Special Episode: “Blessings Reimagined” with Kate Bowler
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Host
Sarah Bessey
Find Sarah online: @SarahBessey on Instagram or Sarah Bessey on Facebook. You can also subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter, Field Notes on Substack. Explore Sarah’s recent books on her website.
Featured guest
Kate Bowler
Kate Bowler, PhD, is a New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and a professor at Duke University. She studies the cultural stories we tell ourselves about success, suffering, and whether (or not) we’re capable of change. She researches the history of the prosperity gospel and evangelical celebrity culture, which gave her a unique perspective when she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at age 35 and had to confront her own beliefs about sorrow and achievement. Her books include Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) and No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear), as well as Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection and The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days, both of which she co-authored with Jessica Richie. Kate hosts the Everything Happens podcast where, in warm, insightful, often funny conversations, she talks with people as varied as Katie Couric, Richard Rohr, and Stanley Tucci about what they’ve learned in difficult times.
Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. You can find her website at katebowler.com.
“The particularity and universality of our hopes are always, I think, crashing into each other. And so I feel very certain and lovey about Jesus and very shruggy about using language like God’s purpose or things like that.”
Thanks to our producer, SueAnn Shiah, who also provided the music for this episode, you can listen to her album A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, or Bandcamp and find her at @sueannshiah on Instagram and @sueannshiah on Twitter.
Transcript
Part 1: Introduction
SARAH: Hi friends, Sarah Bessey here. It's been a minute. I'm sure you were surprised when we popped back up in your podcast feed, but hopefully it was a good surprise. So officially, hello and welcome back to The Evolving Faith Podcast. We are on Twitter and Instagram as @EvolvFaith and over on Facebook as Evolving Faith. And we are also a thriving online community over at community.evolvingfaith.com, where more than 9,000 of your fellow wanderers are currently journeying together. So thank you for joining us today. I'm so glad that you're here. I've got some Evolving Faith news to share, and then we'll have a beautiful conversation with our friend Kate Bowler.
We're exploring the language that we reach for when we don't know how to pray anymore. We're going to discuss the search for spiritual language around blessing, praying without certainty, and Kate is going to field some questions from you all in the Evolving Faith community about hope and her own faith journey. We also chat about her latest book, which she co-authored with Jessica Richie. It's called The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days. And the process of writing blessings for our honest human everyday existence.
So first, let's just go ahead and name the elephant in the room. It is just me here at the podcast today. In case you hadn't heard the news on social media or through our newsletter a few months ago, my co-conspirator and beloved brother, Jeff Chu, made the decision to step away from co-leading Evolving Faith. It was good and right and healthy, but still sad. We had a really good three years, more than three years, of doing good work together.
It has never been easy work, mind you, but it has been mostly good, and I'm incredibly grateful. I'm proud of Jeff. I think we're all still learning how important it is to model wisdom and boundaries and care and leadership. He is doing that exact thing right now. You can always still find him over at his website, over at Instagram as @ByJeffChu, his newsletter. We'll have all those links in the show notes so you don't have to search around too much. But he'll also still be around, especially at the online Evolving Faith community. He's going to continue to moderate the BIPoC affiliate group in particular.
But saying thank you to Jeff for everything that he has offered all of us over these years will be inadequate. But I just want to say it anyway, just thank you for everything. In particular, I just want to express how grateful I am for all that he gave to this community. No one, not even me, will ever know just how much, and he is very, very missed. But we are cheering him on as he continues in his important and vital writing projects and, of course, his PhD work. So for those of you who are worried or uncertain about Evolving Faith, it's all good. And that's part of why I'm here in your podcast feed. We're still us. We are still excited about what's ahead. We have just a ridiculously rock-solid team of leaders and ministers at the helm still, and we exist still and always to cultivate that love and hope and the wilderness.
So as Jeff would say, "Onward," which brings me to today's episode. This isn't officially the start of season three, I'm afraid. I have hit that pause button on The Evolving Faith Podcast as we try to figure out what our new normal will look like in the absence of Jeff. I can't imagine doing this podcast without him, and if you've listened to other episodes, you know why. So we're figuring out how this in particular will work moving forward, but I did want to pop in today for two very important reasons.
So first, I wanted to tell you about the 2023 Evolving Faith conference because we're on, baby. This year we are gathering both in person and online, and those tickets are now on sale. I am brimming with joy as we all anticipate gathering together this autumn. We are hard at work behind the scenes. I am aware in a particularly new and fresh way right now that we are all looking for belonging, that some of you have found your way here because you've deconstructed your beliefs. Some of you, it's because you've endured trauma and pain.
You have stood bewildered before a community that once felt so much like family, and perhaps what you used to call home isn't really home anymore for one big reason or a thousand reasons. Maybe you've landed somewhere completely different. Maybe like most of us, you're still landing. Most of us, many of us, have found our way here to Evolving Faith because we're looking for healing spaces. We are longing for fellow sojourners. We're needing some room to exhale all of our questions and doubts. We yearn to be more connected and less alone, and we're reaching out for others who maybe feel the same. To know that it's not just us out here, to know that it is possible to resurrect and reimagine and rebuild something that works not only for us but for the whole world.
And we know we're not alone and neither are you. And so we're so ready to welcome you to our little outpost so that you can have that healing space to rest and grieve and learn, create and hope. And I think above all, our heart is that you would know that you are loved through and through. And so you're invited to join us, this bunch of folks from all over the world who are in real time creating this beautiful and diverse and messy table in the wilderness.
Now here's some good news, more good news. We have announced our 2023 lineup of speakers and leaders too. So if you hadn't heard, let me loop you in. This year we'll be joined by Lutheran pastor, founder of A House for All Saints and Sinners, and New York Times bestselling author and beloved friend of Evolving Faith, the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber. Author, speaker, activist, and farmer, the Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley. You'll be hearing as well from Barbara Brown Taylor again. She's a writer and speaker and spiritual contrarian. I was joking with her the other day that I'm going to need to create the Saturday Live five-timers jacket just for Barbara because I think this is her fourth time with us.
And then we'll also be joined by the founder and executive producer and host of On Being, Krista Tippett. Danté Stewart, who is a writer and author and speaker. The Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney is coming back again. She's a womanist Hebrew biblical scholar, activist, and Episcopal priest. Dr. Joyce del Rosario from last year's gathering is coming back as well. I should probably start warning people when they come to Evolving Faith that we're hard to get rid of. So Joyce will be with us again this year. She's a writer and speaker and professor, community gatherer.
I'm excited to welcome the moderator of the United Church of Canada, the Right Rev. Dr. Carmen Lansdowne this year. Amena Brown—the poet, author, comedic storyteller, best MC in the whole wide world—is coming back as well. She'll probably need another five-timers jacket along with Barbara. Dr. Amy Kenny, who's a disabled scholar and author; Paula Stone Williams, who's an author and speaker and pastoral counselor; podcast host and storyteller from Reclaiming My Theology Brandi Miller will be with us this year. The womanist minister, healer, circle keeper, speaker, and entrepreneur the Rev. Dr. Marilyn Pagán-Banks. The Rev. Mihee Kim-Kort, who is a writer and scholar and co-pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Annapolis. And some of you might remember Mihee from our 2019 gathering. She was part of the spiritual formation team at that time. And then someone who is very familiar to all of you who are in the online Evolving Faith community is the Rev. Alicia Crosby Mack, who is a justice educator and minister and writer, and, of course, our community cultivation curator.
And we'll also be joined by this incredible creative collective of musicians and artists and writers called The Many. And, of course, I will be there too. So bless my own heart for trying to keep up with this crew. I cannot believe the goodness of that lineup. I am getting my hanky ready for some high-level waving and hollering. I think you are all about to find out just how Pentecostal-ish I might still be in my heart of hearts. And, of course, there's going to be this virtual and literal room full of kindred spirits too.
So there are two ticket options this year. You can purchase a ticket for digital access so you can watch and participate right from the comfort of your own place in the world. That digital access provides the conference itself in its entirety—the live events, the community groups, the October gathering—all without leaving home. Those of you who were a part of our live online conference in 2020, and again in 2022, you know that this is not just an endless Zoom call. It is high-quality production with so many connection opportunities to the digital access. The online access remains the center for us. It is never going to be sloppy seconds. The accessibility and possibility of that is too important.
But we have added back in an in-person component this year, and it's in Minneapolis. We'll be at the Minneapolis Convention Center. And so in addition to your spot in Minneapolis, if you decide to go with an in-person ticket, you receive that 2023 digital access I mentioned earlier so that you also are part of those live events, the community groups, the conference activities, that sort of thing in addition to the actual room in Minneapolis. And we do have a very limited number of seats available, so I would encourage you to grab that ticket sooner rather than later. They're already moving pretty fast, and I would really hate for you to miss out if that in particular is your preference.
We are offering partial and full scholarships to help make participation as accessible as possible. If you want to learn more about that, you can head over to evolvingfaith.com, which is also where you can find all that information. You can read the speaker bios, you can buy your tickets, you can check out the ever-expanding FAQs, and so much more. And as I said, that's all over at evolvingfaith.com.
I would absolutely love to see you in Minneapolis or online for that sacred weekend. I hope that you will find belonging in this little crew as well, that you would bring a friend or 10. You can come by yourself, and I promise it is easier to make a new friend in that room than you think. I'm so looking forward to this oasis with you because, listen, we are not perfect. We are a diverse and sometimes messy bunch. We come from all over the world, from all different cultures and different religious backgrounds, and we all are bringing our respective baggage. And so if you're looking for perfect, this won't be it, but I can promise you this: it's going to be real.
So there's that news. One shift we did make this year in response to your feedback was to actually simplify that weekend together a little bit. We used to joke that it felt like drinking from a firehose for two days. Turns out that's not great. So we decided to take all of our breakout sessions, all those panel conversations, the workshops, those sorts of things, and we're going to host those, we are already hosting those virtually throughout the year in the online community. So if you're in the online Evolving Faith community, you already know this, but for everyone else along with your ticket purchase for October, you also receive all those breakouts throughout the year. And so this conversation you're going to listen to here with Kate is just one of them. There will be others in the coming months. We really like this model because it centers that online community building. It allows the October weekend a bit of room to breathe, and it builds connection between all of us throughout the year too so it doesn't just feel like an explosion of one weekend and then everybody disappears.
So once you get your 2023 ticket, you're going to be part of that private 2023 event group where these sorts of conversations and talks and breakouts are being posted every month, which brings me to this beautiful interview with Kate Bowler as a sneak peek of the sort of conversations and fun that we're already enjoying in the lead-up. And so I will meet you back here at the conclusion of that conversation to say goodbye. But for now, let's listen in on the breakout session at the online Evolving Faith community with our beloved friend, Kate.
Part 2: Conversation
SARAH: All right, everyone, thanks so much for being here. I'm Sarah Bessey, and, of course, I'm one of the folks who are behind Evolving Faith, and I am so happy to sit down today with my beloved friend, Kate Bowler. Kate, of course, doesn't need much of an introduction with most of us, but just in case, I wanted to make sure that we covered that off. So Kate is a PhD, and she's an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School. She's also the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, which traces the history of the movement based on divine promises, health, wealth, and happiness, with which I am very well acquainted.
And then after being unexpectedly diagnosed with stage IV cancer at the age of 35, she penned the New York Times bestselling memoir Everything Happens for a Reason And Other Lies I've Loved. Dr. Bowler subsequently staged a national conversation on speaking frankly about suffering through her popular and deeply beloved podcast Everything Happens. Her latest book is The Preacher's Wife. It's about the precarious power of evangelical women celebrities, and it follows the rise of celebrity Christian women and American evangelicalism. It's actually not the most recent book, so I think I have an old—
KATE: Sorry, I'm sorry.
SARAH: I have an old version.
KATE: That's my fault.
SARAH: No, it's not. It's my fault. But she does still live in North Carolina with her husband and son. She's written a couple of books since then including some blessings books. And so we'll talk a little bit more about all of those. But, Kate, before we get started, I wanted to ask if you knew about the Zellers nostalgia shops that have popped up at the Bay?
KATE: No, no. Stop your face.
SARAH: I know.
KATE: I have been in full Canadian nostalgia mode. I ordered some University of Manitoba Bisons tank tops yesterday just for the joy in my own heart.
SARAH: Well, I was going to ask you, if I go and get you Zellers gear, do you want the hoodie or the T-shirt? That is the question.
KATE: Oh, lovie, I want the hoodie so much.
SARAH: If I could send you an open-face roast beef sandwich, I would.
KATE: There's nothing like low-bred Canadiana to just bring two people together.
SARAH: Oh, true. So, yeah, Kate and I are both Canadian, of course, and we're also the same generation. We share a lot of roots in the same cities and regions. We like to pretend we're cousins. We are not cousins.
KATE: Yet. We could still arrange it somehow if anyone's willing to get married. We could make things happen.
SARAH: I think if our text messages ever were made public, we would both be canceled, but then we would just kind of end up in Moose Jaw going for nice little daily walks in Wakamow. And so there would be consolations if that ever happened. So Kate is brilliant. Of course, she's clever and kind. She rocks a red lip better than most of us mere mortals.
In addition to all of that, Kate is also one of the very best people that I know. She's so funny and irreverent and generous and open-hearted and smart, and I do love her very, very much. And so it feels kind of weird to be doing this interview sort of thing, but I did go and gather up some questions from the Evolving Faith community for us. But before we get to all of that, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the book itself that we're talking about today, which actually, I have here. It always takes a little while to get over the border, but I get it eventually. And so I always end up with two because always on your release day, I always go to Chapters and I buy it off the shelf because I'm like, we want to make sure that our Canadian authors are getting their book spot in the bookstore. And so I always have an extra one to give away. So now I'm excited.
KATE: I really hope that comes as a stinging indictment to my parents who I hope are watching right now that they do not drive to Chapters to buy my book. So, Sarah, you are a magical creature. Thank you so much. It's so great.
SARAH: I do what I can to indict parents. That's just what I like to do on the daily.
KATE: Yeah, it's like my secondary dose of shame goes out to Karen and Jerry. I like it.
SARAH: I live to serve. All right, so you have been writing blessings like this for a number of years now, and one of the things that I think you've reframed for a lot of us, I think especially for someone like me who does come out of that prosperity gospel kind of Word of Faith movements, this idea of blessings that I think you said in the introduction that they put your spiritual house in order, which is such a different way of looking at blessing than how a lot of us have had that either taught to us or even weaponized against us.
KATE: Yes, that's right.
SARAH: And so I wanted to ask you to share a little bit about what led you down that path, and what do you think is the invitation there in blessing those ordinary lives we actually have?
KATE: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, because I guess it started with this very wearying language of spiritual perfection as the #Blessed culture of, you know, it's always next to the Joanna Gaines section every time I go to a very polished middle-class big box store. And “blessed” sounded a lot like the conflation between two ideas, that one that God would sort of reach down and hand you a present, but somehow combined with the sense that if you are in the right place at the right time, that it will be you, that it must be you. And it gets then to that sense of endless control. So that Christmas card feeling that every family should be in matching denim is one that I had really thought about for at least a decade with the rise of the prosperity gospel and trying to make sense of a world in which people want to feel spiritually lucky, and I wanted to have compassion toward that.
But then I found that I just stopped knowing what then to say instead. I didn't really want to say lucky because sometimes God does give us gifts, and we need a little bit of language for agency, that we need a spiritual language of trying that isn't then immediately punitive if and when and when our lives fall apart. I was like, oh, what is the language for that? And it turns out it just brought me right back to where I started because it was the exact same word. My friend Steven Chapman is an Old Testament professor here, and he was writing a book on blessings, and he was like, "Oh, Kate, it is actually just something kind of lovely. It's a kind of—" He used the word emplacement, you kind of put something somewhere. And that is what made me think that it's sort of interior spiritual decorating like, let's just put this chair over here, let's put this decorative pillow over there. And if we start to take the chaos of our lives and say, "Okay, God, let me see parenting in this way. Let me see my loneliness in this other way. God just come into all the…” And this is what you're so good at, Sarah, like the “God be laundry, God be here” kind of ordinariness. Then maybe I can rekindle some of my love for the language of blessing if I start making it applicable to what's actually happening instead of what I wish were happening.
SARAH: You talked a lot in the early pages of the book, and this is something you and I have talked about a lot, that we aren't or we can't be the sum total of our choices.
KATE: Yes, exactly.
SARAH: Right?
KATE: Yes.
SARAH: And that life isn't just about our self-determination, no matter what self-help folks kind of want to sell us, and that delicate balance of agency with just life.
KATE: Yeah, that's right.
SARAH: And so you talk and embody so beautifully the God who accompanies us right to the edge. Where do you see some of that language coming through or even that opportunity or invitation, maybe, that exists within blessings about right at that edge of what we know or what we know about our life or even as we're going over that edge, even while holding all of those things at the same time?
KATE: Yes, because there is no this plus this equals happy, this plus this equals healthy, this plus this equals whatever version of wholeness I thought maybe my Christianity and good behavior would earn me. I really had some secret hopes for that. But in the end, I guess I want to know what I can say in the feeling right after, where you knit together this lovely thing, and then someone pulls a thread, and then you're not wearing the sweater anymore. Just this undone, undone. I guess in blessing it sometimes can feel a lot like the best parts of lament, which is, “Well, God, now that the storms have come in, now that there is so little left of this house I built, could you somehow be here?” That to me feels like the most vulnerable kind of nonprescriptive, almost like nontherapeutic, where it's like, “Now that I can't even guarantee myself the spiritual feelings I want or the life I'd hope for, could you just promise your presence in this even though I won't know what that means?”
Because I really do believe God's deep and abiding love is for those who say, “Right now I have nothing left but the shadow of a desire for you. Could you somehow honor those few things left and promise me you'll be here now?” And it's weirdly one of the only places where I feel really comfortable using language of spiritual promise, like sign on the dotted line. I really believe that God absolutely blood oath guarantees that God will show up. And that is the part that makes me feel like, no, no, no, I know that God will bless that deep, lingering hope. I do. I do because it's happened for me.
SARAH: It's so funny how essential you can feel.
KATE: I don't really, yeah. Sarah, what else would we do?
SARAH: It's like there's nothing else I have.
KATE: If we didn't think that, this is a hard sell. I remember hearing this one totally terrible sermon about how in Job they're like, "Even there, God withheld God's presence." And I was like, actually, no. This is one of the only shreds of... These are the little breadcrumbs we are promised. These are the glimmers that in all things we can say in one very narrow way, you will bless me. You will.
SARAH: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's part of even what we've experienced over the last number of years is we've kind of grappled with a lot of that is this notion of God with us. Yeah, God with us. Right?
KATE: Yeah.
SARAH: And that's a theme that comes through in almost every single one of the blessings in this book, even in the previous book of blessings that you had. I can't think of another prayer book in my lifetime that includes blessings for the garbage days. We all have them. Right?
KATE: Except I got a couple letters written in where I think they really thought I meant Tuesday as garbage day. And I was like, oh, no, but I mean, that's great too.
SARAH: But that's the best thing I've ever heard. I don't see anything here about praying for Phil and Paul on the back of the truck. And that's what I was looking for.
So I was picturing as people were flipping through the book, and, again, it's designed to just be able to pop in and out of, right? You don't have to read it chronologically; although, of course, I did because that's just the kind of person that I am. I was wondering, is there a section of the book that has surprised you the most in how it's resonated with people? You're just like, oh, I'm surprised that this one really caught, this one keeps coming up and I'm surprised by that.
KATE: Yeah, I guess... Well, because so many of the ones that I write are, it's in the middle of the night, I'm having terrible feelings about myself again. But those aren't it, Sarah. Those are not the ones people are resonating with. I think it's a lot of just the stuckness feeling or the sense that a lot of... I don't mean to say this in a way that sounds like I've invented this thought because I hear people say it all the time, but it's the most beautiful things about our loves that are the most painful to us. The better we get at this whole thing, the worse it's going to become. I don't mean to sound weird about that, but our love's painful, our sacrifice painful.
SARAH: Exactly.
KATE: If we decided to become selfish, everything would get better so that we could just put that as an asterisk against the prospect of a beautiful life of faith. So I think the ones that are largely about, hey, now that your faith has made your life harder, I think those ones are, I guess, giving us all a little bit permission to be a little less abundantly cheerful about what love costs us.
SARAH: One of the things that I hear so much from folks even within our community is how it is almost this, if you've lost the old pathways of prayer or you have, I don't know, deconstructed the formulas that you were given for prayer. And a lot of us were given very clear formulas. I mean, there were acronyms. There were points to check off. There were time limits and times of day when you were supposed to do things, what you were allowed to say, what you weren't allowed to say. And, again, that depends based on your... We have such a diversity of experience within the community in terms of people's spiritual backgrounds, their families, their context, culture, their social location for so many different reasons. And yet that common refrain of I don't know how to pray anymore, and I don't have language for that anymore, and I don't even know what that means anymore. And so then when you encounter things, like what even we've encountered just even in this last week in Nashville, we have no words.
And so having something like what you and Jess have put together for giving us that kind of language of... Last night I was sitting up in my bed and I was reading the blessing for when you're tired of broken systems. And it was just like, I don't even know what to pray. And this has given so many of us back some prayer, and it's given us back our language. And so I guess even before I get into all of their questions, I wanted to say thank you for that. I think it matters to us.
KATE: Thanks. That's the kindest... I have felt so entirely at a loss for knowing how to pray without certainty or pray without results. So being able to pray with other people who feel that way has given me back a lot of language for then what hope is. If it's not that, then what is it?
SARAH: It's not predicting outcomes if it's not my binding and loosing habits. Which I still do sometimes.
KATE: Fair enough.
SARAH: Sometimes you need to do some binding and some loosing.
KATE: Absolutely. I guess I lost a lot of confidence in knowing really even just how to set any sort of spiritual hopes for myself, especially after college. I don't mean to sound like every parental fear for their kid wanting to go to seminary, but the more I learned about fancy people interpreting the Bible, the more I felt pretty intimidated, and I kind of started staying in my lane, and my lane got smaller and smaller and smaller, then I was really good at one or two things. And that was all. I was really hoping everyone would bring it up.
I lost a lot of my own footing for even saying... Because I was never the... I had a friend named Kendra. Everyone has a friend named Kendra who has their morning Bible time, and she's doing great. And I don't think I've ever done the same thing more than once ever. I'm brutal at habit formation. I never felt exegetically confident or even... I'll never forget the first time I prayed in public here at a seminary. I mean, the look of overwhelming disappointment in the eyes of this priest sitting next to me. And he was like, "Is that it?" I had no Trinitarian round out at the end. And I was like, well, I guess... So, one, thank you. And, two, trying to practice having anything that comforts my own barely comfortable heart has been a long path for me, so it's very nice to walk it with others.
SARAH: It is good. I mean, I think that sometimes half of what we're doing is just looking at each other like, oh, you're out here too. Is this okay? Is this you too? There's a particular kind of exhale, and sometimes that has felt like the only notion of the presence of God I've had at times.
KATE: Totally.
SARAH: Even there that's where I can find sometimes some of that blessing we talked about. I went into the community a few days ago, and I was like, “Hey, I get to sit down with Kate. Does anyone have any questions?” And so people had a ton of questions. I wish I had time to ask every single one. Elizabeth in particular, holy smokes, she came through. She had a lot of really great ones. Some incredible questions. And so I wanted to be able to ask at least a couple.
KATE: Sure.
SARAH: Jenna was someone who asked... Or actually, she started off by saying that just she loves how you talk about hope, I think like a lot of us. And, of course, hope is a theme that we grapple with and wrestle with at Evolving Faith quite a lot actually. And so she was curious about how you respond to others and maybe even your students in particular, given the kind of place where oftentimes you're working out a lot of these things, when they come to you and they're wrestling with those problems of pain and the big, “Why doesn't God just do this” kind of questions. We know you have all that academic experience and all this lived experience that sort of uniquely qualifies you to help them through that, especially as they are, as students, kind of preparing to lead and live into this tragically beautiful world we have. And so she was wondering, how do you respond compassionately when they come to you with these questions while knowing that there isn't an answer? There isn't a fix-it, easy “if this, then that” to resolve the hurt and anger at God or at the world or what's going on right now.
KATE: Yes, absolutely. It's probably the most... And the question that we all need to prepare a version of our best answer for in our little hearts because the work of chaplains or pastors or leaders is the same work that every good friend does for the person beside them whose life comes apart. I think so much of our language of hope, the worst versions have been just another form of epistemological certainty where we put a story in front of us, and the story is supposed to be so crystalline and perfect that it answers every pain, longing, and sorrow, and then it doesn't. So for most of us, a story of “but then there will be heaven” is beautiful and unsatisfying.
And the other version, which is what we call over-realized eschatology, the one where heaven is supposed to be now so intensely that we also know that to be unsatisfying. It might feel like that in Target every now and then if you need a break from your in-laws. But heaven not being now constantly bubbles up in our little hearts as being an accusation to God. Like, “Okay, well, if it's not then and it's not now, what am I supposed to be hopeful for?” And I've loved... I guess there's two things I've really learned, especially from all of my chaplaincy students, and one is that hope is a strange kind of pace setting. The way that we can keep in sync with someone else is a story about how much hope is a gift and how much then is a burden. You saddle someone with too much, especially when they're under so much sorrow, say, it will feel like another anvil story about heaven and a perfect future.
You promise them too little, and frankly, often it's because we're being self-protective. Oh, I don't want to pray for them. Oh, I don't want to... You know what I mean? I don't want to promise them anything. And then we step back, step back, step back, and then they're all alone again. And so hope as pace setting has really helped me think of how much pastoral intuition we then have to cultivate in ourselves to be really good pace setters with other people. And then, of course, it's God's story about the future, and it's not really our story about ourselves. God tells us the story that we will be loved forever, drawn into God's love forever, never alone, never abandoned. We say that, and then we just have to practice it to each other.
SARAH: Absolutely. It is just a big part of even what we are losing in that moment, is it's not this version of God that we've been conditioned or was built for us or handed to us or whatever. So often it feels like you're just losing all the markers of your life, right?
KATE: Yes.
SARAH: And so it's like you're just desperate for more certainty, but really that's actually the thing that's being dismantled.
KATE: Yeah, totally.
SARAH: It's something that I think is a familiar experience. And so actually one of the things that folks asked is for you to talk a little bit more about your personal faith, to share a little bit about how your own faith has evolved and where you kind of started and where things have landed for you, where you feel... I mean, you've already talked a little bit about the only kind of places of certainty or the main places of certainty that you've kind of found right now. I don't know if certainty is the right word, but you know what I mean.
KATE: Yeah, totally. Where do you drop the anchor?
SARAH: This is some anchor time that I have right now. So they were a little bit curious. Some people have read your books. Not everyone has. And so even just a little bit of a window into your own process and your own story there.
KATE: Well, I am less... Honestly, Sarah, I wonder how we're going to get as we get older, because certain things, I would love to say one of the trajectories for me becoming less certain is I feel more joyfully fuzzy about things I was once very positive about.
SARAH: Joyfully fuzzy. That's a whole... Yes. Say more about that. The more opaque and foggy it gets, the more I just kind of be patient with it.
KATE: Yes, I do. I guess because the deep feeling of mystery, especially around the problem of pain. I'm saying it because it's the world's oldest problem. Or the desire to have ethical certainty and yet the deep desire to have a universalist vision of God's love. The particularity and universality of our hopes are always, I think, crashing into each other. And so I feel very certain and lovey about Jesus and very shruggy about using language like God's purpose or things like that. But I guess I do become more and more maybe confident in God's character. For instance, I was reading about euthanasia rates in Canada, and I was so horrified. I was so horrified. I'm not someone who reads the news and then finds myself crying intermittently throughout the weekend. But all I could think of was how much those who are struggling with chronic pain and isolation from disability, and this one man who said, “I don't want to die. I just can't afford to live.” I feel more and more certain of the great evils of our structure that will never value the people that God loves. And that makes me very opinionated about some things, so weirdly I feel like I'm going to really enjoy being a crotchety old woman who's like, “Let me tell you how I'm voting about this issue.”
SARAH: Sit down. I've got some thoughts.
KATE: Exactly. Do you have 45 minutes to 17 hours? I feel very sure about who God loves and why most of what we think will probably not be very popular.
SARAH: One question that came in was even some curiosity about the actual process of writing your blessings, you and Jess. I know you both have very different process and different way of making things happen, but they were curious if you're like—
KATE: Yeah, we write it together.
SARAH: Oh, you do?
KATE: Yeah, on the same Google Doc.
SARAH: I thought you were each doing like one at a time.
KATE: Oh, no.
SARAH: I didn't know how it worked. That was part of the question.
KATE: We're like weird brain sharers because normally what happens is we're preparing for a podcast guest, and then we, one, immediately fall in love with them, read all of their work, and then meet them, find out if that love is justifiable. Just joking. Most people are pretty great. Edit out the ones that aren't. But at the end of the conversation, we have a big long talk about which part felt like it was going to be the thing we carry with us and the thing we really hope other people do. Because we’ve, at that point, maybe spent 25 hours thinking through their brain, and then we think, well, theologically, where does that leave us? And so we sit down and we write blessings out of a conversation. Someone will almost always give a little phrase that we just never would've invented, and that always feels like they kind of hand you a cute little baby-wrapped present. It's the borrowing and using, then, that feels like we want to lock it in. And that's what makes us, I think moving toward communal use, which I never would've done as an academic. I would've been like great, good for me, and lock it away. So glad I'm smarter.
But it does make me want to then move it immediately into some kind of prayer or usefulness, which is such an earnest thing to say.
SARAH: If you're looking for just as sincere, you're talking to the right person. I'm excruciatingly sincere. It's so upsetting. As a Gen Xer, it's like, God, you need to lock that down.
KATE: Where's your Ethan Hawke heart?
SARAH: It's like you've never even watched Before Sunset. What are we doing?
KATE: I wrote a card to somebody this week that said, "May my uncomfortable sincerity be a burden to you and your family always." Ta-da! I'm like, that's all I have.
SARAH: You see what I mean about people giving you language for your actual self?
KATE: Exactly. This is where I am.
SARAH: So I wanted to ask as well, one of the things that a lot of folks, I think because maybe we have this book, we have your previous book of blessings, there've been a few others that have kind of come out that are actually equipping and giving us some resources, which to be honest with you, a lot of, I mean honestly, we just haven't had. We didn't even have a path to walk in or to journey on in a lot of ways. And I think that's one of the things that I remember, even Rachel and I when we were talking about starting Evolving Faith, was just this awareness that we had of what a profoundly unshepherded space that the wilderness can feel like and how almost the dominant thing you feel in addition to maybe that disorientation of grief and loss and anger that a lot of us have, there's also this overwhelming isolation.
KATE: Yes, that's right.
SARAH: That almost emerges for all of us. It feels profoundly lonely. And so a lot of times then when we have resources like this come along, whether it's the book of blessings or ones that function to make us feel a little bit less alone, to feel like you have some companions, that you're not as alone or as out there as maybe some of the people in your life are wringing their hands over, one of the things that people are starting to do more and more is learn how to write their own honest blessings to be like, “Oh, I get to bless this. I get to be in this sucky little space, and I can actually try to find God here or try to find some language for that.” And so I wondered if you had any advice.
KATE: Oh, I love that. Yes.
SARAH: I don't want to say best practices because that sounds so business-y.
KATE: Oh, I love this.
SARAH: Is there some things that you've learned from this process that you would be like, hey, let me save you a few things and give you some ideas to get you started on blessing your own garbage days or your own days without language?
KATE: Oh, my gosh. Sarah, I've wanted to make a workshop of that sometime just for my own joy because it is so—
SARAH: Oh, we would sign up for that so hard. That would be so good.
KATE: Your Evolving... Evolving Faith is a special group because they... And this is the deep comfort I have around them is they turn directly toward that sort of spiritual miasma feeling where you're like, “I don't know if there's a word for this that I'm allowed to say in front of others.” And I think that's the perfect place to start, is that instinct like, “Oh, I'm having a feeling that doesn't feel spiritual.” I think that's the right… Step one is: Identify weird sensation inside of your own body. And then maybe, two, see if that connects to an emotion word. I feel a lot on anxious and worry or lonely or embarrassed. I think this might be my fault. Oh, actually I think this might be somebody else's fault. And that spiritually makes me feel gross. There's so much around anger that we really should love and yet feel instinctively like we shy away from. Especially of the blobby feelings, those are great. Or sometimes we feel bad that we feel so great because we've had just this little burst of sunshine and then we're immediately aware that other people don't have it.
So it could be wanting to feel grateful without being the annoying person who talks about gratitude or wanting to have more language around feeling thankful. Because thankful carries us through the day, that kind of thing. So I would go blob feeling, try to anchor it to an emotion word, and then go right into the... I always start with, "God, I feel blah," the blob word. And then just let yourself wonder why is it that this evokes…? And then just free associate a little bit with where it goes. I feel abandoned. I wonder why my family couldn't, can't, won't. And just let yourself lament a little bit. And then it turns into the God in this, here now, be here, and then see if any of the lovely... I always find an image comes up or if it's an ocean, then can I get to stand on the shore? Or if it's in a house, can I turn the kettle on in my mind?
But I just pick an image, and then I try to let myself settle into it and then I find I can sort of land the plane. And that is really only about 200 words. It's just like a little paragraph if you just string it out. So I'd say let yourself have the arc and then say all these feelings are spiritual, period.
SARAH: I know. Which in itself can feel so revolutionary and prophetic, which sounds so dumb to be like, what is really prophetic act within religion right now? Telling the truth.
KATE: Yes, it is. Yeah.
SARAH: It is a deeply prophetic act, and it's always going to be almost this form of resistance to be like, no, no, no, I get to gather all of this, and all of this is precious to God. All of this is where I'm going to experience love.
KATE: That's right.
SARAH: I don't know. It's just like a really gorgeous holy middle finger, really.
KATE: That's so good, Sarah. Sarah, I love it. I could picture it illustrated. I see a cover.
SARAH: All right, we'll wrap up there. I know that I could keep going for hours and hours and we haven't even touched on the Friendly Giant or Mr. Dressup debate, but everybody please go and pick up The Lives We Actually Have. It's everywhere that books are sold, including Chapters. I can vouch for that. And I hope that all of you do get a chance to dive into the book. But I hope you also heard here that permission, even if it's not to write, but even just to wander through, embody, or abide within the blessings that you need for your own life as it stands as it actually is right now. So thank you so much, Kate, for your time. Thank you for your presence.
KATE: Oh, my gosh, Sarah.
SARAH: Thank you for all the gifts of you in the world. I'm so grateful.
KATE: Anytime all the time. I love you, and thank you, Evolving Faith. You are precious, precious gold.
Part 3: Wrap-Up
SARAH: Wasn't that amazing? I could probably listen to Kate talk about the virtue of paper versus plastic and likely have my life changed. But this in particular felt so necessary and helpful for me. I have already heard from so many of you within the community that I know that you felt the same. So if you did enjoy that conversation, just come and join us over at the online Evolving Faith community. You're going to find some fellow misfits, good conversations. You can grab that 2023 ticket for our October gathering because we are so deep in the planning of a rich and meaningful weekend together. You can find more info about Kate and her work in the world as well as this full transcript of this episode over in our show notes. And it's over at evolvingfaith.com/podcast.
And you can find me mostly at my newsletter, Field Notes, these days, which you can find at sarahbessey.com, which is also where you'll find all the links for my social media as well as my books. The Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by myself, Ashleigh Nelson, and SueAnn Shiah, who also wrote and recorded our music. So thank you for listening to this episode of The Evolving Faith Podcast, and until next time, whenever that may be, in whatever form that may be, remember still and always that you are loved.
