit with them in anger and fear,” he said, “and leave asking myself, ‘What do they wish people around them could hear if their voices could carry?’”

He asks himself, “How did I end up here?” and asks the people he’s hearing from, “How did we end up here?”

“How are we still talking about the value of a Black life? How did we end up with so many people denying science?” Pavlovitz asked. “Equity is still elusive, and people are not being seen in the ways Jesus saw people.”

“We ended up here,” he said, “because we are facing a poverty of empathy.”

Compassion is currently in great demand, he said. People in ministry and those who are training for ministry “are carrying a lot on your shoulders,” including “the big systemic ills including racism, homophobia, nationalism and misogyny. You are also carrying individual stories of people you know and love and strangers who are under duress right now.”

He said that important questions for people of faith today include: How can we confront inequity and injustice as members of the very entity that is currently responsible for them? How can we fight in a way that we are not defined or overwhelmed by the fight? What is the tangible path for embodying a full expression of the compassionate activist heart of Jesus?

As a frequent traveler who’s uncomfortable flying, Pavlovitz recited for those gathered the words he hates to hear during an update from the cockpit: “Hang on. Prepare yourselves. Turbulence is coming.”
These are also turbulent days for the church, he said.

“Our churches and denominations are experiencing profound shaking,” he said. “Turbulence and fear are a package deal” and “fear can be very persuasive.”

And yes, there is a border crisis in this nation, he asserted. “The greatest border crisis we are currently facing is the separation of church and state,” Pavlovitz said. “We are a nation on the edge of evangelical theocracy.”

Christian nationalism “is built entirely on fear,” he said, “a theology and politics that always require an encroaching enemy to be protected from, an adversary to be brutally defeated, an urgent danger to be overcome.”

That fear gives birth to dehumanization, and battles are mounted against athletes and librarians, drag queens and participation trophies, Pavlovitz said.

He said his upcoming talks as part of the Currie Lectures would include discussing whether Christianity is helpful anymore, “and if not, what are we as followers of Jesus going to do about it?”
During his afternoon talk, Pavlovitz, a longtime pastor, said his version of the meme “I can’t adult today” is “I can’t Christian today.”

“I can’t be tethered to this thing that’s so toxic anymore. I can’t sift through this malice and bitterness … to find what’s left that’s worth keeping,” he said. Lately it’s resulted in a pair of fierce battles. “I’m simultaneously fighting with and for my faith tradition,” he said. At times, “I want people to experience the beauty I have observed firsthand.” Other times, “I urge people to run. I am figuring out how to stand in the middle of those  two important fights.

In his work, Pavlovitz pays attention to what he calls energy orientation awareness. “If I work at anti-racism, sometimes I want to do the systemic work. That will require a certain posture,” he said. “But I also want to make sure I am doing anti-racism work on the story level — to be in relationship with people who are different from me, and working in communities that are creating a world that expresses that kind of reality.”

“In stories, we can find some understanding and feel a sense of urgency,” he said. “When it comes to the system, we may have to do complex, long-term work, and maybe confront something we have benefited from.”

If we understand compassion as “spending of yourself on behalf of someone else,” we should also think about who is paying for our empathy right now, Pavlovitz said. “Sometimes it’s you, and sometimes it’s the people around you who feel the brunt of your work because they’re getting less of us.”

The work of equity “is collective work that must be done by the broadest coalition right now,” he said. Pavlovitz works with the Empathetic People Network, which he described as “people who gather online to talk about the wounds of the world and figure out a way forward.”

“This is about more than your fear and your shaking, more than the grief you carry,” he said. “It’s about your ability to show up in the storms of other human beings, as ministers and educators and caregivers, being a tangible reminder of who we are.”

Privilege is a “natural buffer against turbulence,” he said. “Our responsibility is to leverage our lives to be peace givers, taking on some of that shaking ourselves.”

“When we see migrants being deported as political stunts, what is our place in that?” he asked. “Right now it means we are to be in the gaps, to speak and act boldly even if it means widening those gaps.”

For many people, “this is the time for us to say, ‘I can take a lot of hits and still be OK.’ Risk something,” Pavolvitz urged. “If you experience no turbulence on behalf of what you’re trying to do, you’re not doing it like Jesus enough yet.”

“You have agency and proximity,” he reminded those gathered for the lecture series. “You don’t need an expert to tell you how to do that. That’s what your faith will do.”