Christian Holiness: Moving From Anger and Fear to Love

"Christian holiness is love; lack of love is lack of holiness. The nature of love is unfathomable, because it is divine; but we do know one thing, if there is pride there is no love. Love is a humble disregard for oneself, a giving up of oneself for others, for God, and for God's children."Sin, on the other hand is "remembering oneself" and forgetting others. It is self-satisfaction, sometimes coarsely sensual, sometimes spiritually refined. Therefore all sins are, in a greater or lesser degree, a renunciation of love, a greater or lesser pride and conceit" (Sergei Fudel, Light in the Darkness, pp. 64-65)I am always amazed when I look at anger in myself; it is almost always the result of some kind of struggle for power—whether it is being angry at another driver for “cutting me off” or at another person for “being defiant”. Both emerge from a terrible pride of place—an assumption of superiority and precedence, whether of position or authority. Anger almost always has its roots in pride.Of course, I am referring to the anger that emerges out of one’s ego. There is such a thing as holy, or, righteous anger which exists on behalf of someone wronged, but that is a very dangerous place to go. We often pretend that our anger at someone or some situation is the result of a wrong being done that needs being fixed when in reality we are only asserting ourselves (“remembering oneself”, as Sergei Fudel puts it).Whenever there is a struggle for power we can be sure that evil is present, the more so when it is portrayed as a struggle for righteousness. Power struggles and the anger that accompanies them are always based in fear. We are afraid of what will become of us if we back off and let go. We fear that we will be “walked on” and suffer disrespect from our enemies (though, out of pretence, we may not be honest enough to refer to our antagonists as enemies). True righteousness, grounded in true love, is never concerned with power, per se, and it is never concerned with “self”. True righteousness, grounded in love, is fearless and, therefore, it is selfless. To be “angry and sin not” (Ephesians 4:26) is to remember that we “belong to one another” (Ephesians 4:25) and that without one another we are empty.Power struggles exist in the world because of the malice and pride of the evil one reflected in ourselves. Power struggles in the Church are never “of the Church” and never “of God”; they are always satanic and everyone who participates in them is participating in the devil—not Christ. This is true on the parish level and on the grander level of the dioceses and national churches. We must remember that such things are never “of the Church” even though they may take place within the “Church enclosure” (again, a very clear image from the writings of Fudel). Insofar as we partake of them, we abandon communion with Christ; insofar as we repent of them and reconcile with one another, we partake of Christ and are restored to love. It really is that simple.