When the relationship reaches this level of degeneration, lucidity has already been lost. Anger makes you lose your lucidity. Because sometimes, one of the characteristics of anger is that it does not calm down over time. In these cases, even distance and silence, instead of calming the weight of misunderstandings, magnify it. For this reason, the apostle Paul – as we have heard – recommends that his Christians immediately address the problem and attempt reconciliation, and he says this: “Do not allow the night to surprise you angry”. It is important that everything dissolves immediately, before sunset. If during the day some misunderstanding may arise, and two people stop understanding each other, suddenly perceiving themselves to be apart, we should not hand the night over to the devil. Vice would keep us awake in the dark, ruminating on our reasons and inexplicable errors that are never ours and always the other’s. It’s like this, when a person is under anger, he always, he always says that the problem is with the other person. He is never able to recognize his own flaws and faults.
In the “Our Father” Jesus makes us pray for our human relationships, which are a minefield: a plan that is never in perfect balance. In life we have to deal with defaulting debtors in front of us; as certainly we have not always loved everyone in fair measure. To some we have not returned the love that is owed to them. We are all sinners, all of us, and we all have accounts in the red and we are debtors, we have accounts in the red. Therefore, we all have to learn to forgive in order to be forgiven. Men are not together if they do not also practice the art of forgiveness, whenever this is humanly possible. What counteracts anger is benevolence, open-heartedness, meekness, patience.
But on the topic of anger, one last thing must be said. It is a terrible vice, it was said, it is at the origin of wars and violence. The Iliad poem describes “the anger of Achilles”, which will be the cause of “infinite mourning.” But not everything that is born of anger is bad. The ancients were well aware that there is an irascible part of us that cannot and should not be denied. Passions are to a certain extent unconscious: they happen, they are life experiences. We are not responsible for anger in its emergence, but always in its development. And sometimes it’s good to let anger out in the right way. If a person never gets angry, if he does not become indignant at injustice, if he does not feel something that shakes his insides at the oppression of a weak person, then it would mean that he is not human, much less Christian.