I am not a big fan of Stephen King. His tales are too dark for my taste. One of his stories, I am told, is called “Needful Things.” A sinister figure arrives in a small town and opens a mysterious antique shop.
The shop always seems to stock the one item each shopper desires most, but the purchase price is not what the shoppers expect. To obtain the coveted item, each customer must perform an anonymous act of petty meanness.
One shopper, for example, splatters mud all over a neighbor’s clean laundry hanging out to dry. Before long, the once-harmonious town is ravaged by hatred and suspicion. An instructive plot!
Just the opposite might be true. What would happen if people went around doing anonymous acts of simple kindness? The results could be transformative.
In 1990, I was a grouchy, first-year teacher at Bethlehem Catholic High School. I had not asked to teach. Bishop Thomas Welsh assigned me to the job, and I hated it. Sad to say, I took my frustrations out on my students. (I imagine some of them are still in therapy.)
One afternoon as I was about to leave my classroom after a particularly trying day, I angrily surveyed the schoolroom disarray wrought by my ungrateful “kinderschweine.” The desks were out of order, and the floor was littered with trash. There was even an unclaimed shoe in the middle of the room.
I slammed the door. “I’ll deal with this mess tomorrow,” I growled under my breath.
The next day, however, upon entering room 114, I was stunned. The floor had been swept. The desks were in perfect order. The shoe was gone.
I could not help thinking of the old fairy tale about the shoemaker and the elves. In point of fact, there were elves, although they were adolescent elves. You see, Mrs. Nancy Lynn, the chemistry teacher whose laboratory was down the hall from my classroom, explained that after I had left school the previous afternoon, two of my students asked her if she could let them into my room so that they could clean it up for me.
When I asked Mrs. Lynn the identity of my benefactors, she refused to tell me. They wished to remain anonymous. Again, I was stunned.
The upshot was that, because I did not know who the students were who had done me the kindness, I had to be nice to all my students. Subsequently, I began to look at my pupils, not as “child pigs,” but as real human beings – with real feelings, with real hopes and dreams.
I can honestly say that one anonymous act of kindness changed my whole outlook on teaching. There is real power in an anonymous act of kindness.
On Ash Wednesday, March 5, we shall hear Our Lord tell us to “keep your deeds of mercy secret.” What would happen if we all went out and performed one anonymous act of kindness every day during Lent? How might that change society?
The act of kindness need not be big or one that involves money. It simply has to be good, and it has to be sneaky. We can all, if we put our minds to it, be good and sneaky.
Also, my students were wise. They picked a grouch as the recipient of their anonymous act of kindness. Maybe we ought to target the most disagreeable people as the beneficiaries of our sneaky charity.
Who knows what positive transformations might occur? It might be Stephen King in reverse.
By Father Bernard Ezaki, assistant pastor of Notre Dame of Bethlehem. More articles by Father Ezaki are on his website www.apologyanalogy.com.
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