Kate Bowler: Know Your Own Belovedness
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Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are, you're listening to the Jan Arden Podcast. We have a great, amazing guest today that we cannot wait to talk to. This is going to be a four-hour podcast because I'm here with Caitlin Green. I'm here with Sarah Burke. They're both in Toronto. Kate Bowler is coming to us from North Carolina. She's a fellow Canadian. She hails originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has her own podcast called

It's an award-winning podcast called Everything Happens. And doesn't it just effing just? Ha!

She is also, on top of everything else, she's a professor at Duke University, went to Yale. She is an incredible author. I've got two conflicting reports, and this is really sad. One of them says she's a three-time New York Times bestselling author. The other one says she's a four times. Just she writes brilliant things, things that I'm going to let Caitlin actually lead this podcast off because she has such a personal connection with you, Kate, and you've done a lot to help her. Please.

Please welcome Kate Bowler to the Jan Arden podcast. Caitlin, I just want to let you lead off because it's a great story. It's about grief. Yeah. Well, I mean, I found Kate after our son died and I think I was looking for like grief resources. And I heard the episode that you did on Terrible Thanks for Asking with Nora McInerney and

And I just, I loved it so much. And I was taking in, I was like a little sponge for people that I liked that had sort of been through something that was terrible and weren't there to say, you know, everything happens for a reason. It was that everything happens, period, approach that you had that I really liked. And it felt positive, but without kind of the phoniness of it. So

So, that's when I got no cure for being human and I just fell in love with it. And one of my really good friends who I, our friendship really deepened after our son died because she was diagnosed with an inoperable form of esophageal cancer.

And she's steady right now. But there's really no quote unquote care for it. She'll be living with it in some way for her whole life. And she has a young child and her story had so many parallels to yours. And she lives in Australia and I sent her all of your info and she just became obsessed, like ravenously got your books and listened to all your podcasts and exactly the same as me. And I just felt like,

there are so many lessons to learn and so many valuable insights that you have on the most difficult parts of life that so many people avoid that I really meant so much to me at that time. Cause it was, it was positive and it was real. And, uh, and I, I feel like when someone's struggling, I frequently send them your way. I send them to your website. I'm like, if they have a family member who's sick, if they've lost a loved one, whatever it is, I'm like, you should go to her website or listen to her podcast. Cause it's very, very illuminating. Oh,

So that's my fangirl intro. Oh my gosh. And like, what a joy to be here. And thank you so much for telling me the really, the really real. Because it's a terrible kind of fellowship when you really know somebody because the very worst thing took your life apart. And it does feel like such an incredible honor to be able to share language. And because then you get a chance to be part of somebody's kind of like the most tender thing, which is the way we make meaning of what happens to us. So yeah.

honestly, Caitlin, I think that is the most ridiculously beautiful way to be your friend. And I'm so grateful to meet you. And I'm such a stupid fan of this podcast. So I've been so lightly sweaty and excited to be on with you guys today. Just brought a bomber's hat just in case we need that. It's the vintage one. It's the throwback. Looks a lot like the Huskies one, which is confusing for everybody. That's

Very nice. Just ready to be peak Canadian with you guys, being real people. Well, we try and be real. We're so real, we're in trouble at least like three times a week with someone yelling at us that we haven't represented an opinion properly, which is good because it's all about making people think, and at least we know that they're listening. You might find this interesting, Kate, is last week we touched on the medically assisted assistance and dying.

And so many people that are in a marginalized, disabled situation in their lives, be it mental health, be it a physical disability, I mean, it runs the gamut. And they really came at us very loudly to tell us that, hey, listen to us. MAID is not everything that it seems to be because for people who have no options, that are struggling with grief, struggling with depression, struggling with anxiety,

that is their only option. And I just wanted to ask you what you thought of that. I didn't even think about people wanting assistance in that because they literally can't do their laundry or they can't leave their house or they can't afford to pay for their... From the privileged perspective. Yes. It really shocked me because I think I came at it from a place of privilege and I feel very bad about it. Well, it's hard when we're trying to think about

as a set of choices. And sometimes like the euthanasia debate gets presented to us as just part of that framework is like, well, help me make choices then about how we live and how we die. And part of the supervision of the MAID process is that they do outtake interviews with people. And there's a really stunning article that was written, I think by Plough that took parts of the transcripts of those interviews that people did when they had applied and then received, um,

um, permission for maid. And those, I have to admit, I was like, I was too sad for a whole weekend after reading that article. Cause it was, it was quotes like, um, well, it's not that I want to die. It's just that I can't afford to live. Yes. This, this was the narrative that we were hearing over and over in the last few days from our podcast on Friday. And I have to tell you, I'm very shaken because I didn't know. I didn't know. I think what's,

So lovely and important about everyone being willing to engage in how we think about being sick and terrified is one of our greatest fears is losing control. And one of our greatest fears is then becoming a burden to others. And depending on where we are in our set of abilities, I remember one of my biggest fears when I got sick was I did the math and realized almost immediately that I was going to bankrupt everybody that I loved.

And that like hit me in a very difficult, I start, you know, my shame button is too big. And I really started to think, no, I am, I am the bad thing. I'm the thing that happens to people. And it's a, it's a lie. Of course, we're all kinds of things. And we are at our very core. Like we are precious. We are actually a gift, but sometimes when we're sick, when we get scared, we can get overwhelmed by the,

By feeling like every bad thing that happens is part of our responsibility to make everything easier on others. So I think that's part of what the difficulty around how we think about being weak and fragile is. It's like a hard, but it's such a beautiful conversation because we're all trying to figure out a way to feel our own belovedness, you know, in the best and in the worst. Yeah. I think, you know, you said something just now. I am what happens to people. Yeah.

It's like a Taylor Swift song. Hey, you know, hi, it's me. I'm the problem. It's me. I think a lot of us can feel like that sometime that we have leaned on our family too much, or we always feel like we're in a state of flux and in a state of chaos. And you, you even feel bad about bringing up a conversation with you've had somebody at work or an argument that you've had with someone at the office and

Caitlin just came from a really tricky situation where she worked for 13 years. And I think I felt like she was like, I don't want to burden you guys with the details and that she was kind of keeping it to herself. I don't know how much of that's true, Caitlin, but I did feel like that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, spoiler alert, I was laid off. Oh, God.

And it's not, it's the desire to make everyone else comfortable in conversation and to sort of like gloss over the difficult things. But then when you go through something, like I didn't have as much of a hard time, I think, because of having my previous experience with loss.

So I do think that I learned that, you know, going through something difficult can kind of be this superpower because as you articulated, Kate, it is a shorthand with other people who've been through something. And so you... Yeah, it is. Exactly. And a term I heard was post-traumatic growth instead of post-traumatic stress. I like that. And I, yeah, and I feel like it's a nice reframing of going through difficult times because we're all going to go through difficult times. So I don't, yeah, maybe I was glossing over it. I think...

think it's you do it without even realizing it. You minimize stuff that's happening in your life without even realize you're realizing you're doing it maybe to make yourself feel better, but definitely to make other people more comfortable. And because you don't want them to have a bad conversation or a bad time, or you don't want to feel, and you also don't want to feel like you're complaining because I know that I am fortunate in other ways, but yeah, you're still handling a difficult situation.

There's a couple ways you can usually tell if you're doing it too, because I find that, I mean, I've got a pretty like low, flat affect, which I do for the sake of also being able to be slightly, slightly more honest. But I can always tell when I'm like telling a truth and then I'm starting to notice that it's going really high on the list.

We're out. Like, and I could just tell that sadness is like, I launched a plane and I'm worried that there's not a runway, especially if you see the look on their face and you're like, Oh, I, I broke a rule. And now I cannot. Yeah. You just want to like soften it the second you said it. But the truth is you usually said it because frankly, it needed to be said. You just realized there wasn't a, there wasn't a landing pad. How are you at asking for help? Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean,

That's terrible for me. That's my, I will sit alone for three days. I'm getting better. I mean, 62 years old, I'm finally, my mother's Alzheimer's. I always say good things come out of bad things. My mother's Alzheimer's actually shifted my ability to reach out to my friends and ask for help. And I'd never, people always said that to me, you never need anything. Like I

Are you okay out there? And I'm like, I'm not really okay. So how are you good at it? Oh, yeah. I'm terrible. I'm a huge liar. Yeah. Especially like, how are you fine? I'm wondering like when, Jan, can you remember the time in which like the, was it a breaking moment or was it a, you just realized it was?

You were the only one that was going to have to break the momentum? I was scared. I was very scared. And I think everyone assumes that memory loss is never going to affect them. My parents seemed like these steadfast, steady on people. And they both kind of got sick at the same time. But when people are together, you don't notice it as much. And when my father died...

Cat was out of the bag. But I was scared, Kate. Long-winded answer, and I felt like I was making myself sick. I could hide mine for such a long time because I used to travel by myself for medical appointments, and then I just really got used to doing medical appointments alone because I would spend so much time worrying about how other people received it. Or, frankly, if they say the wrong thing, it's kind of better to be

In a room by yourself. And so I just found that my coping strategies were making me like lonelier, sadder, more convinced that I was the only person in pain, which is a lie, but it feels true when you're the one going through something.

Is traveling for medical what brought you down to the States? No, my journey into America was just the never-ending school program. I was like, will you have me? Great, I'll be right there. And just put stuff in my 1993 Previa and head on out. Got it. So the only places I lived in the States are basically just universities where I'm like, what are we doing? Do I have a sweatshirt? Great, great. What a fantastic place to live, though. I mean, one of my biggest regrets is always going to be not getting a secondary education.

my lack of academic prowess, but I've just learned things that I want to know now, Kate, I go and get a book. I look it up when I'm interested in something. I learn about it. The girls know that about me with history or things like that. Um, I know more about Henry the eighth that I, then I should know. Um,

And now I have a metal detector. So look out. That's so wild for me to hear you say you feel in any way insecure because one of your unbelievable gifts is like your precision of language. You can land a phrase like nobody else. So and I just think that's so much of what

I mean, what like raw intelligence is, is it's like it is the perfectly it's the perfect word. Thank you for giving me this intro into your latest book because you are also a gifted writer. I mean, when I think about Caitlin's experience and how the words that you put down on a page and the words that you said on a podcast shifted the most horrible, terrifying,

terrible moment in Caitlin and her husband's life and in her family's life. So kudos to you for being able to use your own sadness, your own failings, your own, I mean, that's where empathy comes from. You have to know what that feels like in order to share it with other people. But tell me about have a beautiful, terrible day, daily meditations for ups and downs and the in-betweens. And what prompted you to

sit at a keyboard and start this book? Oh, well, I'm just a one-woman mission to ruin small talk mostly. And I just couldn't think of... I always just want more and more language to not sort of immediately step into that like performed cheerfulness that's really expected of women and in particular. And I was... Last year, I was going through this. I just got stuck in a pain loop because of chronic pain I'd gotten from...

too many kind of cancer related surgeries. And so long after I wasn't battling cancer, I just found that I was, I had so much chronic pain and I was so overwhelmed because I thought like, well, haven't I survived this already? Like, can't I be in the magical, where is mountaintop yoga available to me personally? And with ghosts, exactly. Exactly. You give me that smoothie bar, you give me, you give me a cat poster and I want to be on it. And I, um,

I felt that same loop of despair that my days were getting too short because I couldn't manage my pain. It was probably going to be a terrible day. But I remembered something I'd really learned when I was having to live in between treatments that really only guaranteed me two or three more years, two or three more months of life at a time. And I thought, you know, actually, it's a lot.

It's a lot easier if you narrow your horizon a bit and then you just ask yourself, like, well, if it can't be if it can't even be a fantastic day, could it just be a beautiful, terrible day? And how to like. So I only had about an hour of brain space in a day because I was just not well enough. So within an hour, I would write these reflections on how to try to live inside the days I have. Well, you call it bite sized reflections. Right.

And I think that's pretty much all the world can do. Yeah.

Yeah, truly. You know, these morning salutations or a 10-minute yoga or a three-minute meditation, I've got so many apps on my phone, Kate, that are two minutes, 90 seconds, a six-minute reflection. Like if I look at my phone, I'm like, six minutes? Yeah. That's personal. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. What do you think I do? Do you think I don't work? Like six minutes. I totally, that makes so much sense to me. And it's also too, because we get...

The more anxiety or grief or just busyness short circuits our thinking, the more we need these little interruptions to our normal patterns. I think our normal patterns are, I just think of them as a historian. Like, what are the cultural scripts we get? Like, what are the inherited? And one of the cultural scripts we get is that everything always has to be magically teaching us a lesson. You're supposed to be learning that lesson or else you're failing today. Sorry, loser. Yeah.

And I'm like, oh, okay, okay, okay. Like, I can't be losing every day. Sarah, you brought this up in one of the notes that you'd sent me this week. And you're just like, I want you to pursue this question with Kate because it was about how do you not shove mindfulness in?

Down somebody's throat. Down people's throat. So I want you to expand on that a little bit because when I read it from you, I was really interested in how people would perceive positivity, which seems so bizarre. Yeah. Don't you feel like that mindfulness word is thrown around a lot in the conversation surrounding the work that you do? And mindfulness, I think, has become another shorthand for a kind of performance of emotional mastery.

And then now we're back into the framework we really all need to get out of, which is control and letting go. Everybody then becomes – I think the problem is we started this kind of – we all use therapeutic language all the time. We mostly talk about how we feel. If someone says, how are you? We say, I feel. Before the 1970s, we would have answered with usually like mental language like –

I believe that or I'm arguing that. But since the 1970s, we've become so emotional in our language. And part of the consequence is that we think of our emotions as constantly being so important that if we're not demonstrating this like super zen-like calm at all times, then we are at our core either defective to anxious. And we've started to really demonize

having a wide range of human emotion. So that's kind of one of the more interesting sort of trends as a historian is watching the way that now this turn towards the therapeutic is a little bit eating us alive. And even with the idea of therapeutic language, it's still important and it's still useful to

but your emotions are not more important than someone else's is sometimes hard to understand. No, no. And actually, I mean, one of the reasons is because we have, and this is one of my great pet peeves is like, I'm a religious historian. So I think what a lot of the, what people are missing when they use therapeutic language is they're actually attaching religious language to therapeutic language. So that's why we talk about vibes all the time. Vibes are a religious language.

It's the idea that we have...

vibrations that, and like we're in pair, we have that have like layers and then the positive emotions are higher. And wow. Millennials really screwed. Oh my gosh. And the problem then is that we assume then that there's good emotions and bad emotions. And the problem is, is like people who would never think that they're kind of forcing their religion on other people are going to be the first ones. They're screaming good vibes only at you. And I find it pretty, um,

It's oppressive for all of us who need to be able to say, actually, today's a really difficult day because I'm living in reality. And if you don't let me live in reality, it actually has it just it's compressing who we think that we have to be in the world in a really negative way.

I also feel like it seems as though the goal for many people is to create eternal happiness as this baseline, which is insane because no one is happy all the time. Happiness is not a baseline emotion. And so if you get over that successfully, it does feel like a relief. The relief of knowing that you feel sad and then you feel happy or you feel angry and you can feel happy again. And you're just toggling through these different things. And I found that that was great.

this goal that I had, that I had that then was taken apart when I was so grief stricken is that I was like, yeah, you're not going to feel happy for a while. And so many friends would, you know, my friends who then apologize because there's a lot of,

people get worried about how they're responding to you in those moments. And so they say, oh, I didn't reach out or I feel like I didn't reach out enough. But sometimes I wanted to talk to you about it, but I didn't want to bring it up because I thought you were having maybe a really good day. And I was like, guys, I was never having a good day. So nothing you said could have ruined it. And that's fine. It's fine to just be honest and say, I wasn't having a great day. Hearing from you and talking about it would have been just fine. And we can all be okay with me feeling like complete crap right now.

And that's sort of where a lot of your work was really helpful because it reinforced the idea that, yeah, I'm not doing okay. And that was like Nora McInerney's podcast that I discovered you on was like terrible. Thanks for asking. Like, that's how I'm doing. And I think it, it really normalized so much of that. And I just, it's so, it's endlessly helpful. And when you find a good therapist that you click with, which I did.

And when I would talk to her about that, she used you in like recommendation to a lot of her patients as well for just that reason. Because it was like this notion that we're all supposed to be happy in the midst of difficult times, even if it's not happening to you personally, even if you're just reading the news, you're not going to be happy every single day, all day. It's not realistic. Is there not a parallel here? And I say this because I think all three of you have like specific and relatable recent grief that I maybe haven't experienced. Yeah.

But like a parallel here might be like, okay, so what? Jan is sober. She still wants to be invited to go out and participate. I don't know. I'm quite happy here. But isn't it interesting that humans avoid like just what they don't know and understand. It's easier for someone on the other, like, you know, a friend in the circle to be like, I'm not going to ask her about that today because it doesn't, I don't want to ruin her day. But it's all based on assumption. And I think people don't want to take it on, Sarah. Yeah.

Like, I really feel like we're living in such fast times and you know, maybe it was fast times in the sixties. Maybe it was fast times in the twenties. I don't know. We, all we know is that we're here now and this is what we're experiencing and it's a precarious time and we are so not equipped. And I'll be really honest. Sometimes I don't want to take on other people's stuff.

I feel like I'm barely just on the sanity train and I'm coping and I'm sleeping okay. And I selfishly think I can't do it. I just can't do it. And I still will step up into myself and kind of get my shit together, but I still find it hard to sometimes, I'm not going to ask that question because I don't want to fucking know.

And how terrible is that? And then you sit and then you sit in that, Kate. I like that. I really appreciate that honesty because that's, I mean, sometimes we can feel this. We do just get these grief hangovers being a person in the world right now. I mean, the way that we consume media now, because the way it's packaged to us and for us, we do know too much. And we know it in doses that we are unable to like,

I mean, our poor, sweet, little parasympathetic nervous systems like cannot handle. And then when it comes to just the, you know, the people we want to be to the people in our lives, I think we have the scale of our lives is too big. We go on social media and I think that's the first feeling we have is this is too many people. I cannot care equally about this number of people. My heart will implode. I'm positive I'll die of empathy related deaths, you know.

We forget how big our circles are, like how big the acquaintance circles are. My inner circle is very manageable and it's very small and it's getting smaller, which is very much by design.

I have a handful of friends and I know a lot of people and there's certainly people that I enjoy seeing, but when I really think about what I need to make my life work in a manageable, healthy way, it's, it's just where I am. And it's usually, it's people that have known me, you know, quite a long time. I've got really old friends and, uh, and I've got new friends too, although I find it harder to make friends.

friends as you get older and

you know, the kinds that will be there for you and that you can share grief stories with, and you can share, you know, trauma stories with that you don't feel like, am I, am I, is it too much information? I think I want you to speak to that is people that really give you too much information, people that you've maybe known for two months. And all of a sudden you are, you are handed a basket full of snakes. Yeah. And sometimes, um,

certain people and their giant open moon faces, they get too many of those baskets. I mean, like sometimes you're the people that people want to tell. And Jan, especially because you've got like the fun, ironic tone. I bet you people's assumption is like, oh, I can just, I can say anything. And in our hearts, we're like, oh no, but I can't hear everything. I can't hear everything. It's a thousand times more

too much information. I'm just thinking of a conversation I had on Friday with a new person that I thought was going to be a very manageable conversation. And then I realized that because of their assumptions about who I am, that's like, because that's not real intimacy. You know, that's just like two holograms meeting. And then the assumption then that I can carry the whole weight of a whole life. And I think we sometimes do that to each other where we don't

kind of take the longer road. Because at this point in our lives, all of us have befores and afters and kind of stories that take some time to unpack. So I think intimacy takes a lot more time than we think it does. How do we tell those people? In practical terms, so you're standing there, someone's handing you a basket that's on fire with 18 sticks of dynamite.

What is your advice to those of us? Like, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I don't like contention. I don't like any problems. I'm a peacemaker for the most part. What do we do? How do you explain to that person that you don't know that well, that you can't

accept it. Yeah. I don't even know where to start. Well, and there's a certain version of that too, where they almost say it so casually. It's not like they're giving you a gift, like their most precious thing. They're giving you everything that they... I just find that people do that oftentimes for small talk is they are just describing every bad thing of every person they're aware of. And then they just give it to you. The casualness, honestly, I find really painful because I was like, no, no, no. When I hear something like, I'm really going to care and I can't afford...

I can't, I can't hear all of it. So I, sometimes I just like put my hands up and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's going to be, that's, that's, that's, you're right. That's so much to hear. Or just try to offer something kind of like body languagey on like, whoa, that's, that, that is so hard, but like stop hands.

Because in so many settings in my life, I really don't mind hearing it. I have a glitchy, wonderful glitch where I can hear most things and it doesn't hurt me because the people that come talk to me, they frankly like it.

they're trying to give me. I don't know how to describe this. I remember when I was getting chemotherapy, you know, you sit in that stupid chair for like eight hours and my nurse came by one time and she sat down and she, she just touched my arm in the lightest way. And she said, I'm sorry, I just wasn't sure how to tell you, but I lost a son. And she, she said it in the lightest way, but I knew that she was just trying to give me

The gift of our common love. Something relatable. Like, don't worry, you're not over there. I'm not over here. I'm just like you. And so when you can tell someone is giving you a present and when they're trying to like dump something on you and it's the gift that you want to hear and it's the dumping that's too much. And the other part of this, Kate, is when people are stealing from you. So when they want advice and you're thinking, okay, I'm offering you something

my earnest opinion here, but you just see your words, all the letters just floating over their heads. And they're just, you see them coming, the D's and the F's and the E's are coming out their ears. And you're like, no, no, no, you got to put that in your brain, like plug your ears. All the words are coming out. That drives me bonkers too, is the ability that we all have to be stolen from, that we don't know how

to say, well, I really don't know. I don't think I have the experience to tell you. Like I'll usually give an opinion. I don't like being stolen from either. I don't like people, you know, using up my time in a way that's not beneficial to either party. Yeah. There's one other category like that, that I've only met a few of.

But I realized that there was a perfect and horrible word for them. And it's when people... I can't wait for this. ...want to share, want to find out information...

But it's extractive. Like, it's not trying to make me feel better. It's not so that they can go off and magically make me a casserole and come back. Like, they want something and it feels kind of delicious. And those people just feed off of the pain of other people. They just like knowing, but it's not to love you. And those people are ghouls. Or I call them grief thieves, actually, sometimes. Do you really, Caitlin? That's a really good where they like want to know.

Kind of, yeah. And then they'll quickly, you know, like pivot it to be about them. And so, you know, that's kind of like a common thing that happens. And it's funny because there is no etiquette handbook I find on like grief, although it is something that's kind of coming for us all. Even if you're not losing, you know, like a loved one necessarily in this moment, you've had a disappointment that would present as grief. Right.

And I think it could, I do feel as though your writings and a lot of the stuff that you put out into the world helps people navigate a little bit of that. But it's also hard because no one's looking for it until they need it. Yeah, that's so true. It should be like a high school class where people are like, hey, we're going to help you navigate how to talk to people who are really struggling and things that are helpful to them and things that are not helpful to them. Like don't say everything happens for a reason and don't try to assign meaning to like someone necessarily like losing a parent or a child because maybe there isn't any meaning there.

And it's just something that happened. And I think that's, yeah, that has been helpful for me at least because otherwise you can get stuck with the grief thieves everywhere or the ghouls. That is such a good phrase. Let's get t-shirts. Grief thieves. We're working on merch. That could be one of them. Do you find that your background in like your religious studies background, do you think that it helped equip you sort of for

So looking at your struggles, your diagnosis, and then the struggles of others, do you think that that helps you? Because it's funny when I would talk about you to other people or recommend you, I'd say that she has a background. She's a professor of divinity. She has a religious background. And you did a lot of work in...

what was it? Like it's a prosperity. Well, how would you describe that? Yeah. Prosperity gospel that God wants to give you health, wealth and money people. Yeah. Yeah. So like you do good stuff and stuff, good stuff happens to you. You do good stuff, stuff, good stuff happens to you. And when that gets fractured and people don't know what, what to happen or is this bad thing happening to me because I'm bad in some way, it's this like magical thinking. Like, do you feel like your studies and your background made you look at things in a different way? And like, how did that feel for you being a religious person? You know, how do you,

How do you marry all that? Yeah.

Yeah. And like, I probably shouldn't have been surprised that the people, because I teach in a divinity school, which is a lot of people are just doing academic work and, but a lot of people are thinking about how it's going to fit into the lives and communities of people around them. And I should probably shouldn't have been surprised that the people who are most trained to deal with grief and difficulty are therapists and chaplains. I mean, they go to school for that. They're like, they work in hospitals all day long. They're actually like

And I should have known that because they were really lovely with me. They were the flake rent violators of hospital visiting privileges who just like pop their little clerical collars on and like come on over while I'm wearing some like hideous gown. I'm like, stop looking at me. And they were like, oh, the things they would do. They would like just make...

I would wake up sometimes from surgeries wearing socks I obviously didn't put on. And I was like, you love me. It's embarrassing the way you love me. But I think part of what

I mean, it's a weird specialty. I spent almost all my 20s interviewing televangelists. And I got to know the prosperity gospel because of a giant Winnipeg church that blew my mind. And I ran around telling everybody. I was like, absolutely not. This is for Americans. But it turns out it was Canada's largest church run by a man who refused to let anybody in.

grieve or be poor or be a person in any fundamental way. And I was so outraged by it in a way that you kind of look at something you just have absolutely contempt and no connection to. And that's what got me started on this, like, oh my gosh, someone needs to write a history of places like this where God has to reward everyone with every good thing. But it took me a long time until I realized that

We all often have a set of expectations of how life is going to go. And in that desperation, we need some tenderness for ourselves of the lives we wished that we would have and just how heartbroken we are when they don't always turn out the way we wish. And most of us have such a fractured idea of God to begin with because our parents were no more equipped to teach us any kind of religious studies as the people that were running the churches. Right.

I know that, you know, when I was a teenager and it dawned on me that everything that I seemed to be doing and everything that I believed in was based on

punishment and reward that this system this very simple system of if you do good things you'll be rewarded and if you do bad things you're going to be punished and that was that idea goes back in antiquity it goes back thousands of years of how people controlled people i mean taxes were paid so that you went to heaven you know taxes were paid so that you you couldn't go into a church god forbid and everything was in latin so people didn't even have access to

to these sacred books that they could only dream about. You know, you imagine not being able to be buried inside of a churchyard. If you were a certain kind of person, you had to be thrown in a ditch, you know, two miles away in unconsecrated ground. Like all that stuff sunk so deeply into me that really shook my idea about, is there a God? And I guess my long-winded question is, do you believe in God? What is God to you? Yeah. Cause the, when we know God,

Those fractured views, like they do go so deep. And sometimes we don't realize we have been really hurt by something until we feel some kind of like deep unworthiness. It's something we really do deserve, you know? And I think that was what, okay, well, this is all very embarrassing because like as a historian, I'm like very good at being like, look,

It was 1425. And I'm very good at describing things in the past. And I'm really good at ruining historical movies you like. But when it comes to like describing my own spiritual experiences, I like never talked about it. It wasn't until I was very sick and I was so, I was so angry and I felt really hurt mostly by both women.

Christian things people were saying at me, but also the wellness community is just lethal with, it was something I ate. It was something I've done. Have I not manifested that? This is all just different versions of the prosperity gospel or like God had a plan. Oh, Jesus. No pun intended. Yeah. It was the amount of dying in a culture that

seems to have an explanation for why it's me. They have a fucking catchphrase for everything. They do. They have a catchphrase for my death. God doesn't give you anything that you can't handle. I don't want to offend anybody out there. Your God is your God and my God is whatever it is, but it does. It comes down to, and I would imagine the wellness community and its variations on the theme

Of things that people have been taught to say. And this goes back earlier in our conversation of grief thieves, how people are equipped to deal with hard things that are going on, especially when someone is sick, especially when someone has a critical, perhaps terminal disease right in front of them. It comes down to these fucking Hallmark card sayings and it's not helpful to anybody. It isn't. It's crushing. Yeah.

Because it's not a life, it's yours. It's not a son, it's your kid. No one can know. And I know, you know, when you're being lied to, I mean, I believe in heaven and yet nothing in heaven is the, was going to be the promise to me of anything, but that I would miss it all. I would miss it all. And so I was just like, do not fucking lie to me.

Jan, like your friend last week, you were saying was pointing at the floor. Well, the 92 year old, my friend's mother-in-law who was doing the assisted death program, she pointed at the floor and she said, I hope I don't end up down there. And I said, well, if you do say hi to my dad. And, you know, we had a good laugh. I think I was proud of myself the way I went into the room.

It was, it was, it's hard, but I'm not the family. I'm not the son. I'm not the daughter-in-law. And I just said, you guys are going on an adventure. Anyway, I just, I was curious about, you know, if you believed in a personal God and someone, someone sitting there doling out, you know, you're, you're good. You're not. Yes. We'll let this Holocaust go on. No, the war is fine. Like I'm telling you just with how this plays out.

It's just not something my brain will accept anymore. Maybe when I was scared to not believe, scared that something terrible was going to happen to me, but not anymore. I'm just like, I'll take my chances because I don't believe in this anymore.

Yeah, I really hear you. Because the feeling where you're in a, like a deserve matrix, you know, where you have to deserve something like love, you deserve something like punishment. And that's part of the language too, right? I think it falls away. I think, I think, I hope just part of

Living with life as it is, I hope that stuff falls away for everybody. Because when it did for me, and I was such a little striver, you know, I loved like a metals wall. But like in the hospital when I was at my most heartbroken and most angry that it was happening to me, I did feel such an overwhelming anger.

incomprehensible amount of supernatural love, like love from God, love from other people, so much love that I felt like I should have been more angry and I wanted to be more angry. And that feeling of very intense love, like really carried me through the worst, like the worst of the surgery aftermath, the worst of how devastated I was. And I've, I've kind of come back to that every now and then as being, I'm just so I'm,

I'm so surprised, but I'm so relieved because it really was at the moment when all of my ideas of what I thought religion was going to get me really had failed me. Because I was like, wasn't I pretty good? Like, wasn't I like kind of not a bad Christian? Yeah, exactly. Like, I know you're not supposed to say that, but like, I was pretty, I'm a divinity school professor. Like, if someone's going to earn their way into something better, like, it's going to be me. And then I was not, so. Yeah.

Yeah, it feels like the reward is that like being open to that feeling of love and like having that community. And I do really also feel like community seems so missing. And that's a piece that happens and it touches on so much we've covered in the podcast so far. But with Made, you know, when we talk about the part of it that's sad.

because it's some people who don't feel cared for. So they are looking at other options for themselves. Maid might be one of them. The feeling of not wanting to burden other people with your own stuff. What's really missing is community increasingly. I think everyone's leading a more isolated life emotionally. And the church was a bigger part of people's life previously. And as that has sort of fallen away,

through various awful things that various churches have done, maybe perhaps contributing to that. But that role and that important center point that it was for so many people in their life and creating that sense of community and belonging, the good stuff that you took with a lot of religion, with that being gone, it makes people feel very alone. And I think that some of your work, again, when you listen to the podcast and all the stuff that you've done, I feel like

that is sort of what we all need to kind of get back to. Or that's the piece of religion that if we could just grab it and hold onto it would carry people through these tough moments. Cause you build that sense of community and then, and whatever it looks like, whatever that looks like for you. But like, you know, like you said that being open to feeling like in the depths, you're going to have some,

feelings of love and care, whether that comes from family members or just internally, would be like the goal that I would want for everybody at least. Yeah, it doesn't matter if your God is Ted Danson or someone else. I don't know if you've seen The Good Place, but it's just such a funny thing to think about. I love The Good Place. That's better than Ted Nugent, you know. It's not easy being a person. And...

I, like I said, I'd like to keep you here for four hours, but I do want to let you go at some point. And I hope you'll come back and talk to us again, Kate. I think I want to leave people with that whole idea of hope and action. How do you think

we can help each other. You've written seven books and they're all very different from each other. But I think the theme throughout is that love and decency and respect and forgiveness theme that runs in all of us. Yeah, we're going to get sick. And yeah, things are going to happen to our friends. Terrible things are going to happen. And if you think they're not, I think that's when you're the most ill-equipped. I'm not saying to expect the worst, but to not live in this world of

I'm a good person. Nothing's going to happen to me is not helping anybody. How do we talk to each other? How do we, how do we help each other? And that's a huge question. I think that framework of deserve of like good or bad reward or punishment has been really, it's been too heavy for all of us. And like, I think just stripping it down, what we really desperately need is the vulnerability that love creates.

Like the more love we have, the more realize we realize like that we are desperately both needy and wanty and both are good. And it's a little embarrassing because you'll look and feel a little ridiculous, but you'll do exactly what you did, Jan, where you're like, actually, this framework has broken down and I will be asking for 10 favors. Yeah.

But I think the embarrassment of trying to be superhuman has put us in an absolutely unsustainable place. So we're just like stripping it down. We've got to get back to being people who know our own belovedness because we want to share that same feeling with other people. Know our own belovedness. My mom used to always say, and God bless you, Kate Bowler,

When you're easy on yourself, you're easier on other people. When you're hard on yourself, you're hard on other people.

And there's so many little Joan isms that she's left with me. But listen, I cannot thank you enough for spending time with us today. And I mean that in all sincerity, please come back and share your wisdom. Kate Bowler has written seven amazing books. Go online, go to your local bookstore, go find any one of Kate's books. You don't have to read them in order. It's not Lord of the Rings. Any of our books you can take into the bathroom, the toilet with you and open it up and

And while you're peeing, you can find some wisdom. And I know that's probably a terrible sell point for your literature. But to me, I always find the greatest solace in reading things in the bathroom. Just one page, like a one-page poo. That's what I call it.

That's like what I do. That's what I do with podcasts and showers. Kate has had a shower with me more times than I can count. This is going on the cover of every, of every new book as the great endorsement. Make me, make me part of your bathroom. It's all Kate Bowler's book. You'll have a ring around your butt from just sitting there longer than you need to.

To read her books. And please use that. Put me on the front cover of your next one. She also has a terrific podcast, Everything Happens Podcast. And also, if you have a moment today, something, if you're doing the doom scrolling, Kate has an amazing TED Talk. And as we sit here and talk today, there's over 10 million views. And it's a terrific thing to watch if you want to be uplifted, encouraged. You're going to fuck up.

And the people around you are going to fuck up, but we have to learn to, I'm going to just, I'm leaving with the last sentence and then we're going to say goodbye. What we have to learn to what Kate? Oh, be embarrassingly in love with ourselves in the world. Kate Bowler has been our guest. You've been listening to the Jan Arden podcast. We're going to be right back after these brief messages.

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A cola or a cream soda, root beer, yes indeedy. And they've got their limited edition summer flavor, which will take you right back to the second grade. You gotta try the ice pop one. Head to janardenpod.com to find out where the closest place to you is where you can go and buy Cove. Go right now.

Welcome back. Caitlin Green and Sarah Burke are here. And Caitlin's got a cold again because her child goes to daycare and he just, he puts things in a Petri glass. He brings them home and he puts them in his mommy's mouth. His immune system is just onboarding. And so...

It's downloading. Yeah. I am getting my own crash course in current viruses that I was not previously exposed to. And so thus, I'm sick. You had a great five days, though. Great five days. It was a really great five days, you guys. I had a great five days. Yeah. So shut up. You had five days. You know what? You're right. Why am I complaining? But the funny thing is, I do feel like I could now run a marathon successfully with just like a head cold. Like I'm like, head cold. This is nothing. Nothing. So...

Kate Bowler was fantastic. I'm not going to recap everything. I hope you guys have enjoyed this podcast. Listen, before we let you go, we are working on the MAID stuff. As you heard us briefly talk to Kate Bowler, you know, there's a lot of different opinions out there of MAID.

how diabolical this is being perceived as, who it's helping, who it's not helping. Listen, there's a lot of stuff and we are not just going to scratch the surface. So please know we're going to read some comments and yeah, we're going to dive in. We're going to get both sides. There's some people we're going to reach out to that know what it's like to be a disabled person and what the MADE program means or doesn't mean to them, how it's not helping them or how it's really making it very difficult for them to get

other forms of help. So just know that we're not going to let that go. And also too, that we're aware of the fact that, you know, there are, there is another side to it, right? Like, yes, of course there are going to be people who, who benefit from it and who would fit the criteria for a supportive, uh,

medically assisted death. But there is also very clearly other factors at play that happen when you don't support everyone in your community and in society, and then the desperation that comes along with that. And then when you have this option here, right, when you have this option, it is very accessible in Canada now. We have a thread, you know, that where there was a lot of discussion and

Please know that we like reading through that stuff and seeing all the alternate perspectives on... Obviously, what Jan was talking about was just a personal experience. And of course, they're... And I was very ignorant to it. So my apologies to people that felt disparaged and felt...

that I wasn't addressing that. I brought up just a personal experience. I don't know anything about the program. But it was that your personal experience that you had witnessed was positive and it was filled with choice. Now, for some people who are not, who've had their disability benefits cut, for some people who cannot get mental health care, for people who are really in dire straits and don't want to use this, but feel like they have no other choice, experiencing chronic homelessness, all this stuff.

So yeah, we do know we're aware that there is another side to the coin. And I personally am very aware of the fact that some people in government probably view this as a cost saving measure. And that's the part that really, really gets to me. Horrible. Is that it is, you know, you are a dollar sign to many in government. And this is a way to save money in the healthcare system. And so we're

We're aware of it. I'm going to put this article that came up in the thread on Twitter or X in our show notes. Why are 15 times more Canadians and Californians choosing assisted death? It just kind of outlines some of those other perspectives. And like we said, we're going to try to book a guest appropriate for this topic in a future, near future episode.

And thank you very much for your comments. Thank you for listening and all those things. A little happy story before we sign off. A couple of days ago, I had the absolute honor and privilege to interview Jane Goodall at a sold-out event to raise money for the Jane Goodall Institute in Vancouver at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Jane Goodall is 90 years old. She just turned 90. She travels 300 days a year. Did you faint when you got the phone call? No.

Like I have to ask. I've known for several months and I, and I have to say that I think I just felt like it was a pinch me moment. Someone who grew up, um, you know, a National Geographic. I was just crazy about National Geographic magazines. And I remember seeing a very young, young Jane Goodall on the cover of National Geographic. And of course the gentleman that took that photograph, she ended up marrying and they had one son.

And we talked about that, but we talked about, you know, eating. We talked about veganism. We talked about food.

how to, you know, animal testing. She touched on everything of how not to feel hopeless in these times. And that there's young, she has a program called STEM and it's, you know, young girls and young boys that are doing programs in their own communities. There's 70 countries that are doing this STEM program. And janegoodall.ca, you can go on, you can make a donation, you can go on. I'm doing something that's doing $10 a month and they really encourage that.

Listen, I ordered a coffee the other day at Starbucks and it was $8.90. Once I did my add-ons and then I tipped, and I'm a cheap tipper, I tipped a dollar on my $8.90. It probably should have been two bucks. Anyway, I just thought about it. I'm like, I'm signing up and it's called Jane's Team. Um,

Anyway, she was lovely. She was so complimentary. They gave me a copy of a 2017 National Geographic where she was reprising that very famous cover. But she was magical. You could hear a pin drop. Her voice is very quiet. She's tired from traveling. Her flight had been canceled. She got in that morning, had a nap in the hotel. She came out and she just speaks, you know, very much like this.

Was this meeting a hero for you? Oh, absolutely. I think she's one of the world's greatest advocates for wildlife. And it's not just stuck in these preconceived ideas of the climate crisis. It's about the ecology of what we're creating, what we're destroying, how we can fix it, things they're doing to fix it.

She's also lived such a unique life and she's had so much firsthand experience with animals and with at-risk communities. I just feel like it's so common now to just hear people yelling on social media when they don't actually have that life experience that she has. To see someone like her and to see the stuff that she's sharing, I think it holds a lot more weight than just your average egg icon on Twitter now. Yeah.

Well, she said she went into an animal testing facility where they were testing hundreds and hundreds of chimps in disgusting conditions. She said, I went in as a scientist. I walked out as an activist. And she changed. She said, I have got to end this. And that particular facility where it was happening, they have put a stop to that type of testing. And this was 25 years ago, but it's still...

And I will say this, and this is science, folks. 99.9% of animal testing is not useful for humans or for the animals.

And most scientists will tell you that. So these are sinister. They're almost like Nazi-like experiments on beings that are for the interest of these very perverted, whacked-out, crazy people. It's not a part of science that's applicable. Anyway, that's all the time we have for today. Let's get on the podcast. That's what I'm closing with. I will ask Jane if I can ever catch her. I certainly won't be pestering her this week. She's got 10 days at home, which is...

you know, extremely extraordinary for her. But what a, to, to walk on this planet at the same time as Jane Goodall, she's been doing this work for 65 years, 60 years. And we are, we are better for her.

And she, she's, she's, I'll never forget it as long as I live. So anyway, thanks for listening to the Jan Arden podcast. We appreciate you subscribing. We appreciate you leaving us some stars. Uh, we're very grateful. You can see us on YouTube now. All our handles are the Jan Arden pod. That's on all the social platforms. You can write us, you can leave a message on our website, janardenpod.com. And, um, yeah, you can go on there and hit a little microphone. I leave messages just cause I get scared that no one's going to leave us messages. Um,

Hi, I'm Jan Arden and I'm great and I love myself. So I leave that for Sarah. Sarah's like getting sick of it. Anyway, we'll see you next time. Totally do. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.