A woman approached the famous evangelist Billy Sunday after he preached a sermon on anger. She attempted to rationalize her anger by saying, “There’s nothing wrong with losing my temper. I blow up, and it’s all over.” Billy Sunday replied, “So does a shotgun, and look at all the damage it leaves behind.”
Anger is a universal human emotion. Frederick Buechner wrote about anger in his book Wishful Thinking, “Of all the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways, it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.” Frederick is spot-on. There is something perversely satisfying about the deadly sin of anger. Anger wants the people who hurt us to feel the same hurt in return. It’s called payback. Yet, we pay a heavy price for our anger. “The skeleton at the feast is you,” he wrote. Anger can eat us alive.
A monk and theologian of the early church, John Cassian (365-435), identified eight principal vices that distract believers from union with God. These vices were later streamlined into the so-called Seven Deadly Sins. John recognized the spiritual havoc anger can inflict on believers and proposed that we redirect anger toward our own sin. If we are to become irate, it must be at our own sinful proclivities. In the middle of writing on anger, John prayed: