Kate Bowler: What’s faith supposed to look like when everything else feels like it’s falling apart? That’s the question at the heart of today’s episode. I’m Kate Bowler, and this is Everything Happens. I’ve invited two people I trust to give me their very best reasons for why they are still Christians, even after everything. Nadia Bowles-Webber, she’s a Lutheran pastor. Founder of the House of All Sinners and Saints, she’s the bestselling author of Pastrics and Shameless, and Sarah Bessey, my Canadian twin sister. She’s a writer and speaker and co-founder of Evolving Faith and the author of Field Notes for the Wilderness. And somewhere between knitting stores and church basements and mastectomies and raising middle schoolers, we ask, when everything feels relentlessly hard, what should faith look like? Sarah, Nadia, oh my gosh, welcome to Everything Happens. I’m just so glad you’re here.
Nadia: I’m so happy to be here. I wish you guys were in my house though. Absolutely thrilled. I could feed you really good food. That sounds so nice.
Kate Bowler: There’s just a quality of being a person right now that feels very sort of relentlessly, grindingly hard. So I just wanted to start there. I’m curious what that feeling feels like for you guys these days.
Nadia: Uh, I think my, my life has felt so hard for the last six months that things keep piling up like my mother-in-law just broke her hip three days ago. And anyway, it’s, it, it just, as somebody who does not particularly create drama or draw it unto myself, I’ve had more drama in the last 6 months than I feel particularly comfortable with. And so I think I’ve been so distracted by that, that the world drama has felt a little secondary. And I think, I’m not alone. I mean, I think anybody going through really, really big things right now, the world trauma feels kind of secondary to what is happening personally. But I, yeah, so I don’t know how to tease apart how I’m showing up now because of that, or how I am showing up because of the world stuff. But it’s different. I am showing up in a different way, which I’m really grateful for and surprised by.
Kate Bowler: Because you are toggling between a personal feeling of apocalypse and a global one.
Nadia: Maybe it’s the combination of those, but as soon as I was able to, after my mastectomy, as soon I was like able to be out and about, like about six weeks, like I’ve gone to church every week since then, which I don’t go to church unless I’m preaching, which is not, I mean, that’s a very inelegant thing to admit, but it’s true. And I just wanted to be in church. And so things that bother me about church just don’t, I don’t. They’ve fallen away. I don’t care. Doesn’t matter. I just want to be around people. And then I’m like, I don’t know, there’s a yarn store near my house that I started showing up to because I realized there are these old ladies who hang out there and knit. And they don’t know anything about me. I don’t even talk. I sit there and I know, I know.
Sarah: Ladies in the knit.
Nadia: Hey, no!
Sarah: I think I know which one it is because I’ve been to a couple of good yarn stores in Denver and they are spectacular, but please carry on.
Nadia: Yeah, and they’re just these big, long wooden tables and all these chairs and people, women just doing this really human thing of making things with their hands as they chat, like what, that’s pretty ancient stuff. That’s just anthropological, right. And so I’m doing that. And I don’t know, I’m just I feel like wanting to be around people more, but in really simple ways and not in front of them, you know. Not in that capacity but just among them in a way that I didn’t have feel the need for. But sometimes even but that’s something I felt guilty for not feeling the need for in the you know what I’m like I really should go to church I really should show up but I I’m profoundly lacking in discipline so like I can’t make myself do shit nothing I can make myself to anything I want if I don’t want to do it like good luck I can’t force it, but sometimes God… Gives this gift of creating a desire within us for something that we can’t actually manufacture that desire for ourselves. I mean, I can’t. And so I’m really grateful that I just naturally want to be doing this. And then I’m spending time in this warehouse, volunteering at this food distribution warehouse where they take food that is going to be wasted, and then they repackage it, and they give it away to people who are food insecure. And just like filling pallets with a bunch of young people feels pretty good. I don’t know. I just, I feel like I’m showing up in a more community way, I guess.
Kate Bowler: I love that the woman that I met who is like, I’m a misanthrope, I hate everybody, is like I just want a cozy place of faith around other people who I love with my big tender heart.
Nadia: And I only want to go to a church that I started from scratch because that’s the only kind I could like yeah
Kate Bowler: Because, Sarah, you’re my paragon of cozy faith. You’re just like one crochet needle away from…
Sarah: The space of faith at all times. I love it. No, I think that you’re right. I mean, a lot of those, I think that that’s where I’ve pivoted in the last number of years is very far from wanting to be in front of anyone or, you know, believing my own hype or anything anything along those lines. There’s been a real sense of like. Best way that I know how to combat despair right now is by loving things and people in very intense and particular sort of ways. And so, you know, my stage of life, I’ve got three teenagers and a middle schooler. You know, we’ve got life kind of happening here in Canada and the things that we are facing are maybe very different than what a lot of Americans are feeling right now, existential threats to sovereignty, things like that. And so you end up having… I think very similar to Nadia, like it just, life has become very practical and embodied and that is how I find more hope in it. So like, I’m still an unrelenting church lady, right? And I’m the one who’s, you know, picking everybody up from rehearsals for Matilda Junior. Signing up for the meal trains and doing the food bank and making meals for moms whose kids are in NICU and it’s like, God, I I feel like my 40s I’m like a minute away from turning 47 But I feel my 40’s have been like, oh you don’t get to change the world But you do get to love it and so that’s kind of how it feels in the midst of the apocalypse right now.
Kate Bowler: You are both bringing me back to this weird feeling of like, we don’t wanna feel above it anymore. Like, I mean, sometimes it’s really important to feel above a lot of the traditions that hurt us or the communities that we want to have a greater understanding of the deep heresies like Christian nationalism, which is infecting our countries. But it just, it feels like it’s, there’s like a return right now to some kind of like younger, sweeter side of faith that also sometimes also feels old and wizened.
Sarah: That’s very true. I actually had that thought because… Like it sounds like such a silly thing, but Nadia, you brought up the knitting and the yarn store and this idea of like craft and women and community and connection. And I was thinking last summer of just how incredibly overwhelmed I was by the genocide in Gaza and doing all the things I knew to do. Sending the emails, going to the protests, making a nuisance of myself to people I thought should be doing better. You know, just all the things that I know to do and still feeling incredibly powerless. And I ended up picking up my knitting needles, which sounds like such a silly thing to do, but I remember, Kate, you’ll remember this. You have enough, you have a lot of adjacency to like old Mennonite traditions, but you remember Prochols, right?
Kate Bowler: Prayer shawls.
Sarah: And there would always be this ministry within a church, whether it was Mennonite or, you know, sloppy, charismatic one like mine or, you know whatever else the Lutherans I know did a lot. And there was this idea of like, we’re gonna get together as women and knit for people while we pray for them. And we’re going to create these like, usually quite garish looking shawls because it’d be made from like donated acrylic yarn that squeaked when you knit with it. But there was this sense of like, you would gift it to a new mom, or to someone who was in hospice, or to somebody whose kid was sick, or people could go to the prayer ladies and say, would you mind making a prayer shawl for so-and-so? And the idea wasn’t that this person then would wear it while they prayed. It was like this tangible embodied thing of like someone is praying for you. And so It was, it was very, it felt very primal and very connected to like our grandmothers and to our traditions. And there’s this part of me that also felt like it was varied, like useless. Like it wasn’t really actually doing anything other than this, every stitch is a prayer sort of thing. And so I went and found like the numbers of all the kids and all the hostages and all of the people who died on October 7th and all people who have died since. And I picked different colors of yarn and I worked on it for like eight months. And went and found names for everybody and found all the things and put them all into this thing. And by the time it was done, I mean, you could have wrapped it around like nine people. It was so huge and so weighty. I had to start putting it in like my checked baggage when I traveled, right? And so, but there was this thing of like, there’s this long tradition of prayer shawls. There’s this is long tradition, of taking your grief to your craft. And this thing of being alongside other women who are doing this work and also remembering people and having some sense of like vigil and paying attention. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of ways where people are finding ways to kind of connect their body or their feet or their hands or with their prayers. And sometimes they look so small, it doesn’t really make a big difference to anybody. But there is this sense of, I’m paying attention
Yes.
Nadia: It made a big difference to me because you sent one to me. Yeah, that’s right. I did. You made me one and you sent me one after my surgery. I inflicted my knitting on so many unwitting victims. It was not garish at all. It was beautiful. Thank you.
Kate Bowler: It reminds me of what our beloved friend Jeff Chu says about like appropriate smallness. Like it lets us be at scale spiritually and yet participate in something bigger than us. I just, that’s such a beautiful image, Han, of you sitting there like stitching all of your hope with the hopes of the world and all your sadness with the sadness of the word. It’s gorgeous.
Nadia: I love the thing about maybe we can’t fix the world, but we can love it, you know? And I don’t know, finding ways to love the world. I think there’s a barrage of negative words and images that we’re exposed to online that makes us go, oh, this is the world we live in, right? And not saying they’re convoluted or they’re not true. But they’re selected, they’re, you know, they are selected and there’s nothing unmediated, right? They’re selected to evoke something really particular in us and it works. And yet, Eric and I were on another one of our long walks across the UK, we did, And it was after my breast cancer diagnosis, we walked from the. Irish Sea to the North Sea across England. And it was through these three national parks and there’s just, it’s undeveloped national park space in the UK. And it just the world in it and it was so beautiful and I kept telling myself, this is the world. This is also the world, this the world this is world. And don’t we have the right to do that Given the fact that without what feels like a lot of consent other than just getting online, all of these messages about what the world is are being fed to us without too much consent. And don’t we then have the right to go, also, this is the world, this whole world. Oh.
Kate Bowler: It makes me so teary. It’s so beautiful. That’s how I feel when I pray with my son. Exactly that feeling. Like, this is the world too. Like is it okay that our prayer yesterday was about math tests and trying to figure out how to use our day planners well and trying to feel brave enough to ask questions in class? Like just like the smallness, but his big, gorgeous, expressive face, like. This is the world. I love your permission to like be in love with what deserves our, like just what pulls it out of us.
Nadia: Absolutely.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. I totally forgot, Nadia, that you were raised Church of Christ that does this, like, unvarnished a cappella singing. And it just reminded me again that this faith journey of yours has, like brought you back to a lot of singing. The last time I saw you, I forgot what city you were in, you were like, it’s so good to be here. By the way, I’ll be driving an hour and a half out of town to be attending, right? To be attending just like an evening of people singing with Unvarnished. With unvarnished harmonies. The sacred harp. Sacred harp, yes, that’s what it’s called. I laughed so hard because you’re such a badass and you’re like, pardon me one moment. I just have to.
Nadia: Well yeah and I think I skipped out on some fancy dinner with like Krista Tippett and all these people and I was like I’m gonna drive to Bloomington because I think there’s 10 people sitting around someone’s kitchen table singing Sacred Heart there tonight. It’s so great. But it’s my favorite because again singing just singing without instruments just as with and for each other not an audition not a performance just with and before each other. It’s just a deeply human thing. It’s anthropology, right? It’s this is what humans do and I could talk for an hour about how much I love Sacred Heart. I will say that’s one of the things I love about that tradition because we’re singing mostly it’s Christian poetry from the 17 and 1800s are the lyrics, right, a lot of Isaac Watts. And so the language is so beautiful, but a lot of the songs are about dying. There’s a whole memento Mori thing to it. Remember you’re hastening on to death’s dark gloomy shade. Your joys on earth will soon be or your flesh and dust be laid. But it’s really peppy. Everyone’s very happy when they’re singing it. Anyway, there’s a tradition at Sacred Heart conventions that there’s sick and shut in lists So somebody gets up and reads the names of people who. Are sick, they can’t be there. And then there’s a memorial lesson, the names of all the singers who’ve died. And, and then they, they talk really honestly about grief, like honestly about it. And then people are crying and they’ll say, let’s sing number 142 for them. You know, so lovely. And the, uh, the Saturday after my surgery, I woke up to these WhatsApp messages from sacred harp singers in the UK because they had a convention there. The day before and they said your name was on the sick and shut in list and I just want to make sure you’re okay. And so it’s like so lovely, you know, this showing this way of making sure that people’s names are spoken in a space of care. I don’t know, it just felt like kind of the best of church in a way. I know it’s the most earnest. I will say, you know, I don’t like earnestness generally. Like that’s not where I lean into. It is the most honest thing I’ve ever been involved in in my life. Knitting and Sacred Harvesting. I don t know what’s happening to me.
Sarah: I’m so happy.
Nadia: I’m so happy right now. Are you now only if you’re becoming more cynical and misanthropic because then the universe would be in balance
Sarah: The deep well of sincerity is still being plumbed. I think there is something though about like, I don’t know, I’m remembering back and all the conversations with my grandmother in particular around certain like turning point moments in her life and how often she did talk about things like communal singing and being within a community. And of course they didn’t have all of the constant barrage of apocalypse and death and despair and powerlessness that we feel. But almost the only thing that benefits from our despair are the powers and principalities. And the only that really is the antidote is the sitting around the kitchen table praying for people who are sick and shut in. It’s bringing my very tall teenagers along with me and hearing them sing the songs that I have sung all my life. Um, it’s things like bringing the meals for people and it’s, you know, it just, it is that these are all the things that end up making you feel connected, um, a little bit more hopeful. Um, but also like it’s not, you haven’t been swept under yet.
Kate Bowler: Yes, that’s perfect.
Nadia: Yeah, I was having, I wasn’t in conversation with our friend Sulika last week. I was like, you know what? Despair is not gonna save us. It’s not gonna save us. That’s right. It just won’t. But beauty might and, you know, kindness and the small things that we can do and the smaller things that we can notice you’re right. It fends off the darkness, you now? It says like, that’s why I said, you know in the Lutheran baptismal liturgy, we say, do you renounce the devil and all of his empty promises? And I’m like, yeah.
I know, I just love that so much.
Nadia: So much isn’t it the best but I’m like the powers and principalities and all of their empty promises have no dominion in my kitchen You know, I’m having 10 people over for dinner tomorrow. I’ve been doing nothing but cooking for a couple of days. And it’s just the best thing in the world.
Sarah: It absolutely is. I think when people now kind of ask me, like, how do I feel connected to God or how do I feel like I’m making a difference, I am probably just as likely to talk about getting in the kitchen or, you know, doing laundry or cleaning, you, know, the flower beds or something, like as I am to talk about prayer and worship or anything else that we would call, like explicitly Christian. You know, there’s something about ordinary work with very ordinary people that does make you feel Like, so much of… Our lives is like what Eugene Peterson called like that long obedience in the same direction. Very nice. And so, it just feels like this thing that never culminates or ends, which is life, right? But there’s something really satisfying about stepping back and being like, I made that meal. And everybody around this table is having a good time and we are eating and we are together and we have even taken a moment to pray together or to, maybe not, right, maybe just to have a few laughs. And so and all those things all, to your point, they do push back the darkness a bit. I’m so good.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. Kind of makes me want to ask you about labels because I think all of us have had, you know, a mixed experience with labels, theological labels. I know I’ve been recently thinking a about my relationship with evangelicalism, I think, in particular, because publicly… The marriage between evangelical, American evangelicalism and Christian nationalism has been awful to behold. I don’t know, I just, the more these labels kind of take on such a big life of their own, I realized I’m much more comfortable describing myself as a pietist. I am a heart-warmed I’m a pietist. I just love… I love… I like that one. …Emotional, spiritually reliable emotions. I do believe in them sometimes, you know? I do that, like, scripture is this gorgeous language of the heart and God loves my feelings. I mean, just pietism suits me. But lately, I just realized maybe I also just have to be a piatist because I was never really invited into the evangelical club. In the first place. And Sarah, you wrote about this recently and it made me laugh very hard when you describe all of us who are Christian bookstore rejects. I would love to hear you. I would like to hear more about this.
Sarah: Us as one. I think all three of us bear that label of being in the Christian bookstore rejects. It is kind of a remarkable thing to be, because I had this experience, like I was in a city for work and every day I would drive by this Christian bookstore and it had been, I don’t know, a decade since I’d wandered into one, if not longer. All of a sudden, just kind of on a whim, I pulled in and went in. And I was really taken aback. By the one version of Christianity that was being, you know, marketed and displayed and on the end caps, and you know whether it was in travel mugs or notebooks or you know big Bible studies, you now concerning how empathy is a problem. There was this thing that I kind of ended up feeling like incredibly sad about but also like, well this is why. I mean, we go back. You know, a lot of years we’ve, none of us have ever really been featured in any of these stores. And so you have kind of this almost like shift of being like. You know, pretty devout, churchy lady. I’m pretty all in on the Jesus stuff and, well, trying to be the, like, love your neighbor kind and not the storm the capital kind. But there’s this element of like. In this lane for people like that, and yet this would be the last place that you would find anything from any of us. And so I think there was, there was kind of this sense of like, what does it mean to hold onto a label or not? I think, there’s a lot of reasons why people set it down. I know I did in most of my 20s. I had a real hard time calling myself a Christian or identifying as a Christian, let alone evangelical. And then there was almost like this. I don’t know if I wanna call it stubbornness or faithfulness because both of those tend to get twisted up in my mind a little bit. Like I think that faithfulness is a form of stubbornness that’s kind of been, that I can get behind. And so there’s this sense of like, well, of course I’m a Christian. You know, I still am holding onto the label. I 100% understand why anybody does not want to and turns away from it. And yet there’s thing inside of me that is like, you don’t get to take Jesus away from me. And you don’t get to this story away from Me. This is still, for better or worse, shaping how I move through the world and it is everything that I hope is true. Yes. And so, you know, there’s a lot of us who wouldn’t be claimed by, you now, whole swaths of, at this point, it almost feels like a badge of honor. I hate ice.
Nadia: I was never really, I was never evangelical. Like Church of Christ that I was raised in is quite different. It’s more sectarian, fundamentalist. So you guys will joke about like Christian music and I wasn’t allowed to listen to Christian music. Yeah, yeah, that was not allowed. Anyhow, so you guys are kind of softies, but Anyway.
Sarah: If anybody needs a living human video to which is invitation by Carmen, we are your gals.
Nadia: I don’t even know what that means. Okay, but I would say the reason I still claim that the word, it’s multivalent, but one is that I refuse to give it to them, right? I refuse to sort of thing, concede the faith to white Christian nationalism, that’s one. But the other is that, I’m Christian because I fucking need help. Me too. I just need help. That makes me teary to even say it. But like, I don’t, I’m not enough. And I don’t I think Christianity takes very seriously the rather grimmer aspects of being human and our failings and our need and the fact that there nobody, you know, Jesus had zero concern with righteousness in a sense, you now, like he was very suspicious of people who were self-righteous. He never rejected anyone or, I don’t know, I just think when it says he came for the sick, like I can’t think of a day in my life I couldn’t raise my hand and go, yes, please, you know? So, and also as a recovering alcoholic, there’s no way for me to untangle my Christian faith from 34 years of being an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was in a meeting this morning, you now, Like I, it’s. I just need help and I really love that part of the Christian faith that Jesus gives us to the weary. And the idea of mercy, like the mercy of it, the forgiveness of it and the second chances of it also presumes the need for it. All of those things, those beautiful things presume. The need for those things. And I think in our culture, you know, it’s not very popular to say that I’m in need of mercy or that I am in need of forgiveness or that I’m a need of help in any way. And yet it doesn’t change the truth of the fact that I ain’t help. And we all, everyone is, you know, on some level. So I’m just, that’s my lane. I can’t imagine being anything else. And you know the thing I’ve loved, it’s been interesting as I’ve been going back to church every week, what I love now because it’s kind of different, you know. I love hearing big chunks of scripture read out loud. The Hebrew text, Hebrew Bible text, the psalm, the gospel, the epistle, like I love those read out out loud in front of hundreds of people. It does feel like, defying the darkness, in a sense, because these are… Thousands of years old, these words, and they’ve held up, you know, in a way that I don’t think Reese’s book club list will. You know, I think that there’s this sense that it’s load-bearing and it speaks to a bigger vision than what we see on our screens in terms of what it means to be human and how God works in the world, you now, and the struggles that people have had that are documented in scriptures around those two things.
Sarah: I was talking with one of my teenagers about this and they said even if it all turns out to be garbage, like if in the end, like you can’t prove any of it, you know, I love this way of moving through the world.
Mmm.
Sarah: And it makes the world feel like home. And I think that that’s the part that kind of got articulated for me around that story of just like, God, there’s a lot of ways to go through this world that is a tragedy and broken and hurting. And I love going through the world, going through life with the belief that the world is loved, that all of us are loved, that everybody is made in the image of God. Everything that you said, Nadia, like this. At the end of the day, there’s this element of choice and decision and intention and crossing of something. And even if it all turns out to be garbage, I like this way of moving through the world.
Kate Bowler: It’s funny you said that, Sarah, because that was the exact thing I was going to ask you, which is like, what have you noticed? We’ve all been around a lot of very appropriate ways in which people have been trying to deconstruct their faith. And I also know that we have felt the limits of it sometimes when we see people who only know how to stop loving the world. How to burn it all down, how to only want the ash because every righteous anger says it must be so. And I just think it’s really beautiful for you to say like, but also we need to fall in love again with the things that hold us and are strong and help us love each other better and fold us even more and more into God’s mercy and like hopefully each other’s.
Sarah: I think I remember years ago, Nadi, I think it was actually at the COVID version of Evolving Faith in 2020, you talked a lot in that conference about how much you needed big churchy words like resurrection, and that you weren’t willing to set them down yet because of how deeply we need them. And it’s funny to me that as, say I came up in the prosperity gospel adjacent. Charismatic third wave kind of aspect of things in small churches in Western Canada. It’s, you know, to say it was an over realized eschatology is gentle. But there’s this sense of like, the amount of things, like when I thought when that was done in my life, when I had gone through my first experiences with deconstruction, which at the time that I went through them, like there was no language like that back then. But I remember being like, burn it down, wait till the ashes are cold. Dance on them, like, there’s nothing here for me, not in language, not in practice, not whatever. And then as I’ve gotten older, I am shocked at how many things have just kind of quietly crept back in. You know, it like started when the kids were babies and at night when I would be rocking them, it’s like, well, other people might be singing, you know, hymns, but because of how I grew up, I’m singing Maranatha Chorus, you know? At, you know, two o’clock in the morning while feeding the babies. And so, prayer cloths, language like powers and principalities. Where did I pull that from? You know, like just this sort of language or this wave. So it is kind of an interesting thing to me that in a lot of ways, I think I look at Nadia’s love for Sacred Harp, right? And I can see, like, just, God, she’s so gifted as a singer. And I think about the language that we, And in some ways it feels like this defiance. That is almost like setting up this little outpost on the edges of the hinterlands and being like, I hold this still. I hold the way that I pray. And I hold, I hold that deep belief that it matters, even though I have no idea what that means sometimes. And I have this like ridiculously deep love for the Scriptures and for serving the poor or for … Showing up in community or just or for how this posture of moving through the world like what my kids were talking about. It’s that outpost is in the teeth of everything that wants to consume.
Kate Bowler: Yeah, that’s right. I’m working on this joy project, and I just found that there’s, if we’re not, you know, it’s, Mennonite theology just like accepts suffering as being just an everyday reality, and i just find it very comfortable and comforting to say that we cannot always be happy, and we are not even supposed to always be happy, but we can be like deeply joyful regardless. And I’m like sinking more and more into that sort of. I want the dial on reality to be really, really high and for that to feel, not like screaming. I need it to feel like I am seeing God’s world clearly.
Nadia: Augustine spoke, you know, 1,500 years ago about cruel optimism. And if the idea is like the pursuit of happiness, like we should be happy. Like that, if we’re not happy, something’s wrong. If we’re happy, something’s is wrong. And it’s like, no, if you were always happy, something would be wrong. Sorry, that’s not reality. That’s not, that like saying like Francis Buffard’s, that’s like saying every color should be purple. You know, I mean, we’re dealing with an entire palette here, right? A whole palette of human- experience and emotions and the fact that there’s some black on the palette doesn’t make everything gray, right? But to say there isn’t any on the palate is delusional.
Kate Bowler: I love you talking about it as colors. I always think of it as notes, where it’s like, dee, dee-dee-do-de-de, de-de. It’s like that. Exactly. This will be every.
Sarah: Usually a few octaves up if it’s cruel optimism. It’s something that is very ingrained in the faith that I’ve had to reimagine. Because I came up in the prosperity gospel that has now become the religion du jour of pretty much everyone, even if it is very divorced from religion, like the idea. Constant happiness, of entitlement, of affirmation, and this way of moving through the world. The name it and claim it stuff, right? It’s all part of our culture now. It kind of won, right. And so everybody loved the prosperity, nobody loved the gospel part. And so there’s this element of… I’m grateful for the belief that it gave me at a ribs deep level that God loves you. But then the flip side of that is, is like, so if you are suffering or you feel sad or you are sick, you know, God wants you well and would heal you and so you must be the problem. And so there’s this element of like shame that ends up being laid over top of your suffering. And then people, because inevitably we all find ourselves in, I mean, you live for longer than like a minute and you understand that this is. What life is. And so then I think that that shift that you’re talking about, Nadia, is the thing that I am just like, God, what would I do without God with us? Like what would I do, without Emmanuel? What would I without this really deep conviction that God is as present in radiology as in the cathedral. If I did not believe that God is as present at the food bank as in the mountains that are 10 minutes from my house, like, what are we even doing? Either it’s here or it’s not real. And it has to be. And so, I think that that’s the aspect of it that we end up losing with the cruel optimism, is we end losing God with us in all of it. Oh, honey, that’s so good!
Kate Bowler: And how is it that after like a decade of writing about prosperity gospel, I never ever made that killer joke. It’s the prosperity without the gospel.
I made it like the gospel. Oh, poor Kate. Poor Kate. You can call it, it’s going to be in my new one coming out soon. It’s yours, I love it.
Kate Bowler: Take us on the road. You guys, it’s so good. Oh, it is so good friends. I was like in the worst mood today because I was just totally overwhelmed by just that feeling like everyone else was, everyone else had really important problems and big needs and I was just sort of eating snacks alone in a closet. So thank you for giving me so much more than I could have expected from today. I just, I love your big, unbelievably soft romantic. Cozy hearts. Gosh, you’re just two of my favorite softies. I love you guys.
Sarah: Love you too.
Kate Bowler: Sometimes when the world feels so loud and brittle, it’s tempting to believe that the only faithful response is to argue about it. Just argue better when the side, shout out the other side. But what I keep hearing in this conversation is the need to be smaller, and frankly like more human size. It’s Nadia showing up at church just to sit around people and knit together. It’s Sarah making meals and picking up teenagers from rehearsals and just loving what’s right in front of her. And maybe that doesn’t always change the whole world or convince that one uncle because he’s wrong and someone needs to tell him. But we do get to love it, this world, our people, this neighborhood in embodied ways. Like what a challenge, what a gift. Oh, I also want to tell you about a new project that Sarah’s been working on. So she was asked to edit a collection of essays from the late Rachel Held Evans, a very good friend who died in 2019 after a brief illness and who so deeply missed. Rachel was a writer and speaker who helped so many of us hold on to faith while asking hard questions. This book is called Braving the Truth, and it feels like a conversation she would still be having with us now.
Sarah: I think this is the closest I’ve come to time travel in real life in a lot of ways. One of the things that people say to me a lot in the aftermath of losing Rachel is that when she died, they felt like they lost their friend, that they felt they knew her, that she was someone who was really alongside of them. And the truth is that they kind of did. Right, like Rachel was very much the same person off the page as she was on the page. She swore more in real life. But there was this sense for me in going through it of just like, I think at the time I would have used language like, well, she’s a real prophet. But now, looking back on things that she wrote, gosh, in 2009, you’re like, oh my gosh, she was really a prophet. She deeply discerned the moment for the church and what we were heading into. The things that she named about Christian nationalism and about apocalypse, and even about things like racism and patriarchy. And so to look back on it and be like, I’m shocked at how much she saw coming.
Kate Bowler: One of the things I really appreciated about Rachel was how, um… Deeply generous she was about wanting everything to be about the issues, like the actual substance of the debate itself, and not lose sight of all the people around her. She was so very aware that this was about trying to create language that was for a whole. Like a movement. It was very strange at the time to be trying to shape language that was very deeply pietistic without it having to follow all of the rules of hyper certainty, hyper like performative righteousness. Like, am I not so good? Here’s my six-point Bible plan for this. Like it was so, it was very, it very humble. So I guess that’s like … The question I wanted to ask you is like, if we could borrow a quality from Rachel that would help us brave the truth right now, what would it be? And I think my answer to that, I guess, would be, I think she was humble in a way that I would like to be going forward. If I could start a quality now, I think I would soften the underside of my heart a little bit more to be a more generous listener. I think, I’ll need that in the days to come. But I wonder what you would say.
Sarah: I think one of the things that really set Rachel apart then and probably even more now was her unrelenting honesty and complete commitment to not tying things up in a neat bow. And I think any of us who write or work alongside people with very real questions and very real. You know, suffering and moments in time, there’s this urgency or this need, I don’t know if it’s like cultural or religious or like where it all kind of comes from for us, but this instinct to be like, and here’s how you fix that feeling, right? And so I think the thing that meant a lot to me revisiting it was how often Rachel would like write something and not tie it up for people and just let it sit in that moment. Like she would write an essay that was like, the one that is coming to my mind right now is one that was called, I Don’t Always Tell You. And in this essay, she’s like, I don’t always tell you about the mornings when I wake up and I have Sarah, I am not even sure God exists, right? Like she just, the level of honesty, and then it just, There’s not this sense of like, but then I get into the word and then I put on my positive and encouraging music, you know, like there’s this, I get to just sit in this, right? And so there was this sense, I think, for a lot of us at that moment in time. And I think the gift that she gives to all of us right now is just learning what it is to be a person together and saying that all these things belong. All these things belong in a life of faith, all these things belong in your life as a totality, that there’s not this need to kind of tidy it up or solve it or turn it into like a, you know, sermon with like three points and throw it at you like a brick. You know, like it just, you get to sit and saying like, here’s this thing that made me really sad. Like there was another one that she wrote about like, Here’s all the reasons why I’m okay with her. I’ve kind of landed my relationship with the church and why going to church is hard. Even things like, she wrote honestly about like when her church plant failed, right? And like, there’s not too many ministry leaders who are like, here’s my failures. Here’s the things that keep me up at night, you know? And there would be this moment of like, honesty to that, that I find incredibly hospitable. You know, to all of us. And so, you know there’s a humility to that like you pointed to. But even one of the things that she said in that essay about like, I’ve left the church or I’ve this thing and here’s this thing that has been this, you know like, I have relief about that. But when I have a baby, who’s going to bring me a casserole? Like, I’m missing the community, even though this whole other aspect of life is something I’m glad to see the backside of. There was, I remember Kristen Howerton did the response and kind of reflection on that piece in particular. And she was like, people showed up for you, Rachel. Like in the aftermath of all of it, your community was here. And maybe it didn’t look like the community that you were writing about in this moment of this particular church or this particular town. But we all showed up your family and we all show up for your people. And there were more casseroles across the kitchen counter in that woman’s house than I’ve ever seen in my life. And the community was there. Yeah, it’s a really beautiful book and I feel really honored that I got to do it and really honored I was asked and really moved to think of all the people who will have these words and these stories, whether it was about her writing about folding her hate mail into origami as a Lenten practice, right? You know, you kind of, you know, name it, right? I just, I’m excited for those things to live on and not just disappear into the ether of the internet. Yes, totally, that’s totally true.
Kate Bowler: I’ll be sure to link Braving the Truth in today’s show notes if you want to pick up a copy along with links to both Nadia and Sarah’s Substacks where they just offer such like thoughtful reflections and gathering these beautiful communities of faith. It’s also crazy that right now I’m currently on tour for Joyful Anyway and I really hope I get to see you on one of the stops. There are still a few seats available at KateBuller.com slash tour. Come be joyful anyway with me. We can yell in this economy every five seconds and it’ll still be funny. And a big thank you to my team who does the impossible every day. Working with me, it must be impossible. This is Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring, Hailie Dureett, Megan Crunkleton, Katherine Smith, Elias Zaneo, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, and Keith Weston. Thank you guys.
