Julia Baird
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Julia Baird’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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To me, at the heart of grace is something that is undeserved. You will be loving the unlovable, forgiving the unforgivable. You'll be showing mercy instead of measuring merit. You'll be giving people the benefit of the doubt, not judging them by their worst possible moment.
Thank you for having me.
Well, that's part of it. Part of it is it's great mystery and people do say exactly that. Like, I'm not quite sure exactly how to define it, but the moment I see it, I know it. And really, I think it's acts of great generosity, courage, decency and so on. But To me, at the heart of grace is something that is undeserved. You will be loving the unlovable, forgiving the unforgivable.
You'll be showing mercy instead of measuring merit. You'll be giving people the benefit of the doubt, not holding them to or judging them by their worst possible moment. It's something that's expansive and in one sense actually doesn't make sense, but it can change lives. It really is the very best of humanity, I think.
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. My mother was a great woman of grace. And you do meet people like that sometimes who have a kind of light about them, who are open to people, who see the best in people, who leave you feeling better about yourself and the world in general, who just are fundamentally deeply kind. But I think in a way that lets us off the hook because sometimes
Grace is not something that's just inherited or just easy. It's not Kleenex and puppies and like a simple path. To me, there is a really powerfully difficult thing about grace. I see it as requiring a lot of grit. You can decide to be that way. You can decide to live that way. If you decide to forgive someone, it's not the easiest thing to do necessarily.
And often you can decide you're going to, and you still wake up the next morning with all the pain and the grief and the annoyance and the irritation with that person. And you might have to decide to forgive again. You might have to decide that's how you really want to be. and you're going to work towards it and you've got to train yourself towards it.
I mean, I think it's, I just don't think it's necessarily easy or simple. I think it can really change you to live that way. And I think it can change you to receive those kinds of acts, to be allowed a possibility of redemption. But fundamentally, it's about opening yourself up to recognise the humanity in another person.
So the difference, say, between I see the difference between grace and compassion, there'll be maybe you have a neighbor down the road who's got cancer and you've always got on well with this neighbor. You're worried about them. You drop them off food, meals, you know, mow their lawn, whatever it is they need to have done. That's compassion and empathy and kindness.
Now, what if that neighbour had always actually been a real jerk, who had been rude to neighbours, you know, just hostile to the kids in the area, whatever, just not pleasant to be around, and they had cancer and you still did the same thing for them? that's when someone fundamentally isn't deserving it, but you're doing it because there's a need and there's a human there.
And then if you sat long enough with that person, you might work out like, oh, he... I don't know. That's a man who lost his parents when it was orphan when he was two years old and has had chronic illness his whole life and has just suffered a lot and which has calcified around him and made him a really angry person. I don't know.
So do you see that the difference there is it's not about ease necessarily or just being that way. I think you can definitely meditate on it, train your mind on it and be more like that.
Going back to your original point, people know it when they see it, right? So if I could talk briefly about this study, which really excited me, and that's the reason I wrote this whole book. I've done a lot of work in the area of awe.
in what it means to be struck by something, be stopped in your tracks, be amazed by something that you might not understand, that you might marvel at, that makes you feel small. And yet a lot of research around all showing that it makes you feel more connected to each other, to the world. Like it's psychologically really good for us to feel small sometimes and it makes people more altruistic.
There was a study done of 2,600 people in 26 countries, and it asked them to write their accounts of awe. What were your personal experiences of awe? What is the most common way in which you experienced it? And they found...
across all these countries with all the different histories dialects you know demographic groups and cultures the number one i would have said the natural world but that was not it the number one thing was seeing it in each other was seeing great decency great courage great generosity and also people overcoming obstacles with with great abilities um
I think that one of the things that the research shows is that when we see people acting in this way, we are much more likely to do it ourselves. We're much more likely to react in the same way.
There was one study which showed a group of college students a series of videos and they showed some videos which were really funny and then another group which showed people in distress but people trying to do something about it. um trying to help out now the funny videos did absolutely nothing to their brains which is interesting because i watch a lot of funny videos but the second group
had that fight or flight, that kind of, oh, someone's in trouble, we need to do something about it. And then watching that suffering be eased in some way by someone else was incredibly soothing for them. And after the study, they were much more likely to carry out an act, which was looking after other people. So I guess that's a different way of answering your question.
We might not be repeating the word grace to ourselves, but when we witness it, we do it more.
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