Holy Anger

When Grief Becomes Power

Holy Anger: When Grief Becomes Power

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There’s a doubt that arrives sometimes when the day is done, and I’m left alone with my thoughts, wondering what it is that I truly believe. It doesn’t shout or announce itself as despair. It just slips in through some small, unguarded place and asks whether the things I’ve spent my life trusting—depth and resonance, attunement and unseen love, and the holy pulse moving beneath the surface of everything—are enough to build belonging in the world we inhabit.

Sometimes, I hate how reasonable the question sounds.

The world keeps trying to tell us what’s important. We’re shoved in every direction—told what to care about, what to reach for, what to measure, and what to become. We’re told to polish the visible parts of ourselves until they can be understood quickly, admired easily, and chosen without much effort. We’re taught to believe that belonging is something we earn through performance, through usefulness, through beauty or status—or some other exceptional collection of traits that makes us more legible to the culture around us.

And somewhere inside all of that, the quiet things begin to feel endangered.

I want to believe in the unseen. I want to believe in the way one soul recognizes another before either one knows how to explain it. I want to believe in the sacred intelligence of tenderness, in the small invisible exchanges that pass between people and change them. I want to believe that love matters even when it doesn’t arrive in the language the world prefers.

But there are days when the world’s false measures feel so loud and so well-rewarded that I can feel something in me begin to grieve with a sadness so dark and so heavy, that I can only describe it in terms of weather.

My heart grieves all the unseen people who have been asked to become more visible in the wrong ways, to translate the deepest parts of themselves into something easier to consume. I mourn the tenderness we keep mistaking for weakness, the sincerity we keep treating as naivety, the strange cultural habit of making people prove their worth before we offer them care.

✨ And then, every now and then, something ordinary breaks through and reminds me of what’s still true.

A person could be standing in a checkout line and choose, without making it into a performance, to offer some unexpected kindness to the person behind them—just a small human gesture in the middle of an ordinary day. And the person receiving it might light up in a way that feels almost startling—not because the gesture solved everything, but because something real crossed the distance between two people and landed.

That kind of moment has a way of returning me to myself.

It reminds me that love is alive and well, and that it does matter. The kind of love that passes between strangers across a counter, the kind that holds a friend through a hard week, that pays attention to a child without rushing them, and that sees the tiredness in someone’s face and responds with care instead of indifference or hostility.

These moments may seem small to a world addicted to performance—but I don’t think they are small at all. I think they are part of the hidden architecture holding everything together.

Maybe we have been measuring what we value all wrong.

Maybe the things we’ve been calling soft are truly the strongest things we have. Perhaps the small holy moments no one applauds are the ones that keep making life livable, and the hallowed door has always been there, open and unadorned—while everyone gathers at the gilded gate, hoping to be let in. Perhaps the real gold is waiting just inside that open door.

And maybe this is why my grief has started to feel like anger.

For a long time, I have tried to grieve carefully. I have tried to hold sorrow in a way that wouldn’t spill too much or disturb anyone. I have tried to make pain beautiful enough to be tolerated and understandable enough not to be frightening. I have tried to swallow the weather inside me and to keep moving through the world as if the sky would never open. But something in me is tired of carrying these oceans quietly. Something in me wants my sorrow to become visible, to become tidal waves, to become weather, to gather itself into thunder and strike the upturned faces of the unbothered until they are bothered enough to wake.

This anger doesn’t feel like cruelty. It feels like love with its eyes open.

It feels like grief finally standing up inside my body and refusing to abandon what matters. It feels like my soul saying that tenderness deserves protection, that depth deserves space, that the unseen deserves more than a passing glance from a world obsessed with what can be displayed.

It feels holy because it comes from the part of me that still believes we can choose differently, still believes we can change what we call valuable, still believes that belonging can be created through love—but only if love becomes more than a feeling we keep tucked safely inside ourselves.

We have to change how we relate to one another. We have to stop mistaking attention for intimacy, performance for worth, and visibility for meaning. We have to remember how to look beyond the visible long enough to see. We have to ask what kind of world we are building when the deepest parts of people are treated as secondary to the things that can be measured, bought, ranked, or displayed.

I don’t want to live inside the world’s false arrangements anymore. I don’t want to keep spinning past what I know, to chase what I’ve been told is important.

As I grow older, I feel myself returning to the same principles—love and truth, justice and expression, community and care, sovereignty and connection, and being seen without having to perform for it. I want a life small enough to be lived and deep enough to mean something. I want to keep choosing the hallowed door, even when the world keeps praising the gilded gate.

So I gather my strength like thunder. I let it move through my chest. I let the grief become weather and the anger become holy. I let myself believe that the unseen is still real, that love still matters, that small gestures can carry enormous light, and that a single ordinary moment of care can remind someone that they belong to the world.

Maybe that won’t wake everyone. Maybe the whole torn-apart world will not turn its face toward love all at once. But I have seen what happens when kindness lands—I have seen faces change.

Authenticity exists—and so does real love, but we have to be willing to fight for it.

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Enough to Wake
by Michelle Ried

When the sky grows lonely,
it opens its blue body
and weeps.

I want to grieve that openly—
not quietly,
not in the careful way
of someone
trying not to break.

I want my sorrow
to become weather—
to fall in heavy drops,
to strike the upturned faces
of the unbothered
until they are bothered
enough to wake.

Until they are undone
by the fullness of what I feel—
by the storms I have swallowed,
by the oceans I have carried
without asking anyone
to drown.

There is more to life than love—
I have circled the thought
in red ink.

No, love alone does not build a home.
There are rooms inside a relationship
affection cannot hold.

Yet when the world’s 
false measures
guard love’s open door,
how can the unseen
ever become more?

Once, love knew how
to wait for what could be—
to look beyond the visible
long enough to see.

This is what I mourn.

The world praises the gilded gate—
but not the hallowed door.

So, I gather strength like thunder,
let it rumble through my chest—
dark with uneasy laughter,
bright with lightning’s 
silent flash.

I crash through surrender,
into a sky of electric wool.
Heavy holy weather,
poured from,
not pulled to—

to break open freely,
to release whole bodied rain
unto this torn apart world,
unto the faces turned in pain.

Wondering,
will there ever be enough—
will there be enough to wake?

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