Kinship is a curious friend. Drawing near to ordinary people in low places will change our lens for everything.
Shannan Martin
This past week I did a deep spring cleaning of my home office and realized I have an issue. From all the surfaces, files and low lying cabinets came piles of notecards and sticky notes and photocopies with scribbled, underlined and highlighted quotes. Nuggets of golden wisdom I don’t want to forget from books, podcasts, sermons, blogs.
My ears and eyes, trained to detect imperfections in language, naturally perk up in delight at a well-turned phrase or a passage that nails down a thought I’ve struggled to capture.
But what to do with all the detritus of a word nerd? Surely Target has a cute basket.
I feel like speech and language people are the perfect audience to share this love of mine because I’m betting you are a word nerd too.
Kinship
Words will sometimes stalk you. The same word will suddenly pop up in random places and in conversations, demanding your thoughtful attention. One of those words recently has been kinship. Don’t you love it? Its synonyms include affinity, rapport, empathy, closeness, bond.
During my office cleaning, this beautiful word emerged in several places within the piles. But I especially got absorbed while thumbing through the sticky noted pages of an amazing memoir called Tattoos on the Heart by Father Gregory Boyle. He writes of his life in community with gang members in the worst of Los Angeles’s ghettoes. Although miles from a speech therapy space, I recognize a universal truth in his stories that echo our role as an SLP.
While writing about compassion, he quotes Pema Chodron who says the truest measure of compassion “lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.”
Boyle goes on with these thoughts.
“Compassion isn’t just about feeling the pain of others; it’s about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased… Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship, of true kinship.”
And here is the bridge that connects his work with ours.
In order to be effective, we must be willing to feel depths of empathy and compassion beyond what is comfortable or familiar.
Similar to Boyle’s, our clients also stand in margins that cross racial, economic, educational and cultural lines. Nurturing kinship with those labeled disabled, impaired, or disordered may be the key to unlocking greater “success” for us all.
Today, let us bend low in search of the beauty of true kinship. I believe this to be a place of rich treasure, both in and out of our workplace.
A Prayer and a Question
Lord,
May we not forget who we are by placing ourselves on a platform as the knower of all things, instead of squatting low in camaraderie. May we be the margin erasers. Help us seek to understand the battles our people fight. And may we be surprised by the blessing of kinship discovered while walking beside those we help.
What helps you practice the art of compassionate kinship with your clients? Let us know in the comments!
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