Knapsack 1-19

Notes from My Knapsack 1-19-12

Jeff Gill

 

An American dream. deconstructed

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What is the American dream?

 

For some, it's just getting seats behind the dugout at a major league game, and having a hot dog. For others, it's a little more complicated. What do you call it?

 

If there's a consensus on this contentious subject, it's the hope your children will do better than you have. You were a tenant farmer, they owned their acreage. You lived in half a duplex, they will own their duplex and rent out half. You retired in a house whose mortgage got paid off about the time you stopped going to work, and they own a home with a nice lot and maybe a cottage up on the lake.

 

There's a little practical and philosophical problem here, which you don't have to be a scholar of Immanuel Kant to notice. Kant suggested something called the "categorical imperative," which gives us a moral yardstick roughly defined as "if you'd want everyone to do what you are considering, then it's probably moral."

 

What sustainability scholars have noted for decades now is that the world literally can't support everyone living the way most of us in America do, or even all future Americans. Some calculate we'd need about three Earths to support our current population (which they tell me is growing, actually) in the manner to which average Americans are accustomed. If everyone in the world lived as if they were resident in our little patch o' heaven, AKA the 43023 zip code,  it might just be four (or five) Earths. Which is a neat trick, you know?

 

So the problem, magnified like a fun house mirror's reflection in the current political environment, is that if the American dream is that each generation does better than the one before in housing and comfort and wealth, there may just be an upper limit to that, and not just because one party or another is stupid (or venal, or traitorous, or even just wrong). That streak really has to stop somewhere, else we meansure failure as anything short of all our kids living like Trump – and who wants that?

 

The last big tech fest in Las Vegas was focused on "thin." Insanely thin TVs and other devices. My parents had a piece of carpentry in the living room corner, with wood inlays and charming fake brass knob fittings that just happened to have a cathode ray tube embedded in the middle of it; now I could have a vast swath of my living room wall a vivid, lifelike, even 3D screen whose controls are all in a small box next to my elbow across the room. Take that, American dream!

 

Yet you may have heard, or can search out on the internet last week's episode of NPR's "This American Life," titled "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory." You will not feel so delighted by "thin" and your tech devices after hearing this report from Chinese factories. What would a world look like where all the workers making our smart phones had smart phones, the quaint dream of Henry Ford when it came to making Model Ts?

 

To answer that question, you have to enter a dreamlike landscape, but it might be the start of an American dream worth advancing beyond the limits of our own fortunate zipcode.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your American dreams at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Winter OSU-N 2012

Winter 2012 in class tours http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/nrkwrks.gif http://knapsack.blogspot.com/2010/01/links-for-newark-earthworks-tours.html http://newark.osu.edu/Earthworks

Faith Works 1-14

Faith Works 1-14-12

Jeff Gill

 

Contemplating our mortality

___

 

Tuesday morning was a good time to contemplate our mortality.

 

I stood over the casket of my friend Tom Shonebarger; Father Tom, as he was known by all. Looking down, I saw his kindly face, diminished both by death and the illnesses that had worn away at him these last few years. He was fully vested as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, a rosary in his hand, a chalice laid by his side.

 

Back in the pews, I sat down next to Rev. Bill Rauch, two Protestant pastors from Newark just trying not to stand up or sit down at the wrong time during the funeral mass at St. Mary's in Lancaster.

 

Bill and I both had known Father Tom when he served as pastor at Blessed Sacrament; Bill had talked him into becoming CROP Walk treasurer, and when I came to Newark as a new associate pastor pretty fresh out of seminary, I'd met both of them and they'd gotten me right away on the CROP Walk committee, since I'd done that back in Indianapolis.

 

In those years, the CROP Walk committee met every month over lunch in the back of the Old Landmark downtown. Father Tom recommended the French onion soup, and it became my regular order (and I still miss that place, now a vacant lot next to the McDonald's drive-up off the square).

 

That wasn't the only advice I got from him. I'd had a very good mentor in my student placement during seminary, but Father Tom was probably the next most influential person I had in developing my sense of pastoral care, a ministry both public and private with a congregation and a community.

 

We talked during those lunches, when he would come in and sit and say without prelude or preface "we all should spend more time contemplating our mortality!" Which he said, as he said all things, with a smile.

 

And of course he was serious; his point, from devotional reading and prayer time he'd spent earlier that day (a point he never belabored, but you were always aware of this source of his strength), was that it could actually make us happier and more focused on the things of God's interest when we reflected on the fact that someday we will die, and the world will go on. "Those reflections don't have to be sad, unless we wallow in them; it should point us to what endures, what is truly eternal."

 

Our group would debate these declarations, along with planning the work of the CROP Walk, and often Father Tom and I would continue the conversation after lunch, carrying it across the street while buying socks from Floyd Maybold, and get his opinion (which was usually to agree with what Father Tom said, with elaborations all his own).

 

These ten kilometer walks were planned to move through the city in a visible but safe manner, passing through quiet residential streets, rundown neighborhoods, business strips, public parks. The idea was to get the hundreds of walkers to experience more of their own community (where a quarter of the funds raised stay to fight hunger), not through car windows, but at a walking pace.

 

Father Tom and I as route designers would lag back and stay at the end of the pack, checking for folks who were struggling and needed a ride flagged down, or whatever. We'd discuss everything from hymn tunes to Thomas Merton, for whom Father Tom had been a secretary during his days as a Trappist monk at Gethsemani Abbey, and whose funeral he had returned for as a pallbearer. He didn't make a Catholic of me, nor I a Protestant of him. We simply shared our respective understandings of Christian faith as best we could. He talked about how the importance of the Papacy as something more than any one Pope, and I explained my love of the Anglican poets, George Herbert & John Donne, and how they helped open a door for me into ministry.

 

But most importantly, we talked about the nuts and bolts of pastoral care. "What do you do when" and "how do you respond if" in reference to emergency rooms at 2 am, or when sitting in a family's living room after the world has come to an (apparent) end. How to show the face of Christ in a world full of fright masks.

 

I thought about that smile, and the injunction to "contemplate our mortality" looking into his casket. And I smiled, too; something I learned from the face of my Christian brother, Father Tom.

 

Rest in peace, my friend.

 

 

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