Growing Gentleness

I have an anger problem. I didn’t know it for a long time and most people wouldn’t guess it about me, but it’s there. It didn’t show up for much of my life. I was always the peacemaker in my family; the most anger I felt was when my brothers teased my little sister to tears, or when I saw someone being shamed.

But in my teens I experienced things that stretched me beyond what I had been stretched before, and mothering my children brought another whole set of stretching experiences. I got to the end of my rope and I found some pretty ugly things there. I became the person who was doing the hurting, the shaming. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than to cut someone with my words or to shake them until their teeth rattled. And sometimes I did those things. When I wasn’t angry I was scared. Where was all this coming from?  I had always been the kind, patient person; what kind of monster was I turning into?  And why? And how could I not be this way?

I tried for years not to be angry, and I’ve tried to control my actions when I was. I’ve prayed, I’ve confessed, I’ve shoved under the rug, I’ve done better, and I’ve failed miserably over and over. Through the years I’ve learned what kinds of things make me angry, and a little about how to avoid and manage those things. But still, I wanted to be different, from the inside out. I wanted to be a healed person, to have reserves of kindness and calmness and strength.

Earlier this summer when our pastor began preaching about gentleness I realized that this was the opposite of my anger.  I listened; I knew he wouldn’t be giving pat answers and religious know-how. And he didn’t. He talked about cultivating gentleness, doing things that help us become gentle people. He said some things I’d never heard before, or at least not connected in the way it was connected for me that day. Things like, “gentleness grows from experiencing the gentleness of God in the quietness of solitude.” And, “our soul’s first experience, before any of our conscious memory, was one of tender love. In the deepest part of our being, all of us have been kissed by God at our creation and it is when we quiet ourselves in his love that we begin to recover the gentleness that he gifted us with then.”

First we know that God is gentle with us, then we are gentle with ourselves, and only then will we be able to be gentle with others.

I’m not used to saying that kind of thing. It sounds too soft and easy and feel-y. But what is love, if it is something we can not feel, something that does not genuinely, radically change us when we receive it?  What is a good God if he can not be experienced?  And what does it mean to have been knit together by him if that touch doesn’t make a difference now?

So maybe I plant seeds of gentleness for myself and my family when I fall sleep at night remembering that even as I rest my body on the softness of my bed even more I rest my whole self in the Love that holds the universe. Maybe I grow gentleness when I take time to listen to music that feeds my soul and when I let myself cry out the tears that come even when I don’t know why they are there.  Maybe I feed gentleness when I picture myself in the arms of my kind Father and I let my heart still knowing that making a good life is not up to me. And maybe I water gentleness by whispering with each slowed breath “I’m not alone, I’m not alone.”

Maybe gentleness comes from learning to live my whole life in the presence of a gentle God.