Mama Monday #87

A wonderful post from Sarah Bessey from last March: 

At a pivotal moment in Madeleine L’Engle’s classic book A Wrinkle in Time, the mysterious guide Mrs. Whatsit says to our protagonist Meg, “Stay angry, little Meg. You’ll need all of your anger now.”

If it’s been a minute since you read the book, this moment happens as Meg, along with her brother Charles Wallace and their friend Calvin, are about to embark on a rescue mission. The three celestial women who have guided them thus far can go no further and the children are facing the darkness on their own now, all to save Meg and Charles Wallace’s father and defeat the hideous “It,” which seeks only conformity, obedience, and so dominance and control.

Throughout the story, Meg has struggled to contain and manage her anger, seeing it as a vice or a problem, even a character flaw. She has worked to hide it or to get over it, but with that line, Mrs. Whatsit gives her permission to access the very anger she’s been taught to downplay, to channel her anger into goodness and purpose and power, right as she steps into the greatest challenge of her life.

Like Meg, we’re spent a lot of years denying and managing anger. In many cases, denial has made us sick. And for those of us who were once part of the Good Christian Ladies™ Club² were told for so long that nice girls don’t get angry, well, we can be so completely out of touch with how it feels to acknowledge and work with our anger that it feels like A Sin to be angry, rather than a normal human emotion and response.

And that? has to end.

Because our soul-centred anger is a gift, a powerful force we can steward with care and intention as we rise up at injustice.

I have heard from so many people who are angry right now - rightfully. It's anger at injustice, anger over politics (what an inadequate word for the current apocalypse but let’s go with it), anger at the loss of women’s rights, anger at betrayal and poverty and bad legislation and broken promises, anger over abuse, anger over threats to sovereignty and the collapse of world orders. It is real, legit, righteous anger.

And maybe some part of us worries that we’re too angry now, like we will never recover from this sort of rage. Last week, yet again, I was accused of “being angry” like it was a problem for folks, like it invalidated my criticisms or concerns or even my grief.

Beloved, being angry is not the problem.

Because I am angry.

I am PLENTY angry. Furious. Incandescent.³

Our task is similar to Meg’s as she embarks into a battle that will only be won by Love: stay angry, we’ll need all our anger now. Our task now is to learn how to steward our anger well.

I believe the Holy Spirit is active in that space of righteous anger to wake us up from the sleeping numbness of our culture, shocking us out of our nice little lives centred on avoiding conflict or inconvenience or complacency.⁴

So no, I don’t want you to get over it. I won’t be shamed for it. I don’t want you to hide it or ignore it or talk yourself out of anger. In fact, I want us to do something different than what we were taught, implicitly or explicitly.

I want you to pay attention to your anger.

And learn to steward it well as an invitation from God.

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First a confession: I am not historically great at being angry.⁵ I can stuff down and deny my own anger for years in a misguided effort to ‘keep the peace.’ My default is to deny my anger and pretend to be fine like it’s a spiritual gift, sure, but then you mix that up with the Church's historic nervousness about angry women, a Canadian culture which highly values politeness and minding one’s own business, and you see that I have had some serious catching up to do at being, oh, a functioning person.

Instead of distracting myself, instead of satiating or denying anger with numbing techniques like a crammed schedule or “not my circus, not my monkeys” excuses or protestations of "I'm fine! It’s fine! Everything is fine!" or bright-siding the situation (a verb I practically invented, you’re welcome and I’m sorry), I’ve had to learn to regard my anger as an invitation from the Holy Spirit. I’ve had to learn to befriend anger.

We hear a lot about God's anger in Scripture- and it's almost all of the same things that are stirring us up right now. Cruelty to women, to the poor, to children, to the immigrant and refugee, to the vulnerable, broken promises, the triumph of evil or ascendence of the wicked and abuses of power on the backs of the oppressed or marginalized. We're angry for good reason.

Our anger is a reasonable, legitimate response to something which is also angering to God. Our anger is an invitation to pray, to advocate, to learn, to become educated, to support, to protest, to push back the principalities and powers of this world our own selves instead of waiting for someone else to do something. (Stop waiting for the grown-ups to show up and sort things out; it is time to be the grown-ups.)

Be angry. You should be angry. Pay attention to your anger so that you can steward it well.

I recently added a new sticky-note reminder to my writing desk upstairs.

Since my handwriting may be indecipherable, that pink sticky note is a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “You must not allow yourself to become bitter.”

But the context for that quote is even more astonishing: he wrote that after his home had been targeted and bombed by white terrorists. His wife and child could have been killed. He wrote those words, knowing there is a difference between anger and bitterness. Later, in 1968, he wrote that the word of organizing and uniting people is “so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”

Anger is not always bitterness: steward the former, guard against the latter. Well-managed anger can lead to life-giving transformation.

After all, I can forgive - and still be angry.

I can be cultivating all the fruit of the Spirit (including self-control) - and still be angry.

I can be thoughtful, reasoned, nuanced, generous, and kind - and still be angry.

I can love my enemies and pray for them - and still be angry.

I can be hopeful and resolute and faithful - and still be angry.⁶

In fact, the only way I can stay hopeful is to allow myself to be angry. I need to be able to look this moment in the face and call it what it is - to tell the truth - in order to even begin dreaming of what could be.

If you aren’t willing to tell the truth about reality, why should anyone believe you about what’s possible through faithfulness and hope?

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However once I began to let myself be angry, I ran headfirst into the truth about anger's relationship to justice: it’s inadequate for the long game. Anger can serve as a great igniter but it will also prove to be insufficient for sustaining us.

Anger is our holy starting point, sure, but it is Love who sustains the passion and directs it into life-giving transformation. I have a hunch that’s why Dr. King was so cautious about bitterness taking root: it’s impossible to transform within the prison of bitterness. You need hope to do that good work. You need hope to have even half a shot at transformation. Bitterness blocks our ability to dream of what could be possible again. And if we aren’t dreaming, what are we even fighting for?

Our anger gets us engaged, yes, but it is love and hope, joy and faith, community and discipline, rest and contemplation, strategy and solidarity that keeps us in the long game, not bitterness or fear.

I want our passionate engagement to last longer than a viral hashtag. I want our work to be sustainable over the long haul. I want you to have a crowded kitchen table and good friends and meals you remember for days afterwards, a friend to text when you’re lonely and gentle touch, a safe place and a clear view of the sky. I want you to have a full life that stands as a form of resistance against an impoverished humanity that seeks only profit and efficiency and power and dominance.

And so we need that anger, that energy, that passion to be directed right towards peace-making and shalom-building and world-repair. And so we also need to pay attention to joy.

Yes, joy. Imagine that!

For me, I had to begin to pay attention to the work and the people who bring me great joy and hope while engaged in the work. I work - daily! - to cultivate and practice joy in order to keep stewarding the righteous anger without being consumed. You’ve heard me say in my books and sermons a few times that your calling is usually hiding right at the intersection of your joy and your anger. If you miss either what stirs you to anger or what brings you joy, you miss your full calling in this world.

Don’t be fooled: it is absolutely a scary thing, a life-changing, paradigm-shifting thing, to honestly look our anger and our joy in the face, hold it up to the light of the Word and the Holy Spirit and our community and say, “I need to keep caring about this. I need to stay with this. I need to do something about this.” And then to stay faithful to that work. But it’s the best kind of transformation.

The mob will move on. The viral cause de celeb will rise and fall again and again. Your well-stewarded anger and carefully-tended joy will keep you faithful.

When you're angry, be open to the invitation of the Spirit there for you.

When you're joyful, be open to the invitation there.

And then welcome what comes next, however mundane and ordinary and revolutionary. Consider the possibility that the Spirit is giving you permission to channel this anger into goodness and purpose right as you step into the unknown, an unknown filled with phone calls to MPs and emails to staffers, dangerous protests and heated political meetings, bad coffee in church basements and civil disobedience, confrontations and prayer meetings.

Your job isn’t to get over your anger. It certainly isn’t to pretend you aren’t angry or to numb it out or avoid it. Your job is to learn to steward your anger in partnership with Love and hope and even joy.

There is real challenge ahead of us in these coming days and years - we all see it. So with apologies to one of my literary heroes: Stay angry, stay joyful, my friends. We need all our anger and joy right now.

-Sarah Bessey