Faith Works 9-6-08
Jeff Gill

Sitting Down To Dinner
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Last weekend, the Little Guy and I went to our local Farmer’s Market.

The Lovely Wife wanted us to bring home not the bacon, but some tomatoes, corn, and ideally green beans, too.

Unfortunately, we were slow to move, the Little Guy and I, so by the time we made our way down to the carts and tailgates, I feared that our preferred purchases would be out of stock, and only the gooseberry preserves and smashed loaves of banana bread would be left.

It wasn’t too late, as it turns out, and we made our way home with a hefty sack of locally grown, tasty and fresh produce, hitting all three appointed categories.

Back at Sycamore Lodge, I quickly started to snap off the stems, string, and rinse the green beans, tossing them in a pot of boiling water to blanch before setting them aside for a roasting over the coals in a foil envelope, a little later that night.

A dash of lemon juice, some olive oil, and thyme from the garden went into the packet, and a perfect batch of green beans came out.

And a smell. The smell of cooked green beans, hanging even outdoors on the patio, not too strong, but unmistakably cooked green beans.

One of my strongest memories of my maternal Grandmother is of green beans, picked in her vast garden (it seemed vast to me as a little guy myself), piled in bushel baskets, being methodically topped and strung and blanched. That smell in the kitchen takes me to a particular place and time, wherever it is now that I smell it.

That smell was in the air, and our dinner, with Market Day steaks and other elements my grandma would never have recognized, was still connected to those dinners, around the kitchen table in the house long gone from our family, a meal eaten long ago, but real and tasty in the midst of what we’re eating right now.

There is a sense that every meal participates in every other, that we set our tables echoing the model we grew up with (fork on the left or the right, how mom did it and not how Emily Post wants it), our recipes from great aunts and the stray uncle, and those preferences for salt our doctor dislikes and pepper dad put on everything and Tabasco we learned from the Marine Corps and Cholula we picked up from friends on a camping trip some years back.

This makes sense to Christians particularly, when a meal with bread and wine is said to have a direct, vital connection to a meal long ago, one we weren’t even in attendance at.

Every meal is connected to every other, as we all eat, and taste, and smell, and remember. The scent of blanching green beans makes my grandmother live in my kitchen, two states and more decades away. The communion around the dinner table of my family encompasses names and persons whose role at this feast is dim even to me, and my wife brings her own, and who knows what our son thinks about in his private moments (probably something about Pokemon).

Elijah’s chair doesn’t quite sit empty at our table, though we have unexpected guests from time to time. Yet there is a divine presence at our mealtime, the connection of age to age and the recollection of faces and relations, as well as where our sideboard and silverware comes from. That living link is a bit of God with us, fellowship hallowed and holy, made manifest by a scent both real and remembered.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story of menus that bridge generations at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-4-08
Jeff Gill

Who Belongs Here, Anyhow?

Having been a PTA president (before moving to Brigadoon), I may be too easily cheered by this prospect, but I hear folks say Sarah Palin hasn’t faced tough enough challenges in politics and negotiations to be McCain’s veep.

PTA to city council to mayor to governor to . . . all I can say is, if she faced down Murkowski and Stevens (Obama voted for the Bridge to Nowhere, Palin vetoed it), and she survived the brutality of school and civic politics, I’m thinking . . . put it this way: I think more people in the State Department would benefit from having run a village council campaign or sat through a couple of zoning appeals.

The civil affairs officers in Iraq have said much the same.

No matter what happens in 60 days, we will have a senior administration official from either the 50th or 49th state, Barack Obama from Hawaii and Sarah Palin from Alaska. John McCain is from the 48th state of Arizona, and Joe Biden from the 1st, as the senator from Delaware likes to say with Constitutional accuracy.

That’s a fun fact, as is the almost unremarkable point that none were born in their now “home state” except for Obama; Barack’s choice of Illinois for his professional life is meaningful on so many levels, as we move into the bicentennial year of Lincoln’s birth . . . in 1809 Kentucky, and by way of Indiana to Illinois at 21.

We move around in this country, more so now than even in 1830 but it was more common then than you might think. Here in Granville we have a solid substrate of lifelong residents, and a thick overlay of migrants and immigrants and move-ins from neighboring states (like us’ns from Indiana) and even far off countries.

The college on the hill now has about 22% of her student body self-identified as multicultural, so Denison looks much more like the country as a whole than does the village. We are used to academic visitors in Brigadoon, but we don’t always see them as “part of the community.” Actually, student volunteers do amazing work around Licking County to help autistic children, do research for staff at homelessness and housing agencies, read to schoolkids, build Habitat houses, register voters (R as well as D, plus I), and make trails or pick up litter along them.

So who is a Granville resident? Legally, we have certain definitions, with modifications for the school district, who gets municipal services, and who has to live under village ordinances.

Personally, some folks feel like they aren’t residents, or aren’t . . . and this is where it gets tricky. It’s a look when you say a certain street address (or perceived look), an assumption about “587” on a form that has to be crossed out for some other exchange, it’s what you didn’t know that “everyone knows.”

I tend to feel welcome pretty much wherever, but the fact is that some folks are more at ease in new environments than others. Call it a personality quirk. Like many quirks, we have plenty of quirkers who feel quirkly in Our Fayre Village.

How do we want to welcome and include new residents into this bubble of real reality called Granville? Where can people learn the folkways and foibles and “everybody knows” of this place?

Reading the Sentinel is one way (especially the OpEd pages), and the Great Picnic was and will continue to be an incredibly valuable community-building tool. The barriers to entry are low (sign up at village hall or just show up and wander around), and the benefits are high (food, and dancing among the straw bales to La-Z-Boy and the Recliners).

What other ways do you and your neighbors and associations help people “feel at home” here in Brigadoon? Remember, you never know when the fog will set in again and suddenly a hundred years have passed us by . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about places you see time stop around Granville at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-30-08
Jeff Gill

Great Dads Need a Great Team Behind Them

If you think about a dad, the picture tends to be of a solitary figure, standing boldly and bravely and often alone.

That may be a problem.

Dads, like anyone, need love and support and perspective. Other dads, buddies who help build you up, and a loving relationship at home are all so very important. Fatherhood is not a solo act.

A number of Licking County churches are joining together for a “Great Dads” seminar, next Saturday at Centenary United Methodist in Granville. Ed Rizor and the men of Centenary are pleased to invite Christian men from all over our area to spend from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm looking at a program titled “The 6 Basics of Being a Great Dad.”

Ron Hitchcock is pastor of marriage & family life at Vineyard Church of Columbus, and he will present the day’s program around the themes of:

1. Providing Unconditional Love and Affection
2. Spending Time
3. Communicating Constantly and Creatively
4. Partnering with Mom
5. Instilling Moral and Spiritual Values
and 6. Establishing Your Fathering Legacy
Ron shares that in surveys, teens have been asked about stress, and who they turn to for help in a crisis. The truly disturbing answer was that dads ranked 48th on their list!
Cost is $25 per person with pre-registration, and you can call Centenary at 587-0022 to ask about signing up; same day registrations are possible but can’t be guaranteed.
This morning seminar is aimed at dads, prospective dads, dads in training, newly wed men, expectant fathers, or any guy who plans on having children in his household someday. For more information about the seminar you can visit www.greatdads.org and see more about the roots of this program.
And can I point out that this is the time of year when Cub Scout Packs all over Licking County are doing their fall recruitment – check the elementary school near you. Boys 1st through 5th grade can become Cub Scouts, and scout leadership is always in short supply! Check out www.lickingdistrict.org or www.skcbsa.org for more info, or call the Field Director for our county, Jeff Schiavone, at 438-8094.
Finally, on the news and events front, the 11th annual Licking County Prayer Breakfast is coming right up on Sept. 11, with doors opening at 6:00 am. Program time with worship and prayer (of course!) starts right at 6:30 am, and I can say from past experience they get us back towards our day’s obligations by 7:30.
Tickets are $15 per person for a fine, filling breakfast and a few favors at your table, and you can buy a table for $100 to seat eight. Elsa Kok Colopy is speaking on “Changed,” out of her experience as a risk-taker, adventurer, author, and storyteller. Call 522-7407 to reserve your spot!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher (but not much of a risk-taker); share a risky tale of adventure with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-23-08
Jeff Gill

Phoning In My Religion

Not to delve too deeply into politics, but last Saturday night was a televised presidential candidates’ forum at Orange County, CA’s nationally known Saddleback Church, moderated by Pastor Rick Warren. Rick is author of “The Purpose Driven Life” which has sold 25 million copies, so he’s got a wee bit of media attention in the past.

Some have said that they weren’t comfortable with a church as the setting for the first almost head-to-head meeting of the two major parties’ candidates for president, and I suppose there’s a case to be made for that concern, but the candidates were simply invited by Pastor Warren, who has come to know them both, and either or both could have said “nope.” If they’re fine with it, I’m interested.

And quite frankly, Warren was a better moderator than about nine of the last ten debate facilitators I’ve had to listen to in the last year, so good on him. Anyhow, they each took an hour on stage, shook hands in the middle, and were not quite debating, but offered many illuminating moments about their personal and political journeys from the perspective of faith.

But there was a moment that was quite unintentionally illuminating, and it wasn’t from Obama or McCain, coming after the event had formally ended.

One well-known national political reporter said in the course of post-forum analysis “they did a really interesting thing setting up for this here: they had two large screens on either side of the platform, where you could watch them as they were talking from wherever you sat in the room.”

I turned to the Lovely Wife, jaw slowly swinging open. The reporter, who in my experience is credible and quite intelligent, just told me something. Does she know what she actually just told me? That analyst just revealed that she has almost no experience with large or megachurch worship settings whatsoever, in person or on TV or tape.

Full disclosure: I preach most weekends, and am as likely to preach for 25 as 250, and never before 2,000. But I’ve been in and around enough large churches, in multiple states, let alone seen the footage of others, to know that no megachurch worth its salt is without two large screens on either side of the platform. None. You’re more likely to find two large screens permanently built into the architecture of the front of the worship space than you are a cross (that’s a discussion for another day).

Later on, I saw this comment at the New York Times political campaign blog, “The Caucus”: “The church itself rises in the desert and is surrounded by palm trees and dusty mountains, but it’s hard to tell it’s a church. In fact, inside, it looks more like a giant warehouse, than traditional religious sanctuaries. The hosts treated the forum as a major live television event. A woman who was introduced as tonight’s “stage manager,” told the audience to be sure to give Mr. Warren a hearty round of applause when he appears, and to save their bathroom visits for commercial breaks.”

Wow. Y’know, the warehouse comment (I found three more like that just with GoogleNews), might have been pertinent twenty years ago, maybe ten. But most Americans are familiar with the look of large church campuses by now, and calling them “giant warehouses” just tells me they’re looking around for the stained glass or felt banners, and on not finding them, going “Whoa, this is not what I expected.”

No, I guess it isn’t. Do you get out much? I mean, other than around the world?

Later on, “The Caucus” noted that “The event reflects the importance of religion in American life and, increasingly, in politics. It also marks the coming of age of a broader brand of evangelicalism that is more socially minded and more diverse than the orthodox religious movement of the Christian right.”

Thanks for noticing, folks, but here’s a news flash – Evangelicals have been diverse and complex since, oh, always. Socially minded? That’s where we started, and we’re not done. And if by diverse, you mean “ah, maybe now they’re ready to vote for a pro-abortion candidate if we paint them green enough,” well, keep hoping.

They really, really should get out more. I’ll bet there’s a warehouse-like, screen-toting, jeans wearing preacher church just down the street from wherever they live, and I do mean wherever. Just ask at your Starbucks and someone else in line will give you directions.

Yep, we’re so diverse we go there, too.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s not a member of a megachurch, but he does know how to use PowerPoint in worship. Tell him a story electronically at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-21-08
Jeff Gill

Get a Peace of Scouting

This Saturday, Granville’s own Super Pack 3, our Cub Scouting organization, will have their start of the school year picnic out at Infirmary Mound Park.

Aug. 23 at 3:00 pm the lawn chairs and shady canopies will unfurl around the bounce houses and food tents back behind the horse show arena, and a few hundred Cubs and Scouts and little brothers and sisters (plus parents) will say hello to a new school year of Cub Scouting (and a hog will end his year, with our sincere appreciation shown in bbq sauce).

First graders are Tiger Cubs, and from those newest Scouts to the Webelos ready to make the jump in March to Boy Scouts in Fifth grade, we have over 150 young men in Super Pack 3.

The normal pack meeting, the gathering of the whole shebang, is at 7 pm on third Thursdays right through May, but the heart of Scouting is the small group: dens in Cub Scouts, patrols in Boy Scouts. Each grade has a “rank,” Tigers in First, Woves in Second, Bears in Third, and Webelos in Fourth and Fifth. And each rank has three to five dens (Pack 3 had 21 dens last year), which is where the real Scouting program happens, learning about the outdoors, themselves, and what it means to be a citizen and a leader among your peers.

The Scouting Movement goes back to 1907, 1910 in the US, and really to May of 1900, when the entire British Empire went crazy over good news in a very bad year. The Boer War had gone badly for England in South Africa, and a small outpost had been cut off and assumed overrun. It turned out that Mafeking was holding out against overwhelming odds, and on May 18, 1900, a relief column made it to the city and commanding officer Robert Baden-Powell.

Baden-Powell, or B-P as he was known by both friends and respected enemies, returned to a hero’s welcome, and the startling news that his book written for soldiers, “Aids To Scouting,” was selling like hotcakes among young boys (and girls) back home, with “B-P Clubs” starting in various towns (think Michael Phelps and swim clubs).

B-P was actually disturbed by this – he had not written the book for children, and knew that romanticism of warfare was not what young people needed. On the other hand, he saw so many city kids new to the military come into the wilderness helpless, starving where food was handy and dying of thirst where water was available. If kids thought heat came from furnaces and food from grocery stores, what would you expect?

So he turned down a cushy spot in the military bureaucracy, retired a General, and spent two years doing research and writing (in Windmill Cottage next to Wimbledon, which I’m told you can still visit). Then he told his publisher, eager to hit the shelves while his fame was still remembered, that he wouldn’t sell his scheme until he tried it himself.

B-P called his new plan “Peace Scouts,” and used the “patrol method” to deliver character formation and leadership development through outdoor education, with a focus on learning by doing, not adults standing up talking unless it was storytelling. And he did one thing that some still think controversial – he kept uniforms as a central feature of his program.

Uniforms weren’t about militarism, but about uniformity. Because the test run of his new book, “Scouting For Boys,” was to bring 22 young men to an island off the English coast, 11 from the city, and 11 from the small towns and countryside, 11 from some level of privilege and 11 from humbler backgrounds. The Scout uniform was meant, and still means that all the boys are on a level playing field, with only their individual achievements marked with “merit badges” and “activity awards” which they earned by competing against . . . themselves.

August 1, 1907, these 22 boys and three adults spent two weeks testing out “Scouting For Boys,” and the program they began there now serves 38 million young men and women all over the world, in over 200 countries (basically, every country but Cuba and China).

The program gave birth to not only Boy Scouts but Girl Guides, called Girl Scouts in this country, and in 1930 the junior level, Cub Scouting was formally organized. The nation with the largest total number of Scouts in all phases? Nope, not the USA, which “only” has 7.5 million registered – that would be Indonesia, with over 8 million young men and women in Scouting.

But you can just come out to Infirmary Mound Park Saturday afternoon! Or e-mail me at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-16-08
Jeff Gill

What Are We Supposed To Think?

Opinions and observations are my stock in trade, and trust me when I say the shelves are well stocked.

So when I ask the question “what are we supposed to think?” it doesn’t mean I don’t have an idea myself, or that people ought to spend more time telling others what to think, which no one likes to hear.

Yet when every new crop of political ads is parsed and analyzed for “what it really means” or how our thoughts are being manipulated by subtle symbolism, I’m looking around in the here and now and asking about some of the up-front and in-your-face messages that we seem to be sending each other.

Sometimes you can see the outside of the message, but can’t figure out what’s inside the envelope, so to speak.

Tattoos, for instance.

Yes, my family has been out to the State Fair and Hartford Fair recently, why do you ask? And as you walk around in the sun and heat, where everyone is dressed accordingly, you certainly see some major tattooing going on.

A few questions – when you put a band of two-dimensional barbed wire around your arm for life, what do you want me to think? That you’re tough? That you’re a fascinating mix of tender and tough when a sweet faced, well-coifed young lady has a barbed wire wrap sealed with a skull?

Or all those skull tattoos. I get the Grateful Dead “feed your head” message in the tie-dye t-shirts and car stickers with a blossoming skull, and the contrast is meant ironically between the hard, enduring bony eye sockets and the colorful wispy petals of flowers growing within. (I also get that you’re thinking pharmaceuticals get you closer to the heart of that irony, which is why I don’t got one.)

But all the skulls with snakes coming out of the eye sockets, flame-topped skulls, and other grim reaperish body décor . . . what do you want me to think when I see your clearly placed on display body art? That you’re a dangerous person to be avoided? That I should trust the friendly smile and assume that you were joking when you put a grim harbinger of death on your shoulder?

I’ve got a civic, governmental question, too. When we see the now more common red and yellow license plates, indicating that the registered owner of the vehicle is convicted of DUIs, what are we expected to think? That we should avoid tailgating this person? That neighborhood kids will pedal their bikes by saying to each other “whoa, that’s an ugly contrast that I don’t want on my ride someday!”

Do we think that putting these in ever growing numbers out on the roadways will cause more people to scorn and mock their neighbors, or will they just start to become one more option in the riotous range of license plate logos?

What I think when I see one is “what are the odds the person driving that vehicle today is even the one this plate is meant to warn us about?’

There are t-shirts that I’d like to ask “what are you wanting me to think” of the wearers, but most of them I don’t feel comfortable describing on the “Your Faith” page. When I see a dad and two young kids walking down the street, with dad’s chest making a lewd suggestion to the world, you have to wonder if there’s any thinking going on there at all. Maybe all the other t-shirts in the drawer were nastier than that one, so this was the choice meant to say “hey, I’m trying here with my children, give me a break.”

Churches and church-going folk may not have many of the above-mentioned issues to deal with in-house (koff, koff, ahem). Anyhow. What faith communities often do have trouble with is seeing how their building, their signage, their parking areas, let alone their worship, is saying something to new visitors.

Very often, what we’re telling people to think is “you really won’t feel comfortable here; are you sure you belong here? Thanks for dropping by, we’ll pray for you . . . as you leave.”

Hey, we respond, that’s not what we want people to think. If we can step back and take a good long careful look, we might learn something about how a stranger or unchurched person might see what we’re saying to them; often as tattooed, yellow license plated, lewd t-shirt wearing members of our communities. How do we make them think “God may actually care about me, after all.”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story of how your congregation tells their story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-9-08
Jeff Gill

Where the President Will Worship Tomorrow
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Last night the Olympics began in Beijing (or Peking or however you’re used to seeing the capital of China spelled).

Many human rights activists have said that world leaders should boycott the opening ceremonies because of Communist China’s human rights record, especially in regard to religious minorities.

Among Christians, and particularly evangelical Christians, the image of house churches or “the underground church” is the vivid picture carried of China. Contemporary Christian music heard on local CCM radio stations and in some congregations’ worship services offer phrases like these from the Newsboys’ hit, “He Reigns,”
“the song of Asian believers, filled with God’s holy fire . . . Let praises echo from the towers of cathedrals, to the faithful gathered underground.”

What may well be confusing over the next few days is that the religious reality of modern China is really does range from “the towers of cathedrals, to the faithful gathered underground.”. There absolutely is an underground church, often meeting in houses without official government sanction, hence “underground.” Some may meet in caves and basements, but “underground” here mainly means “without government approval.”

There is, though, a “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” Christian church that operates with government license. Hard numbers are not easy to come by in China’s authoritarian culture, where most statistics are considered state secrets, but there seem to be 10 million members of the “official” church at minimum.

That’s like the United Methodist Church for size, so they’re a distinct force in Chinese society. But the underground church, obviously, doesn’t have official numbers. The best estimates for the number of regular house church worshipers runs to 50 million. That’s like . . . well, it’s like nothing since the early Roman empire and the beginnings of the Christian faith. What else can you compare this movement with?

As for the much-debated official church -- the “three-self” does not have anything to do with the Trinity, but is a working abbreviation for “self-governance, self-support, self-propagation.” That’s window dressing for “we don’t publicly advocate from the pulpit anything that makes the Communist Chinese government feel itchy,” such as doctrines like the second coming of Christ or the resurrection of the dead.

So to have public worship and buildings they can call their own means that the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” trims their beliefs, or at least their preaching, to suit political winds. That also means many underground, or non-sanctioned Christian groups say that the official churches are not authentically Christian.

That’s harsh, but not entirely unfounded. And it gets even more confusing.

There is also an official Chinese government Catholic body, the “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.” They are not entirely in communion with Rome and the Vicar of Christ in the papacy by government decree, which says that the Vatican has not sufficiently apologized for “imperialistic actions” in the 19th century, though Rome has tried to avoid a total break with the bishops of the “legal” church given the circumstances. Meanwhile, there are underground Catholic groups in China who are strongly affirming that they are in communion with Rome, but that the “state church” with Catholic forms is in fact not truly valid, or really wholly Christian. The BBC estimates that there are 5 million “state” Catholics, and 8 million underground Catholics.

If you’ve been keeping track, this all means that there are over 70 million Chinese who are claiming Christian affiliation of one sort or another – and before you dismiss the appeasing “state” church folk, remember that to make a public confession of even the “approved” faith is not looked upon with favor by the Communist Party, or by most of the other billion Chinese. Underground or in the open, to claim any Christian faith at all is a bold and lonely step. 70 million have taken it in one form or another.

President Bush said some weeks ago that he would split the difference, diplomatically, by going to the very, very official opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, and then attending a house church worship on Sunday morning.

The Chinese government responded by fairly successfully identifying the leaders of most of the Beijing area “house churches” and sending them en masse off to an involuntary vacation far, far away from the capital and site of the Olympics.

So President Bush’s staff has identified an official Protestant “Three-Self” church where he and Laura will worship tomorrow morning, the “Kuanjie Protestant Church,” which is one of the most prominent officially government registered churches in Beijing. His staff indicated that to re-do their plans for this week would just impact and damage even more innocent pastors and church members than they already have.

How should a leader set a proper example in a place like this, where the state sill controls most of the image-making machinery and media outlets? Just as the US Olympic team has selected a young man who grew up as a Darfur refugee to carry the flag into the opening ceremonies, the opportunities to make symbolic gestures are many. To make a speech with specifics could endanger some of those millions “gathered underground” even more than they are now, and staying away loses you any leverage at all to help them.

Where and how the president goes to church tomorrow will be an interesting statement worth “reading” closely – let the games begin!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he got a medal once for fourth place in the long jump in eighth grade. Tell him your Olympian tale at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-7-08
Jeff Gill

Everyone has a talent or skill of some sort.

Mine happens to be bleeding. Not everyone can bleed quickly and well, especially in a rare blood type, and when you can, that gives you a chance to excel when Olympic competition is far beyond your grasp.

I was at the Licking County satellite center recently, donation needle in my arm, working another pint closer to 12 gallons donated over the last thirty years.

They’ve moved across Newark’s West Main Street to a spot just east of Licking Memorial Hospital in the row of medical offices that face their parking lots. The hours for donation are the same, Tuesdays from 12 noon to 6 pm and Fridays from 8 am to 2 pm. If you’re 18 years of age and have over a hundred pounds on you (I qualify!), they are very likely to take your arterial output.

Yes, they still ask you a long series of questions after checking your pulse and blood pressure and checking your iron (it really is a mini-physical every 60 days for a regular donor), but the “yes” and “no” stuff is very private and on a computer screen. Basically, if you’ve gotten a recent bootleg tattoo or piercing, they may ask you wait, and some other screening questions help them as they continue learning how best to screen the blood itself.

But the bottom line is most fairly healthy people who haven’t eaten marrow pudding in Yorkshire recently can give blood. Can . . . give blood. And don’t.

Laying on the cot with a needle in my arm, even a nearly hundred timer like me doesn’t want to stare right at the spot where I got stuck, so I looked up at the “Supply Board.” This is a white board where they keep an updated list of numbers, by blood type (A, B. AB, O, and +/- for each), showing how many units were currently in storage in central Ohio, and for that particular type, how many days’ worth of supply that meant.

Not a single category was listed at more than 2 days.

Quite a few were listed as “-“ which meant on an average day of surgery and car crashes and such, there was barely enough – or not enough – to cover that day’s needs.

My blood type was “-.” Hey, it’s nice to feel useful, even when all you’re doing is laying there with a tube hanging off of your arm.

As I said, I’m good at bleeding, do it quickly, and soon the cot was open for the next . . . well, there’s part of the problem. They needed a next to take my place, whatever the blood type, but I could have taken my time for all the action they had in line.

I got my fig newtons, passed on the coffee, slugged back some water, and asked “do you have many signed up for later?” The staff sadly said “No, but we sure could use more donors.” I took the card, with the phone number, 348-4696, or 1-800-GIVE LIFE, and the web site where you can schedule an appointment to donate, www.BloodSavesLives.org.

And said, “I’ll tell my friends you need them.” They really do, too.

Remember, “No Child Left Inside” next Tuesday, Aug. 12 – let’s get all kids outside for at least an hour to put bugs in a jar or get their sneakers muddy. Check out www.greenhour.org for ideas!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and has given blood regularly since he was 18; tell him how donated blood helped you at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-2-08
Jeff Gill

Creeping Bentgrass In the Sanctuary
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If your religious tradition has roots in Scotland, creeping bentgrass may belong in your churchyard.

If your churchyard is a tee box or putting green, it may already be there.

Golf and churchgoing are usually seen as opponents; as a wandering preacher, I know I’ll drive by a wide variety of golf courses on a Sunday morning and see a pretty busy scene.

For those who say “I can worship God on a fairway out in nature better than I can in a church building,” I respond quickly that you absolutely, positively can.

Do you?

That’s the question. Not can you, because John McCain could worship God in the Hanoi Hilton and Barack Obama found God in his questions while walking the hard streets of Chicago’s South Side. Yes, you can (if I can borrow that line).

Do you?

The Licking County Coalition for Housing (LCCH) needs to raise local money as a match for the federal and state funds which help us house families and individuals working from crisis back to stability. Every local dollar we gather picks up many dollars, sometimes as many as 20, from beyond our county, in this kind of matching support.

So a simple golf event has a major impact. Their 4th Annual LCCH Golf Outing is on Saturday, August 23rd, at the Raccoon International Golf Course on Rt. 16 east of Granville.

They have fun for foursomes, with a “Scramble/Shotgun Start” at 8:00 am, and a “Hole in One Contest” bringing the grand prize of a trip to Las Vegas. If this is your kind of fun and service wrapped up into a tidy Saturday morning package, then click www.lcchousing.org to download & print a registration form, or call 345-1970.

If golf can be a way to help the needy in our midst, can it be a means of grace for the participants? Isn’t the open air, the clear boundaries, a sense of endings and accountability, all the way many can catch a glimpse of the Divine?

Sure. If they do.

I’m not the best analyst for this question, having never played golf. If you don’t count the blacklight miniature version. But as I said last week, there are many ways churches and faith communities can reach out and engage people, and if Biker Sunday and Geek Week count for evangelism, then golf outings surely make an opportunity for sharing Good News.

Where this all falls apart for many is the fact that what’s really being argued is “I don’t have to do anything to be in touch with God, since God isn’t in touch with me.” Much Sunday golf has more to do with “thank, um, God that there’s at least one day I don’t have to check e-mail” than “this is the day set apart for me to explore my relationship to a deeper reality and broader understanding than I can come to on my own.”

I can imagine “golf spirituality,” and I’m not being sarcastic at all. I really can. I’ve just never seen it in action over the long haul, so I don’t think it makes a basis for a faith community per se. What I do appreciate is the passion of golfers who want to set some time aside, like (for instance) Aug. 23, to enjoy their favorite sport and each other’s competitive company while also helping people less fortunate than themselves.

And many of them do, in fact, have a place they go on Sunday morning or Saturday evening (and one on Friday night) to join a fellowship with a wider sense of faith than just “I believe I can get a hole in one.”

Any of them might just have a moment, when they think about how blessed they are to have a home to go to after the 18th hole, to marvel at creation and their place in it. Or just a flash of delight at the complex weaving of roots and narrow leaves that makes the marvelous surface that is a green, carpeted with creeping bentgrass. Compared to bentgrass, what am I?

In Licking County, there are plenty of places to go and work on that question, some of which you pass on the way to the clubhouse. Stop by and tee up!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is also board chair for the Licking County Coalition for Housing. Tell him about your tee-time epiphany at knapsack77@gmail.com.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Capernaum, the town Jesus called home --

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.