Unmitigated Favor
Peggy Noonan was President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter. In her book about him, When Character was King, she devotes a chapter to his humor. Finding the funny and creating it when there wasn’t any was one of Reagan’s gifts. I’ll paraphrase one of her stories in the interest of space and time:
Retrieved from www.history.com
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady, Nancy, hosted a state dinner for the president of Venezuela. They asked Frank Sinatra, their dear and trusted friend, to handle the entertainment. In addition to his performance, Sinatra decided to jazz things up a little and invite Robert Goulet to join him as the main event. Sinatra planned to warm up the crowd and then turn them over to Goulet, the Broadway and Vegas star, in an attempt to loosen up what is typically a notoriously stiff event. Goulet, in that vein, did not disappoint. Most of his border line below-the-line songs, and the jokes he told in between, worked. Or at the least were tolerated. But he told one near the end that landed with a thud.
Goulet told a story about touring in Tahoe. He said the crowd there was a dud except for this one gorgeous girl in the back that he pitched all his songs to, flirting with her salaciously all night. It was only after the fact, he told the White House guests that night, that he discovered the beautiful woman in the back was the biggest transvestite in Tahoe. He said, “It all worked out, though. He writes me every week!”
Badum tsss.
The joke fell awkwardly into a sea of silence as the uncomfortable crowd shifted in their seats. Sideways glances cut everywhere as people, embarrassed, self-conscious, and offended, were afraid to move their heads. Goulet sang one more song, Sinatra came out to close-up the entertainment, and shortly thereafter President Reagan came out to thank the crowd for having dinner at the White House. The President also thanked Sinatra, and then he said, “And thank you, Bob Goulet, not only for entertaining us with your wonderful voice but for remembering our night in Lake Tahoe.”
The audience erupted.
All of the awkwardness, the anxiety, the discomfort with what had been said went racing out of the too taut balloon that Reagan masterfully untied. He took a ticking time bomb and diffused it at the mic. The state dinner went on to be a beautiful, relaxed, laughter-filled evening that would be tagged by any standard as an unequivocal success.
If you put what Reagan did into a category, it would go in Social Grace.
Grace has all sorts of meanings and applications. We use it to describe a ballerina’s twirl or a receiver’s catch or the way a confident person strides across a room. We use it to encapsulate goodwill. We use it to express honor in attendance. In the Christian world we use it to put a label on the thing that saves the day. A gift we get from God that we do not deserve.
Yet grace is one of those things that’s really hard to get. We know it when we see it transform hearts and soften blows and mend dilapidated fences. But it’s hard to say exactly what it looks like. Things without hard edges are always difficult to define.
The gifted writer, Anne Lamott, says, “Grace meets us where we are and does not leave us there.” Of all the explanations floating around, I think I like that one best. Her implication seems to be that grace’s work is bridging gaps.
We seem to find grace easier to understand when it’s vertical. We kind of ‘get it” when it’s coming from God. He’s big and a little mysterious and capable of things we on Earth are not. But even then, it seems a bit above our comprehension line. The word “grace” floats around like the word “faith” in the clouds that we can’t touch. So we really struggle when we try to wrap our heads around how it works from side to side.
What it looks like on this earth, perhaps, on the horizontal track, is allowance. Not lack of accountability or a free ticket to ride on a gravy train but room for all those things that we simply cannot know. Grace says, “I forgive you” when there is no apology spoken. Grace says, “I love you” when junk is in the way. Grace says, “I believe your best intention” regardless of the action that got twisted in release.
Basically, grace says, “You lunged for the edge of the pool, but you weren’t quite there yet. These next 6 inches are on me.” It says, “I got you.” And then it gets you, as Lamott says, from wherever it is you are to a better place to be.
Grace saves.
It changes the way a situation or a person or a moment looks and feels, because it’s an inside job. It changes the looker not what’s being looked at. Grace bastes a soul like my granny used to temporarily hinge a hem. It holds things together while gently carrying us where we need to go. It is kindly and relaxed…less judgy and “conclusion-ish” … more forgiving and more inclined to leave the door slightly ajar. It washes whoever lets it with a reminder that everything has something worth saving even if all the parts look wonky and the finish is rubbed off.
Grace covers everything. The gaps. The mess. The hurt. The confusion. The toe stubs. The gaffs. The overlooks. The underdones. It coats it all.
And the best part about it is it always lies in waiting. All we have to do is let it in.