What If Prayer Isn’t What You Think It Is? with Malcolm Guite

Everything Happens with Kate Bowler

Kate Bowler

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2026

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if Lent isn’t about giving something up, but about learning how to sit with what’s already gone? In this episode, Kate talks with poet, priest, and theologian Malcolm Guite about the kind of faith that can hold contradiction—the yes and the no, belief and doubt, beauty and sorrow. Malcolm, a Life Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge and author of Sounding the Seasons and Lifting the Veil, reflects on prayer as attention, poetry as a language spacious enough for ambivalence, and why faith might need less forced resolution and more honesty. SHOW NOTES Sounding the Seasons by Malcolm Guite Lifting the Veil by Malcolm Guite Seamus Heaney, Station Island George Herbert, “Prayer” Gerard Manley Hopkins, the “terrible sonnets” (including “No worst, there is none”) and The Wreck of the Deutschland T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets C.S. Lewis, “Blue Spells and Flowered Spheres” Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway Watch the live conversation on YouTube Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, it's Julia Louis Dreyfus. I'm back with a new season of Wiser Than Me,
0:08.6	the show where I sit down with remarkable older women and soak up their stories, their humor,
0:15.8	and their hard-earned wisdom. Every conversation leaves me a little smarter and definitely more inspired. And yes,
0:23.6	I'm still calling my 91-year-old mom, Judy, to get her take on it all. Wiser than me from
0:30.8	Lemonade of Media is out now, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:40.6	Hey, it's me, Steve Burns, and I'm so glad you're here because you and I go way back, right?
0:46.4	Yeah.
0:47.1	And look at us now.
0:48.3	Like, we're all grown up.
0:49.4	We've got this new podcast where we talk about all this grown-up stuff and there's special guests like
0:54.2	Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Nye but for the most part it's about you mean it's always been about
1:00.7	you from Lemonada Media alive with Steve Burns is coming September 17th wherever you get your
1:06.3	podcasts or you can watch every episode on YouTube.
1:10.7	Hey friends it's Kate.
1:12.2	I just want to tell you some big news.
1:14.2	I've got a new book coming out.
1:16.1	It's called Joyful Anyway.
1:18.1	And it's going to be out in the world on April 7, 26.
1:21.9	And it's available now for pre-order.
1:25.7	It's a book about what joy really is, not this glossy version we're
1:31.5	sold, but the real surprising kind that can coexist with our pain, our questions, and our beautiful
1:39.1	ordinary lives. So if you've ever wondered whether joy is still possible for you, even now, this book is my
	...

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