“No Cure For Being Human” with Kate Bowler
Shownotes
When we’re struck by unexpected suffering, we ask question after question attempting to find meaning in the midst of our pain. We wonder why this diagnosis, disaster, or death had to happen to us or someone we love. We wonder if God is really good. We wonder if it’s possible to live within our reality and still have hope, joy, and peace. Though these questions are important, our human nature lends itself toward the comfort of ignorance and flimsy optimism. What are the cultural scripts that dictate our understanding of pain and suffering? How can we come alongside one another through both the highs and lows?
Chris and Eddie are joined by Kate Bowler, author of No Cure for Being Human, professor at Duke Divinity School and host of the podcast, Everything Happens. After receiving an unexpected cancer diagnosis at the age of 35, Kate began to observe that the world does not offer a safe space for people in pain. Her move from crisis to chronic has led her to asking deeper questions about faith, God, and human suffering. She talks to Eddie and Chris about the gift of presence, the absurdity of life, a robustly Christian account of time, and the many ways we try to make meaning out of everything.
Resources
Follow Kate Bowler on the web:
Order No Cure for Being Human here:
https://katebowler.com/no-cure-for-being-human/
Order Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved here:
https://katebowler.com/everything-happens-for-a-reason-2/
Listen to Kate Bowler’s podcast Everything Happens here:
https://katebowler.com/podcasts/
Follow Kate Bowler on social media:
https://www.facebook.com/katecbowler
https://www.instagram.com/katecbowler/
https://twitter.com/katecbowler
Full Transcript
Chris McAlilly 0:00
I'm Chris McAlilly.
Eddie Rester 0:01
And I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 0:02
Welcome to The Weight. Today we're talking to the writer and podcast host and the overall wonderful human being Kate Bowler.
Eddie Rester 0:12
Kate Bowler, she's an associate professor at Duke Divinity School. She completed her undergraduate degree at Macalester College. She has authored multiple books, "Blessed: a History of the American Prosperity Gospel." That's her area of research. She also wrote The New York Times best-selling memoir, "Everything Happens for a Reason: and Other Lies I've Loved," and also has a book coming out this fall. We're going to talk to her about that today.
Chris McAlilly 0:40
Kate is just a delightful person. What you'll hear is that she's wicked smart. She's also incredibly funny, and she's also been thinking deeply about what it is to live in a world where there's pain and suffering, illness and disease. That's part of her personal story as well.
Eddie Rester 1:00
Yeah, if you have ever asked the question why. Why me? Why my friend? If you've ever, in the face of great pain or suffering, just wondered about the meaning of it all, she's one who is wrestling with you in those spaces and does it in a thoughtful and beautiful and humorous way.
Chris McAlilly 1:26
I am going to have to go back and listen and ponder a lot of the things that that she said, but one of the things that I was struck by in her book and then also just in conversation is that she talks about how the world is not a safe place for people who are in pain. And that there are spaces, there are a lot of times that there's not oxygen in the room or oxygen in the church for folks who are experiencing those things. We don't often want to hear what's really going on with folks.
Eddie Rester 2:01
And she gives her kind of perspective on that and even some thoughts on how we can we can live better with one another and, you know, even some reflections on what we lost during this season of COVID. So we know you're going to enjoy this episode. She is funny and fun, but thoughtful and deep as well. So I hope you'll enjoy. Share this one with a friend. Encourage others to join us in this conversation today.
Chris McAlilly 2:33
Thanks for being with us on The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 2:34
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 2:40
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 2:44
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 2:51
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 3:03
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 3:19
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Eddie Rester 3:21
We are excited today to be talking with Kate Bowler, an author, professor at the Duke Divinity School. Chris and I have a little, in fact we'll just talk a lot about Duke Divinity School politics. We'll get to that in just a little bit. Author of a New York Times best-selling book. Another book gonna hit the shelves this fall. We'll talk some about that. Kate, though, this summer, you've had an exciting summer. You were bitten by a snake at one point.
Kate Bowler 3:50
Well, Chris, Eddie, we're just jumping in right here. Yes.
Eddie Rester 3:53
Just jumping right in.
Kate Bowler 3:54
My own, my new, my recent near-death experience, experience. Yes. I was basically being just a local Mother Teresa, making room on a path for an elderly man and his dog. And I stepped one step backward off a path in my local park. And bam, I was bitten by a copperhead snake and had to spend the next couple of days in the hospital being invenomated.
Chris McAlilly 4:25
Bam.
Kate Bowler 4:27
To be un-venomated.
Chris McAlilly 4:28
Un-venom... What is un-venomated? I didn't know...
Kate Bowler 4:32
Well, I was venomated by a copperhead.
Chris McAlilly 4:34
You were anti-venomated.
Kate Bowler 4:35
To either give me both drugs and superpowers. So yeah, that's what I'm bringing into this conversation today.
Chris McAlilly 4:43
We had a friend...
Eddie Rester 4:44
Superpowers!
Chris McAlilly 4:45
We had a friend here in Oxford that for whom that happened. That's what happened to Neil right, Eddie?
Eddie Rester 4:51
Yeah, that's what happened to Neil. Yeah, he was trying to walk through his carport in the dark and he felt something bit his leg.
Kate Bowler 4:58
Oh.
Eddie Rester 4:59
His wife was out of town.
Chris McAlilly 5:01
He was all alone.
Eddie Rester 5:02
It was drama.
Kate Bowler 5:03
Yeah, it is drama. They take it very seriously because of, I don't know, mortality or something. The amount of people who were very alarmed in the emergency room and wanted to come look at it suggested to me that it was serious.
Chris McAlilly 5:22
You have a new book coming out, right? "No Cure for Being Human."
Kate Bowler 5:26
Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 5:27
Yeah. We're excited to talk to you a little bit about about that. One of the things you say at the beginning of the book is, you know, framing life I think that's the way a lot of people think of, of what it means to move through the world as a series of choices. And and, and you talk just right out of the gates about how things began to shift for you for folks who maybe don't know your work or that are new to Kate bowler way out? How? How is that? How did how did that change for you? And what what has happened?
Kate Bowler 6:03
Sure, well, I think like, like a lot of people who are just trying to find their way in the world, I had really sort of attacked life as being a question of maximization, choosing between difficult things, and then climbing, climbing, climbing, and it's part of... I really always wanted to be a professor, my whole life. And so I was working really hard to try to get my dream job at Duke University. And I was simultaneously an expert in the prosperity gospel. So I had spent my whole 20s interviewing televangelists and megachurch pastors about the belief that you can always fix your life that if you have the right kind of faith. That it's, you know, the gospel of best life now. That there is nothing for a believer with the right kind of faith and attitude and mindset and hard work, that the life will always have a way of turning out.
Kate Bowler 7:16
And so when I was very suddenly diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at 35, I found myself having to immediately revisit beliefs that I didn't really know that I had. I mean, the feeling of, and I think it's probably pretty normal for anybody who's really, suddenly suffering with something to just wonder, why me? Why is this happening to me? But it caused me to be really curious about why. Why I had come to believe that I was special somehow, that my life of all lives had to turn out. And so both during my treatment and just as a historian, I started to think more and more about the cultural scripts that we tell ourselves. What is it in the American Christian water that leads us to have maybe very similar experiences to the reactions to the one did?
Eddie Rester 8:22
As you think about that reaction, talk us through a little bit just about how you got to the place. Your first book, "Everything Happens for a Reason: and Other Lies I've Loved" begins this conversation. I feel like the book that's coming out, "No Cure for Being Human," just takes the conversation a little bit further. What were some of the things that you began to struggle with, learn, engage? I mean, you were a new mom at the time.
Kate Bowler 8:54
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 8:55
Living in Durham. You're a professor at the university you said you always wanted to work at. Your career had really taken off. What were some of those things that you really began to wrestle and think about?
Kate Bowler 9:08
Yeah, I think the first questions I had had were those sort of big theodicy questions about why me and this other question, this felt like longer question maybe, was in the move from crisis to chronic. So, right, when something happens, you have a certain set of questions: Is this personal? Is this something to do with me? All the way to, is God good? How can I live with what's happened to me and have the same big, beautiful faith that I might have hoped for? And these kinds of questions came out of surviving or trying to survive when I realized that cancer was not going to be an event, but cancer was going to be something that kept happening to me, that I would have to live with this, possibly forever.
Kate Bowler 10:13
Then I started to think, well, crap. I was really good at preparing to die. I got my brain around that. But then when I realized that I would keep living, I realized that I didn't even have an alternative story I was going to tell myself about how to live now. That it was actually... Almost right away I realized that it was basically easier to try to go back to the person I was before, just like, "Okay, well, now I guess I will just go back to trying to be a good mom and be reasonably ambitious at work."
Kate Bowler 10:58
I mean, I didn't have a compelling, theological account of how to live. I mean, it's so basic, but like, we are fed all of these really intense cultural stories about how to do it. Is it pragmatism? Is it "be present?" Is it "you only live once?" I mean, I didn't know which path to take. And because when you live with chronic cancer, you're always having to carve two paths at the same time. One is a very intense acceptance of your fragility and knowing that the road might end. But then this other one, where you're like, "Well, then. Good god. How do I do this if it just keeps going?"
Chris McAlilly 11:48
Yeah, so it's almost like, I mean, I think that's one of the themes about your work that I find so very interesting, because it's, in some ways, just a, in various ways, it's, you're coming around in various ways our experience in time, and some of that is memory. Some of that is the present, living in the present. Some of that is the future, especially when the future is cut off from you, or that it's shorter than you thought it was.
Kate Bowler 12:18
Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 12:20
Yeah, I mean, I feel like that because I mean, if you take our lives to be... There are cultural scripts, or there are stories that we're telling, and that we're living. Just how, why have you zeroed in--maybe, maybe it's just this is what you do. And this is your experience.
Kate Bowler 12:36
And this is my brain. And this is my brain.
Chris McAlilly 12:41
Talk a little bit about your, just your meditation and contemplation of the reality of time.
Kate Bowler 12:47
Yeah, well, I think it came out of I knew for sure there were stories I didn't want, because people kept trying to saddle me with them. So I think the first story I realized I was rejecting was when people say, [WHISPERS] and I say this all the time, "Why aren't you so grateful for the perspectives that you've learned?" "Don't you think that you would," you know, I mean, "you'd never go back." Right?
Eddie Rester 13:21
Yeah.
Kate Bowler 13:22
And I mean, it's, I mean, frankly, it's so insulting. As if you wouldn't tell a young mom that she wouldn't want to go back to the certainty that she gets to raise her kid. I mean, thank you, heavily spiritualizing Lindas of the world. But I realized that they were also trying to say something about time that I was just trying to, I was nibbling around the edges of which was, isn't it interesting that they're trying to say a bunch of different versions of "no regrets?" That everything, they're all trying to give me stories about the future. And what a weird thing to be a Christian and try to understand our place in time. Like, I mean, because there's the ones that are saying, like, "oh, we're obsessively future-thinking." There's that. There's, "Oh, don't worry, everything's going to be solved in heaven." I mean, all the things that are trying to propel us forward, as if the future solves the problem of pain somehow.
Kate Bowler 14:32
I was like, well, I mean, the future--this I was really stuck on honestly, and because I work at Duke Divinity School, it was also a wonderful time to roam the hallways having theological questions. I think the first person I went to and was like, "This is stupid, but I have no alternative," was Warren Smith. He teaches church history. He is just one of the wisest but also simultaneously most adorable people on the planet. You just want to hold him, because he's so, so kind. And, and I was like, "Warren, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the stories about time. How do I learn to be hopeful, if hope is the story about the future? But it sure feels a lot like people saying I should be certain. And I can guarantee you that with chronic cancer, I can be certain of nothing, except that I'm human. Except that I'm finite. Except that we all die in the end." And just trying to then tease out what is a Christian, a robustly Christian account of time is trying to figure out our place in the story. And what we are in fact hopeful for, is it the thing that's already happened? Jesus died. Jesus saved us. Jesus restores us to a future--but it happened, you know, 2000-some years ago. It's quite a brain puzzler, the way that we try to live inside of time with hope.
Eddie Rester 16:09
One of the, I wrote this down in one of the chapters early in the book, you said, in a conversation you were having with someone about time and the future, you said, "the future is like a language I didn't speak anymore," that this sense of...
Kate Bowler 16:25
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 16:26
How do you even begin to lean forward when you're uncertain about everything in path? How did you begin to sort that mystery out in a way that allows you to kind of breathe, I guess, to live without waking up in just abject fear every day?
Kate Bowler 16:50
Yeah. Well, because part of it is, you're really not sure about how you should feel about the past anymore. Because you know, when something really awful happens to you--and it could be a diagnosis or any number of tragedies and traumas--but the things that have happened, are things that you're trying to live with. So for me, I was trying to not get over but work through the fact that for almost six months, I had been sent home from the ER with Pepto Bismol. And that I had been openly told that it was in my head. And so I had half a year of quite openly dying, and people not believing me. And so the immensity of that, and then having to run the medical gauntlet of enduring treatments where I was in the hospital all the time trying to negotiate a new relationship with people that I would need to trust to take care of my health.
Kate Bowler 17:51
So a part of you is like, gosh, what do I do with the past? The past is an anvil. The past is now sad and tainted somehow. And yet, we can't, I mean, we cannot live with the weight of what has been done except to say, "God, this will not add up to something. And yet, you must heal me from it. You must heal all of us from the things that have been done." So, I couldn't live in the past, because that was just bitterness. Though, you know, it would have been nice, maybe to be like a little angrier than most Christians would have preferred. And then it kind of felt like the present was mostly the playground of neo-stoics. And Neo-Buddhists. I mean, our culture is obsessed with the gospel of mindfulness, that seems to say that self-mastery is the same thing as your meditation app and appearing Zen and having a shirt from Target that says "good vibes only."
Eddie Rester 18:29
My daughter has that shirt.
Chris McAlilly 18:58
[LAUGHTER]
Kate Bowler 18:58
[LAUGHTER] I own that shirt. I bought it ironically, but then it was so soft.
Chris McAlilly 19:05
Oh, that's so funny. That's so funny. All of these things are, I mean, they're meditations on the cultural scripts and stories, but at the heart of it is not just a meditation on time. But it's a meditation on what it means not just to be human, but a human in pain. And one of the things you say in the new book is, I have it here, it's the world basically, I may be paraphrasing, but "the world is not a safe place for people in pain."
Kate Bowler 19:34
Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 19:35
Talk a little bit more about that.
Kate Bowler 19:37
Well, that was in a moment which I was at my best friend's birthday party, and then a friend's partner turned to me and told me that I should go out with a bang because I was gonna die anyway. And then I really contemplated homicide for a second except that I'm Mennonite, and it felt...
Eddie Rester 19:54
a little out of character?
Kate Bowler 19:55
Counter-theological, but maybe in my character, somewhere deep inside. Yeah, it's uh, I think that America, she said respectfully and lovingly. Americans are aggressively positive, aggressively certain that pain should be fixed. And it's not just that it's not safe for people in pain because, you know, life just keeps happening and there are structural and individual evil, but I find that there's almost no oxygen in the room sometimes to say true things that are not neat. You know, like you can hear it in the way people will ask you a question. Like, I wish I could do puppet hands right now, where one's like, "How are you?" and then you're like, "Actually, I was bitten by a Copperhead." Copperhead is, like, a fun example, because everyone is either afraid or interested. But like, let's just pretend you're like "I was bitten by many, many copperheads and all this stuff," Alright, you're like, "something, something, something, something." And then you could hear it in their inflection, when they're like, "oh, but..." And they're just looking for an off ramp. Now, pastors, bless you, are wonderfully trained to just hang out there for longer than the average non veteran. But it is the speed with which the person in pain becomes a problem to be solved, it still never ceases to amaze me.
Eddie Rester 21:33
In the book, you talk about just your relationship with doctors. And I want to tell folks that you have a great podcast, and one of the best episodes is the Alan Alda conversation about listening. And second only to the Matthew McConaughey episode. But just this idea of training doctors to listen, to be within that moment of pain and uncertainty with a patient is important for doctors, important for pastors. But I think you're right. I think we all struggle, because even though we ask people how they're doing, we don't really want to know.
Kate Bowler 22:17
Yeah. Oh, it's so much. I mean, it's so much to really know how people are. And there's an immediate assumption like, "do I have to know what to do?" I mean, "do I even have to..." This has been one of the great tragedies of COVID is that in response to that, the best gift is just that of presence, holding that lovely space where you're willing to be up close to a crack in the universe with somebody. But I have loved the people who are good at that. And so I have loved pastors. Man, I love them. I have loved the way that they know their way in to my problems. I'm like, "No, that's fine. Nevermind," and they're just like... And then I turn around, and there they are, with their anointing oils and their laying on of hands and their bossiness. Like, "now we're going to pray." It's been great.
Chris McAlilly 23:19
I do wonder, did you happen to see the opinion article, it was a while back by a woman by the name of Leigh Stein in the New York Times, I think it was back in March, it was called "The Empty Religions of Instagram." Did you see that one?
Kate Bowler 23:36
Yeah, I did. I ordered her book, too, she wrote. I haven't read it yet, but I'm excited about it.
Chris McAlilly 23:41
Yes. Satire. Yeah, it's a satire.
Kate Bowler 23:42
It's a book called "Self Care." Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 23:44
Yeah. Which is hilarious. Because it's a satire of the wellness industry and kind of the influencer culture. And this is, you know, I think one of the things that I hear particularly from women, particularly from women who feel like there's no oxygen in the room in churches for their pain, that, you know, there's open vistas and new horizons and conversations on social media and the internet, people like Glennon Doyle and Jen Hatmaker and kind of all the rest. That's a space that I know you're exploring as well, trying to find the right way to communicate in this world where the barriers of space have been taken away, but people are finding new communities online for their pain.
Chris McAlilly 24:30
But in this particular opinion article, one of the things that Leigh is doing is really kind of pushing at the way in which there's room for conversations to be overheard. But one of the lines in there that I just found heartbreaking was that people offer confessions without a confessor. I also think sometimes folks offer their pain without a pastor or a Christian community or real embodied, incarnational presence. I just wonder what you are seeing or experiencing, or what your critique is, or what you see is the possibility for Christian conversations online in that space?
Kate Bowler 25:10
Yeah, well, I'm sure both of you have strong opinions after doing a year and a bit of online church. I would, I'd love your...
Eddie Rester 25:18
We've got opinions.
Kate Bowler 25:19
Yeah. I mean, it's a challenge that I have tried to fully embrace, in part because I wrote a book, "The Preacher's Wife," about female influencer culture and how it's related to the church. And that made me very sympathetic to the fact that a lot of people turn to online communities when their physical bricks-and-mortar communities are not welcomed places for them. And simultaneously, that the church has been so ingrained and enmeshed now in entertainment culture, celebrity culture, that it ends up with what I call a kind of Instagram theology, in which we have not just curated lives, but we have, in searching for community, made it almost impossible to find it because our self-presentation now makes it almost impossible for us to be known.
Kate Bowler 26:25
So that's part of what we do here at the Everything Happens Project is we put out faith and media resources that are very friendly to an Instagram culture that simultaneously we have, I mean, we all have higher degrees in theological education. We have folks who are pastors who respond to the hundreds and hundreds of messages we get every week. I mean, we try really hard to think exactly about that question, about whether people are not--there's confession without confessors. But knowing of course that this is also one of the limitations of what we would probably call parachurch ministries, right, is things that are church supplements and not church, non-sacramental presence. So I think there's less of a distinction now between the idea of "real church" and "online church" but there's certainly no substitute for the sacramentalism and embodiment that a that a bricks-and-mortar congregation is there to create.
Eddie Rester 27:37
You know, one of the things that, as we came out of kind of the the closed-down world that I realized, and it happened for me at an Ole Miss baseball game, because I bumped into some people that I had maybe seen from a distance but hadn't really talked to, in these 15 and 30 second and two minute interactions that I had at this baseball game with all sorts of people that hadn't seen much in a year. I realized it was those fleeting moments of just bumping into somebody that we had missed as a culture that are so, that I think more important than I ever realized. It's not that I have to spend an hour with people, but I think we all need these moments where we come across. You know, Chris and I come across each other, "Hey, what's going on?" And you kind of learn that little bit of life from them, even in that fleeting moment. And what I worry, with the shift to online life, is that we miss that fleeting interaction that is more nurturing, maybe, then many of us understood.
Kate Bowler 28:49
Yeah, I think I read a piece about it. I think it was through Network Theory where they were calling it kind of death by weak ties, that we could only afford a few strong ties and so all the other things that sustain life and difference and a diversity of experience, so that we just end up with so much more over the course of a day than we would if we scheduled three online zoom meetings, etc.
Chris McAlilly 29:17
It's like body language, you know. It's the ability to read and I think that this is where this idea that incarnational presence or sacramental presence or just being with another human being, you don't just hear their words or even just see their faces, but you get to see how they just... I know the longer you're with someone and through time and relationship, you just get to see what's going on and then you're able to respond to that. There's a thickness to those interactions. And you get them in the coffee shop, you get them around town, you get them... I think that's one of like... Even so simple, like there was a kind of stability to the Regions teller that would receive my checks when I used to do that, that I don't have anymore because I do everything online. And there's something gained in the way of efficiency there. But there's something lost there in the ability to be with one. And it's those middle relationships, too, that thicken our sense of community to a particular place and time.
Chris McAlilly 30:29
I don't know, I'm just... I wonder for you, Kate, as you think about, I mean, because I do think there is a sense in which being a writer, the general round of writing a book is something where you're putting in time as an individual, going deep in a particular direction, and then you kind of come up for air, and then do a speaking round and tour. And then come out of it. How do you think about that pastoral presence through writing in your own life? How do you find points of connection with real people, not just in the online spaces of your life, but in the embodied spaces as well?
Kate Bowler 31:12
Well, coming out of this whole year, it's been just me. I spent, I think, about 10, quarantines in Canada because of various absolutely ridiculous reasons. So I'm not high on embodiment right now in terms of ratios. But normally, I have a local church community, and I speak and write out of community at the Divinity School in which my project is based, and we have hundreds and hundreds of students. So I think that's one of the joys. I think you'll probably absolutely agree with me, gentlemen, is one of the joys of church and Divinity School life is that there is very little time for abstraction. You know, I always noticed that a writer has done that kind of sinking between writing and then touring for too long when all of their anecdotes for their next book are like, "I was on a plane," or "someone asked me in the Q&A," like, oh, lovely. That sucks.
Kate Bowler 32:12
Yeah, I mean, the messiness that you're both talking about, the unscripted and the interruption is, I think, where we really learn, at least for me, more about the stories that we live with. I'm very concerned about the way that both a self-help and lightly, not lightly, a deeply metaphysical culture has taken over popular theology and made it hard for us to have other kinds of ways of making meaning of our lives, except that we said that we meditated two days in the morning, you know, two minutes in the morning, and that our therapist thinks we're making a lot of progress. I mean, I love meditation, and I love therapy. But we're trying to tell a story about our lives and our churches and our community and our worlds, drawn into God's story. And we have to spend time with other people to really know that we really don't belong only to ourselves. We really, truly belong to one another.
Eddie Rester 33:24
And I think one of the, again, the gifts of your book, a couple couple things I want to highlight here, the book that's coming out, is you really share so much of your life with your friends, and it's a great gift, I think to see that. And at moments, I kept thinking, "Boy, this was all happening before COVID. This was all happening for COVID." But the gift of relationship that you see just through the book, whether it's with your mom and dad, or your close friends, your high school friends. The other gift that I see in the book is just humor. There's a lot of funny stuff, and just in talking with you before we start recording today, just your laughter. How did how do you find healing in humor? How do you nurture that? Because you've been through some serious, serious stuff. Some of the darkest hardest moments of life, but you seem to have come out of it with your humor in tact. Or maybe refined or something.
Kate Bowler 34:30
Well, I do have a strong pitch I would like to say for humor inside of the Christian community. I think maybe it comes from my dad's a historian. And when we were little, he had this pop culture article, like monthly article he wrote for the Canadian version of Christianity Today. And so he would write little things on Bart Simpson or that kind of thing. And then so of course at dinner, we would read his hate mail. Every time my dad made a joke, there was just like, you know, "Dear sir, I was gravely upset to discover..." And I loved it because when I got a job at the Divinity School, one of my friends, one of the deans said that she was helping to make irony one of the demonstrable outcomes for all graduating classes. And I thought, wouldn't that be wonderful?
Kate Bowler 35:25
I mean, because there's the temptation, of course, to make the precious moments version of everything, where sincerity is the equation of what faith is. And I think, honestly, that my faith is sustained by widening the aperture for both the beautiful and the absolutely absurd. And to be able... And humor is my go-to, to be able to say, how can I hold both those things in my mind at the same time? And it does... I mean, just last week, when I was in the hospital for my snake bite, it was, like, the doctor comes in, you're just like, "Oh, come here often?" I mean, it's the only place where you really have to try out your material.
Chris McAlilly 36:12
Oh, man, that's hilarious.
Eddie Rester 36:14
Because I guess if it goes over in the hospital, it goes over anywhere. Is that what you're thinking?
Kate Bowler 36:18
"What's a guy like you doing in a place like this?" I mean, it was really it's always a high moment for me. Probably high because I'm on drugs. But...
Eddie Rester 36:27
You know, one of the things I loved about Duke Divinity School, and I was there ages, and you were a teenager when I was there, but it was young. I think the average age was 26 back then.
Kate Bowler 36:42
Yeah, it's full of babies. Yep. We're still a little baby seminary.
Eddie Rester 36:47
Yeah, I mean, most folks came out. So there was just as always sense of looking for something fun to do, or ways to, we did a thing where we'd mark all of our professors at the end of our senior year, which we could only do at the end of our senior years because Stanley Hauerwas would have failed all of us for the things we did to him. But I think sometimes people present this view of the faith that is long-faced and dark and serious. And part of the story is that absurdity, that just...
Kate Bowler 37:20
It is. It is, because life will just keep happening. I mean, it is... Like, it just keeps happening. I mean, for good or for bad. We just don't get to know whether we deserve what we get or whether we will lose more than we can live with. A part of that, I think, is our faith gives us a different ability not to search for certainty solely, but to just pray, "God, let me see the world as it is." Like, "Let me see the broken heartedness. Let me see the joy. God, open my eyes so I actually get what's going on." And to do that, we need truth. And for truth, I think we need humor.
Chris McAlilly 38:13
I think that it's interesting that because I do think there's beauty and the absurd that has to be included in what is true and in the way that it is, because you have to account for the fact that just stuff happens.
Kate Bowler 38:28
Oh my gosh, it really does.
Chris McAlilly 38:30
Yeah.
Kate Bowler 38:30
I mean, every time someone wants to sing "Circle of Life," you have to remember that out there, you know, two animals are murdering each other. If we don't... I think that we will do especially just, lovingly, she says about the mainline, who I will spend my life serving, but if we could be just a little less serious about--I love our traditions. I love our casserole culture. I think we are just adorable, truly adorable and everyone should want to be us. And also, I think there's so much beautiful satire to work with. Anyone who's been part of a puppet ministry out there just knows. Anyone who's used a flannelgraph just knows that we have a lot. The amount of pottery we all apparently need, but none of us are actually performing communion. I can't get another chalice. I can't, guys.
Eddie Rester 39:28
There's a box of my chalices that I found in our sacristy because I've got so many, I'm like, I don't even want to keep up with them.
Kate Bowler 39:37
If we all had a progressive dinner just with the pottery, the mainline pottery, it would bring me a lot of joy.
Eddie Rester 39:42
We were doing a huge communion thing and we needed 30 chalices. And somebody was like, "Can we come up with that many?" I was like, "can we."
Chris McAlilly 39:49
Oh yeah, we got that. Kate, I wanted to ask you, at the end of the book is the last chapter is Unfinished Cathedrals," and I that's another thing that I see in your writing, it's a thread that runs through that there is no resolution and that life has kind of an unfinished quality to it. And that's not exactly saying, it's not, it's in some ways it's... I guess what I'm trying to get out is that you're trying to help us live in the moment, in the present, in a way that's not stoicism exactly.
Kate Bowler 40:25
Yeah, no, not at all.
Chris McAlilly 40:28
Just flesh that out a bit more.
Kate Bowler 40:29
Yeah. Well, I, if we become too future-oriented, if we're only looking forward to heaven, then, you know, maybe we don't work on forgiving our sibling, or learning to apply our gifts in a way that stretches us. I mean, there's lots about living in the future that prevents us from digging into the present, or just being the kind of person who watches Netflix too often. We forget the beautiful mystery that is now. If we live too much in the past, which is so tempting, we will forget that God is always breaking in and interrupting us, and there are always people who need us. And so maybe now would be a lovely time to feel challenged and changed by that.
Kate Bowler 41:16
But we can't only live in the present. It makes us selfish and individualistic. And it forgets that we are actually living God's story, and not just our own. And so I loved, I loved being reminded that time is a circle, that God has saved us already and continues to save us. And yet hope is an anchor that's dropped in the future. It is slowly yanking us somewhere that we wouldn't even know where to go. And if we almost hold all three in tension, I think we will have big enough lives, even if our lives--especially as we age--become very small. But to do that, we just can't get too caught up in the idea that we get to bucket list or checklist things. We're not going to be able to, like, McDonald's monopoly style, collect all blanks, and then go past Go.
Kate Bowler 42:22
We're never done and to imagine we'll be done, I think, is to imagine that Christianity, our faith is... I just can't, I just can't with the "and then I will be satisfied." Because I'll tell you, I think the Holy Spirit truly gives us the experience of fullness and wonder and God's presence. But that's God's work. God shows up in amazing moments. But then there's just us living our lives and so to imagine we get that kind of non-stop, fulfilled, mountaintop feeling all the time, I think is really not realistic. And I think it miss-reads, what it feels like to be, you know, us--sure, citizens of heaven, but like, kind of just citizens of whatever this is.
Chris McAlilly 43:15
I love in your post about the copperhead snake bite. You say, "The only story is this: pain is inevitable. Nurses are wonderful. Hospitals are loud. People are brave. We grow, and we heal, and we hurt. And then we do it all again." And, you know, I feel like you've been saying that again and again. But it has to go on being said, you know, and we have to go on reminding ourselves of that reality so that we can live both with beauty and with the crazy absurdity and mess that is the life that we have to share with one another and with God. Kate, thank you so much for sharing this time with us. We are so appreciative.
Kate Bowler 44:00
Oh, it was so good to be with you both.
Eddie Rester 44:02
It's been awesome. And for those listening, go ahead and pick up her book, "Everything Happens for a Reason: and Other Lies I've Loved "and "No Cure for Being Human" comes out September the 20-something.
Kate Bowler 44:16
Eighth, yeah, thanks.
Eddie Rester 44:19
Yeah. And if you want to hear both my friend and Kate's friend Matthew McConaughey. Nobody knows that story. Check out her podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Just a lot of, you've had some amazing guests from folks like actors, but also some amazing writers. And it's a great good gift and a great place for folks to kind of get to know you and your spirit as well. So thank you for your time with us today.
Kate Bowler 44:48
Thanks so much.
Eddie Rester 44:51
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 44:54
If you like what you heard today, feel free to share the podcast with other people that are in your network. Leave us a review. That's always really helpful. Subscribe, and you can follow us on our social media channels.
Eddie Rester 45:06
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com [END OUTRO]