Sorts of Anger

God has had plenty of rage and frustration directed his way from Swanvale Halt lately. Just after Christmas a devout and lovely lady from the congregation, who's waited nearly two years for a knee operation which has been delayed and delayed owing to infections and problems, was rushed into hospital with what turned out to be a ruptured intestine. This was itself probably due to the painkillers she's been taking at terrifically high levels for months and months to cope with her knee and back. For a while it looked as though she was about to die and I spent four hours with her on New Year's Day in expectation of that happening. But she's still here, now tracheotomised and ileostomised and heaven knows what else, somehow keeping going. I had this in my mind when I preached on the Sunday before last about the injustice of things and the uselessness of some forms of comfort, which people seemed to appreciate. As St Teresa said, 'Lord, no wonder you have so many enemies, when this is the way you treat your friends'.

The other day I heard Mad Trevor ranting and shouting in the church while I was in the hall next door. There's no point intervening when he's like this, and I don't have anything to contribute anyway, so I let him get on with it: I suspect spiritually it's rather positive. What he was saying wasn't even especially mad. He has been somewhat persecuted by life, has had a rough time of things, and, it seems to me, has every right to be angry.

Over at Heresy Corner the Heresiarch's correspondents (including myself)have been commenting on philosopher Alain de Botton's idea for a 'Temple of Atheism' in the City and his theories as to why atheists of his generation are rather less angry and strident than their older fellows, such as Dr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens. As one pointed out, Dr Dawkins isn't even that angry, and pointed us towards this post by Greta Christina, who really is.

I could make niggling points about bits of it, but, in broad terms, I find it unanswerable. There is so very, very much for Christians to be ashamed of historically, and to guard against in the way they try to think now, and any sense of Christian entitlement to special treatment from a largely non-Christian polity is grotesque.

I sometimes wonder that I am not angry about the right things. All my moods of anger seem essentially selfish, arising from a sense of my own entitlement, of jealousy or wounded amour propre. I have discovered more and more of it thanks to the process of being a priest. But apart from that I'm almost excessively easygoing, very prone to making sympathetic noises to people in bad situations without being able to cut through the emotion and visualise the process that leads to the bad situation, the structure, the relationships of power and injustice. Christ was angry on occasion. Perhaps I need to work on it.