Inciting Joy
READING ~ Joy by Terri Pahucki
I have been wondering
what the morning glories
know. Is it envy
that compels these vines
to strangle other flowers
arising in their path?Or perhaps self-preservation,
to climb these walls, forsaking
humbler beings, winding
greedy stems around the trellis
in their hungry pursuit of light.Still, every morning,
basking in their spiral shadows,
I want to believe it is something morethis fevered yearning
to open purple flowers,
yield bold-throated Glorias
to the sun,
and in the blaze of afternoon
curl petals softly into shyness.And every morning, I plead
with the dew-moist buds
to know their secret joy:
to open and close without holding,
to surrender all to light,
to sing
I am completely yours
over and over again.
READING ~ from Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.
(Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy (pp. 9-10). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.)
SERMON ~”Inciting Joy!” ~ Rev. Margaret Beckman
Let’s begin with a question.
Why does experiencing joy feel like sacrilege?
I’ll never forget a woman at a reading in a public library in April of 2016 in Claremont, California—one of those weird, beautifully ugly sixties California buildings; it was a rancher of a library, maybe with some faux stone on the front, maybe white brick—I suspect she was in her late sixties or early seventies. And as she asked me to inscribe Catalog, she was crying, just a little, not very able to talk. And she said, quietly, wiping her face, “I didn’t know you could write about joy.”
Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy (p. 1). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.
Can we write about joy?
Are we permitted to experience joy or to be joyful?
When our children are murdered in their classrooms,
When worshippers are murdered in their temple or sanctuary,
When the rain just keeps falling and millions are flooded out of their homes,
When wildfires consume millions of acres of forests, farms, and towns,
When white Christian nationalists try to outlaw and erase the very existence of non-heterosexual, non-binary people,
When families are being torn apart by religious and political differences that have become so polarized that civil conversation and a shared meal are impossible,
When police shoot, and often kill, Black people for the sole reason that they claim to be afraid of Black people,
When politicians regard their personal preferences and religious ideologies as more important than the good of the country and superior to the very lives of their constituents,
When thousands of people all across the globe hunger and thirst while others delight in their own selfishness and greed,
In short, or long,
When there is so much sorrow and suffering and
When the world is going to hell in a hand basket,
(This list could go on and on and on and get longer every day)
How can we speak of joy – let alone strive to incite joy and be incited by joy at every opportunity?
How can we?
How can we speak of joy in the presence of so much sorrow, sadness, and suffering?
Well, how can we not?
Life is not one thing to the exclusion of all other things – not generally and not in any given moment.
Sadness and suffering come unbidden and can take up residence in our soul. We don’t question whether it is ok to speak of suffering when life is full of joy. We don’t regard it as sacrilege to admit the power of sorrow and talk about it when it comes to us.
Well, joy comes too. Somehow, we get to convincing ourselves that joy is undeserved and needs to be held at a distance because life’s sorrow or horror are somehow more authentic.
We allow sorrow a prized place.
We banish joy to the far country.
No wonder we can be miserable people.
Life is not one thing to the exclusion of all other things – not generally and not in any given moment.
Joy and sorrow are not mutually exclusive – they are companions.
Joy is not separate from the rest of life; it is life.
Joy is not separate from pain; it lives alongside pain.
Ross Gay says it like this:
But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay “Joy” calls “the intolerable,” for its existence?
Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy (p. 4). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.
So, we know that joy and sorrow companion us through our days.
Sorrows will always get our attention.
Perhaps we could pay a little more attention to joy.
And perhaps we don’t need to separate joy from all the painful things in this world and in our lives.
Without moments of joy, life’s pain would render us too broken to go on.
Let’s think of some examples of joy breaking into life – when we might not expect it.
I think of all the ways that people express and experience pain and sadness. One way is our story telling.
Two brothers are at the bedside of their father as he lay dying. Tears are streaming down the cheeks of both brothers as they tell their father they love him and will miss him.
The next moment, one brother remembers their father’s favorite joke and he repeats aloud just the first line of the joke and soon both brothers are collapsed and heaving with laughter, tears streaming down their faces. The joy they share in that moment is every bit as powerful as the sadness.
It carries them through the pain of losing their father.
A teenager is in the emergency department of the hospital with a possible broken leg following a pretty serious wipeout at the skateboard park. He is with his buddy and through the pain, he relives the jump that he didn’t quite master and both friends are filled with the sheer joy of skating and flying on air when they take a jump.
What I’m saying is that not only is it ok to feel joy alongside pain, it is life-affirming to welcome joy and give it its rightful honored place in our lives.
Here’s another way of thinking about joy in our lives.
The Soul Matters theme for April has been The Path of Resistance.
We might not connect joy with resistance, but perhaps we ought to.
As we’ve noted – our world is a hot mess.
It is so easy to become discouraged.
It is easy to become angry, resentful, sad, judgmental, and/or cynical in the presence of this hot mess.
Joy can be a life-affirming way to resist the pull of despair and discouragement.
Think about it. We can say a big cosmic “NO” to giving up on this world and the people who make this world miserable.
Seeing and feeling and sharing the joy in life is not denial of the pain of the world; it is the affirmation that pain does not have the strongest or last word. Without joy, how do we carry on? Without joy, how do we make sense of the pain or devote ourselves to the thousands of relief and justice efforts in which we engage? Joy is a huge “NO” to the power of the things that diminish and devalue life.
Jane Park is a contributing reporter for the Yale News. In January of this year, she wrote of her experience as an Asian American in the wake of hate crimes and murders directed at Asian Americans.
When sorrow seems to be omnipresent and suffering incessant, it often feels necessary for us to live as containers of grief: to withhold the laughter that the departed can no longer express, to shed continual tears for those who we’ve permanently lost. This only damns us to eternal mourning, creating ghosts out of our own selves who are unable to escape the past. In striving for justice, both for those who are with us and those who are not, we must imagine and actualize a future without violence. This vision is realized through our capacity to experience joy — to define Asian/American experiences as more than just the habitual and persistent violence committed to Asian bodies. In a world where violence seems ceaseless, we must ensure that this cycle of grief is not. …..
Our existence is not a self-fulfilling prophecy of continued violence and oppression. We are infinitely more than the hate that mars our bodies and breaks our skin. As I dance with my Asian grandparents and make rice cake soups with my mom, I am actively creating and shaping my definition of the Asian/American experience. To me, joy is a radical resistance.
After the AASA (Asian American Students Alliance) debrief, a few of us gathered in the kitchen to cook homemade dinner for Lunar New Year celebrations. As the smell of steamed dumplings and sound of lively conversation filled the kitchen of the AACC, I held the victims of Monterey Park close to my heart, with joy, sorrow and resistance.
JANE PARK (contributing reporter for Yale News – January 2023)
Joy is radical resistance that allows us a break from the grip of all that makes our world a hot mess. Because of joy, we can go on to see a different world – perhaps a world free of the violence of hate and fear.
Consider this – when we can share joy, perhaps we can share our humanity with those like us and those unlike us. I don’t know for sure. I don’t want to preach stupid platitudes that make you all shake your heads and wonder if my head is buried too deep in the sand of denial and naivete.
But, I do want to consider whether joy might have a place in bringing people together.
Ross Gay wrote his book – Inciting Joy – with the thought that this might be true. I too want to think that it might be true.
…what does joy incite?—I should say, I have a hunch, and it’s why I think this discussion of joy is so important. My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.
Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy (pp. 9-10). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.
Finally, he says
Joy …. reminds us, again and again, that we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so. Which we must practice, and study, and sing, and story, and dream, and celebrate. Belonging to each other as though our lives depended on it.
Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy (p. 245). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.
Belonging to each other as though our lives depend on it. …. Because our lives may very well depend on it.
Inciting joy and being incited by joy – whenever, wherever, however it comes is an act that resists the deep hole of pain and grief.
Inciting joy and being incited by joy – whenever, wherever, however it comes is an act of life and faith and hope.
I want to leave you with words of the 14th century Persian poet known as Hafiz.
I sometimes forget
that I was created for Joy.
My mind is too busy.
My Heart is too heavy
for me to remember
that I have been
called to dance
the Sacred dance of life.
I was created to smile
To Love
To be lifted up
And to lift others up.
O’ Sacred One
Untangle my feet
from all that ensnares.
Free my soul.
That we might
Dance
and that our dancing
might be contagious.
Blessed Be. I Love You. Amen.
