Faith Works 2-24-23

Faith Works 2-24-23
Jeff Gill

Foundations and new buildings and restoration
___

One hundred years ago is a long time. Five generations almost, at least more than a human lifetime.

A century ago is a different era, a completely different time and place. Yet we enjoy the little connections and associations; there are Facebook groups which treasure the buildings we still have from back then and earlier, and mourn the ones long gone.

From a historian's point of view, a century is not as long as you think. It's certainly tied to a period with documentation, print and written records, even photographs.

An anthropologist would say much the same about a hundred year span; yes, change, but not as much as you might think, and some of it on the surface, not the real differences of social transformation that take centuries and more. And an archaeologist would call a century a margin of error, plus or minus at best.

Church history, especially for a Christian scholar, is focused on a framework of about two thousand years; Protestants get excited about five hundred years ago while the Eastern Orthodox lean more towards millennia. And you get back in written records to Sumeria and Ur of the Chaldees and some six thousand years ago, meandering forward with Abraham and Sarah, Ruth then David, on to Mary and Joseph and that boy of theirs.

So is one hundred years too long to matter, or too short a time to tell? I have learned this, writing a string of essays about events in early 1923 around Newark, Ohio and Valparaiso, Indiana: it is both, and neither.

The emails and messages and posts saying the work of remembering and recovering this period in Midwestern and American history is important have been encouraging, and I appreciate them all. Between some personal travel issues and the sudden increase in volume, I may have missed a few but not intentionally.

That includes the folk who ask "why?" Why bother, why bring this up now, why do we, here today, need to care? Is this some woke exercise in guilt, some scheme to burden the present with the dry bones of the past, am I trying to deal with my own issues — all questions I've been asked? And some who worry that by raising the tensions and faults of then, one hundred years back, I can inadvertently cause stresses and anxieties today, linking past sins to present problems. Well, it hasn't been inadvertent. It's been quite intentional.

Along with a number of individuals telling me stories about personal property inherited from family, and landowners asking about stories they've heard in the last few decades about what went on where they now live in past times, I've heard from a few who think I should just drop it. This is not subject matter that really relates to today. The Klan is dead, and in many ways, they're right. The hoods (or helmets, as they called them), the robes, the horseback parades, the dues and newsletters of the "Fiery Cross" are all part of history themselves.

But just as a building can be 150 years old, and have been a grocery, a dry goods store, an office, and now a remodeled loft apartment, there are foundation stones with a history that still subtly shape today's landscape, in language and institutions and historical outlines as well.

How do we come to terms with the past in the present, or is it something we never can accomplish? Can we learn a lesson now we chose not to learn generations before? I think we can. Lent is a pretty good time to do just that.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he appreciates all the family stories shared with him at knapsack77@gmail.com about the Klan era.