Revd Vanessa Conant, Rector of St Mary’s and the Parish of Walthamstow, writes:

In the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell fire, priest and writer Azariah France-Williams, went to help with the relief effort. He writes, ‘we went the day after it caught fire, and it was still smouldering when we got there. There were a number of people who had had to evacuate the apartment block and they were sat dejected at the side of the road, just huddled together, a thousand-yard stare.’

‘But then behind them was a young man playing the violin, just playing the most beautiful classical music. You could still see the smoke, you could see the smouldering of the flats behind him. Later, I bumped into him, and I said, “Why did you do that?” He said, “When I saw it on the news, I thought I can’t organize some big relief effort or whatever, but I can play the violin. So I thought I’d just come and play the violin”‘.  

I read this story in a new book, ‘Project Kindness’, a collection of conversations about what kindness is and what it looks like to be kind in hostile times. The author and editor, Ellen Loudon, reflected on this story, saying, ‘There is such beauty and such worth in the offering of that gift. This is all any of us can do, offer the little fire of kindness and hope it grows into a positive furnace of something that can change the world for the better.’

I was privileged to attend the launch of Project Kindness last week. For an hour, panellists ranging from a forensic psychiatrist, to a Bishop, to the Church of England’s Director for Racial Justice talked about kindness, what it is and what it isn’t. It was a robust and thought-provoking discussion, and I thought of how often kindness is reduced to something slightly anodyne, or how kindness – particularly in public discourse – has been so eroded.

I remembered, too, a member of one of my congregations telling me that they had been told to ‘be kind’ when they had finally spoken out about being bullied in their workplace. Their anger and sense of injustice had been stifled by this injunction. In this case, kindness was weaponised. Was it unkind to be hurt? Was it unkind to express frustration or disappointment? Is kindness about accommodation no matter what the circumstances? 

In the Bible, the word most often used for kindness is the Hebrew word, Hesed. It’s a powerful word meaning a combination of love, generosity and faithfulness. It describes an act of promise-keeping loyalty that is motivated by deep care. 

In the Hebrew Bible, God is most often the one demonstrating loyal loving-kindness, often to people who are undeserving and have betrayed their covenant. God’s greatest demonstration of this is in the self-giving sacrifice of Jesus for the redemption of humanity. 

In turn, human hesed is expressed by acting justly and living out what it means to bear the image of God on earth. It is characterized by mercy. Kindness seeks out truth and believes in the transformation of all people, it is consistent and patient, trusting in the possibilities of redemption. 

In another part of Project Kindness, Jon Swales, a mission priest at a church in West Yorkshire (described as ‘a place for those battered and bruised by the storms of life’), talks about the fact that kindness can look like ‘the slow burn miracle of love’ and describes how, through loving-kindness, some members of his church have been able to lay down lives of addiction as they step into faith. But, Ellen writes, ‘mostly this is hard, truth-telling loving kindness that is vulnerable and can be heart-breaking.’ 

Being kind, hesed, is very different from being nice. 

In St Mary’s, I receive a great deal of kindness, and I pray that is true for everyone who joins us. I pray that they are able to know and experience kindness. But I hope our experience is much more of hesed – of faithful promise-keeping to one another, of merciful justice-seeking, of truth-telling loving-kindness that help us all to become who God has called us to be. 

And in a hostile world, where sometimes unkindness abounds, I pray we will be people who offer the little fire of kindness, discerning enough to know when God needs us to simply play the violin among the embers. 

With love 

Vanessa