This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Good morning … and happy Star Wars Day: May the fourth be with you.
I know…
But, like the more solemn Remembrance Day in November, if we didn’t have it, we’d probably have to invent it. The yearly cycle needs a day or two when, like it or not, we are compelled to think again about who we are, where we have come from, and why anything matters anyway.
Which is where Star Wars comes in – developing stories we read in ancient classical literature.
My retirement reading has begun with Homer’s ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ – stories that spawned a thousand other stories. Talk about blood and gore, conflict and character, violence and mortality! There’s a great line in ‘The Iliad’ where the god Apollo speaks to the Trojans of the great warrior Achilles “sitting beside the ships and ripening his anger [to cause more heartsickness].”
This might have been written over three thousand years ago, but doesn’t it sound like a throbbing refrain beneath the rhythms of threat, fear, violence and hatred that seep through the news of our world every day? The ‘ripening of anger’. In the case of Achilles, this sulking fury keeps him out of the battle – resentment turning his friend into an enemy and, consequently, taking his focus off the real enemy, the Trojans. In other words, this carefully nurtured bitterness damages himself, his people and his cause.
No wonder a repeated mantra in the Hebrew scriptures is the calmly-stated notion that “anger lodges in the bosom of fools” and should be handled slowly. How? Well, that comes down to us being centred as an individual or community in a worldview and values that hold us constant amid the turmoil in which we find ourselves caught up. Which is where, for example, whatever happens to me or us is responded to through a deep-rooted conviction that personal offense matters less than justice for all.
Now this is not sentimentality. To not be angry at injustice, lying or oppression by powerful people is to be indifferent. The Bible I read is full of expressions of ‘anger’; but that anger is directed at injustice, oppression and the failure of a community – one that claims God’s name, but whose social order fails to reflect his character. So, no bribes, fairness before the law, care of poor, refugee and marginalized people. That’s not the same as exacting vengeance against personal affront.
Furious anger and conflict aren’t inevitable. Nor is our response to them. May the fourth be with you – the force of love and mercy and justice, not the destructive rage that creates chaos.
