Kindness
This is a sermon I gave at the First Unitarian Church of New Bedford on August 8, 2010. It was heard by 12 people.
First, let me apologize in advance. This little talk is going to ramble. It’s going to take a while for me to get to the point. I can only hope that the route to the point, haphazard as it may be, is worth the trip.
The trip starts thusly.
I’m Afraid that I have been spending much of my life looking for enlightenment in all the wrong Places.
I’ve never had a guru. I’ve never had my consciousness raised.
The only relationships I’ve ever had with Erhardt Seminar Training, Silva Mind Control, or any other self-improvement program were contentious. I never learned to pronounce Leo Buscaglia’s name correctly. These days, when I flip to PBS and see someone smiling while lecturing an audience, I keep flipping as fast as I can.
I did start to read Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan”, but quit when I realized that it was about a different Don Juan.
If anyone starts to tell me they have “The Way”, I start looking for the way out.
No, I choose to get my enlightenment from reading mystery novels.
I will admit that it night be a little weird to learn about life by reading about death and murder. It might be a little confusing to encounter someone who tries to learn how to make good choices by reading about people who make choices that are either wrong or very wrong.
But whodunits are about motives and about the choices people make when they are under stress. The stories that resonate with me are character driven. The detective spends most of his time interviewing people and figuring out what they have done and, most importantly, why they have done it. The good whodunits are really “whydoneits”. Of course, according to the formula for such books, for every person who makes a bad choice and commits a murder, there are at least three people who make a good choice, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes by mistake.
These days, paradoxically, I’m reading a lot of stories by Alexander McCall Smith. Smith has an interesting background. He’s a byproduct of the British colonialism. Personally, I consider colonialism to be the political equivalent of slavery and am adamantly opposed to it in all its forms and despite all of its excuses and rationale. That being said, McCall Smith is one of those byproducts I applaud. Call him the silver lining of a very dark cloud, or proof that a broken clock is right twice a day. Although a Scotsman, McCall Smith was born in Rhodesia and spent his childhood in Africa. He went to college in Botswana and Edinburgh in Scotland, and was trained as a lawyer. He helped create the University of Botswana’s law school, and co-wrote Botswana’s only legal textbook. He became a professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Law School and an expert in medical law. So while being a being a citizen of the European world, he knows the African World very well.
When he was 48, he published his first novel. He has published 25 novels in the last 12 years. My favorite series is called the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Set in Gabarone, the capital of Botswana, the series follows the career of Precious Ramotswe, a woman who sets herself up as the city’s first detective agency even though she has no knowledge, no experience, no skill and no contacts.
The ten books in the series are literary comfort food. All are short books, around 200 pages. Ramotswe has never investigated a murder. Indeed, she seldom gets involved in any crime at all. Her clients are every day people come to her with every day problems, which she solves with wisdom and kindness. The books are filled descriptions of every day life in Africa, small and gentle observations of life in general.
The ninth book in the series is entitled “The Double Comfort Safari Club”. In it, Ramotswe is hired to find an anonymous safari guide who has been left an inheritance by an American woman who had taken a safari in the Kalahari Desert many years before.
The plot of the book is forgettable. But I was entranced by the small details of McCall Smith’s writing style. For instance, no woman in Botswana is ever fat. Instead, she is of “traditional build”. No one in the stories ever dies; he or she “becomes late”. And third, Smith uses the adjective “kind” a lot, maybe more than all the other writers I’ve read, both fiction and non-fiction, put together.
Think about that for a moment. How often in your life, say in the last month, have you ever described a person you know as being kind? How often have you read about some public person, be it a politician, an actor, a singer, a writer, or an athlete, described as kind? It almost seems as if the word has been deleted from the English language.
The only time in my memory that the word “kind” reached the headlines was in 1988 when newly elected President George Bush called for a “kinder and gentler America”. But since he had just finished running a presidential campaign that was neither kind nor gentle, his words didn’t carry much weight.
Don’t get me wrong, my guess is that people as individuals are as kind as they have ever been. Personally, I have been overwhelmed by the kindness that this congregation, my friends, family, and total strangers have shown to me. My life would be much poorer if I were left solely to my own devices. I can only hope that I am as kind to others as they have been to me. I suspect that most of us would say the same.
Because kindness is natural and unconscious. Nobody gets up in the morning and decides whether or not to be kind that day. The decision was generally made long ago, often unconsciously and stems from a person’s perceptions of him or herself and of the world. For instance, if a person believes that it is a “dog eat dog” competitive world, he will regard any act of kindness as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Likewise, if a person feels himself to be a strong confident part of a generally good world, being kind could only make the world even better.
Kindness is a motive. And quite often, motives can get muddled. What could be an act of kindness in one situation could be politeness in another. Or it could be an attempt to ingratiate, or call attention to oneself. It could be an attempt to establish a debt or to repay a debt. It could even be an attempt to gain advantage.
As an extreme example, I seriously doubt that any woman of drinking age would consider that a man’s offer to buy her a drink was an act of kindness, or stem from a concern that she might be dehydrated.
So, on a personal level, decoding kindness can get a little complicated. And we, being people, can always complicate things further. But in general, I think, and I think that most people agree with old Mammy Yocum “It’s nice to be nice.”
But I am aware that the world that I am in direct contact with is much smaller than the world or the country or even the city in which I live. I am dependant upon newspapers, television, radio, movies, and the Internet to supply me with information beyond my reach.
And this is where the disconnect comes in. While I see kindness in my own personal life all the time, I am never told about kindness in the larger world. I am seldom shown acts of kindness or urged to be more like some kind person.
For instance, many adjectives could be ascribed to Rush Limbaugh, but “kind” is not one of them. The same could be said for Rahm Emmanuel, Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin, numerous rock singers, many politicians, and most sport stars.
Our society seems to value the person who is most competitive, the most driven, the greediest, the loudest, the most argumentive, and the most rancorous.
So what do we do to make the kind world more visible, more evident? If I owned a newspaper or a TV station, I’d have an easy answer. But since I don’t, I don’t. It’s a little anti-climactic, I know. The world is a big place and neither you nor I can change the overall picture very much. We can’t perfect it, but on the other hand we can’t screw it up either.
All I can recommend is that you recognize the kindness that goes on all around you; be as kind as you can, and promote kindness as a virtue. Your world, and by extension, my world will be a better, nicer and more pleasant place.
