Do Good and Forget It
This past Wednesday would have been my Grandpa Scalise’s birthday. My Grandfather Victor Scalise was born on February 19, 1897 in a small village in southern Italy. His motto was “Do good and forget it.” My father and my aunt heard that phrase a lot throughout their lives. It was something my dad passed on to me and my sisters and which Jill and I have shared with Nathan and Greg. Melanie Stone gave us a nice little painted board with the words on it and we put it right over the walk in door of our garage so that every time we leave the house we see those words as we go.
My grandfather never owned a house and the only piece of land he ever owned was a burial plot in a cemetery in Saco, Maine and he never saw it. This saying, Do Good and Forget It was so defining for my grandparents that along with our last name it appears on their gravestone along with a verse from Philippians 4:11, “I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content.”
February 23, 2014
Proverbs 3:27-35, Do Good and Forget It
Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
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While I don’t know if there was ever a Bible verse behind the Scalise family motto, one that I think is very close to it is Proverbs 3:27. Two weeks ago I said that Proverbs is the “Do” and “Do Not” book of the Bible. This next passage from Proverbs 3 is an example of what I meant.
“Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. Do not say to your neighbor, “Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give it”—when you have it with you. Do not plan harm against your neighbor who lives trustingly beside you. Do not quarrel with anyone without cause, when no harm has been done to you. Do not envy the violent and do not choose any of their ways; for the perverse are an abomination to the LORD, but the upright are in his confidence. The LORD’s curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the abode of the righteous. Toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he shows favor. The wise will inherit honor, but stubborn fools, disgrace.”
The Bible has a great deal to say about being good and doing good. God is good and God wants us to be good. That sounds very simple, but many foundational truths in life are simple and the fact that they are ignored or not followed doesn’t make them any less true. When you look around the world there is so much violence, pain, poverty, hunger and grief, one doesn’t even know where to start. Right now the nations of Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Thailand, South Sudan, are all facing serious upheaval and difficulty. That is not an exhaustive list either. Our nation has a host of issues that we haven’t been able to resolve. On Cape Cod there is a rapidly growing problem with people overdosing on drugs especially heroin. There are issues each of us has personally or in our family or circle of friendship. Sometimes all these concerns seem simply overwhelming and we can feel powerless, helpless, and hopeless. While there are larger and more institutional, national, or global issues that need to be addressed, today, I want to suggest that what is in our power is to seek to do good every day of our lives. Jana Stanfield was right when she said, “I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do.”
Proverbs 3:27 tells us, “Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it.” The first place this begins is with those closest to us. Mother Teresa put it this way, “Spread love everywhere you go: First of all in your own house… let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.” We won’t be radiating kindness all the time without some help. Praying to be filled with God’s Spirit, to see each person as Christ sees them, to see each person as Christ, all these help us to be “the living expression of God’s kindness.” What can happen is we think about ourselves so much that our focus turns inward instead of outward. Making a mental commitment to “let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier” is a great goal and motivation. It’s a way of doing good whenever it is in our power to do it. I also suspect it makes for better relations with our family and neighbors when we do good for them whenever we’re able to do so. Often we’ll find we end up benefiting and being blessed as well.
With the Olympics ending today and the Academy Awards coming up soon we can read and hear a lot about people who are famous and who are making history or who will be remembered years from now. While there may be a part of many of us that would like to be famous, to be remembered, to go down in history, the truth is that most of us won’t. No one is going to write our biography and it won’t go straight to the top of the New York Times best seller list. Leo Buscaglia observed, “The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. it’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.”
Every day we have the opportunity to impact someone’s life, to make our love felt, potentially to turn one person’s life around. Og Mandino wrote about the urgency that can shape how we treat the people around us as we go through each day. “Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.” I was gratified to hear from a member of BBC who recently suffered the loss of a loved one, how helpful this quote and others that I posted on the church Facebook page were to help her cope with what was going on. While we shouldn’t live in constant fear and anxiety that every time we say goodbye to someone that we’ll never see them again, the truth is that impending death has a way of clarifying what is really important in life. Treating everyone with care, kindness, and understanding helps us to live without regret because we will have done what was in our power to do for someone when we were with him or her. Like Do good and forget it, the key is to do it without any thought of reward, simply because is the right thing to do. My grandfather’s motto of Do Good and Forget it, implies that there is a benefit to not keeping a record of the good that we do. Perhaps this is so we don’t get involved in some relational scorekeeping where we find ourselves constantly keeping track of what we did for someone and then growing resentful or bitter because they never reciprocated and did anything for us. In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul says that love “keeps no record of wrongs,” we might add that love keeps no record of “rights” either. The poet William Wordsworth expressed it well when he wrote, “The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” Perhaps one of the coolest experiences we can have is to have someone recall how we did something for them that meant a great deal and we at first have trouble even recalling it because we’re not keeping score, we simply did an “unremembered act of kindness and of love.”
With the presence of social media it’s getting more difficult to do good and forget it because now when you do something it may end up on Facebook or YouTube. One such story I read recently was this: “On January 6, after spending a week at Disney World, Shanell Mouland and her family were on a flight from Orlando, Florida, to Philadelphia, to catch a connection to their hometown of New Brunswick, Canada. Mouland’s husband and their 5-year-old daughter, Grace, sat in one row, while Mouland and 3-year-old Kate, who has autism, sat behind them. Mouland was a bit nervous — depending on Kate’s mood, the young girl’s behavior can range from affectionate to hysterical, so a patient and understanding seatmate would be crucial.
In an open letter titled, Dear Daddy in Seat 16C, posted on her blog Go Team Kate, Mouland writes, “I watched the entire Temple basketball team board the plane, and wondered if one of these giants might sit by Kate. They all moved toward the back. She would have liked that … I watched many Grandmotherly women board and hoped for one to take the seat but they walked on by. For a fleeting moment I thought we might have a free seat beside us, and then you walked up and sat down with your briefcase and your important documents and I had a vision of Kate pouring her water all over your multi-million-dollar contracts, or house deeds, or whatever it was you held. The moment you sat down, Kate started to rub your arm. Your jacket was soft and she liked the feel of it. You smiled at her and she said: ‘Hi, Daddy, that’s my mom.’ Then she had you. Any time we go out in public, we have to plan for anything because Kate has sensory issues and when she’s overwhelmed, her behavior may be unpredictable. Most people warm up to Kate, but interacting with her can be off-putting for those that don’t understand autism.”
Luckily, Kate’s seatmate was Eric Kunkel — a businessman and married father of one from Villas, New Jersey — who for the duration of the flight, entertained Kate by allowing her to fiddle with his iPad and playing a video game with her. The pair talked about dogs (Kate will be getting a service dog soon) and Kate’s experience meeting Winnie the Pooh and the Disney princesses at the theme park.
“I travel a lot for work, and Kate was, by far, the most well-behaved kid I’ve sat next to. Shanelle is also an incredible parent — she didn’t apologize for Kate and she shouldn’t have — but she was very attentive to her.”
Kunkel even tried to distract Kate with her toys when, at the end of the flight, she began screaming to remove her seatbelt. He also allowed the Mouland family to exit the plane ahead of him. “Thank you for letting us go ahead of you,” wrote Mouland. “She was feeling overwhelmed and escaping the plane and a big, long hug was all she needed. So, thank you. Thank you for not making me repeat those awful apologetic sentences that I so often say in public. Thank you for entertaining Kate so much that she had her most successful plane ride, yet. And, thank you for putting your papers away and playing turtles with our girl.”
Mouland is grateful for the experience and says she created her blog to teach others about autism, but she was the one who learned a lesson. “I assumed that a man in a business suit wouldn’t be patient with Kate, and I’m so fortunate to have been proved wrong.” To me that was a beautiful example of doing good and the rippling impact such kindness can have.
I asked my father to share with me what he remembered hearing about Do Good and Forget It from his father and he wrote me the following: “As a boy I recall asking about my grandmother who I never met. She remained in Italy. My father told me that his mother always prepared the meal of the day so that there was enough for one person beyond the family. She would give that nourishing hot meal to my father to deliver to someone who would otherwise go hungry. Nothing was said about it. It was not something the family took pride in. It was rather something that one went quietly about and did. The nature of the idea- Do Good and Forget It makes it difficult to say much because these acts of generosity are done quietly and not trumpeted. If I had not asked my father I might never have known.
When I asked about my grandfather, who I also never met and remained in Italy my father said as he left Italy as a boy of 16 (which was 101 years ago in 1913) his father gave him a silver watch for his journey, kissed him and said, “Do good and forget it.” Clearly this was the philosophy of the home in which he was raised. Doing good was ingrained in him. Being generous to others in need was as natural as breathing. He never accumulated anything for himself except knowledge and wisdom. He died penny less but he was as I often said, the richest man I ever knew.
It was his philosophy of life that shaped him. He was 5’3” but as my sister said, “The biggest man I ever knew.” The reason was because of the way he lived. He always had his hand out not to “grab all you can get” but to give to anyone who needed a helping hand. There were many times when our young family skated on the edge financially. We had three young children and your mother was home caring for you. From time to time I would turn to my father and ask if I could borrow a $100 or $200 he gave it to us and said, “forget it.” When we needed $500 as a down payment to build the cottage in Ocean Park I asked if I could borrow $500. he said, “No.” But he gave us the $500 as a gift so my dream of a cottage could be ready at your birth.
When he died and we stood in line at the Calvary Baptist Church in Lowell hundreds of people came by to share with me what “Pastor” had meant to them. Things they shared were things no one ever knew. He just did good and forgot it. As I write these words am crying as I remember my father. There was no one like him! There was only one Victor F. Scalise and he led his life in everything he did by doing good and forgetting it.”
We do these sorts of things because God is good and calls us to do and be good as well. Jesus even gave up his place with God in heaven to come to earth to go about doing good (Acts 10).
Blessing: “Trust in the LORD, and do good; so you will live in the land, and enjoy security. Depart from evil, and do good; so you shall abide forever. For the Lord loves justice; he will not forsake his faithful ones.” Psalm 37:3, 27-28.
“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
- The Bible has a great deal to say about being good and doing good. Why do you think this concept is so important?
- Why does Proverbs encourage us to do good to our neighbors whenever it is in our power to do so? What results from our doing so?
- Proverbs 3:27-35 lists a number of behaviors that are not good, how do we avoid them in our daily living?
- Doug’s grandfather’s motto of Do Good and Forget it, also implies that there is a benefit to not keeping a record of the good that we do, what might that benefit be?
- While anonymous acts of goodness and kindness are nice, do they have to be “random?” In what ways can you strive intentionally to do good each and every day?
For Prayer: Please remember in your personal prayers this week BBC’s staff search process, the planning work for the third worship service, and the Walk Across the Room all church experience.
Psalm 125:4, “Do good, O Lord, to those who are good,”
Psalm 34:14, “Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.”