Gentleness (Latin: mansuetudo)

Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-control…I looked at the list of nine “Fruits of the Holy Spirit” last Monday after Pentecost, considering using them to channel my blog by channeling my mind, taking seriously the idea that God blew in my ear and now I wanted to follow her anywhere.  But when I looked at the list, the words seemed like the faces of a family, some so similar to others that I wondered how I would distinguish each of them in a day’s reflection, and have that days’ reflection give fruit in the next morning’s blog.

On several Christmases, our Son Chris has come home from his job in Europe for a week or more, to have time to really catch up with us, with Kathy and me and his two sisters.  The time gives us all an opportunity to get a little goofy together.  One morning Chris used PhotoShop to replace every face on our Christmas portrait with Kathy’s.  There we were, the five of us and even the girls’ husbands and one baby, all with the same smiling Kathy face.  There was truth in that funny photo; Kathy’s smile had a way of becoming part of ours, and all of us did come to resemble each other by being together.

But funny photos notwithstanding, it is fortunate that the list I’d found on that Monday after Pentecost included the Latin roots, because today I needed it.  Gentleness seemed so closely akin to goodness and kindness that I felt it redundant.  So I looked at the interesting Latin meaning, mansuetudo.  The first part of the word, man… is the root of our word “hand”, giving us words like manual, manipulation, etc.  The second part, suetudo, was more obscure, and more revealing.  It is a form of suesco, which means to become accustomed .  Together, these Latin guides tell us that gentleness is a hand to which we are accustomed, as an animal is tamed by the hand that has become known as that of a friend, someone we can trust.

I cannot hold Kathy’s hand without being tamed.  And every time I look at my neighbor Gary’s face, or my friend Bill’s, I become calm, relaxed.  There is in me a feral self, a wild self on a level of survival, afraid of being adequate to the demands of life.  To this beastly self, others are a threat, competing for those things I need to live.  I’m aware of my vulnerability, the weakness of my body, and the lapses of my thinking.  Kathy’s hand, Gary’s face and Bills somehow turn me away from fear and toward delight

Gentleness is the music that soothes the wild beast in us, the face into which we look that calms us, the hand that we hold that lets us walk without fear, that calls us not to flee, but to dance. 

I feel in this an opportunity to invite you to stop and consider: who in your life tames you?  Whose are the faces that calm you, the hands that relax you, relieve you of your primal fears?  And also consider, when do you practice gentleness?  When is yours the face that calms others, the hand that relaxes them?  How does it feel?

Tomorrow, the final Fruit of the Spirit: Self-control (Latin: continentia)

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.