Shielding the Joyous
Photo by Per-Ake Adolfsson on Unsplash
Wonder Anew is a new recurring section of the Church Anew blog, intended for spiritually curious readers who want to explore the Christian faith with honesty, depth, and imagination.
In Philippians 4, St. Paul writes to the pastor, Lydia, and her congregation in Philippi: Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice! You’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes. It’s hard to see this verse without a shiplap border, a saccharine promise of happiness being the measure of faithfulness.
But here’s the rub: Paul writes these words from prison. These are not commandments to perform a particular kind of spirituality that brushes off the realities of a world rife with pain. This is a proclamation from the pit of hell that says: hell has no power here anymore.
I need this kind of rebellious joy. I suspect you do, too.
And, as May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I think I need to be honest that I need this kind of joy more than many might expect. I love to tease my hair to Dolly Parton heights and, if you’ve ever seen a video I’ve made on the internet, it’s likely because I was bedazzling church vestments or doing a ridiculous dance trend. I deliberately try to share that my faith is a source of joy, such that I even named the church that began in my living room Jubilee, which comes from Leviticus 25 and God’s commandment for justice that is rooted in God’s joy. Our tagline for the church comes from a prayer we say in my tradition: shield the joyous. I don’t like calling joy my “brand”? But, if we’re being crass, sure: joy is my brand.
When I was on my book tour for God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, the number one question I was asked was some version of: how do we have joy when the world is falling apart? And the second, like unto it, are you always this joyful?
No, babes. I have many bad days. I had terrible postpartum OCD and rage. I live with OCD all the time, actually, so postpartum just turned the volume up on truly horrendous intrusive thoughts and desires to sink into somewhere quiet, forever. Four people in my family died suddenly and violently a decade ago. That is not the kind of thing you wake up from one day like it never happened. You just learn to live a life that accommodates the hole in your heart you never wanted to have.
Like a lot of things with mental health, I think it’s easy for us to bypass the confession of struggle and see only the picture of put-togetherness. The temptation to compare our insides with someone else’s outside is strong. I am careful to not always share the tender insides of my life with an often cruel and heartless internet or world.
But it is actually knowing how much despair can choke me that leads me to know how much we need the joy of God to be our strength (Nehemiah 8). Notice: Nehemiah talks about the joy of God being our strength. Not joy I have manufactured for myself through consumerism (buying things that promise happiness), obedience to oppression (follow these rules and you’ll be happy and if not, it’s because you aren’t following them closely enough), or through invulnerability (only feeling happiness because any other emotion is a threat, the devil, or unable to coexist with joy).
And God’s joy is something we can know even when we have no joy for ourselves. Joy is a practice. A spiritual discipline. Joy is seeking the abundance of God in the face of the world’s scarcity.
When I feel the most joyless is when it is most essential for me to practice joy, to seek out this Godly abundance. Not to disassociate. Not to demean my own suffering or the realities that have brought me low. But because God calls — compels — us to remember: the things that speak death over us don’t get the last word.
Which includes us. And the cruel, intrusive thoughts that tell us we aren’t worthy, we should sink down, or seduce us with the idea that oblivion might be better. I do not mean to add to the shaming that can come with naming we are struggling, mainly because I do not think it is a shame to struggle with mental health. Anguish is honestly the sensible response to the world right now.
We are inundated with more suffering, more demands, and more hopeless statistics than our hunter-gatherer nervous systems were ever designed to handle. We scroll on our phones and see the suffering of children in detention facilities, and the suffering of children in Iran, and the fear-mongering of politicians and family members alike proclaiming these children deserve this suffering for our own illusion of safety, to then contemplating cooking dinner — only to be cruelly reminded milk is now $8 a gallon and we don’t have enough gas to go to the store. The sensible response to this is anguish.
But our God is not a sensible God. If She were, She wouldn’t have cast the planets in their courses, woven the wings of a butterfly, or knelt down in the dust of the earth and sculpted human beings from clay. If God were a sensible God, Jesus would never have been willing to die, lynched like an enslaved person stepping out of line. If God were a sensible God, Jesus would not have sauntered out of that tomb on that third day, the world seemingly still rife with empire power but entirely remade. He would not have stretched out his hands to Mary Magdalene and called her by name.
These are not the sensible responses to the anguish of the human condition. They are divine responses to the power of love in all places and all times despite everything that wants to kill it.
This is why I pray fervently for God to shield the joyous. This is why I choose to laugh at the devil, to seek a raucous and beautiful life despite knowing — all too well — how precarious life is. There have been times I have made a home in the pit of despair because it was the only shelter I knew. There, the walls were familiar and dim and cold, but that was what I had come to expect. I couldn’t be surprised by the vulnerability of love or life or the absurdity of rain falling when the sun is still shining when I was ensconced in the pit.
But that is not really life, and I refuse — I refuse — to let death take one more thing from me. Including the very power it proclaims it holds over my mind.
Which is why, I think, Paul says in the next line in that passage in Philippians: “Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus” (CEB). A man in prison is not going to be foolish enough to promise bodily safety in a violent world. But a man who has been set free of the prisons our minds can make of fear and anguish knows — no prison in our minds, or in the world, can hold back our God’s joy. And so we who long for that freedom can pray: shield the joyous.
