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Japanese Social graces are the everyday skills of being good company: courtesy, good manners, tact, and the ease that puts other people at ease. The Cambridge Dictionary defines graces as “ways of behaving that are considered polite and pleasant”. Someone with social graces greets you warmly, remembers your name, listens to your answer and knows what to leave unsaid.
The Bible never uses the phrase, but it does take us to a dinner party. Jesus went to eat at the house of a leading Pharisee one sabbath, and Luke tells us plainly that “they watched him” (Luke 14:1). He was watching too. He “marked how they chose out the chief rooms”, the places of honour at the table, and he gave the guests a lesson in manners. Take the lowest seat, he said, so that your host may come and tell you, “Friend, go up higher” (Luke 14:7–10). Then he gave the reason underneath the lesson: “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted” (Luke 14:11). For Christians, every grace we practise at a table starts there, with leaving the best place for someone else.
What is the meaning of “social graces”?
The phrase is nearly always plural, because it names a set of small skills. “A social grace” is any one of them: a friendly greeting, a gift for easy conversation, a thank-you note sent the next morning. We know their absence when we meet it, in the guest who talks only about himself, who interrupts, or who leaves the host to clear the table alone. The nearest single words are manners, courtesy, civility, tact and poise, and none of them covers quite as much.
The word grace carries two meanings in English, and both are at work here. Cambridge gives one as “the quality of being pleasantly polite”, and its example is people who “accepted their defeat with good grace”. The other is the grace of God, his favour and help. The Greek word of the New Testament, charis, holds the two together. Strong’s dictionary defines it as “graciousness (as gratifying), of manner or act”, and “especially the divine influence upon the heart, and its reflection in the life”. So the gracious manners of a good host and the grace of God that saves us share one word. When God’s grace is at work in someone, it often shows in how they treat the people around them.
What are some examples of social graces?
Most of them can be learned in an afternoon and take years to become natural. These are the ones people notice most:
- Greeting people well. Looking up, smiling, standing to welcome a guest, and using their name.
- Introducing people to each other, with a word about each so the conversation has somewhere to begin.
- Listening. Asking a question and caring about the answer, instead of waiting for a turn to talk.
- Table manners. Waiting until everyone is served, passing the dishes, keeping the phone off the table.
- Saying thank you, aloud on the day and in a note or message afterwards.
- Tact. Knowing when a truth will help and when it will only wound, and saying hard things in private.
- Including the outsider. Noticing the person standing alone and drawing them in.
- Keeping time, or sending word when we cannot.
- Apologising plainly, without a speech in our own defence.
- Receiving well. Accepting a compliment or a gift with simple thanks.
Christians did not invent any of these, and people of every faith and of none practise them beautifully. What the Gospels give us is a reason for them that does not depend on being liked or getting on.
Are social graces the same as etiquette?
They overlap. Etiquette is the set of rules a culture agrees on: which fork to use, who is introduced to whom, how to address a bishop in a letter. Social graces are the warmth and ease that keep those rules from feeling stiff. The etiquette writer Emily Post drew the line herself: “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.”
Rules change from one country and one family to the next. In some homes guests take off their shoes at the door, and in others the host would be puzzled if they did. The awareness Post describes travels everywhere, and it is very close to what Paul asked of the church in Rome: “Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another” (Romans 12:10). To prefer another in honour is the lowest seat again, taken gladly.
What do the Social GRACES mean in therapy and social work?
If you met the phrase on a social work, counselling or family therapy course, it means something different. The Social GRACES, sometimes written “social GGRRAAACCEEESSS”, is an acronym developed by John Burnham and colleagues to name differences in beliefs, power and way of life that can shape the relationship between a professional and the people they serve. The list has grown over the years and in one widely used version covers gender, geography, race, religion, age, ability, appearance, class, culture, ethnicity, education, employment, sexuality, sexual orientation and spirituality. Training courses use it to help therapists notice how power and difference may affect their work. It has nothing to do with manners.
What does the Bible say about good manners?
More than we might expect, and in plain words. Peter ends a short list of what a church should look like with courtesy: “Finally, be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous” (1 Peter 3:8). Pitiful here means full of pity, with none of today’s contempt: the Greek word behind it, eusplanchnos, means “tender-hearted”. The word the King James translators rendered courteous is philophron, “friendly of mind”. Many modern Bibles, among them the NIV, ESV, NASB and NRSV Updated Edition, read “humble” at the end of this verse, because the Greek manuscripts they follow have a different word there. Friendly of mind or humble of mind, the two readings sit close together.
Paul asks the same of our words. “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man” (Colossians 4:6). Grace makes speech pleasant to hear, and salt keeps it from going flat or going bad. In his great chapter on love he counts manners among love’s marks: charity “doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own” (1 Corinthians 13:5). Love has manners because love notices people. There is more on the hard part of this in Bible verses about controlling your tongue.
Jesus noticed when the courtesies were missing. A Pharisee named Simon asked him to dinner, and while they ate, a woman the city knew as a sinner came in, wept over his feet, kissed them and anointed them. Simon said to himself that a prophet would have known what kind of woman she was. Jesus turned to his host: “I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet” (Luke 7:44–45). Simon had skipped the welcome a guest might expect. The woman he had judged gave it with everything she had.
Scripture also warns us that graces can be worn as a costume. Jesus said of some religious leaders of his day that “all their works they do for to be seen of men”, and that they “love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, And greetings in the markets” (Matthew 23:5–7). Polish used to win honour turns the lesson at the Pharisee’s table upside down. The test of our manners is who they are for.
How can you improve your social graces?
The way we learn any skill: small practice, repeated until it comes without thinking. Here are a few things to try this week.
Learn one new name and use it. Say it back when you are introduced, and again when you say goodbye. Then ask one question and wait for the whole answer. James put the art of conversation into a single line: “let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” (James 1:19).
Write one thank-you note, by hand if you can, to someone who fed you, taught you or helped you. It takes five minutes, and it tells them their kindness was seen.
At the next gathering, whether at church, at work or around a family table, look for the person standing alone and go and stand with them. It is close to Jesus’ second lesson at that same dinner, about whom to invite. He told his host to invite “the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind”, people who could never invite him back: “And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee” (Luke 14:13–14). Hospitality that expects nothing in return is the kind he blesses.
When someone speaks sharply to you, answer softly once and see what happens: “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger” (Proverbs 15:1). And when we get it wrong, as all of us do, we can apologise in one sentence, with no defence attached.
Few of us will ever be asked to dine with a chief Pharisee. We sit at kitchen tables and office desks, in church halls and hospital waiting rooms, beside people it would be easy not to see. The lowest seat is nearly always free. And God, who sees the whole table, still knows who took it. Jesus promised such guests that “thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:14), when the Host himself will say, “Friend, go up higher.”
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