Ephesians 4:25-5:2
I was drawn in by the headline, “The Gift of Anger and Broken-heartedness.” I was intrigued by the author, Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT. What really captured my attention was a single paragraph in this Boston Globe op-ed I read last week, in which Epstein referred to his friend Rod Owens. “Sometimes we burn with rage– the same rage exploding onto streets nationwide lately. But as my friend Lama Rod Owens–the first openly Black, queer, accepted Tantric Buddhist lama–explains, anger can be a gift if we see it, more deeply, as broken-heartedness.”
Eager for a fresh perspective on my least favorite emotion–anger–, I clicked on a hyper-link that led to Lama Rod’s website. I learned that he had a new book that was to come out this past Tuesday: Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger. I pre-ordered it, and on Tuesday, watched it magically appear on my i-pad.
It is a powerful, deeply personal book. Lama Rod describes how, growing up black in our nation, he learned early on that anger was a dangerous emotion: an angry black male of any age is too often perceived as a threat by people in power. As a youth and young adult, he cultivated the art of passive aggression, even as trusted friends told him his anger was seeping out anyway. He grew up in the Methodist church where his mother was a pastor, and absorbed the Christian call to seek justice. After he gave up on church, he became part of an intentional community of justice activists–many of them practicing Buddhists. When he sank into a major depression in his mid-20’s, he turned to a Buddhist teacher, who encouraged him to try meditation.
It was in the silence that Rod began to face his own anger–not to deny it, not to try to fix it or get rid of it, but to give it space and notice it with curiosity. He came to see that it had something to teach him. He began, he writes, “to recognize the anger for what it was: an indicator that my heart was broken.” He went on to deepen his practice, eventually undertaking a three-year retreat, after which he was ordained as a Lama, a Buddhist teacher. From there, he studied at Harvard Divinity School and now offers dharma talks and workshops around the nation.
Lama Rod is not advocating meditation as a way to get rid of anger; rather he sees it as a way to draw upon the energy of anger to do the work of justice. He writes, “When I am rooted in love, anger reveals itself as trying to point us to our hurt, and when I am taking care of my hurt and loving at the same time, the energy of anger becomes an energy that helps me to cut through distractions and focus on the work that needs to be done.” He describes “partnering with the energy of anger to address the roots of why we hurt.”
The capacity to touch the broken-heartedness behind his anger has deepened his compassion. “I’ve moved through the world not just thinking ‘Oh, I am brokenhearted.’ I move also through the world thinking ‘so is everyone else.’”
Lama Rod acknowledges that Buddhism has a complicated relationship with anger. So does Christianity. We have the witness of the prophets, who rail against injustice, proclaiming God’s anger–or maybe God’s broken-heartedness–at human greed and arrogance and abuse of power. We have Jesus turning over the tables in the temple, and we also have his exhortation to turn the other cheek. We have a long history of Christian leaders distorting Jesus’ message to teach us that anger is bad and should be suppressed at all cost.
Amidst this complicated Christian relationship with anger, we read Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. “Be angry, but do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” Anger, Paul teaches, is not a bad thing. Be angry, he says. But do not sin: your anger does not give you the right to mistreat other people. He exhorts us to deal with our anger promptly, before the sun goes down: talk it out, seek reconciliation, let it go.
It’s largely good advice, although it doesn’t acknowledge that the hurt behind anger can be so deep and so complicated that it cannot or should not be resolved in one day.
Lama Rod’s work invites me to take a deeper look at Paul’s words. If anger is a source of wisdom, then perhaps it is a sin–a missing of the mark–when we do not acknowledge it, when we fail to ask what it can teach us. Are we letting the sun go down on our anger without pausing to examine it, without allowing it to lead us to our own broken-heartedness?
Lama Rod offers me a fresh way to enter into my own complicated relationship with anger. He offers a lens through which to view our nation and our world in this time when anger feels so pervasive.
What changes for me with my own anger if I sit with it, if I allow it to point me to the ways my heart is broken by the pain around me? What changes for me if I honor the possibility that broken-heartedness is behind my neighbor’s anger–even when it might be directed toward me? Simply articulating these questions shifts something in me–away from distress and anxiety, toward tenderness and compassion. The questions point to new questions: how can I care for myself and others in our mutual broken-heartedness? How can I be part of the healing?
I find myself moving from thinking about individual anger to thinking about the collective. We readily name our nation as “divided” or “polarized.” We might add “angry” or even “enraged” to that description. What would happen if, as a nation, we dared to sit with our collective anger–not to discount it, not to let it fizzle out, not to ignore or suppress or demonize it, but instead to trust that it has wisdom to offer us? We might discover that we are a nation with a broken heart. We are a nation whose heart is broken by layer upon layer of pain and loss. We are a nation whose heart is broken as we struggle to come to terms with the profound ways we have hurt one another. We are a nation whose heart is broken by the inescapable awareness that we have never lived up to the values we profess.
This is not a bruised heart, that will naturally heal itself over time. This is not a heart with a superficial wound; a bandaid will not help. This is a heart broken open–a heart that needs intensive care, a heart that requires the wisdom and skill of healers who understand the depth of the pain and complexity of the healing process. This is a heart that needs long-term rehab and new habits to keep it healthy.
A nation with our heart broken open. It is a daunting image. It is a hopeful image–if we dare to trust that healing is possible. That, for me, is where my faith comes in. Jesus proclaimed a message of the power of God’s love breaking in. Then he reached out his hand to touch a leper. Then he invited himself to a hated tax collector’s home. Then he rose from the dead. God’s love has the power to heal our broken hearts. God’s love even has the power to heal our nation’s broken heart.
God’s power is love, and God’s love is made known through human action. That means God needs us to bring our own anger and our own broken-heartedness to be part of the healing of our nation’s heart. God needs us at every level of this long-term healing journey: listening and learning so we can understand how we got here; speaking out when the instinct to sew it all up and pretend everything is fine grows too tempting; advocating for policies that can address the systems that keep us broken; examining our own hearts and minds and habits and changing them. It is daunting. The promise of our faith is that it is possible.
At the end of our reading from Ephesians, Paul exhorts his beloved community to be “tender-hearted.” My reflections this week prompt me to reframe his words. Human hearts, created in the image of God’s heart, are tender. No matter what we try to do to toughen them, they are easily broken. We are tempted to build walls around them. But then we just have tender, broken hearts trapped inside walls, unable to heal.
So here’s my rewrite of Paul’s words. “Your hearts are tender. That is a gift. Accept the reality that your heart is easily broken; dare to trust that, with God’s help, your heart can heal. Accept that everyone else’s hearts are easily broken, and so treat one another tenderly. Embrace your tender-heartedness; embrace your calling to be God’s heart-healing power at work in our world. Amen.
Greg M. Epstein, “The gift of anger and brokenheartedness,”, June 9, 2020, Boston Globe.
Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger, Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2020.