During a heavy downpour last week, I found myself caught for an hour in a traffic jam of historic proportions.
Thirty minutes into it, I became really worked up; so much so, that when the driver in front of me allowed a car that had just pulled up to cross into our lane, I found myself smacking the steering wheel with the heel of my hand and muttering a few decidedly non-ministerial words.
Anger and frustration had literally gotten the best of me. Even worse, my anger was directed at someone who had shown kindness to a stranger – certainly the least ministerial aspect of my attitude!
Anger shoulders itself into our all-too-human hearts with great regularity, doesn’t it? At least three times in recent weeks, flights have been diverted from their destinations because passengers got into terrible rows with one another over a few inches of valuable cabin space.
I will confess I do not think loving thoughts when someone else’s head descends upon my tray table, but life is full of maddening matters. Not letting them get the best of us is a spiritual discipline of the highest order.
I do not mean to imply that anger is always unjustified. I think of words attributed to St. Augustine, “Hope has two daughters,” he said. “Their names are Anger and Courage; Anger at what is and ought not to be and courage to make what ought to be come to be.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
So, if we react with indifference to the unspeakable brutalities currently being perpetrated by ISIS, if we wink at the epidemic of unethical and illegal behaviors on the part of too many public officials, if we are dispassionate about the ongoing issues surrounding race in America, then we might be getting close to relinquishing our membership in the human race.
Getting mad about things that ought not to be is the first step toward changing them.
The Christian scriptures contain an excellent gem of good advice: “Be angry, but do not sin” — the implication being that it is possible, even necessary, to be “good and mad” at the same time. The key is to be constructive rather than destructive with anger.
If you have been a victim of someone else, turn your justified anger about it into passion for preventing the same thing from happening to someone else. These are moral matters of the highest order.
However, when it comes to responding to daily irritations of life, I offer this advice: Count to 10 before you react. Take a deep breath; exhale irritation and inhale calm. You won’t be sorry. Pray for patience.
Repeat to yourself this non-Biblical but beautiful beatitude, “Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not get bent out of shape.”
