I. When I was in seminary a generation ago, there was a growing emphasis that each seminarian studying to be a pastor would receive a basic unit of Clinical Pastoral Education.
Clinical
Pastoral Education . CPE. “Boot camp” for prospective clergy. Often, though not
always, a summer-long intensive where you and your peers were subject to
intense dissection of your deepest psychological motives to help, that you
might provide better pastoral care out of it all.
CPE. A memorable experience. A revealing experience.
One
revelation has served me to this day more than any other. It wasn’t something I
learned about myself – and there was much I did learn about myself. What has
served me to this day the most was a framing by our supervisor of the four
basic food groups of human emotions: Mad
… Glad … Sad … and “Afra’d.”
May
not seem profound – or even revelatory. And yet, I have found this framing of
basic human emotions extraordinarily grounding over the years in providing simple
pastoral care to complex church people in complex situations.
Four
basic human emotions: Mad, Glad, Sad, “Afra’d”. Four emotions which ground the 150
sung prayers in our scriptures – prayers known as the Psalms. Our Jewish
forebears – Jesus among them – understood there was nothing in our human
emotional universe excludable from our relationship with God. The constellation
of Mad, Glad, Sad, “Afra’d”: All four expressions
are fair prayer game.
Is it the Glad: “Thank you, God!”? No – that’s not it.
Could it be the Afra’d or the Sad: “Help me, God!”? Not really.
How about, “I’m angry, God” – and perhaps even, “I’m angry at you, God”? Bingo!
What do we do
with the mad that we feel? Well, what can
we do, when we ignore it – repress it – forget it’s even there.
III. And so what do we do with our faith, in the process? For starters, we bowdlerize the Lord’s Prayer. We take the thundering demands of our most popular prayer and decorate them into polite petitions. We neuter the Greek imperative verbs of the prayer – “Thy kingdom: Come! Thy will: Be done!” and “Give us! … and Forgive us! … and Lead us not! … and Deliver us!” We neuter it with voices unraised: “Please, O Lord? Won’t you please allow us a small measure of your kingdom and some of your will and our bread besides? We know you’re busy. You’ve left us here to be independent, to rely upon our American selves, and so we don’t want to bother you overly much …”
Feel mad toward God? Forget it! No way! We are, after all, what Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion calls us: the happy Protestants! Those successful mainline ones, who have learned from the time of our mothers’ milk that to be mad was … well, to be mad was to be bad! And especially to be non-submissive before the Almighty. Otherwise, he’ll get us, but good!
And yet, the
persistence of the widow in Jesus’ parable today is born out of that singular emotion
of mad.
Fierceness … passion … a hunger and a thirst: All these wonderful character
traits stem from a burning within her that she would lose in either rage on the
one hand or apathy on the other if she did not direct her anger into
persistence for justice. Persistence for justice which is itself a prayer – and
then which Jesus folds into his parable on persistence in prayer.
IV. What do we do with the mad that we
feel? Well, first: We have to actively feel it!
Once, during a nonviolent civil resistance action, I found myself in a city
jail’s holding tank with Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson, and the Rev.
James Lawson, Martin Luther King Jr’s mentor. Arun Gandhi told me the story of
spending a summer with grandfather in India’s hinterlands when he was a
rebellious youth. Out of that summer’s experience, he became the keeper of his
grandfather’s flame. “My grandfather would tell me that summer,” Arun Gandhi
said to me, “how much easier it was to attract an angry soul than an apathetic soul
to his soul-force cause. For it’s the angry ones, he said, who become most
passionate about compassion. It’s the ones who feel their anger inside who are
fiercest in their commitment to seek justice through love’s nonviolence.” So
feel the mad, the Mahatma was saying – so God can put it, as the widow did, to
its best and most com-passionate use.
V. Now that we feel
it: What do we do with the mad that
we feel? How
do we, like the widow, bring such fierceness and passion to bear on our exodus
journey? Our exodus journey: away from our captivity to the mad that we feel, on
the road with Jesus to his Jerusalem – and ours?
Two true stories
from here in our Nation’s Capital, and I’ll close.
1. One of the fiercest and most passionate D.C. barristers for many years was the
late Edward Bennett Williams. Considered by many the best trial lawyer in
America in his day, he defended some tough customers over the years: Mob boss Frank
Costello, Jimmy Hoffa, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, junk bond king Michael Milken.
But one of his toughest customers
proved to be Mother Teresa. One day, he received a call that she would like to
see him in his office. Among his many high profile duties – among them along
the way, owner of the Washington Redskins and Baltimore Orioles – Williams was
the president of a major Catholic fund.
Mother Teresa came to Bennett’s office in the Hill Building
to ask for a contribution from that fund to a hospice for AIDS patients. “AIDS
is not my favorite disease,” Williams told a friend from the fund, and they rehearsed
a polite refusal to Mother Teresa. Her head peeking over Williams’s enormous
desk, the diminutive nun made her pitch, and Williams apologetically, but
firmly, declined. “Let us pray,” said Mother Teresa and bowed her head.
Williams looked over at his friend, and the two men bowed with her. When she
was done, Mother Teresa gave exactly the same appeal. Again Williams politely
demurred. Once more Mother Teresa said, “Let us pray.” Williams looked up at
the ceiling. “All right, all right,” he said, and pulled out his checkbook.
2. Talk about persistence in prayer, and persistence for
justice itself as a prayer! A prayerful seeking of justice another meek
individual brought to DC and whose
persistence won over a powerful U.S. Senator. Enjoy with me now this
four-minute YouTube clip of a Presbyterian minister named Fred Rogers – Mister
Rogers – and his testimony before Congress in 1969 to save the fledgling Public
Broadcasting System from proposed presidential cuts. This sermon’s title, in
fact, is borrowed from his poem in this
clip …
VI. And so what do you do with the mad that you feel? Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa,
Mister Rogers, and Jesus alike teach us: Persist in prayer. And persist in
justice – which itself is a prayer.
Be free to be mad toward others. Be free to be mad toward God.
God can take it.
God is not as afraid of our anger as we are!
