Faith Works 7-3-21

Faith Works 7-3-21

Jeff Gill

What if the Golden Age is today?

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If some things are better today, am I writing off yesterday?

This is part of the question that previous columns have provoked, and I'm not ready to drop the subject yet.

When I suggested that "the good old days" were not great for everyone, I knew it would poke some sore spots. If you have good memories of how life in downtown Newark and around Licking County were, I have no interest whatsoever in taking them away, or even stomping on them before giving them back to you.

What I am interested in is the process of adding some depth to the picture, to look at angles not always in the center of the frame, and to see what the shadows can tell us.

In a pragmatic way, I love a series of books by William A. Frassanito about Gettysburg (where he lives) and Antietam and other Civil War battlefields, where he takes classic photography of the era, and uses the shadows and certainties of the older landscape to revisit and reassess what we can learn from visiting those places today. He uncovered some "arranging" and reframing that tells us today about parts of the story from then that were created, crafted, and in some cases just not true. Errol Morris has done much the same in documentary films and the pages of the New York Times.

There are shadows over Newark and Licking County in the century between 1880 & 1980 that, when looked at closely, reveal both detail within the darkness, and also some achievements worth noting that have been obscured. It's a package deal, in faith community life or civic affairs: you take the rain with the rainbow, the storm with the sunny day. If you try to make everything sunlight and warmth you end up with overexposed desert.

By the same token, we have quite a bit that's been done in recent years which I fear we miss out on appreciating as we might because of how we try to compare it to a Golden Age that maybe never was. Church life deals with this all the time: the idea that in the 1950s and 1960s everyone went to church, we all could keep our doors unlocked, and the stores all stayed closed on Sunday so we would all stay home and memorize Romans.

Do I think there's less Bible-by-heart work done today than formerly? Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I could also ask pastorally if we can be sure we were getting the outcomes we hoped for from making "memory verses" the heart of our youth programs. Mark Twain was writing caustically about the ways and means of memorization of scripture in 1876: go find a copy of "Tom Sawyer" and read it for yourself.

So last week I was asking out loud about education and industry, and whether or not we can't make a case for how we live in a Golden Age of sorts, with more high school graduates, more students with disabilities given both schooling and opportunities, and new paths into the workforce, than we've had in generations. What we've lost, and please believe me when I say I feel with you the lack of it, is a way for young people who don't want to keep on going into school buildings and sitting in classrooms to be able to make a way for themselves, towards a secure living and stable housing and a contented home life. The path into factory work and family living is not what it was.

We don't want to jam every high school graduate into a college program if that's not where they're called. But likewise, many more young people have paths forward other than factory work and hourly employment than was true a hundred or even fifty years ago. Our collective concern, and not a little pain, is that these opportunities come with a cost: the reality that many young adults leave to find those second and third steps into new possibilities, and go far away from where we raised them.

It's not to dismiss those losses, locally, that I'd like to first celebrate how much is, indeed, possible today for someone starting their adult lives. And to tip my hat to the recently semi-retired Conan O'Brien and his words: "If you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a bit more to say about discernment and vocation if you promise to come back next week. Tell him what you value from your work history at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-1-21

Notes from my Knapsack 7-1-21

Jeff Gill

A letter from the past, today

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Just before Memorial Day I wrote about a plaque up on the Denison campus that honored the relatively youthful death of an alumnus, Class of 1905, who died as a missionary in China just seven years later. What I could find quickly was fragmentary, and led me to note some general observations about the first days of fighting pandemics on a global scale.

Then I got a message on Facebook, followed by a letter in my mailbox. John A. Cherney, "cheerful, brave, unselfish," left a wife and son at his death in Kuling, who returned to America. And his grandson wrote me a lovely note, even as I learned I've known Cherney's great-granddaughter for many years!

Chris Cherney, grandson of the missionary who barely knew his own son, tells me that the family has four generations of Denison graduates now, plus the memorialized missionary had a brother who graduated out of Granville, and together they're honored with the "Edward J. and John A. Cherney Scholarship Fund" for students of the college.

The infant son mentioned in the scrap of information I had found was Paul Russell Cherney, who not only graduated from his father's Alma Mater himself, but went on to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and as a social work graduate of Case Western in the Cleveland area went on to communicate a sense of mission and service inherited from his father to his son in turn. That impulse, Chris notes, led him to earn an advanced degree in social work from Columbia and serve in mission fields of his own, of a more secular sort.

And the great-granddaughter of John Cherney works at Denison, is part of the Granville Education Foundation, and has two daughters of her own who are both in higher education (and one a classmate of my son's). Quite a history of service and commitment and education!

Chris Cherney was also kind enough to include some pages from a volume about Baptist missions which not only give me the order of worship for his memorial service, on May 19, 1912 at First Baptist Church of Cleveland, but show a picture of the young man I'd often tried to envision. And yes, I think I see a bit of his great-granddaughter there.

Just a few years out of Denison, Reverend John A. Cherney had learned Chinese with enough proficiency to preach to local residents in their own language. On his death, these lines of eulogy add to the bronze plaque in Doane that he "had a genius for friendships. He was loved by those who knew him. He had a winsomeness which could not be thwarted. It was reported of him at Granville that among the students of his generation, there had not been a greater power for goodness."

This is a big part of why I enjoy writing this column: to have the opportunity of introducing us to each other, around the village, and across the generations. It's been good to get to know John Cherney a bit better, and his descendants.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; in 1905 all his ancestors on both sides were praying for rain and walking behind plows. Tell him what your family history has taught you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.