“Random Kindness, Senseless Beauty, and the Quiet Waging of Peace”
Rev. Lilli Nye
January 22, 2006
At a recent gathering of friends over a pot-luck dinner, the jovial chitchat gradually migrated into the territory of national politics, the ever-present war on terror, and the measures being taken at home and waged abroad on our behalf, in our names, for the sake of our security.
Voices grew tense and subdued as we admitted to one another our sense of alienation and helplessness before the great powers that be, and the depth of our concern for the future of our world. No one argued that the world was not dangerous, yet we felt somehow that the active cultivation of an atmosphere of fear had cast a pallor over our living and seemed to have turned us all into sheep—sheep powerless to influence our country’s destiny, sheep being sullenly herded in directions we did not want to go.
“I want to do something. I want to make a difference. I want to help bring about change,” said one person. “I just can’t figure out how.”
Not too long after that I came across this poem by Wendell Berry, written in 1991, when our first invasion of Iraq was underway. How resonant his thoughts were to me! How familiar that feeling of being entangled in a way of life that is so pleasant and convenient on the one hand, and so destructive and even sinister on its underside.
The year begins with war./Our bombs fall day and night/hour after hour/by death abroad appeasing wrath, folly and greed at home/ Upon our giddy tower we’d oversway the world/our hate comes down to kill those whom we do not see/for we have given up our sight to those in power/and to machines, and now/are blind to all the world./This is a nation where no lovely thing can last/We trample, gouge, and blast;/The people leave the land;/the land flows to the sea./Fine men and women die,/the fine old houses fall,/the fine old trees come down:/Highway and shopping mall/still guarantee the right/and the liberty to be/a peaceful murderer,/a murderous worshipper,/a slender glutton, or/a healthy whore. Forgiving/no enemy, forgiven/ by none, we live the death/of liberty, and become what we have feared to be.
Now this is a particularly grim perspective, and many will not agree with the equations that the poet Berry draws.
Yet from all I see and hear, I do feel that there is a sadness, helplessness, anxiety, and anger that has become a backdrop to our lives, and always the question, “What can I do?”
Perhaps an over-exposure to information is paralyzing. The whole world is in our living rooms, on our tv’s, radios, newspaper, computers. The media feeds itself by feeding us bad news. Every imaginable horror (and every analysis of that horror) is in our ears and eyes. Before the staggering complexity of the problems facing our society and our world, it’s often very difficult to decipher how or where to respond, how to organize ourselves, how to act for the good toward which our consciences direct us.
If we cannot figure out how to respond, if we cannot figure out how to be effective against the wrongs we see, we grow numb and mute.
I suspect it was in protest to that very feeling, in rebellion against the constant exposure to news of random violence and senseless brutality, that, in 1982, Ann Herbert, sitting in a restaurant in Sausolito CA, scrawled on a her paper placemat “practice Random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”
She set off chain reaction with that scrawl. Her small gesture of rebellion sparked a quiet peace movement based upon the idea that, even if “the world” is too big to save, this moment is not. This meeting, this contact, this opening—here, at the person-to-person level, here in a place of spontaneity—this is where peace, justice, goodness and human dignity can be shared and kept vibrantly alive.
I can understand that this little slogan, “practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty” would irritate those who really are trying to organize large numbers for social change. Lasting peace and justice do not come about randomly, but must be struggled for and laboriously won at the political, institutional, and economic and levels.
Nevertheless, nevertheless, our very humanity, our spiritual capacity to transcend barriers, and to meet suffering with kindness and help, can never wait for such movements. And maybe it is in the darkest hour, in the most damaged places, in the small gestures that would be forgotten except for their life-saving power, it is in these gestures that our humanity most powerfully shines. Here we combat the inertia of complexity with a simple courage.
The great cellist Pablo Casals said that “Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.”
After Katrina, as stories from New Orleans continued to come out, I was moved many times by testimonies of such interactions:
I heard stories about street gangs, formerly-feared hoodlums, who looted grocery stores in order to bring food and supplies to the elderly and disabled and mothers with babes in arms in their neighborhoods, folks that were being utterly ignored by authorities. These testimonies were shared by the recipients themselves.
Or the diner owner who set up grills on the sidewalk and passed out free burgers and beers to whoever walked by.
Or the guy who got a small multiracial crowd of strangers through a check point into the safety of a white neighborhood by conjuring up a phony but convincing explanation of how all these people of different colors were members of his family.
And what of beauty? The creation of beauty is so crucial specifically because it does not have utilitarian purpose, it is not to be used, but is created to effect our state of consciousness. To startle us, to awaken us, to show us another possibility, to show us truth, or to call to our soul when our soul feels crushed or silenced.
Historian Howard Zinn gave a series of talks on “the artist in a time of war”, and one of his points is that the relationship between the artist and society is one of transcendence, a rising above the stupidity and madness of the world. The very act of creating art is to push past and break open the categories of thinking that society forces upon us.
And even if the artist does no more that give beauty, tenderness, laughter, surprise, or drama, he or she is telling us what the world could be like by showing us what is possible and revealing the spiritual heights and depths of which human beings are capable.
Before moving to Boston four years ago, I lived for several years in Philadelphia. Philli is famous for it’s murals. In every neighborhood, and especially in the poorer neighborhoods, one sees fantastic, vibrant murals celebrating people, history, cultures, nature, the arts, and the imagination. Many of these murals were initiated by community activists who worked with the members of a given community, bringing them together to design and paint their mural. These projects have the capacity to significantly change how the residents feel about their neighborhood and their neighbors, setting other positive changes in motion. The mural shines out, not only making a lasting testimony to their creative process and their shared effort, but it just plain makes the place more beautiful! One cannot help but feel uplifted by the explosion of color and imagination. It gives folks a feeling of pride in their place, and a feeling of hope.
Here in Boston, it’s not murals that are our claim to fame, but community gardens. There’s no oasis more lush and healing to the soul than to come upon a community garden right in the middle of an urban neighborhood. They are places of peace.
Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) calls the person-to-person waging of peace “walking each other home.” In his book How Can I Help? he writes:
“Here we are in the end, fellow beings on a journey. We come together or are brought together in so many ways. Some seem extraordinary: a clown peers into the crib of a child burned beyond recognition; a literacy tutor and a prisoner in solitary keep a conversation going through a food hatch in the midst of a small riot; a North American nun and a Nicaraguan revolutionary lie together in the road, awaiting possible death.
Other [meetings] seem as simple as these are dramatic and yet are still as powerful: a social worker and a bag lady sit together in the park in the rain; an old Japanese man comforts a drunk on a train; a therapist and a patient hear a bird sing.
And sometimes the circumstances are so ordinary we think nothing of them at all, or only in rare flashes appreciate their beauty: putting a child to sleep; talking to a neighbor waiting for the light to turn green; exchanging glances with a fellow overworked employee.
Here we are then in these forms, helping within our appointed roles, easing the pain of body, heart, and mind, working for peace and justice. And yet, in the course of all this, we really do go beyond identification with all that would define us as “other.” We really do meet behind our separateness. And for however long that lasts, such meeting is what helps…helps at the level of being…is help itself. We are sharing the experience of unity. We are walking each other home.”
One of the truisms that I have come to live with is this: I must take positive action on behalf of what I believe is good and right, but not because I expect to make a speck of difference in the large scheme of things; not in order to see gratifying or lasting results in the larger social picture. I must take positive action because it is intrinsically right and good and healing to do so, and because I choose to believe in the beauty of human nature rather than it’s folly.
We cannot know the chain of cause an effect that follows upon our action. We cannot always know whether we have personally made a difference. We may not know whether the total accumulation of peaceful acts does in fact shift human life toward peace. We do not know.
What we do know is that helping, reaching out, giving, sharing, creating beauty, surpassing barriers—these are the quiet gestures that sustain human community through all trials. These are the efforts that keep a lamp lit amidst the darkness of human pain and folly. These are the acts of courage that reveal the world more desired, and show us the way to walk each other back home.
May it be so.
* * * * The Reading * * * *
The reading for this service was drawn from the book The Courage To Give by Jackie Waldman. This collection of stories about every-day heroes includes the story of Bea Salazar. Salazar starts out describing how her life was devastated by an industrial accident that left her unable to work and, for a time, barely able to support her family of five children. After struggling to emerge from a suicidal depression, her life was again dramatically altered by an apparently random encounter.
“I had gone outside to throw the trash away, and I heard something moving in the dumpster. When I peered over the edge, I saw a little boy from a nearby apartment in there. He was digging around in the garbage looking for something to eat. I had never seen anything like that in my life.
I got him out of the dumpster and took the piece of dirty bread he had found out of his hand and threw it away. He started to cry, and I realized he wanted that bread because he was hungry. So I took him into my apartment and I made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then I sent him home.
I was still thinking about this poor little guy about 15 minutes later when someone knocked on my door. When I went to open it, I saw six five-year olds standing there.
“Is it true you’re giving peanut butter sandwiches away” one of the little boys asked me.
“No, I’m not,” I said, “but if you’re hungry, come in. I’ll feed you.”
So I fixed them all peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and I sent them all home. The next day I had thirteen hungry kids at my door. I made some more sandwiches.
Then I started asking questions. I asked people why there are so many hungry children in our neighborhood. I learned that these children got free lunches at school. But it was June and school was out, and so they didn’t have anyone to give them lunch. Their parents worked, and they had to wait until their parents came back at night to eat.
I couldn’t imagine this… I picked up the phone and called the social service agency where my friend worked. Then I called my church. I told everyone what was happening to these children. I told them I wanted to help them, but I couldn’t do it alone.
Did I ever get help! I had so much peanut butter and jelly and bread delivered to my apartment that I still have a jar of peanut butter from that first donation, and that was 8 years ago. With that food…I started feeding the neighborhood kids from my apartment.
We had so much fun that summer. We watched movies, we talked about God, we played games…A lot of the children had head lice, so I tried to clean their hair and get rid of the lice.
The kids came every day the whole summer…At the end of summer, when it was time for school to start, they were sad, and so was I. Helping these children had [helped me] to live.
My apartment felt so empty and quiet that first day of school. But that afternoon, there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, a few of the kids were standing there.
“Bea, we need help with our schoolwork. Will you help us with math? Will you help us with reading?”
“Of course I will,” I told them, my eyes filling with tears. “Come on in.”
In 1990, I formally established a non-profit organization called Bea’s Kids. I went to the management of my building and asked for help, and they gave me an empty one-bedroom apartment where I could take care of 30 kids after school. Within one month, I had 60. So the management gave me a two-bedroom apartment. That’s where my volunteers and I have been taking care of our children for the past 8 years.
Our whole community is involved now. We have volunteers help us from local schools and businesses. People in the community donate thousands of dollars worth of used items, and we sell them once a year in a gigantic garage sale. We use the money to by school supplies, shoes, socks, underwear. Twice a year, at Christmas and when school starts, we buy everyone a pair of new shoes.
There are so many children who need help everywhere. And there are people in apartments complexes everywhere who could help. I tell people, open your doors, open your hearts…
I’ve learned a wonderful lesson from these kids. I’ve learned that the truly happy people are those who have found a way to be useful.”