In the summer before my senior year of college, I was blessed to have received a fellowship through the Fund for Theological Education (FTE) which allowed me to meet up with other young Christians in Nashville to discuss faith and justice for a week (if you haven't figured out how much of a nerd I am yet, hopefully this gives a clear picture). One of the speakers was Father Mike Pfleger, a controversial priest and pastor at the Catholic parish of St. Sabina's in the South Side of Chicago. One of the main take-away points from his presentation was this idea of "holy-rage," the idea of being on fire with the Spirit, driven to righteous anger at the various injustices and structures of sin in the world. Throughout the Bible, there are a number of instances of this righteous anger - hell, if you've ever read the Prophets, you know what I'm talking about. Abuse of power and privilege, extreme gaps between the rich and poor, abandoning the God who had seen them through a difficult history of oppression - the Prophets are pissed off, and have a whole lot of reasons to justify that.
Even Jesus loses his shit at one point, tearing through the money-changers booths in the Temple, flipping tables and whipping people with a rope chord. I don't see this scene as trite, as play acting. I imagine a man whose life was so fully dedicated to the vision of the Kingdom that drove his ministry finally just having a breakdown. Preaching day in and day out a loving and forgiving God, a HUGE God with space for everyone, a return the the real Spirit of the Law, and a move away from the oppressive and life-draining legalistic religion that dominated his days - he finally just loses it in the Temple. All of the injustice, the complacency, the complete ignorance of the gift we have been given through our life in God - and he just lets it out. Jesus just gives into that holy rage and lets it fly for a little while.
Anger is something I fear a little bit. For a long time, anger was my only response to a lot of painful things - fear, sadness, pain - all of these things were expressed outwardly as aggressive anger. I have worked hard over the years to see through my anger to the deeper pain or wound that I am looking to have healed.
Imagine my surprise, then, when over my JVC re-orientation, I found old feelings of anger and rage rippling through my body. We were discussing privilege (white privilege, male privilege, etc.), and issues of societal injustice. I have known, for a long time, that I inhabit the single most privileged group of people in the entire world. Anywhere I go, any room I walk into, I will immediately receive respect and preference that I have done nothing to earn. Simply belonging to certain classes of people afford me this privilege. With this privilege, I have come to recognize that others, who were not born into the same classes as I, are ostracized and oppressed because of it. Their lives are somehow worth less than mine in the grand scheme of things.
These others are my friends. My sister and mom, two of the most powerful and influential women I have ever met, am I supposed to believe that their lives are worth less than mine due to their being female? The Lakota people who I have met this year, whose lives and stories have had such a profound affect on me, am I simply to believe that their needs and concerns are not as important as mine, simply because they are not white?
Fuck that. That's all I can say. It actually makes me sick to have to acknowledge that this is the way the world works - that certain people are given power and preference over than others, due to their being born into completely arbitrary categories. Not that arbitrary - categories that have been designed to be seen as "better" than the others, categories that are being continually supported in their oppressive dominance over the others.
If you are hearing guilt, then you are reading wrong, and I would suggest you check your own lens. Guilt is not a feeling I often have, and is one I rarely find too much use for. This is anger at injustice. This is the result of looking at the world and wondering why we seem to continually redesign it to keep out this enormous God I have so much love for, the God that doesn't know how to do anything other than love us - each and every one of us.
I can't and won't sit and stew in angry rage. That is destructive, and will certainly eat me up from the inside. But maybe like Jesus, I can let that out sometimes, without shame, but rather, as an authentic expression of my being alive, and my having love for this enormous God and all of Her creation. As a person of love, and as a person who has been touched by this love of God, what other response could I have to seeing people continually told and re-told that they are less than the glorious and wonderful beauty that they were created as?
I am angry. And I guess I can only give thanks that my heart can keep breaking and feeling, no matter how hard it gets.
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