It’s easy to be angry when responsible for running a household with children, because children are constantly doing things wrong. The more children you’re responsible for, and the less help you have, the easier it is to remain in a state of perpetual irritation. But a chronic state is not necessarily a good state. Jesus insists: But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment (Matthew 5:22). This makes the anger itself a problem, or at least the imminent indicator of a problem that is looming.
So where does the anger come from?
Habitual anger is the result of ingrained dissatisfaction. If we constantly focus on the myriad disappointments of life, on the people who don’t live up to our standards, anger will always be at our elbow.
It’s true that yearning for the better thing is a powerful motivator toward the good. But lots of factors are out of our control. There’s only so much we can do to achieve what we want, and anger is a natural response to frustration. If the frustration collapses into despair, we give up working toward the goal and are left with nothing but the chafing desire for something we don’t believe we’ll ever get.
This simmering soup of dissatisfaction, disappointment and hopelessness is such a regular meal for so many people that we might describe it as the national spiritual dish of the U.S.A. Left unattended, it can boil over suddenly into violence. The culture we live in keeps the heat up relentlessly. They can’t sell you what you don’t want, so they pour big bucks into figuring out how to make you want it. Not everyone gets to the boilover point, but a lot of people remain in a constant state of miserable frothing beneath rattling lids.
The antidote to anger is joy. You cannot enjoy something and simultaneously feel angry. Joy casts out anger.
Joy in its ultimate form is a lofty mystery. But the pathway to joy begins anywhere, in the small, ordinary thing that you can genuinely enjoy in this moment. Don’t worry about great saints who weirdly experienced joy in the midst of torture. You can begin to feel joyful simply by focusing on whatever good presents itself now, and giving thanks for it.
It can take a huge effort to haul your attention away from the disappointments you’ve been focusing on, but the benefits of doing so are life-changing. As with physical medication, you have to give this practice some time to work. You know that if you swallow a couple of pills for your headache, it’s going to take half an hour for them to take effect. Similarly, begin to make the effort to thank God for what you can enjoy, and soon you’ll begin to feel relief from chronic anger. Just realize that this treatment needs to be an ongoing practice. Thankfulness has to build up in your system and maintain a certain level in your awareness in order to be effective. This means that you must develop a habit of thankfulness to counter the habit of dissatisfaction.
For Christians, thankfulness is not a vague, self-referential shot in the dark. It’s not that we work ourselves up to feeling thankful in general to nobody in particular. We believe that God is the originator of all good: that’s why we thank him for what we enjoy.
We also recognize that human beings have the freedom to choose evil or good. So when someone does a kind thing, that person truly deserves thanks. We practice saying thank you to people for what they’ve done for us not just as a social reflex, but because of freedom. The person who voluntarily does something for you could have omitted that action. So, say thank you to the people through whom you receive good things.
When you thank your children for their good attempts, you’ll find that not only your outlook but their attitudes change for the better. Yes, everything will still be imperfect. But you’ll be imperfectly happy rather than perfectly unhappy all the time.