Love is not Irritable 愛裏不輕易發怒
Irritability is a spiritual readiness to get angry. Anger is an emotion, even a kind of passion. And it brings pain; anger makes us scream and sometimes cry because of the pain. But anger is also energy. An angry person wants to tear things apart. Unlike sadness, which is heavy and immobile, anger pushes us into attack.
The basic cause of irritability is erotic love. Erotic love is the root of irritability because it is personal power generated by personal need. We reach out and strive for anything that promises to satisfy our deep desires to be complete human beings. This restless reaching beyond us is what erotic love is. Erotic love is the root of irritability because our pursuit of fullness always falls short of the perfect ending. Our frustrated need for the satisfaction of being a fulfilled, complete person is the single, deepest cause of our irritability.
Being irritable is not a sin; but it is the inevitable result of being a sinful creature trying to grow into maturity and fullness. But being irritable is a possible menace, for it robs us of joy and it can always spread into hostility.
Some things agapic love does not do for irritability
1. Agape does not disguise anger. We give signals to other people that they have done something that deserves anger, but that we are too good to get angry. This gives us the luxury of expressing anger without the risk of having it thrown back at us. Disguising anger relieves other people of the responsibility of doing something about our anger. But it forces them to cope with an irritable person, who will not let his or her anger be recognized for what it is. And the disguises behind which life is lived in painful anger only prevent us from changing the situation that causes the real anger, and makes us more irritable.
2. Agape does not unleash anger . "Be angry, but do not sin" (Ephesians 4:26). He may have been saying: "Do not disguise your anger, but do not let it roam the streets unleashed either."
3. Agape does not remove irritants from our lives. If divine love possessed everyone in our environment, we might be free of irritants. People irritate us by rubbing our sensitive egos. They ignore us when we need to be noticed. They remind us of duty when we want to have fun. People even irritate us by their love. Love is often put in clumsy hands. People push into our lives and cling to us with love when we want to be left alone.
4. Agape does not reduce irritability by forbidding anger. Agapic love does not overcome our irritability by persuading us that we should not be irritable. If we try love because we are commanded, we will only become the more irritable as people and prevent us from feeling loving. To forbid all anger in the name of love is as mistaken as forbidding someone to be irritable. Love does not make anger wrong. There are things in life that demand our getting angry at them. Not to feel anger at them would mean we are either insensitive to evil or afraid to feel anger. We would be less than human if we failed to get angry at pain and the loss of precious things in our own lives. Jeremiah was seething when he said, "I am full of the wrath of the Lord; I am weary of holding it in" Jeremiah 6:11). Jesus was furious with the Pharisees.
What does agapic love do to reduce irritability?
Generally, love reduces irritability because Love has the power to turn the direction of our desire towards the needs of other people.
1. Agapic love reduces irritability because it meets our deepest need. There is no way to experience the power of agape without experiencing God himself. This is the point John makes persistently: "If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. . . . God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him" (1 John 4:12, 16).
2. Agapic love reduces the potential for frustration.
Agapic love dethrones self-satisfaction as the ruling monarch of our lives. Once satisfying our own deepest desires is less than our ultimate goal, love begins to reduce our irritability by thrusting our energies in the direction of the needs and rights of other people. Agape does not take away the needs that eros seeks to satisfy nor reduce the number of things that frustrate us, but we no longer feel the frustrations in the same way. A shift of concern from self to others reduces irritation.
3. Agapic love gives power to communicate anger. The power of love gives us the freedom to admit that we are angry and to express our anger constructively.
4. Agapic love increases gratitude. Agapic love is the power to overcome irritability because it is the power to see life as a gift. The world is a gift, a playground where we discover our very selves as gifts of God. The first breath of the morning, the chance to be healthy, the opportunity to work - all of it a gift from God! Gratitude is an antidote to irritability.
In sum, first, agapic love does not unravel a lifetime of irritability at once. The inflammation of the ego takes a long time to heal. Second, we need to get angry, and we need the ability for rage. Agapic love, in fact, will move us to anger at things that leave a person cold who is driven only by a need to satisfy himself. Things that do not touch us directly may infuriate us because they frustrate our brothers and sisters in their move for justice. With agapic love we will be given a new power for anger, but at the same time we will be amazed at our tolerance for annoyances that used to drive us up the wall because they blocked our way to pleasure and fulfillment
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撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes
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