SEASON 3: EPISODE 8 TRANSCRIPT

Kate Bowler

Kate Bowler: Honesty is oxygen if you haven't been able to use it in a while. I mean, it's the moment where let's say you were at a party and someone said, "How are you?" And then you, you sweet little dumb-dumb, you got to answer honestly. It would feel like you could finally trust yourself and you could feel like the people around you can actually be not just an observer, but a witness.

Dr. Greg Jones: Life doesn't always unfold the way we expect. There are moments of deep joy, but also seasons of uncertainty, loss, and questions without easy answers. And yet, even in the midst of life's hardest realities, hope can take root. It's not a simple solution, but a quiet, resilient presence that helps us keep going.

My name is Greg Jones, president of Belmont University, and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with amazing agents of hope, people who demonstrate what it means to live with hope and lean into the lessons picked up along the way. They are The Hope People.

Today's agent of hope is Kate Bowler, a writer, professor, and speaker whose journey through stage four cancer has reshaped how she understands faith, suffering, and joy. Through her work, including her book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lives I've Loved, and her latest, Joyful Anyway, Kate invites us into a more honest conversation about what it means to live well in a world that is often uncertain and imperfect.

In our conversation, Kate reflects on the limits of toxic positivity, the beauty of human kindness, and the concept of what she calls stubborn hope, a hope that endures even when answers are hard to find. With humor, honesty, and deep compassion, she reminds us that embracing our limitations can lead to deeper connection, creativity, and joy. Her story is a powerful testament to finding meaning and hope even in life's most difficult seasons.

Kate Bowler, it's great to have you on The Hope People Podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

Kate Bowler: Hello, my friend. This is nice for me. This is catching up.

Dr. Greg Jones: Well, we're going to talk about your journey in a minute, but I want to start with something in the present. This is a time when lots of people are on their heels because it's challenging, lots of challenges in the culture and the world. AI is advancing really rapidly, and yet you continue to be filled with joy. What's giving you hope and joy these days?

Kate Bowler: I think it's always the same. It's always just people, people creating magic by doing something beautiful that they didn't have to do. I mean, it wows me every time. And then the other no fail for me is my kid. Lately, we're all so tired and I wake up in the morning, not sure what day it is, and I find that I make up these dumb songs to him while he's getting ready. I'm like, "It is maybe Tuesday." And then I can hear him from across the house going, "And you are my mom." And it just makes me laugh so hard.

Dr. Greg Jones: How old is he now?

Kate Bowler:  He's 12. He's in-

Dr. Greg Jones: How'd that happen?

Kate Bowler:  I know. He was a little bitty baby when you knew him.

Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, you have been a person since the first time I met you who's just marked by joy and hope and love. And yet about a decade ago, you got devastatingly bad news as a mom of a younger boy.

Kate Bowler: Yeah.

Dr. Greg Jones: Take me back to that time and that news and what that did to your world.

Kate Bowler: Well, I was in that season of life where all you want to do is build and you want to see your own efforts. It was a moment of almost arrival. I got my dream job at Duke. You're my boss. I've got colleagues and I wanted to live in a tower with many gargoyles. I just wanted to have grateful students and a feeling of accomplishment after working on a dissertation for a decade. And I married my high school sweetheart and I finally had this little baby after years of infertility and it just felt like I was finally living this life that I had earned.

And then what I thought was just stomach pain and a lot of misdiagnosis, it turned out to be stage four colon cancer. And they thought I wouldn't live through the summer and then through the next year. And it was just honestly, it's the speed. It's like the astonishing speed by which you have to lay your own future down. And I was heartbroken and I was also very angry because I wanted to feel like I deserved my life. And every then reason I could come up with why it was happening to me felt either totally unsatisfying or made me sort of theologically sound like a narcissist, like aren't I special? But it was me feeling just devastated by not knowing.

Dr. Greg Jones: So you had written your dissertation on the prosperity gospel, which attracts a lot of people who are looking for joy and hope and a sense of a positive future. And you had developed an appreciation for the people, if not entirely the ideas, and yet those relationships turned pretty quickly because of your diagnosis. And you wrote a New York Times op-ed about some of those interactions. Take us to that place and how it made you think deeper and ask better questions about what really enables people to prosper.

Kate Bowler: Yeah. Well, it's a very simple formula. The prosperity gospel says that if you think in the right way and you believe and then you speak in the right way, only positive words, that you will receive health and wealth and happiness and that feeling of completeness that we're all kind of desperate for. So when my life was the one that came apart, I heard a lot of immediate assumptions that it might be something that I'd done, maybe it was something spiritually that I'd done, maybe it was something in my past. There was just a real hunger to kind of run an inventory of my life and figure out where I went wrong. 

And I realized too, that wasn't just confined to all the prosperity gospel people I was studying and still seeing on Sundays when I was doing my research, but that a lot of the people of faith I knew too wanted me to learn a lesson and that learning a lesson from God became much more important than them really understanding that there was no cancer in my family. I had no sense this was coming my way and that every desire to sort of throw me a reason was drowning me.

And I was very upset and I wrote, I'm just laughing because the truth is what I pictured was that I would write this angry thing and then I would print it off at the Divinity School printers and down the hall from my office. And then I would just sort of use it to be like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm drowning in everybody else's reasons." But it turns out that I had a friend who had an editor at The New York Times and he liked what I wrote and then he put it on the cover of The Sunday Times. And because I was so sweet and so dumb, all my contact information was available. And so people read this swan song of me saying, "It is so hard to suffer and die in a culture that's only handing you reasons why it's you." And then I think a lot of people read that and thought, "Wow, this woman is really hoping that I might have a reason. I'd like to supply that to her with the email address available here conveniently at the bottom."

I got thousands of emails, many of them good intentions, some of them just awful. But that was the beginning of me realizing that first of all, this deep loneliness I had in my life coming apart, that I wasn't alone, that everybody is screaming against the void and asking why them? And that maybe there has to be a richer answer than why me? It has to be something more like, God, what do you give us no matter what? What can you promise is always there for your... And now that I'm thinking about it and now that I feel it, don't you love the brokenhearted, God? Don't you love me just as I am?

Dr. Greg Jones: So that piece, despite the emails you got and advice from lots of others, it resonated and you turned it into a wonderful book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved. Why do you think that piece in the Times and then the book struck such a chord with so many people and resonated so deeply with them? Besides the fact that you're funny, a good writer and all sorts of other wonderful things in the book.

Kate Bowler: I was very Frank. I was really angry.

Dr. Greg Jones: I just thought I'd say it so you didn't have to.

Kate Bowler: Yes. I'm very compelling. I think-

Dr. Greg Jones: There are lots of wonderful lines.

Kate Bowler: There's a lot of grouchiness. I recommend everyone write a book when they think they're dying. It's quite illuminating. I think one primary reason why just articulating the loneliness around feeling like you can't put together why your life isn't working out. I think it pointed out that we have such a thick American cultural script around progress, individualism, do-it-yourself-ism, everything-is-possible-ism, that anyone who isn't living into everything-is-possible-ism quickly begins to feel like they've not just failed, they're a failure, they've not just lost, they're a loser. And the stigma around that is very isolating.

So I think in part that just saying, "I didn't want to die like this. I'm not trying to learn this lesson. I'm just trying to figure out how to feel loved when I no longer feel useful," I think just described a lot of people's alienation from a progress story. And that could not just be a catastrophic illness, but man, anyone who's been through a relationship that's come apart, a kid that's estranged from them, we all have unarticulatable kinds of loneliness that never quite can make its way into that small talk script. And then we wonder deep down if there's something truly wrong with us.

Dr. Greg Jones: That's powerful. I want you to unpack a little more because you're pointing toward that and what you just described, but you've pushed back against what you call toxic positivity. And I find that really powerful because the positivity that we're encouraged to have is often so superficial. And the toxicity that you describe is that it puts pressure on a performance or a performative self to always be positive. Talk about what you mean by the toxicity of positivity and the antidote.

Kate Bowler: Well, I think we've all decided since World War II and positive thinking coming from Norman Vincent Peale kind of became the primary articulation of self-help. And self-help as a genre, as an American genre, America is the number one consumer of promises that we should always be happy, always speak positively. And so if we're just eating this up all the time, then we find our language gets more and more limited. A toxically positive person is going to feel so constrained by having to speak positively and reframe every thought as if everything is always a lesson, not a setback, but a set up. God's always closing doors, opening windows. That kind of framework makes it very, very difficult for people to describe realistically what they're going through. And it creates a very punitive cycle where the second we feel off script or like we're unable to say what's really going on, we then experience estrangement from really people who in a toxically positive culture won't let us land on a harder truth. 

And a harder truth is often that we have lost more than we've gained. We've still gained something, but we are not able to realistically describe a human life. And a human life is going to be at least half lived in some form of dependence, whether we're young or we're old or just messed up in the middle. We are, I mean, creatures built, as you've written about beautifully, frankly, by our friendships, by our belonging. So if you're not sort of rowing your boat alone, you're going to feel very strange and alien in a toxically positive culture.

Dr. Greg Jones: So what's the antidote?

Kate Bowler: Well, I really think it starts in a more negative place than people expect because it has to first start with honesty. Honesty is just oxygen if you haven't been able to use it in a while. I mean, it's the moment where let's say you were at a party and someone said, "How are you?" And then you, you sweet little dumb-dumb, you've got to answer honestly. It would feel like you could finally trust yourself and you could feel like the people around you can actually be not just an observer, but a witness. They can hold for you the truth so that in those moments where you can't carry yourself forward, they're going to be the ones that can then say, "Let's just see what is still possible."

Because that's the space we're trying to find. Instead of everything-is-possible-ism, we don't want to move into nothing-is-possible-ism. So it's not sort of insane optimism or despair. It's that rich place of limited agency of what is possible today. And so often it's really the people who love us that can help us, once they know reality with us, can help us live there more fully.

Dr. Greg Jones: I remember a day, I don't know if you remember it, I ran into you in the halls of the Divinity School at Duke and I saw you and we stopped just for a minute and I said, "You doing okay?" It was while you were going through your treatments at the CDC and you gave me such a gift that day because you paused and I think you were trying to decide whether to be honest with me and you said, "No, and I'm quite frankly really tired of feeling like I need to be when I see everybody." And I remember just thinking, oh, I didn't expect that answer, but I went down to my office after we talked a little more and you teared up for a moment and talked about just how life was hard right then. 

And I went down to my office and I just sat and I thought, I'm really glad she answered that honestly. And I didn't really know what I was meaning by, "You doing okay?" except it was kind of like small talk when you see a friend, but it was your willingness not to feel like you had to be up and be so positive. And I remember thinking I probably would've just brushed it on by if I'd been asked that question, probably still do when somebody says, "Hey, you doing okay?" And, "Great." And inside you're really struggling. And I do think that that honesty, but also that's the breakthrough to friendship is when you don't feel like you have to perform, but you can be honest. Now you don't want to be that middle school kid who just is always honest and, "Let me tell you about my day."

Kate Bowler: Why are they like that? Did anything good happen?

Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah.

Kate Bowler: What is happening at that school?

Dr. Greg Jones: But it struck me that one of the things you learned in that journey was the difference between optimism and hope. And you've talked about wanting to cultivate a stubborn hope. Talk about what stubborn hope looks like.

Kate Bowler: You're so good, Greg, on language of hope. Tell me how you do it first because I think I know how it relates to joy, but I want to hear you describe hope.

Dr. Greg Jones: Well, for me, it's a confident trust that God holds the future regardless of what's happening to me. And our mutual friend Kevin Rowe talks about that everybody's on a journey toward dying, we just don't know the timeframe. And so if you take that as the assumption, it means you're not going to just look for all the anti-aging creams and hair tonics or whatever, because there is a recognition that it's not all going to be great and joyful and easy. And any role we have has struggles, but it's the turn of Holy Saturday to Easter. And so it's not that you are evading suffering or avoiding it, you're leaning into it. And I think about a lot, and that's why I was drawn to your image of stubborn hope, because the hope that is there at the Easter vigil, which we'll be observing in a few weeks from the time of this taping, is a hope where it's still dark and it's not... I remember when Rowan Williams mentioned to me, and he's written about it some, but he said, "Most Americans and Brits in the Western world, we want not to worship Christ crucified and risen. We want Christ un-crucified." That's a kind of Harry Houdini ta-da. So what's a little brokenness or illness or anything? Let's just be positive in those ways. 

Hope is actually a clear-eyed vision of the brokenness that's in our own lives, in our relationships in the world, and yet a nevertheless kind of perspective that says, "I'm going to lean into the positive, but not in that toxic positivity, but it's not because of who I am or how I present, it's because of who God is."

Kate Bowler: That's so good. I like hearing that, like you're leaning into the future and the future God has already gone in front and said, "I promise there will be no more tears. There will be no more suicide rails. There will be no more scrolling the worst things that happens every morning." 

I struggled a little bit with how to talk about hope sometimes because I think before I felt like it was trying to use the future to solve the present and there's nothing that solves the present. Even, I mean, Jesus, love of my life, heart of my heart, not a great solution to the problem of pain. And so I didn't always know how to be hopeful because I didn't want to pretend that it was offering some kind of guarantee, but I did really feel like the language thinking more about joy helped open up language about hope for me because one of the great reasons why joy is such a cousin to hope is that when it looks at the future that God has made and lets our soul cry for a second, yes, we are temporarily whole, I do think that God gives us joy, like he gives us the Holy Spirit, which is I think why those are good friends so that we can live like this. 

If joy feels like temporary wholeness, then joy gets to be that constant reminder to be hopeful, to look ahead, that it is still always, no matter what the headlines, it is still good. And I think now that I know that hope and joy spend a lot of time together, I'm way more into hope.

Dr. Greg Jones: That's great. I love that. And the way you personify hope and joy as cousins and spending time together, I think you're about to write the script for the next Pixar movie, Inside Out 3, and Hope and Joy are going to be adolescent kids learning how to be good friends.

Kate Bowler: Yeah, post-puberty. Way post-puberty.

Dr. Greg Jones: You have such a gift for turns of phrase in your new book, which I'm looking forward to getting and reading soon, Joyful Anyway. What's the anyway about?

Kate Bowler: Well, I think anyway is kind of where I started is I had really imagined that someone who's had as much unluck as I have and then had so much of life restored to me, that I would feel almost the way I did right when I was diagnosed is that I had these sort of bright glimmers of feeling like somehow it will be okay. Somehow God's love is here. And then it's been eight years since I've no longer been in full-time treatment. I still spend a lot of time at the hospital, but I have a pretty normal life now and I just wondered why there was still so much ache, hunger, frustration that quietly you don't really want to admit it, "Is this it?" feeling about life. And I just kind of wondered if that meant, not that I wanted to go back to a lessons format, but did I not learn the lesson of being terribly sick? Why can't I grateful my way into feeling like things are whole?

And so I had this actually really wonderful conversation with... I love everyone having a local Jesuit when they've got problems, and this one is a priest named Father Ron Rolheiser. And he just said, "You know, Kate, all this language we have in Augustine and Aquinas for hunger, all of our language for spiritual hunger, don't take that to mean that it's a glitch in the system. That is the system. God has made us achy and hungry and we will remain achy and hungry until we are with God. So if we instead think of it as kind of an enormous spiritual engine, it's less about the ache and more about where we want to direct it. Can we direct it towards something like joy?" And with that kind of framework, I felt much more like all of that unfinished feeling is actually stirring up a desire to find more ways to say yes, honestly, to say yes to the magic of the people in front of us, to service, to all the things that make life rich again without making life fixed again.

Dr. Greg Jones: I love that. And that's been a journey that you've been on now for a decade, and you started the Everything Happens podcast as a way to cultivate conversations in the wake of the book. What led you to start the podcast?

Kate Bowler: Well, I started the podcast with support of some good friends. One is named Greg, who happens to be sitting here, because first I just had friends who believed in me and you guys said, "Actually, why don't you just do what you like doing in the classroom anyway, which is to foster rich conversation?" Because in a conversation, and it's the best part every time, is that there's discovery and in discovery there's always magic, and then special language will come out of it. And then somehow, and this is the beauty of our theological imagination, is that that language can help carry us.

And so what initially started with me being quite lonely in cancer and also a little bit worried about becoming narcissistic in pain, because every pain says, "I'm the only one who's gone through this. No one else will understand me. This is a solo project." So the more conversations I had, the more I realized this was a really wonderful way to explore that space after everything happens, but without having to either just pivot to toxic positivity or say, "We can't learn anything." There is always strangely treasure found in the most unusual places, and digging it out together produces... it just shows you the incredible lived wisdom of people who want their lives to be shaped by virtues.

Dr. Greg Jones: What surprised you about the podcast and the audiences you discovered and the questions people ask and the relationships that have been cultivated?

Kate Bowler: I Think the thing that delights me the most, honestly, is that there's a particular approach to coming up close to the mysteries of the world, like why do bad things happen and what should I do now and who can I yet be, is that people are unbelievably kind, they are very smart, and they're always secretly funny. I think what I found is that especially, because the audience that really emerged were these kind, smart, funny people who'd understood either through their jobs or through their personal life, the complications of life, but also kind of revealed to me something I think you and I just knew because of being in a divinity school when we train these pastors and they go out to these local communities, is that you just have all these people out there that are desperately and lovingly holding each other up. Like the caregiving community, I mean, people who are concretely caring for somebody else in the United States is 130 million people and then 60 million are children, so that's most people.

So we're all much more fragile, much more interdependent, much more kind of desperate to not be how-to'd to death. I didn't realize there were so many of us out there, especially if you just look at the headlines of what people think religious people are. There are so many good-hearted people out there who are rowing each other around, and I find it deeply inspiring.

Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. I want to talk for a moment about humor because I remember we had a conversation because you were going down to the CDC every week and it was incredibly challenging and exhausting and debilitating. And you came back and we were talking and you had a pretty significant person sitting next to you, and it became this very funny moment of you.

Kate Bowler: Oh yes, that's right.

Dr. Greg Jones: And I just thought, "Oh my goodness," you remember the story?

Kate Bowler: I forgot about that. Well, so Jimmy Carter had my same chemo schedule. It was so exciting because the cancer center is really in a basement where you, in order to make yourself happy, have to pretend that the people taking your blood are actually vampires who are using your blood for their own purposes. It's awful down there. And then suddenly on a Wednesday, Jimmy Carter would come in with his Secret Service and just bustle on by and then get set up shop next to me. So every week, the big excitement was trying to hold a different sort of book he'd written and then accidentally fall asleep with it in hopes that when I woke up, he'd have magically signed it. And then I got a chemo pack that I had to wear all the time that I named Little Jimmy and bedazzled it so that we could be together forever.

Dr. Greg Jones: I remember you saying to me, "How great is it that I get to go down there and sit next to one of the greatest American religious figures of the 20th century?" And I just thought, okay, that's a different way of thinking about this. But you maintain a sense of humor, which is closely kin to joy and hope, and yet you want to do it in life-giving ways. Talk about how humor plays a role in your podcast, in your writing, in your teaching.

Kate Bowler: So when the truth really feels too heavy to carry, it is nice to let humor kind of allow a little bit more in through the side door of what we can say. And it's also really been a way that I have also been able to process, frankly, traumatic events. I've had a lot of medical trauma because I was misdiagnosed for such a long time, but I have found that humor has become also a way that I can do what, frankly, psychologists recommend, which is that if you can stop feeling quite so brittle for a moment, if you can start to take in the sounds and then the people in the room, then you can start to make out expressions on people's faces, you're opening yourself up again to the reality of what actually is now. And if you can do that, I tend to find that the fastest way is to realize that the person in front of me is not some villain I've invented, they actually really make me laugh.

So for example, I was having one of the most horrific moments in my life, which is that I'd had this terrible liver resection, and for a while they thought I would die on the table. It was going to be so dramatic. I get through surgery and I am just waiting to go home. I've got my little to-go-home bag and this doctor walks in and he happens to be The one that I just hated. I had seen him earlier that day. He'd supervised a thing that went badly because they weren't listening. 

And when I saw him, he comes in and his arms are up in front of him, I suppose, because they're clean. And he says, "Knock, knock. Kate, hello. I'm here to remove a surgical drain before you go home." And two things about that bothered me. One, that it was him. And two, I had no idea I had a surgical drain in my body. I just thought it was bandages and I was ready to go home. And I looked down and I was like, "There's no way you can pull something out of my body at this point. That's not even physically possible." And so everything in me wanted to say, "No, and I hate you and I already hate this place and I'm so scared." And instead, just his arms up like that reminded me of when I had this brother-in-law who was a wrestler who was really into up-close magic. And he used to pull coins out from behind my ears when I was having my wisdom teeth removed. 

I will never forget that memory. And it just made me realize this situation's kind of ridiculous. So instead of saying no, which I couldn't have said anyway, I just said, "Actually, Doctor, I would prefer if you're going to do it that you'd pretend to do a magic trick." So he glared at me, I glared at him, he spun around, whipped back in and he goes, "Knock, knock, I'm here to do a magic trick." And it carried me. It carried me for days and it reminded me that even when you want to say no, if you just find a little yes in there, weirdly, magic can happen.

Dr. Greg Jones: That's a great story. Thanks for sharing it. I want to bring this to a close with a question. We have a lot of young people at Belmont and who look up to you. And if you were to give advice to young people about both being joyful anyway, but also hopeful anyway, what would you say to young people to say, "Hey, be hopeful, be joyful anyway."

Kate Bowler: Yeah. I think we have a picture in our mind about what a successful person is supposed to be, and it looks more and more like the AI and like all of the technology that we are making ourselves available to. We believe that we have to be better, faster, optimized, perfect in every way, inexhaustible, always on. And all of those stories are going to make us forget, strangely, a lesson that AI can teach us. That amazing artist, Nick Cave, when his response to AI, when they gave him a prompt to say, "What would it be like to write in the style of AI?" He thought that that would be a tragedy because he had lost his 10-year-old son and even just the thought of AI writing a song about a boy could just bring tears to his eyes. Because if AI, as he said, has nothing to overcome, no limits to transcend, what can it teach us about being a person? 

I took that to be a very powerful reminder that all the beautiful things like hope, like joy, they actually come from our need to reach out from inside of unfinished, broken, and often just feeling incomplete lives. But it is our very limitation, it is the fact that we know we can't do it alone that is going to cause us to need our souls to say yes. It will be the reason. It won't be AI. It will be our humanity that reminds us and helps us create all the good things that will remind us all how very good it is that you in particular were born.

Dr. Greg Jones: I'm not nearly as young as the people I was asking you to speak to, but even for an old guy, that message resonates pretty doggone deeply and wonderfully. It's been a great joy to spend some more time with you, Kate. Thanks for joining us today on The Hope People Podcast.

Kate Bowler: Greg, I am proud of you always. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Greg Jones: Thank you for participating in this conversation with The Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself and to help us cultivate a sense of wellbeing for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show, visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation, remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content.