ISBC 18 - The Power of Anger
Chapter 18 of Hope: A User's Manual
And the real secret: anger is often grief in disguise, and this grief is crushing: we are so far from the world as it should be.1
I’m writing this on June 14, Flag Day and it is being posted the day after the 4th of July. Interesting how these things come together. There’s a lot that stirs for people with images of our nation’s flag. What stirs in you when you hear the name Colin Kaepernick? What about people not standing for the flag? What about a flag flying upside down? What about a Christian cross draped in an American flag? What about flags that are similar to the American flag but are instead blue and black (Thin Blue Line flag) or are in rainbow colors (Pride flag)? There’s a good chance that no matter where you are on the social-political-theological spectrum, one or more of those stirred a bit of something in you, potentially some anger.
There’a a lot of anger out there right now and I think that MaryAnn gets it exactly right that a great deal of that anger is rooted in grief. To quote the opening of the Lord of the Rings movies, “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.” While that’s talking about the fictional world of Middle-Earth, I think it reflects a reality for many (all?) of us that there’s that deep-seated feeling that things are not as they should be and we grieve that reality and that grief can emerge in anger. I would love to say that we are all grieving the same things and that our anger is then being directed towards the same changes, but we all know that this is not the case right now.
Maybe it is a naive hope on my part, but I wonder if progress could be made if we were able to explore what it is we are grieving that is leading to the anger that we feel and we see being expressed so much around us. Could standing in our shared grief and brokenness help us to draw closer rather than continuing to push ourselves apart. I don’t know, but I do know that the anger we are feeling and expressing is not sustainable. I do know that there needs to be a new path. Maybe that new path is getting to what is deeper.
Maybe a naive hope. But still hope.
In what grief is your anger rooted?
Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed
McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Hope: A User's Manual (p. 85). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
I believe it was Tara Brach (perhaps quoting someone else) who said, "anger is a lazy form of grief."
Just a quick note on the photo - I photographed this several years ago at a cemetery I was wandering through while I was passing time before a meeting was going to start at the church next door. This partial flag was just trampled off the side of the path through the cemetery. It looked like it had been there for a long time and who knows how many people walked by it or drove by it and either ignored it or never even saw it. I took the pieces home with me and burned them in our fire pit in our back yard.