Unhealthy Anger Single
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Hi, I'm Mark Hadley. Regular listeners to the show will know me as Director Mark. Normally you'd hear John give an introduction to our special single guest, but John is taking a break for personal reasons. Regular listeners will know that John's best friend, Ben Shaw, and his struggle with cancer have been the subject of two episodes to date, It's Cancer and Still Cancer.

Last week, that struggle came to an end for Ben, and John has understandably taken some time off to be with Ben's family and friends as they prepare for his funeral.

I'm sure John would very much appreciate your prayers and thoughts for all involved. In the meantime, a good friend of John's is stepping up to the mic to help out. Stephanie Kate Judd is a solicitor who has researched and written on Christian lobbying and public engagement. And she's here to bring us a special Undeception single. It's in my body, she says to me.

We're hurtling through the city in my car and she's hurtling through the snapshots on replay in her mind. Or rather, it's hurtling through her. The endless looping of all that's happened to her and in her and I can see that she's dizzy with the preoccupation of it all. It's a muscle memory. Hypervigilance baked onto the nervous system. She recounts story after story of predators flexing their power to take what they wanted.

She speaks of the way people she trusted would stand idly by, averting their gaze and throwing up their hands as though nothing could be done. It simply wasn't in their interests to stand up to power. She speaks with an exhausted kind of resignation. This was her new normal. "It's in my body," she says. "In my limbs and chest and the flesh behind my eyes, and is everything spinning for you too?"

And all the women of the world say, "Yes, it's spinning for us too." All the times our voices were drowned out or overlooked, being cornered in an uncomfortable situation by yet another smirking man, the innumerable catcalls, and then, well, women raped and killed when simply walking home at night. Others humiliated and violated in the halls of power.

The rocks would cry out if we remained silent and so we'd cry with everything in us. But this isn't right. It shouldn't be this way. Outrage. It's something that a lot of us seem to feel a lot of the time. Now, outrage is often absolutely the right reaction to significant wrongdoing. There's something powerful about asserting that some treatment is thoroughly incongruous with what it is to be human. See, outrage is partly an expression of identity.

When we defend the perimeters of ourselves? No, not this, not that. We are in a real sense clarifying who it is that we are. It's also a way of reclaiming agency when we feel disempowered. Second guessing and self-doubt can be paralyzing. Anger was the quickest path out of that for my friend. Because it's an active emotion, it feels re-empowering.

And, you know, it's also the kind of speech that can startle the rest of us from our complacency. Sometimes it takes someone yelling at us to realise that what we're doing, or not doing, is hurting somebody. And yet, some forms of outrage can be damaging. Those of us who have felt blinding anger know that after a while, it can cannibalise you.

And as far as you're concerned, unless you're scripted, you're useless. Unless you're scripted, you're useless. Unchecked rage can do things to us. Over time, it can become corrosive to our character and to our communities. He's useless! Anger can calcify into the kind of contempt that's willfully blind to the dignity of the person or people we're angry with.

It dehumanizes us and them. We often can't choose whether or not we're angry, but we can choose what we do with our anger. Jesus has made all the difference for me on this one. He's someone who gets what it is to be mistreated, to be betrayed. He's not indifferent to the abuse of power. On the contrary, all throughout the story of God's dealings with humanity in the Bible, God opposes the proud and takes the side of the downtrodden.

If the Bible's true, and there is a God passionately committed to justice, well, he's the kind of person we can entrust our anger to. Knowing that in the end he will right all wrongs somehow makes it possible for us to choose to act out of the centre of who we are, rather than merely retaliate against what has been done to us.

To keep our anger healthy, we've got to keep listening, particularly in our public debates. Sexual harassment is, curiously, one of those issues that seems to divide our communities. In their 2018 study of 8,000 Americans, Research Body More in Common asked people how prevalent they think sexual harassment is. They found that 49% of respondents think that sexual harassment is commonplace.

while 51% think that too many ordinary behaviours are now labelled as harassment. These differences in opinion aren't the difference between good people and bad people, the smart and the ignorant. They're driven by differences in the core beliefs that govern how we see the world and interpret what happens. We're made up of different tribes. We perceive threat differently and understand morality differently. This means that often,

we're not even speaking the same language. I'm yet to meet a person who's prepared to change their minds when they're being backed into a corner. So, as Professor Carl Weick says, "Argue as if you're right and listen as if you're wrong." Finally, I think history shows us that the most effective forms of protest focus on what we're building, not just what we're tearing down. Unless it's paired with a vision of what right could be,

Protesting what's wrong can become a one-oared boat, spiralling into deeper divisions in an already wounded civil self. Rather, in its best forms, protest is shot through with possibility. Things should be different, and things could be different. This was the spirit of the prophets of old.

Outrage does its most generative work when it's paired with a positive vision of justice and restoration. Not merely the kind of justice that just meets out punishment, but an order of things in which all of us thrive together in peace and security. "It's in my body," she says to me. And we do bear in our bodies the wounds of all the harms inflicted upon us. But there was once a man in Galilee

who bore in his body, on that tree, all the wounds of all the harms of all of us through all of time. Both those that are inflicted on us and those that we inflict on others. By absorbing all of that, I believe he makes healing possible. Even when people let us down and break our trust or misuse their power or let self-interest obstruct justice, Jesus won't.

And you know, when you trust that at the heart of things is justice, not corruption, abundance, not scarcity, love, not indifference, a new way of life opens up to you. One that channels and then transforms your anger. It's hard, but it's magnificent to behold. Because grace, well, it's the most generative thing in the universe.

Thanks for listening, and thanks particularly to Stephanie Kate Judd. There'll be more singles from Undeception's friends ahead. There'll also be some full episodes that we were able to record earlier. We'd appreciate your patience as John and the team navigate the times ahead. Thanks, and see you soon. You've been listening to The Eternity Podcast Network.

eternitypodcasts.com.au.