Wrath

September 24, 2024

Hi!  How is each and every one?  I am trying my best to catch up.  I am determined to make this one within this week. It is amazing that within a week many positive and negative surprises come up as though making this chapter come alive. It is equally amazing how negative situations are drowned by positive ones owing to not taking the negative things seriously as obstructions to the way of positive situations to come alive.

I was made to realize and understand that traffic, road repairs, rain and  sunshine are part and parcel of our daily ordinary life regardless of whether we are heading to office or to school or simply work at home, or from home.

Once again the words of St Augustine have become my favorite reminder: “Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good.  We are the times! Such as we are, such is our own.”

Fr. Fernando Ocariz: “To bring the world closer to God, we seek first of all to come closer to him ourselves, to be contemplatives in ordinary life.” 

Would you allow me, please to share with you the following passages from today’s Mass? I find them consequential to this post.

Ecclesiastes 1:2-11:  “Vanity of vanities.  All is vanity!  A generation goes, a generation comes, yet the earth stands firm forever.  The sun rises, the sun sets; Southward goes the wind, then turns to the north; it turns and turns again; back then to its circling goes the wind.  Into the sea all the rivers go, and yet the sea is never filled, and still to their goal the rivers go.  No man can say that eyes have not had enough of seeing, ears their fill of hearing.  What was will be again; what has been done will be done again; and there is nothing new under the sun. Only no memory remains of earlier times, just as in times to come next year itself will not be remembered”.  

Responsorial Psalm:  O Lord, you have been our refuge from one generation to the next.

You turn men back into dust and say:  ‘Go back, sons of men.’ To your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday, come and gone, no more than a watch in the night.

You sweep men away like a dream, like grass which springs up in the morning.  In  the morning it springs up and flowers: by evening it withers and fades.

Make us know the shortness of our life that we may gain wisdom of heart.  Lord, relent!  Is your anger forever?  Show pity to your servants.

In the morning, fill us with your love; we shall exult and rejoice all or days.  Let the favor of the Lord be upon us: give success to the work of our hands, give success to the work of our hands.

Let us now continue with what we have been talking about in the past two weeks regarding our divine longing for justice (From Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 6).

Wrath:  The Distortion of the Divine Longing for Justice

Many Christians believe that wrath is the simple act of getting angry at an offense or injustice.  In my counseling practice, I encounter many people who have been hurt deeply by others—people who carry deep wounds from abusive parents, philandering spouses, unjust bosses and co-workers, spiteful family members and friends, enemies, and more.  But while many of my clients remain deeply angry at the profound hurt they have experienced at the hands of others, they often feel terribly guilty about being angry, and they wonder if they are committing some sort of sin.  As one client puts it, “I can forgive, but I can’t forget, and when I remember what my parents did to me, the anger just floods me.”

But anger itself isn’t sinful.  How can it be?  God created it just like he created all of our emotions, and God pronounced all that he created as “good” (see Gn 1:31).  Anger is a product of the same neuroendocrine system that is responsible for our hunger and reproductive drives.  Properly ordered, anger is nothing more than the emotional response to an injustice.  It is the warning light on the human dashboard that grabs our attention and says, “This is not the way things are supposed to be!”

Anger itself is not a problem.  It is how we respond to anger that can be either righteous or problematic.  If we allow our anger to motivate us to take thoughtful, appropriate, respectful, and proportionate action to correct an injustice, right a wrong, or restore harmonious order, our anger can be said to be righteous, even godly!  But those four words—thoughtful, appropriate, respectful, and proportionate—are the keys to determining whether our anger is just and righteous or whether it is an indulgence of the deadly sin of wrath.  Whereas anger motivates us to do what we reasonably and respectfully can to make things right, wrath causes us to act in a manner that inevitably makes things much, much worse.  Wrath is anger that is expressed in a manner that is rash, inappropriate, disrespectful, and disproportionate.

 

Bill crushed his wife’s heart when he cheated on her with Britta, a woman he met at the gym. When his wife, Margie, confronted him, he broke down in tears and said that he had been trying to end the relationship, but Britta had threatened to tell Margie everything.  He called Britta that day and told her it was over.  He canceled his gym membership.  He also changed his cell phone number.  Bill asked Margie to go to counseling with him.  They went for a couple of sessions, but ultimately Margie quit going.  It was just too painful.  Although it has been months since the affair was over, Margie still has a hard time being in the same room with Bill.  When he talks to her, the discussion inevitably circles back around to the infidelity.  Every petty irritation becomes “just another reason I can’t trust you.”

Bill has reached out to their pastor for support.  He has tried to encourage Margie to forgive him and surrender her anger, but she denies that she’s angry.  She says, “I don’t have a problem.  Bill is the one who cheated.  I’m not even angry anymore. I’ve forgiven him, but I’ll never forget  what he did.  I don’t think it would be reasonable to suggest that I should.  I’m not going to divorce him.  But I will never let him into my heart again.”

Although Margie’s behavior is unfortunate, it’s important to remember the longing for justice that is at the root of her actions.  All she wanted was for Bill to understand how deeply she was hurt.  Unfortunately, the path she chose in her quest for justice simply locked the whole family in an ever-widening spiral of pain.  Margie had a right to demand justice for the offenses that her husband committed against here.  But what she was doing to her husband couldn’t help but make things infinitely worse.  As St. Ambrose once wisely said, “No one heals himself by wounding another.”

Ambrose’s observation nicely illustrates the insidious nature of wrath.  It turns our anger into an arrow we can shoot right into the heart of the person we believe has wronged us.  It can feel so good sometimes, but it ends up dragging us down, demeaning us, and alienating the very people from whom we want real justice.  More to the point, when we are in the clutches of wrath, we are convinced that we can be satisfied by the justice we can achieve for ourselves in this life, but that’s simply not true.  For every offense we heal, there will be another offense waiting around the corner to disturb our peace.  That may strike some people as a depressing thought, but it’s depressing only if you believe that our divine longing for justice can be completely sated by pursuing worldly justice exclusively.  To find true satisfaction, of course we must pursue justice in this world, but we must pursue that justice in a manner that simultaneously addresses the deeper wound caused by the Fall and the loss of Original Unity and is consistent with our call to divinization.

What does the Holy Father, Pope Francis say opusdei.org The Vice of Wrath:  The vice of wrath is a particularly dark vice, and it is perhaps the easiest to detect from a physical point of view. The person dominated by wrath finds it difficult to hide this impulse: you can recognize it from the movements of his body, his aggressiveness, his labored breathing, his grim and frowning expression.

In its most acute manifestation, wrath is a vice that concedes no respite. If it is born of an injustice suffered (or believed to be suffered), often it is unleashed not against the offender, but against the first unfortunate victim. There are men who withhold their rage in the workplace, showing themselves to be calm and composed, but at home they become unbearable for the wife and children. Wrath is a pervasive vice: it is capable of depriving us of sleep, of barring the way to reason and thought.

Wrath is a vice that destroys human relationships. It expresses the incapacity to accept the diversity of others, especially when their life choices diverge from our own. It does not stop at the misconduct of one person, but throws everything into the cauldron: it is the other person, the other as he or she is, the other as such, who provokes anger and resentment. One begins to detest the tone of their voice, their trivial everyday gestures, their ways of reasoning and feeling.

When the relationship arrives at this level of degeneration, lucidity is lost. Wrath makes us lose lucidity, doesn’t it? Because one of the characteristics of wrath, at times, is that sometimes it fails to mitigate with time. In these cases, even distance and silence, instead of easing the burden of mistakes, magnifies them. For this reason, the Apostle Paul – as we have heard – recommends to Christians to face up to the problem straight away, and to attempt reconciliation: “Do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph 4:26). It is important that everything dissipate immediately, before sundown. If some misunderstanding arises during the day, and two people can no longer understand each other, perceiving themselves as far apart, the night cannot be handed over to the devil. The vice would keep us awake at night, brooding over our reasons and the unaccountable mistakes that are never ours and always the other’s. It is like that: when a person is enraged, they always, always say that the other person is the problem. They are never capable of recognizing their own defects, their own shortcomings.

 In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus makes us pray for our human relations, which are a minefield: a plane that is never in perfect equilibrium. In life, we have to deal with trespassers who have committed faults against us, just as we have never loved everyone in the right measure. To some we have not returned the love that was due to them. We are all sinners, all of us, and we all have accounts to settle: do not forget this. We are indebted, we all have accounts to settle, and therefore we all need to learn how to forgive so as to be forgiven. Men do not stay together if they do not also practice the art of forgiveness, as far as this is humanly possible. Wrath is countered by benevolence, openness of heart, meekness and patience.

 

But, on the subject of wrath, there is one last thing to be said. It is a terrible vice, it was said, that is at the origin of wars and violence. The Poem of the Iliad describes the wrath of Achilles, which will be the cause of “infinite woes.” But not everything that stems from wrath is mistaken. The ancients understood well that there exists an irascible part of us that cannot and must not be denied. The passions are to some extent unconscious: they happen, they are life experiences. We are not responsible for the onset of wrath, but always for its development. And at times it is good for anger to be vented in the right way. If a person were never led to anger, if a person did not become indignant at an injustice, if he did not feel something quivering in his gut at the oppression of the weak, it would mean that the person was not human, much less Christian.

Holy indignation exists, which is not wrath but an inner movement, a holy indignation. Jesus knew it several times in His life (cf. Mk 3.5): He never responded to evil with evil, but in His soul, He felt this sentiment, and in the case of the merchants in the Temple, He performed a strong and prophetic action, dictated not by wrath, but by zeal for the house of the Lord (cf. Mt 21:12-13). We must distinguish well: zeal, holy indignation, is one thing; wrath, which is bad, is another.

It is up to us, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to find the right measure for the passions. To educate them well so that they turn to good and not to evil. Thank you.

I guess there is enough material for you and me to reflect on and bring into our conversation with the Holy Spirit during our silent moments of prayer during the day. He will surely without fail move us to do what is good and to avoid what will further hurt us.  But be aware it will not be without effort and struggle on our part to swallow our pride and discipline our feelings.  Unless we are open and humble to listen and heed what He says, we will not manage to get out of the rot of pride we have gotten ourselves into. Let us ask Him for the virtue of humility to see objectively and accept willingly our own side of the hurt. Always remember that what defiles you and me is what is inside our hearts and not what is outside of us.  The control of the situation is within us.  You and I are the masters of our passions and feelings.  We are the ones who in the end train and discipline  ourselves. Remember also that you and I are not alone in this work of our divinization.  It is God’s work but not without our own correspondence.

See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”

Affectionately,                    

Guadalupinky