On Surviving and “Refusitive Joy”
“Faith does not spring from nothing. It comes with the holy dimension of our existence. Suddenly we become aware that our lips touch the veil that hangs before the holy of Holies.” --Abraham Joshua Heshel
The most important thing to know about a regime of domination is that the accumulation of money and resources, though no doubt desirable and pleasant, is not the point. The point is to inflict suffering. Without understanding this, a regime of domination will not make sense and you will torment yourself trying to understand the rationality of various actions.
A second principle of domination is to locate everything in the universe according to the regime. This does not mean getting people to agree with you or support you – allies are as dispensable as foes. It means everything and everybody must inhabit the meaning prescribed to them by the regime. For Jim Crowe, it is not enough to make money from free labor or to deny to Black people social goods. It is necessary for them to internalize, through constant humiliation and terror, the feeling – the self-identity – that they are indeed subhuman. The miracle of slave religion and the Black church is that this was not completely successful.
Generating in masses of people feelings of anxiety, terror, hopelessness, passivity, impotent rage, sadness, despair, grief – and emotions too deep and disturbing to have names – is not a side effect of polices or proposals. It is the purpose. Whether a particular policy is enacted or not, saying one will do it serves its primary purpose of locating people where they are supposed to be – in an ocean of psychic and spiritual suffering.
Of course, real policies have real and horrifying consequences. Without them, the entire populace could not feel terror and sorrow. What resistance to all of this might look like for any of us at any given time is something we will all figure out as we go along depending on what is happening, what is possible for each of us and for our communities at any given moment. We will show up in whatever way is natural to each of us, and that will be different for each of us.
The primary point of domination is to cause terror and suffering – whether one or one’s immediate loved ones are themselves harmed or not. We might escape personal consequences of a given policy. But we are harmed by the fact that it happened because we are part of a common fabric of humanity and we are harmed because we are afraid of what else might happen.
As modern people, we are taught that doing something or achieving something is the measure of success and importance – of reality itself. Therefore, if we cannot do something that changes the tide of events, it is as if we can do nothing but grieve and fret. This is not true. Since the point of domination is to cause psychic and spiritual suffering (whether one is physically harmed or not), resistance is everything that keeps us alive as human spirits. Preserving our humanity for ourselves and one another is the most radical and difficult thing we can do when a regime of domination has taken over.
Level One: It is of utmost importance at this time to take pleasure in things. Stop doom scrolling and take a walk or listen to something fun. Do not make all conversations, listening, reading, and thinking about what is happening. This will firmly locate you exactly where domination wishes to place you. Your identity, thoughts, and relationships will be dictated by the regime.
Listen to music you like. Gather with friends and refuse to talk about current events. Enjoy food and wine and good conversation. Look at the stars. “I would own the stars if I could” lamented Cecil Rhodes, succinctly naming the desire of all cruel colonizers. He did not own the stars. The regime of domination does not own our dinner parties or our poetry or the way the ground smells after rain. It is absolutely necessary to nourish our joy. It is what Dorothy Day called “the duty of delight.” Black trans feminist Marquis Bey demands we live a life that “not only staves off death but imbues life with a kind of joy, a kind of pervasive refusative exuberance, a kind of fugitive hope – which, far from trapped in social death, is mystical and stateless. Even if murdered, it won’t stay dead somehow. It is hope that does not and cannot die.”
Level Two: You are a precious and beloved spirit held in the eternal and infinite goodness of the Beloved, who holds all of creation, even those we most despise and fear, in a single web of cherishing, compassionate, delighting, zestful love. This is not a matter of creed or belief. It is the condition of everything that exists in any way. The fundamental teaching of the gospel – and countless other spiritual traditions – is not to join a church or believe this or that but to wake up and recognize this truth.
In this, the gospel and domination represent two utterly opposed powers and visions. However much we despise a regime of domination, when it forces us to forget who we are, we have been enslaved to it. This is why the ancient Christian path was one of liberation from the tyranny of evil – symbolized by the devil but understood to be life in imperial Rome. We are not enslaved by evil when we approve of it but when it subtly, imperceptibly takes over our identity and locates us within its realm of fear, rage, contempt, and all the rest.
Freedom from domination is anything and everything that helps you remember this, helps you to rediscover who you are, who we all are, who the Beloved is – not because you believe it, but because it has reconstituted your fundamental consciousness, because it runs through you as completely as the oxygen running through our bodies to keep us alive.
Perhaps we will face unimaginable disasters. Perhaps we will face the end of life on this planet. But this truth can never be destroyed. Even if we face the flames, if we remember this, we are free.
Level Three: This level is, admittedly, difficult and many find it deeply offensive, but I am going to mention it anyway. The gospel is utterly and completely simple. It is constituted by three words: love one another. There is nothing else to it. But in case we did not quite understand, it adds: love your enemies. The most demanding ascetism is far easier than this.
Training this way resists domination not by trying to counter this or that policy – as important as that might be. It resists domination by overthrowing its fundamental logic. Without this training in radical love and compassion, we remain enslaved to domination. This is why early Christians were among those singled out for persecution – not because the little rag-tag communities threatened the power of Rome – but because they undermined its fundamental logic. Domination absolutely detests this. But how one trains this way is a matter for another time.
“Mature in yoga… [the wise person]
See themselves in all beings
And all beings in themselves.
The one who is rooted in oneness
Realizes that I am in every being: wherever
They go, they remain in me.
When they see all beings as equal
in suffering or in joy
because they are like them,
that person has grown perfect in yoga.
Always chanting my praise,
Steadfast in their devotion,
The wise make their lives an unending
hymn to my endless love.
--Bhagavad Gita 6.29-32, 9.14
Dr. Wendy Farley is the Rice Family Chair of Spirituality at San Francisco Theological Seminary, part of the Graduate School of Theology at Redlands University. In that capacity, she is the Director of Programs in Christian Spirituality and Director of Programs in the Art of Spiritual Direction.