Inciting Joy

A little help from Ross Gay

First: Hiiiiii to everyone who just subscribed to my newsletter. I’m really glad you’re here! I hope my intermittent words can bring you some solace or clarity or closeness to God by whatever name you know God. Feel free to comment, and let’s try to be as kind and generous with each other as possible. 

Let’s do it–let’s try–because I actually *don’t* believe that “everybody is doing the best they can.” Some people are very clearly not doing the best they can. I happen to drive on freeways in the Bay Area a lot, which is how I know this. I also work at a church, which is the place people purportedly come to do the best they can, but in actuality often come to dump their unprocessed trauma, anxiety and stuff. And by stuff I mean: gone-to-glory-grandmothers’ electric organs. SO MANY ORGANS. 

Church is HARD y’all. We are having a moment on the Internet with a lot of new/old Hot Takes™ (not as good as Hot Pockets) on how church, and church people, suck. What this says to me is: a lot of us who work/have worked in church have unprocessed grief and hurt from our work. It is a little delicious when someone else writes a good hot take about how church sucks and we can just repost it and hope that Certain Someone Who Knows What They Did sees it. 

Maybe we want them to repent, realize how they hurt us, and apologize (they won’t. Not that way). Maybe we just want the good bad feeling of saying in a kind of raw way after leaving, what we wish we could have said when we were still in the room getting hurt. 

This is all pretty complex, and I’ve *almost* had my fill of the comments sections today, but I just wanted to say this: everything I post about church, I post in the service of trying to help churches (and their leaders, clergy and otherwise) be healthier, more healed places and people, because Goddammit, THE WORLD NEEDS US and what we do when *we are actually doing the best we can.*

I got to read this book yesterday by a river while my young adult children and their friends napped and frolicked around me. Is there any better joy than that? 

Inciting Joy is a simply incredible book that you don’t need to be sitting by a river with (usually) kind teens to enjoy. And because what Ross Gay wrote in the chapter called The Orchard, about creating a community orchard, is *so* like church, I humbly submit what is probably too long a quote and might land me in some legal trouble except that Penguin Random House might take pity on me and see it for what it is, an invitation to buy this book yourself (or request that your public library buy 7 more copies) so they can make a profit and you can remember how actually good it is sometimes when we try to do hard things–TOGETHER. 

“The inefficiency, the incompetence, the ineffectiveness, the dismal rate of production, the off-taskness, the wandering, the flabbiness, the consenssusing, the play, the listening, the dreaming, were all just ways of being together. It was hanging out, it was growing closer, it was mycelial, its product was itself, its product was connection, friendship, it was care, it was I’m making jam on Saturday if anybody wants to join me, it was let me help with hauling the limestone, it was you can leave your kids with us as long as you need, it was take my car, it was whatever you need, if I got it you got it, that was the product, which is to say the product was our needs offered to each other, held to each other, held by each other. Our product was the dream of connection, which, oh yeah, we were living.

And part of that living included, also, disagreeing, struggle, tussling. Because our dreams were not always the same.”

and

“I don’t know when it became apparent to me that this orchard dream, which we had been working on like our lives depended on it for the past eight months (but let’s say nine, for the poetry), was a dream as much for others as it was for ourselves. Speaking for myself, I am a college professor, and the life of the professor is often itinerant. It is not especially common for someone to stay in one job for a long time, maybe particularly if that someone is Black and the job is in Indiana. And given as most of these fruit trees wouldn’t come into full production for some years, at least five, maybe ten, I might very well be long gone, living elsewhere, before the trees would be ready to feed us. Or I might be really long gone, dead, as some of our dear volunteers would be, before the trees got into full production.

…But at some point it became abundantly clear that all this labor, all this vocating, was actually for some future someone—might be me, but it might not be. And it would definitely be for someone I would never know, and could never imagine. If all went well, if these trees stayed in the ground, if they grew up, they would feed people in the future.”

By the way, the name of the orchard they built was “Free Fruit for All,” which I think would make a kick-ass church name. It’s so layered ;).

Love you so,

Molly