Mirabai Starr writes of powerful emotions, including anger, that are part of losing someone we love:

If grief is a natural response to loss … then anger, as a common attribute of grief, is also natural. The power of our anger often correlates with the depth of our love. Anger takes many forms on the grief journey. Sometimes it manifests as a low-level irritability and other times as roaring fire, often unleashing itself on inappropriate targets. Sometimes it is directed at an individual we deem responsible for our loss….

Sometimes the anger is directed at God: “What kind of God could allow such suffering?” or “I was taught to believe God loved me. Apparently, that was wrong.”… While it is tempting to reduce this experience to a crisis of faith, such an easy explanation might obscure the rich spiritual transformation that is unfolding, as John of the Cross (1542–1591) might say, in the darkness of our own souls. Everything we thought we knew feels like it is unraveling and we have nowhere to turn but into the center of radical unknowing. Grief shatters our foundation and triggers a wholesale reorientation of meaning. Before we rush off to reconfigure the shards, we may choose to sit in the wreckage and allow ourselves to simply be broken.

From that place of devastation, we come face-to-face with our own groundlessness. We also get to see the extreme poverty of our previous conception of God. The box in which we had always confined the sacred has been demolished by the violence of our loss. The God we fabricated (with the help of society, our family, the church) has fled. No wonder we feel abandoned. No wonder we are angry. But that god was not the God. Our souls know that now…. Grief is an opportunity to reclaim an authentic connection with Mystery. [1]

Anglican theologian Maggie Ross writes about tears as an opportunity to “cleanse” our anger and pain:

Most of the time our anger is due to unwillingness to face the hurt we feel and the real reasons behind it. To learn to weep in order to be free of anger and know “rest” does not obviate self-respect and is not related to putting oneself down.

On the contrary, if we are struggling to seek God single-heartedly, to learn to weep the anger out of ourselves is a matter of self-respect.

The idea of tears washing anger from us is alien to the mores of power-oriented Western society. We are conditioned to justify our anger, to find the right place to put blame, and to always feel good about ourselves. Most of us associate anger and tears with tears that spring from anger, not tears that cleanse us from anger. But … tears of anger are themselves … a sign of choice, of potential change. [2]

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Sarah Young Jesus Calling

You are on the right path. Listen more to Me, and less to your doubts. I am leading you along the way I designed just for you. Therefore, it is a lonely way, humanly speaking. But I go before you as well as alongside you, so you are never alone. Do not expect anyone to understand fully My ways with you, any more than you can comprehend My dealings with others. I am revealing to you the path of Life day by day, and moment by moment. As I said to My disciple Peter, so I repeat to you: Follow Me. 

RELATED SCRIPTURE: 

Psalm 119:105 NLT

Nun

105 Your word is a lamp to guide my feet

    and a light for my path.

John 21:22 NLT

22 Jesus replied, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? As for you, follow me.”

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