Part 3 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. Stacey Floyd-Thomas presents a vision of Black joy—which the world can't give and the world can't take away. Looking into several depictions of female agency in the Gospels, she outlines a picture of joy that celebrates beauty, redemptive self-love, virtuous pride, and critical engagement with the world. Then Willie James Jennings offers a definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces that lead to death. He presents a creative, communal joy characterized by fullness, connected to but transcending grief and sorrow.
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Part 3 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. Stacey Floyd-Thomas presents a vision of Black joy—which the world can't give and the world can't take away. Looking into several depictions of female agency in the Gospels, she outlines a picture of joy that celebrates beauty, redemptive self-love, virtuous pride, and critical engagement with the world. Then Willie James Jennings offers a definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces that lead to death. He presents a creative, communal joy characterized by fullness, connected to but transcending grief and sorrow.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Miroslav Volf: Hello listeners and friends. Welcome to For the Life of the World. It's me, Miroslav, and before we bring you today's episode, I wanted to interject a brief invitation. One of our fellow listeners and a wonderful supporter of our work at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture has offered a $10,000 donation as a matching challenge, and it's all going to podcast production this coming year. But we need your help to meet that challenge, dollar for dollar, and that needs to happen before the end of 2023.
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Willie James Jennings: I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces, and all the ways that despair wants to drive us toward death, and wants to make death the final word. And death in this regard is not simply the end of life, but it's death and all its signatures. Death, violence, war, debt, all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living. Joy, in that regard, is a work that can become a state, that can become a way of life.
Stacey Floyd-Thomas: Black joy is best represented in my mind from a song that's oftentimes sung in the Black church that, "This joy that I have, this joy that I have, the world didn't give it, and the world can't take it away."
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Macie Bridge: Welcome to For the Life of the World. I'm Macie Bridge, and I'm here with Evan Rosa today.
Evan Rosa: Hello, Macie. It's great to be here.
Macie Bridge: Um, welcome back to week three of our Advent series.
Evan Rosa: So far, we've done hope and peace. We're utilizing past episodes from For the Life of the World, just some key moments that provide a different angle on these Advent themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. And today we're doing joy.
Macie Bridge: Today we're doing joy, which is the pink candle in the wreath of Advent candles.
Evan Rosa: Can you explain the candles?
Macie Bridge: Well, here's the thing. The candles always confuse me. I always assume that week three is going to be love because it's the pink candle. And I did do a brief Google search and it said that pink is the liturgical color for joy.
Evan Rosa: Joy to the world. Today, we're going to be hearing from Willie James Jennings and Stacey Floyd Thomas about joy, particularly Black joy.
Macie Bridge: Yeah. In Willie Jennings conversation with Miroslav Volf, he talks about joy against despair. Joy is an act of resistance against despair. And sort of this idea that Jesus's joy comes into the world in the midst of a contradiction and exists within that contradiction, in that conflict, without necessarily resolving it. Like as Jesus is in the world, in his joy, there is this conflict existing around us. And how we can live into that fullness of joy, not necessarily as a resolution, but as something amidst the darkness, which I think is really relevant to advent as we talk about it coming in the middle of the season.
Evan Rosa: It's really a different picture of, of joy than you normally associate. The emotion gets maybe a thinner, shallower treatment of just like elation or it's kind of always positive instead of a richer, more, well, the full spectrum of human experience in that joy. So it's an interesting definition.
Macie Bridge: And he also discusses how joy becomes segregated by our spaces, and where we learn and are taught to cultivate joy, and how joy ends up shaping a lot of our social hierarchies as well.
Evan Rosa: That's right. Yeah, the expression of joy and the freedom to kind of be in, in one's joy, I think is exemplified in Stacey Floyd Thomas's offering on Black joy in particular from Stacey's perspective, which is a womanist theological perspective, that emphasizes a kind of radical subjectivity and critical engagement and a very communitarian and even, um, I think she says redemptive, self loving approach.
That perspective to me is just super instructive. And I really mean that in a kind of earnest way to be instructed by that kind of joy, I can say as a white man, that is the kind of thing I want to pay attention to. I want to listen. I want to hear from that because especially in her depiction of women in scripture and Black women who have held on to agency.
Again, with Willie's definition of an act of resistance against despair, I think hanging on to agency is this absolutely beautiful and very compelling vision of what joy could be.
Macie Bridge: Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for listening today for our joy reflection on Advent. Now we'll move into some reflections from Stacey Floyd Thomas, and then we'll hear from Willie Jennings on joy.
Stacey Floyd-Thomas: Black joy is best represented in my mind from a song that's oftentimes sung in the Black church that, "This joy that I have, this joy that I have, the world didn't give it, and the world can't take it away." Beauty, which is virtue, normatively understood, and in Western notions, even in Christian traditions, has been the opposite of Blackness.
So Black joy is to say that I too am made in the image of God. My life in its physicality and essence is good. Toni Morrison puts it this way in The Bluest Eye where she's talking about two little girls who are trying to stand in defense of their friend who has been humiliated and abused and believes that the only way she can have self regard or beauty is if, as a Black girl, she had blue eyes.
And these two girls, uh, I think represent Black joy. Uh, Morrison quotes them as saying, "We had defended ourselves since memory against everybody and everything. We considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis. We had become headstrong, devious, and arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention. So we paid very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not known to us. Not then."
And that not then, that ellipsis is important. Because if someone allows their Christian development, their identity development, their flourishing to be charted by a gaze that is antithetical to their embodiment, they become incarnate evil rather than incarnate good. So taking oneself seriously when no one else has paid you any attention is a virtue, which makes humility a vice. And so that joy, um, is what womanists call or, and that, that I've named the four tenets of, of womanism being radical subjectivity.
Traditional communalism, redemptive self love, and critical engagement, or as Morrison's outlining here, being headstrong, traditionally devious or subversive, arrogant enough to believe that you are somebody, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, and to do careful analysis, which is that critical engagement.
And that's the, that's the joy of Black women. It is a joy of the women in the Christian extensive narrative, many of them that have no names, many of them that do have names, right? Whether we're talking about Mary in the Bible, where she is at her girlfriend's wedding party, and her girlfriend is about to be humiliated because they've run out of wine.
And any woman who knows about hospitality and saving face knows that when you can no longer serve your guests, that you failed in your, your job of being a host. And she goes to her son. She goes to Jesus and says, "I need you to turn this water into wine." And what does Jesus say? "Uh uh. Nope. It's not my time."
What does she do? She doesn't even engage him. She turns to the servants and say, and says to them, "Do what he says." She activates. Because of the arrogance and the assistance to save her friend's face. She's radically subjective. She's traditionally communal. She critically engaged and she redeems the self love of what it means to be a woman and provide hospitality.
And she gives, she, she enacts the power that Jesus assumes he doesn't have. The exact same thing with Mary and Martha. They, they arrogantly, with radical subjectivity, taking themselves seriously and being headstrong, they encounter Jesus when he is, when he's away from home. They encounter Jesus who they have supported, who they've taken in as an extension of their family.
And said, "Where have you been? Lazarus, our brother, your supposed beloved brother, is dead. And you failed." And it's because of their insistence and their anger and despair that Jesus weeps.
And then he raises Lazarus from the dead. And we, we don't know if he's weeping because they're angry, if he's weeping because of what happened to Lazarus, or if he's weeping because of their lack of faith. But it was their engagement of Jesus that makes Jesus weep. Right? Or, we can look at the woman with the issue of blood.
Society tells her she's unclean. Society tells her she should be shut in. We probably know now, given science, that she had probably endometriosis. She was suffering year in, year out, as many women do, with thyroids that had gone out of whack. And so she was supposed to shelter in place. She was supposed to keep herself at social distance, lest other people would be offended by her stench and the uncleanliness of what is absolutely natural to a woman's being.
And she hears the rumor of this messiah who is in town, who has been doing all of these wonderful things, and she takes herself seriously, presses her way into the crowd and touches the hem of his garment. She does not engage Jesus at all. Jesus says, "Who touched me? Because I felt power leave out of my body."
She was not touching nor figuring she could tap in on the H-I-M of Jesus. She knew she had no place because the patriarchy his embodiment represented said hands off. She was touching the H-E-M. She was touching. It was her faith, right, that, that said, "If I can just get there."
The Syrophoenician woman, right, whose woman, whose daughter was vexed by the devil. Right? Uh, who other, um, uh, Gospels, um, identify as the Canaanite woman. Right? And we know that the Canaanite people were darker people. Noah curses, uh, Ham's descendants of Canaan, um, to always be subject to the oppression of, uh, the other brothers because he rightfully said, "Daddy, you're drunk and naked."
But that's another podcast and another conversation.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That is a different can of worms.
Stacey Floyd-Thomas: Right, so, so the Syrophoenician woman goes to Jesus on his second holiday. The disciples are telling her to get away. Right? And she says to Jesus, you know, "My daughter is vexed by the devil." And Jesus says, "I am not here for you, but, but for the, the, the house of Israel."
And she says, "Uh huh." And then he said, you know, "It's not fair for the dogs to eat at the master's table." Jesus, in effect, in fact, calls her a dog. He lets her know what the stereotype, what the statistics say, how, what the contextual read, what the normative gaze is of this woman who is out of place, out of time, and out of her mind in making a petition of Jesus.
And when he says that, she says, "Okay, true, but I need help for my daughter. And even dogs get to eat crumbs." And when she says that, Jesus says, "How great is your faith? Let it be unto you, even as that will." And we, and there are several stories like that in Jesus's encounter - the woman with the alabaster jar - I mean, just several, several.
But anytime Jesus or the disciples encounter a man with a problem, the man at the gate, beautiful, the man whose son was falling in the fire, in the water, "I believe help my disbelief." You know, there was always some huge exchange, some huge philosophical account, right? Like the paper I was trying to write.
The women were more like my nana, just, you know, get it and move on. Yeah, because you have so many things to do. Life is held in the balance. This is not some, you know, uh, Nicodemus exchange. Right? This is not some, the man who's at the gate, beautiful for 38 years, it's just he's continuously talking about what people did to him and how, you know, it's like, do you want to, do you want to be well or not?
Jesus has to engage in philosophical banter, debate, pleading of men in the text. Men who I guess are entitled in some ways to what, to the miracles Jesus is to give, but the women, unnamed, the women who, who gave life, and the women who were there when his life was taken by state sanctioned lynching and violence.
The women don't engage in the philosophical banter. They insist with pride in the name of love that something has to change. And so there, what others might call sinful or viceful and being out of place is actually the correct use of love. It's actually filling the glass that is empty. To be clear, I mean, obviously I'm coming from my social location as a Black woman.
I've given examples of many Black women, but I am not saying that to know joy or to know Jesus or to know the good one has to be a Black woman. That's not at all what I'm saying. But what I am saying is that to know true joy and to know good, one must view the objectification of others as simple and as a vice.
And that is what Jesus did. It has been accepted as, uh, evangelical parlance and universalized, uh, way of living to ask the question, what would Jesus do? And what did Jesus do? Jesus was always doing the work of setting the oppressed free, of giving sight to the blind, of giving food rather than insisting on the fast of those who are hungry, of calling everybody to accountability when people only see sin from one perspective, and saying let's use the act of grace in knowing that those without sin do not exist.
To know joy is to be certain in one's thinking, doing, and being that your joy does not exact oppression from another. Rather that your joy brings joy and abundant life to all who have engaged you no matter where you are on the road to salvation.
True joy, being a real thinking person of faith, is not only realizing that the life that you may save might be your own, but it is also to know clearly that there is no divine justice that is not linked to social justice, and that the work of the gospel, the work of the church, the work of Christianity is the work of Jesus.
It is the work of knowing that we can save souls without losing our minds or losing or lynching the lives of others in the process. Our work has to be not only salvific, but sane and lifesaving.
Miroslav Volf: What, what is joy for you as a good theologian, as a churchman, as a Black man?
Willie James Jennings: Yeah, I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces, all the forces of despair. Joy in that regard is a work that can become a state that can become a way of life.
Miroslav Volf: Resists what?
Willie James Jennings: Despair. Despair. Despair and all the ways that despair wants to drive us toward death and wants to make death the final word. And death in this regard is not simply the end of life, but it's death and all its signatures. Death, violence, war, debt, all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living.
Miroslav Volf: So is this a way of singing the Lord's song in the strange land? Is this a way of "living a right life in the false one," to use Adorno's phrase, how would you put it?
Willie James Jennings: I, I like singing a song in a strange land. I also like, as I love to say, making productive use of pain and suffering and the absurd. Not in order to take them lightly, but to take them very seriously, but not to make them gods. So it is pushing back. It is counterintuitive in that regard.
Miroslav Volf: How does one find, though, kind of strengths? How does one forge the weapon of joy in the midst of suffering, oppression? How does one cultivate joy?
Willie James Jennings: Well, practically, you have to have people who you've heard sing those songs in strange lands. You have to have people who have been able to make you laugh in the places where all you want to do is cry.
You have to have conditions set up where those people who have learned how to ride the winds of chaos can say to you, come on, let me show you how to do that. I think that's, that's the first thing you have to have. And then the second thing you have to have is a willingness to want to hold on to life, even when there is very little that makes sense in life.
Joy is the currency that is flowing between hands in such situations. In contexts where your energies have to be focused on survival, it doesn't leave a lot of energy for overt forms of complaint. There can be complaint, but you're spending a lot of energy just trying to hold it together. And I think at another level, the work of joy becomes serious work, which I think in our context, and by our context I mean in the West, the work of joy in many ways is not fully the people's work.
Miroslav Volf: Whose work is it?
Willie James Jennings: It's It's brought to us, and it's commercialized. It is a part of the empire of advertisement that they do the work, the creative work of presenting to you what is joyful and what can become part of the reality of how you create enjoyment and pleasure. But in context where that isn't fully, hasn't fully taken hold, the people's work of creating joy is there.
I grew up in such a situation, I mean, learning how to have a good time with nothing because we had nothing. And there's something very powerful about that because as one artist says, it's how especially oppressed and poor people can make something really beautiful out of what has been thrown away.
We are not attuned to a world in which we have to work with what's been thrown away because we are the ones who throw away. But what does it mean when you're someplace where the world's trash comes to you? And out of that trash, you have to do something. It creates a very different way of thinking about joy.
Miroslav Volf: You've spoken about kind of segregated joy.
Willie James Jennings: Yeah.
Miroslav Volf: Of joy that's part of a particular identity inherited forged in adversity and in your particular case as a legacy of slavery.
Willie James Jennings: Yeah, there is something absolutely beautiful about the joy created by communities, especially oppressed communities. And the clear example I'm drawing on is African diaspora communities in which there's a reality of joy built inside the forced segregation, the separation of the races, geographically speaking, and not simply socially speaking.
And there's something very powerful about a womb of joy that nurtures and helps constitute identity. But there's also another side, not only to just African diaspora forms of joy, but the joy in many communities, and that is segregated joy is fundamentally a part of the reality of segregation, which means that it is a joy that in many instances is built on insult, it's built on hatred of the Other.
And here I'm not thinking primarily about African American or African diaspora communities, but I'm thinking about the way in which multiple communities, their joy is inside of a hard segregation. And so the question becomes for me, can there be a form of joy that helps to constitute identity that happens in the in between, in the gathering of different peoples?
There is a joy that creates. There is a joy that draws peoples together rather than a joy that's built within segregated spaces. I think this is one of the problems theologically in talking about joy, that we don't put it on the ground sufficiently to grasp the way in which joy is always embedded in, you know, the flows of community logics, the cultural logics of particular communities.
And because of that, we probably have to press more deeply when we start to talk about the integrity of a Christian vision of joy until we understand that dynamic.
Miroslav Volf: So if you have a kind of cultural logic that sets patterns for expressions of joy, but it ends up being segregated joy, how do you break open out of the enclosure?
Willie James Jennings: Yeah, this is where I wonder out loud if the life of Jesus, a kind of christological intervention, is what's necessary for us to reconceive joy that opens us out rather than encloses. Now, I do want to take seriously the way in which a community finds joy and creates joy and creates patterns of pleasure that are imagined to only exist in integrity when the outside others are kept out.
We understand that, but here I'm wondering if there is not a christological intervention that the life of Jesus draws us toward that brings an invitation. That the very form of joy and pleasure and contentment and comfort that you imagine in the enclosed space can actually be something far richer, far more beautiful, far more pleasurable in this new space, in which your joy is constituted with some of the very people who you imagine are a part of your despair, not a part of your joy, or those who you imagine their joy is absolutely, and what they find enjoyable, absolutely foreign to what I would.
And I do think there are some analogies. As I said, I think there are artists, musicians, painters, and others who have shown that there's possibilities of living in, being sustained by a form of joy that is not homogeneous, that is fully captured inside, if you will, an expanding world of different people being brought together inside the sheer love of the music, for example.
As I like to say, Christians, we are geographically adrift. We don't think spatially as we should. And so, what we have neglected is that joy is fundamentally tied to space. At one level, it is tied to real spaces and places. Segregated joy is most often sequestered joy, bounded joy, territorially, in particular places.
So, the cultural haunts and habitat of a people. This is where their joy is made known. What we have to understand is it's precisely that kind of geographic dimension that we have to think about if, in fact, we want to think beyond segregated joy. We cannot simply say, we ought to have a joy that we have together.
But no one wants to think about, well, where are our bodies in space, and how is space is configured?
Miroslav Volf: So you need to kind of public spaces as public ritual as possible.
Willie James Jennings: Public rituals bound to real space. And that's what's key. The kind of mapping of joy that would be necessary to actually start to think about the reconstituting of a different reality of joy.
That's what's necessary. There's also the other ways in which space exists. There is the kinds of spaces constituted by practices of joy, like in music, as I call it, sonic space. There is that space. But fundamentally, that is built upon, and I never want to draw too sharp a distinction between other kinds of spaces and that geographic space.
We really should start to attend to where do we find joy? Where do we find joy?
I'm a child of the church. And not every church I've been to is a space of joy. All in all, the church and multiple churches have been places of extreme joy, surprising joy. And to quote the title of a famous book by C. S. Lewis, places where I've been absolutely surprised by joy, stunned by joy. But the reality of it is that I have been in spaces of joy in hospital rooms, gathered with a family and a loved one who's passing on, but there are rituals of remembrance going on, grief processes being begun, and in the midst of that, incredible joy, joy connected to sorrow.
As you can probably tell now, I don't spend much time in barbershops anymore, but back in the day when I used to spend time in barbershops, you know, barbershops and beauty shops are really interesting, especially in Black communities because they can be, in ways that are, as I like to say, profound realities of indirection.
They can be spaces of incredible joy. Stories are told, jokes are told, people walk in, comments are made, and without you being spoken to directly, you've been spoken to. And at the end of the day, once you got your hair cut, you leave thinking, "Yeah, things are going to be better."
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologians Stacey Floyd Thomas and Willie James Jennings. Production assistance by Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show.
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