Hold Fast to the Gentle Things

A Homily for Those Who Still Believe in Softness

Gather here.

Not with your opinions, not with your credentials.

Just come with your heart.

I want to speak to that quiet place in you that remembers what kindness feels like.

Because it’s hard now, isn’t it?

The gentle things are fraying.

The Sunday stillness, the long potlucks, the second cup of coffee poured slowly at the community table.

The front porch swing.

The quiet hum of neighbors who knew your name and your dog’s name and the way you liked your eggs.

We are losing it.

Not all at once, no.

But like fog lifting from a morning field, it’s disappearing without protest, softness slipping away under the grinding gears of politics, profit, and perpetual outrage.

I have seen it in churches that now feel like war rooms, in town halls that echo more with accusation than welcome, in families where the dinner table has become a battlefield of headlines and hashtags.

We are not at peace.

We are not at war.

We are somewhere in between, in the long ache of a moral disassembly.

And so I ask—what holds us together?

When the news comes sharp, when cruelty dresses up as cleverness, when ideologies stack like kindling for a fire that none of us really want to watch burn, what holds us?

I will tell you.

It is the goodness we refuse to abandon. It is the gentleness we choose not to mock. It is the hand we offer, not because it will fix everything, but because not offering it would break us further.

“Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.”

So wrote Pablo Neruda.

But today, I ask you to remember with generosity the ones who did love you, and build again from their example.

Remember the neighbor who brought soup before you knew you needed it.

Remember the church lady who sang off-key but with such joy you cried.

Remember the child who, seeing you hunched and hurried, simply reached up and took your hand.

That, that is our inheritance.

That is the quiet army of the human soul.

And yes, I know the world is loud.

I know the fragmentation is real.

I know some days it feels like no amount of tenderness could possibly mend what’s been torn.

But tenderness is not a weak thing.

It is a rope we throw to each other in storm-swollen rivers. It is a lantern we light not because the road is clear, but because someone behind us is still walking it. It is the thread that refuses to snap.

You are the thread.

Do not let the world convince you to harden.

Do not let righteous rage curdle into cruelty.

Do not let your ache make you bitter.

Cleave to your hope—yes, even now.

Not as a strategy.

Not as a plan.

But as fuel.

The kind that burns long, and warm, and true.

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.”

Neruda again.

And he was right. There will be spring again. But someone has to plant. Someone has to keep the seeds safe. Someone has to water what’s left. Someone has to believe that even now, especially now, goodness is worth the labor.

So I ask you to stay.

To gather, wherever you are.

To sit long in your sacred circles, whether they meet on Sundays or Tuesdays or just once a month when you remember how much it matters.

Be the porch light.

Be the familiar song.

Be the hand extended before the argument begins.

You are not naïve to be gentle.

You are not foolish to be kind.

You are not weak to believe we still belong to one another.

In fact, you may be the last true strength we have.

So hold fast to the gentle things.

And do not falter.