The Gravity of Joy by Angela Williams Gorrell

Author:Angela Williams Gorrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

After thinking about Jayla’s and Amy’s experiences and the conversations I had with David, Carli, and Lynn, it became more and more important for me to help people understand that overdose and suicide are not moral failures, but demonstrations of pain that have led to despair.

Deaths from both suicide and opioid overdose have even been referred to as “deaths of despair.” Despair is an awful teacher, an indiscriminate parasite that feeds off of self-doubt, grief, anger, self-hatred, and fear—in short, it feeds off of people’s pain.

As I reflected on the different experiences that had been shared with me inside the prison and beyond its walls, I realized several sources of pain had come up: abuse, neglect, trauma, perceived failure, lack of control, and financial stress as well as overwhelming feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, worthlessness, or shame.

These sources of pain often nurture loneliness. People believe (whether based on reality or imagination) that they are alone in their circumstances and feelings and that no one empathizes with them or can relate with them.

And the more I thought about it, it seemed that in the case of suicide a lot of these pains contributed to a crisis of identity, which is an especially critical and agonizing human experience that must be carefully attended to.

A crisis of identity can cause us to sense that our gifts, values, beliefs, or passions have mysteriously vanished. It can make us feel as if we can no longer find meaning in or create meaning from our activities and relationships.

For nearly a year and half after my weeks of hell, the research on joy and visions of the good life that I was a part of at Yale felt distant and irrelevant.

Suddenly, though, I realized why the Life Worth Living classroom was a unique space. There are few communities or occasions where people are literally invited to discuss and describe what a meaningful life is and what wholeness looks like, especially in light of suffering.

Unexpectedly, I also recognized joy is not just relevant for our culture obsessed with synthetic happiness and riddled with pain, isolation, and existential rootlessness; it is also something we desperately need to understand, be open to, and eventually identify and experience. And when joy finds us, we need to express it deeply and freely and give others permission to do the same.

When we do, we find out that joy, as the women in the prison Bible study showed me, is a counteragent to despair after all.

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