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Anger comes from an old Norse word meaning– anger. Yes, it's a very old emotion. It is a feeling of extreme annoyance. Do you suppose that's what it is? An emotion? Is anger an emotional response– is it something we don't have any control over?

There are a lot of things which can make us angry. Consider that there are 230 million registered vehicles in the United States but only an estimated 105 million parking spaces (The Week, 05/13/2005, p 20, quoting the New Republic).

And we inherit anger & violence. If our ancestors weren't so violent and angry, we might not be here and it would be someone else's descendants in our place. We have inherited a certain message, "Don't get mad - get even."

The message of the world is that revenge is sweet, and turnabout is fair play. If a friend cheats you, you cheat back. If someone hits you with a stick, you hit back with a bigger stick. If a person does you harm, you sue him. If a criminal breaks a law, the court system locks her up and throws away the key. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, abuse for abuse, suffering for suffering. This is the way of the world, and while it sometimes has the positive effect of keeping hard-core criminals off the streets, it doesn't do much to make us better people.

We inherit an angry god. God gets angry at Adam and Eve. He says: eat whatever you want, but don't eat the fruit from the big tree in the middle of the garden. Then he leaves. Guess what they do? Surprise! They eat from the tree.

God gets angry. He curses the serpent to lose his legs. He curses Eve with the pain of childbirth. He curses Adam with having to work hard for his food. He curses all of them to eventual death. He throws them all out of the garden. God gets mad at Cain for killing his brother Abel. God gets mad at all humans and decides to kill them all except for Noah and his family. God gets mad at humans for trying to get close to him by building the tower of Babel, so he destroys the tower and makes them all speak different languages. God gets angry, a lot. Pretty much every world religion has a history of a violent, avenging god or hero.

Virgil, the Roman poet, referring to the gods, asks: Why such great anger in those heavenly minds? (Aeneid)

When we were children, we watched cartoons of Tom and Jerry or the Road Runner or we watched the 3 Stooges. Later, we read comic books of villains and superheroes– and always there was a violence which trumped other violence. Now our comic books have become movies, but the stories are still the same.

Violence is only beaten by an angry response– a justified anger, but in the end might makes right, and fortunately, the hero always wins in the movies. So we were taught to feel righteous indignation.

What price comes with anger? A contemporary of Jesus, the philosopher Seneca, said:

"No plague has cost the human race more. You will see slaughter, poisoning, charge and sordid counter-charge in the law-courts, devastation of cities, the ruin of whole nations, persons of princely rank for sale at public auction, buildings set alight and the fire spreading beyond the city walls, huge tracts of territory glowing in flames that the enemy has kindled... cities of great renown, their very foundations now scarcely discernible– anger has cast them down: deserts, mile after mile without inhabitant– anger emptied them.

Look at all those leaders remembered as examples of ill-fortune– anger stabbed one in bed, smote down another amid the solemnities of the banquet, tore a 3^rd to pieces... Leave aside individuals.

Look upon gathered throngs put to the sword, on the military sent in to butcher the populace en masse, on whole peoples condemned to death in an indiscriminate devastation" (Thurman, Anger, 42).

There is also the idea of war as organized anger. Robert Thurman in his book Anger writes:

"War" is but the name for organized anger. Culturally organized anger sets the standard for our militaristic, violent lifestyle, modeled by heroes from Achilles to the Terminator" (12).

Now here is Thurman again, making a political statement which he later backs down a bit from, and it is a statement you may find obnoxious, but it is pertinent to our discussion.

"[Our] culture is the most angry yet, in the sense of most violent and militaristic... In spite of our admiration for Athens, we are the Spartan's Spartans, the Roman's Romans, the Imperialists' Imperialists.

We Americans in particular, still-in-denial heirs of the mass genocides of the Native Americans and the slavery holocaust of the African Americans, children of the Pentagon, wielders of nuclear weapons, producers of chemical & germ warfare agents of unprecedented virulence and quantity– ours is the most militaristic culture ever to manifest on Mother Earth.

We spawn mini-militaristic cultures all over the globe, dominated by puppet-like dictators, propped up by militaries manufactured in our image and equipped with our 2^nd hand arms, but never allowed to reach the same massive proportions as us, the inspiring model (21)."

Ouch. Not a very pretty picture. We could argue about whether all this militarism is actually justified or not, or even whether it would be better for some other country than ours to be in this position.

But the power of organized anger– power held in reserve by the countries with the big guns, and power used by the countries with the little guns– the power of organized anger is more potent perhaps than it has ever been in the history of the world.

Some will say anger is good. We need it to motivate us to make the world a better place. When we see social injustice, we can get angry, and this motivates us to make improvements. As Aristotle put it:

The man who gets angry at the right things and with the right people, and in the right way and at the right time and for the right length of time, is commended. Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) Greek philosopher. Nicomachean Ethics.

Some people say anger is good because it motivates social change. I know social activists who hype themselves up by trying to get themselves good and angry. They do this because they find it motivates them to get out of their attitude of complacency and into the public sphere, where they can help right social wrongs. Anger then, becomes a motivational tool.

Writing in the British newspaper, the Guardian, last week one commentator bemoaned the fact that their youth don't seem angry enough to protest anything, they "rarely march farther than the pub."

What about righteous anger against victim hood? I remember a fellow minister when I was in seminary getting all upset by a report that medical researchers were now conducting new tests on women for a drug because previously all their testing had been on men– mainly soldiers.

My friend was upset and angry that the medical establishment had for so many years been ignoring women in their research. It was as if she was taking it personally. But the medical establishment had never heard of and did not know me or my minister friend. How could it have been meant personally?

Surely, it is important to do the work of social justice, to free the oppressed, to house the homeless, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked. But how much more satisfying it can be to do the work of social justice without the cold prickly blanket of anger as a companion.

Anger as motivational tool, if you're not already motivated, is suspect. When does righteous indignation at a social wrong become self-righteous? When does it stop becoming a concern for others and becomes a puffed up self full of fire & vitriol? Where is the line between self-less and self-ish?

Usually we know when we've crossed that line when we end up making "the best speech [we'll] ever regret" as one wag put it. (Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1990) Canadian writer. Peter's Quotations).

We may come to realize that an action made in anger turns us into monsters. During a transit strike a number of years ago, a young man was walking home from work through the park. It was late and he was alone. In the middle of his trek, he saw someone approaching him on the path. There was, of course, a spasm of fear: He veered, the stranger veered. But since they both veered in the same direction they bumped in passing. A few moments later the young man realized that this could hardly have been an accident and felt for his wallet. It was gone. Anger triumphed and he turned, caught up with the pick-pocket and demanded his wallet. The man surrendered it. When he got home, the first thing he saw was his wallet lying on the bed. There was no way of avoiding the truth: He had mugged somebody. Joseph Sittler, The Anguish of Preaching (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966),10. (Told by Charles L. Rice, The Embodied Word, Preaching as Art and Liturgy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 130-31.

The fear of being mugged turned him into a mugger. The fear of being taken advantage of leads us to hurt others.

We can say things in anger to those we care about and then we realize that we can never take back those words. They are like toothpaste out of the tube– easy to squirt out that toothpaste of anger in the heat of the moment– almost impossible to put back in the tube.

More commonly perhaps, we have gotten angry at a driver impeding our progress or our boss, and then accidentally taken it out on our spouse or our children. Young children, in particular, will teach you about the force of your anger.

Most parents I know have had the experience, when they had a young child, of yelling or getting mad around or at that young child and the child instantly melting into tears and sadness at having to experience the wrath of the Mommy-God or the Daddy-God. It is then we realize– hopefully– that our anger has spilled over, that it isn't appropriate. We realize that our anger alone will not motivate other people to change their behavior. It might work temporarily, but anger is a very blunt instrument.

As the Hindu _expression goes: Anger has no eyes (Hindustani proverb). Anger can feel like a very heavy weight, one that we want to put down at the first opportunity.

Or anger can be something we carry for a long, long time. We may not even realize we've been carrying it, until we lay that burden down.

Sometime after I turned 18, my mother told me that I had to move out of the house. The child support checks from my father were going to stop, since I turned 18, and she couldn't afford to keep me anymore. And I didn't seem to be holding on to a job, and I wasn't doing well in school, and it was time for me "to get on with my life."

I was furious. I felt my parents had already messed up my life by getting divorced. Now I was to be tossed out into the street?

I ended up hitch-hiking to New York City where some church youth group friends of mine lived. I would stay at one house for a couple weeks, then another friends. I took some odd jobs here and there. Eventually, I wound up living on a rooftop near 98^th and Broadway in Manhattan, and it wasn't much fun. I didn't have anyplace to go, and I couldn't go home.

Finally, I came down with mononucleosis— sort of a real bad cold that leaves you too weak to do much but lie in bed for a week. And I got enough cash together to get a one-way Amtrak ticket back to my mother's house.

"Home is the place where– when you have to go there– they have to take you in." So goes a line from a famous author. And my mother did take me back in since I was sick, and I recovered, and I got a job and moved in with some other friends in my old hometown.

One day, a few weeks later, I was visiting my father in the next town over. And he told me that he was talking with a friend, Roger. They were talking about their children. And my father said Roger was talking about how his children were doing. One was in a new job– in business– in a career; another was in their 3^rd year at university, and so forth. My father told Roger about what my sister was doing and what my brother was doing. But, my father said, I couldn't tell them what you were doing because I didn't know where you were.

And all I could think of was: Good!

And it occurred to me– years later– that to some degree, anger had been motivating me to act the way I had. That anger had driven me to Manhattan, that anger had colored and poisoned my relationship with my self– not just with my parents.

I had become angry that I was in the situation I was in. My parents promises about college and the future turned out to be ashes, and so I became mad at the world.

And sometimes when we can't or won't take it out on the world, we take it out on ourselves. We punish ourselves. Our response to hurt becomes anger, and in anger we hurt ourselves or others.

And if we’re not careful, we will pass on our anger to our children as an inheritance, just like the one the culture gave us. What can we do about anger? Anything?

Mark Twain summed up my main strategy when he said: When angry, count four; when very angry, swear. Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) U.S. writer and humorist. Pudd'nhead Wilson.

You may take it for granted the idea that if you work hard enough at it, you can overcome some of your limitations. But the religious right, the orthodox, would chuckle at the impossibility of such an idea. It is a sin of pride– they would say– to think you can alter your own nature. Since God models anger from the beginning of time to the end of time, you mock God if you think you can overcome it in your own life.

But we UUs believe we can overcome lots of things– maybe even– including anger.

Where does anger come from? Anger is not a primary emotion. It is not the thing that comes first. This is an important distinction. We may have been taught that anger comes first, but that isn't true. There is something else– before anger.

It is hurt. Anger is one way of responding to that hurt. But as soon as we recognize that anger is only one way of responding to hurt, we are obligated to figure out if there are better ways to respond.

Consider a couple in for counseling. When his wife tried to walk out of a marriage counseling session at their church, a Texas man pulled out a gun and shot her. The woman, in turn, pulled a gun out of her purse and fired back. "Tidbits and Outrages," The Washington Monthly, June 1998, 31.

Is anger a response we have any control over? Does anger start with a decision? Or an impulse? Is anger a defense mechanism, a strategy? Or is it a reaction deep within the primitive reptilian brain? Here is Seneca's analysis from 2 ½ millennia ago:

"To receive an impression of wrong done to one, to lust for retribution, to put together the two propositions that the damage ought not to have been done and that punishment ought to be inflicted, is not the work of a mere involuntary impulse. What we have here is a complex with several constituents– realization, indignation, condemnation, retribution. These cannot occur without the assent by the mind to whatever has struck it."

So anger, in this view, is not an unconscious impulse, but a painful experience with a decision to attack the perceived source of that pain. The couple shooting at each other in marriage counseling are not responding to unconscious impulses, but are choosing that form of violence.

They may have been hurt by each other, but to some degree, they chose anger, they chose violence over other responses. The history of the world– and much great drama, particularly the tragedies– shows us that it is very difficult to overcome anger and the destructive urge.

But as a people who are on a path of spiritual depth– this is what we are called to do. I think anger is almost invariably destructive but it is also a warning sign, a little blinking light. It is a danger and an opportunity.

I know I can get annoyed quite a bit if I get up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak. And little annoyances can build to great annoyances which can lead to anger and angry words.

But anger can be tamed and made into a useful guidepost. It’s nature’s way of letting you know something’s wrong. One of the first things I have to do is to stop and think about what it is that’s really bugging me.

If it’s the guy in traffic ahead of me, then I want to choose to accept reality and cool down and get away from the sense that the world ought to bow down to me.

If it’s the fact that gays & lesbians in our state can be kicked out of their apartments, fired from their jobs, and denied hospital visitation privileges, then I want to say reality is wrong, and I want to change the world for the better.

Being annoyed, paying attention to anger in your own psyche is a warning light, a blinking light that now is the time to bring your full attention to bear. Now is the time to remember who you are– your religious principles. And now is the time to consider how best to put them into action.

The antidote to anger is patience. The opposite of anger is "love & compassion, the will to help others not to suffer and to be happy." We can't just jump across the river from anger all the way over to love & compassion, though. We may need to cross the middle ground we can reach for– the bridge of tolerance, patience, and forgiveness.

My prayer for you and for me in the days ahead, is that when we feel anger coming on, we seek and find peace, peace like a river in our soul.

I invite you to rise & sing verses 1,3, & 6      I've Got Peace Like a River, #100