by Rev. Angela Gorrell, PhD
The year 2020 wasn’t one to remember – in fact, for a lot of people it was an outright nightmare.
Amid such suffering, people need some joy.
As a scholar who has investigated the role of joy in day-to-day life, I believe that joy is an incredibly powerful companion during suffering.
This is more than academic work for me. In late 2016, less than a year after I was hired to be on a team researching joy at Yale University, three of my family members unexpectedly died within four weeks: my cousin’s husband Dustin at 30 by suicide, my sister’s son Mason at 22 of sudden cardiac arrest, and my dad, David, at 70 after years of opioid use.
While researching joy, I was speaking at funerals. In the following months, even reading about joy felt so absurd that I almost vowed to be anything but joyful.
Then, in what can only be ascribed to an act of grace, I became a part of a team leading a Bible study at a women’s prison. This experience changed my life. Many of these women had also wrestled with addiction and thoughts of suicide. They had suffered and were still suffering, and yet they showed a tremendous capacity for joy. Around the same time, I heard my friend, theologian Willie James Jennings, talk about “making pain productive, without justifying or glorifying suffering.” He described the work of joy in the midst of pain.
I wondered: Would the illuminations scholars shared with us about joy during the joy project stand the tests of my suffering and the profound suffering of others? What is joy in the face of suicide, addiction, and sudden loss? Can it be found?
I realized that if research on joy could not speak to the despair present in America today— especially that of addiction and suicide—then it was too shallow.
What I learned wasn’t simple or easy, because joy isn’t simple and it’s not always easy—at least not in those times when we feel its need most acutely. It turns out that joy has grit. It isn’t fluffy or ephemeral. Joy is what we feel deep in our bones when we realize and feel connected to what is good, beautiful, meaningful.
And joy unites us to one another.
For the month of January, I am sharing portions of what I learned during the joy project at Yale and excerpts from my book, The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found. I hope you will join me on this journey and together, we can become more open to joy as we enter a new year.
Rev. Angela Gorrell, Ph.D, is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary and the author of always on: practicing faith in a new media landscape and The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found, which is available for pre-order.
Views and opinions expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of Shepherd Heart.