Becoming Different in the World

The source of this article is On Being, which is “a public radio conversation and podcast, a Webby Award-winning website, publisher and public event convener.  Hosted by Krista Tippett, it examines what it calls the, ‘animating questions at the center of human life:  What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live?'” (Wikipedia)

PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA (host of Poetry Unbound)

A couple of years ago, I visited a friend who was seriously ill in hospital. It was winter, in Glasgow. I’d walked through rain and sleet and cutting northern winds to get there.

At his bed in the ward, we chatted about this and that: an upcoming election, how awful the phone reception was in the hospital, the weather, the reasons I’d come to Glasgow.

The conversation was loving, and deeply affectionate. His health was in such a precarious place that questions about his future hung in an awful balance. He had been due to give a lecture on art and theology but — because of his illness — the lecture had been postponed. “For a year” he said pointedly, eyes bright, smiling at me, both of us crying. I’d written essays about the metaphysics of time in university, but there’s nothing like talking about time with a dying friend to reorient you to how multi-faced time is. “Anyway,” he said, “who’ll win the election?”

This week’s conversation is the first in a new series that we are offering. Called “The Future of Hope,” these conversations see former guests of On Being interviewing someone of their own choosing, engaging in conversations about what gives us hope, what causes despair, and how we see the human condition. Our host for this week is journalist and writer Wajahat Ali. He chose to interview his friend, the historian and theologian Kate Bowler.

Theirs is a friendship deepened over times of tremendous difficulty. Kate has been living with cancer for many years now, and Waj’s daughter Nusayba contracted liver cancer when she was barely three years old. In this hour — an hour of laughter, tears, emotion, unknowing, and wisdom — they talk about time, hope, uncertainty, faith, and despair. “We try so hard to save ourselves from future pain by preparing,” Kate says, and then goes on to describe different experiences of time that gather around cancer: you live in the future making all the plans; or you live in the past.  She doesn’t prescribe which the “right” time is.  A friend of Kate’s described how cancer brings together “tragic time” and “ordinary time,” where you just try to continue on with your own diagnosis as the world trundles on. Over and over in this conversation, both Kate and Waj know that anything can happen – so many of us have been reminded of this through the pandemic – and therefore the idea that there’s a fixed prescription of how to respond is an illusion.

Both Kate Bowler and Wajahat Ali are people of faith – Kate is an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke; and Wajahat has written and spoken about his Muslim faith.  For both of them, their faith traditions inform their relationship with time, as well as their understanding of community, brokenness, hope, and love.  Each brings a critique of a capitalist approach to time, where everything moves forward and gets wealthier and better.  This conversation will move you deeply by the friendship that is clearly so important to both of them; it is also a conversation that incorporates the crushing experience of medical debt. Asked what brings her despair, Kate speaks about how “people are crushed, not just by tragedy, but by a punitive financial system that preys on the weak.”  It is a conversation where wisdom is matched by straight talk.

In all this talk about time, I’m aware that to use the word “timeless” is a stretch.  But I’ll use it nevertheless.  The conversation between Kate and Waj is timeless.  They each have lived through experiences that face them with the radical uncertainty that underpins our lives, and from this point of view, they shape language about work, about art, about vocation, about taking the trash out, about the ordinary mundanity, about emotion, about friendships, about religion, and about hope.  We are so moved to share this conversation with you.

Wajahat Ali and his guest Kate Bowler offer no quick or singular answers; instead, through friendship, honesty, integrity, and intelligence, they carve a place of encounter and wisdom.  It is from this rich space that we wish the same for you, in all the possibilities you live with, in all the things you carry.