By Tom Thomas.
Hot, humid weather. There was not a leaf stirring in the Kottayam plantation. The smell of rubber trees is all-pervasive as well as pungent, making it hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it. The sight of thick greenery everywhere. The ancestral home stirs with signs of life after a long time; the family is back.
Stillness is punctuated by voices rising in discordant notes. Suddenly, this is shattered by a loud sound. Metal expels metal. Life hangs in the balance. One brother against the other over the property. They have enough handed over to them over generations. It is not enough. The balance tilts. One brother is no more, and the other is in custody. The metal is smoking.
One moment of rage is all it took to snuff out a life. Sadness and grief all over, a thousand-year heritage family shattered forever.
Was it really worth it—the fight over a few cents of land? It is Cain and Abel all over again. Will we ever learn? Everyone loses. The Earth cries out for revenge. Can we break the cycle? It is up to us.
These few lines above I had penned some time ago. The incident at that time gripped me so much—how extreme anger or wrath could cause one brother to snuff out the life of another.
As defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, wrath is “strong vengeful anger or indignation.”. It is not a commonly used English term these days. Wrath is something I struggle with too. Therefore it was insightful to read the Holy Father Pope Francis’ recent discourse on the Vice of wrath. The Holy Father says, “It is a particularly dark vice, and it is perhaps the easiest to detect from a physical point of view. The person dominated by wrath finds it difficult to hide this impulse; you can recognise it from the movements of his body, his aggressiveness, his laboured breathing, and his grim and frowning expression.
In its most acute manifestation, wrath is a vice that concedes no respite. If it is born of an injustice suffered (or believed to be suffered), often it is unleashed not against the offender but against the first unfortunate victim. There are men who withhold their rage in the workplace, showing themselves to be calm and composed, but at home they become unbearable for the wife and children. Wrath is a pervasive vice; it is capable of depriving us of sleep and of barring the way to reason and thought.
Wrath is a vice that destroys human relationships. It expresses the incapacity to accept the diversity of others, especially when their life choices diverge from our own. It does not stop at the misconduct of one person but throws everything into the cauldron: it is the other person, the other as he or she is, the other as such, who provokes anger and resentment. One begins to detest the tone of their voice, their trivial everyday gestures, their ways of reasoning and feeling.”
The prescient words of the Holy Father make me recollect those times when perceived injustice or ill-treatment led me into the vice of wrath. It is so true that the one affected by wrath harms himself and those around him. It has indeed been true in my case every time I have succumbed to this dark vice.
But does this mean a Christian should never get angry? Not so, in fact, it is all right to get angry at times. The Holy Father says, “We are not responsible for the onset of wrath, but always for its development. And at times, it is good for anger to be vented in the right way. If a person were never to anger, if a person did not become indignant at an injustice, if he did not feel something quivering in his gut at the oppression of the weak, it would mean that the person was not human, much less a Christian.
Holy indignation exists, which is not wrath but an inner movement, a holy indignation. Jesus knew it several times in His life (cf. Mk 3.5): He never responded to evil with evil, but in His soul, He felt this sentiment, and in the case of the merchants in the Temple, He performed a strong and prophetic action, dictated not by wrath but by zeal for the house of the Lord (cf. Mt 21:12-13). We must distinguish well: zeal, holy indignation, is one thing; wrath, which is bad, is another.”
The Holy Spirit must guide me away from situations of wrath and make me express myself in moments of holy indignation as the Lord did. Should I succumb to wrath, let me be quick to reconcile with the other before the sun goes down. The Holy Father again puts this into context.
“Wrath makes us lose lucidity, doesn’t it? Because one of the characteristics of wrath, at times, is that sometimes it fails to mitigate with time. In these cases, even distance and silence, instead of easing the burden of mistakes, magnify them. For this reason, the Apostle Paul – as we have heard – recommends to Christians to face up to the problem straight away, and to attempt reconciliation: “Do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph 4:26). It is important that everything dissipate immediately, before sundown. If some misunderstanding arises during the day and two people can no longer understand each other, perceiving themselves as far apart, the night cannot be handed over to the devil. The vice would keep us awake at night, brooding over our reasons and the unaccountable mistakes that are never ours and always the other’s. It is like that: when a person is enraged, they always, always say that the other person is the problem. They are never capable of recognising their own defects or their own shortcomings.”
Next time there is a situation that causes me to explode into wrath, I resolve to think of all these points and handle the situation better, without allowing wrath to affect me and those around me. As it affected gravely the lives of two brothers and their families so grievously that I covered it at the start of this article. By removing one letter from the word ‘danger’, we get ‘anger’. Jas 1: 19 counsels, “.. let every person be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.”
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Help me, Lord.
The quote below helps me put the matter of wrath in perspective:
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Eph 4:31-32