Anger is one of the traditional seven deadly sins. One of our members noticed that some sermon material appears in my columns. This week, it is explicitly so. Many churches read Ephesians 4:25-5:2 for worship this weekend. quoting a psalm, the writer tells us to be angry but do not sin-do not let the sun go down on your anger.”
First notice that the writer assumes that we get angry. It is not be not angry, but do not sin in anger, with anger. The sin is not anger itself, but how it is processed or used. Not admitting anger can be dangerous. Not using anger as a guide to one’s level of expectations is foolhardy. Mark Twain wrote: ”Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” Second, the time factor is important. anger left festering, inside or outside, It sets the stage for real trouble.
Not that long ago, Adam Sandler was in a surprisingly not terrible movie, Anger Management. That title is a good clue to anger. We cannot expect not to have it, but we do ourselves no favors in not controlling it either. One of the many baleful effects of baby boomer culture was the notion of “letting it all hang out” with anger and other emotions. Fearful of repression, we went to the other extreme. We know that if anger is permitted to control us, if we feed it, it grows. We all know people who seem to scan the environment for the next thing to outrage them. We have a political culture designed to do precisely the same thing.With child rearing practices of high praise we are creating of generation of angry people whose inflated expectations cannot hope to be met consistently.
As I have mentioned before, I have been taken with some of the research of Dr. John Gottman and his long reflections on watching couples in action in taped segments. He sees anger as feeding into “the four horsemen of the (relationship) apocalypse: criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and being overly defensive, or aggressively counter-punching. All of them have anger as a component of their toxin.
Gottman recommends calming oneself and the situation as much as possible. when we get anger, our emotional and mental systems get “flooded.” (this refers to older cars where one could flood the engine where the fuel mixture did not allow the engine to start Anger causes so many misfires in relationships, and it prevents the repair work that needs to be done when a conflict spirals out of control.The University of Wisconsin forgiveness project finds that those who learn to work with their anger and find forgiveness are much more likely to deal with substance abuse than those who do not. their anger boomerangs against themselves.
Anger gets played out differently in an ambience of appreciation. Healthy marital interactions (and I see no reason to change this pattern in other settings) have a 5:1 ratio of positive interaction to negative.Let that sink in for a moment. What significant interactions do we have that match that ratio, especially those we claim to be vital?
Calming oneself is a key to keeping anger in bounds. It may be prayer; it may be placing oneself in a calming environment; it may be getting distracted with a ball game or shopping.
One of the few good children’s chats in church I have heard dealt with words spoken in anger. The speaker said that it was like trying to get toothpaste back into the tube. words and acts done in anger corrode the connections that allow relationships to live and flourish. It is time for adults to learn to m deal with anger in healthy ways.
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