Slow to Wrath

There’s nothing quite so terrible as the sight of a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.  The spectacle of such extreme rage in one so young is quite frightening to a random onlooker and very embarrassing to the parents.  Whole chapters of child-rearing advice manuals are devoted to this phenomenon and mothers and fathers are warned of the consequences of ignoring their child’s bad behavior (appropriately described by St. James as a “superfluity of naughtiness”).

In his Manual of Pastoral Theology, Doctor of Divinity Fr. Frederick Schulze includes the following paragraph in his template for marriage instruction.  It identifies this “stubbornness” of a child as the first confrontation from which the parents must emerge victorious in order to pave the way for their child’s future moral, spiritual and social success.  Parents would do well to read over this paragraph more than once, making sure they are on top of this problem which occurs naturally in every child:

• “With the education of the little ones you cannot begin too early; do not defer it too long; the earlier it begins, the better.  To neglect it in the earlier days may mean irreparable loss.  Right in the beginning conquer stubbornness, this almost inseparable companion of every child.  If you always do the will of the child and grant all his wishes, you may raise a little tyrant who will trouble you day and night.  But if you show the child who is the ruler of the house, and that his crying and craving will not move you to do his will, he will soon learn the wholesome lesson that stubbornness is of no avail and that above his will there is the inflexible will of responsible parents.”

We are all familiar with men and women whose stubbornness was obviously not conquered when they were children.  They have grown up into adults who are self-centered, who always want things to go their way, who won’t take no for an answer, and who will display their tantrums in various “adult” equivalents.  Such people are often categorized as narcissists, but whatever name we give them, we can all probably concur that they do not make pleasant companions.  Many a marriage has been destroyed by a violent husband or a viciously nagging wife.  Dating, if done properly, will weed out this type of personality through observation and experience.  But it’s not just in marriage that we encounter such characters who obviously weren’t spanked enough as children and who make life miserable for all those around them.

“The wrath of man,” says St. James, “worketh not the righteousness of God.”  If we didn’t learn that as a child, we must now, as adults, make superhuman efforts to rid ourselves of this defect of character that is stubbornness.  We must learn to be “swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath,” practicing patience in adversity rather than yielding instinctively to the vice of our misspent and uncorrected youth.  It is one of those battles of life that we must wage against ourselves and our own frail human nature, a battle which, if we win, will actually prove to be of great benefit to us.  No longer will we be burdened with the weight of our selfish demands, but will become better Christians, more easily adapted to placing the needs of others above our own.  We will act with charity instead of hostility and meanness, generosity instead of selfishness, patience instead of rage, humility instead of arrogance.  The result—people will actually like us better, we will succeed in love, we will be promoted to higher positions, and most importantly, we will become more pleasing to God.  We will receive God’s word, God’s commandments, with meekness, and that, says St. James, makes us able to save our souls!

Spring is a good time not just for cleaning house, but for tidying up some of the disorderly state of our souls.  Laying aside the filthiness of our childish temper tantrums is a good place to start.