You are angry. You believe—you know—the last person to fill his or her cup from this coffee pot failed to refill the pot. The pot is empty. The hot plate is still on. This pot could have exploded. You could’ve had your eyes put out by shards of hot coffee pot glass.
Wait, no—it’s not the fact of the pot’s being empty that makes you mad. It’s the—you know—the principle of the thing. You don’t feel personally slighted by your having to open this foil pouch and pour a hopelessly approximate amount of Tim’s into the paper filter someone left on the counter. It’s that you—well, what if, you know, Secretary Sue came and found this here and had to do it? You’re mad because it is just not right for Sue to have to do the coffee when she was, like, probably not the one to empty the pot.
Who did this?
***
To one another, we say, “turn the other cheek,” echoing Christ. Are you mad? Then turn the other cheek. Forgive 490 times. Do not sin in your anger.
To one another, we reply, “I believe! Help my unbelief”—before crucifying our anger. It is such a base emotion. Could Lewis have experienced it? Tolkien? John Paul II? Yes, we know about those ancient church fathers, they of the sand-encrusted tunics and wild beards and obsessions with heresy. We know of Luther’s raging farts, of Aquinas branding his door with a charred cross after rebuffing the advances of a prostitute. We know, we know—but none of them was an evangelical!
***
“Sue shouldn’t deal with this crap,” you say at staff meeting. “If you kill the pot, refill it. Really, guys, it’s just common decency I’m talking about here.”
You look at your two interns. They have scruffy beards and weirdly formless fedora-esque hats. The brim of the hat nearest to you is about as thick as a slice of peameal bacon.
“Sorry, sir,” one of the interns says, looking confused. He has a habit of working his hands into expressing his feelings before he says something. You watch his eloquent gestures and hear the intake of breath before stopping his next sentence.
“Just make sure Sue doesn’t have to fill the pot next time. Whenever you empty it, basically,” you say.
His hands grow still and he nods.
***
Turn the other cheek! Tone it down. Don’t flip your lid. Be cool, man.
By happy fortuity, whatever remains of the American monoculture has shifted into a position of support for Christian meekness. Sure, there’s the rage-entitled fringe, you think—but out in the world of Midwestern supermarkets and chicken sandwich franchises, politeness still reigns.
***
“My pleasure,” the waitress says as she delivers your (corrected) order.
Your neck is hot. The other cheek, you think.
“No, my pleasure!” you almost reply in a stage whisper.
***
Christian leaders got you down? Criticize constructively, and be mindful of your tone. Did a televangelist push a new heresy through his rictus during an appeal to a vulnerable demographic’s pocketbooks? Resign yourself to the ongoing presence of evil in the world and help those you can. Did a famous church organization shelter child abusers and lie about it after not going to police? Dial it down; you weren’t the one affected by it. You haven’t been a child for many years.
***
“Listen,” you say during your Sunday sermon. “I can’t say how important it is for Christians to look differently from how the rest of the world looks. To act differently. If your faith isn’t producing even just a common decency in you, then I really think you have some tough questions to ask yourself!”
You avoid looking down at your interns, one of whom appears in your peripheral vision to be wearing a newsboy cap.
“And we don’t always get it right,” you say. “I know that. But look: you’ve got to try.”
You look down at Secretary Sue, who appears to be drifting in and out of consciousness.
“You’ve just got to try, you know?”
You finally look down at your interns. The one in the newsboy cap seems to be—well, sort of ashamed, you suppose. His hands are folded in front of him.
You look back up, into the lights, unsure of where you meant to take this thing after your call-to-action intro. Oh—right. That one part of Matthew 21, where—yeah. Where Jesus is angry about something.
***
Jesus cleared the temple in a holy rage. He also tells us to take our anger to one another before we go to bed, and that insulting someone in anger is akin to pronouncing judgment on ourselves.
The life of Christ and the teachings of Christ are not in tension, of course. Anger is not tantamount to sin. It’s a question of stewardship: anger is not a passive experience, but an active and intelligible one that has a propositional root. Anger reveals something to us about ourselves, even as it threatens to carry us away.
To say that an emotion takes a propositional object is to say, essentially, that feelings are reasonable. The logic of emotion comprises three elements, as a college mentor of mine once explained: there’s a feeling, a belief, and a valued good.
The three elements of this triad can each be used to understand the others. If I love my brother and come to believe that he is in physical danger, it is reasonable and fitting for me to experience feelings of alarm. Because I value my brother’s health and well-being, if I believe him to be in danger, I will feel something about that. If I don’t, I either don’t believe he is in danger, or I don’t value his physical well-being in the way I thought I did.
Where this triad of emotion, belief, and valued good becomes most interesting is in its application minus one of the elements. Then it becomes a personal hermeneutical tool.
***
You step down from the stage as people wander out of the sanctuary. One of your interns is waiting for you, newsboy cap still on. You are angry again, somehow. Maybe at the cheekiness of the hat.
“Pastor,” he says, looking pained. “I need you to know I didn’t kill the pot.”
“What are you talking about?” you feign.
“The coffee pot. I don’t drink coffee. Only tea.”
Your face turns red.
“I, um,” you stutter. “I’m really sorry about that, Michael. I don’t know what got into me.”
Michael removes his hat, gestures with it in a lead-up to his words.
“It’s no problem, pastor. I just wanted you to know.”
***
Where does your anger burn the hottest?
“When you speak in anger, you do not communicate well,” an acting teacher once told my class, “but you do communicate the most.” The heat of anger leads us back to our beliefs and valued goods: in its light, they are made transparent for anyone around us to see, even as we find ourselves blinded by the glare. Whom do you blame? Whom would you protect? What frightens you? What disgusts you? What can you not abide?
The presence of anger is always, most fundamentally, a sign we care about something. The question is: what?
