Story, Value, and Becoming More Real
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Of A Kind

January 20, 2025

Matthew Clark

Cultivating Calling and Pilgrimage is a meandering column documenting the pilgrimage of faith. It’s an occasional letter arriving in the mail from that shabby, wandering uncle you only see a few times year, describing the odd bits and bobs of books, songs, stories, people and places that have struck his fancy, put a lump in his throat, or kept him putting one foot in front of the other toward the Face of Jesus, that Joy set before us all.

Growing up, there was a framed drawing in our house of a breast-feeding mother. It’s unusual. If you can imagine, it has no clear lines really, like the sfumato technique used by DaVinci. Instead, the artist suggested forms and shapes by leaving white space and, with graphite or pencil, softly shading other areas. Most of the image is made not by the markings themselves but by somehow marking just enough so that the white of the background seems to come forward to make solid shapes. The mother’s face is the most detailed, but the child and the folds of cloth are not. There’s something mysterious, almost ghostly about it. 

One detail that always drew my eye was how the mother’s arm that cradles the baby is left so vague that there is no distinction between her draping sleeve and the baby’s clothes. In terms of the image’s shapes, the baby and the mother’s arm are left as a single white area. The artist does this in several places, and the subtle effect is a sense of wholeness. Clearly, there are two people in the image, but the artist’s markings obscure or leave out completely the clear lines that would delineate where one ends and the other begins.  

I was home not long ago and ran across the picture again. It still captivates me. In many ways, it’s a simple image, mostly made of white space, almost hazy and otherworldly, but human and concrete. Something the artist accomplishes, in my opinion, is a feeling of the fact that, without exception, humans emerge from other humans.

No one is self-made. We are made out of each other. 

I think about the question of whether we are mainly shaped by nature or nurture. But, like the drawing I’ve tried to describe, I have a hard time delineating between the two. They blend. Whether one is the background and one is the foreground is hard to tell. Nature and nurture are inseparable. The clear analytic compartmentalization of them may serve for conceptual study, but in actual experience our nurturing is most natural. They gradate into one another like fine graphite shading, leaving no hard lines, and the image is whole, a kindness. 

A mother and child are of a kind, they are kindred. Kindness is the quality or experience of nurture flowing into nature and nature flowing into nurture, until two who are separate discover themselves to be made out of one another. They are becoming themselves by sharing in one another; they are of the same kind. 

In the first chapter of Genesis, whatever God creates produces fruit “in keeping with its kind.” Out of such and such a kind of thing, comes more of that same kind of thing. Something wonderful about this detail is that it means reality is discernible, intelligible, not random. Because apples produce seeds that produce more apple trees “in keeping with their kind,” we can plot a course forward, make plans for the future, dream of and plant an orchard. If God hadn’t created such a reliable sequence, nothing would be stable. In fact, that’s the devil’s work—to obscure the “kind-ness” of things as God has made them. If you can do that, the whole world will walk on eggshells, anxiously fumbling around in a chaos of unmeaning. Without kind reliably bearing forward into kindness, reality shatters into unconnected fragments. 

In that scenario, nature and nurture are both lost, and every man, woman, and child becomes an island. The poet John Donne warns against this saying, “No man is an island, / entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / a part of the main.” Later in the poem he says, “Because I am involved in mankind.” I love that word involved. It means to be rolled-into, and suggests images of being enfolded in an embrace, gathered up into a family, into shared laughter, shared promise-keeping. To be involved means to be inextricably part of one another. Donne’s poem centers on shared grief, for as you hear the bell tolling the death of someone in the village, you know that their life and death cannot be seen as separate from your own. One of our kind has died, and the grief gradates out into the background of the community until all the members of the body (the continent, in Donne’s words) feel the kindred sting—the toll vibrates in our own chests too. 

That is the cost of kind-ness. It is also the beauty of it. To be a member of a kinship, a kindred. Compassion, sympathy, belonging—these emerge from our involvement in our kind. Love grows when we nurture the nature of our kind, when we are attentive to and perceive the (swaddling) bands of lovingkindness that make us, on the deepest levels of existence, of a kind. You and I are human-kind, Adamah-kind (adamah or adam, means of the soil. See Gen 2:7), and our kind was, from the beginning, a fruit produced in keeping with God’s-kind, in His image and likeness, born of His kindness. 

Of course, that’s true of this whole world. Everything in God’s good creation has something to say about what kind of God made it. But humans, especially; the second person of the Trinity became one of our kind. Jesus, the second Adam, is Adamah-kind, like us.

Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters” (Heb. 2:11 NIV). 

God’s nature is His kind, and “in keeping with its kind,” comes His nurturing kindness. I think that is something of what that picture of the breast-feeding mother I grew up around bodies-forth, the fundamental involvement of these two things from before the foundation of the world itself. We have a heavenly Father who fosters kinship, sets the lonely in families, makes kindred out of strangers, even draws enemies together to share a wedding feast. Wedding feasts are places where unrelated families become relatives, two kinds of humans become one in kindred kindness, and a reality is consummated whereby kind may produce fruit “in keeping with” kind.  

In that sense, this whole world—both its founding and its fruitfulness—is made out of kindness. 

It’s interesting that Scripture says it is God’s “kindness that leads us to repentance” (Rom. 2:11a). That sentence is in a context of rebuke, perhaps at a refusal to acknowledge the salvation God has provided via Jesus becoming Adamah-kind? If so, the kindness that changes the direction (metanoia) of our minds and our very lives would be the fact of Jesus having so deeply involved Himself with us, making us members of His family, kindred with our heavenly Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. When the death-bell tolled for humanity, in Donne’s words, Jesus didn’t keep Himself apart like an island unto Himself, he felt it vibrate in His bones too. He took the toll of humanity’s death as His own. 

This is a complex involvement, and the more I write about it, the more immense the enfolding becomes, until the Kind and His kindness reaches the end of words. But, like the drawing of the mother and child I began with, another image comes to mind—that of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. Jesus laments at His own peoples’ unkindness: their refusal to see Him as belonging to them and they to Him. They were of a kind, kindred, but the chicks would not be gathered under the wings of their mother. They would not taste the milk of human-kindness. They would not be nurtured and therefore forfeited their true nature as children of the Father. 

Even now, our God cradles this world with His nurturing right arm, the orb of the world like the globe of an infant’s head, as the Spirit breathes over it like a mother’s humming. It would be the most natural thing in the world for a human to lay against that breast, like St. John against Christ’s, and be fed. To be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), being made like Jesus who made us and became, in kind, like us. This is the kindness upon which the world is founded, and from which we and the world to come shall be born.



The featured image, “Pinecones,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.



 

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