Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.

Next month we will hold our service auction, which is our biggest fund-raising event of the year. That is true of many Unitarian Universalist congregations. It is also true of many congregations that the minister as one of their service offerings offers for one of you to choose a topic on which we will preach in the coming year. Last year Ann Perry was the winning bidder for choosing a topic on which I would preach. The topic she chose was kindness.

Ann and her two sisters were raised in the Unitarian side of our Unitarian Universalism. Her parents taught Ann and her sisters had this bedtime prayer: “May we be helpful in our home and ever faithful to our friends. May kindness be the rule of our lives.” Ann said that this wasn’t a bad prayer for three little Unitarian girls, and not a bad philosophy of life.

Someone from a very different religious tradition agrees. Perhaps you know the quote from the Dali Lama of Tibetan Buddhism. He says, “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”

He also says, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” he says it is a simple religion. I am not so sure. I think it takes commitment and practice.

This seemed like a good month for a sermon on kindness, because this month’s theme is “Cultivating Compassion.” But are kindness and compassion the same thing? One of you, Stanley Blackman, told me he thought they were different. I very much liked his distinction, and he said I could use it. He says compassion is internal, something we develop within ourselves. Kindness is external. It is how we behave with others. We cultivate compassion within ourselves. It is the necessary mindset for practicing kindness out in the world.

Neither compassion nor kindness are quite as simple as we sometimes want to make them out to be. A few months ago, I was at the American Association of University Women’s used book sale. There in the section marked as religious books was a book by Karen Armstrong. You may have read her book, A History of God. The first two paragraphs of the Wikipedia page on her say, “Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith… She left the convent in 1969. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.”

The book of hers that I picked up at the used book sale is her 2010 book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. Something that requires twelve steps does not seem so simple.

At the beginning of her book, Armstrong puts the problem like this: “There is no doubt that in the deepest recesses of their minds, (people) are indeed ruthlessly selfish. This egotism is rooted in the ‘old brain,’ which was bequeathed to us by the reptiles that struggled out of the primal slime some 500 million years ago. Wholly intent on personal survival, these creatures were motivated by mechanisms that neuroscientists have called the ‘Four Fs’: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and—for want of a more basic word—reproduction. These drives fanned out into fast-acting systems, alerting reptiles to compete pitilessly for food, to ward off any threat, to dominate their territory, seek a place of safety, and to perpetuate their genes. Our reptilian ancestors were, therefore, interested only in status, power, control, territory, sex, personal gain, and survival. Homo sapiens inherited these neurological systems; they are located in the hypothalamus at the base of the brain, and it is thanks to them that our species survived…

“Over the millennia, however, human beings also evolved a ‘new brain,’ the neocortex, home of the reasoning power that enables us to reflect on the world and on ourselves, and to stand back from these instinctive, primitive passions. But the Four Fs continue to inform all our activities. We are still programmed to acquire more and more goods, to respond instantly to any threat, and to fight mercilessly for the survival of number one. These instincts are overwhelming and automatic; they are meant to override our more rational consideration. We are supposed to throw our book aside and flee if a tiger suddenly appears in the garden. But our two brains coexist uneasily: It has been fatal when humans have employed their new brain capacities to enhance and promote old brain motivation; when, for example, we have created technology able to destroy the enemies that threaten us on an unprecedented scale.”

Some of us have found that it is worthwhile to teach and to be taught how to regulate those two brains. Years ago, when I served the Columbia, Maryland UU congregation, a group of us taught an emotional literacy course to children in the local elementary school. Years later the Annapolis, Maryland UU congregation taught emotional literacy to a group of adults at a local jail.

Some basic emotional literacy is necessary for cultivating compassion and for practicing kindness. And what is emotional literacy? It is being able to identify your own feelings and to be able to read the feelings of another person. It is then knowing how to regulate one’s own response to one’s emotions and how to respond appropriately to another person. It is figuring out how to let the neocortex rule the hypothalamus and not letting the hypothalamus guide the neocortex.

To cultivate compassion within our minds and hearts is to work on a piece of our emotional literacy. I regularly go to a Weight Watchers group, and regularly the leader will say, “Would you talk to a friend the way you talk to yourself?” Would you berate them for taking a second cookie?” How often is the person we are the least kind to ourselves? We don’t expect our friends to be perfect, but somehow, we think we should be. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a directive found in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Gospel, but, if you can’t love yourself, how will you love your neighbor?

And then there is the problem of our neighbor not necessarily wanting to be loved as we wish to be loved. The Golden Rule is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but the Platinum Rule is “Treat others the way they want to be treated.”

I remember an incident from my own teens or young adulthood. It involves my brother and me. My brother is a detail guy. He is a computer programmer. I still remember coming home one night and finding him sitting in his bedroom with reams of paper imprinted with zeroes and ones trying to find the error in a code for a bank ATM. In his young adulthood when he had money to spare, he had a sports car that he washed regularly, including going over the grillwork with a toothbrush. He does woodworking and has the patience to do multiple sandings and finishings until he is completely satisfied with the results.

One Friday, the day my mother reserved for cleaning the house, my brother was at work, and I was home. We were to clean our own rooms. I thought I would do my brother a favor and dust his room as well as the room my sister and I shared. My brother was not happy when he came home. He did not appreciate that I had taken the liberty of going into his room and moving his things. I had apparently moved his hairbrush half an inch. I thought I was being helpful in my home, but my brother would not have called it being faithful to him.

This week I heard a piece on the radio about people using chatbots as therapists or in addition to their therapist. One man of seventy some years felt he was not currently communicating well with his wife. He read transcripts of some of their conversations to a chatbot and asked for advice on how to improve his side of the conversations. He apparently found this helpful. I applaud him for taking the time and the initiative to develop his own compassion and figure out how to practice kindness in his marital relationship, even if I might not have chosen the same method.

Some of you may have taken the online year-long Compassion Course created and led by Thom Bond, the founder and Director of Education for the New York Center for Nonviolent Communication. He is also the creator of Compass, an AI chatbot for empathy-based education and conflict resolution (from About Thom — Thom Bond). The tagline on the Compassion Course webpage is “Changing Lives for 14 Years, with more than 30,000 Participants, in over 120 Countries, in 20 Languages” (from The Compassion Course Online).

A year-long course taken by more than 30,000, a book about a 12-step-program to a compassionate life that close to 4,000 people bothered to rate on Goodreads. It seems people want to learn how to become compassionate and to be kind. Armstrong says Confucius, the rabbis, Jesus, Muhammad all taught some version of the Golden Rule. You may know the story of the Pagan who came to Rabbi Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if Hillel could recite the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel took the challenge. He stood on one foot and said, “What is hateful to yourself, do not to another. That is the whole of the Torah and the rest is but commentary. Go and study it.”

But how does one study the Golden Rule and all the commentary on it? Armstrong lays out a plan or exercise for working on both the practice of kindness and developing the mindset of compassion.

She writes, “Skeptics argue that the Golden Rule just doesn’t work, but they do not seem to have tried to implement it in a wholehearted and consistent way. It is not a notional doctrine that you either agree with or make yourself believe. It is a method—and the only adequate test of any method is to put it into practice. Throughout the centuries people have found that when they behaved in accordance with the Golden Rule, they experienced a deeper, fuller level of existence, and they have maintained that anybody can achieve this state if she puts her mind to it.

“But it will be a slow, incremental, and imperceptible process.” (Simple and not simple.) She says, “First, make a resolution to act once every day in accordance with the positive version of the Golden Rule: ‘Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself..’ This need not be a grand, dramatic gesture; it can be a ‘little, nameless and unremembered’ act that may seem insignificant to you. Perhaps you make a point of giving an elderly relative a call, help your wife with the chores, or take time to listen to a colleague who is anxious or depressed. Look for an opportunity to create a ‘spot in time’ in somebody’s life, and this awareness will increase as you become more proficient in mindfulness (one of her twelve steps).

“Second, resolve each day to fulfill the negative version of the Golden Rule: ‘Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.’ Try to catch yourself before you make that brilliantly wounding remark, asking yourself how you would like to be on the receiving end of such sarcasm—and refrain. Each time you succeed will be an ekstasis, a transcendence of ego. Third, make an effort once a day to change your thought patterns: If you find yourself indulging in a bout of anger or self-pity, try to channel all that negativity into a more kindly direction. If you are in a rut of resentment, make an effort to think of something for which you know you should be grateful, even if you do not feel it at the time. If you are hurt by a unpleasant remark, remember that your own anger often issues from pain and that the person who spoke to you so unkindly may also be suffering.

“As you brush your teeth… at the end of the day, check to see if you have performed your three actions. Sometimes you will find that you have done so, sometimes you will remember that on the contrary, you have behaved unkindly and inconsiderately. At this point, recall what you learned during the third step and have compassion on yourself, smile wryly at your omission, and resolve to do better tomorrow. When these three actions have become habitual and part of your daily routine, it is time to up your game and try for two acts of kindness every day and to prevent yourself on two occasions from inflicting unnecessary pain. Then go for three—and so on. It will not be easy. The goal is to behave this way ‘all day and every day.’ By that time, of course, you will have become a sage….”

None of us may actually become sages. We are likely always to commit unkindnesses for which we are going to need to ask forgiveness and to forgive ourselves. But all of us can say this bedtime prayer: “May we be helpful in our home and ever faithful to our friends. May kindness be the rule of our lives.” If you want to add an Amen to that prayer, and Amen simply means “may it be so,” then do what you can to cultivate compassion in your mind and heart and practice kindness with your hands and voice. Follow Armstrong’s guidance or create a program of your own, but put in the effort. Cultivate compassion in mind and heart so that it may grow. Practice kindness so that it may become more and more fully the rule of your life.

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