Notes from my Knapsack 7-20-23

Notes from my Knapsack 7-20-23
Jeff Gill

A pause that refreshes in more ways than one
___


If you get a chance to take a walk, and it's further than your mailbox, there's something I'd love to invite you to do.

It only really works in the late spring through early fall, five months at most, but right now it's an opportunity waiting for you.

This is a practice that requires just two things: a path that gets you away from homes and traffic, ideally into the edge of a forest or creekside (but a grassy meadow will work, just not a mown lawn), and a place to sit.

You can sit cross-legged on the ground if you're comfortable with that, a log or stump if one's handy, and you can carry a bag chair of one sort or another if that's best.

Here's what I'd love for you to get the chance to experience. Walk your path into a quiet grove, or down alongside the stream bank. Find your place to sit, and do so.

For the rest of this experience, you only have to do one thing, which is I admit very difficult. Just sit still.

Supposedly Pascal said "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." If it's hard for most of us to do this indoors, outside requires even a bit more of us. You need to keep your swatting at bugs or moving about to a minimum. Yet if you can, your stillness will be met with some new activity around you.

You may not notice it on a trail walk, but nature takes notice of you, and bird song and animal life changes as you pass. And normally, you two-legs person you, you pass on by. If you stop, and sit still, they slowly begin to go back to their business.

First, listen to the birds. You will notice the songs change. That's because they aren't letting each other know on down the line "trouble's coming." As you sit, they go back to chat about . . . whatever birds chat about. Food, weather, the birds and the bees?

Then you might even see some birds start to hop and glide past your position, where you're being still and unthreatening. They perch closer, or fly nearer. The bugs? You may have some that are persistent whether you're moving or not, but some now will be visible you hadn't noticed, dragonflies and butterflies and glossy green beetles. If one lands on you, stay calm.

Sit long enough, and you might hear the chatter of squirrels and chipmunks change. One might skitter past you; other movement in the undergrowth nearby can turn into a groundhog dragging some bedding back to their hole. Shuffle a foot in changing position, they scatter again; wait long enough, and they go back to their usual occupations.

You may think you know a stretch of woods, but you don't know it until you've sat very still in it for fifteen minutes or so. And then you start to realize how little you know about all that's going on around you.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes to sit by creeks when he can. Tell him what catches your attention when you sit still at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-14-23

Faith Works 7-14-23
Jeff Gill

Thinking about the unthinkable, unimaginably
___

Jeff Goldblum played Dr. Ian Malcolm in "Jurassic Park," a theorist of science and philosophy who gets invited to the ill-fated soft opening of a theme park filled with dinosaurs, and says to the over-optimistic impresario of the facility: "Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

There's a level of metaphor I'd argue running through the whole "Jurassic" franchise about the role and use of nuclear technology, specifically weapons. If you find that a bit of a stretch, go back and watch that first one. On the side of one of the control room computer terminals is a classic photograph of J. Robert Oppenheimer, pipe in hand, formulas on a chalkboard behind him, gazing almost too calmly at the viewer.

On Sunday, July 16, we mark 78 years since the Trinity test in the deserts of New Mexico. What Oppenheimer and his team of Los Alamos scientists put together as the first atomic bomb went off hundreds of miles to the south, but the light visible even on that northerly mesa for those not on the scene in the south. Top secret to the rest of the world, but much debated among the nuclear scientists rushed into seclusion and work as the world war raged: what are we doing? Is it right? The fictional Dr. Malcolm challenges Jurassic Park's designers, "your scientists were so preoccupied… they didn't stop to think." Not so for Oppenheimer.

That's what makes the human and technological drama of the Manhattan Project so compelling. In fact, they did stop to think a great deal about whether they should. It tormented all of them to varying degrees. There's a movie coming out later this month which centers on Oppenheimer, brings in the Los Alamos community, and sweeps through American society and government into the 1950s, asking again "should we?"

Except of course we did. Convinced by threats from Nazi Germany & the Japanese Empire that it was an existential necessity, they decided to complete the work. After Trinity, two were used on Japan to end the war. A few key spies made sure enough details got to Soviet Russia that the USSR was able to set off their own effective replica atom bomb four years later. From 1949, the Cold War was off with a vengeance, and we live still with the reality of hundreds of nuclear weapons, and decisions to made about their use.

Oppenheimer later recounted how at the Trinity site, on seeing the first atom bomb go off, "we knew the world would not be the same; a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." And he recalled a line from Hindu scripture, where Vishnu says "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." His personal faith was obscure, inscrutable in many ways, but he thought deeply about the larger implications of the science he was engaged in. The name of the Trinity site he took from a poem by John Donne, and he requested at his funeral George Herbert's "The Collar."

Christian or any other religion, there are ultimate questions for the individual, and then there are individual questions with implications for our families, our communities, our nations, and today it can be said without exaggeration, for our world. Are we being Oppenheimers as we decide how to use resources, purchase goods and services, simply to interact in our technologically complex world?

And what if we are wrong, for all our well-intended thinking? I will be curious to see how this movie deals with that inevitable question.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has often thought about what Oppenheimer was thinking. Tell him your thoughts as you like at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.