The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found

Product Description

“My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals.” 
Shortly after being hired by Yale University to study joy, Angela Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide. Less than a month later, she lost her father to a fatal opioid addiction and her nephew, only twenty-two years old, to sudden cardiac arrest. The theoretical joy she was researching at Yale suddenly felt shallow and distant—completely unattainable in the fog of grief she now found herself in. 
But joy was closer at hand than it seemed. As she began volunteering at a women’s maximum-security prison, she met people who suffered extensively yet still showed a tremendous capacity for joy. Talking with these women, many of whom had struggled with addiction and suicidal thoughts themselves, she realized: “Joy doesn’t obliterate grief. . . . Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—in the midst of suffering.” 
This is the story of Angela’s discovery of an authentic, grounded Christian joy. But even more, it is an invitation for others to seize upon this more resilient joy as a counteragent to the twenty-first-century epidemics of despair, addiction, and suicide—a call to action for communities that yearn to find joy and are willing to “walk together through the shadows” to find it.

Review

Publishers Weekly
“Gorrell’s therapeutic message provides a healing balm that will resonate with any Christian.”

Booklist
“You don’t have to be a Christian to relate your own experiences with grief and the search for joy to those Gorrell beautifully shares in these pages.”

“Angela Gorrell was part of a Yale Divinity School project on ‘a theology of joy’ when three members of her family died within four weeks, all in tragic situations. Drowning in an ocean of sorrow, she wondered if joy could keep her afloat. This remarkable book is her honest, vulnerable, and healing answer to that question. There is no spiritual cheerleading here, no cheap grace. Instead, there is the hard-won knowledge that, while we cannot make joy, we can open ourselves to the God who suffers with us, offering us witness and ‘withness.’ The night is long, but if we keep on opening and offering ourselves through our tears, joy will come in the morning.”

— Parker J. Palmer
author of 
On the Brink of Everything, A Hidden Wholeness, and 
Let Your Life Speak

“What is the true life? That is the big question that animates this book. Angela Gorrell teaches us that in a well-lived life emotions are felt authentically, choices are embraced meaningfully, and self-transcending connections are forged broadly. These pages crackle with raw honesty, deep wisdom, profound realizations, and potent reminders that ultimately goodness can be found amidst the rancor of daily life. The author’s insights contained within are not ivory tower speculations, either. They were formed and forged through the crucible of living. Suffering is inevitable and inescapable but does not have to have the final say in our lives. Joy is a gift and ‘will always find us,’ writes Gorrell. You will find joy in these pages—may we all be grateful for this deeply moving gift she has given us.”

— Robert Emmons
author of 
The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns and 
The Little Book of Gratitude

“
The Gravity of Joy is a story of hope in hard times. Angela Gorrell artfully tells her story of faith, pain, and joy. She weaves it with the stories of others—family, women she met in prison Bible study, students, travelers she met on her journey. And she shares a truth that perhaps is discovered only by those who have faced love and loss—especially those society has used and abused, denied dignity to in life and death: that joy comes in the mourning. I encourage all who hunger for justice, peace, acceptance, and comfort to read this book. In its pages you will find beautiful prose and hope that even in the darkest of spaces, places, and time