Newark Advocate 1.26.2025
Jeff Gill
Letter to the Editor
There's a scene in "A Christmas Carol" from 1843 in London, that seems familiar to Charles Dickens in his telling.
Two visitors come to Scrooge & Marley's accounting offices. They are seeking contributions to assist the poor, and old Ebenezer famously asks if "the Union workhouses" (a form of public assistance in that time and place) or other forms of welfare were still available. When assured that they were, he ironically replies "Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course."
When asked to offer further help, Scrooge says "they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there."
You know the response: "Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
And then: ""If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.""
If you don't know the book, though, you may not be aware the conversation continues in Dickens's telling. Scrooge continues, saying "Besides — excuse me — I don't know that."
"But you might know it," says the visitor, but Scrooge replies "It's not my business." He continues to press his rejection of being informed of the needs around him by saying "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's."
This is all foreshadowing of what is to come, after Scrooge's deceased partner Jacob Marley comes to tell another side of the story. The first ghost of Christmas would retort to Scrooge's indifference:
"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business."
We've just concluded in Licking County a six night opening of an Emergency Warming Center, the longest run of nights in a row we've seen since this effort began in January of 2019. An all volunteer effort of churches and community agencies working together to keep people from freezing who can't access, or for whatever reasons don't go to our emergency shelters, which are full in any case this winter, like so many in the past few years.
I keep hearing two things that frustrate me. One is that these are all people who are coming here from "somewhere else." It's ironic that friends and colleagues in Zanesville, Mount Vernon, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Valparaiso, Indiana all tell me they hear the same community concern: "the homeless are from somewhere else." Yet in conversation, my experience is that our guests are mostly from right here in Licking County. Not all, but most.
The other challenge is "if you people didn't offer these services, there wouldn't be people who are homeless on our streets." You can see how the complaints fit together, and fall apart if either is false. Both are incorrect.
What I'm sure of is this: more people would die if we didn't open on frigid, bitter nights. And I believe there is no such thing as surplus population. No, not one.
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Faith Works 1-24-25
Faith Works 1-24-25
Jeff Gill
Evidence of absence or absence of evidence
___
In my shuttling back and forth between Ohio and Indiana these last few years, there's a spot alongside I-70 that keeps me wondering.
It's right around the 78 mile marker, if you know the road as well as I do, north of London, Ohio and west of the Little Darby Creek but looking west across the Deer Creek drainage.
There are some twenty oaks and catalpas in a grove, set around plot with a barn towards the back of it, to the east of the road and cluster of tall trees.
Clearly there was a farm house, a pretty substantial one at that, in the middle of those tall trees. It had to still be standing there in Madison County in 1960, maybe even 1970, since the interstate gently bends around that parcel adjoining the right of way. Not much, but enough to suggest the original designers avoided the extra cost of purchasing and demolishing a private home by going just south of it.
Yet the land shows no marks today, other than the outline of the trees and the presence of the outbuilding which would have been well behind the home. It's been gone a while. Perhaps some local historical society or old maps could tell me more, but I haven't gone that far yet. Once I did take an exit, and drove around by way of a small town that would have been a few miles south of the farm house I imagine, up to the gate, and I walked back just for a quick loop around under the trees, which were even taller than I'd imagined in my mile-a-minute passage past them.
Why do I keep idly wondering about this distant, somewhat isolated spot? Other than passing it often enough to keep the curiosity fresh? Matters of loss and absence have obviously been on my mind in recent years; there's also an echo of a book and film which color in some imagined details here, "A Thousand Acres," by Jane Smiley. If you know the work, my mullings may well make more sense to you than for others. It's a story that's not my own, to be sure, but issues of how memory loss and dementia can mark and bend a family are front and center in this modern retelling of "King Lear" set in Iowa or Illinois (the latter where the movie was filmed, on land I know somewhat).
In that story, a spoiler alert, but at the end there is a grand old farmhouse that is ultimately torn down, and the land merged into a corporate mega farm. Only a few old tall trees remain to mark a home for generations of farmers.
So I wonder about the generations who lived there by what would become an interstate highway. Possibly a widow found she no longer wanted to live in a house with traffic day and night a few hundred yards away, and the children had no interest in farming. That's a simple story, but reality has a way of being much more complex. There is a story there, and I don't know it, I just sense the presence of a complex story as I pass that clump of trees.
Homes are torn down, churches close, businesses end their run, and the locations change in function and purpose, each with different marks left behind which few can read clearly. Hebrews 13:8 says "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever" with a promise that goodness endures, while evil passes away and is dissolved. It's a promise we need to hear, and hold onto. Bad news seems to leave all the permanent marks, while love and goodness appear to wash away all too quickly.
I John 5 says there is a record in heaven, a truth that endures. May it be so.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking about what endures. Tell him your lasting memories at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Jeff Gill
Evidence of absence or absence of evidence
___
In my shuttling back and forth between Ohio and Indiana these last few years, there's a spot alongside I-70 that keeps me wondering.
It's right around the 78 mile marker, if you know the road as well as I do, north of London, Ohio and west of the Little Darby Creek but looking west across the Deer Creek drainage.
There are some twenty oaks and catalpas in a grove, set around plot with a barn towards the back of it, to the east of the road and cluster of tall trees.
Clearly there was a farm house, a pretty substantial one at that, in the middle of those tall trees. It had to still be standing there in Madison County in 1960, maybe even 1970, since the interstate gently bends around that parcel adjoining the right of way. Not much, but enough to suggest the original designers avoided the extra cost of purchasing and demolishing a private home by going just south of it.
Yet the land shows no marks today, other than the outline of the trees and the presence of the outbuilding which would have been well behind the home. It's been gone a while. Perhaps some local historical society or old maps could tell me more, but I haven't gone that far yet. Once I did take an exit, and drove around by way of a small town that would have been a few miles south of the farm house I imagine, up to the gate, and I walked back just for a quick loop around under the trees, which were even taller than I'd imagined in my mile-a-minute passage past them.
Why do I keep idly wondering about this distant, somewhat isolated spot? Other than passing it often enough to keep the curiosity fresh? Matters of loss and absence have obviously been on my mind in recent years; there's also an echo of a book and film which color in some imagined details here, "A Thousand Acres," by Jane Smiley. If you know the work, my mullings may well make more sense to you than for others. It's a story that's not my own, to be sure, but issues of how memory loss and dementia can mark and bend a family are front and center in this modern retelling of "King Lear" set in Iowa or Illinois (the latter where the movie was filmed, on land I know somewhat).
In that story, a spoiler alert, but at the end there is a grand old farmhouse that is ultimately torn down, and the land merged into a corporate mega farm. Only a few old tall trees remain to mark a home for generations of farmers.
So I wonder about the generations who lived there by what would become an interstate highway. Possibly a widow found she no longer wanted to live in a house with traffic day and night a few hundred yards away, and the children had no interest in farming. That's a simple story, but reality has a way of being much more complex. There is a story there, and I don't know it, I just sense the presence of a complex story as I pass that clump of trees.
Homes are torn down, churches close, businesses end their run, and the locations change in function and purpose, each with different marks left behind which few can read clearly. Hebrews 13:8 says "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever" with a promise that goodness endures, while evil passes away and is dissolved. It's a promise we need to hear, and hold onto. Bad news seems to leave all the permanent marks, while love and goodness appear to wash away all too quickly.
I John 5 says there is a record in heaven, a truth that endures. May it be so.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking about what endures. Tell him your lasting memories at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
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