A fervorino, in the context of liturgy, is a short homily; the sort of thing one might expect to hear in the course of a weekday Mass. Given the nature of both my “secular” work and my apostolate, I seldom preach. But I thought I might try to offer here a brief reflection on the readings for Mass on Sundays and Solemnities: a fervorino non predicato or unpreached homilette, if you will (not to be confused with the delicious French egg dish that some of you probably plan to enjoy at brunch today!). I apologize in advance if I am not entirely consistent about this; there will undoubtedly be weeks when my other responsibilities preclude writing something here.
Sirach 27:30-28:7; Psalm 103:1-4, 9-12; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35
Today’s reading from Sirach begins with an arresting image: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” One imagines a person who has nothing left but anger, no one left to embrace but the destructive phantom of their own rage. A hellish thought. Yet anger is a complex thing. One often hears that anger can be good: that it can motivate to action in the interests of justice, compassion, or love, and this is true to some extent. If we were all emotionally neutral in the face of harm there would be no progress toward its undoing. But even justified anger can sometimes be reminiscent of misguided attempts to introduce invasive species into ecosystems in order to correct some problem, resulting, as with kudzu in the American South or cane toads in Australia, in new and much bigger ones. Anger can be consuming and engulfing; even when it begins with good reason and is aimed at achieving good things, it can blaze out of control, harming even the one whose anger it is, constricting interior freedom.
The emotional turmoil of anger can cloud our judgement as to whether or not we are really in the right in a given situation. And here we arrive at the pith of today’s Gospel: hypocrisy. Jesus himself is sometimes, albeit rarely, portrayed in the Gospels as angry, and nothing seems to provoke that response from him more reliably than when people insist that others uphold standards that they themselves, in practice, despise. The servant in the Gospel today is forgiven an enormous debt, only to resort to violence in seeking to extract a petty payment from another. One of the great dangers of anger is that we can find ourselves exacting from others standards of which we ourselves fall short, either because our hearts have become so hard as to be oblivious to our own reality and obsessed with the shortcomings of others, or because, in some way, we are seeking to use the other as a scapegoat for our own guilt (a role Our Lord has insisted he is happy to play, if played it must be, and one that he alone can).
St John Cassian, the great monastic mystic, is uncompromising on this subject: “the deadly poison of anger… must be totally uprooted from the depths of our soul. For as long as it resides in our hearts and blinds our mind’s eye with its harmful darkness, we shall be able neither to acquire the judgment of a proper discretion nor to possess a good contemplative vision or a mature counsel, and we shall not be sharers in life…” (Institutes, VIII.i). Importantly, uprooting anger is not the same thing as suppressing it. If we tamp it down into the recesses of our hearts, it will, reliably, one day explode. Uprooting it is more like frankly confronting its causes, pondering what, if anything, we might do to address them, taking such action as we can in love, and entrusting the situation to God. Often, I realize, easier said than done. But, on the other hand, St John Cassian and the other Desert Fathers and Mothers are remarkably optimistic about what we human beings can achieve with and in God.
It is not for me to say when and how you should embrace anger. Each of us must make that discernment, prayerfully, for ourselves. But, if and when we do allow anger in, we must handle it with great care if we wish to be “sharers in life” and the freedom that is ours in Christ.