Chaplain's Corner

Each month at Bethesda Place we have a leadership meeting. We spend a couple of hours talking about issues related to providing the best possible care to our residents. At our February meeting this year, we talked quite a bit about respect, the importance of respecting each other, the residents, each others job responsibilities and other related respect issues. At one point in the discussion Ginette Morgan, the manager at Bethesda Place spoke up, she said something like, “I probably have shared this quote with some of you before, but it is worth repeating, ‘be kinder than necessary for everyone is struggling in ways that we can’t see or understand.’” The quote originated with playwright James E. Barrie and in its original version it went like this, “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?”

Kindness is the humane side of caring. Often good competent medical care is given but without kindness. Often good competent nursing care is given but without kindness. Often good competent care is offered in other arenas of life but all too often in our western culture it is given without kindness. Yet it has been recognized by people of wisdom for centuries that kindness is an essential ingredient in human relationships. Listen to the thoughts of a few others on this matter of kindness.

Abraham Heschel considered by many to be one of the most influential Jewish theologians of the past century said, “When I was young, I admired intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.” Or the thoughts of Albert Schweitzer, theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician and medical missionary to Africa said, “Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust and hostility to evaporate.” Or how about the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader who said, “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” Or Lao-Tse who was a philosopher of ancient China and is a central figure in Taoism who said, “Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profundity. Kindness in giving creates love.”

But we don’t need the leaders of great world religions to tell us this, we know this from experience. We know that kindness is the one missing ingredient in so much of human relationship and that because it is missing; we create unspeakable suffering in the lives of people that we may otherwise competently care for in a professional or covenantal sense.

Let’s go back to Ginette’s version of the kindness quote, “be kinder than necessary for everyone is struggling in ways that we can’t see or understand.” We all put on our “game face” when we head out into our worlds to work and play and relate socially. Some of us never take off our game face, except possibly in the quietness and loneliness of some safe sanctuary that we have in our lives. I must confess, I’m very much like this. But each of us carry around wounds, burdens, heartaches, problems, stresses that nobody can see, that nobody knows about and when we are treated without kindness, those are the wounds that get reopened, the burdens that grow heavier, the stresses that multiply. Thus Ginette’s words of advice, “be kinder than necessary for everyone is struggling in ways that we can’t see or understand.” Be more kind than you would normally be, because you don’t know what wounds, what burdens, what heartaches lie just under the surface of that person’s life.

We don’t know that that person before us is struggling with the knowledge that her child is undergoing tests because the doctor suspects some kind of cancer. We don’t know that the person we are dealing with has been abused throughout his life and is doing well simply to manage to get by. We do know that the old cranky woman has lost everything she has ever cared for and continues to live under the threat of losing the last shreds of her life as she is moved into a personal care home. We just don’t know that just under the surface of everyone’s life is enough pain to cripple, yet people miraculously keep on going, performing their duties, trying to keep the seams of their life from bursting open.

Because we don’t know, the advice is invaluable, “be kinder than necessary for everyone is struggling in ways that we can’t see or understand.” Maybe this is part of what lies behind the words of Jesus when he told us to love our enemies. Kindness is one of the many expressions of love and perhaps the one perceived as our enemy is really just a deeply wounded soul that is living out of the woundedness and because of this injures us as we relate. The sin-sickness we are all infected with creates in us a propensity to become quite ego-centric in relation to our wounds. Our own wounds seem to be of greater importance than anyone else’s and we can quickly treat others poorly as we lick our own wounds. The solution to this kind of egotism that leads to the wounding of everyone around us is not greater and greater levels of self-protection, but to begin to see everyone around us as equally hurting, equally wounded, equally in need of tender loving care.

When this perception develops in our view of others, then we can begin to be what Henri Nouwen called “wounded healers,” people that can have compassion on others and thus treat them with kindness because we understand that they are hurting as deeply as we are and consequently need the kindness that comes from knowing the pain we see in others and have felt so deeply in our own soul.

“Be kinder than necessary for everyone is struggling in ways that we can’t see or understand.” Good advice and to return to the originator of those words, James E. Barrie, “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?” Shall we? I know I will continue to try and I know many of you will as well. May God give us the grace to show kindness to everyone.