“The Weight and the Kindness”

H,

We ought to always carry with us, a certain kindness. Hate is not the way into anything or the way out of anything, but we might have reasons to hate. Yet, those are isolated and special circumstances. In the main, we are faced with the everyday decisions to be kind to the people around us who have done nothing to us, who are trying to cobble together their fragile lives as much as we are and who are not a party to, as the Buk would say, “whatever is doing us.”

The weight of kindness is not the arrogant idea that our actions have life or death consequences on anyone’s life but the eternal prescription that we are pushing people toward the light or the dark by how we treat them. There is a difference; the former presupposes that we are central to the plot of any given life while the latter suggests that it is a shared weight. People are not brought low by one single cruel act as much as by a thousand, over the course of any given life.

Let us not be arrogant enough to think that we are tin gods but let us not be careless enough to believe that it does not matter how we treat others. This does not mean being “soft” or “indulgent” or “permissive”. Many times, kindness is firm and deliberate. It means making it clear, in your heart, actions and words, that the other person has value, is worthy of your efforts of love and is accepted to be as flawed as you are. So, help us all, God.