grace

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How to be Great

“I have to say — and it is true, it’s not fake — we’ve been on the road with these guys for so long, and that was so gracious, so generous of them. My love to “La La Land,” my love to everybody, ” declared Barry Jenkins, director of Academy-Award-winning “Moonlight.”

Two wonderful gestures captured live at the Oscars Sunday night. Producer Jordan Horowitz, hearing that “La-La Land” had been handed the Oscar in error, quickly stepped to the mike, declared the winner, and passed the trophy to Barry Jenkins, who first acknowledged the gesture, then acknowledged the award. Pretty classy men showing how to win and how to lose. Take notes, President Trump.

If Donald Trump had been the producer of “La-La Land” I’m pretty sure the whole matter would be in court today, because  the man can not lose without claiming the procedure was “rigged.” “Greatness” for the current President can not be declared until the last butt  has been kicked.  Grace has nothing to do with it.

Surely there are some Hollywood producers that would follow the Trumpean way, but Sunday night we had a different demonstration of greatness. “I’m going to be really proud to hand this to my friends from ‘Moonlight, ‘ said Horowitz. A tableau of a man watching a great honor literally slip through his fingers into the hands of another gracious man hardly believing this twist of fate.  And for a moment it was only the generous act of Jordan Horowitz handing the statue to Brian Jenkins that captured our attention. Not a moment of hesitation, but an affirmation that this was justice served.

How refreshing after suffering the bitterness of the Presidential campaign and the persistent sniping that dogs this administration.  “Making America Great” has been at the expense of judges, journalists, undocumented immigrants, and transgendered citizens. In this world there are always winners and losers, braggadocio and shame, white hats and black hats, the sorting of America.

At the Oscars we heard actor after actor paying lip-service to diversity, inclusion, and equality, but  then we saw it enacted in a moment of truth. “La-La Land” ceded honors to “Moonlight” in an accident that could not have been scripted.  In an annual performance replete with staged events, right down to the acceptance speeches, this was spontaneous grace, human nature rising to the occasion.

If America is going to be great, this is how I would like to see “greatness.” Great-heartedness, great fairness, great respect, great honor, great appreciation of the other.  Although it is more often the subject of accusation and jealousy and self-promotion, Hollywood last night gave us instead a model of generosity and respect.  The kind of greatness America should always aspire to.

 

 

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On the National Day of Writing: Writing that Heals

I was touched by Garrison Keillor’s story on Prairie Home Companion (October 11, 2014) about barely avoiding some kids while driving a little buzzed one evening. He was in his mid-twenties when he was driving home from a party and coming over a rise to see three boys walking on the road. He grabbed the wheel, but didn’t see how he could avoid them. “I waited for the bump of the bodies,” he recalled, but it never came. Instead he found himself pulled over to the side of the road and the boys scurrying off into the woods, laughing at their narrow escape.
“Had I hit them, this would have been a deep shadow over the rest of my life . . . It did not happen what should have happened. “ The event haunted him. “Through pure grace your own future did not catch up with you,” he reflected as he concluded his Lake Woebegone monologue.
How soberly he recalled this incident with not a trace of Woebegone irony. He was really living by grace and gratitude for being delivered from tragedy. He remembered the story in the context of a horizontal eclipse, the wonder of the sun rising and the moon setting simultaneously and the moon turned red by the spectacle. It was what the modern mind reduces to superstition, feeling pangs of regret and relief in conjunction with a natural phenomenon. It was either a spiritual moment or an ironic one, depending on your perspective.
Keillor, a man who loves to skewer his religious upbringing, chose the spiritual reflection and willingly shared it on National Public Radio. That is what touched me . . . the vulnerability that says I am here by the grace of God and says it to a secular listening audience. The whole story is recorded on an audio-file on http://prairiehome.org/shows/october-11-2014/ to be reviewed by any cynical ear that wants to judge it.
Most everyone has these near tragedies in their lives, and some are not so lucky in their escape. How we catalog those events matters. Were we lucky, gritty, resourceful or saved by grace? It is not easy to judge. But if we find ourselves habitually lucky or resourceful, we may be missing the humbling moment that helped define Keillor’s life.
In the nadir of my life my marriage was breaking up, and I was living in a cottage rental in January on Cape Cod. A phone call interrupted my anguish. My uncle was dying from cancer, as we knew he would. My wife and I drove to Connecticut, hardly able to speak to each other in the car. I spent four days struggling with my uncle’s passing and weeping through his funeral. My wife stayed an extra week to help my aunt and mother gather the pieces of their lives.
When Kathy returned we suddenly resolved to save our marriage, and that has made all the difference. Whenever “I am the Bread of Life” echoes from my uncle’s funeral, I am reduced to tears. I am not only mourning my uncle, although he meant a lot to me. I am re-living the grace that sent me down a different road, the one that made all the difference.
You could interpret it differently. You could say you summoned your spiritual resources or you backed away from inevitable divorce. Or you could sing “Amazing Grace” and mean it. I like the way Garrison Keillor interpreted it.

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Showing Up

Woody Allen is credited with the statement “80 per cent of success is showing up.” If you teach public school or engage in voter registration, you get this. Your job is to get the unwilling to be minimally willing and move on from there. If the students or voters don’t “show up,” your work is futile.

Public schooling and voting for public officials are considered the great institutions of American society. Both have fallen into disrepute because of modern inventions that confound them, standardized testing and voter suppression laws.  Both regulations rationalize against “showing up,” but rather that you must show up at the right time and meet certain qualifications. Those who advocate for such regulation believe that the processes of learning and voting need strict quality controls. As much as this makes sense, the regulations of standardized testing and voter id/ voting hours are not affecting quality, but participation.

If you are not directly involved in teaching or voter registration you may not understand that both learning and voting require engagement. Without it the rest of the process is defunct. It’s like another popular American institution, the lottery. If you don’t play, how can you win? As one who never plays the lottery, I can attest my interest in numbers chosen on TV or in the newspaper is nil. I am a nonparticipant.  I don’t even get why people throw their money away on such things.  Supposed you believed this about education or voting?  You don’t show up.

I have taught high school and listened to people explain what they vote for, and I know that people do not always show up for the right reasons. I know that there were days when I breathed a sigh of relief when Barry or Linda did not show up for class. But then Barry or Linda show up a week later and say, “What did I miss?” I’m thinking: a week of education. I’m wishing they had been there to know what was going on even if they didn’t do it.

You can say I’m suffering from low expectations, but I also know that these students can suddenly become engaged with the novel we’re reading for no particular reason and take off. Or someone will get through to them, and they will see the point of learning. And I think the same is true of voter registration.

I suspect those who disdain the “showing up” philosophy are thinking, No one begged me to show up, I just did. And why can’t everyone else do what I did? Take initiative, accept responsibility, do what’s right. But if you teach public school or attempt to get the vote out, you can see how thin the margin is between doing what’s right and doing nothing.  There is a redemptive moment in many lives that happens just because they showed up.

And if you want to get down to redemption, you have to believe, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”  If you don’t accept that grace or luck or connections have something to do with success, then you probably don’t believe in “showing up.”  You probably think it all comes of trying harder and having the right attitude. Good luck with that.

For my part, I begin this day asking for mercy not to screw up, and God takes it from there. And I will screw up, but I know that God will remember I showed up that morning. I will learn something, and I will remember to vote.

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The Self-Made Man

They say he was a self-made man.

Well, that should absolve the Creator of considerable responsibility.

I can’t locate the author of this wry remark, but it sounds like one of Abraham Lincoln’s one-liners. It surfaced as I was reading about Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand this week, wondering how different he was from me.  I don’t know much about Ayn Rand, but I know one thing: I can’t trust anyone who thinks he or she is a self-made man or self-made woman.

Humility is not a primary requisite to be a politician or an exceptional athlete or performer, but the illusion of self-sufficiency is not a luxury I can afford those who make decisions for me.  Such illusions have brought this country to reckless invasions and dizzying financial risks with other people’s money. These decisions are based on an attitude of invulnerability and so-called “exceptionalism.”  Ironically it also builds on a kind of  “entitlement,”  the assumption that we get what we earn in life.

Tell that to the martyrs, the casualties of war, the victims of congenital diseases, the victims of violent crime.  If these victims were “self-made,” their expiration date was premature.  They might have lived consecrated lives, but they did not receive their just desserts in this life.

We can either romanticize the lives of those unjustly sacrificed or we can learn what we owe the grace of God and the mercy of friends and strangers.  I want to be led by the latter, by those who know their debt and providence, those who know that a “hand up” is not a “handout.”

Power either corrupts or humbles. We have been fortunate to have been led most often by the humbled. I believe that most of our Presidents have left office with this disposition.  The staunchest conservatives, self-made men like Goldwater and Reagan, finished their terms with more compassion for the weak than when they entered politics. Like the aging King Solomon they accepted that “The race is not always to the swift.”  They knew the need for mercy by the sheer responsibility they bore with their political power.

In the campaign season we will likely hear a lot of humble rhetoric. Probably most of it is for show, so I will not judge candidates by their words. However, I will not vote for anyone who subscribes to the “self-made man” philosophy. I will vote for those who respect power as a vulnerability, not an entitlement.

God save us from the “self-made man” or “self-made woman.”