The Charity Of Kindness
August 2023
By Guest Writer Roy Salmond*
Over these past pandemic years, a plethora of words and phrases entered our communal lexicon:
Social distance
Shelter in place
Vaccines
Isolation
Quarantine
“Be kind,” came to the fore as one of our more magnanimous slogans - printed ubiquitously, encouraging us to extend charity to each other during trying times.
When we think about ‘charity’, we often think about money - disbursing income to serve others and ourselves.
Charity however, is not limited to material matters. Whatever we mutually value and willingly share, is its own form of charity.
Kindness is a contagion we all long to catch.
We all hold kindness as a collective virtue, yet we can’t always acquire it on our own, so sometimes we need help – someone to donate to our cause.
Wonderfully, it rapidly transmits when we willingly celebrate and attend to someone other than ourselves.
And unlike financial donations, kindness is a two-way exchange, given and received. As the song says, “I’ll help you carry on… for it won’t be long, ‘till I’m gonna need somebody to lean on.”
Kindness is a hope we all harbour. Incompatible with self-interest, it’s a potential that propagates itself.
In all our ages and stages we’re a diverse combination of cool and indifferent, undeserving and proud, needy and arrogant, all needing offerings of kindness from others.
As philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel reflected,
“When I was young, I valued clever people. Now that I am old, I value kind people.”
Like that ancient source of wisdom, Proverbs affirms:
“Anxiety weighs down the heart, but a kind word cheers it up.”
(Proverbs 12:25)
The charity of kindness.
You can’t get a tax receipt for it, but as a bonus to the donor, it’s proven to decrease blood pressure and the stress hormone ‘cortisol’, thereby increasing overall health and length of life.
That’s a worthwhile return on investment.
Blessings,
Roy
* Roy Salmond is a record producer, working out of his studio Whitewater Productions in Vancouver Canada. He has also been a successful podcast co-host (family360podcast.com), speaker and writer, penning the weekly arts and faith blog: Between The Notes (this article was originally published there).