Meditation is often associated with feel-good Christianity or the secular humanism of positive psychology. But for me, at least, things are not positive right now. I’ve lost a hero, and aspects of my country that I hold dear are endangered. I’m in mourning, and I’m angry: two conditions not frequently associated with meditation and its images of candles and serene places.
I never met Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but I’ve studied her career and observed her character. We all owe her a lot, particularly if we are female. I am proud that my daughter practiced law and both of us are indebted to a woman whose tiny feet left huge footprints for other women to follow. The year I graduated from the University of Illinois, there were but four women who went on to its law school. By the time my daughter went to law school, about half her class was female.
“We offer the anger, and the grief, to God as a movement in a conversation; then we listen for God’s response.”
I’ve been working today with my mourning and anger. I asked my friends for help in processing the week’s events. Duane Bidwell, our Friday Morning Meditation co-facilitator and a professor at the Claremont School of Theology, replied:
We bring all of ourselves to centering prayer, the anger and grief as well as praise and adoration. We sit with it in the presence of God--not indulging it, not pushing it away, not ignoring it but saying, "Here is anger." We offer the anger, and the grief, to God as a movement in a conversation; then we listen for God's response.
Anger and grief both activate the sympathetic nervous system--flight, flight, freeze; meditation awakens the parasympathetic system ("rest and digest") that allows us to make sense of what's happening to us. Anger can be a spiritual ally; it shows us where we feel threatened (physically, emotionally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually, communally) and it can point toward injustice. In meditation, we learn to befriend, sit with, anger and hear what it is saying to us. When we befriend anger--listen to what it is telling us about what's at risk--we can respond in "rightly ordered" ways (in the Ignatian sense).
Frank Rogers, also on the faculty of the Claremont School of Theology sent an email that includes:
I also ask myself—how do we honor her, what would RBG do? She would find it within herself to keep going and stand up for what we know is right.
On Sunday, Claremont Presbyterian Church pastor, Rev. Karen Sapio, preached from Psalm 69, one of the more bloody minded texts in the Bible, where the writer seeks God’s wrath upon enemies: “Let them be blotted out from the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.”
But in the end, we are instructed to take our anger to God.
On the way, I think I’ll stop off at the ballot box.
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Of all the tributes to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I think this one by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl is particularly moving:
Thanks to Barbara Bergmann for sending it along.
Photo: Gayatri Malhotra at Unsplash