JOINED TO JOY

Public domain.

You have turned my wailing into dancing; * you have put off my sack-cloth and clothed me with joy. - Ps. 30:12

There are levels of trauma. Trauma centers are delineated into various “levels” depending on what kinds of trauma they are equipped to handle. . There are levels of trauma injuries, both physical and mental. But how do you point out where a national emergency and global pandemic falls on any scale? How do we deal with something so unbearably crushing that it outstrips any of the previous comparisons we could have used? 

Psalm 30 recently came up in the 30 Day Psalter. It made me wonder: how can we turn wailing into dancing? Will joy come in the morning? And that’s when I started to read Kim Goldman’s book, Media Circus.

 The book is a series of interviews of 10 sets of victims left behind in the wake of tragedy - from Sharon Tate’s sister (Tate was murdered in the 60s by the Manson Family) to the wife and daughter of Eric Garner by Goldman, herself the victim of a traumatic event - that being the murder of her brother Ron by someone who was most likely O. J. Simpson. Out of all of those people who are left behind to grieve, the chapter I fell into the most was that of Judy Shepard. Judy’s son Matt Shepard was a gay man who was murdered in a hate crime over 20 years ago, and his remains now rest in the crypt of the Washington National Cathedral, placed there by Bishop Gene Robinson. I had the chance to read Judy’s memoir, The Meaning of Matthew, as well. Here’s a portion of the epilogue:

Today, after every speech I make, I open up the floor to questions and try to answer whatever anyone wants to ask. What I hear most often is, “How do you do it?” As many times as that question comes up, I’m never sure how to respond. Part of the problem, I think, is that people assume that I’ve somehow found a way, for the purposes of a speech or for a newspaper interview, to tap into the pain and torture of Matt’s murder and then return to my everyday life unscathed. The question is always posed as if I have some sort of superhuman power or something. How do you do it?

But the truth is that, more than a decade after losing Matt, I still haven’t come to terms with his death, and I don’t want to. The only way I’ve been able to get through the hundreds of speeches and interviews over the past ten years is the same way I was able to get through Henderson’s and McKinney’s trials in 1999—by never ever going to that place in my head if I can help it.

I’m not superhuman. And the real answer to the question of how I do it is one of mind over matter. The speeches and interviews I give are my equivalent of walking over hot coals. I race over my emotions before they have a chance to burn me.

You have turned my wailing into dancing, you have put off my sack-cloth and clothed me with joy.

This is not, of course, the only translation of this Hebrew text. The Hebrew language scholar Robert Alter translates that verse as “You have turned my dirge to a dance for me, undone my sackcloth and bound me with joy.” In his accompanying notes, he writes “The general synecdoches for mourning and rejoicing, dirge and dance, of the first verset are focused concretely through the metaphor of clothing in the parallel second verset: The garment of mourning is undone, or removed, and joy becomes the new garment that God pulls tight or binds around the person He has rescued.”

There’s a difference, as Alter notes, between clothing and binding. And it causes some discomfort for us because the connotations of “binding” relates to the use of force, which I don’t believe is God’s MO. I would instead suggest that “joined to joy” may be a better turn of phrase. Joining, to me, indicates a conscious and consented decision - putting your hand in someone else’s, becoming part of a group or community, or even just putting a name to something that has already organically occurred. Becoming joined to joy through God is not something that we can have forced on us, like a binding, but neither is it something so mundane and trivial as putting on your clothes in the morning. It is recognizing the presence of something already there, and choosing to embrace it, accept it, and give it a name.

Even fifteen or twenty years after a tragedy, as the quote from Judy Shepard indicates, we may still be lost in our grief. And I fear that our collective grief from this pandemic, from the traumatic nature of the things and people we all lost to this virus, will last for as long as I am alive. All we can do, as trite as it is to say, is to recognize the way that joy has been joined to us through the power of God, and to accept it and use it. But we also must join ourselves to joy, and make spaces for others to heal, grow, and accept it.

In Media Circus, another one of those interviewed is Scarlett Lewis. Her youngest son, Jesse, was a six-year-old first grader who was one of the victims of the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, and her oldest son, JT, was in seventh-grade that year. Here’s a snippet of one of the more poignant sections in her chapter:

Her son JT’s suffering was also channeled into something positive. Less than a month after Jesse’s death, several young Rwandan genocide survivors reached out to JT through Skype.

“At this point, we were completely alone in the house; JT hadn’t gone to school and I hadn’t gone back to work yet. We were suffering and not moving forward and these beautiful, young Rwandan kids gave us strength. They basically said we suffered and we want you to hear our story so that you know that you will be okay and that you will feel joy again.”

Inspired by their stories, JT started his own organization called Newtown Helps Rwanda. He threw himself into fundraising for the Rwandan survivors, and raised money for one of them to attend college.

I do not share this to encourage trauma bonding (the effect of forming a bond with one’s abuser) or bonding through shared trauma. What this is is an example of what we can do when we turn to God and say, echoing the prophet Isaiah, “Here am I, send me!” Being part of God’s community of joy works both ways - we have to help others dance along with us.

This has been the core of the Christian life since the beginning. The 13th century bishop of Chichester, Richard, wrote that famous prayer that we may see God more clearly, love God more dearly, and follow God more nearly. The apocryphal Prayer of St Francis asks the Lord to make us instruments of his peace. The Prophet Micah proclaimed that the Lord requires us to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” To take the law and the prophets seriously, to take our religion, our faith, our promises to God seriously, we must reach out our hands, our hearts, and even our words to be joined with others in offering, receiving, and recognizing the joy of God’s presence.

“Take my will, and make it thine; it shall be no longer mine. Take myself and I will be ever, only, all for thee.” - Frances Ridley Havergal