KINGSVIEW

WHAT AMOS
MIGHT RANT ABOUT TODAY
Testing Anger as Resource

Michael A. King

In some ways, at least for now, Garret Keizer’s article transformed my life. It was because I was so taken with it, and hoped other readers would be, that I made the effort as DSM editor to track down its original owner and pay to reprint it. What caught my attention was its focus on the "enigma of anger," as Keizer puts it, pointing to his own complex and enigmatic relationship to this force through which he knows he both destroys and is inspired to do good things.

I too could tell stories of my own unproductive relationship with anger. Perhaps most famous in my immediate family is the time, happily now a good many years ago, when after a ghastly experience buying new tires put on hours late by bumblers, I came home shot through with rage. I picked up a chair in our bedroom (old and already cracked; a hint of rationality remained) and slammed it down so hard it shattered. The experience put me so close to the raw power of anger and what it could have done if I had turned it on a person that I have not again let myself express it so nakedly. In fact various healings in my life journey have made such rage, if not entirely unknown, blessedly less frequent than back then.

I would not want to unlearn what I know about anger’s power to destroy; often we need lessons in anger control, not appreciation. Yet as one who grew up in a tradition that emphasized nonviolence and tended to equate anger itself with violence, I suspect I still have lessons to learn from the other side of the enigma Keizer sketches out for us, which is that he is drawing on its fuel precisely as he writes his article and convincingly makes the case that much of what is wrong with our so often unjust society calls not for inaction but for "well-aimed rage."

And so having pondered Keizer, I want to do two things: first, I want to do what I have rarely deliberately done: write in anger. Certainly I have written in anger before, but not in a conscious effort to test what insights anger can bring. Second, at a time when it seems to me my culture, that of the United States, is particularly living on the edge—between a carefree affluence and the sense of threat that now hangs over our ability to live as we have—I want to aim the anger in one of the directions Keizer calls for, that of wrong values.

I want to join a Keizer-inspired exploration of what anger can do with what seems to me a prime example of this in the Bible: the anger of the prophet Amos. Reading Amos after Keizer, I was struck by how angry Amos must have been back then. Furiously he told a nation sometimes strikingly like ours—often comfortably wealthy, complacent, sure that so much Amos was prepared to call into question was just the way things were and should be—just how wrong things were and how disastrously they would come apart not too long after.

I don’t claim God has told me to say what I’m about to say; I claim only the fallible insights of anger. I don’t know what will happen next in North America. But I do believe that along with whatever inspiration God offered him, anger provided Amos with strikingly accurate insights into a nation which did indeed not long after fall to pieces in much the way he had forecast. So I will at least test what likewise comes from my angry spirit as Keizer provides the inspiration for me to try its release and Amos the inspiration for the targets of its release.

What took me in the first place to Amos after Keizer started me thinking about anger was the memory of that rage-filled line from Amos, "Hear this, you cows of Bashan who . . . oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, ‘Bring something to drink!’" I would be considered to have gone far beyond constructive anger if I were to forecast in today’s cultural terms the equivalent of what Amos predicts for those who, wallowing in obscene luxury, clamor for ever lower taxes while forty million Americans go to bed each night aware they dare not get sick because they lack health coverage. This in a nation that says spending a hundred billion or two on war should pose no economic problem but fixing the health crisis can’t be done.

On and on Amos rages, wanting nothing to do with buzz concepts like denominational transformation, missional congregations, contemporary or good old traditional worship styles, if the people who foster them just do their complacent self-indulgent thing while around them the suffering rises.

So without claiming to be sure these are the exact parallels Amos would rage about if here today, what might at least be potential examples?

Manicured Lawns

I have never heard lawn care raised as a test of membership nor, as pastor, am I about to start. But from everything I can tell, the North American practice of maintaining as manicured lawns stretches of land cumulatively vast enough to house entire nations is an abomination—precisely the type of taken-for-granted-of-course-it’s-a-good-thing horror Amos hated. The damage done to ecosystems by our motorized and chemical intrusions into God’s good earth to create artificial swaths of outdoor carpet is apparently nearly incalculable.

Oh, I too have a lawn. But over the years I have let more forest grow at its edges. And I refuse the chemical applications that make some neighbors’ yards resemble golf courses—meaning just about nothing God originally put there will grow in it. I don’t have the guts to stop growing a lawn, but I hope a century from now we will have learned enough about the damage lawns do that instead of taking them for granted as a sign of good citizenship we will point fingers at those who still stubbornly maintain them.

SUVs

I have nothing original to say anymore against SUVs; happily others have beaten me to it. I will confess to being pleased that enough Christians have finally felt enough rage about countless Americans hurtling along in their gas-wasting, CO²-spewing behemoths of steel that they recently made headlines to the effect that God hates SUVs. I bet God does; I do too.

Housing Developments

Until weeks ago the hillside two fields over was a Salford township field long farmed. First the developer wanted to put hundreds of homes on it. When a bunch of us stirred ourselves to protest, the good news was that the developer had to pare his dreams to 35 homes. The bad news is that I can hear them now, the bulldozers tearing off the topsoil to make way for the lawns that will instead prevail in this new haven now called, dear God, "The Preserve at Salford."

Denominational Organizations

My ire so far has targeted primarily larger cultural issues. But in Amos’ day, nation and people of God were much the same thing, and the people of God were who got blasted. So if one is to emulate Amos’ anger, one must include the church as target.

I believe denominational organizations do many good things. But in recent months I have had contact with stories about two different denominational organizations, their entire reason for existing supposedly being to pursue various forms of Christian mission, which have chosen to do things to people of a sort which if one person did it to another would be considered beyond the pale. You just don’t treat people that way if you want to be able to claim to be a Christian.

The financial woes which forced these organizations into hard choices are understandable; the making of the choices is not the issue. But apparently because leaders of such organizations need not look individuals in the eye and can sit in boardrooms making decisions without directly facing those affected, they endorse implementing hard decisions in ways so harsh that if I used them against a congregational member, I might be disciplined. Organizations that do not implement hard choices in ways that respect the basic vulnerability, dignity, and humanity of the real people affected enrage me.

Ideologues

I am sick of hearing stories of people not allowed to teach and think freely at Christian universities if they do not toe precisely the denominational line on a given issue. Martin Luther did not toe the lines of his day. Menno Simons, for whom Mennonites are named, was from the vantage point of his original Catholic "denomination" a renegade priest. How then today does God similarly bring new light if any effort to think beyond present convictions is heretical?

Likewise I am sick of the reformers also so sure of their new light that they persecute denominational leaders, university administrators, writers, or any figures who catch their eye, as traitors to the cause of righteousness whenever their object of scorn shows signs of not believing precisely what the prophets do.

Eek. I wonder how well I would have liked Martin Luther, Menno Simons, Amos. Parts of them would have thrilled me. But often their relentlessly self-assured certainty that what they were rejecting was wrong and they entirely right would have itself enraged me. It occurs to me that in this column, theirs is the camp I have joined.

I am glad I did; I learned much from them and am convinced they have much to teach me about the constructive power of anger. I still believe in what I have just preached. There are about 20 other abominations yet I could vent my spleen on.

But I have spent my anger. There is a time for it, but it can only take me so far. I am, in the end, a human being, nearly always implicated in what I have scorned, as riddled with complexities and contradictions as the people whose choices I have just judged. Let me now offer them mercy—and ask for theirs.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.