"Kindness - A Spiritual Practice for our Time"

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Rev. Suzelle Lynch
September 14, 2003

READINGS

from 18th century Universalist minister John Murray

Go out into the highways and byways of America, your new country. Give the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling Calvinism, something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men (sic). Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.

from His Holiness the Dalai Lama

"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."

SERMON

The other day I was sitting alone in a busy restaurant, when I happened to overhear a conversation the two men at the next table were having with their table server.

She was bringing them their bill. "I'm so sorry I haven't been able to pay more attention to you, gentlemen," she said. "It's just so busy here today!" This was the third time she'd said this to them - I knew, because she'd also said it to me a few times. "Well, honey, don't worry about it," one of the men retorted. "We're not here to talk to you - we're here to talk to each other!" Clearly he was irritated, and he wanted her to know it.

The waitress blushed. "Oh, no, of course," she said. "I just meant that I like to be able to interact more with my customers… I mean, I really want to do a good job, to help people feel welcome…." she trailed off weakly.

"Ohhhh, I see," said the man, and he paused for a moment. It was a long moment, actually, and I could see that the waitress thinking about walking away. But then he spoke again. "But you have done a good job with us. You brought us our food and drinks quickly, and you gave us the privacy we needed today. That was great! Thank you. And I'm sorry I hurt your feelings," he added.

I didn't hear the rest of their exchange because the person I was meeting for lunch arrived just then, but later on I found myself thinking about that man's kindness.

Clearly the waitress had been irritating, and the man was annoyed. He wasn't kind at first. But when he paused for a moment something new kicked in. He seemed to realize that he and the waitress were not so different from one another. Both of them cared about their work. Both of them wanted to do well. And so he took the time to tell her she had done a good job and to apologize for his irritability. He took the time to be kind.

The late Aldous Huxley was a novelist, most of us may remember his startling book Brave New World. But he also was a scholar of the world's religions. Near the end of his life an interviewer asked him, "Dr. Huxley, perhaps more than anyone else alive, you have studied the great spiritual and religious traditions of the world. What have you learned?"

Huxley answered, "It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer (by way of advice) than: Try to be a little kinder." (Tom Owen-Towle, Spiritual Fitness, p. 343.)

Try to be a little kinder. Aldous Huxley did not say make kindness your spiritual practice, but I suspect that is what he meant. He would encourage us to pay attention to the teachings and stories about kindness from the world's religions - instead of to their doctrines and dogmas.

For example, in both Judaism and Christianity we find the "Golden Rule," do not do to others what you would not have them do unto you - or, more familiarly stated, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The Quran teaches that faithful Muslims must give away their "wealth to ... the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and those who ask, ..." Kindness is deeply embedded in our religious tradition as well, for the early Universalists like John Murray truly believed that God's loving kindness embraced all people for all time - and this is the basis for our present-day covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

And in Buddhism, of course, there is the practice of loving kindness meditation or metta meditation. In the Pali language, metta is said to mean loving kindness. Here's what the Buddha taught about it:

This is what should be done By one who is skilled in goodness, And who knows the path of peace: … Wishing: In gladness and in safety, May all beings be at ease. Whatever living beings there may be; Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none, The great or the mighty, medium, short or small, The seen and the unseen, Those living near and far away, Those born and to-be-born, May all beings be at ease! … Even as a mother protects with her life Her child, … So with a boundless heart Should one cherish all living beings: Radiating kindness over the entire world Spreading upwards to the skies, And downwards to the depths; …

(Translation of part of the Metta Sutta by the Sangha of Amaravati) In contemporary times, practicing this meditation is often as simple as repeating four phrases: May all beings be free from danger. May all beings be peaceful and happy in body and mind. May all beings know love and understanding. May all beings have freedom and ease of well-being.

Practiced fully, however, Metta meditation asks us to move through the people in our life from the most beloved and respected to the most despised, holding each in our mind's eye, bathing each in loving kindness.

It asks us to begin with our selves: May I be free from danger, may I be happy, may I have ease of well-being….

When I first tried this, it felt selfish. But as the Dalai Lama says, our purpose in life is to be happy. Think about that. Your purpose in life is for you to be happy. My purpose in life is for me to be happy. I have a heck of a time accepting that, because it seems so self-centered. But it goes hand-in-hand with another teaching - which is that happiness comes from cherishing others more than ourselves. Then why love ourselves? The deeper truth related to this is that we cannot be authentically kind to someone else unless we can first hold ourselves in the warmth of loving kindness.

At thus in metta meditation we begin: May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be well. May I be peaceful and at ease…

We then meditate on a teacher, or someone we respect or revere. The next person is a someone we feel neutral about and finally we imagine bathing someone we really do not like in loving-kindness.

Does this work? From what I hear from those who practice it, it does. One friend confided in me not long ago that she used to lie in bed at night before falling asleep and find herself silently chanting, "I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead." She was depressed and overwhelmed. But in a moment of desperation, she began to practice metta, all of it, even though it was hard for her to direct loving kindness towards herself. And after a while, her silent nighttime chants began to change. She began to say, not "I wish I were dead," but "I wish I felt better." And then to say, "May I be happy, may I be well…. may all beings be happy…."

Of course, not all of us care to spend a lot of time on meditation practices. But as my colleague, the Rev. Arvid Straube, once said, "the most important spiritual practice is something that every one of us can do. You don't need to meditate long enough so you can melt snow with the heat of your body. Whether we're young or old, we can all … practice kindness."

To practice kindness is to treat everyone we meet as kin. That's the root of the word, after all. When we are kind, we are treating one another as though we are related. As though we are connected. As though we mean something to one another, even if we have just met - even if we have never actually met. To be kind is to realize that every other person is just like us. Everyone wants to do well. Everyone wants to feel good. And everyone experiences suffering. Kindness can be practiced toward other beings as well: Essayist Scott Russell Sanders shares a(n) example…: "Once again this spring, the seventy-seventh of her life" (he writes) "my mother put out lint from her clothes dryer for the birds to use in building their nests. 'I know how hard it is to make a home from scratch,' she says, 'I've done it often enough myself.'" About his mother's actions, Sanders comments: "That is fellow feeling, the root of all kindness." (Spiritual Literacy, p. 190)

But given that our world is not necessarily predisposed to fellow-feeling, to kindness, indeed, given that it seems based on treating others either as competitors or perhaps as pawns to be used in getting what we want, how can practicing kindness make a difference?

Some of us are familiar with the phrase "Random Acts of Kindness." More than eleven million people heard about it on the Oprah Winfrey show nine years ago. It was an idea that first emerged twelve years earlier in the work of Ann Herbert, a visionary pacifist and writer from California, who suggested that the world would be a better place if people practiced "random acts of kindness and senseless beauty." . And for a while, it caught on. Here's an example: a true first-person story from the book "Random Acts of Kindness."

I have been going to the same ... coffee shop every Sunday for years. One morning in the middle of a great dreary drizzly weekend, I trudged in dripping wet . . . and ordered my usual bagel with lox and cream cheese and an espresso. I was casually informed that my coffee had already been paid for. . . . the young woman at the register just smiled and said someone paid for twenty coffees and you are number eight. I sat there for almost an hour, reading my paper, and watching more surprised people come in to find their morning coffee pre-paid. There we all were, furtively at first and then with big funny smiles on our faces, looking at everyone else in the restaurant trying to figure out who had done this incredible thing, but mostly just enjoying the experience as a group. It was a beautiful blast of sunshine on an otherwise overcast winter day. (Random Acts of Kindness, Conari Press, p. 133.)

Now, isn't that nice? Have you ever had something like this happen to you? I have - at least once. And I've done something like this for others, too - at least once. But to tell you the truth, I've often wondered if "random" acts of kindness are actually all that useful. They seem more like "niceness" than real kindness. Being content with a kindness here and there seems like cheap grace. Feels good in the moment, but it doesn't really challenge us to change or to deepen our souls. It's too easy for those of us who live in privilege to be content with random personal generosity while we remain complicit with larger cultural, governmental and social systems that oppress our fellow human beings.

If we truly want to bring about change in our world, I suggest we follow the wisdom of the Dalai Lama; the wisdom of the Buddha, who said that there are at least 84,000 doors to peacefulness and loving kindness in this life.

It seems to me that this is what's behind the story of "Pay It Forward," the novel written by Catherine Ryan Hyde that I read from earlier. It was made into a movie in 2001. Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.

In the story, 12-year-old Trevor McKinney rises to the challenge of an extra-credit assignment given by his teacher, Reuben St. Clair. One morning, in large block letters on the blackboard St. Clair writes: EXTRA CREDIT: THINK OF AN IDEA FOR WORLD CHANGE, AND PUT IT INTO ACTION.

While the other kids work on getting curbside recycling started, or spend time listening to the stories of elders in a local nursing home, Trevor thinks up something radical. He describes it to his mother and teacher this way: "You see, I do something real good for three people. And then when they ask how they can pay it back, I say they have to Pay It Forward. To three more people. Each. So nine people get helped. Then those people have to do twenty-seven." He turned on the calculator, punched in a few numbers. "Then it sort of spreads out, see. To eighty-one. Then two hundred forty-three. Then seven hundred twenty-nine. Then two thousand, one hundred eighty-seven. See how big it gets?" Actually, after about twenty rounds, Trevor's idea could touch every human being on earth - making each one of us a door to peacefulness and lovingkindness.

According to the story, oddly enough, the way the world begins to notice a growing Pay it Forward movement is because folks in the criminal world start taking it seriously. The crime rate goes down dramatically as people who live close to the edge of the law begin to take care of each other with kindness and generosity. This wasn't what I expected to read. I thought that nice middle-class, well-educated people like me would be depicted "paying it forward" to other nice people like me. But the book says something different, something radical. It says get outside your usual circle and give to someone who has a REAL need.

Now, the book was a wee bit schmaltzy - and given what happens when most books are made into movies, I suspect that the movie was even more naïve and sentimental. But still, there's a seed of genius here. Something that opens our minds to new possibilities.

What would our world be like if we tried "paying it forward"? Would the crime rate go way down? Would people give us their car when ours dies in public?

Probably not - at least not within our lifetimes, for I think it is hard to do what Trevor McKinney asks: to reach out beyond our comfort zone, and then be audacious enough to tell the person we've helped that they have to "pay it forward." It's not the kind of thing we could require or enforce, and no doubt out culture of privacy and entitlement would resist such wholesale change.

That's why I go back to Aldous Huxley, who said to us "Try to be a little kinder." A little kinder, at least. This I know we can do, and I know it makes a difference. For I agree with Buddhist and medical professional Jon Kabat-Zinn, who wrote, "If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others." (Lovingkindness, p. 162)

And think about it: aren't most of us already paying it forward, at least in a small way? For example, when someone treats you kindly - like your partner or spouse or a friend gives you a hug, or a fellow motorist lets you cut into traffic, or a stranger smiles and says hello - aren't you more likely to be kinder to the next person you meet? I know I am.

But it won't work if we let our practice of kindness become random or occasional. It won't work if we confuse being kind with being a doormat, and let people bash through our healthy boundaries. No, to be effective, kindness has to be practiced consciously, carefully, and as a part of our daily lives.

So here is what I have been doing. Since last Spring I have been practicing metta meditation nearly every day, and finding it helpful and heart-opening. I am kinder, but perhaps even more so I am aware now of how easy it is to be unkind. And thus I've added a few more practices to my daily life: · letting go of unkind thoughts, · expressing my appreciation of others more generously, · and apologizing more quickly when I realize I have been unkind.

Now, in case any of you are wondering if I am preaching this sermon today because I have found this church to be unkind, let me lay your concerns to rest. In reality, I have noticed how truly kind our members and friends are. But as I learn more about UUCW and experience that individual kindness, I also find myself looking for the ways in which kindness is institutionalized here.

For example, is kindness a part of our mission statement? Is it in our bylaws? I definitely see kindness at work here -- in the efforts of our Social Action committee for example - kindness that is backed up by giving and by service. This kindness also lives in our Religious Education program, where so many volunteers are needed to work with our young ones. And there is a lovely kindness present in the work of the CommUUnity Connections Committee, which strives to aid our members and friends when there's an illness, death, or other distressing event in our lives. And on Sundays, we offer the kindness of sharing our Joys and Sorrows. But I wonder what happens to the people who are newer here, or those who are more shy, or less well-connected. How do we define and therefore practice kinship here?

Aesop, the ancient writer of fables is quoted as saying, "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." Theologian Frederick Buechner writes, "the life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt."

And I say, may we go forth this day knowing that these things are true. Knowing that we are one with all persons, all beings back to the very source of all life. May we go forth inspired by our Universalist ancestors, and intentionally, carefully, and joyfully practice kindness, one act, one person, at a time.

And may we know that our kindness has the power to transform the world.

Amen.