What is Kindness?

Chris Stewart got me thinking about the definition of kindness. It seems to me that we often accept simple politeness for kindness. In our culture we describe a kind person as someone nice. Being kind is about being nice to someone else. The definition of kindness that draws us back to the nature of God says there is more to kindness than being nice.

Taking off on our agricultural metaphor, kindness has to be some sort of ground cover vine or grass. It is a the raw material that makes up the social fiber. Kindness is at the root of hospitality. I think most of us understand how the concept of hospitality has become warped in our culture. (Jeff, you did a recent series on hospitality - any way we can see it?). In ancient times hospitality was more than just being nice. It was required by the gods. Those who didn't show proper hospitalty were as bad as horse theives. To deny hospitality was to violate the basic covenants of human co-existence. When you think about it, especially in the ancient context, it makes sense.

What is the alternative to kindness? Kenneson says it is self-sufficiency. Take self-sufficiency to its extreme and you have a sort of Mad Max Thunderdome world. I saw glimpses of this world on the streets of London. Beggars stole from beggars. It is self-sufficiency to the extreme. Thunderdome is fiction, but the Superdome isn't. One of our newest members was in the Superdome during Katrina. I asked him if it was mob rule and he corrected me. A life-long resident of New Orleans, he told me that gangs are absent in New Orleans, it is instead a city of "every man for himself." Kindness was absent.

New Orleans, kindness and pop culture are coalescing in my stream of consciousness here and I cannot avoid thinking of Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire. So often her famous line ("I have always depended on the kindness of strangers") is ripped from its context and used to compliment nice people. Blanche is adrift in the world looking for another to show her genuine kindness. But like so many she enters into relationships that are more contractual than covenantal. She gives herself to strange men so that she can get what she needs to survive - thus she depends on the kindness of strangers. (The story takes place in New Orleans by the way).

Thinking of all this I am intrigued about the possibility of "chesed"-level kindness coming to fruition among us.