“When you are disturbed [angry], do not sin;
ponder it on your beds, and be silent.”
Selah
~Psalm 4:4 (NRSV)
Ever lost complete control of the
moment and not known why? If you
answered yes you’re just admitting being human.
This is the expression of secondary emotions. In this case, anger was experienced because
the truer emotion was denied somehow.
Spirituality and Emotion
Spirituality is the matter of
integrity between ourselves and God.
We can consider that without
spirituality there is nothing pertinent to life, for it gives all of life its
meaning. The spirituality of the
emotions, then, is about facing the fact that at times we’re honest about how
we feel and other times we’re dishonest—perhaps out of fear, embarrassment or
discomfort.
Emotions, and how they’re dealt
with, say a lot about how vibrant our spirituality is. Therefore, there’s a salient connection
between emotional intelligence and spirituality. Both surround honesty—with ourselves, others
and God.
Then Comes Life
Situations in life have their way
of mussing our emotions. Even the most
emotionally intelligent of people grapple.
Life presents stimuli which we see
as threats. These are realities that
bear unwanted consequences. No matter
how much we rationalise these things in our higher minds, our hearts feel a
certain way about them—it’s innate. Little
can be done to change how we feel deep at heart.
But, we are not defenceless. This
is the point.
Responding to the Challenging Situation
So, we have a time in mind when a
challenge to our emotions was experienced; one we desperately wanted to respond
well about. The mind quelled the heart,
but the heart still felt anxious.
The primary emotion is to do what
the psalmist said: ponder and be silent.
We don’t try and fix something
that, for our hearts, cannot be fixed.
It is what it is. The primary
emotion, therefore, has us feeling the full
force of the emotion and being up for it.
In courage is truth—there is nothing to be feared, because this is just us
facing ourselves. It’s God placing a
mirror before our faces. This is Divine
revelation—a miraculous gift.
The secondary emotion comes
through when we deny our basic truth—when we deny the mirror. Life is made tricky because our default is to
bypass the clean and effective primary emotion for the secondary, fake
emotion—the devil’s tool since the fall of humanity.
Anger is the classic secondary
response; hardly ever is anger a primary (good/true) emotion. It can be, say in
grief or in indignation, but most times it’s not.
The spirituality of this issue
again rebounds in truth.
God gives us ways of properly
meeting every life situation. Nothing is
beyond us if we deal in primary emotions.
This is part of the essence of our spirituality, a key to our relationships
with others, and central to how we relate with the Spirit of God.
We can face anything.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
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