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Orthodox Christian Parenting, hosted by Faithtree Resources Executive Director (and mom of four!) Michelle Moujaes, is a weekly podcast for parents and grandparents navigating the holy struggle of raising kids in the Orthodox Faith. Each episode offers honesty, encouragement, and practical wisdom from the Church—creating space to exhale, freedom from the pressure to be perfect, and openness to grow as you raise children who are deepening their knowledge and love of Christ.
Welcome to the final special episode of our Summer Clip Series here on Orthodox Christian Parenting. We have spent the last several weeks revisiting some of our favorite moments from Season two and we are so grateful that you've been on this journey with us. Today we are closing our series with a vital conversation for the world we live in today. Orthodox Wisdom on Anger in a Culture of Rage. We're joined by Father Ted Polcini to talk about how we as parents can navigate the anger we see in the culture and the anger that sometimes arises within our own homes.
Michelle Moujaes:Father Ted offers a beautiful perspective on what anger actually is and how it can be transformed. You'll hear him talk about the differences between righteous anger and the destructive rage we often see online or out in the world and he teaches how we can model a different way for our children now. He shares practical steps for how to cool the fever of anger in the moment and how to return to a place of peace and prayer. It is truly a masterclass in emotional and spiritual sobriety. Let's listen.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:People who have solid sense of identity, who they are, are much better able to listen to people who are different from themselves. If people come into college, for instance, and you know, colleges sort of market themselves as a place where people expand their vision and they grow in their understanding of the world, well, that happens with people who come into that college environment with a solid sense of who they are, and they know how they feel about things. And when they meet other people, if they have a strong sense of their own identity, they're able to listen dispassionately and openly to others. Their identity is weak, they feel defensive from the outset and they begin to, you know, attack everyone who's not them. Now, you said, how are parents supposed to deal with this?
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Well, I think parents have to have their kids understand that who they are is a justifiable expression of being an educated human being in the twenty first century. But that doesn't mean that everyone else who doesn't think the way you are doesn't have an identity that deserves to be understood. You know, I taught in the Department of Religion, alright? And of course, what topic sort of generates more hostile reaction in a lot of people than discussing other religions. And I remember one student asked me, Professor Pulcine, how do I know when I've studied another religion enough?
Fr. Ted Pulcini:I said, whenever you are able to see the beauty in that other tradition that the adherents to that tradition see, if you are able to understand that beauty, I'm not saying you have to make it your own, but you have to understand that there's a beauty there that other people see and appreciate. And when you understand that they see a beauty there that you might have to learn to see, that their identity is formed by that beauty in the same way that you feel your identity is shaped by a beauty that you see in your worldview. In other words, if people have a strong identity, they are less challenged by people who differ from themselves. If they have weak identities, they rush to the fight to destroy the other, to vilify them, to bring law cases against them. I mean, it's so apparent in our society that people who have very fragile senses of identity become very oppositional with almost anyone else they deal with.
Michelle Moujaes:Father, if you were to define anger, is there a given? Because when I think of anger, I think of a lot of the kind of symptoms of anger. But from a Christian perspective, like what's actually happening in us?
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Anger is, I think at its base, a way to demean the other. In other words, to make the other lesser, and so that the only real way that you can deal with them is to minimize them. And what minimizes something more than directing anger at them. You know, it's funny, the word for anger in Hebrew is af, which is also the word for nose, believe it or not. In other words Nose like the nose on your because I think anger was identified to the flaring of the nostrils when someone was angry.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:And I think anger is at its root a basic self defensive impulse and that has a physical aspect. You know, your heart starts to beat faster. You can feel your muscles tensing and you feel that. And it also has an emotional aspect where you want to demean what the force of the person is you consider to be angry. And that's why if you look at scripture, god, we we refer to the anger of god.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:God never gets angry. God doesn't change. God is. Alright? In other words, we have projected our sense of who, what anger is to us, namely this defensive reaction that protects us against others, we say that's the way God acts towards us.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Well, that's not true. To say that God absents himself from us because he's angry with us, That's like saying that the sun hides himself from the blind. The blind do not see, not because the sun hides itself, but because the person himself has some kind of predisposition that doesn't enable him to see the light of the sun. Well, I think that's what, when we let our emotions and our physical reaction to being threatened affect what we do, we protect that onto everyone else, including God. So I think at the base of anger, there's a self protective kind of impulse that we feel is quite not going in our way, in our direction, and so we use anger to sort of defend ourselves.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:The best way to avoid anger is not to have to be so defensive. And that means that ties back with what I said earlier about the strong identity. Identity is the issue in our culture that needs to be addressed much more carefully. I think we have to really understand that God is not angry with us the way we get angry with other people, and we have to stop projecting that onto God Because God, believe me, does not have any sense of being threatened by us. There's no reason he's threatened by what he sees.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:So we have to feel that we are not being threatened and in danger all the time.
Michelle Moujaes:Is anger always a sin? I mean, we hear about, you know, be angry, but do not sin or righteous anger. Speak to me a little bit about that father.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Some fathers will say anger is always destructive and therefore you should root it out wherever you can. Some people will say there is righteous anger. In other words, Jesus overturned the tables in the temple out of anger for people making the temple into a den of thieves. And my response to that is, you know, I'm not a perfect human being. Christ was.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:And so he knows what anger can be directed at something with a certainty. I don't have that certainty. And so the false say for us is not to react in anger at all. And if anger does happen, we have to immediately begin to sort of rectify in ourselves what we see as the source of that anger. Elder Paisios said something very interesting.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:He said the only anger that is justified is the anger against quote unquote the old man in ourselves. In other words, all of us as Christians have been a new creation. Baptism promises to make us a new creation. But the old creation, the old man within us, is constantly trying to disrupt what we know to be right or to disrupt us in our pursuit of what is good and just and holy. That old man in us is what we can direct our anger toward and realize that the anger that we ultimately direct at others is somehow a function of that old man in us prompting us to be angry with others.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:He says, Don't be angry with others. Be angry to that old man in yourself that gives rise to that anger and that sense of vengeance and desire for retribution against others.
Michelle Moujaes:Susie is a mother in Nashville. I have five children and I want to know what should I do in the moment when one of my children is angry? Praying sounds like the right answer, but it doesn't always deescalate the situation.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Well, don't angrily tell them that they have to stop doing what they're doing.
Michelle Moujaes:Oh, I do that all the time. I'm like, don't be angry. I'm so angry.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:But ask them to think, what do you think you're accomplishing by being angry? What do you want to accomplish by showing anger, like to your sibling or whoever else you're angry at? And get them to express that and say, do you think that what you're saying or doing is actually having that effect on your sibling or the person you're angry with? And if they say no, say, well, maybe there's a better way to go about this. I mean, I think we're all self interested.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Even kids are self interested. And if they see anger, which I think initially they think is in their own self interest to express, if they see it as not being in their interest, maybe they'll consider another approach.
Michelle Moujaes:I love that. Love that.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Let's be honest. Listen, when you were a kid, you have brothers and sisters, the first thing as a kid, you learn is if someone irritates you, you want to hit them, and kids do that. They hit each other. And we sort of get them away from that, even when they're adults. We say you can't be violent, you can't be punching someone in the face or knocking them to the ground.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Well, we have to take that a step further. We understand that we don't attack other people physically because chances are they're going attack us back physically, so it's best not to be physically violent. Well, we have to take that another step, even to be verbally violent or emotionally violent usually has a very unsatisfactory result on us. It's not in our self interest to do it. And I think that's the way we have to break out of this combative dynamic that anger sets up.
Michelle Moujaes:Is the idea though that not only do we obviously not want our kids to be physical and we don't want them to even be verbally angry, but is the transformation at a heart level where we want their heart posture to be first one reacting of love? Or is it first, I mean, acknowledging that self protection is a part of what our kids need to know. Like, that's not what we believe. Like, how do we think about that?
Fr. Ted Pulcini:Anger is normal, but the question is how do you then make it into something that can work to your benefit? And I think that that becomes very difficult to do. And so I think that the stability of compassion brings about the ability to identify with the other to the point where your first and most pronounced reaction against that person is not going to be to destroy them, but somehow to make them your ally rather than your enemy. Don't know. Think that that's the only thing you have to do.
Fr. Ted Pulcini:You know, I think that when we get angry with someone because they feel that they're threatening us or something that we think is valuable, we have to understand what is valuable to them that they feel is being threatened that we have to address. And we have to ask them, why is it that you're feeling so threatened by us that you to be so angry at us about this? And sometimes you don't come to an agreement, you don't come to a meeting of the minds, but you can come to a meeting of coexistence. Not going to agree on a lot of things, but that doesn't mean we should let our anger result in such a destructive violence that you make someone a constant perennial enemy and only increase the presence of violence in the world.