What if we weren't intimidated by the task of living with joy?
Through a collection of short essays, I recommend a fresh view on life, using my own experiences and discovery of joy in both the mundane and magnificent. In energetic prose, we find delight together in naps, capybaras, and wandering the English countryside. When we turn our attention to the joy around us, we become attuned to God's constant presence with us and in all these things.
This is not toxic positivity. I am no stranger to the darkness present in the world. Rather, knowing both darkness and light helps us acknowledge the disparity between the two. Undaunted Joy dares to stare darkness in the eye and respond in joy as an act of defiance.
Over the course of 37 essays, I will encourage you to look at the world through the lens of joy, even when faced with the pain and hardship, and thereby revolutionize your everyday. In teaching readers to see joy as a way of life, Undaunted Joy gives us permission to claim God's goodness even in a broken world and to share it with abandon.
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“My favorite sentence in Shemaiah Gonzalez’s book is ‘He wanted to paint joy.’ It might surprise you to know that she’s writing about Van Gogh and his art. That’s what Gonzalez does with this book. She can take a person almost universally known as a symbol of desperation and see the brightness in him. We live in fraught times—we’ve always lived in fraught times—but Gonzalez teaches us that people have always found their way to joy.”
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“The call to joy from Job to Jack Gilbert and Chuang Tzu to Ross Gay runs through world faith traditions, world poetry, and the lives of saints and sages as one of our greatest antidotes to despair. In this quiet, family-oriented, often humorous book Shemaiah Gonzalez has boarded that good ship. May its voyages grow in number and never end.”
If we keep our eyes on Jesus, small acts of service and love, like those lived out by St. Francis Xavier, will reap more rewards than we could ever imagine.