While his day job for the past 20 years has been chaplain to the students at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Fr. Mike Schmitz is best known for his work with Ascension Presents and his popular podcast “The Bible in a Year.” Full of enthusiasm, Fr. Mike is one of the great contemporary teachers of the Catholic faith, presenting even its most difficult truths with empathy and good cheer. Recently he interviewed a Benedictine monk, Fr. Boniface Hicks, about the experience of suffering. Their conversation was remarkable for its honesty about the different emotions one experiences when facing things such as chronic pain, prolonged illness, a terminal diagnosis, or the death of a loved one.
At one point, Fr. Mike asks, “What do you do in those moments when you’re angry with God?” Fr. Boniface explained that sometimes anger is a perfectly appropriate emotion, a natural response to a situation that seems wrong to us. Therefore, we shouldn’t think that we are doing something wrong when the experience of suffering – either our own or that of another – makes us angry. In fact, he explains, anger can be a positive response to suffering. “There’s hope in anger,” he says. “Sometimes people might be more inclined to fall into despair, where there’s a kind of bottoming out. [But] anger is a kind of movement upward out of despair.” This movement, he explains, “ultimately resolves itself in grief, as we enter into the place of pain and, eventually, acceptance.”
It might sound strange, but anger directed toward God can be an expression of prayer. Fr. Boniface points to chapter three of the Book of Lamentations, “where there are some really choice words directed toward God.” In that passage, we hear the hurt in the author’s cry: “The Lord drove into my heart the arrows of his quiver… He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood… My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is.” Thus, Fr. Boniface notes, “The scriptures give us permission to be angry at God.”
But Fr. Mike distinguishes this kind of expression of anger toward God from one of disengagement with God and avoidance. Unlike the former, which is an authentic engagement with the Lord in the midst of pain and anger, the latter response leads to a fixed position of resentment towards the One whom we believe has wronged us. This is a decision to shut down communication with God and turn away from Him completely. We should pray to be preserved from this kind of response, which leads to despair. With His grace we will remember that the scriptures indeed leave blessed room for us to express our sorrows, our disappointments, and our anger at the Lord; but they also remind us that “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those whose spirits are crushed” (Psalm 34:18).
posted 11/29/25
The Parish of St. Cecilia-St. Gabriel 