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July 12 - August 4, 2020
Augustine describes patience as the virtue by which “we tolerate evil things with an even mind.” The patient person, he continues, chooses to bear evil rather than to commit further evil in response to it.
Patience keeps us from yielding to evils that are “temporal and brief” and from losing “those good things which are great and eternal.”
Kindness is unlike other virtues in that “we know exactly what it is, in most everyday situations; and yet our knowing what it is makes it easier to avoid.”2 We “are profoundly ambivalent about kindness” in that we “are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.”3
We want to be with the kind, even if we don’t want to be the kind.
In its etymology, kind means something radically different from mere agreeableness. Indeed, kind, rightly understood, can include all sorts of disagreeableness. Kind comes from the same root from which we get the word kin. To be kind, then, is to treat someone like they are family. To possess the virtue of kindness is to be in the habit of treating all people as if they were family.
Kindness is like love. The love we have for family members takes different forms. It is not all Christmas mornings and movie nights. But it is always seeking and celebrating the good of that person. The same is true of kindness.
Aquinas calls envy “sorrow for another’s good.”7
To seek and celebrate the good for others is then to treat them as family in this way. This is what it means to be kind.
If kindness means treating someone like family, then kindness must include all the varieties of ways that family members show love for one another through the entire range of circumstances, conditions, and situations they find themselves in.
Niceness has no inherent link to truth.
The virtue of kindness simply cannot be separated from truth.
Even “a harsh truth can be compassionate in the sense that it speeds us along from falseness to truth,”8 explains George Saunders,
kindness, in its inherent connection to truth, must be
grounded in the real.
“Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.”
know such fears are natural and normal. But I know, too, that these fears are amplified by the false values of a culture that idolizes youth, beauty, health, and—most of all—productivity.
caring for these bodies we inhabit for a while—whether that care is of our own or someone else’s body—isn’t a distraction from what life is all about. It is what life is all about. In lieu of death, be kind to one another.
