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.
Reference:
Adapted from Valarie Kaur, with Richard Rohr and Brian McLaren, “What Do I Do with My Anger?” Center for Action and Contemplation, virtual event, March 14, 2025. Unavailable.
Image Credit and inspiration: Ricardo IV Tamayo, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Cuba, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Together, we hold the flowering of compassionate action, remembering our shared humanity and deep connection to one another and all of creation.