By Ajung Sojwal

I used to think kindness was easy, that it was a thing of good upbringing — and then a deep family crisis happened and there, I found myself confronted with all that I had been preaching about. I didn’t know it then, but I know now that it was the fire that not only tested but completely melted away my so-called authenticity of faith in God. In that family crisis, it wasn’t so much undying love or moral strength or deep wisdom that brought us out to the other side; it was kindness birthed from our collective experience of deep pain, of betrayal and loss. Naomi Shihab Nye, in her poem, Kindness, writes, 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
What you counted and carefully saved,
All this must go so you know
How desolate the landscape can be
Between the regions of kindness.

I am learning that faith is so much more about kindness — that involuntary response of attentiveness to another human being where the ordinary becomes sacred. It is the slow and relentless work of the resurrection that my deep sorrow in the face of our family crisis should become the classroom where I finally get to learn the “tender gravity of kindness” that Nye speaks about. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is, I am learning, better practiced as kindness. Genuine kindness demands that I put myself in my neighbors’ shoes not out of pity or even mercy but in realization that this could be me. 

Kindness is what gives me hope that God is still at work in the handful of folks that show up to worship together on any given Sunday. Kindness from parishioners who take the time to ask me how my time was with my parents, parishioners who come to me after church and say “I needed to hear that sermon,” parishioners who shed tears in my office in complete trust that I have the capacity to hold their stories in my heart, parishioners whose faces light up as they walk toward me and I am reminded, This is all God’s grace. This is what it means to be ministered to and to minister. 

It is my own journey with sorrows, which is inevitable for every human being, which made incarnate what Jesus said: “Feed my sheep.” Being given the uncommon privilege of holding someone else’s sorrow, to be allowed to speak to the sorrow of the one who shares their sorrow with me, this I have found is the real food for the soul that looks like, feels like, tastes like the kindness of God that manifested in the non-judgmental embrace of friends who showed up in our family crisis. That is real Kindness, the non-judgmental embrace of another… and of myself, at the crumbling of our meticulously curated lives. 

Ajung Sojwal is the Priest-in-Charge of All Saint’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto, CA. Ajung and her husband moved to the Bay Area after serving for many years in churches in the New York, Connecticut and New Jersey area. Ajung is passionate about conversing and learning to engage in community as the incarnational Body of Christ in a suffering world.