Notes From My Knapsack 5-25-08
Jeff Gill

If You Need a Reminder

Monday is Memorial Day, or “Memorial Day (Observed)” as many calendars remind us.

We’ve mostly forgotten the story of the Grand Army of the Republic, with many of her members laid to rest in the GAR section of Cedar Hill and other Licking County cemeteries under the slanting barrels of Civil War cannon.

Gen. John Logan, commander of the veteran’s association and senator from Illinois, called for the thirtieth day of May to serve as a time set apart for memory, for decoration and maintenance of memorials to the War Between the States. . . in 1868.

About a hundred years later we got forgetful, and had trouble remembering much more than weekends, except when a Monday holiday extended the time for grilling and shopping, and Memorial Day went to the last Monday in May, which is good enough most years.

Except we have to remember to get up, and join a parade or a procession or simply to stand and salute (Left hand? Right hand? Take off hat? Can’t recall…), to put out the flag (where did we put that old thing?) and figure out where the cemetery is, anyhow.

We remember with aids to memory in the paper (list of Memorial Day observances), the flag that the neighbor who was in the service once, long ago, always puts out, with bunting on courthouses and flags off of light poles.

Our communal recollection is assisted by granite and brass, old limestone slowly crumbling and carved letters faintly legible. Those cannons are quaint, but once deadly serious. The flagpoles often need a coat of metallic paint, hard to get up to the bronze eagle high above and harder still to get out of your clothes, so it isn’t always done when it might be.

There are plaques with names, letters upraised seeking our attention, letters carven deep pulling us in. Names with a familiar ring to them, recalling streets and roads and faded labels on mailboxes just down the block, along with names that don’t mean a thing, but bring us to a pause just the same.

Age we know to be cruel when it comes to memory. There are things that no one should forget – a spouse’s face, a friend’s laugh – and yet the years can steal them in life, let alone in death. We’ve all seen how a blank stare can wound when it comes from someone who has forgotten.

Is it any better to see the collective amnesia of faces who should know, but do not, what it means to see the commonplace sacrifice of four elderly men, slowly walking under the proud burden of color guard banners? How cruel is the forgetting of that oblivion?

Formality is certainly a lost art, or at least a forgotten one. Fedoras and white gloves and bowing at an introduction belong to a former age. That’s a page which has been turned, and having turned, will not look back.

Do salutes and pledges and brass polish and careful arrangements of flowers belong to that chapter, or can we write them anew on the blank page ahead? Remembering is often a question of writing something down, I’ve found. We should make a note to set up the flagpole and join the parade and salute the flag, what she has stood for and what she might yet represent.

Or you could just clip this and stick it on the fridge. Whatever helps you remember Memorial Day.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what you remember at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-17-08
Jeff Gill

The Big Sit

With my wedding anniversary, our son’s birthday, and other family complications coming up this week, this column may be a bit of a muddle (as opposed to your other columns, some might ask?).

My best efforts are aimed at Highwater Congregational UCC on Dutch Lane, north of Granville and south of Homer, where Torie Front, their pastor, is graduating today from seminary! To help buffer a busy week of ordination interviews (I heard she passed) and the honor of preaching the baccalaureate service, I’m preaching their 8:30 and 10:30 am services tomorrow. (Then I get to come back into Newark for First Baptist, to preach a Memorial Day themed message next Sunday!)

What I have left over for y’all starts with a note from a pastor posted to a website for a company called “Church Chair,” thanking them for an excellent product:

“It was a very important decision and I wanted to do the right thing. In ministry you’re always balancing between providing the best at the most affordable price. Church seating is a big decision because the majority of a person’s church experience is spent there.”

Owwww. That may well be true, but to casually admit it feels a little awkward. The majority of a person’s church experience is spent sitting in a chair. I say again, owwww.

Torie has carried her sense of ministry from a seat in the sanctuary to a saddle and classroom desk set and a perch next to a hospital bed doing chaplaincy – not more seat time in church than elsewhere, I’m thinking.

Kudos to Central Christian Church in Newark, and their friends from Moss Point, MS, who drove up to join them in rebuilding the town of Greensburg, KS. I’m thinking a week spent in mission efforts (say 10 hours a day times 6, making 60) does a fair amount to balance out 52 hours of seat time in a sanctuary.

Hooray for Habitat for Humanity, with 20 years of work in Licking County, and about that many homes made available to families who put in their sweat equity, more than compensating for seat time between partners and founders like Ken Klatt and Richard Downs.

“Church seating is a big decision because the majority of a person’s church experience is spent there.” That may be true, and no one may be bragging about it, but I’m just thinking that any person of faith has good reason to want to work on swinging the balance back the other way.

Where do you spend your “church experience” time? If you bustle in a basement kitchen making ham loaf for a reception after the family gets back from the cemetery and the committal service, bless you; you don’t spend a majority of your time in a pew or modular seating. You’re lucky to sit down at all.

If your church experience is as a “Wood Samaritan” in a congregation like Centenary UMC in Granville, you may lean over a lathe as much as you sit back into a century old cherry wood pew. Nice pews, but still . . .

Planning this summer for autumn “Fifth Quarter” gatherings in area high schools, as some good folk in Licking Valley do each year, you lean against plenty of concrete block walls, but sitting is not part of the ministry job description there. “They also serve who only lean and nod . . .”

“Church seating is a big decision because the majority of a person’s church experience is spent there.” I’m not going to say that isn’t a true statement, but shouldn’t most of us feel convicted by those words, and want to make them less accurate?

There is a time for every purpose under heaven -- a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to set up chairs and a time to put chairs away; a time for gathering up seating arrangements, and a time to set such things aside, roll up your sleeves, and get to work showing forth God’s love.

Where do you spend most of your church experience?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him where you have your church experiences at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-18-08
Jeff Gill

Notes To a Commencement Speaker

Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, received an honorary degree from Denison University last weekend, and was the commencement speaker for the Class of 2008.

He seemed from a distance to be a charming and thoughtful man, who was aware of the significance of the day for the 5,000 family members crowded into the Mitchell Center on a rainy Mother’s Day afternoon. So he kept the focus on the grads and the future and the brightness thereof, without casting too many shadows across their still developing path.

That’s no doubt as it should be, but I’ll admit to wishing that, as one of our nation’s leading writers and scholars in the area of global climate change, Dr. Cicerone had said a bit more to the graduates on the way out the door on his subject and their future.

What I kept thinking about, looking across that mortarboarded band about to disperse to their jobs and job searches, Fulbrights and fellowships, to the Peace Corps and to parts of Wall Street, where they will trade abstract entities they can’t quite explain but can quickly price . . .

Dr. Cicerone reminded them that Americans use five times as much energy as other world citizens. That’s no doubt true, while the Department of Energy says the ratio is really six times global energy consumption.

I might prefer to point out that we have an energy deficit in this country that can’t be sustained, producing over 70 quadrillion BTUs while burning up 100 quadrillion of the little buggers. That other 30 Q comes out of our hide, financially, politically, and yes, to a certain degree, morally.

And while I take second place to no one, let alone the President of the United States, in my admiration of the marvelous powers of “switchgrass” (check transcripts of old State of the Union addresses), my trust in biofuels and geothermal and other uses of Greek prefixes to solve our energy needs someday is pretty minimal.

The greatest source of new energy resources in this country isn’t in ANWR or Athabascan oil sands or deeper mining of Wyoming coal. It’s in figuring out how to improve fuel efficiency in our vehicles and myriad other conservation techniques and tricks which can cut our energy consumption by a third with the speed we need. Is there any way to do that short of $200 a barrel oil and $7 a gallon gas? We’re running a brief pre-test of this question right now, and short-term declines won’t mean the test is cancelled.

Most of all, I wish the graduates had been challenged to think about the fact that they were about to radically change their carbon footprint just by leaving campus. Even if you didn’t live at the Homestead, or even go out once for a nice lentil casserole, you lived more energy efficiently by being part of a campus. Your energy consumption was much less than the American norm because you shared living space and transport issues and power generation and meal prep. The total carbon output of your everyday lifestyle is about to go back to the current American baseline of radically individualized, one person per car, separate residence, mower and trimmer in every garage, atomized and particularized personal gear for everything.

What choices can you make, Class of 2008, as you go out into the world, that would preserve some of the community and collaborative values that were yours for the having here on campus? To maintain even a portion of those shared advantages will, from this day forward, take intention and effort for you to put them at the center of your lives: will you make that effort?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-10-08
Jeff Gill

Faith Of Our Mothers, Living Still

Frederick Faber was not writing a hymn about Mom when he wrote “Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword.”

And in Grafton, West Virginia back to 1908, Anna Jarvis was not thinking about warfare, spiritual or otherwise, when she began her fight for a day set aside to honor mothers, particularly her own.

You’ve no doubt already heard the story about Ann Jarvis, tireless worker for health and sanitation through the Civil War and advocate for community causes of all sorts, whose daughter Anna decided that she and all mothers deserved a special commemoration all their own after her death on May 9, 1905.

So in Grafton, West Virginia, she set aside the second Sunday of May, when the trees were all in bloom and the Appalachian spring was at its height, beginning with a few friends at home in 1907, leading to the first official “Mother’s Day” event at her Methodist church this week (this very day!) 100 years ago.

Next was the governor of West Virginia, then the General Conference of the Methodist Church (not United back then), Congress made a proclamation, and finally President Woodrow Wilson made it nationally official in 1914.

Now, “Mother’s Day” is not an official part of the Christian Year from Advent to Lent through Eastertide to . . . Pentecost, which is what tomorrow should be, 50 days (“pente”) following Easter itself. Then is the long, hard slog through “Ordinary Time” until the first Sunday of Advent sets the liturgical year in motion again.

Pentecost marks the birth of the church told in Acts, chapter 2, with the descent of the Holy Spirit on the believers in Jerusalem. Among whom, we know from Acts, were Mary and other wives and widows and young women.

Many pastors will struggle tomorrow with how to properly balance the observance of this major feast of the Christian calendar with a high holy day of cultural celebration, complete with cards and flowers and the biggest day for eating out of the entire year (Waitresses Day, anyone?).

What most congregational leaders know is that women, and especially mothers & grandmothers, are the very backbone of most churches. Any student of church history knows that in Antioch and Edessa, from Constantinople to Copenhagen, whether Katerina von Bora or Susanna Wesley, mothers have been the rock on which much of the church we know today was founded.

In this past week I had the sad pleasure of attending a funeral for Betsy O’Neill, of whom it may almost be said that she “gave birth” to the parish of St. Edward the Confessor Catholic Church. As a mother in her own family, and for many beyond her immediate circle of relations, she mothered and loved and cared for a community that made God’s love visible. Without Betsy, there would likely have been a St. Ed’s someday, under some name, of some sort, but it would not be the vibrant parish you pass in Granville today.

She grew up Methodist, and on learning my own affiliation, she told me with great glee some years ago a story, told again for her at the memorial service by Father Paul, of how the Granville Inn’s Sally Jones Sexton threatened to sell out to a convent of Catholic nuns -- if she didn’t get a liquor license.

So good Methodists like young Betsy and her mother marched out on the streets, petitions in hand, to stave off the dread prospect of nuns in Granville, even if it meant the arrival of Demon Rum. She had 61 years of happy marriage to her Jack as a faithful Catholic to balance out those signatures she gathered years before, so she laughed.

That is the laughter that the Devil runs away from, the good cheer which helps build the Kingdom of Heaven, the rock on which the Church of Christ is built. Mother’s Day and Pentecost will coexist very nicely, as signs of the Spirit of God which gives life to the world and points us all to the life eternal to come.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-11-08
Jeff Gill

Making Do and Making Last

The Lovely Wife and I usually go for the proposition that paying a bit more for quality adds up to frugal in the long run.

Buying something that’s half the price which lasts a third as long means you replace it faster, unless the cost consideration makes you realize you don’t need the item in the first place (hence the other household principle of not buying something, anything, on sight).

Clothing gets to be an interesting challenge in this category. Like the “sawdust in the transmission” trick of olde tymes used car salesmen, they’ve gotten good at masking poor stichery and inferior materials until you’ve had the item for long enough that you don’t feel like looking for the receipt and going back to wait in line at (Ha!) “Customer Service.”

Kids’ clothing is the real puzzle, because you’re not buying for the ages, anyhow. I’m delighted to own jackets and shoes with decades of wear in them, since I dress in a fairly neutral (read: dull) style (read: none) that doesn’t go out of style because it wasn’t ever all that much in style. So twenty year old jackets work for me, and buying something twice as expensive as the one that would open up across the seams in eighteen months is a good purchase.

For the Little Guy’s stuff, you know that he will outgrow it in a month or a season or at least a year. You could say that we should go easy on the Earth by getting the better quality stuff and handing it along to other families, but that doesn’t always come to mind when you’re looking for a pair of pants that isn’t blown out at the knees RIGHT NOW.

Equally, we keep messing up on the accessory department, like school backpacks. The lure of Buzz Lightyear or Spider-Man draws us into the shelves of . . . well, junk. Piping that peels off in a week, mesh than snags and tears like tissue paper, and odd inner seam chunks of left over material that endlessly spin off threads and bits to hook on notebook spirals and dump out on the kitchen table or living room carpet.

Next year, no major store or theme branded backpack, we say. Sensible, durable, rugged (pricey) bookbag or satchel is the way to go – until the Little Guy sees a brightly colored logo of some sort, and the negotiating begins.

“Planned obsolescence” first hit the national consciousness in 1960, when Vance Packard, author of “The Hidden Persuaders,” wrote “The Waste Makers,” explaining how manufacturers no longer had a business interest in making lasting, durable goods.

In fact, Packard could document how the retail industry did research and development in how to make things that would have a useable life just long enough for us to tolerate it, and then break down, wear out, or become useless at just the right time for us to buy a new one.

Add to that functional obsolescence something called design obsolescence, which is the mysterious art of making something wear out in your mind – it’s out of date, looks old, isn’t cool anymore.

Packard wrote about “the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals.” They’re still doing good work in this department almost 50 years later. Meanwhile, finding stuff that is effective and durable is like going on a mastodon hunt.

For all the mothers who search the shelves and dig through catalogs and hunt the wild internet to seek the right item that serves your kids’ needs while not wasting the Earth’s resources, a Mother’s Day salute to you.

Keep on stalking and trading and swapping and bartering, O maternal hunters and gatherers! Your family and your planet will appreciate it, in time.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s not a mother, but has one and is married to another. Tell him your hunt for the perfect pair of shoes for your children at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-3-08
Jeff Gill

Accidental Pilgrimages

There’s an interesting feeling you get when you’re telling a story you’ve told a bunch of times, and the punch line gets a rollicking outburst . . . from half the group.

Then you watch and listen as the translator builds to a crescendo of Espanol, followed by . . . laughter, and smiles.

Whew.

Earlier this week, when the Aztec Dancers of the Word of the Holy Child Teopiltzintecuhtli troupe arrived at the Great Circle with their translator, I wished again that I’d taken Spanish instead of German in high school and college. Oh, well. The Latin years helped me follow more than I’d even hoped (“porta” for door, “ala” for wing, “et cetera” for etc.).

They will be dancing and singing this evening at the dedication of the Great Circle Museum, which I’m very proud to have played a role in developing, under the skillful direction and thoughtful composition of Brad Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society (he has good penmanship, too).

6:00 pm folks will gather there off of Rt. 79 or the 21st St. side, coming down from the Reese Center at OSU-N where we’ll have spent a day hearing talks and discussion about the role of globally significant sites like Stonehenge, the Mexican Pyramids where the Aztec Dancers are from, and the Newark Earthworks.

But I was thinking about a tall cross I’d stopped at just a few days before, on a road that was once the Santa Fe Trail. I was heading for a retreat center and 35 congregational leaders in the Church of the Brethren, where knowing German came in handy, if only for a few small jokes. The descendants of Saxon and Bavarian Anabaptists came to settle the high plains, and brought the traditions of Menno Simons and Jacob Amman and the Pietism of Philip Spener which all play a role in the modern Church of the Brethren tradition.

Driving towards Great Bend, I pulled over at this twenty foot tall cross and a historical marker (I do that occasionally, which means usually). The cross has the letters “IC – XP – NI – KA” on the center of the arms, very like those on First Presbyterian in Granville, so I knew even before reading the plaque at the base that this was an ancient abbreviation for “Jesus Christ, Victor.”

The spot marks where the Coronado Expedition of 1541 spent a season with the Quivira Indians (later known as the Kansa, hence the state’s name) before turning back to Mexico. Not a typo – 1541. Hispanic culture in America has deep roots.

There’s also a marker for Cow Creek Station, where I later learned the “real” Buffalo Bill (last name Mathewson) plied his trade, shooting buffalo and defending parties of settlers.

In Great Bend and Ellinwood, Kansas you can find the stray cornerstone with German inscriptions. And there are more Mexican grocery stores every day. Tides of immigration ebb and flow, and faith traditions come and develop.

German heritage doesn’t tend to erect tall crosses, but down near Greensburg, Kansas, where a terrible tornado hit a year ago, destroying the town but creating a strange new opportunity, pioneer farmers built the world’s largest hand dug well (Google it; it’s cooler than you think). Each tradition leaves it’s own mark on the land, even a 1,200 foot diameter circle in soil and sod.

So I’m back here in Licking County, with these songs and scenes rattling around in my head of priests offering a mass over four centuries ago, pioneer cemeteries, Dominican convents with beautiful stained glass and bearded lay pastors singing “Shall We Gather At the River” in the basement auditorium. All as feathered and jangling dancers prepare to offer their songs of praise to a Child who brought relief to the thirsty and light to our darkness.

And tomorrow and next week I get to preach at Central Christian in Newark because their pastor and many members are in Kansas, working with church folks from many traditions and many states to rebuild the wounded community of Greensburg, with sustainable and energy-efficient means, helping them truly become “Green”-sburg.

Jesus said “the Kingdom of God is within you,” and all around you at the same time . . . if you follow it, you will be brought back to yourself, and see where you were anew.

Kind of like dancing around the Great Circle.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s delighted to be back at Central Christian for two weeks to preach about prayer! Tell him where your journey took you back to yourself at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-4-08
Jeff Gill

Sometimes You Just Say “I Don’t Know”

We had a power outage at Sycamore Lodge recently, and I was delighted to be able to fall back directly on battery clocks strategically placed, flashlights, ditto, and candles were ready to augment had we gone past sunset.

What I realized we didn’t have in place was a good general purpose radio on battery power. All our battery operated radios right now are little earbud widgets, which you can’t set up on the kitchen counter while figuring out breakfast on an electricity-free morning.

Thanks to Pandora on the internet, my radio habit anymore is in the car or online, and the broadband router needs power, even with the laptop batteries at full charge.

So I thought I knew we were set for a power outage, and having one reminded me of how much I don’t know, but just assume.

Life’s full of stuff like that, and some of it just doesn’t bear looking at – but we should. Peering intently at the limits of our knowledge shouldn’t promote know-nothing-ism, but it does offer a leavening dose of humility.

Electricity, for instance. Ben Franklin started to figure out how this natural phenomenon worked with Leyden jars (a primitive storage battery) and a silken cord on his kite. How does today’s electrical system work, sending the energy from turning turbines out of coal-burning boilers down the high tension wires to the neighborhood grid to my toaster?

Having lots of electrical engineering students on my hallway at Purdue University, I learned the disturbing fact that we don’t actually know how power transmission works. Hey, we know that it does – Charles Steinmetz, a figure from GE’s earliest history worth looking up, did a Ben Franklin II with lightning strikes in his summer cottage – and engineers have carefully mapped and charted what happens, even if we can’t quite explain how it does what we observe it doing.

So we set up a kind of watershed dynamic with powerlines and outlets and inputs, but sometimes it does stuff that we can only guess at for causes and reasons. The power flows, usually, mostly, and for now that’s good enough.

That coal we burn to make much of our power? Thanks to fossils in the coal beds and those adjoining the seams of anthracite and bituminous, geologists have a very good idea how coal is formed from (largely) the pollen of ancient primitive plants, best represented today by horse-tail, also known as pot-scrubber plant to Boy Scouts, in roadside ditches (equisetum to the scientists).

But oil? There are some very interesting theories out there, and which one is correct will help to predict exactly how much more petroleum we can expect to find and recover, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t know what crude oil is made from or how it’s formed. Which hasn’t kept us from building a global economy on the stuff.

Nor has the problem of flight kept us from building an amazing air traffic network and sophisticated baggage retrieval systems (in this usage, retrieval means “Ha!”). Every school child knows that, according to the principles of physics, bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly.

It’s worse than that.

You know the picture you learned in school, of a wing cross-section, with lift and airflow and all that explaining why a plane lifts off the ground in take-off and stays aloft? It’s a useful fiction, but it actually doesn’t work in mathematical models, either. That’s not why planes do, in fact, fly. Aeronautical engineers continue to pursue a theory that will add up to enough lift and momentum for a plane to fly – even as they still do.

Are fundamental bits of reality waves, or particles? It depends, and the answer seems to be both, anyhow. Fine. And while evolution has marvelous explanatory and predictive power in the natural world, allowing us to treat illness and make drugs and breed cute little ponies and make sense of this interconnected world, it doesn’t even touch the question of where organic life came from.

The whole “lightning bolts in organic soup” thing many folks think they know and believe is part of evolutionary theory got tossed long ago, and the question is still very much in play, if you’re thinking of topics for an organic chemistry PhD.

And what came before the Big Bang? Even Steven Hawking doesn’t have a guess. Where do all the batteries disappear to in my house? I haven’t a clue. There’s much we just don’t know.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what you don’t know at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-26-08
Jeff Gill

Blossoms Above and Before Open Up Right Now

Eternal springtime may be some people’s idea of heaven, but if your sinuses have strong opinions about pollen, not so much.

The peak of tree pollen, with grass pollen numbers swinging up as the arboreal count eases down, starts a grim season for a few (many?) of us.

Which doesn’t mean that even allergy-prone individuals can’t appreciate the beauty of flowering trees. The good news for my nose is what makes them so remarkable: their brief span of blossoming. Dogwood to redbud to forsythia (ok, the last is a shrub) splash their whites and pinks and yellows, then fade from the scene.

Right now we have lilac trees and crabapples and ornamental pears, plus the frilled luminosity of cherry blossoms. What they don’t bring to our scenery is any sense of permanence, with a carpet of petals around the trunk showing up almost as soon as the flowers appear.

There are magnolias I watch for each spring who seem to have lost over half their petals before I see them opened up the next day, and if a stiff wind or hard rain come at the right moment, the soft color could be a purely ground level phenomenon.

This year has been a good slow steady season for these otherwise shortlived displays. The hillsides and river valleys around central Ohio are fuzzing up with buds and new leaves while the splashes and swaths of blossoming trees are maintaining the contrast over weeks, not just days.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, the signs of new life are quite sensisbly attached to imagery of spring blossoms, which are often woody plants given the rugged landscape. Olive and almond usher in the spring as Ecclesiastes notes, then the terebinths Abram and Sarai camped under with their turpentine scented flowers – three times in Genesis we read about the terebinth marking a good place to camp for a nomadic family. Figs and pomegranates have tough but bright blossoms, and the blossom of the grapevine is not on a tree, but is as short lived while still a crucial sign of the season’s decisive turn.

New life is fragile, and trusting the steady progression of the seasons is both certain and terrifying – if you are feeding your family with the bounty of the earth, you learn that summer surely follows spring, but nothing says there won’t be snows after the almond flowers (like our forsythia myths in the New World).

Ask a farmer about how planting’s gone this year . . . never mind, because you won’t find them unless you go out into the field and flag their tractor down. And they may not slow down for you, because they’ve been wanting to get out into the fields for weeks and couldn’t.

So certainly and insecurity, fragility and the foundation of life itself, all resting in the heart of a flower. Georgia O’Keefe spent the latter half of her career painting larger and larger versions of smaller and smaller flowers, like the spring beautys that pop up now on any older, established lawn before the mowers and sprayers do their busy work. The desert flower paintings looked into the hidden secrets on full display if you would stop and look, which O’Keefe tried to help you do by blowing them up to the size of a wall.

Midwestern flowering trees do much the same for us if we let them. The last major florescence around here is that of the tulip poplar, a few weeks from now. 80, 90, over 100 feet above our heads, atop the branchless trunks in their spreading canopies, green spikes are slowly opening up.

Occasionally a squirrel will knock down one of these half-opened orange and yellow flowers, and you kick it idly aside on the path thinking, as you look around on the ground, where are those growing?

In their full glory, pretty much no one sees them, open to the sky above and the bees and butterflies and birds skipping along the upper reaches of the forest. A steady rain follows of petals and a faint scent of cucumber, scattering across the forest as they fall from the heights where they grew.

Some of the greatest beauties of this world appear just beyond our sight, and we can only pick up the hints by watching the ground for what is happening above.

Sounds like something out of the Psalms, doesn’t it?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he hopes to see you all under the tall trees of the Great Circle next Saturday for the new museum dedication at 6:00 pm on May 3 – see www.octagonmoonrise.org for info under “agenda.”

Notes From My Knapsack 4-27-08
Jeff Gill

Layered History, Lightly Worn

If you make it out to the Great Circle earthwork on Saturday, May 3, make sure to check out the trees.

Jim Kingery is proud of those trees, almost none of which he’s planted and a number he’s had to gently take down, like the blue ash that crumpled near the Great Gateway a few months back in a windstorm.

With years of experience as a forester and with the Ohio Historical Society, he’s gotten to know all the vast, ancient trees within and without the enclosure and more recent plantings that go back to Idlewild Park before the 1920s and the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and then the period of OHS stewardship.

Some ask whether we should cut down all the trees to recover a bit of the sense of what was there in a “pocket prairie” 2,000 years ago when the Newark Earthworks were laid out, but that neglects the fact that they buffer the sound of Rt. 79 and Mathews Ford and 21st St., not to mention the visual buffer as well.

And a recent lecture at OSU-N by Lindsay Jones on the “revalorization” of Mexican ancient sites reminded many of us here in Licking County that many years pull many layers of meaning and use and purpose across a landscape, and to decide which layer or approach is “the” right one is tricky, and unlikely to work for the stakeholders however defined for today. “Revalorization” is a handy academic word for reuse, with a twist.

If subjects like that, or how even older sites like England’s Stonehenge has weathered multiple uses and interpretations and abuses, are of interest to you, then the day of May 3 is filled with speakers in the Reese Center on the OSU-N campus – check www.octagonmoonrise.org for details under “agenda.”

Jim is likely to miss most of our speakers, because he and Susan Fryer, director of the Licking County Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, will be getting ready to greet us along with the Aztec Dancers of Queretaro, Mexico for the 6:00 pm dedication ceremonies for the newly refurbished museum for the Newark Earthworks.

And one of those layers for the Great Circle portion of the Newark Earthworks State Memorial is the fact that the best cluster of truly old trees in the county, maybe even the state, is in and around this spot, which was set aside for our county fairground, as a Civil War training camp, and for the myriad peculiar uses of the 20th century to follow. It became an ad hoc preserve, so 300-plus year old trees were left to stand, likely more for shade over the buggies and applecarts than for any sense at the time of conservationism.

The owls of the neighborhood are the direct result of these aged, ancient trees, which naturally have some hollow cavities set large and high up, some from lightning strikes and others from long-ago fungus that wormed its way within and then fell away, leaving some prime real estate for nocturnal hunters of the air.

There are red oaks and white oaks that are older than Ohio, older than this nation, some that may have been a newly sprouting acorn when the Jamestown settlers first stumbled ashore in Virginia or Juan de Onate planted a cross in New Mexico.

Then on Sunday, May 4, you have a chance to roam the Octagon portion of the Newark Earthworks up off of 33rd St. and Parkview west of Cherry Valley School that was and is. The beech trees on the southern third of that site are broader at the base, but as Jim has taught me, younger, and doomed to an earlier death, both by their shorter lifespan, softer wood, and the general stress on trees today that’s more than it was in 1708.

Whether you have an interest in heritage and history, sacred sites or archaeological study, native dancers or academic lecturers, make sure to look into and around and up through the trees of these parks, and let them anchor a bit of your imaginings. They’re not as old as the mounds, but they’re older than you! Show a little respect, and feel a little awe in return.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is delighted to moderate some of the sessions at Newark Earthworks Day on May 3 (see www.octagonmoonrise.org). Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-19-08
Jeff Gill

Presidential Piety Under Scrutiny

One way or another the religious views of Presidential candidates play a role in election season, if not during their tenure in office.

Most of the country now knows that Barack Obama attends Trinity United Church of Christ when he’s at home on the South Side of Chicago. Whether they know that the UCC denomination is the heir of the tradition that brought the Pilgrims to Massachusetts Bay is more up for grabs.

Jeremiah Wright is more colorful than most UCC pastors I know, but he also fits into a tradition that defended the escaped slaves of the Amistad, supported the abolition movement more than any other denomination before the Civil War, and has long promoted progressive political causes.

Hillary Rodham grew up a Methodist, and when she married a Southern Baptist, Bill Clinton didn’t convert officially, but their attendance and her membership has been in United Methodist congregations, in Washington and up in New York State. Her youth minister growing up in a Chicago suburb took the group to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. preach, and that marked a pivotal moment in her taking both faith and public life very seriously.

John McCain comes from a family with a long heritage in the U.S. Navy (three generations, but he has a son who enlisted in the Marines who just returned from Iraq – Ooh-rah). He probably grew up hearing more non-denominational chaplains’ sermons, but was baptized and confirmed in The Episcopal Church. His second wife Cindy is Baptist, and they attend together there when in Arizona, but he has not transferred his membership into that congregation.

The last election was shaping up in some interesting ways because John Kerry was sort of the odd man out – a Catholic by upbringing and occasional attendance later in life (he had not “registered” with any local parish leading up to the 2004 election, but sometimes attended a campus ministry where Mass was offered by a priest).

But John Edwards is United Methodist, George W. Bush is Methodist, and contrary to all my friends and acquaintances who insist that Dick Cheney is a member of the Church of Eating Babies With Mustard For Lunch, he and Lynne are, in fact . . . Methodist.

George H. W. Bush is named for his mother’s family, the Walkers (where the whole Kennebunkport thing comes from, at Walker’s Point in Maine), and his mother’s favorite poet, the Anglican priest George Herbert. Accordingly, George and Barbara are Episcopalian, but their children have traveled in a variety of directions, with Jeb becoming a Catholic on marrying his wife Columba.

George W. and Laura attend an Episcopal church that is within a block of the White House when in Washington, which is appropriate given that John Wesley lived out his days as an Anglican priest, and hoped to promote a Reformation within the Church of England, not start a new denomination. Francis Asbury in this country had a different view, but the United Methodist Church still shares quite a few qualities and characteristics with The Episcopal Church.

Ron Paul is still running, and he considered becoming a Lutheran pastor (which a brother did, in fact do), but decided on med school at Gettysburg College, where he met and married his wife who was Episcopalian. Their children were all baptized into that tradition, but the Pauls now attend a Baptist church when in Texas.

Ralph Nader, who speaks Arabic fluently from his parents’ heritage out of Lebanon, is Maronite Catholic. If elected, he would be the first Maronite, or Eastern rite Catholic, to hold the office. Mike Gravel (yes, he’s still running) is Unitarian Universalist – but he wouldn’t be the first in the unlikely chance that he’d win.

He’d be the fourth, following John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and William Howard Taft.

Oh, and Pope Benedict XVI, who visited the White House this week? He’s Catholic.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s ordained Disciples of Christ, but speaks fluent Methodist, passable UCC, and broken but understandable Lutheran. Tell him your religious dialects at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-12-08
Jeff Gill

Successor to the Apostles

We have plenty of churches in Licking County where the words “apostolic succession” have never been heard. They represent neither a doctrine nor a theological stance for a majority of church bodies in the United States.

The history and traditions behind this idea, though, shape some ideas that many of us brush up against on a regular basis.

It goes back to the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, where in the book of II Kings Elijah passes on his mantle, or his cloak, to Elisha who follows him. The touch of that cloak, and the legitimacy it gives him, is a sign and reality of power and healing for those in the tradition both honored. “Inheriting the mantle” is a phrase that many use with no sense of where it comes from, but read 2 Kings 2 for the source.

Luke’s Gospel tells us in chapter 1 that many thought John the Baptist picked up the mantle of Elijah, and the account of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor continues the image with Jesus himself.

Jesus responds to Simon, nicknamed “Petros,” the Rock, when Peter names Jesus as the Anointed, or “Christos” of God. “Upon this rock I will build my church,” Jesus says, and from this basis, and the Acts 1 account of replenishing the Eleven to become again the Twelve, the idea develops in the early church that the “Apostolos,” or “those who are sent (by God)” continue the vocation given by Jesus.

This is one of the sources of the great excitement around the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger. In the Roman Catholic Christian tradition, the apostolic succession is a very precise and tangible thing, where the original apostles affirmed the “deposit of the faith” by careful selection and ordination of new apostles and overseers, or “episcopos,” or more usually in English, bishops.

Bishops are the source of new ordinations, authorization to preside at communion, and all confirmations into Christian faith in traditions honoring the theological concept of apostolic succession. Each bishop of the Catholic Christian traditions can, in principle if not in historic detail, trace the hands laid upon them at ordination to hands to hands to hands back in direct line to the Twelve Apostles themselves, and so to Christ Jesus.

Martin Luther in beginning the Protestant Reformation did not directly challenge apostolic succession. What he did do was argue against its sufficiency to guarantee the Christian faith with integrity. Because of that, most Lutheran bodies affirm their own practice as being in line with apostolic succession, but few spend much time worrying about the details.

On the other hand of the early Reformation, the Church of England has traditionally maintained their entire fidelity to the line of apostolic succession, though the Roman Catholic hierarchy has not accepted their practices as such. Bishops in The Episcopal Church to this day in the United States still will maintain their “apostolic lineage” upon their ordination to the bishop’s seat, or “cathedra.”

When the Reformation got to Geneva, Switzerland, John Calvin tested the principle against his understanding of Scripture alone, or “sola scriptura,” and found it lacking – so he tossed it. Presbyterian and Congregational and Baptist inheritors of Calvinism for the most part have no idea what you’re talking about on this subject!

Methodists, with streams of heritage from both the Episcopal and Calvinist camps, have bishops, but don’t limit confirmation to a bishop’s administration, while ordination of new clergy is always expected to include a “laying on of hands” from the bishop. The United Methodist Church of this country has a clear break in the chain from the Twelve through the bishops of medieval Europe to the shores of England, since Francis Asbury announced a sort of “connectional” succession, a spiritual inheritance that dismissed the physical contact element as unnecessary.

What modern Methodists and some other Protestant bodies do affirm in a sort of “apostolic succession” is the question of stability and discernment from the larger tradition of a faith community. You need the conference or the region or the association to affirm a call to ministry, rather than any one person being able to set up as a successor to Christ’s apostles.

Of course, quite a few modern groups raise up bishops today exactly that way, essentially by “self-ordination.”

What Christians and others of good will respect when a papal visit comes to this country is the visceral, tangible ideal maintained by the Church of Rome, that an unbroken chain of contact, shown by the “laying on of hands,” literally exists between this cardinal from Bavaria, lifted up by his fellow cardinals as the Vicar of Christ, whose hands touched Peter, and whose blessing can still be felt, and seen, down to the present day.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; his ordination included laying on of hands, in a tent, next to a condemned building, but it may not have been strictly with official succession. Tell him what you think of Benedict’s visit at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-20-08
Jeff Gill

How We Got Here in Ten Easy Books

In a conversation with someone whose own history isn’t in the United States, the point was made: “I don’t get this country.”

A land with foundations in slavery, still plagued with racism and sexism, where a woman and African-American are running for the Democratic nomination and a black woman may be considered for the Republican ticket. Yep, we’re a head case all right.

I mentioned a few books that would fill in some gaps, but the end result was this – a list of ten books, mostly short and often novels, that could give a broad panorama of how we got here, wherever here is for 2008 in the USA.

In all fairness, I’m gonna mention more than ten, but you can pick your ten and get off easy. Eight for middle school to high school readers, and the last two for more grown-up tastes, which should include quite a few teenagers.

1. “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin” - Ben was the “Sage of Philadelphia,” and he had the ear of a Muse or two, with the writing and storytelling still sharp over two centuries later. A colonial boy grows up to discover electricity, invent bifocals, and invented the very idea of “America.”

2. A choice: “The Light In the Forest” by Conrad Richter, or “The Beaded Moccasins” by Lynda Durrant – the first a boy, the second a girl, taken captive by Native Americans in the 1760s, and both returned at the end of Pontiac’s War in the great exchange at Coshocton in 1764. Born white, raised Indian, and asked to become in their young lives examples of what the recent scholar Richard White called “The Middle Ground” in his great scholarly work of the same name.

3. “Johnny Tremain” by Esther Forbes – not only a precise picture of Revolutionary Boston by a skilled non-professional historian (see her “Paul Revere and the World He Lived In” for the non-fiction version at length), but I firmly believe one of the best novels written in American English. Plot, character, dialogue, imagery . . . and excellent history. (And quite short.)

4. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain – this was a tough call, but “Huckleberry Finn” is more likely to be required in school, while Tom is fading into the shadows. Yet the picture of everyday village life and American society before the Civil War is in many ways more complete and detailed in this one.

5. “The Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara – to sum up the Civil War in one book is impossible, but this one comes close. The basis for the movie “Gettysburg.”

6. “That Printer of Udell’s” by Harold Bell Wright – my most quirky choice, but this book is still in print, you just have to hunt a bit more. A perfect summary of the Progressive Era at the turn of 1900, and an eye on the Midwest. Dated, but it wears better than Wright’s friend and colleague from down the road here, Zane Grey.

7. “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker – there is assuredly adult content here, but this is not a list for kids, even if a number of these books are often labeled “young adult” in the bookstore. On the other hand, older youth know this is a hard world, and this story tells just how hard it can be for some. Is there hope at the end? For some, mainly for us as readers.

8. “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury – if you really want to turn your head around, read “The Color Purple” and “Dandelion Wine” back to back. Two young people, at the same historic period, in the same country. Yeah. If you think Bradbury is “just” a science-fiction author, this book will cure that. A boy learns that he is alive, that he will die, and that . . . read the book.

The last two are the over 200 page, take your time, mature reflection picks that fill in the 20th century for you, both memoirs.

9. “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers – if you don’t understand why Communism was a powerfully appealing philosophy and political ideology in the 1920s and ‘30s, you need to read this. A spiritual and intellectual journey.

10. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” aided by Alex Haley – which closes this circle, echoing intentionally the title of old Ben’s book. When Haley last met with Malcolm X before his assassination, he was told “Now you ought to go write down those stories about your family,” which led to “Roots.”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’d love for more people to read all of these books (14, if you’re counting each one mentioned). Tell him your reactions to the list at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-13-08
Jeff Gill

Jack Black’s Favorite Field Trip

If your kids have made you watch “Nacho Libre,” you may recall that (spoiler alert) after Brother Ignacio wins big in wrestling at the movie’s end, he takes the kids of the orphanage, as promised, on a field trip in the bus he bought for them.

The orphanage is in Oaxacan highlands of southern Mexico, and the field trip is to a majestic place where the children get a chance to experience awe and wonder right in their own backyard, over a thousand feet above the valley floor at Monte Albán. Built about two thousand years ago, they kids may not be directly related to the Zapotecan architects of antiquity, but some of them doubtless are, and the site is their common inheritance.

Kind of like the Newark Earthworks in Licking County, right?

Which has something to do with the fact that a troupe of ten Aztec Dancers from Querétaro, a city in Mexico with a history going back to 1531, are coming to help Licking County observe Newark Earthworks Day on Saturday, May 3, with a ceremonial dance at 6:00 pm at the Great Circle off of Rt. 79 in Heath.

1531 is also when this troupe records their founding, when Spanish conquistadores and Native peoples almost fought a battle, but stopped on seeing a vision of Saint James, or in Spanish “Santiago” in the clouds. The people of Querétaro have not stopped celebrating that peaceful coming together since almost five hundred years ago, dancing in the hundreds of thousands for special holidays, led by troupes such as the group coming to help us dedicate a new museum at the former Moundbuilders State Memorial May 3.

During the day up at OSU-Newark, in the J. Gilbert Reese Center there will be speakers and programs to talk about World Heritage Sites like Stonehenge in England, over 4,000 years old but aligned to the same sun and moon in our common sky. We will hear about Teotihuacán, a complex of vast pyramids 25 miles north of Mexico City (as large as those in Egypt), about the same age as the Newark Earthworks and where the Aztec Dancers of Querétaro offer up their chants and songs and armadillo guitars and dances in the central plaza.

And we’ll hear a bit about how these structures and their sky and the cultures who lived between them have qualities if not relatives in common with our 2,000 year earthworks.

You can see the details of what to hear when at www.octagonmoonrise.org (check the “agenda” link), and even if you don’t check out any of the programs through the day, make sure to come out 21st St. just out of Newark proper or south on Rt. 79, and stand at the entrance of the Great Circle, once the county fairgrounds, and see the dancers escort us into the enclosure from the renewed and refurbished museum, also the new home of the Licking County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (www.lccvb.com).

If you have kids in the house who are fans of Jack Black, just tell ‘em it’s like the end of “Nacho Libre” and bring them out for 6:00 pm. We asked the Captain of the Aztec Dancers, Margarita Xochiyaocihuatl Zárate García, if we should have a rain plan – these folks wear beautiful handmade headdresses and apparel with pheasant and peacock feathers.

The answer was no, since they dance at the pyramids of Teotihuacán rain or shine, just out of sheer gratitude. So come help us be grateful for having a majestic place where our kids can experience awe and wonder right in their own backyard, and maybe learn a few new steps.

You can leave the stretchy pants at home.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he came to a greater appreciation of Jack Black fairly recently. Share your awesome and majestic community events with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Ted Turner Hearts Christians, or at least Methodists and Lutherans:

http://www.theledger.com/article/20080402/NEWS/581928346/1039

If you live long enough, you'll see everything. Next, Jesse Ventura joins Church World Service to put on a CROP Walk . . .

Faith Works 4-5-08
Jeff Gill

Connections Bring Life, and Seasoning

In this space a few weeks back, I pointed out that our Licking County bicentennial is echoed by a double bicentennial in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the influence of and statues of Father Lamy tying us both together.

Hispanic culture still has little enough foothold in this area, though the central Ohio region is starting to learn what the rest of the county has long known, that Hispanic culture has been part of American culture from the very beginning – just not at Plymouth Rock or Jamestown.

When a capital was established at Santa Fe in 1608, they were establishing a northern outpost of a larger and older civilization that already had a century of development behind it, bringing Spanish European and Aztecan American traditions and practices and foods together (mmmmm, tamales!).

We will see another wonderful connection between the Newark area and a distant, ancient land on Saturday, May 3. Go back to 1531, three-quarters of a century before even Santa Fe got a two century jump on Licking County, and visit a place in Mexico called Querétaro.

A modern city that today is as large as the Columbus area, Querétaro was an area the Spanish conquistadores planned to conquer, but a vision of Saint James in the clouds, or “Santiago,” meant that Querétaro was not a place of warfare, but of coming together.

Sande Garner, a doctoral student at Ohio State University and a graduate research assistant with the Newark Earthworks Center of OSU-Newark, went down to Querétaro to learn of the traditions that mingled Aztec dance with Catholic devotion to Santiago. She saw 100,000 dancers snake through the streets and alleys and plazas of Querétaro, and caught a vision: what if some of these dancers, with traditions going back hundreds of years and more, could come from their World Heritage Site, Querétaro old town surroundings, and dance here in ours?

You have to be careful about those kinds of hopes and dreams, because that’s exactly what’s going to happen at 6:00 pm on May 3rd. to help dedicate the new museum that is combined with the new Licking County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau at the Great Circle.

Opposite the Arvin-Meritor plant (former Rockwell) just north of Hopewell Drive, or off of 21st St. coming down out of Newark into Heath, you can come out and appreciate the ceremonial dance of a team of Aztec dancers who trace their lineage directly back to that vision of Saint James in 1531, “Palabra del niño Dios Teopiltzintecuhtli” (Word of the Holy Child Teopiltzintecuhtli).

Rain or shine the dancers, as they do throughout the year in Querétaro, will offer up their prayers, their songs, their playing on armadillo guitars, and their dance as a gift to God.

The captain of this dance troupe, Captain Margarita Xochiyaocihuatl Zárate García, is one of the first women dancers to achieve the rank of captain, and regularly dances at Teotihuacán, one of the World Heritage Sites that will be featured at the Newark Earthworks Day on the OSU-N campus earlier in the day. Teotihuacán’s Pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon (both as large as the better known Egyptian pyramids), Stonehenge in England, and the Newark Earthworks will be compared and contrasted through the day – for more info, click on www.octagonmoonrise.org.

The next day, May 4, will even include an open house for tours out at Octagon State Memorial on N. 33rd St., north of West Main in Newark. But the highlight for many of us will be 6:00 pm out at the Great Circle, a once connected part of the Newark Earthworks complex of 2,000 years ago -- when on Saturday night, May 3, the Aztec Dancers will process out into the ancient enclosure. With their headdresses of pheasant and peacock feathers, and with drum and song, they will help make a connection between our culture and theirs, times long past and living time today, between Querétaro and Teotihuacán and Stonehenge and Licking County, Ohio.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he sees connections where others just see extension cords. Make a link with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-6-08
Jeff Gill

Elevate Your Game With John Wooden

John Wooden is at every NCAA basketball national championship, whether he makes it to the hall where it’s played or not.

No one has won more of them as a coach; shoot, no school has won more in their entire history than Wooden did at UCLA, ten of ‘em. (Adolph Rupp won four, and Kentucky has seven.)

He became the “Wizard of Westwood,” but he’s a Hoosier boy through and through, at 97 still giving the occasional interview, though his health – understandably – hasn’t left him free to make every home game the way he once did, let alone travel to the Final Four.

If you watch the coverage, you’ll hear his name. I can pretty much guarantee it.

Growing up in Indiana, and around basketball (I know, that was redundant), you heard about and even saw Wooden – so to speak. When my high school basketball team (full disclosure: I was the manager) played in the state semi-final game at Purdue, our pre-game meal was in a banquet room at the Holiday Inn with a ten foot tall black and white image of a young John Wooden on the wall.

He’s got gyms and post offices named for him from Martinsville, Indiana to the San Fernando Valley, and books of his counsel for coaching and for life are many.

But he says it all boils down to a seven point creed that was printed on a card his father, Joshua Wooden, gave him when he was a boy. Those simple statements Coach Wooden says gave him all he’s needed to build a successful and honorable life – see what you think.

Be true to yourself.
Make each day your masterpiece.
Help others.
Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.
Make friendship a fine art.
Build a shelter against a rainy day.
Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.

These seven lines are on cards John Wooden still hands out, now with pictures of both Joshua and his son John, and what Coach Wooden calls “Two sets of threes” from other counsel that his dad gave him.

The first set is:

Never lie.
Never cheat.
Never steal.

And then:

Don’t whine.
Don’t complain.
Don’t make excuses.

You know, as a life philosophy, you don’t need much more than that. Plus, a really good recruiting strategy that includes having a beach nearby. But if it were just about the beach, Kansas wouldn’t be in the Final Four, so give Coach Wooden the credit.

Kansas, of course, is where the inventor of the game of basketball, James Naismith, closed out his coaching career, which began at the literal beginning in a Springfield, MA YMCA with some peach baskets. He is, ironically, the only losing basketball coach Kansas has ever had – someone should have given him a Wooden card.

Personally, I hope someone gives the entire Cubs lineup a set of these cards this year, the 100th anniversary of the franchise’s last World Series win. They’re gonna need some character building sentiments to buck them up through another year of happy futility.

My take on the Cubs’ plight is simply that you don’t get to play in the most beautiful ballpark in the major leagues (sorry, Boston, what’s with that big ugly green thing in left field?) and also play in the World Series. And any true Cubs fan will tell you – if the choice is between a World Series win while playing at suburban Megacorp Stadium, or losing the pennant again at Wrigley Field, we’ll take the Friendly Confines.

Friday, April 11, from 8 pm until who knows when at Brews Too (their basement bar located waaay upstairs), “Heavens to Betsy” and other musical friends of the Licking County Coalition for Housing are having a benefit concert. Titled “Home Again,” the musicians involved are giving the ten bucks a head to help alleviate homelessness in Licking County. What else you spend is up to you, but you can get a fun evening while helping keep others from a desperate one.

If enough people show up, they might even play “Freebird.”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; his Wrigley Field memories are rich and full, while he knows little about World Series victors of the last century. Tell him about the Yankees at knapsack77@gmail.com.

[Link set for last weekend's Licking County Jail Ministries series of stories is on down, just keep scrolling -- thanks! jbg]

Faith Works 3-29-08
Jeff Gill

How Simple Life Is, Or Can Be

Spiritual disciplines have some constants, like the written prayers of your tradition (from the “Lord’s Prayer” to entire prayer books), wordless prayer (see Romans 8), time spent in solitude (think Bill Murray in “The Razor’s Edge”), and with the gathered community (often known as “goin’ to church”).

There are also the variables growing out of our unique gifts – song for some, art for others. Making lists, keeping journals: these are all spiritual disciplines that I’m happy to commend, but not as a one-size-fits for all comers.

Along with my Bible reading practice, I find poetry reading a very useful tool for prayer. Not just religious poetry (although George Herbert started me on this, and is still a constant companion), but the craft of paring down words and forms to express the heart and soul sets off a sympathetic echo for me.

Sometimes the echo is in reaction against something I read in a poem. Garrison Keillor, the radio humorist of “Prairie Home Companion,” also has a brief daily piece called “The Writer’s Almanac” on NPR stations, with some literary birthdates and milestones for the day, and a short poem. I don’t often get to hear the broadcast, but you can sign up for a daily e-mail with the text of the almanac and poem.

Over Easter week, Keillor has some wonderful poems that added to my experience of Holy Week. Then the usual secular poetry came back in the cycle, with a pleasant sonnet titled “You Made Crusty Bread Rolls . . .”

Gary Johnson, I find, is head of research for the “Jeopardy!” quiz show, and has been married for over 40 years to the same woman from their hometown of Omaha, now living in Topanga Canyon on the edge of Los Angeles. And I’m happy for him! He wrote this sonnet about a dinner and quiet evening at home with his spouse, closing with two lines that includes the statement “How simple life is.”

Can anyone argue with that, after a recitation of salmon and dill and garlic and olive oil, jeans and stylish green t-shirts, “candles and linens and silver”?

“How simple life is. We buy a fish. We are fed.” Really? The fish comes from an Alaskan salmon farm or wild from declining ocean fisheries, the silver from deep in the earth and forges in China, the t-shirt out of an Indonesian factory. Dill probably grown in Venezuela or India; maybe the garlic came from California, but the olive oil from Italy or Turkey, and brie in the crusty bread rolls from France.

The lights of Topanga Canyon are powered by nuclear energy from Diablo Canyon, or natural gas from Canada, or coal mined out of Black Mesa alongside the Hopi Reservation in Arizona – as is the oven that cooked the salmon and garlic.

How simple life is? To eat, to love, those are simple things, and to be thankful – but thankfulness in the world today I think requires a little more care and attention to what we’re thankful for.

Bill McKibben is an author, a Methodist Sunday school teacher at his congregation in New England, and someone who has helped me reflect and respond to the complexity of modern life with simple faith leavened by a more comprehensive understanding. “Deep Economy” is his best known recent book, subtitled “The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.”

He’s going to speak on the Denison campus, up the hill in Granville and in Herrick Hall (the round building behind Talbot Hall of Science, next to the Slayter parking garage). Wednesday night, April 2, at 8:00 pm, McKibben will speak to students but in terms I’m sure that will be of interest to all, and I’m looking forward to the question and answer time following most of all.

I want to hear what kind of questions the students ask, and I know from previous experience that McKibben is at his best in the back and forth, explaining the implications of the simpler life he suggests should replace the “More” that is the one word poem of today.

And thank you, Gary Johnson, for getting me thinking about it all with your poem.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; one of his prayer disciplines is to read the tags on his clothes when he puts them on in the morning, and lifting up each country where they were made. Tell him about your prayer practices at knapsack77@gmail.com.

[Scroll down for the link set to the Newark Advocate series on the Jail Ministry program]

Notes From My Knapsack 3-30-08
Jeff Gill

Keeping Out of the Trash Heap

In our current economy, most of us are used to seeing senior citizens working at fast food joints.

The first time I saw a grey head wearing a uniform cap and name badged polo shirt asking “do you want fries with that” it was a bit jarring, but I’ve gotten used to it.

Trainers at those fast food joints have told me that there’s an obstacle seniors have to get past in order to be effective, lasting employees in a place like that.

It isn’t the pace, which grandma usually maintains better than her youthful co-workers. Older counter workers may need to sit down from time to time, but not as often as teenagers try to slip into a chair while on the clock.

The equipment holds few terrors for them, since the challenge of computer readout is small change compared to work they did forty years ago (now that thing woulda torn your arm off!) and the many different devices they’ve mastered over the decades.

And they know how to make change. I’ll say no more.

What seniors have trouble adjusting to in the modern fast food workplace is . . . waste. Waste is built into the system in so many ways: pots dumped after twenty minutes, sandwiches tossed in the trash after forty, bags and pouches replaced with quarts of product (orange juice, shake mix, sauce) still visibly sloshing around in the bottom.

“Some of these old timers just can’t take it,” a guy told me (chain and name deleted to protect both the innocent and the guilty). “They want to scrape stuff out or set stuff back, and I tell ‘em it’s company policy and health code rules, and they can’t even take it home, and some just have to quit because it makes them sick to throw out so much stuff they think is good food.”

In most cases, it is good food, but the packaging or the pace just doesn’t allow for frugality of the sort they grew up with. It’s cheaper to toss it, and make more.

I was thinking about this the other day as I was cooking and baking for Easter Sunday, and scraping with a spatula right down to the clean bowl, with a vigor not my own. My long-deceased grandmother was leaning over behind me, watching to make sure I wasted as little as possible.

She wouldn’t have survived one shift at a fast food business.

She might have liked Bill McKibben, though. Author of the recent book “Deep Economy,” he’s also written “Hope: Human and Wild,” and “The Age of Missing Information.” He will be up on the Denison campus in Granville on Wed., April 2, speaking at 8:00 pm in Herrick Hall (the funny round building past Talbot Science Hall).

“Deep Economy” is subtitled “The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.” McKibben makes the practical, ethical, and spiritual case that we can’t build our economy on the value of waste and the imperatives of “more” for much longer. He’s got some questions for us to wrestle with about the meaning of life and what really makes for quality – quality of life, of lives in community, and for a future worth beginning right now.

Is it possible that “more” no longer equals “better”? Could less be best, and small beautiful after all? And what do we need to say and do as a community to make that better future?

It may start with a spatula, and a clean bowl, not to mention cooking a bit more at home, with food that comes a little closer down the road to your counter-top.

See you next week at Herrick Hall!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he makes skewed versions of global recipes with local products, and they aren’t often inedible. If they are, there’s always fast food . . . send him your recipe, righteously twisted, at knapsack77@gmail.com.

FAITH BEHIND BARS -- Licking County Jail Ministries on Easter Weekend 2008

Hooray for the Newark Advocate! This is a remarkable multi-part story about a remarkable ministry (and yes, i'm more than a bit biased, from being involved in getting it going in 1989-93, and being president of it 2001-3). There is really almost no other locally supported, one-staffer, volunteer-based, comprehensive ministry like it around the country; there are large cities that have trouble maintaining a co-operative ministry like this, and almost no smaller counties like this one. Two dozen churches pooling resources and laying aside doctrinal matters (yes, they come up, and that's what board meetings are for!) to serve the staff and inmate population with a heaping helping of Good News right where they are.

This account confirms that "lives do change", which is why Scott Hayes is one of the central characters of this narrative, which probably embarrasses him a bit, but it's all true! There are many folks who think that lives don't change (see the comments in some of the stories below), and that's why we need to tell this tale:

http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080323/NEWS01/803230302/1002/NEWS17

Other stories in the series, and click the video/gallery links -- there's a baptism in there (actually, a couple), and just some amazing stuff showing what a ministry in action looks like:

Women's ministries: http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080323/NEWS01/803230301/1002/NEWS17

Volunteers make an impact in the "Be A Friend" program: http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080323/NEWS01/803230311/1002/NEWS17

Storybook program: http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080322/NEWS01/803220303/1002/NEWS17

Prayer returning an inmate "home": http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080322/NEWS01/803220301/1002/NEWS17

A Better Life (the comments on this first installment stayed active all weekend): http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080321/NEWS01/803210302/1002/NEWS17

One inmate's story: http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080321/NEWS01/803210338/1002/NEWS17

One volunteer's story: http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080321/COMMUNITIES01/303210023/1002/NEWS17

Baptisms in the jail -- http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080320/VIDEO/80321002/1002/NEWS17 -- this baptistry is actually under the communion table/altar, and was bought by the LCJM in 1991, and getting that big old hunk of wood and polymer up there was an epic struggle! The chaplain fills it with a hose, and drains it by siphon.

Many other short videos are linked to each of these stories; check 'em out while they're still posted! Lives are transformed, and hope shines out. You'll be glad you spent the time on these.