Paul’s advice to not let the sun go down on our anger confronts the danger of nurturing anger within us until it becomes destructive. When you experience anger, following Paul’s advice, it is important to act in a way that can resolve it. When you act to resolve feelings of anger, you are retaining your power over the anger rather than allowing it to dominate your personhood.
An important first step is to own your power over your emotions. Victor Frankel reminds us, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning that the last and most precious freedom that we have is the power to choose our response to whatever is happening to us. Writing from a Nazi concentration camp, he suggested that the Nazi guards could act in hateful and cruel ways but the power they could never acquire over him was the power to choose how he was going to respond. He could choose to hate them, feel pity for them, laugh at them, or even have compassion for the way that hatred had distorted their personality. That freedom to choose his response gave him dignity in a very dehumanizing situation.
Two days ago I asked you to make a quick list of ten things, people, or conditions that generated anger within you. Now look at that list. Taking them one at a time, first consider what alternative emotional responses you could choose rather than anger. You may not want to choose another response, but you have the freedom to do so.
Having taken control of your capacity to choose, I want to suggest a further step. If the Spirit of God is present in your life, how might you choose to respond in a manner that holds the possibility of building up the community rather than further isolating you within it. Anger has frequently become the generating force that has resulted in transforming actions. A mother’s anger at the fact that her daughter was killed by a drunk driver, resulted in the formation of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers that has saved countless lives. Don’t overwhelm yourself, but pick one of two from your list and consider how you might allow your anger to move you in a redemptive directions. Even as you do that, I think that you will discover that anger has become less destructive in your own life.
