A Sometimes Deadly Sin

It's true I never really thought about anger until I had kids. I was going through life pretty darn comfortable without anyone poking and prodding all of my senses at once. But when I felt my body tensing and blood rushing to my face, I was alarmed and scared of my own anger. What is this? Apparently I've never cared so much about my own peace before. 

I decided to reach out and find a woman in my local church community to help me on my journey of anger discovery. I wanted to know what healthy anger looked like. So, for the past couple of months we've been reading The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin by Garret Keizer. The title alone captured my attention. I didn't want to read a how-to book. I didn't want to be fixed. I wanted something that I could come alongside and grow in grace and mercy. Friends, Garret Keizer has been doing just that. In a strange poetic way, he upsets and rattles my assumptions and forces me to wake up and join Christ in the abundant life. Not a life where my problems must be solved, but suffered.

Because Christ did not solve the cross, He suffered it.

May Sarton, a prolific poet, novelist and memoirist, quotes two of her favorite mentors, Carl Jung and George Herbert:

Jung says, "The serious problems in life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and putrefaction." And so, no doubt, with the problems of a solitary life. 

...I asked myself the question, "What do you want of your life?" and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, "Exactly what I have--but to be commensurate, to handle it all better."

Yet it is not those fits of weeping that are destructive. They clear the air, as Herbert says so beautifully: "Poets have wronged poor storms: such days are best; They purge the air without, within the breast. What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast."

Like Jung, I too believe there is never really closure. Save for the final nail on my coffin I will carry all with me. But not without the grace of new life in the here and now. And like Sarton, I do believe I could handle it all better, and should! And then Herbert sweeps in and graciously clears the air. So perhaps, fits of weeping after my son and I exchange an angry interlude, are okay. Perhaps they are more than okay. Perhaps it's Jesus suffering with us and bringing us through to the resurrected side. The side of reconciliation.

Thinking back through my education, I spent the first 18 years of my life learning in a cubicle. It was a very controlled environment while the spontaneity and angst of my youth seeped through the dividers seeking relationship. Relationships. That's what survived my education. Uncontrollable, full of conflict and joy. But for the large part, my educational well-being depended solely on myself. I created my own perfect little oasis. I laid the law down upon myself to stay motivated, learning for the most part, in isolation. The religiosity of it all was palpable. 

I have felt the cubicles cracking in my mind the past few years. Life pushes and prods and asks, "How are you gonna deal with me now?"

I can't go back to my well-organized space with perfectly sharpened pencils and the sound of minds buzzing in silence. A lot of my life was on autopilot back then...I was asleep to a lot of things. My anger came out quietly and sideways. Never direct. Leaking out of a window, creating a stinky mess. Always caring more about avoiding conflict and fearing losing a friendship. But of course, the irony is that I pushed people further away by stubbornly avoiding them when I was angry. And even avoiding my own thoughts!

I think, in a lot of ways, my anger has risen up now to show me a better life. To tell me that in fact I do care about a lot of things. Sloth and avarice (the love of money), two of the deadly sins, in relation to anger are both numbing. Taken to the extreme, one might as well be dead. Garrett Keizer says it so profoundly here:

Dead men throw no fits, or it seems they wouldn't. And at first glance sloth and avarice do seem a long way from wrath. But death hates resurrection. No one likes to be woken from a sound sleep. Where those afflicted by sloth and avarice can become most angry is when someone or something--like a dissatisfied spouse--disturbs the tranquility of their chosen sarcophagus....Anger comes from an abrupt awakening. Even if we are not especially slothful or avaricious, we can still become terrible angry on being wakened from a reverie, a preoccupation, or an illusion...On a more spiritual level, we are gripped by the same emotion that stoned the prophets. Before I surrender to that kind of anger, I will always want to ask which is of greater moment, the rudeness of the disturbance, or the danger of the sleep.

With every single disturbance I must ask myself, am I going to numb out again? Am I going to spend all my energy on maintaining my cubicle or dying to my ego? Am I going to faithfully step into the moment, however long it might be, trusting the miracle resurrection? Am I going to welcome the disturbance of strangers? Will I welcome conflict between me and my spouse? My children?

As if this wasn't enough to wrap my head around, Keizer goes even deeper to draw out the lie that anger truly is. Perhaps the best way to catch a glimpse at Anger naked is to call it by it's older name, "wrath."

Nowadays, we tend to reserve that usage for God, especially in his preexilic mode--and therein lies the key. Wrath is the anger of someone who has begun to play at God. Wrath is the anger of one who has distorted his sense of self and the world--a disproportion that he shares with his proud, envious, lustful, gluttonous, and avaricious counterparts. He feels that his prerogatives, his grievances, his right to redress are all absolute. Holy, holy, holy. A person consumed by wrath has eaten and digested the forbidden fruit she thinks will make storms out of the garden of Eden cursing and swearing, which is as much as to say acting as though she created the place and that it is her God-damned business and hers alone what happened there.

And yet, before I wallow in self-pity, I turn and see hope. I see the I AM in the midst of the curse. There is a remnant of something created and good. All anger is not sin. The kingdom of God is now and not yet. Perhaps our bursts of frustration and dammits are as if to say, "Take back your world, O God, if this is how it works!" It carries an echo of faith. Faith that the world ought to work better. There ought to be tomatoes on this plant. There must be some angel protecting me from stubbing my toe. There ought not be children separated from their parents at our national border. Its a rough theology, but it's still theology.

Like the child who cries, "You don't love me!" trusting that his parents do indeed love him and thus will be hurt by the remark, the person who cries out, "God damn it" is in some way acknowledging that God has already blessed "it," by making it and by sustaining its cussed existence. If an atheist falls in a forest, do his curses make a sound? They do, but they make no sense.

What have we found ourselves in? Christ have mercy.

I'm only a quarter of the way through Keizer's book and I'm both apprehensive and excited with each new chapter I read. Let me geek out for a second. Here are the remaining section and essay titles:

Anger in the Head:

1. Anger as Mentality
2. Anger as Fear
3. Anger as Privilege
4. Anger as Grief
5. Anger as Grace

Anger in the House:

1. The Chronic Angers of the House
2. Angry Men: Agamemnon and Saul, Michael Henchard and Wade Ward
3. Angry Women: Clytemnestra and Boudica, Medea and Sethe
4. Anger and Children
5. Domestic Revolution

Anger in the Church

1. They That Are Sick
2. Passion Plays
3. Forgiveness
4. Loving the Enemy
5. Anger at God

Anger in the World

1. Work
2. Words
3. Venturing Out
4. Napoleon's Test
5. Someday You Will

There's this mural in downtown Portland that I love to look at. A diving bell-esqu figure at the bottom of the ocean catching the stars from above to shine them in the depths below. Or at least, that's how I see it. I kind of feel like a diving bell lately...