Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash
It’s the seemingly strangest things that bring the tears; I was running on the treadmill when a kind of silly, “Millennial Hopecore” sort of song came on my mix and — thwump — there I was, weeping, lifting my hands to God — before I remembered I was not in church, but at the gym. I tried to mask my praise hands as stretches, except the woman two machines down from me was looking. She caught my eye and smiled.
We had woken up in a blue state.
I know, I know: politicians are not saviors. Only God is on the throne. I studied Hauerwas, rather extensively and with the man himself, in point of fact. I know the expected etiquette we (white) mainline Christians have heard for the better part of the last few decades. Yes, Jesus was political, but he was not partisan. I know.
But I am a lifelong Southerner who has lived in Texas for the last decade. I have been pregnant three times under the Texas so-called “Heartbeat Bill.” Twice, I have delivered children; that third pregnancy bled out of me. I spent the early days of my miscarriage wondering if I went to the hospital whether I might come out in handcuffs.
I have kept vigil with a parishioner whose water broke at 20 weeks pregnant with a much-desired baby. Despite there being no chance for her baby to survive — and every necessity to act to save her life, and her future fertility — I waited with her and husband for days while she slowly went septic. She nearly died on the table.
I have prayed for my parishioners who are public school teachers, weary to their bones as they try not to buckle under the state’s gutting of their schools, all while day by day, their students are vanishing. Whether it was them or their parents who were picked up, deported, or incarcerated in detention facilities, they don’t know. I have held hands with my friends, my family, who fear being kidnapped and deported. We all know someone who has been.
I have held hands with multi-generation Texans who are trans women. They wept for the twenty years they had been out, only to fear now for their lives more than ever.
So with respect to my teachers: the material reality of my spiritual life means this election felt like a resurrection. And there are so, so many Christians now and throughout time who have known this, lived this, and spoken to the need to see God’s hand in our material and political realities: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr; Kat Armas; Hanna Reichel; Gustavo Gutierrez; St. Oscar Romero; etc, etc.
Therefore: I am allowing myself unbridled joy. I keep cackling at nothing, and at ridiculous memes, and at the memories of all we have faced. I weep at the smallest and strangest of things.
I have tears of joy.
And in this moment — whether we are resplendent, or reeling, or ready for promised changes to come now or so help us God — I beg all of us to pray for joy.
Joy is capacious enough to coexist with our lament.
Call me a populist, a progressive, or even plain-old moderate, but we on the left have had a joy problem. Repudiations of joy as being obtuse. Demanding restraint out of respect for the grief. But it is not only the leftist communities that do this. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez so powerfully outlines in her most recent book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, joy has been dangled as the prize for obedience in evangelical American Christianity for decades. We were told joy was something we earned through obedience; obedience to power, obedience to borders, obedience to men in masks and the masking of enmity as “Christian values.” We were told joy was the prize, and that this prize was only given to the faithful few — anyone coloring outside the lines was a liar. A temptation to be avoided.
What both the right and the left neglected to tell us is that joy is, actually, a rebellion. Joy is the revolution of a daisy erupting from the cracks of asphalt. Against all odds, the flower finds life in the sun and in the rain not because she earned it, or or because she followed the rules, but because the sun and the rain and the earth and the flowers belong to each other. Knitted together by a God who is too wily and creative to keep things on the shelves we might want to contain them within.
Joy is not a prize, but nor is joy vapid. Joy is labeled as “childlike” because we are hard-wired to wait for the other shoe to drop, as if our anxiety could prevent tragedy from finding us. Joy is labeled “childlike” because we tend to demean the true power of God so as to not confront our own powerlessness. Joy is labeled “childlike” — because it is. Joy makes us like children in the greatest hope of what childhood ought to be, when it is not thieved by genocide or gestapo: full of hope, full of wonder, full of play. Joy postures us in delight and awe at the intricacy and vastness of the world. I suspect this is why Jesus tells us, over and over, we must be like children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
We were also told joy is impermeable to other emotions. Joy is pure, nothing but bliss and happiness. But sometimes — often — joy is born from the same wound that we grieve.
Joy is capacious enough to coexist with our lament.
And right now, we are also grieving. My tears of joy are tears of exuberant relief, but they are also the tears I have stomached in order to disassociate enough to keep going.
Joy opens the portal within us to truly grieve. Because most of all, as I wrote in my book, joy is the tender underbelly of our connection. Joy is the thread between us: lovers, friends, enemies, strangers. Joy is the connection to God and to the sacred image of God in each of us, joy is the signal flare that is the recognition, however brief or deep, that we were created not to be alone, but to tend to this Garden, together.
Joy is how we grieve. We grieve for the children who have been separated from their parents for years. We grieve for the children imprisoned in inhumane conditions at the Dilley Detention Center. We grieve for the children who have died on the altar of “border security.” We grieve for the mothers pulled from nursing infants, the fathers who clung to their sons while being thrown in the back of vans. We grieve that it took this long, and cost this many lives, to finally say: no.
We grieve for the family lost in webs of propaganda, we grieve for ways our grief has made us sharp and bitter. We grieve the division and enmity amongst us, still, and it is only when we can both rejoice and weep that we will be able to hear the voice of God calling us to love our enemies who are, actually, our neighbors.
But joy is how the grief does not consume us. “The Lord laughs at the wicked, / for he sees that their day is coming,” says Psalm 37. The LORD might be laughing at people here — I cannot speak for the mind of God. But I suspect the LORD is laughing at the forces of evil and wickedness that try to trap each of us. The LORD laughs at the devil. We should, too.
Joy is the rebellion that holds this grief and says: the thing that is killing all of us won’t win. The evil that lurks, hungry and gnawing, will not colonize my imagination of what else is possible. Joy is the rebellion of a ludicrous daisy in the asphalt, and the scoffed-at dream of Texas going blue all down the ballot, and joy is the axiom by which we continue to live beyond the fiefdoms of ballots and borders made by this world and instead run headlong into the Kingdom of Heaven which is here and living and beckoning us to partake.
Joy is how we remember our birthright and our homing: we belong to God. And all of us ought to act like it, and all of us ought to be given the chance.
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A note from the author: Much of this material is what I'm teasing out in my next book, tentatively titled The Rebellion of Joy out in early 2028. Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about the book when it drops!
