But my very favorite is one that might not be on anybody else’s list at all. The first time the Aldonza (Quixote calls her “Dulcinea”) actress, frustrated and furious about being mistaken for somebody good, stood across from me, script in hand, demanding why I do the foolhardy and
outrageous things I do, I was touched rather deeply by having to read back to her the simple words, “I hope to add some measure of grace to the world.”

(This is the “play” Don Quixote talking. The “book” Don Quixote, when asked this question, would invariably reply, “to earn fame and honor.” For himself and his Dulcinea, whom he never actually meets anywhere in the one thousand fifty pages of the book.)

“I hope to add some measure of grace to the world.” I really love that.

But how do you do that?

I guess you could start with President Hinckley’s advice to try just a little harder, be just a little kinder, write columns just a little less randomly. And, of course, there are always his “Be” attitudes: Be smart, be good, be lieve.

You don’t have to be a knight-errant to add some measure of grace to the world. You could be a kid. My wife had to pinch-hit yesterday in Primary for the lady who was supposed to conduct and had spaced it. So Laurie hurried into the chapel and saw little four-year-old Leah Ledbetter sitting in the chair up front where you sit if you’re supposed to give a talk. She whispered, “Leah, are you giving a talk today?” Leah whispered back, “Yes. But I don’t have a paper — someone will help me.” Thereupon my wife announced, “Sister Leah Ledbetter will now give a talk.” Leah’s teacher began urgently shaking her head (her own head, not Leah’s or Laurie’s), from side to side in the universal signal for “What are you thinking?” But Leah, who had no more been asked to speak than to play power forward for the Jazz, was already at the mic. Laurie sprang to her side and guided her through the testimony Leah had confidently planned to bear. (You will remember her faith that “someone will help me.”)

It reminded me of that place in Alma 32 where it is announced that sometimes words are given to little children that will confound the wise and learned. Well, just about every single thing Leah meant to say would have confounded the wise and learned: God talks to untutored farm boys in the woods and little old men in Salt Lake City, dead people will jump up out of the ground and sing, you can whisper words by your bedside at night, along with millions of other children at the same time, and the words will be heard, sorted, and answered by someOne Who is listening from someWhere near Kolob, a star to which hieing is well nigh impossible (ask the people of Babel, but don’t count on understanding their response), and, further, that the answer to prayer
number 3,600,423 will never, ever, under any circumstances, be somehow misdirected to kid number 3,600,422. And, to cap it all, the answers will be good! This sort of thing is generally regarded by the wise and learned as, according to Paul, “foolishness.” For them, it’s the perfect word.

If, however, you are among those very many (and often very young, and often somewhat knight-errantly and occasionally chivalrous) who have empirically discovered that such things are consistently and undeniably true, then the perfect word is “grace.”

In the play, Cervantes is being tried by his fellow-prisoners “in durance vile,” awaiting the Inquisition, which was not, perhaps unfortunately, led by any of the members of Monty Python. His prosecutor assails him for the madness of not seeing “life as it is.”  Cervantes replies that he has lived nearly fifty years (one of your younger playwrights) and has seen life “as it is,” has heard “moans from bundles of filth on the streets,” has been a soldier and seen his “comrades fall in battle, or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I held them in my arms at the last moment. These were men who saw life ‘as it is,’ yet they died despairing. No glory, no gallant last words, only their eyes filled with confusion, and the whimpering question, ‘Why?’ I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Too much sanity may be madness — seeking treasure where there is only trash. Perhaps to be practical is madness. And maddest of all, to see life ‘as it is,’ and not as it ought to be!”

Then he slaps a shaving basin on his head, leaps astride an imaginary horse, and bellows, with full orchestra,