Kindness as a Spiritual Practice

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Created on Sunday, 04 December 2011 16:33
Written by Jenny Rankin

READING: “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye

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.

A moment ago, when we commissioned the pastoral care lay ministers, the “By Your Side” singers sang these words:

“May I be filled with loving-kindness, May you be filled with loving-kindness, may we be filled with loving-kindness.”

Sharon Salzberg was 18 years old when she got on a plane to India, not knowing where she was going to end up, but knowing she wanted to find a teacher who could teach her this “loving kindness meditation” as part of a Buddhist practice.

As young girl growing up in New York City, she had become used to sadness, used to her life being upside down. Her father, whom she adored, left when she was four. When she was 9, sitting next to her mother on the living room couch watching TV, Sharon noticed that her mother was beginning to bleed. Her mother was whisked off in an ambulance, and Sharon never saw her again. She died 2 weeks later. Sharon went to live with grandparents who did not speak of her mother.

Her grandfather died. Her father reappeared but was different, “a disheveled, hard-bitten, troubled stranger” who six weeks later took an overdose, disappeared into the mental health system, and never emerged.

Salzberg, who now travels the world teaching meditation, said she spent most of her childhood curled up in bed, making up stories about imaginary parents. She spoke, rarely. Tried to not feel emotions, anger, joy. There had been too many “uprooting turns and incomprehensible losses.” She lay there, just trying to keep life at bay.

She was sixteen when she walked into the State University of New York at Buffalo and enrolled in a philosophy class on Buddhism. “One of the Buddha’s basic teachings is that because we are born, we experience suffering—not only suffering as grave pain, but also suffering as the instability, the sorrow, the hollowness of life,” writes Salzberg. “Sometimes the distress is simply dissatisfaction that things don’t go the way we wish they would. Sometimes the discomfort is minor; sometimes the pain is unspeakable. When I heard this First Noble Truth, I knew it to be true. The circumstances of my own life proclaimed it.” When Sharon heard about the meditation techniques embedded in the Fourth Noble Truth, she knew she wanted to learn more.

And that’s why, when she was 18, breaking through her long-entrenched habits of hanging back, holding life at bay, she bought a ticket to India and got on the plane not knowing where she would go when she got off. It was the “break out moment of faith” for her, she says.

* * * *

“Before you know what kindness really is,” writes the poet
You must lose things
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
Like salt in a weakened broth.”

Today in worship, we lift up the ministry of pastoral care. We consider the spiritual practice of kindness.

We commission lay ministers, thank Caring Connection cooks, meal deliverers, note writers like Kitsy Rothermel who has been writing notes, I kid you not, for 20 years.

Elaine Peresluha, our Interim Senior Minister, has been teaching us that this interim time can be an opportunity to step back from “how things are done now” to ask a question, consider another angle.

With the help of Elaine and the Parish Interim Team, the congregation will take a look at all areas of our common life. Children, elders, music, life-long learning, social action, pastoral care, spiritual development, community. What do we appreciate? What could be done differently? This kind of assessment is vitally important as the congregation begins to clarify what it cares about most, so it can articulate a mission and prepare to call a new minister.

In pastoral care, we are having conversations about what things look like now and what new visions might be. To better serve the needs of this large congregation.

Sometimes, we put “pastoral care” into a small box. Something done by ordained clergy, by trained lay people. Yes. But it’s bigger than that.

Pastoral care?

The kitchen teeming with cooks a few weeks ago to make meals we can bring.

A visitor walking in the door of the assisted living center, talking with someone, returning, for 5, 10, could it really be 15 years of visits?

A man reading to someone who has lost their vision.

A woman walking up the stairs to leave a bag of fresh food on a doorstep.

Children making art, stunning creations that become note cards, that you can find at a table at coffee hour and write a note to someone who is beginning recovery in their hospital room so they know that although you, the people in this room right now, aren’t with them, you are with them in a way.

Pastoral care doesn’t come in one shape or one size. It doesn’t fit into a small box.

The gospel choir, last Wednesday at a memorial service for David Priftee, a beloved teacher at the high school. This room was overflowing with students and with teachers and the gospel choir stood up and sang, ministering to their own peers, to their community.

The “By Your Side” singers bringing that music you heard a few minutes ago, bringing it to someone who could use some comfort.

Pastoral care is you in coffee hour stopping to say hello to someone holding a red mug.

It’s pausing in the hallway, or after choir, or in the parking lot, just to take a minute, look into another person’s eyes, and ask “how’s it going.”

The caring and tending of one another is one of the central tasks, ministries, missions of a religious community. Religion from the Latin religare. Ligare, to bind up, to bind together.

Today, we celebrate each and every one of you who takes the spirit present in this room, right here, right now—can you feel it—takes that spirit out of those doors and down the street, and into apartments and hospital rooms and homes and anyplace there are people who could use a little of that spirit but just can’t get here right now. People who are walking that landscape of desolation that the poet describes, who are walking a territory where they may never have been before and need a little of this spirit to help them keep on keeping on.

I wonder what would happen if we took “pastoral care” out of the little box. Let it stretch its wings. See how it could fly

* * *

Today, we lift up the ministry of pastoral care and we consider the spiritual practice of kindness.

For Anne Lamott, the tricky part wasn’t so much kindness to others, it was kindness to herself.

For Lamott, it was years of addiction, eating disorders, hating her body, hating herself before she could come slowly to another way.

“But I believe two things now that I didn’t at 30,” she writes. “When we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and skin was 127th on the list of what mattered on this earth.

And I know the truth that I am not going to live forever and this has set me free.

Eleven years ago, when my friend Pammy was dying at the age of 37, we were shopping at Macy’s. She was in a wheelchair, with a wig and three weeks to live. I tried on a short dress and came out to model it for Pammy. I asked if she thought it made me look big in the thighs, and she said, so kindly, “Annie? You just don’t have that kind of time.”

I live by this story. . . . .

I became more successful in my mid-40s, but this pales compared to the other gifts of this decade—how kind to myself I have become, what a wonderful, tender wife I am to myself, what a loving companion.

I get myself tubs of hot salty water at the end of the day in which to soak my tired feet.

I run interference for myself when I am working, like the wife of a great artist would: “No, I’m sorry, she can’t come. She’s working hard these days and needs a lot of downtime.”

I live by the truth that NO is a complete sentence.

I rest as a spiritual act.”

I love the tubs of hot salty water. I love the idea of rest as a spiritual act.

Some of us have an inkling of how to be kind to our friends, families, colleagues, clients, children, the person we walk past on the street and the lady at the check-out counter. But kindness to ourselves? That doesn’t always come easy.

* * * * *

“Before you know what kindness really is,” writes the poet
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 knew
How desolate the landscape can be
Between the regions of kindness.”

There are so many stories in this room right now, you come, you bring yourselves, your lives, your stories.

And there is gratitude and joy and fullness and plenty here,

And yes, right here with us in this room, there are stories that hold so much desolation too.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that life west of 128 in a town like Concord or Acton or Maynard or Bedford or Sudbury or any of these towns

Don’t let anyone tell you that life out here doesn’t know desolation.

Yes, having resources can mean the outsides look good.

The house is painted, the yard trimmed, the leaves picked up, everything neat and tidy.

The clothes, the car, the exercised body, the carefully made up face.

The good jobs, the good grades.

It can all look pretty good on the outside.

And inside?

That is where the landscape of desolation can live.

We have struggles, obstacles, losses. Our children aren’t perfect. They have issues, setbacks, and pain. We aren’t perfect. There are seasons in our lives when we walk the landscape where things have come apart, where we have come undone.

It’s all here. Addiction, prison time, mental illness, physical illness, relationships that change, marriages that end, family members that don’t speak to each other, and so much more. It’s all here. We are a people who know what the poet tells us:

“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 it till your voice
Catches the thread of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth.”

Out there, the world doesn’t always want to speak that language or acknowledge these truths. But in here, we know them as some of the deepest truths that there are. As true and as deep as other truths we know and affirm: truths like hope, courage, resilience, healing, love.

Yes, sometimes we walk this territory where the future has dissolved like salt in a weakened broth. And so we come here. We bring our spirits here that they might receive kindness. Or so that we can practice kindness to others and receive the balm that can be for our wounded spirits.

Pastoral care. The giving and the receiving.

********

It is early December. I am driving by the church, stuck in that line of traffic that backs up on Lexington Road. My mind is filled with a hundred things, shopping list, package to mail, doctor’s appointment to make, child to drive.

I glance up at the church and there it is, gleaming in the twilight. And in each window there is a single candle, burning out. Doug Baker puts them up around this time every year. And every year, I wait for it. . Why does that sight tug at my heart? Why does it catch my breath and lift me away from the lists and for a minute, I kind of go all still inside.

There is a song that the choir sings that I love. “Let your little light shine, shine, shine, let your little light shine all around.
There’s someone down in the valley trying to get home.”

I think the sight of the church with a candle in each window reminds me of that song. I hope that is what we are. A community of people, yes with our own stories of loss and love and sorrow but also of hope and healing, a community of people trying to learn how to let our little lights shine. For one another but also for that person out there that we don’t know yet, that hasn’t walked through the door yet, that will come through that door next month or next year. We are a community of people trying to shine a light in the darkness so that the person down in the valley CAN find a way to get home.

There is someone down in the valley, you know that, I know that,

In one season it may be you, in another season it may be me.

There is someone who knows right now the whole cloth of sorrow

Someone who is waking with sorrow, speaking it, smelling it, living it

“Let your little light shine, shine, shine
There is someone down in the valley trying to get home.”