I Give Thanks for Kindness

Rev. Steve Edington

[This is the text of an editorial that was published in the November 26, 2025 issue of the New Hampshire Union Leader.]

Strange as it may sound, my most uplifting experience in recent days was a memorial service I attended at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire where I had a twenty-four year ministry.

The Nashua service was for a man named John who died much too early after a struggle with cancer. He’d had a very successful career as a chemical engineer; and while that part of his life was acknowledged, the primary themes of his service had to do with bicycles and Santa Claus.

In his retirement John took up repairing discarded bicycles to make them useable again and gave them to people who could only afford very limited means of transportation. This good will project evolved into the Gate City Bike Coop which served as a repair and distribution center for persons for whom having a bicycle made their lives a little easier. It was all an act of kindness and goodwill for John and for the people who followed John’s example, and who came to work with him, giving their time to such a worthwhile humanitarian effort.

John had a big bushy white beard and a bald head and looked like Santa Claus. When Holiday events in the Nashua called for a visit from Santa, John was often there. He had just the right touch for interacting with youngsters, and brought much joy into a lot of little kids’ lives who got a visit from the most realistic Santa they had ever seen.

To honor this part of John’s life, some of the attendees showed up wearing Santa Claus outfits, and they fit in quite well.

The service ended with the combined voices of the Nashua UU Choir and the New Hampshire Gay Men’s Chorus singing the spiritual “River in Judea” that practically blew the roof off the building and lifted us all out of our seats.

Beyond the sadness that was in the sanctuary over the loss of John was also a celebration and an affirmation of the human spirit and of the kindness, compassion, and love which we humans are capable of. It was a calling to all of us to our better selves. It was a reminder I certainly needed as Thanksgiving approaches.

And speaking of Thanksgiving:

While a variety of Thanksgiving observances preceded it, the tradition of Presidential proclamations of Thanksgiving began with George Washington. In his Proclamation, issued in 1789, President Washington asked God to “render our national government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws (and to) bless us with peace and concord…”

The bigger picture in Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation was his view that one of the roles of the President is to uplift us as citizens and summon us to what a later President, Abraham Lincoln, called “the better angels of our nature.” I think the Presidents who came after Washington recognized this role: That above and beyond their political persuasions and actions, they had a greater duty to summon us to our higher selves both as American citizens and as human beings.

Some Presidents, as we know, did a better job with this duty than did others. But Washington clearly recognized such a Presidential role, as the language of his initial Thanksgiving proclamation shows.

We now have a President who simply does not recognize that kind of a calling. Instead of a summons to our better angels, we get spitefulness, mean-spiritedness, and baseless name calling.

After the October 18 No Kings Day rallies he used his social media outlet to post an AI generated depiction of him flying an airplane showering the No Kings demonstrators with excrement.

This is one of the more egregious examples of how the Presidential office is being demeaned; and is being used to call us to our baser selves rather than to our higher selves. Trump’s Presidency is the very antithesis of Washington’s Thanksgiving call for “a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws (that will) bless us with peace and concord…”

I happen to believe the current President’s spitefulness and meanness will not, in the end, prevail. I hold to the hope—especially in this season of thanksgiving and generosity—that there remains enough goodness, and kindness, and human decency in our citizenry at large, as well as a sense of basic human justice and fairness, that will ultimately withstand the baseness and cruelty and grievous injustices we are currently witnessing.

This is why I came away from John’s memorial service with a spirit of hope, believing that there are so many others like him clear across our land. However much of a struggle it will continue to be, these are the people who will in time have the last say as who “we the people” truly are.

Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua.