Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-24

Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-24
Jeff Gill

Looking back at a shared experience
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Mark Twain famously said "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."

I'd say the same about the distinction between a 99% eclipse, and totality. Licking County missed out on totality, just barely. Some estimates were literally less than one percent.

By now you've likely heard from others if you didn't go in search of it yourself: 99% coverage is not the same experience as a total eclipse. And it is not. When the disc of the Moon covers the Sun, there's a truly cosmic sense of scale that both rushes upon the viewer on the ground, and draws you up into the near infinite contrast between Earth and the intervening heavenly bodies. Add in the coruscating lights around the circumference, solar prominences momentarily visible in bright glowing reds and shimmering greens, and you are in the presence of something simply not of this Earth.

There's a comparison of sorts when you happen to see a moonrise on a clear evening, full and seemingly vast against the distant horizon, usually an unusual orange or even blood red when the thickest part of the atmosphere filters the usual silvery moonshine. The rising Moon can capture your attention in ways a full one directly overhead does not. A solar eclipse totality is similar, and yet…

My wife and I were in central Indiana for the event, at a house slowly being emptied after a death last December, part of a neighborhood we've come to know but are still strangers in. We sat on camp chairs on the back patio as totality came into view, no longer needing eclipse glasses, the traffic on a busy road behind having stopped almost entirely some minutes before. There was no one at all within sight where we sat.

Yet as the totality wrinkled its way from the last sliver of Sun to the "beads" of sunlight through lunar mountains and valleys, with darkness suddenly gripping the sky, chilling the air, and opening up stars and planets to view overhead, there was from all around us, unseen, a cheer.

We heard shouts and laughter and applause, dozens of voices from points across the road and to either side. The experience overhead we were sharing with many people invisible to us, but within earshot, a less than cosmic distance around our location.

In an earlier era, we might have gathered at the well or spring, buckets in hand, marveling at what we'd seen; maybe we'd come to the market square, the church towering across us from one side, and share our impressions and understandings. Instead, we had inside the sliding door of the patio a television on to keep us appraised of events at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and later about traffic reports crowding the interstates leaving the area.

In other words, our moment of common experience was brief, and dissipated into the more usual linkages of media analysis. We get told, no matter how politely, what we just saw or felt or understood. Maybe that's more efficient, I don't know.

What I heard in those cheers over fences and across right-of-ways, though, was a moment of communion, of connection. It felt good, it felt right. Something we needed, and need more of. Even if it's just more sunsets shared in common.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in shared experiences. Tell him what you've shared with a large number of fellow humans at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 4-12-24

Faith Works 4-12-24
Jeff Gill

Advice can be answering questions, can't it?
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Not that my goal was to turn this into an advice column, but the reaction from last week's question and answer installment got me a different set of responses than perhaps I'd hoped.

What I heard were mostly questions I get fairly often. If you speak up about faith related matters on social media, you will hear pretty quickly from a cohort of fairly anti-religious voices, some of whom I'm getting used to bantering with.

You can overestimate the numbers versus the volume, or as Pew Research found almost five years ago, there were fewer than 50 million US adults on X (or Twitter), but only 6% of them put up 73% of the political content. Which meant fewer than 1% of us were frequent fliers on platforms like that, and I don't think that's increased.

However, there are questions I bat around often on social media, as a voice for faith perspectives, which I think are worth putting up here, for what I think is a somewhat broader audience. Such as:

Question: Why don't more churches open up in cold weather for helping the homeless?

Response: It's a fair question, but there's a non-trivial issue here called insurance, and yes, religious people in general believe in insurance alongside of faith. And churches are finding it harder in general to get and keep property insurance. I could do a whole column on this and may someday, but it is a real concern for some faith communities who'd like to host but are told they can't by their policy carrier.

Q: Well, why have buildings at all? Shouldn't you Christians sell all you have and give it to the poor?

R: That's a point resting on a scriptural passage also worth a column on its own, and one many sermons have been preached on. I'll dodge it somewhat to go to a practical point. If you've been part of a new church start, which I have, and gone through years of setting up and tearing down on Sunday mornings in rented space, you know why congregations buy and own property. Renting a place to bring a hundred or hundreds together every week gets expensive, as well as a pain (literally, in the back and legs), which makes ownership simply good stewardship.

Q: Okay, but you church folk should pay taxes on your property like we all do. Why don't you?

R: In brief, the reason governments tend to not collect taxes from non-profits is that they're made up of people who choose to associate for purposes that are intended for the common good. So whether it's a church or private school or public museum, if you tax them, you're basically asking their supporters who are already paying taxes personally to then pay a second time to cover the tax burden on said non-profit. Your non-profit supporting citizens tend to be the most publicly engaged folk, as well, so it's been seen historically as a counterproductive course of action. We can change it, but if you tax all non-profits, beware of unintended consequences.

Q: Why are there so many hypocrites in churches?

R: I support having hypocrites in churches, because if you barred them from membership I'd have to leave. Seriously, I think (speaking as a Christian) we could do a better job of loving one another. Fair enough. I also think on average churches do better than the norm in society, but we should not be content with that. Tertullian said in the 2nd century he heard Romans exclaim about Christians, "See how they love one another!"

That should be our goal in the 21st century as well.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still wondering if there are some advice column questions to be answered. Send 'em to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.