I try, in general, not to carry the thoughts of one blog over to the next day—each day ought to sufficeth for its own blogging—but the question of anger is still pinging back and forth in my head. In this case, not because it is so appalling to watch women beat the ground with sticks because of various injustices apparently done to them, but because I, like most people, live with a background emotional miasma of frustration that sometimes bubbles forth into real expressions of anger.
For example, I was so tired on Sunday evening, that when I finally had a minute to sit down with a dear friend, I poured forth a torrent of woes, heaped together—circumstances and occasions I was really angry about, things over which I had no power or control whatsoever. If I could have laid my hand on a stick I might have beat it on the ground. But instead, I just complained and complained. And my friend told me she would pray for me, which I know she is doing, and then went home without getting to tell me about her frustrations and woes. Which is sort of ok, because it will definitely be her turn next time. And we can text and stuff. It’s not like I’m selfish or anything.
There are two ingredients that make anger such a force, such a torrent in the world. The first is the sheer helplessness of the human predicament. If you’ve been going along in Morning Prayer, you had to swiftly follow up the long journey through Job with a shorter, but equally depressing, sojourn in Ecclesiastes. The two books aren’t written by the same person, but sometimes it feels like they might as well be. Incidentally, for people like Joel Osteen who think that the Bible is about being happy and getting more stuff, I feel like he has obviously not read it and that’s a shame. For consider, if anyone had everything wrenched out of his grasp, it was Job. And if anyone understood the misery of grasping for that little bit of something—the chance of rest, to “get ahead,” to “come out even,” to connect to another person, to grasp something precious and not have it disappear into a vapor—it was Qoheleth.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Demotivations With Anne to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.