By Harold W. Anderson, Ph.D., M.A., M.Div., MFT
“Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.”
One day, as I strolled across the campus, one of my students stopped me. She had a question, which I did my best to answer. As she and her friend walked away, I heard her say “He’s so nice!” While academia is all about excelling in scholarship, publishing, teaching, and debate, I think the highest praise we can receive are found in the words of that young woman, “He’s so nice,” a goal I have worked towards my entire professional life. Don’t get me wrong, it is a goal that I have not always achieved. Occasionally students, parishioners, clients, and colleagues can do and say things that get on my nerves, sometimes making me angry, and during those times, I may respond with irritation. Goals are rarely achieved perfectly, and if they are, they are probably not demanding enough. But my life goal is to have people say of me, “He’s so nice.” This is not to say that I’m a pushover. Being nice does not imply the absence of high standards not only for myself, but others as well. Students don’t learn as well when not challenged with demanding lessons; when a parishioners’ faith is challenged, they have a chance to find greater depth to their spirituality; and a mental health provider does their clients no favor when excusing poor behaviors instead of holding out the hope of improvement that accompanies hard work. In fact, a person demands the best of themselves and others when they do so in a nice way. Being nice is the condition by which worlds are transformed and dreams become a reality.
As I reflect upon my goal, I think of those who have mentored me throughout my academic and professional careers. The ones that have made the greatest impact were those who held me to high standards but did so not in a confrontational and hateful way but were…well…nice about it. This started early in my life. When I was young, I suffered a traumatic brain injury, which nearly took my life and for a while, stole my ability to walk. I did fully recover, but soon after my recovery, we moved to a much larger city. My first-grade teacher was NOT nice, and I learned very little. In fact, my memory of that year is one of fear not education. The result was that I struggled to read. Prior to the second grade, we moved, and I started a new school. Mrs. Boseland, my second-grade teacher, recognized that I was not able to read as well as I should, and she worked with me and my parents so that I could catch up. She was not mean about it. She was not judgmental. She did not brand me as ignorant. Rather, she was nice. In a gentle way, she taught me to read and held me to a high standard: learning what I should have learned in the first grade but also trying to keep up with the rest of the class. Because she was nice about it, she taught me more than to read. She also taught me a little bit about life. It would have been easy to give up if I had a teacher like my first-grade teacher, and I may have done so. But Mrs. Boseland was nice; she was not judgmental and because of that, I not only learned to read, I also learned that we find the best in others when we are nice.
A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
I think both of my grandmas were nice, but my Grandma Anderson really sticks out in my mind. She was a woman whose spirituality was amazing. When we were in church, I always knew my Grandma Anderson was in attendance when over the drone of the service, a loud “Amen” would ring out in response to something the pastor had said. When Grandma would read from the Bible, which she did on Christmas Eve, we did not have to imagine what it meant to be loved because Grandma’s love poured out of the words she read. My cousins and I loved Grandma Anderson’s house. It was a place where we felt accepted; it was a place where we felt safe; it was a place where we felt loved. Because of this, the many memories of those days have become an important moral compass for me as I have tried to navigate my life.
I remember a time soon after my wife and I were married. It was my wife’s second marriage, my third. Grandma had just moved to an elderly care unit, and she did not like it much. Being over 100 years of age, Grandma could no longer safely navigate the challenges of “Grandma’s house,” as we fondly called it, and she had to adapt to different living arrangements. Did I say she didn’t like it? That is an understatement. She was downright angry about it. But when I brought my wife to meet her, all her irritation was put aside, and as she grasped the hands of my wife, she looked at her with the love that was so Grandma and welcomed her into the family. Grandma was nice, and her ability to be so, taught me that being nice is more than an emotion. It is a way of life. No matter what life’s circumstances, if we have developed a nice lifestyle, we are nice to those we meet no matter how difficult life may become.
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
My dad, her son, was also a very nice man. He was nice, but he was also strict and sometimes this meant spankings when I misbehaved. The interesting thing, however, is that I remember his acts of kindness much more than I do the spankings. As I grew older, however, the spankings subsided, and I learned a great deal about relationships from my father. As some teens are, I was rebellious and questioned everything my parents thought decent, often embracing a lifestyle they found not only offensive, but frightening. My parents thought alcohol and any type of drug including cigarettes anathema. Yet, I challenged them by engaging in much of what they disdained. They never abandoned me but were always there when my lifestyle knocked me down and I needed to be picked back up except once. My mom—who had a nose like a bloodhound—sniffed out a baggie of marijuana in a jacket pocket in my bedroom. My dad came to my place of employment and asked me to take a ride with him. Without the anger that seemed to accompany the spankings, he looked at me with saddened eyes and informed me of my mother’s discovery. Drugs in our home, he told me, will never be tolerated. I looked at the floorboard of the car in shame, and then I heard these words, “You are forcing me to make a choice I don’t want to make,” he said. “You are forcing me to choose between your mother and you. No matter how much I love you, I will always choose your mother. Please don’t make me choose.”
I didn’t give up drugs right away, but the words of my father hung heavily over my head. There was something in his voice that made me understand that I dare not call his bluff. He was a nice man, but being nice also means that one must set boundaries defining one’s character and one’s compassion. Being nice does not mean anything goes, nor does it mean that a nice person accepts any type of behavior. Being nice means commitment. My dad loved my mom; he loved me. But the sacred nature of his marriage relationship was a relationship that helped him become the person he was and the man he had become. His life, formed by the love of his parents and the marriage to my mother was the substance of him being a nice man and he had the courage to establish boundaries even if it meant denying his son. Wow! The strength of that moment will never escape me and taught me the courage and strength required to be nice.
It takes courage to be kind.
Another life lesson that taught me the meaning of being nice was found in my academic experience. It would be impossible to recount all the nice people I encountered and the lessons they taught me. It should be noted, however, that there is an A-side and a B-side to my education. The A-side was the side of academic laziness, and the B-side was the side when I learned the magic of education, something that took place when I gave up drugs and embraced the fullness of life. It was during the B-side that I learned that education is not something restricted to a bunch of facts requiring route memory. Rather, education is a matter of building character. It is the embodiment of knowledge to find the transcendence of wisdom, and as such includes a transcendental place to stand, which is marked by the ability to sift through life experiences so that in the occupations we pursue, we may do so out of a spirit of edification not arrogance.
In this sense, education is not easy and evades those who want merely a grade or simply seek the skills necessary to perform a task. A very vivid example of this was when I was working on my master’s thesis at Pacific School of Religion. Being a part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, these institutions had amassed some of the most profound theological and religious thinkers the world had to offer. Their intelligence was awe-inspiring if not sometimes daunting. However, my memory of these people is that they refused to allow their intelligence to get in the way of their ability to educate. To draw upon the age-old distinction, education for them was more than theory, it was a practice. One could not become a minister based upon theory and dogma alone. If a person is to be a minister, the person they are and the things they say and do are every bit as important as the knowledge they have amassed. This was quite a contrast to the theory-ladened education to which I had become accustomed, and it was something I wrestled with greatly. But it was their insistence on practice that marked the tenor of their pedagogy and set them apart in what I can only call a “culture of niceness.” In this culture, I learned the age-old lesson that wisdom is a result of learning to ask penetrating questions; it is not found primarily in the answers we give. The demand of my professors was not agreement. The demand was inquiry that called into question not only their thoughts on theology and religion, but the religious traditions of which one was a part. To help us do so, they invited us to a dialogue about religion, but more importantly, about faith.
The meaning of this became clear when I was working on my master’s thesis. I thought my work left behind the denomination of which I was a part. Those who were part of that denomination would not appreciate or agree with what I was trying to do. So, I did not include any denominational teachings in my thesis, or put differently, I did not offer how my thesis was a critique of the denomination of which I was a part making my thesis merely academic. This did not suffice and while they appreciated my thesis, they did not like the fact that it was so theory ladened. If I were to demonstrate my knowledge, it must be grounded in my faith-experience, which meant I had to relate it to the denomination of which I was a part. I didn’t appreciate their insistence much, but I learned something in the process. The reason these scholars had developed a culture of niceness was because they were not afraid to address their existentiality, their place in life and the groups and institutions of which they were a part. When in the spirit of academic discourse, they found they must change, they did so, not in a condemning way, but in an informed fashion. They knew, and their knowing shaped their character allowing them to engage those around them not with arrogance, but with what I would call “intelligent compassion.” They may think me wrong, but they were nice about it and from this mixture came growth…growth of knowledge, but just as importantly, growth in character. That is the magic of education. Education is not simply about amassing information. It is about building character and that is what nice people do. The boundary that marked a mediocre education from a stellar one in my experience, was the emphasis upon character that came with knowledge. To know is to find the ability to become the type of person our academic experience teaches us to become, and if that is truly grounded in wisdom, our character will be grounded in a grueling academic effort, but tenured by the compassion of being nice.
If we are asking for the world to be kind, we must first ask what are we doing to add more kindness to the world. If we are asking for the world to be more loving, we must first ask what are we doing to add more love to the world. We are the vessels for the things we seek
I imagine that is why my professional life was defined as much by practice—being a minister and a marriage and family therapist—as much as it was academia—teaching at college and university institutions. I strove for a balance for I loved the challenges of academia and thrived on the profundity of relationships, whether they were the relationships of faith or those brought by the challenges of life. In this, I am reminded of the adage “bees are drawn to honey.” I wanted my students to want to learn, to love learning as much as I did; I wanted my parishioners to experience the depth of spirituality that transforms life in a kaleidoscopic burst of divine adventure; I wished to help my clients find the magic wand of mental health. But I knew that I could not frighten them into these discoveries; I knew that no amount of bullying tactics would lead to the path of wisdom. Learning to grow as a human being is learning how to be the honey that attracts the bees; it means learning how to be nice, and for that reason, being nice has been my life-long goal.