Choose Joy ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
August 25, 2024
I spent the early part of the summer feeling badly stuck, pinned on the horns of a serious dilemma.
You see, I admire our president, President Joe Biden, and hold deep respect for the work that he has done to stabilize our country over the past four years. And I watched, with growing dismay, as he struggled in the presidential election polls, and as more and more people withdrew their support of his candidacy.
If nothing else, I am a loyal one.
I’m loyal, and I am also empathic, and so I felt genuine pain at what must have been a humiliating time for someone who I think deserved better. As a senior, I was offended by the blatant ageism I saw daily. I wonder, is that our last remaining acceptable prejudice?
And yet, the stakes were, and are, incredibly high as we move toward the election in November.
It’s rare that I cannot find my way to some sense of clarity when I confront an issue. I have my touchstones – our principles, our values, for starters. But I simply didn’t know what the right next step should be, and so there I sat, largely motionless. Waiting. Stuck. If you were to ask me how bad this was, I’d tell you that it was so bad, I stopped reading Heather Cox Richardson.
And then, on July 21, President Biden announced his decision to withdraw from the presidential race, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. I cried a bit at first, for President Biden and his courage and dignity. And then suddenly, it felt as though the sun came out from behind dark clouds.
Since that day, we’ve been hearing a lot about joy. And I’ve been thinking a lot about joy; where it emerges from, and how incredibly important it is for everyone to seek joy, and when we find it, to invite it in, to hitch our wagons to it, as Ralph Waldo Emerson might have said.
What I experienced this summer is how joy can emerge out of hope. I realized that what I was experiencing was a profound sense of hopelessness. This surprised me. I’ve read and written plenty about hope over the years, and have always believed that hope is always present. Often it has to change its form, and sometimes, as I recently discovered, it was buried too deep to hear. But with Emily Dickinson, I have always believed in the ‘thing with feathers…(that) sings the tune without the words – and never stops – at all…”. For a time, I couldn’t feel the fluttering or hear the tune.
But hope grew louder, started fluttering, and with it came joy.
As I mentioned a moment ago, joy came for me this summer on the wings of hope. But of course, joy is much more complicated than that, and so I returned to The Book of Joy to read again what two of our most venerated spiritual leaders had to say about it.
Joy, according to Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama, emerges out of connection and caring, out of empathy and compassion for others. And the book’s author, Douglas Abrams, pointed out that there is an important cycle at work: if we engage with one another and offer compassion and empathy to each other, it makes us more joyful. And when we are feeling more joyful, we have much more to offer others.
My musings about hope brought me back to author Rebecca Solnit’s enquiry in 2016, Hope in the Dark. In a recent new edition, Ms. Solnit wrote that she has discovered two strong affirmations that reinforce her belief in hope. One was noticing how much altruism and idealism exist all around us, if we just take the time and care to notice them. She spoke of relationships and family life, and participating in community organizations. “What we dream of is already present in the world,” she wrote. (Hope in the Dark, Loc. 223, Kindle edition.)
The second reinforcement for Ms. Solnit’s belief in hope came from her observation of how humans respond to natural disasters. She commented, “What startled me about the response to disaster was not the virtue…but the passionate joy that shined out from (stories told) by people who had barely survived. These people, who had lost everything, who were living in rubble or ruins, had found agency, meaning, community, immediacy in their work together with other survivors.” (Ibid.)
It’s been years now since I went on service trips to the Gulf Coast, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Reading this brought me back to that almost forgotten experience of joy: the warmth of new relationships with people who had lost everything, the bonding and belly laughs with other relief workers when we would get lost in the era before Google Maps, or when we made mistakes (and make mistakes we did. Do not ever ask me to measure sheetrock. Just don’t.)
And of course it was hard and hot and exhausting. There were tears and heartbreak and anger and frustration. And smells. And palmetto bugs. But somehow, it’s the joy I remember, and the love.
Rebecca Solnit went on to say, “Thus a disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible.”
Well, anything might be possible except teaching me how to cut sheetrock. But I am not who I was before Hurricane Katrina. That joy propelled me forward and continues to, today.
Rebecca Solnit again: “(It was) a revelation that we can pursue our ideals not out of diligence but because when they are realized there’s joy, and joy itself is an insurrectionary force against the dreariness and dullness and isolation of everyday life…The fruits of these inquiries made me more hopeful. But it’s important to emphasize that hope is only a beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it.” (Ibid.). In other words, “Do something!”
* * *
Joy as an insurrectionary force. This past week, watching the Democratic National Convention, the word ‘joy’ was mentioned often. The candidates keep being referred to as ‘joyful warriors.’ I couldn’t help but feel that we were seeing joy as resistance: a rejection of all the hate speech and all the fear and of the dire, apocryphal predictions that we have been subjected to for so long. It felt almost defiant, and it was fun to watch. There was the joy of diversity: of skin color, and abilities, and there was especially the joy of seeing people willing to wear their hearts on their sleeves.
My friends, this is what can happen when we choose joy. For there are always choices. Joy instead of hate, instead of fear. Of course we cannot choose everything that life will place in our path, but we can always choose how to respond. And for this we need one another. Offer compassion and love to others, and then absorb the compassion and love that will be reflected back to you. And grow in joy, and share that. As we saw this week, joy is contagious.
I’ll leave you with the words of Archbishop Tutu: (May you) ‘be a reservoir of joy, an oasis of peace, a pool of serenity that can ripple out to all those around you.’ (The Book of Joy, p. 63.)
And may you trust that joy will be yours in the morning.
May it be so.
Amen.
