As I sit down to write this, my soul is aching from the senseless killing of nineteen young elementary school children and two of their teachers in Uvalde, Texas. It brings to an end a month of horrors in which we have seen the targeted massacre of African-Americans in a grocery store in Buffalo as well as the ongoing catastrophe that is the Ukraine-Russia war, where schools and hospitals are targeted by missiles to terrorize and demoralize a population. And these are just the atrocities that have made the headlines, the tip of a planetary iceberg of human trauma inflicted by other humans.
There are different ways one can respond to this: grief, sorrow, compassion, a reaching out to bring help and comfort. But anger is surely on the top of the list, anger at those outworn attitudes and behaviors that fail to recognize our common humanity and are unable to accept that our survival depends on our ability to communicate and cooperate with each other.
Where there is inertia, anger is a powerful motivator to bring about change. Anger can transform into the courage to confront habits of thought that promote greed, injustice, selfishness, and the well-being of one group (or one individual) above that of others, and behaviors that protect incompetence and ignorance in the name of “business as usual.” ronically, we can be angry at the way anger is used as a tool to divide us in order that a few may gain and maintain power at the expense of the many.
Anger is rightly seen metaphorically as a fire. As such, it can provide the energy to change. It can burn away what is unhealthy and rotten. But like fire, it can injure those who wield it. It can spread in unpredictable ways and consume what should be cherished as well as what should be removed. The person who holds anger in her or his heart can be damaged by it, which can lead to damaging others. Who knows what unresolved anger led the Uvalde shooter to buy a gun and attack a school?
Anger can be useful, but it should be seen as part of a process, not as a destination. We can think “anger, and….” I am angry, and my anger leads me to change. I am angry, and my anger leads me to positive action. I am angry, and my anger leads me to seek understanding and a new vision. I am angry, and my anger leads me to stand up to what is harmful in my world.
Of course, it takes an act of intention and morality to make anger part of a creative, internal act of alchemy in which something transformative and healing emerges. It is easy for anger to simply become more anger, destruction, killing, and death. Anger is an elemental power, and if we give it the reins, it can take us over a cliff, and often others with us. There is nothing wrong with feeling anger. What matters is what we then become and what we do. What is important is how we determine what comes after the “and….”
Let’s think of this as an alchemical process. I have a hot substance that I want to transform into something useful, but to do so, I need to pour it into a container so I can work with it. If you’ve ever poured very hot water into a thin glass, only to have the glass shatter, you know that the strength and durability of the container is important. This is true when we are the container and anger is the hot substance. How we hold this anger determines whether the process can proceed towards a constructive “and…” or whether we shatter and are damaged.
For me, the essential ingredient of our inner container is love. It can also be formed by joy, compassion, goodwill, a positive vision, and the hope that always opens doors to possibilities. In the end, though, it is love that provides the inner strength and resilience that can safely hold the intensity of our anger and ensure it can—and will—be transformed into something positive and powerful.
This past month, a friend sent me the YouTube video of Dr. Timothy Shriver’s commencement address at Georgetown University:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF0bMQusMy4
Dr. Shriver is the son of Sargent Shriver who helped found the Peace Corps and has himself been the Chairman of the Special Olympics for several years. It’s an inspiring address, in which he says, “I don’t believe that ‘love your enemies’ is any longer the strategy for saints. I believe it is the new requirement for citizenship,” finishing his talk by affirming, "We can’t heal what we can’t love.”
We diminish ourselves when we underestimate the power of love, and we weaken ourselves when we mistake the power of anger as a force of vengeance or retribution for the harms in the world, whether to ourselves or to others. But when justifiable anger is held and transformed by a love that seeks to heal and uplift, then the “and…” that can result is a power that can change the world.