Righteous Anger

God answered me, “The sin of the people of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great; the land is full of bloodshed and the city is full of injustice. So I will not look on them with pity… - Ezekiel 9:9

The scriptures are full of instances of God railing against injustice. It’s primarily what the prophets spoke about and it was a huge theme in Jesus’s teaching (e.g., his major teaching on the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25). Poverty, exclusion, perverted legal systems, and political domineering are often targeted in the scriptures. And there’s no doubt that these things make God mad.

The great American prophet Audre Lorde distinguishes clearly between the hateful anger that she as queer, Black woman experienced and the anger that rises in response to oppression. She put it this way:

This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. - Audre Lorde

In the same piece she articulates how healthy anger can be leveraged for change. Listen in to these insights:

Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. - Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Do you leverage your anger in healthy ways like this - using it to motivate change, to confront those structures in society that push you and/or others down?