“Despair is the lie that it’s only me.”
It isn’t only you. It never was.
By Bobbi Eggers
Last Saturday, more than 300 women walked into Christ Church for a day we had been planning for months, co-chaired by Carrie Sponheimer and Henley Cox, with Ginny Losito as a copilot. By the time Kate Bowler finished speaking, most of us were somewhere between tears and laughter — which, it turns out, is exactly where she intended to take us.
Women came from all over lower Fairfield County and some from Utah and New Hampshire, filling the Christ Church historic campus from morning to afternoon, moving through seminars led by some of the most gifted thought leaders we have ever assembled.
The Keynote Speaker, Kate Bowler, is a Duke University professor, a three-time New York Times bestselling author, and a stage-four cancer survivor who has spent a decade trying to understand something most of us spend our whole lives avoiding: what it actually means to live joyfully in the face of everything that cannot be fixed. Her newest book, Joyful, Anyway, makes a case that joy and suffering are not opposites — they are, in fact, constant companions. Joy isn’t something you manufacture with a vision board or a morning routine. It finds you, she argues, at the edge Backyard Ticks with Pathogens are Surging Here, Right Now of your expectations, when life has interrupted all your best-laid plans.
What none of us expected was how funny she is. Or how unflinching.
Henley Cox, our conference co-chair, conducted the keynote interview — and I want to say something about Henley, because she deserves it. She didn’t ask the safe questions. She asked the ones we were all sitting there hoping someone would ask. The result was a conversation that felt less like a keynote and more like two friends who have both been through the fire, figuring it out together.
Kate spoke about the particular weight of carrying a wound that others don’t fully see or believe. “Part of our anger,” she said, “is we don’t believe ourselves — we don’t believe it was as bad as it was.” Something shifted in the room when she said that. You could feel it.
She talked about the longing for a witness — someone who doesn’t look away. “When we have a witness who sees the wound, who touches the wound and cares,” she said, “we can let it untie the knots.” She talked about the cost of sorrow when it becomes the only home you know. “I needed to find joy in the actual life I have. Sorrow was the only place I knew how to be. Every time I returned, it cost me more.”
And she said something about despair that I have been thinking about ever since: “Despair is the lie that it’s only me.”
It isn’t only you. It never was.
That is, in many ways, the whole point of a day like this one. Three hundred women, from different corners of this community, all carrying something. All showing up anyway. All discovering — in a lecture, a workshop, a conversation over lunch, a sound bath in a side chapel, a flower arrangement made from whatever was right in front of them — that joy is not the reward at the end of the hard thing. It is available right now, in the middle of it.
Dr. Betsy Holmberg, a Psychologist, spoke about narcissism and what the brain reveals about prayer and presence. Elizabeth Fitts, PhD, led an introduction to meditation. The Rev. Dr. Heather Wright spoke on the legacy we leave behind. Iris Eplan, LMSW, led a sound bath. Melissa Murphy, MA, CMHC, LPC, talked about strengthening our heart and renewing our strength. Pam Reimers and Eugenie Pavlic led women in creating floral plantings. Jessica Wisnieski, LCSW, spoke on reclaiming our attention span by unplugging. Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, PhD, spoke on uncovering a biblical discovery that shook the scholarly world. Julie Jason, JD, LLM, spoke on financial planning.
We are already planning next year. We hope you’ll be there.
Autographed copies of Kate Bowler’s new book, Joyful Anyway, are available at Dogwood Books dogwoodbooksandgifts.com inside Christ Church Greenwich, 254 East Putnam Ave., Greenwich, CT (203) 869-9030.
For more information about the Women’s Conference and other events at Christ Church Greenwich, visit christchurchgreenwich.org
