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Kate Bowler Books

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“I remember clearly in the hospital how I felt this strange closeness with God, how I did not feel like dry grass. I was becoming less and less, but I becoming less and less, but I was not reduced to nothing God's love was everywhere, sticking to everything. Love was in my husband's hand on my back, steadying me, a lightness under my feet, all over Zach's velvety wars. I flushed with embarrassment when I described this feeling to my friends, stumbling as I tried to explain its sudden appearance (Wasn't it there before?), that love itself was suddenly more real to me than my own thoughts. Despair was never far away, but somehow the seams of the universe had come undone, and all the splendid, ragged edges were showing. And they brought me close than I've e ed been to the truth of this experiment— living— and how the horror and the beauty of it feels almost blinding.”

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Author:Kate Bowler
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“I keep having the same unkind thought: I am preparing for death and everyone else is on Instagram. I know it's not fair, that life is hard for everyone, but I sometimes feel like I'm the only one in the world who is dying. We're all sinking slowly but one day while everyone watches, I will run out of air, I am going to go under. Even explaining it, I feel more and more frantic. There will be a day when I can't take my next breath and I will drown.”

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Book:Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved
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“The hardest lessons come from the solutions people, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself. There is always a nutritional supplement, Bible verse or mental process I have not adequately tried. “Keep smiling! Your attitude determines your destiny!” said a stranger named Jane in an email, having heard my news somewhere, and I was immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.”

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Book:Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved
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“...there’s different ways of experiencing time. And one is the kind of time that you and I know really intimately, which is tragic time. And we know what it’s like to feel that heightened present where everything really matters because you have to make choices, because everything you love is so precious. And also, we know that we can’t live there forever, because we are just not — we’re not built to live that edge, that close to the edge all the time. And then there’s — he reminded me of ordinary time, or pastoral time. Anyone who’s a farmer knows there’s sowing and reaping time. And I was always, the more I was into tragic time, the more I was a little judgmental about that. I was like: It sounds very boring; it sounds very commonplace. But that’s the — who’s picking up your mom on Tuesday? Did you send that email? Have you made that phone call? It’s all the wonderful, stupid, ordinary stuff of day-to-day life. And like, that is also necessary and good. And then there is something that we’ve all experienced together, very recently, which is apocalyptic time. It’s the feeling that there’s a heightened — that we know that the future is not guaranteed and that there is a kind of lightness and darkness and — like binaries. We’re kind of wrapped up in binaries about how we’re seeing the world. And we experience apocalypticism with our environment: like wildfires and global warming… and fear of — and we see it and we feel it. We experience the apocalyptic time when we see the scope and magnitude of racial injustice, as we understand that structures are not just broken but that they collapse in on people, and that the weak are not sheltered, and that the poor are not cared for, and that far more people are not given the luxury of invulnerability, and can’t and won’t. And in all these forms of time, we have this feeling like we’re seeing things as they really are — like that feeling when you count your kid’s eyelashes and you think, “I see the whole world in just right now.” But the truth is, all of them are true, and we toggle between them all, all the time. And so we just can’t live in any one version for too long, frankly, without not really seeing the scope of — what the wholeness of our lives require.”

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Author:Kate Bowler
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“I think the solution to the past and the future is that there is none. It’s that we borrow from each of them for really — to make really meaningful choices; is that we pull from the past in order to inform a richer future. We pull from the future to be like, Well, it reminds me that these things are yet undone. But if we prevent ourselves from moving between past, present, and future, I think we become really narrow in our cultural language for how to live.”

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“I have another scan this week," I say lightly, hoping to reassure my loved ones that it is safe to rejoin my orbit. There is always another scan, because this is my reality. But the people I know are often busy contending with mildly painful ambition and the possibility of reward. I try to begrudge them nothing, except I'm not alongside them anymore. In the meantime, I have been hunkering down with old medical supplies and swelling resentment. I tried— haven't I tried? — to avoid fights and remember birthdays. I showed up for dance recitals and listened to weight-loss dreams and kept the granularity of my medical treatments in soft focus. A person like that would be easier to love, I reasoned. I try a small experiment and stop calling my regular rotation of friends and family, hoping that they will call me back on their own. _This is not a test. This is not a test._ The phone goes quiet, except for a handful of calls. I feel heavy with strange new grief. Is it bitter or unkind to want everyone to remember what I can't forget? Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I'm everyone's inspiration and and no one's friend. I am asked all the time to say that, given what I've gained in perspective, I would never go back. Who would want to know the truth? Before was better.”

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Book:No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear
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“But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair. The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.”

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Book:No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear
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