new church life: september / october 2013
rightfully feel anger, and our thought gets directed to responding.
Anger, and the thought that we have to respond, often lead us to act badly.
Our actions don’t help resolve the situation, and likely add to the upset. Or we
can practice self-control, and so while we feel the anger, and our thoughts go
to doing something, we don’t say anything, we don’t act. We pause, mentally
stepping back. We rise above the hurt, and the circumstances, and discover
feelings and thoughts that have a deeper source in our spirit.
We remember our place and role in the Lord’s kingdom. We remember
the feeling of belonging to, and connection with, the Lord, our neighbor, even
creation as a whole. These reminders are given to us by the Lord, by means
of deeply stored, unconscious experiences of goodness and rightness in the
world.
When we go through this process of remembering our deeper, spiritual
self, we discover that the other person acted out of a profound ignorance of
his connection to us, and to the Lord’s kingdom, and to all that exists in all of
the Lord’s creation. The person who wronged