Joy Is Survival

When I was growing up in the small church houses of Savannah, Georgia, and then later as a teenage preacher myself, I often heard, or exulted from the pulpit, the words of Psalm 30:5: “Weeping may endure for the night, but Joy cometh in the morning!” Often those words would send the congregation and the choir into an avalanche of “hallelujahs”, “amens”, or, if the spirit was moving, a Baptist fit of shouting and dancing. As a kid, I understood enough to know that the words of that Psalm offered hope that whatever the challenge folks were facing, joy could be found, and not just in some distant future, but soon—“in the morning.” (Praise God). But it wasn’t until many years later that I began to slowly understand that joy and happiness are not the same. Those ideas and experiences were deeply entangled for me, as I imagine they are for most people. I thought that I could only be joyful when I was happy. I understood joy to be an elevated state of happiness—not just happy, but really, really happy.

The first thread on that entanglement got pulled when I read Pema Chodron’s The Wisdom of No Escape. Chodron is a Buddhist and author who makes Buddhist teachings accessible and able to be integrated into everyday life. I’ve often remarked to friends that if I weren’t born Christian, I’d probably be Buddhist. It never quite occurred to me that one could be both. Nevertheless, in The Wisdom of No Escape, there is a chapter simply titled Joy. In that chapter are two excerpts that had the effect of grabbing me and shaking some of the ropes tying joy and happiness together: a story and a lesson. The story is called “Tigers Above, Tigers Below” and reads simply:

There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.

Joy, the story so beautifully conveys, is a matter of presence with each moment—all of those moments sitting uncomfortably between tigers: some unrequested birth and some unknown death. One must eat the strawberry because it is there and you have the time, this single moment, to enjoy it. Chodron then conveys the teaching of a Buddhist Master, Trungpa Rinpoche, that simply teaches “you can do it.” As Chodron goes on to explain, this lesson essentially boils down to if it can be done grimly, sadly, wearily, it, whatever it is, can be done with joy. For me, it was a direct challenge to the idea that joy could only be experienced during moments of happiness. It is common to experience joy at a wedding, the birth of a child, or a kickback with old friends, where rapturous laughter is the most familiar sound. But joy in the midst of the death of a loved one, joy when you get an unexpected pink slip, joy when the relationship you wished would last ends, joy in the monotony of day-to-day life, joy when the country you call home is falling into a fascist state, really, can that be done with joy? I appreciated the story and accepted the challenge, but it wasn’t quite real for me yet. Intellectually, the possibility of joy in any and every moment made sense, but in practice, I did not know how to get there.

Then, one day a couple of years ago, I was setting up for a backyard dance party with friends while in the midst of a heartbreaking conflict with a romantic partner. I was particularly and distinctly unhappy, as was evidenced by my sour mood. I begrudgingly put up the tent, annoyingly hung the lights and miniature disco ball, and unenthusiastically pushed play on the playlist. And then, of all things, as I’m standing under the tent, it started to rain. With the pelting of raindrops on the top of the tent and everywhere around me, tears began to roll down my face. For some reason, still unknown to me even in this moment, the challenge whispered back to me: “It can be done with joy.” And so, I let the sound of the rain mix with the music blasting through the speaker and started to dance: crying, alone, heartbroken, unhappy, but joyful. Had anyone been watching, they would have had to be forgiven for thinking that I was having a mental breakdown, and perhaps I was in some ways. Something was breaking down for me. Something important had crossed over from theory to practice. The intellectualized was felt, not just understood. It was the day I learned to dance in the rain.

I have returned to that lesson often over the last few years during challenging moments. No more than recently as we have begun the faster-than-expected decline into some form of authoritarian state. With every major breaking news alert, happiness eludes me. Every video of the military on our streets, immigrants being inhumanely ripped from their families, long-accepted Constitutional principles tossed aside, less and less happy. Something about dancing alone in the rain wasn’t quite reaching the depths of my despair. But now I believed “it could be done with joy,” I just didn’t quite know how to reach it. That forced me into reflection. We may be the first generation of Americans to watch our democracy fall into authoritarianism, but we’re not the first generation to need to survive challenging times. In fact, as a Black gay man, I exist because my ancestors survived state oppression.

My Black ancestors survived being enslaved not only by their sheer grit but because that grit was mixed with joy. We know this because of the traditions that have been handed down to us. We jump the broom at weddings as they did because moments of union are to be celebrated, even if we must return to the fields to labor immediately thereafter. My body still moves seemingly on its own when rhythmic drums beat nearby–ancestral joy on a cellular level. And singing together while toiling, singing together while sad, singing together while hurt, singing together while oppressed, came over on the ships that dropped my ancestors at the base of the Savannah River.

The same is true of my queer ancestors. As Quinta Brunson once quipped: “people be gay.” And I would add, “people been gay.” There is no time in history when queer people are absent; hidden often, but never absent. And when queer people gathered in the same place, we danced, we laughed, we built places of respite–places we could be free. It is no accident that when the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn, we were dancing. Our existence was unlawful, but we danced anyway.

My Black and queer ancestors answered for me the question of why dancing in the rain alone is insufficient to conjure joy in this present moment. It is because joy, deep, survival-oriented joy must be created by community. Joy built by, and experienced in, community is more durable than individual joy.

When the echoes of “wade in the water” permeated the air over the cotton fields, it was the joining of voices and hearts while struggling together that generated the joy that gave my ancestors the ability to survive. When the civil rights leaders of yore retired from a long day of resisting state oppression, someone turned on a jazz record as the living room filled with swaying bodies, tired but joyful. When AIDS rampaged the queer community, we buried our brothers at memorial services by day and then danced to Donna Summer under the nearest disco ball together at night, sad but joyous.

So too for us now. This moment, this time, can also be done with joy. We can create sustainable, durable, survival-based joy together. That is our challenge. And we must answer it by taking every opportunity to be joyous with one another.

It turns out those folks singing and shouting together in the church pews of my youth understood something that I have only recently come to truly understand: joy is how we survive.

I love you (joyfully),

Edward

One of the ways I say I love you is

by sharing music that moves me, so you’ll often find at the bottom of each Love Letter a “Love Note” (as in musical note) that I hope you’ll enjoy.

Love Note: “dancing in the rain”

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Photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash