Day LXIV: Only Kindness Matters
May 18, 2020

+Porter Taylor
Recently I heard a story on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”It was about Landon Spradlin and his mother Jean—who went to New Orleans to evangelize. Their plan was to go to the Quarter, play music, and then spread the Good News of Jesus. Some weeks before going, Landon had posted a meme that said the reaction to Covid 19 was “mass hysteria” and talked about how the government needs to lift all restrictions. Langdon and his mother evangelized for a few days, but then this mother noticed that Landon was tired all the time. So, they got in the car to drive back home to Virginia.

On the way Landon got more and more sick. He didn’t eat and he slept for hours. At a rest stop his mother had trouble waking him and had to call 911 for an ambulance. Landon died that night from Covid 19.

Here’s the point. After he died---strangers attacked him on Facebook for his conservative posts. One person mocked him for saying, “God can heal any illness.” Another posted his obituary on Facebook and wrote, “I found this story on the Internet and can’t stop laughing.”

Jesus asks: “What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you?” (Mark 8:36; The Message). It may be that the disease that is infecting this country is that we are losing our real or true self by worshiping a political perspective--- left or right/ conservative or liberal---that is not only too small but a false way of seeing the world.

In the hospital ICU, there are no Trump supporters or Trump detractors. There is just common humanity. In her poem, “Kindness,” the poet Naomi Shahib Nye writes
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 mail letters and
purchase 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.

I think about the heated words we throw at one another in our society—especially when there is no face to face contact and when it’s posted on the internet, and I fear where we as a nation are headed I wish the persons that posted on Facebook about Landon Spradlin could have known him; could have experienced a 360-degree sense of him. They had one snapshot of a full life and thought they knew him---thought they knew enough to discount the grief his loved ones experienced. How can there be anything to laugh at when someone this young dies?

Perhaps the disease that is infecting our country is a loss of compassion and a loss of a meaningful perception about others. Of course, it’s not new. We’ve expanded our trigger issues from race and gender and sexual orientation to politics. However, this way of perception is destructive.

If you know someone voted for Donald Trump or intends to vote for Joe Biden, you know as much as finding out they like pimento cheese. Because we are all made in the image of God, when we discount others, we limit our ability to see God. Our world gets smaller and less miraculous. When we look at them, we must realize:

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.

Spirituality is about gaining a wider and deeper vision. It’s about letting go of our old screens and categories because if we want to see God in this world, it will probably be in the most unexpected places. We think we have to see Richard Rohr or Cynthia Bourgeault, but that thought keeps us blind. If God is God, then everything is holy; everyone is the face of Jesus. Chances are as we let go of our preconceptions and prejudices, then the moments of recognizing the Holy One in our lives increases.

In the world of Covid 19 we are all losing things--- “What you held in your hand/ what you counted and carefully saved/All this must go…” The question is whether this will harden or soften our hearts. Will we weep for those who suffer and die regardless of their politics? Will we recognize how our precious and short our lives are and not believe that any one moment of a person’s life defines them?

This is our moment as the Church because we follow the one who proclaims love and unity and justice. May we see that in everyone and respond accordingly.
Prayer: Dear God, help us see your face in the persons we least expect to see you.
Practice: Say a blessing for the very people who trigger you.