Anger – 28 September 2012

The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4^th century thought that anger is the most dangerous of all the human passions.  They ranked anger as more destructive than greed or lust.  Anger, they said, is our biggest obstacle, not only in prayer, but in all of life.  Abba Ammonas said that he had spent fourteen years in the desert asking God day and night to grant him the victory over anger. 

These people knew that anger plays tricks on us.  If we absolutely have to correct another person in a spirit of anger, they said, we should do it quickly and simply, and then let it go.  Don’t get entangled in any expectation of results.  Evagrius, one of the later desert monks, says we easily sin with anger when we misapply it and use it to punish someone.  He said that prayer is the seed of gentleness and the absence of anger.  But prayer is also a warfare, these people knew, because it was when the monk sat down to pray that he was most likely to be distracted by unresolved anger – old grudges, the memory of old wrongs, even schemes of retaliation and revenge.  They could even get into trouble when their anger tricked them into feeling righteous.  There are numerous desert stories about monks trying to resolve their anger by seeing others as less holy than themselves.  Evagrius wrote:  Better a gentle, worldly man than an irascible and wrathful monk.  St Benedict in his Rule cautions:  Don’t think of yourselves as holy before you really are.  The trick there, if you think about it, is that by the time you really are holy, the last thing you will think is that you are.  And in any case, if you are aware of anger against someone, you are not very righteous at all. 

But anger remains utterly basic and imperative in all our contemporary life and culture.  In many quarters it is considered very trendy.  Much of our journalism is expressing anger about this or that, and some writers work hard to express it eloquently or even elegantly.  Vicious anger and violence are important forms of entertainment for people. 

Contemplatives learn another way.  It begins with the steady healing of our own internal anger, the drawing of the sting of memories and the poison in our reactions to people and events.    And this process happens as we are still and silent, and as we find the grace to let go of anger.