All of Abba Joseph’s teachings so far probably make pretty good sense to most readers. As much as we may not live up to the ideal of mutual purity of heart, which defines real love, it is pretty easy to see its value, and it is equally easy to see the direct opposition to this ideal that anger presents within us. Yet, one of the most provocative aspects of Abba Joseph’s teaching on relationships is that he does not hold the Christian responsible only for his own personal inner state in relationship, but demands that every person be responsible also for the anger of other people. Christians, according to him, must put their all into trying to assuage the anger of anyone who might be offended at them, for good reasons or for bad.
For the one who said that you must not be angry with another, said also that you must not ignore another person’s heartache. Between destroying yourself and someone else, there exists no distinction in the eyes of the God “who desires that all men be saved” [1Tim 2.4].12
Abba Joseph is unrelenting on this point, to the degree that he sometimes appears to place total responsibility for the anger of others on the shoulders of the person toward whom it is directed. He even says that those who refuse to try and cool such anger will be punished by God as though they had committed the sin of anger themselves.13 It would be natural for us to consider this teaching a bit extreme. After all, there is always a point at which nothing can be done to avert the choice of another person to be angry. However, while there is no sense in which Abba Joseph expects that the Christian should always be able to succeed in cooling the anger of another, he does always expect that one will try to do so, really taking that anger upon himself as though it were his own.
Thus, Abba Joseph presents human relationships as contact points between two individuals whose attitude toward one another wavers between the poles of love and anger. What is more, he places responsibility for the state of both parties in a particular relationship on the shoulders of the Christian. Ultimately, we as Christians seek to make all of our relationships of all varieties into Christian friendships built on genuine love both by seeking to change our own inner state, and by taking responsibility for the state of other people in those relationships.
Given the nature of love and anger in relationships as defined by Abba Joseph, doing this involves four basic kinds of effort. First, we do whatever we can to assuage anger within ourselves. Second we do what is possible to assuage anger in other people. Third, we do what we can to promote love within ourselves. Fourth, we do what we can to promote love in other people. In so doing, we seek to push the soul of both parties in all of our relationships toward the pole of Christian love, and thus to make them relationships in which that love is shared, which is to say to transform them into real Christian friendships. This means that we are seeking to turn every relationship we have with everyone everywhere into a site where purity of heart is mutually sought with absolute maximal effort on both sides.
Now, it is probably hard to imagine buying a cup of coffee and finding ourselves lifted toward purity of heart by our instantaneous connection in Christian love with the cashier. It is just as hard to imagine reading the news and realizing the same love in light of what the politicians have been up to that week. Indeed, it is hard even to imagine simply not getting angry when that same cashier gets our order wrong, or when those same politicians act as politicians do—-and we may find it impossible even to conceive of becoming capable of preventing them from returning such anger upon us. Yet, if we are going to seek purity of heart while living in the world, nothing less is expected of us, because it is only when we do these things that we allow purity of heart to grow in and through our contact with other human beings.
So, how do we really work toward a goal so distant? We have already made mention of the importance of discretion as a tool for casting away anger in ourselves, and we should keep this tool in mind as we proceed. In the next three sections, we will discuss some of the other primary tools presented in the Conferences for cultivating and seeking to spread genuine love, and thus real purity of heart, by way of our relationships with others in society.
~Daniel G. Opperwall, A Layman in the Desert
12 Conf. 16.VI.7.
13 Conf. 16.VI.7.
