enigma of anger 
by garret keizer 

the
ENIGMA
of
ANGER
essays on a
-
sometimes deadly sin
Garret Keizer

Praise for
T HE ENIGMA OF ANGER
“A wonderfully thoughtful, compelling, psychologically
knowing book that is graced with wisdom—a book that
tells stories that will surely stay with its readers, keep them
good company, through thick and thin, on their daily way.
The book is a precious gift of human understanding, for
which the reader keeps feeling grateful.”
—Robert Coles, author, Children of Crisis series
“In the Enigma of Anger Garret Keizer offers a passionate
and profound meditation on the nature of a greatly maligned emotion, illustrating in scripture, history, literature,
and his own life experiences its intensity and variety as well
as its practical necessity for justice and change. This is a
splendid book.”
—Ron Hansen, author, A Stay Against Confusion
“The Enigma of Anger is a thoughtful, principled, and honest
interrogation of a disquieting subject. Keizer sensitively
balances personal self-examination with a wide range of
cases drawn from culture, politics, and daily life, to draw a
complex assessment of anger, his and others’. The result is
useful and humane.”
—Phillip Lopate, author, Portrait of My Body

“Garret Keizer’s The Enigma of Anger is a highly entertaining
and illuminating examination not just of a ‘sometimes
deadly sin’ but of his wonderfully fascinating life as a husband, son, teacher, clergyman, neighbor, and friend. In the
end, it is a timely book both about the uses—good and
otherwise—of anger and about what it truly means to be
human, by one of the finest and most courageous writers at
work in America today.”
—Howard Frank Mosher, author, The Fall of the Year
“This book is clearly a masterpiece.”
—Noel Perrin, author, Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword
“It is no small irony that Garret Keizer’s essay on anger is so
thoughtful and graceful. Here is writing that triumphs over
an emotion that otherwise, so often, defeats reason and
frustrates love.”
—Richard Rodriguez, author, Brown
“There is enough edginess in this book on anger to convince you that Garret Keizer knows what he is talking about;
there is also enough grace to make you think about anger—
both human and divine—in a whole new way. If you want to
learn how God’s love entails God’s wrath or even how your
own anger may become a source of deep revelation, then
read this book.”
—Barbara Brown Taylor, author, When God Is Silent


other books
by garret keizer
God of Beer
A Dresser of Sycamore Trees
No Place But Here

the
ENIGMA
of
ANGER
essays on a
-
sometimes deadly sin
Garret Keizer

Published by
Copyright © 2002 by Garret Keizer.
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The enigma of anger : essays on a sometimes deadly sin / Garret Keizer.
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contents
-
Preface xi
anger in the lord
Where I Come From 5
The Wrath of God 15
Christ the Tiger 25
The Deadly Sin 39
Even in the Desert 55
anger in the head
Anger as Mentality 69
Anger as Fear 81
Anger as Privilege 97
Anger as Grief 111
Anger as Grace 125
vii
anger in the house
The Chronic Angers of the House 137
Angry Men: Agamemnon and Saul,
Michael Henchard and Wade Ward 149
Angry Women: Clytemnestra and Boudica,
Medea and Sethe 167
Anger and Children 185
Domestic Revolution 197
anger in the church
They That Are Sick 211
Passion Plays 225
Forgiveness 237
Loving the Enemy 251
Anger at God 267
anger in the world
Work 283
Words 301
Venturing Out 317
Napoleon’s Test 331
Someday You Will 351
The Author 363
viii contents
For Kathy & Sarah
:

xi
preface
The aims of this book are perhaps as difficult to reconcile as
are the kindest of our motives with the most volatile of our
emotions. Putting the best face on things, one might say this
is a very human book.
First of all, I wanted to write about anger in a way that
would be genuinely helpful without resorting to the glibness
of the self-help movement. In other words, I wanted to eschew
solutions but not to eschew hope. I also wanted to face what
was ugliest about human history and about myself without
resorting to the creation of further ugliness.
Finally, I wanted to find common ground with my reader
through the only means I know for finding common ground,
which is to dig as deeply as possible into the ground of one’s
own particularity, which often includes one’s peculiarity too.
This meant that I was often writing as a man, a resident of a
small town, and a Christian, though I never felt as though I
were writing exclusively for men in churches in small towns.
The approach may strike some as restrictive, but to my mind
there is nothing more restrictive than trying to speak for
everyone. The best we can do is to speak as one person among
many, and hope that many—or at least a handful—will find
some good use for what we say. That’s what I tried to do.
I had help. I want to thank Sheryl Fullerton, my editor;
Peter Matson, my agent; Jill Chaffee, my typist; James Doyle,
my friend; Kathy Keizer, my dearest partner in everything;
also Lisa VonKann and the staff of the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum; and, finally, every person alive or dead who made me
angry enough to write this book.
Garret Keizer
Sutton, Vermont
May 2002
xii preface
the enigma
of anger

And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he
drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and
the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and
overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold
doves, take these things hence; make not my Father’s
house an house of merchandise. And his disciples
remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine
house hath eaten me up.
John 2:15–17
A covetous person who is now truly converted to
God, he will exercise a spiritual covetousness still. . . .
So will a voluptuous man who is turned to God find
plenty and deliciousness enough in him to feed his
soul. . . . And so an angry and passionate man will find
zeal enough in the House of God to eat him up.
John Donne

ANGER
in the
LORD
-

“Be not too hasty,” said Imlac, “to trust, or
to admire, the teachers of morality: they
discourse like angels, but they live like men.”
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
:

5
Only three limbs of a sugar maple tree, none thicker than
my arm but each broad enough to shade a horse, lay in
a sprinkling of sawdust by the side of the road. On the trunk
above them, three pathetic stumps oozed sap. This was my
tree, one of the beautiful ancient maples that line our rural
Vermont property where it meets the road. Those trees had
caught our eye even before my wife and I had seen the “For
Sale” sign on what is now our home. I love to walk past those
maples on afternoons when I finish work, and evenings before turning again to more work; I had especially longed to
do so on that cloudy June day before unbuckling a briefcase
full of final exams that would keep me up for much of the
night. Mine was a smug little joy, I realized even then, as
much the pride of ownership as the appreciation of nature,
but I didn’t care. We want our joys to be harmless; we don’t
W HERE I
COME FROM

need them to be noble. But now even that small joy was cut
short by the sight of those sawn-off limbs, enigmatic and almost insulting at my feet.
The town road crew had cut them off the tree; I was sure
of that. The men had been grading that section of road in the
afternoon just before I came home. I was less sure as to why
they had cut them. The limbs had not hung out over the
road. They had not been near any telephone or power lines.
They had not been rotten or in danger of falling off. The only
plausible reason I could imagine was that the road crew had
cut off the limbs to make it easier to turn the grader, though
there was an access to a hay field where they might have done
the same thing less than a hundred feet away. Could they
really have been so lazy?
But then, there didn’t have to be a plausible reason, did
there? Maybe one of the men had just felt like sawing off a
few limbs—no different, really, from a kid in my classroom
feeling in the mood to toss a rumpled wad of paper over my
shoulder and into the trash can or to stick out his foot when
another student walked by—except that no kid in my classroom would dare do such a thing. Well, some of the men
around here (I muttered to myself) believe that nothing grows
out of the earth or slips through a birth canal for any purpose better than to be cut down or shot. Today the limbs,
tomorrow the whole damn tree, what the heck. If there’s
dynamite available, so much the better. And I did not think it
irrational to suppose that there was a message intended by
the gratuitous sawing off of those limbs, something like the
message I’d found soaped on my car windows on the first
Halloween after we’d moved in: “Fuck you” plus “Ain’t Vermont great?”—a message to the flatlanders lest they get too
6 anger in the lord

cozy in their precious little farmhouse and forget who was really in charge around here. We had scarcely lived in town long
enough to strike up a conversation, let alone to make an enemy.
That was going to change. Tomorrow morning at 7:00, or
whenever the town garage opened, I was going to deliver a
little message of my own, which is that if you want to touch
something that belongs to me, you’d better talk to me first or
be prepared to talk to me afterward; and talking to me afterward, as I was fully prepared to demonstrate, is never a good
way to start your day. And nobody had better give me any regulatory drivel about “right of way” either; you want to pull
out your little rule books, I might show you a few rules you
never heard of. Three healthy limbs sawn off a tree—for absolutely no reason. And I knew how this stuff worked—you
don’t teach school without learning how these things work:
It’s a matter of incremental aggression, beginning with something so deliberately small that you’ll look like a fool if you
complain and ending with something so outrageously nasty
that you’ll feel like a fool that you didn’t. So much for that
bit about choosing your battles. The battle I choose is every
single battle that chooses me, and I fight to win every last one.
Go on, tell me it’s only three limbs off a tree. I want somebody
to tell me it’s only three limbs off a tree. How about if I break
only three limbs on an idiot? God, was I mad!
God . . . was I mad?
:
I am a descendant of angry men. My father had a temper. I
used to help him work on his cars, and it was rare that we
could finish a job without at least one minor flare-up. It was
where i come from 7

just as rare that we closed the hood with hard feelings. My
father once confided to my mother, who wisely shared his confidence with me: “Gary could tell me to go screw myself, but
I would still know he loved me.” It was the truth. It had been
the truth for men in our family before either of us was born.
My great-grandfather, a Dutch Reformed minister, is said
to have cursed his Heavenly Father following the deaths of his
wife and two young daughters from tuberculosis. He is also
said to have refused to sign a doctrinal confession affirming
the damnation of all heathen souls. Though after long wanderings he returned to the pulpit (first crossing the Atlantic
to the United States) and though it’s doubtful he ever lost his
faith (one doesn’t curse what one doesn’t believe to exist), the
image of his clenched fist shaken in the face of heaven, and perhaps in the faces of his seminary too, has long been with me.
So have the stories of his son, my grandfather and namesake, another angry ancestor I never knew. One day he came
home from work to discover that a neighbor had conveniently
emptied the contents of his cesspool next to the sand pile where
his son and daughter played across the street. My grandfather
threatened to hoist the neighbor up by his ankles if every trace
of filth was not removed within twenty-four hours. “And when
you’re finished, you cheap Holland bastard,” roared the minister’s son, “you get on your knees and pray.”
The phrase “Dutch temper” and the phrase “cheap Holland
bastard”—uttered by a Hollander no less—are two signifiers
of my heritage, a patrimony passed with fiery love from father
to son. They are not the only signifiers, however. Life would be
too easy if they were. My first reading of the Gospels was from
a New Testament presented by my great-grandfather to my
father when my parents were first married. That too was part
8 anger in the lord

of the same heritage, and it ensured that my Dutch temper
could seldom exist without Christian remorse, nor Christian
meekness without some inner resistance. The story of my journey in faith has often amounted to the story of my struggle
with anger. This book is a reflection based on those two stories.
:
I am writing about anger for at least three specific reasons. All
of them are vividly personal, though I trust that they are no
less common than anger itself.
1. My anger has often seemed out of proportion—that is,
too great or too little, but more often too great—for the
occasion that gave rise to it.
2. My anger has more often distressed those I love and
who love me than it has afflicted those at whom I was
angry.
3. My anger has not carried me far enough toward changing
what legitimately enrages me. In fact, the anger often
saps the conviction.
It’s fair to say that I am writing not only about anger, but
also in anger. In other words, anger is in some ways my inspiration as well as my subject. I can give three reasons for that
as well.
First, I have grown increasingly impatient with the blithe reductionism of the so-called self-help movement. I have grown
impatient at seeing the laudable idea that life is a series of struggles to be undertaken—or questions to be asked, or burdens
to be borne—replaced with the idea that life is essentially a set
where i come from 9

of problems to be solved by the adoption of the right program
(spiritual or electronic) or the purchase of the right product
(pharmaceutical or electronic).
I have also grown increasingly angry at our full-bellied
acquiescence to social and economic injustice. I’m referring
to the notion that everything other than the perfectible self is
too vast and complex to admit to any remedy whatsoever, and
that our best course of (in)action lies in ironical detachment
or in the cultivation of an abrasive attitude that delivers some
of the release, but packs none of the punch, of well-aimed rage.
Our advertising and even our arts convey the idea that we as
a society are brash, irreverent, and free of all constraint, when
the best available evidence would suggest that we are in fact
tame, spayed, and easily brought to heel.
And finally, I am writing in petulant resistance to the idea
that anger is an emotion with no rightful place in the life of
a Christian or in the emotional repertoire of any evolved
human being. Darwinian evolution I can buy; most of the
other forms, however, I can neither buy nor stomach. Darwin
saw us linked with the animals, and therefore to the material
creation as a whole; so do the Old and New Testaments. But
the popular theology (most of it Gnostic) that portrays perfection as the shedding of every primitive instinct, and portrays
God as an impersonal sanitizing spirit, is to my mind evidence
of a satanic spirit. The Lord my God is a jealous God and an
angry God, as well as a loving God and a merciful God. I am
unable to imagine one without the other. I am unable to
commit to any messiah who doesn’t knock over tables.
A few years ago I told a dear friend of mine that I was
going to write a book someday for angry men and women.
“I think there need to be more of them,” he quipped. I’m
10 anger in the lord

inclined to agree. But if he’s right, if more of us need to be
angry, then it follows that we shall require a more careful application of anger and a finer discernment of when anger
applies. That is the challenge of this book and one of the
main challenges of the man who presumes to write it.
:
I never did go to the town garage the morning after I found
those three severed tree limbs. That night as I sat at the
kitchen table correcting final exams, I began to hear a noise
“as of a rushing wind” but of such an immediate and dreadful intensity that I could not at first be certain it was the
wind. I remember fixing my eyes on one of the dark windowpanes, which seemed about to shatter at any second, and
thinking that the force outside could not possibly increase. It
increased. I did not think I was dying, but the unreal sensation of those moments must be what it is like suddenly to
realize that you are about to die. The rain was falling too
hard. The next crack of thunder might be louder than we
could bear. The lights snapped off. The roof sounded as
though it were being ripped from the house.
I rushed my wife and our year-old daughter into the basement and then foolishly went upstairs to see what was happening and what I could do, which of course was nothing.
Within a few minutes, the worst of the storm had passed. The
rain subsided enough for me to see through the windows.
One of the maple trees in our yard was snapped in two. Moving to the front windows, I saw to my horror that half the
roof of our large barn across the road was gone, rafters and
steel together.
where i come from 11

For the next three days we were without electric power.
Two-hundred-year-old maple trees and limbs the size of telephone poles lay across the road for more than a mile. The
central path of the storm—and there is still disagreement
more than a decade later as to whether it was a small tornado
or simply a thunderstorm with a terrific downdraft—crossed
the road about a quarter mile from our house and cut a swath
of toppled trees and peeled roofs that extended through an
entire county and beyond. In spite of the commotion we had
heard, our house roof was spared. But twenty-foot-square sections of steel and beam from the barn lay hundreds of yards
behind our house in a hay field. They had been torn from the
barn and blown over the house. They might just as easily have
been blown through it.
How puny my three limbs seemed in comparison to such
carnage. And how puny my anger seemed in comparison to
such fury. It was difficult for me not to think of them as related in some way, as temptation and warning, as sin and
punishment, even as the psychological cause of a meteorological effect. Or as I’ve since come to think of them, as a
man’s paltry anger defused by God’s tremendous mercy.
I took my chain saw out to the road and began to cut one
of the massive limbs that lay across it. One of the road crew
drove up, rolled down his window, and thanked me for saving
him some work. Had he gotten out of his car, I would have
thrown my arms around him.
12 anger in the lord

-

For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire.
Deuteronomy
:

15
I wonder when I first became aware of anger. Was it as my
own reaction or as someone else’s that I first knew what it
meant to be upset, a word we use for our emotions and also
for objects turned over, knocked off their feet.
I can imagine either possibility. I can imagine that I first
knew anger as my own inborn emotion. Before anyone allowed
himself to be angry in my infant presence, I would have experienced some frustration that led to rage. Don’t we sometimes see the spectacle of a baby with his face purple from
bawling, his back stiffened, his clenched fists beating the air
and say, “Oh, he’s mad now!” But is he? Is the baby feeling
what I know as anger, or is he merely feeling an extreme form
of distress, of enormous helpless need? This may indeed be
anger, but only in an embryonic form.
T H E W R AT H
OF GOD

However congenital our capacities for rage, I’m inclined to
think that we learn to be angry, and that this learning comes
along with other things we learn: with skills, strengths, and
possibilities. We could take a step further and say that the
fullest experience of anger is not even possible apart from a
knowledge of skills, strengths, and possibilities. We may liken
an adult’s temper tantrum to that of “a big baby,” but even a
very big baby does not yet know what it truly means to be angry. I say this because I define anger as an emotion of extreme
frustration (something a baby knows) poised at the possibility of action (something a baby cannot know, or cannot fully
know). If we think of our emotions as having purposes—that
is, if we think of them as having been created or as having
evolved for a reason—might the purpose of anger be to enable
us to break loose, to struggle free, and at the most basic level
to survive?
I can picture one of our ancestors fighting some ferocious
beast, with much at stake, her own life not least of all, and
though she is fully conscious of what might be gained or lost,
and conscious too of her wounds bleeding and even of her
own adrenaline rushing, she is not yet angry. She has not yet
attained to the inspiration that our language figuratively describes as being “mad,” that is, out of one’s everyday mind.
But then something changes; suddenly she is no longer
locked in a mortal struggle—she has broken the lock. She has
reached some place where her own survival and that of her
children may mean less to her than giving full vent to the
force now welling up inside. And even when the beast is dead
under her feet, she continues to strike against its bloody carcass. Her rage is a form of glory, like that of a conductor at
the crescendo, whose wand may be little more than the most
16 anger in the lord

refined form of any flailing blunt instrument, Samson’s jawbone of an ass in the fist of a maestro and the Philistines laid
out heap upon heap.
:
But if that ancestor did indeed learn to be angry, how did she
learn? Very likely anger has prehuman origins—the beast she
killed may have been angry too—though this tells us little
about our own anger. My testicles also have prehuman origins, but that knowledge goes only a little way toward helping
me understand my sexuality. My eyes were once the eyes of
fishes, but I am still a fish out of water when I attempt to
reckon with Cézanne.
Perhaps our ancestors learned their anger from the sky.
Before language there was no one to tell them that the thunder had always thundered; it was new in every generation, in
every single life. Even with language that continues to be true:
Who can say that he has gotten used to thunder and lightning? But how tremendous it must have been to hear the
thunder, having never heard of the thunder, to hear the rain
—which even the simplest creature must sense in its mostly
liquid body to be good and necessary—accompanied by such
flashing and crashing, to see the tree cloven to the root and
burst into flame. What was this phenomenon if not the primal revelation of anger? And we may wonder: Which came
first to human comprehension, the angry god or the sense of
cosmic anger itself? Did people believe in divinity and then,
seeing the storm, imagine that the divinity was angry? Or did
they first know only anger, perhaps learning it from the
storm and projecting it onto the storm, and did they then
the wrath of god 17

come to conceive of divinity as a force capable of such emotion and commotion?
Whichever came first, the anger of the god was, like human anger, an active power. A part of nature, it also seemed to
defy nature. It broke the spokes of predictable cycles. It broke
the trees. Even an ape must know where the sun rises, but not
even a wizard can tell you where the lightning will strike. The
storm manifested the power of the divine to shape nature
and even destroy nature—just as our own inner storms may
have evolved as the impetus to move beyond the frustration
and helplessness of naturally occurring predicaments. The
thunder was the fist of the god striking the table, turning it
upside down. Before the psalmist spoke of Christ, the thunder did.
The revelation of Yahweh to the children of Israel in the
thunder and lightning of Mount Sinai set him apart from the
gods of Egypt and the other nations. Those gods were the
rhythmic dancers, the weavers of order, the rising and dying
overseers of the ever-changing-but-also-never-changing universe, and of its mirror image in static imperial society. Yahweh, on the other hand, was a God of history and of slaves, of
order overturned, of thunder and lightning. Many Christians
like to think of the references to his wrath in the Hebrew
Bible as a primitive anthropomorphism, as something they
have outgrown. But the wrath of the Old Testament God is of
a piece with the resurrection of the New: It is the will and the
power to change the normal or customary course of things.
Furthermore, it is the source of, and in some cases the sanction for, our human power to do the same.
I once saw a film clip in which a militant black student at
the time of the civil rights movement made this proclamation:
18 anger in the lord

“We’re going to have a place at the table or we’re going to kick
the [censor’s bleep] legs off the table.” Typically he would
have been classified as an angry young man because of his
coarse language or his violent figure of speech. But I would
also call him angry because, in the image of Yahweh and according to my own definition of anger, he is poised at the
place where frustration is ready to become action. He will not
be deterred; unlike the gods of the nations, he will not be
pacified by ritual magic or the repetition of old formulas.
Like someone before him who also kicked over tables, he has
become a consuming fire.
:
The problem of God’s anger is not a new one. Even in the Old
Testament we find people of faith attempting to refine the
image, to mitigate its force. In the story of Elijah—an angry
God’s prophet, if ever there was such a thing—we see that
mitigating influence extend to the stormy symbols themselves: The prophet learns that God’s voice is not in the thunder or the lightning, but in something still and small within.
Similarly, more than one biblical writer assures us that the
Lord is “slow to anger.” Not without anger, exactly, but slow
to it. For many, this remains too small a comfort. The seventeenth-century poet George Herbert, himself a man capable
of anger, speaks for these tender hearts when he writes:
Throw away Thy rod,
Throw away Thy wrath:
O my God,
Take the gentle path.
the wrath of god 19

Implicit in the desire for a God without wrath is the assumption that we ought to have no wrath ourselves. If even
God forgoes such a thing, surely we can have no rightful claim
to it. You will notice that people who proclaim a God without
anger tend to pride themselves on the same attribute. “But I
didn’t raise my voice,” they’ll say. The activist Saul Alinsky
once defined a liberal as someone who leaves the room when
an argument turns into a fight. Presumably a liberal would
walk out of heaven for the same reason.
In times past the problem of the angry God was associated mainly with the tenderness of conscience. The guilty sinner winced at its force. Today that problem has increasingly
come to be associated with the wounds of abuse. Victims of
abuse have typically been victims of anger; for them the image of an angry God can be about as consoling as that of a
black-and-blue Madonna. Thus, there are compelling reasons
for describing a better path than that of the angry Father
God on the wings of the storm. After all, probably every emotion we ascribe to God—with the possible exception of love—
is a figure of speech. So we might do well to offer better figures, and to remind those wounded by abusive anger that
God’s wrath is partly, even mostly, figurative.
And yet there is a zeal for healing that kills. There is indeed such a thing as killing someone with kindness. The
thoroughly gentle God, the unceasingly kind God, the God
of the unalterable smile is also the fairy God, the clown God,
the stuffed animal God—perhaps not a great deal more helpful than the threadbare little giraffe that a child clutches in
his dark room as he winces with every cry from his battered
mother’s throat. The God who never gets mad for fear of offending the abused must sooner or later be construed as the
God who never gets mad at the abuser.
20 anger in the lord

Certainly that construction makes some sense within a
Christian universe. God’s love is not restricted to a certain class
of sinner and withheld from another: God loves the abused
and the abuser both. It can also be argued that what I have
presented so slightingly as a “stuffed animal God” is none
other than the Christ who suffers with and in every victim.
But to divest God of wrath out of deference for those abused
by anger is ultimately to salve their wounds with despair. It is
to describe a God so benign as to be indifferent, so slow to
anger that he is always late to save. It is to remember the
Christ who suffered the little children to come to him, while
we forget the Christ who said that their oppressors would be
better off drowned with a millstone tied to their necks.
What is more, if we divest God of his anger but not of his
righteousness, and if we continue to aspire to “be perfect as
our heavenly Father is perfect,” then we are compelled to proclaim that perfect righteousness for the oppressed consists of
suffering passively without hope of recourse or retribution.
We have heard that counsel before. Some would retort that
we have indeed heard it before, and where we have heard it is
in the Sermon on the Mount. Yet the most uncompromising
practitioners of that sermon, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin
Luther King Jr. among them, seemed to think differently.
Gandhi, for example, eschewed the term passive resistor. Like
King he saw nothing passive in nonviolent civil disobedience.
The actions of Christ himself were hardly passive either. His
cleansing of the temple was not even nonviolent.
Perhaps what the abused and oppressed require is not so
much a change in metaphor as a change in identification. The
wrath of God is not the wrath of the abusive parent or of
power abused. It is the absolute claim of personhood asserting itself in the face of power and chaos alike. The voice that
the wrath of god 21

speaks from the burning bush says, “I have heard the cry of
my people.” The voice that speaks from the fire says, “I Am
Who I Am.” By implication we are who we are too. Our being
is a value worthy of anger.
:
The wrath of God is hardest to accept in those biblical passages where it breaks forth in seemingly irrational destructiveness. With some reservations we can accept the wrath that
slays the worshippers of Baal or gives those who “sell the
poor for a pair of shoes” into the hands of the conquering Assyrians. We are less easy with those passages where divine
wrath seems to strike out at those who have not so much been
wicked or unfaithful as they have been careless or curious.
The Israelites are told not to venture onto Mount Sinai “lest
[the Lord] break forth upon them.” Adam and Eve are cursed
in all their labors for exercising a healthy curiosity in the
matter of fruit. A man who reaches out to steady the ark of
the covenant as it’s carted over rough terrain receives sudden
death for his trouble.
The rational reader will say that the man was probably
startled to realize the taboo he’d violated and died of a heart
attack—surely not from the wrath of God. Yahweh’s wrath is
simply a poetic expression for his majesty and mystery. From
one perspective this adjusted reading makes perfect sense. I’d
rather not worship a God who is in the details to such an extent
that he’ll strike me dead for failing to take account of even one
of them. In such a universe my doom is a foregone conclusion.
But here too the wrath of God might best be seen as the
sanctity of personhood. By extension it bespeaks the sanctity
of all personhood. Perhaps the assumed masculinity of the
22 anger in the lord

biblical God coupled with the greater vulnerability of women
in a sexist culture prevents us from making that association.
In some ways the God whose wrath consumes the presumptuous and irreverent is not far removed from the goddess
who angrily metamorphoses the hunter who has discovered
her nakedness. To “recover the Goddess” is to recover, among
other things, a sense of that divine modesty that abhors violation. It is possible to see much of the Old Testament as a
story about violation: from the people of Babel, whose approach to God is that of sophomoric boys climbing a drainpipe to see into a girl’s bedroom, to King David fulfilling his
own voyeuristic fantasies with command-performance adultery and murder. Add to these Noah’s leering son, Susanna’s
leering elders, Lot’s expendable daughters, the rape of Dinah,
Absalom going in to his father’s concubines, the knife about
to plunge into Isaac’s heart—and, on another level, the insinuations of Job’s friends plunging into his heart. We see the
violation of privacy, the violation of flesh, the violation of
trust, home, and conscience—all juxtaposed with the wrath
of the inviolable God. By the time Jesus cleanses the temple—
which in the New Testament is frequently equated with his
body and with our bodies (the “temples of the Holy Spirit”)
—we cannot escape the powerful impression, which nearly
amounts to a second definition, that anger is an emotion
arising from a refusal to suffer or to permit violation.
In one of the eucharistic liturgies in the Book of Common
Prayer, the celebrant prays, “Deliver us from the presumption
of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength.”
Deliver us from the presumption, it might read, of seeking
God’s gentleness without God’s wrath. Deliver us from the folly
of protecting the victims of abuse from beholding the stormy
face of their Redeemer.
the wrath of god 23

He had a terrible temper, you
know, undoubtedly inherited
from His Father.
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
:

25
God, said Gandhi, could only come to the starving masses
of India as bread; he sometimes seems to have come to
the barbarians of Europe as paint. The Word was made flesh,
and the flesh was made art. For many of us, even now, Jesus is
known not so much by a set of sayings or a body of beliefs,
nor even by a series of stories, as by a display of images—the
stained glass windows and crayon-colored parchment of our
personal and historical childhood.
The most dominant of these images are probably the
crèche and the cross, with good reason. The intersection of
divinity and humanity is most awesome there. Less dominant,
but hardly less important, are those of the Good Shepherd,
the host at the Last Supper, the suppliant in the garden of
Gethsemane, the risen victor in that other garden. Sometimes
CHRIST
T H E T IGER

one or another of these pictures becomes more prominent.
The early church, for example, seems to have been especially
fond of the image of Christ raising Lazarus; in the case of certain well-known frescoes, he actually brandishes a little wand
before calling his friend, like a dazed rabbit, out of death’s
black hat. More recently the image of Christ with the Samaritan
woman, or with virtually any woman besides his virginal
mother, has served as an icon, if not for our devotion, then of
a certain ideological emphasis.
Among these lesser images in the Christian gallery is that
of Jesus cleansing the temple. Perhaps the best-known example is El Greco’s painting, a postcard reproduction of which
used to hang over my desk. Clothed in otherworldly blue, like
the storm god come down to earth, Jesus scourges his way
through the money changers, whose postures alone reflect his
fury; his own face remains serene. I don’t know of many other
presentations of this image. It seems not to have captured the
imaginations of painters so much as, say, the flagellation,
which also features a whip. No doubt there are reasons for this
proportion of emphasis, some perverse, and others merely realistic: The Son of man, with upper- or lowercase S, is much
more likely to be found flogged than flogging in this world.
Nevertheless, as minor as it may be, the image of Christ
driving the money changers from the temple, especially if
interpreted as an image of anger, is both beautiful and
provocative.
For one thing, his is the zeal of an ego identified with
something larger than itself. He is not incensed over some
personal insult, but by a communal sacrilege, which he feels
bound to take personally. Smite his cheek, and he turns you
the other; slap the dignity of the house of prayer, however,
26 anger in the lord

and he turns over a table. Perhaps for that very reason, his
anger appears at first as an absurd kind of indignation. The
cleansing of the temple is as if a mother were to enter a school
and begin overturning VCR cabinets and tearing up workbooks all in the sacred name of education. She would have a
point, we would grant her that, but the action would be
deemed “over the top”—or to use a phrase that has come to
mean almost the same thing, “too idealistic.” But as with
many other actions judged to be too idealistic, it is the unflinching realism of Christ’s attack that impresses one most.
What is a temple really for? Who, really, is God? What is the
only real response to a sacrilege? If not outrage, then how can
sacrilege be deemed outrageous?
And yet there is also something mercifully restrained in
Jesus’ violence. We read that tables were overturned; we do
not read that people were knocked down or knocked out. His
weapon is a small scourge, not a staff or a cudgel, and of the
four evangelists, only John puts any weapon into his hand. I
wouldn’t be surprised to learn that no one actually felt the
lash, that Jesus mostly beat the air. I don’t imagine the merchants of the temple courtyard to have been a particularly
valiant lot, but if one had been stupid or stubborn enough to
hold his ground, he might have received a few welts. If so, it
would be hard to feel sorry for him. This was one of those cases
where a fool and his money were not parted soon enough.
Of course, there are those who argue that Christ is not angry when he cleanses the temple. His action is calculatingly
symbolic, they would say, not the result of his being “mad.”
He only seems mad. Such a view strikes me as very close to
the beliefs of certain Gnostic sects, who held that Christ only
seemed to suffer on the cross. On the orthodox side, it also
christ the tiger 27

reminds me of those medieval Scholastics who maintained
that while Adam and Eve were sexual prior to the fall (since to
suggest otherwise was flagrantly heretical), the erectile tissue
of Adam’s prelapsarian penis had been thoroughly subject to
his reason. Sexually speaking, Adam could be resolved to have
intercourse, but never aroused to it. So as a theological precedent to the Christ without anger, we can pose an Adam without ardor: the completely “symbolic” scourge prefigured by
the utterly voluntary erection. In such a scheme of sacred history, Moses begins to read a bit like Noel Coward. “Eve, old
girl, would you mind awfully if we were to reproduce?” Destroy Adam and Eve’s passion, and inevitably you must find
another name for Christ’s passion.
Still we can go to the other extreme, which is the perennial
temptation of those who want a more gallant messiah, a temptation probably as old as Judas Iscariot. In this frame of mind
one reads the gospel like a Hollywood director, with an action
tag that has the temple money changers going down like
mobsters on St. Valentine’s Day. American Protestantism especially has often seemed to regard Christ like an ex-Marine
father regarding his overly bookish son, hoping he’ll bloody
someone’s nose just once, wishing his appeal among women
has some other, earthier explanation besides his appeal to
them as human beings. But the gesture in the temple is all
the more poignant and prophetic when we imagine it executed by a man too slight to carry his own cross without assistance, a man whose idea of a workout is a forty-day fast.
Even after we account for the misinterpretations of this
story, however, we can still learn from those misinterpretations.
If we go back to the Scholastic concept of Adam as the perfectly reasonable lover: It is ridiculous only because it banishes
28 anger in the lord

passion, not because it makes a place for reason. Passion without reason is close to violence, close to rape. The same can be
said for righteous indignation that lacks all restraint. That
Christ cleansing the temple—“Christ the tiger,” to use Eliot’s
phrase—can simultaneously seem mad and yet admit to the
interpretation that he is not mad, that his anger and his purpose can coexist without either subsuming the other, makes
for a powerful image. It will seem especially powerful for us
less-balanced souls, who can never seem to decide if we wish
we were less acquiescent, or less explosive.
In only one place in the Gospels is Jesus explicitly said to
be angry. Not surprisingly this occurs in Mark, the evangelist
least likely to edit Christ’s emotions. A man with a withered
hand has approached Jesus on the Sabbath day; his critics
wait to see if he will violate the commandment by healing the
man. Mark says that Jesus “looked at them with anger” before
making the man whole. Here too his anger seems larger than
his own ego, identified not with the temple this time, but with
a suffering man. To be fair, we must grant that the anger of his
critics, assuming they are angry, is also grounded in something
beyond the ego. Christ saw the temple violated by money
changers; the Pharisees saw the Sabbath violated by Christ.
The difference is that for Christ the needs of the human sufferer must come before the letter of the law. From this sole
place in the Gospels, where Christ is explicitly said to be angry,
grows every consideration of his ability to feel that emotion.
The cleansing of the temple is perhaps the most appealing
of these inferences. Christ’s cursing of the fig tree is probably
the least. Both Matthew and Mark tell us how Jesus came to
a fig tree looking for fruit. When he found none, he cursed
the tree, and it withered. Here, the anger of Christ is not only
christ the tiger 29

personal in the smallest sense, but seemingly irrational and
childish as well. The apparent lack of fury only increases the
negative impression. The excesses of the roaring mad are in
some ways more acceptable than those of the merely irritated.
To argue, as some have argued, and as the Gospel writers seem
to imply, that the cursing of the fig tree is a dramatized parable about God’s judgment or about the power of faith simply
does not work for me. This is rationalization after the fact: It
is a father pontificating about the harsh blows of life and the
need to get used to them and a parent’s duty to help that acclimation come about—all delivered in the aftermath of a
furious spanking that has appalled even him. Christ doesn’t
appear to have taken his disciples into a grove of fig trees in
order to demonstrate an eschatological idea or a metaphysical truth. He goes there looking for figs. Both of the evangelists make a point of noting that Jesus was hungry. Mark adds
that “it was not the season for figs.”
And still Jesus curses the tree. At least curse sounds like the
best word for what he does. “May no one ever eat fruit from
you again.” Had the tree only become barren as a result, we
might have made our peace with the story. We might have
concluded that curse is too strong a word. After all, can a tree
care about bearing fruit, even if it can care at all? If there’s such
a thing as a happy tree, perhaps a tree is happiest without the
encumbrance of fruit, which does nothing but invite ravaging
birds and men. But the tree withers. The words reach deeper
than the pit, to the very pith of the limbs and branches.
Of course, we shouldn’t be too sentimental. If you’re reading this book and I’m writing it, then neither of us can be too
squeamish about the death of trees. This very minute I am
writing these words with the warmth of a wood fire at my
back. And the trees that made my woodpile were not, for the
30 anger in the lord

most part, what a logger friend of mine calls “volunteers.”
They did not fall of their own accord. They were felled. But
they were not cursed, either. Nor, like the Gerasene swine on
the cliff, were they given over to the devils. They were sacrificed, as it were, to the logger’s need and to mine. Most of us
can accept that. The cursing of the fig tree, on the other hand,
appalls us.
When faced with a passage in the Gospels that troubles us
in this way, we have basically three possible explanations. We
can say that the text is unreliable, that Jesus is unreliable, or
that our dismay is unreliable. The first is the route of scholarship; the second, that of the skeptic. Both routes are increasingly popular. And although the third is typically the one
most favored by dogmatists and neurotics, it can also be the
route that leads to the freshest and most useful understanding. That is because questioning our dismay sooner or later
comes down to the question of who we are and why things
strike us as they do. At one point Jesus is supposed to have
asked his disciples “Who do you say that I am?” The gospel
asks the same question of us, and not only of us, but also
about us.
:
Stepping back from the doomed tree and aside from our dismay, we might look at the road that Jesus is traveling, at
where it goes, and at where it will be once our own feet step
onto it. The way that Jesus taught has absorbed or been conflated with a number of influences. Some of them, most notably
Judaism, are so central to his message that the word influence
hardly does them justice. Others are more subtle. Each in its
own way has made Christianity what it is, but with the wrong
christ the tiger 31

emphasis can unmake it. We must never forget that the holy
is greater than the sum of its parts.
The job of Christian theology, an enterprise in which every
thoughtful Christian has a role, is to identify those diverse influences, to honor them where they deserve to be honored,
but never to be intimidated or unduly led by them. The task
is not unlike that of recognizing that our metaphors for God
are metaphors, which means that they have great power to
convey meaning, but also great potential to become idols. God
is our father; God is our mother; God is our maker, governor,
source, end, hope, and ground of being. God is love. But even
more than God is love, God is God. And some mystics have
gone so far as to remind us that what we name as “God” is
also not God. In other words, even the word god, and even with
a capital G, is still a figurative expression for the ineffable.
One of the formative influences on Christianity was Stoicism. The Stoics formed a school of Greco-Roman philosophy
that taught patience, self-control, and submission to fate. It
is not difficult to see why the first Christians found Stoicism
appealing and why Stoicism would have influenced Christianity. One of the best-known of the Stoics was Seneca, who
has some interesting things to say about anger. For Seneca
anger is an emotion that arises when our will finds itself in
opposition to the world as it is. We want the hammer to strike
the nail, for example, and it smashes our thumb instead. So
we’re angry. In his view anger is the sign of a man not fully resigned to “reality.” And Seneca is absolutely right. If he and
his followers made any mistake, to my mind, it was to assume
that reality was absolutely right.
Stoicism strikes me as a philosophy nurtured by an imperial world. Change yourself, it seems to say, because you’re
never going to change Rome. Seneca had the dubious honor
32 anger in the lord

of being tutor to the emperor Nero, a position that would
eventually cost him his life. Put yourself in his position, and
you’re in a good place to appreciate his point of view. Seneca
was not trying to conquer the world. He was trying to conquer despair.
Many Christians of the same time shared Seneca’s predicament and shared his fate—Peter and Paul also perished under
Nero—so it is not surprising that they would come to share
his point of view. And as points of view go, his is an attractive
one. It calls out the best in us, and it calls us not to require
much of others. There are many things I’d rather not be than
a Stoic.
Nevertheless, Jesus is not a Stoic, no more than he is an
ascetic, a socialist, a feminist, or a Christian. I would like to
think that each of these terms might be applied approximately to him, and as approximations perhaps they can. But
only as approximations. The one who “was made man that
man might be made divine” (as Athanasius puts it), who turns
over tables, who weeps at the grave of his friend, who cries
out on the cross, who blesses a woman who anoints his feet
with tears and curses a tree that fails to give him fruit out of
season, is not a Stoic. He is most certainly a human being,
and “dignified” is too small a word to describe the kind of
human being he is. In him my own humanity is fully realized
because fully felt. Without his anguish, without his anger,
without his passion—tell me, who would it be who died on
the cross, and how could I ever imagine myself redeemed by
his death? Perhaps it was only by cursing a tree that he could
hang on one and be cursed for my sake.
In the end there is no good explanation for Christ’s cursing of the fig tree, at least none that I can find, but there is
a good application. It flies smack in the face of any Stoic
christ the tiger 33

acceptance of reality—and of any institution that defends its
privilege in the name of reality. What could be more real or
more natural than the seasonal cycles of vegetation? If Jesus
did not refrain from cursing a tree for following its natural
course, then of what use is it to defend the injustices of the
market economy or the patriarchal family or even the “one,
holy, catholic, and apostolic church” in the name of nature,
necessity, or divine patronage? Remember the words of John
the Baptist: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have
Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from
these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” In other words,
do not presume to enter the argument of the “natural” with
the Creator of the natural. Do not invoke the sanctity of the
house of God as an excuse before God. The Stoic sees the market in the temple courtyard as an annoyance to be endured,
the Sadducee as an interest to be preserved, and both as one
of the givens in this give-and-take world. Christ sees it as a
den of thieves and puts them to rout. And rightly or wrongly
he greets the fig tree with this same idealistic expectation, and
then with an indignation, that he refuses to suppress. I do not
understand his cursing of that tree. I do not like what he
does. But on some level, in the same deep place that I believe
in the resurrection of the dead and believe, also, that I shall
one day see John Brown in heaven, I love him for it.
:
I read a story once about the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh,
how he received reports that some of his braves, with the connivance of their British allies, had begun scalping American
34 anger in the lord

prisoners of war. Tecumseh immediately took horse and galloped to the camp where the atrocities were taking place.
Kicking one scalper to the ground and brandishing his tomahawk over another, he is said to have cried out in a loud voice,
“Are there no men here?” The answer reverberates throughout history: There is at least one. If the Son of man was anywhere in the American wilderness at that moment, where was
he but in the heart of Tecumseh?
I also read (in a book by Andrea Dworkin called Letters
from a War Zone) of three women in the 1970s who entered a
store that sold pornography, whips, and metal-studded dildos and splashed the merchandise with blood. They were
splashing nothing less than the Constitution, say the scribes
and Pharisees. They were splashing the law. Their actions were
completely “over the top.” Yet I have found myself thinking of
these women every Palm Sunday when we read the account of
Christ cleansing the temple. Wasn’t their point that a woman’s
body is also a temple and that we use the phrase “consenting
adults” as disingenuously as the money changers spoke of
worship and the Romans spoke of peace? Show me the spot
where those women stood to throw the blood, and I will
kneel and pray there.
And this too—my wife heard the story on the radio years
ago and told it to me, how a family of three had picked up a
hitchhiker who forced them at knifepoint to a motel room
where he tied up the father and raped the mother. Then
he turned his attentions to the five-year-old girl. Outraged
beyond fear or hope, the mother seized a table lamp and proceeded to beat the man so fiercely that when the police finally
arrived he was crawling in his own blood. I see the lamp wire
flailing in the air like a scourge of small cords. When people
christ the tiger 35

speak with disparagement of anger, or with embarrassment
of Christ’s anger, I think of that woman. And when my own
anger arises at some petty offense, I sometimes shame myself
into sobriety by calling their holier rage to mind.
36 anger in the lord

-

Anger and wrath are abominations,
and the sinful man will possess them.
Ecclesiasticus
:

39
The writer Georges Bernanos said, “For men it is certainly
more grave, or at least much more dangerous, to deny
original sin than to deny God.” I’m not sure I believe that.
Bernanos seems to give too much honor to a doctrine. And
yet on the most basic level, the statement makes perfect sense.
I can imagine two scenarios, one in which I’m adrift on the
ocean in an open boat with a party of atheists who, notwithstanding their unbelief, have a vivid personal and historical
sense of evil; and another in which I am also adrift on the
ocean, this time with a party of amiable believers who deny
that any such thing as evil exists. “People make mistakes, that’s
all.” Which boat would be the safer one to drift in? Even if no
disaster arose to distinguish the moral scruples of one party
from those of the other, I can barely bring myself to imagine
T H E DEADLY SIN

the vacuous conversations I’d have to endure in the second
boat. Before it even occurred to its blithe passengers to contrive a theological rationalization for throwing my cannibalized carcass into the drink—and I have no doubt that given
enough time it most certainly would occur to them—I would
probably jump out of my own accord.
A reader aware of the malevolence at work in her own rage
might be close to doing the same thing right now. After reading several chapters on the righteousness of God’s wrath and
the humanity of Christ’s anger and the transforming potential of our own anger, she might feel that we have all but sidestepped the elemental, biblical understanding of anger as a
sin. But we are in no such danger. And I would go so far as to
say, not only that anger in many of its forms is sinful, but
that anger comes close to exemplifying the very nature of
sin itself.
Christians frequently define sin as separation, from God
and from the good intentions of God’s creation. The original
symbol of original sin is that of Adam and Eve hiding from
the voice of God and from each other’s nakedness. Given such
an understanding, we could say that anger includes forms of
separation capable of defining sin even for those who believe
in no God. Anger separates us from our own minds and from
our own best intentions, regardless of any divinity’s intentions. Where else do you find the nerve to cut off your nose to
spite your face, except in the heat of rage? “I could have kicked
myself” frequently means “I did kick myself.” I separated myself into two parts, a self that went amok and a self that bore
the consequences. And that cleaving apart was the result of
anger, which split me away from my better self like lightning
cleaving a tree.
40 anger in the lord

So I have no argument with the author of Ecclesiasticus—
who describes anger as an abomination—but I do have another argument that starts from a somewhat different place.
Yes, I can see anger as an emotion that “the sinful man will
possess.” I can readily see myself as that sinful man. But I also
see anger as part of my nature as a creature made in the image
of God. And this is where I part company with what Bernanos
said about original sin, in that I insist on taking God, not sin,
as my starting point. In other words, I refuse to take sin as my
major premise, however major its role in my life. To do so is to
reason something like this:
I am sinful by nature. I am angry by nature.
Therefore anger is by its very nature sinful.
In contrast, the arguments of the preceding chapters are
based on a pair of different syllogisms. One might be stated
as follows:
God is not sinful. God is sometimes angry.
Therefore anger cannot always be sinful.
The other:
God’s creation is essentially good. Human beings are
part of that creation, and anger is a natural part of
human beings. Therefore anger is good—at least so
far as the divine intention that brought it into being.
Mine is a conservative argument, in the sense that it seeks to
conserve as much as possible of an existing order, in this case
the order of human emotions.
Nevertheless, it would be foolish to believe that a good thing
is incorruptible simply because it is good. Isn’t the goodness
the deadly sin 41

of a thing often revealed by the magnitude of its potential for
corruption? Only a fallen angel is capable of becoming a
devil; a lout can seldom manage to be worse than a lout. To
explore the excesses of human emotion, therefore, is always to
make an exploration of glory confounded. Step back from
the circles of Dante’s hell, and what do you hear but the music of the spheres gone terribly out of tune.
:
According to Christian tradition, anger is numbered as one of
the seven deadly sins, a conceit that derives in part from the
medieval significance given to the number seven. The other
six are pride, envy, gluttony, lust, sloth, and avarice (or covetousness). I shall never forget one of my professors ticking
off the list and ending by saying, “in other words, all the things
that all of us do every day” as if the medieval theologians were
being perverse and impossible. But in any practical discussion
of sin, as in the practical discussion of any other poison,
“deadly” and “daily” mean close to the same thing. A regimen
of small doses is usually what kills us.
Leaving aside the dubious numerology of the tradition, the
seven deadly sins give us a useful way of looking at anger. First
of all, there are features found in at least several of the sins
that are also common to anger. What is more, all of the other
six can lead to anger; or we could say that anger is often symptomatic of the other six.
Finally, if we pair the sins according to which seem most
compatible with which, anger winds up as the odd man out,
the sin without a date. Pride goes with envy (as two sins based
on false comparisons with one’s neighbor), gluttony goes
42 anger in the lord

with lust (as two cerebral sins falsely attributed to the flesh),
and sloth goes with avarice (as two false opposites in the area
of human ambition). And the cheese stands alone. Of course,
our concern in this book is with the cheese. But a person attempting to deal with anger does well to look at anything
standing in its vicinity. Moral detective work begins by rounding up all the suspects, the usual and the unusual too.
:
Pride and envy are companions, strongly with each other and
more tenuously with the remaining deadly sins, in that both
have to do with disproportion. Both have to do with a lack
of proper balance within oneself and between oneself and
the world. That is to say, both are grotesque. In some ways the
seven deadly sins might be called the seven ugly sins. More
than one person has noted that ethics and aesthetics—the
true, the beautiful, and the good—have overlapping margins.
Pride is sometimes said to be the deadliest sin, perhaps
because the thing distorted is the human soul itself. The
proud fancy themselves as something greater than they are.
And since the universe appears to be finite in nearly all of its
particulars, a person can be more than she is only by attempting to make somebody or something else less. Pride is like
one of those ancient Mesopotamian steles declaring this or
that potentate “the brother of the sun,” the “ruler of the earth,”
and so on. His larger-than-life image is presented against a
decorative background of impaled bodies, severed heads,
wailing women, and burning towers. W – Y = M2, where W
equals the world, Y equals you, and nothing on earth equals
the power of me. If you want to know how you get from
the deadly sin 43

E = mc2 to an atom bomb, from the poetry of the Bhagavad
Gita to Robert Oppenheimer quoting it as he rapturously beholds the first mushroom cloud, you need to study that older
formula.
“Pride goeth before a fall,” says the biblical book of
Proverbs; it also goeth before a fit—and for at least two reasons. First, the proud are angry at anyone who challenges
their revision of proper human proportions. How dare you
not see me for the colossus that I am? With perverse irony,
the proud are also angry at anyone who does see them in these
exaggerated terms. Thus, the proud start out by making themselves gods, and end up by protesting, “Who do these ingrates
think I am, God?” The petulance of tyrants with their people,
or of celebrities with their fans—not to forget that of certain
clergy with their flocks—is usually the direct result, and perhaps the well-deserved punishment, of pride.
Wherever pride appears, we also find irony. What can be
more ironic, after all, than a proud mortal? For that reason,
pride is often a conspicuous trait in both tragic and comic literary characters. The disproportion is portrayed in one genre
as a fatal liability; in the other as a joke. Not surprisingly
whether we look at Oedipus the king or Mr. Bumble, we see
pride giving vent to anger. Hold the mirror of reality up to
the midget who imagines himself a giant, and invariably he
smashes the mirror, or puts out his eyes.
Envy is superficially the opposite of pride, but it has the
same features of disproportion, and often the same symptoms of rage. (Were the two sins completely opposite, we would
not so often find them in the same person.) In the throes of
envy, the absurd disproportion that characterizes pride is
projected onto someone else. The envious person imagines
44 anger in the lord

others faring better than himself and almost always in spite
of their true deserts. To envy is to see the world as fundamentally unjust and particularly unjust toward you. Of course,
sometimes the world is, in which case the imputation of envy
seems almost more wicked than the sin itself. I never saw much
point, for example, in calling the starving masses of the third
world “envious” of American prosperity. The distended bellies
of starving children do not amount to a distorted vision of
the truth. We might as well accuse them of gluttony for wanting to eat.
Samuel Johnson said that envy is one of the worst of vices
because, alone among them all, it is indulged without pleasure. Perhaps for that reason it is seldom indulged without
anger. An envious person is polymorphously pissed: at others
for possessing what she would have, at herself for not possessing it, at God or fortune or fate for allowing this state of
affairs to go on. As with the other deadly sins an element of
insatiability characterizes envy. Indeed, if Johnson’s observation is correct, then satiation is not even a question: In the
absence of all pleasure there is nothing to satisfy.
Actually that lack of pleasure, so extreme in envy, may not
be exclusive to envy. To one degree or another all of the
deadly sins may be described by an inability and in some
cases by a stubborn refusal to be satisfied. In other words,
they can be symbolized by an anger that refuses to cool. Conventional wisdom sees it otherwise of course: Sin and pleasure
supposedly go hand in hand. Conventional wisdom is mistaken. The delusion by which a gross sinner imagines himself
an earthy man of pleasure is not unlike the delusion by which
the puerile atheist imagines herself a shocking freethinker.
On close examination we often find that the first is about as
the deadly sin 45

capable of having a good time as the latter is of having an
original thought.
All of this is to say nothing more, and certainly nothing
more original, than that sin is at bottom ungodly. The God
of Genesis is characterized in part by the pleasure he takes
in what he has made. “And God saw that it was good.” The
worldview of the envious—and to a certain extent, of the lustful and avaricious too—runs counter to God’s vision. Nothing
they see is good, or good enough, or else nothing they see is
enough of the good. In other words, you can never please
them, which is as good a definition as you may get of what it
means to be damned.
:
Lust and gluttony are often described as the “gross” sins, the
fleshy sins, but they are in fact deceptively cerebral, the cleverness of the mind showing itself in the stratagem of blaming
the body. Both sins are essentially denials of the body, which
comprehends limitation much better than a mind divorced
from the body. Lust is to erotic desire as gluttony is to physical hunger: Both defy limits; both deny satiation. The hungry
eater, once sated, leans back at the table and sighs, “What a
great meal.” The glutton betakes himself to the vomitorium
and sticks his finger down his throat so that he might eat some
more. In the same way, erotic communion with a beloved human being is never adequate to lust. In its most extreme forms,
its vomitorium forms, lust attempts to increase its pleasure
through the sensation or infliction of pain. Lust never arrives
at the throne of grace. Lust never comes.
46 anger in the lord

The equation of lust and gluttony with “sensuality,”
whether construed by the prude or the libertine, is a libel
against our bodies, our lovers, and our creation. What frequently gives the lie to this false sensuality is the disdain with
which the lustful and gluttonous regard the commonplace
delights of others. “He actually eats in that diner. And probably enjoys it too.” “It takes more than a little bare skin to turn
me on.” This is a credential? I am a typical Westerner in seeing the veil worn by women in some Islamic countries as
oppressive, but I find it sad and ludicrous to hear someone
express great amazement that “any guy could be turned on by
a face.” At least the Muslim women are able to see through or
over their veils. The veils over our eyes are more opaque.
Neither lust nor gluttony is a stranger to rage. Lust will
make a person angry because he imagines his mostly mental
illness to be a mostly physical drive. He thinks of his lust as a
basic human need, with a correlative basic human right, even
though in reality it exists as nothing more than a bizarre distortion of a basic human desire. As he fails to take pleasure,
he tends to give offense—to the body, to women, to the world.
The language of smut is, of course, the language of lust. It is
almost disingenuous to point out that smut is also a language of violence. It is perhaps a bit less disingenuous to
point out that our culture uses different forms of the same
four-letter obscenity to mean “have sexual intercourse,”
“confuse,” “confound,” “cheat,” “manipulate,” “disrespect,”
“dismiss,” “malfunction,” “beat up,” “damage,” “doom,”
“destroy”; as the most intensive modifier of the most negative
adjectives; and in the imperative, as something more offensive
(think about this) than “Go to hell.” Were some future archaeologist to reconstruct our culture based on nothing but
the deadly sin 47

the linguistic record, she could only conclude that we coupled and reproduced in a state of raging fury.
It might appear that gluttony, in contrast with lust, has
little to do with anger. Gluttony merely sighs and salivates;
anger foams at the mouth. Yet if we were to give the natural
world a voice to speak besides our own, I imagine it would describe human beings as furious creatures, and our fury as a
distinctly devouring kind. From the ancient Romans who
wrung the necks of hundreds of peacocks in order to feast on
their tongues, to the gourmets of modern industrial nations
who allow whole coral reefs to be dredged up and destroyed
in order to provide a few shrimp, our quietest dinners bespeak
the most virulent rage. When St. Paul speaks of those “whose
god is their belly,” he refers to a bloodthirsty god.
The connections here may seem remote and invisible, but
you can sometimes see the relationship between gluttony and
wrath by observing the behavior of a certain kind of eater—
often a man, in my experience—who grows visibly irritated
when his food fails to arrive at the table as quickly, delectably,
or hot as he desires. I suspect that waiters and waitresses see
more anger on a given day than prison guards and taxi drivers
see in a typical week. Or observe your own behavior during a
fast. Many is the person who fasted thinking to acquire the
serenity of a saint, only to find she had the disposition of
a bear.
This is where the no-nonsense secularist steps in and says,
“Well, of course, one is going to be irritable during a fast, and
so-called gluttony has nothing to do with it. If fasting makes
you so irritable, you should just eat!” This is to miss both the
point of fasting and the nature of gluttony. The most futile of
all actions for the glutton is to “just eat.” Whether he eats or
48 anger in the lord

fasts, in the end he is still fasting. Gluttony is the myth of
Tantalus with a twist: In this version Tantalus actually manages to seize a piece of the overhanging fruit that so tantalizes
him in the underworld—only to find that it doesn’t satisfy him
in the least. For one thing, it’s a nectarine, and he hates those.
:
Avarice and sloth are false opposites because although they
seem to represent opposite poles of human activity—for example, the go-getter versus the couch potato—they express
the same basic wish, which is a wish for death.
This is probably easier to see in sloth. The attempt to
remain as inert and passive as possible is a morbid preoccupation, so much so that one wonders if the typical funeral
parlor was originally designed to resemble a suburban living
room or the other way around. Dorothy Parker’s famous canard in response to the news that President Calvin Coolidge
had died—“How could they tell?”—could serve as the perfect
motto for sloth. I wonder how many people sit dead in front
of their television sets, and for how long, before someone living in the same house finally realizes they’re gone.
But avarice too has a funereal smell about it. The love of
money is the root of all evil because the ultimate aim of all
evil is death. The avaricious person wishes to obtain that
morbidly prosperous state that is beyond desire, beyond fear,
beyond need, beyond worry, beyond threat, beyond hope.
Avarice is nirvana as imagined by someone who is not yet
a Buddha. Avarice is the unenlightened wish for sublime
extinction.
the deadly sin 49

If the identification of sloth and avarice seems too abstract,
try analyzing the seemingly opposite predicaments of someone who complains about an indolent spouse and someone
else who complains that a spouse is “married to the job.” On
the one hand, the spouses in question seem to be completely
opposite types in temperament, ambition, perhaps even in
the way they groom themselves. Depending on the frustrations of one’s own marriage, each might seem like a desirable
alternative to the other. But the complaints of their mates
boil down to the same thing: The slothful spouse and the
avaricious spouse are both absentees. They’re no fun. They inspire a sense of bereavement in those who love them. They’re
as good as dead.
Dead men throw no fits, or it seems they wouldn’t. And at
first glance sloth and avarice do seem a long way from wrath.
But death hates resurrection. No one likes to be woken from
a sound sleep. Where those afflicted by sloth and avarice can
become most angry is when someone or something—like a
dissatisfied spouse—disturbs the tranquility of their chosen
sarcophagus. Perhaps this is the psychological truth behind
those legends of angry ghosts and vengeful mummies, as well
as the adage about letting a sleeping dog lie: Anger comes
from an abrupt awakening. Even if we are not especially slothful or avaricious, we can still become terribly angry on being
wakened from a reverie, a preoccupation, or an illusion. On
the most literal level, this is probably a physiological defense
mechanism: the vestige of a saving grace that prevented some
of our ancestors from becoming food to the first predator
that chanced upon them sleeping. But on another more spiritual level, we are gripped by the same emotion that stoned the
prophets. Before I surrender to that kind of anger, I will
50 anger in the lord

always want to ask which is of greater moment, the rudeness
of the disturbance, or the danger of the sleep.
:
I have purposely left anger with no companion among the
deadly sins, though I’ve hoped to show it capable of keeping
company with them all—with the false proportions of envy
and pride, the false sensuality of gluttony and lust, the false
opposition of avarice and sloth. To explain why the devil is
sometimes called “the father of lies,” we would need to look
no further than these seven sins. Each one of them is a lie,
anger included.
Perhaps the best way to glimpse the essential falsity of
anger is to call it by its older name, “wrath.” Nowadays, we
tend to reserve that usage for God, especially in his preexilic
mode—and therein lies the key. Wrath is the anger of someone who has begun to play at God. Wrath is the anger of one
who has distorted his sense of self and the world—a disproportion that he shares with his proud, envious, lustful,
gluttonous, and avaricious counterparts. He feels that his prerogatives, his grievances, his right to redress are all absolute.
Holy, holy, holy. A person consumed by wrath has eaten and
digested the forbidden fruit she thinks will make her a god.
She storms out of the garden of Eden cursing and swearing,
which is as much as to say acting as though she created the
place and that it is her God-damned business and hers alone
what happened there.
And yet—even in those curses, and even in that lie, is a vestige of something created and good. Just as all desire is not
necessarily lust, or all gourmets gluttons, all anger is not sin.
the deadly sin 51

At least some of it comes out as an expression of faith. A former
student of mine tells me that one of her professors remarked how anger is so often accompanied by a spontaneous
invocation of God, as in “God damn it.” On one level this
may be nothing more than the spiritual equivalent of breaking one’s dishes or tearing up the flowerbeds. Frustrated by
one thing, I defy the consolation of other things. I smash, I
shatter, I blaspheme. But even that destructive impulse strikes
me as having a vaguely religious meaning. Take back your
world, O God, if this is how it works!
But with those angry words we move to another level of
religious meaning. The angry person who invokes the name
of God is acknowledging that the source of his frustration
runs contrary to an expectation of divine benevolence. In
other words, the world ought to work better. There ought to
be figs on this tree. There ought to be some force, some angel,
that prevents hammers from accidentally crushing thumbs.
The theology may be crude, but it is theology nonetheless. At
the very least, it insists that the source of our frustration is
within the control of a greater power—and a good one. Like
the child who cries, “You don’t love me!” trusting that his
parents do indeed love him and thus will be hurt by the remark,
the person who cries out, “God damn it” is in some way
acknowledging that God has already blessed “it,” by making
it and by sustaining its cussed existence. If an atheist falls in
a forest, do his curses make a sound? They do, but they make
no sense.
52 anger in the lord

-

Abbot Ammonas said that he had spent
fourteen years in Scete praying to God day
and night to be delivered from anger.
Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert
:

55
For the Buddha, it was sexual desire; he is supposed to
have said that with one more obstacle as strong as that,
he never would have reached enlightenment. Apparently for
Abbot Ammonas, one of the fourth-century Christian ascetics we have come to know as “the Desert Fathers” (and ought
to know as the Desert Fathers and Mothers, for their numbers included women too), it was anger. I have thought of
both sayings many times, although I tend to see the Buddha’s
more as a reflection of his humanity and honesty—and of the
tremendous power of eros—than of my own religious struggles.
My aspirations are a good deal less lofty than the Buddha’s.
They are also of a different order. I have not left my wife and
child to seek the meaning of life, nor do I wish to. And in place
of the Four Noble Truths, I have chosen the one ignoble
truth of the cross. So much for nonattachment. Whatever
EV EN IN T H E
DES ERT

else we may say about the man on that cross, he is most
definitely—and painfully—attached.
Certainly my struggles also differ from those of Abbot
Ammonas, our common religion notwithstanding; yet his
words strike home in a way that the Buddha’s do not. For
fourteen years he prayed day and night to be delivered from
anger. He definitely has me on frequency, but I may have him
beat for duration. I have sometimes wondered, though, if he
made his pronouncement after achieving mastery over his
anger or if he continued to pray beyond those fourteen years,
perhaps way beyond, for his deliverance.
My differences from the desert ascetic cause me to wonder
about other things also. I use the word wonder here in the
sense of “marvel.” I marvel that Ammonas should have found
anger so formidable. I can imagine a man afflicted by lust in
the desert, that is, even though he is far away from the objects
of his desire, but how could he have occasions for anger—and
anger to such a tenacious degree—in his solitude? What
would he find to be angry about?
An easy answer is found in the phrase “in Scete,” which
refers to a place where the desert hermits eventually organized themselves into an early monastic community. It may be
that Ammonas was not truly solitary, and that would certainly
account for his struggle with anger. Any kind of shared life
can have its irritating moments—think of all the stand-up
comedy made from that material—but imagine living in what
amounts to a barracks full of aspiring Buddhas, all somewhat
frazzled by fasting and watching and doing without what the
Buddha himself found so hard to do without. Perhaps it was
this kind of situation that prompted another Desert Father,
Abbot Moses, to say: “A man who lives apart from other men
56 anger in the lord

is like a ripe grape. And a man who lives in the company of
others is a sour grape.” You can almost imagine some monastic Henny Youngman opening his routine at Scete with the
line, “Now, take my brothers . . . every last one of them.”
Still, others whom we know to have been true solitaries also
speak of their struggles with anger. St. Anthony wrestled with
it during his temptations. We find references to anger scattered throughout the lives and sayings of the Fathers. Abbot
Agatho: “Even if an angry man were to revive the dead, he
would not be pleasing to God because of his anger.” Abbot
Agatho’s words are good counsel, though we should not forget the case of an angry man who did on several occasions
revive the dead, and in whom God is supposed to have been
“well pleased.”
But why did these hermits wrestle with anger? It is a
source of the most ambiguous comfort to hear that they did.
On the one hand, it gives further proof that the saints were
human and fallible, “just like us”—and that’s of some reassurance. On the other hand, we hate to hear of fallibility in
such heroic circumstances. After all, the Desert Fathers and
Mothers adopted a program such as we sometimes imagine
ourselves adopting, if only in the most hypothetical way, and
that we’re sure would relieve us of much of our anger. They
simplified their lives. They set their priorities straight. They were
“intentional” and “spiritual.” They cut down on stress. They
associated only with people who shared their values and objectives. They didn’t have—at least some of them didn’t have
—neighbors. They didn’t have families and jobs. And yet they
prayed day and night for as long as fourteen years to be
delivered from anger. It sounds hopeless, though of course
it wasn’t.
even in the desert 57

:
Our perplexity at the struggles of the desert hermits with
their anger arises from several misconceptions. The first is
our tendency to see the Desert Fathers and Mothers as embarked on a program of escapism, albeit escapism of the
highest, healthiest, and most “spiritual” kind. (Million-dollar
footnote: Never be so suspicious of yourself or of others as in
the use of the word spiritual.) Anger, we assume, is one of those
things that the hermits were leaving behind, along with noisy
spectacles, streets full of temptation, and platters heaped with
peacock tongues. They went into the deserts to embrace a
simpler, less stressful life. They went into the deserts to find
peace. So it appears.
But on further investigation, we learn that at least some of
these hermits went into the desert not to escape the devil but
to find him. With the conversion of the Roman Empire to
Christianity, and the reading aloud of the gospel in virtually
every major city and town, the Christian hermits of the fourth
century believed that the forces of evil had fled to the wilderness in fear of the good news. The demons were “on retreat,”
not the hermits. The hermits went into the desert to take the
war to the enemy.
Few details in the history of religion have ever struck
home for me with such force. On the one hand, here is a vivid
awareness of evil; on the other an even more vivid awareness
that evil can be put to rout. How dangerous it is for us when
we have one awareness without the other, in which case we
shall have either witch trials or tribunals made up of witches;
either Calvinism in its most stultifying forms or New Ageism
in its most vacuous.
58 anger in the lord

This balance of an awareness of evil and an awareness of
our strength against evil will prove invaluable should we
choose, like Abbot Ammonas, to do battle with the darker
forms of our anger. But it will be every bit as important to remember that the decision to do so can lead us not away from
the fire but straight into it. So many people seem to assume
that the decision to “become more spiritual,” to find inner
peace, to get certain emotions under control, must inevitably
and immediately and by itself lead to a more peaceful state of
existence. In our resolutions, and even in our fantasies, we are
continually making that assumption. If I could just get away
from here, if I could just be more disciplined, if I could just
renew my prayer life, then things would be better, more manageable, quieter. Ultimately this may be true. But the history of
the Desert Fathers and Mothers and of other reputed seekers
of peace suggests the very opposite. It suggests that conviction and conflict go hand in hand. If you go to slay dragons,
you should be prepared to find them angry. You will have
passed beyond the provisional peace of “live and let live,”
where the dragon alternately scorches the countryside and
rests in its cave. At the point of deliberate engagement, either
you kill the beast or it kills you. And the odds are not necessarily in your favor. This may be why Jesus in one of his parables compares the kingdom of God to a king preparing for
war, who first ascertains if he has the resources to engage a
superior force. If he doesn’t, he asks for terms.
These are not antique insights, lost to us over time. They
are as perennial as the human yearning for peace. In May
Sarton’s book Journal of a Solitude, a writer of the last century
records her experiences living by herself in a New Hampshire
farmhouse. Just that basic idea conjures up all the alluring
even in the desert 59

images of the uncluttered life, the focused existence, the hermit’s retreat, the book and the candle—the “desert” with a
few less devils and a few more pieces of furniture. Yet here is
what Sarton writes at the beginning of her journal:
Now I hope to break through into the rough rocky
depths, to the matrix itself. There is violence there
and anger never resolved.
To this all the hermits of the desert nod their heads in recognition.
:
Another misconception that stands in the way of our understanding how and why someone like Abbot Ammonas might
have struggled with anger for fourteen years is our belief that
anger is always tied to an objective cause. Something out there
makes us mad, and if we can but eliminate whatever that
something is, then we shall be at peace again. In a world where
every experience of anger was holy, this would undoubtedly
be true. Anger would be aimed exclusively at real and deserving targets.
Of course, we know that this is not always the case. It is
not even often the case. And lest we forget, we have the testimony of people like Ammonas to remind us. He had reduced
his objective world to sand and sky (and as we have noted,
perhaps to some like-minded companions). Nevertheless, he
not only found anger; he also experienced it as a powerful
and tenacious obstacle to his progress.
At this point I can imagine a devil’s advocate, or perhaps
the devil himself, raising a few objections. “Aren’t you ignoring
60 anger in the lord

the possibility that Ammonas’s ascetic practices could themselves constitute ‘objective’ causes of anger? Ammonas is in
many ways typical of the paradox that lies at the root of
so many religious projects: The method he uses to solve ‘the
problem’ only exacerbates the problem. Take somebody like
Ammonas, give him a nice house and three square meals a
day, a pretty wife, and a couple of good trout streams close by,
and he wouldn’t be praying to get rid of his anger. That’s
because anger wouldn’t be an issue. Neither would threequarters of the other things against which he is so ‘valiantly’
doing battle. Here you have asceticism in a nutshell: Invent
the problem, then invent the regimen that will only make the
problem worse. Then after you’ve knocked yourself down so
many times that there’s not enough of you left even to complain about the problem, declare victory and receive homage
from the next generation of dimwits. What nonsense.”
Perhaps. But speaking as one who has the nice house, the
three squares, the pretty wife, and even the several trout
streams—in which I consistently catch trout—I have to say
that the devil’s argument is a bit disingenuous. History, even
history roughly contemporary with Ammonas, bears that
out. In his writings on anger, the Roman philosopher Seneca
takes his examples from the peevish behavior of the aristocratic landowning class, people who ostensibly ought not to
have had a single murmur of complaint, let alone a temper
tantrum, but who frequently had both. He tells of one aristocrat, for example, so incensed by the racket made by a slave
who had accidentally dropped a tray of crystal glasses that he
had the poor man thrown into a pond of lampreys.
Obviously a change of situation or scene or even of religious regimen is not likely to solve our problem with anger, if
even in the desert 61

we do indeed have a problem. For further evidence you might
observe your own and others’ behavior in the course of a
vacation, when some of us attempt for a time to enjoy the
luxury of a Roman patrician or the tranquility of an Egyptian
monk. For blissful intervals we may have healthy doses of
both, and if all goes well, that’s all we may have. In that case,
great vacation. But if something does go wrong, we may find
ourselves as easily aroused to anger as we are back home—
perhaps more so, because the mishap outrages the expectation created by the mix of luxury and tranquility that we have
contrived.
:
A third misconception in our list has to do with our failure to
see the relationship not only between anger and our unregenerate selves, but between anger and our integrity. We cannot believe that Ammonas or one of his fellows would have
had such a problem with anger because we think of them as
earnest, sincere folks, and we expect better of them. We also
wish better for them; after all, don’t they deserve it?
We fail to recognize that the anger they experienced may
to some degree have been a mark of their caliber as human
beings committed to a noble cause. They may have become
angry because they cared about what they were doing. Their
shortcomings and those of their fellow ascetics were matters
of the utmost importance. A more easygoing attitude would
not necessarily have proved that they were living in accordance with their vocation.
If I were an abbot, or even a psychotherapist, and someone
came to me full of despair over his anger, this is how I might
proceed:
62 anger in the lord

Abbot Keizer: For the next week, I want you to make a
concentrated study of the people you know who never
get angry. I want you to watch everything they do and
mark it well.
Troubled Monk: Is that so I’ll learn how to master my
anger?
Abbot Keizer: No, that’s so you’ll learn how to master
your guilt.
Try it sometime. Spend time in a school, for instance. Locate those teachers who are always jovial, never frazzled, never
upset—those who reportedly “never get mad.” Sometimes
these are individuals of such transcendent competence and
compassion that, as my troubled monk above suggests, the
best thing you can do is watch them and learn everything you
can. But in other cases these are individuals who have succeeded in reducing everything to the least common denominator. Some time ago they stumbled upon a great secret, which
is that many people wish for nothing more than to have a
little fun while making an even littler effort. And another
great secret, which is that they, the teachers, share this very
same goal. And a third great secret, which is that our goal is
best achieved by guaranteeing the fulfillment of their goal.
That’s three noble truths, and the best thing about three
noble truths is that they’re 25 percent less work than four.
So get to work on time, and—more important—leave on
time. Learn to see the mercy in all the little glitches that tend
to infuriate the less enlightened. Fire drill at the critical point
of a lesson? Try to grab a coffee on the way back. And remember, this one could actually be the real thing . . . better
grab a coffee on the way out. Students cut class? If only more
even in the desert 63

of them would do the same. Didn’t try their homework? Less
to correct. Misbehaving? Today’s interrupted lesson is now
tomorrow’s. And tomorrow is Friday, thanks be to God. See
what I mean? Life is good. Anger is bad. Life minus anger
equals longevity. And longevity is what it’s all about. If Jesus
Christ had just strolled into the temple courtyard with a little
money to be exchanged and a few jokes to exchange with it,
he might have lived to enjoy his retirement.
Sometimes there is no great distinction between laid-back
and lying down. Sometimes the worker who is capable of getting angry about the work in the most disturbingly “unprofessional” way is the worker who cares about more than looking
professional when she works. That Abbot Ammonas became
angry was a sign that he had to keep watch on his emotions;
it was also a sign that he was capable of watching something
besides a clock.
The danger, of course, is that the integrity sometimes revealed by anger can itself become a temptation. Lust and gluttony are not the only kinds of obsession, nor are money and
power the only kinds of false gods. We can also make an idol
of our own conscientiousness. We grow angry when it fails to
stand up against every obstacle, and we may also grow angry
when others fail to bow down before it. The devil has often
been portrayed as an impish angel who takes perverse delight
in confounding the creation. Might he also be portrayed as
an overly earnest spirit, convinced to the point of damning
rage that the creation would be so much better off in his
capable hands? After all, God rested on the Sabbath, but the
devil never sleeps.
:
64 anger in the lord

Finally, we may be troubled at Abbot Ammonas’s fourteenyear struggle with anger because we believe, as children of our
culture, that all problems exist to be solved. Ammonas
ought to have been able to solve his. But Christ did not solve
the cross. He suffered it.
Listen again to May Sarton. Here she quotes two of her
mentors, Carl Jung and George Herbert:
Jung says, “The serious problems in life are never fully
solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure
sign that something has been lost. The meaning and
purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution
but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrefaction.” And
so, no doubt, with the problems of a solitary life.
. . . I asked myself the question, “What do you
want of your life?” and I realized with a start of
recognition and terror, “Exactly what I have—but
to be commensurate, to handle it all better.”
Yet it is not those fits of weeping that are
destructive. They clear the air, as Herbert says so
beautifully:
Poets have wronged poor storms: such days are best;
They purge the air without, within the breast.
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting
too much too fast.
I am not so sure as Jung about “the serious problems of
life” never being solved. I believe that sometimes they might
be, but seldom without struggle, never without grace, and
never with the guarantee that they will not reemerge in some
even in the desert 65

new form. In Luke’s account of the temptation of Christ, the
devil eventually departs “until a more opportune time.” The
battle is won, for the present, but there is no “closure.” If there
is a word that raises my suspicions as much as the word spirituality, it is the word closure. Have you noticed how those with
an exaggerated fondness for the one word almost always develop an exaggerated fondness for the other? That is because
of the life-denying quality implicit in both. The only spirituality I believe in is incarnate. And the only closure I believe in
is what will happen when the undertaker screws down the lid
on my coffin. Given the resurrection of the body, I cannot
even say that I believe in that.
With May Sarton, I do believe that my life can be managed
better than I frequently manage it. Like her, I do not desire a
different life than the one I have, nor a different range of
emotions, but a better way of dealing with both. Like Herbert,
I believe that the storms of my life—including the storms of
anger—are sometimes no less a blessing than the storms in
the sky. Apparently, the poet who asked God to “Throw away
Thy wrath” would not have asked him to throw away the
thunder.
66 anger in the lord

ANGER
in the
HEAD
-

I refute Berkeley thus.
Samuel Johnson, kicking a large rock
:

69
I
believe that people in the twenty-first century will come to
see Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman as an even more
groundbreaking work than it seemed when first performed in
1949. And though the themes that moved audiences then
may still ring true in the future, I do not believe that the
play’s tragic portrayal of the American dream will be the
main cause of its celebration in decades to come. Instead
playgoers will judge the play important for being one of the
first treatments in modern literature of a man living almost
entirely in his own head. Unless, of course, playgoers are by
that time so much in their heads that they cannot appreciate
the play.
In an interview Miller revealed that he had actually first
conceived of the stage set as a gigantic head—Willy Loman’s—
ANGER A S
MENTALIT Y

in which all of the actors would perform. He wisely abandoned the device. The play itself suffices to show a man who
inhabits his own memories to the exclusion of the living stuff
out of which further memories might be made. In this he is
both a harbinger of days to come, and a holdover from a philosophy at least two hundred years old.
The eighteenth-century philosopher Bishop Berkeley proposed that what we call reality exists only as a subjective
phenomenon, something “in our heads.” Samuel Johnson
dismissed Berkeley—and made Berkeley immortal in the
process—by kicking a large rock and saying, “I refute Berkeley
thus.” Of course, he refuted no one, and proved nothing, but
he did memorably profess his faith in a concrete world outside his own mind. The tragedy of Willy Loman may actually
go farther by way of refutation. That is because Willy doesn’t
kick the rock; he trips over it. We cannot say that his mind
put it there as part of his wish to kick a rock. God put it there
as part of God’s wish that rocks, along with salesmen, galaxies, and pineapples, exist as unique and distinct creations.
But Miller has not only given us a tragedy about a man living in his head, and thereby an uncanny prophecy of where
more and more of Willy’s successors are going to live, he may
also have given us an equally prophetic glimpse into how that
transformation is going to come about. If you know the play,
you cannot forget the scene in which Willy goes to see his
boss in the hopes of obtaining an easier sales route. The boss
is the son of the man who first hired Willy, and it’s clear in
the scene that he scarcely knows who Willy is and even more
scarcely pities him. What makes the scene so brilliantly horrible is the new toy with which the boss is fascinated to the
point of obsession. As Willy fights for his life, the boss fiddles
70 anger in the head

with his tape recorder, subjecting Willy to various inane
recordings of his children. In some ways the boss is also a
man living in his head. The voices on the machine are more
real to him than the man standing before him in the flesh.
What Miller is showing us—years before the widespread
use of television, computers, and VCRs—is the technological
creation of an alternative reality, a “virtual reality” if you will,
that is ruthlessly isolating, endlessly repeatable, seductively
controllable, and utterly dead. The play does not suggest that
this alternative reality is in any way responsible for Willy’s
retreat into his own mind. But it does foreshadow the way in
which Willy Loman will become more, not less, of an Everyman even while Death of a Salesman recedes more and more
into the past. We all have those recorders now, and the other
devices they have spawned, and it seems that they have led us
willy-nilly to a Willy Loman place where each of us acts in his
own movie, scored by his own music, but influenced by some
master script.
Many forms of anger partake of this same false reality;
they amount to storms brewing in our heads over grievances
that are also, to a large degree, brewed in our heads. And to
some extent, our electronic media have become the brewery.
It may be too that this condition does not so much owe to
the content of what we watch and listen to, as is sometimes
alleged, as to the actual process of watching and listening—of
repeatedly entering a situation in which the flesh and blood
people around us are less real to us and we to them than the
phantoms occupying our attention. It was once assumed, for
example, that young lovers would go to movies in order to
make out. It would now seem that many of our contemporaries are making out even as the movie plays in their heads,
anger as mentality 71

more real to them than the person in their arms. The word
fantasy buzzes around our use of the word sex like bees
around a flower, but no flower was ever pollinated by a fantasy. Something similar might be said about our anger. It
might seem real and visceral and ecstatically primitive, though
when we look at it closely, we discover that it is, in many
cases, unreal, totally cerebral, and fashionably up-to-date.
As a simple example, try to gauge your sense of violent
crime, that is, to assess in as realistic a way as possible your
own degree of danger from violent crime. First, make a quick
mental estimation, like a tire gauge pressed onto a valve:
What’s the pressure? Next, ask yourself how many violent
crimes have actually been committed in your neighborhood.
How many times have you come even remotely near to being
a victim of violent crime? Which for you is more real, your
imaginary sense of crime or your lived experience?
Of course, if you have actually been a victim, or if you live
in an abusive relationship or in what amounts to a war zone
of violent activity, you can hardly be accused of exaggerating
your danger. In fact, you may discover that in order to maintain some kind of sanity you have consciously de-emphasized
the danger. In other words, you have created a sense of safety
that is to some extent unreal—though it may be helping you
to deal with your environment in a more rational and humane way.
For many of us, however, I suspect that the opposite is true.
We have an exaggerated view of the dangers of our neighborhood, because our neighborhood is perceived as a composite “world,” which, strictly speaking, does not exist except on
paper, on a screen, and in our heads. Inhabiting such a virtual
neighborhood is not necessarily a humanizing experience. It
72 anger in the head

can engender a kind of fantasy life in which the dangers of
people everywhere add up to the sum total of our dangers,
not by way of sympathy, but by way of paranoia, which expresses itself in daydreams of revenge and self-defense. These
daydreams can often be formulated as a series of “if” clauses:
“if someone ever did something like that to my family,” “if
what happened six thousand miles away ever happened right
here,” “if this stranger I’m seeing before me turned out to be
another version of the person whose face and name are now
on the news,” and so on. The “then” clauses that follow the “if”
clauses can amount to actual anger in response to imaginary
provocation. With the right stimulus, they can lead to actual
violence.
I used to wonder what Jesus could have meant in the Sermon on the Mount when he said, “Whoever is angry at his
brother without a cause is in danger of hell fire.” How, I asked
myself, could one be angry “without a cause”? Quite easily. I
have been angry in that way many times—as the result of just
such a fantastic process as I’ve described. And in those cases
one doesn’t have to take the fire of hell on faith; one can actually feel it. One could be in heaven itself, as Satan supposedly once was, and still be in hell by virtue of the seething and
fantastic raging of one’s own mind. “If that angel over there
were ever to insult me, I would grab him by his wings and . . .”
Sooner or later the hypothetical “if” becomes the hallucinated “because,” and Lucifer falls from the sky.
:
The recent phenomenon of road rage is a good example of
the anger that results from exaggerated subjectivity. It is also
anger as mentality 73

an example of how the gadgetry of the modern world helps to
foster that subjectivity. Driving, after all, is an experience not
unlike that of watching television, with a windshield for a
screen. But whereas a TV show is an illusion we take to be real,
the world outside our windshields is a reality that we sometimes treat as an illusion. We act as if we were doing something
other than piloting one- and two-ton masses of steel with the
power to kill and maim in an instant. Until a cop, a collision,
or a close call tells us otherwise, we are to a great extent in our
own heads. Have you ever noticed how putting your feet on
the ground of a highway rest stop can feel like a more powerful sensation than it somehow ought to be? It’s like going
to the kitchen for a snack during a television commercial—
the world seems so overwhelmingly solid in three dimensions
and in real time. The teakettle sounds like an alarm clock.
Sometimes, though, the image coming through the windshield doesn’t even register; the “show” we’re watching is
entirely fantastic. The music from our radio or tape player
is the score—not for the fleeting images we see on the screen of
our windshields, but for the imaginary dramas in our heads.
A rude or careless driver’s sudden interruption of our on-theroad daydreams can have the same stress-inducing effect as
being awakened abruptly from a sound sleep. We wake as if to
hungry jaws open above our face; the reaction is automatic
and extreme.
I love the road as much as any American, perhaps more
than most. If I couldn’t be a writer, I would be a truck driver.
Still, I find it unfortunate that so many of our American
metaphors and myths come from auto travel: life in the fast
lane, in the driver’s seat, put the brakes to, take a backseat,
head-on collision. I say “unfortunate” because auto travel is
74 anger in the head

often an isolating experience, asocial and hypersubjective.
Safe driving, as I’m rediscovering in the process of teaching
my teenaged daughter to drive, is an act of contrived paranoia.
You improve your chances of survival by distrusting the other
drivers’ signals, by resolutely expecting them to do the worst.
It might be said that this is nothing other than how we survive at life in general, but I wonder if the prudent guardedness we bring to everyday life isn’t exaggerated by the isolation
and illusion of “the cockpit”—by the speed of the vehicle and
the corresponding fleetingness of every encounter with another
driver. There are things I would not dare do as a pedestrian
among other pedestrians that I might be tempted to do in a
car among other cars, where the fear of retaliation and the human claims of a face-to-face encounter are radically reduced.
It’s hard not to wonder, also, if the daily experience of
being in the car, along with the metaphorical constructions
of being “on the road,” don’t eventually lead people to behave
as though they’re driving even when they’re not. Watch shoppers in a supermarket. Watch friends “navigate” their love lives.
In essence what they’re doing is driving. You almost expect
them to honk a horn. There’s that sense of an accident waiting to happen.
Road rage is typically a loss of reality. Both the perceived
offense and the response to it are completely out of proportion. Someone cuts you off, and suddenly you want to cut her
throat. Someone seizes an advantage, and you’re ready to
hunt him down like prey. Surely there’s a primitive physiology at work in all of this, as in any case where stress triggers
our flight-or-fight response. But that response can also be
triggered, and indeed is intentionally triggered, by loud music
in a gym or in a high action movie. Because the response
anger as mentality 75

functions naturally does not mean that its occasions are all
natural. It’s perfectly natural to scream, for instance, but
something’s wrong if we’re screaming all the time.
Perhaps the best way to grasp the unreality of road rage,
its extreme subjectivity, is to notice how selective and relative
our sense of justice becomes during the experience. The person poking along in front of me is an idiot; the person on my
tail is an idiot too. The person who takes advantage of an
opening in traffic is a pushy bastard; the person who checks
my doing the same thing is an uptight jerk. If I’m lost, the
other driver has no patience; if the other driver’s lost, I have
no time. The only thing real in this picture is me. There are
plenty of out-of-car examples of this kind of meanness and
madness, to be sure, but rage on the road offers one of the
best illustrations I know of the connection between egoism,
anger, and too little else in the concrete world of creation.
:
Another danger of living too much in our own heads is the
inevitable assumption that others live in our heads too. Not
in their heads, but in our heads. In other words, we begin to
assume that others are aware of our doubts, fears, and sensitivities, and that they therefore hurt us with the perfect knowledge of what they’re doing. It’s not simply that they have acted
with a malicious intent, which they may indeed have done, it’s
that they have acted with inside information. Of course, they
could only have such inside information if they were indeed
inside, which is where they would have to be if no such thing
as outside exists. When we live too much in our own heads,
76 anger in the head

every careless injury is seen as a calculated insult, every tactless boor as a clever sadist, every enemy as the devil himself.
A minor and relatively harmless form of this delusion occurs when we assume we’ve told someone something that we
never have. “Didn’t I tell you that Martha and I were going
hiking this Saturday?” “You most certainly did not,” says
your husband. Either you only daydreamed that you told
him, or else you really did tell him, but he was too lost in a
daydream of his own to hear you. If taken in the right spirit,
misunderstandings like this can be one of the comic endearments of a long-standing relationship. They suggest that the
partners are “talking to each other” even when they’re not
talking. But they also serve as a gentle warning that the imaginary conversation is beginning to supersede the actual, or
that even when the partners are actually talking, they’re not
actually listening.
We know we have stepped onto more dangerous, if even
less substantial ground when we hear ourselves saying, with
a frequency that amounts to a refrain: “She knows what she’s
doing.” In other words, she knows where my most tender
places are, and she’s doing what she’s doing on the basis of
that knowledge. Perhaps she is. There are certainly ways to
wound one another without having to know the intimate
particulars of one another’s previous wounds. Human beings
are not so unalike—we all bleed blood. I grow increasingly
impatient with that glib “interpersonal” strategy that attempts
to render all conflicts moot by rendering all grievances subjective. We’re terribly sorry that you had such a problem with
our dropping a bomb on your village; if we made you feel
like a victim of genocide, we regret it. This kind of qualified
apology is nothing more than a different form of living in
anger as mentality 77

our heads; we could call it hiding in our heads. The bombs
don’t exist, just our differing feelings about them.
Nevertheless, we need to be on guard against confusing
the motives of our adversaries with the vulnerabilities of our
own minds. Remember the prayer of Jesus on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Of course
on the most basic level, they do know what they do; it’s hard
to be oblivious to the act of driving nails into a man’s flesh.
But the soldiers cannot know the identity of the man they
crucify—even the insightful centurion who calls him a son of
God cannot know—any more than they could know the
minds of the two thieves. The soldiers are too caught up in
their own assignments, in their own game of lots, even in the
habitual gestures of their own brutality, to know on the deepest levels everything subsumed in the cry of “My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?” Recognizing that they knew
not what they did must have increased Jesus’ sense of alienation, surely, but perhaps it also mitigated his sense of outrage.
The assumption of their ignorance, like vinegar on a sponge,
must have provided him with a few drops of sour comfort.
So too will the hunch that my absorption in my own head
corresponds to a similar absorption in the heads of my adversaries. Most people are too self-preoccupied to mean much
of anything. Replacing a worldview in which everyone is calculating to get me with a worldview in which most people
don’t give a damn about me one way or the other is not necessarily a move toward consolation, but it is, in many cases, a
move toward reality, and therefore toward sanity too.
:
78 anger in the head

At one point in Death of a Salesman, Willy’s wife, Linda, speaks
a line that could serve as her husband’s epitaph: “Attention
must be paid,” she says. She means (and Miller means to say
through her) that we must acknowledge Willy’s struggles and
suffering and goodness. So we must, if we are to avoid dismissing Willy. But attention must also be paid if we are to
avoid becoming Willy. Attention must be paid if we are to avoid
becoming trapped in our own heads, our own anger, our own
hell. “The virtue of humility,” said Simone Weil, “is nothing
more or less than the power of attention.” Attention to what?
To everything that reminds us of our humble place in this
world: to the other drivers on the road, even to the rock at
the side of the road, which has much to tell us if we will but
get out of our comfortable cars once in a while and give it a
good kick.
anger as mentality 79

Love casts out fear.
St. John
:

81
Once during a discussion at my church, a man remarked
that “Anger is nothing but fear.” He claimed to speak
from experience. I was immediately skeptical, in part because
I’m always skeptical of any statement phrased in the reductive
terms of “nothing but,” in part because I could not believe
that a man of his formidable size and commanding personality had found much to fear in his life (an assumption that
was far more reductive than his statement), and in large part
because I resisted the humbling connection between my own
robust capacities for anger and anything as paltry as fear. Was
my friend suggesting that anger was “nothing but” an indication of cowardice?
Of course, if we locate the source of anger in our primordial
flight-or-fight response, there’s nothing especially shocking
AN GER
AS FEAR

or profound in what this man had to say. It is a simple thing
to prove, and on any number of occasions, I have discovered
that I was indeed angry because I was also afraid. I have noticed my rage rushing to encase and contain my fear like the
antibody of some emotional immune system. And this is
basically a good thing, because while fear paralyzes you, anger
prepares you to act.
In some cases, though, acting on anger can be more dangerous than not acting because of fear. Anger is constructive
only to the extent that fear is reasonable. But knowing as
much is not very helpful once you’re angry. Trying to eliminate anger can be every bit as futile as trying to eliminate any
other emotion—as trying to be happy when you’re deeply depressed, for instance, or to “get over it” when you’ve been
shamefully humiliated. You feel what you feel. So often the
attempt to rise above anger can amount to a vain exercise in
fakery—like sitting on a bed of nails and pretending that it
doesn’t hurt—which gives way in a howling cry of pain once
the ruse becomes unbearable.
This is where the recognition of a link between anger and
fear becomes useful, something much better than one of those
bar-stool equations to which we respond, “Ah, I see what you
mean”—though what we don’t see is how the equation has any
practical relevance whatsoever. Sometimes I have found that
the best way to overcome my anger is to deal with it indirectly
by overcoming my fear. It may sound as though I’m doing
nothing more than giving my anger a different name. But
fear can be opposed by a simple act of will in a way that anger
often cannot.
Once I was prevented from pulling into a supermarket
parking lot by a pickup truck idling just inside the entrance.
82 anger in the head

The driver and his two passengers were chatting with someone
who’d just come out of the market, and though I suspected
that the driver was aware of my presence in his rearview mirror, he was in no hurry to be on his way. So there I sat, pulled
in as close behind him as I could get, with my own behind
sticking out on the busy main street.
I did not honk my horn, which probably would have been
the most reasonable thing to do. I have certain scruples about
car horns: I use them liberally as a warning, but I generally refuse to use them as a prod (as at a red light that has just turned
green) or a threat. In this case I might not have used the horn
because I preferred being ignored with at least a pretense that
it was not deliberate to being ignored outright. I also preferred to avoid an escalation: Would I get out of my car if the
horn didn’t do the trick? And would I get out of my car if
these three scruffy rednecks decided to get out of theirs first?
In a situation like this, my mind tends to overload with
considerations. One of the foremost for me is always time:
These guys were wasting mine, but a confrontation was likely
to waste still more. I also remembered that I was supposed to
be “living the gospel.” Shouldn’t one be prepared to bear
these innocuous injuries with patience? On the other hand,
are you truly loving your neighbor as yourself if, through a
cowardly tolerance of someone’s boorish behavior, you set
a precedent for your neighbor to be similarly abused? How often don’t patience, mercy, tolerance—all the so-called liberal
virtues—come down to drinking a toast to your own benevolence and leaving it to someone else to pay for the drink?
Well, of course, by the time you’ve listened to even a few of
these voices, the truck has moved, and you’re ready to go grocery shopping—except by that time you’re so angry you
anger as fear 83

could spit and, what is more, deeply ashamed to recognize
that in the end you were not rational or charitable so much as
you were simply afraid. Anger may arise from fear; it may also
arise from recognizing the fear, and loathing it.
Somewhere in the supermarket, in the midst of deciding
which size box of crackers to buy and which kind of apple, I
decided that I hated the way I felt and that I wanted to feel
different, no matter the cost. And so when I came out to my
car with my groceries, instead of driving directly home, I began to search for the truck, which was identifiable by a faded
sign painted on one of its doors. I wasn’t sure what I was
going to do if I found it, but I was going to try to find it.
Although this was a Saturday morning, and although
searching for a particular pickup truck in my region is a little
like searching for a particular alligator in the Everglades, I did
happen to sight the truck parked outside a down-at-the-heels
mechanic shop. The garage door was down and the windows
covered, so I wasn’t sure at first that the shop was even open.
But when I went inside, I found three men under the hood
of a car.
I asked them if they were connected to the truck parked in
front of the garage. When they said that they were, I recounted what had happened at the supermarket and the fact
that I didn’t appreciate being treated as they had treated
me. What happened next is barely remarkable, though what
might have happened next—if, for instance, one of the men
had decided to deck me with a lug wrench—might have been
terribly remarkable, but what interests me here is what I felt
at that moment: a total absence of anger and, if not a total
absence of fear, then a mastery of it so complete that I might
almost have been disappointed were the fear to have vanished.
I felt calm. More important, I felt alive.
84 anger in the head

All of the men were looking at me now; none of them
seemed sure what to make of me. Later I would recognize their
response as a main advantage to calming anger by facing fear:
One’s adversaries are momentarily thrown off guard. It is much
easier to classify and therefore respond to an angry person
than to one who is . . . well, acting with all the chutzpah of an
angry person but with none of the anger. After a moment one
of the men said, “That wasn’t us.”
Of course it was, but I saw no reason to argue the point.
The man’s lie may have been his attempt to save face, but it
was no less a concession than if he’d been forced to cry, “I’m
sorry!” on his knees—indeed, it was more so, because no one
was forcing him to do anything. Our business was finished. I
had told a simple truth, without bluster or accusation, and
he had defended himself with a flimsy lie. I left the shop feeling better than many a cathartic explosion of rage has made
me feel. What is more, I didn’t have to spend any extra emotional capital on feeling sorry for my adversary or retroactively
foolish on my own behalf, as I might have felt had I gotten
mad at him.
Of course, an episode like this doesn’t amount to the
epiphany I might like to make of it. The same problem handled in the same way might end in disaster. The same problem handled in the same way might lead me back to the very
same dilemma that created the problem in the first place—
except that I would lack the advantage of sorting the problem
out within the protective enclosure of my car. Still, the episode
was not without some value for me. For one thing, I feel that
I can better understand the phenomenal equanimity of certain
persons who have carried on campaigns of nonviolent resistance: Perhaps they did not so much overcome their own
anger through nonviolence as they used nonviolence to face
anger as fear 85

and overcome their fears. Given that victory, their anger was
almost moot.
I feel too as if I can better appreciate, in spite of some
reservations, the conspicuous adventurism one sees in our culture of late—all of this artificial risk-taking and compulsive
gear-mongering, people shooting down rapids and clambering up cliffs, like old-time flagpole sitters and goldfish swallowers reincarnated minus all sense of proportion and any
sense of humor. The thought of a grown man or woman with
a family, a full refrigerator, a well-stocked bookcase, and
enough dirt to grow a garden going off to scale the higher
Himalayas strikes me as little short of obscene, like a man
who forsakes his beautiful wife to seek out the company of
needle-scarred teenaged prostitutes. I want to know how he
became so jaded and twisted as to need that kind of prurient
thrill. And when a crew of these explorers finds itself in jeopardy, my distaste and incredulity turn to out-and-out disgust
at the prospect of other men and women risking their lives to
rescue those who were so perversely incapable of enjoying
their own. More than once I’ve said to myself, Let them perish.
What is the point of their “risk” otherwise? Do we parachute
philanthropists onto the roofs of Las Vegas casinos whenever
a gambler loses his shirt?
But in a more charitable frame of mind, I have wondered
if some of these seeming fools haven’t tapped into a wisdom
that is only beginning to dawn on me: that in the overload of
stimuli and responses that comes of living in our frenetic civilization, life can sometimes come down to a simple choice
between daring and rage, between the risk of freezing one’s
nose in an Arctic snowstorm or breaking someone’s nose (or
having one’s own broken) in a parking lot brawl. They opted
86 anger in the head

for the first, and though there may be a more constructive
way to frame the choice, who dares reproach them for
choosing as they did?
:
If anger is sometimes “nothing but fear,” then what do we
fear that has such power over our emotions? One of the things
we fear most is losing a battle. It is as if the primal emotion of
anger arises in us because every conflict in some way recalls
some primal conflict, when our very lives were at stake, though
the conflict at present may in fact be no more primal than an
argument over the minutiae of office procedure or the up-ordown position of a toilet seat. Remember that we have been
talking about “anger in the head.” Anger that arises from a
dread of losing, when the consequences of losing are a good
deal less than dreadful, is obviously the result of a mental distortion. We’ve all had the experience of playing a recreational
game with someone, or even as someone who could not stand
the idea of losing, whose keenness for winning spoiled the
fun, who was a jerk, in other words. But in the day-to-day
business of our lives, many of us play in the same way, so that
a keenness to win becomes an irresistible rage to win.
Admittedly we sometimes fear losing because we see some
higher principle at stake in the conflict. It is that principle, we
insist, and not our own pride that motivates our passion.
This may be true. And I have little sympathy and recommend
giving no quarter to those who try to ignore principles or belittle conflicts because, as they’re fond of saying, “This is not
a matter of life or death.” Not a matter of death, perhaps, but
always a matter of life. If principles have nothing to do with
anger as fear 87

the quotidian details of office equipment and toilet seats, if
they have only to do with the Vast and the Vague and the
Grand Scale, then they’re worthless. The same goes for that
hackneyed evasion, much beloved by traveling bigamists, serial killers, and the winners of contested presidential elections,
“It’s time to move forward now.” As soon as you hear someone use those words, you know that of all things possible at
that moment, moving forward is not on the list. Any housekeeper can tell you that. People who “move forward” from
their messes rather than cleaning them up only go on to
make other messes—usually bigger ones.
So it is not a delusion to insist on “the principle of the
thing” in a given conflict. The delusion comes of fearfully assuming that the principle is defeated just because we are—
that truth loses out because a liar wins, or that justice no
longer exists because we fail in our attempt to challenge some
injustice. The partisans who fought in the Resistance during
the last world war seem to have possessed a confidence that
went beyond the fear of any such outcome. Certainly they
were afraid, and should have been afraid, of the kind of world
that would result if Hitler prevailed. But could they have believed that all decency would die if they lost? I don’t think so.
If decency were so terminal, they had lost already.
It is also a delusion to believe that in losing some conflict
we ourselves are diminished, even in our very being. We believe so when we have thoroughly identified ourselves with
the issue at stake. “If I lose, I am a loser.” But defeat in itself
is no diminishment, which may be one reason why conquerors
have routinely followed their victories with torture, rape, and
other brutalities: to accomplish, if possible, the subjugation
that victory alone can never accomplish. The vanquished are
not less for being defeated; indeed, they sometimes grow
88 anger in the head

stronger in defeat, just as a cause sometimes gains permanence through being lost.
I try to remind myself of that now and again. I am suspicious of self-hypnotic formulas, self-help mantras, and all the
rest, but I’m also suspicious of letting my suspicions deprive
me of good comfort when it’s available—so I’ve composed a
simple motto that has sometimes proved useful for me:
You do not have to win;
you only have to fight.
And you have to remember
that any cause worth fighting for
is larger than you.
Another way of saying that is “You do not have to be afraid”;
and another way still: “You do not have to be angry.”
:
On the most basic level of all, deeper than our fear of losing,
we are afraid to suffer. As a mere statement of fact, this hardly
deserves mention, but it always comes to the forefront of my
consciousness like a sudden flash of light. I am afraid to suffer. I am a Christian. I worship a man nailed to a cross. But I
am angry; I am angry because I am afraid; and I am afraid because I do not wish to end up like the person I believe to be
the end of all human love, hope, and striving. The absurdists
of the last century boldly proclaimed that life has no meaning; they were amateur absurdists. In so many of my words
and actions, I proclaim that life has a meaning but that I want
no part of it. That is an absurdity beside which any other
form amounts to a mere posture. I think of Peter on the night
anger as fear 89

of Christ’s trial: Asked if he knows Jesus, he begins to curse
and swear. That is the archetype for a good deal of my anger.
I curse and swear by way of denying one of the few things I
know for sure.
:
Examples of that denial are as common as the occasions of
pain, even those mundane varieties that we locate figuratively
in the buttocks or the neck. And how great a variety! Young
students are often amused to learn the types of neurotic
phobia, to memorize the various “silly” things that people
fear. In time we come to see the catalog as nothing more or
less than a partial listing of all the ways that human beings
can suffer and be traumatized. My daughter came home from
school not long ago amazed and amused at having learned of
optophobia, the fear of opening one’s eyes. I am glad that, at
the age of seventeen, she can find such a fear ridiculous.
Nearly thrice as old as she, I can only think of it as rare, and
strangely so.
I can recall a time in her childhood when I could easily
have imagined a fear of opening one’s ears—a very formidable
fear, in that it is most potent at the very times when a person
is most desirous of hearing. I remember, to be more specific,
her Christmas concerts, and one in particular. Student bands
and choirs from several neighboring towns were to join in the
all-purpose room of her elementary school for a precious
hour of public performance. For months she had practiced
her parts on her clarinet, after school on Wednesdays with
the whole band and most evenings at home between cleaning
out the rabbit’s cage and starting her math. From the time
when her instrument was almost as tall as she, I had watched
90 anger in the head

her struggle with it, her eyes those of an overloaded pony as
she strained with all her might to make the notes. That night
she would be the only first clarinet on a difficult song. She
dressed early in her holiday clothes, new evergreen dress, candy
cane–colored sweater, snowman earrings—she was almost as
nervous as she was beautiful. Her mother and I told her she’d
do fine.
I was going to the concert for her, of course, but it was not
as if my only pleasure came from her. How many things on
earth are as lovely as a children’s chorus, to name but one of
the night’s attractions, especially when the choristers not
only desire to sing but dare to sing, especially when their young
teacher is even more nervous and almost as endearing as they
are, especially when they perform in a place where life can be
so hard and the winters so bleak that any single thing of
beauty is a grace so amazing it hurts.
All I wanted to do was sit for an hour and enjoy these kids
and this music in peace. I wanted to hear the words that they
had struggled to memorize. I wanted to follow the notes that
they had struggled to produce. An artistic performance is like
a Thanksgiving meal—be it Grandma’s or the Holy Eucharist:
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble on your behalf, and all
you’re required to do is sit down and eat, watch, or listen. And
in the right frame of mind, that is all you want to do: be
nourished and be grateful. As an aside, I would note this frame
of mind as worth the attention of any careful student of
anger. Learn to recognize the mood and moment when “All I
want is such a little thing,” that is, when you have reduced
your negotiation with the world to one modest requirement
that ought to be yours by virtue of its being so modest. This
is often a prelude to anger, first of all because you’re already
drawing a line in the sand by demanding that one small
anger as fear 91

thing, and second because even that one small thing can turn
out to be more than you’re going to get.
It would be more than I got that night. Behind me, as
there must always be behind me, two women were chattering
away. One leaned forward now and then to talk to her husband or boyfriend, who for some reason was sitting beside me
instead of her, and who in his antsy distraction made a Saint
Vitus’ dancer look like a tree sloth on a particularly logy day.
The other woman, when she wasn’t blabbing to her friend,
was telling her little boy to keep quiet. To sit still. To “be-have.”
Except for the patter of his feet when he ran away from her,
I could hardly hear him. Mainly, I heard her. This was her performance too, you see. I have been audience to a hundred
others just like it: the performance of ostentatious parental
control by a person with absolutely no parental control and
not a clue how to achieve it. Within the space of two songs, a
sixteenth-century carol and an Appalachian folk ballad, the
last stanza of which was drowned by her nagging, she had exhausted her entire repertoire, threatening to make the child
sit out the concert in the cold parked car or else on her lap
“like a baby.” Finally, she seemed to wear him down. At last
she had the opportunity of setting him a good example of
how you behave at a concert—by carrying on with her friend
like a couple of Klondike barmaids.
During the intermission a good-natured neighbor of mine
shook her head and whispered, “Well, it takes all kinds, I
guess”—which was the last straw for me: rudeness under the
auspices of diversity. I supposed that “all kinds” might eventually include the Ku Klux Klan.
Of course, my neighbor was only trying to commiserate,
to be reasonable—except that reason and reasonable solutions
92 anger in the head

were all meaningless here. Someone might say to me, “Why
didn’t you turn around and simply ask the woman to be
quiet?” This is reason? To suppose that a person who would
not attend to her own child making music would nevertheless
attend to a perfect stranger making a fuss? “Well, you should
have moved, then,” says another reasonable voice. “Change
your seat. For that matter, maybe you should change your address!” Yes, maybe I should have annoyed a dozen other people by crawling over them on the rare chance of finding a seat
where I wouldn’t be annoyed. And yes, maybe I should move
away to some genteel place where instead of showing off their
poor parental skills the backseat blabbermouths show off
their superior knowledge of Renaissance vocal music. Only a
hick believes that urbanity exists in a more urban place.
Nothing reasonable could have worked here. And to reason with my anger was as pointless as reasoning with the two
women. So what could I do? Suffer. I said the word to myself
as an imperative sentence: Suffer. That is what I could do, maybe
all I could do. I could suffer. And that is surely what the
mother who sat behind me does, whatever else she does or
doesn’t do—and I bet, and I could hear it in her voice, that
she does it a lot more than I do: She suffers.
Finally, I could remember that above all, in all, and in
spite of all that we suffer, at least at that moment, our children were singing. A man’s daughter was going to play her
clarinet. And I could applaud.
:
The resolution to suffer will not last long apart from a willingness to love. In fact, we could go so far as to define love in
anger as fear 93

terms of suffering: love, the only thing for which a sane person
willingly suffers. Love is the missing link in a Stoic’s scheme
of personal evolution. It is the critical link in a Christian’s.
My friend at church said that anger is often based on fear. I
have said that fear is often of suffering. And St. John closes
the circle when he writes, “Love casts out fear.” In other words,
love enables us to suffer, to embrace the cross of Christ and,
as part of that same embrace, the other people at the Christmas concert, including the woman who annoyed me so.
Love does not cast out all conflict, however. If that were so,
then Jesus would never have said, “Love your enemies,” because
love would make us incapable of having enemies. Perhaps love
makes us more capable of engaging with our enemies. That is
because love makes us willing to suffer, on behalf of those we
love, and in conflict with others whom we may, in the course
of our struggle, come to love even as they come to suffer with
us. This may sound like a tangle of abstractions, and as a string
of sentences, so it is. But in concrete, day-to-day situations, I
find that these abstractions go a long way toward clarifying
what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. Why am I angry? Is it because I am afraid? Then what do I fear? Is it suffering? If so, what must I suffer in order to maintain some
semblance of humanity? And is it as unbearable as I fear?
All these questions ultimately lead me to the same place:
Whom do I love, and what does that love require? Sometimes
it requires me to wield my anger like a sharp sword. But more
often it requires me to suffer, and to do so fearlessly and without complaint.
94 anger in the head

-

Anger hath a privilege.
Shakespeare, King Lear
:

97
The scene opens at the torch-lit entrance to the duke
of Cornwall’s castle. Two messengers named Kent and
Oswald surprise each other in their haste to reach the duke.
Kent comes from King Lear, hoping to prepare the way for his
master’s arrival; Oswald comes from one of the king’s heartless daughters, hoping to sabotage any asylum the king might
find here. Offended by the very sight of Oswald, Kent draws his
sword, and when the cowardly sycophant refuses to accept
his challenge, Kent begins to beat him. The duke enters with his
retinue and demands an explanation for the assault. Kent is
scarcely more deferential to the duke than he was to Oswald.
When Cornwall warns him to mind his manners, Kent speaks
his memorable line: “Anger hath a privilege.”
We love Kent, or at least I do; he’s everything that many of
us would like to be: brave, forthright, and angry in a good
AN GER A S
P RIV ILEGE

cause. In a tragedy filled with vice and folly, he stands as a
paragon of selfless devotion. Nevertheless, though his line is
spoken in a good cause and among reprehensible characters,
its ring of truth reverberates with an echo of hollowness.
Anger does indeed have a privilege. In many cases it
amounts to a privilege. The angry person is often confident
that he will be able to get away with his anger, either because
he is strong or because those around him are compassionate
or weak. Anyone who would look consciously at his own
anger would do well to ask, first of all, To what extent am I allowed this storm of mine? To what extent does it represent a
privilege—of my size, my sex, my reputation, or my status?
The second question that needs asking is like the first: To
what extent does my anger create a privilege? Many people will
defer to anger, and not necessarily because they fear it. Sometimes people defer to anger in the same way that they defer to
tears. Something in a healthy human being responds to signs
of distress in another. What’s wrong with him—and how
might I make it right? A person given too easily to anger can
be too much aware of the deference his outbursts bring. Like
the person who has learned how to shed tears at the most opportune time, he gets angry as an act of manipulation. In the
scene where Kent speaks his line, the duke of Cornwall, insufferable monster though he is, shows himself quite perceptive
in the following remark:
This is some fellow
Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he—
An honest mind and plain—he must speak truth!
An they will take it, so. If not, he’s plain.
98 anger in the head

These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbor more craft and more corrupter ends
Than twenty silly ducking observants
That stretch their duties nicely.
The knaves of which Cornwall speaks are common
enough. The sad thing about them is that to some extent
they have lost touch with their anger. People appalled or
frightened by their outbursts will exclaim, “I wish that guy
could get rid of his temper!” The irony is that he has already
gotten rid of it. By giving vent to it at every opportunity, by
coining his passion and spending it, he has cheapened its
value. Not for nothing do we say “get mad” for “get angry,”
because true anger is like madness in its ability to lift someone out of his everyday mind, either for better or for worse.
But anger that hath a privilege or that seeks a privilege is not
a matter of getting mad. It’s a matter of getting what you
want. It’s a lion in a circus cage, snarling and clawing the air
in exchange for its preset reward of slaughterhouse meat.
:
Privileged anger comes in several forms. It might, for example,
appear as an identity. In that case it amounts to saying that
you get mad because that’s who you are, or at least a big part
of who you are. Anger is what you’re known for, your trademark, and it ought to be respected as such.
In our society people seem to have a great need to define
themselves in this way. And it may be too simplistic to restrict
the need to our society. I think of Homer’s warriors in the Iliad,
announcing their names, ranks, and pedigrees before flinging
anger as privilege 99

a challenge to their opponents, who must then reciprocate in
kind. War as an exchange of résumés—sometimes the introductions take longer than the actual combat. I knew the routine long before I knew Homer. When I was growing up in
New Jersey, it was not unusual to go to a kid’s house and have
his mother ask “your nationality.” I knew who in my class was
Italian or Dutch, Catholic or Protestant, even though that information had no relevance whatsoever to our studies and
games or even to our fistfights. The forms change, but the phenomenon doesn’t. Nowadays I’m no longer surprised when a
new acquaintance tells me where he fits on the Myers-Briggs
inventory before he’s even told me to take off my coat. And I
have caught myself doing the same thing by confessing, with
a subtle hint of disdain, that I have absolutely no idea whatsoever where I fit on the Myers-Briggs inventory. It is a part of
my identity not to be concerned with such things.
Emotions can also serve as identifiers, that is, as cut-rate
substitutes for what used to be called character. If I am known
for displaying a certain emotion, it saves me the trouble of
knowing what I actually feel. An identity is like a precooked
dinner: No mess, and the instructions are right on the package.
The problem with an identity, though, and with the politics
of identity, is that one must be forever certifying his credentials. The more people who claim the same identity, the less it
actually identifies, and so the ease of “knowing who you are”
is sooner or later contradicted by the suspicion that you are
not what you seem. Perhaps you are not really a lesbian—just
a confused bisexual. Or perhaps you are not really a bisexual,
just a lesbian afraid to come out all the way. Perhaps too your
anger was just a passing phase, and now you’re mellowing
out. Perhaps you’re losing your edge.
100 anger in the head

In Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of the
Spanish partisans recounts how during the running of the
bulls that traditionally precedes a bullfight, he had jumped
onto the back of one and bitten off a piece of its ear. The bravado of the act had so impressed the people in his town that it
had virtually become his identity. He was the man with cajones
enough to jump onto the back of a running bull and bite off
its ear. And so every year he was expected to repeat the stunt.
What had been an act of spontaneous abandon in the heat of
the moment had become a duty, a performance, and—in the
sense that it belonged to one man alone—a kind of privilege.
In the same way, a reputation for always giving people a piece of
your mind can amount to little more than the predicament
of continually having a piece of bull’s ear in your mouth.
The conundrum of the Spanish bull-biter calls to mind
what Jesus said about losing one’s life in order to save it. In
some sense, one’s “life” may be taken to mean one’s identity.
If your life is defined by jumping onto the back of a charging
bull and biting its ear, then losing that false life is, perhaps literally, to save your true life. Or rediscover that life. At the very
least, it’s a saner way to enjoy a bullfight.
:
Another way that “anger hath a privilege” is in the guise of inspiration. By this I mean the belief that anger takes possession
of us like a religious ecstasy, as when Samson, inspired by the
spirit of God, smites a thousand Philistines with the jawbone
of an ass. He couldn’t help it, in other words. Anger certainly
can come as such an inspiration; I have already given several
anger as privilege 101

examples where I believe it came in just such a way and for a
similarly liberating purpose.
But not every fit is an inspiration. As God says in the book
of Jeremiah, noting those prophets who pass off their dreams
for oracles, “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream,
but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully.”
In other words, there are visions, and then there is vision. I
tend to be skeptical of any claim for anger as an uncontrollable impulse in the same way as I tend to be skeptical of the
“call” of clergy from one church to another. I would frame my
skepticism as follows: Why is it that a professional minister is
so seldom called to serve a poorer church, or a temporarily insane person moved to attack a more powerful opponent? I’m
not saying either can’t happen, or that God never works in harmony with our best interests; I’m just saying I have my doubts.
We sometimes hear an abusive spouse or parent talking
about how he “lost it,” that is, how he lost all control, all sense
of the harm he might do, in an overwhelming fit of rage. We
might even hear his victims come to his defense with the
same argument: He just wasn’t himself. He was out of his
head. He couldn’t do otherwise.
Really? Why then is there nothing in his long violent history that has him walking into the poolroom of a biker bar
on Saturday night and, beside himself with rage, kicking one
of the burliest patrons in the behind? Why do people “go
postal” in post offices but never in precincts? Does inspiration, much less insanity, make such fine and self-serving discriminations between relative degrees of personal danger? In
contrast, the hallmark of Samson’s inspiration is the fact that
he willingly took on a thousand men with nothing but the
jawbone of an ass. Would he have seemed as inspired if he
had knocked Delilah around with it?
102 anger in the head

If a person is alive, and out of jail, and gainfully employed,
it means, among other things, that his inspirations usually
tend to be mixed with a healthy dose of self-interest. He
should remember that fact whenever he’s tempted to assume
the privilege of losing his temper in situations that pose no
danger of losing anything else.
:
One last example of anger as a privilege has to do with the
assignment of blame. Anger and blame are often found together, sometimes as fire and fuel, other times as fire and
extinguisher. We can feed our anger through dwelling on
blame; or we can use blame to dampen our anger—as when
we blame the victim of an injustice in order to stay calm in
the face of the status quo. In either case, the blamer presumes
a certain superiority. The blamer is the one without sin, who
dares cast the first stone. It is he who exists to be pleased, he
whose business is of the greatest importance, he whose prerogative it is to interpret the merits and demerits of a given
issue. The blamer may not be in control, either of the situation
or his own emotions, but he acts as though he was somehow
in charge.
The book of Genesis treats blame as the second great sin
of humankind, older than envy or murder. Only Adam and
Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit takes precedence. As soon
as God calls them to account for that transgression, they fall
to blame, or at least Adam does; it is almost as if we do not
realize that humanity has fallen until that point when Adam
says to God: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she
gave me fruit from the tree, and I did eat.” What words could
more succinctly express the idea of a paradise lost than such
anger as privilege 103

a paltry and prosaic reversal of the man’s exclamation on seeing his wife for the first time:
This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh
—now turned to the thorn in his flesh, the supposed cause of
all his problems.
That blame should be the second great sin of the Eden
story makes perfect sense. To see that, we need to remember
what Adam and Eve hoped to gain by eating of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil: They hoped to gain the knowledge of good and evil. “You shall be as gods,” said the serpent,
“knowing good from evil.” In other words, you shall not need
a directive from God in order to determine wrong from right,
but rather you shall possess that discrimination as a category
of mind. (Adam and Eve already had some sense of right and
wrong—they knew it was wrong to eat from the tree—but
only in relationship to God and his guidance.) I have never
ceased to be amazed that the Bible, the Bible, should present
the prototype of all sin as the willful acquisition of an independent moral consciousness. Not power or pleasure, a quiver
of invincible arrows or a cache of giant chocolate bars, but
the knowledge of good and evil. Not the stuff of brothels but
of Sunday schools.
Of course, the more one thinks about it, the more plausible
it seems: the moral discrimination of a god apart from God
is hell, like a “relationship” apart from love or a “community”
apart from any meaningful communion of human beings. A
morality apart from God is a morality apart from mystery
and mercy, where the adventure of being alive is reduced to a
guided tour of “must see” and “must not see” attractions,
104 anger in the head

where the poetry of the Bible is reduced to the wooden prose
of an owner’s manual.
Blame inevitably follows that kind of reduction as surely
as anger follows blame. The next step after knowing wrong
from right is knowing who is wrong or right—in other words,
knowing whom to blame. And that secondary knowledge can
prove as irresistible as the fruit that gave the first knowledge.
It comes over us so powerfully because it speaks to our
mind’s yearning to be free of all constraint. The relationship
between anger and blame is not unlike the relationship between anger and hurry. In the latter case, time is what seems
to constrain us. You will notice how often your day-to-day
anger arises when you’re in a rush. Hurrying lowers the threshold of your frustration, even as anger urges you to hurry
more. On some visceral level, it makes sense that the engines
we employ to give us more speed so often sound angry.
Blame, on the other hand, is not so much a rage for speed
as for clarity. In the instant when we make that cause-andeffect connection, the world lights up—things finally make
sense. Much of our mortal time we spend like dazed slot machine addicts in front of the absurd combinations and configurations of our lives: two lemons and a banana; an apple,
a banana, and a pear; two trips to the hardware store on the
same day plus one bolt that still doesn’t fit; an unhappy marriage, an ill-fated affair, a bitter divorce. We pay out, we pull
the handle once again, we keep our eyes on the wheel. Blame
is the deceiving mirage of three lemons. All of a sudden, everything makes perfect sense. It’s instructive to remember what
the Nazis called the Holocaust: the Final Solution, that is, the
promise of everything coming clear and clean at last, like
some grand geometric proof.
anger as privilege 105

The wisdom of the Genesis story consists to no small degree of locating the origins of this phenomenon in a man’s
blaming of his wife and his God. To locate the primary origins of the ovens of Dachau, one must stand by the oven in
his own kitchen. When a man is capable of blaming both his
loving Maker and the one to whom he makes love, then scapegoating anybody else—even everybody else—is no great stretch.
The same can be said for Cain’s killing of his own brother
and all the mayhem that followed.
:
I hesitate to observe that in the Genesis story Adam comes
off as more of a blamer than Eve. There is a trend these days
toward biological determinism in the discussion of gender
that I would prefer to avoid. I question how great a distance
lies between talking about “masculine consciousness” and
“feminine consciousness” and talking about, say, “Aryan art”
and “Semitic art,” or the “Negroid brain” and the “Caucasian
brain.” Men are from Mars and women are from Venus—so
we’ve been told, and so it can seem—but the men and women
I love and revere are all from planet Earth. I’d like to remain
there with them if I can.
Still, I have to admit that men often seem more ready to
blame than women. That should come as no surprise if blaming amounts to the assumption of a privilege. In any situation where men have first position, men will be more likely to
accuse and blame. If we would cast a kinder eye on men, we
would also point out that their predilection toward blame
may arise from a perceived disproportion of responsibility
placed on their shoulders. In a creation story where man is
106 anger in the head

made before woman, where he names all the animals and
woman as well, where it is apparently his job to tell his wife
about the forbidden fruit after she is born from his side,
where it is apparently also his job, or rather his sons’ job, to
“leave father and mother and cleave to a wife,” who presumably need do nothing more than wait to be wooed, it is understandable that in a crisis he will anticipate all the blame
coming home to him by attempting to shift that blame onto
someone else. Blame is the proverbial hot potato, and in a
world where men are expected to take charge and be responsible and snatch their potatoes hot from the fire with their
bare hands, men are also more likely to blame.
I have more than once observed a pattern in domestic
quarrels that goes something like this: The woman expresses
her concern, worry, or chagrin over a certain situation. The
man, assuming he must somehow be responsible for preventing or rectifying that situation, interprets the mention of it as
an insinuation of blame. Resenting that supposed insinuation, the man explicitly blames the woman, who in reality
never intended to blame him at all. The woman therefore
concludes, as conclude she must, that in the man’s eyes she is
to blame for all her own problems. Of course, somewhere in
this process someone is going to get mad.
The anger will be unhealthy if the partners direct it at
each other. It has the potential to become healthy if the partners direct it instead at the fact that they’re fighting with each
other instead of fighting the source of their frustration. I
think of those lines from Homer about marriage:
the best thing in the world
[is] a strong house held in serenity
anger as privilege 107

where man and wife agree. Woe to their enemies,
joy to their friends! But all this they know best.
Aside from changing “wife” to “woman” or “man” to “husband,” all that remains to do by way of bringing the passage
up-to-date is to note that the “enemies” are, more often than
not, the mechanisms for misunderstanding conditioned in
our heads along with every Martian or Venusian notion of
what constitutes a real woman or a real man.
:
The Russian Orthodox priest Alexander Elchaninov wrote in
his extraordinary Diary: “In all life, including the Christian
life, wisdom consists of this: not to be exacting towards people.”
This is an excellent piece of advice, and one easily reduced
to absurdity. Should the Nuremberg tribunal have been less
“exacting” toward Eichmann? Of course not. But such a question betrays the very propensity toward excess that characterizes much of our anger, many of our privileges, and a good
deal of our blame. Most of our adversaries are not Hitler. Few
if any of our indignities are those of Treblinka. The well-worn
habit of invoking the Holocaust in every moral argument
says less about the Holocaust than it does about the hubris
and disproportion that lie at the root of so much of our rage.
Anger frequently arises from excess and can itself be
excessive. A world in which 6 percent of the population consumes 40 percent of the nonrenewable resources and a world
in which a motorist can shoot down a stranger for cutting
him off on the highway are instantly recognizable to me as
108 anger in the head

the same world. And if anger is often excess, then excess is always the assumption of privilege. When my share of the rights
and goods exceeds your share, my share of the rage will do the
same. Big palaces and hideous punishments—the Hanging
Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar and the grisly “forests” of Vlad
the Impaler—are but the yin and the yang of the same gross
misappropriation of the world.
That is to put the matter in its negative form. In a positive
form, a person might come to see the struggle to check her
anger as an act of conservation, as of a piece with her efforts
to recycle and to dispose of toxic chemicals safely. She might
come to see civility as another endangered species, and rage as
another form of consuming fire: something to be kindled
with one eye on its safe containment and the other on its polluting effect to the atmosphere.
That is not to suggest that there is no good time to strike
a match. “I have come to set fire to the world,” says the Prince
of Peace. Perhaps the most legitimate expression of anger is
not an act of excess but a protest against it. The best kind of
anger always “hath a privilege”—by the throat.
anger as privilege 109

Malcolm: Dispute it like a man.
Macduff: I shall do so.
But I must also feel it as a man.
Shakespeare, Macbeth
:

111
Sometimes people will respond to a show of anger or irritation by saying, “Don’t give me any grief,” meaning, I
suppose, “Don’t make my life any harder than it is.” But there
is a variant to this expression that goes, “Don’t give me your
grief” or “I’m not going to take any of his grief”—and in that
case the meaning is more subtle. What it might suggest is
that anger is an expression of unresolved loss. In other words,
we grow infuriated at one thing because we are not done—or
perhaps haven’t started—mourning another.
The relationship between anger and grief is treated in
Ernest Hebert’s novel The Dogs of March, which tells the story
of Howard Elman, a laid-off mill foreman in rural New
Hampshire. Elman is a man trapped in his own unarticulated
thoughts and emotions no less than in his poverty and in the
AN GER
A S GRIEF

press of unforeseen events. The genius of the novel is in giving a voice to Elman’s inner life and in showing how his actions say what his words often cannot; the power of the story
comes in large part from recognizing how much Elman’s inner disquiet reflects our own, no matter how verbal we might
be. In the following passage, Elman attends the funeral of his
coworker Filbin.
The minister had entered the pulpit and was
speaking. Howard could hear the voice, but the
words were mumbled, like a radio blaring in the next
house. Something about Filbin’s family, something
about his work, his devotion to . . . what was it? God?
Something or other. And then there was an organ
playing in the balcony, and then singing, soft and
beautiful. Filbin’s cousin, Merwin, Howard guessed.
And then the minister read from the Scriptures.
More music. And, goddamn, he could feel Carsons
quivering beside him, could feel him begin to weep
before he heard the strained hiccupping sounds.
He was both sympathetic to Carsons and enraged at
him. Carsons, he wanted to say, what the hell are
you doing breaking down at a goddamn memorial
service? There ain’t even a body here. You don’t even
know if there is a body. Smarten up. That Filbin,
who the hell does he think he is? What kind of a
goddamn joke does he think he’s pulling? . . .
And Howard found that he too was sobbing.
In his mind Elman is ready to “give people some grief,” his
grief, which finally bursts forth as what it is. But had he not
112 anger in the head

broken down sobbing, he would have left the church with a
burden of suppressed rage, or rather with a burden of rage
greater than the one he already has.
I suspect that many of our angry outbursts are the result
of grief that never comes to sobbing. Our most grievous
losses represent obstacles that we cannot overcome, sources
of frustration that we cannot staunch, and that certain lesser
obstacles have the power to recapitulate. If accurate, this is a
valuable insight that can, nevertheless, lead to a good deal of
silliness. For example, we can assume that a more effusive style
of mourning will make us more genial people outside the funeral parlor (it won’t), or we can assume that every experience
of anger ought to be cured by a search for hidden grief (it
shouldn’t, and it can’t). What is more sensible, I think, is to
assume that anger can in some cases be controlled and eventually channeled into meaningful action by first determining
what is truly bothering us. It’s not that the anger is somehow
illegitimate, but rather that the assumed cause is inadequate.
The real cause lies buried, sometimes literally in a casket,
sometimes figuratively in the heart.
Some years ago I found myself furious at a delivery truck
driver, not a usual object of my hostility. When you live as I
do, well off the main drag, where the main drag is one of the
last exits off the interstate, delivery drivers of all kinds are familiar and welcome connections to the world at large. The
wood truck, postal, UPS, and FedEx drivers who come to my
door know my name, even my dog’s name, and I know many
of theirs. (The editor of my first book went from wonder to
incredulity when I told him, first of all, that his letter of acceptance had come to me under a rainbow and, second, that
the UPS driver on our route was named Judy Garland.) In
anger as grief 113

fact, I also know the name of the driver in this story, and I
know him to be a likable man. On one afternoon, though,
I found myself ready to take a tire iron to his truck. Of
course, there was a background to my rage, though I did not
perceive all of it at the time.
Bus service had recently been eliminated at my daughter’s
elementary school, the local cheapocracy having seized power
yet again. My wife and I had always driven our child to and
from school anyway, but of course now everyone else was
forced to do the same thing, so the situation had a great potential for stress.
Instead, with a resourcefulness that should have come as
no surprise from an institution that has learned to address
all manner of difficulties with a bake sale, the school devised
a practical arrangement for dropping and picking up children,
one car at a time. It was orderly, safe, and—because teachers
and the principal served as valets and doorman—remarkably
gracious as well. So what had promised to be a small disaster
at the hub of a divided community became instead an oasis
of day-to-day patience and civility. Of course, an oasis can be
a dangerous place.
Enter the driver. For some reason he had decided to make
his delivery at the very same time when the children were being picked up from school. His was a local business, so it was
not as if he had come a long way. Fifteen minutes out of what
I assume is an eight-hour day—this is when he had to show
up. He mounted the driveway parallel to a line of waiting
cars, something he wouldn’t have dared to do with a school
bus. A teacher halted him in a most apologetic manner and
told him, no, you cannot pull up and risk running over some
first-grader’s sneakers. As a gesture of conciliation, the teacher
114 anger in the head

meekly took the delivered boxes into the building and brought
what I assumed was a check out to the waiting driver—smiling all the while. The driver was not satisfied, however. He
began complaining about having to back his truck down the
drive, giving the teacher—perhaps the gentlest man in the
school—a hard time.
At this point I was out of my car, body tense, lungs full
and ready to shout. But the driver was already backing sullenly down the drive. I picked up my child, took her home,
and called the business that had sent the truck. I doubt the
manager there will ever forget my call.
Now some readers might be saying, “Good for you.” But
the rage I felt was so intense, so white hot. Why? No one got
hurt here. The driver did not defy the teacher’s directive. Who
knows but that he had some very good reasons to be angry
himself that afternoon. I had never known him to be irritable
before, nor have I seen him so since.
I can attempt to explain my anger by saying that I hate to
see any self-styled special characters defy good rules of courtesy
and propriety. It annoyed me when I worked as a teacher, it can
annoy me in my work in the church, and it annoys me whenever I see it. Fair enough. I can say that where the safety of
children is concerned, I have a right to be as angry as I choose,
and I certainly do, though no child was endangered here. I
can say that one of my “buttons” is wired to a mechanism of
instantaneous outrage whenever I see a kind and considerate
human being abused, though in this case both human beings
were fundamentally considerate, and the “abusive” one had
willingly yielded his ground.
Something deeper was at work in my anger, and I think
that it amounted to grief—grief because the bus situation
anger as grief 115

was just a small detail in a whole sad school scene, where my
daughter had spent year after year in an overcrowded class
with a sizable number of miserably unhappy kids from intricately screwed-up households, where so much promise had
been lost and wasted, so many hopes had failed to be fulfilled
—where every single afternoon I dreaded to go because of the
shell-shocked expression on my kid’s face when I went to pick
her up, the “nothing much” response to my question, “What
did you do at school today?” Six years ago she was teaching a
song about an inchworm to her teacher; three years ago she was
saying that she wanted to be a scientist; two days ago she
was saying that she wasn’t “good at anything.”
“Dispute it like a man,” says Malcolm, attempting to stir
Macduff against the tyrant who has slaughtered his wife and
children—“all my pretty chickens in one fell swoop.” “I shall
do so,” Macduff replies from the depths. “But I must also feel
it as a man.” I must grieve this before I can even begin to
avenge it.
Even those of us with lesser grievances than Macduff’s
must learn to recognize how to winnow and refine our anger
by first admitting and expressing our grief. I had to do the
same. Eventually my wife and I would make some critical decisions about our daughter’s education that would give us
some peace. We also resolved not to lose sight of all the good
things that happened at her school and all the good people in
our community, including those whose opposition to school
budgets would soften and even reverse itself over time. These
days, with our daughter happily ensconced in high school, I
try to remember the lessons I learned from her younger years,
when I was younger too. I keep an eye out for anger that is actually unexpressed grief. And I try to fight the issues before
116 anger in the head

they become grievous, which is to say, a long time before I
get mad.
:
Of course, we do not grieve only for our loved ones; we also
grieve for ourselves. On some level, I think anger is a protest
against mortality. Its highest form is the resurrection, so beautifully depicted in that painting by José Clemente Orozco,
where a defiant Christ with clenched fist has just chopped
down his own cross, thus adding it to the heap of trashed
idols and armaments that lie piled in the background. If we
never lost our lives, perhaps we would never lose our tempers
—but only if we had never lost our innocence. St. Paul says,
“The wages of sin are death,” but sin without that wage
would be hell. It would be a world where torture could literally be endless. As it is, death cheats every torturer in the end.
In other words, death is God’s mercy on our fallen condition. So if at least some of our anger arises from grief at our
own mortality, we are in effect angry at mercy itself. We are
angry at the reprieve that eventually lets us off the barbed
hook of human misery. Our anger amounts to absurd ingratitude.
Recognizing this ingratitude is not without practical application. In moments of extreme frustration or stress, we tend
to personify the world as malignant. We see it as consciously
out to get us. The gods—or Murphy’s Laws—have conspired
once again to take us down a peg. But if we must personify
the world, we might better choose to see it as a gentle teacher,
preparing us by progressive stages for the fact that we are destined to die and the equally compelling fact that, given all we
anger as grief 117

are and are not, we are fortunate to die. Dylan Thomas urges
us to “Rage against the dying of the light,” and so we are entitled to do, but we do not have to rage against every flicker
that prepares us for the light’s inevitable extinction.
Rage belongs more properly to tragedy, where the light of
life burns with heroic luminosity before being extinguished,
often abruptly and prematurely. But even in tragic works of
literature we often see mortality embraced with something
more sublime than rage. “I am ready,” says Tess of the d’Urbervilles when the gendarmes come to arrest her for murder.
And when a soldier urges Breaker Morant in the film of that
name to devise an escape from his impending execution,
Morant responds in a manner worthy of the great tragic heroes. His companion urges him to “See the world,” to which
Morant says, “I’ve seen it.”
So have you and I, our lesser statures and our lighter burdens notwithstanding. We see the world, and it helps to remember that what we often see is a gentle—not a mocking—
reminder of who we are and where we are going at the end.
There is a cottage on an island off the Maine coast that I
love as much as any place on earth. My wife and I went there
on our honeymoon more than twenty-five years ago—two
kids who had lived at home all through college and never under the same roof. The cottage faces the mainland, separated
from it by a channel of water in which loons, cormorants,
and lobstermen do their fishing throughout the day. From
the back porch, you can watch the sun set over the coastland;
a long stairway descends through the woods to the shore, a
rock-fancier’s dream at low tide.
We stayed in the cottage several times after our marriage,
losing track of it in the years after our baby was born. During
118 anger in the head

that time the owners’ name disappeared from the phone directory; we assumed they were dead. When our daughter was
older, we wrote to inquire about another cottage on the same
island, only to discover when the photo came in the mail that
it was the same cottage with new owners. The fortuitous rediscovery made it seem all the more romantic and magical.
So we began going back. During the summer of my ordination as a deacon, I walked that shore for the first time in
years, with my little daughter shell-gathering in front of me,
and thought to myself, “The One you have been called to
serve made all of this.” The slight repulsion I had felt at having my ministry “regularized” by an institution broke at that
point, like a wave on the rocks.
Part of the place’s beauty comes from its seclusion. There
are other houses not far away, but invisible. The cottage is itself an island in a sea of ferns and pungent evergreens, giant
ash trees, and glacial boulders. At least it was.
Several summers ago we trod the familiar path from the
car to the screen door, luggage in hand—and noticed through
the thinned-out forest the foundation hole of a new house. It
was closer to the cottage than our nearest neighbor at home
in Vermont. Very soon we would be able to wave back and
forth from our respective decks.
It would take many more pages to describe the sinking
feeling, almost of despair, that took possession of my bowels
with that sight. I was dismayed, then angry. Why so many
trees cut? Why not cut down every last one instead of leaving
this ridiculous impersonation of a screen, like a see-through
garment worn for no other purpose than to add titillation to
nakedness? Why this obscene need to be “in somebody’s
face,” even when money and the lay of the land allow for
anger as grief 119

some privacy? You may have found a quiet spot to eat your
picnic, a seat far off the aisle to watch the show, but I choose
to present myself as an unavoidable blot on your landscape,
an inescapable ringing in your ears. “Hi. We’re the Dingdongs.
We’re up from Massachusetts, where we made a big pile of
money, and now we travel all over the world giving people a
big pain in the ass. See you in a bit.” I could envision it all.
Then I looked toward the west, the direction from which
I had come and would return soon enough, and remembered
the old lesson. This is not your permanent home. Nothing is.
The reason is that you yourself are not permanent, at least not
in this world. As it turned out, no one showed up to work on
the house during the entire week we were there. So we were able
to enjoy a brief stay of execution. We never went back. Perhaps
in the not-too-distant future we shall find a place that we like
even more. It’s doubtful we could ever love it more. For someone my age, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
:
So we are angry because we die, and by accepting death we
might become less angry, is that it? Yes, but only in part. I
think it can work the other way around too. Anger is not only
a protest against death, and it is not the only protest against
death. Sometimes I think that anger can be a wish for death,
a rash impulse to throw life away and have done with it. In
that case, patience, calmness, and forbearance amount to the
most effective protest against mortality. In my experience,
this happens most often in the case of people poignantly
aware of death, and especially thankful to be alive. Anger, like
120 anger in the head

diving into cold water or smoking a cigarette, is simply more
extravagance than they can afford.
When Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph and finds the
money changers in the temple, he angrily throws their money
onto the floor. But when he enters the garden of Gethsemane
“sorrowful unto death,” only to have his disciples fall asleep
during their watch, he cannot be angry with them. He is not
even angry with the guards who come to arrest him—nor angry with Judas, Pilate, or the soldiers who nail him to the
cross. Well, you say, he is dying for their sins. So I believe. But
perhaps we can achieve something like the same equanimity
by living with their sins, by bearing with them, because we
recognize that life is so dear and irreplaceable that Christ
himself does not lay it down without some reluctance.
My father-in-law lives in a three-story house on a small
yard in the middle of a blue-collar town in northeastern New
Jersey. He’s one of those men who like to keep their places
neat, their porches painted, their walks swept, the grass
mowed and trimmed. It is not easy for him to do so because
he’s in poor health, with heart disease and emphysema, and
because his yard is full of leaves and twigs from his neighbors’
overarching trees and litter from God knows where, seemingly from every human being who walks or drives by.
Still, the litter does no more than annoy him. It doesn’t
seem to make him mad. Every day he goes out and picks up
the wrappers, the plastic straws, and coffee cup caps that have
blown or been thrown onto the lawn. He sweeps the sidewalk,
stopping periodically for a toke from his pocket inhaler.
Some weeks it may take him a couple of days to finish the
round. But he never loses his mortal perspective. As he likes
to tell door-to-door salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses who
anger as grief 121

come to call: “The owner isn’t home. I’m just the gardener.” I
think of him as Adam, a little worse for wear, but doing the
best he can in the territory east of Eden. For me, he represents
the possibility of making a conscious choice to bear with
whatever garbage blows over the fence into your life, if not
happily at least not angrily, though often happily, because
you’re so grateful to retain the wherewithal to pick it up.
His secret was revealed to me one day when we were inspecting the estate, so to speak, and the subject came up of
a relative’s attempted suicide. “One of the goombahs” had
unsuccessfully tried to end his life in desperation over his
mounting debt. And my father-in-law had sent him this message of goodwill, something I repeat to myself when a dark
mood takes me or a bad temper is about to.
“I told Mike to tell Joey, if he’s planning to make another
attempt, I can use a heart and two new lungs. And if his
prostate’s any good, tell him I’ll take that too.”
Then he added, not unlike Christ in his own littered garden, though laughing instead of praying, but maybe praying:
“Hey, I want to live.”
122 anger in the head

-

’Tis a weapon of novel use, for we
move all other arms, this moves us.
Montaigne, “On Anger”
:

125
I
f anger were the only trouble in our heads, we might be
done now. If the only mental forms that anger took were
those of blame, fear, grief, and things of that ilk, then all our
prayers in respect to anger would be either petitions or confessions. Cleanse me. Forgive me. But there is also an anger that
comes as grace, and a prayer about anger that rises in thanksgiving. I can even imagine a prayer of intercession that implored God to give someone the gift of anger: “Feed my sister
with the grace to know what it means to be fed up.”
That is because there are other sins and delusions in our
heads that have nothing to do with anger, that in some cases
are the very opposite of anger, of anything that might be
called an outburst. There is crippling guilt, for example, which
presumes to deserve every misfortune that befalls us. There is
AN GER
AS GR ACE

a desire to please others, a desire for their favor that puts us
in their servitude. There is a wish to be invisible, to be a germ
so small that no other creature on earth can think of us as
prey, and by means of that invisibility to be immune from
every pain. All of these are ways in which the Samson of the
human spirit can be bound and which anger can dissolve
“like flax in a fire.”
And there are other ways as well. We can also be bound by
burdensome labor, impossible demands, ridiculous expectations, imposed from without or within. In these cases anger
can amount to the overtaxed mind or body’s cry for mercy.
Adults are usually quick to recognize that cry in their young
children: “He’s up past his bedtime, and that’s why he’s throwing a fit.” They are less ready to see the same cause-and-effect
relationship at work in themselves. Failure to do so may lead
to regrettable consequences, even to violence, and thus to the
conclusion that the phrase “anger as grace” is an oxymoron.
But grace does not absolve us of responsibility. I am not
sure that grace automatically saves, nor was I ever comfortable with John Donne’s depiction of grace as holy ravishment. I prefer Julian of Norwich’s vision of the “courteous”
savior. Grace comes, and we decide whether to act on it or not
—and sometimes how to act on it too. For all we know, there
was as much grace at work in the garden of Eden as in the
garden of Gethsemane—there was certainly temptation at
work in both places—it’s just that Christ said yes, and Adam
and Eve said no. Likewise, there may have been as much grace
at work in the cleansing of the temple as in the cleansing of
the lepers, and Christ said yes in both cases.
:
126 anger in the head

Perhaps the strongest forms of bondage in our particular
place and time are the chains of comfort and security. These
can amount to an implicit sadomasochistic pact to endure
every form of intellectual, political, and environmental degradation, all for the luxury of new sensations. Beat me and debase me, so long as you feed me and fondle me too. Entertain
me most of all. Give me bread and circuses, and if I can eat
the bread while watching the circuses, so much the better.
Show me documentaries on the turbulent 1960s; I promise
that I will pay the homage of a few nostalgic tears, even if I
wasn’t alive at the time and am only half alive now, so long as
I can enjoy a premium beer and a big-screen picture of the
March on Washington as I sniffle.
I am talking about no one so much as myself. In an earlier
chapter, I spoke incredulously of the “conspicuous adventurism” of my peers. Here is the less attractive side of my touted
ability to enjoy an “ordinary” (that is, extraordinarily fortunate) life. Whenever I see televised footage of a mass demonstration in some foreign country, and sometimes even in our
own country, I seldom marvel at the zeal of the demonstrators or ponder the justice of their cause. I do not ask myself
why these people hate Americans so much or what they hope
to accomplish by creating such a stir. More often than not,
what impresses me most powerfully is the extreme bother of it
all. I imagine myself in their shoes—except that I am still myself and still shod in the shoes of a comfortable middle-class
American—and I can scarcely think of leaving my house, driving to the center of some sweltering dusty city, parking my
car (of course I wouldn’t have a car in most of these countries), milling about with a bunch of smelly, jostling people,
and then marching myself lame and shouting myself hoarse
anger as grace 127

when I might have been home planting hyacinth bulbs or
reading The New Yorker. What grievance could possibly be
so galling as to make me leave my little homestead to shake
a Qur’an, a homemade placard, or for that matter a palm
branch cut on the outskirts of Jerusalem, at the wicked world?
I sometimes realize with a shudder that had I lived when
Jesus lived, I probably would never have gone to hear him
preach. I might have thought about going, but then, considering the bother involved, I probably would have settled for
reading the book whenever it came out. He would have had
to come to me.
I am probably not all that unusual. I am one of the sheep
who lie down in dollar-green pastures beside domestic still
waters, who will accept almost any rod or staff so long as it
holds the promise of additional comfort. In such a pastoral
arrangement, the ability to feel anger is seen as an undesirable trait, evidence of a bad gene, to be bred out of the line
even as the defective individual is culled out of the herd. Do
you want people to think of you as an ingrate, say the shepherds, a Luddite, a nut? Do you want to wind up like the
Unabomber? Are any of you willing to lose this succulent
green grass, this lion’s share of a lamb’s consolation? Not I,
say the sheep.
But not all of us are sheep. I watched those young people
riot at the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Seattle in
the late 1990s and found myself inspired, convicted, and hopeful beyond anything I ever expected to feel from something
so familiar as a fracas in the streets. The Chicago Seven were a
cliché even before I graduated from college. But without the
reassurance of belonging to a mass movement, without
the benefit of an anthem “blowin’ in the wind,” without the
128 anger in the head

certification of a cover story in Life magazine or the kudos of
a William Kunstler, without so much as an identifiable
charismatic leader, these kids made their unsung way to the
barricades. Never mind my sympathy with their cause—and I
felt plenty of that—what moved me most of all was an overwhelming sense of relief at knowing that human beings are
not dead, that the potential for righteous and inconvenient
rage is not dead either. For unlike many of those arrested in
Seattle, I never believed that it was carcinogenic growth hormones or omnivorous global corporations that would do us
in at the end, but rather the sweet taste of the goodies produced thereby—even the miraculous restoration of a natural
environment so safe and pristine that justice would not dare
light a fire.
:
Moses the lawgiver comes down from Mount Sinai with the
tablets of the law in his hand. Seeing the Israelites worshipping the golden calf—that holdover from the land of slavery,
with its cloying abundance of “garlics and leeks” in the slop
buckets and visible divinities on their thrones—he breaks the
tablets into pieces.
The action amounts to an eleventh commandment: Thou
shalt break the law itself for the sake of righteousness. Of
course, it can also amount to a rationale for every form of selfrighteousness. For better or for worse, it serves as a justification for anger. Enraged at the sight of that golden idol, Moses
rejects even the potential idolatry of the tablets themselves.
Like a wife finally angry enough to pull off her wedding ring
in the face of abuse, like a priest finally angry enough to tear
anger as grace 129

off his collar in the face of ecclesiastical hypocrisy, or a cop
finally angry enough to rip off his badge in the face of legally
sanctioned hooliganism, Moses in his moment of wrath
is full of the grace that St. Paul says “abolishes the law.”
Granted, he eventually heads back up the mountain for another copy. He knows, as Jesus surely did too, that we cannot
do without laws any more than we can probably do without
temples or money changers. Moses never sets himself up as a
law unto himself or unto his followers. But his anger insists
that life is more than regulations, and deserves more than
they can give.
Jesus knew this as well. “It would be better for you if a
great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were
drowned in the depth of the sea,” he says of those who offend
one of his “little ones.” Whether “little ones” refers to literal
children or to all innocent souls, “millstone” refers to a millstone, and “sea” refers to the sea. The anger born of grace, so
strikingly revealed in the violence of Christ’s language, often
comes in response to some little one’s helplessness and the
cruelty of power. In James Agee’s novel, A Death in the Family,
a young boy’s uncle and father convince him that they are
able to make a piece of cheese jump off the table by magic. In
a spontaneous explosion that shocks her husband, the boy’s
normally meek mother chastises the men for exploiting her
child’s innocence. They protest that they were only having a
bit of fun. The people worshipping the golden calf were, by
all reports, doing the same. On another level, so were the
Congolese soldiers who brutally raped and tormented Belgian women before sending them into exile. Of this Susan
Brownmiller writes in her book Against Our Will: “Rape in the
Congo was shrouded in the cloak of vengeance and made
130 anger in the head

plausible by an historic view of woman as the property of
man, but we should not forget that beyond the shiny patina
of ideological excuse, it was also rape amid the levity and frivolity of men having a good time.”
Agee’s angry mother gives the lie to all such fun and
games. In so doing, she seems almost divine, a reflection of
her namesake, Mary the Mother of God, “full of grace.” Apparently, anger is a part of that fullness. “Blessed is the fruit
of thy womb”—and anger is also a part of that fruit.
:
When I was a boy, probably not much older than the character who believed his uncle could levitate a piece of cheese, my
father took me with him one night to “check on a trouble.”
He was a high-ranking supervisor in the maintenance division of the New Jersey telephone company, and it seemed as
though much of his job consisted of going out at all hours of
the night to check on a trouble. He accepted the inconvenience as part of the bargain. “I have a college man’s job without a college degree,” he once told me. The implication was
that you had better be willing to work hard for such a distinction, and he certainly did work hard. He had started
climbing poles at the age of nineteen, once falling straight
down the length of one, so that my mother wound up spending a good part of that evening tweezing the splinters from
his chest and stomach. By the time I was old enough to know
what he did for a living, he was no longer climbing poles. He
was a boss over the guys who did.
The trouble we went to see that night was not up a pole,
however; it was underground. After telling me to wait by the
anger as grace 131

car, my father walked in his fedora and overcoat (a kid in the
inner city had once referred to him warily as “that big detective fella”) to the edge of a hole ringed by the silhouettes of
men. A light issued from the opening, so that I saw other
men’s faces flashing in between the shadows. I kept my eye on
my father as he joined the circle.
Then I lost sight of him. For a while, he seemed to have
disappeared. Perhaps I had simply looked away; as my father
often reminded me, I was easily distracted. Then, just as suddenly as he had disappeared, he was near me again. “Let’s go,”
he said.
As soon as we were in the car, I was aware of a change in
my father’s mood. He seemed angry—he was angry, though
when he spoke he seemed to be standing above his anger
somehow. With more maturity and a bigger vocabulary, I
would have described his tone as one of exultation.
“They’ve got this one poor guy working down in the hole
and all these supervisors up on top telling him what to do.”
My father shook his head as we backed decisively out of our
parking space. “And the more they got on his back, the more
mixed up he got. He didn’t need somebody to tell him what
to do; he needed somebody to show him. So that’s what I did.
I got down in that hole, and I showed him. The two of us had
the problem taken care of in a couple of minutes.” He glanced
down at his dirty knuckles, where he gripped the steering
wheel. “I used to work with these hands, you know.”
Sometimes in my sermons I have used this story as a parable
of the incarnation, of the Word made flesh and dwelling
among us. Prophets and lawgivers told us what to do, I will
say, but Christ shows us. There came a point in the history of
salvation where God could no longer be our boss alone, but
132 anger in the head

needed to become our companion in the depths of human
existence.
The story might also serve as a parable of anger as a form
of grace. Anger pushes us out of our confining roles and identities, out of the ring of censorious heavenly beings—which
also includes the adversary we know as Satan—and ultimately
out of our heads, into the down and dirty place where people
suffer. Had my father not acted on his anger, he would have
carried it home as an undigested lump in his stomach. (God
only knows when the man in the hole would have gotten
home or what undigested thing he would have taken home
with him.) On the other hand, had my father chosen to lash
out at his peers on the rim of the hole, he might have experienced a certain kind of catharsis, but nothing so liberating as
his rediscovery of himself as a working man who could still
work with his hands and in solidarity with other men. In
some ways, his descent into that hole and his emergence from
it amounted to a kind of baptism.
With that analogy in mind, we may be able to go one step
further. Perhaps these two ways of dealing with the story, as
parable of the incarnation and as example of anger as grace,
are not so distinct as I imply. Perhaps every grace-filled expression of anger is in some ways incarnational and sacramental, an embodiment of God’s loving and maternal desire
to be with her children and to advocate on their behalf. Remember that the name for the Holy Spirit given in the New
Testament, parakletos, is sometimes translated as “Advocate.”
And that “Advocate” is the antonym of “adversary,” which is
what the name Satan means.
Likewise, the incarnation itself may be understood as a
highly refined expression of the wrath of God, the force that
anger as grace 133

cleaves the rocks, parts the waters, and ultimately breaches
the barrier between the human and the divine. It is the thunder
of Sinai subsumed in a baby’s cry; the bread of life furiously
hungry at our breasts; the Lord made visible in his holy temple
and rearranging the furniture.
134 anger in the head

ANGER
in the
HOUSE
-

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
:
[Epigraph not available in this electronic edition.]
s
137
All tragedy is domestic. Although Aristotle famously
pointed out that tragic figures like Agamemnon,
Medea, and Oedipus tend to be kings and queens, most of us
will see them as mothers and fathers, husbands and wives—
sometimes in some pretty weird combinations, true, but all
people distinguished by having their hardest knocks at home.
There is nothing extraordinary about that connection. After
all, only among those we love are we capable of the most stubborn blindness, the most fatal vulnerability, the deepest regret—in short, of the basic ingredients that make life tragic.
How strange, though, that a social institution intended to
be our chief refuge from danger should so often prove so dangerous. In that regard, we can take the image of our prehistoric ancestors living in caves as an appropriately ambiguous
T HE CHRONIC
ANGERS OF
THE HOUSE

symbol of their decision to live in families: We can picture a
band of hominids retreating from some wild beast to the
dark recesses of a cave, only to come upon another beast waiting there to devour them. Frequently the name of the beast
is Anger.
It is probably not all that mysterious to find such a dangerous emotion lurking in what we trust to be our safest place.
Perhaps the greatest danger of domestic life resides in the
safety, that is, in the sense of license that comes with safety.
Home is where you hang your hat, where you let go of the
conventions that govern your behavior in the world. In societies of excessive formality, there must be enormous relief in
having a place where you can dispense with the curtsey, the
veil, the formulaic reply—the hat. But in societies like ours,
where formality has been replaced on the one hand with a
have-a-nice-day friendliness (probably a more demanding act
than rote formality), and on the other hand with an in-yourface attitude (which can irritate us more than we dare show),
the release of coming home at the end of the day can be
like the release of a shaken jarful of wasps. Something besides
Jack Nicholson’s over-the-top performance makes us remember that scene in the film The Shining where, having hacked
through the front door with an ax, the insane husband thrusts
his face through the splintered boards and announces,
“Honey, I’m home!”
The human household is a strange mix of the sacred and
the profane. We speak of its various privileges and pleasures in
the language of sanctity: the sanctity of marriage, the sanctuary
of hearth and home. The person who exclaims, “Is nothing
sacred?” is in all likelihood bemoaning the loss or the perceived loss of something close to family life. Yet homes can be
138 anger in the house

dismally profane places, the very opposite of churches (though
churches too can be dismally profane). I hesitate to say the
opposite of synagogues, for the home in Jewish tradition
seems to be an extension of the house of prayer in a way that
Christians have seldom managed. Assuming the contrast exists,
we can speculate on any number of reasons: the sacerdotal
self-absorption of the institutional church, the domestic aspects
of kosher law, the longer history of persecution and therefore
of household worship in Judaism, the deeper suspicion of the
flesh in Christianity.
In Liz Harris’s fascinating book about the Lubavitcher
Hasidim, entitled Holy Days, she tells of a Hasidic husband
singing softly to his wife on Sabbath eve. By custom, he is not
even permitted to kiss her in public, but there at the candlelit
table, with a number of guests in attendance, he sings what
amounts to a kosher serenade. Harris says the words were from
the Song of Solomon, an appropriate choice, I think, not only
for its tone of intimacy, but because the man who sang it
seems very wise.
The point here is not to imagine oneself as a Hasid. The
point is to imagine this particular Hasid screaming at his
wife. It takes some effort to do that. It would probably take
some effort for him to do that.
The Hasidic family points us in a good direction. The
sanctification of our households through prayer, custom, and
ceremonies of tenderness works to curb anger. Of course, for
those who live ritually prescribed lives, sanctification is meant
to come with the territory. That does not mean, however, that
the rest of us cannot keep some version of a kosher home, or
what Christians might call a sacramental home. I know of
households where the brewing of the first pot of coffee, where
the chronic angers of the house 139

the waking of the children, where the warming up of the
boots or the starting up of the cold car amount to intentional
acts of service performed quietly, habitually, and—when
people are paying attention—lovingly. The speaker in Robert
Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” describes how, in
spite of “the chronic angers of that house,” his father would
rise early on Sunday to build a fire and shine his son’s good
shoes. “What did I know,” the son exclaims years afterward,
what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Apparently, the father knew enough to perform them, whatever his other shortcomings, which might have been far worse
without those offices of love.
We need not dwell long on the office of grace at table, but
few indicators better describe the spirit of a household than
the manner in which its members sit down together to eat, or
if they eat together at all. It’s interesting that the prayer said
at meals is the only one we call “grace,” as if to acknowledge
that reverence, graciousness, and elegance exist there or nowhere. Likewise, I have always been fascinated by the crucifix
I’ve seen in Catholic households hanging above the marriage
bed. I suppose one could take it for a censorious witness, the
“blessed passion” asserting its claims above every other kind,
but that’s not the sense I’ve often gathered from the casual
affections of the couples themselves. It says in the Zohar, a
Jewish mystical treatise, that “this pleasure [of sexual intercourse] is a religious one, giving joy also to the Divine Presence.” Who knows but that the couple making love under the
crucifix doesn’t have that same sense of giving delight to the
140 anger in the house

Sacred Heart. If so, then a cross word in a bedroom must
seem as out of place as an obscenity scrawled upon the cross.
I suspect that some might find all of this a bit precious.
How can a few homely gestures and table graces have any
mitigating effect whatsoever against the full-blown force of
wrath? Perhaps they have no effect at all. But perhaps too a
rare explosion of full-blown wrath in a sanctified house—provided that the wrath is not expressed in violence or insult—is
a necessary thing. Even a temple must be cleansed from time
to time. A house where no one ever gets mad might not be
any more healthy to live in than a house where no one ever
opens a window. Aside from the obvious pathological exceptions, I do not think it is the big blows that cause the greatest harm anyway, but rather the constant and petty outbreaks
of simmering ill temper—what the poet Hayden so aptly calls
“the chronic angers of that house.” These are mainly what we
try to keep at bay by the sanctification of our domestic lives.
That sanctifying aim is surely what Yeats had in mind
when he wrote these lines in “A Prayer for My Daughter”:
No doubt we could dismiss these sentiments as a prescription
for the most anemic kind of gentility—as the vain wish of
the chronic angers of the house 141
[Epigraph not available in this electronic edition.]
the father of the bride to see his daughter married to a surrogate father of the bride, more master of ceremonies than
love of her life. Ceremony and custom are nice, but what
about spontaneity and passion?
Experience tells us that they go hand in hand. Experience
tells us that we never really know the one without the other.
There is no nakedness without clothing, no consummation
without courtship, no Feast of Fools without a calendar of
the saints. The shade of “the spreading laurel tree” is the fairest
place on earth for an honest quarrel, and the most delicious
for a good roll in the grass.
:
The effort to sanctify our households leads us to the recognition that our worst enemies are often within us, just as our
worst behaviors can appear within the safe precincts of our
homes. The beam that Jesus tells us to take from our own eye
before attempting to remove a splinter from our brother’s
can amount to a beam in our domestic architecture. Clarity,
like charity, begins at home.
We may also come to recognize that the act of sanctifying
a household or a life is only secondarily an act of exorcism;
primarily, it is an invitation to the exorcist. We are more on
track when we think of welcoming the holy one in than when
we imagine ourselves casting the evil one out. That emphasis
on positive action, on the virtues of praise as opposed to the
power of curses, on invocation as opposed to repression, will
also carry over into the various ways that we attempt to raise
our children and make accommodation with our neighbors
and our mates.
142 anger in the house

One of the sacraments of this holy invitation is hospitality. The guest mirrors the Guest. This is an insight older than
the Bible; we find it in the most ancient of myths, where people entertain strangers who turn out to be gods in disguise.
Given the right conditions—considerate guests, a minimum
of fuss, a total absence of any agenda besides mutual enjoyment
—hospitality can work as a potent charm against anger. The
Greeks believed that the Furies, those snake-haired divinities
who gave us another name for rage, punished crimes between
host and guest. Turn that idea around, and it also holds true:
Graciousness between host and guest tends to pacify fury.
There are at least several reasons why.
The most obvious has to do with the courteous demeanor
we put on for the benefit of our guests. In its best form, the
act of hospitality combines the public face we wear for the
world—sometimes a kinder face than we wear for our loved
ones—with the private ease we feel at home. The effects of
hospitality can be similar to those of a restful vacation: We
come away from the experience with that sense of “That was
so nice” followed by the questions “What made it so nice?”
and “Why can’t life be that nice all the time?”
Hospitality also reminds us of the purposeful nature of
the household itself. A home is not merely the lounge where
we crash when we finish with the “real work.” At least it cannot reduce to that for anyone who calls herself religious. A
household is a workshop for the preeminent business of justice
and mercy. We could gain much by cultivating that awareness.
Have you ever noticed how some people are far more fastidious in the keeping of their work spaces than they are in the
keeping of their homes? The farmer whose barn looks neater
than his house is a standard joke in many rural communities,
the chronic angers of the house 143

but the joke often applies to the rest of us as well. If we saw
the household as the place in which we do some of our most
important work, we might be more conscientious in maintaining it as a place of loveliness. Hospitality can bring us
closer to that insight.
It can also provide us with a foil for our day-to-day domestic behavior. If I am a reflective host as well as a gracious
one, then I shall sooner or later ask myself if and why I am
any less gracious after the guests go home. If I made myself
seem like a considerate partner in their presence, why am I
less so in the solitary presence of my mate? Hospitality compels me to recognize the differences that exist between my behavior as an attentive host and a careless occupant, an ardent
suitor and a complacent spouse, a persona masquerading for
the approval of others and a genuine person acting in the
best interests of those I love.
Finally, hospitality transfigures those I love. In the presence
of company, I hear my child’s conversation from a different
vantage point; I see my partner’s face in a different light. More
than once I have looked at my wife across a table surrounded
with guests, unable to touch her or engage her attention as
fully as I might were we alone, and felt I was the witness to an
inscrutable physical change. It was as if the molecules of her
skin and the tissues of her eyes had reconfigured ever so
slightly. It was like seeing her in the resurrection—“Touch me
not,” yet know me as you have never known me before. Walk
beside me every day for years, but recognize me for the first
time in the breaking of the bread. “Fear not,” yet do not presume either. This is not only the bone of your bones and the
flesh of your flesh, but bone and flesh of an entirely separate
human being, at once familiar and utterly mysterious. Avoiding
144 anger in the house

the irritable word is not even a question at that point, but
rather finding the voice to speak any word at all.
:
The chronic angers of the house may have more than a little
to do with our chronic passivity in the world. They may represent a sad disproportion in the expenditure of our aggression, whereby goodwill in the world is purchased at the cost
of ill temper at home. In that regard, we might consider the
questionable domestic conduct of our great nonviolent saints
—Tolstoy and Gandhi, for example—in comparison to the athome benevolence of some of their more militant counterparts. Perhaps being a bit more fiery abroad would make us
act with greater kindness and fidelity at home.
It is not unknown to discover a greater freedom for women
and a more pronounced tenderness toward children among
notoriously warlike societies. This flies in the face of one of
our most cherished myths, namely that matriarchy and nonviolence would go hand in hand. Perhaps that was indeed the
case in prehistory; yet when we look at the record of warrior
societies as diverse and far-flung as the Scythians, the Celts,
the Spartans, the Vikings, and the Iroquois, what we tend to
find is an uncanny combination of aggressive males and comparatively emancipated females. In the case of the Scythians
and the Celts, we also find evidence of warrior females.
Of course, we must be wary of jumping to conclusions.
Societies in which men are frequently away at war must confer greater autonomy and authority on women simply to
function; this does not necessarily mean that the actual status
of women increases in direct proportion to the aggressiveness
the chronic angers of the house 145

of men. (In both world wars, we saw “emancipated” women
put back in their places as soon as their men were discharged
from active duty.) But neither can one conclude that beating
swords into plowshares is a foolproof first step away from
beating women and children into submission. Outward ferocity and domestic tenderness, like loyalty and aggressiveness, sometimes exist side by side. More than one explorer has
noted the conspicuous affection and forbearance shown by
headhunting tribes to their children.
This is not to suggest that the best way to keep our heads
at home is to bag a few some distance from camp. It is only to
suggest, in the most tentative way, that domestic anger may
amount to little more than the vestige of unexpressed outrage in the world at large.
Emerson wrote that “Society everywhere is in conspiracy
against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is
a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the
better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender
the liberty and culture of the eater.” The language here is masculine, but the observation is by no means exclusive to men.
Perhaps a better metaphor lies in the history of the ancient
Babylonians, among whom every woman, at least once in her
life, was expected to serve as a prostitute in the temple of Ishtar.
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, a woman took
her place in the temple gallery, waiting for a male worshipper
to toss the required coins into her lap. (Herodotus notes that
a few of the less attractive ladies sat there for a humiliatingly
long time.) The man would then lead her to an adjoining
room by the scarlet cord attached to her body. After servicing
him and donating the proceeds to the temple, the woman had
fulfilled her obligation. Presumably, she did not then go home
146 anger in the house

to write any cuneiform dissertations on the liberating glories
of goddess-worship.
Most of us, male or female, have sat in that temple gallery.
Most of us have sat waiting for the coin to be thrown into our
laps, hoping we could make a good enough appearance to
finish our business and be home in time to eat supper. We
have sat down to table in the company of our loved ones with
the souvenirs of Ishtar like bite marks on our flesh. On some
level, don’t we feel ashamed in their presence of the work we
have done? Aren’t we secretly resentful of their implied complicity in that demeaning arrangement? Is it any great wonder that sometimes we lash out in anger?
I can imagine a hybrid myth, applicable to both women
and men, that combines the image of Christ cleansing the
temple in Jerusalem and Herodotus’s description of the temple
in Babylon. I can imagine a woman ripping the scarlet cord
from her wrist and using it as a whip to drive the money
changers from the temple of Ishtar. I can imagine her walking
home purged and at peace. No doubt tomorrow she will learn
the price of her revolt, but for now and for once her children
will not have to pay the price for her compliance. The Great
Mother can turn her own tricks; this mother has just turned
the front door key. Honey, I’m home.
the chronic angers of the house 147

Our stories, Wade’s and mine, describe the
lives of boys and men for thousands of years.
Russell Banks, Affliction
:

149
Sometimes we meet someone for the first time who reminds us so much of another person that science itself
seems like just another branch of the occult. Reincarnation,
astrological influence, doppelgängers—we can understand
why each of these ideas has adherents. We also meet doubles
in books; were it not for our experience outside of books, we
might be ready to believe that they had all been plagiarized.
But after a while, through the books we read and the people
we meet, we come to recognize that the patterns of human
life are not infinitely various, just profoundly strange. No man
is an island, and more men than suspect it are twins. Two
such twins are the ancient commanders Agamemnon and
Saul, who, taken together, constitute a distinct type of angry
man. Perhaps the type.
AN GRY M EN
agamemnon and
saul, michael
henchard and
wade ward

The story of Agamemnon, which we first hear in Homer’s
Iliad, is set around 1190 bce, though the epic itself is several
centuries younger. The story of King Saul, which we find in
the first book of Samuel, dates from about 1020 bce. In the
larger context of history, these men are practically dormmates, though neither is likely to have known of the other’s
existence (that is, if they both existed). Both men are presented as mighty and courageous leaders, with brooding and
irascible spirits that eventually undo them.
Agamemnon is the commander of the Greek military
force that besieges the city of Troy in order to retrieve the supernaturally beautiful Helen, who has run off with a Trojan
prince. (The situation can seem absurd even to characters in
the story; in a memorable scene from the Iliad, some of the
old men of Troy sit grumbling over the waste of a war fought
over one woman—until Helen herself comes gliding past
them, at which point they more or less say, “On the other
hand . . .”) Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaos, is Helen’s aggrieved husband. The cloud that seems to hang over Agamemnon’s head turns especially dark on three occasions.
The first of these occurs when the Greek fleet is unable to
set sail for Troy because the wind is against them. A prophet
advises Agamemnon to placate the gods by sacrificing his
own daughter. A nobler man than Agamemnon would have
refused to do it; a less noble man would have required a more
self-serving temptation. Agamemnon lives too much in the
regard of others; he exemplifies that all-too-typical masculine
reflex of saving face even at the cost of losing one’s head. We
see the same thing in Saul: Before ascertaining who has violated one of his strictures, he rashly vows that even his own
son, if found guilty, shall not be exempt from death. It turns
150 anger in the house

out that his son Jonathan has indeed transgressed his command, though out of ignorance. Only the intervention of
Saul’s men prevents him from executing Jonathan on the spot.
Agamemnon’s officers, on the other hand, do not intervene;
they’re eager for war, and the sacrificial victim is only a girl.
So Iphigenia is put to the knife.
Agamemnon’s second big mistake involves a conflict with
his greatest warrior, the all-but-invincible Achilles. One of
Agamemnon’s prizes in the war is a slave girl who happens to
be the daughter of a powerful Trojan priest. When the priest’s
entreaties fail to set the girl free, he calls on the god Apollo to
plague the Greeks until Agamemnon is pressured into relinquishing his prize. In a tantrum of resentment, Agamemnon
confiscates the prize of Achilles, that is, his captive woman.
Achilles responds by sulking in his tent, refusing to fight, and
the war is thus prolonged. (Not surprisingly, the Iliad has
sometimes been titled The Wrath of Achilles, though it is Agamemnon’s wrath that concerns us here.) If we can see beyond
the spectacle of women being used as the pawns of men, we
can see the related spectacle of men as the pawns of their own
codes of honor. The conflicts that result are, of course, utterly
devoid of honor; they resemble nothing so much as “puppydog fights” on the rug of a preschool classroom. He took my
toy, so I took his.
The best retelling of Agamemnon’s final mishap is found
in a play by Aeschylus named after the doomed conqueror.
Returning in pomp and pride from his sack of Troy, Agamemnon is cleverly murdered by his wife in revenge for his
sacrifice of their daughter. Before striking the fatal blow, she
coaxes Agamemnon to walk from his chariot to his house on
an expensive purple carpet. By acquiescing to her demands,
angry men 151

he reveals his vanity, his wife’s strength, and not least of all
his willingness to trample on precious things, even those of
his own house. He claims he doesn’t want to perform the gesture, but finally gives in under the pretext of satisfying his
wife. It is impossible to describe the power of this scene in the
play: It is like watching every one of your own grossest sins
reenacted in a single, slow motion.
The biblical King Saul is a far less grandiose figure than
Agamemnon; at the same time, he serves a grander god. For
these reasons, we may find it easier to sympathize with his
plight. His stature is closer to ours, as is the venality of most
of his mistakes. It is debatable whether he is even tragic in the
strictest sense of the word. He is certainly pathetic.
A physically imposing man, Saul is anointed as the first
king of Israel in response to the threat of marauding Philistines. Prior to his coronation, the people of Israel have lived
in a loose confederation of tribes, each with its own “judge,”
a charismatic leader combining the roles of adjudicator and
military chief. The last of these judges is a man named
Samuel, who accepts his divinely appointed role as kingmaker with considerable reluctance.
In all of his subsequent dealings with the new king,
Samuel shows himself to be every inch a judge. At first, having Samuel’s blessing, Saul enjoys military success, but he
soon runs afoul of God and his spokesman. As familiar as I
am with the Bible, I always have to go back to its pages to remember what it is, exactly, that Saul does wrong. A few things
as it turns out, though none of them seems to merit his fate.
Briefly, he fails to wait for Samuel to give an invocation; he
spares a king he was supposed to have killed; and he makes
booty of what he was supposed to have sacrificed. If we cast
Samuel in the role of father figure to Saul, we are presented
152 anger in the house

with the familiar image of the son who can never do anything
right in his father’s eyes—a recognizable archetype for many
angry men, including several we meet in the fiction of Russell
Banks.
After a while, God’s favor shifts from Saul to David, the
charismatic killer of Goliath. Apparently, everyone else’s favor
goes the same way. “Saul has slain his thousands, and David
his ten thousands,” the women sing in the street. Even Saul’s
own son Jonathan becomes David’s dearest friend. Saul tries
to kill David in several bursts of bad temper, but fails. These
are rash acts, which the author attributes to an “evil spirit,”
but it is hard not to feel some pity for Saul; at least it is hard
for me. Interestingly enough, Samuel himself seems to have
shared the sentiment: At one point, God asks him, “How
long will you grieve over Saul?” Not that Saul is dead, only
doomed. Samuel dies before Saul does.
In what may be Saul’s most pathetic moment, he visits a
witch and asks her to conjure up the ghost of his dead mentor—this in defiance of his own law against sorcery. Samuel is
just as full of disapproval in death as in life. So much for any
hope of “closure” after the death or estrangement of a stern
father figure. Eventually Saul commits suicide rather than be
captured after a disastrous engagement with the Philistines.
His armor bearer refuses to give the coup de grace, and so
Saul falls on his own sword. Thus dies the great king, heavy
with suspicion and perceived threat, having no one in his life
treacherous enough to relieve him of it.
:
Saul and Agamemnon are both brave men whose strong sense
of outrage is matched by formidable temper. One gets angry
angry men 153

enough to sack a city; the other, angry enough to break the
siege on a city. When Saul hears that the Ammonites have
surrounded Jabesh demanding terms of surrender that include
the privilege of gouging out the right eye of every survivor,
“the spirit of God came upon Saul in power . . . and his anger
was greatly kindled. He took a yoke of oxen, and cut them in
pieces and sent them throughout all the territory of Israel by
messengers, saying, ‘Whoever does not come out after Saul
and Samuel, so shall it be done to his oxen!’” Ox-lovers from
near and far rally to their king, and Jabesh is liberated.
Of course, these two mighty avengers are less than gallant
toward their own families. Both were willing to sacrifice their
own children. It is a mistake to see too much irony in this.
“Men of vision” are notorious for their willingness to pay that
sort of price. On one level, that’s what the story of Abraham
and Isaac is about. Very soon after your father meets a new god,
he’s going to start building a new altar, and he may not be
overly sentimental about what he puts on it. God’s seemingly
perverse testing of Abraham may in fact be a preemptive strike
on the sacrificial leanings of masculine idealism. Command
the patriarch to do what he’s only going to dream up on his
own anyway, and then nip it in the bud. Sometimes I wonder
if the single most compassionate decision Jesus ever made
was to remain childless. In any case, boys who wish their fathers
were more messianic are just that: boys. A full-grown man
learns to give thanks for every contented bourgeois bone in his
father’s body. You take the father with the altar on the mountaintop; I’ll take the one with the workbench in the cellar.
Agamemnon and Saul also engage in tragic confrontations
with men more gifted and attractive than themselves—though
not necessarily more virtuous. Agamemnon’s rival, Achilles,
154 anger in the house

performs outrages on the corpse of Hector in full view of the
slain man’s family, and David’s shenanigans with Bath-sheba
and his murder of her honorable husband are far more reprehensible than any of the errors of rash Saul. Nevertheless,
neither of these warlords is quite so dangerous as his overlord
suspects. Achilles and David are perhaps the natural rivals of
their captains, but not their inevitable enemies. The stories suggest that the outcomes might have been better. Both Achilles
and David refuse to kill their commanders; Achilles suppresses the urge “within his shaggy breast,” and David scorns
the opportunity when he comes upon Saul asleep in a cave.
Though David and Achilles can be ruthless, both are possessed of profound capacities for loyalty and friendship. In
fact, their most striking similarity, aside from the rivalries
under discussion here, is an intense and possibly homoerotic
alliance that each man forms with another comrade, Achilles
with Patrocles (who sleeps in his arms) and David with Jonathan
(at whose death David says, “Your love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women”). Rapprochement, reconciliation
—what the popular psychology books call male bonding—
would not have been impossible with such men. Rage and insecurity are what make it impossible.
And here I cannot resist one of those nickel and dime generalizations that, for the low price of a nickel or a dime, hold
a lot of truth. One of the best ways to discriminate between a
healthy older man and a damaged one is in their contrasting
attitudes toward younger men. A healthy man may attempt
to restrain some of the foolishness of his juniors, but overall
he cannot resist a certain affection for “the young dogs.” It
escapes him as naturally as his own sweat. Those suffering
from the spirit of Saul are more likely to want to pin a few to
angry men 155

the wall with their javelins. Some of the sanest older men I’ve
known always had younger ones under their wings; the losers
and the lunatics only wanted them under their thumbs.
Granted, a few sly ones may have affected the first course as a
way of effecting the second.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, both Agamemnon
and Saul are at odds with priests and prophets, while at the
same time both are also undone through their reliance on augury. Agamemnon offends a suppliant priest by enslaving his
daughter; he obliges another priest by sacrificing his own.
Likewise, though Saul offends Samuel repeatedly, he goes so
far as to employ the services of a witch to bring Samuel’s spirit
before him. What this paradox amounts to, once we trim off
the mythological fat, is a kind of degenerate fatalism that often seems to characterize angry men. They are firm believers,
not only in their own iron hands, but in the iron hands of
genetics, race, culture, bad luck, “the will of the gods.” I am
reminded of the volatile Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in
August, who begins his journey toward murder with the words,
“Something is going to happen to me.” Agamemnon and Saul
prefigure such men in their slowness to embrace repentance,
which implies free will, and in their speed to embrace destiny,
which does not. The prophetic warning, the priestly supplication falls on their deaf ears. But fatalistic oracles and rigid
predictions hold them in superstitious awe. Change Agamemnon’s chariot to a pickup truck, and we know immediately
what the bumper sticker on its tailgate says: “Shit Happens.”
And there’s nothing you can do about what happens. Likewise,
there’s nothing you can do to change what I am.
The stories of Agamemnon and Saul are themselves prophetic warnings to rash, brooding, and irascible men. Behold
156 anger in the house

the real shit that can happen. You will fall on your own sword
in the end. You will either destroy someone you love or be destroyed by her, or both. These are the wages of unchecked wrath.
Of course, the warning is effective only to the extent that one
is able to see himself in the character, so that when God is
quoted in the Bible as calling David “a man after my own
heart,” we can admit that to some degree Saul is a man after
ours. Who knows but that to transcend these characters, we
must first learn to love them. It remains for an artist like
Thomas Hardy—or in our generation, Russell Banks—to
show us how.
:
Thomas Hardy was not a man you would have wanted to ask,
“What’s the worst that can happen?” He would have told you
more than you wanted to hear. He is known as the great pessimist in English literature, but his pessimism is more than
balanced by his compassion. That is one reason that I think
people continue to read him: Behind all of the disasters and
fatal errors of his characters is the author’s worrying love.
Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge may contain the most
fully developed literary expression of the Saul-Agamemnon
archetype. Hardy may even have had these figures in mind
when he created Michael Henchard, an itinerant laborer who,
in a drunken fit, auctions off his wife and child to a sailor at
a country fair. There’s some suggestion that the “auction” is
nothing more than a display of intoxicated bombast, but
then the sailor makes his bid, and Henchard says yes to the
awful momentum he has set in motion. Like the sacrifice
of Iphigenia and the near-sacrifice of Jonathan, the auction
angry men 157

has something to do with face-saving. Aeschylus would have
said the same thing about Henchard’s sale as he said about
Agamemnon’s sacrifice:
Then he put on
the harness of Necessity.
Add to this masculine vanity the abuse of patriarchal power,
the dark connotations of the phrases “my wife” and “my
child.” If you own them, you see, you ought to be able to sell
them.
Henchard also mirrors Saul and Agamemnon in his rivalry with a young man of promise, the Scot Donald Farfrae,
who comes to work for Henchard after the latter has had the
improbable good fortune of building a new life as the mayor
of Casterbridge. Like David and Achilles, Farfrae is charismatic and gallant where Henchard is brooding and irascible.
And as with its Homeric and biblical precedents, Henchard’s
rivalry with Farfrae does not have to be so bitter or disastrous
as he makes it. Farfrae is a decent enough fellow. That said, he
cannot know all that Henchard has suffered, and in some
ways his attractiveness as a character suffers by comparison.
In Hardy’s novel, the ambivalence one feels in the Saul-David
story is completely fleshed out: We like Farfrae more than
Henchard, perhaps even more than David himself, but it
is Henchard whom we love, or at least I love him, to an extent
that we are not permitted to love Saul. What the nineteenthcentury novel gives us that the biblical narrative doesn’t is the
wounded heart of the hero.
The Mayor of Casterbridge is as grim a novel as one can find.
All of Henchard’s attempts to make up for his past meet with
158 anger in the house

failure and heartbreak. His last wish is for the utter annihilation
of any trace that he ever walked the earth. Few passages in literature move me so powerfully as “Michael Henchard’s Will”:
That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae [his stepdaughter] be not
told of my death, or made to grieve on account
of me.
& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.
& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
& that no flours be planted on my grave.
& that no man remember me.
To this I put my name.
At this point we might be inclined to ask what Hardy’s novel
has to offer us besides a highly literate version of that other
fatalistic bumper sticker, “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die”
with “Good riddance” added as an afterthought. Granted that
Hardy didn’t write his novel to serve as an exhibit in a book
about anger, what purpose does it serve to mention it here?
At least three purposes, I think.
First of all, Hardy’s novel comes with another stern warning to angry men, so stern it cannot even be called didactic,
because it tells us that we can quickly reach a point where life
lessons don’t amount to much. There may be no way left
to apply them. Rage always seems so ephemeral once it has
passed, no more than a brief storm, but it can leave irreparable
damage in its wake. This is what an angry man forgets even
more than his manners; at some level, he is convinced that
“we can always fix it later.” Not always. In some cases, there is
angry men 159

simply no room to say “I’m sorry” to anyone but God. I think
of that scene in Raging Bull where the boxer Jake La Motta,
having terrorized his wife and trashed their kitchen, calls to
her where she is hiding with the words, “Let’s be friends.” It’s
a funny line—and a terrible one in its implications. Hardy’s
story says that a man of Henchard’s cast of mind has good
reason to be afraid. “The fear of the Lord,” says the book of
Proverbs, “is the beginning of wisdom.” The fear of one’s own
wrath can be a beginning of wisdom too.
Second, the novel is telling us the corresponding truth
that we have no worthy choice but to attempt to repair any
damage we have done with our wrath. It may do no good, it
probably will do no good, but de Motta needs to pick up the
mess in the kitchen. This is where Henchard differs from
Agamemnon and Saul: in his effort to make amends. That his
eventual fate is little better than theirs compels a reader to cry
out, “What else could the poor man have done?” And the answer of the novel, at once dreadful and sublime, is “Nothing.”
What makes Henchard a good man and Hardy a great novelist, what gives each his stature in the end, is that the mayor of
Casterbridge tries to be good and to make good in the face of
inevitable failure. Our prospects are not always so dismal as
his. But in making his so dismal, Hardy forces us to ask what
other course there is but to struggle, to hope, and to endure
—even if redemption is beyond us. Would we have wished
Henchard to go on drinking? Would we have wished him to
take his own life? He is happy for annihilation when it comes
at last, but the words that move us so powerfully in his will
could only have left us cold in a suicide note. Henchard’s last
will and testament amounts to his bill of inalienable rights.
He has earned every one.
160 anger in the house

Finally, The Mayor of Casterbridge, like the best of literature,
gives us a glimpse of what Albert Camus called “the solidarity of all man in error and aberration.” The viewpoint of the
archetypal man of wrath, be he Agamemnon in his chariot,
Saul with his javelin, or Henchard or King Lear in the pouring
rain, is the viewpoint of a man who believes himself to stand
alone. Whether the belief is based on egotism, desperation, or
grief, the great ragers all see themselves as armies of one. But
literature reminds us, through the repetition of their type,
that they are merely members of an army.
[O]ur stories, Wade’s and mine, describe the lives of
boys and men for thousands of years, boys who were
beaten by their fathers, whose capacity for love and
trust was crippled almost at birth and whose best
hope for a connection to other human beings lay
in elaborating for themselves an elegiac mode of
relatedness, as if everyone’s life were already over. It is
how we keep from destroying in our turn our own
children and terrorizing the women who have the
misfortune to love us; it is how we absent ourselves
from the tradition of male violence; it is how we
decline the seductive role of avenging angel; we
grimly accept the restraints of nothingness—of
disconnection, isolation and exile—and cast them in
a cruel and elegiac evening light, a Teutonic village
in the mountains surrounded by deep dark forests
where hairy beasts wait for stragglers and deer thrash
wild-eyed through the deep snow and hunters build
small fires to warm their hands so as to handle their
weapons gracefully in the cold.
angry men 161

So writes the narrator in Russell Banks’s novel Affliction,
which contains a recent incarnation of the angry figure we
have met in three earlier guises. Banks’s Wade Ward is neither
king nor mayor, but a part-time cop and plow truck driver in
northern New York state. His sacrifice of his daughter is done
for no higher cause, nor even for a base one. He is scarcely
aware of any cause at all. He has simply lost her, officially to
divorce, and actually to his own clueless ineptitude as a father. But many familiar features make up his story, the simmering rage, the oppressive sense of doom, the disapproving
father, not least of all the young rival, who is not even a rival
in any rational sense, but whom Wade kills anyway. In a brilliant twist on a familiar theme, he shoots his young friend in
the way that Saul, Agamemnon, and Henchard sacrifice their
children, as if the deed somehow needed to be done.
The narrator who frames the words in the long quotation
above is Wade’s younger brother, and in his view, the annihilation that Henchard wished for in death amounts to a sad
covenant that angry men like Wade make with life. He explains their acceptance of nothingness as a pitiful attempt to
resist the temptations of rage and violence. In some ways, the
narrator presents us with a choice that differs markedly from
the one presented by Hardy. The mayor of Casterbridge had
to choose between annihilation and a futile hope for redemption, between despair and some kind of tragic resignation in
the face of despair. Apparently, Wade has made a different
choice, one between rage and nothingness, between a direct
and emotional engagement with life, which could prove
dangerous to everyone that he loves, and an “elegiac” detachment that amounts to acting “as if everyone’s life were
already over.”
162 anger in the house

I find myself wanting to close with some kind of answer to
Wade’s brother. I want to pose a better choice than he does.
But I am not sure that I have one—except to say that the
choice he implies goes to the very heart of what this book of
mine is about. If anger cannot be redeemed, then the choice
for those men scarred by its uglier manifestations is very
likely what the brother proposes: either to embrace “the tradition of male violence,” or to effect some kind of nihilistic
disconnection from life—through ironic detachment, through
hedonistic indulgence, through rituals of male bonding that
are certainly not homosexual, but that are even more certainly
not heterosexual. That is precisely the choice that I see many
of my male contemporaries making; their numbers do indeed
comprise an army. And for those who love them, it amounts
to an army in a foreign war on ever-more-distant soil.
The glib ideology that would purport to solve this predicament “by getting rid of all the macho stuff,” by turning the
word testosterone into an epithet of contempt, is a bit like resolving the abortion debate by sterilizing every potential
mother. Anger is a part of our created nature as human beings, both male and female, in the image of God. The choice,
then, is to redeem our anger or to become something less
than human, either by making the tragic mistakes of Saul
and Agamemnon, or by making an equally tragic covenant
with nothingness. Perhaps the best alternative lies in using
one’s rage to annul the covenant. As the poet William Carlos
Williams wrote in his long poem Paterson:
angry men 163
[Epigraph not available in this electronic edition.]
Compared to Banks’s “Teutonic village” surrounded by “deep,
dark forests” and “hairy beasts,” those “sun kissed summits of
love” sound awfully good. They’re where I’m headed in any case.
164 anger in the house
[Epigraph not available in this electronic edition.]
-

Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.
Toni Morrison, Beloved
:

167
Adeceptive show of balance pairs the last chapter with
this one, matching four angry men with four angry
women. It is deceptive in that the women are not and can
never be as representative of their sex as the men. Of the four,
Clytemnestra and Medea are both the creations of male authors (though the myths in which they first appeared may be
more authentically feminine than we shall ever know). Queen
Boudica is an indisputably historic person, who nevertheless
comes to us exclusively through the eyes of historians who
were males as well as citizens of the nation that conquered
hers. Only Sethe is a woman made by a woman. Nevertheless,
it is a man who interprets her in the pages that follow.
Although the balance of these two chapters may be deceptive, that fact alone says something important about
AN GRY WOM EN
c lytemnestra
and boudica,
medea and s ethe

women and their anger. At least some of women’s anger derives from an imbalance that is never entirely internal. It lies
outside their heads, in the world at large. Aeschylus tells us
that Agamemnon “put on the harness of Necessity”; that is,
he chose to embrace his fate. In contrast, these four women
seem to have had their harnesses put on them at about the
same time as they were first swaddled. This is not to say that
they lack free will or responsibility for any of their actions. In
many ways, their actions are more decisive and consequential
than those of the men. Still, taking all these stories together,
one cannot escape the impression that the men slept in the
beds they made, whereas the women merely woke up in the
same beds in which they were born, suddenly unable to sleep.
Medea’s male antagonist, her husband, Jason, arrogantly
says something like that very thing:
A man dares things, you know, he makes his adventure
In the cold eye of death; and if the gods care for him
They appoint an instrument to save him; if not, he dies.
You were that instrument.
This is the point in the drama where every woman in the audience with at least one feminist bone in her body groans out
loud, but in fact Jason is giving a very accurate, if vain and
callous, description of the predicament of all the women in
this chapter. Yes, they are able to “dare things” as well as any
man, but their daring comes in response to the consequences
of their secondary status as the instrument of man. In other
words, their daring is never without a certain desperation.
Most of them are avengers, but none is an adventurer. In some
ways, this makes their anger, and the anger of women like
168 anger in the house

them, a different sort of problem than the anger of their male
counterparts. In some ways, their anger is not the problem at
all. Whoever first said that “Hell hath no fury like a woman
scorned” failed to take into account that the position of being perpetually at the mercy of another’s scorn is itself hell.
:
Clytemnestra is the wife of Agamemnon and—as even those
familiar with classical literature sometimes forget—the sister
of Helen of Troy. Both women were born of Zeus’s fabled
mating with Leda, in which he came upon her in the form of
a swan. Long before she performs a single one of the deeds
that will make her name a byword for treachery, Clytemnestra
finds herself bidding her husband good-bye as he goes off to
war on behalf of her famously beautiful sister. Clytemnestra
is a second-class person two times over, in subordination to
Agamemnon and in comparison to Helen. If anger is frustration poised on the threshold of action, then a woman’s anger
can come from being forever stalled on that threshold itself,
forbidden to act, unwilling to submit. As the narrator in Tillie
Olson’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing” says on behalf of
her daughter: “help her to know . . . that she is more than this
dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”
Clytemnestra is also the mother of three children. Agamemnon, Saul, Henchard, and Wade are all fathers; and all
these women are mothers—but here too the symmetry is misleading. None of the men is defined by his parenthood as the
women are. Take the men, make them childless, and you can
still salvage their stories. You can certainly locate their anger.
This is not so for the women. Take away their motherhood,
angry women 169

and they become different women in stories with very different plots. The absolutism of motherhood in their lives does
two things: It makes them particularly vulnerable through
their children, and it makes their children as instantly susceptible to their mothers’ rage as to their fathers’ power.
You will recall that Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter
Iphigenia to gain a favorable wind for sailing to Troy. The
ruse by which he accomplished this is both horrible and emblematic. According to the legend, Agamemnon sent word to
his household that he had arranged a marriage between his
daughter and the great warrior Achilles. Iphigenia arrived at
the Greek camp dressed in her wedding finery, only to be
seized and slaughtered. In a sense, she and her mother suffer
similar fates: That is, they are each reduced to a very specific
role, that of bride and mother respectively, and then that role
itself is reduced to a cruel joke. It is not enough to say that
the frustration and therefore the anger of women derive from
the limitations placed on their freedom, identity, and talent.
This is true, but only half true—it amounts to the great halftruth of talk-show feminism. Women are also frustrated and
angry because even that limited role is demeaned. We could
express this by changing a few pronouns in that “riddle of inequality” found in the Gospels: “Whosoever hath, to him shall
be given; and whosoever hath not, from her shall be taken
even that which she seemeth to have.” A life confined to the
kitchen cannot be completely assessed without mention of
the muddy footprints left carelessly on the kitchen floor. The
scene in Raging Bull where Jake La Motta trashes his wife’s
kitchen calls to mind the scenes in Faulkner’s Light in August
where the misogynistic Joe Christmas throws Joanna Burden’s
proffered food against the wall. Both are examples of the same
170 anger in the house

reduction that names a woman after her sexual parts and then
abuses her sexual parts, that sees a woman as nothing but a
bedmate or a baby-maker and then forsakes her bed and kills
her babies. If there is any more compelling justification for
rage than this, one should like to hear it—or perhaps not to
hear it, because it would be unendurable.
:
Clytemnestra gets even, for a time. With the connivance of her
lover, she murders Agamemnon on his return from Troy. She
has woven an ingenious robe that acts as a straitjacket when the
conqueror steps into it after his ritual bath; with her husband
confined in its coils, she stabs him to death. She also murders
his captive concubine, Cassandra. Clytemnestra herself will
eventually be murdered by her son, Orestes. The moral conundrum of his vengeance forms the major theme of Aeschylus’s
masterwork, the Oresteia. By its close, Clytemnestra and her
grievance are nothing more than shadows on the stage.
And yet the questions raised by her vengeance continue to
haunt the audience until the very end of the play and beyond.
Does righteous wrath necessarily lead to righteous action?
And do righteous actions, by themselves, make a righteous
world? The story suggests that even when the claims of justice
are irrefutable, the instruments of anger are seldom precise.
Ostensibly, Clytemnestra acts out of outrage over what was
done to her daughter. She has another daughter, Electra, in
addition to her son, Orestes. Clytemnestra follows her act of
maternal retribution by sending Orestes away to live with relatives (she claims to do so for his safety) and by relegating her
daughter to the place of a servant in the palace where she and
angry women 171

her lover now reign. At least that is how Electra sees her situation. Electra has no sympathy for her mother, and no visible
resentment over her sister’s death; she’s the classic daddy’s
girl, who gives her name to Freud’s Electra complex. But it is
Clytemnestra who concerns us here.
Clytemnestra’s righteous rage on behalf of her daughter
Iphigenia is contradicted by her indifference to her surviving
children. Perhaps this can be explained by Aeschylus’s need to
diminish our sympathy for her in order to gain our support for
Orestes’ eventual vindication. Perhaps too it can be explained
by the fact that neither Orestes nor Electra comes across as a
particularly likable child. Then again, given the family, what
can we expect?
Nevertheless, even if Aeschylus is manipulating our emotions so that the male avenger gains ascendancy over the female
avenger, even if Clytemnestra is given all her due, there remains
a very trenchant insight in Aeschylus’s characterization of her
selective love. How often have we seen someone enshrine the
dead or lost child or lover in preference to the living—even to
the extent of wronging the living in order to honor the dead?
Once again, we see the tyranny of the mind, and the mentality of anger. The dead child, like the beautiful dead woman of
romantic poetry, is a secure object of adoration, and an equally
secure excuse for anger. Iphigenia offers no challenge. Unlike
her brother and sister, she has no life to call her own. This is
not to suggest that Clytemnestra has no reason to seek vengeance; she has a reason if anyone has a reason. It is only to
say that her anger has the same dimension of unreality as have
most other angers, and that this dimension is the chamber in
her heart where she has entombed her dead daughter, having
first banished the living children who also have a claim there.
172 anger in the house

As for her murder of Cassandra—
Brought as a variant to the pleasures of my bed,
She lends an added relish now to victory.
—here the unreality of Clytemnestra’s anger propels her from
injustice to further injustice. The neat rhetorical parallelism
of her speech obscures a parallel more terrible: Avenging a girl
brought bound to the altar, Clytemnestra slaughters another
girl brought bound to the bed of her conqueror. Clytemnestra’s rage on behalf of a helpless feminine instrument of a
man’s blood lust finds its object in another helpless feminine
instrument of this same man’s sexual lust. In the broadest
sense, Clytemnestra murders her daughter all over again.
:
Boudica, the Iceni queen who led a devastating revolt against
the occupying Romans in first-century Britain, bears several
comparisons with Clytemnestra. First of all, she is given her
“harness of Necessity” in the context of a man’s world; that is
to say, it is thrust upon her without invitation. Second, she is
outraged partly through her daughters. And finally, though
her vengeance falls on men and women both, it seems that
women bear the worst of it.
The story of Boudica’s grievance is a dreadful one. It parallels the stories of millions of nameless women throughout
history; only Boudica’s stature as a noble lady makes her story
seem more tragic than theirs, and more unusual than it truly
is. The wife of an Iceni king who had reigned peacefully as a
angry women 173

client of the Romans, Boudica inherited the throne after her
husband’s death. Sensing an opportunity for extortion, the
local Roman governor contested the dead king’s will, in
which he had left a portion of his estate to the emperor and
a portion to his own two daughters. (Apparently, this kind of
division had legal precedents; the first legacy was intended to
safeguard the second.) The governor’s agents mounted a ruthless campaign of plunder and land confiscation. As a prelude,
they decided to make Queen Boudica an example in the hopes
of demoralizing her subjects. In the presence of her people
and the Roman soldiers, the queen was stripped and flogged.
Then, she was forced to watch as her two daughters were raped.
Archaeologists tell us that there is still a noticeable layer of
red dust in the soil strata under the present-day city of London, dating from when Boudica’s army burned the Roman
town of Londinium to the ground. Under the command of
their furious queen, the Iceni burned two other cities and destroyed the better part of a Roman legion until they in turn
were crushed by superior force. No one is sure what became
of Boudica, though she lives as a legend—usually with the
name of Boadicea—and in a bronze statue of the queen and her
daughters that stands in London today. The statue is obviously
intended as a symbol of nationalist pride—the native queen
taking up arms against foreign occupation—but it might also
stand as a monument to righteous anger everywhere.
The atrocities alleged to have been committed by Boudica’s
troops are, like many reports of atrocity, subject to conjecture. The enemy recorded them, perhaps embellishing them
in the process, and we have no way of knowing for sure if
Boudica sanctioned those that actually occurred. Her tribe
was hardly a disciplined army, one reason the Romans were
174 anger in the house

able to rout it in the end. In any case, the atrocities seem to
have been directed with particular cruelty against women.
The Iceni are supposed to have cut off the breasts of the
women they captured and sewed them to their mouths to create the macabre impression that they were eating their own
flesh. The victims were then impaled on long skewers. It takes
no great imagination to guess how the latter operation was
performed. The impulse to retaliation probably explains both
the brutality and the methods: We saw what you did to our
royal women; look what we’re doing to yours.
Beyond such an explanation, however, it is hard not to see
yet another ironic spectacle of women’s vengeance falling disproportionately on women. Setting aside gender politics, we
may also be seeing the general tendency to treat the collaborator more mercilessly than the enemy, to hate Judas more
than Pilate. I imagine that at least some of the consorts of the
occupying Romans were native Britons; certainly none of
them were Roman rapists. But then, it was not white South
Africans who were “necklaced” with burning tires, nor Ulster
Protestants whose heads were shaved in the streets of Northern Ireland. Not infrequently, blind rage attacks its own kind
first; like lightning, it takes the shortest path home. This may
be where men and women show themselves the most alike.
The difference is that, in a world where women have secondclass status to begin with, they are more likely to be perceived
as collaborators. The role of instrument is the role of a collaborator, after all, so that even when the role of avenging
angel falls to a woman, other women are invariably going to
pay the price. Earlier, I had said that women’s anger may in
many cases amount to a different problem than men’s anger
—I meant that, on the whole, women have greater justification
angry women 175

for getting angry. They certainly have no lesser reason to be
cautious in the application of their rage.
When we were first married, my wife worked as a clerical
assistant in an academic department of a college. Of the various indignities that she bore from professors and graduate
students alike, the worst came from two women who could
not resist a single opportunity to present themselves as angry
“feminists.” And against whom did they direct their militancy? Pornographers? Rapists? Pimps? Right-wing clerics?
No, but a woman like themselves, who shared nearly all of
their convictions, though she lacked their affectations, not to
mention their adjusted gross incomes. (One of the two, it
should be said, did eventually show a change of heart.) Similarly, when my wife was first looking for a job, her most humiliating interview—in fact, her only humiliating interview—
took place at a family planning center where a haughty
women’s advocate grilled and belittled her without pity for
the horrendous crime of failing to type fifty words a minute.
I must admit that my ruminations in this chapter derive as
much from these vicarious experiences as from any work of
literature. Never mind if the latter are the works of men; the
proof has come from the acts of women. If, as a slogan once
popular among feminists puts it, “the personal is the political,” then according to certain personal experiences of certain
women, the politics of sisterhood most certainly stink.
:
We may know Medea better than any of the other heroines of
classical Greek drama, in part because of a well-known adaptation of Euripedes’ play by American poet Robinson Jeffers.
176 anger in the house

We may also know Medea because, amid all the acts of human
sacrifice and self-mutilation that we associate with Greek
tragedy, hers are the most extreme. She murders her own children, because, as she will tell her incredulous husband, “I
loathed you more than I loved them.”
She has every reason to loathe him. This recurring theme
of reasonable loathing makes these four women in some ways
more interesting than the four men. The women’s anger derives
from a just cause more than from an inscrutable condition.
For that reason, we can move beyond the question of whether
or not their anger is justified and move to the more complex
question of whether it does them more harm or more good.
Medea is a foreign princess who falls in love with the Greek
adventurer Jason. He has sailed with his famous Argonauts to
her country in quest of the Golden Fleece. A sorceress, Medea
uses her magic powers to assist Jason, even going so far as to
kill her own brother to advance Jason’s cause. Hell hath no
fury like a woman infatuated with a thug. Jason takes Medea
back to Corinth, where he marries her and fathers two sons.
(In this, he takes one tentative step beyond that other mythic
adventurer, Theseus, who abandons his female deliverer on
an island.) Jason and Medea might have lived happily ever
after. But always mindful of advancing his own interests, Jason
decides to marry the king’s young daughter and abandon
Medea. To safeguard against Medea’s well-known acquaintance with the black arts, the king announces that she is to be
exiled. He gives her a day to pack.
Medea responds with cunning and ruthlessness. She sends
Jason’s bride a gift, a beautiful dress that catches fire as soon
as the girl puts it on, and that clings magically to her flesh
when she tries to tear it off. Her father dies in a vain attempt
to extinguish the conflagration. Then Medea murders both
angry women 177

of Jason’s sons and departs in a chariot drawn by dragons.
It is no surprise that the modern adapter of this tale
espoused a philosophy he called “inhumanism.” In Medea,
Jeffers saw, not a reason for his misanthropy, but a figure to
admire, one who was strong above all else. His heroine shows
the clay feet of his idol: To worship strength is inevitably to
destroy oneself; it is to join in the project of one’s enemies.
Medea even admits to breaking her own heart in order to
break Jason’s. The great irony of her story is that none of the
other female characters seeks so deliberately to triumph
over her circumstances, and none, it seems to me, is so utterly
self-defeated.
Medea has always struck me as a typically Greco-Roman
creation, in that she achieves ascendancy only by acting “the
part of a man.” Her sacrifice, after all, is more typical of Agamemnon than of Clytemnestra, though her immolation of
Jason’s bride-to-be—another hapless pawn in the power games
of men—is reminiscent of Clytemnestra too. The Greeks
could only conceive of feminine power as an impersonation
(and usurpation) of masculine power. Its operative symbol is
the Amazon warrior, who cuts off her right breast (the word
amazon means “one-breasted”) in order to pull a bowstring.
Emancipation through self-mutilation. We find the same idea
in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, a golden oldie among the
heterodox since its discovery in the 1940s, where Jesus is
recorded as saying that “every woman who will make herself
male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
Impersonation, though, is the ultimate exercise in futility.
At the end of the day, nobody “does Elvis” better than Elvis.
The crowd may love you, but you’ll never sleep in Graceland.
Drag queens teach us no less than tragic heroes, and often
they teach us the same things. The monumental irony revealed
178 anger in the house

by Medea is that the attempt to rise above second-class citizenship by “making the female male” is an automatic admission
of inferiority. To rage against men in conscious imitation of
men is only to cut off your own breast, to break your own
heart—to put on a phony beard and let the knife fall on your
own flesh and blood.
:
Then comes Sethe, hushing all pronouncements. Toni Morrison’s 1988 novel, Beloved, took its inspiration from an actual
event in which a slave woman killed her own child rather than
have her raised as a slave. The story of her protagonist Sethe
is the extreme form of the tale in which woman is born into
“the harness of Necessity”—in this case, the harness of American slavery. Sethe’s circumstances are relatively benign at
first; she comes of age on a plantation known as Sweet Home,
where the master speaks of his male slaves as “men” and does
not molest slave women. (We are left to wonder if this makes
him more enlightened than his peers or more benighted,
since he continues to keep slaves anyway.) A change in plantation ownership straitens the harness that Sethe wears. Her
baby’s milk is sucked from her breasts by two of her new masters. She is beaten mercilessly when she reveals the atrocity to
her sympathetic mistress. Her husband, who had watched it
in helpless anguish from his hiding place in a barn loft, goes
mad. Eventually Sethe escapes to freedom, sending her three
children on before her. During her exodus she gives birth to
a fourth, the girl Denver, who will become the Electra of this
story, the daughter neglected in favor of a ghost.
When slave-catchers come to retrieve Sethe and her family,
angry women 179

she attempts to kill her children, though she only succeeds in
killing one girl. This is Beloved, the child who returns years
later “from the other side” to haunt Sethe’s life as a weird young
woman, at once nubile and infantile. The novel is largely about
Sethe’s struggle to be reconciled with this creature, and
eventually to exorcise her from her life. It is also about the
struggle of her daughter Denver to be something more than
Electra in a head cloth. That both women seem likely to succeed makes Morrison’s novel into something more hopeful
than a typical tragedy. “Call no man happy till he’s dead,”
says Sophocles. Morrison seems to counter, “Call no woman
dead until she has had her last chance to be happy.”
Sethe is beyond our judgment. Even her wrath is beyond
our judgment, if for no other reason than that it strikes us as
an emotion beyond wrath. Her blade is poised, like Abraham’s,
above the level of normal emotions, common experience, or
“universal morality.” Who dares say that she was wrong or
right, a good mother or a bad? Her lover Paul D. is not so deferential. When he learns of her past, he chides her with the
words: “You have two legs, not four.” His response is as understandable as it is short on understanding. Morrison told the
director Jonathan Demme that of all the characters in her novel,
her favorite was Paul D. It must have hurt her, then, almost as
much as it hurt Sethe, to have him say this to Sethe’s face.
But Paul D. redeems himself at the end, as if to emphasize
that redemption is also possible for Sethe and Denver and
perhaps for Beloved too. After the undead daughter is at last
banished from her life, Sethe comes close to dying herself.
Paul finds her delirious and filthy on the floor, mourning her
loss. “She was my best thing,” she cries. To which Paul D. answers, “You your best thing, Sethe.”
180 anger in the house

This is Toni Morrison speaking, though on first reading I
almost mistook her for Whitney Houston. Was she telling us
nothing more than that “Loving yourself is the greatest love
of all”? Much more, I think. In fact, she may be giving us a
key, not only to a better understanding of Sethe, but to our
understanding of Clytemnestra and Medea and of the rage
that inspires them all.
When Sethe says that Beloved was her “best thing,” she is
saying what many of the other characters imply, and that many
of us feel in our hearts: that our children are absolute in their
importance and in their claims upon us. One is inclined to
add, “and so it should be.” The problem with making children
into absolutes, however, is that it eventually makes them into
something less than children. It makes them the first thing
we seize when fury, despair, or divinity seems to demand the
ultimate sacrifice. After all, isn’t sacrifice a matter of giving
up your “best thing”? To make children less than absolute, on
the other hand, is to make them closer to absolutely safe in
our arms.
Any healthy attempt to do so is of necessity a religious
one. The only absolute capable of interposing itself between
our children and our misguided fury is God. Muhammad is
supposed to have said that marriage is one half of religion; in
the absence of religion, however, marriage (or motherhood or
manhood) can become all of life. In the presence of extreme
stress, that sense of totality can backfire in tragic ways. This is
the meaning of the Abraham and Isaac story, revealed at the
moment when the voice from heaven says, “Do not lay your
hand on the boy or do anything to him.” By teaching Abraham
to place an absolute above his only son, God has exempted
the child from the sacrificial danger that awaits all absolutes. In
angry women 181

Christian terms, Abraham puts Christ on the cross at the
same moment as he takes his own son off the altar.
Perhaps the long white beard on Abraham prevents us
from seeing how applicable the story is to mothers as well as
fathers. Perhaps what we need is an Abraham and Isaac story
for women, and perhaps Toni Morrison has given us the closest thing we have thus far. When Paul D. says, “You your best
thing, Sethe,” he is urging her to take a step toward that same
recognition of motherhood in relation to other claims as great
as or greater than its own. It is too facile to say that Beloved
might have been spared had Sethe known this all along. All
we dare say is that many women—and men—might find better
objects for their anger and frustration, and more appropriate
sacrifices to their gods, than unfortunate children harnessed
with the terrible necessity of being their parents’ “best things.”
182 anger in the house

-

Anger which breaks a man into children . . .
César Vallejo, first line of an untitled poem
:

185
I
know people who were so traumatized by the anger of
their parents, or by the anger of some other adult in their
childhood, that they never developed an anger of their own.
Even now a confrontation with someone else’s anger all but
paralyzes them. To give but one interpretation to Vallejo’s enigmatic line: Anger always breaks these adults into children, intimidated and helpless. We could say that they have been
“cured” of wrath in the same way that a sexually abused child
might grow up cured of lust. It is not an enviable cure.
But on the near side of trauma—and in certain psychotic
cases, on the far side of it too—children learn how to be angry
from adults. Anger breaks fathers and mothers into protégés
of their own emotion. Even the child who resolves to be calmer
than her parents is still shaping herself in response to their
AN GER AND
CHILDREN

influence. A parent or teacher does well, then, to ask, What
am I teaching my children about anger? It goes without saying that the most effective lessons will be taught by example.
It also goes without saying that the most successful selfimprovement plan often has the desire of raising happy children as its driving force.
Perhaps the first thing we need to teach our children
about anger is that human beings are allowed to be angry.
If emotions are made to count as misdeeds, then it follows that
emotions are matters of choice. Believing as much, a child
might go on to believe that his choices are as uncontrollable
and subjective as his emotions. The result is either an emotional
cripple or a moral misfit, not that much difference exists between the two. It is one thing to tell children that no amount
of anger gives them the right to say or do whatever they want.
In that regard, I used to tell my students that Malcolm X,
who called himself “the angriest man in America” and had
good enough reasons for being so, did not leave us a single
four-letter profanity in print. To tell an angry child that he
needs to watch his mouth or to take his anger outdoors or to
his room is not to stifle his emotional development. But it is
wrong, I think, to tell him that he cannot scream or stamp
his foot anywhere on the premises. It is wrong to say to him,
“Don’t you dare be mad at me,” even if his anger strikes you
as groundless. It may be even more wrong to say that to her.
You had better refrain from teaching your daughter that
anger is not feminine unless you also intend to teach her that
getting smacked around is.
Equally wrong is the practice of aggravating a child’s
anger unnecessarily. I have been in households where parents
seemed to find a certain grim amusement in a child’s impotent fury, even going so far as to rile him up further, all under
186 anger in the house

the pretext of demonstrating that “throwing a fit gets you
nowhere.” This doesn’t teach patience so much as sadism. As
it says in the Bible, “Fathers, provoke not your children to
wrath.” I think that means more than try not to get your children upset. I think that it also means try not to create situations that will trigger your children’s wrath in later life. Don’t
behave like an implacable boss, or every boss in the future will
wear a father’s implacable face. Don’t play on your kids’ guilt,
or every manipulator of conscience will be capable of making
your grown-up child feel like a ten-year-old again. If a child’s
experiences at home are healthy ones, her bad experiences
later on will have less power to unsettle her. They’ll still be capable of stirring up rage, perhaps, but not the memory of
rage, which can sometimes be more volatile.
Something else to teach a child is that anger, like other
storms, often follows a warning and always comes with a price.
We can’t stop a hurricane, and maybe we can’t help losing our
tempers. What we can do is predict the blow before it arrives
and get the breakables out of harm’s way. So if the teacher is
making you angry, ask to leave the room. If you have enough
confidence, tell him why you need to leave the room. And if he
still withholds his permission, maybe you ought to leave anyway. Maybe it would actually be a good idea to channel some
of your rage into dignified defiance instead of abusive language
or destructive behavior. Learn your own best way to blow off
steam. And learn to recognize the worst ways: for example,
driving a car as a form of emotional release, which is often
nothing more than a legal variation of driving drunk.
One of the hardest things for a child to learn is how to
look beyond his own nose, and perhaps this is one of the
ways in which young and old complement each other: The
old continually need to learn how to live in the moment,
anger and children 187

while the young need to learn that the moment only lasts for
a moment. The question we all need to ask before rage takes
us too far is this: Will my anger lead me out of the frustration
that is enraging me, or will it only cause me a bigger frustration on the back end? In the second case, I shall need to be
careful—and it’s usually the second case. I know a man who
became so frustrated by a malfunction in his chain saw that
he heaved it down a hillside. Thus, a problem that might have
taken him ten minutes or cost him a few dollars to repair became the headache of an entire day. He’d have done better to
put the saw back in the truck bed and quit work early. That
said, he was wiser to pitch the saw than he would have been
to use it as a tool of emotional therapy—with the need for
long-term physical therapy as a likely result.
Of course, these kinds of lessons come with living, and
rarely without having lived for a while. Some years ago a school
bus driver told me that one reason teenagers commit suicide
is that they haven’t lived long enough to learn that most things
get better in a day or two. Adulthood might be described as
having that lesson by heart. In the meantime a parent can
sometimes point out the disproportion of cause and consequence that goes with every calamity, big or small—how easy
it is to break an arm, how long it takes for the bone to mend;
how quickly you can be fleeced of your allowance, how long it
takes to earn the next installment.
Not least of all, we need to teach our children about moral
ambiguity. Not moral vacillation, which often tries to dignify
itself under that name, but the possibility of being right and
wrong at the same time. It is possible, for example, to have every
right to be angry and still to do something wrong as a result.
It is also possible for two very different kinds of actions to
188 anger in the house

both be right. I was told once about a village of Jews forced to
dig their own graves before being machine-gunned by the
Nazis. Two men stood out from the rest: the rabbi, who
walked among his people helping them to say the Shema, and
the village butcher, who grabbed one of the S.S. officers and
bit out his throat. The commentator who told the story
posed this question, “Which man was the better Jew?” A kid
hears a question like that and automatically assumes there is
a right answer. Most adults do too; only they are not so quick
as the kid to risk giving the wrong answer. But the commentator who told the story said something like this: “Each man,
according to his temperament and station in life, gave an appropriate response to the outrage that was taking place.”
In other words, integrity comes in different forms. Parents
would do well to remember that when they presume to secondguess every decision of their sons and daughters. Perhaps
running from the bully and standing up to him are both acceptable responses. Perhaps it is wrong only to allow oneself
to be demeaned—but that too may not be so easy to sort out
from a distance.
In the same way, a child needs to be taught that even an
appropriate action may lead to an equally appropriate, if decidedly unpleasant, consequence. The consequence doesn’t
need to be received in the bitter spirit of a condemnation. So,
for example, maybe the time had come to lash out at a classmate’s taunts, and maybe it was better to vent that rage on
him than to turn it inward against yourself. Still, no school
can run safely or long if students are allowed to overturn each
other’s desks at every provocation. What that means, my
child, is that I support your having to serve a detention after
school even though I also support the action that led to it. It
anger and children 189

wouldn’t surprise me to learn that deep down your teacher
feels the same way. But face the consequence with dignity. On
another occasion you may be able to bear the taunts in silence. This time you weren’t. Events may show that your outburst was beneficial, but we can’t always foresee events, and
even if we could, the wrong or right of an action is not determined entirely by its results. You did the best you could, that’s
all. Live with the repercussions; work for the peace. Pray for
the strength.
In other words, live by faith. If I could teach my child that,
I would not concern myself greatly with what I taught her
about anger. But this may be another case where our children
are better suited to teach us than we them: “Unless you become as a little child, you shall not enter the kingdom of
God.” It is characteristic of adults to live by rules, by customs,
by the given odds, by the measure of what we can get away
with. Very few of us, me included, have that sense of complete
freedom and complete reliance on God that defines faith. It
might even be said that faith casts out rage, in the same way
that St. John says love casts out fear, by giving all frustrations,
mistakes, and scruples their proper weight. I can get mad or
I cannot get mad, but God is still God, and therefore, why get
mad? If that sounds less than clear, it is because I have intuited the truth much more than I have lived it. In a very real
sense, I have chosen to write about anger because I did not
have enough material to write about faith.
:
Anger can also break us into children in the sense that it reduces us to callow versions of ourselves. As we “come apart,”
we begin to regress, recapitulating the tantrums, the sullen
190 anger in the house

withdrawals, the pointless rebellions we knew at the ages of
three, ten, and fifteen. This can be disconcerting enough, but
if we have three-, ten-, or fifteen-year-old children of our own,
then our anger can amount to a nightmare in which the parent virtually disappears into the child he has become. The actual child finds himself suddenly abandoned, at the mercy of
someone still more powerful but apparently no more patient
than he is. This can be a terrifying experience. And, as I have
learned, it can be deeply disturbing even when the parent’s
anger is a good deal less than fury and even when it is not
directed at the child.
This came poignantly to my attention when my teenaged
daughter said to me not long ago, “It used to bother me when
you got mad at the dog.” The remark had no relevant context
and seemingly no motive beyond that of stating a simple fact,
almost as if she were musing to herself. “I used to believe that
a face was looking at me in the tree across the road”—it was
that sort of statement. In fact, she did believe she could see
such a face; she called it “the Blink,” and it sometimes worried her as she sat in her high chair. I could make her squeal
with laughter by telling her that if the Blink came anywhere
near us I would punch it in the nose. She would ask me again
and again to tell her what I would do, and I would always
oblige her, glad to see her gradually turning her attentions
from the Blink to her noodles. Yes, Daddy would punch that
Blink in the nose so hard it couldn’t stop blinking. But it had
upset her, a few years later, to see me slap her dog on the rump.
I wonder now if it was all the more upsetting to see me angry
at the dog because I was so seldom angry at her.
Being the parent of a young child is a curious stage of life:
Perhaps no experience requires us to be more unselfish and
attuned to the needs of another person, and it may be that we
anger and children 191

approach no other experience more self-importantly or less
awake. Only now, when my daughter is a young woman, am I
able to grasp how things like my anger may have touched her
as a young child. I have a vivid recollection of her out in our
backyard, at the age of two or thereabouts, singing with a
tape of Roy Orbison. We are painting the house, I with the
bucket of yellow and she with a small brush and a coffee can
full of water. She is already showing the marked fondness for
babies that will eventually determine her plans for college and
a vocation, though at the time she is little more than a baby
herself. And as she paints the clapboards with tap water, swaying with the music coming from the tape box and clutching
a doll maternally to her chest, she sings with old Roy, “Your
baby doesn’t love you anymore” in a tone that I now recall as
especially plaintive. Of course, the song itself is plaintive. But
her misinterpretation of the words is so poignant as I think
of it now. Does she imagine the loss of love as some terrifying
mystery? All at once a baby stops loving its mother. Did she
ever worry that the spell might come over her, or over one of
her own babies in the future? Was she capable of wondering,
a few years later, when she was ready to start school and her
puppy was starting its wild adolescence, that the same kind
of spell might come over her father and overshadow her dog?
Your master doesn’t love you anymore.
In fact, I was usually angry at the dog on my daughter’s
behalf. I was able to laugh when it snatched a Christmas pie
off the table, but I found it difficult to keep my humor when
it indulged in its favorite prank: snatching the mittens from
the little human’s hands and running away with them. Of
course, in the dog’s eyes, my fuming pursuit was all part of a
grand game, what made the prank so irresistible, what made
192 anger in the house

it worth the scolding and the slap that followed if ever I
caught up with the animal, which was rare enough.
I was foolish to be angry, though the reader ought to know
that I had just gotten a child into a snowsuit. Anyone who
has ever done the same will require nothing further by way of
mitigating circumstances. What is more, on some days her
mother and I would have finally managed to hustle her outdoors on the first afternoon in a week or more when the wind
chill was above zero. Then the dog took the mittens, like a
harpy, like some cruel joke of the gods.
That my daughter would have been bothered by my reaction
is, of course, not at all ironic. Perhaps more than any concern
for her pet, perhaps more than any alarm at seeing her normally gentle father in an ugly mood, what may have disturbed
her was feeling that she was somehow responsible for this
trouble. After all, they were her mittens. Had she managed to
keep them on her hands, the dog would not be in trouble
with Dad. And this leads to an insight that every child knows
but that many parents, most fathers, and nearly all fathers of
girls forget: In some cases, protection is more frightening
than the thing you’re being protected from.
I’ve sometimes wondered if that is a reason for the enduring appeal of dramas about the Mafia. They are double-layered
thrillers, because it’s frightening to imagine what it would be
like to have the Mob after you, and almost as frightening to
imagine what it would be like to have the Mob on your side.
To spend half your life telling your big brother or your father:
“He didn’t mean it, I swear. The mittens just came off by
themselves. They fell into his mouth.” We are reminded of the
fairy-tale princess who languishes between a rock and a hard
place, between the dragon outside the castle walls and the
anger and children 193

guardian who keeps her locked within. The hero’s job is to
rescue the princess from both, though not a few princesses
have needed to be rescued from their heroes as well. We endanger even as we protect, even when we have no reasonable
choice but to protect.
From time to time my wife has cautioned me, in regard to
some injustice my daughter may have borne, “Try not to let
her see that you’re angry. I’m angry too. But if she sees you
get mad, she won’t tell you anything that goes wrong.” It may
already be too late for me to profit from that good advice; I
notice that my daughter’s grievances almost always go to her
mother first, and the worst go to her mother alone. That’s
fine by me. Perhaps one advantage of having two parents, or
of being one of a pair of parents, is that the chores of speaking softly and carrying a big stick can be divvied up according
to each partner’s inclinations. There may yet be occasions
that call for a big stick. Still, I try very hard to be as calm as
possible in the face of my child’s heartbreaks, which may be
the only laudable way under heaven to play God. It is definitely not an easy way.
Finally, I try to be patient with the dog. At least that is not
too hard. She is the best of beasts, much slower these days,
and hard of hearing in the selective manner of the old, which
now that I think of it, is not all that different from the selective hearing of her youth. One of my professors said that the
dog is a common dream symbol for the soul; I’ve not encountered that interpretation elsewhere, but I have noticed
that my dog wants pretty much what my soul wants, the
companionship of its housemates, a pat of approval from its
master, the opportunity to run and sniff at will, with the
chance of discovering something delicious and even slightly
194 anger in the house

disgusting to chew on now and again. Anyway, it’s good for
the dog and me to be at peace. My daughter leaves for college
in another year, and we shall want each other’s consolation.
anger and children 195

The true revolutionaries of the twentieth century
will be the fathers of Christian families.
Charles Pierre Péguy
:

197
I
was never a big John Lennon fan. It wasn’t until recently
that I would even admit that I liked the Beatles. Ever since
the day in fifth grade when I was ridiculed for not knowing
who the Beatles were (having missed an historic episode of
the Ed Sullivan Show the night before), I nursed something like
a secret grudge against them. To an unpopular eleven-year-old,
they were the establishment. It was a notion that stayed with
me, though I did not remain unpopular forever. Years later
when one of my friends was all in a gush because John had
“taken the courageous step” of staying home to raise his son
—this when my working-class neighbors were struggling to
do the same thing, minus all the self-dramatization, not to
mention the leisure that comes of having a few cool millions
in the bank—I could barely contain my disgust. Though I was
DOMEST IC
REVOLUT ION

sorry over his violent death, it did little to change my attitude
toward his fans—quite the contrary. I could almost believe
that the CIA had engineered the whole thing in the certain
knowledge that four Maryknoll sisters raped and murdered
several weeks earlier by right-wing paramilitaries in El Salvador would have no chance of competing for our grief and
outrage with the unthinkable death of a Beatle. Christ himself could have died at that jungle roadblock and scarcely
made the back page of the Times.
Grudges are ugly things—very different from anger. If
anger is a consuming fire, a grudge is a smoking stinkpot. If you
can’t honestly say that you’re angry with someone, then why
would you hold anything against him—except for reasons that
can best be described as perverse? In this case, the reasons for
my grudge had less to do with John than with the cult of
celebrity. Anyway, I no longer hold anything against the man.
In fact, I can admire him. Knowing that everything he did
would be a public act whether he liked it or not, he chose to
perform a decent private act—that of raising his son—as a
public statement. To say, as I was once fond of saying, that his
money made the whole thing easy, is to lack imagination. In
spite of his wealth, in spite of all the insanity that goes with
stardom, he took an honorable shot at being a sane man.
Significantly he took that shot by staying at home. Like
many people, he was at first inclined to confuse staying at
home with staying in bed. But once he had gotten out of bed
and down to the business of fatherhood, he was embarked on
a program that was arguably more revolutionary than anything else he had done or would do. It was something much
more than getting off “the merry-go-round,” as he would say
in one of his songs; it was an act of personal sabotage against
198 anger in the house

the merry-go-round itself. The Industrial Revolution began
by exiling men, women, and children from their homes. When
Marx and Engels called for the “abolition of the family,” they
were merely repeating the marching orders that had created
the proletariat in the first place. Better paid and infinitely
more pacified, we are nevertheless the natural heirs of Marx’s
workers—rootless and expendable, frequently bored to tears,
and just as frequently fit to be tied. We can only speculate
how much of our anger comes from domestic estrangement,
of the upheaval involved in leaving home, and of the frantic
struggle to return there, day after day. Who knows but that
John Lennon’s modest (and immodest) gesture will one day
be remembered as his major contribution to his times.
He might have balked at such a statement. He might have
said, with justice, that it misses the point entirely. His choice
was not to be remembered as a figure in an era but to remember himself in the act of being a father to his son. In any case,
I find myself thinking of John more often and more fondly.
As with others who died too soon after making a radical
change in direction, I wonder where he would be today if he
had lived, and if we’d even know.
:
John came home, and Yoko went to town. Bearing in mind
what Wendell Berry once said, that we do not necessarily liberate Blondie by turning her into Dagwood, it is still important
to note the contrast in direction. Home has not always signified the same thing to women and men. The irritability of
men and the irritability of women have often arisen from different spheres of confinement. What John and Yoko tried,
domestic revolution 199

and what many of us have in our own way explored, is the attempt to open up those spheres for both partners. You can
call it role reversal if you like, though that sounds too superficial to me, as if all our work in the world is about dressing
up in different wigs and standing next to various props. I am
much more interested in how men and women assist each
other in the struggle to break out of the theater than in how
they manage to upstage each other in the attempt to broaden
their repertoires.
In a number of the healthier households I know, I have
observed what might be called a changing of the guard. In the
earlier years of the marriage, when the children were young,
the husband was the family’s chief ambassador and advocate.
He went to meetings, offices, agencies. He was the presence of
the marriage in the world. He was “the redeemer” in the original biblical sense of the kinsman who gets justice for his
family. With the growth of children and the arrival of middle
age, the guard seemed to change. The man is now the bigger
homebody of the two; the woman is out and about more often, and she bears the standard into the public arena.
It would be foolish to describe this pattern as an ideal, or
to prescribe it as a model. It would also be foolish, as well as
arrogant, not to admit that I am observing this as a heterosexual phenomenon, that it might not be an exclusively heterosexual phenomenon, and that in any case it probably has
to do more with individual character traits than with stereotypical gender traits.
But I am what I am, which is a very ordinary, middle-aged
heterosexual man. Speaking as one, I would say that this
changing of the guard bears some relation to the different
ways in which men and women seem to manage anger. It may
200 anger in the house

also have something to do with the different ways in which
men and women age.
Women of middle age seem to grow in wisdom, generosity, and grace. Not always, but often. If God turns out to be
female, my fondest hope is that the Ancient of Days will be revealed to us in the autumnal bloom of forty-nine. That’s the
age I should like Divinity to have if ever I should lose my mind
or break my heart. If, on the other hand, God is masculine,
then let him be either the age of Christ on the cross, or that
of Methuselah at the height of his reputation. Nothing in between, I think. A male god of middle age is too much a God
of the Middle Ages. At least men of that age can seem darkly
medieval in their battle-ax moods, their fortified paranoia,
their dungeons of periodic depression. This is not to say that
men of middle age cannot achieve a wisdom equal to that of
any woman of their years, only that the wisdom most often
consists of being able to acknowledge the strength, competence, and surpassing good sense of their wives.
When our daughter was very young, it was I who went to
school board meetings, I who negotiated with contractors
and bank officers. I was as fair and firm as I could be. I did
nothing without my wife’s advice, but I did some things alone.
I have not necessarily gained patience with age. My wife, without losing patience, has gained fighting strength—and what
is no less important, the desire to go forth.
My wife was never homebound, nor do I intend to become
a recluse. Perhaps John and Yoko taught us a few things about
those dangers as well. We still go abroad together, we still
think of ourselves not only as spouses but as comrades-inarms, in the words of Homer, “Woe to their enemies, / joy to
their friends!” But there has been that visible changing of the
domestic revolution 201

guard I see mirrored among several of my peers. Again, one
must be wary of prescriptions in a matter like this, of presenting as a universal program something that presents itself
to some of us as a natural rhythm, a thing yielded to more
than adhered to. That said, I can envision as one of several
utopias a republican state in which men held council till the
age of forty, at which age women began terms of their own.
So there would be forums of older women and younger men,
a domestic background of older men and younger women—
and probably more hanky-panky than the society could bear.
But not more rage, perhaps, at least not until the hankypanky reached a full head of steam.
A man easily given to anger is well served by a wife, also
possessed of anger, but possessed as well of the wisdom most
often found among mothers whose children are no longer
young. I kiss my wife good-bye and watch her drive away to
town as once she watched me. Now I know what her worries
once were—moose in the headlights, black ice on the road—
though there is one worry she no longer has, which is that
her husband will get into some fracas that she usually knows
how to avoid.
:
If women on the whole, regardless of their age, seem more
adept at coping with anger than men, we can propose two
not mutually exclusive reasons. The first is that something
in the psychobiology of women gives them a better grip on
this emotion. The second is that women have been socially
conditioned to repress their rage. I certainly believe the latter,
and I’m not disinclined to believe the former. The problem is
202 anger in the house

that, number one, the anger of women is not my problem,
and number two, neither explanation will help me with my
problem. Even if I felt so inclined, I cannot hope to reduplicate
the social training of women or the psychobiology of women
in my own more-than-half-lived life. Each of those speculative
avenues amounts to a moral dead end for me, similar to those
equally fatuous questions we find in the Gospels, the ones
that Jesus never answers directly—Will few be saved? Who is
my neighbor?—not because he’s evading the question, but because the question itself is an attempt to evade responsibility.
There is, however, a third explanation, less common but
no less plausible than the other two: Perhaps the nature of
traditional “woman’s work” serves as an antidote to the forces
that make men enraged. Needless to say, it can also enrage
women, especially when it is done without relief, assistance,
or appreciation. But that only serves as another compelling
reason why men ought to ponder it.
The chief characteristics of traditional domestic work are
these: It must be tended to every day, often several times a
day; it is usually simple and often mundane; it is often an act
of service performed for others; and finally, as the adage says,
it is never done. Change the context, and one could list those
same characteristics in a beginner’s manual on prayer. Many
a man could profit from saying to his wife or lover what the
disciples say to Jesus: “Teach us to pray.” One assumes that in
the disciples’ case the question arose from observing how
prayer seemed to enrich the life of their master. Likewise, a
man in a traditional domestic arrangement might do well to
observe what “woman’s work” does for his mate.
First of all, a domestic chore can serve as a pause, and often
as a reprieve, in one’s schedule. The problem with traditional
domestic revolution 203

men’s work—as in “I take care of the outside of the house,
and she takes care of the inside”—is that unless the outside is
a barnyard or the path of an approaching tornado, it allows
more latitude in scheduling than the inside does. You can always put the lawn off till Saturday. But if it’s your job to
make supper and have it on the table by a certain hour, then
no matter what else you’re doing, you have to stop and get busy
in the kitchen. This can be frustrating for anyone compelled
to integrate domestic work with other work, even with other
domestic work. A woman doing her spring cleaning has to
halt three times in the process to feed whoever happens to
be underfoot.
On the other hand, this halt can be an oasis for someone
who’s paying too much attention to an abstract problem or a
simmering grievance. One of the more memorable scenes
from the cartoon series The Simpsons has the usually placid
Marge Simpson about to blow her stack. “Sometimes this
family makes me so . . .” she starts to exclaim. All at once, she
relaxes her rigid body and sighs, “I guess I’ll go start supper
now.” It’s a pathetically comic moment for Marge, which
might amount to a wonderfully healing prescription for
Homer. Of course, you can still nurse a grievance or chew on
a problem while mixing the ingredients for the sauce. But unless you want an inedible disaster, the work calls for a certain
degree of attention. And any act of attention grounds us in
the present moment.
Domestic work is also manual; it has to do with matter.
There’s no such thing as virtual cooking, unless you’re satisfied with virtual eating. Making supper puts us in touch with
concrete stuff: ingredients instead of factors, carefully regulated fire instead of unchecked speculations, distinct flavors
204 anger in the house

in the mouth instead of vague feelings in the gut. We have already spent some time discussing the mentality and unreality
of anger, of how it distorts proportion, imputes motives, imagines inconceivable dangers and unspeakable retributions.
Domestic labor calls us back to the real, created world of food,
fire, and loved ones that anger in its worst manifestations
calls us away from. The Good Shepherd, whose voice the sheep
all know, can sometimes call our names in the guise of The
Good Cook. Should that come as any surprise to people who
remember him and even worship him as bread and wine?
Third, domestic work is done for others. It is a daily reminder that others exist. (As drudgery, it can become the daily
insinuation that you, the server, do not exist.) To make supper is to feed the people you love directly; to earn wages is to
do the same thing once removed, which is to say one step
closer to abstraction and the distraction that comes with it.
In my own wage-work, I have often found that I am the most
unreasonable, the most inclined to let frustration give way to
anger, when I forget that I am doing the work to support myself and those I love. That “materialistic” objective has been
the basis for some of my most “spiritual” work. Ironically, it
was when I saw myself teaching entirely for the good of the
human race, or when I wrote exclusively as an artist, that I became the greatest obstacle to goodness and the worst enemy
of art. To cook supper, to use money to buy flour, and to
make flour into real bread is to be based in the real world.
A man who elects to cook supper will often experience it
as a liberation. He begins to anticipate the happiness of his wife
at seeing it done, the fascination of his children (or their chagrin) in regard to what Daddy did differently from Mommy.
Because in our culture men get to choose this chore more often
domestic revolution 205

than women, who have it thrust upon them as their duty,
even housework can amount to a privilege. We tend to regard
the image of the domesticated hubby as evidence of a feminist accomplishment; in many cases, it merely confirms the
tenaciousness of patriarchal culture. A woman’s duty remains
a man’s prerogative. Like a nobleman dismounting his horse
in order to help the serfs pitch hay, a man sets the table, does
the laundry. What a surprise, what a fine fellow the baron is,
say the villeins. And as the smiling baron once again mounts
his high horse, he thinks, What a lark!
But by making the chore a lark, the baron deprives himself of the fourth benefit, which is that of knowing the chore
as a discipline. If it remains forever in the domain of whim—
if I cook supper only when I feel the need, or have the time,
or hope to curry someone’s favor, then I will not cook supper
when I don’t feel a need, which is precisely when my need may
be the greatest. We should always remember that emotional
ailments, including anger, differ from their physical counterparts in that the impetus for seeking a cure is actually least
when our suffering is greatest. A person having a heart attack
knows quite poignantly that he needs a doctor; an attack of
anger, on the other hand, obscures every need but the urge
to vent.
But to choose a saner course we must first believe that
choice is even possible, which may require a greater leap of faith
than we suppose. Our modern lives are full of opportunities
to make superficial decisions—even as the most important
decisions are increasingly made for us. This in itself is probably a major cause of rage in our culture: a sense of limitless
self-determination repeatedly undercut by the experience
of almost complete powerlessness. My computer allows me
206 anger in the house

scores of choices as to font styles and type sizes, but whether
I can belong to the human race without having two thousand
dollars’ worth of ugly humming junk plugged into my wall is
increasingly not a choice. Nevertheless, one sphere that still
remains within our power—perhaps the last sphere that remains in our power—is the arrangement of our own households, the division of labor there, the rotation of the watch,
the balancing of different needs. Sometimes the last of these
amounts to the acknowledgment of reciprocal needs between
woman and man.
There is a delightful Japanese myth, which I had the good
fortune to hear in my adolescence, when it was bound to make
the greatest impression, about the first woman meeting the
first man. He complained to her, “I have a part on my body
that is overfull.” She replied, “I have a part on my body that
needs filling.” So they got their parts together.
In terms of domestic labor, man and woman are sometimes
angry because—to reverse the myth—she has a part that is overfull and he has a part that needs filling. The solution works
the same as in the myth. Not only does that solution make
sense; it makes love.
domestic revolution 207


ANGER
in the
CHURCH
-

They that are whole have no need of
the physician, but they that are sick.
Jesus
:

211
When my daughter was young, her mother and I enrolled her in a nonsectarian preschool that met in
the basement of a church. I can scarcely think of less propitious words with which to begin this chapter than “the basement of a church,” that place where charitable impulses and
niggling proprietorship join like the ingredients of a witch’s
brew: eye of newt and toe of frog, nose of fussbudget and
thumb of priest, “double, double toil and trouble.” Though
my wife and I were young in those days, I can’t claim that we
were innocent. We’d been in church basements before.
The preschool had no affiliation with the church other
than the free use of its basement. We were told that some in the
congregation were uneasy with the fact that religion played
no part in the school curriculum—perhaps a euphemistic way
of saying that they were uneasy at having the curriculum
T HEY T H AT
ARE SICK

taught by a Jew. In what I could only surmise was an attempt
to have us practice what they preached, our benefactors put
forth a proposal: Every year, the church held a banquet in its
fellowship space. Perhaps the parents of the students would
like to . . . no, not come and sup with the congregation, but
rather wait on their tables? It would be “a nice gesture.” I
never asked whether the gesture included girding ourselves
with towels to wash the congregation’s feet. Instead I angrily
uttered a word that is as serviceable in the church as the word
amen: “Sick.”
Books tend to be informed by whatever crises their authors were going through at the time of composition. Mine is
no different. One of my crises at this time, aside from the ongoing and by now obvious challenge of managing my own
anger, has to do with confronting the difficult truth of how
a religion founded by an itinerant healer should make so
many of its members ill. Or at least fail so miserably to make
them well. Granted, Jesus said that he had not come to call
the righteous but sinners to repentance. So we shouldn’t be
surprised to find a number of unhealthy people in churches.
My father was fond of saying that the church was “not a clubhouse for saints, but a hospital for sinners.” But it turns out
that hospitals can be incubators for the very infections they
exist to cure. This is in fact the main reason for that muchlamented practice of “booting people out the door” as soon
after surgery as possible: The odds in favor of their recovery
are generally higher at home. It is almost irresistible to draw
an analogy to the church. Check in if you like, but linger to
your peril. If you’re inclined to ask what any of this has to do
with anger, I’m inclined to ask how long it’s been since you
attended church.
212 anger in the church

Perhaps I’m being disingenuous. Isn’t the question of why
there is so little health in the church merely the Christian
form of a far more encompassing dilemma, something more
catholic than the church universal itself? Why is there so little
graciousness in the so-called hospitality industry, for instance,
such superstitious dogmatism among scientists, such latent
misogyny among feminists, such a weakness for insurrectionary
rhetoric among conservatives, such boorish and prideful ignorance among educators, such a wanton disregard for the natural and human resources of a nation among its self-styled
patriots, such elitism and haughtiness among those vocally
committed to equality, such cynical disregard for truth and
justice among practitioners of the law, such a lack of nurture,
joy, and faith in family life, such an obsession with pain and
bondage among those who claim to pursue pleasure and freedom as their highest goods? Oscar Wilde said that “Each man
kills the thing he loves,” so why shouldn’t the church kill
Christ? In other words, why should Christians be any different
from everybody else? The answer comes back on the Pentecostal wind, “Because they’re called to be.”
My opening example of the preschool dinner has to do
with the relationship between a church and outsiders, and is
therefore relatively mild. The really pathological stuff takes
place inside the church. I confess that although I attend a
church and in fact have served for quite a while as its vicar, I
know little of that pathology firsthand. My lack of clerical
credentials and the solidarity of my family-sized parish, part
of it made up of grateful refugees from other churches, have
combined to give me the ecclesiastical equivalent of a charmed
life. But I have listened to the harrowing tales of the refugees,
and I have from time to time encountered that peregrinating
they that are sick 213

mischief that makes its way from church to church like a
bigamist blazing his trail of aggrieved wives. Nothing makes
malevolence rub its hands together like the sight of a tranquil
parish or a happy priest.
Essentially, we’ve circled back to a question we asked once
before: How can “home” turn out to be so dangerous? How can
we know such anger with people we’re supposed to love? Here
too the question is dangerous, because one of its plausible answers begs for the abolition of home itself. More specifically,
when we ask what makes the church so sick, we risk the possibility that, beyond citing the various corruptions of “authentic Christianity,” we shall be forced to conclude that
authentic Christianity is itself corrupt. George Orwell quoted
Nietzsche as saying, you don’t need to be told that the religion is sick; if you have any health in yourself, you can smell
it. If this is true, holding your nose will not count as keeping
your faith.
:
One obvious reason for the sickness of Christian churches is
the contamination of Christian teaching. This may derive
partially from the sacramental nature of Christianity itself,
with its ability to take the flesh of different cultural influences, and to take it so effectively that we’re not always sure
which came first, the divine commandment or the dopey
cliché. A good example is the much-touted ethic of being
“nonjudgmental,” which appears to have originated with a
statement in the Sermon on the Mount, been distilled in the
vats of pop psychology, and then fed back to us in a form that
Jesus himself could hardly have swallowed. The ethic not only
214 anger in the church

allows but actually invites people to act out every creepy scenario that enters their heads, secure in the knowledge that
what would get them fired, committed, or publicly horsewhipped anyplace else will get them nothing but sympathetic
attention within the church. I suppose that some would say,
“That’s how it should be!” I suspect that Jesus would not be
among them. We read of any number of times where Jesus
said, “Take up your bed and walk” but not a single occasion
where he said, “Throw yourself down on your bed, and I will
lie down beside you and empathize.” Healing presupposes
that there’s something to heal—a “judgmental” assumption if
ever there was one.
On a deeper level, what we’re looking at here is the presumed equation of religion with subjectivity, an equation
that has been several centuries in the making, and which—
though it may seem like an appropriate reaction to the radical
objectivity of science—is actually the opposite of the covenant
theology of the Bible. A covenant, like a word, is something
set between “me and thee” that anchors our relationship in a
place outside us both. Neither party can claim exclusive ownership of the agreement. Certainly the covenant is subject to
our interpretation, but we too are subject to it as the agreedupon reference point for all our dealings. That means we are
also accountable to each other. A covenant is something like
the large stone that shepherds in the time of Jacob placed on
the mouth of a well to ensure that none of them could water
his sheep until all were present to lift it.
The radical subjectivity that masquerades these days as
“spirituality,” however, is an entirely different sort of stone, a
crystal amulet that each of us wears about his own neck for
his own reasons. It means, as the wearers will readily tell you,
they that are sick 215

anything you want it to mean. So if you say, “Please pass the
salt,” I can say to you, “When you say pass the salt, I feel as though
you’re getting ready to rub salt in my wounds.” An appeal to
the everyday meaning of “salt” or to the well-established custom of asking one’s dining companions to pass food around
the table is completely out of bounds; it amounts to “making
a judgment” on the value of another person’s “feelings,” which
should never be judged and most certainly can never be
wrong. Basically, we’re dealing with a form of fundamentalism,
except that the fundamental value here is not the inerrant
letter of Scripture, but the inerrant flutter of gut sensation.
Neither approach has much use for history, analysis, or correction. At bottom, what it says is that no such thing as common
life exists. Given what we have already said about anger as a
thing in the head, we can readily see the potential for anger in
churches organized as loose confederations of subjective
sovereign states.
Of course, trivializing the gospel will involve trivializing
our language; that is certainly the case in much of the church.
A single church convention would suffice to make Orwell feel
he had died and gone to hell. The communication in much of
church life amounts to a vocabulary of code, a jargon for initiates, where no one says exactly what he means. Of course,
the ancient church also spoke in code, as in the book of Revelation, in order to elude detection by the authorities. We
seem to have continued the habit in order to elude detection
by one another. We disguise ourselves in cues and cant, all because no one wants to say words like money, sex, or tripe. How
many times someone has said to me, “I’m so glad we’re not
like the Catholics—all they talk about is money!” I have
sometimes replied, “That’s what we’re usually talking about,
216 anger in the church

too, except we say things like ‘discernment’ and ‘models of
ministry.’” I suppose that I sound very judgmental.
T. S. Eliot once wrote that the problem with most devotional poetry is that poets write what they think they’re supposed to feel instead of what they really feel. The same may be
true of the day-to-day discourse of the church—and the duplicity may actually begin with our prayers. We tend not to
talk about money, sex, or tripe there either. More than once I
have said in a sermon that if there is anything we enjoy for
which we cannot give heartfelt thanks, it means that we are
either heretics or thieves. We must either change our theology
or relinquish our delights. The kingdom of God has not come
until we are capable of thanking every person of the Holy
Trinity for the incomparable glory of a buck naked behind.
Nor will Christians be capable of speaking honestly with each
other unless they first learn to speak honestly with their God.
I suspect that a part of that honesty may have to do with acknowledging how truly angry some of us are—at one another,
at God, and at the frustration of being called to believe that
impossible things are possible.
:
Some of the sickness of the church may derive from the incomplete digestion of power within a body that counts “powers
and principalities” among the works of darkness. If someone
were to ask, “In twenty-five words or less, what is the church
all about?” we could do worse than to say, “It is an attempt to
build a human organization in defiance of those very principles
on which most human organizations are built.” Jesus defines
the paradox of that enterprise when he says, “You know that
they that are sick 217

among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers
lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.
But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become
great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes
to be first among you must be slave of all.” That is a provocative vision, and whenever I’m tempted to grow discouraged or
cynical about the church, I try to remember the unique thing
we’re attempting to do. The peevish customer’s question of
“Who’s in charge here?” has no simple answer in the church.
Unfortunately, the same tendencies toward cant that inform the church’s discussions of money also inform its discussions of power. “Why, God is in charge. Who else?” Usually
the person who says that. You will even hear people in the
church say that the goal of the gospel is to “eliminate hierarchy,” though Jesus did not say that no one should lead, but
rather that the one who leads should serve. He seems to be
describing the transformation of hierarchy more than its
abolition. Of course, there is more to our cant than the oversimplification of his ideas. Have you ever noticed how those
who inveigh against hierarchy are almost always intelligent,
educated, articulate—able to spell hierarchy without looking it
up—in short, reasonably confident that in the absence of any
hierarchy they’ll be in charge? Samuel Johnson said something
similar: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty
from the drivers of Negroes?” So-called hierarchy is sometimes
the only protection that people on the margins have against
the self-serving agendas of their self-styled betters. As more
and more congregations become unable to make their budgets,
and as the Monday-through-Saturday lives of their members
become busier, many churches develop significant power
vacuums. Sometimes those most eager to fill the vacuums are
218 anger in the church

those with dangerous vacuums within themselves. Sometimes
the blind not only lead the blind; they lead the sighted too.
At the risk of making too easy a generalization, we might
say that churches have two kinds of members. The first type
consists of people who look to the church to sanctify their
busy lives. The second type consists of people who look to the
church to give them a life. Both types are necessary, both have
a contribution to make, and both have definite limitations.
But beyond any shadow of a doubt, power tends to flow toward the second type. Sometimes this is for the good of the
church, sometimes it is for the good of the individual, but often it is to the detriment of both.
Churches provide a powerful distraction from the very ailments that, one would hope, churches exist to cure. In some
ways, they can work like the bars and lodges of the last century’s television sitcoms: They’re where you go after supper to
hide from the people you can’t seem to figure out, much less
love and serve. Optimistically, we might hope that the macho
men doing dishes at the big prayer breakfast will perform the
same office for their domestic partners, as will the women
hugging fifty people to the point of hyperventilation at the
spiritual “retreat,” but one tends to fear that certain forms of
charity neither begin nor end at home.
I suppose someone could counter by saying, “Isn’t this
also part of the gospel?” Remember how Jesus says, with his
mother and brothers standing outside, that his true family
was there beside him in the form of “anyone who hears the
will of God and does it.” Sometimes I wish he had said, “And
who is my mother? Obviously she is that careworn woman
over there with the varicose veins.” I only wish it sometimes
(and in St. John’s account of the passion, I more or less get
they that are sick 219

my wish), because I sense that Christian families are better off
than they might otherwise have been had Jesus spoken with
less ambivalence in their favor. We have mentioned elsewhere
the dangers that come of making our loved ones into absolutes.
By leaving home, and by defining discipleship as a willingness
to “hate” one’s home, Jesus left the home in peace. At its best,
the celibacy enjoined on Roman Catholic clergy is a continuation of that legacy. We know what it is at its worst.
That said, I wonder if all the recent “family values” rhetoric
is only superficially (albeit viciously) an attack on gays, lesbians,
and single parents—if essentially it is a reaction against an
idea rooted in the New Testament and achieving full flower in
the medieval Church, that if you appreciate your parents or
get along with your kids or happen to enjoy spending time
with your spouse, you are probably not as good a Christian as
a celibate “religious,” and you are definitely not a saint. In
other words, the rhetoric may amount to the catastrophic
reaction of the Reformation still emanating through theological space, like energy from the big bang.
:
If people are so easily distracted from the things that make
them sick, can it mean that some of them don’t really wish to
get well? I think it does, and I think we dig deeper into the problem when we pose that question. Side by side with the healing
stories of the gospel, we have in certain strains of Christianity what amounts to a mystique of sickness, of pain and filth
and debilitation as the hallmarks of genuine holiness. In that
connection a close friend of mine whose wife was recently
diagnosed with cancer sent me the following riddle:
220 anger in the church

There are a number of explanations that Christian
people give for disease, among them the following:
Sickness is God’s punishment for our sins. Sickness
is God’s testing. Sickness is God’s will. Sickness is a
way to make us stronger. Sickness is all in the mind.
What do all of these explanations have in common?
Jesus never said a single one of them.
And he added: “I think that any one of them would have
made Jesus angry. I think there’s more authentic Christianity
in the most secular medical practice, or for that matter in the
most lunatic faith healer, than in three-quarters of what passes
for ‘pastoral consolation’ in the mainstream church.” I can
agree with that answer, but I’m not sure it suffices to explain
our attitudes toward sickness and our sometimes perverse
unwillingness to seek mental and social health. I begin to
wonder how neatly we can separate the sickness of the church
from the purity of the gospel, placing the malady on one side
and the antidote on the other. We have perhaps been sick for
too long to pretend that the disease is not a part of us.
After all, the gospel is not only about blind men seeing
and lame men walking; it is also about one man suffering and
dying for the sins of humankind. It is impossible for Christians, perhaps impossible for anyone in the entire Western
world, not to invest his own anguish with a certain romanticism in the light of that narrative. This is not necessarily a bad
thing: Romanticism is a form of meaning. But to find meaning in suffering can also amount to finding cause for suspicion in health. Even the notion of a healthy environment
seems to give some of us doctrinal jitters; on some level, it’s
more reassuring to believe that the whole world’s falling apart
they that are sick 221

than that human beings can, in accordance with the laws of
God’s creation, restore it to wholeness.
In view of this ambivalence, it may be difficult to relocate
the theme of healing that lies at the very core of the gospel
proclamation without also locating the original anger of
Christ. You may recall that painting by Orozco in which Christ
chops down his own cross. You may recall that there is only
one time in all four Gospels where he is explicitly said to be
angry: He is about to heal a man with a withered hand, and
the religious authorities want him to wait until the Sabbath
is over. He won’t.
222 anger in the church

-

Bob Dylan
:
[Epigraph not available in this electronic edition.]
225
Christians in the past and some in the present have been
scandalized to learn that the story of their Lord’s death
and resurrection appears to be but one form—and a relatively
late form at that—of an archetype found in other myths.
Osiris, Dionysus, Tammuz all die and rise and are even
mourned by faithful women, just as Jesus is. I should think
that the pattern might be as reassuring as it is troublesome:
One might infer from the mythological echoes that the Christian story speaks to some primal need within the human
psyche, or even—if one chooses to go so far—that Christ fulfills the archetypes of the collective unconscious no less than
he is said to fulfill the messianic prophecies of Isaiah. Still,
the importance as well as the historical uniqueness that
Christians attach to their story is bound to make them a bit
PA SSION PLAYS

jealous of any comparisons. This is not necessarily a bad
thing. It is only a bad thing when it moves from passion to
prejudice. Believers are lovers, and lovers are not known to be
universalists. Making love to every woman in the world is
generally the fantasy of men who spend most nights making
love to themselves.
It is interesting, though, that the jealousy with which many
Christians guard their story against comparison does not
prevent them from repeating that story, over and over, with
any person willing to be cast in the role of scapegoat. Often
the person is a member of the clergy. And often the drama
that results is, like the Passion Narrative on which it is based,
a tale about anger and resentment turned on a former object
of adoration. Sometimes too it is the story of the god-man’s
own anger, or at least his anguish, at being used in this way.
In any case, it is impossible to talk about anger in the
church without talking about the clergyman or -woman as an
object of anger and frequently as the star of a passion play. Of
course, this pattern is no more unique to the Christian church
than a dying god is unique to the Christian story. Get a conversation going among a hillside’s worth of crucified ministers, and you hear a story that resonates for any number of
their secular counterparts, be they CEOs or celebrities, first
lieutenants or second wives. After playing the leading role in
one or two of these scenarios, you begin to know the pattern.
It looks something like this:
Your predecessor is damned. You hear story after story about
what an incompetent or uncaring jerk he was. True or not,
the stories can be seductively reassuring. One wants to believe
he was a jerk. Nevertheless, there are few instances where the
commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself has a more
226 anger in the church

practical application than in loving one’s predecessor as oneself. That is because, at least as far as these stories of woe are
concerned, your neighbor is yourself. The story in which your
flatterers rehearse your predecessor’s faults may well be the
story in which they prophesy your doom. The year-king who
drinks a toast from the skull of the queen’s last husband is
not necessarily drinking to his own health. The wisest kings
seem to have understood this. Claudius punished the assassins of Caligula, though he might very well have rewarded
them and been praised for doing so. The message was obvious.
But it’s hard for most of us to send such a message with so
many messages of congratulation coming our way. Granted,
these messages are not necessarily insincere. But it is good to
remember that one is not necessarily better than the person
one succeeds, just younger to the job.
You get more credit than you deserve, or at least more than you
need. More than once, Jesus says to someone he has healed:
“Go your way. Your faith has saved you.” Your faith, not my
power. I suppose one can say that he’s being humble. I would
also say that he’s being consistent with his own advice: “Be
ye wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Wisdom is the
ability to see the hollowness of most acclaim and the injustice
of much disfavor. Sometimes I wonder if this is all that wisdom means.
You find yourself doing more and more of what others might do
for themselves. We protest ever so demurely that we are not the
lords of rain and thunder, but we still run around watering
everyone’s garden and washing their cars. Not the lords of
rain and thunder, but we aim to please. Where Jesus would
have said, “Take up your bed and walk,” we offer to carry the
bed, or at least to change the sheets. Of course, with every
passion plays 227

inch we add to our haloes we must stretch our arms higher to
keep them bright. The higher the stretch, the greater the
strain—the shorter the fuse.
So far, we have been sketching this familiar scenario from
the point of view of the scapegoat; we can look at it from the
other side, too. Most of us have played it both ways. The crowd
arrayed against the scapegoat invariably contains people who
are extremely angry, and of these at least some qualify as
former followers of the victim. An analysis of their anger
comes close to naming the themes of the play.
These people are angry, first of all, because they have invested faith in someone who seems to have let them down.
Their faith may have been misplaced, or the object of their faith
misunderstood, but in either case the outraged disciple experiences that terribly annihilating sense of adoration turning
into humiliation. Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss, but to understand that kiss we have to imagine all the times that he
kissed Jesus before that, plus all the times that he received
Jesus’ kiss on his cheek, perhaps with more excitement than
he wanted to feel, perhaps with more acquiescence than he
wanted to show. Judas betrays Jesus because, I am convinced,
he believes that Jesus has betrayed him, and underneath that
sense of betrayal is the gnawing self-accusation that Judas has
been betraying himself. The latter thought is the more insufferable. True loyalty is found most often among those who
never entirely surrender to those they love, or who only surrender gradually. The disciple Thomas, the last to believe that
Jesus had risen from the dead, would also have been the last,
not counting Mary Magdalene, to give him up to the cross.
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” said
Jesus, but when your heart is broken, your tendency is to
throw all of your treasure away.
228 anger in the church

There is a still darker side to the emotional investment we
make in our leaders and our heroes. Faith is equivocal; were it
absolutely convinced, it would not be faith. So part of us believes that “This is indeed the savior, who has come into the
world”—into our pulpit, into our business, into our bed. “He’s
so wonderful. He’s perfect. He’s what I was waiting for.” But
the other part believes from the start that he’s going to screw
up, that he’s not going to deliver on the promises he makes,
or on the promises that we hasten to infer from his arrival in
our lives. What is more, this other part may want him to screw
up. In this case, the adoration we invest in the hero amounts
to the prepaid justification for nailing him to the wall when
he fails to come through with the goods. “I trusted you completely.” It’s a lie, of course. But I told myself that lie, and I
told it to you, wanting both of us to believe it at the time, but
also knowing I could unmask your frailty and unleash my
wrath when the ugly truth inevitably came out. I have a right
to slap your face; I paid for it when I kissed your hand. And to
be honest (if one can be so honest), I knew what I was buying
at the time of purchase.
There is a verse in the Gospel of John that never shows up
in the three-year cycle of the lectionary used now in most
mainline churches; it’s a pity that it doesn’t. It goes like this
(quoted from the King James Version in which it made its
first impression upon me): “But Jesus did not commit himself
unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any
should testify of man: for he knew what was in man.” To know
the same thing ourselves is a step toward recognizing our
own part with those who shout, “Crucify him, crucify him.”
It may not be a step toward preventing our own crucifixions,
however. If Jesus truly understood the dark dynamics of hero
worship, the passions that led to the passion, and could not
passion plays 229

avoid his fate, our prospects are not necessarily brighter. Still,
we can try, as Jesus did, to avoid drinking the bitter cup for as
long as we can. As an old priest once told me when I was still
a young man: “You can only be crucified once. So you had
better make sure it’s necessary whenever you’re ready to think
it is.”
One way to pass the cup is to pass on the extra helpings of
adoration. “Why do you call me good?” Jesus says to the rich
young ruler who addresses him. “No one is good, save God.”
The saying has wreaked some havoc with theologians of the
Trinity, but it’s one of the best I know for the homelier theology of getting through an eight-to-five day in one piece. We
have a parallel in the life of the Buddha, who at an assembly
of his monks invited them to name any faults, “whether in
word or in deed,” that they had observed in their teacher. One
of his favorite pupils responded with fulsome praise.
“Such faith have I, Lord, that I think there never was
nor will be nor is now any other greater or wiser than
the Blessed One.”
The Buddha replied: “Of course, Sariputta, you
have known all the Buddhas of the past.”
“No, Lord.”
“Well then, you know those of the future?”
“No, Lord.”
“Then at least you know me and have penetrated
my mind thoroughly?”
“Not even that, Lord.”
“Then why, Sariputta, are your words so grand
and bold?”
Another way to preempt these passion plays is by refusing
230 anger in the church

to wear our conscience on our sleeves. Quite often the nasty
drama I’ve described begins with some attempt to manipulate the scapegoat’s conscience, often by insinuating that
“You don’t really care.” The insinuation is assumed to be so
devastating because the scapegoat is constantly telegraphing
the message that he does care, really care, so very much. In
the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “When you give alms,
sound no trumpet before you.” In contrast to his command,
we sometimes discover that the heroic caregiver is investing at
least as much energy in the appearance of compassion as in
being compassionate. I can think of few goals I would rather
attain at this point in my life than that of being kinder than
I seem, of seeming less compassionate than I am. Giving alms
in secret is not only a prescription for preventing a big head,
it can also be a way of avoiding the big part in The Greatest
Story Ever Told, which is not all that great when you’re playing
the lead.
:
Finally, one can avoid the role by permitting herself to be angry and by permitting her anger to show. Jesus told his followers to hide their acts of piety; he did not tell them to hide
their emotions. In fact, we sometimes hide our emotions for
the same reason that we make a show of our piety: out of a
wish to seem more perfect than we are. How many times do
we hear people say that they refuse to raise their voices, not
for fear of intimidating their opponents, but out of a refusal
“to sink to their level”? A rather smug form of equanimity, in
my view. It occurs to me that if Jesus were to “sink to our level”
once again and repeat his act of cleansing the temple, he
would run a serious risk of knocking over certain plaster
passion plays 231

images of himself. I’m not sure he would regard that as a
great cause for worry. In any case, though we do well to curb
our anger, it can serve us in curbing the misplaced adulation
of our peers, which must always turn to anger in the end.
:
Most Christian communities gather for worship on Sunday
in observation of Easter, the day Christ rose from the dead. I
think that in many ways, however, the Sundays of the church
more closely resemble the first Sunday of Passion Week, socalled Palm Sunday, when people sing their hosannas and
wave their palms and get their voices in good shape to cry out
for somebody’s blood by the end of the week. Even the appearance of a typical church service looks more to me like
Palm Sunday than Easter. On Palm Sunday, we know the
principal actors. The leading man is on the donkey. The soldiers are on guard. The crowd is on edge. The choir is on the
same page. Everybody is on.
Easter is quieter, more mysterious. The leading man appears for a bite to eat, then vanishes. He meets travelers on
the road; he calls to fishermen at the end of their shift. He
does not even seem to be performing the role of a leading
man. He allows himself to be examined, but not embraced.
He doesn’t stay put, not in the tomb, not in anyone’s definition or devotion. He moves. He “goes on before you.”
I’m not sure the church has gotten to Easter yet. I’m not
sure it has gotten to Easter in its forms of ministry, and in its
structures of hierarchy. I’m not sure it has gotten to Easter in
the consciousness of its individual members. I think that in
232 anger in the church

some ways we’re still stuck in Passion Week, that beautiful
but incomplete story, as in the groove of a scratched record,
repeating the words, distorting the song. And that may be
one of the reasons for our anger. We’re still thinking of our
faith as a drama, with all of a drama’s histrionics. We’re still
thinking of Jesus as a conventional hero, and of our ministers
as surrogate Christs, and of ourselves as inferior Christs.
And that brings us as close as I know how to come to the
crux of the matter. One of the perennial questions of practical Christian theology is whether to think of Jesus as our exemplar or our savior. Undoubtedly, we must think of him in
both ways, though rationality has always been biased toward
the first. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was convinced that
if we could just get rid of the savior part, the blood-sacrifice
part, the atonement-for-sins part, the St. Paul part, we would
be left with the words and example of a sublime moral teacher,
and with a healthier form of religion. I can find this an appealing point of view.
What I also find, however, is that many of the forms of religious neuroticism also tend to the rational side; that is, they
favor the theology of Christ as exemplar instead of Christ as
savior. The only difference is that instead of seeing Jesus as
the exemplar of moral conduct, as Jefferson did, they see him
as the exemplar of redemptive suffering, of undeserved persecution, of the nails and the thorns, the spittle and the blood
—in other words, of martyrdom. This view also has its appeal.
Throw it out, and we must throw out Dietrich Bonhoeffer and
Martin Luther King Jr., not to mention what Jesus himself
said about taking up one’s cross to follow him.
But I’m writing here about our obsessive need to make
martyrs of ourselves and of those we idealize. I’m writing about
passion plays 233

the anger that arises with and in response to those obsessions. And in that regard, I find myself wanting to recover the
good news of Christ as savior, not so much in the evangelical
sense of “Christendom” as in the existential sense of my own
crisis. It is a theology that reaches back to what we mistakenly
call “the sacrifice of Isaac,” who, as it turns out, did not need
to be sacrificed after all. An emphasis on Christ as savior is a
de-emphasis on the need to drive nails into our own flesh as
a way of earning our salvation. It is a de-emphasis on the heroic,
the masochistic, and even the tragic. It is a healthy de-emphasis,
I think. The great church father Athanasius is supposed to
have said that in Christ, “God became man that man might
become divine.” Without meaning to contradict Athanasius,
I would say that God became human so that human beings
might become human too. If even God would be a human being, why should we disdain our humanity? Why should we
need to make holy wrecks of ourselves and heroic scapegoats
of our sisters and brothers?
One does not have to be a Christian to have a Christ complex. The universal archetype of the dying and reviving god
tells us that too. It may be, though, that a Christian has some
advantage in overcoming the malady. More than the right to
drink vodka, eat pork, or weep unashamedly during performances of Handel’s Messiah, the privilege of being a Christian is
that of being able to say, whether to the multitudes or to the
mirror: “I am not Christ.”
234 anger in the church

-

I do not, finally, want the mother to embrace the
tormentor who let his dogs tear her son to pieces!
She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for
herself, if she wants to . . . but she has no right to
forgive the suffering of her child. . . .
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
:

237
T wo days ago as I write, I heard this story from “the new
South Africa”: A white woman living in an affluent township had aroused the hostility of her neighbors by running a
business that drew a number of black customers from other
locations. One night a gang of white men set upon her, beat
her, raped her, and carved the letter K for kaffir (Afrikaans for
“nigger”) into the flesh of her breast.
And thus begins the sequence of hideous associations that
such stories always effect in me. As I scrape old paint from
the clapboards on my house, I recall a passage from Susan
Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will about another gang of
men who raped a woman in her house while her husband, recovering in bed from brain surgery, watched and wept in utter
helplessness. I think of it again, getting into my own bed at
night. Making a pot of coffee in the postnightmare dawn, my
FORGIV EN ESS

mind is thrown back to a passage I remember from the writings of Ho Chi Minh, about a French army officer who filled
a Vietnamese woman’s genitals with liquid rubber because
she had refused to give herself to his dog. It was a good twentyfive years ago that I read this, and probably a good halfcentury since it happened, yet it remains vivid in my memory.
And it hadn’t happened to me. What if it had?
Beyond the anger and outrage one feels over the crimes
themselves, there is for the Christian, or at least for this
Christian, an additional source of anger and outrage: The mere
suggestion that any person who has suffered such a thing
ought to forgive the persons who inflicted it. When the Mongols conquered Afghanistan in the thirteenth century, they
dug up and destroyed an elaborate tiled system of underground irrigation channels that had been centuries in the
making. Pastoral nomads, the Mongols thought of greener
pastures in terms of sparser populations. Imagine being forced
at sword point to do that demolition, too terrified to resist
the taskmaster, yet feeling the horror of your own parched
throat at the aridness of the coming centuries. One is tempted
to give thanks that the conquered were not Christians. Had
they been, should they have prayed, “Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do”? They did know what they were
doing. So did the men who carved the letter K into their neighbor’s breast. It took three slices to carve it, three different
angles of incision, and pity did not catch up with their hands
after the first, or after the second, or after the third. And now,
is the woman compelled to forgive them, in addition to whatever else she was forced to do?
Before grappling with an awful question like this, one
needs to sift out every consideration that is not awful. To dismiss all forgiveness in the name of the most unforgivable
238 anger in the church

crimes is in some ways to recapitulate the thoughts of those
who committed them. You can be almost certain that at least
one man in that South African gang recalled some atrocity
from the war against apartheid and summoned it up as a way
of steeling his nerves, like one of those anti-Semitic fables
about Jewish landlords evicting helpless children into the
streets that the Nazis used to justify the deportations and
death camps. If the glory of human intelligence consists of
being able to make associations, metaphors, and symbols, then
the perversion of that intelligence consists of false associations
and spurious analogies—of vengeance that is not even proper
vengeance. The same goes for moral indignation. Should I
forbear to forgive someone for stealing my car because at some
point in history one people stole another people’s freedom?
In the deceiving stream of consciousness that flows between
the news on the radio and the incivility of the highway,
between history and a hangnail, we make these false associations. They leap in sparks of anger from one thought to another, and they make us too much like the things we hate.
So much for qualification. Why are we asked to forgive?
How can we even begin to forgive in a world like this one?
The questions remain. And anger stands in faithful attendance
upon them, if for no other reason than that, for many of us,
the definition of forgiveness has something to do with the
cessation of anger.
:
“To err is human, to forgive divine.” So wrote Alexander Pope,
coining a cliché and at the same time telling us how not
to make a cliché out of forgiveness. To say that forgiveness is
“divine” might suggest that human forgiveness can amount
forgiveness 239

to an act of hubris. It is certainly so when we presume to forgive someone for causing someone else to suffer. This
amounts to taking a poor man to dinner and then leaving the
check for the owner of the restaurant. But forgiveness can be
hubris even when we pretend to forgive someone who has
wronged us, whom we are simply and truly unable to forgive.
If forgiveness is divine, then it is not an act of willpower
but an operation of grace. It can only be as natural as the offense that is to be forgiven. In other words, in certain extreme
cases it must be either supernatural or impossible. When in
my work as a pastor wounded people come to me with the
confession that they cannot forgive, I do not tell them to “try
harder” or to “move forward.” I ask them if they are able to
pray for the grace to forgive. And if not, if they are at least
willing to pray for the grace to say that other prayer. And if
even that is too difficult, if they are willing to express their refusal to God. At that very basic level, but only at that level, am
I able to assert that free will exists.
But before asking God for the grace to forgive, a person
might think to give thanks for the grace to be angry. Anger in
the face of injury is a mechanism for survival, no less than the
clotting of our blood. Forgiveness is the scar, and it comes
later. Anger comes first, and like all created things, it is good.
If we choose to look at this as a theological problem, it exists for Christians partly because most of us hold a heretical
doctrine of the Trinity. According to orthodox Christianity,
the persons of the Trinity are coequal and coeternal, but most
of us have trouble holding to that idea. In our misunderstanding, the persons exist in a hierarchy, with God the Father at
the top, and the Son under him, and the Holy Spirit somewhere that we can never seem to locate. In terms of the operations of these persons, however, almost the exact reverse is
240 anger in the church

true: The whims we glibly interpret as “movements of the
Spirit” are uppermost, the teachings and devotions we associate with the heroic Son come next, and the creation we associate exclusively with God the Father (also heretically, because
creation is supposed to be the work of the one God in all
three persons) we hold dead last. So I attach the greatest importance to divining the best date (cutest clothing, nicest
cleric, and so on) for my child’s baptism, the next greatest importance to the baptismal service itself, and virtually no
importance at all to the water that I waste and pollute
throughout the party that comes afterward. When Junior
makes his first Communion, I’ll buy him a Jet Ski.
Likewise, though we are fully prepared to grant that to
forgive is divine, we are a bit reluctant to grant that to rage—
as opposed to despairing or destroying oneself—can also be
divine. Our reluctance is nothing else but a failure in faith, a
devaluing of creation that amounts to a demotion of the Creator. Refusing to think of ourselves as garbage—is that not a
gift of grace as well? In the face of extreme degradation, most
of us cannot maintain our sense of self through reason alone,
any more than we can manage excruciating pain through selfhypnosis, or extraordinary courage, or the “right attitude”; we
require adrenaline, we require hormones, we require rage.
And if there is such a thing as a higher gift, a better way,
we have no right to ask for it if we are not humble enough to
give thanks for the lesser gift already received.
:
One of the things that makes forgiveness difficult for Christians is how they hear the commandment to forgive. For one
thing, it makes them feel like hostages, not only of their
forgiveness 241

oppressors but of Christ himself. “Forgive us our trespasses as
we forgive those who trespass against us.” Praying that prayer
can feel like signing the ransom note that describes the
dreadful consequences of not paying your own ransom.
The commandment to forgive also makes us feel as though
we occupy a less favored place in God’s regard than the person who wronged us. Certainly some of the parables of Jesus
can contribute to that impression: God loves the thief, the
slacker, the prodigal son, and show-up-late worker. On the
other hand, the faithful elder son, the hospitable elder sister,
the Pharisee who cannot lay claim to anything quite so glamorous as extorting money from his neighbors or prostituting
himself with donkey drivers—God has little regard for them
except for saying that they should be better sports. So the
kingdom of God is like unto a third-grade class in which a
bully with fine clothes and lunch money to spare rips my
shirt and spits on my sandwich—and smirks in my face as the
teacher says we are to shake hands and “make up” and both
say we’re sorry. At this point, the third grader may find that
he is angrier with the teacher than with the bully.
There are, however, several things we may fail to recognize
about the Teacher and his teaching. The first has to do with
that troublesome conjunction in the petition from the Lord’s
Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who
trespass against us.” Certainly it means what it says. Other
lines from the gospel support the sense that God’s forgiveness of our trespasses is indeed conditional on our forgiveness
of others. What we may not see so readily is the extent to which
our failed attempts to do so are redeemed by the love of God.
We may not recognize that even our tentative forgiveness is
precious to God and might be a key to understanding God.
242 anger in the church

Jesus sometimes made use of a rabbinical formula that
proceeds in this way: “If it is so in a little thing, how much
more so in a greater thing.” Perhaps the best-known example
has to do with his teaching on prayer. “Is there anyone among
you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead
of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion?
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the
Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” You who are evil—at first
we wince at the words. They almost seem not to belong in the
mouth of Jesus. But they are among the most comfortable
words in the gospel. The person who falters saying the Lord’s
Prayer, knowing that she cannot begin to forgive others as she
herself would hope to be forgiven, might exclaim in anger: “I
cannot do it, all right? So I guess I’m a bad person. No forgiveness for me. I am positively evil!” To which the voice of
the gospel replies: “Yes, you are. And yet, even in your evil,
don’t you cut people slack? Don’t you sometimes say, ‘What
I ought to do to that guy . . . What I could do to that guy . . .’
and then refuse to do it? Don’t you sometimes say, ‘That’s
just my mother. That’s the way she is. There’s no point in castigating her.’ So if you who are evil are capable of even that
much forgiveness, if you can hold back the hand of retribution or the word of recrimination that far, how much more
will a perfect God extend forgiveness to you?” The as that we
find so intimidating may hold more encouragement than
we think.
As for the parables and the infuriating impression they
give us of God’s infinite patience with “the other guy,” his unfailing preference for rascals, and his unrelenting disappointment with us, here too we may be missing the point. A few
forgiveness 243

points actually. The first and most obvious is that all of us
have the right to identify with “the other guy.” That we may
feel a stronger connection to the elder brother than to the
prodigal son, to Martha than to Mary, to the Pharisee than to
the publican, is perhaps instructive but not definitive. We are
always both characters in every pair, though we might not be
both characters at the same time. As the situation varies, so
does our role. The prodigal son, in the depths of his penury,
was ready to eat swill; his elder brother, in his refusal to attend the homecoming feast, was ready to eat worms. He too
was in misery; he too was in exile; he too was missed at home.
If we look closely at the stories in which we imagine ourselves vicariously rejected, what we also notice is the tone of
affection—which in some cases is even a tone of complicity—
between the “God” character and the one rebuked. “Martha,
Martha, you are troubled about many things,” Jesus says to
the sister who, after all, was the one to invite him to dinner in
the first place. Martha, not Mary, had reached out her hand
in hospitality. Jesus does not criticize her overwrought hospitality until she herself confesses it to be a burden, and then
he speaks to her in the tone of a peer. We read that her sister,
Mary, sat at Jesus’ feet, listening to his teaching, but Martha
stands as it were at his elbow, hearing the gentle admonition
of a friend.
That is the word that the landowner in the parable of the
Laborers uses for those who complain about his standard of
payment. He has paid those who worked only an hour the
same as those who worked the entire day. But his address to
the latter is “friend,” if the latter can but hear it. He has paid
him as he promised; he has merely pitied the latecomer, who
would otherwise have had to find a night’s lodging with only
244 anger in the church

an hour’s wage. In the same way, the father in the parable of
the Prodigal Son says to the indignant elder brother, “Son,
you are always with me, and everything that I have is yours.”
I take that to mean that little brother has already gotten his
share and done with it as he chose. The father puts love above
fairness, but he has not forgotten fairness. Nor has he forgotten his elder son, though the son probably thinks so. “You
are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” What is a
night’s homecoming party compared to that? In my imagined
sequel to the story, the younger son comes home for about
three months, mooches a little more money, and hits the road
again. If he came back, the father would still receive him; that
is what love does. Therefore—if we might indulge in some
rabbinical rhetoric of our own—if the father so loves his
younger son, who breaks his heart at every turn, how much
more will he love the elder, who plugs along as faithfully as he
can and lacks only a little merriment to be complete? He
complains to his father, “You never gave me so much as a kid
that I might make merry with my friends.” You can bet that
he never asked.
:
It would follow, then, that forgiveness is enjoined on us at
least as much for our benefit as for the offender’s. Just because we hear it as a statement of preference for our enemies,
or as an attempt to make us even more abject than we already
feel, does not mean that it is intended in that spirit. Forgiveness is not some second phase in our humiliation, whereby
the persecutor’s designs find fulfillment; it is the cauterization of our wounds.
forgiveness 245

Alexander the Great is supposed to have gone to the
philosopher Diogenes, whom he greatly admired, with an offer
to grant Diogenes any favor he might name. He found Diogenes sunbathing. “Ask for whatever you desire,” said Alexander,
“and I will grant it.” Diogenes replied, “Stand out of the way
of the sun.” If I had any wish to Christianize the story, I
would have Diogenes say, “I forgive you.” But not only have I
no wish to Christianize the story, I have no need—it is sufficiently Christian as it is. What Diogenes says to Alexander is
that he refuses to have even a moment of sunshine obscured
by the conqueror of the world. Forgiveness can amount to the
same refusal. Forgiveness is both solidarity and separation:
solidarity, in the sense that we admit our own lack of innocence, our complicity in the broad web of human injustice;
separation, in the sense that we assert our willingness to cut
away some of the strands.
The French have a saying, Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner: “To understand all is to forgive all.” Isaac Newton’s formulas with the blueprints of Monticello thrown in for good
measure do not come as close as that one sentence to expressing the spirit of rationalism, both its enlightening brilliance
and its sulphurous darkness. On the one hand, it calls us to
use our intellects as keys to compassion. Could a Christian
take exception to that? Would Jesus himself have taken exception to that? Look for the causes of the crime, and you
will see the criminal more clearly. You will likely see that he is
not a different sort of person from you, only a person shaped
by different circumstances. “There but for the grace of God
go I.” Sometimes grace is nothing more than the ability to say
that and mean it.
Nevertheless, this approach can in some cases be more absurdly preferential than the most radical reversals of the
246 anger in the church

gospel narratives. In this school the bullies not only teach
their victims cruel and demeaning lessons; they assign them
homework besides. “For tomorrow I want you to write a
theme titled, ‘Now I Understand Everything.’ Make sure it’s
neat, written on only one side of the paper—to symbolize the
absolute one-sidedness of this exercise—and remember to put
your name on it.” So as the blinded survivors grope among
the smoking rubble for a few grains of barley to eat, a few severed limbs to bury in memory of their butchered children,
they must also rummage among the details of Genghis Khan’s
biography to discover what made him such a nasty boy.
You may find this a bit exaggerated; tell me, then, what
you find in your own heart that contradicts it. The cruelest
barb of the worst injuries we receive is the sense of obligation
—which can amount to a neurotic obsession—that we must
“understand” our oppressor in order at last to be free of him.
In other words, we can never feel right again until we can admit that he was actually never wrong—or wrong only because
wronged himself—and not merely admit it, but comprehend
it and believe it. Intellectually, of course, we know that understanding is not always the same thing as forgiveness, but
they become almost indistinguishable whenever forgiveness
is seen as an operation of intelligence alone. In that case, the
K for kaffir carved in the woman’s breast becomes the first
letter of a new alphabet, an obscure language with an impossibly complicated etymology, which she must study for the
rest of her life. I see her standing at the blackboard in her
torn and bloody clothing. I see the smugly grinning schoolmaster of humanistic rationalism tapping the board with a
pointer. And I see Christ, in one of his familiar poses, as he
stands outside the door and knocks. All at once the woman
erases everything on the blackboard in one furious, sweeping
forgiveness 247

motion, shatters the chalk on the floor, and walks out of the
schoolroom. “Truancy!” cries the teacher. “Forgiveness,” says
the One at the door.
:
The Gospels draw an explicit connection between forgiveness
and resurrection. When the risen Christ appears to the faithful women, he asks that they inform his disciples “and Peter,”
thus affirming that in spite of Peter’s denial that he even knew
Jesus, Jesus continues to know Peter. In one of John’s accounts
of the resurrection, Jesus actually gives Peter three consecutive opportunities to say that he loves him, as if to undo each
of the three times he denied knowing who he was.
By associating forgiveness and resurrection, the writers of
the Gospels imply at least two things. First, they note the supernatural quality of forgiveness; it does not come naturally
any more than a dead man rises naturally. Second, they note
that forgiveness belongs to the realm of faith; forgiveness affirms that some things cannot be seen, cannot be known.
Comprehending everything can never lead to pardoning everything, for the simple reason that we will never comprehend
everything. To forgive requires faith no less than to believe that
“the strife is o’er, the battle done. The victory of life is won.”
In an earlier chapter, I also drew a connection between resurrection and anger, suggesting that in some ways the resurrection of Christ can be seen as the most sublime expression
of the wrath of God. I based that understanding on our
experience of anger as an emotion that enables frustration
to give way to action. Of course, our ultimate frustration is
with death.
248 anger in the church

In the same way, we might wonder if there is some connection between anger and forgiveness. We have already noted
that anger often precedes forgiveness and ought not to be
despised in the name of forgiveness. Now we come to a new
question: Is forgiveness really the cessation of anger, or its
transformation? Can anger not only give way to love but become love as the ultimate expression of our desire to break the
bonds that hold us? The injuries we suffer almost always
involve constraint and diminishment; they confine us in a
prison of fear, of hatred, of self-loathing. Anger arises from
the desire to break free of that confinement. Anger shows
itself as an impulse to knock down walls. As forgiveness, it
walks through walls—as the resurrected Christ is also said to
have done.
It is tempting to close there. But it is said in addition that
although Christ was no longer subject to the grave, nor apparently to the laws of the physical universe, he still had the
holes in his hands and his side. Neither his resurrection nor
his forgiveness required that he hide the evidence of his hurt.
Quite the contrary. We have no idea how it will be in heaven.
But he has shown us something important about how it is
on earth.
forgiveness 249

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies,
do good to those who hate you, bless those
who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
Jesus, Sermon on the Mount
:

251
I go trout fishing with a friend who, whenever we clean our
catch, likes to find out what the fish have been eating. I
watch as he slits open a stomach to release a tangled black
and brown lump of gnats and hellgrammites, centipedes,
worms, and now and again some creeping thing that neither
of us has seen before. Cut to the pit of Christian meekness, and
a similar bait-ball spills onto the ground: a matted hatch of
passive-aggressive insults dutifully swallowed by the mouthful, filtered like plankton through the teeth of forced smiles
—not to forget the words of angry protest that never made it
past the throat, now half-digested lumps indistinguishable
from lies.
“Love your enemies”—isn’t that what Christ commands,
and isn’t that why we have such a mess in our stomachs? We
may be abashed to realize that we have swallowed so many
LOV ING
T H E EN EMY

creeping things not in an effort to follow the Sermon on the
Mount but in the belief that we could somehow avoid it altogether. That is, we could avoid having to love our enemies
simply by refusing to make any. No need to be so magnanimous if you can just manage to be nice.
A careful reading of the gospel exposes the folly of that
approach. No one could follow even a third of the instructions put forth there without making an enemy. Loving selfsacrifice set loose in a world of “enlightened self-interest” is
bound to cause trouble, not least of all in our own households and in our own houses of worship. Jesus explicitly predicts the first:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the
earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father, and a
daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law
against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be
members of one’s own household.
He illustrates the second throughout his own short life.
Taken separately, Jesus’ prediction of familial strife and his
commandment to love our enemies are among the most troubling sentences in the gospel; taken together, they reassure us
in a bittersweet way. That is, we come to realize that we are
enjoined to love the very people we would most hope to love
anyway. We hear “love your enemies,” and we automatically conjure up images of mutant cannibal marauders on chopped
Harley-Davidsons. More often, the commandment means love
your mother-in-law, who in spite of any resemblance she may
bear to the marauders is at least family. Nevertheless, as Jesus
pointedly reminds us, family is often the foe.
252 anger in the church

The first logical step toward loving an enemy is admitting
that you have one. Like the first logical step toward forgiveness—that of acknowledging that you have something to
forgive, that you have been wronged—this step comes as something of a liberation. “You will know the truth, and the truth
will make you free.” If the word enemy seems too grotesque,
then the liberation consists of putting your hostile thoughts
into some kind of perspective. Lillian is not your “enemy”; she’s
just a nosy pain in the neck who sits at the computer next to
yours. On the other hand, if the name fits, the liberation
comes from saying something true to oneself—possibly as a
prelude to saying something true to the enemy. In either case,
the liberation of naming the enemy can also be a partial liberation from anger. That is because anger itself has helped
liberate us from our denial. Spent in a worthy cause, anger
becomes less necessary.
The act of naming will certainly make us hesitate. The
word enemy is so strident, so devoid of the irony that we postmoderns take as a form of spiritual consolation. Enemy is a
suspicious word to about the same extent, and for some of
the same reasons, that friend has become such a debased word.
It makes sense that in a society where half the people we
know count as “friends,” no one we know should ever count
as an enemy. Aristotle may have been too doctrinaire when he
said, “He who has friends has no friend,” but he may have
been closer to the truth than many people ever come to
friendship. Perhaps he ought to have said, “He who has no
enemy probably has no friend either.”
For a religious person, naming the enemy may come
about as a result of praying on the enemy’s behalf. This may
well be one of the reasons Jesus enjoins the practice on his
loving the enemy 253

followers. Praying for an enemy as an enemy amounts to an
admission, to oneself no less than to God, that one is seriously
at odds with another human being. Having confronted the
truth before God, one is in a better position to confront it
with the enemy.
Of course, it would be sweet to think that a confrontation
of this kind always leads to dialogue, resolution, closure. The
truth is that where people have reduced the social intercourse
of human beings to the cant phrases of “dialogue,” “resolution,” and “closure,” confrontation will in all likelihood lead
to no such thing. Telling someone he is my enemy is more
likely to elicit amusement, a pretense of incredulity, a supercilious show of concern. “I’m sorry that you feel that way. I’m
sorry that you have this problem.”
The person who tries to call antagonism by its proper
name is likely to be treated as a spoilsport. This is progress,
however. Spoilsports do just as they’re called: They spoil the
sport; they wreck the game. The wicked fun of many forms of
adult harassment rests upon the pretense that “everything’s
cool here,” that “we’re all friends in this place,” that “we all
want the same thing and are all working toward the same
goal.” The harasser’s implied challenge says, Would you dare
destroy these illusions? Would you dare call my actions by
name? Would you dare risk so heinous a charge as that of
lacking a sense of humor? You cannot begin to love an enemy
without answering each of the questions above with an emphatic “I would.”
In some cases, though, naming the enemy amounts to
making him realize a situation of which he himself was only
vaguely aware. This is especially common where the injured
party has been trying hard to comport herself with Christian
254 anger in the church

gentleness. There are people who simply cannot resist testing
that sort of demeanor, especially if they sense that different
energies lie underneath it. In the same way that certain people
are sexually aroused by rubbing up against a vow of celibacy,
others are stimulated by pricking a code of kindness. While
this can be deliberately cruel, it is more often the result of
impulses that are probably best understood by studying the
behaviors of toddlers and certain animals—or better yet, of
toddlers with certain animals. I’m not sure that it’s pure viciousness that pulls the kitty’s tail, or that prompts the kitty
herself to toy with the mouse; it’s that mixture of curiosity
and boredom that finds expression in all the lesser forms of
torment. “What will it do if I do this?”
Sometimes it will bite. And of course the Christian who
bites will often feel like a great failure, just as the person who
intentionally provokes the bite may feel as though he has unmasked some great sham he always suspected was there. This
dynamic is also a game, one that pits mock sanctity against
smug mockery, with nothing gained for either side. When the
prisoner under interrogation is finally made to cry out in pain,
what has he proved or his tormentor disproved but the respective humanity of each? Anyone who deliberately sets about to
prove that I’m only human can in no way disprove that I am
a Christian.
Only I can do that. And I am most likely to do so when
naming my enemy succeeds in disarming him—that is, when
I seem on the verge of a real breakthrough in our relations. In
that event I may find it difficult to disarm myself. Loaded for
bear, we sometimes cannot resist discharging our weapon,
even when the bear turns out to be dead or a cub. The most
flagrant violation of the commandment to love our enemy
loving the enemy 255

may be a willingness to forgive him every trespass but that of
repentance. We would almost do better to hate our enemies
forever than to love them only to the point where they respond to our love.
:
Once we have named our enemy in prayer and even to the
enemy’s own face, what then? If honesty does not effect peace,
then it can lead only to war. And although an open declaration may be preferable to the covert raids of daily hostility, it
does make the Sermon on the Mount seem even more lofty
and unattainable. How exactly does one pray for an enemy
who is not instantly disarmed by being named as one?
We know the obvious answers. We pray to be protected
from the enemy. We pray for the enemy’s change of heart.
Barring that, we pray for the enemy’s defeat. In the fullest
possession of ourselves, we pray not to forget that we too are
imperfect and need to remember the values that transcend
our own need to win.
But if that were all we had to pray for, then Jesus’ commandment to “Pray for those who abuse you” would be too
banal for comment. Surely each of those petitions, at least
those for protection and victory, formed the stuff of “war
prayers” for thousands of years before Jesus was born. Obviously, he intends something more radical, and probably
more disturbing.
The problem is exacerbated by what follows the verb pray
in his commandment; we are to “pray for those who abuse you.”
Telling us to pray for our enemies is, at the very least, a call
256 anger in the church

to humility. But telling us to pray for those who abuse us
sounds almost like a call to humiliation. Like the commandment to forgive all who trespass against us, it seems to make
us collaborators in the abuse. It sounds like a recipe for selfdestruction, masochism, pseudomartyrdom; at the very least,
it sounds like a good reason for avoiding prayer.
There is, however, a way in which praying for the enemy or
the abuser constitutes a more militant and healthy stance. I
can pray for God to defend my enemy. I can ask that God will
not allow my enemy to be subdued beyond the point of total
defeat, that is, to the point of utter despair. And why would I
ask this? Because, loving him as I love myself, I intend to do
everything in my power to oppose him. I intend to prevent
his abuse from destroying us both. In a sense, I am coming to
his rescue by refusing to use my own meekness to ensnare
him in his own wickedness. To my mind, this has always been
the dark side of pacifism: giving the foe enough rope to hang
himself. My prayer for my abuser, like my fight against him, is
a refusal to make peace with his damnation. Whatever charges
he may one day have laid on his soul, I am not interested in
being the reason for a single one of them. I will help him fight
the rap, and I will do so by fighting him.
One of the stock threats in our vernacular is “God help
you.” God help you, because I’m coming at you with everything I’ve got. Said in the right spirit, this can be a form of
prayer “for those who abuse you.” And it can be a terrible and
dreadful prayer to say. It means that my outrage and determination have reached a point where I am willing to enlist
the aid of God for the person who is hurting me. On some
level, it means that I am angry enough, resolved enough, even
to work in opposition to God, should he answer my prayer.
loving the enemy 257

Of course, that is a dangerous place to be, and as good a
place as any for asking if some possibility of peace still exists.
Perhaps only the most resolute warriors are capable of praying for their enemies. At the close of Homer’s Odyssey, when
Odysseus is about to slaughter the kinsmen of the suitors he
has lately slain, Athena appears and halts him in his tracks:
“Son of Laertes and the gods of old,
Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways,
command yourself. Call off this battle now,
or Zeus who views the wide world may be angry.”
He yielded to her, and his heart was glad.
His heart is glad because, after years of adventuring and fighting, he has performed his most heroic feat, which is selfmastery. We must not forget, however, that at this transcendent moment in the story, the spoilers of his house are
already dead, and their fathers are already on the run. Earlier
in the narrative, when he stands to fight in his own great hall,
Athena is there to cheer him on. He is not the kind of man to
pray for his enemies, but with the goddess for an ally, he
could have afforded to. The prayer would have been the highest expression of confidence, and a fairly high expression of
humanity as well.
:
When we meditate on the commandment to love our enemies, we invariably think of the great heroes of nonviolent resistance, as well we should. The teachings of Gandhi are like
258 anger in the church

so many green technologies: We have the need and the knowhow; we just haven’t mustered the will or the market. We delay
doing so to our peril.
And yet an exclusive admiration of nonviolent heroes
seems a bit like an exclusive admiration of Platonic love. It is
akin to the sensibility that dogmatizes the perpetual virginity
of Mary and then refers to her, her spouse, and her miraculously conceived child as “the Holy Family.” The implication
is that other more naturally constituted households are unholy. The problem of the Holy Family is at bottom a problem
of the Holy Trinity: We see the Holy Spirit at work in the incarnation and forget about her movement over the primeval
waters of creation and of our own mothers’ wombs. Likewise,
we fail to see that the love of our enemies may not be entirely
incompatible with armed conflict. If one of the great nonviolent heroes of the Sermon on the Mount was a non-Christian,
some of its violent heroes have been non-Christian too.
On at least two occasions in history, we find them arrayed
against “our side” in some of the most brutal conflicts our
side has known: the Crusades and the Indian Wars of the
American frontier. To read in any depth about either conflict
is to risk losing all faith in any possible redemption for the
human race. Their chronicles could serve as the Old and New
Testaments of a religion that worshiped the atomic bomb.
The Franks, as their Muslim enemies called them, not only
slaughtered “infidels” without respect to age and gender, they
are on record—their own record—as eating them. They are also
on record for roasting Christian babies, though I do not recall whether they ate them or not. In Constantinople they
raped Orthodox nuns with abandon; on Cyprus they cut off
the noses of all the Orthodox priests. It is small wonder that
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when Constantinople was besieged by the Turks some two
centuries later, many in the city felt that a conquest by Muslims was preferable to an alliance with Christians farther west.
In the midst of this dismal, disheartening history, we come
upon Saladin, a fierce adversary of the Crusaders and, by their
own accounts, a merciful one as well. When he learned that
the son of his enemy had just been married inside a fortress
that his troops held under siege, the sultan sent emissaries to
inquire in what part of the castle the honeymoon was being
held. He then gave orders that the bombardment be directed
elsewhere for the space of a night. We can dismiss such a
gesture as mere chivalry between the powerful, but Saladin’s
humanity extended to the powerless as well. Not only did he
allow Christian captives to buy their freedom, he freed numbers of those unable to pay. I have not looked deeply enough
into his legend to discover those things that might have
marred it, but his legendary status in the Christian world—
where the official doctrine for centuries was that Saladin and
his coreligionists were eternally damned—speaks eloquently
of the man he must have been.
The same can be said for the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who
attempted to build a Native American alliance capable of halting westward expansion. Handsome, charismatic, and fearless,
he was known even among his foes for his hatred of cruelty.
I have already recounted in another chapter how he stopped
his braves from scalping American prisoners with the cry,
“Are there no men here?”—perhaps the best example I know
of someone unwittingly answering his own question. His compassion first showed itself when he was only a youth. While a
Shawnee war party burned a white settler at the stake, the
young man rose in indignation and delivered an oration that
260 anger in the church

is reported to have put the older warriors to shame. In his
own lifetime, when many truly believed that the only good
Indian was a dead Indian, and assiduously practiced what
they preached, Tecumseh filled his enemies with admiration.
Neither Tecumseh nor Saladin was without anger—quite
the contrary. At least one parley with the chief ended abruptly
when he drew his tomahawk in a white heat. The sultan wore
a sword, of course, and he drew it with similar rage to decapitate a particularly odious prisoner, Reynald of Châtillon (the
father of the bridegroom for whom he had shown such extraordinary consideration, also the man responsible for the rape
of Christian Cyprus). After bringing his prisoners refreshments, Saladin had charged the crusader with his many
atrocities and been met with an impertinent reply. When the
other prisoners saw the ingrate’s head drop from his stillstanding body, they began to grow pale and tremble, but Saladin assured them that he meant to treat them well; only “that
man had gone too far.”
Such violence and anger, even more than religious differences, will prevent many from seeing Tecumseh and Saladin
as proper exemplars of Christian teaching. I tend to see them
in terms of the incarnation. The Word is made flesh and dwells
among us. The Word comes to us where we are, and at least to
some degree, as we are. Krishna appears to Arjuna as a charioteer on a battlefield, and I am not sure that Christ couldn’t
appear in the same guise. That possibility gives us another
way to think of loving the enemy. We’re usually inclined to
say that only love is capable of turning an enemy into a friend.
True enough. It may also be, however, that it is only through
the love of mutual enemies that some people can acknowledge love at all.
loving the enemy 261

:
I have a vivid recollection of what may have been the first
time I heard the name of Malcolm X. I was around ten years
old. My father and I were sitting together in the same room.
I was playing on the rug; he was reading a magazine. All at
once, he held up a picture for me and said, “That’s Malcolm
X.” I can’t remember if I asked “What’s he doing?” before he
said, “He’s letting the Black Muslims know that if they come
after him, he’s ready.”
The photo was the famous Life magazine shot of Malcolm
X standing in front of the parted curtains of his home, rifle
in hand. At the time I was not sure who he was or even who
the Black Muslims were, though a schoolmate had told me a
terrifying story of their mutilating a boy our age in the lavatory of an amusement park. And now they were coming to
get this Malcolm.
The tone in my father’s voice was not one of glee or contempt. It did not have to do with anticipated retribution, with
the chickens coming home to roost. Curiously, it was one of
admiration. I could recognize that at the time, but I could
not really understand it. There weren’t too many people in
Life magazine who elicited that response from my father, and
not many of these were black militants. In several years’ time,
probably one of his greatest fears was that I would become a
militant too.
I had to grow older before I realized that his tone of admiration was essentially one of identification. My father also
saw himself as a man standing guard, prepared to defend his
family against all comers, Black Muslims included, by any
262 anger in the church

means necessary. In the picture of Malcolm X brandishing
his gun for all to see, making a point of telling reporters that
he had instructed his wife, Betty, in its lethal use, my father
saw something that other white Americans would better see
in Martin Luther King Jr. He saw his brother.
I believe that when we get more distance from our present
time, we will recognize how many men and women found the
same thing in the same place. Dr. King told his fellow Americans, we are all equal. None of us is better than any other. But
at the same time, and in spite of himself, he was saying that
he was better than the bunch of us. It was hard for him not to
impart that message, for one simple reason. He was better.
Malcolm X told us something different. He said, I’m no
better than you are, and that is why you had better beware. “I’m
the man you think you are,” he said in one of his speeches. “If
you want to know what I’ll do, figure out what you’ll do. I’ll
do the same thing—only more of it.” These words have never
moved me to tears as the great speeches of Dr. King have done
more than once. But they moved a number of people who
might have remained unmoved by King.
Malcolm X called himself “the angriest man in America,”
quite a claim in any age, and a staggering superlative in his.
Yet his anger remains something of a paradox. He is not known
to have lost his temper in a single act of violence. His anger
was never without a certain civility, a certain humor, a certain
innocence even—not to forget a definite power. He was more
formidable in his white shirt and narrow tie than an army of
“gangsta” rappers in leather and chains. But then their message is different from his; they seem to be saying, “We’re even
nastier than you think we are,” not “I’m the man you think you
are.” After his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm also showed us
loving the enemy 263

that anger could change its mind, just as Dr. King showed us
more than once that love could hold its ground.
Even after Mecca, Malcolm X maintained that violence was
an option. We might be surprised to learn that Gandhi maintained the same thing. Violence, he said, was always preferable
to cowardice. Malcolm X never ceased to be the man who stood
by the parted curtains, rifle in readiness. But paranoia does
not publicize itself in this way. Paranoia lurks and broods;
love warns and hopes that its warning will be heeded. “I
taught you not to bite,” a Hindu sage is supposed to have told
a cobra, “but I never said you couldn’t hiss.”
Were I to design a monument to Malcolm X, I would portray him with a sword, but in the process of sheathing or unsheathing it, and I would instruct the sculptor to make neither
the sword nor the scabbard more prominent. I would have a
double inscription, one ascribed to Jesus that read, “Think
not that I have come to bring peace, but a sword,” and another
ascribed to no one, but obviously applied to Malcolm, “Think
not that he came to bring a sword, but peace.” And every year
I would take some flowers to lay at its feet, for my father and
for me.
264 anger in the church

-

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you
to be angry about the bush?” And he said,
“Yes, angry enough to die.”
Jonah
:

267
I
nevitably, people of faith get angry at God. As we have already noted, even the profanities that we utter in times of
stress can amount to spontaneous confessions of faith that
God not only exists but is in charge of existence. “God damn
it” means that God made it. God controls it. And if God does,
we’re likely to blame God when things go wrong, meaning for
the most part when things go wrong for us.
Anger at God, or at least irritation with God, has a long
and honored place in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Job is perhaps the most famous example, cursing the day he was born,
though he stops short of cursing his Creator. That is what his
wife urges him to do in a passage as ironic as it is poignant.
“Curse God and die,” she says, hoping to cut short her husband’s misery. But if living an upright life has not guaranteed
AN GER
AT GOD

Job’s safety, why should blasphemy guarantee his doom? Job
is no martyr; Job is also no fool.
He answers his wife, “Shall we receive good at the hand of
God, and shall we not receive evil?” Turn that around and it
reads: Should we praise God for all the blessings of our lives
and not complain to him about the bad? Job is aware of that
proposition, too. And he does complain to God, magnificently:
I loathe my life; I would not live forever.
Let me alone, for my days are a breath.
What are human beings, that you make so much of
them,
that you set your mind on them,
visit them every morning,
test them every moment?
Will you not look away from me for a while,
let me alone until I swallow my spittle?
If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?
Why have you made me your target?
Why have I become a burden to you?
Why do you not pardon my transgression
and take away my iniquity?
For now I shall lie in the earth;
you will seek me, but I shall not be.
I have quoted from Job at such length not to preface any
commentary but rather to describe the domain where all commentary is moot. At the extremes of mortal experience, anger
at God is not so much a right to be exercised or a problem to
be resolved as it is a truth to be lived, an existential crisis
in which one either finds or loses his faith. You can perhaps
268 anger in the church

discern the degree of your own anger at God, assuming you’re
angry at God, by examining your expectations for this chapter. If you were hoping for some esoteric map to lead you out
of the predicament, a friend with easy answers, then you do
not sit on the same ash heap where Job sits. If you did, you
would instantly have been insulted by the mere suggestion
that I could offer any counsel whatsoever.
:
There is another kind of religious anger, both less magnificent and more prevalent than Job’s, which comes of sitting
not on an ash heap but in a pew. This is the anger of the soul
in rebellion against the constraints of religion. Sometimes this
kind of anger expresses itself as a grievance against God; at
other times the rebel feels that God is on her side—though perhaps that is the rarer experience. I spoke with a man once who
had recently left a religious cult. Though he was ostensibly “free
to go,” the psychological pressure exerted by other members
of the community made his departure feel like an escape. He
fled with his family, like Lot with his, taking little more than
the clothes on their backs. And all the way down the road, he
told me later, he was overcome with the dreadful sensation
that God was about to kill him.
Perhaps the best literary expression of religious anger
appears in a poem by the seventeenth-century English poet
George Herbert. It is called “The Collar,” probably a pun on
“choler” but not, as some suppose, an allusion to a clergy collar.
Herbert was in fact a priest, but the practice of wearing clergy
collars came long after his death. It is not a priest’s collar he
anger at god 269

has in mind, but a dog’s, a prisoner’s, and he wants to rip
it off.
I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me bloud, and not restore
What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the yeare onely lost to me?
Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away, take heed:
I will abroad.
270 anger in the church

Call in thy deaths head there; tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!
And I reply’d, My Lord.
What person of strict religion could read “The Collar” and
not feel that it struck some chord within him? Not only a person of strict religion—a person of any strictness whatsoever,
any self-imposed restraint, any integrity even, must sometimes feel the urge to break free. And although Herbert’s rebellion is apparently quelled by the voice of his Lord, there
are times when such a rebellion is of greater duration, tenacity, and substance than the poet’s. Before assuming that every
rebellion against religion is a rebellion against God, we would
do well to recall how many religions began in revolt: Buddha’s
against Brahmanism, Christ’s against Pharisaic Judaism, the
Baal Shem Tov’s against a later version of the same, Luther’s
against Catholicism, George Fox’s against Anglicanism, Roger
Williams and Anne Hutchinson’s against Puritanism, Muhammad’s against amoral animism, Hiawatha’s against the
more brutal forms of tribalism, Malcolm X’s against the Nation of Islam. In the biographies of these figures and others like
them, we often come to a place where the budding founder
“struck the board, and cried, ‘No more.’” Or we can imagine
such a place. Not every revolt will open up a new direction, or
a happy one—fanatics have revolted too—but we should not
be too quick to regard every “choler” as a sin. Anger can be
anger at god 271

the color of the Holy Spirit shining through history, just as
light is given color coming through stained glass. We sometimes forget that Moses meets God in the wilderness after
killing an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating a Hebrew
slave. When God says to Moses from the burning bush, “I have
heard the cry of my people,” he is speaking to someone who
has also heard the cry.
Religious anger is perhaps most trustworthy when it
comes in response to the plight of those excluded or shortchanged by tradition. It is useful to remember, for example,
what part of the temple Christ cleansed. The tables of the
money changers were not set up next to the altar of the holy
of holies. In that case, the high priest would have wielded a
scourge also. The marketplace that Jesus disrupted was in the
outer temple courtyard; in terms of the geography of the temple, it was little different from the church lawn. So to many of
his contemporaries, the action Jesus took must have seemed
completely unwarranted, hysterical, mad. But the courtyard
had another purpose; it was the place allowed for the “Godfearers,” that is, for righteous Gentiles drawn to the teachings
of Judaism though they were not Jews. The “zeal for your
house” that the disciples noted in Jesus’ violent act was at
least partially a zeal for those on the doorstep of that house.
The Father’s house was intended “as a house of prayer,” and
in fact, while Jesus was flinging around furniture, all kinds of
prayers were being offered in the inner sanctuaries. But how
could the God-fearers be expected to pray in the bustle of a
livestock market? The little Lord Jesus had been born in a
stable, but apparently he had few sentimental notions about
people having to worship in one—a characteristic he shares
with others born in similar circumstances.
272 anger in the church

His ire would be happily recapitulated in a church that
continues to be absorbed by its own in-house debates—many
of them over the most “relevant” issues of diversity and justice,
of course—while outside on the street people are harassed and
helpless and hungry, like sheep without a shepherd. The academic academy grew up in the cloisters of the church, and
now the church has come of age behaving very much like an
academic academy, which debates what books ought to be in
the literary canon while people who never learned how to
read serve crackers and cheese to the debaters. Oh, for some
prophet to kick the legs off those tables!
But there are so many tables, with resolutions, name tags,
the wares of seminaries and technology vendors. Had I a talent for painting, I would depict the cleansing of the temple
with Jesus fallen to one knee, in the pose of a station of the
cross, amidst a score of overturned tables. He hangs his head,
he is exhausted. Behind him, stretching back as far as the vanishing point, would be a numberless host of tables, as yet unturned, each one stacked a yard high with position papers,
convention materials, and casserole dishes. And I would title
the painting after that verse in Isaiah: “Whom shall I send,
and who will go for us?” Who will finish the job?
:
Herbert’s anger in “The Collar” is not so much directed at the
shortcomings of religious institutions, however, as at the repression arising from religious life. We could say that his anger
is personal. He wants to give freer rein to his passions, and it
makes him angry with himself—and perhaps with God—that
he has not done so. It has often been noted how libertines make
anger at god 273

the most devout converts; the reverse is no less true. Beware
the choler of those who finally break their collars.
Sometimes I wonder if I am more choleric than I have to
be because of the Christian imperative to control my temper.
In other words, I wonder if controlling my anger also makes me
angry. Trying to see everyone’s point of view, trying to be patient beyond reason, trying to remember that the other person is also a child of God, that I am also a sinner—how far do
you go with all this before you explode from accumulated
grievance? And at least to some extent, I believe this is a fair
question to ask. I said once to a friend that reconciliation
often works for me like a weird version of the Heimlich maneuver: I frantically assist someone in disgorging the hat that
I rammed down his throat when he failed to respect me for
approaching him with my hat in my hand. After a while I begin to wonder if approaching someone in that way, given the
risks, is not meekness at all but a form of treachery. Wouldn’t
it be more charitable to approach people with my hat on my
head, more formally and with more reserve, wise as the serpent and harmless as the dove—instead of like a dove with
six-inch retractable fangs? I do think so, and I am trying.
There’s another question I have, though, and it takes me
in a somewhat different direction. Am I really angry because
Christianity puts insufferable restraints on my true self,
or because I am denying that Christianity is an integral part
of my true self ? In other words, am I seething because of
repression or because of cowardice? For which reason am I
most often angry: the stifling of my natural self, or the disguising of my supernatural self ? It seems like a somewhat
abstract question, but it could easily be made more concrete
through an experiment.
274 anger in the church

Take a week, I tell myself, and be as uninhibited, as shamelessly abrasive as you dare to be within the law. Don’t fake,
but don’t fret either. Forget the kingdom of God. Most of all,
forget that other people have feelings. Act on your feelings. Be
a savage. Then take another week, and consciously attempt to
be as religious as you know how to be. Show the same indifference for other people’s secular prejudices as you showed
for their feelings the week before. Don’t be pious, but live
the gospel in as bold a way as your imagination allows. Be a
mensch. Be a meshuggener even. (Too bad the early church
fathers had to rely on Greek; they’d have done better with
Yiddish.) At the end of those two weeks, ask yourself, Which
approach to life made me the more angry? Which gave me
the greater peace with myself?
I have yet to try the experiment. To be honest, I suspect I
already know the outcome. Both approaches would make me
less angry than I am now. Both would give me more peace.
And perhaps I would find more common ground between the
two than I imagine. Perhaps the best instruction I can give to
myself right now is not “Be less angry” but “Be more deliberate.” Be more awake.
:
We cannot talk about anger at God or in the church without
a parting word or two about the biblical book of Jonah. My
wife and I have friends who like to play a few games of “Desert
Island” after dinner: Which three record albums would you
want to have, which five books, if you were a castaway? We’ve
never played it with books of the Bible, but Jonah would certainly be in the running for me.
anger at god 275

The book of Jonah tells the story of a prophet whom God
calls to deliver a message of doom to the wicked people of
Nineveh. Jonah doesn’t want to do it. So he takes a ship headed
in the opposite direction, in fact to the very edge of the known
world, a place where every angry man or woman dreams of
going at one time or another. When a storm blows up, Jonah
attributes it to divine retribution and urges the pagan sailors
to throw him into the ocean. The pagan sailors respond as
pagans often do, with a sense of right and wrong that puts
People of the Book to shame. They keep rowing. But Jonah
eventually prevails on them to toss him over—I sometimes wonder if this is altruism or depression—and the sea is calmed. As
everyone knows, Jonah is then swallowed by a “great fish,”
which popular legend holds to be a whale. In the belly of the
fish, Jonah undergoes something of a conversion: We know
that because he praises God in a neat little psalm and because, like converts the world over, he cannot resist a few condescending remarks about “those who worship vain idols,” in
spite of the fact that a few of that sort tried their best to keep
him out of the drink. No sooner is the psalm over than the
author has the whale vomit Jonah onto the shore, perhaps as
a subtle comment on some of the sentiments expressed in the
psalm, perhaps not.
So Jonah goes to Nineveh, as he should have done from
the start. The Ninevites repent, and in many people’s minds
this is how the story ends. But this is precisely where the real
story begins. God also repents of his destructive designs upon
Nineveh, and Jonah is furious. “O Lord! Is not this what I
said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to
Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious
God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast
276 anger in the church

love, and ready to relent from punishing.” We may have
thought that he fled to Tarshish because of the harshness of
the message he was told to deliver, but now we learn that this
was not the case! He fled because he suspected all along that
God was not going to follow through on it. “And now, O Lord,
please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than
to live.”
There are only seven verses left to the book, and they are
surely among the loveliest in the Bible. It would be a shame
not to give them here in full:
And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of
the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat
under it in the shade, waiting to see what would
become of the city.
The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it
come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to
save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very
happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the
next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the
bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God
prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down
on the head of Jonah, so that he was faint and asked
that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die
than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be
angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry
enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor
and which you did not grow; it came into being in a
anger at god 277

night and perished in a night. And should I not be
concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which
there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand
persons who do not know their right hand from
their left, and also many animals?”
The story of Jonah contains at least two insights into
anger, both rather striking. The first is that all the events that
trouble Jonah, that frustrate him and infuriate him, are intended as part of his education. What a lot of trouble God
takes with the lesson plan! We read that “the Lord hurled a
great wind upon the sea,” “the Lord provided a large fish,”
“the Lord God spoke to the fish,” “the Lord God appointed a
bush,” “the Lord appointed a worm,” “God prepared a sultry
east wind.” The story reads like the account of a six-course dinner put on by the most careful and attentive hostess—little
pickles and dainty forks, sheltering bushes and sultry east
winds—all so that Jonah can come to a place where he is able
to see a city full of people and animals as God sees it. You can
say that the theology here is naïve and anthropocentric. Fine.
And yet, how many of those who would call it so harbor the
belief that the source of all their frustrations is some malevolent force, some cosmic harpy with no better design than to
befoul their picnic lunch—a view no less naïve or anthropocentric, but somehow more acceptable to their sense of
themselves as sophisticated human beings?
The book of Jonah asks us: If we have enough faith to
say “God damn it,” why do we not also possess the faith to say
“God appointed it”? If we can ask, “What have I done to deserve this?” why can’t we also ask, “What am I to learn from
this?” Granted, neither is an absolutely valid question. In a
278 anger in the church

certain predicament—in a death camp, for instance—both
would be utterly absurd. But most of us are not in death
camps. We’re in what amounts to a depressive funk, where we
can believe in God enough to think he might hate us, but not
enough to think he might teach us. We are more likely to blame
the universe for giving us a brain tumor than to trust it for
giving us a brain. Forgetting God for just a moment (because
the moment itself proves that God does not forget us), which
theory makes more sense from a purely evolutionary point of
view: that the human species is being “taught” through its interactions with other creatures and phenomena, or that it’s
being screwed? Swim with the whales; then give your answer.
For that matter, swim with the sharks.
:
The second of the insights we find in Jonah is both simpler
and more startling. The book of Jonah says that the thing
that makes us the most angry with God, more angry than
droughts and famines, male pattern baldness and cellulite, is
God’s mercy. That is what really enrages Jonah, and if we’re
completely honest, it’s what enrages us too. The child who
dies under the wheels of a car may lead us to wring our hands
and even to shake a fist at heaven, but unless the child is our
own, what really infuriates us is the fact that the driver lives
on to enjoy life, to beget other children, perhaps to find his way
toward some kind of redemption. It is mercy—not justice or
injustice—that makes us the most angry in the end. When
people tell you that the Holocaust makes them angry at God,
are they thinking more about slaughtered Jews or aging Nazis?
We cannot know beyond a hunch. But I do know there is a
anger at god 279

difference between what makes us hypothetically angry at
God when we’re chatting at a dinner party, and what makes
us angry when we’re on the highway, driving home afterward.
Before, it was all about “how a supposedly benevolent God”
could allow so many terrible calamities, each one imagined
rather calmly over the coffee and cake, but now in the drizzle
and the glare of the oncoming lights, it’s how God can allow
so many reckless idiots to go on breathing in the world. The
mercy is what’s so maddening.
And maybe this is also the real cause of anger in the
church. At bottom, is it really the institution that galls us so,
the sad history and bad behavior of “organized religion”? Or
is it rather our subconscious disdain for any club that would
have us for a member, and our very conscious disgust at the
outrageous suggestion that God actually cares and cares intensely for these misfits who kneel and mumble in the pews
beside us?
280 anger in the church

ANGER
in the
WORLD
-

Persistent depression is only too
clearly the sign that a man is living
contrary to his vocation.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art
:

283
When I look for people who have their anger under
control—I don’t say people who never get angry—
what I find most often are men and women who love their
work. Not infrequently, they’re men and women who work
“for themselves” in their own businesses or at their own trades,
sometimes in their own homes. My wife and I buy some of
our meat from a butcher whose pleasure in his work is so
evident that we would probably go into his shop even if we
became vegetarians. I can do without beef; I cannot do without the sight of happiness in action. I could imagine several
things that might anger the butcher during the course of his
day, but I can’t imagine many days that he comes to work angry or goes home in a foul mood.
Persistent anger, perhaps even more than persistent depression, is the sign of someone living contrary to his or her
WORK

vocation. That is not necessarily the same thing as saying that
an angry woman or man is in the wrong line of work, though
that may be the case. It could be that an angry woman or
man is in the wrong kind of job. Put our butcher in the meat
department of a big chain supermarket, and a meat cleaver
might turn from a favorite tool to a dangerous temptation. In
a case like that, the work is fine, but the conditions of the job
make the work impossible to perform or to enjoy. (This is the
other side of a no-less-common predicament: that of the individual with the “perfect job,” where everything is ideal except the nature of the work itself.) In fact, the person who
feels truly called to a certain work is the one most likely to be
enraged by a job that frustrates his or her vocation. Find the
angriest physicians at a dysfunctional hospital and you will
probably be able to divide them into two groups: a minority
who never should have become doctors in the first place, and
a majority who could never dream of being anything else.
Those in the middle will probably find it easier to make some
accommodation—one reason we should never be too disdainful of those in the middle. Perhaps there are people called to
have no discernible calling but their own unshakeable decency.
But all of us are called to do work in the world. One of my
repeated prayers whenever I visit the sick is “Give your servant
her work and the means to do it.” I say this almost as often as
“Give your servant healing”—though I have met people who
seem to think of work and sickness as little more than different forms of the same mortal woe. Many of them mistake
this for a biblical idea: that God curses Adam and Eve with
work. This is no different from saying that “the knowledge of
good and evil” is the knowledge of sex, in other words, that
the shame of nakedness is what makes nakedness desirable—
that sin is what enables us to be born.
284 anger in the world

A more careful reading of Genesis dispels both notions. In
the second creation story, for example, Adam and Eve are
placed in the garden “to keep it,” and Eve is created as a “fit
helper” (“an help meet” in the King James translation) for her
husband. It’s hard to see how the pair were supposed to “keep”
the garden, or how Eve was to “help” Adam, if there was no
work to do (and just as difficult to see how they were supposed
to be “fruitful and multiply” if their genitals were on the prelapsarian list of forbidden fruit). Toil, not work, is the punishment
of our first parents. Work that enrages us and breaks our spirits—that is the curse. Conflating work with toil—or thinking
of work purely as a job, as a thing we do for money or not at
all—is proof enough that we have fallen.
Work is nothing less than how we make love to the world.
I have read that in certain peasant cultures it was customary
for a husband and wife to have sexual intercourse in a plowed
field before planting it. Beyond the naïve assumptions of sympathetic magic—the fertility of the human couple used to prime
the fertility of the soil—the practice speaks strongly to me
about the meaning of work. I don’t necessarily grasp that meaning in an intellectual way. After all, it is magic that betokens
an overintellectualized view of the world, one in which all effects have causes and all causes are formulaic. The meaning
I take from the lovers in the field is more evocative, more religious. I imagine them walking hand in hand to the field in
moonlight, how their hearts quicken when their feet touch
the plowed soil. I imagine the moment when something tells
them, or when one whispers to the other, “This is the spot.
This is where we lay ourselves down.” I think of thighs bared
on freshly turned furrows, of knees and buttocks impressing
the loosened earth, of the smell of the soil so rank and the
sight of the stars so dizzying that the lovers hide their faces in
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each other’s necks. I hear their panting cries in the darkness,
perhaps echoing other cries—of nocturnal animals, of other
couples in other plowed fields. Imagine the once-a-year holiness of it, the simultaneous privacy and community of it,
the hunger in the loins consciously summoned to prevent a
hunger in the belly, and perhaps fed by the fear of that
other hunger—the act of love both ceremonial and ravenous.
Imagine too the man and woman going to plant the field the
next day, like two lovers making a bed in the morning, drawing the coverlets up between them, so different now in daylight with their clothes on, how they smile at the memory.
And every day, no matter how hot, every storm no matter
how drenching, touches their most private flesh like a
beloved hand.
Perhaps the total meaning of these images can be understood only in contrast, say to the fabled “quickie” at the office. According to the Harper’s Index, the most favored place
for that kind of encounter is “the boss’s desk.” A sex act performed on that plane is either an act of power (if the boss is
involved) or an act of contempt (if the boss is not); in either
case it is performed in defiance of the work, perhaps in defiance of those with whom one works or those one works to
support. It is hard to conceive of it as anything other than an
act of suppressed rage—a variation on that crude cliché of
“taking the job and shoving it.”
Anyway, when I think of paradise, I do not think of a naked
man and woman on the morning before they eat an apple; I
think of a naked man and woman on the night before they
plant the corn.
:
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But we are not in paradise; our anger tells us so. In regard to
work, many of us are not in the promised land either. Perhaps
the best biblical setting for describing our situation is the land
of Egypt, “the house of bondage.” Not without reason do the
authors of the Torah place its commandments against that
background. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out
of the land of Egypt.” We tend to read that refrain solely as a
statement of obligation: God has delivered his people, so they
owe him their obedience. But the refrain can also be read as
a statement of analysis: Slavery is the background of, and the
alternative to, God’s call to an observant life. Existence profaned, work reduced to nothing but toil—those are the primary
conditions of a slave.
Work becomes toil, first of all, when the worker fails to enjoy its fruits. This is one of those truths that “everybody
knows” but that we seem to keep missing. Either we expect
workers to find fruitfulness solely in the work itself (as with
public school teachers, for instance, who until very recently
were expected to pay for their groceries with idealism), or else
we expect wages alone to provide a sense of fruitfulness (as in
the case of certain well-paying assembly jobs, where workers
have no meaningful connection to the things they produce).
Both situations describe the quality of work in the house
of bondage.
But fruitless labor can also be the predicament of privileged workers who strive to achieve a standard of living that
the work itself revokes. They toil for “a nice house” but are
never at home, even and especially when they’re under their
own roof. Or as Thoreau put it, they make themselves sick in
order to pay the doctor. In contrast, the biblical story of creation is about the satisfaction that follows making: “And God
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saw that it was good.” The story of work for many of us is the
story of Genesis turned into an apocalypse: The maker may
not see “that it is good” until some distant end of time, possibly at the point where he’s about to drop dead.
It takes no great intelligence to see that in many ways the
rage of those toiling at the top of the social pyramid parallels
that of those toiling at the bottom. In both cases, it grows
from the frustration of solving an impossible puzzle, either
how to make ends meet, or how to meet one’s own exalted
ends. The hope of the Old Testament is a vision of every one
sitting in the shade of his own fig tree, but those without a
tree, like those with a sprawling orchard of them, rarely get
a chance to sit in that shade. Seen in this way, the anger associated with work is at least as much a political and cultural
problem as a psychological one. “Anger management” treated
solely as a matter for trainers hired by the personnel department is something like a “war on drugs” treated solely as a
matter of law enforcement. Neither approach looks for the
social cause of the problem. If anything, the approach runs
the risk of exacerbating the problem.
As long as we believe that we can reverse the Fall by abolishing work, either through laborsaving devices or the exploitation
of other workers, we shall experience work as a form of punishment and an occasion for rage. Work does not need to be
abolished, but redeemed. No civilization ought to call itself
advanced until it has embraced the task of that redemption.
:
Work also becomes toil, and an occasion for rage, when we do
not employ our best gifts in doing it. I wouldn’t say when our
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work fails to be “challenging,” because I have come to suspect
that word, with its sly and managerial insinuation that a human being has to be hassled or perplexed in order to feel
alive. But I’m almost as wary of the word gifts, which, like the
related word charisma, has been shanghaied from the Christian gospel in order to serve a very profane agenda.
Our culture tends to define gift as something I can do that
makes anyone else who tries to do the same thing look sick by
comparison. It’s Michael Jordan playing basketball; Django
Reinhardt playing the guitar. In contrast, the New Testament
speaks of gifts as those abilities I can contribute toward making the church—and by extension, the world—whole and well.
“There are varieties of gifts, but the same service.” My gift
may not distinguish me, but it does serve to fulfill me, and it
fulfills me by enabling me to serve.
It also fulfills me, though the New Testament doesn’t say
so, by giving me pleasure. (For that idea, we must turn to
Augustine: “Love God and do what you please.”) We tend to
think of pleasure as something we derive from play, but its
greatest use may be in dowsing the wellsprings of our work.
Accomplishments alone cannot do this. We cannot always
find our pleasure—or the best gifts we have to give—by recognizing our names in a trophy case. More than one person
who was judged to be “gifted” as, say, a mathematician or a
dancer discovered that the gift she had to give was as a physician or a firefighter.
Admittedly, the work that I enjoy will most often be the
work in which others find me the most proficient or the most
useful. But what I’m the most good at will not always determine what I do the most good in. Picasso is quoted as saying
“My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become
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a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead I was a painter, and became Picasso.” Who’s to say that,
his gargantuan ego aside, he would not have made a fine pope?
Perhaps there was a priest in his youth who thought so. Pablo,
you could be a great man in the church if you would only put
aside your doodling. Does anyone wish that he had tried?
Had he done so and succeeded, I think one thing more than
any other would have called him back to his palette: the sensation of overwhelming anger, or depression, every time he addressed the crowd in St. Peter’s Square. Of course, pleasure
alone is not an infallible indicator of one’s calling. Pleasure is
not incompatible with evil, after all, but it does seem virtually
incompatible with rage.
:
Anger can also arise from giving no pleasure to others in the
work that we do. On the most basic level, that means we can
be angry because of a lack of appreciation in the workplace.
But on another less subjective level, the sense of giving no pleasure can come from divining that the work we do is worthless
or even harmful. What, more than anything else, determines
the demeanor of the man or woman who waits your table
in a restaurant? Beyond factors like personality or working
conditions, the most reliable determiner seems to be the
quality of the food itself. If it’s likely to sicken the customer,
it’s not likely to gladden the person who brings it. Talk to
anyone who loves his or her work, and invariably you’re going
to hear some proud disclosure about where the work goes,
where the product gets shipped, who buys it, who has a use
for it, who can’t get enough of it. “And this stuff here goes all
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the way out to Tacoma, Washington. They use it to make . . .”
What accounts for the profound sadness of those in the sex
trade, aside from the degradation of the work itself, but the
knowledge of how little pleasure they actually give?
The otherwise laudable Christian tradition of seeing all
things as useful “in the service of the King,” may blind us to
the possibility that certain forms of work are simply not appropriate for a person of faith. The early church certainly
thought so, especially in regard to soldiers, though in its eagerness to refute the ceremonial laws of Judaism it probably
gave the matter short shrift. (Scholars tell us that at least
some of the “sinners” referred to in the Jewish communities
of the New Testament were nothing more or less than persons
employed in disreputable professions, not only prostitutes
and tax collectors but tavern keepers and donkey drivers, as
well as their wives. The church may understandably have
wanted to avoid such judgments.) One-eighth of the Buddha’s
Noble Eightfold Path is “right occupation,” and the Buddha
is supposed to have singled out several as “not right,” including those of butcher and brewer. We might do worse than to
ask if it is “lawful” to be a developer of strip malls or a purveyor
of third-rate pharmaceuticals to the third world. Sometimes
rage in one’s employment is no different than fever in a case
of food poisoning: It’s a sign that something is wrong, not
just in the culture of the workplace or in the psyche of the
worker, but in the moral and spiritual value of the work itself.
This raises a few interesting questions. One is whether certain forms of work call for anger (as opposed to arousing it),
and if there are not vocations especially suited to angry people
just as there are vocations especially suited to ambidextrous
or bilingual ones.
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In that regard, I think of the attorney Mitchell Stevens in
Russell Banks’s novel The Sweet Hereafter. “Angry? Yes, I’m
angry; I’d be a lousy lawyer if I weren’t,” he says. Later in the
narrative, he adds, “I do it because I’m pissed off, and that’s
what you get when you mix conviction with rage. It’s a very
special kind of anger, let’s say. So I’m not a victim. Victims get
depressed and live in the there and then. I live in the here
and now.”
But we are likely to be skeptical of “this very special kind
of anger.” Is it truly aroused by conviction, or is it merely the
sublimation of unresolved issues in Stevens’s own life? It
would seem to be both, in which case the service he does for
others may sometimes result in a disservice to himself. His
own case never comes to trial.
It is too easy, however, to dismiss the value of such an accommodation to anger simply because it is imperfect. How
many of the good offices of art, government, education, and
philanthropy were performed by women and men with at
least one screw loose? An entirely balanced human being does
not often tip the scales of justice for anyone. Sometimes the
price of the common good is the sublimated grief of an uncommon individual. But it would be a good idea if such
individuals knew the price of their contributions, and I’m not
sure they always do.
I recently visited a police officer, who told me that the average age at death for a Vermont state trooper is fifty-six. I
was incredulous. Vermont is not often the scene of shoot-outs
and hijackings. But as the officer explained to me, it was not
violence or high-speed car crashes that shortened the lives of
most of his peers, but adrenaline. With each response to a crisis, the body produces an adrenaline rush. But then the body
292 anger in the world

has to do something with the adrenaline—especially when it
has produced more than it ultimately needs, as in the case of
a false alarm. Over time this biochemical flux takes its toll in
terms of heart disease, cancers, and all the other effects of
stress. The man who told me this is around my age. It was hard
not to wonder, given his job and my predisposition, which of
us was more likely to go down first.
:
Some of the rage we encounter in work has to do with a loss
of connection to the physical world. This statement may seem
to make no sense in that we think of anger as arising from
frustration, and frustration as arising from the inevitable
conflict between our wills and matter. We want “it” to do one
thing, and “it” does another. So isn’t our connection to the
physical world driving us nuts, rather than any loss thereof?
The problem is that in many cases we have reduced our frustration with matter at the cost of increasing stress. There is a
difference between them. If frustration comes of being stalled,
stress often comes of being rushed—of being able to do more
in less time, with a higher quota of production and a smaller
margin of permissible error. Stress may be harder to bear than
frustration because of its inscrutability. A frustrated person
can usually tell you why she’s frustrated. A person under
stress, on the other hand, often cannot tell you precisely why
she’s starting to come apart. That’s because she’s usually been
moving too fast to keep track. Most of us have had the experience of flying off the handle without knowing exactly why,
and of needing to trace the buildup along an intricate path of
cause and effect, which, as often as not, involved hurry—not
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an attempt to overcome matter so much as the dream of
cheating time. Of course, that has long been the cherished
goal of industrial culture, one hardly modified by the socalled information culture. We fly off the handle because we
flew away from anything having a handle a long time ago.
Emerson said, “There is virtue yet in the hoe and the
spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands.” Part of this
virtue is that it puts us very literally in touch with the elemental resistance of the material creation. The rock in the
sod and the root underneath it both remind me that I cannot
have everything that I want, and that I cannot have even some
of what I want without struggle or a lapse of time. As we become increasingly impatient with even the most refined forms
of material resistance (does the PC ever boot up as quickly as
it should?), do we not also become more intolerant of resistance in other forms? As I virtually do away with my own body,
why not do away with every body that opposes my will? Surely
the move to gate off communities and to isolate segments of
community into various self-defined and self-centered tribes
is not unrelated to our desire to abolish the hoe and the
spade. As with our fellow men and women, so with the wild
creatures, which many of us encounter now as nothing more
than momentary bumps under our tires. Direct contact with
matter—contact in the bracing sense of a “contact sport”—reminds us of limitation and finitude; it necessitates hesitancy.
It demands that thought slow down enough to become reflective. Digging my own grave, I am challenged by the grating
of my spade on a stone: “Are you sure this is what you want to
do?” it asks.
To redeem work, we must redefine efficiency. The efficiency
expert must become more than he already is, which is quite a
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bit when you think of it: engineer, physicist, accountant. The
efficiency expert of the future, however, will also have to be a
psychologist, an ethicist, and not least of all an artist. Admittedly, if work can never be better than toil, then pure technology is the best approach to it; then efficiency does indeed
consist of doing as much as possible as quickly as possible
with the attendant aim of getting the unpleasant business
over with as soon as possible. But if work is not entirely fallen
—that is, if we would not be entirely puritan—then other considerations come into play, with anger having some part in
suggesting what they might be. How can work be made less
infuriating, more beautiful, more useful not only in its product
but in the actual process itself?
Jesus said, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Might he have meant that we are always making the hard
things easy and the easy things hard? Might he have meant to
suggest that it is not the yoke itself that makes us slaves, but
our own frenetic craziness? We pursue happiness and find her
fleet of foot. She turns to chase us, and we snarl over our shoulders, “Two can play that game, you know!” And off we roar in
our shiny new machines.
:
One last thing that turns work into toil is making an idol out
of work. That is certainly a danger in preaching work’s “redemption” as I have been doing: By degrees, we come to mistake
work for the redeemer. But the danger is already present in
the absolute value we assign to jobs and to whatever “gets the
job done.” The word job is as close to “God” as some people
come in speaking reverently. If Hitler were alive today, he’d
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justify the building of Auschwitz on the grounds of how many
new jobs it was going to provide. Run over your mother and
plead for leniency on the grounds that you were on your way
to your job.
Many people fail to realize that the priest and the Levite in
the parable of the Good Samaritan are not so much hypocritical as conscientious. They have what we would call a good
work ethic. They pass by the wounded man lying in the road
because exposure to blood or to a corpse would defile them
for duty in the temple. It would interfere with the job. The
irony of the parable goes way beyond the fact that a Samaritan proves to be more righteous than the Jew. The main irony
is that in passing by the wounded man in order to serve at the
temple, the priest and the Levite become idolators. They have
made a god out of their work. Within the Old Testament frame
of reference, we might say that they have gone back to Egypt,
no less than the worshippers of the golden calf had gone
back to Egypt. In other words, their frame of mind belongs to
slavery. A slave is usually defined as a human being who is
owned by another, but a slave is also a person for whom a
given function—be it making bricks, playing the lyre, or officiating at sacrifices—is absolute. That function is the reason
for the slave’s existence. He was not made, in his master’s eyes,
to “love God and enjoy him forever,” as the Presbyterian catechism has it. The slave was made, or at least made a slave, in
order to “do the job.”
The Bible attempts to check the absolutism of work with
the observance of the Sabbath. Of course, the fact that the
Sabbath itself can also become an absolute sets the stage for
many of the conflicts of the Gospels. Jesus runs afoul of the
religious authorities for doing good works on the day of rest.
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When I read these stories as a kid growing up in a quasiSabbatarian church, I was gleeful at the way that Jesus was
willing to lay aside the commandment in order to meet some
basic human need, allowing his disciples to pick the grains of
wheat as they passed through the fields, healing the sick in
the synagogue itself. I loved him for his rebellion. Though still
rooting for Jesus, I find that I am much more sympathetic to
the scribes and Pharisees than I was as a kid. When I imagine
myself in the story now, I’m no longer the cheeky disciple
standing at the master’s elbow itching for a fight. I find that
I’m standing with the geezers these days, not that I love Jesus
any less (and some of them loved him too), but that I understand from hard experience how ruthlessly one must guard
the sanctuary of rest if there is to be any sanctuary at all. Jesus
probably understood this too. Because he allowed his disciples
to pluck a few grains of wheat on the Sabbath doesn’t mean
he would have approved of their harvesting the whole field.
Because he healed a man with a withered hand on the day of
rest doesn’t mean he would have spent its remaining hours
listening to his life’s story or reading his manuscript.
So we can find a corrective to the idolatry of work in the
tradition of the Sabbath, which I believe Christianity needs to
reexamine in the worst way, and we might find a powerful
antidote to anger in the same place. Like the Syrian captain
Naaman, who would have attempted any heroic quest to heal
his leprosy but balks when Elisha tells him to bathe in the
river, I find that my anger often boils down to nothing more
Promethean than the fact that I’m tired. To be honest, and I
hope not too irreverent, I’ve occasionally wondered if some of
the testier moments in Jesus’ life didn’t result from the same
thing. “And the crowd came together again, so that they could
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not even eat. . . . People were saying, ‘He is beside himself.’”
Jesus had something important to tell his contemporaries
about the dangers of rigidity and legalism, but perhaps they
had something important to tell him too. They certainly have
something important to tell us.
So, perhaps, does contemporary feminism. If the feminist
revolution of my generation was in large part a refusal to take
marriage and motherhood as absolutes, it continues by refusing to take work as an absolute either. By insisting on the
right to be both mothers and paid workers, women have
placed both work and parenthood in relative relationship—
that is, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all
(except the underpaid day-care workers). If you wanted to
speak in terms of the Eden myth, you might say that Eve, having eaten the forbidden fruit, continues to chew on the problem, as opposed to Adam, who continues to blame her for his
indigestion. Her assigned sorrow was to be in childbirth, yet
she fought to have Adam come into the birth room, thus reducing some of the alienation that causes his sorrows. She
fought to enter the workplace, and now she fights to reenter
her home on different terms. In all these struggles, she addresses not only her own problems but two of the fundamental problems of men—in fact two age-old sources of anger for
men (often imposed by other, more powerful men): their separation from the Mother (as sons, fathers, and worshippers)
and their enslavement to work. I don’t wish to overstate the
case. I’m not saying that feminism is the answer to all our
prayers, only that it is a reason for some of my hopes.
:
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My family is not Jewish, but lately on Friday evenings we say
the Service of Light in the Episcopal Book of Common
Prayer. My wife and daughter light the candles on the table,
as would be their office in a kosher home. To see that office as
nothing more than a vestige of patriarchy is to lack imagination, as it is to see the Sabbath as a vestige of anything less
than our divine origins. When does the God of the Hebrew
Bible seem more human, more vulnerably like us, than in his
rest? Perhaps only in his wrath. I seek for him in both places.
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Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say.
Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
:

301
One of the more notable customs of the region I have
called my home for almost twenty-five years is that of refusing to talk to someone with whom you are angry. I don’t
mean avoiding that person, not returning his calls or answering his letters, sitting as far away from him as possible at
picnics and wedding receptions, that sort of thing. I mean
looking at his physical person from a distance as close as three
feet as though he does not exist. I mean greeting his “Good
morning”—not even with coldness or indignation but with
the pretense of never having heard it. This is not the dirty look
we’re talking about here, but the you-are-dirt look—with
“dirt” referring to nothing more remarkable than an earthy
substance under your feet. This local version of the silent treatment works something like shunning among the Amish,
WORDS

except that for the Amish shunning is a communal thing,
voted upon by the elders for reasons known by all, including
the shunned, and reversible by some public act of contrition.
Our type is all the more deadly for being completely informal,
personal, and in many cases irreversible. Taboos become more,
not less, nasty as they become less tribal.
The first time—and I’m happy to say one of the few times
—the ban was imposed on me, I had no clear idea as to why.
I had done no more than exchange greetings, and those of a
conventionally friendly sort, with the woman who suddenly
refused to exchange even a glance with me. To this day I have
no certainty as to the reason. My best guess is that the silence
had to do with my remarks at a town meeting when certain
individuals began to balk at the idea of paying tax dollars for
“kids in special ed.” The shunner was not one of these individuals, so I hadn’t attacked any of her remarks, though it’s
reasonable to assume that I had attacked her sentiments. I
should add for the sake of fairness that the ban is not reserved for spendthrift liberals, friends of “retards,” or “flatlanders.” I have heard of natives with impeccable pedigrees
and respectable IQs who “never spoke a word to each other
after that.”
As with many peculiar customs, this one both invites and
confounds an easy judgment. On the one hand, it strikes me
as childish and absurd. You have to see it in action to get the
full effect; when you do, you have the distinct impression that
you’re back in junior high, and the equally distinct impression
that the silent individual was never so happy as at that time
of his or her life. Certainly the person does not seem happy
now. What makes the practice so absurd is that the ill feeling
is very likely the result of a breakdown in communication. So
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with all the self-assurance of a quack doctor bleeding someone to death in order to save his life, the offended person refuses any and all attempts to communicate.
On the other hand, one can’t help but wonder if there isn’t
something rather civilized about this most uncivil treatment.
The freeze on all communication is also a freeze on escalation.
Tensions can hardly rise when two adversaries are not saying
anything to each other. The ban represents a very strict and
literal interpretation of that old adage, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It also shows a respectful awareness of the relationship between anger and speech.
I’m told that in the logging camps that once dotted this region,
there were two rules in the cookhouse: prunes at every meal
(to keep the bowels open), and no talking at meals (to avoid
fights). I think of these rules as a kind of North Woods charm
to ward off evil—bowels open and mouth shut.
When we talk about anger, we are never far from talking
about language. Words incite anger and express it. If Seneca
was correct in saying that anger arises out of a discrepancy
between our wishes and the real world, then anger may also
arise from the discrepancy between the world of our words
and the world as it is. Our world, our language, and our minds
—one can imagine them as three circles that overlap but never
achieve perfect congruency. We do not say exactly what we
mean. We do not hear exactly what was said. We are able to
imagine but not to attain the kind of creative power that
speaks our wishes into being, “Let there be light,” and there is
light. So we become angry.
The relationship between language and anger would seem
to be most acute at the high and low ends of verbal capacity.
The man or woman of words, able to make his or her thoughts
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“perfectly clear,” grows angry when others seem unable to
grasp such perfection. To these acutely verbal individuals, the
world appears to be teeming with the block-headed and the
perverse, which it most certainly is, though verbal competence has never formed a reliable exemption from either category. Once again, the phenomenon of road rage provides us
with a metaphor. The greater the horsepower, the greater the
potential for acting like a horse’s ass. The faster the words
come to our mouth, the faster we expect the mountain to
come to Muhammad.
On the other hand, anger can arise out of the frustration
of not being able to make one’s mind known. I remember a
broad-shouldered boy in my high school years, who once confided to me, “I don’t know what to do with words. Some guy
starts throwing words at me—I just hit him.” Fortunately for
my nose, he never perceived me as throwing any words in his
direction. Someone who’s worked with a preverbal or nonverbal child knows the tantrums that can arise when the child
cannot communicate his needs. These outbursts have their
counterpart in adults who grow angry as a way of saying what
they cannot otherwise articulate. They may also grow angry
because of the consistent success of those who can articulate.
People who “know how to talk” also know how to get what
they want. After physical attractiveness, the ability to use
words may be the most reliable way of achieving one’s desires.
I find it interesting that one of our regional expressions here
in Vermont has the word ugly as a synonym for angry. Ugly
accurately describes the effects of anger; perhaps it connotes
one of the causes as well. If so, we might also use the word
inarticulate as another synonym.
Perhaps I tend to look at things too much like a schoolteacher, which I once was and in many ways remain, but it
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seems to me that genuine “anger management” has a great
deal to do with education—and not necessarily with education about anger. If we would inhabit a world with less fury,
we should teach all our children to read, write, and speak.
And to those who master rhetoric we should teach philosophy—especially those Eastern kinds that set great store on
keeping one’s mouth shut.
If that isn’t simplistic enough, I can go one better: At bottom, much of anger has to do with the concept of a “fair share,”
and with people getting more or less than their own. Trace
anger to the most primal origins imaginable and what do you
see but the verbal or physical grab for something that belongs
by rights to another, to all, or to none. Take two routes to the
understanding of wrath, one through psychology and the
other through inequality, and the second will invariably
prove the faster and more scenic route. But knowing that also
comes down to a matter of education, and what it means in
the deepest sense to be an educated human being.
:
That said, educated human beings seem to be having as
much trouble as anyone else these days with the relationship
between anger and language. The common perception of
those living outside the American academy is that if any two
words appropriately describe the discourse of our intellectuals,
these words are angry and linguistic. One imagines that college
professors, not unlike some of my neighbors, are either not
talking to one another or else talking about language. “She
keeps going around town calling me a tramp. . . . Oh, and
now she’s saying I’m Eurocentric.” Frankly, language has become one of those words that I don’t much like to hear any
words 305

more. Someone says “language” and, borrowing a page from
my old classmate, I just want to hit him.
That is an unfortunate reaction, of course, the opposite of
what it “means in the deepest sense to be an educated human
being.” It is also a somewhat hackneyed reaction. These days
one is almost expected to wrinkle his nose at the mention of
“political correctness,” in much the same way as one is expected
to feign hunger an hour after eating Chinese food. Speech
codes and “sensitive” nomenclature are easy to mock because
both can degenerate so easily into silliness, and frequently do.
Still, I have to say that the guiding principles behind political
correctness seem basically sound to me. As I understand
them, they go like this:
1. The most interesting, creative, and pleasurable kind of
human society is as diverse and inclusive as possible.
2. If a diverse population is to live in peace (that is, to
avoid the kind of Balkanization that conservatives claim
is the goal and the danger of multiculturalism), it must
develop codes of courtesy.
3. In an “age of communication,” those codes will largely
be linguistic.
To dismiss the logic in the name of good old common sense
strikes me as more than a little ironic. The logic is about as
commonsense as you get.
The problem with political correctness, however, is that
most of us tend to be a good deal more zealous about taking
offense than preventing it. This can be self-defeating, to say
the least. If instead of becoming more courteous, each of us
labors to become more reflexively fastidious, we may wind up
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being too diverse even to appreciate diversity. We may discover
all too soon that there is a carrying capacity for tact as for
everything else. But to refute a bad idea for the sake of a foolish
application is not to be a critic, just a third-rate curmudgeon.
Speech codes, like all codes, are attempts at civilization. Henry
Miller is supposed to have said that the final stage of any civilization is to reject civilization itself. I for one am not averse
to postponing the final stage for awhile, even if the stopgaps
include a few awkward pronouns.
Nevertheless, the speech code that interests me the most
is my own. I don’t have to listen to someone else’s offensive
speech if I don’t want to, but unfortunately I do have to listen
to mine. What is more, I have to live with it, in consequence
and memory. The phrase “foot in mouth” is meant to suggest
an image of extreme awkwardness; it might just as easily be
taken as an image of extreme self-punishment, when “foot in
rear” doesn’t go far enough. A reader might wonder why I
haven’t included a chapter entitled “Anger at Oneself”—you’re
reading it now, if you’re reading between the lines. Were I
to write such a chapter from a purely anecdotal standpoint,
about three-quarters of the material would pertain to violations of my own code of speech. I suspect I am no different
from most people. I suspect that most of us are struggling
with our own speech codes more than with any other moral
dilemma. No wonder we jump at the promise of a respite,
such as the largely academic controversy over political correctness: speech code as spectator sport. Anyway, in its present
version, my code looks roughly like this:
1. Speak less. Treat speech in the same way as your doctor
has advised you to treat food. “Try to leave the table onethird less than full.”
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2. Make your needs known. Never be upset for failing to
receive what you never asked for.
3. Complain for the sake of change, or for the sake of camaraderie, but never to get attention or to put on airs.
Complaints are not credentials.
4. Never take offense—or give it—over matters of taste.
Speak of your own passions, but do not denigrate another’s passions. When there is nothing in the world left
to disagree over, then let us have at one another over
music, cuisine, and movies. Let us fight in the streets
over style.
5. Speak nothing but the truth, but seldom all of the
truth. “Telling it all” is tedious in small matters and cruel
in large. Will God ever tell us all the truth about ourselves? Who could bear it?
6. Speak your heart only to those dear to your heart. “Cast
not your pearls before swine.”
7. Listen as though it were a sacred obligation. Take careful note of the correlation between your attentiveness to
others and your aptitude for prayer. Grace for the one
never exists without grace for the other.
8. Coax the quiet and the shy, but do not badger them.
Have an eye out for those who look for an invitation to
speak, and give them one. But do not cater to those who
coyly wait for repeated invitations.
9. Ask more questions than you answer. Refuse questions
that are impertinent or that tempt you to appear more
knowledgeable or convinced than you are.
308 anger in the world

10. Call no one by an epithet. “Whosoever shall say, Thou
fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Names are sacred.
11. Say nothing about another person that you would not
admit in that person’s presence. It will probably find its
way to his ears anyway.
12. Explain yourself to the degree that others wish to understand, not to the degree that you wish to be understood. The wish to be understood absolutely is a violation
of the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other
gods before me.” Only God understands us completely.
13. Never use knowledge or vocabulary to exclude another
person. This is no different from eating bread in the
presence of the hungry.
14. Waste no time with people who deliberately misunderstand you, who caricature what you say in order to attack
it more easily. Pick on someone your own size.
15. Use or abstain from offensive language with an eye to
etymology and connotation. Shit is a fine old word for
an indispensable thing. Fuck is a violent word for a beautiful thing.
16. Be wary of prescribing commandments. Break any code
for the sake of unsentimental compassion. A noble silence
is not always the opposite of noise. Nor is hatred always
the opposite of love. Sometimes dogma is.
:
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It’s interesting that we use the word profanity to refer almost
exclusively to language. Surely we can be profane in other,
nonverbal ways, but we tend to think of profanity as linguistic. It makes sense to me. In some ways, language seems the
most profaned of all human activities, that is, the most careless, the most taken for granted. I have met only a few persons
who behaved like perfect atheists, but I have known a number
who spoke as if they were. Language, with which we make
metaphor, is itself a metaphor of our sins. We gab the way we
drink; extemporize the way men womanize; abuse words the
way we pollute air and water: in the confidence of an endless
supply and in the presumption that anything free for the taking is to be taken without thanks. Maybe that is the reason
Jesus says (in verses no writer loves to hear): “I tell you, on the
day of judgment you will have to give an account for every
careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” The word account suggests that words are no less part of the economy of
creation than are any other resource. They are there to be used,
but to be used with care, to be used in such a way that they
might be used again, by someone else, and where possible to
be made more beautiful than we found them. In short, they
are not to be wasted.
Of course, waste comes in various forms: Things “go bad”
because they are abused and ruined; they also go bad because
they are hoarded and spoil. A wasted word is not only a misspoken word; it can be a word left unsaid. It can be a damned
shame in either case. The word usually translated as “hell” in
the Gospels is Gehenna, the name of the refuse dump outside
of Jerusalem. Here where worshipers of the Canaanite deity
Moloch once brought their children for sacrifice, the Judeans
310 anger in the world

of a more enlightened age burned their garbage. Hell is about
waste. Angry words and angry silence—profanity in all its
forms—often burn down to nothing more or less than the
sinful wasting of our lives.
I remember from my days as a teacher how my students
would often say that “life” was the theme of some story or the
meaning of some symbol that they had been asked to interpret. “It’s about life,” they’d say. To which I’d reply, “Well, it’s
all about life. You have to be a little more specific than that.”
And in the study of literature, I suppose you do. Still, I wish
that before coaxing my students to a different answer, I had
paid more homage to the one they gave. Yes, people, “it is
about life.” Every word, every action requiring a single breath,
is about that finite experience we call life. You may say it is
about the loss of academic standards, or the encroachment of
state government on the rights of local municipalities, or exactly how long it takes one waitress to bring out two cups
of coffee, but it is about life. It would make sense to get angry
over forgetting that, but for the most part we get angry simply
because we forget.
:
The ban of silence imposed by one neighbor on another in a
small New England town has its counterpart in the silences of
even more intimate relationships. One type of silence amounts
to a game that might be called “Guess Why I’m Angry.” The
other more subtle type might be called “Guess What It Takes
to Please Me.” Both kinds have to do with the hypertrophied
mentality we have discussed before: When my head becomes
the whole world, I expect that everyone in the world ought to
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know what’s in my head. In Robert Browning’s poem “My
Last Duchess,” a Renaissance duke explains to a visitor why
he had his last wife put to death. Though she had done nothing
dishonorable, he found her too indiscriminate in her attentions
and too liberal in her gratitude toward others besides the
duke. As the duke goes on to explain, the problem did not lie
in her willful disregard of her husband’s jealousy; it lay
rather in her innocence of it, and in his resolute refusal to enlighten her.
Even had you skill
In speech—which I have not—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessened so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop.
So much for the confessions of one who has no “skill in
speech.” Beyond the pettiness of the duke’s jealousy, one is
appalled at the pride of his reticence. One is more appalled to
think of what he might have learned about another person’s
heart, or what reassurance he might have found for his own,
had he made some attempt to share his insecurity with his
wife. But in his eyes that would be “stooping.” Apparently,
having her murdered was not. The whole situation strikes us
as the extremity of evil—yet most of us have probably acted in
our own versions of the same drama. Someone “ought to have
known” what angered us, and we would not stoop to tell him.
312 anger in the world

But we would stoop, perhaps, to some form of ostracism
or vengeance.
Of course, reticence is not always the result of pride—and
Browning’s poem hints at that too. Sometimes the things
that anger or otherwise hurt us seem too strange for words.
They do not strike us as worthy of mention. Along with codes
of acceptable speech, society maintains a code of acceptable
pain—a code that pain seldom honors. I spoke with a psychiatrist once who told me of a woman he knew who was plunged
into a profound depression because she had broken her grandmother’s hairbrush. Psychiatrists will hear confessions of that
sort, and sometimes priests, but how does one tell such a thing
to a husband or sister? Even if they heard you with all the
sympathy they possessed, how would they understand that
sensation of a fissure opening in reality itself merely because
a hairbrush lies broken on the floor? People lose their children
—of what consequence is a hairbrush? Of course, it is precisely
the insignificance of the accident that gives it its power to mock
and to maim. Mourn a child and the angels mourn with you;
mourn a hairbrush and your dearest friends shake their heads.
If my own meager experience as a priest has taught me
anything, it is these two principles: First, more people are in
pain than you can imagine; and second, the causes of the pain
are also unimaginable. In speech and in silence, in the experience of my anger and in my experience of the anger of others,
I try as best as I am able to remember those principles. Even
if the neighbor giving me the silent treatment were to speak,
she could or would not tell me everything that’s wrong. She
may not even know it herself, and some of what she knows
she would find impossible to confess. Nor could she tell me
everything she “heard” when I offended her. This is not a reason
words 313

to refrain from speaking my mind in her presence. I am willing
to stoop in ways that Browning’s duke disdained, but I will
not stoop to be governed by another’s subjectivity. The worst
tyranny imaginable is a state where everyone is entitled to file
a grievance and no one is required to give an explanation. I
will try to remember, though, that I always exist in the presence of the ineffable and the invisible, which, after all, is the
essence of religion. I am in the world like a rescue worker. My
work requires me to move the debris of Eden using the tools
of language. But with each movement, I must not forget the
survivors who may lie hidden underneath the debris. And
when I happen to be among the injured, I must not be too
proud to announce my presence with a cry.
314 anger in the world

-

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered
virtue . . . that never sallies out to see
her adversary. . . .
John Milton, Areopagitica
:

317
Given the regenerative power of work, and the various pitfalls of speech, I am constantly tempted to believe that
immersion in the first and withdrawal from the second are
the best ways for someone like me to avoid anger. Do your
work, keep quietly to yourself, and you will do less harm into
the bargain. You will also be less vulnerable to harm from
others. You will come as close as possible to peace.
I make these resolutions at the same time as I recognize
that the offensiveness that causes many people to withdraw
from human society is partially the result of that very withdrawal. Perhaps “the barbarians are at the gates” for no better
reason than that the rest of us no longer wish to sit there. We
may protest that this is so because the gates have been overrun by the barbarians, but the matter is more complicated
V ENT URIN G
OUT

than that. The so-called crisis of our public schools is in some
ways a microcosm of this same dilemma. Whenever we pull
back from our neighbors in anger or disgust, we hasten the
decline of our neighborhood. The moral dangers of reclusiveness are well-known and, I think for most of us, deeply felt.
They can be all the more serious when we withdraw for an allegedly moral purpose, such as controlling our anger. Milton’s
argument against censorship of the press can also be applied
to the attempt to self-censor our daily impressions. “I cannot
praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but
slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be
run for, not without dust and heat.”
But the argument I keep having with myself, and that any
person who has read this far is likely to have also, cannot be
settled by a few words from Milton or a few verses from the
Bible. Especially not the Bible, where those who would be
“God’s people” are intermittently challenged with the call to
“come out” (from Sodom, Egypt, Babylon) and the call to “go
forth” (to Canaan, to Nineveh, to “all the world”). The one call
does not cancel out the other. And neither call can be dismissed as a mere temptation.
Without a doubt, we can spare ourselves some anger by
choosing to control some of our stimuli. Refusing to do so is
every bit as childish as trying to control them all. A good part
of adulthood, it seems to me, consists of exercising the privileges of selective association and occupation that childhood
denies us. With apologies to St. Paul, we might state those
privileges like this: When I was a child I ate as I child, I threw
up as a child, I hadn’t the foggiest sense of my own digestion
as a child, but when I became a man I put away those things
318 anger in the world

that make me sick. I learned a long time ago, for example,
that the anger I felt at inconsiderate behavior in a movie theater was equal to or greater than any pleasure I might take
from a film, so I see almost all my movies at home now. Once
in a while, I do go to an “arts theater,” but the behavior there
is not always better than at the popular cinema down the
street from it. The bad manners of the cultured are not all that
different from the bad manners of the young: Both amount
to an irrepressible indignation at the thought that an audience
would find anything more fascinating than the bad-mannered
individuals themselves. So the one type throws around its
candy, and the other throws around its cant.
But unless we intend to become complete hermits—and
the experience of the Desert Fathers reminds us that absolute
isolation is not a foolproof cure for rage—we cannot always
avoid the circumstances that annoy us. I can cut down on the
time that I spend “out there,” but I still have to go to town
sometimes. There too I have tried to make a conscious discrimination between the places where I’m likely to feel comfortable and the places where I’m likely to get annoyed, avoiding the latter as much as possible. But there’s no fast rule
with these things.
The other day, for example, I came perilously close to stepping over the line in a small drugstore of which I’m very fond.
I think of the pharmacy as an oasis—which might actually
have contributed to my anger, since a provocation there was
more likely to enrage me than a provocation somewhere else.
The pharmacist is a wonderful man who walks his little dog
to work with him every morning and hangs portraits of the
entire graduating class of the town high school in his display
windows every May. Behind the counter he has these two
venturing out 319

gregarious women, posted at the register like coanchors on
the morning news, so it’s like the Jane and Judy show every
time you go in, and I love the show. Because the store is on
the main street, they get a lot of walk-ins, poor folk and elderly who come to get their prescriptions filled and perhaps to
get a little medical advice on the cheap. I sometimes wonder
if the patience they find there isn’t a medicine in itself.
To be honest, I wasn’t feeling so well on the day this happened, or I guess I should say “almost happened.” I knew it
too, and in the end the knowledge may have helped me restrain myself. I had just turned around in a parking lot where
some jerk in an obscenely large SUV was giving the horn to
an old woman too timid to break into the flow of traffic. The
two adjoining stores were a discount grocery and a liquor
outlet, so of course I immediately had the SUV guy pegged as
a cheapskate or a drunk, probably both.
A few minutes later, I went to pull into the space in front
of the drugstore and came upon a small child walking off the
curb to get into his mother’s car, which made it impossible to
see him from the street. Fortunately, I was driving with a lot
less belligerence than Mr. SUV, who doubtless would have
plowed the kid into the storefront before he could have located
the reflex to blast him into paralysis with his handy little
horn. And where was Mother while her son was about to walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, that is, off the
curb and into the blind spot of her parked car? She was sitting obliviously in the driver’s seat, wearing what Emerson
once referred to as “the gentlest asinine expression,” as she
gabbed away with another woman on the curb. And immediately I had her pegged, too (what is the wicked impulse that
makes us glance at the driver of a car we pass or that passes
320 anger in the world

us except to stereotype the driver?): college-educated, vaguely
New Age, militantly concerned about radiated vegetables and
secondhand smoke, and utterly unconcerned that her little
boy was walking into an oncoming car. “How to Improve
Your Parenting in Just Two Easy Steps”: Shut up for five seconds and pay attention.
I smiled at the kid. At least I had the grace to do that. And
not to tell the woman about the two steps toward better parenting—I suppose that was a grace also.
Inside the store I waited for the clerks to find my prescription. At the same time a smirking middle-aged man stood
beside the counter and asked the other woman about a new
drug he’d heard advertised as “a female Viagra.” He went on
and on about it. The women seemed at turns mildly amused
and tense. The man was obviously not a stranger to them, but
he was just as obviously not some poor soul who’d lost his
keeper or his mind. Like the woman in the car, he seemed
bright, middle class, almost professorial. He looked something like Norman Mailer might after an all-night poker
game, with his shirt pulled out in anticipation of betting it
on one last losing hand before deciding to fold instead. I left
the store in disgust, got into my car, got out of my car, and
headed back in. I reentered the store to find that the man had
followed one of the clerks behind the counter—the pharmacist was away for some reason—where he continued his witless dissertation about the female Viagra. I asked the other
woman, “Is this guy bothering you?” “No, no,” she whispered.
“It’s all right. We’re used to him.” A few days later she thanked
me profusely for my concern and was a bit more candid
about the difficulties of being “used to him.” I pointedly suggested that she didn’t need to be used to anybody like that.
venturing out 321

Truthfully, I wish that she had given me some pretext for
grabbing, say, a portable commode off the shelf and beating
him about the head with it. Maybe she would have been more
inclined to accept my assistance if she hadn’t sensed how close
to the line I was standing. Why was I so enraged? The poor
taste of the man’s remarks was not even the biggest reason.
Mainly it was his smug awareness that the women were captive to their customer, that they couldn’t just leave the store,
nor did they have much power to make him leave it. What
nearly lost Clarence Thomas his confirmation as a Supreme
Court justice wouldn’t have lost him the time of day as a retail
customer. It’s something I try not to think about whenever I
leave a tip; it makes me want to hand my wallet to the waitress.
But it is something we should try to think about whenever
we’re inclined to prescribe easy rules for the avoidance of anger.
We should remember those men and women whose skills and
bills place them in continual contact with the almighty public. The argument over how far to withdraw from the world is
to some extent an argument of privilege. That said, I wonder if
it’s an argument that any person, however privileged, ever wins.
:
So what would I do to be less angry with the world and less at
odds with myself when I am in it? Two things come to mind.
The first has to do with recognizing my brother or my sister in another angry person. Though this clearly wasn’t the
case at the drugstore, sometimes the people who enrage us
are themselves enraged. We grow angry at them, in part, for
failing to see a reflection of ourselves—or perhaps because we
do see a reflection of ourselves, at some level, and don’t like
322 anger in the world

what we see. We get confused between the demon we’re fighting in our heads and another person who’s fighting the same
demon. In other words, we mistake the person for the demon.
If we could cultivate the discipline of saying, “That is my
brother; that is my spitting, fuming image,” we might find, if
not more peace, then at least more patience. We might also
find the courage to take one of those extraordinary steps that
are sometimes the most effective antidote to anger. So instead
of muttering to ourselves, “What’s his problem?” we might
answer our own question by saying, “Whatever it is, it approximates my problem,” and by going on to say out loud, “I have
days just like the one you’re having, friend. You should see me
when I’m mad. Can I help you out?” We might get nothing
but contempt in return—but I’d rather get a fist in my eye
than seem contemptible to my eye.
I would hate to say anything so trite as “Cultivate a more
positive attitude”—but then I think what I find most trite
about that sentence is not the word attitude but the word positive, with all its connotations of self-hypnosis and playacting.
I’m at least willing to say, Cultivate a more generous attitude,
a more liberal heart. Instead of thinking, “I have to go to the
store this afternoon, so God preserve me from the idiots,” I
might think, or even pray, “I’m going to the store this afternoon. God, help me to recognize my siblings and bless them.”
Maybe this is the best way to interpret “the mark of Cain”
that we read about in Genesis. We sometimes forget that a mark
was placed on the first murderer so that those who found
him would not kill him, and I wonder if the mark is nothing
other than the predilection toward rage that makes murder
possible and the danger of violence recognizable. If we sons
and daughters of Cain have to wander the earth anyway, what
venturing out 323

better way to pass the journey than to look for others with
the same mark and to make them know that they are not
alone and need not despair?
The second approach has to do with opening our eyes not
only to the rage that mirrors our own, but to the mercy and
kindness that reduce all rage to shame. This may be one reason that some religions enjoin pilgrimage on their members:
Going to see the relics of the saints, we meet their flesh and
blood descendants on the road.
Recently some friends of mine, a husband and wife with
two young children, a toddler and a nursing infant, drove from
northeastern Vermont to Georgia in order to attend a wedding
there. They did not have the greatest car. The first time it broke
down, a Puerto Rican tractor trailer driver pulled off the road
to help them. Under the hood, in need of a sharp-edged tool,
he took out a knife and grinned at the father. “What good’s
a Puerto Rican without a knife?” he joked. He followed the
family through three states, delaying his own deliveries and
his own homecoming, stopping for four or five additional
breakdowns. Though my friends must have experienced any
number of occasions for road rage on such a long trip, what
effect could those occasions have had so long as a dieseldriving angel flew behind them? They made it to their wedding. May their guardian also come safely to the Marriage
Fiesta.
Of course, we don’t have to leave home in order to recognize how often what we take for danger turns out to be grace.
The reversals that happen in literature or in strange places
can also happen in our own backyards. Wherever they happen,
they serve to remind us that anger often comes of premature
conclusions. The old advice about “counting to ten” has as
much to do with letting all the data come in as with keeping
324 anger in the world

all of our bile from spewing out. One summer afternoon when
my wife and I were new to the Northeast Kingdom, she saw
from the porch of our second-floor apartment a delivery truck
go lumbering down our side street, where the driver tossed
what seemed to be a handful of litter out his window. My wife
hates litter with a passion, as do I, and she was immediately
angry. But in the same split second that it took for her mind
to form the words “You slob,” she noticed that the truck was
a candy truck, and the litter was candy. Her epiphany closed
with the fingers of several children standing on the sidewalk,
who caught it in midair at the same instant as she “got it”
in midcurse.
Anger is often nothing more than a hasty judgment registered as a nasty emotion. Anger can result from a failure to
acknowledge the full narrative sweep of life, how events unfold, how characters develop, how interpretations fail. One of
my favorite parables outside those of the gospel has to do
with a friend of my wife who probed a single mystery among
the many that formed her small rural community. What she
found, in the end, was simply more mystery.
The friend was living way out in Victory, Vermont, a remote township with the double distinction of being perched
above a bog and of being the last place in the state to receive
electricity. During the course of earning her master’s degree,
this friend found it necessary to commute several times a
week from Victory to the state university in Burlington, a good
hundred miles away. Coming home late at night, she would
see an old man sitting by the side of her road. He was always
there, in subzero temperatures, in stormy weather, no matter
how late she returned. He made no acknowledgment of her
passing. The snow settled on his cap and shoulders as if he
were merely another gnarled old tree.
venturing out 325

She often wondered what brought him to that same spot
every evening—what stubborn habit, private grief, or mental
disorder. I wonder if she didn’t sometimes begin to doubt her
senses, or believe in ghosts.
Finally, she asked a neighbor of hers, “Have you ever seen
an old man who sits by the road late at night?”
“Oh, yes,” said her neighbor, “many times.”
“Is he . . . a little touched upstairs? Does he ever go home?”
“He’s no more touched than you or me,” her neighbor
laughed. “And he goes right home after you do. You see, he
doesn’t like the idea of you driving by yourself out late all
alone on these back roads, so every night he walks out to wait
for you. When he sees your taillights disappear around the
bend, and he knows you’re okay, he goes home to bed.”
I can think of several ridiculous places to take a story like
this. Perhaps the most ridiculous is to deny the possibility
that the man we see at the side of a road is a serial killer. All
we can say in the light of this story and of the several that
precede it is that folly comes of pretending to know the world
better than it can actually be known. Anger can be one form
of that folly. Anger can amount to a bitter certainty that admits to no surprise. Anger is like a young man who takes
every flirtation as evidence that women are laughing at him.
To expect no surprises is to give no quarter, show no faith,
have no fun.
:
Side by side, then, with the tempting resolution to stay home
and stay focused, I would place this corollary: that I go out
326 anger in the world

deliberately with the aim of claiming kinship with my angry
brothers and sisters and with the additional aim of developing a richer heart. “It is not good for the man to be alone,”
God says in Genesis, and in Isaiah tells us “not to hide yourself from your own flesh.”
Samuel Johnson, an irascible man easily susceptible to annoyances, once said that “There is nothing which has yet been
contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as
by a good tavern or inn.” A man who not only got mad but
was also afraid of going mad, Johnson realized how important human company could be in saving the mind from its
own delusions. Avoiding those places and situations that are
bound to enrage us is one thing, but withdrawing from all
human contact is like attempting to avoid food poisoning by
going without food. Sometimes we need to eat out almost as
much as we need to eat.
I love to eat where the customers know one another and
the proprietor knows the customers, where a little background
noise buys a lot of intimacy, where the cooks and servers have
names, and dishes may even have nicknames. I know a restaurant where there’s a waitress who’s outlasted at least four different owners. I’m probably not the only person who thinks
of the place as belonging to her, though it does not. She’s
friendly, extremely efficient, and as my wife likes to say, “full
of beans.” I remember one lunchtime when a lanky working
man asked her with the bright-eyed eagerness of a small boy,
“What can you tell me about that pot roast with gravy?”—one
of the specials chalked on the board. “Well,” she said placing
one plump hand on her hip and tossing her hair back, “it’s a
pot roast . . . and it comes with gravy.” She let loose a merry
shriek. He smiled sheepishly and ordered the pot roast.
venturing out 327

Change the setting and you have a fine little Zen mondo
there: “A monk once came to Hui-neng and inquired, ‘What
can you tell me about the pot roast with gravy?’ The master
roared with laughter and said . . .” Isn’t the master also laughing at our petulance? As a purely cerebral condition, as the
bodyguard of our preconditions—a mastiff ready to bite when
all the worst things we have imagined come to pass—anger
can exist as a denial of contradictory evidence, of mystery, of
experience itself. And the fear of anger can lead to this very
same denial. “I might get mad, so I’d better stay home. I’d better play it safe.”
A more abundant life, on the other hand, belongs to those
who remain brave enough to try the daily special. It cannot be
tasted through an explanation or processed through any one
emotion. It’s a pot roast, and it comes with gravy.
328 anger in the world

-

It was as if that great rush of anger
had washed me clean. . . .
Albert Camus, The Stranger
:

331
According to an apocryphal story, a woman once came before Napoleon and accused one of his officers of rape.
Imagining himself a late Solomon, the emperor handed the
woman a sword and commanded her to insert it into a scabbard as he moved it back and forth in front of her. When she
failed, he acquitted the officer. His point was as obvious as his
analogy was anatomically ridiculous: There is no such thing
as rape.
I have imagined this scene many times: the supercilious
emperor wiggling his scabbard; the woman at first grimly and
then frantically attempting to bring the sword point to the
opening; the other officers, very probably including her rapist,
mocking her efforts, inflating the little man’s vanity with
their laughter. The sword grows heavy in her hand; it loses
NAPOLEON ’S
TEST

altitude, prompting one of the regimental wits to charge her
with a lack of ardor. Perhaps the woman’s mind begins to be
violated by the inadmissible suggestion that she has not told
the truth, that she was not raped after all. She reddens, she
sweats, she redoubles her efforts. But with each vain thrust,
with each new burst of laughter, the monstrous insinuation
pushes itself further into her conscience, even as everything
she knows and has experienced resists it.
A part of what makes this scene so horrible to contemplate
is the proximity of her vindication. The solution to Napoleon’s
absurd puzzle is literally in her hand. If only she would raise
the point to his neck and say, “Hold still, bitch.”
The story makes us angry, or it ought to, but Napoleon’s
test might also serve as a parable about anger itself. The story
represents the terms of a game that all of us have played, in one
form or another, until overcome by failure and fury. Perhaps
we drop the sword and run weeping from the room. Perhaps we
use it to cut our own throats or, in a gesture that leads inevitably to the same outcome, we thrust it into the emperor’s
bowels.
The endings vary, but the beginning is the same: We are
appointed some test that promises vindication. It will exonerate us, prove us, set us above reproach. It will show that we
are sincere believers, genuine heroes, true friends, real women
or men. Invariably, it is a false test based on false premises
and spurious analogies. Still, we play. We hold out the sword,
we aim for the shifting aperture that is supposed to represent
us or a part of us. We hold justice in our hands, but we are
unable to see it as anything else but a game piece given to us
by the designer of the game. One more thrust, we think, just
a bit more effort and concentration, and we shall prevail. Our
332 anger in the world

determination is at least as great as our tormentor’s amusement. Like the woman, we know that we can do it, for the
simple reason that we know something like “it” was done to
us. After all, truth is on our side. But we have already forsaken
the truth by accepting the terms of the lie that has been
foisted upon us. In other words, we lost at the very moment
that we allowed ourselves to be convinced that our predicament was a game we could win.
The answer to this moral riddle will vary from life to life.
I cannot claim even to know all the ways it answers in my
own. But I think I know how to pose the relevant questions.
What is the false test I have accepted? What do I hope to
prove by taking it? And is there a sword that has been placed
in my hand as part of that very test, by which the test might
be destroyed?
:
A woman asked me what I was writing these days, and then
she asked what I knew was coming next, “Why anger?”
I gave her my stock reply. It is an emotion I know well, I
said, an emotion with which I have struggled. And the struggle is made poignant by certain beliefs that I hold as a Christian, a humanist, and “a progressive” in my politics if not in my
bets. I gave a fair answer to her question. But I can take her
question further. When exactly did I first start writing about
this emotion and why? I discover that I can give a specific answer, an exact set of coordinates that locate the origins of the
project. Granted, I have always had a temper. I have never
been a laid-back type. But there was a recent period in my life
napoleon’s test 333

when I was angrier than usual, and angry more often. At least
two things were making that so.
For one thing, I had become a supervisor of other workers,
something I had never anticipated becoming. I had worked
for seven years as a high school English teacher. I was considered a fairly good one, and I think that I was, if not quite
so good as I was reputed to be. Without any changes in the
job or in my approach to it, I probably would have bowed out
or burned out in a few years. There was simply no way to do
right by a hundred students according to their needs and my
standards and still have a life outside of school. I had always
believed, and I had always hoped, that I was there for the
short term.
Then my department head, who had also become my
friend, died of cancer. I was with her throughout the last
months of her life, and it was during that time that she told
me I could probably fill her position if I wanted it. She gave
me some advice, and she gave me her blessing. After her death
I was indeed offered the position, and I accepted. It felt like a
legacy that I ought not refuse. It also felt like the provisional
solution to a perennial problem: With fewer classes to teach,
I could do a better job teaching—and I could be a halfway
decent father and husband too. In exchange for a little more
responsibility, a little more stress, I could “achieve balance.”
In other words, I could get the sword into the scabbard.
To some extent, I suppose that I was able to manage—the
schedule, but not the stress. Suddenly I was called upon to
solve problems that were not of my making, along with the
usual problems that were. Often caught at what seemed like
an impossible juncture of con artistry, dysfunction, and pride
—the student’s, the system’s, and mine, respectively—I was
334 anger in the world

forever trying to prove what could not be proven, to fix what
could not be fixed. I assumed that if the world really worked,
if I really worked, then there had to be some formula by which
education, equality, excellence, and ego could all assert their
rightful claims, with yours truly as the arbiter. It was mad.
It was also ironic. I had become a teacher out of a love for
reading and writing, in addition to an appreciation for young
people and a preference for working on my own in my own
space. And there I was, without time to read and write, a distracted mentor to the children I taught and frequently an
official adversary of the children I didn’t, as well as a team
captain who had never even wanted to be on a team. Of course,
we can chalk up that kind of irony to what Samuel Johnson
called “the vanity of human wishes” and the writer of Ecclesiastes simply called “vanity.” In other words, we can point to
a principle of futility that operates in most human endeavors.
But notice how we use vanity to denote both that futility and
the pride of our hearts. How much of what we do in vain is
done because we are vain?
So it was the job that was making me so angry, but only in
part. This was not my only “problem with school.” At the same
time, I watched with increasing despair as my own daughter
was jostled about in an overcrowded elementary school taught
by overloaded teachers and populated by undernurtured kids.
Behind the scenes was an underpaid, undereducated community that I seldom met—our village having not so much as
a general store—except on those occasions when they massed
in the town hall to hack apart a school budget. I found it as
hard to direct my anger as to manage it. I was never sure
whom to blame. For the first time since graduate school, I
discovered that there were people I despised. I can remember
napoleon’s test 335

hearing the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself”
as though it had been written to mock me.
Of course, we were all being mocked in one way or another. The favorite practical joke of deprivation is to make
enemies out of people who ought to form a united front. And
schools contain enough mockery of their own: cruelty, boredom, purposelessness beyond imagining. Have you ever played
the mental game of going one worse than the worst; for
example, what could be worse than slave labor? Answer: slave
labor that does not even benefit the master. Slave labor that
is debased beyond exploitation. Picking cotton and carrying
it to the dump. Doing homework that no one sees, writing
papers that no one reads, taking exams that no one reviews
with you. Drowning by degrees in the presence of lifeguards
who think their primary job is to make a little mark every
time your head goes under water. Critics of education mount
the most swaybacked of high horses when they accuse “the
educational establishment” of teaching selfish values, crass
materialism, blind conformity. I’d take any one of these over
the didacticism of despair, the idea that work is meaningless
except as dues for the right to play. The best thing that many
schools teach is resignation, the grim hope that comes of
learning that “this too shall pass.” Critics complain that too
few graduates are prepared for life, but they might at least
give the devil his due by acknowledging how well many of
them have been prepared for death.
Then one day I heard my daughter tell her mother: “I’m
not good at anything.” This when I was working twelve to
fourteen hours a day so that other people’s kids could discover that they were good at some things and be able to feel
good about themselves into the bargain. But could I be certain
336 anger in the world

that I had not made at least a few of them feel exactly the
same way? Something broke with those words. I asked for a
year’s unpaid leave, bought a bunch of books, and told the
state office of education that my daughter would be spending
her sixth-grade year at home.
I have to be honest and say that I did this as much to save
my own soul as to rescue my kid. I did what I did because I
was being consumed by anger. I suppose I have anger to thank,
along with God and the liberal laws of the state of Vermont,
for one of the happiest years of my life. Part of what distinguishes that year is how free it was of anger. It was certainly
full of challenge. I was the superintendent, teacher, bus
driver, nurse, and cook of my own school. And this wasn’t
one of those you-go-be-creative-while-I write-my-novel setups;
I could account for every minute. I did my lesson plans as always, hour blocks of “traditional” school in the morning,
hands-on projects in the afternoon. We did a simulated archeological dig at the site of an abandoned farmhouse in the
woods. We took over an upscale restaurant for an evening, with
our own menu, our own cooking, and my daughter’s friends
helping out as waitresses. We visited fossilized coral reefs and
interviewed farmers, scientists, and state troopers. My daughter scrubbed up and assisted a pediatrician in examining a
baby thirteen hours old. We played Handel, chess, and hooky.
At the end of the year, she returned to the classroom (though
we did manage an encore between the eighth and ninth
grades). Her father did not.
The experience taught me a few things about anger, about
myself, about my fellow human beings. I needed merely to
mention what I was doing, for example, to put certain people
immediately on the defensive. “I’d be very concerned by the
napoleon’s test 337

lack of socialization,” they’d tell me. Sometimes I would
explain that we had addressed their concern by seeing that
my daughter had art and music at the town school, and by involving her peers in some of our projects. At other times I
merely quipped that there had been socialization at Alcatraz
too. Homeschooling, like other forms of abstinence, tends to
be interpreted as an accusation by those who do not abstain.
The teetotaler, the vegetarian, and the virgin are invariably
heard as shouting, “Drunkard!” “Butcher!” and “Slut!” even
if all they have actually said is, “No, thank you.” Another part
of the anatomy of anger, I guess: anger as guilt.
I was more sympathetic to parents who told me, often in
the tone of someone making a confession, that they lacked
the training, the money, or the patience to take such a radical
step. To these I would say, “Maybe you also lack a good reason.”
Why do it if you don’t have to? The experience of teaching my
own child at home was so valuable for me precisely because,
inveterate moralizer that I am, I could extract so few morals
from it. In some sense, it solved nothing, not even for us.
Seen from a practical perspective, it was reckless and irresponsible. For what it cost our household in income, we could
have paid for a year’s tuition at Harvard. Seen from another
perspective, it was tantamount to an admission of defeat. A
sword had been placed in my hand with which I was supposed to slay all the dragons of ignorance (without giving any
one of them so much as a scratch, of course), and I used it instead to come to my own child’s defense. Hardly an altruistic
decision. I didn’t care. The question of “What if everybody
did it?” had no meaning for me. Everybody did not do it,
everybody could not do it, everybody did not need to do it. I
did, I could, and I felt that I had to.
338 anger in the world

In an earlier chapter, I characterized the anger of men like
Agamemnon and Saul as growing out of a fatalistic conception of life, the “shit happens” philosophy on a grand scale.
In some sense, it was happening to me—the shit and the philosophy both—and in some ways I had been cooperating with
the process. Agamemnon holding the sacrificial knife over his
daughter is not all that different from Napoleon’s suppliant
trying to get the sword into his wiggling scabbard: The disgrace that they believe will come of “just walking away” is
already assured. They will be disgraced no matter what they
do. That is not to say that they have lost all freedom. It’s only
to say that sometimes the offer you can’t refuse turns out to
be the one offer that you can.
:
I have spent a good part of this book looking at occasions
when I have been angry, hoping that the reader might do the
same, if that seemed useful. But it is every bit as important,
perhaps more important, to identify those occasions when
we have not been angry at all, when we might have been
but weren’t. Or when we began in anger, and then rose to
something else. That was certainly the experience I had in
homeschooling. Anger sometimes works like the first stage of
a rocket. Without it, you’ll have a hard time getting off the
ground. But if you cannot at some point let it go, it will only
pull you back to the ground once its fuel is spent. You will
rise a ways only to crash. So it is never enough merely to ask,
When did I blast off in some rage only to burn out before I
got anywhere? It is also good to ask, When have I blasted off
only to find myself in a whole different orbit?
napoleon’s test 339

Not long ago as I write, the state of Vermont became the
first in the nation to legalize the covenants of gay and lesbian
couples. The bill provided for the formation of civil unions, a
term intended to make a distinction from marriage, though
couples so joined could count on nearly all the rights and
benefits that married couples do.
The reaction here in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont
was not so ugly as it might have been, but against the backdrop of hate crimes elsewhere in the nation, it was scary
enough. Identical placards, black lettering on white, began to
appear on the roadsides, nailed to barns and houses, and
in bumper sticker form on the backs of cars and pickups:
“Take Back Vermont.” A few of the signs appeared, literally, in
the treetops. The slogan was purported to cover several grievances, including school funding and land use laws, but no
one doubted that the central issue, the straw that broke the
camel’s back, was civil unions. Some of the protests were not
so subtle: Another usually smaller bumper sticker read: “Instead of a Deer, Kill a Queer.”
After decades of my daydreaming about a grassroots revolt in the hinterlands, this was the form it took. Steal our
farms, freeze our wages, stunt the growth of our children,
poison our lakes and streams—and what finally mobilizes the
masses? Two sixty-year-old lesbians joining hands on a cake
knife. Any populist bone left in my body broke there. I knew
from experience that some of those who posted the signs would
have given their lives to protect those women from attack,
but their willingness to throw in their lot with the rest was
not reassuring. And what was even more depressing than the
revolt was the relatively limp response to it. There were almost no signs challenging the others. I may have counted two
340 anger in the world

or three “Vermont: Keep It Civil” signs on front lawns. I did
not see one sign of that sort affixed to a house, nor did I have
any intention of affixing one to my own. A few people wrote
letters to the local newspapers urging tolerance, but these
were easily outnumbered by the weekly succession of diatribes—many adorned with a full complement of biblical
quotations—that sometimes enlarged the letters-to-the-editor
section to several full pages.
It was evident to me that people were afraid, that I was
afraid, to identify my house as belonging to a queer-sympathizer. And I think that some of those who put up the “Take
Back Vermont” signs could smell that fear and were invigorated by it far more than they were inspired by any homophobia.
Disenfranchised rednecks, many of them, often those standing in stony silence at the backs of town meeting halls, now
they were the vocal majority. The liberals were the tongue-tied
ones for a change. One could sense the heady thrill of it, what
I imagine it was like to loot the houses of your “betters” in
company with other Brown Shirts.
I began to wonder how long it would be before some gay
kid was found beaten to death in a roadside ditch. I began to
anticipate my own remorse at having said nothing. (I did manage to deliver a sermon on the issue, which was not exactly
preaching to the choir, but close. Our bishop had already endorsed civil unions.) And I began to grow angry, not only at
the imaginary sight of that young man’s body being pulled
from the ditch, or even at the very real sight of “Take Back
Vermont” signs posted ever-so-indignantly on the front lawns
of individuals known to be wife beaters or pedophiles, but
at the bother and the time it would cost me to do my duty as
a writer and a priest in my community. Truthfully, when I
napoleon’s test 341

imagine participating in the Underground Railroad, I can
hear my voice muttering angrily in the shadows of the lantern
light, outraged at slavery not only because of the misery it has
brought to my fellow human beings but also because of the
extra chore it has given to me. One more goddamn thing I’m
supposed to do.
Anyway, a few weeks before the election, I delivered a letter
to the local newspaper. I drove it to the office, about fifteen
miles away, and when I came home, my wife met me in
the driveway with the portable phone. The editor had read the
letter—she must have read fast, or I must have driven slow, for
it was thousands of words above their stated length limit—
and she was printing it entire. My wife later confided to me
that although she had resolved not to pressure me to write on
the subject, she was relieved that I had decided to do so on my
own. “I think there were people expecting to hear from you,”
she said.
I guess there were. Within hours after the paper (a weekly)
came out, I began to hear from some of them—all in praise of
what I had written. It was as if I had lanced a sore. A woman
from my parish whom I thought might never speak to me
again called to say that “we needed a different perspective.”
Another parishioner had phoned an hour before to tell me
about her two gay relatives, both of them news to me. A
farmer’s wife called and described how she had read the letter
to her husband while he worked on the barn roof; a tolerant
man, he had not tumbled off. A former student wrote to tell
me how he and two of his companions had read the piece
aloud on a truck trip to deliver maple syrup to New York.
“Kick-ass writing!” one of them had exclaimed—the best review
I ever got. Two Quakers, parents of former students, wrote me
separate letters of appreciation, sealed in the same envelope,
342 anger in the world

like the homely metaphor for a marriage. An older gay couple
e-mailed the newspaper to say that they would “make Mr.
Keizer’s article required reading—if we believed in such a
thing as required reading.”
But the response that moved me most came from a gentlevoiced young man who called and would only identify himself
as “Brian.” Sometimes you intuit things in the same mystical
way as you intuit them in dreams, and I knew almost immediately that Brian was the young man whose battered body
had tormented my waking thoughts—not that my letter had
saved him (would his attackers have even bothered to read my
three-thousand-word epistle, much less allowed themselves to
be swayed by it?) but that my vision had been of a real person,
now met briefly over the phone.
The story of my letter does not end with that catharsis,
however. And there is something I should like my Quaker
friends to know. My waking nightmares of Brian had been
dreamed side by side with waking nightmares of an attack on
my own house, of bullets fired through my living room windows, or someone setting fire to our barn. Even before my
letter was published, I went and purchased a lightweight, cutdown, pump action, rapid-cycling, twelve-gauge shotgun. It
was not my first gun, but it represented the loss of my last
illusion about owning one. No one uses a weapon like that
for target practice. No one hunts with it either. It has one
purpose—or, I guess, two cross-purposes: to kill someone, or
to convince him that you will. And yes, I could imagine all the
earnest voices asking me, “What would Jesus say?” Well, according to tradition, Moses said that two men lying together
is an abomination. Funny, isn’t it, how quickly liberals become
biblical literalists when it suits their argument.
Or how quickly Christians turn aside from the gospel
napoleon’s test 343

when it doesn’t suit their fear. I had some hard questions to
face. I had arrayed myself against the majority of Christians
in my neck of the woods with my letter, and I would certainly
have alienated most of the remainder with my gun. What
kind of a Christian was I—what kind of a person even? Perhaps no one has given a better answer than my first-grade
teacher, who wrote on my very first report card: “He worries
so!” But then, if I did not worry so, or act on my worries, I
would not have written on behalf of Brian.
The main point of all this is how far I had traveled from
being angry. As soon as I put pen to paper, my anger began to
disappear. In fact, most of those who praised my letter cited
its lack of rancor—even as I compared the “Take Back Vermont” signs to the Nicht Juden signs posted outside German
villages in the late 1930s—its humor, its attempt to understand some of the frustrations of my opponents. By the time
I test-fired the gun, which plowed out a great trough of snow
in front of me, I felt nothing but a dreadful sense of compassion, not just for the victims of bigotry this time, but for the
bigots too. I wanted no harm to come to any of them. Is this
what it means to love your enemy? I wondered. And are we
best able to love our neighbors as ourselves when we have at
last recognized how much we resemble them?
For it was glaringly obvious to me then; I suddenly saw
the gun in my hand for what it was: incontrovertible proof
that I was a redneck too, armed and dangerous. Political differences aside, I inhabited the same mental landscape of outrage
and perceived threat. Opposing a group of people with words,
and prepared to oppose them, if necessary, with deadly
force, I discovered that I resembled them more closely than I
did many of “my own kind.” Failing to fit my heart into the
344 anger in the world

wiggling scabbards of “biblical morality” and nonviolent resistance, I found out what I really was, which turned out to be
nothing more than what my religion had always said I was: a
sinner, and of a rather undistinguished regional variety. I am
neither dismayed nor encouraged by that thought. I am simply
humbled by it, humbled, you might say, at a point beyond
rage. “Just as I am . . . O Lamb of God, I come.”
:
The refusal to take Napoleon’s test is a refusal to justify yourself on someone else’s terms. It may also be an acceptance of
one’s place in history. As glib as the statement may sound, I
invite anyone to test it against experience. A truly contemporary
man or woman is seldom angry in a seething, self-destructive
way. He or she may be intensely angry—but no more intensely
than purposefully. The anger has some point, and some
threshold beyond which it is able to become something else.
One of the larger tasks for any thoughtful person who is
also a religious person is that of discerning the grace of his or
her generation. To ask, What is the unique opportunity of my
time? We know people who are adept at noting the follies of
their times; this too is a gift, but not the greatest or most useful. Likewise, we know people who have an unerring sense of
“what’s new” and of catching every wave as soon as it crests.
This may be a gift as well, providing that some resilience comes
with it. New waves will leave us high and dry otherwise. But
what I’m talking about here is something else, a combination
of insight and appreciation that sees more in the moment
than the latest “shit happening.”
napoleon’s test 345

It seems to me that one grace of our era is the chance to
achieve personal honesty at a fairly sophisticated level. The
reason is not that we have become less prone to conformity
than our predecessors, but that the currents to be conformed
to are presently so numerous and complex that in the end
you can’t be something you’re not for the one simple reason
that you can’t even figure out what that something is. And
even if you succeeded, there are others so needy to establish
their own identities that they feel compelled to deny the authenticity of yours. You may think you’re a real environmentalist, a real feminist, a real black man (what’s an unreal one
look like, do you suppose?), but you’re not. I’m describing an
epiphany that might occur at the moment when all the officers in Napoleon’s entourage also take out their scabbards
and wave them in front of your face or when, seized by sympathy or malice, they all take your right hand at the same time,
but with varying angles of perception, and attempt to guide
the sword into the emperor’s scabbard. It’s the moment when
you simply have to give up the game. A certain degree of frustration departs with that decision, and a certain degree of peace
takes it place. I’m reminded of a quote by Andrea Dworkin
(which I sent to a school principal I know, who now carries it
in his wallet): “On one level I suffer terribly from the disdain
that much of my work has met. On another, deeper level, I
don’t give a fuck.”
Sometimes the grace of our era is made flesh in the struggles
of a particular group. If that holds true for the present time,
then I think the gay and lesbian experience of “coming out”
most nearly embodies the grace I’m trying to describe. It is the
grace of giving up the pretense of fitting into an “unnatural”
—that is, unnatural for you—set of expectations. I’m not sure
346 anger in the world

that we in the straight world have fully reckoned how courageous and how political an act this is. We think of it as political only in the sense that yet another disenfranchised group
is standing up to be counted. But coming out strikes me as of
the very essence of what it means to be political: It’s not an
example; it’s practically the definition. A “love that dares not
speak its name” can also be a cozy love, within certain bounds,
a rather safe love. Anonymity brings immunity and, in the
most furtive way, a community of refuge. But the decision to
“come out” is also a decision to come in to the larger circle,
and to do so as no one but your undisguised self. It may require some anger to take that step. But it also involves a forsaking of anger, the renunciation of the Napoleonic test with
all of its attendant frustrations. Perhaps it may best be understood as a recapitulation of the divine revelation, where God
identifies himself to Moses with the words “I Am Who I Am.”
The Lord is finally “out” in the burning bush, and calls his
people “out” too—out of Egypt, out of the closet of historical
obscurity.
Writing this book has been an experience of coming out for
me, out as a Christian, out also as a man with “un-Christian”
thoughts and with emotions that are not easy to own. I worry
about how these ruminations will be received, by the critics
I hope to impress, by the editors of publications for which I
hope to keep writing, by the members of a religious community
to which I hope always to belong. But then there comes that
point of release, beyond anxiety or anger, when I find myself
repeating the last words of Camus’s character Meursault just
before his execution. (And publishing a book has always felt
to me like an execution, just as writing it feels like the heady
flight of a fugitive.) Meursault becomes angry, perhaps for
napoleon’s test 347

the first time in his passive life, when a priest comes to his jail
cell to comfort and convert him. Finally, Meursault is forced
to assert who he is, and who he is not. He is “out,” in other
words. And although what he takes to be “the benign indifference of the universe” I worship as benignity of a different
sort, I feel very close to him now as I near my own final chapter.
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me
clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the
dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the
first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign
indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself,
indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been
happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained
to hope was that on the day of my execution there
should be a huge crowd of spectators and that
they should greet me with howls of execration.
348 anger in the world

-

I have now spent fifty five years in resolving, having
from the earliest time almost that I can remember
been forming schemes of a better life. I have done
nothing; the need of doing therefore is pressing,
since the time of doing is short.
Samuel Johnson, September 18, 1764
About six in the evening
:

351
I
have a friend, a retired professor, who relieved some of the
poverty of his postgraduate years by working as a night
watchman on the Harvard campus. Books were a luxury for
him then, and the kind of big book that comes off the scholarly presses in limited hardcover editions was way over his
budget. So for a few minutes of each shift, he went into the
library, searched with his flashlight for the volume containing
Samuel Johnson’s journal, carried it to the photocopier, and
reproduced several pages. Then he resumed his watch. Eventually he had the whole volume, which means he also had the
quotation on the page facing this one.
He would have had a number of other entries much like it,
usually penned on Johnson’s birthday or on the first day of
the new year, or on the anniversary of his wife’s death. Each
one laments the failure of his previous resolutions; each one
SOM EDAY
YOU W I LL

professes his intention to resolve again. It moves me to think,
not only of Johnson resolving and resolving, year after year,
just as I do, but of my friend assembling his photocopied pages
like the fragments of a treasure map, matching his dark nights
to Johnson’s, his poverty, his tenuous hopes to those of the
writer. I love to conjure up that image even more than I love
to conjure up the image of him shocking his dinner guests
one evening not long ago by noting that he detected “a good
deal of anger in our friend Garret.” Not Garret surely! “Oh,
yes,” he averred. “That’s a very angry boy.”
Perhaps I would have been offended by the comment,
which I was not present to hear, except that my friend confided it to me. He was not needling me, either—I had told him
what I was writing, and then he told me what he had said. He
meant that I knew the material. He meant to say, and by way
of reassurance, that I may have fooled others, but I had not
fooled him. There is a distinct comfort in being known, is there
not? I shake my head whenever I hear some well-meaning cleric
argue for removing still more of the penitential language from
the Book of Common Prayer: “Why do we have to keep beating
people over the heads with the idea that they’re bad?” she will
say. Because, I reply, they already know they’re bad and thus can
take comfort from the acknowledgment. The only thing more
painful than the remorse of feeling wicked is the loneliness of
being told that you’re good. All that “I’m okay, you’re okay”
means to me is “I’m completely oblivious, and you’re completely
alone.” Praise me for nothing but my struggle.
And there was my consolation: If my friend could sense my
anger, then perhaps he sensed my struggle as well. What had
led him, after all, to photocopy those pages—not of Rasselas or
The Rambler, The Lives of the Poets, or even Boswell’s entertain352 anger in the world

ing Life, but the journals—if not his profound appreciation of
Johnson as one who took stock of himself in the night, the
better to soldier on in the morning. (Or I guess it would have
to be the afternoon—Johnson had a notoriously hard time getting out of bed in the morning.) Every so often some purveyor
of reheated iconoclasm attempts to get our attention by claiming that the hero of Boswell’s biography might not have been
such a nice man. He was not a nice man. Even Boswell knew
that. He was a good man, and if you really want to get a rise out
of people nowadays, try suggesting that the two things are
not necessarily the same. In fact, I suspect they are very rarely
the same.
And yet isn’t it wicked to believe that they are never the
same? How many forms of self-righteousness are based on just
that belief? Which brings us to what I think was the essence
of Johnson’s inner struggle: the effort to avoid all the selfswindling—the “cant” as he liked to call its verbal form—that
inevitably results, depending on one’s predisposition, in either
a “nice” hypocrite or a shallow curmudgeon.
Johnson seemed born to struggle, and not only with his
petulance, though that is the main reason for celebrating him
here. He was partially blind, partially deaf, possessed of various nervous tics and peculiar mannerisms as well as an appearance that many found ugly (a childhood infection with
scrofula having scarred his face). He suffered bouts of depression so severe that at one point he seems to have bought a lock
and chain in anticipation of his being carted off to the madhouse. Recalling one such period of “melancholy” that had
seized him in his youth, he said that he could stare at the
church clock in his hometown for the better part of a morning
without being able to tell the time.
someday you will 353

He also struggled for much of his life with poverty—sometimes walking the streets of London all night because he had
no place to sleep—and even his harshest critics have never denied his lifelong concern for the poor. For years he maintained
a household of quarrelsome dependents that included a blind
woman poet, a tentatively reformed prostitute, a freed African
slave (and in time, his dependents), and a doctor whose indigent patients paid him, when they paid at all, with free drinks
he did not have the heart to turn down. (“Perhaps the only
man,” Johnson noted, “who ever became intoxicated through
motives of prudence.”) At its best, Johnson’s anger, like all the
best forms of anger, was aroused by any show of callousness
toward human misery. His famously scathing review of a
book suggesting that human beings were the unwitting playthings of superior powers is but one example. His rebuke of
the fastidious Mrs. Thrale when she turned up her nose at the
foul odors coming from the cookshops of a poor neighborhood
is another. “Hundreds of your fellow-creatures, dear Lady,
turn another way, that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge-Island to wish for gratifications they are not
able to obtain.”
But not all of his retorts were so philanthropic. Some of
his more choleric remarks are painful for an admirer to read;
on occasion they also seem to have been painful for Johnson,
who would go out of his way to make amends when he judged
himself to have spoken too harshly. Several of his put-downs
have taken on the patina of legend—“I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding”—
but for the person who was their object, they may have taken
on the patina of a permanent scar. A lot of Johnson’s anger
strikes one as the result of a seething impatience, a kind of
intellectual road rage that flared up at the slow pace of the
354 anger in the world

traffic, the sly detours and self-serving maneuvers of the
other drivers. “The woman’s a whore, and there’s an end on
it,” he growled during a conversation about a certain lady’s
marital adventures. I wonder if he was talking mainly about
the woman, or if he was merely challenging the others to say
what they really meant. In either case, the man who once carried a passed-out prostitute home on his broad back, and
whose powers of association seem virtually unmatched by
any English speaker on record, could not have uttered such a
remark without instantly recalling the savior who supped
with “harlots and publicans.” He could not easily have reproached others without suffering reproach from himself.
The inner struggles of Johnson boil down in many cases
to the plight of a man who was a Christian by conviction, but
not by disposition. Or we might rather say, who was a Christian
by settled conviction much less than by a desperate existential
faith. Johnson’s convictions, I think, were more classical, and
perhaps more agnostic than those of most saints. He would
have found the company of Seneca more congenial than that
of St. Francis. Before his death he hastily destroyed a section
of his journals that some of his biographers have suggested
may have pertained to misgivings he had in regard to religion. The conjecture seems very plausible to me. The journal
entries that we do have suggest that the simple act of attending church was often more than Johnson could bear; he repeatedly chides himself for his “neglect of services.” Johnson’s
life is of great interest to me, not only because of a similar
tension between my own temperament and my religion, but
because I believe that the religion itself is based on a certain
inner tension—and I think that Johnson grasped that latter
tension at its very best.
In Johnson we see a simultaneous insistence on the sinful
someday you will 355

state of humanity and on the duty of human beings to be better than they are. He is neither an optimist nor a pessimist; he
is what you get when you cross a humanist and a realist with
no dominance given to either set of genes. Though the eighteenth century has sometimes been called the Age of Johnson,
he stands opposed to many of its more optimistic assumptions, including those that led the century to also be dubbed
the Age of Reason. As one of the characters in his short novel
Rasselas says: “There are a thousand familiar disputes which
reason can never decide, questions that elude investigation and
make logic ridiculous, cases where something must be done,
and where little can be said.” He sounds very modern, almost
postmodern there. Once in a gathering of forward-looking,
educated white men proud in their rejection of the “superstitious” past and confident in the promise of an “enlightened”
future, Johnson raised his glass and said, “Here’s to the next
insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies!” I doubt that
the rising up of the Negroes offended the men so much as
the implicit putting down of their imperial achievements.
Still, you cannot believe in uprisings without believing in
some possibility of positive change, and you cannot believe
in positive change without believing that some things are
morally preferable to others. In other words, for all his pessimism about the human condition, Johnson refuses to despair
of it. He refuses to retreat into cynicism or nihilism. Those
poignant resolutions in his journal—“to avoid idleness. . . . To
go to Church every Sunday. . . . To keep a journal” [my italics,
his irony]—are all doggedly progressive in their belief that
“something must be done,” and can be done. That was the
achievement of Johnson, no less than any other of his many
literary accomplishments. He continued to struggle, as all of
us must, with minimal gains but with optimal faith.
356 anger in the world

Of course, the relevant application of these struggles is to
anger. Some of Johnson’s last words before dying speak of the
tentative balance he had achieved between the fierce man he
had necessarily to remain and the kinder man he had struggled to become. To one of his visitors he said, “Iam Moriturus,”
“I who am about to die,” the salute of Roman gladiators before
fighting in the arena. And to a young woman visitor, he spoke
what may have been his last words: “God bless you, my dear.”
That beautiful combination of gladiator and godfather is
also found in the story of Johnson and two young friends
who decided, after a night on the town, to pay the older man
a call. They showed up at his door in the wee hours of the
morning and began pounding on it. Believing he was about
to be set upon by robbers, Johnson took up the stout walking
stick he was in the habit of carrying. He appeared at the door
in his nightclothes ready to crack a head or two. But when he
saw the two young men (and can’t you see them as well?—
hats on cockeyed, smiles slightly awry), he responded in a way
that sets him forever apart from Agamemnon, Saul, and those
other figures of Olympian rage to whom he bears a superficial
resemblance. “What, is it you, you dogs?” he said. “I’ll have a
frisk with you.”
And so Johnson dressed himself, and the three men spent
what remained of darkness drinking and conversing in their favorite pubs. At dawn, when the grocers were setting up their
stands, Johnson thought it a good idea to help. Not meeting
with much welcome there, the three revelers found a boat and
went out rowing on the Thames until the two young men excused themselves to keep a breakfast date with some young
women. Imagine how far they might have rowed otherwise.
That image of Johnson roused from his bed in the middle
of the night is one of the images I try to keep always before
someday you will 357

me. There he is, both armed and hospitable, as ready to frisk
with a young dog as to brain a mad one; not the best man who
ever lived, but an example of the best that a man like me might
manage to become. How I wish I could have sat down with
him, if only for an hour.
:
“Someday you will.” So says the woman I love, having read
the preceding words—she who has tried twice now to read my
favorite biography of the great man and found it too much of
a slog, even for my sake. She whose faith is so far from being
worn on her sleeve that she would sooner go sleeveless in January than say a table grace out loud. Women in Afghanistan do
not veil their faces any more than she veils her faith, yet it shines
on me always, and even after so many years of living together,
it continues to amaze me. “Someday you will”—as if to say,
“Did you ever doubt it?”
Before this book had a title, I usually told people it was
about anger and faith. At other times I said only that it
was about anger. But without faith of the kind my wife possesses, I would have no subject. I would have anger, but I would
have no subject. I could write about faith by itself, but what
point would there be in writing about anger by itself?
For the premise behind the book—a premise I cannot claim
to prove in its pages, or demonstrate reliably in my life—is
that anger can be redeemed. The belief behind everything I have
said is that anger can be controlled without being destroyed,
and expressed without necessarily leading to destruction. “A
bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly-burning wick he
will not quench,” says the prophet Isaiah. I can read that two
358 anger in the world

ways. First, that God herself stands as proof that wrath and
mercy can coexist. The One who breaks the rocks does not
break the bruised reed. And second, that the Consuming Fire
Who Is God allows us our own fire, however much it fumes
and stinks at times. We are permitted our share of honest fury.
This is my faith, and like all faith, it falls as far short of certainty as it goes beyond mere speculation. On the one hand,
it proves nothing. But on the other hand, it determines the
way I spend my money, cast my votes, and read the signs of
my times.
I am writing this just weeks after the terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon. By the time
you read these words, the United States may be at war. We
may have suffered an even more devastating attack. We may
have devastated other nations. It is tempting to say that anger
no longer has a place in such a world at such a time, and there
are those who do say it, just as there are those who say that in
view of the suffering brought upon us by religious fanatics,
religious faith has no place in the world either. But statements
like these also strike me as fanatical—for what is fanaticism,
after all, but a war against faith, a campaign to replace faith
with unbending certainties and the fallible humanity God
created with a perfect creature of our own making. Contrary
to conventional wisdom, fanaticism does not demand blind
faith; it takes offense at faith. It attempts to abolish faith. And
its first step is always to abolish faith in ourselves and our possibilities. Talk to a fundamentalist and tell me if I’m wrong.
Faith comes hard, in trying times as in tranquil ones. Our
follies loom so large. But amid so much that dismays me of
late, so much sentimentality, self-righteousness, and saberrattling, I see any number of people trying to arrive at an
someday you will 359

honest answer to the question, “What should we do?” And
part of the question translates as “How should we act on our
emotions?” How do we make some kind of peace between
anger and hope, between pity and self-preservation? If suicide
is the best way to serve God, then perhaps it does not matter
if we also kill our own emotions. But if the service of God is
life, and abundant life, then emotions matter very much.
What should we do? The question is not separate from asking
what we should do with our anger. Denying our anger at a
time like this may prove every bit as dangerous as giving it free
rein. What difference is there between refusing to acknowledge a child and failing to set him any rules? He comes to the
same dead end either way. Besides, I’m not sure it’s anger so
much as a deadly dispassionateness that is terrorizing and
tempting us now. I do not see rage so much as the cold-eyed
calculation of patient assassins and “measured” responses. The
calmer the rhetoric of the mullahs and the generals, the more
nervous I get. The cruelest people I have ever known were
nothing if not calm. An angry torturer is a liability; he always
botches the job. The art of exquisite torment, like that of
mass destruction, comes of the practice of perfect equanimity, whether in a dungeon or a marriage, a secret cavern or a
congressional hall. Might it be anger that actually comes to
our rescue in the end, like an indignant mother, perhaps in
the literal form of indignant mothers, wringing their hands
at the heaps of corpses and the dusty lines of refugees and
crying out, “Enough, enough, enough!”
:
360 anger in the world

“Someday you will.” When she said that to me, I felt as if I
were looking faith square in the face. It was better than seeing
Dr. Johnson. As I imagine it now, that meeting would be beautiful mostly for the delight of hearing her whisper in my ear,
“Didn’t I tell you?” and remembering all of a sudden that, yes,
she did. Against the background of suicide missions and apocalyptic fantasies, one hears acquaintances talking as though
the world was now neatly divided between those who believe
in a life here and now and those who believe in a paradise to
come, as though lovers could similarly be divided between
those who believe in tenderness and those who believe in ecstasy. More and more, I believe in the intersection of today and
someday; and I don’t only mean this in a metaphysical sense.
It can be put in the most pedestrian terms. “Someday you will
master your anger.” Yes, and some days you do.
someday you will 361


the author
Garret Keizer is the Episcopal priest of a small rural parish
and a former high school English teacher, as well as the
author of God of Beer, No Place But Here, and the critically acclaimed A Dresser of Sycamore Trees. His work also appears
in The Christian Century and Harper’s Magazine. He lives in
northeastern Vermont with his wife and daughter.
363

This page is a continuation of the copyright page.
Thomas Merton
“Anger which breaks a man into children” by Cesar Vallejo from an untitled poem in MODERN EUROPEAN POETRY translated by Thomas Merton. NY: Bantam, 1970. Reprinted with
permission of The Merton Legacy Trust.
William Carlos Williams
Excerpt from PATERSON, copyright © 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958 by William Carlos Williams.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
W. B. Yeats
“A Prayer for My Daughter” reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc., from THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS: Volume I, The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1924 by The Macmillan Company; copyright
renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Additional rights granted by A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of
Michael B. Yeats.
Bob Dylan
From “It Ain’t Me Babe” by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright
renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International Copyright secured.
Reprinted by permission.
Robert Hayden
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden, from
COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT HAYDEN by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick
Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.