A number of years ago there was a bumper sticker that was popular with a certain set which read, “If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention.” Now I am always a bit skeptical of bumper stickers that tell me how I should be feeling or for that matter any bumper sticker that tells me to do anything. If I were ranking all of the ways in which people can effectively communicate information, I would put the bumper sticker somewhere around bathroom walls, fortune cookies and Facebook posts. And while none of these methods seem to be instruments for furthering the erudition of our society, I do want to spend a few moments on this particular bumper sticker and point out its rather unique reasoning. First the bumper sticker found anger to be the only logical conclusion for the state of our society and therefore those who were not angry had something seriously wrong with their moral being. Anger in and of itself was what was needed to be fully self-actualized. The other thing I found interesting about this bumper sticker was that it seemed to suggest that there was not enough anger in the world and that we needed to add a little more to the special sauce to get our society really working the way that it ought. Obviously, I would tend to disagree with such an assessment, but more than that I would like to briefly look at anger and what we, as Christians, should think about it. Is anger something to be avoided or are there times and places where it might be not only needed but also virtuous?
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians today he states, “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” This assessment certainly suggest that there is the possibility of anger being acceptable, but not the type that is sinful. Which all seems reasonable enough, however I am not sure if it clarifies the ways in which we are able to or should be angry. If I folded up my tent right now having told you to only participate in the non-sinful type of anger I don’t know that you would leave here knowing what to do, so let’s explore this idea a little more.
As is always the case when you don’t know what to do, it is always good to start with St. Augustine, largely because he was very smart and he wrote about a lot of stuff. And as I had hoped he wrote a bit about anger. St Augustine said this, “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” Now I realize that the first daughter sounds a little like the bumper sticker that I just spent the past few moments mocking, but notice that that Augustine does not end there. Hope does not have only one child, but rather two children and as Augustine would have certainly said if he was familiar with the works of Frank Sinatra, “You can’t have one without the other.” He introduces anger but then states that it can only be part of hope if your anger is translated into changing things. Anger is only useful when it is not an end unto itself, but rather when it is used as the launching point for improving things. I am, however, afraid that is not where we stand these days as a country – being angry or making other people angry seems to be where most of our debates play themselves out. And in many ways for all of the complaining about it, I think a lot of people kind of like it, because simply being angry asks very little of us. I can sit around in my underwear in front of the TV and be angry, in fact I probably have, but I am also aware that it did nothing besides maybe making me feel self-important. But actually changing things, actually making our family, our community or even our country a better place is not so easy, however that is what is asked of us if we are going to go down the path of anger.
I think what taking both St. Paul’s and St. Augustine’s comments together suggests is that there is a place for anger but that it requires something more than just getting angry. I know for myself getting annoyed or upset is something is quite easy. I can watch the news and get upset by people I don’t know or drive on the freeway and get annoyed with any number of people with Illinois license plates, but ultimately it does not do a whole lot. Anger if not used the way God intended can become simply a perverse sort of pleasure - a poor man’s version of joy.
I now and then ponder why we are so angry these days. I mean by most objective measures things are pretty good – we are not involved in a major war, the economy is doing pretty well, there are no frightening viruses spreading and the reported ABBA reunion seems to have fizzled. Yet to listen to people you would think that there has never been a time worse than this. And I think part of the explanation for this is that people have forgotten how to be angry. They have forgotten to not sin in their anger and think that it is simply enough to be very cross all of the time. The anger we find so much these days is entirely outwardly focused; it is about how wrong that other group of people is, but in that it forgets the need to help others and more importantly it forgets the shared bond of our common humanity.
One of the major heretical struggles that Christianity has always had is that of Gnosticism. It has many characteristics which I do not really want to get into, but one thing that it allows for that true Christianity does not is dualism. Dualism essentially posits that there is good and bad and by extension there are good and bad people. This differs from Christianity, which says that we all have the potential for both good and evil. How this works out in practical terms is when we think in dualistic terms we can divide the world into good and bad people, based on whatever criteria we want. These days politics seems to be the main criteria – people who have different views on the way health care should be distributed or how much corporations should be taxed are not seen simply as people with different views but as evil people. And obviously this dualistic distinction is not just something found in Christianity, but a large swath of society has adapted this position happily hating whoever may disagree with them. Into such an environment when anger is introduced it is incredibly hard for it to be the non-sinful type, because we have already supposed that the things with which we disagree cannot be rehabilitated. We are under no obligation to work for the change that Augustine’s second daughter, who represented the courage part, because of the belief that people cannot be changed.
The other day we remembered St Dominic – he was the founder of the Dominican Order (but not the Dominican Republic even though it is named after him). One of the things he is remembered for in his life is his work with a group of Albigensian heretics – which is just as exciting as it sounds, maybe more. I don’t want to go too much into the heresy, but the quick version is they taught that suicide through self-starvation was a good thing. Dominic was not the first to go to them, a group of Cistercians went, but it turns out they were fairly pompous in their approach and the Albigensians weren’t buying it. But Dominic and his companion Diego were austere by comparison and this austerity and personal self-discipline appealed to many of the heretics. We know that they did not convert everyone, but they converted more than the previous group and I think part of the reason for their success was their humility. Certainly they did not like the perversion of Christianity, they were probably even angry about it, but they never forgot the mercy shown to us in the coming of Jesus Christ and so they never looked as others as lessor or other than them.
Yes we can be angry at how things are, but we must never use this anger to elevate ourselves above our fellow humans because we are all sinners in need of a savior. Anger like saffron in a paella can be helpful, but cannot be used too liberally or it risks overwhelming that which we are trying to help. We may be angry, but not sinful so that we can be God’s own both now and forevermo