Faith Works 7-7-07
Jeff Gill
Gifts, Graces, and Gumption
Saw Scott Hayes working at one of the key tasks of ministry the other day, outside of the “Look Up Center” on O’Bannon, the former Hazelwood School.
He was, of course, um . . . preaching? No. Witnessing? Well, sort of. Building up an effective ministry on the east end of Newark? Kinda.
He was mowing the lawn.
I was explaining to a fellow clergyperson the other day, new to some of the ways of the World as it intersects with the Church.
My point, sadly, was nothing more complicated than “never let anyone know you are good at clearing paper jams in the copier.” Parallel to that point is discretion about displaying plumbing skills in front of anyone other than the trustees.
Pastors, ministers, clergy of whatever sort, all know that there is an intrinsic hazard to having keys to the building, because you’ll be the first call most people make. And there is not a seminary dean who hasn’t joked that they need to add a plumbing and electrical skills course to the program, and everyone would sign up. (Instead, they add another class in Akkadian or Sumerian, and wonder how to get more student interest ginned up for them.)
Scott, and many of us, know that before a wedding on a Saturday or when the VBS is coming, you just gotta go find the clippers or the trimmer or the pushmower (I’ve been blessed through the years by good parishioners with riding mowers and a trailer, Amen!), and you do what has to be done.
What clergy are, as a group, not prepared for in schooling, and barely aware of until it hits us in the face, is that you need to know how to do fundraising.
No, I don’t mean preaching stewardship sermons, though those are important. But the mechanics of putting together a campaign, the nuts and bolts, the techniques of how to set up a leadership phase, announcing your goal, keeping the progress in front of the congregation (and other supporters if we’re talking a program or non-church ministry), and having an effective closing stage . . . these are skills, with a body of knowledge and best practices, that are out there but often not well understood in the church. You may have chiropractors or entomologists in the parish, but you’re more likely to have a certified arborist than a development professional sitting in the pews.
All of which creates certain problems, like feeling tugged and torn by each offer made by someone selling or providing a product or service to the church, to use their “fool proof, almost always works” set of tricks for raising money.
Add in the tempting swamp of “can’t we find a grant for that?” and a church leader can find themselves up to their necks in said swamp.
If your faith community is part of a denomination or church body, the problem is magnified by the fact that almost all of them are running their own capital campaigns or outreach initiatives, so if you go to them for assistance, they’re likely to just route you through their own priorities. That, and they often don’t know any more about fundraising than you do, and just have glossier fliers and a shiny veneer of confidence.
There are a number of vital settings for ministry in our community that need and deserve our support. The Look Up Center, Open Arms Shelter a little closer to downtown on E. Main, the Licking County Jail Ministry where Scott Hayes doesn’t have to mow, Water’s Edge Ministry in Buckeye Lake . . . the list could go on. All of them exist for the good of the community and to advance the Kingdom; most of them have websites, a few have Paypal, and even that represents the challenge and opportunity to do fundraising in an unfamiliar modern context.
Trusting God and rooting your work in prayer are necessary first steps, but fundraising is a skill and a gift that should be sought and valued just as you wouldn’t want just anyone switching out the wiring in your church building. We know to look for a certified electrician for major work, but fundraising folks think can be done by anybody.
Pray that God gives you a plan and people who know how to implement that plan when it comes to fundraising, and I’m praying someone offers to do the mowing for Scott!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s seen a capital campaign or twelve through, some successfully. Not all, though! If you have good news, fiscal or faithfilled to share, write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
* * *
Faith Works 6-30-07
Jeff Gill
Have You Ever Been To Moss Point?
We’ve all heard of New Orleans, and many of us in Licking County not only heard about Hurricane Katrina, but have been down to the region assisting in the clean-up and rebuilding effort.
The whole impacted area is called the “Gulf Coast region,” and along with N’Orlins you may hear sometimes about Mississippi, and Biloxi.
On east of Biloxi there was incredible damage, in an area admittedly a little less populous than to the west, but where the force of the hurricane winds and storm surge was arguably the strongest. Right in the path where the eastern corner of Katrina was fiercest, is Moss Point, Mississippi. You’ve probably never heard of Moss Point.
Next door Pascagoula gained a measure of fame in the 1980s when novelty singer/songwriter Ray Stevens featured the town in his hit, "Mississippi Squirrel Revival." But Moss Point has mainly had reason to sing the blues the last couple years.
On August 29, 2005, on the strong eastern side of Hurricane Katrina, much of Moss Point was flooded or destroyed in one day, pounded by vicious hurricane-force winds which lasted from 7 am to 2 pm at a consistent 75 miles an hour, and with a storm surge exceeding 20 feet in some sections. Moss Point was devastated.
Dozens of folk from Central Christian Church, on Mt. Vernon Road in Newark, went down to the Gulf Coast in 2006 and again in February. On the first trip, they slept in the Moss Point Christian Church sanctuary, elevated enough that the structure was sound even with major external damage. The members of that church, led by Pastor Lester Brooks, fixed the roof of their church even before they repaired their own homes, and quickly turned their skills to help others. In that, too, Pastor Brooks led them, taking his day job as a licensed electrician out into a community ministry of repair and healing.
When the Newark folk joined them, sharing meals cooked by Mabel Ford and joining together for morning devotions, driven from job to job by Daddy Willie Smith, 87 years young, they all came together as family. Like a big family reunion, folks made do: for instance, Steve and Connie Crothers slept under a grand piano. Others found pews and patches of floor that suited them.
Then they woke up, sang “This Little Light of Mine,” ate more of Mabel’s cooking, maybe heard Pastor Brooks preach a bit, and went out to work some more until they had to come home.
But they felt like they needed to go home again when they returned, this past February, but needed and housed in Gulfport. So they made sure to go back for Sunday worship to Moss Point, where they were welcomed like the family they’d become. And three of their Moss Point family took time off from their work to come help their nearer neighbors rebuild in Gulfport, all working side by side.
Tomorrow, Central Christian gets to return the favor, and welcome Pastor Brooks to their pulpit at 10:30, and feed Mabel Ford, and Willie McClendon, and Daddy Willie if he can make it, and any of the rest of you who show up, with a potluck to follow. The choir will sing “This Little Light of Mine,” and I’m assured “there will be some preaching.”
There are many of these stories rattling around Licking County from those who’ve been there and returned, but not as many where the story comes to live and walk and preach and eat among us. You’re invited to join these brothers and sisters in a celebration of what faith is building in Moss Point, and Pascagoula (no squirrel involved), and right here in Licking County. And there’ll be plenty to eat.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s seen work trips and mission trips change lives on all sides of the relationship. If you have a mission trip story to share, write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Notes From My Knapsack 7-1-07
Jeff Gill
Hospitality and Heritage in Licking County
Through late spring and early summer, I had the pleasure of meeting 300 new friends.
These were Canadians, whose tour operators had heard about Licking County from the work of our Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB). While making a sweep across the Midwest, they saw Licking County as a spot where a brief interlude could fill in the gaps between major attractions to our north and south.
The reaction of the staff who accompanied the bus loads of friendly and curious folk from southern Ontario (the province of Canada just across Lake Erie from Ohio) was that Licking County was consistently experienced by their customers as the unexpected jewel of their trip. Cherry Valley Lodge in Newark, the world-class Newark Earthworks, the Greek Revival architecture of Granville, and eating at the Buxton Inn left our northern guests wanting more. An evening listening to music at the Granville Inn, and a trip out of town past the Longaberger basket building and Blackhand Gorge, with signs pointing to Flint Ridge State Memorial, has made quite a few request a return tour in Autumn, when the leaves are turning in the Welsh Hills and along the slopes of Licking Valley.
I’ve been privileged to get to tell the 12,000 year old story of visitors feeling at home here in Licking County, and make an explicit invitation to them, and other individual bus tours, to return and stay a few days on their own. My invitation is sincere and based on a firm conviction that there’s more to see and do here than an afternoon and night’s stay, then off and away, can reasonably fit in.
It’s also rooted in the concrete knowledge that a tourist staying two and three nights also needs to buy meals, purchases admission to places like the Heisey Glass Museum, and may make other expenditures whether art at The Works, ice cream at Ye Old Mill, or sundries at the drugstore. Tourism is economic development that costs very little in local investment, and is not only sustainable but expandable with high return rates, where word-of-mouth builds visitation rapidly over time.
Local businesses that directly relate to tourism, like hotels and inns and restaurants, not to mention museums and cultural attractions, know how to be welcoming and work at enhancing the visitor experience. They understand that the point is not only so we get repeat visits, but make visitors want to encourage their friends and family to visit as well. Bus tours, where sixty people come as a group, are even more beneficial, given that to get them individually means thirty or more cars parking and exhausting their way around the sites and attractions of Licking County.
Our recent set of guests (you can call them tourists, if you want, but I like to stick with the frame of mind that comes with “guests”) ran into a few situations where they encountered local residents who were, not to put too fine a point on it, shocked to learn people would pay money to come here. Telling the residents that their home has been advertised in the pages of National Geographic provoked disbelief, and a number of reactions along the line of “No, really, why are you here?”
If in fact there are local folks making complaints that tour buses are sharing our streets, I’d hope to communicate to them that tourism is a great economic development option for Licking County, and while there may be mixed feelings over ethanol plants or other business development, there’s really no downside to tour buses. Our CVB staff is to be commended for their promotion of this low cost, high return business for the county; many local folk who get National Geographic were pleasantly surprised to see an ad for visiting our home in those distinguished pages.
“Do people really want to come visit here?” some ask us. Yes, they do, I get to answer with a smile, especially when we let them know we’re here, and what we have to offer. If you encounter a tourist, thank them for coming, if you would. Treat them like a guest in our common home, and encourage them to stay a few days. We’ll all be glad you did.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he also enjoys talking on a microphone while swinging wildly from an overhead strap with one hand on a tour bus. If you have an odd hobby to share, write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Hospitality and Heritage in Licking County
Through late spring and early summer, I had the pleasure of meeting 300 new friends.
These were Canadians, whose tour operators had heard about Licking County from the work of our Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB). While making a sweep across the Midwest, they saw Licking County as a spot where a brief interlude could fill in the gaps between major attractions to our north and south.
The reaction of the staff who accompanied the bus loads of friendly and curious folk from southern Ontario (the province of Canada just across Lake Erie from Ohio) was that Licking County was consistently experienced by their customers as the unexpected jewel of their trip. Cherry Valley Lodge in Newark, the world-class Newark Earthworks, the Greek Revival architecture of Granville, and eating at the Buxton Inn left our northern guests wanting more. An evening listening to music at the Granville Inn, and a trip out of town past the Longaberger basket building and Blackhand Gorge, with signs pointing to Flint Ridge State Memorial, has made quite a few request a return tour in Autumn, when the leaves are turning in the Welsh Hills and along the slopes of Licking Valley.
I’ve been privileged to get to tell the 12,000 year old story of visitors feeling at home here in Licking County, and make an explicit invitation to them, and other individual bus tours, to return and stay a few days on their own. My invitation is sincere and based on a firm conviction that there’s more to see and do here than an afternoon and night’s stay, then off and away, can reasonably fit in.
It’s also rooted in the concrete knowledge that a tourist staying two and three nights also needs to buy meals, purchases admission to places like the Heisey Glass Museum, and may make other expenditures whether art at The Works, ice cream at Ye Old Mill, or sundries at the drugstore. Tourism is economic development that costs very little in local investment, and is not only sustainable but expandable with high return rates, where word-of-mouth builds visitation rapidly over time.
Local businesses that directly relate to tourism, like hotels and inns and restaurants, not to mention museums and cultural attractions, know how to be welcoming and work at enhancing the visitor experience. They understand that the point is not only so we get repeat visits, but make visitors want to encourage their friends and family to visit as well. Bus tours, where sixty people come as a group, are even more beneficial, given that to get them individually means thirty or more cars parking and exhausting their way around the sites and attractions of Licking County.
Our recent set of guests (you can call them tourists, if you want, but I like to stick with the frame of mind that comes with “guests”) ran into a few situations where they encountered local residents who were, not to put too fine a point on it, shocked to learn people would pay money to come here. Telling the residents that their home has been advertised in the pages of National Geographic provoked disbelief, and a number of reactions along the line of “No, really, why are you here?”
If in fact there are local folks making complaints that tour buses are sharing our streets, I’d hope to communicate to them that tourism is a great economic development option for Licking County, and while there may be mixed feelings over ethanol plants or other business development, there’s really no downside to tour buses. Our CVB staff is to be commended for their promotion of this low cost, high return business for the county; many local folk who get National Geographic were pleasantly surprised to see an ad for visiting our home in those distinguished pages.
“Do people really want to come visit here?” some ask us. Yes, they do, I get to answer with a smile, especially when we let them know we’re here, and what we have to offer. If you encounter a tourist, thank them for coming, if you would. Treat them like a guest in our common home, and encourage them to stay a few days. We’ll all be glad you did.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he also enjoys talking on a microphone while swinging wildly from an overhead strap with one hand on a tour bus. If you have an odd hobby to share, write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Faith Works 6-23-07
Jeff Gill
The Sense of an Ending
If you don’t care for English lit analysis, don’t worry. It’s just that I’ve taken enough classes in that subject to have the name Frank Kermode stuck in my head, unfairly (since he’s written broadly and well on many topics, including Biblical study) tied to “The Sense of an Ending,” a work that takes a point that can only seem obvious after someone has made it.
Kermode goes through a series of illustrations to show us how our expectations and assumptions about where a work of literary craft is going shapes how we read and interpret the text, well before we get to “The End.” Disney movies will end with someone learning something, happy reunions, and an amusing evildoer getting a generally off-screen comeuppance. Oprah recommended books will see a protagonist through unbearable suffering to a point of rest, reflection, and stoic endurance. Jackie Collins novels will . . . nevermind, and no, I’ve never read any.
And I’ve not watched, other than news clips, a single minute of “The Sopranos.” Sounds like an excruciating show to watch, and we don’t have HBO at Chez Gill.
Many of us have been learning about the intense, if not widespread following that Tony and his family (and his Family) led through this final season. The final episode of the final season had an ending that, to some, lacked finality.
Perhaps another way to look at it is that the ending David Chase supplied subverted the ending we expected, and had been watching through the screen of that assumption. In the end, Tony would pay for his crimes, we would see his suffering as redemptive, or his final escape from justice would point clearly to some higher justice (a life lived looking over his shoulder, a life empty of meaning or lasting significance, outward contentment masking inner despair and decay).
Well, Sir Frank Kermode wrote a revised edition of the book that got him knighted, and his observations in 2003 following his 1967 original have to do with our seemingly endless fascination with “subverting expectations,” to the degree that the twist ending or upended conclusion is what we assume is coming, and we watch or read with that assumption in the driver’s seat.
I haven’t watched a minute of “The Sopranos.” Keep that in mind, as I offer this firm and unfounded opinion. C’mon people: Tony got shot in the back of the head, and there was nothing. Blackness. As had been suggested by the gangster chumps themselves, repeatedly and even reaffirmed in a recent re-run before the finale.
So the question to viewers, of whatever faith tradition, is, “So, how does that grab you?”
I suspect on very small but fairly emphatic evidence from the creator-writer-director that he’s saying “This is it. No justice, sorry.” As a person who watches even a fiction with a faith perspective, I feel a strong sense of “Nope, that isn’t quite it; there’s a further chapter to be written.”
But “it isn’t fair” is not the basis for faith in God or what is eternal. “It isn’t fair” is a child’s plea in the face of reality, when big kids steal ice cream and cool kids get the front and center spots. People, possibly David Chase, critique faith and religion as just that, a childlike plea which solid, cold, dark reality does not even notice enough to ignore.
Most of us have our set of truths that lead us away from simple, silent blackness to a further light where all will be revealed, and must be judged. Tony Soprano did not really believe in such an ending, and lived his life accordingly.
But in a conversation with a fellow pastor of a slightly different theological bent, we did agree that there is a strange, unavoidable hint of possibility beyond the scene of Tony, Carmela, A.J., and others framed in a window as the Last Supper, with Meadow still parking outside.
If Tony is killed in front of his family, that event may represent the one chance of redemption the rest of them have. If he lives, they have clearly indicated that in one way or another they will stay “in the life.” If he does, in fact (in fiction) fall face forward into his onion rings, then what may those three (and Paulie) yet make of their lives? Through Tony’s death could come their redemption. Did David Chase intend this, or is it just the power of a particular conclusion woven into our culture that has shaped, is shaping, our perception of this ending?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you spot faith in a dark corner of popular culture, point it out to him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
The Sense of an Ending
If you don’t care for English lit analysis, don’t worry. It’s just that I’ve taken enough classes in that subject to have the name Frank Kermode stuck in my head, unfairly (since he’s written broadly and well on many topics, including Biblical study) tied to “The Sense of an Ending,” a work that takes a point that can only seem obvious after someone has made it.
Kermode goes through a series of illustrations to show us how our expectations and assumptions about where a work of literary craft is going shapes how we read and interpret the text, well before we get to “The End.” Disney movies will end with someone learning something, happy reunions, and an amusing evildoer getting a generally off-screen comeuppance. Oprah recommended books will see a protagonist through unbearable suffering to a point of rest, reflection, and stoic endurance. Jackie Collins novels will . . . nevermind, and no, I’ve never read any.
And I’ve not watched, other than news clips, a single minute of “The Sopranos.” Sounds like an excruciating show to watch, and we don’t have HBO at Chez Gill.
Many of us have been learning about the intense, if not widespread following that Tony and his family (and his Family) led through this final season. The final episode of the final season had an ending that, to some, lacked finality.
Perhaps another way to look at it is that the ending David Chase supplied subverted the ending we expected, and had been watching through the screen of that assumption. In the end, Tony would pay for his crimes, we would see his suffering as redemptive, or his final escape from justice would point clearly to some higher justice (a life lived looking over his shoulder, a life empty of meaning or lasting significance, outward contentment masking inner despair and decay).
Well, Sir Frank Kermode wrote a revised edition of the book that got him knighted, and his observations in 2003 following his 1967 original have to do with our seemingly endless fascination with “subverting expectations,” to the degree that the twist ending or upended conclusion is what we assume is coming, and we watch or read with that assumption in the driver’s seat.
I haven’t watched a minute of “The Sopranos.” Keep that in mind, as I offer this firm and unfounded opinion. C’mon people: Tony got shot in the back of the head, and there was nothing. Blackness. As had been suggested by the gangster chumps themselves, repeatedly and even reaffirmed in a recent re-run before the finale.
So the question to viewers, of whatever faith tradition, is, “So, how does that grab you?”
I suspect on very small but fairly emphatic evidence from the creator-writer-director that he’s saying “This is it. No justice, sorry.” As a person who watches even a fiction with a faith perspective, I feel a strong sense of “Nope, that isn’t quite it; there’s a further chapter to be written.”
But “it isn’t fair” is not the basis for faith in God or what is eternal. “It isn’t fair” is a child’s plea in the face of reality, when big kids steal ice cream and cool kids get the front and center spots. People, possibly David Chase, critique faith and religion as just that, a childlike plea which solid, cold, dark reality does not even notice enough to ignore.
Most of us have our set of truths that lead us away from simple, silent blackness to a further light where all will be revealed, and must be judged. Tony Soprano did not really believe in such an ending, and lived his life accordingly.
But in a conversation with a fellow pastor of a slightly different theological bent, we did agree that there is a strange, unavoidable hint of possibility beyond the scene of Tony, Carmela, A.J., and others framed in a window as the Last Supper, with Meadow still parking outside.
If Tony is killed in front of his family, that event may represent the one chance of redemption the rest of them have. If he lives, they have clearly indicated that in one way or another they will stay “in the life.” If he does, in fact (in fiction) fall face forward into his onion rings, then what may those three (and Paulie) yet make of their lives? Through Tony’s death could come their redemption. Did David Chase intend this, or is it just the power of a particular conclusion woven into our culture that has shaped, is shaping, our perception of this ending?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you spot faith in a dark corner of popular culture, point it out to him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Notes From My Knapsack 6-24-07
Jeff Gill
Why Are We Stopping, Dad?
There are two kinds of dads – those who stop at historical markers, and those who don’t.
Admittedly, some are more compulsive than others. Yes, I have been known to go miles off our planned course to end up seeing the site of the first thoracic surgery in the state of Indiana. I think the building had been torn down, but the state historic marker was there.
For our own “Beautiful Ohio,” check out www.remarkableohio.org and enjoy some road trips from the comfort of your couch. Recently, I’ve had the chance to be present for dedications of new markers in Perry County for Zion Reformed UCC on their 200th birthday as a congregation, and along Granville’s Main Street for the Old Colony Burying Ground.
Other sites around Licking County are working on the process to get an official state historic marker. It isn’t cheap, with the base cost starting at around $2,000.
Infirmary Mound is one spot I’d love to see get an official marker; just off the side of the area where the annual Civil War re-enactment will be held this weekend, this was a fifteen foot tall conical mound before the mold-board plows starting working around the base in the 1840’s. Drive in off of Rt. 37 just north of Union Station Road, and wind your way back into Infirmary Mound Park to the Equestrian Arena; there an uneven patch of hilltop is all that remains above ground of a two millennia old family cemetery that once rose up, as opposed to spreading out across the landscape. Dozens, maybe hundreds of individuals were laid to rest there.
Next to T.J. Evans Athletic Center on Sharon Valley Road is a better preserved mound, also once fifteen feet or more in height, now maybe five. People coming to Newark Community Schools events park up the sides of this mound, which might get more respect if an official “State Historic Marker” were nearby.
We have 22 “Remarkable Ohio” state historical markers in Licking County; about five in Perry County. The oldest Licking County marker is in Hebron, set up in 1960, and the newest dates from 2007 by The Works in downtown Newark, with the Lockmaster’s House along Canal Street, helping mark Howard LeFevre’s 100th birthday as well, I’d guess. There are 1167 of them around the state over all, ranging from points along the famous Civil War “Morgan’s Raid” to the site of the first “electric suction sweeper” in North Canton with the Hoover Historical Center.
You can spend some amusing hours finding errors in these markers. I know a writer of one who found information that changed a statement made on the bronze plaque just months after they submitted their text, but you can’t erase a $2,000 slate very well. Some mistakes are rooted in changing knowledge, others from simple ignorance, and a few . . .
James Loewen is working on a new book, called “Surprises on the Landscape: Unexpected Places That Get History Right,” a follow-up to “Lies Across America,” which noted “historically inaccurate or misleading historical markers and sites across the United States.” The “Lies” book is a searing indictment of what passes for public history in many parts of our country, where inertia and the expense of changing signage leaves “savages” in metal print for future generations referring to Native Americans, or odd silences about other minority groups (check out the Cincinnati Riots of 1884, for instance).
I’m impressed with Prof. Loewen taking on the challenge of showing what’s done right, which can be more difficult to fairly present than pointing out flaws. The sites and interpretive sites that meet his perceptive and exacting standards will make for a great list of “don’t miss” historic attractions.
None of which will blunt my drive to check out the most obscure and least significant historical markers. They don’t go up unless someone there really cared about what is shared on the text. What makes them compelling is the process of reading not only the signage itself, but reading the subtext of what made this effort worth seeing through to a sign and dedication, no matter how long ago the ceremony, let alone the event commemorated.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; his family is remarkably patient with some of the stops they end up making, and who knows, it could end up being an interesting column. Tell him about historic signs you’ve seen at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Why Are We Stopping, Dad?
There are two kinds of dads – those who stop at historical markers, and those who don’t.
Admittedly, some are more compulsive than others. Yes, I have been known to go miles off our planned course to end up seeing the site of the first thoracic surgery in the state of Indiana. I think the building had been torn down, but the state historic marker was there.
For our own “Beautiful Ohio,” check out www.remarkableohio.org and enjoy some road trips from the comfort of your couch. Recently, I’ve had the chance to be present for dedications of new markers in Perry County for Zion Reformed UCC on their 200th birthday as a congregation, and along Granville’s Main Street for the Old Colony Burying Ground.
Other sites around Licking County are working on the process to get an official state historic marker. It isn’t cheap, with the base cost starting at around $2,000.
Infirmary Mound is one spot I’d love to see get an official marker; just off the side of the area where the annual Civil War re-enactment will be held this weekend, this was a fifteen foot tall conical mound before the mold-board plows starting working around the base in the 1840’s. Drive in off of Rt. 37 just north of Union Station Road, and wind your way back into Infirmary Mound Park to the Equestrian Arena; there an uneven patch of hilltop is all that remains above ground of a two millennia old family cemetery that once rose up, as opposed to spreading out across the landscape. Dozens, maybe hundreds of individuals were laid to rest there.
Next to T.J. Evans Athletic Center on Sharon Valley Road is a better preserved mound, also once fifteen feet or more in height, now maybe five. People coming to Newark Community Schools events park up the sides of this mound, which might get more respect if an official “State Historic Marker” were nearby.
We have 22 “Remarkable Ohio” state historical markers in Licking County; about five in Perry County. The oldest Licking County marker is in Hebron, set up in 1960, and the newest dates from 2007 by The Works in downtown Newark, with the Lockmaster’s House along Canal Street, helping mark Howard LeFevre’s 100th birthday as well, I’d guess. There are 1167 of them around the state over all, ranging from points along the famous Civil War “Morgan’s Raid” to the site of the first “electric suction sweeper” in North Canton with the Hoover Historical Center.
You can spend some amusing hours finding errors in these markers. I know a writer of one who found information that changed a statement made on the bronze plaque just months after they submitted their text, but you can’t erase a $2,000 slate very well. Some mistakes are rooted in changing knowledge, others from simple ignorance, and a few . . .
James Loewen is working on a new book, called “Surprises on the Landscape: Unexpected Places That Get History Right,” a follow-up to “Lies Across America,” which noted “historically inaccurate or misleading historical markers and sites across the United States.” The “Lies” book is a searing indictment of what passes for public history in many parts of our country, where inertia and the expense of changing signage leaves “savages” in metal print for future generations referring to Native Americans, or odd silences about other minority groups (check out the Cincinnati Riots of 1884, for instance).
I’m impressed with Prof. Loewen taking on the challenge of showing what’s done right, which can be more difficult to fairly present than pointing out flaws. The sites and interpretive sites that meet his perceptive and exacting standards will make for a great list of “don’t miss” historic attractions.
None of which will blunt my drive to check out the most obscure and least significant historical markers. They don’t go up unless someone there really cared about what is shared on the text. What makes them compelling is the process of reading not only the signage itself, but reading the subtext of what made this effort worth seeing through to a sign and dedication, no matter how long ago the ceremony, let alone the event commemorated.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; his family is remarkably patient with some of the stops they end up making, and who knows, it could end up being an interesting column. Tell him about historic signs you’ve seen at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Faith Works 6-16-07
Jeff Gill
Where Do You Go To Worship On Vacation?
Some folks have a strange idea that worship is one of the things you vacation away from.
Like the lawn, the timeclock, and grocery shopping, there are those who want to get away from the whole church experience.
If that describes you, there’s something about what attending a worship service means to you that needs revisiting.
Let’s be generous, though, and assume that you’ve reflected on why you are part of a worshiping community, are situated as well as you can find in your area for a church, and may not find everything fulfilling your spiritual needs. Maybe that issue is exactly what God’s trying to tell you: you need to worry less about your needs, and work on why we’re made to give thanks and catch a vision in community, and not just in solitude.
One way to get some perspective on whether you have some personal issues to sort out, or need to find a church somewhere else, is to visit churches while on vacation. In fact, even if you think your faith community is the best experience you’ll have this side of the Heavenly Choir, you should visit different churches on vacation.
At the worst, you’ll come home convinced that no one, anywhere, knows how to worship like you do at home. The best and most likely outcome is that you’ll learn a thing or two that your congregational leadership and/or pastor will appreciate hearing about.
Certainly the main point should be that a regular pattern of praise and prayer isn’t what you want to break up. Keeping those disciplines together, while you shake up the usual breakfast on the fly, check e-mail, and run errands flow of the day, can be illuminating in many ways. When you walk into a worship space among the new experiences of amusement parks or beaches or historic sites, there’s a whole new understanding that your heart will open along with that strange church door.
Don’t know where to go? Some folks don’t travel without reservations made in advance, and I respect that, but a church that you just step into can be the most revelatory experience. You saw it as you drove out to the beach, and thought “let’s just try it out.” If that feels a little too outta-hand for you, ask your pastor. Almost any clergyperson will happily help you find churches of your denomination near your destination.
You can also go online to your denominational website (most of them have pretty intuitive addresses, like disciples.org, ucc.org, or unitedmethodist.org; for Catholics, masstimes.org is pretty neat). If you know the zip code for your hotel or campground, you can find congregations within a certain number of miles, and even links to their websites.
But let me beg of you one more time: don’t try too hard to find a service that’s exactly what you’re used to. If there’s a worship style or approach that you don’t quite appreciate, vacation time is a good time to go sample and see for yourself. Stretch, grow, learn. If you just confirm your feelings from before, at least you can say you’ve been there, done that. Hey, you’re a stranger. You can always get up and leave!
You wouldn’t want to eat at the same fast food chain every meal on vacation that you frequent back home, would you? Oh, OK. Never mind. The rest of you, check out a new worship experience on vacation, and then come home and tell me about it. I’ll skip names and places as requested.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s worshiped a number of strange and wonderful places. Tell him your worship tale at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Where Do You Go To Worship On Vacation?
Some folks have a strange idea that worship is one of the things you vacation away from.
Like the lawn, the timeclock, and grocery shopping, there are those who want to get away from the whole church experience.
If that describes you, there’s something about what attending a worship service means to you that needs revisiting.
Let’s be generous, though, and assume that you’ve reflected on why you are part of a worshiping community, are situated as well as you can find in your area for a church, and may not find everything fulfilling your spiritual needs. Maybe that issue is exactly what God’s trying to tell you: you need to worry less about your needs, and work on why we’re made to give thanks and catch a vision in community, and not just in solitude.
One way to get some perspective on whether you have some personal issues to sort out, or need to find a church somewhere else, is to visit churches while on vacation. In fact, even if you think your faith community is the best experience you’ll have this side of the Heavenly Choir, you should visit different churches on vacation.
At the worst, you’ll come home convinced that no one, anywhere, knows how to worship like you do at home. The best and most likely outcome is that you’ll learn a thing or two that your congregational leadership and/or pastor will appreciate hearing about.
Certainly the main point should be that a regular pattern of praise and prayer isn’t what you want to break up. Keeping those disciplines together, while you shake up the usual breakfast on the fly, check e-mail, and run errands flow of the day, can be illuminating in many ways. When you walk into a worship space among the new experiences of amusement parks or beaches or historic sites, there’s a whole new understanding that your heart will open along with that strange church door.
Don’t know where to go? Some folks don’t travel without reservations made in advance, and I respect that, but a church that you just step into can be the most revelatory experience. You saw it as you drove out to the beach, and thought “let’s just try it out.” If that feels a little too outta-hand for you, ask your pastor. Almost any clergyperson will happily help you find churches of your denomination near your destination.
You can also go online to your denominational website (most of them have pretty intuitive addresses, like disciples.org, ucc.org, or unitedmethodist.org; for Catholics, masstimes.org is pretty neat). If you know the zip code for your hotel or campground, you can find congregations within a certain number of miles, and even links to their websites.
But let me beg of you one more time: don’t try too hard to find a service that’s exactly what you’re used to. If there’s a worship style or approach that you don’t quite appreciate, vacation time is a good time to go sample and see for yourself. Stretch, grow, learn. If you just confirm your feelings from before, at least you can say you’ve been there, done that. Hey, you’re a stranger. You can always get up and leave!
You wouldn’t want to eat at the same fast food chain every meal on vacation that you frequent back home, would you? Oh, OK. Never mind. The rest of you, check out a new worship experience on vacation, and then come home and tell me about it. I’ll skip names and places as requested.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s worshiped a number of strange and wonderful places. Tell him your worship tale at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Faith Works 6-9-07
Jeff Gill
The Best Things In Life Are . . .
One of the treasured memories of my marriage to the Lovely Wife is the trip we took for our tenth wedding anniversary when we went back to Zion National Park in southern Utah, and from there to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
We were not staying in the lodge within the park, but our camping set-up allowed us to go to the area laundry facility and showers. We used them the day after our hike down into the depths of the Canyon along Bright Angel Creek, where the temps got up into the high 80’s. Up on the North Rim, well above 7,000 feet, the snow fell gently that night among the pines. In fact, the campgrounds had opened later than their usual May 15 target, because the road in from Jacob’s Lake was buried in snowdrifts.
OK, enough nostalgia. Anyhow, I went into the campground showers, and saw something I’d never encountered before. The Marine Corps had introduced me to the experience of showering while a kindly, solicitous three-striped gentleman screamed at the top of his lungs “faster, faster, FASTER!” What I’d not seen was a coin operated shower head, where five quarters had to go in before water came out. It was, perhaps, more motivational than the sergeant had been.
Much later, while doing our wash, a park ranger came in to do their laundry, and as we talked I mentioned the coin-op shower, and the ranger smiled. He observed that we had hiked past the source of our fresh water, halfway down to the Colorado River, a place called Roaring Springs.
It was plentiful, and pretty expensive to pump up from there to the North Rim. Our quarters did not even put a dent in the cost of providing that fresh water. What the National Park Service was acutely aware of, even more broadly, was the relative scarcity of water throughout the region. We were high on the Colorado Plateau, most of which is desert.
They had tried to put signs up in the shower room, done talks at the firebowl, and tried a number of educational strategies to keep folks from taking a long shower, wasting water in the heart of a desert. None of them reduced water use. Then they found the coin-op shower fixtures.
With the advent of quarters for showers, the water use dropped by more than half. Keep in mind, this is $1.25 (in 1995, I don’t know what it is now) in a place where a slice of pizza was $3 and you spent hundreds, thousands even, to get to that spot. Five quarters. You put a precise price that feels like a price on it, and people value it. They’d thought about four quarters, but that didn’t seem quite enough (too much like a washing machine), so they tried five, and it worked.
All of which is to say to well-meaning youth workers and church staff: you need to charge something. Trip to the zoo, to the amusement park, to a Christian rock concert, whatever.
Even if you have generous support from your congregation (and good for them), charge something. It won’t cover the full price, and let kids and parents know that. But charge something. Even if you have poor kids – I mean, economically disadvantaged youth – charge something. Five bucks. Whatever. Maybe five quarters.
If you charge nothing, the value feels like nothing; if you charge nothing, then you will unintentionally or intentionally be taken for granted. Your last minute cancellations will be high, and your frustration level higher.
Are there occasional situations when even five bucks is too much? If you know your group, you know who that is, and you know how to quietly let them know it ain’t a problem. But charge something, so there is perceived value.
I’ve learned this lesson a number of ways, but none so sensibly than at a twilit campground on the edge of a desert and the Grand Canyon.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s collected fees, sometimes unsuccessfully, for a number of youth outings and trips. Tell him your work trip story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
The Best Things In Life Are . . .
One of the treasured memories of my marriage to the Lovely Wife is the trip we took for our tenth wedding anniversary when we went back to Zion National Park in southern Utah, and from there to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
We were not staying in the lodge within the park, but our camping set-up allowed us to go to the area laundry facility and showers. We used them the day after our hike down into the depths of the Canyon along Bright Angel Creek, where the temps got up into the high 80’s. Up on the North Rim, well above 7,000 feet, the snow fell gently that night among the pines. In fact, the campgrounds had opened later than their usual May 15 target, because the road in from Jacob’s Lake was buried in snowdrifts.
OK, enough nostalgia. Anyhow, I went into the campground showers, and saw something I’d never encountered before. The Marine Corps had introduced me to the experience of showering while a kindly, solicitous three-striped gentleman screamed at the top of his lungs “faster, faster, FASTER!” What I’d not seen was a coin operated shower head, where five quarters had to go in before water came out. It was, perhaps, more motivational than the sergeant had been.
Much later, while doing our wash, a park ranger came in to do their laundry, and as we talked I mentioned the coin-op shower, and the ranger smiled. He observed that we had hiked past the source of our fresh water, halfway down to the Colorado River, a place called Roaring Springs.
It was plentiful, and pretty expensive to pump up from there to the North Rim. Our quarters did not even put a dent in the cost of providing that fresh water. What the National Park Service was acutely aware of, even more broadly, was the relative scarcity of water throughout the region. We were high on the Colorado Plateau, most of which is desert.
They had tried to put signs up in the shower room, done talks at the firebowl, and tried a number of educational strategies to keep folks from taking a long shower, wasting water in the heart of a desert. None of them reduced water use. Then they found the coin-op shower fixtures.
With the advent of quarters for showers, the water use dropped by more than half. Keep in mind, this is $1.25 (in 1995, I don’t know what it is now) in a place where a slice of pizza was $3 and you spent hundreds, thousands even, to get to that spot. Five quarters. You put a precise price that feels like a price on it, and people value it. They’d thought about four quarters, but that didn’t seem quite enough (too much like a washing machine), so they tried five, and it worked.
All of which is to say to well-meaning youth workers and church staff: you need to charge something. Trip to the zoo, to the amusement park, to a Christian rock concert, whatever.
Even if you have generous support from your congregation (and good for them), charge something. It won’t cover the full price, and let kids and parents know that. But charge something. Even if you have poor kids – I mean, economically disadvantaged youth – charge something. Five bucks. Whatever. Maybe five quarters.
If you charge nothing, the value feels like nothing; if you charge nothing, then you will unintentionally or intentionally be taken for granted. Your last minute cancellations will be high, and your frustration level higher.
Are there occasional situations when even five bucks is too much? If you know your group, you know who that is, and you know how to quietly let them know it ain’t a problem. But charge something, so there is perceived value.
I’ve learned this lesson a number of ways, but none so sensibly than at a twilit campground on the edge of a desert and the Grand Canyon.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s collected fees, sometimes unsuccessfully, for a number of youth outings and trips. Tell him your work trip story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Notes From My Knapsack 6-17-07
Jeff Gill
An Unearthly Sound, Deep From the Soil
One of the pleasures of writing for the Booster is our range of distribution, covering (officially) Licking County, but with readers showing up in my email from Fairfield, Perry, Muskingum, and Franklin Counties.
That means we cover a fair piece of terrain, from plains and former prairie to the Appalachian foothills. Some of this area is farmed extensively, and others covered with houses; the ground may be designated as “glaciated,” but beyond Dawes Arboretum toward Flint Ridge, the geologists see that Ice Age glaciers stopped short of weighing down that corner of Licking County.
There is an insect often, and erroneously, called the 17-year locust. Bug people (aka entomologists) know that this periodically appearing insect is a cicada, and the 17 year type is a magicicada.
Three springs back, our local “brood” erupted from the ground, 2004 marking the return of the hatchlings who burrowed deep below the tree branches where their eggs were laid, back in 1987. That grouping of cicadas is known as Brood X, which is a cool name for a bug with giant red eyes and a strange screaming sound filling the evening air.
X is actually a Roman numeral, with less cinematic names for other broods like V or XVII. We don’t have to listen to the thunderous shriek of our local magicicada brood again until 2021 (and 2038, but you knew that).
I’m reading about the reactions up in my youthful hometown area around Chicago, where Brood XIII (Brood Thirteen sounds like a sci-fi thriller, too) erupting this summer is big, even if not as large and widespread as our Brood X gang. When you have major market TV recording the megadecibel buzzing, you get the media attention bonus.
But for our area, Brood XIV is just across the southern edge of our area, coming out next year. Then there’s the thirteen-year cicadas, Broods XVIII through XXX. Brood XIX is no small herd o’ bugs, with all the volume of their 17 year cousins, and they’re perking along, one to eight feet underground, to pop up in 2011.
The various broods, and their pattern of emergence, has some very interesting relationships with the line of glaciation, showing their ancient status in the land. The first re-settling big ol’ bugs must have come right behind the Big Thaw, and the consistency of the early soil led them to hug the transition zone from glaciated to unglaciated pretty closely, until a few millennia of vegetation loosened enough soil to allow trees, which then allowed for cicadas.
Whether Brood X, Brood V, or Brood IX of the 17-year, or Brood XIX of the 13-year cicadas, to sound off, these bugs need trees and relatively undisturbed soil. How undisturbed? Well, at least no more than nine inches down, and for seventeen or thirteen years.
In new subdivisions, folk noticed that while some of their neighbors complained of the noise keeping them up nights, they weren’t hearing the cicadas at all. No doubt. If all your trees are new, then they couldn’t have been part of the original drama. Then, where the fertilized female lays her eggs in slits she cuts in tender branches of healthy trees, the eggs can hatch and the emerging nymphs drop to the ground. Those nymphs burrow deep, and latch onto the root system, where they feed in symbiosis with the tree itself.
If your neighborhood wasn’t around in 1987, 1998, or 2003, you won’t hear any cicadas seventeen or thirteen years later. Cicadas give us a very specific window into how much we tamper with the ecosystem when we build and landscape.
Good news, though: there are “common” varieties of cicada in our neck of the woods that have a two to five year cycle of egg, nymph, burrow, emergence and molting out of their outer shell. They quickly recolonize our new neighborhoods, and clear the way for their larger and louder cousins. It’s their sound that we hear later in almost every summer.
If you’re traveling around the Midwest in the next few weeks, you may hear cicadas as you head west. To hear them closer to home, you either need to wait for the end of the summer, or just listen while sitting below a grand old tree for the subtle sipping many feet below you.
No, you won’t hear it, but it might be good exercise for your ears to try.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Share you bug likes and dislikes at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
An Unearthly Sound, Deep From the Soil
One of the pleasures of writing for the Booster is our range of distribution, covering (officially) Licking County, but with readers showing up in my email from Fairfield, Perry, Muskingum, and Franklin Counties.
That means we cover a fair piece of terrain, from plains and former prairie to the Appalachian foothills. Some of this area is farmed extensively, and others covered with houses; the ground may be designated as “glaciated,” but beyond Dawes Arboretum toward Flint Ridge, the geologists see that Ice Age glaciers stopped short of weighing down that corner of Licking County.
There is an insect often, and erroneously, called the 17-year locust. Bug people (aka entomologists) know that this periodically appearing insect is a cicada, and the 17 year type is a magicicada.
Three springs back, our local “brood” erupted from the ground, 2004 marking the return of the hatchlings who burrowed deep below the tree branches where their eggs were laid, back in 1987. That grouping of cicadas is known as Brood X, which is a cool name for a bug with giant red eyes and a strange screaming sound filling the evening air.
X is actually a Roman numeral, with less cinematic names for other broods like V or XVII. We don’t have to listen to the thunderous shriek of our local magicicada brood again until 2021 (and 2038, but you knew that).
I’m reading about the reactions up in my youthful hometown area around Chicago, where Brood XIII (Brood Thirteen sounds like a sci-fi thriller, too) erupting this summer is big, even if not as large and widespread as our Brood X gang. When you have major market TV recording the megadecibel buzzing, you get the media attention bonus.
But for our area, Brood XIV is just across the southern edge of our area, coming out next year. Then there’s the thirteen-year cicadas, Broods XVIII through XXX. Brood XIX is no small herd o’ bugs, with all the volume of their 17 year cousins, and they’re perking along, one to eight feet underground, to pop up in 2011.
The various broods, and their pattern of emergence, has some very interesting relationships with the line of glaciation, showing their ancient status in the land. The first re-settling big ol’ bugs must have come right behind the Big Thaw, and the consistency of the early soil led them to hug the transition zone from glaciated to unglaciated pretty closely, until a few millennia of vegetation loosened enough soil to allow trees, which then allowed for cicadas.
Whether Brood X, Brood V, or Brood IX of the 17-year, or Brood XIX of the 13-year cicadas, to sound off, these bugs need trees and relatively undisturbed soil. How undisturbed? Well, at least no more than nine inches down, and for seventeen or thirteen years.
In new subdivisions, folk noticed that while some of their neighbors complained of the noise keeping them up nights, they weren’t hearing the cicadas at all. No doubt. If all your trees are new, then they couldn’t have been part of the original drama. Then, where the fertilized female lays her eggs in slits she cuts in tender branches of healthy trees, the eggs can hatch and the emerging nymphs drop to the ground. Those nymphs burrow deep, and latch onto the root system, where they feed in symbiosis with the tree itself.
If your neighborhood wasn’t around in 1987, 1998, or 2003, you won’t hear any cicadas seventeen or thirteen years later. Cicadas give us a very specific window into how much we tamper with the ecosystem when we build and landscape.
Good news, though: there are “common” varieties of cicada in our neck of the woods that have a two to five year cycle of egg, nymph, burrow, emergence and molting out of their outer shell. They quickly recolonize our new neighborhoods, and clear the way for their larger and louder cousins. It’s their sound that we hear later in almost every summer.
If you’re traveling around the Midwest in the next few weeks, you may hear cicadas as you head west. To hear them closer to home, you either need to wait for the end of the summer, or just listen while sitting below a grand old tree for the subtle sipping many feet below you.
No, you won’t hear it, but it might be good exercise for your ears to try.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Share you bug likes and dislikes at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Notes From My Knapsack 6-10-07
Jeff Gill
Summer Reading Program Time
Some folks like to read in the depths of winter, when the sun sets early and the chance to curl up on the couch makes an opportunity for books on the endtable.
Others claim beach reading is a great opportunity, which has never made sense for me. Sand in the bindings, water all around, and sunscreen on the fingers make for oddly discolored pages.
Considering the kind of doorstop-sized, steamy-covered books that usually get called “beach reading,” a little unintentional vandalism might be OK. Summertime just feels like a period filled with lots of slow spots where books can fit in, even if not the beach.There is plenty of fiction to stretch your mind and expand your experience that doesn’t involve embarrassing covers. Everyone else promotes non-fiction these days, so I'm just going to talk novels here.
You can have some reading in your backseat of the car, your knapsack (!), or whatever carryall you carry through the summer – and we all have a bunch of stuff to carry about in the summertime, so a book is an easy addition.
What’s out there to read, though? A ways back I praised Elizabeth Crook’s “The Night Journal,” and it is now in paperback. This is a semi-modern setting in Texas and New Mexico with extended flashbacks and reappearing letters and photos from a century and more ago. You get some US history, a murder mystery, and adventures from Utah to Mexico across the Rio Grande.
“Suite Francaise” is in paperback as well, and the story of the novel (actually, two novellas) is as gripping as the story in the novel. Irene Nemirovsky was a French Jew who not only saw the dim outlines of the Holocaust coming, but died in it, leaving the beginning and outline of a projected five novella sequence that took place in, what was for the author, “real time.”
Nemirovsky’s daughter survived, and was given the manuscripts after the war in a suitcase. She didn’t realize what she had, and thinking it would be too painful to read through her mother’s letters and journal, kept them without either reading or destroying the contents.
You don’t have to read recent fiction. Trollope and Dickens and Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, that is, aka George) are all waiting for you right where you left them, next to the Brontes and Jane Austen and Jane’s misplaced later brother Patrick O’Brian, he of the Aubrey/Maturin series of twenty seafaring novels set in Austen’s day.
I have a major weak spot for Iris Murdoch, who wrote some amazing novels before she got a movie made about her death, let’s not forget. “The Bell” and “A Fairly Honourable Defeat” are mind and heart grabbing stories that reward a slow, second reading.
John Irving is the uncle you swear you won’t invite over next Thanksgiving, but then do anyhow because the whole event isn’t as fun without him. “A Prayer For Owen Meany” makes up for a great deal of his latest work, but I like to recommend “A Son of the Circus” which even many of his fans haven’t gotten to. Richard Russo is working on a new novel with portions set in Venice, Italy, which makes a certain contrast with post-industrial rust-belt cities where his books tend to set up shop; I can’t wait, but I’ll have to. Might be time to go back and re-read “Empire Falls,” which got him a Pulitzer and an HBO movie.
Wendell Berry and Jon Hassler are two major Midwestern writers, and either might say that “major Midwestern” is an oxymoron, but hey, I’m from here. This is my world, and those two describe elements of it beautifully. The problem is that you have to be pre-slowed-down. These aren’t books like Gail Godwin or Carol Shields that help you gear down; Berry & Hassler assume you’re already trotting at their easy going pace, and then slow down some more.
Marilynne Robinson has precisely two novels in print, but she’s rightly considered one of the best prose writers working in American fiction; “Housekeeping” and the recent “Gilead” are both in paper covers, and cover some of Russo’s and Berry’s terrain. Oddly, I think of her work alongside (mentally) with Susan Howatch, whose Starbridge and St. Benet’s series’ of books are all set in the context of faith at work. Robinson writes about Iowa and the non-pretty, working class Pacific Northwest, while Howatch is firmly rooted in the cathedrals and parishes of the Church of England. David Lodge does much the same for English Catholics trying to be faithful and hopeful in work and academia, though his most recent novel is a semi-bio of Henry James.
Without even getting to Robertson Davies or Dostoevsky . . . is that enough to hold you ‘til autumn?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him a book review of your own at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Summer Reading Program Time
Some folks like to read in the depths of winter, when the sun sets early and the chance to curl up on the couch makes an opportunity for books on the endtable.
Others claim beach reading is a great opportunity, which has never made sense for me. Sand in the bindings, water all around, and sunscreen on the fingers make for oddly discolored pages.
Considering the kind of doorstop-sized, steamy-covered books that usually get called “beach reading,” a little unintentional vandalism might be OK. Summertime just feels like a period filled with lots of slow spots where books can fit in, even if not the beach.There is plenty of fiction to stretch your mind and expand your experience that doesn’t involve embarrassing covers. Everyone else promotes non-fiction these days, so I'm just going to talk novels here.
You can have some reading in your backseat of the car, your knapsack (!), or whatever carryall you carry through the summer – and we all have a bunch of stuff to carry about in the summertime, so a book is an easy addition.
What’s out there to read, though? A ways back I praised Elizabeth Crook’s “The Night Journal,” and it is now in paperback. This is a semi-modern setting in Texas and New Mexico with extended flashbacks and reappearing letters and photos from a century and more ago. You get some US history, a murder mystery, and adventures from Utah to Mexico across the Rio Grande.
“Suite Francaise” is in paperback as well, and the story of the novel (actually, two novellas) is as gripping as the story in the novel. Irene Nemirovsky was a French Jew who not only saw the dim outlines of the Holocaust coming, but died in it, leaving the beginning and outline of a projected five novella sequence that took place in, what was for the author, “real time.”
Nemirovsky’s daughter survived, and was given the manuscripts after the war in a suitcase. She didn’t realize what she had, and thinking it would be too painful to read through her mother’s letters and journal, kept them without either reading or destroying the contents.
You don’t have to read recent fiction. Trollope and Dickens and Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, that is, aka George) are all waiting for you right where you left them, next to the Brontes and Jane Austen and Jane’s misplaced later brother Patrick O’Brian, he of the Aubrey/Maturin series of twenty seafaring novels set in Austen’s day.
I have a major weak spot for Iris Murdoch, who wrote some amazing novels before she got a movie made about her death, let’s not forget. “The Bell” and “A Fairly Honourable Defeat” are mind and heart grabbing stories that reward a slow, second reading.
John Irving is the uncle you swear you won’t invite over next Thanksgiving, but then do anyhow because the whole event isn’t as fun without him. “A Prayer For Owen Meany” makes up for a great deal of his latest work, but I like to recommend “A Son of the Circus” which even many of his fans haven’t gotten to. Richard Russo is working on a new novel with portions set in Venice, Italy, which makes a certain contrast with post-industrial rust-belt cities where his books tend to set up shop; I can’t wait, but I’ll have to. Might be time to go back and re-read “Empire Falls,” which got him a Pulitzer and an HBO movie.
Wendell Berry and Jon Hassler are two major Midwestern writers, and either might say that “major Midwestern” is an oxymoron, but hey, I’m from here. This is my world, and those two describe elements of it beautifully. The problem is that you have to be pre-slowed-down. These aren’t books like Gail Godwin or Carol Shields that help you gear down; Berry & Hassler assume you’re already trotting at their easy going pace, and then slow down some more.
Marilynne Robinson has precisely two novels in print, but she’s rightly considered one of the best prose writers working in American fiction; “Housekeeping” and the recent “Gilead” are both in paper covers, and cover some of Russo’s and Berry’s terrain. Oddly, I think of her work alongside (mentally) with Susan Howatch, whose Starbridge and St. Benet’s series’ of books are all set in the context of faith at work. Robinson writes about Iowa and the non-pretty, working class Pacific Northwest, while Howatch is firmly rooted in the cathedrals and parishes of the Church of England. David Lodge does much the same for English Catholics trying to be faithful and hopeful in work and academia, though his most recent novel is a semi-bio of Henry James.
Without even getting to Robertson Davies or Dostoevsky . . . is that enough to hold you ‘til autumn?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him a book review of your own at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Faith Works 6-2-07
Jeff Gill
Sunscreen, check; tickets, check . . . what else?
You may have plans for a great summer vacation, whether to Trinidad & Tobago, or just down to Toboso.
You pack all the kids’ swimwear, sunscreen rated 78 or so, a good book (a portable copy of The Good Book?), and remember the tickets.
Have you remembered your church?
No, not to put in your luggage, but your regular support of the ministry there.
If you have a church home, of whatever faith or denomination, I don’t have to tell you that there’s been a financial campaign, commitment cards or pledges, budgets made and bills due. Even if you work off of a purely faith/tithe basis as a church, let alone individual believer, there’s still that offering plate or Joash box or however you gather up the first fruits.
But the importance of that regular support often slips off the mental radar screen when vacation time drapes over the congregation. It may be that you say, at some point, when you realize you’ll miss five Sundays this summer, “I’ll make it up at the end of August.”
You’ve made a plan for giving, worked out the amount or (better yet) figured out what percentage giving of your income that’s going to support your fiath community, and you really are faithful.
What is surprising to people when they realize it about themselves, but is old, old news to church treasurers and financial secretaries, is that the human (sinful) tendency is too slip behind and not catch up. Out of sight, out of mind, and not out of pocket.
Plus you spend a wee bit more than you meant to on vacation, where you really ought to have a plan and a budget, too, and the next thing you know is that you’re rationalizing just picking up after Labor Day.
Clergy of all faiths know that summer is a season when you hope to go into June with a solid cushion, because so very many churches have major shortfalls of giving versus expenses during July and August, and you spend fall not focused on evangelism and outreach the way you hoped, but on picking up the pieces fiscally and supercharging the November giving campaign.
Repeat cycle more years than not, and you can see why clergy don’t love the summer.
Pretty much the same bills come in the summer as any other month of the year, more or less, but not the same giving.
If you have envelopes, think about using them as summer benchmarks, whether weekly or monthly. You could send your offering back home if you’re gone a long stretch, or even give ahead for the summer (trust me, the treasurer will looooove you for it), which helps you remember not to spend all that money on a four foot tall brass parrot for the porch that your wife will never let you put up anyhow.
There’s a protocol thing that folks sometimes ask me about: if we visit a church on vacation, should we give at the offering? First, kudos for going to worship on vacation. You’re teaching your kids and reminding yourself of the importance and place of worship in your lives. It isn’t just a community obligation, but a positive value of prayer and praise that happens wherever you go. Second, you get a chance to do something many worshipers don’t get, which is to feel your way through what it’s like to be a visitor, and how that affects your experience of a worship space and service. Make sure, the very next time you’re back home, to think through that experience as you park, enter the building, and find your way into the worship space. How can we be more and more effectively welcoming to folks who feel like I did last Sunday in a strange place?.
You can see where I’m going with this: thirdly, most churches worth their name are absolutely fine about folks who just pass the plate along, or hold up a low-slung hand when the basket swings their way. You’re a guest, and guests aren’t paying the bills here. Please feel welcome.
But I can’t imagine, for myself, not putting at least a five or a ten in the offering as a thank you to God for a chance to worship far from home, to learn new lessons, and get re-energized from a whole new angle in a different service while on vacation.
And it reminds me that I should keep up my real offering back home!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s been a church treasurer and a parish pastor, and doesn’t like looking at August budget reports any more than the next fellow. Share your stewardship tips at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Sunscreen, check; tickets, check . . . what else?
You may have plans for a great summer vacation, whether to Trinidad & Tobago, or just down to Toboso.
You pack all the kids’ swimwear, sunscreen rated 78 or so, a good book (a portable copy of The Good Book?), and remember the tickets.
Have you remembered your church?
No, not to put in your luggage, but your regular support of the ministry there.
If you have a church home, of whatever faith or denomination, I don’t have to tell you that there’s been a financial campaign, commitment cards or pledges, budgets made and bills due. Even if you work off of a purely faith/tithe basis as a church, let alone individual believer, there’s still that offering plate or Joash box or however you gather up the first fruits.
But the importance of that regular support often slips off the mental radar screen when vacation time drapes over the congregation. It may be that you say, at some point, when you realize you’ll miss five Sundays this summer, “I’ll make it up at the end of August.”
You’ve made a plan for giving, worked out the amount or (better yet) figured out what percentage giving of your income that’s going to support your fiath community, and you really are faithful.
What is surprising to people when they realize it about themselves, but is old, old news to church treasurers and financial secretaries, is that the human (sinful) tendency is too slip behind and not catch up. Out of sight, out of mind, and not out of pocket.
Plus you spend a wee bit more than you meant to on vacation, where you really ought to have a plan and a budget, too, and the next thing you know is that you’re rationalizing just picking up after Labor Day.
Clergy of all faiths know that summer is a season when you hope to go into June with a solid cushion, because so very many churches have major shortfalls of giving versus expenses during July and August, and you spend fall not focused on evangelism and outreach the way you hoped, but on picking up the pieces fiscally and supercharging the November giving campaign.
Repeat cycle more years than not, and you can see why clergy don’t love the summer.
Pretty much the same bills come in the summer as any other month of the year, more or less, but not the same giving.
If you have envelopes, think about using them as summer benchmarks, whether weekly or monthly. You could send your offering back home if you’re gone a long stretch, or even give ahead for the summer (trust me, the treasurer will looooove you for it), which helps you remember not to spend all that money on a four foot tall brass parrot for the porch that your wife will never let you put up anyhow.
There’s a protocol thing that folks sometimes ask me about: if we visit a church on vacation, should we give at the offering? First, kudos for going to worship on vacation. You’re teaching your kids and reminding yourself of the importance and place of worship in your lives. It isn’t just a community obligation, but a positive value of prayer and praise that happens wherever you go. Second, you get a chance to do something many worshipers don’t get, which is to feel your way through what it’s like to be a visitor, and how that affects your experience of a worship space and service. Make sure, the very next time you’re back home, to think through that experience as you park, enter the building, and find your way into the worship space. How can we be more and more effectively welcoming to folks who feel like I did last Sunday in a strange place?.
You can see where I’m going with this: thirdly, most churches worth their name are absolutely fine about folks who just pass the plate along, or hold up a low-slung hand when the basket swings their way. You’re a guest, and guests aren’t paying the bills here. Please feel welcome.
But I can’t imagine, for myself, not putting at least a five or a ten in the offering as a thank you to God for a chance to worship far from home, to learn new lessons, and get re-energized from a whole new angle in a different service while on vacation.
And it reminds me that I should keep up my real offering back home!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s been a church treasurer and a parish pastor, and doesn’t like looking at August budget reports any more than the next fellow. Share your stewardship tips at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Notes From My Knapsack 6-3-07
Jeff Gill
A Few Words From 1889
Long, long days, warm nights, and food cooked outdoors.
Summer is here, and with the end of school and graduation behind most of us, camp season begins.
There are families that have their own hunk of land and a cabin they may call a camp, and many others camp at a campground that may have little enough ground showing in the camp full of asphalt and travel trailers.
But camp season for me is Scout and church camp, with the opening week always Cub Scout Day Camp.
Next week the Licking District Cub Scout Day Camp takes place out at Camp Falling Rock, under the faithful direction of Ric and Angie Eader from Etna. Over 300 Cubs, and nearly 100 adults and a dozen older Boy Scouts all come together with the theme “From Sea to Shining Sea.”
For seas they have Lake Peewee on the old camp end off Rocky Fork, and the pool up top, where the week long residential camps will fill with Boy Scouts all summer.
For this shakedown week, the younger Cubs will have their turn in the newly cleaned and filled pool – if they can make it up Cardiac Hill. More positive-minded Scout leaders try to call it “Cardio Hill,” which is a good intention, but tradition dies hard.
Some older traditions at Cub Day Camp are carved in stone, like making bird houses and tool boxes, or learning how to fold the American flag, or archery.
When I’m out at Camp Falling Rock, meandering from the original part of the camp around Franklin Lodge (75 years old last year) to the new camp “up top,” the road winds up past Lake Peewee, and levels a bit as Amphitheater Creek gurgles across the rocky path. It’s a kind of breather, with cool air coming out of the stone bluffs, before you slog up Cardiac.
If you look up as you step from rock to rock across the creek, you can barely make out an inscription cut deep, but weathered into the same lichened grey of the surrounding stone.
All it says is “Camp Whip-poor-will,” with the next line “Mount Vernon, 1889.”
It appears to be some kind of church camp, but I’ve never found a precise reference.
What I surmise (note: all that follows is eddicated guesswork, in other words) is that the area was used as a very early Christian Endeavour camp.
Christian Endeavour was originally a youth program, back when no one had youth programs, just a nursery and then “sit in church and be quiet!” It began in Maine at a Congregational (now UCC) church in 1881, and quickly grew, spreading across the US and around the world. The headquarters of this still-extant organization are in . . . Mount Vernon.
An ecumenical youth program, the strength of it was such that whole congregations were founded from the effort, such as Newark’s own Christian Endeavor United Methodist Church. Meanwhile, existing churches could pick it up as their youth meeting structure, and I found a century old, mostly decayed “CE” poster on oilcloth in the attic when I served at Hebron Christian Church.
Now youth programs are the norm, not a new idea, and camps are everywhere. 1889 was well past the pioneer phase of central Ohio, but I suspect Camp Whip-poor-will represents some real pioneering spirit. Whoever organized and led a camp program in 1889 out in northeastern Licking County had enough strength left to carve a message in stone, which tells me they must have planned pretty well.
We don’t believe in marking up the environment today (can you imagine a century of inscriptions each summer?), but most of the values and practices of Camp Whip-poor-will probably line up pretty well with what we do there today.
Whatever you do this summer, make sure to get outside, look around at nature, and make some food for yourself and others without a microwave. Watch a sunset, identify a bird, read a few psalms.
And find something to be thankful for. Thinking about how life was in 1889 can be a good start; then you can think about 2125 and how they’ll marvel at the inconveniences we put up with back in 2007.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about an inscription that caught your eye at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
A Few Words From 1889
Long, long days, warm nights, and food cooked outdoors.
Summer is here, and with the end of school and graduation behind most of us, camp season begins.
There are families that have their own hunk of land and a cabin they may call a camp, and many others camp at a campground that may have little enough ground showing in the camp full of asphalt and travel trailers.
But camp season for me is Scout and church camp, with the opening week always Cub Scout Day Camp.
Next week the Licking District Cub Scout Day Camp takes place out at Camp Falling Rock, under the faithful direction of Ric and Angie Eader from Etna. Over 300 Cubs, and nearly 100 adults and a dozen older Boy Scouts all come together with the theme “From Sea to Shining Sea.”
For seas they have Lake Peewee on the old camp end off Rocky Fork, and the pool up top, where the week long residential camps will fill with Boy Scouts all summer.
For this shakedown week, the younger Cubs will have their turn in the newly cleaned and filled pool – if they can make it up Cardiac Hill. More positive-minded Scout leaders try to call it “Cardio Hill,” which is a good intention, but tradition dies hard.
Some older traditions at Cub Day Camp are carved in stone, like making bird houses and tool boxes, or learning how to fold the American flag, or archery.
When I’m out at Camp Falling Rock, meandering from the original part of the camp around Franklin Lodge (75 years old last year) to the new camp “up top,” the road winds up past Lake Peewee, and levels a bit as Amphitheater Creek gurgles across the rocky path. It’s a kind of breather, with cool air coming out of the stone bluffs, before you slog up Cardiac.
If you look up as you step from rock to rock across the creek, you can barely make out an inscription cut deep, but weathered into the same lichened grey of the surrounding stone.
All it says is “Camp Whip-poor-will,” with the next line “Mount Vernon, 1889.”
It appears to be some kind of church camp, but I’ve never found a precise reference.
What I surmise (note: all that follows is eddicated guesswork, in other words) is that the area was used as a very early Christian Endeavour camp.
Christian Endeavour was originally a youth program, back when no one had youth programs, just a nursery and then “sit in church and be quiet!” It began in Maine at a Congregational (now UCC) church in 1881, and quickly grew, spreading across the US and around the world. The headquarters of this still-extant organization are in . . . Mount Vernon.
An ecumenical youth program, the strength of it was such that whole congregations were founded from the effort, such as Newark’s own Christian Endeavor United Methodist Church. Meanwhile, existing churches could pick it up as their youth meeting structure, and I found a century old, mostly decayed “CE” poster on oilcloth in the attic when I served at Hebron Christian Church.
Now youth programs are the norm, not a new idea, and camps are everywhere. 1889 was well past the pioneer phase of central Ohio, but I suspect Camp Whip-poor-will represents some real pioneering spirit. Whoever organized and led a camp program in 1889 out in northeastern Licking County had enough strength left to carve a message in stone, which tells me they must have planned pretty well.
We don’t believe in marking up the environment today (can you imagine a century of inscriptions each summer?), but most of the values and practices of Camp Whip-poor-will probably line up pretty well with what we do there today.
Whatever you do this summer, make sure to get outside, look around at nature, and make some food for yourself and others without a microwave. Watch a sunset, identify a bird, read a few psalms.
And find something to be thankful for. Thinking about how life was in 1889 can be a good start; then you can think about 2125 and how they’ll marvel at the inconveniences we put up with back in 2007.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about an inscription that caught your eye at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Faith Works 5-26-07
Jeff Gill
Is There a Text at the Statehouse?
So, I won’t be delivering any public prayers at the Statehouse.
Not a surprise, since no one’s asked me. That is, not for a while, and all the spoken, public praying I’ve done in the past has been technically next door, in the Atrium.
I’ve offered invocations for a wide variety of gatherings outside of worship services, and as I’ve discussed here before (and gotten some interesting and thoughtful email in response), I will often choose not to close with “in Jesus’ name, Amen.”
To recap, that’s because a) I don’t end every prayer I pray that way anyhow, so b) why should I do it just to make a point, and c) there are interfaith occasions where my Christian faith is clear enough, and I feel it is both appropriate and courteous to keep a general setting prayer as broad based as seems right, which sometimes means a wrap-up along the lines of “as we are called to express Your love in this world,” or “committing ourselves to the work of Your justice and truth, Amen.”
No one has ever asked me to do a “public” prayer and said “um, please don’t say the ‘in Jesus’ name’ thing, OK?” If I were asked to not say it, I’d probably defer the whole occasion, or ask what the concern is and see where the conversation takes us.
Which isn’t why I won’t be praying over in the State Capital any time soon. Well, that’s part of it. About a year ago I wrote here about the dispute in my old home state, Indiana, where there was a fight over House rules that ended up in a court decision saying that the Indiana legislature needed to ensure that any opening blessings or invocations were Jesus-free.
When a number pointed out, “so I can pray to Allah, but Jesus is right out?” then they got a revision to the guidelines that basically said you can’t say anything but “God” or maybe “Lord” in the prayers to open proceedings.
Which meant rabbis who normally prayed their first half of an invocation in Hebrew were in a grey area, and some women objected to privileging “Lord” as an acceptable term.
Last I heard, Indiana went to all prayers offered by members, not invited clergy, where they could invoke Vishnu, Brahma, and Ahriman if they chose as elected representatives.
Fine, you say, that’s Indiana. Ah, but could Ohio be close behind?
Apparently some legislators have had their tender ears so wounded by sharp edged swinging of Jesus’ name (note to secularists, whom I trust some are still reading: most Christians regularly affirm that Jesus is, in fact, God, which means if you can call God Allah, you should be able to call God Jesus – that’s the point), that they’ve laid down two guidelines.
Remember, your faithful columnist has said that he’d be willing to pray without an obligatory use of Jesus, but I don’t feel comfortable being told that I can’t (He might come up, is all I’m saying).
It’s the second guideline that is surprisingly uncontroversial, or maybe the political reporters just haven’t asked enough clergy about it. Guideline two is, to check for appropriate names of the Most High, any invited prayin’ clergy need to submit a text of their prayer three days in advance.
To be fair, I would probably write a few notes down on a card if I were doing a public prayer in a place like the Capital, just as I do for a Scouting awards event, or special program. Maybe.
But for many clergy, the idea that a prayer has to be written out in advance is problematic. Does anyone involved with this decision know that?
Some folks can take this principle to a fault, and condemn anyone who doesn’t pray entirely spontaneously. That is not entirely fair, and many of those who so aggressively mock “set prayers” in favor of “letting the Spirit move” can sound awfully repetitious themselves over many different prayers – “Lord, we just want . . . We just ask, Lord . . . etc.”
There is a definite place for thought and preparation in prayer, and the great prayers of the saints used again and again, not to mention the Lord’s Prayer.
But to tell clergy that they can’t pray in a way that touches on events of the moment, or of last night; to set a guideline that requires the words to be set down in advance, let alone approved . . . never mind, say I.
Don’t worry, though; I will certainly still be praying for them. Just not up in front of them at the opening of their day. You can pray for them, too (see 1 Timothy 2: 1-3), and say whatever the Spirit leads you to offer.
In all fairness, quite a few of them appreciate those prayers, and count on them. Lift them up, and keep on praying for them all.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; say a prayer for him or just drop a line to knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Is There a Text at the Statehouse?
So, I won’t be delivering any public prayers at the Statehouse.
Not a surprise, since no one’s asked me. That is, not for a while, and all the spoken, public praying I’ve done in the past has been technically next door, in the Atrium.
I’ve offered invocations for a wide variety of gatherings outside of worship services, and as I’ve discussed here before (and gotten some interesting and thoughtful email in response), I will often choose not to close with “in Jesus’ name, Amen.”
To recap, that’s because a) I don’t end every prayer I pray that way anyhow, so b) why should I do it just to make a point, and c) there are interfaith occasions where my Christian faith is clear enough, and I feel it is both appropriate and courteous to keep a general setting prayer as broad based as seems right, which sometimes means a wrap-up along the lines of “as we are called to express Your love in this world,” or “committing ourselves to the work of Your justice and truth, Amen.”
No one has ever asked me to do a “public” prayer and said “um, please don’t say the ‘in Jesus’ name’ thing, OK?” If I were asked to not say it, I’d probably defer the whole occasion, or ask what the concern is and see where the conversation takes us.
Which isn’t why I won’t be praying over in the State Capital any time soon. Well, that’s part of it. About a year ago I wrote here about the dispute in my old home state, Indiana, where there was a fight over House rules that ended up in a court decision saying that the Indiana legislature needed to ensure that any opening blessings or invocations were Jesus-free.
When a number pointed out, “so I can pray to Allah, but Jesus is right out?” then they got a revision to the guidelines that basically said you can’t say anything but “God” or maybe “Lord” in the prayers to open proceedings.
Which meant rabbis who normally prayed their first half of an invocation in Hebrew were in a grey area, and some women objected to privileging “Lord” as an acceptable term.
Last I heard, Indiana went to all prayers offered by members, not invited clergy, where they could invoke Vishnu, Brahma, and Ahriman if they chose as elected representatives.
Fine, you say, that’s Indiana. Ah, but could Ohio be close behind?
Apparently some legislators have had their tender ears so wounded by sharp edged swinging of Jesus’ name (note to secularists, whom I trust some are still reading: most Christians regularly affirm that Jesus is, in fact, God, which means if you can call God Allah, you should be able to call God Jesus – that’s the point), that they’ve laid down two guidelines.
Remember, your faithful columnist has said that he’d be willing to pray without an obligatory use of Jesus, but I don’t feel comfortable being told that I can’t (He might come up, is all I’m saying).
It’s the second guideline that is surprisingly uncontroversial, or maybe the political reporters just haven’t asked enough clergy about it. Guideline two is, to check for appropriate names of the Most High, any invited prayin’ clergy need to submit a text of their prayer three days in advance.
To be fair, I would probably write a few notes down on a card if I were doing a public prayer in a place like the Capital, just as I do for a Scouting awards event, or special program. Maybe.
But for many clergy, the idea that a prayer has to be written out in advance is problematic. Does anyone involved with this decision know that?
Some folks can take this principle to a fault, and condemn anyone who doesn’t pray entirely spontaneously. That is not entirely fair, and many of those who so aggressively mock “set prayers” in favor of “letting the Spirit move” can sound awfully repetitious themselves over many different prayers – “Lord, we just want . . . We just ask, Lord . . . etc.”
There is a definite place for thought and preparation in prayer, and the great prayers of the saints used again and again, not to mention the Lord’s Prayer.
But to tell clergy that they can’t pray in a way that touches on events of the moment, or of last night; to set a guideline that requires the words to be set down in advance, let alone approved . . . never mind, say I.
Don’t worry, though; I will certainly still be praying for them. Just not up in front of them at the opening of their day. You can pray for them, too (see 1 Timothy 2: 1-3), and say whatever the Spirit leads you to offer.
In all fairness, quite a few of them appreciate those prayers, and count on them. Lift them up, and keep on praying for them all.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; say a prayer for him or just drop a line to knapsack77@gmail.com.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Notes From My Knapsack 5-27-07
Jeff Gill
Denison & My Name Is Earl
Many of you know that Steve Carell of “The Office” went to Denison, living here in Licking County for four years.
Usually on right before that show is “My Name Is Earl,” and as far as I know there are no local connections to that program (except some major déjà vu moments while viewing).
But I want to bookend our graduation season glance at the large inscriptions on the College Street campus gateways with an “Earl” connection of sorts.
Along with Earl and his brother Randy there are a number of recurring characters, including Earl’s ex-wife Joy, and a lady she does not get along with at all named Catalina.
Catalina’s immigration status is, um, currently under debate in Washington. Stay tuned to that… Anyhow, Catalina is pretty fluent in English, putting her a step ahead of most illegal aliens in the US, but occasionally, mainly when her character is angry, she launches into Espanol. Having taken Latin and German in high school, I have only scraps picked up on Southwestern trips and in reading the menu at Taco Bell.
But those years of Latin and culinary clues gave me just enough to prick up my ears when I was watching a re-run of an Earl episode.
In a first season episode called "Barn Burner,” it appears that Catalina is cursing out Joy in Spanish. It didn’t sound quite right, though. Later on, I did some Googling about on the internet, and found out something I think is quite clever: what she’s saying is "I want to thank the Latino audience that tunes in to watch the show every week. And to those of you who aren't Latino, I want to congratulate you for learning another language."
Catalina does the same trick, it turns out, at season’s end for both the first and this most recent season, and we can expect more hidden surprises and in-jokes with season three picked up by the NBC network.
Back to those distinguished looking campus gateways at Denison! Down by the intersection of Burg St. and College is the final pair of inscriptions, one long known to be a Ben Franklin classic about time being the stuff life is made of, and don’t waste it.
Opposite is a statement that has long been listed in college lore as “unattributed,” which just means that somewhere since President Emory Hunt picked it out a century ago, no one has been sure where it came from.
It’s kind of appropriate that the obscurity of the quote is tied to the quotation, which says in full “Languages are no more than the keys of sciences; He who despises one, slights the other.” The source is hard to track down because the original is in French, from an author named Jean de la Bruyere. La Bruyere was a student of Pascal and Montaigne, a contemporary of Racine and Corneille, and over to the English side of the channel, he strongly influenced Joseph Addison with his “The Characters, or Manners of the Present Age,” where the quote derives.
Addison went on to create the idea of short essays in cheap, public settings like broadsheets and newspapers, with a connection over time not preventing the enjoyment of any one.
Or, you could just say that Addison invented the role of newspaper columnist!
La Bruyere wanted, like Catalina, for us to appreciate the importance of having knowledge and familiarity with different languages. Emory Hunt wanted Denison students and any passers-by to see quotes affirming hard work (George Crabbe), aspiration (Longfellow’s Augustine quote), good use of time (Franklin), and the value of learning languages (La Bruyere).
In that way, the four quotes on the two gates from lower to upper campus make a perfect summation of what a liberal arts education is all about.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he speaks no French at all, sadly. Parleys-vooz with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Denison & My Name Is Earl
Many of you know that Steve Carell of “The Office” went to Denison, living here in Licking County for four years.
Usually on right before that show is “My Name Is Earl,” and as far as I know there are no local connections to that program (except some major déjà vu moments while viewing).
But I want to bookend our graduation season glance at the large inscriptions on the College Street campus gateways with an “Earl” connection of sorts.
Along with Earl and his brother Randy there are a number of recurring characters, including Earl’s ex-wife Joy, and a lady she does not get along with at all named Catalina.
Catalina’s immigration status is, um, currently under debate in Washington. Stay tuned to that… Anyhow, Catalina is pretty fluent in English, putting her a step ahead of most illegal aliens in the US, but occasionally, mainly when her character is angry, she launches into Espanol. Having taken Latin and German in high school, I have only scraps picked up on Southwestern trips and in reading the menu at Taco Bell.
But those years of Latin and culinary clues gave me just enough to prick up my ears when I was watching a re-run of an Earl episode.
In a first season episode called "Barn Burner,” it appears that Catalina is cursing out Joy in Spanish. It didn’t sound quite right, though. Later on, I did some Googling about on the internet, and found out something I think is quite clever: what she’s saying is "I want to thank the Latino audience that tunes in to watch the show every week. And to those of you who aren't Latino, I want to congratulate you for learning another language."
Catalina does the same trick, it turns out, at season’s end for both the first and this most recent season, and we can expect more hidden surprises and in-jokes with season three picked up by the NBC network.
Back to those distinguished looking campus gateways at Denison! Down by the intersection of Burg St. and College is the final pair of inscriptions, one long known to be a Ben Franklin classic about time being the stuff life is made of, and don’t waste it.
Opposite is a statement that has long been listed in college lore as “unattributed,” which just means that somewhere since President Emory Hunt picked it out a century ago, no one has been sure where it came from.
It’s kind of appropriate that the obscurity of the quote is tied to the quotation, which says in full “Languages are no more than the keys of sciences; He who despises one, slights the other.” The source is hard to track down because the original is in French, from an author named Jean de la Bruyere. La Bruyere was a student of Pascal and Montaigne, a contemporary of Racine and Corneille, and over to the English side of the channel, he strongly influenced Joseph Addison with his “The Characters, or Manners of the Present Age,” where the quote derives.
Addison went on to create the idea of short essays in cheap, public settings like broadsheets and newspapers, with a connection over time not preventing the enjoyment of any one.
Or, you could just say that Addison invented the role of newspaper columnist!
La Bruyere wanted, like Catalina, for us to appreciate the importance of having knowledge and familiarity with different languages. Emory Hunt wanted Denison students and any passers-by to see quotes affirming hard work (George Crabbe), aspiration (Longfellow’s Augustine quote), good use of time (Franklin), and the value of learning languages (La Bruyere).
In that way, the four quotes on the two gates from lower to upper campus make a perfect summation of what a liberal arts education is all about.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he speaks no French at all, sadly. Parleys-vooz with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Faith Works 5-19-07
Jeff Gill
Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign
Does your church have a “no smoking” sign?
No, not the yellowing old hand drawn one on a shirt carboard made thirty years ago that’s taped to the back of the downstairs bathroom door.
I mean the “official” ones by the entrances that tell you what number to call if you find unauthorized smoking in progress.
Somewhere here in the last few years there was a major infiltration of the Statehouse legislators by the powerful, implacable “Sign Makers” lobby. We got a concealed carry law, which allows law abiding citizens to carry shoulder holstered weapons about inobtrusively. They ask you if you’re planning any criminal acts and if you’re crossing your fingers while you answer, and you fill out a dozen forms and then you are licensed for “concealed carry.”
Which was meant to get some balance through making the law inactive if you have a certain size, type, and design of sign at the entrance of your building.
Many businesses chose to put up an “uh-huh, sorry bud, not in here” sign, while many did not, whether they really wanted handguns waved about in a robbery or not. Most retail establishments have, as the centerpiece of their training for armed robbery, the principle “give it to ‘em, and ask if they want fries with that.” You could probably get fired for shooting a patron, even if they drew down on you first.
So that’s business, but then there’s other offices, like not-for-profits who serve the public directly.
I’m part of a service agency board that has long had a no booze, no drugs, no weapons policy built into our service program that all participants understand and sign. Apparently, the law didn’t take such common-sensical approaches into consideration, and we were told that if we didn’t a) vote to exclude concealed weapons, and b) put up the canonical signage to say so, we might not have the right to just tell them.
We voted and signed, like good citizens.
And churches?
Well, I’ve seen quite a few churches with the red circle, handgun, and red slash ornamenting their front entrances. I’ve also seen quite a few without such signs, most where I doubt packing heat is part of the approved vestment for Sunday worship. Maybe they assume that since they preach peace and affirm non-violence they don’t need lame graphics to make the point, nor would they sue a member who chose to take advantage of the absence of a sign to carry a blunderbuss under their choir robes some Sunday.
The fact is, tho’, that if a gun related crime takes place in a church where no vote or signage went into effect, there could be no charges related to their concealed weapon per se. Should we worry about that?
More problematic is the growing impetus behind that ominous word “fairness” when it comes to churches as “public space” and the state smoking ordinance. Will churches be required to put tacky plastic panels with bright red logos (which, by the by, inevitably fade over time, looking even more tacky, and maybe leaving a distinct gun in black but the faint memory of the slash), with the creepy “call this number to report smoking” tagline?
“Call this number” to report animal abuse, school threats, child neglect even, but a central state number to report smoking?
Did I mention that I don’t smoke, dislike being around lit cigarettes intensely, and wish people wouldn’t smoke right next to doors I’m going through?
In Great Britain, there is debate in Parliament over whether or not Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, and every other place of worship large and small will be required to post “no smoking inside” signs at every entrance. Y’know, like the West Front of Lincoln Cathedral, with massive Romanesque arches, Norman stonework in the arcading, and large Plexiglas placards with red circled butts of the tobacco variety bearing their heraldric slash.
For future debate in Columbus, or London, shall we discuss a “No Lawsuits Between Christians” sign, “Gossip forbidden here” banners, or just “Only Good Thoughts Welcome”? Is there a logo that affirms healthy eating, or regular exercise?
Or what about just posting the Ten Commandments at the door? That would set a comprehensive tone for what’s expected in a public space, wouldn’t it?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he did not have the foresight to invest in signmaking companies ten years ago, more’s the pity. Tell him about a sign that caught your eye at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign
Does your church have a “no smoking” sign?
No, not the yellowing old hand drawn one on a shirt carboard made thirty years ago that’s taped to the back of the downstairs bathroom door.
I mean the “official” ones by the entrances that tell you what number to call if you find unauthorized smoking in progress.
Somewhere here in the last few years there was a major infiltration of the Statehouse legislators by the powerful, implacable “Sign Makers” lobby. We got a concealed carry law, which allows law abiding citizens to carry shoulder holstered weapons about inobtrusively. They ask you if you’re planning any criminal acts and if you’re crossing your fingers while you answer, and you fill out a dozen forms and then you are licensed for “concealed carry.”
Which was meant to get some balance through making the law inactive if you have a certain size, type, and design of sign at the entrance of your building.
Many businesses chose to put up an “uh-huh, sorry bud, not in here” sign, while many did not, whether they really wanted handguns waved about in a robbery or not. Most retail establishments have, as the centerpiece of their training for armed robbery, the principle “give it to ‘em, and ask if they want fries with that.” You could probably get fired for shooting a patron, even if they drew down on you first.
So that’s business, but then there’s other offices, like not-for-profits who serve the public directly.
I’m part of a service agency board that has long had a no booze, no drugs, no weapons policy built into our service program that all participants understand and sign. Apparently, the law didn’t take such common-sensical approaches into consideration, and we were told that if we didn’t a) vote to exclude concealed weapons, and b) put up the canonical signage to say so, we might not have the right to just tell them.
We voted and signed, like good citizens.
And churches?
Well, I’ve seen quite a few churches with the red circle, handgun, and red slash ornamenting their front entrances. I’ve also seen quite a few without such signs, most where I doubt packing heat is part of the approved vestment for Sunday worship. Maybe they assume that since they preach peace and affirm non-violence they don’t need lame graphics to make the point, nor would they sue a member who chose to take advantage of the absence of a sign to carry a blunderbuss under their choir robes some Sunday.
The fact is, tho’, that if a gun related crime takes place in a church where no vote or signage went into effect, there could be no charges related to their concealed weapon per se. Should we worry about that?
More problematic is the growing impetus behind that ominous word “fairness” when it comes to churches as “public space” and the state smoking ordinance. Will churches be required to put tacky plastic panels with bright red logos (which, by the by, inevitably fade over time, looking even more tacky, and maybe leaving a distinct gun in black but the faint memory of the slash), with the creepy “call this number to report smoking” tagline?
“Call this number” to report animal abuse, school threats, child neglect even, but a central state number to report smoking?
Did I mention that I don’t smoke, dislike being around lit cigarettes intensely, and wish people wouldn’t smoke right next to doors I’m going through?
In Great Britain, there is debate in Parliament over whether or not Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, and every other place of worship large and small will be required to post “no smoking inside” signs at every entrance. Y’know, like the West Front of Lincoln Cathedral, with massive Romanesque arches, Norman stonework in the arcading, and large Plexiglas placards with red circled butts of the tobacco variety bearing their heraldric slash.
For future debate in Columbus, or London, shall we discuss a “No Lawsuits Between Christians” sign, “Gossip forbidden here” banners, or just “Only Good Thoughts Welcome”? Is there a logo that affirms healthy eating, or regular exercise?
Or what about just posting the Ten Commandments at the door? That would set a comprehensive tone for what’s expected in a public space, wouldn’t it?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he did not have the foresight to invest in signmaking companies ten years ago, more’s the pity. Tell him about a sign that caught your eye at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Notes From My Knapsack 5-20-07
Jeff Gill
Imagine a sailor, long away from England.
His last leave-taking turned awkward, and our Roger was estranged from three brothers.
Forty years passed, and he returned from the ocean trade wealthy, looking to retire quietly in his home county. There were three nephews, a niece, and a cousin once removed who lived a bit of a recluse life in the forest.
Roger said to himself, as people say in poems of the year 1801:
“Yet hold! I’m rich; - with one consent they’ll say,
‘You’re welcome, Uncle, as the flowers in May.’
No; I’ll disguise me, be in tatters dress’d,
And best befriend the lads who treat me best.””
You’ve heard these kind of stories, no doubt. Roger goes as a beggar to the three nephews and is roughly treated and ill-used by each; even the niece shrieks and shies away.
When he wanders into the woods to search for “surly John,” where Roger finds him and says “I hunger, fellow; prithee, give me food!”
John does not run him off or condemn him for the “sin” of poverty, but simply replies:
“Give! am I rich? This hatchet take, and try
Thy proper strength, nor give those limbs the lie;
Work, feed thyself, to thine own powers appeal,
Nor whine out woes thine own right-hand can heal;
And while that hand is thine, and thine a leg,
Scorn of the proud or of the base to beg.”
Our incognito wealthy sailor is delighted by the answer, reveals himself, and shares his fortune, saying to John “With beef and brandy (we’ll) kill all kinds of care;
We’ll beer and biscuit on our table heap,
And rail at rascals, till we fall asleep.”
When John dies, Roger leaves the rest for the benefit of the poor, but still none as inheritance for his relations. Or at least, that’s the story.
If you have walked from Denison’s lower campus along Granville’s Broadway, across College and up to “the Hill,” the gate next to Cleveland Hall carries an inscription on either side.
On the left, many laugh at the sentiment, proper for a long, long stairway leading up a steep hillside, speaking of “The heights by great men reached and kept/ Were not attained by sudden flight,/ But they, while their companions slept,/ Were toiling upward in the night.” a piece from Longfellow’s “The Ladder of Saint Augustine.”
The right hand inscription sticks in the imagination of many a DU grad, but the source is little known. It is two lines from a 2,400 line poem (filling around 58 standard pages) called “The Parish Register,” written in 1801 and published in 1807 by one George Crabbe.
Students are directly admonished: “Work, feed thyself, to thine own powers appeal,/
Nor whine out woes thine own right-hand can heal.”
Crabbe is little known today but indirectly; his poems were a major influence in Thomas Hardy’s novels, and a segment from another long poem, “The Borough,” was the basis for Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”
Already a century old and obscure in 1906, these lines stuck in the memory of one of Denison’s better read presidents, and they a literate bunch, to be sure. Emory Hunt was president at the college from 1901 to 1912, and was the first occupant of a new president’s home he named “Beth Eden,” or “House of Peace” in Hebrew. Oriental and English literature were all one to President Hunt, and when new ornamental gates to join upper and lower campuses were planned early in his administration, he personally selected the inscriptions, leaving an impression on students that continues today.
There is a second inscription-flanked gate which contains quotes from Franklin’s “Poor Richard” and another mysterious source, which will be another column anon.
The soft limestone of the panels had worn dangerously over the decades, and President Blair Knapp renewed them with sterner stuff in the 1960’s, but the cryptic quotes remained the same.
As honorary degree recipient Douglas Holtz-Eakin, economic adviser to the McCain campaign and former head of the Congressional Budget Office, said to the graduating DU class of 2007, “Your first task now is: Get a job.” He got the applause of many parents on the lower campus lawn last weekend, and I thought of George Crabbe, and hoped he was smiling.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; while approving of pastors who write poetry, he’s not so sure about a 58 page poem. Send him anything but a 59 page poem to knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Imagine a sailor, long away from England.
His last leave-taking turned awkward, and our Roger was estranged from three brothers.
Forty years passed, and he returned from the ocean trade wealthy, looking to retire quietly in his home county. There were three nephews, a niece, and a cousin once removed who lived a bit of a recluse life in the forest.
Roger said to himself, as people say in poems of the year 1801:
“Yet hold! I’m rich; - with one consent they’ll say,
‘You’re welcome, Uncle, as the flowers in May.’
No; I’ll disguise me, be in tatters dress’d,
And best befriend the lads who treat me best.””
You’ve heard these kind of stories, no doubt. Roger goes as a beggar to the three nephews and is roughly treated and ill-used by each; even the niece shrieks and shies away.
When he wanders into the woods to search for “surly John,” where Roger finds him and says “I hunger, fellow; prithee, give me food!”
John does not run him off or condemn him for the “sin” of poverty, but simply replies:
“Give! am I rich? This hatchet take, and try
Thy proper strength, nor give those limbs the lie;
Work, feed thyself, to thine own powers appeal,
Nor whine out woes thine own right-hand can heal;
And while that hand is thine, and thine a leg,
Scorn of the proud or of the base to beg.”
Our incognito wealthy sailor is delighted by the answer, reveals himself, and shares his fortune, saying to John “With beef and brandy (we’ll) kill all kinds of care;
We’ll beer and biscuit on our table heap,
And rail at rascals, till we fall asleep.”
When John dies, Roger leaves the rest for the benefit of the poor, but still none as inheritance for his relations. Or at least, that’s the story.
If you have walked from Denison’s lower campus along Granville’s Broadway, across College and up to “the Hill,” the gate next to Cleveland Hall carries an inscription on either side.
On the left, many laugh at the sentiment, proper for a long, long stairway leading up a steep hillside, speaking of “The heights by great men reached and kept/ Were not attained by sudden flight,/ But they, while their companions slept,/ Were toiling upward in the night.” a piece from Longfellow’s “The Ladder of Saint Augustine.”
The right hand inscription sticks in the imagination of many a DU grad, but the source is little known. It is two lines from a 2,400 line poem (filling around 58 standard pages) called “The Parish Register,” written in 1801 and published in 1807 by one George Crabbe.
Students are directly admonished: “Work, feed thyself, to thine own powers appeal,/
Nor whine out woes thine own right-hand can heal.”
Crabbe is little known today but indirectly; his poems were a major influence in Thomas Hardy’s novels, and a segment from another long poem, “The Borough,” was the basis for Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”
Already a century old and obscure in 1906, these lines stuck in the memory of one of Denison’s better read presidents, and they a literate bunch, to be sure. Emory Hunt was president at the college from 1901 to 1912, and was the first occupant of a new president’s home he named “Beth Eden,” or “House of Peace” in Hebrew. Oriental and English literature were all one to President Hunt, and when new ornamental gates to join upper and lower campuses were planned early in his administration, he personally selected the inscriptions, leaving an impression on students that continues today.
There is a second inscription-flanked gate which contains quotes from Franklin’s “Poor Richard” and another mysterious source, which will be another column anon.
The soft limestone of the panels had worn dangerously over the decades, and President Blair Knapp renewed them with sterner stuff in the 1960’s, but the cryptic quotes remained the same.
As honorary degree recipient Douglas Holtz-Eakin, economic adviser to the McCain campaign and former head of the Congressional Budget Office, said to the graduating DU class of 2007, “Your first task now is: Get a job.” He got the applause of many parents on the lower campus lawn last weekend, and I thought of George Crabbe, and hoped he was smiling.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; while approving of pastors who write poetry, he’s not so sure about a 58 page poem. Send him anything but a 59 page poem to knapsack77@gmail.com.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Faith Works 5-12-07
Jeff Gill
Herod Lives, Kinda
With all the fluffy, heavily edited for TV, agenda driven archaeology that’s been in the public eye lately, the latest news will probably get little or no attention.
Every year, right before Easter, we get some barely credible theory floated that has an artifact or two in the promo shots. Now we’re after Easter, and the storyline is, well. . .
What has been found is not earthshaking, nor does it disprove anything in the Bible, so where’s the big deal? It’s just Herod.
That’s right, the tomb of Herod the Great has been found.
Herod is called the “Great” because while he was an amoral, vicious, family killing sack of slime, he built and built and built. The version of the Temple Mount where Jesus walked, prayed, and preached, where Saul studied Torah and Caiaphas presided (another name recently discovered on a bone box in a tomb by Jerusalem), that’s Herod’s work; all still visible is the famous Western Wall plaza, and the monumental Foundation Stone, which can be seen in the tunnel along the base of Herod’s construction project.
Herod built the mountaintop fortress and palace Masada, and the scale version of the Temple Mount above the Caves of the Patriarchs in Hebron (Israel, not Ohio). His grandest palace was in Jericho, where he died.
That isn’t where he was buried, though. Scholars had long thought he was buried near an odd little hilltop palace and fortress (yes, he built quite a few of these) outside of Bethlehem, called Herodion (yes, he had an ego that was as outsized as his architecture).
None of the excavations around the Herodion had turned up a tomb, just two massive palaces. Even the most diligent archaeologist can take a few decades to excavate a palace, especially one with a documentary record like Herod left.
So it was just a little while ago that some Israeli archaeologist found the funding and time to go back out into the desert and dig . . . wait for it . . . in between the two palaces! Sure enough, there it was.
Empty, and desecrated, likely done when the Herodion was, like Masada, taken over around 70 AD in a Jewish revolt. Herod liked to point out he was Jewish, and had re-done the Temple in gold and glory, always feeling he got little appreciation for the upgrade.
This may have had something to do with his habit of killing his wives, sons, and assorted in-laws when they annoyed him. Not to mention the tradition, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, that Herod ordered the killing of “the innocents,” any boy below age two, just to be on the safe and thorough side, thinking he would kill the prophesied Messiah.
It was his son (by a surviving fourth wife) named Herod Antipas who plays a role in the death of the child Herod tried to kill, some thirty years and more later. The name and shadow of this megalomaniacal puppet of Rome falls across the entire story of Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem.
So now, outside of Bethlehem, the burial place of the homicidal tyrant is now confirmed for history. Another major character in the Gospel narratives is confirmed by independent inquiry.
We have inscriptions of Pilate from Jerusalem and Caesarea (and from later in his career in Europe), along with texts by Josephus, Philo, and Tacitus. Gallio, the proconsul of Acts 18, has turned up in carvings from Achaea where he in fact ruled. Caiaphas has been confirmed from an ossuary outside of Jerusalem noted above, and Rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 5) is a significant source quoted in the Talmud, as is his grandfather Rabbi Hillel.
The stone-cut evidence to confirm portions of the Old Testament is a double-length essay itself. (Remind me, I’ll get to it!)
Over and over, the evidence of inscriptions shows that the four earliest sources of the story of Jesus, and the narrative in Acts and the Epistles is rooted in as much solid historical sources as Tiberius and Claudius, or even Nero, Herod’s true child in spirit.
Octavian, who became Caesar Augustus, has a wide and rich body of sources, in texts and inscriptions, and even his story is still debated by scholars. As it should be.
I really don’t mind scholarship debating the exact understanding and connections of events in the New Testament. John Dominic Crossan, for one, has done an amazing job of tying our growing understanding of the early church and the claims of the Roman Empire with “In Search of Paul,” which I commend to anyone wanting to understand what it meant to say “Jesus is Lord,” versus “Caesar is Lord.”
But when folks want to say “Maybe this never happened, but was all made up for religious purposes,” I can’t help but wonder if they say that about Vespasian.
And why not.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your historical notes with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Herod Lives, Kinda
With all the fluffy, heavily edited for TV, agenda driven archaeology that’s been in the public eye lately, the latest news will probably get little or no attention.
Every year, right before Easter, we get some barely credible theory floated that has an artifact or two in the promo shots. Now we’re after Easter, and the storyline is, well. . .
What has been found is not earthshaking, nor does it disprove anything in the Bible, so where’s the big deal? It’s just Herod.
That’s right, the tomb of Herod the Great has been found.
Herod is called the “Great” because while he was an amoral, vicious, family killing sack of slime, he built and built and built. The version of the Temple Mount where Jesus walked, prayed, and preached, where Saul studied Torah and Caiaphas presided (another name recently discovered on a bone box in a tomb by Jerusalem), that’s Herod’s work; all still visible is the famous Western Wall plaza, and the monumental Foundation Stone, which can be seen in the tunnel along the base of Herod’s construction project.
Herod built the mountaintop fortress and palace Masada, and the scale version of the Temple Mount above the Caves of the Patriarchs in Hebron (Israel, not Ohio). His grandest palace was in Jericho, where he died.
That isn’t where he was buried, though. Scholars had long thought he was buried near an odd little hilltop palace and fortress (yes, he built quite a few of these) outside of Bethlehem, called Herodion (yes, he had an ego that was as outsized as his architecture).
None of the excavations around the Herodion had turned up a tomb, just two massive palaces. Even the most diligent archaeologist can take a few decades to excavate a palace, especially one with a documentary record like Herod left.
So it was just a little while ago that some Israeli archaeologist found the funding and time to go back out into the desert and dig . . . wait for it . . . in between the two palaces! Sure enough, there it was.
Empty, and desecrated, likely done when the Herodion was, like Masada, taken over around 70 AD in a Jewish revolt. Herod liked to point out he was Jewish, and had re-done the Temple in gold and glory, always feeling he got little appreciation for the upgrade.
This may have had something to do with his habit of killing his wives, sons, and assorted in-laws when they annoyed him. Not to mention the tradition, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, that Herod ordered the killing of “the innocents,” any boy below age two, just to be on the safe and thorough side, thinking he would kill the prophesied Messiah.
It was his son (by a surviving fourth wife) named Herod Antipas who plays a role in the death of the child Herod tried to kill, some thirty years and more later. The name and shadow of this megalomaniacal puppet of Rome falls across the entire story of Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem.
So now, outside of Bethlehem, the burial place of the homicidal tyrant is now confirmed for history. Another major character in the Gospel narratives is confirmed by independent inquiry.
We have inscriptions of Pilate from Jerusalem and Caesarea (and from later in his career in Europe), along with texts by Josephus, Philo, and Tacitus. Gallio, the proconsul of Acts 18, has turned up in carvings from Achaea where he in fact ruled. Caiaphas has been confirmed from an ossuary outside of Jerusalem noted above, and Rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 5) is a significant source quoted in the Talmud, as is his grandfather Rabbi Hillel.
The stone-cut evidence to confirm portions of the Old Testament is a double-length essay itself. (Remind me, I’ll get to it!)
Over and over, the evidence of inscriptions shows that the four earliest sources of the story of Jesus, and the narrative in Acts and the Epistles is rooted in as much solid historical sources as Tiberius and Claudius, or even Nero, Herod’s true child in spirit.
Octavian, who became Caesar Augustus, has a wide and rich body of sources, in texts and inscriptions, and even his story is still debated by scholars. As it should be.
I really don’t mind scholarship debating the exact understanding and connections of events in the New Testament. John Dominic Crossan, for one, has done an amazing job of tying our growing understanding of the early church and the claims of the Roman Empire with “In Search of Paul,” which I commend to anyone wanting to understand what it meant to say “Jesus is Lord,” versus “Caesar is Lord.”
But when folks want to say “Maybe this never happened, but was all made up for religious purposes,” I can’t help but wonder if they say that about Vespasian.
And why not.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your historical notes with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Notes From My Knapsack 5-13-07
Jeff Gill
Tread Carefully On the Earth
So I’m walking backwards, slowly.
Warblers, cardinals, towhees, robins, all keeping up a steady symphony.
There’s a bird on a high branch of a nearby tulip poplar (yellow poplar, tulip tree, Ohio sequoia, whatever). The leaves are just past buds but not yet big and green enough to be anything other than springtime in two dimensions. And there’s a blue to the sky, behind the leaf and branch filigree, that we may not see again until fall, dry air and steady light spreading cerulean overhead.
A cedar waxwing had just coasted past me, tan and black accents, swooping up into a tree nearby. Truth be told, I’m not sure what a cedar waxwing’s song sounds like, even if I could spot their size and coloration from a township away.
This song is repetitive, but fairly musical; nicer than a starling, not quite a red winged blackbird trill. Somewhere above me, some forty or fifty feet, the bird is bouncing from branch to branch, and I want a clear look at whether this is my waxwing from a few minutes ago, or . . .
It turns out to be a Northern Flicker, also tan but with a dramatic red hood thrown back on his neck, but he’s singing and not pounding his tiny little head into the bark. That I hear him doing later in a mating display (listen to me build a home and hunt the bugs, ladies!).
What people don’t always seem to appreciate is how flexible you’d better keep your neck for birding. Birders may not be noted as Olympic athletes exactly, but along with an inhuman indifference to finding a comfort station for hours on end, they’re known for usually keeping their necks loose and mobile.
Walking backwards is also a useful skill in birding. Or for any outdoor activity. There’s giving tours to kids at a Licking Park District site, or around Dawes Arboretum, or as I was, at Flint Ridge State Memorial for the Ohio Historical Society. Even on your own, when a songbird has perched just behind you, up high, and often against the sun’s contrast, you don’t regret (much) all the time you’ve spent walking hindways.
Spring is a great time to watch birds and wander through forests, not yet too overgrown with underbrush, trying to figure out what that sunny shadow up three levels of branch is.
Sometimes, birds come to you whether you’re looking for them or not. Bird’s nests in the doorway, or animal adventures mixed with the gunpowder of curious children.
I had recently been looking up some information on William S. Denison, the namesake of a local university. His family migrated here from near Mystic, Connecticut, where the Denison Homestead is still standing and a noted area attraction, after the Mystic Seapot and, certainly, Mystic Pizza.
(And none of this can be confused with the local Denison Homestead program in Granville, which is having a 30th anniversary along with Commencement Weekened!)
There is also a nature center tied to the area of the 1717 Denison house, called the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center. Their website has a “FAQ” page on wild animals and particularly birds that is the best I’ve seen about anywhere: what to do or not do with them, and so on.
The website is http://www.dpnc.org/faq.html, and you can learn all the average outdoor wanderer needs starting there.
Congratulations to the ancestral Denison home in Connecticut for 290 years, and the environmentally-oriented community living experiment for college students in Ohio, celebrating 30 years. May they all have blue skies and singing birds and many years before them!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who knows that there’s a bird related reason to those medieval funny hats they wear at graduation ceremonies. Tell him about a cool bird you saw (or thought you saw) in Licking County at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Tread Carefully On the Earth
So I’m walking backwards, slowly.
Warblers, cardinals, towhees, robins, all keeping up a steady symphony.
There’s a bird on a high branch of a nearby tulip poplar (yellow poplar, tulip tree, Ohio sequoia, whatever). The leaves are just past buds but not yet big and green enough to be anything other than springtime in two dimensions. And there’s a blue to the sky, behind the leaf and branch filigree, that we may not see again until fall, dry air and steady light spreading cerulean overhead.
A cedar waxwing had just coasted past me, tan and black accents, swooping up into a tree nearby. Truth be told, I’m not sure what a cedar waxwing’s song sounds like, even if I could spot their size and coloration from a township away.
This song is repetitive, but fairly musical; nicer than a starling, not quite a red winged blackbird trill. Somewhere above me, some forty or fifty feet, the bird is bouncing from branch to branch, and I want a clear look at whether this is my waxwing from a few minutes ago, or . . .
It turns out to be a Northern Flicker, also tan but with a dramatic red hood thrown back on his neck, but he’s singing and not pounding his tiny little head into the bark. That I hear him doing later in a mating display (listen to me build a home and hunt the bugs, ladies!).
What people don’t always seem to appreciate is how flexible you’d better keep your neck for birding. Birders may not be noted as Olympic athletes exactly, but along with an inhuman indifference to finding a comfort station for hours on end, they’re known for usually keeping their necks loose and mobile.
Walking backwards is also a useful skill in birding. Or for any outdoor activity. There’s giving tours to kids at a Licking Park District site, or around Dawes Arboretum, or as I was, at Flint Ridge State Memorial for the Ohio Historical Society. Even on your own, when a songbird has perched just behind you, up high, and often against the sun’s contrast, you don’t regret (much) all the time you’ve spent walking hindways.
Spring is a great time to watch birds and wander through forests, not yet too overgrown with underbrush, trying to figure out what that sunny shadow up three levels of branch is.
Sometimes, birds come to you whether you’re looking for them or not. Bird’s nests in the doorway, or animal adventures mixed with the gunpowder of curious children.
I had recently been looking up some information on William S. Denison, the namesake of a local university. His family migrated here from near Mystic, Connecticut, where the Denison Homestead is still standing and a noted area attraction, after the Mystic Seapot and, certainly, Mystic Pizza.
(And none of this can be confused with the local Denison Homestead program in Granville, which is having a 30th anniversary along with Commencement Weekened!)
There is also a nature center tied to the area of the 1717 Denison house, called the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center. Their website has a “FAQ” page on wild animals and particularly birds that is the best I’ve seen about anywhere: what to do or not do with them, and so on.
The website is http://www.dpnc.org/faq.html, and you can learn all the average outdoor wanderer needs starting there.
Congratulations to the ancestral Denison home in Connecticut for 290 years, and the environmentally-oriented community living experiment for college students in Ohio, celebrating 30 years. May they all have blue skies and singing birds and many years before them!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who knows that there’s a bird related reason to those medieval funny hats they wear at graduation ceremonies. Tell him about a cool bird you saw (or thought you saw) in Licking County at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Faith Works 5-5-07
Jeff Gill
Idolatry Bad, But “Idol” Gives Back
Most of the great monotheistic traditions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – have strong condemnations of idol-worship built into the very foundations of their belief systems.
Idols, themselves, are bad. So it is either a fascinating irony, or another sign of the decay of Western civilization, that “American Idol” is the behemoth and leviathan of popular culture these days in Christian America.
I use that last phrase, “Christian America,” advisedly and unironically. The most winners have come from the Birmingham, Alabama area, and their viewership and most passionate voters come from the South and Southwest. The “Idol” part of the name doesn’t seem to bother many. Maybe it shouldn’t.
What had me utterly fascinated was the spectacle a week ago with the theme “Idol Gives Back.” Inspirational songs were sung, many guest stars appeared, the obligatory Quincy Jones group song came out on the show and for internet download, and all to promote giving for “the less fortunate” in America and around the world.
What grabbed me about the show was not so much the images of hurricane ravaged N’Orlinians, which are all too familiar, the economically ugly but naturally beautiful hollers of West Virginia and Kentucky, or even the tragic scenes of so many dying of AIDS in Africa.
It was that the basic narrative and appeal of the whole program felt very, very familiar. It felt like so many mission and missionary programs I’d had in church, from childhood to, oh, last month.
Today we have video production values, not flannelgraphs, and the print materials include web addresses, not PO boxes, but the basic story and expectations raised were the same from “Idol” to “Church.”
Except for God.
Yep, I wasn’t startled at all to hear no God-talk in the “Idol Gives Back” pitch, but what did surprise me was the degree to which the whole deal felt rooted in church culture, but carefully avoided any religious references at all. Period.
This is where, I suppose, I could go off on a fairly predictable rant, but there is a sad acceptance I feel about elements of what “Idol Gives Back” was doing.
Simon, for one, was clearly impacted by his show-sponsored trip to Africa. Impacted as in stunned, horrified, and even a bit disoriented. Clearly, the reality of poverty in the developing world, and the growing plague of AIDS, scattering orphans and sorrow in its wake, all came as a shock to Simon. They show him trying to be strong, attempting to be decisive and helpful, and then they show him collapsing in a heap, in tears.
One suspects that many viewers were like Simon, or at least it was pitched on that assumption. For many of us, none of this comes as a surprise, even if a mystery. We’ve been hearing missionary reports and joining women’s relief society programs and going on mission trips with our church, and know that the world is still broken, not fully healed, and calls on the best we can give to represent the promise of God’s love.
For those who have no church background at all, a segment of American society that everyone concedes is growing, even with no agreement as to what size, “Idol Gives Back” is their outreach committee presentation. This is their “relief work” appeal.
It worked, too. Seventy million dollars was raised, which goes to . . .
Well, what it goes to is a list of projects that I’ve been hearing about and seeing supported by churches and folk like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels for years. They weren’t mentioned in the program, but their buddy Bono, the great bridge builder of the modern era, surely was. UMCOR and OGHS and WOC and WRS/LDS and CROP and CRS and the SBC have all been buying malaria nets and digging wells and sending medicines overseas, no strings attached, for decades. Bono is a welcome brother, and if Simon and Paula and Randy and Ryan all want to join the helping hand brigade, then climb aboard.
I still wonder where this kind of compassion goes, based exclusively on emotion and empathy and sorrow. Why would you want to share the sadness of a stranger halfway around the world? How is that grounded or extended when you do not believe?
We may end up getting to vote on that question by cell, text, or internet; log on now.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has never voted for any of the contestants, not even Melinda (yet). Talk about outreach in today’s society with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Idolatry Bad, But “Idol” Gives Back
Most of the great monotheistic traditions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – have strong condemnations of idol-worship built into the very foundations of their belief systems.
Idols, themselves, are bad. So it is either a fascinating irony, or another sign of the decay of Western civilization, that “American Idol” is the behemoth and leviathan of popular culture these days in Christian America.
I use that last phrase, “Christian America,” advisedly and unironically. The most winners have come from the Birmingham, Alabama area, and their viewership and most passionate voters come from the South and Southwest. The “Idol” part of the name doesn’t seem to bother many. Maybe it shouldn’t.
What had me utterly fascinated was the spectacle a week ago with the theme “Idol Gives Back.” Inspirational songs were sung, many guest stars appeared, the obligatory Quincy Jones group song came out on the show and for internet download, and all to promote giving for “the less fortunate” in America and around the world.
What grabbed me about the show was not so much the images of hurricane ravaged N’Orlinians, which are all too familiar, the economically ugly but naturally beautiful hollers of West Virginia and Kentucky, or even the tragic scenes of so many dying of AIDS in Africa.
It was that the basic narrative and appeal of the whole program felt very, very familiar. It felt like so many mission and missionary programs I’d had in church, from childhood to, oh, last month.
Today we have video production values, not flannelgraphs, and the print materials include web addresses, not PO boxes, but the basic story and expectations raised were the same from “Idol” to “Church.”
Except for God.
Yep, I wasn’t startled at all to hear no God-talk in the “Idol Gives Back” pitch, but what did surprise me was the degree to which the whole deal felt rooted in church culture, but carefully avoided any religious references at all. Period.
This is where, I suppose, I could go off on a fairly predictable rant, but there is a sad acceptance I feel about elements of what “Idol Gives Back” was doing.
Simon, for one, was clearly impacted by his show-sponsored trip to Africa. Impacted as in stunned, horrified, and even a bit disoriented. Clearly, the reality of poverty in the developing world, and the growing plague of AIDS, scattering orphans and sorrow in its wake, all came as a shock to Simon. They show him trying to be strong, attempting to be decisive and helpful, and then they show him collapsing in a heap, in tears.
One suspects that many viewers were like Simon, or at least it was pitched on that assumption. For many of us, none of this comes as a surprise, even if a mystery. We’ve been hearing missionary reports and joining women’s relief society programs and going on mission trips with our church, and know that the world is still broken, not fully healed, and calls on the best we can give to represent the promise of God’s love.
For those who have no church background at all, a segment of American society that everyone concedes is growing, even with no agreement as to what size, “Idol Gives Back” is their outreach committee presentation. This is their “relief work” appeal.
It worked, too. Seventy million dollars was raised, which goes to . . .
Well, what it goes to is a list of projects that I’ve been hearing about and seeing supported by churches and folk like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels for years. They weren’t mentioned in the program, but their buddy Bono, the great bridge builder of the modern era, surely was. UMCOR and OGHS and WOC and WRS/LDS and CROP and CRS and the SBC have all been buying malaria nets and digging wells and sending medicines overseas, no strings attached, for decades. Bono is a welcome brother, and if Simon and Paula and Randy and Ryan all want to join the helping hand brigade, then climb aboard.
I still wonder where this kind of compassion goes, based exclusively on emotion and empathy and sorrow. Why would you want to share the sadness of a stranger halfway around the world? How is that grounded or extended when you do not believe?
We may end up getting to vote on that question by cell, text, or internet; log on now.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has never voted for any of the contestants, not even Melinda (yet). Talk about outreach in today’s society with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Notes From My Knapsack 5-6-07
Jeff Gill
Sharing the Pursuit of Happiness
What do Steven Hawking, Heather Mills, and Roger Ebert have in common?
In recent days, all three of them have shown us a total lack of fear about being seen as less than perfect. They have set an example worth celebrating, and maybe for reflecting on coming up to this Tuesday.
Steven Hawking is the world famous astrophysicist (“A Brief History of Time”) who is also famously stricken with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He has long been not only confined to a wheelchair these last few decades, but must talk through a computer controlled by his eye movements.
He chose to let his situation be the focus of a fundraiser for ALS research, getting a trip on a zero-gravity airplane to experience weightlessness, taking fellow passengers who paid well for the day, and accompanying video cameras.
Hawking was essentially helpless, but clearly delighted by the chance to come so close to space.
Heather Mills was married until recently to Paul McCartney, and before that had lost a leg in a motorcycle accident. She chose to start a new chapter in her life by going on a national televised dance competition, and more than held her own, even when the prosthetic went south as she was heading north.
Much of the audience and all the judges were, quite frankly, stunned and grateful at the same time, realizing that their assumptions about what an amputee could do on a fake leg were the real limitation.
Then there was Roger Ebert, the movie critic out of Chicago. Ebert had cancer of the salivary glands, and had surgeries that did not work out as hoped. The cancer was largely eradicated, but he ended up with much of one side of his jaw missing, unable to speak and looking much the worse for wear.
His response was to put on a suit with an ascot (the better to loosely wrap around his tracheotomy) and go to his “Overlooked Film Festival” that he established at his alma mater, the University of Illinois. Asked if he was concerned about appearing in public looking so bad, he wrote, and his wife read, “Why? They’ve already written that I’m dead.” He later added “My mind is fine, it’s just my face that looks awful.”
He looks forward to getting back to writing film criticism for print, a task that requires no speaking, “and lets me sit in the dark!” Ebert still hopes to get further facial reconstruction, and be able to speak again. But he’s not going to wait at home until then.
All three of these celebrities have pursued their dreams, their happiness, without concern over looking perfect, or even normal. Why not? That is the question, given how often we hold back for fear that we won’t look good, whether in dancing or working or dreaming.
What we surely don’t want to do is hold others back for those reasons, but it happens. Hawking and Mills and Ebert probably had good, well meaning friends, who asked “are you sure you want to do this? Do you want to end up looking foolish, or pitiable?” Fortunately for all of us, they didn’t listen.
We get a chance Tuesday as a community, as Licking County, to encourage some 1,000 of our fellow citizens to pursue their dreams and follow their calling right out in the middle of our common life. The MRDD levy helps people who don’t always look or act quite like fashion models or Phi Beta Kappas to live their lives and pursue happiness pretty much like anyone else.
“Mental Health/Developmental Disabilities” is the long form of what we have a tax levy to support, and Nancy Neely and her crew is at work in every community of this county to serve their clients. MRDD clients do math, and dance, and I’m sure some one of them has reviewed a film somewhere. Send me a link, will you?
What we don’t want to do is be one of those well-meaning friends who says “maybe you ought to stay home. Let’s not go out where you might be disappointed or let down or embarrassed.” Our affirmation of this long-standing levy is a way to say, “let’s get out there and look silly together. Have you ever seen me dance?”
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has size fifteen feet, a disability for most dancing-type activities. Share your bold accomplishment in the face of opposition at knapsack77@gmail.com.
* * *
Faith Works 4-28-07
Jeff Gill
Gathered, Step by Step
When civil religion is invoked, the text for the message of the day is often II Chronicles 7:14 – “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
This is the voice of God, appearing by night to Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. Days and weeks of celebration and consecration have just ended for the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, and if you have ever put on a big event like an anniversary or groundbreaking or commencement . . .
There is a moment of letdown after the crowds have dispersed and the dignitaries have gone home. You’re tired, but satisfied; you no longer worry at each turn what’s been forgotten, and you’re barely aware of your own thoughts starting to tend back to an arc towards the future.
For Solomon, he is at his bedtime prayer, or perhaps dreaming in the night – the context is ambivalent. What is certain is the sense that God is speaking, in the wake of the completion of the Temple first dreamt by his father and fulfilled during his reign.
“If my people, who are called by my name,” speaks to the set-apart nature of Israel, the land chosen to fulfill promises made in Haram and Egypt, a place where the unity of God would first be preached abroad.
“Humble themselves,” is the command, just as a place of beauty and opulence is finished atop the highest spot overlooking the City of David, itself a rocky ridge above the Gihon Spring.
“Pray, and seek my face,” a proper request in a Temple, but an odd thought when the record shows that “none can look on the Lord’s face, and live,” but the command is to “seek” that same soul-scorching sight.
“Turn from their wicked ways,” said just above a place to be known as Hinnon, or Gehenna, an ever-smouldering trashdump on Jerusalem’s edge, already a metaphor for lasting, enduring destruction.
“Then I will hear from heaven,” God says from above the Temple, to a king in a palace just below the hilltop, overlooking the citadel and the valley below.
“And will forgive their sin and heal their land…” with not just a spiritual good feeling, or an emotional adjustment, but a promise that Amazing Things Will Happen if these requests are answered by the people.
Thursday, May 3, is the 55th anniversary of the National Day of Prayer, going back to a Congressional Procalmation signed by President Truman. Different communities each have their own way to mark this occasion, often on the steps of civic buildings, and the Newark Area Ministerial Association will gather again on the steps of Newark City Hall (or to the council chambers just inside if the weather is inclement). Their plans are to begin at 12:20 pm, and be in prayer until 12:40 pm.
Whether there or at your own municipal building, there will be prayers for the nation, our local officials, safety forces, judicial system, schools, churches, and special observance of the memory of those serving overseas, and the tragedy at Virginia Tech.
Wherever you pray, and whatever your faith tradition (there have been Buddhists and Jews involved in the Newark gathering in years past), don’t forget the promise of God that comes in the next verse, following II Chron. 7:14: verse 15 -- “Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.”
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your community worship events with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
* * *
Notes From My Knapsack 4-29-07
Jeff Gill
This month, the Jamestown Settlement celebrates the anniversary of three ships landing 400 years ago.
In 1607, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery sailed up the James River estuary, where they would leave not the first English settlement in what’s now the United States, but the first one that would last.
Today, a National Park occupies the spit of land where the settlement was built, a state park is nearby with replicas of Christopher Newport’s ships (the ones you see on the back of the Virginia quarter), and the former capital of the colony named for virginal Queen Elizabeth, Colonial Williamsburg, is just inland.
Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, still worshiping right along historic Duke of Gloucester Street, descended directly from the Jamestown congregation, and hosts a number of observances this month for the beginning of Anglican Christianity in America, the roots of The Episcopal Church, and the first ongoing Christian body in the USA. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip plan to attend, showing there’s no hard feelings about 1776 and all that.
Regular readers know that I always like to point out the Spanish heritage in New Mexico that goes back well before Jamestown. Let alone those latecomers in 1620, the Plymouth Pilgrims, but the New Mexico pioneers had missionary priests and we aren’t sure of a church built in Santa Fe until 1610, though it is still our oldest capital (and the oldest still-present town is Saint Augustine, Florida, 1565).
You still have to acknowledge that a huge chunk of our national heritage and identity derives from barely over a hundred folk who saw land at Cape Henry (just north of Virginia Beach) two weeks and four hundred years ago, watched Newport and expedition leaders Winfield and Smith erect a cross, and then slowly waited as they crept inland, until a spot was selected for them to land.
Like the Pilgrims thirteen years later and many miles to the north, less than half of the initial group would survive for long. In 1622 they would nearly be swept into the ocean by the Powhatan confederated Indians, who had quite enough of having their food borrowed, begged, and finally stolen, and their people killed in the process.
But the numbers and tools and technology ultimately could not be stopped – that, and a lack of immunity to both smallpox and the (in the Old World) common cold. By as early as 1707, some estimates say that 9 out of 10 American natives were dead, and the European settlers were still coming, and marrying, and adding to their own numbers…
…And starting to think of themselves as something new, something different. It was just another fifty years before Benjamin Franklin would come up with perhaps his greatest invention: he called himself and fellow British citizens of the colonies “Americans.”
In less than a hundred years, there would be 10,000 African slaves in the Chesapeake and south of the estuary, involuntary pioneers, but early arrivals who have a “First Families” claim of their own, if not the genealogy. Americans in chains; and many of the second wave of colonial immigration from Wales and Yorkshire and the urban underclasses of London carried an indenture, as servants a bare step up from chains and slavery. Read William Byrd’s diaries, only translated out of their private code a few decades back, for a grim peek into everyday life for most everyday people in the early colonies.
Truth be told, it was easier to sing a song of history back when we could tell comfortable lies that we almost believed ourselves. Bold, independent spirits came for freedom, selflessly, bravely pushing from a barren coast into a sparsely settled wilderness whose few occupants were a mix of savage primitivism and solitary unappreciated genius, plus an amazing number of Indian princesses, most of whom jumped off of high spots out of unrequited or unauthorized love. Then their families sadly wandered off into the west, where they would meet Hispanics who had been waiting for the border to be established so they could cross it by night to come and do our masonry work.
With the last two sentences being mostly and demonstrably false, the reaction of some is anger and more generally an indifference to history. Which is not only too bad, but like leaving a Buckeyes’ game in the third quarter.
Modern historians are finding the specific, individual tales, long buried in archives, or trunks, or in the earth, where courage and love and a bit of greed and fair amount of willful moral blindness mix to make people who sound like us. They tell us about situations we cannot imagine, and point us to possibilities we might just be able to achieve.
When the Queen of England and her Consort wander through the museums of Jamestown, they are themselves relics of another age, barely understandable today, but the 400 years gone stories told there could be our neighbors. They fled danger, and occasionally good sense, in pursuit of a better life for their families, which their decisions didn’t always reach. I know those folk, and I’d like to know them better, 400 years later.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; ask him about historical tales at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Sharing the Pursuit of Happiness
What do Steven Hawking, Heather Mills, and Roger Ebert have in common?
In recent days, all three of them have shown us a total lack of fear about being seen as less than perfect. They have set an example worth celebrating, and maybe for reflecting on coming up to this Tuesday.
Steven Hawking is the world famous astrophysicist (“A Brief History of Time”) who is also famously stricken with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He has long been not only confined to a wheelchair these last few decades, but must talk through a computer controlled by his eye movements.
He chose to let his situation be the focus of a fundraiser for ALS research, getting a trip on a zero-gravity airplane to experience weightlessness, taking fellow passengers who paid well for the day, and accompanying video cameras.
Hawking was essentially helpless, but clearly delighted by the chance to come so close to space.
Heather Mills was married until recently to Paul McCartney, and before that had lost a leg in a motorcycle accident. She chose to start a new chapter in her life by going on a national televised dance competition, and more than held her own, even when the prosthetic went south as she was heading north.
Much of the audience and all the judges were, quite frankly, stunned and grateful at the same time, realizing that their assumptions about what an amputee could do on a fake leg were the real limitation.
Then there was Roger Ebert, the movie critic out of Chicago. Ebert had cancer of the salivary glands, and had surgeries that did not work out as hoped. The cancer was largely eradicated, but he ended up with much of one side of his jaw missing, unable to speak and looking much the worse for wear.
His response was to put on a suit with an ascot (the better to loosely wrap around his tracheotomy) and go to his “Overlooked Film Festival” that he established at his alma mater, the University of Illinois. Asked if he was concerned about appearing in public looking so bad, he wrote, and his wife read, “Why? They’ve already written that I’m dead.” He later added “My mind is fine, it’s just my face that looks awful.”
He looks forward to getting back to writing film criticism for print, a task that requires no speaking, “and lets me sit in the dark!” Ebert still hopes to get further facial reconstruction, and be able to speak again. But he’s not going to wait at home until then.
All three of these celebrities have pursued their dreams, their happiness, without concern over looking perfect, or even normal. Why not? That is the question, given how often we hold back for fear that we won’t look good, whether in dancing or working or dreaming.
What we surely don’t want to do is hold others back for those reasons, but it happens. Hawking and Mills and Ebert probably had good, well meaning friends, who asked “are you sure you want to do this? Do you want to end up looking foolish, or pitiable?” Fortunately for all of us, they didn’t listen.
We get a chance Tuesday as a community, as Licking County, to encourage some 1,000 of our fellow citizens to pursue their dreams and follow their calling right out in the middle of our common life. The MRDD levy helps people who don’t always look or act quite like fashion models or Phi Beta Kappas to live their lives and pursue happiness pretty much like anyone else.
“Mental Health/Developmental Disabilities” is the long form of what we have a tax levy to support, and Nancy Neely and her crew is at work in every community of this county to serve their clients. MRDD clients do math, and dance, and I’m sure some one of them has reviewed a film somewhere. Send me a link, will you?
What we don’t want to do is be one of those well-meaning friends who says “maybe you ought to stay home. Let’s not go out where you might be disappointed or let down or embarrassed.” Our affirmation of this long-standing levy is a way to say, “let’s get out there and look silly together. Have you ever seen me dance?”
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has size fifteen feet, a disability for most dancing-type activities. Share your bold accomplishment in the face of opposition at knapsack77@gmail.com.
* * *
Faith Works 4-28-07
Jeff Gill
Gathered, Step by Step
When civil religion is invoked, the text for the message of the day is often II Chronicles 7:14 – “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
This is the voice of God, appearing by night to Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. Days and weeks of celebration and consecration have just ended for the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, and if you have ever put on a big event like an anniversary or groundbreaking or commencement . . .
There is a moment of letdown after the crowds have dispersed and the dignitaries have gone home. You’re tired, but satisfied; you no longer worry at each turn what’s been forgotten, and you’re barely aware of your own thoughts starting to tend back to an arc towards the future.
For Solomon, he is at his bedtime prayer, or perhaps dreaming in the night – the context is ambivalent. What is certain is the sense that God is speaking, in the wake of the completion of the Temple first dreamt by his father and fulfilled during his reign.
“If my people, who are called by my name,” speaks to the set-apart nature of Israel, the land chosen to fulfill promises made in Haram and Egypt, a place where the unity of God would first be preached abroad.
“Humble themselves,” is the command, just as a place of beauty and opulence is finished atop the highest spot overlooking the City of David, itself a rocky ridge above the Gihon Spring.
“Pray, and seek my face,” a proper request in a Temple, but an odd thought when the record shows that “none can look on the Lord’s face, and live,” but the command is to “seek” that same soul-scorching sight.
“Turn from their wicked ways,” said just above a place to be known as Hinnon, or Gehenna, an ever-smouldering trashdump on Jerusalem’s edge, already a metaphor for lasting, enduring destruction.
“Then I will hear from heaven,” God says from above the Temple, to a king in a palace just below the hilltop, overlooking the citadel and the valley below.
“And will forgive their sin and heal their land…” with not just a spiritual good feeling, or an emotional adjustment, but a promise that Amazing Things Will Happen if these requests are answered by the people.
Thursday, May 3, is the 55th anniversary of the National Day of Prayer, going back to a Congressional Procalmation signed by President Truman. Different communities each have their own way to mark this occasion, often on the steps of civic buildings, and the Newark Area Ministerial Association will gather again on the steps of Newark City Hall (or to the council chambers just inside if the weather is inclement). Their plans are to begin at 12:20 pm, and be in prayer until 12:40 pm.
Whether there or at your own municipal building, there will be prayers for the nation, our local officials, safety forces, judicial system, schools, churches, and special observance of the memory of those serving overseas, and the tragedy at Virginia Tech.
Wherever you pray, and whatever your faith tradition (there have been Buddhists and Jews involved in the Newark gathering in years past), don’t forget the promise of God that comes in the next verse, following II Chron. 7:14: verse 15 -- “Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.”
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your community worship events with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
* * *
Notes From My Knapsack 4-29-07
Jeff Gill
This month, the Jamestown Settlement celebrates the anniversary of three ships landing 400 years ago.
In 1607, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery sailed up the James River estuary, where they would leave not the first English settlement in what’s now the United States, but the first one that would last.
Today, a National Park occupies the spit of land where the settlement was built, a state park is nearby with replicas of Christopher Newport’s ships (the ones you see on the back of the Virginia quarter), and the former capital of the colony named for virginal Queen Elizabeth, Colonial Williamsburg, is just inland.
Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, still worshiping right along historic Duke of Gloucester Street, descended directly from the Jamestown congregation, and hosts a number of observances this month for the beginning of Anglican Christianity in America, the roots of The Episcopal Church, and the first ongoing Christian body in the USA. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip plan to attend, showing there’s no hard feelings about 1776 and all that.
Regular readers know that I always like to point out the Spanish heritage in New Mexico that goes back well before Jamestown. Let alone those latecomers in 1620, the Plymouth Pilgrims, but the New Mexico pioneers had missionary priests and we aren’t sure of a church built in Santa Fe until 1610, though it is still our oldest capital (and the oldest still-present town is Saint Augustine, Florida, 1565).
You still have to acknowledge that a huge chunk of our national heritage and identity derives from barely over a hundred folk who saw land at Cape Henry (just north of Virginia Beach) two weeks and four hundred years ago, watched Newport and expedition leaders Winfield and Smith erect a cross, and then slowly waited as they crept inland, until a spot was selected for them to land.
Like the Pilgrims thirteen years later and many miles to the north, less than half of the initial group would survive for long. In 1622 they would nearly be swept into the ocean by the Powhatan confederated Indians, who had quite enough of having their food borrowed, begged, and finally stolen, and their people killed in the process.
But the numbers and tools and technology ultimately could not be stopped – that, and a lack of immunity to both smallpox and the (in the Old World) common cold. By as early as 1707, some estimates say that 9 out of 10 American natives were dead, and the European settlers were still coming, and marrying, and adding to their own numbers…
…And starting to think of themselves as something new, something different. It was just another fifty years before Benjamin Franklin would come up with perhaps his greatest invention: he called himself and fellow British citizens of the colonies “Americans.”
In less than a hundred years, there would be 10,000 African slaves in the Chesapeake and south of the estuary, involuntary pioneers, but early arrivals who have a “First Families” claim of their own, if not the genealogy. Americans in chains; and many of the second wave of colonial immigration from Wales and Yorkshire and the urban underclasses of London carried an indenture, as servants a bare step up from chains and slavery. Read William Byrd’s diaries, only translated out of their private code a few decades back, for a grim peek into everyday life for most everyday people in the early colonies.
Truth be told, it was easier to sing a song of history back when we could tell comfortable lies that we almost believed ourselves. Bold, independent spirits came for freedom, selflessly, bravely pushing from a barren coast into a sparsely settled wilderness whose few occupants were a mix of savage primitivism and solitary unappreciated genius, plus an amazing number of Indian princesses, most of whom jumped off of high spots out of unrequited or unauthorized love. Then their families sadly wandered off into the west, where they would meet Hispanics who had been waiting for the border to be established so they could cross it by night to come and do our masonry work.
With the last two sentences being mostly and demonstrably false, the reaction of some is anger and more generally an indifference to history. Which is not only too bad, but like leaving a Buckeyes’ game in the third quarter.
Modern historians are finding the specific, individual tales, long buried in archives, or trunks, or in the earth, where courage and love and a bit of greed and fair amount of willful moral blindness mix to make people who sound like us. They tell us about situations we cannot imagine, and point us to possibilities we might just be able to achieve.
When the Queen of England and her Consort wander through the museums of Jamestown, they are themselves relics of another age, barely understandable today, but the 400 years gone stories told there could be our neighbors. They fled danger, and occasionally good sense, in pursuit of a better life for their families, which their decisions didn’t always reach. I know those folk, and I’d like to know them better, 400 years later.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; ask him about historical tales at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Faith Works 4-28-07
Jeff Gill
Gathered, Step by Step
When civil religion is invoked, the text for the message of the day is often II Chronicles 7:14 – “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
This is the voice of God, appearing by night to Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. Days and weeks of celebration and consecration have just ended for the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, and if you have ever put on a big event like an anniversary or groundbreaking or commencement . . .
There is a moment of letdown after the crowds have dispersed and the dignitaries have gone home. You’re tired, but satisfied; you no longer worry at each turn what’s been forgotten, and you’re barely aware of your own thoughts starting to tend back to an arc towards the future.
For Solomon, he is at his bedtime prayer, or perhaps dreaming in the night – the context is ambivalent. What is certain is the sense that God is speaking, in the wake of the completion of the Temple first dreamt by his father and fulfilled during his reign.
“If my people, who are called by my name,” speaks to the set-apart nature of Israel, the land chosen to fulfill promises made in Haram and Egypt, a place where the unity of God would first be preached abroad.
“Humble themselves,” is the command, just as a place of beauty and opulence is finished atop the highest spot overlooking the City of David, itself a rocky ridge above the Gihon Spring.
“Pray, and seek my face,” a proper request in a Temple, but an odd thought when the record shows that “none can look on the Lord’s face, and live,” but the command is to “seek” that same soul-scorching sight.
“Turn from their wicked ways,” said just above a place to be known as Hinnon, or Gehenna, an ever-smouldering trashdump on Jerusalem’s edge, already a metaphor for lasting, enduring destruction.
“Then I will hear from heaven,” God says from above the Temple, to a king in a palace just below the hilltop, overlooking the citadel and the valley below.
“And will forgive their sin and heal their land…” with not just a spiritual good feeling, or an emotional adjustment, but a promise that Amazing Things Will Happen if these requests are answered by the people.
Thursday, May 3, is the 55th anniversary of the National Day of Prayer, going back to a Congressional Procalmation signed by President Truman. Different communities each have their own way to mark this occasion, often on the steps of civic buildings, and the Newark Area Ministerial Association will gather again on the steps of Newark City Hall (or to the council chambers just inside if the weather is inclement). Their plans are to begin at 12:20 pm, and be in prayer until 12:40 pm.
Whether there or at your own municipal building, there will be prayers for the nation, our local officials, safety forces, judicial system, schools, churches, and special observance of the memory of those serving overseas, and the tragedy at Virginia Tech.
Wherever you pray, and whatever your faith tradition (there have been Buddhists and Jews involved in the Newark gathering in years past), don’t forget the promise of God that comes in the next verse, following II Chron. 7:14: verse 15 -- “Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.”
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your community worship events with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Gathered, Step by Step
When civil religion is invoked, the text for the message of the day is often II Chronicles 7:14 – “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
This is the voice of God, appearing by night to Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. Days and weeks of celebration and consecration have just ended for the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, and if you have ever put on a big event like an anniversary or groundbreaking or commencement . . .
There is a moment of letdown after the crowds have dispersed and the dignitaries have gone home. You’re tired, but satisfied; you no longer worry at each turn what’s been forgotten, and you’re barely aware of your own thoughts starting to tend back to an arc towards the future.
For Solomon, he is at his bedtime prayer, or perhaps dreaming in the night – the context is ambivalent. What is certain is the sense that God is speaking, in the wake of the completion of the Temple first dreamt by his father and fulfilled during his reign.
“If my people, who are called by my name,” speaks to the set-apart nature of Israel, the land chosen to fulfill promises made in Haram and Egypt, a place where the unity of God would first be preached abroad.
“Humble themselves,” is the command, just as a place of beauty and opulence is finished atop the highest spot overlooking the City of David, itself a rocky ridge above the Gihon Spring.
“Pray, and seek my face,” a proper request in a Temple, but an odd thought when the record shows that “none can look on the Lord’s face, and live,” but the command is to “seek” that same soul-scorching sight.
“Turn from their wicked ways,” said just above a place to be known as Hinnon, or Gehenna, an ever-smouldering trashdump on Jerusalem’s edge, already a metaphor for lasting, enduring destruction.
“Then I will hear from heaven,” God says from above the Temple, to a king in a palace just below the hilltop, overlooking the citadel and the valley below.
“And will forgive their sin and heal their land…” with not just a spiritual good feeling, or an emotional adjustment, but a promise that Amazing Things Will Happen if these requests are answered by the people.
Thursday, May 3, is the 55th anniversary of the National Day of Prayer, going back to a Congressional Procalmation signed by President Truman. Different communities each have their own way to mark this occasion, often on the steps of civic buildings, and the Newark Area Ministerial Association will gather again on the steps of Newark City Hall (or to the council chambers just inside if the weather is inclement). Their plans are to begin at 12:20 pm, and be in prayer until 12:40 pm.
Whether there or at your own municipal building, there will be prayers for the nation, our local officials, safety forces, judicial system, schools, churches, and special observance of the memory of those serving overseas, and the tragedy at Virginia Tech.
Wherever you pray, and whatever your faith tradition (there have been Buddhists and Jews involved in the Newark gathering in years past), don’t forget the promise of God that comes in the next verse, following II Chron. 7:14: verse 15 -- “Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.”
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your community worship events with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Faith Works 4-21-07
Jeff Gill
Where Do We Belong When We Don’t
Harper’s Magazine has a feature they’ve run for years called “Harper’s Index,” a series of statistics that usually tell some kind of a story, or series of stories.
In April, they led with these factoids, strung together for us to consider from either direction: “Percentage of American adults held either in prisons or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.68, 0.68.” Then, “Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75,” followed by “Percentage today who are in prison: 97.”
So to punch up this point, let me rephrase. If you took the total of US citizens who were either in a mental institution or prison, for both 1953 and 2006, the same fraction of the overall population is under state supervision in each year. It hasn’t gone up hardly at all.
But that total number, which hasn’t changed, has swung from being 75% in places like Central State Mental Hospital, to being 97% in places like Lucasville.
The implication of these numbers is that we appear to be dealing with mental illness as a society by jailing rather than treating the disease. Central State is no longer open on Columbus’ west side, and that may be a good thing. Large residential mental health facilities, formerly called “asylums,” got a very bad reputation, for very specific reasons, and the political tide turned against funding those places.
When they were closed, the argument was that the money saved would go to community mental health clinics and group homes and supportive services in people’s own communities. Those who work in the mental health field assure me that this money never made it out of the Statehouse, but was routed elsewhere (see entry “lottery, proceeds for education”), while the mentally ill were routed out onto the street.
We still have under 1 percent of our adults under state care, but the shift from 75% asylum to 97% prison convinces me that either a) in 1953 there were mostly criminals in mental institutions, or b) we’ve got a significant mental health population in the Department of Corrections. The word from our Ohio prison system leans to b).
Which brings us to the tragic intersection of the Blacksburg shootings and our own ongoing homelessness problem. Violence and mental illness is not an automatic association in any set of statistics, but for the public mind, they are stuck together.
Schizophrenics, for instance, are likely to commit a violent crime at a rate of 15 out of a 100. The general population is about .5 in a hundred. Do you focus on the data so that it says “schizophrenics are 30 times more likely to commit violent crimes,” or “85% of schizophrenics never commit violent crimes.” Both are true, but not equally accurate depending on circumstances.
Churches struggle with the mentally ill in worship and congregational life in general. People who don’t follow standard patterns of behavior or speak inappropriately and bizarrely create major disruptions in group settings, and it gets terribly easy to justify easing such folk back out onto the sidewalk, arguing “for the greater good” and “aren’t they a safety risk for the children?”
Are they? Do we look into these questions in the larger context of safety and security for all youth activities, as they apply to all adults? And in fairness, when a troubled individual treats any restrictions as unfair singling out, we tend to go to an “all or nothing” approach to guidelines that really helps no one.
The folks at Open Arms Emergency Homeless Shelter (www.lastcalloutreach.org), on East Main in Newark, just tallied up their situation, after 70 days of operation over 94 days (they had to move a few times, you’ve heard). They’ve helped feed and shelter 36 different homeless persons through those 70 days, some staying one night, others as much as 30, with the average in between.
Half of their guests have reported mental health or addiction issues leading to their situation, and half have spent time locked up – on that, go back to the first paragraph and read it again.
Where do we want people to go who don’t fit in? Where are churches called to be at work for those who don’t fit in, and how does that outreach fit into the larger mission of the church? Call Mental Health America of Licking County at 522-1341 (or check out www.mhalc.org), and ask them to come speak to your church’s leadership about how mental health can be part of your ministry.
It probably already is, and just isn’t spoken out loud. Bring the subject up, and see where God leads you.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your ministry efforts with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Where Do We Belong When We Don’t
Harper’s Magazine has a feature they’ve run for years called “Harper’s Index,” a series of statistics that usually tell some kind of a story, or series of stories.
In April, they led with these factoids, strung together for us to consider from either direction: “Percentage of American adults held either in prisons or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.68, 0.68.” Then, “Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75,” followed by “Percentage today who are in prison: 97.”
So to punch up this point, let me rephrase. If you took the total of US citizens who were either in a mental institution or prison, for both 1953 and 2006, the same fraction of the overall population is under state supervision in each year. It hasn’t gone up hardly at all.
But that total number, which hasn’t changed, has swung from being 75% in places like Central State Mental Hospital, to being 97% in places like Lucasville.
The implication of these numbers is that we appear to be dealing with mental illness as a society by jailing rather than treating the disease. Central State is no longer open on Columbus’ west side, and that may be a good thing. Large residential mental health facilities, formerly called “asylums,” got a very bad reputation, for very specific reasons, and the political tide turned against funding those places.
When they were closed, the argument was that the money saved would go to community mental health clinics and group homes and supportive services in people’s own communities. Those who work in the mental health field assure me that this money never made it out of the Statehouse, but was routed elsewhere (see entry “lottery, proceeds for education”), while the mentally ill were routed out onto the street.
We still have under 1 percent of our adults under state care, but the shift from 75% asylum to 97% prison convinces me that either a) in 1953 there were mostly criminals in mental institutions, or b) we’ve got a significant mental health population in the Department of Corrections. The word from our Ohio prison system leans to b).
Which brings us to the tragic intersection of the Blacksburg shootings and our own ongoing homelessness problem. Violence and mental illness is not an automatic association in any set of statistics, but for the public mind, they are stuck together.
Schizophrenics, for instance, are likely to commit a violent crime at a rate of 15 out of a 100. The general population is about .5 in a hundred. Do you focus on the data so that it says “schizophrenics are 30 times more likely to commit violent crimes,” or “85% of schizophrenics never commit violent crimes.” Both are true, but not equally accurate depending on circumstances.
Churches struggle with the mentally ill in worship and congregational life in general. People who don’t follow standard patterns of behavior or speak inappropriately and bizarrely create major disruptions in group settings, and it gets terribly easy to justify easing such folk back out onto the sidewalk, arguing “for the greater good” and “aren’t they a safety risk for the children?”
Are they? Do we look into these questions in the larger context of safety and security for all youth activities, as they apply to all adults? And in fairness, when a troubled individual treats any restrictions as unfair singling out, we tend to go to an “all or nothing” approach to guidelines that really helps no one.
The folks at Open Arms Emergency Homeless Shelter (www.lastcalloutreach.org), on East Main in Newark, just tallied up their situation, after 70 days of operation over 94 days (they had to move a few times, you’ve heard). They’ve helped feed and shelter 36 different homeless persons through those 70 days, some staying one night, others as much as 30, with the average in between.
Half of their guests have reported mental health or addiction issues leading to their situation, and half have spent time locked up – on that, go back to the first paragraph and read it again.
Where do we want people to go who don’t fit in? Where are churches called to be at work for those who don’t fit in, and how does that outreach fit into the larger mission of the church? Call Mental Health America of Licking County at 522-1341 (or check out www.mhalc.org), and ask them to come speak to your church’s leadership about how mental health can be part of your ministry.
It probably already is, and just isn’t spoken out loud. Bring the subject up, and see where God leads you.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your ministry efforts with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
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