Kate Bowler:
Hey friends, it’s Kate. I just wanna tell you some big news. I’ve got a new book coming out. It’s called Joyful Anyway, and it’s gonna be out in the world on April 7th, 2026. And it’s available now for pre-order. It’s a book about what joy really is, not this glossy version we’re sold, but the real surprising kind that can coexist with our pain, our questions, and our beautiful ordinary lives. So if you’ve ever wondered whether joy is still possible for you, even now, this book is my wholehearted yes. You can pre-order it wherever books are sold and it really helps a lot when you do. Pre-order is this weird thing with authors where it lets everybody know that it’s the book that they want on sale and on shelf spaces and it’s just like a little vote of confidence. So if you want to pre-order it, it’s all yours.
Oh hello, I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. So Lent is often described as a season of giving things up. I don’t know if you ever went to Catholic school like I did, but it was always the time where someone was like, chocolate, that’s it, I will go without. And that this somehow brought us significantly closer to Jesus. But for a lot of us, Lent ends up feeling more like sitting with what’s already gone. What’s gone? Certainty, ease, the feeling like everything’s gonna add up or inevitably get better. It’s a time that asks us not to rush the hard parts, but to see reality clearly.
My guest today is someone who has spent a lifetime living inside of that kind of spaciousness. Okay, you’re gonna love him. His name is Malcolm Guite. He is a poet, he’s a priest. He’s a theologian whose work circles the meeting place of faith and imagination. He’s life fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. And he’s the author of many beloved books, including Sounding the Seasons and Lifting the Veil.
In this conversation, we talk about language, about how it can hold contradiction. This is what is so nice about talking to somebody who loves precision. So when he talks about these finer points of faith and prayer as the act of attention and about why faith might even need a little bit more ambivalence rather than resolution, then I listened up. Here’s my conversation with Malcolm Guite.
Also, if you’re listening to this, it’s not entirely clear that he has this amazing beard and pipe that he smoked mildly outside and like a waistcoat. And it made me wanna hug him. And also we read Tolkien. So yeah, just know this guy is a character in the very best way.
Malcolm, I’ve really been looking forward to this forever and ever. Thank you for being forced into this friendship.
Malcolm Guite:
Well, no, thank you for having me, but I very much enjoy the kind of ambiance you’ve set up, the little bits and pieces, the kind oscillation between the sacred and the absurd.
Kate Bowler:
You know me completely. One of the things that I’ve come to really rely on you for is the delicacy of language of prayer and prayer as poetry. How did spiritual language and poetry start to marry themselves in your imagination early on?
Malcolm Guite:
I was very fortunate, I think, that the poetry started early and I was kind of soaked in it. My mother had a vast reservoir of poetry, which she just, like, it just flowed naturally into her language. And it wasn’t like she sat me in a corner and said, you know, this is poetry, it’s good for you, you must have eight minutes of it before playtime. It was not like that at all. She would just suddenly recite a bit of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or whatever. I thought everybody’s mother did that.
I remember saying to some kid at school, you know that thing where your mother recites Coleridge? And they were like, what?
It was interesting because the language of poetry—ours was always quite a fairly buttoned-up house and my father was quite a reserved person. We did a bit of English understatement. But poetry gave you license. Somehow if it was poetry, it’s all right. You could have the biggest feelings imaginable.
Then when I realized I still had a vocation to priesthood as well as a vocation to being a poet, I mean, it’s ridiculous because George Herbert was staring me in the face all the time if I’d only realized. But there was a time when I thought I was robbing Peter to pay Paul if I spent Sunday afternoon writing a sonnet.
It was actually Seamus Heaney who kind of got me out of this quandary. He has a book called Station Island, which has a sequence of poems in it dealing with suffering. They’re astonishing poems. In the eleventh of the twelve poems, there’s a scene where he remembers having been to confession, and this extraordinary Spanish monk to whom he’d been making confession suddenly says to him, “Read poems as prayers.”
That idea—that I could read poetry as prayer, that I didn’t have to leave the poetry book behind and go into the chapel—that I could read the poem in the presence of the Holy Trinity, read the poem with the Word Incarnate standing at my shoulder raising an eyebrow—it suddenly set me free not to feel these two were in conflict.
That was confirmed a little bit later when I was writing a poem myself, which I thought was just about poetry. I wrote this poem called The Singing Bowl. There’s a line in there that says, “Stay with the music, words will come.” It finishes with the image of a singing bowl, which has richness rising out of emptiness and timelessness resounding into time.
When I finished this poem, which I thought was about poetry, and sounded it again to check all the sounds in it, I realized it was about prayer. It was exactly what I needed to know about how to pray. The poem about poetry was also about prayer.
Why does one need the language of poetry? I think it’s partly because in transactional language you want to be exact—each thing must denote another thing. But in expressive language, particularly in poetic language, you want to be able to say two opposite things at the same time.
There are antonyms in English like “cleave,” which means both to cleave together and to cleave apart. To be even remotely honest in prayer, I needed ambivalence—not just ambiguity, but ambivalence. I needed to be able to say yes and no to God at the same time. And poetry lets you do that. In the end, a really good poem brings you to the brink of language and gestures beyond it. Again, that’s what you want to do in prayer.
Kate Bowler:
I did come from one of those families that you got money for memorizing poetry and it got priced out per complexity of poem, of course. But what was so useful about poetry later is in very, you know, in moments of awe, where you just, there’s that beat—or in moments of real pain—that something just bubbles up.
Malcolm Guite:
Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, that lovely thing that Shakespeare says about poetry where he says, imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown, and the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
There’s so much that happens in your life which is kind of in your—it’s really important—but as Eliot said, it’s like peripheral vision. It’s there, but if you stop to turn to it, it is not there. Shifted again.
Whereas poetry has the ability to kind of woo that peripheral vision and give it enough confidence and then make a house for it, make a shape for it.
So I find again and again that a poet will enable me, finally, to own or acknowledge or say something that I’ve been half saying for years.
Kate Bowler:
I don’t even remember who wrote the poem, but I remember when I was—I had just been diagnosed. I was in the hospital for the first time. Everything about my life had just come to a sudden and abrupt end and I had to take off my—the clothes that was like my lovely teaching dress that I knew I would likely never get to wear again, never get to be a professor again. And I’m in this awful cotton—
Malcolm Guite:
Oh, God, there’s awful those things. And they’re just so scruffy. It’s also when they give you this thing that ties up at the back. It’s a very sexy time. Nothing could make you feel more kind of simultaneously exposed and discarded.
Kate Bowler:
Exactly. Exactly. And the words—and I don’t even remember—it was from a poem I had to memorize in eighth grade. It was, “And one by one we shall all file on through the narrow aisles of pain.”
Malcolm Guite:
Wow.
That’s right. I don’t know who that is, but that’s very good.
Well, here’s the thing. Once—just a weird concatenation of circumstances—I suddenly found myself as the person who was going to interview Seamus Heaney in 2002. Seamus Heaney I think is one of the greatest poets of our age. He died ten years ago. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He’s a poet from Northern Ireland. He was a Catholic, born into a Catholic culture. He has a Catholic imagination with a small “c.” But he’s a great, great poet.
So I sat down and I said, “Where does a poem live? Does the poem live on the page? Does it live when you’ve read it two or three times? Does it live because you’ve memorized it? When does it become a poem in the reader?”
And he said, “Well, you know, gone are the days maybe when a person might memorize a whole poem. But it may be that there’s a phrase.” The poem is really alive when a phrase or a line of the poem occurs to a person when they’re not thinking about poetry at all—when they’re waiting to have the gown put on in hospital or they’re looking at it—and suddenly the phrase offers a clarification.
And he said—these were his exact words—“I hope at its best, my poetry will offer phrases that feed the soul.” It’s a very modest thing. I’m not saying I remember my whole poem. “Phrases that feed the soul.”
And I think how much of my mind and my life is full of gifts from the poets, in which it’s just a phrase that feeds the soul.
Kate Bowler:
Yes, that’s such a pastoral—
Malcolm Guite:
It was very pastoral. It was unashamedly pastoral.
Kate Bowler:
The way that words—first you carry them—
Malcolm Guite:
Yeah. And then they carry you. Absolutely.
No, I would go even further. I’d say, you know, the only thing that kind of gives me the temerity to call myself a poet is the conviction that all the words I use are older and wiser than I am. They know stuff that I don’t know.
Kate Bowler:
We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere.
The best compliment anyone has ever paid me is that they said, “Kate, when you talk, I can hear that you can separate the lyrics from the melody.” And what I loved about that compliment is that I’ve always wanted to be able to find ways of telling the truth about just how undone we are as humans in the faith—in the face of our desire to truths about God and to have these robust beliefs.
And one thing I found very touching about learning about your past is your real unflinching approach to depression and the real despair that we’re all fighting against at all moments to even make sense of anything at all.
Malcolm Guite:
As a poet, what I’m interested in is threads of connection. And if I’m in the zone, I feel this great web of interconnectedness, and I feel one word summoning another word.
And if I am—if I’ve been caught in or lost in a depression—it’s like going into a cold, black world where it is like somebody has systematically cut all the threads of connections, so I can’t connect out.
So when you’re really in that place, you can’t write. One of the things you can do—and I felt like I owed it to people to do—is when I can write again, is to write about that experience.
Kate Bowler:
When did you first realize that depression was a feature and not a bug?
Malcolm Guite:
Well, yeah, it’s interesting because I had—I assumed when I had these ups and downs, I just assumed this was me being a teenager. I just felt like this happens to everybody.
It was only when it came back much later—I had one really serious part where I literally couldn’t function. And in a way that’s slightly terrifying because you think, what if that happens to me again? May it always?
Kate Bowler:
I think the first time something terrible happens is very bad, but the second time has a different quality because you remember the cost of almost not getting out.
Malcolm Guite:
Well, what’s really interesting is when I finally sat down to write my fourteen or fifteen Stations of the Cross—I didn’t grow up, my dad was Methodist, my mom was Presbyterian, but I’m a sort of high church Anglican, but the Stations of the Cross as a liturgy and as a set of tropes was not familiar to me. But I learned about it and loved it.
So I ended up writing these fifteen sonnets. And what I didn’t realize: there’s one of the stations—Jesus falls for the first time. So I’m going, okay, I can get this. I can work with the word “fall.” There’s lots we can do with it. So I write my poem on Jesus falling.
And then I realized, wait a minute—he keeps falling. Jesus falls the second time. So I end up with a poem about stuff that happens twice, and about the bruised bruise—the second beatings have already beaten me, and the bruise bruise is—
And I think I’m done. Jesus falls the third time. And you’re like, as a poet, I really came to the end of myself.
But that was when I wrote about depression. That was when—there’s one poem, “The Christian Plummet,” where I actually used the word “depression,” which for me was quite a big thing. It was like almost breaking a taboo to use that word.
Kate Bowler:
Do you have that poem?
Malcolm Guite:
Yes. So this certainly draws on my experience, but I was also in a better place when I wrote it. I was actually writing it also for a friend—for a guy in my band—who had to really contend with this. And he’s Christian, and I was sort of addressing it to him.
So this poem is part of a series responding to one of George Herbert’s great poems, which is simply called “Prayer.” And it’s a sonnet, but it’s not a sentence. It’s twenty-six tumbling-out images of what prayer is, and every one of them you could go with for years.
So one of the phrases he says: prayer is the Christian plummet. And he’s thinking about the lead line that the ship lets down to find out how much water is under the keel.
But I just love that he put the word “Christian” and “plummet” together. Like, if you plummet, you still get to be a Christian.
So this is how it came out:
“Down into the icy depths you plunge,
The cold dark undertow of your depression,
Even your memories of light made strange
As you fall further from all comprehension.
You feel as though they’ve thrown you overboard,
Your fellow Christians on the sunlit deck,
A stone-cold Jonah on whom scorn is poured,
Sacrifice to save them from the wreck.
But someone has their hands on your long line.
You sound for them the depths they sail above.
One who takes Jonah as his only sign
Sinks lower still to hold you in his love.
And though you cannot see or speak or breathe,
The everlasting arms are underneath.”
Kate Bowler:
I come from a family with a lot of clinical depression, and there was that long stretch—in the nineties in particular—in evangelicalism, where the culture had just slowly begun to have better categories in mental health or even like the words “clinical depression.” We didn’t say that before, and Prozac was invented. It was just these new glimmerings.
And then in the wake of that, like such a demonization of all those who suffer as being faithless.
Malcolm Guite:
I hear—awful. It’s absolutely awful.
So when I was thinking about what it meant to speak of the Christian plummet, one of the things that I realized is that the ship can’t sail without somebody sounding the depths. And that actually thinking of all of us on the ship—in the enterprise and community and ship of faith—is awkward. We need the Christian plummet.
And actually, I’ll give you an example. The Christian plummet, par excellence, has got to be Gerard Manley Hopkins.
If you think about the so-called terrible sonnets—I mean they’re not terrible because they’re terrible poetry, they’re terrible because they’re so—think of the one that begins, “No worst, there is none…” and then it’s the mind as mountains, cliffs of fall, sheer, frightful, no man fathomed.
But this guy is a faithful Christian. This is the guy that said, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God…” He sees the glory of God. “Glory be to God for dappled things.”
But he’s also the guy that writes “No worst.”
And when all the skeptical moods come on—when you’re trying to think, you know, where is Jesus in this? I’m done with it—you remember Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he’s the Christian plummet. And he’s saying, you could go way lower than this and still be a faithful Christian.
And he’s also very good at getting the point that the moment you’re going through something terrible actually is—although you may not know it at the time—a moment of extraordinary intimacy with Christ.
Because in “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” when he’s thinking about this shipwreck and these five nuns drowning, he talks about—he says, “I am soft, I am sand,” and then he says he feels Christ’s flail coming in and tearing the husk off him, “that the grain may shine sheer and clear after such heaven-handling.”
Kate Bowler:
He has been… buffed.
Malcolm Guite:
Yeah, exactly. It’s like C.S. Lewis has a wonderful thing where he says, “I don’t doubt that at every moment I’m in God’s hands and he’s gonna do what’s best for me. I just worry about how much the best is gonna hurt.”
Thinking of Eliot and this whole question of how much is it gonna hurt, in his Good Friday section in one of the Four Quartets where he says, “The wounded surgeon plies the steel that questions the distempered part… we feel the sharp compassion of the healer’s art.”
Malcolm Guite:
Yes. Sharp compassion—Lewis’s severe mercy. These are just horrible gifts.
Yeah. But the thing about that—as a poet—you’re like, yes, that’s incredible.
I don’t know if you ever did in science in school, that thing with bar magnets and iron filings. You put the iron filings and get the magnet underneath and suddenly some kind of symmetry shows.
And I think of words as not meaning a single thing, but as having a hidden, complex semantic field—like a magnetic field. What is activated and what kind of power comes out of a word depends on how it’s arranged with other words.
If you remember that bar magnet thing, you did the other thing where if you have them one way around, they go like that—and that’s magnets, so what, we know what a magnet is.
But if you turn one of them around so the poles repel, suddenly—it’s invisible, but you can hear this pulse, you can feel this quivering.
That’s what I think happens in lines like “sharp compassion.” The poet constrains these opposite words. And just as magnets in their magnetic field are capable of producing electricity—generators and motors—there’s a power. There’s literally almost a live current running through a line that makes you say “sharp compassion” or “civil butchery.”
You’re never going to be comfortable with that. Those two words are never going to go click and tick the box. There’s always going to be this field of disturbance between them.
But that’s the honesty of the poetry because most of us live at some point or another—or in various fields—of disturbance.
Kate Bowler:
So the very opposite of that friction is what I study in American self-help, where there’s really no friction in the phrase.
So I just love your description because it immediately brings to mind all of the very delicious and convenient lies that we all believe that have no—they have no charge in them.
The most common phrase is like “best life now,” “everything happens for a reason,” “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” which always seems facile, but they hold together a whole belief about God’s intentions toward us, our own ability to try.
So just—there’s—I hear—
Malcolm Guite:
Yeah, the ability to try.
I think those things which are apparently very comforting and sell well and everything are actually cruel because in the end they make you feel more of a failure.
If they say you do this program, you think these positive thoughts, and you’re still clinically depressed because that’s just the way it is—now you’re blaming yourself. Now you have another failure to add to your impressive list.
Kate Bowler:
The secondary suffering that it creates is so enormous. But the primary suffering—people don’t feel like they’re suffering at all.
So that’s why when you’re putting two very tense words together that are trying to hold the mystery, I find that very appealing.
I think that’s what I’ve always found to be so powerful as a cultural historian: the closer you get to a seemingly seamless sentence, a cliché is a perfectly held hermetic—
Malcolm Guite:
Yeah, but it’s so hermetic that it then stops referring to anything at all outside itself.
I remember Christopher Ricks referring to a cliché as dead language that won’t lie down. It’s just so good. So you end up with this kind of—it’s actually zombie speak masquerading as life.
Kate Bowler:
Oh my gosh. Malcolm, I actually think that might be the greatest thing anyone has ever said to me. I’m going to put that on a wall. And I am not lying to you.
We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back.
I did wanna ask you about how we can live more richly inside of the turning of the seasons because sometimes just the very ordinary is what sparks in us like a higher quality of attention.
Malcolm Guite:
In the Northern Hemisphere, Advent is in a darker and darker time, and then the coming of Christ—as “the people that walked in darkness have seen a marvelous light”—the light-dark contrast is really helpful.
And weirdly, when you get Lent: Lent as a word goes back to an Old English word which means “lengthen,” and it’s because the days are beginning to lengthen. And so you get this great death and resurrection story—Jesus himself speaks of it as the sowing of a seed and its rising. It’s about burial, and it happens in this season that works for it.
So there’s some kind of reinforcement and harmony going on between the physical seasons and the spiritual seasons. So I find that very helpful. I’m a fan of it.
I suppose he might be quite obscure, but there’s a great late sixteenth-century, early seventeenth-century preacher and writer called Lancelot Andrewes, whose main claim to fame is that he was in charge of three different companies of translators that made the Authorized Version—the King James Bible. He’s the guy that King James tapped on the shoulder in 1604 and said, “I want you to do this.”
But he’s got one of his early sermons—there’s a big quarrel going on between the more Catholic elements and the more Puritan elements in the Church of England about what do we keep from the old order. A lot of people were saying we need to get rid of all these feast days. And of course eventually when the Puritans got in charge, they ruined Christmas.
So Andrewes writes a defense of it. And he’s just great. He says, you know that thing when somebody robs you of something really precious, some thief comes and breaks in—wouldn’t it be great if you could find a way of making that thief come back and return what he left?
And you say, well, the greatest thief in the world there is is time. Time steals everything from us. Would it be great if we could make time bring it back?
And he says, that’s what an anniversary is. That’s what a remembrance is.
That Christmas when you first began to realize it was okay to be human because God was—you forgot about it—but Christmas comes back again, and you remember it. So time the thief becomes time the restorer because you have these annual seasons.
Kate Bowler:
There’s a long, very Protestant tradition of wanting every truth to be so literal that it grounds us. Because I don’t think we feel safe unless we know what it means to say that something is true.
And then every highway has a big sign on it that says, “The Bible answers all.” Welcome to this answer factory. And I think we imagine that the answers have to be no metaphor.
Malcolm Guite:
You can’t believe it when the Bible itself—one of the greatest lines of Paul is “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”
And the point is: I would say a poem isn’t a poem until it’s breathed into life. It doesn’t live on the flat page in its letters—it has to have the breath of life. And then it becomes a communication from the heart of one person to the heart of another.
As Newman says, cor ad cor loquitur—a heart speaketh unto heart—and the poem lives and breathes as the medium, like the Holy Spirit itself coming back and forth.
Now, when we hear about scripture being God-breathed, that’s very different from God-dictated. It’s kind of—you know—God.
I mean, just to make it clear: I thoroughly believe in the virgin birth and the death and resurrection and the empty tomb. I think there are lots of historical truths.
But the deepest truth is not the historical one. The Bible’s not written in the way of a sort of candid factual report—this is what you would have seen if you’d been there Tuesday with a camcorder—which isn’t to say you couldn’t have seen something if you had been, but every phrase has this potential resonance.
Kate Bowler:
Of the way you describe this baptized imagination—we—our mutual friend, the wonderful New Testament scholar Richard Hays—oh, when he was—
Malcolm Guite:
I want him to be—rest in peace, rise in glory. What a great man.
Kate Bowler:
He was. He loved thinking about the arts as a vehicle for truth. And every faculty meeting he would foist upon us his deep desire for us to shape a Christian imagination—that some of us are less imaginative than others.
I really—I mean, historians, we would just rather that it happened and I can document it and thank you so much.
But I think it’s such a lovely challenge to imagine the layer upon layer—the truth as having resonance.
Malcolm Guite:
So one of the people who really got this—there’s a weirdly titled essay by C.S. Lewis called “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” which are two words he made up. So nobody reads this essay because it’s such a weird title, but it’s actually one of his most important pieces of writing.
And in it he considers the relationship—the contrasts and commonalities—between reason and imagination. He says at one point, it’s just phenomenal, so clear: “Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
So I can know a lot of truths and I can get a lot of truths about what happened—the story of Jesus—on a rational level, and it’s important and I’m glad to do that. But unless I engage with it imaginatively, I don’t know what it’s about at all.
And if we see the arts as the imagination at work in the world, crafting and making things which will be the local habitation and name for so many different truths, then I think we’ve got to say that taking the truths of scripture and the truths of the creed, we haven’t really taken them as far as they can go unless we bring the artists and the poets on board to, as it were, open out and kind of unfurl the leaves and blossoms of meaning.
That doesn’t mean that you’ve messed with the root of the plant—the content. This is rooted and grounded in truth and in God’s will. But unless I let the thing blossom, all I’m doing is sticking a label on a horribly trimmed bush and muring it in a tree.
Kate Bowler:
It has been a complete joy to watch you think, to listen to your gravelly, incredibly rich voice describe the truth of the universe to me. And just to be said, I could not be more grateful to have spent this time together.
Malcolm Guite:
Well, thank you. It’s been great fun. It has been lovely, lovely for me. I’ve really enjoyed it. Nice to meet you properly in person.
Kate Bowler:
Malcolm talked about poetry—like, isn’t his mind a wonderful place? But really we’re talking in particular about the sorts of language, the kinds of words that stay with us. Words that we remember long after the moment that first gave them to us.
And I’d love to know what that language is for you. Is it a song? Is it poem? Is it phrase that you’ve held onto? Is it weird rap from the 90s that you suddenly remember all the lyrics to?
Do I remember the French version of MC Hammer’s “You Can’t Touch This”? I do. I’ll sing it for you someday.
But I want you to come on over to Substack. I want you to tell me about it. I’m at katebowler.substack.com. And you can also find a daily entry throughout Lent if you want just a little spiritual friendship. The comment section is truly the highlight of my day. It is every nice person being loving to each other and it is totally free.
Also, this episode is available if you wanna watch it on YouTube, and then you get to see what Malcolm looks like, who is just a delight, and then you can share it with a friend.
Okay, here’s a blessing before I go.
I wanna use my words to bless the crap out of you.
Bless you in the words that return to you when you don’t know what else to say or to pray. May poetry or song become a prayer, reminding you that you are not the first to feel this way. You don’t have to make sense of everything. You don’t have to find the right language. It’s enough to hold what holds you. It’s enough to let yourself.
Alright my friends, big thank you to the Lilly Endowment for making today’s episode possible, and to my wonderful team that I just could not do anything without: Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring, Hailie Duritt, Megan Crunkleton, Katherine Smith, Elias Henao, Anna Fitzgerald Peters, and Keith Weston. I love you guys.
This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
