rage and outrage

This is a response to Emily's post. It is a quotation from Sue Monk Kidd's "The Dance of the Dissident Daughter", her spiritual memoir. The book is the story of her feminist spiritual awakening. The quotation below had a heading: "Transfiguring Anger", and regards her anger at patriarchal structures that wound women.

page 186-187
"By transfiguring anger, I don't mean that we wave a placating wand and poof! anger disappears. Nor do I mean that anger is turned into sweet resignation. By healing or transfiguring it, I mean to imply, in Clarissa Pinkola Estés's words, that anger becomes "a fire that cooks things rather than a fire of conflagration." A conflagration may embolden and impassion you for a while, but if you get stuck in it, it can burn you up. A fire that cooks things, however, can feed you and a whole lot of other people...
...The transfiguration of anger is a movement from rage to outrage. Rage implies an internalized emotion, a tempest within. Rage, or what might be called untransfigured anger, can become a calcified bitterness. What rage wants and needs is to move outward toward positive social purpose, to become a creative force or energy that changes the conditions that created it. It needs to become out-rage.
Outrage is love's wild and unacknowledged sister...She is the one grappling with her life, reconfiguring it, struggling to find liberating ways of relating..."

Love,
Rachael