I’m not sure if the producers of TNT’s series “Saving Grace,” timed the episodes to match the appropriate scripture readings of the Christian liturgical year, but they sure did nail the message of the first week of Advent: “Yo, Grace! Wake up! Because you’re headed to hell!”
I absolutely loved the dialog of the first scene between Earl the “Last-Chance” Angel (Leon Rippy) and Oklahoma City police officer Ham Dewey (Kenny Johnson), Grace’s partner on the job and in bed (even though he’s technically, ah, married).
Ham and Earl are sitting at a local bar listening to the weather report about the severe tornado headed their way.
“Looks like I’m going to have to cancel my fishing trip,” says Earl (who no one can tell is an angel until he flashes his wings, which is totally cool) to Ham.
“You don’t want to be out in this stuff,” Ham replies.
“What are you doing out?”
“I work for the city. … What do you do?”
“I’m just here helping out a friend. . . . She doesn’t want my help.”
“Maybe she does but she doesn’t know how to ask.”
“She thinks she can do it all by herself, but I keep telling her nobody can. . . . But the girl is stubborn.”
“Oh yeah? She’s got a lot of sharp edges? Know matter how you hold her you’re going to get hurt.”
“Let me ask you something. How do you go about saving someone who doesn’t want to be saved?”
“Hey. When you figure that one out, you let me know! But I don’t know how much choice you have, because as mad as you get, if you love her, what are you going to do?”
“Why does God make you so darn fragile? Maybe he can give you some shells like turtles have!”
“Yeah, definitely.”
The two guys walk over to the door and look out at the ominous sky.
“That’s an ugly sky,” says Ham.
“Yeah. I’ve seen a sky like that before,” replies Earl. “A sky like that makes you think about the big things … like life, death, how they get that squiggly line on the cupcakes.”

Man is that fantastic dialog. I especially like the cupcake line.
And I swear the scriptwriters must have read their lectionaries because a team of bishops couldn’t have come up with a more appropriate episode for the first week of Advent. Because here’s our assignment for this week: think about the big things, take an inventory of our life, and list the necessary amendments. Then, somewhere around New Year’s, pull out the list and get started.
In recovery language (the 12 steps), we’d refer to this exercise as steps four (Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves) and five (Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another person the exact nature of our wrongs).
I hated those steps when I first read them. And I can’t say my opinion has changed much. The year I got sober I made a list of everyone whom I had wronged or stole from or lied to. Then my sponsor and I decided on a small list of folks whom I should really make my amends to in person.
One was the manager of the swim club I used to lifeguard at. The summers of my sophomore and junior years in high school, I stole money from him to buy booze. It was incredibly easy. A member would hand me a five-dollar bill for her guest. I put the five money in my pocket and didn’t record a guest.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. C.,” I said, “for stealing money from you three years ago.”
Boy did I felt like a moron that day. Especially when he stared back at me with a half-grin, waiting for me to crack up like Sponge Bob and start laughing.
Henri Nouwen has a great line about this very task … taking inventory: “The more I come in touch with what happened in the past, the more I come in touch with what is to come.”
Even as Grace isn’t ready to do that herself in last night’s episode, she inspires one of her victims/criminals get there.
When the tornado touches down, a woman is trapped in the building where Grace is investigating a case: a school bus was sent out with a bad axle, which led to the death of three children.
The owner of the repair shop where the bus was serviced knew that properly fixing the axle would take too long—he’d lose the contract. So he made his sister doctor the paperwork in order to send the bus out as soon as possible.
Grace figures out that the woman trapped in the building is the sister, the woman who signed off on the paperwork. She interrogates her, and finally the sister confesses.
“He said we had to keep them rolling—that nothing was going to happen,” the woman explained sobbing.
“Oh God, those babies! What did I do to those babies!” the woman cries.
She begs Grace to give her an overdose of morphine, and then when Grace refuses, she tried to slit her wrist with a piece of broken glass.
Grace handcuffs herself to the woman and says, “If God wants you, he’s going to have to go through me.”
“Forgive me!” the woman yells … to Grace, to God, to herself.
At that moment the sky opens up as if it’s a window to heaven, and Grace hears a bird chirping.
“You can’t have her!” Grace yells to God, or whoever. “She’s mine, you son of a bitch.”
Finally the tornado is over and Grace loads the woman into an ambulance. An hour or so later she learns that the ambulance was t-boned by a city bus. Everyone survived but the sister of the crook.
The final scene is as intense as the opening. Grace is analyzing the woman’s body in the morgue.
Earl shows up.
“I’m sorry about the way this turned out,” he says.
“Shut your mouth. I’m tired of you. I can’t listen to you anymore,” Grace replies. . .. “All I wanted to do is save her.”
“You did.”
“She’s dead.”
“You just don’t get it, do you, child?”
And you hear the chirping again.