Anger

Does anyone harbour anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord?

-The Book of Sirach

This small passage was part of the first reading at mass today. It hits on a few things that have been very important to me in my practice as of late. I'll start with the words "against another". Sometimes it feels as though we drastically underplay the importance of the relational nature of our ethical lives these days. Looking at the news and politics of global economies, it is very easy to see the world as a series of wars, crises and disasters that are to be conquered. People are often either allies or obstacles. Those who seem to stand against us seem pretty deserving of our anger and wrath. After all, they are standing in the way of our noble vision of how things should be (whatever that is). But if we really look at our place in this vast world, such anger and the energy that we might devote to defeating those who oppose our vision of the world is a huge misdirection of time and energy.

There are close to 7 billion people on the Earth today. That is a lot of people to expect to conform to our view. As daunting an exercise it would be to just focus our mind on wanting each of these individuals to be the way we would want them to be, none of these people are autonomous. They know each other, and for each person they know, their actions and behaviours are influenced by these relationships moment after moment. To just spend the mental energy wanting a person to be other than exactly what they are is akin to trying to make the ocean calm by pressing down on the waves on a beach.

The other important word for me in this short quote is "harbour" ("harbor" for my American readers). We tend to treat anger like an infant we have won in a contest. (WHAT?). I know, strange analogy, but by this I mean that we treat anger as something we feel entitled to and something that we need to care for and nourish. When we react with anger to some wrong done to us, we take some version of the stance that "they MADE me angry". Accepting that position blindly, we take the position that we have no choice in being angry. Granted, there is a thing such as righteous anger that arises very naturally. Heat is sometimes the natural response. But something shifts when we hold onto, play with, and nurture that anger. It grows and deepens. It poisons and consumes us. We rage outwardly trying to beat out fire with more fire, until we exhaust ourselves.

I get angry, I get happy, I get sad. But with all things, a time comes to let them go. I suspect that we tend to hold onto anger beyond its natural shelf live with a greater regularity than other things.

I know how hard it is to let go of anger in the face of people and situations that seem determined pour crap on you and the universe. I run into this difficulty every day and I meeting with varying degrees of success and failure. But I also know that I can't get angry enough to end the anger. I can not "expect healing" until I release it.

I heard this teaching as I sat beside my wife in church, in about the same place my father and I used to sit. My daughters were working in the sacristy as altar servers, and my in-laws were singing in the choir. In the midst of all of this, I felt the room shrink. Everything became closer and more personal. Everyone became closer and more personal. In some way, I could feel that there was less room for anger.