Just a few more assorted images from the Granville Candlelight Walking Tour, starting with a view of the front of the Avery-Downer House (1842), and the Mower House next door (1824), followed by the interior of Centenary Church (1894, founded 1810) where the 6 pm youth musical was getting started --

Christmas in Hogsmeade

Call this little sequence "Christmas in Hogsmeade" if you like (we do like!); they're from last Saturday's Granville, Ohio Candlelight Walking Tour. It was even more beautiful than usual, and as the evening settled into darkness, the snow began to fall. The inn at the end isn't the Three Broomsticks, but the Buxton Inn, built in 1812; the white pillared building is the Avery-Downer House & Robbins Hunter Museum, with an odd little folly built onto the very back, an octagonal study that Mr. Hunter would go into at night to play one of his three organs, much to the discomfiture of the neighbors.

That may not go on anymore, but it still is the kind of town where the volunteer fire department brings Santa Claus in with Mrs. C and an elf all in the bucket of their big truck, down past Sugar Loaf and stopping at village hall where they were gently lowered to earth amid cheering throngs of children. It's quite a town, Granville is.

The church down towards the bottom is Centenary UMC, where the Little Guy did essentially the same part Linus did in his Christmas program as his part of the Walking Tour, and it made the whole evening for his mother and me, snow and all.

This is one of the walls of the former stable of the Buxton Inn, which is now the Tavern in the cellar -- in this space, if Johnny Appleseed spent a night in any building still standing in Ohio, it was here. These walls, and the timbers overhead, are what were put in place in 1812.

Faith Works 12-6-08
Jeff Gill

A Baby and The Scandal of Particularity

When I was in high school, the movie “Oh, God” was out in theaters and my church youth group went to see it. The trip had the result no doubt hoped for by our advisors, with a long and specific conversation about theology happening at Mickey D’s that we didn’t know was theology.

In our conversation, we kept coming back to a conversation where the character played by John Denver (yes, that John Denver), a grocery store manager in Tarzana, CA is asking questions of God, played by George Burns (he did God before Morgan Freeman cornered that market).

Our mild-mannered manager asks if Jesus was God’s son. George played the moment with a moment of serious gravity, looking and sounding quite sad and sincere. “Yes, Jesus was my son.”

Pause. Then, gravely, “Buddha was my son. The man who said, 'There's no room at the inn'--he was my son, too. Let’s move on.”

The characters went on with other questions (“What about Judgement Day?” God: “I’m not looking forward to it.”), but our group didn’t. We were wrestling with it right on through our fries long after the movie had ended and we were waiting for parents to come pick us up, and some of us wrestle with it still.

Leslie Newbigin was a Christian thinker and leader through the 20th century, whose writing on Christian mission is very powerfully active in the “missional church” movement today. Newbigin is one of those rare figures as appreciated in evangelical circles as in liberal seminaries, but a real sticking point for some on the theological left is what Newbigin called “the scandal of particularity.”

Bishop Newbigin’s point was that the universality of Christ was made all the more effective by the particularity of who Jesus was; he argued passionately to Western culture after his years in leadership in South India that “the scandal of particularity” was a uniquely western problem, where our secularizing desire to see Jesus as “one of” God’s children eroded the impact of how Jesus came as embodied “Good News” for all. The particular and the universal had, for Newbigin, a very direct connection, while general categories lead us to the selective and the approved.

So for Lesslie, the idea that God’s love had a unique embodiment in a particular child in a certain village at a precise point in time was absolutely necessary to making the case that God’s saving love was offered to absolutely everyone – even those who came before that moment, let alone long after.

Which is why, when I look at a manger scene, I think of Lesslie Newbigin and Francis of Assisi more than I do George Burns or Avery Corman (the fine author who wrote the script for “Oh, God”). To make Jesus one of the many “sons of God” starts us down the road of who is, who isn’t, and who can’t even be considered as one of the One.

To proclaim the child born in Bethlehem as the “Prince of Peace,” to sing “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” means not that I’m emphasizing who isn’t included in the grandeur and sweep of God’s grace, but that this baby born in a stable, laid down to sleep in a feeding trough, is a reliable sign for not only the religious and observant, but for the lost and seeking, the struggling and starving.

For the Licking County Food Pantry Network, St. John’s United Church of Christ on the south edge of Newark on National Drive is sponsoring a “Festival for the Christ Child” tomorrow afternoon, Dec. 7, in their sanctuary. It’s a concert, made up of a number of acts from around the county, with prelude music from 1 to 1:30 and the formal program starting at 1:30 pm, and your scribe is honored to serve as the emcee. Tickets can be reserved in advance at 323-2407, or you can buy them at the door for $10. All proceeds go to the area food pantries, who need to be a sign of hope in a dark time themselves. St. John’s is well known for their “Bethlehem Marketplace,” which is held every other year, and they didn’t want to wait until next year to make a particular, specific stand on behalf of our community’s hungry.

However you choose to proclaim the Christ Child in your life, spending a little time and money at this gathering can be a real gift to someone for Christmas. You may never know who that particular person you helped is, but they will know that their whole community has not forgotten them.

And what might grow from that one particular act of kindness, a point of grace?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your particular joys or concerns with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack – 12-4-08
Jeff Gill

Making Memories, Creating Experiences

This is the week when you start to almost get used to the unusual sight of trees, trussed and tied down to car and van roofs, whizzing around the village.

Some go off to the pick and pay lots, while others, quite a few others in fact, go further afield to Walsh’s Tree Farm or up to Timbuk, where they can set out into the carefully managed forest to cut down their own. (Those places will just sell you one, too.)

Other than giving a family material for later Clark Griswold stories about dad severing an artery, or the flying squirrel jumping out onto Mee-maw’s towering blue wig, why? Why would you go out to do such a thing on a cold day, when the last thing you cut down was three inch tall grass blades?

Because it makes a memory. Creating experiences is a powerful part of what this time of year is about, from roasting an entire bird when your usual poultry option is take out stir fry, to carefully mitre-folding shiny decorative paper around a box already impregnable by most country’s special forces untis, so children can shred your handiwork in less time than it takes Michael Phelps to swim a pool’s length.

Spending your money on making experiences that last in the memory may be the smartest expenditure you can make for the holiday season. With planned obsolescence making your laptop out of date in a year and inoperative without cracking open the motherboard in three, with materials from overseas saturated in lead and melamine, and that’s the sturdy part of some purchased goods, memory may be more durable than you think.

Age and ailments can take a toll, but the memories that last have a shelf life that stands up pretty well next to consumer goods, and you can pass those memories on to your children and grandchildren – who knows which stories they actually listened to while they were typing on their iPhone screen?

An Advent wreath on the dinner table, in observant Christian homes, can create a focus for remembrance that also is good for many years, with just a set of new purple candles needed to start again. Advent calendars, at least the ones not focused on chocolate behind each little paper hatch, can return and be passed down through a family, creating layers of memory.

In your Christmas season shopping, we’ll all spend some money, recession or not, but one way to maximize minimal dollars is to think “how can I buy a gift that makes a memory” for the person or family you’re shopping for? That helps us get off the treadmill of stuff (What stuff do they already have? What stuff can I afford for them? Is this stuff in style?) and reduces questions of storage or even usefulness, questions all the more nagging for the fact that we hate to ask them of ourselves as we shop for others.

Restaurant gift cards or certificates are easy to mail and always can fill a niche, but what about getting someone a chance for a meal somewhere different? Wherever they don’t often, or ever eat, try that as a present and as a provocation. Help people get out of their rut, which is usually less to do with actual tastes and more to do with habit. Take a chance, get ‘em to eat some hot Thai spice or at an Italian restaurant they didn’t even know existed.

Books are my favorite gift to give or receive, but it’s true that not everyone welcomes reading as a present (it feels like a homework assignment, the Lovely Wife tells me). A picture book can take you somewhere cheaply without assuming they want to commit to a sit down readthrough.

And a cookbook with a few interesting spices wrapped into the package can be a fun way to invite some adventure right in your own kitchen.

Does anyone out there have any other ideas for helping people make memories out of this Christmas season? Write me at knapsack77@gmail.com and I’ll use ‘em here for last minute ideas . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

This is both funny, and not-funny -- having watched a mall die while living in West Virginia, and now watching Indian Mound Mall go on life support (some vital signs, but a few extremities and internal organs shutting down), you see how a downtown can go into hibernation and come back, but a mall is like a shark.

If it stops moving through the waters of commerce, it dies, from the head down, and the rot isn't pretty.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/27/AR2008112702345_pf.html

What are some new business models for a mall? Churches in the former anchor store spaces? Remodeling into senior housing on one end? I'm not kidding -- they need some ideas beyond the newest tchochkey outlet . . . unless Les Wexner figures out how to make us all believe we need another overpriced personal care product in 43 varieties to stave off bankruptcy: "Follicles, Defoliation, and Finance" might do it.

Faith Works 11-29-08
Jeff Gill

Old Fashioned Means Many Things

Last week many of us sang the Thanksgiving classics, “We Gather Together” and “Now Thank We All Our God” and “Come, Ye Thankful People Come.”

These aren’t songs the ad business folks have figured out how to co-opt.

They not only come with a fair amount of theological content, but they swing with a heavy load of archaic imagery – tares cast out, grain put in a garner, “first the blade and then the ear,” before the whole shebang “doth appear” to “lay down in store.”

Huh?

Even those among us who actually live their lives around a harvest season and know what a harvest home looks like (usually needs sweeping daily) don’t call any building on their farmstead a garner, and tare weight is a cryptic label on a scale readout unless you’re in charge of setting pricing.

Never mind, because this time of year makes singing about grain and corn and sheaves feel right at home in our harvest homes, cornucopia stuffed with fruits and gourds as a centerpiece until the Christmas decorations come out.

Thanks to the election and the near monopolization of the airwaves by political spots, we didn’t start getting slammed with Christmas (koff) Holiday season ads until, oh, Nov. 5. Which is about two months later than it’s been the last couple years.

The Lovely Wife and I have noticed that there’s a bit of a theme to the ads on TV this year, or at least in the tube we’ve seen – nostalgia.

Traditional scenes, and classic music, with a focus on family and fun and snow that seems to us a shift from what had become (in this household’s perspective, at least) a rolling attempt to out-cool the competition during the “Holiday (koff) season.” Edgy music, surrealism with red and green tones, and a general effort to stretch the boundaries of you might still consider “oh, an ad to buy stuff for Christmas.”

What we’re seeing now is a wide range of commericals that all aim at a fairly narrow band of 70’s era musical variety show sets, all of whom have an Andy Williams clone in them wearing a striking sweater (yes, that trend is his fault – age 80, still wearing them in Branson) that stands out against a stark white set, among other colorful people mainly organized into recognizable family groups (young couple, young family, older couple with a teen, elderly couple beaming at them all).

Christmas music for some years now has been “officially” limited to “Deck the Halls,” “Ring Christmas Bells (sans words),” and “Jingle Bells,” so I understand why some ad agencies went with 50’s finger snapping hipness just to get out of that box, but this year we’ve climbed back into the box and put a big honking red ribbon on it.

Is this the economy? If so, how does that logic flow? Are ad buyers less interested in taking risks in a tanking economy? Does the TV ad trend mean that traditional is safe (well, duh), and it pays?

It does seem safe to guess that all sorts of families, traditional and non-traditional, will be looking for safe, cheap, simple ways to celebrate the season in the way they’re used to, or remember being used to, or would like to learn how to do in the first place.

Thursday night is the downtown Newark “Sights and Sounds” tour, which you can learn more about at http://www.sightsandsoundsofchristmas.org A family can learn a little about local traditions around Advent (starting tomorrow!) and the Christmas season for very few dollars and much enjoyment, with the Courthouse Square lights anchoring it all for free.

Also at no cost is the Granville Candlelight Walking Tour, next Saturday Dec. 6 with various events from 1:00 pm through 9:00 pm all over the village – see http://candlelight.webstorefront.net for sites and times of various musical and performance venues. Most all are free, but lots of chances to spend money if you want!

And that Saturday is also “Christmas in the County” down at Infirmary Mound Park from 6:00 pm through the evening, no cost but much merriment for all, including the legendary Christmas pickle.

Is your family thinking along more traditional lines this Christmas season? Are those of other faith traditions doing things differently in their different observances through the end of 2008? Drop me a line and let me know; I’d love to share those ideas with our community.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your traditions at knapsack77@gmail.com.

So, a lovely mountain pass in the Swiss Alps. And a scene from memory of . . . Licking County?

Ellen Hayes, in her 1920 book "Wild Turkeys and Tallow Candles," said of her growing-up years just before the Civil War that, as a much older woman, a professor at Wellesley College, she had been on the Grand Tour of Europe.

It was in passing through the Furka Pass, seen above (click to enlarge), that she was struck with how much the scene around her felt the same as how she, as a child, viewed passing through "the Dugway" alongside Raccoon Creek, bending around the hill now sliced off by Rt. 16 heading east into Newark. The sense of scale and wonder to young eyes, and the expectation of adventure beyond the bend around the river, a steep slope on your left hand, made her feel a sudden direct link between that experience long before and her travel in that moment.

And now i think of that connection almost every time i zip around that bend at 55 mph, the "vale of Newark" opening up before me. Can you see it? Or more to the point, can you feel it?

Faith Works 11-22-08
Jeff Gill

When the Frost Is On the Punkin’

James Whitcomb Riley is known as the Hoosier Poet, creator of “Little Orphant Annie” (yes, that’s how he spelled it) and “The Frost Is On the Punkin.”

He’s an acquired taste, though you’re required by state law to acquire it as a schoolchild in Indiana. So I didn’t learn as I should have, being a small Hoosier lad, memorizing dialect doggerel, certain small points of neighboring history. Such as the fact that Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, and later went to West Point having realized that pounding tacks into his trunk lid for arrival at the United States Military Academy would spell the initials “HUG,” so he wisely adopted his mother’s maiden name to create Ulysses Simpson Grant, or “USG,” a much more patriotic abbreviation.

At any rate, I wrongly said here last week that Grant was born in Illinois, and thanks to Gary from Lancaster for catching that online; Galena, Illinois has a home and museum and claims U.S. Grant pretty comprehensively, but he’s born in Ohio (Grant Park in Chicago is named for him, though).

Illinois has a number of politicians that they kind of inherited, like Lincoln (born in Kentucky), Grant (born in Ohio), and Obama (born in Hawaii). All three are associated with the state, but weren’t born there . . . though your faithful scribe was. Who knew?

It’s amazing how many things we know that we don’t know, and don’t know that we think we know. As days get colder in the morning, we may idly cite “the frost is on the pumpkin” whether our gardens grow gourds or not, not ever having heard of old Mr. Riley who wrote over 100 years ago that “O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,/ When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.”

But what is fodder slowly drying on the shock? ‘Tis corn, destined for the crib to feed the stock (that’s the animals on your farm), but preserved best by desiccating while in the field still up on the cornstalk, or “shock.”

Few enough of us are dependent on the fall harvest to feed us through the long, cold, desolate winter. Even so, down in our bones, we have a sense that gathering up food and fat and fodder is a really good idea when the days get short and chill and frosty.

So a good hearty meal with lots of grease and butter and oil has a unique appeal to any of us human creatures in the month of November. And our cultural memory is triggered with spices and dried fruit from August and herbs put up back last April – “Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yaller heaps;
And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With theyr mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage too!... “

We enjoy our gravy and our earthy spices this time of year, and the observations that put our anachronistic meal in context . . . seriously, we don’t raise big birds in the backyard anymore, or even grow gourds in the garden, but we do love Thanksgiving.

And it’s the experience of gathering with neighbors and family known well, and new friends to meet, that makes a Thanksgiving meal taste the best. A community worship service where multiple churches gather together to focus the whole “giving thanks” idea is the best seasoning I know (even if rosemary is every November cook’s secret weapon).

You can go tomorrow, Sunday evening, Nov. 23 at 7:00 to Hebron United Methodist Church if you live in the Lakewood area, or that same night at First Presbyterian Church in Granville; Wednesday, Nov. 26 in Newark is their Community Thanksgiving at Trinity Episcopal.

Somewhere near you is a service where you can join fellow citizens to give thanks this week. Make sure to find your right way to step into and support an ecumenical service in your neck of the woods!

“I don't know how to tell it—but ef such a thing could be
As the angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me—
I'd want to 'commodate 'em—all the whole-indurin' flock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and he loves “The Bear Hunt”, too – let him know what you’re thankful for at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 11-20-08
Jeff Gill

Thanks To Give

Sunday night, at 7:00 pm in First Presbyterian Church, Granville’s Ministerium is hosting a Community Thanksgiving Service open to all.

“Giving thanks for what,” say younger retirees with their money largely tied up in a cratering stock market?

“Giving thanks for what,” ask breadwinners who just lost their job. Those who had hours cut might say “should I be giving thanks for not losing my job, but just living in fear now that I will?”

“Giving thanks for what,” might be the retort from those who still have their job, but realize that many of their lifestyle and family choices are now hemmed in and constrained in ways not imagined last November.

Those are all tough situations, and even here in Brigadoon the prospects for Christmas in many families are grimmer, if not actually grim.

Parents are having late night conversations with each other about how to talk to the kids about where they won’t be going, what won’t be bought, what has to stop happening in the new year. That’s hard, and whether in an upper income bracket or down in the dumps, moms and dads don’t want to have to say these kinds of things.

Giving thanks for what we do have is a good place to start, though. You focus on what you don’t have, and the big ol’ world will always keep you on your heels.

The band Switchfoot has a song titled “Gone” with a passage towards the end you have to hear jauntily sung to really appreciate, but the idea is the same: “Gone, like Frank Sinatra, gone, like Elvis and his mom; like Al Pacino's cash, nothing lasts in this life. Gone, my high school dreams are gone, my childhood sweets are gone -- Life is a day that doesn't last for long.”

In other words, everything is “gone” sooner or later. How are you going to deal with that? To grab ahold of stuff with all the more desperation, or start to look at what’s really of value to you? How do you communicate to those around you what really matters?

Switchfoot goes on to sing “Life is more than money, time was never money.” Time is the one thing that everyone has the exactly same amount of – Now. That’s all you have, but it’s all anyone has, so no complaining. Now. Whatcha gonna do with it?

Time isn’t money. You can use money to shift your time around a bit, but there’s still one now to a customer, step up and spend it well. Is a super cool vacation helping to justify not spending time together the other 50 weeks of the year? Are restaurant meals saving time at home but resulting in store-bought conversation that isn’t bringing anyone any closer than watching TV? And do the extra cable channels give you all something to talk about, or do they keep people from talking to each other in the first place?

“We've got information in the information age / But do we know what life is, outside of our convenient Lexus cages?” Switchfoot asks us if we might step out of the boxes we’ve made, whether willingly venturing out, or pushed by circumstance, and realize that life truly is something to give thanks for.

Come join us Sunday at 7 pm at First Pres; I’d be thankful if you did.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what you’re thankful for at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 11-15-08
Jeff Gill

Startling Echoes, Head-turning Parallels

These last few weeks have been dramatic and evocative on so many levels.

I’m enough of a history geek to recall in the middle of so many other associations that Grant Park in Chicago is named for the general who began a career in Illinois, and who played a key role in ending the Civil War. I’m also old enough to remember Grant Park as a place forty years ago where “armies of the night” surged against police barricades with angry shouts and raised fists, as a Democratic candidate for president was being nominated to fail.

And my own heritage out of Illinois and Indiana, and my wife’s from Kentucky, keeps the thread living and vital pulling through the fabric of today about a tall young man who ran for an Illinois Senate seat 150 years ago, losing to Stephen A. Douglas after a dramatic series of debates over freedom, slavery, and the place of liberty in this nation.

Abraham Lincoln, born February 12th exactly 200 years before the January 20th we have ahead of us, entered office without an official faith stance or church membership. We’ll have a number of opportunities these next few months to review and rehearse Lincoln’s journey of belief, but I’ll just note that perhaps no president has written so thoughtfully and so well about discerning God’s will in human affairs than the man from Springfield.

But I was mc-ing a clergy gathering just a few weeks, and got some very uneasy laughter from partisans of both candidates heading for Nov. 4 when I pointed out that pastors had an interesting choice ahead of them in the two major parties: one a fellow who had sent a letter quitting his church because he didn’t agree with the minister, and the other a guy who wouldn’t formally join the church where he attended with his wife because he had a busy travel schedule.

I’m pretty sure both McCain and Obama supporters laughed, and both laughed uneasily, because that knife really does cut both ways. Men are bad about “joining” and more likely to “quit” over conflict than women are.

Men’s ministries have never held the role or influence, ironically given other aspects of American culture, that women’s groups or ladies’ aid societies have maintained. They’ve always been smaller and shorter-lived compared to their female institutional counterparts. In mainline/oldline Protestant denominations, another era of die-off is hitting men’s programming, and among evangelicals the Promise Keepers’ movement had great impact for a season, but has generally faded into obscurity (though Bill McCartney and Raleigh Washington have just returned to leadership with PK, so we’ll see what happens there at www.promisekeepers.org).

Why are men so resistant to “joining” and so quick to cut ties? Some suggest that women are more invested in relationship as a basic quality and value, hence their structures are more important to them on a personal level.

Others note that much of modern church life is in a more feminine mode, starting with singing (yes, I know Billy Ray Cyrus sings, but in general . . .), the décor, and often even the preaching, focused on feelings and emotions and personality.

John Eldredge has become a kind of one-man movement among evangelical Christians with his books and weekend programs starting with “Wild at Heart” and “Waking the Dead.” He argues that a more masculine faith is needed to most effectively reach men, which makes a certain rough sense of the face of it.

A number of Reformed and Calvinist pastors have expressed alarm at John’s use of popular movies and books to present a worldview that is “not quite Biblical” in nature; liberal mainline writers are concerned at what they see as his glorification of combat and warfare in those same images.

Eldredge argues that he is using those popular images to tap into an essential hunger for men to be part of “spiritual warfare” to defend and protect their families, and can quote Scripture just fine for his own defense. He’s happy to admit that his oeuvre isn’t for everyone, but is an outreach to an audience that has tended to sit outside in the car reading the Sunday paper waiting for the wife and kids to come out of church.

You can judge for yourself at www.ransomedheart.com, but the two candidates present an interesting test case for any faith community – if you met Barack Obama or John McCain through work or community business, and wanted to invite them to your church, how would that offering look to them?

(CORRECTION: the original version of the first para said Grant was "born in Illinois," which of course is incorrect, said the guy living in Ohio. His business career which turned into his return to the Army with the Civil War began in Galena, Illinois, but he was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, just upstream from Cincinnati.)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; suggest a way to reach those left out by modern church life at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 11-8-08
Jeff Gill

Points of Light, Circles of Hope

Last Sunday evening I had the distinct pleasure of Emcee-ing a “Gospel Celebration” concert at the Midland Theater in Newark, on behalf of the Licking County Coalition of Care.

Funds were raised and spirits raised higher, but I had an interesting moment when I got a round of applause I wasn’t expecting.

During one of the transitions between groups, which is when the master of ceremonies is actually useful if they fill the time productively, I tossed in a little speech about how “no matter who wins the election on Tuesday, the kind of work the Coalition does will still be vitally needed; government is not good at providing time, a listening ear, and a word of hope.”

Trust me when I tell you that I was acutely aware that the hall and the 600 audience and some 200 performers included the most passionate of Obama supporters, and hearty advocates of John McCain, and at least one Bob Barr stumper that I knew of. But what I was pleasantly surprised by was how the crowd thundered applause, as one vast meaningful rumble, when I noted that the change in presidency will not change the need to support work like what the Coalition of Care does.

I was thinking that again Thursday night, when I was standing in a more modest throng, but significant for a candlelight vigil after dark on a November evening. Just to keep things a bit confusing, I serve as board president of the Licking County Coalition for Housing, a group which works on providing transitional housing to people and families leaving emergency shelter and needing assistance to get to stability, along with a major financial literacy effort to do preventive work to fight homelessness.

For the last seven years, we’ve done something inspired by a very moving exhibit at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, where a wall is simply twenty feet of empty shoes, echoing a pile found at Auschwitz. The mind quickly thinks to fill those shoes with bodies and faces and people, but the emptiness remains and helps you imagine and understand loss, to resist invisibility.

That’s why we’ve set out some 1,400 pairs of shoes, discards from other agencies, for the last six years, to show the number of people who come to the Housing Coalition for assistance and support in staying housed, one way or another. We get federal funds to maintain the 38 units of transitional housing we provide as the core of those supports, so we don’t pray with our clients the way the Coalition of Care can, working as they do with entirely local funds, but I know that many of our staff and friends pray for the people they work with, every day.

And even the Housing Coalition can have a little ecumenical prayer in our public education efforts, which I got to do at noon on Courthouse Square and what I listened to Brad Isch, pastor of Narrow Road Community Church on Fifth St., do in both prayer and a bit of preaching about the need to go from awareness to action, in this as in so many areas of our lives.

The Housing Coalition needs support from those of us who still have jobs, who can afford to share with those who are hurting, for unrestricted funds and also for local match to qualify for those useful if restricting federal dollars (give us a few hundred thousand a year and we could walk away from those HUD bucks, but . . .); the Coalition of Care needs your help because no one anywhere else is going to help pay to keep the lights on and support people here in Licking County in that way. We can count on them to pray with and listen to and share a little aid provided by congregations working together, and they can help direct people most efficiently from church referrals to the state and federally funded agencies they need to talk to, but with the knowledge that someone will stand behind them or even with them as they make their way through those systems.

It is said about prayer in schools that as long as there are algebra tests, there will be prayer in school; we will always have much prayer around all the efforts in our community to help people in need. Pray for those folks, pray for those working to make that aid usefully available while strengthening the recipients at the same time (a tough, tough challenge), and pray for those making decisions through this holiday season about their giving.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s happy to remind you that donations can come online at www.lcchousing.org! Or just write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 11-6-08
Jeff Gill

Presidential Candidates in Black and White

One of the interesting challenges of writing a newspaper column these days is that you get to write material days (sometimes weeks) before a print run, while the internet never sleeps.

So my writing of this piece precedes the election itself, but will necessarily appear after the results have been splashed far and abroad. What to do?

Actually, given the historic role of the Obama campaign, let alone a likely victory, my thoughts have tended towards putting his story in a broader, but also Ohio context.

One of the aspects most remarked upon about the Barack Obama candidacy is the fact of his African background, with a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother, raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, and matured in Illinois by way of Columbia and Harvard.

In fact, Barack Obama would not be the first President of the United States to carry some African heritage. Surprised? Well, this gets to be a complicated and obscured history on many levels.

Quite a few U.S. Presidents have had African ancestry claimed for them, but mostly it’s been political opponents making the claims, hoping to rally racism and xenophobia against the other side.

Ohio’s own Warren Harding was said to have African American ancestors. His usual response was along the lines of “who knows what my ancestors were up to?” makes you think he wasn’t quite saying no to a claim that was political poison in the 1920’s. Modern genealogical research leaves the question open, which is as good as a “Yes” for me looking at the 19th century.

Saying that Harding was the great-grandson of a black woman was supportable enough for the New York Times to print in April, anyhow. Less proveable is the persistent claim that Andrew Jackson, namesake of Licking County’s Jacksontown, was as much as one-quarter black, and that an older brother was sold as a slave until redeemed by family. These stories trace back to a common and unsubstantiated source from a political opponent, but intriguingly they can’t be entirely dismissed, either.

Dwight Eisenhower was quietly but persistently said to be one-quarter black, perhaps largely based on two points about his mother: she was a committed Jehovah’s Witness to the end of her life, and her younger portraits do look quite African American, if in fact such a thing can be usefully said.

For an Ohio connection to the presidency and African Americans, the most interesting is to Thomas Jefferson.

As Annette Gordon-Reed, in her new book “The Hemingses of Monticello” points out, not only is Sarah, or “Sally” Hemings most likely the effective “second wife” of our third president, she is almost certainly mother of six or possibly seven of his children.

From 1790 to 1808, the births of each of Sally Hemings’ children match a documentable presence of Thomas Jefferson nine months before, where no other male in his line would fit as precisely – and DNA test results show that the narrative of Eston Hemings in the Pike County Republican of 1873 is supported by scientific data.

Not only do Eston and Madison Hemings end up in Ohio (though Eston continues on to Wisconsin before his death, to put more distance between himself and slavery), but Thomas Woodson, whose family maintains by oral tradition that he is the first son born to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings out of their Paris sojourn in 1790, is the founder of a settlement of free blacks in Milton Township, Jackson County, Ohio.

Madison Hemings’ son becomes the first African American elected to public office on the West Coast, becoming a California State Assemblyman in 1918, though born in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1879.

Sally Hemings’ last resting place is to this date unknown, as she was a 56 year “old woman worth $50” according to probate appraisal in 1826, after the death of Jefferson on July 4. He could not see his way clear to freeing his slaves upon his death, as did George Washington, but his daughter Martha gave Sally “her time,” a form of freedom that allowed a former slave to remain in the area. But did she?

Scholars believe that Sally Hemings died in 1835 in Charlottesville, VA, down the hill from Monticello where she lived from her childhood, to nursing her half-sister Martha Wayles Jefferson through her death in 1782 when she was nine, through the trip to Paris at 14 or 15, the two years overseas, and then the return to Monticello which she never left . . . until Jefferson’s death.

Is it possible that like many widows of that era or even today, Sally Hemings went to live with one of her more prosperous sons? The gravesites of Thomas Woodson in Jackson County, Ohio, or Eston Hemings in Ross County, Ohio, are not well marked or fully recorded. Rather than beneath a parking lot in downtown Charlottesville, VA, could the “second wife” of our third president be buried in southern Ohio? It is quite possible.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about anything other than the election at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 11-1-08
Jeff Gill

A Man Who Rippled the Waters

Last weekend I got to spend my time with members and leaders of the Church of the Brethren in the “Western Plains District,” which includes all of Kansas, Nebraska, parts of Colorado and New Mexico, and a mission on the Navajo Reservation.

With yesterday as “Reformation Day,” the anniversary of the nailing by Martin Luther of his 95 points for reforming the Church Catholic of his day in 1517, Lutherans are remembering their roots.

However, it was a movement called “Pietism” led by pastors like Phillip Spener and others that helped to create a number of other movements that we don’t always associate with the Lutheran end of the Protestant Reformation. John Wesley was deeply influenced by Spener’s writings in college at Oxford, and encountered Pietists at key moments in his faith journey that helped produce the Wesleyan/Methodist communion.

Pietism was behind a number of German, or “Deutsch” groups that came to William Penn’s colony in the New World. They were often called “Dutch” by the English speaking Quakers, but the Pennsylvania Dutch included not only the Anabaptist movement communions like Amish and Mennonite, but Pietists who were tagged with names like “German Baptist Brethren,” “United Brethren,” and other religious societies who withdrew into institutions like the Ephrata Cloister (a possible inspiration for the Shakers later) and the Harmonists, who ended up on the Ohio River founding New Harmony, Indiana.

Between Philadelphia and New Harmony there are a number of Dunkard Creeks and Dunkard Hollows, remnants of the folks who in large part became what is now known as the Church of the Brethren. They are still found in Ohio, but many moved west with the frontier, and their congregations still tend very strongly to rural settings, and are rare in cities.

As they migrated west, some of their number slid over into the E&R branch of what is now the United Church of Christ, and others into the old EUB, “Evangelical United Brethren,” which is now part of the United Methodist Church. Ohio still has quite a few Grace Brethren congregations, and Ashland University is one of the legacy institutions of a group named “The Brethren Church”, another branch of the Brethren stream.

However those rivulets meander, you can trace them all back to a place in Germany called Schwarzenau, and a miller’s son named Alexander Mack near the Eder River. The Schwarzenau Brethren arose in 1708 with baptisms of adults in the Eder by Alexander Mack; this break with the established church of their German state, and the official requirement for infant baptism, led to persecution and finally a migration that went first to the Netherlands (like the Pilgrims did before 1620), and then to America in 1719.

So 2008 is a 300th birthday for the Brethren movement, and my Church of the Brethren friends shared with me their pictures and stories from a summer visit to Scharzenau and the Eder River, where the Mack Mill and many other structures from their heritage are still standing.

I brought home from this gathering for the Little Guy a book, lavishly illustrated, called “Alexander Mack – A Man Who Rippled the Waters.” It tells the tale of Mack, the Brethren, their travels, and the hunger for freedom to worship and seek God as one’s conscience dictates. You don’t have to be related to the Scharzenau Brethren to enjoy the text or the paintings on each page . . . but odds are you are, in some way!

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

Faith Works 10-25-08
Jeff Gill

Looking Up Into the Rafters

Thanks to the marvels of them internets, especially that Ebay person who is so busy doing all these auctiony things, I will shortly have a Dickens’ Village “Peggotty’s Cottage” to put under my Christmas tree.

My tastes in reading and, sad to say, writing, were long ago warped and distorted by having read “David Copperfield” when I was far too young. Long sentences and repeated semicolon-related offenses are the least of my sins that trace back to following the tale of Trotwood.

On the Norfolk coast, David Copperfield encounters a home made from an overturned boat, described as charming and cozy beyond even the label “Dickensian.”

The Peggotty family lives there, overlooking the North Sea, and I had a sense of what it felt like to live in such a house when I looked up into the criss-crossing rafters of my home church and a number of nearby churches I would find myself in, from time to time, growing up.

I had a slightly mistaken idea that “worship” related to the idea that we gathered each Sunday under the outline of an upturned ship, a “wor-ship” that sailed us into God’s stormy seas of trial, where we had refuge with Jesus at the helm and worked together as the crew.

When pastors and preachers talked of the honored dead who had gone before, the saints in glory who were now a great cloud of witnesses, whether in my Disciples congregation, the Episcopal parish across the street, or the Lutherans to our north and west, they pointed up – at the rafters and joists and hammerbeams.

That was a picture of heaven and the realm of glory that stuck: those knurled knobs and solid timbers spanning the nave (recalling “navis,” Latin for “ship”) were an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible place. High ceilinged woodwork hinted at heaven, and still does.

It was pleasing to see the ancient timbers and lathed ornament of Trinity Episcopal, 1834, on the front page of the Advocate some days back. As I had the chance to tell the congregation of St. Paul’s Lutheran the next Sunday, where I was filling the pulpit and whose history followed Trinity in that same space, it was oddly pleasing to reach up on the third floor of the current spatial arrangement, and touch those finials and brackets.

My very strongest sense is that myriad young eyes, and a few adults, had looked at those upper ornaments during church services and thought “I will never actually touch that, but it appears so familiar to me.” And with that thought, I could reach out and touch them.

These were the hints and signposts of heaven, the home of the saints, the pointers to All Hallows for many people over many years.

In the illustrations by Phiz in the Dickens original for “David Copperfield,” and with color and more perspective reading the “Classics Illustrated” comic version, I’ve always had a picture of Peggotty’s cottage, where the ship’s braces and struts are just overhead, within reach. I suspect part of my great love of the movie “Local Hero” is due to the key appearance of a Peggotty-type residence near the conclusion of the story.

Something solid and real and mundane, but just out of everyday reach, visible but almost unapproachable, except by extraordinary means, maybe a little extra assistance not our own. That’s what it means to reach up to heaven, to join the saints in glory.

The eve of All Saints, All Hallows, is of course the night before Nov. 1, that feast day; October 31 is All Hallows’ Eve. Thursday is “Beggar’s Night” in most central Ohio communities, leaving Friday in a bit of limbo.

But Nov. 1 is called, on a liturgically oriented calendar, All Saints’ Day, backstopped by Nov. 2, All Souls’, when everyone from humble Barkis to hopeful Micawber to striving Trotwood Copperfield himself is lifted up as a member of the honored dead, those who have gone before yet still cling closely to us.

Except they’re fictional. Yet their example is as real to me as the long torn down, demolished, vanished roof timbers of my childhood church that I will now never touch. I touch someone else’s reverie on First Street, in the 1834 church building there. And with the saints, I enter the blessed realm through the merit of others’ works, earning nothing on my own but graced and gifted by the generous offering of others.

And we can give one another the gift of a thoughtful and well-considered vote on Tuesday!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a haunted tale at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Chess geeks, unite!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXM3wrIhcwY

Oh, you know you have to see it . . .

Faith Works 10-18-08
Jeff Gill

Take a Hike

October 4 was the “feast day” or commemoration of Saint Francis of Assisi, who brought an appreciation of nature and animals back into the heart of Christian faith and imagery.

Give Francis credit for those sheep and ox and donkeys that are so prominent in our coming Christmas celebrations and decorations; they’re in the Bible, but had been dropped from our iconography until Francis led them back into the heart of the stable where they belong.

The outdoor tradition of that rustic saint has led to his religious community, the Franciscans (the friars and monks who still wear a simple brown robe and a belt made of rope), keeping up the practice of “prayer walking,” praying and focusing on God through the rhythm of step and pace and slow, steady progress.

The tradition of walking meditation can be found today in Dominican houses, Franciscan monasteries and retreat centers of all sorts today; Methodist “Emmaus walks” and Orthodox Easter processions round and round the churchyard, even an interfaith expression with Buddhist meditation teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, with a book and DVD on “Walking Meditation.”

So when Church World Service’s multi-denominational work invites churches to join in a “CROP Walk,” they’re not only raising funds to fight hunger, but giving you a chance to practice a form of prayer and devotion that has a long and broad tradition perfect for this beautiful season of the year.

The central Licking County CROP Walk starts after 1:00 pm and an opening prayer and registration at OSU-N, walking along the bike path to the YMCA and back. Other communities, such as Granville and Buckeye Lake, will have their own walks at the same time. Pledge envelopes are available at many area churches, or you can bring and/or make your own donation that day and just join in the procession.

CWS does work around the world in the name of dozens of Protestant denominations, and works closely with other denominational relief and development bodies in the “Third World” or Global South, while a major percentage of the dollars raised by a CROP Walk stay for hunger relief efforts right here in Licking County. The Licking County Food Pantry Network is a major participant in this program each fall.

Walking as a tool for sustaining and deepening prayer may be just the approach your prayer life needs, and a CROP Walk may be the place to get it started. The distractions even in a quiet home can be multiple, and most who struggle with keeping a prayer practice talk about their challenges to keep in a prayerful state for an extended period, or just maintaining focus.

A prayer walk can address all of that: you have the progress of the walk as your indication of where you’re at, and that you aren’t done; you can steadily increase the length of the walk to bump up the time spent in prayer; there may be less distraction in your mind when your body is needing to keep up the thump-thump-thump of walking steadily along.

If you’re just looking for a beautiful environment and less people right around you to try a prayer walk, the Octagon State Memorial, also known as the grounds of Moundbuilders Country Club, is having an open house from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. The Ohio Historical Society will have formal tours leaving regularly and children’s activities and such, but the over a hundred acres that enfold the majestic 2,000 year old mounds are filled with fall color and are a wonderful site for a prayer walk.

Did Native Americans two millennia ago have prayer walking? I can’t imagine that they didn’t!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a prayer practice that works for you at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack -- Granville Sentinel 10-23-08
Jeff Gill

Is Granville Haunted?

What a rich and beautiful season, if you’re watching the hillsides and treeline instead of the financial and news channels.

Pumpkin patches like Devine Farms down Rt. 37 (turn left at US 40 for the Devine’s, or right a bit further to Pigeon Roost Farm) are a riot of orange and yellow and many shades of brown. Summer spoils us with green, and we brace ourselves for the whites and greys of winter, but the rich palette of autumn deserves some close attention.

You have to look fast, because of the shortness of the season, and with night falling ever sooner (and look past the political signs with their own unique color schemes). But even the nature of the darkness has a special fall quality, with mists in the early morning and still a wisp of hanging smoke some evenings.

It’s just warm enough to let a few more grills to fire up for dinner, and a fire pit or chiminea is especially welcome for a group to huddle around when the cold knife of an October night slices the sunset away.

As a general rule, I don’t tell ghost stories. We have plenty of practitioners of that art, starting at certain inns with great skill, and being told alongside the stray bonfire or camping lantern by us amateurs.

Granville is haunted, though. Make no mistake about it. I actually am quite skeptical of ghosts and hauntings and poltergeist tales; the Bible has a couple of ghosts in the Old Testament, but they seem to be more dream figures and guilty consciences than apparitions of the sort featured in your usual ghost story.

Haunted is another story. Haunted is a state of mind, and an openness to evocations that help to make us sense, more directly, of the reality of lived experience not our own. A moment that may be long past, but still moving through and past our lives today.

Passing the Four Corners, with a “ghost” of a high conical mound in the center of the original street plan, a point from which the very visible grid we now drive was platted; a block north, where “The Drag” curves up College Hill, there was set into that alcove where a stone panel now faces south, once a building, a market and school and structure whose keystone stares at you in the basement of the Granville Historical Society. It may sit in darkness most days on the floor there, but I see the sun-face gazing back contentedly, above the spot where Denison’s open book now looks blankly down Main.

East of the village, where new and comfortable homes now spread past Bryn Du, I walk often through an intersection where the first European settlers here, a young Welsh couple, spent a winter, survived a year, and then Lilly Jones died a few weeks after giving birth. Some evenings, you can almost hear the low cry of a baby, and the muffled sobs of a strong man brought low by frontier life, punctuated by the impact of a spade into cold earth, now simply still-green lawns.

Heading back towards the village, past the Great Lawn, over ground well populated two millennia ago, with the rustle of fallen leaves turning into the shuffle and stomp of moccasined feet, a chant blending into gospel cadences softly sung by escaping slaves not two centuries back.

The historic center of the village spreads out before you as Mount Parnassus, spirits of the Greek Muses hovering over the very name, recedes to your left, and John Chapman walks past you, padding along barefoot and long-limbed, invisibly returning to the forest where Mr. Appleseed is most comfortable, even if he did sleep in the stable basement of the Buxton Inn on harsh wintry nights. The sidewalk past the Granville Inn, with the remnant of one of our many vanished colleges now just the back wing, was once the favored stroll for courting Victorian era students. Kept male and female on their respective ends of Broadway, healthful walking, at least, was never discouraged, so this very promenade was where those young passions found their object and focus . . . who courted and proposed and plighted their troth in front of a tree shaded lawn where now couples marry under vast white tents, right into October.

Is Granville haunted? I should think so. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a haunted tale at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 10-11-08
Jeff Gill

Sing, Shout, Celebrate, Support

Ephesians 5.19 reminds us of the role “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” have in Christian communities, from the earliest days of the church.

Spiritual songs may have been an assortment of things in the earliest days of the Christian church, but the musical label “spirituals” is the unique blend of African traditional forms carried to this continent by the unwilling immigrants aboard slave ships, mixed with the Scots-Irish traditional music of congregational singing in the southern highlands.

While early urban and cultured American worship still hewed close to the classical forms of the Old World, the participatory art form of congregational singing, encouraged by traditions out of Welsh singing and northern European Pietist practices, helped to bring about the art form that we now call “Gospel music.”

Gospel music is a wide river with many tributaries, flowing down out of the highlands and down through verdant swamps, coming together into a Big Muddy of gospel music rolling power, drawing so many sources into a single deep expression.

Gospel can have a country sound among white folk, a distinctly African form with rural black hymn singing, and all these streams converge in the roots of blues and jazz and rock and roll, but the idea and ideal of “Gospel music” endures for all races and ethnicities in this country.

So if you go to a Gospel music concert, you may hear what you expected, or you may hear something more; you are almost certain to hear music that takes you beyond your expectations.

The Licking County Coalition of Care, a co-operative outreach ministry of 43 Christian congregations in this county (43 and counting!), has put together a Gospel Celebration for Sunday, November 2nd, at 4:00 pm in Newark’s Midland Theatre. You can click to www.midlandtheatre.org for ticket information, if you go to “tickets” and look under “Gospel Celebration” for Nov. 2.

They’ve got Vintage Voices, Christian Apostolic Church’s Sanctuary Choir, a quartet from First United Methodist Church in Newark, the choir from Shiloh Baptist Church, the Granville High School Chamber Singers, and even more groups scheduled to sing between 4 and 6 p.m.

Churches that purchase a block of 20 seats can get that chunk of theatre for $15.50 apiece, but you’ll be buying individual seats the “day of” for $17. So check www.midlandtheatre.org or call 345-LIVE. You can buy single tickets for that amount on Nov. 2, but why not buy a block of 20 seats now, and gather up the faithful to come and fill them?

It won’t surprise anyone to hear that in the last few weeks, this faith-based group has heard from an average of over 100 families a month, people needing support for their efforts to keep the lights on and stay under a roof. The Coalition of Care has tried in their first couple years of existence to meet and pray with families asking for aid, spending an hour and a half in follow-up conversation with households that average 4.3 persons per home.

“Putting God’s love into action” is the emphasis this community group keeps as their priority; The Coalition of Care works to maintain an ongoing level of conversation and communication with those they assist, using funds offered by local congregations through the co-ordination of the Coalition of Care.

You can learn more about their mission and plans at www.coalitionofcare.com, or call 670-9700. But right now, they need people and particularly churches to buy up blocks of seats immediately (20 seats @ $15.50 each, vs. $17 per otherwise), and then make sure to fill those 20 or more seats with church members and friends – put people in those seats who need not only a little spiritual boost from listening to the superlative singing of spirituals, but also the chance to get excited about the coalitions and collaborations that mark Licking County charitable outreach.

And your columnist has been invited to participate, not as a singer – it’s safe to come listen, then – but as your Master of Ceremonies. Wa-hooo! I hope to meet many of you on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 2, for a marvelous afternoon of Gospel music in all the forms that wonderful art can take, from 4:00 pm forward. I suspect that the wrap-up will give us all a chance to sing along a bit, and between the economy and the election, we could all use a little singing together.

“Joyful Voices, Helping Hands” – watch for the posters and flyers, and come join us that afternoon. I’ll be the one singing just a little bit off-key, off to one side!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s looking forward to preaching at St. Paul Lutheran tomorrow where we’ll “recall” the old Trinity Episcopal building that’s been in the news lately. Tell him a tale of history at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 10-4-08
Jeff Gill

Uh-oh, They’re Talking About It Again
__

Fall is usually the season for financial campaigns in local faith communities, sometimes called a “stewardship emphasis” or “pledge drive” or almost anything but fund raising.

The awkward fact is that avoiding the term “fund raising” makes sense, because the problem is less that there needs to be an annual emphasis on giving from participants, than that these matters should be discussed year ‘round, but rarely are.

Once a year is better than never, though. One time a year is sometimes as often as church leadership’s nerves can take the strain of talking out loud about one of the few no-go-zones left in a culture where sexual habits and personal failings are the stuff of reality tv and coffee shop unembarrassed conversation, but wallets and income and spending are kept in secret.

Check out Mark 4:22 on that.

Here’s what is important for religious people in general, Christians in particular, and potentially of benefit to anyone about the practice and discipline of stewardship. Stewardship, or care for what we’ve been given, is not just what you call the little tablet of envelopes you get when you join.

The Lovely Wife and I have had a practice since the beginning of our marriage. We have a budget, based on projected income. That budget starts with giving 10%, saving 10%, and then we look at what’s left.

What’s left is shaped by the fact that almost 30% of our “gross income” goes to taxes, the good and worthwhile work of larger institutions, and a bit of waste here and there (yes, some, but that’s not our topic today). When our household adds up income and payroll taxes, my self-employed quarterly estimated to SocSec and various local taxing bodies, our property taxes, and the chunk of spending that goes to sales tax, just under 30% of our income goes to local, school, county, state, and federal taxes.

Since most years we actually put more than 10% in savings, that means, if you’ve been doing the math, that we live on less than half, under 50% of what we earn. My point is not that we’re dreadfully frugal (we are, but not so terribly), but the order you figure this out in, and the fact that the last thing this method takes you to is how much you can spend on whatever.

The budget, with that 48 or 49% we’re looking at in the final stages, has to list house payment and utilities and groceries and some clothes and such, the Little Guy’s amusements, and . . . there’s usually some amusements left for us, mainly aimed at a vacation trip or two.

If you start with that, and work backwards to how much you can “afford” to give, I can pretty much guarantee you the number will be 1 to 2%, tops. Given that our national savings rate is effectively in negative numbers these last few years (the hidden engine of our current economic mess), unless you give to your church on your credit card, it won’t be there.

So starting with what you give isn’t about how much more your church needs the money than you do. It’s about how much you need to look at your income more as gift and opportunity and responsibility than as “what I earned,” which is why I know most folks would flip out at the idea of living on less than half of “my income.”

A gift you can give yourself is to stop seeing it as “my income,” and seeing yourself as a steward of what comes into and through your household at any given time. I’m willing to bet most of my readers aren’t paid what they ought to get, and who of us says “no, I haven’t earned it” to a raise? Pay is rarely equal to value, or daycare workers and kindergarten teachers and OB/GYN nurses would make more than anyone.

Start with giving, which says to God and your own heart and anyone else paying attention (like the children in your family who don’t miss a thing), “this is just what I get to manage for a season.” Prioritize some savings, which says to a future you and yours “I know that me, right now, isn’t all there is.” Write down your fixed costs, and make sure to account for taxes, because sooner or later you’re gonna pay ‘em.

And have fun with the rest; if you do those other things first, I’m not really all that worried with the choices you’ll make with what remains. For many of us, there’s not much trouble we could get into with that amount, anyhow!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he likes Dave Ramsey, but he’s no financial adviser. Tell him where you find fiscal wisdom at knapsack77@gmail.com.

What a President should be reading (1903 edition)

http://books.google.com/books?id=KPMEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA265&lpg=PA265&dq=theodore+roosevelt+nicholas+murray+butler+november+4+1903&source=web&ots=tABgmNj7Ox&sig=XWaObhC6DDCzn1seH2AYb4xLKsw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA267,M1

Market explosion, fueled by mortgage gasoline . . .

Here's the fuse being lit in 1999 -- http://tiny.cc/T6Jz1

Read it, and see how obvious it all is now.

Faith Works 9-27-08
Jeff Gill

Watching The Sun Set, Reflecting Light Into Darkness
__

We celebrated our friend Don’s life, in a sanctuary lit from the west, not the east.

The sun was going down, with the golds and reds in the stained glass casting an unusual glow across the crowded pews, filled with smiling, crying people.

After the service was over, we rolled down off of the hill where Thornville perches, a view northwest over an arm of Buckeye Lake starting to fill with a faint haze below, and just enough scudding cloud above to give the sky some depth and texture.

We were crossing Don’s mission field, laboring up towards the Jacksontown ridge, where browning treelines caught an extra russet hue to our east, and then passing under I-70, we started seeing glimpses to our left of the wide, open valley where the South Fork bends from Hebron towards Heath.

Old historic State Route 13 crossed the even more historic White Chapel Road, dipping through Hog Run where some of our earliest county history was set down in parchment deeds and sandstone grave markers.

Up the other side, and across Dorsey Mill Road, with an ancient Adena burial mound of Native American cultures two millennia ago and more in the backyard of a much newer home; a mound which is also the first recorded “archaeological dig” in Licking County back before the Civil War.

A few of the fallen from that war, and more foreign conflicts in decades since are laid to rest in Mount Calvary Cemetery, glanced at quickly as we snake right and left and down off Radio Heights, Jenkins Knob, or whatever you call the sudden and brief view of Newark’s courthouse ahead and the invisible (from above) border with Heath, before you come to the corner of Linnville Road, National Drive (the old Plank Road), and Hopewell Drive.

We turn left, crossing the South Fork eagerly surging towards a meeting with Raccoon Creek to our right, and wend our way to the busy corner with Rt. 79. Business aplenty to the left and the right, with the darkening stillness of the Great Circle straight ahead, trees multiple centuries old having survived the windstorms, while a couple did not, and lay fading on the grass.

Down into the trench between the Wehrle factories on Union Street and Modern Welding off of Williams, then bursting out into the sky, leaping Raccoon Creek next to White’s Field (where the ghosts of Babe Ruth and decades of Friday & Saturday night heroes play), arcs lifting left and right with solid earth beneath but oh so much sky overhead.

If you are heading south, or a quick and familiar eye in your rearview if you’re branching east or west going northbound, you see the treelined curb of Blue Jay Heights southeast of downtown Newark, where the united waters of the North Fork and that of the South and Raccoon branches are urged on to the east, the darkening east which is the destination of the single Licking River, exiting the mysterious channel of Black Hand Gorge on towards the Muskingum Valley.

We head on west, where the light is not even fading anymore, but dimming, and the first stars – really planets – are popping above along the ecliptic’s curve. Rt. 16 skirts the first outcroppings of the Welsh Hills as we head for home.

Truly, we live in the Land of Legend. The thing about that is that many, most of those legends are true stories. Mary Harris and Christopher Gist, Catharine Stadden and John Chapman, Chaplain Jones and Theophilus Rees, Jonathan and Margaret Benjamin, Israel Dille and Victoria Claflin Woodhull.

The list goes on, and our friend Don is now one of them, a legend whose story inspires; but the creativity is in how he lived his life, not in how his life was written. Most of the details are not terribly literary or dramatic, but how he lit up a gathering, even as the sun set, is the glowing heart of the story we’re not done telling.

Don, of course, would want me to say that his was a reflected light; like the moon that rose as I meditated on this Land of Legend we call home, that clear pure light is reflected from the sun, and what Don shone into lives around him was what he picked up and reflected from the Son, his savior, Jesus the Christ.

Rest in peace, Don, until all the legends of this land are raised up and seen in the clear light of truth, at the last telling of all tales.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a legend you know at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-25-08
Jeff Gill

Where the Foundations Are

It was likely after watching a Chicago Cubs game on WGN, the snowier channel on UHF (kids, ask grandpa what that is), that I was down in the basement getting my hair cut by mom.

At one point, there in the unfinished part of the basement, that I was looking up at the joists and stringers and ductwork branching off of the furnace, and suddenly realized – our house was not solid.

My home was a structure, a framework like the newer houses down the street going up as I watched after school, with two by eights and two by fours and a main support I-beam across the center line. The apparent unity of the exterior was an illusion made of aluminum siding and fascia board and shingles up top, while a balloon frame of lumber and sheathing held up the floors and ceilings, plywood and sheetrock coated with paint and paneling and spackle.

This new realization helped me figure out how to hide stuff in switch plates and under vents that lifted quietly away from the floor, where you could reach down into the ducts beyond what was visible. Comic books you wanted safe from little brothers, or money and trading cards you wanted safely out of sight could go behind those vents.

I never forgot, though, the real shock of seeing clearly that a house, or any building, was really the sum of parts more than it was a whole.

Years later I was involved in laying block atop footers, mixing mortar and finding out the obvious, that most homes are not built on bedrock or stone of any sort, but actually float atop soil on the pontoons of the foundation. The lowest level of most structures is not anchored in an irrevocable way to solid stuff, but moored, if you will. A foundation is as much a boat as it is roots, and the heave and sag of seasons and eras is taken into account as most substructures are planned.

Then I worked on archaeological digs, and found that soil is, if anything, even more fluid than I realized. Slopes migrate and new layers slowly build up, so that any stratigraphy is not an irrevocable record of immutable time, but is a slippery and suspect document in its own right. Delve into the geology behind the soils, and you start to catch a glimpse of glaciers plaining continents, and continents playing bumper cars with one another, sliding first against one land mass and then another.

So to find that the wisdom of Wall Street is actually a body of suspect conventional wisdom mixed with fragile trust, a confidence that can evaporate in a single trading day, is not so surprising. If a building is a collection of parts that work together, and the earth itself not immutable, but constantly changing, then the stock market may well be something less than bedrock itself.

Can the earth move? Ask a Californian. Do buildings collapse? Ask a firefighter; faster than you might think, and even when it looks stable from the outside. Do markets always self-correct? Check your mutual fund.

Somehow, the wisdom of markets needs to be tempered by human hearts, but those hearts need wit alongside of compassion. Myriad minds buying and selling have an economy of common sense that is hard to replicate in any one thinker or decider, but in unusual times a single thought may need to have a place to stand and be heard.

Clearly, one of the themes of the national election and state policies here in Ohio is who knows the right balance between decisive compassion and generalized calculation. The short-term caring choice could actually hurt more in the no-so-long run, but “help me now” always carries its own logic.

As does “I’ll help you, right now.” Is there help that isn’t worth the taking, because of the price on down the road costing more than the crisis at hand? That’s the choice we’re all working on right now.

Sept. 30th is the deadline for registering to vote in the Nov. 4th election!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s been a Cubs fan since his birth in Chicagoland a year or two ago (but not longer ago than their last World Series appearance). Give him your thoughts on impermanence at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-20-08
Jeff Gill

Rock Of Ages, Rolling Thru Generations

One of the many benefits of living in Licking County is that we have so many opportunities to hear live music performed, often by people who live right down the street from us.

All day down in Hebron next Saturday is their “Music & Arts Festival,” with high school bands at Hebron Elementary from noon, a “Battle of the Bands” on High Street from noon next to the car show along the National Road; country, bluegrass, and gospel over at Canal Park from noon as well, all culminating with McGuffey Lane at Main and High for 6 pm. (Details at www.hebronmusicandartsfestival.com, thanks to the Hebron Business Association, the Greater Buckeye Lake Chamber of Commerce, and the county Convention and Visitors Bureau.)

Over in Granville today on Broadway the Hot Licks Bluesfest (http://hotlicks.spruz.net) starts at 12:30 and runs to their final act, The James Cotton Band at 8:30 pm. The Granville Federation for the Appreciation of the Blues raises thousands of dollars for Licking County charities like Big Brothers, Big Sisters or the Licking County Coalition for Housing, all through custom t-shirt sales and some really good eating.

There will be good crowds turned out for both of these events, as there was for the big Dawes Arboretum concert Labor Day weekend. Live music pulls in ears and minds and hearts, and pulls people together.

You should know, if you’re not aware of it already, that thousands upon thousands of Licking County residents turn out to share together in the joy of live, participatory music every Sunday morning. They don’t call it a concert, or a show, they call it worship and praise and even prayer itself.

Many don’t realize that quite a few of the musicians playing so well on stages and in clubs and late into the night on Saturday are getting up and anchoring a praise team or choir or sitting at a console on Sunday. They lead worship bands or play the organ or just lead congregational singing (a harder craft than almost anyone realizes who hasn’t done it).

Live music has long been a core element in worship, alongside of preaching and printed bulletins. Some just think of it as background noise, keeping the odd interruption from the outside away from the quiet ambiance of the sanctuary.

What music has become for many congregations, especially new church starts, is the core defining characteristic of their approach to faith and worship. If you are more of a piano and organ kind of worshiper, that implies many other elements of what kind of church you’re likely to be, while a drum set on the platform says volumes to many, let alone a stack of Peavey speakers.

Sunday afternoon at 3 pm St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Granville will have a piano and organ recital, dedicating a new piano and offering their powerful Casavant pipe organ with selections from Bach to Widor. Marcia Brannon and Julia Parker will present a concert that is free and open to the public as the dedication service for their new concert piano.

Is that a worship service? No, it’s yet another free concert with live music in Licking County, but all of these opportunities and venues speak to a connection between faith and music that is essential for many of us.

Can you worship God without music, in utter silence? Sure. But can you imagine worship without words, but music only? Can you imagine worship with music that isn’t your own preferred style? Can you imagine worship in any music style at all, or is it only fit and proper in some?

These are vital questions, and ones congregational and worship leaders wrestle with every week. You might want to think about them as you attend one, or two, or even three and more different chances to enjoy the music that lifts your spirit this weekend.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; sing him a song at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Happy Constitution Day!

Sen. Robert Byrd and i agree on very little, except on this day, and its significance.

July 4th is not only the wrong day to celebrate the Declaration of Independence (you could go with July 2 or 8 just as accurately, first reading and vote on 2nd, most signed it on the 8th), but as for the day we began to be the country that we are, we have been, and that we might just yet fulfill, Sept. 17 is THE day -- the day the Constitution was officially voted into existence under the preamble: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Modern historiography tends to focus on the compromises and the shortcomings, which are many in the document (the 3/5th compromise the most egregious of them all, putting a lesser work on some humans while still leaving them in bondage even as you gave their owners votes based on their bleeding backs). What Catherine Drinker Bowen called it in her still readable account, now almost 50 years old itself, is a "Miracle at Philadelphia."

They gathered to tweak the Articles of Confederation, which were nearly unworkable from 1776 over the next ten years. Unlike the blazing talent of a Thomas Jefferson writing the whole, the group process -- with leadership like Benjamin Franklin and James Madison and Edmund Randolph and Governeur Morris, to be sure -- created a remarkable document that has just enough flexibility to work without being so rigid as to require constant adjustment.

The European Union tried to write themselves a constitution starting in 2004, and they came up with an unreadable volume that to date has not been ratified (they're starting over after a "period of reflection."). The length and comprehensiveness of the EU draft constitution is a big part of why they can't get it passed; our Constitution, for all its flaws, can be read in just a few minutes by anyone.

Why don't you read it today yourself? Or you can listen to it by clicking the buttons on the sections -- either way, at this link:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States_of_America

If you are a teacher or educator of any sort, here's a slew of links at the Library of Congress for getting into the many fascinating details of this truly Founding Document:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Constitution.html