Anger--Yes, It Can Be Deadly

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, April 23, 1995

This has been a week where I felt like the whole world--from the local to the global-- reared up with something to say about a sermon topic I'd actually chosen for this Sunday over two months ago. I obviously had no way of knowing all that would come to pass in the interim. Sometimes I regard it as good fortune when that happens--when a preplanned sermon topic coincides with some timely event or circumstance that brings the subject into better focus. This time, however, I've felt mostly overwhelmed, and not a little scatter-brained, when I try to sort out a lot of what's been on my mind--and yours, too, I would imagine--that in one way or another feeds into the subject of anger.

Last Saturday evening, following our Seder, I found the positive Easter spirit I like to generate, and have spread among us, greatly tempered by the anger I felt over the vandalizing of our cemetery. In more recent days as I've had to deal with the event, with the police, and with the two boys involved, the anger has largely turned to sadness. I'll say more on this momentarily. Over the past two weeks I have been reading selections from Robert McNamara's book In Retrospect, and have been following much of the reaction that this book has generated as well. The Vietnam-Indochina war ended twenty years ago. But this book, with Mr. McNamara's confessions of the deep misgivings he had--and now the personal regrets he has--as to how and why he and those in power with him were conducting our involvement in that war, has served to resurface much of the anger that still persists from that terribly tragic and misguided venture on our part. And then, over these past few days, Oklahoma City has become the center, not just of our nation, but of our consciousness as a nation as well. Behind this unspeakably horrible and utterly senseless--to our minds anyway--act of terror is, by all appearances, a deadly, irrational, and insatiable anger. It is the kind of anger Mary Gordon described quite aptly nearly two years ago when she wrote:

Deadly anger is infinite ... (it) is a hunger, an appetite that can grow like a glutton's or a lion's seeking whom(ever) it may devour.

What we have quite likely seen in this case is the hideous outcome of the irrational anger that fuels the racist, the anti-Semitic, and the anti-government hatred that is behind some of the grossly paranoid and dangerous paramilitary groups in this country. And, before the real nature of this crime became apparent, we also saw the terrible dangers of misdirected and hatefully manipulated anger. On Thursday afternoon, the day after the bombing, Howie Carr opened up his call-in talk show on Boston's WBZ radio by inviting his listeners to Tell me what you'd like to do with these towelheads, essentially inviting his listeners to vent anti-Arab and anti-Islamic venom before any solid information as to the real perpetrators of this deed had become known. And even if the perpetrators had had ties into the Middle East, Mr. Carr's words would have been no less contemptible.

Well, my usual process in composing a sermon is to retreat from the world for a time so I can focus my thoughts and my writing on whatever the subject at hand may be. This is one of those times, however, when the doings of the world turn out to be the subject at hand. Nevertheless, I will for the next few minutes take a step or two away from these events just cited, and then revisit them as we look at the subject of anger as one of the so called "seven deadly sins."

This is the second of an eight part sermon series I'll be doing over the next several months, which in turn plays off of a series of articles that ran nearly two years ago, during the summer of 1993, in the Sunday New York Times Book Review section. The Times editors invited eight authors to offer a contemporary, literary-based commentaries on one of the seven deadly sins, one per author. These categories of transgressions were originally formulated by Pope Gregory the Great, and later refined by St. Thomas Aquinas, in an attempt by the Church to come up with seven major classifications into which all human folly, misdeeds, shortcomings, and sins could be placed. The result was a listing of pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice, and sloth. While the Church's list is religious and ecclesiastical in origin, and was put in place many centuries ago, the Times editors felt the list worthy of a secular treatment in this day and age and so went about it, as just noted, by inviting eight contemporary authors to give a commentary on each one. The editors even threw in an eighth sin of their own for the sake of their series--the "sin" of despair. Last month we looked at pride and the ways in which it is and is not a human transgression. Next month I'll take on envy. Today it's anger.

Like some of the others on that list, the alleged "sinfulness" of anger is clearly open to debate. Like pride, anger has a kind of "angels of light/angels of darkness" quality about it. Anger, like pride, is an essential component of human well-being, if not human survival. I spoke to this point, with regard to anger, in a sermon a little over a year ago. My point then was that anger is a "first alert." It is a warning signal that certain area of our lives are dis-eased and out of balance, and that we need to work on moving towards healthier levels of wholeness and healing. I cited what I considered to be a very insightful observation by Dr. Harriet Lerner in her book The Dance of Anger where she says:

Just as physical pain tells us to take our hand off the hot stove, the pain of anger preserves the very integrity of our self. Our anger can motivate us to say 'no' to the ways in which we are defined by others and 'yes' to the dictates of our inner self.

I went on to point out that anger over human injustice and wrong has been one of the great motivating factors behind most movements for social reform and social justice. The genius of people like Susan B. Anthony, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and many other lesser known but still very significant individuals, was that they were able to give an articulate voice and a coherent strategy to a wellspring of anger present within certain segments of society, and give that anger a positive channel for its energy. There are, then, many conditions and circumstances under which anger, far from being a deadly sin, is actually essential to the maintenance and well being of our lives.

That said, it is also true that the boundary between anger as a life-giving and life-enhancing force, and anger as a deadly, life-inhibiting, and life-denying force is a very thin and porous one. It takes very little to cross the boundary or tip the scale. This is the point that Mary Gordon addresses so well and so eloquently in her Times essay, selections of which I read earlier. Ms. Gordon, very briefly, is a very talented writer of fiction. Her latest book is a collection of three novellas called The Rest of Life. In this piece she shows how anger becomes a deadly sin when it crosses that line from enhancing our humanity to denying or robbing us of our humanity instead. In the course of her essay she describes an incident that is both amusing and frightening at the same time. She recounts how, on a very hot August afternoon she was preparing for a dinner party at her home that evening. Her children, ages 7 and 4, in concert with--and this I had a hard time grasping--her 78 year old mother, began hounding her to take them swimming, as she'd earlier promised to do when she thought she'd be less pressed for time. So the three of them--two children and one mother--got in her car and began blowing the horn to remind her of her as yet unfulfilled promise. This is clearly a situation warranting a good, healthy outburst of anger. But I'll let Ms. Gordon pick up her story from here:

I lost it. I lost myself. I jumped on the hood of the car. I pounded on the windshield...I couldn't stop pounding...Then the frightening thing happened. I became a huge bird, a carrion crow...I wanted to peck and peck forever. I wanted to carry them all off in my bloody beak and drop them on a rock where I would feed on their battered corpses till my bird stomach swelled ... I had to be forced off the car ... When I (came to myself) I was appalled. I realized I had genuinely frightened my children. Mostly because they could no longer recognize me. My son said to me: 'I was scared because I didn't know who you were.'
[She then goes on]
I was unrecognizable to myself and, for a time, to my son, but I think I would have been unrecognizable to the rest of the world as human. Deadly sin causes the rest of the human community to say 'How can this person do this thing and still be human?'

On this note, let me return to the three incidents with which I opened up these remarks. I hope I can deal with each of them while not losing my focus this morning. They are quite separate and unrelated incidents, but they each in their own way offer both some warnings and some advice when it comes to anger.

I doubt I will ever celebrate another Seder in quite the same way as I did the one we had here last Saturday evening; at least I hope that proves to be the case. As the meal was being brought out I noticed through a kitchen window that several gravestones, which I knew had been standing just a few minutes earlier were down. As I went to my office to call the police about it I saw three young children in the cemetery pushing, with two of them pushing over the stones as hard as they could go, as if it were some kind of lark. Once I was told that the police were on their way, I ran into the cemetery in a state of mind not unlike that of Ms. Gordon heading for her horn-blaring car. I've never thought of myself as a frightening kind of person, but I believe I actually scared those three children--two of whom were actually involved in the vandalism--into staying where they were until the police arrived. Therapists like to talk about the value of "being in touch with your anger," and I know and appreciate what they mean. But I'm glad, in that situation, that I managed to stay sufficiently out of touch with my anger, because what I felt like doing was taking one of those markers myself and swinging it over my head like an enraged Moses with the Ten Commandments when he caught the Israelites cavorting before their golden calf while he was off getting the word from Yahweh. Just as Moses hurled the tablets, I wanted to hurl a grave marker. In truth I never came close to doing such a thing, but the image was in my head--and my anger was very real; as it was for many of you who saw the destruction.

In the days following, the anger has become more sadness than anything else. What's happened is that the parents are being assessed for the damage, although I know that their economic circumstances are dubious. The boys, who are ages 9 and 7, will be asked to do some supervised work on our grounds. One set of parents has already agreed to this. The conversations with the families, through the police, are still continuing. I'm not going to publicly discuss what I have learned of the family lives of the two boys involved. But the saddest part of all comes for me when I take a look at the life, the opportunities, the good times along with the difficult lessons, the hopes, dreams, and sense of possibility that I seek to provide for my own child, my own son; and compare that to some of what I've learned this past week as to what the world looks like for these two. It does not excuse their behavior, nor does it make them and those responsible for them any less accountable for their deeds. It just makes me realize what very different worlds can exist in such close proximity to each other. I won't deny that there is still some residual anger on my part about this incident, and I know that if something like this happens again, I'll get very angry all over again. But I don't want that anger on my part, or on anyone else's part, to impede or intrude upon our efforts as a religious community to continue to reach out in whatever ways we can--sometimes small, but still vitally important ways--to enhance the quality of life in our neighborhood.

Moving now to the second incident cited--the publication of Mr. McNamara's book In Retrospect, and the angry response it has generated in many quarters. This book would have fit just as well, if not better, into the sermon I did on pride; in particular the sin of pride as hubris, i.e. believing so strongly in the rightness of your cause and your actions that you cannot see the harm, if not the evil, that you are actually doing. Robert McNamara, as most of you know, was the Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the chief advocate, architect and promoter of our military involvement in the Indo-China War in which 58,000 American lives and as many as 4 million Vietnamese lives were lost; and with the primarily nationalist forces of the North Vietnamese eventually securing a military victory. In this memoir, from which I've only read excerpts, Mr. McNamara essentially recants his words and actions of some 30 years ago. He delivers a very damning indictment of himself and his associates in conducting a war he now says he realized pretty early on was well nigh unwinnable in terms of how a "win" was being defined and understood by the United States. We were wrong, terribly wrong, he now says.

The information the former Secretary reveals is hardly new, in terms of the blunders, the false and hubristic assumptions by which we pursued our involvement in that war, and the deceptions and falsehoods that were perpetrated by himself and others as to both the rightness and the supposed "win-ability" of our cause. All of that, as a matter of record, has been pretty well documented already in books like David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, Neil Sheehan's A Bright and Shining Lie; and the Pentagon Papers themselves which were published in their entirety by our own UU Association's Beacon Press back in 1971. It is the author, more so than the information, that is now generating and re-generating anger that has never been completely laid to rest.

I have to acknowledge that as I've read the former Secretary of Defense's words and witnessed the reactions to them, I've felt some of my own anger and frustration from those days creeping back. From about 1965 on I felt that our military involvement in that conflict was terribly wrong--wrong in terms of policy, wrong in terms of strategy, and mostly wrong in terms it's completely contradicting what we as a country purported to morally stand for in the world. I recall some of the pain and tension this created within my family. I recall a few occasions of being labeled unpatriotic or unAmerican for saying out loud what Mr. McNamara apparently knew and felt in his heart clear back then but wasn't saying out loud. I will say I felt some vindication in reading passages from his book, but I take absolutely no pleasure in it. The former Secretary's rationale for his silence was that he owed his loyalty to the President. It is true that a Cabinet officer does owe a large dose of loyalty to his/her President. But there are times when an overriding loyalty to the country should prevail, and that was the loyalty that Mr. McNamara overlooked.

But I have to go onto say most emphatically that any lingering anger on my part is really small potatoes compared to the anger now being aroused once again on the part of some of those who fought in that war and who came home with physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual wounds and scars they will carry for the rest of their lives. And whatever anger I may have is even smaller potatoes compared to that of the families who lost relatives and loved ones in that ill-fated conflict. It is certainly not my place and it is clearly not my prerogative to tell those veterans and those families that they should set their anger aside and accept the hard lessons that this book teaches. And yet I also have to say--and I can only speak for myself and from my own experience on this--that I feel for Robert McNamara; and feel as well that for all of the understandable anger his book has generated, he has done the country a service by writing it. I believe that those who exercise the kind of power that alters the course of history--for better or for worse--owe a debt to succeeding generations to show how and why they exercised that power, whether it was for good or for ill. Whatever else can be said about Mr. McNamara, he has, at age 78, paid that debt at the cost of a great deal of pain to himself and to many others. Recalling what I just said about my own place and prerogatives in this whole matter, I can only hope that the anger that this book has brought on will in time subside enough for us to see some of the painful, tragic, but still necessary lessons it contains.

Returning briefly now to the third, and still unfolding, incident with which I opened up this sermon today, I only want to add just a little to what I've already said. As you may have noticed, I do not, as a general rule, like to jump onto a topic or incident that is still too fresh and immediate for the kind of thoughtful reflection and consideration that I think a sermon calls for. But there are exceptions to every rule. Like practically all Americans and all people of humanity and compassion around the world, our first and immediate concern is for the families and loved ones most closely affected by this horrific event--for those who have lost friends, relatives, children, and playmates. We can only hope and pray that each of them will in time find the courage and the wherewithal to choose life again.

When the larger story behind this terrorist act unfolds--and it's a story I certainly do not claim to know in its entirety--we will, I believe, have held up for us to see just how vicious and dangerous certain hate groups in our midst indeed are. It's a bigger subject than I can, or want, to take on in any great detail today, except to say that these hate groups are part of a movement that both feeds upon and fuels the anger of the dispossessed, convincing them that their often sad lot in life is because of them--the Afro-Americans, the foreigners, the Jews who really run this world, and most of all the government that supports and protects those who are really your enemy. Within the framework of that perverted ideology that feeds on a perverse anger, a certain kind of perverted case can be made for taking out a government facility, with the loss of innocent lives being an acceptable trade-off for whatever kind of sick statement is supposedly being made. It was downright haunting to read Mary Gordon's words as I was also watching the events of the last few days unfold:

This is the deadly power of anger; it rolls and rolls like a flaming boulder down a hill gathering mass and speed until any thought of cessation is so far beside the point as to seem hopeless. It is not that there is no cause for the anger ... But the causes are lost in the momentum of the anger itself and in (its) insatiable compulsion to destroy everything.

As the presence of paramilitary hate groups comes into greater light, as I'm sure it now will, we as a nation are going to have to face some hard questions for which neither I, nor anyone else, has quick or easy answers. The basic question will be: To what extent can a free society also permit the existence of organizations that manipulate anger in order to serve the purposes of a perverse and evil ideology? It's an extremely tough question: How free can we be without jeopardizing that baseline level of collective security that is necessary in order for any kind of freedom to be meaningfully exercised at all?

Well, this is more than enough grist for the mill when it comes to dealing with anger as a deadly sin. The question I'll close with today is: What is our calling as a liberal religious community of faith in the midst of all this? I may not have the answer for that one, but I do have an answer. We are to be a community of hope, even and especially at those times when hope is hard to find: A community of hope in a neighborhood that has its troubles; a community of hope in a world that has known more than its share of pain and still suffers from its inexplicable tragedies and horrors; a community where human dignity is respected, where human love and concern show forth; a community where anger--while not denied--does not have to be the final and defining component in human relations. We can live our lives with one another, and with a compassion that extends beyond us, in a way that demonstrates what our hope for the entire human community is. Mahatma Ghandi once said:

Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it anyway.

I often find myself coming back to those words after encountering the thoughts and concerns like those I've expressed this morning, and I pass the words onto you.

Anger, as Mary Gordon rightfully notes, lets us know that we are alive. But there is an even deeper aliveness to be found in the peace that follows anger. May we find that peace in our lives and in the presence of this community.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua

Anger--Yes, It Can Be Deadly