Notes from my Knapsack 12-26-24
Jeff Gill
The days after Christmas are a journey
___
Every birth is a miracle of sorts.
Christmas celebrations often lift up this everyday reality. Any birth, all births, are a miracle we do not fully understand.
We may know something about fertilization and gestation and labor and delivery, but to go from a hope, a dream, a desire, but no person, to the sudden arrival (even with nine months to anticipate, sudden) of a person who is now very emphatically here: it's a miracle.
There was a hidden, water-borne existence as the potential came to pass, there's much myth and legend let alone reality around the experience of coming into this world, for women and men (men mostly imaginatively, standing to one side), but once the birth has happened, there's now a child, audible as well as fully visible, calling on us to respond in love and care.
Every birth is a miracle, whether that of Jesus or your own child; you, too, were born, and if you'll pardon my making this point with emphasis, that means you are a miracle.
All this I try to hold onto for the joy of Christmastime. I also have to admit that the last five years, and in many ways for even longer, the season has had a close association with death. Which is, if you'll forgive the drastic comparison, a miracle of sorts, though we rarely use that word. You wait, and watch; at one moment there is breath and life, and then there is not, and something, someone, is gone.
My first funeral as a minister was one where the family met with me on Christmas Eve, their widower father having passed the day before, and we planned a service for Dec. 28th. When in our conversation I mentioned it was the "Feast of the Holy Innocents," one of the adult children said to me "I didn't know there were sad events connected to Christmas." It almost made her feel a bit better, certainly a little less alone.
Over the years, I've gotten used to the peculiarities of funerals around "the holidays." Not comfortable with them, but it's something you get used to. People die in June, and they die in late December, too; the rituals and forms and comforts of grief should work in any season, and they do. I was just at a memorial service for a family friend who passed a couple of months back, but we all came together with an Advent wreath in the front of the church, and someone had wisely brought her Christmas stocking, with a piano sewn onto it as her life's great joy.
Sorrow, smiles; grief, laughter. Christmas, and Christmas miracles, around entering this life, and leaving it.
We have memories aplenty this time of year, and oh what a miracle memory is, especially when it fades or turns traitor. You start to appreciate the wonder of a memory caught and held differently when you watch them slip away wholesale for another.
Christmas is a time of miracles: that God was born into this life in a way that tells us we are miracles in a strangely similar way, and that leaving this life leaves traces which can be forgotten, but never wholly erased. Time itself is slippery during the Christmas season, and it will take us into the new year to get our bearings for what is next to come, having just been so deeply into the past.
You are a miracle, reader. Blessings on your 2025.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not sure he's ready for a new year, but you know. Tell him your memories of 2024 at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Monday, December 02, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 12-11-24
Notes from my Knapsack 12-11-24
Jeff Gill
Walking tours gone by, and why that's okay (because it has to be)
___
Joyce and I first came to Granville in December of 1989. We'd been told "you have to see the Christmas Candlelight Walking Tour."
They were right.
We fell in love, frankly, with the whole thing. The weather was perfect, cold with occasional flurries. We ended up by default going into the late lamented "Granville Life-Style Museum" of Hubert & Oese Robinson's house next door to the United Church of Granville, and I met Gloria Hoover for the first time. A few steps south was my first visit to the Old Academy Building and the rich history that's taken place inside those walls.
We heard a choir sing in what was then the First Baptist Church and I met Rev. George Williamson; we heard woodwinds play at St. Luke's Episcopal Church where I got to talking to Rev. Harry Sherman on the porch, leading to the most incredible long lunch of my life a few months later with him and his old friend Rev. Robert Farrar Capon, which is a story for another day.
We ate yum-yums at Aladdin's, shook hands with the new president of Denison University, Michele Tolela Myers, at Monomoy Place (with no idea Joyce would be working directly for the next president, Dale Knobel, fifteen years later, let alone retiring from Denison twenty years after that!), and we wandered amazed through the Avery-Downer House where I got to know Paul Goudy, and we agreed to meet later to discuss historical matters.
Up and down Broadway we strolled, music continuing at Centenary United Methodist, and handbells at First Presbyterian, where Joyce would be directing that group a year later. Gazing up at Swasey Chapel's spire, then just 65 years old (as opposed to its centennial this year!), we wondered about the Denison campus, which we were to come to know so well.
These were the days of Victoria's Parlour and Hare Hollow and Taylor Drug in the middle of the block where Village Coffee now does brisk business. There's more I wished I remembered that I've forgotten, but the overall sense of wonder and delight still is with me.
Obviously, much has changed. The house where Oese's kitchen and bedroom set were left undisturbed, clearly her hope and intention, is now a private residence and her collection and some funds (not enough to keep a stand-alone quirky museum running) resident with the Granville Historical Society, probably the best outcome for all concerned. I got to speak at Gloria's memorial celebration at the College Town House a few years ago, and we all talked about the many things that have changed in the village.
Today, the restaurant options range more widely than I think any of us might have imagined that night in 1989. The shopping is a bit different, and you might say the range is both more limited, and wider. There's stuff at CVS we didn't used to have, and there are curios and knick-knacks you can't find; The James Store I still hear women missing, though I regret never going inside myself.
For me, the marvels of the Granville Times Book Cellar will continue to be part of my subconscious. It's hard for me to walk into the 1828 Kussmaul Gallery building and not make a beeline for the stairs into the basement. So many finds still on my shelves, and conversations alongside the heavy-laden shelves.
All those layers of past uses and practices, helping to support the vivid reality of what we have now in downtown Granville: they're out of sight, but in no way out of mind.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's delighted to have preached in most of the churches mentioned in this reminiscence! Tell him what you recall that's now no more at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Jeff Gill
Walking tours gone by, and why that's okay (because it has to be)
___
Joyce and I first came to Granville in December of 1989. We'd been told "you have to see the Christmas Candlelight Walking Tour."
They were right.
We fell in love, frankly, with the whole thing. The weather was perfect, cold with occasional flurries. We ended up by default going into the late lamented "Granville Life-Style Museum" of Hubert & Oese Robinson's house next door to the United Church of Granville, and I met Gloria Hoover for the first time. A few steps south was my first visit to the Old Academy Building and the rich history that's taken place inside those walls.
We heard a choir sing in what was then the First Baptist Church and I met Rev. George Williamson; we heard woodwinds play at St. Luke's Episcopal Church where I got to talking to Rev. Harry Sherman on the porch, leading to the most incredible long lunch of my life a few months later with him and his old friend Rev. Robert Farrar Capon, which is a story for another day.
We ate yum-yums at Aladdin's, shook hands with the new president of Denison University, Michele Tolela Myers, at Monomoy Place (with no idea Joyce would be working directly for the next president, Dale Knobel, fifteen years later, let alone retiring from Denison twenty years after that!), and we wandered amazed through the Avery-Downer House where I got to know Paul Goudy, and we agreed to meet later to discuss historical matters.
Up and down Broadway we strolled, music continuing at Centenary United Methodist, and handbells at First Presbyterian, where Joyce would be directing that group a year later. Gazing up at Swasey Chapel's spire, then just 65 years old (as opposed to its centennial this year!), we wondered about the Denison campus, which we were to come to know so well.
These were the days of Victoria's Parlour and Hare Hollow and Taylor Drug in the middle of the block where Village Coffee now does brisk business. There's more I wished I remembered that I've forgotten, but the overall sense of wonder and delight still is with me.
Obviously, much has changed. The house where Oese's kitchen and bedroom set were left undisturbed, clearly her hope and intention, is now a private residence and her collection and some funds (not enough to keep a stand-alone quirky museum running) resident with the Granville Historical Society, probably the best outcome for all concerned. I got to speak at Gloria's memorial celebration at the College Town House a few years ago, and we all talked about the many things that have changed in the village.
Today, the restaurant options range more widely than I think any of us might have imagined that night in 1989. The shopping is a bit different, and you might say the range is both more limited, and wider. There's stuff at CVS we didn't used to have, and there are curios and knick-knacks you can't find; The James Store I still hear women missing, though I regret never going inside myself.
For me, the marvels of the Granville Times Book Cellar will continue to be part of my subconscious. It's hard for me to walk into the 1828 Kussmaul Gallery building and not make a beeline for the stairs into the basement. So many finds still on my shelves, and conversations alongside the heavy-laden shelves.
All those layers of past uses and practices, helping to support the vivid reality of what we have now in downtown Granville: they're out of sight, but in no way out of mind.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's delighted to have preached in most of the churches mentioned in this reminiscence! Tell him what you recall that's now no more at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Sunday, December 01, 2024
Pre-submitted for the rest of the month...
…and I can keep submitting each week in turn, if that helps, but here's the whole "set" from next week 13-24, & 20-24, as well as the year-ending 27-24 coda.
Let me know what helps or reduces confusion the most as we head into holiday season!
Pax, Jeff
===
Faith Works 12-13-24
Jeff Gill
Getting off of the naughty list, part 2
___
"I'm in the regret reduction business."
That's what the lady in the long coat told Rodney, the clerk at the ZipMart, as she stirred her midnight cup of hot chocolate. She'd come in after a long quiet stretch, and as he pointed out where the parts of a hot chocolate were on the coffee stand, they ended up talking.
He asked, thinking it wouldn't seem too creepy at this point in their conversation, what had her out so late. Her explanation about "regret reduction" made Rodney look something more than puzzled.
She laughed at her own joke, then added "I'm a hospice chaplain. But that doesn't mean much to most people."
Actually, Rodney had been two places in the hospital, the emergency department and the hospice floor. He told the chaplain about his grandmother, and how much he thought the hospice program had helped her in those last few days up there. "But regret reduction?"
"Oh, it's a stupid joke, I admit," she replied, "but the sixth floor used to have a big sign as you got off the elevator showing how to get to the risk reduction department. When hospice expanded up there, they moved, but the idea stuck with me."
"How is hospice a . . . regret reduction thing?"
She tried to explain: most of what made hospice different from regular medical care, when a person was dying, was that you didn't want to do things with the precious time you had left that later you would, well, regret. Hospice, she reminded Rodney, wasn't about stopping treatment, it was a different kind of treatment. You might risk taking meds or chemo that made you sick for weeks if it would give you months or years in return, but if you only had weeks in any case, those sorts of interventions . . .
"You might regret later," Rodney completed.
"Exactly," the chaplain said. "Plus, we sometimes can encourage people to say things, or do things, that they might regret not doing later, even if it's hard now. We see the timetable a little more clearly, sometimes."
"Except we all can run out of time," Rodney said.
She looked back at him quizzically over the edge of her cup of hot chocolate. But didn't say anything.
After a long pause, Rodney added "I feel that way, sometimes, waiting here."
"Waiting here for what?"
"For when I can figure out what I'm supposed to do."
She sipped a bit more of her drink, then asked "What is it you're supposed to do?"
Rodney thought a while. The lady seemed patient, like his grandmother, but healthier. He looked at her, and looked away as she continued to gaze at him calmly. Looking out the big windows of the front of the store, he said "I'd just like to get off the naughty list. It's Christmas time, you know? I just feel like I'm stuck on the wrong side of Santa's book."
The chaplain sat her drink down next to the register, and leaned against it, looking out the same direction Rodney was, at mostly their reflections against the darkness outside.
"Well, that's a dilemma. You don't want to regret missing a chance to get off the naughty list. But here you are, doing a good job, keeping this place open, and clean, and helping customers like me. Are you sure you're on that list?"
"Oh yeah," said Rodney. "I've done enough stupid stuff to fill up a dumpster."
"So are we talking about Santa, God, or your family and friends here?"
"Pretty much all three know I'm on the naughty list."
"Well, I can't speak for Santa, or your family, but maybe we should talk about God."
(end of part two of three)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's telling another multi-part story this December. You can tell him where the story should end at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
===
Faith Works 12-20-24
Jeff Gill
Getting off of the naughty list, part 3
___
"Why are you so sure you're on the naughty list?" asked the hospice chaplain at the ZipMart.
Rodney had been helping her get hot chocolate as midnight passed, and other customers were few and far between during these single digit hours of the night. They got to talking about her work with the dying and those who loved them, and about his work here in the convenience store.
He explained how he'd made a fair number of mistakes in his life (she interrupted him gently to point out that he wasn't all that old, not to her, anyhow), and it was hard to see how he would ever make things right.
"So one night, there's this lady with a couple of kids, who comes in for just basics sometimes when she can't get to the store where it's cheaper, milk or cereal and stuff. And you can tell she's counting her change and times are tough for her."
The chaplain nodded.
"I had been thinking I'd help out some time, and the next time she walked in about 9 pm, went to the cooler, I pulled out some of my cash and figured I'd offer to cover it for her, you know, Merry Christmas and all that. Then she comes back to the register about when another guy rolls in, comes up right ahead of her, buys a pack of smokes and a bunch of scratch-offs, then says 'and put her groceries on my tab for good luck, okay?' He laughs and she laughs and I put my money away."
"So you didn't get your chance."
"Right. But then a few nights later, another older guy comes in, all flustered, because his battery died. He needed a jump. My heap is right over by the side of the building, so I shut down the register, run out, move my car, go to get his car started, and it won't turn over at all. Then another guy comes up, looks in, doesn't say a word but reverses how I'd connected the clamps, and it started right up. He snorts at me and walks off."
"Okay, that stung. But you helped the man?"
"Maybe, but he didn't act like it, and when I went back in? Two punks had snuck in and were running out with two bottles of pop and and armful of bags of chips. I was so ticked I didn't even try running after them, with my leg and all. I just added it up and paid for it to make the totals work."
"What you're saying," the chaplain said, "is your efforts to get off the naughty list never seem to work."
"Not even close."
"Well, has it occurred to you that you're going about it all wrong?"
"I must be. So what's a better way?"
"First, can I tell you something about God? God isn't Santa. Not even close. You're worried about a naughty list, and maybe Santa has one, maybe he doesn't, but I've got a book here in my purse that says God doesn't make lists that way."
"Yeah, yeah, you're gonna tell me God is love. I know."
"Do you?"
She looked evenly at him, standing behind the register. He had the higher position by a step, but it was as if she was looking at him eye to eye. "If God is love, and God so loved the world that we get to celebrate Christmas as a gift from God, then maybe you don't have to earn that love. Maybe you can't earn it. It's just something that's given us. You're trying to work off your regrets with good deeds, and God says every Christmas and most days in between you don't have to do it that way."
They talked for a long time after that, and agreed that they'd talk again. Probably after Christmas, right there at the ZipMart.
(end of part three of three)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he appreciates your having read this year's December tale. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
===
Faith Works 12-27-24
Jeff Gill
Getting off the naughty list, coda
___
"Take down all the Christmas stuff."
That was on the manager's whiteboard on the cooler door at the ZipMart; Rodney knew to check it every shift. Corporate might send emails and texts, there may be memos under glass on the counter, but the whiteboard was the law. Do that first, and all will be well.
Rodney had the overnight shift, the one he preferred. It had a rhythm and pace he was used to, busy at first, then slowly tapering off through midnight, then the long night hours but the interesting people and questions you got at 3 am.
Plus, the manager knew to ask him to take care of stuff the day shifts couldn't get to as well, and he'd take care of it. Like taking all the Christmas decorations and seasonal displays down. They had gas and hot dogs and bottles of pop every few minutes, but the night shift was full of long stretches where he could step out and work around the store, or pause with a customer and answer their questions.
Or sometimes, to ask them. A few weeks back, Rodney had helped a customer, just after midnight, dressed a little better than he was used to seeing, and looking for hot chocolate. She was a hospice chaplain coming back from a home where someone had died, and after a long night, she wanted something hot more than just going home and staying awake anyhow. Or so she said.
They got to talking about regret, and dying, and hope, and the future, and Rodney found himself talking about his regret, his worry, his fear even, that he was on the naughty list for good and all, and there was no way of getting off of it. He'd tried to do some good things, and they never seemed to work out the way he'd hoped, and in the end, he never felt better.
The chaplain suggested he was confused not about himself, but about God. He might have made some mistakes (or many, as Rodney corrected her), but she argued God's love wasn't limited to those who had a winning scratch-off ticket for it that you bought with your good deeds.
They talked a long time that night about churches, and her faith, and his history with a couple of different congregations. She didn't tell him he had to go to church, or where, just that she thought he might be ready to be around some other people wondering about the same things, and wrote down a few places she thought he might find a welcome ear.
Reaching high to unloop the lights, he began to reel the strand onto the spool. It was funny, but there were so many things he'd been doing all along that now seemed like they were, well, little blessings he'd missed because he was trying so hard to check them off as good works. Blessings for himself, and blessings for others. Just doing your work well, with intention; simple acts of kindness, done for themselves and not for what you might receive for doing them.
The world and the year ahead looked different now. He hoped the chaplain would stop by again so he could tell her about it. He was off the naughty list.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes your year ahead is already filled with anticipated blessings. Tell him how you've been blessed at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Let me know what helps or reduces confusion the most as we head into holiday season!
Pax, Jeff
===
Faith Works 12-13-24
Jeff Gill
Getting off of the naughty list, part 2
___
"I'm in the regret reduction business."
That's what the lady in the long coat told Rodney, the clerk at the ZipMart, as she stirred her midnight cup of hot chocolate. She'd come in after a long quiet stretch, and as he pointed out where the parts of a hot chocolate were on the coffee stand, they ended up talking.
He asked, thinking it wouldn't seem too creepy at this point in their conversation, what had her out so late. Her explanation about "regret reduction" made Rodney look something more than puzzled.
She laughed at her own joke, then added "I'm a hospice chaplain. But that doesn't mean much to most people."
Actually, Rodney had been two places in the hospital, the emergency department and the hospice floor. He told the chaplain about his grandmother, and how much he thought the hospice program had helped her in those last few days up there. "But regret reduction?"
"Oh, it's a stupid joke, I admit," she replied, "but the sixth floor used to have a big sign as you got off the elevator showing how to get to the risk reduction department. When hospice expanded up there, they moved, but the idea stuck with me."
"How is hospice a . . . regret reduction thing?"
She tried to explain: most of what made hospice different from regular medical care, when a person was dying, was that you didn't want to do things with the precious time you had left that later you would, well, regret. Hospice, she reminded Rodney, wasn't about stopping treatment, it was a different kind of treatment. You might risk taking meds or chemo that made you sick for weeks if it would give you months or years in return, but if you only had weeks in any case, those sorts of interventions . . .
"You might regret later," Rodney completed.
"Exactly," the chaplain said. "Plus, we sometimes can encourage people to say things, or do things, that they might regret not doing later, even if it's hard now. We see the timetable a little more clearly, sometimes."
"Except we all can run out of time," Rodney said.
She looked back at him quizzically over the edge of her cup of hot chocolate. But didn't say anything.
After a long pause, Rodney added "I feel that way, sometimes, waiting here."
"Waiting here for what?"
"For when I can figure out what I'm supposed to do."
She sipped a bit more of her drink, then asked "What is it you're supposed to do?"
Rodney thought a while. The lady seemed patient, like his grandmother, but healthier. He looked at her, and looked away as she continued to gaze at him calmly. Looking out the big windows of the front of the store, he said "I'd just like to get off the naughty list. It's Christmas time, you know? I just feel like I'm stuck on the wrong side of Santa's book."
The chaplain sat her drink down next to the register, and leaned against it, looking out the same direction Rodney was, at mostly their reflections against the darkness outside.
"Well, that's a dilemma. You don't want to regret missing a chance to get off the naughty list. But here you are, doing a good job, keeping this place open, and clean, and helping customers like me. Are you sure you're on that list?"
"Oh yeah," said Rodney. "I've done enough stupid stuff to fill up a dumpster."
"So are we talking about Santa, God, or your family and friends here?"
"Pretty much all three know I'm on the naughty list."
"Well, I can't speak for Santa, or your family, but maybe we should talk about God."
(end of part two of three)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's telling another multi-part story this December. You can tell him where the story should end at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
===
Faith Works 12-20-24
Jeff Gill
Getting off of the naughty list, part 3
___
"Why are you so sure you're on the naughty list?" asked the hospice chaplain at the ZipMart.
Rodney had been helping her get hot chocolate as midnight passed, and other customers were few and far between during these single digit hours of the night. They got to talking about her work with the dying and those who loved them, and about his work here in the convenience store.
He explained how he'd made a fair number of mistakes in his life (she interrupted him gently to point out that he wasn't all that old, not to her, anyhow), and it was hard to see how he would ever make things right.
"So one night, there's this lady with a couple of kids, who comes in for just basics sometimes when she can't get to the store where it's cheaper, milk or cereal and stuff. And you can tell she's counting her change and times are tough for her."
The chaplain nodded.
"I had been thinking I'd help out some time, and the next time she walked in about 9 pm, went to the cooler, I pulled out some of my cash and figured I'd offer to cover it for her, you know, Merry Christmas and all that. Then she comes back to the register about when another guy rolls in, comes up right ahead of her, buys a pack of smokes and a bunch of scratch-offs, then says 'and put her groceries on my tab for good luck, okay?' He laughs and she laughs and I put my money away."
"So you didn't get your chance."
"Right. But then a few nights later, another older guy comes in, all flustered, because his battery died. He needed a jump. My heap is right over by the side of the building, so I shut down the register, run out, move my car, go to get his car started, and it won't turn over at all. Then another guy comes up, looks in, doesn't say a word but reverses how I'd connected the clamps, and it started right up. He snorts at me and walks off."
"Okay, that stung. But you helped the man?"
"Maybe, but he didn't act like it, and when I went back in? Two punks had snuck in and were running out with two bottles of pop and and armful of bags of chips. I was so ticked I didn't even try running after them, with my leg and all. I just added it up and paid for it to make the totals work."
"What you're saying," the chaplain said, "is your efforts to get off the naughty list never seem to work."
"Not even close."
"Well, has it occurred to you that you're going about it all wrong?"
"I must be. So what's a better way?"
"First, can I tell you something about God? God isn't Santa. Not even close. You're worried about a naughty list, and maybe Santa has one, maybe he doesn't, but I've got a book here in my purse that says God doesn't make lists that way."
"Yeah, yeah, you're gonna tell me God is love. I know."
"Do you?"
She looked evenly at him, standing behind the register. He had the higher position by a step, but it was as if she was looking at him eye to eye. "If God is love, and God so loved the world that we get to celebrate Christmas as a gift from God, then maybe you don't have to earn that love. Maybe you can't earn it. It's just something that's given us. You're trying to work off your regrets with good deeds, and God says every Christmas and most days in between you don't have to do it that way."
They talked for a long time after that, and agreed that they'd talk again. Probably after Christmas, right there at the ZipMart.
(end of part three of three)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he appreciates your having read this year's December tale. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
===
Faith Works 12-27-24
Jeff Gill
Getting off the naughty list, coda
___
"Take down all the Christmas stuff."
That was on the manager's whiteboard on the cooler door at the ZipMart; Rodney knew to check it every shift. Corporate might send emails and texts, there may be memos under glass on the counter, but the whiteboard was the law. Do that first, and all will be well.
Rodney had the overnight shift, the one he preferred. It had a rhythm and pace he was used to, busy at first, then slowly tapering off through midnight, then the long night hours but the interesting people and questions you got at 3 am.
Plus, the manager knew to ask him to take care of stuff the day shifts couldn't get to as well, and he'd take care of it. Like taking all the Christmas decorations and seasonal displays down. They had gas and hot dogs and bottles of pop every few minutes, but the night shift was full of long stretches where he could step out and work around the store, or pause with a customer and answer their questions.
Or sometimes, to ask them. A few weeks back, Rodney had helped a customer, just after midnight, dressed a little better than he was used to seeing, and looking for hot chocolate. She was a hospice chaplain coming back from a home where someone had died, and after a long night, she wanted something hot more than just going home and staying awake anyhow. Or so she said.
They got to talking about regret, and dying, and hope, and the future, and Rodney found himself talking about his regret, his worry, his fear even, that he was on the naughty list for good and all, and there was no way of getting off of it. He'd tried to do some good things, and they never seemed to work out the way he'd hoped, and in the end, he never felt better.
The chaplain suggested he was confused not about himself, but about God. He might have made some mistakes (or many, as Rodney corrected her), but she argued God's love wasn't limited to those who had a winning scratch-off ticket for it that you bought with your good deeds.
They talked a long time that night about churches, and her faith, and his history with a couple of different congregations. She didn't tell him he had to go to church, or where, just that she thought he might be ready to be around some other people wondering about the same things, and wrote down a few places she thought he might find a welcome ear.
Reaching high to unloop the lights, he began to reel the strand onto the spool. It was funny, but there were so many things he'd been doing all along that now seemed like they were, well, little blessings he'd missed because he was trying so hard to check them off as good works. Blessings for himself, and blessings for others. Just doing your work well, with intention; simple acts of kindness, done for themselves and not for what you might receive for doing them.
The world and the year ahead looked different now. He hoped the chaplain would stop by again so he could tell her about it. He was off the naughty list.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes your year ahead is already filled with anticipated blessings. Tell him how you've been blessed at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Faith Works 12-6-24
Faith Works 12-6-24
Jeff Gill
Getting off of the naughty list, part 1
___
"Get everything ready for Christmas!"
The scrawled red statement on the whiteboard was not meant to be festive, Rodney knew. The manager wrote it there to remind people to check the stock list for the seasonal items that might be missed in the regular routine.
ZipMart had a standard process on a laminated card taped to the cooler next to the whiteboard, but everyone knew to check what the manager wrote first. She'd been there virtually since the mini-market was built, and had a good sense of the rhythms of the business. Sunday night before deer gun season she'd have a note up about doubling the breakfast sandwiches in the heater before 3 am, and not because she was a hunter.
Rodney had been hunting once, twice maybe, and wasn't any good as a hunter. Or hadn't been around anyone wanting to teach him, more like it. He was not at ease around guns, which was funny because he'd had a couple of stick-ups in the years since he started taking night shifts at ZipMart, and had a letter somewhere in a bin from corporate congratulating him on how calmly he'd handled himself in a difficult situation.
Actually, he was pretty sure the second stick-up guy hadn't had a gun, but no way was he going to find out the hard way. He opened up the register like he'd been trained and stepped back.
That night, after the robber had left and Rodney called the police, he went over and wiped down the coffee counter and started a new pot, since he knew they'd be interested in a fresh, hot cup around the middle of their shift. In fact he'd ended up making two more while answering their questions before morning came and both he and the police went home.
Home for Rodney was an apartment over a garage, a little cold even with a small furnace dedicated to his unit in the corner downstairs; it was a three bay garage for a contractor he had worked for briefly until he'd hurt his leg. Disability didn't go through, even with a bad limp, but the owner felt bad for him and recommended him for the ZipMart job along with making him a deal for the apartment. Everyone said it was a good alternative to working with a crew, since he would "just stand in one place," which he now knew meant they'd never worked in a convenience store. Rodney figured he walked more a shift there than he had on an average day at a job site, but it was work, even some benefits.
The benefits were important, because he'd agreed to provide them for his kid. Rodney didn't see him often, but he wished he could more. Night shift made that tough. His ex had offered to stop by a few times, but it was just never good timing with a little kid, late at night or early in the morning.
Other times? He knew he didn't make good use of the time he had. It was something he felt bad about, like a lot of things. That's what he had ended up talking about tonight to the lady who came through about midnight. Rodney asked her what had her out at that hour, as she stirred up her hot chocolate at the coffee stand, and he remembered what she first said.
"I'm in the regret reduction business."
(end of part one of three)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been telling multi-part pieces of semi-fiction in December for some time. Tell him where the story seems to be going at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Jeff Gill
Getting off of the naughty list, part 1
___
"Get everything ready for Christmas!"
The scrawled red statement on the whiteboard was not meant to be festive, Rodney knew. The manager wrote it there to remind people to check the stock list for the seasonal items that might be missed in the regular routine.
ZipMart had a standard process on a laminated card taped to the cooler next to the whiteboard, but everyone knew to check what the manager wrote first. She'd been there virtually since the mini-market was built, and had a good sense of the rhythms of the business. Sunday night before deer gun season she'd have a note up about doubling the breakfast sandwiches in the heater before 3 am, and not because she was a hunter.
Rodney had been hunting once, twice maybe, and wasn't any good as a hunter. Or hadn't been around anyone wanting to teach him, more like it. He was not at ease around guns, which was funny because he'd had a couple of stick-ups in the years since he started taking night shifts at ZipMart, and had a letter somewhere in a bin from corporate congratulating him on how calmly he'd handled himself in a difficult situation.
Actually, he was pretty sure the second stick-up guy hadn't had a gun, but no way was he going to find out the hard way. He opened up the register like he'd been trained and stepped back.
That night, after the robber had left and Rodney called the police, he went over and wiped down the coffee counter and started a new pot, since he knew they'd be interested in a fresh, hot cup around the middle of their shift. In fact he'd ended up making two more while answering their questions before morning came and both he and the police went home.
Home for Rodney was an apartment over a garage, a little cold even with a small furnace dedicated to his unit in the corner downstairs; it was a three bay garage for a contractor he had worked for briefly until he'd hurt his leg. Disability didn't go through, even with a bad limp, but the owner felt bad for him and recommended him for the ZipMart job along with making him a deal for the apartment. Everyone said it was a good alternative to working with a crew, since he would "just stand in one place," which he now knew meant they'd never worked in a convenience store. Rodney figured he walked more a shift there than he had on an average day at a job site, but it was work, even some benefits.
The benefits were important, because he'd agreed to provide them for his kid. Rodney didn't see him often, but he wished he could more. Night shift made that tough. His ex had offered to stop by a few times, but it was just never good timing with a little kid, late at night or early in the morning.
Other times? He knew he didn't make good use of the time he had. It was something he felt bad about, like a lot of things. That's what he had ended up talking about tonight to the lady who came through about midnight. Rodney asked her what had her out at that hour, as she stirred up her hot chocolate at the coffee stand, and he remembered what she first said.
"I'm in the regret reduction business."
(end of part one of three)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been telling multi-part pieces of semi-fiction in December for some time. Tell him where the story seems to be going at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
Re: Architect questions
Well, in 1881:
"The original plan was to put up a building that should cost twenty-five thousand dollars, half to be raised at home, while they hoped to raise the rest among the generous people of the state who loved Granville. These donors stipulated that "they would pay the sums opposite their names, provided that the church should raise twelve thousand dollars, and that the whole amount raised should reach $25000."
"The original plan was to put up a building that should cost twenty-five thousand dollars, half to be raised at home, while they hoped to raise the rest among the generous people of the state who loved Granville. These donors stipulated that "they would pay the sums opposite their names, provided that the church should raise twelve thousand dollars, and that the whole amount raised should reach $25000."
As always happens, however, in the end it cost more, indeed twice as much, the contract, as before stated, being for thirty-three thousand dollars, while the furnishing and finishings brought it up to a fraction less than fifty thousand dollars."
[So...]
"The building committee consisted of Deacon Shepardson, Mr. E.M. Downer, and Professor A. U. Thresher. The Architect was Mr. L. B. Vaulk, of New York City, and the contractors Messrs. Gerber and Vance, of Newark. If crowded, the building
will seat about twelve hundred."[Dedication in November 1883]
Now, Levi Scofield was architect of both the Ohio Reformatory in Mansfield, and the Athens Asylum complex (beloved of Ohio University alumni and their parents who attended all the home games for the marching band, overlooking Peden Stadium as it does). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Scofield
The history volume for Granville Baptists is in error at least in spelling: the architect was Lawrence B. Valk (no U), and HE has some interesting credits:
L. B. Valk was an architect who designed many churches and residences in the United States between 1859 and 1924.
Born in Florida in 1838, Valk was listed in New York City directories as an architect as early as 1859. His son Arthur was his junior partner in the firm from 1885 on.
Valk's work included the First Presbyterian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska (1884-1885) and the Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) in New Orleans (1886-1887).
Firm: Valk's firm, L. B. Valk and Son, was based in Brooklyn, New York. During the decades when they were based in New York, Lawrence and Arthur Valk completed commissions for many churches in New York and other states east of the Mississippi River. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1890s, they spent the remainder of their careers designing Craftsman bungalows along with a smaller number of known churches. In addition, Arthur Valk is credited with designing some of California's early movie theaters.
L. B. Valk was an architect who designed many churches and residences in the United States between 1859 and 1924.
Born in Florida in 1838, Valk was listed in New York City directories as an architect as early as 1859. His son Arthur was his junior partner in the firm from 1885 on.
Valk's work included the First Presbyterian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska (1884-1885) and the Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) in New Orleans (1886-1887).
Firm: Valk's firm, L. B. Valk and Son, was based in Brooklyn, New York. During the decades when they were based in New York, Lawrence and Arthur Valk completed commissions for many churches in New York and other states east of the Mississippi River. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1890s, they spent the remainder of their careers designing Craftsman bungalows along with a smaller number of known churches. In addition, Arthur Valk is credited with designing some of California's early movie theaters.
A list of some of his buildings:
And a much longer list -- which doesn't include Granville! But clearly he's the architect here.
https://noveltytheater.net/person/lawrence-b-valk
https://noveltytheater.net/person/lawrence-b-valk
I hope you have as much fun skimming those links as I did finding them!
Pax,
Jeff Gill
http://knapsack.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/Knapsack
"Live your faith, share your life"
Jeff Gill
http://knapsack.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/Knapsack
"Live your faith, share your life"
On Tue, Nov 26, 2024 at 9:08 PM David Ball <dball@rosenbergball.com> wrote:
Hi Jeff,Kim and I were watching the Shawshank redemption a day or two ago and it certainly looked like the stonework of the original building of the Ohio reformatory was very very similar to the stonework of the United Church of Granville. Our Internet research suggests that the architect of the Ohio reformatory was Eric Scofield. I have to think that the architect of our church was the same man. Curious if you have any information about this?Best, DaveDavid T. Ball ¤ Partner
Rosenberg & Ball Co., LPA
205 South Prospect Street
Granville, Ohio 43023
t (614) 316-8222
dball@rosenbergball.com ¤ www.rosenbergball.com
Top Lawyers 2024, Columbus CEO magazine; 2010 American Bar Association Outstanding Young Nonprofit Attorney; Certified Arbitrator, American Arbitration Association ; Co-Host of the "Two Balls, One Court" podcast
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Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 11-28-24
Notes from my Knapsack 11-28-24
Jeff Gill
Thankful for what is no more
___
Thanksgiving season is obviously a time to work on feeling thankful.
The usual drill is to try and be more mindful of the blessings and advantages and gifts you have that you may well be taking for granted. And there's nothing wrong with working on that one!
What I have in mind this year, though, is more obscure, but I hope is something that might help me in that increased awareness of immediate reasons to be thankful.
If you've followed the saga of the 1900 Avalon Building in Newark, on social media a large number of people turn out to have had personal stories which wound through the apartments above and shops below over the previous century. Obviously there was sentiment to save it yet again, but old buildings are not like cats, and are lucky if they have two lives, three at most. The water from extinguishing the fire across the roof of the Avalon sealed its fate. And the hard reality about historic preservation is: you can't save 'em all.
So while I never lived in, shopped at, or even entered the Avalon, its demise has me thinking about other buildings now gone that are part of my life, if only now in memory and imagination.
For six years I had a desk in the 1886 county Children's Home on E. Main St. with the juvenile court. Torn down in 2013, while there were voices calling to preserve it, the structure was, like the Avalon, too compromised for preservation. It was a fascinating building, though, with a great deal of history taking place within it over a century and a quarter, and it pops up in my dreams at odd intervals still.
When I first visited Newark in 1989, the Auditorium Theatre was still standing, and had more going on inside of it than the then shuttered Midland across Second St. Built in 1894 as the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall, it was an echo of my hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana, which also had the unique feature of a Memorial Opera House built instead of a towering monument to Civil War veterans. There was a practical spirit linking the two places which pleased me; why spend a pile of money on a monument when you could memorialize the soldiers and sailors with something everyone could use?
At that time, fires and decay had taken away the building's classical facade and sculptures, some of which you can still see at VFW Post 1060 on Forry Avenue; the pinnacle statuary group is on private property elsewhere in the county but survives as well. I saw performances and concerts in the old Auditorium, and think of it still when I walk past the Licking County Foundation's offices now on that site.
Recently I got to attend a friend's production of a play at the Eisner Center on the Denison University campus; it was in the Hylbert Family Studio Theatre, and well staged there. But I kept thinking back to the Ace Morgan Theatre, the knotty pine lobby, its history back with Morgan's friend Hal Holbrook, and later student stars in the making like John Davidson, Michael Eisner (whose center now occupies the location), Steve Carell, and Jennifer Garner.
Along with long-lost family homes and places where in years past I've enjoyed Thanksgiving dinners, there are so many buildings that I find myself thankful for which are no more. What lost locations helped shape you, and what do you recall of them?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if he got going on lost church buildings this column would be a multi-volume book. Tell him about places that are gone but not for you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Jeff Gill
Thankful for what is no more
___
Thanksgiving season is obviously a time to work on feeling thankful.
The usual drill is to try and be more mindful of the blessings and advantages and gifts you have that you may well be taking for granted. And there's nothing wrong with working on that one!
What I have in mind this year, though, is more obscure, but I hope is something that might help me in that increased awareness of immediate reasons to be thankful.
If you've followed the saga of the 1900 Avalon Building in Newark, on social media a large number of people turn out to have had personal stories which wound through the apartments above and shops below over the previous century. Obviously there was sentiment to save it yet again, but old buildings are not like cats, and are lucky if they have two lives, three at most. The water from extinguishing the fire across the roof of the Avalon sealed its fate. And the hard reality about historic preservation is: you can't save 'em all.
So while I never lived in, shopped at, or even entered the Avalon, its demise has me thinking about other buildings now gone that are part of my life, if only now in memory and imagination.
For six years I had a desk in the 1886 county Children's Home on E. Main St. with the juvenile court. Torn down in 2013, while there were voices calling to preserve it, the structure was, like the Avalon, too compromised for preservation. It was a fascinating building, though, with a great deal of history taking place within it over a century and a quarter, and it pops up in my dreams at odd intervals still.
When I first visited Newark in 1989, the Auditorium Theatre was still standing, and had more going on inside of it than the then shuttered Midland across Second St. Built in 1894 as the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall, it was an echo of my hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana, which also had the unique feature of a Memorial Opera House built instead of a towering monument to Civil War veterans. There was a practical spirit linking the two places which pleased me; why spend a pile of money on a monument when you could memorialize the soldiers and sailors with something everyone could use?
At that time, fires and decay had taken away the building's classical facade and sculptures, some of which you can still see at VFW Post 1060 on Forry Avenue; the pinnacle statuary group is on private property elsewhere in the county but survives as well. I saw performances and concerts in the old Auditorium, and think of it still when I walk past the Licking County Foundation's offices now on that site.
Recently I got to attend a friend's production of a play at the Eisner Center on the Denison University campus; it was in the Hylbert Family Studio Theatre, and well staged there. But I kept thinking back to the Ace Morgan Theatre, the knotty pine lobby, its history back with Morgan's friend Hal Holbrook, and later student stars in the making like John Davidson, Michael Eisner (whose center now occupies the location), Steve Carell, and Jennifer Garner.
Along with long-lost family homes and places where in years past I've enjoyed Thanksgiving dinners, there are so many buildings that I find myself thankful for which are no more. What lost locations helped shape you, and what do you recall of them?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if he got going on lost church buildings this column would be a multi-volume book. Tell him about places that are gone but not for you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Monday, November 18, 2024
Faith Works 11-29-24
Faith Works 11-29-24
Jeff Gill
When we say we can't wait, we mean it
___
In the Christian liturgical calendar, Advent is the period of prayerful preparation leading up to Christmas Day.
Some years, it backs into November (in the Orthodox Church, it is longer and always does), usually observed with four Sundays of themed worship before Christmas Day itself, all leading up to that joyful day.
Advent is traditionally seen as a commemoration of the Incarnation, of God entering into this world in the person of Jesus, first as a tiny, helpless baby, but also as a penitential season preparing us for Christ's return, sometimes called the Second Advent of Jesus. In either case, it is a season of waiting.
Which we're terrible at.
Wait? Have you heard of one-click ordering? Wait? Do you know what my office sounds like when I'm getting on a video conference with people from multiple time zones, many of whom I've never met and may never meet, but will soon see and converse with, but first the window pops up: Updates are now downloading. Aiiiieeee! You mean I will have to WAIT a minute or two to do something that not all that long ago required a long car or train trip, perhaps a plane flight, a taxi to a conference center, checking in, then walking up to a meeting room? Instead of all that, I can do it NOW, unless I first have updates to download . . .
Waiting is not a spiritual practice much cultivated in the world we live in. Imagine the horror of going to the cereal aisle and seeing forty-eleven brands of breakfast snap-crackle-and-pop but not finding our preferred sugary discs? Someone will hear about this, now!
Advent says: or we could learn how to wait. To, if you will excuse the profanity against our modern era's commercial divinities, learn how to defer gratification. Christmas will come soon enough, on the 25th, but first, we could just try to enter into the waiting as a good place to be, and not just a desert of unfulfilled wants we're enduring, like the drive across Kansas (my apologies to the fine folk of that remarkably level state).
If we were to find the journey part of the joy of the destination, then waiting would not be something to be endured, but a part of the plan we embrace. One of the worship practice elements some churches observe in Advent I find both charming, and instructive: to start the first Sunday of Advent with an empty manger scene. Then to add over the next days and weeks the cow, the donkey, the sheep, shepherds of course, Mary and Joseph . . . Jesus, who will arrive in due time.
You can even spice up the period after Advent, between Christmas and Epiphany, with a Biblically appropriate slow roll of the Magi and their camels making their way in post-Christmas, culminating January 6th.
We all need to wait better. I think that's spiritual counsel few would dispute. Advent is both a time, and a way, for us to work on that gift: to wait with God for fulfillment.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not that great at waiting patiently himself. Tell him how you've learned to wait well at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Jeff Gill
When we say we can't wait, we mean it
___
In the Christian liturgical calendar, Advent is the period of prayerful preparation leading up to Christmas Day.
Some years, it backs into November (in the Orthodox Church, it is longer and always does), usually observed with four Sundays of themed worship before Christmas Day itself, all leading up to that joyful day.
Advent is traditionally seen as a commemoration of the Incarnation, of God entering into this world in the person of Jesus, first as a tiny, helpless baby, but also as a penitential season preparing us for Christ's return, sometimes called the Second Advent of Jesus. In either case, it is a season of waiting.
Which we're terrible at.
Wait? Have you heard of one-click ordering? Wait? Do you know what my office sounds like when I'm getting on a video conference with people from multiple time zones, many of whom I've never met and may never meet, but will soon see and converse with, but first the window pops up: Updates are now downloading. Aiiiieeee! You mean I will have to WAIT a minute or two to do something that not all that long ago required a long car or train trip, perhaps a plane flight, a taxi to a conference center, checking in, then walking up to a meeting room? Instead of all that, I can do it NOW, unless I first have updates to download . . .
Waiting is not a spiritual practice much cultivated in the world we live in. Imagine the horror of going to the cereal aisle and seeing forty-eleven brands of breakfast snap-crackle-and-pop but not finding our preferred sugary discs? Someone will hear about this, now!
Advent says: or we could learn how to wait. To, if you will excuse the profanity against our modern era's commercial divinities, learn how to defer gratification. Christmas will come soon enough, on the 25th, but first, we could just try to enter into the waiting as a good place to be, and not just a desert of unfulfilled wants we're enduring, like the drive across Kansas (my apologies to the fine folk of that remarkably level state).
If we were to find the journey part of the joy of the destination, then waiting would not be something to be endured, but a part of the plan we embrace. One of the worship practice elements some churches observe in Advent I find both charming, and instructive: to start the first Sunday of Advent with an empty manger scene. Then to add over the next days and weeks the cow, the donkey, the sheep, shepherds of course, Mary and Joseph . . . Jesus, who will arrive in due time.
You can even spice up the period after Advent, between Christmas and Epiphany, with a Biblically appropriate slow roll of the Magi and their camels making their way in post-Christmas, culminating January 6th.
We all need to wait better. I think that's spiritual counsel few would dispute. Advent is both a time, and a way, for us to work on that gift: to wait with God for fulfillment.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not that great at waiting patiently himself. Tell him how you've learned to wait well at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Faith Works 11-22-24
Nate & Ben — I will shortly be sending you my Nov. 29 column, too, as I'm used to a request for early submissions around T'giving & Christmas! Pax, Jeff
===
Faith Works 11-22-24
Jeff Gill
A gentle reminder of a pressing reality
___
This whole column could easily be rendered down into two words: don't wait.
My justification for writing more, other than to fill the space this is intended to cover, is I have a very specific area of "not waiting" to urge upon all you readers.
When it comes to family gatherings and the holidays, we're all familiar with the sudden outburst of an unexpected story, and someone piping up at the end "you ought to write that down." Indeed, someone should.
What I have to add to that over these last few years of caring for aging family members is an encouragement from two angles.
One is from how I look back now over the years before my father's passing, and how I had tried to recover and record some family stories, with a special emphasis on gaps and missing turns between better known pieces of the narrative. I made special trips home with just that in mind, and in our last summer together, I will always be glad I encouraged him to take a trip with me where we shared a long car trip and a hotel room for a week at a church gathering we'd both attended many times in the past.
Again, I will long value the fact that I made those choices. But I have to tell this part of the story: for the most part, it didn't work. In many ways, the stories had already receded into a bit of gathering fog that obscured stories I knew had been vivid in years past. A few times I asked about a particular situation, and he wasn't sure what I was talking about, and more than once said "that didn't happen."
Maybe my childhood memories of some stories had turned astray, but mostly I knew from other records and information (I got my love of history and genealogy from him, so there's a fair amount of that, too) the incident I had in mind was a story he had told, but now had no recollection of it.
I waited too long, in other words. After he died, I found a number of fragments on his computer which I treasure, and I suspect a few were triggered by those conversations I started on visits home, which for me went nowhere. So there's that, along with the obvious fact that the time spent was worthwhile in its own right.
The other side of this is an awkward, perhaps even painful subject for many of us, but it's relevant. My mother is still with us, and she's happy to talk, but her stories are getting . . . interesting. As in often, clearly implausible, and not infrequently I have plenty of basis for saying "that just didn't happen."
Occasionally, my siblings and I can piece together how she's merging events from her childhood and her parents with her earlier motherhood and raising us. It's an interesting exercise. Names have gotten fairly random (and we think strongly influenced by what was recently on TV), but any suggestion of "Mom, do you mean Jeff" will get a chortle and a very firm, emphatic, "no, that's not who I mean."
Author Richard Russo's mother Jean died in 2007, and the circumstances of her passing are echoed in his 2009 novel "That Old Cape Magic," something you can find confirmed in his memoir "Elsewhere" which came out in 2012. He describes a lengthy period of storytelling by a elderly, dying parent, which may or may not be influenced by morphine, but moves back and forth from solid facts to a stormy ocean of likely fiction. The son is left to sort out what really happened.
All of which is to say: don't wait. If you want stories from older relatives, don't wait to ask, don't wait to write down or record them. Do it now.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a handful of narratives he's knocking into shape while he's still thinking clearly. Tell him your favorite family stories at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
===
Faith Works 11-22-24
Jeff Gill
A gentle reminder of a pressing reality
___
This whole column could easily be rendered down into two words: don't wait.
My justification for writing more, other than to fill the space this is intended to cover, is I have a very specific area of "not waiting" to urge upon all you readers.
When it comes to family gatherings and the holidays, we're all familiar with the sudden outburst of an unexpected story, and someone piping up at the end "you ought to write that down." Indeed, someone should.
What I have to add to that over these last few years of caring for aging family members is an encouragement from two angles.
One is from how I look back now over the years before my father's passing, and how I had tried to recover and record some family stories, with a special emphasis on gaps and missing turns between better known pieces of the narrative. I made special trips home with just that in mind, and in our last summer together, I will always be glad I encouraged him to take a trip with me where we shared a long car trip and a hotel room for a week at a church gathering we'd both attended many times in the past.
Again, I will long value the fact that I made those choices. But I have to tell this part of the story: for the most part, it didn't work. In many ways, the stories had already receded into a bit of gathering fog that obscured stories I knew had been vivid in years past. A few times I asked about a particular situation, and he wasn't sure what I was talking about, and more than once said "that didn't happen."
Maybe my childhood memories of some stories had turned astray, but mostly I knew from other records and information (I got my love of history and genealogy from him, so there's a fair amount of that, too) the incident I had in mind was a story he had told, but now had no recollection of it.
I waited too long, in other words. After he died, I found a number of fragments on his computer which I treasure, and I suspect a few were triggered by those conversations I started on visits home, which for me went nowhere. So there's that, along with the obvious fact that the time spent was worthwhile in its own right.
The other side of this is an awkward, perhaps even painful subject for many of us, but it's relevant. My mother is still with us, and she's happy to talk, but her stories are getting . . . interesting. As in often, clearly implausible, and not infrequently I have plenty of basis for saying "that just didn't happen."
Occasionally, my siblings and I can piece together how she's merging events from her childhood and her parents with her earlier motherhood and raising us. It's an interesting exercise. Names have gotten fairly random (and we think strongly influenced by what was recently on TV), but any suggestion of "Mom, do you mean Jeff" will get a chortle and a very firm, emphatic, "no, that's not who I mean."
Author Richard Russo's mother Jean died in 2007, and the circumstances of her passing are echoed in his 2009 novel "That Old Cape Magic," something you can find confirmed in his memoir "Elsewhere" which came out in 2012. He describes a lengthy period of storytelling by a elderly, dying parent, which may or may not be influenced by morphine, but moves back and forth from solid facts to a stormy ocean of likely fiction. The son is left to sort out what really happened.
All of which is to say: don't wait. If you want stories from older relatives, don't wait to ask, don't wait to write down or record them. Do it now.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a handful of narratives he's knocking into shape while he's still thinking clearly. Tell him your favorite family stories at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Monday, November 11, 2024
Faith Works 11-15-24
Faith Works 11-15-24
Jeff Gill
Paul said it to the church in Corinth, and to us
___
Last week I opened "To be clear: this column was written before Election Day."
To be clear, this one was written after the results were well and truly known. And I've had the unedifying spectacle of Christians on my social media interact over the outcome.
Generally, as this column is intended for a widely general audience of "faith-interested" people, and not simply Protestants (whom I know best, to be fair) or even just Christians. However, in Licking County and even more widely, if I'm going to speak as an ordained minister, I'm going to have to quote some Scripture. So stand back!
In the twelfth chapter of Paul's first letter to the fellowship in Corinth, he says at the twenty-first verse: "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you,' nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you.'"
Does this sound relevant to anyone else?
Just before that, Paul was setting up his overarching point: "For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, 'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body."
With me and Paul so far? The foot may be stinky, but it's a necessary part of the whole. The ear may have a higher place and smell of cologne, but it can't get within hearing distance of anything worth listening to unless the feets don't fail us now. You gotta get along, feet and toes and eyes and tear ducts…
Paul continues, just to beat the point into the dust of the marketplace: "If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body… As it is, there are many parts, yet one body." (vss. 14-20)
It's a vivid metaphor, one of many in the Bible (which is worth reading, you know?) and a very useful one for our current cultural moment. You could sum it up with "We need each other, even or possibly because of our differences," but human nature (note the need for a discussion of sin sometime here) means we may need something more startling, more intense to help us get the point.
As Flannery O'Connor said on this subject: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." She was talking about writing on the subject of faith and life, and she knew her Paul, too.
We need each other, progressives and conservatives, yes, but also the old and the young, the praise music folk and the pipe organ fans; the sensitive and caring sorts and the more objective and mathematical people as a both/and, not an either/or. You generally don't want the English majors doing your books, and as a Purdue grad I hope the engineers out there won't mind if I say they aren't as a rule the obvious choice for Hospitality Committee chair.
I have contacts and engagements all across a wide swath of my own religious tradition, and a few adjoining us, so I'm not talking just to my village or county or region. But I am talking to you, dear friends. We need each other, and to say after a bruising electoral campaign that we can't have anything to do with "those people" is just the foot having a fit over the ear's high and mighty place.
We need each other. And we all probably need to read I Corinthians 12 in full, maybe twice.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's possibly more of an appendix, or maybe a spleen. Tell him where you fit in at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Paul said it to the church in Corinth, and to us
___
Last week I opened "To be clear: this column was written before Election Day."
To be clear, this one was written after the results were well and truly known. And I've had the unedifying spectacle of Christians on my social media interact over the outcome.
Generally, as this column is intended for a widely general audience of "faith-interested" people, and not simply Protestants (whom I know best, to be fair) or even just Christians. However, in Licking County and even more widely, if I'm going to speak as an ordained minister, I'm going to have to quote some Scripture. So stand back!
In the twelfth chapter of Paul's first letter to the fellowship in Corinth, he says at the twenty-first verse: "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you,' nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you.'"
Does this sound relevant to anyone else?
Just before that, Paul was setting up his overarching point: "For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, 'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body."
With me and Paul so far? The foot may be stinky, but it's a necessary part of the whole. The ear may have a higher place and smell of cologne, but it can't get within hearing distance of anything worth listening to unless the feets don't fail us now. You gotta get along, feet and toes and eyes and tear ducts…
Paul continues, just to beat the point into the dust of the marketplace: "If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body… As it is, there are many parts, yet one body." (vss. 14-20)
It's a vivid metaphor, one of many in the Bible (which is worth reading, you know?) and a very useful one for our current cultural moment. You could sum it up with "We need each other, even or possibly because of our differences," but human nature (note the need for a discussion of sin sometime here) means we may need something more startling, more intense to help us get the point.
As Flannery O'Connor said on this subject: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." She was talking about writing on the subject of faith and life, and she knew her Paul, too.
We need each other, progressives and conservatives, yes, but also the old and the young, the praise music folk and the pipe organ fans; the sensitive and caring sorts and the more objective and mathematical people as a both/and, not an either/or. You generally don't want the English majors doing your books, and as a Purdue grad I hope the engineers out there won't mind if I say they aren't as a rule the obvious choice for Hospitality Committee chair.
I have contacts and engagements all across a wide swath of my own religious tradition, and a few adjoining us, so I'm not talking just to my village or county or region. But I am talking to you, dear friends. We need each other, and to say after a bruising electoral campaign that we can't have anything to do with "those people" is just the foot having a fit over the ear's high and mighty place.
We need each other. And we all probably need to read I Corinthians 12 in full, maybe twice.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's possibly more of an appendix, or maybe a spleen. Tell him where you fit in at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Tuesday, November 05, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 11-14/21-24
Notes from my Knapsack 11-14/21-24
Jeff Gill
In the light of Election Day
___
Election morning the village turnout, at least in terms of "as the door opens" at 6:30 am, was impressive. Possibly the most I've ever seen for the dawn patrol here in Granville.
There was a man in his running outfit, shorts & sneakers; I saw women & men dressed for business or court or something official this morning, in ties or dresses and dark fabrics. I saw neighbors and fellow churchgoers and former clients; there were fellow Kiwanians across the table checking in voters & college students plus professors from up the hill down here in the church basement. There were a few in patriotic gear, but of course nothing overtly partisan. I saw people I've known for over two decades here in the village, folks I've more recently met whose names I scrambled mentally to recall, and a fair number of complete strangers.
It was Election Day in the United States of America. The genius of our founders is encapsulated in the propositions that we are all created equal, and therefore our votes count equally. All of us, at least those who make the effort both to get registered, and to cast their vote.
For democracy to function, it requires a critical mass of voters to participate, and register the outcomes as "the consent of the governed." If we only had a handful of us voting, the system would flounder if there's not enough of us participating to sustain the hard work of governance, which boils down to the levying of taxes and the expenditure of public funds. Those two issues are contentious enough, but we make it work because of the deposit of good faith made by enough of us having voted; it works enough to leave the citizenry in general feeling like the actions of our commonwealth are by common consent.
There are those who vote whose engagement and understanding I wonder about. And there are reasons expressed for making certain choices that leave me baffled as to why their perspective is even relevant. I won't lie: some ideas strike me as ignorant and uninformed. Yet the essence of democracy is that they get to vote, too, if they meet certain minimum criteria. The various pluralities, for elected officials and financial assessments and governance revisions to charters locally or constitutions on the state level, will decide. Majority rules.
Whichever top ticket candidate prevails, I have work to do locally not because my preferred candidate won or lost, but more likely to make the best use of the outcomes of other ballot matters which are not even on the local TV news let alone cable coverage. Certain things village residents are voting on will affect me quite personally, and county-wide the results of things like library levies and senior funding will be matters with impacts I will see, up close and personal.
So I pray for blessing on all those I see going about their civic business this day, in sporting togs or blue suits, with obvious partisan commitments or those whose actual sympathies I do not know and can't even suspect. Thank you most of all to the pollworkers, and a hearty thank you to my fellow voters, and may the blessing we have of taking part and doing our part spill over from us for the good of our community as a whole.
Decisions are being made on this day, but they are almost all decisions about what work we have to do the next day, and next year, and on into the next few. Take a deep breath, say a prayer as you are comfortable doing, and let's look on ahead -- to holiday movies, to the Candlelight Walking Tour, for a new year drawing near, and to continue serving together in addressing the needs around us.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has political opinions and a basic commitment to democracy. Tell him about anarchy or any other option you prefer at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
In the light of Election Day
___
Election morning the village turnout, at least in terms of "as the door opens" at 6:30 am, was impressive. Possibly the most I've ever seen for the dawn patrol here in Granville.
There was a man in his running outfit, shorts & sneakers; I saw women & men dressed for business or court or something official this morning, in ties or dresses and dark fabrics. I saw neighbors and fellow churchgoers and former clients; there were fellow Kiwanians across the table checking in voters & college students plus professors from up the hill down here in the church basement. There were a few in patriotic gear, but of course nothing overtly partisan. I saw people I've known for over two decades here in the village, folks I've more recently met whose names I scrambled mentally to recall, and a fair number of complete strangers.
It was Election Day in the United States of America. The genius of our founders is encapsulated in the propositions that we are all created equal, and therefore our votes count equally. All of us, at least those who make the effort both to get registered, and to cast their vote.
For democracy to function, it requires a critical mass of voters to participate, and register the outcomes as "the consent of the governed." If we only had a handful of us voting, the system would flounder if there's not enough of us participating to sustain the hard work of governance, which boils down to the levying of taxes and the expenditure of public funds. Those two issues are contentious enough, but we make it work because of the deposit of good faith made by enough of us having voted; it works enough to leave the citizenry in general feeling like the actions of our commonwealth are by common consent.
There are those who vote whose engagement and understanding I wonder about. And there are reasons expressed for making certain choices that leave me baffled as to why their perspective is even relevant. I won't lie: some ideas strike me as ignorant and uninformed. Yet the essence of democracy is that they get to vote, too, if they meet certain minimum criteria. The various pluralities, for elected officials and financial assessments and governance revisions to charters locally or constitutions on the state level, will decide. Majority rules.
Whichever top ticket candidate prevails, I have work to do locally not because my preferred candidate won or lost, but more likely to make the best use of the outcomes of other ballot matters which are not even on the local TV news let alone cable coverage. Certain things village residents are voting on will affect me quite personally, and county-wide the results of things like library levies and senior funding will be matters with impacts I will see, up close and personal.
So I pray for blessing on all those I see going about their civic business this day, in sporting togs or blue suits, with obvious partisan commitments or those whose actual sympathies I do not know and can't even suspect. Thank you most of all to the pollworkers, and a hearty thank you to my fellow voters, and may the blessing we have of taking part and doing our part spill over from us for the good of our community as a whole.
Decisions are being made on this day, but they are almost all decisions about what work we have to do the next day, and next year, and on into the next few. Take a deep breath, say a prayer as you are comfortable doing, and let's look on ahead -- to holiday movies, to the Candlelight Walking Tour, for a new year drawing near, and to continue serving together in addressing the needs around us.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has political opinions and a basic commitment to democracy. Tell him about anarchy or any other option you prefer at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, November 04, 2024
Faith Works 11-8-24
Faith Works 11-8-24
Jeff Gill
How popular is pop culture, anyhow?
___
To be clear: this column was written before Election Day.
So I'm not being discreet or non-topical, but pragmatic. How did it go? Well, by Friday I hope we know. Meanwhile…
Last weekend I was in Indianapolis, which was having a three-day Taylor Swift invasion, shows back to back and the city abuzz with excitement. Attendance records were set for Lucas Oil Stadium each night. In other words, it was BIG.
Well, I confess to having helped nudge a preacher into making a Taylor Swift reference early in Sunday's worship where I attend services while in town. The ministry staff there and I know each other, and with the news wall-to-wall Swift-centered coverage, plus the associate pastor had gone with his daughter, I made some comments online asking how Taylor's lyrics might make it into the themes of the day.
Then I doubled down on my semi-ironic pleading as I entered the church, but actually not thinking the senior minister would go there. However, he did. He opened the pre-service announcements saying "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me." Pause.
Then he immediately asked, "so, how many of you know what that was a reference to?" On an average early service in that congregation, with the pews fairly well filled, of 150 people present only five raised their hands.
I think all five of us were somewhat surprised.
The senior pastor repeated the experiment, I suspect now out of curiosity, at the second service, where there were probably more like 200 present, and he messaged later that "about eight people raised their hands."
Taylor Swift was the dominant figure in TV news all weekend, and she's a pop culture behemoth, spilling over into NFL games (and if you don't know, I'm not going to explain it). But less than 4% of those present said they knew much of anything about her. Let the reader understand, as the Bible says.
I said to the associate after the service — who was wearing a special Taylor-themed jacket, yes with glitter involved — that this reminded me of a Wednesday Bible study I once had with about 50 attending each week. Once I made a reference to something about a popular film's account of personal sacrifice by way of an illustration, and then thought to ask "actually, how many of you have seen a Marvel superhero movie?" One lady proudly waved her hand. Just one, bless her. She wasn't the youngest person there, either, but she was the only one.
Later on, the same impulse led me to ask "how many of you have seen a Harry Potter movie, on TV or even just on a DVD?" None. Zip. Nada. (Yes, I know, some Christians have issues with Hogwarts etc., but it was still interesting. Is it possible some had, but weren't willing to say so in a church setting? Could be.)
In this pop culture context, and in the wake of the election, which again I hope is effectively over by the time you read this, I thought it useful to note this parallel point: according to the Census Bureau, in 2020 we had two-thirds of eligible voters participate in the general election. In terms of the country as a whole, that means only 48% of the nation's population voted (158.5 million vs. 330 million total).
If the winner gets 50.5%, that means they are still supported by something less than 24% of everyone. Sure, that includes children and people in assisted living and so on, but you see my point. Is "everyone" all wrapped up in the election, or in any one candidate? Like knowing a key Taylor Swift lyric or who Doctor Strange is, not so much.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's fairly sure he's the problem, but that's not Swift, that's Chesterton (look it up). Ask him about anything but elections at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
How popular is pop culture, anyhow?
___
To be clear: this column was written before Election Day.
So I'm not being discreet or non-topical, but pragmatic. How did it go? Well, by Friday I hope we know. Meanwhile…
Last weekend I was in Indianapolis, which was having a three-day Taylor Swift invasion, shows back to back and the city abuzz with excitement. Attendance records were set for Lucas Oil Stadium each night. In other words, it was BIG.
Well, I confess to having helped nudge a preacher into making a Taylor Swift reference early in Sunday's worship where I attend services while in town. The ministry staff there and I know each other, and with the news wall-to-wall Swift-centered coverage, plus the associate pastor had gone with his daughter, I made some comments online asking how Taylor's lyrics might make it into the themes of the day.
Then I doubled down on my semi-ironic pleading as I entered the church, but actually not thinking the senior minister would go there. However, he did. He opened the pre-service announcements saying "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me." Pause.
Then he immediately asked, "so, how many of you know what that was a reference to?" On an average early service in that congregation, with the pews fairly well filled, of 150 people present only five raised their hands.
I think all five of us were somewhat surprised.
The senior pastor repeated the experiment, I suspect now out of curiosity, at the second service, where there were probably more like 200 present, and he messaged later that "about eight people raised their hands."
Taylor Swift was the dominant figure in TV news all weekend, and she's a pop culture behemoth, spilling over into NFL games (and if you don't know, I'm not going to explain it). But less than 4% of those present said they knew much of anything about her. Let the reader understand, as the Bible says.
I said to the associate after the service — who was wearing a special Taylor-themed jacket, yes with glitter involved — that this reminded me of a Wednesday Bible study I once had with about 50 attending each week. Once I made a reference to something about a popular film's account of personal sacrifice by way of an illustration, and then thought to ask "actually, how many of you have seen a Marvel superhero movie?" One lady proudly waved her hand. Just one, bless her. She wasn't the youngest person there, either, but she was the only one.
Later on, the same impulse led me to ask "how many of you have seen a Harry Potter movie, on TV or even just on a DVD?" None. Zip. Nada. (Yes, I know, some Christians have issues with Hogwarts etc., but it was still interesting. Is it possible some had, but weren't willing to say so in a church setting? Could be.)
In this pop culture context, and in the wake of the election, which again I hope is effectively over by the time you read this, I thought it useful to note this parallel point: according to the Census Bureau, in 2020 we had two-thirds of eligible voters participate in the general election. In terms of the country as a whole, that means only 48% of the nation's population voted (158.5 million vs. 330 million total).
If the winner gets 50.5%, that means they are still supported by something less than 24% of everyone. Sure, that includes children and people in assisted living and so on, but you see my point. Is "everyone" all wrapped up in the election, or in any one candidate? Like knowing a key Taylor Swift lyric or who Doctor Strange is, not so much.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's fairly sure he's the problem, but that's not Swift, that's Chesterton (look it up). Ask him about anything but elections at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Faith Works 11-1-24
Faith Works 11-1-24
Jeff Gill
Ancient mysteries, modern challenges
___
On November the First, one hundred and sixty four years ago, a remarkable discovery was made in our area.
David Wyrick, the former county surveyor and noted amateur antiquarian, was digging where once towered the Jacksontown Stone Mound, formerly forty feet and more in height and constructed almost entirely of rocks, uncut, loosely piled over what turned out to be a complex of smaller earthen mounds at ground level. Some two hundred feet across at the base, the piled stones were largely hauled away after 1823 to build the "Northbank" of the Licking Reservoir of the Ohio & Erie Canal – what we now call Buckeye Lake. Tens of thousands of wagon loads of stone were rolled from their hilltop to the valley below to the west.
A tomb carved out of a tree trunk, copper rings, and other funerary material had already been found at the ground level where the stone mound once stood. Digging beneath even that, Wyrick found on Nov. 1, 1860 a carved stone box in two pieces, and within what became known as the Decalogue Stone. It was covered in a squarish form of Hebrew lettering.
This was not, however, the first Hebrew inscribed stone Wyrick had discovered. On June 29th, just four months earlier, in a shallow pit near the Octagon of the Newark Earthworks, he dug up an oddly shaped rock which became known as the Keystone. Attention both locally and nationally was quickly focused on this strange object, with Hebrew phrases carved on the four faces of the Keystone.
There are volumes which could be written about the Newark Holy Stones, as these objects have come to be called. In fact, Brad Lepper and I mean to write at least one; he's been "on the case" a few years longer than I have, but we've been digging archivally and elsewhere into this mystery for over thirty years now, and it's time for something more than a few articles in journals and dozens of public talks, all of which we've done. They're interesting not just for "antiquarian" or archaeological reasons, but because their story, and what these objects might be saying about history and humanity in the United States, continues to fascinate and attract attention, right down to 2024.
We say they are hoaxes, which doesn't end the interest, but begins it. The briefest possible explanation for why we're so certain they're fake is because the Hebrew on each, the Keystone and the Decalogue, bear tell-tale signs of modern Hebrew. They aren't, they can't be 2,000 years old, or even two hundred. But if they were made in 1860, with such care and carved in stone, what was the purpose? What reasons justify the effort expended to create them & hide them for Wyrick to find (because we think he was a patsy, a victim of the hoax himself)?
Our best explanation has to do with what happened on Nov. 6, 1860. The period in which both Holy Stones were fabricated and found was while the nation struggled through a presidential election with high stakes, and then voted into office Abraham Lincoln.
The struggle, one that Lincoln himself wrestled with, was the human status of what at that time were seen as entirely distinct races of people, and the question of whether or not such differences were real, and if so whether those distinctions justified a different status under law. The Dred Scott decision three years earlier, and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry the year before, all were a "tragic prelude" to the conflict everyone saw coming.
We suspect the Holy Stones were an attempt to influence the election, and public opinion, in favor of the equality of all humankind, whatever race or ethnicity. It's a debate we still are having today, and a book we really need to write. Stay tuned!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; yes, he's daring himself to get writing on this project described here. Tell him if you'd read that book at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Faith Works 10-25-24
Faith Works 10-25-24
Jeff Gill
Religious backgrounds and anticipated outcomes
___
In the U.S. Constitution, it's spelled out fairly specifically in Article VI, the third clause:
"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
"No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust."
This is effectively the end of the core, original draft of the Constitution as it was approved in 1787 and referred to the states for ratification; there is one more section, Article VII, but it's all about how the ratification would take place. So in a functional, practical sense, this is the culmination of the U.S. Constitution: "no religious test shall ever be required" for public service.
The pragmatic tension here is that while the Founders made it clear the law can never require a religious affirmation or status as a qualification, that's not quite the same as whether the voters could apply one in their own private decision making about how to vote.
We've had Unitarians (the Adams family) and Catholics (Kennedy and Biden), all manner of Protestants, and even Anabaptists (Hoover, Eisenhower, and Nixon, though they each had journeys away from their roots). Mostly Christians of various sorts, but as yet no Lutherans or Pentecostals or Orthodox incumbents.
The quasi-incumbent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a long-time member of an American Baptist Church in San Francisco; her pastor, Amos Brown, was a student in the one college class Martin Luther King, Jr. ever taught, and Brown has been noted for his ecumenical engagements throughout his preaching career. Harris's mother is from India, but Hinduism was not a part of their lives growing up by all accounts. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, is out of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America tradition.
Also semi-incumbent, former President Donald Trump has roots in Presbyterianism, with a mother from Scotland who grew up speaking Gaelic as her first language; his parents later joined Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan which was the congregation led by Norman Vincent Peale, affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, and Trump's first marriage was in that church, but he continued to claim the Presbyterian faith in which he was confirmed for many years. In 2020 he stated he was "non-denominational Christian." His running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in 2019, after having a childhood exposure to what he calls "conservative, evangelical Christianity."
In the spirit of the Constitution, I'd say none of this should either qualify or bar any of the leading candidates from their offices. In the spirit of democratic inquiry, I find it a good sign that we have such a range of religious backgrounds in the two top tickets. A non-Christian might say "not such a wide range, Jeff" and a non-believer secularist might call this no range at all, since there is no avowed atheist or agnostic among these four: duly noted.
I would never say a non-religious person couldn't be a good civic leader, but I think it's still true that if you have no religious experience in your portfolio of life involvements, you may be missing something many of your fellow citizens find necessary. There shall be no religious test for public office, but I am reassured that all our leading candidates know something about how faith works for many Americans.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has his own ideas about what qualifies someone for public office, and it ain't church-going. Tell him what you think they are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Religious backgrounds and anticipated outcomes
___
In the U.S. Constitution, it's spelled out fairly specifically in Article VI, the third clause:
"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
"No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust."
This is effectively the end of the core, original draft of the Constitution as it was approved in 1787 and referred to the states for ratification; there is one more section, Article VII, but it's all about how the ratification would take place. So in a functional, practical sense, this is the culmination of the U.S. Constitution: "no religious test shall ever be required" for public service.
The pragmatic tension here is that while the Founders made it clear the law can never require a religious affirmation or status as a qualification, that's not quite the same as whether the voters could apply one in their own private decision making about how to vote.
We've had Unitarians (the Adams family) and Catholics (Kennedy and Biden), all manner of Protestants, and even Anabaptists (Hoover, Eisenhower, and Nixon, though they each had journeys away from their roots). Mostly Christians of various sorts, but as yet no Lutherans or Pentecostals or Orthodox incumbents.
The quasi-incumbent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a long-time member of an American Baptist Church in San Francisco; her pastor, Amos Brown, was a student in the one college class Martin Luther King, Jr. ever taught, and Brown has been noted for his ecumenical engagements throughout his preaching career. Harris's mother is from India, but Hinduism was not a part of their lives growing up by all accounts. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, is out of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America tradition.
Also semi-incumbent, former President Donald Trump has roots in Presbyterianism, with a mother from Scotland who grew up speaking Gaelic as her first language; his parents later joined Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan which was the congregation led by Norman Vincent Peale, affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, and Trump's first marriage was in that church, but he continued to claim the Presbyterian faith in which he was confirmed for many years. In 2020 he stated he was "non-denominational Christian." His running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in 2019, after having a childhood exposure to what he calls "conservative, evangelical Christianity."
In the spirit of the Constitution, I'd say none of this should either qualify or bar any of the leading candidates from their offices. In the spirit of democratic inquiry, I find it a good sign that we have such a range of religious backgrounds in the two top tickets. A non-Christian might say "not such a wide range, Jeff" and a non-believer secularist might call this no range at all, since there is no avowed atheist or agnostic among these four: duly noted.
I would never say a non-religious person couldn't be a good civic leader, but I think it's still true that if you have no religious experience in your portfolio of life involvements, you may be missing something many of your fellow citizens find necessary. There shall be no religious test for public office, but I am reassured that all our leading candidates know something about how faith works for many Americans.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has his own ideas about what qualifies someone for public office, and it ain't church-going. Tell him what you think they are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Faith Works 10-18-24
Faith Works 10-18-24
Jeff Gill
A landscape of departures and arrivals
___
We are coming into the peak of both fall, and election season.
Election Day itself is Nov. 5 but a startling number of voters have shown a preference in recent years for getting it over with early, for whatever reasons, and early voting is likely to encompass two-thirds of the total 100,000 or so ballots cast in Licking County.
November 1 is All Saints Day in many Christian traditions, often observed on the first Sunday in November which would be Nov. 3 this year. That means we will (technically, at least) be thinking about saints before we do our voting.
Saints, the honored dead, are of course part of the seasonal round with the eve of All Saints, or All Hallows as the early English said, being on our cultural calendar as Hallowe'en (the apostrophe being your call, stylebook-wise). Secular Halloween acknowledges the change of season and the shortening of days, chill in the air and leaves crunching underfoot, and I don't have to tell you that the acknowledgement or even enthusiastic endorsement of death is part of "secular" spooky season.
It's hard not to think about death with shadows getting longer, and winter approaching, but All Saints as opposed to the eve of is something more to do with Chesterton's "democracy of the dead." His mediation on capital-T Tradition included the voice of those who have gone before, a not inconsiderable number of souls, who may know things we do not entirely understand, hence "the democracy of the dead."
We can get caught up, politically and socially, with the idea that the future is always new, and things are always going to get better, but history and tradition and the saints who have gone before bear witness to the reality that in many ways "there is nothing new under the sun" (that's not from Chesterton). The past may have something to teach us, and it certainly helped make us and shape us, for ill perhaps in some ways, but often for good.
Hence the role of saints.
Whether your faith tradition observes a formal process of canonization, or if you simply mark any believer's passing as a promotion into the ranks of the saints, this is a good time of year to reflect on the saints who have shaped your life, and even your community's life. Founders and builders and grandparents and caregivers, parents and family, friends and mentors. You don't have to be all that old to come to a point when you realize a number of your guideposts in life have "gone on before" as the hymn sings, and you might just have advocates in heaven.
A few of my friends and mentors have died in this last year, not to mention some close relatives by marriage. I've been wrestling with two different cemeteries in the last year to get markers erected for those who have passed, and in a few inscriptions, for those not yet gone but getting close. It's a bracing experience, the story of "the dash" and all that. My initial engraving is 1961, and the second number… who knows?
But I'm in this realm of thought less to confront my own death than my personal relationships with those who have already died, for whom many questions are answered, and whose support and encouragement and guidance is still active in my life. How is it active? That becomes an interesting theological question; some might say it's more psychological, but as Prof. Dumbledore would add, that doesn't make it any less real.
"For all the saints, who from their labors rest": to this group we present our living work, our choices, even our voting, and listen for their response. Can you hear it?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's listening to what this season has to say. Tell him what you hear at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
A landscape of departures and arrivals
___
We are coming into the peak of both fall, and election season.
Election Day itself is Nov. 5 but a startling number of voters have shown a preference in recent years for getting it over with early, for whatever reasons, and early voting is likely to encompass two-thirds of the total 100,000 or so ballots cast in Licking County.
November 1 is All Saints Day in many Christian traditions, often observed on the first Sunday in November which would be Nov. 3 this year. That means we will (technically, at least) be thinking about saints before we do our voting.
Saints, the honored dead, are of course part of the seasonal round with the eve of All Saints, or All Hallows as the early English said, being on our cultural calendar as Hallowe'en (the apostrophe being your call, stylebook-wise). Secular Halloween acknowledges the change of season and the shortening of days, chill in the air and leaves crunching underfoot, and I don't have to tell you that the acknowledgement or even enthusiastic endorsement of death is part of "secular" spooky season.
It's hard not to think about death with shadows getting longer, and winter approaching, but All Saints as opposed to the eve of is something more to do with Chesterton's "democracy of the dead." His mediation on capital-T Tradition included the voice of those who have gone before, a not inconsiderable number of souls, who may know things we do not entirely understand, hence "the democracy of the dead."
We can get caught up, politically and socially, with the idea that the future is always new, and things are always going to get better, but history and tradition and the saints who have gone before bear witness to the reality that in many ways "there is nothing new under the sun" (that's not from Chesterton). The past may have something to teach us, and it certainly helped make us and shape us, for ill perhaps in some ways, but often for good.
Hence the role of saints.
Whether your faith tradition observes a formal process of canonization, or if you simply mark any believer's passing as a promotion into the ranks of the saints, this is a good time of year to reflect on the saints who have shaped your life, and even your community's life. Founders and builders and grandparents and caregivers, parents and family, friends and mentors. You don't have to be all that old to come to a point when you realize a number of your guideposts in life have "gone on before" as the hymn sings, and you might just have advocates in heaven.
A few of my friends and mentors have died in this last year, not to mention some close relatives by marriage. I've been wrestling with two different cemeteries in the last year to get markers erected for those who have passed, and in a few inscriptions, for those not yet gone but getting close. It's a bracing experience, the story of "the dash" and all that. My initial engraving is 1961, and the second number… who knows?
But I'm in this realm of thought less to confront my own death than my personal relationships with those who have already died, for whom many questions are answered, and whose support and encouragement and guidance is still active in my life. How is it active? That becomes an interesting theological question; some might say it's more psychological, but as Prof. Dumbledore would add, that doesn't make it any less real.
"For all the saints, who from their labors rest": to this group we present our living work, our choices, even our voting, and listen for their response. Can you hear it?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's listening to what this season has to say. Tell him what you hear at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Notes From my Knapsack 10-24-24
Notes From my Knapsack 10-24-24
Jeff Gill
Local considerations, wider implications
___
Granville had a library before there were streets or a complete survey.
The pioneer settlers of 1805 formed a church in Massachusetts before they ever got here in late November, but by 1806 the interest in a library proceeded schools or banks or even much government to speak of.
The library charter, in fact, was leveraged to get a bank started, which is part of why we have the Granville Historical Society building, standing on Broadway since 1816. Today's Granville Public Library building is historic itself, now 100 years old with a Frank Packard design completed by his firm after his untimely 1923 death.
In all the attention to national politics on TV news and across social media, we run the risk of overlooking the sort of electoral decisions that have an immediate impact on our lives. Not just the voting, as we do every two years, for our U.S. House of Representatives occupant, but for Statehouse officials representing us, like the State Senate and State Representative. We have three seats on the Ohio Supreme Court up for ballot, along with two Licking County commissioner spots.
There are lots of uncontested seats on the ballot for county government, which I really dislike seeing, which is not to voice anything against those running unopposed. Sometimes that's a sign you're doing such a good job the opposition gracefully declines to dispute the position, but seeing seven or eight slots in a row with a single candidate is not a good sign for loyal opposition, in any electoral situation.
We are being asked to voice our opinion, which will have a weighty implication in practical terms, for the ongoing property tax levies to support the countywide senior citizens services programs, and to continue and slightly increase the Granville Public Library support, as the latter is trying to prepare to serve a wider audience as their service area covers not just the village but the entire school district. More residents in Granville South means more potential customers and needs in that growing area.
There are also two opportunities to weigh in on village governance, with charter amendments needing your approval, or not happening if you do not. Small matters, perhaps, but with a very direct impact on your life, and not something you'll hear much about on cable news.
Personally, I have opinions on almost all of these matters. Ask me personally, and I'm happy to share them. But this column isn't to exhort you to vote one way or another on any of them: it's to remind you that this is where the rubber of democracy meets the road of governance. Who reviews zoning variances, or state funding for school districts, or presides over drug court: you decide, at least in part. Will we expand service of library programming? That's pretty much entirely up to you; likewise, you could throttle senior services back considerably. Your call.
Foreign policy? I'm not sure your vote on top of the ticket matters will sway that a great deal (reasonable minds may vary on that, but you see my point). But county level policy is something you can influence, quite directly.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has his ballot in mind, but hopes to vote in person on Nov. 5. Tell him your political philosophy at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Local considerations, wider implications
___
Granville had a library before there were streets or a complete survey.
The pioneer settlers of 1805 formed a church in Massachusetts before they ever got here in late November, but by 1806 the interest in a library proceeded schools or banks or even much government to speak of.
The library charter, in fact, was leveraged to get a bank started, which is part of why we have the Granville Historical Society building, standing on Broadway since 1816. Today's Granville Public Library building is historic itself, now 100 years old with a Frank Packard design completed by his firm after his untimely 1923 death.
In all the attention to national politics on TV news and across social media, we run the risk of overlooking the sort of electoral decisions that have an immediate impact on our lives. Not just the voting, as we do every two years, for our U.S. House of Representatives occupant, but for Statehouse officials representing us, like the State Senate and State Representative. We have three seats on the Ohio Supreme Court up for ballot, along with two Licking County commissioner spots.
There are lots of uncontested seats on the ballot for county government, which I really dislike seeing, which is not to voice anything against those running unopposed. Sometimes that's a sign you're doing such a good job the opposition gracefully declines to dispute the position, but seeing seven or eight slots in a row with a single candidate is not a good sign for loyal opposition, in any electoral situation.
We are being asked to voice our opinion, which will have a weighty implication in practical terms, for the ongoing property tax levies to support the countywide senior citizens services programs, and to continue and slightly increase the Granville Public Library support, as the latter is trying to prepare to serve a wider audience as their service area covers not just the village but the entire school district. More residents in Granville South means more potential customers and needs in that growing area.
There are also two opportunities to weigh in on village governance, with charter amendments needing your approval, or not happening if you do not. Small matters, perhaps, but with a very direct impact on your life, and not something you'll hear much about on cable news.
Personally, I have opinions on almost all of these matters. Ask me personally, and I'm happy to share them. But this column isn't to exhort you to vote one way or another on any of them: it's to remind you that this is where the rubber of democracy meets the road of governance. Who reviews zoning variances, or state funding for school districts, or presides over drug court: you decide, at least in part. Will we expand service of library programming? That's pretty much entirely up to you; likewise, you could throttle senior services back considerably. Your call.
Foreign policy? I'm not sure your vote on top of the ticket matters will sway that a great deal (reasonable minds may vary on that, but you see my point). But county level policy is something you can influence, quite directly.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has his ballot in mind, but hopes to vote in person on Nov. 5. Tell him your political philosophy at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Twitter.
Monday, October 07, 2024
Faith Works 10-11-24
Faith Works 10-11-24
Jeff Gill
Religious politics across a wide spectrum
___
Religious exhortations to support one candidate or another are nothing new.
Faith communities have goals and priorities for both their own common life, and for what many Christians call "missions," or outreach, which are their personal and congregational intentions for the wider community.
Any group, however organized, that has goals for their wider community is going to be bumping up against political agendas. That's politics in a nutshell: how we organize our common life. You can have our life in community organized by a king or queen, and that's a monarchy. You can end up, intentionally or not, with a very small group of people making all the key decisions, and that's an oligarchy.
As is pretty well known, the origin of what we call democracy in ancient Greece was letting the "demos," the people vote as a group on how the community would be governed, but that demos wasn't too democratic by our standards today: it was free adult male citizens who had been through basic military training, so about 10% of the population in Athens some 2,500 years ago.
Early American democracy had the same shortcoming: free white male property owners had the right to vote. So it was more inclusive than a monarchy or oligarchy, but still fairly limited. Come women's suffrage into the 1920s and the civil rights movement into the 1960s, American democracy is wider and more diverse than almost any broad-based democratic polity.
Within that large and diverse electorate, you end up with a wide range of religious perspectives. Under "free white male property-owners" type democracy, you had a relatively limited range of religious perspective, and most of it Christian and broadly Protestant. Expand that population of politically engaged citizens, you radically increase the variety of faith perspectives.
Sure, there are now church-based groups out there who are in favor of oligarchy, with them inside the select governing coalition, and there are Christian anarchists out there, too. We now have a rich, complex, even bewildering range of attitudes towards how a person of faith should look at political life, and while it can be confusing, I think it's better than having a handful of church traditions in the driver's seat.
Some belief systems actually opt out, and tell believers not to vote as an unjustifiable entanglement with worldly matters. I don't hear folks worry about that stance as much as there's loud concern about a congregation or preacher who tells their adherents how to vote. That's not how I roll, but the American experiment is not that churches can't tell people for whom to vote, but that you can't be expected to hold a particular religious belief in order to vote, let alone to hold office. Religious tests for being a political candidate were a real thing until relatively recently in much of Europe, and still exists in parts of the world (whether Communism is a religion I will leave for another day). Our Constitutional democracy says "nope" to that idea.
Jesus, who is the benchmark for most Christians in most matters, said "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." That was in a dispute over taxes, akin to the example about voting: some religious leaders said paying taxes was too much involvement in secular matters for the truly faithful. Jesus seemed to see a space for politics, but one that should be kept alongside of one's faith, without tangling them up too much.
When challenged with what Herod Antipas was saying, Jesus replied "you tell that fox" he was going to do what he was sent here to do, regardless of political opposition. Strong words, clear distinctions. Calling the ruling authority a "bottom feeding unclean parasite" is not political, but it's pretty challenging to the politics of his day.
And with Pilate, the chief magistrate, Jesus simply kept turning his own words back to him, asking for honest consideration. Political speech, or powerful preaching?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in what Jesus is saying in almost any sphere of life. Tell him how you decide your political positions at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Religious politics across a wide spectrum
___
Religious exhortations to support one candidate or another are nothing new.
Faith communities have goals and priorities for both their own common life, and for what many Christians call "missions," or outreach, which are their personal and congregational intentions for the wider community.
Any group, however organized, that has goals for their wider community is going to be bumping up against political agendas. That's politics in a nutshell: how we organize our common life. You can have our life in community organized by a king or queen, and that's a monarchy. You can end up, intentionally or not, with a very small group of people making all the key decisions, and that's an oligarchy.
As is pretty well known, the origin of what we call democracy in ancient Greece was letting the "demos," the people vote as a group on how the community would be governed, but that demos wasn't too democratic by our standards today: it was free adult male citizens who had been through basic military training, so about 10% of the population in Athens some 2,500 years ago.
Early American democracy had the same shortcoming: free white male property owners had the right to vote. So it was more inclusive than a monarchy or oligarchy, but still fairly limited. Come women's suffrage into the 1920s and the civil rights movement into the 1960s, American democracy is wider and more diverse than almost any broad-based democratic polity.
Within that large and diverse electorate, you end up with a wide range of religious perspectives. Under "free white male property-owners" type democracy, you had a relatively limited range of religious perspective, and most of it Christian and broadly Protestant. Expand that population of politically engaged citizens, you radically increase the variety of faith perspectives.
Sure, there are now church-based groups out there who are in favor of oligarchy, with them inside the select governing coalition, and there are Christian anarchists out there, too. We now have a rich, complex, even bewildering range of attitudes towards how a person of faith should look at political life, and while it can be confusing, I think it's better than having a handful of church traditions in the driver's seat.
Some belief systems actually opt out, and tell believers not to vote as an unjustifiable entanglement with worldly matters. I don't hear folks worry about that stance as much as there's loud concern about a congregation or preacher who tells their adherents how to vote. That's not how I roll, but the American experiment is not that churches can't tell people for whom to vote, but that you can't be expected to hold a particular religious belief in order to vote, let alone to hold office. Religious tests for being a political candidate were a real thing until relatively recently in much of Europe, and still exists in parts of the world (whether Communism is a religion I will leave for another day). Our Constitutional democracy says "nope" to that idea.
Jesus, who is the benchmark for most Christians in most matters, said "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." That was in a dispute over taxes, akin to the example about voting: some religious leaders said paying taxes was too much involvement in secular matters for the truly faithful. Jesus seemed to see a space for politics, but one that should be kept alongside of one's faith, without tangling them up too much.
When challenged with what Herod Antipas was saying, Jesus replied "you tell that fox" he was going to do what he was sent here to do, regardless of political opposition. Strong words, clear distinctions. Calling the ruling authority a "bottom feeding unclean parasite" is not political, but it's pretty challenging to the politics of his day.
And with Pilate, the chief magistrate, Jesus simply kept turning his own words back to him, asking for honest consideration. Political speech, or powerful preaching?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in what Jesus is saying in almost any sphere of life. Tell him how you decide your political positions at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 10-10-24
Notes from my Knapsack 10-10-24
Jeff Gill
A personal stake in the input, plus the outcome
___
Both of my parents were born in the middle of the Great Depression. They would call themselves Depression babies, but it's also true they were respectively seven and six years old when Pearl Harbor happened, and times went from Depression shortages to wartime rationing.
None of which is to take away from them the challenges they each faced, in Iowa and Illinois where they grew up in rural communities. Yet they both finished high school, and grew up with indoor flush toilets and running water, and electricity even if it was frequently subject to outages.
So my folks were very at ease with the lights going out. We always had a kerosene lamp as a dining room centerpiece, and a couple more around the house. They were used to trimming wicks and refilling lamps, where they were strange to me.
I bring this up because I realize, having spent some time getting my mother to talk about her childhood in the last couple of years (the one set of memories which, once we tap into a vein of them, still flows freely), that it wasn't that they had to pump water for the kitchen or make soap for the washing up — though they were familiar with such things! — but they were raised by people who did. My grandparents raised their kids having known what it was like to carry every bucket of water in from the side yard pump, and it made my parents rather vigilant about how long we ran the tap, or how much soap we used.
And I'll be honest: it took me years to get to where I wasn't cautiously squeezing out the dish soap in dribs and drabs. It was a second generation carryover of that caution, which starts with the frugality that comes from knowing just how much work it takes to make a bar of soap (or to churn up a dish of butter, or pump a bucketful of rinse water).
Where I got interested in these generational effects was when I started making crackers. No, I don't do it often or wholesale, but the first time I read about the possibility I thought "oh how quaint" and did it for amusement. Then I kind of got into it, for a quirky taste twist.
But the interesting thing to me is, after I've done the mixing and cutting and baking and cooling and serving, I'm both more aware of the taste (hey, I made these!) and I don't tend to plow through them as quickly.
On the other hand, I am as capable as the next guy to sit mindlessly munching on a box of factory made chips or curls or crackers. I don't think, I definitely don't savor, I just eat. And whoops, they're gone.
Making my crackers? Sure, it's the back end of laziness: if I eat too many, too fast, I'll have to do the work to make more. Can't get 'em at the store in a quick trip. Still, there's something else going on. I don't want to consume, I enjoy.
Sometimes, I think about all that at the kitchen sink drinking a glass of water. And my grandmother at the pump a century ago, wondering how many trips today.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on being mindful of his crackers. Tell him what makes you stop and think at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
A personal stake in the input, plus the outcome
___
Both of my parents were born in the middle of the Great Depression. They would call themselves Depression babies, but it's also true they were respectively seven and six years old when Pearl Harbor happened, and times went from Depression shortages to wartime rationing.
None of which is to take away from them the challenges they each faced, in Iowa and Illinois where they grew up in rural communities. Yet they both finished high school, and grew up with indoor flush toilets and running water, and electricity even if it was frequently subject to outages.
So my folks were very at ease with the lights going out. We always had a kerosene lamp as a dining room centerpiece, and a couple more around the house. They were used to trimming wicks and refilling lamps, where they were strange to me.
I bring this up because I realize, having spent some time getting my mother to talk about her childhood in the last couple of years (the one set of memories which, once we tap into a vein of them, still flows freely), that it wasn't that they had to pump water for the kitchen or make soap for the washing up — though they were familiar with such things! — but they were raised by people who did. My grandparents raised their kids having known what it was like to carry every bucket of water in from the side yard pump, and it made my parents rather vigilant about how long we ran the tap, or how much soap we used.
And I'll be honest: it took me years to get to where I wasn't cautiously squeezing out the dish soap in dribs and drabs. It was a second generation carryover of that caution, which starts with the frugality that comes from knowing just how much work it takes to make a bar of soap (or to churn up a dish of butter, or pump a bucketful of rinse water).
Where I got interested in these generational effects was when I started making crackers. No, I don't do it often or wholesale, but the first time I read about the possibility I thought "oh how quaint" and did it for amusement. Then I kind of got into it, for a quirky taste twist.
But the interesting thing to me is, after I've done the mixing and cutting and baking and cooling and serving, I'm both more aware of the taste (hey, I made these!) and I don't tend to plow through them as quickly.
On the other hand, I am as capable as the next guy to sit mindlessly munching on a box of factory made chips or curls or crackers. I don't think, I definitely don't savor, I just eat. And whoops, they're gone.
Making my crackers? Sure, it's the back end of laziness: if I eat too many, too fast, I'll have to do the work to make more. Can't get 'em at the store in a quick trip. Still, there's something else going on. I don't want to consume, I enjoy.
Sometimes, I think about all that at the kitchen sink drinking a glass of water. And my grandmother at the pump a century ago, wondering how many trips today.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on being mindful of his crackers. Tell him what makes you stop and think at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Faith Works 10-4-24
Faith Works 10-4-24
Jeff Gill
Faith and trust and electoral awareness
___
Faith, we are told by the author of Hebrews, is the assurance of things hoped for. Faith can also be called the conviction of things not seen.
Now, something not seen is hard to put on television. And in our world as it is right now, if it's not on TV, did it even really happen?
Yet it has been an . . . I was going to say interesting, but maybe I'm looking for something a bit more like bracing, or even a shocking realization, that instant replay has not ended arguments over referee's decisions in sports. There was hope that the widespread use of body cameras would resolve concerns about law enforcement interactions with the public, but while I think they have a useful place it's also true we are still finding wide variation on interpretation of what we just saw when something tragic or terrible happens.
Some of that is about when the video starts or ends, or what's just out of view, or blurry (and yes, you need to turn them on and not leave them off when an encounter begins), but just like end zone calls with a toe on the out-of-bounds line, it all depends on camera angles.
Which makes me think of politics.
Honestly, everything does right now, doesn't it? if you watch anything on broadcast TV you have already gotten a snootful. October 7 is the last day to register (you have been warned!) and early voting starts the next day, Oct. 8. That's right, the election may well be decided before we even get to Nov. 5.
We have a presidential race (you may have heard) and there's a U.S. Senate seat up for re-election, but there are local races from county commissioner to your ability to buy liquor on Sundays on the ballot, if you work on down to what I think of as the real nitty-gritty.
When we're making up our minds on what to vote on or for whom we will vote, there's a great deal of faith at work. Faith Works is the tag I put on this column now almost twenty years ago, riffing on our earthworks as a local landscape image, and a reminder that faith is not just a mental process but a part of what we do, as we figure out how the cosmos works and where we fit into that.
Faith is part of how we react to information we hear about the candidates or issues. We can't know everything there is to absorb about where they've been or how they've changed or why they make the statements they make that we see and hear on the internet. In fact, we're likely to believe faster what we want to believe, and hold back when information pushes back against our assumptions, the beliefs we started with.
This is a bigger factor with national or statewide races, yet it's true for even local matters. We have the senior levy up for renewal, for instance. I know what I see on my property tax bill; I'm told it's not going to increase if I vote to renew it, and that the programs it supports are worthwhile and needed.
Here I find the mix of faith and certainty working in my favor: I've seen and worked directly with some of those funded services for seniors, and all I know directly matches the bigger issue I'm asked to, well, take on faith. So I say yes with an easy heart.
Presidents and senators? Oh, I have opinions, a modest store of observations, and an acute awareness that my faith is inevitably part of the mix. How does faith guide you in voting?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows voting is already a top of mind issue for many. Tell him how faith will shape your decisions at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Faith and trust and electoral awareness
___
Faith, we are told by the author of Hebrews, is the assurance of things hoped for. Faith can also be called the conviction of things not seen.
Now, something not seen is hard to put on television. And in our world as it is right now, if it's not on TV, did it even really happen?
Yet it has been an . . . I was going to say interesting, but maybe I'm looking for something a bit more like bracing, or even a shocking realization, that instant replay has not ended arguments over referee's decisions in sports. There was hope that the widespread use of body cameras would resolve concerns about law enforcement interactions with the public, but while I think they have a useful place it's also true we are still finding wide variation on interpretation of what we just saw when something tragic or terrible happens.
Some of that is about when the video starts or ends, or what's just out of view, or blurry (and yes, you need to turn them on and not leave them off when an encounter begins), but just like end zone calls with a toe on the out-of-bounds line, it all depends on camera angles.
Which makes me think of politics.
Honestly, everything does right now, doesn't it? if you watch anything on broadcast TV you have already gotten a snootful. October 7 is the last day to register (you have been warned!) and early voting starts the next day, Oct. 8. That's right, the election may well be decided before we even get to Nov. 5.
We have a presidential race (you may have heard) and there's a U.S. Senate seat up for re-election, but there are local races from county commissioner to your ability to buy liquor on Sundays on the ballot, if you work on down to what I think of as the real nitty-gritty.
When we're making up our minds on what to vote on or for whom we will vote, there's a great deal of faith at work. Faith Works is the tag I put on this column now almost twenty years ago, riffing on our earthworks as a local landscape image, and a reminder that faith is not just a mental process but a part of what we do, as we figure out how the cosmos works and where we fit into that.
Faith is part of how we react to information we hear about the candidates or issues. We can't know everything there is to absorb about where they've been or how they've changed or why they make the statements they make that we see and hear on the internet. In fact, we're likely to believe faster what we want to believe, and hold back when information pushes back against our assumptions, the beliefs we started with.
This is a bigger factor with national or statewide races, yet it's true for even local matters. We have the senior levy up for renewal, for instance. I know what I see on my property tax bill; I'm told it's not going to increase if I vote to renew it, and that the programs it supports are worthwhile and needed.
Here I find the mix of faith and certainty working in my favor: I've seen and worked directly with some of those funded services for seniors, and all I know directly matches the bigger issue I'm asked to, well, take on faith. So I say yes with an easy heart.
Presidents and senators? Oh, I have opinions, a modest store of observations, and an acute awareness that my faith is inevitably part of the mix. How does faith guide you in voting?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows voting is already a top of mind issue for many. Tell him how faith will shape your decisions at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Faith Works 9-27-24
Faith Works 9-27-24
Jeff Gill
Taking chances, seeing a longer-term upside
___
Tom Chapman died a few weeks ago, at the age of 82.
He had lost his wife Vicki back in 2015; his son Chad and brother Bob had helped manage his care in these last few years; as I'd turned to caring for family members myself, I'd lost track of him. It was good, at least, to thank them at Tom's calling for their care.
Tom Chapman had cared for his community in an interesting assortment of ways over the years. He may have been best known as the owner and operator of a collection agency in Newark, which brought him into contact with everyone from bankers to the bankrupt, and everyone in between.
Not many ministers get to know collection agents, and that's probably an oversight. I've had parishioners who worked for some of the online bill collection companies here in the area, but Tom was the only "go and knock on doors" collections person I've had the chance to talk to at length.
This association came about because Tom was the very first landlord of the Licking County Coalition for Housing in 1992 as we were getting off the ground. He rented us four apartments for transitional housing use, well before LCCH had HUD grants or other major programmatic supports. We were a patchwork of memorandums of understanding between agencies, and a handful of donations from Church Women United and a few cooperating churches in the area. Jana Lowe was a part-time director with each paycheck a hope and a promise to be renewed each month.
Basically, our birthday organizationally was the day after Tom's memorial service; on Sept. 23, 1992 our incorporation was processed by then-Secretary of State Bob Taft, and we signed a rental agreement with Tom Chapman for four units above his collection agency. Other landlords had looked us over and said "ah, no thank you" but Tom said yes.
Even so, the whole operation was shaky, and Deb Tegtmeyer, who would not become our first full-time executive director for a few years yet, stood with me on a snowy November evening as we filled the first three of our four units, using up most of the housewares and bedding we'd collected over the previous few weeks. It all felt very uncertain.
Then Tom pulled up, in a station wagon. He got out, our new landlord, but still an uncertain quantity in this whole variable filled formula, and looked at us with a note of concern on his face. Then he said "I have four frozen turkeys in my back seat, plus four bags of groceries that I thought would be right for Thanksgiving; should I take them up to the residents, or would it be more appropriate for me to have you give them?"
Deb and I looked at each other, and we both knew: this crazy idea might just work. Because Tom Chapman believed in what we were doing.
LCCH has grown beyond four units; we do much more than just transitional housing, and I think our best work is what Tom always hoped we'd be able to do more of, which is helping prevent homelessness before an eviction or other action was taken. Through the next thirty years, Tom helped us in many, many ways, including helping us get funds gathered for unexpected needs which are an ongoing memorial for Vicki and now, of course, for him.
Tom Chapman took a chance, because he knew all too well how much some people needed second chances, and he wanted to be a part of extending them. He couldn't do it alone, and we couldn't have done what we've done without him (and others like him).
Rest easy, Tom. The work and the second (and third) chances will continue.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad to have known Tom Chapman. Tell him about your unsung hero at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Taking chances, seeing a longer-term upside
___
Tom Chapman died a few weeks ago, at the age of 82.
He had lost his wife Vicki back in 2015; his son Chad and brother Bob had helped manage his care in these last few years; as I'd turned to caring for family members myself, I'd lost track of him. It was good, at least, to thank them at Tom's calling for their care.
Tom Chapman had cared for his community in an interesting assortment of ways over the years. He may have been best known as the owner and operator of a collection agency in Newark, which brought him into contact with everyone from bankers to the bankrupt, and everyone in between.
Not many ministers get to know collection agents, and that's probably an oversight. I've had parishioners who worked for some of the online bill collection companies here in the area, but Tom was the only "go and knock on doors" collections person I've had the chance to talk to at length.
This association came about because Tom was the very first landlord of the Licking County Coalition for Housing in 1992 as we were getting off the ground. He rented us four apartments for transitional housing use, well before LCCH had HUD grants or other major programmatic supports. We were a patchwork of memorandums of understanding between agencies, and a handful of donations from Church Women United and a few cooperating churches in the area. Jana Lowe was a part-time director with each paycheck a hope and a promise to be renewed each month.
Basically, our birthday organizationally was the day after Tom's memorial service; on Sept. 23, 1992 our incorporation was processed by then-Secretary of State Bob Taft, and we signed a rental agreement with Tom Chapman for four units above his collection agency. Other landlords had looked us over and said "ah, no thank you" but Tom said yes.
Even so, the whole operation was shaky, and Deb Tegtmeyer, who would not become our first full-time executive director for a few years yet, stood with me on a snowy November evening as we filled the first three of our four units, using up most of the housewares and bedding we'd collected over the previous few weeks. It all felt very uncertain.
Then Tom pulled up, in a station wagon. He got out, our new landlord, but still an uncertain quantity in this whole variable filled formula, and looked at us with a note of concern on his face. Then he said "I have four frozen turkeys in my back seat, plus four bags of groceries that I thought would be right for Thanksgiving; should I take them up to the residents, or would it be more appropriate for me to have you give them?"
Deb and I looked at each other, and we both knew: this crazy idea might just work. Because Tom Chapman believed in what we were doing.
LCCH has grown beyond four units; we do much more than just transitional housing, and I think our best work is what Tom always hoped we'd be able to do more of, which is helping prevent homelessness before an eviction or other action was taken. Through the next thirty years, Tom helped us in many, many ways, including helping us get funds gathered for unexpected needs which are an ongoing memorial for Vicki and now, of course, for him.
Tom Chapman took a chance, because he knew all too well how much some people needed second chances, and he wanted to be a part of extending them. He couldn't do it alone, and we couldn't have done what we've done without him (and others like him).
Rest easy, Tom. The work and the second (and third) chances will continue.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad to have known Tom Chapman. Tell him about your unsung hero at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 9-26-24
Notes from my Knapsack 9-26-24
Jeff Gill
Searing summer, sizzling fall
___
Muted colors are likely this autumn here around Our Fayre Village.
If it wasn't for the splash of color accents from the political yard signs, we might be going through one of the lower key fall seasons in recent memory.
We're in a drought: not as bad as just south of us, but enough to render lawns crunchy, plantings frazzled, and the trees are indeed stressed.
Autumn foliage changes are a regular stress the woods are accustomed to, but this kind of stress is likely to leave damage we'll see falling in winter storms and early spring ice coatings.
If you're a farmer, God bless you indeed for the work in general, but certainly farmers need a blessing this year, and of the sort that only the heavens can provide. It really is essentially past the point, though, that any rain can do them any good. Yields will be down, and in some corners not at all.
Is this part of climate change? We are in the middle of an ongoing period of global average temperature increases, with new records set in admittedly short (scientifically speaking) spans of measured high temperatures. The idea that industrialization around the world is adding to greenhouse effects with increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hard to argue with. The debate, as is so often the case, is more in what the best solutions or even just simple responses would be.
The flip side of this question is that all the scientific evidence tells us 15,000 years ago our sunny valley was covered with a deep sheet of ice, only just starting to recede back to the north, its melting and deposits helping shape the landscape we know today. Warming slowly but steadily, the environment when mastodons roamed alongside the streams a few thousand years later, while hunted by the first human residents of Licking County we call Paleoindian peoples, our ecosystem looked much more like northern Alberta or the upper Hudson Bay region does now. Spruces and sedges and lots of lichens, not the oak-hickory climax forest that was present by the time of the Hopewell culture, the Native American builders of the geometric earthworks we marvel at today.
Two thousand years ago, there is archaeological evidence that those humans at that time, right here, were modifying their landscape to benefit their culture. Controlled burning kept some openings in prairie, adding border spaces between grassland and tree cover, where game animals would thrive and also where they could be hunted. Those managed meadows allowed for the sight lines which the Newark Earthworks track and predict, without obscuring trees blocking a clear view of moonrises and sunrises.
In other words, we have been managing our landscape for millennia here in Ohio, and the history of that management oscillates between good management and not-so-good. Pictures of 1860s Granville are striking for the near complete absence of trees: we cut them all down building cabins and early structures, as well as for firewood. It's almost unrecognizable as the Tree City we are today.
We have to have ongoing discussions about we manage our landscape, the environment, our resources. I suspect they had them in the wake of completing the earthworks as pilgrims came from around North America to watch and witness. We can learn a bit of mindfulness about our impact on our world, and attention to the question of how our choices will affect generations yet to come, from the Native American example.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to the Octagon open house on Oct. 20th. Tell him how you're managing your landscape in this drought at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Searing summer, sizzling fall
___
Muted colors are likely this autumn here around Our Fayre Village.
If it wasn't for the splash of color accents from the political yard signs, we might be going through one of the lower key fall seasons in recent memory.
We're in a drought: not as bad as just south of us, but enough to render lawns crunchy, plantings frazzled, and the trees are indeed stressed.
Autumn foliage changes are a regular stress the woods are accustomed to, but this kind of stress is likely to leave damage we'll see falling in winter storms and early spring ice coatings.
If you're a farmer, God bless you indeed for the work in general, but certainly farmers need a blessing this year, and of the sort that only the heavens can provide. It really is essentially past the point, though, that any rain can do them any good. Yields will be down, and in some corners not at all.
Is this part of climate change? We are in the middle of an ongoing period of global average temperature increases, with new records set in admittedly short (scientifically speaking) spans of measured high temperatures. The idea that industrialization around the world is adding to greenhouse effects with increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hard to argue with. The debate, as is so often the case, is more in what the best solutions or even just simple responses would be.
The flip side of this question is that all the scientific evidence tells us 15,000 years ago our sunny valley was covered with a deep sheet of ice, only just starting to recede back to the north, its melting and deposits helping shape the landscape we know today. Warming slowly but steadily, the environment when mastodons roamed alongside the streams a few thousand years later, while hunted by the first human residents of Licking County we call Paleoindian peoples, our ecosystem looked much more like northern Alberta or the upper Hudson Bay region does now. Spruces and sedges and lots of lichens, not the oak-hickory climax forest that was present by the time of the Hopewell culture, the Native American builders of the geometric earthworks we marvel at today.
Two thousand years ago, there is archaeological evidence that those humans at that time, right here, were modifying their landscape to benefit their culture. Controlled burning kept some openings in prairie, adding border spaces between grassland and tree cover, where game animals would thrive and also where they could be hunted. Those managed meadows allowed for the sight lines which the Newark Earthworks track and predict, without obscuring trees blocking a clear view of moonrises and sunrises.
In other words, we have been managing our landscape for millennia here in Ohio, and the history of that management oscillates between good management and not-so-good. Pictures of 1860s Granville are striking for the near complete absence of trees: we cut them all down building cabins and early structures, as well as for firewood. It's almost unrecognizable as the Tree City we are today.
We have to have ongoing discussions about we manage our landscape, the environment, our resources. I suspect they had them in the wake of completing the earthworks as pilgrims came from around North America to watch and witness. We can learn a bit of mindfulness about our impact on our world, and attention to the question of how our choices will affect generations yet to come, from the Native American example.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to the Octagon open house on Oct. 20th. Tell him how you're managing your landscape in this drought at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Faith Works 9-20-24
Faith Works 9-20-24
Jeff Gill
Intervals of reflection, looking back, looking ahead
___
___
This week marks one year since the World Heritage List declaration added the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, including our own Newark Earthworks, to the global roster of enduringly significant sites.
On Saturday, Sept. 21, there's a program at the Great Circle Museum, off Rt. 79 on the border of Newark and Heath, to officially unveil a plaque marking World Heritage List status, putting us in a distinguished category of locations alongside Mammoth Cave and the Grand Canyon, Independence Hall and a series of Frank Lloyd Wright homes. We are the 25th World Heritage Site in the United States.
The unveiling and speakers are at 10:30 am on Saturday morning, with tours of the Great Circle afterwards, and at 1:00 pm I will be taking anyone interested "off site," as we walk north into Newark and look for "remnants" of the once four and a half square mile complex of interconnected geometric earthworks.
That walking tour takes about three hours and starts and ends at the Great Circle Museum, covering some three and a half miles, mostly of sidewalk and alley. I recommend you bring water, and a hat perhaps: very little shade along the way! But the route is mostly level, and it's no spoiler to tell you we will see a number of bits and pieces and fragments and remnants of the walls and pathways and mounds once dominant between Raccoon Creek and Ramp Creek.
There are events planned for October, around the Octagon open house during the day on Sunday, the 20th, and later that evening as we begin having moonrises along the core alignment of that element of the earthworks complex.
As I've been contemplating in the last couple of columns, it occurred to me that the Newark Earthworks have been around for about a hundred of the 18.6 year lunar cycles they mark (among multiple other functions, no doubt). As scholars have noted, the Native American builders in the Hopewell Culture era had to have watched and monitored and recorded the lunar intervals over some time, at least three full cycles, to have then built what they did at the Octagon. So I claim no precision around my hundred intervals marked silently by the geometric figures west of 30th St.
What I do know is that as I see many in my demographic cohort talk about how "age is just a number, and mine is unlisted," along with other age-defying exhortations, I find it bracing to think about how brief my own span is against the backdrop of these ancient works. Last week I referred to it as "humbling, and I would also say inspiring."
My religious faith is tied in many ways to events of two thousand years past, and I've heard preachers talk about "a hundred generations" between the time of Jesus and our own. We come from a generation, we see . . . what? Three generations or four pass us by, and we have some sense of the passage of time from them. But it is so partial, so limited; our awareness is of a small circle of illumination cast around the place where we currently stand.
There were some in our community who asked when tens of millions of dollars were spent to restore our 1876 courthouse: why not tear it down, and spend the same amount to build a new one, which might be easier to adapt and occupy into the coming century? It's an argument, and one I know our leaders did consider warily.
Their decision in the end, though, I think was wise. We preserve from the past to give us perspective in the present. The future will keep coming at us, but the newest answer is not always the right one. It helps to keep some ancient wisdom on hand.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been around a few generations. Tell him what you're glad to see past at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
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