Now, here is my point. We've had volumes of poems, songs, art, literature talking about the need which I call intimacy. The need for intimacy means the need to be fully known and fully safe with another person. Volumes are written about love or intimacy. Very little is being said about the number one enemy of intimacy. I'm not going to give a theological or erudite lecture this evening. What I'm going to do is give you a couple of practical points, practical tips if you will, that come out of being married almost forty years to my high school sweetheart and growing every year, and of dealing with people for almost forty years who have lost the ability to achieve intimacy.

The number one enemy of intimacy, in my opinion, is unresolved anger. We teach people how to do just about everything in relationships except how to dissolve anger. Two practical tips: first, to resolve anger which is the number one barrier to at-oneness, we have to discard some myths about anger. Secondly, we have to embrace some very difficult tasks.

Let's take the myths first. First of all, there is a myth that somehow anger is evil. It's beneath our humanity. We should never get angry. I hear parents say to children all the time -- the same things, unfortunately, I said to my children and that I hear people saying all the time -- don't be angry. Well, to tell a human being not to be angry is like telling them not to breathe. Anger is not an evil trait. Anger is a built-in, self-defense mechanism that tells us we are in trouble. It's a gift of God which lets us know that things are not right, either in our lives, physically, emotionally, maritally or whatever. So, the idea that anger is evil is a myth. I am glad the bible talks about being angry, and Paul even says it's good not to let it fester into rage and that sort of thing. I'm glad that Jesus got angry one time and drove money changers out of the temple.

The second myth that we need to discard is that anger is avoidable. I have actually studied seminars in how to avoid becoming angry. That's impossible. As I said, it is a built-in, self-defense mechanism. Here is something else about anger. Anger is a sign that you care. To be angry at the person you love means that you care. The opposite of love is not anger; the opposite of love is indifference. If I don't care about you and me and what happens to us, then I will not be angry. So, the first two myths that anger is evil and that it's avoidable need to be discarded.

Now, I want to come to the most prevalent myth and that is that there are three easy, fast-acting, tasteless ways to deal with anger -- swallow it, vent it, and...swallow it, vent it and reroute it. Let's take swallowing it. Anybody who's out there tonight understanding what it is to swallow anger knows that it's impossible. Anger will always find a way out. You can't bottle it up. It will be transferred to somebody else. There are many people who are ill, physically, emotionally, psychologically, because they have been trying to swallow anger for generations or for years. You cannot swallow anger. To tell somebody to swallow their anger and to put it off is not a healthy thing at all.

The second popular way of dealing with anger is to vent it. One time I actually went to a primal scream therapy class designed to teach me how to vent my anger in a healthy way. Well, whenever you vent something like anger, you get an endorphin rush. Endorphin rushes are addictive, so when you vent, you becoming a venting-type person, and so venting anger only makes you want to vent it more, and it establishes a pattern of ventilation which is very destructive. Besides, as you know, we say many things when we are angry that we wish we could take back and would never say again otherwise. So, we cannot vent it; we cannot swallow it.

Then, there is the rerouting approach which means don't hit your mate verbally or physically, go hit a golf ball or something of that nature. Well, hitting a golf ball is better than hitting your mate. However, that does not get rid of the cause of the anger. It only deals with the symptoms.

So, if we're going to deal with the number one enemy of intimacy which is unresolved anger, we're going to have discard the myths that we can swallow it, that we can vent it and that we can reroute it. We are going to have accept the fact that anger is normal and we can't avoid it. Okay. With that tip in mind, discarding the myths, how about accepting the hard tasks? Anger can be dissolved. There is another way, and I am just going to share with you what's worked for us and what I've seen work for many others.

First of all, there are four steps and the first one is the most difficult step. You must give your mate permission to say, "I am angry" without retaliating. I call it a SALT treaty -- "Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty." Freedom to say, "I am angry with you" without you coming back and saying, "Well, by golly, I'm angry at you." Permission without retaliation. When that happens, then you schedule anger sessions. You are able to visit with each other about anger without it going into rage and you don't wait for it to bubble over.

The second...permission without retaliation...the second step is equally as hard, and that is to reconstruct the anger situation. I call it reconstructing the wreck. I say, "I'm angry." My mate says, "Okay, let's go back and reconstruct when you got angry, why did you get angry, what was said, what was understood about what was said." What I have found in my own pilgrimage is that the overwhelming majority of the time when I reconstruct the anger situation, somebody misunderstood, somebody misapplied, somebody misstated. Quite often, I was not angry at all at my mate. I was bringing some other frustration into the mix. Somehow in that sort of process of reconstructing the wreck and having permission to say, "I'm angry" without being retaliated against, anger begins to dissolve.

Now we are ready for the third step, which I call "Flowing Around the Boulders in the Stream." If you have ever seen a great rushing river, you know that the river does not try to remove all of the boulders. It simply flows around them. What does that mean? It means that I am an imperfect being and you are an imperfect being, and all love relationships take place between imperfect beings, and there are some things about my mate that I will never, ever change. They are boulders in the stream, and instead of trying to remove them before we can have a relationship, I have to go around them.

Quick illustration. My idea of a well-furnished house is a bed and some chairs and the very rudimentary things that you need to live in. My wife's idea of a well-furnished house is to put as much in it as possible. Between our kitchen and our den is a 20-foot wide corridor. It's full of furniture, except for one little 2-foot wide span. The other day I came home and there was a pedestal table there. She had just bought it. Made me angry. I was going to say something to her about it and then I thought, "No, boulders in the stream." I left it there. That night I ran into it when I was going to get tea and I broke it, and I bought her another table. I'm not going to change my wife. That's a boulder in the stream. So, the freedom to say "I'm angry" without being attacked, reconstruct the wreck, accept the fact that you are not going to change some things about your mate. You are going to have to flow around it.

And the fourth thing which you would expect me to say -- and that's okay, I'm going to say it anyway -- invite God to the fight. What does that mean? That doesn't mean just to hold hands and pray every day, although that might be part of it. It doesn't mean to have a family altar or read the bible together. What it means is to realize that I, in and of myself, am incapable of loving my wife or any of my friends or anybody else as they need to be loved, and they are incapable of loving me to that extent as well. That means that unless I have the help from a Higher Power to fill in what I am unable to do by myself, that anger will always be unresolved and that intimacy will never occur.

The most wonderful verse in the bible for me is, "We love God because He first loved us." We are incapable of being able to fulfill the needs of another. So, it's okay to be angry; it's not okay to dismiss anger by treating the symptoms and not getting to the cause. The cause of our anger is that we are unfinished people, and the only way we will ever be finished is to understand that we can work on anger and dissolve it with the help of a Power Higher than ourselves.

Orley Herron: Gerald, I really enjoyed your message to us. I loved reading your book about common sense religion and I want to quote something that you said because I think it really captures your philosophy, that you could just build on with us. You said, "A good news person," (and we're trying to really inspire in these "30 Good Minutes"), "A good news person is someone who proves there is no rut so deep you cannot leave it, no dream so lost you can't retrieve it, and no pain so great you can't endure it." I think about anger there. "And no sin so bad that God can't cure it."

Gerald Mann: I was invited to do a commencement address or a baccalaureate, I can't remember which, at a university and everybody goes to sleep and they're ready to get out of there anyway, and I just got up and did that little poem. That sort of, though, inculcates my whole philosophy of the Christian pilgrimage. And that is that we have got to be able to get people to connect with the fact that there's no dream so lost you can't retrieve it, and there is no rut so deep that you can't leave it, and those things I truly believe, and they're not just sort of pasted on positive thinking tributes.

To me, the grace of God means that helpless is not hopeless, and that we can always start over again, and too many of our churches are built on law and protecting something in the past, and my whole approach to life, which I have discovered the hard way -- it has discovered me, I haven't discovered it -- is that God is alive and dynamic, and He is in the midst of this whole mix. People are saying to me all the time, "Don't you think all of the chaos proves the absence of God?" And I say, "No, I think it probably proves the absence of our courage, but it proves the presence of God." God is in the mix. The whole theme of the bible is that God, no matter how bad things are, is in the middle of it, and there is always a remnant. There is always somebody He holds over or that understands that we don't need to pull the shroud over our heads and call in the cavalry because we're not hopeless.

Herron: One of my senior vice-presidents, whom you know, who attended your church when she was in Austin, said about you that you really had a lot of common sense and you talked about the "yeses" in the spiritual growth, rather than the "noes." Tell us about that.

Mann:  Well, I tried to! One of my favorite sayings -- I have made up all these little things so I can remember them -- is "there's a yes in every mess." I was reading Second Corinthians one day in a modern translation and it said that God is never "yes" or "no," but he is always "yes," and Jesus Christ is the "yes" in the midst of all our troubles. And I thought, man, I've never read that before. Jesus Christ is the yes. So I went and I got out the Greek New Testament, and I got all the tools, and I read, and that's exactly what it says, that Jesus Christ is God's "yes." It doesn't say that everything is great. In fact, everything is probably going to be bad or even worse, but that in the midst of the mess, there is always a yes, and that's not, you know, just look for the silver lining, because sometimes there aren't any silver linings. The Old Testament didn't say that God spoke to Elijah in a still, small voice -- it says He spoke to Elijah in the silence, the absolute, utter silence, not in the wind and the fire and the rain and the thunder, and sometimes the silence is where we have to look.

Herron: Let's talk a moment about anger as you talked to us. In the big cities in which we live, some people can be angry and have a gun.

Mann:  Oh, yeah.

Herron:  And kill somebody. Or churches are divided today over difference and anger. Now, what do we do about that?

Mann: I think that what we're in right now is we have no more enemy. The evil empire, as Ronald Reagan called it, is gone. The Russians aren't coming. We no longer have a president or a congress that can shine in international foreign affairs, and now this society is in a maelstrom of change. We are going to have to decide whether, after worshipping the enthronement of the individual for the last 75 or 100 years, whether we are going to turn on each other, or become a community. The great issue in America is the issue of community.

I agree with Daniel Boorstin, the great historian, the greatest danger to America is the hyphenated American -- the African-American, the white-American, the black-American, the Polish-American, ad infinitum, the Baptist-American, the Catholic-American. We don't know how to build community, and we see that everywhere, or the results of that -- that's the violence, that's the people saying, you know, almost every issue now is a civil rights issue.

I was listening to a debate the other day about the HIV epidemic. Is it a civil rights issue? Is it a public health issue? A hundred years ago it would definitely have been a health issue, a public health issue. We would have identified the carrier, isolated them until we found a cure. But now we are in this mix where we are all screaming so much the language of entitlement, "my right," that we don't know how to be a community. And I don't think there is any way out of that except to bring the Christian principles -- I didn't say the doctrine or any of that -- but to bring the Christian principle that there is, beyond all of the differences, a unity, and that what we think is diversity is really an example of God's varied creation, and that there is a center around which we all revolve, even if we are so far out there on the edge that we don't know it. Does that make any sense?

Herron:  It makes a lot of sense. Thank you, Gerald.