Week 8 Sunday
Week 8 Sunday
The Third Enemy: Anger, Resentments
Psalm 34:5; Isaiah 45:22; Mark 9:33-35
We have now looked at two of the fifteen enemies of the human personality: lack of a vital faith in God, and consequent self-centeredness. We now come to the third: anger, resentments, hate. In taking up these three, we are entering the realm of the emotions.
This age is afraid of being emotional; and yet it is turning out to be a very emotional age; in fact, emotionalism is rampant. Most of this emotionalism is self-disruptive. An age that is afraid of emotion ends up following the thing it fears. It has tried to suppress the emotions, and the emotions, put out at the door, have come back by the window.
For the emotions are a part of us and cannot be eliminated. All attempts at elimination end in complexes. They are pushed into the subconscious, and there they fester. We cannot set aside the emotions; we can only direct them, sometimes redirect them to great aims and purposes. The emotions are the driving forces of the personality. They can drive toward the rocks or toward the open seas of expanding accomplishment.
Take anger, for instance. It is an instinct of self-protection and for the protection of others. It causes us to stand up and fight against harmful enemies of the human personality. We are angry with evil, and therefore we stiffen ourselves against it and oppose it. Otherwise we would allow it to invade us and others. Nietzsche is right when he says that “virtue is of no use unless it can be lashed into rage.”* Otherwise we would be “moral cows” in our “plump comfortableness.”** Our capacity to love the good determines our capacity to hate the evil. But note that it is our virtue that is to be lashed into a rage—not our pride, our hurt egoism, our fears. There is all the difference in the world between the two: one is harnessed to higher ends—constructive; the other is harnessed to the ends of a wounded self—destructive. The one is a righteous anger, and the other is unrighteous.
O God, I do not sail calm seas. I am driven by tempests of emotion. Help me harness these to the purposes of your kingdom, for unharnessed they drive me to the rocks upon which both I and my relationships are broken. I surrender myself and my emotions to you. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
** Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 26.
Week 8 Monday
A Good Anger
Psalms 95:10; 97:10; Proverbs 8:3; Mark 3:5; Ephesians 4:30
Yesterday you saw that anger is a driving force; it throws adrenalin into the bloodstream, and you are then ready for fight or flight. If anger is to be constructive, it must be harnessed to great causes. It must be like the explosions in the engine of your automobile; these explosions are under the control of purpose and will drive you to your destination. But if, instead of harnessing the explosions, you light all the gasoline in your tank at once, you would blow yourself and the car to pieces in one great “blowup.” That is what happens to your insides when you have a “blowup” of uncontrolled, nonconstructive anger. It leaves you and your situation torn to pieces.
Jesus was an example of controlled anger. When he was about to heal the man with the withered arm, he saw the hard faces of religious men who opposed the act because it was being done on the sabbath. He looked “around at them with anger, deeply grieved at their unyielding hearts” (Mark 3:5 CEB). Here his anger was not personal pique, a wounded egotism; it was grief at the hardness of men’s hearts that could block the healing of a poor unfortunate man. His anger drove him to oppose these men on behalf of the underprivileged. It was a righteous anger.
Anger is righteous if it has in it grief on account of what is happening to others, and not a grudge on account of what is happening to oneself. But one must be careful at this point, for the mind plays tricks on itself. It will dress up its personal resentments in garments of righteous and religious indignation so that they will pass muster before the religious self. Many a person fights “for principle,” when he or she is fighting only for personal pique and pride.
But even righteous indignation should not be kept overnight: “Be angry without sinning. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26 CEB). Here is an anger that sins not, and yet it must not be kept overnight lest it corrode the soul into bitterness.
O God, give me clear insight and courage to see myself truly, for I may be cloaking my resentments with garments of piety, and I know these resentments are deadly in whatever form they gain a footing in my life. I would harbor no dangerous Trojan-horse enemies within me. Help me then to be completely honest with myself. Amen.
Week 8 Tuesday
The Disruptive Effects of Anger
Genesis 49:7; Ecclesiastes 7:9; Colossians 3:8
Now that we have seen the possibilities of righteous anger for good, let us look at the possibilities of resentments for evil.
There was a time when people thought that to get angry and hold resentments was sad but inevitable; holding resentments made people difficult to get along with but nothing much happened except that. We know now the fallacy of that belief, for in the cold light of science, the effects of anger are being revealed.
First, upon the intestinal tract. Some doctors put a tube down into a man’s stomach. They tested the contents of his stomach according to the state of his mind. When he was in good humor, digestion went on normally; but after they had purposely made him angry, digestion completely stopped. Only when they brought him back into good humor would digestion start again. This fact was at the basis of a doctor’s advice when he said: “You ought to feel good-minded when you eat. If you don’t feel good-minded, you’d better lay off from your eating.”
Another doctor could not find any physical basis for the constant vomiting of one of his patients. One day, she incidentally remarked that her mother-in-law was coming to visit her at Thanksgiving. Taking this chance remark as a clue, he sent for the husband, persuaded him to wire his mother suggesting postponing her visit, told the wife that the mother-in-law was not coming, and the vomiting stopped. The resentments had upset her digestion.
The doctors tell us that stomach ulcers are often caused by anger and resentments, and that they will return even after they are cut out by operation, the edges of the wound becoming ulcerated again, if the resentments are not eliminated.
Such scientific revelation makes it quite clear that the stomach, in its very constitution, is made for good will and not for ill will.
Anger may cause arthritis. A mother-in-law did not like her son-in-law, whom she visited once a year. Every time she went to visit him, she developed arthritis; and every time she came home again, she was well.
O God, my Lord, I see that good will brings harmony and peace and effectiveness, and that ill will makes for disharmony, upset, and ineffectiveness—it lays a paralyzing hand on soul and body. Then save me from any clinging resentments. Help me pull them up by the roots. Amen.
Week 8 Wednesday
Anger Is Poison
Psalm 37:8; Proverbs 16:32; Ecclesiastes 7:9; Colossians 3:8
In yesterday’s study we saw that the stomach is made for good will and not for ill will. Good will “sets up” the stomach, and ill will upsets it! What is true of the stomach is true of every other portion of the body. A counselor tells me that he knows of no single thing that causes more havoc in the human body than resentments. For resentment is poison.
A doctor was baffled over the cause of sickness in a baby. One day in visiting the child, he came into the home while the parents were quarreling, and saw the mother suckling the baby meanwhile. The doctor threw up his hands and said, “Now I know what is the matter with your baby—you are poisoning it by this ill will!” The poison was in the mother’s milk, put there by anger. In two days the child was dead.
A missionary in China did not want the wife of the doctor to visit her when she had her baby. The knowledge of this upset the doctor’s wife; there were strained relations. The flow of the mother’s milk stopped two days after the child was born. The upset with the doctor’s wife was responsible for the stoppage.
A doctor in the Mayo Clinic told me that he could see a stomach ulcer healing before his very eyes on the X-ray, when a patient surrendered her resentments.
A pastor had his heart set on a certain appointment. When he did not get it, his wife became embittered and ill and died shortly afterward, and he himself became spiritually so upset that he left the ministry. Resentment killed the body of one and the soul of the other. It was poison.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that qualities of character determine frequently the physical health of the person. We do not mean to say that they determine all diseases, for there are contagious diseases, and they are real, and there are structural diseases, and they too are real. But in all probability 60 percent of diseases root in the mental and spiritual.
O God, I see that I pass on to my body the health and unhealth of my mind and soul. I want, then, to be healthy in soul and in mind. Therefore I would take into my very being the health of your mind. Let me be saturated with your ways and your thought, that I may live in radiant health through and through. Amen.
Week 8 Thursday
Subconscious Resentments
Jonah 4
They tell us that if a rattlesnake is cornered it will become so angry that it will bite itself. That is exactly what all harboring of hates and resentments against others is: a biting of oneself. We think we are harming others in holding spites and hates, but the deepest harm is to ourselves. Many times these resentments are dropped into the unconscious, the lid is shut down on them, and there they work their unconscious havoc. Unconscious resentments are often just as potent for disruption as conscious ones.
A young woman could not raise her arm, which seemed paralyzed. It was found that, when angry, she had a secret desire to strike her mother. When the reason for the paralysis was shown and she gave up her resentments against her mother, the arm was restored to normal health again.
A similar case was that of a man who was constantly falling from his horse. He wondered why he couldn’t stay on. It was discovered that he had a secret desire to commit suicide, and this falling was the outer sign of that secret desire. When he gave up the hidden resentment he held against life, then he ceased falling from his horse.
A pastor and his wife had a disagreement over their pastoral appointment; he wanted to move, and she didn’t. When the bishop made the appointment and moved them, she was very bitter and resentful, especially as the husband, wanting to avoid a crisis, stayed away and let her do most of the packing! After some weeks of harboring this resentment, she became ill; she could not get her breath. She went to the new appointment an invalid and resigned herself to a life of invalidism. When she saw that the harbored resentments were at the basis of her illness—had paralyzed the nerve fibers that control breathing and that she literally was choking herself to death by her resentments—she surrendered the whole thing to God, became reconciled to the new place, arose out of her invalidism, and is today a radiant, happy, and useful person.
O Christ, I now begin to see why you were always urging us to get rid of anger and resentments and ill will, for you saw by your penetrating eye the havoc wrought within the whole person by hate. Forgive us that we have not seen. And forgive us that, after seeing, we do not surrender them. Amen.
Week 8 Friday
Anger Dims the Vision
Genesis 19:9-11; Psalm 34:21; Acts 13:10-11
We saw yesterday that resentments, though unconscious, may be just as havoc-producing as conscious resentments. Often we consciously use the illnesses produced by resentments to harm the person against whom we hold resentments. A girl in India was constantly having fits. One was so violent that her mother-in-law was visibly frightened. When the mother-in-law was out of the room, the girl whispered to the doctors, “I’ll have these fits as long as I have to live with her.”
Someone asked a husband why he got drunk; and he replied, indicating his wife, “It is the only way I have of getting even with her.”
Sometimes these resentments are unconsciously used against others. A girl of twenty-one walked in her sleep, a habit that, of course, greatly upset her mother. It was found that she was holding a grudge against her mother and taking this unconscious method of getting even. When the girl saw the connection between the sleepwalking and her resentments, she confessed the whole matter to her mother, made it right between them, and the sleepwalking stopped.
Resentments and anger not only dim the spiritual vision so that the inner life becomes blurred; but they also literally dim the physical vision. Some doctors experimented with rats and found that after the rats had been kept angry for an extended period of time, opaque films came over their eyes. The report continues: “One realizes the picturesqueness and accuracy of the old expression ‘blind with rage,’ and the lesson to be learned is to avoid being angry. As the children say, ‘One might freeze that way.’ ”*
An optometrist tells me that he can never examine the eyes of an angry person, such a person literally cannot see straight. As Dante puts it, the wrathful travel in a cloud.** They do.
Neither spiritually, mentally, nor physically can those who hold resentments and angers see straight. Their outlook on life is distorted because their inner condition is out-of-joint through hate.
O God, we see that you have made us, in the inner constitution of our being, for love. Forgive us for having introduced into the delicate fabric of our inner being the havoc of hate. We are made for you, and your way is love. Help us to live your way. Amen.
* Southern Medical Journal, November 1940: 1237.
** See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, “Purgatorio.”
Week 8 Saturday
Resentments Resulting in Self-pity
Jeremiah 31:15-16; Luke 23:28; Acts 21:13
A woman involved in an automobile accident suffered a broken neck and a severed nerve at the base of her spine, which left her lower limbs useless. She is doomed to a wheelchair the balance of her days after terrible initial suffering. But she has met the whole tragedy in a spirit of faith, confidence, and good will. Hence she is radiant—in spite of! At the table in the institution where she stays, she presides as a queen, and does so from a wheelchair. Depressed patients are assigned to her table so that her very presence may cheer them up. She is on top of her circumstances. But her husband reacted differently. He was unhurt by the accident, except in soul. He became embittered, held resentments against the man who was driving. The resentments have spoiled his life work. One tragedy occurred to both; they reacted differently. One emerged with a broken neck but with her spirit intact; the other with his body intact but with a broken soul. Resentments broke him.
A well-educated woman with every opportunity before her is frustrated and defeated, because she resents her sister getting married and leaving her unmarried. The manifestation of the resentment is self-pity, resentment that she is left alone in the world. Her life has been rendered impossible to herself and to others by that basic resentment.
It is obvious that to hold hate and resentments is to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of life. Structurally, you are made for positive good will, in other words, for the Christian way of love. When you try the other way, then the machinery of life breaks down, or at least works so badly that it leaves you exhausted and ineffective. Hate is sand in the machinery of life; love is oil, and life works better with oil than with sand. The lovers love others and themselves; the haters hate others and themselves.
O God, my Lord, I have now come point blank to the necessity of getting rid of all resentments, all hates. If I live with my hates, I shall not be able to live with myself. So now I ask for help. I shall need your help to get rid of these things that have become rooted in me, which have become me. I offer them all to you. Amen.