Reprocessing Anger into Grace
Listen: “Praying” by Kesha
Throughout most of my life, I have never been someone who harbored anger or bitterness in my heart towards people, even people who hurt or offended me. I’d rather forgive, love, and pray a blessing—in essence, take the high road. However, in these last couple of years, I have actually had to consciously, consistently choose to walk in forgiveness and grace towards myself and others. It’s been a challenging part of my faith journey for the first time in my life.
There are several varieties of anger. Anger can have a positive and adaptive force in life. For example, we typically respond with anger to real or perceived injustices. Many important and powerful actions for justice and compassion have emerged out of anger towards injustice, like the civil rights movements in America and around the world. However, anger can also devolve into personal resentments and bitterness which destroy the person harboring them.
In the twelve step recovery community, people come to step four and do a moral inventory as a part of their recovery journey: “made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” At the top of the list is dealing with resentments. “Resentment is the ‘number one’ offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual diseases, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically” (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 64). One doesn’t need to be an alcoholic to identify with this statement.
As people in recovery know so well, resentments and bitterness do more harm to the person harboring them, than to the people they wish to hurt or avenge. Several versions of this important idea have been attributed to various people. Buddha is attributed with saying, “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Mandela is attributed with saying, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” Anne Lamont said, “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.” (I’ve even read a version of this attributed to Saint Augustine.)
In my mind, the most challenging version of this idea comes from Jesus. In his famous Sermon on the Plain message, Jesus says: “But to you who are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you” (Luke 6:27-28; NLT). Early in my life, I would have thought of my enemies as people who were far away. Maybe people from other countries whom we were fighting or terrorists after 9/11. As a pastor, I began to realize that our enemies are the people for whom we harbor bitterness and resentments. Our enemies might be our spouse, our child, our co-worker, our friend, or our former spouse. Usually people who are very close to us.
Love your enemy is easily one of the most challenging ethical commands ever floated into the universe. How in the world do we do that? Revenge or retaliation, get-even or an eye-for-an-eye come so much more naturally and effortlessly. And yet, they deteriorate the human soul. Practically, how do we practice loving our enemy? How do we turn anger into grace?
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. It’s a process. It’s a choice. It doesn’t come through gossip or backbiting or triangulating. A trusted friend, sponsor, or therapist is a good resource for processing with honesty as long as they are removed from the situation. Journaling is another option for processing and healing.
I recently ran across a story in the Big Book of AA which I thought was interesting. The story is entitled “Freedom from Bondage.” At the age of seven, the woman in the story was suddenly abandoned by both of her parents and sent to live with her grandparents whom she felt were strangers. The woman spent the next many years harboring anger and resentments which contributed to multiple divorces and alcoholism. Once she got into AA, she began working the steps. She came to a point in the program in which she knew she needed to forgive her mom—a twenty-five year grudge. The day she decided she needed to let go of her resentment she came upon a magazine article by a clergyman on resentment. Here’s how it read:
He said, in effect: “If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don’t really want it for them and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks, and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love” (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 552).
The woman tried it and said it worked. Sometimes she had to ask for the willingness, but it continued to work in other situations. So maybe this is one way of “blessing those who curse us.” So challenging. Perhaps even liberating.
Life is quite short. Why spend it drinking poison? We all need love, forgiveness, and grace. Why not spend our lives being agents of grace, instead of purveyors of hatred and revenge? Revenge leaves us all blind, repeating the cycle hurt and retaliation, until we all stumble in the darkness. We long for grace that heals and grace that liberates. God, forgive us our debts (trespasses, sins) as we forgive our debtors.
Shalom
©realfredherron, 2021
