Love Is the Answer to Anger
The limitation of gushy feelings. How the love that prevails is something other than what we feel.
Love is the answer to anger. To make use of this principle, it helps to understand what love is. It helps to understand anger.
What is love, saving and transforming love, the kind of love that can overcome the worst of what overtakes us? Part of an answer is what it is not: Love is not gushy feelings. It is something other than gushy feelings. When we are called into a way of love, surely this means something other or something more than a call to feel something different. When Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he could not have meant, “Cultivate feelings for your neighbor like the feelings you feel for yourself.” And when he went to the cross in his ultimate expression of love, we know from his agonies as they are recorded in the gospels that he did not go to this death feeling gushy.
The ancients reading the original language of the gospels could understand this better. Love is (to some extent) lost in translation, because multiple words in the New Testament’s original Greek all get translated as one word, love. Rather than connoting feelings, the word as Jesus used it has to do with regarding another as inherently worthy, no matter the feelings. I wrote about the different words for “love” here.
Our anger is where the futility of gushy feelings fully crashes. Any countervailing good feeling is like a breeze against anger’s gale; it does not save us from anger or its cost. Anger, whether white hot or smoldering, will always have a higher temperature than warm fondness. But the commitment to love against our feelings offers the power that can prevail.
On anger: It is not all bad. It is not evil by nature. Jesus became angry. When anger is the source of power allowing us to stop something harmful or prevent harm from happening, this is anger delivering good.
Yet most of our anger is not this righteous sort. Because we entertain a high regard for our own defense or point of view, most of our anger simply presents itself this way, pretending to be righteous and justified.
My anger takes this form. Most anger that comes to me focuses on offenses done to me or slights against me, some real and some imagined. My anger is the fury crying out to avenge the offense. The means of vengeance varies. Depending on the offense and what I believe the person has done, the means I imagine might include telling this person off, undermining their success, or marring their reputation or happiness in some way. I usually refrain from actively pursuing these means, but even so, this is no indication of my virtue or peace, because I still imagine what it would be like to do so. And here is the cost of that imagining: Even if I don’t act on my rage, I can darken my soul with the activity of my mind. How tragic and wasteful is this?
A unique soul is the great resource we are each given. Rather than staining and stirring my soul just to increase my own distraction and suffering, I could use the miraculous gift of my own ability for thinking to think for positive ends. I might even enjoy peace, maybe happiness, if I wasn’t burning instead with obsession over how I have been mistreated or hurt.
This gets to where the gushy feelings are of absolutely no help. Even if I had those feelings available to me, I could not find or activate them by somehow searching for where I had misplaced them. The soul does not work that way. More than that, equating love with good feelings is actually worse than useless. The very focus on feelings is counterproductive, because feelings are the home turf on which anger hopes to compete.
One of the promises of anger—maybe its biggest lie—is that unleashing anger will feel so good. Anger insists that relinquishing control to anger will deliver satisfaction. Acting or speaking out of anger will be so satisfying, says anger, that I need not consider the cost I will pay in terms of self-inflicted damage, lost relationships, or the humiliation I will experience through my act of vengeance.
The alternative way is not cost-free. The alternative way is love. This response has a cost. We must see this if we are to see the matter truly and be prepared: Love is costly, too.
Jesus demonstrated this if he demonstrated anything at all.
On my own anger: The harm done to me, the harm that made me angry, might be very real. I was hurt.
But then, have I ever hurt another? Yes, I have. That answer does not mean I deserve the hurt done to me. Not at all. But the question brings the consideration back around to whom we regard as worthy. I am not worth less than another. I should not be treated as less. But is there a danger I am premising my feeling of rage on the assumption that I am worth more?
Love stands opposite to feeling. It stands opposite to gushy feeling and it stands opposite to furious feelings. In contrast to our feeling, love is the rational commitment to choose which cost to pay. That is, do I choose the cost that advances pain, or do I choose the cost that bears the pain but constrains it from further advance?
You might now see to where we have come. We are not quite talking about anger anymore. Now, we are talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness is where this consideration has brought us, because forgiveness is this very thing: the choice to pay the price rather than inflicting the pain.
Love is the answer to anger. Vengeance is the path anger presents. Forgiveness, not feeling, is the path love presents instead.
I have written more about forgiveness: what it is and what it says to evil. If the subject of this post continues, it continues there.
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Photo: “Anger” by Patrik Nygren