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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
No Cure for Being Human summary
Kate Bowler
(and Other Truths I Need to Hear)
32 mins
Table of Contents
No Cure for Being Human
Summary of 8 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 8
A meltdown in the hospital gift shop.
As a rule, hospital gift shops are stocked with scrupulously inoffensive wares. Think tasteful potted plants, greeting cards with euphemistic messages about “recovery,” and books of the uplifting, spiritual variety.
So why is Kate Bowler standing in the gift shop of a North Carolina hospital, wearing a baggy cotton hospital gown and trailing her IV drip behind her, surrounded by a pile of books she has plucked from the shop’s shelves? And why is she, in no uncertain terms, telling the nonplussed teenage shop assistant that these books are inappropriate – no, outright offensive – reading material for a hospital gift shop?
The reason Kate is in the hospital is written clearly on her chart. After suffering through months of unexplained abdominal pain, nausea, and dramatic weight loss, Kate has at long last been diagnosed – with cancer. And it’s a particularly horrible form of cancer: Kate has stage four colon cancer. Her colon is riddled with tumors that have spread to her liver. The survival rate for this scenario is hardly promising, at 14 percent. And even that word, survival, is a bit of a misnomer; of the fourteen percent who do “survive,” most only live another two years. Despite her young age and her – until now – good health, Kate is living on borrowed time.
The reason she’s causing a scene in the hospital gift shop isn’t so immediately apparent. But if we take a look at the books she’s pulled from the shelves, it all starts to come into focus. They’re all Christian best-sellers, and they’re mostly written by those who preach the prosperity gospel.
The prosperity gospel teaches that if you serve God faithfully, you’ll reap the rewards: health, wealth, and happiness. This sounds simple enough, but scratch the surface of this superficially uplifting ideology and you’ll find a more sinister subtext. If God rewards those who have faith in Him, then those who suffer must have brought it upon themselves. If you’re poor, or sad, or sick, the thinking goes, your faith must be lacking. If you have stage four colon cancer, the thinking goes, then it’s your fault.
Kate’s a Christian herself, but she’s always found the teachings of the prosperity gospel antithetical to her own open-hearted, empathic, and accepting form of Christianity. And as a professor of the history of Christianity in North America, she’s spent a lot of time critiquing not just the prosperity gospel, but the broader industries of wellness and self-help that peddle the same essential idea: that, through a series of choices and behaviors, you can not only control your life, you can perfect it. You can avoid pain and suffering and misfortune altogether. Living your “best life” is within your grasp.
Now, of course, her issue with the idea of the best life isn’t purely academic. It’s personal.
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What is No Cure for Being Human about?
No Cure for Being Human (2021) is the thoughtful chronicle of Kate Bowler’s attempts to make the most of her life after a brutal cancer diagnosis at only 35. Part memoir, part critique of the widespread obsession with positivity, No Cure for Being Human is a poignant dispatch from the fragile border between life and death.
Who should read No Cure for Being Human?
- Those who’ve supporting a loved one through a serious diagnosis, or have received one themselves
- Critics of the prosperity gospel and impeccably curated Instagram feeds
- Those grappling with the idea that they, too, might be incurably human
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