Anger Into Praise

But what of the healthy and inevitable anger in response to suffering and injustice we witness because it is real in our lives? Where do we as individuals and as a society respond to this anger without making the anger into life itself? This brings us back to Kathleen Norris's statement, “The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation in praise.” I’m especially interested in that phrase, transformation into praise.

Noah Levine, author of Dharma Punx, and founder of the American Buddhist meditation society called Against the Stream, spoke once of transforming that rightful distrust and anger present in punk rock and its culture into a useful questioning of authority and the status quo. Punk rock, rock n’ roll, rap, these were all originally (and sometimes still are) emanations of disquiet among social and political injustice. While incarcerated as a teen, Levine discovered meditation and its cohort, awareness, as peaceful vehicles against the current of pain and suffering, and now he teaches those tactics to anyone who dares to transcend. Ex-addicts and prisoners and rock hipsters are some among those he teaches. The website proclaims, “The Buddha said his path to awakening was one of rebellion –a subversive path that is against greed, against hatred, and against delusion. It is a path of radical, engaged transformation, a path of finding freedom and spending the rest of our lives giving it away. It is a path that goes Against the Stream.”

Similarly, in response to Chicago’s gang violence, there is an organization called CeaseFire that uses reformed ex-gang members in their tactical “street violence interruptions,” creating a community network system to actively defuse gang-related shootings and killings.

Compassionate action is praise. It is fruit born of the seed of anger.

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty, via www.guardian.co.uk)