Father Richard Rohr explores how getting in touch with our grief allows us to transform our anger:
Anybody who’s on the edge, disadvantaged in some way, or barred from a position of hegemony or power will naturally understand the tears of the prophets, with their gut-level knowledge of systemic evil, cultural sin, and group illusion. Black Americans might have seen white people act nice or speak of human equality, for example, but they knew we lived behind a collective lie. Collective greed is killing America today. We make everything about money—everything—and injustices like these will naturally leave us exasperated and ultimately sad. How can we look at the suffering taking place in Gaza, Ukraine, or Sudan and be anything but sad? It’s sad beyond words or concepts. Only the body can know.
I recently turned eighty and the older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be. This is true of Christianity, the United States, politics in general, and most of all myself. Remember, if we do not transform our pain and egoic anger, we will always transmit it in another form. This transformation is the supreme work of all true spirituality and spiritual communities. Those communities offer us a place where our sadness and rage can be refined into human sympathy and active compassion.
Forgiveness of reality—including tragic reality—is the heart of the matter. All things cry for forgiveness in their imperfection, their incompleteness, their woundedness, their constant movement toward death. Mere rage or resentment will not change any of these realities. Tears often will, though: first by changing the one who weeps, and then by moving any who draw near to the weeping. Somehow, the prophets knew, the soul must weep to be a soul at all. [1]
Spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr describes the compassion that can arise as we experience both our anger and our grief:
Anger is a natural response when we let the pain of the world into our hearts. It is not the only appropriate response, of course. However, when we can welcome the fire of the Prophets into our own lives, we tap into the true nature of righteousness and draw the vigor necessary to step up in service to that which is greater than ourselves. We remember our essential interconnectedness with all that is and we are motivated to act on the impulse to protect the web of inter-being with all our might.
Personal and planetary grief are inextricable. Our encounter with the manifold losses that characterize the human experience can till the soil of our hearts so that we are more available to the suffering of other beings and the earth we share. When we have been broken, we recognize the brokenness around us and compassion naturally grows. Sorrow can be paralyzing at first, but compassion, which can sometimes take the form of anger, is a wellspring that offers infinite sustenance.
The Wisdom of Rage
Sikh activist Valarie Kaur traveled to Guatemala to learn about the 20th-century genocide of Mayan Indigenous peoples. While there, she joined CAC teachers in an online event to explore how we might honor and learn from our anger.
I’m speaking to you all from Guatemala City. I have been here for a week to study the state-sponsored genocide of Mayan Indigenous peoples that happened in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. It was important to me to be here at a moment when the United States is undergoing such catastrophic crisis. I’ve gone from gravesite to gravesite. I’ve looked at so many skeletons…. I’ve been reeling, I’ve been feeling grief, I have been feeling rage.
The U.S. government was complicit in carrying out the genocide that happened here, and I was taught by an elder Mayan woman, a sage elder, Rosalina, who was still searching for her father and her husband. As I held fast to her, I realized that the world has ended many times before and the world has been rebirthed many times before. This is simply our turn in the cycle. In every turn through human history, people have been thrown into the darkness, and we have a choice: Do we retreat into our despair, into the smallest parts of our hearts, or do we dare to lift our gaze and reach out through the dark, holding fast to one another and standing in love?
What I learned from these Mayan women, as I’ve learned from so many Indigenous elders, is that in order to show up with our whole hearts, we must not be ashamed of any part of ourselves. Oh, my grief! Oh, my anger! Oh, my rage! You are a part of me I do not yet know. You have information to teach me.
This brings me to why I use the word rage in my work. I want us to be able to confront the fiercest and perhaps most terrifying parts of our own hearts, to feel angry about something. To feel rage is the fiercest form of anger and I didn’t want to shy away from that. I use rage as both a noun and a verb. To rage is how we can process that vital fiery energy inside of us just like our wisest ancestors did.
The solution is not to suppress our rage or to let it explode. The solution is to process our rage in safe containers like the Mayan elders I’ve been with all week, dancing and drumming, singing, screaming, wailing, shaking. We have to move those energies. Once we rage, once we move that energy through our body, we can ask ourselves: What information does my rage carry? What does it say about what’s important to me? What does it say about what I love and what I wish to fight for? How do I wish to harness this energy for what I do in the world? I call that harnessed energy divine rage. The aim of divine rage is not vengeance; its aim is to reorder the world.
Praying While Haunted. (from Mark Longhurst. RR’s assistant and curator of the daily devos)
To pray these days is a type of haunting. That’s how I’m experiencing it, at least.
That doesn’t mean I don’t experience the benefits of my Christian-based meditation practice. They are real and continue to provide me with necessary grounding, skills for riding emotional waves, and a persistent awareness of divine presence. God is here, now—when I’m sipping seltzer with my wife by the river near our house, taking a sick kid to the doctor, or tapping fingers on the steering wheel in the Dunkin’ Donuts line—and for you, too, in the “holy ordinary.”
But even while that’s true, the consolations of contemplative prayer share space with haunting. That’s because I’ve started caring about Palestine—and once I’ve seen, I can’t look away.
“The consolations of contemplative prayer share space with haunting. Once I’ve seen, I can’t look away.”
Why Gaza Haunts My Prayer
I’ve mentioned the Palestinian genocide numerous times in past Substack posts, but I haven’t taken a step back to explore why this particular horror haunts me. This is the beginning of a series to share what I’m learning—and to invite you to consider what it might mean to not look away.
The first fact to confront is this: We are living in a time of genocide. The Palestinian people are being—have already been—systematically destroyed by Israel’s military and America’s weapons.
I’m not sharing an opinion. I’ve simply been listening to international human rights lawyers and genocide scholars—often ignored in the U.S.—who’ve been sounding the alarm for over a year. Their framework is based on the United Nations’ Genocide Convention. One of the clearest summaries I’ve found is from Palestinian Christian theologian Munther Isaac in his powerful book Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza.
An essential theological resource from Palestine
What Genocide Means
According to the UN’s Genocide Convention (Article 2), genocide includes acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group—such as:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm
- Deliberately inflicting life conditions to bring about destruction
- Imposing measures to prevent births
- Forcibly transferring children to another group
What the Experts Are Saying
“There are reasonable grounds that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”
—Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, “Anatomy of a Genocide”(March 2024)“Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.”
—Amos Goldberg, Holocaust and genocide researcher, Hebrew University“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed… Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.”
—Raz Segal, Holocaust scholar, Stockton University“I’m a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it… My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
—Omar Bartov, genocide scholar and former IDF soldier, in The New York TimesIn addition to these voices, reputable human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the independent Palestinian human rights NGO Al-Haq in Ramallah, and more, detail the facts in chilling, systematic ways.
Take a breath. These realities have come to haunt me, and they may you, too.
The most devastating and comprehensive documentation I’ve seen is Francesca Albanese’s UN Human Rights report. In March 2024, she filed her “Special Rapporteur Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967.” It is sobering, haunting reading—and this, too, is not an opinion piece. It is a meticulously documented, carefully reasoned report rooted in international law.
Just from the introduction:
After five months of military occupation, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street, or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to severe ill-treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.
The Unwillingness to Face Reality
With voices like these concluding what is happening is genocide, what’s been remarkable to me is to witness the collective unwillingness to face reality in the West.
Instead of acknowledging and working to stop ongoing Palestinian suffering, we turned just criticism of genocidal violence into weaponized charges of antisemitism. That’s not to deny real antisemitism, which of course exists and must be opposed rigorously. But how did critiquing hate-filled violence itself become cause for charges of hate?
“How did critiquing hate-filled violence itself become cause for charges of hate?”
Jewish journalist Peter Beinart unravels this complex thread masterfully in his Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza:
“Accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism is the single best way to avert one’s eyes… It’s more effective than questioning death tolls, invoking human shields, or comparing Israel’s bombing to other wars, because those arguments require discussing Gaza. Accusations of antisemitism change the subject entirely.”
What About Hamas’s October 7th Attack?
This is a critical question. And for folks drawing attention to Israel’s genocide, there is no moral equivalence that somehow justifies Hamas’s brutal attack on children, families, and people enjoying life dancing at the Nova music festival.
“We danced with joy and then hid among the dead,” festival goers recalled in a BBC documentary.
It is important for the left to recognize the dehumanizing horror that Hamas fighters unleashed when they launched rockets, breached defenses, attacked civilians indiscriminately, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 more.
Initially after the October 7 attack, the left in the United States failed to condemn or look at the impact of such violence. Journalist and author Peter Beinart remembers unsuccessfully scouring antiwar messages in the U.S. looking for condemnation of Hamas’s attack. He writes:
“Again and again I heard the slogan ‘Resistance is justified when the people are occupied,’ as if October 7 had not just happened… as if Hamas… had not just murdered and tortured more than a thousand souls.”
A Starting Point: Grieving All Children
The inspired human rights activist and Sikh author Valarie Kaur captures the expanded moral imagination needed in this moment:
“I don’t know the solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine, but I do know the starting point: to grieve ‘their’ children as our children.”
Jesus’s exhortations to love our neighbors as ourselves—and even to love our enemies—invite us to recognize our inherent unity with one another. Refusing to dehumanize the other keeps our hearts awake and keeps us human.
Understanding the Broader History
It’s also important to understand the wider history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine to understand that Hamas’s hatred has a context—and that Israel is not an innocent victim of Hamas’s evil. Israel created the conditions for evil through evil by sustained systemic oppression and injustice.
Others know and articulate the history far better than me, but here are the basics.
Israel created the conditions for evil through evil by sustained systemic oppression and injustice.
Israel stole Palestinian land and ethnically cleansed up to 750,000 indigenous Palestinians in 1948, called the “Nakba” or catastrophe. A while back I wrote about the founder of Palestinian liberation theology Naim Ateek and his boyhood experience of losing his family home and land. Israel has occupied Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, which by all international legal standards is considered an illegal military occupation. Israel, the U.S., and the West looked the other way while Israel encouraged the building of settlements in the occupied territories and erected an apartheid state treating Palestinians as unequal.
The Language of Apartheid
The word “apartheid,” like “genocide,” seems strong until one does the work of learning about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—and the consensus that international legal bodies share. Here’s a quote from a UN Special Rapporteur report from 2022:
“There are pitiless features of Israel’s ‘apartness’ rule… such as segregated highways, high walls and extensive checkpoints, a barricaded population, missile strikes and tank shelling of a civilian population… Israel has imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world.”
This is just the surface. Here’s the report. See this post, too, for how the state of Israel mirrors the violence of ancient biblical empires:
In the meantime, let us pray and act, haunted. Next week: Evangelical and mainline forms of Christian Zionism.
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