“Be nice” were the words I heard most often as a child. My mother constantly directed her three children to be nice. But it was more than a command to stop siblings from quarreling. She insisted that “nice” was the prime moral value. In any situation, when faced with any choice of how to treat others, she advised, “be nice.” Indeed, parents, teachers, and pastors spoke so persistently of “niceness” that I was certain “be nice” appeared in the Bible in red letters, indicating it was an injunction from Jesus himself.
In the last few days, I’ve often recalled my late mother’s dictum. Watching cable news and Twitter - as pundits and controversialists ridicule the police officers who protected the Capitol on January 6th and mock gymnast Simone Biles for withdrawing from competition in the Olympics - I not only remembered mom imploring niceness but found myself blurting out the same: Be nice! Please! Be nice!
I’m not sure where and when it happened, but niceness seems out of fashion. And it isn’t just highly paid FOX News hosts. While on social media yesterday, I happened across a thread of young clergy making fun of a 90-year old retired leader in their own church, a man who had a debilitating stroke several years ago. Attacking the Capitol police and Simone Biles is reprehensible cruelty of course, but it also seems that heaping scorn on a now-disabled senior leader of one’s own denomination is a lesser - but similar - form of disrespect and denial of another’s dignity.
Reading their thread made me long for niceness, too.
When I was a student at Duke in the late 1980s, Professor Stanley Hauerwas regularly derided “niceness” as a kind of failure of middle-class Christian ethics. His was a good argument. “Nice” wasn’t in the red-letter Jesus words of the New Testament. Instead, it was a familiar moralism of white, middle-class expectations. “Nice” was a way of controlling behavior, of making ethics bland, and of avoiding arguments regarding difficult moral issues like racism and poverty. “Nice” was a cop-out and a cover-up. Jesus wasn’t nice. Jesus was a troublemaker and got killed for it. “Nice” had effectively turned Christian virtue into moral mush and undermined the church’s ability to speak prophetically and do justice. “Nice” wasn’t an outright corruption of ethics - it was more of a counterfeit value. An accommodation to WASP-American culture.
Sadly, I watched some (not all) of my graduate school classmates imitate their mentor by deploying “prophetic” anger and using objectionable language in surprisingly violent ways in order to prove they’d rejected nice Christianity. To them, nice faith was weak faith. Even then, while appreciating some of Hauerwas’ points, I could see how easily deprecating niceness could be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.
I’d often muse how much Professor Hauerwas would dislike my mother, who embodied the “be nice” morality he so vigorously decried. For my mother, however, “niceness” was not a way to avoid ethical issues. Niceness was the path toward a better, more just world. “Be nice” was the door into understanding another’s perspective, the embodiment of the Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Be nice.
When she was a high school senior, her school was integrated. Before the Black students arrived, her friends organized a boycott. They’d all skip school in protest and assumed my mother would join them. She refused. Instead, she went to school and greeted the new students as they got off the bus. “Mom,” I asked as she told me this story, “how in the world were you brave enough to do that? Go against your friends? Welcome the Black students?” She replied, “Well, if I was going to start at a new school, I’d want someone to greet the bus. It was the nice thing to do.”
And that was it. My mother’s resistance to her peer’s racism was birthed in niceness. It was nice to greet the bus.
Being nice doesn’t solve every problem. And critics of niceness are quite correct that it can be a tool for all sorts of control and injustice. It was a middle-class value. Maybe not so much any more. It used to be an accommodation. But now? Niceness seems positively counter-cultural and radical.
What if my mother was at least a little bit right? That niceness is a first step - the necessary step - of showing up and recognizing that another person deserves respect and dignity. That their presence is welcome and their story worth listening to.
Nice. Good. Kind. Lovely. Pleasant. Admirable. Commendable. Gentle. Gracious. Seemly. People try to draw distinctions between these words, but the truth is that these are all shades of the same thing. Jesus might not have exactly said, “Be nice.” But the Apostle Paul urged the first of Jesus’ followers toward a virtuous life grounded in the truest sort of niceness: “Let your gentleness be known to everyone…Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:5-9)
I’m done with ridiculing “nice.” We need more of it. Lots more of it. We’re so far gone down another path, that nice is a really good place to begin again. Without a revival of niceness, I fear we’re doomed.
INSPIRATION
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Kindness”
It's so nice to be nice! Cuddle
Nestle
Nuzzle
Don't tickle
. . . well, maybe a little.
Love was meant to be passed on.
— David Ezra Stein
Niceness is magic, but no one thinks of it that way since it's quiet and constant.
― Kimberly Karalius
People tell me I’m too nice, but they never turn away when I am nice to them.
― George E. Miller
My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart.
― Maya Angelou
Kindness is not a journey for the meek and mild. For those of us who have been steeped in ways of being that are not kind, it takes tremendous energy to purge ourselves of patterns and behaviors that are not kind. Every day we have to choose to commit to live out kindness that day.
― Bruce Reyes-Chow
Stay safe, friends. Get vaccinated.
Wear your masks indoors as needed or directed. We’re all exhausted, worried, and angry about living with this pandemic - and the unwise choices too many of our neighbors have made.
We can get through this. We’ve learned a lot about staying safe and keeping others safe. Find joy where you can. Rest regularly, meditate, pray. Reach out to someone who might be lonely or scared. If you are lonely or scared, reach out to someone who understands.
Be kind. And be brave.
We can do this.
"It used to be an accommodation. But now? Niceness seems positively counter-cultural and radical." -- And isn't that a table-turning transformation? Grace at work; the Spirit constantly on the move, mysteriously so.
Beautiful! My Mother embodied niceness and being like Jesus to me and everyone she came in contact with. If we were all like that, the world would be a wonderful place!