Love and the Fire of Life

Ecological teacher Sara Jolena Wolcott values what our anger can teach us, especially when it joins with love:

Increasingly, I see anger as being like fire. Fire is necessary for life.… Anger is a part of the larger fire in our lives. Anger is an important emotion; it is part of the flight-or-fight response that is core to how humans respond to danger. As such, it has a valuable role to play in our lives. It is important to feel fire’s heat, but fire can burn out of control. The trick with anger is to let it inform us, maybe even to let it warm us if we have become too cold with indifference or apathy, but not to let the fire control or consume us.

Ultimately, we want our lives to be guided: illuminated, warmed, comforted, provoked by our deep love affair with the Divine. That love, as so many mystics remind us, can also be like an all-consuming fire. So love, not anger, needs to be the ultimate guide. Sometimes anger can point us to love.…

I have sympathy with those spiritual leaders who say we should strive to get rid of anger, or at least to not act in anger. Yet the classic example of anger and spiritual teachers, at least within Christianity, is when Jesus overthrew the moneychangers’ tables (see Matthew 21:12–13). If the son of God can do this, we get the sense that it is fully acceptable to be righteously angry at systemic injustice that harms the poor and the vulnerable.

However, in the end, I don’t think Jesus’ passion or his death were lived through in anger—certainly his resurrection did not arise from a place of anger. So, what does that tell us? Anger can inform us and sometimes guide us, but anger is not the ultimate, final word; love is. Love is bigger than anger. Love still overtakes the divisions and fractions. I think there is room for anger in love. It is in God’s holy fires that these emotions can be used well. [1]

Brian McLaren reminds us that we can trust God with all our emotions, including our anger: 

Opening ourselves to God when we’re in need says that we trust God and want God to accompany us, support us, and befriend us in every way.

We trust those we love most with our deepest fears, doubts, emptiness, and disillusionment. So we love God when we share those vulnerable aspects of our lives with God. Just as a little child in the middle of a temper tantrum can shout “I hate you, Mommy!” only because he knows his outburst will not end their relationship, we can express to God our deep doubts, anger, or frustrations only because we possess an even deeper trust in God’s love…. The fact that we share this pain with God rather than withhold it turns out to be an expression of love. [2]

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Naaman, the great military commander of Syria, and the enslaved Israelite girl who served Naaman’s wife, had almost nothing in common. And yet, the girl expresses concern and compassion for Naaman because he suffers from a skin disease. She tells him of a prophet in Israel who can cure him. What allowed her to find empathy for a person utterly unlike herself? The link between empathy and identity has been well-established by researchers. I found one study conducted in the U.K. to be particularly illuminating. The first part of the test invited soccer fans to take a questionnaire. The questions were written to identify Manchester United fans and, importantly, to reinforce their identity and allegiance to Manchester United.Each participant was then told that part two of the study required them to watch a short film about soccer in another building. While walking there, an actor dressed as a jogger and hired by the researchers would run past, fall, and grab his ankle while shouting in pain. Here’s where it got interesting. Sometimes the jogger wore a Manchester United shirt and other times he wore a Liverpool shirt (the rival soccer club to Manchester United).The Manchester United fans helped the injured jogger 92 percent of the time when he was wearing a Manchester United shirt, but only 30 percent of the time when he wore a Liverpool shirt. This study and many others have found that we are far, far more likely to have empathy for those with whom we identify and much less for those with whom we do not. But there’s more. The study also found that empathy increases or decreases based on which of our identities is emphasized.The same researchers repeated the study but with one significant difference. They changed the questionnaire in a way that deemphasized allegiance to any specific soccer club, and instead, the questions emphasized the Manchester United fan’s overall love of soccer. They then proceeded to have their encounter with the injured jogger. This time 70 percent helped even when he wore a Liverpool shirt.The dramatic increase in empathy was directly linked to how they identified themselves and the injured jogger. When the participants saw themselves as primarily Manchester United fans and the jogger as a Liverpool fan, empathy was unlikely. The jogger was one of “them” and not one of “us.” But when the participants saw themselves as primarily a soccer fan, that identity was broad enough to include someone wearing a Liverpool shirt. The injured jogger became one of “us,” and therefore worthy of their concern. Which brings us back to Naaman’s story. If the girl saw herself primarily as an Israelite and Naaman as a Syrian, empathy would have been unlikely. Or if she had identified merely as a slave and viewed Naaman only as a powerful general, again it’s unlikely she would have shown kindness to him. Instead, she found a point of connection; a place where her identity and Naaman’s overlapped and she no longer viewed him as one of “them” but as one of “us.” I suspect the identity they shared was rooted in pain.She knew the grief of being abducted from her home and family, taken to a foreign land, and enslaved. Naaman knew the pain of leprosy and the social isolation the disease brought. Did the young Israelite girl look at Naaman struggling with his skin disease and see a glimpse of her pain? Is that what kindled her compassion for him? Was their shared identity as sufferers enough to overcome their many other rival identities? As our society’s capacity for empathy continues to decline, we need to ask if the problem is actually a matter of identity. Maybe if we begin to change how we see and identify one another we will also transform how we treat one another. DAILY SCRIPTURE MATTHEW 9:10-13  2 KINGS 5:1-27 WEEKLY PRAYERFrom John Chrysostom (347 – 407) Lord, let us pattern our lives only on those things that are worthy of being imitated. Not gorgeous buildings or expensive estates, but on those people who have confidence in you. Help us to imitate those who have riches in heaven—the owners of those treasures that make them truly rich. Help us to imitate those who are poor for Christ’s sake, so that we may attain the good things of eternity by the grace and love toward man of our Lord Jesus Christ. Glory, might, and honor be unto him with the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, now and always, world without end. Amen.

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