What do I do with my anger?
Last week I attended a webinar put on by the Center for Action and Contemplation entitled “What do I do with my anger?” It was headlined by Richard Rohr and Brian McLaren, which motivated me to attend it, but to me the real star of the show was a woman named Valarie Kaur. Kaur is a Californian of Sikh decent who is a civil rights lawyer, activist, filmmaker, and author. Kaur spoke to us from Guatemala, where she had been present for the exhumation of mass graves dating to the genocide of the indigenous population during the Guatemalan Civil War. What she taught us about anger was grounded both in that atrocity and atrocities she had experienced in her own body and family. “Anger is the force that we harness to protect that which we love,” Kaur said, “but it has to be processed. Unprocessed anger can either go inward, damaging us, or outward into hatred and violence.”
Kaur led us through a brief imaginative, embodied experience where we were able to locate our anger in our body, and sense both its color and shape. She then instructed us to place a loving hand on that part of our body that held our anger for us, as well as one on our heart. With our feet on the floor, connected to the Earth, she told us to breathe our anger in with each inhale, and release it through our feet into the interconnected community of the Earth with each exhale. “Let it come, and let it go, let it come, and let it go,” she repeated for several minutes. By locating, welcoming, and releasing our anger in this physical way, the 6000-some participants on the call experienced firsthand that anger is not something to be feared, bottled up, or taken out on others. Rather anger is a powerful source of energy, wisdom, and protection.
What to do with our anger? “Rage it out!” Kaur recommended. Sometimes we need to scream, hit a pillow, dance, run, write, draw, or yell to allow our anger to fully express itself in a safe space. Thus we can avoid allowing it to poison us as hopelessness or bitterness, and avoid inflicting it on others. “Rage can calcify into a hardness that is unbearable,” Richard Rohr said on the webinar. “We have to die to our love of our anger.”
We have real reasons to be angry about things that have happened to us in our lives, things being done to others, the state of our community, country, and planet Earth itself. Our anger is a reflection of our in-born sense of the justice of God, which is love writ large. Through engaging the biblical prophet, Rohr said, we can “Let divine anger and our anger inform each other.” Anger tells us that things are not as they should be, and it gives us the energy to try to make things right. If we welcome, befriend, listen to, and process our anger, that energy can be a force for good in our lives and in God‘s world.
Richard Rohr’s new book, The Tears of Things and Valarie Kaur’s, Sage Warrior, both address the constructive use of anger on the engaged contemplative path.
Attentive readers will notice that my piece this Wednesday addresses anger and Bishop Alan’s on Saturday will address forgiveness of debts as a part of the jubilee theme of Lent and our “triple jubilee” 150th year as Grace. These are not unrelated! The Center for Action and Contemplation faculty at the webinar spoke of their recently deceased colleague Barbara Holmes theology of anger as a process of moving toward forgiveness, which doesn’t come immediately or easily. Ultimately, the biblical concept of jubilee embraces restorative justice, in which, through God’s grace, all parties are made whole. Forgiveness, the releasing of another’s debt to us, and the continuing experience of anger as a positive, constructive force are not mutually exclusive. May we, as we wrestle with, welcome, befriend, process, and partner with our anger to build a better world, experience the Grace of Jubilee— knowing that we, too, have been forgiven, healed, restored, and freed.
In Christ’s Deep peace, Rev. Amy
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