The Hidden Power of Kindness: A Practical Handbook for Souls Who Dare to Transform the World, One Deed at a Time by Lawrence G. Lovasik

Author:Lawrence G. Lovasik [Lovasik, Lawrence G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1928832008
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Published: 2011-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

Kind thoughts preserve you from many sins against charity

The practice of kind thoughts has an effect on your spiritual life. It leads to self-denial. The practice of kind thoughts enables you to overcome criticism and all the influence it may exert on others. You thereby sacrifice successes at the moment they are within your reach. The triumph over a proud heart and a bitter temper is the result of difficult spiritual combat, but it brings its reward, for self-denial is a fountain of peace and joy in your soul.

The practice of kind thoughts is your main help to that complete control of the tongue without which all religion is vain, as St. James says.130 The interior beauty of your soul through habitual kindness of thought is greater than words can describe.

The practice of kind thoughts helps you to grow in the spiritual life. It opens and smooths the paths of prayer. It sheds a clear, still light over your self-knowledge and enables you to find God easily.

Kind thoughts imply a contact with God and have a special power to let in upon you the light of God. They are the scent with which the creature is penetrated through the indwelling of the Creator.

Charity is the deepest view of life, because it is nearest to God’s view. This is the reverse of a worldly and superficial view of things. God’s view is not merely the truest view, but the only view that is true at all. Thus, uncharitable judgments and prejudices, misunderstandings and suspicions, envy and jealousy, and uncharitable words and slander will not take root in a soul that thinks kind thoughts. Aversions and bitterness disappear, strained relations are smoothed out, and petty arguments end of themselves.

If you were to make it a practice to begin each day with benevolent thoughts in your heart, instead of selfish ambition, you would not be inclined to deny a helping hand or ignore a favor rendered you. You would certainly be disposed to spare the feelings of oversensitive persons, to sympathize with the suffering, and to help others in the solution of vexing problems confronting them. If, instead of harsh thoughts and bitter resentment, you fostered in your heart a readiness to forgive and forget, you would not find it too difficult to adopt a friendly attitude toward those who are habitually cold and hostile toward you.

To keep firmly to supernatural principles in your daily conduct is not easy. It takes great willpower to master thoughts of hatred, selfishness, and mistrust that rush in upon you and to turn them into gracious and kind thoughts. You need God’s grace and much self-discipline to realize the ideal expressed in the words of St. Paul: “Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience.”131

Get into the habit of putting a kind interpretation on all you see and hear, and of having kind thoughts of everyone of whom you think. This will enable you to live a new life in a new world.

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