Within the Shape of Love: What I Learned from Michael Gungor About Turning Back Inward
The title of this episode was “Shapes of Love,” the title of Michael Gungor’s book. I just didn’t anticipate the degree to which Michael would lean into that phrase.
Here is a man who grew up as the music kid in a tiny charismatic church in “nowhere Wisconsin,” rose into the Grammy‑nominated Christian music world, publicly deconstructed his faith while the industry was still playing his songs, and has now landed in a place you could call mystical but very practical.
The working title of his forthcoming book is Within the Shape of Love. Listening to him, that title began to feel less like a metaphor and more like a map.
The map looks something like this:
- We keep trying to fix inner problems with outer solutions.
- Jesus’ invitation was to metanoia—a turn in the opposite direction.
- The “shape of love” is that upside‑down movement: from outward grasping to inward presence.
And the credibility of that message, in Michael’s case, is rooted in a very specific story.
From Nowhere Wisconsin to the Christian Music Machine
Michael grew up in Marshfield, Wisconsin—a small town whose claim to fame is a clinic and not much else.
His father’s story is already a lesson in displacement and belonging:
- Born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican mother, abandoned by his biological father.
- Adopted by a Turkish doctor, Dr. Gungor, who moved the family to rural Wisconsin.
- “The only brown boy in town,” as Michael put it.
His dad eventually became the pastor of a small charismatic church on the edge of a very white, very Lutheran town:
“He was kind of the eccentric Puerto Rican tongue‑talking revival‑holding pastor on the edge of town.”
Michael’s mother was from St. Louis; they met at Bible school. He grew up in the church’s orbit:
- Playing guitar and keys in youth group and children’s church from an early age,
- Learning to stretch out worship sets in long charismatic services,
- Discovering improvisation and responsiveness—how to “follow the moment” musically.
“There was a lot of good in it,” he said, “and a lot I needed to outgrow.”
The first crack came in junior high.
A Christian‑school English teacher assigned them a project on the end times, built around a conspiracy‑heavy book:
- Visa cards as the mark of the beast,
- Barcodes as 666,
- A world of hidden satanic plots.
Michael read it at home. His dad looked at it and said flatly, “This is nonsense.”
Armed with that, Michael went back to class and became the main student arguing against his own teacher’s “lesson.” The teacher eventually applauded the class for pushing back—that had been his goal all along.
But Michael was left with a nagging embarrassment:
“I was kind of ashamed that I needed my dad to say it first.”
That shame sparked a deeper question: What do I actually believe, and why? Whose authority am I basing this on?
From there began a slow, painful fifteen‑year process he now easily calls deconstruction.
While that inner deconstruction was happening, his music career was taking off:
- Signed to Integrity Music as “Michael Gungor,” a worship leader.
- Then “The Michael Gungor Band,” doing more progressive worship.
- Then simply Gungor, with a more art‑driven, experimental sound.
Those early Gungor records—Beautiful Things, Ghosts Upon the Earth—earned Grammy nominations. They were also full of doubt.
“I was writing, ‘I don’t know what I believe, help me,’” he said. The industry and the audience assumed it was poetic hyperbole.
It wasn’t.
When interviewers and gatekeepers realized his questioning was real, not just lyrical color, the pushback began:
- Trouble for saying he read Genesis metaphorically rather than as a young‑earth history textbook.
- A major Christian radio network sending him a required “statement of faith” that included lines like, “There are only male and female and there is no confusion about it,” as a condition for airplay.
- The dissonance of touring on a “dry” Christian concert series where no alcohol was allowed for attendees, while almost the entire tour crew and band members drank every night backstage.
“There were beautiful people in it,” he told me. “But as a business, there was a lot of hypocrisy.”
By around 2016, the inner and outer contradictions had done their work. The final “death knell” sounded on his attempt to figure everything out, to land neatly on a new set of certainties.
What emerged from that long dying isn’t cynicism or vague spirituality.
It’s a radically simple thesis:
We’ve been walking in the wrong direction.
Looking Outward for What Can Only Be Found Within
During our conversation, Michael described what he sees as a basic miswiring in how we handle inner distress.
He started with the body.
As organisms, we have very good reasons to scan the environment:
- Looking for food,
- Looking for shelter,
- Looking for safety,
- Looking for connection.
At the physical level, it makes perfect sense for the body to look outward. You feel hunger; you look for something to eat. You feel cold; you look for warmth.
The problem, he said, comes when we unconsciously apply that same outward‑directed scanning to our inner life:
“What we’re looking for inwardly is never actually found out there.”
We feel sadness, loneliness, shame, exile, depression, a sense of being “not enough.” Our instinct is to treat those as problems to be fixed with external inputs:
- If I just find the right relationship,
- If I just get enough approval,
- If I just gain control over my circumstances,
- If I just succeed in ministry, in art, in business.
We keep hoping that some configuration of outside conditions will heal an inside wound.
It doesn’t.
That’s where he sees Jesus’ message as so profoundly counterintuitive—and relevant:
“The kingdom of God is within you.”
Not up there somewhere. Not in the next achievement. Not in better circumstances. Not in a future, perfected version of yourself.
Within you.
He links this to the Greek word metanoia, usually translated “repentance.”
We often load repentance with guilt: feel bad for doing bad things, then try harder.
Michael hears something different:
“It’s not about feeling guilty for doing bad things. It’s literally reorienting and turning it all upside down.”
If our instinct, like Eve in Genesis, is to grasp for something outside ourselves to make us “wise,” metanoia is the moment we realize:
- Wisdom isn’t “out there” somewhere in a tree we can pluck;
- It’s something we awaken to by turning back, by noticing the present moment, by becoming honest about what’s actually happening inside us.
That inward turn is what he means by within the shape of love.
Love, in his understanding, has a very specific shape. It is always:
- Moving toward what is, not away from it.
- Saying yes to this moment—sorrow, fear, judgment and all—instead of trying to edit it into something more spiritual.
- Embracing even what we consider our “shadow” with curiosity and compassion.
When we encounter, say, a judgmental attitude in ourselves, the reflex is to judge the judgment: “I shouldn’t be this way.” We create a loop of self‑contempt.
Michael suggested a different response:
“Seeing the judgment, noticing it, and bringing loving awareness to it as though it was part of your family—a young child throwing a tantrum: ‘Oh, hello. What do you need? Who are you? What’s going on here?’”
That is the “upside‑down” logic he sees in Jesus:
- “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”
- “The greatest among you will be your servant.”
- Freedom not in grasping tighter, but in being willing to die.
The shape of love, in his view, is actually everything turned upside down from how the ego operates.
Which brings us to the question: What, exactly, is here, in this moment, when I stop running from it?
Four Ingredients of the Present Moment
One of the practical tools Michael is writing about is a simple way of noticing what’s actually happening right now.
He suggests that every experience we have is some mix of four “ingredients”:
- Perception – The data from our external senses. What you see, hear, taste, touch, smell.
- Sensation – The felt sense inside the body. Tightness in the chest, warmth in the hands, the pace of your breath, the need to use the bathroom.
- Emotion – The affective tone: sadness, joy, anger, fear, grief, delight.
- Thought – The stream of words, images, and concepts running through the mind.
At any given moment, if you pause and look, you can notice all four somewhere in your field of awareness.
- You’re seeing these words on a screen (perception).
- You may feel tension in your shoulders or ease in your jaw (sensation).
- You might feel curious, skeptical, moved, bored (emotion).
- You may be thinking, “This resonates,” or “This is too abstract,” or “I should check my email” (thought).
One of the ways we suffer, he argues, is by collapsing everything into thought and then believing those thoughts as reality.
Especially thoughts about ourselves.
We construct what he and many psychologists would call the ego—a bundle of stories, reactions, and inner “parts” that each say, in their own way, “I am me.”
Internal Family Systems therapy, which he appreciates, points out that we don’t even have one ego; we have many:
“If I ask you, ‘How are you feeling?’ and you’re honest, you might be feeling a bunch of different ways right now if you really pay attention.”
Some parts feel confident. Some feel like a scared child. Some feel angry. Some feel numb. Each shows up with its own story.
The problem isn’t that these parts exist. The problem is when we:
- Fuse our whole sense of self with one of them,
- Or build imaginary worlds in thought, then wire them directly into the nervous system as if they were actual tigers in the room.
He gave a simple example:
- Our fight‑or‑flight chemistry evolved to help us escape physical danger.
- Now, the same cortisol and adrenaline surge may be triggered by “a bad comment on my Instagram post” because that comment feels like a threat to the abstraction of “me” we carry in our mind.
We thus live in chronic low‑grade emergency, even when our bodies are relatively safe.
I recognized myself in that.
Years ago, when I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a severe autoimmune condition, every doctor in multiple countries told me there was no cure. I was offered permanent disability. The medications would ease symptoms, but at a cost.
In hindsight, part of what my body was doing—attacking my own tissues, particularly in my spine and hips—mirrored a deep inner war:
- Constant defensiveness,
- Chronic sense of being under threat,
- Old childhood traumas and identity fears churning below the surface.
Similarly, when Michael described his bout with Bell’s palsy, where half his face went paralyzed, he realized that disease can come not only from the body attacking itself (autoimmunity) but from the body losing touch with part of itself.
In his case, the nervous system had effectively “forgotten” half his face existed.
When individual nerves started to come back online, he experienced each flicker of return as a homecoming:
“Like the prodigal son,” he said. “Welcome home.”
That experience gave him a visceral analogy for our spiritual and social condition:
- When we lose sense of who we are—as individuals and as a species—we either attack parts of ourselves or forget them entirely.
- At a global level, bombing our neighbor becomes as absurd, once you really see our shared humanity, as gouging out your own eye.
In that context, the shape of love looks like:
- Touching each “forgotten” part of ourselves—physical, emotional, or communal—with attention and welcome.
- Letting each returning awareness be greeted, not with shame, but with “You’re back.”
Spiritual practice, in this view, is less about improvement and more about re‑membering—literally bringing members of the whole (personal and collective) back into conscious belonging.
The Shape of Love Is Upside Down
So what does all this have to do with being created in the image of God?
Michael sees Jesus (Yeshua) as embodying and teaching a fundamentally upside‑down way of being that’s actually right‑side‑up:
- We think we save our lives by grasping; he says we find them by being willing to lose them.
- We think greatness comes from rising above; he says it comes from becoming the servant of all.
- We think holiness is escape; he points to birds and lilies, to this breath, to bread and wine.
In that light, within the shape of love is not an esoteric idea. It’s an invitation to:
- Stop running from what we feel,
- Stop outsourcing our worth to others’ perception,
- Stop using religion as a boundary marker to decide who’s in and who’s out.
Instead, it’s to:
- Turn around (metanoia) and attend to what’s actually here,
- Bless the ordinary—our “egos and constrictions and resistance and dread,” as he put it—
- Trust that when we bring loving awareness to even the most unlovely parts, they begin to “alchemize and grow and move and become full.”
In his words:
“Everybody’s trying to get rid of their suffering. The radical move of Jesus is to embrace the suffering.”
Or as he summarized at the end of our conversation:
“Bless the ordinary, bless the common, bless the mundane, bless the pain, bless the suffering, bless the resistance… Even this can be part of it.”
You are created in the image of God.
And God loves His creation.
That includes the messy, frightened, defensive, half‑paralyzed parts of you and me. It includes the parts of our world we wish we could disown.
The way out is not to grasp harder for something outside ourselves. It is, paradoxically, to turn inward with open eyes, to see what is actually here, and to let love take its upside‑down shape.
Coming up on Created in the Image of God
On upcoming episodes, I’ll be talking with:
- Stephen Ferrara, a spiritual author, teacher, and former CEO, about how he navigated the loss of his son and later his wife—and what it means to find peace and meaning on the far side of grief.
- Gregory Coles, writer and language scholar, about the intersection of faith, sexuality, and belonging, and how the words we use shape the stories we tell about who we are.
If Michael’s reflections on ego, identity, and the shape of love stirred something in you, these conversations will add more facets to that same question: what does it really mean to live as someone created in the image of God, here and now?
