Anger management: Chris Rose’s Thought for the Week
‘In order to show love we need to show a passion.’
In her recent article (‘Fire away’, 15 July) Moya asked ‘Has the spirit of early Friends entirely left us, or could it be rekindled?’ She recounted receiving an email from a local clerk signed ‘With love and rage’ and asked whether our respectable Society of Friends has lost contact with its ‘passionate youth’.
This reminded me of a visit I made some years ago to a local prison. Talking to the chaplaincy team there, one remembered a former Quaker chaplain. ‘A typical difficult Quaker’ they said. I wasn’t sure if it was a complement or a complaint but thinking about it afterwards, I thought ‘Good for him!’
Certainly, George Fox and the early Quakers were not afraid of expressing rage and anger at what they perceived to be wrong. In the New Testament, Matthew and John tell us how Jesus went into the temple in Jerusalem and overturned the tables of the moneylenders, angry at the hypocrisy and corruption they represented.
Recently I read about the story of Kaj Munk, a Danish pastor and playwright. Kaj was living in Denmark when the Nazis invaded. He eloquently expressed his anger at the state of the world back in the 1940s: ‘What is, therefore, our task today? Shall I answer “Faith, hope, and love”? That sounds beautiful. But I would say – courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature… we lack a holy rage… The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the street … a holy anger that things are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth, and the destruction of God’s world. To rage when little children must die of hunger, when the tables of the rich are sagging with food. To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of the militaries. To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction “peace”. To rage against complacency. To… seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of Kingdom of God. And remember the signs of the Christian church have been the lion, the lamb, the dove, and the fish… but never the chameleon.’
Kay was executed by the Nazis in 1944, but his words are sadly as true now as back when he wrote them.
I believe the most powerful force in this world is love. Maybe in order to show that love we need to rekindle early Friends’ passion. Perhaps we need more ‘difficult Quakers’ and yes, sometimes in order to show that love we need to show a passion, nay an anger, yes even a rage.
Who knows what the energy generated in expressing that love might lead to?
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