When I was 22, I watched my father fight and lose a battle with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare, fatal brain disorder. For me, those final days of his life were overwhelming, frightening and deeply disorienting. Yet, even in that gut-wrenching time, I caught glimmers of joy.

While Dad lay bedridden upstairs, I stood at the front door, welcoming his many friends who came to say goodbye. To this day I can hear Dad’s jubilant “Hey!” echoing down the stairs as he greeted his old pals. Peals of laughter filled the house.

Dad exuded a joie de vivre even in the face of his imminent death.

I have been thinking a lot these days about joy as an act of defiance as in the I- will-not-cave-in, I-will-not-bow-down, or I-will-not-run-and-hide variety.

We live in a time where fear, cynicism and despair vie for the valuable real estate of our brains.

No wonder. The daily news is unrelenting in its assault on the human spirit: People are plucked off the streets and deported without due process. Our judicial system is being turned into a weapon of retribution. Programs that support our most vulnerable citizens are being slashed.

How can we allow ourselves to feel joyful when our hearts are heavy? Are we kidding ourselves: by closing our eyes, covering our ears, and pretending everything is fine?

What if we choose joy not because we are in denial, but as an act of defiance? It’s not as if we don’t know how bad things are or could become. We know. But what if we choose to be joyful nevertheless, as an act of resistance against a world that wants us to stay afraid?

Set in 1930s Germany during the rise of Nazism, “Cabaret,” the musical, tells the story of the Kit Kat Club, a small island of burlesque, music, dance and laughter, amid that darkening time.

In the 1972 movie the emcee, played by Joel Grey, opens the evening by saying:

“Leave your troubles outside!

So, life is disappointing.

Forget it.

We have no troubles here.

Here life is beautiful.”

The spirit of the musical uses humor as a way of snubbing its nose at the authorities.

Still, it is not easy to be joyful when despair knocks on the door of our hearts.

Negativity bias is real. As a survival strategy we have evolved with brains that are more easily activated by negative stimuli than positive ones. Our minds wrap around fear, as if they were Velcro, but our joy slides off our brains as if they were made of Teflon.

Every time I am tempted to fall into despair, I think of something Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Potawatomie tribe of Indigenous people writes,

“I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Gratitude. At the end of the day, we recognize that life itself is an amazing gift, not for the things we have but that we are.

Right now, we are living through a battle between all that is good, sacred and decent and the quest for power for power’s sake. We are given this moment where we can either surrender to despair and be defeated by our exhaustion or we can be a resister by choosing joy.

I’m inspired by those people I’ve known who, like my dad, lived with joy.

One of those people is a man named Dick Schiefelbusch, who is now deceased. He was a longtime KU professor, founder of the speech clinic and Life Span Institute at KU, and a member of the church I served as pastor.

Whenever I was around Dick I caught his irrepressible joy.

What I did not know until recently is how much his spirit was forged in the crucible of hardship. Dick was a World War II POW. And every night while in the German prison camp, Dick and the other prisoners, to keep their spirits up, put on plays, told stories and shared music. They turned their confinement into a Cabaret!

However imprisoned I may feel by the despair of the world, I want to live my life with a spirit of joyful defiance. Like Dick Schielfelbusch or my dad, I want an exuberant “Hey!” always bubbling up from my heart.

— Peter Luckey is a pastor of the United Church of Christ.