Sheelah, I’m glad you liked my ‘poor man’ reflection. It wrote itself reminding me how often I am that ‘poor man’ longing for redemption but afraid to ask.
In the 1990s I put an Episcopal Church bumper sticker on my truck’s rear bumper. In addition to the Church logo, the bumper sticker said: “Share God’s Love Today.” I would forget the bumper sticker was there until after I made some particularly aggressive driving maneuver! In today’s digitally enabled world, a ‘smart bumper sticker’ could display my “Angry Denials of God’s Love Today = ??? times.”
Why would someone cherish anger? Because it covers over the responsibility to learn (as you wrote) that Jesus is the interpretive key “… to your approach to your fellow human beings.”
Anger is secondary. First, we feel – fear, or loneliness, or sadness, or significant loss; feelings one may perceive as untenable and then deny by projecting them onto another person, or a human condition, or perhaps a cultural taboo turning primary emotional energy into anger, perhaps even rage. The subconscious mind implements the projection freeing the conscious mind to cherish the arrangement, which for a time the individual may experience as freedom from the intolerable.
