Four Reasons Why So Much, Yet So Angry
I've only been in court once. Yet being called adversarial by my own lawyer was more memorable. The case against me actually had some validity, but it was falling apart under the weight of an unnecessary and basic overreach. All I had to do was watch, and the judge was all but certain to vindicate me. I couldn't manage. As the plaintiff's attorney flailed and swiped at my character while questioning another witness, I failed Client 101 and piped up in my indignation. My attorney hissed, "You are about to prove his case for him."
I thought of that window into my heart and the human condition while considering the opening of Psalms 2. The psalmist questions why the nations rage and why kings conspire together. The very people, it seems, who are most blessed and who are best positioned to point away from the common, bitter passions end up reinforcing them. They even use their regal company to do so. A well-adjusted student of the Bible would move on from the rhetorical question to the answer which is soon to follow in the course of Psalms 2, but I passed the well-adjusted student of the Bible stage a while ago. If the Bible asks a question which points to an aspect of the human problem, I want to answer it. After all, if I think the human problem slight enough to barely consider it on the way to resolution in time for the commercial break of my television attention span, I won't be very grateful for the solution. When the Bible points to what's wrong with people, I want to, in the phrasing of The West Wing, avoid rushing to the "however" that will mitigate the consequences. I want to "stand there and be wrong" long enough to appreciate the predicament. Perhaps, on a good day, the exercise will help me avoid the next one.
And it is me standing there and being wrong, along with most who will read this, though we lack royal position or pedigree. As I was in the courtroom, we are in various stages of winning, usually in ways that are not direct results of our merit. The technology we are using to connect with one another right now is the stuff that would have set the kings of the Earth agog in any previous age. Our writ, otherwise known as a Google search, can summon experts who would have elevated the discourse of any royal court. For most of us considering these words, the genuine prospect of lacking food, clothing, and housing is farther from us than it would've been for any of history's monarchs. They, fearfully, were one famine away from such a calamity engulfing themselves and their people. We, living like kings in every sense but titular, can have oranges in January. Yet the rage to which the opening of Psalm 2 points is much, much closer at hand than actual deprivation.
(1) We thought having would be more satisfying. Just as every book I read in my frantic book chase which is slowed down in 2018 made me aware of two or three more books I wanted to read but hadn't yet, so connections enough to know a little bit about a lot of things leave us aware of what is still uncertain. Access to more information in fact, may obscure the material ways in which we are blessed because we can keep looking until we have something to worry about.
(2) With great power comes greater responsibility. Peter Parker's uncle in the Spiderman franchise was more right than he knew. We have chased position and the possessions that accompany it with the idea in mind that once we reached our goal we would be able to use sometimes selfish gains for selfless purposes. Now that we have the experience, the bank account balance, or maybe even the title we long sought, we have a better vantage point to admit what those things can't rectify. John F. Kennedy said he was envious while in Congress of the power of the presidency. Once president himself, he said he now knew that the real power resided in Congress. Whatever kingly aspects we have been given, we soon realize that they are not in themselves sufficient.
(3) Word choice. Word choice. Word choice. As we climb toward our version of comfort, the heart acclimates to the new normal. Jesus said in Matthew 12:34 that out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks. Our overblown diction and vocabulary, especially as we bounce it off each other, as in Proverbs 2:2, reinforces overwrought expectations. The scripting of the Bible's book of Esther exhibits this dramatically. King Xerxes repeatedly offers half his kingdom in order to show his willingness to please his audience. Esther, taken into the courtly atmosphere in this respect, pledges that she wouldn't ask him for anything if only slavery was at stake. This is an environment, I suspect, where one can simply ask, "Please pass the salt." Perhaps asking for a small sample of the granular grandeur of the ocean would be appropriate?
Though our daily doings are not particularly dramatic, we talk to ourselves and to others as though they are. How many of our sentences begin, "I can't handle it if…", or, "I will kill him if…" We overuse words like disaster to the extent that a more modulated, realistic register hardly registers at all. We admire people, admitted an ESPN commentator in a yearly wrap-up which included an ongoing, heated confrontation, "who are pure id."
(4) Our Abigail is absent. This had to get back to The West Wing, our best adaptation of the ways of the royal court to modern American life, sooner or later. In one episode early in his administration, President Bartlett follows standard procedure by moving ships out of port in order to avoid a hurricane, only to have the hurricanes shift so that he has inadvertently put them in danger. Facing this and other reminders of his limitations, his wife Abigail, in her first appearance of the series, confronts him. "One of the things that happens when I stay away too long is that you forget that you don't have the power to fix everything. You have a big brain and a good heart and an ego the size of Montana. You do, Jed. You don't have the power to fix everything."
Whatever we are or aren't king of, most of our relationships tend to be fairly transitory. There are precious few people who know us from stage to stage in our life's journey, and even fewer who will take the risk of telling us when what we are raging at is not reasonable. However royally blessed, we rage because we aren't satisfied, we rage because we think it a dialect of compassion, we rage because we have become so accustomed to rage that it has dyed our souls along with distorting our diction, and because our rage has discouraged the very people who might help hold it in check.
I thought of that window into my heart and the human condition while considering the opening of Psalms 2. The psalmist questions why the nations rage and why kings conspire together. The very people, it seems, who are most blessed and who are best positioned to point away from the common, bitter passions end up reinforcing them. They even use their regal company to do so. A well-adjusted student of the Bible would move on from the rhetorical question to the answer which is soon to follow in the course of Psalms 2, but I passed the well-adjusted student of the Bible stage a while ago. If the Bible asks a question which points to an aspect of the human problem, I want to answer it. After all, if I think the human problem slight enough to barely consider it on the way to resolution in time for the commercial break of my television attention span, I won't be very grateful for the solution. When the Bible points to what's wrong with people, I want to, in the phrasing of The West Wing, avoid rushing to the "however" that will mitigate the consequences. I want to "stand there and be wrong" long enough to appreciate the predicament. Perhaps, on a good day, the exercise will help me avoid the next one.
And it is me standing there and being wrong, along with most who will read this, though we lack royal position or pedigree. As I was in the courtroom, we are in various stages of winning, usually in ways that are not direct results of our merit. The technology we are using to connect with one another right now is the stuff that would have set the kings of the Earth agog in any previous age. Our writ, otherwise known as a Google search, can summon experts who would have elevated the discourse of any royal court. For most of us considering these words, the genuine prospect of lacking food, clothing, and housing is farther from us than it would've been for any of history's monarchs. They, fearfully, were one famine away from such a calamity engulfing themselves and their people. We, living like kings in every sense but titular, can have oranges in January. Yet the rage to which the opening of Psalm 2 points is much, much closer at hand than actual deprivation.
(1) We thought having would be more satisfying. Just as every book I read in my frantic book chase which is slowed down in 2018 made me aware of two or three more books I wanted to read but hadn't yet, so connections enough to know a little bit about a lot of things leave us aware of what is still uncertain. Access to more information in fact, may obscure the material ways in which we are blessed because we can keep looking until we have something to worry about.
(2) With great power comes greater responsibility. Peter Parker's uncle in the Spiderman franchise was more right than he knew. We have chased position and the possessions that accompany it with the idea in mind that once we reached our goal we would be able to use sometimes selfish gains for selfless purposes. Now that we have the experience, the bank account balance, or maybe even the title we long sought, we have a better vantage point to admit what those things can't rectify. John F. Kennedy said he was envious while in Congress of the power of the presidency. Once president himself, he said he now knew that the real power resided in Congress. Whatever kingly aspects we have been given, we soon realize that they are not in themselves sufficient.
(3) Word choice. Word choice. Word choice. As we climb toward our version of comfort, the heart acclimates to the new normal. Jesus said in Matthew 12:34 that out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks. Our overblown diction and vocabulary, especially as we bounce it off each other, as in Proverbs 2:2, reinforces overwrought expectations. The scripting of the Bible's book of Esther exhibits this dramatically. King Xerxes repeatedly offers half his kingdom in order to show his willingness to please his audience. Esther, taken into the courtly atmosphere in this respect, pledges that she wouldn't ask him for anything if only slavery was at stake. This is an environment, I suspect, where one can simply ask, "Please pass the salt." Perhaps asking for a small sample of the granular grandeur of the ocean would be appropriate?
Though our daily doings are not particularly dramatic, we talk to ourselves and to others as though they are. How many of our sentences begin, "I can't handle it if…", or, "I will kill him if…" We overuse words like disaster to the extent that a more modulated, realistic register hardly registers at all. We admire people, admitted an ESPN commentator in a yearly wrap-up which included an ongoing, heated confrontation, "who are pure id."
(4) Our Abigail is absent. This had to get back to The West Wing, our best adaptation of the ways of the royal court to modern American life, sooner or later. In one episode early in his administration, President Bartlett follows standard procedure by moving ships out of port in order to avoid a hurricane, only to have the hurricanes shift so that he has inadvertently put them in danger. Facing this and other reminders of his limitations, his wife Abigail, in her first appearance of the series, confronts him. "One of the things that happens when I stay away too long is that you forget that you don't have the power to fix everything. You have a big brain and a good heart and an ego the size of Montana. You do, Jed. You don't have the power to fix everything."
Whatever we are or aren't king of, most of our relationships tend to be fairly transitory. There are precious few people who know us from stage to stage in our life's journey, and even fewer who will take the risk of telling us when what we are raging at is not reasonable. However royally blessed, we rage because we aren't satisfied, we rage because we think it a dialect of compassion, we rage because we have become so accustomed to rage that it has dyed our souls along with distorting our diction, and because our rage has discouraged the very people who might help hold it in check.
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