By Dalton Roberts
IPS Features

Speakers don’t really do us much good until they shock us and snap us to attention. Once I heard a speaker say anger is a holy emotion. That certainly shocked me. I have been the victim of anger and have released my own at times in very unholy ways.

He said, "You can turn your anger into light. The purpose of anger is to create light." So I sat down and thought about all the episodes of anger I could remember. Sure enough I began to see how some of them had turned into openings for positive change, which are often openings for new light in our lives.

I thought of a man who really inflicted a lot of pain on me. I remembered how it forced me to look at the forces that molded him and I ended up with empathy for him. I could see that few person could experience what he had been through without accumulating a reservoir of anger. I understood, and understanding is spiritual light.

I thought about someone I hurt in a moment of unexpected anger. It still is a briar in my heart. I’ve bathed that briar in tears several times over the decades since it happened. Each time I saw more of the contents of my own heart and soul Seeing our inner being is a powerful form of light.

Instead of saying anger is a form of light, I say it can be a form of light if we let the embers from it light up our understanding, empathy and self-examination.

Our Being Is Music

Fate did me a large favor when it routed a writing of Hazrat Inayat Khan into my life. He was a Sufi mystic and bubbles forth insights on life like fresh-poured champagne.

Tune into what he says about music in his Mysticism of Sound: "What makes us feel drawn to music is that our whole being is music. The nature which made us is music. We live and move and have our being in music."

That which is comes from that from which is was made. Your kid favors you because he came from you. Since we all sing and dance and whistle and make music in one way or another, I can see Hazrat is right. We came from music. It’s perfectly alright to pray, "Our dear heavenly Musicmaker."

Priceless Perspective

A personal journal is no good unless you record the bad as well as the good.

It’s the interplay between the two that gives you perspective.

I realized this today as I felt chagrin reading a statement I released long ago blasting a political opponent. I had good reasons to respond to him but the situation didn’t call for my nuclear missive.

Thankfully, on the next page was a picture of me joining some folks in breaking ground for what appeared at the time to be a risky business. Since then it has become one of the most successful enterprises in the state. So my chagrin over my big mouth was balanced off by seeing that I did have the courage to stand for a good idea, to support a grand project at a time when it was unpopular.

Another thing I’ve noticed about things in my journal. What may have been written in an attitude of failure can become a source of deep satisfaction as we see the gloom becoming a glow, year after year. Like when someone slamdunks you and year after year you see that person roll like a tank over other victims. Your initial feeling of loss becomes gratitude for escape.

You can also have the opposite experience. You can write something in glee and see with the passage of time how shallow your victory really was. Maybe the best thing our journals do for us is tell it like it was so we can decide how it now is.

• Professionals built the Titanic, amateurs built the ark.
• Great ideas need landing gears as well as wings. ~Adolph Berle
• A yawn is a silent shout. ~Chesterton
• If you are able to express yourself clearly, maybe you should avoid a career in politics.
• The Lord loveth a cheerful giver. He also accepteth from a grouch.
• We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self. ~Cyril Connelly