My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals.
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..
This is the Story of Angela\'s discovery of an authentic, grounded Christian joy.
Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even--sometimes most especially--in the midst of suffering. . . .
Talking with these women, many of whom had struggled with addiction and suicidal thoughts themselves, she realized: Joy doesn\'t obliterate grief.
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.
But joy was closer at hand than it seemed.
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.
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.
Shortly after Being hired by Yale University to study joy, Angela Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide.
My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals
