“The Dubious Luxury of Anger”        June 25, 2017   Community Christian Church

Roger Ray, pastor     Click here to see the video

— ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 66 “Big Book”

If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.

AA devotional - "Dubious luxury." How often have I remembered those words. It's not just anger that's best left to nonalcoholics; I built a list including justifiable resentment, self-pity, judgmentalism, self-righteousness, false pride and false humility. I'm always surprised to read the actual quote. So well have the principles of the program been drummed into me that I keep thinking all of these defects are listed too. Thank God I can't afford them—or I surely would indulge in them.      

The gloves come off and the language gets salty as voices are raised in a lot of the meetings I attend these days, and I’m proud to say that it isn’t even always me who starts the shouting. Just this week, I had a meeting with Senate staffers in Clair McCaskill’s office to talk about some judicial legislation and it ended with a very normal housewife and mother talking like a sailor in a heavy storm at sea.

I hosted a support group meeting at my home for the parents of incarcerated sons and one father, in total frustration, condemned the whole of not just America’s court system but the government, the corporations, and the whole fraud of American freedom and liberty in a blue streak of desperate anger.

I went to a meeting that the library about feminism led by two professors who were basically talking about the historical evolution of feminist philosophy and a young college student talked herself into an absolute rage about her family members who had somehow ignorantly and indifferently voted for a narcissistic tyrant to become the president of the United States.

And I know enough about these sorts of family conversations to know that her family members probably assume that she voted for a narcissistic tyrant who happened to have lost her bid for president. There is a lot of anger in the world today. We have a lot of reasons to be angry. I’ve been too busy to write newspaper articles for the past few months but when I heard what was in the Senate Republican’s new healthcare bill, I dropped what I was doing and poured my vitriol though my fingers into my keyboard and it was on the editor’s desk before I had time to reword calling Trump, Ryan, and our legislators, Blunt and Long, murderers. You’ll be seeing that in print early next week.

We have reasons to be angry, lots of them, lots of good reasons… in fact, I would worry about someone who could be the least bit aware of what is going on in the world and not be angry sometimes. But, pastorally, from a spiritual perspective, I just want to slow down for a few minutes and think about this.

Our emotions should be our servants and not our masters. I keep asking people to try to turn their anger into action… don’t just get mad, get involved, make a plan, make a difference, but the truth about anger is much more complicated than just a simple fight or flight reaction.

Many years ago, my eldest uncle was dying. My father and I went to see Uncle Presley in his home near Chicago. Shortly after we arrived, I saw my father get angry about how dirty the house was… he wanted to fire the housekeeper.

We stepped outside and he became enraged about how poorly the lawn and garden were being kept and he wanted to fire the teenaged boy next door my uncle paid to care for his lawn. I had been around enough to know that my widower uncle was very lonely and when the cleaning lady came, she spent more time sitting and talking with him than she did in cleaning and I suspected that the lawn boy was being equally compassionate, spending more time talking with my uncle about the garden he loved than he spent in trimming and weeding.

And it dawned on me that what was really going on is that my father was horrified by the looming death of this man who had been more than a brother to him because Presley, as the eldest, had been like a father to my much younger father. My dad wasn’t really mad at the cleaning lady or the gardener, he was afraid, afraid of the inevitable death of a man that he loved and wasn’t quite sure that he could live without.

What he needed to do, what my father was never able to do, was to tell Presley that he loved him, that he would miss him, that he was sorry to see him slipping away, he needed to thank him for all that he had done for him and his family… which was considerable… and he needed to be able to say “good-bye.”

But in a man’s world of the old south, such sentiments, while felt, were not allowed to come out and be seen in the light of day. There could be no tears, and little affection, but the macho emotion of anger was always the go-to emotion. Deceptively, anger presents itself as being strong, even threatening. It suggests confidence and courage.

What is surprising, however, is to realize that the root of anger is fear. The “fight or flight” response is a fear response. When we are scared, adrenaline jumps into our blood, our pulse quickens, and though we may shout and growl, we are not suddenly courageous lions… we are, in fact, frightened rabbits trying to get away from the monsters that scare us.

As sad as the death of my wonderful and loving uncle was, it gave me the first real insight I ever had into understanding my own father… it gave me a chance to be forgiving for a childhood literally terrorized by his frequent temper fits. He wasn’t a tyrant or a bully, he was just afraid…. He was an old soldier traumatized by too much violence, a man who had seen too many people die, a man who could not control his world or his surroundings. Thomas a’Kempis wrote in The Imitation of Christ, that to fully understand is to entirely forgive.

There is a modern proverb that says that holding onto resentment is like drinking poison in hopes that it will kill your enemies. What so many people, especially men, and I think especially red state, rural, southern men, which is my tribe, keep turning to anger as a way of responding to our fears and frustrations without realizing that anger is poison.

You have heard me repeat this quote from Scott Peck many times… he said, “If you need therapy but can’t afford it, pretend to be an Alcoholic and go to AA.” The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, though not perfect, is an amazing distillation of the wisdom of 20^th century psychology.

I’m particularly fond of this little piece from the Big Book about anger that calls anger the “dubious luxury of ordinary people.” Clinically, I don’t always like the way the Big Book draws a line between “normal” people and alcoholics though I understand that a lot of people in recovery resent the fact that they know a lot of people that can go to a bar and have a couple of drinks and still wake up the next morning in their own bed with their car parked safely in the garage… resenting people who can drink and still be sane is the sort of thing that alcoholics have to let go of.

But the Big Book tells alcoholics that they can’t afford to let themselves wallow in their anger… anger, for them is a poison that will, with certainty, rob them of their sobriety. So the Big Book leaves a little room for people who are not alcoholics… maybe they can afford to get angry, but I love the way they qualify that by calling it a dubious luxury because that is sort of like saying, “well, you can get a tattoo on your face but I’m not sure that you can call it a good idea.”

While there are lots of good reasons to be angry, I’m just asking you to realize that in most cases you are not angry that your daughter wrecked her car… you are scared that she might have been hurt. Behind many angry marital fights is the fear that your spouse may not really love you anymore. And if I may add, if you want to hasten that problem, keep drinking the poison that is anger.

It is the nature of a child to let their emotions have nearly total control of them.

Growing up is little more than learning to stop pooping in your pants and to make your emotions work for you rather than working against you.  The Buddha said, it is not your enemies that you should fear. It is your anger that destroys you.

Think of your anger as a precious commodity to be reserved for times of great need. Slow moving traffic does not deserve the energy and sacrifice of your anger. Neither Mediacom nor AT&T should be dignified by you becoming angry at either one. Your children live right inside your heart. You love them so do not let your fear become anger, let it always express itself as what it is, undying love.

When my daughter was young and going through the phase of using the word “hate” too liberally, I would often correct her by saying, “we don’t hate broccoli, we really only hate Republican congressmen.” It wasn’t until I found out that she was quoting me in her Sunday School class that I had to explain to her that we wanted to save our anger for when we really need it and not to waste it on the school lunch program.

The opposite of anger is not indifference. The goal for a wise person is not to become neutral about everything that happens.

All that I’m suggesting is that anger doesn’t make you brave, it doesn’t make you strong, and it sure doesn’t make you smarter. It is a fear based emotion. I’m just asking you to stop being afraid.