Kate Bowler: Oh, hello there. I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. So this week marks the end of Lent, which means that Easter is coming. But there is a particular pressure that comes at the end of LENT. Like you’ve done the reflecting. Maybe you gave something up. Maybe you picked up a new practice that might in hope bring you closer to God. Hey, and maybe you even joined us over for Lent on Substack, where we’ve been reflecting on what it means to live with the ache of being human. But… is coming. The bunnies and the lilies and the hallelujahs and you might not feel. There is a version of the Christian story, heck, it’s the American story, that suggests that we should move briskly from sorrow to joy. Because of course, we worship a resurrected Savior. But then we get to Holy Week and we feel, oh no, I look around and my life is still unresolved. The diagnosis hasn’t changed, my relationship is still strained, the future feels blurry at best. So, then what does it mean to talk about joy during Easter? Not as a mood that you have to manage or sticking your head in the sand about denying reality, but as something sturdier, like something that could carry you. My new book Joyful Anyway, I argue that joy isn’t the reward for an ache-free life. And it’s not what shows up after everything is better. It’s just not like that. Joy is this stubborn, defiant insistence that our unfinished lives are still held in love. It is the kind of joy that can sit right up next to grief and uncertainty, right next to whatever we’re carrying. And today, I get to explore that with one of my spiritual heroes. Today’s guest is Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. He is a renowned theologian and poet and professor and just all around kind human being. Mutual friend of so many mutual friends that this is part of an elaborate web of lies in which I’ve drawn him into this friendship. So watch as my duplicity unfolds. Rowan led the Anglican Communion for a decade with
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Kate Bowler: Oh, hello there. I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. So this week marks the end of Lent, which means that Easter is coming. But there is a particular pressure that comes at the end of LENT. Like you’ve done the reflecting. Maybe you gave something up. Maybe you picked up a new practice that might in hope bring you closer to God. Hey, and maybe you even joined us over for Lent on Substack, where we’ve been reflecting on what it means to live with the ache of being human. But… is coming. The bunnies and the lilies and the hallelujahs and you might not feel. There is a version of the Christian story, heck, it’s the American story, that suggests that we should move briskly from sorrow to joy. Because of course, we worship a resurrected Savior. But then we get to Holy Week and we feel, oh no, I look around and my life is still unresolved. The diagnosis hasn’t changed, my relationship is still strained, the future feels blurry at best. So, then what does it mean to talk about joy during Easter? Not as a mood that you have to manage or sticking your head in the sand about denying reality, but as something sturdier, like something that could carry you. My new book Joyful Anyway, I argue that joy isn’t the reward for an ache-free life. And it’s not what shows up after everything is better. It’s just not like that. Joy is this stubborn, defiant insistence that our unfinished lives are still held in love. It is the kind of joy that can sit right up next to grief and uncertainty, right next to whatever we’re carrying. And today, I get to explore that with one of my spiritual heroes. Today’s guest is Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. He is a renowned theologian and poet and professor and just all around kind human being. Mutual friend of so many mutual friends that this is part of an elaborate web of lies in which I’ve drawn him into this friendship. So watch as my duplicity unfolds. Rowan led the Anglican Communion for a decade with remarkable steadfastness and grace. Before that he was the Archbishop of Wales and a professor at both Oxford and Cambridge. He is the author of more than 30 books, I keep reading them, and Rowan is one of those rare people who makes you feel like complexity is somehow a holy place. It seems to me that he is not afraid of the dark and neither is God. Oh, and this is such an honor. Thank you so much for doing.
Rowan Williams: Thank you guys, thank you very much indeed.
Kate Bowler: I’ve been a Christian all my life, but it was really in the worst, lowest moments of my life when I was very sick with cancer that I felt the intensity, that like lovely crystalline clarity of not just knowledge of God, but like God’s love, God’s like weird, specific love. And it made me realize in a way that I probably couldn’t have known just how God loves the brokenhearted. Why do you think there’s such a relationship between God’s presence and an awareness of pain?
Rowan Williams: It’s a huge question, isn’t it? And, and there’s one very wrong answer that can be given often is given, which is if you’re miserable enough, then God will eventually fork out and help you. And that’s utterly the wrong way around. Isn’t it because you don’t make yourself miserable or make other people miserable with mortal point so that there’ll be opportunity of encounter with God. I think of it so often in terms of God, not being able to help himself. If God is love in the way that we say God is love, if we say that the eternal truth about God is that God wants to come alive in the other, and that’s what we mean by, God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then when there is room given, a room made, as people have sometimes said it’s like water. Tiny crackling gets in everywhere. And it’s, it’s the Leonard Cohen thing. It’s not the crack where the light gets in, but there is something about our defenses, our fictions about ourselves breaking down at certain points where truth comes in and, and the other thing that’s very vivid in my mind is the conversation, sorry, this is the name drop of the day, but the conversation I had with Nick Cave a couple of years ago.
Kate Bowler: Big favorite. I’m so glad you’re quoting Nick Cave.
Rowan Williams: One of the things he said about his own extraordinarily difficult and draining experience is he was determined that suffering will not define or defeat him. And that’s why his own conviction about God, his own relation with God came alive somewhat more deeply in those moments of appalling loss and appalling pain that he’s spoken about certain moving things.
Kate Bowler: One of my lectures at Duke Divinity School, I really think a lot about McCave, who lost his son and has this wonderful treatment of. Is what the human spirit feels like as it is trying to transcend itself. Like he has that lovely kind of diatribe about why AI can never replicate our humanity. But I just love the language of, that AI or anything else cannot feel the limits that we like stream to press ourselves over, that we can’t know true love unless we’ve known loss. We can’t no jealousy unless we, knew that we could want things.
Rowan Williams: Exactly. And that’s why I think it’s a mistake to call AI intelligence. Human intelligence is something so completely different. Human Intelligence applies to all those areas of ourselves like fear of death, and pain, and lust, and hope, and appetite. And occasionally I ask students, can you imagine a question that an AI system would have real difficulty answering, why did you sleep well last night? That smells good, doesn’t it? But that’s intelligence. And for us to work with that patiently, imaginatively, generously, that’s how we become intelligent beings. It’s not by becoming vastly skilled at moving huge numbers of statistics around.
Kate Bowler: Yes, I mean, our absurd humanity is so specific. I mean it’s just funny that tells me so much about how God loves us in our granularities because we don’t want things in general. We want that person to come back, this person to be well. We wish. Smell our dad’s hair and be back.
Rowan Williams: That is so interesting, isn’t it? That our suffering, our sense of loss is nothing, if not specific. It’s why I think a lot of talk about the problem of suffering, understandably, but to still rather problematically ignores that very specific side of it. It’s not that you grieve because you have lost a certain cluster of opportunities of making yourself happy. What you’ve lost is a particular set of relationships with real others that make you’re happy. Yeah. And somebody put it Breaking a finger is a different problem if you’re a cellist from a greengrocer.
Kate Bowler: I always like what Tom Long is this wonderful preacher and professor and he says, there’s always two preachers at a funeral. You know, one is the body, one is like the reality of everything you lose. And then like, who will stand next to that story and have anything to say. And I’ve always loved thinking about like how to be hopeful in the right way. When our losses are so stark and obvious.
Rowan Williams: That’s right, because hope that denies that what you call granularity is really not hope at all, it’s just compensation, isn’t it, it is consolation, and I don’t think Christian hope has much to do with that. And what we say, I think, in the face of loss, and why I say, say, don’t mean… Very often what we’re saying is, yes, this is an un-mendable wound in some ways. Yes, this something which is never going to be alright. Somehow or other, within the context of the act of God, the act of God in the life that’s been lost, the life that goes on, somewhere in all that, love continues. Yes is not defeated, is not extinct. What that’s going to feel like or what’s it going to look like? Nobody can tell you.
Kate Bowler: I hit middle age hard with the realization that I was never going to become a kind of person that doesn’t. I did think, naively, that a better person, a better Christian, a better, a a better, that this feeling of incompleteness or this longing would eventually quiet. After all, I spent my 30s almost dying of cancer. And so to have even gotten back this much, I should be so grateful. A person like that shouldn’t—and I’ve really struggled with the right Christian language for longing. You are very reassuring that there is a kind of holiness in our longing.
Rowan Williams: Absolutely. Because that’s the positive side of humility. Humility, a kind of static humility that just says, well, I’m not doing very well, is neither here nor there. It’s what St. Bernard calls cold humility. But the other kind of humility, which says I haven’t got it yet, and oh, I wish I could be there, that’s warm humility. Oh, imagine what our lives would be like if we would at some point say, I think I really well nailed it now. I think that I’ve got this whole inner stuff. Everybody tells you that is the path to implosion.
Kate Bowler: Alternative theory, God is a huge jerk and withholds peace. And you gave a very, I thought very funny, helpful reading of a George Herbert poem about why it is that we seem to not exactly be the world’s most peaceful creatures.
Rowan Williams: Oh, the pulley, isn’t it, by George Herbert? Yes, if—what’s the last couplet? Restlessness may toss him to my breast. God has poured out everything he can on us, he’s made our lives as good as they could possibly be, except he looks at what he’s got on the shelf and he sees that he hasn’t actually decanted the little bottle marked rest yet. He says, leave that there, because without that, people would actually become less than they really are, they would rest content with less than the real, less the truth. I think I’ve got it pretty well worked out. And Jesus himself in the Gospels talks about that enough. The parable of the rich man who’s planning to build all these outbuildings and barns and all the rest of it. And God looks to him, and I imagine, shaking his head, You idiot. If this is where you put your security, then you are settling for less than the real, less than the true. And this longing, I think, is that instinct for the real or the true, and because the real and the true are not like the next good meal, they don’t come to an end, then in one important sense, you’re never going to be completely free. Writers like St. Augustine will, from time to time, say, in heaven, there is both a longing and a fulfillment. It’s not that you just sit back and say, right, well, here I am. Problems over? No. There’s a growing, where it continues. There’s that lovely image from Ezekiel… there’s a sea that you have to go on swimming in. You can’t cross it.
Kate Bowler: I don’t think I ever thought about heaven as being both longing and fulfillment, and that’s why it seemed incredibly, like deeply boring in some way.
Rowan Williams: That’s the problem, isn’t it? We often talk about that connection with God… as if it were just, now we’d arrived.
Kate Bowler: Yeah, it’s kind of the worst parts of church, no offense. Praising forever? I suppose I could.
Rowan Williams: And the thought that it’s the kind of joy that is constantly breaking its own boundaries. You know, this is one of the things that C.S. Lewis is so brilliant about… joy has in it that sort of constant breaking open to new levels. You think you’ve mastered it and you haven’t.
Kate Bowler: I’m so glad we’re talking about C.S. Lewis and joy, because I do think this is exactly where we get to with the more satisfying understanding of the ache… I ended up calling the book Joyful Anyway, because of the bothness of it… joy is a real sneaky little jerk… appears in this wonderful fulfillment and then it’s just gone. But that doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong.
Rowan Williams: No, exactly… I often go back to musical analogies here… when you’re singing something wonderful and bar by bar it opens out… and then you sing it again and it’s different and there’s more… and on and on.
Kate Bowler: That sounds exactly like the Kierkegaard description of joy… like you’ve gotten it and lost it in the same moment.
Rowan Williams: That’s right… and insofar as we can imagine the joy of heaven, it’s all of that, without that fear of loss.
Kate Bowler: That’s so beautiful… I can see why music is such a great analogy here… Carl Rahner… the unfinished symphony… all that which can’t be and isn’t and will never be… and yet how beautifully bittersweet it is to live like this.
Rowan Williams: That’s right… and so often what lasts in music is music that somehow contains that.
Kate Bowler: I totally agree… there are so many more words when they’re musical words for longing… saudade…
Rowan Williams: Yes, in Welsh we say hiraeth.
Kate Bowler: Bittersweet, here and not…
Rowan Williams: And again… the ridiculousness of the love of God… the surreal generosity.
Kate Bowler: I’m always struck by how few entirely true things there are to say in the face of loss… but despite everything there will be music.
Rowan Williams: Despite everything… a bold statement… and if not… what then?
Kate Bowler: Yes… like Sam Wells says… if we can’t make it happy, can we make it beautiful?
Rowan Williams: And to look and not to flinch… and not to lie.
Kate Bowler: I worry about both the cultural lying to protect people and the religious over-certainty… and Christians often seem suspicious of joy.
Rowan Williams: Couldn’t agree more… the confusion between joy and certainty is toxic… joy is not that kind of certainty… you can’t manufacture it.
Kate Bowler: I’d love to schedule joy… Wednesdays between eight and nine…
Rowan Williams: It happens to you… often when you’re not expecting it.
Kate Bowler: You can’t grab onto joy… you can only surprise yourself.
Rowan Williams: Surprise yourself, yes.
Kate Bowler: I find it comforting to say… there will still be joy… nothing is spiritually wrong unless it is despair.
Rowan Williams: Not that there will be a happy outcome… but something will still surprise you… like the man hanging from the cliff who notices the wildflowers… how beautiful.
Kate Bowler: Take supplements for it.
Rowan Williams: Buy photographs for it…
Kate Bowler: I landed on joy being closest to gratitude, hope, and delight… sometimes absurd delight… like the world’s largest Ukrainian sausage.
Rowan Williams: That makes a lot of sense… delight leaves room for the absurd… even the Gospels are full of it.
Kate Bowler: Joy feels like a necessary yes… even in the face of death.
Rowan Williams: And gratitude… people see something in your actions… something that opens windows… that’s holiness.
Kate Bowler: It’s easy to feel like we must perform joy or sadness…
Rowan Williams: That leads to anxiety… which is its own kind of totalitarianism.
Kate Bowler: How do we cultivate openness to joy?
Rowan Williams: Stillness… silence… attention to the body… letting anxiety ease… worship that creates space… not pressure but seriousness… a sense of homecoming.
Kate Bowler: Let everything be sturdy… when is the last time you felt joy?
Rowan Williams: Two weeks ago… walking in the Malvern Hills… the landscape, the music, the sense of this is it… joy is that sense of what we are made for… and realizing—I am not God… I am a creature… loved.
Kate Bowler: Thank you… it was a joy.
Rowan Williams: Joy indeed. Thanks so much.
Kate Bowler: After conversations like that, I always feel like I just need a minute… I have buried friends… lived with chronic illness… and also laughed at the most ridiculous things… grief and joy sit right next to each other… maybe that’s the invitation… the courage to be joyful anyway. So as you head into these holy days… may you not rush your sorrow… may you not manufacture your joy… may you feel no pressure to tidy what is unfinished… and if joy finds you—in music, absurdity, forgiveness, or the steadiness of love—may you let it in… not as proof that anything is fixed, but as a recognition that God is still at work… even now… even here… even if not. Bless you, my dears. My new book Joyful Anyway comes out just in time for Easter… available wherever books are sold… a handful of tickets still available for book tour… This episode was made possible through the generosity of Lilly Endowment… Thank you to my amazing team, Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, Ellia Zonio, Anna Fitzgerald-Peterson, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
