"Kindness: Humankind's Greatest Delight"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
January 10, 2010

Reading                      ’Coon Jack
Granpa and Granma had an understanding, and so they had a love. Granma said the understanding run deeper as the years went by, and she reckined it would get beyond anything mortal folks could think upon or explain. And so they called it “kin.”

Granpa said back before his time “'kinfolks” meant any folks that you understood and had an understanding with; so it meant “loved folks.”  But people got selfish, and brought it down to mean just blood relatives; but that actually it was never meant to mean that.

Granpa said when he was a little boy his Pa had a friend who oft times hung around their cabin.  He said he was an old Cherokee named “’Coon Jack,” and he was continually distempered and cantankerous.  He couldn't figure out what his Pa saw in old ’Coon Jack.

He said they went irregular to a little church house down in a hollow. One Sunday it was testifying time, when folks would stand u,' as they felt the Lord called on them, and testify as to their sins and how much they loved the Lord.

Granpa said at this testifying time, ’Coon Jack stood up and said, “I hear tell they’s some in here been talking about me behind my back.  I want ye to know that I'm awares.  I know what's the matter with ye; ye’re jealous because the Deacon Board put me in charge of the key to the songbook box.  Well, let me tell ye; any of ye don’t like it, I got the difference right here in my pocket.”

Granpa said, shore enough, ’Coon Jack lifted his deer shirt and showed a pistol handle.  He was stomping mad.

Granpa said that church house was full of some hard men, including his Pa, who would soon as not shoot you if the weather changed, but nobody raised an eyebrow.  He said his Pa stood up and said, “’Coon Jack, every man here admires the way ye have handled the key to the songbook box. Best handling ever been done.  If words has been mistook to cause ye discomfort, I here and now state the sorrow of every man present.”

’Coon Jack set down, total mollified and contented, as was everybody else.

On the way home, Granpa asked his pa why ’Coon Jack could get away with such talk, and Granpa said he got to laughing about ’Coon Jack acting so important over the key to the songbook box.  He said his pa told him, “Son, don't laugh at ’Coon Jack. ye see, when the Cherokee was forced to give up his home and go to the Nations, ’Coon Jack was young, and he hid out in these mountains, and he fought to hold on.  When the War tween the States come, he saw maybe he could fight that same guvmint and get back the land and homes.  He fought hard.  Both times he lost.  When the War ended, the politicians set in, trying
to git what was left of what he had.  ’Coon Jack fought and run, and hid, and fought some more.  Ye see, ’Coon Jack come up in the time of fighting. All he’s got now is the key to the songbook box.  And if poor Jack seems cantankerous . . . well, there ain't nothing left for ’Coon Jack to fight.  He never knowed nothing else.

Granpa said he come might near crying fer ’Coon Jack.  He said after that, it didn’t matter what, ’Coon Jack said, or did . . . he loved him, because he understood him.

Granpa said that such was kin, and most of people’s mortal trouble come about by not practicing it; from that and politicians. I could see that right off and might near cried about Coon Jack myself.

Sermon            Kindness: Humankind’s Greatest Delight            Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

’Coon Jack didn’t know how to ask for kindness, but surely that is what he needed.  That other “hard men” found it in themselves to offer kindness to him, even after his aggressive appeal for consideration, threatening them with a gun, was a testament to their willingness to accept even a cantankerous old fighter like him into their little church family.  The storyteller’s Granpa became ’Coon Jack’s defender because he understood not only ’Coon Jack’s history of fighting; he also knew how desperately ’Coon Jack needed to be part of a community after having lost his own.  And now, this art of understanding, of how learning to recognize ’Coon Jack’s needs through the telling of his story, even when he couldn’t express these things clearly himself, had been passed on to the fourth generation.  Along with the understanding came sympathy, a natural feeling of compassion and a desire to help ’Coon Jack feel honor so he could have a place as a respected member of society.   Everyone in that little church might not have known ’Coon Jack’s story, but they didn’t have to because when Granpa led the way, he reminded them all of their natural desire to be in solidarity with human need and to extend kindness to others.  This morning, I hope to help us all revive our awareness of something we already feel and know, that kindness makes life worth living.
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In December I preached about Greed, one of the so called Seven Deadly Sins.  In that sermon I talked about how our concept of sin has changed over time, to the point where liberal religion rarely even uses the word sin anymore.
To counteract the Seven Deadly Sins Christian theologians created the Seven Heavenly Virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, Faith, Hope, and Charity.   Today, we would likely call them values instead of virtues, and we might substitute Creativity for Prudence, and update some of the other names.  For instance, our topic today, Kindness, might have come under Charity in the original list, but I believe kindness is a larger and more important concept than Charity.  Kindness certainly starts with small acts – “a word of thanks, a nod of approval, a tip at a restaurant, a smile to a weary worker, a greeting on the street, a hug for a friend.”  These small, unremarkable acts of Kindness and love are not trifles; they are evidence that a person has a generous heart.  But kindness does not stop with small acts; it encompasses meaningful acts of love, words of encouragement, various kinds of etiquette, and generosity.  It reverberates through and beyond our kin.  Practicing kindness imparts deep benefits to our spirits.  It has been called the best part of a good person’s life.

Kindness’s original meaning was the way we would treat people when we recognized they were like us.  It implied there was a sense of sameness or kinship amongst a clan of people.  In our ’Coon Jack reading, the storyteller gave us the historical definition of the term “Kin.”  “Granpa and Granma had an understanding, and so they had a love. Granma said the understanding run deeper as the years went by, and she reckined it would get beyond anything mortal folks could think upon or explain.  And so they called it “kin.”  Granpa said back before his time “'kinfolks” meant any folks that you understood and had an understanding with; so it meant “loved folks.” 
Over time, this sense of kinship has been called sympathy, brotherly love, empathy, and even pity.  Understanding another’s plight can create a sense of compassion – the desire to care for another person.   We are said to express kindness when we act with benevolence, generosity or altruism.  All of these terms “denote what the Victorians called “open-heartedness,” the sympathetic expansiveness linking self to other.”

Jesus’s version of the Golden Rule, “love your neighbor as yourself,” sanctified kindness, raising it to the level of a person’s highest duty, and he included all people in the commandment.  In biblical times, most people were not officially due any kindness.  Over 90 percent of people were either slaves or the next thing to them, and only the rich and powerful were supposed to be treated with respect.  Christianity proposed to extend fair treatment to everyone, even women.  This universalization of respect was quite a revolutionary notion in that era.  It seems it still is in our own times.
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Since the Kind life, one lived in harmony with our instinctual identification with others, has so many benefits for us and the world, how have people become so reluctant to reach out to their neighbors and experience the deep pleasures acts of kindness can give?  How have so many people come to the belief that kindness is foolish in the dog-eat-dog business world; that we are all best served by looking out only for our own selfish interests?  Who made kindness a soft virtue, one to be practiced only by mothers toward their children, and maybe girly-men like pastors?  How has needing kindness from others become a sign of weakness, certainly not to be encouraged?

As with so many components of our Christianized Western Culture, we can look to Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine to Catholics,  for the historical roots of our modern psychological hang-ups.  In our meditation this morning, the Farmer chides Augustine for not indulging in his instinctual desire to eat the sweet pears.  Unfortunately for Augustine, he didn’t accept the Farmer’s invitation to worry less about the depravity of human nature and to accept the abundant grace available to us in our world.  The result of Augustine’s struggle with the fact that he indulged in fleshly desires and that he sometimes did harmful things he knew he shouldn't resulted in his theory of the total depravity of the human flesh.   Because of his low opinion of human nature he concluded people could only be saved from themselves by opening their hearts to the goodness of God.  Prior to Augustine, Stoic philosophy saw people as temperamentally kind and that to indulge in kindness was not only pleasurable but enhanced a person’s goodness by bringing him into harmony with nature.   Unfortunately for the rest of us, Augustine’s ideas suppressed the joy available thru kindness, and his view prevailed in the Catholic Church for about the next 1300 years.

At the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther’s disciple, John Calvin was even more anti-humanistic.  According to him, all people were, “vile polluted lumps of earth,” whose every impulse was selfish and rotten, satanic creatures who deserved to burn.  People were to be looked on with suspicion; no one was to be trusted.  Kindness, which might open a person to understand and empathize with a corrupt human being, was demoted from its position of importance in Christian personal morality and became institutionalized charity to be administered by the church.  Philosopher Thomas Hobbes depicted human beings as driven solely by self-concern and “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death.”  For Hobbes and his followers, selfishness and aggression were inescapable parts of human nature.  Capitalism’s prophet, Adam Smith accepted Hobbes’s premise and saw no problem with selfishness as the engine of capitalism claiming commerce would turn individual desires to public benefit.

We can trace the roots of our society’s emphasis on the self-sufficient individual to the 18th century, but we can also see there the beginnings of a more congenial view of the role of Kindness.  Enlightened Anglicans led the way, repudiating original sin and calling Benevolence a primary instinct.  Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson wrote, “To be kind is the greatest measure of human happiness.”  Prior to this time, kindness had always been seen as a solution to the problem of what to do about other people.  Each person was seen as a separate entity with kindness acting as a bridge between them.  A caring person was supposed to forego some of her own needs in order to help another, “thereby promoting good will and social solidarity.”   But kindness defined this way leaves it dependent on the individual’s willingness to leave some of her needs unmet, and it is prone to collapsing into sentimentality.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau created an alternative view of kindness wherein people are not seen as isolated individuals but in actual fact are social beings whose personalities are formed through relationships with others.  In this model people’s sense of self is a product of a mutual sharing of feelings among people – literally “Fellow Feeling.”  In Fellow Feeling, we are taken out of ourselves into the internal worlds of others.  This means our individual selves are interconnected with those of our family and friends and our happiness is to some extent dependent on theirs.  The oft repeated claim, “I’m the only one I can do anything about,” is simply not true.
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Rousseau’s enlightened view of human nature was not embraced by everyone.  Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries there were battles between those who saw people as inherently isolated and selfish and those who saw us as inherently social beings who thrive on empathetic relationship.  In pre-modern times theologians defined human nature, then philosophers took a stab at it for a few centuries, and lately it’s been psychologists and sociologists.  The debates over the role of kindness carried on into these disciplines as well.  For example, the complaint most frequently presented to psychologists by patients is an inability to be as kind as they want to be.  I will not go into detail describing all the skirmishes over the true nature of humans in recent decades.  Suffice it to say, we in liberal religion tend to side with those who have a more expansive view of the inner self and a healthy respect for the value of relationships.  However, the consensus in our country still seems to be a belief in competitive individualism.

So, why is it that so-called realists continue to believe that people are fundamentally selfish and prone to cut others off?  Even though there have been many examples of mean-spirited, cruel and even murderous behavior throughout history, at least as many instances of kindness have been present all along, too.  Good or bad acts in themselves do not explain the totality of human nature – only that we have the capacity to do both.  No matter how bad some people are, we can’t seem to give up on the experience of kindness.  There is something powerful about taking a sympathetic interest in each other, about our capacity to imagine the sorrows and concerns of another, and to make a beneficial difference in others’ lives.

I think the reason people are reluctant to fully embrace kindness, even though it can bring such happiness, is because there is also a big risk involved.  To engage someone at a personal level, to get down to the real deal and learn about their most difficult problems, exposes their vulnerabilities and also makes us think about our own.  In order to risk sharing deeply with others, if we want share our ultimate concerns with another, we must feel trust that such intimate sharing will be met with kindness.  We won’t be fooled by a sentimental kindness that offers a pat response or a magical solution to our concerns.  A person who won’t really open herself to look at her own weaknesses can’t offer much help to a person who does.  Intimate relationships require a presumption of equality, that the other person is as capable of sharing and caring as we are.  In our highly individualized society, I think this seems too big a risk for some people.  For some, openheartedness feels too exposed, and then their sympathy contracts.  It makes ordinary simple kindness hard for them to believe in.

That certainly is unfortunate, because all the evidence shows that people do care.  It is also true “that all people are dependent creatures, needing each other for support and comfort.”   If Fellow Feeling is what we truly want, and it has such huge benefits for us, how can we allow ourselves to have it?  We have to come to accept that we are vulnerable and dependent creatures who have no better resource for our survival and happiness than other human beings.  “Our resistance to kindness is our resistance to encountering what kindness meets in us, [our weaknesses,] and of course our resistance to learning the limits of what [other’s] kindness can do for us.”
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It will not be the grand strategies of the Federal Reserve Board or the bold initiatives of the President and Congress which will bring us through the difficult economic times we are in right now.  We will not solve the ills of our lives with moral rectitude but with efforts to understand each other and the power of our kindness.   What we really need is to be able to touch each other with our stories and to feel compassion for others who have shown us their vulnerabilities.  Showing kindness in times of trouble forms an emotional bridge between people who may feel isolated by the loss of a job or shame over financial hardship.  The best thing we can do right now is to share a generosity of spirit for each other.  It is a mark of true “genius to be able to generate warmth and well being in others.  Such largesse literally enlarges our lives.”

Kindness is not just a sentimental virtue to be practiced only by the weak, or soft-hearted idealists.  Kindness requires bravery.  Kindness, which helps those of us who are brave enough to face and deal with our vulnerabilities, is also a necessary component of our social fabric.  People were not meant to live insular lives; we are social beings who need to be in relationship with others.   We form our individual self concepts through relationships with others, and our self-esteem depends on others for sustenance. We need to stop resisting the temptation to kindness for in so doing, we will place ourselves in solidarity with human need, and it will bring us great delight.