Grace is the self-effacing friend at a gathering, lurking profitably behind the scenes, setting the table and wiping away crumbs when no one is looking. Kindness seeks no limelight, calls no attention to itself, is most contented when the hum of lively conversation seasons the room with its own subtle romance.
Grace has no self-exalting agenda. Rather, kindness gives, levels the path of the other, sets the stage for good things in which it calculates no immediate gain save the satisfaction of its companions.
Cruelty, its sometime opposite, stomps loudly from room to room, seeking its own, squeezing faint praise from the careful neutrality of people more polished than itself. Cruelty imagines those who look on in silence to be its allies, mistakes noncommittal poise for approval, imagines that onlookers find pleasure in its putdowns of the clumsy and the innocent.
Both earn their reward:
Those who are kind reward themselves,
but the cruel do themselves harm.
We reduce the reliable textures of created reality to a banality when we name them ‘karma, when we mechanize them, when we turn it into maxims, principles, and cheap ditties and then presume upon them.
The biblical proverbs, much more aware that the created order is complex rather than simple, avoid this blind alley.
Yet they do reckon with order. One of its manifest ironies is that behaviors sew the seeds of their own compensation.
The cruel man and woman, remote from their intentions, punishes themselves.
The gracious man, the kind woman fill their pockets with gold’s equivalent. Nobody knew their treasure, predicted the lavish bonanza of their reward. No one understood the counterintuitive potency of self-denial, of restraint, of the economics of generosity.
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