I am sometimes surprised by how much a simple act of kindness can touch me.
When I approached Main Street the other day to make a right turn, I noticed a bicyclist at the corner, waiting to cross. He was less than respectable looking, bone thin, with a short scruffy beard and an arm covered with tattoos. I was fully expecting him to cross the street before I turned — after all, he got there before I did. Instead, he waved me on ahead of him.
That’s all he did — just let me go first. No big deal. But I felt as if his action were a sign of the goodness of God. More, it seemed at that moment that the kindness of God was visibly present in him.
“All creatures are by nature endeavoring to be like God,” says Meister Eckhart. “The heavens would not revolve unless they followed on the track of God or of His likeness. If God were not in all things, nature would stop dead, not working and not wanting; for nature fundamentally is seeking, although obscurely, and tending toward God.”
We human creatures are also, often very obscurely indeed, seeking and tending toward God. Our efforts may be misguided, as we mistake lesser things for God; or we may try to refuse the search or turn from Love. However, we are made for God and made to be like God, which is the only way we will be happy. Performing or receiving a simple act of kindness can provide a glimpse of that truth and bring us closer to the conclusion of St. John of the Cross, who said, “In the evening of our life, we shall be judged by love.”
“And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”
(2 Corinthians 3:18)