Is This a Pride Sermon or, Pride is a Verb

MCCNY
June 22, 2025

I want to start by reminding us of the Ezekial passage just now. Here’s what it says again: As I live, says God, your brother Sodom and his sons (I’m not having that misogyny nonsense today on top of everything else; live with it) your brother Sodom and his kids have not done as you and your children have done. This was the guilt of Sodom: they were arrogant. They had abundance and easy prosperity, but they did not empower the poor and needy and make them strong. That’s what the word means translated by so many bibles as “help.” It’s not alms or pity help or white saviorism. It’s not condescending or even genuine, generous condescending. They had abundance and easy prosperity, but they did not empower the poor and needy and make them strong. They were arrogant and did not abide by my laws. So I removed them.

God said that. Hold that thought.

I’m tired and out of sorts. I may never have needed to swear in a sermon more than I need to swear in a sermon this week. I feel like I’m living in The Running Man, and not in a good way. If you don’t know the reference, shame on you. It’s peak Richard Dawson.

Today is Stonewall Sunday. Next Sunday is the 56th anniversary of the Stonewall riot. June has for decades been committed to Pride emerging and exposing itself, sometimes literally, in marches and parades and corporate pretendo allyship shilling for queer and genderqueer dollars. Over time, we got safer. We did more parades and fewer marches. Maybe we got comfortable. Maybe we started to think we were post-queer.

This year, this month, they’ve undone the name of the U.S. Navy Ship Harvey Milk, named for a queer, executed city council member and national pro-gay activist. They’ve redone the names of confederate forts Pickett, Hill, and Lee that we’d changed because those guys were traitors and they were committed to preserving human trafficking and enslavement. They decommissioned the suicide hotline dedicated for queer and genderqueer callers; and people will die. When they did it, they removed the T from the acronym, our acronym – our acronym! I have such mixed feelings about our acronym and the conflation of sexuality and gender and the bogus false inclusion of trans folks in name only and the weird way the full acronym is used as an adjective. Like how a February NYT headline reads “Nearly one in ten adults identifies as LGBTQ.” I doubt that very much. I’d be surprised if a single adult anywhere identifies as “LGBTQ.” The bland thoughtless use of those letters makes me nuts the way some people get worked up about the Oxford comma. Okay, I’m one of those people, too. It’s a frustrating acronym, but it’s our acronym. *Our problematic friend. And we, we will decide who will and won’t be bogus false included in name only.

This month a Minnesota state senator was assassinated, her husband murdered, another senator and his wife shot, their families threatened in their homes. Violent murder in their homes and a two-day killer at large in the state, but Minnesota was mocked and its representatives mocked and blamed and laughed at like they were women disclosing rape in the 90s.

The Supreme Court this week affirmed a state’s right to deny harmless, reversible, best practice, science-driven gender-affirming healthcare wanted and needed by some trans kids *and their parents, with their parents’ permission, and people will die. The House made deep cuts to Medicaid and they’ve shut down AIDS and cancer and other disease research and vaccination, and people will die. They’re supporting a war against starving children. They’re supporting a war against people defending their own national sovereignty. They’ve started yet another war over control of middle east wealth and assets, and people will die.

What’s the sin of your brother Sodom? This is it, these are Sodom’s sins. Arrogance, abundance, and not sharing. Not resourcing and building up folks who are sick, disempowered, who don’t have enough. It’s here, it’s happening right now. I could really use some Sodom-era divine justice fire and brimstone. I don’t even believe in hell, but I could use some of that OG retribution right now. Not drowning the whole world or burning a whole city; I’m with Abraham on that, but certainly let’s have some Reed Sea close over some selective cohorts after the good guys have passed through. Definitely let’s have some zapping like God did at those two guys trying to catch the ark from tipping over.

Seems like if two guys can get zapped for trying to keep the sacred ark from falling over and getting busted, there could be a lot more zapping right now for all the deeply on-purpose evil acts against the sick and poor and disempowered. I’d like to see a large number of pillars of salt that used to be all these people looking backward and longing for the old days of enslavement and klan rule and trans erasure and mediocre white men in charge. I’d be cool. A little casting into outer darkness and gnashing teeth. Where’s Armageddon when you need it.

I’m joking.

I’m not joking.

Where’s divine justice.

Where is it.

This next sentence is going to feel obvious. I don’t want this to be a feel good sermon, and not just because of naming all the evil in the country this month, this year. I don’t want us to leave here feeling good about ourselves. I don’t want us to leave here feeling Pride month proud. I don’t want us to leave feeling good enough.

Please stay with me on this; I love us. I love you.

We aren’t bad; we aren’t bad. And we’ve got to move past encouraging and feeling good about ourselves for not being bad. I love us. I love you so much; we are existentially good. And we have got to move beyond affirming our existential goodness. Yes yes yes, Sodom wasn’t torched, even in the parables, even in the fables, Sodom wasn’t torched for being homo.sexual. Those guys raped and broke faith with a traveler and were treating their own disadvantaged neighbors similarly. We know this, and if anyone here doesn’t know it, please check in with one of us for the bibliography. We aren’t bad, Sodom wasn’t gay, God loves us. The end. But not the end. That’s not the goal, it can’t be. Pride isn’t the point.

Pride is the point. Pride is our power, our empowerment. And it’s not the end, it’s just the beginning. We can’t stop there. We can’t just work enough to get ourselves through the door, and then close it behind us. That’s what Jesus is mad about today, it’s what he has advocated and acted against again and again. It’s what he’s demonstrating against today.

I want us to feel strong and empowered. I want us to reject shame and blame. I want us to move through the world heads up, eyes up, shoulders back. I want us to claim our promise, our birthright, claim our goodness and divinity. But that’s just not enough. It’s not enough. I’m not sorry for saying it; Jesus said it.

You are enough. And knowing and living our enoughness is not enough.

We are called to act for justice, for distributive justice. To hold accountable. Anything less is falling short of the glory, baby.

Knowing what racism is and does isn’t enough. We are called to countermand and dismantle it. Knowing what sexual consent is isn’t enough. We must share power and practice consent in all of our interactions with one another, and name it and hold each other accountable when we don’t. And if anyone thinks sharing power is weak or “woke,” I’ve got a donkey-riding king to show you and a messiah who went open-eyed so to speak toward arrest and execution. It’s not enough to know the definitions of colonialism and cultural extraction and mass incarceration. Knowing that homos.exuals and transes are in every era of history and geography, we are, isn’t enough. Knowing that we’re in the bible stories as exemplars and saviors, we are, knowing that we are as holy and wise and righteous as anyone, we are, is not enough. It’s a lot. It’s amazing. I want it for us. And we must go beyond our Pride; we must strengthen and build up the poor and sick and disempowered.

Jesus said it and demands it of us. That’s what’s happening in the temple today. Every gospel has this account of the temple civil disobedience. Any gospel in the canon that isn’t completely made up pairs it with the street action of the palms procession for a two-part indictment. Any gospel in the canon that is completely made up uses the two acts of public civil disobedience at the beginning and the end of Jesus’s ministry to bookend his life and work, to highlight acts of discipleship, of direct action, and its cost. These actions are almost certainly very actually probably why Jesus was executed.

It’s really important to know what he was criticizing. I’m not one hundred percent sure what Jesus is specifically targeting in the temple, but he’s not attacking Jewish faith, or necessarily temple structure or even the high priesthood. Probably yes, though, he may be targeting specific priests and lampooning specific governors and administrators yesterday, and maybe even other messiah types, with the donkey cabaret. I believe he is criticizing current practices, current legislators so to speak, current policies and structures so to speak, associated with the way the temple was currently operating. Who it was serving and who it was taking for granted. That he was highlighting and condemning these people and what they were doing to prop up the *system,” to support and grease the faith machine that “practices faith,” that “has faith” but doesn’t do justice, that “performs faith” and enacts ritual and allows the poor and sick and disempowered to participate but does not “help” them, doesn’t strengthen and build them up. In our own terminology, Jesus is probably definitely criticizing the operation of the church for giving the superficial impression of doing church but not, in fact, doing God’s work.

That’s what he means by quoting “den of thieves” from Jeremiah. The church is the refuge. It’s being used as cover.

Probably the Mark gospel made the house of prayer reference for its own purposes forty years later, but probably historical Jesus quoted Jeremiah. Jeremiah was talking about leaders who robbed or exploited the poor and sick and disempowered and then used the temple as cover. It might be like what the Southern Baptist Convention did, also this month, curse them, and any other body calling for harm and disenfranchisement of queer and trans folks in the guise of religion. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s similar, and people will die. Jeremiah says, your churches are pirates’ lairs. Your churches are bunkers. They are fundamentally rejecting, Jeremiah is, Jesus is, the veneer and machinations of any faith that doesn’t do its work of strengthening and building up the poor, sick, and disempowered. They are saying what Amos (5), and Hosea (6), and Micah (6), and Isaiah (1) all say: Your hands are covered in blood.

This is what I’d like us to think about today, but not as the victims of the violence. Not just as the victims of violence. This is how I’d like us to think of our Pride this year and ever, our church, our streets this year and ever. Not just for us. Not just for homos.exuals and transes. Not as a time and place to bolster ourselves only, to let ourselves through the door just to close it behind us.

That would make us the thing Jesus is condemning and demonstrating against today. To use our Pride, use our faith, use our inclusive churches, use our Pride month as a cover, as a beard, for celebrating ourselves and raising up ourselves and looking good and doing the appearance of justice and equity but not doing the work of justice or equity. The work of empowering the poor and sick and beset upon. We can’t just feel good about being queer and genderqueer. Please stay with me with this; I love us. I love you.

You might be thinking, but we are the beset upon, and we are. But we aren’t a monolith. The Jews under Roman control in the first-century land of Jerusalem were not a monolith. It’s one of the things that bothers me so much about the acronym, *our acronym! and its conflation of sexuality and gender and the bogus false inclusion of trans folks in name only and how people use it. I’m going to just say and hope we can acknowledge together that, yes, we are all beset upon, and that trans and genderqueer folks this year especially, this year uniquely, are profoundly experiencing a different level of violence and erasure, legislative and communal, in sport and healthcare, in identification documents and how that affects us moving in and between public spaces. That the numbers of our Black and brown trans sisters have never gone down, not once, at Transgender Day of Remembrance.

I hope we can acknowledge together that the newish anxiety and fear in this country of authoritarianism, or fascism, or totalitarianism or whatever words you’re using is not new or newish to our Black family and neighbors, that these or similar terms generally and broadly could be described as Black experience in this country always. Always. That our Latine family and neighbors are being literally hunted, literally hunted in their homes and cars and workplaces, hunted in the courts and offices needed to conduct their legal pleas for residency.

There aren’t sides. No things are a monolith. It’s not enough to be indignant. It’s not enough to be indignant about what the “other side” is doing and be proud of not being Them. It’s not enough to know what’s wrong, and it’s not enough to be in another political party than the one doing the deeds. There are people doing terrible, violent things. There are people aiding that harm, or looking the other way. There are people interrupting and shutting down business as usual, throwing blood on the draft files. And all those people are all along the political spectrum. This isn’t about being registered Democrat any more than being anti-racist means just not being klan.

I am so resistant to saying any generous thing about Liz Cheney, who voted something like 96- or 98% in line with her party eight years ago. But she is entered into evidence that they aren’t a monolith. Blue politician Gavin Newsom is defending his handily blue state from legislative and economic attacks, and he is beleaguered, and – and I still remember this – last year he said transgender lives and rights were expendable and should be sacrificed for his party success.

There aren’t always sides. There aren’t monoliths. Last Wednesday, Nezza sang the pre-game anthem at Dodger Stadium in Spanish para su gente, even though the Dodgers club administration said sing it in English. And some Dodger fans called for a boycott, and someone from the Dodger club maybe told Nezza she wasn’t welcome back. But Puerto Rican baseballer Kik3 Hernandez, Dodger utility player and currently in a bit of a batting slump, had posted to Instagram last weekend that he “cannot stand our community being violated,” and is “saddened and infuriated by what’s happening in our country and our city.” And yesterday those of us who get NYT notifications on our phones about the LA Dodgers got one that the Dodgers administration closed its parking lot to ICE agents and announced it is fronting $1 million and partnering with the California Community Foundation, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and other organizations to continue providing aid to immigrant families.

I don’t want us to leave here today feeling good about ourselves. I’m worried when I preach about our responsibility how many folks afterward seem to keep only hearing me say that whatever you do is fine. Whatever you do isn’t fine.

Whatever you do is fine. If you do something. Whatever you do is fine if you do something. It’s not me saying it; it’s Jesus. If the church isn’t doing God’s work, shut it down. If Pride isn’t doing Justice’s work, it’s not enough, shut it down. Do something. There is plenty, large and small, something for everyone. Some people turn over the moneychanger’s tables and get executed. Some people go around the corner and untie the donkey and the colt of a donkey. (Just kidding, there was only one donkey.) Nezza sang in Spanish para su gente even though she was scared. Safeway workers are striking. Millions of people protested and marched and put their bodies in danger for No Kings. The NAACP won’t invite a sitting president to its national convention this year for the first time ever in its 116 years. That Swedish kid that rode in a boat to the climate summit rode in a boat to Gaza with food and medicine. Boston has declared itself a sanctuary for immigrants and trans folks. People donate to the ACLU and Lambda and The Abortion Project.

There is a lot to do, different kinds of things to do, and it is not enough to perform faith, or Pride. We have got to do the work. Jesus said so; he said it, not me. He said, you have to do something. Jesus didn’t die for us so we don’t have to; someone else told us that. Someone who wanted us to sit down and look away. Jesus said I’m going to do stuff they’ll kill me for; follow me. And in case we spiritualized that, like how we did for hundreds of years, he said, Take up your cross and follow me. We still spiritualize it.

I love you, Compton people. Folsom Street people, I love you, Stonewall people. I love us. You’re good; you’re so good. Happy Pride, family; Let’s get to work.

Peace.

There’s Still My Joy

MCCNY
December 17, 2023

The spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me; God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of God’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; For I, God, love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. Their descendants shall be known among the nations, and their offspring among the peoples; all who see them shall acknowledge that they are a people whom God has blessed.

Greetings and blessings from the Council of Elders.

I have been thinking for a while about joy and what it is and whether I have any, and I need to be honest and warn you that today will be a struggle, mostly for me but also for you all, given that it’s Advent Three: Joy Candle Week and given that, on a basic level, I am constitutionally suspicious of joy. Joy is one of those things, like forgiveness, that people seem to talk about with a lot of certainty and confidence, like it’s inevitable or even fathomable; people telling us that we should have it and when, and what it does and how it feels. And to smile more.

We’re told I think that joy is a synonym for happiness, for example, or as extremely deep happy-ness, but we’re not really taught about how it’s different from being happy. We’re told to think of this season as intrinsically joyful and happy, we’re practically bullied into it by capitalism and compulsory Christianity. And Joy feels equated with decking halls, for example, or what fun to ride, or ho ho ho, which are all fine things don’t get me wrong. (Though all my favorite hos are homos.) Happiness is lovely. Of course, of course, for pity’s sake. I’m not a grinch. I don’t want to spoil joy. But I don’t want to keep getting battered by it, and I’d like to think about it and appreciate what it is and, maybe more importantly for me, what it’s not.

Because we are living in this terrible time. The October 7 attack of Israel was the biggest escalation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. More than 100 hostages are still held in Gaza. In the responsive strike against Hamas, Palestinian homes, hospitals, schools have been leveled with the death number at nearly 19 thousand. Without clean water, disease is spreading. Israeli soldiers and, as of yesterday, Israeli hostages are being killed by friendly fire; journalists are being killed in record numbers, I think. In the U.S., anti-semitic attacks have increased 400% since October, but reports in April showed anti-Jewish violence already high from a worldwide spike in 2021 that never ebbed in the States all through last year and this year, including hate crimes and anti-semitic white supremicist propaganda. New York City, our own city, our home, was among the three cities named with record numbers of anti-Jewish hate crimes. And the Council on American-Islamic Relations is receiving double the number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab reports and requests for help.

Then there’s the Movement Advancement Project, which has mapped that forty-five percent of queers and genderqueers live in the 28 states with low or negative state policy tallies. People are going after trans humans like we’re a threat to democracy. But we’re just doing regular stuff mostly, occasionally using public restrooms, sometimes but actually pretty rarely trying to play some sports, every once in a while hoping to postpone puberty in completely safe and reversible ways.

Last time I was here I mentioned the death rate for people in childbirth has increased for everyone but Black women, and still the mortality rate is most deadly for Black folks in childbirth. That’s not a coincidence. It’s not an accident. That’s the brutally logical result of racism and misogyny and the violence and weathering effect on every person who lives at that intersection.

And I feel like I can’t even scratch the surface of the actual, documented threat to democracy that we are facing and have been facing since we experienced for the first time in our nation’s history a failure to transition power peacefully from one administration to the next. The attack on journalism, on the separation of powers. Or what’s happening with reproductive freedom. A woman in Ohio was told by her doctor in the 21st week of her pregnancy that she may miscarry, and a week later she did. She was on the toilet, miscarried, was taken to the hospital for life-threatening complications. And a police went back to her home, cracked the toilet base to retrieve the fetus, and charged her with desecration of a corpse.

This doesn’t seem joyful. This seems counter-joyful. At odds with joy. It seems anti-joy. But I don’t think it’s inappropriate to attend to these violences and inequities and name them today on Joy Sunday. I feel like if folks don’t know these things are happening, we need to know, and it maybe is of concern that we don’t. And I don’t think it actually is anti-joy or anti-Christmas to hold them and feel deeply their grief and their anger. But I also struggle to *feel joy when I read the news and listen to the news. Except for Jon Lovett. My dudes. If you are struggling to stay connected to what’s happening because it feels like too much, too bad, too draining, may I please just ask-slash-urge you to check out Lovett or Leave It, which is part of the Crooked Media family and is cousins to Pod Save America and Hysteria. It’s a bunch of former Obama White House staff and other people, younger than me, smarter than me, taking on the real mess we’re in with a filter that helps me, at least, feel still able to move and act and laugh and feel.

There may be a tie-in here to the Isaiah text, which also describes oppressed and brokenhearted people and captives. This text describes the return of exiles, coming home to a country that’s been ransacked, a wasted temple, a conquered and subjugated nation. And it talks about moving and feeling and acting. In the same lines and in the same breath that the writer names prisoners and mourning, it also speaks of bringing good news, binding up the broken, and proclaiming liberty.

Of course it is possible to remain connected with joy, in times such as this and while sitting with and naming injustices. Of course it is; but is it, though? I worry about moving too quickly to optimism or positivity. I worry about skipping over the raging wildfire of awful, of minimizing the magnitude of injustice, dismissing it by taking sides or with lemonade or with quick and over-simple platitudes about God’s will and tough love. I worry about compartmentalization and dissociation. It’s more or less our nature, maybe, to want to squirm out of sitting with feelings of sadness and frustration. We are definitely not encouraged or taught how to express a full and complex emotional experience that includes a range of sadness and grief and rage and fear and also a nice selection from the joy family. Something that is joy or akin to joy.

There’s a winter hymn, an Advent hymn, my favorite, that could illustrate this, called In the Bleak Midwinter from a Christina Rossetti poem,

In the bleak midwinter/ Frosty wind made moan/ Earth stood hard as iron/ Water like a stone/ Snow had fallen/ Snow on snow/ Snow on snow/ In the bleak midwinter/ Long, long ago.

It’s describing a winter reality much like earlier cultural constructs of this season, before our current claymation-based marketing strategy: Advent used to be Winter Lent, and it used to be as staid and self-denying and bleak as any other Lent, and maybe more so because it was in the season of darkening and cold-ening rather than in spring. People would fast and pray and repent, and Lutherans would sing especially-tuneless hymns, more than usual. This hymn is brilliantly reflective of the reality of its setting, in these early lyrics and in the key of G-major; it is cold and distant and still warm and intimate: Only his mother/ In her maiden bliss/ Worshiped the beloved/ With a kiss… What can I give him?/ Give him my heart. It is bleak and iron gray and iron hard and also gently and softly joyful.

These scriptures and these hymns are clues, I think, to ways to recognize the pull and the power of joy, even in hard, awful times. That it is not always a victory march, can be a cold and broken halleluiah. Knowing that possibility and complexity I think can make it possible to be more present for our neighbors and comrades who are struggling. Knowing that grief doesn’t have to undermine joy can make it possible, perhaps, to attend to folks who are feeling estranged from community and care, folks who are grieving loss or reliving loneliness while so many others are demonstrably happy, acting like it’s the most wonderful time of the year and vomiting bows and glitter. I wonder, even, if this is exactly why the Liturgical Powers That Be placed Gaudete this late in Advent, in the week closest to the darkest day. Not because joy makes the most sense, but because it makes the least. Not as a mandate or a compulsion, but maybe they and Isaiah and Rossetti and many others are encouraging us to look for and maintain joy as a practice, as a discipline.

Some of the low-hanging fruit, when it comes to joy, is children. The liturgists and lots of people associate joy with children or childlikeness or childish wonder. Gaudete Sunday traditionally includes a blessing of the children, and a lot of the imagery and symbolism of joy, and of Advent joy in particular, is associated with children: Elizabeth’s child leaps within her at Mary’s greeting, Mary’s baby is born with a heavenly proclamation of good news of great joy for all the people, children and vipers play together in peace. I think people find it easier most of the time to talk about ideals like joy in terms of youth and innocence. And I get that. Children can be great. Some of my most uncomplicated joyful memories are of teaching my godson Alfie to ride a bike and giving him piggy-back rides on our way to the park while he narrated his world in my right ear.

But equating joy with children may be, maybe, overly romantic and incomplete. And not just because it used to take Alfie an hour and a half to eat a peanut butter sandwich. Not just because of that relentless snot situation, or watching children eat yogurt from a tube, or the struggle to have a rational conversation. And only partly because of how awful it can feel to be treated as though our families without children are not real families, or that the emotional harm of medical and athletic and legal exclusions to grown trans folks or violence to whole Black adults isn’t worth caring about or organizing around.

Part of the tension, and part of our larger-community interest in queering theology, is to find ways to reframe things that are harder and less idealistic and less common, to face things that feel hard, even when it comes to joy. It seems important and necessary to connect children to struggle, and important to relate our grown-up, imperfect lives to joyfulness and wholeness. It seems important and necessary to know that we are all children, and we are all like children, when it comes to archetypal values like worth and protection and innocence. We are all worthy. We are all precious. We are, Sarah MacLaughlin says and I think she’s solid on this, we are all still innocent. (Yeah, Adia.)

Joy can also, obviously, be felicity. It can be like that magical stuff we call grace, the kind of joy that comes unbidden, or unaccounted for, from no apparent source. That’s Isaiah today again, when through oppression breaks good news, over brokenheartedness comes bolster, against captivity shines liberty. Lots of us have experienced this, I imagine, those moments of incomprehensible peace or unaccountable bliss in the midst of chaos or terror. Something divine not in the devastation but in the healing; something holy not punishing us or testing us or building character but wanting and aching for justice and healing with us.

And joy isn’t always or maybe not even mostly a gift. Understanding joy as a discipline, as a practice, makes us responsible, too, for our joy specifically and more generally accountable for our attitudes and actions. When Isaiah asserts that the spirit of God is upon us, because God has anointed us; God has sent us to bring good news, to bind up, to proclaim liberty and release; to comfort all who mourn it seems both an assurance and a calling. It seems as much a vocation as a promise.

There’s a post-it note I’ve moved into every office I’ve had for the last ten years or so that says “emotions are habits,” I have it tattooed on my arm, to remind me mostly that I can re-learn lessons about anger, and maybe someday also shame, but also that joy isn’t a mystery, that peace isn’t only a product of my circumstances that day, that lovingkindness is almost never something I feel. Joking but also not necessarily joking, you know? Emotions come at us and surprise us, but not only; we don’t have to be and I think mustn’t be at their mercy. We can cultivate them and, at the risk of sounding like I’m telling anyone what to do, we probably should cultivate them. If we wait around until we actually feel like loving people, if we depend entirely on feeling peace or joy or patience or gentleness or self-control… I don’t know. I don’t know. These are awful times, now and throughout our whole lifetimes things are deeply jacked. Maybe peace and joy and patience and gentleness and self-control are also spiritual gifts, but it’s not even just that I think of this stuff as work we have to and *get to participate in, but also that understanding joy exclusively as a spiritual gift makes it deeply implicated in supremacy and hegemony. It makes joy one more thing in a long list of things harder to access for marginalized folks and easier to monopolize and define for privileged folks.

Reframing joy as a discipline is exciting; it’s almost subversion. It’s another way to tear down dominant empire, participate in setting and re-setting value, creating new heavens and new earths where good and nonviolent ways and eternal values set the tone and where *we name and create and broaden the definitions of peace and joy and patience and gentleness and self-control, for ourselves and with one another.

Cultivating a practice of joyfulness transcends circumstances, bad *and good. It allows us to experience and share joy in the midst of all of life, to reject pleasure as the sole determinant of when and where we will feel peaceful and joyful and content. Long live pleasure; baby, please. Nobody is doing away with pleasure. But rejecting pleasure as the force that dictates our actions and emotions? That’s revolutionary.

Imagine practicing a discipline that locates our own joy in other people’s well-being. Both sympathetic joy, celebrating good things that happen to others, and also the kind of joy being described by Isaiah, if I can characterize it as joy: a joy that is instigated by distributive justice and social activism. The Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg talks about something very similar when she says that the way to happiness is through kindness. I first learned the lovingkindness meditation from Salzberg, and then from it I *started beginning to learn to try to practice becoming someone who can more often maybe extend warmth and feel connection to more people, including those I feel indifferent toward, those I feel alienated from, those I am actively in conflict with. What I feel when I try to practice mindfulness, the equanimity I experience more often, the presence and connection and *patience and *trust that I feel more strongly more often, is so much of what I understand to be Joy: a joy that isn’t circumstantial or conditional.

And it’s when I feel unskillful, when I feel more anxious, angry, overwhelmed, helpless, when I experience those feelings more strongly more often, it’s then that I self-consciously, intentionally seek out and re-invest in mindfulness.

Look, I’m not telling you all what to do or anything. But tai chi first saved my life and then helped me live it more fully. So, you know, do what you want. You know. Don’t learn tai chi and have a better life. I’m not the boss of you.

This is subversive love as resistance as joy. Jesus said it about turning the other cheek, he said love your enemies, love those who hate you and revile you. Jesus said love extravagantly, like it rains, ridiculously, willy nilly, on the good and bad alike. Joy is exactly like that. An internal practice, a discipline free of what good or horrifying things are happening around us. It does help us to experience joy even when the world is on fire. But maybe more importantly, maybe most importantly, it keeps us from glossing over pain and injustice, and allows us to experience a kind of joy that still also attends to and engages with and feels deeply about a world that is on fire. And salves and feeds us to hope for and make change.

Peace.