TOKENS PODCAST: S3E12
An interview with Angela Williams Gorrell, Professor of Practical Theology at Baylor University, and author of a new book entitled The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found. Angela recounts her own experiences with the sudden, tragic, and nearly simultaneous losses of three family members; how America’s current crisis of despair can be traced and understood through suicide and addiction rates; and the surprising ways in which gateways to joy can be found in the midst of deep grief; plus, additional commentary from Angela’s former boss at Yale, Miroslav Volf, on the connection between joy and sorrow.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Rev. Dr. Angela Gorell, graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary with a Ph.D in practical theology is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Baylor's George W. Truett Theological Seminary. Prior to joining the faculty at Baylor University, she was an Associate Research Scholar at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, working on the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project. Further, she was a lecturer in Divinity and Humanities at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She is an ordained pastor with 14 years of ministry experience. Dr. Gorrell is passionate about finding issues that matter to people and shining the light of the Gospel on them. She is the author of Always on: Practicing Faith in a New Media Landscape and a new book, The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found, which shares findings of the joy project while addressing America’s opioid and suicide crises. Dr. Gorrell’s expertise is in the areas of theology and contemporary culture, education and formation, meaning-making, joy, new media, and youth and emerging adults. Dr. Gorrell regularly consults, speaks, and leads workshops and retreats on her research and areas of expertise.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Angela: I read as much as possible about joy.
I took notes daily on it, and I just thought. Does it get any better than this?
Lee: That's Angela Williams Gorrell: Professor, pastor, and recently the author of The Gravity of Joy. She's recounting her experience, as a newly minted PhD, in which she had taken a job researching joy at Yale... But then:
Angela: In four weeks, lost three people that I loved very suddenly and I just thought. Study joy? Unthinkable.
Lee: On today's episode, Angela recounts how the sudden, tragic, and near-simultaneous losses of three family members prompted her to rethink both the meaning and measure of a joy-filled life. We'll also hear briefly from Angela's former boss at Yale Divinity School, Professor Miroslav Volf, on the ways in which...
Miroslav: Joy and sadness. They're not incompatible. They can live together in one person. They can live together in one moment.
Lee: Coming right up.
Part 1
Lee: Angela Williams Gorrell is assistant Professor of practical theology at Baylor University's George W. Pruitt theological seminary ordained pastor in the Mennonite church USA. And today we're talking about her new book, The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found. Welcome Angela.
Angela: I'm so honored to be here and to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for having me.
Lee: Yeah, it's a delight to have you here in Nashville on your way to talking to various audiences here in the Southeast. So glad that we could meet here. Your book is seeking, as you say, to consider joy as a counter agent to America's crisis of despair, which is a lovely line, but I'm going to flash forward just a second, not to talk about it yet. But we will later. And yet at the end of the book or one of the last chapters you say, well, we can't make joy, like spaghetti. There's not a recipe for it, right? And so you're clearly not doing self-help technique in the book. And yet you frame the sort of difficulty of this book's agenda, by talking about how you were studying joy teaching a course at Yale on joy when the so-called crisis of despair crashed into your own life.
Angela: Yeah, it was eight months into working. I was working on the theology of joy and the good life project at Yale and teaching a class called life worth living, or I was about to, I hadn't taught it yet. You know, of course, in the first few months that I was there, I just was over the moon about what I was doing. I read as much as possible about joy. I took notes daily on it, and I just thought. Does it get any better than this? You know, like working on this team at Yale University? I don't know that it does. I felt very, very grateful.
Eight months into working on the project, one of my family members died by suicide. And that day changed my life forever in a moment. And that, you know, people talk about that a lot. How one minute of your life can change everything. It changed the way I saw my life, the way I related to other people. It changed my faith.
Angelas' cousin's husband, Dustin, had killed himself. Being an ordained Mennonite pastor, Angela was naturally called upon to help officiate the funeral.
And that whole week I happened to be Dustin's family's kind of like one of their people. I think as a pastor, you're kind of called upon by your family in the midst of crisis in a way that it makes sense to everybody. And so just helping to do the funeral present for a lot of, very, very painful moments that I don't even write about in the book. And got back to Connecticut a week and a half later and just thought, don't know how we're going to recover from this as a family.
This is going to be a very difficult road to healing for us. And then a week and a half later-ish, get a text from my sister. You need to call me. I call her and find out that my nephew Mason had died at 22, very suddenly of a previously unknown health condition, a heart condition that he had called my oldest sister, who is his mother.
And you know, I'm like Steph, do you want me to come? Yes. Will you come? And so I find myself just a couple of weeks after Dustin's funeral headed to Albuquerque, New Mexico for another funeral. And got back to Connecticut on a Sunday night the day after Mason's funeral. I read his obituary at his funeral, spoke at Dustin's funeral, you know, just my heart.
I did not think I could be any sadder. It was just like, you know, I don't know again, how am I going to recover from this? Oh my goodness. This has been the worst three weeks of my life, you know?
Two days later after I get a message that my dad is in the ER, fighting for his life.
I can't even comprehend it at that time. And I just think there is no way. There is no way that my dad is dying this week. Like this cannot happen to me. Like this cannot not happen to all of us. Like Steph just lost her son. Like we cannot lose our dad.
So it was my first day teaching at Yale University. I just got my PhD six months before. Like, I'm trying to hold myself, you know, I'm teaching a brand new class that I've never taught before too. And then it's called life worth living. And so, yeah, I just do whatever people do. I think when they are in the mode of survival, I was just in survival mode. And I went to some other, like, Namaste place in my head.
I don't know what I did. And I went into there and I just did my thing and I just kept my heart almost closed to what was happening. And then I just casually mentioned to my students. Yeah. If I can't be in class it's because my dad's not doing very well. He's in the ER and you know, he's really sick. Like he's dying.
And then the next morning I just realize my sister and I were going back and forth and she called the nurse and she has a degree. She's an occupational therapist, but she's done nursing school too. So she called the nurse and was just like, just shoot us straight. And the nurse was like, if you want to see your dad alive, you have to come today. So then I find myself on three planes in a rental car, getting there as fast as possible, begging God to allow me to see my dad, and my dad died that night.
I did spend five hours with him, which was so beautiful. It was sacred, holy ground, you know. So eight months into the joy project, in four weeks, lost three people that I loved. Very suddenly. And got back to Connecticut and I just thought, study joy? Unthinkable.
Lee: When you think back to your family member who died by suicide and the days following and your being present to your family, and you're being present to your own grief what are some of the kind of some key moments that you look back on of what you experienced in the wake of such a devastating death? Or what are details of your experience that stand out to you?
Angela: I mean, honestly I've never cried that much in my life for six days straight. Today. I mean, I can cry thinking about it. I mean, even into Christmas, it was like, seven, eight days straight. I just. Every moment was like trying not to cry. All of us, we just cried so much. You know, so it was like a lot of weeping, you know, but then this real desire to celebrate who he was to honor him. We wanted on that Friday night in that funeral service, that Memorial service, we wanted his life to be more than about his death.
Lee: This desire to honor a life, even in the midst of grieving that life lost, reminded me of a conversation I had a while back with, of all people, Angela's former boss at Yale: Professor Miroslav Volf.
Volf is one of the world's leading Christian theologians, and is the director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. In recent years, much of his work has focused on the study of joy. I asked him to comment on the possibility of joy in the midst of sorrow.
Miroslav: Well, first let's try and recall or imagine situations in which it is possible, which we experience it, then, then we can maybe figure out a bit how it might be possible.
I certainly have had experience of a funeral where I am both sad that this person has departed. That somebody who was such a live presence in my life is no longer there. Sometimes deep, also grief. While at the same time I've had experience of just that, which makes me miss them. I'm rejoicing over of a life that has been lived that has been lived in such a way that made a profound impact upon me upon other people. I celebrate something while I'm grieving and in grieving, I'm also celebrating something and rejoicing.
And so you can see how because joy and sorrow are tied to particular states of affairs. They have philosophers call intentional objects.
Certain things have happened and I rejoice over them. Certain things have happened and I am sad over them. And so I can one in the same time having different objects in view, I can both read your eyes and I can also be sad.
And in fact, there are traditions especially in Jewish tradition of nurturing sadness as accompanying every joy.
Lee: Every joy?
Miroslav: Every joy. And the reason for that is very, very simple. There's something untrue about giving oneself completely to joy while one realizes that there are so many things in the world for which I should be grieving. How can you rejoice? That has been often questioned.
We engage this really long process, studying joy. How can you concentrate so much on joy when there's so much suffering, so broken a world? But it's possible that even in every joy that you pay homage to the brokenness so that you don't proudly and obliviously with regard to others forget about sorrow.
Lee: This is not merely theoretical, ivory-towered observations about joy and sorrow for Miroslav. He is a Croation, born in the former Yugoslavia, which was home to one of the most distressing ethnic conflicts of the 20th century. His best known book is entitled Exclusion and Embrace, in which he asks pointed and challenging questions about the theological notion of forgiveness, especially in the face of the brutal violence observed in the Yugoslav War, and it's horrific ethnic cleansing .
Miroslav: I grew in a family, my father was an inmate in the labor camp. My mother gave birth to six children, two of whom are alive today. Four of them died. We were a persecuted church. I grew up in a communist, uh, environment, where it was not particularly a good thing to be a Christian.
And so the, the, the pressure, the, the suffering, the loss. Was always part of it, but I also grew up in the family and maybe less my mom and my dad than my, uh, very saintly nanny, who came to our home because she didn't have a place to stay and we had two rooms. And so she could find the bed with us and take care of some of the kids, me as a, uh, as a child, he's lost his husband in the war.
He was 50, 56 when she came to us diabetes. She had all sorts of troubles in, in her life. And yet she was the most joyful person that I have ever met in my life. She was always sick. There was a kind of peace that paraded her life. It was kind of notwithstanding peace. I have a joy which the real world did not give and the world cannot take away. It was a kind of joy, which are African American communities know that quite well in this country. Uh, other people who, uh, endure great suffering have that. That was my experience. It was my experience of the possibility of joy in the midst of actually great pain and great, uh, suffering.
There's a phrase that Alexander Schmemann, the great Russian Orthodox theologian, mentioned in his diaries where he describes joy as a bright sorrow. So that even in the overwhelmingly sorrowful environment, you can have the brightness of joy. If you can flip that, right? Sorrowful brightness.
So that in the overwhelming joy, there's a place that registers brokenness. Brokenness that might come afterwards. Brokenness that was. Brokenness that is elsewhere. We're not oblivious. We live in the world while recognizing these boasts.
Lee: This brings us back to Angela's experience at Dustin's funeral: a simultaneous expression of both deep joy for a life lived and loved, and deep sorrow for that life being lost. When thinking about that moment, she recalls...
Angela: We worked very, very hard to honor his life and who he was and to bring him to life for people, you know. But also to say, like, everyone knew that was there, that he struggled with depression very severely since he was like 14 years old and he was 30 when he passed away. Very severe depression for that whole time, it never let up.
And I remember, man. Okay. I remember that week being very, very upset with God in a way that I had never really been upset with God, where I was like, why did you not allow the darkness to lift? Like, why, why, why did the darkness never lift for him? Like why did it take this for the darkness to lift? You know?
And that's the thing after this happened, I wanted to understand suicidal thinking in a ways that I could help to work against it. The biggest thing that I learned, the most important thing that I learned other well, there's two important things.
One was that people who die by suicide really are trying to find relief from the pain in their life, from darkness. And they think that this is the only way that it's going to happen. And I think that's a very important thing is that we understand, that that helps us to have compassion for people who die by suicide is like they really were trying to find relief and they felt like this was the only way. You know, and then the other thing is Thomas Joiner's book, Why People Die By Suicide, says that there's a trifecta of three things that come together that make it possible for someone to take their own life.
And one is a sense of profound loneliness. Like no one understands me. No one can reach me where I am. Another is the sense of, your life has become ineffective, that you're a burden on other people or your life is meaningless. Some version of that, you know? And then over time, the developed capacity to harm oneself.
And so he says these three things come together. And we can't really change someone's developed capacity to harm themselves. Oftentimes that comes from an abusive childhood, for example. You can't change that, right? But we can change whether people feel lonely or they feel like a burden. And so that's what I wanted to focus on in the gravity of joy is how do we feel less alone and how do we help each other to see that you're not a burden. Your life might be full of pain. Like, you may not like yourself. You may have made mistakes, you may have failed, but your life is not just ineffective. You can be redeemed. Everything can be redeemed. Yeah.
Lee: I want to go back to what you said just a moment ago, about how you feel like you're not aware of having been that angry with God before, or perhaps even spoken to God in that way before. I wonder if one of the failings of Christian formation or theological education might be our insufficiency in teaching lament. Which is odd given that half the book of Psalms are laments, right? But I know that you're doing work in religious education, theological education. And what are you learning about teaching people to express emotion, teaching people to express anger, express lamentation, express grief.
Angela: I think it's so central to Christian faith and to Christian religious education.
And this is absolutely something that I'm teaching in my classes, but also encouraging through this book in retreats I lead, in conferences I lead, and trainings that I do to say that creating space for befriending emotions. Especially difficult ones. The thing is, is that we don't create space for like any emotion very well, you know, but, and so it's so important.
It's Fred Rogers who said that feelings have to be mentionable, you know, that we have to have permission to feel and to feel deeply and openly. And so we have to give people that permission. And one of those things that we need to be able to feel deeply is absolutely lament. And we do have to learn how do I articulate my laments to God?
And for me, for example, in one of my classes I teach how creating a lament room in a church is actually a really meaningful thing to do or at a Christian university, probably at any university. But to have a room where, especially in a church, for example, where people can go into it and express laments in all different ways. I'm imagining where you have index cards and people can just put their laments up on the walls.
Where you have colored pencils and markers and whatever paper and people can draw their laments and put them somewhere. Where people can paint, where people can light candles. I mean, I think that's the power. A few months ago, you know, I'm a Mennonite pastor, but I found myself at a Catholic church. The Catholic church really does this right. In the sense of like, they always have an open sanctuary, you know, and I found myself entering into this dark beautiful sanctuary where there's all these lit candles and the more that can be lit kneeling before Mary, like praying. There needs to be that space like that, that's what they do. Right? That's a really beautiful thing that the Catholic church does for people just creating this space where people can lament. And so we need the same thing for righteous anger, I think.
Lee: Yeah. I think that some years ago I remember starting a season of some therapy and, and that there, and I was dealing with among a number of things with a great deal of depression and the therapist said so what are you feeling?
I thought for a moment. And then I said, I don't know. And he chuckled and he said, I think you're telling the truth. But yet, that capacity to learn, to pay attention to what we're feeling and not repress it or suppress it. And then to learn that there are healthier and less healthier ways to express them, right? And to process them.
Angela: Yeah. So it's like, how do we constructively feel this thing? I just think there's no such thing from my perspective as a bad emotion. Like, we feel things and we cannot help how we feel. Yeah, oftentimes, but the question is, can I feel this in a constructive way, in a way that's going to not yet destroy my own self or dehumanize someone else in the process, you know. But yeah, I've started a guided meditation about eight months ago, like right in the middle of COVID where I was just like, I need this in my life.
So I started with a guided meditation that every morning, one of the questions that it asked me is how does your heart feel? Many days it's actually hard for me. I'm like, how do I feel today? Like paying attention to how you feel, and honoring that and then saying like, I think feelings are there's wisdom there. Yeah.
Lee: And for me learning also to pay attention, not with all of my emotions, but with some of my emotions, I've learned to detect particular physical or bodily sensations that sometimes go with some of those. So sometimes I can catch the physical sensation and say, oh, I'm in a place of where I might be sliding into some depression because I'm noticing the way that feels on the back of my head. And so that's been helpful to me to pay attention to.
Angela: Yeah. The body keeps the score, right?
Lee: Yeah that’s right, indeed.
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
You can always reach us, tell us where you're listening from, or let us know some of the things you'd like to hear more about. by emailing us at podcast@tokensshow.com. Also remember you can sign up for our email list, or find out how to join us for a live event, all at tokensshow.com.
You've been listening to our interview with Angela Williams Gorrell, Professor of practical theology at Baylor University, and author of The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found. Coming up, we'll hear from Angela about her father's struggle with opiod addiction, and the surprising ways in which tragedy may open potential gateways to joy.
Part two in just a moment.
Part 2
You're listening to Tokens and our interview with Angela Williams Gorrell.
Lee: Your, uh, your father's passing away from opioid addiction. Give us some kind of pictures of what it was like coming to realize your father's addiction.
Angela: I denied it for a really long time, not intentionally, but I did notice basically my sister had put it so well at the funeral that I just, you know, asked her if I could put it in the book this way.
And it was just like, he lived big for so long. My dad was just not only like a big dude, you know, he just had a big stature, but he was like a big presence in a room. He walked into a room and he was like, here I am, you know, which I probably get a little bit of that from, you know. And I remember even watching him as a kid, he was an attorney, like, watching him do the closing arguments in a courtroom.
And it was like magic. The guy could captivate an audience. That's why he won so much, cause his closing arguments were on point. It was beautiful. You could hear a pin drop in the courtroom. Cause he was articulate and he would walk and, like, pause in all the right places. And then I remember post-college just starting to see in him that, oh, like he stopped going to work.
He's not working as much. And then realizing in phone calls. Wow. He sounds, I'd say in the book, he sounds so sleepy. He sounds like he's not able to engage in this conversation. You know, and I knew he was taking a lot of pain medication for pain that he had, that he said he had, like, he had had two hip surgeries.
But then the thing was he didn't want to go to rehab. He didn't want to really learn to walk again. Well, and then it was just. Then every time I went to visit him, it got worse and worse. And over the years the phone calls got worse and worse. And I remember when he could not remember where I went to school or where I lived in a conversation.
He's like, wait, wait, where do you live again? And like, I'd lived in Los Angeles for years. And I was like, what? Why don't you know where I live? And I became angry and I just thought, why don't you care enough about me to remember these things, you know? And I didn't know what opioids did. I didn't realize how much it impacted your memory.
I didn't know, also, how much he was doing it until a particular time that I described that I went there and it was like, wow. His house was in disarray. I mean, it was awful. It was disgusting. And I was like, this is his life. His whole life is doing pills all day long. That's what he does. He sits in a bedroom by himself.
Anybody you talk to who has become addicted to opioids say that it's almost like being in a womb. Like it just creates this, like, very safe, warm, cozy feeling. Other drugs you want to do with other people, you know, from what I understand. Andrew Sullivan talks about this in a really important article that he wrote, I think for the New Yorker, but he says like, you know, that the drugs of your time say a lot about kind of the moment of the culture, which I thought was so fascinating in this piece.
And he was like, you know, there are other drugs, like cocaine like that people want to do with other people. And it makes you want to be around other people. You want to, like, go party with other people. You want to work really hard. You want to do this or that. No. Opioids make you want to retreat and to be alone, but they make you happy.
But that's the thing they make you happy with no one else. They make you feel safe with no one else. And so, yeah, I watched him go from being the guy who lived really big to the guy who lived so small. And he forgot my birthday, didn't come to my wedding reception. Then that's when I really realized like this thing has overtaken his life. And especially that very last time that I saw him, he had lost so much weight and it was just, it was awful, awful.
Lee: Didn't come to your wedding reception.
Angela: I got married in San Diego and he couldn't come and I knew he wouldn't be able to come because he was in a wheelchair, but it wasn't just that. I knew, like he barely leaves his house ever.
So he’s not going to be able to get on a plane. You're just not in the shape. He had to have a lot of help to even get to a car. But it was important to me that I get to experience this with him, you know? So I created a wedding reception. I had my aunt have it at our house in Kentucky, just for him to be able to be there. Nobody else. It was literally just for him. And that morning I called him and he said he couldn't come.
Lee: So then came that day, in the midst of the start of teaching her first class at Yale, when she got the call about her father's impending death.
Angela: Yeah I'm so grateful that first of all my dear friend, Phil Love, who's in hospice right now, actually the former manager of the Yale center for faith and culture is in hospice.
I called him that morning and I asked him, you know, should I go? I don't know. I just see you as my boss, other than Miroslav, you know? But he like ran the center. So I'm just like, well, I've been gone a lot the last couple of weeks. And I said, should I go? And he was like, yes, get on a plane right now.
Like right now, go. Just get off the phone with me and go. And I'm so eternally grateful to him for that. And when I walked into that hospital room, the Angela who has always, always loved David Williams, it's just. Was very there. And it was like everything that had been happening, everything that he had forgotten, every moment that he really hurt me in those hours. It was just like all put aside, you know? I was just able to tell him, you know, I love you and I'm going to miss you terribly, and I'm so grateful for you.
And it was almost as if like it was a futuristic understanding of addiction that I was gonna learn later because similar to suicidal thinking, I think we can think a lot of things about people who die by suicide that are unfair and confused.
Same thing with addiction. I used to think that it was a moral failure. And now I know that it's a health crisis. And I think if we can think about it as a health crisis and not a moral failure, it helps us to have more compassion for those in our lives that experience addiction.
Lee: Yeah, I do think of it myself as a health crisis and I think of it in watching family members, friends, being close to recovery communities, in recovery communities. I do think of it as I think the disease model, the disease whether we take that as a metaphor, we take it explicitly, certainly some sort of chronic dysfunction, right?
That people can't control. I wonder sometimes too, though, if one of the reasons it's so easy to reduce it to a moral failure is because of the ways in which the manifestations of the disease feel so much like personal hurts. I mean, for you, you just described, you know, that your father didn't show up after he said he would at your wedding reception that you had planned for him or,
Angela: forgetting my birthday,
Lee: forgetting your birthday, right. Or. You know, people that we love lying to us or taking things from us that are not theirs to take. And yet there's reams of research about the ways in which if we reduce it to a moral failure, we're not seeing clearly what's going on. Right?
Angela: Right, yeah. And also, I mean, I think I'm arguing in The Gravity of Joy, I think. We're always, we write things and then we're like, I think I'm trying to say this.
I think I'm saying it's a health crisis, plus at the root of that health crisis is this crisis of despair that I think stems from cultural issues where we have a problem. We have malformed visions of the good life in American culture. I think there are many cultural things right now that are contributing to identity crises, which are really very like integrally tied to both addiction and suicide.
Lee: Yeah. So you say that our culture is obsessed with synthetic happiness and yet riddled with pain which I take that as kind of a double entendre there of synthetic in the sense that we're metaphorically seeking a synthetic happiness, and yet sometimes literally seeking synthetic happiness in the synthetic pill, right? And the synthetic drugs.
Angela: Yes absolutely, because we think that happiness is the good life.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. And talking about the health crisis you cite some statistics at one point, the rate of opioid prescriptions since the 1990s are mind-boggling. In 2017, for example, doctors in Kentucky, where your father lived, prescribed at a rate of 86.8 prescriptions for every 100 people, which is mind boggling. One of the highest prescription rates in the country. In Alabama, my home state, which had the highest rate. Doctors wrote a hundred, 107.2 prescriptions per 100 people. And the sort of sense of brokenness in that in the wake of destruction is, it is mind boggling.
Angela: Yeah. Yeah, you feel that. You read that statistic and you feel it in your bones. You know, I did, I read that statistic and there was moments while I was writing this book while I was doing research, you know, looking for stories or this or that, where I actually had to leave my office at Yale and go take a walk. Because you can't read that and then just go on with your day. You can't read this story or that right? You have to, you feel it. And especially as Christians, otherwise we're the people who walk by the good Samaritan and we don't want to be those people.
Lee: Yup. I will say that I was pleased to see that when you go back home to Kentucky you love “Hardee's Biscuits ‘N’ Gravy.”
Angela: Oh my gosh. I know it's so silly, but I,
Lee: That's, no, that's one of my favorite childhood memories is stopping at the Hardee's in Talladega and getting biscuits and gravy.
Angela: I mean, I don't know how you would not think that a fast food restaurant could make that good a gravy and those biscuits are like so flaky and stuff. I know. I can't.
Lee: And the country ham.
Angela: Ah, kryptonite, kryptonite.
Lee: Yes. Yes. So you go on in your book to say that one of the things that began to help you move through or process this heavy grief you were in was a prison Bible study. And how so?
Angela: Goodness, I say at the end of chapter four of the book that I sought help in numerous ways for, you know, my grief.
I woke up every day for a year and a half just in the fog of grief. And I did wonder how will I ever recover from this? You know, I was incredibly sad all the time. And so I sought help in all kinds of ways. And I did do some EMDR therapy, which was helpful for me. I think that's important for people to know. I tried journaling. I tried, you know, walks around the city and blah, blah, blah, like yoga and stuff. But then I signed up randomly to be a co-leader of a Bible study at a prison, a maximum security prison with women.
And I had been thinking for a few years about mass incarceration. I'd read some books on it. And I was really feeling that sort of tug in my own spirit, like by the spirit of God, I think to respond to mass incarceration in some sort of very, like, concrete way, like do something about this.
And so I'd just been feeling like maybe I would end up doing some ministry related to prison. I didn't know how it was all gonna happen, but yeah. So I decided, you know, during the saddest time of my life to become a co-leader of a Bible study, and of course the quintessential beautiful things that God does all the time. I think I'm going to go and minister to these women, and I'm the one that's ministered to.
And that's why I dedicate the book, partly. I dedicate the book to Dustin and Mason and my dad. But I also dedicate the book to the women in prison because it's like such a beautiful, it's basically the, you know, the yin and the yang, almost. Like these women who helped me to get on the road to healing and. But I say in the dedication may the joy that you brought me be yours too.
Lee: So you, at one point, began to kind of describe ways in which we might become open to joy or open to receive joy or posture ourselves for joy. And so I'm wondering what sorts of practices did you begin to see in the context of the prison that have become for you pictures of practices that allow this sort of posture to be open to joy?
Angela: Yeah. I often, when I talk about this, I talk about them as gateways to joy, because like you said, at the beginning, you know, I say we can't manufacture joy. We can't make it like we make spaghetti, but we can be ready for it. And we can look for it. Joy is for my perspective, the feeling of the recognition and connection we feel. So what is meaningful, truthful, beautiful, good? Oftentimes our connection with other people. So a gateway to joy is gratitude. And Bob Emmons has done a really good job as a scholar, trying to help people to understand the power of gratitude in our lives.
His books are really wonderful on this topic. It was in being in that Bible study with women that I really saw this enacted where the more that we would give them space to actually talk about like is there something to be thankful for? Can you look back at this last week and find some way that God met you, some way that someone helped you, some way you helped someone else?
Like, what are you grateful for? What can we be grateful for, even in this room, you know? And they always could find things to be grateful for. And as they share, and you could see it became an infectious thing that happened where, uh, it was a contagion, like where people are sharing with each other.
Oh yeah. That reminds me, this person did this for me, you know? And this happened. And when we meditate on things that are good in our lives, when we meditate on the truth, when we focus on that, it opens ourselves up to that warm, beautiful feeling. That joy is, you know? Another, I think, gateway to joy is absolutely faithful presence with other people.
When we are faithfully present to each other. And you know, I am not someone who's, like, get rid of all technology or anything like that. Obviously, like I wrote a book about the media landscape and ways to navigate it that are constructive. But part of it is there is something about when I was in that room with people and there was no cell phones. We can't bring them into the prison. There was something about sitting in a circle. I talk about Nina's council circles that she runs. There's something about sitting with people, faithfully present, listening to one another from the heart, sharing stories, sharing gratitude, sharing lament, that there is a power in that that the effect of which is joy.
Yeah. You know, sometimes it's a sobering joy. But, you know, so that's another gateway to joy. Absolutely. And then I think, you know, that creating spaces of joy with expectation, hope is a gateway to joy. Moltmann, the great theologian, says that hope is the anticipation of joy.
So actually being able to write out our hopes, name our hopes, you know, declare our hopes, I think is a way of posturing ourselves for joy.
Lee: You had this beautiful picture when you first started going to the prison about singing and being together and, uh, a story about singing “This Little Light of Mine” and gathering as a sort of seed perhaps of joy.
Angela: Gathering is a gateway to joy. I think music is a gateway to joy. I think we see that a lot.
Lee: When I was a boy in church -- in a predominately white church -- “This Little Light of Mine” was a Vacation Bible School song that we little kids sang, complete with some finger choreography, which simply meant something like "I'm gonna be a good example." Then years later, when I would learn of the key role music played in the American Civil Rights movement, I discovered that "This Little Light of Mine" was actually a song of resistance. So combine that fact, along with this picture of these women singing “This Little Light of Mine” in prison, along with Professor Gorrell's assertion that
Angela: Joy becomes an act of resistance against despair.
Lee: Well, then you've just got something worth paying some attention to.
That's the Settles Connection, at one of our live shows. Back to Angela Gorrell:
Angela: That's what music I think really allows us to do that probably creates this room for joy in our lives is because in that room,
Lee: That is, in the prison, those women gathered, singing, and sharing.
Angela: there was no shame. Shame will keep a lot of us from joy. Like I talk about obstacles to joy, too. Shame is one of them. And in that room though. And it wasn't me that produced it. It was these women. We just had particular leaders in the group where this was a place where you could be fully yourself. You know, I say in chapter five, like nothing was half-baked in prison. That's why I felt so alive there, you could tell the truth in that room. And not just the bad truth, you know, but you told the truth. Like, I see you, like, this is who you are. This is who you can become. God loves you. This is how you're seeing, you know, like we told the truth to each other. And when you tell the truth to one another and not in that really messed up way, we often talk about truth telling, which is like, you tell hard things in love with people.
Like, no. In that room, we celebrated. We affirmed what was good about one another and that creates room for joy. And that takes away shame. And the more we told the truth to one another, the more we were faithfully present, the more we came to that space and gave each other permission to feel whatever we were feeling.
And then we entered into music the more room for joy we had. Yeah.
Lee: Storytelling plays a crucial element throughout your book but it seems clear to me it's not merely a rhetorical device for you in your book. But instead storytelling becomes itself one of these practices or one of these gateways, perhaps, to being with. Describe that for us. How do you see that working?
Angela: Yeah, the medium is the message, you know. I think all along the way in the book, I'm trying to precisely demonstrate what I'm inviting all of us to do. When we have a sense of where we have been and where we're headed, we have a sense of who we are. When we believe that we have a story to tell that we're living into a story, most especially when we realize that story is larger than ourselves.
And that my story is not finished yet. That's how joy becomes an act of resistance against despair. And when you realize, oh my goodness, I'm a part of something larger than myself. My story is not finished. I have somewhere that I'm going. And also I have community. I'm a part of a community that has endured suffering, that has made it through, as Dr. Wimberley and Dr. Wright. I quote them in chapter eight of the book. I talk about the power of cultural memory of passing on stories of people, making it through suffering. That's their beautiful research that I'm noting there. When we realize I'm a part of a community that has overcome, that has endured, that has found God in the midst of. There's power in that too.
Right? And so there's this sense of like, there's a larger story and mine's not finished yet, and I have somewhere I'm going and I have a community of people that I'm living out this story with. That helps us too. You see the meaning and truth and beauty and goodness in our lives. Yeah, that's why it's so important.
Lee: And it points to, again, the ways in which shame can not only be inhibiting oneself, but it can be inhibiting the flourishing of the community because it can keep us from telling stories about hardships we've been through and the ways we've learned to move through them.
Right?
Angela: Mhmm. And especially shame around failure and mistakes, you know, but if we can learn to talk through those things, to tell the stories of this is the mistake that I made.
I mean, I think that was my dad. A huge problem in his life was that he had so much regret and so much shame about particular things that had happened. And he'd never felt like he could actually tell the stories. He never found that community and really tried to work through those things. Yeah.
Lee: Yeah. I've been sitting here wondering whether to tell this, but I told you before we started that my great-grandfather killed himself.
As I know. What I know of the story was that he had made it through the depression and he owned a general store in Alabama. And then his store burned down from a fire and he lost everything still. And then he died by suicide. And it was happening when my grandmother was in her first year of her marriage.
I don't recollect our family having talked about that until I was like in my early twenties. Maybe we did, but that's my earliest recollection of that. But when I was getting married and my grandmother was 94, 95 and I thought I've never talked to my grandmother about her father's suicide. But I want to talk to her about it before she dies.
And so I was with her alone one day back in Alabama. And so I asked her to tell me the story and she did, and she was very open about it, but the thing that broke my heart was she talked about the, why, you know, everybody asks the why questions after suicide and was I not enough to live for and so forth.
And then I asked her, I said, do you still think about it? She either said every day or all the time.
Angela: Yeah. Yeah.
Lee: And she's like 94 years old and she had never talked about it with me before, but she's thinking about it everyday or all the time. And for whatever reason, her inability to talk about it or to find a safe place to talk about it, or and I'd asked her, I said, did you and granny ever talk about this stuff? And she said, there's some things that are just too hard to talk about. And so it's that sort of not finding a way to move into that place of vulnerability. Or out of the shame or whatever it is, you know, to find a place where you can talk about this stuff.
And so I think it's beautiful that you found a place to talk about the stuff that you've been through and facilitated other people, having spaces to talk about these things and the possibilities of the gateways to joy or facilitating a posture that's open to receive joy. So it’s a beautiful thing.
Angela: Thank you so much.
Lee: Thank you for that. Well, we've been talking with Angela Williams Gorrell, assistant Professor of practical theology at Baylor University on her new book, The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found. Thank you, Angela.
Angela: Thank you so much for having me.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our interview with Angela Williams Gorrell on her new book The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found.
Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and refer us to a fellow podcast listener. Got feedback? We'd love to hear from you. Email us text or attach a voice memo, and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, and Tom Anderson. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Research by Brad Perry. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
Live music here is performed by the Settles Connection, along with our most outstanding Horeb Mountain Boys, here comprising Byron House, Chris Brown, Aubrey Haynie, Pete Huttlinger, Bryan Cumming, and our music director Jeff Taylor; plus Calvin Settles sitting in here on the piano.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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