by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given April 28, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Some have come this morning in joy, others in deep sorrow. Some have great hope, others have lost hope. Please know you are welcome as you are, as we gather together in this community of love and caring. Come, let us worship together.

This past Friday, I was out for a walk, doing a few little errands. For one thing, I wanted to get some copies made of a photograph, so I went into a small copy shop. The young clerk who took my photos was clearly new at the job and wasn’t quite sure which settings to use. She tried one, but the copy turned out way too dark. She tried on another machine, and the copy was still too dark. Then she asked her boss which setting she should use, finally made a good copy, showed it to me and said, "And you’ll have to pay for all the other copies I made." Incredulous, I said: "Are you telling me I have to pay for the copies that are no good?" I thought this was merely a clear and direct statement, but apparently I scared her. She started blinking her eyes rapidly, and said, "I have to ask my boss." Having overheard everything, the boss came over to me, handed me my photos back, and said, "You can just take these somewhere else," and went back to wrapping a package. It occurred to me that I wasn’t going to get my photos copied this way. So I said to him, in a somewhat softer voice, "Did you see the copies that didn’t work?" He ignored me. So I said again, calmly, "Did you see the copies that didn’t work?" Still he ignored me. But I would not go away (tenacity is one of my strong points). I said a third time, "Excuse me, but did you see the copies that didn’t work? Why don’t you take a look at them?" He turned from his wrapping, strode over to the copier, and took the copies from the hands of the still quavering clerk. "Hmmm. Oh. Uh-huh," he said. After a lengthy examination of the copies, he told the clerk just to charge me for the good copies. "Thank you," I said to him. Still he didn’t speak to me. I paid, and as I left the shop, he said, "Thank you." I left feeling better, but still with a bad taste in my mouth. I’m sure the clerk wasn’t any more confident about her work because of my visit, and the boss was probably feeling not so good about himself. "How could all of this have been different," I asked myself, " if I had thought before I spoke? If I hadn’t been so quick on the trigger?"

I’m speaking on anger today and next Sunday on a subject which naturally follows: forgiveness. I have chosen these topics, not because I have any great wisdom or understanding to impart to you, but rather because I struggle with anger and forgiveness in my own spiritual life, and I need to reflect on these topics. I can bring you only what I’m learning as I struggle.

Anger. It’s not that there are no valid uses for anger—there are. In self-defense, for example. A woman told me that she was walking on her college campus one night, and a man appeared from nowhere, with the clear intention of raping her. Turns out, though, that this young woman had a black belt in karate. "What happened?" I asked her. "He got the worst of it," she said. She became instantly focused and single-minded, concentrating her strength, and defeating her opponent, which is what she needed to do.

Another positive use of anger: anger sometimes helps other people to understand the depth of your feeling. Sometimes there is no other way to make your point. I will never forget something that happened when I was a young woman living in England—there I met people from all over the world. One night at a party, in my innocence and ignorance, I was defending the U.S. presence in Vietnam, and a fiery woman from South America just tore into me. Her eyes flashing, she said, "Don’t you know anything about your country’s foreign policy?" Well, I didn’t. But I soon began to learn.

Anger is also useful when it fuels our work in social justice. In Beverly Harrison’s landmark essay, "The Power of Anger in the Work of Love," she says, "It is my thesis that we Christians have come very close to killing love precisely because we have understood anger to be a deadly sin. Anger is not the opposite of love. It is better understood as a feeling-signal that all is not well in our relation to other persons or groups . . . Anger is a mode of connectedness to others and is always a vivid form of caring."

Personally, I am passionate by nature—I’m a fighter, and I am a lover. I do care, and I wonder how much of my passion is fueled by my anger. I carry around a lot of anger, and I always have. I think a lot of us do. Half the time I don’t even know where my anger comes from—some of it may well originate way below the conscious level, may come from my earliest days. Some of it comes from living in a commercial culture in which I feel that I am constantly cajoled, lied to, encouraged to consume. Some of my anger comes from my outrage at the pain that so many people suffer in this rich country of ours.

I heard a story this past week from a worker at the Food Bank. She told me that the demand for food keeps rising in Oregon, and that with welfare reform, much of the safety net for the poor has disappeared. She told me of motels where 2 and 3 families live in a single room, motels where the carpet seems never to have been swept. She told me of visiting such a room where the children all had head lice, and the parents could not afford the medication to treat it. There are some things that we ought to be outraged about.

But if there are legitimate uses for anger, there are also tremendous costs, if anger is not used well. In the personal realm as well as in the international, we see a simple truth played out over and over again: anger begets anger, violence begets violence. Simple to understand, it seems—but vengeance is so tempting, it’s so natural, isn’t it, to want to hurt someone who hurts you. Well, we are creatures of the flesh. How do we escape these very visceral responses to hurt? Only by using our minds and deepening our spirits.

Let’s look at some of the costs of misused anger. As our anger rises, our tolerance and flexibility decrease. Anger makes us rigid and unyielding. The result? Other people resist our angry demands by avoiding, discounting, becoming passive. Anger can take the relaxation and fun out of life, can isolate us and make us lonely. Studies have shown that anger can even make us ill by weakening our resistance to disease. Hostile people have higher death rates from all causes than do other people.

It used to be in vogue in therapy circles to "get your anger out" by beating on pillows, for example. My Gestalt teacher had us using tennis rackets on beanbags. Then one summer I went to one of his seminars, and he was no longer using that technique. I asked him why and he said, "I guess I’m not so angry any more." I’m beginning to believe that "getting anger out" might be like feeding the wolf. You may feel tired and relieved, to some degree, but the root causes are still there, and your anger will rise up and be at you again.

A direct expression of anger designed to make another person change takes us nowhere but to frustration and ultimately to feelings of helplessness. Helplessness can be arrived at in four easy steps: first, you tell yourself, "I am in pain"; second, you tell yourself, "Somebody else should fix it"; third, you express anger and become aggressive; and fourth, your anger makes the other person resist and withdraw. I want to suggest a different approach.

Writer Harriet Lerner tells this story about an encounter with her son Matthew, who was three years old at the time. She noticed Matthew sitting at the kitchen table about to cut an apple with a sharp knife. The conversation went like this:

Mom: "Matthew, put that knife down. You’re going to cut yourself."

Matthew: "No, I’m not."

Mom: "Yes, you are!"

Matthew: "No, I’m not!"

Mom: "Yes, you are! Put it down!"

Matthew: "No!"

Then this good mom remembered the advice in her Parent Effectiveness Training book. She said to her son, "Matthew, when I see you with a sharp knife, I feel scared. I am worried that you will cut yourself." At this point Matthew paused, looked his mother straight in the eye, and said, "That’s your problem." Mom thought a moment and then replied, "You’re absolutely right. It is my problem, and I’m going to take care of my problem right now by taking that knife away from you." And she did.

Now this is a perfect little parable about anger. The mom was disturbed; she tried to get her son to "fix it" by speaking to him in anger, which caused him to withdraw and dig in deeper. Finally, she owned her problem and then exercised her parental authority and responsibility. Matthew had no problem with this. End of the story.

It’s easier, you see, to become angry than to admit that you are fearful or hurt or empty. To deal with the core of our anger, to get to the root of it, we must invite the feelings underneath the anger. We must try to recognize them and acknowledge them.

We cannot expect another person to change—that would have to be his or her own free choice. All we can do is to recognize what we’re feeling and to express our needs. A few weekends ago I traveled to Seattle to be with my younger son Madison, who is having severe problems with tendonitis. When I arrived, he had had a particularly bad day—he was in pain, and he was frustrated. We went out to eat, and he became agitated and critical of me, over what I didn’t know. He said, "You do some things that just drive me crazy, Mom!" "Like what things?" I said, beginning to ask myself why I had come to Spokane. He didn’t want to say what things; he wanted to sulk.

Sometimes it feels so good to just stay angry. I myself began to feel very sad. I started crying into my lunch, and the silent tears kept coming and coming. I said to him, "Madison, I love you so much. What you’re saying really hurts me. I want so much to help you—I don’t want to make your life more difficult. If you’ll tell me what bothers you, I’ll try my best, within the scope of who I am, to change." He cooled down a bit. That weekend, I helped him at work. Then he and I cleaned up his neglected apartment—"neglected" is the nicest word I can think for it—and we spent four days together bumming around Spokane. When I left, he apologized and told me that he loved me—and he said, "Mom, I’m going to be a better son." And he has been. He has been calling frequently and telling me he loves me. He has let go of some of his anger about his disability, and his arms have begun getting better. The story is not over, though. His lashing out at me has made me pull back emotionally, has made me more wary. Anger scars the delicate tissue of relationship.

Sometimes you do everything right—you identify your feelings, take responsibility for them, and share with the other person how you feel, and yet the result is not what you’d hoped for. Take the case of Joan and Carl. They had been living together for some time, and agreed that they were committed to monogamy, but wanted to maintain their separate friendships. That casual contract was workable until Carl began spending time with his young research assistant who was going through a divorce. Joan found herself feeling threatened and angry. This went on for a year, and Carl’s relationship with his assistant was the focus of many arguments, but with no resolution. Should Joan be jealous? She herself didn’t know, and she went back and forth blaming herself and then blaming Carl. Finally Joan realized that the on-going anger was a signal to her, telling her how deeply bothered she was, and she simply told Carl that the situation was causing more jealousy and anger than she could live with. She did not fight or become defensive. She simply said, "My feelings are my feelings." Joan’s clarity forced Carl to clarify his own feelings. Turns out that Joan was not his priority. So she asked him to move out, and soon afterward he moved in with his assistant. We have to know our bottom line, we have to know how much compromising we can live with, and still maintain self-respect. Sometimes we just have to say, "This hurts too much," and we have to leave.

An author who has been helpful to me in my own struggle to become kinder and more peaceful is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He suggests a gentle approach when one is angry. He tells us that we mustn’t throw anger out, but rather observe it with love and attention. Just as we cannot say to a stomach ache, "I don’t want you stomach ache—get out of here!" We cannot say to anger, "Go away, I don’t want you!"

We sometimes think if we allow ourselves to really experience our deep anger, it will overcome us—we will be overwhelmed by it. But Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that we are more than our fear, more than our anger. In meditation, our anger appears, we recognize it for what it is, we become friends with it, and take good care of it. Thich Nhat Hanh says we take it up like a mother holding her child. If the child knows the mother’s mind is occupied with something else, the child will not quiet. But when she holds the child close and just allows herself to be with the child, the child is likely to quiet down. So it is with anger.

Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a husband and wife who were estranged. They did not enjoy each other’s company anymore because of the emotional wounds they had each inflicted upon the other. The husband had taken to traveling more, and the wife suspected that he was finding his comfort and happiness elsewhere. One day after he left on yet another business trip, she was clearing out a closet and came upon a box of letters—letters he had written to her during their courtship. She took out one and read it. Its sweetness touched her deeply. She read another letter and another and another, and as she read, she realized that the seeds of her past happiness were still there, buried under all the suffering. They had watered the seeds of suffering in each other. But with her reading, the seeds of happiness began to grow. She sat down and began to write her husband a letter. "My Beloved One," she began. It was a love letter addressed to the young man who had written to her so many years before. Her letter was a kind of meditation. She felt light inside. "I’m partly responsible for our suffering," she wrote, "for the fact that we don’t have the happiness that both of us deserve. Let us begin

again . . . Let us make happiness a reality again." Her husband came home and went upstairs and found the letter and thought about her words for a long time. For him, this was a meditation. They had a chance to start over. I don’t know the end of this story—Thich Nhat Hanh doesn’t tell us. But in one sense it really doesn’t matter. We just need to sow the seeds of happiness, and then let go.

Increasingly, I don’t want to make even a little place in my being for cynicism, negative feelings, and anger—although reading the morning paper makes that a real challenge. I don’t want to be around people who are negative and hostile. I want to be with people who say "Yes!" to life, who contribute in a positive way. I’m less and less tolerant of complaining, both in myself and in others. Basically, life is just too short.

You know, on that same Friday after I left the copy shop, I ran into two men who own a restaurant in my neighborhood. I don’t know them well, but when I saw them, I stopped them, and said hello, and then I said, "I want to tell you a story." They were a little surprised, but they stopped to listen. I said, "Three and a half years ago my best friend died. I had seen her through two years of cancer treatment, and we were very close. The day she died, I was devastated. I was heading home, feeling so bereft, and I saw your restaurant. I thought, ‘I’ll do something nice for myself,’ and so I decided to go in and have breakfast." I told the two men, "You had no way of knowing what I had just gone through, but you and your staff were so welcoming, so hospitable, that I felt my spirits rise. I felt cared about, and began to feel restored. I just want to tell you, yes, the food in your restaurant is good, but it’s not just about food—it’s about the atmosphere you create, an atmosphere of comfort and joy. And I just want to thank you." And they reached out their hands to me, and they had tears in their eyes as we parted, and so did I.

How do we control anger? How do we tame the beast within? I think we just have to make friends with it, make friends with ourselves as we are, accept our feelings for what they are, and then fill our lives with loving. When the heart is so full of love, there is not much room left for anger. The beast just gets distracted, just gets side-tracked, and moves on out. And then there appears the room we always wanted in our lives—room for creativity, for justice-making, for loving of all kinds. Isn’t this how we were meant to live? So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, we come today confessing that at times we have let our anger run loose, unchecked. We have hurt others, and we have hurt ourselves, and we want to behave differently. Other times we have failed to recognize our anger and have turned it in upon ourselves, in depression. Help us to be mindful of our feelings, and accepting of ourselves as we struggle to grow and change. We pray this morning that, through your grace, we may become wiser and more loving, that we might find peace in our hearts and create peace in the world. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and leave this place with thankful hearts! Fill yourself so with love that anger is not tempted in. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2002, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.