Anger. Such a negative emotion: primitive, uncivilised, it brings brings feelings of anxiety and fear. It is uncomfortable and frightening, both when we experience another’s anger or our own, and it is difficult to examine in a detached, rational way. Our tendency is to keep it controlled, suppressed, under wraps, away from where we think it can do harm.
But anger is too important an emotion to push to the back of our minds. In fact, it has a tendency to rise in us however we try to keep a lid on it, perhaps with good reason.
Righteous Anger. The Oxford Dictionary defines righteous as, “morally right or justifiable”. In some Christian doctrines, righteous anger is considered the only form of anger which is not sinful. Anger, when in reaction to a sense of mistreatment, insult, malice or injustice, is a perfectly understandable reaction. Why then do we fear it?
Probably because of where it might lead when it is allowed to go too far: into mindless rage and loss of control, causing us to do physical or emotional damage; when it breeds resentment and the poison of bitterness; when vindictiveness and vengeance cause us to do harm to those things or persons we perceive have hurt us.
Anger can serve a positive purpose. In response to injustice, it is a prime motivator in people making changes. However, we see so often how it goes unchecked, spilling over in to ugly demonstrations, where hatred infects it. But is it any wonder that this is so? When voices go unheard, as with the “nightmare screams” of Maya Angelou’s poem, so the voices will start singing in righteous anger, a “fearful trill”. And if that song is not truly heard and justly acted upon, the anger will inevitably be lit, by any possible spark, to burn fiercely and hot: rage and vengeance are the unwelcome but wholly understandable followers-on to a righteous anger which is ignored for too long.
And so we see vandalism and arson, hate speech and counter speech. Symbols of a repressive system come under attack: politicians, authority figures and their property, statues. Sadly, the verbal and physical violence only serve to harden boundaries and further misunderstanding and division. The righteousness becomes swamped and lost in the unholy tumult. The conversations we could be having to find new ways of living in a just society are drowned out by, sometimes petty, arguments over blame, shame, responsibility and who said or owes what to whom.
There are many who believe, or maybe just hope, that we can pull back from the damaging excesses of anger and not just hear and understand, but actually start cutting the ties which bind the feet of all the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the outcast, the lowly and the oppressed.
Dark and Light. Cold and Hot. Weak and Strong. Yin and Yang. What the Chinese philosophical text the Tao Te Ching calls the Two which make up the One. For rather than being two sides of a coin, so to speak, the Two are inseparable from each other, two manifestations of a unity. Dark is not the absence of light: it can only exist because of the presence of light. Heat is not the absence of cold: it exists because of the presence of cold. They are really an inseparable whole.
In the same way, human beings cannot be separated one from another. The short and the tall, the big and the small, the dark and the light, the good and the bad: all only exist because of the presence of each other. The divisions we make are shaped only by our language: we label and divide and make the mistake of living by those labels, forgetting that language is but an inadequate attempt to describe the complexity and nuances of the universe we live in.
Along with our labels, we tend to make value judgements, favouring one part of the Yin and the Yang: the light, strong, good aspects. We have needlessly become afraid of the darkness, forgetting how it allows us respite and nurtures life. Somehow, we have come to believe that any imbalance, any fall to the dark side, will be temporary and that the lightness, strength and goodness will always reassert its dominance. But this is a fallacy: neither Yin nor Yang has any more worth or importance than the other and there is nothing in this world that makes progress synonymous with improvement. We fool ourselves into thinking things will only get better. The lessons of history tell us otherwise.
By assigning differing values to aspects of life, we lose sight of the fact that human beings, as whole beings, are equal to each other in worth. The African Roman playwright, Publius Terentius Afer, wrote a line for a play which is variously translated as, “I am a human being and nothing human can be alien to me”. Borrowed by many later writers, it demonstrates that we are all each other, capable of the same emotions, thoughts and actions, however we have chosen to label them. When the Abolitionists of the early 1800’s borrowed Shylock the Jew’s words from Shakespeare, they were appealing to this sense of shared humanity: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
To value all lives equally, in all their glory and imperfection, we do not need to destroy or ignore the words and labels we use. We have to balance them, see them and value them as they really are, as equal manifestations of a unity, aspects of a greater whole that we can only ever see glimpses of at any one time, none of them any more important than another.
Life is not fair, we don’t all get the same hand dealt to us. Some face challenges others can hardly imagine, some are born into a life of ease others can only dream of. This does not make any person of less value or worthy of less consideration than another. But treating everyone the same is not fairness: it ignores real differences and promotes privilege. We have to look beyond equality to our sense of what is equitable, that is, giving everyone what they need to be successful despite their differences. Some people are more in need of assistance than others, which is where equity comes in: being fair and impartial in our dealings with everyone, removing our ideas of who is more deserving than another based on our descriptive labels and value judgements.
Is it enough to recognise our shared humanity, our basic equality, and treat everyone in society equitably? I would argue it is not enough: we have to look at the root causes for some of those systemic things which keep certain people disenfranchised. Then, if we really believe “change is gonna come”, we need to decide on the direction of that change and work to remove those barriers to people’s success.
There is a saying that you can judge a people by how it treats its animals. I think it’s even more true that you can judge a people by how they treat each other, especially the most vulnerable in its society. Around the globe, human beings treat each other in a huge variety of ways, with differences between societies and between sub-groups within those societies. What that suggests is that none of those ways is inevitable or unchangeable: they are not simply human beings acting out an inevitable, innate set of behaviours, they are ways which have been chosen and are acquiesced to by those populations.
Much of that acquiescence is through inaction: people are neither actively engaged in pursuing nor opposing a certain policy or opinion. But this sort of neutrality is empty virtue. It is not enough to say “I am not racist/sexist/ageist/” or whatever. If we continue to pass by someone in need on the other side of the road, we deny our shared humanity. If we count ourselves as good, goodness demands more from us than sitting on the sidelines while others make the rules.
I’d just like to read a short passage from a book called ‘The Time is now: A Call to Uncommon Courage’.
“The question, What will you do? Is at the core of spiritual maturity, of spiritual commitment. To follow Jesus means that we, too, must each do something to redeem our battered, beaten world from the greed that smothers it. We must put ourselves between the defenceless and the nuclearism that would destroy it in the name of peace. We must confront the sexism that demeans half the human race. We must redeem the anthropology of false human superiority that consumes its resources and diminishes its peoples at the cost of everything on the planet except humankind. And then, as a result, most of humankind as well.”
At this time when we are so aware of the roads that lie before us, we have three possible options and are called to make a choice. We could walk away from the challenging road and choose an easier route, closing our eyes and ears to the difficulties of it all. We could give up the fight because we feel no-one is ever listening and just continue our comfortable, responsibility free lives. The third choice is to refuse to accept the way things are and insist on pushing for change, to join our voices in song with the caged birds and actively work to break the bars, unbind the feet and support people in their flights to a full life.
Whether our emotions are ones of righteous anger, a sense of shame or just a simple desire to make a positive difference, we are prompted to ask, “What can we do?” We can pick a battle for a cause we care about, whether it’s for gender equality, Black Lives Matter, supporting the Homeless, Addicted or Imprisoned, or any of the huge numbers of people whose voices routinely go unheard. Pick one and go to make contact with those who are already fighting the battle. Find out what they need us to do to help dismantle the human-made barriers which keep them back and then do it. As Maya Angelou said, “It may not be expedient, it may not be profitable, but it will satisfy your soul.” Why is that? Because doing what is right is in line with the sacred within all of us, the divine spark which lives within and links us all.
It doesn’t much matter whether we believe we are doing God’s will, creating what Jesus described as the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ here on Earth, or if we act because we simply believe in the fundamental worth of all life and in basic human decency. What matters is that we act. It will take courage, but the choice is clear: we must do what it is right to do, where we are in the world. It can be better, it must be better, but it is up to us to take a small step, then another and another and never stop. Let us be gentle in our anger and let us show by our acts, the truth of the words we speak.
Amen
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House 