|
Chapter 2
On Kindness [1911]
Jean Guibert
[In addition to a broad examination of the relationship between happiness and kindness, Your Unfinished Life features selected summaries of two largely long lost works: Jean Guibert’s On Kindness (1911) and Frederick Faber’s Kindness (1892). It's a mini-adventure to read their resurrected words. It might seem as if no one would need a “how to” guide for extending kindness, but you may agree after reading samples from their works in the next two chapters, that it can only be improved by implementing their insightful recommendations. No one could read these summaries without appreciating he charming language of a bygone era and seeing themselves and others in them. They will speak to you in magical and eloquent ways that I never could.
On Kindness is a small book I found among my mother’s personal effects after she died. After many years, it started me on the path of writing this book. A selected summary of it, with my parenthetical comments, appears below. It’s style is simple, humble and affectingly beautiful.]
Preface
No duty do we require to be more frequently reminded of than that of being kind. Just as men long for others to be kind to them, so they are slow to grow in this virtue, and remiss in its practice. It is so important to stir up in ourselves the instinctive kindness... implanted in the depths of every human soul, but which too often is stifled out by a life of selfishness.
The Exceeding Worth of Kindness
Kindness Is A Virtue of Great Price
Kindness is to be felt rather than to be defined. It is better to experience it, than to try to explain what it is. Moreover, its home is in the heart, rather than in the intellect. Sometimes it takes the form of a special affection, manifesting itself by gentleness, affability, obligingness, amiability and graciousness. Sometimes it takes a more active form, inspiring zeal, generosity, devotedness and self-denial. But oftener it is externally, hardly more than passive, enabling the kind man to practice patience and endurance, to be indulgent and sympathetic with others, to forgive injuries, and to humbly forget himself.
Kindness is a retiring virtue ... in silence and in the dark it does good and therewith is content... that kindness is prone to conceal itself takes nothing from its worth.
All Men Love The Kind-Hearted
Father Faber remarks: “Kindness makes life bearable." Under this cross some fall to rise no more, others march bravely onwards. Why this difference? May it not be that some lose heart because they know not how to hope? Others, their hearts enlarged by happiness, are rushed on by the very joy of their being. Of a truth, facing life, man is strong or weak accordingly, as he is cheerful or sad at heart. Sadness quenches the living fire within him, happiness is as fuel to it. And what breath better than that of a kindness received, to fan the flames of joy in a man’s heart?
Kindness Overcomes All Things
The double reward of kind words is the happiness they cause in others, and the happiness they cause in ourselves... It is because a man feels that he is and ought to be free that he hates to yield to force, but gives way easily to kindness. We could soothe many sufferings if, as St. Francis de Sales has told us to do, we made kindness “the first dressing for the wounds which we undertake to heal." Victor Hugo’s maxim applies: “If you want to make men better, make them happier.” [Victor Hugo(1802-1885) was an important French novelist and dramatist. His best-known works were Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.]
St. Vincent de Paul said, “The very convicts amongst who I lived can be gained over by kindness, and in no other way. When I spoke harshly to them I spoilt everything, and on the contrary, when I praised them for being resigned to their hard lot and pitied their sufferings; when I...showed them that I felt for them, then they listened to me…” [St. Vincent de Paul(1581-1660) was born and died in France. He served as a parish priest in Paris starting organizations to help the poor, to nurse the sick and to find jobs for the unemployed.]...
On The Nature Of True Kindness
The first of all acts of kindness is to pity any who suffer: a heart moved by the pain of another straightaway feels itself instantly drawn to succor him in his trouble. But the gifts of the kind man must be given kindly and graciously, or else the act will be no balm to the soul of the sufferer.
True Kindness Is Compassionate
There are men and women who take no note of the sufferings of others. Every day they see people in trouble; but it neither surprises them nor affects them...They simply pass on, nor allow the trouble of their neighbor to draw them for a single instant from the pursuit of their pleasure or from their business. Nothing will they sacrifice for the sake of their fellow-creatures. It is such as these one is thinking, when one speaks of hard, cold, callous hearts.
There are men and women who, in the presence of acute distress, forget to pity the sufferer, so intent are they on discovering where the fault lies. They seem to be seeking to know the truth, in order that they may feel justified in shutting compassionateness out of their hearts and in trampling on those who have fallen, rather than reaching out to them with a helping hand; they have made known weaknesses of others about which they would do well to be silent and take a truly criminal pleasure in fatally compromising, by their indiscreet utterances, persons whom a charitable silence might have saved. [“Gossiping often carries an element of malicious criticism and judgment of others, and so it also strengthens the ego through the implied moral superiority that is there whenever a negative judgment is applied to someone...Whenever you feel superior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.” (The New Earth - Eckhart Tolle.) He advises that as long as our egos predominate, personal growth will be stalled.]...
|