03/04/2025
Honoring Our Anger and Grief
Father Richard considers the inherent connection between anger and grief that ultimately heals and liberates:
After a lifetime of counseling and retreat work—not to mention my own spiritual direction—I have become convinced that most anger comes, first of all, from a place of deep sadness. Years ago, when I led male initiation rites at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, I would watch men’s jaws drop open and their faces turn pale when I said this. Life disappoints and hurts us all, and the majority of people, particularly men, don’t know how to react—except as children do, with anger and rage. It’s a defensive, reactionary, and totally understandable posture, but it often goes nowhere, and only creates cycles of bitterness and retaliation.
Over time, the Hebrew prophets came to see this profound connection between sadness and anger. It was what converted them to a level of truth-telling. They first needed to get angry at injustices, oppression, and war. Anger can be deserved, and even virtuous, particularly when it motivates us to begin seeking necessary change. But only until sunset, Paul says (Ephesians 4:26). If we stay with our rage and resentment too long, we will righteously and unthinkingly pass on the hurt in ever new directions, and we injure our own souls in ways we don’t even recognize.
Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III shares how the prophets’ grief empowers them to seek justice:
We must learn to grieve prophetically, seeing our world, even at its darkest, with the spirit and energy of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Those ancient teachers warned that the world was out of balance and that its repair requires our help. Grieving with them, we weep sometimes, yes, but without giving in to cynicism, hatred, and violence. We mourn as we work for change.… The challenge is to remember, even in our justified hurt and anger, that answering insult with insult and harm with harm just worsens the situation for everyone. We must remember the words of Dr. King: “Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.” When we grieve prophetically, we heal ourselves and the world by looking to shape the larger forces that damaged the soul of the person who caused hurt or anger, whether minor or devastating. [1]
Richard Rohr considers Jesus a model of prophetic tears.
In this way, the realization that all things have tears, and most things deserve tears, might even be defined as a form of salvation from ourselves and from our illusions. The prophets knew and taught and modeled that anger must first be recognized, allowed—even loved!—as an expression of the deep, normally inaccessible sadness that each of us carry. Even Jesus, our enlightened one, “sobbed” over the whole city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) and at the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). In his final “sadness … and great distress” in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:37), “his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood” (Luke 22:44).
Shared from Center for action and contemplation - daily meditations
