Author-ized L.J.#Joy finds no place in a moralistic religion. Joy is messy, unpredictable,kinesthetic, embodied, and erotic. It blurs boundaries wherever moralism attempts to draw them. Joy is intricately interwoven within a relational universe, and it insists that right action be worked out, not on the sterile surgical table of moralism, but in the steaming cauldron of relationship. . . .
This is joy as a verb. Perhaps “to joy” is to enter fully and unabashedly into the messiness of relationship, which is to say the messiness of life, and there to sing like Miriam, dance like David, be amazed, wonder, be renewed by giving ourselves, and rejoice in the goodness of creation. This is joy, not separate from grief, mourning, repentance, suffering, and pain, but all bound up in it.
– Lynice Pinkard and Nichola Torbett, We Need the Funk https://geezmagazine.org/magazine/article/we-need-the-funk (CW mentions of violence & death)
