And so it's that balance that we're trying to get right.

Yeah, it's you're kind of framing language of the future and what kind of hopefulness is a gift and what is a poison.

Because I do think that when I think most people imagine just end up reframing hope as just another language of certainty.

Like things will always come my way.

There will always be another opportunity.

And when you know for certain that that's not true.

Yeah.

How do you do that when you are reeling from the loss of a person, like someone you love or someone you're with? How do you think about grief in that sense?

And what happened?

I went and did the scan and went home.

I figured they'd find something in my gallbladder.

There was some talk of, like, maybe it was just kind of, like, wonky numbers in my gallbladder, and they would just have to do a minor surgery and no big deal.

And, um, so I was at the office the next day.

Um, I was walking on my little treadmill [laughs] and got a phone call from a nurse, uh, who I'd not met, and she said that the results of my scan showed...

And then it was very blurry i- in my mind.

Hmm.

And what happened?

I went and did the scan and went home.

I figured they'd find something in my gallbladder.

There was some talk of, like, maybe it was just kind of, like, wonky numbers in my gallbladder, and they would just have to do a minor surgery and no big deal.

And, um, so I was at the office the next day.

Um, I was walking on my little treadmill [laughs] and got a phone call from a nurse, uh, who I'd not met, and she said that the results of my scan showed...

And then it was very blurry i- in my mind.

[laughs]

So can you talk a little bit about your story and then leading to the joy discovery?

Yeah, well, sure.

I lived every girl's dream, which is that I became a historian.

My dad's a historian and all I ever wanted was to be a historian.

And I just had this whole life I'd had planned out.

I got my dream job at Duke University.

I had this little baby that I'd wanted forever after years of infertility.

Visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

Yeah

...

I...

Those are usually a place to pause and then wonder, is there something in my past that actually bubbled up into joy like this? And it will remind you to be hopeful then that something like that is probably going to come visit your doorstep sometime soon, 'cause joy is like wonderfully, not cyclical, 'cause you don't get to exactly predict it, but like you really have to, you have to believe in joy.

Like it-

Yeah

...

I think it's getting harder and harder for us to be delighted.

Exactly.

I live in the anxious middle future where something might happen.

Every kid has this

wonderful, like, oh, oh,

they'd

be like drawing things and

they're

And do you feel like no one can prescribe you how to get that? Like your barometer of that feeling is the only thing what gives someone else joy is not necessarily going to be the same thing for someone else.

Are you thinking about one now?

There was just, like I felt so...

When you're that sick, nothing can be okay, right? Any- anything anyone says just isn't that true.

Like, of course it will be horrible.

Of course it will be painful.

Like, I...

The story is, well, nothing will ever be good again.

Yeah.

It's a quest.

[laughs] Right.

Well, it started in a funny way.

I grew up around Mennonites, who are, um, y- you know, if you haven't heard of Mennonites, they are, they like to make their own furniture.

They're devoted to simplicity, pacifism, but mostly, um, just being generally a bummer, and I, I love them for it.

But they started attending, um, in my hometown, many of them started attending Canada's largest megachurch that was devoted to the prosperity gospel, which is the belief that God wants to give you health, wealth, and happiness.

And I was 18 when I first was like, "Wait, what is the prosperity gospel? Why are they telling everyone that they have to only speak positive words or else bad things will happen to them? Um, and why are all my friends going?" [laughs] And so this began an, a research obsession that became me wandering around, interviewing televangelists for all of my 20s, and then I ended up writing, like, the first history of why people believe that happiness and ki- emotional self-mastery and, like, picture-perfect Christmas cards is-

But joy is, like, blowing up context and making it no context.

So Kate, the title of your book is Joyful Anyway, which suggests a kind of determination to enjoy life regardless of what is going on in it.

I totally agree that people have basic predispositions to either optimism or we worry about diseases of despair.

Some people seem very bouncy.

There's always bounce back.

Other people seem to fall all the way down.

But the anyway for me is... is there joy out there no matter what? And then no matter what is, is like such a bold claim.

Like, can it come to us in moments of undoing? Can it come to us when we have very little? And in so many of the stories that I've heard and things I've experienced, it's sometimes when we're in a very precarious situation that we're actually more likely to to experience joy kind of as a grace, a thing that happens to us.

Kate, you are nodding away.

Mm.

But I had this weird memory of when I was very sick, and it should've been the worst week of my entire life, and my, e- everything that I loved was falling away, and we thought I wouldn't live through the summer, and yet I had this weird little stretch where I felt strangely bubble-wrapped with, like, this c- this, this sticky feeling of, like, love.

And it felt like, how could all this beauty and almost, like, heart-aching love for the world, it's like falling in love-

Mm.

Like, we will just have seasons where we, we will come undone.

But when we do, weirdly, it's changed something in us where, well, if that can happen, maybe other things can happen, too.

And maybe it can open me up to greater love and a greater sense of caregiving that I couldn't have received otherwise, a greater capacity for surprise, in particular.

I think uncertainty sounds horrific for most people, but it can carve out these new places inside of us.

Mm.

Um, "Oh, I'm j- I'm manifesting this." And usually people mean, "I spoke positive words," or, "I thought positive things, and I brought it into being with my own power." And man, I, so I wrote the first history of the prosperity gospel.

It's a book called Blessed, and it took me 10 years to write.

And at that time there was not one single inkling that I had that, that prosperity gospel would get rebranded for an entirely new generation under-

Mm-hmm.

And to want to really, like- ... engage in the harder parts of reality, but require things that sustain us.

And so we can't just, we can't just be fragile and, and demand that everybody around us be toxically positive.

We need life-affirming, deeply soulful things that will make this life not just, like, worth living, but worth loving.

Kate, who remains a practicing Christian, then went on to write another five books, and in the midst of all this came news that nobody had written into any version of Kate's story.

story.I spent about five years in active treatment, and then really shockingly, the immunotherapy that I was on held, and this new wave of immunotherapy drugs has been really wonderful at keeping people like me in remission.

Nobody, like, knocked on my door and was like, "Hey, surprise.

Remember when you thought you were gonna die? [laughs] You're fine." But it's been a very kind of gradual unclenching my fists and being like, "Oh, okay, whatever life is going to be is gonna be not a tragedy." I have ongoing health problems where I have to, you know, keep going back to the hospital every four months, every six months, but, like, nothing like before.

But acknowledging that truth is not the same as surrendering to it.

I think the most interesting question, at least to me, is, like, what can we actually promise people during difficult times? Can there be something more durable than happiness, which is actually quite fragile? [gentle music] Joy is one of those things that have popped up again and again and again in hospital rooms, in times of devastation.

Joy is temporary wholeness.

Temporary wholeness.

And I think

playfulness is like a wonderful entry point into joy.

And if you don't mind, if I just like separate out what joy is from happiness is for sex, we don't get confused.

Yeah.

Happiness is part of that homeworky feeling that we have all the time because really happiness is a sense of ease.

It will feel relaxing.

It will feel like things are going our way, that maybe everyone got up on time and was in a good mood and had a good sleep and you got coffee and your song is playing.

When you were going through your cancer treatment, what was going through your mind to try to grab those little nuggets of gratitude, joy, hope, looking towards the future, all of those things?

Yeah.

But I, I think every now and then when you're worried that your thoughts are not ordered, whether it's mental illness, whether it's memory loss toward the ends of life, I think, I think some traditions when they can step in can be very comforting in saying, "We are not primarily our thought world." I mean, in the, in the Christian tradition, we would say you're carried by a God who holds your understanding, so your self-understanding is...

doesn't have to tell your story from beginning to end.

But what, what do you think a person should be thinking about in terms of a response?

Well, I do remember the first advice I ever got was from a nurse.

This is my first chemotherapy treatment.

I didn't really know what it would feel like.

I thought maybe I'd be in a target and just pass out.

Okay, so tho- if those are the joy blockers, what can one do to put one's self in the way of joy even when things are, you know, pretty deeply suboptimal?

One thing you can do, which is really also counterintuitive, is, um, service.

There's, like, a really strange alchemy between giving- And getting joy.

It doesn't feel like that's very good math.

It should be that when you give, you have less, because [laughs] that's subtraction, and you put in all this effort [laughs] and wow, somebody else reaped the benefits.

But there is, like, just wonderful studies about, like, just the incredible emotional lift and connectedness you get through community service, by deep friendships, by...

And then partly that's because joy is highly socially contagious.

I have or learned over time to tune into that and, and realize that what I'm really thirsting for, but in the chanda sense, is better and fuller relationships.

did not know much about the mystical art of judo, I think.

But Chelsea and I have been friends, friends, friends, like witness to my life.

But we started doing something in a pandemic, I think, because there was just so much walk and talk that I have never done with another person, which is that I tell her the full thought, including all of the ugly parts, because we talk every day.

The feeling that she can see all the sort of like inside out, all the seams of every shirt for me, I've let her see everything.

the uglier part of my embarrassment.

It's just pre-filter.

I don't think I've ever really gotten that far with somebody before.

Yeah.

Like some sort of.

I, I, I, you know, and my mom was really a role model for me, because she was the first woman tenured at her institution.

She became a professor of music at the University of Manitoba, and I watched what it cost her to grow up with virtually no expectation that she would go to college, and then to get a PhD, and then to try to create maternity policies, and to try to realize that there's not an institutional commitment to you as a woman even if you make commitments to it.

And I saw how fulfilling and difficult it could be to reach for things that would then be quite painful.

And so when I went on my own PhD journey, I really thought, oh, I'm just walking a path that's been paved before, not realizing of course that I would be the first [laughs] woman to get pregnant at my own institution.

I would have to make my own maternity policies, and it's still not a very common thing to be a woman in that field.

But it really wasn't until I was very sick and the immediate assumption was, well, if you only really have a year max to live, shouldn't you just drop everything and just be at home with your family? And that sounds like a wonderful thing If there is not this churn inside, this, like, desire to have a pure, separate space for one's own brain to create.

Right, they're not all joy.

[laughs]

Uh, but I, I do th- like, I do think that the feeling that there are more and more people with any kinda comfort could come a greater community, and that I feel beholden to, like financially, emotionally.

Like, how many causes should I care about?

Uh-huh

... tempting him along the way, and then there are some people who help and some people who hold you back, and, uh, but the, the bit that always got me is in the first, like, three sentences of the book, he leaves his family.

Like, he, he's, he's going on a journey, and in the journey he leaves something behind.

And in that version, I could never imagine any form of growth that wasn't o- o- just not even, like, oriented by my loves, but just me trying to, like, carry all my loves-

Kate Bowler, a practicing Christian herself and a historian, spent a decade going to services, getting to know parishioners and their prosperity gospel preachers, investigating the relationship between the two.

I have met dozens and dozens and dozens of them, and I think the answer, uh, it really varies.

I have, um, met people who are likely at this moment defrauding a widow in, in Florida, and I have, um, met people who were really concrete and practical about how they imagined that this v- could very materially, uh, transform people's lives.

I'm thinking of a church I went to, um, an inner-city church, and the, the megachurch pastor who had a, a Rolex and a mansion and a all that also simultaneously believed that all the things he was teaching his parishioners would be the reason why they get that job and they are that partner that creates a stable family home.

So i- in one version you could say, well, it just robs people of their money, promises them things, and can't possibly deliver.

In other versions, we call it the redempt and lift effect, which is that when you stabilize people's lives, that you s- encourage them to, um, network, save, take care of their home life, and are able to redeem and lift is what they describe.

And why do the parishioners, seeing how well off the preachers are, keep giving them money?

Well, in the minds of parishioners, it doesn't matter if the preacher is sincere or not.

Maybe you're so glad to escape the grief for a moment.

Well, I think that there's a relationship there all the time between what joy is telling us.

And I think that's why I think it is a story.

It's not just a nice feeling.

Because there's so many forces in the world that convince us there's no good reason to hope, there's no good reason to... to face the day with anything other than reading the headlines out loud in a sad voice and despair.

And joy, because it feels like temporary wholeness, will suddenly delight us by whatever is actually happening.

Like, for example...

What is with paragliding?

Oh, so we all

had the same parents, though.

Yeah.

Yeah, every, like, take it down all the notches is so key to my personality.

I mean,

one, Canadian.

I mean, can we get lower? Can we get

How did you know that you wanted—what was the moment? Was there an epiphanous, like, point? My

And I think we can do it.

[laughs] I give you, I'll give you two months.

But I think it's, I, I don't know.

I, that's why I really like thinking about, um, i- instead of wanting to be part of a culture that just wants to feel good, I wanna be part of a culture that like has a couple virtues it really cares about and is trying to like walk a path to it.

Like, like mutuality, like just even thinking of ourselves as belonging to other people, or like a virtue that really matters to me is, um, is like courage, is-

Yeah

...

it was.

So we were delighted to have a reason to invite her back, and tell us how with such a harrowing diagnosis and arduous recovery she could still find time for joy, and of course, for storytelling.

Joy is an amazing feeling because it feels like fireworks or like a sudden burst of helium goodness, but it's also very fleeting, and at the same time it tells us a story.

And that's what's, why it's different than just like a positive emotion.

Joy somehow bubbles up from inside of us and isn't just a nice feeling.

It somehow expresses to us that it is so good for us to be here.

It is so good for us to be alive.

And there's not a lot of feelings we get that are also a story, that also kind of convince us of something.

[laughs]

Okay.

[laughs] One of those endless optimizers.

And he had a very, like, riddle me this kind of presence.

And he was like, "Hey, everyone, kind of play my game.

Um, would you, would you follow this formula to have this perfect life?" And everybody at the table immediately waffled, which is...

It feels like it should be an automatic yes.

Like, give me the answer.

[laughs]

... what does ambition mean to you at this point in your life?

Yeah.

Well, my, I'm, I'm repping hard, and I have a sweatshirt on that says Middle Province, because I love the fact that when you're from there, you might feel like you're the only people from there.

And whenever you want to feel...

Like, if you wanna just try on humility, just live in the States, and then they say, "Where are you from?" And you say, "Manitoba." And then they say, "Where's Manitoba?" And you say, "It's north of North Dakota." [laughs] And then they say, "Where's North Dakota?" [laughs] So it just, it leaves you in a very unsettled place.

[laughs] And then I just always end up saying like, "West of Drake." And then they're like, "Okay, that's good.

I got it.

Right