February 11. Love is Not Irritable or Resentful
There are two words – even sometimes combined and translated as ‘easily angered.’ The first word – paroxyno – is an internal emotion, a passionate feeling; the arousal of the spirit to anger or grief, an urge or sense of provocation to irritation. The second phrase – logizetai to kakon – has more to do with the mind. Logezetai means to calculate, to consider, to think about something, to classify. Kakon means bad / evil. Say that word out loud. Kah – kon. Those consonants have come down in our vernacular as well. Kaka is a slang term for vomit.
This sentence reminds the readers that passionate negative emotions come from both the heart and the mind. Our hearts react when they are aroused to anger; our minds use strategy to express that anger.
My father refused to allow us to accuse him of being mad. He’d acquiesce to the word ‘angry,’ but never mad. In his mind, he associated that word correctly – with madness – a certain level of insanity and he never wanted his emotions to be that out of control.
When he was still in high school, he was hired at the Iowa home for the criminally insane in his hometown. He knows they should never have hired him, but his calm demeanor and incredible strength were a bonus and they needed him. He watched madness encompass patients and had to hold them while electroshock treatments (of the 50s, no less) were applied. He saw too many minds destroy people from the inside out. These people had no control over their passions and ended up there because they had lost control in some hideous way.
Madness frightened him and he didn’t want to ever admit to allowing any of that to touch him.
Anger that is fueled by passion and then released in a calculated means in order to hurt others is in opposition to love.
Love will not allow these types of negative emotions to reign in the heart or in the mind.
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