Kate
Bowler is a religion scholar and best-selling author who is sharing daily
reflections on Instagram.
By Elizabeth Dias Published April 5, 2020Updated April
6, 2020, 4:46 p.m. ET
As the
coronavirus pandemic spreads, the normal touchstones of
everyday life have vanished without so much as a warning. In their place are
terrifying thoughts about the future, about loss and about mortality.
For Kate Bowler, a
historian at Duke Divinity School, this is familiar terrain. In 2015, when she
was 35 and a new mother, Dr. Bowler learned she had incurable cancer, and uncertainty
became a way of life. She explores what it is to be human in dark times in her
best-selling memoir, “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve
Loved,” and in her podcast.
During the pandemic —
which has intensified during the Christian season of Lent — Dr. Bowler has been
offering daily reflections on social media about living in
fear. In a conversation with The New York Times, which has been edited for
length, Dr. Bowler reflected on why forcing yourself to stay positive is not
always best, the human longing to love and be loved and why living in constant
fear makes it important to have two different routines: one for the day and one
for the night.
How are you feeling your way through this new moment of mass
fear and uncertainty?
It feels so familiar.
That feeling of waking up in the morning and for a moment you don’t believe
it’s real — I remember that feeling of not remembering I had cancer, and then
remembering all over again, every day. I think so many people are waking up
each day and forgetting that they are scared that they can’t hold their mom’s
hand in the residential care facility they’re at. Or their sister is about to
have a baby, and there are concerns that people can’t even have their partners
in the room with them as they have what they hope will be a perfectly healthy
birth.
On the other hand,
this situation is totally new to me. It’s very bizarre to share that feeling
with everyone and realize: Wow, we are all feeling especially delicate, at the
same time.
soul of the country, or the world, right now?
I think it’s painful
for everyone to know that there’s just not a lot of room between anybody and
the very edge. It really does run counter to the whole American story. It’s a
story about how scrappy individuals will always make it, and it’s a story about
how Americans’ collective self-understanding will always build something that
will save the nation. And currently both things are not true. Everyone else in
the world will suffer, too, but I don’t think they will suffer nearly the same
cultural disillusionment because they didn’t have that account of
exceptionalism.
What do you make of the idea that we should all just “stay
positive” through this?
The idea that we’re
all supposed to be positive all the time has become an American obsession. It
gives us momentum and purpose to feel like the best is yet to come. But the
problem is when it becomes a kind of poison, in which it expects that people
who are suffering — which is pretty much everyone right now — are somehow
always supposed to find the silver lining or not speak realistically about
their circumstances.
The main problem is
that it adds shame to suffering, by just requiring everyone to be
prescriptively joyful. If I see one more millionaire on Instagram yell that she
is choosing joy, while selling journals in which stay-at-home moms are supposed
to write joy mantras, I am going to lose my mind!
You’ve been sharing daily wisdom in your Instagram stories,
giving people permission to feel and just be. In one post you say, “Today it is
OK to be limited.” Tell us about that.
You mean when I’m
lightly crying and sitting in my pajamas?
Especially when
you’ve drunk too deeply from the wells of invincibility, you get in a time like
this, and I think we feel confused. Like it’s 8 a.m., why am I still tired?
There was a rhythm I
got into with cancer that has served me well right now. Every day sort of has
an arc to it. There’s a limited amount that you’re going to be able to face as
you stare into the abyss. Being able over the course of the day to track your
own resources will help you know how to spend them.
There’s just a minute
where you know, OK, I’m starting to hit the wall. Time to turn the boat around.
There’s only so much we can do, and in the face of unlimited need we have to
not just wildly oscillate between sort of intense action and then narcolepsy.
How do we now feel
the day and allow ourselves to be human inside of it? I think that’s really
tricky work.
You’ve said people who live with a lot of fear have taught you
to have two routines: daytime and nighttime. What are they?
Daytime: My eyes
open. There is a 6-year-old boy in pajamas. I feed him cereal, then we snuggle.
Then I decide there’s only a couple things I can do in the day. Then I launch
myself toward them. Then I get overwhelmed midway through the afternoon. You
just take a minute. You see who’s left to care about. Then at some point you’ll
realize that you’re about to hit the wall.
Nighttime: What’s
most important, at least in my little routine, is you pick a time and then you
call it. So like 7 p.m., no more new information. No more starting sentences
with, “Did you hear about the … ” And then start this sort of gentleness. I
have positive music and cheese ball movies and more snuggles, and then go to
bed earlier than it seems socially acceptable. Because if you violate that
rule, then you’ll break the next day.
What are other practical survival tips for living in fear?
If the days are
really full and heavy, to focus on the absurdity is so great. Small delight is
really fun. I’ve been in onesie “Star Wars” pajamas so much more this week. Get
really in to a reality show that people would lose respect for you if they knew
that you watched it. Make a commitment to something unbelievably dumb right now
— now’s the time.
There’s the light things. How do you find meaning amid all the
terrible?
The trick is to find
meaning without being taught a lesson. A pandemic is not a judgment, and it
will not discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving. I think
moments like this reveal to me God’s unbelievable love for us.
Ahe second I see all these nurses and doctors going
out there trying to save somebody else’s life, I realized it’s such a window
into how gorgeous it is to be a human being. And the more we see fragility,
sometimes the more we understand what an incredible miracle it is to have been
created at all. So I think just having a higher and higher view of our gorgeous
and terrible humanity.
We’re learning right
now in isolation what interdependence feels like and what a gift it is. And the
more we’re apart, the more we realize how much we need each other. We’re
allowed to be like beautifully, stupidly needy right now. We’re allowed to
FaceTime people and be like, I feel like a mess, and all I want to do is be
loved.
I’ve been thinking about how this is happening in an
increasingly secular America, and how there are people who have these deep
resources in their religious communities and there are others who don’t. What
if you are someone right now who doesn’t pray?
For me, part of the
joy of prayer is having abandoned the formula. I have no expectation that
prayer works in a direct way. But I do hope that every person, religious or
not, feels the permission to say, “I’m at the edge of what I know. And in the
face of the sea of abyss, someone out there please show me love.” Because
that’s, to me, the only thing that fills up the darkness. It’s somehow in
there, the feeling that I am not for no reason. And that doesn’t mean anything
better is going to happen to me, but in the meantime that I will know that we
all are deeply and profoundly loved. That’s my hope for everybody.
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