Exploring the renewal to be found in joy and awe.
The Joy of Renewal (or, To Be Regularly Gay)
Rev Joe Cleveland
June 16, 2024
I set myself the task of preaching about joy, so there should be some sort of fun happening here, not just some preacher perorating profundities, but perhaps that plus a little playfulness.
I love the minister who was my mentor for the two year internship I served at the First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts. He was and is the Rev. John Gibbons and one of the things I love about him is how playful he is. No gimmick was too corny to bring into a service. He bought a disco ball for the sanctuary which was pretty spectacular twinkly fun during the winter holidays. During my time there, he also acquired with great glee an inflatable flying clownfish which he would pilot around the big sanctuary, the sparkles from the disco ball reflecting off of it.
When I arrived, he had a well-established penchant for streamer and confetti cannons. One of my first lessons at his hands was how to handle the streamer cannon. There were streamers every Water Communion service in September and after the Christmas Eve services, too. In fact, when the couple who were the lead plaintiffs in the successful case for same sex marriage in Massachusetts—Julie and Hillary Goodridge—got married at UUA headquarters in Boston and walked out onto the steps, the photo snapped by the AP photographer features streamers by Rev. Gibbons. Simply fun and joyful.
I think of John whenever I get out my bubble machine.
I’ve been meditating on the theme of renewal this month. When I try to understand how renewal might happen, the first thing I thought of was experiences of joy. Experiences of joy feel like renewal to me. Call to mind a time that you experienced joy. Thing about where you were and who was with you. I’ve been thinking lately about May 25th, ten years ago, when this congregation voted to call me as your minister. I was bouncing off the ceiling of this room with you all.
What is joy like for you?
The poet Ross Gay has found acclaim by writing about joy and delight. And often, when he gives a reading, someone will ask him a question that goes something like: What with all of the awful things happening in the world, all of the terrible and troubling things that happen that we need to think about, difficult things that we need to address— With all that going on, why would you, how can you write about joy? Gay points out that what this question implies is that joy doesn’t have anything to do with all the terrible stuff. “Or even,” says Gay,
that joy is the opposite of what’s in there. Which I guess is a reasonable notion, given how joy is often imagined to be the result of organizing our closets and bookshelves or getting the new Tesla or winning the big game or acing the test or getting a promotion or getting our dishes sparkling clean. […] Joy, the thinking goes, is that room at the top of a flight of stairs that, upon entering, washes you with clean air and glad music and comfy furniture and gentle warmth emanating from the white pine floors, suffused with light pouring in from the enormous windows with a sweet window seat where you can read a happy book. The joy room, the thinking goes, is snug with every good and nice and cozy thing.
Neither Gay nor I believe that’s really how joy works.
For example: There are at least two important and joyful celebrations going on this month. June is Pride month and next Sunday the Saratoga Pride Festival will take place at High Rock Park from 2 to 5. And we UU Saratogians will be there peopling our table and there will be rainbows and laughter and even joy.
And there will be more joy this Wednesday when Juneteenth, that now national holiday, will be celebrated. UU Saratoga is one of the sponsors of this year’s local Juneteenth celebration, along with many other organizations. This Wednesday from noon to 4 at the Saratoga Regional YMCA. A program of speakers, musicians, poets, dancers, and players will run from 1 to 3 and it will include UU Saratoga member Dan Berggren and you will see joy there.
Celebrating Pride, celebrating Juneteenth. These are joyful events, and that joy is not simple. Or, I should say, that joy seems connected to suffering and hurt which Pride month and the Juneteenth holiday also holds. Ross Gay says,
“It is a kid’s fantasy (by which we grown-ups seem as seduced as plenty of kids) to imagine any emotion discreet from any other. But it strikes me as a particularly dangerous fantasy,”
continues Gay,
—by which I also mean it is sad, so […] sad—that because we often think of joy as meaning “without pain,” or “without sorrow” […] —not only is it sometimes considered “unserious” or frivolous to talk about joy (i.e. But there’s so much pain in the world!), but this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live without—or maybe a more accurate phrase is free of—heartbreak or sorrow. Which I’m pretty sure you only get to do if you have no relationships, love nothing, are a sociopath […] I don’t know about you, but I check none of those boxes.
We all know sorrow. We all know sorrows. And we all know joy and fun and laughter. And I don’t know how possible it is to disentangle or separate them.
I read something that gave me some joy this week. It’s a piece published in 1922 by Gertrude Stein, that might be first time that the word “gay” was used in a published piece of writing to describe a same-sex relationship. It’s called “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” and here’s a taste of it:
Helen Furr had quite a pleasant voice a voice quite worth cultivating. She worked to cultivate her voice. She did not find it gay living in the same place where she had always been living. She went to a place where some were cultivating something, voices and other things needing cultivating. She met Georgine Skeene there who was cultivating her voice which some thought was quite a pleasant one. Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene lived together then. […] They were together then and travelled to another place and stayed there and were gay there.
[…] They were quite regularly gay there, Helen Furr and Georgine Skeen, they were regularly gay there where they were gay. They were very regularly gay.
To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.
And so on. I can’t help it. It just makes me grin. It makes me gay. It makes me gay here where we are together cultivating something, voices and other things needing cultivating. And part of what we are cultivating is our sense of compassion, our practice of compassion. We are very regularly practicing the cultivation of compassion. And being gay, being joyful, which means being gay. Which comes to mean being gay in spite of the cultural misogyny which disrespects the showy or the effeminate. But which still means being regularly gay, cultivating being joyful. I don’t think I would feel what I feel about Helen and Georgine being regularly gay, very regularly gay, if it wasn’t regularly hard and even regularly dangerous to be regularly gay in our country. But out of that hurt, and out of the community holding that hurt together and healing together, helping one another through the hurt to wholeness—out of that suffering you won’t find anything more joyful than a Pride parade or a Pride festival.
Though the Juneteenth celebration will come close. It will be joyful, too. And it also is a joy that comes out of a sharing of suffering.
Ross Gay, who must be regularly gay, wonders
But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?
What if the renewal we need is a renewal of joy that welcomes suffering, a renewal that emerges with joy from caring for one another and accompanying one another through pain, suffering, or sorrow? Could we practice such a renewal regularly? Could we cultivate our voices to speak of sorrows held in common, to sing of a gaiety, a joyfulness that emerges from noticing what we love in common?
Ross Gay says,
My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.
May we be here in community together to cultivate voices and other things that need cultivating. May we open to our sorrow and to how we have in common that we sorrow and suffer. May we be drawn together. May we survive and thrive in common, noticing what we love in common, together, regularly gay. Every day doing the gay thing to do every day. Practicing care every day that we will have been, will be, every day regularly joyful, regularly gay.
Amen.
Resources
Ross Gay. Inciting Joy: Essays. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2022.
Stein, Gertrude. “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.