Anger

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Many of us have grown up being taught that anger is a bad emotion. That it might even be sinful to be angry or have anger. When we see anger expressed, we might feel threatened by it. When we feel it in us, we might stuff it away behind something else, or we might choose to express it quickly in order to “vent” it out of our system.

Anger is something that shows up in different ways for all of us. For myself, I have had a close relationship with anger all of my life. There are times I have been proud of my anger. Anger helps us get things done, doesn’t it? Anger is energy. It is energy that manifests in the body and can result in action. Many revolutionary stories begin with anger. Our own country’s story, as a case in point, can point its founding to the anger related to England’s “taxation without representation” and expressions of anger like the “Boston Tea Party” or the Revolutionary War itself.

When we read Ephesians 4 and come across verses with ethical exhortations that warn us against anger and untruthful speech, they are almost offered in a rapid-fire way. The author of Ephesians doesn’t expand on them much. It leaves a lot of room for (mis)interpretation!

I think anger gets misinterpreted a lot—especially the anger we might have ourselves. A lot of emotions we might learn as children to be “bad” emotions can lead to a really dangerous path of self-loathing and low self-esteem. What kind of person am I if I have these bad emotions? Buddhist master Thich Naht Hahn describes anger as an “internal formation,” or something that crystallizes within us. Fear is another internal formation; so is despair.

These crystalline experiences can seem unyielding. When we confront them in ourselves, we can feel powerless to stop what they do to our bodies. Hahn continues to elaborate on this by explaining how we are like a house with a living room and a basement. Often, our solution to these internal formations that are related to pain (like anger) is to keep them barricaded in the basement, or try to get them out of the “house” in whatever way possible.

When you feel angry, how do you respond? Do you stuff the anger down because it isn’t an appropriate feeling to have? Do you vent the anger some how by maybe yelling or punching a pillow? Maybe you do your best to just ignore it. Or maybe you distract yourself from anger by focusing on something else. Hahn writes,

“Our blocks of pain, sorrow anger, and despair always want to come up into our mind consciousness, into our living room, because they have grown big and need our attention. They want to emerge, but we don’t want them to come up because they are painful to look at. So we try to block their way. … That is why our daily habit is to fill up the living room with guests, like television, books, magazines and conversations, in order to keep these internal formations from surfacing. When we do this, we create bad circulation in our psyche, and symptoms of mental illness and depression begin to appear. They may manifest in our body or in our mind.” (Anger, Thich Naht Hahn, 175-176. Riverhead Books, 2001.)

It sounds like we should vent our anger right? For me, that has been a long-time solution that I thought worked. I don’t hang on to anger because I release it as soon as possible. Of course, doing that has created its own problems in my life. It has led me to be misunderstood. It can create an impression that I am not a safe person to be around!

Hahn describes this behavior of venting anger as simply “rehearsing it” rather than letting it go or releasing it. Wow.

Instead, Thich Naht Hahn recommends breathing and being present to anger. Especially because behind anger is pain. Just like what is behind a headache might be a deeper issue that needs healing, when we are angry we need to sit with that anger in us so we can heal the pain that is behind it.

The author of Ephesians writes, “Be angry, but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” (Ephesians 4:26) When we let anger take control of us, leading us to vent it, or hide it, or be distracted from it, we make room for the devil!

But when we are present with our anger, and have compassion for ourselves; when we welcome it as a part of who we are (for everyone has anger), and accept it without allowing it to control us, we can find healing and be “imitators of God” who “walk in love” and whose lives can be a “fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”