YES, God, the ever-merciful and compassionate God, can be
angry. His anger can even turn into fury and wrath. Just read the Old
Testament, and you will have a good dose of vivid instances of this
divine anger and wrath.
Which reminds us that anger is not bad after all. If God
can be angry, we, who are his image and likeness, can be angry too.
Anger has a place in our life. Except that we have to be most careful
with it, since our anger can only be good and righteous only when we
are truly identified with Christ. And given our current condition,
that identification can only be at best tenuous.
To be sure, God’s anger is not a lasting, much less,
permanent feature. It’s a passing emotion. As Sacred Scripture puts
it, he is slow to anger, quick to forgive. His anger is just for a
moment, but his mercy and compassion is forever.
Our anger should be like the anger of God. In the gospel,
Christ showed this anger when he drove away those sellers and vendors
who were desecrating the temple area. The same when he found a fig
tree full of leaves but without fruit. (cfr. Mk 11,11-26)
We can clearly see that Christ was a man of passion also,
which tells us that we should not be afraid of emotions and passions
as long as we express them in the proper way. This training our
emotions and passions will be a life-long process, and so we just have
to be patient and sport about the whole affair.
We have to understand that to move toward our human and
Christian perfection, not only should we be spiritual, but also we
need to go passionate. That’s simply because man is both spiritual and
carnal, intellectual and emotional, with passion as the strongest
expression of our feelings.
We have to overcome that partial understanding of our
humanity that only highlights our spiritual aspect at the expense of
our bodily dimension. Of course, it is also wrong to go the other way
around, to stress the emotional at the expense of our spiritual
development.
We have to take care of both dimensions to the highest
degree possible. And in a certain sense, this reminder is urgent,
since many so-called pious or religious people who try hard to effect
some good transformation in individuals and society often concentrate
on the spiritual and neglects the corporeal component of life.
The result is often dismal failure, wasting a lot of
energy on an apostolic approach that perhaps can achieve some good
effects that often do not last. These apostolic fruits fail to tackle
the finer demands of our real life in the world.
Passions have to be properly cultivated. First of all,
they have to be given due attention. They have often been considered,
wrongly, as a drag in our human and Christian growth. They are left in
the margins, at best.
They are never a hindrance. They are a necessary
component, because love which is our perfection, while mainly an act
of the will, a spiritual operation, cannot do away with our bodily
dimension where love too has to be expressed.
I remember one point in the book, The Way, of St.
Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, that gives a relevant insight.
“You tell me, yes, that you want to. Very good. But do you
want to as a miser longs for gold, as a mother loves her child, as a
worldling craves for honors, or as a wretched sensualist seeks his
pleasure? No? Then, you don’t want to.” (316)
If love has to be true love, it should not be confined
only in the will and in the intellect. It has be go passionate,
marshalling all the powers of our body—imagination, memory, feelings,
the very use of our body, etc.—to its employment.
Human and Christian love first has to be human before it
can be spiritual and supernatural. It cannot be any other way. We
would do violence to the nature of things if we understand it
differently.
That’s why, especially when dealing with kids and the
young ones who often develop love first through feelings and the
bodily aspects, we have to understand them and know how to make these
feelings or passions conform to right reason and the requirements of
faith and charity.
It’s not a matter of repressing those feelings. It’s a
matter of educating them, revving them, in fact, to become passions
and not just wimpy elements that we are ashamed to show and express.
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