A Welcome Mat for Your Anger

Invitation to Zoom Conversation #11

It has taken me most of my life to first, acknowledge my anger, second, to not shame myself for my anger, third, to feel my anger, and fourth, to welcome my anger when it comes knowing, for me, nearly 100% of the time, that anger is there to show me something worth caring about.

In The Understory, I write,

I grew up with an angry father who would shout and throw things, who struck holes in our walls and who seethed when crossed. I learned to cower from his anger, but sometimes when I felt brave enough, I would say, “Please stop yelling.”

“This isn’t yelling,” he would yell. And then he would raise his voice even more. “If you want me to yell,” he would pause here for effect, “this is me yelling!” and his voice would reverberate through my body.

And so this is how I learned to mistrust the anger of others, to assume my estimation of their anger was always wrong. And I learned to distrust my own anger, afraid it would turn me into someone who wouldn’t admit the power of their own voice. What I didn’t realize, though, is that by pretending I didn’t feel anger, I was not admitting the power of my own voice or the emotion I had toward the thing I was angry about.

Admitting the power of my own voice—the death and life in the tongue—admitting to anger, to the cut glass of it all, to the power of it to harm others and sometimes to harm myself, has been one of the more formative works of my adult life. Some spend their lives trying to reign in their anger, others spend their lives learning to let anger—like love—have its work in us. If love is a like soothing balm for a scarred soul, anger can be like the surgeon’s scalpel, scraping away the infection within. It has been for me. It often reveals the source of my grief or hurt or pain, and then it exacerbates the pain as it simultaneously scoops it away.

To know that is not sin to feel my anger but that I can still sin with my anger is like holding a very powerful tool and choosing to use it as it was intended. Anger is there to show me what God cares about and what God means to remedy in the kingdom to come. Anger is not there to spew about with and upon others when I don’t get my way. It is there to show me injustice, wrong-doing, abuse, genocide, and so much more. It empowers me to speak up, to ask hard questions when others would rather I stay silent.

I am still learning how to feel my anger, not shame myself for it, and to do good work with it—specifically to have the courage to feel it and do work with it. I sense it will be a lifetime’s work. But it is a work I have learned to welcome and to trust and to believe is good and working in and through me good.

Next week, on the Second Tuesday Zoom for paid subscribers of Sayable, we will be talking about anger. God’s anger, our anger, righteous anger and unrighteous anger. I will be sharing how I learned to use and ways I’ve misused anger in my work as a writer. If that sounds like a conversation you’d love to participate in, the details and link to join are below. We always have really good conversations on these Tuesday Zooms and it is such an honor for me to hear your own stories each month.

Lore Wilbert is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting 👇🏼