Soul Boom - Kate Bowler: Can Faith and Anger Coexist?

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Kate Bowler, renowned author and professor, joins Rainn Wilson to explore the complexities of American Christian traditions and the nature of suffering. Bowler delves into her personal journey with stage four cancer, her struggles with the American healthcare system, offering profound insights into faith, resilience, and the misconceptions of positive thinking. Together, they discuss the dichotomy of American religious practices and the deep, often unspoken struggles that accompany a life of faith. Tune in for a heartfelt conversation filled with wisdom, humor, and authenticity. Thank you to our sponsors! Hoka: https://bit.ly/HokaSoulBoom Waking Up app (1st month free!): https://wakingup.com/soulboom Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Spring Green Films Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you could distill all of your work and all of your study down, what do we learn about American Christian tradition in the last 100 years? They exhaust themselves, believing that they have to do it on their own, and that God is only obsessed with winners. We just love winners. It's like you have to be positive, think positive, perform a certain emotional mastery. That's as a result of the rise of psychology in the last 100 years.

But we've taken it in a very American way and made it kind of a way of separating the winners from the losers. The winners. Emotionally equanimous. The winners. Well, Jesus loved the winners and only hung out with the winners. It was a rude. Oh, wait a minute.

It's the exact opposite. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson. And I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the first. the Soul Boom podcast. Bowler or Bowler?

Bowler. Right down the middle. Wow. Yeah, that's what I have to work with. This interview is going to be right down the middle. Okay, bowler. I said bowler downstairs. I was okay with that.

Sorry. Well, those were kind of you to introduce me. I really put my best foot forward to. Talking about defecating on a marathon. Yeah, that's always a good. That's a good conversation starter. I did leave with that. Speaking of defecating in your pants during marathons,

you have a great quote. No, I don't. You do, and I'm going to go there. My motto is life is so beautiful, life is so hard, if you ever have ruined some perfectly good small talk at a party with your honesty, we're already friends. Soul sister. We did that downstairs.

We were. meeting Rich Roll and you were talking about, we were talking about how do you shit during a marathon? Well, I try to compliment a mutual friend Alexis Pallas, who is a marathon runner and has a beautiful memoir about parenting herself and then trying to overcome mental health limitations and this amazing person. But mostly I was so caught up and her ability to transcend her own ability to run while possibly having to pee yourself. I was so blown away by that.

I was like, maybe I have too many limitations. That's determination. I want like a cat poster with her face and just the ability to go and a and a little pool of urine kind of drawn in down below. And we feel free to pee yourself during this pod and spent to sit in it for an hour and a half. I will insist on it. That's grit.

It's determination. That's right. Character building. Tell me about ruining perfectly good small talk with your honesty and being friends with that. How does that work for you? It's not an easy combination because I'm also very sensitive and desperately want the other person to have a possibly lingering good memory of me. Me too. And yet, I can't seem to stop myself from answering the question, how are you?

with well just fresh from this or prepping from my colonoscopy it's i'm actually really worried about what they'll find you know yeah just bringing it i read your your your book which one did you read i read no cure for being human oh that's nice and i thought it was wonderful and profound and moving and sad and delightful and i thank you for it And, but I did want to talk about the big sea and Canada. Canada. Yes. Good.

Chappaquittic. Good. We can't get Chitua. Corn. Canola. Cancer people. We're talking about cancer here. At 35, you were diagnosed with colon cancer.

Yeah. And stage four, not a great prognosis. Yeah. you have been thriving. God bless you. And thank you, Lord. And it's not often that one gets to talk to a theologian that's been at death's door and has come back to talk about it.

So I'd just love to hear that particular perspective. I mean, there's never a great time to get cancer. Most tragedy visits you as a horrible surprise and like an avalanche. But in my case, I had just kind of stuck the landing on my life. I'd like finally had a baby after years of infertility. I'd paid into a system and now I finally got to live in the loveliness of it. So dream job, dream baby, married my high school sweetheart. Like everything was actually Instagramable for a moment.

Wow. And then I got some stomach pain and I just really couldn't get anyone to listen. to me. And so I already, so I was really vigilant about health. And I thought, something's got to, like, this is, this has got to be wrong and fixable. So I went to see everybody all the time. But I was just constantly turned down for. You have acid reflux or something. I mean, I was sent out of the ER with Pepto-Bismol at one point. I just kept saying, there's something wrong. It hurts so much that I double over and sometimes throw up in my hands. Like, this can't, this, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is genuinely unbearable. And so then by the time I yelled at a doctor and refused to leave the room until they did a scan because I had finally just decided that no one was ever going to take me seriously, we sort of concluded it was probably just like a wonky gallbladder. And I did what I was do, which is I went back to work and I was reading something interesting. And then I got a phone call that said it was stage four cancer and that I had a phone call that I was stage four cancer and that

I would have to go to the hospital right away, which meant that I, at the university, I was in this lovely dress I'd just been teaching in. And I was, I could feel right away that a life I loved was over. And so I called my family who were all far away. And I walked down and across the quad and into the hospital to start a very different life. And that was really kind of the end. of a set of very lovely, well-earned delusions that I had about myself as being a really hard worker who's just going to manage to overcome all obstacles and that in the end that I would get the life that I deserve. And that was, I just wanted to be an academic. I was just like, good God, just let me be a historian. Yeah. And which already felt like it was just the realization of a lot of

dreams and and then that was it it was like a real stripping down of everything right away like the dress is gone they put a port in you can't wear anything that doesn't have to be you know washed for blood or saline i started immunotherapy and chemotherapy and the assumption was that it would it would never end that i would do this forever and forever wasn't very long and so it was the fall and I remember thinking, oh, I guess like, but this, this is the last fall. And everything was so fucking lovely. It was just so beautiful. Everything was beautiful. Everyone was beautiful. It was so, I was so grateful suddenly to be alive and I felt so loved, just really loved. I felt very loved by God, even though it was so mad, felt really loved by like nurses and friends

and because my office was very inconveniently close to the hospital, I was like constantly in these like gross states, a partial undress and a professor would come by to like put anointing oil on my head. And like, pray for me and like their hands on my head. I just felt so carried by love and prayer. And I was so hurt. I was just so hurt that I'd like put all of this into everything and that it wasn't going to be. It was just like if I'd been able to, if I'd known.

known I would have done it so different. I just, I wouldn't have, I would just, I wouldn't have let it hurt so much getting there. So, you said you felt loved by God, even though at that point you had really been given a death sentence and you were angry at God. Can you unpack that a little bit? It was very, well, I guess it's, it was very weird. I felt I've never had an experience like that before or since but it I really and I understand it I understood it then and now as being this very strange thing that God does which is that God loves the broken heart and it doesn't always happen because it is just like a gift that's just kind of handed to you sometimes but you feel like you're in this little bubble

and maybe you can kind of tell like your feet should scrape the ground, but they just don't quite. And I felt really carried through how horrible I genuinely knew it was. I mean, intellectually, I was like on point, fighting with doctors. I was about to go bankrupt and bankrupt my family because the number one cause of bankruptcy in America. America is health care bills. Wow.

And we let the worst thing that ever happens to people be the second and the third and the fourth worst thing that ever happens to them. I asked a number of other like people who are actually theologians and experts and Christian ethics and tradition. And I was just like, hey, this is unusual, right? Like I feel a kind of lovely wholeness that I feel. shouldn't feel and I know it. And I feel really weirdly loved very specifically by God. And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They gave me like eight different versions of moments in people's spiritual

biographies like mystics and others who are like, yeah, yeah, this person called it like the sweetness. Other people called it this. But like, I was like, will it go away? Because I really need it. And I'm barely getting by with what's happening. And they're like, oh, it'll definitely go away. So the sweetness goes away. It's just. But isn't that kind of where your work is right now, is to hold on to that sweetness and to share that?

I mean, these, the other books, the have a beautiful, terrible day, the new thing you got going on, the lives we actually have a 100, blessings for imperfect days, devotions for a life of imperfection, et cetera. Is that sharing that sweetness? I love that term. There are going to be so many moments where we don't get to have the spiritual feelings that we wish or the feelings from other people that we wish we could have. But I do want people to know that they're going to be there in these little glumers.

They are. It's just one of the only, like, because I was like an expert in God's promises, God's promises of, you know, I did endless. That's prosperity gospel stuff. Yeah. I did hundreds of interviews with televangelists of people promising that God's going to give them certain things. And it was either money or health or, but often, like, a spiritual person is going to feel a certain way.

We can do a laying on a lot of. I like the heavy breathing. We can do laying on hands now. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Can you just go. But.

But so I'm so, oh, I got the new Apple show. You called. I'm very reluctant to promise people anything because I have to know, I really have to know that it's not falls under the vast rubric of spiritual bullshit. But I do genuinely believe that God has a very special category for all those who are suffering. and that there's a whole category of like really small acts of mercy and effort that we can participate in. And that's why I'm obsessed with like little tiny steps that people can have in their day. But it's the feeling like you don't want to just be stuck in a loop that maybe it could be a spiral. And maybe there's just these small acts of progress where you can get somewhere, especially when it feels impossible.

Other people find they were going to, they can climb the ladder. But like for all those of us who are like, gosh. What did you get better at? I'm gratitude, connecting with people. I'm really good at noticing what's in a day. Like, I'll regularly pray like, God, just help me see things as they really are. And help me, like, help me be in this day. And so, I mean, I could be having the most garbage, like, infusion.

I'm sorry to jump in on that, but it's, I just had a deja vu because Jeff Cobur, a meditation teacher and Vedic. spiritual journeyer. He said the exact same thing, like from the Vedas, which is like, I want to see reality as it is, not my thoughts or my feelings about reality. And it's like, as a prayer, like, please let me see reality as it is. Two very different traditions leading to the same same thing. Please continue. I like that. Yeah. There's a, there's a yielding there. That's hard. normal but like but what's that like how does that manifest itself well like i'm i'm thinking of a day that was especially gross and i'm in a basement in the basement of a hospital far away it's

incredibly expensive i'm going to have to do it for what it feels like forever and i'm alone because i always had to travel by myself and i'm always overwhelmed and i'm tired of doctors But I was like, God, just let's do this. Whatever this is, just let's do this. And the blood work guy comes in. And it was such a creepy small room. And I was like, hey, what are we doing here? And it's like, wouldn't it be weird if while you're taking my blood, it's actually like,

this is your thing. Like, this is what you really want. Like you're a vampire. And when I go, you'll use it for your own purposes. And then he looked at me just with such. At first I thought kind of like banal horror that this was going to have to be part of his day. And then he leaned over, he takes my arm as he like preps the preps my inner elbow. And then he just starts to caress it again and again in a way that suggested that he was.

Dracula or? That he was like, it's so weird that you would think that. He pretended to be a vampire for the next. next 45 minutes and in every subsequent appointment and he was like goodbye. And he was like, I left him in a part of mostly shadowed room. He's just a big, scary looking dude. And I, I, please send him a silk cape as a gift. Just please.

That's right. A nice soutine finish. That is something I can do. I can live in the day I have, especially if it's bad. I can settle in. But settling in was what took practice. So then you got this experimental therapy. You got in for it was quite a struggle to get it.

And then you got it. And it was horrible. Yeah. It was horrible because clinical trials are horrible. And everyone says you're so lucky and you feel lucky. But then because they said you're lucky, you actually don't really know some of the fine print, which is that you're no longer in the hands of a doctor. You're in the hands of an experiment.

So you have a scientist and that even if something's bad for you, they might not even tell you that. You might just have to run the paces getting drugs or being part of processes that might be good for the future. But they're not necessarily good for you. But you'll feel very confused about that because everyone's wearing white coats and you're in a hospital. Right. And you've never had different treatment. And it's a purposefully obscure consent process. So even a very smart person, she says, aggressively pointing at her.

things, won't necessarily know that had I looked at other clinical trials offering the same drug in other hospitals, I might not have had to have my organs brought to toxicity level as they tested chemotherapies. So it was a mixed bag, is what I will say. I had one drug that was a gorgeous drug called Kutra, that I responded so well to. And that drug absolutely saved my life and was incredible. And also, all the other things they did in the process of having their trial protocols were so unbelievably awful from my body. And it was, I was in so much pain all the time. And it was unnecessary pain. I could have only had the immunotherapy. I didn't have to have the other stuff. Right. Wow. So it was, I had to run the gauntlet in order to get the drug. And then,

and I felt very confused at the time because I said lucky every step of the way. And it was only looking back and I was like Lucky and tortured at the same time Yeah It was a complicated gratitude Wow wow, wow That's rich Can you just do something for me

Because you're really smart You're a professor And a Christian Can you explain Christians to me? Oh sure Yeah Um revelatory religion

So one guy's cooler than other people Jesus Okay. Interrupts time and space to show us the fullness of God. Inconveniently, not enough information over time. So we do a lot of filling in the blanks over the last 2,000 years. Yeah. So like, what does it mean that God had his son, but it's still God?

Doctrine of the Trinity takes us a couple years to hammer that out. Are you on board with the whole Trinity thing? Yeah. I like the hundred percent. Yeah. So that's really more like a, that's a Catholic thing that the hardcore Trinity is. a little more. I mean, any revelatory faith is a bit of an obstacle course.

Like, they kind of give you stuff that it's like, well, we can't, we're not, it's a doctrine, we can't move. So you either got to get over it. But these are the ones you can't get around. And that includes tricky ones, virgin birth. Virgin birth. That's a lot. That's just a lot.

Just by itself. Resurrection. Resurrection is a biggie. And we can, his miracles, sure. Yeah. Miracles in general. I studied miracle rallies for a lot of my research adult life. What's a miracle rally?

Like when people expect. Is it like a monster truck rally? It's actually quite similar. It has a similar emotional arc. There's a lot of noise in the middle. Some people leave injured or disappointed. It's when people are getting to the same room or place, usually with a spiritual person they admire and are really hoping that they'll be healed in a pretty concrete way.

Is that that Benny Hinn laying hands kind of thing? That kind of thing. Right. Yeah. There's a long Christian tradition of healing, but the healing miracle rally is more like a very intense, immediateist view of how God's supposed to act. So keep going on the explaining of Christianity. Christianity.

It's got some obstacle forces. And Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Triune God. Yeah. All in. Mm-hmm. But it's one. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Three and one. Yeah. Yeah. Revulatory religions. where it's like God shows up in a particular time and place and was a baby and then an adult, that's one of the strangest parts of belief is like, how does this moment act as a key to what you think about the character of God? And that I think is, if people don't think that's weird,

I don't think they're paying a lot of attention. How do you overcome all the weirdness? I love. Because a lot of young people these days are just like, Oh, too weird. It is a lot. I really, both my parents became Christians later in life, and they're both unbelievably smart people, and I loved watching them, except Christianity for very different reasons, but mostly

just that they liked being curious. They put it inside of a worldview that came out really lovely. And so when I thought about Christianity as an obstacle course, I was like, yeah, and if I want to be a person of faith. I got to run the course and see how I land on all of these. And I work now as a professor teaching Christian history at a divinity school. So I get to teach these adorable do-goaters. And especially North American Christian history and especially over the last century or so, right? That's exactly it. Yeah. And I do find that when I get stuck on something, I can actually walk down a hallway and be like, hey, what are we doing about love? Like, is there something particularly

Christian about how we think about love? Or is love like a universalizing? Like, so it's just fun to be worried about things. What does God think about self-esteem? Is that like a modern therapeutic language? Or like, what do we really mean by that? Like, these get to be my lunch breaks. And because I'm aggressively nosy and I don't mind worrying about things I'm not entirely sure I have the right answer to then it's it's it's ended up just being I think of being Christian as being a worldview it's my it's my like peering through the keyhole of that faith and it's also a transformation of the heart it's how I know how to love myself or anyone else so that's kind of the main reason, I suppose. So like all podcasters, I was asking you that question because I really wanted

to just give my own personal opinion. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I should have made it short of it. Go ahead. So it was, we'll cut it down and edit in. Don't worry. But here's the deal with me when I was thinking about Christianity because I've, with the, we were talking about Russell Moore earlier. And with the advent of my book, I got to do a lot of Christian podcasts and conversations and churches and stuff like that. And as a Baha'i, have I been to church? Of course I have. Have I have tons of Christian friends? Yes. You know, I love so much about Christianity. And it's when you say Christianity, that's a tough umbrella too, right? Two thousand denominations. That's right. And it's a brand. We're doing great.

Everyone's like, oh, Christians. You know, I feel so accepted by them. Thank God. There's one of those around. Yeah, a little branding work maybe. But part of it is in the triune God and the Father, Son, Holy Ghost because here's, here is the problem with Christians. From my perspective is because Jesus is thought of as the Son of God, although he never referred to himself as the Son of God, because he's thought of as the Son of God, he is then God made flesh and all of his amazing. works and his example are like, we don't have to do it. He's the son of God. Well, he's the son of God. Of course he went and washed the feet of prostitutes. And of course he went around and fed the poor and healed the sick and was with the lowly and the outcast and the broken people and giving of his heart and soul and saving them, saving them not just saving their souls, but saving

their feet and saving their bellies and making their lives better. So there's kind of a disconnect was like, well, that was Jesus because he's, he's Jesus. So I don't really need to do all that Jesus stuff. Now, that being said, of course, there are countless examples of Christians that live in, you know, Jesus's example. But that's where I would put my finger on it. So if Jesus was a little less God and just a tad more man like on the dial, you'd be like, I could do that too.

I couldn't just believe in him and thereby be saved. I could actually, as you know, faith without works is dead, I could actually ascribe to that and do and do some more works. What do you think? There are a few different ways that we think about how Jesus saves and how and what that means and whether him being God makes alienates him from our ability to feel like we need to participate in the same kind of saving too. So how much work does Jesus just need to do by himself and how much are we supposed to be?

And this sounds too like it gets to your like, we don't need a special spiritual class above other. We just all need to participate in this general work of salvation, right? I find it comforting that there's at least four useful. The umbrella, theological umbrella, this falls under is atonement theory. Like what does it mean to how much does Jesus need to save and how much do we just need to do the work also? There's a whole thing, Atonement Theory. Atonement theory. And like there's about four very good versions of Atonement Theory in my opinion.

Can you take like a webinar on Atonement Theory? This is one of the like, I think this is one of the fun things about like the, I mean, sometimes I framed it like an obstacle course. But what I really like about teaching Christian history is I do think of it like chess. Like if you push one thing forward like your piece like you, you know, you put a rook forward on gosh, it feels like, geez. Jesus's anthropology is too high. What does that do to our anthropology? And then you get to be like, oh, okay, well, now you got to move your pawn to spaces. Right, right.

And so when I think of that, I think, well, there's a lot of really long Christian tradition about Jesus as moral example and how him being like us is actually more formative in the Christian tradition than him being not like us. ways in him in which him being not like us inspires and motivates acts that are so uncommon for how we know how to be human that we need him to be different than us like for example leper colonies or inventing hospitals or like all the other things that Christians have been great at they they needed something so absurdly not human in order to inspire us into the very grand granular work of like intense gross gritty service. I like your Atomic Challenge. I would say there's a few different versions that would be closer to what you would like

that there's long Christian traditions for. That's very well said. Yeah. I know that that's a long conversation is salvation through deeds or salvation through belief. You know, Arthur Brooks has had a column come out recently that was very much of like faith is it's belief feeling in action and what in what measure and that's kind of like the chess game but you could kind of like it's kind of it's like a mixing board you know with all the different dials on it and like how much is belief in here how much is feeling in here and in your gut

and how much is what you do in different faith traditions kind of like yeah parcel that out what do you think yeah i i like those grids like i love for example um john wesley has like the Wesleyan, we have this thing called the Wesleyan quadrilateral, which is like four, four ways that you can tell if something is probably true. And we go, and I always forget the fourth. Okay. Okay. But it's like, one is scripture. One is tradition because I'm an expert in Christian tradition. And I like that one. Experience. And then the fourth is Nisorra. Yeah. And that one is tricky. But to present you're saying it number four. is when I definitely struggle with.

It sucks about trying to be smart professionally. It's like every time I suck at something, the comment section is always like, it's obviously this. And later I'll be like, oh, I know. But here's what we can do on a podcast right there. Watch this. Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.

Reason. Dang it. Of course. Of course it's reason. Classic bowler that she would forget reason. No, that's not true. So how, let's back it up a little bit. I want to get into your story a little bit.

How did you come to be who you are through the prairies of Canada that brought you to the halls of Duke? And then we'll get to part two of your story after part one. Yes. It's riveting installments like this, but. It's a quadriline. This is part one of the bowler quadrilateral. It has to do with the Canadian prairies. Well, I was born in London, England, not London, Ontario.

Not Ontario, okay. Where my parents were students. And then they got jobs in the middle of Canada. So I grew up in Manitoba right in the dead center where the best kind of people live around. To be honest, in the middle of the city, there's an enormous garbage hill and we sled on it in the winter. And I think about it all the time.

Wait a minute. Manitoba. What city? Winnipeg. So in Winnipeg, in the center of town is a giant garbage hill that gets encrusted in ice and snow and the kids sled down the garbage hill in the center of town. Yes, we do. And when rich people buy a home, we always have to talk about whether the home they bought

is up or down wind from the landfill because it's still in use. It's still in use. They haven't found a better place to dispose of it. of the Canadian garbage? This was part of my Canadian tire... My dad's rabid anti-recycling feelings where he was like,

we've got this huge landfill. I was like, Jerry, you bring that argument up one more time. But yeah, it is actually my favorite city because it's full of lovely people with so much shrugging about like, well, no one said we were fancy. We just said we were cool.

And I believe it. It's a delight. And I grew up in the right outside of the University of Manitoba, which every time the school year started, I'd walk outside in my backyard, and it was rank with the smell of manure. And that was because it's also largely an agricultural school, and they're testing manures.

And I would turn to my professor parents and be like, ah, the learning has begun. And I... I didn't know you had to test manures, but I'm learning so much from you today. Someone's gone, too. I learned from watching... Why not the Canadians? Why not? I guess what I loved about watching them.

This manure here we haven't tested yet. What are we going to do? Call Manitoba, stat. I hope they put it on a train. Hey, how's it going? You want us to test that for you? They will. They want to.

I loved watching them be university professors as public servants. They went in as genuinely believing they were going to hit the lower middle class hard and stay there. And we were going to live in our crappy bungalow with a frequent mold problem. And there was going to be something absolutely undignified about the whole thing, that we would live inside of basically a moldy library, but that there was going to be something really shockingly pure about just ideas for their own sake. And living inside of that was exactly how I fell in love with. Ideas, faith, other people's weirdness, the design.

to know things for no reason and the unconquerable unpopularness of early childhood of early adulthood as well that's fantastic and what did what did they teach my dad taught history enormous surprise and my mom is a musician okay and taught music as well yep she has a PhD in music she sang for prince charles she once did a weird avant-garde performance with like two-story paper Ramesh. Oh, and we talked about this. Your mom was a Baha'i for like a week and a half. Yeah, really sexy dude was like, hey. This sexy Baha'i dude was like, hey, kumbaya, come on. It's the guy got to get you into a more universalizing faith. Yeah. She was like, all right. I love that idea of a university professor as being some kind of public servant. Because right now in contemporary

America, you know, in these elitist ivory castles of colleges as they're painted. And, the absurd, you know, indoctrination that happens in these, you know, ultra-liberal woke institutions. You know, university professors are being painted as like, the problem, not the solution. Whereas for eons, they were the solution to bring humanity closer to God and closer to its maximum realization of its own potential. And I love that idea of, because I've encountered professors. that were servants. Just like I have encountered, albeit rarely, Christians who are Christians and servants

in emulation of Christ and the emulation of teaching, enlightening, you know, through thought and falling in love with ideas and debate. Yeah. That's exciting. I've always thought of them as sort of petty romantics in the best way. They fall in love with books and ideas and the hope it's somewhere else. there is a salon environment just waiting for their opinions about Derrida. But it was part of a kind of a feeling that my dad was a tragic hero in an academic story

in which like most professors, there really just aren't enough jobs. And when they publish things, they will write a book for 10 years for an audience. And it's a great book of 200 people. And we'll go on to an endless feeling that their vocation. which can align with students will never reach beyond a very small classroom and for abysmal pay. So for a while, he was teaching at 10 different institutions over the course of one, like just driving back and forth between each for $2,000 a class. And I watched him go from being a kind of mighty mind to being unbearably depressed,

wouldn't come out of the basement, was... devastated by the idea that nothing was ever going to get better. And he wasn't wrong. I've seen this story play out a million times with a million friends. And there's such a love of wanting to be useful and then an inability to have anyone to serve. It erodes your ability to know what you're for. And so I, so when I was like very over-eager to take up the mantle of being a professor and like living into my dad, carrying my dad's dream.

I went just gangbusters into wanting to, to like be the full realization of my parents' hopes. So I went nuts in my 20s being the most ambitious, a little prairie girl that ever prairieed. I was like desperate to get into, because it's very difficult to get into American schools. It's always, we didn't have any money, so everything was beg bar our own steel.

And so I got it. out for all of my 20s, getting like ridiculous injuries. I lost use of my arms for two years. I had to verbally dictate my entire dissertation in my parents' basement. How does that happen? Was it the garbage hill? It was it was the fact that I had loose, you know, a lot of people have joint laxity, but what happened was it was so much hunching and so much writing that really a temporary paralysis set in and no one could. We certainly just didn't have the money to fix most of that stuff, only gets fixed by an insane amount of off copay helpers.

Yeah, yeah, physical therapy and massage and alternative healings and stuff like that. So chronic pain set in and I lost, I lost everything just so, I just like, I kind of tried to get to the top of a mountain, found it almost impossible to get there. When I was giving a tour to my parents of the Duke University campus for the first time,

my dad. leaned over and put a heavy hand on my shoulder and with a bright smile was like, if you ever leave a place like this, I'll kill you. And it was. It was the shining castle on the hill, literally. The fact that it's fancy, I mean, the whole university is quarried from the same stone. I mean. Wow.

I mean, yeah. It was everything anyone had hoped for. And I had paid a lot to get there. But the problem is I was so desperate to do it. that I overpaid. I was, by the time I realized that my life was going to be quite limited, I was horrified to realize that I had poured everything into a dream that might not ever have been meant for me.

It was mostly just about trying to combat my dad's despair. And that it had cost me so much in the process that I didn't even really know how to start counting what was for me or what was for anyone else. It's astonishing how much we have in common because, and I do feel like so much of, when you start to pull the thread on someone's life story, it's so much of, especially folks that are successful in their careers, it's in reaction or response to parents, either proving something to them or following in their footsteps or having to do with some

kind of trauma because my dad, the same thing, failed artist, not failed academician, failed artist. Failed is a strong word. He lacked the self-esteem and will and resolve to try and get his paintings out there and to take them to galleries to try and, you know, get a book agent for his crazy science fiction books he was writing. So he was in our version of the basement, which is our converted garage, you know, writing and painting and these paintings are stacking up like so many pizza boxes in the corner. And so for me who had the same impulse to be an actor, to be an artist, to tell stories, I saw that. I saw the image of my father feeling so limited by his possibilities.

And I did the same thing. I undertook the same thing. I want to go to the best acting school and scrimp and save and get scholarships and go to NYU and do theater and train and work with the very best teachers and scrap and and climb and dig. And, you know, I paid price too. I paid mental health price. I paid some physical health price and addiction price and workaholism price. But I'm doing great now. Who are you talking to?

They're not even listening. My producers are like checking their Twitter. But anyways, so, yeah, so life journey in response to parental trauma. Yeah. The feeling that somebody's failures are sitting somewhere in a drawer or in a stacked paintings in a garage are, and if you could just, if I could just, I still feel so, I'm so moved always by people whose ideas that are beautiful ones

don't find the home that they need to to tell the person the story that needs to be told, that they are good, that their creativity is valuable. Yeah. That, like, that art is never for nothing. How do you serve your students? I mean, this is part of why I love theological education. I love divinity schools. universities love it. Interesting. I just love it. I think there's a lot of people watching right now

going gone. It's it's it's it's it's you get a lot of people it's the mostly when people are in theological education it's in for their master's program or doctoral work and what you get by the time you get they've had a bachelor's so they've had some time to be like I like this I don't like this and then they're just like spiritually hungry emotionally interesting nuanced hard workers who either come to us because They're at that lovely early stage where they want a space to pursue just the questions, or they've had another career. And they're like, I need a framework to explain the experiences that I've had.

And so I can always assume that I'm going to be surprised by something in the room. And that's, I mean, it's the joy of podcasting and it's the joy of teaching. It's like there's a shape to it and there's a magic that will always happen. And then you get to, you get to be there. I'm going to re-ask the same question and how specific, you love it, That's great. How do you serve them? By pummeling them with impossible questions, berating them into a view that's mostly my own. No, I know that that's not true. But I do pummeling them with unanswerable questions seems. I think it's the same thing that I got growing up,

which is the presentation of an argument like this beautiful chess game in which there's an elegance to ideas that 200 people always already had a great framework for and introducing them to, yes, what an interesting observation, this is very much like. And then it's kind of scaffolding people and really working people, myself included, out of condescension is most of our ideas, I'm gonna say all of them are not new.

And when you're introduced to, there's a wonderful EP, Sanders, who is a biblical scholar, who talked about the enormous condescension of posteriority. Just say the second you look back, you're like, Of course. And so I think most of the work I get to do is being like, none of this was had to happen this way. Like we're all evolving into something. And so don't talk about history like an inevitability. Things can be new. And also most of what you think is new is unbelievably dumb and old. I'm like, let's get into that. So I get to do that in the context of American religion,

but I get to do that with the history of spiritual ideas, which is my favorite. Before we go on to the angle of the quadrilateral equation. What do you love about North American Christianity over the last century? Yeah. Whoa. That's fascinating to me. And most of it is... You're the one who taught me the difference between a Protestant...

No, not a Protestant... A Pentecostal and an evangelical. A Pentecostal and an evangelical. I never even knew there was a difference there. I think also you were like, I'm just trying to get a snack. And I was like, hey, look. FYI. I remember doing a lot of unnecessary monologuing.

Well, I think what's especially fun for me is growing up Canadian, most of the religious phenomenon that I saw was strange but familiar, that feeling. where like I remember watching ideas land in Canada that had never existed there before, like an obsession with creationism, for example, or the idea that this earth can only be 6,000 years old, I remember being like, we don't, that hasn't been our view. Yeah. And then I get a minute to kind of look at which magazines became popular

and which ideas and where. And so you kind of get into like a, so the idea that American religion is familiar and strange has been fun because I feel like I get to sort of crash land as a Martian and be very interested and kind of confused. And so most of the stuff that I ended up studying are, I kind of think of as like the most American, American religions. So American's obsession with the idea that they're bootstrapping all the time, that they're constantly picking themselves up and reinventing themselves, that they're entirely self-created, that they're rabid individualists, like all that is

very not Canadian. And so it's been almost easy. easier for me to be like, take out the notepad, get in there. I love the idea of you, a Canadian from the prairies and from the garbage heap mountain coming into America and observing this whole strange world. You fit right in because you look like a cheery Baptist, but if you could distill all of your work and all of your study down, what do we learn about American Christian tradition in the last hundred years? they exhaust themselves believing that they have to do it on their own and that god is only obsessed

with their with winners we just love winners and we've accidentally overlaid most of the best parts of being a human with so much um standards from i'm i'm trying to think of a nicer way of saying like, I guess like psychological performance. Like you have to be positive, think positive, perform a certain emotional mastery. That's as a result of the rise of psychology in the last hundred years. But we've taken it in a very American way and made it kind of a way of separating the winners from the losers. The winners.

Emotionally equanimous. The winners. Well, Jesus loved the winners and only hung out with the winners. It was a real. Oh, wait a minute. It's the exact opposite. It was a huge focus for him. Yeah.

He had like the winter circle. That's his thing. And the other, I guess, is show and tell. Americans have a distinct kind of spiritual show and tell. They always want everything good about them to be visible. They have a really hard time with truths that aren't immediately evidence of something. And really just like a stepping stool to get them somewhere else. like heaven or prosperity?

I mean, yeah, heaven is a good, it's like ultimately sure, but like mostly they want, it's like they don't think, like every time I say, well, I mean, like if you're a Christian, it might actually sort of ruin your life in some kind of pretty concrete way. They're like, what? I'm sorry, it's not going to make my life demonstrably better. I'm like, oh, I mean, probably not. You might be desperately inconvenienced by service and other people's pain. You might find yourself more or less ambition or ambitious or changing your definition of what that means.

You might find that some things that people don't think of as virtues, like humility or I wish sarcasm was a virtue, but are actually like. Blessed other sarcastic, so for they shall inherit the earth. Well, they'll inherit the best one liar. They all inherit the internet. Yeah, they will. You have this death sentence. Yeah. And before we get to the recovery and the turn, like, what was it like facing your mortality?

I was mad at old people a lot, like really resentful. How so? Well, I work almost exclusively. Yeah. Good for them. Talking about their retirement accounts. Yeah. I work in a geriatric profession.

So almost everyone that I worked with was also 70 plus. So much must be nice came out of my mouth. So there was a lot of bristling at other people's. Cluelessness. The deep unfairness of the world. And like just being able to say that was a joy. Just shit-talking old people became important to me. For your mental health.

It did. And they were wonderful about it. And kind of became some of my most trusted people to say, because they'd, because actually they'd lost kids. They'd lived a life. They knew, I mean, some of the most perfect things came out of the mouth of like, older colleagues who said things like, I was like, look, I'm just trying to, I said, look, I just, because you feel this panic of trying to, um, freight what is left with all

of the meaning, all the experience. You go really bucket listy. And I was, I, I asked a colleague, I was like, look. I'm not just trying to bargain, but like I'd really, if I could just get to 50, and then I could, I could launch my kid. I could, I could just, I could, I could finally get everything done. And he was like, oh, but Kate comes undone. And he's right. Like, you have this feeling like you're always knitting a sweater and then someone pulls a thread.

And then you're just not wearing a sweater anymore. And that is the idea that progress is always available to you. Like that is just one of the lovely. delusions that we have. So acting without the promise of progress is probably one of the most incredible things that I see people do. How do we just, how do we try even knowing that it might come apart? I think it takes incredible courage. I have a dear friend who had his wife, who was becoming his ex-wife and his daughter both got brain tumors. The wife then turned ex-wife passed away.

The daughter had it excised and is recovering and doing great. But that action turned him against God. I mean, he literally was like, fuck you. If there's a God, this is a cruel fucking God. Fuck you. I don't want anything to do with you. how would you address that response which I'm sure part of some part of you wrestled with on some to some degree around I mean that response is so real and so appropriate and it's the it's the big

theodicy right like how do we live confronted with the fact that evil isn't just like dictator far way it's the evil that comes to our doorstep and robs us robs us in daylight like that ability that anger i have so much respect for and most of my anger was directed toward platitudes and most of my career now is directed toward the rage i have about platitudes so dismantling the things that make it even more painful for someone like that where it's supposed to be worth it or he learned lessons or God's making angels or it's just we are so the suffering are mired in bullshit so yes when someone says very understandable is very it is a very relatable I and I also think it's different to be the sufferer and to be the one who is standing there having to live after and the the

the sufferer and the caregiver are in so often on very different planets and so I think I saw some of anger and the people in my life that I didn't experience because I was I felt I hadn't really thought about that I felt like I was being brought into that I was just having to learn a different story where it was some of your caregivers struggle more than you did as the as the sufferer they did yeah and like and then just differently I mean really differently and like I tried to have this conversation with my dad right now about that topic And I was like, sitting on the floor leaning against his knee and he had his hand on my head. And I was like, Dad, did you think like, what did this happen to my daughter?

Like, what could I? He was like, oh, man, he was like, I was so angry. I just thought like, man, if there's a, like God, just take it away from her and give it to me. And I was like, Dad, that's like a really lovely thing to say. And he's like, well, but then I think about how Mozart died in his 20s. And I was like, well, I could tell you as if he's weighing these two thoughts with both hands. And I was like, maybe we could just go back to loving each other in silence for a while. And when someone gets to a place of like, God, fuck you, this is, what they're also saying, I think, is this is truly unbearable.

And like, how am I supposed to live my whole life this way? So whereas I was so desperate and sad trying to figure out how to say goodbye, especially to my son, and also feeling like what I was trying to do was learn the story that it might be okay spiritually in a big story about how God draws all things to God's self and makes the world beautiful. but it's not going to be okay for me in the way that I hoped. I'm like living with that, like, it still had some kind of like, there was just a lot of love there. I think dying is weird. And I think as you're dying, there's some strange comforts there that are not the same ones that are afforded to those who are watching you,

watching you die. Yeah, that's a great way of encapsulating it. What did you learn about our health care system? The rich will live and the poor will die. unless you didn't jesus said that right can you say that well it's a christian nation can he's oh i think i again i think it was the opposite yeah okay go ahead yeah he said that he said that that's why i love him he loved winners what else it's wonderful that it moves faster than other um nationalized health care systems american systems can move very quickly

You can have a thought and get an MRI on Friday, which is incredible. You don't have to wait three months. You don't. But there will be no quarterback. You're the only quarterback. I've been in charge and I'm still entirely in charge. I took myself off chemo based on my own research and made every doctor upset. And it turns out I was 100% right.

I was just in a trial protocol where they were never going to say that to me. So the fact that I was quarterbacking things that were so out of my pay grade. And I've kept myself alive. So as much as I think the system kept me alive, I kept myself alive. Wow. Trying to just find the side doors that would get me back to any kind of anyone who's on a super highway. And especially if you have a cancer or any kind of diagnosis that has an established protocol, it's actually a really great system. It's just any side road, it will be a bumpy road.

All the while people will be telling you. that it's so much worse in Canada. I was like, actually, it'd be fine. Those drugs are available in Canada, too. Right. It's okay. It'll be okay. Yeah.

It would have been okay. The Baha'i faith, there's this concept about tests and difficulties, and that tests and difficulties are sent to us as a bounty. And we're even asked in some really. prayers that make me outraged to be grateful for our tests and thank you, God, for this test, and that that's really the highest point of spiritual, you know, enlightenment is to be just so grateful for the vicissitudes because they grow our souls. And the whole purpose of this life from the Baha'i mythology is a little different than Christian, but it's similar in a lot of ways,

too is we are in these fleshy soul growing machines for you know 70 80 90 years if we're lucky and the those divine qualities that we've been speaking about you know humility and patience kindness love uh we're taking those with us but it's the tests that really yeah grow those qualities and it's like going to the gym when you're when you're doing this with weights you're literally up the fibers of the muscle so it regrows stronger and bigger. You can tell I do a lot of work around that. I felt it was it was hard to almost listen because I was odd. Odd. Yeah. And odd.

So in this construct, you know, you've gone to hell and back again. You're in remission. You're in recovery. You're doing great. You're teaching. You're momming. Your wifeing, you're traveling, your uplifting, podcasting, bestsellering, right and left, bringing your wisdom, strength, experience, light that you gained going through this.

But is that a bunch of bullshit really? Like, is it like... I love this question so much. Yeah. This, I think, is one of the most interesting questions we get to ask ourselves. Oh, goody. I do. I asked a good question. Well, I...

Cartick. Do you see? See, I can do it. Okay. I think I really agree with half of what you said. Okay. Which is there is an uncommon, unduplicated wisdom that comes from suffering. Mm-hmm.

We're just really trying to take the terrible things that happened to us and metabolize it into something that can be still beautiful and then maybe more beautiful. Like I was talking to a mom the other day who lost both her sons and she said, oh my gosh, she was so lovely. She said, well, it's hard because everywhere I go, there's a, you know, a reminder or it's a birthday or it's a, I met somebody else's grandkids baby shower or and she said, everywhere I, and then every memory I reach for, there's like a little tear. You know, I can just tell.

It's like tearing at my heart. So it will just, it will have to regrow. And like, I loved the idea that it's like regrowing into a different shape. And every little micro tear is also a way because of what she's doing. And the way she's trying to be in the world can grow still into something beautiful. It won't be better. It will never be as good as her having her sons. And like, this is the strange way in which.

It is, I think it's very bad math. It's very bad math to say, suffering plus anything equals virtue. Because there is no, there's no math there. We can't say true things about loss, about things that can never be recovered and say that it was, we can't say worth it. I mean, we just can't use any additive words. But what we can say, I think, is that there is a. there can be a shocking beauty and a progress that happens in our own souls as a result in which we do say, I don't know if I'd ever say thank you, but I would say, God, you are showing me so many things.

But if I could go back, I would absolutely give every bit of it up and be a lovely medium delusional historian. With a kid. With an intact abdomen and a great prognosis. Yeah. Yeah. I will never say. But that's why I love when people say things like, I always collect versions of this that I really,

I'm like, that's it. And so I heard two this last year I really liked. Okay. Beth Moore, who's a wonderful spiritual teacher Baptist, she said, God,

if my prayer is just like, God, it was not worth it, but could you make it matter? That's a great iteration of a bad math. And the other one... That's a kind of a prayer, isn't it? I really liked it. The other one I really liked was Rabbi Steve Leader,

and he said, well, if you're going to go through hell, just don't leave empty-handed. And I liked that too. But these are all non-linear ways of saying, we can genuinely become more beautiful and more human after suffering. But you will then have to live with what remains. I like, that's why I made my own t-shirt that said, what doesn't kill you, we'll try again tomorrow.

And I wear it at like colonoscopy kind of like situations or cancer runs. Colonoscopy conventions. Yeah, is everyone having theirs? Can we do ours together? What does have a beautiful, terrible day? I mean, I've seen it, but tell us about it. Well, I just, I've suffered and I want others to suffer. And this is my small contribution to mankind.

We live in such a toxic positivity, aggressive optimism, everything always has to be lovely. We're really crowding everybody onto the good vibes section of the emotional spectrum. And I just think it would be nice if we could say something like a little truer and maybe something a little more emotionally dynamic. So, you know, it can't always be a wonderful day. May it be like a beautiful, terrible day. We can find those little glimmers in the midst. And also just know, like, all these small acts are us trying to inoculate ourselves against despair, which is just right there. But the second you say, I'm living with what I can't solve, then everyone's positive.

They're just going to go right back into nihilism, fear. despair. No, no, no, no, no. We don't have to do that. We don't have to say everything is possible. And we don't have to say nothing is possible. We can get more into a what is possible today. So have a beautiful, terrible day. I love it. Kate, this has been such a profound pleasure getting to know you. And I have to say that you are my absolute favorite texter. You are so good at texting if anyone out there watching can get a hold of kate and get her number somehow and start a text thread it will enlighten and invigorate and cajole it's so good i only have two what i'm hoping our spiritual gifts is compliments and sarcasm so that's my medium thank you um the one we have

going with joel mckel you sent a picture today of um sound bath healing practitioner training workshop training Yeah. They're not ready yet. They can't ring those bells. They can't. They have to get trained in like the gong gong, gong, gong. Yeah, I want them to be. Start the larger bell first and then go to the smaller bells because it's going to vibrate more.

Ah, okay, let me write that down. Sound bath practitioner workshop only in Los Angeles. Yeah, I'm going to a sound bath tomorrow and I'm going to ask on the beach because waves are not soothing enough. They need to just. we need an additive component. They're doing sound bath on the beach. I'm going to be like, what? Is it down by LAX?

Is it going to have the roar of planes going over? I've never done it before. This was such an honor and a delight. And I hope it's the first of many conversations because you're really amazing. I like you so much. This was so fun. I have so many questions for you.

Let's disagree again. I love it. I'm going to come five more things that we almost agree on, but we feel devastating. separated by let's I I love that let's yeah let's live in that liminal space thank you my pleasure you're listening to soul boom