BBC Radio 4 Thought for the Day Wednesday 11 October, presented by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Good morning. News of hostage-taking, massacre and carnage stirs understandable and profound feelings. Almost everyone knows the rapid journey from discovery to reaction, from judgement to anger, from fury to rage.
There’s a liminal moment between anger and rage. Anger can be a constructive emotion, stirring us from distraction or self-absorption, to an acute awareness of wrong done, leading us to a process of restitution or reparation. When directed away from our own pride, and towards another’s well-being, anger can be a means to a healthy end, like a ladder we can kick away once we’re truly engaged in seeking the good.
But rage is something different. Rage names the moment we lose all rational faculties. The red mist descends. We find ourselves incandescent, untrammelled by any restraint. We lose sight of the original wrong done in our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance. In our outrage we tell ourselves we can and should destroy all in our path, for only then can justice be restored and fury satisfied.
There can be something exhilarating about rage. Our culture prizes both visceral experience and impregnable righteousness, and rage offers a combination of the two, an intoxication of indignant fervour. To be so right that you’re justified in whatever damage you wreak is almost a peak experience of a society that valorises both intense passion and moral superiority.
When Jesus says, ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword,’ I understand that to mean ‘Don’t seek a sentimental peace, but one with sharp edges.’ It sometimes sounds facile to pray for peace amid the rage of war. But it depends what you mean by peace. The peace of still waters and quiet rest is certainly a fantasy at a time of widespread horror. But maybe peace is more like the sword that divides rage from anger.
It’s rage that’s based on fantasy. Rage assumes a story by which I obliterate you and all is resolved. But it’s not resolved: it’s just stoking up further rage for another explosion sometime later. By contrast anger can stir us to action, such as the brokering of ceasefire, the measured and even-handed witness of the wider community, the careful identification of and holding to account for wrongs done, the patient hearing-out of resentments and fears, the finding of a path through to mutual security, dignity, understanding, respect and hope.
That requires everyone involved to deescalate back through the red mist of rage to the heightened awareness of anger, to set aside the urge to obliterate the other, and begin to allow trusted outsiders to modulate the temperature of dispute. Anger can lead towards reason and eventually justice; rage, to neither.
