Mercy, Mercy – radical kindness to all

I’ve recently completed an annual spiritual practice that I do at the same time every year. It’s a long way from a desert retreat or 30-day Ignatian spiritual exercises (and a lot cheaper too) but my day of learning never fails to teach and remind me about important things in life. About acceptance and compassion, but especially about mercy.

I live just a mile or so away from the route of the Great North Run, the biggest half marathon in the World, which began in 1981. I ran in the first three and in several others since, but I am no longer running. As a club runner I trained hard and prided myself on achieving the best times I could, always striving to do better. Whenever I wasn’t running, I’d go along to watch, seeing the elite athletes and supporting the club runners who I knew. I didn’t bother to stay and watch the fun runners who were running at a more sedate pace. After I stopped running, I no longer went to watch the race, but over the last few years I’ve started to go along again and now watch all of the runners go past. I tend to go to a point close to the Tyne Bridge where they’ve run about 2 miles. I started to cheer on runners I didn’t know, calling out their names or those of the charity for whom they were running to raise money and trying to encourage them. But I found myself introducing a very rigid (and unlovely) selection process as to who I’d cheer for. I would never cheer on anyone walking so early in the race. They didn’t deserve my encouragement nor did the ones who clearly hadn’t trained. Even those jogging ever so slowly got my cheers and words of support. And I’d pick my preferred charities – the bigger more organised ones seemed less deserving than the small ones.

When I discovered that I was doing this, I was quite shocked, even more so when I discovered it went very deep. I applied this mean-spirited, conditional and judgemental approach to a lot of other situations and people I came across, not just fun runners, but including of course, judgements about myself. It seems that I’m not alone in this sort of thinking. As Brennan Manning observed in his book The Wisdom of Tenderness, each of us lives in a world of our own, the world of our own mind. “How often we’re narrow, cold, haughty and unforgiving. Above all else we are judgmental, happy to believe appearances, impute motives and interpret behaviours with nothing but the slightest scraps of evidence to back it up.”

Jesus was very clear about the wrongness of this behaviour. In the story of the Good Samaritan, answering the question as to who our neighbour is, Jesus shows that the real neighbour is the one who cared for the beaten man and showed him mercy. The Samaritan may have had a host of reasons for not helping the victim or thinking he did not deserve help, as two previous religious figures had done, but he didn’t – he showed mercy and cared for the man without any conditions. Elsewhere Jesus is even more explicit when he says “Judge not, so that you yourselves are not judged”. Throughout his life he showed acceptance to the most judged and vilified people of his time – prostitutes, lepers, disabled, tax collectors, adulterers, beggars and so on. He himself experienced judgement and unkindness much of his life; as a young child he and his parents were refugees, as an adult he was consistently misunderstood, rejected and threatened by his own people. His trial and death were unfair and brutal.

The point of Jesus’s teaching is not just that we should seek to be merciful and non-judgmental, but that in doing this we reflect the character of God. “Be merciful, as your heavenly Father is merciful” he said. God is not the big, bad villain we think but our compassionate, loving, merciful ever hopeful creator who only ever wants to restore and embrace us, most especially those who feel far away. God is the Father in the story of the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan who binds our wounds, the employer who pays over the odds.

Learning to be accepting and non-judgemental seems to be intrinsic to the 12 Step programme too. Not only is there a recognition that we’re all in the same boat, all helpless addicts without a hope, but a deeply compassionate, merciful streak to all, even the difficult, awkward and contrary ones. The Big Book talks about having survived a common peril, regardless of who we are and having found a common solution. This is a solution where “there are no fees to pay, no axes to grind, no people to please, no lectures to be endured.” In the telling of stories and hearing different and common experiences there is a recognition that none of us is in a position to judge the other, because underneath it all we’re no different at all. We are all walking through this life with bandages and a limp.

Since in wider society we are conditioned to assess, categorise and judge almost all of the time (clothes, class, gender, age, job, weight, skin colour, income, ethnicity, religion, education level, etc) we have to work hard to overcome these prejudices. It seems to be like a little used muscle that only grows with practice, training and cultivation. As Anne Lamott says, “Mercy means that we no longer constantly judge everybody’s large and tiny failures, foolish hearts, dubious convictions, and inevitable bad behaviour. We will never do this perfectly, but how do we do it better?” The Just For Today Card is a useful way of improving our behaviour by practising kindness, compassion and above all showing mercy. This is the mercy that I know I need from my fellow beings and above all from God for all my slips, errant behaviour and sometimes downright nastiness. I don’t deserve it and maybe others I meet don’t either, but mercy is never about just deserts. Encouraging those runners (and walkers) in the Great North Run is not about what they do or don’t deserve. It’s a gift, and when I saw the increase in pace, smile or look of gratitude on the faces of those I encouraged this year who would not in the past have made the cut, I realised that they were bandaged and in need of my support. And in that brief moment there was connection and the Kingdom of God became real to us both.

Mercy, mercy, looking for mercy. Peter Gabriel

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Jesus of Nazareth

Mercy is the stuff you give to people that don’t deserve it. Joyce Meyer

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved………The good news is that God has such low standards, and reaches out to those of us who are often not lovable and offers us a chance to come back in from the storm of drama and toxic thoughts. Anne Lamott

Most of us were taught that God would love us, if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change. Richard Rohr

Compassion is not a virtue — it is a commitment. It’s not something we have or don’t have — it’s something we choose to practice. Brené Brown

The Constant Gardener – enabling spiritual growth

It’s a busy time of the year down at my allotment. I share the plot of rented land with a couple of friends and right now the fruit and vegetables are at their most productive. This year the combination of warm sun, heavy rains and damp, muggy air have not only benefitted the crops but also made it a paradise for numerous weeds and uninvited plants. For some unknown reason, the weeds grow more rapidly and far more profusely than the strawberries, chard, beans, beetroot and leeks that I am trying to grow. 20190731_122803 Regular work is required to keep the weeds under control. Since I don’t always do this weeding as frequently as I ought to, the plot as a whole quickly becomes a jungle of assorted greenery instead of neat rows of plants, growing in well defined beds and borders. It’s easy to despair and abandon the fight, letting everything grow together in the hope that it’ll sort itself out in the end. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Making the most of the well composted and fed soil that was meant for the crops, the weeds flower and spread their seeds around the plot long before my crops have matured, guaranteeing me the same problem for years to come, unless I do something about it.

The parallel for our own lives is not hard to see, partly because many of us are familiar with Jesus’s stories of crops and weeds along with good and bad soil. The parable of the sower which is recorded in three of the gospels, is particularly well known, with the seed failing to germinate, growing poorly or flourishing, depending on the soil conditions where it had been sown. This is exactly what does happen – plants sown on the edges or growing close by are smaller and much less productive than those in the central, more fertile areas; plants with weeds around them have to compete for light, water and nutrients and also grow far less well than those in cleared ground. Those in weed-free, well-watered and composted areas are by far the most productive. Likewise, in our own lives we need good fertile environments in which to thrive and an absence of things which choke or stifle our spiritual growth.

In twelve step programmes the need to deal with these impediments to growth is a vital part of recovery, dealt with most clearly in steps 5,6 and 7. Making a moral inventory is a revealing process, showing us just how widespread and deep our wrongs and failings are. It is not the more glaring shortcomings we have that shock but the small hidden things, including our negative responses to the events of our lives. I came to see how many and how deep my resentments were towards people and circumstances of life – recent and long past. Because we are powerless to move on from or eliminate these things ourselves, we have to ask God, our Higher Power to remove these character defects and shortcomings. We must not only remove the weeds and clear the ground, but as I know only too well from both my allotment and my own life, we need to continue to manage them, because weeds continue to grow. Sometimes too it takes time to completely get rid of the deep roots of established weeds in our lives which can grow back. We need to find some way to reflect on and keep on top of these things. So it is no wonder that step 10 helps us to do this by “continuing to take a personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admitting it”. Handing things over to our Higher Power is always central, and a reminder that our lives remain unmanageable if we try to do it alone. But neither Recovery nor following Jesus are passive activities and we have to play our part not least in wanting things to change. As they say in the rooms, “we alone can do it, but we cannot do it alone”.

I am not sure that there is the same amount of work put into deep reflection, admission and clearing of ground by many of us Christians as there is by those in recovery. Admit your wrongs and move on via a quick general confession is often the process and too much time dwelling on your failings is seen as beating yourself up rather than basking in the grace of forgiveness and new life. Of course this can happen, with guilt trapping us in an unhealthy whirlpool of despair, far removed from the freedom which Jesus promised. But like weeding, the purpose is to clear the ground, not feel bad that weeds have grown and as a general rule some sort of moral inventory is a helpful and productive thing to do periodically, preferably with the support of a spiritual mentor or guide, who will help us to avoid unhealthy levels of guilt. As the Desert Fathers discovered, true spirituality begins with the acceptance of our own flaws and limitations and in the compassion that emerges from this self-knowledge – compassion towards ourselves, towards others and towards all of humanity. We are all beautiful but flawed and we are all in this together.

As well as slowly clearing the ground (and it really can be slow work), we also need to water and feed the ground of our lives to make them fertile. We must dig deep wells to find the things which feed and nurture us, like the living water which Jesus said flowed from him. Serving others and helping the stranger is a sure yet mysterious way to receive nourishment and spiritual blessing. Step 11 talks of prayer and meditation as being a means of helping us to improve our conscious contact with God, seeking guidance and help with our lives. Jesus’s life and ministry was totally reliant upon prayer and time spent alone with God, enabling him to be obedient to his calling, proclaiming the Kingdom of God here on earth.

A common prayer in 12 step circles is the Set Aside Prayer. I forget who it was I read who developed this into a fuller prayer which helped me so much (Heather King, I think), and which in turn I have amended to capture the things which my moral inventory revealed were the weeds of my life which will choke the growing seed if I do not seek to manage or remove them on a daily basis. So, with grateful thanks to whoever it was who wrote the first version, here is my take on the Set Aside Prayer.

“Loving God, please set aside everything I know or think I know about spirituality, religion and faith that has become formulaic or gets in the way of new understanding. Set aside every idea that has frightened, threatened or angered me. Set aside everything that’s been forced down my throat, that’s inconsistent, that manipulates me. Set aside all my resentments and the ease with which I find and harbour new ones. Set aside my desire to be in control and my discomfort when I’m not. Set aside my tendency to see things through the lens of my emotions of the moment. Set aside my constant judging and categorisation of other people. Set aside my worry and anxiety about almost everything. Set aside my plotting and planning about how I’d like things to be and my unconscious expectations that things should be perfect. Set aside my addictions, my doubts, my guilt, my shame, my jealousy, my rage, my intolerance. Set aside all these things and anything else which prevent me from having a loving heart, an open mind and a fresh experience of you today. Amen.”

Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade. – Rudyard Kipling

If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. Bill Watterson

Most people don’t have the willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims. Carlos Santana

Don’t let your sins turn into bad habits. Saint Teresa of Avila

When you find yourself in need of spiritual nourishment, it is in the opportunities to serve others that you will find the abundance you seek. Steve Maraboli

There are two types of seeds in the mind: those that create anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, hatred and those that create love, compassion, equanimity and joy. Spirituality is germination and sprouting of the second group and transforming the first group. Amit Ray

Becoming like Christ is a long, slow process of growth. Rick Warren

The Christian who has stopped repenting has stopped growing. A W Pink

When Love Comes to Town

Sometimes just a few words that someone says to us can have a profound impact on our life. A number of years ago, I met some incredible women who ran a centre in the USA which helped to transform the lives of women working on the streets. They offered them warm, safe houses to live in, help to deal with their addictions followed by education and employment opportunities when they had recovered. Many of the workers had been through the programme themselves. I got into conversation with one woman called Rochelle, intrigued by what made their programme so successful. I expected some well-established psychological approach within a structured programme, quietly hoping that it would accord with my own views about what did and didn’t work. I was in for a surprise. She just smiled and in her deep southern drawl told it to me straight. “Our approach is simple. We just luuurv them well”.

In another context, I might have dismissed this as well-meaning but hopelessly simplistic, but Rochelle and the others I met were extremely credible witnesses to the programme’s success, their own lives having been transformed through the power of love. Plus, she struck me as the sort of person not to pick an argument with! That brief conversation set me on a long process of reflection and conversations about love as a means of healing. There were many people I knew in the organisation where I worked who were employed in caring or therapeutic roles, running amazing projects, including one which also helped sex workers. With my newly opened eyes, I could see that love was undoubtedly at the heart of their practice – but they shied away from the word when I mentioned it. They understood that it meant agapé and not romantic love yet felt uncomfortable with the idea that they were loving the people they were helping. To them it seemed kind of wishy washy, unprofessional and unsophisticated – a long way from the confident and assured use of the word by Rochelle. As a description of what people do, Unconditional Positive Regard gets in under the professional radar, but not love!

Yet Rochelle and her friends were onto something. Researchers at St. George’s Hospital in London have found that oxytocin, a hormone naturally produced by the brain and often called the “love hormone” for its anti-anxiety effect, can help opiate addicts avoid relapse and remain clean. The hormone is most closely associated with childbirth and breastfeeding, but Oxytocin is also released through warmth, touch and affectionate connection. Other research has demonstrated the damage that lack of love does to a person’s wellbeing and healthy development as well as the positive effects of love on reducing stress, anxiety, depression and improving the immune system. Brené Brown who so often gets to the nub of what is going on in our damaged and broken lives and relationships puts it like this: “Love will never be certain, but after collecting thousands of stories, I’m willing to call this a fact: A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all men, women, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong.”

All of this presents a big challenge to me in how I live my life and do my work. Where does love figure in my actions, my intentions and my thoughts, wherever I might be and whatever I might be doing? As ever, I try (with a mixed degree of success) to make my reference point the life and teachings of Jesus. For him, love is at the heart of it all and pretty much everything he did and said was about love, because he came to show and reflect the love of God for all. As Brennan Manning puts it so well, “Through meal-sharing, preaching, teaching and healing, Jesus acted out his understanding of God’s indiscriminate love – a love that causes the sun to rise on bad people as well as good, and rain to fall on honest and dishonest people alike.” At times he can seem a bit snippy with his dim-witted disciples (or rather, the men, because the women consistently grasped what he was saying so much more quickly,) but he loved them all to the end – and beyond. He always believed in them, always thought the best, never kept a tally of their mistakes and always forgave them when they didn’t quite hit the mark. Jesus says that everything boils down to two things – loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves. And the God of love he pointed us to, leads the way every time.

The Big Book of AA says that “Love and tolerance of others is our code.” In his last major address to AA groups, Dr. Bob said he believed that the Twelve Steps, when reduced to their essence, could be summed up in the phrase “love and service.” Over the years I’ve heard it said that in Twelve Step meetings there’s a lot of talk about service, but nobody ever talks about love. If this really is the case, it may actually be okay, because talking about love is not love. Talk is cheap, but love can be costly because it is about doing something. Like riding a bike, love only works when you start pedalling. And truth be told, I see a lot of love in the rooms and amongst people in the fellowships – welcome, acceptance, long-suffering, understanding, giving, sacrifice and compassion. Wounded healers at work, dispensing love.

Love is

This blog site has covered some big themes so far, but none comes bigger than love. It truly is the golden thread woven into the whole tapestry of life. When all the ephemera is stripped away, our life work seems to be about learning to love. Learning to love God, learning to love our neighbour and learning to love ourselves. And because it’s what life’s journey is about, anything I say is only ever going to be a hazy impression of what love really is. Furthermore our understanding is always going to be changing and evolving.

But what I do know is this. Whether as the provider of a professional caring service or the recipient of one, someone with close family and friends who I want to love, or simply in the many casual encounters of the day, it is always possible to try to suffuse these relationships with love. We may not always get it right – in fact usually we don’t, but that should never stop us aspiring to the ideal of love.

So as it stands today, these are currently my top ten ways of trying to love people well, learned in the main from the way others have loved me:

Welcome them at all times whether they are new to you or well-known and smile because it’s hard not to feel better when someone smiles at us. On occasions, a smile from a stranger has brightened my whole day.
Allow them to be themselves – and accept them for who they are even if this is irritating and the tolerance isn’t reciprocated. It might seem that the world would be a better place if more people were like me, but its not true. It would be a nightmare.
Don’t judge, label or categorise people and always think the best of them. This is very hard and especially difficult to avoid doing when discussing them or their actions later with other people. Gossip can be such a juicy morsel. But it’s not loving.
Overlook small mistakes, errors or offences and don’t feel the need to mention these to them. Or indeed to anyone else.
Be patient with them – on occasions this may involve counting to ten before speaking – or in my case counting to fifty or more.
Look to their needs with acts of kindness. Think: what would I want others to do for me in this situation? They may or may not need to know we’ve done them a kindness, it depends on what it is. And the good news is that acts of kindness make us feel better too.
Eat with them or at the very least have a tea or coffee with them. Somehow, eating together breaks down barriers. Jesus knew this and frequently did so with people who for whatever reason were hungry for inclusion and connection.
Appreciate them for what they do and who they are – everything that makes them unique. Tell them they are valued and appreciated. Life is short and it’s too late to do it at their funerals.
Pray for them and don’t feel the need to tell them that’s what we’re doing.
Take time to love ourselves and connect with our core self. This may happen best in times of quiet, meditation and solitude when for a brief moment we stop listening to our chattering minds and receive the loving acceptance of who we really are, by a loving God of infinite compassion.

Love is, as Rochelle said, very simple. But it will take us a life-time to master it.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you do. C.S. Lewis

You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not. Jodi Picoult

Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come. Henri Nouwen

Unconditional love does exist – it just has an 8 second shelf-life. Anne Lamott

When we love ourselves, we fill our lives with activities that put smiles on our faces. These are the things that make our hearts and our souls sing. Elizabeth Kubler Ross

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Jesus Christ

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get. Confucius

I was a sailor, I was lost at sea, I was under the waves before love rescued me. I was a fighter, I could turn on a thread, Now I stand accused of the things I’ve said. When love comes to town I’m gonna jump that train, When love comes to town I’m gonna catch that flame, Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down, But I did what I did before love came to town. U2

In The Power Zone – the spiritual risks from personal power

I recently read an interesting piece by Brennan Manning, a recovering alcoholic who wrote some fine Christian books marked through with 12 step wisdom. In it he said that most of our personal battles are about us seeking security, pleasure or power. Whilst I willingly plead guilty to the first two, it has taken me a lot longer to recognise that I am also guilty of wanting power – the speck in other people’s eyes is always much easier to see than the log in my own. Most of the time I do a fairly good job of convincing myself (and maybe others) that I am a fair and benevolent person who shares what power I have and only wants a little power in order to add to the greater good. Which is true. But there is a less comfortable side, because power is always about control – control of what I want, what I do, what I experience, what I have. The corollary of this is controlling others so that these and perhaps more hidden needs of mine get met. It is very hard to see where the cross-over between wanting to do good and benefit others becomes a justification to satisfy my personal needs for power and control.

The reason I can get glimpses of my interest in power through the cloak of innocence that normally hides it, is that other people come clean about their own relationship with power and I see myself in their stories. Sometimes too, people close to me have the courage to shed a spotlight of objectivity onto my actions and self-perceptions. The reality is that I do want power and when I don’t have it, I’m envious of those who do, whether through their schooling, their jobs, their connections, their political positions or through their income, wealth and resources, especially when they seem to misuse it – measured of course by my yardstick of what’s right and wrong. Even as I write (and perhaps because I am writing on this subject) I am wrestling with a decision about my continued membership of a group which has moved away from doing the things which first got me involved and which I no longer really believe in. Do I leave and move on? I am beginning see that it is the power and prestige of membership which is the biggest attraction to my remaining. And of course the silky voice of temptation provides me with a number of very reasonable justifications for doing nothing and staying put.

We cannot get away from the harmfulness of power. Power does change us, and power can corrupt us. Where there is abuse, it always exists in the shadow of power; power that is misused, deliberately and through ignorance or weakness. Physical and sexual abuse, racial abuse, exclusion of individuals and groups who do not fit in, the creation of actions and behaviours to gain compliance are all based on power dynamics. Power structures underpin the Church, and the emotional, sexual and spiritual abuse of countless individuals over the centuries bear witness to the damage that misused power can cause. Power inflates our egos and self-importance – research has shown that individuals rise to positions of authority by being collaborative and selfless but once they reach a high rung on the leadership ladder, many become coercive, impulsive and self-centred.

In the 12 step fellowships, there is a strong recognition of the damaging nature of power. The grounded checks of the 12 traditions have helped to safeguard the programmes from the excesses of power. As tradition 2 says, “our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.” There are no chiefs in AA or NA, no central directives or authority, no managing group or Board. No opportunity for power to be misused. Group conscience decides what individual meetings will do and everyone is entitled to their opinion. Most people would say that this is a recipe for anarchy and yet it works in 12 step fellowships – the core principles of AA remain as they were 80 years ago and it is because it is uncorrupted by power that it remains as effective as ever with no agenda except to carry the message.

Jesus had a unique take on power. He saw the abuses of power, he declined to accept the trappings of power and many of the accounts of his life in the gospels relate to the verbal duels he had with the religious authorities who held enormous power, in spite of the Roman occupation of Palestine. Eventually he was killed because he challenged these powerful and influential men who saw him as a threat. In the account of his wilderness temptations early in his ministry, he rejected power as a way of being, let alone how he would communicate his message, and he consistently rejected the offer of power over the three years that he taught and healed. Even in the days and hours leading up to his death he refused to buy into it. Towards the end he rebuked Peter for using a sword, he did not try to ingratiate himself with the High Priest, Pontius Pilate the Governor or King Herod, and he accepted the nails and the hours of dying agonisingly on a wooden cross. Jesus came into the world to share a new type of power – power based upon compassion, honesty, sharing and transparency that the world has never really liked. He was the Servant King. And sadly, in spite of this example, Christianity has yet to redefine power in the way that Jesus showed us.

None of this is to say that power in itself is inherently bad or indeed that any society has ever existed without a power structure of sorts, but if power corrupts as it surely does, then institutions and individuals need to create safeguards to prevent the harm that unchecked power will cause. So how do we build in actions, checks and systems to prevent us misusing the power we have? Firstly, since a sense of power is associated with a growing urge to gratify our own desires, an easy starting point is to question whether we ever use our positions of power to feed the other two areas of indulgence (security and pleasure) identified by Brennan Manning. As a starting point, resisting the temptation to gratify our desires would massively reduce the destructive impact of power in every context, personal and institutional. Building in some sort of system of review and reflection on our actions is useful. We are more likely to abuse power when we don’t have anyone who will constructively criticise our actions, so having someone outside our positions of power (a mentor, sponsor, spiritual director) who we are honest with and accountable to and who is not afraid to give us honest feedback is so important. As Anne Lamott bluntly says, “Since we can’t heal our own sick mind with our own sick mind, we need to consult somebody else’s sick mind to help us.” It is undoubtedly true that when we have to explain our actions to someone else, we will think twice about what we do. (so long as we can manage to avoid trying to manipulate or control them to give us the answer we want!) External checks are necessary too for large organisations. Finally, and possibly most important of all, we need to be servants in everything we do. Whatever our position but most especially if we hold a position of power, serving others with compassion, consideration and kindness will help to stop us becoming self-absorbed and seeing other people as objects to use for our own ends. As Jesus said to his disciples on the evening before his death, after he had taken on the role of a common servant and washed their feet, “ I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” Power based on service that is shaped by compassion, honesty and sharing becomes benign and the power of love overrules the love of power, making the world a better place.

Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Montesquieu

Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. Anne Lamott

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. Carl Jung

Good people tend to be naïve about power; bad people aren’t – they know it’s all about power. Richard Rohr

The story being told in ‘Star Wars’ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not. George Lucas

Power always thinks that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws. John Adams

Guerrilla Gardening – spreading kindness

It takes a brave person to give up everything and voluntarily rely upon the help of others to achieve a goal. The Kindness of Strangers is a book by Mike McIntyre, a journalist from California, who, feeling unfulfilled and trapped by his safe life, left his job and without any money, travelled coast to coast across the United States, relying upon other people’s acts of kindness to help him. To make it even more challenging he refused to accept gifts of money. Kindness of Strangers Six weeks later, having met many wonderful, kind people, he completed his life-changing journey, having travelled 4233 miles, across 14 states, getting 82 rides, 78 meals, 5 loads of laundry and a round of golf! He noticed how often it was people with very little, or those who had experienced terrible, tragic events in their lives who not only took the risk to help him but gave with immense generosity too. The book’s real strength lies in the way he introduces us to these people and how their kindness comes to touch our lives too.

Kindness is the outworking of loving our neighbour as ourselves, which Jesus spoke of as the second great commandment. Jesus is constantly referred to as showing compassion to people he meets and to all those with great need whom he healed, taught and fed. His stories too were often about the importance of showing kindness, compassion and generosity to others – the good Samaritan, the parable of the sheep and goats, and when he received an act of great kindness from a repentant woman who poured expensive perfume on him, he predicted that her story would be told for ever. Kindness is also one of the nine fruit of the spirit mentioned by St Paul.

Central as compassion and kindness are within the teachings of Jesus, they are by no means the monopoly of those following his way. Kindness is encouraged within all the World’s great religions, but it is not even exclusive to religion, for those with no religious beliefs at all embrace the importance of kindness and look for ways to practice it. Kindness seems to transcend all people, beliefs and nations and research suggests that positive relationships and kindness are at the heart of our health and well-being.

A recent report from the Carnegie Trust argues that nowadays many people feel an increasing sense of risk in engaging with others and asking for or giving help. As a result, there is a tendency to use more formal routes to help those in need, and we measure kindness in contribution to organised charity rather than our individual interactions with people. Unfortunately, these charitable organisations are also increasingly preoccupied by risk, which together with growing levels of bureaucracy, regulation, performance indicators and professional detachment, crowds out everyday kindnesses and the intuitive nature of kindness. This certainly resonates with my experiences. I can only think it fortunate that the Good Samaritan didn’t have to risk assess, impact evaluate, time-manage or outcome measure his involvement with the victim of robbers he found by the roadside! He just helped him. The Carnegie report concludes that those things which ‘get in the way’ need to be balanced with a greater confidence and support in the value of trust, goodwill, affection, warmth, gentleness and concern.

Within the 12-step tradition, kindness is seen as an important way of helping us to stop being so self-absorbed, enabling us to look beyond ourselves. If we are thinking about other people, which requires some imagination, empathy and most important of all, action, then we are taking time out from just thinking about ourselves. At this point it is worth noting that there are those who say that in helping others or being kind to them, we are still self-absorbed and preoccupied with our feelings, and are only acting in this way in order to feel good about ourselves. Well, this may or may not be true, but even if there is no such thing as altruism, (which I dispute), I would still always choose to live in a world where people are kind to one another and do good things for others, whatever their underlying reason for doing so. When Mike McIntyre was feeling guilty for putting on people who often had very little, one of those who had helped him said, “Mike, on this trip keep in mind that when people give you something, there’s always a reason for it. They have their own motivations for helping you.” Compassion, helping and kindness are virtues whatever the motivation. Period.

Kindness has a ripple effect. When somebody does an act of kindness, it can not only affect both the doer and the receiver in personal, emotional ways, but it also affects other people who hear the story. At a surface level we may be impressed at the kindness somebody has shown, but at a much deeper spiritual level we are moved by the way the actions unlock something much more profound about ourselves and our lives together. Kindness promotes connectedness and this I think is touching on what Jesus referred to as the Kingdom of Heaven. So, as well as doing acts of kindness, we need to speak about acts of kindness too, rippling the effects more widely afield.

Acts of kindness are unilateral and radical. In a world where so much isn’t in our control, we have complete license to do acts of kindness, to pretty much whoever we want, whenever we want to do them. A year or two ago I did a bit of guerrilla gardening. I used to walk to work across an uninspiring trading estate, which apart from a few spring bulbs and flowering trees, had little in the way of natural beauty amidst the roads, offices and factories. I made small dried cakes of compost, fertilizer and seeds and deposited them on the muddy verges and derelict sites. Being an inherent coward, I didn’t hurl them like grenades or Molotov cocktails in case some lurking security guard challenged me. Rather like prisoners of war in the Great Escape who dropped waste soil from their escape tunnels down their sleeves or trouser legs whilst walking around the compound, I would furtively release the flower bombs from my pockets without breaking stride, all the while looking in a completely different direction. This approach did mean that my aim and the distance achieved were not all they might have been but in time there was some success. It was not the greening of the estate with fields of flowers drawing astonished crowds as I had fantasised, but flowers did grow and maybe in time more will appear as they seed themselves and dormant seeds begin to sprout. In the same way, random acts of kindness each day can spread the seeds of hope, love and connectedness which will flower and in time spread more widely.

Finally, acts of kindness do not require a lot of resources. Sure, we can give gifts or money away, but kindness is not really about the size or scale of the act. Jesus commended the poor widow for what she gave, not because of the size of her gift but because she gave out of what little she had. Kindness is all about the thought and willingness to think about the needs of others, to put ourselves out, or give up a bit of time, comfort or security for the sake of someone else.

Hearing about acts of kindness or reading about them in Mike McIntyre’s book, I know that I tend to see myself as the generous giver. But the reality is almost certainly a little different. Would I really take a stranger into my house or find the time to accompany him to a café and pay for his food and enjoy his company, or do I regard it as too risky, myself as too busy or else find one of a myriad of other excuses for passing by on the other side. In a crowd of people I know, do I go to talk to the person who seems alone or do I stay safe and look after my own wants? Do I worry that an act of kindness will seem foolish or weak? If I am to break out of such self-interest, self-absorption and fear I need people, methods or tools to help challenge me to step out of my comfort zone and do more acts of kindness that may have a cost to me. The ‘Just for Today’ Card popular amongst all 12 step fellowships, with its many actions that we can manage to do for one day, can be a very helpful tool. Part of it offers both an active suggestion for kindness and a reactive way of behaving kindly: “Just for today I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out; if anybody knows of it, it will not count…… Just for today I will not show anyone that my feelings are hurt; they may be hurt, but today I will not show it.” Both actions are more challenging to do than they sound, and in trying to do them they reveal a great deal to us about who we are and how we relate to those around us. And they will both help us to be more kind. We may want to have a month of kindness – thirty days which can have a lasting effect upon how we look to the needs of others. Or it may be an outworking of Christmas goodwill, or a New Year’s resolution. How we help ourselves to start matters much less than actually doing random acts of kindness whenever we can. In doing them we become guerrilla gardeners of kindness, helping to make a brighter, better world.

Kind hearts are the gardens. Kind thoughts are the roots. Kind words are the blossoms. Kind deeds are the fruits. 19^th Century children’s rhyme

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again. Og Mandino

A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. Amelia Earhart

A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses. Chinese Proverb

Kind words can be short and easy to speak but their echoes are truly endless. Mother Teresa

Suffering is only intolerable when nobody cares. I continually see that faith in God and his care is made infinitely easier by faith in someone who has shown kindness and sympathy. Dame Cicely Saunders

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