It was a January in St. Louis, cold and icy, and our friend Al had lost one of his leather gloves. He exploded into the coffee room, using words a gentleman and a Christian don’t typically use in public, and we all stared, gape mouthed.
We watched him storm some more, at the sink, across from the mailboxes, sitting down opposite me. Not pushing my chair away from him was an act of will.
“What’s wrong, Al?” someone finally asked softly.
He froze for just a moment and then hung his head. “I got some bad news,” he sighed. An old friend died that morning.
Bad news does strange things to us sometimes.
Last week was full of bad news for our community, our state, and our country. It felt like uncertainty. It felt like fear.
Uncertainty and fear are no friends of ours. They make us feel weak and helpless, so you know what we do with them? We make them into anger, exploding and storming and taking it out on whoever’s close at hand.
Years ago, Kathleen Norris wrote about anger, and I’ve carried her wisdom with me ever since. She wrote of God’s anger, “It is truly and more wholeheartedly righteous than human anger could ever be.” God gets angry about injustice or evil or pain.
Human anger is different. We get angry about a whole lot more, and it’s rarely so pure.
Norris went on, “Now that I appreciate God’s anger more, I find that I trust my own much less. I am increasingly aware of its inconsistencies, its tendency to serve primarily as a mask for my fears” (Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith [New York: Riverhead, 1998], 126).
You see, anger is an easy make for all that unpleasant fear and sadness, uncertainty and grief. Anger feels a little closer to control when the world around us is going haywire.
Last week, when the news broke that our Safeway grocery store would be closing, a lot of us got mad. We got mad at the Albertsons Corporation first. That’s fair. They’re the ones actually closing the store. But then we got mad at the City Council, as if they had any control over what a company worth $28 billion does with one of its stores. I got pretty annoyed at all the people calling our community a “ghost town.”
Then, we watched students get shot again in Evergreen and Charlie Kirk die in Utah. More anger. One kid, one man, one gun each, with motives still unclear. We started taking it out on each other. What was that about anger feeling like control? It accomplished nothing.
What if we just let sadness be sadness? What if we had a good cry or went for a walk or just stayed home and did nothing for a while until the sadness worked itself out? What if we listened closely to the people with lots of different ideas than our own, and just let those ideas be different rather than dangerous? What if we remember that God is in control anyway, so–by faith and hope–our lives and community will heal?
Kathleen Norris, quoting the monk Evagrius, wrote, “The remedy for all anger is prayer.”
You know how, sometimes, the answer is so simple that it’s hard to hear? Yeah, that would be now. Pray. And pray more, and pray some more. Listen, talk, and pray even more.
I get it. There’s work to be done finding a new business for our empty store front, addressing violence in the schools (again), and building relationships with people who disagree with us politically. Yes, there’s work to be done, but it can’t be done while we’re angry. And it’s going to get done a whole lot better and faithfully if we start the work with prayer.
I went to Safeway yesterday for the first time since the announcement of its closure next month. Clearances tags on everything. Shelves beginning to empty. No more deli. A lot of good people about to lose their jobs. I didn’t cry in line. I figured the checkers had enough to worry about without having to console me. I cried in the car. I prayed for the employees on the way home.
Even Jesus wept (John 11:35). We can too.
I have a tree outside my living room window that likes to get ahead of itself. Every year, it tries to grow one or two or three new trees from its own branches. It’s an overachiever.
