Faith Works 10-8-16

Faith Works 10-8-16

Jeff Gill

 

Humanity, Unity, and Diversity

___

 

If I were to hear about an event called "One World: a Celebration Embracing Multicultural Licking County" at the Davis-Shai House on 301 Central Parkway in Heath, I'd make some assumptions right off.

 

One, I have to admit, is that we'd be importing a fair amount of that diversity into the county. But on further reflection, that's simply not true.

 

We may not be as diverse as the nation as a whole, or as ethnically vivid as some places, urban or otherwise, but the Land of Legend has a pretty wide range of cultures and peoples already here.

 

The ancient history of the area, as will be celebrated on Monday at the Octagon Earthworks with tours from 1 pm to 4 pm (33^rd St. & Parkview Rd. off West Main in Newark), includes pilgrimage and multiple traditions gathering in these valleys some 2,000 years ago. Native Americans traded across the continent, bringing objects and we presume to some degree people from as far away as the Gulf Coast to Yellowstone, from the Smokies in North Carolina to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

 

Just as there are 550 "first nations" in the United States today, so then all American Indians weren't just a single homogenous, interchangeable culture. That makes Newark & Heath a place of exchange and understanding from our earliest records.

 

We are, it is true, very much a majority Anglo/Caucasian place, but the African American, Hispanic and Latin American cultures, and a variety of Asian American and other groups from around the world live and are practicing their traditional ways from their homeland to right here . . . and there are indeed still Native American people here (some say they never left!).

 

So for a multicultural celebration at the Davis-Shai House (behind the Heath Walmart shopping center) to happen, it just means in some ways we need to come together, and see each other for who we really are. From 2:00 to 5:00 pm on Sunday afternoon, Christ Lutheran Church in Heath and Trinity A.M.E. Church in downtown Newark will host and a variety of community partners will present programming that will include children's activities, music, crafts, and educational displays & programs along with dance, song, and artistic displays in the building, and much more out around the historic home on the grounds.

 

Storytelling & poetry for all ages is planned, all of which Joy Williams says is "an invitation to celebrate our diversity as a community." The goal of this local group of friends & fellow worshipers is to help Licking County become more aware of the diversity and multiple cultural traditions we already have, strands of connection to distant places, but serving as colorful threads running through the lives of those of us who live here in a place we call home.

 

For thousands of years, humans have crossed this landscape, after the retreat of glaciers first revealing the terrain as we know it today, up to our vast reshaping in building interchanges and ramps and highways to speed up our passage now. What "an invitation to celebrate our diversity as a community" can do for us is to simply slow us down, bring us together, and give us a place to see each other, sing with each other, share food and arts and stories between our different homes and families and practices.

 

To build such a place of unity and diversity might be just as important as any other civic piece of construction we're all so distracted by right now. Come help create that place by dropping by this "open house" for our entire community, free and open to the public Sunday afternoon.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about the cultural diversity you've encountered in this area at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 10-1-16

Faith Works 10-1-16

Jeff Gill

 

A decent end to a difficult conversation

__

 

Talking about decency means, of course, asking about what's indecent, and why.

 

For some of the "Nones" or what are also called "Spiritual But Not Religious" folk (SBNRs), our emphasis in the established church on so-called decency, of language and image and propriety in general, is off-putting. "Why are you so prissy?" That's one of the nicer ways people ask me why my Facebook feed is cluttered with (language alert) parentheticals at the top of posts.

 

Since I'm a congregational minister, a Scout leader, and part of other youth serving organizations, I have everyone from teens to moms to senior citizens on my feed, and many of them are hesitant about social media in large part because of decency. If there's a curse word in the post, I'll think twice or thrice before reposting, and if the obscenity is in the header, I just won't use it generally. Yes, that includes the d-word and the s-word, let alone the f's and m's and so on.

 

And for those who think this kind of circumspection is a boutique interest, a concern only shared by a dwindling few, I'd point out that a big factor behind the whole contemporary Christian music scene, the radio stations playing them, and the recent surge in Christian-themed movies, is less about a national revival of decency per se, than it is a parental and family based reaction against the prevalence of nudity and nearly-so, profanity and swearing, sounds and pictures that communicate sexuality and anger and hostility as forms of casual entertainment.

 

Lots of people are not so squeamish as they are sick of it: enough. I can watch "The Godfather" or even "Pulp Fiction" on occasion, say many, but I'm tired of a steady diet of the harsh, the edgy, the graphic. And that puts lots of people in a mood, even when their theology isn't what's driving them, to enjoy seeing a movie where they don't have to see body parts they don't want to have shoved into their faces, or hear words they'd rather not hear, let alone their children.

 

Count me as part of that number. I know pretty much all the swear words you're likely to think of, have had them said to me, and know quite a few in a couple of other languages if you're interested. I know what consenting adults do in their free time, and am not overly concerned with what folks are turned on by, nor do I want to control or restrict it. I'm just starting to feel like we're all getting a steady diet of entertainment-grade Red Bull and musical Cheetos.

 

So to turn away, or looking for a haven of healthier options (so I claim, anyhow) doesn't mean censorship. But then I turn back to the church, and our life as a congregation. Are we too prudish? Is the effort to clean up our act in worship and in our life together unrealistic?

 

What I'm trying to say is that I understand all too well what some SBNRs are saying when they see church life as a bubble of pretend, and they want to know if we can accept people on their own terms. They wonder if we are turning away from the world so completely that we don't understand it. And they ask: with my tattoos, my piercings, my lapses into profanity in everyday conversation, will I still be accepted by you folks inside the church bubble?

 

I think it's an ongoing dialogue we have to maintain. I also don't think I have to get a tattoo to be welcoming to those who do; I hope I don't have to curse in sermons to reach out with my message to those who believe their lives are a pile of mess.  And part of the tension and confusion in this murky political season is that now even into electoral campaigns we're all being asked to accept coarseness and crudity as the new national normal.

 

Discernment, though, is clearly the calling of the faithful. We are requested by God to look with the eyes of the heart, and see beyond the surface, and I would add to hear and read beyond the cultural conventions we've become accustomed to, and listen to what angry and hurting people are saying. Even in 2016, there's still some challenges out there in congregational life, where we need to remember that we're not a museum of preserved saints, but a hospital for wounded sinners.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been cussed at even in church, and it doesn't leave a mark. Tell him, cleanly we hope, what you think about standards of decency at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-29-16

Notes From My Knapsack 9-29-16

Jeff Gill

 

 

An Interesting Few Weeks Ahead!

___

 

Yes, there's an election season all around us, and oh my, is Ohio a battleground of appearances and advertising and excitement (including our neighbors in Newark with an on-again/off-again Michael Moore program about the campaign). Historical precedents are being cited, smashed, and put back together again in new ways.

 

We've gone in fifty-seven years from the first televised debate and the question of whether or not Nixon should have used make-up (short answer: yes, but he still would have lost) to this month as podium height and spray tanning are part of the civic if not civil discourse.

 

So let's add sex to the volatile mix. Sure, why not? We're looking at the first woman to earn the right to be on the final ballot across the nation for President of these United States, and in Licking County we remember that daughter of Homer, Ohio who first addressed a congressional committee, who first made a plausible run for the presidency (even if she couldn't legally vote for herself, or anyone else), and who is uniquely memorialized in Granville.

 

There near one of only two memorials erected to honor Victoria Woodhull's memory, inside the Robbins Hunter Museum on Thursday, October 6 at 7:00 pm, I will speak on "The Dilemma of Sex: The Free Love Debate Within Victoria Woodhull's Writings." My talk is free to members of the museum, and only $5 for the general public. As candidates get accused of all sorts of things today, so did Victoria Woodhull in 1872. I may not clear up the current election for anyone, but there may be some elements of the contest today that are echoed in that earlier era's debates.

 

I don't think history repeats itself, but as many a sage has observed, it does tend to rhyme.

 

And stepping back into even earlier history, the amazing 2,000 year old Newark Earthworks continue to make progress towards their rightful place on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Sadly, this year the fall open house at the Octagon Earthworks, a 135 acre portion of the once four-and-a-half square mile complex of geometric earthworks in full, will be on a Monday, not on a Sunday afternoon when so many more could visit. On Monday, Oct. 9, from sunrise to sunset, at the corner of 33^rd St. and Parkview Road just off of West Main St. in Newark, you may freely roam the octagonal and connected circular enclosures, and we will have guides available for tours at points through the middle of the day.

 

Monday, Oct. 9 is also a day dwindling in observance, Columbus Day. It didn't become a federal holiday until the 1930s, and was a state observance in a number of places from early in the 1900s, but began to draw attention around the celebrations of the 400^th anniversary of Columbus "discovering" the Americas, in 1892 and along with the Chicago "World's Columbian Exposition."

 

Today, Columbus Day often gets shuffled aside unless you're trying to get your mail or do official business. I think it may be time to repurpose the observance, and call it "Encounter Day." What we realize is important about that event in 1492 was the beginning of an ongoing encounter between the Old World and the New, with tragedy and terror one result, and biological exchange and cultural impacts another. We are still learning (in books like Charles Mann's "1491") about what that encounter has done and is still doing to the world and its peoples: maybe making the second Monday of October a day to reflect constructively on cultural and ecological encounters and how they can be used for mutual benefit.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about stories you'd like to hear more about at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter. 

Faith Works 9-24-16

Faith Works 9-24-16

Jeff Gill

 

Is Decency Ever Graphic?

___

  

There's an old story about Justice Potter Stewart and the Supreme Court trying to come up with a definition of obscenity under "community standards" and he finally said more out of frustration than insight: "I know it when I see it."

 

Some words are pretty generally accepted as profane and, at least once upon a time, not to be said in public. Let alone in church.

 

But as I started to wade into last week here in this space, community standards seem to be changing (again). There's a marching band that wears scarlet and grey, with a certain tagline that I, at least, just can't say from the pulpit. But I've heard folks I think of as quite decent saying in full "TBDBITL" (not just the incomprehensible but immediately recognizable acronym), and yes, in church. Without any overt sense of irony, it's said in what is taken to be a different context.

 

To use such a word as an expletive, rather than an adjective . . . but there's a well-worn preacher's story about a staid and decorous evangelist using an Anglo-Saxon profanity in observing "it's a darn shame that more of you are upset I used a swear word than you are that your friends and neighbors are going to Hell." Except he didn't say darn.

 

Standards are changing, though, and that word I'm feeling constrained to work around in this column is showing up on TV in the long-lost "family hour" and printed on billboards, let alone in print. Am I just being . . . prissy? (Can I use that word?)

 

One of the common complaints about political correctness is that often objections to some insensitive terms are raised in profanity-laced tirades, with the justification that the racist label is more hurtful than monosyllables about human biological functions. To some, that un-distinction makes sense, while others of us just shake our heads.

 

I'm not horrified or offended by swear words or harsh language. I've been on Boy Scout campouts and to Marine Corps basic training, I've helped move dead bodies to the mortician's vehicle and cleaned out abandoned homes, I've been to court and to the jail. I won't say you can't surprise me or make me flinch, because life is funny that way, but it's just not that I want to live in a happy-clappy bubble of pink cotton candy.

 

Yet as I see the coarsening of the culture and the ratcheting down of standards about language in public, in entertainment, in life in general, I can't help but wince. "For the children" is one battle cry for this concern, but I'm more concerned for us all than just for the kids. I think there's a certain set of rules and guidelines and, well, decorum that can ease the unavoidable strains of everyday life. Is it sexist to hold doors? Well, I try to hold them for about anybody; is it ageist to say "sir" let alone "ma'am" if you do it across the age ranges?

 

And yes, when I post on social media, I try to add a "language alert" up top if there's profanity. It just seems appropriate, just as some ask for "trigger warnings" on violent or disturbing content (which basically I just don't post, given my roles in the community).

 

But then I run into some pretty insoluble dilemmas, between a graphic description of life and sorrow and yes, sin, and the proprieties we've tending to think of as necessary in church life. Our church library has a large number of lovely Christian romance novels, and they're quite popular; one author got a little more raw-edged about what happened to his protagonists, and I heard a great deal of dislike for that shift on his part.

 

I've got some books I'd like to put into our church library, for the "equipping of the saints" for the battles we are fighting. "Hillbilly Elegy" by J.D. Vance is one; a marvelous treatment of growing up in a town not at all dissimilar to Newark. But it is rough, and raw, and definitely with profanity throughout. It also reads like what I live as a minister here: should I shelve it? "The Liars' Club" by Mary Karr I think can offer a measure of hope to women who lived through childhoods like her own, and the adult end of her story in "Lit" surely would speak to many Christians: but oh, the content. I recommend it, individually, cautiously.

 

Please bear with me if you would, as I spend one more week on this topic next Saturday. Thank you for the feedback last weekend!

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he still has a tendency to say "sir" and "ma'am" even when people ask him not to, and let's not even talk about holding doors and chairs. Tell him your ingrained habits at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-17-16

Faith Works 9-17-16

Jeff Gill

 

Decency and decorum and faithful living

___

 

My great-aunts, who were a sort of extra uber-grandparents to me and my brothers and sister growing up, had a very precise and certain sense of decorum. Things had to be a certain way, and to not be that way was indecent, "wasn't done."

 

They surely taught me enunciation (as did my mother, who got some of that from them herself), and table manners, and how to behave in public. Not that my parents didn't tend to such things, but the great-aunts lived in and took us to the big city, where the restaurants we visited and the sights we saw were not what we had in Indiana.

 

What those extra pieces of silverware were for, and who stood up when or held which chair for whom: they knew all that and how to tip, too.

 

They were devoted members of churches out of the same religious tradition in which I minister, and while they moved a number of times, they tended to look for congregations of that sort. I probably associate the Disciples of Christ with them more than is strictly accurate, but the truth is that quite a few of us grew up in this denomination surrounded by the spiritual sisters of the great-aunts.

 

Part of what made us a culture and set of social traditions that attached themselves to a Protestant Christian practice of our faith is that we were a frontier tradition, starting in pioneer communities, moving out with the plough and the log cabin, then sprouting in small towns and rural villages, pushing on into county seats, and only lastly emerging or being planted in urban settings.

 

One of the great-aunts' books (they lived together most of their lives, elderly maiden ladies who chose schoolteaching when it required the unmarried state, a rule which changed long after they had any thought of changing their state), I have my own copy of today, as a reminder, and a warning. "Evils of the Cities" by T. De Witt Talmage, D.D. This stern parson (his engraving facing the title page) preached a warning to all the fine folk of the countryside who might themselves, or sadly their children might find their way into the "evils of the cities." Primarily, cities were . . . indecent. Indecency, it seems, is the main reason cities were built in the first place, at least according to this book. Indecency around every corner and through each doorway.

 

Granted, most of the warnings are about East Coast cities, and the book was published in Chicago in 1909; Dr. Talmage served in Brooklyn, which clearly he believed he was keeping a moral and bucolic refuge in the hills beyond New York City proper. Brooklyn was more of a suburb then, the trolleys only just getting there in his era, making the local Trolley-Dodgers a crew worth naming a base-ball club after.

 

My great-aunts came from the farms and one-room schools of downstate Illinois to Chicago to make their way, and I never heard if the book was given them as a warning on departure, or purchased ironically by them in an old book shop after arriving. But it sums up what marked my mother's family, and in many ways my denomination in that era: social advancement was important, and even necessary, and could be honorable if it was done decently.

 

To curse and swear and spit and drink were perhaps ways to get ahead in the shop, on the Main Streets and Broadways of growing middle America, but the Christian way of temperance, chastity, and deferred gratification were not only the path of divine blessing, but the surer and more secure path to the social heights as well.

 

Candidly, decency has been a two-edged sword for us.  While Christianity has affirmed its unique gift of chastity since the earliest days of our faith, the larger bundle of "decency" has picked up a great many hats and girdles and neckties along the way. The first big church fight I remember from my youth was over the propriety of putting married women's first names in the directory (i.e. Mr. and Mrs. Joe Doakes, vs. Mr. and Mrs. Joe and Esmerelda Doakes… they settled it by putting Mr. and Mrs. Joe (Esmerelda) Doakes which, of course, satisfied no one).

 

Cleanliness is next to godliness is the old phrase – also not in Scripture, albeit beloved of John Wesley – there are many practices that are good that are not necessarily an index of faith in God, pro or con. Whited sepulchers, et cetera. I hope you'll bear with me as I carry this theme over into next week's column as well!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he still has a tendency to say "sir" and "ma'am" even when people ask him not to, and let's not even talk about holding doors and chairs. Tell him your ingrained habits at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.