Brian’s Reflection: Monday, December 7, 2009

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments,
we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them.
When it has left a place where we have always found it,
it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something
malevolent and bottomless.

Willa Cather, author, born on this date, 1873,
in Back Creek Valley, Virginia


Were some children ever terrified by Grimm’s “fairy tales”? I suppose there were some; but I would be interested to know what percentage. I always understood that they were stories, so they didn’t disturb me. It never occurred to me that one of those monsters would catch me in the “real” world, my world. Similarly, I can watch “Star Wars”, which has some pretty nasty characters, doing some pretty horrible things, and I’m not afraid or repulsed. I understand they are “tales”, meant to teach me something.

But when I think of Matthew Sheppard’s killers, trapping him and leaving him to die bound to a fence in the Wyoming cold, or of the Nazis calculated extermination of Jews, Gays, and others in the camps, with meticulous “cold” records of their gold teeth, my skin crawls. I sense the “something malevolent and bottomless”. I’ve had to leave certain movies when cruelty appeared. I just can’t bear it. More than anything else, “when kindness has left people”, I have to flee.

I feel it in my gut in the way some slave owners treated their slaves. In ethnic cleansing. In genocide. In religious fanatics blowing apart their victims. In men brutalizing their wives or girlfriends. In tortured animals. In waterboarding by our own government. Alas, there are countless examples of the absence of Kindness in our World today. In my view, it can never be justified nor must ever be condoned. Cruelty always reveals a collapse of human decency.

Willa Cather’s words remind me to pay attention to my behaviour. It is so easy to be unkind. It doesn’t take much to wound another – and we can be so cavalier and unaware of the power of our unkindness.

May we remember the Buddha’s words today: “Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion”. And the reminder of 1 Corinthians 13 about the greatest of the three things that last: “Love is kind”.

Brian+