An Advent Calendar for my Friends: December 6

The picture at the centre is a photograph taken by Drez
at stock.XCHANG.

The Angel of Passion

by Anselm Grün

The Angel of Passion seems to contradict the Angel of Calm. But we need many angels to make life flower inside us. The Angel of Passion wants to challenge us, to live with the whole power of our hearts, not to simmer gently through our days. If a person is no longer capable of great passion, life grows boring and stale. It loses its flavour. This was certainly not what Jesus had in mind who challenged us to be the salt of the earth, to season this world with our vitality. Passions are natural driving forces in a person, which want to push her towards living and at last towards God. The Angel of Passion is meant to teach us the art of dealing with these driving forces so that they are powering our lives, that they don’t drive us, but that we can use them for the our real aim in life. We are not supposed to turn completely instinctual or animalistic, into driven personalities who just drift along, but to turn into personalities who force passions to serve life and to form life in all its variety.

Who is able to get passionately involved in something, can also fight passionately for life, and who can also be passionate in their spirituality. This shows a Chassidic tale: “A Chassid once accused a few other persons before Rabbi Wolf, saying they were turning the night into day playing cards. ‘This is good,’ said the Zaddik. ‘Like all people they, too, want to serve God and they don’t know how. But now they learn to keep awake and to stick with a project. Once they have perfected that, they only need to repent their ways – and what kind of servants of God they will be then!’

The early monks have spent a lot of thought on passions. Evagrius Ponticus († 399) counts nine passions a monk has to fight. For him, passions are positive forces. The point is not to extinguish them, but to integrate them in life. Passions are supposed to serve us and not the other way around. Apatheia, the goal in the battle with passions, is not a passionless condition, but being free of pathological ensnarement in passions, the integration of passions in everything what I do and think, a condition in which I am no longer dominated by passions, but in which they are at my disposal as powers, as virtus, as a virtue that is fit to make me alive.

Passions are free of any value judgement. If they turn good or evil depends on how I use them. Anger is a positive force that enables me to distance myself from others, to free myself from the power of others. But anger can also eat me up inside if I allow it dominate me. Sexuality can make me feel alive, but it can also oppress me. Neither in oppression nor expression of passions leads to vitality, but a responsible way of dealing with them. Who lives without passion has no “bite”, lacks power, misses the fullness of life. Many Christians have killed their passions in their striving for correctness. Thus they have turned boring. They are the salt of the earth no longer, but only a stale seasoning that no one is interested in any more. Jesus was a passionate champion of the poor and the disenfranchised. He talked full of passion about the merciful father and fought passionately against the cold-heartedness of the Pharisees who darkened the image of God with their narrow-minded legality.

The German word for passion is “Leidenschaft” and is derived from “zu leiden”, “to suffer”. And “leiden” meant in earlier times: going, driving, travelling. Who travels, gains experience, she has to go through something, suffers something. And that way the word took on the meaning of: suffering, feeling pain. Consequently, passion is connected with experience. Who gets involved in something, gets experienced, experiences something new and undreamt of. But just like every journey can also be troublesome, so is dealing with passions. It’s a tightrope walk. And all to easily a passion can grow stronger than is good for us. Then the passion dominates us instead of aiding us to live our lives with passion. The Angel of Passion may accompany you on your tightrope walk so you may become a truly passionate person, a person who passionately gets involved with others, a person, who passionately fights for making a humane way of living together here on earth possible.

© by Anselm Grün, 50 Engel für das Jahr;
translation by JunoMagic.