Anger or Dallas Willard is the man!

I am slowly working my way through Dallas Willard's excellent book, The Divine Conspiracy. It is a great book that I have been living with for a while, challenging me in many ways. The book is a powerful exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount. Here's a quote from his discussion on Jesus teaching concerning anger in Matthew 5:

The first illustration of kingdom dikaiosune (righteousness) is drawn from cases in which we are displeased with our "brother" and may allow ourselves to treat him with anger or contempt.

When we trace wrongdoing back to its roots in the human heart, we find that in the overwhelming number of cases it involves some form of anger. Close beside anger you will find its twin brother, contempt. Jesus' understanding of them and their role in life becomes the basis of his strategy for establishing kingdom goodness. It is the elimination of anger and contempt that he presents as the first and fundamental step toward the rightness of the kingdom heart.

The emphasis is mine because I find it amazing to think that the elimination of anger and contempt is fundamental, elementary to my spiritual life. Yet how many times have I heard this proclaimed? How many times have I been challenged to eliminate the anger in my life?

To this end, I am experimenting with a couple of new spiritual discipline tool idea thingys. I'm calling them "anger mapping" and "contempt mapping". As spiritual mapping has become popular among church planters and missiologists, I think anger mapping could reveal a powerful picture of particular geographical locations and the abstract relationships of those in a particular community.

I think it would look a lot like a mind map at first but could probably be overlayed a geographical area to demonstrate strained relationships and the "anger terrain". I'll be experimenting with this as I get a chance. What do you think?