By Mark Kutolowski
“I’m sick and tired of Brother Jonah!”[1]My thoughts began to pick up momentum. It was nearing the end of the work day during a multi-month stay at Mount Saviour Monastery. I was cutting up a small cedar tree I felled in the midsummer heat. I was sweating from the labor, but I could feel my body heating up even more as I thought about the offending monk. “Why is he in charge of my work, anyway? He hasn’t even taken full vows. He’s pushy, bossy, why… he’s not even a real monk!” The further my thoughts raced, the hotter I felt. I could feel tension building in my body. I looked down and saw I had one final cut to make on the log in front of me. I looked up and realized I had left my saw by the truck twenty feet away. Tired and irritated, I pulled out my hatchet from my belt. As I started swinging, I thought of Brother Jonah and what he had said to me earlier that day. I clenched my teeth and swung harder. It felt good to let it rip, and to cut deep into the tree. One swing, then a second, and then it happened. On my third swing, I saw the hatchet skip and bounce back into my shin! I gazed down in horror to see the end of a tendon exposed through a three inch gash in my leg. The thoughts of Brother Jonah immediately left as I looked down in shock, assessing the damage and what I had to do to stay alive. I had just learned a very hard lesson about the nature of anger.
Dividing the Heart
The ancient desert monastics were men and women who evaluated everything by their one supreme goal of entering into the Kingdom of God – both in this life and in eternity.[2]Everything else in their life was in service of this. No sacrifice was too great to attain this pearl of great price.[3]While they served others and practiced compassion, they had no elaborate plans to fix society. Their only offering was a training for each individual to radically align their life with God and virtue.[4]Thus, when they explored the nature of the afflictions of the psyche (dejection and anger), their question was not ‘is this thought natural?’ or ‘can this thought be useful?’, but only ‘is allowing this thought into my heart compatible with union with God?’ For both dejection and anger, their answer was conclusive – no.
From a modern, psychological perspective, it seems bizarre, and perhaps inhumane, to suggest that we can live without either dejection or anger. Isn’t it dangerous to repress our emotions? Again, it’s essential to understand the subtlety of the desert teaching. The desert monks acknowledged that it was impossible to keep the afflictive thoughts from rising in consciousness. However, they affirmed that it is possible to keep these thoughts from entering into our hearts and gaining power over us. It is when a thought enters into the heart that it builds into a physiological and emotional response. Only at this point does it take possession of our awareness and drive our thoughts, feelings, and actions.[5]With training, it is possible to allow the thoughts to come and go through the mind without ever entering into the heart. The desert training of recognizing afflictive thoughts when they arise and denying them access to the heart was known as ‘Vigilance’ and ‘Guard of the Heart’.
Like Dejection, the thought of Anger is related to the frustration of the desires of ego. Whereas dejection is a sinking down, anger is a flaring out. Anger brings heat, intensity, and passion. It is activating, and threatens to quickly take over one’s heart when it arises. Like the story of when I badly hurt myself, when we feed our anger it narrows our awareness, drives our actions, and blinds us to the fullness of reality.
Evagrius wrote of anger as the most forceful of the passions:
The most fierce passion is anger. In fact it is defined as a boiling and stirring up of wrath against one who has given injury – or is thought to have done so. It constantly irritates the soul and above all at the time of prayer it seizes the mind and flashes the picture of the offensive person before one’s eyes. (Praktikos 11)
As Evagrius mentions, anger is typically connected to a sense of being harmed or offended by another. Because unchecked anger leads to hatred of another person (who is a bearer of God’s likeness and image), it drives the soul away from awareness of God whose nature is unconditional love. We cannot be open to God’s love and hate another person at the same time. In any given moment, our heart can either be animated by love or by hatred. When we are animated by hatred, we are no longer in alignment with God who is love. In this way, anger threatens to drive us from the presence of God.
The desert monastics were quick to point out how anger quickly blinds us to the rest of reality. Once under the sway of anger, we can no longer think clearly or see things rationally. When under the control of anger, revenge or at least ‘righting the wrong’ (even if just in our imagination) comes to be seen as the ultimate good. Thoughts of evening the score spin endlessly in our heads. The desert monastics realized that the influence of anger prevented stillness of the heart, and thus prevented silent prayer. Evagrius is emphatic on the danger of anger to a life of prayer:
Do not give yourself over to angry thoughts so as to fight in your mind with the one who has vexed you…. (it) darkens the soul…. (Praktikos 23)
No one who loves true prayer (contemplation) and yet gives way to anger or resentment can be absolved from the imputation of madness. For he resembles a man who wishes to see clearly and for this purpose he scratches his eyes. (Chapters on Prayer 64)
Cassian elaborates further on Evagrius’ teaching, noting how even when we cease from doing harm to others, anger can still destroy one’s inner life:
For rage that has been suppressed in one’s heart is, to be sure, of no offense to one’s neighbors, but it excludes the splendid radiance of the Holy Spirit just as if it had been brought out into the open. (Institutes, Book 8, ch.12)
Whether held within, or expressed outwardly, anger divides the human heart.
Is Anger Ever Just?
Of the eight thoughts, I believe anger may be the most difficult to see clearly. I say this because I often hear people advocate the value of channeling anger in service of justice. On the surface, this seems rational. When we are angry at injustice done to the poor and marginalized, surely this is right and just, isn’t it? Anger energizes and activates. Why shouldn’t we use this energy to do good? This is an area with considerable subtlety, so bear with me as I try to articulate why I believe in the integrity of the desert teaching.
Anger, like each of the eight thoughts, is a universal energy of affliction that arises within human consciousness. Whenever it is consented to and enters into the heart, it blinds the soul of the angry person to the presence of God which is characterized by unconditional love and forgiveness. As stated earlier, we can be angry, or we can be in union with God. We cannot be both at the same time. Anger arises when our ego is frustrated and reality is not conforming to our desires. When we are angry at an injustice done to others, it simply means that we have expanded the concerns of our ego to include the injured persons. It is better than a selfish lack of concern for others, but it is a far cry from true compassion. Even when we have accurately identified an injustice, when anger arises we lose both vision and spiritual connection. Even if it feels like the ends justify the means, when we employ anger in our efforts to bring about justice, we have strengthened the influence of anger in our own heart.
Indirectly, when we cultivate anger, we are subtly increasing the presence of this thought/passion in the collective mind of humanity. When we cultivate mercy and forgiveness, we subtly decrease the power of anger over humanity. Over time, our state of mind will either increase or decrease the presence of anger in ourselves, in our communities, and in our world. Even if we accomplish some ‘good’ in the outer world through our anger-motivated action, we pay a heavy price, both personally and collectively, by feeding anger through our actions. If we step back and view the spiritual world as a struggle for the soul of humanity between Divine Love and selfishness, the consequences become clear. Every time anger is fed within human consciousness, Divine Love ‘loses’ and selfishness grows stronger. We might win a battle for justice in the material world, but if we have fed anger in the process, we may have only contributed to losing the war.
To make matters worse, when we are under the influence of anger, we enter into dualistic us/them thinking, and our solution to injustice typically involves vanquishing or punishing another person or group of people. Even when this group is genuinely in the wrong (and under the influence of anger it will be difficult to objectively tell who is right and wrong), revenge and punishment inevitably perpetuate the cycle of violence into the future. Anger in one group stimulates anger in their opponents, and regardless of who ‘wins’ the conflict, anger ‘wins’ over compassion and gains a greater psychic hold over the humans involved. Even if we get what our side wants, we all remain slaves to the passion of anger, and decrease our access to the presence of God.[6]
I believe the attraction to using anger to fight for justice stems from a false dichotomy between anger and passivity. If our only way to activate is anger, then indeed, there may be times when anger is necessary. It seems that many people have never experienced what it is like to be energized and activated without anger. But it is not only possible, it is more effective. When we are free of anger, we can look clearly at injustice, and simultaneously feel compassion for the pain of both the oppressed and the oppressor. With this unitive vision, we can act in ways that can truly resolve the conflict, without being blinded by the desire for revenge. We can call for justice and accountability, but retain the free and flexible thinking of a mind unclouded by anger. We might even take bold physical action – as when Jesus drove out the money changers and merchants in the temple.[7]There’s no indication in the gospels that he was driven by anger – and its only our false dichotomy that leads us to imagine that he was. This dynamic, activated clarity was the mental state of the most successful nonviolent revolutionaries of the 20thcentury – Mahatma Gandhi in India, Martin Luther King Jr. in the USA, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu in South Africa, and Lech Walesa in Poland.[8]
I practice Systema, a traditional Russian martial art. In over a decade of Systema training, I’ve observed an interesting paradox. When I fight with tension and anger, it feels like I’m acting with more strength and power. It feels like I’m punching harder. In fact, the opposite is true. When I am relaxed, I move with greater ease, and my strikes are more precise and have a much greater impact on my training partner. I’ve been on both sides of this exchange and it’s always true – the more relaxed the person striking is, the more powerful their strikes. I think this is often the case with anger in other realms. When we are angry and we rage against our opponents, it feels like we’re doing something useful and effective. That’s often not an objective truth. It’s usually just the anger talking from inside our heads, telling us we’re giving it what it wants. From an objective viewpoint, our actions might be largely ineffective. Under the influence of anger, we’ll never see it.[9]
Why am I spending so much time focusing on the issue of just (or righteous) anger? For someone committed to a life of faith and seeking justice in the world, ‘righteous anger’ is usually the primary way that anger takes hold of the soul. I have met countless deeply caring people who are chronically angry and burnt out by the injustice they fight in the world. It’s a very common hang-up among socially concerned Christians, one that robs us of inner peace and experiential access to divine mercy. It’s often the primary thought form that keeps us stuck in dualistic thinking, and outside of the universal forgiveness that is characteristic of the mind of Christ. I’ve also observed that when we believe that any anger is justified, our tendency to want to rationalize our feelings means that we’ll inevitably come to the conclusion that, even if anger is generally not good, our anger is justified. If we can see that anger is never necessary to accomplish justice, then we will be far less likely to be caught in its influence. When the illusions of effective anger and righteous anger are dispelled, far greater inner resources are unleashed in the service of peace and justice.
Forgiveness, Compassion, and Acting from Freedom
Refusing to pick up the thought of anger liberates tremendous creative energy. It allows us to experience forgiveness, compassion, and the ability to act from freedom. These three divine attributes allow us to share in the inner life of God:
Forgiveness—When we are free from anger, we can more easily forgive the wrongs that our done to us. Unclouded by anger, we see that the bad actions of others are done from their own ignorance or enslavement to the passions. We begin to feel pity for them, and are freed up to love our enemies. We become ‘children of (our) heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes his rain to fall on the just and the unjust.’[10]We no longer take offense at harm done to us, and are free to joyfully ‘turn the other cheek’ when circumstances warrant this response.
Compassion—Liberated from the reactivity of anger, we respond to injustice done to others with heartfelt compassion for both victim and perpetrator. Instead of anger, tears of compassion arise when we see evil in action. We weep as we feel the pain of both parties, and then respond with energy and care to seek the highest good of all involved. We gain the ability to love our ‘enemies’ even as we directly oppose their actions and ideology.
Acting from Freedom—In the absence of anger, our hearts, minds, and bodies are at rest. From this place, our full creative energy is available to listen to the Holy Spirit, and to be led into right action in response to the urgent needs of our time. We hold the big picture, refuse to get stuck in the narrowing grip of anger, and play our small but essential part in bringing God’s mercy and healing to a world in need.
We’ve now explored five of the eight ‘negative thoughts’ of the desert monastics. The first three (Gluttony, Lust, and Greed) all had an aspect of excess, and work primarily upon identification with the body and its desires. The next two (Dejection and Anger) carry strong emotional charge and work primarily with identification with moods of the psyche. We now move to the final three thoughts, which attack the disciple in the more subtle realm of the spirit. The battle for a liberated heart is far from complete, and the most dangerous thoughts still lie ahead. Sound exhausting? Next week, we explore the thought of acedia – the demon of weariness in the spiritual life.
[1]Not the Brother’s real name, though this is a true story
[2]Mt 6:33
[3]Mt 13:45-46
[4]The desert monastics, likely through the influence of Greek philosophy, held that growth in the virtues was an essential prerequisite to progress in prayer and contemplation.
[5]As I mentioned in the post on dejection, when you realize the thought has taken hold to some degree, the Welcoming Prayer is a powerful resource to return to freedom.
[6]In contemporary US politics, both liberals and conservatives are incredibly angry at the opposing party. What is fascinating to me is how, within their own echo chambers, both sides are entirely convinced that they are right, that their anger is justified while the other side’s anger is proof of their insanity, and that the other side is the epitome of what is wrong with the country. If we believe that anger is justified for any reason, we make ourselves vulnerable to the influence of the passion/thought, and make it that much more difficult to enter into open-hearted love and forgiveness necessary to rest in God.
[7]Jn 2:13-25
[8]And, equally as important, it was the mental state they encouraged and cultivated in their movements.
[9]Another interesting phenomena of training in Systema: When in a state of inner tranquility, it is possible to take down an opponent with tremendous force, yet smoothly and without doing them harm. When fighting from a state of anger, it is much more likely that I’ll injure myself or my opponent. The goal in the art is to do minimal harm, and it’s possible to act with immense power yet not hurt the opposing person. I’ve also observed that strikes given with an emotional charge often transfer tension and bad feelings to the recipient, while very forceful strikes given from a state of peace can even help the recipient relax by breaking open chronic muscle tension!
[10]Mt 5:45
A hawthorn sapling
This post is part of the ongoing series:
Purifying the Heart: What the Desert Teachers Can Teach Us About Healing Ourselves And Our World
Through the season of Lent, we are posting a series of reflections based on the teachings of the desert fathers and mothers. Each week we are highlighting one of the ‘eight thoughts’ of the desert system of inner transformation. In this series, we’re drawing on a deep well of ancient wisdom from an era and culture very different from our own, so it requires some translating. Read the introduction here.