Down in my heart to stay

Never judge a book, we are told, solely by its cover. Nor should we do so by its bibliographical information. While Shemaiah Gonzalez’s first book is published under the Zondervan Academic imprint, those who expect either an Evangelical Protestant author or a scientific treatise on the nature of joy will be disappointed (or perhaps relieved, depending on the point of view).

Instead, this Seattle-based Catholic author has given us a varied and delightful collection of 37 essays that certainly spur the mind but also aim to touch the heart and soul.

This reviewer just finished another semester of teaching moral theology to M.A. students, so the nature of joy was on his mind when he started reading Undaunted Joy. Thus, I had been thinking in the scientific vein about joy already. What I found in Gonzalez’s book was itself very compatible with the writings of the great Dominican Servais Pinckaers that I had been teaching. Nay, it was not merely compatible but a wonderful verbal collage of stories, observations, and meditations illustrating the classic truths Pinckaers wanted the Church to remember in order to renew our moral and spiritual lives.

Pinckaers thought (quite rightly) that too many modern people mistake lower levels of happiness, most often pleasure, for true joy. Pleasure, he explained in Morality: The Catholic View, is: a passion experienced in our ordinary senses; typically caused by goods from outside; incompatible with pain; short-term; variable; at the surface level of our experience; and individual. Joy, on the other hand, is: interior and at moral and spiritual levels; connected to excellent action; born from trials, pains, even sufferings; lasting; deep enough that it can exist with external suffering; and completely communicable—in fact, joy grows when it is shared.

You know the old joke about conceptual art? Once you’ve understood the concept, you can throw away the art. True art is a bit different. It doesn’t merely communicate an abstract message; instead, it offers the viewer or reader a peek at the glorious truth and goodness on which the artwork’s beauty is meant to shine a light. Gonzalez’s essays are, in this sense, true art. One who read the previous two paragraphs of this review after reading her book would no doubt nod along, and be able to say a great deal more about them.

What kind of essays are these if they are not scientific or expository? Well, they are themselves a variable bunch. The titles reminded me of some of the volumes of an earlier, more masculine and pugnacious, but also lighthearted essayist named Hilaire Belloc. In one of those volumes (presently on the shelf behind me), titled On, the vast majority of the essays begin with that preposition. In a similar vein, Gonzalez’s alternate title might have been In and Of Joy since those two prepositions begin the majority of her chapter titles. What comes after them is a wide variety of words or phrases connoting secular or sacred things to the reader: “In the Drive-Through Car Wash,” “Of Wandering,” “Of the Sabbath,” “In Capybaras,” “In the Darkest Places,” “In Abundance,” “In the Face of Death,” and many more.

Like the best essays, many mix a blend of story and reflection in order to allow the reader a glimpse at the truth around which Gonzalez is painting with her words. The stories include tales of her family growing up, her family now, her friends, her neighbors, the people she meets in Costco, and pretty much anybody she encounters who shares a bit of himself with her. The overall story that is related in this patchwork quilt of encounters and meditations is that of her discovery, acceptance, and pursuit of joy. “Today I dwell in joy,” she says in her introduction. “But it was a long, tenuous road to get here.”

An adult convert to the Catholic Faith, she grew up in a lower-class household that had faith but also very imperfect love. “My childhood was filled with poverty, abuse, and neglect. I spent my teen years desperately attempting to flee that world and find my own. When I finally settled down, married, and held the stability and love I had always longed for, I collapsed.”

Yet, in contrast to some storytellers, her memories are not told for shock value or to settle scores. There is plenty of darkness in her family of origin, but she does not discount the light that was present as well. The poverty of her family meant that trips to the laundromat were a kind of adventure where she could experience fun and much more: “I’d find one item, perhaps my favorite jammies or my sister’s bright pink sock, and watch it rise, then fall, spin, then plummet. As I watched, nothing in the world existed but me and that splash of color. My mind erased into absolute peace.” The memory produces meditation along the lines of Simone Weil’s essay on prayer and concentration: “I wonder now if this was the beginnings of prayer working on me. Repetition. Meditation. Just basking in the light of something that dazzled.”

So, too, the wilderness years with bad relationships, attempts to find meaning or escape at the bottom of bottles, and wandering. Though she disclaims the title of an absolute “authority” on joy, Gonzalez will claim it insofar as she has determined to “be willing to look at joy, to not be afraid of it.” The excellent action of joy about which Fr. Pinckaers wrote is most perfectly seen in the one who is thankful for what God was doing for one through a marvelous providence, even when all seemed dark. Joy is possible after suffering if one sees that the excellent action of God was working sometimes despite, and sometimes even in those who were causing one pain. Gonzalez sees that her father, an abusive addict, did love her truly at times. She sees now that God was taking care of her even when she was confused and hurt—even if she didn’t know it.

One way was in preparing her for something better. If her family of origin seemed dark at the time, there was a bright spot in a kind young man named Justo whom she met at the tender age of fourteen. He gave her space to just be with him. Nothing developed at the time, but many years later, they married. Kind, talented, and thoughtful, he provided the kind of firm strength and shelter she had lacked as she grew up. Nor did he freak out when she freaked out about this normalness. Instead, he gave her the space, the support, and the prayer to figure out how Jesus the Bridegroom was caring for her through her own bridegroom.

It was not an instant process. As she admits, the origins of this book were in 2019, when she was building the habit of learning to recognize and accept joy, and the word itself seemed to be leaping in her mind. Then came the annus horribilis 2020. She was able to write some of the essays that came to be part of this book, piercing through the veil of the ordinary to see God’s hidden hand in her own chubby little sons, ancient Chinese neighbors, capybaras, and all manner of things—especially coffee, which gets its own chapter. (Occasionally, the exuberant joy overwhelms the style by inspiring too many enthusiastic adverbs.) But as she had learned to see God’s hand in a frustrating and painful past, she now had to digest how to rejoice in a country and a Catholic Church deeply polarized.

By 2023, Gonzalez had decided that she was going to take a trip to the U.K. and really write the book on joy. It was on this trip that she realized yet again that even when things were placid and obviously worth rejoicing in, there was a deeper problem. As she spent her days praying the Liturgy of the Hours with monks and nuns, then walking, walking, walking, she was able to receive a gift of simplicity: “The tape that played in my head for years—over and over, noise and static, about politics and relationships, old hurts and future worries—just stopped. I could be present, completely present in the moment.” In the monastery, she learned that silence and asceticism are necessities.

Learning to allow God’s peace to enter her and to rejoice in it was essential. To cast her cares, as St. Peter puts it, upon the Lord because he cares for her. God wasn’t done teaching her the lessons. As she came back and then prepared to write the rest of the book, an avalanche of unpleasant external actions played havoc with her passions—health problems for Justo, betrayals by friends and those with whom she had worked for years, and many more. In the middle of this storm, she again realized that loneliness and adversity can themselves serve as the crux of a greater and deeper joy, for the cause of our joy was Christ’s own experience of these on a cross—or crux.

Undaunted Joy fits well in the genre of spiritual essay collections produced in different ways by writers such as Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris (whom she quotes several times), Anne Lamott, and Lauren Winner. Though she is a serious and orthodox Catholic who can write of Mary, the saints, and all the rest, Gonzalez writes in such a way that other Christians and even those who are only Christian-curious will find her accessible in the way these other authors are. There is nothing defensive about her collection. She believes and loves, and has found joy in Christ and his Church. She knows that sharing that joy will only lead to an increase. The joy, joy, joy, joy is down in her heart to stay, whether those with whom she shares reciprocate or reject her, as Christ himself was rejected.

Undaunted Joy: The Revolutionary Act of Cultivating Delight
By Shemaiah Gonzalez
Zondervan Academic, 2025
Softcover, 224 pages