Kate Bowler: Hello my dears. This is Everything Happens and I’m your host, Kate Bowler. And I’m Canadian enough to tell you about that this early in the conversation. So we all love where we’re from, but I am from the very middle of the prairies. I am from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and if you’re from Winnipeg, you’re really from Winnipeg. And you know every single thing about it. You know that we have Le festival du Voyageur, which is where people dress up as French-Canadian explorers and build ice sculptures and it’s a spectacle of ice and delicious food made over a campfire. We have a bajillion restaurants and gorgeous communities and really funny, weird things, like only one fast road that goes around the city. But also my very favorite, we have an open landfill right in the middle of the city that you can go sledding on in the winter. So when people say, where are you from? I always think, hey, I’m from the garbage part. Mostly because it makes me laugh at every time a friend moves, they always tell me where they moved in relationship to the landfill. Oh, I’m just five blocks upwind. And I just can’t think of a place that I would rather be from. One of the things I have loved about growing up in Winnipeg is that one of the biggest pop star sensations is also from Winnipeg. Her name is Chantal Kreviazuk, and if you’re Canadian, I don’t need to explain to you how excited I am for this conversation, but if you’re not Canadian, I guess one, I feel bad for you, you really missed out on sledding season. But two, Chantal is incredible. She was the soundtrack of our adolescence. She sang so many popular ballads, like the cover to “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane” that was featured in the movie Armageddon, or, a cover, too, “Feels Like Home” that was in How to Lose a Guy in Ten days. And wow, just like that, now I have those songs stuck in both of our heads. I’m going to take a quick break to talk about the sponsors of the show before I tell you more about Chantal and we really dig in to this open-hearted conversation. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.
Kate: Chantal Kreviazuk is a Canadian singer, songwriter, composer, activist and pianist. She is a three-time Juno Award winner and was the soundtrack of all of my teenage angst. Chantal has become a major advocate for destigmatizing mental illness, a cause near and dear to her heart after her brother struggled to get adequate care for nearly 20 years. She said, “When a family member is sick, the whole family is sick.” She offers such wisdom for people who struggle with a hurting family member and their own mental health, and for their marriages that are sometimes not as easy as we’d hoped.
Kate: Chantal, oh my gosh, this is so surreal. Thank you for doing this with me and inviting me to your home. I am just yeah. Goosebumps. I couldn’t be happier. I thought maybe, if you don’t mind, we could start at the very beginning by talking about your musical childhood.
Chantal Kreviazuk: Should I play this? Just have that on loop in the background?
Kate: That’s so great. Because you were a singer, piano player, and Winnipeg has this amazing classical music scene, and it sounds like… My mom was a music professor at the University of Manitoba and the highlight of my year was getting to play with the orchestra at the Centennial Concert Hall, where you got to, like, walk on the red carpet and then play where the sound is so beautiful and rich. It sounds like music was absolutely your childhood too.
Chantal: Wow. When I think of my childhood, it’s it leans mostly soundtrack, so the soundtrack of my life is actually more like the soundtrack WAS my life. So when I was a very little, little person, it started, with, I think my grandparents. So, my, on my dad’s side, the Ukrainian very, very Ukrainian side. He grew up in Lockport, Manitoba, which was, a tiny little spot off the freeway, off the highway, north of Winnipeg. And there’s a farmhouse there that is still in the family. And it was tiny. And there was a piano just like this. In fact, I got this piano because I needed to get one, just like the one at my family’s farmhouse. And so on Sundays, we would try to fit in as much music as possible before the Disney movie at 6 p.m.. Do you remember when that would start? And the the fireworks at the beginning? So I was always kind of the last one at the piano, and there was always just hymns, the sheet music for hymns on the piano. And, and my dad had 12 brothers and sisters. So between aunts and cousins, there’d be a lot of people around. And that was, that was that. I was very, very little. But I was even littler when I was with my grandparents on my mom’s side, my very first memory of my life is me sitting on my grandpa’s knee while he played the fiddle, and my grandmother was across from him about just, just like us now. And she was playing the mouth harp. Harmonica. In front of the refrigerator and, and, you know, they’re jamming and I’m just bouncing on my, my grandpa’s knee, and he’s playing the fiddle, and they played beautifully together. So I actually find it bizarre, uncanny and like cliche almost that at this point in my life I am now a duo with my husband because it was literally the very first memory of my life. And so in my schema of life, you play music and you marry your musical partner and you live out a musical life together. I mean, that was, you know, and then from there, I think it was just, you know, my parents could see that I, I did definitely have like, an unnervingly like, like a kind of, like a level of musicality to me. Like, if we went to the movies, when we came home, you know, everybody would go to their respective places. I would go to the piano and play the score.
Kate: Oh my gosh. So you’re like, emotionally thinking through the story, through the music again.
Chantal: I mean, yeah, I just I just felt like you had to… Everything, everything was expressed through that lens. And so I just was and I had a crazy ear. And so I guess I was about, I mean, there’s, you know, the pictures of me are I’m very, very little. And I’m at the piano. And then I guess at some point my mom said, why don’t you sing while you play? Because I was singing separate. And then. So I started to accompany myself by the time I was 5 or 6. And so I was, you know, then put into the Conservatory of Music because they could see that, you know, there was something going on.
Kate: It sounded, too like music was a really important companion to you in the good times and in the bad. You had a terrible accident, is that right?
Chantal: Oh, I did, yeah. I mean, I would say long before that music was what I leaned on, but I did have an accident when I was 19, and that was just overall a terrible time in my life. And I think that’s a great time to just completely fall, like, have the wheels completely come off and and start your life. And so, yeah, my wheels literally came off. In Italy I was in an accident.
Kate: What happened?
Chantal: I was hit by a motorcycle while I was on a moped. He had just gotten a ticket for having his lamp off by a cop on foot. And the cop said, you know, you’ve got to you’ve got to, take your bike home, you have to, you know, walk your bike home. And he said, no way. And he grabbed the ticket from the cop on foot, and he peeled away and hit me. Because he said to him, you’re never, you know, you’re going to hit someone, nobody can see you. And that’s what happened. So he wasn’t wrong. And, so I spent a lot of time in the hospital there and. And had my little tenure with, with, with, with morphine. It was great.
Kate: Yes. The endless itch of the gift of morphine, it goes on and on.
Chantal: Why is that? Anyway, so, yeah. And I think, you know, even in the hospital, when I was in, when I could not move, I would sing to the nurses and they loved it. And I knew that that, I knew that…
Kate: It’s just these Italian nurses and this is all in English?
Chantal: Mhmm. I was singing them like the world-renowned, like I was like, “And IIIIIIIIIIIIII…..” it was super cute.
Kate: You went big. You went Whitney Houston.
Chantal: Go big or go home. Yeah. So yeah, I was there a month and had great, great doctors and nurses.
Kate: Was that when you began, like, really writing your own music, or was that after?
Chantal: I was already writing my own music, like I was a little girl, and, I was on a school bus with my girlfriends, and I would write a song about, like, the homeless and indigenous on the way into school. And my school was downtown, and, and the kids all sang the songs that I would write on the bus. I’m still friends with all of those girls, and they we still talk about it. They remember the songs. It’s incredible. So I was little when I was writing songs, but I think that when I had my accident right after that, that was when I became, you know, very serious about it and that I was going to make, you know, in my mind, like I was going to make my, my, my demos, I was going to make an album, like I was going to, you know, be an artist, you know, for real, as my life.
Kate: Wow. Your first album, Under These Rocks and Stones is it was not, to me, Baby Kate, not just an album. It was like a full, wide range of acceptable human emotion, for the Canadian girl. And all of a sudden, because it had these open hearted joyful songs, or bittersweet songs, or angry songs. It was, I thought, like very transformative, at least for my emotional range. I wonder if there’s a song from that album that is still particularly meaningful to you now as you look back.
Chantal: Definitely Surrounded, because it was the song, you know, of my life, like I wrote “Surrounded,” but then “Surrounded” wrote my life. “Surrounded” is the song that I sent to a record label. Within halfway through a listen, the record company called. They said, you know, we would like to come, like, tomorrow to Winnipeg, will you pick us up? Do you have somewhere that you can, you know, play your songs for us? We’d like to meet you. We’d also like to bring the publishing arm of Sony with us. So by the next day, essentially, I had, you know, essentially like…
Kate: A different life.
Chantal: A life-long long publishing deal and a record deal. And within, you know, that was February. And by June I was recording my album at all of the pop staples studios in Los Angeles that are still, you know, that are still alive and well, like the Conway’s and the A&Ms and Oceanways and yeah, you know. In September when the single came out, I was traveling, you know, around the world, going to all the Sony offices and starting to, you know, work with their teams and create, a base in many countries. So I was, you know, a 21-year-old girl when I got signed, I was a 22-year-old girl when it came out.
Kate: You like got on a water slide.
Chantal: Yeah. And, so it was, it was rather a whirlwind. It was wild, you know. Yeah, it was, it was. It was wild.
Kate: We’ll be right back.
Kate: You describe the soulmate feeling of wanting to sort of meet and marry your musical other half. And it is of course wild that you met and married Raine Maida. For all Canadians everywhere, the idea that the two—I’m just using puppet hands right now—like the two most spectacularly wonderful and beautiful people would then meet each other. It’s like just watching your favorite bands get married. When you know that they’re separate people.
Chantal: And I truly like, no lead singers. Like, in my head, it would be like a bad mustache or, you know? “No.” And yet…
Kate: There he was.
Chantal: There he was.
Kate: I imagine that a lot of the early years is all of the thrill of like, I want so much to be known. And yet I would really prefer if you know all the wonderful parts in particular, may I list them now. I wonder… that you have such like a heart-forward way of getting to know people. Like you’re obviously very good at intimacy. And I wonder what the first thing that he knew about you, that you kind of like, wish that he didn’t. Where you’re like, well, here I am. And.
Chantal: Wow! That’s a great, I mean, we should bring him in here. Wow. That’s a yeah. Wow. Well, I was in a very abusive relationship when I got to my accident, and I am so heart-forward, and I am so transparent that I almost needed to… Just like, until I could say to myself, you know, okay, phew, he knows everything, right? I really needed that. And and it is it’s it is a private, private pain, the level of abuse. And it’s not just it’s not just the abuse of the person. It was the self-destructiveness that I was in at the time. And so, it wasn’t pretty, and I, I did I did feel that I needed to, to let him know what that had looked like. Yeah, for a bunch of reasons, you know. And yet, even though I needed him to know. Okay, first of all, he is so amazing with people. Raine, Raine is like he is neutral, borderline aloof at times. But the thing that I love about him is that despite that slightly like, mysterious thing about him, I’m always amazed at how great he is with people and news. Nothing shocks him. No no no no, it’s very hard to get any kind of a rise out of him. He is like a rock. He really, really is. And so I can remember that I was, like, shaking. I remember where I was sitting in my car, in my car rental in Toronto outside of actually the Sony building, when I needed to tell him before I could go inside the building and have a day as this like 22-year-old girl, I needed to tell him the things that I had sort of I felt I was hiding. I mean, we’d only met, but only just met, but I remember when I told him, he didn’t… it didn’t affect him that much. Like he already loved me. And I can also remember the very first time that I was back home in Winnipeg, and I told him that I loved him unconditionally. And I remembered that I felt that way and the way he received that, like he was more that that seemed to affect him a lot more, I can remember, than me telling him something that I felt really ashamed of, you know? And so he’s just, you know, he always talks about like being the bigger person, but he like, actually is the bigger person. Like I have seen him be a big person. And when I could not have been that big of a person, like, he’s a, he’s an absolutely, smart soul. Yeah, yeah.
Kate: I just your description, it makes me think of that song you wrote the like, “let me tell you who you really are.”
Chantal: You’re my comfort. You’re not a superstar. Well can I tell you what that’s actually about?
Kate: Yeah, tell me.
Chantal: Okay. So in my family dynamic we have you know major challenges with, with mental wellness in, in one of my, you know, family members. And at one, there’s one day I was in Vancouver in a really big show with like Sarah McLachlan and I think Raine’s band was in it like, all these people were piling into an arena to do a huge, actually, I think a big cancer benefit. And, my, my, family member went missing in an episode, you know, and it was really and at that point in my life, it was still the driving force of my life was my, my, my family member’s health. And I was so upset. And I’d gone over to, I think, my manager at the time, his house, and there was a guitar, and I picked up the guitar and I literally wrote the song in two minutes, sitting there thinking about like the this, this family member’s whereabouts. And so what I’m actually saying is, it’s the reverse of conversation. So in my mind, it’s the person saying to me, let me tell you, Chantal, tell who you really are to me. You’re my comfort, you’re not a superstar, you know? And I think, what do I say? You know, you’re my comfort, you’re not a superstar. And I could bring you back down to the ground and show you everything. And give you everything you dream about… It’s about, you can’t you everything you dream about. It’s, it’s basically, me, you know, I think, you know, people will say like, how do you remain grounded, you know? And I think that when you come from such tethering, you know, in your family’s health and wellness, it’s very hard to shed that, you know. And so that’s very much what, what that song is, is, is, is me, like, like reflecting back to myself what I mean, to my family, you know, that I’m really just a family member. Yeah. More than any of these other things that are, you know, circling. Yeah.
Kate: You’ve been really, passionate and honest about the cost of what happens when in a family someone is struggling with mental health and they can’t they cannot get that diagnosis, the care, the access, the…
Chantal: Average diagnosis, 30 years, I get it. You know, I, I, I had a doctor tell me, you know, a decade ago, just stop. There’s nothing to be done, you know, just stop. And I don’t I don’t know that that’s the right come-at either. I do know that one thing I can see in my friends who don’t have kids and my friends who do have kids, is that we all can only be so much to so many people. Right? And at some point, it becomes, you know, too hard on you, you know, body, mind, spirit to be omnipresent. Yeah. You know, and I had a moment when I did, I did for my own health. Yeah. I did have to decide. I am first and foremost a mother to these children.
Kate: Because the amount of vigilance and caregiving about other people in your family was too much?
Chantal: Yeah. Like, I just, I just I think, you know, you, you… At some point, whether it’s a marriage or anything else, any relationship, like if someone is not on board to help, like pull their own weight and be accountable. You know, one of the things I tell my kids all the time when, you know, complaints are made about a style, something that happened as a child, that’s my fault. My husband. What whatever it is like that that might be so. And I am sorry, but here’s the thing. Now you are in your life and you are accountable. I cannot fix that for you. Like, you’re going to need to go and seek what you need in order to heal that trauma because it is yours, completely yours. I may have been a part of it. No one wakes up in this house, for example, to be, you know, abusive or seek and destroy. That is not a thing. Everybody did their best. But I do think that someone has to be accountable for their own, you know, pain, suffering and you know, that work, it’s required of us, right? And so I think whether it was conscious or maybe still a bit unconscious at the time, I think I put my own body first. How my own health first, because these little people, they needed me. Yeah. I still don’t I still don’t think they got the best of me because of what that grievance has, had been in my life. I’m much better now than I was with regard to that letting go. But I’ve had to do it. I have had to do it, and I, I think a lot of people get to that point, and I don’t think a lot of people talk about it, but they have to come at family, extended family, on their own terms, and they have to do it in a way that, okay, like this isn’t going to be easy, but but it’s something that I need to do because there’s just not enough of me to go around. Yes.
Kate: Have you had stretches of depression?
Chantal: Of course. Yeah, absolutely.
Kate: Like tar pit type? I’m just I have a lot of depression in my family, and we think of it like seasons sometimes. And other times…
Chantal: I know that what I grew up around, I don’t have. And I am somebody that like I always say, the first ten minutes of my day are really, really hard. They’re getting easier. But those are hard. And then after that I’m in. And yeah, I think probably…
Kate: Do you have to like gear up for it?
Chantal: I’ve got to gear up. I often start the day I’m like can’t do it, won’t do it, won’t happen. And then I sort of, in this, you know, stupor. Go into my, my closet, put the gear on. The you know, okay got got a knee brace on, got sneakers on. All the things that mean I’m moving forward. Yeah. And then with that sort of wardrobe, that costume…
Kate: I see, you put on your armor for the day.
Chantal: I do and it works for me.
Kate: My, my dad has struggled with depression most of his life, and I can tell when he wakes up because it it’s the cutest, saddest thing I ever hear. It’s so adorable. But I know that. He opens his eyes in a dark room, and then I hear him sing a little song to himself. And I love it. Because it goes. Go, Jerry, go Jerry, go Jerry go! And like, he is launching himself into his day. And I love the like, when I hear it, when I hear it I think like: courage. I’m hearing courage.
Chantal: Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. It’s very strange. I think people are complex, you know? And and so there’s your chemistry, there’s the things that you, you have experienced, your traumas as a child and what you’re up against in your day, right? And then there’s just a straight-up like I imagine it like a weed pushing through concrete. You just, you can’t fight it, it is pushing through no matter what you do to that weed, it is pushing through. I feel like I am like that. Like, I am a very upbeat person and I’m no matter what, I just end up funny and fun and bright and light. And I have a sense of humor, I thrive on people’s joy. I thrive on learning and on nature. And I have so, so much stuff in my arsenal that I can’t go down. But is there something in my soup that is terrifying? Sure, there’s a there’s a dark tornado in there somewhere. Sometimes it just stirs the pot and that helps a little, you know? So, but I think that, I think that if you listen to my music, for example. That’s all in there. It’s there. The light, the, the Pollyanna meets, you know…
Kate: Dark night of the soul sometimes…
Chantal: Destructor. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. For sure, it’s kind of all in there. And I and I think, you know, that’s kind of being a woman in a way, is. I mean, it’s. Wow. I remember when I had my first baby, and, I can remember I went to the toilet in the night, and I just never felt worse in my life, you know, after birth. And I remember I was sitting there and I think I said the words out loud, “Nobody tells you.” “Why, why does nobody tell you?” You know what I mean? Right?
Kate: Nobody tells you. No, they don’t. It’s true.
Chantal: And and so we go through, you know, just like pain everywhere and just, like, and no sleep ever again. And this, like, this little stranger that I thought I was going to like and is now like a terrorist, you know, forever in my house. So I think we are all, you know, like depression is warranted anyway. Like, you know, when I hear people saying postpartum, sometimes I’m like, pfft, yeah, you had a baby! What are you talking about? You drove a truck through your body. And, and your life is ruined as you knew it. Or you have a new life, you know? And you have no idea what that looks like.
Kate: One of the things you are very, honest about is that love in marriage is a choice. And it’s really hard. And I don’t… why is that so refreshing?
Chantal: Yes! It’s Sunday, and I drink early in the day on Sundays.
Kate: Why do you think people are so… I mean, you had this documentary, you did this wonderful documentary which I watched with so much interest and, like… I thought I was going to have, I thought compassion was going to, like, fall out of my eyeballs because it was, you’re going, you know, it’s dead of winter. You’re going to this…
Chantal: Yeah that was a mistake.
Kate: Remote fishing village to…
Chantal: Island in France, yeah.
Kate: To create music together.
Chantal: To get away from the terrorists.
Kate: You have two very different kind of like emotional patterns that you’re bringing together and then you’re going to co-create something. And then for the next two hours I watch two people who love each other very much be honest about how about like the, the struggle and the grinding the gears of that.
Chantal: Like a Rubik’s cube. And it’s like, but the Rubik’s Cube, it would if I just couldn’t find all green or all yellow, that’d be great. This was just like, we couldn’t even move the freaking, like cubes.
Kate: This was, I thought, a very honest and very refreshing to see people be that honest.
Chantal: Well, what I’m always fascinated by and and I guess I could use celebrity couples as, as sort of the, the example. But I’m seeing it now as a, as a, you know, 50 year old woman. I’m seeing it in people, just people. There’s this, we’re together, we’re together, we’re on the red carpet, everything’s great. Haven’t heard from them for a while. We would like to announce that we love our children, and we very much love and respect each other. And we plan to continue on as a family. But we are not together anymore. Please give us our privacy while we… dot dot dot. And so the announcements made and, and and like for me, I’m like, damn, I’d sure like to see the thing between the last red carpet and the, you know, the announcement.
Kate: Yeah absolutely, the very smoothed-over announcement.
Chantal: Yeah. And, and I think as I get older, what’s amazing to me is, you know, I hear people saying like, that, you know, there’s ageism and, and you know, oh, it’s old and there’s nothing left. And like to me there is just like a treasure trove of truth that has not been even… like, to me, it’s like gold rush. There’s so much about the human condition and these constructs we live in that we have not began to share.
Kate: How many years into marriage are you?
Chantal: 27 years together? About to be 24.
Kate: And you’re like, we’re just getting started.
Chantal: Yeah. Like, I mean, I don’t know if I don’t know if he and I or maybe we are. I mean, I always think that every single day you’re a new iteration of of yourself. There’s new opportunities for for growth every single day and failing and falling and getting back up. And, you know, your conflicts are your strengths. And I think in terms of of he and I, like I think about the history together as, as becoming more and more precious and almost like it almost like incentivizes me even more to really sort out what’s the best way forward for us. Because if we can, you know, protect this thing we have, it is unbelievable. But the the movie we made is a moment. It’s a moment in a marriage. It’s not every day. And it’s not. Every year. It’s. But it’s that moment and it that was a really hard moment. And I think in marriage, if you’re in it, you know, for the long game there are really, really frigging hard times. And, you know, where you, where you’re like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? This is so hard. This shouldn’t be this hard. Oh my gosh. And all of the, you know, the responses were just incredible. Most of them went something like this. Thank you for validating the the pressure of marriage, the truth of marriage, the the hard times. Thank you. Some people still, to this day, I’ll get something that says, well, if it’s that hard, then you should not be married, you know, or leave that asshole or she’s too needy. You’re not a match. I used to be a fan. Clearly you’re this weak abused woman who can’t stand up for herself, you know, or Raine, she’s… Like, I read Some of Rain’s, and it’ll be like, dude. You need to put your woman in her place. She is emasculating you. You know, everyone sees that film through their filter, through their lens, and that is very powerful to me. Because it’s it’s a moment for them to to get this opportunity to actually internalize what they think of the concept of marriage, never mind their own marriage. You know, we need more conversations surrounding. The struggle of marriage.
Kate: I agree. I love… I love the way you love each other. And I just wondered if there was, what song that you’ve written lately that feels like it most encapsulates the stage that you guys are in.
Chantal: That’s so funny. We’ve been writing a song.
Kate: Are you really? Wow.
Chantal: Yeah, it’s called “All For You” and it’s so funny. The lyric that just came out of me, like he was writing this sort of verse part to it and, I was coming in with a chorus part and the words just, just came out, I do it all for you. I do it all for you. I do it all for you. And and I think at some point, you know, for good or for bad, like you’re making that choice, right? Like I’m, I’m doing this. We’re doing it for each other. Everything. Everything we do is really for each other. And so, the fact that that just kind of popped out in a song is it’s really exceptional to me, because if you told me we were going to write a song like that ten years ago, I would said, pssh, no, you know, because that sounds cheesy or something, but that’s that’s the truth. That’s where we are now.
Kate: That’s so gorgeous. Lovey, thank you for doing this with me. You are, like, the most delightfully—I mean, this as a great compliment—entirely transparent. Like, I think one of the great things people can be ever and they rarely are, is knowable. And being able to know you is a joy. So thank you.
Chantal: I think honesty is just where it’s at. Honesty is genius, right?
Kate: It totally is. I love it. Thank you, hun. Well then, I count you a genius.
Kate: I love how honest Chantal is about the ups and downs of a life, like relationships with family members who are struggling, or with your kids as they’re becoming their own independent people, or with your partner over the long haul of a marriage. I thought it felt right to just bless us a bit. This is a blessing from Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day and it’s a blessing for married love. And I don’t say that to exclude anyone who isn’t married, so just feel free to swap out the nouns for any situation you’re in. But if you’re in a partnered situation, so often we can experience marriage as a refuge, or not, as a partnership, or not. And I just kind of thought, hey, let’s let’s bless the in-betweens of that. Unconditional love is rare. And when we see it in ourselves or anyone else, let’s draw close to it like we’re warming ourselves by a fire. We are learning something about God’s long covenants of love.
Kate: Lord, thank you for the love that endures. Love that rings on long after the note is struck. Love that holds together two who solemnly swear to be faithful to one another without even a reasonable foreshadowing of what the world will bring to their doorstep. Begun in hope, witnessed and celebrated in community, and blessed by God. We promise and you promise. That’s why it’s sacred. We hold on to what holds us. Of all endeavors that’s most awe-inspiring and the hardest to fulfill. But it’s only after the wedding that the marriage can begin, after promises are made and vows sealed, and then poof, a wife or a husband appears. Who is that? And the best and worst in each. Blessed are we who become witnesses to the truth. That every person is a foreign country, even to themselves. Marriage must therefore be an unveiling at the borderline, where desires meet in confluence or in conflict, and sharp corners chafe and are rubbed smooth. Proof that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Blessed are we in celebration of love. Where in one word or glance, an old joke can be fully reconstituted. No footnotes required. You know, it’s a miracle when we set aside our predictable self-sabotage for a love that brings us back to each other.
Kate: Bless you, my loves. Thanks for being with me and a huge thank you to the generous partners who make everything possible. The Lilly Endowment, Duke Endowment, and Duke Divinity School. Thank you. We are so grateful that you love theological education and faith in media as much as we do. And thank you to the people that make all of this unbelievably, meaningful and joyful. This is my incredible team. Great love of my life, Jess Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Jeb Burt, Sammi Filippi, and Katherine Smith. It is a joy to make things with you, and we do it because of and for listeners like you. Yes, you juggling your 12-step morning routine or you on your way home from work, or you who are worried about your parents. You are our favorite and we are so grateful to get to make useful things for you. Let us know who you want to hear from this season, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It will help us so much and it just takes a couple seconds. Or call us and leave a voicemail at (919) 322-8731. Next week we’re talking about a really important question. There’s a topic my team and I have been wanting to tackle for a long time, but we hadn’t found the right guest until now. I’ll introduce you to Doctor Pamela Morris-Perez. Together we’re going to talk about suicide prevention in young people. It’s one of the holiest and most necessary conversations I have been a part of. I will never, ever, ever forget it. And it’s got some glittering gems that I think will be so valuable to you. You won’t want to miss it. Until then, this is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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