One of the astonishing differences in the new Kamala Harris-led change in the political landscape today is the unmistakable note of joy in her campaign and in her followers and, in contra-distinction, the way her political opponents are sneering at this joy.
Most outrageously, they created a picture of her face as The Joker who hides her malice behind a laughing mask of a face.
Stephen Shoemaker
Harris’ full and free laughter and easy joy are getting on their nerves. So of course they attack her joy. There is, to be sure, an element of political euphoria here as her campaign has begun with the wind at her back. But I want to explore the various graces in her joy and in God’s gift of joy in its many expressions.
There is the joy of sheer love of life, a joy full of wonderment and surprise. Sometimes joy comes unbidden, as grace often comes. America’s poet, Mary Oliver, in her poem “Don’t Hesitate” writes:
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy
don’t hesitate. Give into it …
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Poets of creation’s beauty lead us there. “Glory be to God for dappled things,” Hopkins wrote. The poet Li-Young Lee, in “Blossom” describes “the round jubilance of peach.” In face of the immense beauty, goodness and succulence of the world, how can we not jubilate?
Then there is spiritual joy. If the first kind is a common grace, a grace given to all, this kind is for those who have joined their lives with God. Jesus spoke of the joy he brought: “that my joy will be in you and that your joy may be full.”
It is the joy the Hebrew writers spoke of as “the joy of the Lord” and of this joy the prophet Nehemiah wrote: “The joy of the Lord is your strength!”
Hebrew and Christian worship partakes of such joy.
But there is also joy as a form of courage. Journalist Dorothy Thompson, who wrote in the time between the World Wars, was the only American journalist to interview Adolf Hitler. In one essay, she describes a friend who had suffered much and yet who exhibited in her words “that most beautiful form of courage, the courage to be happy.”
“God gives … joy as a form of courage, a grace that sustains them.”
God gives to God’s people, especially those in dire straits and living in oppressive conditions, joy as a form of courage, a grace that sustains them. I have seen such joy in Black churches as they are given joy in the midst of life’s injustice and human cruelty.
The poet Jack Gilbert writes in “A Brief for The Defense”:
We must risk delight …
We must have the
The stubbornness to accept our gladness in the
ruthless furnace of the world.”
Then he adds:
…to make injustice the only measure of our
attention is to praise the devil.
There is one more form of joy which New York Times columnist David Brooks calls “moral joy.” Moral joy is the joy we feel when we are living according to our best and highest values. It is the joy of being engaged in a cause greater than ourselves, justice or peace or love.
We feel this joy when we are grasped by a purpose beyond ourselves and it is as if God is the one grasping us, not a fancy of our hearts. It is then a grace. It is what the secretary general of the U.N. Dag Hammarskjold was describing in his spiritual journal, Markings, discovered after his plane crashed in a mission to the Congo in the 1960s:
I don’t know Who — or what — put the question. I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life in self-surrender had a goal.
I believe some of the joy we are witnessing in the vice president as she runs for president of the United States is moral joy. It is the joy we have seen in the faces of those who endured hatred and violence as they participated in the Civil Rights Movement to secure the right to vote, a right now again under assault.
If there is a devil, he must sneer at the joy of heaven, and as for his grim minions on earth, they too sneer at what they cannot fathom: Joy.
Stephen Shoemaker serves as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He served previously as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas; and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.
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