By Laura Pennock
Scripture Text 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.
Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.
Is There Joy Before Us?
I don’t know about you, but my last few weeks have been fueled by sugar and caffeine. I don’t know what to make of the world I am living in. As of right now, nothing has changed, and everything has. We’ve seen previews of this freakshow before, so we can be certain that things are going to get bad. I live in dread of the next few years, where I anticipate Joy, Hope, Love, and Peace are going to become scarce, precious things. I sat in the ballet recently and reflected on what it is going to look like next year and the year after that.
I thought about Europe in WWII. People attended cocktail parties, ballets, symphonies, went to work, and lived their lives while the world burned around them. That generation is largely gone now, and they didn’t really exist here in the United States at all. Our grandparents and great grandparents sent sons and brothers over there, but didn’t live with the destruction in their homes. When I went to Europe a year and half ago, I was struck by how little perspective American’s have.
Embrace Joy Everywhere
We have, however, been in this economic climate before, but few remember because history is not really our strong suit. The 1920’s brought us the Great Depression of the 1930’s, but how many of us here even have people in our lives who could recount those days? Who could tell us how we ended up there and, more importantly, how we managed to find our way out?
We are at the starting line of a whole lot of oppression that will land on a whole lot of people. We are going to become exhausted with the resistance and it will be tempting to just give up and roll over, but we do have resources and histories to guide us.
Our BIPOC and Queer brothers and sisters have laughed, and danced, and sang; made art and community even as they faced genocide, terrorism, and opposition. They have a great deal to teach us, the privileged, previously untouched. We should seek and heed their advice with humility, gratitude, and respect as we learn to navigate paths that are far too familiar to them.
Nothing will get better if we operate from a place of despair.
That’s why we need to invite, create, practice, embrace joy everywhere and at all times. “Joy is an act of resistance” was first used as the title of a poem by Toi Derricotte.
Authoritarian regimes often ban sources and forms of joy. Music, dancing, art, various forms of celebration and self expression.
Examples very close to home illustrate how this happens.
Only a few animal species, like us, celebrate. Ethnologists have observed chimpanzees celebrating the arrival of a caretaker delivering a prized food to their enclosures. The first to spot the caretaker will begin hooting loudly and the rest of the group will join in. They hug and kiss each other and display a marked increase in friendly body contact. The whole community sits down to enjoy the feast, with even the lowest ranking chimps getting to enjoy the treat. Chimpanzees are extremely hierarchical and these celebrations disrupt the typical hierarchy.
Elephants will celebrate when the herd is reunited after a separation, stamping around, peeing, and trumpeting with their trunks.
We should do that – stamp around, and pee, and trumpet.
Wolves howl together after a hunt. We should do that too. Howl together.
Singing together synchronizes a group’s heartrates; musicians playing together can have brain waves line up, any sort of communal rhythmic forms of entertainment connect us on a physical level. We cannot consciously identify that these things are happening but we have all experienced that sense of wellbeing and connection that forms even among a group of strangers on a dance floor.
Rigidity and control evaporate in the face of celebration. Communal joy provides a kind of glue that unifies a group. A unified populace is harder to dominate.
Joy Forms a Bridge
Joy is a feral creature. It will stalk you through the darkness and leap on you in unexpected places and times. It will twirl you around and lead you in a wild dance and cause you to laugh so hard tears roll down your face.
Joy is a manifestation of abundance while the language of oppression is one of scarcity and fear.
Joy disarms. It takes something that might be threatening such as difference or otherness and makes it less so. Pride parades and celebrations blur the lines between party and protest. It’s really hard to be angry and suspicious when surrounded by people laughing, dressed in all shades of color, and having fun.
Audre Lorde said, “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference” The quickest way to bridge cultural gaps is to share in others’ cultural and traditional celebrations.
Engage in the work; do what you can, where you can. Do not let the fact that you cannot save the entire world drown you.
Deal gently with those who have chosen this dystopia and then find themselves betrayed. While I don’t believe we have to shield them from the learning opportunity that is the consequences of their choices, it will likely not be useful to mock them either. We will not find our way back to our highest and holiest ideals by being purveyors of the malice that they’ve been captured by.
When the work becomes too much and despair leaves you hollowed out, slow down and walk more deliberately through life for a spell; give thanks for crunchy fall leaves, for the astonishing landscapes in which we live, for family who choose us, for new life wherever we find it.
Joy Like Glitter
For this is the season we anticipate New Life writ large. Light coming into darkness.
I drove an overnight delivery truck a couple of nights a week from Columbus Ohio to Harrisburg Pennsylvania when we first moved to Ohio. Deep into one night on a particularly dark stretch of turnpike, I glanced out the window of my truck and I saw a single house lit with electric candles in each window. I was startled by the wave of relief that washed over me. I had not expected how welcome the sight of this little house with those beacons in the windows in that darkness could be because I knew there were businesses and homes all along the way – just off the exits. In that moment, I had some sense of how long ago people would feel at coming upon a small flame that said, “you’re no longer alone.” Of how powerful the metaphor of Light was. Of how I could be unexpectedly seized by joy over something so small and so simple.
It is time . . .
It is time to take every single opportunity to put on our crowns and allow ourselves to be swept away by Joy, to sing, to laugh, and to celebrate every little thing; to cover ourselves in Joy like glitter – to wear it openly and get it all over anyone who comes near us. Celebration is subversive to authoritarianism.
Solidarity, Brothers and Sisters, solidarity. Amen.
