If You Can't Say Something Nice

When I was twenty-one one of my friends told me, “Risa, people don’t know you like them. They can’t tell. You don’t show them.”

Nate was my roommate Shelley’s boyfriend (hi Nate! Hi Shelley!) who had decided to adopt me as a little sister. (“But I’m older than you,” I told him when he informed me of his decision. “That’s OK,” he said, “I’m taller.”) He read my essays, forced me to watch bad action movies, and coached me in my complete lack of a social life. He was one of my best friends, and he was sitting at my kitchen table, calmly informing me that most people kind of thought I didn’t like them.

I was a little devastated by the thought. I’m a Hufflepuff, meaning (as I explained to my therapist during one of our first visits, all the while saying, “You should really read Harry Potter”) that I am driven forward by relationships, by contact and closeness. By twenty-one I’d shut down the sun-shiny friendliness my mom insists I was born with, but I’d maintained the bounding enthusiasm in the existence of almost everyone around me. I figured that, being as great as they were, they were working off the assumption that I liked them. I didn’t need to go out of my way to communicate it.

Me in all my sunshiny friendly glory, pre low-grade school trauma. I’m freaking adorable.

But I watched that week, and Nate was right. My walls were pretty high after very run-of-the-mill high school drama, and they prevented me from letting the people around me know that I thought they were great. So I started telling them. I handed out compliments like calling cards. I crossed rooms to tell people that I liked their shoes, texted people to say I appreciated their comments in Sunday school, made pacts exchanging affirmation for hugs. Sometimes I freaked people out with my over eagerness in their existence, but I found that, generally, the secret to getting people to like you is just liking them and letting them know it.

The degree to which this has improved my life is difficult to overstate. There are people I talk to every week that I probably wouldn’t have been friends with if I hadn’t decided that I wanted people to know that I liked them. There are jobs I never would have had, places I never would have gone, joy I never would have felt. And while I probably would have figured it out eventually, Nate saying, “People don’t know that you like them,” was the shove that got me out the door, so that conversation at that dingy dinner table is my experiential definition of kindness.

There are phrases that live at the back of my head and emerge in my parent’s voices whenever given the opportunity. My dad says, “For every problem under the sun, either there is a solution or there is none,” along with a few other quoted rhymes that come to me in the midst of panic attacks. (I haven’t found the rhymes particularly helpful, but I expect I will end up saying them to my kids through force of biology.) My mom is the one who says, “Are you being nice or are you being kind?”

The “or” makes it sound one or another, which it’s not. In my mom’s definition, nice is what you do and say to make people like you. Kind is what you do and say to help people be the best version of themselves. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. Encouragement is nice and often what helps people be the best version of themselves. Politeness is nice, and it can prompt feelings of community that bring out the best in people. But, as the “or” implies, they’re not always the same thing.

The example I usually give for this is a hypothetical situation where I meet a friend’s boyfriend who I am pretty sure is a serial killer. When she asks what I think, a nice thing for me to say would be, “He has beautiful eyes.” This is very possibly true and it would make her feel good. The kind thing for me to say, though, is “I think he’s a serial killer, and you can totally sleep on my couch until the restraining order comes through.” She might get mad at me for saying that, and it probably won’t make her like me more, but she’s my friend, and I want what’s best for her, and what’s best for her is not being serial killed by someone with beautiful eyes.

As with everything that I want to be, Jesus is the best at this. Jesus would totally offer you his couch if you were dating a serial killer, and he would absolutely not let you out of his house without mentioning that you were dating a serial killer. He was all about kindness.

When the Pharisees brought a woman to him, saying that she’d been caught in adultery, Jesus scratched his answer into the dirt: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And then he went back to doodling on the ground. As he did, everyone wandered away, one by one, until Jesus was left with the woman. When they were alone, he who was sinless said, “Neither do I condemn you… Go now and leave your life of sin.”

There is kindness all over this story. It was kind to the accusers, because it let them condemn themselves. Although Jesus could have looked each of them in the eye and pronounced their worst sin, instead he let it come to them in quietness. He let them walk to their own repentance.

It was kind to the woman because she got to be alone with the savior in her moment of judgement. She didn’t have to see herself through the eyes of the people who dragged her through the streets, she could just be in front of the person who loved her most in the world.

But it was also kind because Jesus did not give her forgiveness without correction or boundaries. He didn’t lift the commandments from her, just the shame she felt from breaking one. He freed her from her sin and, in her freedom, commanded her to live better. To not just receive his forgiveness, but to regain his trust, to become the person God needed her to be.

Marko Rupnik, mosaic

Kindness requires wisdom. Jesus’s kindness speaks to a knowledge of the people who accused the woman and a knowledge of the woman herself. Jesus knew what to do to invite them to be the best they could be, because he knew who they were.

Which is how I make sense of how Jesus interacted with the pharisees. Jesus was not nice to the pharisees. He called them a lot of names—like “blind guides,” “fools,” “serpents,” and “hypocrites.” I think in today’s language that might be “idiots,” “idiots,” “jerks,” and “self-centered, self-righteous doofs.” I imagine this hurt the pharisees’s feelings. It’s not like God wasn’t important to them, it was that they lost their way on their way to him. They thought they were following God and doing OK, and here comes Jesus saying things like, "If you were blind, you wouldn’t be guilty…. But you remain guilty because you claim you can see” (John 9:41).

I don’t think Jesus lost his temper here. I think when perfect beings react in anger, it’s because anger is what will get the people they’re interacting with where they need to go. It’s what will invite them to be the best they can be. Jesus called the Pharisees names because it was what was going to call their attention to the faults they needed to address to become the people they needed to be. He chastened them because he loved them. He loved them in all their very evident, very hurtful weakness, he just didn’t want them to stay in that weakness.

Kindness is situational. It requires adherence to principles instead of rules, and principles are messy, their forms are fuzzy. Kindness is hard, and I am not great at it. I speak when I should be quiet, and I’m quiet when I should say something. I hurt people aimlessly or spare their feelings to spare my own pride. When my mom’s voice says, “Are you being nice or are you being kind?” I sometimes feel a little helpless. I don’t know, Mom. How would I know?

But, as one of my favorite books I read last year says, “Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails” (Barbra Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, 14). Minus Jesus’s perfect knowledge, I can only practice and fail at being kind. I can have conversations and feel bad about them afterward go to God and ask, “Was that kind?”