Anger in the Eyeglass

I've been thinking a lot lately about anger. I'm not all that sure why. Questions just keep coming up, floating incessantly through my own mind, bubbling off the lips of others, reverberating off walls, and always piping up when I feel the flame of that powerful emotion in my own chest. What is it? What causes it? What should we do with it? What did Jesus do with it? What does that mean for us?

As with most things I write about, I'm no expert on this topic. I've got no series of capital letters behind my name, no claim to have done any research at all on the stuff I'm about to write. But I am human, and anger is no stranger to me. Why not work through it? Why not embrace the questions that keep popping up? A great deal of thought and prayer has resulted in a few conclusions. I'll explain them below. I may be right. I may be wrong. I welcome as much dialogue on this as you care to provide. Feel free to comment below. But please read first, if you would.

Perhaps the best place to begin is to introduce you to the context which fueled—but certainly no longer aligns with—my own thinking. Over the course of my life—and even more so recently—I've heard three statements about anger that just don't seem right. There are more, I know. But these are the ones I've heard repeatedly, and these are the ones that sparked my thinking. Perhaps you've heard them too:

1. Anger comes from fear.
2. Anger is an emotion, but it's a very bad emotion. We need to stop feeling it.
3. We can be angry. We can even cultivate anger. It just has to be "righteous" anger.

There's no chronology to these statements. There's no relationship at all, really. They are just three statements that prompted my thoughts—three statements I heard from multiple sources and couldn't quite believe to be true.

The first has to do with the source of anger. The suggestion of many: fear. This sounds great at first. It even comes with its own fancy formula: Find your deepest fears, work through those, and knock out your anger at the same time. I decided to try it. I thought through some of my fears, considered some instances that had made me angry, and tried desperately to find a connection—any connection—between them. But I couldn't find anything. The stuff that made me angry often had nothing to do with the stuff that I feared. In fact, I found that, in many cases, it was easier to be angry when I was not afraid. There were some instances, however, where I noticed fear and anger arising simultaneously. This, I found, was the key to the whole thing.

You see, fear does not cause anger. Put the other way, anger is not a result of fear. Rather, both anger and fear are emotional responses to something else; both are triggered by a perception of what is happening in the world at a given instant. We encounter reality, and our emotions, in a large way, let us know how to respond to it. Perhaps I can illustrate this by pulling at your emotions a bit.

Imagine with me a tattered, coarse, brown cloth—woven tightly years ago but clutched by so many desperate fingers since then that the threads have separated, leaving tiny holes in the once-beautiful fabric. Dark smudges of soot speckle its surface—probably left from those same clinging hands. Despite these flaws, the aged cloth rests in gentle and lovely folds on the shoulders of an old woman. Her long white hair, arranged in a careful braid, lies limply among its folds—snowy purity starkly contrasting with smudges and tears. The plainness of her hair and her garment, however, are not matched by her eyes. Emerald flames searching deeply, lovingly, the depths of every soul which meets her gaze, her eyes must forever be remembered. They express the depths of her own soul: the pain of loss, the weariness of days of hunger, the strange spark of hope despite the odds against its existence. She lowers those remarkable eyes, and her thin lips part—making way for a scarcely audible rasp: "Some bread, please? Anything will do."

Now try this one:

Think of the same tattered cloth—not on the stooped shoulders of an old woman this time but crumpled on the floor of a dark and damp basement. The light from your flashlight reveals its dirty surface, making its folds seem harsh and set. You rub the back of your neck, wishing the box you were looking for could be anywhere but down here. Slowly, you inch your foot over to the cloth, hoping to move it quickly to the side so that you could step by it to continue your search. You slip the toe of your sneaker under the closest corner and kick the cloth away. Your heart leaps into your throat in an instant. Something black and hairy had been lying underneath. You clap your free hand to your mouth, trying desperately not to scream, and aim the beam of your flashlight—as best as you can with a trembling hand—down towards the dreaded arachnid.

And one more:

Same cloth. Same flashlight. Same dark and hairy speck crouching treacherously in the shaking light. But then you notice something. It's not moving. You peer closer. Dead? No. Ugh. Plastic. Your cruel little brother.

What have I done? I've given you three events. You encountered them, in your imagination, of course; and I can bet that each one triggered some emotional response. The first? Probably compassion. Maybe annoyance, if you're pestered by that sort of scene too often. The second? Fear, undoubtedly. And the third? Anger.

My point? Emotions in general are the result of perception. Fear and anger are both emotions. When you realized the spider was a fake, it was not your fear that made you angry. It was the fact that your brother had played a nasty trick on you.

Anger, then, is not the result of fear. It is the result of a sense of injustice. This explains why we can feel just as angry about the Holocaust as we can when someone insults us—not because we are afraid of either event but because we feel, deep down, that what happened should really not have happened. We get angry because we sense that the world is not right. Understood this way, anger is a good emotion; it's a signal that something's not how it should be.

This knocks out our second statement. It is dangerous to never be angry. It means we've lost sensitivity to perceiving injustice. It means we've lost the ability to care whether things are right or whether we are okay. More than that, if we say that anger is a bad thing, we run into serious problems when we look at the life of Jesus.

But here is where the waters get a bit murky. Two comments are helpful. First, although anger is a response to a perception of injustice, just because we feel that an injustice has occurred does not mean that one actually has. We can be totally mistaken in our perception of injustice and/or our definition of justice in the first place. Anger is a signal of what we believe to be injustice, but we may not always be right.

Secondly, just because it is good to feel anger does not mean we can cling to it. The Bible is extremely clear on this point. In Ephesians 4, Paul writes, "Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry" (v. 26) and, "Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice" (v. 31, NIV 1984). What Paul is saying is that the proper thing to do with anger is to dump it. Right now. All of it.

This wipes out our third statement as well. Notice how often this statement is the passionate declaration of someone who is keeping anger in a tight hold, stroking its fur with an evil grin, and waiting anxiously for the day that bottled fury can be released to wreak havoc on every deserving individual. "It's righteous anger I feel. I have a right to feel this. I need to hold onto it for a little while." Aw, knock it off! Paul said to get rid of it. ALL of it. There's no such thing as righteous anger, and we have no right to hang on to it. Dump it.

So what does all this mean? What do we do now?

First, know what anger is telling you. Let it show you where you are perceiving injustice. But that's it. Let it simply prompt the question, "Is something wrong here?"

Then, give it up. Give it to Christ. If something is really wrong, He may teach us to use our anger as fuel to make it right. How will we know? Because our anger is never to be our focus. Jesus Christ is. Anger tells us something. So does fear. So does compassion. So do all the other emotions. But we aren't to focus on these. We aren't to cling to these. We are to cling to Christ. When you look at Him, everything else falls into place.

Why? Because Christ is our focus and our lens. The more we look to Him, the more we see the world as He sees it. Our perceptions of reality—and the emotions that serve as a response—become ordered. They reflect the world more truly.

The conclusion, then, is this: Anger is not bad. It can show us really well where things aren't what they should be. But the only way we'll be able to see this rightly is if we are looking at Christ. And, once you look at Christ, you'll see something so beautiful that you'll find there's no point to holding on to anger anymore. Seriously, all you'll want to do is hold to Christ.