The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

Anger and the Wounded Ego But it is a third possible involvement of the will in anger that makes it so deadly as to deserve the censure Jesus places upon it. We can and usually do choose or will to be angry. Anger first arises spontaneously. But we can actively receive it and decide to indulge it, and we usually do. We may even become an angry person, and any incident can evoke from us a torrent of rage that is kept in constant readiness. This is actually the case with those who are caught up in the current epidemic of “road rage.” The explosion of anger never simply comes from the incident. Most people carry a supply of anger around with them. Perhaps it comes along with that “quiet desperation” that, according to Henry David Thoreau, characterizes the life of most people. Increasingly, now, the desperation is not so quiet. But why, one might ask, would people embrace anger and indulge it? Why would they, as they do so often, bloat their bodies with anger or wear it like a badge of honor while it radiates real and potential harm, not only to its proper object, the one who thwarted their will in the first place, but to others standing by—often with deadly effects on their own life and health and happiness? It is well established today that many people are killed by their own anger.10 Untold many others die of secondhand anger, like secondhand smoke. In Los Angeles and other cities, hardly a week goes by without the death of a child from bullets fired at others in anger. Th...