I think it was Henri Nouwen who first commented with sadness that many of the angry, bitter, and ideologically driven people he knew, he had met inside of church circles and places of ministry. Within church circles, it sometimes seems, everyone is angry about something. Moreover, within church circles, it is all too easy to rationalize our anger in the name of prophecy, as a healthy passion for truth and morals.
The logic works this way: Because I am sincerely concerned about an important moral, ecclesial, or justice issue, I can excuse a certain amount of neurosis, anger, elitism, and negative judgment, because I can rationalize that my cause, dogmatic or moral, is so important that it justifies my mean spirit: I need to be this angry and harsh because this is such an important truth!
What makes us genuine disciples of Jesus is living inside the Holy Spirit, and this is not something abstract and vague. If one were searching for a single formula to determine who is Christian and who isn’t, one might look at the Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter 5. In it, St. Paul tells us that we can live according to either the spirit of the flesh or the Holy Spirit.
We live according to the spirit of the flesh when we live in anger, bitterness, judgment of our neighbor, factionalism, and non-forgiveness. When these things characterize our lives, we shouldn’t delude ourselves and think that we are living inside of the Holy Spirit.
Conversely, we live inside of the Holy Spirit when our lives are characterized by charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long suffering, constancy, faith, gentleness, and chastity. If these do not characterize our lives, we should not nurse the illusion that we are inside of God’s Spirit, irrespective of our passion for truth, dogma, or justice.
We need to be more self-critical in regard to our anger, harsh judgments, mean spirit, exclusiveness, and disdain for other ecclesial and moral paths. We may have truth and right morals on our side. But our anger and harsh judgments towards those who don’t share our truth and morals may well have us standing outside the Father’s house, like the older brother of the prodigal son, bitter both at God’s mercy and at those who are receiving that mercy.
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