Thirty-seven years ago it was common in Cleveland that luncheon and banquet planners invited a local member of the clergy to open community program events with a prayer.
All those years ago I was beginning my pastoral responsibilities with a downtown Cleveland congregation. My name popped up on a luncheon banquet planner’s list and I received an invitation to offer the Invocation for an up-coming luncheon. After hearing the description of the event, I accepted! My acceptance was not for any theologically imperative reason. It was purely self-serving. I wanted to meet the luncheon speaker!
The speaker was the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Alex Haley. Giving the Invocation meant that I would be seated on the dais beside Haley and have the unique privilege of personal conversation with him.
Haley’s 1976 novel, “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” was an educational game-changer in this country. For the first time the majority population of America – through Haley’s book and then the ABC miniseries based on Haley’s book telecast the following year – was exposed to the history of the horrific American slave trade and subsequent terrors of racial segregation.
But there was much more.
In Haley’s national lesson exposing the history of a tragic, brutal, American evil there was also an equally important lesson. Across the country there developed a greater affection for a nation in which its diverse people will endure, confront, and transform evil by doing good; working to ensure that justice for all is not aspirational, but a national reality.
Sharing seats at the table on the dais that day, Haley and I talked together before his address. During the conversation, we somehow got onto the challenge of moving forward despite awful things and unrelenting hatreds. Haley said to me what he wrote about and said many times to many people over his life that ended suddenly in 1992. But, at that Cleveland luncheon moment he said it to me.
“Young man, I have found that the secret to just about everything in living life to its fullest and making a positive difference is to find some good and praise it.”
In these present days of red herring culture wars, political tribalism, mass shootings, corruptions, efforts to ban books, sanitize or prohibit the teaching of unhappy history, and all manner of horrific news of death and destruction can there be a more salient word for coping with our times? “Find some good and praise it!”
Immersed as we are in the daily barrage of bad news, seeking out socially good and redemptive things is a great antidote to the insidious pressure to become cynical, depressed, and self-righteously disconnected.
Finding good and praising it is a daily choice to take positive mental action. Such focused thinking to discover the good is hard work and often not without opposition. But the positive, personal, emotional payoff is lucrative.
Haley’s admonition to praise the good that is found requires action. Praising the good becomes an investment in amplifying – and thereby helping to sustain – the discovered good. Such praise is more than clapping or cheering from the sidelines. Such praise takes on all manner of positive, helpful actions from writing a check of support to being a part of the team doing the good found worthy of the praise.
It is not very difficult in our present, deeply divided times to find excuse for being unhappy and perhaps angry. It is not difficult to launch into a general ranting about problems that we cannot solve or situations we cannot change. The carefully rehearsed, internal bitterness that results however is too high a price to pay. It is also of little use to oneself or anyone else.
There is far more than enough of such unabashed selfishness. It is soul-killing. Haley was right. Haley is right. We must find some good and praise it.