If a friend asked you about going to a rage room, would you tell them to go? Would you go with them? Would you secretly want to go for yourself?
What might the Bible say about rage rooms?
And can rage rooms help us understand those disturbing psalms that ask God to kill babies (the imprecatory psalms)?
Rage Rooms are good…
for people who struggle being honest about their anger (often women). A rage room can be a safe place of empowerment and freedom to get in touch with repressed anger.
Rage rooms are good because they help to…
• Externalize an experience,
• Expressing powerful emotions,
• And verbalizing the pain or trauma.
This externalization is good because it is both…
• a means of being authentic to reality,
• while also claiming agency over it.
But rage rooms are bad…
for people who struggle with overt anger and are tempted toward or act out their aggression (often men).
For these kinds of people, expressing their rage and anger isn’t cathartic and doesn’t diminish the anger. It actually increases it (see “What are Anger Rooms Beneficial”).
(Learning to live with authentic emotions—rather than pretend we are just independent brains—is the second major shift I talk about in Deconstructing Fundamentalism without Destroying Faith. Please check it out if you are struggle to know how to re-integrate emotions and faith)
What if the imprecatory psalms are written rage rooms?
These are the psalms that ask God to punish or kill the enemies of Israel (the major ones are Psalms 5, 10, 17, 35, 58, 59, 69, 70, 79, 83, 109, 129, 137, and 140).
This is the famous one:
“Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (Psalm 137:9).
The imprecatory psalms seem distasteful and offensive to empowered (and enlightened) Westerners—who are often out of touch with their emotions.
But we must remember, Israel was a disempowered and endangered minority surrounded by superpower kingdoms (Assyria, Egypt, Babylon).
Israel was constantly dealing with injustice, oppression, covert anxiety, and overt fear in the face of these superpowers.
So Israel probably had some repressed anger that needed expressing.
Embodied Faith requires Authentic Emotions
So, it seems helpful to think of these psalms as written rage rooms. These psalms were the means of dealing with difficult, painful emotions.
Thankfully God can handle all our emotions (even if many of us have been trained into a fundamentalist faith that disconnected us from our emotions).
In fact, an embodied faith is always open to authentic emotions.
So, how are we to “be angry, but do not sin” (Eph. 4:26)?
It seems that we bring this anger and lay it before God, just like the writer of the imprecatory psalms did.
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