Gentleness – Sunday, November 15, 1981
Recently, a small girl was playing with her cat, dangling yarn in front of its face and pulling it away as the tabby pawed. As might have been expected, the cat’s efforts to snag the yarn and the child’s glee in pulling it away led to the inevitable mistake of the cat snagging the child instead of the yarn.
“Ouch,” the little girl complained. “Be gentle.”
Be gentle. Sort of a curious thing to suggest to a cat, or perhaps to a person. Especially when all around us there are evidence that aggressiveness and petulance are the qualities of character required to succeed. This is, after all, a very competitive world; even many of our economic systems are based on the idea of competition, of “getting ahead” at the expense of others.
But Christ said, “I am not of this world,” even as he condemned us for being too much a part of it, being too much controlled by it. If we are to be Christians, truly; if we are to seek the higher way; then we must allow ourselves to be gentled by the gentle influences of Christ’s love. And we must reach out to others—not like a cat, wanting only what it wants and at whomever’s expense, but like Christ did: lovingly, caringly, gently.
Hugh Blair, the 17th Century Scottish cleric, wrote:
“True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us, and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.”
If we are to be gentle in a world that tempts us to be otherwise, then we must cling to those principles of faith and love from which gentleness springs. If competition is necessary in the marketplace, we must not see our fellowmen only as competitors; if a degree of aggressive attitude is desirable as we aggressively seek to do good, we must not allow our desires to succeed to overwhelm our desires to promote the welfare of all God’s children. And if the world admires courage and seeks to define that courage in ways that are cruel, we should perhaps remember the knights of old whose code of chivalry described the most excellent accomplishment of gallantry as “gentleness”—to become a “gentle knight.”
In the words of Frances de Sales: “Nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength.”
It takes courage to be gentle in a world that often is not. But as we are gentle, as we are loving, our courage will increase, and our faith. And through gentleness of spirit and the love and faith that spring from it, we will find the courage to follow Him—the gentlest of all—into The Gentle Way.
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November 15, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,726