When I think of the word “rising,” I think of the expression “rising to the occasion” and the question, “How do Christians best rise to any occasion?” Jesus would answer, “with kindness, compassion, mercy, graciousness.”
I recently met the poet Naomi Shihab Nye and her astonishing poem “Kindness” on Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being. Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate through the Poetry Foundation and a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. She believes most of us “think in poems,” whether we know it or not. She recommends the discipline of writing to “get into a more gracious community with ourselves — or rather, with all of the selves that live on in each of us at any given moment: the ‘child self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes.’”
For Shihab Nye, kindness is not some saccharine-sweet emotion we slather on the others like icing on a cake. “Before you know what kindness really is/ you must lose things.” You must know how “desolate the landscape can be/ between the regions of kindness.” You must develop empathy for others, be able to walk in their shoes. Before you know kindness, you must become acquainted with grief and sorrow. (Think of the prophecy of Jesus as a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Isaiah 53:3 KJV) She suggests that once we know kindness, it is a constant companion, “like a shadow or a friend” that gets woven into our way of life.
How might we as individuals make the world more like the kingdom of heaven? By rising above the way the world functions; by rising to the occasion to show love in the form of kindness. This love is a costly love, forged by the reality of suffering. This love is released by God’s own grace in the death, resurrection, and ascension of our Savior, who has “risen with healing in his wings.”
I shared this poem recently with several fellow pastors in the new Presbytery of the Northeast (formerly the Newark Presbytery) and it stimulated a lot of discussion among us regarding our responsibility as disciples of Jesus Christ to rise above the ways of our culture and world and to embody Christ’s compassion in the world. We also mused on the link between compassion and suffering, and how Jesus never shied away from being honest about both.
Read her poem using this link: https://poets.org/poem/kindness. You can hear more about the poem and about her experiences that led to its creation at
https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab-nye-before-you-know-kindness-as-the-deepest-thing-inside/.
Margo Walter