Flailing with Anger and What to do About It: Lent, Catholicism, and the Country

I'm throwing out Bible verses like an angry octopus, kids (this will make sense once you read the essay).

We’re heading into Lent this week over here in Christianity, which for believers of the faith is a time of prayer and fasting and reflection in preparation for Easter. But Catholics in particular? For Catholics, this is their moment, man. Break out the ashes and throw out the peanut butter eggs, because Lent is Sacrifice Go Time.

Gimme all your chocolate, ‘cause come Ash Wednesday it’s not allowed in the house.

Drink ALL the margaritas tonight because tomorrow? Tomorrow you’re going Sober-except-Sunday for the next 6 weeks.

HAHAHA you want to skip church this week? NOT SO FAST, sinner. Confession is from 3-5 right before the Saturday vigil Mass, so you best be going to both.

(Please note: Ramadan overlaps with Lent again this year. I should not joke about fasting when some of my readers are like, “Oh, you think skipping a couple snacks is cute, don’t you? TRY NOT EATING THE ENTIRE TIME THE SUN SHINES THEN LET’S TALK.” Ramadan Mubarak, my Muslim friends. I’ll move on now.)

Ash Wednesday, as humbling as it is, often feels too performative for my comfort level. We go to church and get our ashes in the morning, then walk around all day in public sporting chrism-smeared crosses on our foreheads, despite having been reminded during the service that Jesus said, “when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites…go to your inner room, close the door, and pray…in secret.” (Matthew 6—I told you I’d be throwing out the verses today. Who knew I had it in me!)

And it’s not uncommon to gather at a dinner with friends or family during these next 40 days and compare what we all “gave up” for Lent. (This is funny: I heard a relative once declare, “I gave up alcohol one time for Lent. I’m NEVER doing that again!”). Is it wrong to share your faith in a public sphere or compare notes with friends? Of course not. In the best parts of such things, these actions build community and roots us more solidly in what we believe. But every year around this time I still have the same thought: that the quiet season of penance can sometimes be quite loud.

And noise, lately, is something that’s been weighing on my mind.

If you read my post last week you know that I am a hot mess when it comes to current events, boiling with rage and despair on the inside and sometimes on the outside, too. I have started thinking of it as flailing with anger (I imagine a really fired-up octopus) because that’s what it feels like. When I read the statement the president made at the national prayer breakfast, each section more horrifying than the last: angry octopus. When I saw Friday’s entire awful interaction with Ukrainian president Zelenskyy by Trump and Vance: angry octopus. When I read that our administration cancelled 5,800 contracts for polio, H.I.V., malaria, and nutrition programs around the world, ensuring that people will in fact die as a result: I was flailing so hard with anger the octopus lost its flipping mind.

So there’s a reason for the flailing, I guess. Not even an octopus could wield enough lids for all these grease fires.

So here’s what I did: I wrote some more. I texted with friends and messaged back supportive OV readers. I read newspaper articles and Substack think pieces and responded to the occasional social media post (I had some time on my hands late Friday night). And after spending a large chunk of time vent-raging to David, then getting hit with a cold (Godsmack for the vent-raging?), then keeping my cool the rest of the weekend because his mom was visiting (plus the cold made it hard to talk), I realized that something inside me needs to shift. I can’t keep feeling and acting in a way that doesn’t feel right, not in a world that already seems so unsteady. Luckily for me, the season of all self-help seasons is upon us.

So, dear reader, I walked into church Sunday morning with a somber sort of heart. I went solo to the 9:30 Mass at the beautiful Cathedral of St. Patrick here in Harrisburg—it’s not our parish church, but it’s the one I love being in. It sits in the shadow of our state capitol, and I always find myself standing in the middle of the street there like a looney tune staring at the thing in awe.

Once inside the church, I sat down and looked around at the people around me: a man and a woman, both with the same gray hair, to the left, with the man’s arm relaxed around his wife’s shoulders, pulling her close. Two men with matching wedding rings sitting with their two young children in front of me. To my right, two other men, sitting shoulder to shoulder, both with salt-and-pepper beards. A large family behind me to the left, with children banging toys on the pews, and the mom dropping her sunglasses to the floor with a clatter, then her own mom trying to reach around her daughter’s pregnant belly to fetch them, the young dad taking a deep breath and, dare I say, rolling his eyes. I stood up for the beginning of the Mass, me amid a sea of old and young and middle-aged and Black and brown and white. I felt at home.

When the readings started, I felt at peace. Sometimes, I’ll be honest, I sit in church and daydream and count how many lights need to be replaced in the ceiling and mentally plan my grocery list and check my watch. Sometimes, during the homily, I roll my eyes and mutter under my breath if I don’t agree with what’s being said.

(I’ve said this before: I may not a very good Catholic.)

But the Scripture excerpts read Sunday were laser-focused on a particular theme that got my attention real fast. Take this one from the Old Testament (Sirach 27), for example:

“When a sieve is shaken, the husks appear/so do one’s faults when one speaks.”

Well, then, I thought. We’re going right for the throat today. And then this one:

“The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had/so too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind./Praise no one before he speaks/for it is then that people are tested.”

Huh. Okay. I’ll be honest, I heard this being read and immediately thought, Yeah, Trump. See how well you look when you’re tested, huh? You didn’t look so praise-worthy when you were threat-vomiting all over Zelenskyy on Friday, did you?

And I thought of David, the person closest to me, and the moments in which we’re debating or arguing over something happening in the world beyond and he says something I disagree with—this happens a lot—and because words are so so everything in my mind, I attach his goodness/badness/failings/attributes to what comes out of his mouth and then we both end up talking too much and too loudly instead of listening better and asking more questions and remembering that, even when we disagree on something and I’m telling him that if this were Star Wars, he’d no longer be considered a Jedi (yes, this is is something I said once. I’m not proud), this noisy, self-focused path isn't the one we want to be on.

It took me a good minute to understand that I was supposed to be thinking about just my own behavior, though—the point of the story was to assess my own tree’s fruit/speech/faults.

Sigh. Self-reflection is hard. Maybe I prefer the Sundays I can daydream after all.

But then the Gospel reading came along (Luke 6) and I snapped back to attention:

“'Jesus told his disciples a parable, ‘Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?’”

This made me laugh. Which apparently is a no-no in the middle of the Gospel reading, but nevermind that.

This was the Scripture that talks about noticing a splinter in someone’s eye while you have a giant wooden beam sticking out of your own (You know: don’t be a hypocrite. Also, that imagery sticks with you.) But the part that jumped out at me this time, considering where we all are right now, was this again:

“…every tree is known by its own fruit/For people do not pick figs from thornbushes/nor do they gather grapes from brambles.”

Oh, okay, I thought. Maybe that’s the OG version of the “you catch more flies with honey” adage. And then, there was this:

“A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good/but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil/for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”

Once again, my brain went to a certain couple of leaders and the droves of people in government who stay dry from the needs of everyday people by hiding under the umbrella of power, and it went to the words—the words of hate and oppression and hubris and mockery—that keeps spewing from their taxpayer-paid pieholes in public. My brain went to the people who still actively support the umbrella-covered piehole people. And it went to the ones who actively choose to not know what’s happening day-to-day and tell me, “Oh, I don’t pay attention to any of that” or the ones who simply support it all with a shrug of their shoulders and a “Hey, I’m sure the president knows what he’s doing.”

Angry. Octopus.

But my thinking started to shift inward a bit, despite my best intentions. I recommended a link to you last week from a far-left activist who is stepping off the leftist train. Now, she’s not changing her work in the world or her beliefs, mind you. She’s still participating—she’s just not jumping into the mosh pit every single time people are in there slamming into each other.

I’ve had multiple people with “peace and light” email signatures force my stomach into knots with the ways they utilize identity and ideology just to enact the same old white supremacy you see elsewhere…I’ve watched as people turned against each other for perceived slights even though our shared causes have so little capacity for individual egos.

—Dionne Sims

Sims was talking more about the people who share her values but still push and fight each other away over the slightest differences in beliefs, but…if you pull the focus out, is that really all that different from the rest of us?

There I am, sitting in church, and I’m thinking about how a lot of people are bad. I assume that their “bad” voting decisions or ways of thinking—big and small—are, simply, from shitty morals. (I’ve placed my own above them.)

I sit there in church and don’t understand how the Jesus I’ve read about all these years has been mistaken for whatever version of his words is being thrown around by people who claim to follow him but seem to like their money and power more. (I am certain I know better than they do).

I sit there in church thinking about how other people sitting in church are way worse than I am and that their worse is ruining our country and jeopardizing world peace and that if more people thought like I do everything would be okay.

(I mean…that last part? No?)

I sit in church.

On the way home from the city Sunday, I drove through a crisp, cold morning. Blue skies were overhead, and as I crossed the bridge over a Susquehanna River already swelling with snowmelt, I saw seagulls resting atop the chunks of ice slowly moving along with the current. They just drifted along, but would occasionally push up off the water, flapping their wings to move back upstream a few yards, then settle down again among the rest of the flock, more or less in the same place where they’d started.

I was listening to a program on NPR (which is the most cliched thing for a suburban white lady to be doing on her Sunday drive, I know) which played a clip from the My Unsung Hero podcast. In it, a woman recalls a moment in 2014 when she was pregnant and on a plane about to take off. She tells the man next to her that she’s been nervous to fly ever since 9/11. When the man assures her there’s no reason to be nervous, she asks him why. He turns to her and simply says, “Most people are good.” And, the narrator explains, those four words became a mantra for her husband and her as she raised their young sons and moved through the world’s hardships and tragedies.

Most people are good.

I mean, I guess so.

But that means I am, too. Even when I’m hating everybody I think made the world mean. Even when I’m loud. Even when I’m acting or thinking or writing in a way that makes me feel justified but still nags at a sense of discomfort in my center, something telling me my approach isn’t quite right.

The seagulls lift up. They flap their wings. They move upstream, and settle back down, only to drift again.

I turn the radio off, keep driving, silent. I think about the values I hold onto so dearly. I wonder if I might need to step back (step down?) and take a look at how my actions match them.

I’m headed home, back to my family. And as I do, painful things are happening to other families in the world, in the country, in my town, and I can—and should—do what I can in my own little ways to fight back against them.

But as the beginning of Lent finds itself at our doorsteps, I think about how I want to greet it. I want to be less the woman walking around with a big dusty cross on my forehead for one day a year like some kind of billboard and more a woman who spends these 40 days doing the work. And I want to take a step away from the noise and actually sit inside all these angry feelings and breathe—or dare, pray—through them. Maybe I practice a calmer approach with my own husband and family and friends. Maybe I try to drop the constant flailing anger, even just a little, and recognize it for what it really is: Fear. Concern. Worry. Caring.

Bad things are happening. Full stop.

Most people are good. Full stop.

If I’m really going to try to make the most of this effort, I can take two of those emotions I’ve recognized—the concern and caring—and live those values a bit better than I have been. With maybe a little less of the angry octopus. A little less flailing (even if that flailing is absolutely expected and understood right now) and instead with a more centered focus. A little less moshing, and more of whatever the opposite of moshing is. A little less internal screaming, if I can help it, and more…I don’t know. (That Oval Office meeting really messed me up, as it did a lot of people. It’s a strange thing to be in a country that’s entire foundation seems to be in a different building than the one we’re currently standing in.) I’m still angry, and I strongly believe in a moral right and wrong and think the government is really off the rails in an oppressive, scary sort of way. But maybe I can start learning how to convey the first bits better—concern and caring—and figure out the rest as I go.

Because I got the message Sunday: fix yourself first, then what’s out there. Quiet the noise, so that you can hear what’s needed.

For there’s an important differentiation between yelling CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?! and asking, “Can you believe this?”

What do we want to believe in? What do we want to shape? Instead of seeing it all crashing and burning around us and flailing, maybe we, knowing our own strengths, choose one pile of debris, pick it up, and try to dust it off and put something good back together. Maybe we start there. Maybe I start with taking a deep breath before picking my way through the mess. Maybe we drag the wooden beam out of our eye and try not to lead the blind right off into a pit—or something like that. Maybe we embrace our “good” and become better role models to the people already in our lives. Maybe we stay angry—really angry, even—but learn how to channel it.

We’ll figure out the rest as we go, quickly enough.

* * * * *

Here are links to everything I was just talking about. It’s all good stuff:

• In his statement reacting to the White House meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro pointed out that “The Oval Office should be a place where we advance American values – not where we retreat from them.”

• “‘People will die,’ said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, ‘but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.’” U.S. terminates funding for polio, H.I.V., malaria and nutrition programs around the world, by Stephanie Nolen. (The New York Times)

• Dionne Sims concludes her essay why don't I feel aligned with leftists? with this: “I want to be morally and ethically solid, while still having a soft heart and the courage to allow myself to be imperfect. I want to have more passion for breaking down systems than I’ve seen us have for bringing down individuals. I’m tired. [A]nd there’s fucking work to do.”

• The story in which a woman hears four words that changes the way she and her family navigate through life is called ‘Most people are good:’ How a stranger's words became a family mantra, (NPR). I highly recommend you listen to her story rather than just read it.

• The president used his statement at the national prayer breakfast this year to joke at length (and to laughter) about surviving the assassination attempt (without a mention of, let alone a prayer for, the civilian there who did get shot and die), to say he wants to bring people to religion through dominance, and to remind his followers that he’s “signed an executive order to resume the process of creating a new national park full of statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived.” In his remarks, he also makes many references to God, his growing faith as a Christian, the ban of trans athletes, and his poll ratings. (whitehouse.gov)

• You know as well as I do that the entire time I was writing this I was thinking of Shelby Van Pelt’s novel All the Bright Creatures (Ecco), right?

• In her guest essay Zelensky/Trump Fallout: What’s at Stake for America, Elise Labott, Edward R Murrow Press Fellow at Council on Foreign Relations, lays out exactly what the future looks like—with both benefits and immitigable cons—if America continues to form a primary alliance with Putin and Russia: “When President Zelensky arrived at the White House, he wasn't just fighting for Ukraine. He was standing at the fault line of a seismic shift in American foreign policy that has the potential to reshape our democracy in ways few Americans yet comprehend.” A necessary read. (The Preamble, Substack)

• This week I told you I was an angry octopus. A couple weeks ago I compared myself to sparkly snail trail. I need to branch out with my analogies. Here’s the other post if you haven’t seen it: My Oldest Turned 17 and the Geese are Back and Both of These are Good (One Vignette/Substack, February 14, 2025)

• And speaking of feeling unsure about the world: do yourself a solid and go read this post I wrote *eight years ago* about what we need when we’re navigating new territory (whether, I guess, it be emotional or cultural or national). It stars Quinn, and the message is very simple. I should listen to myself more often: Getting One Answer Right. (One Vignette, November 16, 2017)

I’ll be back next week, everybody. Take care.

xo - Leah