The Art of Rage

When I interviewed at the Pittsburgh VA hospital for a spot in the summer intensive Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) cohort back in 2002, one of the supervisors asked me if I ate my anger, a question that kind of took me off guard, being as this was only an interview and not the actual thing.  It surprised me, and then it made me a little angry, and then I got hungry, and that made me more angry.
For those of you who don't know CPE is a thing that a lot of your pastors have had to go through at some point in their training.  It is basically half working as a chaplain in a clinical setting and half group therapy designed to rip your false sense of self to shreds and then put you back together.  Each unit of CPE is 400 hours, either in a summer intensive (10 weeks of 40 hour weeks) or spread out over the course of a year.  People talk about it the same way military people talk about boot camp.  If you haven't been through it, you don't know, and once you have been through it you get to join the crowd that knows, or thinks they know.  To this day, I use the things I learned in CPE much more than I use my knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and John Calvin.  It is valuable, and it is hard, and it pretty regularly makes you confront your shadow side, which for me turned out to be a lot of mad.
I learned that anger can be used, or it can use you, largely depending on your awareness and your level of emotional balance.  Which leads me to today's observation that our cultural level of anger has risen to a place where it is certainly using us.  Here's a stream of consciousness recollection of all the things I have seen people be outraged about over the past few days:

Trump (oh so much Trump), Harambe the Gorilla, the kid who fell into the Gorilla's enclosure, the mother of the kid who fell into the Gorilla's enclosure, the people who shot Harambe the Gorilla, Thailand Tigers, Hillary's emails (again and again), the fact that Bernie Sanders exists, Trump (did I already mention Trump?), Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the electoral process, the primary process, Ted Cruz (still for some reason), Mitch McConnell, Obama visiting Hiroshima, Obama not apologizing for our country nuking Japan, Obama hugging a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, ISIS, Muslims, abortions, fundamentalists, #blacklivesmatter, #alllivesmatter, The Iran nuclear disarmament treaty, transgender bathroom stuff, gay marriage, Methodists who like homosexuals, Methodists who don't like homosexuals, Methodists who are homosexuals, traffic, the weather, guns, gun regulation, the fact that memorial day and veterans day are different, the fact that people die in war, the fact that have wars, the fact that some people say we shouldn't have wars and how that disrespects the people who die in wars...

Yeah, so I could go on, and on, and on, but I hope you get the point, name something and there's someone out there who is freaking irate about it, and that, friends and neighbors, is not particularly healthy.  There are some legitimately worrisome things in that list, and some emotionally charged issues, but what seems to be happening is that we're filtering all of these complex events and ideas through glasses that are very much a darker shade of red than the rose colored ones.
Anger triggers a strong fight instinct, which if it goes unchecked and even un-evaluated, makes for dialogue, particularly sensitive, nuanced dialogue very difficult.  The thing is that anger is actually a secondary emotional response, and forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but the underlying emotion is actually fear.  There's that feel again.
Believe me, back in the day, I didn't want to admit that anger flowed from fear.  I was okay being angry, that was bad-ass, that was manly, that was perhaps even culturally acceptable, but being afraid?  Who wants to identify with that?
CPE supervisors have this annoying way of peeling the onion of your emotional processes back to the underlying motivations.  Things you think make you strong and powerful turn out to be motivated by some deep seated feeling of inadequacy, acknowledging that is uncomfortable and most of us don't want to do it, so we build our walls higher and stronger and we entrench deeper and deeper into our own egoism.
Once you have had your emotional fortress razed to the ground, you find that you still have the same raw materials to work with, but you also have the freedom to arrange them rather differently.  I still get angry at things, but I have a different way of dealing with that anger; I ask myself, what am I afraid of?  For instance, injustice makes me angry, because I am afraid that our ability to love one another is growing weaker, because injustice is a failure of two other core emotions: love and peace, the failure of love and peace leaves a vacuum which fear is all to happy to fill and anger then starts flinging things around like, you know, a 400 pound gorilla, but this is actually the way it should work, it's part of how we know stuff is wrong.
If I ask myself, what am I afraid of? and the answer comes back with something less universally askew, I may need to reevaluate my feelings, which is difficult, but necessary.
For instance: At first I was angry about Harambe the Gorilla being killed, then I realized that my anger was based on a fear that perhaps we, including our expert zookeepers are not quite the responsible stewards of the creation that we should be.  Fear response: we are not in control of a 400 pound silverback gorilla, even though he's in a cage, he can still fling that little kid around like a piece of paper.  Fear response: what if my kid slipped away from me and did something dumb like falling into a gorilla enclosure.
These are true things, but our response to them is rarely rational and it leads us to fits of rage and saying things that are not helpful or constructive, like blaming the mother of the kid for being distracted while her kid did something dumb, or the animal response team for responding according to protocol and judgment that had to be made quickly without any emotional hand-wringing, or even Harambe the Gorilla, for well, being a gorilla.
We should be sad about such a waste, but sad is a different root emotion.  We should seek to take a constructive look about how we treat animals and how we keep our kids safe, but raging about on the internet does no one any good, least of all Harambe or that little boy.  Maybe there is a place for anger, but most of it seems to have been misplaced.  The fact of the matter is, like them or not, zoos are not just entertainment, but are often important resources in the preservation of biodiversity.  Like it or not, studying gorillas is not particularly profitable, unless you figure out a way to generate revenue by having tourists come see them.  Whether you want to admit it or not parents, your four year old can get away from you and probably do things that aren't that bright.  When that happens you should be glad that there are people who wrote, and who followed the protocol for dealing with a 400 pound gorilla that wants to play volleyball with your kid.
I feel like we need to do more thinking and less raging.  I think we could use less knee jerk reacting and more constructive criticism.  I hope that love and peace don't always get shoved aside by the 400 pound gorilla of our fear.