Second Day of Lenten Retreat

ANGER AND SLOTH

Holy Spirit Catholic Church, Mustang, OK

Father Thomas Boyer

March 7, 2016

Reading 1 (Ephesians 4:26-32)

A Reading from the Letter of Paul to the Church of Ephesus.

“My brothers and sisters never let the sun set on your anger or else you will give the devil a foothold. Anyone who was a thief must stop stealing; instead he should exert himself at some honest job with his own hands so that he may have something to share with those in need. No foul word should ever cross your lips; let your words be for the improvement of others, as occasion offers, and do good to your listeners; do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God who has marked you with his seal, ready for the day when we shall be set free. Any bitterness or bad temper or anger, or shouting or abuse must be far removed from you – as must every kind of malice. Be generous to one another, sympathetic, forgiving each other as readily as God forgave you in Christ.” The Word of the Lord

The Homily

Whoever said that “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you.” must have been living with deaf mutes. That old saying deserves to be deleted from our memory. As a child I never believed it, and as an adult, I have come to wonder what kind of person could have ever thought such a thing. What were they thinking? “Careless words can do untold damage; one word may destroy even a sublime love.” This sin, called Anger is not about sudden flashes at things gone wrong – those outbursts here one minute and gone the next make the best of us giggle at how silly we reacted over something of little consequence. This sin is about a disorder, an outburst of emotion connected with a desire for revenge. This is an emotion that becomes an obsession. Perhaps it is better called: “Wrath.” It is a fixation and we live in an age of wrath. It is observed every day in the behavior of terrorists, kidnappers, hijackers, looters, and sometimes the clenched fists of demonstrators.

This is an angry age. Our world is crowded with angry people. Sometimes we are the angry ones. In my reflection on this third of the Deadly Sins, I am coming to realize that much of this anger is fueled by a serious confusion over rights and wants. We have come to a time in human history when any need, desire, or longing for anything that one lacks but someone else has, is today conceived to be my right that, when demanded, must be provided without challenge, and if it is not at once supplied the one making the demand as entitled to be angry. In that kind of climate, you can hardly blame the one making the demand for taking advantage of this foolishness since they are justified in advance on four grounds:

What they want, it is their right to have;

When it is asked, it should be granted;

If it is not granted, it is understandable that they are angry;

Since they are angry, it is clear that their demand in the first place was justified.

I don’t think any civilization in human history has ever gotten itself in this mess before. It is a vicious circle: any and every felt want is translated into a “right” which incites the citizens to Anger then to destructiveness.

I have no intention of “preaching to the choir” so to speak, or of getting side tracked by this example, but the best example in front of us day in and day out is the matter of a woman’s “right” to control her body: “Abortion.” The bottom line here is that there are no boundaries that can logically be set to the concept of individual and human rights. We are so individualized in this culture that every individual need, want, or desire has become a “right.” But any high school student who studies biology knows that we don’t have control over our bodies.  They are subject to infection, disease, decay, and death.  The truth is, one cannot claim as a right what cannot be guaranteed, and there is no way of guaranteeing to any of us, male or female, the right to have “control over our own bodies.” To present as rights what cannot in the end be secured as rights, as we all too often do today, is a sure prescription for Wrath.

Wrath is inevitably directed, even if not intentionally, at an innocent object. In this case, it is the conceived child. The mother may want to abort, but it isn’t a right. To translate a wish into a right is an example of the absurdly distorted concept of individual and human rights by which our society is now confused. It sets us against each other in an endless combat for the rights we claim. Anger is the consequence.

Most of these “rights” someone will claim will, if granted involve the diminishing of another’s rights. The freedom of a woman to choose not to have a child can be a diminishing of the freedom of a man to enjoy the child whom he has played some part in conceiving; to say nothing of the rights of the child to life. If anyone can claim that any felt want or need or longing is a right, there are clearly no such things as rights left at all, since everyone’s supposed rights are pitted legitimately against everyone else’s supposed rights, and we no longer have any way of deciding what is a right and what is not. We have a mess on our hands and it is deadly: not just to an unborn child, but to civil and social life.

The desire for revenge is both an outcome of Wrath and a cause. “Getting even”, Getting back” – it’s all the same. Waiting for that bridge to go down yesterday I sat behind a car which had a bumper sticker that read: “I get mad, and I get even.” Road rage is an epidemic in our time, and so is gratuitous violence. Both are directly related to a culture of hyper-individualism which has placed a giant chip on everyone’s precious shoulder. “How dare the world slow me down? How dare we be inconvenienced by a traffic jam, by someone in the grocery store line ahead of us who chats kindly for just moment with a tired checker? How dare that old person slow down in front of me before turning right?”

We are living through the angriest time in the history of our nation. The horrible events of September 11, 2001 created more anger in this country than anyone has seen since Pearl Harbor. The anger raged into wrath and the need to retaliate against the real perpetrators. We’ll get Osama and his network He’ll be hunted down, smoked out, and brought home dead or alive. Anger, you know, often causes us to make promises we can’t keep. What’s more, when dealing with September 11, the distinction between real and perceived injury becomes more than academic. Most Americans defended the war to drive the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and shut down the terrorist training camps. The problem came when “perceived” injuries were ascribed to Iraq, and our anger was directed at a country which, although suffering under a cruel dictator, had done no real harm to us.

We let our anger get the best of us, and then later we learned that the weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda did not exist. We were right to be angry about September 11, but by focusing on our own desire for revenge we allowed ourselves to be dragged or manipulated in a war that has not brought us any closer to capturing the real terrorists. We were hurt, and so we lashed out. But the convenient target isn’t necessarily the legitimate target. While our response may have made us feel better, it hurt our reputation around the world. You know what the difference between a reaction and a response is? It’s a pause. I remember my mom standing still with lips tight counting to ten. She taught me to do that. It makes the difference between an angry reaction (knee jerk) and a reasonable response (wisdom).

Mahatma Gandhi warned us that “an eye for an eye just leaves the whole world blind.”

So, when things don’t go well, or we fail to get something we want, someone else must be to blame. That is the thinking of our culture. We are taught to assume personal responsibility, but as individuals we often act like victims. The lyrics of nearly every country and western song reveal the sorry mess we are in: “Somebody Done Somebody Wrong.” and, we’re, “Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.” (Another bumper sticker I saw this week.) There always has to be someone to blame with this crazy thinking because Wrath needs an enemy, and even where this is none, it will invent one. Timothy McVeigh grew up angry and then left a loveless home to live in a world of cheap hotel rooms, hate radio, and the fraternity of racism. Failing to find himself worthy of love, he became addicted to hatred, which can be its own kind of narcotic. After the bombing, our anger was first directed against Arabs, and we immediately detained several men of Arab descent without cause, except that they looked to white America like terrorists. When the real perpetrator turned out to look very much like a clean-cut Marine, we found it difficult to believe that he acted alone, and began to spin out conspiracy theories like cotton candy, because anger can blind us and make us believe we know something, even when we know nothing.

So what about a virtue to use against this sin? There is a theory about “good anger and bad anger.” Let’s call it Indignation. Put the word Righteous in front of it if you want, but I think that’s confusing. “Indignation” has to do with dignity, and what I want to suggest is that a little indignation – that is to say, a little good anger about the right things might help us refocus and surface a little good old passion for justice, not revenge. It might be a good idea sometime to get angry because we care, not just because our feelings have been hurt. Lots of people are mad these days, but not about anything that matters.

The Gospel images of Jesus do not avoid the reality of anger and the human passion of Jesus Christ. That occasion when he cleansed the Temple was an experience of human passion that could not be ignored. The image of Jesus as “meek and mild” is not always reconcilable with the Jesus of the Gospels. Remember the time when he walked past a fig tree looking for something to eat? In fact, when you start looking at the man who cursed a fig tree because it didn’t give him food when he wanted it even out of season, when you remember that he suggested a mill-stone as a necklace for those who hurt children, you might suspect he needed an anger management class. This matter of anger is really about passion directed in the right way. It is about action, doing something, not just thinking something. The reality of Jesus is that he was angry, but not over some injustice done to him. Rather he was boiling over with indignation over the corruption of religion in his time. I think he is still indignant. The scandal of our church today is not about sex abuse nor that people do not believe the right things as some on the far right would like to suggest. It is that people hardly ever do the right things. Jesus has become a cosmic pal, a buddy. God has become wise and adorable, maybe awesome, but never disturbing. The Word of God has become a study guide. It might be time for God to become frightening again. It might be that so many are obsessed with the second coming because the first coming was so disappointing.

Anger is self-serving passion. When we stir our passions for the sake of others, stop worrying about our rights and act more out of justice, it won’t be so dangerous on our streets. We are at war with terrorism and we will be for a long time to come. The manner in which we marshal our anger and wage this war will determine whether we make the world safer or more dangerous. Indignation on the other hand moves deliberately but patiently to bring terrorists to justice rather than bringing ‘justice to terrorists. Instead of a deadly sin, we need a lively virtue. The love of justice perverted into the desire for revenge and the injury of someone else will end our civilization. Whenever love is translated into hatred, we know that sin has entered and wrecked its havoc.

Silent Reflection

Reading 2 (Mark 4:26-29)

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark

A man scatters seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know. Of its own accord the land produces first the shoots then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the crop is ready, at once he starts to reap because the harvest has come.”

The Gospel of the Lord

The Homily

“Life is tough. Then you die.” Another bumper sticker I saw this week. I think I may work up some talks on “Bumper Sticker Wisdom”! But there’s another old saying like the one I just mentioned: “Sticks and Stones”. It’s a simple one; four words that were drilled into me as child: “Mind Your Own Business.” As an adult and priest, I have begun to question that wisdom. I have begun to suspect that it is at the root of a seriously sinful life style. “Live and Let Live.” is part of that false wisdom. “Don’t’ get involved.” my father once said to me. Bad advice!

“Sloth”. I choose to stick with the old English word because it is so curious. It sounds like being lazy, like laying too long in the bathwater or sleeping through breakfast. It hardly sounds deadly, and certainly not like a capital offence, but it is. It is way more than an energy deficiency. It is not about deciding one morning that you’ll roll over and go back to sleep, or taking a nap in the afternoon when you should be doing laundry. It IS about a fundamental loss of faith in one’s ability to do anything about anything. It is about a feeling expressed this way: “So what? I couldn’t care less.”

If we are living in an age of Anger, it is also an era of anxiety. Like the previous sin, it rests upon the false notion that an individual can find fulfillment and salvation in nothing but his or her own self and the denial that we are members one of another, and that “the solidarity of mankind links the crimes of each to the sorrows of all.” It is that business of individualism again. It is summed up best in the advice: “Look out for Number One.” It is the first commandment of Sloth.

This whole idea, the whole concept of individualism reached a new high and new approval/acceptance in this country in the 1980s. It was first observed in an economic policy called: “Supply Side Economics” that turned out to little more than an economics of ego centric individualism. Trickle down didn’t, and now we live with are can no longer deny a chasm between the rich and the poor that is shocking to everyone who pays attention. It nurtured a kind of isolated individualism that has set the stage for a gradual polarization as the rich get richer and the poor take care of them. Our Church calls this into question again and again.

The first symptom of sloth is Complacency. Individualism breeds it. It is the complacency of the comfortable. As they have grown in number, one begins to hear the denials that we are our brothers’ keeper. That’s Sloth in your face. Looking out for Number One has been given even more enforcement by the self-indulgent idea that if “I’m OK, you’re OK” or “I’ll leave you alone, and you leave me alone, and if we do that, everything will be fine!” No it won’t!  It will not be fine. I won’t be fine, and you won’t be fine. In Genesis God said: “It is not good for man to be alone.” There is something wrong. This is a breeding ground for indifference, and “Indifference” is another word or manifestation of Sloth – it is deadly: deadly to individuals and deadly to the human family.

One of the consequences of all this in our society is getting more and more obvious to people like me. It is at the root of many divorces and the cause of a pressing crisis in our church. When I was a pastor I would interview one by one the young people in confirmation class. One of the questions I ask them is what they will be doing after High School. My favorite answer is: “I don’t know.” I squirmed when they told me they are going into law school, medical school, or planning to be an X ray technician. To those I had a second question: “Do you think that’s what God wants you to do?” At least those who have not made up their minds might be open to wondering what God wants them to do with their lives. It’s all about pursuing some purpose in one’s life, and that means it’s about commitment to someone or something other than oneself. I am of the opinion that young people have no interest what so ever in the priesthood because it requires that frightening experience called: “Commitment.” Avoiding that is what gives so much anxiety to young people approaching marriage. Living it is what makes keeping a marriage alive so difficult. Avoiding it because a marriage like priesthood is hard work is called SLOTH.

Sloth grows quietly and steadily in an environment of gratification. If it doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t get done. If the good feeling is delayed, other things will come first. A lot of charity work is like that, and I am suspicious of it. A large group of young people from Norman, Oklahoma went to a town in Mexico under the sponsorship of a local Methodist church and they built a couple of houses. They came home. Some of them felt really good about it and they want to go again, and I wonder: to build houses or feel good, can they build enough houses to really matter, will they do something about the system that creates the problem if it means they will have to suffer with less? Some became profoundly disturbed, and they have the best chance of all to make a difference if they stay disturbed. The good feeling here is like a narcotic. It satisfies, provides contentment, and nothing changes.

Those who have taken ill with sloth have no identity except their personal identity. There is an absence of group identity. That’s what happens with people too lazy to go to church – they think they are Catholic, but the very identity of Church springs from the assembly. If you’re not in it, if you’re not part of it, if you’re not identified by being in the middle of it, you can’t claim the identity. You’re just claiming an idea. The individualism that is on the rise in our culture shows it's self in that question: “What’s in it for me?” with immediate gratification of one’s need coming before all other loyalties. So, the commitment to marriage or to having children while debts get paid off begins. The individualism of our age is an ideology that encourages people to maximize personal advantage while consideration of the common good is increasingly irrelevant. It’s SLOTH.

I find it fascinating to discover that in collectivist societies which are often religious (Islam being a perfect example) a person’s loyalty to his family or group takes precedence over his personal goals. Such societies have among the lowest rates of crime, dysfunctional families, and alcoholism. The thought/comparison makes me uncomfortable, but have you ever wondered why no one among us ever blows themselves up for a cause or an ideal or a vision of what should be? We don’t care enough. We are too complacent. We don’t care about the right things and are too easily satisfied with puny pleasures that never last.

Meanwhile, in the real world, millions of people are moving through life like zombies, staying outwardly busy but not finding anything much worth living for. “I’m so busy! I hardly know what to do.” Business! It is deadly. I’ve given up on a couple of relationships I had hoped would foster lasting companionship because the other person was just too busy all the time. All they could ever talk about was how busy they were. I began to feel like an interruption, an intruder. Personally I hate it when people walk up to me or call me on the phone and start by saying: Father, I know you’re busy, and I’m sorry to bother you!” WHAT?  My life is not about meetings and reports which fill in the gaps that anyone else can do. So when I hear that, rather than be insulted, I simply quietly realize I am being corrected. I can’t count the marriages I’ve seen blow up because people are so busy or the number of families that fall apart because of busy parents and equally busy children who run from soccer to Tee ball, to ballet or swimming lessons. Their refrigerator doors are covered with schedules and lists, and inside there is nothing to eat because they don’t have time to sit down and look at one another, so they eat on the way to or from some game or some practice or some meeting. This is deadly. It is sloth.

Herein lays the paradox of sloth: its ability to disguise itself in misdirected activity. The consequence is neglect, neglect of higher things, greater things, spiritual things, in the end, neglect of self. This is life in a vacuum.

There is a spiritual side to this as well. Just as the slothful avoid obligations that demand sacrifice, so do we experience the same thing spiritually. I think it is what gives rise to some popular devotions that are so shallow and silly and ask so little of us while the real stuff of spiritual life gets ignored: Fasting, Prayer, Sacrifice. Instead of visiting the sick, the nursing homes, the homeless and taking up a share of Saint Vincent de Paul Society’s work, we just look quickly and think: that person in the nursing home isn’t my mom or dad. Someone should so something! I am always suspicious of spiritual exercises that bring consolation and comfort to those who are already so by their position in life.

This is an anxious age. Anxiety is essentially a dread of nothing. What to do about it? I would suggest some balance in life that the little story from the Gospel suggests. Sow the seed, and wait. It is the ancient dilemma of when to do and when to wait. The parable defines something called contentedness in terms of the proper order of things: first you do, then you wait. After you have done what only you can do (plant the seed), you wait while the seed does what only it can do. When the time for harvest has come, you gather in the crop that grew itself, but which cannot harvest itself. This is divine wisdom – a revelation! “The order here is very important. First the seed is sown, and then sower knows that he can do nothing more so he waits. Nobody stands over a seed and screams, “Come on now, grow!” A seed carries its own future in its bosom. The sower has done all he can do. Now he waits patiently for God to do what only God can do.

“No one would think to call his waiting slothful. It is wise. He turns his mind to other things. He hopes for rain. He mends fences. He watches and waits because he is not the master of the harvest; he is the steward of the mystery. When that mystery is fully present, his waiting is over, and he puts the sickle to the stalk.

“Mark preserved this parable for an anxious church, one that waited for the return of Christ and wondered why it hadn’t happened. The answer is that we cannot know, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can and then be content. We plant the seed of the word, and then we wait for the mysterious way in which God brings it to fullness.

This kind of contentment means that we know there are limits to what we can do, but these do not produce feelings of failure. Failure comes from doing nothing. This kind of contentment makes us more attentive to those moments when we can do something and more patient when we know it is time to wait. Being busy does not make us happy. “Idol hands are the devil’s workshop.” is a lie. More than anything, Sloth is a sin of omission, a sin of neglect. Technology and gadgets have freed us from drudgery leaving us the challenge of what to do with the time now available. Minding our own business, not getting involved means we will not hurt nor get hurt. But of course, the hurt is deep both ways because it leaves us separated from humanity and that’s a deep inner tear that ultimately separates us from God, which by ancient definition is sin.