Canter Bridge

For a Latin American woman, this is the worse place to be.

Marta’s husband was a respected professional. He had cultivated a career in one of Costa Rica’s government agencies and grown accustomed to the perks that go with it. He was affable, smooth, and just handsome enough to get through doorways and into hearts without appearing to push. His salary was enough to provide for some extra help in taking care of their mentally handicapped daughter, though not to relieve Marta of most of the extra burdens that little Anita brought to her life.

‘In your country’, I remember her telling me at about the time when Anita could no longer be lifted, ‘there are agencies and homes that help in situations like ours.’ Marta would never have said ‘situations like mine’, though we who knew her best could discern when that is what she really meant. ‘We don’t have that here …’

During the part of his career that slanted most promisingly upward, Marta’s husband found weekend work as the pastor of a local church. People thought well of him for it, though it was hard to know how he squeaked out the time. Somewhere, Marta discovered the hours to support this extra activity. We who knew her best understood that it had to be taken out of the hours when the rest of us slept. Marta didn’t sleep much.

‘Situations like ours …’, she would have put it if we had asked awkward questions, ‘mean we have to do a little more to make it all work out.’
When Marta’s husband came clean about his other woman, people thought well of him for it. ‘Marta must not have satisfied him’, some of the church ladies offered. ‘A man like that … she must not have understood what she had …’

Marta sat in my office for long hours back then, occasionally apologizing for ‘hiding here’. Sometimes she just needed to be quietly alone with somebody else in the room. When she needed to speak out her story so that someone would know, I would lay my work aside and listen for a while. She paused whenever she felt unable to restrain her tears. Mostly, she cried silently.

‘This place’, she said to one of my colleagues, ‘has become my church.’ By the time she drove away to pick up Anita at the special school, her cheeks were almost always dry. She could usually greet the teachers with a smile. ‘Our situation’, she would patiently explain to people who asked where her husband was, while the ladies in the third pew counted the ways that Marta must not have satisfied him, ‘has become difficult’.

* * *

Piety and anger mix awkwardly.

Both are dangerously self-justifying, both move the heart, both attract fascinated observers who pretend not to notice. The tears of biblical faith do not always fall silently, as Marta’s did. Sometimes they rage with hoarse throats and clenched fists.

‘Fair Babylon, you predator!’, shrieks the voice of a Judean exile in perhaps the most embarrassing of Psalms for manicured piety. ‘A blessing on him who repays you in kind what you have inflicted on us! A blessing on him who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rock!’. Lips of rage speak out in God’s presence what its hands would never allow themselves to do. Remarkably, the biblical library reserves a shelf or two for such vehemence, rather than storing it safely away in an unlabeled drawer. The permission to be angry lies unveiled in biblical texts whose custodians might have preferred more demure sentiments.

‘Be angry!’, counsels a different piece of biblical instruction, ‘But in your anger, do not sin.’ Then, in a twist of practical wisdom that recognizes both the legitimacy of rage and the need to subdue it, the author sets a limit: ‘Do not let the sun set on your anger.’

* * *

A life’s work is a treasure. It is undergirded by a visceral sense of calling, years of patient study, and the unremarked accumulation of competence and wisdom. A life’s work rises out of days, months, years, decades of resolution, of challenges faced, crises resolved, disappointments overcome, victories shared. A man startles himself the first time he forms the words ‘my life’s work’. Up to that point, it is just what he does. When he names the thing, he has passed a threshold. He has unwittingly confessed his own brevity. He has affirmed choices that appeared mere circumstance. He has said, ‘I am here for this, and not for that.’ He has conceived his legacy. That man has, in a manner of speaking, come to know himself.

How strange then the casualness with which a board of faceless mediocrities stick their forks into this treasure. Odd, the quaint rigidity with which they decide matters between 9:15 and 10:00 a.m., since the accountants will be arriving at 10:15, and there will be coffee … How quietly the fury mounts as people with no clue vote on the fruit of incalculable effort, expertise, and love with the same engagement with which they decide in favor of the chicken and against the beef. Virtual morons make the choices that keep scholars in cautious deliberation for years. One man, one vote, no matter if he knows nothing or practically everything. OK, that’s done. The accountants will be here any minute.

* * *

It is difficult to distill the way biblical faith views anger, since its heat is so often felt in the ragged flow of narrative rather than the didactic calm of instruction. In biblical terms, anger is what it is. The wise person shields herself from its destructive rebound, even as she yields her heart to its relentless truth. It is not to be denied. It resists all attempts at a cover-up. It must flow in order to be stanched. It must tear so that healing might come.

God is angry.

The merchandising of truth, the oppression of the widow, the manipulation of scales, the betrayal of one’s beloved leave the biblical God writhing in the twisting passions of anger. One of the commonest things that the biblical writers say about God is that he is mad as hell. Divine anger is not counterpoise to God’s love. Petty hatred, not anger, is the biblical opposite of love. The Lord of history is angry because he loves, not because he does not. The enigma of divine foreknowledge and human responsibility leaves a space in which humankind’s creator recoils from damned evil and pronounces that he is fed up with the whole mess. The very first translators of the Hebrew Bible, a century and a half before the time of Christ, had already got religion enough to airbrush astonished dismay out of the inventory of divine behavior. Could God really be that riled up? But there was too much godly anger in the scrolls that lay before them for even the aesthetics of piety to bury it completely.

Marta, it turns out, has a friend in heaven.

* * *

The Christian story into which followers of Jesus find their lives interwoven, portrays the Galilean prophet overturning tables in the holiest places, raging at his opponents stony hearts, and shaking with fury before his good friend Lazarus’ grave. This latter moment is captured in the Bible’s shortest verse and perhaps also its most engaging: ‘And Jesus wept.’

The Scriptures offer various interpretations of the brute fact of Jesus’ death. They tell us that the execution of this accursed criminal is an event in which he takes into his person the divine rage against the rebellion of all time. ‘It is finished’, Jesus says with his last breath, not merely because his heart gives up its final beats, but because a heavenly anger that might have been eternal has been absorbed and cut short. Such a script challenges every orderly ethic. Only from the inside can it be loved and lived.

* * *

Only when the heart has fed upon goodness can it properly rage against what is bad. The classic interrogatives of pain—‘Why?’ and ‘How long?’—belong to those who have worshipped a powerful and good God more than to any other. Any human being can scream in pain and nearly all eventually do. Still, the logic of grief cuts most deeply in the hearts of those who have confessed the beneficent orderliness of life.

In spite of all efforts to suppress it—‘this is not the right moment’—anger must have its day.

Perhaps the truest thing to be observed about anger is that sometimes it can only be spoken out before God, left there with him, and waved in the opposite direction from hatred. In the end, those Judean exiles never splashed Edomite babies against the wall, much as they might have wished. Marta, marked but not crippled by her pain, lives a life of heroic service. Other deeper, infinitely unanswerable angers are taken into account—like unknown soldiers buried in sealed tombs—only by God. ‘Vengeance is mine’, says one of the Bible’s most memorable property claims. And then, in an enigmatic promise that tells us almost nothing except that one’s anger has been heard, sympathized with, and written down, it asks everybody to go home and resume their normal activities: ‘I will repay.’