Of the many words that name aspects of love, tender is one of my favorite. 

 I used to sing my daughters to sleep, and later visiting grandchildren, with the song “Tender Shepherd.” It ends with the phrase, “safe and happily go to sleep.” Tenderness doesn’t require a response; it offers repose. I hear it in Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” No reciprocation required. Just release into trust. 

It’s easy to feel that tenderness with small children in their utter vulnerability. Our deepest instincts are to protect them–not only our own, but all children. We’ve seen in recent history how even those who regard warfare and indiscriminate violence as “necessary” can be troubled and moved to tenderness by the harm done to children. Loss of tenderness is one measure of a culture’s health.

“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? Eleanor Roosevelt asked. The question remains on the table as we witness the escalation of human misery for profit. According to UNICEF, over 50,000 children have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Here at home, the Senate is considering a budget bill that will put 11 million people at risk by reducing health coverage and food assistance.

An ancient root of “tender” means “to stretch.” Knowing that bit of etymology helps me think of tenderness as a quality of lovingkindness that extends itself–reaches out a hand, offers food, encircles shoulders trembling with grief, stretches beyond one’s own comfort zone to meet someone who needs comfort.

In the course of its long history, tender has come also come to mean vulnerable, undefended, open to wounding–meanings that connect the word directly with the “vulnerable God” embodied on the cross.

A tender conscience is not the same as a guilty one. It is not anxious, but attentive. It is awakened to action on behalf of, in the best interests of, in solidarity with the vulnerable. It begins in being willing to see and to bear the burden of seeing. The expression “bearing witness” reminds me that what we are called upon to witness in our time is sometimes nearly unbearable. It takes courage to see. 

And sometimes, tenderness. A while back I came upon an essay by science writer Tim Folger about Gregor Mendel, monk, scientist, and discoverer of the principles of genetics. The writer had visited the monastery garden where Mendel grew the peas that brought him fame in his 1865 paper proving the existence of genes. In that paper Mendel wrote about his ground-breaking work (no pun intended), “It requires indeed some courage to undertake a labor of such far-reaching extent.” Folger muses in response,

But ‘courage,’ I would argue, is the wrong word here. More than ‘courage,’ there is something else evident in that work–a quality that I can only describe as ‘tenderness.’

It is a word not typically used to describe science or scientists. It shares roots, of course, with ‘tending’–a farmer’s or gardener’s activity–but also with ‘tension,’ the stretching of a pea tendril to incline it toward sunlight or train it on an arbor. It describes a certain intimacy between humans and nature–a nourishment that must happen before investigation can happen, the delicacy of labor that must be performed before the delicacy of its fruits can be harvested. 

The image of a diligent, curious monk in his garden tending peas is quite in keeping with Jesus’ various images linking care of the earth to godliness and compassion. Folger’s essay on Mendel links science, when it is driven by a kind of holy curiosity, to compassion as well. 

“Tender curiosity,” is the phrase F. Scott Fitzgerald used to describe one character’s protective affection for another. It is the way I would describe Oliver Sacks’ curiosity about his incurable but deeply interesting patients. What distinguishes Sacks’ stories of clinical encounters is the appreciative attentiveness he brings to his work. What is it like to be you? seems to be the question at the heart of his medical inquiries. He wanted to know what was going on in their tangle of nerves. He also wants to know how they managed–how they went about being who they were. He modeled not only for other doctors but for the rest of us how curiosity is a dimension of tenderness. Medicine, for him, was not only science but a healing art.

With respect to his own art, Van Gogh was more explicit. In a letter to his brother he confides, “I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly’.” We are meant, it seems, to take his paintings personally, take them to heart, behold what they bespeak and betoken. 

In biblical literature God’s tender compassion coexists uncomfortably with references to divine vengeance, violence, and wrath. That tension can’t be fully resolved by human imagination; all emotions attributed to the Creator of the universe are necessarily pale projections of our limited, embodied, hormone-driven experience.

I heard a helpful sermon years ago, though, that helped reconcile the apparently conflicting attributes of the Almighty. God’s wrath, the preacher said, is always wrath against evil itself. In the same way a parent’s response to a child, after snatching her away from the truck into whose path she heedlessly ran, is likely to be both profound, tearful, tender relief and fury at her carelessness or disobedience. As in such an instance, wrath—or, say, outrage at injustice–may be a measure of tender compassion. 

“Be kind one to another,” Paul admonishes the Ephesians, “tenderhearted, forgiving one another.” It’s simple advice. Also, perhaps, one of the most urgent pleas we can make to one another and to those in power as we witness growing militarism, xenophobia, and power to harm. Christian hope means investing in the unlikely truth that tenderness is more than a match for greed.