The Multiplication of Rage

You know how muscles get stronger, right? It’s by being broken down. Stressing muscles causes micro-tears that allow for growth.

This seems a very appropriate analogy for life right now. I am going through a time of great spiritual…let’s call it development. “Reorientation” and “upheaval” both sound good, but they aren’t really accurate. Basically, I feel like I’m looking at a stressful situation (my life) and beginning to consider not just how to handle it but whether I’m making it worse by my own spiritual-emotional habits.

I meet weekly with a wonderful pair of women for faith sharing. We’ve been reading Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved. It’s been a weekly occasion for mind-blowing, in beautiful but sometimes very challenging ways.

“How different would our life be if we could but believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace would multiply as long as there are people to receive it?”

The thing is, what Nouwen says of love, forgiveness, joy and peace is equally true of judgment, resentment, anger and intolerance. And when I say intolerance, I’m not referring to the common topics associated with that word these days, although it applies there, too. No, what I’m talking about is tolerance for irritation. For having our convenience thwarted. You know. The car that’s driving too slowly in front of you. The school district’s decisions about scheduled days off and weather days. The incompetent cashier or the inconveniently-timed software update.

Every January and every Lent, I spend a fair amount of time discerning how best to grow as a human being in these fresh seasons. Yet nearly every year, I get a few weeks in and discover that I’m off-course, or at least, not digging deep enough.

I’m angry these days. So very angry, all the time. Angry about big things, but finding that it gushes down into far too many of the little ones, too. Eroding my capacity for tolerance for hassles, for kindness to people who inconvenience me. Even my capacity to love.
I’m hardly alone. This essay came through my Facebook feed last week; the resonance of it left me speechless. The first few “top comments” prove the author’s point.

And I realized that I had to turn off the radio in the car again—not just for a few days, but for the duration of Lent. There’s no silence, no peace in my heart; I feel this frantic, well, franticness (to materialize a word) to fill every moment of blank mental space with stimulus, with information. We are desperate in the modern world, and we don’t even know what it is we’re desperate for.

I think it’s rest. A rest we can never find, because we’re strung so tight, the slightest little whisper of a breeze makes us vibrate. Silence feels like a threat, like walking on eggshells through a room where a very colicky baby has just fallen asleep after hours of constant screaming. We’re longing for rest, and also authentic connection. I mean, what else is the draw of talk radio, podcasts, and social media if not to feel like someone is talking to us? Accompanying us in our minor pilgrimages across town?

Yet the only way to get to a place of rest is to sit down, shut up, and shut down, and we have to go through silence to get there.

I’ve had the radio off for two weeks now. Not just off news radio, but off. And still, it’s hard. I thought it would get easier after a week’s withdrawal, but it hasn’t. I feel the pressure in my chest, in my brain, begging for relief.

We all know when we’re strung tight, we can’t roll with the punches; we have no give in our strings. We just snap. It’s no wonder I’m angry. Sure, there are plenty of things, legitimate outrages. But I can see how easy it would be to let anger and negativity crowd out every good thing about my life. Anger feeds on itself and grows bigger, more all-encompassing. As Nouwen said, they multiply as long as there are people to receive them.

I’d rather take his solution and multiply kindness and forgiveness.

But dang, it’s hard to make that shift. We’re wound so tight toward rage, the force is nearly impossible to resist. You try to turn toward the light and the dark pulls you right back.

But we didn’t get here all at once. It’s been coming a long time, and we’ve encouraged it. I know I have. So I have to commit to seeking the light, again and again and again and again, until it at last feels like my home territory.

I’m writing stream-of-consciousness late at night, following choir practice when my brain is revved up and won’t shut down so I can sleep. (Ironic, given the topic, I know.) The danger in opening myself up like this is that people will judge and/or try to tell me exactly what I SHOULD do, which is not at all useful. (In case you missed the hint: please don’t! I don’t need more negativity in my world, and neither do you.) I’m not putting these reflections out as a cry for help or an invitation for judgment—quite the opposite. I think I’m expressing something that is a universal wound of modern life, in the hope that it will resonate, and help others to set sail on their own, desperately-needed journeys of the spirit.