Grace: Virtue in Action

Craig 00:02 

Living an excellent life requires actually living according to virtue, not just having a theoretical understanding of virtue. One of the best ways to put virtue into action is through the practice of grace. Grace gives life to virtue and in the process, moves you closer to the Creator.

Welcome to Live Well and Flourish, where I help you understand what it means to live a flourishing life. I'm your host, Craig Van Slyke. If you're ready to think beyond material and external success, if you're ready to take control of who you are and the kind of life you live, if you're ready to flourish, this is the podcast for you.

Craig 00:52 

Some believe that only God can give grace, but I don’t agree. We all have the opportunity to extend grace. Grace is an ideal way to practice virtue, making it essential to living a flourishing life. It seems to me that this is an important, but often overlooked aspect of flourishing. The practice of grace deserves more attention; in many ways, it’s the embodiment of virtue. Grace puts virtue into action.

What is grace? As is often the case, this is a fairly complicated question and there are lots of perspectives on just what constitutes grace. Since it’s my podcast, I’ll give you my take. 

To me, the essence of grace is the idea of extending favor to someone when it isn’t warranted. My view is probably based on the Christian notion of grace as the unmerited favor of God, but I think the basic concept goes beyond any particular religion or religion in general. Put simply, grace is unmerited favor. Often this takes the form of forgiveness. When you forgive someone even though they don’t really deserve it, you have practiced grace. But grace can take other forms, such as doing someone an unearned favor or extending unearned love. In many ways, it’s similar to kindness in that true kindness is performed without a requirement of reciprocity. Grace isn’t quid pro quo, it’s a gift you bestow just because you’re a good person.

Craig 02:32 

Why is grace important to flourishing? Well, flourishing, living a life of reason and virtue, requires the practice of virtue. As Aristotle put it, to become excellent, be excellent (or something like that). I’ll talk more about how grace puts virtue in action in a moment. First, though, I want to bring up another idea, one that I freely admit might be a little out there.

Let’s go back to the idea that only God can extend grace, which I rejected. What I disagreed with was the “only” part, I fully believe that God extends grace. To make this broader, I’m going to refer to the Creator here on out rather than God. A benevolent Creator extends grace, after all, for most of us humans it’s kind of hard to say that we deserve the Creator's goodness … at least I can’t make that claim. But, for the vast majority of us, the Creator has bestowed us with considerable goodness, I know that’s true for me. That goodness is bestowed through grace.

Craig 03:42  

OK, so let’s say you accept my argument. If so, here’s the point: Since the Creator bestows grace, when we practice grace by extending it to others, we move just a little closer to the Creator. Yeah, I know, that might be a little new-agey for some of you, but this is something I firmly believe. But, even if I’m wrong, by practicing grace, you WILL be living a more flourishing life. 

OK, let’s talk about how grace puts virtue into action. To help me explain, I’ll use an all-too-common scenario. Suppose someone sends you an unnecessarily nasty email. You face a choice. You can react in kind and fire off a scathing take down that points out what an inconsiderate jerk and idiot they are. Or, you can let the tone of their email slide and reply calmly. You, being a good person, practice grace and ignore the tone of their message and send a calm, rational response. After all, maybe they’re just having a rough day or they didn’t realize how their email would come off to you and a nasty response would probably just further upset the other person and start a pretty bad cycle. One reason that you decide to respond calmly is that you realized you probably made similar mistakes in the past and it would have been nice to have a little grace extended to you. You fully realize that you could macho up and blast back until you “win" the exchange, (and I put “win” in air quotes, by the way.) But you also realize that winning the exchange might be losing in the long run. So, you take a breath, compose yourself and respond with grace.

Craig 05:34 

OK, what happened here with respect to virtue? Well, the list of virtues you just put into action is actually pretty impressive:

●       You practiced kindness by tempering your response and responding in a way that isn’t likely to upset the other person further.

●       You practiced temperance by not flying off the handle and losing control as you fired off a nasty response.

●       You practiced compassion when you thought about how a nasty response might affect the other person.

●       You practiced humility by recognizing that you’ve probably acted inappropriately in the past.

●       You practiced courage as well. You were courageous by taking the high road and suppressing your lesser urges to boldly live a life of grace and virtue.

Craig 06:25 

So, you had a choice and you chose to not just hold your virtues intellectually, you chose to put them into practice through your actions. That, my friends, is flourishing.

What are the benefits of practicing grace? Well, there are benefits to at least three parties, you, the other person, and society as a whole. I’m going to cover these in reverse order.

Society benefits in at least two ways. First, grace promotes social harmony. When you decided to practice grace and not respond in kind to the nasty message, you lowered the heat on the exchange and short-circuited what could have been a vicious downward cycle of anger and tit-for-tat ugliness. Imagine this happening hundreds of thousands of times a day. Hundreds of thousands of nasty exchanges cut off at the knees. Yeah, when you practice grace, society benefits. Second, much like kindness, there’s a ripple effect of grace. When the other person calms down and realizes that you extended grace to them when they didn’t deserve it, they may want to act similarly towards others. Again, society benefits.

Craig 07:42 

When you practiced grace, the other person benefited directly. You helped them live a better life by modeling grace and by not leading them to double-down on their decidedly unvirtuous behavior. You modeled what it means to be virtuous; your practice of grace served as an example that, hopefully, they will want to follow in the future. You also refused to fan their flames of anger. No, it’s more than that. Not only did you refuse to fan the flames, you removed the fuel for their anger. You metaphorically sucked the oxygen from their fire of anger. Trust me, when you do this, you’ve made the other person’s day better and that’s a good thing.

But the big winner here is you. You improved your emotional well-being by letting go of potential anger and resentment. You also focused on what you can control, which is important to your well-being. You can’t control the other person's actions, but, as I talked about last week, you did control your reactions. And you did. You did so in a manner that aligns with virtue. Rather than getting upset over the nasty message, you controlled what you could, your reaction.

Craig 08:59 

You are also likely to benefit from what we might call grace reciprocity. In future encounters with the other person, they are more likely to extend grace to you should the need arise. Sure, there’s no guarantee of this, but it is more likely.

By practicing grace, you also practiced practical wisdom. You made a choice to act according to virtue and reason, and that’s the wise choice. By doing this, you moved closer to building a habit of wisdom and to simply being a wise person; that is a huge benefit to your flourishing.

There’s more, though! By rising above the fray and maintaining your calm, you also preserved your self-image as a good person. At least I hope that’s your self-image. It should be if you're listening to this podcast. If you reacted harshly, you would have chipped away at that self-image, which is a bad thing. I want to take this a step further, you not only preserved your self-image, you strengthened it by providing yourself with tangible evidence that your virtue isn’t just an intellectual activity, it’s what you practice, it's what you actually do.

Craig 10:15 

Finally, and I think this is a huge benefit, you’ve set yourself up for what we might call self-grace. You’re going to screw up in the future. To be human is to be imperfect (which is why we all need grace). By extending grace to others, you’re more likely to extend grace to yourself when you do make mistakes. This is a powerful form of self-compassion, one that can help spur you to learn from errors rather than ruminate on them, which will let you grow and flourish. By extending grace to someone else, you’re building a double virtuous cycle of grace, one between you and the other person and, more importantly, between you and yourself. 

Craig 11:01  

That’s a pretty good list of benefits, don’t you think. So, there’s not only a virtue-based argument for practicing grace, there’s a rational argument as well, based on all those benefits. Your act of grace really didn’t cost you much, but the payoffs were massive. So, your act of grace hits both of the requirements for flourishing, acting according to virtue AND acting according to reason.

Before moving on to how you can better put grace into practice I want to mention two other things. The first is a reminder to sign up for my email list. I promise, it will be worthwhile in the near future. To sign up, just go to livewellandflourish.com.

The second thing is a warning. There should be limits to your grace. You don’t have to be a doormat for everybody, just taking every proverbial punch they throw at you. There are times when you should act less gracefully for the greater good. Discerning when can be difficult, but knowing the proper limits to your grace is important. For example, if someone is constantly nasty over a long period of time, maybe you should just cut them off or maybe you should fight their fire with a bit of well-reasoned fire of your own. I can’t give you a set of rules here, it’s something you’ll just have to learn through awareness and experience.

Craig 12:23 

There’s also a special sort of qualified grace that is sometimes appropriate. For example, if I get a kind of nasty, disrespectful email from a student, I usually respond with a terse message that points out the consequences of their disrespect. Often, this is a good learning opportunity as the student may not even realize how their message sounded (they often don't). Remember, the proper practice of a virtue requires finding the right middle ground (the mean) between the vice of excess and the vice of deficiency. So, too much grace or too little grace is contrary to virtue. You have to find the right mean.

Alright, it’s time for three things you can do this week to refine your practice of grace.

Craig 13:08 

My first thought is that you should begin building awareness by intentionally looking for opportunities to practice grace. Even during a mundane day, there are likely multiple opportunities to extend grace to someone. Smiling at someone who frowns at you, giving a wave and a smile to someone who cuts you off in traffic (not the middle finger wave though), letting a harsh remark from a colleague slide … there are all kinds of chances to practice grace each day. Even if you just notice these opportunities, you’ll make progress. Awareness is the precursor to practice.

Here's another idea. Each day, pick one grace opportunity and carefully analyze the costs and benefits of extending grace. Then determine whether extending grace was the proper thing to do. If not, how can you use your ability to reason and your virtue to respond in a way that is ultimately helpful, even if you don’t practice grace. Do this for a week, and you’ll start to build your ability to discern opportunities for grace in a way that enhances your flourishing.

Craig 14:18 

My last suggestion is to practice some self-praise when you make the effort to practice grace. You don’t want to become conceited, but a little self-praise will reinforce your acts of grace, encouraging future such acts. Also, when you fail to practice grace appropriately, practice self-grace with the goal of being more mindful of grace in the future. Remember practicing grace, like flourishing, is an ongoing journey, not a one time box to check.

In closing, when someone acts poorly towards you, don’t reflexively react in kind, take a breath and react with grace. Do so and you’ll not only flourish, you’ll move a little closer to the Creator.

I don’t know the source of our closing quote, but I do know wise words when I hear them. “In crucial things, unity. In important things, diversity. In all things, grace.”

Until next time, be full of grace my friends.

I produce Live Well and Flourish because of my dedication to helping others live excellent lives. I don't accept sponsorships and I don't want your money. The only thing I want is to help you and others flourish. If you've received some value from this episode, please share it with someone that might also benefit from listening. The best way to do that is to direct them to livewellandflourish.com

Until next time.