Sacred anger: Because we are sacred, too
by Stuart A. Wilson-Smith, CSP
June 30, 2014

One of the most significant reflections on my spiritual life lately is related to the Psalms. I must admit that there are large sections of those pages that I never understood. The ministry I am engaged in this summer has helped change that.

Since the end of May, I’ve been doing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), which will run until the beginning of August. The program involves interning at a hospital as a chaplain, participating in group discussions, and sitting in on learning sessions on topics such as grief and loss. The whole process involves a great deal of reflection – looking at the ways our interactions with patients bring up emotions and events from our lives.

After a particularly rough day a few weeks ago, I decided to do my evening prayer (Liturgy of the Hours) a little early. I was reading the words of the Psalms, words that I had read countless times before, when I recalled that these words of suffering, petition, and often outright anger that I was reading were sacred. So this became my deep, burning, spiritual question: What does it mean that we call these words of anger, especially anger at God, “sacred?”

A few days later someone asked me how they might start building a relationship with God again after many years of silence. I dug a little further, and lo and behold, this person had an abiding anger for God. But the biggest problem in the relationship, we discovered together, was not the anger. It was that the anger had gone unsaid.

I shared with this person the question I had been sitting with: What do you think it means that our words of anger toward God are sacred? (The Psalms, after all, are part of Sacred Scripture.) We both discovered that it’s a hard question to answer succinctly. It seems to be more of an answer that you feel, and hopefully, live.

Ultimately, to be angry with any person in our lives and to express that anger openly, is to be honest with that person. So if we desire a relationship with God, and take as a given God’s clear desire to be in relationship with us, there is no way around telling God how we feel. Of course, God knows how we feel anyway, but when you think about it, our loved ones often do as well. That’s not the point. The point is that saying we’re angry is the only way out of the silence, and moving out of silence is the only way to start talking again. God, I firmly believe, desires the fullness of our hearts and the fullness of our being. That is why our anger is sacred: it is because we are sacred.