What We Nurture
Rev. Cricket Potter
Follen Community Church
September 16, 2012
READING:
Our reading comes from the book Spiritual Literacy by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, and it is entitled “Kindness.” In this piece, we hear the brief musings of several great thinkers on the topic of kindness.
“Whether one believes in religion or not – there isn’t anyone who doesn’t appreciate kindness,” observes the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism…..
American novelist Henry James gets directly to the point: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a Hasidic master, says, “It’s easy to criticize others and make them feel unwanted. Any one can do it. What takes effort and skill is picking them up and making them feel good.”
Kindness is sometimes viewed as one of those effete virtues lacking in charisma or clout. And yet it encompasses meaningful acts of love, words of encouragement, various kinds of etiquette… (and) generosity….No wonder Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel near the end of his life concludes: “When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.”
This past summer was a very full one for me and my family because, as many of you know, we adopted 5-year-old Dagmawit and brought her home from Ethiopia just as our church year was ending.
After two trips to Ethiopia and over two years of slogging through a very trying adoption process, we were finally all together.
So, our summer was all about settling in as a newly expanded family of four.
I will admit, I was not quite prepared for how chaotic life would feel with two children.
One seasoned parent of four wrote to offer her well wishes, and she described that sense of chaos in such upbeat terms.
“Life must be a little topsy-turvy for you,” she wrote.
Topsy-turvy indeed!
Dagmawit had so much to adjust to and figure out – a new language, new culture, new family, and a new home, to name a few things.
Not to mention all the losses and transitions she has experienced in her life.
There would be a whole range of feelings on her part including sadness, anger, confusion, and frustration, and those might get acted out in challenging ways for us all.
What another adoptive parent wrote to me in the middle of a particularly exhausting and trying day sums it up well:
“Okay, I’m just trying to remember to be compassionate. Be compassionate. He’s been through a lot in his little life – both in Ethiopia and in coming here, and I can’t forget that.”
I was going through my own exhaustion and frustration, and this parent’s email reminded me of what I needed to stay focused on.
“Be compassionate, Cricket. Focus on compassion,” I would say to myself when a tantrum was going on longer or with greater intensity than I was prepared for.
“Dagmawit is going through so much, and all you have to do is be compassionate.”
To be perfectly honest though, I was struggling.
In the nitty-gritty of my own daily effort to cope, compassion felt too big for me, almost inaccessible.
In those intense moments with my child, when I needed all my strength to stay calm, I needed something more mundane, more concrete, if that makes sense.
I remember one afternoon – a real low point.
I had to take Dagmawit to her room to separate her from my older daughter.
She rebelled against the time-out with every ounce of her being.
I tried to stay calm and stay with her, but eventually it got to me.
“I don’t care,” I finally blurted out in desperation, and I got up and walked away.
As soon as I made it down the hallway and to a quieter space, I was ashamed and horrified at myself.
I hated what I had just said to Dagmawit.
I knew I needed to change something within me, but I just didn’t know what at that moment.
It just so happened that, within a few days of that low point, I heard an interview with Sylvia Boorstein.
Boorstein is a renowned Buddhist teacher, a psychotherapist, and a best-selling author.
But she will tell you that, first and foremost, she is a wife, mother and grandmother.
What I love about Sylvia Boorstein is that she writes and speaks from a place deeply grounded in the complexity of family life and relationship.
She gets the wonderful joys and the daily challenge of it all.
In this interview, she talked about what she tries to nurture in her family and what she has been focusing on lately in her teaching.
She said,
I have been talking a lot about kindness in the last few years. It’s such…a humble word
when we think about spiritual practices or if I think about 30 or more years ago when I
began to be interested in a meditative path. We talked about things like enlightenment
and revelation, and kindness is much more humble….(K)indness is what I’d really like to
establish in myself.
She went on to say,
The Dalai Lama, when people ask him what’s your religion, says my religion is kindness.
I think that’s a word that subsumes tolerance and forgiveness and graciousness and
patience. What I like about kindness is that it’s doable. Unlike those virtues like
compassion or even tolerance that you have to cultivate…. You can actually be kind to
someone even if you don’t feel especially compassionate.
Boorstein then offered this one simple question as a tool, a way to check in on our ability to be kind in any given situation:“Am I able to care in this moment?”
That I could get.
That was something doable, something I could wrap my brain around, even in frazzled moments.
Boorstein was speaking right to me.
Even if I couldn’t feel the expansiveness of compassion in a given moment, I could still be kind and act kind.
In the heat of the moment, I could keep asking myself, “Am I able to care?”
The very asking would help keep me mindful of my need to stay tuned into Dagmawit’s ownstruggle in a given moment.
Boorstein’s question became a mantra for me.
When I felt myself being pulled toward anger or resentment, I would take a deep breath and repeat to myself, “Can I care right now? What do I need to do to care right now?”
That mantra brought me back from the brink.
It helped guide me toward the smallest and simplest things I could do – an affirmation or a touch - to keep the connection going between us and keep kindness at the forefront.
It helped me to see my young daughter as someone struggling in her own right and not as the hellion she appeared to be.
It helped me to breathe, name for myself the frustration or tension I was definitely feeling, but then move through that to a better place.
Not long after I was saved by Boorstein’s wisdom and the mantra she offered me, we had a particularly rough afternoon at home for us all.
Everyone’s nerves were frayed.
My 12-year-old daughter Haley finally pulled me aside and said in a serious and vulnerable tone,“Mom, this is really hard.”
My heart ached for her in her struggle, and I so appreciated her honesty.
We hugged and I said, “It is hard at times. It’s very hard. I struggle, too. We may not like how Dagmawit is behaving and you may not like her at times. That’s okay. But we have to be kind to her.”
Haley got that.
She got that she might not like her younger sister in a particular moment, but she still needed to treat her sister in a kindly way.
And I saw her put that into action.
What I began to realize is that kindness is accessible to us all, across all ages and relationships.
It isn’t the grand strategies or big plans, it’s the day-to-day things that may seem small but added together very much shape ourselves and our relationships.
It also allows us to have our very human feelings but work around or through them in the way we treat the other person.
Remember Boorstein’s comment that you can still be kind to someone even if you don’t feel compassionate in that moment.
For Dagmawit as a 6-year-old, it’s learning not to hit and to be gentle with others, to help them if she can, or share.
For Haley, it’s all that plus learning to listen, trying to see things from the other person’s perspective, reaching out and helping even if it involves some work on her part.
And for us adults, it’s all that plus being even more mindful of the different perspectives we all bring to our gathering along with the different ways we can reach out to one another.
The thing about kindness and caring is that while it is doable for us all, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Patience, understanding, forgiveness, generosity, deep listening – they are all needed.
What helps me is to think of kindness as a spiritual practice.
It is something we work on, not expecting to be perfect but trusting we can get better with intention and practice.
And this is here Boorstein also helped me -to aspire but not to beat myself up when I mess up.
We need to be gentle as we learn.
Forgiveness of self and others is key.
So, we pick ourselves up and try again.
We seek to keep the connection going, whether it’s with our loved ones, our friends, our colleagues, or the people right around us here at Follen.
What we don’t want to do is shut down or shut another person out.
I think of my saying I don’t care and walking away from Dagmawit.
That is what we don’t want to do.
Thinking of us now as a community, I can see some potential challenges in the months ahead.
We have national elections with all the heated debate they tend to bring.
We have your search process for a new settled minister and all the discernment that goes with the process.
Other things may arise as well.
No doubt, there will be a lot to work through as a community of faith.
Can we continue to care as different opinions and needs are aired?
Can we also find strength and guidance in our faith as Unitarian Universalists?
Can we continue to lift up our shared principles - about how unique and worthy we each are and about how we value our individual search for truth.
Sylvia Boorstein offered a question that helped me in my challenges as a parent.
I would like to offer another question to help us as a community of faith.
This comes from the closing worship service at our denomination’s General Assembly in June:
Our question for you is whether (your faith) leads you to connection, leads you to listen
to your deepest self…and serve needs greater than your own. In other words, do your
beliefs help you connect to self, life, and others? (Rev. Kaaren Anderson, June 26, 2011)
I certainly hope so.
And if you feel we are falling short in that way, I hope that you would come to Tricia and me so that we can explore ways that our faith can connect us more deeply.
As I think about my own personal work on all this and about our communal effort, particularly in the months ahead, I want to add one last thing.
I keep learning how essential humility is in all this.
Humility to understand that my story is not the only story.
Humility to be open to other ideas, other ways, other needs beside my own.
Humility to say, “I was wrong,” “I’m sorry,” or “I need to try again.”
As my daughter said to me, “This is hard.”
It’s hard in part, I think, because it’s about where the rubber hits the road everyday in our gestures and interactions.
That’s where I trust that we can support and nudge one another.
That’s where I know from my own experience that just naming the struggle together helps.
When my daughter Haley named how hard it was for her, we took a collective sigh together and, in that, found a renewed strength to keep trying.
In this moment and with these people, can I care?
Is my faith leading me to a deeper connection to myself and to others?
Such worthy questions for us to ask.
I am grateful to be here with all of you so that we can face into these questions together in the year ahead.
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