that April 20 could be a New National Holiday

It is not an anniversary worth celebrating.

Waco. Columbine. Oklahoma City. A group calling themselves “Hutaree” is in jail in Michigan, or there would probably be another ignominious name to add to the list this year. A day more of infamy than anything else, and if not for the sorrows of many victims, it would be a day well worth forgetting.

Which is why it is an anniversary worth remembering.

Anger is the most underappreciated of all human phenomenon. St. Paul says “Be angry, but do not sin.” (Ephesians 4:26). Of course, he also thinks that wives should follow their husbands and husbands should love their wives like Christ loves us, so his objectivity is questionable, to say the least. In fact, a few verses later, he suggests that we just “put away … all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving …” (Ephesians 4:31-2). As if he heard what he was actually saying and thought better of it, too.

A prominent TV commentator says that God has called him to stand, “peacefully, quietly, with anger.” With what? Anger? How does that work? It’s far too clever by half, as my Grandpa used to say. Most of the angry people I see are neither peaceful nor quiet. They are everything but. Since when did peaceful and angry decide to not be opposites anymore? I didn’t get that memo. What new dictionary are we reading today? Or is there something else afoot? Should we now declare anger a Godly aspiration? Do we need more anger?

No, we have far too much anger I think.

Anger is a tool. A dangerous tool. Fear is the great motivator for otherwise ignorant masses, and anger is fear with an outward bend, fear in search of a scapegoat, of release. Anger provides the convenience of an enemy, a deception that salves failure with violence, replaces hope with passion, and explodes on the lives of the other for the preservation of the lowest, basest part of me. Manipulated by fear, cast down on my anger, I am Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, I am Tim McVeigh.

In the hands of the devil, anger is the crucifixion of Christ all over again.

But in the hands of another? Oh!

Anger could be a different tool. Anger bent introspectively is humility, self-awareness, perhaps even change. Anger felt in truth, about truth, fashioned by truth, refines, distills and purifies life, it clarifies judgment, propels determination.

And that anger is in much short supply.

Perhaps we could enshrine a National Day of a new anger and ritualize a new truth – that we are the force of destruction and death that we fear most, that we are the enemy of our freedom and well-being. Perhaps a new national holiday of anger could be used to attack the foes that deserve our anger, the poverty, despair, pain and greed that are sucking the life out of our community.

A day of a new anger, directed not at the end of what is so much as driving us to the hard work of what ought to be.

Imagine capturing the energy of all of our hatred and building something instead of blowing it up, nurturing life instead of taking it, finding and taking new paths instead of burying each other on old ones. Picture a righteous anger that is not conceived in falsehood nor which leads not to sin, but a sacrificial anger, a cleansing anger, a fragrant offering of an anger. Imagine if we saw the world as it truly is, as God sees it, a world birthed and renewed and spirited in love. Can we know the distance between what we are doing and what we have been called to do?

Maybe if we were angry enough we could do something about it.

And that would be an anniversary worth celebrating.