"But I'm a Minister!"
In my early forties, someone told me that I had a problem with anger, but I didn’t believe them. But on certain occasions I was a little startled at myself.
Then, using some of the inheritance money from my father, I bought a windsurfer. We christened it “Bongo.” One day I went out to give it a try. There was a very light breeze blowing, and I got going quite nicely. “This is a piece of cake,” I thought. Then I got to the far side of the lake and tried to come back. I don’t know why it’s relatively easy to sail from left to right slightly down-wind, but very difficult to sail from right to left, and downright impossible up-wind. And I was stuck among the reeds. It was backbreaking lifting the sail out of the water time and again, and I could not understand why it always fell towards the wind so that it was always on the wrong side of the board. As I disappeared under the water for about the twenty-fifth time, I discovered the desire in myself to start swearing. By the thirtieth time, the bubbles were coming up as steam, and I was shocked at the words that were starting to come out of my mouth!
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Sometime later I discovered the Enneagram, and realised with a shock that I was a perfectionist, and that the besetting sin of perfectionists is anger. We don’t recognise it, because we regard anger as imperfect, so we deny it and push it down. Suppressed anger often leads to depression, which in my case it did. Part of the cure, the Enneagram showed me, was to learn to express anger properly.
So it was, some two years later, I was trying to express anger in more acceptable ways.
And I was a minister! A minister who had a problem with anger.
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One of the few times I
wore a dog-collar
I had an old black-and-white TV which had finally broken down. So I took it in for repair.
Two days later, I went to collect it. The man behind the counter was pleasant enough, although he was clearly a rough diamond – with a big moustache and the beer-barrel stomach. I paid for the repairs, and he carried the TV to the car for me. Just as he was putting it in, I noticed a deep gouge across the face of the TV.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but there’s a scratch on the screen of my TV.”
“Oh!” He said, “Well, we didn’t put it there.”
“Well, it wasn’t there when I brought it in.”
“It must have been,” he said, “because we didn't do it.”
Now, we were standing on the pavement of one of the busiest streets in town. People were streaming by. One or two were beginning to notice the slightly raised voices.
“Well, I can assure you, it wasn’t scratched when I brought it in. Are you accusing me of lying?” By now there was a dangerous edge in my voice. (We perfectionists are very good getting an edge to our voices. It’s what we do instead of expressing proper anger.) He didn’t read the warning signals.
“I’m not saying whether you’re a liar or not,” he replied. “All I know is that we didn’t scratch this TV.”
Now I was getting really angry. We perfectionists pride ourselves on our honesty, among many other things. Now he was questioning my integrity. Now I was really angry, but just for a moment I was able to pause and think before I spoke. “Okay,” I thought, “here is where I get to practice a bit of anger-expression.” So, in a voice that made a number of passers-by stop in their tracks, I let him have it:
“WELL, I’M A MINISTER AND I DON’T LIE!”
Not exactly Churchillian, but it felt good.
To this day, I don’t know why it had such a deep effect on him. Perhaps it was the anger itself. Perhaps it was his horror to discover that he was dealing with the gentleman of the cloth. Perhaps it was the interest of the passers-by, and the potentially bad publicity. But, whatever the reason, he said, “Look, let’s go back into the shop. I’ll talk to technician in the workshop. Come back tomorrow and we’ll see what we can do.”
So I came back the next day. The door to the shop had one of those old-fashioned bells on a spring that ring when you open the door. When it rang, he looked up and called across the shop for everyone to hear,
“Hello Reverend, how are you today?”
“Reverend!” Only non-churchgoers call me “Reverend.” But it was music to my ears.
Believe it or not, he apologised for the damage to my TV, and paid me out the full value of it.
Boy, it felt good.