An Anger With No Address

It has been about a year and she is not usually an angry person and that is what makes it so strange to carry.

It arrives with proper heat. Not irritation. The real thing, the kind that makes you put something down harder than you meant to, and it comes without warning, usually when she is doing something unrelated.

And it has nowhere to go.

Because when she gets to the end of it and looks for who she is angry with, there is nobody there. Not a person. Not a living institution she could write to. Everybody who had a hand in it has been dead for a very long time and most of them left no names.

So it circles. That is the only word for it. It comes up, it looks for a door, it does not find one, and it settles back down and waits.

And she has noticed something she does not like, which is that when heat cannot find its own target it starts trying doors that are nearby. A man on a program. A comment somebody made at work that was nothing to do with any of it. Her husband, twice, about something else entirely.

She is not becoming a bitter woman. She is a long way from that and she would know. But she has seen where the road goes and she has been on it for about a year and she does not want to walk any further along it.

She said, in the car, out loud: I am furious and there is nobody to be furious at.

You know that heat.

Maybe yours is about this. Maybe it is about a thing that happened to your people, or your family, or a person who is now dead and beyond reach of anything you might say. Maybe you have found yourself sharper than you used to be and traced it back and been surprised where it came from.

There is nothing wrong with you. Anger is what a person feels about something that should not have happened, and it does not check first whether there is anybody available to receive it.

Where the psalms actually put it

Here is an instruction, given to a whole people, about what to do with the inside of you.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out your heart before him.

Not: sort your heart out and then bring the acceptable part. Pour it out, which is what you do with a container you want empty, and the psalms are full of people doing exactly that with contents that would alarm most prayer meetings.

There are psalms with rage in them. There are psalms that say things about enemies that no one reads out on a Sunday. They were kept anyway, in the songbook, for three thousand years, which tells you what the collection thinks about a person arriving hot.

You are able to pour this out somewhere, and it does not have to be tidy before it goes. That is what pour out means in Psalm 62:8, emptying rather than presenting, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a real transfer rather than an exercise in venting, which is the difference between a thing leaving and a thing being rehearsed.

And notice the last clause: God is a refuge for us. A refuge is somewhere you go when there is nowhere else. That is the exact situation you have been in for a year.

This page will not give it a target

Now let me be very plain, because this is the moment where an article could do real harm and I am not going to.

Nothing here is going to hand you somebody to be angry with. Not a party, not a people, not a century, not a council, not a tradition, not a name. Not by statement and not by hint and not by which facts get selected.

That is not because the heat is illegitimate. It is because a target would feel like relief for about two weeks and then it would be a wall in your life, and you would carry a grievance instead of a grief, and a grievance is heavier and it never ends and it costs you people.

You are not being handed anybody to blame, and the relief of a target is a loan and not a payment. Scripture says dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord (Romans 12:19), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that an actual handing over rather than a suppression, which is the whole difference between putting something down and sitting on it.

What the heat is actually made of

Here is the thing worth knowing, and it may explain why nothing has cooled it.

Anger with no target is nearly always grief that has not been allowed to be grief.

Grief is a soft feeling and it makes a person feel weak and it has no action attached, which is unbearable for anybody with any fight in them. Anger is a strong feeling. It stands up straight. It feels like doing something even when it is doing nothing at all.

So when a loss arrives that cannot be repaired, a capable person will very often meet it as fury, because fury is easier to hold than helplessness.

You have been meeting a sorrow with the only strong feeling available, and that is not a fault in your character. Scripture says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit (Psalm 34:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to be broken hearted without being frightened of it, which is the only way anybody ever puts the fury down.