Toward a Christian Spirituality of Anger

After a significant season of discernment about this address, I made the decision to focus on the topic of anger. It was initially for personal reasons, as I will soon describe, but in the months since solidifying that decision I was both surprised and delighted to discover that when I mentioned this topic to others, without exception there was immediate interest and affirmation. What is it about anger that would elicit such a widespread and consistent response? Perhaps it is because we seem to live in, to borrow the words of author Pankaj Mishra, an "age of anger."¹ According to Christian theologian and activist, Barbara Holmes, who focuses her work on African American spirituality, mysticism, cosmology and culture,

People of color are angry about police brutality, white supremacy, white privilege, and economic marginalization. … white men … feel marginalized although they maintain dominance in the economic and social structures of our society. They feel threatened by immigration, diversity, and their declining percentage of the population. White women are angry about sexual harassment, glass ceilings in their workplaces, and some of the above.²

There is lots of anger out there and around us.³

Perhaps our interest is also because, in light of all this anger diffused throughout our society, there is a growing urgency within churches (that is, among communities that identify themselves as Christian) to find ways to confront and address it.⁴ But maybe it's also because each of us has some sense of the personal anger within us. There is interior anger in our bodies that we are not always consciously aware of, but that is so close to the surface it resides in that liminal space of "that which we almost know."⁵ This was true for me for most of my life. Let me share a bit of that story.

MY PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH ANGER

I am the first born of my parents, both Christians and regular church attendees, facts that profoundly shaped me during the years of my upbringing with them. From as young an age as I can remember, I self-identified as a church kid participating in all the religious programming available, and during early adolescence this shifted into a self-conscious personal awareness of interior faith and corresponding desire to be a disciple of Jesus. In the dominant category of my particular Christian tradition, I sought to live a holy life and came to believe that God's grace was present and active in my life, making me more like Jesus. My active involvement in the church continued and I was consistently affirmed as a leader and encouraged to take on various leadership positions. This continued through college, graduate school (including seminary), doctoral studies, and in my vocations as a pastor, spiritual director, and theological educator. I've never seen myself as outstanding in any particular way, but I developed a sense of myself as basically good, likable, and dependable. An easy-going, nice guy.

As can often happen as one moves deeper into adulthood, I became interested in learning more about myself. My academic journey, first in the psychology of religion and then in the field of spirituality, provided numerous lenses with which to increase my capacity for self-awareness and self-knowledge. One such lens that has made a profound impact on me is the Enneagram, a wisdom tradition and personality typing system with strong resonance to the Christian desert teaching about the Eight Deadly Thoughts as collected by Evagrius of Ponticus.⁶ Although there are tests you can take whose results can suggest a dominant type, the ultimate confirmation must come through sustained personal reflection on one's own life. As I began to learn more about the Enneagram system, I found the process of seeking to discover my type to be quite a challenge. The descriptions of two types seemed most consistent with my self-perception: the One-Perfectionist and the Five-Observer. For quite some time I went back and forth between them, not confident yet to stake a claim. Looking back at that process, I was governed more than I was...