These are vintage photos from my decades in the Spiritual Life Institute. I don’t remember what made my dad and me so joyous. Or why Dave Denny and I are laughing so hard. But these images beautifully illustrate our latest Fire and Light podcast on “Joy as Resistance.”

Is your life joyful? Do you think everyone has a right to joy? How do we keep joy alive in the midst of so much sorrow in the world? Can we practice it? And what do we mean by joy as resistance? Dave and I grapple with these questions and more.

Zen Roshi Bernie Glassman said we don’t have a moment to lose on “non-joy.” Novelist Barbara Kingsolver observed, “Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.” And Jack Gilbert insisted that we “must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world.”

I don’t know who Gilbert is or where I found this passage. But it really gets to me. Yes, the world can be a “ruthless furnace.” But the world is also full of gladness, and sometimes it takes stubbornness to accept it. Accepting gladness is not a feeling but an action, an act of resistance.

At the beginning of her “Telly Cycle” in 2008, Black poet Toi Derricote wrote, “Joy is an act of resistance.” Barbara Holmes echoed this theme in her seminal work, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. I found it again in Inciting Joy by Ross Gay, who points out that “joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things.”

Then I discovered Austin Channing Brown, author of I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. Her crucial insight? “We aren’t just pursuing racial justice when we are organizing or voting or protesting… we are also pursuing justice when we indulge in joy.” She continues:

I am so grateful for Ms. Derricote opening the door, thru the lens of resistance, so that I don’t work myself to death – believing that is the only way to speak truth to power…. Now I want more because my human dignity demands that I, too, experience unadulterated joy.

The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu would agree. These two men have suffered some of the worst injustices of our age through apartheid in South Africa and the Chinese invasion of Tibet. But when they met in Dharamsala as old friends to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s eightieth birthday, they laughed and laughed. You can read the story in The Book of Joy, published in 2016. Or watch the film of their encounter in Mission Joy: Finding Happiness in Troubled Times on Netflix.

If you go to https://missionjoy.org/ you can access the trailer or the entire film, learn about the book and the science of joy, and find four concrete practices scientifically proven to help you feel more joy. These have worked for me throughout my entire life: kindness, gratitude, connection, and reframing, or finding the “silver lining.”

Dave and I conclude our podcast with a favorite meditation from George Bernard Shaw:

This is the true joy in life: being used for a purpose recognized as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making me happy. My life belongs to the whole community. As long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.