RAGE AND LOVE [M, 4-4-22]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

There is a rage deep within each of us. It is because we know life is futile, because we shall die. So, what’s the point?

That undifferentiated rage is down at the bottom, below a lot of other layers, but it is there. It is what motivates everything else we do.

It is not just anger. Anger is at the upper levels. Rage is at the foundation.

Adler said all we do is motivated by the desire for power. Freud said it was sex. Jung said it was the collective unconscious.

Adler is right. the desire for power is the attempt to counter the deep rage. If I can just get power, I can hold death off. My world of power might be very small, perhaps just one other person, but if I can have that power, I am invincible. This is the source of rape, especially the most common rape, men against women. It is from the wombs of women that life, and thus death, comes. If I can have power against the life source, even in the life source, I can have power against death.

Freud is right for the same reason. Sex is the power to create life. If I can create life, I can hold off death. This is why poor people refuse to stop having babies, even when they cannot afford them. This is why pro-birth advocates are so often paradoxical, being only pro-birth, not really pro-life. They are also pro-gun and pro-capital punishment, sources of power over death.

Jung is right. In the collective unconscious is the deep rage against the futility of life.

John S. Dunne, SJ, says there are three strangers that come to us in life: the world, sexuality, and mortality. Dunne says that life depends upon whether we make friends or enemies of these three strangers.

[I know, I’ve written about Dunne’s “strangers” before, but I’m coming at them from a different point of view this time.]

First Stranger: We experience “the world” mostly in other people, but it is also nature. If we abuse the world—other people, animals, the environment—use people and the environment instead of enjoying them, the world becomes a hostile and alien place to us.

Second Stranger: Sexuality is the drive for life, expressed in physical union. But that drive is never fulfilled, for death always follows the creation of life. We can do sex all day, forever, but it will not stave off death.

Third Stranger: Mortality. Death. Nothing lasts. That is why Ecclesiastes [1:2] says, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” We call that wisdom, as in “Wisdom Literature.” Nothing lasts, so why bother? We shall die, and with that death goes our love for other people, our care for the world, so why not just “eat, drink, and make merry?” Nothing matters.

I add a fourth stranger. Christ, the Word of God.

If we make friends with God through Christ, all else follows into wholeness, including the world and sexuality and mortality. If we are enemies with God, the deep rage conquers, and we are enemies with the world and sexuality and mortality, enemies of the world and other people and of our own true selves.

 

When we talk of salvation, we are saying that Christ saves us from our rage, creates in us a new heart, allows us to be friends with the world and sexuality and even death, for in Christ, death does not have the last word.

Not “vanity, vanity, all is vanity,” but “What lasts are faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.” That’s true wisdom literature.

John Robert McFarland