How to Deal with Anger as a Christian — Owen on the Slow Cooling
⏱ 13 min read
You did not used to be the angry one. That is the part nobody on the outside understands. The woman who keeps showing up in your kitchen, in the school car park, in the long evening hour after the children have gone to bed — short of fuse, low of patience, sharper than she meant to be with the people she most loves — is not the woman you intended to be, and you can almost remember the year she started replacing the woman you used to be. Something accumulated. Something was carried for too long without being put down. And now there is a heat in the chest that arrives before you do, and you are tired of apologising for it, and you are also tired of the older Christian instructions — be slow to anger, take every thought captive, the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God — that have not, as it turns out, been enough to cool the actual chest.
This essay is not the voice that will scold you for the heat. The chest is honest. The anger is, more often than not, the late symptom of an earlier exhaustion that nobody named at the time. The question of how to deal with anger as a Christian is not a question that responds to being told to try harder. It responds to being walked slowly, by someone who has seen the chest before, with the kind of older Christian language that does not flinch from the heat but also does not leave the heat as the last word. John Owen — the seventeenth-century pastor whose long, careful, almost embarrassingly tender book Communion with God has been on the shelf of slow-readers for nearly four centuries — knew this chest. He spent a lifetime writing the older Christian cure for it, and the cure he names is not the one most modern teaching reaches for. It is not suppression. It is not white-knuckled self-control. It is the slow cooling of the chest by communion — by the long, repeated, daily setting of the chest in the presence of a God whose first disposition toward you is tenderness. The 140-day form of this slow practice has its place in the Devotionals on Anxiety, built for the woman whose chest has been running hot for longer than she meant to.
What follows is the older Owen cure. Not manage your anger. Not count to ten. Not say the verse and move on. The slower, gentler, more honest thing the older saints meant — the slow cooling that comes when the chest has been in the room with a God of eternal, free love long enough that the heat begins, in its own time, to subside. (How to meditate on scripture is the sister Owen essay for the page-practice the cooling sits inside, and the Christian women’s study guide for going slow with one book is the broader rhythm this kind of reading lives inside.)
What Christian anger actually is, before we try to manage it
Anger, in the older Christian tradition that Owen writes from, is not a character defect. It is not the proof you are a bad woman. It is the chest’s response to a sustained pressure that has not been relieved — the response of a nervous system that has been carrying too much for too long with too few breaks. The heat is real. The pressure underneath it is more real.
The mistake most modern Christian teaching on anger makes is to treat the heat as the problem. Take every thought captive. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath. A soft answer turns away wrath. These are good verses, and they are not the first instructions to the chest that has been running hot for years. The chest that has been running hot for years has been carrying something. The verses applied to the heat without attending to the underneath produce more shame, not less heat. The shame produces, in its own way, more heat. The cycle runs longer than the woman expected when she started trying to manage it.
Owen’s older cure begins at a different end of the same problem. He does not start with the heat. He starts with what the chest is not getting that it would need in order to cool. The chest has been performing devotion — performing faith, performing patience, performing the right verses — for years, and the performing is part of what has kept the underneath unattended. Owen, in the slow careful work of Communion with God, tries to lead the chest back to a different prior — that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him — and to let that prior, slowly, become the soil out of which a different chest can grow. The cooling is the fruit, not the entry fee. (How to deal with the louder relational cousin of anger — the bitterness that has named the person it is angry at — is its own essay; this one is for the heat that has not yet named what it is hot about.)
The first line — Owen on the everlasting tenderness the chest has not been resting in
Here is the first of the three passages worth keeping near the page. Owen is writing, in Communion with God, about what most Christians have been quietly missing in their picture of the Father — the thing he calls the first notion the saints have to lay down before any other devotion can be built:
“They that know thee will put their trust in thee.” Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness; and so their spirits are not endeared. Would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, his present gracious acceptance, it could not bear an hour’s absence from him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour. Let, then, this be the saints’ first notion of the Father, — as one full of eternal, free love towards them: let their hearts and thoughts be filled with breaking through all discouragements that lie in the way.
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read what he is saying carefully. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness; and so their spirits are not endeared. The Christian woman whose chest is running hot has, very often, been fixing her thoughts on the severity — on a God she experiences mostly as the one she keeps disappointing, mostly as the one whose verses she keeps not living up to, mostly as the one she is trying not to grieve. The chest has been straining against a God whose first face it has been seeing as a demanding one.
Owen, who watched souls do this for decades, names it as the cause of the spirits not being endeared. The chest cannot soften to a God it experiences mostly as a demand. The chest will harden, quietly, against any sustained demand, no matter how true the demand is. The heat in the chest is, in part, the chest’s slow hardening against a God it has been holding the wrong picture of.
The cure — and this is the older Christian thing the modern self-management approach has lost — is to let the first notion be re-laid. Eternal, free love. Everlasting tenderness and compassion. His thoughts of kindness that have been from of old. His present gracious acceptance. These are the four phrases Owen wants the chest to dwell on, slowly, for as long as it takes the first notion to be replaced.
The cooling does not come from new instructions. The cooling comes from a re-pictured Father. The chest cannot stay tight against eternal, free love dwelt in long enough. The heat begins to subside, not because anyone has applied a verse to it, but because the underneath has been quietly attended to.
How to deal with anger as a Christian, on Owen’s reading, begins with sitting in front of a re-pictured Father — eternal tenderness, free love, gracious acceptance — until the chest’s first reaction to God is no longer the small braced reaction it has been for years. The cooling follows the re-picturing. The verses about anger management, applied later, sit inside a chest that can now receive them.
A pause for the body
Set the screen down for a breath. The anger lives in the body before it lives in the words. Most often it is a held heat in the upper chest, sometimes a clench in the jaw, sometimes a tightness across the shoulders that have been bracing for the next demand. Bring one hand to the place where the heat sits. Stay there for one slow inhale and one slow exhale. Do not try to manage the heat. Do not try to apply a verse to it. Let the hand be a small acknowledgement that the body has been holding the demand for years, and the muscles that have been bracing have grown tired. Let the shoulders lower by an inch. Let the jaw loosen. Let the breath come a little slower than it has been coming. The body is allowed, in this minute, to sit in front of the re-pictured Father — the one of eternal tenderness — before the mind catches up to what is happening. The slow cooling starts here, not because the chest has been instructed to cool, but because the body has been given a minute in which it does not have to brace.
The second line — Owen on the persuasion that begins to soften the chest
The second passage is from the same book, and it names — with the slow careful tenderness that is the whole tone of Communion with God — what happens when a chest that has been hot begins, slowly, to be persuaded into a different posture:
To give a poor sinful soul a comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him; to give, I say, a soul an overflowing sense hereof, is an inexpressible mercy.
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read the four verbs slowly. Loves. Delights in. Is well pleased with. Hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards. These are the four dispositions Owen wants the chest to receive as the actual disposition of God toward you. Not as a sentimental over-claim — Owen was a careful Puritan, not a soft-focus preacher — but as the truthful re-picturing of a Father whose first face toward His own is not severity but tenderness and kindness.
The chest that has been running hot is almost always a chest that has not been receiving these four. The chest has been performing for a God it has been picturing as severe, and the performing has been costing the chest its capacity for everything else. Comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections — Owen’s phrase for the slow inner settling — is what the chest has not had room for.
The reason this matters for the anger question is this: the chest that is being slowly persuaded — across weeks, across months, in the chair, in the small daily five-minute practice — that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him is a chest that begins to lose the underneath of the heat. The heat needs a chronic sense of being in the wrong with the demanding Father in order to keep running at the volume it has been running at. Remove the chronic sense — slowly, by communion, by the long persuasion of the four verbs — and the heat begins to subside on its own. Not because the chest has tried harder. Because the chest no longer has the fuel the heat had been running on.
This is the slow form of the practice the Devotionals on Anxiety was built to walk. Not as a script for instant calm, but as a daily small room — five minutes, one scripture, one slow prayer — in which the chest sits in front of the re-pictured Father, the four verbs receive their slow soaking, and the cooling is allowed to happen at the pace cooling actually happens at. Five minutes a day, for a hundred and forty days, is more cooling than five years of trying to manage the anger by force has produced. (What to write in a Christian journal when you feel blank is the on-ramp for the woman whose chair-time has thinned to the point that even the page feels like one more demand.)
The third line — Owen on the chest that has slowly come into the rest
The third passage is the one that names — almost gently — what becomes available to the chest that has been allowed to sit in the communion long enough for the cooling to actually take:
The soul being thus, by faith through Christ, and by him, brought into the bosom of God, into a comfortable persuasion and spiritual perception and sense of his love, there reposes and rests itself.
— John Owen, Communion with God
Brought into the bosom of God. There reposes and rests itself. This is the image the rest of the book has been building toward, and it is — astonishingly, for a Puritan in 1657 — a tender one. The chest that has been hot is, in this passage, brought into the bosom — not lectured into rest, not forced into rest, not even taught into rest, but brought. The bringing is the work of Another. The soul’s part is the slow daily showing up to the room in which the bringing happens.
The cooling, when it has done its slow work, is not the suppression of the heat. The cooling is the chest that reposes and rests itself in a place it had not previously been resting. The heat had nowhere to rest, and so it ran. The chest that has been brought into the bosom of God has a place to rest, and the heat — slowly, in its own time — finds it has lost the reason it was running.
This is what Christian anger management actually looks like in the older tradition. Not the gritted-teeth self-control of the modern instruction. The chest brought slowly into the bosom of God, over months of small daily communion, until the heat has been quietly cooled by the long sitting in the room where rest was always available, and the chest had simply not been bringing itself in. (How to meditate on scripture walks the page-practice underneath this; the sister readings for the cousins of anger are hard forgiveness with de Sales for the named hurt, and bitterness with Murray for the slow chronic version.)
So — how does one actually deal with Christian anger?
You stop treating the heat as the first problem. The heat is the late symptom. The underneath is the chronic sense of being in the wrong with a God you have been picturing as severe, and that sense is what the slow cooling has to address.
You let the first notion be re-laid. Eternal, free love. Everlasting tenderness and compassion. Present gracious acceptance. These are the four phrases of Owen’s older Christian re-picturing. Read them slowly. Say them in the chair. Let them sit in the body for a minute longer than the discomfort wants to allow.
You walk the daily communion. Five minutes. The chair. The hand on the chest. One verse from a place that speaks of the Father’s disposition toward His own — the bosom passages, the I have loved thee with an everlasting love, the as a father pitieth his children — and one slow prayer. Father, I am letting myself receive that You delight in me, are well pleased with me, have thoughts of tenderness and kindness toward me. No outcome required. The communion is the practice.
You let the cooling happen at the pace the cooling actually happens. The first week, the chest will not feel different. The third week, the heat will arrive a little later than it used to. The third month, the chest will be cool more often than it is hot, and you will not be able to pinpoint when the change happened, because the change happened by the long sitting in the bosom of God, not by any single moment of decision.
You forgive yourself for the years of trying to manage it the modern way. The modern way was the wrong instrument for this chest. The older way is gentler and slower and, in the end, actually works.
That is the slow Owen cure. The cooling is not a project of the will. It is the fruit of the chest being brought, daily, slowly, by communion, into the bosom of a Father whose first disposition toward you is tenderness and kindness. The heat loses its fuel. The chest reposes. The anger, when it has been walked all the way through to its source, is found to have been the late symptom of a long unattended exhaustion — and the attention, given by the slow daily communion, is what eventually puts it down.
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The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety.
