Kate Bowler: Oh, hello my dears. This is Everything Happens and I’m Kate Bowler. This is a podcast for anyone who’s tired of trying to live their best lives now. And I’ve always wished we could just rewrite that cultural script and instead just tell everyone that we’re living our okayest life now. Except that really doesn’t market well on t-shirts. That’s my marketing voice. This one. Life is beautiful and terrible and sometimes gloriously boring. And this is the community of people where we are honest about every bit of it. This week marks the start of the season of lent, and if you are not a churchy church type person or maybe twitch a little whenever religion is brought up, or maybe you come from a background where they never practice lent, stay with me. There’s room for you here. It can just often feel like other people have it figured out that we must be broken somehow, because our lives haven’t worked out the way we thought they should, like we hoped they would. Cue lent. Lent tells a deeper truth about what it means to be human. Lent is a season of 40 days in the church calendar that walks us toward Easter, and it is the season where God is on the losing team. For the lucky, the people who, you know, things are going pretty well right now, lent is a lovely discipline. It’s a way of allowing us to practice seeing the world as it really is fragile, unfinished, and held together by grace. And, well, for all of us unluckies we already know that truth deep in our bones. So for the next 40 days. We walk together on the downslope of God. And yes, Easter is coming. Hope will be realized. The lovely part is going to come true, but we’re not going to skip ahead. This is the season that asks us to stop pretending we’re holding it all together. It is a time to pause, to sit with what’s fragile and unfinished, and let God meet us in the hardest parts of our lives. So if you’re still listening, thank you, and kind of curious about this whole lent thing, join us. There are tens of thousands of people all over the world who are participating together, and we’re all using a daily reflection available totally for free at Katebowler.com/lent, and I will link it in the show notes if you want to find it there. Okay, today’s episode is going to be a bit out of the ordinary. I opened up the floor to you lovelies. That’s right. I’m going to answer your questions. You filled it with questions that cut right to the marrow of what it means to be human in this season of lent. Deep, beautiful, aching questions. So let’s sit with them together. Here goes.
Natalie Frisk: Hi there. My name is Nathalie Frisk. I’m from Ontario, Canada. What was your experience of lent in childhood and how did it kind of develop, in what ways was it cultivated through the years?
Kate: I didn’t do Lent growing up because I grew up in a very we call like a low church tradition, but it just means there’s less sort of bells and robes and fancy whatnots. Mennonites are a group of people who like to keep it real simple, and lent didn’t make the cut. So I never did Lent growing up. I was only introduced to it much later when I got to know Catholics and Anglicans and Episcopalians and Orthodox and people who really, really like the church calendar I came to realize how important lent was, really, at the moment of the great undoing of my life. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I felt so overwhelmed by the just daily assumption that everybody’s lives were always fine and that everything is just magically supposed to come together, especially for the faithful. And I had this sort of sneaking suspicion that there had to be something in the church calendar that would let me feel deeply normal in my own undoing, and I discovered it in lent. It turns out that the 40 days that march up to Easter are the great bummer season of the church calendar. And in fact, if I wanted to really dig into that, I needed to practice being more honest about how awful it was. I realized I was using the F word not in spite of my faith, but really like because of it. I wanted all the words I could to express the offense of suffering in a world that’s constantly trying to explain you, and just wanting to believe that God actually sees us in our suffering and actually might be on our side for a moment. So yeah, lent has become my very favorite place of spiritual honesty, and I just think there’s so much room in there for all of us. When things are going well, we practice walking with the suffering, and when we’re suffering, well, geez, we get to be normal for a second.
Cynthia: Next message. Hello Everything Happens team. My name is Cynthia. I am from Cincinnati. I don’t know how it is for the humanities, but at least in science academia, it can be very brutal, even more for the scientists that study the brain in mental distress and in mental illness, which is, you know, their goal for my career. And so I just wondered how you’ve remained soft. Kate Bowler how are you, like, made a kinder place in the world that is can be really, really brutal.
Kate: Oh, man. Thank you for that question. And that is so hard. Academia and so many of these very head focused professions can be really difficult places. I guess one thing that I try to really remember is that some of these professions, they can have a way of swallowing us up into their identities and making us feel like if we’re not winning in that one way that we’re losing, that can make at least me feel very brittle sometimes. I used to watch people retire and sort of imagine in that moment that they were going to have all the feelings that they ever wanted to have about their job and how much they’d sacrificed in their career. And I realized, seeing that again and again and again, that you have to keep a part of yourself separate, tender and soft, and there only for your own deep hopes and dreams that can be totally separate from however your job is making you feel. I know it’s very silly, I say that very honestly because I’m somebody who loves compliments, like I love academic compliments. I wish I could just have like sticker charts and awards etc. etc. but I have to kind of give myself back the gift of meaning in my own career, regardless of whether people notice. So lately I’ve been really trying to slow down whenever something even just very small goes well and try to celebrate it with somebody else. And that could be just like going on a walk and yelling about how great it was. But finding more places for your own contributions, even if they’re not recognized, has a way of making me softer and frankly, less resentful. And also just realizing that, like, there’s a moment where you have to ask yourself in a job, is this a sacrifice or a waste? Meaning am I giving something up for a greater purpose? And I will either be rewarded for it later or it belongs to a great good that’s good for everyone, and you’d want to do it anyway? Or is it a waste where you’re just sort of hoping that you’re going to get paid back by this work economy, and you never will? When I got sick, I kind of realized that I might have poured in a bit too much and that some of it was a waste. I ended up actually returning to a feeling of like real ambition and love of what I do, but it had to be separate from the hope that I would ever be acknowledged for it. Sorry if that was like my most honest answer, but that’s really how I feel. We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere.
Audrey Weber: Next message. Hi, this is Ogden Weber, and I’m a pastor, PhD student, and a mother of two. I have a lot going on in my people here at my beloved church have a lot going on, too, with so many different struggles. And I’m thinking about how do we love on each other during the season of lent? How can that work in community as we try our best to support each other?
Kate: Oh my gosh, it’s so much, isn’t it? Sometimes lent can feel like it’s just adding one more thing already on top of a to full life. But here’s kind of what I’m thinking: when I want to season to matter more, I need like a settling. I need a sifting moment. And that’s what lent can do. Or it can make you feel like the deepest core of who you really are in your finitude, in your mortality, in your quirks and insecurities and everything that makes you feel broken, that those things still beat the heart of God. Which sounds very abstract, but here’s something I do in seasons where I really want to matter. I write down not just the problems that I’m having on a piece of paper, I write down a circle that’s the middle, like the very center circle, and I put down the things I really want to matter most. So maybe right now it’s your health or a feeling of peace, or your relationship with a friend, or a kid, or a mom or something. I will put down the heart of the heart, but try to keep the heart of the heart right dead center, and then make another circle and add a couple more people and issues and so on and so forth. So like it helps sift the very outskirts of, like, maybe that person that called you back isn’t actually who you really need or need to prioritize right now. And it’s okay to just let that fall to the bottom. But if we try to put our deepest self and also deepest hopes, oh, I do want to bring that meal to a friend, I do actually want to make that volunteer date, alongside of your own, I think we might feel like both in your feeling exhausted and your desire to still be loving that that is really also at the dead center of what this whole season is about. So yeah, you are allowed to be very tired or sad or kind of over it in lent. I also think that’s what lent is for. That’s what Jesus said on the cross. I’m over it. He didn’t. Wouldn’t that be amazing, though? He kind of almost said that.
Caller: So my question is how to be okay with being unwell and being extremely trapped by the limitations and constrictions of my illness? Currently, I feel like if I’m close to God, I feel like I should then be at peace and okay with how I am, but to be honest, I’m not. I’m desperate to experience life and not be so limited and debilitated by the illness I have.
Kate: Oh man, I know that feeling so well. There’s a strangeness where when you’re really going through something truly awful and the walls of your life, start closing in, simultaneously, there’s a lot of cultural pressure to declare that, you know, whatever you still have is enough. Puppy snuggles, the love of a friend, when really, when so much is stripped down to the studs, we can feel this roaring hunger inside of us too. And that can also just feel like anger and despair and frustration beyond frustration. Rage. Like I wanted to swallow the whole world and here I am, stuck in this tar pit. So I guess like the first thing I would say is the not having peace with what’s going on is, is really part of what it means to be alive. That hunger itself is your aliveness. It’s. And it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s nothing spiritually to be embarrassed about. It doesn’t mean that you’re not like a lovely, peaceful, wonderful person. You just mean like you hunger for aliveness. I usually often felt like guilted, whether from myself or from other people, that I was supposed to say that what I had was enough. And I think it’s okay to to acknowledge that it doesn’t feel like enough and it might never feel like enough. But in that ache, we’re allowed first to grieve that ache, but maybe to want to do something else with it. So one thing I tried to let myself do is to try in whatever energy I have to, like, spend it on something that matters to me, even if it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Like, I wrote a really hilariously specific book that nobody read when I was, like, openly dying. And it was like, wow, this is an academic book. I wanted to use my brain, and I wanted to not be in a hospital waiting room all the time. And sometimes for people, it’s weird hobbies or a relationship or just like watching TV, like you’re a professional TV watcher, but letting yourself spend out your energy the way you can feels like a very good kind of permission. I think the other maybe bit of advice I got really recently from Father Ron Rolheiser, he’s an oblate priest, he said, where you can’t move past what you don’t grieve. And he was talking about that achy, hungry feeling. So he kind of suggested trying to create, like if there is genuinely things that you have to give up, then trying to find a person, and a way to ritualize, like to make a little ceremony around and words of acknowledgment around the thing you’re giving up and take it super seriously, just hilariously seriously. Even if it feels small or even if it’s enormous, take your grief seriously enough to invite somebody into it and say, I really need a minute to be so hurt and sad and to say goodbye to this one thing I can’t do right now. So I have found that to be really helpful with things as small is like saying goodbye to the last belly button I had that I really like to. Now I have this new garbage one. That really mattered to me.
Karen White: Hey Kate, it’s Karen White, I’m calling from Panama City, Florida. I am, I guess I would say, reconstructing my faith. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts about how to navigate and maneuver through this journey of figuring out how to be, I guess, true to my new set of beliefs without completely abandoning everything that I’ve learned before.
Kate: Oh, Karen, that’s such a good and honest question. And maybe the only way forward is exactly what you’re doing. Refusing to totalize, like make one issue everything, or to flatten the story into one single easy narrative. It’s something I really, really believe, as you know, as a person, but also as a historian who’ve watched culture wars roll through our society and just rip people apart, making one issue just so eclipsing or one set of very confusing, insistent beliefs so much that it really like hollows out the belonging and the community and all the sweetness of what you’re doing, because culture wars make it very hard to remember that there was really some good there, and that what was good is still good, and what was hard is still hard. And the fact that you’re holding both, that’s evidence of a heart that’s learning how to tell the truth gently. I really do think that is not just knowledge, but it’s the work of wisdom, right, is to discern, is to parse, and then to hold what’s left with real honesty, to say, this part was beautiful. This part was deeply harmful. This shaped me in ways I’m grateful for, and this shaped me in ways that I am still unlearning. Hey, there’s no rush to resolve it all. You are allowed to carry forward with whatever still rings true and let go of what no longer seems true. There’s absolutely no need to abandon the good stuff that you’ve learned and have brought you this far. And hey, we have a conversation coming up in a couple of weeks with my friend Sarah Bessey that talks a lot about this tension, and I think you might really like it, but that’s a great question. I’m in the middle of one of those myself right now, where there is something I realized that was dressed up as Christianity that was truly terrible, and I need to unlearn it. But it’s been a painful untangling. Thanks for your question.
Karen White: Hi, Kate. My name is Tracy Cushing. I’m wondering what life looks like now that you are in remission? Did things change, did your outlook change? Because I know it sure changed when I got cancer. What is yours look like now that you’re in remission?
Kate: Hey, Tracy, that’s such a lovely question, because it gets at one of the strangest bits about aging itself. It’s like if we’re given the opportunity to have a new chapter, how do things change? Do we even let ourselves change? For a long time, I thought it was my job to just kind of get back to before. Get back to my relationships the way they used to be, that certain kind of like very easy to have small talk, sweet naivety. Even just like the schedule of like go, go, go. But I would say one of the the most enduring gifts of remission has been that I have a much wider patience for the fact that things, they come and they go, you know? I used to be so scared that nothing could ever be different because everything was so scary. And now I try to take the same lesson and see it as like, yes, terrible things can feel like they will never change, and also good things feel like they can never change. So in the terrible things, try to have a little more hope and in the good times have a little more humility, you know, that what is good is something that I, I might really miss someday. So I do kind of get very cherishy, especially about my son and the way his head smells just like shampoo and Cheerios, mostly. But I would say I’m definitely not less ambitious. And cancer really made me a feminist. I love the ability to make things. And that’s become even more precious to me. But I do feel more cracked open to the fact that life is fragile for me and for everyone else.
Tony: Next message. So my question is, is how do we let go given what is going on in our country and how do we go on? I feel like I, I have to insulate myself with everything. I don’t watch the news anymore. I feel like I can only talk to certain people. I pray, I do devotionals, I need some sanity And I guess that’s what I’m looking for, how do we create that sanity in our world? Thank you again for all you do. From Colorado, I’m Tony.
Kate: Oh my gosh, yes, it really does feel like we are in the bad place. I think, I mean, maybe the first thing to say is, this is just my historical brain here, but we’re living in a moment that has a very apocalyptic fragility to it, meaning that we can see the limits and how very delicate our structures are. Stuff that felt neutral, doesn’t feel neutral anymore. That’s one of the sort of qualities of an apocalyptic time. But I will say one of the weird gifts of feeling apocalyptic fragility is, and we see this all throughout Scripture, is that heightened awareness. We have to like, okay, first we have to create practices that try to restore our own peace, to try to bring our neurological alert systems down, to remind ourselves of God’s abiding love, and really, the strength of the way that we can love each other back into a web that can reweave our own lives and our culture. I really do believe that. But the other thing is moments where we feel apocalyptic, you know, fragility are also moments like the word apocalypse is the word in the same language as that which is revealed. It’s the feeling of seeing things. And there’s some things that we should see. We should see injustice. We should see how much we are required to be a part of a world that needs us. We should see our own interdependence. So sometimes that revelation feels pretty awful. But other times I think it can make us really like sane. Like deeply sane. Because we can know what’s true, that our world is fragile. We can give ourselves more grace to restore our own peace, and that we just kind of double down on the stuff that really matters. Like being concretely loving, concretely honest, without being sort of hysterical on each other, I can always hear it my voice when I have something to say. I think we can kind of double down on the stuff that actually makes us like good people of faith, nice, loving, not culture warriors. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back.
Caller: So I think I’m just wondering how you hold intention, grief and the things that have been lost and also move forward into the truth and the beauty that God has given you and the future without maybe getting stuck in grief, or also like failing to grieve.
Kate: Man, that’s such a great, such a great comment you’re making. The sense of loss, the sense of things that are gone and being lost really comes in not just like waves, but circles. We can feel absolutely certain that we’ve done such a good job acknowledging something and trying to rightsize it, like put it in its emotional, spiritual, mental place and then bam, it’s back again, taking up all the room. So I guess I would just say, first of all, like, try really hard to have grace with yourself and don’t skip ahead to the part where you feel like you have to have it tucked away. Even though we want to have it tucked away, I totally get that. But there is room here in this season for the beautiful and the terrible. That’s one of the lovely bits I like about the language of blessing. My friend Stephen Chapman wrote a lovely book on blessing and the way he describes it, he calls it the spiritual emplacement, like putting things in the right place, and always makes me think of interior design. Like maybe when we are holding terrible loss or terrible grief, what we can ask for is not just that it’s over soon. Because you know, we know, we know we just have to carry it in different ways, but just that God like, put it in its place today. Make it only exactly the right size it needs to be. Not too enormous and not too small that I don’t acknowledge what’s real and then I’m very surprised that I’m, like, crying in a Walmart parking lot. So I think lent is a really good time, because it asks us to just walk with what is and tell ourselves I am living in reality today. And today, my grief or my loss is this big and also my joy, I am hoping will be about this big. Maybe we can even just increase it by chasing after something lovely that occurs to us. So, joy is coming. And maybe not quite yet, but in the meantime, I would say deep grace, deep honesty, and then deep stubbornness about chasing the lovely parts that are there for you. This community is genuinely one of my very favorite parts of this job. Like you all just get it. There is a certain knowing that we all share because we get to the marrow of what it means to be human right away. I was thinking of you all recently when I sat down with my friend Kaitlyn Tarver. Kaitlyn is an actress and a musician. She also just had a recent Super Bowl commercial where she was playing pickleball, and she’s so cool. She had this quick and weird and wonderful rise to fame, from winning the kids version of American Idol, to starring on Nickelodeon’s Big Time Rush, to now making a way for herself in music and acting. But it’s definitely a bit of a more wonderfully unvarnished version than the child star version of herself. So she wrote this song that made me laugh so hard. And so maybe, maybe we want it as our anthem. It’s exactly in the spirit of when I began, for spiritual reasons, using the F word during lent. But her song is called Shit Happens, and I got a chance to ask her about it and ask her to play it for us. And if you’re not a sweary person, I completely understand. You just know in your heart this is the kind of honesty we need. And I hope you’ll take a listen. We’re not really a culture with, like, a strong tolerance for uncomfortable feelings. The Everything Happens community is so wonderful with their, like, desire to hold, like in both hands, the beautiful and the terrible, the good in the bad. But every now and then the feedback is, I mean, just from life is very funny, but for instance, we put out these curriculum for like Christmas and for lent every year. They’re like these big kind of like guided ebooks that people can download. And like the one for lent is, you know, like Jesus, like, dies very badly at the end. And, it’s this devotional reflection but people who are looking for more of the feel good meditation, I think they were just like and like because once we get to Holy Week, like, like his friends are going to let him get murdered, you know, it gets really excitingly bad. And like, we asked for feedback on the lent curriculum and like, keep in mind like hundreds of hours of work goes into making these. It’s entirely free. And we’re just kind of hoping that they’re just like, you know–
Katelyn Tarver: Thank you.
Kate: Thank you. Exactly. And instead, we got a bunch of like, what a bummer. And I was like, look, if I could change, if we could get a happier savior, believe me, we would ask for one.
Katelyn: Totally. But.
Kate: So I just wondered, in response to Shit Happens, the song, which I’m hoping for a future Shit Happens, the musical.
Katelyn: Oh my God. Yes.
Kate: I just wondered if you ever get any, like look on the bright side.
Katelyn: Oh, yeah. For sure. I mean, my mom made a joke once, like, because one of my first EPs had a song called It’s Good, and the song is so sweet. It’s like it’s good, everything will turn out like it should. Like, I know that I’m going to get it a little bit right, a little bit wrong. Still, I’m going to sing my song. Okay, I wrote that when I was very young, and then obviously my mom was like, gosh, Katelyn, you went from it’s good to shit happens. Like you’ve really gone on the dark journey. And I’m like, well, I grew up.
Kate: So I’ve never gotten the chance to ask a musician that I love to like to play the song that I love, but I was kind of wondering if maybe you could play the glorious anthem of my heart.
Katelyn: I’d love to play Shit Happens for you, Kate.
Katelyn: Sometimes good guys get no credit and bad guys get all the praise And you get that house you wanted, but it’s just more empty space. The happy couple you look up to is getting a divorce. Your ex is dating your best friend and you can tell he loves her more. And I’m not trying to be all doom and gloom, but sometimes shit just happens. Worse than you can imagine. Stop trying to make it make sense. Sometimes shit just happens There’s no real deeper meaning. Let me save you the suspense. Sometimes shit just happens and you learn to live with it. By all means, find the silver lining. Make good out of the bad. But don’t tell me there’s a reason that somebody lost their dad. Yeah, I know it’s hard to swallow that no one’s in control. No matter how you try and steer it, life’s gonna throw you off. I’m not trying to be all doom and gloom. But sometimes shit just happens. Worse than you imagine. Stop trying to make it make sense. Sometimes shit just happens. There’s no real deeper meaning. Let me save you the suspense. Sometimes it just happen. You might get cheated, get lost and defeated, find yourself looking for the cause of the pain. But there’s not always someone or something to blame. Sometimes shit just happens, worse than you can imagine. Stop trying to make it make sense. Sometimes shit just happens. There’s no real deeper meaning Let me save you the suspense. Sometimes shit just happens and you learn to live with it.
Kate: Oh that’s so good. Oh, my heart. Oh, okay. Is that not the perfect Everything Happens anthem? Oh my gosh. And hey, if you haven’t listened to her album Subject to Change, it just celebrated its one year anniversary. Do yourself a favor and put it on repeat for your next road trip. Or you know your next I need to feel my feeling session. All right, my dears, if you are ready for the big bummer season of lent, please join us. Let’s be real together. You can download your daily reflection for free at katebowler.com/lent, or maybe grab a friend and ask them to do it with you. Or you can just be the weird person that talks about lent all the time. I will be sharing my thoughts and feelings over the next 40 days, so come find me @katecbowler. And until then this is Everything Happens with Kate Bowler. A big thank you to our funding partners, Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment, a Duke Divinity School, and to the team behind everything happening at Everything Happens, Jess Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Eli Azario, Katherine Smith and Megan Crunkleton. Thank you, my loves.
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