Adding A Bit Of Leaven

Our country has been through another election cycle, and once again campaigning has widened the gulf separating us. We’ve endured months of vitriol from both sides, which leaves us asking, “Where do we go from here?”

I believe one answer to that question lies outside of politics. Each side has said everything it can to convince the other side, but the reality is that we end up talking past one another or not talking to each other at all. Much has been said about the need to find common ground, but little has been said about how to create common ground.

I’d like to propose a social experiment, one based on kindness. No, not the sappy kindness we find on greeting cards, but kindness as concrete acts that can happen in our everyday interaction with one another.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber once wrote that there are no great people, only useful people. In a similar way, I suggest that we give up saying to people, “Oh, you are such a kind person,” and instead thank them for doing a kind act. Shifting the focus from the person’s value to the value of what the person did is actually more useful.

Why? Because saying to someone “You’re such a kind person” commonly leads either to feelings of pride or, more often, a sense of guilt. We all know that we are not always kind. We have been rude, short-tempered, and judgmental enough in our lives to know we don’t deserve to be summed up as a kind person. But when we say to someone, “That was a kind act,” the focus is on a choice a person made, not on the person.

This social experiment begins by our observing the kind acts that we see around us and, if possible, letting the person who did the kind act know that we noticed. If not at the time, maybe the opportunity to acknowledge the person’s kind act will happen later, through an email, or perhaps not at all.

The more our antennae are tuned to note and acknowledge the kind acts around us, the more kind acts we will see. We’ll awaken to a new truth, that the glue that holds communities together is the kind acts, many of them small, which happen around us every day.

Another by-product of noticing acts of kindness is that we will find ourselves in more and more situations where we’ll have the chance to offer a kind act. We won’t do the kind act to be complimented; we simply will do the kind act because we’re getting turned on to the beauty of small acts of kindness.

Yet another by-product of this social experiment is that we will be increasingly shocked when we observe unkind acts. We’ll find mean and rude behavior jarring, and we’ll grieve more when we witness those behaviors.

My point is that noting, acknowledging, and offering kind acts can help heal our divided society because kind acts have nothing to do with party affiliation. When someone offers a kind act, we don’t ask if the person is Republican or Democrat. Likewise, we don’t ask about the person’s ethnicity, religion, where they live, or anything else that divides us.

Returning to the Indianapolis airport recently and feeling a bit light-headed because of some medication, I struggled schlepping the luggage onto the bus taking us to the parking lot. Across from my wife and me on the bus sat a woman close to my age—in other words, not so young herself. She looked straight ahead, never glancing in our direction, never seeming to notice us. When the bus driver asked which stops we needed, the woman called out a stop well beyond ours, yet, when the bus arrived at our stop, she jumped off the bus and said, “Pass your suitcases down to me.” Once I did, she jumped back on the bus and was gone before I barely said “thank you.”

It was a small moment, one so small that someone might say it wasn’t consequential. But as Jesus said, It takes only a small amount of leaven to cause bread to rise. Perhaps it will be small kind acts that will be the leaven that will cause our society to rise.