Kate Bowler on Faith, Fragility, and the Surprising Gift of Fear
Ten years ago, at just 35 years old, Kate Bowler was told she had stage 4 colon cancer and that it was incurable. As a Professor of Religious History at Duke University, the diagnosis prompted her to rethink her beliefs surrounding struggle and success. As she began treatment, Bowler also embarked on another more public journey, making it her mission to help people navigate suffering and find happiness despite life’s uncertainties.
She launched a podcast, Everything Happens, now deeply beloved and in its 13th season, and wrote several New York Times bestsellers, the most recent of which is Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!: Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs & In-Betweens . A collection of reflections and blessings, Kate hopes it will help people to “feel the truth of our realities, without letting reality itself overwhelm us,” and remind us that we can be faithful and feel afraid at the same time.
A CONVERSATION WITH KATE BOWLER
Do you have a regular practice or ritual that helps you find stillness and stay above the noise?
There’s one moment every day when I feel the most grounded, and it’s at night when I pray with my son. He has this absurdly large bunk bed, so I have to crawl on my knees to get up to him because he is so buried in stuffed animals and kid nonsense. But there’s something about his big feelings and me being on my knees that reminds me to connect my love with my gratitude every day. It’s that overwhelming feeling of: Here I am, as a parent, and also as a believer. It feels like worshipping at the altar of love. Also, he’s ridiculous. His prayers include: “Mom, do you think we could ride in a zeppelin?” Even though I’ve explained that they explode!
What does “living a meaningful life” mean to you?
We are handed a pretty ridiculous script for what it means to live a meaningful life: be happy, look shiny, have purpose, live your best life, don’t have an off moment, and hope it looks great on Instagram. But I really think a meaningful life begins with honesty—being able to say, This is beautiful, this is terrible, and then ask, How might there still be beauty in this? How might there still be joy and sorrow in the same pair of hands? I think a meaningful life isn’t one where you feel forced to stay on script. A meaningful life is one that’s allowed to unfold. Because, truthfully, none of us are going to be able to stay on script for very long. Not one of us hasn’t had our lives interrupted by something we didn’t choose.
I think in those moments, people feel frantic to try to get back on script, get back to the way they were before, and that creates a whole wave of unnecessary, secondary suffering—because then we go from struggling to feeling like we’re failing. That’s why I worry that even the best advice about living a meaningful life can accidentally cause us to feel like we aren’t doing it right. So, I like to start with honesty and then allow what’s most beautiful to try to bubble up from inside.
Tell us about your faith journey.
I grew up Canadian, which has no magical story about God choosing Canada for divine reasons, which I really appreciated. But I was still raised in a faith that loved certainty. And I’ve loved certainty too—I’ve loved a closet belief that God is supposed to make my life measurably better. But what suffering, aging, and being cracked open has taught me is that faith will feel a lot less like certainty and a lot more like mystery and love. So often in life we have to start again. Faith is asking God to be present in what is, instead of what I wish it would be.
How do you find space for spirituality in the everyday?
I take a minute to try to make an ordinary thing feel special. When I’m writing, I light a candle—I have a series of hilarious candles with the faces of my friends on them—and I try to let there be a pause. Having a moment in writing, it does sort of feel like you quarry a well. You dig into a deeper place, and then there’s one moment where suddenly you have an insight that you didn’t have before, and you’re so grateful. Those moments are usually my best days, because I feel like I got a chance to be a part of discovering something I wouldn’t have known. Those are the magical days.
But I have weird little rituals I do almost every day, like my ridiculous candles. I have a very solemn moment where I put moisturizer on my face, as I try to remember to be grateful for my body that, you know, I have mixed reviews about. Being overly serious about things that aren’t that big of a deal is such a joy.
I also find that doing something I don’t typically do opens up a space for feeling surprised by love, and by the divine. I think it’s pretty hard to surprise somebody who stays on script. If you do the exact same thing every day, it’s probably going to be the same every day. So sometimes I try to challenge myself to do something slightly out of the ordinary, and I find that it makes me more generous with other people, with my time. Just being willing to be interrupted by other people lets me experience God in the particularity of someone else’s life.
I feel it always when I go to the hospital: I don’t want to be there, it’s never for a good reason. But when you sit in the waiting room, you get to see the specificity of somebody else’s careworn face, somebody with their arm around them. It makes me fall in love with the world again. Except the intake person. That person’s always grouchy.
On your podcast Everything Happens, you say the world would be a gentler place if we took apart the well-meaning clichés we use when life is hard. How do we cope when our life plans are disrupted or derailed?
Well, I think step one is raging against all of the cultural messaging we get—that we should have figured it out by now, that other people are already at the finish line. Allowing yourself to feel and to name the guilt, shame, and embarrassment of feeling like you’re failing. Nothing in culture is going to let you off the hook for that.
Then, leaning on people who can sit with you without fixing you. It opens up a whole different kind of friendship and way of relating to people when you realize that sometimes what you really want is just a witness: This is real, isn’t it? You saw what I saw? Tragedy or loss is often devastating for friendships, because no one knows what to do. And everyone should be let off the hook for feeling like they’re supposed to do that perfectly. It takes work to even allow people to see how undone we are. But man, when they do and they get to see that over time, it becomes more and more precious to have that witness.
And then letting ourselves grieve the life we thought we’d have. I like it when people can ritualize it. Even if you write it on a piece of paper and burn it up, all these moments give us a chance to feel like the loss was real. At first it makes you feel like you’re being dramatic—like, wouldn’t I get over it faster if I didn’t make such a big deal out of it? But I find that the more people let it take up its own space and be as big of a deal as it is, the faster they can get over it, because they’ve been allowed to. It sort of gives it its own oxygen. So my friends and I, we try to ritualize it as much as possible. We like to make a big deal. It doesn’t have to be throwing a party about it, although that is hilarious.
How has your experience of cancer changed the way you live your life?
My health is so much better than we ever expected, because I am 10 years out and I’m still alive, which is truly incredible. But I’ve had to get used to living with a lot more fragility, health appointments, and chronic illnesses, which has forced me into a different way of living. Because at first, it’s just the tragedy, right? It’s the event of cancer. It’s a huge wave with a big wake. But then you have to learn to keep on living with what you know, and I have found that to be a life’s work.
I try to hold plans more lightly. I try to waste less time pretending that I am invincible. It’s hard, because when your body’s not working, you just want to crawl out of your own throat and find someone else’s body. I mean, you just can’t believe you’re stuck in this one. It feels like we should get a reboot, and then we don’t, and that continues to be a surprise.
About once a day, I feel afraid, and I don’t ever tell anybody. I think about all the things that could come back, all the problems I still have. I remember what it was like to think I was going to die that year, and it never really leaves you. But there’s a little decision in that every time: do I stay in a place of fear? The fear is going to happen anyway, so just accept that it’s going to happen once a day. But then what? And I think the answer is that if there’s space for my fear, there has to be space for my joy. So in that way, I try to let fear be what it is. I don’t know if you ever really, entirely get used to it.
Did cancer change your relationship with God?
God feels more like presence than protection. I love what Father Greg Boyle says: “My God protects me from nothing and sustains me in everything.” I find that spiritually refreshing. I think what that implies is that life requires a lot more courage than we maybe expected. But I think that when we feel deeply loved—loved by God, loved by others—it is emboldening. If we believed we were that loved, maybe we wouldn’t feel quite so undone by how much we weigh in the morning, whether other people are mad at us at this very moment, whether we’re getting our emails done.
Do you have a message or a piece of advice for others who have had their life plans derailed?
I wish I had taken a moment to not try to make everything meaningful right away. It made me feel scared and anxious to always be asking: Why did this happen? What is this for? In the end, the most beautiful things that happened I couldn’t even have invented. The good parts were feeling weirdly loved by God, usually in the moments when I felt the most physically weak, terrible, and scared. And then people who showed up who I didn’t expect. Like waking up from a surgery and wearing socks I did not put on—socks a colleague had knitted for me, and then obviously broke hospital visiting hours to make sure that I was wearing these rainbow wool socks.
If you’re scared and your life’s come undone, you feel like you have to create all these moments that are going to fix it. So yeah, the bad thing happened to you, but also some of the best things are going to happen to you too. So you can just calm down a little.
Also, I think it’s okay to need help a lot longer than you thought you would. Because the first wave will come and go, and you’re still going to feel ridiculous. And it’s okay to want and need things at that stage too, and to ask for help long after people think you need it. And you’re still entirely lovable, even though you feel like you are suddenly the bad thing.
What would you say to people who want to find peace, stillness, and closeness to God in the muddle and jumble of everyday life?
Start smaller than you think. Maybe just a deep breath and a short prayer. A real moment of frankness. And then let the peace find you without feeling like you have to engineer a better story.
I think God’s greatest, sneakiest gift is creeping up in the middle of the mess. And we just have to be willing to take a moment and wait. I think that’s why I like the prayer time at night. It’s just there in the middle of an absurd day.
We couldn’t get my son’s school computer to connect with the magical password and printer function. It was all the terrible chaos of feeling like it’s day one and you’re failing. And then you just turn off the lights, take one deep breath, and there you are right back at that altar of love.
Kate Bowler is the three-time New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason, No Cure for Being Human, Good Enough, The Lives We Actually Have, Blessed, and The Preacher’s Wife and hosts the popular podcast Everything Happens. A Duke University professor, she earned a master’s of religion from Yale Divinity School and a PhD at Duke University.
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