Day Twenty-Three: How to be free, one: Be angry but do not sin

If we are “normal” and have the usual rough and tumble in our lives, situations will come up that “tick us off.” This is Life on Earth. And in the Bible, this suggestion is offered, an amazing distinction: BE ANGRY BUT DO NOT SIN. How to go about this.

Well, shucks, first step is obviously to get clear on what anger is and what sin is. The following views are mine and not approved or disapproved by any person or agency.

To be angry means to rise up in that hot blooded state where our muscles and emotions (e-motion, the pointing of our motion a certain way) are mobilized for some big deal effort of the sort where we rip to shreds, kill, wound, or otherwise push away some thing or persons that are either actually threatening us, or are perceived as a threat to us.

Needless to say, a lot of conditioning can make us perceive very weird things as a threat ( a black person moving into our neighborhood/ dating our daughter; someone making fun of our favorite book/ movie/ car/ laundry soup; you name it).

But anyway, anger rises, and we want to bash, physically or verbally, or both.

And there might be real situations where this makes total sense: we see someone abusing a child, say.


Okay, anger brings out the slasher and basher in us.

What to do with that?


Here’s my latest interpretation: either act, or don’t act, speak, or keep our peace, and inside have an attitude of love.

Sounds weird. Sound impossible. Oh, well.

Sin, as I understand it now, is leaving the present and leaving an abiding in love. That “simple.” (Ha!)

Our child is swinging a bat around and could seriously harm their younger sibling. We could just stop them and give a little talk. But maybe we get angry, and come at them with strong words and actions. Or maybe we aren’t angry, but pretend to come at them in angry, to get the point across.

The “do not sin” part, is that while we are doing this, a part of us fully and completely remembers that this little rascal is a child of God, a child of ours, a beloved and wonderful being.

That’s the do no sin part, acting in a rage or not acting, and still being angry, while all along, underneath that anger we love the other person, see them as our equal in some way, have at least a partial realization (easy to bring back later, out of the heat of the moment) that just about any idiotic, mean or selfish thing they are doing, we have done sometime in our past.

So, be angry, act or it or don’t. This is part of our growing to wisdom and a certain control in our lives. Act even, and shake up the whole scene, create conditions for a more just and safe and kind world. Stop a criminal in their tracks. Wake up someone to a mean habit of theirs.

Fine. But not with an I am better than you inner state.

No, our job/ path/ challenge / opportunity is to rise to our Real Self level and do that by keeping alive inside of us a sense of living in the present (sensing our anger, seeing the other and hearing them in the moment), a sensing inside our own real bodies in the rushing of our emotions, AND a realization of their lovable nature as human beings, even under the mess.

How to translate that into today’s practice: think about and cultivate something like “joyous anger,” a sense that our joy and love is our primary relationship in life no matter what we do.

So, hey, cultivate joy and love and presence and if anger comes along, great! Welcome it as a chance to build our joy and love and presence muscle, even while the temptation is to do the “normal” thing, become a beast fighting a beast (or worse, a beast fighting an imagined beast, remember the person insulting our magazine taste).

Good.