“Whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’
The word of the Lord has brought me insult and injury all day long.”
—The Prophet Jeremiah (20:8)
When I was sent to the principal’s office in the second grade for pointing out my teacher’s conspicuous favoritism, my parents wondered aloud what to do with me. What followed was a lifelong lesson about the tricky balance between message and method: how not to deliver the right message in the wrong way.
My parents have taught me, sometimes using words, that telling the truth will cost me something; that wisdom is the negotiation of minimizing or avoiding that cost. “Be careful with the truth,” they said. “People who don’t like it will just call you angry.”
When the United States elected its 45th president, I encountered something for which my parents’ lessons had not prepared me: People rarely wanted to hear the truth about a man as told by a woman. I learned that women who share their truth are dismissed as being “dramatic” or “too angry.” It took so little to be ignored yet so much to be heeded.
I did it anyway. I named the willing seduction of American evangelicalism, already one of the most powerful religious institutions in the world, greedy for more power. I pointed out the silent moderacy of the Christian majority as the enemy of their purportedly beloved “gospel.” I also examined my contribution to American evangelicalism, silent moderacy, and quests for power and stability.
I’ve received countless reminders to be a “Christian,” a “godly woman,” and to “show grace,” terms describing something more like a sedated animal disconnected from its own sense of anger than a human afraid about the future. These people read my anger as a disqualifier of reasonableness. Even in monstrous times, I’m expected to be respectable and respectful, my anger dissolved in a string of soft words.
But anger is not at all what people think it is. Anger has been kind and caring to me. When, as an undocumented woman, I felt most vulnerable to the former-and-future President’s rhetoric and policies, anger was the sign of my will to survive. Outrage on my behalf was hope for our collective futures.
More often than not, in the secret center of anger is not a desire to destroy but to protect those it loves. It wraps itself around a vulnerable area, like a body turned into a shield for its friends.
Prayer
God who inspires and anoints our anger, give us the ability to discern this gift, to discipline and harness it with righteousness. Just as joy without spine and love without resolve are empty, so too is struggle without anger. Teach us this lesson; give us this gift. Amen.