We have become more sensitive to the presence of grace because of its profound absence in amid epidemic of grievance.
Nancy Gibbs opinion piece on Tom Hanks’ commencement speech at Harvard brought back memories. “The language of the academy is increasingly centered on who or what is centered,— what voices, what values —” She wrote in the Washington Post, ”and there wasn’t the least doubt, on a day that also honored a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, a magisterial historian, a groundbreaking biochemist, a media pioneer and a four-star admiral, that Dr. Hanks was the center of attention. It takes an astute understanding of human physics to redirect all those energies and center the students. Over and over, he found ways to send the focus back to them, rising from his seat to kneel in awe before Latin orator Josiah Meadows, hugging Vic Hogg — who recounted a harrowing recovery from gunshot wounds suffered during a carjacking — grace notes and gestures aimed at the musicians and speakers whose names he wove into his own remarks, and at the parents whose pride pulsed across the sea of caps and gowns.”
Grace is a gift. Like kindness, it permeates all but the hardest shells. You never know when acts of grace and kindness may make all the difference. These days, it is rare and priceless; a glittering diamond in a sea of abhorrence.
Gibbs reminds us how, “Leaders find power and profit in crassness and cruelty, and signal that virtue is for suckers… On a brisk spring day, watching the radioactive level of attention on (Hanks), and his ability to refract it into pure joy and shared humanity, was a healing energy in a sorry time.”
Nancy Gibbs’ observations are so powerful that I’ll give her the last word. “The opposite of love is not hate, Elie Wiesel said, but indifference, and Hanks put the challenge before his audience of rising leaders and explorers, artists and environmentalists, teachers and technologists. ‘Every day, every year, and for every graduating class, there is a choice to be made. It’s the same option for all grown-ups, who have to decide to be one of three types of Americans,’ Hanks said. ‘Those who embrace liberty and freedom for all, those who won’t, or those who are indifferent.’ Bracing as the words were, the actions spoke louder. For those of us in the truth business — which is to say, all of us — it was an actor who never finished college who set a standard we can work to live up to.”
