The Heart of the Desert and passion

Heart of the Desert is a book I'm returning to. The latest chapter that has me thinking is about the early Christian idea of the passions. Most of us look at passions as separating us as in the seven deadly sins, but the early fathers and mothers talked about all passions as gifts. Certainly those gifts can misused. And in our fallen nature passions like anger are likely to be misused, but instead of denying them we should be looking at how to use them correctly.

Can anger fuel our passion for doing the right thing? Instead of using anger to get into a fistfight or war, perhaps we should be using that same anger to drive a reconciliation or to bring a creative act of protest or for working on correcting the problems that led to the nager. The passions can be destructive or constructive - the difference is in how we use those passions. Instead of denying that they're present let's work on using them correctly