Bright Shining

How Grace Changes Everything

BairdWhat do I mean by grace? I have found the reflections by journalist Julia Baird in her 2024 book Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything, both insightful and inspiring. She writes: Grace is like the sun. it warms us, fuels us and unerringly brings light. At first and, perhaps, second glance, though, the world seems to have been drained of it. Try to recall the last time you saw a public act of grace or an unexpected, extraordinary decency. Presidents trash talk, commentators brawl and spit, vitriol is a currency of clicks, outrage is a profitable algorithm, and hate fills online pews. Rage flows thick, daily, through well-worn tributaries on social media.

But something has happened in the past few years, both subtle and seismic. During the pandemic, millions of us squinted, shifted our lenses, started looking further and asking for more, for better. We began to imagine a different way of life, of being, and of relating to each other.

Baird continues, I wrote a book about the importance of hunting awe and wonder, of living deliberately and with purpose, of stout-hearted friendship, of finding an inner light when the world goes dark and was astonished by the number of people who wrote to me to say, “Me too. I feel the same.”

At the same time, I was struck by something else that was not easy to articulate . . . something more mysterious and hard to define. People were talking about a need to reckon with our own smallness, a need to find meaning and dignity in connection, and to better understand each other.

I had been stunned, too, to read the results of a recent study on the science of awe (defined as “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world”). In this study, Dacher Keltner from the University of California, Berkeley conducted research into what the most common sources of awe are, surveying 2,600 people across 26 countries. Would it be nature, art, music, sports games, the ocean?

He found it was seeing moral beauty—“the exceptional virtue, character and ability”—in other people. Many of the stories they told were stories of grace. I saw also a desire to more readily acknowledge—and build on—our shared humanity, to be kinder, bigger, better, more forgiving. Which isn’t always easy when we’re tired, overwhelmed and worried about this melting planet.

To me, this read also as a desire to see, experience and express grace. Something that might look and sound good but is not easy. How—or why—should we willingly do something that costs us when the world is full of enough pain? The answer is that grace isn’t a form of capitulation or complacency, isn’t about weakness or politeness. It requires grit and strength, and, somehow, can change everything.

This is what, Baird says, I became determined to understand. My quest has become even more urgent given that we live in an era when grace is an increasingly rare currency. The silos in which we consume information dot the media landscape like skyscrapers, and the growing distrust of the press, politicians and public figures has in some ways choked our ability to cut each other slack, to allow each other to stumble, to forgive one another.

Think, too, of these trends: We are getting lonelier, angrier and less tolerant. Trust in institutions and in each other has corroded. We report having fewer close friends. We are also becoming less empathetic.

Asked to find reasons for this dramatic decline in empathy, Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan points to growing social isolation—in many Western countries, the number of people living alone has doubled in recent years, and we are less inclined to join communities such as churches, scouts, unions and political parties. Social fabric is fraying, like patches decaying on quilts. (We are also, incidentally, reading far less—something that has been shown to impact empathy.) It seems obvious to say, but research tells us that those who report being more empathetic do actually respond more to the needs and concerns of others.

Lonely people are more likely to cheat, think worse of others, and suffer from a range of physical and mental health issues—even moderate loneliness can make us sick. And, curiously, the lonelier we are, the less wise we are. Researchers compared loneliness in two starkly different populations, one in Cilento, in rural southern Italy, and one in San Diego, in the United States. In both groups, they found that the more wisdom an individual had, the less lonely they felt.

The study defined wisdom as having several components—all of which stoke grace—including empathy, compassion, self-reflection and emotional regulation or discipline, with the first two having the strongest inverse correlation with loneliness. Be kind to people, listen to people, try to understand their point of view, and you will be wiser and less lonely. Wisdom also meant people slept better and were healthier.

The designer of the study, Dr. Dilip Jeste, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, says “wiser people don’t feel lonely and vice versa. Obviously, this doesn’t prove that increasing wisdom will reduce loneliness, but it certainly points in that direction.”

This all makes sense, and researchers are now working on ways to increase people’s compassion and in turn improve health. A 2021 study even showed how loneliness and wisdom—including compassion—relate to gut microbial diversity and composition.

Some find empathy too hard, too taxing. But empathy is integral to grace, and something I believe to be integral to a life well lived. “Turn your face to the sun,” goes the old saying, “and the shadows fall behind you.”

NOTES

Julia Baird, Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything (pp. 1-5). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin, 2023).

Jamil Zaki, “What, me. Care? Young are less empathetic,” Scientific American, 1 January 2011.

Steven W. Duck, Kris Pond, and Geoff Leatham, “Loneliness and the evaluation of relational events,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, vol. 11, no. 2 (1994), doi:10.1177/0265407594112006.

E. Lee et al., “High prevalence and adverse health effects of loneliness in community-dwelling adults across the lifespan: Role of wisdom as a protective factor,” International Psychogeriatrics, vol. 21, no 10, pp. 1447-1462 (2018), doi:10.1017/S1041610218002120.

Dilip V. Jeste et al., “Study of loneliness and wisdom in 482 middle-aged and oldest-old adults: A comparison between people in Cilento, Italy, and San Diego, USA,” Aging & Mental Health, vol. 25, no. 11, pp. 2149–2159 (2020), doi:10.1080/13607863.2020.1821170.

Tanya T. Nguyen et al., “Association of loneliness and wisdom with gut microbial diversity and composition: An exploratory study,” Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 12 (2021), doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2021.648475.

C.D. Cameron et al., “Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 148, no. 6, pp. 962–976 (2019), doi:10.1037/xge0000595.