Blog 2547 – 10.18.2022

The Point Of Kindness

The point of kindness is not and should never be just to pay back those who have been kind to us nor to have the bread that we have cast upon the water return to us but rather to widen and widen the circle of kindness in the world till all feel it’s healing and encouraging effects. Jesus once said if you are good (kind) to those only who are good (kind) to you how are you different from the Pharisees?” The Pharisees were the most popular and numerous Jewish sect of his day and like so many today they seldom did anything that did not benefit themselves in one way or another. Even their observation of the custom of giving alms to the poor, disabled, and disadvantaged was accompanied by their ringing a bell to call attention to their acts of kindness, like shouting, “Hey, look at me, what a good and kind person I am.”

Jesus answer to that kind of kindness was the admonition, “When you give alms or do acts of kindness, do not ring a bell to call attention to yourself but do them in secret for what you do in secret your father will reward you for openly.” The real reward for any act of kindness is that it means there is more kindness in the world. At any given moment there are millions of precious souls on the razor’s edge considering the age ole question that Shakespeare’s Hamlet asked “To be or not to be” or whether there is even one reason to stick around in this time and space jungle for one more day.

I have shared before and will most likely again the story that a beloved Psychology professor told his classes of the first recorded person to ever come out of the catatonic state. He was a young man committed to a psychiatric facility because he was found in this vegetative state, completely oblivious to all external stimuli and unable to even feed, bath, or cloth himself. After several months he just snapped out of it and it took him another six month to convince his caregivers that he was sane and whole enough to be released from the mental asylum. During that six months he studied those afflicted as he had been and wrote a paper about what he believed caused and kept people in the catatonic state.

In his paper he theorized what people caught up in this situation are really doing. He said that they and he were all consumed and focused on considering their own self worth or as Hamlet put it, whether to be or not to be? When asked why so very many never come out of the catatonic state he said they conclude there is not enough positive evidence to tip the scales in favor of living. We have all felt worthless, unimportant, and that nobody loved us at certain dark times in our lives. Every act of kindness we have ever experienced reminds us that those feelings are untrue.

The young man when asked why he came back said it was a chorus that he had memorized as a small child that awakened him: “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” Jesus like Superman was sent to earth by a loving father to save it and us. The lyrics to the theme song of the ten year running TV series about a young Superman called Smallville are below:

The true super power this world has always needed and still does is love. Every act of kindness however small always tips the scales in favor of life.

Remind yourself when you are reciting your daily intentions to above all be kind to one and all. For all the great and wonderful things that Jesus and Kal-El or Clark Kent can do it is kindness that defines them both and not just to a chosen few but to everyone.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kzZ4u6Ynba6M4BzqLSWpeJol5YYoBo0L/view?usp=drivesdk

You Raised Me Up