The place of anger in my relationship with my Heavenly Parents

By Anne Lester

An essay for the BYU “Literature and Spirituality” course, taught by Matthew Wickman.

My relationship with God (which I believe to be and use as a title to describe both Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother together) is the most important relationship in my life. My divine identity as a spirit child of God is one that I often fall back on as I try to navigate the hardships of day-to-day life, prayer is the most important and valuable part of my day, and the revelation I receive from God is the measuring stick I use in making all major decisions. However, my relationship with God isn’t perfect or complete. As in all other aspects of life, there is room to learn and improve.

One aspect I have recently discovered and identified as a weakness was my unwillingness to sit in my anger with God. Being angry with God was a topic that came up fairly early on in my senior capstone course at Brigham Young University, a class on spirituality in literature. As we discussed the poetry of Christian Wiman, it was noted that Wiman’s poetry is coarse and sometimes vulgar in describing his relationship with God. One of the greatest examples of this is his poem “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians.” In this poem, Wiman takes on the persona of a preacher who is frustrated with religion. “I tell you it’s a bitch existence some Sundays,” the poem begins, “and it’s no good pretending you don’t have to pretend” (Wiman 63). The poem goes on to claim that “our only savior is failure” (Wiman 64), which, through rose colored glasses, could be read as a lesson to learn and grow toward salvation through failure and repentance, but in context of the poem is certainly a cry against a God who has probably seemed too distant in this preacher’s life to provide salvation. Wiman’s poetry made several of my classmates uncomfortable, but that discomfort opened what was probably, at least for me, the most important discussion we had in class.

In this discussion on anger’s place in our relationships with God, one classmate suggested that we “don’t give God enough space” to be everything that He is (or, as I prefer to say, that They are). As humans, we obviously can’t understand the depths and lengths of eternity, but we at least know that God is eternal. This should, another classmate suggested, make Them “big enough to handle our anger.” Each of these comments struck me to my core. I have certainly had ample opportunity to be angry at God, yet each time I have opted to simply say “I trust You,” and turn my anger into some sort of palatable sorrow, something I’ve always been taught God can turn into joy. This pattern has always worked out just fine, but our discussion in class got me wondering whether or not I should test my anger with God sometime. As I debated internally, another classmate made a comment that made up my mind: If God is our Heavenly Parents, we should have a similar relationship to Them as to our earthly parents, which includes experiencing the full spectrum of emotions with Them. After that insight, I felt that not only was anger an important part of a relationship with God, but that if I was truly striving for a full relationship with my Heavenly Parents, I needed to let Them in to every part of me.

It was not long before I had a chance to test this theory. When BYU flipped the narrative on the changes it had made to its honor code and retained the right to punish LGBTQ+ students after two weeks of saying they could finally safely date on campus, I was distraught and angry. This was not the first time I’d had to talk to God about my place in the church as a member of the queer community, but each previous time I had been reassured that everything would be okay and had, thus far, seen that reassurance come to pass. However, this time the thing that had made everything okay had come first and then been taken away. My prayer that night was me shouting, “Where are You right now?” in between sobs. I didn’t get an answer that night and I wondered if God really was big enough to handle my anger. However, the next day, friends texted me checking in to make sure I was doing okay. One friend even told me, “I was asleep and had a dream about you. I woke up just knowing I needed to text you. I’ve never received revelation through a dream before but I know that’s what that was.” Never in my life had I seen God work so directly through the people close to me for me. Up to that point, our relationship had been almost exclusively between us. I had felt God work through me for other people before, but never vice versa. Not only had God been able to handle my anger, but They used it to open up our relationship and deepen it even more.

One of Christian Wiman’s poems that resonated with me most as I reflected on the difficulty and blessing of being angry with God ends by saying:

my prayer
is that a mind
blurred
by anxiety
or despair
might find
here
a trace
of peace. (Wiman XI-XII)

Wiman’s poetry may be aggressive or explicit in its descriptions of an imperfect relationship with God, but the author’s prayer for peace is genuine; anger is an honest expression of hurt, but it is not the end goal. Similarly, our anger toward God may seem inappropriate or even sometimes borderline blasphemous, but if we allow God more fully into our lives, into the substance of how we really thing and feel, They can work with us that much more.