Kindness comes from charity. The Last Judgment 39 in part says, “a life of charity is a life according to the Lord's precepts; so that to live according to Divine truths, is to love the Lord.”
We read in The Heavenly City 9 in part….”Everything in the Holy Book relates to the philosophy of love and kindness. The Lord was explaining this when He said: ‘You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. This is the first and greatest rule. The second is similar: You will love other people as much as you love yourself. The Law and Prophets depend on these two rules.’ (Matthew 22:37-39) The Law and Prophets means the whole Bible.”
If we want to practice true charity or kindness, we will look for what is of the Lord in the neighbor. This means that we will be kind or charitable not just to everyone the same way, but to each according to their lives.
We read in The Heavenly City 85. “A common view these days is that we should consider all people to be our friends on an equal basis, and that we should help people who are too poor to support themselves. But good Christian sense tells us we should take a close look at how people are living and show kindness to them accordingly. Deeply religious people make these distinctions, which means they show kindness to people intelligently. But superficially religious people cannot make these distinctions, so they show kindness to people indiscriminately.”
And The Heavenly City 84 in part says,”we might show kindness to harmful people in the same way we show it to good people. Then our kindness would not really be kindness, since harmful people use anything good done for them to hurt others, but good people use it to help others.”
Each act in our lives builds up to form our character and if they are acts of true kindness, they will lead us to our eternal home in heaven. There is a lovely poem by Mrs. J. A. Carney (1845) that says it very well:
“Little drops of water
Little grains of sand
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land
Little deeds of kindness,
Little words of love,
Make our earth an Eden,
Like the heaven above
And the little moments,
Humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages
Of eternity.”
(Riferimenti: The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 104)
