Anger, Even Toward God, Can Be Good And Healthy — But Only To A Point
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(OPINION) When I was going through hard times a few decades ago, I used to see a very good Christian counselor. It’s not an exaggeration to say he saved my sanity. He may have saved my life.
Among my problems was that, even as I dealt with multiple, simultaneous catastrophes, I was also laboring under the conviction that as a Christian (and as a pastor, for crying out loud!) I ought not be feeling the ugly emotions I was feeling: bitterness, despair, self-pity. I felt guilty for feeling so rotten.
I thought I ought to be sitting on the top rail, praising Jesus, as we used to say in my religious circles. Instead, I was lying under the bottom rail, bloodied, trampled in the dust and not praising God or anybody else.
“Feelings aren’t good or bad,” my counselor used to tell me. “Feelings just are.”
I recalled that recently after reading a devotion by the Roman Catholic contemplative Richard Rohr on the related subjects of anger and grief.
Among the few things my counselor and I ever disagreed about was anger — or at least a particular kind of anger. He thought I was furious at God for the trials I was undergoing. He thought I didn’t want to admit I was mad at God because that was unseemly or I feared incurring the wrath of heaven.
Now, I absolutely was mad at a slew of people.
But I wasn’t mad at God, I insisted. I wasn’t afraid of being mad at him, either. I mean, the Bible itself is chocked full of decent people angrily shaking their fists at the heavens and calling God everything but a milk cow.
What I felt toward God wasn’t anger but disappointment. I wasn’t mad at God because I’d never assumed he was obligated to bail me out of my troubles. He hadn’t directly harmed me. My problems weren’t his fault.
My disappointment stemmed from the fact that God could have helped me and apparently chose not to. That was his right. No hard feelings. But if I could have helped God as easily as he could have helped me, I would have. I was disappointed he hadn’t done for me what I would have done for him if the circumstances were reversed.
Anyway, I digress. My counselor and I never did agree about whether I was mad at God, but our ongoing discussions forced me to ponder anger as a principle — anger toward the Lord, anger toward difficult circumstances and anger toward my fellow pilgrims.
Here’s what I think today.
Anger, as with all emotions, is neither good nor bad. It just is. In fact, if the Bible is to be believed, even God gets mad. Jesus got mad. The apostles got mad.
Indeed, some things should make us angry: The abuse of children. Exploitation of the old or the poor. Tyranny. Selfishness.
The problem arises when we humans, prone to distorting almost everything, distort our anger. We allow it to become unhealthy or even dangerous.
We do this in one of two ways, usually.
First, we may deny anger, as my counselor thought I was doing. We swallow our rage in the interest of “keeping the peace.” If we do that, our anger festers inside us. We poison ourselves. Also, we allow bad actors who’ve harmed us or others to continue unchallenged in their destructive ways.
Second, we may let our anger run amok. We discover so much self-righteous satisfaction in venting our spleens that fury consumes everything we think or do. We identify ourselves as “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.” We proudly set everybody straight all the time. We lash out verbally or even physically at those around us, including the innocent.
Basically, we either underreact or overreact.
Rohr’s daily devotion made a point that might start us on a healthier path:
“After a lifetime of counseling and retreat work — not to mention my own spiritual direction — I have become convinced that most anger comes, first of all, from a place of deep sadness,” he wrote.
True.
“Hurt people hurt people,” I once heard a TV preacher say.
So it’s beneficial to form the habit of examining our anger. We must be ruthlessly truthful with ourselves.
We might ask, for instance: What is it about this situation that makes me so furious?
More often than not, we’ll find our anger is a stand-in for pain: rightly or wrongly, we feel rejected or unappreciated or inferior.
Other times we’re angry because we fear. Maybe we’re afraid we’re much like the ugly people who’ve wounded us — the resemblance is too close for comfort.
It’s amazing what we find when we unflinchingly look. The better we come to know our anger, the better we understand ourselves. The better we understand ourselves, the less power anger holds over us. Having analyzed it, we can bend it toward a healthier end than either denial or bile. We can ask God’s spirit to soften and guide us as we go.
We can use our softened anger to help reshape injurious rules or relationships — it’s a great motivator toward prophetic reforms. We can use it to remind ourselves not to treat others as we were treated, to be more compassionate than we previously were.
As we do such things, we allow anger to be not a vice but a virtue.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.