Releasing Our Passions

Richard Rohr explores the emotional energy of anger and how we can allow it to both inform us and move through us:   

In Greek mythology, three female goddesses, the Furies, were the deities of retribution and vengeance. They were horrible to look at, with snakes for hair, black wings, and blood dripping from their eyes. Though they were supposedly pursuing and punishing evildoers, their righteous need for vengeance brought about little lasting good, because they needed to punish evil too much and thus became evil themselves. Does this not sound like what practitioners of modern nonviolent theory tell us—violence begets violence? Our words “furious” and “infuriated” come from these goddesses. Their main problem was that their righteous anger consumed them, and their blind fury became an end in itself—and the lasting message.  

It has taken us centuries to fully recognize this pattern is operating in human beings too. It is common for the psyche to put its hope in a retributive notion of justice even though it never works long term. That reveals the classic pattern of all addiction: We keep doing something even when it is not working.  

The preoccupations of the Furies were what the later Desert Fathers and Mothers would call “passions” or what we might call addictive emotions. Whenever we recognize an outsized emotional response, we can be pretty certain that we are over-identified with something or our shadow self has just been activated and exposed. If we are ultimately incapable of detaching from an emotion, we are far too attached!  

There is much evil and injustice in the world that deserves righteous anger, but a good practice is to watch that emotion a bit—to see where that anger is actually coming from. This will take humility and patience. If it is truly God’s anger, we can also trust God to lead and resolve it to some degree, but when it is mostly our anger—if we are using God as our justification—it will have too much urgency, too much of “me,” too much righteousness, too much impatience, too much need to humiliate the opponent. We almost always start there, but good therapy, a wise friend, or spiritual direction can help us distinguish between our personal anger and God’s pure anger. This might take some time to learn, but, unless we do this, we will not have healthy or helpful emotional responses—the unhealthy ones will have us! This is surely what the Bible was pointing to in using the psychologically astute phrase of “being possessed by a demon”!  

If we don’t want to let go of our anger and keep justifying why we deserve to hold on to it, we’re probably operating out of our own offended ego. When we can let go of it—after properly acknowledging it—we will probably be able to retrieve its wisdom—without its excessive charge and use it effectively.  

Reference: 
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (CAC Publishing, 2017), 105–107. 

Image credit and inspiration: Nsey Benajah, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. A gentle openness, relaxed and present, welcomes each moment as it is; neither clinging to feeling nor fleeing from it—simply accepting and allowing it to flow through. 

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