Dealing with Anger

We humans are born with a remarkable ability to feel and a concomitant ability to respond to and express these feelings. How our feelings are perceived, accepted and responded to depends on many factors.

Anger, as the other emotions: love, sadness, joy, fear, is a normal human feeling. Feelings reside very much in our body selves. Anger is an emotion that propels the person to move out in physical or verbal response to protect self others or things from harm. Fear, on the contrary, is an emotion that evokes a pulling back in self protection. Love is a feeling that energizes us forward to loving action and embrace.

All of these emotions are fueled, inspired, by our mind’s perception of the object or person before us as positive or negative, life threatening or enhancing.

Of all human emotions, the one that seems most prone to be problematic is anger. Anger, according to its strength and our capacity to see clearly and deeply into its nature, can be an enormous source of suffering for us and others. Anger destroys family relationships, friendships, business partnerships...it may lead to bullying, road rage and all too easily sow the seeds of war.

Many of us grew up with the idea that anger was a “bad” emotion. Yes, “Jesus did get angry,” (at least once) says the Gospel. But - he was God. In their loving attempts to raise good children, parents sometimes squelch the early self protective energy (that’s what anger often is) that impels children to speak out their feelings when they perceive something as negative or harmful. Adults usually do this because they believe it is in the child’s best interests and in an effort to teach good and appropriate conduct. Sadly, if this happens too often the child grows into either a rebellious adult or an overly docile adult with little sense of how to make wholesome use of the energy of anger in personal or public situations.

Our hope in these hours of retreat is to invite all to look deeply at the God-given emotion of anger. We hope to offer insights into how this emotion can be used to strengthen us in our convictions and allow us wisely to caretake ourselves, those we love and our world. We believe that this will only happen if we understand deeply the roots of our anger and if we know how to tame its strength rather than fuel its sometimes inordinate desires.

Honest, fearless self-reflection can do a great deal to help us understand the roots of and negatives ways we deal with our anger. We can learn how to gently soothe ourselves and assure ourselves of our own goodness and value. We can find tools to help us to speak our truth mindfully and without blame or shame.

We need, each of us, to appreciate not only our own pain but the pain of others/ the pain of our world, so as to live and act with COMPASSION that is truly HEALING.

Pat and Tim will present a weekend retreat October 21 to 23, 2011 at Holy Family entitled, Dealing with Anger: Creating a Culture of Compassion. Click here for more information.

Surprised by Joy

by Brandon Nappi

Our society puts incredible pressure on us to be happy. Shelves at bookstores are spilling over with self-help books. In our culture, happiness is a billion dollar industry which peddles everything from wrinkle-free skin, to slim waist lines, to the perfect sex life. I don’t know about you, but this pressure to be happy is making me unhappy. Think of the messages that we invite into our homes by way of television: you’re fat, ugly, too old, too wrinkled, too stupid, too busy, too tired. Billions of dollars a year are spent to entice us to measure our happiness by externals.

Yet true Christian joy is like the current deep below the river where I bring my young daughters to play. Depending upon which point of the river we come to, we can see calm pools of peace, crashing whitewater, or places where the water almost seems to be running backwards as it encounters giant boulders and tree trunks. The surface of the river knows the great variety of activity, but deep beneath the surface, the water knows only one direction. Your sorrow, anger, frustration, and worry along with your happiness, gratitude, and elation are all wonderful parts of what it means to be human. If those emotions make up the chaotic surface of the river of our humanity, then joy is the current deep beneath. So you can have joy even in your sorrow. You can have joy deep beneath your anger.

In an age when we are pressured to be happy from the outside, we easily forget that joy comes from deep within. I remember my very first year at the retreat center, a retreatant came into my office. “How are you?” I asked. “AWEFUL!” she declared. She had been homeless, beaten by her husband, and abandoned by her family. She struggled with addiction and depression while living alone in chronic pain. She said that her life had not been easy. Still, she declared, “Joy is not the absence of suffering. Joy is the presence of God.” This constant availability of God is the true foundation of Christian joy.

So how do you become a joyful person? Being joyful is not about becoming something you’re not; it’s not about getting something you don’t have. Being joyful is about accessing something you already have. You become joyful by opening your eyes and discovering that God’s presence is with you in every place and every moment.

The great surprise of Christian joy is that it is always available. It’s nothing of consequence. It’s provoked by the thing you walk past everyday. You step on it as you walk out your front door. It lies just through your kitchen window. What is remarkable about joy is precisely that it is not remarkable. It’s a joy that God has generously scattered all over the earth like sprinkles on my daughters’ cupcakes. We’ve missed this in our churches. For too long, we’ve made the Christian life a rather gloomy and somber existence in which holiness has been defined by how aloof, disconnected, and how other-worldly we become. Joyless Christianity is not Christianity. Let’s remember the wise words from Julian of Norwich, the 15th mystic who said, “The greatest honor that you can give Almighty God, greater than all your penances and sacrifices and mortifications, is to live joyfully because of the knowledge of his love.”