Looking at Anger

Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Being Peace, explains the fourteen precepts of mindfulness training and said this about anger:

Aware that anger blocks communication and creates suffering, we are determined to take care of the energy of anger when it arises and to recognize and transform the seeds of anger that lie deep in our consciousness. When anger comes up, we are determined not to do or say anything, but to practice mindful breathing or mindful walking and acknowledge, embrace, and look deeply into our anger. We will learn to look with the eyes of compassion at those we think are the cause of our anger.

In the West, we might ruffle a bit upon hearing "we are determined not to do or say anything" when anger arises. Psychology teaches us to speak up for ourselves, that it's healthy to let our anger out. Perhaps both are valuable. Perhaps if we are first determined not to do or say anything, we will do some real work on ourselves, get our thoughts straight, understand the root of our anger before we speak up. Then when we do speak up it can be stronger, more compassionate, and more honest than simple rage. "To look deeply into our anger" is an act of faith.

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)

Psalms for Chicago

I have been thinking more about the psalms. Kathleen Norris expressed an idea that the psalms question all our dignified, American middle-class notions of politeness. She points especially to women who “are conditioned to deny their pain, and to smooth over or ignore the effects of violence, even when it is directed against them.” (Cloister Walk, 94) She wisely links pain and anger, “Anger is one honest reaction to the cost of pain, and the psalms are full of anger.”

My thoughts turn to Derrion Albert, the young man recently murdered by gang violence in South Side, Chicago. He was not involved in a gang but was a bystander and his beating was recorded via cell phone video. His is one of a rampant amount of children’s deaths in that area due to gang violence, which stems from what? Anger? Anger seething in alive and hopeful (and they are hopeful in spite of themselves, because they are human) young men and women who see no options for their future. They are entrenched in poverty, crime, drugs, domestic violence, poor education, distorted values… And the communities suffer endlessly watching their children die. If we can remember that these are misguided human beings caught in a wicked web, we might look at poverty, poor education, and drugs as among the true adversaries and see new value in the psalms: (9:18)

To the nether world the wicked shall turn back,

all the nations that forget God.

For the needy shall not always be forgotten,

nor shall the hope of the afflicted forever perish.

Rise, O Lord, let not man prevail;

let the nations be judged in your presence.

Strike them with terror, O Lord;

let the nations know that they are but men.