Willie Jennings defines joy in a surprising and profoundly physical way—as an act of resistance against despair and death. He explains joy as, "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living." Here, in a 2018 talk for the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, Willie Jennings comments on the powerful, embodied act of resistance that joy calls for, examining its scope and cultural context, exploring the musical form of the blues as a space for commonly held joy, and envisioning a pathway of life through the valley of the shadow of death.
Willie Jennings defines joy in a surprising and profoundly physical way—as an act of resistance against despair and death. He explains joy as, "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living." Here, in a 2018 talk for the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, Willie Jennings comments on the powerful, embodied act of resistance that joy calls for, examining its scope and cultural context, exploring the musical form of the blues as a space for commonly held joy, and envisioning a pathway of life through the valley of the shadow of death.
About Willie Jennings
Willie Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Africana Studies, and Religious Studies at Yale University; he is an ordained Baptist minister and is author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race,Acts: A Commentary, The Revolution of the Intimate, and most recently, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. You can hear him in podcast episodes 7, 13, and 57 of For the Life of the World.
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.
Willie Jennings: Joy work is always body work, always body work, and it is serious and dangerous work because you are negotiating reality at the site of despair and death. A body angling itself against despair is one engaged in the art of dancing ever so slightly above the line of sheer survival, moving, twisting, turning between surviving and thriving.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa, with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Willie Jennings defines joy in a surprising and profoundly physical way: as "an act of resistance against despair." He goes on "resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living."
Each of us have seen life strangled, not just in the shocking video evidence of Black life being suffocated under a brutal choke, but we see life strangled in war from a far off country. We see life strangled in political battles. We see life strangled in the tension of a domestic argument. We see life strangled in the dejected shame of a publicly scolded child. We see life strangled in the critical voice of self hatred that emerges from within.
So the suggestion that joy is in fact an embodied active movement to counter those forces of despair and strangulated life--well, this is a call to resistance and protest and just "no" against the forces of despair.
I'm reading The Lord of the Rings to my boys most nights, these days. And there's this central scene early in the Fellowship of the Ring and it takes place in Rivendale when Gandalf suggests that they should just waltz into Mordor and destroy the Ring. And the response is predictable: "despair or folly?" Gandalf asks. "It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity when all other courses have been weighed though, as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy!"
And we who sometimes witness or feel the life strangled or drained from us by enemies, visible and invisible, we do not actually see the end beyond all doubt. And thank God we can't. So while there is movement in us, we can continue the act of resistance against that despair. Here's Willie Jennings with a 2018 lecture entitled "Gathering Joy" from the Theology of Joy in the Good Life Project, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.
Thanks for listening, friends.
Willie Jennings: Joy, joy. The first thing that must be said about joy is that it is a work. Before we think of joy as a sentiment or a feeling or even a delusion let's first name it for what it truly is. It is a work of resistance against despair and death. The marvelous, joy workers who taught me this were the people who raised me.
I was raised by people of the dirt, of the earth, who lived on land that they did not own and who raised crops for people who would never pay them an honest wage for their back breaking labor. My people were sharecroppers in the South who turned their dreams toward the north and toward what Isabel Wilkerson called in her marvelous book "the warmth of other suns."
The Black folks who raised me lived in the constant showers of racial oppression and disappointment moving from the Jim Crow South to the racist North from racist straw bosses to racist factory foremen from Southern struggles to Northern struggles. From old forms of being underpaid and overworked to new forms of the same situation.
And in the midst of all that, my parents and my people worked hard, worked hard at joy. What does it mean to work at joy? This is the question for us this morning as we sit in a difficult moment in history when joy seems to be in such short supply. I want to draw on and extend the wisdom of my folks to help us think about the work of joy.
The magnificent joy workers who invited me into their craft were church folks. Joy work for them is a work from the inside, inside the sweat, inside the silencing, inside the secret, inside a segregation that will not yield. How do oppressed peoples access joy from within a segregation they did not design and from within fragmentation and division that they did not want? Segregated joy work follows what James C. Scott calls the arts of resistance for oppressed peoples and functions within the hidden transcripts of speech that are off stage or behind the scenes in the sequestered spaces of the dominated.
There in those segregated spaces, joy work commences: working in the absurdities, the absurdities of lack, surrounded by places of plenty. When you live in places of limited resources, limited social and environmental supports and limited opportunities you do have a wealth of despair. It is a currency that people struggle not to use.
Despair has always been a currency born of death. We theological types, we know this. It is death's fundamental calling card. The Black church folks I knew understood that joy work begins with renouncing despair, renouncing despair by angling one's body against it.
Joy work is always body work. Always body work and it is serious and dangerous work because you are negotiating reality at the site of despair and death. A body angling itself against despair is one engaged in the art of dancing ever so slightly above the line of sheer survival. Moving, twisting, turning between surviving and thriving.
Not everyone, not everyone takes on this art. It is not a uniform characteristic of all Black diaspora people or of any people. It is fundamentally a decision of thought, act, gesture, posture, dress, mood, or manner to do something different with the given, instead of simply giving into the given: the given of suffering, the given of pain, of oppression, of fear, and especially, especially of violence. Joy being formed under these constrained conditions is always a profound work of improvisation. And improvisation, as we all know in this room is never just making things up.
Improvisation is working with the given, the broken, the fragment, and drawing on moves and gestures, moves and gestures of those who have gone before you, and those who surround you engaged in their own acts of improvisation.
I wanna return to this theme of improvisation a little later, but what is crucial to capture here is that joy being formed under this pressure is always an oppositional joy that stands against the world and the prevailing racial and social order. This oppositional joy humanizes dehumanizing conditions. This is the art, my friends, this is the art of making pain productive without ever trying to justify or glorify suffering. For so many church folk, the quintessential site of productive pain and the place where their joy is rooted is the body of Jesus and his own joy work.
There is this passage of Scripture in the New Testament that so many people seized upon that suggested an extraordinary connection between Jesus's joy and their own joy, found in Hebrews chapter twelve, verse two. It states "looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, disregarding its shame and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God."
My folks and so many other people of color saw in Jesus a joy that sustained him through his criminalization, his isolating shaming, his torture, and of course his capital punishment.
Jesus's joy was a joy found in contradiction, not in the resolution of contradiction. It was a joy sustain, that sustained him in conflict, never eradicating the conflicts he faced. Jesus's joy inside constrained conditions not only matched the constrained conditions of Black life, but it also captured captured those conditions, brought them into the divine life and made Jesus an insider in the work of joy and made joy work for so many Christians of the Black diaspora, a work inside Jesus himself: a work inside his body.
Their joy was born of their deep faith in, and their love for Jesus, their every step in the footsteps of Jesus each day that asking that his joy would be their joy.
Yeah. This is, this is difficult work as so many people, especially those of the Black diaspora understand all too well, because joy work, my friends, always lives close to addiction. Addiction is the anti-side, the shadow side of joy work, haunting it with another option in the face of the given. That option is to give into the given and turn despair into a teacher, and by whatever means at one's disposal by whatever one can get their hands on, to lose oneself in it, even if only for fleeting moments.
Addiction has been with us from the beginning, from the beginning of it all. And it has been, it has been on the, it has been on the hunt for people of color around the world from the first moment modern colonial settlers gave indigenous peoples alcohol and weapons and took their land. That was the beginning of the hunt. But addiction's greed has never known boundaries.
And now as we all know, it hunts for all of us. Joy work, and the anti-joy work of addiction, they look at, they look like each other, each a form of improvisation, each capturing whatever fragments of life they have at hand a gesture, a stolen moment, a few words here and there, a laugh, a shared story, shared pain, shared anguish, frustration, a stubborn memory, a kiss, a hug, a touch. Each weaves these fragments together, but one aims to bind people to life and the other aims toward death. Improvisation, improvisation always aims either at life or death, either forming a new that would destroy or a new that would heal.
Even faith, any religious faith can be captured in addiction once it aligns itself with death. Faith that becomes addiction loses joy in the desire to control bodies and in the power of violence. Addiction, and real joy, both work. Both, excuse me. Addiction and real joy work, both aim to cover the body, to capture the body in ecstasy because we need ecstasy.
We are creatures created by God for ecstasy with God. This is what the people who rooted their joy work in Jesus imagined it as a work inside Jesus himself. This is what they showed me. Joy work rooted in Jesus is always work of the creature, vulnerable, fragile, and unstable, and in need of community and communion.
Aiming at ecstasy is never the problem. We are always aiming at ecstasy. It is the type of entanglements necessary to aim at it, that's the problem. Joy requires the right entanglements, which is to say, which is to say that it works, that it is work that cannot be sustained alone, nor is it work that can be done without space.
Joy requires space. That's the second thing that needs to be said about joy. What constitutes, what constitutes a space of joy and where are those spaces to be found? For so many diaspora peoples the spaces of joy have been sequestered spaces, segregated spaces where the pleasures of unguarded speech, unguarded speech is often coupled with aesthetic pleasure.
This space could be what I call cultural nationalist space, which is space of a people, by a people and for a particular people that conducts the performances and rituals of enjoyment. This fact is to be both celebrated and mourned, just as much as geography matters in structuring pain, and suffering, oppression and domination, and of course, death. Geography matters in joy work. In specific places, a people can repeat their joy and know themselves, know themselves in the repetition. For many Black folks, that place would be the church, but it could also be a good club. I say a good club, good club, or a bar. I mean a good bar. A gym, a barbershop, a beauty shop, someone's home and even a street corner.
You need a place to teach people how to make joy, a place that can also teach them how to handle the contradictions of life. Yet the space of joy is also a psychic space of emotional and spiritual habitation, psychic space and geographic place dance together in memory and dream in fantasy and hope. One example of this is sonic space, a space constituted by music.
Music and joy have a long and celebrated history together among Black diaspora peoples. This sonic space often becomes a womb for joy, where it could live and breathe, take flight through sound, weaving together bodies and places in joy and habitation, the joy of the body and the joy of the place becoming one. Learning how to access this space, learning how to access this space of joy is a spiritual discipline, a discipline shared by Christian and non-Christian alike. However, Afro-Christianity has historically been a grand facilitator of this spiritual discipline. As displaced African peoples taught themselves and their children, how and what it means to inhabit the sonic space of joy, the sonic space of joy.
One powerful site of joy within sonic space has been the blues. The blues have always existed in a Trinitarian fashion, as a mode of musicality and as a particular musical structure or idiom. And of course, of course, as a way of life.
You got that? That was three, the three of one.
The blues at essence, the blues at essence is a method of working contradiction and dissonance into a statement of pain, pained life yet being lived well, did you get that? The importance of the blues as a grand architectonic of modernism and modern music from gospel to country to hip hop has been well documented. But we are yet to fully appreciate the role of the blues in creating sonic space, a space that many people can inhabit at the same time.
I have listened to and watched, watched people drawing on the blues, create sonic spaces of joy and then press their whole bodies, their whole bodies into those spaces of joy. Sonic space has always carried the possibilities of joining people together in joy work and rooting us together in real places. You can glimpse this possibility in a good concert or a good worship service or in a good dance where people find themselves grasping for a shared ecstasy.
Joy work, joy work is communal work. It is the work of the people and joy work should entangle us together. Yet our spaces of joy are for the most part constrained in racial and cultural segregation and shaped in social hierarchies. And the work of joy has been in too many cases, taken from us and commodified, and then presented to us as things to be bought and sold.
Sonic spaces exist all around us in commodity form as aesthetic bubbles. We carry them in our pockets and through our earbuds. Now I for one am glad that so many people carry their theme music and their visual meals in their pockets. Everywhere they go. I think that's a sign of civilization, but I long for a pedagogy of sonic space that teaches us how to inhabit it together and that invites us into a shared joy work, a shared joy work. So the question for us is this, as I prepare to close--I'm a Baptist minister so you know what that means: another 20 minutes!
[laughter]
You say preparing to close just to keep people interested, but you keep on going.
[laughter]
So the question for, so the question for us is this: is there the possibility of a joy that joins? Joins people who would never imagine their joy work together, but usually are forced to imagine their joy work in isolation or either against one another, for fear of exploitation. This, it seems to me is a crucial question for Christianity, but for every other religion, if the joy of a religion sustains its adherence, even in the face of brutalities of life and over against addiction of violence in all its forms, has that joy work exhausted itself in that very work in that very work of survival?
I think not. Because if joy is a reality of the creature, then joy is always an opportunity to link us in ways only limited by our imagination. Too many Christians however, continue to promote segregated joy work through the limited ways we imagine life together bound as it is by racial reasoning and geographic segregation.
What I learned from my people a long time ago is that Jesus presents a joy that gathers. His joy, gathers its strength from the cloud of witnesses of God's faithfulness. Yet even further, his joy draws life from the life of God. The joy of life with God that mark the life of his people also marks his life in extraordinary ways.
It is a joy he once shared among his disciples. The words from John Chapter 15, 8 through 13 point this, point this out to us: "my father is glorified by this, that you bear fruit and become my disciples. As the father has loved me so I have loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete."
Completed joy suggested in this lovely passage is a joy that connects, like an expanding circuit. The possibility of a joy that gathers is already implicit in African diaspora Christianity, as it is in many other forms of religious faith. Segregated joy, however, was thrust upon the African Christian and took on its horrific dimensions through the centuries of inflicted terrorism: white supremacy teaching these and other Christians that real joy cannot be found at the site of mixture at the site of joining at the site of shared life. Thankfully, there were those who pressed against segregated joy opting for spaces of shared desire and hope that would heal the stolen pleasure of a joy that suggested a different way, a different life.
Sonic space was often host to such outbreaks of illicit joy, illegal joy. As people shared in music and dance bodies, turning, twisting, touching. Turning themselves, even if only for a moment, into conduits of exchange that would unleash a power to create the cultural Baroque and open new avenues of thought and dream for a better life together.
The potential of a joy that gathers from within Afro diaspora peoples resides in its long history. And Afro Christianity resides in its long history of a radical egalitarianism in the spirit that acknowledged the ability of God to take hold of any life. No matter how resistant. The historian Albert Raboteau suggested that sometimes even slave and slave master shared a common conversion and a common ecstasy.
The issue, however, has always been how might a shared ecstasy be sustained? How might a shared joy become constitutive of a shared thriving life, a life freed from oppression and violence. A joy that moves through boundaries and overcomes social fragmentation requires the desire to locate joy work in new spaces that become more than a search for new commodities to consume.
A gathering joy is possible only if there are those who are willing to resist modes of life, that, that align joy with the structuring energies of class, gender, and racial division, a new kind of gathering joy is possible where we do marvelous things with joy. But it will require fugitive acts, acts that break open not only our despair, but the despair of others by breaking down the walls that exist, even in our joy.
Thank you very much
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 theologian Willie James Jennings. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday, sometimes midweek. If you're new to the show, welcome friend! Hit subscribe in your favorite podcast listening app, and we'd love your feedback. Ratings and reviews and Apple Podcasts are particularly helpful, but we're just as happy to hear from you by email at faith.yale.edu. We read each comment and do our best to respond and improve the show, bringing you the people and topics that you want hear.
And if you're a regular listener, it's a huge honor that you stick with us from week to week. So I'll ask you to step up and join us. Help us share the show. Behind those three dots in your podcast app there's an option to share this episode by text or email or social media. If you took a brief moment to send your favorite episode to a friend or share with the world, not only would you be supporting the show, you'd be sparking up a great conversation around stuff that matters with people that matter.
Thanks for listening today friends, we'll be back with more this coming week.