Joe Biden is the president whose heart and soul we desperately need right now | Maria Panaritis

The grown-up arrived a few minutes before noon on Wednesday.

Joe Biden was squinting into the sun while swearing to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts that he would uphold the U.S. Constitution. Biden took the presidential oath of office with one hand on a Bible in front of the grand edifice that is our nation’s sanctuary of government by the people, for the people. Just two weeks earlier, the Capitol was a raging crime scene. Violent insurrectionists attacked Congress but failed to stop certification of Biden’s victory over the Republican incumbent who had lost.

“So help me God,” Biden said, and with those last four inaugural words the Democrat assumed office with the conviction and ramrod posture of an altar boy. In that moment, the Scranton-born son-turned-honorary Philadelphian by way of Delaware assumed power over He Who Shall Not Be Named.

It was a relief, even if not an instantaneous undoing of the damage that Biden’s profane predecessor had caused our country through negligence and disdain for human decency.

Kamala Harris had spoken those same four words with her eyes closed just a few minutes earlier in her own oath. Such was the magnitude of her moment, too. The first woman in history had ascended, finally, to the post of U.S. vice president. The milestone was both remarkable and shameful for the centuries it took to be reached.

About four hours after the oaths were taken, there was still more relief. Still more hope on the horizon after the despair of the last four years of a nation in dysfunction and disintegration in the hands of a toddler president.

We watched Biden, his Willow Grove-native wife Jill, and their family walk onto White House grounds that the Republican incumbent had vacated via helicopter earlier in the day. An abusive president was gone. A torn nation was shifting, at long last, into safer hands.

“Stop the shouting and lower the temperature,” Biden said in an inaugural speech that was refreshing for its plainspoken yet compassionate tone.

“Without unity,” he said, “there is no peace. Only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation. Only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge.”

The man Biden is replacing has left most everything but U.S. stock indexes in tatters after four years of cynical leadership that sought to dismantle, not support, the institutions that support citizens. It is Biden’s job to clean up after that orgy of authoritarianism.

One of his biggest tasks: the coronavirus pandemic in its 10th devastating month. The inauguration was full of masked VIPs and attendees, a stark reminder of a plague that has killed 400,000 Americans on his predecessor’s watch. The departing Republican president had refused to so much as endorse mask-wearing for fear of conveying weakness. The result: mass casualties.

While Biden has his hands full, however, he also has a tool in his arsenal that, beyond his extensive political relationships, is desperately needed right now: emotional intelligence.

He is coming into office at a time when lies and conspiracies are being peddled with polish through social media, dubious news outlets, and dark corners of the web. Biden cannot reach voters receptive to fantasies – many millions of them voted for his opponent in November – without trying to connect in a different way.

Empathy. Ordinary language. Straight talk. All three may help break the trance.

“I understand that many of my fellow Americans view the future with fear and trepidation,” Biden said as only someone with blue-collar bones could. “I understand they worry about their jobs. I understand they lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling wondering, ‘Can I keep my health care, can I pay my mortgage, thinking about their families, about what comes next. I promise you I get it. But the answer is not to turn inward, ... distrusting those that don’t look like you ... or don’t get their news from the same sources as you.

“We must end this uncivil war,” he said.

The prior president conditioned many Americans to accept hatred of each other as essential. He was a Homer Simpson-like figure so driven by impulses that he stoked people’s anger and fear to then feast on them. This was his power M.O. It came at the expense of our souls and our sanity.

Consider the sharp contrast of something Biden did the day before his inauguration.

It happened during a farewell speech in his home state of Delaware.

Biden cried for the grown son he had lost a few years earlier to cancer. A man about to become the most powerful leader on earth made space in his soul not for intoxicating self-reverence, but for the warmth that mourning a child, in its own sad way, can bring to a parent’s aching heart.

He showed this heart while speaking from a military facility named after his son, Major Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III National Guard/Reserve Center.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, tears streaming down his face, “I only have one regret. He’s not here.”

May we have no regrets about the man we have elected president for this perilous time. He is the man for this moment.

So help us God.