There’s a powerful quote buried halfway through Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s novel, A Wrinkle in Time: “’Stay angry, little Meg,’ Mrs. Whatsit whispered. ‘You will need all your anger now.’”
Just as Meg Murry, Charles Wallace Murry and Calvin O’Keefe are about to lose contact with Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who, the first of the celestial beings utters these words. Soon the children will continue their adventure through time and space without their guidance; they will navigate the “unsettlingly ordered planet of Camazotz, where Dr. Alex Murry is being held captive and the place the evil ‘IT’ calls home.”
Cara Meredith
If they are to survive, anger is more necessary than ever before.
Mrs. Whatsit’s words have played on repeat in my mind over the last couple of weeks. What began with feelings of shock and denial soon morphed into a shaking, furious kind of anger. Call it a natural cycle of grief and bereavement, but when 92% of USAID agency grants have been cut, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is insulted and accused of disrespect by our own president and vice president, and even when the 617,800 square mile Gulf of Mexico is renamed the Gulf of America, anger boils under my skin.
I can call my senators and I can email my representatives; I can hold up a sign in protest and raise my voice on the internet and pray until my knees are skinned, but more often than not, I am left wondering if these actions will ever be enough — if any of these things will ever really make a difference in the end.
“I am left wondering if these actions will ever be enough.”
It is then that I remember the church.
When the church got angry, she built hospitals and universities. When the church got angry, she did as the carpenter of Nazareth did and led with a kind of holy and righteous indignation. When the church got angry, she turned outward and started caring for the marginalized, right there in her very own neighborhood.
Because when the church got angry, she did something.
Perhaps for some of us, it starts with permission to be angry in the first place.
In Outside the Lines, Mihee Kim-Kort writes about the unspoken messages she heard growing up in the church: “’Don’t bring your sadness, doubts, criticism, hopelessness, angst, frustrations (unless it’s about the coffee or homeless people on the corner), and certainly not your anger,’” she muses.
Perhaps this is an imperative for 50.5% of the population in the United States who identify as female — or for our purposes, for the average 61% of U.S. churchgoers who are women. Too often, women (or at least white and Asian women) swallow down a cultural narrative that it is not feminine to be angry. (Black and Latina women, on the other hand, deal with pervasive, aggressive stereotypes of anger based on their race and gender.) Just as society often tells women anger is an unacceptable emotion, receiving messages that anger is bad can cause shame to build and further prevent women from expressing anger altogether.
“Righteous anger means we’re just doing as Jesus did.”
Because if anger is a natural, acceptable emotion, which it is, then the church — and for our purposes here, women in the church — should most certainly give permission to anger and welcome its subsequent presence into her places of worship and gatherings of holy misfits.
Because righteous anger means we’re just doing as Jesus did.
Scripture is full of instances when Jesus got angry. As John and Mark both tell, he cleared (flipped over) the tables in the temple when the people were buying and selling in the place of worship. He called out the hypocrites in Matthew 23, spouting off a litany of woeful declarations to hypocritical teachers of the law and Pharisees.
In Mark 3:1-6, although Jesus wanted to heal a man’s withered hand, the religious leaders couldn’t have cared less about his motives — they just didn’t want him healing anyone on the Sabbath. As Liz Cooledge Jenkins writes in Nice Churchy Patriarchy, “Jesus got angry, and then he moved urgently to do something good with that anger — something healing and liberating for the man, and, at the same time, something that messed with the worldview of the powers-that-be.”
As Jenkins writes, just as Jesus got angry, his anger led to something else, something more, something ultimately good. As I write in my first book, “Righteous anger is more than OK, for such anger is redemptive anger, the kind of anger that ‘moves you to transformation and human up-building.’”
For in this spirit of divine indignation we flip temple tables in our heads and with our mouths and sometimes with our typing fingers too.
After all, more often than not, anger leads to action.
In the documentary God + Country, American Protestant minister and social activist William Barber II reflects on the power of Christianity as a powerful force for change:
In the face of sickness, a church created hospitals. In the face of people needing to be educated, the church created universities. In the face of Jim Crow and racism, the church marched from churches into the street, across bridges, went to jail and forced nonviolent change. Everywhere you look, when the church has been at its best, it protects people regardless of their race, their creed, their sexuality.
“When the church is committed to love and truth and justice, then the church feels the plight of the marginalized.”
John S. Dickerson echoes this sentiment in his book, Jesus Skeptic. Of hospitals, he writes that Christians, when “motivated by Christ’s teaching to ‘care for the least of these,’ began building hospitals where the poor could receive the medical care they could not afford. This was the birth of today’s hospitals.”
Neither Barber nor Dickerson may have included anger in their initial arguments of the social good that has happened when the church let herself get angry, but I don’t doubt anger is a critical, viable part of the imperative for change.
Because when the church is committed to love and truth and justice, then the church feels the plight of the marginalized — a plight often characterized by anger and sadness when things are not as they should be. The church sees what isn’t happening for the widow or the orphan, the foreigner or the poor and chooses to harness her anger appropriately and do something about it.
And through this anger, change happens.
Cara Meredith was raised in the American Baptist Churches in the USA but currently worships as an Episcopalian. She is a freelance author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include The Color of Life and Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.
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