I’ve talked before about my issues with forgiveness-as-enlightenment, and my perspective on the truth about healing and why healing doesn’t require forgiveness
…but both are pieces in a larger paradigm.
I was raised in a neo-enlightenment environment which subscribed to the idea that anger and hate and fear served to disconnect us from others, and that we should only act from love and joy.
Anger itself was considered to be toxic.
Then one day I realized that, in the Bible, even Jesus had occasions of righteous anger. Of moments where he basically said that this shall not stand.
That was my aha! moment.
And I realized that it isn’t an act of love to allow someone to hurt others, it isn’t an act of connection to ignore the pain they cause, that there is no joy in suffering. And that people who’ve been harmed can connect through their anger and fear.
I wasn’t particularly religious – my church was of the bourgeois hippie variety – but I found the Jesus perspective to be authoritative enough to allow me to reject the anger-is-bad message.
They were so self-congratulatory about their perspective on sin, and yet they essentially preached the sin of humanity, that normal human emotions and responses are toxic in and of themselves. That you should accept the ‘negative’ actions of others, and forgive them, regardless of how they have harmed you, but never accept ‘negative’ emotions in yourself.
It is an unwitting cult of self-negation.
You couldn’t even say you were sick or feeling poorly because that would be ‘affirming’ negativity. You couldn’t experience your own suffering because ‘suffering is a choice’.
At least Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity is upfront about viewing people as sinful; but this church, and others like it, praise humanity but denigrate actual humans.
I think that remembering the purpose of anger and hate and fear allows us to engage with those emotions mindfully. Recognizing their place in the pantheon of the human experience can give us perspective, using them as a tool helps protect us, and this coping mechanism moves us forward.
What a gift anger and fear can be.