Kate Bowler: There are things you can say out loud, and then there’s all the things you cant. Anxiety, fear, depression, doubt. Stay silent. And some silences can feel sacred, like the kind of stillness that lets the gravity of what is take up all the space that it demands. But there are some silencers that devastate, the kind that creeps into families, into churches, into whole communities where pain is tucked neatly out of sight. Today’s conversation is about those silences. I’m Kate Bowler, and this is Everything Happens. Today we’re gonna talk about what happens when the people we love are hurting and don’t or can’t tell us how much. And just a note before we start, this episode does include some discussion of suicide. So if you or someone you love is struggling, just know if you’re in the United States or Canada, you can call or text 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline. You are not alone. Just, you know, take care while listening. If sorrow had a sharp sense of humor and a brilliant Canadian accent, it might sound like Miriam Taves. She is the author of so many of my favorite things. She wrote All My Puny Sorrows, Fight Night, Women Talking, holy crap, that’s such a good book. And the film adaptation was nominated for best picture and won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. She has written other like heartbreakingly funny, sharply tender books, and it’s made her one of Canada’s most beloved writers. She has won basically all of the awards. But what I love most is how she writes about complicated families, about mental illness, about unlikely love. And she writes it all with like a humor and defiance and a kind of hard won grace. I have read.
Miriam Toews: I’ve really, really been looking forward to meeting her. I feel like I’ve wanted to meet her all my life. And her newest memoir is my great excuse. It’s called A Truce That Is Not Peace. And she is here with me today. Miriam, oh my gosh, hello. I’m so excited to meet you. Me too. Thank you so much for having me here.
Kate Bowler: We grew up 45 minutes apart and you’ve always been the person that really understands the bizarreness, the strange alienness that is.
Miriam Toews: Meta Knight World and Manitoba, apocalyptic winters. I mean, if no one has been there, it is called like strange alien flatness, wide open sky, but like a claustrophobic.
Kate Bowler: Smallness. That’s a very good description.
Miriam Toews: Great.
Kate Bowler: Well put. How do you think that like that place in particular formed you? Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Miriam Toews: Yeah, that’s so interesting. It was a place physically sort of geographically so isolated, the equivalent of a flyover state in Canada, people don’t go there. Yeah, and I think that just that big open space all around me, the feeling of sort of being nothing and nobody and maybe not even existing in the world. So in that way. Shaped me, but then even literally in terms of my community, it was a community that was supposed to exist in the world, but not of the world. The Mennonite thing. I think that it was just a smallness and I think from that smallness and from that sense of being sort of outside of the broader, wider world at large, I was able to stand back and.
Kate Bowler: Observe. We grew up with such a deep, I’m not special. Art is not made about me. I’m gonna turn on the TV and watch California teenagers have feelings.
Miriam Toews: Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the Partridge family, right? The Brady Bunch, I mean that was my diet. Yeah, and pop culture for sure from America.
Kate Bowler: I feel very lucky to be able to ask you right now about Mennonites because most people are not very familiar with how very unusual this community is because as an ethno-religious group, it’s both an ethnic group and a religious commitment. So you are ethnically Mennonoite and not religiously Mennoite now. I’m not ethnically, Mennanoite, but I’m religiously, Mennenite. So we’re both two different sides of the same coin. It’s a very strange community to grow up inside if. And to even describe to others because sometimes I find myself falling into the trap of describing them as adorable, cheese-eating pacifists, which is sort of the nicer version of a community that really never intended on assimilating. That every place it moved, it needed to be alien and even continued to speak its medieval tongue that it borrowed from three countries.
Miriam Toews: Before that it had been exiled from.
Kate Bowler: Exactly. But the distinctiveness of the way you describe like its inheritance in your life. If someone were to ask you how to describe Mennonites, how do you describe it?
Miriam Toews: Mennonites are so many different things. I am a Mennonoite. I grew up in a very conservative Mennoite community, one of the first Mennanoite settlements in Canada. I’m a Russian Menninoite. You know, there are Menninites. There are Swiss Mennoniates. There are the Mennomiates from Pennsylvania, Lancaster. There are Mennenoniates all over the place. And the Mennenonites are people that are sort of constantly on the move, historically persecuted for their religious beliefs, which included. Pacifism, of course, that’s sort of central tenet of the faith and being apart from the world. We’re all familiar with the Mennonites or maybe we’re not familiar, but you know, Mennonoites from the colonies, from the ultra conservative colonies, for instance, who dress a certain way. My mother is a Mennoniite and belongs to a Mennenonite church here in downtown Toronto. A very liberal, very open-minded, very nurturing, very tolerant, very loving. Church congregation, inspiring. I go there with her sometimes now because she’s very old. She needs more help. She needs help going to church too. So I will go with her and I’m really enjoying it. I’m inspired by it. And it’s so completely different from the church that I grew up in, in my Mennonite community.
Kate Bowler: The world that you describe has a very Gothic quality to it that I really enjoy. I really enjoyed you bringing that to life. Like there’s incredible like lightness and connection when people describe the word belonging, but there’s also such a long shadow of all those who feel excluded or like our regular imperfections don’t let us live up to this magical standard.
Miriam Toews: It’s so true. When I think of my Mennonite community and I think about it more and more, as I get older, I’m half there, half here, certainly in my imagination. And I miss it. I miss all sorts of things about it. I lived there until I was 18 and had finished school and then left. There are all sorts of beautiful aspects to it, to this kind of collective community where I’m related to everybody. We’re all related to each other. We all know each other, we all know. But there is the awful. The oppressive kind of, the church sort of sanctioned almost in a sense, persecution in and of itself. I mean, the discipline, the rules, the emphasis on guilt, on shame. And that’s, it’s very, very difficult to be a human being within that kind of environment.
Kate Bowler: I grew up in Winnipeg and city Mennonites often have very different experiences, but my parents had a habit, like a practice of taking in Hutterite women who had escaped from the colony if they were truly experiencing oppression. I mean, for things like, frankly, like reading the Bible on their own or wanting to wear pants or. Trying to get out of an abusive relationship and. This lovely Hutterite woman who is my babysitter growing up really was the one that taught me to pray. And she said that she was so, so fearful of God because she’d only been taught that you had to pray on your knees. And that one time she was in the hospital and she couldn’t get down on her knees. And she feared in that moment that God would utterly abandon her and she would die in rejection. And like, that sounds exaggerated to some people, but there is such like a cataclysmic feeling of like being. Close to God or that or God is withheld from you. And it has these enormous implications for people’s lives.
Miriam Toews: Absolutely. And you know, and it’s up to us to sort of reclaim in a sense that faith or that relationship with God or however you want to put it outside of those oppressive sort of definitions of what it is to be a member of the church, basically a member Christ’s followers. And I know when I was nine years old, I would pray also every night. I had to be on my knees, my head bowed, my hands folded, and I would have to. Ask God every single night to forgive me for all of my sins. I wasn’t sure at that time what they were, but I knew that they must exist because I am a sinner, that was the message. And then I would have to express gratitude. Thank God for every single member of my family, including not just my immediate family, but my extended family, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, my friends, and for nature and for, you know, for that. Everything under the sun, as they say. And if I didn’t do that every night, if I were to die in my sleep, I would go to hell. Absolutely, this was clear to me as a nine year old. And one night I fell asleep in that position and my mother came in and woke me up and said, you know, what’s going on? What are you doing? I confessed this to her, that this is what I was doing every single night and that I had to do it. And she told me that it was okay, I didn’t have to do that, I would be fine. First of all, that I wasn’t going to die in my sleep. I needed that reassurance too. And secondly, I could pray, I could commune with God however I wanted.
Kate Bowler: Your mom is such a delightful person, so funny and like spunky. And like, it just seems like there’s, the way you describe this strength that she has, it feels like it’s so easy to see all over your writing, this kind of spine of iron in this like warm loving person. That’s right. Surrounded by. It really loses a tremendous restriction around what women can do. And your book, Women Talking, which of course became this Oscar nominated film, it’s a really stunning account of how women can negotiate with their categories to kind of like participate in their own freedom. And I wondered if you could.
Miriam Toews: Talk through like that kind of feminism for a little bit.
Miriam Toews: Yeah, it’s funny. Yeah, mentioning my mother and feminism. She was living as a feminist from day one, really, even within the confines of this community. And she didn’t know it, of course. And it was only later in life, maybe in her 40s, when she decided to go to university together with my sister. It was a friend of hers who said, Elvira. You’re a feminist. And my mom was, oh, I don’t think so. Yes, you are. You are. And she said, oh yeah, I guess. Yeah, I suppose I am. Like you say, like practicing feminism or whatever it is. Not that it’s that conscious an act, but I mean, just the idea of women talking, right? Which for certain people, particularly the male elders in the community, I mean that’s a dangerous thing. That’s something to fear. And there are so many times just in daily life in these communities where the women are together, are separate from the men, of course, because the roles for men and women are so divided and separate. There are so opportunities to be subversive together. And I remember being so surprised too, as a kid growing up in my community, when all the women would be together, my aunts, my cousins, my mother, grandmother, et cetera. The difference in that, the conversations that were. Being had compared to when the men were around. And then of course, it was like serving, subservience and silence really to a certain degree. I mean, not really, like certainly not from my mother and not in my household. My mother was outspoken and really never silent, but in the community for sure. Yeah, so in that book and in the movie, this was an opportunity for the women to organize and act. When they were finally on their own, needing to understand what had happened to them.
Kate Bowler: Tell me a bit about like the story behind.
Miriam Toews: The book was kind of, what did I call it? An imagined response to these real events, these crimes that occurred in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia. It’s called the Manitoba colony. In my book, I call is a Molachina colony, but it is the Manatoba colony and most of the people there came originally from Manitob. For years, a group of men was drugging and raping the girls and the women in the colony. Sneaking in at night using an animal tranquilizer and the women would wake up obviously in pain, bleeding, not knowing what had happened and they didn’t talk about it necessarily, but when they did start talking about it, they were told, well, this is, you’re being punished. This is the work of the devil. It’s sort of, and there was nothing that they could do. These colonies are remote, they’re isolated, they’re self-policed. This is part of the agreement that these colonies have with particularly the countries in South America and Central America. So eventually one night two women stayed up and they caught one of the men, one of perpetrators and then the whole thing unraveled. They realized, okay, it’s not ghosts, it’s demons, it not Satan. It’s men from our community. It’s man that we know and love.
Kate Bowler: Mennonites have this like priority on conformity and that sounds very like a racing, but it was really like wonderful to watch women have to collectively, it’s like just watching the sort of like a gentic quality of people having to really disagree with each other and then they go through this voting process. I mean, in order to figure out what to do next and in the middle of it, there’s just so many really important theological stakes are we allowed to protect ourselves? Can we withhold ourselves from others? Can we take our children with us? Like at what age do people become? I don’t wanna say like, but the field, the debate is like.
Miriam Toews: Depraved, like would they be too influenced? And even just today in my class, I cited you as being like, what an interesting question that we’re all trying to decide.
Kate Bowler: How we spiritually lead and show up, especially in moments of crisis.
Miriam Toews: Absolutely, and for those women and others, the question is they wanted to keep their faith. They wanted to act within the parameters of their faith so they had to determine whether, if they were to leave, would this be a sin? Would God forgive them? How would they protect their children? This was a priority, obviously, because their children were being attacked as well and is protecting their children somehow, again, a sin against their. Their husbands, God, et cetera. And so philosophically, debate this, theological points, philosophical points, and just pure sort of pragmatism. What are we gonna do to survive this? And what can we do? Basically, the entire book is this conversation.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. I don’t think I understood until I started reading your work just how much silence there is inside of this faith. There are all the things we say, and then there are, of course, all the thing that we don’t say. And sometimes that can have tremendous power to it. My sweet Mennonite father-in-law does all kinds of things with his silence. He can use it for good or for…
Miriam Toews: That long pause before he says something, I’m like, and I know what’s happening.
Kate Bowler: But I wanted to ask you about the kind of like long shadow of the things that we don’t say. I get a lot of mail from people who’ve gone through really difficult times. And some of the mail I get specifically from these communities is that there’s a real unspokenness, especially around tragedy, that tragedy immediately makes them feel like they’ve spiritually failed, that all kinds of sort of depression and darkness. It goes unchecked because it lacks language. And that’s something that you really have such keen insight into.
Miriam Toews: It’s true. For my father, he was diagnosed at age 17 with a bipolar disorder. It was called manic depression then and would have bouts of real suffering and sickness. He spent his entire life, he lived and died in that community and took his own life. And it was not talked about. It was just not something that was acknowledged. It was either seen as maybe a lack of faith, a lack inner strength, a lack will. He certainly wasn’t accepted as an illness. I mean, the damage that that does. He had to keep it hidden. And of course, he couldn’t keep it. Keep it hidden, people knew, but it’s something that’s so fearful, so judged. People are ashamed of that, right? And seeing it as a weakness. And I think that particularly in these closed religious communities, and if there’s no talking. About them or attempts to address some of the conditions that create the tragedies, then nothing ever changes. And my dad took his own life. People in the community, I mean, there were so many rumors being spread. People needed, I think it was just this kind of human sort of built in need to have like answers, right? And we know with suicide, there are no answers. You wonder. Forever, how, why, what could I have done? What didn’t I see? What didn I act on? So there were these rumors. My mother must have done something to him. She must have threatened to, she must have been leaving him or he did something that he couldn’t live with and had to, all of these crazy rumors. And I think that just comes from that need to sort of apply a narrative on things so that you can go, okay, that’s why this happened. And that’s because it is such a horrifying. The idea of killing oneself or being depressed, like a being mad in a sense of losing your mind in a sentence. I mean, that’s a horrifying kind of prospect. So it’s much easier to explain it away as something other than what it is, which is something that could happen to any one of us.
Kate Bowler: Looking back, I can see how much my father’s depression rearranged my family and created all kinds of silence because we just weren’t sure, no one knew what to say. I wonder how the silence around your father’s illness rearranged your early family ecology.
Miriam Toews: Thankfully for me, my mother was really invested in talking about just about anything. Well, really anything. And so she, early on in our lives, in my life anyway, she explained to me what was happening. He was seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis. He had medication going through mainstream medical healthcare. And because of her and her willingness and her need to explain it, to tell the truth, I knew what was going on. And then seeing mental illness also affect my sister, I felt very defensive, very protective of them, knowing that this was something that was so sort of, just not accepted, not talked about, undermined, undermined. Dismissed, not believed really. That was there then, but I’m not sure that things have changed radically. In the outside world in 2025, I mean, there’s still a lot of silence around these things. It’s a shame.
Kate Bowler: You were so sensitive and perceptive. It must’ve been heartbreaking to see your sister begin to struggle and begin to suffer and begin kind of collapse into silence. I wonder if you could tell me about your beautiful sister.
Miriam Toews: Thank you. Yeah, it was, it started maybe not slowly, but for me, I mean, she was six years older than me. So our lives as kids were really quite separate. I mean we’re in the same home and we did things together, but really, her life was so out there and she was so wanting the world and she went into the world wanting an education, which she got. Travel and life and art and culture and history and all of these things, education. She was so discouraged by the church elders to pursue that, to leave the community, to get an education and go to university. My parents obviously encouraged her to do that and supported her, but the community. And so, but she did it, and then it slowly became apparent or maybe not slowly. She was coming home more often. She was struggling. She was sick, she was depressed and she had moved back home with our parents in bed and unable really to function. And that was the first of many, many, times. And then just like my father and seeing the pattern repeat itself was, it was so scary, particularly towards the end of her life when she had made several attempts. And at that point, we knew, I knew. That it was just a question of time. We knew that she was very absolutely, very certainly going to end her life.
Kate Bowler: It feels like you’re saying something so important about the nature of despair that I wish other people knew. Like, what do you think people get wrong about despair?
Miriam Toews: Yeah, that’s, well, yeah, all of us. I mean, getting wrong about despair. I mean I don’t know if despair is just sort of like despair or if we all experience it differently. And the despair that comes from mental illness, for instance, with a chemical component, clinical depression and the despair of that. And I think that there’s just so much misunderstanding of that, just this kind of attitude like, come on, you’ve got a lot to live for, shake it off. Look, you don’t want to do that to these people. That is just not how it works. For my sister, for instance, after one of her times, she had left a letter appealing to God to forgive her, hoping that God would understand it, that God will accept her to be with him after her death and that we would all understand. And that really hit home. Sometimes a kind of anger about it that people have kind of rolling their eyes about depression, about suicide, about wanting to die, that a person is being melodramatic or just overly sensitive. And that’s just so not what it is.
Kate Bowler: There are, bless them, dispositionally, people who seem to never even know the edges of that feeling. But for the rest of us who, even if we’ve never been fully down that path, that we understand the whole world that it creates around people, like all of it. Not just blacks and whites, but just the grays that it paints over everybody. And one of the things that, I mean, I have just found difficult about being on the cancer side of suffering is when people respond to the sort of abyss of it all of just pain and suffering with a, I can’t imagine. You have very strong feelings about this, which I appreciate.
Miriam Toews: You know, a friend of mine lost her young son to cancer. And she said, you know, when people would say to her, and in a well-meaning way, well-intended way, which, and it’s what we do. I feel that I’ve heard myself say the same thing in the past, like I’m so, I just can’t imagine your pain. And she says that that just drove her crazy. She wanted to say to these people, well, just try, try to imagine. I mean, isn’t that the beginning of empathy, of creativity, for instance? Just try to image. So stay with me. Like, don’t go away. Don’t go way. You know, stay with stay with in your imagination with my loss, my pain, my grief. That really struck me because I just hadn’t ever heard it expressed quite so.
Kate Bowler: Strongly before. I love that stay language because it just feels like it brings up like witness, like stay, stay, what, like, if you can’t imagine, you’re gonna turn away. And I actually, this is actually unbearable for me. So like. Yeah.
Miriam Toews: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And just try. You know, you may not succeed in feeling what I’m feeling, but you’re trying, you’re making the effort and you’re staying. You’re here. You’re with me.
Kate Bowler: Yes.
Miriam Toews: I’m not alone.
Kate Bowler: And what the great sort of lies and truths about pain is it does communicate such aloneness. Like nothing makes us feel more alone than the feeling that we are, that we like are trapped inside our own skins and can’t crawl outside our own throats. Like it’s just, it can be so eclipsing to feel that alone.
Miriam Toews: Absolutely. And I don’t even know what you did with those feelings or what one does with those feeling, what I did with these feelings. I mean, there really is nothing to do about it in a way. You just move through it, you know? And maybe that sounds a little bit pat simplistic, but it’s. Yeah.
Kate Bowler: Did you feel the motion of it? You try hard to hear it. The motion.
Miriam Toews: Yeah, I like the like moving hands that you’re doing. Cause like.
Kate Bowler: Cause there’s like a, there’s a version where the truth of it and then the stuckness of it. Like that, I think in that case, it just feels like the water’s rising.
Miriam Toews: Yeah, exactly. And even coming out of it, out of sickness, out of despair, I think that just that feeling of aloneness is something that is probably unique to us humans. Yes. I know, regardless.
Miriam Toews: I could go to a lemur retreat one time where I could learn about many kinds of lemurs and they do not seem to struggle with aloneness.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. There’s an argument that you’re making about how to live inside the terrible, but also beautiful like ambivalence of this world. And like even in the title from that lovely Christian Lyman poem, like the truth that is not peace, there’s like this tensile quality to the way you’re like, this is what it’s like to be a person in the world. You understand despair with so much color and texture to it. Like you’re so open about your own. Experience of despair and what it’s done to your family. I was just, I’ve been writing this book about joy and joy is a real slippery little jerk to study because it’s really wonderfully not at all like happiness. Right. I’ve really thinking about it as this experience, this like Nietzschean experience of like a yes to the everythingness. And we only get it for like a glimpse and then it goes away. And I’ve seen, you know. I’ve seen so much depression in my life. I’ve been depressed in my live. I know what a relief it is when you finally get those like breakthrough feelings of like, okay, well now I can say yes. And it feels like one thing that you’re arguing is like, well, is that there’s, I don’t know, like friction in this. Like I feel like what you were saying was like, I didn’t say no to life. And sometimes that’s as much as you can do. Right. Is that right?
Miriam Toews: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean that truth. I remember this kid in my high school and she was a year older than me and she super cool in every way. Maybe she was two years older than this. She was just like this amazing girl in my mind. And she, when everybody’s signing their yearbook at the end of the year, all she wrote was yes with an exclamation mark. And her name and I was just so blown. I thought, okay, well that, there we go. Like she, yeah, she’s got it all figured out. Yes. That is so cool. Yes, exclamation mark, heart. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Kate Bowler: I don’t think that it sounds as hopeful as it is though. Cause what you’re saying is really profoundly hopeful. But for people who don’t understand just the like the pull of it, like the anchor that goes all the way down, just not being submerged by the reality of this world sometimes is like as much courage as we’ll ever see.
Miriam Toews: Absolutely. So that we can become really acutely aware of those moments when we are feeling the joy or whatever it is, the lightness, a sense of like aliveness. Oh yeah, I’m here in this world and it’s good. Yeah. And we can really appreciate those moments. But yeah, no, I absolutely think that it’s something that I need to accept in order to, yeah, just to go on. Yeah, a little head, you know, the waves are, yeah, you now here instead of here. This was not supposed to have water. Yeah, right. Cause if I have a straw, I’ll be okay. I’ll still be okay, yeah.
Kate Bowler: I totally agree. Cause I mean, you show courage in all kinds of different like portraits of like people who could, I mean they could despair at great evil. They could despair and being excluded. They could disappear at like the silence that it presses down on us. But if there’s like one thing I would be like, what is Miriam like? Like she would, she admires courage, you know?
Miriam Toews: I do. Yeah, I absolutely do. And that’s something that, you know, I see in my mother. I don’t have it. I mean, I’m learning how to live from her every day. And I wish that I had what she has, but at least I could be adjacent, you now, courageous adjacent. You know, she can lead us into battle as she has so many times and out again.
Miriam Toews: I do love the figure though, like the picture of my mind of like this, those sweet Mennonite Oma who with a bun recipe, who’s just like out in front of all. And then this slings and arrows.
Miriam Toews: Yeah, yep, you know, and I think of it as kind of Mennonite thing too, in a way, I mean, it’s not obviously exclusively Menninite, but look at who it is, you now, or, you no, of course he would say that. And it’s kind of funny, you, now it’s funny. It’s a funny, it so it’s a way to get through things. Not again, not that we need to silence ourselves and everything and not that we don’t need to talk about the dark stuff and the hard stuff. We do, absolutely we do. But we can also shrug it off sometimes too.
Miriam Toews: No, totally.
Kate Bowler: I really feel like on the little, like if I’m trekking on the way to, like things are terrible and then we’re trying to.
Miriam Toews: Stop before we reach the cliff of nihilism, where nothing makes any sense anymore. And it threatens to like a clip those entirely. Yeah, that’s so close. Yeah, oh, it’s there, right there. One of the stops for me is like the tragic.
Kate Bowler: One response to things being meaningless is just to say.
Miriam Toews: Absolutely, to call it, you know, to call it that absurdity, you know, of life, of again, what it is to live, you know, how to survive suffering. Comedy as subversive, comedy, not as, you know, relief, you know, I mean, I take, I take my comedy very seriously. It’s another tool that we have. Of truth telling, of like. Truth telling, yeah, of fighting, of, you because we can look at something with humor and maybe not be destroyed by it. Yeah, that’s subversive, that very specific. There’s a very specific Mennonite, at least from my community, subversiv humor, you know.
Kate Bowler: I don’t think you get the jokes unless you’re from a persecuted people. And they’ve got jokes. Persecuted people have jokes.
Miriam Toews: Yeah, that’s for sure. I mean, that that’s for sure, absolutely.
Kate Bowler: So I did, I was talking to Malcolm Geit recently, who’s a poet. He’s a wonderful poet, but he was really kind of explaining to me like the wonderful tensile strength that words have, like opposites have when they’re placed up close to each other. So he’s struggled a lot with depression in his life. He used this poem to describe the depths of depression. Well, he was describing the like the the tensile line that tests the water depth under ships. And he described that as the metaphor of the Christian plummet, like what goes all the way down. And I thought of I thought of your memoir because it’s such a because you’re saying like you’re giving your own like qualified yes to the everythingness of life. And I like what he said, too. He was like, it’s only when you know like the depth of something that even like you can even. Make faithfulness any sense? Like, how could someone even know what faithfulness is costing you unless you knew like just how deep it goes? The Christian plummet that is.
Miriam Toews: That is so yeah, that’s so beautiful. You know about, yeah, faith, like faith and doubt. Yes, you know how they have to be. They have to go together. You can’t have one without the other. Yeah.
Kate Bowler: I guess that’s yeah. So your account of despair in terms of like pairing, I feel like hope is just right there as it’s as its cousin, as it like as its beautiful mirror.
Miriam Toews: And I don’t think it is always easy. It’s obviously we know that to have hope. I mean, you know, hello. Yes, wildly. I think everything is dark. Everything has, yeah, fade to black and it’s god awful. And there is no and there is no hope. And yet if we if we are able to survive long enough through those periods. That a hope or some semblance of hope or whatever it is will will return to us. I really believe that. Yes, how brave. How very brave. Well, back at you.
Kate Bowler: The places we come from, the people we love, the losses we carry, they shape us. They shape how we endure, how we hope, how we begin again. Because it is no small thing to endure, to keep breathing and laughing and staying under the weight of grief or despair. And if you love someone who’s facing something that you can’t imagine, one of the truest. Hardest things we can do is just to try. Try to imagine what despair might feel like. Try to listen, even when there are no easy answers. Just try to stay with someone in pain. Because staying with when it would be easier to look away is where empathy begins. And maybe we’re healing can too. Look, if this conversation stirred something in you that feels difficult, just know. You are not alone and you do not have to carry it by yourself. If you feel like you should, you really should. Good caller text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. I thought it might be a nice time for a little blessing for those who stay. This is a community of people who, makes me wanna sing Stand By Your Man, but just, you know, stand by everyone. So here it goes. A blessing for the one who stays. Blessed are you who stay, who sit beside pain that can’t be fixed. Who choose presence over platitude and silence over shallow comfort. Blessed are you who ask hard questions without rushing toward answers. Who bear witness to the kind of grief that rearranges the world. You who try, try to imagine, try to listen, try to love in the absence of tidy outcomes. May your staying be its own kind of balm because it says your pain matters. You matter. And may you feel, even now, that this too is holy to stay, to try, to say yes to life in all of its complexity and to love each other all the way through. Well, my darlings, if you want any more blessings or reflections, I am really, really liking my time at Substack. That’s katebohler.substack.com and it has like the sweetest comment section in the whole world where nice people talk to each other. So come on by. And if you don’t mind leaving us a review on Apple or Spotify, it really helps people find us. And hey, I’m on YouTube. My many blazers, where you can watch every episode. I’m at Kate C. Bowler. This is an amazing team over at Everything Happens and I am nothing without them. These people are the following. Jessica Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, Elia Zonio, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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