A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 24, 2005
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 24, 2005
I once worked at the State Hospital at Danvers through the Chaplain's office as part of the necessary training for ministry — something called Clinical Pastoral Education. Things like this go through fads, I hate to say. And the fad of that era was "getting in touch with your feelings." The patients, yes, and us, too, the chaplains. When we weren't on the wards with patients we could be found in the chapel arranged in a circle on those folding chairs. Here the supervisors took great pride in teaching nuns to cuss. People were sometimes seen to throw chairs. The drill involved a good deal of bellowing. Once, walking on the hospital grounds, I passed the chapel and, through those old gothic stone walls, I could hear the supervising chaplains bellowing at each other. Getting in touch with their feelings.
There was, about that time, a popular little book called The Angry Book, with a red cover. Get it out or you're likely to pop. That's what we thought.
Well, of course, it's essential to be conscious of our anger. Then what?
The chaplain-supervisors at Danvers had in their religious backgrounds many traditional images to draw on. After all, there was Jesus, hot-headed reformer, kicking over the money changers' tables in the Temple and yelling untoward things at the Pharisees. And then there's the Old Testament, wooooooh. Its God was a genuine hot-head who did terrible things to people who perturbed him, even whole nations that perturbed him. And the armies of God rolled on their bloody way. His ill temper goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden.
And of course there is the central thesis of Jonathan Edwards' most famous sermon — "Sinners in the Hands of an — Angry God." The ultimate role-model.
But then there's the Bhagavadgita, the founding Hindu scripture from the third century of the Common Era, with its God Vishnu disguised as Krishna in the chariot telling the hesitant prince Arjuna he's got to fight his enemies and wipe them out — it's his duty as king and warrior, his religious duty, and anyway God told him to do it so he needn't doubt the rightness of what he's about to do. Sounds a lot like Joshua, actually, whom the God of the Hebrew Bible, not a little jealous, he — ordered to go into Canaan and massacre all the men and women and children and even their animals for daring to worship some other God, to call the Ultimate Reality by the wrong name. Oh, there's lots more, trust me.
We've taken in all those ancient, outmoded images, even as human consciousness has evolved. We are capable of more, of better, but it is as if we are addicted to the old patterns. Our politicians get elected and reelected on the strength of it with their promises of capital punishment, with the Patriot Acts and wars, and the dominant political party with its self-understanding as a stern and punishing father. Our culture is filled with violence, as both the guns and the prisons proliferate.
But despite all that, there were other messages about anger, too, but they always rang with impracticality. Anger actually made it onto the list of seven deadly sins! — a mortal sin, lethal to the soul's life in God. Augustine said of it:
It is better to deny entrance to [even] just and reasonable anger than to admit it, no matter how small it is. Once admitted it is driven out again only with difficulty. It comes in as a little twig and in less than no time it grows big and becomes a beam.
What is this, anger, anyway? In the West, it's defined as a strong passion which is to do with displeasure, stimulated by a sense of insult or injury. It can run to "rage," which implies that you've now lost self-control, or "fury," which Merriam-Webster's Collegiate associates with "an overmastering passion verging on madness." And then it lists "indignation," another form, which it calls "a deep, intense, often righteous anger roused by that which one considers mean, shameful, or the like," and finally, "wrath."
Of course there's also the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount. He refers back to the traditions that preceded him, with the angry Jehovah and all, but then suggests a further evolutionary step:
You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, "You shall not murder"; and "whoever murders shall be liable to judgment." But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say "you fool," you will be liable to the hell of fire.1
Oh well. And there's the bit about loving not just your friends, which is easy, but your enemies too.2
Buddhism has been teaching something like that for two and a half millennia. Buddhism says that whether you have actually committed a murderous act or not, and whether there is an all-knowing "God" or not to judge you later and punish you — in your anger you have committed a negative "evolutionary act" or karma that will take a toll on yourself and you'll be headed off in a downward evolutionary direction for having done it. If you read Emerson, you know he says the same thing.
A contemporary of Jesus — though they wouldn't have known each other — Seneca, the Stoic philosopher — gave us a fine essay on anger, which he calls "this most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions." And, he says, "some of the wise have described anger as `brief insanity' — it is just as uncontrolled . . . intent on anything once started, closed to reasoning or advice, agitated on pretexts without foundation, incapable of discerning fairness or truth . . ."
Oh, and he isn't finished. Seneca goes on:
No plague has cost the human race more. You will see slaughter, poisoning, charge and sordid counter-charge in the law-courts, devastation of cities, the ruin of whole nations, . . . buildings set alight and the fire spreading beyond the city walls, huge tracts of territory glowing in flames that the enemy has kindled . . . anger has cast them down; deserts, mile after mile without inhabitant — anger emptied them.3
But wait. Didn't Jesus stand rather boldly against injustice, enraging those rich and powerful whom his words indicted? and wasn't Emerson one of the most powerful voices in America against slavery and racism and the shameful treatment of native American Indians? And didn't King and Gandhi and Mandela and Sojourner and Margaret Fuller all lift their voices and spend their lives to make an end to violence and oppression and hypocritical structures of power?
They did. And we know this about them, too: They are all speaking out of an inner realm that is very centered and calm even when fired by a great passion for righteousness, that is never out of conscious control, like when I lose my temper and slam a door because Windows crashed again or "somebody" turned off the water-heater and I want to take a shower.
They spoke of a kind of soul-force that so transcended mere rage or bitterness that the distinction becomes clear.
What a confusing tradition. So consider not what religious doctrine says Jesus was doing, but what it now appears the likely actual historical Jesus, the street philosopher and not the god, was really doing. If you read his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew or Luke, or read the Gospel of Thomas, you've got a very cool, spiritually-centered street-philosopher in the Cynic philosopher tradition, in a very civilized way gathering a crowd and skillfully, with a lot of guts, drawing people in to a very pointed critique of the structures of prejudice that prevailed in his day, and the structures of injustice, and of wealth and power. It was all blended in with a message of a different Kingdom of God — not a theocratic state but an inner state out of which people could see the world differently and live differently.
But note well: he didn't, like, say, Norman Vincent Peale or the usual blandly inoffensive variety of preachers, duck the controversies, the public sins, the popular public sins of prejudice and hate and injustice. He took them head-on. But how did he do it?
And it is at this that I think we have to aim.
I lived in Newark after the riots of 1968 burned most of the Central Ward of the city to the ground. It was a massive door-slamming, only it wasn't over the lack of hot water or a computer crash. It was over the big stuff. Years and decades and centuries of grinding oppression and humiliation. It was justified. Fully. But it wasn't creative or courageous. It was just — an explosion of rage.
Which brings to mind the time about two and a half years ago when I had just recently been diagnosed with this diabetes thing that descended out of the blue sky and it's morning and I'm rushing to get to a meeting and I've ironed a particularly good white shirt and then I go to do the obligatory finger-prick blood test and the blood and I can't get any blood and then I do and the blood gets all over the good shirt and it's getting later and I have to go upstairs and iron another white shirt and I heat up the iron and — hurl the iron at the wall! Quite scaring the painter who's painting my dining room. But listen, I can tell you this: that iron learned a lesson or two! That iron will never again make my finger stain a white shirt with blood!
The American Buddhist Robert Thurman — in another little book, this one also red but this one really splendid — calls these explosive reactions — whether to the lack of hot water or whether to a massive crushing injustice — an addiction. "The addict," he writes, "is seduced by the addictive substance by feeling that it will help relieve their bad feeling." It's as if, in the explosion of fury, we think the fiery energy will burn away the obstacle or problem. It's an addiction to a mental habit that's so subtle it's almost irresistible.
That kind of anger, he suggests, has to be tamed by means of a or spiritual discipline or yoga.
And the yoga he recommends is a three-fold patience:
A patience that learns to tolerate the momentary pain by learning endurance.
A patience that can carefully dissect what is going on within ourselves — that can observe yourself as if from a distance, with insight; that can, before exploding, go instead for insight, for focussed mindfulness rather than surrendering self-control to an explosive rage.
A patience that sees the other in the self and the self in the other and can therefore forgive.
When the first impulse of anger has been passed through that fire, the fire of patience — the patience of endurance, of insight, and of forgiveness — then anger is transformed. It becomes creative transcendence.
It isn't a matter of putting our head in the sand, refusing to look at reality as it is with its injustice and hypocrisy and violence, and pretending it isn't so.
A popular Western Massachusetts therapist's widely-published advice is never to listen to the news or read it anymore, but instead create your own happy world as if it isn't so. No, that's not what the greatest spiritual teachers would have us do. Creative transcendence takes it all in and passes all the ugliness and wrong through a transformative fire within the mind and renders what begins as anger into something else, something transcendent. Ask Gandhi about that, or Dr. King, or Jesus the street-philosopher, or Nelson Mandela.
They turned anger into a joyous heroic energy. They looked at an outrage and found in it a joyous invitation to take up the work of making the world anew, to find the meaning and purpose of their lives and to discocver in themselves that joyous heroic energy, a furious fire for transformation.
Copyright © 2005 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
For more on Anger, see Robert A.F. Thurman's superb little book
Anger (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
From the rains and storms without, we gather today as those who have known storms within — the tumult of human passions; — we who have been driven by forces we do not command, feel the force of energies not composed into creative endeavour, not illuminated by wisdom, but reaching still from times long forgotten and drawing us from our path.
Sometimes we are filled with noise and tumult. Sometimes there is violence in us.
Let something more essential, our very humanity at the core of us, renew our minds, cleanse from our hearts the delusion and lend to our eyes clear vision.
Let us know the eternal silence, the wisdom of love, the calm clear spirit of the mind, and let our ordered lives give testimony to peace beyond the momentary and the surface appearance of things.
May we go forth from here restored to the life and the work that is ours to live and to do, fired by great joyous heroic energy for the sacred tasks that are ours to do in this time.
In this silence.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead:
A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine. Above all, mind what you say. "Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire" — that's the truth. When my father was old he told me that very thing in a letter he sent me. Which, as it happens, I burned. This surprised me a good deal more at the time than it does in retrospect.
My point in mentioning this is only to say that people who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did. Just to reflect on it makes me a little irritated.
Anne Lamott, Plan B
One reason I think we get so angry with our children is that we can. Who else is there that you can talk to like this? Can you imagine saying to your partner, "You get off the phone now! No, not in five minutes"? Or to a friend, "Get over here, right this second! The longer you make me wait, the worse it's going to be for you." Or to a salesman at Sears who happens to pick up a ringing phone, "Don't you dare answer the phone when I'm talking to you."
No, you can't. If regular people spotted your hidden, angry inside self, they'd draw back when they saw you coming. They would see you for what you are — human, flawed, more nuts than had been hoped — and they would probably not want to hire or date you. Of course, most people have such bit parts in your life that they're not around to see the whole erratic panoply that is you. . . . If you need to yell, children are going to give you something to yell about.
Second voice:
Ann Lamott
I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. . . . My mother might find a thin gold chain in a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. . . .
Lately our pastor had been urging us to act more like Martin Luther King, Jr., which I feel gives an unfair advantage to the more decent and humane people. The rage returned in me.
I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but that they do hurt and even sometimes kill us. . . .
I wondered whether I could try to love my president, as Jesus or Dr. King would . . .
In my head I saw the president, marching on an aircraft carrier, with his little squinched-up Yertle the Turtle mouth, like a five-year-old whose dad owns the ship. Which his dad probably does. Then I saw him in a photo op, signing papers, and something made me stop. I wasn't thinking about his legislation or his tax cuts for the wealthy — I just experimented with the idea that God loves him just as much as God loves my niece Clara . . . How could this be? It didn't seem right. But I stuck with it. And after a while I could feel the tiniest of spaces in the knot, the lightest breath between tangled links. In that space, I saw the face of a boy I used to know superimposed on the president's face, a boy named John who liked the smartest girl in first grade. When she wrote at her desk, she squinched up her face fiercely, intently, and John thought that expression was what helped her to be so smart. So he squinched up his face, too, when he read, for the entire year.
For a few seconds, I imagined my president doing this in first grade as well. Actually, I remembered him doing this, about a week before . . .
To be honest, I am never going to get anywhere with this president. But Jesus kept harping on forgiveness and loving one's enemies, so I decided to try. . . .
It meant trying to respect them, it meant identifying with their humanity and weaknesses. It didn't mean unconditional acceptance of their crazy behavior. They were still accountable for the atrocities they'd perpetrated, as you were accountable for yours. . . . I was fine, until I heard the latest bad news from Iraq, and my hostilities flared up again. It continues to be a struggle. I know that . . . trying to love the people in this White House is the single most subversive position I could take.
I got the chain out of the drawer and gave it another try, but I didn't have any patience. It crossed my mind to take a hammer to the miserable thing and bust it into pieces. . . . But something inside me got back to work. . . . So, tug, tug, poke, poke: I have to believe that if I do this, it will cause change . . . You never know exactly where the knot is going to release, but usually, if you keep working with it, it will.