Kindness [kahynd-nis]

“What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.”
~ Barbara Kingsolver

“The greatest challenge of the day is:
how to bring about a revolution of the heart,
a revolution which has to start with each one of us.” ~ Dorothy Day

Recently I was listening to On Being and Krista Tippet’s interview of Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet whose work I have long admired and enjoyed. As part of the podcast Shihab Nye read her increasingly anthologized poem “Kindness” which is a personal favorite and a poem I have used often in talks and retreats. It was timely, as kindness has become not only a cud that I’ve been consciously chewing on for a while now but a way of being to which I especially aspire with varying degrees of success.

The older I get the deeper my respect grows for kindness and for those who embody and exude it. In the Book of Micah, the prophet famously reports God naming loving kindly or loving-kindness (hesed) as one of the three things God asks and expects from us (6:8). Yet, in human society, kindness is considered a second string virtue, playing second fiddle to other virtues, especially love. It keeps company with similarly under appreciated expressions of faith and full human living like openness, wonder, awe, reverence, decency, deep sympathy, humor, non-judgment, and perseverance.

Kindness has always received much less attention and adulation than love, yet kindness is an integral and indispensable dimension of love. Kindness is the sweet spot, the tender center of love. The two greatest impetuses for kindness are having the fortune of being on the receiving end of it and suffering.

No one comes forth from their mother’s womb fully formed in kindness. Like all virtues, it is a learned behavior and, put simply, those who receive kindness have a better chance of acting kindly themselves. Receiving kindness from another often implants in the receiver the desire to be kind and the commitment to be a bearer of kindness. This is true whether the kindness comes from family, friend, or total stranger, either in an ongoing, unassuming way through the sacred routine of everyday life or in one unforgettable, life-changing experience that is unexpected or seems unmerited and that rearranges your hair, your day, your life.

In addition to receiving kindness, the other top-rated school for learning kindness seems to be suffering. Not surprisingly, the waiting list for this school is almost non-existent, although never has a year gone by when the student body wasn’t at full capacity. The kind-hearted person tends to be the one whose heart has been tenderized by life, by loss, by suffering. Shihab Nye writes

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.

The kindest people I know have all been visited personally by suffering. They are well acquainted with grief.

Although it has the capacity to bring forth kindness, not all shattering suffering and sorrow does. It’s not a guarantee. Many who suffer become resentful, bitter, cynical, self-absorbed, unkind, or inflictors of cruelty themselves. Those who don’t let their own suffering shrink them, awaken to the kinship of loss and allow it to connect them to others. They learn to catch “the thread of all sorrows” and to “see the size of the cloth.” As Shihab Nye puts it,

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Kindness involves an act of imagination that opens the heart so that it can make connections and desires to form personal identifications with those who suffer. “You must see how this could be you.” Fellow poet Wendell Berry maintains, “By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place . . . As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection.”[i] This suggests that, like imagining, sympathy too is a way of seeing that stimulates action. Deep sympathy moves the onlooker from being a neutral observer to being a committed participant. Guided by imagination and moved by sympathy to “pass over” to another’s mishap, diminishment, shame, pain, tragedy, or woe, they return more inclined to reach out in kindness.

There are few things that require more courage than kindness. In a time when bullying, power-posturing, and winning at all cost have become commonplace from playground to boardroom, kindness is a prophetic act. In a time when we are regularly inundated with news of the most recent act of not-so-random cruelty, even the smallest gesture, word, or act of kindness is a stick in the spinning spokes of those intent on ridiculing, inflicting abuse, preaching violence, or enacting hatred. To be kind to someone is an act of resistance against indifference, callousness, and all that separates us from one another. Kindness is an act of solidarity that reminds us we belong to each other. Kindness is the transposition of love tenderized by life for the sake of fostering a holy communion between all beings on earth as it is in heaven.

I suspect what is being asked of us in this hour of history is not random acts of kindness but conscious, intentional, regular, and planned acts of kindness. I sense that what is being asked of us by the God who is “mercy within mercy within mercy” (Merton) is the audacity and courage to “bring about a revolution of the heart,” a revolution of kindness one kind word, gesture, or action at a time. Make ready. Make the path straight— only kindness makes sense anymore.

♦   ♦  ♦

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

by Naomi Shihab Nye
from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
© Eighth Mountain Press, 1995.

[i] http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture