A Year Of Kindness (I): Prologue

 

To be completely frank, after completing A Year Of Humility, I was not sure that I was going to do another such series.  Not that it was not valuable (I need it more than most) but from a couple of other items, the biggest one simply being that I do not know that I got every post on Humility right.  

That might seem like a small thing - after all, this is a very small corner of the InterWeb - but there is enough bad teaching out there that one would not like to contribute further to it.  Added to that was the fact that - honestly - not every week of writing on Humility was straightforward.  Some weeks the posts almost wrote themselves.  On others, I struggled with coming up on a new aspect of humility (a problem of me, not issue itself:  entire works have been written on humility).

And so I had almost talked myself out of a new series - until I read Samuel Hancock's comment on the last day of the series:  "So, which virtue will you tackle for exposition next?  Perhaps not for an entire year, but I would appreciate your thoughts on those that remain and are of importance in your own life."

Without missing a beat, the word that came into my mind was "Kindness".

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Arguably, this is simple an extension of realizing (especially over the past year, it seems) that I have found an increasing split between what people believe and how people act.  The split was probably always there and I missed it, but suddenly it seemed to become very real to me.

Looking at it from the perspective of the Christian,  we are by default arguing for a belief and a relationship that (to the unbelieving or agnostic eye) is almost completely based on 1) What we say based on Scripture; and 2) What we do (Yes, there are mystical interventions of God.  That said, it is not something we can or should necessarily count on for basic presentation to the world).  Whenever there is a dissonance between the two, others question - rightly - if we really have anything different to offer from every other belief and The World, where these sorts of things are common enough. Or in some cases, other beliefs and The World do a better job than we do of merging the two.

When I think of many Christians that I either read or follow, the first word that does not leap into my head is kindness.  Which is a shame, really.  Christians too often like to point to Jesus' confrontation of with bold actions (Which he did, although to be completely accurate most of those confrontations were against the established religious order, not against sinners).  

It is seldom they refer to His kindness, or to that of His Father.

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Kindness remains the legacy of my mother.

My mother was a kind person, perhaps the kindest person I have known.  This manifested itself in how she was in our family (small and bigger), how she manifested her relationship with me, how she practiced that in the world as a schoolteacher, and how - even in the end - she manifested it during her final years with Alzheimer's.

Other patients could be argumentative or even violent.  Not my mother, who even when she did not recognize who we were, acted as though she did, a habit (I believe) maintained from years of teaching.  At one point she told me "I always wave back to children who wave at me, even if I don't remember them.  They remember me, and for me not to wave back would make them sad."

The world could benefit from more of my mother's ways.

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I have no idea where or how this goes, to be honest.  But I am confident that since this idea was the sort of instinctive response, the "gut feeling" that one has before one can even think about it, that there is a reason for it.

If - for no other reason - my firm belief that kindness is maybe the virtue we are in need of most now.