Joy as fierce spiritual resistance

MONTREAT, North Carolina — The Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail stood before hundreds of college students on Jan. 3, holding up medieval manuscript images of the Virgin Mary — not cradling the infant Jesus, but beating the devil with a stick.

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“This is probably not the picture you would find in Hobby Lobby underneath a nice throw pillow that says ‘joy,’” she told the crowd at Anderson Auditorium during the opening keynote of the 2026 Montreat College Conference held Jan. 2-5. “This is what it is: taking a spear right through the evil and the sin and the death and the tyranny."

McManus-Dail, vicar of Jubilee Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, delivered a 90-minute address titled “How to Practice Joy When the World Is Falling Apart” at 9 a.m., delving into the conference’s theme of “Strains of Joy.” She returned later that day for a workshop where students engaged the same themes while creating art projects.

McManus-Dail began by distinguishing her understanding of joy from easy happiness. She recounted standing at a funeral for a beloved 90-year-old family member and hearing the liturgical proclamation “Alleluia. Christ is risen.”

“Even at the grave, we make our song: Alleluia,” she said, explaining that the word literally means “praise God.” The priest, who has walked with parishioners through traumatic deaths and experienced profound loss in her own life, argued that joy is most critical precisely when it feels impossible. She described joy not as a feeling that happens to us, but as “looking for God's abundance in the face of the world's scarcity.”

Drawing on research by Brené Brown, McManus-Dail identified joy as “the most vulnerable human emotion” because “when we feel joy, we want to immediately clap up, put a little wall around it.” She challenged the audience to reject what she called the world’s commodification of joy — the idea that happiness can be purchased through control, consumption or isolation from pain. “Joy is not a fence you can build,” McManus-Dail said. “It is not a wall, and it is not necessarily going to protect you.” Instead, she described joy as “profligate,” “extravagant” and “gaudy” — excessive beauty that refuses to be packaged or sold for profit.

McManus-Dail shared her experience of giving birth via C-section, describing the visceral sensation of lying on an operating table “like being on a cross” while bringing life into the world. A phrase from her friend came to her: “To bring life into this world, you must face death.”

Ten years ago, four of McManus-Dail's family members — her aunt, uncle and two cousins were killed in a plane crash. McManus-Dail spoke of how creativity became a spiritual practice of resistance. “To face death, you must bring life,” she said, inverting her earlier phrase. 

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“Creativity in the face of anti-creation, participating in the midwifery of God in the face of everything that tries to kill God and us — that is Christian joy.”

McManus-Dail turned to Mary as an exemplar of joy in the face of suffering, noting her title as “Our Lady, Queen of Heaven and Empress of Hell.” She read Mary’s Magnificat from Luke 1, emphasizing its themes of social reversal: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.”

Medieval Christians facing plague and political oppression, McManus-Dail explained, depicted Mary defeating evil with fierce strength rather than passive submission. She described an act of creative resistance in her transformation of her chasuble, a liturgical garment McManus-Dail wears. The pink chasuble was transformed with Rit dye and decorated with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and sequins from her late aunt's craft supplies.

McManus-Dail closed with a warning and an invitation. “Tyrants,” she said, “want nothing more than for us to think about them, that every headline, that every thought, that everything we think about, talk about and dream about to be about them.”

“They are not our story,” she said. “They are not the whole story.” She urged students to practice “small acts of creation” daily as resistance against despair. “Joy has teeth,” she declared. “Joy is a spiritual discipline.”

During the afternoon workshop, students engaged the themes from the keynote while creating art. One college student asked about those who commit evil acts: “Where are their hearts?” She wondered if the divine core in every person “has been hidden by capitalism” or “torn to the winds.” McManus-Dail wrestled with the question, citing Pharaoh’s hardened heart in Exodus. “We have incredible capacity for self-deception,” she said. “Hurt people hurt people.”

Another student asked how chronically ill people can practice joy through fatigue and sickness. McManus-Dail, who lives with chronic illness herself, emphasized the importance of community support and honoring bodily limits as “a joy of necessity — staying alive and staying well enough to play.”

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Near the workshop’s end, another student asked, “Is joy a privilege?”

“"We are responsible for our own actions, but as Christians, we do not believe that we exist in isolation,” McManus-Dail responded. “It is on us as a practice of collective joy to ensure that there are not people who are totally hopeless and helpless amongst us.”

“I love the theology,” said Jacob, a conference-goer from Statesboro, Georgia, who specifically asked about the story behind the pink chasuble. Jacob has been following “Rev. Lizzie” on Instagram and TikTok for years.  He said he loved the part of her keynote “when she was talking about that within God, God is community within itself.” Jacob also loved the premise of McManus-Dail’s book, “God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us.” “God didn't need to create us but chose to create us as uniquely special,” said Jacob, referring to an example from the keynote speech: “God was in a silly, goofy mood, and made a humpback whale.”

Highlights from the Montreat College Conference will post the rest of the week on pcusa.org.

Throughout the spring of 2026, reels featuring video testimonials from college students on where they find spiritual joy and their favorite things about being Presbyterian in college will be posting through PCUSA's TikTok.