Notes From My Knapsack

Knapsack 2-9

2012-01-26T08:05:00.000-05:00

Notes From My Knapsack 2-9-12

Jeff Gill

Dreaming of dinner, one entrée at a time

___

Teaching the Lad a few new recipes, I'm reminded as we chop and stir that most "authentic" cuisine of various cultures is based on a single, central principle: stretching.

Just to clarify, Chinese food in China isn't large quantities of deep-fried meat with a few scraps of largely ornamental and uneaten cabbage and carrots; Mexican food in Mexico does not center on large dollops of sour cream and a thick coating of cheese. Et cetera.

There are for various places on the globe what are called "staples," rice in Asia, pasta in Italy, rotting fish sauce in ancient Rome (and now you know what happened to their empire). Somewhere south of the Rio Grande I'm sure refried beans are relatively common, even if not to Taco Bell levels.

But the rest of what is the traditional set of recipes is usually based around taking an often scant amount of protein, whether meat or eggs (or legumes for the vegans out there), and making a filling meal with a bit, enough of the protein getting to each of the many people around the family table.

So fajitas were a way to take a cut of meat, and along with tortillas and peppers and onions, make sure everyone got some. Egg rolls took a single serving of pork, minced it fine, rolled it up with a bunch of cabbage and a wonton wrapper, and along with some oil (sure, deep frying isn't all bad) got a sense of heft into everyone's belly. And so on.

Northern Europe liked more meat when they could get it (and who doesn't? Sorry, vegans), and when they came over and carved out their homesteads in the New World, they didn't recognize the plant foods other than nuts, and it took a while to open up garden plots, let alone learn what vegetables they could grow. Meanwhile, deer and bear and turkey meat was plentiful, so much so that in pioneer accounts, a mere piece of fresh bread was a dessert-level delicacy, and a sandwich was often a piece of deer meat between two slices of bear meat. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.

So we got used to a very meat-centric diet; as immigrants came to this land of milk and meat, they adapted into the plenty formerly only known in palaces with obvious glee. In fact, I can recall as a kid that pasta wasn't considered a decent meal, which you would hear older folks say was because you went back to a plate of pasta for dinner when money was tight: a successful man had meat on the table for his family every night.

Times, indeed, have changed. It's helpful to know they changed to get us here, too. I'm not a vegetarian, but a meal without meat in our house isn't a sign of either poverty or that someone forgot to go to the store.

Most dieticians, and Michael Pollan with other sustainability advocates, all ask us to think about meat as more of a garnish than as the weighty center of a meal. Big chunks of meat, whole or processed, go through our physical selves and internal systems differently when we spend our day as a steelworker or farmer, as opposed to when we sit all week at work.

Two generations back and more, meat meant a big part of the American dream was fulfilled right there on the dinner table. We can celebrate successes and live a happy life, maybe happier, if we look back at some of the elegant original recipes in our history that bring a bit more of the field and farm to the table than the stockyard.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he likes to grill steaks in the summer, right next to the sweet corn in the husk. Tell him your dinnertime dreams at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 1-28

2012-01-22T15:53:00.000-05:00

Faith Works 1-28-12

Jeff Gill

The prodigal wakes up from his nightmare

___

It was as if he was reviewing his life to date.

He saw his angry encounter with his older brother, who had tried to point out what wasn't working in how he operated the oil press, then suggested they trade places between the olive trees supervising the pickers, and tending the bottles under the spout of the press.

Kicking over one of the precious amphorae, he stormed into his father's counting room, demanding his share of the inevitable inheritance immediately. He saw his face as if from without, watching himself carefully not look startled when father consented – the thought was just to press the old man into enough money for a long weekend in town, away from big brother.

As if from above, he saw his journey out of the home province, and past the crossroads to the market town the other, unfamiliar direction to the larger city farther away. There he met the denizens of the nightlife, the old familiar crowd of fast dealers, slow waiters, and languorous women. His moneypouch steadily emptied, the nights rolled by in anonymous procession, the days passed without his waking to see them until sunset served as his wakeup call.

Then he found himself in a chance conversation at a taverna, where the flute and tambour were not so loud as to make talk an effort. It seemed one of his drinking companions had recently inherited an olive grove, and he had no idea what to do with it.

After a few off-handed suggestions, his new friend asked if they could ride out together tomorrow (at dawn!) and review this new plan. The evening ended uncharacteristically early, and the landlord looked oddly at him as he saluted heading in to bed not long after dark.

The next day, the situation was as clear to him as it was a total confusion to the heir, and after a few adjustments to the mill, some words with the field overseer, the heir made an appealing offer for him to manage the property. They shook on it, and a new life began.

Success breeds success, and soon there were other well-to-do property owners who asked for his counsel, and paid in imperial coinage for the privilege. By the time another growing season had passed, the rented upper room was left and the young man moved into a small, unused villa of one of his clients a short canter from the city gates. Downstairs, a pair of scribes kept track of the contracts he negotiated, and copied out the letters of instruction to ever more far-flung estates where overseers wrote at their master's command to get direction from him on making the most of their land.

The nights were shorter, he saw more of the day, but there was plenty of time to party, and each week a different woman was escorted out to the villa with few expectations. One particular girl, whose smile and conversation amused him, stayed for three weeks, but that was as long as he let those relationships (if that would be the word) linger.

Gold in a storeroom piled up before his eyes, days flickered past as if by magic, faces of the women and the scribes and clients changed – and then he turned, and looked in a mirror, and saw himself aged, grey-haired, wrinkled. And he saw his father's face, but hard and bitter.

Then he awoke.

Scrambling out of bed, he walked quickly into the wide front room of the homestead. The housekeeper smiled up at him from the fireside, and asked "would you draw me one more pail of water?" As if this part was the dream, he slipped on his sandals, and went into the courtyard, leaned over the coping of the well, and heaved at the thick rope.

When the bucket came into his hands, he grasped it firmly with both, and looked at the surface of the water. His youthful visage stared bemusedly back at him.

Carrying it back into the house, he almost ran into his older brother at the door. "Hey, you saved me a trip, thank you." Then, more softly, "Are you alright? You look a little queasy." Answering quietly, "No, I'm fine," he continues inside to set the water near the fire, and then on into the counting room.

There, his father was already at work on the accounts, getting a head start before breakfast. "Good morning son, does the dawn find you well?"

And he answers "Yes; but Father, I had the most horrible dream."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Winter OSU-N 2012

2012-01-20T12:37:00.001-05:00

Winter 2012 in class tours http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/nrkwrks.gif http://knapsack.blogspot.com/2010/01/links-for-newark-earthworks-tours.html http://newark.osu.edu/Earthworks

Faith Works 1-21

2012-01-19T13:57:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 1-21-12

Jeff Gill

Mobility and immobility each have their downsides

___

First, a correction: I never knew this until a very kind call after my column last week about Father Tom and our visits to Maybold Shoes; that was Floyd McKenna I was introduced to, and so enjoyed speaking with. He was so much the spirit of the place as I knew it that I just internalized him as "Floyd Maybold," which of course was incorrect.

When you live in a place long enough, you start to do that sort of thing; you know much, and you don't always know how little you know.

It was interesting to me remembering, as I wrote that last week, that I really only "lived" in my hometown, as I still consider it, of Valparaiso, Indiana for seventeen years. I left for college, my parents still live (most of the year, anyhow) in the home where I grew up, but after starting college I was never there for more than three weeks at a time until the Lovely Wife and I married, and since then never more than three nights. So I lived in my hometown for seventeen years.

But we've now lived in Licking County, Ohio for a total of seventeen years. Five homes in three communities, but seventeen years, and this was the first Christmas season we've set up the tree in the same house for seven years (our old record was six). God willing, he prayed sincerely, we will run that number well up into double digits as well.

So we are no longer "mobile," by intention. Our lives and commitments, short and long term, circle around this place, and all things being equal (Deus volent) we can stay put. For us, that's not just good, but it is very good.

In today's economy, stability and rootedness are not an abstract economic good. The mobility of capital and the ability of workers to relocate are considered almost vital necessities, and for the particular family or individual who has their reasons for not being able to move, well, "devil take the hindmost."

So we see a bias in employment opportunity for the young, the rootless, those who are more able or willing to pick up stakes and travel to where the jobs are, or are perceived to be. That's how you get ahead, that's improvement, often (in many fields) the only way to advance. Many large corporations make it clear from management training on up that if you want to advance, by which they usually mean not only more responsibility but the only way to increase your pay, you have to be willing to go where the company asks you to go.

Which means you leave a place you know, where the young woman at the drive-up window knows your name, where you've found a good auto mechanic and family physician, a place that you know where to go for a walk, or take your family for a picnic . . . you leave there, and go someplace where you start over again.

Some folks thrive on this kind of clean slate, but many respond by pulling in their horns, drawing the blinds, and withdrawing from a community they're just too weary to learn from scratch.

And the ultimate irony of this mobility-fetish in our economy as we have it is that often it's those mobile folk who end up staying home when work is over, finding comfort in food and mindless leisure, and start to pay a price for their pay bumps and title upgrades in their health.

Without meaning to be too terribly revolutionary here, it seems as if we know darn good and well that encouraging and supporting family and geographic stability is good for people and communities, and that for those individuals and our common health (not to mention commonwealth) it's good for more of us to just move a little bit more. Not that we all become fitness freaks, just that if we all moved around a little more, we'd all be better off.

Mobility in the social sense has its ills, and immobility in the physical sense does as well, and there may be a bit of a connection between the two.

Is it just me, or do any of you in faith communities see an opportunity here? To reach out to new residents and help them find their footing, and for congregations to pledge not just their paychecks, but their shoe leather, to get up and get moving together?

We can talk about Paula Deen and church potlucks later, but I think you can tell where I'm headed.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's trying to up his exercise activity, too. Tell him how your church got moving at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 1-19

2012-01-11T23:32:00.000-05:00

Notes from My Knapsack 1-19-12

Jeff Gill

An American dream. deconstructed

___

What is the American dream?

For some, it's just getting seats behind the dugout at a major league game, and having a hot dog. For others, it's a little more complicated. What do you call it?

If there's a consensus on this contentious subject, it's the hope your children will do better than you have. You were a tenant farmer, they owned their acreage. You lived in half a duplex, they will own their duplex and rent out half. You retired in a house whose mortgage got paid off about the time you stopped going to work, and they own a home with a nice lot and maybe a cottage up on the lake.

There's a little practical and philosophical problem here, which you don't have to be a scholar of Immanuel Kant to notice. Kant suggested something called the "categorical imperative," which gives us a moral yardstick roughly defined as "if you'd want everyone to do what you are considering, then it's probably moral."

What sustainability scholars have noted for decades now is that the world literally can't support everyone living the way most of us in America do, or even all future Americans. Some calculate we'd need about three Earths to support our current population (which they tell me is growing, actually) in the manner to which average Americans are accustomed. If everyone in the world lived as if they were resident in our little patch o' heaven, AKA the 43023 zip code, it might just be four (or five) Earths. Which is a neat trick, you know?

So the problem, magnified like a fun house mirror's reflection in the current political environment, is that if the American dream is that each generation does better than the one before in housing and comfort and wealth, there may just be an upper limit to that, and not just because one party or another is stupid (or venal, or traitorous, or even just wrong). That streak really has to stop somewhere, else we meansure failure as anything short of all our kids living like Trump – and who wants that?

The last big tech fest in Las Vegas was focused on "thin." Insanely thin TVs and other devices. My parents had a piece of carpentry in the living room corner, with wood inlays and charming fake brass knob fittings that just happened to have a cathode ray tube embedded in the middle of it; now I could have a vast swath of my living room wall a vivid, lifelike, even 3D screen whose controls are all in a small box next to my elbow across the room. Take that, American dream!

Yet you may have heard, or can search out on the internet last week's episode of NPR's "This American Life," titled "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory." You will not feel so delighted by "thin" and your tech devices after hearing this report from Chinese factories. What would a world look like where all the workers making our smart phones had smart phones, the quaint dream of Henry Ford when it came to making Model Ts?

To answer that question, you have to enter a dreamlike landscape, but it might be the start of an American dream worth advancing beyond the limits of our own fortunate zipcode.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your American dreams at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Winter OSU-N 2012

2012-01-11T13:46:00.004-05:00

Winter 2012 in class tourshttp://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/nrkwrks.gif http://knapsack.blogspot.com/2010/01/links-for-newark-earthworks-tours.html http://newark.osu.edu/Earthworks

Faith Works 1-14

2012-01-10T21:18:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 1-14-12

Jeff Gill

Contemplating our mortality

___

Tuesday morning was a good time to contemplate our mortality.

I stood over the casket of my friend Tom Shonebarger; Father Tom, as he was known by all. Looking down, I saw his kindly face, diminished both by death and the illnesses that had worn away at him these last few years. He was fully vested as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, a rosary in his hand, a chalice laid by his side.

Back in the pews, I sat down next to Rev. Bill Rauch, two Protestant pastors from Newark just trying not to stand up or sit down at the wrong time during the funeral mass at St. Mary's in Lancaster.

Bill and I both had known Father Tom when he served as pastor at Blessed Sacrament; Bill had talked him into becoming CROP Walk treasurer, and when I came to Newark as a new associate pastor pretty fresh out of seminary, I'd met both of them and they'd gotten me right away on the CROP Walk committee, since I'd done that back in Indianapolis.

In those years, the CROP Walk committee met every month over lunch in the back of the Old Landmark downtown. Father Tom recommended the French onion soup, and it became my regular order (and I still miss that place, now a vacant lot next to the McDonald's drive-up off the square).

That wasn't the only advice I got from him. I'd had a very good mentor in my student placement during seminary, but Father Tom was probably the next most influential person I had in developing my sense of pastoral care, a ministry both public and private with a congregation and a community.

We talked during those lunches, when he would come in and sit and say without prelude or preface "we all should spend more time contemplating our mortality!" Which he said, as he said all things, with a smile.

And of course he was serious; his point, from devotional reading and prayer time he'd spent earlier that day (a point he never belabored, but you were always aware of this source of his strength), was that it could actually make us happier and more focused on the things of God's interest when we reflected on the fact that someday we will die, and the world will go on. "Those reflections don't have to be sad, unless we wallow in them; it should point us to what endures, what is truly eternal."

Our group would debate these declarations, along with planning the work of the CROP Walk, and often Father Tom and I would continue the conversation after lunch, carrying it across the street while buying socks from Floyd Maybold, and get his opinion (which was usually to agree with what Father Tom said, with elaborations all his own).

These ten kilometer walks were planned to move through the city in a visible but safe manner, passing through quiet residential streets, rundown neighborhoods, business strips, public parks. The idea was to get the hundreds of walkers to experience more of their own community (where a quarter of the funds raised stay to fight hunger), not through car windows, but at a walking pace.

Father Tom and I as route designers would lag back and stay at the end of the pack, checking for folks who were struggling and needed a ride flagged down, or whatever. We'd discuss everything from hymn tunes to Thomas Merton, for whom Father Tom had been a secretary during his days as a Trappist monk at Gethsemani Abbey, and whose funeral he had returned for as a pallbearer. He didn't make a Catholic of me, nor I a Protestant of him. We simply shared our respective understandings of Christian faith as best we could. He talked about how the importance of the Papacy as something more than any one Pope, and I explained my love of the Anglican poets, George Herbert & John Donne, and how they helped open a door for me into ministry.

But most importantly, we talked about the nuts and bolts of pastoral care. "What do you do when" and "how do you respond if" in reference to emergency rooms at 2 am, or when sitting in a family's living room after the world has come to an (apparent) end. How to show the face of Christ in a world full of fright masks.

I thought about that smile, and the injunction to "contemplate our mortality" looking into his casket. And I smiled, too; something I learned from the face of my Christian brother, Father Tom.

Rest in peace, my friend.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what you contemplate at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 1-12

2012-01-05T21:18:00.001-05:00

Notes From My Knapsack 1-12-12

Jeff Gill

2012, the year of the cloud

___

If you are one of the benighted view worrying about the Mayan prediction of the end of the world this coming Dec. 21^st, I really can't help you, other than to suggest that it's the end of something the same way 2000 was an end…and a beginning.

2012 is looking to be a significant phase in the movement to what's generally referred to as "the cloud."

"The cloud" is the location, in virtual terms, where our data and info and personal materials all are starting to reside on the internet. Where is the cloud? If you must be so tiresomely concrete and particular, I guess it would be in a server farm (a building full of server/hard-drives/technology) that could be in Redmond, Washington, might be in Shanghai, China, and could even be in unexotic places like Dusseldorf, Germany or Poughkeepsie, New York.

One of the characteristics of the cloud, and a value of it, is that it is "backed up," so isn't just in Shanghai, but is simultaneously in Washington State and Dusseldorf, so if it suddenly melts down in one place, it can be recovered from another physical location, as the cloud drifts calmly on.

After decades of carrying around a bricklike daily/monthly/yearly planner, my calendar through 2012 is in the cloud, accessible in a smaller device I carry with me, but updateable on any computer I happen to land at through the day, with a user name and a password, and another password, and I can tweak or update my calendar for next May. It being in "the cloud," when I check it at home on my own computer, the update from the morning shows up right there, bouncing by way of Dusseldorf through my home router into the wifi and there as the Lovely Wife and I compare calendars. She pays more and more, now most of our household bills online, and checks our debit card and account balance online, where paychecks (her one, my four or five) are more and more going directly into that same encompassing cloud.

This all seems odd, until I recall that, over the last decade, I've gone from the last ribbon on my Smith-Corona to where my columns for the Sentinel & Advocate rarely ever "exist" anywhere until they come out of the business end of a printing press. The initial ideas go onto Evernote, the columns are typed in Word and sent by e-mail, edited in Quark, and I save my own copies on a hard drive and my own little corner of the cloud. There is literally no physical writing or typing until the printing…and more and more, people are wanting to skip that step and go to digital subscriptions, seeing the content online.

Will 2012 be the year that becomes the majority desire?

Many of my holiday books, magazines, and music, are in "the cloud." I can have them on my device, but I can delete them for space and go back to the cloud later to access them again. Are they mine? Well, yes, but…and the Lovely Wife notes serenely that, for all the potential downsides, they aren't taking up space in our house, or using up resources to make physical forms which then are warehoused until use.

Is "the cloud" a good thing? There's room for debate, especially if you're selling those physical forms, but the one solid reality of 2012 looks to be that we're moving towards the cloud.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your experience of "the cloud" at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 1-7-12

2012-01-05T20:49:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 1-7-12

Jeff Gill

Ghosts and good health in a new year

___

Not as a new year's resolution, but for the last four months, I've been running.

I turned 50, and quite frankly, it was starting to become noticeable that I could either continue eating the way I had the last many years, and buy lots of new pants, or keep my pants, and start eating less.

Eating less. Hmmm. Not necessarily a bad idea, but I wasn't really eating that much (in my opinion, and the dieticians in the audience can just pipe down), and making meaningful cuts in my caloric intake seemed unpleasant, or at least enough to make me consider the alternative.

The alternative was more, and more regular exercise, which I'd been fiddling with for a while, but not with enough seriousness. Having to eat less seemed serious enough.

But running. Once upon a time, I ran quite a bit; not marathons, but plenty of miles. The complication there was that this running was mostly in high-top black leather boots, and some of the United States Marine Corps' best trained, highly fit sergeants ran alongside of me at what seemed like for them a slow trot, screaming various imprecations at me for not running fast enough, even as I felt my lungs and legs burning on the last hill back to the squad bay.

Poor me, yeah, right. I volunteered for it. And after Uncle Sugar sent me a lovely honorable discharge from the USMCR, it felt like an official document permitting me to not run anymore.

So I had run, but not for thirty years. Or at least, not longer than, say, the distance from the center of the Great Circle earthworks to the Grand Gateway, or from the bridge from the picnic area to the center of the circle atop Eagle Mound. Often I get to lead 4^th grade tours out at the earthworks, and sometimes just to wear out the poor little dears, I'd offer to race them, and can still beat all but the most energetic two or three (after all, I am twice their height).

Anytime I did that I remembered that I did enjoy running, and could cover a few hundred yards at a steady lope and still speak loudly to a hundred kids at the other end, and thought "I could try running again." But I never did.

I didn't, in part, because if I were to run more than a couple of football fields' worth, and started to gasp, I'd slow down, and if I slowed down, that sergeant would start yelling at me about my general & particular worthlessness. So why start?

In religious terms, with all due respect to Staff Sgt. Camire as a person back in 1980, what I needed was an exorcism. The demon of doubt, the spectre of failure, masquerading as Sgt. Camire, kept whispering in my ear "you can't do this, and if you do, you can't do it right." So I didn't even try.

What exorcised my demon, aside from my own personal desire to not have to eat less, was a vision. I was reading a blog from a friend of a friend, a guy whose faith and practice had long been meaningful to me, and he talked one day about running in these weird "barefoot" running shoes. He posted a picture of the shoes, and then of his feet wearing the shoes: and as I looked at them, I saw my feet wearing those shoes. That's all, no trumpets, but I saw my feet wearing those shoes. It felt real, and it felt right.

So I went to get a pair of them, and the whole way, I kept hearing a voice saying "I can't do this. I can't do this." I got home, changed clothes, and put them on, and heard what more and more seemed to be a voice NOT my own saying "I can't, I can't, YOU can't do this, YOU can't do this."

And then I ran.

Here's the thing. I didn't run that far. I still haven't run, all of a piece, more than a mile. People ask me about my plans for a 5K or a marathon, and I smile and say "No, I'm just running." What I did was I ran as far as I could without gasping, and then I walked. Once my heart and my breathing calmed down, I started running again. And so on. I "run" one, one and a half, two miles now that way. If I get up to three, great; three miles without walking, maybe, but I don't care.

Because the ghost, the demon is gone. It was prayer, and discernment, and intention, and the realization that a voice from the past is just that. Today, I need to run a bit, and walk a bit, and run some more, and that's good enough.

And thank you, Sgt. Camire, wherever you are; I know you didn't mean it.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he spent some time in the military in his youth, ooh-rah. Tell him about the ghosts you've laid to rest at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 12-24-11 & 12-31-11

2011-12-09T19:17:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 12-24-11 & Faith Works 12-31-11

Jeff Gill

The Tree on the Porch

___

Grandma's hospital bed had been in the front room for two years now.

When she got to the point that she couldn't make the steep stairway to the second floor, Mom made up the front room for her, and got a better pair of drapes to keep out the cold and the light. Grandma slept mostly, even during the day. You could hear the psst of the oxygen even upstairs at night, every half-minute or so.

They'd put the TV in the kitchen, and tried the first year to wedge the Christmas tree in next to the dinette, sticking out into the opening to the front room. After the umpteenth person had brushed against it, knocking ornaments to the floor, Mom had said that was it, and the tree went out on the side porch.

Actually, it was kind of cool, and his friends liked the look of it, lights glowing, as you drove by in the busy alley alongside the narrow house. You could see it clearly through the big window behind the dinette, which was where they ate when it wasn't a meal over the sink, and Grandma could see a bit of it out the narrow window opposite her bed. The side door opened into the kitchen, and they rarely used it, mostly coming in the long hallway from the back into the other end of the kitchen. That was now the tree door, getting the most use when for twenty-five days they dashed out to plug in the tree each evening and the last person to bed dashed out to unplug it.

The three of them made it through the year fairly well, with Grandma's social security and Mom's job, but it was never easy. At Christmastime, Mom always went down to the Salvation Army and signed up for an Angel Tree gift package for him, but he was getting kind of old for that.

He'd gotten some good clothes and a few fun little toys, even one year a bike that he rode way past where the frame really suited him. Other times you could tell that either the people who'd picked his card hadn't read it, or (he figured) were older people who didn't know what a nine or ten or eleven year old boy would like, putting a stuffed bunny or craft set in with the sensible clothes.

Most of his friends at school had experience with Angel Tree gifts, and the ones with older brothers and sisters had ruefully pointed out that as you got to twelve and thirteen or fourteen, you generally got a gift card if you were lucky (because it didn't get picked, they guessed) or a bottle of cologne you'd never heard of. The game cartridges were usually not for a game he or his friends had, but you could trade them in downtown.

Mom was pretty smart about watching at Dollar General or Big Lots for the fall months, and she could usually pull out something kind of cool to add to the Christmas pile: a gadget to take apart and put back together, a radio control car in an odd color, or a dvd they'd watch together, joking about the bad acting. To tell the truth, those gifts he liked best because they came from her, not that they were better than what came from the nameless people who got his name off the Angel Tree.

Grandma, when she talked more, would tell him that when she was a girl there was no gift under the tree, but an orange in the stocking and a new toothbrush hanging from a branch with red ribbon. Mom would whisper to him "that wasn't her, that was her mother, your great-grandmother; she got toys and such just like you did, just no batteries." He'd saved up some money, and got her a tube of body lotion and silk flower in a vase from Big Lots; Mom thought that was wonderful he wanted to do that with his money, but warned him "don't feel bad if she doesn't react much when you give it to her. She knows, it's just hard for her to show much. Feelings are hard work for her with all the medications and all."

It looked to be a good Christmas, with a pie in the freezer they'd been given at the food pantry, and a little turkey that came with the Angel Tree gifts. He wondered what they were, but not too much. Expecting too much just led to disappointment, he'd figured that much out. They were together, the tree on the porch, the bird in the oven.

And he had a package for Mom. It wasn't much, but it was something, and he knew she'd love it. It might even be a pleasant surprise. She could use some joy this Christmas, and he wanted to give that to her.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Tell him a Christmas story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

* * *

Faith Works 12-31-11

Jeff Gill

December 31, 1945

George hung up the phone and looked up at the picture of his father.

Just beneath it was the cross-stitch his mother had made for him of his dad's favorite quote – 'All you can take with you is that which you give away.'

He looked past them to the window, where the snow was still falling outside. The building whose owner had just been speaking to him was sifting into invisibility behind the mist and growing dark.

Potter wanted him to know they had "found something of interest to both of them." It was the much-searched for $8,000, in an envelope left in a deposit slip rack. A good-hearted customer had discovered the crumpled packet and turned it in to a teller; they had given $50 of it to the finder, which he was sure George would approve of.

Sure, said George. He was surprised how little excitement he felt at the return of the prodigal deposit, although he was amused at Potter's generosity with George's money. For a moment, he thought about asking "If I had found $10,000 of yours, and had given $20 as a reward, would you have been fine with that?" But he just added "Thank you for thinking of that, Mr. Potter."

There was a peculiar tone to the rest of the call, though. Potter sounded positively wistful, asking him about his children's Christmas day, and how the aftermath of that already fading Christmas eve had gone, with half of Bedford Falls crowded into his house on Sycamore Street.

It was true that the hall carpet was essentially ruined, but he didn't tell Potter that.

Harry had left yesterday for Pensacola, where he would be training new pilots. "Watch out for that Potter," he said at the train station, adding "he's got something he wants to prove, and you're in the way of it."

So it was with an extra sense of unease George had heard the words "Why don't you and that charming family come over to my house for dinner tonight, and toast a new year, and the prosperity of peace?"

There was silence on both sides of the line, long enough to punctuate with a couple of Potter's carefully controlled wheezes, just enough sound to indicate listening silence.

"I'll have to check with Mary first, Mr. Potter; to tell you the truth, things have been so busy I'm not sure what our plans at home might be."

"Of course, of course my boy, you do that; wouldn't want to upset the missus. Just give me all call when you get home out here to Beech Grove."

Potter's father had begun a large rambling Georgian home on a knoll well out of town, and built barns and a pond and trails for horseback riding around the wooded acreage. It was along those, everyone knew, that a young Potter Junior had been thrown by a spooked horse, and been paralyzed ever since. There were stories about a young woman and a broken engagement, but all that was before George was even born.

The current Mr. Potter had added wings and grey stone and a high iron fence, but the few who had been on the grounds reported back food that was excellent, cooked in Continental style by a chef who it was rumored spoke no English. George said "I will certainly call as soon as I get home."

"Excellent, excellent. George, we have much to talk about. My best to your Mary," followed by a decisive clunk.

Should he go out there, he wondered? Should he even mention the invitation to Mary? She would wince and shake her head, but then say sternly, "We ought to say yes, if only to find out what he's up to."

And just how would it be, with his children, no doubt in danger of breaking a priceless object at every turn, sitting there about to say things they'd heard at home? There was no way it would be a pleasant evening.

Yet there was something in the old man's voice, or in that silence as he chose not to wheedle or plead ingratiatingly, as was his usual style. Something *was* up, that's for sure.

George reached for his hat, and thought "at the very least, I'll have a story for Harry the next time he calls." And then stopped and read for the millionth time those words of his father, neatly stitched by his mother - 'All you can take with you is that which you give away.'

Well, I'll always have this evening then, thought George.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story of a new year at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 12-17

2011-12-07T11:46:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 12-17-11

Jeff Gill

Walking down the sidewalk, hand in hand

___

Christmas eve, and in a light snow, they pulled up to the church.

It was such a joy to see the lights shining through stained glass, the full parking lot, the children's heads bobbing in the basement windows. He had helped dig that basement out fifty years ago, one coffee can at a time to start, crawling beneath the sanctuary. Now it just seemed to everyone there had always been a fellowship hall below the church, including them.

He picked his way across the asphalt carefully, recalling when it had been gravel. Safer, when his step was surer, but it certainly helped keep the carpets! Opening the car door, she swiveled to get out, as he opened up the walker.

They made their way to the elevator, another thing that wasn't part of the building when he'd been a trustee; she'd been president of the women's fellowship when they raised the money to put it in, one pie at a time.

In a way, there were no secrets between them. He knew about the early marriage she'd had that no one else who knew her even suspected; she knew how he wept each year watching "It's a Wonderful Life," not at the end of the movie when the basket full of money comes in, but when Clarence tells George that Harry Bailey didn't save the troopship from an enemy fighter crashing into it, because George wasn't there to save Harry.

He was a quartermaster's mate during the war (no further label needed for them as to what war), and piloted an LST across the Pacific. It had no name, just a number, even though she displaced 5,000 tons, more than many cocky ships that cruised past her with a name on the stern. They had names for their ship, but few worth repeating, or remembering. She'd heard them all, though.

She'd also heard him tell of when a Japanese Betty drilled into the starboard bow, not quite sinking the nameless Landing Ship Tank, but killing hundreds of soldiers who were helplessly waiting, and never landed on their island. She'd gotten letters from him out of Evansville where the ship was built, from Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he joked about how joining the Navy meant seeing the world, but the Midwest first (they were drilling on a mockup LST constructed in a vast building deep within the encampment, for security).

Then the long silence, the fears, and then a letter cryptical in wording, and even so half blacked out by a Navy censor. But she could tell something had happened, something changed. He told her all about it when he came home, once. And wept at that scene in the movie.

They had no secrets. He hadn't told her how bad the doctor had said the congestive heart failure was getting, but she knew; she hadn't told him that she suspected the breast cancer might be back, but he knew she'd asked if he could take her to the doctor, "after the holidays."

When the elevator got to the sanctuary floor, it stopped with a thump, and the door slowly slid open, revealing the Christmas decorations and the line of children now waiting to enter, holding small battery-powered candles. They both smiled, having spend hours (years?) on their knees with irons, paper towels, and wax paper cleaning candle wax out of the carpet after Christmas.

Their pew was marked, in a way, with a cushion that always sat there. New custodians would bring it to the office on Monday (once), and it would go back to her spot. Both hips had been replaced "back when they used hickory and pot metal" she joked, and the doctor had gently said it probably wouldn't be a good idea to go under anesthetic again.

No children had ever been raised in their home, "God had other plans for us" they both quickly answered whenever someone would ask. But here at church, they had helped raised hundreds (thousands?) over the years, and it was a family reunion more than anyone knew when everyone came together for Christmas Eve.

They had no secrets, but few knew all their sorrows; everyone knew, though, about the joy they shared, with each other, and in being at worship. They smiled, and a light shone round about them, and no one was afraid to sit next to them.

It was Christmas Eve, and they were at home.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you think you know who this story is about, I'm sure you're right, all of you! Tell him your story of Christmas joy at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 12-15

2011-12-06T00:07:00.001-05:00

Notes From My Knapsack 12-15-11

Jeff Gill

Just south of Granville

___

There is something about this time of year that makes you think about times gone by, the "auld lang syne" of pioneers and predecessors. The nutmeg and allspice and cloves we use so infrequently the rest of the year mingle with cinnamon and maple to create a memory-rich atmosphere with but a single whiff of seasonal scent.

Some of these memories are ones we can only know second-hand, but are often no less vivid for their distance. I think it right and meet for us to reflect at Christmastide on how the holiday preparations once felt, and looked, and smelled.

In 1881, N.N. Hill wrote a history of Licking County, Ohio, and he included as part of the book a lengthy reminiscence where "Samuel Park, esq., of Marshall, Illinois, a former resident of Union township in this county, writes:

"I was born in Union township, November 21, 1810, and at four weeks old, in midwinter, was taken into a green beech cabin, without floor, door, or chimney, which, however, was soon made comfortable by the industry of my, then, young parents. Nor did I enjoy the luxury of a nice baby-crib set on rockers. I was cradled in a sugar-trough, and often lulled to sleep by the notes of the owl and the howl of the wolf. But, even then, the sweeter songsters of the forest, such as the mocking bird, the nightingale and the whip-poor-will, sang just as sweetly from our wild forest surroundings, as they do now from the fancy groves of our finest villas. The attempt to resurrect and place upon record the history of our pioneer fathers and mothers, has caused me to live much of my life over again. The scenes and associations of my youth have many of them been brought vividly before my mind, as in other years.

The old fashioned log cabin with puncheon floor, clapboard door,

wooden chimney, warmed by a massive log fire at one end,

and lighted by oiled paper windows;

the chimney corners hung full of jerk;

the rich, juicy, fresh venison, broiled on the end of a sharp stick;

the noble wild turkey, roasted for Thanksgiving and Christmas;

the occasional feast upon a fat coon or opossum;

the johnnycake, baked on a board;

the rich and healthy coffee and tea;

the product of the garden, the field and the forest,

and made doubly palatable by rich cream and maple sugar.

The pleasant social gathering of our fathers and mothers around the cheerful log fire,

relating the incidents and anecdotes of their lives;

the hilarity sometimes produced by the exhilarating effects of egg-nog or warm toddy;

the happy associations of the young folks;

the trippings to the charming notes of the violin;

the cabin-raisings, the log-rollings, the corn-huskings, the wood-choppings, flax-pullings;

the sentimental songs;

the jumping, hopping, wrestling and foot-racing exercises of the young men;

the quilting parties of the ladies; the buzz of the spinning-wheel in the cabin;

the whack, whack of the flaxbreak at the barn;

the guns, the dogs and the chase;

all, all of these have been brought freshly to our mind,

and we are in a great degree permitted to live over again

the happy days of our innocence and youth;

and that, too, with the most happy reminiscences of those youthful associations.

But amidst these pleasant reflections there are some sad thoughts.

These revered fathers and mothers have all passed away;

more than half of our youthful associates are numbered among the dead,

and those that are left have lost the vigor and elasticity of youth

and are blossoming for the grave.

The school children of to-day greet us as grandparents,

and we, too, must soon be numbered with the dead."

And Hill concludes this section by simply adding: "It is pleasant to record the fact that Mr. Park is yet living in Marshall, Illinois."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; it is pleasant to record the fact that Mr. Gill is yet living in Granville, Ohio. Tell him your favorite seasonal scent at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 12-10

2011-12-05T23:45:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 12-10-11

Jeff Gill

A Simple Twist of Wire

___

Every year about this time, I think of them.

In a modern American home, you find the approach of the commemoration of Our Lord and Savior's birth coming when days get short, and nights lengthen to where they start shortly after lunch. This time of year, darkness wraps itself around you like a cheap rain poncho in the wind. You gotta do something, and that something is go to [insert big box store name here] and shop for Christmas lights.

They come in green wire or white wire, the latter a prayerful hope for a proverbial White Christmas, with tree-colored wire for wrapping around, well, trees, both indoor and outdoor.

They are white or multi-colored, and now they're LED or old-fashioned: although for me, an old-fashioned Christmas light is a bulb the size of what you plant as tulips, a proper bulb. (Of incandescents and CFLs we will not speak.) I'm told there are those who shop for all blue bulbs or other such specialty displays, but those are further back in the towering aisles than I ever get. Green wire, white wire, white bulbs or multicolor, LED or regular – all confusing enough for me.

Especially when there are 50 light, 100 light, 150 light strands, even 250 to 500 of 'em. There are probably 1000 light strings back with the blue bulbs. Each January, when the lights come down after Epiphany, some have died, some are flaring with a manic intensity that bodes ill for us all, and others are fine, but the blue spruce insists on growing, so more are needed.

Each year, I stow and toss and make notes for what I need next December 6 (St. Nicholas' Day, as Epiphany is January 6, a tidy frame for décor rituals in our house). And each year I struggle to remember what my note from eleven months previously was getting at.

So it's the odd year that I don't end buying a few more boxes or reels of Christmas lights. They have to be unsealed from their secure packaging which insulated them from the shocks and strife of being shipped across oceans, dropped on docksides, heaved into trains, and tumbled from trucks into loading zones before being carefully shelved by the guy down the street in his blue or red or orange apron.

You slit or gnaw the tape off the plastic or cardboard, and get down to the strings of lights themselves, but there's one last step. The twist ties.

This is when I think about them. If you open up enough boxes, even of outwardly identical lights, you start to realize that the twist ties are where you see the mark of an individual, actual person, someone in China, because yes, they all (as far as I can tell) come from the People's Republic of China now. Somewhere along the Huangpu or Yangtze Rivers, or up Suzhou Creek (as far as I can tell online, most of these lights are coming out of the Shanghai area), there's a vast factory in the middle of a sea of vast factories. Last summer, or earlier, the shop floor retooled to turn out the pre-tangled strands of Christmas tree wire, and throngs of basic laborers stood along lines to place bulbs in sockets and wind handfuls of seasonal joy into proper lengths after the outlets are snapped into place.

All of this among dozens of boxes or reels looks exactly identical across the packages, with a monotonous, almost inhuman sameness. You think only of machines and an acres-wide roof in a desolate landscape.

But then I get to the twist ties. They're always a little bit different. Year by year, you sense the encroachment of the bean counters, with less and less excess on the ties that are themselves snipped off a no doubt large reel, a few inches at a time. The work of squeezing the bundle of 150 or 250 lights tightly enough, then anchoring it in place with a flick of the wrist, a spin of the fingertips. It can't be terribly rewarding work, and I suspect is the lowest job on the totem pole.

Still I see in each box the particular mark of a fellow human being, the loop or knot or bow last touched literally around the world, next unwound by me, here in Ohio. What do they think of us, and what we're doing with these things? What does it mean to them?

I think of them, as persons, and I say a prayer, and touch an infinitesimal part of their lives, in contact with mine.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he no doubt will need just one more trip for lights. Tell him where you come into contact with "the other" this Christmas season at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 12-3

2011-12-01T14:50:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 12-3-11

Jeff Gill

Everyone, have a wonderful Advent

___

What should everyone do?

Once you get past the Ten Commandments, there's not much agreement on what choices or decisions are right for every-everyone.

We live in an individualistic age (I'm sure you needed me to point that out), and blanket solutions or one-size-fits-all answers are rarely heeded.

Still, we created, finite persons have quite a bit in common. I was doing a program that touched on this subject for Monday Talks, and a good doctor of the community rose to observe that after having performed surgery on all sorts of people with a wide variety of skin tones, they all had the same red blood and general arrangement of internal organs once you got past the subcutaneous layers.

And I've been to three different churches' potlucks in the last couple weeks, and saw almost the exact same assortment of casseroles and desserts at each one, so there's that.

I got to thinking about this because we preachers can fall into the trap of saying, almost as an aside, things about what Christians should do that are heard as "what everyone should be doing," with the implication, intentional or no, that if you aren't or don't, you're not a good person. Or at least not *as* good as those who do.

Which may be more message than we intend, but if that's what people hear, then . . . we have to take that into account.

Take the Bible (please! *rimshot*) – I just read in print a fine Baptist columnist just sort of toss off the observation that every believer should have the practice of reading the Bible through every year. It wasn't his main point, but it kind of stuck out as one.

Should's and ought's aside, I am quite certain that it is a vanishingly small fraction of even regular churchgoers who do this; leaving me to suspect that the vast majority hear such exhortations not as a spur to Bible reading, but as reason for a bit more guilt in their ditty bag of life.

Let me suggest this: every practicing Christian should read a book of the Bible, all the way through, preferably a Gospel (Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John) every year. Yes, some will cheat even on that and go with Ruth or Philemon, but that's their call.

Or prayer – if you read anything that's focused on the subject, you're likely to run into the off-handed comment that a person with solid spirituality spends at least an hour a day in prayer. They're likely to concede that you could start slowly, with thirty or maaaaaaybe twenty minutes a day, and then work up.

Again, I think the bulk of truly striving churchfolk read that and just give up. They don't see it happening, and they don't want to start knowing they'll fail. Can I offer an olive branch to the rest of us? If each of us just made space for five uninterrupted minutes of prayerful quiet, focused on God, at the start of each day, I think we'd all be amazed at what could happen.

Ditto tithing. I know the Scriptural citations, and have preached the sermons, but seriously: most people don't even have a household budget. So what does 10% mean when you don't know what your 100% is? How's this: people of faith, please sit down this very day, and figure out a) what you earn per annum, b) what you take home (pause for a drink when you see what percentage of your gross income goes to taxes), and c) calculate honestly what percentage of your income you give to mission, outreach, your church. That's your total giving divided by your takehome times a hundred.

Yeah, not pretty, is it? So what would it take to push that percentage up by one?

Then there's small groups. They're the catnip of church growth these days, and they are much more important & nutritious than catnip, but it does have the same deranging effect on some consultants. Look, some people just are not comfortable in a small group per se, and making it a universal (let alone accountability groups for everyone) is just an incitement to guilt, and guilt doesn't grow anything, let alone a church.

How about this: every person who regularly worships in a church should be committed to making a personal connection with people they don't already know each year? If it's just one family, one new couple, even one older person you've never talked to before – that could be so powerful.

Four ideas. They may be lowered expectations, but if they really represent what we all could do, and we did them, I think it might leave all the more room for God to do something even greater in our midst.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has generally found low expectations to be highly rewarding. Tell him to up his game at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 12-1

2011-11-22T09:21:00.000-05:00

Notes From My Knapsack 12-1-11

Jeff Gill

A December to remember

___

The candlelight walking tour is upon us!

Some leave town, some just lock their doors and settle in with a stack of movies (or stream a night's worth through their widget), and the rest of us embrace the insanity with open arms.

C'mon, we all know it's insane. The kids most of all, and bless 'em, they aren't yet sold on the value of sanity and sensibility, so they are most ready to run forward with arms open wide.

They glory in the red-suited fellow and his soft-spoken wife, elves on duty all around; they run to the kettle corn copper pot and the cocoa urn; they try to be more restrained in Monomoy House, but even the Lad still loves to count the number of Christmas trees and report back the census to President Knobel.

Older youth get to walk about more dignifiedly with candle-lighters to keep the luminaries burning, or shuttle cookies from inside to outdoor tables; many of this community's young people put their talents to good work in church chancels and other performance venues, with plays and recitals and concerts from the elementary school's daytime craft fair on the east side of the village, to Pilgrim Lutheran and the Newark High School strings in the evening where Cherry St. points to Broad Street and the west.

Everyone gets to share their talents; my afternoon challenge is that my friend Mary Borgia is singing & strumming at the United Church of Granville in the afternoon while the Lovely Wife is playing at the Robbins Hunter Museum (sorry, Mary!). Andy Carlson and some bluegrass desperados will be holding up Park National Bank, even as Spring Hills Baptist's musicians will be trying to make connections with passing audiences in Windstream Park.

And the hardest choice of all: St. Luke's Episcopal offers a sing-along "Messiah" at 8:00 pm, just when the Denison University Concert Choir performs atop College Hill in Swasey Chapel.

There are certain family traditions about where to go and what to do, but they can't be set in stone. Monomoy is only open every other year, certain groups in various churches come and go, and through the years there are new, changing responsibilities (setting out those luminaries, helping erect sets at Centenary, shoveling snow in front of the Avery-Downer House). We used to always start the evening, just before Santa & Mrs. Claus' arrival, with Don Snelling making the Lad a grilled cheese – times change, people pass, memories endure.

There's the walk through the Christmas lights behind the Buxton Inn, and the admiration of ice sculptures in front of the Granville Inn (weather permitting, of course). I see that the Soup Loft will have bean soup & cornbread: a new tradition, perhaps?

We can't dawdle, because Common Thread is starting down the street, and we might just get them in before the "Hallelujah Chorus." As I will always remember, thinking of the Granville Candlelight Walking Tour, the sound of a child's voice that might be my own, but is just as likely to be someone else's son or daughter:

"C'mon, let's go!"

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your walking tour tale at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 11-26

2011-11-21T11:26:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 11-26-11

Jeff Gill

Think faithfully, shop locally

___

Tomorrow is the First Sunday in Advent.

There are probably more people in general (if not reading this) who are aware that yesterday was "Black Friday" than know what the First Sunday in Advent is, or means.

A new liturgical year begins, and the lectionary cycle of Scripture readings turns; we'll now be in Year B, with a special emphasis through the year on the Gospel of Mark (A=Matthew, C=Luke, and John gets heavy rotation in special seasons like Easter, but not his own year in the cycle).

I've talked about Advent before, but not so much about Black Friday. Not that I really want to do that now.

There is a small push on to declare today "Small Business Saturday," It's an interesting idea, with some major retail interests behind it, ironically, but the concept has more than just merit.

Some would suggest that a truly faithful, and particularly Christian few should be to consume, to shop, to buy stuff less. I think there's something worth considering there; why would committed Christians buy consumer goods in volume and type and brand indistinguishably from the community around them? Not to be different for difference's sake, but if your faith commitment doesn't change your shopping habits, I think it might be fair for an outsider to wonder: what does it change, then?

You can also take this line of reflection too far. Some claim that Christmas shopping and gift-giving is "the problem," and a kind of neo-Amish retreat from commercial society is what our beliefs should lead us to.

Consumer society can be a big, big part of "the problem" (my departure from most such rants is that the problem is "sin" and not shopping isn't "redemption," but save that for later). How we shop, though, might also be part of a solution to finding a form of faithful living that proclaims what we believe.

I find a small business emphasis, not just for today, but in general, one that appeals to my understanding of "the beloved community," the new creation that God is seeking through Christ not just "in our hearts" but in our shared reality, right now. A sign of the Kingdom, if you like.

Giving gifts can be a blessing, and where or how you get them can bless in multiple directions. Everyone knows there's a certain wonderment in handmade gifts.

And many of us quake in fear and trembling at the idea of crafting anything at all.

Do we have to jump from home-made offerings to objects, entombed in plastic, shipped from overseas, bought in big box stores? Is there no middle ground here?

Buying locally is an affirmation of community, of common ties. Even buying internationally rooted consumer goods from a local, nearby retailer, says something if only to that business and their employees with whom you interact.

I wonder what would happen if, as part of the Christmas season, more churches spent a moment or some bulletin or newsletter space to promote, not as an advertisement, but as a gift itself, those in their fellowship who make gift items? What I'm not so crazy about are so-called "Christian businesses," in whose name I've seen too much incompetence and opportunistic profit taking be done. What I mean is a purchase that has some relationship in it. A local artist's CD, jewelry made by LICCO, preserves from the farm just a township over.

There's also the next circle of connection, where faith & practice mean not an endorsement, but just a gracious hint. My wife & I give a number of out-of-town gifts through Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, a Trappist monastery whose emphasis on prayer & work I value, and whose products are handmade on the grounds. There may be better fruitcakes, but not only do I think they're tasty, I like what the gift says, and what I'm supporting by giving through them.

So shop as you discern that you must, and wrap away for the celebrations of month's end, but think a bit about from whom, and where, and how you buy – and see what you can do to bring the gift a little closer to the life and living you would affirm.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; yes, he does like fruitcake, some do! Tell him about a Christmas gift at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 11-19

2011-11-18T11:01:00.000-05:00

Faith Works 11-19-11

Jeff Gill

Communities of Thanksgiving

___

One of the best byproducts of the ecumenical movement of the 1960s & 70s was the development in cities and locations all over the country of "community Thanksgiving services."

I grew up with one that was always Wednesday night, rotating among churches downtown, which was (to me, at least) always exciting about getting to see the inside of churches I had never been in, and get a taste of how other traditions worshiped God.

Wednesday night always had the downside of excluding no small number of women who were, at 7 pm on Wednesday night, literally up to their elbows in a turkey. Over time, most of these have continued, but moved to the Sunday evening before. This also helps draw in the many of us who are traveling on Wednesday, over various rivers and through "Leafy Woods" subdivisions, to grandmothers' or other relatives houses. The horse may not know the way, but we have our pilgrim paths that are part of the holiday.

Licking County is no exception, with three that I can tell you about for sure, and I don't doubt there's a combined service or two out there I've not gotten definitive word about.

Down by Buckeye Lake, the Lakewood Area Ministerial Association is holding a community Thanksgiving service hosted by First Community Church there, Sunday night at 7:00 pm. Churches from Jacksontown to Hebron and along the north shore are joining together for that gathering.

The Newark Area Ministerial Association is gathering at Trinity Episcopal Church, just east of Courthouse Square, also at 7:00 pm Sunday night. Kitty Clausen & Sam Harnish have led an effort to invite folks from all around the Newark area both to participate and come worship.

They very kindly invited me to join them, but I was already helping with arrangements for the Granville Ministerium service, Sunday night at (wait for it!) 7:00 pm, hosted by the Church of St. Edward the Confessor on Newark-Granville Road. We will have readings from youth lectors out of a number of the participating churches, and John Ball, an 8^th grader from the United Church of Granville has organized a shoe drive for a mission project their youth group is supporting. The shoes may be used, or if they can't benefit a wearer, they get recycled in bulk and the proceeds drill wells in developing countries around the world. So we're having a shoe offering!

Each Thanksgiving service has it's own rhythm and special offering traditions, plus that chance to see inside a different worship space, and hear other voices in both preaching and song. Often there's a combined choir singing at these services, with folks showing up early to rehearse together an anthem and lift up voices in harmony, with unity.

That is truly something to be thankful for, whenever and wherever it happens!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio (who gets to preach tomorrow morning at Hebron Christian!); tell him what you are thankful for this year at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 11-17

2011-11-11T13:00:00.001-05:00

Notes From My Knapsack 11-17-11

Jeff Gill

A Thankful Connection

___

This Sunday, you all are invited to St. Edward's Catholic Church at 7:00 pm for a Community Thanksgiving worship service.

Rev. Dwight Davidson of the United Church of Granville will offer a message on "Making the most of the time" from Ephesians 5:16. A community chorus will rehearse together at 5:00 pm for the 7:00 pm service, and a number of young people from different congregations will share the readings.

One particular young person, John Ball, from UCG, is organizing a shoe drive which the Granville Minsterium wants to support this year. If you have old, worn shoes, tie or rubber band them together, and bring them to deposit at the service. John and his youth group are collecting them for Edge Outreach, a non-profit ministry which both sends on into the developing world shoes which can be worn, and recycles the others in bulk to earn cash that is then used to drill wells where they're needed, from Haiti to Sudan.

The shoes, like the canned goods we often collect in other years at the ecumenical service, are a small token, but a reminder, and one that has its own place. The offering makes us stop and think in a way writing even a fifty dollar check might not; walking into a church with barely useful shoes dangling from our hands gives a sense of the limits of our giving, but a practical insight into what's needed. Hope and healing, and clean water, may just be a few grubby sneakers away.

It's this question of how faraway places matter to us, and how we are connected to them, which dogs my question about what kind of "empire" our country, our culture is going to be. As Christians in a country with global impact, we can shape some ends with our actions, and resist some initiatives with our votes, even as we struggle to define which global matters truly do matter to a life of faith, and which means are right and proper to use as faithful people in the world.

Sending a check used to be safe, but we've gotten wise to the foolishness that money alone will announce the gospel, the good news. Sometimes you can't buy what God wants to see done; actually, that's usually the case.

Overseas mission, along with our local work recently celebrated and supported at places like a concert of gospel music in Newark, needs the kind of support that can only be participated in. Granville is blessed with the fact that most of our churches contain people who have actually gone and been and done in distant places, returning to tell us those stories, to make real to us what good news looks like in Myanmar and Mexico. Participation is more important than contribution, it seems, and even if we can't physically go, we can participate through holy listening, just as a gospel concert isn't complete without an audience softly singing along at times.

Overseas, counterinsurgency against violent threats is being rethought as well. Apparently we can neither bomb nor drone our way to a lasting peace, who knew? And "existential threats" may be best fought in a struggle that begins before the first IED is set, when skills and talents are better spent in building a life with hope & promise, rather than building bombs and booby traps.

I don't entirely know how we help others make that choice. I'm guessing learning more about why people make the choice to blow people like me up (or their own folk) is going to be one part of it. Figuring that out doesn't excuse their choices for evil acts, but it does give people like me a starting point to figure out what could be done. You don't have to concede terrorism is our own fault to realize that there may have been something we could have done sooner to prevent it.

And far enough back, it might have been as simple as a pair of shoes. Given with love.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he hopes to see you at the ecumenical Thanksgiving service! Say hello at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 11-12

2011-11-09T10:24:00.001-05:00

Faith Works 11-12-11

Jeff Gill

The More Things Change

___

"The Lord be with you"

"And . . ."

Those statements are familiar, as far as they go, across many Christian traditions.

They have long taken the form, in America, of "The Lord be with you" from the priest, preacher, or presider, with a response from the people gathered of "And also with you." It comes from the Mass in English after the great transition of the Vatican II conference for the Roman Catholic Church, and sets the worship service rolling.

Those responsive statements are so effective that actually in the vast majority of Protestant churches you could step up to the platform or pulpit and say "The Lord be with you," and count on the majority of worshipers to respond in booming tones "And also with you."

This will get a little complicated come the end of the month.

Nov. 27 is the first Sunday of Advent, which is, for liturgical churches (and to some degree for any congregation which follows the lectionary cycle of Scripture readings), the beginning of the year. Everything resets, from the texts in weekly worship to the colors of pulpit covers and table paraments (purple for Advent).

Catholic Christians will find on that day, and I presume in the "vigil masses" on Saturday evening before, a bit more of a change. Well, more than a bit.

It turns out that the Mass translations from the Latin many of us have heard for years have been provisional, awaiting a more carefully considered effort from an international commission on worship texts. They've been provisional for over 40 years, but Rome likes to remind people that they don't think in terms of years, but of centuries (and wags would add, "yes, the fourteenth century").

After some politick-ing that I've read about but can't claim to understand (there was a draft worked on for some 30 years that was liked by many, but pitched at the last minute and reformulated under different management to reach the new, final translation), this new liturgical year ushers in an official, non-provisional "Missal of the Roman Mass" for use in worship among Catholics throughout the English-speaking world.

With this first Sunday of Advent, you will hear the priest say "The Lord be with you," and your response will be "And with your spirit."

Is that all, you might ask? Oh no, there's much more. The form and sense of the whole is really not much changed at all, but some have said that a certain preference for Latinate constructions is what most marks this translation, with words like "consubstantial" likely to trip up unsuspecting tongues.

I've spoken to two priests and a few church musicians about the coming change, and the consensus is that the adjustment for the congregation should be relatively simple & straightforward (watch the card that's going to be in the pew!), but the real problem will be for priests and musicians who have been putting off wrestling with their parts, where the largest number of changes in wording have been made (I'm told). Some have begun already "saying the Mass" in this form in their private devotions, even practicing it in front of the bathroom mirror ("like being back in seminary!" one said).

But all agree the rumors and worries are a bit out of scale with what's actually going on. When you read the Latin text the 1970 translation was based on, you don't have to know the language to see why the 2011 adjustment makes a certain sense: Priest: Dominus vobiscum. People: Et cum spiritu tuo. You can see it: "And with your spirit."

There is also returned from traditions of an earlier day a practice which is behind the common idiom "breast-beating": instead of what the 1970 version asks the people to pray as "that I have sinned through my own fault," the new translation returns, in English, to the Latin mass usage of inviting worshipers to tap their chest three times while saying "that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault," from an original Latin "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

Meanwhile, for all us Protestants, the question now arises: do we change, too? Or does the sacramental meaning of acknowledging the Holy Spirit at work in the presider, reclaimed with "And with your spirit," mean that most of us would do well to keep "And also with you"?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he hopes that the Lord is with you! You may respond as you prefer to knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-5

2011-11-02T09:55:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 5-5-11

Jeff Gill

Just a knock on the door

___

So, you all know where to show up tomorrow, right? No, after church.

Sunday, 3:30 pm, Midland Theatre in downtown Newark, Gospel Celebration, a concert for the "Coalition of Care" helping congregations serve those in need around Licking County (www.coalitionofcare.net). Lots of great choirs, ensembles, & soloists, with the ticket just $20. Come help us pack the house!

With that, I've asked you to come where I'll be at (and it's a sincere invitation). But if I come to where you are, especially if I'm your pastor or clergyperson of any sort, it's a "call."

Pastoral calls have been the single biggest thing that's changed in ministry over the last thirty years. Some would argue that it should be technology, which has changed greatly, but it hasn't transformed the work of ministry in the same way . . . yet.

And others might say that the rise of contemporary Christian music and the worship style that goes with it is the biggest change, but even there, it's one of those things where your congregation has either done it, or not. Many are still relatively untouched by contemporary worship, or have never known any other style.

Pastoral calling, on the other hand, has really changed right across the board for anyone who's been in a ministry position since the 1980s. One aspect of that is the explosion of hospitals, and the shortening of stays. Thirty years ago, a pastor in Newark rarely went to Franklin County to pray with a parishoner before surgery, while now it's a regular event (some might even say weekly). And if you don't get right over there, you might just arrive to find them dismissed already.

While many folks still have some of the same expectations today that they did then, which most clergy I know try to meet.

That's actually not what I'm thinking about, though. It's the other side of pastoral calls, the "home visit."

It came to mind because I was recently reading in the annals of Rev. Jacob Little, the legendary Granville pastor at First Presbyterian there, who served from the end of the pioneer period to the Civil War, and left a large amount of written material along with the general church records.

Apparently, what Parson Little did each Sunday was post, in the vestibule, two lists. One was of those who had not paid their pew rents (long story, but just call it "their pledge"), and the other was a list of those families he intended to visit that week.

These weren't social calls, either. Little would quiz the children about their studies in Scripture, invite the parents to discuss doctrine, and generally inquire about the state of their souls and fitness to receive communion.

The posted list helps to explain why the Reverend would often come to the door of a home and hear the head of the household loudly already at prayer, with special blessings asked for the pastor. Old Jacob had very little sense of irony, so I'm not sure he got what was going on, since he would report these incidents with great approval.

Anyhow, Rev. Little would call on parish families three or four days a week, between the noon meal and supper, two or three families each day. Apparently he could count on arriving at a house, on a weekday afternoon, and find the entire family, father included, there waiting for him.

Today, catching people at home? You'd have to call in the evening, if then, and quite frankly, there aren't many people who like having visitors at home in the evening. The new reality is that most pastoral home visits tend to be associated with crisis and bad news, which warps the sense of having a minister at the door even more.

We are still coming up with what a new model can be for pastoral calls on a good day, when there's not a problem to be dealt with, and maybe even for a relaxed but serious conversation. Most clergy are really interested in the state of your soul, the condition of your heart, and welcome a chance to talk and pray with you about things of the spirit.

We do have those conversations with people in assisted living, nursing homes, and yes, even in hospitals when the stay isn't measured in hours but there's a day or two at hand. For everyone else – should we try going back to posting lists?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 10-29

2011-10-27T15:47:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 10-29-11

Jeff Gill

I am homeless

___

I am homeless.

I am also blessed to have a place to live; some might say "that is Jeff's house," and they aren't entirely wrong. My wife makes more than I do, so the whole question of how we saved the down payment over the years past and who covers the mortgage payments each month we will draw the gentle shroud of "community property" over.

For the Lovely Wife and myself, there is the fact that the bank which holds the mortgage owns more of it than we do. Can we sell it for what we paid for it? Maybe, probably not. If we could sell Sycamore Lodge, we'd be able to pay off the mortgage, but then we wouldn't have a home, would we? We are at least thankful that we're not, in the all-too-current phrase, underwater.

There are a few in the neighborhood who know it as the "BLANK house," blank being the family who lived here before us, and who sold it into our care. When we leave, someday, as we all must, it will likely be "the Gill house" for many years across the early ownership of the next occupants. Hope they don't mind.

And my family, my parents, still own the home I grew up in, and live there, at least for a chunk of the year that isn't ice-encrusted blown down off of Lake Michigan. That's unusual among my peers, I know. I can call the phone number I learned for kindergarten, and it still rings to a place where people who know me pick up. But my dad is starting to make noises about stairs, and downsizing, and . . .

I am homeless. We all are, in a way, because the place we call home is not certain and secure in any ultimate sense. Odd occasions of chance and ill fortune, a shift in the land itself, and my place is . . . not assured. There's a historic home near me, with many indirect connections that I still feel as personal, going back to the very first Anglo settlers of Licking County, over 200 years of history. But the soggy ground is shifting, and hand-made bricks have their weaknesses after a couple of centuries, plus a doorway cut into a foundation wall perhaps a century ago turns out, in the long run, not to have been the best of ideas. This – this landmark, a stable point in a changing village, is very likely soon to be no more, only a photograph, and a fading set of memories.

We are all homeless. There's a saying among housing advocates that "we are all three paychecks away from being on the street." That's true for more people than will easily admit it, but I suspect there's too much room for people to excuse themselves from such an analogy. I'd say it's true right now: we are homeless, in that we have a place to sleep tonight because of many factors, quite a few beyond our direct control, and the care and consideration of so very many others. I have friends who got down payments from parents, there are an assortment of mortgage interest deductions, and so on and so on. Plus that whole "three paychecks away" thing.

Why do some people miss the leap from ice floe to ice floe that we're so proud to have made safely, and instead slip into the icy water of homelessness? It may be they weren't looking closely, they might even have not taken care to lace their shoes carefully or had a bit too much to drink for warmth and lost their balance by their own fault.

No matter. I could have fallen in, and if I did, I'd want someone to reach out and pull me up onto the next stable spot, help me dry out and warm up properly, then we'd all venture on. That's what I should do.

This week you'll see the shoes set out along the edges of Courthouse Square. The Licking County Coalition for Housing will offer "Shoes on the Square" along with some signs telling stories of how particular folks (names changed) ended up in the water, if not under. Noon on Wednesday, All Souls' Day, Nov. 2, we will have a gathering at the gazebo on Courthouse Square, to reflect briefly together on what it means to help someone get back on their feet. Come join us, would you?

Then on next Sunday, Nov. 6, at 3:30 pm in the Midland Theater, just across from the gazebo in Newark, the Coalition of Care will hold their annual Gospel Celebration, which helps support their prayerful and face-to-face work with individuals and families in need around Licking County. Ticket info can be found at MidlandTheatre.org or likely at your own church tomorrow.

My home is somewhere on ahead, and we all will be welcome there. Let's all be willing to pause and help people get up, get moving, and head for home, finding secure stopping places along the way. Places warm and safe enough that for the time being, we can just call them "home."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow on Twitter @Knapsack .

Knapsack 10-27

2011-10-20T22:04:00.000-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 10-27-11

Jeff Gill

Yes, an Election Year. Oh Joy.

___

Tuesday, Nov. 8 in this year of 2011, begins a twelve month period of more politicking than the human eye, ear, and mind can truly comprehend.

Let's not look past this next week to over-anticipate the balloting of 2012; we will have no small number of charter amendments for Granville, and some pretty significant voter initiatives for Ohio, in the Nov. 8 plebiscite.

Already, though, we're considering the choices and decisions for this election in light of the national debate over which party will hold the executive branch, aka the White House, and control (if that word makes any sense in this context) Congress.

Our local concerns, for water and sewer rates, for the quality of our schools, intersect with federal mandates and guidelines, that themselves are funded or cut back based in part on some of the budgetary stresses of our overseas expenditures, such as for Predator drones and the occasional carrier task force sortie. So they all connect.

In response to a village council question about personnel cost increases, the answer was "a recent rise in the cost of employee benefits, driven in part by action on a federal level." All of which is to say that the cost of being a global empire has a way of trickling down to the local level.

That's why I want to keep asking the question: if an empire, by any other name, would smell as . . . much, then is that the scent we want to wear? Or is the idea of empire something that hangs in your nose like a middle school boy wearing far too much Axe body spray?

The debates, among GOP candidates and ultimately between incumbent President Obama and whomever the Republican nominee ends up being, will tend to talk about the economy on the surface – but I'm convinced the substance will be about empire.

Some of the "Occupy This-n-that" protesters would protest that the point for America should be to not be an empire at all, but I just don't see that as an option. Short of ceding a huge amount of sovereignty to the United Nations by many countries, not just the US of A, and US'ns outsourcing much of our global armed reach to the blue helmet crew, we are now and will be in the foreseeable future a global empire.

That's where I think permeating the coming year of electoral wrangling, in the media and on the floor of Congress, will be the question: "what kind of empire are we going to be?"

As more comes out about Khaddafy's endgame, and forty year lifestyle, and as it causes us to consider even more closely what's going on in Syria and Iran, without even getting into North Korea, it is clear that there are some scary people running governments in the world, with the ability to project power narrowly, but across great distances.

Then there's the relative instability of oligarchical systems like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and yes, even China. Being an empire means not only military obligations, but a certain degree of social and cultural self-interest for long-term stability woven into economic concerns.

So what's a self-respecting, even moral (or morally aspiring) empire supposed to do? Claim sovereignty over energy sources in distant lands directly or indirectly, or figure out how to power an economy without depending on overseas commodities? Buy up and control raw materials half a world away, as China is actively trying to do in Africa as most Americans still are baffled at the question "where is North Katanga, Alex?" Or shift consumption to products that can be grown, generated, or gathered within our own geographic neighborhood?

Empire. Some call it an ugly word, and history doesn't help pretty it up, but what it means and will look like is going to be a key factor in the American political landscape of 2012, even if you rarely hear the word itself used.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has no imperial ambitions even over the back seat of his own car. Tell him your tales of empire at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 10-22

2011-10-20T10:39:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 10-22-11

Jeff Gill

Is it a church, or something…else?

___

There's a place where people go, often as a family.

It's a place where they go to confront both fears and doubts, but also to laugh and celebrate, passing along family traditions that go back generations while generating a few new ones every year or so.

There is symbolism aplenty all around, and other people who gather with much the same intention, all gazing intently at the images, some subtle and amazing, others crude and startling, but all making young and old think about death, and what lies beyond.

Every year, a larger and larger portion of the family income goes to this place and the observance at home of the special day that everyone who passes through those doors celebrates. Even as the economy struggles, it's a priority to spend a chunk of what you earn not only for this event, this gathering, but also to share it back with many, mostly strangers, so they can know the odd mix of joy and awe that lies ahead for us all.

I'm speaking, of course, about the Hallowe'en store. Did you think I meant somewhere else?

Sure, it's just one day a year, but the fastest growing American holiday as measured by consumer expenditures. One date on the calendar, but another civic date called "Beggar's Night" just to keep everyone satisfied, and the lights and lawn décor and window clings and even tastefully arranged pumpkins on the porch go up earlier and earlier each year. Oct. 1 to Oct. 31, 'tis the season.

Do I overstate to compare it to a religion, a belief system? Well, there are plenty of people who claim a faith perspective who observe it in a church building maybe 2 days of the year, and there are lots of people who make at least that many trips (pilgrimages?) to the Hallowe'en store during the now six weeks the storefronts are "temporarily" open.

And look at the displays: they all, in one way or another, danse macabre-ly around the idea that beyond death is . . . something. Something unpleasant, something awful, or something awfully funny? We put on the whole armor of disguise and humor to fend off that which we spend money to shove in our own, let alone others' faces; a Raggedy Ann costume skipping past a skeleton sitting up from a Styrofoam tombstone.

What does it all mean?

Don't count me among the nay-sayers of Hallowe'en and Christianity mixing. Look to the roots of the word itself, the traditions of All Saints, the fiesta of Mexican Day(s) of the Dead with sugar skulls and graveside visits. There is a place for laughing at death, at the Devil himself, because everyone – churched or un-churched – knows that Satan hates being laughed at. No sense of humor at all, that one.

But in absence of any other belief system, Hallowe'en can awkwardly suggest one on its own merits, and a flawed structure it is, muddling zombies and vampyres and various undeads with magic spells and attributing power to wands and purloined skulls and twisted phrases usually stolen from the Mass anyhow.

Hallowe'en isn't necessarily a church, but it can become one if it's all you've got. I enjoyed visiting the Haunted Mansion at Disneyworld, but I wouldn't want to go there every Sunday.

What does how you observe the end of October (or the whole month) tell others about what you believe about death? Ask yourself that; the answer may surprise you.

Boo!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher in central Ohio; tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 10-15

2011-10-14T14:22:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 10-15-11

Jeff Gill

We make the road by walking

___

Walking.

We travel, one step at a time, swinging out our bodies, off balance, into space. If we don't lean forward, push ourselves just beyond where we're stable and secure, we can't stride forward with a leg out to catch us.

Walking. There's a rhythm you have to find, a steady pace, a consistent passage from here into just ahead that becomes a thing in and of itself, the journey.

Antonio Machado, the Spanish poet, wrote "Se hace camino al andar," or "We make the road by walking." That's part of what the community CROP Walk is about, gathering tomorrow at First Baptist Church in Newark at 1:00 pm. "We walk because they walk" is the running theme for this ecumenical effort to respond to the challenge of hunger and famine and under-development for people around the world; local hunger needs are addressed as well, with a quarter of the amount pledged to walkers going to Licking County food programs.

There's also a walk concluding around 2:00 pm at Octagon State Memorial on Sunday, the final mile of the "Walk with the Ancients" which has gone from Chillicothe to Newark now with a third group of pilgrims on the way.

Sunday is the fourth of four "open house" dates annually at the part of the Newark Earthworks found at 33^rd St. and Parkview Rd. Leased for a century to Moundbuilders Country Club, the Octagon and attached circle will be open to the public for general access, and tours from noon to 4 pm.

The walkers of the 60-plus mile trek actually returned to Newark and the OSU campus here in town a few weeks ago, where most of this group are students. Their "final mile" of the actually 72 they travel was saved until tomorrow, when they could enter the Octagon along the path traveled by pilgrims 2,000 years ago. You may help welcome them around 2:00 pm at the Octagon Open House.

From where all did these original builders and pilgrims travel? Some hints come from the archaeological record, and a new exhibit opens this weekend in Columbus at the Ohio History Center which emphasizes both the Ohio Middle Woodland period, also called the "Hopewell Culture," and Newark's place in that cosmos 2,000 years ago.

"Following in Ancient Footsteps" is the theme of this exhibit, and a series of "Faces From the Past" gaze calmly back at you at the entrance to the new area – including the Wray Figurine, also known as the "Shaman of Newark." A person, male or female we don't know, in a bearskin costume, looking into . . . the future? Even as we look closely back through the glass of the display case, trying to see more clearly into the past.

And as we have all these journeys and pathways and stories unspooling around us, there is a movie coming to this area in another week which I hope to see, and I hope you do, too. It's called "The Way," and is a labor of love by Martin Sheen and his son (no, not that one) Emilio Estevez, who has returned to his father's pre-acting family name.

Father and son have gone to Spain, and made a movie about a pilgrimage, to Santiago de Compostela. Sheen plays a man who decides that he needs to make this pilgrim's journey by foot, from the Pyrenees to the Atlantic coast, and into the shrine church that is the goal of those who walk this path, "The Way." He didn't plan on the journey, isn't really sure he wants to do it, but he finds that he must, and he does.

Truly, while I know more about the plot, I'd rather just invite you to go on the trip in your own way, and find out for yourself. But it's double delightful that these events occur all together, for as my friend Brad Lepper has been working as curator of archaeology for OHS and the new exhibit, and on the study of the "Great Hopewell Road" between Newark & Chillicothe these last many years, the metaphor we've both used in trying to explain what the journey might have been for the Hopewell culture has been: Santiago de Compostela.

Wherever your weekend takes you, may you be blessed by the journey, and remember: "Se hace camino al andar," "We make the road by walking."

Or "the Way."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher in central Ohio; tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 10-13

2011-10-07T07:20:00.000-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 10-13-11

Jeff Gill

An Empire By Any Other Name

___

For Christian believers, the challenge of living out your life day to day according to the principles you affirm is called "discipleship." A disciple is a follower of someone, and for a Christian, Jesus is whom you are following.

Let me say right up front that the most straightforward response to living in a violent world as a Christian is pacifism. The examples are there, the teachings are there, and frankly, while living it may be a "heavy lift," the discipleship of pacifism is an easy defense.

There are places, though, where it seems soldiers are not told they must quit their jobs in order to follow "the Way" of the early church, where John the Baptist just tells them to be content with their pay and not use their authority to extort more from civilians. Peter after the Resurrection, in the earliest life of the church, deals with Roman soldiers without ever telling them to quit.

Perhaps the point is that a Roman centurion was as much a public servant in certain settings as he was a warrior. Which is true in today's US armed forces, as well. At any rate, there is Christian tradition & teaching around a cautious acceptance of a role for the military life.

St. Augustine, around the year 400 AD, as the Roman Empire was falling to pieces around him in North Africa, developed something called "Just War" theory. This leading teacher and preacher of the developing Christian faith believed there were circumstances when going to war (jus ad bellum) was justified: if a legitimate authority declares war; if there is a just cause (such as self defense, defending third parties, or to restore order); and for the right intentions, both objectively (to restore peace) and subjectively (from a position of love for those oppressed, and for enemy).

Just war theory also has guidance for when to go to war: It must be a last resort; you must listen to sincere offers to sue for peace; the effort must be winnable; you should exercise proportionality in damage and reaction to enemy damage; your side shall respect treaties and law; and ultimately, you should be sincerely convinced that your side is just.

While in war itself there are guidelines (jus in bello), says Augustine: you shall observe an absolute immunity for the innocent; weapons must be used so as to distinguish between combatants; your methods must be proportional to the threat posed; and finally all the necessary means to this end in the terrible eventuality of war shall respect human dignity to every extend possible in that situation, which practically speaking includes - no torture, no slander, no rape, no poisoning of wells.

That last point about wells reminds us that these guidelines were written 1600 years ago. How might Augustine have changed his outline if he saw airplanes, battleships, remote drones with missiles that strike an enemy from halfway around the world? Proportionality and discrimination in the means of war are both aided at times, and obliterated at others by the technologies of modern war. Some would argue that modern war can never be just by these standards.

What would Augustine have thought about our American empire? Because, like the description or not, that's what we are. In reach beyond our borders, in the projection of power, in the extension of our trade and our culture around the world, I don't think Augustine would find any argument credible to say this country is not, in most meaningful ways, an empire. We can argue that we are a kinder, gentler empire than any that has ever bestrode the earth, but we project power to defend our economic interests and national safety at home by acts of violence abroad.

So what are the ethics of empire? Can just war theory be extended to define what a just empire would look like? I will admit to being pragmatic enough in my theology & philosophy to be very impatient with an argument that says it is impossible to be an ethical empire, just as politically I'm very unimpressed by a starting point of "bring all the troops home." That would only make sense if you simultaneously say "and we're going to end all trade beyond our national borders."

And as Augustine was struggling to describe, there are times when injustice & oppression on a national scale require a response. What hasn't changed over nearly two millennia is the knowledge that such response takes a terrible toll on the individual combatants, the victors as well as the vanquished.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher in central Ohio; tell him your story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 10-8

2011-10-05T15:11:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 10-8-11

Jeff Gill

Oh, Why Bother. (Here's Why.)

___

Let's just sell all the churches and worship in living rooms.

Seriously, I got a bunch of e-mail and comments that were variations on exactly that from last week's column.

Congregations, especially congregations with buildings and staff (clergy and otherwise) and mailing lists, were given a number of ongoing developments to think about last Saturday. Some of you said "Tomaytoh" while others said "Tomahtoe," but a few suggested we call the whole thing off.

Before we dismiss our local, loveable cranks as, say . . . cranks, let's think about that. Why not get rid of the cost and bother and misplaced focus on buildings?

One obvious answer is size. Even a small, struggling congregations has 25 to 40 people a Sunday, and it's the rare living room which has the capacity for that many.

One of the challenges facing church leadership is that not long ago an average Sunday attendance of 70 was enough to sustain a building and a full-time pastor with seminary training. That number has shot up to more like 120 or more if you're talking about a full salary package with health insurance, and that's not even talking anymore about a custodian and secretary.

So churches up to 200 a Sunday in the pews are going to part-time jobs for office staff, building staff, and even for clergy. Meanwhile, if you have "only" 175 per week in worship, you sure aren't going to find even a basement rumpus room in a member's house that will fit you all.

Your fellowship can duck the whole building deal with renting space in a school auditorium or catering space that isn't used on Sundays; some new church starts find an older congregation which is willing to make a deal for Sunday afternoons, and that's very common in Ohio for ethnic congregations of Korean or Hispanic members.

You avoid certain complications with that sort of borrowed space approach, but you pick up new ones. And until you've worked with it, you can't calculate the very real expenditure of leadership & volunteer time spent in setting up and tearing down in gyms or hallways or theaters every weekend. That time and energy comes out of possibilities that you never quite can plumb, but that loss is not nothing.

A truly hard-nosed church building skeptic might say "why not keep establishing house churches, and just never have any one get bigger than can fit, but the growth is in an expanding number of home meetings?" You'll not have an organ or stained glass windows, but you'll have none of the limitations of those walls, either.

Xenos Christian Fellowship in Columbus is built along that model, with a few of their home groups here in Licking County. They argue that they aren't a large church with home groups, but a connection of home groups that occasionally has large meetings.

I have to count myself a rueful pragmatist on church life. You can focus, as a Frank Viola does, on home groups, or you can be a Joel Osteen and celebrate size and expansion as an end in itself. What I see in Christian history are home churches that grew to where they had to purchase a home, keep it looking that way outside, but gut it out inside to create a worship space (you can online search for "Dura-Europos" to see our earliest example).

Once you have social approval, such as under Emperor Constantine in the Fourth Century, you find yourself with an option to set up shop in underutilized basilicas or repurposed temples, and next thing you know you're in a giant physical plant and the report of the trustees is half the monthly board meeting.

So moving into old pagan temples left vacant, bad idea (you'll have to put a new roof on in no time); putting up something bigger than a residential home but smaller than a blimp hanger, good idea (though some pastors have blimp-like ideas about what is a sustainable size).

Rather than wish them gone, I wonder what would happen if we look at our buildings, our real estate, our gathered fellowship -- with all the parking and sanctuary temperature management problems that these imply, and if you consideration led to . . . stewardship.

Perhaps a vital personal faith needs to be tied to the vitality that can, that may, that SHOULD grow from taking seriously a shared obligation: to take care of a classic building, or to carefully select and affirm a staff that's right-sized and well-purposed to your particular fellowship's calling?

In other words, annoying though they can be, you probably need a church more than you think. Big-C church and small-c church alike, building-church or sense of membership and commitment to a shared vision-church. If irritation helps oysters create pearl, what might going to church help you to do?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what (or who) annoys you at church to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 10-8

2011-10-03T23:45:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 10-8-11

Jeff Gill

Oh, Why Bother. (Here's Why.)

___

Let's just sell all the churches and worship in living rooms.

Seriously, I got a bunch of e-mail and comments that were variations on exactly that from last week's column.

Before we dismiss our local, loveable cranks as, say . . . cranks, let's think about that. Why not get rid of the cost and bother and misplaced focus on buildings?

One obvious answer is size. Even a small, struggling congregations has 25 to 40 people a Sunday, and it's the rare living room which has the capacity for that many.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what (or who) annoys you at church to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

2011-09-28T08:44:00.000-04:00

For Winter Quarter 2011

2011-09-15T10:42:00.002-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 9-29-11

Jeff Gill

Why is there a Ron Paul?

___

Politically, I don't usually want to get into politics.

It's too easy to go for the "there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two major party candidates" attitude, yet there's also a perspective which I think we all do well to consider: that our vote for President of the United States may not really be as important as our votes for village council, township trustee, or school board members.

So while I nod at "all politics is local" (whatever is grammatically actually correct), and shrug at "the most important national election ever," I am interested in candidates and narratives.

Looking back, there's always a story arc to follow, one that often seems obvious as well as clichéd in retrospect, but they are wonderfully resistant to predictability looking forwards.

Richard Nixon, the outsider who fought his way into the inner circles of power, but never quite felt like he was truly included, whose insecurities led him to fatal errors. Gerald Ford, the amiable Midwesterner who was a bit out of his depth but married well and made the most of the opportunities that he was given. Jimmy Carter, the rural smart boy who grew up into a know-it-all who actually did know nuclear engineering, but couldn't quite bring that knowledge to bear on face-to-face, human relationships and was tricked by less intelligent, but much cleverer operators in the big city.

Reagan, the actor who grew into his roles and inhabited them so fully he sometimes forgot which were parts, and which were personal experience, but who turned out to have not only learned his lines but did the background research on his own.

The Bushes, father and son, living out a Steinbeckian "East of Eden" scenario with a whiff of the Prodigal, perhaps giving us an uneasy look at how things went after the welcome home party from the skeptical older brother's view.

Bill Clinton, poor boy who strives and achieves and makes good, but brought low by hubris, never quite achieving his full potential. Then there's Hillary – the one national figure who seems to be writing her own story, chapter by chapter, without worrying about stock figures or stereotypes. Love her or loathe her, she's an original.

And then there's Ron Paul. No, I don't think he's going to be president. I doubt if he'd make it long as a Rotary Club president. For his stretch of Texas outback, he's the kind of citizen legislator that we all know, deep down, is what Madison and Hamilton had in mind, with all their messy quirks and contentiousness, ideally cancelling each other out in extremes through the true melting pot designed into the American experiment, Congress itself.

For some, immersed in the politics of the day, Rep. Paul sounds like some old crank utterly out of touch with reality and his district, and what they need him to do in Washington, let alone out on the stump running quixotically for President. But what he sounds like, to me, is Davy Crockett.

Col. David Crockett was a three term Representative from Tennessee, although his reputation is more associated with Texas in the public mind. As Rep. Crockett, he is said to have given a speech on the floor of the House, known to history as “Not Yours To Give,” telling the story of his encounter with a constituent named Horatio Bunce. You can easily find a copy online searching with Crockett and Bunce and the speech’s title. Did events happen exactly as this account puts it? Probably not, but it’s the continuing popularity of the speech that intrigues me.

And when you read that speech, you’ll think you’re hearing Ron Paul. And when you search for it, and see how many websites proudly carry a copy of it, you might see why this story is not just history.

Who will win in 2012? I've no track record to speak of national elections; my own history is one of support and campaigning for folks like Dick Lugar and John Anderson. You'll recall their administrations fondly, I'm sure.

But even as I count out Ron Paul as a credible national candidate, I think the fact that he has the profile he does says something about the story being written politically right now, something about how people are starting to feel about "what Washington can do for you." Sure, air traffic control, national defense, maybe even food & drug regulation (sorry, Ron, you're just wrong there), but federal guidelines that ban bake sales at Granville Middle School? How about "Not Yours To Take."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your political narrative at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 10-1

2011-09-14T09:55:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 10-1-11

Jeff Gill

An Open Letter to Church Leaders

___

Dear church leaders of all sorts, lay and ordained:

I'm writing this to respectfully ask, or suggest, or at least give a heads-up to you, for the consideration of the following list of what are not really possibilities, but almost certain probabilities.

Can you look at your congregation as it is today, and then envision what it means you need to be doing now (not later, not soon, but now) to deal with the following…

Church newsletters in the not-to-distant future will not be viable forms of communication for you. Postal rates will continue to skyrocket, especially for the kind of mailing that we call a "church newsletter." How will you replace that?

People will simply not have money or checkbooks with them when they come to church, especially if they're under the age of 60. How does the offering time in worship work, and what does it do to special appeals, let alone the general fund, when that already developing trend becomes the new normal?

Most people who read the Bible will do so on their smart phones, tablets, or e-readers. How does this impact worship and Sunday school or Bible study time? Maybe not much, or maybe it's an opportunity to create new relationships between parishoners and the Bible itself, but it's a change that, again, is already happening.

(And then what do you present to high school graduates or 6^th graders? Still a "symbolic" hard-copy Bible?)

Your congregation, even above age 65, is starting to abandon landlines. Cell phones are being displaced by smart phones (see Bible note above) which are used more for non-phone call related activities & communication than they are for saying "Hello, did I wake you up?" How do your phone trees and directories work when most congregational communication is happening through Facebook group page postings, or Twitter? (Oh, you didn't know that e-mail, yes, e-mail, is being seen as an "old person" way to communicate?)

What happens to staffing if new federal law says any employee of 12 hours or more a week has to have health insurance? This is a bit more of a stretch, because no one can figure out where federal mandates and state worker comp guidelines are going to go.

Likewise, what happens to your church kitchen if state and county health codes become even tighter on "public feeding" guidelines? Yes, that might well include potluck dinners.

More generally, how does your budget look if a) the parsonage/housing allowance disappears, b) charitable deductions vanish from the tax codes, and c) your parish has to start paying property taxes? I'm not recommending or happy about that (non-profits of any sort shouldn't pay property taxes in my opinion, and I can defend that, but it's a whole column itself), but trends are heading that way. If you doubt me, ask your property committee about "watershed assessments" and look at what we've now integrated into the annual paperwork flow. It's all in place but the final addition of some level of property tax billing on that line, now empty.

None of this is meant as an apocalyptic or crisis-mongering set of questions. Each likely impact will come with nuances difficult to anticipate, but pretty much all of the areas I've noted are changes already percolating into view.

Pretending they aren't happening, or bemoaning their occurrence, is not going to change the fact that things just won't be the same, and that's the one thing that's always been true.

Has your faith community stopped to reflect on these developments, and put together specific strategies for dealing with them? I could go on, but that's enough to chew on through the end of 2011.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's seen a few changes in church life – tell him about yours at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 9-24

2011-09-14T09:04:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 9-24-11

Jeff Gill

My Strong Deliverer

___

One of these days

We all will stand in judgment for
Every single word

That we have spoken

Mac Powell of the contemporary Christian group "Third Day" has become one of my favorite theologians. When he writes and sings lyrics, there are layers below the surface that reward continued prayerful reflection.

"Revelation" is another song whose lyrics just jolted me up out of my seat the first time I heard it, not that it's saying anything preachers haven't been saying for generations.

In the same way, "Trust in Jesus" has nothing really new in it. Call it "the old, old story," but the side of the story that has a cutting edge on it.

One of these days we all will stand before the Lord
Give a reason for everything we've done…

The idea of having to give a reason for everything I've done, even for all I did yesterday, is not appealing. OK, it's terrifying. If this makes no sense to you, feel free to move on to the car ads (but why do you want a new car?).

And no less bracing is the image of having to stand before one wiser and more knowledgeable than me and hear some of the stupid stuff I've thought and said, let alone try to remain upright before an ultimately wise, infinitely powerful One (and to those who don't think anything other than physical decay happens after death: why are you still reading, anyhow? Is it what W.C. Fields said when caught reading the Bible – "I'm looking for loopholes!").

Almost every human culture has some element of "judgment" in it, whether in the next life, or in a returning life as with reincarnation. The idea that the things you do just now have a lasting impact whose consequences are still, in some meaningful sense, yours. In environmental terms, the phrase is "we all live downstream." In a cosmic or spiritual sense, we can't just walk away from our actions.

When people start cracking on Christianity, of whatever denomination, for having "created" guilt, my inner anthropologist says "uh, no." The human condition in folktale, mythology, and legend always tells us that the ratty slippers we throw over the mudbrick wall will come back, that the old man at the crossroads we were so rude to will turn out to be a king, or that a weeping swan can become a glorious princess.

The particular Christian spin on this is called "the Last Trump," the "End of Days," or "Judgment Day." We say, with varying emphases, that our ultimate destiny has something to do with a final appearance before God's presence, "the Great White Throne" next to the crystal sea as Revelation has it.

Jack Chick says it's a movie, but he was a big fan of "This Is Your Life."

Unless you're of the "we're just a meat sack of chemical interactions" persuasion, it's hard to avoid some kind of mental picture like that, whether you're a Bible reader (or Jack Chick tract reader) or not. And the truth is, if I'm judged by any sort of reasonable standard, after one viewing, my story is fit only for the trash, kind of like after watching a DVD of "Ishtar."

And what I've done is

Trust in Jesus
My great Deliverer
My strong Defender
The Son of God

This is why we keep talking about this Jesus fellow. His story, in brief, is to come and stay long enough to make it clear a) he's speaking directly for the Eternal One, b) he will prove it by rising from a shameful, unambiguous death to equally startling, certain new life, and c) he promises to speak for us when we have nothing to say for ourselves.

Thank you, Mac, for reminding me how simple that story is.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your tale at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 9-17

2011-09-12T13:10:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 9-17-11

Jeff Gill

Back to Church Sunday: For You?

___

Tomorrow, Sept. 18, is "Back to Church Sunday."

You may ask, "Sez who?"

Well, it's fairly unashamedly a promotional campaign by Lifeway Christian Resources, a publishing house and Christian bookstore chain that is a ministry of the Southern Baptist Convention. Their materials are used by a wide variety of evangelical and mainline Protestant churches.

This is obviously a win-win approach, since churches want to invite people to come, and Lifeway knows that if more people come to church, they'll sell more Bibles, books, and other media.

Lifeway is also a ministry, and as their president, Thom Rainer points out that in studies, it appears that only 2% of regularly attending worshipers invite someone to come to their church over a year, and over 80% of unchurched people say they are very to somewhat likely to say "yes" if someone were to invite them.

For those as challenged by math as I am sometimes, Rainer helpfully notes a little further on that this means 98% of committed Christians never invite anyone to church during a year. Ouch.

So whatever your denomination, this is a situation that it's good to have backup for, and the "Back to Church Sunday" effort includes a video you may well have already seen on Facebook.

It includes a delightful list of reasons why people don't go to church, and possible answers, including my favorite pairing: Reason – it's full of hypocrites! Answer from an amiable burly pipefitter – there's always room for one more!

The tagline is simple: Invite someone.

So I'd argue (and suspect Thom Rainer wouldn't dispute) that "Back to Church Sunday" is aimed as much inside the church as it is outside. "Invite someone" is an exhortation not to the unchurched, but to the faithful; to phrase a bit differently, and less diplomatically, "Why in heaven's name aren't you?"

There's the tricky conversation that is far beyond any one Christian resource firm or coaching process. It's tricky, but it's awfully simple. Why aren't people who are members constantly WANTING to invite people to church?

Phrased that way, there are a few obvious possible answers. One is: people I meet wouldn't really like it there. OK, so why do you? Is what you like something no one else likes? Huh.

Or, more dangerously, most people I meet I'm not sure I'd want at my church. Urrrgh. Hopefully it's not that.

The usual suspect is the guilty answer: if I ask, and they don't want to, then it will make it awkward for us at a) work, b) bridge club, c) the bar (huh?), or d) in my neighbor's house. Sort of like in high school, where you want to ask someone out, but until you do, it's not like they've said no, but once you've asked, it can't be taken back.

And that's hard. I truly don't mean to mock. There's worrying about looking like "one of THOSE Christians" at work, for whom the only subject of conversation is why you should go to their church (and there's really not that many of them), and there's the simple fear of rejection, which I think is the larger obstacle for most.

So the simple need, and kudos to Lifeway for helping provide some, is for enough motivation to push within us against that adolescent fear of getting a "no," or even a brush-off, from someone.

This is a morning paper, so let me hope that you might just read this, and have an opportunity before the day is over to invite someone, and bring them back to church for this Sunday, and maybe a bit more.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your tale at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 9-15

2011-09-09T14:50:00.000-04:00

Knapsack 9-15-11

Jeff Gill

Steps to nowhere, or from somewhere

___

We laid Robert Thomas to rest a few weeks ago at Centenary.

He was a pillar of the earliest, the 8 am service, and his family is woven back into the history of the village.

Pastor Steve noted that his first visits with Bob and his mother was at their home just past Tannery Hill, one door east of Minnie Hite Moody's house. The Thomas home wasn't built in 1809 with foundation stones from Alligator Mound a thousand years old, but it was where his father practiced the veterinary arts for what seems like most of the last century.

Dr. Thomas is gone, his wife died with her son living there so she could stay at home to the end, then it was torn down as the westernmost part of what became the St. Edward's property. Only the steps up from the sidewalk and a bit of wall remain, but you can see right where the Thomas home and barn beyond once were.

A common refrain at a few recent memorial services I've attended (or presided at) has been the passing of an era, the loss of what once was. "Old Granville" is going and New Granville is hurtling down the newly widened expressway.

Perhaps. There are new faces at parent meetings, or filing variances with the Board of Zoning and Building Appeals, where I realize with shock that I'm now the second most senior member of the panel, even though I feel like the rankest newcomer.

Having a historian's ear, I pick up stories, and being a storyteller at heart, I like to tell them. No doubt I change them a bit, rounding the corners as most talespinners do, and occasionally filing off the serial numbers like a thief (names changed to protect the guilty, and all that).

What I've noticed, though, as I tell my stories, is that those of the Old Granville often start with entering the village as a newcomer: cresting the hill south of town on Rt. 37 and seeing the Swasey steeple for the first time, riding across Clear Run in an ox cart from the east, skirting the valley of Raccoon Creek on horseback.

We all came here, except the Native people, and even there we tell the story of a fluted point 10,000 years old, found below a mound on the edge of today's city limits, a connection to those heroic first explorers, the Indian hunters gently walking across the land in search of mastodon and mammoth, walking the retreating glacier's edge on their epic journey from Asia into a New World from the west.

Today the newest arrivals are likely to come from the west, whether in a taxi from Port Columbus or with a moving van down Rt. 661 or whatever number we're putting on that road for now.

The old, old story of Granville is of an endless parade of new arrivals, and the ones who got here first waiting along Broadway to tell them where the class lists are posted, which flavor of frozen custard is best, or why there's three steps up from the sidewalk into a patch of grass east of town.

Look out, you'll soon be an oldtimer yourself if you're not careful; crackerbarrel and pipe optional.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him an old-time tale at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 9-10

2011-09-09T10:55:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 9-10-11

Jeff Gill

Remembering a Day Like No Other

___

Tomorrow the tenth anniversary of 9-11 falls on a Sunday, and doubtless many churches will include moments of remembrance and prayer looking back on that day.

Later in the day, Sunday afternoon at 4:00 pm, a block east of Courthouse Square, Trinity Episcopal Church will host what's sometimes called a "Blue Mass," a memorial liturgy based on the burial service and communion celebration of The Episcopal Church's "Book of Common Prayer." It is open to the public, but is especially intended for members of the police and fire services, and their family members.

Part of the worship and commemoration is a combined choir, including not only folks from Trinity but also out of St. James Episcopal in Zanesville, St. John's Episcopal from Lancaster, and First Methodist Church here in Newark.

If you are looking for an interfaith prayer service, the Ohio Council of Churches and the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio are convening a gathering in the Statehouse Atrium also at 4:00 pm on Sunday in Columbus. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian groups will participate.

Another combined chorus will lift up a Community Service of Remembrance at 7:00 pm in Swasey Chapel of Denison University, in Granville. Faure's "Requiem" will provide the basic structure for the time of memory and prayer, with 60 community members ready to work together to provide a solemn, yet hopeful note to close the tenth anniversary day.

The performance of the choral work will end with prayers for peace from a number of world religions, and a time for reflection in silence, focused on service to others…a point of unity among the religious traditions of the world.

We come to this point, this grim anniversary, with politics and conflict echoing around the world and causing all of us, I think, to crave some silence along with a few well chosen words. Some say it's been only an escalation of hostility and violence since that terror-stained day, and they grieve the world that was lost.

I believe we should grieve those who died at the hands of vicious criminals, and honor those who ran towards the smoke and flames to serve others, but my grief for the world of September 10^th is fairly limited.

I do not believe God, not the God I worship, wanted 9-11 to happen, or needed it to occur to bring something better out of it. What I do believe God does is work through our pain and our suffering, using the bent nails that we would toss aside to build something better…and when we smash that, God patiently stoops to pick up the pieces and invite us to build again. I believe in miracles, but I also believe that God has chosen some fairly strict criteria in self-limitation for when those may happen, for reasons that are both beyond me, but also make more sense with every passing year.

I know when there are times that I'd like to be able to call on what I might call "supranatural" intervention, God does not respond as I would like. When people jump from flames and suffocating smoke, into a hurtling abyss. When priests ministering to the dying are struck by collapsing steel, killing them as well. When you know, you just know there are stairwells being climbed by gasping men in turnout gear, climbing up, as you watch on TV when the towers fall.

When friends lose their only remaining child to cancer,;when age takes memory and mind and leaves only motion without meaning; when parents turn away from their own children right in front of me, and cannot be convinced to try again to love.

If I were God, I would do things differently, or so I'm saying when I wish things were so. Yet I wonder at what I do not know, or understand, and then I see . . .

That they did run up those stairs, knowing what could, would happen; that arms carried those whose legs had given out beyond the ring of debris; that thousands dug through "the pile" long after any survivor might remain buried; that love shone forth in startling ways like the lights which shone up over Manhattan in earlier remembrances. Reaching towards the sky, into the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

There's still so much sin and brokenness in the world, and I wish God would wipe that away, too, but then what would be left? We again pick up the pieces, and in so doing start to heal our broken hearts.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story of light shining in the darkness at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 9-3

2011-09-01T14:39:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 9-3-11

Jeff Gill

What is a Powwow?

___

This weekend, where Newark and Heath meet, a gathering of Native Americans will take place, called a "Powwow."

On the grounds of the Great Circle, part of the Newark Earthworks, just off to one side of the 2,000 Native achievement, a space for dancing and singing will be set apart.

The host organization, the Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio, has held these gatherings for almost 30 years, with the gate proceeds helping maintain their presence on the south side of Columbus. In that neighborhood where a relocated population of Native peoples came together from a variety of tribal backgrounds, many following work during and after World War II, a woman named Selma Walker put together a community center that is a home for a variety of educational and service organizations, recovery group meetings, and a food pantry.

Her daughter, Carol Welsh, lives here in Licking County with her husband Mark, and she is now the director of NAICCO. The two of them work to manage and promote the center, and they have been continuing the tradition of annual Memorial Day & Labor Day weekend Powwows at the Franklin County Fairgrounds, over in Hilliard.

This year, with the support and co-operation of the Licking County Convention & Vistors Bureau (who staff the museum by the opening of the Great Circle, just off of Rt. 79), and the Newark Earthworks Center of OSU's Newark Campus, they have come to visit Licking County.

The last "official" gathering of Native people on the site to encamp and sing and dance was in . . . 1889. Why 1889? That's because Buffalo Bill Cody's "Wild West Show" was performed inside the Great Circle when it was still the Licking County Fairgrounds, and as a handbill for the show said, the entourage included the "largest delegation of wild Indians ever brought east."

Cody said in the Newark Advocate of the Newark Earthworks that they were "the most wonderful mounds in existence." Sadly, no one asked the Indian contingent their opinion, a group that probably included Sitting Bull himself.

I said "official" because there was a later gathering, and an "unofficial" encampment at the Great Circle in 1992. The Ohio Historical Society, owners and managers of the site since 1933, had approved an archaeological dig to slice a section of the mound to determine the stages of construction, and to try to narrow down the date after which the enclosure was built.

Some Native people were concerned that this act had the potential to disrespect the site, and did not have sufficient input and oversight from their viewpoint, so an encampment sprang up for most of the dig, with archaeologists (full disclosure, including me!) working as Native people from around central Ohio keeping a watchful presence, including a prayer circle.

For some of those Native guardians, this was their first visit to the Great Circle, and they came away from the experience both having heard a bit more about what archaeologists were after (we weren't searching for treasure or bones, but data), and having shared their worldview with respectful listeners (I met people I've gotten to work with for the succeeding twenty years). Relationships with the place, and with people began.

We don't all agree even now, except that the place is important, and meaningful, and a proper setting to reflect on Nature, our lives, and community. At a Powwow, the sound of the drum is meant to give everyone who hears a connection to the heart of creation, and while there will be spiritual perspectives around the circle that don't agree, the heart of a Powwow is respect and thankfulness, to each other, and to the One who created us.

The best way to understand what goes on at a Powwow is to visit one, and all are invited this weekend to the dance circle next to the Great Circle Museum, just outside of the earthwork itself. Grand entry is at 1:00 & 7:00 pm on Saturday & Sunday, and at 1:00 pm on Monday. The charge is $7 for day entry, $13 for a weekend pass, and entry is just $3 seniors & students.

You can come to watch, to hear the drum and the singers, to eat (the food is always good); there are opportunities for everyone to dance when invited by the master of ceremonies, who does a marvelous job of explaining each portion of the Grand Entry. Drum and flute playing contests along with the dancers themselves will give you memories to last a lifetime, and the conversations along the vendor booths may cause you to join in a circle of relationship that goes far beyond even this awe-inspiring site.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he will be in the Newark Earthworks Center booth most of the weekend when he's not giving tours of the Great Circle! After Monday, he will see knapsack77@gmail.com but he will tweet @Knapsack all weekend.

Knapsack 9-1

2011-08-18T15:49:00.000-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 9-1-11

Jeff Gill

A shadow on every clear blue sky

___

One morning at Scout camp, as we walked down to the dining hall for breakfast, another one of the adult leaders looked up at a deep blue, cloudless sky, turned to me and said "Every time I see a sky like this, I think of 9-11."

He's not the only one, is he?

Meanwhile, all around us were young men who were one or two or three years old on that beautiful September day. My own son has only the dimmest memories of watching his parents watching the replay that night at home, not of the attacks themselves and their immediate aftermath.

It's similar to the fact that I really don't recall when Kennedy was shot, but I have distinct recollections of watching the funeral in black-and-white with my quietly weeping mother, seeing John-John salute his father's casket as it passed (yes, I just turned 50, thanks for asking).

Joyce and I were more than three years away from moving to Granville, and she wasn't yet working at Denison, but I was driving to the college from Newark when I began to understand that something had happened that day.

The morning had been taken up with a lengthy board meeting at Second Pres for the jail ministry, and as president there were a number of dangling threads still distracting my thinking as I got into my car, and got on Rt. 16 to meet Dave Ball in Slayter Center before a Granville Ministerium meeting at noon.

So with my mind stuck between two projects, it only slowly dawned on me that while I had WOSU, the NPR station on my radio, I was listening to Peter Jennings of ABC. It wasn't until I got off at Granville Road that I started to wonder about the length of the news story, that was apparently about some kind of readiness drill in Washington, or New York.

It wasn't until I saw Swasey Chapel through the trees across Clear Run that I realized that, quite literally, "this is no drill," and that something unimaginable had not been imagined, but had happened. Today.

And once I parked and entered the lower level of Slayter, I saw crowds packed around the overhead TVs, made up of students for whom the skyline of Manhattan was part of their home landscape, and we watched together as first one, then the other of the World Trade Center towers fell. The murmured conversations came to a halt, then began as a halting attempt to find words which tended, for all of us, to trail off into uncertainty.

Dave and I went on down the hill to First Presbyterian, where our agenda for the day of housing and homelessness got set aside, and we planned a prayer service for that evening, not knowing yet even what we were praying for, other than peace.

I left for home, glad to have had a roomful of pastors to pray with, and to have borrowed the bones of what we planned there, to take back and use to lead a prayer service for the Hebron community. Not six hours later, I stood before as crowded a congregation as I would ever see inside that sanctuary, and leaned on those colleagues from a distance as I led us all in prayer.

We still search for words, and support, as we think about that day, now ten years on.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 8-27

2011-08-18T15:23:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 8-27-11

Jeff Gill

Stupid things I thought ten years ago

___

A bit less than ten years ago, I was wrong.

Yes, I've been wrong since then, too. And before that.

In the wake of the tragic events of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, I was quite certain that one outcome would be a change in the political and social climate.

We had just finished a summer full of shark attack hype and groundless speculation about a young woman who had disappeared in Washington, DC; the Chandra Levy case was then conflated into a rehashing of the earlier intern-related Capitol area news of the previous decade which had soaked up an immense amount of political time and energy with the hem of a "little blue dress."

I thought, and said out loud and in print, that we all would find ourselves being a little more thankful, and little less obsessed with trivia, and a whole lot more committed to the common good, after seeing the drama of September 11, 2001 play out in front of us. We'd heard the sobbing last phone calls from people trapped in the Twin Towers, counted up the steps climbed by first responders up towards their sacrificial doom, and we'd seen the impassive faces of the perpetrators glare back at us as a challenge to our national spirit, and our resolve.

It was such a searing, heart-wrenching experience for Americans, there was no way that it wouldn't turn us towards each other in newly caring, co-operative, compassionate ways. You know, like we've been experiencing since 2001.

Hah, he said ruefully.

Ten years on, and it's tempting to make the same mistake by going in the opposite direction: we're doomed, this is hopeless, never will we learn. But no.

First, churches just can't spend much time worrying about our national culture. 24 hour cable is still trying to scare us into not changing the channel, the political parties want goodies from everyone's pockets to then give to their chosen friends, and no repetition of "We Are the World" is going to change the fact that most pop culture is, was, and always will be largely an endeavor in praise of selfishness.

Fads are almost without exception either the direct product of, or the indirect result from forces manipulating the marketplace to advance a message and usually to make money. Join the fad, and you've signed yourself up to help sell something, one way or another. Fight the fad, and you may well find yourself fulfilling the non-Biblical adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity if they spell your name right."

Second, people of faith have very little reason to expect transformation of hearts stemming from current events. Show me anywhere in the Bible where a major event in the world (deaths of kings, edicts of emperors, invasions by the opposition) triggered a widespread change of assumptions or attitudes. There was a census that seemed to play a role in triggering events, but the census itself didn't count for much.

If souls are to turn, or in the quaint old term "repent," it's only going to happen because someone stands up and points one way and says clearly "this is what's at the end of that road," then points the other way and adds "and there's where you want to be heading, and here's why . . ."

Repentance, "metanoia" in Greek, or simply "turning" is what happens as the result of a vision, clearly articulated, and consciously chosen. We need a gracious gift of awareness wrapped around us that makes the right choice possible, but beyond that grace, there is no chance that large numbers of people will make a course change in the right direction just because of one event in another direction.

Or at least they might for a little ways, but another loud boom from another point on the compass is just as likely to stampede us all back the way we just left.

There are a few hopeful learnings we can gain from the last decade, and some lessons we might gain from looking closely at the incredible sacrifices made that day, in the air and on the ground, in the face of such implacable evil. I want to talk about them in the next couple of weeks, but first I wanted to say this:

I was wrong.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; there's no need to send him more examples of when he's been wrong to knapsack77@gmail.com. He's sometimes wrong @Twitter under the tag Knapsack, too.

Faith Works 8-20

2011-08-15T10:08:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 8-20-11

Jeff Gill

Jesus goes back to school

___

Some began this past week, some are heading off in the next few days, but it's "back to school" for the community.

School supply lists have been checked, and many churches in the Licking County report anxious requests for assistance in getting the full panoply of pencils, markers, notebooks, and backpacks have been at all time high levels.

The commentary I've heard and would pass along with a confirmatory shrug of "it's as good an explanation as I can imagine" is that it's not that things are so much worse, as it is that families aren't seeing any improvements in wages or job stability (many low income families work multiple jobs both at the same time, and through the year, so a month's extension or reduction is often a major issue).

Such families have adjusted their expenses and assumptions down as far as they can, and have borrowed money from family and friends where feasible, and the reality right now is that there's simply no stretch left in the rubber band or the bootstraps. They have nowhere else to turn, especially for paper goods and other housewares which food stamp assistance can't cover.

In that sort of environment (again, I don't know this is an absolute description, it's just what I'm hearing from ministry & social service friends and associates), school supplies can be a source of stress far beyond clothes, uniform or no, or even beyond getting your family fed.

When everything is right on the ragged edge, an unexpected bill is huge, no matter what the size. Hearing that, most of us think about a car breakdown or medical crisis, but school supplies are a once a year thing that can't be covered with hand-me-downs or a loaner from a neighbor. You can argue it's something predictable enough that families should budget for it all year, but it makes sense to me that a budget close to the bone doesn't often consider something like what's on the third grade list for your second grader back in January or March.

A family that considers an $8 pizza a splurge suddenly runs into a $40 or $65 expense in the doldrums of August, and it can feel like the wheels are coming off.

This is why the churches and groups which do a school supply drive are finding themselves both beleaguered, but also blessed. There's a load taken off of a mom who is able to meet her child's needs that's much more than the weight of a fully loaded backpack. It's hope, and a sense that you're not in this struggle alone.

I mention all of this because I know the first couple of churches in my general orbit of connection were completely emptied in short order when they announced school supply assistance. There are many more planning to offer such help in the next couple of weeks, and they may be your church, your congregation's community center, or the folks across the street you do VBS with.

If you hear they are collecting supplies, and you have a chance to pick up an armload of materials when you're at the store, or just need donations to make some targeted purchases to fill up some niches on the lists, they're serious, and the need is very serious.

And seriously: if you wanted to put a Bible at the bottom of those backpacks you were giving out, there's nothing wrong with that . . . and you might have just ensured, with everything else you put in that knapsack, that the parent or child receiving it might just read it in a different light.

Because you have shown them, in a way, that you're willing to walk alongside of them. Which changes everything.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your back-to-school story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 8-13

2011-08-11T14:11:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 8-13-11

Jeff Gill

Lost origins hidden in plain sight

___

Last week I laid out my interest in the architectural & organizational setting of the Harry Potter books in Hogwarts, an imaginary place with some very specific real world roots.

If you visit Oxford or Cambridge or St Andrews in Great Britain, you are visiting both the origins of the modern university system for higher education, and three ancient monastic establishments as well, an architectural vernacular directly reflected in the general layout of Hogwarts itself.

You can easily see at graduation ceremonies the academic robes and mortarboards which point back to medieval monastic tradition, and at a place like Denison University there are a number of official occasions when the faculty wear their robes complete with hoods and other ceremonial headgear (depending on the particular traditions behind the institution where they got their PhDs), all designed to keep the dripping of dank stone ceilings from dampening your head, or your spirit.

Simple black monks robes were part of everyday wear for all undergraduates at one time: Oxford required academic "gowns" on students for attending class as late as the 1960s, and still are mandatory at test taking time or for visiting officials of the university, with gowns for dinner up to individual college tradition. The term "town and gown" has to do with the easily identified distinction between students in black robes and the everyday citizens of a college town.

All of this is because the great educational establishments of Europe began as places to educate clergy; they developed advanced degrees (master of theology, doctor of philosophy) and began to have their own officials parallel to those found in a monastic establishment (provosts and chancellors and deans).

Theology was then known as "the queen of sciences," a comment that would get you a sharp laugh or an angry look in a science department today, wondering what kind of odd joke you're making.

What is still anchored in science & technology today is first the monastic structure of undergraduate degrees; freshman or first-year, sophomore aka "wise fool," junior and then senior, four years leading to a baccalaureate or "bachelor's" degree signifying the "laurel" of honors in learning. Additionally, there is another, even more important element of Christian faith and tradition which supports learning and scientific advancement.

From the 12^th century foundations of learning, there was much debate over the nature of reality, and questions of the Divine Nature which created and maintains it. Much of the ancient world saw nature as capricious, changeable, and constantly in flux, with the only consistency coming from the orbit of the planets through the constellations of the zodiac, or nervously encouraged through our sacrifices to nudge cosmic forces into paths we could predict. Unpredictable outcomes meant that the sacrifices had somehow changed the balance of the cosmos in the wrong way.

Into this hyper-complex, Ptolemaic world of epicycles and wheels within wheels, the theology of western Christendom said "No." The Church said (in Latin, the language which could cross the many national borders and local tongues which fragmented the remnants of the old Roman Empire) that God is consistent, coherent, and wants us to understand clearly how the book of Nature works as much as we were to understand how the Good Book taught us how to live.

So on one hand, scholars began to delve into the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible (with some unexpected outcomes, granted), and on the other, monks and friars began to test Nature, looking for immutable laws which were always and everywhere applicable.

You could argue that it was this commitment to finding Natural Laws which gave the Christian West the basis for their unprecedented leap into science & engineering proficiency that burst into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; that argument continues, but what doesn't hold up at all is the idea that the Renaissance & Enlightenment were entirely movements that occurred in spite of religious faith, let alone in opposition to it.

We do see a split at work in today's world, not only between the scientific worldview and much of what is understood to be a religious worldview of almost any sort, but also between science and the humanities. Some of that division is more apparent than actual, not so much the lived experience of scholars as how it is seen & discussed (I know many religious scientists, for instance), but the problem persists.

Which is where I find it very interesting to replay the Harry Potter saga as a sort of allegory, with magic & wizardry as science & technology. When Harry & Hermione stand in Godric's Hollow and look at two tombstones, each with a Biblical quotation on them, they don't recognize the words as such.

Yet the words speak to them, and they yearn to understand them.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story you love at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 8-26

2011-08-11T11:59:00.000-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 8-26-11

Jeff Gill

A funny name, a fascinating history

___

Every so often, you may find yourself having to explain something to out of town, out of state friends and families.

"Licking County? Really?"

Like many language shifts, the culture and our sense of what's ludicrous, silly, or vaguely off has changed over the centuries.

Over 200 years ago, quite a few Licking Creeks and Licking Rivers were named across the United States. It appears that we are the only Licking County, but the watershed that gave us our name, when we were peeled off of Fairfield County in 1808, has cousins in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

The origin, most folks know, is in salt licks. When you can identify a spot animals gather, you have an edge in hunting. Today some hunters still set out salt blocks to draw game to a particular spot. Salt licks have a potential commercial application in a frontier setting, where salt supplies have to come over the mountains from long distances, and cost accordingly. A local salt supply can be a real boon for a settlement.

Usually, you have less of an exposed area of mineral salts (which would dissolve quickly if exposed, anyhow) than you have a spring with a salt taste, stemming from a geologic source deep below the ground which is carried up by the artesian spring in question. Animals who crave salt in their systems will go out of their way to drink it, just as salty food doesn't taste too strongly salted if you've been out and working up a sweat. The body wants and needs a certain amount of salt, low sodium diets being a modern issue of too much all the time.

So a "Salt Fork" or "Salt Springs" is another indication of pioneer interests, and we have plenty of those around Ohio and beyond. Running right through Granville's own Spring Valley Nature Preserve is Salt Run.

Currently, the Granville Township Trustees, the Granville Recreation District, and some faculty & students from Denison University are working at returning Salt Run to a more natural flow. A low dam and retaining wall are almost all that remain of the old Spring Valley pool, and they are in the process of removal, which will be followed by some careful planting and un-scaping to give the natural plants and animals a chance to return and thrive.

Between the picnic shelter and Salt Run are two low parallel walls of earth. Preliminary research shows that they date to an attempt in 1820 to sluice off some of the Salt Run water and evaporate or cook down useable salt from the creek, which ended fairly quickly when it was determined that the energy it took to reduce salt from solution was not cost effective. There's also another low earthwork further south, deeper in the woods, that has been dated to the Middle Woodland period (c. 2,000 years ago) which may have been related to salt production as well.

During the research on all this, I went back to the question "how did Licking County get named?" The earliest note, preceding many later mentions of a conveniently unchallengable possibility of licks in the "Great Buffalo Swamp" which has been submerged under Buckeye Lake since the 1830s, is in the Journal of Christopher Gist, from 1751.

He enters what is now Licking County from the Coshocton area, cutting across the eastern half of the region, but with more to say, possibly told him by the noted trader George Croghan or one of the other members of his party already familiar with the landscape, that from "Licking Creek about 6 M from the Mouth, are several Salt Licks, or Ponds, formed by little Streams or Dreins (sic) of Water, clear but of a blueish Color, & salt Taste the Traders and Indians boil their meat in this Water, which (if proper Care be not taken) will sometimes make it too salt to eat." (Wednesday 16 January 1751)

Nowadays, the mouth of a river would be the end of it; for the modern Licking River, that's in Zanesville, and six miles up from that barely gets you to Dillon Reservoir, and there's no story that I can find of salt licks or springs near there.

Six miles up from where today's North Fork, South Fork, and the one-time so-called Raccoon Fork come together, as forks of the Licking drainage; six miles up the Raccoon fork of Licking Creek puts you right at where Salt Run empties into the larger stream.

It may well be, then, that when you hike at Spring Valley Nature Preserve, you are walking near the source of Licking County's name itself!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 8-6

2011-08-03T15:55:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 8-6-11

Jeff Gill

The Boy Who Lived, Come To Die

___

To say that Harry Potter is a Christ-figure is not exactly a stretch at this point.

I don't believe I need a "spoiler alert" anymore to note that Harry Potter dies for others in the final movie, eighth of that series, seventh of the books.

And yes, there's a resurrection stone involved (or is that a Resurrection Stone?), but I'll leave it at that for the five of you who haven't made it to see the movie yet.

As with Jadis, the evil White Queen of Narnia, there's a nasty glee in Voldemort's noseless face, upon finding a point of vulnerability in goodness, which turns out to have hidden deep within that wound a possibility of transformation and inversion which their greed and selfishness kept them from seeing.

For Aslan, the allegorically exact Christ-figure of the Narnia books (and movies), it was the revelation that when a willing victim presented themselves blameless as the blood ransom for a traitor, as did Aslan himself, he knew that "though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know... the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

For Voldemort, there was the unexpected outcome of someone, out of love, throwing themselves in front of his Killing Curse. The rebound set in motion the plot of all seven volumes . . . and at the end, has the Dark Lord learned anything? Nope. He's so infatuated with technique, in love with his skill and his own magnificent self, that he can't see how selfless love confounds his charms.

Is Harry meant to be Jesus? I'm certain I speak for J.K. Rowling when I say absolutely not. But if you look at most beloved works of narrative art, whether books or movies or even many songs, there is a pivotal figure of sacrifice and transformation, whether it's Syndey Carton in "A Tale of Two Cities," Neo in "The Matrix," or Jean Grey in "The X-Men." The Christ-figure is one of the central plotlines of Western storytelling, just like the ever speeding-up assembly line is a central plot device in TV sitcoms ever since Lucy & Ethel worked at the chocolate factory.

What fascinates me is not so much the ways Harry Potter carries the mark of life & death on his body, but the symbolism of the place where he goes to be transformed himself. I refer, of course, to Hogwarts.

The boarding school to which all the young students of witchcraft and wizardry are sent is somewhere in the Cumbria-Scotland borders, with a deep loch and dark woods and a rocky promontory on which is set . . .

Well, is it a castle? Not exactly. There's not much of traditional castle strongpoint architecture to Hogwarts, as the students and faculty realize in their great battle with the Death Eaters. Hogwarts, frankly, is an old monastery, with a church and refectory and chapter house and cloisters and dormitories all tangled around each other on an isolated perch.

And that pensieve. C'mon, folks: you don't have to know much of anything about art & architecture to see that it's a baptismal font. A vessel in which you can reconcile past and future, where time and truth come together.

I could go on in this vein, but my main interpretation is this: I'm not saying I'm telling you "what Rowling really meant," but there's a way to read this story that is so comprehensive that I have to say this must have had some kind of place in her subconscious as she wrote.

In sum, magic is science & technology. In the wizarding world, and in our own, there are those who quickly and readily speak the involuted language of engineering, mathetmatics. Others may not have the knack, but hard work and support can get them there. Either way, there are those who understand how a piece of plastic that looks like a half empty gum packet holds the entire contents of the Library of Congress, and there's all the rest of us.

The world of science has its own traditions and rituals, and is woven into almost every element of our world, but the vast majority of it is effectively invisible to almost all of us. And this inner cosmos of science & technology grew out of the great colleges & universities (Oxford, Cambridge, & St Andrews foremost among them all, let alone in Great Britain), which are themselves outgrowths of a monastic tradition that is all but forgotten, except when we don gowns and mortarboards for academic rituals.

(Continued next week!)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story you love at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 7-28

2011-07-22T10:44:00.001-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 7-28-11

Jeff Gill

Some Things Change, Some Things Don't

___

This week our local Boy Scout Troop is off to summer camp. Huzzah for Troop 65 and Granville Kiwanis, their chartering organization!

There's a number of images that some of us might have about what BSA camping looks like, but if you've not been involved for years, or only have some loose, media-related scenes in mind, you may have the wrong picture.

My troop loaded up on an old school bus, a not uncommon way for Scouts to roll into camp in the 1970's. Troop buses, sadly, with their distinctive paint schemes and refurbished back ends with shelving and racks for gear, are a thing of the past: even the most well-funded troop can't afford the liability insurance, and they've almost all been retired across the country from sheer practicality.

Ask today's adult leaders if they miss the adventure of looking for a part on an antiquated school bus from a breakdown that always happens in a wonderfully awkward situation. Not so much.

What you may envision is a group of lads trekking into wilderness, chopping down trees and building their entire site out of lashings right down to the latrine – if they don't get picturesquely lost as do most pseudo-Scout groups in movies.

"Leave no trace" has been the watchword for some years in the BSA, actually, and long-term (five or six night) camping, while an annual part of every troop's outdoor program, is either at a Scout camp like Licking County's own Camp Falling Rock, a Scout reservation in a nearby state, or a high adventure program around the country like Philmont, which is a whole different proposition (and another column).

So not only are the young men of T-65 going to an established camp with a summer staff and designated troop camp sites, even latrines are changing. Groundwater regulation means that the old pit KYBO's are being phased out in many areas, while composting toilets are more and more common. (The legend is that many early Scout camps used coffee cans from the Kybo brand, hence the name sticking to the outdoor outhouses and "kybo tape" being…you guessed it. Now they say it's an acronym for "keep your bowels open," but you know "the rest of the story.")

Adult leadership for our 34 Scouts will be five Scouters; each troop brings their own unit leadership, while the total camp of some 300 has a site staff of 35-40 for dining hall, program areas, aquatics/lifeguards, etc.

Every adult present at a residential camp has to go through what's called "Youth Protection Training," an excellent program that can be done online and must be repeated every two years. There is additional training for various unit roles, let alone for summer camp staff.

Plus each youth & adult must have a physical form (three pages, lots of detail along with a copy of the insurance card), and then there's the "tour permit," a document that is filed with the council office as to the insurance and safety status of each driver. We're going into Pennsylvania this year, so a tour permit out of county is absolutely mandatory.

For all the modern trapping of paperwork and safety, the Scouts will still swim and canoe in a lake, sleep in tents (even if made of space-age fabric and not mildewy canvas), build fires (in approved locations), and burn food which will be eaten enthusiastically. Much has changed, and yet much is still what Baden-Powell and twenty-two British boys did on Brownsea Island in the summer of 1907.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and an assistant scoutmaster for Troop 65. Tell him your camping tale at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 7-30

2011-07-19T14:28:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 7-30-11

Jeff Gill

Now is the acceptable time

___

Less than 150 days away.

No one will thank me for pointing this out, I know.

Christmas is less than 150 days ahead, and every so often I like to mention that in July or so, because if you're going to get a grip on the ears of this rough beast and turn it, like the young boy riding the tiger, you need to start now.

If you are perfectly content with how you and your household celebrate Christmas, in décor or gifts or traditions, you may feel free to skip ahead to the ads or the Sports section, and congratulations. . . I think.

For many, there's a growing discontent through November and December, sometimes erupting earlier in September when the first decorations show up in stores. We don't quite like how we're celebrating the occasion, not just in "the culture" (whatever that is) or at church, but in our own lives: the area we should be able to best control, and yet end up feeling most out of control there, at home.

July & August, pastors and church leaders know, is when the mold is carved, when the ingredients are mixed, when all but the final coat of paint is applied. Cantata music is picked and ordered, pageant scripts are considered, costume parts and craft elements are hunted down like a nimrod looking for his wild boar in the woods for the wassail feast.

In a more inobtrusive way, we're doing that as we start to idly think, while browsing catalogs or strolling past storefronts, "Hey, I'll bet Millie would like that for Christmas." And so the rut begins to be worn.

Before the rut goes so deep the wagon can't turn, how do you get control of the applecart? Tomorrow I get the chance to preach on this, at least a bit, at Centenary UMC in Granville (8, 9:20, & 11, thanks for asking), and I have some suggestions that are relatively painless and potentially productive. You don't have to swear off all gifts, all decorations, every party, just to get your seasonal celebration back on track.

There's the ever-popular "remember that Jesus is the reason for the season," but there's two problems with that approach to redeeming Christmas cheer. One is, it doesn't work very well. Years of putting that slogan on bumper stickers and bookmarks make it clear that it works for those for whom it already works, and just puts a cherry top of guilt on the whole teetering pile of non-Jesus-y Christmas stuff. Or to put it another way, if it was going to work, we'd see it by now.

The other problem with "Jesus – the reason for the season" is that, as Christians (I'm talking to us'ns, now), we know that Jesus is the reason for every season, and should be celebrated as having entered our world and our lowly estate on every day. Lots of Christmas season sermons remind us of exactly that; Jesus was born that we might live, and that's gift, pure and simple.

So why celebrate Christmas at all? Is making it "a day" let alone "a season" actually a problem in and of itself? It can be, but not necessarily. Our Puritan forebearers suspected it was going to end up like this, and if you read the early Licking County histories (before the return of Civil War veterans with those wacky trees they wanted to put in the parlor, like the fellows in Siegel's regiment had in their camp) – there were basically no Dec. 25 celebrations to speak of here in the early 1800's, other than among German Catholics, and even that was low key.

Most of what we call Christmas celebration is less Christian than it is a cultural acknowledgement that winter is hard, and long dark nights are depressing, and we need some feasting and lights and gift-giving just to get through it. When you start to separate out the purely cultural from the faithful, it gets a bit easier to figure out what you must do from what you want to do . . . and then sort out what you have to do, or if you do a'tall.

Sort it out from your angle, but start sorting now: what kind of Christmas do you want those around you to remember in years to come? Making memories is a perfectly reasonable frame to put around your own picture of that baby in his manger.

Just don't let the frame overwhelm the portrait you're putting on display for others to see. If they only see the frame, it's the wrong choice!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your Christmas memory at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 7-23

2011-07-19T14:00:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 7-23-11

Jeff Gill

What is familiar may not be reassuring

___

On vacation last week, my family went to church. No shock there, I trust.

This is something I regularly commend to anyone who will listen: I've heard marvelous feedback from young people and seniors alike over the years, in parish ministry and through this column, in how one's own experience of worship is seen afresh by way of going to a service where you're a stranger.

What's different, even in small ways, can help us get to grips with what's important. We've got that well-known travel writer Soren Kierkegaard to remind us that worship is fundamentally conducted for an audience of one, that is, God (not a program put on for the benefit of the congregation).

When we go to a different service, we don't have any reason to expect things to be the way we're used to, or oriented around our tastes, and when those experiences are subverted, we can get a bit more real about how we tend to want worship to focus on us, not God.

On the other hand, we need a service that helps us focus on God, so our choices and responses are part of the picture.

Our experience last week, though, surprised me in a way that doubles back on these questions. We were in a tourist-oriented, resort-ish community, with a very young demographic on the streets and behind the counters, but probably an older skew if you came back in February. Either way, the surprise in the service was . . . how unsurprising it was.

From the moment we stepped off the sidewalk through the red doors, there was nothing unfamiliar at all. Granted, we were in a neighboring Midwestern state, even if it was a long drive away and there were large boats down the block with masts higher than the steeple. It was a mainline Protestant denomination with which we're familiar, and there was much that would have led you to assume most of what made up the service.

But it was just striking how we could have been sitting in a pew, singing these songs, looking at the make-up of the parishoners around us, anywhere right here in Licking County. Drop this church in Kirkersville, St. Louisville, or out towards Croton, and they would have fit right in, let alone if you'd walked out the doors not to fudge shops and beachwear stores, but to Perry or Knox Counties.

There's something very comforting and (duh) familiar about singing "How Great Thou Art" or "In the Garden" when far from home, and the prayer time joys and concerns, with a few names changed, are almost certainly the ones you would have heard along Rt. 13 or down Church St. in Newark.

Yet the question I think we could ask is: why? Why would an order of worship, and even more so the style of worship, be so identical, across eight hours of driving or four decades of churchgoing? And how is that working for us?

To which many sigh wearily, and reply "so the answer to share the gospel is to do everything differently? And if so, how often do we have to change? And to what, exactly?"

Actually, not at all. What I think the problem is has to do with not so much our worship patterns, but our understanding of what church is for, let alone worship. If a church is doing mission that is deeply engaged with their local context, and that missional life is woven through the entire life of the church, then it won't be a question of conformity to culture, but a healthy interchange from the everyday work of the church back into the worship life itself.

I think of a Franciscan parish among the Navajo/Dineh people, where the art and images of the culture were shaded into the familiar stations of the cross and window art. There's a community center down in Buckeye Lake where lighthouses and lake scenes that tie directly into Bible stories fill the worship space. A church plant we occasionally visit when in a suburban area where we have family has literally built its sanctuary into an office park, the horizontal lines of the space echoing the area in a way that reaches out and embraces the world where they are called to serve.

What have you seen while worshiping on the road, whether familiar or unexpected, or even unexpectedly familiar? And what does it say to you about worship?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your wayside worship experiences at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

2011-07-13T10:48:00.003-04:00

Faith Works 7-16-11

Jeff Gill

Where Would Jesus Vacation?

___

Empty pews often mean vacationing families this time of year, as folks leave their familiar scenes of church & community to try out a new landscape, and get some "relaxation" in.

The scare quotes go 'round "relaxation" because so many of us work hard at our leisure, cramming in experiences and sidetrips and meals and such to the point where we come back from vacation exhausted.

So for those of you who manage to re-create yourselves in your recreation, and get down on your downtime, congratulations. That seems like a worthy goal, alongside of learning about new places & gaining a variety of experiences. Growth and broadening are good for mind, body, and spirit, but if you run around to do the same things you do back home, just in different chains or under new nameplates, but within shouting distance of a beach (that you rarely see), then I'd speak up for just finding a place to veg out and relax.

Christians might find themselves asking, whatever type of vacation experience they pursue, the classic question: What would Jesus do? The ol' "WWJD?" query.

Or reframed here as "Where would Jesus vacation?" Or just: would he?

Well, yes – that's the simple answer. The details are a bit more challenging.

Over and over in Mark & Luke's gospel accounts, Jesus takes some time "in a place apart." These mentions are usually tied specifically to the words "for prayer," but the overall sense is clearly for renewal and restoration.

There's a whole 'nother column about the value & place of spiritual retreat, which is rarely identical to what any of us mean by vacation, but there is some overlap.

When you look at Jesus' travels, though, you find a man who regularly goes to Jerusalem (yes, for Temple ceremonies, but he clearly goes more frequently than even piety of the day called for), and also ends up in unexpected places like Caesarea Philippi, also known as Banias, or the place of Pan.

Banias, known during Roman rule as Caesarea Philippi, was a bit of a Las Vegas. It was a resort community around the springs of the headwaters of the Jordan, populated with many myriad shrines to a plethora of pagan gods. It made a great backdrop to Jesus' question to Simon soon to be Peter, "who do you say that I am?" but it was an odd spot to find an observant Jew.

Then there was the road trip to Sidon & Tyre, where the notable tale of the encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman occurs ("even dogs can eat scraps from the table" she says to the alien rabbi from whom she seeks healing). However you read the gospel record, Jesus was not just a homebody, nor did he only travel on church business.

The wider tradition suggests that during the so-called "hidden years" between twelve and thirty, Jesus might have journeyed to the East, perhaps as far as India, where Hebrew traders had outposts in that era; British lore has long held that a young Jesus came with relative and businessman Joseph of Arimathea to see the tin mines of Cornwall, and either with him or inspiring Joseph to return after the Resurrection to establish Glastonbury.

As William Blake wrote: "And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England's mountains green:/And was the holy Lamb of God,/On England's pleasant pastures seen?"

At any rate, it doesn't seem too far out on a limb to say that Jesus would have, did have the occasion and opportunity to take a break and a trip from time to time. It wasn't all carpentry in the shop in Nazareth and then a relentless round of preaching for three years across Galilee and Judea.

What is clear, though, is that you don't stop praying or maintaining your spiritual practice on vacation. In fact, vacation might well be the time to focus on and refine your discipline to seek communion & communication with God.

That might be the best souvenir you can bring back.

Meanwhile, I hope many of you try out a worship service somewhere on vacation, and I'd love to hear from some of you about what you learned about your own services and practices back home, through your tourist's eyes on the road.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; yes, he's on vacation this past week – how could you tell? Tell him your story of worship on the road at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 7-14

2011-07-07T14:30:00.000-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 7-14-11

Jeff Gill

Might Have Beens & Could Still Imagines

___

When someone is excited about a book they've read and want everyone (EVERYONE!) to read it, too, they can be quite tedious.

I know, I've been that person.

So let me try a different approach.

Imagine the entire Columbus metro area, including Granville & Newark & Lancaster and all around, in the wake of a horrible bio-disaster. A new infectious agent shows up out of nowhere, and kills off 95% of the population, sparing among the few a disproportionate number of the very young, and the very old.

Horrible, but not tedious, right?

Let's carry on the thought experiment by imagining that the area is largely sealed off from further interaction with anyone else for about a generation, call it 21 years.

After that interval, come back, whether to downtown Columbus or Granville itself. What do you find?

Well, probably no OSU or Denison – remember, the mystery disease left mostly the young & old in the 5% survivors – and other civic institutions are likewise obliterated. The buildings themselves: do you think much of the utility infrastructure did well over two decades? Maybe in a few isolated pockets, but most of the power plants and transmission systems would break down and not be repaired.

Schools would exist, but in a radically revamped form, given the survival priorities of the remnant and the strange new skew of demographics. Government, ditto, with a structure probably barely recognizable from pre-outbreak days. The flag, the pledge, witness oaths in trials, but otherwise . . .

In a nutshell, this is what Charles Mann tries to help us understand in his book "1491," now out in paperback. He gives a continent spanning overview of current research on Native peoples, from South America through the Hopewell culture of the Ohio valley, and makes his case that our sense of what "Indian" life was like both at and pre-European contact is radically warped.

What he shows us is a growing understanding among historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists that there were very, very early contacts (DeSoto comes in for some deservedly rough treatment) right on the heels of Columbus & 1492, then a gap, before the first so-called "contact narratives" are written.

During that crucial twenty-or-so year period, the first few transmissions of smallpox, influenza, measles, even the "common" cold, tore through the Americas devastating populations of Native peoples. Kill rates of 90 to 95% are looking more and more likely.

More significant from the cultural studies perspective is that we think we know what the continent "looked like" or how Indian nations "worked" & "behaved." We do not, because what is first written down is almost always a description of what American Indian life looked like after the "great dying" (as some Native accounts record it), and some time after, to boot.

While I'm obviously most drawn to the attempts to put Hopewell & Mississippian cultures of the Ohio Valley & Great Lakes in context, some of the richest material is looking at the Amazon River basin, long thought to be always unoccupied by people other than the most primitive subsistence tribes.

The growing new understanding of how Amazonian cultures worked & shaped their environments before 1491 is stunning, and holds hints of how much more we have to understand about Middle Woodland peoples of our area "before the dying time."

And the paperback of "1491" is out now, because Mann is publishing his newest book, titled "1493," next month. I cannot recommend these books too highly.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and a program assistant at the Newark Earthworks Center of OSU-N; tell him about your summer reads at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 7-9

2011-07-05T23:33:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 7-9-11

Jeff Gill

A Basket of Summer Fruit

___

In the eighth chapter of Amos in the Hebrew Scriptures, also known in the Christian Bible as the Old Testament, there is an ancient image with immediate relevance.

Amos, that dresser of sycamore trees and charcoal burner, a layman of the countryside, had a vision that the priests of the Jerusalem Temple apparently couldn't see. It was of "a basket of summer fruit."

They didn't have tomatoes in Israel of old, but summer fruit is close enough. Large, thin skinned, juicy, filled with taste and a savor that is only good for a season.

The thing about summer fruit is that it doesn't last, it can't last.

We have tomatoes year round now, but at the cost of thick skinned, solid jacketed, nearly tasteless globes of tantalizing red with the flavor of white insulating foam. That's not summer fruit.

A basket of summer fruit is a beautiful thing, but by just sitting there you can feel it: ripeness will soon turn to rot. Seasons turn, insects erupt, mold appears. You can put them up in jars or cook them into another dish, and it usually makes sense to just slice them and layer them with mozzarella and fresh basil leaves, with a touch of balsamic vinegar, but if you try to admire them on the counter for too long . . .

Amos goes on to explain that the vision God gave him said something about the land, the nation, the people of his day. They were themselves "a basket of summer fruit," lovely to behold just now, for a moment, but soon and very soon, things will change.

There is rot inherent in the rosiness, decay underneath the deliciousness, and doom about to ooze out of the very heart of what seems like hope and promise.

This is the vision that troubles many in faith communities today. It is a vision of America as "a basket of summer fruit," overripe and ready to burst. On all sides of the political spectrum, there's concern over how sustainable the American way of life really is; from the left, dependence on oil and consumption lights up Vegas and The Strip, but heads us towards an inevitable rupture. From the right, indifference to family structure in general, and to moral principles in public life opens up a seam that can pour out the vitals of our society across the countertop, leaving the husk fit only for the trash.

Prophetic visions, both, tied back to an ancient image of God speaking through prophets to offer the nation a different way.

The dilemma among many church bodies is that these not-dissimilar visions often end up in conflict, arguing about the right political path for believers to support. Progressives call for increased taxes on higher incomes to pay for more investment in alternative energy investigations and social program supports, while traditionalists cry for stronger statements and stricter laws on behalf of the values they understand as sustaining for us all.

Where I see an intersection between Amos' vision and both Christian factions is a reminder of the importance of sustainability. A society based on "whatever works for you" has little future, nor does one rooted in "I've got mine, good luck getting yours."

What all political efforts in faith communities could do better to reassert is that the believers' understanding sees no earthly quality or situation as truly sustainable in the long, the eternal haul. Over time, only God is sustainable, since God sustains all creation.

So any position that doesn't start and to some degree come back around to end with God is almost certainly unsustainable in an ultimate sense. Neither green technology nor constitutional amendments are going to last forever.

Like most politics, church politics can easily lapse into the short term approach, and the winning strategy for the current election cycle. What congregations & denominations can best find unity around that will last is by proclaiming something, or someone, who is going to endure from yesterday, through today, and well beyond tomorrow.

If you've read Hebrews in the New Testament, you know where my thinking is going. Tomorrow I plan to preach this out a bit further at Central Christian in Newark at 8:30 & 10:30 am.

Meanwhile, pray for all those off at work to the many denominational & jurisdictional meetings taking place through the summer. May they find an eternal word to proclaim!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; no, he's not going to General Assembly this year. Tell him about your take on church politics at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 6-30

2011-06-23T11:46:00.000-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 6-30-11

Jeff Gill

The Knapsack Uncomprehensive Plan – 50 cents

___

Oh, dear.

If you're going to write opinion and perspective in the public press, these moments come from time to time.

What at least the handful of columnists I have talked to all agree is our least favorite part of the work (other than deadlines) is when we have to disagree, out loud, with friends.

There are a number of people I consider friends on the various panels that have been working on our Granville area "comprehensive plan," and I know them all to be hard-working persons of good will who mean only the best for our lovely and lively community.

If you want to see some of the evidence of their diligent efforts, you can go to the village website: http://www.granville.oh.us/draft_comprehensive_plan/

But I must be candid if I'm to be a columnist with integrity. I'm massively underwhelmed. We've spent a great deal of money to hire people to come in as a design consultant firm and speak the obvious to us, at length.

(Cue chorus from the balcony: we've heard you preach, Gill. That's the pot calling the kettle cast iron!)

Right. A municipal comprehensive plan, like a zoning code, exists in many cases to define and refine the obvious, because of those charming folks known by the blanket term "developers." I've written elsewhere on this, but basically, I mean them no ill, either: developers develop.

Since their goals are to a) develop, in order to b) make a buck, their interest in long term community health is often not what it could be. They often say c) we care about this community, and that's why we want to do a) – to which I refer you back to b). Anyhow.

If you don't lay out this stuff, developers will cry foul if you try to stop them from putting a pink five story pachinko parlor in the middle of downtown, saying that you let a two story tan building go in down the block, so ipso facto and Q.E.D. (in legal terms). Hence the obtuse & lengthy articulation of the apparent.

None of which makes me feel better reading pages and pages of "if wishes were horses we'd all ride to town." For the fifty cents it costs to get a Sentinel, I'd propose this simple plan:

I. Downtown Granville shall look generally like something Norman Rockwell arguably might paint. No element of this plan shall be construed to prevent the streets from being turned to a variety of public uses, which reminds everyone from truck drivers to local folk in a hurry that public purposes are why we have a village core in the first place. Retail also has a place, as evidenced by many Rockwell works which can be consulted as to drug stores & soda fountains & small, cramped police stations.

II. The residential part of the village surrounding downtown shall faintly resemble a Thomas Kinkade "artwork." Additions, outbuildings, & solar panels are only allowed if they do not block the slanting rays of "the golden hour" from charmingly illuminating the streetscapes.

III. Denison University is understood to be a vital engine of innovation, diversity, and economic energy for the village, and hence will be cut some slack, understanding that the closer to the downtown, the less slack shall be cut, but don't take it personally.

IV. Business is icky, but necessary, and we'll find a place for you somewhere, ideally way out there at the edges, unless you can masquerade somewhere on the Rockwell-Kinkade spectrum.

V. The farther from Main & Broadway you get, the bigger we expect house lots to become, until the lawns become golf courses or farms that have no odor to speak of (or smell of).

That would work for me, but they tell me it's not legally enforceable. Plus, I think roundabouts are kind of cool, plus they work if you give 'em a chance. It's probably just as well I wasn't on the committee.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's on the BZBA for the village, which should probably worry you. Tell him your worries at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 6-25

2011-06-23T11:17:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 6-25-11

Jeff Gill

Let the Whole World Sing

___

Just to catch up anyone who is just joining us: hard though it may be to believe, but not that long ago, if you couldn't speak with enough volume & projection to be heard in the back row of a large, high-ceilinged room, you had no future as a preacher.

Or a politican, for that matter.

The flip side is that a smart, thoughtful person with a soft voice might not be heard in more ways than one, and that a buffoon with leather lungs could have a career on the stump or in the pulpit.

Public address systems didn't start getting used by national figures until 1914, Warren Harding got it really going as President in the 20's, and Aimee Semple McPherson was a pioneer woman preacher in 1923 California in no small part because she had both radio and microphones in her Angelus Temple.

For the average congregation in the Midwest, though, in a 60 by 40 foot sanctuary with a 20 foot ceiling, the bias towards "elocution" as a job skill for preachers still held through World War II. In the 1950s, small PA systems became affordable, and then they became necessary (all those returning vets who stood near 16 inch guns going off might have had something to do with it, too).

Organs, both pipe and electric, have their roots in the preamplification age, because it was the accessible technology that got notes "broadcast" enough for all to hear and occasionally join in through a vast, cavernous, stony space. Early Lutheran churches in Europe and Anglican cathedrals in England were where the technology of full-size pipe organs really took off, because that's where congregational singing and lay choirs began to be central to Christian worship (hat tip, choirmaster Johann Sebastian B.).

Now we think of pipe organs as quaint, and technology means praise bands, or worship teams, or whatever you call them. Yes, I know, some call them the Devil's spawn, others say the high point of their week.

Modern sound technology means volume is now no problem, for speakers or music alike, correct?

Ah, but no. Now our problem is: how loud should it be?

A small footnote – I have the pleasure of preaching tomorrow morning, 10:45 am, at the Church in the Mall. You don't get much more contemporary than a church in one of the frontages inside Indian Mound Mall, and they do, indeed, have a rockin' praise band with a full playlist of Christian contemporary music (often known as CCM for short).

The truth is, I'm a fairly half-hearted fan of CCM. It's OK, but left to my own devices (you can go to Pandora and click Sycamore Lodge Broadcasting if you doubt me), I'm more of a Mahler and Rachmaninoff and Carlos Nakai kind of guy, with the stray Jars of Clay or Third Day tune mixed in.

My point being that CCM is not something I welcome because of my own tastes, but because I see who is responding, and it's the younger adults who have been so long absent from Sunday worship. Unchurched or dechurched folk who don't actually hate hymnbooks, either, but find that dirge-y tunes sung slowly just accent their already alienated sense of what "church" means to them.

CCM is a tool, and will no doubt be dated and quaint (and held onto past its sell-by date) in a few more decades. As a tool today, it's working quite well in certain settings.

But how loud should it be? Some point out, with some accuracy, that the "live your life with earbuds implanted" generation may expect a volume level somewhere around Nigel's infamous "turn it up to 11 on the dial." I know I once spent a long night ten feet from a wall of speakers for Marshall Tucker Band and the Outlaws that probably took a whole range off my hearing, and would hope for younger listeners that they realize that making your ears bleed today can lead to decades of "say what? I can't hear you!" down the line.

What contemporary worship does need, in my not so humble opinion (IMNSHO for you Twitter fans out there), is actually more diversity. We need bluegrass worship services, acoustic worship services, and yes, techno-rave services even if I may not be a good choice to preach for them.

But in general, I hope worship leaders & sound techs alike keep one thing in mind: if you can't hear the person you're standing next to sing, at least a bit, it's too loud.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; yell a question to him over the music at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 6-18

2011-06-14T14:49:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 6-18-11

Jeff Gill

A Speaker Used To Be a Person

___

Last week I talked about those thrilling days of yesteryear, when air conditioning was not the norm in worship spaces, and for a preacher to step to the pulpit in shirtsleeves could make the wire services (now there's another anachronism, along with "ring you up," or "spin a record").

What churches often did in the summer, and a few still do, is a) move the service up a little earlier, before the sanctuary walls started picking up the heat of the day, and b) open the windows.

Hah. Today, whether your office, your child's school, or likely your church, the odds are the windows couldn't be opened if you wanted to.

What created an added challenge upon opening windows, aside from bugs flying in (since stained glass windows with hinged bottoms tend to be nearly impossible to screen), was the sound.

The town I grew up in had a cheerfully heathen motorcycle lover who, beyond doubt, made a point around 11 am of driving a loop past all the downtown churches, twice, before heading out into the more welcoming countryside. What was a hushed sanctuary for most of the year, swathed in oak and maple and maroon carpet, interrupted only by organ music and resonant preacherly intonations, would gain for June, July, & August the punctuation of dogs barking, birds singing, and the occasional fire truck (plus that 11 am motorcycle).

My mother's hometown had a train track a block away, and there was occasionally a special that would run through on Sunday mornings, and there was an odd moment of some duration when everyone, organist, preacher, all & sundry, would simply pause, and look about smiling as the clanks, shrieks, and clacka-clacka ding-ding-ding would fill the auditorium for a time . . . until the sound would fade, and the sermon would pick up as if nothing had happened once the gates swung back up with a thunk and the warning bell ceased to ring down at the crossing.

The thread through all of this was: no microphones. Electronic amplification was, as far as I can discern, a secondary outcome of radio technology, and didn't start getting used in this country at all until around 1913. Theodore Roosevelt is one of the last speakers to address a packed Madison Square Garden without amplification, in 1912 (all this is discussed in the opening of the eminently readable book on Roosevelt's later life by Candice Millard, "The River of Doubt"); when he returned two years later from his subsequent trip to the Amazon, although weakened he still wanted to tell the story of his explorations, so he booked the largest room in Washington, DC, Constitution Hall. His hour and a half lecture, delivered in a weary, softer tone of voice than the capital was used to hearing from Roosevelt, was still entirely without amplification.

In the 1920s, political speechmaking changed dramatically, starting under Ohio's own Warren Harding. Radio addresses became more common, reaching a national audience, and making a simultaneous "public address" system an obvious side-benefit.

As Andrew Tobias says about finance, "a luxury once sampled soon becomes a necessity." PA systems went from an extravagance to a commonplace, and more and more people insisted they couldn't hear if there wasn't a microphone in front of the podium . . . even if it wasn't turned on.

Two things were going on. One was expectations: crisp, clear tones that you don't have to strain to hear are no longer just a welcome relief, but a baseline assumption in any public presentation. The other change is that the interaction between audience and speaker changed dramatically, some would say for the worse.

Gladstone, the British prime minister and noted public speaker in his own right, talked about how an audience's attention and energy was "the mist, which I give back as rain." What he meant was that, in order to ensure a good speech, you had to work to make good listeners of them, and the effort meant there was a mutual process, a cycle of sorts, between what it took to be heard, and how you delivered what they listened to.

George Whitefield, the contemporary of John Wesley who made open air preaching common in the 1740s, had a voice that Benjamin Franklin personally confirmed was clearly audible from a city block away. For a generation, politicians and preachers had to have loud, strong voices, and be able to read and engage an audience in order to help them hear, whatever their vocal quality.

Today, a sound system allows almost any voice to be made audible, but the connection with the listener – that's still an art.

Next week: sound meets music. Buckle up, buttercup!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story you've heard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

2011-06-08T22:47:00.001-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 6-16-11

Jeff Gill

By the Light of Another Campfire

___

There's a moment on most campouts, no matter how sugared up everyone got on 'smores, when things start to get quiet.

It's usually after dark, when the first round of Scouts have voluntarily gone off to their sleeping bags, and just after you've gone 'round to tell the rowdy crew over by the dining fly to quiet down with their euchre game, and checked the tents of the newer boys where the giggling comes in sudden waves and just as abruptly turns to silence mixed with snores.

You're back by the campfire, which was high as a signal beacon for Viking armies not long ago, but has now burned down to a sea of embers dotted with whitecaps of orange & blue flames.

Every so often, the glowing wood pops or just shifts, and a spray of sparks kick out and up, drifting into the night sky.

Some sparks go high, lasting longer than you think they'd might, and some wink out far earlier than you think they should.

Whether you're in a comfy camp chair or perched on a slice of tree trunk, there's a perimeter defined by the line between almost too hot on your face and knees, cool on the back of your neck. Adult scouters of long standing and a few of the older youth leaders make up the circle, with the occasional guitar or even a fiddle coming out to lend a melody line to the roundabout, singing one song after another, old and new in turn.

Not that the music isn't central to such a scene, but then there also comes conversation, a welcome time to talk without having to shout, that doesn't include a sudden shouted "put that down!" or "don't hold it that way if you like ten fingers!" It's a relaxed time, when campouts and hikes from years ago blur together, and blend into future treks, not yet taken but immediately real in our imaginations.

You can talk about almost anything at such times, if it's what you need to talk about. There's a store of wisdom and experience around the fire to match almost any challenge you may see ahead, personal or professional.

Embers have burned down to a dim glow now, and we are all but faces, the rest in darkness. The cold curls in around our shoulders, but the heat of the remaining coals keeps any of us from edging closer for fear of melting our boots. The songs pop up sporadically, and the conversations eddy from one side of the fire to the other, flaring into the whole circle from time to time.

One by one, the faces withdraw from the campfire, and mutter from off in the darkness "I'm going to bed." The last few remaining splash the corners of the firelay into a decent order, brush the cleared space beyond the rocky border a few perfunctory times, then lay a last log or two in the middle as a down payment on the morning's coffee, now just five or six hours away. A last word or two across the charmed circle, and then the faces become simply a voice wishing you a good night's sleep as you go your separate ways.

In Troop 65, I really hadn't had the chance to get to know Art Lowell as well as I'd have liked, and I was looking forward to the week ahead at summer camp, perhaps to get to know him better. We'd both sat around a few late night campfires, and assumed we both had many more ahead before lights out, and "Taps."

He will be present, though, at many gatherings yet to come, even though we laid him to rest, a young man of 50. And he will remind us to treasure every campfire, as our earthly light dims, and the sparks fly upward.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a campfire story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 6-11

2011-06-08T18:36:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 6-11-11

Jeff Gill

Headline News, 109 Years Ago

___

A friend who is scanning through early 1900s newspapers for some historical info found an article that wasn't his target, but sounded like I might appreciate, so he sent it to me by e-mail. Thanks, Peter!

Not only did I enjoy it, but I think some of you will, as well. Copyright having surely lapsed, I will reproduce it in full . . . it isn't long.

The headline is "Popular Preacher," and the subhead reads "Removes Coat During Services."

Dateline "Newark, O., July 9." The article reads "Rev. H.N. Miller, pastor of the Fourth Street Church of Christ, appeared in the pulpit of his church Sunday night in a shirt waist (i.e., shirtsleeves). Mr. Miller, before preaching a scholarly sermon, spoke of the intensely hot night and invited the men in the audience to remove their coats."

Before I give you the second paragraph, which is also the last line of the article, let me set the scene for any of you who are unsure what's being described.

This is in the congregation which is today known as Central Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), now up at 587 Mt. Vernon Rd. a bit north of downtown.

In 1902, they were in the spot on Newark's Fourth St. which is a gap today, between the Masonic Temple and the Telephone Building. They were thriving, since being founded in 1884 and building their own structure in 1895, which would add a full-size sanctuary just two years later in 1904 . . . which would burn entirely to the ground in 1946, leading to the "new" building they now occupy up Mt. Vernon Rd.

So in 1902 it's July, a hot July across the state, and the Fourth St. Church of Christ still has a morning Sunday service, and an evening service, which is usually more of a Bible lecture than a sermon as we think of them, or a "scholarly sermon."

The hall is not terribly large, maybe 40 feet by 60, and of course there is no air conditioning, or even electric fans. It is well-filled with worshipers, and the heat of the day, even with the sun low in the west, is still radiating through the brick walls.

For the preacher to suggest, even at the sultry end of a steaming day, in a tightly packed, almost airless sanctuary, that the men might remove their coats as he had just done: it made statewide wire service headlines. My friend didn't find this in the Newark paper, but in the Stark City Democrat. It clearly got around the next day.

It closes: "There was a general response and Mr. Miller is being complimented for introducing the custom in Newark."

Do not underestimate the courage it took for Pastor Miller to take this, to our eyes, logical step. I started preaching in the 1980s, and vividly recall some conversations behind the platform, in un-air-conditioned churches, where the relative merits of "coats" or "no coats" were discussed with no little nervousness. Even then, there were feathers and fur that could be ruffled by deciding to dispense with the suit jacket.

After all, what's next? Not preaching with a tie on?

Now we have A/C in nearly every congregation, and often no one has a coat . . . or a tie. And I read this article, salute my distinguished forbearer Rev. H.N. Miller, and wonder: what did the women in starched dresses, complex foundation garments, and heavy hats think as the men took of their coats?

I suspect I know part of why it took another 80 years for this to no longer be a newsworthy story.

Next week: sound systems . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story for a summer day at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 6-4

2011-06-02T08:10:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 6-4-11

Jeff Gill

There Are No Spectators At a Wedding

___

There is a moment in just about every wedding I've ever officiated at, one part of the standard liturgy that is on my short list of non-negotiables. I'm fine with, and even encourage interest in writing one's vows, or being a bit creative with the outline, but there's something that always needs to be present, in my opinion.

It's adapted from the Episcopal "Book of Common Prayer" service, and it's after the "Declaration of Consent" from the bride and groom, which folks sometimes confuse with the vows themselves, being a statement of "yes, I know why I'm here, what we're about to do, and it's of my own free will."

The vows come shortly after, but before that and the readings and a homily from the officiant, even before I ask – or don't ask! – "Who presents this woman in marriage?" and just after I've asked each of the two main celebrants of the day their declaration, I look past the happy couple, at you.

The families in the front pews, the bridesmaids and groomsmen on either side, the more distant relations in the middle distance and dad's workplace colleagues in the back along with Uncle Charlie and the cousins who always come late, even when the wedding doesn't start on time. I look at you all.

And in my best ringing tones, projecting my voice up over and beyond the man and woman immediately in front of me, I ask "And YOU: do all of you gathered here, from far and near, family and friends . . . will all of you do everything that is in YOUR power to uphold these two persons in their marriage? If so, please respond by saying together, 'We do.'"

What occasionally startles the bride and groom is the strength of the response, as the roomful of invited guests, of all manner of connection, loose or strong, religious or merely tolerant enough to come to this sort of occasion, all prick up their ears at being asked to take an active role in the proceedings, and sing out with great emphasis, "WE DO!"

Do they all mean it? There may be moments ahead when one or another of them, maybe in the wedding party itself, maybe in the back row, is tempted to say "Ahhh, who cares what she says? C'mon, let's go; we'll be back by midnight I'm sure."

I'm just crazily optimistic enough to hope that, having said this "WE DO!" at the wedding, they might recall some years later that they promised to help build this marriage up, not tear it down.

And I'm encouraged in my lunacy by the vehemence with which people at least SOUND like they welcome being asked to play a part. Folks who assumed their role was to bring a gift and fill a seat, suddenly becoming an actual part of the ceremony, and in a low stress role to boot . . . they like it. Maybe because they immediately realize it makes sense, too.

A marriage is not, really, just about two people. It's about community, and a culture (small-c) around what it means to celebrate in the beyond-the-big-day sense of celebrate a marriage. It needs everyone at their oar, all of us invested, involved in getting the occasion off to a good start, and also carried on without untoward incident.

Without that wider view, when the vision narrows down to just the two, then it's easy for the focus to get misplaced, and look at the external trappings and décor elements as the real heart of the story. It's from this cramped viewpoint that you get brides asking "Can we get THAT thing out of here for the service?" (pointing at the cross on the altar), or grooms planning the honeymoon more carefully than they do the getting of the license (oh, yeah, can I bring that to you next week afterwards, pastor?).

We are all part of the marriage, even if we (rightly) have no part in planning the service. Or at least we should be, because any one person can get divorced, but it takes the whole community around the couple to make a happy marriage.

Just two people can pull it off, but it's hard, hard work to do on your own.

If you attend any weddings this summer, I hope you get asked to speak your support, and trust me, the couples hear how you say those two simple words, "WE DO!" and they draw comfort from them.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 6-2

2011-05-25T12:43:00.000-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 6-2-11

Jeff Gill

The Nature Center is all around you

___

Next Monday aside, school pretty much ends this week.

(Yes, yes, I'm sending my son to school on Monday. I do other pointless things without complaint, so why not that . . .)

Ahead of us all stretches the summer. We hope and pray that the storms have passed, that blue skies will be the new normal, and that we who have school age kids can get them to play outside sometimes.

The legendary seventh grade science wildflower project is now behind us, and I'm curious to see how personally handling the Peterson Guide for Wildflowers and learning how to see, to notice, to consider the easily overlooked life in our own yard and nearby fields – I'm wondering if much of that will stick, or thinking about how I can incentivize keeping the examination of nature going through the summer.

The Lad went from anxiety over the rare and mysterious "dame's rocket" to realizing that, for a few weeks, it's everywhere; he now knows that bloodroot is effectively gone and won't be back 'til next April along with Trillium (we saw trillium flowers, but never where we could pick it). Checking out the field guide, he learned that his dad's old favorite, ironweed, is something he points out in August because that's the only time you can find it.

Birds are starting to be "seen" in his world, as opposed to just being "birds" (other than the dreaded mourning dove lurking on our front porch mornings), and he's figured out that the savant who created the Pokemon franchise built it on a pre-existing hobby of insect collecting. So there are some carry-overs already.

With the Lovely Wife having planted Ohio wildflowers on two sides of Sycamore Lodge, after watching the ravening deer packs chew through anything not evolved to mock their depredations, we had quite a bit right around the house for the class project. Add in that Dad quixotically hand-pulls dandelions and avoids all but the barest trace of chemical treatment on the lawn, and it's been fun watching the Lad shift focus to see that "lawn" is not a homogenous green mass (OK, later in the summer, brown), but an ecosystem of sorts with a vast assortment of plant species and even a range of insects and a few mammals.

Bill McKibben, the noted essayist and nature-writer, is passionately interested in the environment, concerned about global climate change, and when he's home in New England, a Sunday school teacher at his neighborhood Methodist congregation. He was on the NPR faith and culture program "On Being (with Krista Tippett)" last August, talking about everyday life and ordinary people and a personal faith.

He made one remark that's stuck in my head since last summer: "The suburbs are a device for making sure that you don't notice nature."

Cars and air conditioning and big box stores and no sidewalks and . . . yep, I think he's got a point. I could talk about programs and plans and lessons, but the corrective is perhaps no more complicated than – Notice nature.

And help the children around you notice it a bit more, too. It's right outside your door.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-28

2011-05-24T16:06:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 5-28-11

Jeff Gill

Prepare For Sudden Stops

___

If you watch video on a slow internet connection (is there any other way?), you are well familiar with a certain awkward reality.

Take anyone, no matter how handsome or lovely, well spoken or practiced in public presentation, and then stop the video at a random moment.

They will look silly, or worse.

If you take any one of us, and pause at a point in time, you will see eyes closed (or one eye half closed), mouth askew, or hands flapping oddly. The fine photographers of the Advocate know this all too well, too, which is why they love digital technology – take hundreds of pictures, and only one or two are recognizable and useful. You don't have to squint at rolls of film by red light to figure out which to develop, and toss most of even that selected set.

In a grim sort of way, death is like that. Most of us will not have lots of advance knowledge (it's why ministers joke about scheduling funerals), and even those who have an inkling are usually not expecting that unwelcome guest when it arrives.

So it's not usual to have to sort through pockets and drawers and in-boxes of people who have recently passed and find yourself feeling a bit embarrassed for them. You just know they were not planning on having anyone see this aspect of their life, or deal with their flaws and foibles, and figured they had a bit more time to arrange their public presentation for a general audience.

You could call it "the end times," if only for that person.

Last week, there was quite a bit of jovial mockery, some of which I willfully participated in, about the fringe pastor out west who had declared a set day AND time for the Rapture, or "ingathering of believers to God" with the End of Days, aka Eschatological Apocalypse, scheduled for Oct. 21.

As you may know, the world did not see (as far as we know) a taking up into the air of Christ-followers, and there was an all-too brief silence from this gentleman who became a media celebrity.

Apparently overlooking Deuteronomy 18:22 (let alone vs. 20), he's taken up his notes, peered through them, and decided to double down on dumb and assert that Oct. 21 is the day of departure, not of destruction, and later events will follow in due time.

Summer vacation spots no doubt breathed a sigh of relief.

Let's be clear: I'd never heard of this guy before his end of the world pronouncement, and neither had just about everyone. He got lots of attention when plenty of minor preachers and prophets labor in anonymity because he set up conservative Christians perfectly for abuse and derision. Seriously, you could do this story every month in this country alone, daily if you combed Africa and Asia for end-times predictions, but the key was a major purchase of billboards and ads which made this story both unavoidable and irresistible to general media.

Do I think he's sincere? I don't even know enough about him to answer that. He's 89, which tells me one thing: with all due respect, he's got a judgment day facing him soon. Personally, he's got the odds on his side for predicting an end to it all one day that's sooner than later.

What we're in danger of losing in all this mess is that each of us, relative to time and eternity, have a full stop coming not too far down the track. It's not always well marked, and while the point is very much to enjoy and make use of the journey, the end is a summing up, at least for others to make if not for us to witness.

The life of faith says we have a perspective on that final review, and we can face it with confidence because God wants us to expect it, to not fear it, and sent Jesus to show us with his life, by his death, and through his resurrection that it's all gonna be OK. We've played our part, made our faces, missed our cues, and stumbled on our entrances, but it's not our show to ruin, so be of good cheer.

Our lives, this world, time itself will end. Knowing that shouldn't give us despair or cause us to chase ever more desperately after satisfactions that won't last anyhow; an awareness of our end should guide our todays, with one another.

The fact that we might get caught looking foolish, in a last photo, or like the preacher in California, isn't really the problem; not living thankfully in the time we're given might just be the real embarrassment.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-21

2011-05-16T10:57:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 5-21-11

Jeff Gill

Utilitarianism and Faith, Together and At Odds

___

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were levees along the Mississippi that were literally blown up, near where the Ohio joins the Big Muddy, and where some of our local runoff and outflow ultimately joins rainfall from across the Midwest.

The decision was made to flood some 100 homes to relieve pressure that threatened 3,000 people in and around Cairo, Illinois. Two hundred some people take a hit, so more than twelve times as many people can be protected.

Is that fair?

Most of us would work to avoid that word, and fall back on "logical." It makes sense to us, a kind of sense that philosophically gets called "utilitarianism," or "the greatest good for the greatest number."

It makes sense, but is it enough? Utilitarianism, that is.

Last weekend, the Morganza floodgates were opened, releasing through a planned pathway a torrent of water from the still rising Mississippi, again reducing the pressures building up on levee walls, some of which date back to the great floods of 1927 where hundreds along the lower Mississippi died.

Not only levee failure, but over-topping is feared, where the maximum height is reached by rising water, which can quickly start to cut gaps in earthen structures, or simply undermine from behind other kinds of built floodwall.

If the massive flows of water continued unabated to New Orleans, there was great concern that they might do again to that city from the north what Hurricane Katrina and levee failure did from the south in 2005.

Might.

You can see where utilitarian arguments that look so straightforward and elegant in some settings can get complex and confusing in a big hurry. So we know, if we open the Morganza, that 3,000 square miles, 11,000 buildings, and at least 25,000 people will be flooded out, for sure.

If we don't, there might be flooding in Baton Rouge or New Orleans, which could be sudden and relatively unpredictable, leading to possible loss of life, and the probability of tens of thousands of homes and businesses hit again as they were not very long ago.

What's the right thing to do? You can still do a number of pragmatic utilitarian calculations as to just how probable the damage will be if nothing is done, and in this case it looks very high. Not for sure, but high. How do you do the math for deciding just how probable probably has to be in order to definitely impact someone else?

And what is the math for a sense of the justice in giving New Orleans a little extra consideration? Does the recently repaired devastation from Katrina mean that we should go out of our way, even to the detriment of others, to protect the Crescent City from repeated horrors?

Then there's the counterbalance in that all of the people in the areas being affected this week through Louisiana are regularly reminded by civil and federal authorities that they've built or located in an area which can be chosen for "protective flooding." If you've wondered at why so few folks in the Cajun country watching waters rise have pitched a fit, that's a major reason why.

Information, then, plays a role: as does compassion. Some of the folks interviewed in the flooded zone have said flat out "better us than those poor folks in N'Orlins." I doubt they've all said it, but some have. How do you put that sentiment into a formula?

I raise these issues as the floodwaters rise, at least on our TV screens if not nearby, to partially address a point. Those who are unhappy with or even outright hostile to a public role for faith & religion in civic affairs usually comment on "reason" and their dislike of "unreason" getting a voice in decision-making.

Their implication is that there is, close at hand, an entirely reasonable and rational way to make choices about things like floodwaters and health care, military action and relief operations, or public policy in general.

During these sorts of events like the Mississippi floods, utilitarianism looks, from a distance, like it's head and shoulders up out of the muck, making clean and crisp decisions on the mathematical merits.

Up close, on an individual and communal basis, utilitarian options drown in the fast moving tide of minutiae. Faith isn't a shortcut for hard choices, either, but it can give you a solid place to stand while you make them.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-14 edited

2011-05-12T18:42:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 5-14-11

Jeff Gill

On the Beauty of Chastity

___

We're heading into the heart of commencement season, with advice and counsel freely provided to captive audiences.

You'll hear some good ones, you'll hear some bad ones, all of them well-intended and some ("Use sunscreen") quite brief, as well as helpful.

The late David Foster Wallace gave what is considered to be one of the best commencement speeches of the last few decades, just up the road at Kenyon College in 2005. It's been turned, since his recent tragic death, into a book ("This is Water"), and the text of the basic address itself is easy to find online.

If you consider yourself rather old school about things like graduation ceremonies (say, you'd never imagine bringing an airhorn in your pocket for when your relative crosses the stage), it starts off rather ramblingly, and fairly typical commencement fare for all that.

Then Wallace makes a sharp pivot in his talk to say this: "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."

Whoa. Outside of a private Christian high school or a denominational college, that's a bit unusual. He goes on in this vein, with a nod to the variety of traditions honored or deferred by his audience in Gambier on that sunny day:

"An outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough."

"Will eat you alive." I read a blog post where one of the graduates that day said he paused there, and repeated it, to rapt silence.

"Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you."

A commencement speech that is unlikely to be heard much of anywhere is an address "On the Beauty of Chastity." Like David Foster Wallace struggling with the question of what (or Who) to worship, there are some subjects even in these days that are not fit for polite company. Chastity would be one of them.

If you had John Milton, or C.S. Lewis come back to speak, or St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa of Avila (maybe even old St. Joseph himself), they'd surely find chastity a good starting point for their talks to graduating students, even as they might be baffled by airhorns.

It's not so unlikely a subject for moderns as you might think, given that chastity doesn't mean the Punch-n-Judy caricature most people think of hearing the word. Chastity is purity in the sense of self-discipline; as Kierkegaard said "Purity of heart is to will one thing."

We stand in awe as basketball players sink three-pointers, knowing the tens of thousands of practice shots that led to that game winning moment; we watch, rapt, at footage of Navy SEALs in grueling training in ice cold water, preparing for feats only possible with intense focus & discipline; we listen in delight to singers & instrumentalists who practice, practice, practice to give a fluid, easy performance on the day of the show.

That's what chastity is, as the saints knew. It's not NOT having sex outside of marriage, but it's the life practice of discipline, self-discipline, a learned focus that allows us to achieve that which truly leads to happiness. A happily married couple is chaste, a single person who hopes to marry and prepares for that relationship until it begins is chaste, and chastity is as much what you do, when, much more than it is what you don't do.

Chastity is deferring some satisfactions now to gain a greater joy and peace later, and can be practiced by anyone.

Anyone, that is, who worships a vision and a goal somewhere beyond their own fleeting pleasures; who can accept short-term pain for long-term gain. Exercise and diet and study, as well as sex, are all tools for a life well-lived if used in a disciplined, which is to say chaste, manner. Tools flung about without intention or plan are dangerous, to self and others.

Chastity, on the other hand, can make something beautiful. May all those who commence this graduation season become craftspeople of their own lives.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

2011-05-12T17:06:00.001-04:00

Notes From My Knapsack 5-19-11

Jeff Gill

Where It All Can Be Found

___

One of the early and best indications that my little series of "Twelve Years Old in Granville" had struck the mark I was aiming at has been people asking me where they can read more about the background and history of the stories I've been telling.

Yes, they are an outgrowth of the fact that my own son is twelve (but not for much longer!), and to some degree, they are a reflection of the hard fact that school tours and field trips are fading from the landscape, even as young people and families feel more and more distant and alienated from the landscape in which they live.

So, being a storyteller, I decided to address this by telling stories, ones that I hope children and parents can read and hear together, putting themselves in the shoes or boots or moccasins of the previous inhabitants of these valleys and hilltops.

It begins, without a doubt, in the pages of "Wild Turkeys and Tallow Candles," the wonderful 1920 memoir by Ellen Hayes, still available at the Granville Historical Society and at Reader's Garden. Anyone who has read through her recollection of growing up in the house still standing, just west of St. Edward's, can tell you what a wonderful piece of writing that is.

Even if you have no knowledge of or history with Granville, it is a delight to read about a childhood in the years mostly just before the Civil War. I've tried to write in the spirit and sense, if not exactly the style of Professor Hayes' first person masterpiece.

The Robbins Hunter Museum preserves a number of fragments about the builder of the Avery-Downer House, our 1842 Greek Revival marvel that stands in such bright and hopeful contrast to the hard life Alfred Avery knew back in Granville, Massachusetts and in the first days of the colony here. Ann Lowder wishes someone would write a longer piece about the fatherless boy who grew up to become a mercantile marvel, and yes, I get the hint!

To go back to the earliest residents of Raccoon Creek's banks, I am as always indebted to Brad Lepper, and particularly his award-winning "Ohio Archaeology," still in print, with wonderful artist's depictions of what life among the artifacts we have today would have looked like more fully back then.

There is much detail that can be gleaned from books hard to find on shelves, but easy to peruse online: Henry Bushnell's "The History of Granville, Licking County, Ohio" from 1889, and N.N. Hill's "History of Licking County, Ohio" of 1881, both of which owe an obvious debt to Henry Howe's "Historical Collections of Ohio," originally written in 1847 & revisited in 1888.

And again at the Granville Historical Society, they not only have a few copies still for sale of William Utter's "Granville – The Story of an Ohio Village" from 1956, but will be happy to sell you copies of their bicentennial achievement: "Granville, Ohio: A Study in Continuity and Change."

Isaac Smucker, Mary Hartwell Catherwood, Minnie Hite Moody, Charles Browne White and other writers long ago; Dee Ann Wymer, Bill Dancey, Tony Lisska, Dale Knobel, Flo Hoffman, and of course Dick Shiels have shared generously of their ongoing researches and knowledge of this "most eligble part" of Ohio.

There is much more one could learn about this valley nestled below Mount Parnassus, and the service of the Muse Calliope does not allow just sipping at her wells: "A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-14

2011-05-09T11:42:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 5-14-11

Jeff Gill

On the Beauty of Chastity

___

We're heading into the heart of commencement season, with advice and counsel freely provided, not only the useful or highflown, but the mundane and inspirational all equally available.

in other words, you'll hear good ones, you'll hear some bad ones, all well-intended and some ("Use sunscreen") quite brief as well as helpful.

The late David Foster Wallace gave what is considered to be one of the best commencement speeches of the last few decades just up the road, at Kenyon College in 2005. It's been turned, since his recent tragic death, into a book ("This is Water"), and the text of the basic address itself is easy to find online.

If you consider yourself rather old school about things like graduation ceremonies (say, you'd never imagine bringing an airhorn in your pocket for when your relative crosses the stage), it starts off rather post-modern and elliptical, and fairly typical commencement fare for all that.

But I'd love to have been there to see the reaction when Wallace makes a sharp pivot in his talk, and then says "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."

Whoa. Outside of a private Christian high school or a denominational college, that's a bit unusual. He goes on in this vein, with a nod to the variety of traditions honored or left behind by his audience in Gambier that sunny day:

"And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough."

Will eat you alive. I did read a blog post where one of the graduates that day said he paused there, and repeated it, to utter silence. Because of disbelief, or complete comprehension of what Wallace was getting at?

"Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you."

There's a commencement speech that is unlikely to be heard much of anywhere tomorrow or in the next few weeks, and that's an address "On the Beauty of Chastity." Like David Foster Wallace struggling with the question of what (or Who) to worship, there are some subjects even in these days that are not fit for polite company. Chastity would be one of them.

If you had John Milton, or C.S. Lewis come back to speak, or St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa of Avila (maybe even St. Joseph himself), they'd surely find it a good starting point for their talks to graduating students, even as they would be baffled by airhorns.

That's what chastity is, what John and Jack and Cathy and Teresa knew. It's not NOT having sex outside of marriage, but it's the life practice of discipline, self-discipline, a learned focus that allows us to achieve that which truly leads to happiness. A happily married couple is chaste, a single person who hopes to marry and prepares for that relationship until it begins is chaste, and chastity is as much what you do, when, much more than it is what you don't do, let alone ever.

Chastity is deferring some satisfactions to gain a greater joy and peace, and can be practiced by anyone.

Chastity, on the other hand, can make something beautiful, May all those who commence this graduation season become craftspeople of their own lives.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-7

2011-05-05T16:23:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 5-7-11

Jeff Gill

Among the Bits and Pieces in the Stairwell

___

When you sit up in the front of a church, whether behind the pulpit or the communion table or wherever, you find that there's always . . . stuff.

Matches or lighters for candles, stray bulletin inserts and cards from stewardship campaigns years ago, tissues new and used.

No matter how neat and tidy and tucked away the sanctuary space is, the view from behind is usually a bit more pragmatic, practical, functional.

You see the cords for the sound system, the half-full box of candles, the other set of vases, maybe a case for the altar cloths in seasonal colors.

In the same way, when you duck through the doors opening into the chancel or worship center or the platform, however you call the front of your church, you go from a well-appointed, clean and orderly world, into what theatre folk just call "backstage."

Backstage has old props and sets and costumes, and in the vestry or sacristy or baptismal space of a church, it's much the same.

You walk more carefully, as parts of the sanctuary furnishings lean against the walls, rolls from nave runners, spears from Roman soldier outfits in the Easter pageant all lean against the narrowly spaced walls. There are generally crosses, various sizes, suitable for your life or mine, a large Jesus or a youthful one with a glued on beard, and they make an interesting arrangement in their corner, one you try not to bump into.

There are often restrooms, or "a" restroom, but those usually have an old wardrobe or hand-built closet filled with costumes for Mary and Joseph and Kings from the east. You can find rocks from a garden scene in a box, next to a large stone made from chicken wire and papier mache, painted grey.

In the tradition my wife and I grew up in, there's also always a pair or two of fishing waders. Some clergy would step, suit and socks, right into such a rig to baptize a new convert right off, which believer's baptism by immersion would call for. You also find a few baptismal gowns of various sizes, all white, symbolizing the spiritual intent of the act, washing the new Christian's sins away in the waters of life.

Myself, as a minister, I've not baptized as many as I've buried, an all too common situation and something I'm not pleased about, but there it is. Many of us clergy in the Midwest have walked along leading a casket to its place in the earth, on more occasions than we can count (well over 200), but are all too sure how many people we've baptized. (About 42.)

What makes each occasion even more memorable for me is that my ridiculously large feet (size 15) means that I've never even tried waders. I just put on swim trunks and an old white shirt like the candidate for baptism wears, and over that a retired black preaching robe with weights sewn into the hem so it doesn't poof up around my waist. The robe sinks down as I walk down, barefoot, into the baptistery to offer the blessing prayer and scripture reading from Matthew 28: 18-20, our warrant for baptism from Jesus himself.

The trick usually is to complete the baptism, then rush past the newly baptized person (or persons; one Easter I got to baptize eight people at the start of the service, a truly wonderful day); they're usually still rubbing the water out of their eyes and drying their hair in the hall by the time I come back out. If I dry off and change fast, I can get back out before the opening hymn is finished. Done it a million times . . . or at least a few dozen.

It wasn't that fast last Sunday. There at Central Christian Church on Mt. Vernon Road in Newark, at the start of the 8:30 service, I waded into the baptistery, faced the smiling congregation, offered the usual words to begin, then turned to the door at the top of the steps and held out my hand as I always do, to help the candidate walk down the steps into the water.

This time, my son took my hand, and stepped into the water with me. And I baptized him, "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

And they had to sing two hymns before I made it back up into the sanctuary from backstage, but no one seemed to mind.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he had a good weekend last week. Tell him about your good news at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 4-30

2011-04-28T16:18:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 4-30-11

Jeff Gill

John Paul, the People's Pope, the People's Saint

___

Tomorrow, in the Roman Catholic Church, Karol Wojtyla will be declared a saint. That's the birth name of the Polish priest who became known to the world as Pope John Paul II.

Sainthood is a category recognized in various part of the larger Christian world on various levels. The Orthodox Church of the east recognizes saints, more by common consent than by any official process of the church, and they consider "a saint" to be those who are undoubtedly in the presence of God.

Most Protestant bodies consider anyone who is part of the gathered community a saint, but only exemplary examples are referred to as such – "oh, she's a saint" – but you do often hear in hymns and sermons "all the saints, on earth and in heaven" spoken of, including any committed member of the body at worship.

It's in the Catholic Church that you hear the most about sainthood, and where there's an official process for declaring someone a saint. More to the point, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has a process of "canonization," with four steps to it, through which an individual's case goes to be declared "a saint."

You could say five steps, because almost without exception you have to die first (Aaron, Moses' brother, is called a saint, the only one in the Bible, and that may just be a question of translation).

When you die and popular or general opinion says "that person had the qualities of sainthood, a special example to the faithful for closeness to God," the official Church will decide to call some "Servant of God." That's step one, the beginning of what is really called the "recognition" of a saint, since the Catholic Church would say they don't "make" saints, they simply discern who has been one.

That can be done by a local bishop, or by the Vatican and the Pope if there's a special circumstance, such as asking for recognition sooner than within five years of the death (as has happened for Mother Teresa and John Paul II).

Moving to the next stage, and the title "Venerable," requires the involvement of the Vatican Curia. When that designation is given, you can't name churches and such after them, but their "cause" starts to move forward, and prayers are offered to ask for intercession.

"Blessed" is the next-to-last step, and a person is declared Blessed So-and-so by the Vatican when a miracle is declared as the sign of that person's intercession (or if the person was martyred for their faith). They can be honored on a local basis, and their cause is much more an effort of the larger church, with a "devil's advocate" assigned to look into the person's background and activities to see if a case can be made to NOT declare sainthood.

If a second miracle is confirmed as being due to the intercession of the "Blessed," then the path is open for sainthood, or "canonization." The key point here is that when a person is declared a saint, it is intended to be a recognition by the church of something that was true all along, and an affirmation of the absolute certainty of the church in the world that this person is undoubtedly in the presence of God.

When the church reaches this level of assurance, then the title "St. So-and-so" is given, churches can be dedicated in their name, and a date is assigned for the particular "feast day" of that saint, usually on the anniversary of their death.

Given that there are thousands of saints, the date thing is sometimes adjusted a bit, and not every "saint's day" is an official event in church life, but their name does go into the liturgical calendar for that day and any worship that happens then. St. John Paul II's feast day will be October 22^nd, in honor of his installation as Pope on that day in 1978.

For me, May 1 will be a special day for an entirely different reason, but I'll tell you all more about that next week! Blessings to all you saints out there . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is not known to be a saint on any official calendar. Tell him about people special to your faith journey at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 4-23

2011-04-21T17:33:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 4-23-11

Jeff Gill

Taking the Spices They Had Prepared

___

When Luke begins what we now call the twenty-fourth chapter of his account of Jesus, he walks us with three women heading for the tomb where Jesus' body had been laid out in a borrowed niche, behind a heavy stone, "taking the spices they had prepared."

John speaks of a hundred pounds of spices, a mix of myrrh and aloes. The aloes are a grim reminder of what they expected to find when the women had gotten someone to help roll back the stone – rot, decay, putrefaction. Aloe would mask and compensate for the stench with enough freshness and bright scent to allow them to finish their work, an anointing of the body that normally would have happened earlier.

Myrrh was simply the usual outer application for a dead body, a hint of Temple incense and a scent of the divine in the midst of the most earthly. More for the wealthy, a faint hint for the poor, but always there.

The rush of the crucifixion and the impending restrictions of the Sabbath meant Jesus' body had been hastily wiped off and wrapped in a shroud, but not properly treated with the spices and oils that normally attended the funeral of a beloved family member or friend. In most cases, the press of circumstance would mean that it was just too bad, "but we did our best", and the body would be left to the work of a dry climate and natural processes of decay. With any luck, the family whose burial site had been borrowed would not have need of it again, until the remains in the niche had crumbled to a dry outline which could be swept into an ossuary, a bone box, and set into a smaller niche while the bench was again used for a new corpse.

These three women were made of both faithful and stern stuff. They were not going to assume they had done their best, and they were steeled to face the unpleasant realities of their beloved friend and rabbi on the third day after his grotesque execution. No smell, nor expense would be spared, and they were likely the women who had tended dying family members, births, and everything up to and including the spring lambing, so dealing with a decayed body was something they did not flinch from.

In fact, from Matthew's account, an anointing of sorts had been done by a woman, perhaps one of the three, but probably not, just before the fateful final trip into Jerusalem proper. An alabaster jar of nard, a very fine (and expensive) ointment, from Nepal or somewhere from the uttermost east, had been poured out on him and rubbed into those travel-worn feet, just up from Jericho along the steep, winding path to the Holy City.

For the everyday and always for the poor, olive oil would do, but myrrh in the temple, aloes in the countryside, and various scents in healing ointments were a vital part of life in such a dry and weary landscape. It was soap, it was refreshment, it was renewal and restoration, for the skin and much deeper. Anointing was important, in life, and in death.

So it was that the women had gathered and prepared a hundredweight of spices and incense and oil. More than thirty pounds apiece to carry, across the Kidron Valley, through the awakening city, out the other side and around into the mix of garden and garbage dump where the Romans executed prisoners and where a few of the upper classes kept their family tombs.

They had no expectation of anything other than death, and decay. There was no plot, no plan, no illusions, no delusions: they had done the hard work of preparing burial spices for a silent corpse, and were going at dawn the first day they could, the third day after the Passover's deadly conclusion, the last thing they wanted to do.

They knew what they would find, and could not even imagine any other outcome, as the sun rose over Jerusalem on the first day of a new week.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him an unexpected outcome at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 4-16

2011-04-13T23:58:00.000-04:00

Faith Works 4-16-11

Jeff Gill

A Week That Changed the World

___

This Friday, in a variety of ways and at a number of locations, the events of some two thousand years ago in a Roman backwater outpost, putting down a possible popular rebellion, will be remembered.

That's remarkable in and of itself, right there.

A handful of revolutionaries and agitators getting their leaders snatched and executed, as any imperial functionary knows, usually disappears back into the woodwork or woods or wood and plaster hovels from whence they came.

A few years later, even their closest associates have forgotten the names of the leaders, the disappeared, those who were cut down. If they are remembered, it's more for trying to figure out what they did wrong so the next attempt at revolution can succeed. The person themselves becomes a lost note played on an uncertain trumpet, whipped away on the wind.

Not in Judea under Pontius Pilate, though. At least at one time.

Pilate is one of the few – OK, only – Roman procurators known to the general public today. He was like any Roman official worth his salt (or "salarium," soldiers in imperial service being paid in the fungible commodity of salt, which could get you a drink or a quiet upstairs room in any corner of the Roman world).

There were quite a few rebel leaders and charismatic figures whose blood was already on Pilate's often-washed hands. The Galilean was by no means his first, probably not even his first slaughtered Galilean. Quick, name one other. No, thought you couldn't.

Processions in Jerusalem were no new news, either; claimants to the wobbly post-Herod Jewish throne often gathered their adherents and marched in with the Passover crowds, hoping to co-opt the tourism excitement for their own cause. Sometimes the Roman legionaries clipped them off in the deeps of the Kidron Valley, occasionally as they passed through the eastern gate, hedged in before and behind, hustled into a tower room of the castellation, not always emerging (or at least emerging chastened, sometimes beaten).

A parade that built on the energy of a Passover pilgrimage might enter the city itself, but the first turn was directly below the walls of the Antonia, the fortification guarding both the Temple courts to the south, and the pilgrim way along its north. Soldiers could apprehend a claimant right at the convenience of their own gates.

For a troublemaker out of the sticks, to get all the way into the Temple porticos, let alone to pitch over the stalls and tables of the financial branch offices, still escaping intact back into the teeming city – that was unusual. But to keep one's hide, let alone one's name alive, you then needed to get out of town. If you stayed in the general reach of both Roman and Sanhedrin authority, your arrest and disposition was simply a matter of time.

What was, and is, the key point is that when the powers that be apprehend and execute you, that's oblivion. Your story ends there, whether shot by dark out in the desert, flown over the ocean in a military transport and pushed out miles from the coast, or assassinated by death squads in broad daylight. These horrible dramas play out regularly around the world here in our present, civilized day, and in dimmer times, longer ago, the death toll was no less savage. The obliteration was no less complete.

Yet this "Good Friday" there will be a contingent gathering at 10:45 am to walk from St. Edward's Catholic Church in Granville up to Denison's Swasey Chapel, a solemn drum and carried cross leading them. St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Newark will host a service from Noon to 3 pm, marking the "Seven Last Words" of a condemned man, commemorated by seven different pastors reflecting on the meaning of that day. In the evening, a 7 pm service at Lakewood High School will bring a number of churches together in remembrance and prayer.

In all those places, and many more, the death on a cross of a man from Nazareth will be remembered, with great clarity and distinctness. Before we consider the radical claims of Easter, it's worth recalling how revolutionary it is that we know who this man is at all, someone whom the vast Roman Empire wanted both dead and forgotten.

This time, they got neither. Just to say the name of the one who died on that cross is a great miracle all by itself. He is not forgotten; you might almost say, in a way, that he lives.

His name is Jesus.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him something that shouldn't be forgotten at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 4-9

2011-04-06T17:53:00.001-04:00

Faith Works 4-9-11

Jeff Gill

Religious, But Not Very Spiritual

___

Spirituality is a word that won't get you thrown out of too many respectable establishments.

Cultivating a sense of the spiritual is a welcome topic even among the largely secular and unchurched, whether through exercise classes or martial arts or even spending your money to join a "ghost hunt" which is largely sitting around past midnight in a darkened, unfinished room with a digital thermometer and audio recorder.

"I consider myself spiritual, not religious" is a cliché which can be counted on to travel well in many circles, where it won't even be called cliché . . . more like conventional wisdom.

That's how all the cool kids feel, right?

This is the big weekend for the "Church of the Great Outdoors" and the "I Meet God on the Golf Course" denomination thereof, where the High Mass is held at its Vaticanesque enclave of Augusta, Georgia. The Memorial may be a source of civic pride in central Ohio, but ah, The Masters (there should probably be a copyright circle-c there, but the commercialism takes away from the spiritual cachet, don't you think?).

The Masters draws in even agnostics & atheists like me, for the sweet bird song in the background of the broadcast (never mind that CBS piped in augmentation in previous years; they promise they've stopped); the gentle arc of the bridge over some point on the course named for some saint or significant figure in the history of private golf clubs, framed by early spring flowering trees, and the steady, vibrant greens of the stage the drama acts out upon – it's quite a display.

You may not golf, but you get a feeling out of watching it play out; Jan Fink does a marvelous job of giving you a Newark-eye view of being in the middle of the ceremonies and circumstances, and I always eagerly read his tales, having never golfed a round in my life.

Is this an example of "spiritual, not religious"? Likely so, especially when one key imputation of the phrase is "I don't have to go to some gathering of people at set times and days to have a spiritual feeling." That's part of the whole "I can encounter God better at Amen Corner than I do in Sunday services," or "Worship, for me, is being out under the trees…as long as my ball isn't too far under the trees."

To which I always say "don't doubt it for a minute: but do you? Do you pause and thank God for life that day, beauty in that place, a plan for the future beyond the eighteenth hole?"

Some probably do. Most probably mutter curses at heavy dew on their cart seat, let alone louder imprecations when a soaring drive finds a lovely end in that beautiful pond, fringed with picture perfect lily pads. Anyhow.

Speaking purely for myself, I want to admit that, for the most part, I'm someone who is more religious than spiritual. No, that's not a typo. It also feels vaguely like making a public admission of something slightly embarrassing.

I'm religious, not spiritual. The emphasis on spirituality, in my encounters with that priority, ends up placing feeling before thought, and attitudes ahead of action (if action even makes it onto the menu). "Spiritual, not religious" as a stance comes across like a group of people who love to talk about gourmet food, watch programs on how to make it, buy lots of devices and gadgets for cooking at home . . . and who almost exclusively eat meals handed to them through a car window with a handful of change, or in the living room out of tinfoil TV dinner trays.

"Religion" comes from "religare," the Latin for "to bind." Religion is the binding together of community, the drawing together of individuals, the weaving of healing congregations who come together for purposes that cannot be accomplished on one's own. "To bind" not our creativity or to tie down our spirits, but perhaps to stay grounded in what can and must be done, maybe even to "religare" our worst impulses by tying us to models and inspirations which lead us beyond that which would just tie us in knots.

Religion is where we can tie those knots of connection which only really hold well when two (or more) are working together. Many hands, light work, all of that.

There is much about modern life which feels more than a bit unraveled, unraveling ever more, each moment. Some religion, some knotting and tying and re-linking, re-connecting, re-newing, might just be what we need.

I doubt I can get that sitting at home Sunday morning watching The Masters. The Master, though . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; no, he doesn't golf. He has many other flaws, as well. Try to correct them at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-21-11

2011-04-06T16:37:00.001-04:00

Twelve Years Old in Granville – Chris, 2011

Granville Sentinel 4-21-11

Jeff Gill

___

[A note from Jeff: I thought this series was done with twelve tales,
from prehistoric days to the view from 1959. As it turns out, there
is, and should be, one more story to round out this experiment in
history and narrative, and both my son and I thank Bernice for her
suggestion. The following is written by my son, Chris, who is (as
many of you have figured out) twelve years old.]

When my dad told me that I had to get a haircut, I was not thrilled.
There is nothing wrong with getting a haircut, it just interrupts my
afternoon.

Once I got there, it really was not so bad. We went to the Village
Barber Shop like we usually do. My dad got his hair cut by Jim, and I
got my hair cut by Susan.

Then we walked past the Granville Post Office where there is the
mural of the founding of Granville. When I look at this picture, I
think about how it would have been like to be twelve years old back
then.

I bet a twelve year old in 1805 would have had to work much harder
and more often, like chopping wood, carrying hay, or maybe even
killing chickens.

We walked to Readers' Garden on the other side of the street and went
in. I went looking for new books around the bookstore, especially the
newest "Wimpy Kid" book.

My dad started talking to Joanne, the owner of the bookstore.
Suddenly, the two of them were introducing me to a lady named
Bernice. She had been reading my dad's stories on "Twelve Years Old
In Granville." Then she turned to me and said that I should write a
story on what it was like to be twelve in 2011.

I thought about what Bernice said as we walked to Subway next to
Elms' Pizza. I felt excited and nervous at the idea of writing one of
these myself. I look to the right, I see the Old Academy Building. I
look ahead, I see the Old Colony cemetery down the hill. I look to
the left, I see Mt. Parnassus. When I think about a long time ago, I
suspect there was much less history to learn back then. There is a
lot more to learn now. It was probably also less fun since more work
was required.

Although, life may have been a little fun back then. Some interesting
things happened, like things that we look at today and say, wow! That
must have been very cool to do back then, when it first started, like
electricity or telephones. And some of the stuff about having farm
animals in your yard, or making food from every step, had to be fun
in their own ways, along with being hard work. At least your parents
already knew how to do all that, and could show you how.

But today, life is very interesting and fun. I cannot wait to be
thirteen.

[With this tale, our "Twelve Years Old" adventure is ended. In the
next column, I'll share with you where you can read a bit more about
our amazing and engaging history here in Granville, Ohio.]

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around
central Ohio; he didn't write most of this one! Congratulate his son
Chris by way of dad's e-mail, knapsack77@gmail.com.