Grief that transforms anger to song to tears to peace

God can take our anger as much as our tears, but wait, there’s more; much, much more.

God just doesn’t accept our anger, even when it is aimed directly the Lord’s way. Indeed, God has a plan for that anger, and the Bible reveals it. The very first verses of Psalms 10 and 13 indicate what we hesitate to admit. We blame God for all sorts of things we don’t like. There is no need for anyone to say, “No, you cannot shake your fist at God!” If the Bible allows it, we can know that God not only understands, God endorses it.

Yet, God’s got much more in store for our anger when life’s going wrong than we even realise. Anger is an inevitable ingredient in the grief process. No genuine grief process is without it.

Now, God could leave us in our anger, to be thwarted in our frustration, without help in our exasperation. That’s where anger leads if we stay angry. Anger alone won’t fix a thing.

Having been angry, the Bible provides a way for our anger to morph into something more productive. And let’s not think of anger as simply spitting chips and cussing. Anger is any response of refusal to submit to God’s good way; it is the epitome of stubbornness, and yet we often do not progress through our grief until we’ve tantrumed ourselves to the point of recognising outbursts solve nothing.

The biblical pattern of lament—whether alone or in community—is to enter into song. Somehow when we speak our sorrows into existence such that we hear ourselves, we feel God hears somehow, and somehow such language of prayer ascending to the genre of song causes us to weep.

Weeping is one way to put paid to anger. Sorrow that forms into saline droplets that run down the cheeks, or that run into our ears when we’re lying on our back, speaks of a grief process that has progressed beyond anger. 

In anger, we’re still able to deny our sorrow, even as we refuse to acknowledge how hopeless we feel. But in sorrow, we’ve concluded that we’re out of control. In anger, we loath being out of control that much that we insist our anger is a form of control. Whether it works or not is irrelevant when we’re sticking to our digs. But in sorrow, we come face to face with a truth that when we accept simply depresses us. Yet, in tears are the transport of healing.

Tears are the vehicle to peace, even if that peace is short and temporary. Tears are a process to heal the untenable moment. Tears are the language of truth for the sorrow we find unacceptable. Yet, tears take us more directly to peace than any other thing.

We soon realise that there’s no shortcut through grief, such as it is that we loved so greatly. Why would we wonder that the gravity of grief is so heavy? We loved what we lost THAT much!

But at least through song, we have a way of overcoming our anger, so we can feel our sorrow through our tears, which gives us more direct access to peace.

Image: from The Lovely Bones soundtrack. Brian Eno.