Truth and Anger
I Was Thinking…
What do we do when we are so angry that we’ve forgotten why we’re really angry? I can simply say that in those moments of life, it sure is helpful to have an honest truth-teller in my circle of living. Isn’t it true, “that before ‘truth sets you free’ it tends to make you miserable?” We all need risky truth-tellers in our lives.
Life can be frustrating. I once read frustration defined as ‘anger and depression’ combined. I find it helpful when I’m frustrated to pause for a moment and think about what has made me angry and why I have allowed that anger to turn toward discouragement and depression. If I am able to pause for a brief moment, I can often ‘name it’ and thus begin to deal with it (whatever ‘it’ is). If I don’t pause, then frustration, at least for me, leads to blaming others unnecessarily and never owning my piece of the struggle.
Richard Rohr in his book Falling Upward writes, “What passes for morality or spirituality in the vast majority of people’s lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks. Some would call it conditioning or even imprinting. Without very real inner work, most folks never move beyond it. You might get beyond it in a negative sense, by reacting or rebelling against it, but it is much less common to get out in a positive way…Jesus uses quite strong words to push us out of the family nest (Luke 14:26) and to name a necessary suffering at the personal, counterintuitive and sentimental level possible…We all must leave home to find the real and larger home…The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking.” (Pp. 83-84)
All of life is multi-layered and so are our lives. Leaning into spiritually mature living is hard work. It requires the intentional effort of accountability, study, and balanced mentoring. The question I have to ask myself (and maybe you do too) is do I really want to mature in life? Or am I too tired, too old, too young, too frustrated, too arrogant, too sure of myself to sense the need to continue the journey toward perfection? Even though Jesus said, “Be perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), do I really desire to lean into Jesus’ exhortation toward maturity? And if I don’t feel I have the energy to follow Jesus in this way, is it a step in the direction of giving up on myself? And if I give up on myself, am I in fact beginning the process of giving up on others? And If I am in the process of giving up on others, am I in fact in the process of giving up on the world? Where has my hope and resurrection-faith gone?
“In the twelfth and final step of the ‘Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous’ it is stated, ‘Until and unless you give your life away to others, you do not seem to have it yourself at any deep level.’ Beauty or ugliness is first of all in the eye of the beholder. Good people will mirror goodness in us, which is why we love them so much. Not-so-mature people will mirror their own unlived and confused life onto us, which is why they confuse and confound us so much, and why they are hard to love.” (Rohr, Pp. 154-155)
What do we do when we become so angry that we have forgotten why we are angry? The answer is multi-layered, but I will simply say, that when our anger reaches such a level, we’d better address it, or it will literally destroy us; destroy the relationships that matter and it will move us beyond frustration into the destruction of our very soul.
In the movie A Few Good Men there is a famous line that has been repeated in all sorts of circumstances, “You can’t handle the truth!” I hope that will never be said of me. I hope it will never be said of you. Before truth sets us free, it often makes us miserable first…yet it is worth every moment of miserableness to be set free.
Always Thinking…
The Rev. Dr. Terry E. Walton
Executive Assistant to the Bishop
terry.walton@ngumc.net
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