Fierce Kindness.

BY DREW BROWN

Drew Brown is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can follow him on Twitter @drewbrownwrites or on his website at drewbrownwrites.com.

“[Fred Rogers] wanted to talk to us so that we could remember what it was like to be a child. And he could talk to anyone, believing that if you remembered what it was like to be a child, you would remember that you were a child of God.”

-Tom Junod (“My Friend Mister Rogers”)

Before we knew Grandma had dementia, back when she was still living on her own, a man impersonating me gave her a call.

He said his name was Andrew and that he was in trouble. No one calls me Andrew, but Grandma was having memory issues then and probably didn’t catch that. He told her “I” needed two thousand dollars in order to get out of jail. He said I needed the money fast. She stood there at her kitchen counter, phone in her hand, and told the man that she would have to talk to my parents before she sent me any money. When she said that, he hung up abruptly.

I hate the idea that I share the same air, the same sun, the same world with someone like him.

Sometimes I think we’ve made synonyms of nice and kind. We see kindness as weak-kneed submission.

We see it as ease, as comfort, as flattery. Kindness should exist when it’s easy and when it’s deserved—an inch deep and Dollar General cheap. Nothing solid enough to build a home on.

Kindness doesn’t feel like it belongs in 2020, not with impersonators calling old women, not with school shootings flitting across living room televisions, not with a political system primed to villainize the rest of the world for its own gain.

Tom Junod, in a recent Atlantic article about Fred Rogers, pondered what Fred would do in light of recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. How would he react to the horrific news of the world today? How would he handle the reality of a world seemingly gone mad? Would he just fold up his neighborhood, put away his puppets, and cloister himself inside his own imagination?

Junod writes that Fred would “say that the mass murderers of El Paso and Dayton were children once too… He would pray for the shooters as well as for their victims, and he would continue to urge us, in what has become one of his most oft quoted lines, to ‘look for the helpers.’”

How could Mister Rogers show kindness to all parties involved? Is that kindness, and can that even exist today?

I have a heart which easily sours to the world. It looks at the news, looks at the chaos, and decides working towards beauty is a savage and fruitless affair. I grow cold shoulders because that’s what is needed to not be punked, to not have a man call your grandma pretending to be you. I just want to close my laptop, close my eyes, throw up my hands, and open my mouth: “Screw them. Screw the world. Screw it.”

I don’t like that about myself. I wish I could be open to the world. I wish I had the quiet prayerfulness of Mister Rogers. I wish I could walk towards justice while holding kindness, seeing justice and kindness as compatible collaborators.

But sometimes I can’t. Sometimes kindness just doesn’t work.

One of my favorite novels of all time is a book called Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It’s named after the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, and the narrator is an aging pastor named John Ames who has a young son he knows he will not be able to see grow up. The book is a collection of journal entries for his son to read when John is gone.

At the very end of the book, Marilynne Robinson, through the character of John Ames writes, “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?”

That question, “Only, who could have the courage to see it?” is, in times like these, my north star. It snaps me back to the truth of kindness, of beauty, of all the words I want to throw away or sentimentalize: they exist, but they exist within courage. I must pray for the courage to see them.

Kindness prays for the victims and the shooter, my grandma and the caller. And kindness radiates from the faces of those praying and working towards justice and beauty—in the face of Mister Rogers on reruns and in the face of my grandma, even when she can’t remember my full name.

What does it look like to develop a fierce kindness that faces the world, a kindness which doesn’t sentimentalize or patronize, a kindness which breathes? How do we recognize the innocence still smoldering, the child still longing for beauty, deep within every soul?

This feels nearly impossible, but I am praying for you. I am praying we have the courage to see it.