My Solution To Resentment

By Father Stephen Morris

While it is true that students change at The Family Foundation School, change is also true for those who come on as staff.  I’m in my fifteenth year as a chaplain here. That’s half of my priesthood. I’ve done parish work, taught in Catholic Schools and ministered as a chaplain to a University Hospital prior to coming to The Family Foundation School. And while those ministries involved me with large numbers of people, the work left me busy with outside things but essentially untouched interiorly. That changed soon after coming here, where perhaps the most frequently heard word is resentment. And though I was hearing the resentment-word in seemingly every conversation, it never occurred to me that I had resentments:  at least this priest didn’t have resentments. Any negative thing that I felt towards people was justified.

Early on in my Family School employ Terry and I became friendly and he asked if I’d be interested in the two of us going off for a weekend to the retreat house at the Martyrs Shrine at Auriesville. And while we were there, not spending a lot of time talking with each other, he introduced me to some program basics which, like the blind gospel-man who washes in the Siloam pool, suddenly allowed me to start seeing.

Resentment is any negative feeling towards another person. And when I understood it so simply, so plainly, I was suddenly free to acknowledge that I was filled with resentment – and that resentment was draining the life out of me – priest or not. Indeed, I realized that resentment had become my life, my oxygen.

My talking points were all born of resentment. I had a resentment story at the ready, always. I was adept at holding court telling resentment stories – holding people spellbound with tales from the past. With each telling of any resentment story, the account grew in drama, pathos or twisted humor. Oh Stephen, how marvelous that you survived THAT! Oh Stephen, what a miracle that you’re as normal as you are.

And as I would begin to take up any particular story yet again for fresh ears, I’d feel bored with myself but would rise quickly to the occasion eliciting fresh sympathy and laughter all around. It was all very predictable, dark and tiring, dissatisfying and empty. And while I’m not an alcoholic or addict, the behavior had the feel of a drunk sitting on a barstool registering his complaint. I was busy, busier, busiest as a priest, but inwardly enslaved. All day, walking from one hospital room to the next I’d see and think about Doctor A who postured during his rounds, and nurse B who snubbed me, and intern C who looked sloppy, and resident D who had a poor bedside manner. And in the parish Father E who hid in his room and didn’t work, and pastor F who couldn’t make a decision, and housekeeper G who did a lousy job, and parish-lady H who wanted to run the show, and sister J who asked too much of me, and on and on and on. And there were the resentments from many years ago: the teachers who were mean or who didn’t teach so that I could learn, the kids who made high school such a hell, the adults who had failed me.

Many people deny that they have resentments. But my work with people over many decades suggests that they have either, as we say, stuffed them, or   covered them with piety, or a tough (keep away) exterior, or a bright but forced smile, the busy-ness of work, joylessness, or an unconscious life of complaining. Most people are oblivious to or not good at controlling the leakage, or like myself, utterly justified in and protective of their resentments. In Christianity this is especially sad, as Jesus makes it patently clear in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5,6,7) – we’ve got to get rid of resentment.

Carl Jung said, The answer to our real problems is a spiritual answer.  By problems Jung wasn’t talking about getting a speeding ticket or winding up wet having forgotten an umbrella. Rather I expect he’s referring to the issues that hamper life, that make things more humanly difficult than they need be, the things that challenge us beyond our felt capacity, the fears that want to paralyze us. Being a resenter is a problem. In fact, when someone talks to me about problems with the spiritual life: not feeling God’s presence, having trouble believing that God hears, I don’t respond by talking about religious things but by inquiring about resentment (spiritual enemy number one).

When I was a young priest in my first parish, the telephone rang one Friday night with the caller summoning me to a home in a community of convoluted streets but which had only one entrance off the main road. I arrived at the house at approximately 2 A.M., staying about an hour at which time I left to return to the rectory. But the streets were poorly lit and so intertwined and circular that I quickly lost all sense of direction and became hopelessly lost, wandering around for hours. There was no one out to ask about how to exit the neighborhood, and as time went on I became increasingly anxious and angry. Then, almost two hours later, as the morning sun began to light the sky, I stumbled on the turn which took me back to Mineola Ave and back home. The relief was profound!

And so here’s the spiritual resolution for those who are lost wandering in a closed world of long, convoluted, exhausting, angering resentments. It’s simple. Make a list of every person you know with whom you have any negative feeling. First names only. And now learn this prayer:

Lord, as you know, I have resentments with all of these people. And even if I don’t feel it right now, I ask you to remove them. Take my stony, cold, hard heart, and make it into a heart of mercy, compassion and love. Amen.

Someone will know if this prayer is found in AA literature. Or maybe I paraphrased or adapted a prayer found there. No matter. Everyday, read the list of names slowly and carefully. Don’t rehearse anything of the resentments. Then pray the prayer with an attentive heart. In other words, mean it. Do this every day, twice a day (like a doctor’s prescription) for two weeks.

I had 87 names on my first list. Faithful to the little discipline, most of the resentments were gone by the end of the first week, though I continued, completing the second. By that time all of the resentments which had consumed me (some of them for 40 years) were gone. It was like finding the road with the right turn OUT. I haven’t told one of the stories in almost thirteen years. And not too long ago, when I became aware that I’d told a story about a teacher in college that put him in a bad light, I realized at once that I hadn’t placed his name on the original list!

But life goes on, and so new resentments will arise, though perhaps fewer as we distance ourselves from the savory-ness of resentment (which is power). And so the prayer can become a regular part of our lives. I never pass on internet chain prayers (You must send this to a dozen people within ten minutes or else), but I’m happy to share this new story and prayer with the paper’s readership.

There are people, of course, who will at once dissect the experience, perhaps looking to debunk that God has anything to do with the new freedom. I don’t spend time on those kinds of concerns. The prayer is addressed to Lord. So be it. It is a prayer of surrender, asking the Lord to take me and change me – ME – and no one else.

Last month when I introduced a close relative to the reality of resentment’s poison and that this prayer was indeed wonder-working she joked that my lifetime’s 87 resentments were light-weight – that she could rack that up in a week. Indeed!

How to end this? Try the list and the prayer’s discipline and let me know what happens. Write to me at school. And God bless your desire to be a new kind of person – one who enjoys the freedom of God’s children!

Tagged as: The Family Foundation School