In the third episode of our 2024 Advent Audio Retreat series, “Fury and Love”, our principal, Alan Gregory, reflects on the complicated emotion of anger — something we all deal with but don’t always understand. 

Together, we’ll consider how anger can be both a motivator and a troublemaker and explore the delicate balance of using it for good.

With raw examples and thoughtful reflections, this episode is inspiring and practical, encouraging us to fight for what we love without losing sight of who we are.

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My mother was a sulker.

When she got angry, she would withdraw into a cold silence that, to me, had

the remorselessness of an arctic waste.

My father's temper was fiery, even explosive.

It was very occasional, a bit dramatic, and evaporated as quickly as it came.

Given the choice, I always preferred annoying my father.

Growing up, though, I fell into a basic error about anger.

I followed my father in a flair for the occasionally explosive.

Unfortunately, perhaps because I admired my father, I settled into

the illusion that nobody minds a hot temper, that the odd bit of piratical

roaring and chair kicking was harmlessly normal, if not quite endearing.

I was wrong, though it took exasperating and terrifying quite

a few folk before I got the memo.

As a colleague advised, always remember the first person to lose

their temper loses the argument.

Now it gets a little trickier.

What about getting angry but not losing one's temper?

Does that deal with my problem

- the anger I thought was ok but wasn't.

It might seem so.

Then I remember my mother, who never lost her temper, just

chilled the wrongdoing out of you.

What though if my anger is righteous anger?

Isn't that the good stuff?

Righteous anger is better than okay, it's more than fine, it's positively desirable.

My experience of righteous anger however, or at least my experience of getting

angry and feeling righteous at the same time, doesn't encourage me much.

If I'm honest, the righteous label is only a fig leaf to cover my fury.

Anger bothers me.

I don't have a happy history with anger, and I expect that's not unusual.

My hard learned wariness with anger, my embarrassment about having

got anger so wrong, in theory and practice, still leaves me with

both the anger and the uncertainty about how I let it play in my life.

Among the emotions, anger has, after all, an important, if

hardly straightforward, place.

Scripture instructs us, put away all wrath and anger.

Yet the same author also exhorts us, be angry, but sin not.

Jesus gets angry and the voices of the Old Testament sometimes storm with anger.

The prophets denounce, and the psalmists cry out against their oppressors:

I hate them with perfect hatred.

I count them my enemies.

Where would we be without anger?

Would parents protect their children?

Lovers surmount opposition?

Neighbours fight for their communities, without anger?

Many achievements that we admire, from transformations in the arts,

to organisations created to save lives, had anger in their making.

Anger is a great motivator.

Justice begins with getting angry.

Unfairness, bigotry, cruelty, bullying, exploitation.

There's plenty we should get angry about.

Yet here's the problem.

That deceiving, unsignposted, all but irresistible slide from anger to sin.

Be angry, but sin not.

Anger, it seems, is ambiguous.

We can't do without it, but often we can't live with it either.

We're very familiar with anger.

Most of the time, we recognise it at once.

When we hear angry voices, see some guy shaking a fist, feel it rise

in ourselves as our chest tightens and the blood warms in our face.

Nonetheless, we express anger in so many ways.

Sometimes we also disguise it out of recognition.

Some give their most gracious smiles while grinding their teeth.

So we miss anger in others, and people like me may well think that if anger's

not wild and obvious, it ain't real.

What did my mother's sulks and my father's roaring have in common?

In a rough and ready way, we can say that anger is our emotional

response to actual or threatened harm to someone or something one loves.

Something or someone includes whatever we hold precious.

Our family, our possessions, our dignity, our faith, our country, the causes we

pursue and the diversions we indulge.

You name it.

Anger is not necessarily accompanied by hatred, and it's not

necessarily violent in expression.

Nor does anger always pose an immediate threat.

However various the rules and conventions for its expression, anger is common

across gender, class, culture and age.

For us today, anger is a wide ranging cultural and political issue.

A recent article in the New Yorker magazine noted, 'The aura of

the internet age is energised, passionate and above all angry'.

However odious the political rant on social media, and however much

I lament snarling at yet another man for shouting at my Great Dane,

we know that anger is important.

And we know why it's important.

A threat to something I hold precious.

Without anger we'd not survive.

We lack the energy that fuels protecting what we love.

Aquinas therefore argues that a lack of anger, when for instance anger should

move us to defend the weak or to act justly, a lack of anger under those

circumstances is quite simply sinful.

In this case, love, righteous love, demands anger.

That's also the problem though.

We love many and various things.

We love some too much, and others not enough.

As Augustine taught us, we love, but our love is disordered.

In loving, we bear our likeness to God.

But in the way we love, distractedly, perversely, unwisely, selfishly,

we reveal how far we have erred.

As our love is, so also our anger, since anger serves love.

That's why we must try and understand our anger as best we can.

Question it.

Submit our anger to prayer, discernment, the guidance of wiser heads than ours,

the warnings of those who love us.

After all, there is much that deserves our love, and our anger

stirs us to protect what we love.

I am angry now.

You should be too.

We've got used to thinking that our planet is small, less than a

pinprick in the fabric of immensities,

galaxies, nebulae, stars.

The field of life on our planet, though, is smaller still, a thin envelope

of atmosphere, soil, and creatures.

Begun, and probably lost and begun, again, perhaps many times, as microscopic

organisms began the stitching of the web that is us, the living.

We now know that life, in the form of human beings, can shake life

itself right down to the threshold.

Global warming, biodiversity loss, deforestation, impoverishment

of the soil, disruption of nutrient cycles and on and on.

We have grown rich on the loss of what we need for the future of life.

For some time now, at least in the industrial and post industrial world,

we have set about eating our seed corn, ours and everybody else's.

Some weeks ago, I was trying to spot harlequin toads in a bavarium.

Since I'm likely to miss a gorilla in the back of my car,

I was not having much luck.

So I stood still for ten minutes, pretending to be a tree.

Then I saw one, then a couple more, and suddenly dozens of them.

Tiny and gleaming, black and gold, around vine stems and over waxy green leaves.

I felt privileged, graced by what you might call a biophony.

Not the appearance of gods, but of living wonders.

Harlequin toads have lost, however, most of their world to global warming,

habitat destruction, the introduction of invasive species, and disease.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature now classifies

them as critically endangered.

I am furious, again.

Unfortunately, my anger loves a villain.

I need people to blame, otherwise I'll suffocate in a rage that has no outlet.

Conveniently, our global plight has a good crop of genuine villains.

People who truly deserve the black hats my imagination loves to dispense.

Oil company executives, politicians, financiers, climate deniers,

the man down the road who shouts at my dog and drives an SUV.

My anger turns furious, and before I know it, my imagination has ripped out

their humanity, turned them into devils, and thrust them into outer darkness,

beyond the world of decent living people.

Phrases like, string them up, come to mind.

I'm sorry, but it's true.

You wouldn't like to party in my imagination.

When I calm down, I feel bad.

I also notice something oddly ironic.

What I accuse these villains of doing is treating living creatures like stuff.

Like they weren't vulnerable, intricate, extraordinary, and above all, alive.

Part of the creation we share.

What my furious imagination then does to these guys, is fearfully alike.

I toss them from the circuit of life, out beyond the care of

anything, rubbish and worthless.

That troubles me.

It brings back that verse, be angry, but sin not.

This seems hopeless.

Anger is a necessary passion, yet the more I care about something, the

more anger burns like a forest fire.

Before I know it, my imagination is murderous.

What am I getting wrong?

I realise, rather bitterly, that anger seizes on the joy of blaming, then turns

ugly and goes nowhere good for life.

Should I then focus only on the good and collect messages of chirpy reassurance?

Yet, still, we certainly are facing great and appalling evils.

How shall I name them, especially when these evils come out of

human choices and human actions?

A description of climate catastrophe, that piously avoided mentioning the oil

and gas industry, agribusiness, global corporations and political parties,

would inspire no change, call for no repentance, and offer no comfort,

save the prospect of dying politely.

The Bible, after all, is as robust in naming the wicked,

as Jesus is clear about not judging.

A Christianity that does not dare hold people to account is

a Christianity without prophets, and we sure need prophets.

Zephaniah spears Israel's leaders in a fury of denunciations

guaranteed to ruin anyone's evening.

Jerusalem listens to no voice.

She accepts no correction.

Her officials are roaring lions.

Her judges are ravening wolves.

Her priests profane what is sacred.

They do violence to the law.

How does this sit with not pointing the finger?

Not blaming furiously?

My imagination loves this.

But that's a bad sign.

Israel's prophets do speak on behalf of God, of course.

Is that enough to distinguish them from my internal ranting?

A serious ranting in that it does have real world effects

in my attitudes and behavior.

No, there is more prophetic anger, than that prophets

speak for God, not themselves.

The prophets, you see, voice the judgment of God from within the people of God.

They do not deny their brothers and sisters in the flesh.

They do not look to escape this relationship.

Rather, they bear it with all its consequences.

The promises they announce are promises for them also.

And those scorching judgments they proclaim fall upon the prophet as well.

They speak as the Israel that keeps faith, to the Israel that has lost itself.

Their condemnations come not from outside, but from within the people,

and in the voice of the prophets, the people of God confront themselves.

Prophetic oracles are not emails bounced untraceably around global servers, or

hidden in the crowd of #wehatebankers.

In this way, the prophets anticipate Christ himself, the Son who shares

and suffers the flesh of Israel and of humanity, who bears us in

himself as brother and friend.

We blame in order to get the stink off ourselves and on to others.

In the depths of my anger growls a furious fear that I am like those I condemn.

In this case, that I too share in careless, self centered,

arrogant attitudes and actions that toward the non human world.

We repent only when we admit the hopeless partiality of our loving.

How persistently our self concern pulls us from the fullness of life

back into the sorry orbit of ourselves.

At least in the West, for example, we cannot deny the benefits, delights, the

increase in happiness and ease that we have enjoyed through practices that have

issued in suffering and global disaster.

We have enjoyed these good things so much that we can barely imagine

a life without their expectation.

To put it bluntly, we may not exclude ourselves from the judgments we make.

When we begin to feel our hard heartedness, when we lament the limits

we all place on the generosity of God, God who nourishes the just and unjust and

all the wealth of the world's creatures.

When we know and feel this, our love's poverty, then the fog begins to clear,

and we know ourselves in company, bound to the light and dark of a vast

multitude on whom God's blessing rises.

That light holds out the promise of freeing our anger for good, for action,

for keeping a ferocious hold on what is precious for all of us, including

our brothers and sisters who resist us, but for whose sake we side with life.

Much of our planet is dying.

Many of our brothers and sisters burn in drought and starvation,

drown in floods, die as refugees.

We must get angrier than we are.

We must name the evil as did the prophets, as did Jesus.

Remember though, for Jesus' sake remember, that naming evil, fighting

evil, always binds us more tightly to our enemies, to those we hold

accountable, those who belong with us in a common created life, and who

are embodied with us in communities, neighborhoods, nations, cultures, out

to the horizon of humanity itself.

Be angry then, but remember the one vast company God draws to himself, human

and non human, friends and enemies.

Then fight for life, and you won't sin.