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Kamala Harris’s concession speech was, pundits on both sides agreed, “graceful.” The compliment is a tad gendered; men are seldom described as graceful, though they certainly can be. But brush that aside, because this country stands in desperate need of grace. And that holds true across all of the word’s possible definitions: forgiveness, understanding, leniency, slack, room for everyone to be who they are.
Maybe that is why the phrase “giving someone grace” has caught on. I hear it all the time lately—perhaps because people keep having to give it to me? We are so bloody exasperated with one another, so adamant about offense or uncertain what is offensive that there is no padding, no buffer. Our exchanges are all sharp angles, and nails stick up from the floor waiting to impale our feet.
Yet Harris, having just been called trash and any number of other vile epithets, kept her elbows tucked close to her body and executed a graceful, courteous, civilized concession speech.
Graceful is the opposite of awkward. Grace moves fluidly, without hesitation, around obstacles. In traditional theological terms, grace is the opposite of condemnation. The concept goes back to the Middle Ages, when grace was said to be freely given by a God who knew our flaws and loved us anyway. Today’s grace has moved from evangelism to self-help to casual conversation. Why the ascendancy? Maybe because we know that kind of pure, unconditional acceptance can heal us. It can leap across a chasm, soften fiery differences, rise above petty resentment.
Harris had to be bitterly disappointed by the election results, a disappointment no doubt laced with incredulity, exhaustion, and outrage. But what she said and how she said it were more than pro forma politics. Her words and tone exercised courtesy and self-restraint. And if we are to hang on to democracy, we need courtesy and self-restraint. Not to placate or avoid conflict, but to return the country to a place of civilized exchange, so our conflicts can at least make rational sense. We need discussions that remain adult instead of degenerating into childish insults or wacky conspiracy theories. And we need to ignore those on both sides who pronounce this milder approach weak and futile.
On both the left and the right, the reaction to Harris’s speech was warmed by gratitude, an emotion that is inextricable from grace. Before meals, members of every world religion thank God and ask that their meal be blessed, made holy. Christians are taught to “say grace,” speaking it into being as they express gratitude to God for the food and companionship that will sustain them. Pope Francis urged all believers to return to this humbling, sweet-hearted custom. Did he sense the rise of grace’s opposite, the arrogance of entitlement and exclusion? ‘
Grace is hospitable. Regardless of our beliefs, it reminds us that we are not self-sufficient—we need that food, grown and prepared by someone else, to continue living. Grace softens our fierce pride by making room for us at the table. Grace is flexible, not rigid. To accommodate Boy Scouts of all creeds, a special grace, named after the S-F Scout Ranch in Knob Lick, Missouri, is addressed to a great, nondenominational, nonpersonalized Spirit. In One Long River of Song, Brian Doyle writes of a friend saying grace before a meal: “He bowed his head, in the guttering candlelight, steam rising from the food before him, the fingers of the cedar outside brushing the window, and said, ‘We are part of a Mystery we do not understand, and we are grateful.’”
Hunting for variations of grace, which are many and lovely, I come upon a Fodor’s travel forum asking how Europeans handle the saying of grace when they come to this country. The replies spiral into fury, with people ranting about dinner hosts who dare ask their guests to hold hands for a quick prayer before the meal.
How churlish can you get? I grew up painfully shy, and I did hear such invitations with dread. I dry-swallowed and swiped my suddenly sweaty palms on my jeans, then sat very still, hands pinned to strangers on either side. But even when the prayer’s assumptions or phrases were foreign to me, I always wound up glad afterward. Warmer inside, freer to laugh and lean in and pass the potatoes.
I read on, glad to see that not everyone in the Fodor’s chain is appalled. “We really don’t get upset if our annual beanfeast with colleagues starts with a Grace we don’t believe in,” remarks a Brit. But someone who does get upset explains that nonbelievers are made intensely uncomfortable by the practice, because they feel “embarrassed for their friends, whom they had considered adult thinking persons, behaving in such an irrational way.”
“That isn’t embarrassment you are feeling,” retorts another participant. “It is condescension.”
Well, there has been a lot of condescension in this country in recent years, and one way or another, it has cost us all. Now Thanksgiving looms, with its new reputation as the holiday during which you must get drunk to endure one of your relatives’ crazy political rants. The sacrifice itself is not new: family members have always had to bite their tongues in order to remain cordial. The bond of blood creates an illusion of safety, and people speak too freely. “Familiarity,” my grandmother loved to say, “breeds contempt.”
Today’s rants, though, express seemingly irreconcilable world views, and seldom does anyone bother to calmly, clearly explain why they think what they think, let alone squint hard to find a few small areas of overlap. Maybe if a therapist came to every Thanksgiving table to mediate? Few of us are sufficiently diplomatic and socially adroit to manage these conversations. As a result, the combatants push each other even further apart.
Kamala Harris managed to be true to herself and encouraging to her supporters without provoking, jabbing, pouting, or polarizing. Biden was quick to call Donald Trump and congratulate him, and the Obamas started their public statement the same way. I winced in sympathy—it cannot have been easy. But a gracious response glows, impossible to overlook. Anyone who tries to mock it looks like a buffoon.
It is naïve to think we can give each other a little grace and wind up in amicable agreement. Democracy is hard work, and it needs shoring up fast, for all our sakes. But it is heartening (and this is a measure of where we have been) to remember that civility is not dead, not abandoned, not impossible, not a waste of breath.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
