Plane Kindness

There are a lot of things, both selfish and unselfish, that go into the decision to be kind to someone. Today Coleman breaks down some of the ways that God nudges us towards being kind to others out of true heavenly love. -Editor.

Since becoming a pastor, I’ve spent a good deal of time in airplanes and airports. You might expect that spending all that time with tired, overcrowded, hurried individuals, I’d have seen a lot of the worst in people. But I’ve found the opposite to be true. Sure, I’ve run into some grumpy folks in my travels; but I’ve also seen travel bring out some of the best in people. On one flight I was on, there was a passenger who didn’t have the right credit card to pay for her meal, and the airline didn’t take cash. Seeing her trouble, the man next to her (a complete stranger as far as I could tell) handed the flight attendant his credit card instead, and when the woman took out cash to offer the man, he turned it down. Another time, when I was flying with my then-fiancée Anne, we both had middle seats in different parts of the plane; but when the man next to me found out we were engaged and not able to sit together, he gave up his aisle seat for Anne’s middle seat.

What is inspiring these people to give up their seats and their money? There was an article a few years ago in Air Canada’s EnRoute magazine explaining the scientific, brain-chemistry reasons that doing acts of kindness for others—even small ones in places like airplanes and airports—makes us feel good and increases our happiness. There’s something about doing something nice for someone else that just feels good.

That article points out the difference between being in a plane and being in a car. In a car, we can’t see the other people—it is all mechanical interactions. But in a plane, we see people as people. And for little cost, we can do something personal that will affect another person’s life. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that you’ve brightened a stranger’s day.

That ability to see other people as people is vital in learning to love the neighbour as ourselves. The root of all evils is the love of ruling over others from a love of self; and the book Divine Love and Wisdom says of spirits who are in this love, “These spirits are all sensually natural, and some are of such a character as to believe that they alone are alive, regarding others as phantoms” (144). The love of self causes us to view ourselves as more alive and more human than others; but love to the Lord and love to neighbour sees everyone as a recipient of life from the Lord, made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore truly human.

Those moments where we see other people treating strangers kindly can help remind us of this. In those moments, we see the Lord acting in the world. Now, maybe the person who gave up his seat to me is mean in his everyday life; maybe that man who paid for the woman’s meal was only doing it so he could feel pride in his own generosity. Those small acts are not charity itself, which consists in acting from love every day. But even so, the Lord uses those moments to bend a person’s life toward heaven.

And the angelic view is to look for the good in people—to assume a good motivation, to put the best interpretation on everything. And so I hope and choose to assume that those people who acted kindly in the airplane were acting from genuine love that has been implanted in them by the Lord.

That article in EnRoute magazine suggests that we should do small acts of kindness like these in places like airplanes and airports because it will make us happier, causing our brain to release pleasurable chemicals into our body. That’s an okay place to start. But the Lord challenges us to go even further—to do those good deeds not for ourselves, and not even for the pleasure we get from helping others, but truly for the sake of others. The paradox is that if we focus on the pleasure we get from doing the good, we actually get less pleasure; if we focus on the good itself, we get more pleasure. Arcana Coelestia puts it this way:

When an angel does good to somebody else he also communicates to that person the goodness, blessedness, and bliss he himself has received; and he does this in a spirit of wishing to give the other everything and hold nothing back. When that spirit of communication is present in him, he receives far more goodness flowing in with blessedness and bliss than he imparts; and this goes on unceasingly with increasing returns. But as soon as any thought enters in of wishing to communicate what he has with the purpose of gaining that influx of blessedness and bliss into himself, the influx is nullified, especially if some thought occurs to him of repayment from the one to whom he communicates the goodness he himself has received. (6478)

The Lord’s goal for each one of us is that we reach the point where we act spontaneously to give to others simply from the love of doing good to others. But we need the in-between stage, where we are partly doing it for the sake of others, and partly for the good feeling we get from knowing that we’ve been kind. The Lord uses both those motivations to lift us step-by-step toward a true heavenly love. And giving up a seat on a plane—or a bus, or a train—isn’t a bad place to start.

Coleman Glenn

Coleman is the associate pastor at New Church Westville and chaplain of Kainon School, both located in Westville, South Africa. He maintains a blog (when he manages to find time for it) at www.patheos.com/blogs/goodandtruth.