"Seven Deadly Sins: Anger"
by Rev. Kimi Riegel
January 2, 2005

The words of our responsive reading, taken from the Buddhist tradition, offer a heartening hope: that we might live with “boundless love for all the world,” with “love unrestrained, without hate or enmity,” never wishing “evil to anyone at all.”

But then when we signal our interest in moving into the right-hand lane, so we may leave the highway at the next exit, some fellow traveler just behind us in that lane chooses to speed up into the space we need, forcing us to miss the exit and have to go an extra mile and double back, contemplating all the while the forms of evil we wish this idiot might receive.  

Or, more seriously, people we know and love frustrate our expectations: as a parent, our teenager doesn’t come home on time, or as a teenager, our parents are way too restrictive and too unforgiving. Annoying things our spouse does that we were sure would go away, haven’t yet, and it’s been five years. Our boss is an idiot, or our employees or customers are. And while we may not wish them evil, boundless love is not exactly what we feel.

What we may feel is frustration and sometimes downright anger, even rage. Acted upon, these emotions can result in harm and hurt, even grievous harm and hurt, psychological bruises struck deep in someone’s sense of self, physical bruises, too … and even worse, like our story this morning, death.

Anger touches all our lives not just as people who are subject to the anger of others, but as people who bear and express it ourselves. It is important to condemn violent anger’s most awful results, but it is not enough; we need to consider how anger works in us as well, and how our society deals with violence in general.

The thing about anger is it is a part of who we are as humans. We have inherited it from thousands of centuries of evolution, in which it played a role in helping our ancestors survive. “With anger blood flows to the hands, making it easier to grasp a weapon or strike a foe,” Daniel Goleman observes in his book Emotional Intelligence “heart rate increases, and a rush of hormones such as adrenaline generates a pulse of energy strong enough for vigorous action.” [1] Very handy in the prehistoric environment; less so today.  

Thus, there is no cause for shame that we feel anger; that’s how we’re designed, and some people more than others.  

Some people are quick to anger and others are slower. Some people are more internal with their anger and others are external. Carol Tavris in her book Anger: the Misunderstood Emotion suggests that our responses are learned reactions in part due to our social environment and our genetic make up. In one study she sites people who were more passive about their expression of anger had a negative physical reaction when told they had to be more assertive. And conversely people who were more aggressive in their anger expression had a negative physical reaction when told they had to be more passive. However both groups, with practice and social rewards, learned to behave in the exact opposite way and had the exact opposite physical reactions; the passives learned to feel good when they were aggressive and the aggressives learned to feel good, in time, when they were passive.[2]

The question then is, how to respond to the anger we feel, large or small, easy or hard, slow or quick. The fashionable answer of thirty years ago was that anger was a healthy, positive thing, and it deserved expression. The best way of dealing with anger was to let it out, the worst thing was to bottle it up inside.

Essentially every book written and study done on the subject in the last twenty years has gone to pains to point out that this earlier answer turned out to be largely, but not altogether wrong; giving in to anger only leads to more anger, not less. One becomes a more anger-prone person the more one indulges one’s anger.  

This is hardly surprising. As someone once asked, we know that love does not decrease the more we express it, why should it be different with anger.

There are a few parts of the earlier analysis that were right. First, bottling up anger really isn’t a good idea. Venting your anger isn’t the answer, but neither is repressing it.  

And second, anger is a good thing in some ways. It may be a sign that we should pay attention to something about our circumstances more attentively and with greater thought and understanding. Acted on appropriately, it can goad us into action we should take but might wish to avoid, like finally confronting a neighbor, co-worker, or family member whose behavior is upsetting, abusive, or wrong. Anger can kindle and stoke the flames of our conscience and our struggles for greater social justice. 

In the new, more balanced way of seeing things, anger is not shameful or wrong in itself. It is natural, even healthy, but it is a powerful emotion with dangerous potential and it has to be managed and controlled.  

Venting is rarely the right answer. By venting I mean when I feel anger in me, I let it out at the person who’s provoking it, then and there, full force. Venting not only increases one’s anger, it hurts other people, and it often provokes anger in them in return.

But the feeling can be so strong! What to do? Answers abound, and they’re pretty simple, even obvious, but it seems they’re the sorts of things people need to have in mind before they go do something rash.

These are pretty basic things, like Goleman’s saying that as early as you can in the process of losing your temper, try to picture the disturbing event or behavior in some less negative light. Too often, our tendency is to conclude that we are under some sort of attack, that things are transpiring as they are because someone wishes us ill, that our self-esteem is imperiled. Our animal instincts kick in, anger rises, anger builds on anger, we can lose perspective, objectivity, and even control. Long before, we need to “seize on and challenge the thoughts that trigger the surges of anger….”

Goleman is drawing on the work of one Dolf Zillman, whose studies showed there was a way of preventing anger from overwhelming our reason: take a break. Cool off. Do something distracting, and eating and shopping don’t count: those can go on building your anger; better is TV, movies, reading, or exercise. [3] Figure out the other emotions that are also present, fear, grief, pain or a desire for control. All of these can be a source of anger and once brought to awareness can be dealt with reducing the need for anger. 

You may still want and even need to relate the content of your discontent, but after your body’s chemistry is more normal, and your mind is less controlled by emotion. In the meantime, as your mother may have told you, hit a pillow.

One important piece to remember is we are responsible for our anger and its effect on the people we love. There was a time when we were encouraged to believe we are not responsible for our effect on others and to a degree that is true. We can not live our lives wrapped in concern for our effect on people – However when it comes to the kind of harm, emotional and physical, that aggression can cause we must take responsibility for our actions.

Such measures are essential if we are to live with ourselves. Goleman notes that “Of all the moods that people want to escape, rage seems to be the most intransigent; [research] found anger is the mood people are worst at controlling. Indeed, anger is the most seductive of negative emotions; the self-righteous inner monologue that propels it along fills the mind with the most convincing arguments for venting rage.” It has a “seductive, persuasive power….”[4]

But along with all its other negative effects, it kills. And I mean those people who are its victims, but I also mean you and me, for our own lives shall last less long if we are pawns of this emotion, prone to “the power of anger to damage the heart.” Studies confirm it: “hostility … puts people at risk.”[5]

Let us stay with Daniel Goleman a little longer as we close, because his message takes on a religious aspect. Responding to the correlation between anger and heart disease, he writes that “The good news is that chronic anger need not be a death sentence: hostility is a habit that can change…. [One] anger-control training resulted in a second-heart-attack rate 44% lower than those who had not tried to change their hostility. [Such a program] teaches … mindfulness of anger as it begins to stir, the ability to regulate it once it has begun, and empathy. [Empathy!] Patients … are encouraged to purposefully substitute reasonable thoughts for cynical, mistrustful ones during stressful situations…. For frustrating encounters, they learn the ability to see things from the other person’s perspective – empathy is a balm for anger.

“As [the researcher Dr. Redford ] Williams told Goleman, ‘The antidote to hostility is to develop a more trusting heart.”[6]

Unitarians and Universalists have been inclined toward trusting hearts from their beginnings. The world does have its evil, and cause for anger and action. But mostly the universe, our auto mechanic, our neighbors, our friends, the shoe repair shop, the folks here at church, our family members, and even strangers on the street are not trying to do us in, but only trying as best they can to muddle through, like us.  

If we can hold to such a faith, guarded though it must be in the real world, which does not yet deserve our “boundless love,” perhaps we can at least achieve some freedom from our own hostilities and our unmerited sense of anger.  

Let us save our anger for tyrants, bigotry, injustice, and hate. Let us learn to live with, and manage, and keep in control those angers we feel for those most close around us. And let us even imagine that such “love unrestrained, without hate or enmity,” never wishing “evil to anyone at all,” might some day be expanded to a “boundless love for all the world” and deservedly so.