Saint Anger No More

And there's always a place for the angry young man 

With his fist in the air and his head in the sand 

He's never been able to learn from mistakes 

He can't understand why his heart always breaks 

His honor is pure, and his courage as well 

He's fair and he's true, and he's boring as hell 

And he'll go to his grave as an angry old man.

~Billy Joel “Angry Young Man”

"Rage Face"

I meet quite of few of these people. People who will go their graves angry. Truth be told, they break my heart and they motivate me to be more forgiving.  

I want to be more forgiving because I don’t want to go to my grave as an angry old man. I screw up a lot: I’m still learning my vocation, and I’m still learning how to be a good husband, and I’m still learning how to be a good father, and I’m still learning how to be a good son and brother. And in the midst of this learning, I am able to recognize my own need for grace and forgiveness.  And in recognizing my own need I cannot help but recognizing the that the other has the same need.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.-Martin Luther King, Jr.

But more than simply recognizing that the other has the same need for grace as I do, I want to be more forgiving because it has the ability to free me from being angry. 

I’m still learning this.  Just want to say that up front.

If I forgive the other (whether the other is a person or an institution or a situation), the other no longer has control of me on an emotional level, or on a spiritual level.  

I remember facilitating a study called Companions in Christ, The Way of Forgiveness.  The author of the study said something along the lines of this, “Forgiveness frees us from the power of another person’s nightmare.” As I scoured the Internet looking for this quote I came across this one:

"Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control...to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare.”-Lance Morrow

I have told this to many people in words less eloquent than Marjorie Thompson (the author of The Way of Forgiveness) or Lance Morrow. So maybe I’m just putting this up here as a reminder to myself of these quotes; to save them for future reference, perhaps?

But to be honest there’s a part of me that hopes that someone reading this needs to read those quotes and can begin the process of forgiving the other.

It really is a process, too. I can’t say how much I wish that I could just flip a switch and the work of forgiving was done. But I find that the more I live, the more I am faced with reality that forgiving the other is a long, ofttimes painful, process. And the prayer that accompanies us along the way are the words “I believe, Lord; help my unbelief.” (Mark 9:24)  These words help me accept that I cannot do this work alone, but that I have the desire to step out onto the path that may lead me to forgiving. And to be on the path to forgiving means I’m on the path to not being angry about that event any more.

I wish that we were able to get through life without encountering people and situations that cause us pain. But since that’s not going to happen, it’s helpful for us to learn the capacity to forgive.  Otherwise, we just end up being angry. And the more angry we are at the other, the less we want to trust the other.  And we won’t just distrust the other that has done us harm; we will begin to distrust all the potential others who may bless us and we end up being angry and alone.

Some of you may be thinking that I’m just being naive, that forgiving others just makes it easier for others to take advantage of us. Maybe you’re right, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

(I’m stewing a post about how naivety is probably more of a virtue than a vice, so look for more on that topic later.)