We’ve added a second volume of commentaries to the MHSAA Library under the title Lasting Impressions.  Here’s one of my favorites, published in the MHSAA Bulletin in August 2007.

Last Easter Sunday, our church organist brought the worship service to a close with a loud hymn that resonated in the sanctuary for several moments after the final note was played.  Nobody moved.

Whereupon my wife leaned toward me and whispered:  “If you play that loudly, you’d better not make a mistake.”

I think she was cautioning me, not the organist.

“Words are the bugles of social change,” states writer, lecturer, broadcaster Charles Handy in The Leader of the Future.

Concepts are needed, both ethereal and practical; stretching but also thoughtful of unintended consequences.

And of course, it is action that is ultimately required (“one’s philosophy is not expressed in words; it’s expressed in the choices one makes” – Eleanor Roosevelt).

But words sound the charge.  They shape and share the message.  They describe and detail the course.  They motivate the bold to move and many more to follow.

An extraordinary communicator can do this in a quiet voice.  Like Emerson.  In her introduction to The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bennington College teacher and author Mary Oliver writes:  “. . . it is not a simple matter to be both inspirational and moderate.”  Emerson’s prose was like a slow, wandering brook, not a rushing river of rhetoric.  He could touch both banks, present both sides, and yet move people in one intended direction.

But for most mortals of letters, arguments must sometimes be overstated and language a bit edgy to get the attention of people and to push them where we want them to go.
 
Those who speak and write as often and as intemperately as I about the highest ideals of school sports have the same responsibility as that organist on Easter Sunday.  A wrong note won’t be missed, and it will greatly compromise the message.

If we merely whisper our beliefs, not much will be made of the mistakes we make.  But neither will much become of our message.

If we boldly broadcast our beliefs, our missteps will not be overlooked.  If we sound the bugle, we must be prepared also to lead the charge.