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Proverbs 14:29 "He who is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly."

 

Strong emotions of any kind can cloud our ability to think rationally. We cannot evaluate or understand a situation properly when we allow anger, fear, jealousy, lust, or other emotion to take over. A friend who was suffering tremendously once wondered aloud why we even have emotions. Her sadness and pain were difficult to bear as she tried to do the things that she absolutely had to do to keep herself and her family going. I so sympathized with her, and I spent some time thinking about her question. Interestingly, it was thinking back on a struggle I had with anger that gave me a bit of an answer.

 

Many years ago, when faced with the situation that I found difficult to navigate, God dropped Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Discernment of Spirits in my lap (it really was like that, God is so amazing!). It was a game changer for me to learn this manner of opening myself to God's will in any given situation. One component of this discernment is to be aware of the emotions a proposed course of action raises in us. If we are allowing the "good spirits" to guide us, things we have a bad feeling about, or that raise negative emotions in us, are most likely things we should steer away from, even if they are otherwise good things. It takes a certain kind of detachment from one's emotions to get this right, but once I saw it in action, I understood what a valuable tool my emotions were.

 

Without getting into the details, a situation I had been in began causing anger to rise up in me repeatedly. Having been practicing Ignatian discernment, I realized that I had to step away from it rather than reacting to the anger and causing more problems. Because I had been learning St. Ignatius' method, I was able to feel the anger, but in a detached way, so that I didn't react to it, but just said to myself "Oh, here it comes again, this is not good." I then removed myself from a problem that I would otherwise have kept trying to fix, unsuccessfully I see now, if it hadn't been for this anger. (Also, slowly but surely, things began to happen to repair the situation without me. I realized that despite my best efforts and good intentions, I had actually been contributing to the problem!)

 

Our emotions can help guide us in doing God's will, in choosing what He wants for us, but we have to learn to control them, not let them control us. That is, I think, what it means to be slow to anger, and it truly does bring great understanding, and even joy in suffering, as we realize we are striving to do His will.