There is no escaping the snare of resentment, save for the sovereign grace of God. Once you let the seed of bitterness get planted and take root, the flower only blooms what is bitter.

Theodore Dalrymple is not a Christian. I don’t find much in his writing that demonstrates an understanding of redemption. But I do find a lot that shows a keen understanding of sin.

The Bible uses the word “bitterness.” Others refer to it as “holding a grudge.” Some label it “baggage,” or even more laconically, “issues.” Dalrymple calls it resentment.

For him, this means blaming his parents: “When I review my failings and incompetence, of a kind that I am too ashamed or embarrassed to admit in public, but which life itself often forced me to do, I explain them by reference to my childhood–parental neglect, for example” (Anything Goes, 209).

For others, it means blaming friends, spouses, partners in ministry, former bosses, Wall Street, the government, the church, or the man. However we get there, we are masters at resentment, what Dalrymple calls “pre-eminently the emotion or mode of feeling and thought of our time. When the social historians of the future, if there are any, come to characterize our era they will not call it the age of the atomic bomb, or the financial derivative age, or even that of the 100 per cent mortgage, they will call it the Age of Resentment” (211).

The wonderful thing about resentment is that it never lets you down.

For example, if someone points out to a resentful person reasons why he should not be resentful, he will immediately come up with reason why he should be.

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