Brian’s Reflection: Friday, December 7, 2007



When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become
afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place
where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from
security into something malevolent and bottomless.

- Willa Cather, author, born on this day, 1873, in Black Creek Valley VA


Willa Cather was born into the Baptist religion, but “converted” (funny word, that) to the Episcopal Church in 1922. After co-authoring a very critical book about Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science (which so outraged the Christian Scientists that they tried to buy every copy printed!), she wrote for McClure’s magazine. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “One of Us”. She made the town of her youth, Red Cloud, Nebraska, famous. She died April 24, 1947, and is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. And I’m sure that many of you will be thrilled to know that she was inducted in 1986 into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame!!

Kindness. Ms. Cather is right. Along with Love, and Compassion, Kindness is right up there in my book as a mark of great human soul. I think this is why I can’t watch any movie or read any book where someone is being tortured. And why I was so both stunned and angry that any high government official could possibly say that they couldn’t say whether waterboarding was or was not torture. The feeling I had was that indeed we had dropped from “security into something malevolent and bottomless”.

I can think of several instances when I have been unkind. It means that I have lost sight of a person’s humanity – and my own. And I am ashamed of myself for it.

The word “kind” has a telling etymology. It comes from the Old English “gecynde”, meaning “innate” or “natural”. Theough prehistoric Germanic, it is related to “kin”.

To be kind is to be innately, naturally human. And to be part of the human family.

Let’s join the human race.

Brian+