After Communion, as the choir began the simple Taizé chant Adoramus te, Christe, I found myself praying for a mother a few pews ahead of me who had recently buried her son. As the chant swelled into a crescendo, it occurred to me that I was surely not the only one in the church praying for her at that moment. I felt those prayers almost physically, like connective tissue, invisible arteries forming channels throughout the congregation, carrying and compounding life within the Body of Christ.
This integrating spirit of prayer could not be more different from the disintegrating spirit of division and outrage that so often engulfs us. Spend any time online and you encounter it: venom, accusation, indignation at a fever pitch. Even former pockets of consensus are turning on one another, fracturing into smaller and smaller factions.
This cacophony of outrage online begins in hidden interior concessions. The Desert Fathers warned that the devil first approaches us looking for dialogue. The serpent in the garden did not begin by demanding Eve’s allegiance, but by posing a question: ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat of any tree of the garden”?’ To enter that conversation is to follow his logic, which begins in suspicion, hardens into accusation, and ends in division.
When I was a new mother, I briefly had a friendship with a young woman who was habitually critical of others in their absence. It felt harmless enough, and even bonding, at first. As René Girard observed, we often secure unity by identifying a common rival.
While initially I entertained the gossip, I soon began to recoil from it and even developed a low-grade paranoia about this habit in her. What was she saying about me in my absence? Then, in a moment of grace, a thought surfaced: this is her struggle; don’t make it mine by engaging it or by ruminating on it.
Sin reproduces itself in two ways: through imitation or through rumination. Rumination feels safer than imitation because we tell ourselves we are merely observing the sin rather than participating in it. But what we rehearse inwardly often hardens into suspicion, then accusation, and finally division. Sin does not remain neatly contained within the individual; it reshapes souls. And reshaped souls reshape the world.
Revolutionary movements have long understood this combustible power of suspicion and division. Frantz Fanon famously described violence and rage as a cleansing force that purifies the oppressed and galvanises action. Che Guevara spoke openly of hatred as an element of struggle, something that pushes a man beyond his natural limits. From the Jacobins of the French Revolution to modern political agitators, leaders have recognised that anger mobilises more quickly than reason, and that indignation clarifies enemies and consolidates tribes.
There is no shortage of beneficiaries of an inflamed populace. Politicians and ideologues can easily marshal an emotionally charged collective to sow chaos. Media outlets and algorithms can monetise and amplify outrage. An inflamed public is far easier to manipulate than a reflective one.
Sometimes anger is warranted. Injustice should be met with moral seriousness. But moral seriousness requires self-governance. It does not outsource our emotional state to the news cycle. It resists the addictive pleasure of outrage and the counterfeit superiority that comes from dwelling on the vices of others. And it rejects the false unity secured by scapegoating.
Lent can give us the space to notice how easily we are swept into reactionary cycles, and to regain our footing so that our words and actions are born of deliberation.
We can also go a step further. Rather than merely suppressing reactionary responses to things and people over whom we’ve no control, we might redirect that instinct towards what we can affect. If revolutionary movements have long harnessed the combustible power of suspicion and outrage to reshape society into an infernal power struggle, all the more should Christians invest in the enduring power of interior conversion – prayer, examination of conscience and targeted resolutions.
The serpent’s logic pulls our attention outwards, fastening it to circumstances we cannot govern while suffocating the interior life. But we have seen another logic at work. I think again of those invisible arteries of prayer carrying life through the congregation that morning at Mass. That work reforms souls, and reformed souls reform the world.
The impulse to react can be transfigured into prayer: for the person who sparked my indignation, for the scapegoat of the day and for my own jaundiced heart, which finds it far easier to diagnose others than to examine itself.
Suspicion, accusation and outrage are contagious. They keep us circling the perimeter of events, rarely entering the interior where the decisive battle is waged. Especially during Lent, the Church, in her wisdom, calls us back again and again to conversion, to return to him. In the paradoxical physics of the Christian life, that reorientation is not a withdrawal from the world, but a return to the only ground from which the world can be healed.
Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of the books Awake, Not Woke, Theology of Home, and a forthcoming book, No Contact, on the politics of estrangement. She is a wife and mother of six in California.
