Anger, Our Teacher
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 17, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
I remember the incident like it was yesterday. I was just wrapping up a talk I was giving to a group of social justice advocates in Concord, MA where I was serving as intern minister. During the talk I recounted my time in Mexico as part of a religious delegation of ministers and seminarians studying immigration. I noted how throughout our trip we mostly stayed in migrant shelters run by churches and other nonprofits. And of these, one in particular remained especially vivid in my memory, the one in Nogales.
The shelter, situated deep in one of the poorest areas of the city, was positioned behind a gate atop a hill overlooking the slum that surrounded it, with some dwellings having only three walls and most made of a hodgepodge of materials, some of which I could not identify with any certainty. It was an eerily quiet place save for a near constant chorus of barking dogs and the sound of trucks driving through to deliver drinking water.
My talk had been going fine until, after mentioning my stay in Nogales, I added, “The experience left me feeling guilty.” At that moment the person hosting the talk, who happened to be the chair of my internship committee and someone I greatly admire, shook his head in seeming disapproval and said, “That’s so selfish.” Though stunned and hurt by his remark, I simply replied, “Well, that’s how I feel.”
We are always feeling, even when we’re not conscious of exactly what we’re feeling. “Feelings”, a former mentor once said to me, “Are not wrong; they just are.” Indeed another mentor, a Buddhist, reminded me we feel what we feel and what we feel and to what degree or intensity changes constantly and mostly automatically. The trick, he said to me, is to get curious. I heard this as an invitation to become a student of one’s emotions or feelings.
It took some time for me to understand how the chair of my internship committee saw my feeling of guilt upon witnessing such dire poverty as selfish, but in time, I discovered my feeling of guilt pointed to my own discomfort in witnessing the poverty in Nogales, and desire to make myself feel better. The focus had shifted from the experience of the people living in poverty to my own experience of discomfort.
My feeling of guilt was not right or wrong; it was an opportunity to get curious and learn about the origin of the feeling which in turn could potentially challenge, even change my response to what I witnessed.
Most of us are conditioned to form an attachment to rather than get curious about our emotions. We even talk about them in the language of attachment, “I’m happy, I”m sad” rather than “I feel happy” or “I feel sad.” When we’re attached to our emotions, we identify with them and come to believe it is who we are, making our ability to choose or change something a more difficult process or one that we resist altogether, believing change to be a threat to self-identity.
This resistant form of attachment or self-identity seems to come up over and over when it comes to anger. The current political climate in the US and indeed the world over seems fueled by a strong attachment and self-identification with anger. I trust most us have seen a car, maybe our own, with that bumper sticker that reads, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” I can certainly empathize with that sentiment at times, but it doesn’t really leave me feeling empowered to do anything other than be angry. I would advocate a rewording of that bumper sticker, “If you’re angry, pay attention.”
After all, people do stupid things when they attach or self-identify with anger. I know; I’ve done some of them myself over the years. Things like yelling at someone, braking something I really liked, running a red light and when I was in fourth grade, I punched a kid who bullied me in the mouth and hurt my hand on his tooth in the process. As we’re all well aware many people grow up and still do these things and a few do things far, far worse out of anger. And the cost to every measure of wellness be it economic, emotional, social, and spiritual, is greater than most of us can imagine.
One person able to imagine the full cost was Martin Luther King, Jr. whose memory we honored today with our responsive reading. Dr. King knew anger intimately. In his autobiography, King wrote about an incident that occurred in 1943: "When I was 14, I traveled from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia with a dear teacher of mine, Mrs. Bradley (to) participate in an oratorical contest. We were on a bus returning to Atlanta. Along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn't move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us. I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. We stood up in the aisle for 90 miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life."
King not only knew and experienced anger, he came to understand it, learning from it as he struggled with it in himself. Recalling an especially challenging event in which he responded with anger, King wrote, “I had spoken hastily and resentfully. Yet I knew that this was no way to solve a problem. 'You must not harbor anger,' I admonished myself. 'You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent, and yet not return anger. You must not become bitter. No matter how emotional your opponents are, you must be calm.”
I think it is fair to say, Dr. King got curious with anger rather than attaching to or self-identifying with it. He became a student of anger and it proved a valuable teacher that only deepened his conviction in the power of nonviolence and the truth of his faith as he understood it, namely that to respond with love, rather than out of anger, in the face of injustice is not only possible, it is essential.
As our reading notes, his is an unrealized vision. Although Dr. King was not a Unitarian Universalist, he had great affection for this tradition and the many in it who joined him in pursuit of a more just society.
And this brings me to the role of anger in our own time and the continued struggle for justice. There is more than enough anger to go around. People of every imaginable political, religious, and socio-economic variety are saying they are angry and that you and I should be too. And I am angry or, more accurately, I feel angry. Not every minute of every day, but enough that it is of concern to me.
I’ve now expressed anger over gun violence in this country several times this church year. In the last couple of years I’ve spoken about my anger related to things like homophobia, racism and poverty and income inequality. The anger you or I feel in the face of these and other forms of injustice is often called “righteous” anger. I suppose that’s to differentiate it from bad or sinful anger. Which isn’t too far from the widely held belief that bad violence can only be defeated with good violence. Both rely on dividing the world into us and them, the righteous and the corrupt.
Many a hell on earth has arisen from ashes of people who fashioned themselves righteous and responded from a place of righteous anger, transforming the energy of the emotion into the engine of war. The basic operating principle seems to be the same...if we subjugate, eliminate, or exact revenge on the other, then everything all will be well.
We know this is not so. Yet many of our movies, television shows, video games and other forms of entertainment reenforce this idea and it makes us feel good. I’m a James Bond fan and I admit, when the villain is finally defeated at the end of each movie, I feel a sense of satisfaction, even of justice served. But I also admit feeling a certain sympathy for the defeated villain both in the movies and in real life which has always perplexed me.
I think it has something to do with what Rilke is speaking about in our second reading,
It is short enough that I will repeat it here:
Ah, to not be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner- what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
The poem speaks to that yearning for connection that dwells within each of us. We long “to not be cuff off.” It reminds us that Deep down, we seek to be in community, because, as the, Quaker teacher Parker Palmer notes, “we know that with it we would feel more at home in our lives, no longer strangers to one another and aliens to the earth.”
As I see it, when we feel anger in the face of injustice, that anger, if we recognize it as our teacher and get curious about it, points toward this essential yearning, a yearning that belongs to all of us and whose realization injustice attempts to control, sever or prevent. Anger teaches us what we fear most...the loss of our basic humanity, the denial not only of our worth and dignity, but our interconnectedness as well.
That’s the more obvious or easy lesson of anger. The more subtle one, and the one Martin Luther King Jr. understood so profoundly is whatever action we take to restore, preserve or empower the realization of our deepest human yearning for connection must not depend on efforts to deny it to others, even those who would deny us. Something we’re always at risk of doing when we act from a place of attachment or identification with our anger, righteous or not.
Feelings may not be wrong but the actions they inspire can be. Dr. King knew this. It is one of the reasons we remember him and lift up his example to this day. If there is one thing we might do in our own time to carry forward the spirit of his beautiful, radical dream of human freedom, a dream of human dignity, connection and community, it is to treat the anger that arises within us in the face of injustice not as a call to arms, but a call to conscience. An opportunity to let anger, our teacher, point us toward deeper truths from which we may respond in love. So may it be.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 17, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
I remember the incident like it was yesterday. I was just wrapping up a talk I was giving to a group of social justice advocates in Concord, MA where I was serving as intern minister. During the talk I recounted my time in Mexico as part of a religious delegation of ministers and seminarians studying immigration. I noted how throughout our trip we mostly stayed in migrant shelters run by churches and other nonprofits. And of these, one in particular remained especially vivid in my memory, the one in Nogales.
The shelter, situated deep in one of the poorest areas of the city, was positioned behind a gate atop a hill overlooking the slum that surrounded it, with some dwellings having only three walls and most made of a hodgepodge of materials, some of which I could not identify with any certainty. It was an eerily quiet place save for a near constant chorus of barking dogs and the sound of trucks driving through to deliver drinking water.
My talk had been going fine until, after mentioning my stay in Nogales, I added, “The experience left me feeling guilty.” At that moment the person hosting the talk, who happened to be the chair of my internship committee and someone I greatly admire, shook his head in seeming disapproval and said, “That’s so selfish.” Though stunned and hurt by his remark, I simply replied, “Well, that’s how I feel.”
We are always feeling, even when we’re not conscious of exactly what we’re feeling. “Feelings”, a former mentor once said to me, “Are not wrong; they just are.” Indeed another mentor, a Buddhist, reminded me we feel what we feel and what we feel and to what degree or intensity changes constantly and mostly automatically. The trick, he said to me, is to get curious. I heard this as an invitation to become a student of one’s emotions or feelings.
It took some time for me to understand how the chair of my internship committee saw my feeling of guilt upon witnessing such dire poverty as selfish, but in time, I discovered my feeling of guilt pointed to my own discomfort in witnessing the poverty in Nogales, and desire to make myself feel better. The focus had shifted from the experience of the people living in poverty to my own experience of discomfort.
My feeling of guilt was not right or wrong; it was an opportunity to get curious and learn about the origin of the feeling which in turn could potentially challenge, even change my response to what I witnessed.
Most of us are conditioned to form an attachment to rather than get curious about our emotions. We even talk about them in the language of attachment, “I’m happy, I”m sad” rather than “I feel happy” or “I feel sad.” When we’re attached to our emotions, we identify with them and come to believe it is who we are, making our ability to choose or change something a more difficult process or one that we resist altogether, believing change to be a threat to self-identity.
This resistant form of attachment or self-identity seems to come up over and over when it comes to anger. The current political climate in the US and indeed the world over seems fueled by a strong attachment and self-identification with anger. I trust most us have seen a car, maybe our own, with that bumper sticker that reads, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” I can certainly empathize with that sentiment at times, but it doesn’t really leave me feeling empowered to do anything other than be angry. I would advocate a rewording of that bumper sticker, “If you’re angry, pay attention.”
After all, people do stupid things when they attach or self-identify with anger. I know; I’ve done some of them myself over the years. Things like yelling at someone, braking something I really liked, running a red light and when I was in fourth grade, I punched a kid who bullied me in the mouth and hurt my hand on his tooth in the process. As we’re all well aware many people grow up and still do these things and a few do things far, far worse out of anger. And the cost to every measure of wellness be it economic, emotional, social, and spiritual, is greater than most of us can imagine.
One person able to imagine the full cost was Martin Luther King, Jr. whose memory we honored today with our responsive reading. Dr. King knew anger intimately. In his autobiography, King wrote about an incident that occurred in 1943: "When I was 14, I traveled from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia with a dear teacher of mine, Mrs. Bradley (to) participate in an oratorical contest. We were on a bus returning to Atlanta. Along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn't move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us. I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. We stood up in the aisle for 90 miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life."
King not only knew and experienced anger, he came to understand it, learning from it as he struggled with it in himself. Recalling an especially challenging event in which he responded with anger, King wrote, “I had spoken hastily and resentfully. Yet I knew that this was no way to solve a problem. 'You must not harbor anger,' I admonished myself. 'You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent, and yet not return anger. You must not become bitter. No matter how emotional your opponents are, you must be calm.”
I think it is fair to say, Dr. King got curious with anger rather than attaching to or self-identifying with it. He became a student of anger and it proved a valuable teacher that only deepened his conviction in the power of nonviolence and the truth of his faith as he understood it, namely that to respond with love, rather than out of anger, in the face of injustice is not only possible, it is essential.
As our reading notes, his is an unrealized vision. Although Dr. King was not a Unitarian Universalist, he had great affection for this tradition and the many in it who joined him in pursuit of a more just society.
And this brings me to the role of anger in our own time and the continued struggle for justice. There is more than enough anger to go around. People of every imaginable political, religious, and socio-economic variety are saying they are angry and that you and I should be too. And I am angry or, more accurately, I feel angry. Not every minute of every day, but enough that it is of concern to me.
I’ve now expressed anger over gun violence in this country several times this church year. In the last couple of years I’ve spoken about my anger related to things like homophobia, racism and poverty and income inequality. The anger you or I feel in the face of these and other forms of injustice is often called “righteous” anger. I suppose that’s to differentiate it from bad or sinful anger. Which isn’t too far from the widely held belief that bad violence can only be defeated with good violence. Both rely on dividing the world into us and them, the righteous and the corrupt.
Many a hell on earth has arisen from ashes of people who fashioned themselves righteous and responded from a place of righteous anger, transforming the energy of the emotion into the engine of war. The basic operating principle seems to be the same...if we subjugate, eliminate, or exact revenge on the other, then everything all will be well.
We know this is not so. Yet many of our movies, television shows, video games and other forms of entertainment reenforce this idea and it makes us feel good. I’m a James Bond fan and I admit, when the villain is finally defeated at the end of each movie, I feel a sense of satisfaction, even of justice served. But I also admit feeling a certain sympathy for the defeated villain both in the movies and in real life which has always perplexed me.
I think it has something to do with what Rilke is speaking about in our second reading,
It is short enough that I will repeat it here:
Ah, to not be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner- what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
The poem speaks to that yearning for connection that dwells within each of us. We long “to not be cuff off.” It reminds us that Deep down, we seek to be in community, because, as the, Quaker teacher Parker Palmer notes, “we know that with it we would feel more at home in our lives, no longer strangers to one another and aliens to the earth.”
As I see it, when we feel anger in the face of injustice, that anger, if we recognize it as our teacher and get curious about it, points toward this essential yearning, a yearning that belongs to all of us and whose realization injustice attempts to control, sever or prevent. Anger teaches us what we fear most...the loss of our basic humanity, the denial not only of our worth and dignity, but our interconnectedness as well.
That’s the more obvious or easy lesson of anger. The more subtle one, and the one Martin Luther King Jr. understood so profoundly is whatever action we take to restore, preserve or empower the realization of our deepest human yearning for connection must not depend on efforts to deny it to others, even those who would deny us. Something we’re always at risk of doing when we act from a place of attachment or identification with our anger, righteous or not.
Feelings may not be wrong but the actions they inspire can be. Dr. King knew this. It is one of the reasons we remember him and lift up his example to this day. If there is one thing we might do in our own time to carry forward the spirit of his beautiful, radical dream of human freedom, a dream of human dignity, connection and community, it is to treat the anger that arises within us in the face of injustice not as a call to arms, but a call to conscience. An opportunity to let anger, our teacher, point us toward deeper truths from which we may respond in love. So may it be.
Amen and Blessed Be
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