Curb Your Wrath

Theodore of Mar Sabba monastery in Palestine is commemorated this Sunday, October 28, in the Orthodox Church. I am responsible in my parish for overseeing the chanting for vespers and matins, so I look ahead of time (mostly) to review the texts. I read in the first selection for Theodore that he "curbed his wrath with manliness." I don't have the original Greek here, so I am unsure exactly how wrath might relate to another common word in translation, "passions," but all the same what struck me is the notion of manliness being the thing that controls wrath: It takes a man to be angry yet not sin.

Nowadays many people at least in the public popular media equate manliness with something along the lines of macho, which includes swagger, and when a guy gets really angry and just vents, well that's what men do; he's just being a guy. But this text reminds us that it takes a real man to keep wrath--and passions--in check.

About keeping things in "check": I used to think, or maybe I just assumed, that the "inner landscape" of human beings is pretty much the same from age to age and culture to culture. But I am not so sure about that: haven't we "reformed" something called the "inner check" of former times--something tethered to a well-informed conscience attuned to society and our community as a whole--and turned it into a reprogrammed inner check that runs along the lines of political correctness and non-judgmentalism?

In other words, we're stuck with a faculty of an inner check, but it can be reprogrammed to kick in, say, when a teacher asks a class "Who thinks sex outside of marriage is wrong? Raise your hand..." while it sits idling, inactive, when one feels the urge to make a one night stand. The morally-minded student will feel shame in raising his hand, while others will feel no shame in boasting about a one-nighter.

We need to keep our eye on the ancient virtues we see in the saints, lest we be reprogrammed to curb even moral outrage itself. Or has that already happened?