Book + Excerpt: Kindness as Commodity

Because I am woefully behind on a book manuscript deadline — Prophets, Priests, Pastors, and Poets: Being and Becoming the Resurrected Christ — in lieu of new content and for the next month or two, I will share book excerpts from past book projects. I would not hate it if you bought a copy or ten :-)

Kindness as Commodity

In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World (Chalice Press, 2021), 17-22

My grandfather’s name, Esteban de los Reyes, or Steven of the Kings, is a pretty cool name. Unfortunately, when he immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in 1928, the US government thought that it was just a bit too exotic and summarily changed it to Steve Reyes. Though this was the name he used as a teenager who found himself working in restaurants in Los Angeles, the name he used working the fields of the Central Valley of California picking tomatoes and strawberries, and the name he used getting to know the movers and shakers of Stockton, California, as a bartender at the local country club, to me my grandfather will always be that stylishly dressed young man worthy of the smooth name Esteban de los Reyes.

Grandpa Reyes was generous, playful, and always ready for a good cry that was either fueled by anger or born of joy. My mother tells me that when he got home from his shift at the bar, she and her siblings would hear his pocket jingling with coins. This meant that when he opened the door, coins came a-flying. It was like literal pennies falling from heaven as he tossed coins in the air for the kids to catch and keep.

He also felt deeply. Whether it was for a social injustice or the love of his family and kids, he had all the feels. Many a time he would just be sitting on the couch watching his grandchildren play, and he would start to weep with joy. Yep, I’m crying as I write this. As we have learned, the crying is genetic—apologies to my children.

In the eyes of many, I am sure that all these traits put together made him appear too nice and, when it comes to his marriages, I would not disagree.

His first wife, my grandmother, was—how shall we say?—feisty, passionate, and determined. And truth be told, she took advantage of my grandfather. As she once wrote to my mother when talking about me as a child—I’ll expand on this later—“When I met your dad, I told him I don’t love him but I was willing to get married if I could have children. In the long run, I have been happy with him because of you kids.”

If this were a movie, it would be some version of “The scrappy survivor meets the hopeless romantic.”

The same personality and character traits that helped my grandmother survive being abandoned in Little Rock, Arkansas, then make it to California, get a job, and start a family also created situations in which she was not faithful to him. This forced him to make decisions that many would have seen as too nice and as allowing my grandmother to take advantage of his commitment to his children.

There is a movie-deserving story here, but if you sense a bit of hesitance on my part, you would be correct. No one in the family knows many of the stories of their marriage and the decisions he made in response to her actions. While such stories would make poignant illustrations, I am choosing to be kind and let people pass down the stories when they are good and ready. Some of them are not my stories to share. They are intimate, painful, and raw, so I am choosing the kindness of discretion.

I did say “some stories” because I have no problem dishing on his other wives.

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After my grandfather eventually divorced my grandmother, he remarried twice more, both times on trips to the Philippines to visit relatives. My grandfather craved and deserved companionship, so he married Tessie on his first visit to the Philippines. While a bit shocked, we were in some ways very happy for him. But the pattern of his wife taking advantage of his kindness was repeated. His second wife had some severe mental health issues that eventually led to us not being able to see him very much. When we pleaded with him to do something, his kindness was evident. Even though this was not an ideal marriage, he felt he was supposed to protect and care for her, and he did everything to maintain his marriage.

A few years into the marriage, Tessie died in a car accident, leaving my grandfather companionless again.

Some years later when Grandpa let us know that he was going to the Philippines for a visit, we all said, “Grandpa, do not get married!” Well, you can imagine how that went.

This time he married a much younger woman, one just a year older than my mother, and we knew from the start this was not going to be a good situation. The short version is that she blew through his savings, they lost his house, she moved him to San Diego, and often we could not even locate him for a visit. I cherish the few times that we were able to see him during those years, and I still get angry about what she did and what we were not able to do. She eventually let us know that he had died and that we needed to be “family” and pay her the respect due to our “grandmother.”

That didn’t happen.

Clearly my grandfather was kind to a fault. His kindness led him into painful situations, and I wish he had made different decisions. I would have loved for all of my children, my nieces, and his namesake, my nephew, Esteban, to have known this amazingly kind, generous, and loving human. They would have met a man who was empathetic with others’ struggles, loyal to those in his community, and kind without expectation of reciprocation.

That kindness is not transactional is one of the greatest lessons I learned from him. While I wish that he had been more kind to himself, and while I would never want someone to be taken advantage of as he was, I err on the side of this sort of optimistic kindness every time. I do so out of a genuine belief that every person deserves to be seen as a human being and not because I expect the same treatment in return.

For if our commitment to kindness is contingent upon being repaid with the same posture and approach, we are in for a lifetime of frustration and a jaded future. If we make kindness contingent, then we have failed to examine the possible repercussions of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you.” Two problems can come from not examining this rule. First, it is quite possible that the recipient of the treatment does not actually want to be treated in the same way that you do. If our social location and context become the norm, we treat people how we would want to be treated, assuming that they live in the same norm. A good example is how we greet one another. I tend to be a hugger, but not everyone likes to be hugged. The second potential problem with this saying is that there is an implicit understanding and expectation of reciprocation. If we take kindness and individual agency seriously, we will not read this rule as a transactional guarantee.

Nope, there are no guarantees that kindness will be reciprocated. We are kind not because of what we get out of the act, but because of what it says about how we understand the humanity of others and how we believe that humans should be treated.

Expressing kindness doesn’t guarantee that we’ll get kindness in return. But we hope that the more expressions and act of kindness there are, the more people will experience the world as benevolent. We hope that our acts and expressions of kindness will gradually result in a world that sees kindness not as a commodity to barter, but as a natural and normative way to treat everyone around us.

For Reflection:

• What other human interactions are often considered as eliciting some kind of reciprocation?
• Share a time when you were frustrated that your kindness was not reciprocated.

Try This:

• The next time you say “Thank you,” gauge how much you expect a response of “You’re welcome.” Reflect on your reaction.

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Thanks for reading this book excerpt. All of my books can be found on bookshop.com or wherever you buy books to be added to your nightstand pile.