In this episode, Michael Gungor explores the song "Burdens," tracing its origin from a Mystic Hymnal retreat through LA wildfires, Bell's palsy, and time alone in the Sequoia forest. He shares how personal pain, community rejection, and the healing arc of the album shaped the music and lyrics, blending field recordings, playful community rituals, and reflections on welcome, scars, and transformation.

Michael Gungor walks through the song "Smokeless Fire" from his album Magnificat, explaining his musical choices and the three-character arc that shapes the record.

He explores themes of desire, incarnation, suffering as offering, and the invitation to let life have its way, guiding listeners into presence and surrender.

Michael Gungor breaks down the song "Totally Meaningless" from his album Magnificat, sharing early demos, inspirations, and studio moments. Through playful strings, candid demos, and his daughter Lou’s cameo, he explores how embracing life’s inherent meaninglessness can open the door to presence, joy, and creative freedom.

This episode blends songwriting behind-the-scenes with a philosophical invitation: let go of yesterday and tomorrow’s stories, inhabit the moment, and find how meaninglessness can become radically meaningful.

Michael Gungor breaks down episode 3 of the Magnificat series on the Loving This Podcast, exploring the song "All In" from his album Magnificat — a celebration of embodied life, sexuality, and the wildness of being human.

He shares the song's origins, its place in the album's narrative (Mother, Father/Forest, and the mystic child), and challenges purity culture by inviting sexuality into the realm of the sacred.

Gungor also reflects on mortality as a path to presence and closes by playing the full song and inviting listeners to engage with his Mystic Hymnal work.

Michael Gungor breaks down the making of "Same Sky" from his album Magnificat, sharing early versions, studio anecdotes, and production choices that shaped the final song.

He explains Internal Family Systems and the sky/cloud metaphor that inspired the lyrics, and invites listeners to witness and hold all parts of themselves with open, non-judging love.

Host Michael Gungor introduces his new album Magnificat and a short podcast series that explores each song, blending music-making with a spiritual invitation to "spirit remembering itself."

The episode recounts a powerful experience at a songwriter retreat in the Garden of the Gods where Hope hears a voice she identifies as Mary singing in 432 Hz, a moment that becomes a recurring, transformative texture on the record; themes include the divine feminine, transmutation of suffering, and the album’s other characters—forest and mystic.

Listeners are invited to listen meditatively as each episode dives into a song’s story, meaning, and sonic choices that shaped the album.

May we be free from our beliefs. Amen.

In this episode, Michael talks about his discovery about how the most destructive patterns in his history have been rooted in a story of not being enough. This realization has made him refocus his mission to the point that he is restructuring all of his life, work, and business. Support this new work at www.patreon.com/michaelgungor

“What do I love when I love my God?”

This is a famous question asked in St. Augustine’s “Confessions” that many people through the centuries have pondered and wrestled with.  

I too have wrestled with that question. And I can tell you it wasn’t just a theoretical or casual philosophical conversation for me. For me, it felt like the slow breaking of a tree branch I was perched upon over a cliff.  It was terrifying and painful and often lonely.  But one thing that I think sometimes gets missed in conversations around “deconstruction” is that there is often a deep love that is underneath and even fueling the questioning. I didn’t question God because it was a cool or progressive thing to do… I didn’t question the Bible because I was trying to be relevant culturally. I questioned God BECAUSE I loved God. I questioned the Bible because it was so important to me.  

This tension between loving something and not being able to understand it has shown up not just in my spiritual journey, but my personal life as well. In the last several years, some of my most important relationships have either been lost or redefined in some very scary and painful ways. But honestly, I still have such deep love for every one of those people. So what do you do in those scenarios? What do you do when your structures/expectations/understanding of reality falls apart even while you still are in love? What do you do when you love God even if you don’t know how to believe in God? What do you do when you love someone but don’t know how to define your relationship or understand them? This new single, “I Still Love You” that dropped today is an exploration of that tension. Sometimes, you just gotta let things be what they are. And maybe that’s actually the heart of what true, unconditional love is.