Anger

I would like to think about anger here for a while. Yes, about the passion of anger in particular, as opposed to a short emotion that comes and goes.

A passion becomes the subject, and the soul turns into an object. Man becomes passive in his heart -- something which is completely contrary to created nature. The anger, as passion, becomes master: the person becomes a slave -- something he should never be.

There is much that is written already on anger. I recommend the Philokalia, or something by Metropolitan Hierotheos, or one of the new things by Fr. Alexis Trader.

But here and now, I propose something different. Let us think about the anger -- not of you -- but of someone else. What if it is the anger of passion that is afflicting your friend? your parent? your spouse? your child? your colleague at work?

Here, the responsibility is not so direct. For the self, the prescription is relatively simple. Repent. Surrender blame. Fast. Repeat the Jesus Prayer. Deliberately forgive your enemies and bless them in your mind, over and over again. Resist thoughts that are known to re-enflame the anger. Consider your own sinfulness and your need for Grace that exceeds the guilt of your enemies. Receive the mysteries of reconciliation and the Eucharist. Repent. Rejoice. Over and over again. Bear your Cross.

This is old advice, and cannot be modified, because it is perfect. It is designed for human nature, and it can be and must be effective in every moment, in every person and situation. To think otherwise is to fall to satanic deception.

That is the counsel given by the Church to angry people.

But again, what if the angry person is not you, but someone else? This advice is meaningful for the penitent, who accepts his radically free moral agency and takes complete responsibility for his actions. What if he doesn't? What if you love that person, but are exposed to his anger? What if you suffer collateral damage? What if he becomes -- at least in practice -- your enemy? An enemy who is supposed to love you? An enemy that is becoming increasingly more difficult to love?

It seems that this age is becoming more ludicrous and more incensed. Stupider, less truly educated and intellectually disciplined, and even more inflammable.

What do you do with the irrascibility of another, whom you either cannot, nor would not, choose to escape?

I wonder if the sojourn of our Lord with humanity in the world might help us in this question. Let us think about this problem in the only way a Christian can: theologically. Let us speak of what we know:

He was and is impassable, sinless, divinely obedient in His humanity, completely co-inherent.

I do not know whether the Manger and the Cave were surrounded by an angry mob of cult and society, but His persistent Mystical Body is. Right now. Like in your house.

What do you do when the tantrums flare, when the long repetitions of grievances get chanted, when the black books of past aughts get opened up to decades of carefully registered catalogs? When someone else, a brother or closer, must wring their heart in distemper?

What did, what does, Jesus do? What did, what does, Mary? Or the saints?

Prayer, of course. Even our Lord, the Second Person of the Trinity, retreated in wilderness to pray. There is no possibility of sainthood without constant prayer: it is the primary condition of "Theotokos."

In particular, pray the petition "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." You cannot trust the Lord without praying this. Pray the Jesus Prayer, wear your prayer rope. Pray and fast.

Why? I surmise, with more than anecdotal evidence, that evil grows like bacteria in the social presence of passion, especially anger. And I take literally the hopeful words "Resist the Devil and he will flee you."

If you do not pray, then the passionate anger of your friend will suck you into its dark vortex. You, too, will enter the fray. And while you might entertain yourself with images of romantic self-defense, of only standing up for yourself and establishing your rights, the reality remains: none of these images will be realized in the end, and the only gain will be greater ruin.

I have fallen to anger many times in my odd life, and never has it turned for good. Prayer, on the other, has never failed to turn out for good, if prayer was really done.

It establishes, for one thing, a zone of freedom. Or, if you please, a shaft of sunlight on a distant pasture in a cold afternoon of gloom and foreboding. Prayer establishes a locale in which determinism no longer obtains. Genetic predispositions might not take over here. Personalities may not give over to the iron chains of probability.

"Sin is crouching at your door: you may overcome it."

That can only be understood on a plane higher than double-election. The problem of anger has forced me to turn against not only nihilism, but also voluntaristic calvinism. One cannot lose hope for the conversion of destiny in prayer: anger can fade away.

But it doesn't have to: and, in a barbarous age, more frequently it does not. That is the problem.

Pray so that the tide of anger will ebb at the shoreline of your heart. Only prayer will accomplish this high ground.

Pray and fast. Fasting is the incarnational realization of prayer. As such, it acts as an amplification into real history. Onto the real dirt of this world. Into the real time of human speech and defecatory idiocy. 

Fasting wilts passion, and we are not talking here only of gluttony. Fasting withers the passions -- the presence of any provides fuel for the enemy fire. 

I know -- sadly, only from secondhand experience -- that the presence of a person totally surrendered to deification (i.e., a saint) seems to pacify the ragings of others. Deification is really the only response we have to demonification: which, I fear, is really the problem here. Passions elevated to a level where empathy is lost, and where also is lost all manner of self-control and voluntary decision seems to indicate a power that is completely alienated from human nature.

I am thinking here especially of the intensity of passion that violates even the rubrics of selfish self-interest. A boy that casts himself into the fire is oppressed by greater powers than his own sinfulness. A man who shakes his broken chains in the place of the dead, and rages at the Son of God, is moved by a deeper pestilential dread than his own sinful choices. He may have been a wife-beating drunk, who moved into murderous crime, who descended into deeper sins -- but now he is inhabited by a Legion of devils.

Yes, I know. Not every anger is demonic. But some are so intense that, without stopping to wonder whether it is "obsession" or "possession," if there is no humane reponse, if there is no answer to the Shepherd's Call, "Are you there? Is it you My child? Could you not tarry one hour?"

If not, and only rage remains, then I wonder how humanity may have gotten so eclipsed. 

Saints are needed. Shepherds who are not hired hands are required. 

Meantime, we remain, on the battlements, in a lonely redoubt, under an apparent siege.

For the meantime, we in the garrison (to continue this marshal trope) cannot lose hope, for to do so is to surrender. We can rightly believe that all sieges come to an end. Every martyr knows that the oppressors and tormentors can only do so much, and then the Lord calls a halt to another Friday: Crossbearing is always limited under God's severe mercy.

This open trust to Sovreignty must be maintained.

There is, too, the Sovreign Promise. We do not have to understand it as deterministic in order to receive its ministry. "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, say to this mountain move, and it shall move."

I wonder. Perhaps our allegorization of that good verse had not gone far enough. Perhaps it needs to stretch into the reach of time and space: certainly on the Cross, the Lord moved mountains of inevitability, did He not? Sin and Death, after all, are the only answers to certain equations: but, here is Life and Love, anyways. Who could have thought?

Even so, if I pray and fast, believe and confess, and commune with the liberating, excorcizing Christ: then might not the mountains of anger move, even if they are lodged in the heart of another?

"This kind cannot come out other than by prayer and fasting."

So, beloved legionnaires, we will wait and suffer the enemy tide. We will keep safe and preserve the little ones, who do not and cannot understand: it is not our task to explain, and to burden innocent hearts.

We will fast and pray, and liturgize in our little fort.

Here the Son rises, even before the Dawn.

 

Comments

[Darlene]

Thank you so much for this excellent instruction. It was timely for me.

[Steve L]

Thank you, father.

[Prayer Rope]

When Anger strikes me, I turn to prayer and my prayer rope. It helps me to focus on the prayer instead of the anger.

Regards and God Bless,

Sabrina

[Air Jordan Boutique]

He is a good friend that speaks well of us behind our backs.