Well …

That rules me out.

I am really hoping the brilliant lights here at T+S will be able to help me clear up my understanding of righteous wrath. It is a moral question that has puzzled me for at least 30 years. There’s a deep conflict for me between Christ’s sermon on the mount, and my personal experience of abuse, in which I have found that righteous wrath can make significant contributions toward teaching abusers better behavior and making the world overall a better place.

I want to testify of something. This came to me in poetic rather than logical form. Once I heard Amiri Baraku (some of you may know him as Leroi Jones) read his some of his poetry live, at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama. There was a poem he read that made me feel an understanding, if for only a moment, of what it really means to be an enslaved human being. The poem had elements of righteous wrath that felt like pure fire from the heavens. It felt purifying. It did not burn like poison, but rather it was like cauterizing a festering wound. I wish I could communicate that experience. I can’t even find the poem again online.

Maybe what distinguishes righteous wrath from other sorts of anger is that it has no component of self-interest. Maybe we may only feel righteous wrath on behalf of another.

Or perhaps it is only reserved for God. Yet somehow I feel that’s not quite true. Maybe it’s very hard to do correctly, so that we almost always botch it up and commit worse sin ourselves when we try. But I think it may be possible to do it right. We do have those divine examples, after all.

I await with impatience your thoughts.

I don’t do guilt but upon occasion I experience regret. Such is the case now because I find myself forced to exit this conversation. Not by boredom, but by other clamoring circumstances.

My ideas about justice are not very developed; I’m content to leave matters of justice in your hands.

I must say I have not found you to be half the blackguard some have painted you to be. At every turn you have acquitted yourself as a gentleman, except, perhaps, at the outset, when you barged into the room.

So, till the next time you interrupt a conversation, sword drawn …

“The Greek word of which this is the translation denotes a change of mind, i.e., a fresh view about God, about oneself, and about the world. Since we are born into conditions of mortality, repentance comes to mean a turning of the heart and will to God, and a renunciation of sin to which we are naturally inclined. Without this there can be no progress in the things of the soul’s salvation, for all accountable persons are stained by sin, and must be cleansed in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

In my mind, forgiveness has all of those attributes, except, perhaps, that it does not result from the offendee’s having sinned (at least in the first place).

Okay, I hear you loud and clear on the justice issue. I’ll present my POV by addressing your delineated POV step by step, starting tonight with #1, and I’d like us to stick with it a while to see what happens (unless a more interesting topic demanding immediate attention arises). Maybe we’ll get no farther than point #1. I’m in the middle of packing to move. But the main problem will be that I’m deeply disposed toward the poetical, which some people believe exclusive or masking of the logical. At one time I subcribed to that belief myself but no longer. Good metaphorical language is always deeply logical at its roots (that’s not taking into account that some people believe that all language is metaphorical).

Also, I’ll state my cases as if I believed them ironclad, but such is not the case. I have a motto: I know I’m wrong, the point is to become less wrong. I’m always wondering what’s out there beyond the furtherest reaches of my thinking. I enjoy conversations like this because they present prospects for finding out.

Also, as I tell my 16-yr-old logically disposed son, logic ought not to be used as a weapon against others. Logic is valuable in making choices when others present them to you and may be indispensible when one needs to defend oneself, but its best applications arise in considering the value of one’s own thinking. If we take the 10 Commandments, we’re struck (at any rate, I am) by their focus. They never say, “Thy bishop shalt not steal,” or “Jim F. shalt not bear false witness.” Their focus is quite personal: “Thou shalt not.”

1. “Repentance always implies wrong-doing.” I said that I agreed that repentance implies sinfulness and wrong-doing but that I thought repentance implies more than wrong-doing and that sin isn’t the only thing repentance is full of. Repentance, in fact, is about right-doing more than it’s about wrong-doing. (Not repenting is about wrong-doing.)

Repentance, associated strongly with the weeping and gnashing of teeth aspects of guilt, often gets a bad rap. For many people guilt IS repentance. Nobody likes guilt; I dislike it so much I rarely do it. I’m more likely to respond, “Oh, I was wrong to do that or to think that. Won’t do THAT again. Cool, where we goin’ now? What’s next?” Repentance is the common grade fuel of human progression. If we are growing we are combusting it (broken heart, contrite spirit) on many levels of our lives all the time.

I’m not saying that you, Mr. Greenwood, impale repentance upon the the mere splinter of guilt. I’m talking about my own beliefs in order to explore what’s possible in this conversation.

And I’ll stop there for tonight.