We Begin with Kindness
Rev. Jan K. Nielsen
One day not long ago, I was sitting in traffic.
The light was red.
(I think it was one of those “no right on red” intersections.)
After the light turned green,
the driver just ahead of me hesitated
just a few seconds too long
before turning right.
And then, from behind us, came the sound.
The driver just behind us sat on the horn,
making that loud and annoying and all too familiar sound.
Not an unusual occurrence, I know,
but I felt sorry for the slow driver ahead of me.
I had just made some off-handed remark
about rude drivers when,
from the back seat,
one of my wise teenagers said something like:
“Mom, how can you say that?
You don’t know what’s going on with that guy behind us.
Maybe he’s had a rough day
or maybe he really does need to get somewhere in a hurry.”
I could not argue. I had to admit she was right.
How many times had she heard me say something like that?
Don’t you just love it when your child
uses your own words against you?
It can be both frustrating and humbling
but always inspiring
to have our words as parents come back at us from our young.
My young teacher that day echoed
the lesson of Ellen Bass’s poem:
we are all human,
all of us vulnerable,
all of us in need of heat, touch, breath –
all of us in need of understanding, kindness and love.
On another day not long ago,
we were out running holiday errands.
We had stopped in a retail store
to pick up something I had left for repair.
There was some minor confusion
about when I had left the item
and when it was supposed to be ready
when things suddenly changed.
The clerk snapped at me, his tone too abrupt,
his voice too loud.
I didn’t snap back or demand to talk to his boss.
I could see it in his face:
the weary exhaustion of working in retail
during the month of December.
I knew I was right,
but I also knew that the facts that day didn’t matter.
What mattered on that December day
was that all of us in that store were human –
all of us tired and stressed,
all of us in need of understanding, kindness and love.
After the clerk snapped, I smiled and said something,
I don’t remember just what,
to try to bring some humor into the situation.
And then he smiled, and it was okay.
A few minutes later he placed a chocolate in my hand.
Small graces.
We didn’t get to this place of grace
because I am an especially good person.
I have human faults and foibles just like the rest of us.
What kept me from entering the fray
and making things worse on that day
was sorrow.
Just days before, I had stood at a bedside
of someone who died too young
and left behind two young daughters.
I was carrying a fresh reminder that our time here is short.
Why waste a minute of it, sorrow had again taught me, quibbling over who is “right”
when I could, instead, choose to offer kindness.
After we have walked in the land of sorrow,
it is only kindness that makes sense,
teaches another poet,
Naomi Shihab Nye.
She is a Palestinian-American poet who wrote a poem called “Kindness”
after she travelled to Columbia
and saw there a people and a land
ravaged by violence.
Listen to her words:
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 you I have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Words can have the power to save.
In her book called, Saved by a Poem,
Kim Rosen tells the story of how she invested her life’s savings
in 2008 with Bernard Madoff,
just months before his fraud was discovered.
It was Naomi Shihab Nye’s words on kindness, she says,
that saved her.
The poet’s words, Rosen explains, were like her prayer,
and helped her begin to let go of her anger
and move toward healing.
It is not so easy, the Naomi Shihab Nye tells us,
to know what kindness really is.
Kindness is, in essence, a spiritual practice,
a way of living that none of us gets right, all the time.
And even though sorrow can teach us about kindness,
most of us in the pace of our days
will sometimes forget sorrow’s lessons.
It’s almost like we need to carry a spiritual navigation device, an internal GPS,
to remind us to re-direct, change course,
and get back on the road toward being our best selves.
There are different ways
to come back to our best selves,
different words we can use to signal our souls
that it’s time to redirect
both our words and our actions toward kindness.
The practice of kindness is at the heart of the Golden Rule,
an ideal common to all of the major religions of our world:
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
As a mother, I’ve said it another way to our children:
“Treat other people the way you would want to be treated.”
This is what Jesus meant when he taught,
“Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Here we say together each week those final words of our prayer for one another:
“Honor All Beings.”
Kindness as a spiritual practice
means looking for the Divine spark or,
as the Quakers might say,
“that of God” in other people –
all people, even the ones that annoy us,
or disappoint us, or hurt us,
and even those who may be different from us in some way.
The word kindness comes
from the same root as the word “kin,”
which of course means “of the same family; related; akin.”
The practice of kindness is rooted
in the reality that, like it or not,
for better or for worse,
we are all family here on this earth.
Indeed, our very survival as a species
depends upon our ability to live with one another
despite our differences.
Kindness is about looking beyond our differences,
differences of all kinds,
like differences of opinion
as well as other kinds of differences –
differences of class, race, religion, gender,
gender identity, sexual preference.
Looking beyond difference
can be harder than most of us want to admit.
We might accept difference intellectually,
as the “right thing to do”
but we remain stuck in “us versus them” thinking
until we have done the soul work
of looking beyond our differences
to see another human in need of heat, touch, breath,
to see someone who, like us,
needs understanding, kindness and love.
Our worship theme for this month is justice.
Justice is a deeply religious word;
its most basic meaning is fairness.
For generations,
our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors
have worked to make this world
more just and more fair for all people.
Some traditions focus on preparing for an afterlife.
We, instead, focus on this life
based on our belief that all people
are entitled to basic human rights
and to live free
from oppression and hopelessness,
hunger and want.
Justice work of any type, though, begins with
what the poet named “the tender gravity of kindness” -
the understanding that, despite any illusions of difference, another human not all that different than you
needs heat, touch, breath –
understanding, kindness and love.
The roots of justice are in the practice of kindness.
Just as it is not easy to know what kindness really is,
kindness is not so easy to put into action in our daily lives.
The stress and anxiety too many of us carry
these days is thick and real.
If you were here last week,
you heard our collective wishes for the new year.
I asked everyone to write on a card
what they wanted less of and what they wanted more of
in the new year.
“Less stress, less anxiety,” so many said,
along with
“I want to be less judgmental,
less critical of myself and others.”
“More peace,” so many of us said.
When we’re stressed and anxious,
when we feel pushed and stretched,
it can be harder to be kind to one another.
The practice of kindness can be especially hard
when we are afraid.
We are still hearing about the Christmas Day
bombing attempt,
another reminder
that our world is not as safe as we would like to believe,
a reminder that we’d better learn
how to live together despite our differences.
Being kind to one another may not keep bombers off planes,
but we’ve got to start somewhere.
There is much in this world neither you nor I can control.
But we can start where we are, with our own lives,
with our own words, our own actions.
In the end, no matter what happens,
our integrity
and the love we have given and received
is what will matter most.
In the end, even our best thoughts
and our highest ideals
will count for nothing
if we haven’t put into practice what we believe,
and those values we most cherish.
As Abbot Pastor,
a monk who lived and taught in the desert
over 1700 years ago, once said,
“If you have a chest full of clothing,
and leave it for a long time, the clothing will rot inside it.
It is the same with the thoughts in your heart.
If we do not carry them out by physical action,
after a long while they will spoil and turn bad.”
This is timeless wisdom.
It’s a self-centered, “me-first” world out there.
A good number of us need to get over ourselves
and surrender to the spiritual law
that we human beings need one another to survive.
Too many of us scurry around,
our heads down,
our eyes and souls never meeting those of another.
It’s time to look up and around,
to see one another as children of God,
to love thy neighbor,
to treat another as we would want to be treated,
to honor all beings,
to let kindness go with us, as the poet says,
“everywhere like a shadow or a friend.”
“The hardest spiritual work in the world,”
writes Barbara Brown Taylor,
“is to love the neighbor as the self –
to encounter another human being
not as someone you can use, change, fix, help,
save, enroll, convince or control,
but simply as someone who can spring you
from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
All you have to do is recognize another you “out there” –
your other self in the world –
for whom you may care
as instinctively as you care for yourself.
To become that person, even for a moment,
is to understand what it means to die to yourself.
This can be as frightening as it is liberating. (She concludes),
It may be the only real spiritual discipline there is.”
We can start today.
Today, with our loved ones,
we might choose to stop
when we’re ready to criticize and complain
and instead offer kindness.
Today, and in the week ahead,
we might choose to meet strangers,
even the ones that annoy us,
even our sisters and brothers who may seem “different,”
with compassion and kindness.
Today, and in the days to come,
we might choose to see one another as we really are,
as family,
all of us in need of heat, touch, breath,
all of us in need of understanding, kindness and love.
The Universalist Church
West Hartford Connecticut
January 10, 2010