Enlightened Perspectives: Kate Bowler Shows Grace in Gravity

Kate Bowler doesn’t believe everything happens for a reason. In fact, she takes umbrage at the aphorism, which she cheekily appropriated for the title of her 2018 New York Times bestselling memoir, adding the subtitle “And Other Lies I’ve Loved.” (Everything Happens, a popular podcast, soon followed.) Three years earlier, at the age of 35, the associate professor of American religious history at Duke University was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer, upending the life she shared with her husband Toban and their newborn son Zach. Bowler rallied—and thrived—overcoming a two-year survival prognosis and discovering that she could find joy even when things were, well, awful.

In her latest book, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day: Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs & In-Betweens, Bowler weaves together Bible verses, meditations, and reflection prompts to address the wide spectrum of the human experience. In this conversation with contributing editor Karen Brailsford, the banter ricochets from giggles to grief and tears and back to giggles again—life in all its fullness.

Karen Brailsford: When I pick up Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! I feel as if it’s vibrating. It’s clearly infused with your energy, with Spirit’s energy. Is that what you hoped people would feel?

Kate Bowler: That’s exactly right. It came out of a painful time to hope because I was overwhelmed with chronic pain. I had such a limited window during the day to imagine any beautiful thing happening. [Tears up.] You understand how vulnerable hope is and how very precious it is when you get to share it with other people.

Karen: Was the title inspired by Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?

Kate: [Laughs] I love Roald Dahl and I love kids’ books! My favorite are the ones that never talk down to you. They let you know that you’re about to confront the world in all its ridiculousness. When you are a kid, you don’t have a lot of control over what will happen. I think that’s partly why kids love the rambunctious honesty of “Guess what? Sometimes everything will go wrong!”

Karen: Why did you write this book?

Kate: I am prone to a certain kind of cheerfulness that gets out of control. I’m worried that if I’m honest about what is going on, it will be too difficult for other people. I worry that if I’m honest with myself, I will tilt toward despair. And so I find myself protecting myself and others from the truth. The truth is I often have chronic pain or some kind of difficulty that is happening to me that I have very little control over.

Karen: So in a way you wrote it for yourself.

Kate: Books are like time capsules. They act like these little reminders sprinkled through my own life that become testimonies. “Oh, yeah, that does remind me of my best friend who reminded me that I was deeply loved and able to meet this challenge. Oh, yeah, that did remind me of the time when the pain was so loud, I had to remember that I am fragile and trapped inside my body sometimes.” Otherwise, a bad story has a way of sweeping all the landmarks away. I think one of the lovely bits of being part of a podcast and this community is we get to reweave meaning back into a story that could either just be one way or the other.

Karen: Then the story continues to unfold as you’re living it.

Kate: I had that initial very difficult experience of feeling like my life had been taken apart by cancer in so many ways. Getting the opportunity to live through it and then to be able to add layer after layer of meaning—my own story and other people’s stories—helped me come up with more careful language about what’s possible. I met this incredible family the other day who had lost both their kids. It was so beautiful listening to them describe the intensity of their love and how much their hearts were being reformed in the process. We need ways to show that love can grow in a new direction. Then we’re not only destroyed by what happens to us, we are also remade. It’s a miracle when people are still whole after tragic circumstances. It’s almost like you have to see the miracle over and over again to be reminded of what is still possible.

Karen: What is possible?

Kate: I’m so Canadian. We try to keep our feelings mostly to ourselves. But in my very worst moments, I have felt so absurdly loved. Loved by God. Loved by other people. Loved even if I felt angry at God, about the medical care I received, or at the inadequacy of what it’s like to be a person with pain in the world. And that really weird bubble wrap of divine experience has completely transformed what I think we’re promised on earth—which is not what a lot of people think we are promised.

I don’t think that faith is always going to give us all of our heart’s desire or the health or finances that we want. But I do know that it promises us the gift of community. The point of us being gathered into churches and religious communities is that we get to carry each other. We’re promised a story about how in the end all things will be made right, and every tear will be dried, and that we will be saved from ourselves and anything that would do us harm. It’s kind of an insanely hopeful story about God saving the world. And we get glimmers of incredibly beautiful things that remind us that we are never alone and that every good and true thing we see about ourselves is also a reflection of all of God’s and love’s greatest qualities. I think the problem is if we keep our vision too narrow and too immediate, we’re going to miss the big story.

Karen: Your first book, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, addressed this.

Kate: It is one of the most popular Christian theologies of the modern era: God will give us health, wealth, and happiness within the course of our lifetime, so we’ll always be able to have a kind of spiritual show and tell. It’s incredibly American because it tells the story of a spiritual version of the American character: that every act of bootstrapping gets to see a reward. The problem is that it tries to explain away the suffering of all people as being something they deserve. We’ve all seen beautiful people who seem to hit every branch on the way down. It lacks a charity or a wider view of how much people have to struggle against the injustice of the world and the society we live in. I’m hopeful, though. Every time we go through something, there’s a little window where we can try to offer ourselves some of the grace that our culture hasn’t given us. There’s that moment where we know that hope is a kind of protest. We get to push back against the things that told us we were not worthy or lovable or scrape off some of the shame that sticks to us when we have a difficult season.

That’s what I’m really excited about—this culture that doesn’t mind talking about mental health and community and justice. We don’t always know why bad things happen to us. When people say they believe everything happens for a reason, I never want to take that away from them. I just want to add the asterisk that I’m not sure God always acts in a way that I will be made aware of. I never want to say that a terrible experience was there to teach me a divine lesson. But I am completely devoted to the idea of finding wisdom in the midst of the terrible thing. What I love about hearing other people’s stories is that they’ll give you these gorgeous, horrifying true glimmers of what they could have only learned because they went through it.

Karen: What about your spiritual background helped you thrive?

Kate: My parents became Christians a little bit later in life. I grew up without a lot of the kitsch and culture in a secular country so I always thought that spirituality could be a shockingly beautiful way of seeing the world. Part of the reason I wanted to be a professor like my parents is that I realized it was an amazing way to see art and beauty. It was also an amazing way of being nosy. I became a professional interviewer so I could ask people, “What makes you tick? Why did you choose this not that?”

I’ve always loved faith as a worldview in such a heartfelt way. But when I got really sick, I had to pose a really hard set of questions: “God, if you love me, why is this so painful and why is everything coming apart? God, if anything is true about you, what is true now?” The stuff that was true about God throughout the worst of my cancer and that carries me now is that God is overwhelming love. That God will never leave us. That my life might not be outwardly proof of something, but it’s still the long story where everything will be beautiful, even for me. Now every time somebody falls and a rung breaks in their ladder, my heart is fully broken open to that because I certainly didn’t deserve to live, and I certainly didn’t deserve to die. I think that has made me a very different person than I was before. And in that way, I think I’m kind of thriving.

Karen: You have a tattoo!

Kate: [Holds up left wrist] I’d had a really unlucky stretch. I had infertility for years and then I had my absolutely spectacular, perfect son. I consider his birth the luckiest day of an unlucky stretch, so I got his birthday in Roman numerals tattooed. One of the temptations after something bad happens to me is to say, “Of course that happened to me.” I had to remind myself that the very luckiest things also happen to me. It helps me balance a narrative where I am too fearful. I used to do that week after week for chemotherapy. I would make giant lists on a whiteboard over my fireplace of every lovely thing that happened. And it genuinely made the time feel special again. There’s a magical feeling you get when you see love everywhere. That’s how gratitude feels to me—this sort of shimmery feeling.

Karen: You’ve used the word glimmer and shimmer. I described your book as vibrating. That’s the energy behind all of this—of life and love!

Kate: I feel like you can never get the full view of everything that’s happening. But when you get enough sparks, I think of them as breadcrumbs, little trails that remind you of hope, love, other people. Those are the things you don’t always get a clear picture of. That’s why you have to hold onto the little glimmers.

Karen: I think that sometimes the glimmers are actually big. I say that’s God or the Universe speaking.

Kate: The language I use for that is transcendence—when you feel God breaking into things.

Karen: Did you ever just want to throw a pity party?

Kate: Yes, I was really scared. I was less afraid of dying and more afraid of nothing being as good for my family. I believe you get to go on and be with God. But I knew grief can cause so much pain. It’s funny, I was really kind of devastated. But I had to stay very angry all the time because I was having such terrible medical care. And I found that really difficult—having to constantly oscillate between trying to live out what I thought was my last year with gratitude and openness and soaking in all the experiences, and then having to go to the hospital and pick a serious fight about whether the care I was getting was ethical. One of the trickiest questions is when do you fight and when do you have to be a passenger and let what is happening happen to you?

Karen: How does your anger show up?

Kate: I use what my mom would call a healthy outdoor voice. I used to not be able to ask the Applebee’s waitress for ketchup. I am much more assertive now.

Karen: You also had to allow yourself to be helped.

Kate: I would’ve done everything by myself until I died. But then people love you, and you have to let them.

Karen: And they stepped up. I love your appendixes in Everything Happens for a Reason where you list what to say and what not to say. When my mother died, my siblings and I wrote such a list. “Do not say, ‘I always loved that hat of hers.’” Too soon.

Kate: [Laughs] Oh, really? I would love to see that list! Almost all the mistakes we make are extensions of things we know how to do that work in almost every other situation. Like when someone says something and you want to relate to them, it becomes, “Oh, you have cancer. Well, my aunt died of cancer.”

Karen: They’re trying to connect as opposed to just listening.

Kate: I think we are naturally meaning-making creatures. Every time we’re trying to decide why something is happening, it’s actually really tender spiritual work. We don’t always get to choose the days we have. Some of them might be terrible or some of them might be wonderful. We have to be able to make space inside of all of our days to hold both hope and fear together.

Karen: There’s a lot of humor in Everything Happens.

Kate: I think some people make life more beautiful, richer, by noticing beauty. The key to my heart is absurdity. I find humor is the way to tell the truth about something that is almost unbearable but then becomes slightly more bearable because it is ridiculous. All I want is the funny, random story that cuts through the noise of what’s happening, and then it’s a very different kind of day.

Karen: The good thing about life and with people is that you’re going to find plenty of random stories!

Kate: It’ll never end! The other day I had to get an MRI and they either forgot to remove or were just too cheap to take the ads off Spotify. It was so funny. I was screaming through the microphones, “Guys, this is really expensive! I feel you could afford the $7.99.” We were all just dying.

Kate Bowler, associate professor at Duke University, is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books. To learn more about her, visit katebowler.com.

This article appeared in the Sept/Oct issue of Spirituality & Health: A Unity Publication®. Subscribe now.