Notes From My Knapsack 6-23-16

Notes From My Knapsack 6-23-16

Jeff Gill

 

Waiting for a light to change, or go on...

___

 

What did you learn from your experience?

 

That question kept coming up in the wake of my column about spending a month following the speed limit. To briefly recap, I spent the month of May trying my level best to observe the posted speed limit wherever I went. 55 out on the highway to Newark, 70 on into Columbus, 35 on the main drags and 25 or even 20 where applicable.

 

And I got honked at. A lot.

 

Not complaining, just saying.

 

I will freely admit it was an experiment, and it's over, and I'm not doing quite the same thing anymore. We all learn, even from driver's ed teachers, that there's basically a "cushion" out there, and unless there's a "Strictly Enforced" sign attached below the speed limit placard, or allowing for weather or other special conditions, you're not going to get a ticket for going 59 miles an hour in a 55 zone, and so on. How much of a cushion you think the Flying Tire Salesmen or local constabulary allow is up to you to estimate.

 

But what did I learn? A good question. Did I learn I generally drive too fast? That's the kind of answer you're supposed to reply with. But I didn't, and still don't think so.

 

Less congenially, I will say that you all drive too darn fast. You just do. Maybe not you, but it sure seems like it's most of you. Not to go all Andy Rooney on y'all, but this experiment made it even more apparent that turn signal usage is at a minimum, getting passed on Newark-Granville Road is not as unusual as it should be (yes, on double-lines, too), and the general impatience, agitation, and near-insistence that getting somewhere faster is a constitutional right leaves me as depressed as a Republican after listening to a Trump speech.

 

For the most part, we all just need to ease up, share the road, and calm down. A lot.

 

What I worry will sound contradictory is that the other thing I learned is that following speed limits strictly is a real pain in the tookus. I was constantly trying to figure out exactly what it was in any given stretch, and I'm almost of a mind to say there needs to be some attention given to rationalization of speed limit postings.

 

It jumps up, then backs down again, and suddenly pops up. Having the experience I do in village governance, I have a sneaking suspicion that not a few of these changes in posted speed limits have to do with who in that area has been able to make a loud enough fuss for long enough to get a change made.

 

It could also be the case that, to simplify things, more speed limits should be made lower. And I might still need to slow down myself. My experiment showed me over and over again that people who jerked forward, honked, passed, swerved around to my right at intersections where I didn't turn on red fast enough, et cetera et cetera . . . they generally were just getting out of their car as I pulled in next to them at the same destination, smiled at them, and walked in seconds behind the one in a hurry. Some of you know who you are.

 

It's just a good time this summer for us all to try it. Slow down.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's usually in a hurry, but tries not to rush whenever he can. Tell him your high-speed troubles at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-11-16

Faith Works 6-11-16

Jeff Gill

 

Water will out, always

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You can eyeball a stretch of floor or pavement or lawn, and say it's flat. You can put a carpenter's level down on one stretch, but it only indicates for where it sits. If you really want to know if everything is really on the level, pour out a bucket of water.

 

A yard alongside a house might look straight across, or a landscaper might even up the terrain, but the reality is that sooner or later, rain or even heavy dew, let alone gutter runoff or buckets dumped from washing the car, will tell you where the slope is.

 

It all goes somewhere.

 

Up at camp, there was rain the first night, and someone tried to dig some drainage ditches to dry out the road past Franklin Lodge, soaking the back of the circle where the Cub dens stand. It all goes somewhere.

 

Our church's Mission Team likes to re-tell the story of a mucking-out they did on a half-ruined house, shoveling buckets full of mud out of the basement, passing them along to the head of the stairs, and passing them along to the level stretch alongside the home . . . or so it seemed.

 

After a while the crew wondered why they didn't seem to be getting ahead in digging out the mud, and looked around to find a window well in the back that had a slow but steady trickle of liquid mud dripping steadily down into the basement. They went out to see where it came from, and traced a grand arc of muck from the window well around the side yard and up to where the crew was dumping the buckets.

 

It all goes somewhere.

 

Water will out. It finds its level and an outlet, filling up an area until it can start overtopping somewhere and flowing out and down.

 

Look at interesting geology or landforms more generally, and there's a story of how water will out behind almost any terrain. Work on landscaping, and you find yourself thinking like water, trying to determine where it will go, and learning that you have to work with it, giving it a place and a path. You may try to impound it or hold it in reserve, a reservoir, but even then you have to allow for overflow, passage through.

 

It all goes somewhere, and water will out. We can't treat it as an intruder or unwelcome guest, because we need it. Dry out the lawn too much and you have to end up watering it; raise up your beds for gardening, but then you're working out how to keep the crops from getting parched.

 

Most of our house architecture, most of human architecture when you get right down to it, has to do with taking the local materials at hand, and building up walls and stretching out roofs while making allowance for the inevitability of water. Rain, dawn damps, snow as the frozen form of it, water trickling here and there but always seeking a path down. The Seventies were cruel to churches and schools as architects overestimated their materials and underestimated water (Frank Llyod Wright could sit in Arizona and dismiss guttering, but even adobe has to take rain into account, sooner or later). Flat roof construction is, to most ministers, a hole into which churches pour money year after year.

 

Even so, a steep pitch and good drains can't keep water from sometimes backing up and working down through the shingles or roofing, drip by drop by trickle. Inside architecture has to bow to the needs of water management as well, in repairs if not in allowance.

 

Water will out, because it is a quiet and inexorable force that will go on through, no matter what we try to do to stop it. It's like time, in a way. Despite your best efforts, you can't stop it from having an impact. As is well-known, water can wear away stone just in a very slow drip; it also can pull down ceilings and undermine walls and bring down hillsides if it's of a mind to. It all goes somewhere.

 

Water is a source, some say *the* source of life; you can drown in it, and it can destroy, but without it at all you have desolation and dryness. That's why, I think, we read in the Bible so often of God as giver of springs, source of rivers; in the Psalms again and again, and in Isaiah 43:19 the prophet tell us that God says – "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."

 

Water, and God, will out.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him what metaphors of the spirit and the divine catch your attention at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 6-9-16

Notes From My Knapsack 6-9-16

Jeff Gill

 

Different pace, different drummer?

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So I spent a big hunk of last month getting honked at.

 

Not in a good way.

 

To explain, I have to go back to the end of April. I was coming back into the village, heading west down the hill on Newark-Granville Road, slowing to pass the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses where not infrequently a Granville police cruiser is sitting, passing the time as it were.

 

So I know where I was, as the hill leveled off, and I know my speed, because I checked, having made an involuntary contribution to village coffers at that spot a few years ago. I was over the speed limit by a good five miles per hour . . . and was passed, at a fair clip, by a vehicle whipping around to my left and zooming on ahead past Welsh Hills School (20 mph when children are present).

 

Of course, there was no cruiser present that day. I shook my head at the blazing impatience of the passing car, already long ahead of me, and kept on my way. At the Cherry Valley Road intersection, a found myself behind my high-speed acquaintance, who was stuck as we often are behind someone trying to turn left, waiting in the face of a stream of oncoming traffic. Such is life.

 

When we all were released, the parade rolled at a more stately pace into Granville proper, and we both veered off at College St. at the foot of Mount Parnassus, and I couldn't resist. The distinctive vehicle in front of me didn't have much farther to go, and turned into a driveway. I pulled in immediately behind, and pulled out a pen and paper and started writing down the license plate number.

 

The driver got out, glanced back quizzically at me, then walked to my window, pointing at my pen and paper. I rolled it down, and said as cheerfully as I could "You know, passing inside village limits, on a double line, at 50 mph or more, just strikes me as a bad idea." The intrepid motorist looked on aghast as I reversed, backed into the street, and went on my way. I can only hope for some anxious thoughts over the next few hours or so, since I threw the note away not long after, doubting that such a citizen's report would do either of us any good: I was going for the look of horror, and got it, and hope the lesson was useful.

 

It was to me. It got me thinking about impatience, and impetuousness, and speed, and I tried an experiment. I spent the next thirty days doing my level best to drive the posted speed limit wherever I went.

 

Yes, that's right: 54 or 55 on the expressway so-called, and only 70 or even 69 when going on west along our new superhighway. There, I just got odd stares from people passing me, which pretty much everyone but farm equipment did.

 

It was in Granville and Newark I got the honking. And lots of it. If you stop thinking about the infamous "10 mph cushion" that even driver's ed teachers tell us about, and actually follow the driving instructions as posted, you are stuck trying to keep up with changes (25, 35, 45 mph within a single mile sometimes), and I for one was struck by the fact that I was either always having cars – or trucks, oh those pickup trucks – right up against my rear bumper, or passing me wherever they could and even when they really, reasonably could not. But they did anyhow.

 

What's the message here? Well, on one hand, I think there's a saturation point on speed limit guidance that's going to take some study and attention. Too much monkeying around just makes people ignore what's posted, so there's that. The counterpart question is simply: what's the hurry? Really, why are so many so quick to leap around at turns on intersections, pushing and flashing along residential streets, and honking at cars going the speed limit?

 

In any case, my thought to Granville and environs: ease up. Slow down, even. Take it easy. And no, I'm not sticking to the speed limits anymore, but I'm not zooming past them as quickly, either.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's usually in a hurry, but tries not to rush whenever he can. Tell him your high-speed troubles at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-4-16

Faith Works 6-4-16

Jeff Gill

 

Finding a way to worship on the road

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To worship is to gather with others who share your hopes, your vision, your relationship with the divine, and to give thanks.

 

That thankfulness can be shown in song, in prayer, or in communion and offering, but it is best shared in community.

 

You can say a silent thank you to God, to the world, to the cosmos, but alone and on your own you're simply less likely to. Together, we are more truly, more deeply, more consistently thankful. So we gather together, to ask the Lord's blessing.

 

We need to be with others, but do you have to know who they are? Can it be with strangers, relatively speaking?

 

Aside from the usual existential qualification of whether we ever really know each other, whether anyone other than God can truly know us as we are, I'd argue that we can find our thankfulness improved, enhanced when it's practiced among fellow believers with whom you share little else other than your faith.

 

At home, people tend to know, and you can assume they're aware of what you are struggling with, and where you're grateful. And they can make assumptions, the nature of which you're likely to just let slide for the sake of not having to explain yourself.

 

On the road, with new faces and different voices around you, the thanks can be taken out of different places, new corners of your heart and soul. Your appreciation of what you'd earlier neglected can come out, even in words let alone through unfamiliar thoughts, when you're worshiping among newly met friends.

 

Vacation times can also be times for a new understanding of what your religious practice is. If you are away from home, don't try to be away from God. Ask Jacob, ask Ruth, ask Jonah – it doesn't work.

 

Perhaps you'll find a place of worship of your own tradition in a place you're going, and I suspect your church leadership can help you find where that might be if the internet doesn't make it show up quickly enough. Or if you're feeling truly adventurous on your vacation, just drop in somewhere. Again, that internet thing can help with times and addresses and usually even the standard garb . . . but if you're in a tourist area, the faith communities in those places tend to be even more easy-going than most about what to wear.

 

And there are often worship services organized and publicized in national parks with campgrounds, even some state parks; many popular tourism hubs have weekend devotional offerings designed with your particular needs in mind, either through nearby year-round churches doing special services in the summertime, or a program made available right in the heart of the attraction early on a Sunday.

 

The bottom line is that vacation time is no time to take a vacation from giving thanks. Like the whole point of taking time off, you can get a new perspective on your everyday life by living it in a new place, a different schedule, among strangers (as it were).

 

I think I speak for almost all worship leaders when I say we appreciate it when people bring us folders or bulletins or handouts from different faith communities. If you come home and say "hey, we have to change everything to do it like this church does it," then no, not so much, but if you have something to share about how someone else is structuring and sharing their Sunday (or other day) gathering, it can be a glimpse of possibility that wouldn't come into view any other way.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been to church in some pretty strange places. Tell him about your adventures in worship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-28-16

Faith Works 5-28-16

Jeff Gill

 

Memorials Take Many Forms

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On Monday, there are many cemeteries and markers and monuments around which we will gather.

 

Parades will end at plinths and cenotaphs and plazas where plaques and inscriptions will remind us of names and events. There's a certain range of materials, in bronze and marble and granite, that tell us "here stands a memorial." The substance endures, and the words persist in that medium so generations to come will read and see and reflect.

 

Memorials are reasonably part of Memorial Day.

 

Tuesday, May 31, is the next-to-last open house day at the Octagon Earthworks, the October 10 being the only other opportunity in 2016 to walk the entirety of this 135 acre portion of the once four-and-a-half square mile complex of geometric earthworks here in Newark.

 

There's a public area you can visit 365 days of the year off the corner of Newark's 33^rd St. & Parkview, but it's a different experience altogether to walk the vast landscape enclosed within these shapes, a giant octagon and a huge circle (but a bit smaller than the circle at Newark Earthworks, the Ohio History Connection park and preserve just off of Rt. 79 where Heath meets Newark).

 

One of the hypothesized functions of these earthen walls, built some 2,000 years ago to enclose space and guide steps, is that they were part of a path to be walked, a path with a purpose. Certain sights along the way, and acts to perform, would recall for the participant or participants their history, the stories of spiritual realities they believed in, and as is so often the case for any cultural tradition, to remember those who have gone before.

 

The ancestors.

 

Can a walk be a memorial? Actually, today we're re-engaging in what was once a common practice. We honor cancer survivors with a walk, we walk in the autumn to remember those who hunger, we walk to promote health and healthy living in many ways. We usually think of these walks, and runs, as fund-raisers, but if you participate in a few, you pick up on the fact that memory plays a significant part of why so many come together to walk a path, a track, a certain distance.

 

Just a few days ago, our United Way of Licking County executive director, Deb Dingus, completed her 50 day walk "around" Licking County. She covered something like 450-plus miles when all is said and done. Her goal was to help Licking Countians remember each other, in all our geographic and civic and cultural diversity. We may lack a certain amount of ethnic diversity, but there are many different cultures just beneath the surface of what some might call our sameness here. National origins and socio-economic backgrounds that create differences which get in the way of effective communication, events and celebrations that have their uniquenesses in one township versus another, let alone this town versus that village. Deb's goal has been to make us think both about the homeless and the transportation-challenged, but also more widely to remember each other.

 

It has been a sort of memorial walk, if you will.

 

And Deb's walk has made me think about one of my favorite films of the last few years, "The Way." It came out in 2010, a labor of love between Martin Sheen and his son Emilio Estevez. The story is based on a very ancient pilgrimage route, perhaps nearly 2,000 years old, across the top of Spain from the French border to a place in Portugal called Compostela. This pilgrimage of St. James is known as "El camino de Santiago" (the Santiago being a form of the name St. James).

 

The "Camino" is, for most pilgrims who choose to walk it, about 500 miles, and takes six to eight weeks to walk. Are you seeing the same comparison I am? That's right, Deb's #GiveWalkDo50 journey has been about the same distance and challenge of "El Camino." Which is walked most often as a memorial, a remembrance, and a celebration even when it's an attempt to ease a sorrow. (And I cannot commend the movie "The Way" too strongly to help you see how that might be true.)

 

So we might make a short parade to a marker this Memorial Day, or we could find a way or a place where we might step out on a journey, a make a memorial by walking. A long loop, or a distance where someone comes to pick us up and bring us home, but the journey by foot can be a place where memory is honored, where memories are made.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he wishes he'd gotten to walk a few more days with Deb, and hopes to do the Camino someday himself. Tell him about walking and memory in your life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.