Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to professor, author and podcaster Kate Bowler. 08/03/2023
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast that eschews small talk and promotional chat and arguments, and instead tries to go deep with our guests. They come from all points on the political and religious compasses – ‘compie’, like ‘dice’ and ‘die’? – compie, from many different professions and interests. But what they have in common is that they are shaping our common life in some way through art or politics, or religion or business or literature or education to name just a few recent ones. I’m interested fundamentally in how we resist the polarising trends in our culture, and build empathy instead. So I’m seeking to listen to a wide range of people, not just from the tribes I feel at home in, with curiosity and openness, and hope to learn something from them.
Before we get to our wonderful guest, who you will learn much from today, I want to remind you about our live event coming up on the 19th of April. We haven’t done one of these since before the pandemic. I could not be more excited, it’s a little bit sad. At the time of recording, we had some tickets still left, but they are going quite fast, so I would encourage you if you’re dithering, to commit and sign up. Bring a friend. I cannot wait to see a bunch of you in person. I’ve been getting some really delightful posts from Sacred listeners recently. Someone sent me a book of their very good poetry. Someone sent me this really interesting kind of psychological prayer about what does it mean to encounter another mind. Someone sent me a zine. I’ve had a thank you card. I just I can’t tell you how encouraging it’s been. It reminded me what an extraordinary group you are, and the idea of putting you all in a room and just watching you meet each other on the 19th of April brings me a lot of joy.
My guest today is Kate bowler. Kate is a professor in American religious history at Duke University, the ‘Harvard of the South’. She is the writer of two memoirs and several books of blessing, which explore her experience of being diagnosed with stage four colon cancer in her mid–30s, when she had a two year old. Despite some amazing help from a gruelling clinical trial, she continued to live with significant health challenges in a kind of state of precarious health and a lot of pain, really. And despite that, I have never laughed more, I think, on a Sacred interview. And I’ve interviewed some also very funny professional comedians, but Kate is hilarious and so wise and so honest about what does it mean to live well. Anyway, I’ll stop waffling because I want you to just go listen to her, but there are some further reflections from me at the end.
03:11 What is sacred to you? Kate Bowler’s answer
Kate, I am gonna flagrantly ignore the British conventions of a first meeting and not talk about the weather or, you know, how was your commute, because we haven’t had one because we’re both on Zoom. And instead ask you a question that I am obsessed with, but is strange, which is “what is sacred to you?” And I have asked people this for five years, and I still have not come up with any kind of pithy summary of it. It’s not an academic thesis, let us say. It is more a sense that the word ‘sacred’ remains a bit more capacious than some of our language. And that it is possible for people to take it in any direction they want, not necessarily religious, to get at some deep principles or values that we’re trying to live by. And we kind of bracket out our dear beloved family because I think that one of our shared ‘sacreds’ actually, are loved ones.
Kate Bowler
Yeah, you’re like, boring. No way. I totally agree. It’s over.
Elizabeth
Yeah, no. But just a sense of basically something that you’ve tried to live by. I also have a theory that we don’t really know, that it is one of those things Durkheim said it was naturally refractory to analysis. Like, the sacred, our mind bends away from it.
Kate Bowler
Comes sideways. Yeah,
Elizabeth
But just as a generative question, I like it. So, what bubbled up for you?
Kate Bowler
Yeah. Because what I am translating the question into is, what consistently rings as ‘transcendent’? My beautiful co–author and Project Director for the “Everything Happens” project, we always talk about, like, you flick the cord of the universe, and then it rings. And so, for me, and that’s why I think it’s such a fun question because it is so bizarre what rings sometimes. But for me, it is tragi–comedy. It is the intense joy I feel in the ‘Great joke of living’. And so, a lot of it then becomes the absurd. I find like incredibly large statues very funny. I have visited the world’s largest Paul Bunyan. The world’s smallest Paul Bunyan…
Elizabeth
Sorry, what is a “Paul Bunyan”?
Kate Bowler
Thank you so much for asking. What kind of ‘Bunyan’ is a ‘Paul Bunyan’? It is a man. It is mythical man in American folklore, about a man who helped cleared the plains. The truth is, as a Canadian, I thought he was a real person. I thought he was Paul Revere who goes through the town, reading that “the British are coming, the British are coming”. He is in fact a mythical man. And in Minnesota, there are many, many statues. Enormous, because he was supposed to be like, a giant. So an American Nephilite, is what we might say. And the fact that I thought he was real, until maybe my early 30s is not as an American historian, something I thought I’d be prepared to admit, but here we are. So I visit dumb statues all the time, especially when life is horrible. And I find those, and I find friendships, deeply sacred only because it’s only in the particularity of loving somebody that you feel like the gold thread winding through anybody’s life. And I love their problems. I love how sweet and silly and absurd it is to be a person when you hear… Like, I have a friend whose ex–boyfriend is always showing up on those gross anonymous websites where women tell terrible stories about other ex–boyfriends, and she keeps discovering that people she’s dated have in fact dated everybody else at the same time. And we just are weeping, just joy and horror it is. Everybody’s life is so absurd. And all of it makes me feel like I’m part of something.
Elizabeth
Yeah. Did you go through – this is kicking my chronology in the absolute teeth – but did you go through a stage after you were diagnosed where people hesitated to tell you their problems, because “pale in comparison” situation?
Kate Bowler
Yes! Absolutely. It took months for people to start telling me petty things again, or gossip with me. And of course, that’s what I want. I mean, don’t take that away from me. What a privilege! What a joy! It’s being immersed in the stupidity of the details. I mean, who hates who on faculty, who didn’t cite who in whose book. Those are academic problems, and they are delicious.
Slick preachers, televangelists and women religious celebrities
Elizabeth
The kind of the first part of that… And the thing is, what you’ve said is so profound, and funny, and then profound, because it’s the black comedy. The first thing you said was the black comedy and the holding together of the kind of our mutual friend – Luke Bretherton calls it “the wound and the wonder”. You know, the intense bitter–sweetness of life as a thread to just like not try and collapse that binary, not try and say “the world is dark”, or “the world is lovely”. It is both. How has it shaped your life? Can you look back and go, “I’ve made decisions based on the fact that this is a value for me”?
Kate Bowler
Yeah, well, I guess it started maybe with what I found genuinely, academically interesting. And so I started writing about, which is, I found myself mostly choosing topics that other people thought were a joke: televangelists, slick preachers with planes and incredible hairlines. And I thought, “No, I think this is really quite serious.” And I took it more seriously than anyone had chosen to take it seriously before, and ended up writing the first history of the prosperity gospel. And that was 10 years of me in my 20s, with a clipboard, interviewing televangelists with absolute solemnity, only because there were parts of it that were so unbelievably funny. Like, for instance, being standing in the River Jordan with televangelist, Benny Hinn, who promised to personally dunk 1000s of people in the water only, of course, to realise that the current would probably take them away. So he refused to get into the water and stood under a Nestle umbrella in the hot sun while bodyguards shoved people under the water and he would lightly tap them just in the centre of the top of their head. And I spent hours hanging out with the bodyguards after, being like, “What is this like for you?” All of it. I wanted to produce a very serious and compassionate look at why people enter that movement and what they find compelling about it. But I think I only could have done that if I knew that we’re all caught up in this bizarre like set of hopes that makes even our faith into a big, hard, deep question. What can I expect? Am I allowed to have that? Could I possibly have it all? What is a miracle? Am I entitled to one? And then to put it in like such a high stakes situation that everyone would either have to laugh or cry. And that became so interesting to me that I was like, “Yeah, I could spend a whole decade caring about it.” Yeah, so I did that, and I wrote a book on women religious celebrities that no one took seriously. They just saw them on Instagram with like beautiful, blonde flowing hair and a series of, you know, dish soap products. And I was like, “That’s me. I want to be there.” And so that was the next four years of my life. But yeah, if someone thinks it’s funny, I want to be there taking it unbelievably seriously.
Childhood, religion as a worldview, and the lovely nosiness of theology
Elizabeth
I sort of want to wind back and try and do some archaeological digging for where this comes from in you. So, just paint me a picture of your or childhood, particularly any big ideas – political, philosophical, religious – that you think are formative for you?
Kate Bowler
Well, my parents became Christians later in life. And so their sense that faith was a worldview, was probably the first great idea I could build other theories on, which is, “Oh, this is a lens”. This is an interpretive filter. So my dad read Augustine, and was like, “What an impressive set of presuppositions!” And my mom got handed a pamphlet in a student centre, and the pamphlet said, “Have you fallen? Have you sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?” and she was like, “Probably”. So, that was it for my mom. And the sweetness and the seriousness of their approaches to what makes life, a life of faith in particular, one that was both challenging intellectually, and pietistically. I thought, “Wow, yes, absolutely to both”, and they weren’t precious about it. So there was no… They said, if I kept reading, my life would never be boring. And I really thought that that would likely be true of a life of faith, that no theme I would stumble on would be all that new or interesting. You know, “Can God be both good and fair?”, questions like that. So I felt like the playfulness of it really early on. And even when I went through my Mennonite evangelical years, where we would do a lot of the things that we accidentally borrowed from Americans, like pray around the flagpole, but we didn’t know why, having not believed that God gave us Canada for any particular purpose to save the world. There are some weird years there. But all of it had a sense that I could try stuff on and take it off again. So I would say that the most formative assumption was that it was a worldview with a lot of dials you could turn up and down. And I kept that. I really did.
Elizabeth
Did you have a crisis of faith, dark night of the soul, atheist teenage rebellion?
Kate Bowler
Well, you don’t need to have an atheist teenage rebellion when, you know, Canada’s mostly secular. So you’re just trying to go through your sort of Christian neck brace years, you know what I mean? Where you just really want to be good, but you have the sense that being good is probably extremely boring. And I was so unpopular, Elizabeth, for so much of my life that I was just a little desperate to play the game. “No, I’m fun!” That could be… my Christian biography would be called “No, I’m fun! For real!” Was I vice–president of my inner school Christian Fellowship? I sure was. I sure was, but I was mostly there for the snacks, you know.
Elizabeth
And then you decided to continue your startlingly edgy trajectory but decided to go into academia. How did that happen?
Kate Bowler
Yeah, it’s very brave to go into academia when both of your parents are academics. Actually, they did try to… At one point, my mom – they had no idea what I was supposed to be – they encouraged me to join the Canadian Army, which is a modest attempt at global peace–making.
Elizabeth
How many of them are on horses?
Kate Bowler
The RCMP is a real deal. We’re really excited about it. Did date a Mountie? Yes, I did. That was a beautiful time. Yeah, I was stupid. Whoever knows? The things we thought we would be. It’s so dumb. But the truth is, I was only really very good at religious studies. I did one of those hippie liberal arts schools where you’re kept up night after night by the sounds of a drum circle, and then you realise you hate peace now. You hate peace on earth, because you can’t sleep. It’s just like, yeah, you need everyone to stop having ideals immediately, because you’re trying to keep a routine. Yeah, I realised that religious studies was the only classes I was any good at. I tried physics for poets. I tried to yoga for athletes. I was neither an athlete nor talented in the yogic arts. Yeah, no, but I know it’s terrible philosophy. So I was like, “Man, I think… am I still… can I still do this?” But I loved the nosiness of theological questions. I mean, you’re nosy. I’m nosy. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? We couldn’t do this with another discipline.
Elizabeth
Yeah. “What do you believe? Tell me everything.”
Entering academia: dreams, sacrifices, and the horrible truth
And you spent in your 20s a lot of time in rallies and crazy churches and kind of carving out this part of being a scholar, ambitious to be a successful academic. But you’ve spoken a little bit about gender in that world. What were your experiences as a woman in your 20s trying to get tenure?
Kate Bowler
Oh, well, I entered academia in that sort of 2.5 feminist wave where they’re not sure if the two point of rules of academic feminism apply to you, which is that it’s mostly a men’s world, you definitely shouldn’t have kids if you’re serious about your work. And congratulations, you will now spend the next 40 years beside, you know, Perry, your office suitemate, whose problems will become your problems for the rest of your life, so don’t speak up. And it took me a long time to realise that it was a strange time to care about the life of the mind, because most of the structures of what we imagined, at least I imagined as part of university life, were about to go away very quickly. When the recession hit, people didn’t retire for another five years. Very few people could come in, and really most of the structures of the profession declined. So people thought, “Oh, you could go in and be a professor, and it would be like a career.” It could hold the weight of a family vacations to something other than Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, which is the only place I’ve gone growing up. And then all of a sudden, there was sort of no money and then all of us had really been told not to have kids. And I thought, what a sort of aesthetic ideal. Why would we do this if we don’t feel fancy anymore? Elizabeth, I don’t mean to besmirch the good name of Duke University, which is lovely and has many, many Gothic, aspirational Gothic qualities. But if I opened my window, squirrels come in. Squirrels, Elizabeth. It is not a fancy place. I was teaching the other day and I opened a box, and I discovered that there was puppets in it. And I thought… Well, my first thought was, because someone assigned me that room, obviously, I was like, “Is somebody mad at me?” And then I was like, “No, no, this is teaching in a seminary. This is the life I chose. This is my world.” And I think, what I realised when I got sick was that that was the sort of bookend to a whole set of choices I’d made when I’d realised that I had been climbing a ladder to what I imagined was this fancy fleet of graduate students who adore me. Just a bizarrely, romanticised life. And then when I got sick, I realised I’d overpaid. And I was truly horrified. I was because I didn’t realise how much I had invested into one very narrow story of the way I thought my life should turn out. I would have had a kid earlier then I would have been able to have another child before chemotherapy took that option away. Like, there are so many like, “What if? What if? What if?” because I had poured my whole life into one very specific dream.
Gendered misdiagnosis, colon cancer and incredible support
Elizabeth
Yeah. So, I do want to hear because there is this just sense of a pivot. And, you know, I hope you don’t mind me saying you’ve written about dealing with infertility and fertility treatment. There was a kind of valley and a struggle that becomes a defining valley and struggle in lots of people’s whole lives that you had already been through, and then had to fight incredibly hard to eventually get a diagnosis. Looking back when you had so much pain and you saw so many doctors, why do you think you didn’t get diagnosed until so late in the day?
Kate Bowler
Oh, I mean, I didn’t fit the profile of someone that they would believe. And I’ve read so much more about the gender components around misdiagnosis. And how I dressed for those appointments like it was a job interview. I knew I was auditioning for care. And yet I was sent home from the ER with Pepto–Bismol. I mean, I was fully doubled over at some points because the pain was so intense. And then the nausea was so intense that I couldn’t… I just needed a few minutes to… because I couldn’t walk. And I’d lost 30 pounds. I mean, every marker was there for the six months leading up to a diagnosis. And so I can only guess that I didn’t seem like somebody with… Certainly, colon cancer was largely considered a disease for older men. And part of it was the speed, with which they move you in and out of an office. But I think I presented as someone who was a cheerful, young female and not entirely believable. It was only later I started learning to yell and not leave offices unless I was… And then, the only reason I got the diagnosis was because I yelled, “I can’t take this anymore. I’m not leaving.” And I refused to leave until they got me another scan. And then that was it.
Elizabeth
What was the immediate aftermath like for you, and I guess particularly the people around you who were trying to process it often out loud with you?
Kate Bowler
Yeah. It was like a landslide. I’m still completely astonished by the speed at which my life came apart. It was like I was wearing a sweater, and then someone just lightly held a thread and then pulled, and all of a sudden, like the whole thing unravelled. We thought right away that I probably wouldn’t make it through the summer – and it was the fall. So then, all of a sudden, whatever time is, is gone. And every reason that I had to live in Durham, North Carolina, far, far away from my family evaporated because it was for a job. A job I could no longer keep. But you know, they were so beautiful. They put me on leave, and then came to visit me an absurd amount of times. I mean, that community just rallied. That that night of my surgery, my professor friends and students held a prayer service. And I only watched the video of it much later, because it was so overwhelming to me watching them, I mean, not just cry, like wail. Like, serious, serious professors. I loved it. I love the indignity of watching, of them caring enough to have deeply embarrassing spiritual hopes for me. It was so beautiful. But they would walk over from their offices, because the hospital and the university is adjacent. And I mean, one of the things that they still tease me about is, I told them everything, because I was on so many drugs. I would wake up and I would see things in my own handwriting beside me like names of people, like doctors I hated, I guess. I guess I said it all. So, you go from like wanting to build a reputation to having people… I mean, I woke up one morning and someone had stayed up all night like piecing a quilt together for me, like a little hope quilt. Come on! Sometimes I’d be wearing socks I didn’t go to sleep in. Like, someone had come by and brought me socks and then put them on. I just like, it kills me. It kills me, that kind of love. They were so good. Anyway, I just saw so much of them that I would never have seen, because it turns out that when you work at a Seminary, people have married and buried before, and they all have their little anointing oils and they come out and they put their hands on your shoulder and they put their hands on your head and you feel the weight of their love. And things are not nearly as terrible as they were a second ago. And so they were my… That was a total remaking of whatever I thought my job was. But the burden was largely financial. The astronomical cost of American health care meant that we were almost… I almost immediately knew that we would – that I would – bankrupt everybody. I mean, my parents, my in–laws… Everybody had to figure out what was left with their mortgages to try to pay it off for me. So that was it. I was like, “Oh, I’m the bad thing. I’m the thing that happens to everybody.” And that was probably the worst, the worst thought that I’ve ever had. So yeah.
Desperate forms of Christianity and the prosperity gospel’s ubiquity
Elizabeth
You were literally just finishing ‘Blessed’, the book about the prosperity gospel, and a lot of listeners –there are people who listen to the podcast, who’re Christians, there’s a lot of people who listen who are not Christians – and I think from the outside, it’s hard to distinguish the granularity of these different subcultures. And, you know, ‘Blessed’, it’s not harsh or unsympathetic, but it’s critical of the prosperity gospel. Could you say a bit more about what you think is the difference about the way Christianity plays out around suffering in some of those communities that came up in your book, and the way Christianity can play out around suffering in the way that that community of pastors showed up for you in fear and terror, and suffering? For people who might not have experienced either.
Kate Bowler
Yeah, well the prosperity gospel, it promises that there is a cure for suffering, and that it is faith. And that the right kind of Christian, a faithful one, the one who believes that good things are coming, the one who aligns their mindset in a particular positive way and speaks those words out loud, you know, “I will be happy”, “I will be healthy”. All those kinds of positive practices should then lead to, you know, a happy, healthy, wealthy life. And if it doesn’t, that means that you must have thought negatively, spoken negative things, been critical, not sufficiently put yourself in the right place at the right time. So we can think of it sort of like a boomerang: whatever is good then comes back to you, whatever is bad then comes back to you. So having spent 10 years supposedly learning the lessons of people who can make themselves happy, healthy, wealthy, then what did it say about me that I was 35 and dying? And there was like, a ready conclusion: it must have been something I did or said, something my family did or said, it could be generational, just… So, it’s a theology that needs a reason. And it wants you to find the reason not just to be cruel, but so that you can fix it, that you can save yourself. And there are lots of forms of Christianity that are desperate for reasons. But the form of Christianity that was so beautifully expressed in the Seminary where I work has a lot more mystery around how and why bad things happen to any of us. And in the mystery, we have a lot of practices: like praying for the sick, like just bringing casseroles till no one wants casseroles anymore. But acts of love and service and just like hopeful prayer make it very different. Because one has a formula, and one is where the thing has to happen, or else you failed. And the other is a not a formula, it’s just a response. Now that we know that, life falls apart. Like how can we live even still?
Elizabeth
How much do you see kind of prosperity gospel–type thinking playing out in wider America and I guess Western society? And the thing that’s coming to mind particularly is ‘manifesting’, which I am trying really hard not to be cynical about. And people I love aren’t really into it, but my instinctive response is not positive. Say a bit more about that for me.
Kate Bowler
It’s just the prosperity gospel. Secularised. Well, there’s so many versions of the idea that you have to think positively and that will attract into your life or create a reality around you. And it’s not just the prosperity gospel. That’s a Pentecostal version that has a set of mega churches that dominate the American landscape. So the reason why it’s so popular in the States is about 40% of churches over 10,000 are prosperity churches, and it dominates American religious television. So that’s why it feels bigger. It feels like it’s everywhere because it’s a market–dominant faith, not necessarily because it reflects the highest number of churches on the ground. And then there’s one bajillion forms of what are called like not prosperity gospels… ‘peloton’. Dear God, peloton. This is goop. Most of Oprah, most health and wellness gospels, any cousin who’s gotten into essential oils. It’s all predicated on the idea that everything is possible if you believe, if you attend this seminar, if you begin to set up time management strategies, that you can eat yourself, think yourself happy, healthy, whole. And so, “manifesting” is just a synonym for the many different forms the prosperity gospel could be called. Mind cure mental magic manifesting. The new one is also ‘lucky girl syndrome’. ‘Attracting’, like you’re attractional. ‘Positive thinking’, the power of positive thinking. Prosperity gospel… but it’s all the same. It’s a full “You are in charge of your own spiritual destiny. If it hasn’t happened, it’s because you didn’t spiritually try.”
Elizabeth
Which gives us a sense of agency, right? I feel the pull of it, the surrender to how little I control and how not just “not God” I am, but how little I understand God. The word, the concept. How little I understand the world, how tiny my brain is… When I feel spiritually healthy is when I have surrendered to that, and I’m able to just sit in the presence of Love and not feel like it’s my job to fix the complexity and fix my life. But this formative powers of the alternative are so strong that I do think I spend quite a lot of time in “I can fix suffering, I can fix the world” mode.
The reason for cancer and the life raft of Love
Did your diagnosis do like a full blown lifelong deprogramming? Do you think the work you’ve been doing had already done it, or did you realise, “Actually, a bit of me did believe that because I was a Christian, I was safe from this stuff”?
Kate Bowler
I mean, as much as I would have said that I don’t believe a single thing about the prosperity gospel, I would never assume a formulaic faith, I really did believe that life was a set of obstacles that I could overcome with my great choices and my spectacular personality. I mean, was I not very charming to nurses in the hospital? Like, am I not special? Am I not…? There’s a strange part of it, honestly, that fits into a very precious hard thing that I think most of us actually need to survive, which is, “Am I not worth loving? Am I not worth saving? Am I not good?” Like, in some way, that makes my pain actually valuable. That part was the bit that killed me, because I needed to know I was loved in some deep way or else… The way that the medical care system was taking care of me, honestly, I did come to believe that I was disposable. I was in a brutal clinical trial process for years that just mostly erased my ability to feel like I wasn’t just anyone who should get washed away. And then, simultaneously you have to actually, in order to grow up, you have to believe like, “Oh my gosh, everyone’s thinking… If we are all equally special. If everyone is special, no one is special. None of us are special.” Letting go of the “Couldn’t I have earned my way out of this?” was very painful. And I mean, that bit. That bit took me a long time, but I think the solution to that one wasn’t a different belief. It was how intensely I felt loved. That was the only sort of life raft.
Elizabeth
Did you have… I feel like a lot of people would have a major faith wobble under those circumstances.
Kate Bowler
I was very angry. It was very “Fuck you God”. I mean, “Thank you for this, the cruelty of this life.” And that was mostly related to having a two–year–old whose absolute perfection felt just like it spit in the face of like, “Isn’t there some kind of design flaw here?” It’s not just like, “Where’s God when bad things happen?”, but where is God then if good things happen? If this beautiful creation is the culmination of all my hopes and dreams, why does my love feel like it’s being punished so intensely? “Shouldn’t my life get better because I’m good at loving people? Oh, wait, it’s gotten significantly worse.” And so, that was not an easy… And I was so sad. I was so angry at mostly at other Christians. I was very angry at all the people who gave me like a green smoothie… I mean, colon cancer is a real treasure trove of people telling you it’s your fault. If you want to feel like you died from your own fatness, feel free to have colon cancer, because people will tell you. Everyone will tell you. Strangers will tell you. I had someone… a lady just came up and gave me a blender one time outside of my office. Just a stranger, never seen her again. And a smoothie book. She was like, “Here you go!”. Like, “Best wishes”. So I had a special anchor reserved for the health and wellness community. And for Christians who wanted to find a reason, and the reason had to be me. But the other bit, which was not sort of an equal and opposite, was just that there was… I had this completely bizarre spiritual experience when I was in the hospital, that lasted for about three or four months after. And it’s just that I felt, confusingly, spiritually loved. Like, weirdly bubble wrapped. And I couldn’t even get rid of it. I mean, I just felt so loved. And I didn’t pray anything, I didn’t earn it in any way, it just sort of got dropped in my lap like a present. And so I asked a lot of the beautiful seminary professors I work with and I was like, “What? Any thoughts on this one because I feel like I should be very angry right now.” And they offered me all these historical figures who had experienced the sweetness and Love of God. And I was like, “Great, well, it lasted for like, absolutely not… It will definitely it will definitely go away.” But I needed to know that I wasn’t going to be able to manufacture a set of feelings that would carry me through, that I would actually just need to be carried. And I mean, as you know already about me, Elizabeth, it’s like, I hate it when I can’t solve my own problems. I’m just miserable when I can’t fix myself.
A book for letting go and a podcast for fighting loneliness
Elizabeth
That is unfortunate. You started writing quite soon – not another academic, well, it sounds like two books… Maybe your ability to produce books is astonishing. Writing about preachers’ wives, but also ‘Everything Happens for a Reason, and Other Lies that I Have Loved”. How much was that, “I need to write for other people in this sort of ‘travel guide’ way.” Like, I’m in the valley of the shadow of death and it’s making some things clear, and I need to capture it and disseminate it, and how much… Because it was not obvious that an academic would start writing this beautiful memoir–y wisdom book.
Kate Bowler
Well, I was just extremely lonely, and I was stuck in that strange feeling where you are like an astronaut drifting into space, and I didn’t belong. I mean, I just felt like I would go to my son’s friends’ birthday parties and just be this bizarre, tragic, ghostly apparition. I looked terrible. I felt terrible. 1/7 of my life was spent in hospitals and airports for medical travel. It was just awful. So I started writing in waiting rooms and then… But mostly because I wanted to try to make sense of that bit before. This person I no longer recognise that had this, like, life as a series of choices, like ladder feeling. I was like, “Wait, wasn’t I that just a second ago?” And then whatever I was becoming, which felt a little more obsessed with love, but very confused then about what do I do with the rest of my personality, then? My whole personality is just, like, trying to super–achieve my way through things. Like, what the hell? What the hell do I do with all of this? And I saw it, and there was all kinds of stories that were so evocative to me. But I’ve been trying to write this in a serious historical genre, and I hadn’t really allowed myself to really think about the challenge that the prosperity gospel was posing to suffering, like a ‘shaking your fist at the sky’ feeling and then, when I was the person shaking my fist at the sky, I was like, “Okay, I want to rewrite what I think I learned from studying them for so long, and what I learned about myself.”
Elizabeth
Did you expect the response – presumably, no one expects the response – but what was it like, kind of putting the book and the podcast out into the world, and being met with the strength of feeling and relief and connection that you have been met with?
Kate Bowler
I think when I… So, it was exactly five years ago this week that I published the book and then launched the podcast. The book was mostly just trying to figure out my own mental infrastructure around trying to let go of having quite so many reasons for why bad things happen. But the podcast was really that ‘everything happens’ was just an attempt to get at the “I’m about as special as everybody else” feeling. Where the truth is, if we all have this sort of model of transcendent and horrifyingly petty thoughts about whether our lives should turn out, then I knew already that that was going to be language I would need to borrow and learn from other people. So that’s really what was such a relief, because I was so very lonely. And those podcast conversations, conversation partners, and then the community that developed around it, became my feeling that like, “Oh my, even if I’m sitting on the floor of radiology right now waiting for test results, there are all these people out there, and they know when we’re all living in the ‘in–betweenness’ and we want to do it with more courage, and we want to have a thicker account of hope.” But none of the language is going to be as obvious as we hoped it would be.
Elizabeth
Yeah. You sometimes called them “everything happens–type of people”. Kind of, who are they? Who are these people that you are so clearly serving and speaking to?
Kate Bowler
There’s two kinds of people, I think. One is the person like me, who’s the ‘experiencer’, sort of like the person who had a big undoing. And it could be a diagnosis, or a loss, or a divorce, or a parent or a kid who’s been in trouble. Suffering is such an acute experience, and so, often we say, “Well, I lack the words”. I’m like, “No, no, but we need the words because otherwise we’re not going to make it.” By that, you should mean that we’re not going to make life beautiful enough to live in the way we hoped. And then the other part of the community is people who often have very emotionally expensive professions. They might be types like you, beautiful you, meeting, making do–gooding types. They might do, you know, ministry, or teaching or social work or health care… but they’re in something that requires that they care, and maybe they don’t always want to anymore. I mean, they go through a little stretches, of like, “Ugh, I would rather not.” Those are also my people. I love them so much. So why do we keep choosing to put ourselves in the way of the world’s weakness and undoing. I’m very interested in what it takes to keep living like that.
Elizabeth
And my hunch is that everyone is one of those two categories at some point in their life, right? There’s the divide between the ‘suffering’ and the ‘not suffering’ is permeable.
Kate Bowler
There’s always one guy, Elizabeth. One guy is doing great. I feel like you see them every now and then. Nice, eating a salad. A 45–step salad.
Elizabeth
No, he’s heading for the meaning crisis. It’s all gonna fall apart underneath him.
On how to be supportive to someone who is suffering
So, I’m interested in divides. How do we talk across these divides and these differences? And one of the things you’ve written and spoken about a lot is, there is a sense in which sometimes the attempt to communicate with someone who is suffering, if you are not, in fact, in that moment, suffering or not suffering acutely, can go horribly wrong. Like, add additional suffering to someone who is suffering. I would just commend listeners to read everything you’ve written – but could you summarise a little bit about what you’ve learned? Because it does sometimes feel like a chasm, and someone feels like a wraith, or the fear and the terror of tragedy can just pull us asunder, right? We don’t know how to stay a thread of connection across such different circumstances. What helps us really see and really help each other?
Kate Bowler
Yeah. Well, I mean, one easy thing we can take off the table is any need to relativise or to or to frame their suffering in relationship to anyone else’s. So, it’s such a tempting thing to do, because we want to connect: “Oh, I also had a…” But then you find you’re hearing about somebody’s like, weird ankle problem, and you’re like, “Oh, I just had a liver resection. Same, same, same.” So all relativising language is not all that useful. Anything that starts with ‘at least’. “At least you’re in a good hospital”. Well, ‘at least’ often makes the person feel like they have to justify how sad they are. Most relating language is actually pretty hard. If someone’s child died, that’s not usually the moment in which they want to know that your child died, unless you can say it was such a light touch that you’re not handing it to them. You’re just situating yourself in their world, but that is a that is a magical art form. And my nurse did it maybe two months into my chemo. She just said it so lightly, she said, “Oh, I meant to tell you. I lost a child.” But she said it like she was giving it to me, like a little bridge between us. It was so beautiful, honestly. So I thought, “Oh, you live on my planet too. Thank you. I had no idea.” It’s so sweet and perfect. I just saw her yesterday. We stayed up till 1am crying and she is… nurses: they are a dream. Most people really can’t bear to hear how your aunt had the same thing, because almost always the aunts of the world are doing very poorly. And they often died. So if your aunt had it and died of it, tell someone else. Tell someone else. And most attempts at solving are not likely useful. “Oh, I recently saw a documentary” is always the worst beginning to a sentence in which to solve the problem of sugar born, et cetera, et cetera. But teaching, solving, relativising, are all very normal instincts. But almost always what people want is just for you to like, fully face them. Like, both your little shoulders squared, and then look at them with love, like you’re not scared of them. Don’t look like you’re trying to run away, and then let them finish the sentence even if the end of the sentence makes your heart lurch, where they go, “Actually, I have an incurable, unfixable, etc, problem”, and just let them land. Because what you’ll hear in their voices, they want desperately to go, “Well, I have this.” They’re like a plane taking off, because they’re too scared to hand it to you. So just let them hand it to you and say, “I’m just so on your team. You’ll do a great job.”
Elizabeth
Yeah. Yeah, like most important things in life, it just takes some courage, doesn’t it? Some courage and some attention to get out of the automatic, which is “I want to fix it. How do I fix it?” And “I’m dealing with my own feelings. How do I settle my own feelings?” Well, I’m going to try and pretend it’s not as bad as it seems.
Kate Bowler
Yes. Right. And sometimes… I mean, one thing I do too, is I just put a little reminder in my calendar that maybe if you’re not the crisis person, maybe their thing sets off in you a lot of other feelings, maybe be the later person. Put something on your calendar for three months that says “Check in with so and so about this.” I swear to you, very few people get the three to six to nine month check–up. And they would love to have somebody pop in at that time, even if it’s with like, “Oh my gosh, I’m such a fan of dumb presents.” If all else fails, just buy a stupid non–teachy, unrelated present. The first present I ever got that was just like, erasers. It was just stupid animal erasers. I burst into tears. I was so happy. I learnt no lessons that day.
Elizabeth
Yeah. Someone who can bring a casserole long after all the other casseroles are eaten. That’s a sign that I’m still here. It’s a nice thing.
Kate Bowler
Exactly. Yeah. I didn’t wear you out with my stupid long form problem.
The distortions of social media and how to bowl down the middle
Elizabeth
I wanted to ask a little bit about social media. Because when I talked to people about what makes it difficult to connect with people across our divides, to keep seeing people as fully human, to be growing in empathy rather than tribalism, social media is often named as a problem. And it is definitely that. But rather, you’re one of the few people who gives me hope that it is possible to use social media in ways that do the opposite, that connect us to each other. How natural has that journey been? And how do you think – you’re a very thoughtful, intentional person – how do you think about that bit of what now feels like your vocation and your job, which is saying some of these hard things on Instagram, for example? I’d love to hear more about that journey.
Kate Bowler
Well, thank you. That’s such a cool thing to hear. I really care a lot about social scripts. And I do really worry that the social scripts, especially for women, on platforms like Instagram, or God forbid, TikTok, have forced all of us to be the thing we thought we despised. It has made everyone into a televangelist of good, better, best. I mean, took those once a year Christmas cards where every child is a scholarship recipient and then made that into a daily… It really has distorted how well we think other people are doing. And I know we know this, but then there we are, just 8PM, scrolling through, finding our own lives feel distorted. I think it’s very difficult to communicate to other people how we’re really doing without looking like it’s a plea for attention in a way that then makes us have to do more work when we’re actually just having a hard time. If your thing looks too sad, then it creates work. If it looks too happy, oh boy, then we’re all stuck in a funhouse mirror forever. I tried to imagine Instagram as a place where you can kind of bowl down the middle, and just try to work against type. So if everybody else got children in matching denim, then we wear whatever we’re wearing, and try to capture a moment of genuine joy, and try not to imagine whether that joy looks the same as how the photo… whether the photo matches what the emotional experience was. And then use it to find and connect with the people that you know feel the same. So I love hearing about people’s very dumb joys on Instagram. Show me a picture of the… I build gingerbread mega–churches at Christmas. Show me your dumb, whatever, whatever, knitting monstrosity, whatever. And I use it too so that we can sort of bless each other and pray for each other and name those. That is the right amount of disclosure, where people can just add a few names and words, and then we can use that as an opportunity to really keep each other’s burdens in mind. So because we’re always on it, we may as well just find little windows for uncomfortable honesty.
The ‘faux secular’ perfect world of #blessed, and genuine blessing
Elizabeth
Yeah. And both your books – both your memoirs and your books of blessing – and I think your Instagram, my impression is that probably like the base started with people who were also Christians, but it’s now much broader. How do you think about that? And why do you think that it has been possible, given that we are so algorithmically predetermined to end up in bubbles? I find it very refreshing to watch you communicate in ways that are authentically Christian and entirely accessible for my friends who are not.
Kate Bowler
Oh, that’s nice. That’s so nice. Well, I think the thing that we’re all struggling with, which in the Christian iteration is the prosperity gospel, and it’s not really that… we’re all doing battle with religious presuppositions that hurt us, that we should always be able to fix our life. Like, there’s really no secular and religious in those versions. There’s just like, the wellness industry is ‘faux secular’. Everyone’s local hot yoga studio, fake secular. I mean, I guess that’s why it feels like we’re all going to battle against the same exhausting, ‘toxic positivity’ kind of presuppositions. So, in those, we just get to spend a lot of time though. And this is my favourite part about theology, is picking the concepts that really resonate. Like, the other day, I realised I was reading a little history of the term “prudence”, about, like the wisdom to discern. And I was like, “What isn’t that exactly right? Isn’t that we’re all trying to do?” But that’s different than curating, which has this framework of control. So I think that’s what I love about it, is if we can pick words that resonate, we can almost like excavate the religious presuppositions that undergird all of our actually secretly ‘pretend secular’ lives. If I could pick anything to be like my job, it would just be that.
Elizabeth
Well, I think you’re already doing it. And why do you think the language of ‘blessing’ – people are finding it so helpful?
Kate Bowler
Because they got stuck in “#blessed” like I did for so long. I mean, #blessed went bananas online about 13/14 years ago, and since then, we have used it as a synonym for lucky, in a way that “actually I really do deserve it”. So, trying to translate some of the #blessed feelings “Isn’t this mountaintop yoga experience so devastatingly exciting”, into an attempt… Because this is my worry with social media or any of it. So my life continues to suck in documentable ways. Like, oh my gosh, I just like cannot catch a break. I cannot catch a break. And so, like, if I wait until some perfect world to get my ‘#blessed moment’, I’m not going to get it. It is not around the corner. So then what can I say instead? I really like the language for ‘blessing’ because it lets me say, “What spiritually true thing can I say, here and now, even though I’m not living my best life now.” Blessing – it’s my go to, and it genuinely is what lets me say “Bless this garbage day. Bless this painful day. Bless this day where the bad thing feels like it’s never gonna end. Bless this life.”
Elizabeth
Kate Bowler, it’s been a real joy. Thank you for being present.
Kate Bowler
Oh my gosh, you’re a dream.
Elizabeth Oldfield’s reflection on her conversation with Kate Bowler
Elizabeth
Well, obviously, I love Kate. I think she is a real gem, a real refreshing and encouraging bringer of hope, in the least saccharin possible way. And basically, I want to be like her when I grow up. I think we’re basically the same age, but I hope to grow a character as luminous as Kate’s. I obviously hope I don’t have to go through what she’s gone through to get there, which is probably one of those deeply unhelpful things that non–cancer people say, which is the group I’m currently in, as far as I know. But Kate’s story reminds us that at some point in our lives, we will all struggle. We will all suffer. We will all grieve, and her determination to make something of it and to make meaning of it, it reminded me actually of Katherine Rundell’s book on John Donne, ‘Super–Infinite’. And I hope to have Katherine on The Sacred at some point, but it’s something that she wrote about John Donne that he kind of tried to hammer his sufferings into something meaningful, and I really see that in Kate. “You flick the cord of the universe, and it rings.” My goodness, what a delicious sentence. It’s like a little piece of poetry. It made my whole body sort of scrunch up a little bit in the way that… Did it happen to anyone else? When you hear something that feels so right, or true, or perceptive, I get a little sort of spasm in my body, of recognition. And the fact that tragi–comedy is sacred to her: wow. Yeah, life is bittersweet. She has this amazing mural in in Durham where Duke University is, which goes “Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.” And it’s become a place of pilgrimage for a lot of people, and people have stitched it onto cushions and other things like that. And I can see why it’s one of those incredibly simple things to say that somehow holds such a weight of profundity, and I just find it… I find myself muttering it to myself sometimes. “Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.” And what Kate represents, for me, is this kind of stubborn resistance to the binaries. It feels to me like something in the human mind or heart or soul really wants there to be a binary a lot of the time, really wants there to be a clear, “good or bad”, “yes or no”. Humans are really good underneath, and occasionally they go bad. Humans are really evil underneath, and with some strong structure they can be made good. You know, there is all hope, there is all despair. And we don’t seem to want to balance on the kind of balance bar, on the narrow way, in the ambiguity, in the complexity of the both. And Kate is why she feels a bit like a prophet to me. Life is so beautiful, life is so hard, and the temptation to either be delusional and deny the darkness and the suffering of the world and of our lives, or just close our ears to it and distract ourselves and numb and make things shiny and comfortable – both of these, I think, are temptations. And that she has like the courage to stay in the tension. The “Christian neck brace years”. Funny! Also, I wanted to say, if you didn’t know what she was saying when she said “Nephilite”. A Nephilite is one of the weirder bits of the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, in the kind of ancient bit to the Hebrew Bible, there are references to these Nephilim which basically giants, half–humans, half–giants. It’s very significant word for me, because after became a Christian, one of the youth leaders came down to see our family and we’re a very tall family. I’m five foot 11. We all take up a lot of space. And he said, “Oh, you’re the Nephilim family. Look at all these Nephilim clothes.” It really stayed with me. It’s the only association I have being ‘tall–shamed’ as a teenager. Took me quite a long time to feel at home in my stature. A nosiness of theological questions was another thing I wrote down. So amazing. Also, we sort of skimmed over it, but part of her story is of infertility and “I’m not starting to try and have a family till late” because of the misogyny of academia telling female academics that they shouldn’t have children because it would ruin their careers. That makes me extremely angry. It also makes me – and if you if you are in fact a male academic, or just a man in the workplace who could just be alert to these dynamics, I hope things are changed and have changed and are changing, but I don’t think we’re fully there. And my experience is that we are not fully there. Please, would you just pay as much attention as you possibly can to the bright, ambitious women around you who maybe want to have kids? And what are the messages they’re getting about that? Sorry, rant over. The love that she experienced after her diagnosis. I have to say, I think she’s exactly right. You want a priest in a crisis. They are like people who are very calm in a metaphysical crisis. They are very… They spend a lot of their life on the like frontlines of human experience, on the extremes of human experience. And they are not fazed. They are not the people who will come out with clichés, they are not the people who will try and minimise your suffering. They are not the people who will try and sprinkle God like a plaster over what you’re going through, unless they’re really bad. And I have never met one. And the picture of the sort of accident that Kate works in a bit of the university where a lot of people trained to be priests, and then they will showing up at her bedside with anointing oil, and liturgies, and prayers is just extremely beautiful. I’m going to make this such a long episode because I could go on about all the amazing things that she said that I loved. So I will try and be brief, she is honest. We talk a lot about authenticity in public, and I have come to slightly cringe at the word because it’s one of the ones we’ve worn out, but Kate is honest. She’s honest about being lonely, she’s honest about being scared, she’s honest about being angry, she’s honest about feeling loved by God. And I had such a sense with her in a way that I almost only feel with artists. That in her telling the truth about her life, she’s forming these webs of connection. She’s forming these threads, from heart to heart and mind to mind, and all those moments where human beings go “Oh, me too.” Where we feel recognised, and dignified and seen, because our experience is no longer our experience alone, but part of something bigger, part of the human condition, and it’s extremely beautiful. And the final thing I will say is, I want to really take seriously that advice about what to do when the divide that you are trying to cross is one between the suffering and the ‘suffering–less’, between the person who is going through the worst thing that could happen in their life and you, and their sense of “Don’t run away. Don’t minimise. Don’t say ‘at least’. Don’t give advice. Don’t try and fix it.” Just square your shoulders and look them in the eye, and try not to look afraid of them and say, “I am totally on your team.”
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