Anger in the 21st Century – Father Theologos

Anger is a great nuisance – a passion that tries us especially today. Why especially today? What are the causes that favor this? How can we get rid of it or at least reduce it?

By watching this video you will find out!

Enjoy!

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever and unto the ages of ages. Amen. Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us! Amen.

If last time we talked about the causes and stages of meekness and how not to get angry, now we will continue and we will focus more on anger because today the causes of this passion are many and complex. The main cause of anger is the cutting off of the will, because one’s own will is the plenary expression of the person, it is the outpouring of the person, it is the spine of the being, which due to the fall is the horn of Adam that strongly opposes the will of God. Do you understand? The spine that has become crooked and torments us. We have spoken many times on this topic. Understand? It’s the crooked will.

Well, today, brethren, with today’s way of thinking, influenced by our belief in science, influenced by everyday electronics, we are taught to do this distorted will like never before. You see that on the cell phone or on the laptop everything happens instantly, as soon as we press it immediately happens and we don’t feel any kind of resistance – touch of a button – when we press a button many things happen, they move, we don’t wait anymore. And you see, with a single scroll, with a single finger sweep, everything flashes by – you see the contact list on WhatsApp and so on. How fast everything moves, right? Speaking of WhatsApp, we respond immediately to messages and we don’t think about it. Do you understand? We want to see things faster and faster and more and more, and so our depth of thought decreases dramatically, we are superficial, brethren.

The quickness of thought increases more and more and with it our impulsiveness. I’ve talked about this before, brethren. Now when we tell people that we don’t give the WiFi password, because we have WiFi here – some of them are frozen – as if they hit a wall. Folks, we are talking about a day that you are with us. Of course, it’s also about bandwidth, brethren, we don’t have 4G signal here and plenty of speed. But first of all, brethren, you need a little detoxification, a little fasting, a little recovery from the anxiety, excitement and speed that you are used to in your daily life. To cut off your will. Understand?

We don’t come to the Holy Mountain for WiFi. We come to pray and calm down. We must learn to cut off our will, brothers, because if we do not learn we become monsters of our own free will and the first to be torn apart by the wrath of these monsters will be ourselves.

At one point, a young man came and I received a blessing from Fr. Abbot to give him the WiFi password to install a small application. So he could not bear it anymore, he had to install that application. In the Holy Mountain… a whole story. Why? The good Lord knows. The installation took about 20 seconds and during this period he was gesticulating continuously, waving as if he was cranking a lever, impatient as to why it took so long. 20 seconds, brethren. It wasn’t something urgent. Absolutely not. Another time, there was another in an analogous situation who for 20 seconds put his cell phone on a shelf where we have the library and where there is a signal and walked impatiently in circles. I mean, we need to calm down a bit. Do you understand? I say this with great love and with great compassion for young people.

Well, how then will such young people be able to be patient with the weaknesses of their friends, their wives and – especially – their children, if they have children, if they are going to have a family, of course? Do you understand? There is no more patience. All this quickness, lack of patience, tendency towards anger and extremes is also exacerbated by the recommendation algorithms of the most popular platforms – YouTube, TikTok, Insta (you know them, I hope you don’t know them, but you know them) – algorithms that are based on Artificial Intelligence and that learn very quickly and very “well” – but well for them, for those who make them – they learn to do your will, to fulfill your passions, to maximize your pleasure in order to keep you a slave there. Addicted, brethren.

Okay, and if you are continually taught to have your will done, what will happen when this will be necessarily cut off by someone else? Not to mention that when these algorithms profile you and offer you only what you want, you come to believe that everyone agrees with you and that we are all one in opinion, forgetting, in fact, that for you the world is reduced only to those who post and agree with you. Do you understand? Brethren, God forbid!

Well, even in this absolutism in which you believe yourself, at some point someone else comes and offers you a different opinion. Another position. Then you will burst like a volcano of course. Like an atomic bomb. This is very dangerous, brethren, especially in the case of children who have the cell phone as their father and the tablet as their mother. These children don’t actually have parents anymore because they are raised by screens and the moment real parents come to pass on their experience, then they see them as strangers because they haven’t learned much from their real parents.

The big problem is that their real parents are the only ones who love them or among the few who love them on this earth and could pass on their experience to them. But unfortunately, they leave them to be prey to electronics, to screens. Beyond that, because the person no longer exists, being alone with the screens, with the messages on them and with our thoughts, based on a message we can weave a whole intertwining of thoughts and suspicions that to a greater or lesser extent are untrue. “Why did he write to me? What did he mean?” and so on. Do you understand? Usually, though, brethren, the proportion in which they are untrue is 90+ percent… Why? Because we have a lot of confidence in ourselves, in our thoughts, in the knowledge that we supposedly learn from the net with the help of these recommendation algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I ended up talking a lot against AI, brethren, even though I’ve been in computer science all my life. You know, brethren, AI is a model of a digital beast, a digital Antichrist, if you will. It doesn’t feel, it doesn’t have mercy, it doesn’t have anything – it doesn’t have God, it doesn’t have love. It`s cold. You as a person, are for it either a resource or an impediment, a ballast or a threat. It’s the total lack of understanding. This gives hardness to the AI core because, in fact, they don’t have a heart, they only have numbers.

Understand? Speaking of which, this digital antichrist, be careful, because it does NOT say in the Revelation that the number of the beast is 666. Do you understand? Better said, “Antichrist” is not even written in the Apocalypse. 666 is not written and neither is “Antichrist” written. Now, it is easier to explain about the Antichrist because – you can look it up – about the Antichrist it is written in the first and second ecumenical epistles of Holy Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian, and not in the Apocalypse, brethren.

Going back to the number of the beast, as I said, it doesn’t say 666 there, but χξστ, because the Greeks didn’t have numbers, they had letters like all the ancients, actually. They didn’t have numbers, they had letters and they used letters as numbers. χξστ of course cannot be translated into Romanian and other languages other than as 666 (600, 60, 6) – we have talked about this before – but in short, now in our discussion, beyond the fact that it represents Nero as the precursor of the beast, the angry man par excellence, calculated by gematria, it also represents something else: χξστ represents Χριστός Ξένος Σταυρού that is, a Christ who is a stranger to the Cross – that is, to Love. That is, we will have a pseudo-Christ who will give us everything materially, but there will be a lack of mercy, love and sacrifice out of love. Today you can see this substantially, brethren.

Of course, some of you will tell me about 666 as a way of regimenting people, of control – which of course is obviously a big story, but now we are talking about anger in the contemporary, in the 21st century and in the future. We just remind you that the system of social credits and programmable electronic money that will allow you to buy or not buy certain things depending on your behavior are already officially announced by the IMF, the World Bank and those around them, brethren. Let us be careful with ourselves, brethren! Very careful, brethren! You need a lot of prayer, to be close to God!

Also related to this, another factor of the increase of anger, of the lack of understanding and therefore of the death between us, of the tearing, are paradoxically, also computer games, brethren. Why? Because we get in there, we get stuck there in that unreal, virtual universe and we don’t feel anything concretely about others and we don’t feel anything anymore even when we shoot someone in a game or on the contrary, there is a huge satisfaction, especially when we talk about games in which you see how you shoot the other, first person shooter as they are called. The sense of immense satisfaction that you have shot the other and this satisfaction starts from the points accumulated and the advancement in the game, going through the levels and up to the safety and comfort that the armchair offers us and especially the hatred, triumph and visceral satisfaction that we feel the moment we manage to “kill” someone in the game, when we make them bloody. Do you understand? And this, as I said, in the comfort of the armchair. I mean, we don’t have any kind of fear about our safety.

I remember a movie now, Toys it is called, in which there were two brothers and one of them was a crazy, paranoid army general, and the other had stayed with his father to help him run the company. That company was involved in the production of toys – the largest toy factory in the  world. And at a certain point, the father dies and dies without making a will and then the company remains rightfully with the eldest brother, who was the paranoid army general. And then, the film unfolds by telling how in fact, this army general turns the toy factory into people killing toys. Do you understand? A whole story.

In any case, there is a very iconic scene where children in a huge computer room play computer games and shoot the planes and enemies in the game. Yes, but these computers were linked to real airplanes and those children at the moment when they were rejoicing, they were shooting in the real world, brethren. Do you understand? Terrible. And this film is, I don’t know, 20 years old.

But now a real case. I remember a young woman, a drone pilot in the U.S. army during the Iraq war, who would go to the club and have fun with her friends, and that’s what she would do in the evening and during the day, she would fly drones and shoot the poor Taliban or whatever they were, in Iraq. Understand? She was very calm, she would shoot them and then at one point she was talking to her friends, “I’m going back to shoot that other one.” She would return. Do you understand? So she doesn’t feel anything.

And now, even more, in the war in Ukraine, footage has emerged from drones from 10-20 meters high in which drones drop grenades on Russian soldiers hidden in small personal pits (foxholes) and kill them in a brutal way. And we sit and watch those poor people curl up there and the grenade falls and fills them with blood, cuts off their hands, even kills them, you can imagine. God forbid!

I think that somehow we are returning to the epoch of brutality, as it was in Antiquity, after a long period of gentleness brought by Christianity, even if today almost no one on this planet was a Christian as it should be. As someone said: only one Christian has existed in all history and that One we crucified. Yes, brethren, we are very brutal, unfortunately.

Specific to our century as a source of anger and turmoil can also be messages on WhatsApp, Skype and things like this. A single message sent can give rise to a whole avalanche of thoughts: “What did he mean? Why did he do it?” or even worse a whole bunch of suspicions. And then you wake up with an avalanche, continuous messages, about what he wanted to say and so on. Or on the other hand, the other suffers terribly and cannot express their drama in messages and this increases their anger even more. Brethren, leave it! Don’t believe your thoughts. Leave it! Forget it, it’ll pass! Let it pass because it’s not like that! We are people. That is, let’s not absolutize some things.

Related to this, another characteristic of 21st century anger is the fact that it is enhanced by online anonymity. It is not enough, brethren, that online we no longer have the loving warmth of people, of loved ones, but rather, hidden under the anonymity offered by the online, we unabashedly pour out all our passions and we concretely feel this satisfaction that “I told him!” Yes, the comments I see, brethren… God forbid! Sometimes. Most are good, may God bless you truly and they are constructive. But sometimes one comes and pours out all his frustration there, the poor person. May God bless him and enlighten me, together with him, for your prayers. Do you understand?

The presence of the loving person is needed because the presence of the loving, attentive person is the presence of balance, brethren. We need restraint, responsibility, the awareness that God sees us and is above us or, rather, is in us. Anger leads, of course, to a lack of balance, so love extinguishes anger. Love brings balance. Do not think, dear ones, that an even greater anger extinguishes the anger of the other, this will not happen, in general it is not like that! Fight fire with fire – it’s not like that! Fire is not fought with fire. Fire is fought with water. And the Holy Apostle Paul says: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Understand?

Anger stirs up anger even more, brethren. If it does not manifest itself, it does not manifest itself out of fear and just presses it into the heart of the one who is fearful and at some point when it breaks out, God forbid! Very big traumas can arise. It is true that sometimes this fear can be a form of humility and then the anger of the one who says “Well, wait, it’s not good because I won’t get the thing I was angry about” disappears. In general, however, these forms of anger do not resolve things in the long run. You see that all the kingdoms of the earth were founded on hatred, on anger, and they did not resist. They caused convulsions and repression, riots, brethren. The only kingdom that has endured and will endure forever is the kingdom of Christ’s love and peace.

This is what we see for ourselves, brethren: the moment we are angry, we either do not eat at all, or we give ourselves completely to eating without measure. Beyond these extremes, sometimes we can also lose sleep, of course. You know very well. I hope you don’t know, but no, what we can do and what can you do… Anger is the pouring out of human nature because peace is the nature of man. And you see, we have this expression: “You’re beside yourself with anger” – which means that the man is angry beyond measure. Peace is human nature, peace is man’s nature. But we must use these tendencies to the extreme by pulling the rudder to the opposite side, and in this way heal them: that is, when out of infatuation and wounded egoism we do not want to eat, we humble ourselves and eat a bit more. Or if out of unrestraint we start to devour everything in front of us, then we say to ourselves: “Stop! Wait a minute! Don’t eat like a pile of pigs!” Do you understand?

We have to put ourselves in balance, at the center. The virtues are always at the center, brethren. Distortions are at the extremes – I’ve been talking about this for I don’t know how long. Demonic energy, turmoil – these are at extremes. St. Maximus the Confessor says that sin, distortion, is the unnatural use of natural affections. Yes? Do you understand? To get rid of this, we must confess, forgive — not remember evil because if we remember evil, we remember the distortion. Confession is essential, spiritual dependence is essential, brethren, especially for those who tend to go to extremes and today almost all promoted influencers tend to go to extremes. And we follow them – what the influencer says we do too. We are a society at the extremes. Do you understand? We are a society that is going in this direction. It’s not good, brethren, because extreme feelings generate extreme deeds, brethren. God forbid!

I see young people who have a lot of extreme thoughts, they are agitated, they don’t have patience at all. I have said this, I gave you examples at the beginning of my word. Speaking of extreme thoughts, let us be careful not to have the image of the one who has grieved us, the one who we think has hurt us, regardless of whether he has really hurt us or not, because all this is from the enemy, especially if it is during prayer. He wants to disturb us, brethren. We need to cut it off and focus on prayer and improving the situation. The fact that we cling to thoughts like: what he did do to me… and I’ll show him, and so on, going so far as to argue with him even when he is not present, shows that we are in deception, brethren. I saw people arguing on their own, talking like crazy.

This is not how problems are solved. Anger is not a rational part of the soul, and so the mind is dark when anger is exploding. When we are impulsive and angry because we are pressured, embarrassed by someone or something that hurts us or it can happen that we are pressured or embarrassed by something, by a deed; then we must take care to keep our balance. Because, on the other hand, you must know that we can be pressured and embarrassed by something or someone who apparently does us good, brethren, that is, of a very great interest, of a more or less selfish plan, a very great desire. Then the shame disappears and then again we have a form of wrath. So I think about becoming something great and strong and so on and then I’m angry again because, supposedly, I’m looking for the good. Brethren, this is not good. If meekness disappears and disorder appears, it is not good. Even if I say that I have to do such and such a thing to get there – career, money, pleasures and so on. Brethren, it’s not good! Because everything is trampled underfoot, brethren, including the fundamental laws of the country, of the group, of the family, all of that. It is not good!

Now, how do we heal? The cure. First of all, obedience, brethren. Obedience to God, who speaks through the Church, brothers first of all, then through institutions, through people and in our conscience. Perhaps it would be good to specify here that when I say that God speaks through the Church, I am referring first of all to the problems of sin, which of course are the most serious and therefore take precedence. If, brethren, the laws of people do not contravene the law of God, we must obey them. But if the laws of people are contrary to God’s law, then God’s law takes precedence. So the legislature should not get involved in problems of sin, because it will not turn out well. Do you understand?

I know a great personality in the state, a prime minister, I won’t say who he is, who passed a very spiritual law at one point, as much as was possible, and I asked him: “Mr. Prime Minister, how did you pass that law?” And he told me that a very close relative of his is a priest and his conscience urged him to pass that law and he asked his relative, the priest: “Father, what should I do, should I pass this law? Because if I pass this law, the politicians will destroy me.” And then that priest said to that prime minister: “It’s better to fight with politicians because if you fight with God you won’t come out well.”

No one who has fought with God in the history of the Church has done well and in the history of mankind. That’s what he did, he passed the law and it turned out very well, you should know, brethren. The man is very calm at this time, he is no longer prime minister, but he is very good. That is, he can sleep well at night. Beyond listening, in second place I said that it is about restrained and balanced behavior. Extremes are from the devil, I think I’m saying it for the tenth time today! Let’s cut off all these extremes, brethren, because it is not good to look for something like this.

You’re going to tell me now that the “cool” phenomenon sells – yes, it sells until you sell your soul. It’s not worth it, folks. Whether it’s “cool” in the sense of pleasures, entertainment, or toxic environments in which you stay for money, career and the like. In this context, of course there are also those who stay in toxic environments because they can’t otherwise (they need a salary for the family, they can’t do otherwise, they don’t know anything else and so on) – now, brethren, I don’t mean them in the first place, we understand, even if they also get angry in such environments, maybe even more than those who do it willingly. In general, however, we must avoid the three great giants of the passions: power, affluence and pleasure. PAP, brethren.

Power, affluence and pleasure. Power is also glory – glory is a form of power. If we avoid these great giants of the passions, then we will get less angry. Also in second place – on par with cutting off the causes of sin – is our correction through confession, prayer and socialization, brethren. In our daily behavior, charity helps a lot. When I say charity, I am also thinking of giving things, but here, first of all, of a thought of allowance towards our brothers and sisters. Allowance, that is to understand others.

St. Paisios says to see others as a mother would and, in fact, all the Holy Fathers say to see others as better than us. Of course, we must not have the spreading of the mind and have their image inside us permanently because this is dangerous and the enemy can remind us of the real or imaginary evils that others have done to us and start judging them. Be careful! I say this – that we must do this – the moment the thought already comes to us, from the enemy, of hatred within us against others, then we will justify others.

Let me give you a case. There was someone… we put some antennas, we agreed with a father and we placed them in his yard. And a brother came who had no connection with that father, he came there and took all the antennas that were calibrated and gathered them without asking anyone, of course, so neither us nor the father where those antennas were. And then, on the one hand, I could judge that brother by saying: “Why did he involve himself in this?” on the other hand, I can say, “The brother wanted to do well because he didn’t know what was with those antennas there and he took them because they were just left there.” Understand? So we have to have the good thought, to think about how it helps us. Let’s always say that, “Yes, indeed, that brother didn’t know and took them and now, with a good heart we will buy new antennas and we will put them in, because those antennas were old.”

Now, why antennas, because the Holy Mountain as you can see is a mountain, stone, and people die on the paths, you should know. Well, they don’t die every moment, it’s rare, but they get lost and I know cases, they ended up dying and that’s why we need communications, brethren. So a little parenthesis, don’t venture through the Holy Mountain if you don’t know. Do you understand?

Going back. It depends on how we see the other, how we have the good thought! Do you understand? You must know, brethren, that here too, culture helps a lot in calming anger. St. John of the Ladder says that music in moderation wonderfully calms anger. Yes, brethren, but we are talking about music that does this and not about music that generates anger or – worse – anti-music and passions and “Manele” God forbid!

Of course, here we could say that psaltic music is the most appropriate music, but brethren we have to be a little realistic and we have to say that on the one hand, psaltic music is not music to listen to, but to pray to, and on the other hand, it is music very much like…. which for most young people it is very difficult to find good psaltic music and most of them do not listen to psaltic music. That’s why we don’t say to look for psaltic music, but to look for good music that will calm you down and with discernment – not to go to extremes again. As a monk, I can’t tell you much, I could tell you a few composers, but I’m not very good at it, but look for serious music to calm you down and get you out of the turmoil of everyday life and not one that excites you and generates a state of rebellion or debauchery.

And the strongest, brethren, in the healing of anger is patience. Let’s be careful that it doesn’t come out through mimicry, words and especially not through deeds of revenge. It’s not good at all. You see that man needs special training to manage his anger. Do you understand? Do not act. Those from the special troops do special training to act angry, with quickness. If we are to say something, let us say it when we are undisturbed, not when we are in turmoil, because only then does God validate us.

Let’s be patient, brethren, and we will see that in time, even if at first we grieve and are sorrowful in our souls as a side effect of passion, in time we will no longer feel this sorrow, and in the end we will feel that what happened to us was like a crown, that we have received a crown from God because we have been patient. Then we will come to peace, to Christ who is our peace and this is the result of the resurrection; you see that Christ after His resurrection said this to us: “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.” This is heaven, brethren.

Come on, brethren, let us not get angry because it’s not good. Let’s not even get angry about the fact that we got angry so as not to add wound to wound. Do you understand? Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us! Amen.

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