Opening Words - "Te Deum" by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largesse of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day¹s work done
as well as I am able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

Sermon

As a child the poet Naomi Nye once asked her mother as they traveled
along a road in a car while watching palm tree after tree float by the
windows in an endless pattern, "how do you know if you are going to die?"
With strange confidence, her mother answered, "When you can no longer make a
fist." I immediately associated this little story with anger, not just
because it made reference to making a fist with that image of punching back,
but it seemed to me a defiant affirmation of life in the face of the
inevitable, a time when anger was its most righteous. It is like Dylan
Thomas saying "rage, rage against the dying of the light" because he does
not want to give up this good earth. I will fight for life until the end.
If we think of fighting for life in this way, probably most of us realize
that anger is typically described as one of the five normal stages of
preparation for death we all must encounter. In this case we use anger to
assert that something fundamental about life is unfair, and it is also
something we assert to ultimately accept that which has made us angry, yes,
we finally agree, I must finally let go and accept this fact of life.

We all feel anger as long as we live, and we often ask when should I keep
it in, when is it speaking righteous truth, and when should I just let it
go. During the last couple of weeks Andrea and I have had to deal with our
share of anger emanating from a tenant controversy at our house in Maine.
Our insurance company was forcing was to remove a wood stove from our
tenants apartment. Even though we installed a furnace a few years ago, and
said the stove was no longer in use, that was not sufficient. The stove had
to go. I tried to make arrangements with the realtor who handles our
property to remove the stove, but our tenant Sandy, was concerned how the
place would look with no stove, and a hole in the chimney. She went to see
him to gain assurance that he would cover the hole. He is a man who has
incredible class prejudice, and does not even realize it. He telegraphs
that anyone who is struggling or poor is clearly to blame for their state,
and therefore an inferior being, only worthy to rent to if you must.
Apparently she did not return his phone calls quickly enough for him, and
when she went to gain reassurance that the space would be cleaned up, he
refused to shake her hand. There was an angry outburst. She removed the
stove from the apartment and would not let him in. She called us in tears
because he treated her like a piece of dirt. He called to say, this is a
very angry woman. I don¹t know what her issue is, but she is very angry. I
am not going to take it anymore. I will no longer manage your property.
Anger - red hot, ending in flames.

We are nearing the end of the season of Lent. While modern people do not
easily embrace the idea of giving up very much, the approach of the
Christian holy days with Palm Sunday today naturally leads to serious
reflection on our lives. Ancient peoples practiced self-denial in order to
make themselves more holy, and we consider what part of our lives needs
balancing or restoration in order that we might feel better about our own
spiritual development. The emotional balance I seek in my own life always
begins and ends with anger. Today I want to reflect on what many of us
learned about the expression of anger, how it is most frequently expressed
in our culture today, and what use it may have in our own lives.

Let me begin by saying that when my tenant and the realtor were both
expressing their red hot anger at each other, I was uncomfortable. Anger is
a difficult emotion for us because many of us learned that anger is bad.
Martha Nussbaum in her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of
Emotions reminds us that emotions like anger are value laden. They express
our ways of understanding the world. In my case I learned that the people
around me made value judgments about the expression of anger. If you feel
it, don¹t express it. You can control it, so keep a lid on it. If it gets
out of hand, everything around you will fall apart. In one word: don¹t. So
while we may have felt anger, we could only have angry eyes, and not words,
and certainly not actions. Unfortunately the inability to express anger in
words frequently leads to pent up anger, which we all know, can turn to
rage. My boys frequently get angry at one another often over some slight
such as who got the toy that the other wanted. We counsel them, "use your
words rather than your fists."

There is a tribe of Eskimos who Nussbaum refers to as true Stoics. They
make a moral judgment about all anger, which is that it is always
inappropriate. It is absurd, they say for an adult to care deeply about
slights and damages. They say it is a sign of immaturity that makes the
possessor very childish. It is true that for many childish slights it is
better for us emotionally to work it out with our words - some means of
compromise or sharing. We are looking to establish norms of human goodness,
and so we learn to be nice to each other and not express any overt anger.
We can understand the cultural context, too. Eskimos live in close
proximity, and need to let go of small slights. You cannot get away from
those you disagree with since there is no place to go except frozen tundra,
whereas the wild west could be wild because there was plenty of open range
for cursing and expressing those angry emotions. The problem is those Eskimo
have the emotions but it becomes an issue of how or where they can be
expressed.

Our religious traditions have also instructed us that expressing anger is
bad. The God of the Hebrew scriptures is often depicted as someone who is
capable of great anger towards the people. We see with the story of Noah
that because the people have not been righteous enough, God becomes angry
and destroys the world with a flood. God is both creator and destroyer
here, rather than two separate beings as depicted in a similar Babylonian
myth. Terrible catastrophe is followed by a new covenant with the same
being who caused the catastrophe to occur out of anger. I think it is
helpful that these qualities are merged in one being as they depict how we
reflect the gamut of emotions in ourselves. We are all potentially creator
and destroyer, and need to find ways to manage our anger. When we were
children we learned to count to ten, and later we punched pillows or found
other physical outlets. As God¹s image evolves in scripture he becomes less
and less destructive, and more a warm family member, but a useful
expression of anger also disappears from our religious understanding of
wholeness. The meek and mild Jesus that many of us were reared on
underscores this failure to find a place for positive uses of anger.
Christians have struggled with those places where Jesus expresses anger.
The recent cinematic Jesus is the suffering one who takes his punishment in
horribly violent ways, but does not strike back. Yet the scriptures show
Jesus in one place acting furiously at the money changers, and in another
cursing a fig tree for no apparent reason, but just to make it wither.
Jesus is usually praised for his lack of anger - he either does not have it
or it is completely under control. We learned that lack of anger meant
emotional perfection. With the temple story, it is said that the people were
bad, and would not listen, and so he is trying to improve them. And what
about the cursing of the tree? Is he testing his power? What about anger
over something he said or did? It might have helped me understand some of
the anger I saw expressed or felt myself that seemed to have no rhyme or
reason. Why couldn¹t Jesus just be angry?

A more recent cultural understanding of Jesus has made him more familiar
with anger. The political radicals of the 1960¹s made Jesus the zealot who
advocated the overthrow of Rome. He was the rebel who eventually inspired
the Latin American liberation theologians. This Jesus was angry at the
establishment, and wanted it overthrown, and so the money changer scene was
depicted in a new light. Now it reflected that he said it was next to
impossible for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven - something about a
camel and the eye of a needle. So ,too the Palm Sunday main event was
overthrowing the normal pattern of a monarch entering a city. Here the poor
king enters on a donkey, and has palms rather than gold carpets strewn
before him. His anger was good. It was a righteous anger that sought truth
and justice.

If anger became a good thing in the 1960¹s, it has become a globalized
right ever since. Our opening words from Charles Reznikoff may surprise us.
We are expected to want that seat on the dais, and if we don¹t get it, then
we become angry at what we don¹t have. We say we would be less angry if we
were satisfied with our lives, but no one seems to be satisfied. It is
unfortunate because there was so much good righteous anger that was born
from unjust circumstances such as racism and the oppression of women. More
recently we have seen this in the battle for same-sex marriage. These
issues have taught us that anger can be responsible and right. Emotions like
anger are no controlled by suppression, but must be part of ethical decision
making. Anger can help us act and make good decisions about what is right
and just. We learned that anger was often appropriate when people were
abused or mistreated. A person who is angry feels like some damage has been
done to them. We believe it has been done willingly; they hurt me. Now it
is important for our well being to express this hurt as anger. Usually the
anger has a blameworthy cause, in others or in ourselves. I feel wronged,
and want it corrected.

We can see that often anger has been legitimate. It is good that our
culture has come to understand that anger should not be judged as bad.
When we feel and own the emotion, we then can find ways to constructively
express it. Whereas I grew up in a time where, especially for women, it was
inappropriate to express it at all, and men had to repress it until it only
came out as rage, now we see anger as legitimate, and not something we can
control with a cool stoicism. Unfortunately, we seem to vent our anger over
trivia. It is apparent that now we often see it as cure for all our
disgruntlement. Whether it emanates from a culture that expects that
everyone needs to work constantly to fulfill all their desires, or
advertises us to death with expectations of big cars and multi-media toys,
we act like we are insatiable. Life just isn't¹ good enough for us anymore
unless we all have the trophy home and the extravagant travel plans. These
are the expectations, and so we feel angry and inferior if it appears we
can¹t have what we think everybody else has. This is born from the feeling
that we have a right to anything we want, and if we don¹t have it, we become
angry.

I think this fixation with slights prevents us from legitimately working
on those things that truly make us angry. Perhaps our anger is a symptom of
deeper hurts, but when the pure expression of anger becomes everybody¹s felt
right, none of us learns ways to constructively understand or learn from our
anger. It is enough just to express it. The problem with claiming any need
or desire denied as a cause for anger shows how clearly wrong headed we can
be on issues of individual freedom and justice. It is unusual these days for
anyone to be angry at themselves for their own mistakes. Sure we have a
right to feel angry if we have been wronged by another unjustly. But did my
tenant ever consider how she didn¹t return phone call, or did the realtor
ever consider how rude he was. No. They felt wronged, and thus justly angry.
What if we were to ask, whose fault is it? In an angry culture we strike
back rather than consider what role we have played in the interaction. Look
at road rage. I often find when someone cuts me off, rather than acting
contrite, they prefer to offer an extended digit.

Anger can be a perversion of true love and true justice because it can
be focused exclusively on how wronged we feel. We become so convinced of the
rightness of our own position we cannot see justice for anyone but us, or
feel love for anyone but the one who is wronged. Terrorists specialize in
anger, and unfortunately a response of anger escalates the anger out of
control. Often we fail to see any righteousness to their position because
we would be angry if we had to give up anything we have, but they are
righteously angry because we have everything. Mostly we fail to understand
that. We are like the Englishman in Pearl Buck¹s novel who is nice enough
but does not even understand that he sees a chink. And he certainly would
not see it as his fault that he fails to understand how prejudice he is. He
is angry because he has felt put down and powerless, but the Englishman
would be surprised at his anger. He would say, he has no cause.

This points to the blindness of anger. We sometimes joke in my household
about how I walk around under a black cloud. Anger is my hot button issue,
and I have always had trouble dealing with anger, expressing it
appropriately, and even understanding when I felt it. Having to referee
three boys and understand their emotions has helped me understand anger
better, but I think most crucial of all is how my anger effects others. Here
there has been a certain inability to understand first how anger effects me,
and second how that emanates out to the world. In the reading from Susan
Griffin she tells us how she loses her sense of self- empowerment when she
defines the person she is angry at as her enemy. Soon she defines herself
entirely in the context of this outside enemy. It becomes the locus for her
very reason for being. I am going to live based on my anger towards you.
There is nothing positive in any of this, and the anger manages her life.
This monstrous force becomes her life.

My life has never been dominated by anger for another person or thing,
but we can see that our anger prevents us from knowing our role in a
relationship. Even though the Englishman is not angry in Pearl Buck¹s
story, what is crucial is that he is not able to see his effect on the other
person. This is what occurs with anger. We are so obsessed with our issue or
our feeling of being wronged that we fail to see how our anger effects those
we love. They want to know what is going on inside. They want to know if
there is something they did. While expressing anger more openly may seem
like a positive step in our culture, that expression has often failed to
take account of how anger effects others relationally and communally. We
should tell those we love about the anger we feel, but not assert its
rightness, as we once asserted its wrongness. Its rightness emerges in the
context of the relationship, not in how I feel. Anger spills onto others and
hurts them, and makes them not want to be around us. We should own it for
ourselves, but not make those we love own it for themselves. Anger needs a
safety valve. We should never be in love with our anger. From the terrorist
we love to hate, to the venom we sometimes let fly on those we love. Let us
learn to understand our anger not in freedom for ourselves, but in justice
for all, so that together we might go forward in love.

Closing Words - "Beginners" by Denise Levertov

But we have only begun
to love the earth.

We have only begun
to imagine the fullness of life

How could we tire of hope?
- So much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

How it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet -
There is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt that we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much in bud.