#RevThread #160(a)
Righteous Anger
1/ Someone asked me to do a #RevThread on Righteous Anger, on how to steward that anger and be healthy while angry. My initial response is that I couldn’t do that right away because I was too angry. But it’s a really interesting request.
2/ The person asked please twice, which moved me.
3/ It’s the kind of question – like “How should I parent?” or “What keeps love alive?” -- which is way beyond expertise, a question about which every one of us is an amateur. What is righteous anger? How should I manage it? When should I let it go?
4/ One day a few years ago I was driving in a rough area of a Texas city where many people were begging at various intersections. My wife was getting upset, muttering, “This is terrible.” And then, loudly, “Jeff! Stop the Car!”...
5/... I pulled over and saw tears of rage spilling down her cheeks. She opened her purse and took out a 20, jumped out of the car, crossed to a man, pressed it into his hand, and came back.
6/ She said, “That was the Lord.” Whether she meant, “The Lord was prompting me,” or “That person was the Lord,” I didn’t ask, since both things would have been true. She said, “It’s all so wrong.” I married way above myself.
7/ Righteous anger comes, I think, from three sources: Righteous anger is a spiritual gift from God. Righteous anger is an ethical response prompted by our conscience. Righteous anger, like all anger, is a biological reaction to fear.
8/ The most sustained and imaginative Biblical meditation on righteous anger is the book of Job. In Charles Williams’ great phrase, Job shows us that humans “are intended to argue with God”. What prompts the anger of God, the anger from God my wife felt in that moment?
9/ In Job’s case, what prompts the anger of God is some clergy of the day. Job had lost everything and had done nothing to deserve those losses. Three worthies came to minister to him; three folks who had a graceless theology that runs like this:
10/ “God is good and approves of good people, nice people, compliant people. God is mad whenever we are bad, so he disapproves of and punishes bad people. So, your suffering, Job, must be because you have sinned. Come on, admit it and then maybe God will forgive you.”
11/ These beauties carry on like this for a few chapters when, finally, God has had enough. God shows up and speaks from the whirlwind: “Who is this who darkens counsel without understanding? Where were you pipsqueaks when I was creating the world?”...
12/.. God is upbraiding-not Job, but the clergy who were scolding Job in his suffering.
13/ God’s righteous anger is aroused when innocent people are made to suffer by the greedy, the entrenched, the privileged. Righteous anger has its origin in God.
14/ That divine anger is usually expressed through those whose consciences are aroused when suffering is imposed on the vulnerable by the powerful...
15/.. A fine recent example: the surviving youth of Parkland school and the parents of the slain children. Their ethical clarity is immediate and unsullied. What happened to them was not right.
16/ The Floyd family is currently leading a massive ethical awakening for which I praise God. When I march to support Black Lives Matter and see the vast crowds risking the pandemic to witness for racial justice, I sense God’s insistent “yes” to our desire for justice...
17/.. and our outrage that justice was so violated. The awakened human conscience is one of the sources of the word of God. And that awakened human conscience is empowered by anger.
18/ Yet paradoxically, because we are complex critters, righteous anger, like all anger, is a secondary emotion--a response to the prior emotion of fear. That’s how our biology is wired: something threatens and I need either to run or to fight.
19/ For righteous anger to be healthy, we have to have the ability not just to feel it, but also govern it. That means we need to face and to name what we’re afraid of in this moment.
20/ When we know what the threat is, then we can know when the threat is removed. Then we can let the anger go. So, here are some of my fears:
21/ I am afraid that what Lincoln loved to call “our form of government” is being killed. I am afraid that we will surrender our liberty--content to be mere consumers rather than free citizens.
22/ I am afraid that the law itself is being traduced by those who imagine themselves above it. And I am not willing to passively observe this massive destruction of our once hopeful land.
23/ I say to Trumplandia what Melville said: “No! in thunder.”
That’s a bit on the origin and nature of Righteous Anger. Next up: Stewarding Righteous Anger.
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