what counters anger it's not
courageous to get angry it's actually courageous to be able to suppress your anger and our prophet peace be upon him
said that it's the great the wrestler who can throw a man is not the strong man the
strong man is the one that can suppress his anger and there are so many verses one of the
most uh reiterated virtues in the quran is
patience and it seems to me that this age is an age that really demands that
spiritual practice the virtue of courage and from that the daughters of
courage uh of which include patience and forbearance and and
and just the idea of being able to to bear other people i mean god gave us
families for in order for us to teach teach that fundamental truth that we
need to bear other people because we don't choose our families and very often i don't think there's any family that's
not immune to the uncle or somebody they don't want brought to the dinner table
but they come anyway because home is the place where if you have to go there they have to
take you in as frost reminds us so i i feel like
if we don't restore the the place of virtue ethics
uh in our culture i just i don't see any solutions to this problem well we also diminish
or or we don't understand the power of the moral life
uh vastly grossman i think writes about this beautifully in life and fate that the power of kindness he calls it
simple human kindness and i saw that in eastern europe
in the revolutions that i covered where these figures like vaslav havel i was every night in the magic lantern
theater with hovel he'd been a non-person from since
charter 77 since 1977 until 1989 and yet his steadfastness
to that moral imperative to what he called living in truth gave him an authority that brought down
the communist regime of czechoslovakia and i you know i i was in venezuela
square was cold and snowy for all of those demonstrations half a million people and the great uh
czech singer uh marta kubasheva who had sung a prayer for marta which was the anthem of
defiance in 68 when the soviet tanks rolled in and overthrew duke check so after the soviets took
control and put in a puppet regime her she was banned from the airwaves a recording stock was destroyed
uh she worked on an assembly line in a toy factory and i was there when she walked
out on that balcony 500 000 checks she begins to sing a prayer for marta
and every check in the crowd knew every word and most of them hadn't even born
in and that is the power mandela had it on robben island you know that forbearance
that patience and essentially you know there were large numbers of guards apartheid regime
guards who were struck down by that moral force and
this again i know you admire solzhenitsyn as i do this is a constant theme of solzhenitsyn
and i think that in a secular society we've done many
things wrong and one of the worst is that we don't understand
the power of love and and that that power is one that can vanquish evil
if we have the courage to practice it that's what tobias was teaching what he called bold love
which is is really that kind of loving somebody who's really not worthy of your
love and and one of the interesting things about anger in the table of the seven deadly sins of
hieronymus bosch you know he has he has the two
one one's got a table on his head i think and the other one's brandishing a sword but it's the woman who's holding
him back and and i think you know there's something very profound in that
uh in that image that it is love that can overcome that
hate cannot overcome hate uh and that and that was i think dr king's
you know the power that he had of of love and and
um sheikh abdullah also that's something that he definitely
he emanates that and and people can feel it around him because
it's something that uh the spiritual power of it and not a kind of
you know agape right it's it's that deep spiritual love
that that we need more of and i think that's the only thing that can really
defuse a lot of these things it doesn't always work unfortunately with some people but
there are people that are completely disarmed by it i mean there are we you know our tradition distinguishes between
spirit demons and human demons and the prophet muhammad said that human demons were much worse
because they they have they have they can actually they have a type of volition and agency
in the world that the spiritual demons don't the spiritual demons can only suggest whereas the human demons actually can
impose their will on the material world you know i we could go on and i'm always
i always marvel at what you've done and where you've been and and the power that you can bring into a conversation
because of that experience and i've seen you do this many times it's very disarming
because so many people have have not seen what you've seen or been through what you've been through
and i think the palestinian you know the testimony that you've given to the palestinian people has just been so
powerful over the years because you know
despite the fact of unfortunately the leadership is is in all in all cases
everywhere is wanting deeply but uh the people as you know are just
they're just extraordinary people and uh just have a beautiful culture
we we're people of hope and uh you know it's it's
it's one of the great theological virtues that uh our our faith share a
lot of people don't know that you are a minister i hide it hansa i know
you know unfortunately um my experience because i went to catholic schools i was like you i was from a very
poor my immediate family was very poor but i came from a extended family that had a lot of wealth
but my mother was a working class mother and uh and i i had a opportunity to go
to a prep school so i went to school with the rich kids and i agree with you i was i was laughing about you saying
that they they're surrounded by these psychopaths who don't realize you know and dylan has
that great line you never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the crown clowns that all did tricks for
you yeah yeah it's there's a tremendous wisdom to them you know i i i go back to them and i and
i really do feel um that yeah that they're definitely
a wisdom even the six poisons in buddhism has four of the seven
so i think they're and pride is always you know traditionally they saw pride as
really at the root because i think anger a lot of anger comes from pride um one of the things that uh the prophet
muhammad said that if somebody gets angry that he should if he's standing he
should sit down and if he's still difficulty in one narration he says let
him put his cheek on the earth and and imam al-ghazali's commenting on
that in in his book called the 40 he says because
it's arrogance that makes us angry and and he said that putting your cheek
on the ground is to remind yourself that you are humus you are of the earth
and and and you should be like the earth everybody stomps on her
and yet all she gives is goodness yeah that's great
god bless chris all right it was great to see you take care you