Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.

Is there a word in any language for laugh-cry or cry-laugh or that thing you do when you couple the most tragic story in the world with something suddenly so ridiculously comic? I never read the book, “Waiting to exhale,” but I feel like I understood the sentiment of that title when listening to another author, Duke Divinity Professor Kate Bowler, tell her story to a sanctuary full (even the satellite viewing rooms at White Memorial Presbyterian Church were standing room only last Thursday night) packed with people.

Kate, until two years ago, had the perfect life, a new baby, a husband she loved, and her dream job, when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer at the age 35. "But I have a baby," she said when the oncologist broke the news.

As a documentarian, I have sat breathless in tight-quarter sound booths, with sweat running down the backs of my legs, conducting intimate interviews, knee to knee with my subject, and even though there were hundreds of people at White Memorial Thursday night, that is the effect Kate Bowler had on all of us. We were squeezed in tight. There was no way not to hear what she was telling us in such vivid technicolor.

No one would ever, ever, ever wish a diagnosis of stage four cancer on anyone, but especially on someone so young and full of promise, good and hard-working and “special.”

“That’s one of the big lessons,” Kate said softly at one point, “I’ve learned I’m not special.” (Millions, I'm confident, would argue with her.) Maybe Kate would have already had -- without this dire diagnosis -- all the words to unleash what she unleashes in the people who listen to her. I don’t know. I do know she would never, ever choose the path that led her here, but here she is and in who she is while she is here, she often has the uncanny (and also relieving) effect of undoing some internal lock in those who read and listen to her.

“One of the most embarrassing things is I needed so much help,” she confessed, adding, “and one of the most powerful things was having my community show up to give it.”

At some moment Thursday night—I had forgotten there were other people in the room until associate pastor Tracey Daniels carried a mike around the sanctuary for Q & A—I looked around. A mother my age, herself with cancer (though in remission), stood up to ask Ms. Bowler about the role of vocation in helping her reengage with the present and the future. A 12 year old girl still home recovering from a bone marrow transplant, brought levity saying she understood Kate’s desire to allow herself the simple pleasure of essential oils and the normalcy of standing in the pantry in one's pajamas looking for Coke. An older gentleman pressed Kate for her most comforting authors—anyone, theologian or not, he said, and then asked again. One sensed he himself was in need of some measure of comfort.

Who, in that sanctuary as I looked around, wasn’t bringing their own sorrows, their own experience of, as Kate so articulately offered, a “Before moment and living with the After?” I brought mine. The two friends I came with brought theirs.

The quilt is big, I thought, looking out over the pews. But here we all were, packed in tight, finding comfort in being together as we sat with the uncomfortable that Kate offered, “Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”