Faith Works 7-26-08
Jeff Gill
Celebrations Are What Churches (Should) Do Best
___
Last Saturday, you may have toasted the 160th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, a major step forward in the organization of women for voting and civil rights in the country.
The date was also the 55th birthday of Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks, was born in Brooklyn. He lives on the other side of the country now, in Seattle, and still has 15,000 stores selling really strong coffee.
You didn’t celebrate either of those? No? Well, you may not have been at my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration, either. It was out of town about six hours, so you’re excused.
My sister and I had a fascinating time gleaning our folks’ wishes, their invite lists, and facts along with photos . . . not that we didn’t believe them (although we weren’t there at the time, either of us), but so one of my sister’s friends could help make a very attractive display board for guests to ooh and ahh over.
Our two brothers made it with some work finagling, the three of us with spouses had them and the grandkids available for family photo arranging, and there were four states worth of family and friends present.
Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio if you’re really that curious.
Ron & Rose were married in her childhood church by the pastor who had baptized her, Rev. Myrtle Parke Storm. Trust me when I say I’ve been and do go to quite a few Fiftieth Anniversary events, and you don’t often see a woman minister in the wedding photos. In fact, I’m certain that my own folks’ was the first.
They tell me it was a hot day after a rainy morning in 1958, which our day in 2008 echoed; they tell me there was no air conditioning in the church and even the basement for the reception was beastly hot, which we chose not to emulate.
On the tables for the guests were “Rose & Ron Bingo” sheets and also a Golden Anniversary word search (Mom loves word searches). My cousin Kris (Mom’s cousin, actually) won the Bingo with a lifeline from my Aunt Pat (Dad’s sister), a nice touch of both sides of the family working together. Kris was the flower girl 50 years back, and everyone assured her that she obviously is 2 in the pictures (koff).
The Bingo game had squares with questions you needed to answer – “Where did Ron graduate college?” (Iowa State) – and a Free Square in the middle courtesy of the Rock City garden gnome.
Y’know, “See Rock City!” Haven’t you seen those barns? Right, only painted on old saw blades. Anyhow, you can “See Seven States” from Rock City atop Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, where they visted on their honeymoon and where garden gnomes were introduced to the United States. For class, they saw Monticello on the way back home to Illinois, where their first date was a Bears game at Wrigley Field (you read that right), on their way to Iowa City and grad school for my dad, and a return to teaching for Mom.
Aside from sheer self-indulgence, I share all this because I think home-brew events at simple venues like church basements or “fellowship halls” are a major memory maker. Large catering halls have their place, and event planners can be useful, but when every wedding and birthday and anniversary epoch is celebrated according to a script written by non-family members, in a space that looks like downmarket Vegas, with food from the consumer-industrial complex, you lose something.
You lose those events around the event, while the sandwiches are made and the punch mixed and the ribbons taped up. You miss something when the standard sheaf of photos goes into a video montage with pre-recorded music that you heard at the last event you attended.
And you miss noticing that a relative you barely knew you had is more than happy to pitch in and move tables back to the storage room and pile chairs, and even scrub frosting out of the carpet under the kids’ table. When you do that along with them, you even have a fighting chance of remembering their name at the next family event.
Remembering is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Thanks Mom & Dad, for helping us make a marvelous set of memories for a whole bunch of people, some of whom we’re even related to.
Did we get any pictures of all that?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he compulsively checks for lens caps, which apparently digital cameras don’t have. Tell him about a memory making event at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Notes From My Knapsack 7-24-08
Jeff Gill
Stretching Out For Community Fitness
Borrowing a page from the Lovely Wife’s field of “natural resource interpretation,” there is a concept in planning and designing visitor experience at a natural or cultural site called the “genius loci.”
When you are trying to present, or interpret, the sense of a location or resource, you need to identify the “genius loci” or “spirit of the place.” What is the particular sensibility that a spot is already trying to communicate?
For the Grand Canyon, the “genius loci” is obviously grandeur and awe and deep, deep time, written in stone. If you go to Ford’s Theater in Washington, there is certainly a date and a history to where Lincoln was shot in 1865, but the “genius loci” there is something to do with “all our revels now are ended” in Prospero’s words from “The Tempest,” that tragic sense of life where a war’s end and a night of comedy ended in death and loss for a whole nation.
So identifying a “genius loci” is not always to state what is most obvious. Looking at Granville, the commonplace notation is “New England village with Greek Revival architectural treasures.”
That does say something important about the community, tying in education and aspiration and culture. What I’m coming to suspect is the real genius in our “genius loci”, though, is the Granville gift for adaptive re-use. It may be a gift we can keep giving ourselves and others well into the foreseeable future.
“Adaptive re-use” or “Flexible use of public space” doesn’t have the same sex appeal of “quaintness on steroids,” but I think it does say something important about who we are, and what we want and need to preserve.
The Great Granville Picnic is one basic example of this. We take Broadway, shut it down as a traffic artery, and put a bunch of people on it to eat dinner this Aug. 16 (nota bene: deadline to reserve a space for your basket at village offices is Aug. 4).
Well, sure, some may say, but we do that downtown every year for the Kiwanis Fourth of July street fair, right? We close streets for the Tour de Granville and other occasional bicycle events, the Cub Scouts’ Cubmobile races in the spring, we’ve had (and may have again) Antique Fairs on side streets. The Bluesfest rocks and even rolls a bit right in the heart, or esophagus, of the village. Doesn’t everybody do that kind of thing?
In brief, no. and some folks get itchy even here in Brigadoon, murmuring that we should not block traffic and impede business with these dratted messes. Streets are for cars, moving or parking, darn it.
What makes our use of public space so vital in Granville is that we give ourselves the room and the angle to view what is truly public about such areas every time we put a ferris wheel in front of the library or a bandstand in front of First Baptist. Is the Farmer’s Market an interruption of what a street is for, or an extension of the real reason we call some areas “public”?
One of the most contentious areas of local politics in the near future is going to be “who defines public use & public purposes” for public land. We need to stay flexible in our thinking as much as we need to stretch out before exercising, because if we do neither . . . well, you’ve all seen Wall-E.
Monoculture in agriculture or in land use leads to rigid, narrow, life-choking responses to changing circumstances; breadth and mobility means as times change, we have options, which is the only way we will preserve the things we value today into the future. Freezing it all in amber is not an option.
(Remember – No Child Left Outside, Tues., Aug. 12!)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him how you’d adapt a public space creatively at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Stretching Out For Community Fitness
Borrowing a page from the Lovely Wife’s field of “natural resource interpretation,” there is a concept in planning and designing visitor experience at a natural or cultural site called the “genius loci.”
When you are trying to present, or interpret, the sense of a location or resource, you need to identify the “genius loci” or “spirit of the place.” What is the particular sensibility that a spot is already trying to communicate?
For the Grand Canyon, the “genius loci” is obviously grandeur and awe and deep, deep time, written in stone. If you go to Ford’s Theater in Washington, there is certainly a date and a history to where Lincoln was shot in 1865, but the “genius loci” there is something to do with “all our revels now are ended” in Prospero’s words from “The Tempest,” that tragic sense of life where a war’s end and a night of comedy ended in death and loss for a whole nation.
So identifying a “genius loci” is not always to state what is most obvious. Looking at Granville, the commonplace notation is “New England village with Greek Revival architectural treasures.”
That does say something important about the community, tying in education and aspiration and culture. What I’m coming to suspect is the real genius in our “genius loci”, though, is the Granville gift for adaptive re-use. It may be a gift we can keep giving ourselves and others well into the foreseeable future.
“Adaptive re-use” or “Flexible use of public space” doesn’t have the same sex appeal of “quaintness on steroids,” but I think it does say something important about who we are, and what we want and need to preserve.
The Great Granville Picnic is one basic example of this. We take Broadway, shut it down as a traffic artery, and put a bunch of people on it to eat dinner this Aug. 16 (nota bene: deadline to reserve a space for your basket at village offices is Aug. 4).
Well, sure, some may say, but we do that downtown every year for the Kiwanis Fourth of July street fair, right? We close streets for the Tour de Granville and other occasional bicycle events, the Cub Scouts’ Cubmobile races in the spring, we’ve had (and may have again) Antique Fairs on side streets. The Bluesfest rocks and even rolls a bit right in the heart, or esophagus, of the village. Doesn’t everybody do that kind of thing?
In brief, no. and some folks get itchy even here in Brigadoon, murmuring that we should not block traffic and impede business with these dratted messes. Streets are for cars, moving or parking, darn it.
What makes our use of public space so vital in Granville is that we give ourselves the room and the angle to view what is truly public about such areas every time we put a ferris wheel in front of the library or a bandstand in front of First Baptist. Is the Farmer’s Market an interruption of what a street is for, or an extension of the real reason we call some areas “public”?
One of the most contentious areas of local politics in the near future is going to be “who defines public use & public purposes” for public land. We need to stay flexible in our thinking as much as we need to stretch out before exercising, because if we do neither . . . well, you’ve all seen Wall-E.
Monoculture in agriculture or in land use leads to rigid, narrow, life-choking responses to changing circumstances; breadth and mobility means as times change, we have options, which is the only way we will preserve the things we value today into the future. Freezing it all in amber is not an option.
(Remember – No Child Left Outside, Tues., Aug. 12!)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him how you’d adapt a public space creatively at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Re-posted from earlier/farther down -- see Advocate blog for fully linked version to each book and both campaigns:
Notes From My Knapsack – Granville Sentinel, July 10, 2008
Jeff Gill
“Had We But World Enough, and Time”
---
Andrew Marvell was speaking “To His Coy Mistress,” not to the 2008 election season, but there is a fair sense of urgency in the presentations on both sides of the ballot.
(Pace to all Nader, Paul, and Barr supporters.)
Marvell goes on to hearken to “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” and to consider the reams of print material available online, in magazines, and from street corner fliers stuffed into your unwilling hands even a speed reader might sense “Deserts of vast eternity” before them.
May I recommend books? Seriously, if you want to get up to speed with the full range of opinion on both sides, you might find that the old fashioned print volume does you more good than a stack of magazines. You check the table of contents and index for guideposts and benchmarks where your particular interests are addressed, and flipping back and forth is still an area where the technology of printed and bound pages has no peer. (These are all available in the libraries of Granville, Newark, or Denison, too.)
This is all presuming that there are some who haven’t entirely made up their minds, McCainiacs with qualms and Obamacans with hesitations, plus us mushy middle slow thinkers.
Start with their own books: Obama has famously penned his own two, well worth the time to read right through, “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” McCain works with Mark Salter of his staff to write “Worth the Fighting For” and “Faith of My Fathers.”
On the current war, whatever you call it, to get a good diversity of views: “Fiasco” by Tom Ricks of the Washington Post, along with “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama from the distant past of 1992 to see part of the basis for said leap into the heart of darkness (yeah, and read that, too, in a collected Joseph Conrad). Douglas Feith’s “War and Decision” gives the view from inside of the choices that led into Iraq.
“The Assassin’s Gate” by George Packer is the wide view of the Middle East today, and a contrasting but well-reasoned complement is Bernard Lewis’ “The Crisis of Islam.”
Climate change and biotech are intertwined but crucial areas where science and politics intersect with public awareness, and we need to be thinking more clearly than we are about those areas: “Panic in Level 4” is new and excellent, by Richard Preston, author of “The Hot Zone,” and “Cell of Cells” is accessible to the general reader as well thanks to the careful work of Cynthia Fox.
Try the older “Earth In the Balance” from 1992, which reads better than “An Inconvenient Truth” does as a book, both of course by Al Gore; compare to Bjorn Lomborg’s “Cool It.”
And wrap it all up by getting out some Wendell Berry, specifically “The Art of the Commonplace” and “Citizenship Papers.” You might want to read the poetry of “A Timbered Choir” or “The Country of Marriage” just to wash away the taste of politics.
(Psst: Tues., Aug. 12, No Child Left Inside Day!)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a good read or tale or idea at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Notes From My Knapsack – Granville Sentinel, July 10, 2008
Jeff Gill
“Had We But World Enough, and Time”
---
Andrew Marvell was speaking “To His Coy Mistress,” not to the 2008 election season, but there is a fair sense of urgency in the presentations on both sides of the ballot.
(Pace to all Nader, Paul, and Barr supporters.)
Marvell goes on to hearken to “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” and to consider the reams of print material available online, in magazines, and from street corner fliers stuffed into your unwilling hands even a speed reader might sense “Deserts of vast eternity” before them.
May I recommend books? Seriously, if you want to get up to speed with the full range of opinion on both sides, you might find that the old fashioned print volume does you more good than a stack of magazines. You check the table of contents and index for guideposts and benchmarks where your particular interests are addressed, and flipping back and forth is still an area where the technology of printed and bound pages has no peer. (These are all available in the libraries of Granville, Newark, or Denison, too.)
This is all presuming that there are some who haven’t entirely made up their minds, McCainiacs with qualms and Obamacans with hesitations, plus us mushy middle slow thinkers.
Start with their own books: Obama has famously penned his own two, well worth the time to read right through, “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” McCain works with Mark Salter of his staff to write “Worth the Fighting For” and “Faith of My Fathers.”
On the current war, whatever you call it, to get a good diversity of views: “Fiasco” by Tom Ricks of the Washington Post, along with “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama from the distant past of 1992 to see part of the basis for said leap into the heart of darkness (yeah, and read that, too, in a collected Joseph Conrad). Douglas Feith’s “War and Decision” gives the view from inside of the choices that led into Iraq.
“The Assassin’s Gate” by George Packer is the wide view of the Middle East today, and a contrasting but well-reasoned complement is Bernard Lewis’ “The Crisis of Islam.”
Climate change and biotech are intertwined but crucial areas where science and politics intersect with public awareness, and we need to be thinking more clearly than we are about those areas: “Panic in Level 4” is new and excellent, by Richard Preston, author of “The Hot Zone,” and “Cell of Cells” is accessible to the general reader as well thanks to the careful work of Cynthia Fox.
Try the older “Earth In the Balance” from 1992, which reads better than “An Inconvenient Truth” does as a book, both of course by Al Gore; compare to Bjorn Lomborg’s “Cool It.”
And wrap it all up by getting out some Wendell Berry, specifically “The Art of the Commonplace” and “Citizenship Papers.” You might want to read the poetry of “A Timbered Choir” or “The Country of Marriage” just to wash away the taste of politics.
(Psst: Tues., Aug. 12, No Child Left Inside Day!)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a good read or tale or idea at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Faith Works 7-19-08
Jeff Gill
Consider the Geeks, They Toil Not, Neither Do They Spin
A church along I-70 has a large banner up in black and burnt orange. Some of you don’t need me to explain much more about it, and not because you’ve driven through Columbus lately.
Bikers know the colors of Harley-Davidson even if they sit astride rice burners and Goldwings, and those colors stand out as ones VBS banners don’t usually select.
The church in question is having a “Biker Sunday,” part of a trend in congregational life to conduct outreach by targeting a group that isn’t known for church attendance, and approaching them on their home territory.
As I said to a fellow preacher last week, we’re all called to share the Gospel “to the ends of the earth,” which may just be nearby but out at the edge of our comfort zone. So a faith community is reaching out to the motorcycling community with a special emphasis Sunday, and the parking lot will doubtless be rumbling that day.
Other area congregations have tried this approach to reach out to men in general, who in general are less well represented in worship than women are. Sports themes have long been a favorite for men’s fellowship groups, especially if a winning coach or marquee player is available, regardless of their own religious literacy. (I’ve sat through too many who are trying to adapt their noon service club standard talk to a church event, and it can be painful to watch.)
More recently, churches have gotten a bit creative about this. They find a supplier of exotic entrees and put on a “Hunters Feast” event, where instead of a bean supper or baked ham loaf the invited males chow down on venison, alligator steaks, and a bit of kangaroo fricassee.
Rattlesnake hors d’ oeuvres go without saying, as does the occasional Rocky Mountain oyster.
And I know a church that has a plethora of carpenters in the pews, so they developed “Wood Samaritans.” Get it? Wood…good…
Not to mention many automotive ministries, “Hot Wheels” and “Gearheads for Jesus” and “Emmanuel Transmission” and so on.
What I’m wanting to ask, or just throw out there and see if anyone bites on the lure, is a particular ministry target group I’ve never heard aimed at.
“Geek Sunday.”
Seriously: many men are, in fact, geeks. We can spell dilithium, know what mineral form it takes (crystals), and some of us can tell you the names of star sytems where it can be found (sorry).
We have schematics for how to construct your own lightsaber, as every Jedi must do for themselves (mine would have a green crystal, natch); we know how many hit points a kobold has, and how to roll percentile for DI.
Plus anyone who made sense of the preceding paragraph can tell you there are some theological points of contact in those fictional ideas, and geeks do discuss them. Geekily.
Just as bikers have many and meaningful discussions about mortality, and destiny, and the destination of the soul after you lay down your ride on a curve that has no edge. I think an occasional Biker Sunday is good, solid, meaningful evangelistic outreach, and good for those that hold them; hunters and folks who fish hold life and death in their hands each time they pursue their craft, and a Wild Buffet can be a good place to draw those conversations into the church precincts.
What I hope doesn’t happen as these forms of outreach grow is that we pass over the less cool, less socially celebrated segments of our communities. “Geek Sunday” is near and dear to my heart, but what about “Runners Sunday,” or “Vegetarian Sunday”? You could have a “Welders’ Sabbath” or a “Geocaching Weekend.”
How’s the edge of your comfort zone holding up? Maybe your church could have a “Goth Sunday” or a “Celebration of Cashiers.”
Think about that – a cashier preaching to us about how the world looks from their side of the register? We might just realize how much we all need forgiveness…
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your church’s outreach idea at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Consider the Geeks, They Toil Not, Neither Do They Spin
A church along I-70 has a large banner up in black and burnt orange. Some of you don’t need me to explain much more about it, and not because you’ve driven through Columbus lately.
Bikers know the colors of Harley-Davidson even if they sit astride rice burners and Goldwings, and those colors stand out as ones VBS banners don’t usually select.
The church in question is having a “Biker Sunday,” part of a trend in congregational life to conduct outreach by targeting a group that isn’t known for church attendance, and approaching them on their home territory.
As I said to a fellow preacher last week, we’re all called to share the Gospel “to the ends of the earth,” which may just be nearby but out at the edge of our comfort zone. So a faith community is reaching out to the motorcycling community with a special emphasis Sunday, and the parking lot will doubtless be rumbling that day.
Other area congregations have tried this approach to reach out to men in general, who in general are less well represented in worship than women are. Sports themes have long been a favorite for men’s fellowship groups, especially if a winning coach or marquee player is available, regardless of their own religious literacy. (I’ve sat through too many who are trying to adapt their noon service club standard talk to a church event, and it can be painful to watch.)
More recently, churches have gotten a bit creative about this. They find a supplier of exotic entrees and put on a “Hunters Feast” event, where instead of a bean supper or baked ham loaf the invited males chow down on venison, alligator steaks, and a bit of kangaroo fricassee.
Rattlesnake hors d’ oeuvres go without saying, as does the occasional Rocky Mountain oyster.
And I know a church that has a plethora of carpenters in the pews, so they developed “Wood Samaritans.” Get it? Wood…good…
Not to mention many automotive ministries, “Hot Wheels” and “Gearheads for Jesus” and “Emmanuel Transmission” and so on.
What I’m wanting to ask, or just throw out there and see if anyone bites on the lure, is a particular ministry target group I’ve never heard aimed at.
“Geek Sunday.”
Seriously: many men are, in fact, geeks. We can spell dilithium, know what mineral form it takes (crystals), and some of us can tell you the names of star sytems where it can be found (sorry).
We have schematics for how to construct your own lightsaber, as every Jedi must do for themselves (mine would have a green crystal, natch); we know how many hit points a kobold has, and how to roll percentile for DI.
Plus anyone who made sense of the preceding paragraph can tell you there are some theological points of contact in those fictional ideas, and geeks do discuss them. Geekily.
Just as bikers have many and meaningful discussions about mortality, and destiny, and the destination of the soul after you lay down your ride on a curve that has no edge. I think an occasional Biker Sunday is good, solid, meaningful evangelistic outreach, and good for those that hold them; hunters and folks who fish hold life and death in their hands each time they pursue their craft, and a Wild Buffet can be a good place to draw those conversations into the church precincts.
What I hope doesn’t happen as these forms of outreach grow is that we pass over the less cool, less socially celebrated segments of our communities. “Geek Sunday” is near and dear to my heart, but what about “Runners Sunday,” or “Vegetarian Sunday”? You could have a “Welders’ Sabbath” or a “Geocaching Weekend.”
How’s the edge of your comfort zone holding up? Maybe your church could have a “Goth Sunday” or a “Celebration of Cashiers.”
Think about that – a cashier preaching to us about how the world looks from their side of the register? We might just realize how much we all need forgiveness…
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your church’s outreach idea at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Faith Works 7-12-08
Jeff Gill
Statistically, It Just Doesn’t Add Up
The Pew Forum survey on the “US Religious Landscape” is jam-packed with stats and numbers, but in many ways it ends up being a commentary on Psalm 14 and James 2:19.
Go ahead, look ‘em up. We’ll be here when you get back.
Find the passages? Great. Anyhow, the point is that for all the detail in the study, the conclusions don’t always add up.
Two people can look at a set of survey numbers and come up with three interpretations, but there are some very interesting trends in the data, or rather, in how writers and reporters are reacting to the data. Let me sort and cherry pick and offer my own misreading and tendentious interpretation (and if you want the link to the big hunk o’ data, navigate over to the newarkdvocate.com home page, and I’ll have the link with the story as posted at the “Notes From My Knapsack” blog).
http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report2religious-landscape-study-key-findings.pdf
A couple juxtapositions – 76% of Americans say there are “many ways” to heaven, and 34% say “every word is true” in the Bible. I think that tells me 10% of us would be really interesting to interview about how we reconcile those two statements.
8% of atheists are “absolutely certain” that God exists, and 10% of self-described atheists (“atheists”?) pray “at least weekly.” Oh, and 12% of atheists believe in Heaven, and 10% in, um, the other place. OK, fine – Hell. 10% of atheists. Is that the 10% I wanted to interview up above? (In this column, not up above in . . . oh, stop it.)
And I know it will sound like I’m piling on here, but these numbers just jump out at you – 9% of atheists say they are “skeptical of evolution.” Can there be an atheistic creationist?
Swinging across the spectrum, 13% of self-defined evangelicals don’t believe in a personal God. Really? 48% of Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, a working majority (!) versus 45% who disagree (7% were waiting for the next Supreme Court opinion, apparently).
Which gets us closer to the problem with this 270+ page report on a survey of over 30,000 Americans. When the Catholics in this study were asked where they get their views of morality, 22% said primarily from religion, with 57% say it comes from “practical experience and common sense.” Only 9% of Catholics say religion is where they ground their political views – that may be bad news for both Obama and McCain.
There is clearly a sense that American ideals about individual freedom and autonomy trump all, even in matters of faith and doctrine. Except . . . in the survey questions, if you take the time to drill down in the data to where the data comes from, which are the questions people are reacting to, you find that the questions themselves leave no room for doctrine or structured belief to come up.
The first twenty-plus questions don’t mention religion at all; the word “Jesus” is never seen at any point in the survey. The question about Heaven is phrased “Do you think there is a heaven, where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded?” Many Christians would say that description bears no resemblance to their beliefs about the world to come, and so do we answer “No?”
And how would you interpret that response?
Which is how you end up with a survey where 21% of atheists believe in God. They aren’t actually measuring anything about faith or beliefs, but about culturally conditioned attitudes toward religion. Their landscape is political and cultural, and I suspect respondents, getting the drift of what they were being asked about, did what Americans do so well – they politely shifted gears to give the answers that they use in public general contexts.
You can argue that there shouldn’t be “two sets” of beliefs (google Goerge Barna for one), but I’ve found there are very few Americans who keep their beliefs right out, oh, on their desk through the week. Most of us have a go-along get-along approach at work and in social life, and a slightly or even strongly structured faith stance at home and in church.
The Pew Forum didn’t get at this distinction at all, and actually built the survey to get the public attitudes only. Does it tell us much about what we do in a voting booth, let alone in Sunday worship? There’s a major survey coming up on Tuesday, Nov. 4.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he relaxes by reading survey data. Tell him something a bit more interesting at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Statistically, It Just Doesn’t Add Up
The Pew Forum survey on the “US Religious Landscape” is jam-packed with stats and numbers, but in many ways it ends up being a commentary on Psalm 14 and James 2:19.
Go ahead, look ‘em up. We’ll be here when you get back.
Find the passages? Great. Anyhow, the point is that for all the detail in the study, the conclusions don’t always add up.
Two people can look at a set of survey numbers and come up with three interpretations, but there are some very interesting trends in the data, or rather, in how writers and reporters are reacting to the data. Let me sort and cherry pick and offer my own misreading and tendentious interpretation (and if you want the link to the big hunk o’ data, navigate over to the newarkdvocate.com home page, and I’ll have the link with the story as posted at the “Notes From My Knapsack” blog).
http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report2religious-landscape-study-key-findings.pdf
A couple juxtapositions – 76% of Americans say there are “many ways” to heaven, and 34% say “every word is true” in the Bible. I think that tells me 10% of us would be really interesting to interview about how we reconcile those two statements.
8% of atheists are “absolutely certain” that God exists, and 10% of self-described atheists (“atheists”?) pray “at least weekly.” Oh, and 12% of atheists believe in Heaven, and 10% in, um, the other place. OK, fine – Hell. 10% of atheists. Is that the 10% I wanted to interview up above? (In this column, not up above in . . . oh, stop it.)
And I know it will sound like I’m piling on here, but these numbers just jump out at you – 9% of atheists say they are “skeptical of evolution.” Can there be an atheistic creationist?
Swinging across the spectrum, 13% of self-defined evangelicals don’t believe in a personal God. Really? 48% of Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, a working majority (!) versus 45% who disagree (7% were waiting for the next Supreme Court opinion, apparently).
Which gets us closer to the problem with this 270+ page report on a survey of over 30,000 Americans. When the Catholics in this study were asked where they get their views of morality, 22% said primarily from religion, with 57% say it comes from “practical experience and common sense.” Only 9% of Catholics say religion is where they ground their political views – that may be bad news for both Obama and McCain.
There is clearly a sense that American ideals about individual freedom and autonomy trump all, even in matters of faith and doctrine. Except . . . in the survey questions, if you take the time to drill down in the data to where the data comes from, which are the questions people are reacting to, you find that the questions themselves leave no room for doctrine or structured belief to come up.
The first twenty-plus questions don’t mention religion at all; the word “Jesus” is never seen at any point in the survey. The question about Heaven is phrased “Do you think there is a heaven, where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded?” Many Christians would say that description bears no resemblance to their beliefs about the world to come, and so do we answer “No?”
And how would you interpret that response?
Which is how you end up with a survey where 21% of atheists believe in God. They aren’t actually measuring anything about faith or beliefs, but about culturally conditioned attitudes toward religion. Their landscape is political and cultural, and I suspect respondents, getting the drift of what they were being asked about, did what Americans do so well – they politely shifted gears to give the answers that they use in public general contexts.
You can argue that there shouldn’t be “two sets” of beliefs (google Goerge Barna for one), but I’ve found there are very few Americans who keep their beliefs right out, oh, on their desk through the week. Most of us have a go-along get-along approach at work and in social life, and a slightly or even strongly structured faith stance at home and in church.
The Pew Forum didn’t get at this distinction at all, and actually built the survey to get the public attitudes only. Does it tell us much about what we do in a voting booth, let alone in Sunday worship? There’s a major survey coming up on Tuesday, Nov. 4.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he relaxes by reading survey data. Tell him something a bit more interesting at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Faith Works 7-5-08
Jeff Gill
An Errand, Interrupted and Fulfilled
In the back seat, the small boy noticed that his dad’s attention was swinging off the road in front off to one side.
The car slowed, and then bumped along the shoulder to a stop.
“Are we stopping here, dad?”
“Yes, just for a moment.”
“Should I get out?”
“No, son, just stay put. I won’t be long.”
His dad got out of the car, and walked around the front and jumped over a ditch into an unfenced back yard. Just then another car slowed and stopped on the shoulder just ahead, and another man got out of his car.
The boy watched as his father walked into a yard where a flagpole sat in a garden, with a flag dangling in the geraniums and marigolds off of a swinging rope. They had driven through a quick rainstorm preceded by stiff winds just before, and the sun was coming out accompanied by a brisk, erratic breeze.
As the boy’s dad picked the flag gently out of the flowers, he reached up to the pole where a cleat had torn loose from the pole itself. When he began to unclip the flag from the rope hanging off the pulley far above, the other man who had stopped his car walked up.
From where he sat, there was no conversation between the two adult men, just a glance at each other, and as the boy’s dad finished unclipping the United States flag, the other man picked up the striped end of Old Glory just like they had practiced at a Cub Scout meeting a few weeks before.
He watched as they stepped back from each other, smoothly folded the flag lengthwise once, twice, and then stepped even further from each other, pulling the flag taut, as the strange man began to fold and flip the flag into the proper triangles, ending as he should have with an all blue and starry triangle shaped like a tricorn hat. He handed it to the boy’s dad, and stepped back, saluted him, and walked away. The dad walked up to the porch, arms folded over the damp but properly folded flag, laid the neat bundle on a chair by the sliding glass door, and walked back to the car.
When he got inside, the other car had pulled away.
“Dad, did you know that other man?”
“No, son, he must have seen the same thing we did.”
“You mean the flag that blew down?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you know who lives there, Dad?”
“No, but it seems like they put their flag up before the storm blew through, so they wouldn’t have known that it all would have pulled apart like that. We saw it on the ground driving by earlier, and it was still there, so I just wanted to get it off the ground. That must have been what the other fellow thought, too.”
“If you didn’t know him, how did you both know . . . I don’t get it.”
“Son, we both know how to care for the flag, and we both felt bad about seeing it drag around in the dirt. Someone taught each of us to fold a flag properly, so we could work together just fine.”
“So you both just knew?”
“We knew we needed to . . . keep the faith. We owed it to the ones who taught us how to show respect, and those we’re showing respect for. It’s not the flag itself, really, it’s . . .”
“I know – it’s what the flag stands for that we are respecting. And the flag represents our country, right?”
“That’s right. So I hope the people living there don’t mind.”
“Won’t they be glad it was folded right?”
“Sure. And I hope they have some idea why we did it.”
“To get the flag out of the garden, and keep it clean?”
“Well, that; and about keeping the faith, with those . . .”
“Who taught you how to fold it the right way?”
“Sure.”
“You taught me how to fold it right, and we practiced. I bet I could help, next time we see a flag on the ground.”
“Then I won’t even need to have another fellow stop and come help me, will I?”
“Nope! I can help you, uh, keep the faith, Dad.”
“Thank you, Son.”
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and he’s gotten to teach many Cub Scouts how to fold flags at Camp Falling Rock. Tell him about how you’ve taught others to help “keep the faith” at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
An Errand, Interrupted and Fulfilled
In the back seat, the small boy noticed that his dad’s attention was swinging off the road in front off to one side.
The car slowed, and then bumped along the shoulder to a stop.
“Are we stopping here, dad?”
“Yes, just for a moment.”
“Should I get out?”
“No, son, just stay put. I won’t be long.”
His dad got out of the car, and walked around the front and jumped over a ditch into an unfenced back yard. Just then another car slowed and stopped on the shoulder just ahead, and another man got out of his car.
The boy watched as his father walked into a yard where a flagpole sat in a garden, with a flag dangling in the geraniums and marigolds off of a swinging rope. They had driven through a quick rainstorm preceded by stiff winds just before, and the sun was coming out accompanied by a brisk, erratic breeze.
As the boy’s dad picked the flag gently out of the flowers, he reached up to the pole where a cleat had torn loose from the pole itself. When he began to unclip the flag from the rope hanging off the pulley far above, the other man who had stopped his car walked up.
From where he sat, there was no conversation between the two adult men, just a glance at each other, and as the boy’s dad finished unclipping the United States flag, the other man picked up the striped end of Old Glory just like they had practiced at a Cub Scout meeting a few weeks before.
He watched as they stepped back from each other, smoothly folded the flag lengthwise once, twice, and then stepped even further from each other, pulling the flag taut, as the strange man began to fold and flip the flag into the proper triangles, ending as he should have with an all blue and starry triangle shaped like a tricorn hat. He handed it to the boy’s dad, and stepped back, saluted him, and walked away. The dad walked up to the porch, arms folded over the damp but properly folded flag, laid the neat bundle on a chair by the sliding glass door, and walked back to the car.
When he got inside, the other car had pulled away.
“Dad, did you know that other man?”
“No, son, he must have seen the same thing we did.”
“You mean the flag that blew down?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you know who lives there, Dad?”
“No, but it seems like they put their flag up before the storm blew through, so they wouldn’t have known that it all would have pulled apart like that. We saw it on the ground driving by earlier, and it was still there, so I just wanted to get it off the ground. That must have been what the other fellow thought, too.”
“If you didn’t know him, how did you both know . . . I don’t get it.”
“Son, we both know how to care for the flag, and we both felt bad about seeing it drag around in the dirt. Someone taught each of us to fold a flag properly, so we could work together just fine.”
“So you both just knew?”
“We knew we needed to . . . keep the faith. We owed it to the ones who taught us how to show respect, and those we’re showing respect for. It’s not the flag itself, really, it’s . . .”
“I know – it’s what the flag stands for that we are respecting. And the flag represents our country, right?”
“That’s right. So I hope the people living there don’t mind.”
“Won’t they be glad it was folded right?”
“Sure. And I hope they have some idea why we did it.”
“To get the flag out of the garden, and keep it clean?”
“Well, that; and about keeping the faith, with those . . .”
“Who taught you how to fold it the right way?”
“Sure.”
“You taught me how to fold it right, and we practiced. I bet I could help, next time we see a flag on the ground.”
“Then I won’t even need to have another fellow stop and come help me, will I?”
“Nope! I can help you, uh, keep the faith, Dad.”
“Thank you, Son.”
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and he’s gotten to teach many Cub Scouts how to fold flags at Camp Falling Rock. Tell him about how you’ve taught others to help “keep the faith” at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Faith Works 6-28-08
Jeff Gill
Calm the Waters, or Inherit the Wind
___
Troubling your own house, Proverbs 11:29 reminds us, is like sowing the whirlwind – you reap the storms you set in motion yourself.
The Licking County Players are bringing “Inherit the Wind” to their stage in July, this 1955 stage play and 1960 movie taking their title from the aforementioned text.
I should warn Brad Lepper that he now shares with me the odd distinction of playing a clergyman onstage, and I’ll be curious about how many cast members ask him theological questions through the rehearsal period.
If you have never seen this classic American play, click over to www.lickingcountyplayers.org and get tickets for their production space over on West Main St. in Newark.
Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee wrote the play to speak to McCarthyism, which for all its faults provoked a great deal of arts and literature, more than got blacklisted it would appear. I will admit to a certain ambivalence about the body of the play itself, which has many fine set pieces and great monologues and debates.
The fact that it echoes but in no way accurately represents the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee is not a problem. Plenty of great art uses reality as a starting point, but meanders into more productive rivulets and streams and rolls into a mighty river through fiction.
What I trace down to today from that wellspring is the beginning in popular culture of the image of the angry evangelist, the wild-eyed, hot-headed, truth-trimming, ultimately hypocritical preacher fellow who is now so much a stereotype that no comment, seemingly, is necessary.
Popular culture is key here because “Elmer Gantry” was written by Sinclair Lewis in the late 1920’s, but was controversial and not greeted with much approval outside of the literati; a play based on the novel didn’t last a month. The movie, which is how most people know the ol’ rapscallion, played by Burt Lancaster, came out just after “Inherit the Wind” was filmed and only with the major success of the play clearing out the space for it to thrive.
Are there Elmer Gantry and Jeremiah Brown sorts out there, filled with rage and hypocrisy? Yep. I’ve met ‘em, and suspect I can see it in the eyes of more than a few you can catch on TV between requests for money. Steve Martin did a stellar update of the genre which I love, the movie “Leap of Faith.” Go rent it and see what you think.
What I resist is the pull of the notion that Rev. Brown represents much of anything widespread or essential to Christian communities around the US, whether in 1925 or today. In fact, Clarence Darrow could not say enough about the good cheer and courtesy extended him throughout his stay in Dayton, TN by the locals; his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who actually did die in Dayton five days after the trial ended, was a political progressive whose faith led him to rail against greed and robber barons of the “Gilded Age” and Roaring 20’s.
He was also one of far too few who spoke against the growing popularity in the 1920’s of eugenics, the “sterilization of the unfit” and the need to “weed and cull” mental defectives and physically deformed from the “healthy population.” No less a figure in evolutionary studies than Stephen Jay Gould has said that Bryan’s passion was to preach against “Social Darwinsim” more than evolutionary theory itself.
So go see “Inherit the Wind” and reflect on all it has to say about human nature, and eternal ends, but keep in mind the people and personages of the town are not what was, nor are they what is.
Five years after Bryan died, friends and supporters endowed a college in Dayton which is, of course, named “Bryan College.” Their motto is “Christ Above All.” And on Bryan’s tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery (he served as Secretary of State as well as in Congress for Nebraska) are the words “He Kept the Faith.”
The monument I most like for Bryan is another thing not in the play. When the judge found Scopes guilty of teaching evolution and imposed the minimum fine of $100, Bryan insisted on paying it for him.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s got some untold stories about Charles Darwin he wants to tell soon, too. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Calm the Waters, or Inherit the Wind
___
Troubling your own house, Proverbs 11:29 reminds us, is like sowing the whirlwind – you reap the storms you set in motion yourself.
The Licking County Players are bringing “Inherit the Wind” to their stage in July, this 1955 stage play and 1960 movie taking their title from the aforementioned text.
I should warn Brad Lepper that he now shares with me the odd distinction of playing a clergyman onstage, and I’ll be curious about how many cast members ask him theological questions through the rehearsal period.
If you have never seen this classic American play, click over to www.lickingcountyplayers.org and get tickets for their production space over on West Main St. in Newark.
Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee wrote the play to speak to McCarthyism, which for all its faults provoked a great deal of arts and literature, more than got blacklisted it would appear. I will admit to a certain ambivalence about the body of the play itself, which has many fine set pieces and great monologues and debates.
The fact that it echoes but in no way accurately represents the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee is not a problem. Plenty of great art uses reality as a starting point, but meanders into more productive rivulets and streams and rolls into a mighty river through fiction.
What I trace down to today from that wellspring is the beginning in popular culture of the image of the angry evangelist, the wild-eyed, hot-headed, truth-trimming, ultimately hypocritical preacher fellow who is now so much a stereotype that no comment, seemingly, is necessary.
Popular culture is key here because “Elmer Gantry” was written by Sinclair Lewis in the late 1920’s, but was controversial and not greeted with much approval outside of the literati; a play based on the novel didn’t last a month. The movie, which is how most people know the ol’ rapscallion, played by Burt Lancaster, came out just after “Inherit the Wind” was filmed and only with the major success of the play clearing out the space for it to thrive.
Are there Elmer Gantry and Jeremiah Brown sorts out there, filled with rage and hypocrisy? Yep. I’ve met ‘em, and suspect I can see it in the eyes of more than a few you can catch on TV between requests for money. Steve Martin did a stellar update of the genre which I love, the movie “Leap of Faith.” Go rent it and see what you think.
What I resist is the pull of the notion that Rev. Brown represents much of anything widespread or essential to Christian communities around the US, whether in 1925 or today. In fact, Clarence Darrow could not say enough about the good cheer and courtesy extended him throughout his stay in Dayton, TN by the locals; his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who actually did die in Dayton five days after the trial ended, was a political progressive whose faith led him to rail against greed and robber barons of the “Gilded Age” and Roaring 20’s.
He was also one of far too few who spoke against the growing popularity in the 1920’s of eugenics, the “sterilization of the unfit” and the need to “weed and cull” mental defectives and physically deformed from the “healthy population.” No less a figure in evolutionary studies than Stephen Jay Gould has said that Bryan’s passion was to preach against “Social Darwinsim” more than evolutionary theory itself.
So go see “Inherit the Wind” and reflect on all it has to say about human nature, and eternal ends, but keep in mind the people and personages of the town are not what was, nor are they what is.
Five years after Bryan died, friends and supporters endowed a college in Dayton which is, of course, named “Bryan College.” Their motto is “Christ Above All.” And on Bryan’s tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery (he served as Secretary of State as well as in Congress for Nebraska) are the words “He Kept the Faith.”
The monument I most like for Bryan is another thing not in the play. When the judge found Scopes guilty of teaching evolution and imposed the minimum fine of $100, Bryan insisted on paying it for him.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s got some untold stories about Charles Darwin he wants to tell soon, too. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Notes From My Knapsack – Granville Sentinel, July 2008
Jeff Gill
“Had We But World Enough, and Time”
Andrew Marvell was speaking “To His Coy Mistress,” not to the 2008 election season, but there is a fair sense of urgency in the presentations on both sides of the ballot.
(Pace to all Nader, Paul, and Barr supporters.)
Marvell goes on to hearken to “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” and to consider the reams of print material available online, in magazines, and from street corner fliers stuffed into your unwilling hands even a speed reader might sense “Deserts of vast eternity” before them.
May I recommend books? Seriously, if you want to get up to speed with the full range of opinion on both sides, you might find that the old fashioned print volume does you more good than a stack of magazines. You check the table of contents and index for guideposts and benchmarks where your particular interests are addressed, and flipping back and forth is still an area where the technology of printed and bound pages has no peer. (These are all available in the libraries of Granville, Newark, or Denison, too.)
This is all presuming that there are some who haven’t entirely made up their minds, McCainiacs with qualms and Obamacans with hesitations, plus us mushy middle slow thinkers.
Start with their own books: Obama has famously penned his own two, well worth the time to read right through, “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” McCain works with Mark Salter of his staff to write “Worth the Fighting For” and “Faith of My Fathers.”
On the current war, whatever you call it, to get a good diversity of views: “Fiasco” by Tom Ricks of the Washington Post, along with “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama from the distant past of 1992 to see part of the basis for said leap into the heart of darkness (yeah, and read that, too, in a collected Joseph Conrad). Douglas Feith’s “War and Decision” gives the view from inside of the choices that led into Iraq.
“The Assassin’s Gate” by George Packer is the wide view of the Middle East today, and a contrasting but well-reasoned complement is Bernard Lewis’ “The Crisis of Islam.”
Climate change and biotech are intertwined but crucial areas where science and politics intersect with public awareness, and we need to be thinking more clearly than we are about those areas: “Panic in Level 4” is new and excellent, by Richard Preston, author of “The Hot Zone,” and “Cell of Cells” is accessible to the general reader as well thanks to the careful work of Cynthia Fox.
Try the older “Earth In the Balance” from 1992, which reads better than “An Inconvenient Truth” does as a book, both of course by Al Gore; compare to Bjorn Lomborg’s “Cool It.”
And wrap it all up by getting out some Wendell Berry, specifically “The Art of the Commonplace” and “Citizenship Papers.” You might want to read the poetry of “A Timbered Choir” or “The Country of Marriage” just to wash away the taste of politics.
(Psst: Tues., Aug. 12, No Child Left Inside Day!)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a good read or tale or idea at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
“Had We But World Enough, and Time”
Andrew Marvell was speaking “To His Coy Mistress,” not to the 2008 election season, but there is a fair sense of urgency in the presentations on both sides of the ballot.
(Pace to all Nader, Paul, and Barr supporters.)
Marvell goes on to hearken to “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” and to consider the reams of print material available online, in magazines, and from street corner fliers stuffed into your unwilling hands even a speed reader might sense “Deserts of vast eternity” before them.
May I recommend books? Seriously, if you want to get up to speed with the full range of opinion on both sides, you might find that the old fashioned print volume does you more good than a stack of magazines. You check the table of contents and index for guideposts and benchmarks where your particular interests are addressed, and flipping back and forth is still an area where the technology of printed and bound pages has no peer. (These are all available in the libraries of Granville, Newark, or Denison, too.)
This is all presuming that there are some who haven’t entirely made up their minds, McCainiacs with qualms and Obamacans with hesitations, plus us mushy middle slow thinkers.
Start with their own books: Obama has famously penned his own two, well worth the time to read right through, “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” McCain works with Mark Salter of his staff to write “Worth the Fighting For” and “Faith of My Fathers.”
On the current war, whatever you call it, to get a good diversity of views: “Fiasco” by Tom Ricks of the Washington Post, along with “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama from the distant past of 1992 to see part of the basis for said leap into the heart of darkness (yeah, and read that, too, in a collected Joseph Conrad). Douglas Feith’s “War and Decision” gives the view from inside of the choices that led into Iraq.
“The Assassin’s Gate” by George Packer is the wide view of the Middle East today, and a contrasting but well-reasoned complement is Bernard Lewis’ “The Crisis of Islam.”
Climate change and biotech are intertwined but crucial areas where science and politics intersect with public awareness, and we need to be thinking more clearly than we are about those areas: “Panic in Level 4” is new and excellent, by Richard Preston, author of “The Hot Zone,” and “Cell of Cells” is accessible to the general reader as well thanks to the careful work of Cynthia Fox.
Try the older “Earth In the Balance” from 1992, which reads better than “An Inconvenient Truth” does as a book, both of course by Al Gore; compare to Bjorn Lomborg’s “Cool It.”
And wrap it all up by getting out some Wendell Berry, specifically “The Art of the Commonplace” and “Citizenship Papers.” You might want to read the poetry of “A Timbered Choir” or “The Country of Marriage” just to wash away the taste of politics.
(Psst: Tues., Aug. 12, No Child Left Inside Day!)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a good read or tale or idea at knapsack77@gmail.com.
For anyone wondering why THIS is a good development, or even what all the fuss is about, i want to point out THIS photo, and note that from the right angle with a fuller understanding, we have that kind of awe and beauty and mystery available right here in Licking County.
If the National Park Service can help us get to that level of access and understanding, enabling people to see the slopes and arcs of the earthworks the way most people reflexively see the meaningfulness of fluted columns and Ionic capitals, then welcome aboard NPS!
If the National Park Service can help us get to that level of access and understanding, enabling people to see the slopes and arcs of the earthworks the way most people reflexively see the meaningfulness of fluted columns and Ionic capitals, then welcome aboard NPS!
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Notes From My Knapsack 6-26-08
Jeff Gill
No Child Left Inside – Sounds Good To Me!
Get ‘em up, get ‘em out, get ‘em bit.
Here’s my thought: can we just declare Tuesday, August 12, “No Child Left Inside Day” for Licking County?
Oh, you ask, is there a special program or event or planned activity on that date?
Nope.
That would be the point. No agenda or checklist, just kids and everything that isn’t under a roof and within HVAC serviced walls.
To be fair, I’m swiping this idea from the good folks with Project Learning Tree and their website www.learnoutside.org, supported by the Environmental Education Council of Ohio at www.eeco-online.org.
Their concern is to keep environmental education at the forefront of thinking about formal, classroom education and curricula, and I support them in their admirable endeavours. We’ve all been motivated and inspired by Richard Louv’s necessary book “Last Child In the Woods,” but that’s exactly why I’d like to suggest a Licking County “No Child Left Inside” on a Tuesday, before school starts in those classrooms, with no formal program at all.
Louv’s useful and worrisome account shows how we’ve somehow let ourselves become convinced that children are at more danger from random violence, vicious animals, and Lyme disease out roaming the woodlots and fields, than they might be endangered by the effects of sloth and obesity and sedentary electronic numbness – and I don’t just mean in their hind ends.
Just as we’ve learned the hazards of making playgrounds so safe kids no longer want to play on them, leading to lack of exercise or activity which is truly dangerous in a subtle but very real way, we need to get real about Nature.
Nature is all around us and inside our bloodstream and yes, even under our fingernails even with antibacterial soap. We need to get comfortable with soil and moss and bark and rocks again, let alone worms and mantises (yes, that creature in “Kung Fu Panda” actually exists!) and know how to behave around opossums and raccoons and even deer.
Yeah, deer. I’m fine with hunting them, but for the foreseeable future we will share our neighborhoods and our hosta with them. Do our kids know how to move around and respond to an apparently tame deer (hint: they aren’t, and their hooves can disembowel you if you aren’t careful).
Animals of all sorts deserve care and respect, which I think can include a compound bow on occasion (if you don’t believe me, watch the first five minutes of Daniel Day-Lewis and Russell Means in “The Last of the Mohicans,” a sequence that will earn the respect of a committed vegan). Kids deserve the chance to encounter Nature writ small in order to develop a proper respect of her larger manifestations, whether cervids or cyclones.
So I want to suggest this simple idea – make Tuesday, August 12 a day when we all commit to making sure that every kid spends some time outdoors, gets their knees dirty, and brings a rock home in their pockets. I’ll have some further suggestions in future weeks, but what about it? “No Child Left Inside Day” for Licking County.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your “Wild Kingdom” moment at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
No Child Left Inside – Sounds Good To Me!
Get ‘em up, get ‘em out, get ‘em bit.
Here’s my thought: can we just declare Tuesday, August 12, “No Child Left Inside Day” for Licking County?
Oh, you ask, is there a special program or event or planned activity on that date?
Nope.
That would be the point. No agenda or checklist, just kids and everything that isn’t under a roof and within HVAC serviced walls.
To be fair, I’m swiping this idea from the good folks with Project Learning Tree and their website www.learnoutside.org, supported by the Environmental Education Council of Ohio at www.eeco-online.org.
Their concern is to keep environmental education at the forefront of thinking about formal, classroom education and curricula, and I support them in their admirable endeavours. We’ve all been motivated and inspired by Richard Louv’s necessary book “Last Child In the Woods,” but that’s exactly why I’d like to suggest a Licking County “No Child Left Inside” on a Tuesday, before school starts in those classrooms, with no formal program at all.
Louv’s useful and worrisome account shows how we’ve somehow let ourselves become convinced that children are at more danger from random violence, vicious animals, and Lyme disease out roaming the woodlots and fields, than they might be endangered by the effects of sloth and obesity and sedentary electronic numbness – and I don’t just mean in their hind ends.
Just as we’ve learned the hazards of making playgrounds so safe kids no longer want to play on them, leading to lack of exercise or activity which is truly dangerous in a subtle but very real way, we need to get real about Nature.
Nature is all around us and inside our bloodstream and yes, even under our fingernails even with antibacterial soap. We need to get comfortable with soil and moss and bark and rocks again, let alone worms and mantises (yes, that creature in “Kung Fu Panda” actually exists!) and know how to behave around opossums and raccoons and even deer.
Yeah, deer. I’m fine with hunting them, but for the foreseeable future we will share our neighborhoods and our hosta with them. Do our kids know how to move around and respond to an apparently tame deer (hint: they aren’t, and their hooves can disembowel you if you aren’t careful).
Animals of all sorts deserve care and respect, which I think can include a compound bow on occasion (if you don’t believe me, watch the first five minutes of Daniel Day-Lewis and Russell Means in “The Last of the Mohicans,” a sequence that will earn the respect of a committed vegan). Kids deserve the chance to encounter Nature writ small in order to develop a proper respect of her larger manifestations, whether cervids or cyclones.
So I want to suggest this simple idea – make Tuesday, August 12 a day when we all commit to making sure that every kid spends some time outdoors, gets their knees dirty, and brings a rock home in their pockets. I’ll have some further suggestions in future weeks, but what about it? “No Child Left Inside Day” for Licking County.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your “Wild Kingdom” moment at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Faith Works 6-21-08
Jeff Gill
Party A and Party B Approach the Counter
June is the month for weddings, and California wants us to be in the mood for love.
You’ve heard about the big news in California, no doubt, where the blanks on marriage licenses are no longer labeled “Bride” and “Groom” but “Party A” and “Party B.”
How to decide which half of the couple gets to be A and who’s stuck with B we leave for future litigation . . . and there will be litigation, of that there is no doubt whatsoever.
Just in case I haven’t bothered and confused everyone, here’s what I see coming. In the not-too-distant future, “civil union for the purposes of maintaining a joint household” will be the norm, with special provisions for said unions with children under the law.
In other words, we’re all looking at “Party A” and “Party B” someday soon when it comes to the legal portion of what we currently call “marriage.”
Keep this in mind – clergy already have a state-mandated, legal hoop through which we jump, in order to have the legal standing to “solemnize” or legally sign a valid license to marry. The hoop is neither tiny nor high, but there is a hoop (and when I got mine, it was $10 to Sherrod Brown, but I suspect that’s gone up). To make valid a license issued by the Licking County Common Pleas Court under the Juvenile-Probate Court, you need a judge, a mayor, a magistrate, or a religious leader certified by the Secretary of State to have the limited, quasi-notary like power to sign said license.
What religious people may not entirely understand is that while there is currently a major overlap between church language and state language on marriage, this is going to change. What we need to protect is the right of religious groups and clergy to conduct “weddings” only for those parties they understand to be in a position to enter into a valid marriage. This may or may not overlap with the state categories, which will go through a wide range of changes these next few election cycles.
And I’m willing to say that’s all well and good for any state, or the State of Ohio, as long as you don’t try to force Catholic Christian priests to conduct marriage ceremonies for those who have been married and divorced, or Evangelical Christian pastors to join same-sex couples together, and so on. The “civil right” of a religious body to affirm whichever couples they see fit to join within their religious tradition will need defending.
Likewise, we religious folk need to understand that words like marriage and wedding and solemnize will be steadily emptied of their theological meaning, if not removed entirely from the wording of the Ohio Revised Code, requiring us to be ever more clear about what we mean when we use those words in church.
And we religious folk will really appreciate it if those in favor of civil unions, or gay marriage, or whatever phrase is popularly accepted, understand that aside from theological scruples, there are quite a few folks who are not even faith oriented at all, who join with various faith communities to ask: Do we know what it is we’re monkeying around with here? Do we really get it that treating the partners, entering into a shared home with the assumption of the possibility of children, as interchangeable units regardless of gender or commitment, could become an experiment with massive unintended consequences?
To which the usual chorus of “yes, but slavery and racism and xenophobia were around for a long time, too, along with kings and hereditary nobility, so tradition and so-called revelation may not be as reliable as you think” will rise up.
And in fact traditional churchgoers need to consider and repent of the fact that the relative inevitability of “Party A” and “Party B” has not a little to do with the widespread and casual acceptance of cohabitation and simple divorce within faith communities. If we thought marriage between a man and a woman was such a special, important thing, our actions don’t show it much, says the watching society around us. I’m talking within churches, let alone in society at large.
If we value it so little, the argument goes, then why not let those who want so much to share it have their share of the institution?
And so the experiment begins. The New York Times, bellwether of all things avant-garde, assures us that gay marriage will teach us all new ways to make marriage work even better.
The Times is also where we read in 1921 and 1936 that a rocket will never leave the Earth’s atmosphere. To be fair, they ran a retraction in July of 1969 of those assertions.
Jeff Gill is writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Party A and Party B Approach the Counter
June is the month for weddings, and California wants us to be in the mood for love.
You’ve heard about the big news in California, no doubt, where the blanks on marriage licenses are no longer labeled “Bride” and “Groom” but “Party A” and “Party B.”
How to decide which half of the couple gets to be A and who’s stuck with B we leave for future litigation . . . and there will be litigation, of that there is no doubt whatsoever.
Just in case I haven’t bothered and confused everyone, here’s what I see coming. In the not-too-distant future, “civil union for the purposes of maintaining a joint household” will be the norm, with special provisions for said unions with children under the law.
In other words, we’re all looking at “Party A” and “Party B” someday soon when it comes to the legal portion of what we currently call “marriage.”
Keep this in mind – clergy already have a state-mandated, legal hoop through which we jump, in order to have the legal standing to “solemnize” or legally sign a valid license to marry. The hoop is neither tiny nor high, but there is a hoop (and when I got mine, it was $10 to Sherrod Brown, but I suspect that’s gone up). To make valid a license issued by the Licking County Common Pleas Court under the Juvenile-Probate Court, you need a judge, a mayor, a magistrate, or a religious leader certified by the Secretary of State to have the limited, quasi-notary like power to sign said license.
What religious people may not entirely understand is that while there is currently a major overlap between church language and state language on marriage, this is going to change. What we need to protect is the right of religious groups and clergy to conduct “weddings” only for those parties they understand to be in a position to enter into a valid marriage. This may or may not overlap with the state categories, which will go through a wide range of changes these next few election cycles.
And I’m willing to say that’s all well and good for any state, or the State of Ohio, as long as you don’t try to force Catholic Christian priests to conduct marriage ceremonies for those who have been married and divorced, or Evangelical Christian pastors to join same-sex couples together, and so on. The “civil right” of a religious body to affirm whichever couples they see fit to join within their religious tradition will need defending.
Likewise, we religious folk need to understand that words like marriage and wedding and solemnize will be steadily emptied of their theological meaning, if not removed entirely from the wording of the Ohio Revised Code, requiring us to be ever more clear about what we mean when we use those words in church.
And we religious folk will really appreciate it if those in favor of civil unions, or gay marriage, or whatever phrase is popularly accepted, understand that aside from theological scruples, there are quite a few folks who are not even faith oriented at all, who join with various faith communities to ask: Do we know what it is we’re monkeying around with here? Do we really get it that treating the partners, entering into a shared home with the assumption of the possibility of children, as interchangeable units regardless of gender or commitment, could become an experiment with massive unintended consequences?
To which the usual chorus of “yes, but slavery and racism and xenophobia were around for a long time, too, along with kings and hereditary nobility, so tradition and so-called revelation may not be as reliable as you think” will rise up.
And in fact traditional churchgoers need to consider and repent of the fact that the relative inevitability of “Party A” and “Party B” has not a little to do with the widespread and casual acceptance of cohabitation and simple divorce within faith communities. If we thought marriage between a man and a woman was such a special, important thing, our actions don’t show it much, says the watching society around us. I’m talking within churches, let alone in society at large.
If we value it so little, the argument goes, then why not let those who want so much to share it have their share of the institution?
And so the experiment begins. The New York Times, bellwether of all things avant-garde, assures us that gay marriage will teach us all new ways to make marriage work even better.
The Times is also where we read in 1921 and 1936 that a rocket will never leave the Earth’s atmosphere. To be fair, they ran a retraction in July of 1969 of those assertions.
Jeff Gill is writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Faith Works 6-14-08
Jeff Gill
Things That Aren’t Optional, Are They?
“Would you be interested in the extended warranty?”
You’ve heard that question, I’m sure, and I trust you’ve answered, “Uh, no.”
The big profit generator of recent years in retail has been to invite folks to pay extra for quality and reliability, or at least the guarantee of same.
Some call them service agreements, or a long-term service contract, or maintenance agreements. A prolonged warranty means that if you expect your goods or products to be worth purchasing, you need to pay a bit extra for that benefit. Y’know, for what you thought you were buying in the first place – quality, reliability, and standing behind your product.
You can still get that, but yer gonna pay.
Apparently fatherhood is an optional add-on now. Not that you can’t find fathers here and there, but more and more a father is an extra, almost an inconvenience, for which . . . ok, the analogy breaks down here, since they pay for the privilege of being considered a father under the law. You can do things the old way (dating, marriage, pregnancy, driving your wife to the hospital, fatherhood), but that’s going the way of getting what you pay for up front, instead of being a kind of extended warranty on your kids’ development.
As a dad, I’ve spent a goodly part of the last week driving back and forth to Camp Falling Rock out Rocky Fork way in northeastern Licking County. Summer entrance up top, helping the parking crush down at the “winter entrance” by historic Franklin Lodge, means getting out early and walking down Foxfire Trail to the flag field below Lake Peewee. 475+ kids are a new record for Cub Scout Day Camp (congrats Ric and Angie Eader for an awesome job directing), and with the loss of the Rocky Fork bridge, access is tight, tight, tight.
Coming into camp early, there’s a spot before I get to Falling Rock that has made me start slowing down in awe and delight, before I have press on to get to camp on time. There’s a home that’s being renovated up in Eden Township, and along one end of the ell, after pulling off siding and sheathing and lath and such . . .
It turns out the core of the old house isn’t just old – it’s a log cabin. Looks to me like 1820 or even earlier, yellow poplar logs shaped by broadaxe and square-joined on the corners. The act of fixing up the house has revealed the foundation of the house, its origins, the history.
Strong, solid, stable, the log cabin was there all along, but long unsuspected (I suspect). After the new sheathing and siding, and the passing of a few years, maybe even a change of owners, and the fact of the undergirding structure could be forgotten again.
It’s as we take apart the structure that we have a chance to see the roots, the origins, the reliable sub-text to what has held up the roof and kept out the weather all along.
Recent years and ongoing challenges to the very nature of marriage and family has peeled off boards and yanked siding away to reveal the basic structure beneath.
We step back from the demo work and look at the actual bones of the building and have a chance to ask – What is necessary? What is vital? What makes the core structure?
We have the chance in these rapidly changing days to assess what we think is necessary, having peeled back quite a bit of the façade of marriage and family. Tomorrow is Father’s Day, and before we start nailing up new vinyl siding or trim over the top of what is essential, we need to look at the main support beams and structural members, and figure out what needs primary maintenance.
Fathers are close to the center of the institution of family. You may be able to ornament the exterior enough to forget that those beams and rafters are there, but if you are responsible for long-term upkeep, you’d better keep them in mind.
Happy Father’s Day to every dad who’s trying to hold up his end of the deal. There’s a few stresses on the foundation, but the basic design is sound, and will hold up fine with a little preventative care. A new tie here, a fishing trip there, or maybe a little camping, and things will hold together just fine.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a Father’s Day story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Things That Aren’t Optional, Are They?
“Would you be interested in the extended warranty?”
You’ve heard that question, I’m sure, and I trust you’ve answered, “Uh, no.”
The big profit generator of recent years in retail has been to invite folks to pay extra for quality and reliability, or at least the guarantee of same.
Some call them service agreements, or a long-term service contract, or maintenance agreements. A prolonged warranty means that if you expect your goods or products to be worth purchasing, you need to pay a bit extra for that benefit. Y’know, for what you thought you were buying in the first place – quality, reliability, and standing behind your product.
You can still get that, but yer gonna pay.
Apparently fatherhood is an optional add-on now. Not that you can’t find fathers here and there, but more and more a father is an extra, almost an inconvenience, for which . . . ok, the analogy breaks down here, since they pay for the privilege of being considered a father under the law. You can do things the old way (dating, marriage, pregnancy, driving your wife to the hospital, fatherhood), but that’s going the way of getting what you pay for up front, instead of being a kind of extended warranty on your kids’ development.
As a dad, I’ve spent a goodly part of the last week driving back and forth to Camp Falling Rock out Rocky Fork way in northeastern Licking County. Summer entrance up top, helping the parking crush down at the “winter entrance” by historic Franklin Lodge, means getting out early and walking down Foxfire Trail to the flag field below Lake Peewee. 475+ kids are a new record for Cub Scout Day Camp (congrats Ric and Angie Eader for an awesome job directing), and with the loss of the Rocky Fork bridge, access is tight, tight, tight.
Coming into camp early, there’s a spot before I get to Falling Rock that has made me start slowing down in awe and delight, before I have press on to get to camp on time. There’s a home that’s being renovated up in Eden Township, and along one end of the ell, after pulling off siding and sheathing and lath and such . . .
It turns out the core of the old house isn’t just old – it’s a log cabin. Looks to me like 1820 or even earlier, yellow poplar logs shaped by broadaxe and square-joined on the corners. The act of fixing up the house has revealed the foundation of the house, its origins, the history.
Strong, solid, stable, the log cabin was there all along, but long unsuspected (I suspect). After the new sheathing and siding, and the passing of a few years, maybe even a change of owners, and the fact of the undergirding structure could be forgotten again.
It’s as we take apart the structure that we have a chance to see the roots, the origins, the reliable sub-text to what has held up the roof and kept out the weather all along.
Recent years and ongoing challenges to the very nature of marriage and family has peeled off boards and yanked siding away to reveal the basic structure beneath.
We step back from the demo work and look at the actual bones of the building and have a chance to ask – What is necessary? What is vital? What makes the core structure?
We have the chance in these rapidly changing days to assess what we think is necessary, having peeled back quite a bit of the façade of marriage and family. Tomorrow is Father’s Day, and before we start nailing up new vinyl siding or trim over the top of what is essential, we need to look at the main support beams and structural members, and figure out what needs primary maintenance.
Fathers are close to the center of the institution of family. You may be able to ornament the exterior enough to forget that those beams and rafters are there, but if you are responsible for long-term upkeep, you’d better keep them in mind.
Happy Father’s Day to every dad who’s trying to hold up his end of the deal. There’s a few stresses on the foundation, but the basic design is sound, and will hold up fine with a little preventative care. A new tie here, a fishing trip there, or maybe a little camping, and things will hold together just fine.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a Father’s Day story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Notes From My Knapsack 6-12-08
Jeff Gill
Why A Knapsack?
Howdy!
You may have read one of my columns before, and I’ve written the stray piece or two for the Sentinel, but an introduction seems in order.
I’ve lived in Licking County since 1989 with a sojourn in West Virginia, and resided in Granville since 2004. That makes me a new guy, but with my historical interests, I get to sound like I’ve been around here for ages.
My knapsack represents the odd stuff I pick up as I meander around the terrain of the Land of Legend, and then I pull items out and tell stories about them. The knapsack is not quite entirely virtual, but pixels and links are more and more part of what I lug around.
Six months or so ago a very rude and profane site called Cracked.com (you’ve been warned) ran a very useful piece about “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable.” This is exactly the kind of bright shiny object I pick up and stuff in my knapsack and bring out later to tell you about, and this summer seems like a good time to pull out this one.
Number one is that we don’t have enough annoying strangers in our lives. Sound crazy? Here’s David Wong’s point in a nutshell: “The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it.” And we can use technology to edit all kinds of everyday aggravation out of our day – this may not be as good a deal as you might think.
Two: We don’t have enough annoying friends, either. No, really. Older folks grew up in towns they had to go fight Hitler to get out of; lacking Hitler, you had to learn to get along with some real hard cases (not to say head cases).
Three and Four are about texting and e-mail, and the fact that they are forms of communication, but just barely. If anthropologists can tell us that 93 percent of a statement’s impact is communicated non-verbally, no wonder we get so many misunderstandings with virtual comm. 7% doesn’t give us much margin for error.
Five has to do with the fact that we handle criticism poorly, but can dish it out invisibly, behind masks and aliases, instantly and around the world. Six speaks to the “Outrage Machine,” which is a whole column in itself .
And Seven addresses why we “feel worthless,” suggesting that it’s “because we actually are worth less. There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about: They demand less from you.”
We’re working on building a new Granville in the middle of the olde village, a smaller place where folks knew each other face to face, over the butcher’s block and around the blacksmith’s forge. We want those vital connections, but we want out wi-fi, too.
My plan is to keep picking up those pieces of the older way of being, and keep looking for ways to fit them into the mosaic of a diverse, new, but tradition rich Granville. Hope you’ll enjoy puzzling along the path with me!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Why A Knapsack?
Howdy!
You may have read one of my columns before, and I’ve written the stray piece or two for the Sentinel, but an introduction seems in order.
I’ve lived in Licking County since 1989 with a sojourn in West Virginia, and resided in Granville since 2004. That makes me a new guy, but with my historical interests, I get to sound like I’ve been around here for ages.
My knapsack represents the odd stuff I pick up as I meander around the terrain of the Land of Legend, and then I pull items out and tell stories about them. The knapsack is not quite entirely virtual, but pixels and links are more and more part of what I lug around.
Six months or so ago a very rude and profane site called Cracked.com (you’ve been warned) ran a very useful piece about “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable.” This is exactly the kind of bright shiny object I pick up and stuff in my knapsack and bring out later to tell you about, and this summer seems like a good time to pull out this one.
Number one is that we don’t have enough annoying strangers in our lives. Sound crazy? Here’s David Wong’s point in a nutshell: “The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it.” And we can use technology to edit all kinds of everyday aggravation out of our day – this may not be as good a deal as you might think.
Two: We don’t have enough annoying friends, either. No, really. Older folks grew up in towns they had to go fight Hitler to get out of; lacking Hitler, you had to learn to get along with some real hard cases (not to say head cases).
Three and Four are about texting and e-mail, and the fact that they are forms of communication, but just barely. If anthropologists can tell us that 93 percent of a statement’s impact is communicated non-verbally, no wonder we get so many misunderstandings with virtual comm. 7% doesn’t give us much margin for error.
Five has to do with the fact that we handle criticism poorly, but can dish it out invisibly, behind masks and aliases, instantly and around the world. Six speaks to the “Outrage Machine,” which is a whole column in itself .
And Seven addresses why we “feel worthless,” suggesting that it’s “because we actually are worth less. There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about: They demand less from you.”
We’re working on building a new Granville in the middle of the olde village, a smaller place where folks knew each other face to face, over the butcher’s block and around the blacksmith’s forge. We want those vital connections, but we want out wi-fi, too.
My plan is to keep picking up those pieces of the older way of being, and keep looking for ways to fit them into the mosaic of a diverse, new, but tradition rich Granville. Hope you’ll enjoy puzzling along the path with me!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Friday, June 06, 2008
Notes From My Knapsack 6-8-08
Jeff Gill
Six and a half years ago, about 340 weekly columns before this one alongside a smattering of cover stories and stray features, I got a chance to write for the Booster.
Maybe it was “The Community Booster” then, or we should say “Booster Snapshots” now, or you may just say “that free weekly thing the Advocate folks put out,” but it’s part of the long, proud history of print journalism in Licking County.
The Advocate is the oldest continuously operating business in Licking County, starting in 1820. They get the nod for printing under the same name, even as owners and editors have changed (kind of like an inn, come to think of it, but while The Buxton Inn’s building goes back straight to 1812, they’ve had a few different names through the centuries).
Benjamin Briggs was a young man in an unprepossessing town when he printed the first issues in 1820; the Advocate has seen many competitors over the years come and go, buying and being bought by some of those business concerns.
The Newspaper Network of Central Ohio is part of the larger Gannett Corporation, of which “USA Today” is our cousin. They are diversifying out into various print and online media formats, which means new opportunities for some . . .
. . . and endings for others. This is, I’m told, the last “Booster” (however you dress up the name, “Booster” has been good enough for most purposes). You’ll still see “The Advertiser” showing up in bags and bunches hither and yon, as our free weekly for a now multi-county area, with news highlights from our “Advocate” colleagues.
“The Granville Sentinel” was a competitor through the 1970’s and 80’s with “The Granville Booster,” both weeklies in the shadow of the legendary “Granville Times” and all the way back to Sereno Wright’s “The Wanderer” that rose up to dispute Newark’s upstart newspaper in 1822. (Sereno was a printer from Vermont who had put out a “Weekly Wanderer” back East from 1801 to 1811, so the printer’s ink runs deep in Licking County veins, back to the auld sod.)
I’m delighted to say that “Notes From My Knapsack” will have some kind of regular place in the pages of the “Sentinel,” where the Op-Ed pages host a distinguished company of columnists, like Bill Nichols and Scottie Cochrane’s husband, plus a guy who’s always right.
This, I cannot claim.
So the torrent of verbiage will be diverted, but not stilled. Many of you have been kind enough to share your corrections, dissentions, and disputations with me by e-mail and in person on sidewalks and buffet lines all over Licking County, and I truly have been enriched by those interactions. My best hope is that between the “Sentinel” and my weekly “Faith Works” column in the Saturday Advocate, and perhaps even preaching or telling a story in your neck of the woods, we’ll all stay in touch.
Friends, it has been a pleasure.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; you can still tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, and who knows where it will come out, but it’s all grist for the mill, which still turns.
Jeff Gill
Six and a half years ago, about 340 weekly columns before this one alongside a smattering of cover stories and stray features, I got a chance to write for the Booster.
Maybe it was “The Community Booster” then, or we should say “Booster Snapshots” now, or you may just say “that free weekly thing the Advocate folks put out,” but it’s part of the long, proud history of print journalism in Licking County.
The Advocate is the oldest continuously operating business in Licking County, starting in 1820. They get the nod for printing under the same name, even as owners and editors have changed (kind of like an inn, come to think of it, but while The Buxton Inn’s building goes back straight to 1812, they’ve had a few different names through the centuries).
Benjamin Briggs was a young man in an unprepossessing town when he printed the first issues in 1820; the Advocate has seen many competitors over the years come and go, buying and being bought by some of those business concerns.
The Newspaper Network of Central Ohio is part of the larger Gannett Corporation, of which “USA Today” is our cousin. They are diversifying out into various print and online media formats, which means new opportunities for some . . .
. . . and endings for others. This is, I’m told, the last “Booster” (however you dress up the name, “Booster” has been good enough for most purposes). You’ll still see “The Advertiser” showing up in bags and bunches hither and yon, as our free weekly for a now multi-county area, with news highlights from our “Advocate” colleagues.
“The Granville Sentinel” was a competitor through the 1970’s and 80’s with “The Granville Booster,” both weeklies in the shadow of the legendary “Granville Times” and all the way back to Sereno Wright’s “The Wanderer” that rose up to dispute Newark’s upstart newspaper in 1822. (Sereno was a printer from Vermont who had put out a “Weekly Wanderer” back East from 1801 to 1811, so the printer’s ink runs deep in Licking County veins, back to the auld sod.)
I’m delighted to say that “Notes From My Knapsack” will have some kind of regular place in the pages of the “Sentinel,” where the Op-Ed pages host a distinguished company of columnists, like Bill Nichols and Scottie Cochrane’s husband, plus a guy who’s always right.
This, I cannot claim.
So the torrent of verbiage will be diverted, but not stilled. Many of you have been kind enough to share your corrections, dissentions, and disputations with me by e-mail and in person on sidewalks and buffet lines all over Licking County, and I truly have been enriched by those interactions. My best hope is that between the “Sentinel” and my weekly “Faith Works” column in the Saturday Advocate, and perhaps even preaching or telling a story in your neck of the woods, we’ll all stay in touch.
Friends, it has been a pleasure.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; you can still tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, and who knows where it will come out, but it’s all grist for the mill, which still turns.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Faith Works 6-7-08
Jeff Gill
VBS Is Better Than CBS, NBC, & ABC Put Together!
School’s out for the Little Guy, so we were walking down the street on a sunny weekday morning when a blimp flew overhead, going opposite our direction.
We stopped to crane our necks and watch (he’s 10, so not too awful long), and marvel at the size and delicacy of the huge oval shape sliding almost silently past us.
Then we went on to climb Sugarloaf in Granville with a hundred of our closest friends!
This rain has kept kids indoors, just as we got them back from their public education calendar, and likely has quite a few of us parents at home thinking of Vacation Bible School.
VBS is one of those old traditions that is being repackaged for modern tastes, like praise worship and screen projection in worship or e-mail newsletters. There are still some traditional models rolling down the road, and different ways to do VBS right around the corner.
Starting this week, many congregations will hold a series of sessions, some in the morning, quite a few in the evening. Many will start Monday bright and early, while a few hold a registration night on Sunday. More and more you see churches hold their closing ceremony on Thursday, since so many families head away Friday after work, but others plow right through to Saturday.
In Granville, many of the downtown churches do a joint “Ecumenical VBS” which is this week, rotating locations and responsibilities and sharing the work and the joy.
(I’d drop by, but this is also the week of Cub Scout Day Camp at Camp Falling Rock, where oddly enough I’ll be . . . telling stories; they start on Tuesday, with a picnic and closing on Friday and a few of the older Cubs camping out that evening.)
Down in Buckeye Lake, Water’s Edge Ministry is offering a VBS at 11 am from Monday to Thursday for the next week, June 14 to 17. And I get to tell some stories about Joseph and his sibling rivalries at that one!
So if you’re thinking about VBS for your kids, a few friendly reminders to all. First, check the days and times, because “they way we’ve/they’ve always done it” isn’t, anymore. Just because your neighbor says “oh, I’m sure it starts tomorrow” doesn’t mean anything – drive by and look for a sign, since most churches with a VBS put one out, along with posters down at the local businesses or restaurants.
And if you are driving around the county, and think “hey, didn’t I see the same sign and theme somewhere else?” – you aren’t losing your mind! There are a number of Christian publishing companies that put together “VBS kits” with a theme each summer and includes posters and banners and all the curriculum materials, and it’s pretty common for more than one church in an area to buy the same kit.
What that doesn’t mean is that, if you’re used to having your kid go to multiple VBS’s, that it will be the same. Everyone personalizes their kit, and no two churches will use the package in quite the same way.
Finally, if you’re thinking about wanting to check out a church but don’t actually attend there, and wonder “will my child be welcome there?” The not-so-secret secret is that folks like you are a big reason behind why congregations put on Vacation Bible School. Part of the reason is to give a big boost to the kids’ chances to learn faith content and Bible teachings, but reaching out to families that haven’t decided to attend on Sundays is even bigger.
It really can be a chance to see the inside of the building dressed however you normally would on a weekday, talk to some of the members without feeling any “when do I stand up or sit down” pressure, and at the closing you’ll get a taste of the worship and teachings of that church.
The next two weeks will see ‘em sprout like mushrooms around Licking County, and often there’s another burst of ‘em at summer’s end right before school starts; but there will hardly be a week these next couple months when there isn’t a VBS in session somewhere near you.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s told stories at quite a few VBS’s, where you have the audience’s complete attention until someone says “Snack Time!” Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
VBS Is Better Than CBS, NBC, & ABC Put Together!
School’s out for the Little Guy, so we were walking down the street on a sunny weekday morning when a blimp flew overhead, going opposite our direction.
We stopped to crane our necks and watch (he’s 10, so not too awful long), and marvel at the size and delicacy of the huge oval shape sliding almost silently past us.
Then we went on to climb Sugarloaf in Granville with a hundred of our closest friends!
This rain has kept kids indoors, just as we got them back from their public education calendar, and likely has quite a few of us parents at home thinking of Vacation Bible School.
VBS is one of those old traditions that is being repackaged for modern tastes, like praise worship and screen projection in worship or e-mail newsletters. There are still some traditional models rolling down the road, and different ways to do VBS right around the corner.
Starting this week, many congregations will hold a series of sessions, some in the morning, quite a few in the evening. Many will start Monday bright and early, while a few hold a registration night on Sunday. More and more you see churches hold their closing ceremony on Thursday, since so many families head away Friday after work, but others plow right through to Saturday.
In Granville, many of the downtown churches do a joint “Ecumenical VBS” which is this week, rotating locations and responsibilities and sharing the work and the joy.
(I’d drop by, but this is also the week of Cub Scout Day Camp at Camp Falling Rock, where oddly enough I’ll be . . . telling stories; they start on Tuesday, with a picnic and closing on Friday and a few of the older Cubs camping out that evening.)
Down in Buckeye Lake, Water’s Edge Ministry is offering a VBS at 11 am from Monday to Thursday for the next week, June 14 to 17. And I get to tell some stories about Joseph and his sibling rivalries at that one!
So if you’re thinking about VBS for your kids, a few friendly reminders to all. First, check the days and times, because “they way we’ve/they’ve always done it” isn’t, anymore. Just because your neighbor says “oh, I’m sure it starts tomorrow” doesn’t mean anything – drive by and look for a sign, since most churches with a VBS put one out, along with posters down at the local businesses or restaurants.
And if you are driving around the county, and think “hey, didn’t I see the same sign and theme somewhere else?” – you aren’t losing your mind! There are a number of Christian publishing companies that put together “VBS kits” with a theme each summer and includes posters and banners and all the curriculum materials, and it’s pretty common for more than one church in an area to buy the same kit.
What that doesn’t mean is that, if you’re used to having your kid go to multiple VBS’s, that it will be the same. Everyone personalizes their kit, and no two churches will use the package in quite the same way.
Finally, if you’re thinking about wanting to check out a church but don’t actually attend there, and wonder “will my child be welcome there?” The not-so-secret secret is that folks like you are a big reason behind why congregations put on Vacation Bible School. Part of the reason is to give a big boost to the kids’ chances to learn faith content and Bible teachings, but reaching out to families that haven’t decided to attend on Sundays is even bigger.
It really can be a chance to see the inside of the building dressed however you normally would on a weekday, talk to some of the members without feeling any “when do I stand up or sit down” pressure, and at the closing you’ll get a taste of the worship and teachings of that church.
The next two weeks will see ‘em sprout like mushrooms around Licking County, and often there’s another burst of ‘em at summer’s end right before school starts; but there will hardly be a week these next couple months when there isn’t a VBS in session somewhere near you.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s told stories at quite a few VBS’s, where you have the audience’s complete attention until someone says “Snack Time!” Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Faith Works 5-31-08
Jeff Gill
Ringing Up the Summer
What can I say that you don’t already know about gas prices, food costs, and the economy?
When talking heads say food costs are up 5% or so, they sound grim enough, but it seems as if the actual cost of stuff I buy regularly is up more like 15 to 20%, and convenience items are up even farther and faster
What I can say is that the trend lines are going to keep going up. The situation with global energy supplies is going to tighten, and that will increase prices for oil and natural gas which move food prices up faster than almost anything else.
Which will put more stress on the economy generally.
We have a role to play in moving towards more energy conservation and sensible, sustainable national energy policy, from our own use of natural resources to how we vote next November. If I made my living off of people taking long, leisurely trips in their cars, I’d worry right now.
For churches, that may mean fewer people gone for long stretches this summer, but it may also add up to more weekend in-state outings, so the impact on attendance is harder to predict than gas prices.
We will almost certainly see an impact on giving in the offering plates around Licking County.
Summer is often a stressful time for congregational budget makers and managers, since folks who give weekly often miss a goodly number of Sundays and don’t always make up their giving for those weeks, or wait until after Labor Day. Meanwhile, bills still come in about as regularly as they do in October or April. If your church doesn’t carry much of a cushion, there can be few options for a pastor or treasurer.
To put it bluntly, it can mean no paychecks in August if all the dominoes fall the wrong way.
So the usual plea goes out, and I’ll echo – don’t forget your regular giving at home during vacation time. No matter how solid the circumstances of your faith community, cash flow crunches can create real problems for outreach and ministry.
Some folks even wonder about how to support their church after they leave on an, um, permanent vacation. If you are doing estate planning, take your annual giving, multiply it times 20, and that amount in a memorial account should produce your annual gift in perpetuity. Talk to the folks over at the Licking County Foundation or your bank’s trust department to see if I’m talking sense or not.
Meanwhile, this may be a very good summer to look at your church and church building and think about energy consumption. Do you have automatic thermostats? Sensor lights in bathrooms, that kick on when someone enters and kick off after a long enough time of no motion?
What about solar panels on the roof? Geothermal in the lawn? Or just having the trustees change the filters in the HVAC system?
A few words from www.theoildrum.com that have an impact on what stewardship might need mean: “Oil is still very cheap. Bottled spring water at $2 per litre works out at $318 per barrel. Oil is fundamental to our lives for transportation and a myriad products ranging from plastic to pesticides. Unlike spring water, oil is finite and costs significantly more to find and produce. The price of oil will continue to rise until the world as a whole decides it can do with less or until meaningful volumes of energy substitution take root.”
Speaking as a Christian pastor, the only commodities I’m called upon to preach as limitless are God’s love, and Christ’s forgiveness. Creation itself is made to exist within limits, the bounds set by God “in the beginning” for this life, and our living of that gift.
If we continue to live as if the limits of creation do not apply to us, then we are setting ourselves up as gods, and there is a price to pay for that kind of ultimate misunderstanding. From the Tower of Babel to the Golden Calf to Annanias and Sapphira, when we choose to step across certain limits, there are consequences. Our way of life can be scattered, dispersed, even ended.
Will we find our place, or be forced to accept certain consequences? “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. . .” and it may be time to conserve and not consume. Or wait for $5 and even $8 a gallon to teach us what Ecclesiastes is saying in this generation.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he keeps a little solar fan in a western window, just because. Tell him how you plan to conserve creation at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Ringing Up the Summer
What can I say that you don’t already know about gas prices, food costs, and the economy?
When talking heads say food costs are up 5% or so, they sound grim enough, but it seems as if the actual cost of stuff I buy regularly is up more like 15 to 20%, and convenience items are up even farther and faster
What I can say is that the trend lines are going to keep going up. The situation with global energy supplies is going to tighten, and that will increase prices for oil and natural gas which move food prices up faster than almost anything else.
Which will put more stress on the economy generally.
We have a role to play in moving towards more energy conservation and sensible, sustainable national energy policy, from our own use of natural resources to how we vote next November. If I made my living off of people taking long, leisurely trips in their cars, I’d worry right now.
For churches, that may mean fewer people gone for long stretches this summer, but it may also add up to more weekend in-state outings, so the impact on attendance is harder to predict than gas prices.
We will almost certainly see an impact on giving in the offering plates around Licking County.
Summer is often a stressful time for congregational budget makers and managers, since folks who give weekly often miss a goodly number of Sundays and don’t always make up their giving for those weeks, or wait until after Labor Day. Meanwhile, bills still come in about as regularly as they do in October or April. If your church doesn’t carry much of a cushion, there can be few options for a pastor or treasurer.
To put it bluntly, it can mean no paychecks in August if all the dominoes fall the wrong way.
So the usual plea goes out, and I’ll echo – don’t forget your regular giving at home during vacation time. No matter how solid the circumstances of your faith community, cash flow crunches can create real problems for outreach and ministry.
Some folks even wonder about how to support their church after they leave on an, um, permanent vacation. If you are doing estate planning, take your annual giving, multiply it times 20, and that amount in a memorial account should produce your annual gift in perpetuity. Talk to the folks over at the Licking County Foundation or your bank’s trust department to see if I’m talking sense or not.
Meanwhile, this may be a very good summer to look at your church and church building and think about energy consumption. Do you have automatic thermostats? Sensor lights in bathrooms, that kick on when someone enters and kick off after a long enough time of no motion?
What about solar panels on the roof? Geothermal in the lawn? Or just having the trustees change the filters in the HVAC system?
A few words from www.theoildrum.com that have an impact on what stewardship might need mean: “Oil is still very cheap. Bottled spring water at $2 per litre works out at $318 per barrel. Oil is fundamental to our lives for transportation and a myriad products ranging from plastic to pesticides. Unlike spring water, oil is finite and costs significantly more to find and produce. The price of oil will continue to rise until the world as a whole decides it can do with less or until meaningful volumes of energy substitution take root.”
Speaking as a Christian pastor, the only commodities I’m called upon to preach as limitless are God’s love, and Christ’s forgiveness. Creation itself is made to exist within limits, the bounds set by God “in the beginning” for this life, and our living of that gift.
If we continue to live as if the limits of creation do not apply to us, then we are setting ourselves up as gods, and there is a price to pay for that kind of ultimate misunderstanding. From the Tower of Babel to the Golden Calf to Annanias and Sapphira, when we choose to step across certain limits, there are consequences. Our way of life can be scattered, dispersed, even ended.
Will we find our place, or be forced to accept certain consequences? “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. . .” and it may be time to conserve and not consume. Or wait for $5 and even $8 a gallon to teach us what Ecclesiastes is saying in this generation.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he keeps a little solar fan in a western window, just because. Tell him how you plan to conserve creation at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Notes From My Knapsack 6-1-08
Jeff Gill
Engage Your Mind, 360 Degrees
If you have been past the website of the mothership, www.newarkadvocate.com, you know that a major redesign has worked through the whole deal.
You can click for “home” and get the main, frequently updated site; you can also pick up links off the edge of the header for our sister publications, the “Pataskala Standard” and “Granville Sentinel,” along with targeted content for other regions of Licking County like Licking Valley and Heath, along with those ubiquitous “Buckeye Moms” who apparently like to chat.
Just below the main news content is a row of links for blogs (short for weblogs), which are created and generated entirely off of the newarkadvocate.com website. Yep, you’ll see “Knapsack” posting there, along with an assortment of regular bloggers who run the gamut from retired professional journalists to anonymous high school drop-outs.
There are still chances to comment on stories and post to forums as the old website had, but with a bit more integration of content crosswise between areas of the site entire. Once you register as a user, with or without your funky little logo (mine is a picture of me telling stories, natch), you have your own header which allows you to jump about posting comments or putting up longer comments at your blog.
Folks can recommend your blog, put your on their watch list, or leave you messages, all within the website itself. It’s a cool thing.
Plenty of voices have whimpered anxiously that blog culture occupies the same relationship to civil dialogue that yogurt culture has to Rachmaninoff. Could be – there is certainly a fair amount of moonbattery fluttering around “Recent Blogs” or “Featured Blog” headers at newarkadvocate.com.
There have also been picture galleries uploaded from everyday citizens, proud parents, and prom goers, news analysis from former employees who should be taken with a grain of salt, but have some salty perspective you wouldn’t hear about otherwise, and comments that completely change how you read a story or editorial.
Obviously, I think blog culture is a good thing. In fairness, it doesn’t support a vocation, but is it taking jobs away from journalists or saving the positions that will remain when the e-phenomenon finishes sweeping through the country? Hard to tell so far, but the news biz is clearly changing, and the trick is to stay one step ahead.
Because if it takes four, five months for even a limber management structure to make major changes, writers and photographers and other “content providers” need to stay at least half-a-year out ahead just to stay even. If you don’t like dealing with reader response, this is not going to be a congenial business to be in for the foreseeable future.
Just as doctors and pharmacists have had to get used to internet savvy patients asking oddly precise questions about their condition and treatment, and mechanics or used car salesfolk are forced to adjust to customers who know the Blue Book value before they can look it up, the news biz is shifting how we relate to our readers.
The web site is one small, but very significant way to do just that. Click on over and check it out!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who’s been on-line (he said smugly) since 1979 when a big honkin’ e-mail account allowed 5K of storage. Tell him about your internet adaptations at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Engage Your Mind, 360 Degrees
If you have been past the website of the mothership, www.newarkadvocate.com, you know that a major redesign has worked through the whole deal.
You can click for “home” and get the main, frequently updated site; you can also pick up links off the edge of the header for our sister publications, the “Pataskala Standard” and “Granville Sentinel,” along with targeted content for other regions of Licking County like Licking Valley and Heath, along with those ubiquitous “Buckeye Moms” who apparently like to chat.
Just below the main news content is a row of links for blogs (short for weblogs), which are created and generated entirely off of the newarkadvocate.com website. Yep, you’ll see “Knapsack” posting there, along with an assortment of regular bloggers who run the gamut from retired professional journalists to anonymous high school drop-outs.
There are still chances to comment on stories and post to forums as the old website had, but with a bit more integration of content crosswise between areas of the site entire. Once you register as a user, with or without your funky little logo (mine is a picture of me telling stories, natch), you have your own header which allows you to jump about posting comments or putting up longer comments at your blog.
Folks can recommend your blog, put your on their watch list, or leave you messages, all within the website itself. It’s a cool thing.
Plenty of voices have whimpered anxiously that blog culture occupies the same relationship to civil dialogue that yogurt culture has to Rachmaninoff. Could be – there is certainly a fair amount of moonbattery fluttering around “Recent Blogs” or “Featured Blog” headers at newarkadvocate.com.
There have also been picture galleries uploaded from everyday citizens, proud parents, and prom goers, news analysis from former employees who should be taken with a grain of salt, but have some salty perspective you wouldn’t hear about otherwise, and comments that completely change how you read a story or editorial.
Obviously, I think blog culture is a good thing. In fairness, it doesn’t support a vocation, but is it taking jobs away from journalists or saving the positions that will remain when the e-phenomenon finishes sweeping through the country? Hard to tell so far, but the news biz is clearly changing, and the trick is to stay one step ahead.
Because if it takes four, five months for even a limber management structure to make major changes, writers and photographers and other “content providers” need to stay at least half-a-year out ahead just to stay even. If you don’t like dealing with reader response, this is not going to be a congenial business to be in for the foreseeable future.
Just as doctors and pharmacists have had to get used to internet savvy patients asking oddly precise questions about their condition and treatment, and mechanics or used car salesfolk are forced to adjust to customers who know the Blue Book value before they can look it up, the news biz is shifting how we relate to our readers.
The web site is one small, but very significant way to do just that. Click on over and check it out!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who’s been on-line (he said smugly) since 1979 when a big honkin’ e-mail account allowed 5K of storage. Tell him about your internet adaptations at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
Faith Works 5-24-08
Jeff Gill
Try To Remember
Memory is a strange thing. Somewhere in all that grey goo is a series of electrical impulses vibrating off of chemical connections, that we access by a sequence of relatedness, from dim early childhood images to last week’s phone number we were trying to call today.
What we remember is not what “is,” but is the impression the “is-ness,” the actuality had on our subjectivity, stuck in that grey goo. We carry an arrangement of impressions with us that get sorted and dealt into patterns, stories and pictures and even movies made out of what is etched on our brain in chemical traces. Those impressions have the tendency to shift and move over time, even when we have no need to misrepresent, let alone misremember.
So we develop aids to memory – symbols on cave walls, letters on papyrus, carved statues, cast inscriptions in bronze. It’s amazing how much actually sticks on the brain, informally ordered, when we turn to our distant history and catch ourselves amazed by the effect of a small sound, or a slight scent.
Framed photos are now animated, or at least electronically flip past on the end table, and we can add a voice or a song to a chip on the back. These aids to memory almost, but not quite, keep pace with the tricks memory can play, especially as the years pile up. There are problems of biology, prions and eroded sheaths and tumors, which all can eat away at that precious pile of recollection. Our medical attempts to maintain the brain and body can nibble down the sharp edges with pharmaceuticals and cut big holes with surgery.
We learn, too, from such events that there is in the substructure of the mind a resilience that often can wire around such holes – and yes, fill in gaps wholesale with made-up memories sometimes – but the fundamental integrity of how our memory relates to what was, what “is” can still be trusted, else all of life would be an untrustworthy illusion.
Which makes it OK to be a little vague on dates (was that ’43? Maybe ’44 was when he died…) and sometimes even names (we just called him Jake, but look at that, his name was Jeremiah…) when we have pillars of stone and brass plates and documents of proclamation to lean on.
Our need for a Memorial Day, and we need one ourselves as much as the honored dead deserve the honor, is to remind ourselves how fragile and precious memory is. To paraphrase Paul, what we want to remember, we cannot, and what we do not wish to remember we cannot forget. That is a lesson of Memorial Day as well.
We need this solemn ceremonial gathering, this reverent processing behind flags and bands, this time for tender maintenance of family markers on our hands and knees, so we can put in perspective what we do recall, and what we need to remember, and how we smooth over the gaps between those two realities.
We need Memorial Day, even if, especially if, this area has no family or personal connections for us. There is a realization about the nature and function of memory that comes from walking down a line of gravestones, a series of names and dates and few puzzling inscriptions, knowing none of them.
In Deuteronomy and Zechariah and in the Letter to the Hebrews, the refrain “remember” is at the heart of religious observance, but it includes remembering things that God has not yet done, but has promised to do, in which we can trust; and that God has promised to NOT remember certain things at the End of Days, for which we can be thankful.
In Deuteronomy 24 – “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing...Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.” Can we remember something that didn’t happen to us?
Yes we can, and sometimes we should. On Monday, remember Valley Forge and Lundy’s Lane and the Somme and Omaha Beach and Pelieu and Pusan and Khe San and that bump in the road outside of Basra. Remember it all as yours, for a time, and join with others as we remember our debts and the ones who forgave those debts for us.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio (and will be preaching at First Baptist this Sunday in Newark); let him know what you remember at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
Try To Remember
Memory is a strange thing. Somewhere in all that grey goo is a series of electrical impulses vibrating off of chemical connections, that we access by a sequence of relatedness, from dim early childhood images to last week’s phone number we were trying to call today.
What we remember is not what “is,” but is the impression the “is-ness,” the actuality had on our subjectivity, stuck in that grey goo. We carry an arrangement of impressions with us that get sorted and dealt into patterns, stories and pictures and even movies made out of what is etched on our brain in chemical traces. Those impressions have the tendency to shift and move over time, even when we have no need to misrepresent, let alone misremember.
So we develop aids to memory – symbols on cave walls, letters on papyrus, carved statues, cast inscriptions in bronze. It’s amazing how much actually sticks on the brain, informally ordered, when we turn to our distant history and catch ourselves amazed by the effect of a small sound, or a slight scent.
Framed photos are now animated, or at least electronically flip past on the end table, and we can add a voice or a song to a chip on the back. These aids to memory almost, but not quite, keep pace with the tricks memory can play, especially as the years pile up. There are problems of biology, prions and eroded sheaths and tumors, which all can eat away at that precious pile of recollection. Our medical attempts to maintain the brain and body can nibble down the sharp edges with pharmaceuticals and cut big holes with surgery.
We learn, too, from such events that there is in the substructure of the mind a resilience that often can wire around such holes – and yes, fill in gaps wholesale with made-up memories sometimes – but the fundamental integrity of how our memory relates to what was, what “is” can still be trusted, else all of life would be an untrustworthy illusion.
Which makes it OK to be a little vague on dates (was that ’43? Maybe ’44 was when he died…) and sometimes even names (we just called him Jake, but look at that, his name was Jeremiah…) when we have pillars of stone and brass plates and documents of proclamation to lean on.
Our need for a Memorial Day, and we need one ourselves as much as the honored dead deserve the honor, is to remind ourselves how fragile and precious memory is. To paraphrase Paul, what we want to remember, we cannot, and what we do not wish to remember we cannot forget. That is a lesson of Memorial Day as well.
We need this solemn ceremonial gathering, this reverent processing behind flags and bands, this time for tender maintenance of family markers on our hands and knees, so we can put in perspective what we do recall, and what we need to remember, and how we smooth over the gaps between those two realities.
We need Memorial Day, even if, especially if, this area has no family or personal connections for us. There is a realization about the nature and function of memory that comes from walking down a line of gravestones, a series of names and dates and few puzzling inscriptions, knowing none of them.
In Deuteronomy and Zechariah and in the Letter to the Hebrews, the refrain “remember” is at the heart of religious observance, but it includes remembering things that God has not yet done, but has promised to do, in which we can trust; and that God has promised to NOT remember certain things at the End of Days, for which we can be thankful.
In Deuteronomy 24 – “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing...Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.” Can we remember something that didn’t happen to us?
Yes we can, and sometimes we should. On Monday, remember Valley Forge and Lundy’s Lane and the Somme and Omaha Beach and Pelieu and Pusan and Khe San and that bump in the road outside of Basra. Remember it all as yours, for a time, and join with others as we remember our debts and the ones who forgave those debts for us.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio (and will be preaching at First Baptist this Sunday in Newark); let him know what you remember at knapsack77@gmail.com.
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