Faith Works 3-04-06
(production error; ended up printed 3-11-06)
Jeff Gill

So, Why Don’t We Clap in Church?

Oy. Applause in worship settings is still one of the most contentious issues in church life – except where it isn’t.
First, let’s look at where it isn’t, because there really are a fair number of spots where this question is pretty much resolved.
In quite a few congregations, when you feel that God has just done a cool thing, you put your hands together. It may be a musical presentation, solo or choral, it could be a point made in a sermon or a particular prayer issue now resolved. Clapping is how joy or thankfulness or celebration is expressed.
Let me note, as someone from a clap-free background, that it isn’t fair to say "we shouldn’t offer our worship (etc.) for applause, but for God!" My experience with worshiping communities is that music, in particular, is no more focused on our human response than as a gift for God in clappin’ churches than non-applause places. There can be no applause at all, ever, and the soloists, vocal or instrumental, still be very oriented to how the congregants are reacting more than anything else.
Most people know and expect that more charismatic churches or services will be more applause-friendly, where a hand or two may be lifted in the air and vocal reactions in general are not only allowed, but expected.
So that’s the clap-happy side, where the issue is settled. On the other end are faith traditions, usually more liturgically focused (set order of worship, responsive readings, printed prayers), where everyone understands that applause simply isn’t part of worship. Let’s be fair to that culture: they are very likely to clap and cheer like crazy for certain other gatherings – it’s not like they’re simply uptight – but church is not where they’re gonna do that.
So those are the ends of the spectrum. The broad middle of Christendom (this is a similar but essentially different question for synagogue, mosque, or sacred circle), that’s where the jostling and awkwardness comes in.
But I haven’t talked about one more group where the clapping question is largely a settled thing. Between the ends is a small island of churches where applause is OK some places and not others, and even better, the leadership understands that this issue will continue to create questions and need gentle resolutions. In that intermediate zone, the most common compromise is multiple services, where people clap at some and not at others.
What creates the friction, I fear, is where the leadership, clergy and laity, want to reach an absolute, final, comprehensive solution. We clap, say those, or we don’t: what’s it gonna be?
The Bible has little to say on such matters without a thick layer of interpretation, largely because applause is a modern cultural construct. In most of both the Old and New Testaments, prayer was offered by people standing, with hands held out, palms up, waist high. We generally don’t do that anymore. Two hundred years ago, in Ohio Protestant Christian settings, most prayer was either offered standing with bowed heads, or kneeling on the plank floor, turned to lean on the puncheon benches.
Today, we mostly sit on padded chairs or pews, head slightly bowed as we grope for the cell phone to turn it off when it plays "Fur Elise" during the pastoral prayer.
The one consensus that holds across traditions today is that we really, really ought to set our electronic devices to vibrate during the prelude.
Should we clap? That is a question that gives congregational leadership a great opportunity to reflect on what is our tradition, and what might make for effective evangelism. It is an occasion for the practice of discernment, to pray your way through your own history as a faith community and your place in worship tradition and where God is calling you to minister in your services today.
And if you do that, I’ll quietly give you a standing ovation!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; offer your answers to disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 3-05-06
Jeff Gill

Things That Aren’t So

Four years until another Winter Olympics, and I’ll be waiting. The Summer Ringfest events I can take or leave for the most part, but we’ll be watching Peking or Beijing or whatever they’ll have decided to call the capital of China by 2008.
Winter sports and their inherent uncertainty – ice, snow, narrow skis and thinner blades – make for a more interesting spectacle, plus the requisite mountains and snow covered valleys. Even the obscure sports like biathalon or moguls create a strong storyline, with no one, no matter how good, guaranteed a top finish.
Bode Miller took his lumps, and seemed to have earned them, but few pointed out that even in his best year he’s gone oh for five in a third of the weekend competitions. Like baseball (can you say "Spring Training"?), hitting the ball one in three at bats makes you an All Star. Less we should fret about Bode’s non-performance than we can celebrate Shaun White for meeting sky high expectations in a sport with more variables than the quadratic equation.
Once again, though, I must kvetch about the "medal count" that is always at the forefront of coverage. News flash: no nation wins the Olympics. Countries send teams, but among the subtle messages of the Olympic Movement is that they march in flag by flag, teams neatly separated, by in the Closing Ceremonies they come in largely as a happy, merry mob, as athletes together.
Say what you will about the IOC (and they have their quirks and shadow side like any large organization), but they have nothing to do with the national medal total stuff, nor do they mark, honor, or celebrate it. If Germany gets more total medals than the USA, that isn’t an Olympic thing, and I wish NBC or whatever other media outlet would make it clearer.
"Advertising Age" may be the one publication that has a true interest in which country or what national team (ski, skate, curling?) had the most gold medals. What the Olympic Movement celebrates at its best, which was mostly what was on display in the Torino Games, is athletic competition bridging humanity. See entry: Korea in the rosters to get what I mean. Many flags, but one spirit in sport is the goal.
Now that I’m on a roll, let me note a few more regular flubs that I caught in the broadcasts from Turin which are actually long-running frustrations of mine. I know there are some fellow usage and grammar purists out there reading this column, since, um, I hear from one or another almost every week. You can point out my foibles, and I promise to print a bunch of them soon, but for now…
A homing pigeon or homing signal allows one to "home in" on a goal or destination, but when you want to focus or sharpen your process, you "hone down" like a knife blade on a honestone. "Honing in" on an endpoint of a journey just ain’t quite right, I’se thinkin’.
"Toe the line" is what sailors do on deck when called together for inspection, or Marine recruits along a certain infamous yellow stripe. At the starting line, you put your toe up to, but not over the line.
"Tow the line" is what you do when . . . well, when you’re wrong. There’s no idiomatic use of "tow the line" that I know of, except when you drive a boat with a water skier; if you look back and you’re simply towing a line, you should loop back and find what you lost.
And as we remember N’Orleans this week, a levee may "breach," but a "breech" may find you giving birth backwards, with the baby arriving breeches first. The Seventeenth Street Levee was breached by a barge swinging loose in Hurricane Katrina, and the Bush administration got caught with it’s britches down in the response.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you have a language pet peeve, even if it’s his, send it to disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 2-25-06
Jeff Gill

Western Liberal Democracies Have More Fun

You have surely heard about those cartoons first published five months ago in Denmark, the result of an editor asking 25 illustrators to show how they saw the Prophet Muhammad. 12 responded, and the newspaper printed them as editorial comment on the challenges faced in Europe and around the world in responding to militant Islam. The man in charge admits that he knew the preference against images of the Prophet among Moslems, but said he wanted to make the point that mocking or humorous images of Christian figures were tolerated, but any slight against the Islamic community provoked harsh words and threats of violence, intimidating comics and politicians alike.
In other words, he was looking for a flap, and got a flapdoodle.
A number of Islamic leaders in Denmark put together a portfolio of the images, plus three whose sources have never been identified (and are the most offensive), and traveled to Cairo and other centers of the Moslem world to raise awareness of the affront to faithful adherents of Islam.
Suddenly Syria and Iraq and Pakistan found cause for offense, or at least radical Islamic groups were able to use them as provocations to assemble mass demonstrations against Western influences in general and the freedom to mock in particular. Deaths resulted, so far pretty much exclusively among the rioting protesters, especially young children caught up in the mobs.
Then Iran, whose new president is nothing if not consistent in his distaste for all things Western and therefore decadent, decided to follow up his public speeches (asking for Israel to be wiped from the map and declaring that the crimes attributed to the Nazis are largely fiction) with a declaration of a contest. Send us, he asked, your cartoons that deny the Holocaust.
Israel’s newspapers were swift to respond. They announced the next day a contest, asking readers to submit their favorite pieces of . . .
What do you think properly concludes that sentence? Another round of Mecca-bashing, or snideness about sultans? Nope. They asked for the best examples of anti-Semitic humor, saying "No one is going to outdo Israel in making fun of Jews!"
And they ran them.
I can’t use almost any of this is in a nice family paper like the Advocate, but it turns out Israelis know some pretty good shots at themselves, much of it ruder than I should be able to get the point of, actually.
One well worn joke was noted as needing to be officially retired (the one about the Volkswagen that seats 6,000,004 – think ash trays), and some submitted art was good enough to reprint, including a scene of Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and yes, Mohammed looking down in a group from heaven onto a scene of clashing rioters, with Big Mo saying "We didn’t teach them that!"
Some of my good conservative Christian friends worry about decadent modern Western culture as much as Osama bin Laden on a bad day, and who’s to say we don’t share a few concerns (noting stopped clocks twice a day, blind pigs finding the stray acorn, etc.). But what gives me a smile most days in Western Liberal Democracyland is that we have the social structure that allows us to make fun of ourselves, even mean spirited mocking at times (ask Bob Taft how he feels about capital punishment for cartoonists, or even columnists), and move on, possibly even conceding that we learned something in the exchange . . . but you’re still wrong!
Dr. Pangloss may be wrong about this being "the best of all possible worlds," but I give thanks that we can have a copy of "Candide" in some church libraries, "The Book of Mormon" in public libraries, "Brokeback Mountain" in theaters, and the "Qu’ran" in local bookstores, and no one need riot.
Actually, given that Westernized groups have shown a remarkable ability, even a preference, for taking terms of derision and embracing them as labels (Quakers, Shakers, Methodists, Mormons, or Holy Rollers to name a few), it would seem to be an essential part of our make up.
As Blake said and "Godspell" quoted, "Mock on, mock on!"

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; make fun of him at disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 2-26-06
Jeff Gill

Touching History, Feeling Distance

In a world of steel plate four inches thick, along miles of corridor punctuated by the step-ups of hatchway and drops down twelve tread accommodation ladders, hundreds of boys rambled widely, parents trying and usually failing to keep up.
Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and adult leaders from four states spent Washington’s Birthday weekend on board the USS Yorktown in Charleston, South Carolina. Sleeping on four high chain slung racks, just as 3,000 and more sailors and Marines did during World War II, right down to red lights near the deck (floor to you, lubber) and cold water in the heads (restrooms which normally have plenty of hot water, just not much fresh, vets tell me), it was an immersion in history for everyone concerned.
What startled me was not the crowded conditions or the labor of dragging duffels up and down the hangar deck and up to the berth, but a quick mental calculation. The Little Guy, who was fascinated in a seven year old sort of way by the stuff, if not the story, is as far from the events of 1943 as I was at his age from Blackjack Pershing’s expedition against Pancho Villa, with Lt. Georgie Patton showboating around. He is as distant from the start of WWII (not even counting the head start Poland and Great Britain got) now as I would have been from the Boer War or the Philippine Insurrection.
That first decade of the twentieth century still feels about as far back to me now as it did as a kid, but World War II was just a few years back when I was a Cub myself, watching "Combat!" with Vic Morrow and "The Rat Patrol" and "McHale’s Navy" on TV. All my conscious life, politicians have compared where their service in that conflict took them and taught them. George H.W. Bush flying off the USS Intrepid and shot down over the Pacific, young Lt. Gerald Ford almost washing overboard in a monsoon on the USS Monterey, Bob Dole shot in Italy fighting up the Adriatic coast.
But we will never again elect a WWII vet as president; John McCain, a Vietnam naval aviator whose father and grandfather commanded ships and fleets in the Pacific against Japan, now openly wonders if he’s too old to be chief executive (but ends up thinking he’s not, and I agree).
I can’t imagine how exciting this would have been for me as a kid, how fresh and recent the images and cultural memories would have been; it was amazing enough in my mid-40’s, let alone with Fort Sumter as a capper for the Civil War geek in me.
These kids, our own from Licking County and others out of Georgia, North Carolina, and New Jersey, were obviously excited and fascinated. What was less obvious is how they feel the connection to the ship and all she represents.
The exhibits on the hangar deck and all through the compartments, divided into six self-guided tours, tried to tell a story, and each night movies in the ship’s theater – formerly the forward elevator – put pictures together with the surroundings. (Note: "Tora, Tora, Tora" is best seen from the intermission to the end, with the first half reserved for those who read diplomatic history and the Proceedings of the Naval Institute for fun, but "The Fighting Lady" was in 1944 and still is an inspired piece of film making, let alone a fine documentary.)
Still, the gap between the world of our kids today and the world where the Norden bombsight was high tech and jets still a science fiction concept, read in pulp magazines with Betty Grable pin ups on the back cover, may be too great to bridge. The Rough Riders and Baden-Powell still feel as antiquated to me full grown as they did to my younger self, but men who flew TBD’s off carriers or landed at Omaha Beach still are elder contemporaries.
The Little Guy will not grow up with that same sense of nearness, but at least he has the Yorktown. And in that changed world, as we navigated our way among the planes and displays, we heard the voices around us of day visitors, speaking – I kid you not – Japanese and German, Italian and Spanish. All offering a kind of tribute by having chosen to buy a ticket and come to see by what simple tools and valiant young men, now elderly guides in blue vests, the Axis powers were vanquished, and renewed.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; praise the Lord and pass your stories along through disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 2-18-06
Jeff Gill

What Burns But Isn’t Consumed?

As I am typing this, ten churches in Alabama have burned. Five white, five black in membership, but all Baptist, with the arsonists driving past Christian churches of other sorts to reach their targets.
Since we can’t slot this tale into the standard hate crime category, it is being skittishly avoided in favor of coverage of Arab riots ostensibly over some five month old Danish cartoons. Only one religion story per news cycle, please.
Is it even possible for there to be people angry – rationally or obsessively – at Baptists in particular? Whoops, now we’ve gone and asked the question out loud, and there it is. Of course there can be hate crimes against Baptist Christians or even Christians in general, but how does one describe assaults against the majority? It would be like arguing that men get a raw deal sometimes in family court, or that the Catholic Church gets an unfair swipe in "The DaVinci Code." Yeah, yeah, tell me something interesting.
So what will we hear when the Alabama church fires are pinned down to the two angry fellows who had to kick their way (leaving hand and footprints behind) out of a church they had lit from within starting at the communion table, an apparent common thread in the storyline? No, that couldn’t show a perspective and bias, torching the communion table at the heart of the worship area as the primary act of arson.
The story may be unfolding as you read this, and I encourage you to listen for what’s not said in the wire service and TV media summaries.
The close of that narrative I can’t anticipate: two criminals argues less for monomania than a shared grievance, over an act of exclusion or affirmation of boundaries that left someone angrily outside, now breaking in with gasoline and matches in hand, or a pair of pranksters with a deeper motivation that kept the joke going for a chillingly long strand of burning fuse.
What I can speak to is the unique blow that a church fire can be to a community, let alone to the congregation in question. Except for families who have lost a home to fire, there are few who actually can relate to the drawn-out loss and anguish that is a church lost to flames.
I’ve stood with fellow congregants on a cold night while the roof collapses under the hoses of valiant firefighters at work saving neighboring structures more than worried about the total loss before them. With the senior pastor, I’ve met with fire department staff and heard the shocking words "suspected arson," and though our tale was one of age and decay leading to ignition, not malice in the end, the weeks of wondering leave a sour taste indeed.
You don’t realize until you’ve been through a fire, home or church, that you "lose" little; the complete conflagration is rare. What you get is one last chance to look at precious artifacts and memories, now blackened, twisted, and soon to be on the trash heap. You get books that look a bit swollen from singeing on the outside and water absorption within, but mostly fine, and then a helpful insurance fellow tells you that the fungi and molds that will grow from them could overtake your other books, so it too must be pitched.
Very little is never seen again: what you see is contorted beyond belief, and must be cast aside as an act of necessary but unwilling volition, including the ragged walls that are left, and usually even the foundations, which are now usually toxic waste for which you will pay a premium to have hauled away.
You say to the TV cameras, boldly and quite honestly as you say it: "The church is not the building, the church is the people." But you confront in new and profound ways how the building was a source of unity and cohesion that is not easily replaced, even when faith is strong and hope is bright. The kindly offers of temporary quarters become, unavoidably, an imposition, and even unvoiced the question "When are you moving on?" is always in the air.
All of this, and more, hovers about some ten congregations in northern Alabama. Their Christian neighbors have offered worship space, some have insurance and many do not, and they continue to meet on the Lord’s Day to give thanks for many blessings.
And let me assure you, they need our prayers as much as they need our checks. Most will rebuild, none will be the same. A fortunate few will be better faith communities for having experienced this fire that burnt them, but did not consume them, and many texts from Scripture will never read the same, either.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s been through a church fire and seen the new life on the other side. Tell him your stories of new life at disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 2-19-06
Jeff Gill

Curling Rocks (Granite, Actually)

Curling fans no doubt are unsure how to welcome all us johnny-come-lately aficionados of the sport.
Salt Lake’s 2002 Winter Olympics, aside from teaching most of Licking County the difference between luge and skeleton, helping bring curling out from the Canadian studies ghetto to the place of prominence they now enjoy.
Cub Scout Pack 3 had a great outing to the Newark Ice Arena, home of the Newark Generals ice hockey team (plus some mean hockey moms playing full contact sport after the wee kiddies left), but there was no sign of curling catching on in this area. The well-appointed concession area sold Blue Jackets jerseys, hockey sticks, and pads for all over, but no curling stones or brooms that I saw. Maybe they’re behind the counter. Make a trip some weekend this winter and ask ‘em.
Watching seven and eight year olds learn that a figure eight is not as easy as it seems when Dick Button is doing commentary was fun; your scribe turned a few figure threes, and the Little Guy finally decided, with no regret, to settle for a figure one before quitting his first foray into skating.
Many of us dads taking an unaccustomed turn on skates that we may have been on before, but not recently, noted too late the need to stretch. It was duly noted in many households the next morning, however. In our 30’s and 40’s we could sympathize with Michelle Kwan, who finds at 25 that some muscle injuries don’t recover as fast or as thoroughly in adulthood.
Everyone loved the story of Anne Abernathy, the 52 year old member of the Red Hat Society in her native Virgin Islands (which she represented as their only athlete in luge), going for a new record as oldest woman to compete in a Winter Olympics. Had she not broken bones on a practice run, she would have beaten . . . herself, always a good competitor for anyone.
Red Hatters of Licking County (and there are many of you, I know), salute your role model! She’ll be in the closing celebrations if not on a medal podium.
But I still want to watch more curling. No, really. There is a Zen, focused, cosmic aura about the whole sport. Seeking the center, the blend of slow deliberation and frantic sweeping, the human arc of arm and the earthy thunk of one rock thunking with an unambiguous tock into another, the movement transferring with stately inevitability into a new angle, the first stone settling into the pattern.
Even at 3 am, some of us are lured in to watch the mesmerizing coverage, though 5 pm works out better for so many reasons.
For the TV camera, there is the steely glare of the thrower, arm outstretched for a long moment after the stone leaves the hand, a balletic simplicity followed by the downright hoedown of the paired broom handlers. Plus, you get to whack your opponent, at least symbolically.
If you haven’t watched curling, you’re missing out. For the hospitable and renewed Newark Ice Arena, may I recommend curling as the newest attraction along Sharon Valley Road? At minimum you’d sell a whole bunch of hot cocoa.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who falls down gracefully on ice; share your Olympic dreams at disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 2-11-06
Jeff Gill

Was Lincoln Unchurched?

Tomorrow we mark the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, whose bicentennial is coming soon (2009, to be precise).
His place in the American epic is unquestioned, his writings still read (his speeches among the last entirely penned on his own), his life an object of reverence.
Among the majestic works of Lincoln’s pen are the addresses, not only from Gettysburg but at the second inauguration, not long before his assassination, which reflect theologically on the times and seasons in which he and the nation found themselves.
There is also tucked away in his papers a page of focused moral reasoning in the light of God’s purposes, never shared in public. Lincoln’s "Meditation on the Divine Will" takes on the vexed question of war and public morality in ways that are reflected through each of his more official statements, but here more personally, as he wrestles with his decisions and influence while seeking a greater good for others. It is concluded, in a sense, by the phrases near the end of his Second Inaugural: "with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right; let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds,; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widw, and for his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."
This man, an American exemplar in many ways, never joined a church. His parents were good Baptists, but their congregational records in Kentucky and Indiana survive, and young Abraham never was baptized there. My home tradition out of the Restoration movement tries to claim Lincoln from time to time, but the hard fact is that the Lincolns were put through a church trial for suspicion of being "Campbellites," and . . . they were acquitted.
Presbyterians take a turn at grabbing a piece of the great man, and it is true that he attended there in Springfield and Washington, where his wife was a member, but there too the records show he never came forward. Even Catholics take a flier on his having contributed to building a church for their tradition in Springfield, Illinois, but so did many leading citizens of the day. Unitarians point to parallels in some of his writing to their creed, but he had many opportunities to affiliate and passed them by as well.
It is not in me to say that, on this, Abraham Lincoln was ahead of his time. I am preacher enough to strongly affirm that even Lincoln could have missed out on something that he needed, but never claimed.
What he very carefully did, with enough care to show he knew what he was doing and did it on purpose, was that he stayed out of the organized church. Methodists know they can’t even sidle up to Lincoln as an adherent, since one of the great pioneer circuit riders, Peter Cartwright, not only preached against the infidel from New Salem and was one of the few to debate him to a standstill, he ran against Lincoln for elective office, and beat him. Joining a church would have been a smart political move.
So I can’t help but respect him for not joining: some careful scruple, probed at by many but revealed to few, and none who shared it, kept Honest Abe’s conscience from declaring his Christian affiliation.
Yes, I do believe that a thorough reading of his papers shows a man convinced of Christ as his Lord, but of no church as proper witness. To affirm any one doctrine or creed in full was not in him, for reasons we can only guess at.
Today, church membership is a social necessity almost nowhere. You don’t need it to run for office, sell insurance, get a job, or for anything else really. For the most part, if you join a church, it is because you want to, not because you gotta.
That is actually a help to building healthy church membership, I would think. But it makes all the more challenging the question: what kind of church would Lincoln join? A man who knew his Bible and the history of faith, a person with deep reflections on God’s will and a serious desire to live within Divine approval? Wouldn’t you want your faith community to attract someone like that? Forget music or liturgy or styles (though Lincoln always said that the best preachers in his opinion looked like they were fighting a swarm of bees!), but is your fellowship living out a faith and practice that would bring Abraham in out of the cold?
And what would that church look and feel like . . . a good question to mull over as winter slowly turns to Lent these next few weeks.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story of faith at disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 2-12-06
Jeff Gill

What They Don’t Teach You

How would you feel if your child brought home a history book that was 1,200 pages long and weighed as much as a small engine block? If it came with wheels and a retractable handle it might not actually attract much notice. "Don’t forget to wheel along your text cart, honey."
As an occasional purveyor of history, in classrooms and less formal contexts, I get weary of the refrain "they don’t teach that in school." Truly, there is much we don’t teach in school. Give me your child for 180 days a year from K through 12th grade, six hours a day, and I’ve got access to about 9% of their life from birth to age eighteen. In that sliver of their lives, sayeth the teachers, we do math, science, grammar, health, too little gym and nowhere near enough music.
But somehow you don’t get a constant threnody of "boy-o-boy, they sure didn’t tell me about the rules for cricket in school," or "isn’t it sad that they never explain the Finnish mythology behind Sibelius’ symphonies in the classroom." Nope, it’s only history teachers who are all part of a vast academic conspiracy to hide vital information from the kids.
English teachers would love to show the development from Indo-European roots through Latin to our modern language, which reveals how our speech changes today, and Math folk wish they could spend some time on Euclid and Euler and Riemann and all the marvelous characters who pressed the sphere of our knowledge of numbers out towards infinity. Yet no one implies that they’re keeping this complex narrative from the public, just that in a certain amount of time, with texts a certain length, some stuff has to be left out.
History goes into a very different evaluation system. To some degree, historians, professional and otherwise, understand this. We are telling the story of communities and groups and nations who have a strong, usually passionate relationship to the narrative thread that is running through our hands. Minority perspectives and voiceless groups looked at history books from a past era (Our Nation Marches On To Her Manifest Destiny) and said, "Um, could you, like mention us? Other than as, say, "savages," please?"
Good points, most of which have been worked into the standard texts in use for decades now. We hear from the lower decks and not just the captain’s cabin on the voyages of discovery; the slave ships are shown through the magnifying end of the telescope, instead of the minimizing glance sweeping past on the way to the focus on the Civil War (which was fought why? The slaves just kinda showed up?).
And there is still some work to do, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. When I was teaching American history to college freshmen, I never felt like I spent enough time on Reconstruction. It came at the end of the semester (Native American empires circa 500 BC to Columbus 1492 to 1776 to 1877. . .can you feel the squeeze?) so was often noted on the last ill-attended day of class with "this is a tremendously important period in our nation’s history and I recommend Prof. Blank’s course on the Reconstruction period" which of course hardly anyone took.
(Editorial aside: if you had this happen to you, and it did, go to the library or your favorite on-line book source and read Eric Foner’s magnificent new book, or his still awesome older one on what went down 1865 to 1877 in our land. Then read Taylor Branch’s final volume in his civil rights trilogy "At Canaan’s Edge." You’ll listen to yourself going "ohhhh, ah ha, now I see. . .ouch" and other deep historical insights.)
But the bottom line is that history classes will never cover it all, choices will be made, and reasonable people can disagree over which choices they would have made. Now we have conservative groups crying foul over the fact that there is less or no Winston Churchill, but much of the contents of Mrs. McGillicuddy’s sewing bag in the tenements of Boston. Liberal groups protest the "exclusion" of gay Basque sheepherders when three pages are "wasted" on that noted reactionary Harry Truman. Thanks to all for playing!
There is no end to that particular game. What we need is an understanding and commitment to life long learning in American culture; that we will read and visit and listen and talk about all the interesting details, often near at hand, of the story sketched out in the classroom.
No one taught me in any classroom about the Sepoy Mutiny in British India 1857, but knowing about the rebellion of Muslim troops beginning with a rumor than their musket cartridges were smeared with pig fat, culminating in the infamous "Black Hole of Calcutta" gives me a useful perspective as riots in the Arab world result from some cartoons in a Danish magazine. I was curious about where the term "Black Hole of Calcutta" came from, and spent precisely zero time wondering why "they" didn’t tell me; I went looking for the answer, using the skills "they" did teach me.
I’ll bet math and literature and science teachers wouldn’t mind if we all took that principal to heart for their fields. They are giving us a launch pad, not a gated enclosure for knowledge. Start the countdown!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; point out an area worth learning more about to disciple@voyager.net.

Note: Scroll down a bit for the next "Faith Works" column for the Newark Advocate which is attached to last week's ( i sent two in at once). Sorry to juggle the sequence for those of you who care about such things!

pax, jeff

Notes From My Knapsack 2-05-06
Jeff Gill

Winter Olympics from the Peanut Gallery

We have a real treat ahead with the every four years phenomena of the Winter Olympics, this year in Italy, around Turin or Torino, or at least the northern part of the boot near the Alps!
Most second graders were three years old or so when the Salt Lake City Games happened, but here in Licking County, as you will see, even the youngest of us caught the Olympic flame and it still burns in their memory, even if for fairly everyday reasons.
So without any further ado, here are a number of Olympian observations from a group of second graders:
Tristan - My favorite sport is skiing because they are fast.
Eric - My favorite sport is bobsledding.
Renata - My favorite sport in the Winter Olympics is figure skating, and my favorite Olympic gymnast is Carly Patterson.
Gracie - I like the part when my aunt Lea Ann got a medal, and this year she is going to coach the skeleton team.
Zachary - My favorite sports in the Winter Olympics are skeleton and skiing, because it is cool that someone is going more than 100 mph.
McKenna - My favorite person in the Olympics is Lea Ann because I know her niece and she knows my dad.
Jarred - My favorite sport in the winter is hockey because I play it.
Vega - My favorite sport is basketball, because I like shooting hoops.
Ella - My favorite sport in the winter is indoor swimming because it gives me a lot of exercise.
Tate - Kelly Clark is my favorite because she won #1 snowboarding in Winter Olympics 2002.
John - My favorite part about the Winter Olympics is watching people snowboard.
Jonathan - I would love to snowboard in the Olympics someday.
Hailey - My favorite part of the Olympics is that I know Lea Ann Parsley.
Mikayla - My favorite sport is ice skating.
Madeline - My favorite sport is to go sledding and ice skating.
Christopher - My two favorite activities in the Winter Olympics are skiing and bobsledding.
Peyton - My favorite part of the Olympics is gold medals.
Trent - My favorite sport in the Winter Olympics is snow boarding because I do it all the time.
Tori - My favorite activity in the winter is ice skating, because you learn how to do tricks on the ice.
Brittany - My favorite winter activity is playing in the snow.
Shelby - My favorite winter sport is ice skating, because I enjoy slipping and sliding.
Mary - The coolest winter activity is ice skating because you get to swirl around.
Alex - My favorite winter activity is making stuff in the snow.
Samuel - My favorite part of the Winter Olympics is skating because it is really tense.
Zoe - My favorite Olympic athlete is Lea Ann Parsley, because her niece is in my class.
Andy - My favorite sport in the winter is skiing, because I like ramping.
We will have an update after the games of Torino are over, especially on that skeleton coach and her team that you kept hearing about. Stay tuned, but first, a word from our sponsor. . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he also does some writing tutoring at Granville Elementary. Write to him at disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 1-24-06
Jeff Gill

Sacrifice, Saints, and Scout Sunday

Next weekend many congregations will mark Scout Sabbath or Sunday, honoring the Scouts and Scouters (adult leaders) among them, or possibly even the Packs or Troops or Crews that are sponsored by their faith community.
The Scouts may carry in the colors to their proper positions in the building, or enter the sanctuary as a group to worship together whatever their own tradition. Scouts will lead singing in some churches, read Scripture in others, even offer the message in a few places.
What is slowly getting nearer is the chance to honor a Scouting saint, at least in the Catholic Christian tradition. Francis "Frank" Parater of the Diocese of Richmond is a young man who was one of the early Eagle Scouts in the USA after 1910, when the BSA was founded. He went on to run a summer camp, and then to enter the priesthood, finally sent to Rome for advanced study.
Once there, he was quickly struck down with a debilitating illness that took his life, but not until he was able to pen his thoughts, his prayers, and his devotions in words that are read to this day in both Rome and America. This faithfulness and commitment even in the face of his impending death have led Christians in the Richmond area to petition Rome for recognition of the sainthood of Frank Parater. His "cause," as such an effort is known in the Catholic sainthood process, is making progress in Rome this year.
With the centennial of the Scouting Movement worldwide coming up in 2008, the anniversary of the first Scout camp at Brownsea Island off southern England in the summer of 1908, this first saint for Scouting (in part at least) will be watched with great interest.
The chaplains of the USS Dorchester are honored each year at this time, Feb. 3 always coming just before Scout Sunday. Four chaplains, a priest, a rabbi, and two Protestant Christian clergy going down with a troop ship during World War II after giving their lifebelts to young soldiers in their care after the Dorchester was torpedoed, have long been remembered among veterans and pastors alike. You don’t have to have Navy traditions or a particular denomination to honor the supreme sacrifice made by those four men, whose story has been told before at length in this space, but whose memory should annually be rekindled among us all.
In terms of kindled memory, tended and kept burning bright, we might draw some motivation from a small but very significant loss the world experienced just before Christmas this year past.
You may well have missed the modest news coverage of the death of the last living survivor of the famous 1914 "Christmas truce" during World War I. Alfred Anderson was the only man alive these last few years who knew exactly what the silence on Dec. 24 and 25 meant in the early days of the first World War. He was 18 then in the Black Watch regiment of the British Army, and lived to be 109 in Perthshire, England, telling all who asked about how Germans and British came together in "No Man’s Land" to sing "Silent Night" or "Stille Nacht," but either way to sing together and not to shoot. The shooting started up again soon enough, but Alfred Anderson survived to tell the tale.
Just before Christmas of 2005 he died, and that living memory is nowhere to be found on earth. Only the fainter echo of story and song and commemoration.
A book by Stanley Weintraub, "Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce" recently came out in a paperback edition. There are a precious few vets of World War I left, and only a couple can still tell their stories; we can narrate for them now, and record the events of more recent days for generations yet unborn, from World War II through the day after yesterday.
So we talk quietly, but persistently, of Frank and Baden-Powell, of the Dorchester and the Black Watch regiment singing carols across the trenches, about Easter on Guadalcnal and in Baghdad, of warriors and peacemakers.

Propose someone for sainthood at disciple@voyager.net; Jeff Gill is just a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher, but he promises to pass it along.

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Faith Works 2-04-06
Jeff Gill

Episcopal Angst or Bonhomie

NBC has pushed "The Book of Daniel" from the narrow ledge on Friday nights they’d given it, which means I can avoid having to say much of anything about it.
I’m not a TV critic, but while I found much to dismay me in the muddled, careening plot (was there a plot? …asks the Lovely Wife), I actually liked how Jesus was presented. As an internal dialogue made visible, all of the back and forth between the Rev. Daniel Webster and Christ the Lord made sense, as an internal dialogue.
What made many react strongly to the premise of the series was the portrayal of a clergy family and church politics in a very specific context, an Episcopal one. The fact that the producers got basic facts of Episcopalianism wrong was bothersome even to some who really wanted to like the melange of issues embodied by the characters inhabiting the Webster home, let alone the parish.
With the every-three-year national meeting for the Episcopal Church (ECUSA for short) coming to Columbus this June, local Episcopalians are no doubt already weary of mass media depictions. Not surprisingly, given the literacy and verbal emphasis of historic Anglicanism (the branch of Christianity the ECUSA springs from), they get a much better break from books than movies or TV, which I suspect like the ambience of their liturgy and tradition more for the visuals than the verities.
Everyone knows something of Jan Karon’s Mitford series, found on paperback racks in grocery stores and in church libraries, with charming covers and a series now running to seven easy to read volumes. If you haven’t read them, you’ve seen them laying around on someone’s kitchen table.
The lead character is Father Tim Kavanaugh, and his parish in Blowing Rock, North Carolina . . . whoops, I should say Mitford, since even Karon realizes that no one would believe that a bucolic community could have the name "Blowing Rock" and not immediately become a complete joke, except that it really does exist, where Karon lives and writes.
If her life is as delightful as most of the events she describes in Mitford, she is truly blessed. The small town simplicity and elementary complications that drive the, um, plots (in their own way, as improbable as much of "The Book of Daniel" in the other direction) have an undeniable appeal.
And the simple, traditional faith presented by Father Tim and most of the cast deserves the respect this series gets from Karon’s many fans.
Much less simple, and I would argue much better written, are Gail Godwin's "Evensong" (1999) and "Father Melancholy's Daughter" (1991), each focusing on Margaret Bonner, daughter of an ECUSA priest who is ordained herself at the end of "Daughter," and as "Evensong" begins is married to Adrian, a priest himself serving as a school headmaster. All Saints High Balsam is the Revs. Bonner’s little patch of North Carolina, where the new millenium’s arrival is no respecter of parish realities. Ironic that the two sets of books are all based in the Tarheel State.
Personally, I enjoy the Mitford books, but never as a pastor have I felt an author was looking over my shoulder more than when I read "Evensong." Is that an endorsement? Read it and see what you think.
What I can most delightedly endorse is a series of murder mysteries that look over the shoulder of the Rev. Clare Fergusson and Millers Kill, N.Y., police chief Russ Van Alstyne. Julia Spencer-Fleming has written "A Fountain Filled With Blood," "Out of the Deep I Cry," "In the Bleak Midwinter," and now "To Darkness and To Death." They all take place around the parish rhythms of St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Millers Kill, with the most recent in one day as the bishop is about to visit. Let me pay Julia, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, the compliment of noting that unlike a major television network, she gets the basics of bishop-ingcorrect.
In the conflicts rending today’s ECUSA, some have offered a new pair of terms to replace the unhelpful (as somewhat inaccurate) liberal/conservative dichotomy. One group might be called "Reappraisers," those who belief that modern life demands a reappraisal of ancient tradition and interpretation; the other "Reasserters," who see the modern world as calling even more urgently for a reassertion of orthodox values and stances.
In this pairing, Father Tim and the Mitford church are Reasserters, while Mother Margaret and High Balsam would come down on the Reappraisal side. Maybe why I enjoy the Miller’s Kill series is that Rev. Clare and St. Alban’s can’t be too neatly categorized, with a female cleric having an obvious attraction to reappraisal, but circumstances leading her to reappraise the tradition as worthy of reassertion.
Or if you like your Anglicanism straight, try the English authors Joanna Trollope and Susan Howatch. There you’ll find the Church of England in all its complex glory. Either way, their prime time has always been during library hours, not in the TV guide.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; the best stories in his experience have been in print before they saw film. Tap out a tale to him through disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 1-29-06
Jeff Gill

"People For Parks" Serve You . . . Breakfast!

Resolutions are not my cup of tea, or java, or anything else. As noted previously, most so-called "New Year’s" statements of intent to change, grow, or shrink in some form don’t seem to work.
Anytime is a good time to decide to improve your life, but choosing the day you start writing a new number for the date after the comma is not so much random as forced. People who think "hey, it’s 2006, so I’ll stop smoking this year" are often going with peer pressure more than coming to a firm internal conviction. Everyone is talking "new you," so they think "I should join in."
What the January period can offer is a great set of motivations to do stuff you’ve intended for a long time anyhow. Even if it isn’t cold, it isn’t warm enough to do casual outdoor stuff; you can’t really get much done on the yard or the house (except take down the Christmas lights, because you gotta), but there’s a bit of a break before the big surge of events and activities with the springtime.
Take a walk, then. Put on a coat, but don’t bundle up. If you move, you generate warmth, but if you sweat, you’ll get cold for sure. Cover your head and your hands, make sure you have sturdy shoes that walk well, and leave the house.
You get more of what sunlight there is (hahahahahahahahah), you see farther with the leaves gone and get views normally hidden the rest of the year, and the fresh air does sharpen your perspective and lift your heart a bit.
After you’ve done the block around you and few adjoining, it might be time to go further afield. This is where the rich resources of Licking County really come into their own. Your own community likely has walking paths or hiking trails on public property to start close by. Dawes Arboretum, Black Hand Gorge with Ohio DNR, even Hebron Fish Hatchery all have some walks and paths that stretch both your legs and your mind.
The there’s the Licking Park District. We have in this county, thanks to the vision of the county commissioners and the work of the park commissioners they’ve appointed, three major facilities along with the rail trails from Johnstown to Newark and from East Newark on east, with spurs hither and yon like up to OSU-Newark campus and down towards Heath. Many of these tie into city and village paths, as well.
Along with the park offices and central facility on Rt. 37 at Infirmary Mound Park, the William C. Kraner Nature Center out Linville Road just onto Fairview north of US 40, and Lobdell Reserve north of Alexandria, there are walking and horse trails on each of these properties.
"People for Parks" is working to secure the future of open space and outdoor recreation in Licking County on behalf of the Licking Park District. They invite you to come have breakfast at the James Bradley Center of Infirmary Mound Park this Saturday, Jan. 28, from 7:00 to 9:00 am, with donations accepted. You can just come to eat, meet other nature lovers, and learn a bit about work to secure dedicated funding for Licking County Parks in the future.
Then you can go walk off the eggs and pancakes and sausage by walking back around the horse arena, down past the osage orange trees, and up through the pines. You can eat just about anything you want if you only do the work to justify the calories; the farmer’s breakfast isn’t a health hazard if you pitch straw bales into the barn loft all day after eating it!
Seriously, look at your plate: you should see some china under the food, and you should see some color. That’s the best diet advice you’ll get anywhere in 2006. If your food is all white, tan, brown, and grey, you aren’t getting what you need. Color means health, with bright reds and greens leading the pack . . . no, I don’t mean jello, but that’s fine too in moderation.
Keep your plate lightly loaded, don’t refill it, keep the color in your diet, and drink plenty of stuff that doesn’t have corn syrup in it (you don’t drink corn syrup? Check the label, my friend), and get out and move.
Dr. Phil charges a sawbuck for that much advice in a book, and you just got it in a free paper with a breakfast invitation. Life is good, isn’t it?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; pass word of breakfasts and health tips to disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 1-14-06
Jeff Gill

Watching Out For Kids With Open Eyes

According to an online poll, a case of sexual abuse of children by a person in a position of trust (in this case a youth minister) was the "biggest story" the Advocate covered in 2005.
I hope so. If biggest means the story we remember and work on preventing in the future from happening again, then fine.
But this year was a clergyman, and just before that was a volunteer and then director of a major social service agency focused on kids, especially kids at risk who also are infamously targeted by molesters, pedophiles, and users or abusers of all sorts. And next year?
We want to believe that child abusers, especially of a sexual sort, "look the part" and stand out in the crowd. I knew the pastor and the agency director somewhat who have since been found guilty and sentenced for unimaginable crimes. Neither had a look or quality or obvious sign, and I’d like to think that by now I’d now if there was such a thing.
No, I haven’t got a story of molestation to tell of my own, though I note that just a few days ago a Catholic bishop shared his story of having been sexually abused by when he was a boy. But there are hundreds of people in Licking County (and a few hundred in other states) who have heard me present a program that the Boy Scouts of America calls "Youth Protection Training" or YPT. I’ve done it for church groups as well as all manner of Scout gatherings, where it is a mandatory training for certain leaders.
Scouting was the first to put "Youth Protection" front and center of youth-serving agencies, back in the early 1980’s, which was also when I first began directing summer camp residential programs. New expectations like "two deep leadership," where adults are never to be alone with children under any circumstances, or background checks for unit leadership, were not terribly popular with volunteers, but Scouting had come to a clear realization that their programs were regularly targeted by people with horrible tendencies, and that strong measures were needed to protect the outdoor program and character building activities that make Scouting what it is.
One can argue whether some of the steps then, and now, are too extreme, but everyone understands that we can’t just shove adult molesters down the road after turning a blind eye for too long.
Doing YPT for so many years, I’ve also learned that at almost every training event, someone will quietly come up to me afterwards, women and men, young and even very old, and tell me they are glad for this requirement, because . . . and then tell me of their own story of abuse at the hands of an adult when they were a child. It was often decades ago, but still fresh and raw and tugging at the ragged edges of their lives to this day.
Part of my motivation in doing YPT for the Scouts, and arguing in church settings for comparable policies, is that over my five years spending the summer running a Scout camp, I had to fire and report five adults, some volunteers in for just the week, and twice my own staff, for inappropriate behavior with kids. It was hard, and none ever admitted anything other than misunderstandings . . . and all five were arrested on other charges of sexual abuse and jailed within the year, our report just one point on a terrible graph.
That wasn’t the fun part of my job, but it was rewarding along with all the other good that a camping week with a values-based program can bring to young people. It was a big part of my call to ministry, and when I was ordained, there was in the program a reading done by a man in Scout uniform, who was also ordained in the Methodist Church, a friend who had been chaplain and aquatics director for me.
A few years later, he was arrested, tried, and convicted for molesting kids at the school where he worked; in his testimony, it became clear he had also done so at our camp, though no charges were ever filed by parties involved.
And he was, in fact, filling in at my ordination for another man, a priest of the Holy Cross order at Notre Dame who first encouraged me as a fellow camp staff member to go to seminary, and was my model as a camp leader in many ways. He couldn’t attend because he had been transferred to Arizona that year.
Last week this man was sentenced to 111 years in prison for molesting at least three boys, with testimony at his trial from young men whose cases were beyond the statute of limitations in Indiana. Turns out he was transferred to Arizona after accusations in our state by his superiors.
So friends, make sure your church has guidelines for working with youth, but here’s the really hard part. Make sure they are followed, and be willing to stand up and make a fuss when they aren’t. No one gets an exception, no one, because you really don’t want to wonder for the rest of your life what you could have prevented, if only you hadn’t wanted to not make too big a deal out of something.
When it comes to youth protection, you can’t make it too big a story. On that much, trust me.

Jeff Gill can be contacted at disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 1-22-06
Jeff Gill

Getting’ In the Garden

Two pots of lentil stew later, and the last of the green peppers from the garden are gone. Well, used up, anyhow.
Which means this is the right time to start planning for warmth and light and growth and greenness!
True, the frosts are still coating the browns and yellows of our lawns and planting areas most mornings, and the trees are bare sketches of what will be, but all the more reason to think life.
First, because it’s good for your soul: the daylight is lasting longer, but our bones don’t quite believe it, and need convincing from deep within that the seasons are turning ‘round again. I don’t know about "seasonal affective disorder" or the benefits of personally making your own Vitamin D from sunlight on your skin, but I do know that too much grey muck can make anyone feel down and out of sorts.
Second, because this really is a the best time to start planning, indoors during the sleet storms and freezing drizzle, what you want to do when you first stand outside with the birds singing around you and a spade or trowel in your hands.
Pencil and paper still work, but computer programs now abound as well, to help you envision what you can do on the land you’ve got to work with and how to arrange it. There’s what you think at the store looking at flats of plants (hmmm, six to a block, they oughta be a few inches apart, I’ve got something like three yards along there) and then there’s what happens when you get home (whoa, I’ve got way too many). Some quick measurements and calculations can save money and bother, not to mention guesswork, in March and April.
Some folks are so ambitious, whether around their home or in garden plots elsewhere in their community (municipalities, neighborhood associations, churches, and other groups make plots available for gardeners with minimal space of their own), that they order seed and plant seedlings themselves, forcing them to young maturity under grow lights or even atop refrigerators.
Refrigerators? Sure, since the back of your fridge puts out major heat which naturally flows up between wall and appliance, steadily bathing your little peat pots with warmth. That more than actual light is what many plants need to get going.
Another thing pre-planning, purchasing of seed packets, or a little reading can do this time of year is to remind you that not only the time for planting is not so far ahead, but the growth that follows is right behind. Are you about to buy some flats of stuff that will grow taller than what’s behind it? Boy does that feel silly when you realize you’ve done it. . .
Even for those of us who don’t garden and plant extensively can start now to think about the biggest crop most of us manage: lawn grass. I may fantasize about a neatly paved expanse around the house when I’m rushing to mow on a steamy day between appointments with impending rain on the horizon, but that’s not really a good idea in any way. We might be better off with more of us having natural prairie on our property, but we can do some planning to avoid using excessive fertilizer and herbicide treatments on our laws if we start now. Any garden center is happy to see a customer right now, and if you go in and tell them about what your lawn looks like and how big or sloped or weedy it is they will gladly guide you to the products and amounts that are right for you. In my experience, they really don’t want to sell you a ton of nasty chemicals that sit in your garage hardening into a toxic block. They want to give you a healthy lawn at minimal price – so you’ll be happy and come back and buy a bunch of plants and shrubs from them!
At any rate, if you start thinking about this after the grass is growing, some approaches that can safe time, money, and reduce environmental impacts are no longer possible. Ditto the lawnmower, which is probably the single biggest polluter in America (maybe personal waterscooters a close second). Sharp blades, a tuned engine, and a clean air filter can help you put less hydrocarbons into the air and soil, not to mention save you some money on gas, oil, and the life of the engine.
So clear the south 40 of the dining room table and start ploughing a path into a greener 2006 this February!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; as a gardener, he does better in the produce department, but the intention is there! Send him garden tall tales at disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 1-14-06
Jeff Gill

Calendars, Kalends, and Keeping Track

Have you ever heard of the "Proclamation of the Date of Easter on Epiphany" in worship? It dates from the days when people didn't have calendars built into every electronic device they used, since they . . . didn’t have electricity!

It also served, and serves now where it is still held as a living tradition, as a reminder of what is the central point of Christian Faith. Liturgical traditions like Catholic Christian and some Protestant Christians (mainly Episcopalians and Lutherans) have used it.

And traditionally it would be sung as chant, the way of speaking the parts of the service that – before electronic volume enhancement! -- all should hear, since the singing (or chanting) voice carried farther and more clearly.

You would hear, echoing through the church, something like this:

[begin ital]
Dear brothers and sisters,

The glory of the Lord has shone upon us, and shall ever be manifest among us, until the day of His return. Through the rhythms of times and seasons let us celebrate the mysteries of salvation.

Let us recall the year's culmination, the Easter Triduum of the Lord: His last supper, His crucifixion, His burial, and His rising, celebrated between the evening of the thirteenth of April and the evening of the sixteenth of April.

Each Easter — as on each Sunday — the Holy Church makes present the great and saving deed by which Christ has forever conquered sin and death.

From Easter are reckoned all the days we keep holy. Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, will occur on the first of March. The Ascension of the Lord will be commemorated on the twenty-fifth (or twenty-eighth) or May. Pentecost, the joyful conclusion of the season of Easter, will be celebrated on the fourth of June. And this year the First Sunday of Advent will be on the third of December.

Likewise the pilgrim Church proclaims the passover of Christ in the feasts of the holy Mother of God, in the feasts of the Apostles and Saints, and in the commemoration of the faithful departed.

To Jesus Christ, Who was, Who is, and Who is to come, Lord of time and history, be endless praise forever and ever.

Amen!
[end ital]

Now, I don’t come myself from a very liturgical/formal worship tradition. But there is a beauty to starting the new calendar year with a clear affirmation of what the anchor of the year’s services is with the date of Easter (remember, first Sunday after first full moon after Spring Equinox, but let’s not fight any more wars about it), and then calculating all other major feasts and festivals from it.

Or, at the next worship committee meeting, you can let American Greetings or Bob’s Filling Station ("Our Gas Keeps You Going!") tell you in their pocket calendar what you’re going to do. But where did Bob, or his print shop, get the date?

At any rate, you see above the actual dates for those worship celebrations for 2006; for federal holidays, check at the Post Office.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your favorite liturgical observance through disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 1-15-06
Jeff Gill

What Would Vince Do?

If I were Vince Young of Texas, Rose Bowl and National Championship winning quarterback, and I were thinking about my senior year of college. . .
C’mon. I know I should say "finish your college education, set the basis for a career that lasts the rest of your life, not just a few more years, and then play pro ball and rake in the cash." That’s the careful, responsible answer.
Or is it? This is where economic calculations become complicated even with strong moral and idealistic influences added in.
Compare these two situations: deep in Vince’s knee, a small piece of ligament has a worn, thin spot. Given a certain move or pressure, it will tear, likely in the next twelve months.
He can sign a contract now, worth $2 million a year for five or more years whether he plays or not, deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as they come, go through rehab (on his team’s nickle, no less) and maybe get back into a starting slot.
Or propose the same injury in the second game of his senior year at Texas, not play the rest of the season, get drafted late in the second round with a two year, $250,000 per contract, going into training camp as second string competing with another ten year vet even for that place on the roster.
Got it? Same injury, same date: scenario one a minimum of ten mil in the bank, scenario two maybe half million tops.
Add in the fact that Mr. Young appears to be a thoughtful, intelligent fellow who likely will finish his current degree (among others in years to come, I’ll bet) during springs and summers anyhow, and the calculus is not complicated.
The only argument I can muster for why I wouldn’t myself encourage him to go professional is the ol’ athlete example question. Should he do it – run the risk of losing nine and a half million dollars by staying in school – to show young men and women the importance of school for 99.9999 percent who will never make a living even for a short time out of athletics?
The best thing I can say about Vince Young is that if he does stay a Texas QB one more year, that will be the reason he does it. But I’d understand all too well if he doesn’t.
Contrast our old friend Maurice . . . y’know, I really hate to give him any more publicity, even on our modest little pages of the Booster. Getting arrested for a dopey "armed" robbery on the eve of the Fiesta Bowl in a grubby alley of Columbus makes me wonder: did he time it on purpose, semi-subconsciously? His classmates celebrate an amazing four years together back to Tempe, and there he is, out of the spotlight, so he swings it back the only way within his reach?
And why the series of poor choices that led him behind a sleazy bar named "Opium" (now doesn’t that shout trouble?), and away from the pro contract that likely did await him after at least another year or two of college? Well, a version of the same flawed economic logic that just barely might be true for a Vince Young, but rarely is the case for anyone else at all, magnified by personal circumstance and social injustice.
Clarett’s family is, from uncle to grandparent to neighbors even, deeply impoverished. What does even the $250,000 payoff look like? It looks like groceries and electricity and a car, not even necessarily a hot ride, either. You know that $250,000, after taxes ($180,000 if he’s got a good accountant, but there goes another $12,500), and an agent’s $25,000 leaves say $142,500. Give mom half, buy two uncles $30,000 cars, and you have left . . . about $10,000, which is about what you’d make at MickeyD’s working the drive up window.
But he just saw the zeros, and not the emptiness behind them.
Does Vince owe the future Maurice’s another year in college? I don’t think he owes it to anyone, except maybe to Martin Luther King Jr.'s memory.
But it would be quite a gift, to all of us. And I’ll root for him whoever and wherever he’s playing next year.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; contact him at disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 1-07-06
Jeff Gill

Breaking News Excess For Faith-Related Stories

Some weeks there is more faith and religion news popping up than can be spread usefully over a few weeks, so here’s a bunch of stuff on my radar screen which has probably already been resolved or burst onto the wider scene by the time you read this on Saturday.

*Sago Baptist Church in Tallmanville, West Virginia has found itself in the news for reasons that any church should want but no congregation would pursue.
They are serving as a refuge, a safe place, a gathering point, and a source of renewal for hurting, frightened people.
While the cable news networks and satellite trucks line the gravel road outside, families of the coal miners caught in an underground disaster have come together in a little white siding frame church, with a fellowship hall next door. The media have agreed to stay off the property, where relatives and neighbors all come and eat and talk and pray.
"So are all these people members of this church?" asked one reporter in a live stand-up with a Red Cross official from nearby Buckhannon. No, he carefully replied, but the church is kind of a community center in these parts, and everyone knows they are welcome there. His explanation clearly left some questions for the puzzled journalist, who went on to ask about how his work here compared to Katrina. Behind them, the golden rectangle of light flashed on and off as the door opened and closed with people coming and going.
Our prayers are with all of them, and with those that dig the coal that still powers most of our electricity; say thank you the next time you flip a switch.

*Last Wednesday a four week series began on PBS, based on the book "Walking the Bible" by Bruce Feiler. I’ve been reading and admiring his work in immersion journalism (circus clowns, country music, Japan) for twenty years, and he has emphasized faith in his last three books. Sorry about the first episode, but you should check out the next three Wed’s.

*Does the whole "sons inheriting pulpits" thing give you the creeps? Somehow it just doesn’t pass the "ick" test for me, which has no theological standing whatsoever, but really. Franklin Graham doesn’t provoke me quite as badly since he built his own ministry from scratch, Samaritan’s Purse, before taking over dad’s shop, but the Oral Roberts deal (what’s his son’s name?) and now Robert Schuller . . . hmmm.
Last Sunday Robert Schuller announced in his New Year’s sermon at the Crystal Cathedral that his son Robert A. would take over as senior pastor Jan. 22. Father Robert will still preach occasionally at the church and on the "Hour of Power," but focus on raising an endowment to support their church "for a thousand years." Hmmm.

*Brian Bosma is Indiana’s speaker of their House of Representatives. When I was involved in politics and lobbying for higher ed in the Hoosier State, I knew him as a new state rep and good guy, with relatives who lived in my college dorm.
He’s been put in quite a spot by a judge who has ruled that no prayer in the Statehouse can include the words Jesus, Christ, or I would presume the letter H. (If you don’t get the joke, you’re a better person than me.)
Apparently a Christian layman who runs a ministry that got legislator attention enough to garner an invite to pray at a session opening got a bit carried away, including prayer for the conversion of all present, and the state for good measure, then led a song to drive the point home, featuring the man from Nazareth’s name in the refrain.
I would quite understand that the fellow would not get invited back, nor receive the traditional state seal embossed pen. Yes, I’ve done it, and lost the pen.
Fuller disclosure than that: when I am asked to do public prayer at civic events, school functions, or Scouting activities, I generally don’t end "in the name of Jesus we pray, Amen." First, I don’t even use that ending exclusively in Christian churches, so why is it obligatory in public? Second, when I am not praying in an exclusively Christian setting, it just seems courteous to not talk like everyone listening believes as I do, but to seek common ground. Which does mean I speak the Boss’ name and all, but not as the mandatory sign-off.
Having said all that, I think the judge in Indiana is an idiot. This is the kind of motion that gives people cause to be more disrespectful and downright fearful of the judicial branch of our government than they ought to be. His precedents are specious, his reasoning incoherent, and his conclusion downright insulting. I would have much more respect for a judicial ruling that said "no prayer at all" than "go ahead and pray, but never mention Jesus and other names to be added later as their movements get big enough to bother me."
I’d disagree with him, but I would respect him enough to have a good disagreement. As it is, the ruling is too silly to even argue with. Which is where the Hon. Mr. Bosma’s dilemma comes in: while they wait on an appeal to a higher court (no, not that one), last Wed. was the first session of the Indiana House since the judge sputtered. He doesn’t want to encourage lawlessness, but hates to encourage the inane. What will happen?

*And for Moslems (can you mention Mohammed, PBUH, in Indiana prayers?), the Hajj or "Great Pilgrimage" to Mecca begins this weekend. Believe it or not, I’ve got even more left over for next week!

Feedback is welcome, write Jeff at disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 1-08-06
Jeff Gill

What’s the Shelf Life of Football?

Having established that Ohio State gets home field advantage whenever playing in Arizona, my interest in football has largely just dropped to academic, if that.
As I write this, there are at least three more bowl games in the college football cosmos to play, and then the elongated pro football playoff season, extending now to February.
Stop it, please.
Baseball now goes to November, with flurries obscuring infield fly balls, and hockey is apparently a summer sport. Now I plan to watch far too much of the Winter Olympics, even if LeeAnn Parsley isn’t riding the skeleton down the mountain, and I love aspects of baseball enough to be able to name for you the entire 1969 Chicago Cubs starting lineup. Sport is fun, and fun to watch, in all manner of forms and year round, but . . .
You may know the phrase about "killing the goose that lays the golden eggs" from the fable of the greedy old soul who cut open said fowl to see how to maximize the production of precious metals. Wordsworth said in one of his poems "we murder to dissect," reminding us that some mysteries are best enjoyed mysteriously, and not broken down into constituent parts for profit analysis.
The whole bowl game, BCS, stretch the ratings out approach leaves me wanting to ask: can they actually be so clever as to drive away sports fans? I see the goal of stretching out big games over enough nights to draw more eyeballs, additional ratings points, and beaucoup dollars from advertisers, but could they outsmart themselves at some point, a point we may already have passed?
Wednesday, now past for you but still a Rose Bowl fantasy, is so far beyond the parade, Times Square, and all the little bowl cousins. Part of the mystique of New Year’s Eve and Day was the spectacle of more football in the channel guide than you could ever watch. The games you weren’t seeing were part of the thrill of the game you were watching; no more.
The program is similar to the shelf space Monopoly that goes on in groceries and retail outlets. Thingummy, a product sold for fifty years, becomes Thingummy with Mint, No Wax Thingummy, and Thingummy Classic. Sales staff sees that the amount of linear feet devoted to product has increased, and start to gin up items that don’t really sell well, but help to maintain a visually dominant place in front of the consumer. Thingummy Menthol, Whitening Thingummy on Casters, Thingummy To Go in a tube, and Kosher Thingummy for Goyim join Thingummy By the Foot and Industrial-Strength Thingummy. Ten products, of which eight are likely not only unnecessary, but unwanted (not that they aren’t supported by a nationwide ad campaign). All are needed, though, to maintain a goodly foot of shelf space.
That same kind of illogic seems to be at work with sports seasons. Even with a few less viewers or spectators per event, the total comes out higher, or so goes the reasoning. Add longer rents for the profit centers called sky boxes ("Jack Abramoff, call your office; Mr. Abramoff") and more sales of logo-ed items year ‘round, then you can even be insouciant about lower attendance figures.
For a while.
What happens when we get jaded with the manipulation? When Thingummy just becomes another brand, and no longer a vital part of our lives, which it actually never was anyhow? If we start to see sporting options as another consumer choice, and find jai lai just as compelling, followed a few years later by full contact mah jongg? (Quidditch, anyone?)
This is likely wishful thinking: that the tastemakers and media moguls could outsmart themselves. Mencken famously suggested that no one ever went broke underestimating the tastes of the American public, but doesn’t everyone hate condescension, especially when it’s obvious?
On the other hand, I held off watching "American Idol" until last year, and now the Lovely Wife and I are thoroughly hooked. I thought it was all about the Bo, while she saw Carrie coming from way back. Maybe someone will sing "She Bangs" again this year in the audition episodes.
So I guess this is Idol season now, isn’t it?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who is also a not-so-secret American Idol fan of recent vintage; explain Clay Aiken’s attraction to disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 12-31-05
Jeff Gill

After a year of sharing this column with our local readership, I’ve been looking back over my notes and records, preparing (among other things) for 2006.
Turns out I’ve gotten to visit or even preach at services of eighteen congregations out of seven different Christian denominations, which is a very small percentage, to be sure, of the thousand some churches of all traditions in Licking, Perry, Muskingum, and Franklin Counties. It does give me some interesting perspectives, though, that you might miss if you just attend your own and maybe occasional visit a nearby faith community.
It did cross my mind at one point that it might be interesting to do something that a writer for a northeast Ohio paper did a few years back for a stretch: rate worship events the way a restaurant reviewer or film critic might. (Cue horrified shout from editor. . .)
Well, that might work in a more urban area. But aside from other arguments against that proposal, I’ve not only been in an awful lot of area churches for various reasons through the last sixteen years, and don’t want to start wearing wigs and sunglasses like Ruth Reichl checking out how many stars a bistro still should get, but I want to be able to go back to many of them.
So there went that idea.
What I think I can helpfully do is offer some general observations from all of my wandering around, in a spirit of constructive . . . well, decide for yourself if this is criticism, or commentary.
Number one is – wait, let me make a very clear point right off. Anyone one or any one church who’s wondering if I mean "your" church can rest easy, sort of. Each of these points is a cumulative observation, shared because it is such an across-the-board phenomenon.
Right, number one. Many churches have gone to using for some or all services a projection system and words for music that are not on a thick, sound-muffling block of wood pulp to hold in front of your mouth, also known as a hymnal. This is, in general, a great idea.
But what you need, if PowerPoint is part of your musical offering, is for the operator of the system to be part of your rehearsal of that music. Nothing is more frustrating than for the words to consistently be a few lines behind where the praise team is at, and then for the worship leader to lean into the microphone and say to the congregation "C’mon folks, let’s sing out!"
If you wouldn’t practice without your keyboard player, you shouldn’t do it without the display operator either.
Two is right at that operator. And two words, "sans serif." Sans serif is your friend. We know you have hundreds of fonts on your laptop, because it’s a computer. Most of us use them, so you don’t have to show us that capability. Two more words: Arial, and Helvetica.
Three I just hate to get into, because it seems like this point has been beaten to death over my last three decades in church life. Perhaps it has, but apparently not enough folks have been listening. Number three is SIGNAGE.
There are so many reasons to avoid this issue; we all know which door is what, who goes where, and more, bigger signs don’t look, well, nice. But signs are, by definition, for those who don’t know, and isn’t that one of most faith communities’ purposes? In probably forty church buildings I’ve walked through in the last year, perhaps two had clear, consistent, easily visible signage throughout the building.
And a quick fourth: Greeters. If your service starts at 10:30, and they go sit down with their family at 10:29, or even 10:31, you might as well let them skip it.
Most new visitors come late, and on purpose. They want to sneak in, talk to no one, and they’ll leave early too. They also want to know where to go and what to do, but not on your terms (i.e., arrive early). I’ve guest preached a bunch of places where, from my perch, I see people come in late, cast about nervously in the entry area, and turn around and leave.
Greeters, aside from needing some basic training on what a ministry of welcoming means in your church, should be in place at least fifteen minutes past the start of the service. That may feel pointless most Sundays at most churches, but like a parachute, you have to do it each week to be there for the times you really need them.
That’s my New Years gift to more effective outreach for us all, whatever tradition you follow.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; you can send faith community news to him at disciple@voyager.net.


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Notes From My Knapsack 1-01-06
Jeff Gill

Can Products Change Your Life?

We just celebrated our first Christmas in our home; the Lovely Wife has put up with eleven moves in twenty plus years of marriage, four of them parsonages (five if you count seminary housing).
Along with the obligatory apartments early on we’ve been the second residents of two houses, one fifty years old and another not quite five, which is where we now live and are about to mark a full year.
We’ve used some existing nail holes, spackled and painted and made some new ones. A few trees left the lot, and a couple new ones arrived just in time to wear a full suit of lights for the season (thanks, Jim!), along with some village excavations which we’ll try to grow grass over come the spring.
What’s made homelife so interesting has been our re-formatting of the household operating system, and adjustment of family roles. The LW has long been happy to let me do a majority of the cooking, and my increased time at home has given me the chance to hit the trifecta: pie crusts, pizza dough, and pasta homemade. LW query: "Don’t they still sell that stuff in the stores, hon?" Yes, but I notice she’s still happy to eat it even made at the cost of much more flour etc all around the kitchen.
Which brings us to the major shift of 2005. I now do most of the cleaning around the house. Please don’t assume I never cleaned a toilet or dusted and vacuumed before, but that’s not what has made such an impression on me.
Thanks to friendly loud-voiced men with three stripes on their shoulders and veins popping out of their necks, I learned mopping and fine work with toothbrushes on a very high level. Actually, my mopping technique at home suffers from the fact that I’m still thinking in terms of hundreds of square feet, working on concrete or well-polished pine planking. Oh well. But if you’re expecting a white glove inspection on your toilets, I’m your man.
The hard part isn’t cleaning, in my (newfound) opinion, but in keeping clean. What I’ve been used to is the major impact, the thorough swoosh, and the gleaming final appearance. But the slow, ongoing, bit by bit work of keeping shelves free of dust, the bare floors unstickified, or dishes fairly food fleck free, is a whole ‘nother creature, a creature I have not mastered entirely yet.
Then I discovered Swiffer ©. Life got better, right there. My mother had four kids’ worth of retired cloth diapers for dusting purposes, but we had built up a fair supply of cleaning rags by the time the Little Guy made his appearance. I know how to dust with a bottle of squirt stuff and a cloth (high to low, remove objects and dust bases before replacing, shake outside between rooms), but it takes a fair amount of time.
Not with these little wonders, it doesn’t. One out of the pack does the whole house, no shaking required, and no squirty deal either. We had a brief conference on the whole "curse of the disposable society," and tried some back of an envelope calculation on ergs, economics, and caloric output, and inconclusively decided that we were sticking with the sticky sheets o’ wonder. Laundry costs and our time count for something, at least until we learn that arsenic is used to create the amazing adhesive effects, or that they’re packaged using soon-to-be-executed Chinese political prisoners.
How can something this small change your life? The hard fact of the matter is that is doesn’t, but there is also the truth that dusting does happen with greater frequency, which is good for our marriage. You may have heard, somewhere, that men and women have different opinions about how often things like dusting (or scrubbing the tub floor) need to happen. That’s why the LW still manages most of the laundry, since she has rather picky ideas about separating lights and darks (oh yeah, and whites).
With some household products, these differences get smaller, and that is very near to life-changing. When they come up with a spray bottle to reduce pre-washing in the sink before dishwasher insertion, our lives may become downright idyllic.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he does not pre-wash sufficiently, and if you share this disability, commiserate with him at disciple@voyager.net.

Holiday Greetings to All!

Posting will be consistently well ahead of publication through these next few weeks, so if you're looking here for columns out of the Newark Advocate (Faith Works on Saturdays) or Community Booster (Notes From My Knapsack), watch the dates marked after the header, which should be the pub date for that piece.

And this is where my text goes for archiving; what the Gannett Corp. chooses to actually print is their affair, so don't assume that what you read or heard about from the wood pulp product is what you see pixellated here!

Et in terra pax,
Jeff