Dear Paul:
Can we talk about 1Corinthians 13:4b - Love is kind - for just a minute? On this I fundamentally agree with you. When love is Love, like big capital T true Love, it is always kind. But the trouble is people who say they love you often get sideways and say or do unkind things. This is being human, right? I’ve gotten sideways a few times before.
One of the first things a child learns in a healthy family structure is trust. This is experienced through safe affection, responsiveness to cries, affirmation of experiences, and consistency in routines. But there’s this other layer of metacommunication - what someone says without really saying it. Bono, of the band U2, sings it this way: “You gotta cry without weeping, talk without speaking, scream without raising your voice!” When a mother’s explicit, verbal communication is, “Honey, you know I love you so much,” but her eyes are hostile and her body is rigid, the metacommunication is confusing and contradictory. When this type of message is consistent over time, Love is not felt as kindness. The child cannot leave the field, so to speak, and her inner and outer experiences are distorted growing up in this reality. Emerging from such a space, coming to believe that “love is kind” is sometimes a life long journey.
The question again becomes, “How shall we love?” Both so that the love we give is kind and so we can transform confusing love into genuine kindness. I don’t think you meant that love is kind, therefore we should just become immovable doormats in the face of not love. I don’t think you meant kindness is only your wide hipped rosy cheeked granny who says “Fiddlesticks!” with a chipped tooth grin and serves cookies after school. I’ve begun to think that there are two, sometimes competing, forms of kindness - toward self and toward others.
Kindness toward self might be what one dear friend calls fierce love. There are times when our patterns of behavior no longer work or when the unspoken rules we live by aren’t mutually beneficial. If we live with an alcoholic, or any kind of co-dependent actually, placating them gets toxic and ceases to work for both parties. A kindness toward self is setting limits about what you will or will not tolerate. When you draw a firm but loving line for a boundary pusher that they cannot cross, I guarantee it will make them mad. It won’t feel kind to them at first. But I also guarantee both of you will feel safer. If I sit with a person who says something like, “Your husband doesn’t sound black,” (which has happened) a kindness toward myself, my husband, and ultimately to the sayer could be, “And what do you think a black person sounds like?” It’s a different type of metacommuication that most likely causes an awkward pause, but hopefully opens a small space where a biased thought has potential to unravel. In this space, no one’s dignity is stripped. Such a response has the ability to say, “I’m not really down with what you’re saying, but ok...I’ll ask some questions so we can dialogue about it. Maybe then I can understand you, and you can understand me. Maybe then we can both shift toward each other.” A kindness might also be saying nothing because you can’t grope around for the question past the rising exasperation. Kindness is holding everything and nothing in the same hand, wondering what it’s like to be the other while never losing sight of yourself. Maybe It’s the simple breath that keeps us alive as in Naomi Shihab Nye’s far more elegant summation.
“Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend. ”
Richard Wingfield’s “notes” from class