Hope's two daughters

Earlier this year, amid a flurry of tradition and ceremony, the Roman Catholic Church elected a new Pope.  Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, an American with dual citizenship, spent many years in Peru working as a missionary, living among the poor and striving for a better life for them.  As an Augustinian he committed himself to upholding vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and to following the example of St Augustine which included a little saying about hope.  “Hope” Augustine said “has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage”.  Though he said it, I think, with social justice in mind - in order to fulfil the hope of a fairer world we need to be angry about how things are and brave in doing something about it - those two sisters perhaps have something to offer us when thinking about our mental and emotional well being.

Anger can be a tricky customer.  Its easy to get it wrong and let it be something that’s ugly in us and frightening in others.  Most of us don’t enjoy it when we’re the focus of someone’s ire and owning our own anger can trigger feelings of guilt or fear.  It can be alarming to discover the destructiveness that lies within and scary to contemplate what we might be capable of doing.  Yet, as with so many of our feelings, it has a purpose and there’s for a reason.  Feelings aren’t a choice, they just happen and for the larger part are there to inform, guide or direct us - if you pick up a hot pan from the stove without protection it hurts, the pain is there to warn and motivate you to let go so that no more of your flesh than necessary gets burnt.

In the same way, it may not always feel like it but, arguably, anger is an explosive energy that is there to protect us.  If someone steps hard on our toe we don’t laugh or smile, we don’t relax, we erupt in a cry of pain that triggers anger - Hey! get off!  But its easy to get it wrong.  If, when our toe is stepped on, we took out a sledge hammer and beat the person to a pulp then it wouldn’t be a reasonable reaction but neither, perhaps, would it be if we stayed silent and did nothing.  Anger is tricky but is an energy to be used.

Courage isn’t always straightforward, either.  There’s the danger that we can confuse it with the concept of ‘fearlessness’ - a thought that to be brave, to have courage, is simply not to feel fear, to be, literally, fear-less.  But that’s not bravery (arguably, that’s not feeling…).  Its not that brave people don’t feel fear, but just the opposite in fact.  Brave people feel frightened just as much as anyone does but what they’re able to do is keep engaged with what they need to do.  They feel the fear and do it anyway, as a saying goes.

Courage and anger often, I suggest, have a part to play in thinking about how to find a greater peace of mind.  Quite frequently it is the case that our poor mental health has been instigated by a trauma of some kind.  Either recently or, perhaps more commonly, in our more distant past, we have suffered a painful and damaging experience.  It might be that its obvious though, equally, it can be quite subtle; we might think that there was nothing to see but if we look more closely and scratch deeper below the surface we find that not everything was as harmless as we thought.  Its tempting to think that our childhood was normal, and indeed in one sense it was because it was the only one that we had first hand experience of, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t have elements of (perhaps entirely unintended) harmfulness within in.   Allowing an honest acknowledgment of that (and any anger it might trigger in us) is perhaps a key step to working out how to live with greater freedom.

Winston Churchill - who knew a thing or two about both righteous anger and the need to be brave - once said;  “Success is not final.  Failure is not fatal.  It is the courage to continue that counts”.  Churchill got angry and used it to enact a great endeavour in the face of over powering odds, odds that must have privately terrified him to the bottom of his boots (no wonder he drank so much…).  “Keep going” was another of his (“If you’re going through hell, keep going” he said.)

So:  hope, anger, courage, and then perhaps as well, perseverance.  A family worth getting to know.