AmyB, thanks for the quote, and I’m in agreement with you. I’ve definitely fallen into similar kinds of pitfalls myself, and I’ve found that working “through” the anger (by allowing myself to feel it and deal with it) is the tactic that has worked the best in my life.

This particular quote made me think of this thread:

The clinician should be mindful of the “defensive misuse of spirituality and inflation of the ego.” For example, a client’s suppression of strong feelings of anger, rage, depression, sadness, or hatred by a pseudospiritual presentation of forgiveness and love for all people should be gently confronted in case the client is using spirituality as a defense against emotions that feel too dangerous to allow into conscious awareness.

I know for myself that my most powerful experience of being able to forgive came only after I allowed myself to fully feel my anger and then work through it.

A sticky question, though, since, as Ecclesiastes says, there’s a time for peace a time for war and making a stand sometimes means we have to resort to pummeling bullies.

Y’all will save a lot of time if you program a keyboard macro to type that statement out

I’m curious, though, where the distinction is between the unrighteous anger, and the righteous anger. Does the difference lay in what we do with those feelings, how long we keep them, or perhaps in subtle differences within the emotion itself?

I wish I had a good answer, but I don’t. I tend to think that there is a difference in the emotion itself (that there is a form of anger that God feels that is justified), but because I think that as mortals we are most likely to end up in a place of unrighteous anger, that we should not try to justify any anger as righteous anger. Instead, we should just focus on working through the anger, dealing with it, etc.

Charity, I think I’m going to have to agree with Ann. While I think there are many instances where we get irritated about small, inconsequential things, and we need to display more patience and less anger, I think in situations where true offense has been given (such as the serious examples Ann states), it is difficult, and not necessarily wise to try and immediately escape/ignore anger (or you can run into some of the problems that Lynnette has run into).

[Wink] argues that the passage I have just read from the Sermon on the Mount has been misunderstood: Christ’s command to “resist not evil” is assumed to mean we should be passive in the face of evil. Wink points out that that is a bad translation. What it more accurately says is “Do not respond violently to violence.” . . .

Wink points out that in that culture smiting a person on the right cheek was done only to humiliate inferiors and only with the back side of the right hand. The left hand could only be used for unclean tasks, and to actually strike a person, an inferior, directly with a fist would be to recognize them as an equal. So if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek, the left cheek. Now he can neither strike you with his fist nor backhand you with his left hand, which puts him in a remarkably difficult position: even your process of submission becomes a judgment on his violence.

(from Eugene England, “The Prince of Peace,” in Making Peace: Personal Essays)

I’ll leave it to the New Testament scholars among us to weigh in on the plausibility of that interpretation, but I find it intriguing.

But I’ve always wondered: if forgiveness does not demand that we put ourselves into situations where we are repeatedly victimized–and my belief is very much that it does not–what, then, we do with the verse in the Sermon on Mount about not resisting evil and about turning the other cheek that Seraphine places at the beginning of her post? It does seem to suggest that we not defend ourselves.

How do all of you understand this passage?