Theological Journal - March 13: Empire and Joy

Empire, the milieu in which we live, stamps out joy because joy means we have become connected to our strength, our source of creativity, and collective energy. Joy overcomes the sadness (in the Spinozan sense of shutting us off from that which Joy connects us to) Empire sponsors as our way of life. It enervates, exhausts, and dispirits till we come to accept the way things are as the way they will always be.   Empire trades us happiness for Joy. Happiness becomes another of subjection to it.

We are told to search for happiness through consumption, consumerism, and upward mobility. Indeed, that is our job in life under imperial domination.

“Under Empire, happiness is seen as a duty and unhappiness as a disorder. Marketing firms increasingly sell happy experiences instead of products: happiness is a relaxing vacation on the beach, an intense night at the bar, a satisfying drink on a hot day, or the contentment and security of retirement. As consumers, we are encouraged to become connoisseurs and customizers, with an ever more refined sense of the kinds of consumption that make us happy. As workers, we are expected to find happiness in our job. Neoliberal capitalism encourages its subjects to base their lives on this search for happiness, promising pleasure, bliss, fulfillment, arousal, exhilaration, or contentment, depending on your tastes and proclivities (and your budget)” (Joyful Militancy, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joyful-militancy-bergman-montgomery, 21.)

Perhaps the most harmful effect of the sadness Empire shrouds its subjects with is a disconnect with ourselves and our true desires, creativity, and destiny. This disconnect separates us from others and tamps down our capacity and willingness to feel and respond to their pain and hurt.

Joy, on the other hand, especially the affection or disposition of Joy we began this series focusing on, is  the joy that we experience even amid trials and difficulties we encounter for following Jesus. It cuts behind and beneath and over the head of empire by reconnecting us with our primal identity and dignity, calling, and vocation – as royal priests in God’s creational temple. Undergirded by this relationship to Reality we can bear up under the assaults and indignities heaped on us by other “realities” foisted upon us as the “real” thing and penalizing us for denying them.

Victor Frankl has taught us that possessed of a sense of meaning in our lives we can bear up under any suffering and outrage. Joy is our connection to that meaning which so sustains us. Sure of whose we are, who we are, and what we are to be about in our world we can remain attuned to our true North even when everything around us is heading due South. It is this sense of being rightly related to Reality that sustains that sense of what we earlier called Joy 3 that distinguishes Christian faith from others.

This Joy reconnects us to God, ourselves, others, and the world in healthy, life-giving ways. It creates the passion in us that makes us willing to give up our own lives for God and others. This Joy makes possible and sustains proper emotions and enables us to lay aside or endure improper ones. How it does this I’ll consider next.