kindness is the only non-delusional response to anything

Father Greg Boyle reminds us of an irritating and difficult task

I know things are churning nationally, but this post is about my domestic front. Personally, it’s been a tough year. Three beings I loved with all my heart died in the span of ten months, one just five days ago. The first death was violent, incomprehensible, and anticipated. The second miraculous, ceremonial, and tender. The third bewildering, unforeseeable, and tragic. Three very different departures.

Each death was sacred.

Each took me on winding roads into the psyche and out of ordinary realms of existence.

Each returned me—at times reluctantly—to the same terra firma: Kindness.

Precious beings I lost this year.

In our chaplaincy training, Father Greg Boyle made this statement: “Kindness is the only non-delusional response to anything.” It was a bold declaration, irritating at the time. When I heard him say it, a mob of inner voices revolted with a litany of counterarguments. What about this circumstance, you-sir-with-a-charmed-life?¹ And this circumstance? And this one?!

Trust me, believe me, hear me in your bones, I know it’s maddening to talk about kindness, certainly right now, especially right now. You’re living and breathing your own outrages and sorrows, so you know there are plenty of other places we can go when the world is not turning the way it’s fucking supposed to. We can cartwheel into glib positivity and googly-eyed hope, or sink into numbness, depression, and despair. We can drive fast and furious toward finger-pointing and blame, or curl into creature comforts and distraction. There is so much mental terrain at our disposal.

In my own times of lamentation and loss—like today, this very day—I have visited all of those fields. I have circled their borders, knelt on their earth, palmed their soil, breathed it in, tasted it, swallowed it. Some days, I’ve staked a tent to the ground and camped alone under many moons. Each time, I find these fields offer no nourishment. They’re always, in some way, incomplete, like a planet whose atmosphere is too thin to breathe fully, or whose water evaporates as you drink. In frustration and pain, these lands did seem promising but they never circled back to balance, perspective, or vitality. I would emerge from my tent hoping for otherwise, only to be entranced by the red sky of anger, the wildfire of revenge, or the fog of delusion. And the soil—it always yielded bitter fruit: rot in the heart, heaviness in the body, deadening in the soul. But few things are more exasperating than some sanctimonious fool exhorting us not to visit those lands, hawking oversimplified versions of kindness, empathy, and forgiveness, or puerile quests for a silver lining.

I would never make reckless suggestions to you. I know from my own treks into the wound that real kindness—hard-won kindness, startling kindness, kindness culled from the depths of your being, combining boundaries and agency with clarity and personal pain—takes skill and courage.

It also, often, takes time. Father Boyle’s interpretation of kindness was light years away from our first imagining of it as saccharine, diplomatic niceties, or socially-sanctioned words and deeds. His interpretation² was more formidable, aligned with how we might describe kindness in our tradition³: an astute blend of wisdom and compassion, an active choice to minimize harm and take mindful care even when it’s hard, even when the outcome of something is the precise opposite of what we want, even when confronted with the most unlikeable aspects of ourselves, others, and the world.

I think of this as less-delusional, applied kindness and it’s what my family is grappling with right now as we face that third bewildering death—the untimely passing of a noble, generous being, Falkor the 2nd, who had already suffered immensely.

Falkor the 2nd, smiling gorgeously in the front, died of heart failure on November the 8th. We may never really know what happened. He was between two and three years old.

You may wonder, what does kindness look like on this ground? For me:

• It looks like not nursing anger toward the woman from whom we rescued him. A woman convicted of ten counts of animal cruelty for hoarding and abusing 67 animals, many of whom died in excruciating ways. A woman who created an environment so inhospitable to life there’s no reasonable doubt it compromised Falkor’s chance of survival. In a more spacious moment, kindness looks like an effort to consider the horrors of her life, kindling a spark of compassion for conditions that made violence toward innocent animals somehow make sense to her.

• It looks like generating kindness toward the ER veterinarian who took us down branches of a medical decision tree without helping us calculate the risk, and without acknowledgement of a potential fatality. A woman inured to the stakes for Falkor and our pack, lackadaisical at helping us think straight, and blasé about the expense. A woman working with abundant resources but also conflicts of interest, bound up in a system of greed and profiteering, sharing muddy details while extracting thousands of dollars in the midst of panic, fear and confusion. In a good moment, kindness looks like realizing she did the best she could do.

• It looks like generating kindness toward ourselves for not understanding the severity of what Falkor II lived through prior to adopting him, for not paying closer attention to his health sooner, for not knowing enough about pleural effusion to assess options to make better decisions, decisions that might have kept him alive longer, or at least abbreviated his suffering, that might not have ended with his heart failing on the clinic floor, surrounded by strangers performing CPR. It looks like kindness circling back to us as we contemplate the awful possibility that, somehow, in our exhaustion and ignorance, we missed crucial signs and signals, and failed to honor our commitment to him of a life where he could flourish.

Altar for Falkor the 2nd.

I know the coordinates of less-than-kind places I’ll approach as my mind reviews this event. I know I will wander barren terrain—sometimes on purpose—to remember, viscerally, there’s no sustenance there for me. There is nothing in any of those fields for you either, but do not take my word for it. For us to really know and choose kindness, we must visit those fields ourselves. We must taste the soil of self-blame and resentment, of bitterness, loss and despair. When the sun sets on those seductive options and we still hunger for vitality, still yearn to be wholeheartedly alive, it will only make sense to find another field—the field Rumi spoke of beyond right and wrong. The field Father Boyle pointed to when he made his bold statement. The field Naomi Shihab Nye wrote of in her poem, Kindness.

I do not profess to know formidable kindness in all of its contexts and forms. I only know the alternatives lead to places I learn from but do not wish to linger. If kindness does turn out to be the only non-delusional response to anything, then I pray for all of us to practice—to be sincere in our effort, steadfast in experimentation, and courageous in our willingness to try. Falkor the 2nd left in his wake a painful and powerful teaching: to be kind even when the stakes are life and death, even when the ultimate is lost. I cannot return this great teacher to my arms but I can rescue more animals, be rescued in return, and whisper this ongoing blessing:

Noble and Generous Falkor the 2nd, may your body be at ease. May your heart be open. May your mind be boundless. May all trails lead you to love.

From your human mother, heart-broke-wide.
Sun

1. During this training, Father Boyle expressed having lived a charmed life, with a healthy upbringing and family culture, a minimum of adversity. He shared that the many categories of suffering he attends to in his ministry are not something he claims to understand or know intimately.

2. A contemplative Jesuit philosophy.

3. An American version of Sōtō Zen Buddhism.