I will admit it. I am a first born daughter who wants everyone to like her and hates the idea of feeling angry for any reason. Keeping the peace at all costs has been a constant in my life. Raising my voice or confronting conflict makes me dizzy with fear and I avoid it like the plague. This has been a pattern in my personal and professional life and it has likely led to both good and bad situations in both. The health of this commitment to peacekeeping, of often denying anger can lead, as we all know, to harmful and sometimes disastrous consequences. This denial of emotion has been fed by a culture that doesn’t like the display of anger…particularly by women and girls…and by a faith tradition that can, at times, encourage us to stuff feelings and words of anger for all kinds of reasons. We often forget the many times the Psalms reflect anger directed at all kinds of people and specifically toward God.

So this past week as I reflected on the tragedy and violence at the Tree of Life Synagogue and  in a Kroger store in Kentucky, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with what could only called be anger. Of course, this emotion was mixed with so many other feelings…devastation, sorrow, astonishment, weariness as the ‘not again’ thoughts washed over me. But what mostly colored everything else was anger. Anger at the lives lost. Anger at the senselessness. Anger at the bigotry, the ignorance, the seemingly ever present ability to have guns meant to do nothing but kill, kill lots of people quickly. Anger at what feels like an inability for intelligent, rational people to do anything to change this tragic drama in which we find ourselves over and over. Anger. Anger. Anger.

When I need to wrestle with something I often go for a walk and so I took this feeling and put my feet to it. And what came out of that walk was a prayer, and I do believe it was a prayer, whose message was: “Bless this anger.” As someone who has been a part of a community that believes in the power of blessing, I have come to see this act as the recognition and honoring of the Sacred within and between what is being blessed and the one who blesses. It is what has me inconspicuously raising my hand toward those animals that have met an untimely death on the road or toward children stepping onto the bus in the morning. It is a way to remind myself that I am connected, connected to all that has been created through no effort on my part and that we are sharing in this journey of life together, in all its beauty and terror.

What might it mean to bless this anger? Since I am not an expert in this emotion, I am still living into this. But later in the day, I came across this Franciscan Blessing that helped bring language to my wrestling:

May God bless you with a restless discomfort
  about easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
  so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your heart.
May God bless you with holy anger
  so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace  among all people.
May God bless you with the gift of tears
  to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, or
  the loss of all they cherish,
  so that you may reach your hand to comfort the, and
  transform their pain into joy.
May God bless you with enough foolishness
  to believe that you really can make a difference in this world,
  so that you are able, with God’s grace, to do what others claim
  cannot be done.

These days call for blessing upon blessing. Blessing all that connects us. Blessing what divides us. Blessing what makes our hearts sing and what causes it to break. Blessing our hopes and our deep disappointments. Blessing those we love and those we may never understand. Blessing our tears and our foolishness. Blessing our discomfort. And blessing our anger, making it somehow holy enough to propel us toward acts of justice, compassion and love.

May Grace dance through all these blessings bringing us to a place we can only imagine. For the healing of our hearts. For the healing of our lives. And for the healing of our world.