Notes from my Knapsack 8-20-20

Notes from my Knapsack 8-20-20

Jeff Gill

 

Summer clouds and heavenly powers

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August is a grand month for cumulonimbus formations in the west.

 

Sometimes, depending on where you live or spot you've found to sit, you get a good view as they pass in review to the north or south.

 

But to the west, on the horizon, as Elijah's servant tells him "a cloud the size of man's hand" first appears, so too can we see the first blossoming upwards of a storm cloud.

 

It might look like a cheery little cotton puff, or a happy cone of cotton candy, but there's a certain structure and development you learn to notice. If you have the right perch, and the time at hand, you can sit and gaze and soak in the scene, some thirty to sixty thousand feet above the ground, and forty or fifty miles or more away, a flat triangle bent along the long flat bottom by the curve of the earth.

 

If it's to your west, though, this time of year it is making good time towards you, maybe twenty or thirty miles an hour. And as it is spreading and growing this is where a good cumulonimbus can reward a meditative hour, or even just a precious ten minutes. When you can still yourself, and see clearly enough with your eyeballs, binoculars adding to the fun, but not necessary, so you can see the power and surge and uplift of those cloudy curves pushing out and up to where the energy behind it starts to make an impression on you, long before its winds ruffle your hair.

 

Under the right circumstances, but this time of year they're often there, you can watch the swirl and foamy geysering and outpouring upwards until they reach a natural, necessary ceiling. There's still sky overhead, but as if the cloud tops have hit a plaster overhead barrier, the cumulative upwards energy of the cloud starts to spread out, from side to side, flattening across an invisible layer of overhead air, necessarily cooler, absolutely blocking and even driving back down some of that heat energy boiling up.

 

Now it gets interesting. Under the classic anvil head of a cumulonimbus you can have air movement up and down, or under pressure closer to the ground it can end up going around and around. When rising warm air precipitates out moisture in the cooling updraft, the falling raindrop can get caught in ever more agitated currents swirling vertically, flung back up to where it chills and ices into a pellet, and with enough energy in the return gusts upwards after the pellet falls, it can pick up another layer of moisture, freezing on the upswing and down again – the growing hailstone only as big as the number of trips on the meteorological elevator it can take before falling to earth.

 

The spatter of hail finally making it to earth can herald a suicide squeeze of descending air that, compressed between the ground and weight of air above, squirts sideways into a spiral that can surge right into a funnel and then a tornado, spinning that energy down and around out of the immense forces weighing down from above.

 

By that time, of course, you've gone inside, the sky clouds over, and it's not as interesting to watch. Like many great dramas, a summer thunderstorm is best appreciated from a safe distance, preferably to one side.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been known to chase a storm or two, if safely from behind. Tell him how you enjoy summer skies at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

 

Faith Works 8-15-20

Faith Works 8-15-20

Jeff Gill

 

George Washington and the prophet Micah

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230 years ago this week, George Washington came to Newport, Rhode Island.

 

As a general during the American Revolution he had been there, but as President of the United States he had skipped over a Rhode Island visit earlier because the state had not yet ratified the new Constitution.

 

But in 1790 they did so, and to affirm that choice, along with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and other top officials of the new nation, Washington came to the thriving seaport on August 17th of that year.

 

He was greeted, as you'd expect, by a series of speeches by local officials. One of them was Moses Seixas, an official of Yeshuat Israel, the first synagogue for Jewish people in that place, and one of relatively few in the country.

 

Celebrating Washington's presence, and the new system of governance he represented, Seixas said in his address that he and his people were glad to be part of "a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to All liberty of conscience." This had not always been true in those waters, as anyone who knows the history of Rhode Island vis a vis nearby Massachusetts can attest. Pilgrims fought with Puritans, Unitarians rebelled against Congregationalists, and dissenters of all sorts got expelled from Boston and came to Providence and Newport where they then had a residual tendency to expel people who dissented from them (and almost everyone harried the Native Americans off of their land, all within living memory in 1790).

 

But that line, saying of America that here we are to be governed by authorities whom "to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance," comes from the Jewish community leader Moses Seixas. It has entered our common lexicon of America, though, because a few days later George Washington sat down to write thank you notes to those who greeted him in Newport, and to Seixas and the Touro Synagogue – which you can still visit and I recommend the experience! – he wrote a very beautiful and deeply meaningful letter.

 

You see, one of the points of contention around ratifying the Constitution had to do with that pesky First Amendment, which was specifically intended among other things to forbid the federal government from formally "establishing" any one church as a state church – and in 1790, half of the new states had state churches. Including Massachusetts until 1833 with Congregationalism, and Rhode Island's other neighbor Connecticut likewise; Roger Williams had come to establish Rhode Island in the 1600s as a refuge for, among other things, "separation of church and state." His Baptist faith became a central element in the new colony, but it was never the established church. This attracted Baptists and Quakers and Jews to Rhode Island; Catholics were tolerated, barely, until the good behavior of French naval officers during the Revolution made such a good impression in Newport that it led to formal permission to build a Catholic church there (where JFK & Jackie would be married decades later).

 

Washington's thank you to the Touro Synagogue in 1790 nears its conclusion with this: "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants." And rather than affirm mere "toleration" of religious pluralism, he emphasizes religious liberty in "the exercise of inherent natural rights," echoing Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence, on the heels of repeating and reframing Sexias's powerful phrase: "for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

 

What I find most appealing in what our first President says to the Jewish community of Newport in 1790, and through them to us today, is when he quotes Micah 4:4 about what "the good will of the other Inhabitants" is intended to bring about: "while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid." Every one, not just George or Moses, but all of us.

 

His last line is: "May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy."

 

Signed simply "G. Washington."

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's weeding his vine and fig tree this morning. Tell him how you use your religious liberty at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.