A few weeks ago, at my spring Oregon Respite Retreat, my friend Heidi asked how we were all…you know…surviving in the current political and social climate, and BOY HOWDY do I get that question. In January 2017, DJT took office and our church denomination of many decades kicked us out due to our implacable stance that queer folks be fully welcome and included. The timing of it all was not coincidental. and we felt very betrayed. Very deceived. Very bereft. Because what we’d been taught about the c/Church was not, in fact, the case. All are not welcome. All are not loved. All are not embraced. And we certainly cannot sit inside the tension of disagreement, as one family, as one faith, and hold each other in the light and love of Jesus. And MAN, was that a blow. Like hurricane winds.
I was filled to the brim with dread and despair. I was enraged. I was full of grief. But I was also presented with the opportunity we all have when we’re burned to the ground. We can remain in the ashes or we can rise like the phoenix. I chose both. What can I say? I don’t appreciate binary choices. I wallowed, friends. In the ashes and the muck and the mire. A good, solid amount of wallowing because wallowing is an underrated stage of grief. And then I rose. A little bit at a time, because that’s what no one tells you about being the phoenix. It’s not all triumph and the overcoming of great odds. It’s not all the remaking of ourselves from loss and hurt. It’s a little bit at a time. Miniscule victories compounded. Sometimes feats so tiny, you’d need a microscope to see them.
One pint-sized such win? I started to study the great civil rights leaders, trying to suss out their paths of maintaining their fight–their unrelenting passion for justice matched with action–without becoming discouraged. And I found my muse in John Lewis. This was a man who was beaten in Selma. Jailed for his work seeking racial justice. Lived to see a brilliant Black man elected president, and watched the backlash of white supremacy still trying to tear that work down. Here is a man who had every reason to give in to dread and despair, but you know what? He declined. Instead, he chose joy.
Isn’t that AUDACIOUS, friends? Isn’t that just the most brash and bold response you’ve ever heard? Joy in the face of folks trying to rob you–AGAIN–of your equality? Your humanity? That’s defiance, that is. And it’s the kind of defiance that FEEDS your own soul.
So I started (slowly) to try joy on for size. Little bits at a time. And I realized joy is totally irrational. It’s like to have to set sense aside to find it. I started fostering kittens, which makes no sense and creates chaos and soothes my heart. I travel the world for too few days on a shoestring budget. I allow teens to invade my home 24/7, to take over the kitchen, to be messy and mouthy and awesome. This weekend, I gardened. GARDENED. Me, the Plant Killer out there in the dirt. trying to keep things alive. It’s ludicrous, I tell you.
And it may not seem like a big thing when it comes to the Tom Fuckery going on right now. I know. I get it. But I’m telling you, it IS. It’s a Big Thing. It’s huge. The most enormous. Because it keeps my heart alive for the fight. It creates safe space for vulnerable creatures, including my own sweet self. And it’s subversive as hell, because you know what they can’t have? You know what they don’t get to steal from me? You know what John Lewis kept for decades? My joy. My happiness. My heart. My life.
That’s why I started the Irrational Joy Project. That’s why I tag so many posts that way. That’s why, while I continue to fight, I’ll continue to pursue preposterous joy wherever and whenever I can find it.
I have so much more to say about this, friends, but I have to run because I’m picking up a mommy cat and her eight kittens. It’s going to be absurd around here.
Waving in the Dark,
