Life is painful. Period. But are there some aspects of our faith or our posture toward the world that can change how we experience it?

Father Richard Rohr is everyone’s favorite preacher of love. Love for each other. Love from God.

In this conversation, Kate and Richard talk about:

• How great love and great suffering can move us into a new stage of life
• The spirituality of subtraction
• Making room for mystery of joy and suffering
• His secret to staying present to God

Together, might we all learn when to hold on and when to let go.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

This episode originally aired November 2021.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’ve all seen the Christmas pageants where Mary is very sweet and demure and she is wearing a tablecloth pulled from the church dining hall. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how much impossible courage Mary had from the beginning. She finds out that she is pregnant in a completely scandalous way. But what does this divinely-prepared, teenage girl do when an angel crashes into her life with an announcement guaranteed to upend all her best plans? She sings.

But not a sweet lullaby. Mary belts out a protest song:

“He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52–53).

This is not the peace of spa music and chamomile tea. It’s the kind of peace that rearranges the furniture of the universe. That scatters the arrogant and topples the unjust. God’s peace doesn’t politely avoid conflict; it writes the soundtrack for a revolution.

And somehow, Mary holds all of this—terror, disruption, and hope—in her own body. She sings peace into a world that did not ask for it, but desperately needs it. And here we are, centuries later, humming along too.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The pandemic introduced many to living with uncertainty. But for some, uncertainty has always been their norm. Actress Nikki Deloach has starred in several Hallmark Christmas movies, but her life hasn’t matched the happily-ever-after plot-lines of her characters. Nikki’s dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of dementia and her son was diagnosed with congenital heart defects in utero… all in the same week. In this conversation, Kate and Nikki discuss how to live with constant uncertainty, how to stay open to both the terror and the beauty of living close to the edge, and how to make Christmas meaningful when hope is hard to come by.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

This episode originally aired December 2020.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.