Dare to Dance Week 3: Empowerment

April 29, 2012

Dare to Dance Week #3: 

Series Title: Dare to Dance: Moving towards Healing

Anchor: Judy Emerson’s drawings

Frame:  Empowerment

Threads: Prayer beads, healing prayers, Dance, Song - Healed Healthy and Whole

Image:  Child is naked, crouching, fists clenched, beginning to rise

Nahum 1:2-6

A jealous and avenging God is the Lord,

   the Lord is avenging and wrathful;

the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries

   and rages against his enemies.

The Lord is slow to anger but great in power,

   and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.

His way is in whirlwind and storm,

   and the clouds are the dust of his feet.

He rebukes the sea and makes it dry,

   and he dries up all the rivers;

Bashan and Carmel wither,

   and the bloom of Lebanon fades.

The mountains quake before him,

   and the hills melt;

the earth heaves before him,

   the world and all who live in it.

Who can stand before his indignation?

   Who can endure the heat of his anger?

His wrath is poured out like fire,

   and by him the rocks are broken in pieces.

I have to admit that I am having some difficulty opening up this week. To be honest, anger scares me. I grew up in a “peace at all costs” kind of family and the basic value of that teaching is that anger is dangerous. Yes, rationally I understand and appreciate what Judy E said about this part of her drawing; that “anger is energy.” I acknowledge that we need that energy to dislodge us from the trapped position of victimhood. Yet underneath all the intellectual veneers there still lie in my inner child’s heart the messages that anger is bad and dangerous and uncontrollable.

            Which is why I offer the passage from Nahum. How many of us have actually read the book of the prophet Nahum in our children’s lifetime? The description of God given by the prophet is stereotypical of both fiery Old Testament prophets and God. It is a fearsome, terrible portrait. Reading this description of God, it makes me sympathize with Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights when he prefers to pray to “Dear Lord Little Eight Pound, Six Ounce Baby Jesus.” The Angry God is fierce and uncontainable.

            Which brings us back to Judy’s observation: it is the energy of anger that can draw us out of our trapped position. That, I believe, was the role of the prophets, too. Too many times prophets have been cast as prognosticators and fortune tellers. Really, they were working to bring the people back into covenant with God. Maybe the anger they invoked was the energy needed to break the people free of entrenched patterns of death, allowing them to get to the dancing place.

            If our own anger can be a healing gift, then God’s anger can be seen so too. I know I have spent a lot of time ignoring and evading the angry God of much of the bible. I do not believe that there are two different Gods, one of the Old and one of the New Testaments. We know one God, the same God of Jesus’ tender compassion for the woman caught in adultery and the same God of Jesus’ impatient anger at the Pharisee’s hypocrisy. Instead of hiding from God’s anger (or at least the testimony of it in scripture), can we embrace it as energy for deep healing?

            The archetypal scene from the movie “Network” captures the energy of this anger. Howard Beal, stately newscaster loses it on air and starts a movement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMBZDwf9dok&feature=related

There is available to us the energy we need for our own transformation, and for the healing transformation of our world. It is ours to claim.