Today is World Kindness Day. It began in 1998 as a simple global invitation to notice and practice ordinary decency. This year it arrives ten days after an election in which a surprising number of winners talked about kindness. I want to take them at their word and then ask more of all of us.
In Kansas, the Rev. Adam Hamilton became the first Democrat the state has sent to the U.S. Senate since 1932. On election night, he told supporters, “This election is a rebuke of unkindness and cruelty in Washington.”
In Texas, James Talarico, a former middle school teacher who speaks often of Jesus’ command to love God and neighbor, became the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate race since 1988. Talarico has described a politics grounded in love of neighbor.
May that hope prove true in a purple Texas. It is faith-filled, and it is good public policy.
It would be easy to read these results as a partisan scoreboard. I want to read them through an older word.
The Hebrew word chesed appears roughly 250 times in the Hebrew Bible and translators have never quite agreed on how to translate it: Mercy. Loyalty. Steadfast love. Kindness.
In the 1500s, Miles Coverdale finally coined a new word for it: lovingkindness. Chesed is not a passing feeling. It is love that keeps its promises.
Chesed is what God shows Israel when Israel has not earned it and what Ruth shows Naomi when walking away would have been easier. Writing from the ruins of Jerusalem, the poet of Lamentations still insists that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
Chesed is kindness with a long memory and a longer future. That is why I am cautious about the power of the blue wave in this election. Waves crest and recede.
On election night, conservative columnist (who almost became Trump’s press secretary) Scott Jennings talked with Obama advisor Van Jones about the power of kindness in this election. Together, they described it as what Republicans and Democrats most deeply expressed through their votes: a turning away from unkindness.
Jennings said he was glad to see the hate-filled views of certain Republican candidates being sidelined. He said it’s clear to him as a conservative that the hatred of trans kids is not what Texans want. The hatred of Muslims isn’t who we desire to be. The treatment of immigrants has gone too far.
Maybe this election will help us see that kindness is the future for the left and the right. What gives me hope is smaller and steadier than a victory speech.
Hamilton told NPR he hopes to become his Republican Kansas colleague’s “best friend in Washington.” Some will call that naive. I call it covenantal. It assumes that people who disagree are still bound to one another and still owe one another faithfulness.
There is more common ground than our politics admits. Nearly all of us want a government free from greed and corruption. Strong public schools serve every family in a town, whatever yard signs they put out. Affordable health care saves everyone money, including taxpayers who pay for emergency care no one could afford to prevent.
These are not partisan goods. The prophets called them justice. Jesus called them loving your neighbor.
The prophet Micah summed up faithful life in three verbs: Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God. The Hebrew for “love kindness” is ahavat chesed.
Notice that Micah does not say perform kindness or display it. He says love it. Desire it. Keep choosing it when it costs you something.
So the question this World Kindness Day is not which party won. A blue wave can turn red again and probably will someday.
The better question is how we build something steadier than a wave. Call it a tide of lovingkindness.
Tides are not built by moods. They are built by practices.
Speak of opponents the way we would want to be spoken of. Hold our own side to the standard we demand of the other side. Find one shared good, a school, a clinic, a food pantry, and work on it with someone who did not vote the way we did.
In my field of social work, we learn that lasting change is relational. It grows in neighborhoods, congregations, and classrooms long after the cameras leave.
May this turn of events keep us turning and may we keep turning toward one another.
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Professor and the Diana R. Garland Endowed Chair of Child and Family Studies at Baylor University’s Diana Garland School of Social Work.