2017.04.02 Kindness

Confitemini domino. That’s Latin for "Praise the Lord for good." We sing it in chant—over and over to warm our hearts toward each other and Godde. It is a very kind prayer.

Does the phrase mean for good, as in, that’s the last hurrah for praise?  Or does it mean to give thanks to God who is good?  Probably both. Whatever its exact meaning is, it kindles warm love in me.

I think of Psalm 136 in which— over and over— we give thanks for the goodness of God’s imprint on the world and say in refrain: “ . . . for his mercy endures for ever.”  In Pamela Greenberg's translation of 136 the refrain is. “. . . for God’s kindness is toward the world.” Kindness sounds fresh to my ears and to my heart. Why?
    -it’s more intimate than mercy
    -kind relates to kin….I think of kindling to get a fire ablaze
    -it’s not condescending, toned with superiority
    -it’s not love, love, and more love
    -it’s not gendered
    -it’s reverently vernacular
    -I can imagine myself being kind, without aspiring to divinity

Let’s call kindness manageable. It goes a long way when you’ve lost your grip and/or your ground. The poet knows.

KINDNESS

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

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 gaze at 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.


Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri to a Palestinian father and an American mother. She is an award-winning poet, songwriter and novelist. A visit to her paternal grandmother on the West Bank was life-changing for her. She lived there for a year and says that being part of both a minority and a majority in cultures influenced her political views and the message of her poetry. Naomi calls herself a “wandering poet”.

Nye's poem “Kindness” came to my attention through a friend who told me that an unknown woman in an elevator on 9/11 gave him the poem, saying, “Here, you will need this today.”  The woman was right. When my friend, professor of pastoral theology at Boston College, teaches on 9/11 he always begins his classes with this poem.

May I suggest that we begin each day with this poem—not just for Lent but into Holy Week, all through Eastertide and beyond. God’s kindness is toward the world. We need it now.  Oh, we need it now.

2016.09.11 Leap

Today I remember and honor all the lovely bodies and brave souls that perished fifteen years ago today when planes flew into the twin towers in New York City and burst into flames. My hometown.

A poem to say: terrorism is not the last word. A prayer to say: May the warm hand—always warmer than mine— of my husband hold mine as we leap into Life together.

 LEAP
    by Brian Doyle

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.
      Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.
       Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.
       The mayor reported the mist.
    A kindergarten    boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.
    Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Minstrel saw people free-falling backward with their hands out, like they we parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping. “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand. 
    Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.
    But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.
    The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, wrote Peter, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that therein shall be burned up.
    I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.
    There is no fear in love, wrote John, but perfect love casteth out fear; because fear hath torment.
    Their hands reaching and joining is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.
     Their passing away was thought an affliction/ and their going forth from us, utter destruction, says the book of Wisdom. But they are in peace.  . . . They shall sing, /and shall dart about as sparks through stubble.
    No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running sets and jump out the shattered window, but they did read for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.
    I trust I shall shortly see thee, John wrote, and we shall speak face to face.
     Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold on to that.

Brian Doyle edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, Oregon, called “the best spiritual magazine in the country” by Annie Dillard. Doyle is also the author of 13 books of essays and fiction and poetry; among the honors for his work are the Christopher Medal and a Catholic Press Association Book Award. He lives with his family in Portland.