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Angela Gorrell’s work focuses on all things connected with joy—what it is, how it differs from happiness, and how it can exist alongside sorrow.
The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
What is joy? What is the difference between joy and happiness? What's the relationship between despair and joy? Angela Williams Gorrell has been exploring these questions. Angela is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at George W. Truett Theological Seminary and an ordained pastor in the Mennonite Church USA. In this episode. Sushama Austin-Connor talks with Angela about her work recently published in the book entitled, "The Gravity of Joy: The Story of Being Lost and Found". Together, they explore what it means to study joy with a theological lens and how joy can be sustained alongside sorrow.
You are listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.
I was very interested in learning more stories and illustrations from your childhood and your background. Can you give us even a more full idea of your background and your childhood in life leading up to your academic career?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me today. It's great to be talking with you. I grew up in Eastern Kentucky in Appalachia, in a little town called Pikeville, and it might -- actually in Appalachia though, like, it could be called a big town. [laughter] But I grew up there, spent the first seven and a half years of my life there and really grew up in church, went to church the first Sunday after I was born, as my parents like to tell the story. They like literally, you know -- back then, babies, they just, they didn't worry about them, you know, catching anything. I don't think [laughter]...
Sushama Austin-Connor:
That's right. [laughter]
Angela Williams Gorrell:
They're like, "Hey, you were born three days ago, we're taking you to church and passing it around to everybody." [laughter] So that's me, and I've been going to church my entire life. The church has really been a sanctuary to me, a safe haven, which I know it hasn't been that way... I mean, and not, and not in every respect. And certainly there's been a lot of hard moments, being a part of Christian communities, but in many respects, I'm very grateful to say, especially youth group, I think was a really powerful safe haven for me and my life. But, anyhow, my parents got divorced when I was seven and a half, and that meant that my mom decided to move us to Lexington, which is in central Kentucky. And I, you know, I'm really grateful that that happened because of some opportunities that I got in Lexington. Mostly two things that I think are important for people to know about me. One is that I've been writing since I was like -- could write. Like basically when I could write things, I began to tell stories and to write poetry. And so it's interesting to look back at like my second-grade self and the kinds of poems that I wrote. But I've always been an observer of life, like someone who deeply... Like my friends like to say "Angela lives in the deep end of life." [laughter] So, yeah! So I, when I got to Lexington, one thing that was really important was that I got to attend The School for the Creative and Performing Arts. So, from fourth to eighth grade, every single day for two hours a day, I wrote, which many children can not say that. But, we all have -- we had to all different majors at our school. So some people did arts -- like did art for a couple hours. Some people did dance, singing, you know, violin, piano, whatever. But for me, it was creative writing. And so that was very formative for me and important. And then the second thing that happened was that I got a special speech pathologist to help me because, as I described in The Gravity of Joy, that I was born deaf. And so for several years, basically until I was in sixth grade, I had a really hard time communicating with other people. Unless you knew me really well, it was difficult to understand me because I had a really significant speech impediment. And so it actually made it hard to make friends in elementary school and to be myself, 'cause I constantly was fighting for my words, which is interesting because... I say that to say -- today too, that the two things that I am most known for other than teaching are writing and speaking, and until I was in middle school, I couldn't be understood by people very well. So, but in Lexington, you know, I had this, like this special speech pathologist who really invested in my life -- for three years, every week -- and then went to the school that was very formative and important for me. After high school, I went to school to become a youth minister. So I, you know, I went to school, college, I got my bachelor of arts is in youth ministry from Azusa Pacific University in Los Angeles, lived in LA for 13 years. And the whole time I was living in Los Angeles, I kind of... I kept one foot in the church. I was always in ministry, mostly in youth ministry, but on a lot of preaching teams as well and doing family ministry of course, and then one foot in the academy. So I was kind of like always getting a degree, but also hanging out in the church. And for me as a practical theologian, that's super important because it was like, you know, I would be in the church. I would be among Christians in community. And I would be seeing the sorts of things that were keeping people awake at night. And then I'd be like, okay, as a researcher, as you know, I'm a Ph.D. student, for example, I want to think more about that in relationship to their faith. But then as I was, you know -- when you're in the academy, when you're getting degrees and you're reading books, like you're like, okay, but what's going on in people's real lives?
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Right, right.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Like, how did this relate to people's everyday experiences? And so, for me as a practical theologian, it was very important to kind of always be in ministry and -- while learning in the academy. And I still to this day try to be a very grounded theologian. So while I was finishing up my PhD in Los Angeles is when I got an email about a job at Yale University, working at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. And I received that job in March of 20-- I accepted that job, excuse me, in March of 2016 and ended up moving to Connecticut. And that's how I'm... yeah. So I went from Kentucky to Los Angeles to Connecticut, and then I worked on the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project. That's what I was recruited to Yale to be on that research team. And then, after the project ended, I applied for this job that I currently have at Baylor University. And so I moved to Waco, Texas in fall 2019 to become a professor of practical theology at Baylor University's Truett Seminary.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
That's great. That's great. I wanted to jump right into the Life Worth Living course, but before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about what you mentioned about keeping one foot in the church and one foot in the academy. Because I know in our work in continuing education, where this podcast series is housed, that's kind of our work. That's what we hope we're doing well. So what do you feel that doing your work in both of those spheres, what does it offer to you when you're out and about talking to pastors and their congregations or to pastors and lay leadership?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
I think that, you know, for -- like, people ask me, you know, what are you an expert in, Angela? Like, what do you research? And, certainly I can say a few things that I think that over the years I've become more adept at talking about, like the ability to help people like make sense of like, like the meaning and purpose in their lives, joy, new media. Those are some of the things I've focused on a lot. But in general, I tell people that I feel called to research the things that matter to people and to shine the light of the gospel on them. And I think that as I hold both the experiences that I have in Christian communities and the research that I do together, like, the more that I hold those together, I think the more that pastors feel like, you know, "Yeah, Angela, the things that you're doing and talking about, they do relate to our congregants lives. They do relate to everyday Christians lives." And I think that there's something that feels to then pastors, like, very honest about it. Where they're like, "Okay, you're a theologian who does care about what's happening in people's lives every day. That's good."
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Talk to me about the Life Worth Living course at Yale, because, in doing the research, I realized that it has a profound impact on people and is really well known. Yes. I would love to hear more about what that course is and what it entailed and how you got to be a part of that.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah. So, seven years ago, Miroslav Volf -- and that's whose research team that I was on and anybody who, you know, most people are familiar with -- if they know about Miroslav's work, they know about his very, very famous book *Exclusion and Embrace*, and he is just an extraordinary systematic theologian and person. And I'm very grateful that I had the privilege and the honor of being on his research team for the Theology of Joy the Good Life Project. Seven years ago, Miroslav and my colleague, our colleague, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, who still works at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, they read two books that were really pivotal to them. For them. One was "Education's End" by Anthony Kronman and another book is called "College: What It Was, What It Is, and What It Should Be". And both of these books argue that the meaning of life used to be central to the college experience, that the search, the examination of, and the articulation of meaning and purpose used to be not just a part of the college experience, but actually like fundamental to it. And so they wondered what would it look like to bring the meaning of life back to the classroom. So they created a course called Life Worth Living, and they pitched it to the humanities department. I mean, they're housed at the divinity school and Miroslav is a professor at the divinity school, but they wanted to do it with Yale undergraduates. So they reached out to the humanities department there. They said, sure, you can have 14 students for a semester and do Life Worth Living. And that's what they wanted. And then 60 students signed up for the class, and then every semester, no matter how many times, no matter how many sections of the course that we offered -- because we always want to keep it small, like 14 to 17 students, because it's a conversation, it's a dialogue; it's about helping young people to grow inarticulacy about the good life, the flourishing life. So we can't help them develop articulacy if they're not actually talking. So we want it to keep it small, but no matter how many sections we offer at Yale, every spring, we have way more students than we can accept. So the last time I taught it was spring of 2019, and I think we had 75 spots and about 235 students apply and they all wrote essays to get into the class.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Incredible.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Pretty extraordinary. Yeah. And so what, we've -- what we're finding... And then the more that we tell people about this program... I've taught it in a prison with my colleague, Matt Crossman, who's the Director of Life Worth Living at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. We have taught, done weekend retreats with people who are on the brink of retirement, weekend retreats with people who are in business and, you know, corporate leaders who just want to have this conversation. There are people who are doing this in all different types of settings, in high school settings, you know, those sorts of things. And so we're actually trying to figure out more how we can spread, like, basically our methodology to more and more people. And right now I've actually been training chaplains in the US army at multiple bases, all over the country in how to help soldiers articulate meaning and purpose. And so it's been really exciting. And then at Baylor, I teach a class on Mondays at Baylor called Jesus and the Meaning of Life. And in this class we are -- so whereas Life Worth Living in... Like when I'm training chaplains or when we're doing it in a prison or at Yale, we do it in a pluralistic way. You know, it's very, we look at how different people... So Life Worth Living has these key questions.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Mm hmm.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
What does it mean for life to go well? What should we hope for? What does it mean for life to feel well or to feel right? What does it mean for life to be led well? How should we live? What is the role of suffering in a good life and how should we respond to suffering? And what happens when we fail to live the life that we have that we hope for? And so those are the key questions. And when we ask them in a pluralistic setting, we look at how different people have answered these questions from religious and philosophical traditions throughout history. When I do it at Baylor on Monday afternoons, right now, we are thinking about these key questions in light of the life and teachings of Jesus specifically, and really at Baylor, in this class, we are looking at contested Christian visions of flourishing life, which I feel like has been, I mean, I think if you look over the last few years in the United States, we have contending visions of what it means to follow Jesus. And so on Monday afternoons at Baylor University, we are debating those visions.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Yeah. I feel like it's just an amazing career when you can study joy. That even the ability to study joy feels like it would be inherently a part of a good life for a scholar. Like, how do you study joy? What, what is the process for studying joy? Why joy?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Joy is actually one of the most under- -- or before the joy project -- it was one of the most under-explored, positive emotions across multiple disciplines, actually. And many people conflate joy and happiness. And we wanted to try to understand the difference between the two as well. From a theological perspective, people like, for example, Thomas Aquinas say that joy is the culmination of all positive emotions, like, that sort of every positive emotion culminates in joy, it's the ultimate positive feeling. And so we wanted to explore what is joy from a theological perspective? What does it take to cultivate joy? What is the difference between joy and happiness? Why is joy important in our lives? If so, why, what does it do for human beings? And so we actually brought together 239 scholars from over 140 institutions on, I think, four continents and multiple countries from all different kinds of disciplines. We had psychologists, philosophers, literature professors, historians, all different kinds of professors come together and researchers and... Every consultation had a theme related to, so, you know, maybe the theme was, like, joy versus fear. And then people would submit papers from their academic discipline, like their perspective. And we had emerging scholars and senior scholars and we would read papers and we would debate. And then we would distill big ideas into bite-size pieces. And a lot of things were written over the last few years about joy. Many books were written, a lot of articles were submitted to journals. A lot of popular articles were submitted by scholars. And so we're really grateful and excited that over the last few years, there's been a lot more written and thought about in relation to joy that I think is going to be really helpful to people.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Why is it understudied? Why do you think that was?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
I don't know. It's a great question. I... my hunch is that it was so associated with happiness because happiness is not an underexplored phenomenon.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
No, it's not. Yeah.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Positive psychologists have contributed, have dedicated a lot of time to happiness over the last probably 20 years or so. And so positive psychology is such an interesting movement because for many years, psychologists studied and focused on pathology and how do we, you know, reduce depression? How do we reduce mental distress of all sorts? Um, how do we treat mental illness? Whereas positive psychology came along and they said, instead of focusing on pathology, like what if we focused on how do we nurture positive emotions and virtues in people's lives? So what if we focused on how do we cultivate happiness, for example? And so I just wonder if maybe the study of happiness... Sort of, like, people just assumed when they were studying happiness, that they were studying joy.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
I mean, this seems like a good place to maybe give your definitions and ideas about the difference. So like what, what is joy versus happiness and how do they relate?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah, I think for me personally, like from a theological perspective, when you look at happiness and I think that Adam Potkay's book, *The Story of Joy* is very helpful for understanding the etymology of joy. So how did it come to be -- and happiness -- and like, what did they mean when people began to use these words? Joy is actually a much older word than happiness... In like, so it was used much more. But it really, and it really is a biblical word. It's actually, like, throughout the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament, joy is used quite frequently. And so Potkay talks a lot about that, but basically happiness became very popular in the 1800s, I believe, is when he was talking about it, as a way, a calculus of material conditions. So, generally happiness from my perspective is associated with people's sense that their lives are going well. People assess the circumstances or the conditions of their lives and they sit back and they think, yeah, my life is going well, I'm happy. I'm happy in this moment with the circumstances that I'm in, and I'm content with how my life is going. Whereas joy is a much more profound emotion and it is... and it, and it actually occurs less frequently,I think. I think happiness is easier to access for people than joy. But joy is -- so one thing about joy is that it's very modifiable in a way that few positive emotions are, I think, which makes it a strange emotion in the sense that joy... There is, there can be exuberant joy. And I think when we think about joy, most people associate it with like exuberant joy, like, oh my goodness.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Sure, yeah.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
So like, this is amazing. This is so great. Right. But joy, there's also quiet joy, sobering joy, healing joy, restorative, redemptive, joy. And actually from a theological perspective, I think that theologians and also in the, in the scriptures, what we see is that joy tends to be more like... For me, Luke 15 is the biblical ode to joy where... In Luke 15, what we see is the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son. And so what's lost is found. And so there's the sense that joy is often the result, the feeling of, like, reunion, of restoration, of redemption, of what is lost being found. And so in order to feel joy sometimes, I mean that kind of joy, I mean, you have to have lost something. So there seems to be for me... And what I explore a lot in *The Gravity of Joy* is that joy has this mysterious capacity to be held alongside of sorrow. Joy can sustain us and can be sustained even in suffering... Which I think is very helpful to all of us. And like, sort of in the moment that we're finding ourselves in.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
[inaudible]. Yeah, yeah. This moment. And then just, the moments that you described in your book, too. Reading, especially the depth of the chapter about your father's dying. I was... I have to say I was really affected. I actually re-read a little last night of that particular part. Because it's, it's so clear. You almost feel as a reader that you're there, too. I have to admit I was teary. And it occurred to me, I remembered about, maybe longer than a decade ago, a student at Harvard Divinity School telling me that she had just gone through, like, a season of death and grief. She called it a season of death and grief. And she did like a, almost like a mini sermon about it for an introduction to a forum we were doing. And I'll never forget how she described that. But when I read yours, I thought this is a season of death and grief. And the implications of that, that you found in your work in joy and how much it mattered in your work in joy. So I wonder if you would give us some sense of what was happening for you in holding all of these things and holding all of these moments in this season of death and in grief for you.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah. Thank you so much for what you said about the chapter, about my dad's death.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Yeah.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
I think for me, it was very important in this book to honor the journey of grief, and to speak about it, to write about it very honestly and openly. I... And because I think I wanted to really -- and I do spend a good deal of time in chapter four, talking about how grief not only produces tears, but anger and fear, and that those are stages of grief that are really important, I think, for people to talk about. I think a lot of times people experience profound grief and then find themselves really angry like I was. And they don't, they haven't been told that the two are associated. And so then they feel a little bit like, "What's happening to me?" Like, "Why am I so like... Why am I waking up so mad every day?" But when you've experienced significant loss, especially sudden loss, or, for me in the case of my dad, you know, losing him after nearly 12 years of opioid use, there was so much anger about not just his death, obviously, but all of the years that were lost before that, like the death of the guy that I knew long before he actually died. And so for me, I wanted to describe in this book, I mean, it's called "The Gravity of Joy" for a reason.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Yeah.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Because it is about the weightiness of joy. It is about the kind of joy that I found in the midst of suffering was more of what Alexander Schmemann, the priest, calls 'a bright sorrow' in one of his journals. He describes joy as 'a bright sorrow' in the sense that to give ourselves over to joy is to always, in any moment that we do that to allow for just a few minutes, the brokenness, the loss, the sadness, the sin of the world, to hang in the background and instead to focus on what is good, what the relationship we have with other people, what is meaningful, you know, and to give ourselves over to just that goodness for a moment, and to allow that -- the darkness to hang in the background, the loss, you know? And so, yeah, that's what I'm doing in this book, as I think I'm trying to describe what it was to hold both sorrow and joy together in my own soul.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Yeah. And in doing that, the fact that these deaths came pretty much one after another, did you try to pivot to joy? Or do you feel like joy is inherent in the grieving -- so you like have ebbs and flows of joy -- or are you thinking to yourself, you know what, this person had a wonderful life. I remember these memories with them. That makes me joyful. Like, I'm going to concentrate on the joy in this moment of this person's life.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Not during those four weeks, not a year and a half after. No. Joy did not -- no. I think that it was not for about a year and a half that I really could allow joy in. I think that joy is a gift. I don't think we can manufacture the feeling of joy. I think that it finds us and then we open ourselves up to it. Or, you know, I think we can be postured for joy. We can get ready for joy. And then when it makes its way to us, we can give ourselves over to it. But yeah, even for that year and a half, I wasn't, I wouldn't say that I was someone who was postured for joy. I wasn't looking for joy. I was able, after I got into writing the book, to look at the weeks that -- those four weeks when I lost three people back to back in very sudden and very tragic ways each in their own, you know, suicide, senseless death of a young person, and then opioid use, like I was able to look back and to see a moment in each, after each person's death, when I experienced a kind of sobering, quiet joy or a healing joy. You know, I experienced some joy in thinking about them and what they meant to me.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Sure.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
And like, in moments that, like, God met me and my family in the midst of what was happening, which is what brought joy. Because I say in the book too, that joy is the very being and presence of God, ministering to you. And so I was able in, very much in hindsight to see where God was and that brought me joy, but like, I would not describe those four weeks as joyful whatsoever. And I also would say that it took me a good year and a half to actually start to write about joy. Again, like I had written, I was writing about it a lot, reading everything I could get my hands on in the first eight months, even outside of the consultations we were doing. And then it was just hard to go to work. And I lived in the fog of grief and then I became this chaplain at a maximum-security prison for women on suicide watch. And that's when -- and then, so I become this chaplain. I decided to volunteer, which was such a strange thing to surrender to because I was at the end of myself, I did not think that I had anything to offer anyone. And yet I felt the tug of the Spirit in church one night when they were asking for more volunteers and I just decided to do it. And then a few weeks into it, I realized I'd been assigned the building, like, with women on suicide watch. I realized that the overwhelming majority of women in my Bible study were in prison for heroin or crack. And then I realized that... So basically my, like my study of joy, my family suffering, and the suffering of these incarcerated women collided in that prison. And I began to wonder, like, what could our research on joy and visions of the good life and contemporary culture, like what might it say to my family suffering, to these women's suffering, to America's crises of despair, both suicide and death by opioids have been called deaths of despair. So I began to wonder like, what's going on in the larger picture of what's happening in America today? You know what I mean? And then finally I'll say that my friend, Willie James Jennings, who was a colleague of mine at Yale Divinity School, he gave this lecture about a month and a half after I started being a chaplain at the prison on joy. And he said two things that absolutely changed my life in this lecture. One was that he said, we can make our pain productive without glorifying or justifying suffering. And that, because that was the last thing I wanted to do. I did not want to write about my family suffering as some sort of like way of saying that like, God had this happened, that I could write a book about joy amid suffering. You know, I don't, I don't claim that to this day. I don't think that God does stuff like that in our lives. I don't make sense of my family suffering in that way. And so this book is not an attempt to justify or to glorify what happened to my family or to the women that I met in prison. It is an attempt simply to make pain productive, to say that, you know, I can take what I went through, what these women have gone through are still going through. And I can try to be a part of the groundswell of people who are addressing America's crisis of despair. Like, you know, and then the second thing he said was joy is a work of resistance against despair. Like, he channeled Habakkuk 3 and he was just like, you know, this is, this joy is a work of resistance against despair. And so as I, you know, it like all came together in this moment, in this lecture where I was like, oh wow, we have a crisis of despair in American culture. My family has experienced it. I'm meeting with women every Wednesday who experienced this. And then joy is a work of resistance against despair. I'm writing about that. And that is what *The Gravity of Joy* is, that is the thesis of this book. That joy is a counter agent to despair.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
You talk about this counter agency of despair. Give more illustrations of how that joy, like if it's from the women's prison or in your own life, but how is it that joy might serve as this great counter agent to despair?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Well, if despair is the feeling that many people I think have... When I think about despair, I describe it as a theologian. So that's important. I'm not a psychologist. You know, I keep saying that throughout the thing, but I just want to [laughter] -- like, I'm thinking about despair and joy and suicide and the opioid crisis from a theological perspective. And when I think about despair from a theological perspective, what I see is that people begin to feel that even though they can see others, that people cannot reach them. People cannot connect with them. People don't see them, understand them, truly hear them. Also despair tends to give us the feeling that... Nothing will heal or bring us relief from our pain. And so we've become hopeless about the idea that, like, healing is possible for us. Despair also tends to come from the sense that our life has become ineffective, that we've failed massively, and we can't recover from it. That we've lost our sense of self, that we don't know who we are or where we're going or where we've been. That we're not a part of some sort of larger story that's being told, you know? And so joy is the opposite of all of that. Joy is the feeling that we get when we recognize and feel connected to meaning, to truth, to beauty, to goodness, and to other people. Joy is a realization of relatedness, to these sorts of things, right? And so the more that we can help people to have realizations of connection, to meaning truth, beauty, goodness, to one another, the more we help people to resist despair in their lives.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Yeah. You're making me think about kind of the moment that we're in also as a country, I feel in some way, we're in a -- it feels like collective grief, collective despair on all fronts, in every way that you can think about it. And it could be anything from racial injustice to, you know, like the reshaping and kind of like, degradation of like our democratic ideals, like, and anywhere in between all, all these ideas in between. But there's kind of a collective grief happening, a collective despair. But I don't, I'm not finding there's room for much collective joy right now and how we, we get people to some joy or to some joyfulness or to looking at some of our, of these issues in a more hopeful way. What are you, what are you thinking about like collective joy?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
No, it is a thing. I think the best example, and Brene Brown has pointed this out in her work, is in sports. Sports really demonstrate collective sorrow and collective joy in a very powerful way. I mean, we saw it at the national championship game two Monday nights ago. And you know, I gotta give a shout out to the Baylor men's basketball team. You know, but it's so interesting. I actually preached about this last Sunday that, you know, at the national championship game, it's just, you see right at the end of that game, this collective sorrow and collective joy just collide. And it's, you know, because Jalen Suggs is crying and Mark Vital is crying. They're both crying for very different reasons. One is weeping. One is rejoicing. You know, and so we see collective joy and sorrow in sports. And I think that's why sports are so powerful in people's lives, because it's this space that we have to feel like I'm with these other people in what I'm feeling. So we feel very, very connected to other people, and we feel permission to feel deeply in sports. I don't know that there's any place that people feel such exuberant joy or such profound sadness, so publicly, right?
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Yes!
Angela Williams Gorrell:
And so sports are interesting. And the Sports Institute at Baylor, they're doing some really interesting work in thinking theologically about sports, so I just want to give a shout out to them as well. But basically what you're saying about collective despair, collective sorrow. I absolutely feel it too. I literally, I woke up to the news headlines this morning of this young, 13-year-old boy being shot in Chicago by police. And I literally, I just, and I'm looking -- I follow black liturgies on Instagram. I commend them to everyone. And it's just literally all they can like post this morning is like -- inhale. Like, we are sad, you know, something to the effect of like, we're sad -- exhale, please, like, help us not to give over to despair. I, you know, it's like when George Floyd's trial is going on, and then we hear about Dante Wright. And now we hear about this young 13 year old. It's like, I don't -- it's so hard for me to have any hope going forward for policing in the United States. It is. It's like, and I want to believe that there's hope, but I can understand why so many people would say like, there is no hope for redeeming this, you know? There is no hope for, like... All we can imagine is that we have to rethink the whole thing because like, how can this be redeemed? You know? And so, yeah, it's very -- there are certain aspects of American life right now that it's very hard to not just say like, this is irredeemable. Like this is lost, and nothing can be found. Right. You know what I mean?
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Nothing. And when you think about, you know, a 13-year-old boy, and I have a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, and it's like, now I won't go, I won't be too dramatic. It's not all joy, but most of it, of their childhood is joy. It is pure joy. That's what we're aiming for. That's what they're aiming for. That mostly, it's a lot of joy. So for a 13-year-old to be gone out of our lives, because of a collective crisis is really, really painful. And I appreciate you naming that. It's really painful.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah. Well, and what I was going to say about it too, is like, when it comes to joy, it's like, we can't rush joy. And I do, I do think that in the case of the kind of week that we're having with [inaudible], you know, with this trial going on, and I mean, I think for me, George Floyd's trial is just so representative of the fact that, like the fact that we have to have this, like, very long trial, about a murder that everyone saw is so, so painful and disorienting.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
I'm with you. Yes.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
It's like, we all watched it. Everyone watched it.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
We saw it! [crosstalk]
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Everyone saw it! Like, everyone saw it. And so I think it's very important for me to say today that there are obstacles to joy, but not that -- in that they're bad, but like one is anger, especially righteous anger, and fear. Where fear resides, it's difficult for joy to make its way to us. When anger resides, like where anger resides, it's difficult for joy to make its way to us. And that's not a bad thing. Anger and fear are emotions that teach us. That -- if there's anything I've learned over the last four and a half years, it's that emotions are not -- I don't really like using the words 'negative emotions and positive emotions' actually. I mean, I have been saying positive, like, about joy, but I don't really think that there are bad emotions. I think every emotion is a teacher, if we let it, right? That there's wisdom there. Anger, especially righteous anger says there's something wrong. There's something broken that needs to be fixed. And so there, like, we have to work through anger and fear in constructive ways and saying, what are you teaching me? What do I need to do in response to this emotion? You know, we have to listen to them, you know? And so I don't, and I think that's for us to get to collective joy. We have to first, like, constructively work through our anger, our lament, our fear.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Yeah, yeah, yes. To all of that. I want to talk about the women's prison for a little bit too, because I wanted to hear some of your stories. That feels like that was a place of some healing, working with these women, that it was a place of some healing for you. And I want to know who (again without naming names, but just illustrations), who were some of the women? What did they offer you during that time that felt therapeutic or felt like it helps you along in your own healing coming off of this season?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yes, absolutely. These women got me on the road to healing. No doubt about it. There is... the second part of the title of the book, the subtitle is 'a story of being lost and found,' I'm the person who was lost, who was found. And I was found in this, strangely enough... I found myself and my sense of faith. And I found that I could hold my faith and doubt together with these women in this Bible study. I came alive for the first time after -- I felt, I think I felt numb. And I felt like I was dead for like a year and a half. And then they like, awoke -- and they awakened something in me. And I say very clearly in both the dedication of the book, and then in the last chapter, that I don't claim that the joy that they brought me was also present in them. But it's important for me, like, to say, you know, I hope that the joy that they brought me at some point is theirs, too. But these women were so critical in my own healing journey. One, because they had been through so much. These women had been, almost all of them, sexually abused. Almost all of them had grown up in foster care at some point in their life. They had spent time in foster care in a group home. Almost all of them were caught up in cycles of poverty. Almost all of them had parents who were caught up in cycles of substance use. And yet these women would cling to God. They prayed the most honest prayers that I've ever heard. And in that room, there was, like, such respect for one another. If you were over 45 or 50, they called you Miss, like Miss Aliyah, for example, as a sign of respect among each other. And so all of us, the Bible study co-leaders, we followed them. We called particular women Miss, like Miss Aliyah, just following their lead, but this was not something we did. It was something that they did. Their ability to humanize one another in such a dehumanizing situation, after all that they had been through, was remarkable to me. And specifically like, when I think about Miss Aliyah and one of those, like, you know, on the last day that I was in the prison, I said that she was like, "Angela, I want to sing a song for you." And, you know, and so then she just like stands up in the room, and she starts singing Amazing Grace, off-pitch, and then a few sentences in, she forgets what she's saying, and she sits down and it's like, "I'm so sorry. I forgot the words." And yet, after spending a year in that prison, it was so perfect because I had realized that to live... To live exposed, vulnerable, honest, without shame, is to be truly human. And that's the only way to actually live well. In this room, there was no shame, which is why we sang so loudly and we danced and we told bold stories. You know, I tell another story in the book. I mean, there was a moment when Vanessa was trying to help a young woman who was being bullied on her tier, get off a different, her tier and get into another part of the prison. And so Vanessa like, "Hey, grab -- like, we need a piece of paper. And so she rips out a piece of paper of her notebook, and she gives it to her and she's like, "Millie, like here, just start writing a letter to this person." Because Vanessa had been in prison for about nine years. And so she knew what was going on and she knew the places of power in the prison. And so she's like "Here, like, write down, you're going to write to this person." And Millie's like, "I can't write." You know, and she's like 22 years old, but the education system has failed her. Right. And so she cannot write, and Vanessa then says, "Oh, it's okay, I'll write it. And then you just sign it, and give it to this person." And it was like, you know, there's so many moments, I feel like, outside of that room where somebody realizes somebody else can't write, or they sing off-pitch, or they forget something. And there's like this moment of like, ugh -- like, where you kind of look at someone, and you're like, what? Like you can't -- what? You know, and you have this reaction to each other that then induces immediately, like, shame and a sense of like, "Oh, wow. I just told you something. I shared something. I made a mistake in front of you. Like, and now I feel vulnerable and exposed and it's not good." No, in this room when you were vulnerable and exposed and real, it was welcomed and accepted. And it was like, you're deeply human. Welcome. [laughs] Oh my God, it's the most refreshing thing in the world.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
I was just thinking, where does that happen? That's so refreshing!
Angela Williams Gorrell:
I mean, I say in *The Gravity of Joy* in chapter five, that nothing is half-baked in prison. That's why I felt so alive there. And that's my great hope and prayer that these women leave prison and then are able to cultivate these kinds of spaces in their own lives. You know, because I just, I don't, like, I don't want it to have to be prison that gets people, people to that place. You know?
Sushama Austin-Connor:
That's beautiful. I mean, so authentic and I don't know -- you're right, where... What other spaces that that would happen. There's so much, and I'm looking at our time. I want to get maybe two quick, two last quick questions. And if you're willing, one is to ask you about, as people read this, as they look at your interviews, as they're kind of Googling around who you are and what your work is. What do you want people to get from this book, of course, but also from your research and your life's journey of talking and thinking about joy?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
So there are several things that I want people to get. And one thing I want to mention is that my website www.angelagorrell.com (and Gorell is G-O-R-R-E-L-L) -- so angelagorrell.com -- you can have, there's a free discussion, story prompt, and activity guide that goes with *The Gravity of Joy*. And the whole point of creating that guide is that I want this, this book to cultivate conversation about every emotion that people experience in their lives. So, this guide is a guide to talking about the grief of your own life, the losses you've experienced, it's a guide to sharing stories about your own righteous anger and fear, but also of course, your own experiences of joy. It's a guide that all the activities are what I call 'gateways to joy.' And so we can't make it, but we can posture ourselves for it, and we can be open to it. And so, these are all ways to become more open to joy in your life. And so the whole idea of my book is, number one -- I want people to understand joy more and to become more open to it in their lives. And two -- I would love for people to feel like that in telling my story that they have permission to tell theirs. And third, I would love for more people to become part of the groundswell of people who are working to address suicide rates, the opioid crisis, or mass incarceration in the United States, and the epilogue describes each of these three things that are going on and resources for learning more about how to join the groundswell of people working so hard to address these very critical issues.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
I downloaded the discussion guide. So, it's really great. So thanks for that. Last question for you. And it's... I think it's personal, but it doesn't have to be, I want to know how you're doing, how your life is, how you have grieved and come to some redemptive joy. How's your sister and your family, and where are people in their lives? They really live as characters and real people for me. And I'm sure for many, many, many people who have read the powerful book. So how's everybody doing? How are you doing?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
You know, what's so fascinating about this question is that I think I've done upwards of 25-plus interviews in the last month about this book. I mean, maybe, maybe more. You're the first person to ask that question. So thank you for asking it. Wow. I, you know, I definitely am someone who continues to hold together joy and sorrow. I described in chapter 8 Ezra being at the temple. And like, there are all these people watching the temple be rebuilt, and there's a lot of people weeping because they remember the old house and the way that things used to be. And then there's a lot of people rejoicing because they're seeing the temple be rebuilt and they're excited about it. And I feel so, like the -- I feel like both people that are watching the temple. I am incredibly grateful; this book is being received in the way that it is. The emails, the DMs that I'm getting on Instagram, on Facebook, the texts, it has been so beautiful to see people receive this book. And many people just say to me, you know, Angela, I feel so resonated with like, "I lost a parent a few years ago and I just feel like, wow, you described it in a way that was so, like, 'Yes, you get it.'" You know what I mean? Or "I have felt powerless to help someone that I love, and that I really get it. I have lost someone I love to suicide, and I feel like you honored the experience," you know? And so, that's been so beautiful, but then, you know, it's sobering that, you know, my book was, for example, like in, for the first week, it was the number one new release in Christian death and grief. And it was like, wow. I'm so grateful that, wow... This book cost my family so much to write. This book, you know, and then I'm thinking constantly about these women in prison. I prayed for them every Monday through Friday morning. And I'm constantly thinking, I wish I could tell you because now I'm in Texas, so I don't get to see them anymore. I'm going to be, I'm going to actually be a volunteer at a new prison. I'm so looking forward to it, and be investing in, investing in the lives of women who are going to be eight months out from reintegration in the next couple of years, I'm so excited about this work. But I... Even as someone who really is about prison abolition, but so I'll -- I just want to say that. I'm really not, I'm not really about prison reform. I'm more about prison abolition. And yet it's very important to me that as we're on the way to that, that I am with women who are in prison and continue to do this work anyways, I wish that I could tell these women what was happening, that their stories are being told, and that they were not for nothing. [emotional] You know, and that their pain is being made productive. And that, I'm just so grateful to them. You know, it's so funny though, because I say in the book and it's true to this day, to this day, they don't know who I am. They don't know that I have a Ph.D. or that I'm a professor or that I'm an author or anything like that. And it was important because it helped, like, I think our relationship would have been so different if they knew those things. But, so we were just human beings in a room together. But my family, you know, my sister Steph, who lost her son, to this day is having a very hard time. She misses him every single day. She doesn't wake up one day without having it, like, at the forefront of her mind. And it's hard. It's hard for her. She's like, you know, I don't know, like, like she -- she knows she'll never entirely like heal from it. And she's like, so she just tries to do her life realizing that, you know, that she just, she has this backpack. That's what she describes it as. Like, every day I put on my backpack of, like, grief and I just carry it with me everywhere I go. And she's like, you know, that's just her reality now. My little sister and my older sister, Alison, I mean, all of us, you know, we just... [sigh] we have ups. It's just like, there are days when we really think, you know, we're going to be okay and everything, you know, and we're making the best of this. And, you know, we're -- I don't know, we lean on each other. And then days when we just all kind of, like, text about it or call each other, we like Zoom or FaceTime about it. And we're just like, damn, like, it's still so hard. You know? So that's the honest, raw answer, is like, on many days, especially particular holidays and birthdays. And, you know, it's very hard for us still.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
Yeah.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
And obviously like my book brought all of that back for everybody, right? And so I have to also, I guess, close this by just saying I am indebted to the women who I met in prison. I am indebted to all of my sisters, to my family, my extended family, for their willingness to allow their stories, to be implicated in the telling of mine. I'm grateful to them for giving me the consent to use their names, to tell their story as well. And just, yeah, it's -- so, and they're all -- a lot of them, they're leading their own groups about this book. They're doing a book club on the book, [crosstalk] and I think that's really good for them.
Sushama Austin-Connor:
That's wonderful. Well, we're grateful for your story and for your work, your gift to the church, your gifts. This book is a gift. I really appreciate your honesty and just all that you have offered today and all that you offered in the book. So thank you so, so very much, Angela.
Dayle Rounds:
You've been listening to The Distillery. Interviews are conducted by me, Dayle Rounds, and me, Sushama Austin-Connor.
Shari Oosting:
And I'm Shari Oosting.
Amar Peterman:
I'm Amar Peterman and I am in charge of production.
Dayle Rounds:
Like what you're hearing? Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast app. The Distillery is a production of PrincetonTheological Seminary's Office of Continuing Education. You can find out more at thedistillery.ptsem.edu. Thanks for listening.