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Surprised by Dangerous Joy: Lessons from Chewbacca Woman

Surprised by Dangerous Joy: Lessons from Chewbacca Woman

Last updated on: May 23, 2016 at 7:58 am by Jonathan Ryan

Surprised by Dangerous Joy: Lessons from Chewbacca Woman 2016-05-23T07:58:20-05:00 Jonathan Ryan

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By now, everyone has seen the video of Chewbacca woman, the lady who buys a cheap Chewbacca mask and laughs hysterically at its absurdity. This video has gone uber viral and many people on my Facebook feed talked about how it brought them joy.

I’ll be honest, my first reaction when I watched the video was a cynical sneer. This woman seemed, at least to me, to be demeaning herself in front of the world. She should have more self respect, I thought to myself. Doesn’t she get that she looks like an absurd idiot? But the more I thought about my initial reaction, the more it disturbed me.

I figured out why when a dear friend recently pointed out that I’d lost the ability to laugh at myself and the sadness of my life. She believed I had lost my joy. As she is going through her own serious trauma and suffering, I couldn’t dismiss her opinion. Her ability to laugh at herself and her circumstances has always astounded me. She has something that I lack.

The last four years have been the worst of my life. I’ve been through just about everything other than the death of family member (God forbid) or a major disease. I’ve gone through a divorce, a major move, and a complete career change that involved flushing eighteen years of pastoral career experience when I became a Catholic. My new job as an editor is very humbling because I’ve almost had to start at the beginning. Very often, I feel like a twenty three year old kid just out of college. On top of all that, my kids live five hours away from me, involving twenty hours on the road a month to see them. I’m thinking these sorts of things would wipe the joy from anyone’s heart.

To be honest, I’ve not handled all of this very well. I’ve been a terrible friend, selfishly talking about my troubles with friends who are often going through much worse things. I’ve been a bad employee because the stress of life overwhelms me so much that I’m often paralyzed at work. It seems that I stay one step ahead of utter disaster most of the time. Honestly, there have been days I just don’t want to get out of bed. The very act of dressing, showering and going to work is like lifting a hundred ton weight.

There are days were I fantasize about chucking it all. And by that, I don’t mean suicide. I daydream about finding an obscure mountain tourist town in Colorado or on the Oregon coast, get a shabby one room apartment, work at a bookstore and just start all over. My eyes glaze over with peace when I think about living out my days telling tourists about the latest shitty popular novels.

Aside from being one of the weirdest escapist fantasies ever, it’s also a weak one that brings no real or lasting joy. It’s safe, warm and allows no room for the messiness of life. And, there is the problem. At best, it’s an injection of fantastical heroin into my emotional system. It brings me a thrill for awhile, and then it’s soon gone. It’s safe and I control it. It involves no personal engagement or real work. And, above all, it involves no trust in God, people or the world.

But, what’s worse, is that it keeps me from real joy and that’s because I often want it to. It’s easier to escape rather than listen to the call to live in Christ’s dangerous joy. I’d rather continue to live in the trauma, the sadness and then occasionally shoot up with my escapist mountain town fantasy. And meanwhile, darkness ravishes my soul, chasing away friends and encases me in a numb cocoon of protection.

I do this because to experience joy, at least, joy as Christ calls us to, is extremely perilous. It’s dangerous because it makes me engage with a real God, real people, and real situations to find what will make me truly happy. That is a scary proposition, because all of those things involve vulnerability, probability of pain, danger, hurt and heartbreak. It involves a huge degree of trust that beauty matters, God cares and everything will be well.

If you grew up in the church (especially on the Protestant side, but sadly, becoming more common in the Catholic church), you had to be joyful. God tells us to, we are told. And we tell ourselves that clever little lie over and over again. It’s a crafty lie because it does contain an ounce of truth, that is, God does call us to be joyful. The problem is, we have a terrible definition of joy that is based on an “American-can-do-boot-straps-sadness-is-for-losers” mentality. We’re called to ignore painful things and plaster a smile on our face.

None of that holds up for very long in real life. And it’s not the sort of joy that Christ wants to give us. No, what He wants is far more difficult and dangerous.

Dangerous joy begins at the Cross, and the destruction of how we view things. We always think that St. Paul was being metaphorical when he said we are united with Christ at his death on the Cross. He wasn’t. He meant it sacramentally, meaning that we are literally united with Christ in His suffering. This is most especially true when we suffer in our own lives.

The past four years have been my cross experience and in many ways, I’m still living it. Sometimes, all I feel are the scrape of the wood, the nails in my hands, the mock of crowds, and the spear in my side. There is nothing joyful about it to me. However, unlike Jesus, I come to the cross because I needed it. I come because it is the only way I’ll be transformed into something new. I suffer with Christ so that I may die. And let me tell you, its not been a pretty death.

We can’t play Pollyanna to the world, saying this death is not necessary. The world is too broken, sad and terrible much of the time. People recognize Christians are telling lies when they ask for joy without the suffering. It’s way more interesting to me to hear someone who has suffered and then learned real joy out of it. People who are happy while ignoring the reality of the world aren’t participating in real, dangerous joy.

But what comes from that death is the Resurrection. Too many times, I want to linger in the death, enjoy the suffering and sing about my grief. It’s the sexy artist thing to do, after all. We are obsessed with the broken things, the laments and the sadness. It’s still a comfort to us and we don’t want to progress further up and further in. Like my escapist fantasy, it’s something we can control and enjoy for all the wrong reasons.

Dangerous Resurrection joy, then, calls me out to see the beauty in God, people and creation. Not just see it, but trust in all three. And doing that poses significant dangers to my lie of self-sufficient joy. The people part is especially hard for me. I don’t like admitting I need other people. It offends me, rubs me the wrong way. I’m not codependent.

In reality, God tells me that I will find joy in others by living with them and serving them. And the truth is, I’ve found that when I’m alone, busy and out of contact, the more miserable I get. But to really engage with people is a very dangerous thing, subject to heartbreak, being taken advantage of (the horror of all Americans), and admitting that other people can hurt us. But that is what Dangerous joy requires.

None of this comes easy to me. Sometimes, it doesn’t come at all. I take myself too seriously most of the time. I often fail to laugh at my own absurdities, because I might expose myself as someone who is, most probably, more than a bit ridiculous. For someone like me, that is what is so dangerous about joy. It exposes me for what I really am, a mildly ridiculous sinner who resembles the cute four year old that uses words too big for his vocabulary. And when I can’t laugh at myself, I fail to find real joy, real peace and any real comfort.

Until I’m ready to engage this sort of dangerous joy, I’m doomed to keep walking in the shadows, which are certainly safe for awhile, until they start choking me to death.

I’m getting up from the computer and going to buy a Chewbacca mask. Excuse me. Maybe I can figure out the Chewbacca woman’s joy before its too late for my own soul.

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