Chaplain's Corner

This past summer my wife and I took our three grandsons to see the movie Inside Out. It is a beautifully done story of a little girl who moves from the Midwest to the West Coast and all the emotions stirred up by being taken away from her familiar friends and community and being relocated. Most of the story happens inside her head, the animators do a masterful job portraying her emotions, how they interplay and find expression. One of the primary emotions in the story is “anger”. We all know that one. Anger has its way of finding expression in a variety of ways sadly many of the ways it finds expression are hurtful and damaging to relationships.

This fall I was at a daylong workshop on Compassion and in the course of the day one of the presenters quoted Liza Palmer author of Conversations with the Fat Girl (I haven’t read the book). The quote struck me, because it helped me understand the interplay and complexities that take place in the expression of our emotions. The quote: “Angry is Sad’s bodyguard”.

It is not unusual to encounter sad’s bodyguard in the hospital. Hospitals are sad places. People are sick, people are succumbing to the ravages of disease, advanced age and it is not unusual to encounter anger. Unfortunately, when we do, we seldom stop and ask the question, “What Sadness in this person’s life is Anger protecting?” It is a revolutionary question.

I run into Sad’s bodyguard often and so do you. Let’s take a moment to reflect on this quote for I think it might give us all some insight first into ourselves, then into the others we relate to from day to day. Anger is a protective emotion isn’t it. We use anger to protect ourselves from many things. You see, sadness reveals our vulnerability. We don’t like to be vulnerable. Sadness is seen as weakness by many. Few respect us sufficiently to move into our sadness and help us explore it and understand the sources of the sadness. Face it, we live in a “Disney culture” where we just want to be happy. Hedonism is the driving philosophy of many, even many folks who identify themselves as “Christian”..

We seek happiness like a drug addict seeks heroine. When one “Happy fix” wears off, we desperately seek another. Many today have a desperately hard time being alone and quiet, because the silence and “aloneness” so often allow our sadness to surface.

This past weekend I was angry. I am not expressive when I am angry, I was taught as a boy that to be angry was sinful (a heresy to be sure but a hard one to disavow). I didn’t explode at anyone, probably no one even knew I was angry, but I thought, “What sadness is this anger trying to protect? It didn’t take much thought, the anger was trying to protect me from the sadness of being disappointed at the way the day was going. When I acknowledged that, I was able to quiet my anger and attend to my disappointment and the sadness it was generating.

What do you think might happen if the next time a person got angry at us we asked, “What am I doing that is making you so sad? What have I done to disappoint you? What have I done to make you feel unimportant or unconsidered? What have I done to communicate to you that you don’t matter to me? What is your sadness about?”

Think about it? It is true that there are reasons we get angry that don’t have a lot to do with a deeper sadness, I think Liza Palmer is on to something: “Angry is Sad’s bodyguard”. What is the sadness in your life that your anger is trying to protect?