Anger
Preacher: Reverend Andrea Abbott
Anger
I’d like to start by sharing a poem by Phil Cousineau
“The True Origins of Anger” For Rhino
The venerable old word comes down
To us from the Norse, like the prow
Of a ship splitting the fog.
Angr, its bog-rich roots suggest,
Means far more than fury,
Rage, ire, or wrath,
Instead, the sagas say, anger reflects
Profoundly felt grief about what’s
Gone wrong with the world.
Not blue-nosed, bad-termpered, knee-jerk
Reactions to life’s inevitable misfortunes,
But red-faced insight into its avoidable injustices.
If you’re never angry, sang the Viking skalds
In the great mead halls after battle.
You’re still unborn.
This is not what I planned to speak about. This is not what I want to talk about. This is what I feel compelled to talk about. I know there are a million and one other things to talk about besides mass shootings but, as I think I said the last time I talked on this subject, this, what would you call it, phenomenon? trend? horror? keeps reoccurring and, because it does, it announces itself as the problem that cannot or will not be solved. I don’t think we are going to solve it today, right now, but to ignore it, to talk of other things while so many are grieving seems wrong. To say, as many are already saying, that they have heard too much about Orlando also seems wrong. For those that survived, for the families and friends of all involved, including the gunman, Orlando is now the word that will define much of their lives. The question then becomes what new can be possibly said about this? What can we say about the boundless anger that calls forth more anger? How can we live with the amount of unfocussed hate that seems to be engulfing us?
But perhaps we have said far too much about Orlando and all the other mass shootings that came before it. We have said too much and understood too little. One sign at one of the many vigils read End the Anger Now. An interesting demand. How do we end anger? How do we end anger when anger is often a cover for depression, an almost addictive emotion that keeps despair at bay? How do we understand the depth of the depression and despair that seems to stalk so many today?
I have heard people say that they are afraid to be at events like the Gay Pride Parade, or at same-sex weddings. I have heard that people are afraid to be near someone wearing Muslim garb. I have even heard people say they are afraid to go to any event, to be out in public. All these fears keep us locked in smaller and smaller boxes until our fears distort all our perceptions. Some have said that fear, not hate, is the opposite of love. If this is true perhaps we also have to consider that the shooters have acted out of fear, not hate. Where would such fear come from? How would we work to reassure those who are so fearful?
Many of the vigils and comments in all sorts of media focus on the conquest of hate by love. Of course we all believe that. We are a church that is focused on the divine power of love. But, again, how do we manage to convey that to the people who need it most? And, though it is good to remind ourselves that love conquers hate and to focus on ways to avoid the cycle of fear, depression, rage, retribution, somehow the cycle goes on. Didn’t we say that last time, and the time before that and the time before that? Are these sentiments helpful for change or are they only what we say to comfort ourselves? To comfort ourselves so we can go back to our lives, forgetting the people who can never again go back to theirs.
Would it help to end this cycle of violence by understanding our own despair, our own fears, our own anger. It is harder to see our own shadows, the parts of us that are less than perfect. Indeed, orthodox, organized religion has often made the anger within us so unacceptable that we are unable to confront it. Orthodox, organized religion has left no room for self-understanding but only room for self-loathing and the fear of our own, natural impulses. There is ample evidence that Omar Mateen in Orlando was a victim of self loathing. There is ample evidence that, rather than acting for ISIS, he was trying to kill his own sexuality by killing others who shared that sexuality, others that represented to him all he loathed in himself. He came from a culture that interpreted religion in a narrow, punitive way that did not leave room for the natural range of human emotions, did not leave room for self-understanding, for self-acceptance. But this is not the stance of all Muslims, of all Middle-Eastern people. Every religion, every culture offers a mix of good and bad.
Religion is changing, as is our culture. Change terrifies many people, leaves them to cling to a spurious past in response to the terror they feel. For me, religion, especially this one, should further self-understanding and self-acceptance. Religion should deepen our knowledge and should offer a path to help us through change. It should give us the strength to shoulder the burdens that change, personal or public, places on us.
It is true that religion as often divides instead of uniting. It is necessary, therefore, to imagine a different type of religion, a religion that helps us see ourselves and others in all our contradictions and complexities. Let me quote from Robert Johnson who describes these limits and the possibilities for transcendence in his book Inner Work.
We know that, though we seem to be individuals, we are actually plural beings. Each of us has a great multitude of distinct personalities coexisting within one body, sharing one psych. We also know that the human mind experiences the world as a duality. We divide the world and our own selves into darkness and light, “good” and “bad,” and we stand eternally in judgment, siding first with one side, then with the other, but rarely undertaking the terrible task of integrating all this into a whole.
It is perhaps this human tendency to see everything as “good” or “bad” that creates the greatest obstacle to accepting and utilizing our varied inner personalities. We don’t realize that our categories of “good” and “bad” are usually arbitrary and subjective. We derive most of these standards from family, culture, and childhood conditioning without questioning them. If we have the courage to look with open minds at some of the instincts and energy systems within that we have been so ashamed of, we almost always find that they can also be positive strengths–and that they are merely normal parts of a total human character. As with all our inner contents, they need to be acknowledge, honored, and lived on an appropriate and constructive level.
Imagine what would have happened had Omar Mateen had integrated the various parts of his personality, had been able to face his sexuality, had he been able to be supported in his conflicting feelings, how many people might now be alive? We have good reason to be proud of the inclusiveness of U-U’s and equally good reasons to continue to be conscious about who we accept and who we turn away. Where are our lines and our limits? This requires self-examination, self-understanding.
We need to understand ourselves because by understanding ourselves we can understand others. That is why inner work is so important. As Terence, playwright in Ancient Rome, said, “Nothing that is human is foreign to me”. And this work of understanding is vitally important now because we are living in a time of unprecedented change when every assumption we have long held is up for grabs. This may be said in any time but I do believe it is particularly true now.
Even the worth of democracy, a bedrock assumption to us, is under question. Many people are questioning whether democracy is really the right form of government. Recently I head that Indonesians are questioning whether democracy or rule by a strong individual is the better choice for that country. A few days later, I heard a South American expert explaining why Hugo Chavez had been such a popular leader in Venezuela. He also explained that many people in that country and in other countries in the region want a strong leader to keep them together, to make decisions that will allow them to live in some peace and safety. And what about us? How many people here, in this country, look to find a leader that will give us the lives we feel we should have rather than having the confidence to create those lives ourselves?
And, as we are beset by numerous fears, including the fear of random violence, it becomes more and more tempting to think that only a strong leader can offer us safety. Of course this ignores the question of how we are to be safe from this strong leader.
The world at once seems to be a much smaller and a much larger place. I think many people, myself included at times, doubt our ability to have much impact on this world, whether it’s in our own personal lives or in our government. We seem so small compared to the large institutions, whether governmental or corporate, that dominate us. And when we feel insignificant, that is where depression, fear and anger can take root.
Politics, as the art of making decisions that will solve problems, appears to have vanished. In its place are competing desires and appetites that are manipulated by people who use them to achieve personal power. And I mean this in a very non-partisan way. Or, for those whose alienation from themselves is most complete, it involves picking up a gun and killing the monsters in their own heads by killing those they have created as monsters. The ability to achieve some kind of reasonable public life relies on a free people, a people free enough and confident enough, healthy enough in themselves to govern themselves. It takes a lot to be such a people.
I’d like to quote from Roger Scruton’s book The Soul of the World, which captures some of the essence of the maturity required to be such people.
In speaking of freedom, he speaks first of the freedom we have within ourselves which is challenged when we meet other people, also with freedom within themselves, whom we perceive as objects. He then says:
Until realized in an objective world, freedom is a dream, not an exercise of rational choice, nor a form of self-determination and self-knowledge. … the subject, exercising his freedom in the world of objects, enters into conflict with others who are doing the same. In this conflict, each regards the other as an obstacle, an object to be subdued….Being object for each other, each becomes an object to himself, entering the state of alienation in which the value of freedom is as though veiled by need and appetite. The alienated world is one in which the agent finds no worth in his own being and no reason for his actions, which are compelled from him by the pressure of events. Only when the parties recognize each other as free subjects do they come to act from reasons. For reasons that pare public, valid for all rational agents, and phrased in terms of the world that they share…In other words, freedom is fully realized only in the world of persons, bound together by rights and duties that are mutually recognized.
It is a taller order than we might think to recognize each other as subjects, as people with their own sense of meaning and purpose, not as objects to be manipulated or eliminated. And this ability also includes our own recognition of ourselves as subjects, subjects with rich lives, essential parts of a beautiful and interdependent world, not separate and inert things pushed and pulled by appetites and feelings we do not understand. But only with this connection, this understanding, can we achieve inner freedom, freedom with its recognition of our responsibilities to the outer world.
What is our covenant with each other in a changing world? Who do we include; who do we exclude? What is our covenant with ourselves? We live in a world that tempts us to see ourselves and others as objects every minute of every day. We live in a world that tempts us to self-hatred and self-destruction every minute of every day and that tempts us to turn that hatred and destruction outward on others. What can we do here to turn that alienation and despair to love and acceptance?
How do the events in Orlando and the mass shootings that came before it challenge us as free people? If we are to remain free, we are compelled to work that is the holiest work we can do, work that challenges us to understand ourselves and come to terms with ourselves, work that challenges us to see in each other, all the each others in the world, the inner light that is within all of us. And to help that light shine.