A Culture of Kindness
Feast of Christ the King
As many Farm Street parishioners know, I was for a number of years involved in Jesuit schools, especially our high school in south London, Wimbledon College. The aims of our educational work the world over were identified by Fr Pedro Arrupe, our superior general in the years following the Second Vatican Council, as helping to form “men and women for others”. There is no doubt that the words of Jesus in this Sunday’s Gospel reading for the solemnity of Christ the King are a great inspiration for all involved in this enterprise: “I was hungry you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty you gave me something to drink; naked and you clothed me, sick and in prison and you visited me”.
Many of the activities we organised for our young people aimed at helping them realise that they had many gifts and talents which enable them to be of real service to those in need. The younger students were enthusiastic fundraisers for charities and collectors of food items which were made into hampers for delivery at Christmas. The older students organised visits to the elderly in care homes and cared for children with special needs during vacations or while on pilgrimage to Lourdes. One particularly imaginative project took place each summer and involved 20 or so sixth formers travelling to a Jesuit mission station in southern India where they helped build a school for dalit children, amongst the poorest in India.
One of the most impressive projects I’ve come across is in our high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where the oldest students have formed a society dedicated to St Joseph of Arimathea. They attend the funeral masses and carry the coffins of those who otherwise would have no one to pray for them. Such an experience would surely shape for the better a young person for life.
But I used to think, and still do, that becoming a man or woman for others, someone who can recognise Christ in those who have least, begins by expressing ordinary, everyday kindness and respect for others at home or around the school.
In his recent encyclical letter, “Fratelli Tutti”, Pope Francis writes about the need for universal fraternity and social friendship. He considers how there is much injustice, how too often government policies fail to recognise and promote the dignity of each and every human being. There’s too much in our individualistic consumer society, he writes, that treats other people as annoyances, as obstacles to “our own serene existence”, forgetting that every person has a right to be happy as well. Putting this right, he says, includes restoring what he calls a culture of kindness.
The Pope notes that for St Paul kindness is a gift of the Holy Spirit. It is no “superficial bourgeois virtue”. Those who “possess this quality help make other people’s lives more bearable”. So he encourages us to “cultivate kindness” What might this involve? It involves, he explains, being gentle, pleasant and supportive; finding the time to stop our busy lives and bother about others and to say, “excuse me”, “pardon me” and “thank you”. It involves sharing the weight of other people’s problems and burdens.
Kindness entails esteem and respect for others and once kindness becomes a culture in society, it can transform lifestyles and relationships such that, we might hope to add, the hungry are fed, the thirsty are given drink, the refugee is welcomed, the homeless are housed and the unemployed and their families have a future to look forward to. In short, we’ll be on the road to becoming a “man or woman for others”, after the example of Jesus himself.
Fr Michael Holman SJ