Browsing tag: anger

  • Bless Those Who Blast You

    If people curse you, do not curse them back but bless them instead. (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 32)

    Sadly, the right to retaliate is not an inalienable right.  It may be necessary to fight your enemies and to defeat them, for the sake of the common good.  But the Christian must not inflict harm merely for the satisfaction of revenge.  Yes, it’s hard.  And unfortunately, this isn’t just St. Benedict’s idea.  This is Jesus himself Luke 6:28.

    Can we give them the light-activated puzzle map of the United States?  If they fail to replace Montana, Alabama and Arizona, they’ll be learning about Helena, Montgomery and Phoenix every time the headlights of a passing car flicker through a chink in the curtains.  If they bury it under blankets in the closet, in the middle of the night a strangled voice will say, “New Jersey: Trenton.”

    Not only are we not allowed to give their children motion-sensitive, musical toys with no OFF button: God requires us to pray for them as well.

    When we suffer an insult from another person, we have a reaction, anger, which is as natural as the body’s inflammatory response to injury.  If you didn’t feel anger at being wronged, it would be an emotional failure, just as it would be sick for your body not to react to a wound.  But just as your inflammatory response can itself become a problem if it doesn’t subside, so anger can become destructive to the person who feels it.

    St. Paul describes anger as the devil’s foothold Ephesians 4:26-27 (also translated “place,” “room,” “opportunity.”)  Anger serves as the devil’s foothold because it’s not in itself wrong.  All the other vices are absolutes.  Only anger has this ambiguous quality of being at the same time justified and harmful.  St. Paul tells us, “Be angry but do not sin.”  This means that anger itself is not the sin.  The sin is what the devil tempts you to do when you’re angry.

    Your anger is just.  The wrong is real.  To dismiss the offense would flaunt the law of God.  But because the anger is justified, the devil can easily slip in temptations to vengeful acts which are against God’s law too.  So, anger functions as the gateway through which righteous people can be tempted to do things which normally would repel them.

    When the thirst for revenge sets in, it’s like a bacterial infection that develops in a contaminated wound. If it isn’t addressed immediately, it can become chronic, like vengeful feelings that persist for years after an offense.  The infection can invade your entire body and ruin your health.  Vengeful feelings can obsess you even after the perpetrator is dead.

    It’s true that revenge can attain to the level of tragedy.  There are wrongs that no mere mortal can bear alone.  But usually the vindictive person is shallow and selfish.  It’s the conceited person who punishes someone for an honest remark.  It’s the spiteful person who exacts retribution for a petty grievance.  You don’t want to become that person.

    This is why God prescribes such a horse-pill.  Praying a blessing on the person who has wronged you is like swallowing one of those enormous pills.  The prayer operates like an antibiotic within the soul to combat vengeance.  You don’t have to be enthusiastic about it, not anymore than you have to like those pills.  It may take you more than one try to get it down.  Your natural gag reflex might seem at first insurmountable.  But even a nauseated blessing through clenched teeth will begin to alter your interior state.  Whenever you have vengeful feelings, say, “God bless [so and so].”  That’s all you have to do, but you may have to do it many times, every three hours for weeks. Daily for months. Weekly for years.

    You’re not requesting on their behalf a life of luxury, flippant and carefree.  Still less are you asking for evildoers to continue to do harm with impunity.  When you bless those who’ve mistreated you, you’re asking God to intervene in their lives.  You may have detailed ideas for how exactly God could proceed. He will consider your suggestions fairly.  But at the end of the day, you surrender judgment to Christ.

    Who is the person who does inspire respect?  It’s the one who can laugh off an insult and make a joke of it. The one who sticks to principle in the face of harassment is inspiring, not the one who lashes out in fury. The one who gets back up after being knocked down and keeps right on running toward the goal: that’s who you want to be. Outmaneuver your opponents. Leave them in the dust, and leave revenge in the hands of God. “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.‘”

     

     

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  • Rid Yourself Of Anger

    You are not to act in anger… (Rule of St. Benedict 4.22)

    It’s easy to be angry when interacting with children, because children are constantly doing things wrong. The more children you’re responsible for, the easier it is to remain in a state of perpetual irritation.  But just because it’s a chronic feeling doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.  Parents should take seriously what St. Benedict says here, which is also what Jesus himself insists on: “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5: 22).

    Habitual anger is the result of ingrained dissatisfaction. If we constantly focus on the myriad disappointments of life, on the things that don’t live up to our standards, anger will always be at our elbow. It’s true that yearning for the thing that’s beyond our reach can be a powerful motive for action, and for good. But lots of things remain out of reach. There’s only so much we can do to achieve what we want, and anger is an instinctive response to frustration. If the frustration collapses into despair, we give up working toward the goal and are left with nothing but the chafing desire for something we don’t believe we’ll ever get.

    This simmering soup of dissatisfaction, disappointment and hopelessness is such a regular meal for so many people that it’s impossible to overstate the dangers of it. Left unattended, it can boil over suddenly into violence. The culture we live in keeps the heat on relentlessly. They can’t sell you what you don’t want, so they figure out how to make you want it. Not everyone gets to the explosion point, but many people do struggle constantly to keep themselves from blowing their lid.

    The antidote to anger is joy. You cannot enjoy something and simultaneously feel angry. Joy casts out anger.

    Joy in its ultimate form is a lofty mystery. But the pathway to joy begins here and now, in the tiny thing that we can actually enjoy in this moment. Don’t worry about the great saints who weirdly experienced joy in the midst of torture. You can experience joy simply by focusing on whatever good presents itself in the moment, and giving thanks for it.

    It can take a huge effort to haul your attention away from the disappointments you’ve been focusing on, but the benefits are enormous. As with physical medication, you have to give this practice some time to work. You know that if you swallow a couple of pills for your headache, it’s going to take at least half an hour for them to take effect. Similarly, begin to make the effort to thank God for what you can find to enjoy, and soon you’ll begin to feel relief from chronic anger. Only realize that this treatment is an ongoing therapy. Thankfulness has to build up in your system and maintain a certain level in your bloodstream to be effective.

    For Christians, thankfulness is not a vague, self-referential thing. It’s not that we work ourselves up to feeling thankful in general to nobody in particular. We believe that God is the originator of all good things. This is why we give thanks to God for the thing we enjoy. It’s important here to be completely honest. Maybe in your life almost everything is the opposite of enjoyable. You have to exert yourself to identify something—anything—that you can truly enjoy. Often this one thing is small and ordinary. Perhaps it’s just a cup of hot coffee that you’re able to enjoy in an otherwise miserable moment. So, give thanks to God for your cup of coffee.

    As Christians, we also recognize that human beings have their freedom and can choose to do evil or good. So when someone does a kind thing, that person truly deserves thanks. We practice saying thank you to specific people at specific moments not just as an automatic social reflex, but because of human freedom. The other person didn’t have to bring you that cup of coffee. So, say thank you to the person through whom you received the good thing that you enjoy.

     

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  • Beware Fatal Attraction

    Rage Definition

    We must then be on guard against any base desire, because death is stationed near the gateway of pleasure. (Rule of St. Benedict 7.24)

    Last week a man identified himself with death and stationed himself at the gateway of pleasure to deal it out.  

    This was not a Kenny Rogers kind of Gambler.  But was he one of us?

    Answer 1:

    We don’t see the appeal of murdering as many people as possible before killing ourselves.  If we were to kill ourselves, we’d just swallow a bottle of pills.

    Answer 2:

    Ending it all is not necessarily the goal.  You just want what you want, and you don’t care if it kills you.

    Answer 3:

    The lure dangling before your eyes is more playful.  You figure you can take the bait and leave someone else on the hook for it.

    Answer 4:

    None of the above.  You want to live a good life.  And you want to be happy.  Why does this have to be so hard?

    St. Benedict’s approach:

    St. Benedict warns us not against desire in general, but against base desire.  We keep all our other desires in check because our deepest desire is for life itself.  Only God can satisfy this desire.

    First mistake to avoid:

    The first mistake is to imagine that Christian faith requires a repression of desire itself.  

    Not so: Christian faith is all about the ultimate fulfillment of desire.

    Second mistake to avoid:

    The second mistake is to imagine that because desire itself is good, therefore all of our particular desires must also be good.  

    Not so: the practice of the faith involves learning to distinguish between right desires and base desires. We also develop self-control, so we can enjoy good impulses without giving in to bad ones.

    Third mistake to avoid:

    The third mistake is to imagine that because there are right desires and base desires, every impulse must have a moral rating.  

    Not so: many actions are in themselves neutral.  The rightness or baseness of a desire resonates within the forms of God.  Where God is silent, we may improvise as we please.  But where God reveals, we heed and harmonize.

    The theory isn’t that difficult.  It’s the practice that gets you, as you finger your way through the cacophony. All around are neurotic types who want to dominate, each according to his own devices. There are hedonist types who want to let everything go, especially themselves.  And there are neurotic hedonists: the peculiar creatures of our time.

    The neurotic hedonist rejects the forms of God in their entirety, by rejecting the very existence of God.  He sets himself up as a replacement for God.  This sort of narcissist glorifies the impulses of the self.  But the neurotic hedonist also regulates the worship of the self with a complex, compulsory structure.  Then when he really gets going, he tries to impose the worship of himself onto everyone else.

    The Enraged Man:

    A neurotic hedonist can develop into an enraged man.  For a lifetime he cultivates anger at everything that does not conform to his control.  For a lifetime he refuses to tune the one thing his creator asks him to adjust: himself.

    The Christian script calls for an entirely different way of living.  We worship God and attempt to follow his lead.  We subordinate our wills to his on principle and seek to harmonize our desires with his.  But within the parameters set by God, we enjoy complete freedom.  We’re under no compulsion to do anything in a fixed way.  We rid ourselves of anger, rage, malice, slander–how?  By giving thanks to the one from whom we receive every good thing.

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