Kate Bowler: I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. So today I want to introduce you to someone really special. I think you’re just gonna love him. His name is Patrik Hagman. So he’s Finnish and he lives and teaches in Sweden. And that’s just where I want start is with place because it matters so much in this conversation. So Finland, Patrik’s home country, is a very unusual and interesting place. It’s a Scandinavian country. It shares an enormous, massive border with Russia, which is to say that it is like a very sophisticated, efficient, well-run country on the edge of an experience of constant existential threat, which a part of daily life. For instance, there are these beautiful recreation facilities that they built underground so that they can also double. As enormous bomb shelters in case of attack. This is a country that has tried to figure out a way to live meaningfully and normally with danger close at hand. And yet Finland is usually at the tippy top of the world’s list of world’s happiest people. Happiest people most imperiled. I really wanted to understand more about how that’s possible. How do we become people who can think honestly and clearly about fragility and still describe themselves as content, like even happy? And I found the perfect person to talk to about it. Patrick Hegman is a theologian. He’s a pastor. He is a writer. He is very well known for his public commentary and for his astute mind. And he’s also someone who is far too familiar with grief. We talk about losing a parent, we talk about losing a child, we talked about losing a spouse, and we talk about the strange clarifying moments that follow catastrophic loss. When life gets very small and very bright at the same time. And he says something I will never forget about how we need to be more surprised, not by tragedy, but by goodness. Like tragedy is to be expected. But goodness is more rare. This is not a conversation that rushes to comfort or certainty, but it’s the kind that asks us to sit inside of the complexity of a life that does not turn out the way we hoped and still remains full of joy and beauty and meaning. So, you know, basically, Patrick is our perfect kind of person. If you’re listening and you’re trying to make sense of something that doesn’t add up. Your grief, your faith, your anger, your gratitude. I wanted to start with you being Finnish. Because I just got to visit Finland for the first time a couple of weeks ago. And they had this whole thing about Finns being the happiest people. I think in the United States, when they have a particular language of happiness, I think what they are saying is that happiness is fundamentally a self-improvement project. Can we conquer this project called the self? And if I were going to write an entire history of the United states as one religion, I would describe them as a religion of New Year’s Day. New Year day, bright resolution, congratulations. You are about to make yourself into your greatest dream. I think when we’re talking about Finland and happiness, this is not what we’re taking about.
Patrik Hagman: I think for Finland, the Finnish people excel at being content. So if you ask, are you happy about your life? They say, well, yeah, it’s not so much that they feel this strong sense of, oh, things are so wonderful. It’s just, oh well, things could be worse. They’re not, I’m okay. So I think it’s actually the way these international studies measure happiness, it doesn’t really function on the Finnish mentality.
Kate Bowler: They should, they should do like a scale from like, weee to like, eh. Right. You’re saying it’s closer to eh.
Patrik Hagman: No, no, I think it’s probably closer to the middle of that. But that’s apparently internationally registered as happy. So this is a bit strange because Finns usually see themselves as a very melancholic people and all Finnish hymns are in minor key and so on. So it’s not what you typically see that Finnish is very joyful. But there is, I think, a quite broad sense of contentment. And I think that’s a really beautiful thing. If I were to brag about the Finnish culture, which kind of is counterintuitive for me, but there is a sense that you can be thankful for what you have. I see that, well, we have peace, we have a family and so on. It’s okay, you know, I don’t need, I know, fireworks.
Kate Bowler: It seems too that there’s something that in contentment that there are other words around it we might use like an experience of public trust feels like it’s folded in there.
Patrik Hagman: Thing about Finland is it’s still a society that is still, you say, it’s quite functioning. You can trust like the healthcare system, for example, or that the schools work most of the time and the trains run on time. So there’s all these kind of practical things that I suppose have quite a big impact on your general sense of how the world is and how your life is. So, in that sense, Finland is a quite… Safe place, you could say.
Kate Bowler: One of the stories, at least in some countries, about Pentecostalism, and you grew up Pentecostal, is that it’s the religion from the wrong side of the tracks. It’s the people without power, it’s a story, I guess I would say, of disenfranchisement from mainstream culture. I wonder if you could tell me a bit about, first of all, Chris growing up Pantecostal, and I think one of the things we know about Pantecostals, I’m like. From the inside is it’s a story about, I think it’s story about wonder, like about possibility, about miracles. What kind of world, spiritual world, did that lay out for you?
Patrik Hagman: First, I have to say that when I grew up, Pentecostalism was barely solidly middle-class already. So I don’t think those associations were very strong anymore. What was clear to me as a child was that we were definitely a bit removed from the rest of society. So my parents wouldn’t really. Seemed to find it important to get to know our neighbors when we moved to a different place because the congregation was their social life. When I grew a bit older, there were kind of a schism in our congregation and this was under the influence of very American style charismatic Christianity that was very popular in the 80s here.
Kate Bowler: You’re welcome.
Patrik Hagman: We give so much! And then my family ended up leaving that particular congregation and also the Pentecostal movement, and we moved to a Baptist congregation. And for me, during the teenage years, it was very much living in these two worlds, having one foot in this very charismatic world, and one more, like more of an everyday Christianity world. Which was not so much this spectacular, I sometimes call it the special effects idea of Christianity. The congregation I grew up in then as a teenager, the Baptist church was much more Jesus is with you in your everyday things. That double understanding of two versions of Christianity that kind of coexisted in my life, I think that was very much what formed me during that period.
Kate Bowler: It sounds like your worldview was challenged somewhat by your father’s diagnosis with cancer. I wonder how your faith community’s response to his illness shaped your own understanding of faith.
Patrik Hagman: For the entire time, my father was sick and it was on and off for eight years, my entire teenage time. On the one hand, I and we in the family were sort of certain that he would be healed at some point. And there was also in this one side of my faith life, so to speak, these notions that not only would he be healed, but it would be this great miracle that would have a- great impact on how people would look at Christianity in the Finnish society and so on. And then on the other hand, there was this very everyday thing about people that would come from the church to my father’s room in the hospital and just sit there with him. The notion that you can kind of sense in their voice when I would talk about, oh, I think my father will be miraculously healed, they would say, oh that’s interesting. And you kind of felt that… This is maybe not the thing that they would think it’s worthwhile to think about. So the interesting thing is that when my father finally died, the one version of Christianity just kind of immediately faded away, and I was very comfortable in the other one. And in a sense, that meant that there was no crisis of faith, because I already had this version that kind of worked. With this different sense of circumstances that my father had died. So it was really just one version of my faith that just faded away. But that said, when I, a few years later, started studying theology, I have later realized that this question was present in everything I’d been doing. How do we formulate the theology? How do we understand God in a sense that the fact that somebody like my father will die will not be a problem for how we believe things? That became kind of the criteria for everything I did theologically. I had very little interest in theological questions and fields that felt far removed from those kind of practical questions. So I was very much attracted to like the Desert Fathers and the early church that to me seemed to be really wrestling with these heavy things in life very concretely with us. Types of thinking seem to just not want to get into that messy thing, messy parts of life.
Kate Bowler: I just find that one thing that marks people who have suffered or people who are around suffering is they’re very careful with their expectation that hope administered wrongly can be poison.
Patrik Hagman: Right, yeah. When it’s coupled with a simplified understanding of how the world works. Me it seems like you can use religion for basically two functions. On the one hand, it’s possible and it’s quite common to kind of use religion or faith to kind of explain the things in life that can’t be explained. So it’s like we don’t know how these things work, but religion can explain them. So we kind of paint in the banks. And then you’ve got this like really ordered version of the world. It’s quite rigid. But then to me it use quite. Opposite way, to kind of take this complex and quite hard to understand experience of being alive and making that even more complex and open and really try to work in like opening up our understanding of what is possible and what is probable.
Kate Bowler: Then I think it’s quite common among ordinary Christians and I think people from other religions too that actually give religion dysfunction. So I don’t understand why bad things happen to good people. Well, here is a spiritual explanation that kind of puts that difficult thing in my life to place and then I can be safe in that I understand how things work.
Kate Bowler: So if I could paraphrase. Badly what you just said. One version tries to make faith simpler and the other allows you to tolerate the more complex.
Patrik Hagman: Yeah, and even enjoy it. Yeah, exactly. See the beauty in all the unexpected things that happen in life.
Kate Bowler: How do you think that like existential posture changed you when you became a parent? I mean, for women, it is our very first confrontation often with mortality. And I think for everyone just understanding, oh my gosh, I’m holding fragility.
Patrik Hagman: Right, yeah I very much remember the moment when I held my son for the first time and I physically felt that the center of my world like moved 20 centimeters to the front. It was a very strong experience. That said, becoming a parent for me was hard and I don’t know how to connect that with the experience of losing my father. I think it might be a connection there but I had lived a life for quite a long time where I could decide what I wanted to do. And what is important and how to, and to just have a person that depended on me and that demanded my attention. That was really, really tough. It was really like tough training in kind of putting something else before me. And I’m not sure I ever really figured that one out.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. How did you first respond when you found out that your son was ill and you were going to have to be a certain kind of parent for a long time?
Patrik Hagman: That was a strange thing. When we found out finally what the problem was, he had been ill for a while. And we’ve gotten news that he had this like avocado-sized tumor in his head. My first sense was a kind of sense of competence because having had the experience of my sick father, I knew how things worked, both like I knew how the hospital system function and so on. But I also had some… Very solid concepts of how you get through these difficult things. So, for example, my father set down a rule for us in the family that it’s okay for anybody to be really down one day, but it’s not okay for one to be down on the same day as somebody else in the family.
Kate Bowler: Oh, I like that.
Patrik Hagman: Taking turns. Right and that kind of, it was brilliant because it kind of made things like how I feel about my life this day, something that I can be responsible about.
Kate Bowler: I really like that.
Patrik Hagman: So those kinds of things kind of kicked in. I hadn’t thought about them for 10 years, but then suddenly they were absolutely useful again. So that was really strange. I knew exactly how to do this. At the same time, of course, the notion that my son was gravely ill was, of course devastating, obviously. But the thing is, at least for me, and I think it’s quite general, humans are excellent at adapting. And at that point. It was completely clear what was important in my life. I didn’t have to think about that anymore. Of course, this was a bit later in my career, so my job was there. I didn’t have to thing about that. I remember immediately after the doctor had told us about this, my notion was, yes, I have to go see that Joel is okay in his bed, that he has everything he needs. And then I can call my mother and so on. But I had this kind of quite clear understanding of, okay, this is my life now. I have to do what I can to make his. All these difficult things he will have to go through with the treatments and all these things. I have to make that bearable for him. That’s my job. So there was a clarity there. We’re strong.
Kate Bowler: For some reason, I don’t know if this is true about everybody, but there was almost a relief I felt when I understood what my job was as someone who was probably dying. It felt so bright, but so obvious. And then some things were lovelier, like as if all the colors were painted in, in like a more beautiful, a richer blue. Yeah, and then everything else that didn’t matter didn’t matter in such a hilarious way It’s almost like the tragicomedy of it feels.
Patrik Hagman: There’s a layer of reality that’s kind of stripped away and you’re doing like the bare life. These are the most important things. And I also think because it’s really hard to live the life with a small child with cancer. We stayed for long stretches at the hospital with him, lived in a tiny room. Like the Finnish healthcare system is very generous but it’s not luxurious. So we slept on a mattress on the floor between his. Beside his bed for many nights and so on. And it’s really physically very, very hard. And then these moments of beauty and goodness, they become so, so important, because without them, there’s no way you make it through this. So that’s also something you really learn to appreciate. You have to cling to these moments and really see the value in this. Nurse that just takes a little bit of extra time to make sure he’s all right in his bed or whatever it is. These really mundane normal things. So there is something when we approach these most existential life becomes much easier to understand.
Kate Bowler: When you describe it to me, as the dad, it sounds almost like monastic, like you’re stripped down. And you know, I mean, having studied the desert fathers, you know how very bare bones and then spiritually structured you can make your heart and mind when you can, in these wonderful rare moments where we can line it up, what kind of, did you find that you felt that there was like spiritual habits that you took on to kind of help you get through like the terrible sameness as well.
Patrik Hagman: Of course we would like pray and things like this, but I think one of the most important spiritual practices we developed was writing a blog. Yeah. This was back in the day where blogs were a normal thing to do. And it really started just as a way to keep in contact with our.
Kate Bowler: To do the updating.
Patrik Hagman: Because we didn’t want to send like 100 text messages today. But pretty soon, and especially during the periods which were like more normal when we were at home and so on, this almost daily routine that we had to write this short text and like upload it. But we said, this happened today. And more and more we tried to work in also something nice that had happened today So we would write, oh, we got this test back and it was like this and that. And then, and also we had a really nice time when Joel said this funny thing or something. And to make that a practice to kind of, and at times it was hard to look for that. And of course, there were days when there were absolutely nothing positive to write about and then we didn’t. But I think that really became a spiritual. Exercise in the best sense of the world and it really, really transformed us. And I have noticed, now it’s a long time ago, but that kind of stayed with me. So, you can always have a, often have a kind of simplistic understanding of what visual exercises do, like they’re analog to physical exercise, and I don’t really think they are. But at this point, you know, just To try to practice thankfulness, it’s a really powerful thing to do.
Kate Bowler: I’m sure some days was just ridiculous kid playfulness where they’re just like puppies. And then I’m share other times asked hard questions. How did he understand what his situation was and what it was gonna mean for him?
Patrik Hagman: Was really difficult to say because he was three when he got sick and six when he finally died. And of course, there was a development there. So he knew definitely that he was sick, of course. And there was this quite pedagogic book that we got from the hospital described like a little story about a little kid with a brain tumor. That was really meaningful for him. It could like relate to that. I think that’s… Wasn’t so difficult because Humans in general are good at adapting. Kids are amazing. He didn’t know anything else. This was life for him. Of course, he was really annoyed that he couldn’t do some things he would, but pretty soon his life was that hospital life. He wasn’t like he was down or anything when he had to go to the hospital because it was a very safe space for him and there he could, when he was at hospital, he could watch as much video films as possible. Then we had no restrictions. At home, we were slightly more strict. So- so it was usually he was happy to go. Then, of course, in the end, it became different. When it got to the point that we knew he was going to die, there was nothing else they could do. They had tried everything. Then we had to sit down and talk about this. During my studies, I had chanced upon an old study. Being done in a cancer warden in the US in the 70s. And these were grim places because back then you couldn’t really do much to the kids that had cancer. There were very few functional medicines. And the researcher noticed that a lot of parents couldn’t work up the courage to tell their children they were dying. The point of the article was that these children, They figured out that they were dying anyway. They’re perceptive enough, but they had to deal with this all on their own. And that seems so cruel. So then when we were in that situation, we were completely sure. Well, we have to tell him and we have. That’s where a bit of theological training actually helps. We said that well, the good thing had been to my grandfather’s funeral. So we had a concept of what death is. So we could refer to that and say, well, this will happen to you now and you will get to meet my grandfather who he knew and my father who he never met and Jesus and so on. And then I threw in a bit like… Theological fancy thinking and I said that. When you die, time stops. So when you would die, mom and I will be there with you because there’s no time there. So you don’t have to wait for us. We will be with you. But we’re really sad because we’ll be here and we will have to see you again. So that’s why we are crying now.
Kate Bowler: That’s so lovely though, like, this is not gonna hurt, this part won’t hurt you, you’ll never be separate from me. That’s such a, like a powerful thing to feel like your love is never interrupted. But we’ll do the hard work of waiting for you.
Patrik Hagman: And it’s difficult to know at this point. He didn’t really talk anymore, but he seemed calmer after this. So I think he had probably been thinking about what is going on now. And after this, it was quite a smooth last bit. Of course, there were situations when he had pain, but then he got medication.
Kate Bowler: It is so wild how many truths feel absolutely impossible. I will love you forever. How can I possibly be separate from you? Like, I don’t think there’s nothing in us that even can imagine that we can be separate. So just to like, to try to live into that. Gift of heaven in a way that doesn’t feel. Trite and but feels like it’s an actual gift. We will someday both get to be in the same moment of love.
Patrik Hagman: I had the experience from when my father died. When Joel died, and I think I talked to other people, this is a really common experience that something happens in the room when a person dies. And it was so strong with Joel because he was heavily medicated. So his presence in the rooms was kind of blurry, if you could say. It wasn’t so clear. But then when his final heartbeat. And he didn’t breathe anymore. Suddenly his presence was completely clear and crisp in the room for like a number of seconds before it kind of. So that, which of course you can give any kind of explanation for something that if you’re inclined to. And as I said, I think these experiences are quite common. That also made it easier for us to kind of really believe that what we said to him is something we really can work on ourselves. It’s something we can hold on to. You know, the Bible will not tell you much about what heaven is like, almost nothing. So you can’t really say much. So this is about what I felt comfortable saying about what happens after death. And that experience kind of validated that very simple idea of an afterlife in some sense.
Kate Bowler: And a soul and a hearingness and a gone-ness.
Patrik Hagman: Exactly.
Kate Bowler: That is wild. And that you can only feel the truth of it through love. Cause I, you know, we wouldn’t. I think, because witness makes us sit there and like just, and like reach for each other. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. I also think one of the other things theologically that doesn’t make any sense, if I’m just registering complaints, is joy. Joy doesn’t also make any sense. And you had these incredible experiences of joy where, like, there’s that photo you took at Christmas where he’s in the hospital bed and you’re with your wife. And that’s like taking a fun, ridiculous picture.
Patrik Hagman: It was our very first selfie.
Kate Bowler: Haha, it was your first thought.
Kate Bowler: I imagine Patrick, you’re not like a super selfie guy. Just picking up that vibe.
Patrik Hagman: No, it was really extraordinary. It was Christmas Eve, and we were in the hospital. And this was actually just a few days before Joel died. So we had moved in, both of us, usually just one of us stayed in there, but they were kind and let us take over the room. And we had put all the Christmas card to get up on the door. So we have kind of taken over that room and created a Christmas space there. And then when Christmas Eve came in Finland and Sweden, and we celebrate on Christmas Eve mostly. Friend of ours called us and asked if we have a lot of food. Do you want some? Yes, we would. So we brought some of the Christmas food to us and we asked the nurses to sit with Joel. So we went up and bought ourselves a Christmas gift, a board game or something. And then we just took our food and we sat there and ate. It was really, really beautiful. And Joel was sleeping in the bed, he was completely unconscious all the time. Yeah, then we took this picture and my wife just has this radiant smile on that picture. You don’t, it’s, I suppose that people that saw it and knew what was happening was really confused. But to us, that was a really, really beautiful moment. Also, because I think that was when we started to picture a life after all this. This is one of maybe the most forbidden feelings. Rarely talk about it, that when somebody is sick for such a long time, it’s really heavy. It’s really gruesome. You’re really, really… So the notion that your loved one dies and your life will return to something more normal. It’s quite a liberation that it’s really spoken of, but it’s a big part in the mix of all the crazy things you feel when you them.
Kate Bowler: It sounds like part of the like fumbling our way through these impossible moments is constantly trying to not like reconcile these contradictions, but let them sit as closely together as possible. I will miss him forever. I’m so glad he’s out of pain and I need and life begs to continue. And this is totally devastating. Isn’t it so surreal that I am so happy right now that I, I don’t even know when I could even be this happy again, because it feels so, I, there’s just some, there’s a weird thing in a minute. In improv comedy where you’re trying to like add to each other, but there’s a, they always say that when you hit a low moment, there’s like a ricochet feeling when you bounce from the lowest moment to the highest moment. And I’ve always thought theology is actually very good at this. Like the joy and the like it, that kind of joy is only really it’s a capacity that you have. It sounds like you have tremendous capacity.
Patrik Hagman: Difficult to compare to anything, but it really was something that happened to me during those years. I certainly learned something about that kind of hard happiness. See, I will enjoy this in spite of everything, but also at times it was such a gift. Skipping a bit forward in the when my wife then a few years later also died due to a stroke. On the night when she finally, when they turned off the machine, she had, she was in a coma for two weeks when there was no brain activity anymore. And we, we had said goodbye to her and they took her away and it was over. Then it was in June and this had happened during the night. So when we walked out, parents-in-law and a friend of mine who is also a minister and have been there with us during the night. We came out in the morning, the sun was rising and there was this really strong warmth in the air early during the summer had finally arrived and it was such What a beautiful morning. My wife had just died. And still the feeling was almost as if God told me, well I’m sorry your wife had to die, but here’s a really beautiful sun, beautiful morning. And I think that says something really important about God’s priorities being slightly different than ours. It seems to me, And this is the sense I’ve had to make of all this, of course, is that… To God, questions of life and death don’t have quite the same dignity as for us. There’s, yeah, people die. And in truth, it’s not odd if you look out creation in general, all life comes out of death all the time. So it’s really a problem on that level.
Kate Bowler: Problem has quotation marks around that. I can hear the quotation mark. It’s not a problem insofar as we can’t solve death.
Patrik Hagman: But it seems that, in some sense, a beautiful morning can be, from God’s perspective, actually more important. Well, that’s maybe not the best example. And I think this is one of the kind of hard lessons to learn and things where we really have to do some serious theological work in how we talk about these things. Because I would actually say that I think… Gives us mostly good things. He just defines goodness slightly different than us. And that’s very, very painful. But kind of, there is in a sense like a third option here between saying, well, either God is loving or bad things happen. And that says that, yeah, we don’t really understand God’s love fully, But we… Still may choose to trust it in some sense. Does that make sense to you?
Kate Bowler: I well first of all when you say something like that I listen very carefully because so often when people are describing like a system of fairness There’s like a because when I hear you describe it what I hear. You saying is this isn’t math. No There’s very I think that Richard Rohr says like God has many things but not a mathematician.
Kate Bowler: but not a mathematician.
Patrik Hagman: He might be that too, but I don’t know.
Kate Bowler: At least it’s not given us any answer. But in the mystery of what we can’t know about gifts. It feels like part of what you’re saying is that rather than trying to reconcile the math of evil, that we might marvel at the mystery in good because there are so many kinds of, like the sunset, like there’s so many ways. When I picture you standing there, I don’t picture you saying, I’ve suffered catastrophic loss. Oh, thank goodness these are the same. At last I have found this explanation. But that like, there are these moments when you can feel the such like your own goodness, God’s insane, particular love in one weird moment. And that oddly has this like, not 0%, not 10%, it just somehow goes to 100% battery. Why would it do that? That does seem like the mystery of goodness that you’re very interested in.
Patrik Hagman: And sometimes I think there’s a funny thing in your first book because you have these appendices.
Kate Bowler: I was very angry and I had a family gathering and I went into another room, and this is the truth, I went to another room and I wrote a really angry list of things I wish no one would say to me ever again.
Patrik Hagman: The funny thing is that one of the things you write there is never tell anybody, oh, God needed an angel.
Kate Bowler: Do you say that?
Patrik Hagman: No, not exactly, because I too know that God doesn’t create angels out of babies. God does not create, I mean, just from like, yeah, angels are a separate created being. But in truth, this was a concept. Maybe my wife, it was really important to my wife after you all died, she would put it slightly differently. She said, maybe God needed him for something. But it’s basically the same idea. But, of course, coming from a slightly different perspective and again, as a theologian, I was thinking, well, that’s kind of difficult to say. We don’t think God needs stuff as such. But the more I thought about it… It kind of turned into kind of an exercise or a reminder that I don’t understand how God works, which I think is really, really important. Who knows? I don’t really know why God wants any of us here. Truthful. So why not have a use for a six-year-old? Who knows? And I think that attitude is really, really important. So, of course, and I would agree that it’s probably not a good idea to say that to anybody. And it’s a huge difference what you say to somebody to kind of comfort them, but you’re really comforting yourself. And the kind of ideas you use infuse your life with meaning because I don’t think we can avoid doing that. Of course, there’s no way to explain why you all had to die or had to have a brain tumor. It would be insane to say anything.
Kate Bowler: Wait a minute. Okay, so you translate Stanley Hauerwas’s books, right? That’s you? Yeah. There’s something he said that sounds so close to what he says. I think the ability to live well is to live without quite so many reasons. Yeah. And when you’re describing this, I feel like you’re not trying to let go of the deep grounding of like, love and createdness. And you are just trying to detach yourself from needing as many reasons without interrupting this fundamentally being a story about love.
Patrik Hagman: No, exactly. I think there’s kind of two pitfalls we can go into. The one is what I talked about earlier, when you have a religion that orders everything. So you get this rigid system and if anything breaks out of this, the whole thing falls down. But there’s another pitfall that could be like to say in order not to do that, we have to say, well, there’s no rationality to anything and… There’s no reason why- And I think we have to let the idea of God constantly challenge all our ideas of why things happen.
Kate Bowler: That’s good. The thing I used to love about Pentecostals to bring it back is they were so good at a God who looks specifically at our biography and makes us feel loved and chosen and known and saved. It’s such a personal God. And sometimes it could be like absurdist, like God putting money in a mailbox every second day. But it was so good it making everyone feel like every memoir. Is a theological love story. And I guess what I really like about you, sir, and your approach is that you still wanna tell the love story, but you’re trying to allow it to be as separate from your own life experience and let God be as God as God needs to be.
Patrik Hagman: Right. I kind of think of life as an invitation. Constantly look for new kinds of beauty. These kinds of experiences, which are painful and bad and in some sense, completely meaningless, they do function as such challenges. What is happening here is in one sense that in ordinary life, if we can use such a word, there’s such a strong sense of normalcy. This is what a life should be. You should get married and have children and blah, blah, blah, and this of course resembles very few real lives. But that idea of a normal life, it kind of blinds us from all things life can give us. And when things like these happen to us, that normalcy stripped away and suddenly you can find this openness. The way God’s love can come to us in ways we wouldn’t have imagined and wouldn’t ever expect or think that this is the way my life should be.
Kate Bowler: Or wanted. And I wondered, as a community that understands how very constantly that you have to be a witness to the worst, hardest moments of people’s lives, what do you think like, what you think the best advice is for how to walk beside people through that dark valley and hopefully up into some brighter light?
Patrik Hagman: Pastors find out, and I think it’s true for anyone, that what you need when you go through a period of grief when something, you lost someone or something similar, also like a divorce or something, what you the most is just somebody who represents the notion that life goes on. Since, as I said, these times are, in a way, Potential clarity. I think it’s really important to help people that grieve to find truthfulness about how they grieve. So for example, I could have started telling the story about my marriage to Kika as, oh, this was the perfect marriage. We had everything going for us and then she was cruelly taken away from us. It’s not wrong, but it’s not true. And I think that’s one way to understand what grief is. Is like the process of integrating this loss into your life story in a truthful way. So for these kinds of process, I think other people are really important. It’s much easier to lie to yourself than to lie in front of another person.
Kate Bowler: When I think about this conversation, I’m going to think about the intensity of how faithfulness and truthfulness will seem closer together because of what I’ve learned from you. Really, thank you so much for this beautiful conversation. Some stories are not meant to be solved. They’re meant to witnessed. So if you’re walking through grief right now, you’re standing beside someone who is, I really hope this conversation reminds you that you don’t have to explain anything. You don’t to tidy the pain or rush toward hope. Sometimes the most honest thing we can do is just stay present, tell the truth, and keep your eyes open. Goodness and beauty and joy. And frankly, that’s also exactly what Lent invites us to do. So we’re in the middle of Lent right now. Lent marks that 40 days leading up to Easter, mirroring the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness. Now during Lent, we ask God to show us the world as it really is. It’s the down slope of God, the great descent where the whole church moves together toward the cross. And if that sounds like something you wanna learn more about, I’m doing these daily reflections throughout Lent over on Substack. It’s totally free. It’s been a joy to do. It’s kateboehler.substack.com. And I swear to you, it is the nicest place on the internet. So come on by. But before I go, I just love to bless the crap out of you. So this one is for you. The one learning to live with things as they are. Blessed are you who are learning to live with fewer reasons. May love be the center that holds, even when everything falls apart. And may joy arrive without permission, not as a solution, but as a strange, stubborn companion in the middle of all that is also happening. Hey, just in my word of thanks, I just had the most amazing opportunity in this podcast to visit Sweden, and it was really all made possible with the help of Joel Haldorf. Joel is just like the coolest Swedish theologian. He really organized this launch for everything happens for a reason. And otherwise, I’ve loved my first memoir being translated into Swedish. So, if I just want to give a plug for Sweden. You have to visit Joel and his wife Lydia’s Culture House in Linkping. Okay, it’s just a little bit south of Stockholm and it’s this incredible place called Babets. I’ll make sure it’s linked in the show notes. But they are doing amazing things in their community and have built this gorgeous center for conversation and Fika, which is their cute little like dessert and coffee situation and friendship. And I just wish we could export them to Durham. Also, a big thank you to Lilly Endowment for their support. Making today’s episode possible, and for my team, Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Ann Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunckleton, Katherine Smith, Elia Zonio, Anna Fitzgerald-Peterson, and Keith Weston. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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