We Must Risk Delight.
House Guests
(after Rumi)
When Joy comes to your house,
Welcome her.
Kiss her upturned face and give her a seat
At the head of your table.
When Joy takes you by the hand,
Dance with her.
Drink deeply from the wine she offers, and
Do not fear the lack of her tomorrow
Nor the arrival of her sister, Sorrow.
For she must and will come too, holding
Her own draught of tears
Close to her chest.
Do not deny her cup; rather,
Let Joy and Sorrow pass freely
Over the threshold of your heart.
When the wine and the tears flow as one,
There will, at last, be music.
The sound of singing will echo from a far-off valley:
All shall be well,
And all manner of things shall be well.
A month after his mother had passed away in April 2019, my husband and I attended a lectureship series at Pepperdine University. The theme of the conference was “Broken Vessels,” which was appropriate as our grief was fresh. Mercifully, there were sessions on lament and grappling with pain when God feels distant. It was a much-needed time of restoration and refreshment as we sensed God speaking to us in and through our sorrow.
On the final day of the conference, we decided to throw our sensible bedtime to the wind and attend a late evening session in the campus’s stained glass chapel. We did so solely because we were drawn to the session’s name: “Joy as an Act of Resistance in the Face of Death and Despair,” a title derived from Willie James Jennings’ theology of joy.
As with every session prior, I dutifully opened my journal to take copious notes on joy, as if I believed I could cultivate joy through sheer cognitive effort. Here is what I wrote:
Joy is a work of resistance, not just a feeling.
Joy refuses to allow the painful “givens” of our life to get the last word. It is the better, truer word.
Joy requires courage.
We must allow our bodies to be liberated for joy. . .
. . .Aaand that’s where the notes stop. Not content for their audience to merely theorize about what liberated bodies mean, our speakers insisted that we practice liberating our bodies until joy truly became embodied. At this point, the speakers announced that the rest of our session would, in fact, be a dance party.
<insert nervous laughter and wide eyed panic on the faces of good Christian white people>
At 9:30 p.m. on a Thursday evening in Malibu, my husband and I found ourselves dancing to “Uptown Funk”. . .in a chapel. It was terrifying, awkward, and exhilarating. With not much room to move between my seat and the pew in front of me, I closed my eyes and settled for the classic “wave-my-arms-as-if-I-have-tentacles-while-shuffling-right-and-left” as I began to move to the music. And you know what? Two songs of horribly prolonged public dancing later, it worked. I had joy in my body. I opened my eyes, grinning sideways at my husband doing something that looked like “the robot,” and just. kept. dancing.
* * *
There are some poems that move my body into a felt experience of both joy and sorrow. “A Brief for the Defense,” by Jack Gilbert is one of them. After a long list of the horrible ways humans suffer at the hands of one another, he writes:
“We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.”
Why must we risk delight, when it would be so much easier to point to the evidence of suffering all around us and give in to despair? Gilbert answers this in the next line:
“To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”
Why does joy require such courage? Because it is a work of resistance against the strongest forces of darkness. Allowing pain, brokenness, and evil to be the barometer of how joyful we ‘get’ to be is to agree that pain, brokenness, and evil have the final word. This is what Gilbert means by “praising the Devil.”
In the book of Revelation, we learn that Joy gets the last word at the end of all things:
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.” (Revelation 21:4)
Joy is the better, truer, final word. It is our hope and our future. True, deep and lasting joy does not deny the sorrow and hurting of this world, but rather defies it by looking evil in the eye and stubbornly holding fast to the promise that
“All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”(Julian of Norwich)
Although everything around us points to the contrary, the world will not end in fire or ice, but will begin again with Joy.
This Sunday evening I walked through the door of our home, weary with despair. I had spent the day with a loved one who was suffering, and my heart was breaking. I could not justify the goodness of God with the pain I had witnessed. My husband, seeing the look on my face, extended his arms for a hug. He held me for a little while, and then proceeded to drag sweep me around our kitchen, waltzing in time to a song only he knew as he hummed it under his breath.
In my sadness, I tried to extricate myself from this situation, pushing him away—but he only pulled me closer, insisting on joy. As my feet began to follow his, I learned anew what I had learned in that Malibu chapel two years ago:
Joy in the face of despair is not denial. It is defiance.
We must risk delight.