11/03/2025
Sacred rage
What if anger is not what breaks us, but what finally sets us free?
Writers and thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Martha Nussbaum, and Harriet Lerner have all tried to answer the same question: what is anger really for? For most of us, anger has been treated as something shameful, an emotion to hide, control, or apologize for. But what if anger is not the problem? What if it is a sign that something inside us still believes in fairness, dignity, and truth?
Anger, when we listen to it instead of pushing it away, can be one of the most honest emotions we have. It tells us when something is not right. It shows us where our boundaries have been crossed. It is not the opposite of peace, it is often where peace begins. Beneath its heat is a kind of clarity, a demand for justice, and the courage to face what we have ignored.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has warned that anger can trap us in the past, focused on revenge instead of repair. She argues that if we stay stuck there, anger can eat away at us. But Audre Lorde saw another possibility. In her essay The Uses of Anger, she wrote that anger “is loaded with information and energy.” For her, anger was not something to be feared. It was a tool for transformation, a way to turn pain into power. bell hooks built on that idea, describing love and anger as partners in the fight for justice. She believed that anger rooted in love becomes a moral force, not a destructive one.
This is where the idea of sacred rage comes in. Sacred rage is anger that has been understood and shaped by awareness. It is not about lashing out or losing control. It is about paying attention to what our anger is trying to show us and using that energy to create something better.
History shows what sacred rage can do. The civil rights movement, the fight for women’s rights, and so many struggles for equality began with people who were no longer willing to stay quiet. Martin Luther King Jr. called this “divine dissatisfaction,” the refusal to accept injustice as normal. That kind of anger is not chaotic. It is disciplined, focused, and full of love for what could be.
But in everyday life, most of us are taught to do the opposite. Harriet Lerner, in ‘The Dance of Anger’, wrote that women especially are taught to bury their anger until it turns inward, showing up as guilt, anxiety, or self-blame. Reclaiming anger, then, becomes an act of self-respect. It is a way of saying, “My feelings matter. My boundaries matter.” When we stop apologizing for our anger, we begin to see it for what it really is, a signal that something deserves our attention.
Of course, anger can go wrong. It can harden into bitterness or blind us to nuance. But when we slow down and ask what it is really about, what value has been violated, what truth ignored, it becomes a teacher. It helps us see where silence has cost us too much, where we have accepted less than we deserve, or where the world has failed to live up to its promises.
To honor sacred rage is to understand that emotion and reason can work together. Anger, at its best, is a form of care. We get angry because we love, because we want fairness, honesty, and safety for ourselves and others. The more deeply we love, the more fiercely we react when those things are threatened.
In a culture that prizes politeness over truth, sacred rage is a radical act of honesty. It refuses to let us look away from pain or injustice. When we let it move through us instead of bottling it up or letting it explode, it does not make us harder. It makes us clearer.
The goal is not to live in anger, but to live through it. Sacred rage is what carries us from silence to speech, from frustration to action, from despair to clarity. It burns away what is false so that something real can grow in its place.
Because in the end, sacred rage is not about destruction. It is about awakening. It is the fire that clears the way for truth, for courage, and for change.
