Article February 13, 2006 Issue

MY WAY OUT OF ANGER

BY SARAH HYATT

Growing up in a home with an alcoholic parent, I was exposed daily to bad temper, yelling, and anger. I was also angry with God, who, I felt, had put me in this situation. While I fit the pattern of children of alcoholics who try to be super-responsible and obedient to authority, I was inwardly seething and would have outbursts of temper myself, especially toward my younger brothers and sisters and my dad. Anger just seemed to be something I was saddled with by heredity and environment.

But as a teen, I was introduced to the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. I grappled with the idea of a God who is Love and who made me in Her image and likeness. It seemed so far removed from my experience. But the author, Mary Baker Eddy, insisted that the ideas in the book were a science, the divine Science. And I figured that if they were part of a science, they were subject to proof.

One basic idea was that in order to truly understand our identity, we have to start with the Creator and the divine nature of everything. It occurred to me that I had been thinking about being the image and likeness of God backward. That is, I had assumed that God must be like me (not a pretty picture). But I realized that if God is the original, the cause, then I could only be effect. I needed to know about God in order to really see who I was.