The yearly Super Bowl party at Lynn’s house exists like the warm lights of a hunting lodge glowing on the horizon of a bleak winter’s landscape. Each year, Lynn’s party provides an excuse to shovel out a space for one more winter’s holiday…a chance to step in from the February cold.
In many ways, the Superbowl of 2011 unfolded in all of the usual ways. Just like every year, we gathered. Just like every year, our glycemic indices were boosted by trays of every imaginable configuration of fat and carbohydrates. But on this year, something was unmistakably different. On this year, the Super Bowl felt much more like a business meeting than a holiday party. That’s because, on this year, after fourteen long years, the Green Bay Packers had come in from the cold! That’s right, “The Pack” had made it “back” to the Super Bowl. And for my cheese eating, snow shoveling, Lambeau-loving, Wisconsin born-and-bred wife, (and her three children) the NFL’s championship game had little to do with socializing, and everything to do with concentrating. On that year, the clever television ads were a mere distraction. Superbowl 2011 was the year of, “Shh! I can’t hear the game!” and, “Could you please move, I can’t see the television!”
In 2011 the good guys won. As the clock ticked down to zero, with a foam wedge of yellow cheese on her head, braces on her teeth, and fourteen-year-old Green Bay hormones coursing through her veins, my daughter dissolved into a full fifteen minutes of joy-tears as she hugged anything and everything that wasn’t moving. This was the same girl, who several years ago, wrote the former quarterback, Brett Favre, two separate letters on two separate occasions, begging him to stay on, when it looked like he might retire from her team. On those two occasions, she received letters back “signed” by her football hero, the legendary, Brett Favre. Both letters were lovingly enshrined next to her two Favre statues, and two framed Favre action pictures.
Just about two years before the Brett Favre replacement, Aaron Rogers, led the Green and Gold to a playoff victory,it was officially announced that her football hero, Brett,would be playing for the hated Minnesota Vikings. Around that time, Annalise casually asked me if she could borrow some money. She explained that she needed to buy some postage to return some merchandise. When I asked, “What merchandise?” she took me upstairs and pointed to a box that she was ready to send: two statues, two framed pictures, and two letters signed, “Sincerely, Brett Favre.” Her shrine had been dismantled. She had constructed a new letter to send to her old football hero. It read, “Dear Mr. Favre, I will not be needing these anymore. I am no longer your fan. Sincerely, Annalise Wagner.”
In the Gospel passage that my spiritual tradition picked for this Sunday, Jesus delivered a hot potato for anyone interested in integrating a spiritual approach to dealing with others. “But I say to you, whoever is angry with brother or sister will be liable to judgment… (Mt 5: 22a).” It seems to me that besides fishermen, farmers, tax collectors, and carpenters, it would have helped if Jesus had selected a psychologist Apostle to translate this passage into a more digestible bite.
From the research conducted from my counselor’s arm chair, I see plenty of mischief from Christians’ split-off, disowned anger: stuck grief processes, an inability to set and hold boundaries, decades of co-dependence, and more. Lately, I am noticing a troubling willingness for people who earnestly attempt to walk in the shoes of the Fisherman to accept and repeat the words of ranting/angry speakers, leaders and politicians. My theory is that divorced from their own anger response for so many years, it kind of feels good to follow someone who says the inside things on the outside…with impunity. It doesn’t help that whole news channels and news sites are dedicated to providing content intended to piss listeners off and scare them. In a society suffering from chronic loneliness, uniting with others around a shared hatred can provide a warm glow of pseudo-community, even an odd kind of pseudo intimacy with other angry gnostics who “get it.”
It seems to me, that any reflection on anger should begin with the insight that, like all the other emotions, anger is morally neutral. The old bromide that “feelings are neither good, nor bad,” was just as true in Jesus’ day as it is now. The appropriate response to an emotion is to notice it, and to ask oneself, “What is this feeling revealing to me, and what will I do with it?” In his famous novella, A ChristmasCarol, Charles Dickens observed that some feelings can have a purely biological source. We can feel easily moved to anger when we have eaten or drunk the wrong things, or failed to get enough sleep, or pushed ourselves too hard without a break. At other times, a deep and persistent emotion can be a finger pointing to important longings of the heart. According to Ignatius Loyola, we should pay attention to such inner movements. They have the potential to reveal a call to action.
My research has revealed that anger was woven into the soul for at least three potential purposes. First, it can provide an important way to notice injustice done to ourselves, or others, and to take action. I have frequently noticed that in the healing process that follows a cruel childhood, or the break-up of a bad relationship, men or women will heal far more quickly when they allow themselves to feel their anger. What my clients find when they head my advice is that anger is a good stepping-stone in the healing process, but it makes a lousy destination. Second, anger can signal that a deeply held value has been transgressed, and therefore needs to be redressed. Third, anger can simply arise as an artifact of an appropriate grief process. And what is grieving but the normal letting go of what one wishes could be, and accepting the current reality that one wishes would go away? Naming the anger as a normal part of this process frequently allows for that feeling to move along in due time.
My daughter’s petite and charming little anger ritual helped her move on from her allegiance to a former football idol. If she had stayed stuck in that anger, by rehearsing it day-after-day, she may have become like one of the poor unfortunates who populate the sports talk shows for whom an athlete’s choices on, or off the field are the occasion for another extended rant.
Healthy anger activates healthy action. Boxing up an old shrine, provided Annalise an anger ritual that allowed her to find a container for her disappointment. At the outset of Lent, perhaps you could ask yourself a few questions? Is there a persistent sadness, or an unattended grief in your life? Allowing oneself to experience the latent anger contained in sadness or grief can be one powerful way to bring about an unexpected healing. On the flip side, is there a place or person that is feeding an anger or fear system within you? Can you imagine a 40 day experiment where you conduct a fast from these sources?